The one thing people are not talking about is the one thing everybody says they want: Happiness.

I myself can find happiness in a cup of dark, rich, hot coffee watching a sunrise, the farther away from civilization, the better. Within my age bracket, in this way I represent many. But I recognize that’s because I/we are experienced in dealing with problems that are not present in the coffee+sunrise setting. If, say for example, a six-year-old grandson were to join me he might get joy out of sharing something with his grandfather for a few minutes, and then he’d get bored, and likely leave the scene wondering what the appeal could possibly be. He, too, within his age bracket, in this other way would also represent many. The appeal is the absence of unpleasant things, which saturate the experiences of people our age, but are not known to six-year-olds. Happiness can be one or several things that affect us negatively, and have gone missing; there’s nothing wrong with that.

I doubt very much that you can find happiness by simply thinking about it. However, I do think we should spend more of our time and energy thinking about it as a concept, because we spend so much of our time and energy with things the way they are, making other people happy. This is a mistake when we’re laboring for the pleasure of people who will never know pleasure this way. When we try to make people happy who will never be happy. If this is indeed a mistake, it’s a mistake we make often. That’s why I think we should think about it more than we do.

If someone wants to be unhappy, we should recognize it, and let them. Somehow, it’s become our default course of action to make other people unhappy on purpose, who would be quite willing to be happy if they were given an occasion to be that way, for the sole purpose of making other people happy who are never going to be happy. How do we go about doing this pigeonholing? Must make this person unhappy, to make that other person happy. That, too, should be getting more thought out of us.

I would be remiss in closing this without including something my Dad said, that I thought was poignant, profound and wise. It’s also pretty darn simple: The purpose of life, is not to be happy. This made an impact on me because I notice, when people live life making it a high priority to be happy, they very seldom end up doing anything positive for anybody else.

Also, like the people who don’t want to be happy, they seem to have a greater influence on our cultural mores than the average. It’s like we’re in an oxcart pulled along by those two: The people who want to be happy and think that’s the whole point to living, and the people who go around demanding things to make them happy, who actually will never be happy.

Other than the foregoing, I don’t have much of an opinion about it.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. — John 15:13.

In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out in theaters and shocked everybody when Spock sacrificed himself to restore warp drive in the Enterprise, saving everyone aboard from the exploding Genesis device. It was the most shocking demise of a central character since Old Yeller.

The following year, Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, laid down his life to save his son in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Gotta tie up those loose ends.

And then Mayday sacrificed herself in A View To A Kill. Sybok sacrificed himself in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Miles Dawson blew himself up in Terminator II: Judgment Day. Dillon and Ripley offed themselves in Alien 3. Léon, the Professional, blew himself up in Léon: The Professional. Russell Casse famously yelled out “Hello, boys! I’m back!” and blew himself up in Independence Day to save the world. Jack Dawson sank like a stone to save Rose in Titanic. Harry Stamper blew himself up to save the world in Armageddon. Don Diego de la Vega received a mortal wound, sometime somewhere…? In The Mask Of Zorro. Jericho Kane sacrificed himself to save the world in End of Days. Qui-Gon Jinn received a mortal wound in Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace and Maximus received a mortal wound in Gladiator. Also, Maximus received permission from a female to go ahead and die…how touching. Hawk Hawkins sacrificed himself to send the deadly nuclear warheads into deep space in Space Cowboys.

Data replicated Spock’s feat, blowing himself up to save the Enterprise and Earth as well in Star Trek X: Nemesis. Jean Grey buried herself under a lethal mass of water so the X-Men could get away in X-Men 2: X-Men United. The titular Bill did was he was titularly supposed to do, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, and momma and child lived happily ever after without the dumb ol’ dad. Tarantino repeated this momma plus child minus dad formula in Planet Terror with the death of El Wray. Neville blew himself up to kill the zombies in I Am Legend. Walt Kowalski got himself all shot up with machine gun fire to send the murderous gang members to prison in Gran Torino. Rorschach said “do it” to Doctor Manhattan, who then obliged, obliterating him in Watchmen. Flynn sacrificed himself to take out Clu in Tron: Legacy. Captain America took down the plane in Captain America: The First Avenger. Ella blew herself up to take out the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens. Batman seemingly atomized himself hauling the nuclear bomb out of Gotham in the Batwing in The Dark Knight Rises.

Superman: The Man of Steel offered a triple play of white males sacrificing themselves for the greater good: Colonel Hardy, Emil Hamilton and Jonathan “Pa” Kent. Groot sacrificed himself to save his fellow Guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy. Nux sacrificed himself in Mad Max: Fury Road. Pietra Maximoff used his body as a shield to save a small child along with Clint Barton in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Superman offed himself to save all of humanity, lancing Doomsday with a Kryptonite spear in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Barbossa allowed himself to be consumed by the ocean to save his daughter, and others, in Pirates of the Caribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Yondu froze himself to death to save Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. Steve Trevor blew himself up to destroy the poison gas bombs in Wonder Woman. Merlin blew himself up to save his fellow Kingsmen in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Silas Stone sacrificed himself so that his son, Victor, could track down the Mother Box and save humanity in Justice League: Snyder Cut…and, presumably, in the theatrical cut as well, we just weren’t able to see it happen. Some guy named Toshi and some guy named Heller sacrificed themselves in The Meg. Vice Admiral Holdo engaged hyperdrive at point blank range, a suicide move, in Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, and then later on Luke Skywalker did a cool thing with Force projection and then…just kinda vanished just because. Natasha Romanov sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone in Avengers: Endgame and then later on Tony Stark did himself in with The Snap. He, like Maximus, received permission to die from a female, how sweet. Granting permission to die. Just makes your heart melt.

And then…spoilers, those who have not yet see No Time To Die might want to skip this…highlight to read…James Bond blew himself up by engaging the blow-up-bad-guy’s-base trope one more time, but skipping the escape-with-moments-to-spare trope, because his body was irreversibly infected with nanobots that would have killed his estranged wife and daughter if he ever came in contact with them again.

To say that a pattern has emerged would be understating the issue. Those who are sufficiently interested to track the years by what I’ve listed above, will notice there’s been an acceleration; the self-sacrifice started out as a rarity, and nowadays it’s a rarity if it isn’t there. To say I find it offensive, as a straight white male, would be engaging in a falsehood. I was never offended by it. I skipped straight from blithely ignoring the pattern, failing to notice that what in my childhood was an exception had now become a rule — to — pure and sincere boredom. Yesterday, Saturday, I was staying home enjoying a marathon streaming session with Mrs. Freeberg and it came time to pick the third movie. Noticing the previous two movies (I shall not say what they were) were just build-ups to dumb-noble-sacrifices from straight-white-males, I made the request that we find something that doesn’t have that.

It’s not a matter of offense. And it really isn’t purely a matter of boredom. A lot of these movies, when they have a dumb-noble-sacrifice from a straight-white-male at the end — all that comes before that, is relegated to being merely a lead-up to that. Well, that’s a solid block of at least two hours. Movies used to be a hodge-podge of beautiful things, and genuine surprises, non-tropey ones. They were a delight. You never knew what you were gonna get. Now you kinda do. Some hackneyed noble sacrifice, usually, and invariably from a straight white male. The observation I’m making here is about shifting norms. A sort of death-worship has crept in and gone mainstream.

I imagine I should be more concerned about the suicide rate among white boys. I really don’t know how that shakes out over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if suicide is as high, or higher, in non-whites, but males have been leading the suicide statistics for awhile. It’s the worldview that really concerns me the most, whether it leads to suicide or not. It’s the unwritten rule. Save the world, fornicate like a happy tomcat over it, live to fight another day, leave the audience wondering what exciting adventure you’re going to have next — it seems, now, that that just can’t happen. Someone’s banned it. It’s slightly less intrusive than banning happy endings altogether.

The idea of younger generations filing into movie theaters conditioned to ask themselves: “I wonder who’s going to off himself?” is troubling. Back in my day, we used to wonder what to wonder. Death worship of some kind might happen, but so could anything else. It was a real smorgasbord, if the movie was any good. A real grab bag.

The concept of remembering the sacrifice is a solid swing-and-a-miss. There’s always some subtext about the importance of remembering the fallen. Seems the build-up is always there, and the payoff never is. The other cast members, and the audience, will make darn good & sure to celebrate the life of the decedent, and never, ever forget them and the sacrifice they made. For about ten, fifteen minutes. After which, they’ll be replaced by a more diverse cast, and never mentioned again.

Well, if you’re a Christian, you belong to a religion that does not, and cannot, see martyrdom as something trivial. That’s another concern we should have. It’s being trivialized. When Spock did it, it was sacred. Now it’s like an empty box to be checked as the script makes its way through various drafts.

Some of this has to do with natural attrition. Actors get tired of roles, and part of a writer’s job is to find some coherent believable way to make the necessary cast change happen. Where it’s the white males biting the bullet, oftentimes it’s a planned scrubbing. This is why the “we’ll always remember your sacrifice forever and ever for the next five minutes” bait-and-switch comes to pass. The remembrance is what’s promised, but the forgetfulness is what’s planned. That’s the real social norm that is crystallizing before our eyes: The scrubbing of people, from existence and from remembrance. More often than not, because of their sex and their skin color.

We’re paying for creativity and we’re not getting it. The field of available plot elements should be expanding over time, and instead it’s being narrowed, sharpened like a pencil. Central characters, particularly white male central characters, off themselves simply because the scriptwriters don’t know any other way to do it anymore, and maybe the audience doesn’t know how to watch anything else anymore. Perhaps the mindset now is one of all-or-nothing: The thing you’re doing is so much bigger and more important than you are — and we require a suicide to make it obvious, this being a movie & all — or else, it’s not worth anything at all, and why are we bothering to watch? So there’s an expansive middle ground between the two extremes that’s gone missing. That’s very rarely any kind of good thing.

One liberal has acknowledged that the science of COVID has been infused with a “tinge” of politics…but just a tinge. Another liberal has refused to concede even that much. Most liberals don’t talk to me, so my sampling here is limited. But based on interactions like these and other things I’ve seen, I think this to be the big disconnect between emotionally-invested, self-identifying liberals vs. normal people.

What is all this fuss about the ‘Vid? Science, or politics? I think most people who are thinking on it with some clarity, would acknowledge it’s a mixture of both. The question then must arise: How much of each? What is it — predominantly?

People like me might be inclined to ask: Can science and politics co-exist anywhere, without the latter dominating the former?

Well, as we look into that, first we have the masks. In theory they ought to be at least partially effective. But we just haven’t seen a correlation between mask mandates versus slowing the spread, and that’s after…what, a year and seven months? So nineteen months. That could be because mandating masks is not the same as actually wearing the masks. But there’s been so much nanny-nanny-boo-boo and tut-tutting about masks, and so little science. Masks are elevated above other remedies because they’re visible. I think everyone who’s been watching what’s gone down, understands this, or should. We pivoted away awfully quickly from “wash your damn hands like your mama should’ve taught you,” even though COVID did wonderful things to educate us on how many people hadn’t been doing this. Some of whom work in food service. Yuck. Anyway. I would hope everyone with a brain still undamaged, would concede there’s been very little actual science overlapping with these masks.

Next we have the fired health care workers. Science would say…hey wait a minute, these are health care professionals. They’d rather suspend their careers than get the shot. What do they know that we don’t know? But also…if this is so serious, how can we afford to fire so many of them? The only explanation that makes sense is that this is about control, not about a real pandemic. Politics, not science.

The third thing is the natural immunity. There is such a thing. It’s science. How come the powers-that-be are playing it down the way they are? It’s got something to do with being powers-that-be, obviously. That’s politics. It isn’t science.

And then there is Tony the Tyrant. Perhaps it’s escaped everyone’s notice, but we don’t need “The Nation’s Top Epidemiologist” to tell us the things he’s telling us. Let’s review: Don’t doubt the statistics, even though we were caught red-handed counting a motorcycle crash fatality as a COVID death. Believe everything. Stay home, wear two masks, wash your hands, Rand Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about, socially distance, wear masks even if you’re vaxxed, I’m so glad I don’t work for Trump anymore, if you attack me you’re attacking science, the droplets are how it’s spread so wear your masks…and gee, I dunno about this “vaccine mandate applies to people who already had COVID” thing so I’ll take a pass on that. Wear your masks. That pretty much covers it, right? Now a lot of these are opinions, that are reasonable, but conflict with other opinions that are also reasonable. We could have discussions about these. As far as being science, they’re not advanced science so there’s no reason to pick out our “top expert” and forget about what everyone else says. That’s not how you do science. That’s how you do bureaucracy and phony-consensus-building.

And then, fifth thing, is China. We’re not allowed to say, or even recall, that it’s a China Virus. It’s just like O.J. Simpson murdering his wife, the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. Except that analogy breaks down because we were allowed to say “O.J. killed Nicole.” There we go again with those powers-that-be. When they’re telling us what not to say and what not to think, how in the world could that not be politics?

This is not the first time China has infected us with a deadly strain. If we were really into using science to protect ourselves from this, the scientific questions to be asking might include: Say, what’s China working on right now? Getting ready to hit us again? I think that might be the fifth or sixth deadly infection, I’ve lost count…

Another thing is our attitude toward the “vaccine hesitant.” It’s just weird, and I’m in a position to know because I’m one of them. I’m not anti-vax, but I’m definitely hesitating, waiting to see how this whole thing plays out before I go injecting something into my system I can’t pump out again. Discussing this has made me tired…ah, ha ha! That’s not true. We haven’t discussed it even a tiny bit. Which is weird and strange, given that vax-hesitancy has taken everybody by complete surprise. They did Nazi it coming! Well, whether we discuss it or not, I can monologue about it so allow me to expound on this one…

Accountability used to be a real thing, and no longer is. Think on this: Our alleged President likes to throw out numbers, dates and ultimatums. So maybe slip this one into his hopper…”If we can get the vaccination rate up past ninety percent we’ll get rid of the COVID. If we do that and it doesn’t happen, I will resign as President at noon Eastern Time, November 30th.”

No, I don’t really want that. There’s no such thing as getting rid of COVID, and I wouldn’t want that giggling whore running so much as a lemonade stand let alone the executive branch. But apart from those problems, you know I know you know you’re never going to hear him say something like that. It would involve accountability.

We The People are supposed to perform, and provide our “I’ve been vaxxed” cards if we want to eat, work, travel or associate with anybody. The people telling us to do this performing, keep their jobs no matter what happens. In fact, for him to say anything even vaguely resembling what’s above, he would have to define a goal. “Daily new cases” or “positive per 100,000” or something like that. We receive those reports. So we know they can be measured. But we don’t hear about any goals. All we get is “keep wearing your masks,” “get vaccinated” and “we think we’ve turned a corner.”

For, closing in on two years now. Strange, innit? Real science would be intrigued and want to know more. What we’re dealing with here, doesn’t want to know anything. It’s got this –>||<– much curiosity about why people are hesitant, what it might take to make them not-hesitant, what exactly it is we’re trying to do…etc…

As a side-point: People who are oriented toward specific goals, shouldn’t take direction from people who aren’t.

But anyway, I just don’t see very much science in this. I see people with degrees wearing white coats and using science-buzzwords as they appear on teevee. Did you know, politics can look like science? It’s like the metaphorical wolf wearing a sheep costume. This particular costume, up close, when you take the time to inspect it, isn’t very convincing. It only looks like a sheep from a distance. It looks like real science if, and only if, you refuse to ask any questions…

…you know, the way the powers-that-be want. Believe everything, don’t ask questions, get your shot or you’re fired. Seems political…but, that’s just my initial impression. My temporary, fleeting, nineteen-month opinion.

Way way back in the olden days, back when going to a movie or dinner at a restaurant was simple, I had comments to make about process vs. outcome. Since then, the Trump Era has come & gone…for now…and we’ve been battling the China Virus. I’m reminded of what my Uncle Wally told me about what one of his editors used to say to him: “The world is divided into two groups of people, the ones who go around dividing everyone into two groups, and everyone else…”

There are “process people” and there are “outcome people.” How do you tell them apart? Remember that old saying that insanity is repeating a consistent behavior with the expectation of an inconsistent result; that’s how.

Process people engaged in a bad process headed toward a bad outcome, won’t care about the outcome. They’ll defend their adherence to the details of the process, nevermind the fact that the process, also, is bad. Their defense is that there’s some authority or weight invested in this bad process, and they’re adhering to it. Their hope is that whoever is in a position to adjudicate, will put all the emphasis on following process and ignore outcome, the way they did. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, they just appeal to a higher authority. So they never learn they did it the wrong way, because there’s no reason for them to learn this.

If you listen to them carefully, you can hear them ‘fessing up that this is how it works. “Our response was/is in line with guidance from the CDC.” It’s an answer to a question no one was asking.

No-on-recall, keep Gavin Newsom, was all about process versus outcome. Who in their right mind is going to defend the outcome of having Newsom in charge? Taxpaying residents heading for the hills, shit on the sidewalk, the place is literally in flames…but our guy in charge does have a defense. It’s all about “gonna follow the science!” — not about what’s supposed to be the whole point of leadership, leaving things in a condition better than how you found them.

When process people defend themselves this way, things get awkward fast because they’re bolstering a claim of premiere excellence, atop an accumulation of evidence that supports nothing better than adequacy. You can’t do an excellent job of following a process; that’s strictly pass-fail. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. Lookit me following the science! I’m following the CDC! They yell jump, I say how high? Clearly, I’m irreplaceable!

Everybody likes to be thought of as intelligent, but intelligence is the ability and the willingness to learn. Learning is a non-instinctive behavioral change. You have to screw up and admit you did it wrong. Only outcome people can do this, because only they monitor the outcome, with a genuine potential for saying to themselves, if the situation calls for it: “Well, that sucks. Let’s do it differently next time.”

When we debate taxing businesses, we’re actually debating destroying businesses. Outcome people tend to be pro-business, because you really can’t run a business while ignoring outcomes, unless your “business” is some government agency that never runs out of money. Conversely, you aren’t going to fit into any of those “businesses” in any capacity, unless you’re a process person.

The China Virus has polarized us deeply, because we’ve responded with a thorny thicket of rules rules and more rules, which are refined day-to-day by process people. You’ll notice this refinement, back to the very beginning, has had very little to do with results. That’s why. Meanwhile, the people who are fixated on these rules rules and more rules, and obliged to live under them, are outcome people. We care about the results. “But my shelter in place order was the approved method at the time” doesn’t mean an awful lot to us.

“Masks are how we keep each other safe!” is fraud, not because it’s demonstrably untrue (although certainly, support for it is lacking). It’s a deceitful statement because it’s what process people say when they’re pretending to be outcome people. They don’t care about keeping each other safe. They’d prefer people be safe versus not safe…maybe….but they really care about following and enforcing rules.

“I’m following the guidance from the CDC” is, at least, honest. It’s a process person presenting himself or herself as a process person. The final outcome which is on everybody’s mind, is a mere afterthought to such a person, but at least there’s no effort spent to pretend otherwise.

When people are forced to give up one thing for another thing, and thereby make clear what their priorities really are, the thing that rates highest to everyone with a working brain is a good outcome. When push comes to shove, no one with functioning intellect really cares about process, except as a means to an end. We’d sacrifice it in a heartbeat for the other, because we’re rational. But we’re not letting outcome-people actually make any decisions about anything. From the beginning, we have invested all the authority in process people. Here we are a year and a half into it, wondering what we did wrong. That’s what.

Mask maniacs, cornered by the obvious problems posed to Mask Theory by real science, lunge for this loophole of “It’s good manners” or “It shows we care about each other.”

I am one of the people who understand they shouldn’t be doing that.

See to me, if something comes naturally to me because Mom raised me that way, it’s not included in “good manners” because I don’t have to put in any effort. Someone else might think “Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you'” means good manners, but for me, it would be much harder not to do it. Good manners, for me, include only things that are difficult…for me. So in my case, since I have opinions other people don’t have, good manners must include what’s hard for me to do: showing proper respect to people who disagree. I have to work a little harder to keep in mind that people who reject my opinions, or maintain other opinions I find to be opprobrious, might very well be intelligent people. There are people who think, for example, that if women ran the world we would have less fighting. There are people who think the Washington Redskins should have changed their name. There are people who think Barack Obama is a “lightworker.” It gets very hard for me to show proper respect and keep in mind these people might have brains in their heads…which, maybe, they’re not using.

Other opinions are even worse. There are people who think paper straws and single-use plastic bags will save the planet. There are people who think increasing the minimum wage doesn’t impact employment, or might even result in more businesses hiring. There are people who think we’re (somehow) living in The Handmaid’s Tale. Opinions like these, for all purposes, logically exclude the possibility that the holder of the opinion has a working brain. In these cases I can’t bear in mind a possibility that isn’t there, so I have to pretend. Good manners, to me, have a lot to do with all this. Occasionally people will object to what I say and remonstrate me about keeping such things to myself. The response to which is…snowflake, you should hear the things I do keep to myself. And then I have to make that one of the things, and leave it unsaid. This is all very challenging and that’s what makes them good manners. In my case.

So if masks are good manners, we’ve got a big problem here.

That’s because Dr. Fauci is apparently getting bored with epidemiology and is branching off into manners. Hence, the problem. When the subject is epidemiology, people insist I should defer to Dr. F’s vastly superior knowledge and experience. This makes sense to me, and I so defer. But I will not defer to his understanding of etiquette or “showing each other we care.” I refuse. It makes no sense for me to do such a thing.

When it comes time to show proper respect to a person holding an opinion he doesn’t like, Dr. Fauci is not the top dog, or the go-to. He’s not on the bottom either, but he’s close to it. He’s definitely in the bottom 50%. Maybe even in the bottom 10%.

From all I have seen over the last year and a half, when Tony the Tyrant is speaking off the cuff and encounters an opinion he doesn’t like, or sees one of his own opinions questioned in a way that doesn’t suit his fancy, he turns into one of the rudest little cunts I’ve ever seen. He does this rather speedily, and reliably, like he thinks he’ll be subjected to a tax or penalty if he leaves behind any lingering doubts about his disrespect for the dissenting viewpoint, and the person holding it. He is very far from any sort of Manners Master, about as far away from that as someone could get. No. I will not enshrine him this way. Absolutely not. An alley cat would be a better choice.

“Wear a mask because Dr. F. says it’s good manners” isn’t going to wash, with me.

All your life you have heard “Women fought for and won the right to vote” and it makes it sound like men were the Evil Galactic Empire and women were noble brave Ewoks on Endor…but, no. It was a constitutional amendment that had to be ratified by 3/4 of the states, and in order to ratify, you had to be a man. Men gave women the right to vote.

Ever since then, we have been dominated by what we might call The Hystericals. These are people who are driven into hysterics when they figure out there’s danger around…just humdrum, everyday, ordinary danger. In network security we call it “residual risk.” It goes with simply living life. When The Hystericals figure out residual risk has not been reduced to zero, which is an impossibility anyway, they insist on turning everything upside down. They don’t feel completely 100% safe yet, because they’re not, and so everyone else has to do some more accommodating. We need more taxes and more rules, to suit The Hystericals.

This is why we have a “pandemic”…or “shamdemic.” “Plandemic.” All our official diktats are built around calming down and soothing The Hystericals. It’s not about “following the science.” The science says forcing little kids to wear masks is a futile endeavor, and a cruel one. The science says there’s no point imposing a vaccine mandate on people who’ve already been infected, and recovered. This propagation of an evil deadly virus is a hundred year event, and we’ve gone through it before, but a hundred years ago we didn’t handle it this way. Woodrow Wilson never said anything about Influenza, did you know that? Not one word. He actually caught it and nearly died. That’s your tip-off: Everything we do with this problem, and all the others, is about soothing and mollifying those who refuse to be soothed or mollified. That’s what politics is now, and it started with Women’s Suffrage.

Here’s the thing though.

All women are not Hystericals. And all Hystericals are not women. When we gave women the right to vote, we created a new potential for marketing irrational progressivism, and the progressives took the opportunity to do the marketing and they’ve never stopped. They manufactured The Hystericals. It’s really no different from the boost progressivism got when they lowered the voting age to eighteen, even though all progressives are not 18-21, and all 18-21-year-olds are not progressives.

But then here’s another thing.

Ever since we’ve gone down that path of kowtowing to The Hystericals who go apeshit whenever they figure out there’s residual risk…we have put women in a danger they didn’t have to face before. As “civilized” society has gelded itself, it has made itself more hazardous to women in general. A lot of this has come from the erasure of definitions. We’re supposed to refer to Alana McLaughlin as “her” and “she,” but that’s a dude, dude. And now that society is ball-less and slap-happy with slapping down definitions of things, he gets to rough up women and punch them in the face. It’s sick, disgusting and wrong.

Mark Steyn wrote of the “culture of positivity” shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, making reference to earlier carnage:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the ‘Montreal massacre,’ the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine. As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not [the shooter] but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over…they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

And now we have the tragedy — we think — of Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. He came back from the cross-country trip without her, and her whereabouts are unknown. Mr. Laundrie is not talking. Police have already tried to question him, and that’s supposedly reached a dead end because supposedly, the Constitution says if he doesn’t want to tell anyone where she is, or isn’t, nobody can make him. So he lawyers up, and anyone who wants answers out of him has to settle for pre-fabbed statements from his attorney.

Yes it’s supposed to be constitutional, but we’ve had the Constitution for a long time. Once again: Men are being unmanly, and women are facing new dangers. It’s a new thing. The Constitution didn’t make it this way. You see, this is why it’s important to study history, and to think logically about such things. We are abandoning women to terrible fates at the hands of not-quite-men, because of the Supreme Law of the Land…which predates our doing such a dreadful, passive, pusillanimous thing. This tells us, however much we may wish to deny it, that there’s more to our actions than just the law. There is culture too, and ours must be on a rapid decline. If it’s on one, someone must have put it there. The enemy is us.

Someone should say something, because we have a lot of women who are not Hystericals. They, being mature grown-ups, can accept residual risk, and it has not gone unnoticed by me that some men could learn a few things from such women. But such women are capable of accepting reasonable residual risk. They do not plan on being smashed in the face by Mr. McLaughlin, or filed into a room to be perforated by the likes of Mr. Lépine and his Ruger Mini-14, or to be driven out in the middle of nowhere and abandoned or who knows what else by Mr. Laundrie.

The Hystericals have made it popular for everyone, particularly those in positions of power, to assume testosterone is “toxic.” In fact, they’ve made it hazardous to assume anything else. The rest of us are supposed to take note of their issues, that they’re still falling short in their goal of complete safety and security; and leap to the conclusion that everyone else has to nudge them a bit closer to that unattainable goal, by getting rid of the testosterone.

Experience, on the other hand, is counseling us toward the opposite. It is this drive to get rid of testosterone that is putting the women in danger. A lot of these women never fell for the ruse in the first place, and those others among us who are still falling for it, are doing them a dangerous disservice.

It’s time once again to extract civilization’s cranial unit from it’s own sphincter cavity. The reminders are coming at us thick and fast now, and they’re all symptoms of a common problem.

There are at least three occasions in The Bible in which flawed humans have to be rebooted because there’s just no fixing ’em (us): the Great Flood; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and the Apocalypse.

That we’re flawed, is not a matter of degree that changes across time — we just are. And I discard as a possibility that the dates are predetermined (except maybe for The Flood I suppose); something deteriorated to a level where there emerged a decision-point. Therefore there had to be what one might call a “social dynamic” that had degraded to the point where it was no longer salvageable. The collective forms a social code, which may be viable or not, and social codes can slouch over time like fruit on the ground, rotting. Eventually you get to the point where good conduct, at the level of the individual, doesn’t matter. You create a collective situation in which you have to be an asshole in order to survive. At that point, an overseeing deity would have to merge the rotten collective with a good one and hope the cultural absorption would work in the right direction, wait for the bad behavior to dissipate by way of attrition, send His son into the middle of it to preach some & get crucified, or flush it all.

Anyone who’s attended public school K-12 is going to understand the situation.

And you can see it now. People start off their little speeches with their drive to “follow the science” and their determination to avoid being seduced/distracted away from it…by what, one wonders? And then that translates into a resolve to be obedient…to whom, one wonders? And before they’re three or four sentences in, they’re celebrating that someone got sick and died, or looking forward to it.

No, I don’t think these are End Times. I’m sure God has much bigger things on His plate. This crisis, in my view, is just an advance preview, a “revelation” of sorts of what people are like inside, what they show when things get tough. It’s not pretty. Yes we have some heroic first responders, but those are individuals. The group dynamic is deteriorating at a rapid rate. “Death-wishing” should, by rights, be an unpopular thing, and instead we see it is quite fashionable. It’s emerged as the first-and-foremost way people deal with their day-to-day stresses & distresses: Seek out, or imagine, those with disagreeable opinions, and wish death on them.

The Supreme Court has declined to intervene with the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” for now. There is sure to be more drama coming.

It’s like the 1980’s all over again. Everywhere, I see people offering their opinions about abortion, and a lot of these opinions consist of nothing more than a showy cranky statement that some certain set of other people shouldn’t have opinions. Of course that’s a dishonest way to present a non-argument argument. What they’re really trying to say is “We want this other set of people to have a license to kill, but we know if we argued it that way we’d lose, so we’re going to argue about not arguing about it.”

That’s the way they presented it some forty years ago. We did what they said, and for the most part, stopped arguing about it. I can see now, the “Abortion is a done deal, let’s stop arguing it” people were wrong. We did what they wanted us to do, and for a long time. Now that abortion is a thing to argue about again, it is evident there are a lot of people out there who look at men, women and children all cock-eyed. Their viewpoint, which has gone mainstream, is what used to be a fringe-kooky radical viewpoint and we haven’t noticed this because we’ve been so busy not-arguing about any of it.

They think children are liabilities and not assets. You’ll notice our whole society is built around this idea now. “Who’s going to take care of him or her?” “How are you going to afford child support for three kids?” “Oh you are collecting child support from him, aren’t you?” “Better keep her happy fella, she’s a Fertile Myrtle and that would be one expensive divorce.” “He has special needs, how are you going to get him the help that he needs?” Etc….it used to be, the poorer the farmer, the more kids he would have to have. Children were assets, even if you were heartless, and if you had a heart they were a blessing. We don’t look at it like that anymore because, let’s be honest, we can’t. Liabilities aren’t blessings.

Before the child is born, these people think he is an illness that has happened to the woman’s body, like a disease. How is she going to get access to health care? What do you mean, she’ll have to pay for it? How dare you!

The man putting her in that state, has done something to her, taken something away rather than adding it. To even inform him that there’s a plan to murder his child, is the exception now, with the rule being that she’ll have to clean up after him, the way we pick up candy wrappers and potato chip bags in our corner lot left by who-knows-who.

If she keeps the child, she still doesn’t have to tell him. There is no expectation that she should bother to do so. No expectation that he’s anywhere around to find out about it.

If a mother mentions the problems she’s having with a child, be it schoolwork, discipline problems, kid getting picked on by bullies, losing his equipment & supplies, medical misadventures, etc., it has become socially expected that she won’t mention any father involved. Also, that if she doesn’t, no one will ask. This seems like good manners until you stop to consider: We have now accepted the idea that there’s no father. We have accepted a new default in which humans breed the same way cattle breed. The “bull” is expected to do what it takes to get things going, and then move on to other things. An exception to this would be just that, an exception.

And then we busy ourselves with rewriting history, imagining things have always been this way and that men were never held to any kind of obligation, legal, social, any other kind, to take care of women. There was no Code of Chivalry, no social code in which gentlemen offered ladies their seats, opened doors for them, walked on the side of the sidewalk facing traffic, etc. That never happened, it was just thousands of years of exploitation. And since we’re wrapping up five thousand years or so of men exploiting women, supposedly it’s time to turn things around and see to it women make all the decisions, run everything, that they graduate from college and earn degrees in higher numbers, that any decision any one makes is above question and beyond appeal.

Oh, you certainly can heckle a woman in power if she supports Donald Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene knows all about that. But, our culturally-accepted woman-in-power is not like her, not at all. We have a great understanding of what a powerful woman should look like, and she’s a termagant in a pantsuit. Part of the reason congresswomen like MTG and Elise Stefanik get heckled, is because they don’t fit into the required mold. We’ve put together a fairly complete, crisp profile: Hardcore left-wing, pantsuit every damn day, scold scold scold, maybe shake a finger too, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, living in an alternative reality, launching into a how-dare-you monologue anytime anyone mentions 2+2=4; negative, toxic, unpleasant and shrill. I’m talking about which one? So many fit into it, and every year there are more because it’s what we expect and accept. For all my description, I could be talking about any one from a vast number and I’ve specified nothing. Pelosi and AOC. Klobuchar and Clinton. Boxer, Feinstein, Warren, etc. etc. etc. etc…….

Being male, I’m only mildly annoyed and bored with it. If I were a woman, I would be insulted. We have granted women — in fact, they always had — the power to say go, and to say stop. Let’s do this, let’s not do this. Pregnancies, by default, have to be stoppable because it would never work out right with that guy? But she picked him. Yes feminists want us to imagine rape scenarios, and all of the time, whenever we argue about abortion. They don’t think all pregnancies come from rape, but they’d be pleased if everyone else thought of them that way. Well…back in the olden days, Daddy picked the dude. He had veto power, and a lot of the feminist movement had to do with rebelling against Daddy, “empowering” the woman to pick her own dude. Now it’s just so terribly important to terminate pregnancies? What does that say about the terrible, awful judgment of women? Feminists seem to think women are a bunch of dummies, who would have been just as well off leaving the crucial, life-making decision up to Daddy. Insulting doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s wrong with this.

So I’m glad we’re arguing about abortion again, in a way. It’s tiring. But it exposes this idea that men are a pestilence, children are liabilities not assets, and women should be acrid, acidic shrews who go to Washington and systematically mass-produce terrible ideas about how to control others. The alternative is to not discuss any of this…but allow the idea to reign supreme. That’s been given a fair shot now, for many years. I’m not pleased with the results. So by all means, let’s go back to arguing it again.

“Liberals question things and conservatives don’t” is an axiom that’s been wandering afield. It has been losing fidelity to what’s real — but not, I see, popularity or currency — about as quickly as “democrats are the party of the Little Guy and Republicans represent rich fat cats.” And for pretty much the same reason: The democrats and the liberals have been chasing dependent, unproductive people as a constituency, along with casual lazy thinkers who don’t question the things they’re told.

Between those two, it is the question-things change that has lately had a greater impact, and is more sneaky, sultry and seductive. We have become accustomed to it happening and now it’s just a matter of routine. Liberals, or those who fasten their interests to the interests of liberals, say “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there’s no blah blah blah and/or everyone has access to blah blah blah.” And with that simple declaration of mission-statement, you have something people can choose to believe uncritically, to question, or deny altogether. As an aside, there’s an interesting binary-choice playing out here. Liberals can’t seem to think about increasing or decreasing something; they have to drive it from the planet forever, or flood everybody & everything with it so you can’t get away from it. Between those two extremes, in their world, there isn’t anything.

Get rid of mask hesitancy, vaccine hesitancy, any notion that there are only two genders, this that & that other statue, this emblem, that brand, any & all unsavory opinions, make sure white people are properly outnumbered, gas powered cars and trucks, Imperial measurement system, meat, family, capitalism…

Saturate everything with eco-cups, heavy plastic bags, the masks, paper straws, gay gay gay make everything gay…

Lazy thinkers say, as they’re supposed to say: Great! Who could possibly be opposed to this? Whoever opposes this, must be some kind of monster!

And then it falls to conservatives to ask the necessary questions:

Why?

How then is anybody going to do X, that relies on this thing you’re eliminating, or on an absence of whatever it is you’re promulgating everywhere?

How exactly is that going to work? California’s under-powered and incendiary electrical grid, just magically fixes itself in time for everyone to be driving an electric vehicle…everywhere?

How do you know what you think you know?

Could you be cocking up the incentives by doing this? What’s that do to supply and demand?

How is this going to affect the upbringing of children? Apart from pushing more of them to become liberals…

Is the technology really ready for that?

At what cost?

We’re left with a persistent problem of polarization, which is due largely to the liberals maintaining their problem with labeling. A deceptive, or mistaken, caption under something will snooker ’em every time. They cannot distinguish between packaging and contents. They see someone saying “twelve years left to save the planet” to get attention…we know these are people who will not stand to be cornered, a year from now, with “So now there are eleven years, right?” The honest ones will say: I exaggerated to get a little bit of extra attention. The less honest ones will change the subject. Meanwhile, the well-mannered liberal won’t factor in any of that, then or now. He will simply think what he’s told to think. Twelve years, start that clock. Run around screaming and panicking, and a little bit of arms-flailing-overhead wouldn’t hurt either.

I don’t think “liberals question things and conservatives don’t” has been a good rule-of-thumb since somewhere around LBJ’s time, if even then.

One of the Quora kids who think they know everything, tries to make the point that what would have passed for lunacy in 1999 is standard Republican intellectual fare today.

An opinion can be well-founded and/or well-reasoned. His is neither, but it’s important anyway because it reflects the feelings of so many. Ah, there’s that problem again. Feelings. You see the damage being done when you stop to realize: None of what the Quora commenter listed is nearly as off-the-rocker as “I voted Biden/Harris in 2020 and I’m not sorry.”

The President is senile. Electronic and print media are pretending he isn’t. His communications apparatus is presenting his embarrassing failures as successes. The media is doing little to nothing to correct this.

We have this new industry of “fact checking” that answers to no one and forms questionable conclusions in a bubble and as a monolith. They label things as “misinformation” that are not false, and in some cases, are provably or demonstrably true. We have become numb to this, after years of seeing persons in positions of authority add their signatures to things that are known lies, forced to conclude what people must say in totalitarian dictatorships: “Maybe it’s a lie, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so whatevs.” If any one resource is “caught spreading misinformation,” someone somewhere with power takes steps to disconnect them. There is usually no appeal and we almost never know who exactly is making the necessary judgment call. They cite “community standards” that do not exist in any written, open format that could be cited or referenced. They just suspend/disconnect and that’s that.

Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats suspend or shut down entire industries on the shaky pretext of a deadly pandemic, leaving literally millions unemployed. They don’t suspend-until some such-and-such a specific date. They just suspend. While those affected stumble around wondering when or if they’ll ever see an honestly-earned dollar again, these decision-makers get to collect a regular paycheck.

And then there is the Afghanistan embarrassment. The news is still changing too quickly for me to insert an excerpt or a link, we just have to keep watching it. It’s sort of a combination of “hard to look away from a derailment” and “I can’t trust anybody’s version.”

We need to update our “misery index” again, because you need to start with that before adding in unemployment/inflation, bank lending rates, etc. Economic indicators are like the top floor of a building. The overall mental health of our society is like the foundation.

None of it is doing too well right now.

The people who were lining up to get rid of Bad Orange Man are very quiet. I have to say, I’d be quiet too.

So, it’s “Please wear masks regardless of your vaccination status.” And apparently everywhere, multiple counties. China Virus stats are up, so our leaders are clamping down hard…on us. Good to know.

We’ve been through this before. A few times. Once again, it’s up to me to point out the obvious…to point out what everybody with a brain knows already, but people with better manners are going to leave unsaid.

What we’re seeing play out here, is a conflict between two ways to look at medicine. There are the very loud people, what I call the “Puppeteers and puppets” people, who perceive it’s the job of the medical authorities to tell us what to do…and our role is to do what they tell us. This seems reasonable, at first, until you ponder the most obvious question: Are they sure? And the clear and obvious answer is, no they’re not, and that’s okay. It’s science, which is supposed to constantly evolve as we learn more things. It’s science about what is still essentially a novel virus.

And then there are the people like me, who understand what’s wrong with that. The puppeteers are not sure, and that’s okay. But the central premise for everything we’re doing, is that they are sure. They’re scientists, after all! Are you a scientist? Am I a scientist? No and no. They outrank us, so let’s pretend they’re sure when they’re not.

So I guess you call us the “No Pretend” people.

“Puppeteer and Puppet” people will demand to know, with some justification…what does it matter? If they’re not sure, but they know more than we do, we might as well pretend they’re sure even if they’re not sure. Are you worried there’s a danger with the vaccines? Are you worried there’s some perceived cost involved in wearing the masks? The answer in my case is no & no. I just refuse to pretend.

If we see things as they really are, and think about those things the way they really are, we have to admit to an unsavory truth: It’s the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people, not us, who can’t handle this lack of certainty. We, as a whole, are romping around in the tall-grass looking for a Cracker Jack prize…we’ve been doing it for nineteen months now…haven’t found it yet. So it’s worse than a lack of certainty. We literally don’t know what we’re doing. They can’t handle that, so they’re observing this sanctimonious never-ever-circumvent hierarchy, with Tony the Tyrant on top, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. The people at the top are supposedly giving us the very best of known science, which is probably true. They’re probably being candid and sincere, usually, about everything they know. The problem is they don’t know. So the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people want this rigid chain-of-command observed, and all of the time, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. because they can’t handle the truth that we don’t know what we’re doing.

We won’t do this pretending. The Puppeteer-and-puppet people say that means people like me are putting them in some kind of danger. But that’s just more pretending. They pretend the science backs them up on this, but every now and then they have to deal with the fact that the science doesn’t back them up on this. So then they have to veer off into this “manners” thing, protesting that we have to wear masks to show we care. They want to pretend their Puppeteers are authorities on manners, rather than medicine. Well, anyone who’s actually dealt with a few doctors knows why we shouldn’t put doctors in charge of manners. We No-Pretend people aren’t ready to pretend that either.

Maybe this is my bias talking, but I think we No-Pretend people are the ones who have it right. We shouldn’t pretend clearly unknown things are known, or that clearly false things are true. It’s important we refrain from doing that, because pretending leads to more pretending. Now we’re supposed to pretend a higher vaccination rate is what’s needed to get rid of COVID, and that we’re almost up to that level, but not quite there yet. This, as a foundational premise, would legitimize more puppeteer-and-puppet rule-making, so a lot of people want that. We can pretend that’s “evidence” if we want to pretend that. But it isn’t.

A lot of people are “string” people. They’ve been making real nuisances of themselves. They fancy themselves to be superior to the puppets, and they want to tell the puppets what to do, but they have to receive instructions from the puppeteers about what to do. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in this chain of command, in which they take up this middle-position, playing no role in formulating the commands, but rather in enforcing them. They are often heard issuing the final conclusive staccato note in these deliberations, something to the effect of “just do it!” They’re accustomed to the puppets complying, because they seldom to never are confronted with the obvious rejoinder: That’s not a logical argument. That isn’t even an assertion. It’s just being pushy.

We’re divided right now because we’re being prevailed upon to pretend good crowd management is the same as good individual management; someone has taken a stab at the vaccination rate needed to bring about herd immunity, and their guess is that it’s very high. So the narrative is that unvaccinated people are selfish and harmful. We’re all supposed to pretend there are good scientific arguments in support of that, when there aren’t any, and the No-Pretend people aren’t pretending while the string people are yelling “just do it!”

Puppeteer-and-puppet people are prone to buy into “Let’s Try This Let’s Try That” medicine. That’s where the doc sees he’s not going to figure out exactly what’s wrong with your kid, or your pet, anytime soon, but the parent/owner is just a little bit off her rocker so he’d like to get her out of his office, but he’s figured out his role is more like a psychologist than a medical doctor, and he sees an opportunity to fulfill expectations without finding anything definite. So he prescribes something to treat the whatever…let’s just try it and see what it does. This makes the kid/pet into an experimental subject, which lends cachet. For a lot of parents/owners, that’s a huge plus. It makes for a good story to tell. But, it also just might possibly work, so there are valid reasons to opt into this, and there are valid reasons not to opt into it. It’s generally a good discussion to have. It’s also generally a discussion that, when all’s said & done, doesn’t happen.

“Let’s try this let’s try that” medicine is popular…with some. That’s another reason we’re divided. The Puppeteer Class has been wrong so often in this thing; people point it out, and the rebuttal is “Yeah but that’s to be expected, it’s how science works.” So it is! But because that’s how science works, y’all can stop pretending, anytime you want, that the No-Pretend people are hurting you just by being No-Pretend people. Also, let’s stop pretending the puppeteers are taking actual responsibility for end results. They aren’t.

You have your vaccines now. If you’re worried about the China Virus, take your vaccine. And your booster shot too. Pretty soon, there are going to be multiple booster shots…and the people who’ve taken all five of them, will be blaming the people who’ve only taken four.

But let’s not have any more pretending about “We’d be all done with it by now if it weren’t for that guy over there,” or about “doing this” or “getting rid of it once and for all” or “kicking COVID’s butt.” Y’all aren’t doing that.

Lately it seems like we’re living in a Twilight Zone episode. In fact, I notice among the loudest of us, there’s an idea that if we’re not living in one yet, something’s wrong, and we have to get started on it a.s.a.p.

Let’s see…have I got this right? We had

1. Those dirty rotten unvax people are keeping us from reaching herd immunity; but then it emerged natural immunity was as effective as vaccine-driven immunity. Fauci The Great just wasn’t a fan of it, so after we admitted he wasn’t being straight with us it was

2. Those dirty rotten unvax people are unwittingly using their bodies as petri dishes to make new variants of the virus, like Delta for example; but then it emerged that a lot of us were still testing negative for the virus and antibodies as well, meaning we hadn’t contracted it; so then there was

3. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus; but then it emerged that vaxxed people were shedding it too, so then we had

4. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus more often and faster than the vax people; but then it emerged that that wasn’t true, so then we had

5. Those dirty rotten unvax people are filling up our hospitals, and all the deaths are unvax people; but then it emerged that a) When you’re dead, you’re no longer filling up a hospital and b) here, there and elsewhere there are some deaths from COVID among vaxxed people, our experts had just been covering them up; so then we had

6. Those dirty rotten unvax people are getting sicker than vaxxed people when & if they get the ‘Vid! Well yes, that’s true; that’s the whole point of having a vaccine. It gives your body a leg-up on forming the necessary resistance to fend off the virus, should you ever be infected with it. The problem is, that substantiates “I wouldn’t be doing it this way if I were them.” It doesn’t substantiate “They’re hurting me.” You can’t have a good witch hunt without they’re-hurting-me.

As these arguments have failed, one after another, like tumbling dominoes; those who rely on them to do their witch-hunting have slipped easily from one to another, as if it’s expected at a certain time, like changing underwear. Being right is fun, being wrong is not-so-fun. So they haven’t noticed the ground shifting beneath their feet. “What exactly are the unvaxxed doing to hurt you?” is a question that only burbles up to the surface, every now and then. It’s guaranteed not to happen if you never allow the target of your ire to say anything in response, or if you don’t listen. The “Why Aren’t You Vaccinated?” Karen-types are often seen falling short at one of those, or the other. So they don’t notice that while their lecture stays consistent, the support for it has to swivel around, changing over time. The overarching objective that endures, is to blame the right people for…whatever. To live in this pretend world of they’re-hurting-me.

Vax-tivists say they don’t owe anything to unvax people. That’s not wrong. In fact, that’s the problem. Unvax people don’t disagree. You have to have disagreement over something to have conflict, and you have to have conflict in order to achieve the true goal here: Making the designated group the target of widespread public hatred, preferably as the scapegoat for the misery China has brought down on us all.

What China has accomplished here is truly remarkable. They, the communists, have managed to acquire leverage over us, to tell us what to think by telling us what not to think. But our own government, sprawling out of control or any sensible restraint, still lacks the power to tell us what not to think. For that, you need large, corporate entities. We don’t think the virus came from China, because Disney won’t let us think the virus came from China. And who owns Disney? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Disney, in turn, owns just about everything. Don’t piss off The Mouse!

And because we aren’t allowed to blame China, when the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else, we fall for these smoke-and-mirror parlor tricks. We end up living on Maple Street, blaming each other.

Like a bunch of filthy rats, eating each other. Like communists.

The China virus has communists acting just like capitalists, and us capitalists acting just like communists.

Everybody arguing likes to think they’re arguing rationally with facts, logic and reason, and it’s the other guy getting hoodwinked by his hysteria and his emotions. Everybody gets more excited about it when we’re arguing about medicine, and this is understandable. We all understand how precious health is and what a life-changing event it would be if health were to go away so that we can’t get it back again.

Well, here’s something else people need to understand:

“Just wait ’til” arguments are emotion, not reason.

This may not be evident to the people who need to know; the people who go around using them, with varying degrees of frequency. It is abundantly apparent to those of us who have been continually on the receiving end of them for the last sixteen to nineteen months. “Just wait ’til you catch the ‘vid.” “Just wait ’til you’re on a ventilator.” “Just wait ’til you suffer permanent lung or organ damage.” “Just wait ’til it’s your family members who have it, and they caught it from you.”

These are not rational arguments. They feel like they are, to the person who is making them. That’s the problem. Feel.

“Future events will prove me right” is something you say when all other maneuvers have failed. If all other maneuvers have failed, there’s a reason why. Also, it is a tacit admission that present events, and past events, have not provided foundation for what you’re saying. By now, we have a certain depth of history behind a viral infection that, last year, was truly novel. If an argument is strong, it is reasonable to expect some past events should provide support for it, so there’s no reason to go delving into the future unless your argument is weak.

In addition to all that, it’s a turn-off when someone who’s trying to convince you to do something, is looking forward to your death or serious injury. It doesn’t close the sale. It doesn’t inspire reasonable, normal people to do what the other fellow wants them to do.

The 2020 Election turned into a cheat, and the cheat turned into a battle of wills. My side lost the battle of wills. And then the people who won it used the Capitol Penetration on January 6, and other things, to try to make their victory more decisive, and — let’s all just come out and admit it — accumulate for themselves a level of influence over things elevated as far as possible, above what was merited by their “victory.”

Now we know the whole thing was a mistake. So people like me are looking around and wondering…alright, is this the part where I keep my mouth shut and allow others to gradually come to the conclusion we were right all along, on their own? Or do we go with the “Nobody else will toot my horn for me, so here I go?” Past history would tend to suggest they need the horn tooted. They don’t learn on their own.

I’m settling for a combination of both. And I’m monitoring, recording and taking notes. One liberal expresses disappointment in Placeholder Joe’s handling of Afghanistan but stops short of admitting to a mistake. Another wants to talk about Iraq and how she knew that was the wrong thing to do…I guess trying to shoehorn in a one-for-two for herself before admitting to any error…

You really can’t get any more bait-and-switchy than this, can you? I mean, can you? The booby prize for getting rid of Trump and replacing him with the kindly old Grandpa was prestige on the world stage, a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state, dignity, respect, cogent analysis of whatever situation came along, even-tempered leadership…you know, “Hooray the adults are in charge again” stuff. How’d that go?

They want to look like they don’t make mistakes.

What they look like, to me, are people who can’t learn from mistakes. That’s far worse than making mistakes, assuming that on those occasions you make them, you can admit you made them and learn to, as the liberals like to say, “do better.”

I guess it’s up to the rest of us to learn it’s a mistake to do anything their way. But this is a realization that I’d made back in…oh, around the late 1970’s. But now I understand that includes running elections. There’s just no getting around it. Liberals will not admit to their mistakes, so the rest of us are going ot have to “admit” them on their behalf.

What else are we to learn from this?

After we’re done beating up on the liberals for caring more about the appearance of WinningTheArgument than about actually being right, and in so doing hurting others, I think we have to be fair and admit this is essentially what politics is, and on all sides. Those who do it for a living say to all the rest of us, “We can see what’s distressing you, and the cure for the problem is to vote for my guy.” It’s salesmanship 101: The solution to my problems has something to do with a solution to your problems. This may or may not be true, but validating it is entirely up to the buyer. When you’re the buyer, and you do a bad job of this, you get taken and at some point you have to admit you sucked in your execution of this very critical task. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. This one is more bitter and quite a bit bigger than most other such pills, because this is a situation where the delivery was the photo-negative opposite of what was promised, and the consequences are disastrous.

The liberals shoved us out of the way and seized the controls. Now it’s glaringly apparent to everyone paying attention — us, them, our friends, our foes, their friends, their foes — everyone involved would have been a lot better off if they’d just jammed their hands in their pockets and kept them there. There’s no one they can blame for this. It’s all on them, and they know it.

But we can’t rely on them to learn from the mistake, and avoid doing it again. We just can’t. If they had what it took, they wouldn’t be liberals.

Part of the reason we’re divided in 2021, in politics, in both intensity and frequency, is that for approximately half a century there has been this drive to avoid making each other feel bad.

You say: Hold up there Freeberg. How can this political division, which makes people feel bad, be the result of some effort to avoid making each other feel bad? That’s kind of like Superman being hurt by rocks from his home world, isn’t it? Makes no sense! In order for me to explain this I have to simplify things, a lot. It is necessary to remove the emotional attachments. So let’s say we’re discussing whether or not water is wet.

All the Sesame-Street pandering to feelings has resulted in a new deliberative tool having been forged, a rhetorical device of: “If you mention that water is wet you make me feel bad.” Note — the people on the other side wouldn’t have to use this device. You can easily prove water is wet, so it wouldn’t make any sense to go wading (ha!) into an argument wielding a rhetorical device of “You make me feel bad if you say water is *not* wet.” It would be needlessly convoluted, time consuming and wasteful. So this new device is available only for those who assert the weaker positions. But since 1960 or so, it is available.

Black people owned slaves too. You make me feel bad!

The virus really did come from China. You make me feel bad!

Gay married couples have fights & divorces too. Feel bad!

Here’s a rich guy who didn’t inherit anything. Down-tingles!!

Women on average can’t lift as much. Triggered!!

Aside from furnishing this new rhetorical tool to people who have taken the wrong position on something, and know they’ve taken the wrong position, this divides us in other ways. It splinters us. Think of all the ways you can respond to this situation, of “I’m going to feel bad if you mention water is wet.”

Normal people will respond with: Well then you know what? Let’s just avoid the subject entirely. That’s the default response from anyone who is decent. And, uh, maybe their husbands.

Then you have dickheads like me. No, we can avoid talking about it if we want, but water is wet and nothing we say, or refuse to say, is ever going to change that.

And then you have bullies, which people like me are tempted to be, and we try not to cross that line…we get no credit for it, no one knows how hard we try not to be the asshole who says: “I’m going to stress the wetness of water again and again and again until that whelp is lying on the floor in a fetal position, quivering and pissing himself.” Those types are certainly out there. The temptation is out there. That’s what polarizes us.

There are also some real assholes on the other side. The kind that grew up crying whenever mommy was in earshot, and stopped when she left the room. “I know water is really wet, but if I act like I’m triggered whenever anyone mentions it, I get to start fights and make it look like it’s the other guy’s fault.” These crybabies really don’t care if water is wet or not wet. They thrive on the thrill of breaking things and making it look like the other guy did it. They’re like porch pirates who don’t know what’s in the box they’re stealing. It’s the thrill they get from doing something they know is wrong.

Deep down we all know what’s true. We don’t need me to actually say it. But…here I go.

It was a mistake to get feelings involved in these discussions in the first place. If water is wet, it doesn’t matter who’s throwing a temper tantrum over it. It’s still wet.

Some 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks began to debate and inspect the concept of what’s true, and what truth is. We’re behind where they were 25 centuries ago, because of our…feelings, nothing more than feelings, whoa oh oh feelings…

The public at large is in a state of agitation and distress because democrats and liberals have taken control of the situation with the China Virus, and they have done nothing about it apart from shaming, censoring and criminalizing anyone who mentions it’s a China Virus.

Their message to the public is one of “Don’t you worry, we’re going to kick COVID’s butt” and the public’s response is “That’s why we’re worried.” Remember, we’re still waiting for this crew to kick Climate Change‘s butt, and poverty‘s butt, and illiteracy‘s butt, and bigotry‘s butt, and crime in inner cities‘ butt, and stagnant wages & high cost of living‘s butts, and and and and………

All they have done with these things amounts to creating campaign issues out of them. And then fix exactly nothing because if they did, the campaign tools and weapons would go away. They’d lose their ability to do things they couldn’t do before. They know this, everybody else knows they know it, they know everybody else knows, we know they know we know they know…

We have a good understanding here, whether we’re allowed or motivated, to talk about it, or not. Issue after issue after issue, democrats make a problem, then they campaign on it, win, and rather than fix the problem, make it worse. They exacerbate it, intensify it, pull more people into it to expand it in both breadth and depth. Then they run on it again, win again, lather rinse & repeat…

Why not just admit to what’s obvious? Since China infected us with a deadly virus, the democrat party has seen the list of issues subject to this cycle, increase by one item. Let’s be honest, that is what’s changed.

The public is right to be agitated.

A number of events have me thinking about people and what makes them tick. And, occasionally, collide.

When you strip away the good manners, and all the other devices that conceal motivations, you see the behavior of the individual is more or less dictated by answers to just one from among a very few questions. I reduce these to just three:

1. How do I make the gadget work?

2. What are people going to say/think/feel about me?

3. How does it make me feel?

If it isn’t a singularity, it becomes one in short order; whoever finds himself obsessing over a plurality of these, with the passage of just one or two challenges, will subjugate all others in favor of just one. And after this happens a few times, the personality crystalizes. The individual starts to favor the same one out of the above three, consistently, all the way up to the dirt nap.

And so, whether or not we like it, we have our taxonomy. We have our tribes. And we’re tempted toward tribal thinking.

When people congregate, they get along much better if all in attendance are motivated (chiefly) by one of these. When the congregation straddles a line between two or more of these, there are obstacles. An obstacle is not an impossibility. People can still get along with each other, and with a bit of effort, start to see the other’s point of view. But it takes substantially more effort if the two of you are motivated by different things.

We are deep into an odd-numbered year, weary with the China Virus mess, struggling to get along in life, many of us afflicted with health problems resulting from medical neglect, or acquainted with a friend or relative who is so afflicted.

So few among us have the capacity or spare bandwidth to deal with the awful truth, but here it is: Biden/Harris got 81 million votes, or democrats are stealing our elections. And it is virtually impossible for Biden/Harris to have received that many votes. Also, if the democrats did steal the last election, it is virtually impossible for them to have been doing it for the first time.

There is a real possibility, and some would credibly assert a likelihood, that democrats haven’t legitimately won a national election since Bill Clinton in 1992 (a three-way, Taft/Roosevelt/Wilson type of fluke).

The most ominous thing about this is the possibility, by no means remote, that very soon after people see posts like this on social media, those posts will be scrubbed. There’s this mindset out there that anything that calls election results into question, must be “misinformation,” not because the question would be illegitimate but rather because it might put a damper on the public’s enthusiasm or drive to vote the next time. And so “admins” have to “combat” this “misinformation” by censoring any such questions, along with any insinuations or observations that might inspire such questions. This opens up a brand new chapter, not unprecedented but quite different from what came immediately before, in which people are responsible for what other people do, or don’t do…but it would seem no one person is responsible for his or her own actions. Also, that it’s “misinformation” to point out “Hey, we don’t really know X for sure” — when we don’t.

When we know something is *not* so, there’s no need to censor it. There’s no need to censor phlogiston theory. There’s no need to censor “That wrestling match was totally legitimate.” There’s no need to censor “The moon is made of cheese.” The need for censorship exists when the message is provably true, or open to question with an outright refutation being impossible. That is the situation that exists with these doubts against the Biden/Harris “victory” of 2020.

Liberals go through the motions of coming up with brand new ideas, and then the conservatives complain about them. High up on the list of these complaints the conservatives have about the liberal idea, is the observation that the idea is anything but new.

Liberals then complain about the conservatives. They ascribe all sorts of personal defects to the conservatives that are rather silly, for if they apply at all, a search for an enthused self-identifying liberal who shares such defects in equal measure, is a brief search. High up on the list of these complaints the liberals have about conservatives that apply with equal legitimacy to liberals, is the complaint that conservatives do a lot of complaining. But that one, at least, has the virtue of being true.

Moderates complain that both conservatives and liberals are enthused and entrenched, beyond what circumstances would legitimately permit, into their respective ideologies. If only conservatives would forget about being conservative, and liberals forget about being liberal, and if each of those two sides would stop complaining about the other, we could get things done.

Where the conservatives and liberals overlap, you have the prime, vital and unifying characteristic of the moderate. “If only everybody else would stop complaining about anything, and be more like me, we could all get things done.”

You allow all of them to have their say and enjoy their influence, put ’em in a big bag, shake it up, hold your “free and fair” election…and evidently, what you get is the Biden administration.

Hmmm…what’s the takeaway?

1. Sliming other people because they “complain” is useless. It is silly, in no small part because it is, in & of itself, complaining; therefore it is the act of assuming the form and shape of the target of one’s loathing.

2. Therefore, making a villain out of everybody who complains, is a useless exercise.

3. Pursuing it to its logical end, we construct, and then must endure the consequences of, substandard results. People who think shushing up complaints is apt to give us good things, are just saying what sounds good without thinking it over, failing to pay attention, or engaged in some combination of those two things.

4. Nobody’s really above it. There may be some people who abstain from it entirely, either by way of self-restraint or a mental handicap that denies them the fundamentals of complaining; but they’re not above it, they’re beneath it.

5. Most importantly, our ability to discuss these issues comes from our empowerment to vote. And that comes from one or several complaints someone had. We owe what we have to the complainers. It comes under “Be careful what you wish for”; without those who complained in years past, you wouldn’t have anyone complaining in the here & now. They wouldn’t be allowed to, and they wouldn’t dare. Think a few more times on whether you really want to live in such a world.

Rather than looking back on history to when society at large blamed Jews, poor people, rich people, blacks, whites, gays, witches, straights, women, men, etc….let’s remove the emotionalism from it and just call the scapegoated group A. The history of human beings is much easier to understand, when you look for the simpler patterns, because when you review it in this sort of context you find the patterns. And once you find them you see they’re not complicated. So the era is unspecified, but it was cool to blame A. Let’s leave the problems unspecified too. Cows gave spoiled milk, real estate & gasoline were expensive, unemployment was sky-high…whatever…everybody blamed A because it was cool to blame A.

The pattern you’re going to see as you read up on history is that an effort arose to defrock A of any influence. Lots of people from all sorts of different walks of life participated in it, and they believed in it passionately, so the effort was both intense and broad. There was little resistance against this. Resistance would have been punished, with a sneering attitude of…so what, you’re with the A? And so members of Group A became pariahs. They may or may not have been driven underground or herded into boxcars, but the one consistent thing is that they weren’t allowed to have an effect on anything.

But humans are flawed. So no one did the logical thing of: Let’s monitor things for a year or two and see if they get better. Hold those in power to account.

Nope. What you’re going to find happened instead was, other people were left with the influence, but responsibility for results was not attached to this power, because the coolness-factor of blaming A for everything, remained. So those with power, did not labor under the heavy burden of improving things. They just continued to blame A. And they didn’t have to work too hard at it.

What happens when the people who have the power, don’t labor under the responsibility of making things better? Things don’t get better. When things don’t get better, they get worse.

And when people in power can direct the public’s agitation and blame-seeking as easily as you can direct the stream when you’re watering your lawn — you are going to find there was deterioration and things continued to get worse until there was a much more devastating crisis, like a Depression, or a war.

You’re also going to find that when there was a problem, but things got better, it wasn’t that easy for the powerful to direct this public blame like watering a lawn. You’re going to find that’s when the public had & used critical thinking skills, and said to the powerful “No thanks…we’ll figure out for ourselves why things are rancid, and we’ll put the blame where it makes sense.”

Right now we think we’re so hip and cool because society as a whole is blaming the unvaxxed, the whites, the males, the straights, the Trump supporters…all the people who have already been driven, with GREAT fanfare, from influence. Hooray! Yay for our side!! Yay!! But…why isn’t the pandemic over?

The truth is, the pandemic was over when the vaccines became widely available. Ever since then, if you’re really that worried about getting sick, you can just get the shot and then it’s the other guy’s problem. Just like locking up your car; the lock doesn’t have to be that good, the thieves will just meander onward to the next car that isn’t locked.

Since then, the “pandemic” has been a political thing. A blame game, an excuse to defrock those who have already lost influence, from influence. It’s an old game. People like to say Hitler was a bad guy, worst of the worst. It isn’t so common for anyone to put some quality thought into exploring why & how. Hitler had a lot of peculiar and unique strengths, but as far as running the country he was just another piece of crap bureaucrat who exploited the public’s suffering, to accumulate power for himself by blaming specified groups. It led to bad things and this is what makes him such a bad guy within the tapestry of history. But this particular aspect of him wasn’t, and isn’t, that unusual. Something like that is going to happen anytime the powerful who make the decisions tell the public “blame that group over there,” and the public responds with “Duh okay whatever you say boss derp derp derp.” Things aren’t going to get better.

There has lately been a sharp uptick, on social media, of messages to the effect of “Take the vaccine you idiot.” I was wondering if it was just my imagination, then someone found this.

Click to embiggen

I haven’t bothered to hunt all these down to see if they’re genuine. It doesn’t matter much, does it? People have their hackneyed lectures to give because they came up with them themselves, or they’re spewing what someone else gave them…whatever. A wave is a wave. I do wonder if my tax dollars are paying for this one, though. They probably are, and there isn’t likely to be much I can do about it.

People are frustrated. They feel like they’re doing all the right things, and here come our busybody “leaders” to clamp down again. They’re not allowed to get mad at the busybodies and this causes some strange things to happen in human psychology.

Really, all of the last year-and-a-half has been like this. People consciously realize they should have opposed the “peaceful protests” that were actually violent riots, last summer, and expressed frustration at them, even anger. But socially, they feel like they’re not allowed to do so. So they redirect onto the “insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January sixth.”

They consciously realize COVID-19 was not a natural event like a hurricane, and the “bat soup” theory doesn’t gel. But socially, they feel like any acknowledgment of this would end with an indictment or besmirching against China, which is full of people who aren’t white, and that must be racist. So they redirect onto that jerk who wouldn’t wear his mask. He must have done it to us.

They’ve built up an association in their minds between following the instructions from the NIH, the WHO, the CDC and Dr. Fauci, and “beating this thing.” They’ve built up an association in their minds between failing to follow these instructions, and ending up on a ventilator. Consciously, they understand that what we’ve seen happen is the opposite — people follow the instructions, get vaccinated to BeatThisThing, and end up getting told No whoopsie, sorry! You’ve got to keep wearing your mask! If a woman’s husband did as good a job relocating the freeway again after tootling through the backroads as Dr. Fauci has done guiding toward beating-this-thing, she’d insist on pulling over to ask for directions, and maybe grab the steering wheel or kill the ignition. But it’s not socially permissible to doubt the great Dr. F. And so this myth arises that “If everyone got vaccinated we’d have beat-this-thing by now.” We’re supposed to pretend science backs up that notion, when actually science says we’re infected and we’re never getting rid of it.

We can develop herd immunity, sure. There are ways to get there, and there is advice from our experts. We hope there will be a lot of overlap between the advice we receive, and what actually works. To date there’s been very little of this overlap. The experts have taken to inventing boogeymen to explain this, rather than admitting “I was wrong, hopefully I get it right next time”; and we let them. Getting mad at and placing blame on that guy over there, is quick, easy, costs nothing, and it’s socially uplifting and fun.

This is what too much emotion does to your thinking process. It keeps pushing you to focus anger and blame in the wrong place, to fabricate delicate fantasies about why things are the way they are. It lulls you into looking for the lost watch in the ditch with the best light, rather than the one on the other side of the road, where you dropped it.

Yesterday I hung up on our first “schedule your free vaccine appointment” telemarketer. Yay, my tax dollars at work.

Obviously the times are changing. Thirteen years ago people were wondering “Is America ready for a black President?” Now we can see not only was she ready; it turns out, the election of our first black President didn’t change diddly squat. The implied accusation, that we weren’t ready and could never be ready because we’re just too bigoted, stood firm. In fact it has metastasized like a cancer. There’s a lesson here about caving in to people who say “I’m going to spread the slander about you unless you do such-and-such a thing.” It never seems to ever pay off to do the such-and-such a thing. The more years I see come and go, the more impressed I am by seemingly smart people who rush around doing the such-and-such in this futile effort to defend their reputations, against predators who lack the standing or dignity to do real damage. It seems they never learn this.

Two recent events dwarf this O-Election in significance, and by quite a big differential. There is the Voldemort Virus, of course, and all the lockdown fever and “we’re all in this together” nonsense that goes with it. And then there is the big problem from four years earlier that all this was exploited to address, and possibly engineered to address: The election of Donald Trump back in 2017, and with that, the demise of journalistic objectivity. One Lewis Wallace had the audacity to announce this in what I consider the most important column of the last ten years, give or take. He weirdly tied this in with his own status as a transgender, then got sacked for having written it. And then, arguably, was proven correct in the ensuing years, over and over again.

But is this really a change? This is one of those questions that arouses decent points to be made on both sides. It would be hard to live through the earlier Obama years and come out of them saying there was any neutrality left that needed killing. But, it’s just as hard to live through the Trump years, and into these first few months of the Biden administration, and deny some meaningful event has taken place.

There’s been one, and things are different.

How would I explain the news cycle and the zeitgeist of the now, after time-traveling to something that came before. Before Obama, before the September 11 attacks, Clinton’s impeachment, all of that. Modern times, but not weird-modern-times…like, early 1980’s, late 1970’s, thirty-five to forty-five years ago. They/we wouldn’t recognize this mess. In fact, they/we would require some cushioning of the blow. How would we even begin to explain the differences?

1. I’d say the one advantage we have now versus then is that the divisions are clear. Back then, people thought Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were centrists. With the FCC Fairness Doctrine in place, we just swallowed what was spooned out to us by…well, the whatever. Passive voice is necessary here as the subject of the sentence is an afterthought. “They” would tell us what was going on in the world and what it meant. A few of us would suspect there was a slant to it, that the purveyors of this information were concealing meaningful details. But, unable to tell a complete story about it, and unable to assess the extent of the deception, would go about our business. We knew the news leaned left, but people “knew” this the way they knew Roosevelt was in a wheelchair or that John Kennedy was screwing around on his wife. Now, you can look at how Chris Wallace, et al, treated Donald Trump during those debates. Look at the fact checkers beclowning themselves. The partisans are out and proud.

2. Charles Krauthammer commented many years ago that conservatives think liberals are merely misguided, but liberals think conservatives are awful, terrible people. These feelings are essentially the same now but much more intense. Also, liberalism has been revealed as an ongoing effort to misguide easily misguided people, and this effort is conducted by liberals who are awful, terrible people. This is why, when conservatives find themselves “debating” liberals, there is this confusion arising especially when the conservative and liberal happen to like each other, or even are married to each other. What happens in the discussion is ever-changing, but the one constant is that the conservative is left wondering the same old thing, every time: What has happened to my co-worker, my old college buddy, my wife…etc.? Are they being earnestly snookered? Or have they turned evil? Do they really not care about these kids being “educated” in ramshackle substandard school districts, the aborted babies, the waiters and busboys who can’t find jobs with a higher minimum wage in place and the shelter-in-place orders…? This has been going on a long time. But nowadays, it’s much easier to see that when a liberal is the caboose and not the locomotive, that he’s among the deceived and not the deceiver — there’s a certain willingness. Al Gore’s house uses a lot more energy than the average — oh, I don’t care about that. The liberal may throw a “fact check” back at you about it, but it’s pure sophistry. He’s really saying he just doesn’t care about what should be a game changing revelation. Today we can see this. In times previous, we couldn’t.

3. Back then, there was a prevailing notion among those who supported the guy who lost the election, that the winner, hopefully, would remain unchallenged by subsequent events and his term in office, while not preferred, would be a successful one. In other words, the passengers who didn’t like the pilot, would hope the pilot wouldn’t crash the plane. That’s gone now, as the man-in-the-street has become a much more political creature. He’s not hoping the pilot crashes the plane necessarily, but he doesn’t envision a safe landing. This is perhaps the most meaningful change and it isn’t a good one. For this I suppose we can blame the changing nature of impeachment, from a truly exceptional emergency-case maneuver, to a standard political weapon. Congress merely lurching off in the direction of impeaching Richard Nixon, was the precedent-shattering transformation of the day. Looking back on it, it’s just adorable. Now we have real wisdom. You can tell it’s “wisdom” when there’s a tragedy involved in gaining it. And the tragedy here is that impeachment hurts the vision. “Step One: Got to get rid of that guy.” It’s tainted both sides.

4. Those who are elected, or appointed, enjoy many tools they didn’t have in the box before, to choose their own constituencies. There are people who’ve noticed this and they like the changes being made, sympathizing with these new-constituents being enfranchised. These people are morons. There’s no kind way to put it. Government picking and choosing the people who get to elect the government is like the killer robot being in possession of it’s own remote control. Who’s being enfranchised, and how this affects subsequent electoral outcomes, are less-important considerations. Government selecting the character and priorities of itself, is untenable and out of character with the intent of our founding. Anyway; this is somewhat new. Not completely new. But you know there’s been a change because these enfranchising maneuvers are more-or-less commonplace now. Illegal aliens, convicted felons, children. As far as I’m concerned, it’s okay to have these measures on the table and put up for referendum — people should be able to vote to give away their vote, to help that killer robot seize it’s own remote, if that’s really what they want to do. But they should understand this is what’s really being discussed. And where it happens, it should always be by referendum. Congress, and state legislatures, shouldn’t be able to sit down and decide “Yeah, totally, we want 16-year-olds to be able to re-elect us,” because enfranchising this guy means disenfranchising, to some degree, that other guy.

5. Laws that are supposed to stand for something, and include real penalties that can’t be dodged, are now up for debate. Compared to generations previous, we have a sprawling mess of “not-laws” that are supposed to declare some certain action illegal, and don’t, because they’re offset by cultural taboos that say you can’t enforce the law. There are also things we’re supposed to enjoy the right to “tweet” and to say out loud, but we can expect to be punished if we do, so we don’t really have the rights we’re supposed to have. Up above I mentioned the vaccines. Do we want to start requiring those? If we’re thinking about passing a law, we’ll have to discuss it first, and consider the constitutional ramifications. Layers of judicial oversight would have to hear the case. But if it’s a cultural demand, we bypass all that, and then we have to head into a dirty, mud-slinging melee between two factions competing with each other for the coveted position of “mainstream thought.” This is why people like me haven’t been too crazy about the civil disobedience remedy against the lockdown-mania. This isn’t supposed to be how we decide what’s allowed vs. not-allowed. We have written laws, and written protections against what could be penalized, for a reason. That’s all jeopardized with this business of “It’s illegal on paper but we’re gonna go ahead and do it” and “It can’t be punished on paper, but just try it and see what happens to your career.”

6. Some thirty years ago or so it was understood throughout all sorts of different cultures and walks of life, that people should be treated equally regardless of their sex, religious creed, or skin color. Now it seems to be universally understood that that’s not supposed to happen. I’m not sure who we could “credit” for having brought that change about, but it’s gotten a big helping hand from people who weren’t elected to anything anywhere, and there is no set of circumstances available under which this can lead to racial harmony or anything good for society overall.

There’s an old saw you might occasionally notice embroidered into wall hangings in trailer homes inhabited by little old ladies, something like “Grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” These are good wise words and they suggest the little old ladies might be on to something. In fact, every year I see come and go, I become more convinced that true satisfaction in life is connected to that wisdom. But I would put a little bit of a twist on it:

Grant me the patience to allow the problems to solve themselves that will naturally solve themselves; the courage to solve the ones that won’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is where we have to reckon with our status in the universe, as aberrations. Let’s say your house is on fire. From the universe’s point of view, that’s a problem that will naturally resolve itself. The fire will exhaust it’s fuel, or else it will spread to where there is more fuel and then exhaust that. Either way, the conflagration will reach full entropy and a sort of order will be restored. But that’s not in your interest. From your point of view, this is an urgent matter that requires your attention and you’d better hop to it. That’s because, as an aberration, you rely on other aberrations. What’s a natural state of rest and order for you, is not that state to the universe as a whole, and vice-versa. The universe can chug along just fine with your home reduced to ashes, but if you smell smoke, you’d better locate the source and act on it as necessary.

How do liberals fit into that?

Whether or not they’re a problem we have to solve with urgency, is, in & of itself, a question we have to answer with urgency. I can’t help noticing it seems to resurface again and again and again. People who agree with me about politics continually chide me against engaging the liberals, wisely counseling that ignoring them is the far better alternative. I tried that in 2008 though. We all did. These assholes are a house fire.

The way I see it, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Cavemen lacked the technology we have, and with that they lacked the understanding of the basics we have. But they didn’t tolerate liberals. When they roasted the carcass over the fire and prepared to share it because it was far too much for any one family to eat, the hunters who brought down the kill got the choice cuts. The others had to contribute in some way. Nobody got to amble to the front of the line and say, “I contributed nothing but I think deep thoughts and do a lot of complaining, and I have visions of where society should go. So feed me and my non-productive friends first, and then you mighty hunters who brought down the kill, we might think about tossing you some bones.” That’s essentially what liberalism has become today. It would not, could not, have existed back then. Can you just imagine?

Ignore the liberals? Ignore the house fire?

Not only are there consequences. We’re living in them. And more are coming, if we continue to let the house cook away. There’s lots more fuel.

Liberalism hurts people.

I think we should go ahead and engage them, simply because the alternative is contrary to the assurance of our continued existence. Just like a house fire. This isn’t something on which we need to speculate; we’ve lived through a cycle or two of their destructive ways of thinking and their destructive deeds, and we know for sure. Socrates, who was known for derailing seemingly invincible propositions merely by asking “Socratic” questions, would have wondered what’s taking us so long. The philosophy of liberalism, such as it is, cannot even survive exposure to it’s own premises.

Retreating from liberalism is like retreating from a duel in which your opponent is constantly stabbing himself. Why? Seems like a waste of energy to me. It’s needlessly hasty, and it exposes innocent fellow universe-travelers to unnecessary pain.

Something got me hot and bothered about narratives thirteen years ago, which would be just after our election of America’s First Holy President…but it’s impossible to say what it was now because YouTube has yanked the video. And my memory is not filling in the gaps.

Narratives are important. They represent the broadest gulf within supposedly responsible thinking people — how they’d like to think they think, versus how they really think. Narratives are responsible for all the polarization in our society. Wherever the discourse deteriorates, and reasoned discussion melts down into shouting matches, bordering on a fist fight, there are narratives.

A narrative can be true, false, or partially true. Narratives can represent things that are known, unknown, or are probable based on other things that are known.

Narratives are convincing because they’re so often at least partially true, and at least partially known.

However — and this is key — there is no such thing as a narrative that is fully known and fully true. Such a thing then becomes a fact, and ceases to be a narrative. Truth can assert itself, and there’s no social appeal involved in repeatedly asserting something that is so plainly true that it’s obvious to mediocre people.

This is why narratives are not to be trusted. The loudest ones are the ones that are pretending to be something they aren’t; the falsehoods, and the uncertainties, marching around cloaked in the disguise of known, sure facts, which is something a narrative can never be.

You hear them most often, and expressed with the most bumptious confidence, when the speaker literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is trying to convince himself.

This year, just like any other year, celebrations of Father’s Day will be rather subdued. Now part of the reason for that is that we Dads are spoiled, in a way; the best way to celebrate FD is to “let” us grill food for everybody else to eat, outside, and that can be any day we have the necessary supplies available, and don’t have to work.

We can find any one of a number of ways to treat Mom right that are out of the ordinary. If your Mom is like most Moms, pretty much anything you can do that will involve her skipping a cooking or cleaning regimen, will be as good as anything else you can do. So Mother’s Day is a special one-off, by design, whereas Father’s Day means we stay home and use our grilling equipment, on a summer Sunday on which we’d be doing that anyway.

I’ll be doing that today. Me, the Dad. I don’t look that good.

Unless you’re dealing with a situation in which the male space has been whittled down to nearly nothing, it isn’t set apart from the other weekends. So to fix that, you have to do something like invite friends over to help with the eating and such. Which we’re doing.

But there’s a darker reason we celebrate Father’s Day quietly. Here, as in many other places, we go the extra mile to avoid offense. A lot of people see a celebration of fatherhood as an attack on the moms, especially the single moms.

This is not a competition. Moms and Dads are both important. However, one thing that should be noted this Sunday is that humans are better than other animals, and anything that sets us apart from them, in a good way, is to be celebrated. And the thing no one ever wants to discuss is that fatherhood does that while motherhood does not. Following the momma in a Congo line is a trait that applies to many lower species. And it applies to humans, too. But eventually the kids have to mature and take on life.

There are some species that mate for life. The father sticks around, and raises the kids. With most species that is not the case. He does what has to be done for him to become a father, then he’s out of there and the momma raises the kid. Humans are unique, in that we can go either way.

But one way is better than the other way.

We’ve got a lot of people walking around among us who are laboring under the misunderstanding that if daddy goes and takes a hike — or is sent packing — not much is lost, and most-to-all of the recovery needed can be achieved by heading to the courthouse and extracting some money out of him. This flawed idea endures, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t make sufficient sense for anyone with a name or reputation worth defending, to string the words together in sequence. No one says it, but many act on it. Also, very few people who have actually lived under such an arrangement, would agree with it. Daddies are not billfolds.

On Father’s Day, that should be our motto: Dad’s not (just) a wallet. There’s more to it than that.

One of the many ways we’ve all helped to bring about this progressive whatever…”revolution” I guess is how they like to think of it…mess…anyway.

We have made it a rather reflexive habit to assume the best of their intentions. Others more articulate than me, have already commented on this. But we also make charitable assumptions about their inferences. “We have twelve years to save the planet” comes off sounding like: There is a line, or a curve, of exhaustion of some resource; someone has made an assessment of how much of that resource there is, done the necessarily math on it and come up with that amount of time.

Sure there was fraud in the 2020 elections, but not nearly enough to change the result.

The protests are/were mostly peaceful.

ALL non-binary kids are born that way.

Epstein hung himself.

Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman who ever lived.

Hydroxychloriquine will kill ya dead.

Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter and called Nazis “fine people.”

Being on time, is a western/white-person concept.

Russia is our enemy and they put Trump in the White House.

China, on the other hand, is not our enemy. The virus came from…well just don’t say it came from there.

I have many different copies of this sort of list floating around…other people have started their own lists. Listing all of them is not the point, this is not “Pokemon” and we don’t gotta catch ’em all. Some of this stuff has yet to be falsified and might very well be true. The interesting thing here is what we hear when liberals say this stuff. We presume the message is “I’ve gone out and checked it, or I’m speaking on behalf of someone else who has.” We say it’s raining outside. That must mean it is.

Well…no.

A lot of the time, this stuff is: You see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world, in which everyone believes…it’s raining.

Or…we want to do some stuff, and we’ve figured out we’re not going to get any of it done until such time as everyone thinks it’s raining. So spread the word.

Or…So-and-so said it’s raining outside, and you see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world in which everyone trusts that guy implicitly. So do your part to make sure everyone thinks it’s raining outside, because he said it is.

Or…I have already repeated that it’s raining outside, so I have an emotional investment in the idea that it’s raining outside.

Or…Give up on fighting us, we have the votes that it’s raining outside, right or wrong.

Or…We don’t give a crap what you think it’s doing outside, we have your kids trapped in our “education” system and we’ll teach them it’s raining outside.

This is the frustrating thing about arguing with liberals. Heard one of them the other day say “Joe Biden is obviously competent” and, when asked for evidence, he didn’t have anything. He just said something about the spending programs being extremely popular, which his opposition quickly showed wasn’t even true. When you have a friend or a relative offering up these chestnuts, you have to make these spot-decisions about whether you’re talking to someone who’s stupid, or evil, or a combination of both, or maybe just emotionally invested in something of which they can’t let go. But you also have to make an interpretation of what they’re really trying to say. No one anywhere is truly qualified to say “Man is screwing up the atmosphere.” No one’s pulling out a super long ladder, climbing up and looking. So on that one, we can rule out the idea that they checked to see if it’s raining and are reporting on what they say. They’re doing something else. A lot of the other things they say are like that too.

That’s one thing I know for sure. It is a Northern Star of stasis and certainty in an enormous sky of constant movement. An oasis in a desert of hazardous predictions that, tempting as they may be, cannot be assured with any genuine confidence. That’s one we can take to the bank.

On whether or not he’ll be President again, or whether he’ll be abducted by aliens at midnight tonight, I haven’t a clue. None of that is relevant; no one really cares about it; it’s minutiae. When people talk about any of that what they’re really talking about is “Are we done with him for good?” That remains true whether they want this to be the case, or not. It is the operative question. And we’re not.

The opposite belief, “Thank God that’s over,” is an absolute impossibility. It is putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Further than that, it’s a just plain stupid supposition. How do you see such a world of tomorrow, emerging from the eddies and currents of today? There’s no path from this to that. None. The tube’s been squeezed, his constituency has tasted meaningful representation. The Morlocks have been out of the underworld.

It’s like the crown heads of Europe saying “Thank goodness they’re all done storming that stupid Bastille and got that guillotine stuff out of their systems.”

For the past several years I have occasionally read “psychological profiles” and the like, struggling to triage a borderline mental illness that is Trump support. It’s actually Trump hatred that is more mystifying and more baffling. I’m sure history will ultimately record it that way. It is the #NeverTrump types who more closely resemble the witch hunters in Salem. And those witch hunters are the ones on the wrong side of history, whose wounded consciences and mental enfeeblements continue to fascinate us. Isn’t that obvious? If we could time travel back to 1692 and put one faction, or the other, in straight-jackets and padded cells, it would be the hunters, not the witches or their defenders. We relate to the hunters, but we think the worse of ourselves when we do, and that’s what makes The Crucible a dark story. It makes us wonder what’s wrong with us. That correlates to the Trump-phobes, not the Trump-philes.

This is not empty, biased, rah rah “Hooray for Our Side” stuff. It is objective reality. When you “know” there’s water in the pool just because someone’s trying to warn you there isn’t any, and you hate that guy, but you don’t really know very much about the water level in the pool — it’s time to reassess. And that’s where they’ve been for awhile. They don’t really know anything about Hydroxychloroquine being particularly dangerous, or that the Voldemort Virus didn’t originate in the lab to which President Trump was directing his scrutiny. They just didn’t want to agree with Orange Man on anything. And look how certain they were.

What has been happening here is not new. It is the dynamic of “Forgotten Man” politics. History doesn’t offer us much by way of these events coming to a sudden stop. They don’t. They burn away like old tire fires, across years and decades, even centuries. America herself, arguably, is just one long “Forgotten Man” political saga. Well, Trump’s constituency was forgotten too, and for a good long time.

Now, the Trump haters are wallowing in their marinade of “Thank goodness that’s over” and doubling-down on the forgetting, turning it into a pillorying. A pity-party of “blame those guys for everything, and be loud about it.”

It is a tactical error of historic severity, and proportion. It is a screw-up worthy of documentation and preservation across the ages.

But, dividers can’t become uniters. It isn’t in their physiology. They’re doing what they do. They can’t stop.

It continues to surprise me, how many people say “We need to come together and stop being so divided,” and then immediately turn around and support a political party dedicated to bringing pain.

We shouldn’t have such a party in the United States, let alone a major political party. No organized party should remain organized after making it their priority that it should hurt this much to make a quarter millions dollars a year. Or that it should cost this much to hire unskilled help, should the need arise. Or “No justice, no peace.” Or that every divorce that might possibly happen, has to happen. Or that it ought to hurt this much to buy a gun, or the ammunition for it. Get hired/promoted when you’re a white guy. Register your car. Buy a kilowatt-hour of energy. Buy groceries. Water your lawn.

They always have these excuses. You can’t raise a family of eight and pay for their college educations on $3.25 an hour, or we have to break storefront windows to show how upset we are over the latest police shooting, or she was in an abusive marriage and didn’t realize it. Or something to do with spotted owls, or snail darters, or shrimp in the vernal pools. Or, the public debt is out of control. That last one, by the way, justifies any & all initiatives to make things more expensive, which is over half of the pain deliberately brought. So it’s odd that I haven’t heard it for a very long time. When I was coming of age, federal spending was just about to cross the trillion-dollar-annual threshold. That really got people’s attention. People of all political stripes worried about the increasing debt. “Stagflation” was looming large in the rear-view mirror. Liberals said “We have to make the rich pay their fair share” and it sounded sincere.

Now no one gives a crap. But democrats still say “make the rich pay their fair share” which proves they’re really just all about hurting people who are trying to run their businesses. They never cared about anything else. And the casual consumers of news, who know little but claim not to be intransigently tethered to one side or the other, thinking themselves to be above it all, slobber like Pavlov’s dogs. Oh yes, make those rich so-and-sos pay! They have to endure a certain minimum of pain! Well, why?

These people are lying and don’t know they’re lying. They get away with it a lot, because they look sincere. Well that’s the thing about lying to yourself: You look sincere, because you are, and yet if you aren’t being truthful with yourself then you can’t deal truthfully with anyone else. And the truth is, an agenda of hurt is going to cause division. You can blame the division on the other guy, but there’s nothing divisive about “Please don’t make it painful for me to run a business when you aren’t helping anybody by doing so, just to make it painful to run a business.”

We are always going to have destructive people, because destroying things is easy. We’re also always going to have people like me, who think things through all the way, lack any desire to destroy or bring pain to anyone just-because, and say “When that guy pays more taxes, and the receipts get blown on nonsense, that doesn’t help anybody.” We’re always going to have both these types. So an agenda of “This perfectly legal thing that helps many and hurts nobody, ought to hurt a certain amount” will always drive a wedge between the two. That’s where the divisiveness is.

Also, it’s undignified. It’s proof that whoever thinks this, labors under skewed priorities. They’re looking for new problems, probably because they’re not dealing with enough already. Haven’t had to accept any real responsibilities in life. Have it too easy. And that’s probably because the businesses they want to tax more just to make it hurt more, have made it that way.

If I take the term “fact checker” literally, I’m not left thinking of it the way they want me to think of it, because they want me to think of them as a sort of filter. Someone makes a statement, the statement goes into the hopper, then the fact checkers check it to see if it IS a fact. If we really believed that was the process, and wanted to come up with a phrase to accurately describe it, they would be statement checkers.

They could be statistic validators. Maybe statistic checkers, statement validators or verity verifiers.

“Fact check” means a fact is what goes into this hopper. Logically, what happens within the innards of the mechanism, must be something besides making sure the fact is a fact, as that must have already been done.

And so I am to believe that these professionals and volunteers apply their talents and resources to something already known to be true, and check it for something. Like for example, whether the people for whom they work, have an interest in the rest of us knowing that fact, or whether they have an interest in that fact being suppressed. That’s what a tin-eared technically-precise reading of that term would mean. Reminds me of one of David Burge’s most famous tweets, about covering the stories. With a pillow until they stop moving.

Ironically…that’s a completely accurate way of looking at it.

Fourteen months ago, just a few days after our first “shelter in place” order, I predicted in a round-about way that for this debacle to come to a close, there would have to be some sort of civil disobedience. I didn’t like that idea then and I don’t like it now. We’re a nation of laws, laws require definition, and you can’t function according to “this law counts because we like it but that other law doesn’t count because we’re civilly disobeying it.”

But I do have to admit, even at the beginning of this I could see this is not absolute. Our nation got started, after all, with civil disobedience. Still & all, like everyone else, I’ve been learning.

Stay inside, don’t go anywhere, and watch teevee ALL of the time like a couple of liberals? No problem, we like each other. And we’ve got all the James Bond movies! We’ll watch one a night and after 24 nights, this thing is bound to be over!

Heh…heh…no really, that was our plan. Oh, the Governor might keep this going into June 2020? Shocker! We-ell…we have more movies…

Okay. So we’ve been met with a series of surprises. Our leaders/rulers/aristocrats, call ’em what you will, “public health officials,” etc…well, there’s no point arguing about it anymore. There is no doubt. They’ve exploited the crisis. It’s just so obvious that writing it down or saying it out loud is an exercise in redundancy. It’s like saying water is wet. No one arguing honestly is going to doubt it or question it, so if they’re doing that they’re just wasting your time.

Scott Morefield at Townhall says Never Again…Never, EVER again.

Like a snowball that’s turned into an avalanche, the restoration of the rights and liberties millions of Americans, particularly those in blue states, lost over the past 14 months seems to be unstoppable at this point. Indeed, the precipitous fall of Covidstan has happened quicker and in more places than any of us could have possibly predicted even three weeks ago. We’ve got a long way to go, particularly with schools, workplaces, and public transportation, but I never imagined that restrictions and mask mandates would end in places like New York, Connecticut, and Virginia anytime before 2022, but thankfully, here we are.

That’s good news we should all celebrate heartily, but if you think this sudden relinquishing of unconstitutional governmental power has anything to do with our overlords’ sudden, Damascus-road-like grasp of ‘science,’ I’ve got an autographed picture of Gretchen Whitmer at a mask burning to sell you. From the CDC’s constant mixed messaging to Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admitting that he was wearing a mask after being vaccinated only for show after indignantly denying it to Sen. Rand Paul just weeks earlier, any attempt to portray these blubbering fools as anything short of utterly incompetent or pure evil is going to fall on deaf ears with me.

No, they’ve loosened their iron grip on forced public masking, not because they ever “followed the science” (LOL), but because WE forced them to do so. And by “we,” I’m talking about a pretty big tent. If you at any point during this charade pushed back by refusing to comply, speaking out in some capacity against local or state authorities, or even engaging in the information war by telling the truth to those in your circle of influence, however small or large that might be, YOU had a role in winning this battle.

I dunno, it’s too soon to say. I do agree people like me deserve a high-five. And the people who are actually civilly disobeying, deserve a bigger one. See, I haven’t been doing that. I’ve refused to wear a mask when alone, and I’ve maintained that since Day One just because I know what’s stupid when I see it. But in the grocery store, when the sign says you have to wear a mask, I wear one. But does it matter? A year ago it wasn’t all about masks, it was about staying home. Masks were in there, to be sure. But the larger concern was that these assholes were shutting off our jobs, like flipping a giant light switch. And because they themselves had never had a real job, we could see they were laboring under the delusion that when you’re ready to restart the economy, you just flip the switch the other way. The quiet panic was over the fact that this all-important consideration wasn’t receiving the attention it deserved.

It’s difficult to see exactly where you are, when you’re actually right there. It’s much easier to make the observation in hindsight, so we’ll have to wait awhile on this. I do like that headline though, never ever again. Damn straight.

Because for the last year, our high advisers who hold themselves to be so superior to us, have outwardly identified public trust or lack of it, as the problem. And they’ve been right about that. We’ve watched as they peg this sense of trust, accurately, as a high value asset in the struggle to slow the spread of the China Virus. And then they got rid of that sense of trust as fast as they could, as if it were a liability. In most cases, it’s genuinely difficult to envision how they could have done a “better” job of that. This has been a debacle wrapped in a flaming dumpster fire wrapped in a shitshow. A disaster bigger than Biden or Trump…although historians will blame it on one or the other of those guys, depending on which way they lean, and you can guess which way the loudest “historians” will lean. But the big takeaway is what it takes to enable a loss of liberty on such an unprecedented scale, and how well it works. I’ve read about it in the write-ups over all the stuff that happened before I was born, and it did make an impression on me, but now that I’ve lived through it — words don’t do it justice. I’m just genuinely shocked. There’s-a-virus-out-there and…that’s it? That’s all it takes? Just like that, we’re a command economy with stay-at-home orders and you need a Mother-may-I to do anything?

Just speaking for myself, it’s a thing I needed to have happen. I had no idea we as a species were so pliable. And here in America.

But it’s not all humble pie for people like us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anybody who chastised me for “paying too much attention to politics” before the Voldemort Virus came along, can apologize to me anytime they want. And I do have some names in mind. But people also suffer from the sin of pride, so I know if I expect no apologies I won’t be disappointed.