It is in our nature, that when we hear the beginning of a good story and we want to hear how it ends, or when we get a taste of a narrative we happen to like, we overlook things that are real problems. Deep down we know they really are problems but we sidestep them to get to the part we like. It’s a universal failing, no one is immune.

Once you head down that road…a single, inconvenient question can stop the whole show. We don’t ask these, because they’re almost certain to lead to rancor — and, no answer. It’s rude to stop the show.

But that doesn’t mean they’re bad questions.

1. Why is the U.S. Senate conducting a trial declared unconstitutional by nearly half of its members, when it requires a 2/3 vote to convict?

2. Why would Batman ever care what Ma Kent’s first name is?

3. Why are California, New Jersey and Michigan opening when the Chinese Virus statistics are not good in those states?

4. Where’s that plan President Biden said he had?

5. If James Bond’s brother did all this bad stuff, just to get back at him over daddy issues, when does MI-6 revoke his double-oh clearance and access to top secret information?

6. How do we address gender disparities if people just identify as whatever gender they want?

7. Why did Luke Skywalker leave a trail of clues to his location on Ach-To if he just wanted everyone to leave him alone?

8. How do we objectively define “Incitement”?

9. What science is there to justify keeping the schools closed for the Chinese Virus?

10. If democrats represent people who are financially insecure, what is their incentive to strengthen the financial position of the average American?

11. Come to think of it, why is it so hard for democrats to win elections if they’re supposed to represent the 99%?

12. Does Wonder Woman’s golden lasso stop topic drift? Because I’d be all…wow that rack…those thighs…

13. Speaking of women, why do we pretend they’re a disadvantaged minority, when they’re not & not?

14. Where does the potential energy go when you beam Starfleet officers down to a planet?

15. How could a minimum wage increase not affect employment?

16. How much air is in Super-Breath? What makes it cold?

17. If antiwar activists represented their concerns honestly, why did they vote against Trump?

18. What — exactly — do masks have to do with “beating” a virus?

19. How big does the Incredible Hulk get?

20. How does keeping dissenting views from being expressed anywhere, foster a new national “spirit of unity”?

21. Come to think of it, if your arguments are right, why de-platform anyone?

22. How does being Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter make Rey powerful?

23. How does it work that Russians meddled in elections in 2016 but in 2020 we can trust the results?

24. Where does Iron Man keep the fuel for the rockets in his boots?

25. Why do college kids shut out their parents and just about everyone else over 30, then let their college professors dictate to them what to think?

26. How come when Han Solo is in Cloud City, suddenly he can go ahead and shoot first?

27. Is it immoral for spiders to eat flies? If not, why is murder immoral? If so, what do we do to make sure it never happens again?

28. What is the origin of Terminator/Skynet technology?

29. How do you use words to “incite” someone to commit violent acts who has traveled with gear, and other signs of preparation, for committing violent acts?

30. Wouldn’t Bo & Luke become fugitives each time they resist arrest?

I’m not a lawyer in Constitutional Law and I don’t play one on teevee, but I’ve been mulling this thing over and over in my mind. People say I never change my mind about anything, but when they say that what they’re really wanting to say is they had a script all written in their heads where they’d change my mind for me, and it didn’t work because I didn’t correctly play my part in their script. They’re really saying they thought more highly of the arguments they presented to me, than I thought of them, which is something that happens often when people argue about things.

I do mull things over and change my mind. It just happened…I think. Unless I see or hear something that changes my mind again, I’ll have to tentatively come down on the side of the democrats and Mitt Romney, against the 45 Republicans. It’s constitutional to try a former President of the United States in the U.S. Senate. At least, in this case, only because Donald Trump was still in office when the House of Representatives impeached him.

Now. If the Senate votes to acquit, and the House of Representatives says “Oh wait we just thought of something else, we’ve got more articles headed your way” — that would be unconstitutional.

What really decides this for me is the way Article I, Section 3 is worded:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present. Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has refused to sit for this, I’m hearing second-hand, because he does not preside over impeachment trials of casino owners and real estate developers, and right now that’s all Mr. Trump is. That’s correct.

This situation is weird but it is not out of the scope of what was anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. They did think of it. The “articles” make up the mechanism within the Constitution that deals with this. The House of Representatives has to worry about what office is being occupied by the person they’re impeaching; the Senate doesn’t need to worry about that at all. They have articles. They are reviewing the articles that have been delivered to them and reaching a verdict on those articles.

We here in modern times have an obsession with that “remove” thing. The Constitution clearly lists the punishments upon which the Senate may decide. There are two, not just one. “[R]emoval from Office” is listed first because it’s more important. But here, the democrats don’t care about that, they just want to make sure Donald Trump can’t run again.

Things can be stupid and dishonest, and still be constitutional. That’s what’s happening here. Trump didn’t incite violence. The politicians who say he did, know full well he didn’t. The people you meet everyday who say Trump incited violence, often are going to believe he did because they’ve been deceived. Those who are impeaching and chomping at the bit to vote to convict, are really worried about crimes. They don’t want crimes exposed and they want Trump banned from office so that he won’t expose them. Someone somewhere said “The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime, then they elected the guy who did the crime.” That’s a pretty accurate summary. This is a lie within a lie. But lies are not necessarily unconstitutional.

As I said, this is a tentative finding on my part and I look forward to the insights of those who are better educated about constitutional matters to see if they agree or not, and why or why not.

I am hereby declaring a word for 2021: Ungaslightable.

Yeah yeah it’s got a red line under it because it isn’t a real word. Well, someone has to get on that and fix it. It is the MOST Important word. It can save your soul.

People talk about “gaslighting” but it seems no one remembers the most important thing about it: It requires consent of the victim. You have to disrespect yourself, and rely on the inferential powers of another.

To gaslight means to make one feel that they’re perceiving things incorrectly. Feel, not think; feel. To be a victim of gaslighting, you have to rely on emotional reasoning. Just don’t do it.

Be ungaslightable. Especially right now. Rely on facts, common sense, and yes…your own experiences do count. They are “anecdotal” but anecdotal doesn’t mean “it never happened.”

If science, or the establishment, says there are black swans and all the swans you’ve seen are white, your anecdotal experience lacks value. But if the establishment says all swans are white, and you’ve seen a black one, your anecdotes become relevant.

Trump really did win.

Since November I have been hearing that phrase tossed around rather casually, “not enough fraud to change the results” of the election. It gives off the appearance that someone has managed to pinpoint, or at least ball-park, two numbers and compared one to the other, something that I doubt has happened. Let’s look at it.

AZ: 1,672,143 votes for Biden, 1,661,686 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 10,457 votes, 0.31% of all Arizona Biden/Trump votes, 0.0129% of Biden’s national total.

NV: 703,486 votes for Biden, 669,890 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 33,596 votes, 2.45% of all Nevada Biden/Trump votes, 0.413% of Biden’s national total.

PA: 3,459,923 votes for Biden, 3,378,263 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 81,660 votes, 1.19% of all Pennsylvania Biden/Trump votes, 0.1005% of Biden’s national total.

GA: 2,473,633 votes for Biden, 2,461,854 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 11,779 votes, 0.24% of all Georgia Biden/Trump votes, 0.0145% of Biden’s national total.

WI: 1,630,673 votes for Biden, 1,610,065 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 20,608 votes, 0.64% of all Wisconsin Biden/Trump votes, 0.0254% of Biden’s national total.

MI: 2,804,040 votes for Biden, 2,649,852 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 154,188 votes, 2.83% of all Michigan Biden/Trump votes, 0.1897% of Biden’s national total.

Total votes that gave Joe Biden and Kamala Harris these six messed-up can’t-count-’em battleground states: 312,288, which is 0.3842% of Biden’s national total. Three eights of a percent. What would change the election? Not all six. Pennsylvania and one or two others.

Mary Trump says any discussion of this should begin with a demand of acceptance of the “fact” that Biden won overwhelmingly, and if this demand is not fulfilled immediately the entire discussion should come to a screeching halt. Which is not how we do things in America. But former Clinton administration official we’re supposed to think of as a journalist George Stephanopoulos took it on himself to do it that way anyway. It didn’t go well. It ended up with everyone on his side saying his guest, Rand Paul, “melted down” or some such thing, but if you watch the video you see it’s Georgie who couldn’t handle his end of the non-conversation conversation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Sir, there are not — there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state.

PAUL: Sure there are. There are two sides to every story. George, you’re forgetting who you are. You’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar because I want to look at election fraud and I want to look at secretaries of state who illegally changed the voter laws without the permission of their state legislatures. That is incontrovertible, it happened. And you can’t just sweep it under the rug and say, oh, nothing to see here, and everybody is a liar and you’re a fool if you bring this up. You’re inserting yourself into the story. A journalist would hear both sides and there are two sides of a story….

STEPHANOPOULOS: There can be more investigations. The investigations that have taken place have shown there’s not enough fraud to change the results of this election…

There’s that phrase again. People think they’re quantifying the fraud, and they must think very highly of their own attempts to quantify it if they really believe there’s 0.0129% or less.

Of course that is not what people are doing when they say this. They’re doing what they were taught to do in second grade to fourth grade: Pick up a vibe that seems to represent the majority viewpoint, and act like they made it up themselves.

What’s fraud? The worst kind would be capturing a vote for Donald Trump, inside the machine perhaps, and transforming it into a Biden/Harris vote. If we’re talking about that then you can cut the 312 thousand in half, and plug in the number 156 thousand. After that, there is manufacturing votes for Placeholder Joe, or “losing” Trump votes. Then there are the honest “oopsies” like what briefly happened in Michigan. I see people wanted to get Trump himself in trouble for using the word “fraud,” and that’s not fraud but Trump would definitely call it fraud…take that to the bank. Trump would call anything that changes the results from what they should be, to benefit his opposition, “fraud.” And that’s actually quite alright. But just try explaining that to fact checkers.

Then there’s all the spurious nonsense that can arise from the Vote By Mail baloney. People whose ballots are being filled out by someone else and they have no idea what’s happening. They haven’t lived at that address in many years and someone intercepted the ballot. Ballot harvesting. Vote swapping across state lines. Double-voting. The Secretaries-of-State arbitrarily changing rules, outside the perimeter of their authority, as Sen. Paul mentioned. All the votes that were counted or discounted because of decisions like those. The list goes on and on…

“Not enough fraud to change the results” rests on the faulty premise that we can inject all of those ingredients into the stew…and expect a final concoction that is 99.6158% pure, or purer. That is where this second-grade, show-hands, swivel-head-side-to-side see-what-the-other-kids-are-doing child-thinking gets you. The honestly expressed state of affairs is that the loudest among our fellow citizens learned to “think” this way somewhere around age seven, and never refined it beyond that.

As Sen. Paul pointed out in his interview, courts don’t like to get involved in elections so they sidestep the cases by citing technicalities and allowing things to stand without a decision from them. Biden-backers like to call that by deceptive terms like “hearing the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it” or something like that. I heard Sidney Powell in another interview say that this (at the time) never happened. I don’t know that this strong of a statement can be accurately made now but it really doesn’t matter. We have a lot of instances, most notably at the Supreme Court, in which the court reviewed the case and opted not to take it…too hot to handle…and then our media sprinted away trumpeting falsehoods about looking at the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it.

It is a lie. It is fraud.

And this should be comforting to people, although a lot of them won’t see it that way. It means that a lot of these troublesome Trump supporters who “refuse to accept” (more honest description: have trouble believing) the “results,” far from being fringe-kooky whack-a-birds you see muttering to ourselves in the city park…we’re merely imposing standards on the process we came up with ourselves, and forming our opinions when we see things fall short. Which is not a huge disaster, it is the expected outcome. We reformed election practices all across the fruited plain, in response to the China Virus, remember? It’s going to take a few election cycles to get some quality out of it.

I don’t think much of this Mary-Trump way of discussing things. She can do it that way if she likes…others who think the way she does, can follow suit…I can’t stop them.

But when truth has something to do with what you’re doing, and you could lose life or limb by being wrong, that isn’t how we do it. In America, we discuss things. And we don’t “accept” flimsy results that we can’t measure properly and that are at odds with what we can observe ourselves, then refuse to discuss them with whoever else might see something wrong. That’s what little kids do before they’ve engaged in any grown-up activities that are potentially dangerous, and might hurt other people.

Now that we’re living in the world the wounded, incomplete people have made for us, and they run everything, I should write about them more specifically. I have often used this phrase “wounded, incomplete people” to describe them but I’ve not put anything in writing to say exactly what it is that I mean by that. The time has come.

We make stupid decisions when we’re wounded, or when we’re incomplete. Being wounded means a part of you has been taken away and you’re missing it. Being incomplete means you haven’t matured yet to the extent you can make good-quality decisions. They both mean your cookie is missing some dough but one means you’ve lost what you used to have, and the other means you never had it in the first place. This is a distinction that is practically meaningless most of the time, but in some contexts the distinction does have meaning.

Since we all have the potential to become wounded and incomplete, we would do well to try to avoid it. If you really want to avoid it, you have to pay some attention to how people get to be like this.

If you go into an experience trusting, and it turns sour and you change your behavior as a consequence, it could mean that you’ve been wounded. It could also mean you’re learning lessons you needed to learn. How do you tell the difference? It matters because one means you’re making worse decisions than before, and the other means you’re making better decisions than before. In the first scenario, you are joining the ranks of the wounded/incomplete; in the second scenario, you are extricating yourself from their ranks by way of valuable, albeit painful, experience. So this requires more study, not less. It matters.

You can’t use results to assess, because the blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Sticking with a poor process that happens to generate a few isolated good results, is the road to ruination.

A lot of this necessary growth has to do with getting wounded. You lose the cookie dough before you build it back again. So how do you tell when the wound has closed and the growth has been achieved?

You look upon the lesson learned. And you have to be honest with yourself about it. It’s got to do with your level of certainty.

“I know he won’t do right by me, because he reminds me of whatever” — is the lesson “learned” by the wounded. They are not being wise although they feel like they are. They’re stereotyping. They’re paying forward their pain and misery.

“I do not know that he will do right by me” is the lesson learned by the learned. You see the difference? It’s very subtle. I do know he’ll screw me, versus, I don’t know that he won’t. The former is a stop, the latter is an opportunity. The former is what you say when you pick up your marbles and go home, because you’re still hurting and you’re not yet ready to share again. The latter is what you say when you’re tough because of your battle scars, and you can start making some logical decisions about how much trust to extend to a potential new friend. If you extend a little bit of trust, and it’s fulfilled, then you can extend a little bit more. You are not yet on this healing cycle, but you are ready to take your first lap. It is the difference between the negative and the positive.

This is why Biden/Harris supporters are acting angry, mean, petulant and vengeful, as if they lost, when they won. They voted that way because they were wounded, or incomplete. It’s not an accident, it’s a plan. The democrat party works long and hard to get people voting when they lack authorization to be in this country, when they’re convicted felons, when they’re angry/hurt/vengeful and feel like they want to get even with “corporations,” when they’re too young to vote, old enough to vote legally but not old enough to vote smartly — or don’t exist at all.

They are wounded…incomplete…people. They’re supposed to be flush with victory but they’re more angry and butt-hurt and hatey than they were before the election. Some of them have gotten hurt and lost some of their dough. Some of them never had it in the first place. But none of them are whole. If they were whole, they would be acting like winners, because whole people act like winners after they’ve won, and President Biden’s supporters don’t act that way.

I see the new President held a press conference. The liberals who won’t allow me to question his election victory are squeeing over it and flapping their hands, as if we’ve seen some actual good results come of this.

Dr. Fauci’s relief that he’s now working with fellow liberals, is palpable. I hope that translates into something beneficial for all, I really do. Liberals-working-for-other-liberals hasn’t done good things for us here in California, but every day is a new day.

Meanwhile, the bad guys are testing limits. What’s it worth to them to test limits? Two assholes plus 32 deaths worth of collateral damage, and another 100 wounded. American media doesn’t report on this much. They’re more worried about Placeholder Joe’s favorite flavor of ice cream.

The Elder Abuse Victim in Chief has signed a flurry of executive orders. No more America First, no more wall, come on in COVID-infected illegal aliens, death of women’s sports. Our friends neighbors co-workers who voted blue are lining up for their congratulations and wondering why they’re not getting them. Those of us who can see what’s wrong with all this aren’t congratulating them so we’re to blame for the ensuing conflict. We’re not shaming either. No high-fives, no shaming…we’re wondering why everyone in the country is living and thinking in silos. Well maybe that’s why.

They shame our guys with the flimsy logic of, “If these assholes who stormed the capitol supported Trump then he must support them, and you must support them too.” It’s the most serious kind of category error but look how well it worked. Formerly loyal politicians, pundits and back-benchers all leaped backward. It was an explosion. It was like a barrel of Menthos tossed in a swimming pool of Diet Coke. Not me! Not me! Not me!

Our side sucks at shaming their side. We’re not political. We’re farmers, construction workers, homeschooler parents, sewer pipe cleaners, animal husbandry professionals, etc. who make time for politics under protest. Yeah just a few of us are software weenies too. We’re all stealing precious minutes and hours away from other pursuits that are more worthy, because we’re cornered and we’ve figured out if we don’t care about politics at all, politics will surely care about us. We don’t shame them because it isn’t in our nature, it’s not part of what we do, and it would require a bit of extra time on top of the time we’ve invested already. For which we have yet to see a good return.

Hate to say it, but you’re seeing the default state: People who have spent their entire lives building exactly nothing, come up with the standards, policies and guidelines to be enforced upon the people who build the things. And they do this with fancy speeches. They steal the good results from the people who build the things, like for example the Trump administration with Operation Warpspeed, and they get cheered on by other people who reason emotionally, build exactly nothing. and make a lot of noise.

We need a new unit of measurement. We’ve got people running around who think they’ve thought this through all the way, saying “Sure there was fraud in the 2020 election but not enough to change the results.” They think they are quantifying. They are not. They do not even have a unit of measurement they can use to measure fraud.

And so I propose the FRAUDULUM. It is the smallest unit of fraud. I define it to be the amount of fraud that is taking place when a husband tells his wife that the pants do not make her ass look fat. When you call a company and their recorded message tells you “Your call is very important to us,” that is 2 or 3 fraudulum. When the gas company calls and you tell them the check is in the mail, that is a dozen fraudulum. A dozen dozen fraudulum is a gross fraudulum, and that’s when a politician tells you “I feel your pain.”

A “great gross” is a dozen dozen dozen which is 1,728. An example of a great gross fraudulum would be “BLM protests did not spread COVID (but Trump rallies are death).”

There is no kilofraudulum or megafraudulum because the Metric System is for sissies.

Now that I have established the base unit of measurement, can someone please engage in this quantifying they only feel like they’re doing. How many millions or billions of fraudulum would it take to change the results of the election in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, et al? And how many fraudulum did, in fact, take place? How is it you guys are able to put any sort of cap on this? I am so intrigued. Tell me more.

The #NeverTrump people won after all. This is their election. Let’s face it, there is no mandate for any democrat policy but there is a mandate for “get that guy out of here.”

Me, personally, I’m the opposite of this. I approved of President Trump when Trump brought good results. Good policies have rewards, bad policies have bad consequences. From arguing with the #NeverTrump types I’ve been impressed by, and occasionally bewildered by, their complete lack of regard for consequences. Some of them are even proud of it. Principles are everything! If only they could say what the principles are.

A lot of their argument rests on Trump’s mannerisms and so I assume our difference of opinion is there. For me, way back when I was just starting to become aware there was this thing the grown-ups were watching called “news,” the President’s name was Richard M. Nixon. So this idea that the President should set a good example for children to follow, is alien to me and it’s absurd to me. Children don’t take their cues about how to behave from the current President. Who would think that? Who wants that?

I don’t like the idea of kids on the elementary school playground calling each other “LOSERS” just because they heard Trump do the same thing. Well, I also don’t like their parents being forced to explain to them what a blow job is, when the kids are something like eight years old. The way kids should learn about politics is: It’s good when you share your toys with other kids who don’t have any, but it’s very wrong when someone comes along and forces you to share your toys.

Out here in the grown-up world, we have a lot of losers running things who shouldn’t be running them. Even people who hated Donald Trump should, right now, be wondering what we’re going to do to call out those losers. They’re still cranking out execrable results and no one’s calling them out on it. Gov. Whitmer, Gov. Cuomo, Gov. Newsom, I’m looking at y’all.

Good manners, but no one’s calling out the losers? Or someone calls out the losers for being losers, and in so doing sets a poor example for children…who shouldn’t be watching that closely anyway? Which?
Looks like we just had an election, and my side lost. Now we have to worry about consequences.

The consequences that really hurt people, but mean exactly nothing to the people who won.

People who don’t pay attention to politics, want people who do pay attention, to stop paying attention. But it never seems to happen. People who used to not pay attention start doing it, and once they start paying attention they don’t stop. You would think it must be a lot of fun to pay attention to politics. It isn’t. It is as close to an opposite of fun as you can get, so why do people do it? And how come, once they start, they don’t stop?

That’s the question that’s really on people’s minds.

No one answers it because no one asks.

Well, I just did. And so now I will tell you.

Once you start paying attention to politics, you will immediately and continually notice a pattern in which power is seized, and then used, by people who are not fit. There is a reason for this. Generally, the people who want the power are the people who shouldn’t have it. We as humans have a tendency to just give away the power to whoever wants it. So this is not a problem that dissipates on its own.

Lots of problems do that. A toddler screaming about bedtime, throwing a tantrum, will eventually wear himself out and fall asleep so you can just carry him to bed. People think if there are any problems in politics, they’re like that, ignore them and they go away. That’s wrong. Unfit people having power, is like the barn being on fire when it’s too close to the house. You don’t ignore that.

Who doesn’t understand this by now? Last year the Chinese Virus shut down our economy. We can now look back with the wisdom of hindsight and see that among the various remedies and countermeasures we implemented, all disadvantaged because they fell into the category of closing the barn door after the horse has run away…as far as effectiveness, “shutdowns” and “lockdowns” and “shelter in place orders” bring up the rear of the parade. It’s too late now, but there’s a good chance nobody ever had to be laid off from their jobs, no restaurants had to close. They closed on the orders of public health officials, usually appointed not elected, who’d never provided a service in their entire lives for which someone would willingly pay. Political animals who paid absolutely zero of any price for making the wrong decision, unilaterally making the call to shut down entire industries.

In the aftermath, I waited patiently for all the people who scolded me for paying too much attention to politics over the years, to apologize and acknowledge how right I was and how wrong they were. It still hasn’t happened yet. What’s wrong with them?

Yes I know I’m writing those last three sentences like something of a jackass, on purpose, but I’m semi-serious. If this recent experience doesn’t alter their perspective on things, what’s it going to take?

Right now the prevailing consensus, if there is one, is that Donald Trump was the one guy who had power who was unfit. That’s the reward of a massive effort of people-programming. Imagine taking this idea seriously. We had all these career politicians in the capitol just doing their thing…problems problems problems galore, not getting fixed, across decades, across generations. Here comes Trump the outsider, and whether you like him or not, he fixed some of the problems. Oh but he himself was a problem that we just fixed now? So it goes back to the career politicians. Who wanted the power. And they had it before…what did they do with it? Good things? If that were the case, there never would have been a Trump.

He didn’t want this job. Remember? He only started being this super bad nasty dumb guy a little while ago. On that escalator.

So now with the problem fixed, we can go back and not pay attention anymore? Back to wondering why there’s more month left at the end of the money. Wondering why gas is getting more expensive…while our betters soothe us with their palliative words, about how we’re going to rejoin this or that “climate change summit.”

Right now, there are no ideas other than “marginalize those creepy red hat wearing guys.” That’s it. That’s all. Problems galore. No solutions. The people who have all the power…wanted it.

The barn’s burning. It’s not a problem you can ignore.

I’m so happy that the law enforcement agencies and the people who lead them, along with the mainstream news media, have all discovered a variety of destructive mob rioting they don’t like.

To me, what democrats and liberals are doing is not at all complicated but I guess my perspective is unique.

As a child, I was bullied a lot and I asked for it. I was socially detached, underweight and underheight. But then in the middle school years when the bullying reached its apex, my growth spurts started to be a little bit…off. This was when I figured out the bullying would stop if you were the second-wimpiest kid. Just hit back once or twice. Bullies are cowards. Go ahead and get hauled in to the principal’s office with the bully. Of course they’ll let the bully go, and scold you because you’re one of the “good kids” and you’re not supposed to be doing that. That’s okay. Authoritarians are cowards too. That’s what I learned.

Some of these bullies that stopped picking on me, like in a heartbeat, because I had the balls to fight back turned out to be among my best friends.

But the most important lesson I learned about bullying? By the time I finished eighth grade, I was taller and stronger than a lot of my bullies. And I began to notice they worked it into their bullying, the fashioning of a fake phony narrative: They were the “real victims,” and I was the “real bully.” I am grateful for this education. This is when I figured out what bullying really was, and is, and always has been.

It’s deception.

I was just minding my business, teacher. That guy you think I was picking on, he’s the real bully. I’m the real victim, here. Look at Morgan, he’s almost six feet tall, I’m just five feet. That’s why I had to join the wrestling team instead of the basketball team. Just like now. They’ve campaigned for no purpose other than to grind us, their opposition, down into the dirt. They don’t like Placeholder Joe. They don’t like Kamala, we know that. They just wanted to obliterate us. And now that they’ve succeeded they’re just so, so scared. Oh somebody help me. Please! What a bunch of b.s.

Now I dunno…maybe because of these weird growth spurts, my experience was unique. I guess I’m seeing something not a lot of other people can see. But I do know for sure what I learned. Bullies are deceivers. Bullying is deception.

And that’s what we’re watching right now.

Placeholder Joe prepares to govern a country that is divided as follows:

The first group resolutely refuses to consider the possibility he won this election fairly or legitimately. The second group refuses to consider any possibility that he didn’t. These two groups all by themselves create considerable difficulty for the task of governance, since they’re both sizable and each of them represents a different reality. In rhetoric, there’s no way for both of them to win a contest. And in reality, there is no way for both of them to be right. They are entirely mutually-exclusive.

There is a third group of people who think Biden won the election fairly, but aren’t militant about it. They’re willing to allow for the possibility that some shenanigans may have taken place. But they justify this with questionable excuses like “not enough fraud to change the results.” They don’t think they’re rewarding the fraud, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing. It is the sentiment of crooked places within our great nation, like Chicago, Baltimore, Sacramento…the bosses fix the election, and whaddya gonna do? Just let it ride. A lot of people in this group are from such crooked places, and they don’t understand the damage that’s involved when you get the entire country working this way.

The fourth group is like the third group, but biased the other way. I’m in this group. The idea that the Biden/Harris ticket won this election fair and square, it just doesn’t compute. We know that history, even when recorded by historians who hated Trump and loved seeing him go, will offer up a huge bright cherry-red asterisk by the Biden administration. And we know that is fair and just.

But only one group gets the megaphone, and that’s the second group. We could call this the “Schwarzenegger Group.” They call others “spineless,” but they’re the ones who “know” things that they don’t really know. Nevertheless, their “knowledge” has become the dominant narrative, so I guess that’s good for Placeholder Joe. It portends ominous things for the rest of us, though, when the prevailing narrative doesn’t allow for sensible doubts. They are deeply suspicious of anyone who doesn’t agree with them. About everything.

Maybe people in the fourth group like me, will end up relying on the good graces of people in the third group for…staples of life? Food? Shelter? They are leaning in the correct direction and they won’t be ostracized. But they’re not following logic and reason. They’re just trying not to be ostracized.

The first group is actually more logical than the third group. Yes, they’re strident, maybe even shrill. The first group, like the second group, will not tolerate any doubts. But at least they’ve been paying attention and they’re refusing to be gaslit into accepting silly, nonsensical things.

What’s scary is that a lot of people who would claim to be in the third group, actually aren’t there, they’re in the Schwarzenegger Group. The defining distinction I laid out is tolerance of doubt, which is a characteristic of reasonable, mature thinkers. A lot of these people want the cachet that goes with being a reasonable, mature thinker but they’re not willing to bring it. If you show doubt, they will mock and ridicule you mercilessly, and that’s the acid test.

After all: Doubts about Placeholder Joe’s legitimacy, contribute to structural weakness in our system of law and order. That’s the lie they have been told, and they’re eager and anxious to pay it forward.

Meanwhile, they’re in no hurry to fix what was broken with the 2020 elections that led to this fracturing. To the contrary, they want the system to remain dirty, and in the near future, to get a whole lot dirtier.

It’s going to be an interesting four years. It won’t be fun to be in the fourth group, where I am. But I think it will be even less fun to be Placeholder Joe. Or Gigglepuss Kamala.

Yesterday afternoon, I checked and it wasn’t a word yet. I’ll check various resources periodically.

President Trump became the first President in United States History to be impeached by the House of Representatives — twice. How do we explain this to future generations?

I can boil it down into seven words: Liberals impeached Trump for using their tactics.

That explains everything. What we’re seeing at Congress now is this perfect acting-out of the “Nobody picks on my little brother but me” syndrome. And you can see it in the official damning article:

Resolution impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Resolved, the Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and that the following article of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Article of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors.

ARTICLE 1: INCITEMENT OF INSURRECTION

The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that the President “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment, for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Further, section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from “hold[ing] and office … under the United States.’ In his conduct while President of the United States — and in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, provide, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed — Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States, in that:

On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.

President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.

In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore, Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. Donald John Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

False statements…addressed a crowd…made statements that encouraged lawless action. You don’t say! Fight like hell?

Oh so you mean this rabble-rouser put ideas in people’s heads, that the government we have now isn’t going to address their concerns? He convinced them that extraordinary action was necessary, and absent that, the powers-that-be were going to ignore the hopes, dreams, desires and misgivings of the assembled hordes? Hmmmm…

Yesterday, liberalism impeached liberal tactics. It was a classic case of “Okay now that our revolution has succeeded and we’re on top, no more revolutions.”

No more appealing to the “forgotten man.” That’s our job!

Ten or so Republicans climbed on board, and there are going to be more. You may have had discussions with squishy Republicans like these. They claim to be the ones holding “principles” and they claim to be among the very few who are behaving consistently, deploring mob violence on both sides. They’re not wrong about that. But by recognizing this as what it is — liberalism punishing liberal tactics only when used by others — you can easily see how these squishes are being fooled. Their focus is all on the maneuverings and the manners, and they turn a blind eye to the agendas and ultimate goals. They say they’re the few who have principles. They’re really among the few who don’t have any. Their “principles” are, zero tolerance for revolutions, unless the revolutions succeed, then no more revolutions after that. Unless they succeed.

The immediate ramifications are non-existent. The likelihood of our current President being removed before the new guy takes charge, is on par with a bullet knocking another bullet out of the air. This is something that is a possibility, but the point is not to make it happen. The point is to put together a temporary, fragile coalition that includes lawmakers who want it to happen. That’s a different thing. Time will tell.

The precedent for the future is execrable. It is now an impeachable offense for a sitting U.S. President to say…nobody knows what. Whatever will set off emotionally unstable “Auntie Mabels”…as inferred by some pearl-clutching, Well-I-Never Pseudoboi. Predictable as a bouncing football. And it’s another step toward that perfect, perfect world they want to build. The one in which everyone is responsible for all the bad stuff everybody else does. No one, anywhere, is responsible for his or her own actions though.

The consequences are gawdawful. Impeachment is now a weapon. Anyone want to complain when Republicans take the House, and then retaliate? You better practice acting surprised now.

And the optics can’t be worse. Looks like there is, after all, a “Deep State” that wants Trump gone before he declassifies something that will land someone important in the graybar hotel. These may or may not be optics only. There’s probably reality behind it. Ponder the implications of that.

Other than those very few minor quibbles, Grey Goose Nancy…perfect impeachment. Flawless. Penguin-clap for you.

Continuing the thought from yesterday in which I identified the two sets of rules that are putting us in conflict with each other; the real grown-ups have two rules and the fake grown-ups, who think like children, have two rules…

There is a third rule, maintained by the real grown-ups, that is all-important. It is what makes society, as we know it, go. And it is:

3. You can tell me what to do (or not do) for sake of law and order, but you don’t ever get to tell me what to think.

So no, when we vote in elections we’re not voting on whether climate change is scary, since real science doesn’t work that way. We’re not voting on whether Michelle Obama is pretty or on whether Hillary Clinton is smart, or whether George W. Bush or Sarah Palin are dummies, or Joe Biden still has his faculties about him.

The fake grown-ups have a third rule too, and this is what’s really setting us at each other’s throats.

3. Oh yes I can!

We know this conflict exists because the grown-ups have won elections before, and we have won court victories before. No one presumed it was obligatory for the losers to believe in the Bush v. Gore decision, just like you don’t have to believe slavery is morally unacceptable. You just have to stop practicing slavery, and you have to stop counting votes in arbitrarily chosen counties. You’re free to doubt it if you want. That’s okay, you’re just wrong. But you’re not an affront to moral decency. And you’re certainly not getting anyone hurt. We’re grown-ups. We can handle fellow citizens disagreeing with us.

And so now we have the myth of the Biden/Harris victory. My intellectual superiors won’t allow me to question the idea that Joe Biden netted 81,283,485 votes. That’s the official total and it’s been made official in every possible way. This divides us, rather cleanly, between grown-up, critical thinkers, versus fake-grown-up, obedient thinkers.

I can’t get any of them, not a single one, to go along with my mental exercise in which I task them to go out and find the 81 million votes. Supposedly I gift them with Mr. McNulty’s stopwatch so they have an unlimited allocation of time to complete this, along with Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. It would be a lot of work, but that’s okay because it’s just a thought exercise. They don’t have to do this actual work, they just have to be honest and do a bit of thinking. I’m very clear about it. I can’t get a single one to commit to the objective of finding that many votes that were

1) non-duplicated,
2) from people who were living at the time,
3) and authorized to vote,
4) who knew what they were doing.

No takers. Seems the entire country is in agreement Biden didn’t really get that many.

If you do buy into this doctrine that the majority gets to tell the minority what opinions to have, it becomes a textbook case of circular reasoning: I get to tell you what to think because my guy won the election, because he got all his votes, because I get to tell you what to think…

But…you don’t.

The mythology that persists is that people died last week because other people didn’t accept that Biden won that many votes, so if we let people go around thinking Biden didn’t win that many votes, more people will die. This latest incident, this, this right here, this episode, here is where you M-U-S-T stop supporting Trump! And stopping supporting isn’t good enough, we all must actively oppose! Or else we’re complicit in murder. Nobody can say what Trump said to cause the destruction. So even if we accept all their fake-grown-up child-thinking premises, there’s a huge gap that remains.

The democrats stuffed the ballot boxes and everybody knows it. We’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen then? I’m not from Chicago. I’m not from Baltimore or any one of these other places that just rolls over and accepts crookedness. Someone please tell me, why are we in such a hurry for the entire country to emulate those bits and pieces of it, in which the law of the land is crime itself? We do not want the whole country to work that way. You don’t tell me what to think, and you don’t reward theft.

Nobody’s talking about how it seems every single dead victim was a Trump supporter, because the media wants to make it look like the Trump supporters did the killing. We’re still waiting for the details on that, but no matter how that goes, two and two still make four and I’m not inclined to reward theft, or pretend it didn’t happen. No it doesn’t mean I don’t care about dead people. It means 2+2=4 and the democrats stuffed ballot boxes.

It’s science. You can’t have more votes than voters. Stop being a denier!

Now President Trump is to become the fourth outgoing President, and the first one in modern times, not to attend the inauguration of his successor. Good. He’d be the subject of all sorts of criticism if he did go, so he’s invoking Morgan Rule #1 “If I’m gonna be accused I wanna be guilty.” I approve wholeheartedly.

Go ahead and inaugurate Placeholder Joe, before an empty mall. I hope a tumbleweed rolls by in the background.

What we’re seeing play out now is a conflict about how one achieves, not the authority that goes with being President of the United States, but the basic respect that we expect to come our way once we’ve reached full adulthood. And I mean, by that, real adulthood not legal adulthood. True maturity. Two sets of rules.

To people who’ve fully reached adulthood there are two simple rules:

1. I can’t make you respect me. I can only inspire respect by way of my words, my efforts and my achievements.
2. I can also inspire you, in the same way, to disrespect me. It’s your choice how to see me, my choice how to inspire you.

To people who haven’t reached adulthood the two rules are much simpler:

1. I get to tell you what to do.
2. You can’t tell me what to do.

The problem that turned deadly last week is that people who haven’t fully reached adulthood can’t see things from the perspective of people who have. And so with all the loud voices heard most often, belonging to people who haven’t fully reached adulthood, the whole “certify the votes” ritual turned into an imbroglio. We hear of the people who “stormed the capitol” and committed the acts of violence, be they genuine Trump supporters or not, having trashed the movement. This is demonstrably true. We’re left to debate whether it was foolish Trump supporters doing damage to their own cause, or brilliant Trump-phobes who committed the perfect false flag operation (seems to be an eclectic mix of both).

But as far as what happened, with the election itself as well as with the aftermath, it’s been a never-ending fireworks show of decrees dressed up in fancy costumes as hard news. But we have to wait so long to get any hard news. Most of it is just decrees, from people who haven’t grown up all the way, telling us what to think.

“Baseless” and “false” have been thrown around by these loud people, so often and so lazily, you have to wonder about the ramifications of wearing out whole words. Can you do that? We can certainly wonder if editorialists have programmed them in as keyboard macros. Words certainly can be abused. The word “false” has been used in place of “contested” or “disputed,” so routinely that by this point we just expect it. We don’t discuss it. It’s “false” that natural herd immunity applies to the Chinese Virus, or it’s “false” that Joe Biden received votes that are non-existent. If you contest either of these, or any one of several other “debunkings” and say “You know I think there might be something to that,” the guy who made the statement that they’re false will just find an expert or two who agrees they’re false. Then the conversation is over. So what’s the point? There may be an equally qualified expert who would affirm these propositions are possible, not necessarily false…but this is so time consuming and we all have work to do. So false it is.

We all like things to be settled, don’t we?

And people who have not yet reached full maturity, need things to be settled.

One of the defining attributes of true adulthood, is the condition of knowing what to do when doubt remains. It’s a learned skill, and these kids don’t have it. They’re accustomed to knowing which answer to choose on a written test, and they want to know…just that much. A, B, C, D or None Of The Above.

Meanwhile, we also hear that power corrupts. I think deep down, whether people want to admit it or not, we’re seeing how that happens. No one who has achieved genuine adulthood, is inspired in the genuine-adulthood way, to respect Joe Biden as a fellow adult let alone as a U.S. President. It’s not as if this predicament is new ground for us. We saw Bill Clinton would lie just for the sake of lying, as if someone was ready to slap a fine or a penalty on him for not telling enough lies within some defined period of time. Joe Biden has the same issue. This whopper about “[BLM] protestors would have been treated very differently…[had they been the ones that] stormed the capitol” is as good an example as any. It’s the sort of lie that demonstrates an intense disrespect against anyone who’s being persuaded to believe it. It relies on a forgetfulness of the events of just a few short months ago that, if it were to be validated, would signify something bordering on mental illness.

Trump-phobes would retort that the current President has told 20,000 lies or something. But the claim disintegrates when placed under the minimal burden of being taken seriously. These are just more postcards from the heartland of faux-adulthood, “I get to tell you what to think.”

If Joe Biden really does get to serve a full term as our next President, or even part of a term, I don’t envy him. He’s pushing eighty and he’s still at that stage where you stumble around thinking you get to give orders to others about how much respect to give you. As the kids say on the Internet, that’s not how any of this works.

My belief in “conspiracy theories” is a bit complicated. I am reluctant to believe in them because I don’t have confidence in people’s ability to communicate fine details to each other, one time, the first time, with accuracy, and surreptitiously. People can train together and get it right with repetition. But to do a one-time thing, “Ocean’s Eleven” style or “Great Escape” style, and get it right the first time requires meetings. I’ve been in meetings. I’ve chaired meetings. I think, by default, everybody misunderstands everything. By default, it’s an exercise in herding cats. Defaults exist to be countered and overriden, and this is possible…but the effort is expansive, inertia is great, and progress is slow. So I doubt it.

And I doubt people can keep secrets. People can keep state secrets if their livelihood is attached to the secret-keeping. Or if they’re threatened with real jail time. Even then it’s not foolproof.

OTOH…I do believe large numbers of people can be affected by a common incentive that will fill them with a common passion, that manifests consistently even as they operate with something resembling autonomy. I think this is intensified if they show off for each other. I believe our public education system has been perverted into an abomination that trains children to be good subjects in a quasi-communist collective state and it’s been training them to show off for each other. I believe higher education intensifies this. And, from my experience in high tech, I know how fond high tech is of higher education.

Now I understand Twitter, YouTube, Apple and Facebook have banned President Trump and/or any mention of the election results being in error. Several other platforms are de-platform-ing Trump. At. The. Same. Time. Hmmmm…

This is ominous. Best case scenario, the high tech whiz kids are showing off for each other the way they’ve been trained. They don’t know shit from Shinola about whether the election’s been fixed but they’re eager to show off for each other that they embrace the correct and approved opinion. Banning the opposite opinion, to a weak or unfocused mind, just intensifies the signalling. Nothing wrong with that! Even though, to a more resilient and better focused mind, it’s a way of forfeiting the argument. But they’re not applying their resiliency, they’re not focused and they don’t need to worry about arguments anyway. Because nobody in their peer group disagrees.

Worst case scenario…there is a secret that is being kept because someone is worried about their livelihood, and/or going to prison. Someone knows more than they’re saying. And what they know must run contrary to the narrative they’re pushing, because if the truth supported the narrative they’re pushing, they’d enjoy the luxury of openly discussing it.

After all, in the few circumstances in which conspiracies can actually function and remain secret, they’re still very expensive. There is no reason to maintain a narrative by way of conspiracy, if there are alternative methods for supporting that narrative. No reason, if truth supports the narrative. You would only opt for this clumsy and difficult coordination and secret-keeping, and banning of the opposition, if truth is aligned against it.

So yeah, I’m unsure about “conspiracies,” but I’m very sure Joe Biden did not win that election.

I have been struggling for the last 35 years or so to find out, and writing almost without pause about, what exactly it is democrats are trying to do. I have been curious about this since 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro made it look like what they want to do is a lot of scolding. This time, they have won all three branches of government and we should all be more sure of what they want to do than we ever have been before. But now, even after all this time I can’t give anyone an answer with any confidence. I suspect I’m chasing a rainbow; I don’t know what they’re trying to do because they don’t know what they’re trying to do.

Just like I don’t know why Darth Vader can’t sense his daughter when she’s standing right in front of him. You can pretend to have an explanation for that. You can pretend to know where Iron Man keeps the rocket fuel for his boots. Why Wonder Woman needs bracelets if she’s bullet-proof like Superman, or why she needs an invisible jet if she can fly like him. Why the look of the Klingons changed so much after the old teevee show was over. Some of these answers are plausible. Some are popular. Some would be highly likely to be true, even, granting the premise that we’re talking about truth and not fiction. But there’s a certain dishonesty permeating throughout all of them, which we don’t notice because we’re honoring the rules that come with thinking about fiction. That doesn’t mean the dishonesty isn’t there. The honest answer, to all, is that there’s no answer. Deep down we all know this. The rainbow doesn’t have an end.

But, we chase it anyway.

Now the democrats say their goals have something to do with empathy. Gosh, ya know…if we had a major political party established that was opposed to anyone showing any empathy to anyone else, it’s hard to envision what such a party would be doing that the democrats are not, in fact, doing. All this time later, scolding remains an important ritual to them. And not scolding like a loving parent who wants a dumb child to mature more quickly and grow, to live a happier life. They’re scolding more like the housewife scolding the mouse right before she hits it with an iron skillet.

It’s clear they ran this election, not with any vision of guiding the country to a better place or to come up with resolutions to any problems, but to obliterate the enemy.

They don’t want America pulled out of any counterproductive, useless, “illegal unjust” wars. They don’t want the unemployment rate lowered for minorities. They don’t want women respected or recognized for their talents and contributions, regardless of sex. In fact they don’t want women recognized at all. They don’t want to provide opportunity for the poor to achieve upward mobility. They are not honoring the “working man”; they seem determined to make “him” obsolete. They’d much rather attend their fancy dinners at The French Laundry than crusade for any sort of greater egalitarianism or equality in our society. So if they want anything with regard to inequalities, they want to exacerbate the inequalities we have already, and maybe make some new ones. They’re not interested in getting rid of any. They don’t want small businesses to remain afloat; they seem determined to get them closed for good. so that big business can buy up their spaces and scavenge their parts.

After all this time studying this movement, I couldn’t begin to tell you what their value system is. My working theory is that I can’t tell you because they can’t tell you, just like I can’t tell you why Han Solo shoots first in one movie but is constrained from shooting first in another movie. The answer doesn’t exist. Things just haven’t been thought out that well. Sure here & there a democrat can tell you what he or she wants to do. But that democrat is only speaking for himself or herself.

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” — Eisenhower.

January 6th is not all about policy or who-runs-what.

Stop and take notice that every now and then, a liberal will pop off with some kind of remark that Trump wants to keep being President to keep from going to jail. Now notice that no one is accusing him of anything that would send him there, and that it’s a defining trait of liberalism that they’re saying their enemies are doing whatever they themselves are doing.

The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime. Now they think they managed to elect the guy who committed the crime.

How many other crimes are out there?

If the whole point of the election — for somebody — is to keep from going to jail, and they have the connections to stuff ballot boxes, they will stuff ballot boxes. It wouldn’t make any sense for them not to do it, right? We don’t have established penal codes for this and we don’t have established procedures to actually put someone in the graybar hotel over that stuff. It doesn’t happen. If they have the connections to stuff the ballot boxes, they have the connections to keep from getting caught.

If the ballot box stuffing has to move into a higher level of magnitude because the other guy got more votes than expected, they WOULD shut down the counting for awhile to recalibrate things. Exactly what happened. Aborting the operation would be out of the realm of consideration. Commitments would have to get made and then there would have to be deliveries. No. Matter. What.

Now consider this. With the ballot box stuffing done, but statistical anomalies galore, evidence of fraud everywhere but it’s all circumstantial, the guilty parties are going to take the position of: You can’t prove it. They will object to any and all audits. They will not do what innocent people would do, and say: Go ahead and look at the innards we have nothing to hide. The very best the guilty people would do, is put on a sham…”The swamp investigated the swamp and found no swampiness.” But they’d make sure and control all of it. And then they’d tell us what opinions to have.

Exactly what we have been seeing.

See you Wednesday.

Related: In Deciding The 2020 Election, Congress Will Get The Last Word.

I haven’t been blogging about politics, mostly because I’m still waiting to see how things are going to go. But, I resolved quite some time ago to put this up when it comes out, and the day has come. I shall click it open and consume at my leisure.

Marpril…hehe, yeah, that’s pretty much how I remember it.

Alden Ehrenreich is the actor who played young Han Solo. He didn’t do a bad job. Being unfamiliar with his work, and having been tipped off that he performed to great acclaim in Hail Caesar!, which I have not seen, I don’t want to single him out for criticism. It wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be accurate either. But, he did fail in this role, and his failure is an important one because it highlights something we’re losing. This is going to become clear when the Star Wars franchise is wiped clear of everything touched by Kathleen Kennedy, who excels at making beautiful, expensive movies that have no point.

Ehrenreich never had a chance because he was born in 1989. He is missing something. I’m not sure I have it myself but Harrison Ford had it in 1977. His movie-daddy Sean Connery had it in 1962. There’s a certain swaggering confidence men had. It’s not discipline and it’s not charm. It isn’t wildness and it isn’t tameness either. It’s a certain ease, a harmony of sorts with chaotic things.

I think riding a motorcycle gets you closer to it, but that’s not all of it. Lots of guys do that and they still don’t have it. And I have seen this problem come up before throughout Hollywood’s remake fever. Even remakes of silly things that weren’t all that successful, or if they were successful, would not & could not have been taken too seriously. Dukes of Hazzard remakes, Knight Rider remakes, Judge Dread remakes, Robocop. The later version of the male action hero has this “bobblehead” look he can’t quite shake. So now they want a younger Indiana Jones? He’s going to be another bobblehead actor in an Indiana Jones outfit, and he’ll look like that.

Being young right now makes it likely you’ll miss out on it. These boys have been told just about everything they do is “toxic masculinity,” and it really shows. They’re more ready to genuflect before a disapproving mother figure than Indiana Jones or James Bond ever were. They can’t hide it.

I hasten to add that I am not singling out these lads for a lack of balls or toughness. Some of them might have gone over to Iraq and killed people, for all I know. I’m sure a lot of them can bench press more than I can and last longer in a gym than my pot-belly, code-writing ass. The nagging fear is that what I’m describing is a permanent disability, a wound that can never be closed, on one or several generations. The irreconcilable consequence of boys having been raised into men as second class citizens. I look at these bobbleheads struggling to swagger around the way Bo and Luke Duke used to do it, and there’s something that isn’t there. It’s not the “Who the Hell is this guy?” shock we got back in the olden days with replacement actors. There’s something else that has been stripped away.

Some of the young people I talk to, at least the males among them, show some timidness about odd things. Walking with a chin held high, like you belong in the world, is something that seems to have gone away thanks to the text messaging technology. Offering a firm handshake. Even making some money. I’ve heard it said that that’s “selfish.” Perhaps what they mean to say is, someone else might conceivably construe it as selfish to make your own money, and keep it. Maybe that’s the problem. “If someone could possibly interpret it as a bad thing, then you’re guilty until proven innocent.” My generation wasn’t raised that way. We had to respect authority, but the rules were firm and, if we were expected to follow them, always explained.

Young men are intimidated from doing such basic things, and they don’t think about the intimidation. I guess they think these are good manners? It seems like they’ve been bullied away from doing things we did, without preoccupation or deep thought. Speak in a voice below middle-C. Make that money. Look at a girl in a bikini. Change a tire, or if you can’t, learn how. Measure something without using the Metric System.

Stand your ground in an argument with a girl, or a woman, who happens to be wrong. Unthinkable!

Fire a gun. Tie a knot. Identify tasks and chores that have to be done…and do them. Unhooka bra. Spot a contradiction. Start a conversation.

Maybe that last one is the crux of the matter? “Don’t speak until you’re spoken to first.” Otherwise it’s date-rape?

Smoke a cigar. Light a fire. Grill a steak. Argue about politics. Grow a chest hair. Pee on a leaf floating in a creek.

Offer to hold a door open, or retrieve something from a high shelf for a lady.

Now I’m sure here & there, there are some guys born after Perestroika who can do, and often do, a few of these things. But there are also a few who are afraid to do a few of them, and some who won’t do them. “Better to play it safe” seems to be the operative guidance. Well, when you live life that way, I think what we’re seeing here is that it shows. Even if you’re a talented, professional actor, it shows in how you walk and how you talk. When you step into the shoes of someone from a prior generation, especially someone like Harrison Ford, Steve McQueen or Sean Connery, all of whom held a variety of weird, humble, odd jobs before acting…it shows even more.

I know it isn’t a matter of simply being young and having youthful features. Try this: Look up a male actor from back in those olden days. John Wayne, perhaps. Do some research. Everyone has at least an approximate birth date that is a matter of public knowledge. Add exactly thirty years to that, and go find a movie in which that guy plays a prominent role, and is thirty. Watch him walk. Watch him talk. Now watch one of the recent movies with a male lead, who is somewhere around thirty.

See it?

We can’t have another lovable rogue in our movies until this is fixed. Ever. Anywhere.

They all have that bobble-head look.

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” People think America is going to be struck down soon. Maybe Obi-Wan’s most famous line applies? Now that the Internet is on fire with concerned, compassionate people prognosticating imminent doom for the United States, what exactly would that entail? What would the final epitaph be, the lesson for the world to learn from the demise, or the steep decline, of the USA?

I think we can safely rule out “They did it the wrong way.” Quite to the contrary: If doom is near, history would have to record we met it after a good run, in fact a great run, and then it would be obliged to ask the question everyone who thinks like an adult must ask: What makes it so? Oh yes, a lot of loud, opinionated people would line up to shout “Nothing!” But that doesn’t pass the smell test.

Especially when so many of our enemies had to labor so long and hard to bring about our end. Using technology and economic models “borrowed” from us. As America confronts her destiny, we’re looking at thousands and thousands of years of various civilizations doing it the other way, with aristocrats twiddling and fiddling with more humble layers of humans. Nobody has succeeded, quite like we have, in lifting up the standards of living for those humble humans. Whether you’re trying to feed the hungry, speed up mass communication, develop medical procedures to extend life or save the sick — with the United States of America relegated to the ash heap of history, your first step would have to be to stop and ask “How do we make another one of those?”

I have been noticing a common refrain throughout all of these loud chattering voices yearning for the death of the United States. They all lust after world domination, with these control knobs and levers placed under the greedy hands of themselves, some dictatorial power that has earned their trust somehow, or…an enigmatic presence. A star chamber packed with strangers. Some respected commission of authorities, perhaps one yet to be established, that is to be offered unlimited deference by everyone precisely because we have no idea who’s on it. And whoever pulls these levers, flips the switches and twiddles the knobs, it goes without saying, pays no price for being wrong. The world as a plaything. That seems to be the fantasy. And this hatred for a country that has helped so many, is merely an offshoot of the fantasy. A child’s fantasy.

I’m less than impressed.

I’m left to conclude all this hatred must come from our national habit of doing it the other way: Authority must be an obligation first, with any privileges that come with the authority being a distant second, merely an afterthought, a byproduct that may or may not ultimately materialize. Power should be a raging pain in the ass. If the decision made is the wrong one, let the decision-maker suffer first. Oh yes, we’ve been lagging a lot in that department. We’re at our worst when we forget this. But we do make the effort, fulfilling the vision occasionally, and it seems that’s plenty enough to inspire all the hate. The mean children with their world-as-plaything children’s-fantasies; they don’t like it. Being obliged to help others, or at least not to hurt them, is enough to get them peeved. They’re ticked off when they think about others being so obliged.

They want us gone, and they want our way of living gone. The relationship between the rulers and the ruled, with the rulers laboring away under real responsibility, is what they want gone. It’s not going to happen. If we cease to exist tomorrow, the demonstration has been made and the lesson is taught: Mortals slaving away for other mortals, with one class living & dying to fulfill the whims of some other class, isn’t the right way to do it. Over the millennia, this has been given a fair shot in a variety of different forms and structures. It doesn’t work.

It works best when government recognizes the inalienable rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator, and is charged with defending them: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Five weeks left to the year. Plenty of time for people to apologize to me, others like me, they criticized in years past for “paying too much attention to politics.”

You can do it in a Zoom call. Wear your mask. Observe social distancing. Don’t go anywhere. Use proper pronouns. Don’t say “Chinese Virus.” And be sure to buy enough vouchers to offset your carbon emissions!

Seriously, though. It’s obvious we are deeply polarized and it’s been getting worse and worse. How come? It’s because of the Voldemort Virus and our response to it; made up “learning disabilities” in our kids; “global warming” or “climate change,” whatever it’s called today. Plastic or paper grocery bags. Plastic or paper straws. American exceptionalism. Nuclear power, fossil fuels, alternatives.

We are polarized because we are surrounded by a message of “Stop doing anything or else you’ll die and take everyone with you.”

Therefore there is a deep division between those who have been waiting for just such a message so they can stop doing anything, and those who would be enslaved for their maintenance. Between those who can, and cannot, afford to stop doing things. Between those are free to do as they please because they haven’t acquired the necessary skills for anyone to rely on them, and the ones upon whose efforts others depend. Between those who think they already know everything worth knowing, and those who regard it hellish and unthinkable to ever go a day without learning something new.

All of the scolding comes from that. Haven’t you noticed? From one hemisphere it’s all “How dare you” and “Listen to the experts.” From the other hemisphere it’s an eyeball roll, a protest of incredulity…and a job that has to get done, that the first one can’t bring itself to comprehend. All of the arguing ends with “Yeah but you’re going to get Grandma killed.” (So I win.)

It’s not just the virus. It’s this way with everything. It’s all Don’t versus Do.

I have been saying for years now, in so many words, that anonymity has a dazzling effect on us. If we hear a commission has decided such-and-such a thing, it’s in our programming to accept this and even elevate it, like to Ten Commandments status, just because we don’t know who is on the commission. This is extremely dangerous because it makes us into a passive-voice society.

What a great time it is to demonstrate the truth of what I’ve been saying.

“The election has been called for Joe Biden!” carries gravitas.

“Such-and-such a thing has called the election for Biden” doesn’t carry as much.

“Bob my next door neighbor has called it for Biden” carries far less…and arguably should. But look what’s going on at the other end of the spectrum. Go passive-voice and lop off the subject of the sentence, conceal the identity of the persons making the call, and you give extra weight to the call. The exact opposite of the way it should work.

There is a word for this fastening of an identity to the content of an idea, to give weight to the content: imprimatur. It’s a word rarely used, and when it’s used it’s usually for sake of criticism: “You have placed this silly idea above your imprimatur.” The symptom of our mental disease is that we have forgotten how to manage imprimaturs. We think the 800-pound gorilla imprimatur that cannot be defeated, or even subjected to challenge, is the one that doesn’t exist. We don’t know who’s saying it? Then we cannot appeal it. And we’d better accept it.

Not good!

Shopping list for my day off is getting kind of long. I should be sure and take some extra cash, I suppose, for the guy (real vet I hope?) handing out poppies. I’m sure this year is not being kind toward that particular effort.

The difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day:

Memorial Day is, as the name implies, a time to pay respect and honor those who have died either while serving their country, as a result of military service, or after they have finished serving as a retired or separated veteran.

Veterans Day honors those who have served in the past, present, and even pays tribute to those who will serve in the future.

One week.

All of my discussions with liberals have been started at the behest of the liberal, although I’m sure in most cases the liberal doesn’t remember it that way. They tag me in a post on social media, or they call me on the phone, or whatever. The script in their head says they’re supposed to be jubilant and I’m supposed to be sullen and twitchy. They’re genuinely curious about whether I’m holding out unrealistic hopes, or have sunk into a catatonic state, or both. Instead they discover I’m in good spirits; the Trump era may be coming to an end, but all good things must come to an end, and in this case we have a near certain shot that Trump is going to uncover just a few more things. Just a few more flies in the ointment, clumps of crap in the air hose, skulduggery, shenanigans. Maybe some malicious intent, or at the very least, hard evidence that the reforms made so hastily earlier in the year constituted nothing more than a regrettable mistake. I give Placeholder Joe the odds but only just barely. Gun to head, I put my betting money on him and Proud-of-Rapists Gigglepuss…as little as I can. Nothing more than what I can afford to lose. Trump has a one-in-four chance, I think. And that’s climbing. And as the days tick on by with no concession out of him, I’m enjoying watching people around him reveal their true selves — yet again. Munching my popcorn. Having a good time.

Our roles unexpectedly reversed, the liberal rings off with “Well, I don’t wanna get into it” or some variation of that, forgetting that the discussion began in the first place because of their inquiry.

They’re not well.

I do have one frustration burning away right now. I’m all about learning the true nature of our polarization. It’s become something of a lifelong goal, one I am sure I’ll never completely finish. This is a big split. It’s bigger than our country, of that much I’m sure. My frustration now is that it’s been the key factor in all of our distress, all year long. The Chinese Virus, and all its attendant hardships, isn’t responsible for our problems; it is revealing our problems. Now it’s too late to do anything with what we’re learning, but this is where we’re gaining yet more insight on what is really dividing us.

We are having, it seems to me, a difference of opinion. It’s international, sprawling beyond the borders of the United States, but it falls short of global. It’s a First World schism.

Common ground: Life is short. Stay away from assholes.

Follow up question: What, exactly, is an asshole?

Their answer: He goes on Twitter and calls people “losers”!

My answer is a longer one, and this is the schism. If it were just me saying this, there would be no division. But millions upon millions see it the way I do.

“Loser” is not a figment of anybody’s imagination. There really are losers out there. They’re energy sucks. If you’re worried about staying away from a certain kind of person because life is short and you want to make the most of it, these are them. And, far from laboring under some sort of asshole-pollution in which we have way too many people calling out the losers, we’re really struggling with something of a shortage. We have been coping with a sort of toxic mythology that good manners have something to do with pretending losers aren’t losers, and in so doing, we have spent generations and generations handing unearned influence over the most intimate aspects of our lives, to people who don’t even rightfully deserve to have influence over their own.

They’re losers!

Kind looks like I hate them, doesn’t it?

See, that’s also part of our toxic conditioning. If you see someone for what they really are, you’re hateful. The only way not to be hateful is to pretend what is so obviously true, cannot be. Meanwhile…if you’re feeling sad or depressed or angry about something, it’s important that all negative emotions are expressed. If you bottle up those bad emotions they’re going to come back on you, cause health problems, drive you nuts, etc. Have you heard that one? Of course you have. For half a century or more. “Don’t bottle up your feelings”…but…don’t say anything that might make someone feel bad about someone else, or themselves. We are therefore at liberty to — in fact, encouraged to — go around identifying any and all “problems” as long as they’re properly confined to our feelings, so that they are lacking in actionable solutions. Which multiplies the assholes, since we end up drowning in people moping about how sad or “triggered” they are and how they need help and can’t do anything…

No one can count on me to [Thing] until someone brings me a [Thing].

It’s healthy! Another person not bottling up their feelings! But once again, we have one more person pulling the wagon, one fewer person pulling it…

Meanwhile we have these problems with actionable solutions, usually because some “public servant” has been elevated to deity status — almost always a democrat — and is just screwing around, playing with their “toy.” Making judgment calls that have consequences, as the Owner of the ship not the Captain of the ship. We’re not allowed to notice that. Someone obviously has to be defrocked of their high position, everyone understands it, but to say so out loud is something we’ve identified as “hate.” The asshole is the person who says what we all know to be true.

I do not like the notion of small children looking up at the President of the United States, and learning it’s appropriate to say “Gretchen Whitmer has been doing a horrible job in Michigan” or “Hillary did a very, very bad job” or “Hunter Biden is a loser!” I’m displeased with these anecdotes of kids running out on the playground and calling each other losers. I suppose I should question the verity of such claims, but I don’t. I’m sure it’s happened.

But I have a unique take on it. Your children shouldn’t be watching the President that closely. That’s not his purpose. Article II of the Constitution doesn’t mention anything about the nation’s executive being a role model for children.

We have losers among us. Real assholes.

Our common ground is the notion that a life well-lived, has something to do with staying away from them.

We know — from repeated, and repeatable, experience — that if we do not define what asshole-ism is, not only will we fail to properly isolate it, but we will elevate it. Every. Single. Time. It is our ancient, timeless, common frailty. It is burned into our wiring. It is the way we are. Asshole-isolation is just yet another important thing that has to be done, that we can’t do without establishing, maintaining, validating and reinforcing strong definitions.

It’s impossible to get this idea across to the #NeverTrump crowd. They’ll misunderstand and think you’re talking about The Donald…or they’ll willfully misunderstand…and translate this wisdom to their own joke, at everybody else’s expense. There will follow the forced, non-jocular, horse laugh — HAR HAR HAR — and, the point will be lost. But they’re nuts. They seriously do agree with people who have more sense, that it’s important to call out the assholes. And here they are, defining the “asshole” in the room, as the guy who’s actually calling out the real assholes for being them. They want more of the same, more of the mistake we’ve all been making: It’s very important to stay away from a certain kind of person, but “good manners” means you’re not allowed to notice who they are, and you’re certainly not allowed to notice it audibly where others might hear.

I started my own adult living. I left my hometown for a bigger one, with the support of exactly nobody. I was full of enthusiasm, maybe a bit of youthful rebellion, but I had no guidance. Millions upon millions of us begin our adult living that way, and I think it’s common for us to learn the real secret to happy living the hard way. Maybe my story is so common, that it is the source of this real-split? Because at the beginning of my adult life, I ended up getting eaten alive. I will never forget. If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not forget. Stay away from assholes. If you choose your friends wisely and resolve to do right by them, you still have to work hard but others have had to work much harder before you came along, and things will pretty much fall into place. If you do not stay away from assholes, nothing else you do is going to matter very much. You will become one yourself. Or you will lose everything and live a life devoid of purpose. Probably, both of those things will happen, but definitely the one or the other.

But you can’t stay away from them if you don’t define what they are. And you have to call out people who’ve been elevated to positions of high authority, who aren’t doing any good there. The #NeverTrump crowd thinks they’re doing exactly that. They’ll say so on cue. But deep down, they know we don’t have any problems today — not a single one, not even the Wu Flu — that doesn’t predate Bad Orange Man. Deep down, they know he’s been revealing the problems, not creating them.

If they didn’t understand that, they’d be the happy ones. Things the way they are, they’re apprehensive and miserable. They agree with me: We’re still learning about what’s really broken, and we’re almost sure to learn a few more things, no matter what happens with this election’s outcome. They’re “winning,” in theory, but all of the genuine confidence is eluding them. All of it is on our side of the net. They can see this is so, but they don’t understand why. They’re not savoring this.

This annual wishing of a happy birthday to The Corps is a family thing, not a professional thing. I’ve actually been working around Army and Air Force guys. No leathernecks where I work. But we put up our shout-out to the jarheads every November 10th, because they’re our oldest branch, and Mom would’ve wanted me to do it.

This year things are a bit different. It is, just like with lots of other things, full of suck. So now we all get on the same side, and we fight. But fighting is what Marines do. They’re the first to do it. You know that old saying: If I can’t shoot, I’ll load, if I can’t load I’ll help with the wounded…etc. That’s where my family is right now.

We can’t make the trip for Thanksgiving, so our thoughts are with our warrior. Get well. Kick some ass.

At least, I think so.

I’ve lived through…let’s see. Carter was the big education for me. I was actually for Carter at first. How much wisdom can a ten-year-old have? I’ve said before many times that I owe a huge debt to Carter. He did more to get me voting Republican, than any Republican ever did. And he forced me, before my 14th birthday, to endure the most hideous experience imaginable for a young teenager: I had to admit my parents were right about something and I had been wrong. What a priceless head start and at such a tender age.

I was breathing air throughout the last two and a half years of Johnson’s presidency, so I suppose that doesn’t count. Of course I don’t remember it. Those thirty months, from what I’ve read, were pretty much a big flame-out. It takes some digging, historians don’t like to write about it. There was “unrest” due to the Viet Nam war, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King got shot, and at the end of it the democrats lost pretty much everything.

I was very much politically engaged when Mondale challenged Reagan. In the aftermath, I could see everyone else understood what I understood because Mondale lost everything except Minnesota.
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Adult responsibilities and relationships with wounded, incomplete unstable women had distracted me from politics and lured me into the “don’t care zone.” I became one of those casual-living casual-thinking types, the “Not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties so what’s the point” types. Bill Clinton cured me of that. I remember after the Gennifer Flowers scandal had started to die down a bit, and Bill Clinton made an appearance in a Kindergarten class I suddenly realized: That’s our next President, no doubt. It made me sick to my stomach. Not because he was a democrat, but because he looked and talked like a computer software salesman and at the time, people in this vocation had made my life miserable. My adult responsibilities had grown to include developing and testing the products they were promising people…

Clinton’s presidency resulted in the 9/11 attacks. Hoping we don’t get another one of those.

Then there was Barack Obama. Too soon to say, we’re still anesthetized against the damage He did around the world, although we did get a front-and-center view of the War On Cops that He promoted nonstop. Our media blames all the fighting and distress on Trump, which just goes to show we can’t rely on them. I think the worst thing about the Obama era, among the travesties upon which we can rely for a new Biden era, is the fawning press. Questions they asked of Obama were not the same as the questions they asked of Trump. We never would have heard “Obama suggests, without evidence, that blah blah blah…” The running joke is that the harshest question Emperor Obama was ever asked was “What’s it like to be so awesome??” It’s not completely a joke.

Now before I came along, what sort of damage did democrats do? JFK shut down the loonie bins and to this day our streets are crowded with mentally challenged people who can’t get access to the services they need. Truman flooded our federal agencies with communists, and from what I understand we have yet to figure out if he knew what he was doing or was in denial. The historians are covering for all that. FDR failed to pack the Supreme Court, but succeeded in making the judicial branch into his lapdog, which in turn created misery for all sorts of Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned…including George “Sulu” Takei, who somehow blames Republicans for it. FDR also created a whole new chapter in American liberalism, in which we’re supposed to sit on our asses and wait for the government to feed us. Lots of things are wrong with this. The worst is the mental abuse, since this romantic vision of the bold young revolutionary is supposed to remain in place. So we’re supposed to sing our revolutionary songs and join unions and march in the streets and show our strength and really stick it to The Man…but then cry like little birdies waiting for the momma-bird which is the government, to spew some pre-chewed food into our little beaks. We’re the resistance but we’re also the obedience. That cognitive dissonance started with Roosevelt.

Woodrow Wilson? Do I even need to go there. Racist. Segregationist. Eugenicist.

So…dunno…the damage democrats have been doing, is evidently on the wane, but nowadays there is a lag-factor and it’s hard to remain conscious in the moment of the consequences of the damage they’re doing. They, of course, would like to blame it on whichever Republican comes into office after them, and with a willing and complicit press, they tend to succeed at this.

But overall I think we’ll be okay. You’ll notice the revolution is never complete. And they keep losing. People figure out the effect they have is not good, and so they require young children who are idiots like I used to be, to come to voting age still being idiots so they can maybe win elections again.

Supposedly they’re representing the “poor” who would be helped by progressive taxes and redistribution schemes, with their opponents representing the “rich,” the very few who would be taxed to pay for this sumptuous buffet of social services for the poor. Should be a cakewalk for them. Obviously it isn’t. That’s what gives me hope. People are learning, like I did back at age 10, and they’re doing this learning pretty reliably.

I’ve already asked if Clarence Thomas has another four years left in him. I’ve been assured he does…these people wouldn’t know for sure. But I got to hear him when he swore in ACB, and he sounded alright. We’ll be alright. I can’t promise it for sure, but I’m betting on our good health for the long term. And as far as election shenanigans? We just rewarded them so for the short term they’ll get worse. But we’re going through a learning experience and over the longer term of time, we’ll come out of it wiser.

We’ve got a lot of people walking around out there, who have actually voted and are free to vote again, saying “Trump supporters need to give it up because the math is insurmountable” even as they admit the process of counting votes has been shady as hell and there likely has been some shenanigans taking place.

This is looks to me like some kind of mental enfeeblement. This is why I say things like “thinking like a grown-up” versus “thinking like a little kid.” Math is derivative of the counting process. Do I even have to say it?

I noticed earlier this week CNN was putting up graphics of the electoral vote totals, things like “BIDEN 247 TRUMP 213” …without having put Alaska in Trump’s total for some reason…counting Michigan and Arizona for Biden, after both states had spent the night swinging back & forth…Trump within one percentage point in AZ, WI, NV, PA, NC…were they, perhaps, not looking at that and just fixated on the deceptive electoral vote totals the whole time? I’ve noticed we have a problem with widespread ignorance about the Electoral College’s purpose. Stands to reason we must have a lot of ignorance about how it works.

It takes a tiny bit of fraud to produce an enormous change in the Electoral College result.

What you’re getting here is a good look at what liberalism really is. You have millions upon millions of people who are reaching the same erroneous conclusions about things because they don’t understand the basics, don’t think in terms of cause and effect. And they’re hooked on the feeling of “I know something nobody else knows”…can’t stand that healthy humble inversion of it, “Everyone else seems to know something I don’t, I need to shut up and listen.” So, fresh after uttering something that reveals their ignorance, they strut, pose and preen. Oh yeah yeah yeah I know how the Electoral College works, I’m like an expert on the Electoral College. But you red-hats need to totally give it up, the math is insurmountable.

Related: “Glitches” in Michigan gave thousands of votes to Biden.

Tucker Carlson’s Show last night.

A real whistle blower, covered by way of real journalism. We used to have that kind of stuff.

Update 10/29/20: Had to replace the video, the first one got yanked. Not surprised. May have to do this a few more times.

Funny how these “oopsies” always seem to go in the same direction…

Okay we got one week left. This is an unusual election in that all three are a toss-up or close to a toss-up: House of Representatives, Senate and White House. After today it’s pretty pointless to pass on any sort of deep-thinking to people who don’t already agree with me.

So if I could call it, here is how I would like people to envision it.

I wish to address the issue of the mommy-state providing us things for free. It’s become a big issue because looking after the public debt has gone out of style. Politicians have figured out they’re not going to make a lot of headway promising people raises so they can afford things, or easing regulations to make the things cheaper to buy. People just want their free stuff. They can see everyone else is getting free stuff so they want theirs.

So. I’m leaving a lot of pressing issues unmentioned so I can concentrate on this one thing. It’s that important.

I want you to envision a sort of alternate reality in which we all need and want our bananas but there is a banana shortage. If I use the example of “contraceptive shortage” I’m going to lose half of you and if I say “ammunition shortage” I’ll lose the other half, so let’s say it’s bananas.

Can you envision the fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politician jabbing his finger up in the air and proclaiming, with lots of righteous indignation, that “bananas are a human right”? Deep down inside I think we all understand it takes more than that to make something a right; just emphatically saying it is one doesn’t make it one. But I recognize a lot of people are well past that now. We need our bananas!

The point I seek to make is about a critical difference. It is relevant to the situation and the times in which we live.

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, they get one…

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, no one has two or more.

See where I’m going with that? Two different things. Not the same. When people say stuff like “Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried” they’re talking about that. Oh, this bait-and-switch game doesn’t fail. There’s something in the human psychology. People think they’re looking at a promise to make sure everyone has a banana, when they never even heard that and no one ever gave them that promise. The promise is “equality”; it has to do with taking bananas away, rather than giving them to people who don’t have them.

Now that I’ve defined this critical distinction, go back and look at what these fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politicians are telling you. And think back in recent history. A decade ago, the bananas were health care coverage, right? The guy whose name was on the bill got to be President of the United States for two full terms. He used executive orders to modify the provisions as He saw fit. It was like putty in His hands, because if anybody got in the way of what He wanted to do they’d have been called racists. Here it is a decade later. And all these people are still missing their bananas.

You vote them in ten more times to give you the free bananas, it’s going to go this way ten more times. The plan is not to give people bananas. The plan is to make it all “equal” by taking bananas away from people. Listen to what they are telling you. They’re explaining it to you. “It’s just awful that in the richest country in the world people are missing blah blah blah while we have millionaires and billionaires.” They talk this way ALL the time. The problem isn’t that someone is missing a banana. The problem is someone is missing a banana while someone else has two. There’s a difference.

Okay, I’ve said my piece. That’s okay. Maybe I didn’t manage to educate you, but if you’ve read this far you’ve lost your excuse. Now vote wisely.

I found this to be nothing less than brilliant.

The truth is, on all of this, we owe the country a broader discussion. Competing claims about Senate customs cannot fully explain where we are…

Catastrophe looms right around the corner. The country will be fundamentally changed forever. When a Republican president makes a Supreme Court nominee. They have hauled out the very same tactics for fifty years. Some of the opposition’s more intense, but the doomsday predictions about the outcome of nominating these extremists like John Paul Stevens, David Souter? Why, somehow, everyone knows in advance that nominations like Bork, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are certain to whip up national frenzies… while nominations like Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are calm events by comparison. This blaring asymmetry predates our recent disputes. And it comes, my colleagues, from a fundamental disagreement on the role of a judge in our republic.

We just have a fundamental difference of opinion. We just heard the Democratic Leader name all of these things that are threatened by this nominee. It sounds very similar to the tunes we’ve heard before. We, like many Americans, want judges to fulfill a limited role the Constitution assigns to them: Stick to text, resolve cases impartially, and leave policymaking to the people and their representatives, which is what we do here…

But the left thinks the framers of our country got this all wrong. They botched the job. The people who wrote the Constitution didn’t understand what a judge ought to be. As several Senate Democrats have reaffirmed in recent days, they find it quaint and naive to think a judge would simply follow the law. Scalia used to say if you want to make policy, why don’t you run for office? That’s not what we do here…what they are looking for is a small panel of lawyers with elite educations to reason backward from outcomes and enlighten all the rest of us with their morals and political judgment. Whether the Constitution speaks to the issue or not. They know best what’s for us. No matter what the Constitution or the law may say. And for the last several decades, in many cases, that’s what they have gotten. One activist decision after another, giving us subjective preferences of one side of the force of law…

President Obama actually was refreshingly honest about this. He said he wanted to appoint judges who had empathy. Think about that for a minute. What if you are the litigant before the judge — for whom the judge does not have empathy? You’re in tough shape. So, you give them credit for being pretty honest about this. That’s what they’re looking for…And that is clearly why we have taken on such an outsized, combative atmosphere with regard to these confirmations…

The democrats aren’t afraid to play politics with the Supreme Court. Republican Senators have consistently applied a more congenial standard to nominees to the nation’s highest court: Is he or she certifiably crazy? If not, then confirm. Don’t worry about how many conservatives or how many liberals are there already, and don’t worry about going home and telling your constituents “I kept this liberal whack-job out of there.” Just confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Which they did, 96 to 3. That was not — I think both sides would agree — because RBG represented the mainstream of the country’s thinking on issues likely to come before the Supreme Court.

This is important because the Senate is important. Keeping the Senate, in 2020, is almost as important as keeping the White House. It might even be more important than that.

A lot of people are out there ready to punch the chad for Placeholder Joe and Proud-of-Rapists Kamala because they don’t like President Trump’s combativeness. Or, they’re ready to stay home over this genteel-language issue, even though they support Trump’s policies. As we’ve seen over the last few days, a lot of the heated and counterproductive bickering is in Congress, and I’d really like to know what people think about this “blaring asymmetry.” Some liberal ACLU hack gets nominated to the Supreme Court and everybody falls in line, and starts fawning. Remember Elana Kagan’s nomination? Oh, she’s so funny! Just adorable.

Republican President nominates a learned and steady voice like Barrett and it has to be World War III. Seriously, what do they think about all that?

Truth is, for this function…and maybe for any other…we don’t need any democrats in the Senate at all. They’re just there to scheme for power, slander their enemies and stir the crock.