In my youth, I bored quickly of this show because I was a spoiled Star Wars kid. The special effects are cheesy and dumb, by design, and it’s really supposed to be more about characters and relationships. Now I’m in my second-half-century on the planet and this appeals to me more. Having finished off the first season, this is all new ground for me.

I was surprised yet again because I read the synopsis for Season 3 Episode 3 and I thought…NO…you’re breaking it. Someone on the writing staff doesn’t understand the character of Pam, the low-drama, take-it-all-in-stride, the adult in the room. They built an episode where she does the annoying high-drama thing, “It’s either me or the [blank] and I’m outta here” thing…or so I thought. Hey it’s the early eighties, everyone was obliged to do this. Girlfriend says, Fine go on your adventure, your last bank heist, explode the laser beam satellite and save the world…I won’t be here when you get back.

This annoys me, especially given the era. We were being re-programmed to think of women as equals. And the first, last, and only thing they were having these newly-empowered female characters do was lay down the law — no world-saving when I’m in the picture. Get used to mediocrity, sucker. Now help me unfold the teevee trays, and turn the teevee set to Love Boat while I go get your bowl of prunes.

I mean, couldn’t feminism hide what it was trying to do to us for a few years?

But this episode is not that. Well it is…but you end up sympathizing with Pam, and it isn’t because the writers are manipulating you into it. She’s right. Ralph and Bill are wrong. You see it isn’t the donning of the red suit and the galivanting off on the latest sting of derring-do that’s got her piqued. It’s the pattern. It’s the fact that things have settled into being this way, every instance of normalcy is treated like it’s an exception but it’s all baloney. Bill says jump, Ralph says how high, and this is the way things are always going to be. She’s coming to a decision about whether she can deal with this over the long term and deciding it logically.

Can’t fault a girl for that.

And here we come to one of the more fascinating things about people. I have noticed this thing with patterns is a sensitive issue; people who live in patterns, don’t want to admit they live in patterns, and they don’t like having it pointed out to them. But sooner or later the subject has to come up and see the light of day. I’ve often said, in a few places, that whenever I notice patterns of things people get annoyed with me…oops, there I just did it yet again. But it’s true. People settle into a rut, and when it involves a lack of consideration for others, to just put a stop to things by cutting them loose without saying anything seems almost like cruelty.

But pattern driven people are firecrackers. “I notice whenever you put up Facebook posts with pictures of your food in fancy locales, within a few days you need some gas money from me until payday.” Boom. There’s no tactful way to put it. It’s too much truth.

This episode was put together very tastefully. The whole sequence of events is told from Ralph’s point of view, with him being the primary sympathetic character. In the end, it’s all about Pam’s feelings though — and how do you do that? The easy way would be for her to look down upon Ralph’s efforts to put together a decent vacation for her, like an angry and offended goddess, with a total lack of appreciation. And in the beginning they kind of did that, but in the end the message was driven home loud and clear: The relationship is on the ropes not because of just any one event. That’s what high-drama liberal chicks in Seattle do. “Ooh! I thought you were going to do this and you did that! You’re a promise-breaker!” Drama drama drama…yawn…no, that’s not Pam.

In the end, she just needed to be shown a little bit more consideration from Ralph, the pattern-guy. I’m sure if there was a way he could go on with his suit-life with the pattern dislodged, or merely disrupted, he would have done it. But, she saw that, and also saw there was no way, things would have to be like this for the sake of other people, and she could live with it after all. It’s Lois Lane‘s never-ending problem.

In real life, though, such alienating patterns are not the unavoidable side-effect of having superpowers. They are, all too often, signs of something not quite right. A boxcar that’s not quite fully lined up on the tracks. Blown deadlines, no-showing, “Sorry there’s been a change in plans”…it means there are others involved, a micro-community of sorts having been formed, with the less stable people exerting control, consciously or otherwise, over the stable people when the pecking order should, by rights, work the other way around. Such patterns can be left undisturbed. But when that happens, there’s a circle of trust that shrinks just a little bit, and someone who used to be on the inside of it ends up on the outside.

It’s far kinder to people to point out the pattern and allow the fireworks to commence, with the attitude of “If there’s gotta be bloodbath then let’s get it behind us.”

People are complicated. That’s why relationships are complicated. Third floor of a building isn’t gonna be any less rickety than the second.

The whole point of the book I’m writing is that I, like millions of others, want to see liberalism go away but of course that arouses a question — what parts of it? Not the people themselves. If I wanted actual people to go away then I’d be a liberal myself, and I’m not. I can’t be one because I don’t hate people that much.

I think Wednesday and Thursday night we all became a little bit better equipped to answer questions of this sort.

I think after they figured out they can use politics to put material resources under their control, the next summit of annoyance they achieved was this insufferable “I will win” thing. Providence is on our side, time is on our side, our opponents are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of something called “facts”…WE HAVE YOUR CHILDREN…

What they’re trying to replace is “God is on our side.” But they can’t bring themselves to use the capital G. And so a certain secular smirking smugness has crept into these substitutions of theirs. I know something you don’t know…I have done my googling and my snopesing…I have “facts”…and so they have become “actually” people. Actually, two and two DO make five, but if you need to have it explained to you then I’m way too busy to do it, you’ll just have to be left behind. It must be so. I’m so smug! And look how much anger I have. What’s what we saw in the debates. Seldom correct, never in doubt.

The very picture of someone you don’t want running anything.

They can’t even keep track of their own message. Two and two make five, and “you didn’t build that,” because I and a select few others have elite access to some nugget of game-changing information that eludes you…or…two and two make five because if I can convince 51 percent then nothing else is going to matter. Which is it? I don’t know and you don’t know because they don’t know. They don’t know because they don’t care.

Oh look at that, they want to do away with the Electoral College and lower the voting age to 16, but of course they do. Maybe the rest of us will support them in these efforts…if, and only if, we don’t have enough of the smirking smugness and we want more of it.

Former President Jimmy Carter added himself to the growing list of these smug, smirking, annoying actually-people, with his glib remark that President Trump actually didn’t win the election. Oh but of course he didn’t.

In my time I have annoyed people in a lot of different ways, mostly due to my immaturity. I owe a tremendous debt to Carter because, at least, I haven’t annoyed people THAT way. He kept me from becoming a liberal. At age 13 I could see what was wrong with these people and what they were trying to do. I can never thank the man enough.

The dumbest propaganda move The Left ever made, might have been to ascribe the motives of their opposition to fear. If you’ve ever argued with them about one of their silly changes they want to make for any length of time, or watched someone else do it, you’ve heard it:

You’re afraid! Scaredy-cat white males afraid of big tall black guys being on the same airplane flight or something…

I think whoever popularized The Left going that route, might very well have been a right-wing infiltrator. It’s a horrible, horrible idea for them. If I were a left-winger, the last thing in the world I’d want to do is get the whole audience thinking about, What would my priorities be if fear had no effect on them?

The answer to the question is, we’d act like conservatives. Some nanny-state do-gooder would approach us about voluntarily surrendering some of our rights, or our privileges, or our firearms “for the greater good” — and we’d tell ’em to shove it. It’s a beautiful dialogue that practically writes itself, and it would play out over and over again:

“It’s just that, ten years ago, there was this guy who had a gun just like yours, and he went to this crowded restaurant and did these awful things…”

“Well then take it up with him. Now fuck off.”

Fear would be acquiescing to such nonsense.

Here’s what they don’t get: Having, and using, the capacity to noodle out consequences to actions is not fear. If the liberal thinks it’s a great idea to wheel a baby stroller with a baby in it up to the brink of a cliff and then give a it a mighty shove — and let’s face it, a lot of their proposals are just like this — it’s not “fear” to understand that this results in a dead baby, and on those grounds oppose the idea. When James Bond figures out he’s got to blow up the orbiting laser satellite before it fries some major city and kills tens of millions of strangers he’ll never meet, and does his predicted transformation from martini-guzzling whore-fornicating nihilist assassin into altruistic white-knight who’s going to save the day because he suddenly cares about people — until the next movie — is he being fearful? That’s not fear, that’s concern for others, the one attribute all real heroes have in common with each other.

Liberalism is the Population Bomb ideology. It is the ideology of “Now that I’m here on the planet, resources are scarce, so fuck everybody else I’ve got mine.” It lives for today and retains no real hope for the future.

It is the ideology of a rat on a sinking ship.

It IS fear.

Rant: I do not believe in conspiracies but I do believe in common incentives and I believe some of these are hidden. These could be fairly called “conspiracies” because they achieve the same effect although they do not involve the collusion that should be necessary to qualify for the term.

There is a conspiracy to fuck with people.

Show me a hundred people who want a “climate surcharge” and I can show you a hundred people who want higher taxes. Show me a hundred people who want higher taxes and I’ll show you a hundred who want the climate surcharge. If things were on the up-and-up it wouldn’t be that way, because higher taxes are not good for the environment. Also, every dollar you spend on higher taxes leaves a dollar less available for surcharges, and vice versa. Furthermore, I would not be able to show you a hundred people who, by their own private conduct, do good things for the environment. On average, their “climate skeptic” dissenters would be kinder to the environment. So these are not people who want to preserve a livable climate; they are people who just want to make it more expensive to live.

California has water rationing during droughts, which makes some sense. We keep the rationing in place when there is flooding, which doesn’t make sense. Unless you accept the conspiracy to fuck with people. With regard to the environment, I have also noticed there is a “toilet paper rule” in effect: The cheap, rough toilet paper that chaps your ass will never be found to be bad for the environment. Only the cushy, comfortable, popular things are harmful. Environmentalism is not in conflict with things that really hurt the environment, but it’s in everlastingly conflict with us, and the things we prefer. And the measures that “protect” the environment seem to be chosen not on the basis of their potency for protecting their environment, but on the basis of their profile…which means their inconvenience. I mean seriously, what does the “straw ban” do? We got a much better benefit for the environment when the lumber companies began voluntarily planting trees on a 1-for-1 basis whenever they clear-cut a forest. But that did not get in the face of the average taxpayer/homeowner, inconvenience him, annoy him, obstruct him, nor did it justify the coercive police power of the state. So the straw ban is a model for future efforts, and the 1-for-1 sapling planting is not. That’s hosed.

We are indoctrinated from childhood to accept this. Our third-grade teachers told us “Because one of you did X, none of the rest of you will be allowed to do Y” and “If I make one exception, I’ll have to make a thousand.” We are conditioned to accept encroachments on our liberties and detriments against our standard of living based on the actions, or the neglect, of people we will never meet. In adulthood, we see persons of influence take advantage of this. “Things the way they are right now, with what’s going on lately, whenever you do a [blank] you’re going to have to get/do [blank] [instead].”

It has become the siren song of our times.

And we have allowed it to be this way.

But it’s never too late to reverse course.