I don’t know about this Colonel Vindman guy. I have noticed online that discussions about anything connected to him, are pretty short: Someone says “war hero” and then there are gasps of righteous indignation against anybody who would dare question this or that…

And this is something I’ve seen before. Every now and then The Left will trot out someone who says something The Left wants said. And if the person was in the right place at the right time, and maybe holds some position that would run contrary to the ugliest stereotypes about The Left, then he or she becomes a hero. From the moment we first learn their names, they’re elevated by their democrat-party handlers to iconic status. We aren’t allowed to question what they do or say. Anyone with a heartbeat who so much as suggests anything short of glowingly positive, faces an onslaught of Internet mockery and derision.

One of them, back in the day, was lionized by a prestigious columnist as holding “absolute moral authority.”

And I have come to a conclusion about them: I don’t trust them. No actually it’s worse than that: They tell me something is so, I immediately disbelieve it. I have doubts if they say water is wet.

It’s not an anti-democrat-party thing. Okay so it is, but only partly. Mostly it’s based on the past track record. These megastars don’t tell the truth very often, and when they do, after all the chips are down you come to find it’s only a half-truth. Sure there are teeming throngs of Internet denizens ready to circle wagons around them, and that’s important because the Internet is fairly reliable as a tell-tale about where the national discourse is, and where it’s going. But it suffers from a horrible reputation when it comes to figuring out what is & isn’t true, and it deserves that horrible reputation. With me, The Iconics have a less than desirable reputation as well. I’d sooner trust a salt-lick canoe.

So say what you want about me. No, I don’t think your Autistic Swedish brat can see carbon dioxide in the air. The Iconics, and their unscrupulous handlers, bore me.

In my third-of-a-century arguing with liberals on the Internet, I have occasionally used the phrase “think(ing) like a grown-up” and I’m sure it comes off looking like I’m hurling an insult. Some of those on the receiving end have come back and shown their understanding of logical fallacies, by accusing me of an “ad hom(inem) attack,” which is an elaborate way of demonstrating they’ve missed the point on multiple levels. Since I’m not completely socially inept and stupid, I do reserve use of this phrase for situations where I don’t care about the ensuing person-to-person relationship too much, but that’s different from an actual insult. As an insult, it wouldn’t work very well. We all start out life forming opinions like children, because we start forming them as children. But that doesn’t mean, in adulthood, we should still be doing it the same way.

Persons who think it is uncalled-for need to reconsider their view. We do live in an age in which people tend to be very proud of the conclusions they reach, but not proud at all of the way they got to them. And so they want to talk to excess of the former but not inspect the latter. They cause strife and contention, and then they blame others. But it is true that, in order for this to be a useful observation, I should take more & better responsibility for my definitions. What do I mean by this?

1. First and foremost, you have to release “it makes me feel bad” from its anchoring at center-stage. There are other things to consider. Respect reality. It doesn’t care about your feelings.

2. When you argue with people, do your arguing to discover & disseminate truth. Recognize you can “win” an argument, and be wrong. It logically follows that you can lose, and be right.

3. Use active voice. Word selection and sentence composition influence thinking. “Don’t leave your car unlocked, it will get broken into” encourages desultory thinking, obliterating the subject of the sentence, the vagrant who would be breaking into the car. If something is to be done, someone is doing it, and the root of the problem being discussed is there.

4. Deal with specifics in your critiques. “Your response is full of logical fallacies” is not specific. It conveys your own disapproval, but nothing else, no justification for dismissal. You may discover, if you go looking for a specific objection, that when all’s said & done you don’t really have one.

5. Recognize cause and effect. This must necessarily mean distinguishing intent from ultimate outcome. “Straw man! I never said to throw the baby over the cliff, I just said to wheel the carriage up to the brink, and then give it a mighty shove.” There are other metaphors we could use. “I never said to blow up the truck, I just said to check the gas level with this cigarette lighter.” “I never said to eliminate jobs by making it hard to hire people, I just said to put the employer on the hook for all sorts of unfunded new expenses.” Your own ignorance of what-causes-what shouldn’t excuse you from the deleterious effects of the bad policies you support. Not unless hurting people is what we’re trying to do.

6. Think about the “lurker variable” when noticing correlations. If two changes seem to be connected with each other, there are four possibilities: A causes B; B causes A; there is an unseen C causing both B and A; or, it could be a coincidence. Four is a lot, so picking out just one of the four as “proof” of your thesis, without something to eliminate one or all of the other three logically, is child-like thinking.

7. Respect your enemies’ successes, talents and skills, and be careful about condemning others who do this. It is one of the thresholds of adult thinking. I don’t agree with Barack Obama on very much of anything, but I can respect His many talents. A general leading a charge against a resourceful and determined adversary, is more likely to prevail if he can appreciate the strengths of the other side even as he tries to make the most of their weaknesses.

8. You don’t get to play the “If this doesn’t convince you nothing ever will” card, if you haven’t yet brought a compelling “this.” People who apply this note of resignation, to terminate the discussion when they haven’t yet made their case, are arguing like children and almost certainly doing their thinking like children.

9. Since the argument is supposed to be about the true nature of things & what to do about it, not a duel to show who’s wonderful & who sucks — it doesn’t do achieve anything constructive to get lost in “Trivial Pursuit” games and show your opponent doesn’t know something. Even if the nugget of trivia he doesn’t know is strongly related to the topic, there’s a good chance he could still be supporting the right answer and you could be supporting the wrong one. So when the nugget is only weakly related this becomes even more of a likelihood. There’s nothing disgraceful about ignorance in & of itself. We’re all born ignorant.

10. In the same way it doesn’t ensure victory showing your opponent doesn’t know how many angels fit on the head of a pin, it also doesn’t ensure victory to highlight your own intransigence. It’s a common game on the Internet: “Nothing you can say will ever change my mind!” This actually works backwards. It shows your position is embraced by at least one person, and likely others, who can’t be told anything and thus are likely uninformed.

11. Recognize when & where your current problems developed from your past errors. If you want to go through life as a smug egotist, that’s okay, you don’t have to admit this to anyone. But it is necessary to at least acknowledge it for yourself, if you want to be credited with greater wisdom at, say, age 35 compared to what you had at age 25, because that’s what it takes to get it done. Without the ability to try things, fail at them, and recognize where you went wrong so you can improve, you don’t learn things from one year to the next. Part of thinking like an adult is anticipating how well your thinking is going to function for you, when you’re an older adult, and nobody wants to be an old fool.

12. Self-restrain. A lot of people rankle at the slippery-slope rebuttal, protesting “I don’t want to do this, I just want to do that.” They want to be given credit for stopping at some point. So, self-stop. If your argument is that a speed limit should be raised from 25 to 35, you should be the first to reckon with the consequences of raising it to 45 or 55. If you want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, you should be able to say why we’re not raising it to $30 — and why we won’t. Why should the line be drawn there? What’s to stop it from being moved?

It could be truthfully said that many, and perhaps all, of the above twelve have to do with preferring light over darkness; could be distilled into a simple “don’t conceal/obfuscate.” It really comes down to that. “I’ve decided this and that’s final” has become a popular structuring of the most passionate (Internet) arguments, in no small part because, as I said above, people are proud of the conclusions they reached but not proud of how they came to them. If that’s a problem, we would all do well to attack it directly, because as a problem it’s been getting bigger and bigger, for quite awhile now.

It’s been quite a week. I can’t spare a sufficient block of time to get it all captured, but it has not been lost on me that all of the significant events have to do with a socially accepted set of observations going in one direction, while the truth lies in the opposite direction. We as human beings can do this. We possess an ability, unique within the animal kingdom, to lie to ourselves. I did manage to make a list. It isn’t short. It makes me wonder if we’re becoming so estranged from truth and so anesthetized to even the most blatant attempts to deceive us, we may be losing the whole distinction between truth and falsehood.

1. Mitt Romney was embarrassed by the exposure of his nom de plume, “Pierre Delecto.”

2. ABC News got busted for airing phony war footage.

3. Greta Thunberg, as myself and others have observed before, is not in any position to be commended for giving a wonderful speech, or even to give the wonderful speech in the first place. She’s a child with learning disabilities, and people who recognize her as some source of wisdom or good decision do a disservice to their own reputations. If she’s to be given extra laudatory praise for her Autism-spectrum diagnosis, then she can be criticized for that as well. That’s why it’s a betrayal of trust to be exposing her to this level of discourse. Furthermore, singling out predominantly-white societies and nations for “how dare you” climate-criticism while turning a blind eye to India and China, is racist.

4. Elijah Cummings was subject to a bunch of high-profile hagiography as some kind of big swaggering hero who did all sorts of things to help the less fortunate…and a whole bunch of suddenly-indignant people in all sorts of places, were unable to name those things. Cummings, you’ll recall, was lately the subject of a spat with President Trump over the ramshackle state of his own home district, and seemed to be just fine with large numbers of his own constituents being forced to live with rats.

5. Elizabeth Warren has been working extra hard to get herself established as some kind of a victim, which has led to a pattern involving her getting busted for falsehoods over and over again — since the truth is she’s been quite privileged. And I notice she never backs down after she gets busted. Once it’s definitively established the facts are not on her side, she plays the “I’m still going to win the argument” game.

6. Speaking of democrats running for President. All of these promises they’re making, which they aren’t going to be able to keep anyway, would cost big money. I’m talking play-weird-games-just-to-understand-the-magnitude money. “If I spent such-and-such dollars every minute since the assassination of Julius Caesar” type money. We’re supposed to consider them over Republicans because the Republicans aren’t minding the store on the public debt issue…which has some truth to it. The case is that their tax cuts “cost” money, which is at best a strange way of looking at it, and at worst an out-and-out falsehood. But let’s accept it as truth for sake of argument. If democrats are the answer, what’s up with this “Christmas all 365 days” thing? You have to do so much pretending and so much self-contradiction to consider supporting them. And yet here they are. A major political party.

7. PG&E is pulling the plug on nearly a million ratepayers this weekend…which must translate to millions of people with heartbeats, or more, struggling to figure out how to cope without power. That’s because there’s a lot of dry brush, we just finished up with a hot summer, and there’s wind. There is an established cause-and-effect between PG&E’s equipment and some deadly wildfires we’ve been having, so that’s all on the up-and-up…but…what about all the unasked questions? We have a wind event, then ten days or so without power. What’s to be said of other places with dry hot summers, lots of dead brush, and when there’s a “wind event” — nothing. The power keeps flowing. There are no wildfires. People don’t have to throw out freezers full of meat, kids can keep going to school. We don’t have PG&E, we have SMUD. So, there’s high wind for us, too, this weekend…we get to have power. One doesn’t automatically flow into the other. I mean, if I were a PG&E ratepayer I’d be getting ticked that the most obvious questions don’t seem to be getting much inspection.

8. Politicians and their mansions. A lot of the ink spilled on this is pure-jealousy-stuff, not having much to do with logic and common sense apart from wondering pointedly how our representatives can effectively represent the rest of the nation. The real cause for wonder that doesn’t receive much wondering, though, is the congressperson whose real-livelihood is under a big fat question mark. We don’t actually pay these people mansion-money. So people may get irked over Darrel Issa’s entrepreneurial success, or Jay Rockefeller’s inheritance, but at least we have a rough idea of what’s going on there. With someone like Maxine Waters, we don’t. We only know something’s amiss. We don’t know what.

9. The hate crime hoaxes are pretty much out of control. The Jussie Smollett case was only the most famous example, although that’s a good one, because on hearing it for the very first time anyone with some common sense could see things weren’t fitting into place there. Nevertheless, we were obliged to “believe” it. And all the others. The running-tally of true-ones versus false-ones, in hindsight, seems to be kinda…lopsided. The ones that are blasted all over the place before anyone knows what they are, and thus cannot be cherry-picked by anyone with an agenda, almost always turn out to be hoaxes.

10. Fake families at the border. This one is particularly sultry and seductive. We have a great many fellow citizens among us who, it would appear, simply cannot process the thought that the content of a package may be different from its labeling. MigrantsAndTheirChildren!! It flows out of their mouth like one word. Well…how do you know they’re their children?

My list doesn’t stop there. California’s gas tax for fixing the roads…the bullet train…our wildfires being caused by “global” warming…Trump investigating Joe Biden as a “political rival“…the so-called “impeachment inquiry.” Hillary Clinton calling everybody she doesn’t like a “Russian asset.” The nonsense about “betraying our allies” in Syria, the risibility of the Transgender movement, the leakers being called “whistleblowers,” Caitlyn Jenner being a woman, Kavanaugh’s accusers…

What they all have in common is that they’re lies. But that’s not overly concerning to me, because people have been lying for a long time. What causes distress is the brazenness, the “How’d they ever think they’d get away with it.” And then I realize they’re getting away with it because the people being deceived, are aiding in their own deception. It’s on par with the little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar, insisting that he was actually putting it back into the jar. Except…it’s more like, while he’s offering up this excuse, he continues to take the cookie, remove it from the jar, chew off a piece of it and continue bullshitting you with his ramshackle excuse around the mouthful.

Something is happening. Uh no don’t go there, this pre-dates Trump. But it doesn’t pre-date…let’s say…the first George Bush? Sometime in the last twenty years or so. The lies have deteriorated in quality, to the point where they wouldn’t work if the person being fooled didn’t want to be fooled. And yet they keep working.

As willing as I may be to indulge in political incorrectness — perhaps even with a sense of glee over ticking off the right people, that’s not entirely in good taste — I wouldn’t stoop to blaming girls for it. I don’t like doing that, and that’s in no small part because of the consideration that boys are acting a lot more like girls lately, and vice versa. Sexual stereotypes have moved from being merely needlessly alienating, to being poorly advised, because even if people belonged in their pigeonholes they’re not staying there.

But look what someone else managed to do. Okay, that’s certainly a provocative headline…but I’m keeping an open mind…

“Big Mother”: the Decline of Men and…Truth-telling
Guillaume Durocher • October 27, 2019

The speed of social change in the modern era, and in particular in the contemporary West, is so rapid that we all are liable to feel a bit lost.

A recent example of this was provided by none other than Hillary Clinton, that most “progressive” representative of global oligarchy. You see, the 71-year-old Clinton, whose presidential campaign was premised on making history as the first female presidency, still believes in biological sex:

In an interview with The Sunday Times, journalist Decca Aitkenhead asked the Clintons if someone with a beard and a penis can ever be a woman, to which Chelsea replied emphatically, ‘Yes.’

However, as Aitkenhead describes it, Hillary looked ‘uneasy’, and blamed generational gaps for being less accepting.

‘Errr. I’m just learning about this,’ Hillary responded. ‘It’s a very big generational discussion, because this is not something I grew up with or ever saw. It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to understand what it means to be defining yourself differently.’

…There’s something truly surreal about these kinds of developments. One wonders where to start.

The article then runs through the factual foundation, familiar to many of us already, supporting the trend of shrinking maleness. We’ve made it very cool and socially-uplifting to identify areas of life where women don’t yet have a fair shot at things, and we’ve made it cool to offer them increased, even unfair, opportunities. Once they catch up to men, or even pass them, it’s still cool to notice it’s happened. It’s decidedly not cool to conclude from that, that it’s time for the unfair advantages to go away. The skewed worldview seems to have had a direct effect on our physiology. Testosterone levels are on the decline.

But how is this to blame for our weakening attachment to reality? It’s true the two trends have taken place at roughly the same time, but that’s the very definition of a post hoc fallacy. We need something better.

Well…

The predominance of women is not without consequence for liberty and excellence. A 2015 Pew poll found that women were almost 50% more likely to support government censorship of “statements that are offensive to minority groups” than were men. Women, particularly left-wing women, are more politically intolerant: one survey found that 30% of Democratic women had blocked, unfriended or stopped following someone online for their politics, as against only 8% of Republican men. The London Times reported in May 2016 that female students overwhelmingly supported censorship of university publications if these were “considered offensive to certain groups.”

Naturally, any number of truthful statements may be painful or “considered offensive to certain groups.” Most pointedly, any suggestion that men and women have meaningful biological and psychological differences, and therefore to some degree should have different social roles, will be considered “offensive.”

This highlights the self-reinforcing nature of the Western societies’ feminization.

Among the people I know, the ones who are most likely to remain open to initially-unwelcome ideas, and in so doing are likely to expand their horizons and learn something new, are slightly more likely to be female so this doesn’t jive with my personal experience. But I know the sample pool is tainted because there are some small-minded bitches out there and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I happen to live in California, and it’s pretty easy to spot them from a good distance away. And I know from my past experiences, from back before I learned how to stay away from small-minded women, how much damage they can do. The “I refuse to listen” men are just as dangerous. But I haven’t been marrying or dating those, so again, I know my perspective is skewed.

On the other hand, though…

While men have historically controlled the priesthoods and the media, it is women who nag their menfolk to live up to the society’s established social norms and be respectable…

As we have become comfortable, so our societies and culture have become feminized and infantilized. Today, it seems that women project their mothering instincts upon all the approved “victim groups” of the world: homosexuals, migrants, and minorities all are their symbolic substitute children. [emphasis mine]

There certainly is an impulse, outside of the women I personally know, to reach out with a suffocating variant of “motherhood.” And to cause some damage. Certainly it’s a valid argument to be considered that men do it too, but that’s not the issue here because there is no concerted, energized agenda to pack high influential offices and committees with men. But we do want to pack them with women. And, what kind of women? The ones i know? Or the ones I seek to avoid?

The answer is the same as it is for any other movement. You make a point of placing a woman in an office of influence, she’ll end up being the screechy, unpleasant, destructive, child-thinking kind. If you make a point of just placing the best and most competent person…it just might end up being a woman. A much better one, who creates, and defends and preserves, and thinks like a grown-up. As you move up into the occupations that involve greater power and trust, and are more widely visible, it seems the effect intensifies. Had Hillary Clinton won the election of 2016, she would have stood as the most extreme example.

With the argument now made, I can see the link between that, and this new strain of “shut up and take my money” fraud that requires sanction of the defrauded. The fraud that requires a sanction of “Okay, you’re lying, I know you’re lying, you know I know, now…aw fuck it let’s just get this thing done.”

Who-to-blame, of course, is always less important than how-fix-it. When a popular notion is an obvious lie, and there are loud angry people surrounding you and prevailing upon you to accept the lie, ready to heckle you mercilessly if you reject it as a lie…it really doesn’t matter if they’re men or women. The fix, I think, is to re-evaluate this unstated but successfully-proliferated idea that some lies are good lies if they hurt & help the right people. It’s easier to do that if we keep in mind that a lot of lies that appear at first blush to hurt no one at all, if you take the time to inspect more closely, you’ll find there are indeed some people being hurt and quite badly.

It’s not “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” and it isn’t “Welcome to the party, pal.”

It’s “Oh, you’re in charge? Well, I got some bad news for you Dwayne, from up here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.” There is deep meaning here. There is social commentary here that is important.

Putting the Breakfast Club guy here was brilliant casting. He was born for this.

How many Deputy Police Chief Robinsons do we know in real life…you run into them pretty much constantly. They’re “in charge” in the sense that they have an official title and they’re ready to take credit for anything that happens to go right. But they’re not at all attached to the moment-by-moment condition of the overall situation. They aren’t committed. If something goes wrong, they’ll just blame someone else. They are Seagull Managers. They are Grenade People.

My state has a new governor who’s trying to be the anti-Donald-Trump. It is tragic watching this contrast play out every week. He hasn’t got a clue. He’s got the “I never apologize for or regret anything ever” thing down cold…he thinks that’s all there is to it. But Trump is not a grenade-person. He’s a salesman, which is about as annoying…but if you find something wrong with the situation under Trump’s control, and get in an argument with him about it, sure he’s going to insist on having the last word like a little kid. But he’ll still remain attached to, and committed to, the situation. He has plans. If the plans go wrong, he adjusts. Quietly, maybe. He probably won’t admit to it. But he doesn’t abandon. He doesn’t take large fast strides away from it, like a man who just lobbed a grenade, retreating behind some rehearsed lines about “Well you’ll just have to go talk to those other guys, it’s all their fault” or socially browbeat you to change the subject to something else. If he doesn’t like your opinion, he’ll just call you a loser. But he’ll continue to work the problem.

Watching my Governor try to be the democrats’ answer to Trump, is like watching Dwayne Robinson try to be John McClane. It’s just a pathetic sight to see.

Gov. Newsom, from down here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.

Grenade Person (n.)

A grenade is the furthest you can get from any kind of precision instrument. There’s no scope-sighting, no aiming, no plan to adjust for wind, downgrade, muzzle velocity, bullet weight in grains…just an explosive projectile lobbed in at an approximate location. Such people demand and require uncontested control over whatever is happening. Everything in earshot or line-of-site has to be exposed and subject to their frag. They are the last to compromise on anything and the first to ostracize any dissenters who show too much recalcitrance or hesitation to “get with the program.” If you continue with your not-getting-on-board bad behavior, you will find yourself subject to some passionate gossip while your back is turned, sure as the sun rises in the East.

But they take no responsibility whatsoever for the ultimate outcome. Just like the grenade tosser. In fact, after they’ve run things for awhile there is a perceptible similarity between the aftermath, and the wreckage left by a live grenade. That’s what they do, they just pull the pin and walk away. Power and responsibility; they want all of the former, none of the latter.

You run into them at work, you want to go home as soon as you can. You run into them at home, you want to go on a long vacation. Maybe fake your own death and move to another continent. They make life short, but seem long.

The overall thrust of the piece by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel is anti-impeachment, which is the correct opinion. But even the obligatory disclaimer that makes up the first paragraph, with its status as essentially throwaway, get-this-out-of-the-way ballast, is too much for me to take.

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions should not be about politics. Those two things need to remain separate. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world’s many corrupt countries. America is better than that.

I cut it off after those last five words, they were enough to make me reach for a bucket. This is propaganda of the enemy. I know that for sure; I get their fund-raising and petition-soliciting e-mails. The communication from the democrats, to the lightly-informed, is that we have to have impeachment because of foreign interference in our elections. Trump, supposedly, was “digging up dirt on his political opponents.” It’s a good sound bite because it sounds like Watergate Part II. There’s just one problem. It’s poppycock.

Biden is a very odd case. Common sense, only a dash of it, will confirm he’s not going to be President. I realize the Hollywood A-listers were saying that about Trump 3 years ago and that didn’t age well, but in Biden’s case it’s really true. He can’t even be nominated. And yet the polls have been putting him out in front, by a large margin, so to those who are eager to have opinions but are OmgWayTooBusy to actually follow the news, Trump must have hatched a plan to clear the playing field of Joe-Freakin’-Biden, after that his second term would be assured. Yeah. Um…it’s actually not possible for it to have happened that way.

The polls might be reporting correct raw data about Biden’s double-digit leads, but it’s only raw data. He’s not really a front-runner. He’s not even a contender. Trump doesn’t need a plan to deal with him, and if ever he does need a plan to deal with him it will be something far, far simpler, something along the lines of “just let him talk.” So spare me, please, your hyperventilating about how this must be Trump dealing with political opponents the only way he knows how. Anybody who knows anything knows that’s not what is happening here, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything so why should I care what you say?

But there’s an impeachment inquiry, so he must have done something wrong! Well, the first fifty percent of that is true. And you’ll note the “inquiry” is not really what it is being made out to be. It’s all packaging, no substance. But understand this: The packaging has to be there.

It’s important to the beltway crowd that impeachment, or something that looks like it, happens for five reasons:

1. It doesn’t protect Biden. If anything, it pushes his misdeeds out into the limelight which makes it easier to get rid of him. And by the way, this is working just fine so far. Obviously a lot of people want that, and not because of any likelihood he has to win. The man’s a constant embarrassment.

2. The democrats don’t have anything else. Unemployment is at an historic low now. The picture is crystal clear that if we want some actual positive results they shouldn’t run anything, exactly what I’ve been saying for years and years.

3. The democrats’ base will eat them alive if they don’t get something that at least resembles impeachment.

4. They need to establish a precedent that looking into these kinds of transactions potentially carries repercussions, since Biden is far from the only one who’s been playing this game.

5. Rightly or wrongly, they see Vice-President Pence as another Romney. They can withstand a bloodless revolution every four years and they can tolerate these unwelcome opinions about lower taxes and strong defense and abortion-is-murder, but they cannot abide this “punch back twice as hard” thing and they hate being mocked. They want their lose-with-a-smile Republicans back, the ones who look good in a suit and babble away about this thing or that thing being “deeply troubling” before they disappear.

But the go-along-to-get-along, know-nothing, “Please give me an opinion for me to have at the Thanksgiving table” voters think it’s all about Trump going after his political enemies, starting with the most threatening one: Joe Biden.

Bull squeeze. Biden’s filthy-dirty and guilty as hell. Our government has three branches, the legislative, the executive and the judicial. Now, which one investigates? Who manages that? This is Civics 101 stuff.

So with all due respect: Cram it. Take your deeply-troubling, your spooky Watergate-redux language about digging up dirt on political opponents, wad it up into a little ball with your “we’re better than that,” and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Seriously, in what universe does that make sense? You run for President one time, and from that point until whenever the sun burns out you’re a “political opponent” and so you’re immune, no one can ever speak of starting an investigation on you? We want that precedent set? That’s what it takes to make us better than something? Better noodle that one over a bit more there, Tex.

It would be funny if it weren’t dangerous and sad.

Isn’t this a rather odd headline?

White, middle-aged Christian private school principal slams climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, 16, as a ‘little girl with mental problems’ – and urges students not to believe her ‘doomsday waffle talk’

A Christian private school principal has savaged 16-year-old climate campaigner Greta Thunb[e]rg and called her a ‘little girl with mental problems’.

Rodney Lynn, head of Coffs Harbour Christian Community School, wrote a letter to pupils and parents on September 26.

He did not mention Greta by name but told pupils not to pay attention to her impassioned speech at the UN which went viral last week.

In the speech, the Swedish activist tearfully urged politicians to take action on climate change to stop the planet from being destroyed.

But Mr Lynn dismissed her as ‘a little girl from Scandinavia’ who was full of ‘doomsday waffle talk’.

In the letter seen by the ABC, he said she was a ‘little girl with self declared various emotional and mental problems that she thinks give her a special insight into a pending doom’.

‘My life experience has taught me that the doomsday predictors are just attention getters.’

In a message to his pupils, he added: ‘Do not be afraid. Your world’s future is in the hands of God, not in the predictions of a little girl and false prophets.’

It seems like this isn’t anything to worry about over on that side of the Atlantic, and I know I’m not one to talk, but that headline seems really…bloated. It looks like there might have been a prior version with just-the-facts, and an editor looked at it and said “That’s not going to make our readers angry enough at this guy, you need to put in his quotes so they get properly ticked.” And don’t forget to mention you…know…what.

Speaking at the United nations last Monday Greta broke down in tears while furiously scolding international delegates for not taking responsibility for fixing the planet’s warming climate.

A host of Australian celebrities lined up to criticise Greta after her speech. Her supporters said most of the criticism came from white, middle-aged men. [emphasis mine]

Hmmm…I’ve seen this somewhere before. Where? Ah…here.

Jeremy Clarkson’s daughter has slammed middle-aged men for criticising Greta Thunberg – as the Grand Tour star branded the climate change activist a ‘spoilt brat’. Emily Clarkson made her feelings known on Twitter, referring to a tweet by John Bishop in which the comedian praised the 16-year-old for being an inspiration and ‘breathing life’ into the debate surrounding climate change.’ Quoting his post, she wrote: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if all middle aged blokes could talk to and about Greta, the ballsy af teenager out there changing the world, like this.’ She makes a good point…

++blink++ She does? And what would that be? That looks to this “middle aged bloke” like nothing more than emotional reasoning and lusting.

Hey do you people even know what “a good point” is? I could try to explain, but I’m sure I’ll be kinder to your own workload and time allocation, along with my own, if I just provide an example.

How dare we? No. How dare you sail to America on a carbon fibre yacht that you didn’t build which cost £15million, that you didn’t earn, and which has a back-up diesel engine that you didn’t mention.

I’m sorry Ms Thunberg, but if you’re going to lay into my generation, you must accept it when I lay into you and yours.

What about the pills you take when you have a headache?

What about the clean water that comes out of your tap? What about the food you can buy at any time of the day and night?

No 16-year-old was responsible for any of that.

What about the aid missions currently being run in some of the poorest countries of the world, or the drugs that help keep Aids at bay?

Think about all the movies you’ve enjoyed. Movies made by grown-ups. And all those comedians who’ve made you laugh.

And then pause for a moment to consider how soundly you sleep at night, knowing that adults are building and servicing and flying Sweden’s fighter planes. To keep you safe.

We gave you mobile phones and laptops and the internet. We created the social media you use every day and we run the banks that pay for it all.

So how dare you stand there and lecture us, you spoilt brat.

And yes, you are spoilt because when you told your mum and dad to stop using planes and give up meat, they didn’t behave like sane parents and ignore you. They actually said, “Yes, dear.” And did.

It’s the difference between emotional reasoning and logical reasoning. The difference between closing one’s eyes to things, versus opening them, looking, and pondering what things mean. Emily Clarkson does it one way, her father does it the other way. His way is better.

But back to this “white, middle-aged men” thing. I thought it was a bit odd when I myself was on the receiving end of some criticism after setting my phone ringtone to Ms Thunberg’s polished-thespian professional-warbling “How Dare You!” — which makes me very happy, by the way. My critic called me a white middle-aged male, which is something I can’t change, but also he happens to be one of those guilty-white-liberal males who actually has half a year on me. Still, I thought little of it at the time. Just liberals pigeonholing people by race and sex, which is what they do.

But with these three examples, and some others, we have an established pattern. It is clear a talking-point has been circulated from some central point somewhere, to marginalize anybody who has objections to the spoiled child’s rantings and make sure, should they qualify, to call them out as a “white, middle-aged male.”

Seems like a fragile public relations strategy. It’s not the optimal time. White is negotiable now, right? We’re still debating whether Elizabeth Warren is or isn’t, even after she had that expensive DNA test done. Middle-age is always open for discussion. And although science says otherwise, our culture has decided “male” is an open question too.

Still & all, there’s something to their observation. With their implication that this means an opinion should be bulldozed to the gutter just because of the demographic of those who hold it, those who promulgate the talking point have branded themselves as racists, sexists and ageists. But they’re not wrong, even a blind squirrel can find a nut. How come so few people are identifying a problem with the world accepting orders and scoldings from a mentally ill teenager? And how come we’re almost all “middle-aged white males”? Is it because, as they imply, there’s something about us that is inherently indecent?

I can dismiss that as a possibility with my own limited experience. I know lots of minorities who can see what’s wrong with exploiting this girl; young people see what’s wrong with it, old people see what’s wrong with it, women see what’s wrong with it. This kind of common sense is not exclusively a white middle-age male thing. The not-white not-male old-n-young just aren’t as vocal, they don’t say it out loud. It seems speaking out about it is the thing.

Well isn’t it obvious?

White middle-age males have nothing to lose. This new-world-order of sorts rejects us by default; we could be accepted if we say a bunch of woke-stuff some of us aren’t willing to say. We already threw out our Gillette crap after that dumb ad, so we’re not going to go chasing our maze-cheese by signaling away with “I hate 4x4s!“. Non-white non-middle-age non-male people, not subject to the verdict of guilty-til-proven-innocent, can achieve this level of acceptance merely by being quiet. Therefore they have something to lose. So because our liberals are sexist and racist, and they’ve had influence in forming and reforming this new culture, the playing field is a bit uneven. We, the white middle-aged males our liberals detest — nevermind that many among them are themselves white middle-aged males of the self-loathing sort — are left to consider invocation of The Morgan Rule: “If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty.” There’s no reason not to so invoke. For the better and more desirable demographic segments, the situation doesn’t exist. Well anyway, that’s one explanation.

White middle age males are not worse than everybody else. We’re not better either. What’s happened is that your blatant discrimination against us as had the exact opposite effect on us from what it was supposed to have: It’s liberated us. To say the obvious things everybody else is thinking. In fact, in a funny kind of way, it has obliged this segment of the population to point out what we, uniquely, can say without losing anything we haven’t already lost:

To throw her into the public eye is unforgivable. It’s clear she is not pretending to be terrified about an eco-Armageddon, an emotion likely compounded by her conditions. Has anyone who supposedly cares about her thought this through? She really believes this garbage. She thinks we’re all going to die, horribly and soon. She doesn’t get that this is a grift, a scam, a political ploy…But when faced with the reality that people aren’t willing to surrender their money and freedom simply because she demands it, she may lose hope. What happens if this precious child hurts herself?

That’s obvious. Her backers would cynically morph her from living demigod to martyr and blame you for what happened, you awful, selfish people who refused to submit to the emotional blackmail that underlies the whole Greta of Arc campaign.

Let go of this kid, you creeps.

Yes racist-sexist-ageist liberals, you’re seeing different behaviors from different demographic portions. That’s because you’ve constructed the dynamic that confronts those different portions with different situations and different ramifications for speaking out on true-but-forbidden things, like the above.

But you know, that might be changing. Basic human decency is not an exclusively white-male middle-age thing either, and exploiting children for your climate-change scare-mongering, for the reasons Colonel Schlichter offers, is a truly low blow. So you’ve got a strategy to marginalize anyone who objects based on our race? Well enjoy that clean simple breakdown while you still can, and maintain awareness of the passage of time; the battleground will shift, as it always does. Women, in particular, don’t like seeing children thrust into situations inappropriate for them.

Your racist, sexist, ageist talking point is milk. Note the sell-by date carefully, it’s bound to curdle quickly.