Month: October 2018

All Trump has done is put a timer on this issue.  It has never appeared in front of the Supreme Court, so the case law is not settled.  He forces the issue with the Executive Order, which obviously will result in immediate lawsuits, which will in all likelihood be appealed over some period of time to the Supreme Court.

It was laying on the floor.  He picked it up, dusted it off, and will soon send it out into the world to prove itself or die in the process.

And who knows?  Maybe by the time it gets there RBG or another judicial legislator may have moved on too.

Why do so many people who have adopted Collectivist sympathies believe Trump is a Fascist? 

Because they are told he is, by much of our media, and most Democrat leaders.

Is this claim true?  Patently not.  Fascism is about de facto government control of all resources and people, and Trump is doing what he can to REDUCE the amount of government control, and to shrink the overall size of government.

In contrast, the Democrats have adopted across the board nearly fully fascist policies.  They want controls on free speech, they want government control of healthcare, they want to confiscate our guns (they are open about this when they are being honest, which is rare), and it is obvious a high percentage of them would gladly have accepted some sort of Mugabe or Chavez arrangement for Obama or Hillary.  I think that was the intent, and Hillary just sucked so much as a candidate they couldn’t pull it off.  THIS is why senior Democrats are still in shock.  They had a plan to put in fascism and call it an Open Society, or some similar fig leaf, and it was a good plan, and they STILL failed.

But returning to the point I wanted to make, is it true that the false claim that Trump is a fascist is damaging to our country?  Obviously.  It makes discussion impossible, and violence likely.

Are your friends the ones who tell you the truth, or those who lie to you?  The former, obviously.

Ergo, the media, in stoking unnecessary tension and hostility on the basis of patent lies, is playing the role of the Enemy of the People, if we define the people as average Americans who just want to work, worship and raise families as they see fit.  They are driving people crazy, and doing so for nakedly political reasons. 

This whole thing is awful.  Anti-American.  It is contrary to every shred of moral decency which has made this country work thus far.

The French Revolutionaries at least had real grievances.  They had a King capable of a great deal of arbitrary power.  The Russians had the Tsar.

Here, here, lunatics want to overturn and overthrow the most prosperous, most just, most fair political order ever created, on the basis ENTIRELY of manufactured and ludicrous grievances. 

I don’t get it.  How do people at the University of Chicago and Berkeley, and Harvard and Yale, and Princeton and all the others fall for this bullshit?  How do they not recognize IMMEDIATELY how stupid is?  More: how do they embrace and further it enthusiastically?

This is one of the least necessary madnesses in the history of humanity, and it is being fomented nearly entirely by a small cadre of corrupt minds, and propagated most effectively through the media.  Trump has described the situation accurately.

Is not the dominant focus of the Simpson’s the profound idiocy of Homer, a middle class white man, and his son, Bart, who conforms to all stereotypes of shitty behavior?

How did this show last nearly 30 years, and ONLY NOW realize that Apu is a bit of a stereotype? 

Shit: stereotypes are funny.  I will trade you: you mock me, and we get to mock you.  Deal? 

In the past: deal.  Now: fuck you, all white men are evil, and the rest is up to us.  Shut your fucking mouth and leave while we decide your fate.

 Me: I may have some other ideas.

In all honest, I get this image in my head of human sharks, prowling endlessly in the pursuit of some bubble they can burst, some shit they can start, some day they can ruin.  And they happened to hit on Apu a week or two ago: THERE, THERE, THERE is an ethnic stereotype.  RUIN THEM, RUIN THEM, RUIN THEM.

My best guess is that some Indians (the real ones) found it offensive, most didn’t give a shit one way or the other, since they were using our system to built comfortable lives which would not have been possible in India (particularly in its long and awful Socialist period), and some actually found him amusing.  I would hazard a guess that at least 80% of Hindu Americans were either supportive or indifferent.  Probably more.

But these fucking psychopaths, these sharks, these human predators–their day and their week is not made until they are shitting on someone.

The shortest path up any mountain is straight up.  But that is not the path any sane professional takes.

I may have said this about the last election too, but it is even more true today: this election will be a referendum on the complicit media. They lie, Trump accused them of lying, then they accuse HIM of hate speech.

They say WEHATEUOUWEHATEYOUWEHATEYOU, Trump says “you know, HONEST journalists don’t act like that”, and, again he’s engaging in hate speech and”divisiveness”.  It is like calling the most bullied kid in school the biggest BULLY, except that Trump, when attacked, attacks back. This is his singular virtue, along with an intimate understanding of how to play the media, which is why I was an early supporter. I said, quoting Lincoln, “He Fights”, before I saw anyone else say that.

But as deranged as the media was back then, it was a slow simmer. They were sure he would lose. Since then, it is an open, raging boil. They have abandoned even a thin patina, even a weak pretense, of doing anything but try to sabotage him, all his policies, and all (most) the American people affected by them.

So who do you believe: your eyes, or the lying media?

E will get an answer, one way or the other, which should be indicative, absent major cheating.

The Walkaway March was this past weekend, and consisted entirely in former Democrats who have become disillusioned by the viciousness, violence, and use and abuse of minority groups for nakedly political reason by their former party. Democrats are no longer Democrats, most seem to have concluded.. I’m sure it drew little media attention because of the shooting and attempted (was this a serious attempt?) bombings. This is a pity, since a similar march, if it drew a similar crowd of several thousand in rainy, dreery weather, would have certainly been national news, if they had been former Trump supporters.

And I will comment that a friend on Facebook predicted that “if the bombing and caravan do t work”, we will see the gold standard of s media diversion and opportunity for partisan grandstanding: the mass shooting.

And he was RIGHT. How is this possible? How is it both these people chose this EXACT MOMENT to do their insane and evil things?

Coincidence only goes so far to explain things. I am, rightly or wrongly, not buying that these things were not a part of someone’s plan. How all this works, how they “activate” people, I can’t pretend to know. This is a gut instinct, and certainly not derived rationally. I admit that. But gut instincts are, by actual scientific analysis, often the shortest path to truth.

It is easiest to win the wars you don’t fight. This should be obvious.

Now, the Pentagon has all sorts of contingency plans for war with everyone, certainly Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran; and, for all I know, Australia, France and Britain.

I wonder though, if it has occurred to them to use the DIA to work to thwart the efforts of those who benefit from war, financially and/or politically, and who seek to start wars which are unnecessary for protecting America, which cause a waste of lives, effort, focus, money, and overall preparedness. The Pentagon owes it to its troops to work internally to identify, perhaps name, and certainly to thwart such evil.

I get that many senior leaders could be labeled corrupt. But not all of them. And they have the ability to work in the shadows too.

Somebody seems to want war at least with Russia, and perhaps China too. These people meed to be stopped.

There is a man who lives not too far from me, who I assume is from Morocco or thereabout.  He is small, perhaps 5’4″, and has a wife who no doubt cooks for him, and who I have no reason not to assume he treats well.  He seems quite mild in all ways.

I was watching him on a walk today.  He had a sweater with a US flag on it.  And it hit me that the way most people around the world treat time, and the way we treat time, are radically different. 

And I think a great many things we call psychological disorders, like anxiety, are in some cases nothing more than growing up without ever having to wait for anything.

Patience is rarely regarded as a virtue any more.  It’s all Carpe Diem, and YOLO.  But I think virtually everything that is exciting and good is the result of things that are dull and repetitive.  I think we ask too much of life, despite it giving us nearly EVERYTHING we could possibly ask for.

What we don’t ask for is patience.  What we don’t ask for is AUTHENTIC, as opposed to posturing, kindness.  Such is my feeling at this moment at any rate.  I blabber sometimes, and perhaps I am doing it here.

Ponder if you choose.  Discard if you see nothing worth keeping.

I would like to offer a modest “Freakonomics” (which I have not read, but am still pretentious enough to reference) analysis.

Now, I am a grumpy old man.  Well, I’m not old, but I am a man, and I am grumpy.  I once described myself as an “aspiring curmudgeon”, and have been “congratulated” by several on my success.

I don’t like ice in my water.  I don’t see the point, except on exceptionally hot days when I walk through the door with sweat dripping from every pore, which does happen.  I was once served ice water in the middle of winter in northern Michigan, after walking in from roughly 0 degree temperatures.  Why?   Habit.

But think this through.  Drinking really cold beverages is vastly less painful through a straw.  You can more easily sip, and perhaps it warms a bit on the way up.  Further, sodas of all sorts taste better cold.  Nobody would drink 16 ounces of warm or even room temperature Coke.  It would be too syrupy, and would remind everyone that it consists mainly as a form of concentrated sugar.

Looking up the history of ice machines (quickly: I’m not going to spend all day on this), they seem to have become mass produceable around 1950, and we can assume their gradual expansion took a decade or two.

Now, it has long been my understanding that fast food exists in the main to sell sodas.  Pepsi actually owned Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken outright for a good while, to guarantee that their products would be sold.  It was spun off as Tricon, and is now Yum Brands.

Ice in water, we can assume, is the simple result of treating the rare person who just wants water the same way someone who wants a soda of some sort is treated.  No matter what is going in the glass, treat it the same way.

So I wonder if the growth of fast food happened pari pasu with the growth of ice machines, their cost and availability.

From this perspective, we can view straws of any sort as the consequence of both fast food and carbonated sugar waters of various sorts. We can view them as the consequence of marketing necessity.

Imagine what would happen to fast food if they started serving Cokes in the sizes they served before mass refrigeration was possible.  They were tiny.

So maybe we can blame some sizable portion of our obesity problem on plastic straws.  I am being only two thirds facetious.

And I will wonder out loud with no possibility of speculating intelligently what the overall effect on our CULTURE of fast food has been.  Are we more impatient?  Has our taste in food declined, or rather, our ability to TASTE our food, rather than respond to some chemical concoction hatched in a lab to make us want more immediately?

When I say “Fast Food Culture” what does that mean to you?  I get visions of plastic, and grease, and wrinkled paper, and people eating in cars, gulping their food.

America was not always an undignified place.  We really weren’t.

But as a practical idea, what if more and more food places made both ice and straws explicitly optional?

What if it became trendy again to drink really small Cokes at room temperature, especially if they follow through on creating one with marijuana in it?

I am a free marketeer.  I like private profit, so even though I think they have done some really shady things over the years, I would like to see a way out for Coke.  Hell, maybe Coke, as a public relations initiative, could start to offer paper straws with every shipment of Coke?

As I have said, the American use of plastic straws is no threat to sea turtles.  Most of the damage is being done by the Chinese and those around them.

But waste is still ugly and stupid.  I don’t like it.  There is something about enduring objects in our lives which stabilizes things.  Otherwise, it is too easy to treat ideas and principles like the objects we use once then dispose of forever without a second thought.

I have a teapot and cups, and some chopsticks that I absolutely adore.  I like the plates I eat on, and love my collection of coffee mugs.  These enduring objects in my life make me happy.  And who doesn’t remember similar things from their childhood?  Nobody remembers plastic plates, forks and spoons, except in context.  For me, church picnics come to mind.  Perhaps there is a metaphor there somewhere.

I think all of the various claims of nationalism, white supremacy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and whatever I am forgetting or they plan to add tomorrow, can all be understood as the core accusation of dissidence.  A useful synonym might be “You’re not one of US.”  This is what they are saying, after all.

Alternatively: You are not a part of the COLLECTIVE.  Fuck you.  You MUST be one of us to be human.

Now, there are people in rural everywhere who might agree with statements like “homosexuals are inferior and deserve whatever they get”, and “black people should not be allowed to hold public office”, or “if it’s not American, bomb it.  Fuck them all”.  I get this.

But none of these people are singled out or identified when you deal in the class “not one of us”.  That is a lot of territory.  None of the actual racism and bigotry is addressed.  No minds are changed, because no new thoughts are introduced.  I HATE YOU is not a conversation provoking statement.  It is not educational, and not intended to be, other than to show aspiring dissidents, people thinking “you know, maybe all this IS bullshit, like some people are saying”, what the consequences of stepping out of line are.