Everything is Stupid

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

They said the world would end in fire next time. But no one said the fire would be set when a bunch of buffons de derriere were running around with matches, misinterpreting everything, and claiming we had to listen to them because they’re experts.

Seriously? They didn’t know Afghanistan, a place that is like our primordial tales where parents are served a stew of their children, a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism, would fall that fast. And now there are Americans — not all of them aligned with the idiot chauve-souris de la lune — there, exposed to the barbarism and the horrors, and America can’t help them. Which btw, is going to make our enemies sharpen their teeth and think we’re ready to fall, when it’s just the idiots at the top who are…. well, idiots.

Meanwhile the Junta has its hair on fire over Covid, or at last that’s their pretense, to get us to look away from their craven failure.

Here’s the inside scoop on those “overloaded” hospitals. It’s true. They’re overloaded. Oh, not because Winnie-the-flu is that terrible, particularly not the “dreaded” Delta variety. It’s because many medical personnel chose to exit rather than take the vaccine as condition of employment. So “I’ve got weasels in my pants” Joe’s attempt to fix it by making all the nurses take the vaccine means–

Come on, guess it. Go for it. I give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

EVERYTHING is STUPID.

And do you know why everything is stupid, boys and girls?

Oh, sure, Socialists and Communists who’ve lied so much they don’t know where truth is anymore are running around and ordering things in the way that makes sense to them. (Spoiler: it didn’t make sense to anyone else.)

But they are the symptom, not the origin.

The origin is the idea that “experts” have special magic and should be given control of everything.

Now, that virus bit sometime in the early 20th century.

Sure, if I want to build a house, I’ll find an expert. But if the expert is building a house with the roof two inches above the floor, I can tell him to go soak his head and have it fixed.

And that’s the way things used to be. People were judged on accomplishments not credentials.

Sure, after WWII, probably because of the GI bill, we became very hot on credentials, but that was not terrible, because people were still judged on what they did.

And then– And then in the eighties, sometime, everyone started worshiping “expertise” by which of course they meant credentials.

It had nothing to do with ability, just “knowing the proper procedure” and having the right manner, and saying the right words.

And things that had never before been under the “proper procedure” protocol now fell under it. Business. How to dress. etc. etc.

There were “ways” to do things.

My problem, of course, is every time I looked into those procedures and “ways” and established modes, at least in any field I had the slightest bit of expertise, I found that it was all smoke and mirrors and buck passing.

It’s probably not coincidental that worship of the experts ran hand in hand with leftist takeover of fields and institutions. After all, they don’t want to be judged by their results, do they? Who of them would escape a whipping?

So they default to tab a, slot b and didn’t they teach you to use the right term?

I remember being yelled at by a bunch of undergrown brains on this blog because I questioned their teacher. How dare I? She was the ‘expert.’ I had to respect her.

She was an English teacher, whose corrections on my son’s papers led me to believe that English was her second language. The first was dumbass. (Turned out I was wrong, btw. The first was cannabis.)

And that was my warning that everything was stupid. And getting more so.

From now on, in the wake of Fauci — whose insanity led to people dying of AIDS 30 years ago, because he was sure it was airborne, so people were neither warned about dangerous sexual practices, nor was our blood supply secured nor, btw, were the poor people dying of it get family support, because it was “airborne” and “anyone could catch it.” Now he’s led the country into a rathole, destroyed the economy, and is preening and posing, demanding fascistic rules and restrictions on citizens. — I suggest a new rule. Which is in fact a very old one.

By their fruits thou shalt know them.

And the fruits of these experts are all rotten and filled with death.

I say we shall have a great Simplification. (The first one to get the reference gets a signed book of his choice. Though he/she might want to remind me of this mid-September.)

No more experts. Question everything. Apply common sense. And keep an eye out for obfuscation and passing the buck.

A man with a (mental) overcoat is an enemy. You know what to do. (What? A book for that one too? Okay fine. just remember to remind me in September.)

Build under, build over, build around. Because she’s gonna blow, and we — heaven help us — we! are the last best hope of mankind.

Be not afraid.

Hearts on high.

Yes, some of us might very well die of this. But dying isn’t the worst fate. There are much worse things. Like being abandoned in Afghanistan by your government run by “experts.”

No more experts now. Just us.

We might not be the ones we were waiting for — I was expecting someone taller and less tired — but we’re the adults. And it’s time the adults came home.

513 thoughts on “Everything is Stupid”

      1. Not as much a new magna Carta or constitution but the actual underlying cause by which they functioned, maybe. Rulers need to fear their slaves again.

        1. I’d say, “respect their subjects,” or better still, their citizens. We don’t need to label ourselves slaves.

          1. We don’t need to. But in the way people reacted, the fact that we have a death squad answering only to partisan politicians without even the foia fig leaf, and have no reaction to the new multiclass systems, i can’t consider 90% of people anything but slaves to the rulers

        2. Which is the whole purpose of the Second Amendment. To instill an awareness that they can only push us so far before we push back.

          Any form of awareness is sorely lacking in the current political class.

      1. Hi Sarah,

        Thank you? Threading is goofy and I’m not sure if you were addressing my post.

        Is the best way to PM you still at first and middle initials last name at the mail of heat?

        Good luck with your move.

  2. Learned this back in 1985-91 working down the street from Tulane and Loyola colleges in NOLA. The stupidest people I dealt with were Proffs and Grad Students.
    As the saying goes “There’s a lot of knowledge in College. Every year, the Freshmen bring a little in, and the Graduates leave with none, so it accumulates.” These days, the Frosh bring nothing, and someone washed away what had accumulated, so it is effing cocked up.
    Fauci The Fetish Hound wanted Gays to wear masks to prevent HIV transmission. It’s his default fetish.

    1. Springboarding. One doesn’t need to be an expert to realize that this. isn’t. working. I don’t need to be an expert on internal combustion engine design to know that my engine is running rough. I don’t need to be an expert in thermodynamics to know that my AC is blowing warm air. And I don’t need to be an expert in vaccine production to know that needing a “booster shot” mere months after being “fully vaccinated” means the vaccine wasn’t worth shit.

      1. Very good point although, from what I can tell, the vaccines are working fine. Ignoramuses in charge don’t seem to know that vaccines aren’t meant to prevent infection, but to prevent disease from infection. At least they pretend not to know that to spread fear.

        1. Interesting and true. You can have a fully vaccinated person catch a disease if you overload their system with exposure such that the body can’t keep up with the pathogen. You can also have an immune reaction large enough to slowly clear the pathogen from your system, but small enough that it may take quite some time to clear it all, meanwhile you are carrying it and probably causing low level exposures to those around you. IIRC that was one of the problems with tuberculosis and the early treatment regimes (and still is with some of the modern resistant strains.)

        2. I keep pointing out that vaccines are an immune system hack.

          They will only work as well as your immune system.

          It…sometimes gets through to people?

          1. We were told that vaccines are magic because the experts “knew” that there’d never be a vaccine so stay locked down people, we’re the experts and know what’s best. Now that we have a vaccine and are finding out — and yes I do know they’re not magic I get the flu shot every year knowing it’s often not effective at all — that they’re not magic, they’re making like the grinch and thinking up a lie and thinking it up quick by telling us to stay locked down, they’re the experts and know what’s best.

            What they can’t ever do is tell the truth, first because they’re simply unable to tell the truth, and second because they’d be hanged.

            I think this is an underexplored area in fantasy: what happens when the magic fails? I’ve seen a bit of it but it strikes me as relevant. I suppose you do see a bit of it in “the god bleeds” scenes.

            1. Oh, the “magic vaccine” thing is WAY older than that, it’s at the heart of the “burn the anti-vaxxer” hysteria.

              Because all vaccines are safe, and magically protect you with no cost, you see!

              *bangs head against wall because she grew up close enough to animal husbandry to realize how much consideration goes into any treatment, because all medicines are poison*

            2. ‘The Magic Goes Away’ by Larry Niven, 1976. Magicians dealing with a world in which they’ve used up most of the magic.

              Warlock, after being attacked by a barbarian with the demon sword Glirendree: “Clever, but it didn’t work. Carrying Glirendree works, but it isn’t clever. It will eat you some day.”

              1. Thank you. I have read little Niven apart from Pournelle and Ringworld.

                I still hold that our experts sincerely believe in magic, most children do until they find out how dinner hits the table, if they ever do. Our expert class, having lived curated lives, are still children.

            3. The Lord of the Isles triple trilogy dealt with a form of that, in the “what if magic works, but the wizards are idiots” vein of things.

              I enjoyed, but I’ve found it to be a 50/50 sort of thing. Half the people who read it really enjoy it, and the other half don’t. It does have a lot of gods in the gears, on the other hand, they’re mostly breaking the gears, rather than fixing things, so your mileage may vary.

          2. I wonder how many of the “breakthrough cases” in people who were vaccinated or previously had it are people who have low Vitamin D levels or insufficient zinc in their systems, since those two things seem to be directly related to severity of impact.

            1. Probably a lot of them…They spend all day in offices, and taking vitamins or supplements is just so bourgeois that they won’t do it…

            2. A lot of the breakthroughs in those who already had it are probably all the folks who had false positive tests due to either a) running far too many PCR cycles or b) it was really regular flu.

        3. If working means preventing Covid, the vaccines aren’t working at all, as Pfizer’s 6 month trial demonstrated…so they changed the narrative to moderating the symptoms…But the vaccines, as predicted by the 2012 animal trials, has made people targets for severe problems with mutated versions, like delta…

      2. Honestly, at this point, I’m thinking the “booster” is just political cash grab.

        As near as I can tell, the vaccines have been effective at reducing deaths in high risk groups, but eventually everyone’s going to get covid.

        Unless we stretch things out long enough for a bunch more versions to develop that can get past the immunity to the first version. Probably by then it would be down to the level of the average cold though.

          1. Just what the world needs — a dozen brands of generic Viagra. 😛

            Democrats cause enough trouble already.

              1. Well supposedly the Afghan market has dried up since the Taliban don’t approve of it for the uses the Afghans put it. We’ll see.

        2. Insty had a link this am about those having recovered from WuFlu have better long term ressistence to it than those vaxxed. his antibody count is still quite high while those of the vaxxed are waning and require the boosters

      3. How long til you need a booster shot depends entirely on what disease you’re talking about. How long does it take for antibodies, or ability to produce appropriate antibodies, fall off to where infection can cause disease? (As someone else notes, immunity whether via vaccine or virus doesn’t prevent infection; it prevents seriously symptomatic disease.) That varies wildly:

        — Smallpox vaccination is good for life (documented to as long as 75 years).
        — Tetanus vaccination is good for about 10 years.
        — Rabies vaccination is good for four years, then falls off rapidly and is entirely gone by 4.5 years..
        — Rattlesnake venom vaccine is thought to be good for about a year. (Jury still out.)
        — Leptospirosis vaccination is good for about six months tops (sometimes less).

        Fact is we don’t yet KNOW for the Covid vaccine’s immunity, so some whirleyheads are running with the shortest known duration for vaccine of any sort. But prior evidence suggests it’s probably good for many years. Canine coronavirus exposure or vaccine immunizes for life (and I’m tolerably sure there’s cross-immunity with Covid). SARS-1 recoverees still have good immunity 17-18 years later. I’d be very surprised if Covid19 immunity was seriously different, whether gained via virus or vaccine. I’ll also be surprised if “variants” significantly impact this.

        1. What is clear is that some people are getting it after getting the shots. My co-worker was one of them. He was completely asymptomatic, though. So if he hadn’t know that he’d been exposed and gotten tested, he’d have been none the wiser. On the other hand, we don’t know how severe it might have been if he hadn’t gotten the shots. The vaccine hit him pretty hard. Would the actual illness have done similarly?

          Unfortunately, there’s no way to know.

          1. If he only knew he “had” it due to a test, and he was vaccinated already, how do we know he really was infected?

              1. For my understanding, only for the more expensive/lab tests.

                The quick tests are still the “nextime we’ll get one that doesn’t trigger off of the flu” flavor.

                …which just happen to be the ones that colleges, etc, use for weekly testing….

    2. Granted the difference between this and various design flaws that were completely pilot uncontrollable in the 37, 47, 57, 67, and 87 to pick on Woeing specifically were different only in that the media lit this on fire (major American company that wasn’t currently fighting against the BOM). But we keep trying to play to the complacent and begin to assume that automation will solve everything.

      1. you’d figure Airbus would serve as a “Don’t Do It This Way” what with planes deciding to ignore pilots and fly into the scenery or other fun and new games. (Frontier had one A318 that required ground maintenance to reboot it like a faulty Win95 box every single time it landed at NOLA)

        2. I’ve got a long list of how we’re you this stupid for Renton, and this is number 2 after how do you not crosscheck. But I compare this to stuff going back to the O’Hara engine go byby and it seems we are too reliant on autotoys.

      2. Well, Isaac Asimov’s vision of Utopia was a world controlled by giant positronic robot brains.

        Hey, if we just built a big enough brain it could manage the world Perfectly!

      3. Yeah,

        We have ‘automation will fix it’ activists and cultists who do not actually understand any form of automation.

        We do have actual for real experts in implementing this or that automation scheme, what the limits are, and what you should absolutely never use the scheme to do.

        Then we have a bunch of people with some of the training, perhaps even the capacity to go the distance and become a real expert, who can implement an automation scheme, but are wildly overconfident it how well it will work in practice.

        This will surely end well.

        1. Admittedly I’m also biased against software folks because they are too deterministic. They think if you give same inputs to a person they will come out same. Iirc Intel showed that doesn’t even happen with puters

          1. Software is a good field to be suspicious of.

            I’m skeptical of everything. Partly because, I have a personal goal that I’ve been chasing, and I’ve spent some time reflecting on whether it is really a good idea at all. There are aspects that are definitely at least risky, if not things I should be able to /prove/ are things I ought not be trying to do at all. I doubt I have already discovered all of the errors in my thinking so far. One of my default behaviors is blindly trying to get something done by brute force. Then there are the mistakes I have already made without noticing at the time. I’m sure I’m probably not the only screw up interested in technical things; I worry about humans being human in all areas of technology.

            There are areas of software that are supposed to handle statistics appropriately. Some of these have engineering applications. State of statistics, and the state of software, do not fill me with a broad confidence in all such endeavors. Good luck finding someone who understands software, understands statistics, and understands ‘these laws are written in blood’, or training someone who almost has everything down how to understand the missing bits. We would be well advised not assign so many tasks requiring such that we are not finding the people to do them*.

            *Yeah, this is me trying to be polite and tactful. I think you understand that I am good for hours of raving about the stupidity of certain efforts.

          2. I should probably resent that, as I resemble the remark…

            But I spent a fair chunk of my career designing and implementing a variety of error correction codes – and always put in the those comments “Guaranteed to not break – until a stray cosmic ray comes along at the worst possible time in the worst possible place. God and Murphy are the same being.”

            1. I resemble that remark too. There is a reason I don’t trust some software and check the heck out of others. Also a big reason why “because the computer calculated it so …” is the wrong line to use with me. I wrote software. I know better.

              I also had to listen to hubby rant, more than once, “Why did they change perfectly good working software?” (IDK, I don’t work on it.) Also get “why did they do this, this way?” Again. IDK. I didn’t work on it. AND IDK because I don’t use it.

              Also got it from clients. But there I always had the “This change is line item # the annual change request list from the user convention” (from X years ago, but hey, it was on the list). Especially the last major change I was working on. The request had been on the list for over 15 years … I only worked there 12 years 🙂

              My joke? I wrote software. I don’t use it! 🙂 (1/2 not true .. but still).

              1. Around the house, I tend to use “DAM, I didn’t write it.” and “DAM, I don’t use it.”

                Can’t use that any more with Windows 10, but at least I am still able to dump anything Google on one of the daughters.

                Still need to write an incremental backup to replace the PERFECTLY GOOD software that Western Digital dropped. Time, ask me for anything but time…

                1. It has taken (almost) 6 years, but at least hubby has backed off. He still won’t bother with some things, sigh. I’m out of programming. 100%. Most I do is email, this blog, social media (lurk), and banking accounts track. There is absolutely nothing I want to write. Do need to figure out how to get the current Amazon eBooks to load into Calibre. Plus suspect the Nook DRM removal has broken again. Just don’t want to deal with woke-ism deleting everything on a whim.

                  Mom depends on me and the granddaughters for support. She has a Samsung Tab 4 10″ (almost 8 years old now). Mostly keeping the internal storage not full. No matter how many times I show her, slowly, how to do it, I end up dealing with making sure stored to the micro-SD card. The other aspect is when apps quit working, either reboot (not turn off dang it) or upgrading apps because OS upgraded. Nieces deal with her iPhone issues.

            2. Society continuously creates better idiots. But my issue more those that treat people as automatons. Input A into a person does not always result in output B. It often won’t even replicate identically in the same person.

              1. That also.

                Humans inherently have an aspect of memory, and additionally have huge variations. Said variation can be invisible when you are only looking for visible signs of one kind of variation.

                1. Don’t worry. WordPress is even less id10t resistant than most software which is bad enough.

            3. >> “God and Murphy are the same being.”

              Heh. I’ve long said that Murphy is the one God even an atheist like myself can believe in.

          1. For some things, the safety switch is the employment of crotchety individuals. Other day, Pixy Misa was talking about how the “not on /my/ servers you don’t” sorts being endangered even when he was young.

            Lot of organizations these days seem unwilling to tolerate that stuff, that safety switch is bypassed, and as a result engineering is one of the fields that is now worth less.

            Which is one reason for the attempt that is bypassing the safety mechanism of skilled operators mentally engaged in what the equipment is doing.

    3. Don’t you know there’s only one kind of expert? The kind that agrees with them. Otherwise, they’re not experts, they’re shills.

  4. I’ve always thought that the problem with experts is that there had to be something to be expert in. The future is unknown and unknowable and, thus, not something one can be expert in. That is what haruspices, fortune tellers, and economists are for, to exploit the fears of the stupid and gullible. A life spent working in the markets shows you this, in spades — “no one knows nothing” as the boys say.

    At the end of the day asking this question of “experts” is what they killed Socrates for. So, let’s be radical, return to the roots of our culture, and start to ask the question of our “experts” — how do you know? They can’t answer it.

    Your quote sounds like Leibowitz but it’s too early in the morning for me to process now and I’m not first in any case. It also reminds me of the great simplification of Chinese language from the 50’s, which is much the same, and for the same reasons, as the simplification of Russian from the 20’s. Commies gonna commie.

    2. Meh … While I’m sure there was some NewSpeak trimming done to Mandarin and Cantonese in the 50s, I can’t fault Mao too much for wanting to simplify written Chinese. It’s a writing system that if it wasn’t actually designed to keep literacy rare and reserved for the elites, it certainly had that effect. Even today, being “literate” in Chinese requires only knowing around 2,000 characters, one fifth of the number of words to be considered literate in English, because it’s a hell of a lot harder to remember all the ideograms than how to combine twenty-six letters.

      It’s up there with foot binding as a practice where even the communist ideas were better than the native culture’s.

      1. The local communist ‘education experts’ are pushing ‘whole word reading’ — it’s ‘too hard’ to memorize 26 letters, so have the kids memorize 6,000 words instead.

      3. From all accounts it’s not really simpler. It’s just not compatible with the old style.

      4. Which – no doubt – is why the Japanese added kana (syllable characters) to their kanji (i.e. Chinese inspired word characters).

        Typing on a computer in Chinese is actually kind of fun, if you don’t mind the fact that it’s going to slow you down a lot. You start typing the English spelling of the word, and after the first few letters the computer starts presenting you with “best guess” choices for the character you want based on what you’ve typed so far. But it doesn’t take much thinking to figure out why Chinese and keyboards aren’t compatible.

        1. You are bringing back memories of working NLS at IBM (on the iSeries)…

          What’s so bad about a keyboard like this (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/keyboard_karma4.jpg)?

          Gotta wonder about an area of computing that has gone beyond acronyms, TLAs, and eTLAs to monstrosities like ‘I18N’.

          (for the uninitiated:
          – TLA – Three letter acronym – i.e. IBM, CPU, etc.
          – eTLA – Extended Three Letter acronym – HDMI, etc
          – I18N – “Internationalization” )

  6. Meanwhile the Junta has its hair on fire over Covid

    At Wally World this morning (picking up some fruit for my daughter to include in her lunch), the greeter was handing out masks. That was new, not something I’d seen before. I was like “screw it; you can kick me out if you want.”

    1. I saw that here too, a while ago. I took his mask and jammed it in my pocket, walked through the store and did my business as usual. I consider it a free sample, just like the little bits in the grocery store. I chose not to partake.

    2. Take the mask, put a plum in it, make like David against Goliath and sling that sucker as far as you can down the aisle. Then tell people Wally World is handing out free slings!

    3. Ours has a big sign saying, “Masks are recommended, even for those who are fully vaccinated.” The thing is, though, that this sign is in the far corner of the airlock, mostly hidden by the grocery carts. And at least last time I was there, no one was batting an eye if you completely ignored this “recommendation.” I think people around here are done with it, whatever the CDC says.

          1. I am. I only wear one if it’s one of our medical places that requires them (in their defense, we have RSV and a few other things going around, and they have people in the office who are on chemo and other immune-suppressing things.)

    4. Oregon has a mask mandate (again), and compliance is higher than I would have expected. Perhaps 50% where it was 30% at the low-cost/big family grocery store, and 80% vs 50% at Fred Meyer (Kroger). OTOH, because it’s newly reinstated, some people might comply until they see what the Geheim Statspolizei/OSHA is going to do to enforce it. Almost no greeters with masks, and those unmasked (who, me?) were left alone.

      One industrial place had zero compliance, though the front office had the infamous plexiglas barrier between the worker bees and the customer(s). Still high compliance at the dentist’s waiting room, though it’s a mix of clients, some who make my late-60s age look young.

      1. Costco definitely. But they have greeters. Waved my face *flag* at them, but greeter was persistent. However, they are still giving out samples, that can be eaten in the store. It is amazing how long/far I can make an Aussie (sawdust) Bite last before finally tossing it … Then next item to carry around … toss … rinse and repeat. Did put it back on for self check out. Minute done there, off it came, tucked away. (What? They going to ask me to leave?) Next time Pepper goes (need to get back into taking her). Either they focus on her with the two questions, or they focus on the diaper. Not likely to focus on both.

    5. I saw that at a local Walmart a few weeks ago, too. I refused the mask and walked in anyway. I wasn’t kicked out but compliance was about 80% and we’re not under a city mandate yet – granted this one was in the county (who’s already said they’re not going to mandate them – last time it was only because they couldn’t enforce it, though) not the city so it made for a depressing sight overall. Fearmongering is up for the county here, too, so I’m sure the city’s going to expand it beyond government buildings and schools soon eough. *Sigh* I’m so tired of it all but I don’t see it going away.

    6. Masks were coming off, though I’d guess more than fifty percent were still masked.

      And then a few weeks after they finally came off, LA County slapped the mask mandate back on. Crap.

      Compliance – at least where I am – is full.

    7. My Wal-Mart’s greeter has been offering masks too for the last few weeks, but doesn’t make a fuss when I wave her off. Of course, the look on my face might have something to do with that…

  7. Socialism is the rule of experts. A tiny handful of people can plan the economy, according to it.

  8. One of the great falsities of the modern age is the belief that election to public office conveys some measure of intelligence and competency on the elected when in truth all it means is that they have demonstrated a superior skill in lying and cheating their way into office.
    And sadly, that erroneous belief is held most strongly by those self same elected officials.
    I will also posit that Donald Trump is the exception that proves this rule as he did not come up through the traditional route of ever increasing political positions, but rather jumped straight into our most senior position from a life as a bare knuckles real estate developer and construction king.

    1. I have the same view of Trump. The psychologists say that the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is that psychopaths are born and sociopaths are made. Our political class is a mixture of both but Trump was not a member. I would watch Trump’s reactions to some of the press statements — they don’t ask questions — and realize that he was human. Graham’s reaction during the Kavanaugh hearing was the same. These DC people just ain’t right.

      The rest of them just say “that’s how things are done here”. Why? Why are things done that way and why are we supposed to go along with it?

      I knew Jim McGreevy the former governor of NJ vaguely, his first wife was nice and he’s is proof that “some mothers do have ‘em.” He had said he wanted to be governor from when he was in kindergarten, My view is that anyone who wants power over me from that early an age should on no account ever get it.

    2. I’ll be a little more charitable and say some of them have demonstrated superior communications skills and the ability to at least simulate caring about people’s needs and desires.
      The “experts,” don’t seem to realize how much of Trump’s power comes from his simple ability to look at people and say, “I love you guys,” and mean it. They think he’s faking it and his audience is foolish to believe it because…..well, because.

      1. Because they are. And because he’s a rich businessman, and they *know* that all rich businessmen are greedy *censored*.

    4. The skills and characteristics required to win an election have nothing whatsoever to do with any ability to do the job.

      So our ‘leaders’ are a bunch of experts at winning elections, soliciting bribes campaign contributions, and virtue signaling to other politicians. Useless for actually running a functional government.

      2. Yes, and no.

        A campaign is more than just the candidate. The amount that devolves down to the candidate as opposed to, say, the campaign manager, is going to vary from candidate to candidate.

  9. I think that one of the very few posotives of Biden’s fuckup in Afghanistan is that it shows to anyone paying even slight attention to the news that the DC Establishment are utter incompetemts. In much the same way that Carter showed the same in the late 1970s. So there’s an opening for a Reagan to strike in 2024 even with the Dem fraud.

    1. Relatedly there are apparently several thousand (maybe tens of thousands) Americans (and I suspect several more thousand “Westerners” in Afghanistan.

      One question I have is what were thy doing there? and who funded them?

      Because my suspicion is that the majority are NGO workers of one sort or another and that a significant number of them are the sons and daughters/nieces/nephews etc. of NY Times reading liberals. So the Biden fuckup has just become personal to people who voted for him.

      And if a large number of them die or “disappear” or come back raped and tortured then Biden is going to face a revolt from the very class that (s)elected him. In fact it could well end up as blue on blue civil war.

      1. I have a cousin who left the ‘stan a few months ago (Praise God!). She was, from what she told me beforehand, doing what she had been doing in the Navy only in a hole in the ground and getting paid contractor money, tax free. So some of the people there are just honest capitalist who took a chance to make big bucks and are not stuck with the short end of the stick.

          1. Their civil war is still on, actually, though I don’t know for how much longer. The Afghan Vice President (now self-proclaimed Acting President) has a bunch of troops in a northeastern province that has historically hated the Taliban. The problem is that the province doesn’t connect to a neighboring country. The leadership estimates that they have enough supplies to last through the winter. After that is anyone’s guess.

              1. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s an open question whether it will last. The Taliban might very well be able to just surround the province and starve them out.

          2. It will not be planes. They were only able to do that once because the hijackings in the 70’s trained everyone to be passive and comply.

            Now everyone assumes the hijacker is going to kill them all, and people tend to go a bit berserk when they know they will die regardless.

            It will be something else entirely.

              1. Arson has been popular lately. Some sack of crap burned down an anime studio in Japan last year and killed 34 artists.

              2. Sail a freighter into a harbor…

                There was an NCIS episode about a plot along those lines. Lebanese dad had lost a kid in Lebanon, and blamed the Americans. So he got his hands on a freighter, had the crew abandon ship just outside US waters, sailed it to a US harbor, and announced that he wanted to claim asylum. Don’t need a nuke. There are plenty of things that will make just as big of an explosion that you can put on a really big cargo ship.

                3. I have read that the Halifax explosion (2.9 kt equivalent) was the largest maritime kaboom. A quick web search says that ships go kaboom far more often than I expected.

                1. And the Chinese are *very* much aware of that…

                  A clash with the Chinese was inevitable, I suspect. But I really, really wish that one of them hadn’t been (officially, at any rate) over seized opium.

                2. “Never mind, we’ll just sell the capitalists the rope and they’ll take care of the rest.”

      3. Nah. It’ll be trumps fault for not having a turnkey “end war” mechanism that did everything correctly regardless of their meddling.

        The national symbol isn’t the eagle. Its the freaking mask. A religious totem and fetish in the sociological sense of the word.

        2. Er – apparently Trump did have a contingency team. Which Biden defunded a while ago.

          Don’t know if the team would actually have helped given the other problems, but…

          1. Tbf, if I’m honest I give this a pass until I can actually see the information. I put that in the same boat as the ‘Trump deactivated the pandemic team’ BS we heard all last year.

            Granted if there wasn’t already a plan already built up that it was duplicitive up that cluster is on the forever government. We need that even if we aren’t occupying somewhere. Even just the wuflu repatriation needed some level of this

      4. The State Department, CIA, and NGO personnel stuck there thought they were “in on” the larger conspiracy, and just found out that they were sacrificial pawns.

        I expect many of the survivors to be based as @&$;.

        1. I believe a bunch of them (especially NGOs), are genuinely trying to “make a difference,” or “doing well while doing good.” They are in for severe disillusionment, if they survive.

    2. I hate to say this, but Biden is worse than the Carter cock-up. This will be worse than Saigon. 15,000 Americans are still trapped there and cannot get to the airport to be evacuated.

      1. This would be alleviated somewhat if we had hung on to Bagram, which is more defensible, and has two runways to the one in Kabul. We would also have had more time to destroy some of the stuff we didn’t want to take with us.

        2. Correction – Bagram has one strip.

          I saw the two strips at Bagram get mentioned elsewhere before someone stepped in and corrected that info. Aside from that, though, it’s a far superior spot to evacuate from.

        3. My guess is that they deliberately made decisions with an eye towards “We can’t leave! It would be a disaster!” (As they’d done to Trump for most of X2s

          Then they learned that * neither understood the ramifications, nor cared.
          And a game of bureaucratic hot potato began.

          1. That still doesn’t explain abandoning Bagram in the middle of the night.

            And not giving our European allies in the country ANY sort of heads up.

          2. [scene: Pentagon Planning Department office. Wall calendar says March, 2021]

            [Col. SUBORDINATE puts last sheet in binder labeled “EVAC PLAN”]

            [enter Gen. MILLEY]

            Col. S: Oh, General, I just finished…

            Gen. M: [interrupting] Colonel, you know that we in the Pentagon and the folks over at State think it’s a bad time to get out of Afghanistan. You understand that, right, Colonel?

            Col. S: Um, yessir.

            Gen. M: As I thought. Now, I’m about to meet with the President, and he’s probably going to ask if we have any evacuation plans. Do we have any completed evacuation plans, Colonel? [glares]

            Col. S: Um, … [pauses, pushes binder off desk into wastebasket] … no?

            Gen. M: That’s what I thought. Good day, Colonel.

            [later, the Situation Room]

            Pres. BIDEN: General, I really want to get out of Afghanistan right now, and I don’t really care what we have to do to get it done.

            Gen. MILLEY: Mr. President, we talked about this before, we and the folks over at State…

            Pres. B: [petulant] No! I want out NOW.

            Gen. M: Sir, we’ve been working on plans but nothing’s completed yet…

            Pres. B: [suddenly raging] I don’t care what we have to do! Get us out or I’ll have you keelhauled!

            Gen. M: Uh, sir, that’s really a Navy thing…

            Pres. B: KEEL. HAULED.

            Gen. M: Yessir. Right away, sir.

            [the Pentagon]

            Col. S: But, General, I burned it already!

            Gen. M: Dammit! Fine, just get on the horn and do whatever you remember.

            Col. S: I don’t have the phone numbers or emails…

            Gen. M: Don’t care. Whatever you got. NOW. Or it’s your career.

            Col. S.: [swallows] Yes, sir.

          3. My guess is that they deliberately made decisions with an eye towards “We can’t leave! It would be a disaster!” (As they’d done to Trump for most of X2s

            More likely, they were accurately making decisions to try to avoid Utter Disaster. Just because the News told us that it was because they hated Trump doesn’t mean they did, or that the people telling them “if we do X, the Bad Guys will do Y” were wrong.

            And then got a CiC who is actually willing to do the “to hell with the human costs, pull out now” thing.

            “I don’t care, I said we are doing X” thing.

            This is what “just do it” looks like.

      3. Have heard it might be as many as 40,000, largely due to NGO-and-Democrat personnel bloat.

        Well, look on the bright side… Jimmy Carter is no longer the worst president in modern history!

        2. Jimmeh was only the worst until Clinton. Clinton was only the worst until 0bama. 0bama was only the worst until the FICUS. Biden will only be the worst until the Vice-FICUS takes over.

          They seem determined to ensure the last Democrat never winds up ‘the worst President of all time’ by dredging up one even more wretched.

          I don’t know how they’d go about finding a worse one than Kommie Harridan for 2024, but I have faith in their ability to discover somebody still more atrocious. Maybe, The Return Of Queen Hillary?

          1. I can think of a dozen or so worse than the Queen of Kneepads, but none with enough support within the Party to gin up the necessary election fraud.

            1. Oh come on Bernie would have mad a heck of a mess of things if he had managed to get elected (and somewhere in the Multiverse perhaps he did, poor b*stards on that time line). And certainly AOC or one of her tribe will go for it somewhere down the line. Just when you think you’ve had the worst idiot of a president even the Universe carefully comes up with a worse idiot

              1. I did say they’d be worse… just that they might not get enough Party support to pull off enough nominal votes. To think we might be saved by inadequate fraud…

            2. It might not take election fraud. Don Surber mentioned he’s heard rumors that Kamala is considering Hillary for VP if anything happens to Biden.

              If true then Kamala’s apparently never heard of Arkancide. That, or she really is so dumb she can’t even put 2 and 2 together…

              1. Where did I see that Hillary wound up talking to some other head of state last week, when Winkin’, Blinken, and Nod were all for some reason unavailable… well, that’s …encouraging…

    3. >> “So there’s an opening for a Reagan to strike in 2024 even with the Dem fraud.”

      We already have a proven Reagan still eligible for one more term. And if the audits officially prove that Trump was the rightful winner all along I don’t think anyone will be able to stand against him in ’24.

      And I’m calling it now: After the theft is proven I fully expect some idiots on the left to use their own fraud to try and disqualify Trump. They’ll argue that since he technically won two terms he’s not eligible to win a third. Yes, it’s terminally stupid but you know one of them will try it.

  10. This expert worship has created a huge class of second class citizens. Much of the working world is shut off to them by licensing and plain prejudice. When I was a Realtor the association wanted to make having a degree – ANY degree – a requirement to be a glorified house salesperson. They felt excluded and had this delusion that they were professionals on a level with doctors and lawyers.
    Many of the businesses require a college degree to even apply for jobs that have no need of one. They base this on the perception college grads are superior. I’ve rubbed shoulders with lots of ivory tower inhabitants. Outside of a narrow focus on their specialty very few have any desire to expand the boundaries of their knowledge. I knew a college professor who couldn’t make a pitcher of lemonade because nothing to his mind was right or wrong. He could read the instructions on the can of frozen concentrate and find four different interpretations of what he should do – so he was gridlocked mentally.
    I was having dinner at the home of the local president of the university with a half dozen people at the table. Talk turned to the coffee we were having being quite good. A professor wondered aloud were coffee came from – so I informed him of it’s history, the type of climate required to grow it and the larger producing areas. He was amazed and asked if that was my business? To me it is amazing a grown man can not know where his food comes from. Has he no curiosity at all? Coffee companies brag on the variety of their coffee, where it was grown, and how well the treat the usually impoverished third world growers. You have to almost be holding you hands over your ears to not know something about it.
    Having a degree is not a measure of intelligence. It’s a club membership.

        1. Because aptitude tests are racist (It Says Here) and you have to prove “to the satisfaction of the court” (good luck with that) that it really reflects job requirements and is not just a tool for discrimination.

          1. Yep there was a case somewhere in the early 80’s where aptitude tests of any sort were deemed prejudicial. I remember taking several at various places (AT&T, NSA, at least one other) when I interviewed in late 1983. With that gone the credential was all you could use in combination with questions during the interview. And the credential ‘s value has been sliding downhill for a long time.

            1. Griggs v. Duke Power Co (1971)

              Introduced the “disparate impact” theory [spit] into SCOTUS jurisprudence.

              I expect that aptitude tests carefully tuned to employment requirements survived, but looked more and more like lawsuit bait and were phased out. You probably got the last batch of them.

              1. Thanks, earlier than I thought. NSA was government so somewhat exempt. That AT&T was when Ma Bell was still Ma Bell before it was broken up. So it had some serious protections from its various monopoly consent decrees.

            2. Now credentials will get you in the door, but it might not keep you there. Temp to hire. Even in software. All my employers, since ’90, have had at least 6 month trial period, after extensive multiple interviews with multiple people and groups. None went through temp agencies. But seeing that more and more.

              1. I get hired through temp agencies. The managers I work with like me, and are willing to keep me around indefinitely. But I’ve only gotten an offer once to move me up to a regular employee.

                And corporate nonsense arbitrarily killed that.

                Unfortunately, temp work isn’t really “temp” anymore.

      3. IQ tests aren’t very reliable for assigning a single IQ figure to people. However, some of them are (or have been) pretty reliable indicators of future academic success. But that’s a statistical phenomenon; and statistics don’t work worth a damn for single, unique, individuals.

        1. IQ tests are a hobby horse of mine. Once you remove the very low scores, the correlation with “success” vanishes. Trust me, I’m an expert on this. 😜. It was a very good way to meet pretty, dumb, girls studying psychometrics in the education department – redundant, I know, back before I met the wife.

            1. Well, it worked for me 😇 and that is success, of a kind. Only time math was ever good for pulling chicks. An expensive car would have been more effective.

          2. What is “very low scores” before correlation disappears? I know correlation of IQ (as measured) with success in academia, salary etc. is not 100%, but how much do you have to chop off to make it go away?

            1. You’d have to dig into the archives, but from memory the last time we did this dance, it was “if you don’t count the people who are quite literally retarded, the pattern breaks down.”

              The score changed depending on how the test scored the people who were mentally incapable of functioning in day-to-day life.

    2. The hazard of being a specialist is to think, just because one has mastered one field, no matter how difficult, that one has mastered all fields.

      Some of the stuff I do professionally, I absolutely would not grab my local mechanic and send them off to go do, because they would not be up to it, or have the experience or training to handle it. Most people, even with the training and experience aren’t able to do some of the stuff I do, and never will be.

      But, I’d be an absolute fool to try to do their job for them, when they know it far better than I do. Just because I probably could learn it as well as they have, does not mean that I have, and does not mean that what I do know translates at all.

      This isn’t to say that you need to stay in your lane, but you need to respect your ignorance.

      1. Lawyers are the worst. “Ah bin ter Law Skewl and Ah knows awl thar iz ter know!”

        They’re Experts on Everything. Just ask ’em, and they’ll tell you.

        1. Nope. Journalists are the worst. They become instant experts, and will tell anyone and everyone how to do anything, because they know best.
          Thomas Sowell had a section in one of his books (sorry, can’t remember which) where he talked about the people who work with language as opposed to the people who work with things. The people who work with words are deemed “smarter” but they believe that reality can be changed as easily as words. The people who work with things KNOW that ain’t so.

          1. Try working with things without knowing the right words. Does not end well.

            Some celebrities are convinced they know everything because they’re famous.

          2. As a profession, journalists are definitely the worst. As a rule, they know that they can do anything, by virtue of the fact that they can write an article on any subject after one 15-minute news conference about that subject, and they also know that no human being who isn’t already a journalist can write or can learn to write any article on any subject ever.

        2. “My name is Benjamin Jowett,
          I’m the Dean of Balliol College.
          If there’s anything to know, I know it.
          What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.”

      2. I’m very glad I worked in the Real World before I returned to the Halls of Macadamia. That, and growing up reading military history, and having parents who had skills as well as educations.

    3. Sounds like the time I visited my Little Brother a few years back and had to talk with his associates.

      Little Brother was a grad student at the time, and all of his friends were also grad students, and they were all researching various topics of applied physics. They had a monthly (I think, could’ve been weekly) routine where they would all come over to his house on Sunday morning for breakfast/brunch and chat. My visit happened to coincide with that get-together, and Little Brother invited me to attend. I figured, cool, I’ll get to meet Little Brother’s friends.

      The only thing — the. ONLY. thing! — they talked about was their research. What they were researching, the status of their research, any grants they’d gotten, etc. I quickly realized that I was completely out of place and out of my depth, so I fixed my plate and leaned against the kitchen counter by myself. Little Brother came over in short order and quietly chewed me out for being “rude” by ignoring everyone else. I told him, “look, I don’t know how to talk to these people and I doubt they know how to talk to me.”

      “What do you mean? Go over and introduce yourself and ask someone what they’re working on!”

      So I went over, sat down, introduced myself to one of Little Brother’s pals, and asked what they were researching. I don’t remember what exactly they were working on, but I do remember that I was able to more-or-less understand and follow what they were saying. So then they asked me, “so what are you researching?”

      “Oh, I’m not a grad student.”

      “You teach?”

      “No.”

      “Oh, you work in a lab!”

      “No, actually, I’m a writer.”

      “Science writing?”

      “No, I work in a supermarket, but I write fiction in my spare time. I actually just finished the first draft of a novel last week.”

      I watched that poor grad student’s brain go into vapor-lock. You could SEE the gears in their head start to grind and strip. They quickly mumbled something and got up and walked away. NOBODY in the group would even make eye contact with me after that: they did. not. understand. me. and did not know how to communicate with me because I wasn’t a scientist. Afterwards, Little Brother asked me what I’d told that one person. I told him the truth. He didn’t really believe me (because he didn’t get that not everyone in his group was as “well adjusted” as he is) until he asked his friends what had happened.

      1. It would horrify them, but I recognize that state from occasionally being in a cousin of it– mommy brain.

        Where you’re tired, and focused, and ALL OF YOUR ENERGY goes into ONE SUBJECT, and even your relaxation time is around that subject.

        (I told you it would horrify them. Almost as much as small talk about diaper contents. )

        1. That makes sense.

          If graduate school was simply an unusual state of mind, then there would be a lot more people who simply can’t hack graduate school then there are.

          If it is instead a redirection of the focus that can go into ‘mommy brain’, it makes sense that we have so many relatively effective graduate students. With the caveat that this is very much relative, I do not insist that people willingly associating with a university are neither desperate nor stupid nor insane.

          1. With the caveat that this is very much relative, I do not insist that people willingly associating with a university are neither desperate nor stupid nor insane.

            *mandatory agreement re: mommies*

        2. That makes sense, having worked projects set to psycho, done hardwork set to psycho and having dealt with newborns. It is the same function.

          Almost ended up submitting a Dilbert proposal from the project too…

          (We were on week there of a 7 day test, that was running 24/7. I was the lead, so I was coming in on the shift changes to keep on top of what was going on, and help the handovers. I was heading out after one of those and spotted a bench and thought it would be nice to sit down, and had a very clear mental image of falling asleep and getting woken up by the campus security thinking I was a hobo or something. Was way over due for a shave and a haircut, and probably overdue for a shower too… Yeah that was fun 🙂 )

      2. When my parents had their New Year’s Eve party with all their college friends, you’d have the husbands in one room talking engineering shop, and the wives in another talking about other things.

        Though I still remember the decades later party where a civil engineer who spent his retirement as an expert witness and a drama and politics major who worked for an insurance company talking shop.

  11. When I grew up in rural nowhere in the ’70s, it was called “common sense.” And the Left has been successfully trying to remove it from our lives for a hundred years now.

    My dad never finished high school, ended up help build ships in Newport News in WWII before they sent him off to Leyte. After that he came back, drove a tow truck for a while, then opened his own auto repair shop which is still open to this day. Want to know who some of his best repeat customers were? Students and professors at the local high-end very expensive very snooty private women’s college. Because they knew which fork to use and all about what 18th-century English author wrote what book, but they couldn’t ever figure out why changing the oil in their Volvo was necessary.

    1. The “common” in common sense refers to commoners, not “universal.” So call it “peasant sense,” in the manner that it’s the kind of sense you get when you have your hands on things.

      And yeah, that’s why it’s so uncommon now. None of us are living like peasants.

  12. You can clearly see the, “experts are special, they are the wave of the future,” popping up in the early 20th century. It was part of the whole, “progressive,” shift. Everything was going to be done in accordance with scientific principles, and would be efficient, effective and utterly fair. Like a machine, perfectly tuned and built, the results would be perfect, uniform and provide the “best,” outcomes for everyone. Because of this, people would gladly give all authority to the wisest, most intelligent, far-seeing people, who would automatically make decisions based both on, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and logical necessity.
    On one level, it can be seductive. On another, it’s the logic of an anthill, and about as attractive.

    1. It was an artifact of the industrial revolution.

      Industrial engineering was shown to be capable of some amazing things, in circumstances that were in hindsight quite limited. But people largely did not even understand industrial engineering as the industrial engineers understood it. So, it was magic and could be applied everywhere.

      So you had people like Fisher, who maybe did good things with statistics and agriculture, get into the crazy cakes of racial statistics. (Moderns understand that racial statistics is nuts, but their theory of why may be unsound and ignorant of the real reasons.)

      1. One of my sons is an award winning industrial engineer. He is COO of a plant for a major manufacturer. He specializes in supply chains and has been having a rather horrific year and a half. His dad is a successful manager of a large automotive part’s store. He also has had a rather horrific time of it due to supply chain issues. Dad has been managing the same store since he was 17 year’s old. No college.

        They were comiserating last night on the phone about supply chain issues. Dad mentioned that it was so hard to get fuel, oil, and air filters and that warehouses had been out of stock for weeks that he ordered a bunch on eBay and wasn’t even going put them in his inventory so the other stores in the chain wouldn’t have them transferred to their stores.

        There was a bit of a stunned silence from our engineer. The idea that you would or even should or COULD go out of “official” suppliers had not even occured to him.

        His dad said that his customers were counting on him and he felt obligated to get product for them wherever he could.

        The warehouse could get them from eBay too, he said if they cared about their customers.

        I guess you don’t learn about customer service in college.

        1. Yeah, I can’t think of anything to do with customer service that would condense well into an academic theory. That is basically a cultural thing, and personal discipline.

          Large bureaucracies tend to like their bureaucrats a bit blind when it comes to suppliers that aren’t on the official list, or otherwise deviating from standard operating procedure. When you are, or manage all of, your own business, when it is a matter of personal skill, you don’t really need to be bound by procedure in the same way.

  14. This is, at long last, the death of the “expert class.” And if Fauci ends up in a retirement home instead of hanging from a lamppost, I don’t care. We don’t have to kill the “expert class.” We just have to fire them.

    1. I have this vision of Fauci at a podium making another pronouncement while some enterprising kid sneaks in, sticks matches in his shoes, and lights them. First the shoes smolder, then Fauci’s pants burst into flames on national television.

  16. Stray thought: despite the gut-clenching visual parallels, the fall of Afghanistan reminds me not just of the fall of Saigon, but the mess that was the Crimean War.

    That was one of the first major wars to have the telegraph (the Victorian Internet!) and photographers on the ground to send pictures back of what was actually going on, instead of what the People In Charge said was going on.

    The result, from a quote from Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate:
    “Shaun Hastings: It was also one of the first truly “modern” wars, if large masses of men shooting each other over which toff got to call themselves Emperor of Wherever can be called “modern.” Technology like the exploding artillery shell, the railroad, and the telegraph shaped the conflict, and the advent of photographic technology meant it was one of the first wars to be documented in the press. This was particularly delightful in that the great legacy of the Crimean war was the rank incompetence and general mismanagement on the part of the leadership of all sides. Something to really be proud of there. If you’re going to be inept, be REALLY inept. For the citizens on the home front puffed up with patriotic fervour, this was a bit like going to see your favourite band in concert only to realise that they only sounded good thanks to auto-tune and ruthless editing.”

    …Tell me that doesn’t echo, given what we’re seeing in the MSM vs. on the internet today.

  17. Oh, not because Winnie-the-flu is that terrible, particularly not the “dreaded” Delta variety. It’s because many medical personnel chose to exit rather than take the vaccine as condition of employment. So “I’ve got weasels in my pants” Joe’s attempt to fix it by making all the nurses take the vaccine means–

    I’m darkly amused by the same news reports declaring the hospitals overloaded also mentioning that there are hospital tents set up in the parking lots around the hospitals….

    and they’re empty.

    Because they don’t have the nurses/personnel to man them.

    Because they fired over 150 people, on the spot, when they refused to accept experimental medical treatment as a condition of employment.

    What a kabuki show! Or is Potemkin disaster more fitting?

    1. Or they “shifted focus” towards the tens of thousands of COVID hospitalizations that never happened, and then “downsized” when those hospitalizations never occurred. And now that cases are on the upswing, they’re desperately trying to fill those personnel slots again.

      My current role is in healthcare staffing: the past few months have been a nightmare for us. The latest fad is healthcare employers forcing ALL employees and contractors to get the jab, no exceptions… even if those employees/contractors are working 100% remote, will never set foot in the facility, and aren’t even located in the same state.

    2. Same as the stories about how overwhelmed the hospitals were in Spring 2020, and yet the temporary hospitals and hospital ships that had been deployed were never used.

      1. The field hospitals and ships were provided by Trump. They would have stood patients on end in the closets before doing anything that might make Trump look good.

      2. I keep wanting to hear the answer to – How many beds (normal and/or ICU) added since Jan 2020?
        We are well past lead time issues for converting space, especially in a ‘crisis’.
        If this is such a medical crisis, why no increase in physical capacity?

        (Yeah, I know you need staff too… but there is a lot of staff ’round here on reduced hours due to no-elective / non-critical )

        1. They can’t give that number, because it would involve explaining that it’s not really beds, it’s “currently staffed and empty beds.”

          Which would gut the freak-out value.

  18. My usual points summarized:

    Widget techniques are not valid for not-widgets.

    Even people skilled in teaching valid widget techniques may not have the interest to understand the true limits of a widget technique.

    Skills are only learned by training and experience, training and experience which are tested for past situations. Credentials are imperfect measures of learning, and of skill utility.

    The true measure of an expert is if anyone finds consulting them worth it. If the public does not get service for the trouble, those credentialed are not real experts.

  19. Today is my birthday–I don’t want my day to be a day of infamy dammit. It looks like I won’t get that wish this year. Plus the entire leadership has fallen or is dropping out today. I’m wondering what we will see at the top in the next few days– including the Joint Chief of Staffs.

        1. Well, I share a b-day with the late Emperor Hirohito, so there’s that. Also Duke Ellington. I go with Ellington as my preferred b-day share. 😀

          1. Well– I would pick Duke Ellington too. Thankfully they aren’t doing a big Clinton bash after that Obama bash this year so I don’t get my face rubbed into it.

            Thanks for the birthday wishes

          2. Hirohito did a lot with human rights.

            I find him inspirational.

            Thinking back on him, I find myself reflecting on the value of human life.

    6. Congratulations on hanging in there for another year. Keep it up — don’t give the bastards the satisfaction.

    8. Yay for birthdays and other excuses to celebrate!
      May yours be the happiest one you’ve had in years!

        1. One year, chickenpox on my birthday. Another year, freak snowstorm. Another, nuclear meltdown. Another, movie theater I was in caught on fire.

          …I may be paranoid of birthdays. Just a bit.

            1. It just feels like the universe tells me every year, “Keep on your toes, Or Else.”

              ATM looks like the universe is reminding all of us of Heinlein’s bit, “Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death.”

              The problem being it’s often death for a whole bunch of people around the stupid, too.

              2. I feel that. Half the time when I end up in trouble at work it’s because I step in someone else’s stupid and catch the blame for it because corporate rules. Nothing serious has ever come of it thankfully (aside from the current house arrest, though that doesn’t threaten my job) but it’s one more thing wearing down on me.

  20. This is it, folks. It’s the beginning of the end for the Puppet. Even CNN has turned against him. As soon as they can find a way to sell a person so unpopular even her own party didn’t want as president, it’s Harris Time. And when that happens, hold onto your butts.

        1. They are already doing that.

          Which only proves how stupid they are. When they abolish the Republic and eviscerate the Law, nothing remains to stop us.

        2. nah. Bullshit. She might, but people will ignore her, like they’re ignoring masks. Kamala is the quickest ticket to “ANd then the veterans had had enough.”

          1. I doubt it will get there, simply because she is so incompetent that the back climbers in her own party will take her down before she gets there.

            She was the presumptive front runner going into the nominations, had all of the big names backing her and managed to flame out before the first vote.

            Then they slid her in as the VP because ether big names were sure they’d buffed her up so she’d do much better this time. And she ma aged to get torched by Jill almost right out the gate.

            No matter how many intersectionality check boxes she’s got on her bingo card, she will never be competent to lead a girl scout troop down a lit straight hallway.

            I don’t see how she gets a third bite at the apple, unless the DNC somehow managed to be even less competent.

          2. didnt we say in November ” do you want starship troopers? this is how you get starship troopers.”

        3. Won’t happen: even her own Party can’t stand her. My understanding is that Pelosi hates her guts. At best (for her), she’ll be an impotent, powerless puppet. At worst, she gets impeached for misconduct, real or imagined.

          1. They are not removing Biden, no matter how feeble and no matter how badly it hurts them in opinion polls, because the minute Harris becomes POTUS, the Democrats lose their tiebreaking vote in the Senate. That tiebreaking vote is critical for them.

            2. I’m surprised they’ve managed to keep the FICUS propped up this long. I never expected the old fart to last long enough to get sworn in. It’s been a sad, sad spectacle and it can’t go on. This… THIS is the best the Democrats had to offer? Blatant election fraud to put a mumbling, bumbling, stumbling buffoon on the throne?

              Derpy Joe was meager at best, and has declined considerably even from that.

              1. Their other choices included Ms. “I can’t even win my home state *cackle*”, Mr. “Hell yeah, we’re taking your AR-15s!”, and Mr. “Reproductive rights for trans-women!”

                Since Biden kept his mouth shut, he looked downright tame compared to most of the rest of the field.

              2. They were promised the future, but they were never the future. It’s now obvious they’re the future of an imaginary past. And desperate. For perspective I recommend reading The Forgotten Man. I’m listening to it while painting. I read it while I was very I’ll, so it’s all new. The amazing thing is how stupid, gullible and treasonous the intellectual ancestors of these ass hats we’re, even 100 years ago

              3. It’s amazing how long terminal illness can be. I would not have been surprised had he died before Election Day.

      2. The camel would be worse than Joe.

        Current Daily Mail headline is Deluded in DC.

        I just finished getting text blasted by a British cousin, who served in the forces,. I told him that I didn’t vote for Joe and neither, actually, did a majority of Americans so don’t go blaming us. Still, this is shameful.

          1. I for one would not consider the Vice-FICUS dangling from a lamp-post ‘at worst’.

              1. At this point, Pat Buckman (from Tom Kratman’s “Caliphate”) might be the best-case scenario. Not least because after Biden’s Kabul Debacle, the Caliphate itself might be the alternative . . .

              1. Judging by what the Taliban have been up to these last few days, hanging from a lamppost is no way near the worst for her.

        2. The British Parliament voted to hold Biden in contempt over the Afghanistan disaster. It was universally accepted.

          A country that has acted as one of our oldest allies, signing onto our military escapades over the last few decades without a moment’s hesitation, just held Biden in contempt. And no groups in Parliament were against it.

          Congrats, Joe. Good to see that we’re once again loved and respected in the world.

            1. He has united the ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD against the United States. Which I’m sure was the plan. Not FICUS’ plan — I doubt any of his plans go beyond making sure he got his ice cream and his ass was wiped. — but somebody’s plan. Probably the Communist Chinese Party’s.

              1. Obviously, since I have no doubt the time and chaos of the pull-out were made to the CCP’s order.

                Who are not at all interested in their allies the Taliban, but a lot interested in Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

                1. I have a dark suspicion that China Joe was directed to screw things up like his maladministration did to not only give the US a black eye but to get a peek at some of the hardware left behind, courtesy of throwing a bit of pocket change at some warlord or other to buy the more advanced stuff like those ScanEagle drones that were abandoned.

                2. my sole solis is, if the Taliban are relying on the Chin it is going to go bad for them as the Chin do not care at all, and it won’t go well for the Sino Commies either, but they will put up with it to get those minerals therein.

          2. More –

            Apparently he left PM Johnson waiting for 36 hours. Johnson called to talk Monday morning. Biden finally called him back Tuesday evening.

            RESPECT IS BACK, BABY!

        3. The British government is livid. Not only did they get caught off-guard by the evacuation, but Biden snubbed PM Johnson by not returning Johnson’s call for 36 hours.

          BOTH parties joined in voting for a contempt motion against Biden

          2. And I managed to fat finger my E-mail address for two consecutive (on the page) posts.

            /Facepalm

  21. Derpy Joe is an ‘Expert’ on Foreign Policy, unlike that blundering amateur Trump. We’ve been told that for more than a year.

    Tells us everything we need to know about ‘Experts’ right there.

    Which suggests to me a solution: dump all the ‘Experts’ in a pit and let them chew on each other.

    (Bragging points if you can untangle THIS reference)

    1. Plugs has always been wrong on every foreign Policy situation. Even his own party has always ignored him there until they decided OMB HAD to go.

  22. Yep, buckle up gang! If ABC actually airs the raw video of Stephanopoulos’ interview with Biden he’s done and the media is done. They have released the full transcript, but that doesn’t give you the facial expressions and tone of voice. And I saw somewhere else that Biden has expressed a wish to “go home” because he’s tired and not sleeping well, so they’re going back to DE for a couple of nights.

    The Harris administration is just over there, and you don’t even need to squint any more. Even my far-left, progressive, runs-with-wolves MiL is talking about pooling money to buy a compound in the wilderness for the family.

    1. That interview is the worst, especially the Puppet’s dismissal of the people falling to their deaths off the planes.

      1. That’s why I’m glad the transcript at least has been released. Maybe, once ABC execs realize that their people left in Afghanistan are hosed along with their kids and family working for all those NGOs, they’ll release the raw video in retaliation. Hope springs eternal.

      2. Did anyone else notice that ALL of those would-be plane-riders are fighting age young men?

        No interest whatsoever in getting out the women and children….

        1. If you look at the picture of the 640 passengers that’s been circulating, there are quite a few women and kids. You do need to look a bit more carefully to pick them out, and there are more adult men than women. But the women and children are present in numbers.

          At least part of the reason for the skewed gender balance in that picture is the fact that – based on what I’ve read – close to half of the passengers who got onboard that plane did so in a last minute surge after the plane had stopped collecting passengers. It sounds as if they basically rushed the ramp right before it closed. That sort of thing is going to be easier for the young men than for the other age and sex groups, which would at least partially explain why there are more men on board.

          1. I’ve been watching video from various sources. After the initial load, it’s been all young men.

    2. It impressed me that they didn’t edit out the stammers and pauses in Biden’s responses (at least not all of them). That’s something they could have easily done “for clarity”, and our side wouldn’t even blame them. Mock them endlessly, but not blame them.

  23. It’s my son’s birthday, too. I remember being wheeled out of the delivery room and someone saying, “Did you know they had a coup in Russia?”
    And there we were, a coup in the U.S.S.R. and us 50 miles from NYC. It was not reassuring.

    1. I remember this! I was in third grade, and one of our spelling words this week was “cue.” Which I misspelled as “coup” because that was the version I’d been hearing and seeing.

  24. This is my take: the expert class has surrounded itself with bureaucratic minions, Tobiahs, ankle biters. And I had a fun run in with one just the other day. I emailed her to say “the mask mandate is insane bs, etc. etc. Stop it.” Her reply:
    “Kathy,

    We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. Should it be helpful, here’s a summary of 60+ studies that demonstrate the efficacy of masks: Science Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2

    And a brief overview of Dr. Spitters stellar education and background; Snohomish County is lucky to have a health officer of this caliber.
    Dr. Spitters has served as the District’s contracted physician for tuberculosis control since 2001 and previously served as the District’s deputy health officer from 1994 to 1999. He earned his medical degree from Stanford University. He completed residency training in general preventive medicine and public health at Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene & Public Health and has been certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine since 1994.

    Previous roles have included serving as the medical director for the Public Health Seattle & King County Tuberculosis Clinic at Harborview Medical Center from 2003-2020 and as health officer for the Yakima Health District from 2001-2018. He is a clinical professor in the Division of Allergy & Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington School of Medicine and in the Department of Epidemiology at the UW School of Public Health.

    There are a number of RCWs and WACs that guide our work, and the majority of which can be found in Title 246 WAC and Title 70 RCW. The one that may be most helpful: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=70.05.070.

    Health officer orders and directives do not require any vote or approval.

    Heather Thomas | Public & Government Affairs Manager | Snohomish Health District
    3020 Rucker Avenue, Suite #306 | Everett, WA 98201 | p: 425.339.8688 | c: 425.508.4980
    Public Health: Always working for a safer & healthier Snohomish County”

    Summary: “hey, girlfren! Here’s some lies and propaganda, tee hee. And that guy? We juss love him to death! He went to a famous school, and he’s had a job the whole time since he left college! Oh, and yeah, we wrote rules to say we can do what we damn well please, and we don’t have to ask you or anyone else! Tee hee!”

    They are making us the “other,” and the bureaucrats have a special hand in making it happen. It is their deaths I wish for first.

    Not to be too barbaric on Cyn’s birthday, but you know? I’ve had enough.

    1. Heather the Health District Flunky:

      Why should we have to ‘agree to disagree’ when you are full of shit?

      1. You should have written my response.
        What I did say was “We seem to have a misunderstanding. That phrase “agree to disagree” is between individuals at the kitchen table or over the fence. You are an employee, and I’m paying your salary.”
        I like yours a bit better, but hey.

    2. So this individual passed his boards and went immediately into a bureaucratic post, rather than spend any time actually treating patients or dealing with the public?

      And that is considered a good thing?

      1. Not just good. Stellar.
        Theoretically he works in several local clinics. The online information gives the lie to that.

  25. “They didn’t know Afghanistan, a place that is like our primordial tales where parents are served a stew of their children, a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism, would fall that fast.”

    Okay, you pushed my button Sarah. Here doth ensue a rant:

    Can we all stop pretending these people are stupid? They’re not. They are the very smartest of the smart, and they are EATING OUR LUNCH.

    This fall of Saigon II is not a mistake. Not a miscalculation. Not a screw-up. It is quite deliberate. Everyone involved, for the last 20 years, knew this would happen. The Afghans knew it, the Taliban knew it, NATO knew it. They f-ing well knew.

    I’m not going to pretend that -I- knew it, but as news reports stop being able to lie their way out of this fiasco, reports keep popping up of documents and officials in and out of government who called this right from the start. They knew.

    So why the surprise now? Why turn Trump’s orderly and gradual withdrawal into a rout with people falling off airplanes? Because now they can pin the disaster on the doddering old man in the White House who can’t find the bathroom on his own. Perfect fall guy.

    Deeper issue, why let it happen at all? Because what happens in Afghanistan is not important. They don’t care. As long as their gravy train keeps running and those biscuit wheels keep sopping up all that beautiful wonderful gravy, they do not give a single shit about guys falling off the outside of C-17s trying to escape the Taliban. They don’t care about the world-wide reputation of the United States. They don’t care about soldiers dying for nothing. They don’t care if inflation drives the whole middle class into poverty, destroys your savings and f-cks over the whole nation for 20 years.

    Those things are not important, okay? They don’t care.

    And how do we know this? We know because we’ve seen it before! Anybody out there old enough to remember John F. friggin’ Kennedy playing chicken with Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis? It was revealed in his memoirs that Khrushchev turned those ships around because he finally understood that Kennedy was insane. Kennedy wasn’t paying any attention to Khrushchev, he was busy positioning himself to win the coming election.

    It wasn’t important to Kennedy what the Soviets did. It wasn’t important if a war started. It wasn’t even important if nukes were launched. He didn’t care. It was only the next crooked election that mattered. All those Joint Chiefs of Staff guys and the whole Cabinet knew that, and let him do it.

    Okay? That’s what this really is. -We- are the stupid, clueless idiots who go along and let them do it.

    Here endeth the rant.

      1. My problem is that if they were stupid they wouldn’t be able to win all the time. And they do. They win.

        Biden won. By cheating of course, but he’s in the White House now and Trump isn’t. The people who put him there did not accidentally stumble their way to victory, they WON despite all the idiots under them who kept screwing up all over the place. All those guys caught on camera with boxes of votes, and they still won. Okay? That’s what I’m saying.

        The airport fiasco in Kabul is not due to incompetence. It is due to the people giving the orders NOT CARING how it turns out. They don’t care, and it is not because they are stupid. They don’t care because that outcome is not important to their main goals. It doesn’t matter if those people die, it doesn’t matter if billions of dollars in war materiel is abandoned, it doesn’t even matter if China invades Taiwan. Which they might.

        The people in charge clearly don’t think those things matter. What matters is the 2022 election. They’ll do ANYTHING to win. We are currently watching the level of anything they are willing to tolerate to get what they want. That’s where their effort and attention is directed. They don’t notice anything else.

        Ultimately that will probably prove to be amazingly wrong, when the larger universe finally take a huge dump on their heads, but for now they are -winning-.

        1. They AREN’T winning. Haven’t been for ten years. They’re barely holding on.
          Their “rule” required absolute control of the news and entertainment.

          1. So how’d they get that control if there weren’t enough smart people at least running the backroom show?

            1. Salesmanship, a world-view that made it OK to fire for having the Wrong Politics, lack of morals, and oh yes– having gotten into power before too many people could look closer. Most of the stuff is related to those But It Sounds Nice lies I mentioned earlier, where if you live by them you DO horrible things. Add in people who are willing to get others to do horrible things, and then use that against them…..

              Notice how many of the Old Guys who get caught in stuff have been and doing that stuff since before the internet?

              I’m over median age for the US. Most of these freak-shows have been in power as long as I can remember.

              The wheels are coming off, that’s not going to remove the SOBs, especially not when they’ve had literal generations to get folks to do something horrible that Isn’t That Bad if you believe their lies. But the lies burn, so folks are hurting…which makes them more vicious…which makes them more likely to do horrible things, which still doesn’t silence their guilt.

              1. I’m over median age for the US. Most of these freak-shows have been in power as long as I can remember.

                ————

                Feinstein – Got into power by bathing herself in Harvey Milk’s blood
                Biden – Was a Senator during the fall of Saigon. First ran for President while Reagan was in office

                There are a lot of *really* old Democrats right now. Unfortunately, the young ones are the really crazy scary ones.

                1. As was pointed out when Hillary was running– they didn’t have a healthy back-bench, because sane young blood is competition.

            2. a) bunch of cultists.
              b) Multi generational pursuit of power through lying.

              Cathedrals were also a multi generational religious project, but 1) Christianity is a functional religion, where communism is an evil stupidly wasteful religion 2) construction is a wee bit less destructive than lying is. Furthermore, 3) a cathedral is a physical object, so you can test whether it is realizable, and understand some of your progress towards constructing in. Scams and ‘then the revolution’ are things a bit more difficult to evaluate and communicate over the generations.

              Sarah formulates it in terms of becoming stupider over the generations, and that is a little bit too simple of a model, and it is the category of model that we should not have predictive faith in.

              Some of the people are loyal to the lying pyramid scam they were recruited into, because they respected the people who recruited them, largely because they were stupider than the people who recruited them. Certainly, there are enough worthless moron socialists in academia that this part of the model looks like it might explain everything.

              The combination of the lying, the magical thinking, the long term ‘investment’, and the measureability issues of the goal mean that a lot of the older communists are quite insane. So, what does it say about a younger person that they back an older communist? Personal interest, lacking the raw intelligence to notice problems, or themselves being quite insane.

              Humans all have limited time and energy, there are a lot of competing objectives where work and emotion are concerned. So, if you do not see results, you may start putting yourself into other things.

              Eric Flint clearly has a little intelligence, and an ability to apply it to some problems. Just as clearly, he has put a lot of his life into communism, and at this point probably will refuse to see anything that contradicts that investment. Consider instead someone who had put more into family.

              Joss Whedon is of a younger generation, and is definitely crazy of the ‘too many yesmen’ variety. But, it is also very clear in hindsight that his ‘feminism’ was only ever in service to his personal interest in sexual predation. Media seems to be riddled with Whedons, sexual predators who realize that left politics is very compatible with raising folks to be vulnerable prey, and personally using trust or respect as lures. There seems to even be stable gentlemen’s agreements supporting this in Hollywood and the news media. I know a university whose former president was clearly a cynic pretending to woke, and allegedly preying sexually on students. That university’s current president may be cast from the same mold.

              Pelosi thinks she is about to pull things off. Pelosi is eighty, has been invested in this for some time, and as of now is quite nuts, perhaps solely from being surrounded by sycophants for so long. She thinks the investment she has put in is bearing fruit, because her yesmen have been telling her so long that it is fruitful.

              There probably are some reasonably intelligent, thoughtful, observant types among those who listen to these old crazies, and conclude that now is the time to join in on the multigenerational investment into lies. However, the early generations of communists, before Gramsci, may have been less obviously nuts in their advanced old age. Because between the 1930s, and Gramsci, they were working towards near future goals, like serving soviet intelligence, or immediate revolution. So, in the early generations of institutions captured by the left, the go along to get alongs might have known less about how bad the communists are at presenting as sane outside of their own communities.

              Humans notice patterns. If you can control all the ‘information’ seen by a person, you can in principle control what patterns they notice, and what conclusions they draw. In practice, this never is entirely perfect. It is a lot more feasible with information bottlenecks.

              Forty, sixty years ago, if you saw a professor who you were not close friends with, it was under circumstances where they may have had a shrewd idea of how to behave in order to preserve their respectability, so the average person was not exposed to dozens of them making huge idiots of themselves. Curating twitter to be a leftist echo chamber makes perfect sense to the left, because magical thinking, but it also means that everyone can see the professor idiots and lunatics, and anyone who wants can have all the citations they can handle.

              So, the modern wealth of information is significant.

              1. Pelosi thinks she is about to pull things off. Pelosi is eighty,

                ————–

                A part of me wonders if she’s announced that she’s stepping down from the Speakership following the 2022 election because she anticipates ascending to the White House. She’s currently third in line, after all.

                Of course, even if she did pull it off, she’s too frail for the position. She doesn’t have the physical health and endurance for the job, imo.

                1. Thus between 2021 and 2024, Presidents 46, 47, 48, and 49, at minimum? Then President Trump comes back in for #50. That works #45 and #50! 🙂

            3. Because they are a militant religion. They have no morals but the party. They’ve promoted their own and ditched ours no matter how competent. So they got control and ran everything into the ground. They ain’t smart. They are, however, evil.

              1. A while back I thought of a simple simulation that would be easy for anyone to test for themselves.

                1. Take a deck of cards and deal out six cards face up. These are your academic department faculty.
                2. Remove the one on the left and place it in the discard pile. That’s a retirement. What’s left will choose the replacement.
                3. Now deal out two cards face up. Those are your new hire candidates.
                4. Whichever one has the highest value (1-10,j11,q12,k13) — i.e. skills and merit — gets the job and takes the rightmost place on the faculty.

                That’s how it’s supposed to work. Now assume that black cards are conservatives/moderates/apolitical types, and red cards are, well, Red.

                1. Remove the leftmost card from the faculty.
                2. Deal out two cards as candidates.
                3. The faculty now “votes” for the one with the highest face value, EXCEPT red faculty adds two to the value of any red candidate to simulate how political affinity substitutes for merit (so a red faculty would count an 8 of hearts as a 10, beating an 8 or 9 of spades). In case of ties, blacks vote for blacks and reds vote for reds.
                4. Repeat, and see how many cycles it takes until the entire faculty is red.

                1. 3a. The more red cards in the existing faculty, the more ‘bonus’ points they add to the red candidates. If all 6 are red, they add 4.

                  4a. And below average, and getting progressively lower.

                    1. I had overlooked that aspect yesterday.

                      My expected value for professor intelligence is a specialist, very able to apply intelligence inside the specialty, and often very bad with anything outside that specialty. Bad in weird ways. Since I tend to look at reality in very different ways, it can come across as stupid to me.

                      My feeling is that the selecting for idiots model isn’t the full explanation, and that it is not 100% correct, in that no simple model ever completely describes a human behavior across a large chunk of people. In particular, I think at times they accidentally select more right leaning candidates, and that some schools noticed the leftward tilt, and have made an effort to be right. Quite possibly a terribly implemented effort to be right, but an effort anyways. (Theory generally is so left contaminated that to teach a curriculum free of leftism, you would have to be able to reinvent the field, or dig up old sound stuff. And the folks capable of reinventing the field from first principles well are a bit rare.) Of course, there are go alongs every where that identify as left, and will try to infiltrate organizations trying to be right.

                      I’m pretty sure I overlooked selection by the prior cohort, but if I didn’t, I’m sure I felt that unstated and implied was sufficient given the other things I was arguing. (Wednesday was a bad day for frustration, Thursday for fatigue.)

                      Anyway, a lot of academic fields seem to be filled with scholars who function at a mental level that people of ordinary intelligence should grow out of after highschool. Decision by those in the younger cohort to follow those in the older cohort is one aspect of selection. The other is the selection by the older cohort. Since the project is a would be puppet mastering, and since the project is vague and distributed enough that they have no idea how to select people for getting the job done, they select people for feeding their personal sense of being a puppet master. IE, selection by the older cohort for idiots.

                      Anyway, I may have not understood that yesterday. I’m quite suspicious of my level of understanding now; I don’t drink coffee, but this is before coffee by my standards.

                    2. My feeling is that the selecting for idiots model isn’t the full explanation, and that it is not 100% correct, in that no simple model ever completely describes a human behavior across a large chunk of people.

                      Reminds me of when I realized why the terrorists are so stupid– as folks here have pointed out, if you want to do damage, and live, there are TON of ways to do it.

                      …but they’re not acceptable, because the value to them isn’t, EXACTLY, “doing damage.”

                      It’s got to be the right KIND of damage, done to show it off in the right way. They have different values.

                      See also, the “eating our lunch” vs “burning down the lunch room” discussion– from our values, what matters is our lunch is gone. That’s the important part.

                      From their values, it’s…. more complicated. And, given the number of folks and unexamined beliefs*, probably contradictory.

                      * that does sum up a mob, no?

                2. As it happens I had a deck of cards on my desk, so I tried a couple of rounds.

                  The first round I played it using your exact rules. Red got lucky and got most of the initial spots, but then high-value black cards kept coming out. Black never dominated, but it held its own. I stopped after about half-a-dozen rounds because neither side was making any headway.

                  For the second game I had three candidates per cycle instead of two, to give competitive reds a better chance of coming out. Instead black held 2/3s of the seats turn after turn. Again, I stopped after 6 or 7 rounds because the game wasn’t going anywhere.

                  Granted, this was a very small sample size and luck of the draw played a part. But I suspect you need to increase the bias a little.

                  1. I confess I’ve never actually played it out because I do not own a deck of cards. 🙂

                    The boost is arbitrary. As a thought experiment I considered starting with “imagine the boost is 13, so reds will always vote for the red without consideration of merit”. Which, in practice, may be more in line with reality.

                    I also considered using more than one deck, and splitting the candidate pile so the choices are always between a red and a black, never two reds or two blacks.

                    1. Just tried a game with maximum bias – as in, red ALWAYS voted for red – and played through the whole deck this time. And what I found was that it almost never mattered due to the draws I was getting. I never had more than 2 reds getting to vote at once until there were only 10 cards left to draw, and then red gained seats twice in a row due to the draw. The red bias only made a difference once they finally controlled more than half the board.

                      Once they did, though, it would be very hard for black to come back from that. I suspect that’s the real factor: getting to a majority is very luck-dependent, but once they have it they have it red can lock things down easily by being heavily biased when black is not.

    2. Can we all stop pretending these people are stupid? They’re not. They are the very smartest of the smart, and they are EATING OUR LUNCH.

      No, they’re setting the lunchroom on fire.

      Both involve our lunch being gone, but it’s a rather different ‘win’ condition….

      1. I agree, they’re winning by destroying the West. Not just America, also Canada, Britain, Australia and Europe.

        This is their blind spot. They think the nations are invulnerable. They’re like the geniuses in the Middle East who take soil from the dike that holds the sewage lagoon. They think they can just keep taking soil from wherever it is most convenient, and nothing bad will ever happen.

        They keep thinking that right up to the moment the dike fails and a sewage tsunami sweeps away their village, drowning their families in shit. They keep doing it no matter how many villages die. Because they want the soil! They don’t care if the dike breaks.

        That’s who we are dealing with.

        1. Nah. THat was before. Now they don’t have control, so they’re just malicious toddlers causing trouble. The minute we stop obeying them, they got nothing. Look at the “dreaded Delta.”

    3. Gotta disagree. There’s no way that whoever’s pulling Biden’s strings is controlling the Taliban. The Taliban’s not even controlling the Taliban. And that’s what a master plan would require, along with so much more.

      Thugs generally do not have a lot of deep thinking. I heard a writer explain how she writes for evil characters: just imagine a really selfish person. That’s wgat we’re dealing with. Not an intricately thought-out plan. They are simpky too far removed from reality for that to ever work.

      As for the JFK example, who on earth is surprised that a politician is thinking about his own future over his constituents? Pretty sure people knew that at the time. And FWIW, disaster from the missile crisis was averted by sheer luck. Kennedy, his brother, and the rest of his brain trust thought they were playing brinksmanship with the Kremlin; they weren’t. Local commanders at the Cuban missile sites had the authority to launch. Kennedy never knew.

      1. I’m not saying there’s a master plan. I’m saying they don’t care what happens to Afghanistan. They’re not paying attention to it, because no matter what catastrophe occurs they think their goals will not be affected.

        Kennedy got what he wanted out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He risked a nuclear war, but my point is that he didn’t care if a war occurred. It wasn’t important. He would still get what he wanted even if there was a war with the Soviet Union.

        I’m not saying they are right to think that. I’m saying that’s how they think. And it works for them, so far. They’re winning.

        1. Okay, there’s no master plan, but they’re super smart, and it appears that their goal is to make their puppets look like such incompetent fools that they lose control of them. That’s “winning.” Not buying it.

          The simpler explanation is that the people who look like incompetent fools actually *are* incompetent fools, or they’re being controlled by incompetent fools. The only goal they can have right now is to ensure that no one finds out who they are. What a win.

          Regarding the weird side argument about Kennedy — my point is that your take on how the Cuban missile crisis was resolved is incorrect, and doubling down by saying Kennedy didn’t care if his country got nuked, because then he’d be sure to win reelection, is a pretty wild claim.

          Anyway, their winning looks a lot like losing.

          2. I used to work for a guy who worked for Joe Kennedy at the time…. He said JFK was eager to put his finger on that red button, but was held back by saner heads.

        2. See, i have to disagree with your assesment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don’t care what Kruschev said in his memoir, this is the same guy that swore “we will bury you”

    4. Phantom, they’re not smart. They’re a cargo cult.
      I’ve seen what gets acclaimed as smart. It’s “repeat after me” bullshit.
      Honestly, stop thinking htey’re smart or eating our lunch. They’re trying to destroy us because we’re at long last fighting back. They’re SCARED.

      1. Some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life has come from the mouths of people who are acknowledged experts in their fields of endeavor, whose accomplishments are inarguable. They’re genuinely gifted… in their field. When they step outside it, they’re morons.

        My favorite was the MD/PhD AIDS researcher who thought the whole cartridge came out of the gun, brass and all, not just the little bullet on the end. Stupid people don’t get their MD and a PhD to go with it, doing cutting edge bio-research. They can’t. It’s too hard. But the conversation was about firearms. She didn’t know a damn thing about firearms, and she wouldn’t listen. That’s the problem.

        The politicians and media wranglers and military officers who created the SNAFU that is Afghanistan this week are not stupid. Their attention is highly focused on their area of expertise, which is climbing the Big Dog ladder.

        They’re not trying to destroy us. They don’t care about us, probably don’t even notice us. They’re focused on getting up that next rung. Smart. But stupid.

        Does Paris Hilton care about the economy or inflation? Going by her public statements, no. Is Paris Hilton smart? Oh yes. She is. She’s focused on her area of expertise, being famous and making money from that fame. -Should- Paris Hilton care about the economy? Absolutely, because if it crashes she’ll go broke. But she won’t, because she busy with the fame thing. Smart. But stupid.

        Now change the name to Kamala Harris, and you will understand Kamala Harris. Except Paris Hilton is most likely a lot smarter at her job than Harris is at hers.

        They’re scared because we, collectively, are not behaving the way we’re supposed to. We’re fucking up their plans and overturning their cozy deals with their buddies. We are, finally, starting to catch on to the real game. That’s the worst thing that could happen to them. That’s why they moved mountains to get the Sniffer in the White House. If Trump had won again they’d all be going to jail.

        1. Case in point. My Father-in-Law(retired Col. in the middle ’80’s) was Chief of Internal Surgery at the largest VA hospital in the country(at the time). AFAIK the only light switch he ever changed in his house was in the bathroom and he put in upside down… .

        2. And that is why the Oracle says that Socrates is the wisest man in the world!

          (Pity that Plato’s Apology of Socrates is not required reading.)

    5. The most glaring problem with your theory is that many of the people most affected by this mess, and trapped in Afghanistan, are the very same people who keep the gravy train that you mentioned running. That train isn’t going to deliver if there aren’t thousands of pencil pushers sitting at desks making sure that the wheels keep turning. But right now, an awful lot of those people are trapped in Kabul.

      1. “The most glaring problem with your theory is that many of the people most affected by this mess, and trapped in Afghanistan, are the very same people who keep the gravy train that you mentioned running.”

        The man who owns the railroad does not care if a derailment kills a train full of widows, orphans and railroad workers. He will hire more workers, shove the wreckage off the tracks and drive the hell on.

        Should he care? Yes. There will be consequences from that event. Some quite bad.

        Does he care? No! He’s got shareholders, debts and a mistresses who wants a new Duesenberg. That’s what he cares about, that’s what he’s paying attention to. One train? He doesn’t care! There’s always another train, and another bunch of monkeys to run it.

        He’ll donate a new wing to Our Lady of Mercy hospital next month and everybody will forget the derailed train. That is how it has gone every other time something came unstuck in his life, and he has no reason to think it won’t go that way for him again. He’ll just rinse and repeat, as always. He’s smart, but stupid.

        See? That’s what they’re doing. One train crashes, another leaves the station. Take a look at Drudge Report today, all kinds of “look, a squirrel!” shit going on this week. Damage control. Smart, but stupid.

        2. That works only until the people who know railroads decide working for you’s likely to land then in a box.

          Yeah, you can get minimum wage temp workers to sweep glass in a live assembly line and can possibly even get away with having a few of them get a half ton crate dropped on their torso, but do it enough and people find out. And if the law doesn’t come for you, their family will.

  26. US Intelligence – an oxymoron if there ever was one. Why do we pay these people. This was from 4 days ago. Technically they’re not wrong, but …..
    “The collapse of US-backed Afghan security forces in the face of a nationwide offensive by the Taliban insurgency has led US military and intelligence officials to warn that the fall of Kabul could come within one month to 90 days, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.”

    1. Don’t confuse what the news covers from may-or-may-not-exist sources with what the intel community is actually saying– it’s as accurate as when they cited “sources” saying the US military would beat the average American city, for an example where the thing being reported on actually existed and can be checked.

      Actual, and much criticized, report basically said that if one made a butt-ton of very favorable assumptions, the entire force of the US military could probably beat a moderately sized American city.

      It included things like there BEING choke-points going in and out of the city.

      1. It included things like there BEING choke-points going in and out of the city.

        Well. That kind of leaves out every city that isn’t in the mountains or mostly surrounded by water, doesn’t it.

        1. And even then…

          The US military trying to take Greater LA would not go well. And it’s got a lot of both mountains and water nearby.

            1. Oh yeah. The water is a major weak point for most of Southern California. And I will not talk about the idle thoughts I’ve had while driving around the state, because too many of them are plausible terror targets if you know the right location.

              1. Yes. A friend and I started chatting about something at lunch several years ago, then caught ourselves, and he said loudly, “Nah, can’t work for the novel’s plot. We’d better try something different.” Because we were getting a wee bit too close to some things, and people at the tables near us were giving us Looks. (Lots of active duty and retired military around.) He’s an Army vet, I keep up with things and have Odd security interests.

        2. You can be generous and include those that have major roads going out– like El Paso, there’s very limited roads leaving the area just because there’s a limited number of places people want to go– but anywhere that use to be farmland?

          HA!

          Even if it’s “just” dirt roads, those are usually graveled over dirt, which even a SmartCar can handle. And they bleed out EVERYWHERE.

      2. I need to find an unmarked up scan of that 1940 news article quoting how Bell’s new fighter was doing 520mph in level flight, and over 700mph in a dive.

        It further went on to say that the only fighter believed to be capable of matching it was Lockheed’s new interceptor that was capable of 420mph at 75% throttle.

        For those of you who aren’t airplane folks, they’re talking about the P-39. It’s Vne (speed, never exceed) is 520 mph. That’s the speed where important things start departing the airframe, like the wings.

        The P-38 numbers are also special…

        Reporters have always been idiots.

        1. I wonder how long the P-39 could have dived at that speed (structural issues, aside) before hitting the ground? IIRC, it was only capable of doing well at lower altitudes (which is why the US didn’t like it, but the Soviets loved it).

          1. That’s actually nota big problem, so long as you can retain control enough of the airplane to get the nose up before one reaches the air/earth interface.

            The bigger problem is, it’s really not possible with a propeller engine to break the sound barrier. The tips of the propeller are moving at a combined mach of the aircraft’s forward motion and the rotation speed of the prop, so you get a massive wave drag spike as the tips go super sonic, and they stop generating thrust.

            Thing is, the actual plane had a top speed, even in the turbo charged version, of only around 400 mph. Same with the P-38, and the P-38 was actually starting to experience sound barrier effects at that speed.

            So once you know a little bit about the aircraft, the numbers they’re quoting are as ludicrous as Car & Driver talking about the latest Honda breaking the sound barrier on all season tires.

            I don’t even know how they would come up with these numbers.

      3. >> “Actual, and much criticized, report basically said that if one made a butt-ton of very favorable assumptions, the entire force of the US military could probably beat a moderately sized American city.”

        And I’m guessing that one very important assumption you CAN’T make anymore is that the military will all obey your orders. I image a lot of our troops are fantasizing about putting their own brass and CiC in front of a firing squad right about now.

        What percentage do you think would turn if it came down to a civil war?

        1. fantasizing about putting their own brass and CiC in front of a firing squad

          Can’t say for sure, but right now I expect a bunch of Airborne and Marines are considering what would be the downside of fragging their on-site top command.

        2. And I’m guessing that one very important assumption you CAN’T make anymore is that the military will all obey your orders.

          The guy was honest enough to right up front state that he had no idea what on earth would manage to motivate the troops to be willing to stand against a US city full of US civilians, just like in the “Marines vs US Girl Scouts” plan there was a magic wand that just Made It Work.
          So that calculation was treated as any other civilian population.

          From memory, mind you.

          1. >> “no idea what on earth would manage to motivate the troops to be willing to stand against a US city full of US civilians”

            Yeah, somehow I can’t see the Marines who just took in a random AFGHANI baby deciding to attack innocent U.S. citizens.

            >> “just like in the “Marines vs US Girl Scouts” plan there was a magic wand that just Made It Work”

            Hey, I’m only talking about INNOCENT U.S. citizens here! The Girl Scouts have it coming:

        3. Our elites are stupid enough to try and find out.

          https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2021/08/more-pressing-issues-than-afghanistan.html

          “the president told his team the U.S. was simply providing life support for the Kabul government while neglecting more pressing issues.”

          “In our new compassionate, tolerant, be-nice-to-everybody world where hatred and stereotypes are taboo, there is in fact one type of person throughout the five continents whom it is not only acceptable to ridicule, castigate, demonize and, yes… hate, it is in fact almost mandatory to do so. And that is: a leader or member of America’s Republican party. And no, that it is not something that is recent (or the fault of Donald Trump or George W Bush…)

          As an 1860 presidential contender, Abraham Lincoln, put it more than 160 years ago, as he tried to address Southerners and members of the Democrat Party only five or six years after the birth of the Republican Party,”

    2. Because if they don’t get paid the ruling class gets horse heads in their beds and possibly Xs on their streets.

  27. I can’t believe that no one has commented here yet on the source of the quote “A man with a (mental) overcoat is an enemy.” – The Puppet Masters.

  28. I think much of this is also due to the rise of the instant, electron-and-pixel-based economy. It’s a huge opportunity for people who have no actual skills or accomplishments to become successful and respected. And when enough folks see en ‘expert’s talking head on a screen often enough, that itself lends credibility to what’s being claimed. (and they certainly aren’t going to go do any deep research into their credentials or track records).

    2. “For action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action. He is what one calls committed – which is certainly what the Communist party anticipates, for example, and what the Nazis accomplished. The man who has acted in accordance with the existing propaganda has taken his place in society. From then on he has enemies. Often he has broken with his milieu or his family; he may be compromised. He is forced to accept the new milieu and the new friends that propaganda makes for him. Often he has committed an act reprehensible by traditional moral standards and has disturbed a certain order; he needs a justification for this – and he gets more deeply involved by repeating the act in order to prove that it was just. Thus he is caught up in a movement that develops until it totally occupies the breadth of his conscience. Propaganda now masters him completely — and we must bear in mind that any propaganda that does not lead to this kind of participation is mere child’s play.”

      — Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes

      Ellul was a Christian Anarchist and probably too impressed by Marx. Despite that, he was one of the most interesting writers I read when I was a young, rather stupid, doctrinaire libertarian. I could post entire chapters that are relevant to our current situation.

      The entire ruling class here and abroad civilian and military have compromised themselves and now they’re stuck. I hope it chokes them.

          1. The lies have to be something that will make it easier to do something horrible, though.

            Getting folks to start with “being nice” and then when they’re in a tough spot, they act on the thing that before was just “being nice”, especially when the right thing to do is so hard— and they’re in.

            Sex outside of marriage, avoiding have to raise a child, easy divorce… they’re all eased into with being nice, and then it’s so much easier to live the lie than to face the hard stuff…and then you’re left with either admitting you did something that was wrong and bad, or you can hate the people who make you feel bad, even if they only make you feel bad because they *didn’t* take the easy route.
            Then, they are hateful, and must be punished.

            1. There’s a reason why Redemption Arcs are hard to pull off well in fiction – they’re hard IRL. You have to admit you were wrong and keep trying to do better, with that burning in your past.

              But it’s worth it. If only for your own self-respect.

              1. The honoring of Redemption is probably one of the biggest theological powers in Christianity– and one of the hardest to understand. I know you’re familiar with how nasty tribal politics gets- it *guts* them, by granting honor to those who *don’t* carry a grudge against those who stopped, and try to make amends.

                We all understand the idea of wrong, and punishment, and justice, even if we’re scared of justice. (Like the old joke goes, my conscience is clear– because my memory is terrible!)

                The idea that, if we try to fix things, even if it’s something that can’t be fixed– the working to TRY to make amends means we can be forgiven is very, very powerful. Hard to accept, but *powerful*.

                ***************

                My usual any-vague-excuse PSA:
                Rachel’s Vineyard.
                If you’re hurting in relation to an abortion– even if you still don’t think you did anything wrong, but you *hurt*– they will try to help you. Most of them have *been* there.
                Women, and men, too. There’s online options, too.
                https://www.rachelsvineyard.org

                Yes, I do believe that pain is one of the things that drives some of the more insane behavior. But more than that, I don’t want people to hurt when there’s help.

                1. I’m all in favor of gutting tribal politics. Yes, it’s familiar to the primitive instincts and thus what people default to given any excuse. It’s also poisonous to the spirit over time.

                  1. I’m all in favor of gutting tribal politics.

                    That maaaaaaaaaay slightly show up in your work, in the “show, don’t tell” sense.

                    Mostly from the lack of anvils dropped to justify being petty But It’s OK We’re The Heroes. (K, I may be a little burnt out on “modern” writing right now. 😀 )

            2. I agree but the first lie, or several lies, just has to be something you get away with. Personal betrayals, yes, but even smaller lies lead to bigger lies.

              I think your point about “nice” is very interesting. The bourgeois left all know that they’re the “good people,” so anything that upsets them must be bad because the alternative is that they aren’t the “good” people and that would be intolerable. Children in other words. They haven’t taken the steps to form their conscience, which explains how Biden and Pelosi can describe themselves as “devout” Catholics despite being opposed to all the Church’s teaching.

              I believe that theology is a banned topic, so I’ll stop but I recommend John Bossy Christianity in the West for an overview of how the west began the shift.

              1. Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

                ~ Theodore Dalrymple

                And the lies start with little white lies, because that one little white lie will keep you from hurting someone’s feelings, and you don’t want to be a Mean Person who hurts other people’s feelings, do you? Especially when they’re the downtrodden.

                And then once you’ve assented to the first lie, you have little defense against another, to avoid hurting this other group’s feelings, and then another and another, and eventually everything you say is a lie and the ranks of the Oppressed™ have swollen until they have all the power and you have none.

                All because you let others manipulate you on your sympathies.

              2. Theology is allowed, but if you’re sensing hot spots it’s wise to avoid. It’s arguing religion to the tune of “no, this is the true faith!”, plus standard poop-head behavior that’s banned. *grin* I geek on that stuff too much to see when it annoys folks, so I’ll go with your sense of a hot spot ahead.

                Not familiar with John Bossy, but Flannery O’Connor made a very strong point about what I call “nice,” when she said something about “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber”.
                As I’ve said in here before– mercy killing to put the ‘victim’ out of the killer’s suffering.

                The “nice” I’m looking at is, for an example, a family friend that was divorced….um…. 8? 9? times. He’s currently happily married, for the longest period ever– some 15 years.
                To ex-wife #3.
                But every time stuff got hard, they did an easy split, and nobody would tell them “just grow up” because that’s *mean* and *you have no right* and *how dare you*, and so on.

                And yes, kids were harmed in this “niceness.” I think that’s part of what got them to grow up…not that the other exes seem to have grown….

                Which is why all the TV shows *have* to show divorce is, if not an active good, then at worst just another kid thing that’s totally normal. Not the equivalent of an amputation, to be used like a dangerous tool, much less the even older view of it being a legal recognition of an existing fact, that the marriage is *gone*.

                Because an honest accounting of the costs is not nice.
                It would hurt, and it would be hard, so…just make it easy, and if anybody questions it, deploy the motte and bailey.

                1. Bossy was a historian, I highly recommend him. The book is short and well written but very dense with ideas. One of the things he talks about is the change from emphasis on the seven deadly sins and works toward a legalistic compliance with the 10 commandments and faith that came in with the reformation. Malformed conscience is a very RC centric thing, pity that, and I didn’t want to start a debate, though I’m probably the only one who knew where that ended, having read Bossy. Faith without good works is nothing as James wrote but Luther excluded and all that.

                  1. Eh, a lot of stuff is a very RC centric looking thing, because that’s the loudest folks who are speaking English right now and make the very old philosophy available.

                    Thankfully, even just in my lifetime folks have gone from “Eeeek! Catholic Kooties!” to “k, who cares who said it, is it true?”
                    The “but I feeeeeeeel” aspect is, from looking around, not a good way to go; but, on the flip side, we can also see that the gut-level no, this is bad carries truth and power as well. So it’s a matter of talking about how that works. The Catholic way is ‘formation of conscience’. (I think some of the other more high-church sorts do, too?)

                    Even if it didn’t mean they are more likely to agree with me, I’d consider this a huge win. 😀 It’s harder to lie to people who know what they think, and why.

                    Folks are becoming more open to things that are not-bad. They may not respect her as much as I do, but there are Evangelicals honoring Mary! Some even use tabernacle language to do it, though more are just agreeing with probably-Gabriel’s greeting to her in the Bible.
                    This is still shocking to my mother, and wonderful in general. 😀

                2. Divorce – “the equivalent of an amputation, to be used like a dangerous tool,”

                  Yes. This is how it should be. And I wish more people would recognize the harm it does to children even when absolutely necessary. Specifically because when it is absolutely necessary, it means there’s been a lot of harm going on inside the marriage a long time. Meaning anyone involved, and definitely the children, have been deeply injured.

                  One of the worst things about my parents’ divorce was that my mother got to come out looking like an angel for dealing with the psychopathic and sometimes downright stupid things my father had been pulling for years. (She got summoned into court after getting rid of a completely broken-down armchair, no lie.) When in fact she’d done, and continued to do, serious harm to all her children to the point 2 of them are just as sociopathic as their father and myself and the other semi-sane one have only in the past few years realized how insane everything was.

                  Appreciate your laying things out like this. 🙂

                  1. I’m glad it makes sense from the inside of one of the messes.

                    I wish I could share my family… they’re crazy, but it’s functioning crazy, yell-at-folks-but-still-love-them crazy.

    3. “I think much of this is also due to the rise of the instant, electron-and-pixel-based economy.”

      Which was something else Brooks warned about: When you can make things happen by typing the correct incantation on a keyboard, you are prone to believe that things happen without physical components.

    1. Looks like we all know what the big story’s going to be for the rest of the week and through the weekend.

        2. Perhaps a little too convenient.

          There’s already some speculation of a false flag, of the guy sounding like a caricature of how the Left imagines us.

          2. That was my first thought when I heard the rough of the story. It’s fake, a put-up, especially since everyone and their dog knows neither the POTUS nor the VPOTUS are home.

            2. “False Flag!” was trending on Twitter almost immediately. It was certainly my first thought.

              1. Gee, guy who looks like a good quarter of the AntiFa mobs in Kenosha pulls over in a hopped up black pickup (from the pictures I saw, it was odd– not dirty or beat up enough to be an off road vehicle, but it did have mud on it; a pavement princess that someone drove over a park, or what?) drives up on the sidewalk, throwing dollar bills out the window, and announces he has a sound-activated nitrogen bomb in his glove box?

                Why would folks think he’s anything but sincere and perfectly sane?

                1. I am tempted to say “sounds sane to me”, but in fact it does not sound sane, even to me. Or especially to me.

                  I have a dark sense of humor, but “sounds sane to me” is a joke that is a little bit too inappropriate, even for me, even as unhappy as I am right now.

      3. I thought so too. But it is already off the news … Supposedly a Trump supporter. But if that was true they’d be news breaking it all over the place. 7:36 PM PST and nada. Been dropped from the news cycle already. We’ll see if it holds.

        1. Heard elsewhere that he apparently uses a lot of weed. That’s something else that would get it out of the news cycle very quickly…

          1. So, probably like the guy who did the Pentagon train station stabbing– known violently insane individual, long history of interaction with police, finally did something that got attention.

        1. Honestly, crazy, possibly chemically enhanced, is my default expectation for stuff like this.

          I have heard reports he may have been ranting about towels. As in, “the thing you dry yourself off with” towels, not racial slang for various middle Eastern groups. Like actual towels.

          I haven’t actually verified it, so this could easily be a bad game of telephone translation, but we will see. Or it will disappear off of the news like the schizophrenic who stabbed the DC police officer at a bus stop a few weeks ago.

          1. At times like these, it’s important if someone thinks they’re losing it, that they have someone they can trust to turn to, to help them get their heads together.

            And not just for their sake: as sad as this is to consider, everyone has to think about how their actions will reflect on others. I know every excess by the left will be excused while we have to watch our every word and action, and I know it’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is.

  30. Two things come to mind.
    First was when at former job the networks were being converted to TCP/IP architecture. Knowing not one damn thing about it, I found a book at the library and was working through it. One day two experts- multiple degrees and all- were over trying to figure out why the line between us and them wasn’t working right. Our guy- who’d mostly self-taught on this- seemed to know more about it than they. After a while boss came over- I was working on the book- and quietly said “I think you know more about this than those assholes do.”

    It was our guy who figured out the actual problem.

    Second is a few weeks ago someone I know made a post that “If you don’t like what your school is teaching then homeschool or private school for someone who fits your beliefs, because the teacher knows better than you how and what to teach because they have one or more degrees.”
    Coming from someone who really ought to know better than to think that a degree makes someone competent and expert, it was jarring. Plus the attitude that “You shouldn’t have any input in your kids school.” That just pissed me off no end, especially considering some of the idiocy that’s come out of so many degreed and multi-degreed teachers and administrators. Then a guy popped up with “If I need surgery I want an expert, not a faith healer.”

    My response: “True. A surgeon who went to school, then med school, then trained for years- more if he goes into a specialty- and has to do further education over time.
    And they STILL screw up; you think a teacher having a degree/s means they can’t be bad at it, or can’t screw up?”

    I’ve found out lately that an awful lot of people who ought to know better have a very unhealthy respect for anyone with a degree or listed as an ‘expert’.

    1. “…the teacher knows better than you how and what to teach because they have one or more degrees.”

      The comment is one I hear often. It really means “shut up and do as you’re told.”

      Usually said to me by someone who sucks at their job, whatever it is that they do. They never seem to understand that most teachers suck at teaching the way they suck at their own job.

      I’m not inclined to go along, let’s just say.

      1. I have the perfect comeback for that.

        True story: my 6th grade science teacher was ADAMANT that Titanic had been discovered by James Cameron in 1996. Me, being obsessed with undersea exploration in general, knew that Robert Ballard had discovered the Titanic in 1986. We “debated” this back and forth, which ended with me bringing in my copy of a book that Ballard himself had written about the discovery. Teacher’s response was to make me stay in for recess on a BS charge of not being prepared for class. Then followed by “Hey Google/Siri/Alexa, who discovered RMS Titanic?”

        1. We got taught that John Glenn was the first man in space, and that the Pilgrims discovered America.

          1. Oh FFS.

            Glen was the first AMERICAN to ORBIT the Earth. As far as the Pilgrims go, that’s not even close.

            I can’t facepalm or headdesk hard enough.

      2. But then there’s the autistic kid who, if you make some offhand remark during math about word origin will go rambling off about the abandonment of diacritical marks in the English language and you just lost the whole class.

        1. Or the “Spectrum” kid who objects to the story-math problem that is having you calculate the average number of foals a herd of mules will produce.

          (Yes, we got questions on that level of stupid. That’s before history taught with an eye to throwing elbows.)

          There’s many reasons we home school….

          1. >> “having you calculate the average number of foals a herd of mules will produce.”

            Easiest. Math problem. Ever.

            2. Oh, they gave numbers for what was being produced– and there are actually very, very, very rare mules which can become pregnant, so it’s not ACTUALLY zero, just practically so.

              But that’s the kind of thing that would drag me off in the weeds for hours.

              1. Now I’m wondering if you could take those rare ones and actually breed a race of fertile mules.

    2. a) Why should I trust or respect the thinking of someone so hidebound and unimaginative that they see getting a bunch of degrees by rote as a good career move? If you want to impress me with degrees, do cool things with them that stand on their own.
      b) I find Education majors particularly suspect, but the great thing about American tertiary education, anyone can get just about any degree if they want to enough, is also very much a horrible thing. You can’t stop lunatics from studying things that aren’t appropriate for a university degree without also stopping people going against expedience, and much of the real useful work.
      c) There are a lot of people who haven’t seen the degree sausage made, and who then make assumptions about the value of a degree, and where the value comes from. Or, if they were involved, they didn’t pay attention to what was happening, or really think about it.

      I kind of want to expand this to a case study/mental experiment, but not a good time.
      d) The experiences that go into a degree matter. Multiple degrees only make an expert when the experiences are relevant. If and only if the problem is of a type where experience with similar past problems can be applied. A bureaucracy who can’t tell if my resume is relevant, whether it says fifty years experience with samba, or it says five years experience with samba, is not a bureaucracy that can judge the real value of the experiences of someone with multiple degrees. A single bachelors is potentially easy to assess. Maybe also a JD. The only people worrying about assessing MDs maybe have enough background to assess MDs, or maybe they are the blind leading the blind, for all I know.

      Most people do not have a very discerning eye for the type of a problem that they are asking the expert to solve.

      Okay, a plumbing problem is probably something that a good plumber can fix, if you can find a good plumber. I can tell you, my last problem I sent to a plumber, I had only figured out there was a leak, and got the location of the leak entirely wrong. I thought I understood what I was asking, and did not. The reason I know for sure that the plumber was correct? No more puddles, so he fixed it. That guy was a real expert.

      e) Anyone who is trying to tell you that someone understands the problem and the solution because that someone is an expert, almost certainly does not understand the problem well enough themselves to know if an appropriate matching expert exists, or whether that someone is such an expert.

      There are definitely types of expert so specialized and esoteric that you kind of need to be an expert yourself to judge their work, and tell that they are super supreme experts. Guys you would tell your own type of experts to go learn from, if they are interested in x, because they teach you things about x that you would never discover if you self studied x. But such a super supreme expert is someone whose level of expertise does not matter to people outside that field.

      If it matters whether I understand that someone is an expert, then I can judge the alleged expert by the quality of their work.

      1. When my husband was a computer tech, he wasn’t necessarily the fastest one or the one with the best customer service skills (though he was no slouch.) What was he an expert in? Weird stuff. As in how-the-hell-is-that-even-a-thing stuff. Whenever his group had a problem that nobody understood, they’d hand it off to him. He’d figure out that it was some crazy combination of circumstances, figure out how to reverse it, and move on.

        And yes, that skill still pops up from time to time, not always with computers.

        1. I occasionally get work via word-of-mouth referrals, where someone needs someone willing to dive into a proprietary inventory system written in QuickBASIC, or can set up a printer on an old Xenix business machine, or load new software onto a VAX, or knows how to manage serial interfaces on antique CNC machinery, or…

          Those were once cutting-edge tech skills, then obsolete, and now so obsolete they’re worth money again.

          Sometimes I’m the second or third arrow, following along behind big IT consultancy outfits who either couldn’t be bothered to look it up, didn’t want to get old-software cooties, didn’t want to get their hands dirty, or had one skillset and weren’t interested in expanding it. Or maybe only interested in taking advantage of an opportunity to sell a “solution” instead of fixing the problem.

          1. COBOL, RPG, etc., programmers, mid to late ’90s (Y2K). Still could be true for some legacy systems. Ironically, if those legacy systems haven’t been replaced … don’t laugh, it is entirely possible, they are looking at another crisis approaching 2030, if they didn’t hit it already.

      2. The reason I know for sure that the plumber was correct? No more puddles, so he fixed it. That guy was a real expert.

        My experience with expert craftsman and technicians is that the really good ones will then turn to you and explain so you can understand: “See, you thought the leak was here because puddle, but it was really over here because [simplified reasons]. Now you know, in case it happens again.”

        1. Yup, the really good ones are excited about their area of expertise and want to share it with anybody willing to listen. The ones that shoot down your questions with “You can’t understand” don’t actually understand the subject themselves, they just have a supply of rote solutions to common problems. Hey, if the ‘Expert’ can’t understand it, what chance would you have?

        3. If the ‘Expert’ can’t explain it to you, he/she don’t understand it properly hisself.

        4. I discovered this blog a few days ago: https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/introducing-dead-men-tales/

          It’s about… steam space heating. *Old* steam space heating, from the 1800s and early 1900s, mostly. Steam heat doesn’t even exist where I live, and the kinds of systems he talks about are ancient history even up in Yankeeland.

          Not a subject I have any interest in, but he explains why bizarre Rube-Goldbergish systems were designed the way they were, and how they worked – usually until someone meddled with them without understanding what was going on, how how they were figured out and repaired. And it’ *fascinating*.

    3. f) The so called professional teachers are dividing up instruction tasks by grade and by subject. Teaching is a kind of task where the real results are holistic, aggregated across grades and subjects. For most of the teachers, it is basically impossible even for them to really see if they are doing a good or a bad job, or to get much feedback on how changes in process create changes in performance.

      After I do a bunch more learning, I start to understand the good and bad in what the previous cohort of teachers did for me. But, I did a lot of self study and reflection to even grasp how primary and secondary school went, maybe a lot of people do not bother. Certainly, even if everyone does bother, they are not all continuing to discuss it with every teacher they had in primary and secondary school.

      This is partly trash talking teachers, and partly a further reflection on degree quality. There are degrees where people continue to really think about what they were trained in, and sometimes go back to talk to their professors. This definitely is not every major.

      1. When I was in middle school, my school had something called CORE. This was History, English, and Social Studies, three periods taken in the same classroom with the same teacher. The theory was that those three topics interacted enough that you needed to get them together, with the same evaluator, and I think it was a good one.

    4. It’s unlikely to work, but–
      you may try explaining that an education degree is aimed at classroom management.

      If you’re not trying to handle roughly 30 unrelated students who are the same age, +/- 9 months, for a period of between 45 minutes and two hours, and then switching to an entirely different group….

      THEN AN EDUCATION DEGREE IS NOT USEFUL.

      The US military is far more effective at training than US schools, and they do it by having people who know the subject and then training them for small room management with intense focus. It’s a few weeks of training, maximum.

      My mother got a minor in education, and it’s useless for attempting to homeschool my kids. Because it’s not *designed* to teach 6 different students ranging from preschool to college prep subjects.

      1. “The US military is far more effective at training than US schools, and they do it by having people who know the subject and then training them for small room management with intense focus. ”

        Which is also the corporate model for technical training.

        1. Depending on audience, I can flutter and explain that I was good enough to teach the other kids when I was a kid in school, the military thought I was good enough to teach when I was in the military, and I do not see how either of those things have changed just because I am related to the children involved– quite the opposite, I know a lot of the mental quirks that drove my teachers insane.

          ….they tend to BSOD at that point because “everyone knows” only stupid people are breeding. There’s a song about it and everything. -.-

        2. Well, that costs money. So now it is hand em the software and a course book and they either get up to speed or you fire em for poor performance.

      2. I asked my old second grade teacher, 30 years later, “Sister, why were you all so mean?” She told me that when she was a novice at 16, they put her in front of a class of 50+ hooligans in Hell’s Kitchen. “You kept order or you went under.”

      3. …but if teachers became more successful and efficient, the schools wouldn’t need as many teachers.

        “The union won’t stand for that.”

    5. From homeschooling and looking at other, successful home schoolers– it’s closer to being a tutor.

      You know, the job that public schools have kids of the same age doing in all of the classes, while the paid teacher reads off of prepared lecture, copies questions from the book, and checks answers against prepared answers.

      Because tutoring requires one on one interaction that isn’t possible in a public school environment.

  31. I read the news today, oh boy.

    Apparently today’s my day to see all through fecal colored glasses. Don’t see things getting better before they get worst, a heck of a lot worst and worser and worstist.

    Hence I’m going to drive down to Healy (125 miles from here in North Pole, AK.) to buy a pound of sugar. If that doesn’t change my attitude, there’s always John Jamesons.

    If I see more than 5 moose and a bear two along the way, I’ll let you guys know, as more than that would be remarkable.

    1. Hence I’m going to drive down to Healy (125 miles from here in North Pole, AK.) to buy a pound of sugar.

      So, all the things Europeans fail to understand about the size of America? That. But from the perspective of an American failing to understand Alaska.

      1. Not to mention Juno. What’s a wierd, interesting place, once you start climbing the streets.

        Cool library, too.

    2. What, is Fairbanks out? If that’s the case, I think that’s bigger news that what’s on the TV.

      1. No, the local stores are not out of sugar, sorry if I mislead you. The pound of sugar was just an excuse for the, change of attitude, nice drive.

        I did buy forty pounds of sugar and quite a bit of other stuff at the Healy Three Bears, though.

        However, various shelves in the local grocery stores are often empty since the Bad China Cold. There are days, for example, when no bologna can be found on any of the shelves, other days sharp cheddar isn’t available anywhere.

        But yes, even though sugar isn’t a problem, in my opinion the shelves, nowadays, being bare of certain items is big news, even if it’s not sugar.

        However, like putting the frog in cold water and bringing it to a boil; it is happening slowly and nobody notices, they just accept it.

  32. Just remember the definition of ‘expert’ as told in the joke that was so popular in the 80s.

    An ‘ex’ is a has-been, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip, under pressure.

  33. Jordan Peterson has spoken about this credentials problem.

    Used to be employers used IQ tests (one of which Dr.P developed and sold) as a pretty good proxy for “is this guy smart enough to learn the job and not cock it up”. IQ tests were outlawed as discriminatory, but employers still needed a way to sort prospects into Yes, Maybe, and Nope.

    So instead they started looking for credentials as the minimum filter against Nopes. Initially it was just high school graduate (which being generalized studies had no “credentials” attached), but the day came when pretty much everyone still breathing had a high school diploma, and to filter out Nopes it became necessary to set the bar at the next higher level, bachelor’s degree. Which brings with it a concomitant “See here, these are my creds in this here particular subject; I am therefore an Expert.”

    And because credentials are attached to that root criterion, the idea naturally grew that such credentials are necessary and thereby intrinsically superior,

    Rinse and repeat until nowadays you need a PhD to flip burgers. (Okay, slight exaggeration…)

    1. I’m sure there are a fair number of PhD’s flipping burgers, considering what they teach PhD’s these days. And most of them needed a lot of on-the-job training to become competent burger flippers.

      1. True. After all they are now offering higher degrees in Useless Studies… and they haven’t yet managed to create enough sinecures in HR departments.

      2. As we all know:

        BS = Bull Excrement
        MS = More of the Same
        PhD = Piled higher and Deeper

        I think this has only gotten truer in the 40+ years since I first heard it.

      3. To be fair, a man’s inability to do a job like flipping burgers well because he tends to go off into his head and disappear from the world from time to time, is not necessarily a function of maleducation.

        Though it can be grossly exacerbated by same.

    2. And past employers can’t help filter out the “Nopes” via poor references because that’s ALSO been deemed discriminatory and made illegal. Now all they’re allowed to do is verify that the prospective employee was employed when, where, and how they claim to be (and I’ll betcha even THAT will be ruled “discriminatory” someday soon too!).

      1. They are on their way to making ‘competence’ a discriminatory evaluation method.

        I had a cousin that gave prospective employees a basic coding and electronics problem to solve on paper during the interview. He did this because he had Stanford EE grads that couldn’t do first semester 100 level work. I know because he handed it to me when I was going to do a summer internship with his company. I told him I didn’t know CSharp, and couldn’t do the coding part exactly as requested, but I could do it in assembly, and did he want a mux, or a decoder for the hardware portion.

        The fact that grads couldn’t do first semester stuff was fairly shocking to me back then. Now, it’s sadly common. Heck, Oregon just removed literacy and basic math skills from their HS graduation requirements, so why should we expect any more from an expensive-as-hell four year college?

        1. Actually, yes — I just heard (and clearly did not pay much attention to) that some company would no longer be hiring based on competence, but henceforth on victimology credits.

          Of course, it’s already been that way for some time in South Africa…

        2. Was it ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’ where some idiot proposed granting everybody a college degree just for having a pulse? Because it was So Unfair that college graduates made more money.

          That would be less evil than the current racket, in which they are granted a worthless degree after wasting four years and drowning themselves in debt.

          1. I think that was in “Friday”, in the “People’s Republic of California”. Again Heinlein was just a little too early.

            2. Pretty sure my copy is in a box in the attic. Along with ‘The Moon Is’ and ‘The Puppet Masters’ because I wanted to check on Sarah’s quote from there.

      2. There are also places (California is one of them) where you’re not allowed to ask a job applicant about their salary history.

        1. News to my employers. They wouldn’t consider you unless you gave them that information. (Which is a way to ensure that once you’re paid a certain amount, you’ll never get paid significantly more on moving jobs. Keeping you in your class.)

    3. In several of Mack Reynolds’ stories, a single Ph.D. wasn’t enough to get a job as a burger flipper. It usually took several Ph.D.s. Doctorates had become the minimum entry level to the employment ladder, so new educational levels above that had been created to maintain the class structure.

      “Mack the Hack” doesn’t get much respect, but not everything he wrote was schlock, and a lot of it is starting to look uncomfortably prophetic.

  34. I suppose you’ve heard about the teacher in Utah who was recorded by one of her students going on a political rant, telling them, among other things, that politics was forbidden in her classroom (after she had expressed her views about the alleged flaws of Donald Trump), that they were smarter than their parents and didn’t have to obey them, and threatening them with her punishing wrath and ordering them to get out of her class if they expressed certain beliefs about vaccines, climate change, or LBGT+. persons. She is of course entitled to her beliefs, but to threaten students for having contrary beliefs (even if they are wrong) instead of encouraging them to research the subject is not what I expect teachers to do.

    The school district has also reportedly placed her on administrative leave. At least there is a trace of sanity in the place. But only a trace. She should be dismissed for incompetence. She is reportedly a chemistry teacher. What any of this has to do with chemistry I have no idea. I was not aware that the social issues of the day had any important connection with the periodic table of the elements or the laws of conservation of matter and energy.

    But I don’t doubt there are too many just like her.

      1. I saw after I posted that she has been fired, by her school district. There’s been some stink about it being for her political beliefs., but those have nothing to do with what she was hired to teach, and the way she went about presenting them was as unprofessional as all hell.

        1. And in most parts of Utah, stuff like that would *not* go over well at all with the parents.

    3. She’s on paid leave because she let the curtain slip, not because anything said was wrong as far as they are concerned. Regardless of the pap they try to feed anyone wondering why their kids grades went from straight A to failing.

        1. Not if they bring up politics or mindsets against the teachers liberal religion. Then their grades and homework happen to take a nosedive. Ego plus idiots plus God mentality means east to take out on kids

    4. That teacher was actually fired (or maybe quit, but is no longer employed).
      It might be helpful that Utah state law explicitly recognizes parents as the primary partner in child education. “A student’s parent is the primary person responsible for the education of the student, and the state is in a secondary and supportive role to the parent.” https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title53G/Chapter6/53G-6-S803.html
      It made it onto my neighborhood facebook page and my wife showed me the recording. A disturbing number of my neighbors comments in the facebbok group were supportiveish of the teacher on everything outside of talking bad about the parents. Sadly, before I was able to get ahold of the school district (I’m part of the district so definitely wanting to kill that before it gets entrenched), I double checked the story and saw she had been fired. The good news about that one at least is that now everybody has cameras – she was probably going off on similar rants for years without anyone being willing to testify against her – imagine he said, she said against a teacher who already said she’d make your life hell.

      1. I suspect that that bit about “You can tell on me, but the administration doesn’t care, so I can do what I like in here” didn’t go over well with the school board. It sounds as if there had been complaints about her for some time, but without better evidence of unprofessional conduct, the administration had insufficient cause to do anything.

        1. It’s already established law that you can record the police when they’re performing their duties in public. If we’re going to have public schools then perhaps we need a similar rule allowing students to record their classes.

          1. Slippery slope time: Are we going to include a provision that parents can’t withdraw permission to record their kid? What about parents who don’t want their kid’s picture recorded for perfectly good reasons like kidnapping by ex-spouses? OTOH, if we include that provision, all it takes is one parent to derail the whole thing.

            1. Most of those are covered under Public Place exceptions, same as the attempts to claim teachers have privacy rights to not be recorded when they’re screaming rude things at students.

              You’d need parental permission to *release* the video without editing out their kids’ faces.

  35. I know I’ve posted this before, but it seems timely. From Eisenhower’s Farewell Address: “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” That sounds like a warning against a “tyranny of experts,” so to speak.

  36. Apparently the Feds are considering trying to sue states that won’t permit mask mandates for school kids. Oh, that will go over SO well. Especially with Gov. Abbott apparently doing well and recovering from his brush with the WuFlu.

    2. Just remember – the Feds trying to force states to assist the Federal government in carrying out its constitutionally mandated duty to manage non-citizens is unconstitutional. But the Federal government suing states that are trying to keep their citizens free is just fine and dandy.

  38. The first thing that came out of my mouth when I heard we were going into Afghanistan was something like “Well that’s a stupid idea”.

    Afghanistan is a tar pit. Winning a war in Afghanistan is like trying to win a Soccer match on someone else’s soccer field that has no goal posts. You run around, kick the ball, wear yourself out. There is no way to score a goal, there isn’t one. Then, when the clock runs out you get back on the bus and head home. Your opponents (the home team) loudly declare victory because they still own the field.

    BTW… the screwups abandoning US citizens and those who allied with us over there. Par for the course. They did the same thing when we exited from Vietnam.

  39. a man with an overcoat is an enemy is from “The Puppet Masters” by RAH. I believe “the great simplification” is from the past through tomorrow talking about the crazy years, but I’m not as sure of that. V/R William Lehman

    Islam delenda est.

    ________________________________

      1. I’ve been trying to remember the whole quote all day. Wasted a few minutes searching the Intertubes for it, came up empty. All I remember is:

        “Lock your doors and windows. A man wearing a coat is an enemy. Shoot!”

        Did it start with “Stay away from crowds”?

        1. News headlines at the beginning of Chapter 14 of the 1951 novel version:

          “LOCK YOUR DOORS!”
          “CLOSE THE DAMPERS ON YOUR FIREPLACES!”
          “NEVER ENTER A DARK PLACE!”
          “BE WARY OF CROWDS!”
          “A MAN WEARING A COAT IS AN ENEMY-SHOOT!”

          It’s in mixed case in the “Galaxy” serial, and in upper case in the 1990 “restored” version.

          1. On the back cover of my 1951 Signet paperback 6th printing, is a copy of the “ATTACK FROM SPACE” warning. The rest is standard capitalization. It starts with “Lock your doors”. It ends with “You must kill”.

  40. Everything is stupid indeed… I do hope this worship of morons passing as experts is on its way out, and at least where Afghanistan goes that seems to be the case. Maybe because it’s been a serious black dog week (even with house arrest winding down) but I still can’t shake my own fears that the general public is going to compartmentalize it all, dismiss the fools of Afghanistan but still accept, or at least go along to get along with, the fools in education and public health in particular’s brain droppings due to the institutional power behind them, likely marking those of us who are doing the thinking and questioning as the true villains of it all. Maybe things will look different when I’m free again but for now just… *Sigh* I’m so tired of all this.

      1. Looks pretty interesting. I hope I’m wrong and that the hammer really is coming down on the people pulling this crap on us rather than it getting ready to come down on us. It’s not easy to be hopeful about that. And yeah music has helped a bit, like The Roar of the Spark from Guilty Gear Strive that I posted during the Saturday music thread. Might be worth posting again if anyone else needs encouragement from the Thunder King. After all, the inscription on his gloves reads “Nothing can be done without hope.”

      2. Thursday morning I went to the gym and walked (trotted) on the treadmill to Sabaton. Hearing about heroic battles was what I needed. The exercise probably didn’t hurt, either.

        1. They help too. I take it you played the Sabaton yourself? Most gyms I know of mainly play modern pop.

          1. Yes. The gym music was something pop, a little heavier than their usual but not quite hair metal or Ozzy Osbourne’s station.

  42. One thing we HAVE to make clear: The entire Democrat party did this.

    Don’t let them just hang Derpy Joe out to dry and wash their hands.

    They conspired to put that empty suit in charge by rigging the nomination, and then the election. They have scripted the FICUS’s every move and word. Don’t let them hide behind their puppet now that their buzzards are coming home to roost.

    Everything that has happened since January 20 belongs to the whole Democrat party. They’ve had everything their way and they don’t get to blame it on anybody else.
    ———————————
    My grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

      1. Since they felt the need to steal votes from registered democrats even in deep-blue areas?

        No, you shouldn’t include all registered Democrats.

        The guys doing the stealing didn’t.

    2. The question is who is in charge? Last year, South Carolina primary, someone organized who was going to “win”. This includes getting one of the richest men in the world to cooperate. What do they have on him?

      This is no conspiracy theory, we have the evidence of people’s actions. This is the question we need to learn. We blame 0. We blame nanzi. Who is responsible? Is this like a Japanese organization where a private consensus is developed, and no one deviates? Who then is part of this “leadership”? How much are they owned by China? Or are they all just Chinese puppets?

      One important thing no one seems to have noticed. The way is now open for China and Iran to build a protected oil pipeline. I expect the Waghir/Wakhjir pass to be an important addition to our geographic knowledge. Not an easy build, but the value to China of such a pipeline is priceless. Likely easier to build than the Alaska pipeline, and no environmentalists to worry about fish in the Darya. The Taliban get paid to allow and protect, Iran gets to sell its oil direct to China. This may explain where the Taliban got the money to pay off the army.

  43. Hoyt, you see it all so clearly for a person your age…I’m 77 and I “began” to see it 20 yrs. ago but must admit I did not believe our fellow Americans would let it go this far, as it is today. Great blog today!! It fills me with hope for our future!!

  44. Romans 1:18-32 warned us this would happen.

    Similarly, Romans 10:9-13 gives us hope for our own future… But only if we believe.

    Like the man in Mark 9:21-24 said to Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

  45. a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism

    Going to have to rise to the defense of the Afghans. That is only true if you add “since the coming of Islam” to the end.

    Uncivilized barbarians don’t create the Buddhas of Bamiyan among hundreds of other things from the mixed Helenic and Indian period of the region’s history.

  46. We might not be the ones we were waiting for — I was expecting someone taller and less tired

    That’s okay. The typical progressive is a little short for a storm trooper (and this days fatter and bluer haired than I expect).

    1. Yeah, but they have the +5 Facial Piercings of Assertion and the +10 Wagging Finger of Intimidation…

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