Theater of the Absurd

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:

“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –

Eric S. Raymond

The context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.

The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.

We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must all stop eating meat, or We must stop using fossil fuels.

Each of those involves atrocities that would make Pol Pot blanch. Whatever they imagine, they have no idea what it would entail.

They might think all we need to do is stop reproducing. Say, sterilize most of mankind, and let population reduce quietly. But it’s never that way, of course. Even if you managed that, do you have any idea what removing people’s hope of connection to the future — most people’s only way to matter — and making them feel they don’t count? Ooh, boy. I could write an entire dystopian novel on the death and destruction that will follow. Entire industries would collapse, and the ability to feed those humans they left able to reproduce. The end of civilization comes shortly after.

Or let’s make meat too expensive and/or unavailable. Turns out — conversationally — children need a certain amount of animal protein to develop properly. And you have no idea what parents of a dying child will do. None. Again, I could write entire dystopian novels.

Stop using fossil fuels, this might sound very good if you are wealthy and live in an enclave where you can drive your electrical car everywhere and charge it everywhere and, oh, yeah, if you don’t know where electricity comes from. Not only is renewable negligible for electricity production, in the current state of tech, but to mine the materials for batteries is destroying (of course, poor continent) Africa and its children. And electric will never do for the transport of goods and materials that take to support a civilization. Not in current tech. And no, tech development is not something you an just create out of thin air by wishing it. The cold equations of physics are bitches that won’t move.

So, the various cities, states and countries happily jumping aboard the ban fossil fuels bandwagon are all on board to kill millions of people of famine and cold or heat. Atrocities.

And do they believe absurdities?

Ooh, boy, do they ever. Their minds are a collection of things that were never true with all the depth of a comic book for toddlers.

  • They believe that the great god science (not the process of inquiry and proof/disproof that goes under the same name) has said the Earth will boil in 12 years if we don’t stop using evilbad fossil fuels. They are shallow enough not to check about all the other failed doomsday predictions. (To be fair, some of them are actually children, in so far as college students these days are children.)
  • They believe there are too many people in the world. They never ask too many people for what. Or too many people where specifically. Or even How do we know there are too many people? because in absolute terms the data collection is mostly Pull From Air. No. They believe there are too many people in the world. Because they were told there are too many people. And if there are any more people, we’re all going to starve and destroy the Earth and offend science. Or whatever.
  • They believe we shouldn’t eat animal protein because…It varies, doesn’t it? Many of them it’s because “it’s bad to have to kill to live.” Which only means they haven’t looked around at the vaunted circle of life. Or they believe killing an animal is the same as killing a human. Or they believe that it’s somehow bad to be human and eat animals. Or farming causes global warming, and we’re all going to burn in 12 years. Or–
    The idiocy is gibberingly insane and none of these people has ever so much as visited a model farm, let alone lived near one.

All of these people, who look at normal humans with hatred — humans are a plague upon the Earth, you know — and do acts of casual destruction, like pour out milk in the grocery store, or destroy art, or glue themselves to roads, or pass legislation forbidding fossil fuel want to kill you and yours. In their minds, the perfect world starts with destroying humanity.

Some delude themselves about the extent of the destruction it would entail, but a lot — I have in mind an elderly, seemingly kindly SF fan, who once started talking glowingly about “Earth changes” and his eyes shone, and he became animated about how billions needed to die, so we could have a better humanity and a better future — do and rejoice in this.

The absurdities this hatred for humanity rests on, are puerile, even stupider than “if only everyone.”

When someone starts talking about the necessity to eliminate most of humanity, interrogate their motives. Chances are they are inane, a tissue of lies and wishful thinking.

Resting on nothing but an unearned assumption of superiority.

164 thoughts on “Theater of the Absurd”

  1. Let’s see, I need 9 billion non-human populated Earths, and then teleport each of these ZPG/No more humans types to each of them, 1 per planet. (I’m sure I don’t need 9 billion, but hey, when you’re popping new universes into existence, you can always use a few extra.)

    I figure the rest of us here will get along much better without those harpies screeching in our ears.

    1. But it’s always “those Others” who need to die to create Utopia.

      The best response to that sort of narcissistic garbage is to laugh in their faces and say, “OK; you first”, then walk away while their heads explode.

      1. It never ceases to amaze me that the people who think we need mass famine and disease to “thin the herd” always imagine that they will survive. Even if no one goes hunting for them, because they caused it, what do they imagine they can do so well that they will always be one of the ones left?

          1. It’s always struck me that “The Time Machine” and Kipling’s “The sons of Martha” seem to reflect each other. I haven’t looked up the publication dates on either, but influence isn’t ruled out.

            1. A couple of minutes with Ye Olde Searche Engine (Qwant FTW) says Martha was written in 1907, while the Time Machine was novelized in 1895, adapted from a short story “The Chronic Argonauts”, done in 1888.

              Still won’t rule out influence, though Wells and Kipling seem to be rather different in political outlooks. OTOH, “Good writers don’t borrow, they steal.”

        2. The same people who think humans are a cancer and we need to thin the herd are the same people who moan that global warmening will kill millions.

          Make up your minds already.

          2. The common thread is, “the good of the planet.” Warming might damage the planet; humans are just collateral damage.

        3. They’re the metaphorical heirs of the Soviet intellectuals who lived out their final days in a gulag saying to themselves “if only Stalin knew…”

      2. Once told a relative the only time I want to hear “there are too many people” is when I read it on his suicide note.

        Didn’t go over well.

        4. “[T]the only time I want to hear “there are too many people” is when I read it on his suicide note.”

          yoink

      3. The useful idiots are true believers, my leftist aunt will line up for her suicide shot when she is no longer useful, and she will vote for everyone else to be forced to do the same, because she is a ‘good’ person.

  2. On the cult of warmism (which of course closely followed upon the cult of coldism) I like to refer people to the GISP2 data set (found on the Web). This is a database of temperature data obtained from Greenland ice data, from 40k years ago to 100 years ago in intervals of 5-8 years or so. It shows the most recent ice age very nicely, no surprise. What’s more interesting is that it shows substantial temperature variations since then, i.e., in the past 8000 years or so.
    As a fair number of people know, there have been quite cold periods in the past 1000 years or so. In particular, around 1850 was the coldest in the past 8000 years. Not too surprisingly, this is also exactly the “pre-industrial” temperature reference the high priests of Warmism want to use as the “can’t go more than 2 degrees above that” edict. But when Leif Eriksson set sail for America is was almost 2 degrees warmer than 1850. When Brutus stabbed Caesar, it was almost 3 degrees warmer.
    So, the fear mongers are telling us that the world will end if we allow it to get not even as warm as in the days of Caesar and Cicero.

    1. yes, 8000 years ago temperatures were 3* higher than today, while just 350 years ago, temperatures were 5* colder…and scientists have no idea why….Earth remains in a 3 million year old glacial period, with intermittent warming like the current era…but these fools claim to be worried about warming….

    2. Yup, 80% of the last few million years have been Ice Ages. We are now in the Holocene Interglacial Period, one of those brief intervals of warm climate between Ice Ages.

      And the next Ice Age is overdue.

      700 million years ago, the Earth was intermittently frozen over for periods ranging from 5 million years to nearly 60 million years.

      Climate Alarmists are running around with their hair on fire over a possible temperature rise of one degree.
      ———————————
      “The Science Is Settled!!” we are told, again and again — but then ‘The Science!’ changes every week, and somehow it’s always exactly what the politicians need it to be.

  3. Flyby c4c. And hey, wings flapping should cool the earth down! (Especially since they’re big enough to support a full-grown human’s weight.) I’m doing my part!

    Whoosh

    1. What would the atmospheric density have to be to enable you to fly with those wings in your profile pic? I’m figuring roughly 2x current Earth surface air density based on surface area for hang gliders and aerobatic chutes.

      1. That’s the least of the issues. The muscles (pectoral) to drive that even assuming lift would have to be huge, and those have to attach to something. Its why most birds have huge keel bone in the center. I fear that the rather delicate mold implied by the image would require some kind of psychokinetic powers to augment the physical wings lift and thrust. I do think there is a RAH story (Menace from Earth I think) which has people flying in 1/6 th gravity with near earth normal air density. Whether it really would work is beyond my ken, Damn it Mike I’m a Software Engineer not an Aeronautics Engineer…

        1. IIRC what they did in the cavern wasn’t “flying” as we usually understand it (power strokes yielding propulsion and lift); it was soaring on thermals, the way vultures, albatrosses, etc do it. No enormous muscles or keel required, just the ability to support 1/6 your weight on extended arms, which were strapped to the wings, meaning that the shoulders took most of the weight. Doable? Damfino, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Just my 20 mills… 🙂

          1. I don’t think it was thermals but an artificial updraft, but I don’t seem to have a copy to check.

            1. And by the way, RAH wouldn’t have put it in a story if it weren’t feasible. He wasn’t an official aeronautical engineer but I’m pretty sure he knew a lot about that topic.

            2. You may be correct; it’s been decades since I read it. The effect would be the same, though.

          2. I think the wings had an entire frame structure to support them, and weren’t just strapped to the shoulders.

          3. The wings they rented out for tourists were essentially soaring wings, with just enough freedom of motion to convince the tourists they were flying. The wings the locals used allowed more birdlike flight. If you weighed 120 lb on Earth, you’d weigh 20 lb on the moon. That’s about the weight of a wandering albatross, with about an 11 foot wingspan. Sounds eminently feasible.

        3. The Bat Cave was the reserve air storage chamber for Luna City. Pressure varied between about 1.3 and 1.6 bar depending on the city’s air usage. Air entered the chamber at the bottom, creating an updraft through the middle nicknamed the Baby’s Ladder. Knowledgeable flyers would check today’s pressure immediately after entering through the air lock.

          There were several types of wings. Some were semi-rigid gliders which inexperienced flyers were strapped into. Holly owned a pair of high-end Storer-Gull articulated wings and, yes, she could fly by flapping the wings and directing airflow over them with finger controls. It’s much less work to use the Ladder to gain altitude at the beginning of your flight, though.
          ———————————
          “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here — this is the War Room!”

          1. Thank you Imaginos. I had that in a huge collection (like 750 pages, Expanded Universe maybe?) that was all the RAH future History stuff but Time Enough For Love piled into one, it has gone missing (likely loaned out and never returned).

            1. If this were a promo post, I could point you to a fully dramatized (voices, music, sfx) recording. Alas, this is not my blog. 😃

            2. The Past Through Tomorrow. Everything from ‘Life-Line’ and ‘Let There Be Light’ through ‘Methuselah’s Children’. I think my copy is in a box in the attic.

              1. Again Imaginos you come through. Thank you that is indeed the one. Expanded Universe has/had lots of other stuff plus many of his essays.

              2. No, “Let There be Light” is not included in that collection, due to publishing permission issues IIRC.

                (The reason is from a known-dubious memory, but I just opened up the Table of Contents of my copy to verify that story isn’t in the collection.)

        4. Of course, 1/6 Earth gravity means you won’t have an Earth atmosphere….. 😎

          Unless that cavern has an airlock.

          1. Indeed was the cavern used as atmosphere storage, had several airlocks and was at 1.2 to 1.6 atmospheres pressure as I think someone noted.

          2. You won’t have an atmosphere over geological time. Loss to space is not instantaneous. I’ve read that if we were to somehow generate an Earth atmosphere on the Moon, it would take 100,000 years for it to fully escape.

            1. But so is the generating event over geologic time, and absent a spontaneous instant generation, the odds of something that density ever generating and holding its’ own would seem low.

              I suspect, that once we can get gravitational sensors in position to measure it, the moons with an atmosphere greater than their size alone would account for are actually dredging it out of their gas giant companion’s upper atmosphere with the gas giant actually holding the atmosphere.

      2. If it helps, I looked up the original artwork and did some quick estimations and conversions. In real life, the total wingspan should be about 14 feet. (170 inches).

        (Anne Stokes ‘Prayer for the Fallen,’ if anyone’s curious.)

        1. Wingspan and area is not the only flight problem/challenge for angiform humanoid fliers.

          The typical design may or may not be up to developing much thrust, but it also seems to lack some of the control surfaces for flight stabilization.

          Birds tend to have tails.

          The unbalanced drag forces on the humanoid body could easily cause one to accidentally tumble an awful lot.

          So, tails or some other control surface.

          REcently I was thinking about four wings on the torso, in two pairs. One pair on the hips, the other on the shoulders. For extra control surfaces, eight more wings. With a single wing on each wrist, elbow, knee, and ankle.

          1. I think once you’ve got four, you should have sufficient control. The four independent push/pull wing system is what gives dragonflies their manuverability.

          2. Another problem for humanoid flight is having the body generate enough energy. Poul Anderson addressed this in ‘The People of the Wind’.

        2. Largest flying avian is the California Condor with a maximum recorded wingspan of ~3m (call it 10′) and a maximum mass of like 13.5Kg (30lbs). The young lady with the wings is going to have to be very small to stay airborne with just natural lift. Someone else called it an angiform human, which I like. That said we definitely need to avoid actual descriptions of seraphim and cherubim from the biblical texts. They are just downright strange verging on creepy, there may be a reason that usually the first statement out of an angel is “Be Not Afraid”…

            1. Lots of Wings check. Eyes everywhere check. That seems like accurate an image as any I think that’s a cherub. Clearly NOT the cute little things with bows and arrows we use on valentine’s day cards. No wonder the shepherds near Bethlehem nearly soiled themselves.

      3. > “What would the atmospheric density have to be to enable you to fly with those wings in your profile pic?”

        Time to bring this out again:

        Hope Lady El doesn’t have any classholes in her life…

  4. I recently saw a Youtube video on the North Sea Tsunami c. 8000 BC. Back then, Great Britain was connected to the rest of Europe by what is now the landmass under the North Sea, called “Doggerland” by some…because sea levels were ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY METERS LOWER. So in 10,000 years, the first 9,800 of which had no appreciable heavy industry, sea levels rose 120 meters, almost 400 feet. And the fertile and thriving civilizations of Doggerland that weren’t wiped out by the North Sea Tsunami eventually had to leave as their land sank beneath the sea, and head to what is now England or France or Scandinavia.

    And they’re wetting the bed over a few centimeters’ sea level rise here and there. When the sea levels rose or fell that much every year for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.

    I’m old enough to remember seeing Newsweeks from about forty years ago that were screaming about how the coming New Ice Age was going to cause it to routinely snow in Louisiana and leave everything north of the 40th parallel or so uninhabitable. Then USA Today was publishing weather maps in “2030” showing summer highs of 145F in Little Rock. Now it’s just generic “climate change” which is what’s used to cover any sort of weather that inconveniences a liberal.

    If we find the next Doggerland, let’s send climate idiots there and leave them so we can wave goodbye as the seas close over them.

    1. Oh, yes – I was fascinated to learn about Doggerland – a fertile lowland, connecting the British Isles to Europe, and the Rhine and Thames actually connected in one massive river.
      And I am old enough also to remember the panic about the New Ice Age, and global thermonuclear war, followed by nuclear winter, and future shock and overpopulation. Every five or ten years, there is some horrific doom! Doom, I say – pending doom. Which never arrives, and so the screamers have to create another DOOM! to panic the unwary with.

      1. Ugh. I remember all the nuclear winter post-apoc novels of the 1980s. Thanks, just what you want teen readers soaking in. (Although, compared to some of the dreck today, those where great, uplifting, and well-written, morally sound volumes!)

    2. The best explanation for why Sumerian was a language isolate is that it was the last survivor of the languages of the exposed and near-paradisical Persian Gulf seafloor, which rapidly flooded at the same time — like hundreds of feet of shoreline regression per year rapid.

    3. The weight of the ice sheets pressed down the continent under them, as the earth’s mantle is hot enough to deform from weight. Slowly.

      When the ice melted, fairly abruptly, the land began to rise. In some places, the rise is over a centimeter a year.

      Sea floor basalt sinks over time, causing the local ocean to become deeper.

      So the “zero” point on sea level shifts over time.

      When the last cold period ended, the coasts flooded -way- inland. Now the coast land has mostly risen back up, but northern and Central regions still rise.

      Such as the grand canyon area. And northern Finland.

      When next the ice sheets advance, the seas will retreat to the edge of the continental shelf, and possibly a bit downslope if severe.

      Then the land sinks, and the seas return inland a bit, until the next melt inundation and re-rise.

      You can find evidence of former coastline inland and offshore.

  5. “Stop using fossil fuels, this might sound very good if you are wealthy and live in an enclave where you can drive your electrical car everywhere and charge it everywhere and, oh, yeah, if you don’t know where electricity comes from. Not only is renewable negligible for electricity production, in the current state of tech, but to mine the materials for batteries is destroying (of course, poor continent) Africa and its children. And electric will never do for the transport of goods and materials that take to support a civilization. Not in current tech. And no, tech development is not something you an just create out of thin air by wishing it. The cold equations of physics are bitches that won’t move.”

    Imagine for a moment you work for a power company. Your employer supplies electricity to some hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of miles of wire. Hundreds, if not thousands, of subs. Transformers.

    Generation facilities. Quick fix gas facilities. Coal facilities. Nuclear. Hydro. These are your bread and butter. These are what have to run, flawlessly, 100% of the time so you get paid. There can be no downtime, aside from forgivable moments like massive natural disasters.

    Tree falls on a line? It will be fixed within two hours, most times. Six if it’s a bad one or in a bad spot. Eight to twelve if it’s a nightmare.

    Now imagine all you have are electric trucks to do the job with.

    Electric trucks don’t have the range. They will be heavier, more complicated, more temperamental, break down faster, and cost more to operate. They won’t even be able to get to some of the lines because of range in one charge.

    What are you gonna do? Drag a gas powered generator around to maintain uptime? Kinda defeats the point.

    Electricity would rapidly become completely untenable. Not kidding at all, there will be bloody riots.

    Now fossil fuels.

    Fossil fuels are made of petroleum. And the lefties, they hates them some POL. Hates with the fires of twenty quazillion suns. Petro bad. Plastics bad.

    Wait, wha?

    Plasitcs. Without plastics, no modern medicine is even possible. Modern farming? The same. Food and medicine gone bye-bye?

    Mass death. If you don’t starve, disease and infection will get ya. If the violence doesn’t, first.

    But it won’t come to that, of course. That’s just bad sci-fi.

    What will happen is, we go insane and the rest of the world bloody well ignores the towering idiocy and goes on with things that work, with the insane systems they still have operating. At least until they fall apart, too, because so much of their way of life is still dependent on us.

    And even that won’t happen because there’s only so far you can push the envelope until the whole thing catches fire. Nasty revolution time then.

    If we’re extremely lucky, in that instance, we make it through more or less okay with some bad scars and a new appreciation for rule of law. I’m talking miracle straight from Himself kind of luck, though. The kind of thing you cannot ignore or explain away.

    But most likely is the slow slide into mediocrity. That’s another thing I’d like to avoid, because I like modern medicine and not washing clothes by hand in the dark. In February.

    If things get that bad, that is.

    As of right now, we’re not at that point. Arresting political opponents on BS charges ain’t right. It’s a step, a large one, in the wrong direction. But let us wait and see for now. The right don’t riot. Violence for us is a switch, not a dial. We don’t go there unless all the other options are gone.

    But as I see it now, Trump wins either way. They indict him, he wins in a landslide, and nothing says he can’t run and win even if they do convict. He gets exonerated, he points to that and says they are:

    Full of poopiness.
    Attacking people like you on the right with the full weight of the legal system.
    Too dumb to realize that their trumped up charges are bogus.
    The legal system is compromised with zealots and fakes.
    The left will stop at nothing to stop him, and by extension you, from even holding power.

    And that they’re flat out evil enough to charge an innocent man that they know will stand up to them, while ignoring the threats to private citizens that are violent criminals that somehow keep getting sweetheart deals from these same DAs and judges.

    Don’t get taken in by despair. The bastard lies. Mind your own place. Protect your kin. Set a little aside for when things get rough.

    And take a minute or two a day to pray. Or meditate. I ain’t judging anybody on that. Then make plans on what to do if/when trouble finds you and yours, whether that trouble be fire, flood, civil unrest, zombie apocalypse, or plague of girl scouts.

    Y’all be careful out there, now, ya hear?

    1. Occasionally I have a wonderful dream of being able to wave a magic wand and during a press conference with Pelosi, AOC, Mitch McConnel, and a number of other activists and politicos, have everything made with petro-chemicals vanish from their persons. No cosmetics, no elastic, no synthetic fibers, no plastic dentures, no “vegan leather,” nada. smiles evilly beatific kitty smile

      Granted, the looks of horror on the faces of the security guys who realize that they have pieces and parts and bullets falling out of their holsters, or no holsters at all, would also be entertaining.

      1. There is not enough brain bleach in all the world for thy mental image…

        Not to say it wouldn’t be funny. I’d just have to claw out my mind’s eye afterwards.

      3. To say nothing of implants, medically necessary or otherwise. Nor cell phones. No cameras. No teleprompters. No laptops. No electric cars. No insulation on the copper wires in the building (fire hazard anyone?). No refrigeration. No cheap sterile containers for food. Safety glass is no longer a thing. No contact lenses. No hearing aids. No fake fingernails. Conception… maybe. Latex ain’t plastic, but plastics are involved in its manufacture, packaging, and sale same as anything else.

        Life without plastics is pretty damned primitive. I heartily approve of lefties embracing this lifestyle fully.

        Just do it somewhere else. Downwind, a looooong way downwind, preferably.

        1. IOW, the solution used to deal with the Gaia fanatics at the end of Rainbow Six. Sounds good to me…

          1. John Clark for Vice President!

            (He’d never agree to be president, and you know it. Plus, everyone ignores the Vice President. Which would be very useful when people started taking ‘extended vacations.’)

            1. Point… “Will no one rid me of this troublous lefty?”

              And “Ding” Chavez for Secretary of State. 🙂

    2. Weird thought strikes me, assuming they did convict him and he does win election, given the requirements for housing the President of the United States, what exactly would NY do with him that would functionally be any different from being free and POTUS?

      1. They could attempt several things. He could be arrested, sure. Grant was. He could be fined. They could try all sorts of legal shenanigans.

        Could they imprison him for state crimes? Not without his approval and help. Federal crimes? Some of them preclude holding office, like 18 US Codes Sec 2071. Others do not.

        Candidates for president have been allowed to run their campaigns while in prison before. They didn’t win, but it wasn’t prevented. The only things preventing a person from being president are laid out in the Constitution. Thirty-five years old, natural born citizen if the US, resident for at least 14 years. That’s it.

        New York could try to be fussy about it. Fed Gov could show their displeasure in several ways that wouldn’t be stupidly overbearing (Viz Biden et. al.). But New York would most likely look like buffoons while the MSM tried to run interference.

        It’d fail massively with a character like Trump. He’d play them like marionettes.

        2. The Secret Service has, I believe, made it clear that as their protectee Trump does not go without their protection, period. Presumably part of the negotiations before the arraignment were discussing how to handle the issue of Trump’s security.

          While there may be NeverTrumpers or full-blown lefty TDSers on the protection detail (there’s no requirement that those on the detail like their principal, after all), carrying out the primary purpose of the Secret Service requires the protectee’s trust in those assigned to protect them. Even as much as other government agencies have been corrupted (like say the Dept of Homeland Security, which controls the USSS as of the [un]PATRIOT Act’s passage), it’s very much not in the agency’s best interests to be even thought to be tools of any given political party.

    3. > “Then make plans on what to do if/when trouble finds you and yours, whether that trouble be fire, flood, civil unrest, zombie apocalypse, or plague of girl scouts.”

      Look, there’s no point in planning for a plague of girl scouts. If that happens humanity is just doomed.

      1. But will they have cookies? I could put up with a lot of doom in return for a hefty supply of Samoas or those crispy mint things.

        1. Right?

          Missed GS Cookie season this year. Saw one display ($6/box – finally price increase) and obviously trying to sell the last few boxes. Not that we need cookies but hubby does like his Samoa and Thin Mints.

        1. Keebler sells both Samoas and Thin Mints under their own brand after the GS Cookie season. Costco is selling GS branded mint pretzels. Not as good as real Thin Mints, though.

        2. Okay, fine, you can plan to enjoy some cookies before the end.

          But you’re still doomed.

        3. Offhand I don’t know if they have stores in your neck of the woods, but as I understand it Dollar General sells cookies made by the same manufacturer as used by GSA, but packaged under their own brand.

          And in any case, at least of the ones I’ve tried Keebler brand cookies are just as good, but without the GSA name recognition tax.

  6. It’s not the state of our politics that worries me these days. Yes, it’s bad. But we’ve had worse before. No, what worries me is the general morality of parts of society. A society that genuinely believes we’ll all be better off with fourteen out of every fifteen people dead, or that male and female are not intrinsically tied to biology, is what really worries me.

    The pendulum can’t swing back fast enough.

    2. I keep envisioning it as a slingshot rather than a pendulum. The other side is stretching it to the breaking point.

      The metaphor, of course, implies that we need to be less worried about whether it’ll swing back quickly enough and more worried about how far it’ll go when it does.

        1. I was thinking this today with regard to the many, hmn, shall we say “disturbed” members of the Cult of Education and their indoctrination of little girls with chest binders, boys in the girls change room, etc. and so on.

          I have some minor personal stake, a distant relative is experiencing trouble with their children in this regard. To say that it is damaging to all concerned is to understate the case, and made worse by “educators.” So very, very much worse.

          The backlash to all this is going to be legendary, and I seriously think it will be coming soon. Slowly at first, then quickly.

          Their best-case outcome may be getting permanently barred from employment in education. I can easily see that happening, entire school boards deposed and barred by statute. Pendulums and slingshots don’t stop when they get to the middle. They keep going, all the way to the bitter end.

  7. Newsweeks from about forty years ago that were screaming about how the coming New Ice Age was going to cause it to routinely snow in Louisiana and leave everything north of the 40th parallel or so uninhabitable.
    ….

    40 years ago was the early ’80s. I was being indoctrinated with the New Ice Age starting in 1962, in first grade science, with the alphabet, counting, and nuclear strike hide under your desk drills.

    1. Yep. And now if you mention it in “intelligent” circles (I did; silly me) the response is “Oh, that was never a real thing in science; it was just the newspapers”. Classic memory hole; even if you dig up the scientific papers which said it was a real thing, with the data to show it, they’re ignored because “fringe”.

      It’s places like this one that keep me at least marginally sane.

          1. Does anyone know why butter wouldn’t melt in the mouth of the innocent?

            It’s always used in the false appearance sense, but it would imply that butter wouldn’t do that.

            1. Just a quick look but apparently nobody knows “why butter wouldn’t melt in some people’s mouths”.

  9. Northfield Minnesota, circa 1876, where the businessmen banded together and agreed to defend each other and their fellow businessmen. They legally obtained their rifles and when the time came, most stood up and did the right thing. They shot the piss out of the James Younger gang who mostly had pistols. There was no DA Bragg to let the gangsters go, that is true. But that is not vigilantism, that is what a real militia does. Be like Northfield Mn. be the Militia you and your neighbors need. Then it doesn’t matter what the DA Bragg/Sorros type does. His time will come, besides the best thing you can do to liberals/Communists is ignore them and move on with your life. They really hate to be ignored drives them even crazier. We can always kill them when the time comes, if it comes to that. If not, pity the moronic scum and keep them away from your children.

  10. Or farming causes global warming, and we’re all going to burn in 12 years. Or–
    The idiocy is gibberingly insane and none of these people has ever so much as visited a model farm, let alone lived near one.

    I think that was what was going on in CHOP back in Portland.
    They laid down. trash bags, dumped bags and bags of potting soil on it, and planted seeds. That was their garden, it was going to feed them.
    Just like in Farmville.
    They think growing food is like a video games.
    I think that is where Bloomberg’s comment came from. But hey, I spent summers on my aunt’s famr in Indiana. What do I know?
    SMH.

    1. Which is why Clarkson’s Farm is one of the most important shows on television right now.

      Unfortunately, the people who need to watch it probably aren’t.

      2. Since it denies their fantasies it’s almost certainly racist, fascist, homophobic and transphobic. And a bunch of meanies…

        1. Clarkson is persona non-grata with the wokesters because a month or two ago he said some less than fawning things about Me Again Markle. From what I’ve heard, season three of his show has already been completed. So Amazon will probably air it to avoid wasting money. But speculation is that he won’t be allowed to do a season four.

    2. The CHOP ( Capitol Hill Organized Protest) was in Seattle, not Portland.
      But minor geographical quibbles aside, yeah, their “farming” methods were laughable, just what one would expect of a bunch of crazed urban communists.

  11. Thus the moniker Green Leap Forward for the left’s policies and plan; if implemented it will result in mass deaths that dwarf those that occurred as the result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It is the same kind of impossible plan based on the same insane ideology, except juiced up on steroids and with an express goal of reducing the populace and standard of living.

    The elites of course will be exempt, or so they think.

    1. The typos will always be with us. They are like unto the rain, or old age, or bread always landing butter side down.

      Let he who is without typo cast the first stone!

  14. “Even if you managed that, do you have any idea what removing people’s hope of connection to the future — most people’s only way to matter — and making them feel they don’t count?”

    That’s destructive enough when it’s only on an individual level.

    They’ve made an excellent start on implementing it society-wide, of course, on a psychological and voluntary level, which is probably contributing to the sudden eruption of “trans and non-binary” mass murderers.

    And to a whole bunch of other less obvious destructive things like anyone who has given up all hope of fruitful relationship and either doesn’t bother to try, or only goes for sterile relationships.

    2. I think a lot of the quite quitting work ethic is related to the lack of marriage and children. I think the leftists thought that people without families would have more time to work harder. Ha ha jokes on them. They probably mistakenly thought that those with a work related vocation, who often don’t get married, were that way because of the lack of spouses. So they tried to engineer more vocational level work intensity by eliminating families.

      1. Agreed. I’m glad that you were able to articulate the connection between those, because I couldn’t when I tried.

  15. I’ve been thinking lately about C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, specifically about the N.IC.E. honchos who’ve trained themselves to suppress every normal human impulse, even normal sinful impulses, because Science and how superior they ate to the hoi polloi. It ends up with three unclothed old men dancing awkwardly around a severed head and two of them slaughtering a third to appease the powers they have sold themselves to. Telling themselves to the end that this is all Science.

    Tired out today and don’t really need to draw the parallels for this crowd. Don’t want to get a picture in my head of Fauci and Schwab shuffling around the Head…

      1. You could put Soros on a bonfire of herbs and scented oil, and still the gods of all pantheons would be offended. Even the gods of the various underworlds would turn their noses up at it.

        1. I’m not sure if Infernal War Machines in D&D are powered by raw soul-stuff, but if they are, that could work for whatever unambitious souls just couldn’t cut it as devils. Throw ’em into the machines and rumble onward.

        2. “You just don’t get right proper brimstone these days anymore. Sure, you can get something, but it’s nothing as good as the pre-war brimstone…”

          And despite claims of some coworkers, nope, not my abode.

    2. I am pretty sure that Fauci et al. have already done their little shuffling dance to appease the Head. I wish I knew for sure that the Eldils are gathering in force right now to take them out.

    3. Sounds similar to The Scientific People in “The Stars My Destination” (or if you prefer, “Tiger! Tiger!”) – “You have been inoculated with Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue! That’s Science!”

      Fauci, anyone? 🙂

    5. Yeah, THS is one of Lewis’ best.

      The Rehabilitation of Fauci, er, Alcazar…

  16. Those in the democrat party who don’t like all this stuff, take your party back from the insane wokies. If not, than yes you do support Pedophiles. If your party does not support your views, find a new party. Yes, Virginia you can walk away from the wokies. Don’t run though, you might spoke the zombie freaks.

  17. It has become an article of faith in many circles to assert that it is human activity that is causing global warming. This is such an unquestioned article of faith that it is defended with religious fervor. I recently read an article which essentially claimed “We’re experts, we’ve looked at all the other possible causes, it can’t be anything else, and only ignorant fools and tools would disbelieve”.

    Unfortunately, I have an idea how sausage is made, or rather how science is done, and how scientific consensus is both achieved, and in some fields routinely overturned. Some areas are quite well established. In others, that’s so much the case. The earth’s climate is sufficiently large and complex that it is not yet one of the solved problems. The basic error of the AGW advocates is to assume that it is, and move on from there. The ludicrously and routinely wrong projections of activists and alarmists ought to be sufficient evidence that they aren’t using good science. That doesn’t mean that those who oppose the theory are always right, either.

    The process of establishing scientific consensus is messy even when political influence isn’t noticeably intrusive, which in this case, it is. The AGW crowd does have plausible arguments. But plausible is still not proven, correlation is still not causation, and especially, ridicule is still not refutation. I remain resistantly agnostic about the subject.

    1. Too many rice bowls are tied to AGW being true for them to ever admit it is false, or even unproven.

      I suspect science really only happens these days where the people paying for it do not care about the results. And why spend that kind of money unless you care what you find?

      1. Political careers, too. For instance, you can’t be a California Democrat and oppose the economic lunacy of mandating the phaseout of gas powered cars and trucks within 25 years. Why, only Republicans and a few selfish truckers who are afraid of getting squeezed out of business between rising costs and shrinking markets as consumers and other businesses bug out of the state would worry about such as thing.

    2. A ‘Scientific!’ theory that can’t make verifiable predictions about the future is worthless. Their ‘Globull Wormening Theories’ can’t even predict the past.

      Quant Suff!

    3. I still maintain that the weather is controlled mostly by the sun. It’s hubris and a need for the illusion of control.

      If a few volcanoes going off at the same time could change everything completely it’s really not that big a factor.

      Leftists believe that they can control the weather and cure the common cold. At the root of it they seek to kill God and replace God with themselves.

  20. And as much as I like and respect ESR (fun fact; I was his supervisor many moons ago), I think this is an oversimplification. Some people are just evil; they don’t have to believe in anything except power.

    1. Some are evil by choice, some (the rarest of the rare) by wiring that all the good efforts in the world can’t repair. (We had one of those here, just after I moved here. The jury needed five minutes to find him guilty as all get-out, and he made one of the fastest trips from court room to Old Sparky that I can remember.)

    2. What happened to ESR? No posts on his blog for 3 years and he used to be prolific.

      1. Tech issues, and issues with the provider.

        Adjustment of the technical details has had some delays, from other projects that took priority, but it is kinda up again last I checked.

        1. I do wish he’d take up blogging again. His was the only other blog where I’ve bothered to participate in the comments in many years.

    3. Tell you what, I was trying to think up the worst possible ruling faction for an alien race. Bad guys so fantastically disgusting the whole Human Race would line up for a chance to kick them in the nethers.

      And eventually I invented something that turned out to be Critical Theory. Nothing exists except speech acts and power, the only thing of any importance is power and who has it… that’s Critical Theory. For real. I was quite shocked.

      On the bright side, that alien race is being invaded by bad-tempered humans. So it may all work out for the better, eventually. After the craters stop glowing, anyway…

      1. Karen Ian’s

        “We have come to your backwater rock because you stupid ugly lowlifes have no clue how to organize yourselves to worship obediently your obvious betters, you smelly mongrel morons.”

  21. I got to that part about “connection to the future” and remembered the movie “The Children Of Men,” based on the novel by PD James.
    “Oh” I thought. “I love PD James. This will be good.”
    I put it on pause maybe 45 minutes in and checked to see if the real PD James had actually written a novel so dark. DARK dark. Mankind can no longer breed. Until this one woman shows up, pregnant, and thus the chase begins. Some trying to save her and the child, the authorities trying to do the opposite.
    No, thanks. I’ll take the messiness of lots and lots of people of all ages, romping about unattended and enjoying themselves as they can.

    1. It is based on a PD James book, though there are differences about where the plot goes. Still, based on brief readings of the plot summaries, it’s probably just as dark as the movie is.

  22. We have created a religious caste (and they are a caste) that believe in miracles. Not magic, miracles. Say the right words, the thing happens. Works for them every time.

    That it doesn’t work for you means that you’re wrong and therefore get what you deserve.

    I hate religious fanaticism. And pulling out this particular cult of the One True Religion is going to be painful when it happens.

    1. I just really wish the founders had said freedom of religion or philosophy. The left pretend that they are legislating the truth, because they claim not to believe in God.

      When I try to point out to lefties that the no state religion concept was desired by Americans because of remembering a bunch of unpleasantness during the 30 years war and the Glorious Revolution that involved GOVERNMENT intervention and dictates in regard to religion that involved certain types of laws. And that instituting the same sort of laws in preference to scientism and atheism, will still give the same sort of awful results.

      The founders, for the most part (Thomas Pain excluded), were never against religion just state inforced religion.

  23. I am against violence, especially when the other side is obviously trying to provoke it.

    The laughable part is how utterly incompetent they are at everything.

    Brag actually committed felonies in releasing grand jury materials. And his office (city, county, or state) is not permitted to try people on federal charges. Nor are they permitted to turn Federal misdemeanor charges past the Statute of Limitations into felonies.

    I mean, Bragg is effectively pooping on himself (and his credibility) more than Brandon does.

    1. Even without that, the charges he is trying to make stick are a combination of insane legal theories, hide the ball where he legally cannot and wish casting that seems to require the accused to have a time machine.

      Even with the inherent bias, it is quite possible that this charge ends up being so beyond the pale that the judge dismisses it outright.

      These people genuinely cannot tell the difference between a deer and a donkey.

    2. It is no longer about “constitutional” or even “legal”. It is “I can get away with this and no one can stop me.”

      He is going to do what he wills. No one is going to stop him. The “judge” is going to allow it, and both will ride that bum-steer to the end.

      Because they can.

  24. Reading your post made me think of old science fiction for some reason. For a long time there’s been this strain of narrative that humans never really invented anything, they were either taught by aliens or stole from them.

    Two recent examples were the first Transformers movie and the [shudder] Elementals movie from Marvel. In Transformers all the tech of Silicon Valley was really taken from Transformers by a government operation and disseminated in patents to IBM etc. In the Elementals there was the Smart Alien who taught Humanity all the stuff we were supposed to know, from fire on down to nuclear fusion.

    Older books and stories I don’t remember so well, but you know the ones I’m thinking of probably. Where everything was invented in Atlantis, and we just keep digging it up, etc. I hate that stuff.

    The final straw for me was Elementals. Really, there had to be a Smart Alien to invent fricking gunpowder for us? And animal husbandry? And farming? And carpentry? And freaking irrigation?!

    So yeah. when you say there are people so stupid/smart they think the earth is going to go poof in 12 years, those would be the same type of people who buy into the notion that humans are too stupid to invent irrigation on their own, and the idea must have “diffused” from ancient Egypt.

    No. Aliens did not gift the moronic Humans with unearned knowledge. Atlantis didn’t do it. Dinosaurs didn’t do it. WE did all that. Humans did it. (I can just hear some f-ing Leftist screaming ‘nooooooo!!!!’ right now.)

    And not to put too fine a point on this, White Europeans did 90% of it, and they did it in the last 300 years. Yeah. Us. The bad people. We went from penniless cow farmers and crappy sailing ships to THE MOON. In 300 years.

    And wretched Christians from the buttcrack of the European continent, Scotland, invented the modern world. You name almost anything from the Steam Era onward and most likely a Scotsman invented it. You’re welcome. ~:D

    1. This, ironically enough reminds me of the thing that annoys me about the ending of Troy Rising. I know about the reason there’s no book 4. Not getting into that.

      But ending it with people asphyxiating in space because of lack of ships to get to them. REALLY?!

      Few chapters back, there were missiles flying through the gate. What is a missile? Propulsion and payload. That flies through space. See where I’m going with this?

      Okay, complicating factors. Open battlefield with high velocity shrapnel in every possible direction. Whaddya do about that? Can the AIs handle the complexity?

      Say no.

      So, you need more processing power. Can’t fly all the missiles AND track all the debris AND keep track of all the human velocity vectors. So, give the missiles pilots and just track the dangerous debris along the flight paths as best you can with the processing power you have.

      Risk? Sure there’s risk. But I guaran-damn-tee you there would be more volunteers to fly those “missiles” than missiles themselves.

      You could throw in mini stories absolutely galore in that arc. Medical emergencies that need to stop off in a pressurized space… that happens to also have Rangora in it. Rangora demanding the humans rescue their HV personnel, too (nothing said about the bullet-catchers, of course). Losing people from idiocy, from not following directions, from equipment failure. Finding ones that survived, but multiply redundant coms and suchlike somehow failed. Can you use captured Rangora ships as temporary drop off points for survivors? They lost, after all. Do they have enough built up knowledge of Rangora ships to maintain the pressure hulls they capture? Somebody may not get the memo.

      And so on. Human ingenuity can come up with amazing solutions given time, but “good enough” solutions generally happen pretty rapidly and then get refined on the fly. Human engineered solutions to environmental problems pretty much defines the species.

      Ignoring that is such bullcrap.

    2. That’s like when people say “nobody knows how they built the Pyramids” (or Stonehenge, or whatever). Bull. A whole lot of burly men used a whole lot of simple tools and expended a very large amount of muscle power over a very long time. That’s how.

      That level of effort seems near impossible to our fat lazy modern asses, and that level of sustained effort seems near impossible to our low-attention-span modern minds. But that just means we don’t understand humans in the past, not that aliens or Atlanteans or Merlin or whatever did the big jobs for them.

      1. On that theme, I expect we will see claims that aliens built the:
        – interstate highway system
        – Mackinac, Golden Gate, etc bridges
        – Kennedy Space Center

        They are just too big and to complex for mere humans to build in that short a time.

  25. Anyone not leading by example when arguing that the population needs to be reduced is clearly in bad faith.

  29. Read this and immediately thought of this quote from 6 decades ago when I read it.

    “There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who ‘love Nature’ while deploring the ‘artificialities’ with which ‘Man has spoiled “Nature.” ‘ The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of ‘Nature’ — but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the ‘Naturist’ reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e. his own self-hatred.” Robert Heinlein

Comments are closed.