The Illusion of Knowledge

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The problem with totalitarian states is a problem of information, or lack thereof. No one wants to tell the boss that things didn’t turn out the way he planned. And there’s a hierarchy of bosses before the ultimate boss. At each level, the information is corrupted.

Suppose that you manage a factory making boots for the army. You were asked to make 4000 pairs of boots, but you only managed ten, because the leather for the boots never got to you. When the big boss asks for the boots, of course you tell him it’s on the way, the because you know the leather providers lied and said they got it to you. The guy in charge of transport, in turn, will tell his boss the trucks are fueled up and full of boots. The fact is no only doesn’t he have boots, but also no fuel and possibly no trucks.

This is why totalitarian regimes make wrong decisions and why they lose wars. Also why they’re absolutely convinced they’re the strongest, etc. until they lose.

Now I’m going to blow your mind: this is not exclusive to totalitarian states. It’s in fact endemic in any system where truth imposed from above and no redemption is possible. In fact, most centralized organizations of a certain size, with no countervailing culture.

You know all the chest beating “In this company there’s no room for failure?” That’s a company that will fail, because people working for it can’t afford to.

If your company — say — expects the editor to know exactly how many copies a book will sell, in a system that neither surveys the market nor knows how to market, the editor will pull numbers from ass, control as much as he can to make sure it sells the right number, and — if needed — pull the book out of print if it’s going to sell too much. Because no failure allowed and estimating too few sales is as bad as estimating too many. (True story, not me, but someone had a book that was becoming an unexpected runaway bestseller pulled out of print after a week. And the editor refused to put it back in print.)

I’m sure there are a ton of other examples, from huge corporations, where people are taught that they need to set goals and be inflexible, and that there is no failure, etc.

However, the most obvious examples for this are our media, our intelligence agencies, our institutions that are supposed to know what people think and want and how they are coping with current issues.

I was reminded of this today when I accidentally tripped on an article where the writer was utterly baffled all surveys claimed that religion and religiosity are in sharp decline in the US and yet the Bible is hitting new numbers in sales and the top podcast is a Rosary in a Year podcast.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but I absolutely can square that circle. It’s not even difficult. If the surveys aren’t outright fabrications — a big if these days — chances are that what was asked as if they were members of a church. With the mainstream churches, without exceptions, tilting more and more into conformity with the leftist establishment, a lot of people who are very serious about their religion are finding it hard to attend a church or admit they belong to an organized church.

Of course, the left who are most of the people commissioning these surveys, wouldn’t even understand this concept, because in their minds “left” is just mainstream, and churches that are leftist should therefore be the most popular. If people aren’t attending them, it must mean they’re no longer believers.

Or alternately they asked people who don’t trust the person asking the questions, and who would be destroyed if their colleagues knew they were religious.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the information/culture/industrial complex is running the Marxist script according to which the smarter and more “advanced” you get the less religious. And every bit of information they get must fit into the matrix or be disregarded.

Because, well, failure is not an option. If the Marxist assumptions are wrong, their whole world collapses, because they’ve been interpreting everything through the Marxist assumptions.

The other part of the problem is that their cultural branches continually manufacture pseudo-knowledge, which adds up to a picture of the world that has nothing to do with reality, but does so by being so pervasive, so unified and so inescapable, that it triggers our subconscious impression of what’s real.

What do I mean? Well, it turns out that things like TV and movies can trick the back of our brain into thinking what we watched is real. It won’t stand up to examination, but it is never examined. Our brain doesn’t actually have a defense against seeing things that look realistic but aren’t real. This wasn’t a thing in our evolution.

So, people assume something like 25% of people are gay, and 50% of people are black, and probably at this point that something like another 25% are transgender. The numbers are, of course, nowhere close to that. Not even vaguely.

BUT the system of information is corrupted and that feeds more corruption.

About five years ago I stopped watching British mysteries. Understand that, even though some series bothered me with political insanity, most of them didn’t, and it was my escape. And then I realized that every couple shown in every series, including those set in the 30s was a bi-racial couple. Why? I don’t know. I asked friends from England if this was realistic and the answer was ‘lol, no.’

And I couldn’t watch it. Because the fact EVERY SINGLE couple was bi-racial obtruded to such a level I couldn’t suspend disbelief.

And then recently, I started seeing this in American movies. Just… all of a sudden every couple is bi-racial, unless they’re both some non-white variety. These are stories set in small towns in areas of America I know d*mn well — having been there — are 90% white.

Yes, this means I rant at the TV and my husband tells me to shush, but seriously!

I have no problem with bi-racial marriage. By the crazy leftist definition I’m in one, though it’s really hard to figure out which of us is what race, and you have to squint and go with the 10% rule. (Like most Americans, we’re just shades of beige.) And I seem to have an unusual number of friends who married different races. Mostly I think because I’m part of a group where we couldn’t care less for “race” but care for individuals. And being Odds we have enough trouble finding people we get along with without caring about skin color or “ethnic” features.

However, I know d*mn well that day to day, out there, bi-racial couples aren’t that common. Most people are or appear to be “standard white” (see we aren’t at home to the one drop theory in this case. It’s visual identification, and for that most people are “white” ranging from pale blond to tanned Mediterranean.) Then there are some obviously Hispanic couples, some Indians, and depending on where you are, a lot of black couples, but nowhere near as many as white-white couples. Bi-racial couples aren’t rare enough that people turn to look, but they also aren’t anywhere close to the rule.

I have nothing against the occasional ethnic or bi-racial couple in a movie. I’m not even going to stand here and go “Well, statistically it’s 15%” or whatever (For one, statistics are unreliable, because they depend on self-identification, which mostly depends on the one drop rule.) If 2/3 of the couples are white, and the 1/3 is mixed, ethnic, whatever? That won’t feel jarring. Heck, 50/50 wouldn’t feel jarring. It’s when you start noticing it’s something like 90% mixed and you don’t see a single white-white couple. And you start going “What reality are these people living in?”

The reality they’re living in is one in which they think black and white are 50/50 and then the other ethnicities are 30% (yes, I know, but Math is racist. You know that.) And everyone is isolated and belongs to this group and hates everyone else.

In their befuddled little minds — ask them. They’ll rant about the global South and how white people are going extinct. It’s stupid stuff, but you see, they give incentives for claiming to be a minority, and never notice people change IDENTIFICATION not ethnicity — they’re easing the extincting of you those evil Westerners by promoting bi-racial marriage and “erasing whiteness.” This in turn will bring about magical califragilistic communist Utopia.

Anyway, the only way to make sense of this is to get into the minds of these people, and it’s almost impossible to do so, because there’s failures of information, at every level.

Take for instance the fact the head of every police department is a woman and has been for at least the last 30 years, in every TV show and movie. (Though they used to also allow black men.) If you believe that, you’re going to think that when this doesn’t happen people are being “intentionally held back” and need DEI. And then…. And then things like LA happen. Because every time you promote or select based on any characteristic but competence, you are degrading competence and end up with mediocrity.

It basically amounts to “delusion on delusion on delusion.” And it’s impossible to figure it out completely, even if you make guesses.

This is to say, as a lot of people become redpilled, don’t assume they’re faking it. A lot of them really were lost in a morass of bad information and bad first principles to which to interpret the information.

The thing is that one event that is shocking enough can wake people from this type of thing. (It’s how you deprogram cult members.) And Trump’s election was a very shocking event for them. They thought they had won full control of the country forever.

So some of the newly red-pilled might be completely sincere. (Though probably not the ones who claim not to have known Biden had dementia. At least not those that had any contact with him.)

The other thing is: you don’t have to mimic their errors in thought. You don’t have to believe their TV shows and run around with your head on fire saying the “white race is going extinct.” (For one, you’d have to define white race. Also, the “white race” has absorbed so many things considered “not white” and yet it’s still here. Chill.) You don’t have to listen to their designated ethic virtue-bearer talk about how he hates all whites and believe this is true of your neighbor who tans a bit.

And you certainly don’t have to believe no one is religious anymore. Or that America has changed out of all recognition. Or that people don’t want to work anymore. Or whatever is being pushed by the crazy media, at the top of the pile of distortions and lies.

As the election showed, this country is nowhere near dead, and mostly Americans are Americans. (With some cities entirely taken over by invaders. Probably. Only I haven’t been there.)

No, you can’t find anything about the country as a whole and be sure it’s true. All of the information streams are corrupted. But there are clues.

I knew that the left wasn’t fully in control or even close to in control when Let’s Go Brandon went viral and was everywhere. I knew the economy sucked because I have a lot of friends in all types of retail. And also because I saw the prices in the supermarket. I knew the real state of people’s satisfaction with the Bidentia by listening to people at the supermarket. (I listen to strangers’ conversations. I’m a writer. We have no shame.)

This is again to say “Get out and touch grass.” Or better yet, look around at reality, listen to people not in your immediate circle. Look at the subtle signs the left is in real trouble. (The right can boycott brands into submission is one of those. The opposite isn’t true. They’re loud but not many.)

Always look behind the ideas and “facts” being dished out by the media and experts. Sure, they’ll call you a conspiracy theorist, but these days it’s just what they call people not taken in by the psy-ops. And there are more and more of us every day.

Because the “facts” the left is dishing out just don’t add up. They’re as phony as wooden nickels and you’d have to be a fool to believe them.

Or foreigners. As I found out in October, in Europe they tend to believe everything they see in our media. Which means Americans on average are part of a shootout a day, we’re all in mixed race marriages, and all our men are stupid and all our women brilliant.

Let them fool themselves. It’s dangerous enough to have them running around in an illusion.

We don’t have to join them.

312 thoughts on “The Illusion of Knowledge”

  1. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Illusion of Knowledge

  2. Yep, “What Is White” is a good question.

    Many “Hispanics” look “White” as in they are “pure” European. (From Spain & Portugal).

    Liked by 1 person

    2. The Feds have a special term, “Non-Hispanic White”, on various Federal forms. Which implies the existence of a “Hispanic White”, which doesn’t appear on the forms, at least last time I looked.

      I still haven’t figured out how an Apache from north of the Rio Grande is a “Native American” (and I am not), but their cousin Apache they can wave to over the river is “Hispanic”.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The Census has two blocks. The first is Hispanic/not Hispanic, the second asks race. Most “hispanics” only answer the first. So that seems the identifier. So I question the accuracy of white/nonwhite. But then I try and practice being a paradoxic cynical innocent, trusting everyone and no one at the same time.

        America is blessed with a Census bureau that still values accurate confidential data. Every month the Census Bureau samples the country, as accurate data as possible. The ACS survey, (you can look it up). Demographic data.

        Like

        1. Best choice: Pick as many “races” as you can justify, both through family records and statistically, based on ancestral location(s) (in my case, at least 4, depending on the available choices) and check them all. Always turn the handle further than expected. :twisted:

          Liked by 1 person

            1. Not sure what I did for 2020 (Despicable Kate Brown was getting a bit too jackbooty and I was keeping a lower profile for a while. Didn’t last.) but in the ’00 and ’10 census forms, I filled in “Human”. (Waggles hand. Might try “Odd” this year…) On non-census forms, I’ve filled in NYDB when they asked.

              Like

              1. In ’10, when the Grete Blaqk Safier Goy was POTUS 44, I might have put “human” on the Census Bureau forms. Maybe I wrote in “hobbit” but it’s been a while. I’m pretty sure I gave them Jenny’s number to call me at.

                Like

            1. Possibly; idiots are always with us. Or they could just decide that the data about “race” are useless (which they are). But checking every box which accords with reality isn’t dishonest, especially given that “race” is itself a chimera, and can mean whatever you want it to mean.

              Liked by 2 people

                1. Yep, in last place right until he crossed the wire. (I have a Best of Spike Jones album, so maybe not dating myself too badly).

                  Liked by 1 person

    3. As the Reader joked when his wife was picking paint colors for our current house – ‘it’s 50 shades of beige’.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. Yep – I have a perfect example of a “white Hispanic” in my own household at this very minute: my grandson, Wee Jamie, whose bio-father is Hispanic. Jamie has light brown hair, rosy complexion and hazel eyes, and presents as Anglo … but his father is Hispanic.

      Liked by 1 person

    6. Hispanic movie actors have been known to adopt stage names because otherwise they get rejected unseen because the director doesn’t want someone who looks Hispanic, or on first sight because he does.

      Like

  3. And then things like LA happen. Because every time you promote or select based on any characteristic but competence, you are degrading competence and end up with mediocrity.

    I am not at all saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying that lots of people in Los Angeles right now would gladly kill their pets, on livestream, to achieve the vast improvement that is mere mediocrity.

    Dear Lord, what a perfect storm of forced incompetence they have achieved there, after decades of diligent work at multiple levels. And as many of us in Western North Carolina can attest, the disaster won’t nearly be over once the natural disaster is over.

    Illusion of knowledge is right. So many people with so much power know so many things that aren’t so. And I’ll stop my disjointed ranting now.

    Republica restituendae.

    Liked by 2 people

          1. Or at least to look less weak. Hell, just look at the Biden* Regime. They managed to assemble an entire administration without including one single competent person, even by accident. Starting at the top, of course.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. To be fair, some of Biden’s gatekeepers had to be pretty competent to keep the illusion that the President actually making the decisions going as long as it did – and the fact that we still don’t know who was making them is evidence of their competence.

              Like

                1. They still had to curb him enough so the MSM could shill it properly. Witness the disaster of the debate.

                  Like

                2. The thing is, we still don’t know who was (still is?) making decisions for the President. Who he was going to “get in trouble” with if he answered a question. Even with a prospiracy, keeping a thing like that hidden so effectively shows competence, at least in CYA.

                  Liked by 1 person

              2. They didn’t create an illusion, they just kept repeating the same lies over and over and over. While the Biden-dummy doddered around lost, shook hands with invisible people, and we were told we didn’t see it.

                Liked by 1 person

      1. Thank you, but Helene just grazed my stomping grounds compared to a lot of people in WNC, especially in outlying counties. Lots, lots of others need the hugs, and more than hugs, much more than I do.

        As to your incompetence reply: to coin a phrase, THIS.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. I will give the fire chief credit for objecting to the $17.6 million budget cut in writing. Not that it did any good, but at least she tried.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Or to quote Hairgel, “The locals will figure it out,” when asked why there was no water in the hydrants.

          Like

  4. . . . BI-racial couples on tv in any movies/series. . . heh, heh. Now start counting mixed races in commercials. And notice if a white male appears always in a commercial(if not obviously gay), he always the stupid person being advised by the wise black person.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. And yet… When creating the new Battlestar Galactica, the replaced the competent and effective black male second in command with a white male drunkard who in the end turned out to be one of the enemies, apparently without realizing it (nor did anyone else realize it). Likewise, Boomer, a very competent black male fighter pilot, is replaced by yet another enemy sleeper agent, this one female with asian ancestry, who has an identical clone twin serving on the same ship carrying the name of the original series’ Commander Adama’s daughter (also a competent officer on the bridge in BSG TOS).

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I SO didn’t get the references to John McCain as “Col. Tye,” until I saw part of an episode of the new series. I’ll stick with the old one, thanks. (Although the soundtrack of the new series was/is great for writing eerie, “don’t open that door!” chapters.)

        Like

        2. I do have to say, there are parts of the rebooted BSG that are pretty epic. One, yes, is Bear Mcreary’s soundtrack. But honestly, Katee Sackhoff was a really good Starbuck even if she wasn’t the same as Dirk Benedict’s Starbuck from the ’70s. And Edward James Olmos is just, well, Edwards James Olmos. The guy was a great Adama. They did some good stuff but the plot kind of went off the rails in the last two seasons.

          Like

          1. If they had called it “Endgame Escape” and just had little nods to BSG, some music ques, similar names, “Vipers”, etc, BSG2 could have been epic, despite the absolutely sucky ending. As it is, “skinsuit of a real series – extra crappy”.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. The miniseries and first episode of S1 were freaking amazing, but it fell apart *quickly* after that. And yes, the ending was completely idiotic.

              Like

          2. Maybe a great Adama, but…

            The differences in the two series might be best summed up by observing what would have happened had the ragtag fleet found our Earth.

            Commander Adama: “At last, we have found our new home.”

            Admiral Adama: “Holy fuck, you mean there really is an Earth?”

            The fact that costuming was mostly “bring something from your closet at home” really bothered me.

            Like

            1. I read some “making of” that explained that they wanted a recognizable feel, not wayout future. Relateable to folks today.

              Thus conventional firearms, vipers firing link-belted shells, telephone handsets, etc. They wanted near-today look and gadgets, with just enough tech/handwavium to be “in space” but familiar and relateable. Plus, the Galactica herself was in-story -old-, four decades out of the prior war, and not new then.

              Like

              1. Yeah, and … they made it too familiar. And perhaps this was supposed to call back to the “it’s all happened before, and it’ll all happen again” thing they had, but the cycle was too exact. One particular one – the idea that the pilots used “call signs”, much like military aviators in the US do today. I don’t think that’s a common custom across the world today, much less that it’s something that a culture hundreds of thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of light years away in origin, would just duplicate. As well as the close match of the governmental system – the Secretary of Education ascends to the position of President?

                Nah – they were preaching, and not even hiding it.

                Like

                2. Nope, call signs / code names are a thing that’s necessary when you can’t see the other guy.

                  My first name is Steve; I HAVE to use my last name in restaurants because they yell “Steve, your order’s ready” and 5 heads pop up.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Not quite. Aviator call signs, such as “Apollo”, “Mongoose”, and such, are more nicknames. Operational call signs are more like “Angel Flight Lead”, “Angel Flight Wing”, “Foxfire 1”, and such. Much more systemized, and much less permanent – in fact, they’re assigned on a per-mission basis.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. And the “nicknames” are usually something you really wish had not been noticed.

                      No one gets to pick “Maverick”. Military handles get assigned, like “Dickhead”. And later on, some epic F up or humilation gets you renamed something worse, like “Skidmark”.

                      I had several. Only one was remotely complimentary. (grin)

                      I have awarded a few. (grin)

                      Liked by 2 people

                    3. I don’t remember if it was posted by Schlichter or Peter Grant, but the callsign “STAB” was awarded to a pilot who had two “accidents” in his flightsuit🤢 followed by boltering: S**t Twice And Boltered.🤣

                      Like

                  2. Same.

                    All 3 of our names are common.

                    Last name is common too, way more than my maiden name (very rare for this area, in other areas, apparently not). But at least don’t have 5 or 6 others raise their heads when we get called for our reservations.

                    Like

                    1. It got really unamusing when I worked on a DoD project and shared all three names with a Captain on the same base. He and I had a similar clearance level but NOT the same project read-in. People would search for his name (or mine) and hit send for all sorts of interesting stuff. Fortunately I was working on a DoD issued laptop, so my corporate laptop didn’t get them.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    2. Work? At least most of my jobs being the only female, when someone asked for D, they meant me (job ’96 – ’02, there were 3 other ‘D’s in the company, sigh). Although my last job I’d get a call of, “Hi this is ‘D’.” With no context. Problem? Well response was “Hi ‘D’, ‘D’ here (both laugh) … Which county?” There was a possibility of 5 answers (didn’t count the “same but not quite the same” variations).

                      Like

                  3. There is no rule that you must give restaurants your real name. Being a “Mark” in the midwest, I often pick something else. “Aloysius” is fun because no one can spell it – including me; I just looked it up for this comment.

                    Liked by 2 people

                    1. “Can I have a name?”

                      They didn’t give you one at birth? I’m sorry.

                      “Can I have your name?”

                      I think my wife might object.

                      “Can I get a name for your order?”

                      You may call it…Sam. Sam Mich.

                      Sampling from many orders at the deli where I’m a regular.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    2. “Sam Mich”

                      One day, you are going to get a dead mouse in your sandwich.

                      -Never- F-Around with the “spoons”. You will Find Out.

                      Never f with spoon or doc.

                      Like

                  4. Try being “Josh” in the last few decades: one thing the bride and I agreed on even before I popped the question was that any kids we’d have would have less-than-ubiquitous names. Not weird names, but the Top Ten Baby Names are all right out.

                    Like

              2. It’s one of the super-carriers of its’ world. How many life extension projects have ours gone through? Navies are expensive; space navies are more expensive.

                Even Manticore needed a license to print money aka wormhole junction to make it work.

                Like

      2. Also note recent Marvel movies where the villains were black males.

        I’m starting to see commercials with “matching,” couples where the husband isn’t always an idiot. One Tide commercial where college-age son is asking dad for laundry advice and dad is allowed to be smart. But yeah, the, “all couples must be bi-racial,” bit gets old fast. And I wonder how black men feel about commercials with a white husband/black wife?

        Liked by 1 person

        1. My vagueish understanding is that it’s black women who are more unsettled by white husband/black wife couples.

          Although what I find ironic is how blacks and other minorities are in big demand as nameless extras in advertising, while the named brand mascots of color have been purged.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Black women see white women as stealing “their” men. The successful black men don’t want black culture women. They want women as capable as themselves, leaving the black culture women to black culture men.

            Black women outside that culture seem to have no problem attracting men who are also outside.

            Black culture women respond by attacking the interloper, not seeming to realize that the issue is no longer skin color, but culture.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Spoiler: it was always the culture. (Most American black people have more of the vaunted Northern European blood than entire very successful NYC Italian neighborhoods.)

              Like

              1. Yes it was always the culture. But as long as the competent man or woman is trapped they can use us vs them and divide by illusory skin color. They honestly do not realize that it’s a culture issue because they have been taught that it’s race. The entire cultutal identity is based on maintaining that illision.

                When one of “theirs” breaks out, it’s seen as a betrayal rather than an escape. Even if they denied that person or drove them away, that person cannot be allowed to destroy racial purity (yes, I get it, there’s no such thing) by marrying outside the group.

                Liked by 2 people

              2. Saw a photo of the American delegation to Ghana which included the Mayor of LA. I’m sorry, honey, but all of you have a ton of crackers in your genetic woodpiles.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. The thing that (visually) annoyed me about the first Black Panther movie was that for all their All-Black Cast of Wakandans, the actors were different enough from each other in skin tone, facial sculpt, body type, and so on, that all you could peg them for was “significant sub-Saharan parentage.” Had the entire story been set in Atlanta, and frankly most of it could have been, their mutual kinship would have been far more credible.

                  Isolated kingdoms in Darkest Africa™ don’t spread their phenotype range like that.

                  Like

                  1. My story-patch for that actually makes them way less evil– they were only “isolated” in that it was a place that folks driven out of their homes or rescued from Dire Situations(tm) could live in peace, without having to fight the Bad Stuff they left.

                    They only got more isolated recently when it was more possible for folks to run away and survive on their own, so you only get new blood via the traditional “lookit the lovely wife I picked up on my travels!” route.

                    (And yes, “we have super awesome tech which we lock down and do nothing but complain about everybody else for centuries” is evil.)

                    Liked by 1 person

          2. I like to point out to people that funny how the non-white brand faces–Aunt Jemima and the Land o’ Lakes maiden–are completely gone, and yet somehow the white ones are still here… (Not sure about Uncle Ben, if they erased him or made him white? Haven’t looked lately.) It’s almost as if the people screaming about racism didn’t like seeing non-white people on their products…

            Liked by 2 people

            1. “…dont like or respect non-white people….” Fixed It For You.

              Thus no “heroic” team mascots or references. Especially ones where the Blackfeet or Seminoles say “Sure! Rock on!”

              Liked by 2 people

    3. I think its got better or perhaps I am just not noticing.

      But for a while there, every second commercial on Australian TV featured an American or Australian Female Black as the bright young face, aboriginals where only about 1 in 10. note ex-african descended people are <1% of the population

      As an aside the nz navy only has about 8 major ships, but including the one that sunk last year they have multiple Lesbian captains. My initial thought was huh how did that happen, and then I realised.

      Liked by 2 people

  5. A couple of historical examples of information corruption:

    A primary reason US Intel, especially CIA, missed the coming collapse of the Soviet Union, is that they were looking at what the Soviet leadership believed without realizing that they weren’t being given accurate information from their subordinates.

    I personally think Sadaam Hussein believed he had an advanced, operational, WMD program, because all of his subordinates, down the janitors at the empty bunkers, was afraid to tell him about the delays and failures of the program. Which (combined with intel on the actual WMDs in existence) led US Intel to believe there was more there than there was. (Speculation on my part as I was out of the community and had no access by that time, but know that Iraq damned well had functional, deployable WMDs in 1991)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Well, yes, but they also had the moving goalposts mounted on rocket sleds for that. Every time actual WMDs were actually found, you could hear the zooming sound of the goalposts moving from the opposite coast.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Well, Saddam had already used WMDs on the Kurds. Not nukes, of course, but does anyone but the idiot media talking heads think “WMD” means only nukes? In terms of long-term effects, it has reasonably been argued that nukes are the least bad of the CBR (or NBC, depending on branch of service) triad; I’ve read knowledgeable essays that in increasing order of “bad” it goes nukes, gas and bio, based on initial effects, wideness of distribution in use, long-term lethality, and controllability.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I recall a report modeling a Soviet use of persistent chemical weapons as per their published doctrine supporting an armored Fulda Gap invasion (which report I can’t find any trace of now), and IIRC they were basically projecting a completely life-free dead zone across a huge chunk of West Germany for decades, with effects all the way down into soil bacteria, as well as impacts from the rivers into the North Sea ecosystem due to runoff.

            The conclusion was it would be much faster to recover the North European environment from tactical nuclear weapons use than chemical weapons use.

            Like

            1. Yup. The nerve agents kill anything with nerves. Kill the earthworms and you land isnt going to be it to grow weeds in very short order. Apparently the essential soil criters are much more rad tolerant than we are.

              Some of the later agents are …. hellspawn.

              Liked by 2 people

      1. I’m glad I had the water glass up to my mouth when I read that line. Might have needed a major monitor-clean&dry.

        Like

  6. “So, people assume something like 25% of people are gay”

    I’ve seen that one myself out in the wild. No grasp of numbers. Human societies would be radically different if that were anywhere close to the case.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Back in the mid ’90s, the gays thought that they were 10% of the population. I saw a magazine titled 10% back then. A friend of unstated sexual orientation was renting a room from a lesbian couple. Their reading material. This was in Silicon Valley. Not sure if Santa Cruz had acquired the reputation of “Lesbian Central” by that time. If not, it was heading that way.

      Like

      2. I’m pretty sure that the 10% number comes from the Kinsley study. I’m going to be lazy and not look it up, but from memory it was done in the 1960s using – wait for it – a small sample of college students that was then extrapolated to “everyone”.

        Even leaving aside the issue of “how honest are college kids going to be answering questions about sex?”, the sample is hardly representative of the population. I also somehow doubt they surveyed the student athletes, but more likely whoever happened to be in the social “science” courses Kinsley taught, which is not even representative of “college students”, let alone the entire US.

        On the other hand, in the interest of being fair, there were not a lot of data choices because it was one of the few studies that existed.

        Liked by 1 person

  7. Hi! My name is Tangent, so glad to meet ya:

    …a lot of people who are very serious about their religion are finding it hard to attend a church…

    Reminded me of a headline (I’m skimming the article now) from Instapundit a bit back:

    Young, single men are leaving traditional churches. They found a more ‘masculine’ alternative

    Those young men are exploring the Orthodox church. It makes demands, challenges, pushes. Huh. How shocking. :|

    Polls, surveys, annoying questions…not gonna come to terms with people’s sincere beliefs for a whole host of reasons (as noted in the OP). People aren’t simple, but the narrative demands simple boxes. Oops.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. The same seems to be true of Catholic religious orders. The strict, demanding ones have waiting lists, almost. The “be yourself” liberal ones are aging away into nothingness. (About ten years ago, the Trappists/Cistercians had to temporarily stop accepting novices in the US because they had no room for them. That is hardcore monasticism right there.)

      Liked by 1 person

          1. um… papal infallibility doesn’t mean we have to accept all his idiot ideas. He’s not made any statements ex-cathedra so far, probably for the same reason that Biden didn’t send people to confiscate guns door to door. They dimly understand that there WOULD be a revolution.

            Like

            1. Point taken; the Pope can say any idiotic thing he wants, and as you say, none of his idiotic statements (AFAIK) have been ex cathedra. The problem is that many people take anything he says as “official”.

              Liked by 1 person

    3. My boys go in respect of my wife and I. I go because my wife goes and because, well, I’m a Roman Catholic and I’ll be damned (tee hee) if they’ll drive me out. Especially when “they” are a jumped up Jesuit who managed to break the church in his own country before he allowed pagan idols on the altar in St. Peter’s. Then again, my parish is fairly Orthodox, we have a good, simple priest (a Portagee yet) and …. it’s my parish.

      We had an orthodox, fairly conservative bishop here in the Archdiocese of Newark until Franky named the current clown. The seminary was full, now it’s empty. just sayin.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. I saw an interesting YouTube video recently (one of those where a non-American, in this case a Brit, I think, reacts to uniquely American things, be it culture/food/weather/whatever). He was stunned at how high a percentage of American homes have a Bible in them.

      Americans are still a pretty darned religious people–it’s just that so many churches decided to join the wokies. (I think that is changing.) I’m very grateful that, thus far, mine has not. (I mean, I’m sure there’s local exceptions in particular–that’s what happens when your clergy is called from amongst the congregation and it’s not something they got to choose to do (they can refuse the calling, of course)–you get a lot of different opinions and viewpoints, and sometimes that makes a mess.)

      Liked by 2 people

      2. I’m one of the least religious people I know (as opposed to in active opposition to religion; I know some of them) and even I have two Bibles in my house.

        As to why two: I love the King James language(*), but the New International version (with translation footnotes) is much easier to read.

        (*) it is “thy will be done” not “your will be done”. “Fiat voluntas tua” is a bit old-school, even for me, but “tua” is clearly second person singular possessive, which is “your”, these days.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. The ESV may also be to your taste. (The ESV Study Bible is excellent)

          But I too prefer the “voice” of the KJV, even if there are some less than apt tanslation items.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. If you go with the NIV, make sure it’s the *older* version of the NIV. The newer ones went a little wokeish. ESV is good, that’s what my old church used. I currently have an NKJV study Bible that my wife got me, and it’s also OK. I grew up on a KJV from my Mom that had all the diacriticals and everything in the names. Made it almost impossible to read, honestly.

            I have never quite understood the obsession some denominations have with “KJV and nothing but KJV amen.” All translations are inspired by God and the Holy Spirit but made through fallible men. So I’ve never been sure why some think the KJV is somehow more special and is THE authoritative Protestant Bible translation. Maybe there’s a historical reason, if so I’m not learned enough to know it. Just make sure to avoid the awful modern paraphrase versions like “The Message” and whatnot. Eww.

            Like

            1. Probably nostalgia, more than anything: it was the first English translation of the Bible, and even though the English weren’t the first Protestants, they definitely got around :D

              My religion’s take on it is that, of all the translations, we feel it to be the most correct, so it’s our standard. Mind, that’s for a given value of “correct”–as you said, God’s inspiration and direction as recorded by flawed and fallible men.* But as with most such things in my religion, people who want to also read other versions are welcome to do so for their own delight.

              *Even some of the non-English translations of the Book of Mormon can end up with some hilarious mistranslations. They work really, really hard to make sure nothing of the doctrine is mis-written, but little things still get through. Case in point: there’s a passage where Christ has the sick and the lame, and the withered brought to Him for healing. In the Romanian translation, the word they opted to use for “withered” actually means “wrinkled” and so it inadvertently makes it seem like He said “bring me your sick, your lame, and your old people.”

              Like

            2. You would have had a rough time with my Dad. His position was the translators of the KJV were Directly Inspired by God; therefore every word they wrote was Divinely Inspired and the Only True Word, period, end of story.

              I never disagreed with him on Biblical questions, but I can attest that crossing him on other issues was…unpleasant. Yet he had no issues whatsoever with Jews or Moslems, regarding them as, “People of the Book.”

              Liked by 1 person

            3. Basic reason for preferring the KJV is “literal” word for word translation, pre dating subsequent “what were they trying to say” translations of meaning. Many of which also may have been /or are accused of influenced with “what do we want to wind up with” .

              literal versus meaning, both can be valid.

              KJV Shall not Kill.

              NIV Shall not murder.

              Different words in English and Hebrew. Different meanings. Original Hebrew word used is “murder”. NIV is more correct on that one.

              Other specific items favor KJV versuon/method.

              And my KJV-Only friend won’t preach from two KJV items that may be add-ons from later centuries. So even KJV-only folks differ.

              I try to focus on the bits that call me to the Savior, and guide me to fix much of my brokenness. I am so very much in need of it.

              How did Mal Reynolds put it? (As to primay sin from Operative’s POV)

              “I’m a fan of all seven.”

              …-So- guilty. So grateful. Hometown: Island of Misfit Toys.

              Liked by 1 person

          3. Us Mormons use the KJV as well. It’s a bit of a joke that Mormon teens do better with Shakespeare than some, because we spent our childhoods reading the KJV with the family, and then have seminary all through high school, most places :p

            Like

        2. Putting my pedant nitpicking hat on, to avoid translational intersteps, shouldn’t a best-English-word reference look back to Aramaic rather than Latin?

          Like

          1. IIRC, Most modern NT translations go back to the Greek. None of the New Testament books were written in Aramaic (there was a belief that Matthew was written in Aramaic but most scholars believe it was first written in Greek).

            Note, I seem to remember that the first King James (NT) version did go back to the known Greek of its time.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Vulgate’s from about 400AD, and a complete collection, and folks agreed on it then, so it’s easiest to have it as a baseline and then collect all the other language copies into one place to figure out what they meant at the time if there’s been any shifts in meaning.

            From memory, as Drak points out, Greek was the most common language for the bits we’ve got of really old stuff.

            This exchange isn’t exactly on topic for the question, but it’s got a good selection of discussion about theories of what various letters were written in.

            https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/27265/was-any-of-the-new-testament-actually-written-in-aramaic

            Liked by 2 people

  8. Even the game shows are corrupted. My wife likes to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. If we go by the contestants they show it’s the same 25% gay – 50% black mentioned. As soon a they introduce them at the start I look at them and tell my wife – he’ll going to tell us about his husband and everybody will nod approvingly and accept it as normal. I can tell you more than they are free to say on TV yet. He’s not only gay, he’s the bitch and doesn’t get a turn. Give it another 5 years and they’ll feel free to tell us all the gory details.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. They have trans contestants fairly often, too. The change really got going after Alex Trebek passed.

      Like

      1. Just remember they cast the contestants from the self-selected applicant pool, rather than kidnap absolutely random people off the streets.

        They pick who they want to show.

        Liked by 1 person

  9. If you’re marrying, having and raising children, you’re not going extinct. When someone claims the ‘white race’ is going extinct, look at how many children that person has, or doesn’t have. ‘White’ doesn’t do a thing for me. I’d be just as happy if my spouse (and children) were of Asian, African, or any other descent. What matters is my western culture: a desire for freedom from unwanted restraints, a chance to accumulate enough wealth so I don’t have to live hand-to-mouth, and a feeling of satisfaction (or relief) in leaving enough descendants that my genetic contributions to humanity are considered viable survival characteristics, as well as passing down that drive for excellence that western culture contains. Okay, that looks a bit circular, but I’ll let it stand.

    Speaking of touching the grass, time to see if I can make it over my entire walking route without freezing my butt off.

    Liked by 2 people

    3. So much this. Anyone–from either side of the aisle–who natters about “white going extinct” ought to be laughed at. Because skin color is not a freaking race, however much they’ve pulled that over the centuries. Human is a race.

      Of course, only about 120-150 years ago I, so lily-pale that only albinos are pastier than me (I’m a redhead, heh), would have been considered ‘not white’ because Irish. Race is and always has been, in my opinion, a silly construct and used to justify “we don’t like those people over there, therefore they are not human and we can do what we want to them and not feel bad.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. We finally got a (sort-of) redhead on our third kid; I believe I got my severely dark hair and capacity to tan (but it’s not automatic—look under my watchband some day!) mostly you from my Grandmother’s Wexford family (the freckles are from my other grandma, whose father’s line is in the north Highlands). The New-Orleans-Irish lady was nearly a Catholic saint; sixty-six years with my old reprobate granddad and raising his seven kids, and still not gray at ninety-one? Gotta be a miracle somehow.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. Heh. I have high hopes of not going gray for a very, very long time–I’m 45, and not a single white or gray hair yet. (Of course, I haven’t got kids, either, just the aged parents and they’re fairly well behaved.) My mother is 70, and hasn’t got more than 2 gray hairs :D I figure it’s a tradeoff for the “burns to a crisp if left too long in the sun” thing. (Though I was lucky, and also inherited Mom’s brown eyes–both parents are blond–which means I can stand the sun a BIT longer than redheads with lighter eyes. Weird correlation, but…)

          Liked by 1 person

          2. Mom barely had any gray into her early 80’s. Dark gray now at 90. Middle sister is the same, she has some gray, but very little. Youngest sister, harder to see as her hair is very light brown to blond anyway. Me? First white hair age 23. All the natural red highlights gray by the time I was 30, before son was born. Dad and his two younger brothers all had white hairs coming in before they were out of HS. Difference is dad never went fully gray. Neither did his mother. Me, now? Full white hair, now with gray coming in. Makes it look white blond. OTOH, while my hair is thinning, at least I have a full head of hair. Mom and middle sister’s hair can be considered “very, very, very, thin”, not bald, but … Personally I’ll take white hair over very thin hair.

            Like

  10. There’s one basic, physical law that creates huge issues for top-down totalitarian governments, especially ones that try to micromanage things – speed of information flow (ultimately, the speed of light, but generally effectively significantly slower). By the time the Top has heard about a situation, determined the “appropriate” response, and transmitted the instructions back down, the situation has changed and the instructions may no longer be useful, and may well make things worse.

    The original idea of the US government tried to work around this – local, county/parish, state, and federal government, with each layer handling either broader, more abstract things, or coordination between lower level entities. These days, however, everyone wants a Federal law for everything, with Federal money to implement the uniform solution.

    We saw this with FEMA after Hurricane Katrina, when everyone is wondering where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was immediately after, rather than asking why New Orleans and the State of Louisiana were so poorly prepared. FEMA was supposed to be coordinating aid from other agencies – military such as National Guard units from other states, USDA food and commodities stockpiles, etc. – not being boots on the ground with everything to instantly solve all the problems. And of course, jurisdictional issues arose – New Orleans actually controls very little about the Mississippi River that runs right through its middle – that’s the bailiwick of the Army Corps of Engineers.

    But it makes damned little sense for New Orleans to be prepared for a blizzard or earthquake (if the New Madrid cooks off, they’re just f’d anyway), New York City to be prepared for a spate of tornadoes, or Iowa to be prepared for a volcanic eruption. Sure, some supplies are useful in any kind of disaster – food, water, shelter – but does New Orleans need to have snowplows and salt stockpiled, does California need contra-flow highway plans for a hurricane coming to hit them, does Seattle need to maintain tornado sirens? I don’t think so.

    But with a federal agency, you tend to get one-size-fits-all solutions, which is never true.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’ve been poking at this one for a while.

      What’s the maximum effective size of an organization? The primary limits seem to be speed of information transfer and effectiveness of that same transfer.

      Sooner of later, the increase in complexity and delay will damage any organization (and countries are organizations, of course). At a certain point, the options are “split,” “shrink,” “collapse” – or speed things up.

      The thing is, a certain type of manager doesn’t want to do ANY of those things, except pay lip service to the last one. If you can’t fix it, talk about making things move faster…

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I’d say the bottleneck in speed of information is more the processing of it than the actual transmission speed. Even good managers need some time to think about the information they have been given, reach a conclusion, and then start to act on it.

        Like

        1. That would be covered under “effectiveness.”

          How quickly can those managers process and act on that information, whether they effect it, discard it, or turn it back around to ask “what in the hell were you thinking?”

          Like

        2. Plus, there’s a lot of local ‘tribal knowledge’ about things that would never reach the national level, and no one would think to pass up the chain. It’s just ‘what everybody knows’ unless they’re ‘not from around here’.

          Liked by 1 person

        3. There’s a book called The Mythical Man month, which can be summarized as follows:

          Some tasks can be parallelized: 10 men can harvest the apples 10 times faster than 1 man.

          Some tasks can’t be parallelized: 9 women and 1 month will not get you a baby.

          Other tasks can sort of be parallelized, but the different people working on it have to coordinate, and the amount of time it takes to coordinate increases as the square of the number of people involved, while the work assigned to each person only decreases linearly. You eventually reach a point where putting additional people on the task actually makes things take longer.

          TL;DR: You’re right, there’s a maximum size at which an organization can work, and the reason is usually information exchange. That size is different depending on the task, but it’s always there.

          Like

          1. /grin

            Congratulations! You’ve just described most of the concept of Project Management. The rest of it is how to arrange the pieces to get it done in the least amount of time.

            Like

          2. Some tasks can be parallelized: 10 men can harvest the apples 10 times faster than 1 man.

            Provided there are 10 tasks that can be worked independently of each other. As Brooks points out, it’s when the 10 men have to communicate with each other rather than each grabbing a tree that the adding of an additional man will require that all of the next man’s labor just to keep them in synch.

            Like

          3. I read the “Mythical Man Month” (Projected People Period?) in college, early 1970s. Nothing vital has changed in the way organizations function (or not).

            Then add the Peter Principle.

            Then add DEI.

            We are doomed in so many ways.

            Help us DOGE – you’re our only hope!

            Like

        4. Well, both. One of the reasons the Roman Empire decided to split into Eastern and Western was the rate of information progress physical limit, such that a missive from the easternmost frontier took a bloody long time just to arrive in Rome, and then an answer took just as long to get back. Saving the time it took to proceed from Constantinople to Rome and back could be critical.

          Now, that speed of advance is the speed of light, so the bureaucratic decision delays become the entire pie.

          But just wait until we get to Mars and the belt, and transmission delays return.

          Like

          1. Funny thing about that. I’ve been watching the news on quantum communication using entanglement and I suspect they will have the bugs worked out and a useable communication technology by the time we actually get to those places. I figure that if we can get near instant communication across the solar system, barring any unknown barriers, we should be able to implement near instantaneous communication between star systems and interstellar spacecraft, when we’re able to leave for them.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Thus enabling micromanagement from the next planet.

              I have generally agreed with the observation that one learns more from one’s bad managers than from the good, and the late President Jimmeh was the source of much learning by the U.S. military, especially on the fact that just because you now can micromanage a complex and difficult rescue mission from the Oval Office does not mean you should.

              I can just imagine a convergence between the NASA ultra risk averse culture, the new tech enabling no light speed lag, and a meddlesome administration yielding disaster for the folks that far from home.

              Like

              1. Speaking from experience, not that I was infantry or any other kind of shooter, nothing good ever comes from being micromanaged from a distance. The point of the spear is the one who makes the immediate decisions. Once the big bosses give you your mission and the tools for it, they need to stay completely out of it; save for providing OPTIONS IF REQUESTED. And those bosses, civilian or military, will get you killed if they’re the ones trying to manage you remotely. That was another one of the reasons when I retired when I did.

                Liked by 1 person

      2. Size may be part of it but also the people on top. Over my career I have ended up as the appointed or defacto leader of a group. Thjngs went well with the usual fumbles. Times I was replaced….the project typically fell apart. As no one here knows me, please just acceot what I say for a discussion point.

        Or Musk and Bezos swapped companies, in five years which would be going to Mars and which would be struggling to launch?

        Engines matter.

        Like

    2. Well, Iowa might want to have at least a contingency plan for a Yellowstone Mega Eruption to deal with the ashfall, but that’s about the extent of volcanic eruption planning.

      Like

      1. I suspect that if the Yellowstone Caldera/Supervolcano cut loose Iowa’s only effective preparation would be “Now bend over and kiss your a$$ goodbye”. Most of the country west of the Mississippi would be in deep doodoo.

        Fun fact: Historically, Yellowstone has erupted 3 times in the past 2.1My; 2.1M, 1.3M 640k, so less time between each. And it’s been showing increased activity over the past couple of decades. Sweet dreams! 😉

        BTW, interesting article:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera

        Like

          1. I have.

            Plus seen first hand what a bitty little baby volcano in US west can do. During (from 40 miles afar, not the direct eastern ash impact) and decades afterwards.

            Like

          2. I rarely read non-fiction. I bought just because of the author. It’s very interesting. I liked the Displaced Detective series better.

            Like

          3. I was interested enough to look it up, but alas, it seems to only be available in electronic form.

            I was here (fifty miles away) on May 18, 1980. I have since been very interested in the vulcanology side of things. (The wind was blowing the OTHER way. We were very lucky.)

            Like

            1. Where? We were in the sonic umbrella (didn’t hear of feel a thing).

              We were about 40 air miles west, W. Longview. Which made the whole “what if the new plug dam does not hold?” a bit scary to these 20 somethings not married yet for 2 years. We hadn’t bought up on Columbia Heights, yet. The rental backed up to the flood control canal. Yes, a blessing for those of us west of the mountain. OTOH the logs they started pulling out through Cougar log truck ramp were “interesting”.

              Like

        2. “if the Yellowstone Caldera/Supervolcano cut loose Iowa’s only effective preparation would be “Now bend over and kiss your a$$ goodbye”.“

          All the way to the Pacific to the west, and Arctic to the north (hello Canada, you too). Plus all the volcanoes from Shasta north, would join in the “fun”.

          Like

          1. The jet-stream-carried ash would do the number on most everything to the east; the ash could reach feet in depth hundreds of miles away.

            Like

            1. Rest of the world. Years without summer. Difference for those of us in the upper midwest, PNW, which includes nearby Canada, is we won’t see it all. Willamette Valley, given that is where we are, has a little more time than the immediate blast zone. But not that much more. Evacuating will be futile.

              Like

            2. That happened in the Philippines when Mt. Pinatubo erupted. A yard of ash piled up on Olongapo almost 100 miles away. Then it rained, as it does in the Philippines, and buildings collapsed under tons of instant mud. Then the ash-mud dried and hardened like concrete.

              Like

                1. Well, duh. Way to belabor the obvious.

                  On the other hand, they’re both volcanoes. They produce similar effects, just different sizes. In the same way, one can extrapolate the effects of a 500 lb bomb from a grenade explosion.

                  Like

                  1. Sorry if you took offense. Sure, they’re both volcanoes. And cherry bombs and grenades are both explosives; so are 500-lb bombs (nukes aren’t). But the difference in effect due to the difference in size is worth noting; not everyone has a firm grip on that.

                    Like

                    1. Not just a quantitative difference – at some point, there’s a shift in regimes similar to a phase transition. Like in flight, where simply going faster doesn’t change anything – until you get very near the speed of sound, when all of a sudden things do start changing. Or with low and high explosives – the difference between combustion and detonation (which actually involves the speed of sound through the medium of the explosives). A 500 lb bomb is more than just a hand grenade scaled up 1500 times.

                      Like

                    2. Also, people actually saw Pinatubo erupt. There weren’t even modern humans the last time Yellowstone got froggy. In the one case we have observations and measurements, in the other the evidence is 650,000 years old and buried.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    3. 650,000 years old and buried, but as unmistakable as the global iridium layer from the Chicxulub impact, and that was 65 million years ago. IIRC, the ashfall from all three eruptions has been at least partially charted.

                      Like

        3. Wyoming would probably be under > 5 feet of ash, and that’s on their eastern border; the rest of the state would be a powder covered wasteland with most plant and animal life dead, or soon dead. Some trees might make it if they extend above the ash and the roots aren’t damaged as we saw in many places after St Helens. What it would look like after a rainstorm beggars the imagination. I figure Iowa on having 6 to 12 inches of fine powder that they can clear off the roofs and plow into the soil. However, respiratory illnesses will go through the roof over most of the U.S. for a couple of years.

          Like

  12. Traditional Latin Mass Catholics and like minded Novus Ordo parishoners are also a growing demographic. (See Rosary in a Year podcast and the boom in TradWife channels, Jordan Peterson, and even celebrities turning to God for details)

    And this is enough of a concern to TPTB so as to merit special surveillance by the alphabet agencies here and stamping on freedoms for the likes of Peterson here and elsewhere.

    Everything about everyone we see everywhere from, no one believes in religion anymore to a certain religion is one of peace, we have been told is a lie.

    Population explosion- lie.

    Masculinity is toxic- lie.

    Patriarchy stomps on women- lie.

    Women are only successful and happy if they do men things- lie.

    You can be born in the wrong body- lie.

    Murdering unborn children is women’s health care and good for society- lie.

    Unchecked migration of criminals is a net good- lie.

    The government knows best- Uber lie.

    It’s like turtles, lies all the way down.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Reverent Novus Ordo is PREDOMINANTLY YOUNG. We attended one by accident — were in Colorado Springs, and I wanted a last mass in the parish the kids grew up in. It had gone rad trad, and of course I was on vacation and in jeans. No one said anything, but I stuck out like a sore thumb — and the only demographic missing were…. my age. the fifty somethings. There were however rows and rows of young families with a lot of kids. (TBF the parish was known for big families when we attended. (Well, we TRIED.)

      Like

      2. Oh, no doubt. I’ve spent a lifetime being almost the most conservative Catholic I knew, save for people in real traditionalist EF parishes. And now almost all the college kids are much, much more conservative. They come in, in the fall, just like their suburban parish back home, and then within a few weeks, they are doing edgy things like dressing up for church, wearing chapel veils on their heads, and kneeling/prostrating on the floor as much as people will let them.

        I mean, you go to Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and it’s wall-to-wall adorers.

        And then college couples meet, they marry, they have kids, they have more kids…. And they mostly look happy.

        Same thing with the Byzantine Catholic parish that shares the college chapel space. A lot of young people, a lot of converts, a lot of older people and middle-aged people too, but very solid and comfortable with their own faith tradition, not feeling like they have to apologize for incense or icons or Byzantine chant.

        It makes me very happy, too.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Anyway, my point is… if a church has clergy who actually teach their faith and take prayer/worship/liturgy seriously, the people in the pews will show up, and they will already be, or will turn into, people who take the whole faith tradition seriously. And they will do things for evangelization and charity, of their own free will.

          People are hungry for that. They are excited when they find it, and when they test it and it turns out to be real.

          So yeah, churches can definitely be part of that, but they have to show up — and be serious about it.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. Joe Rogan had a serious evangelical on his podcast and the comment was his audience was exposed to the basic gospel….posters pointing out that just telling the basics honestly reached an audience of millions.

              Like

      3. Well, so far, you may have raised just the 2. The number of Spiritual children you have is as yet not numbered. You may be responsible for many more lives than you will ever know this side of the veil.

        It’s entirely possible you are responsible for thousands of sons and daughters that other women “raised”.

        Which is actually kind of convenient really. I mean, where would you put them all? That’s a lot of bunk beds.

        Like

        2. There was a promise given to another Sarah about her descendants that applies here – something about the stars in the sky and grains of sand in the desert…

          Like

    2. Unchecked migration of criminals OUT of your country might be a net good for your country. It’s not very helpful in a world-wide community though.

      Like

  13. “About five years ago I stopped watching British mysteries.”

    Yes, no kidding. The most appalling DEI propaganda currently on offer. This from a nation whose aboriginal inhabitants are the ones living in it.

    “I was reminded of this today when I accidentally tripped on an article where the writer was utterly baffled all surveys claimed that religion and religiosity are in sharp decline in the US and yet the Bible is hitting new numbers in sales and the top podcast is a Rosary in a Year podcast.”

    I will tell you what. Growing up in the 1960s turned me off church forever. It was so fake it made my hair stand up. That’s why NO ONE GOES anymore, it is nothing but an old, failed, method of control that had it’s cat-bird seat shot out from under it by the First World War.

    Some local colour. The funny little St. John’s Anglican Church down the road from me was sold, despite it having been an historic and well established congregation, founded around 1830ish. One of the oldest in Ontario, containing some very old graves in its graveyard. But no one went there, so it is now a monument. Sort of. I think they still have weddings etc.

    My United church from when I was a kid is largely attended by Koreans these days. They’re the only ones who go. The church is a daycare operation that has religion on Sunday and the odd wedding/funeral/christening.

    But who’s the biggest name in Canada right now? Jordan Peterson. Love him or hate him, that man has an -audience-. And what does he talk about all the time? Christianity. Not in the scoldy “you better behave!” type of way I remember growing up, but more in the “this is why your life sucks, this is what to do about it” kind of way. There are an awful lot of people very ready to hear that.

    You know why the #ShinyPony picked -now- to resign? Because Donald Trump is trolling him personally, and because the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, went on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. He talked live and unedited for an hour and a half about Canada, how f-ed we all are, and what he plans to do about it. He made a reasoned, credible case in the face of Peterson’s questions.

    The #Pony and his handlers know that he would not survive five minutes in front of Peterson. JP would eat his head. Probably make him cry. They have no answer that could meet even the most cursory questioning. That’s why they’ve lived by soundbites for ten years. That’s all they’ve got. 30 seconds of this-week’s-topic in front of the cameras, couple of softball questions, and then off they go back into their fortress. Ended by one interview with the religion guy that likes weird jackets.

    Religion is big. Churches, not big.

    Like

    1. Whenever Church and State-culture get linked, both suffer. United Church of Canada, Church of England, various denominations in Germany, Russian Orthodox … Becoming an officially approved denomination seems to end badly. Solid doctrine and then believers seem to go out the door in favor of whatever is trendy with the Authorities. (The recent break-up of parts of the United Methodist denomination as one example.)

      Liked by 2 people

      2. The Presbyterian church on a main street in F-Falls has made it abundantly clear that it is not part of the woke branch. Haven’t seen anything like that for the ELCA church in town, alas. Seldom get to services in town, so haven’t tried Missouri or the tiny Wisconsin synod churches.

        Like

    2. My church, though small, seems rather squared away on both people and theology. Then again, the folks that participate put much effort into improving it, verus quitting when things are a bit off.

      Liked by 2 people

    3. Strange. That’s about the same time I gave up TV almost entirely. I liked the first few seasons of super hero shows, but they rapidly devolved into the very things Sarah mentioned, and more. It got so blatant and insulting after the Arrow anti-gun episode that I gave it up cold turkey.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Green Arrow was the hard left of DC forty years ago. Now he is almost a centrist.

        Was it the fairly recent Justice League TV show that had Green Arrow and Hawkman arguing left/right politics while bashing villains? It was hilarious.

        Like

  14. the last few posts have been mirroring my own thoughts in a rather disturbing way. It’s happened before, but it’s spooky. Still, the illusion or, better, pretense of knowledge is a real thing. I’ve had to face up to the fact that even the things in economics I thought were probably true (e.g., utility) are conceptually flawed and their practical execution provably false. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised, because the great Friederich Hayek said it best in his acceptance speech for the Bank of Sweden Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel for Economics titled The Pretense of Knowledge

    “If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”

    Read the whole thing.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Surprise and preference cascade.

      So if before a preference cascade, it was obvious to everyone what the new status would be, and the schedule it would happen on, then there would be no preference cascade, because it would just happen.

      The preference cascade model is only one type of widespread surprise, and is probably overdiscussed compared to numbers of times it actually happens.

      Yet, there are interesting things that can still be deduced from said model.

      There does seem to have been soem preference falsification, and some shift in signalling, and things are probably in motion with an unknown result.

      We seem to be in an academically interesting period where the unknown result is partly known, and partly knowable. Unusually sensitive and foresightful people can be an estimator in such times. With major differences in accuracy distributions. People whose methods are still working may at times, due to getting same or equivelant new bits of data, be exactly converged in their new understandings. (There’s also the usually good people whose methods are simply unsuited to the current immediate conditions for whatever reason.)

      I don’t know. My head has pretty much been elsewhere.

      Like

      1. The math around cascades is very interesting (ang least to me, I’m odd) and very applicable to (e.g.,) stock market crashes. What I have taken away is that you can predict whether there will be crashes (depending on the load and interconnectedness of the system) but not when or how big. Power grid failures are the paradigm case, but it’s very applicable.

        Interconnectedness is the key, which is why Musk buying Twitter is so very, very important. no connections, no cascades.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The idea of math describing preference cascades tweaks the Reader’s interest. Do you have any references he could dig into?

          Like

          1. it’s a real thing in network theory. Any study of power networks would be a good start, perhaps:

            I. Dobson, B. A. Carreras, and D. E. Newman,  A loading-dependent model of probabilistic cascading failure, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 15–32. Would get you started. Santa Fe institute did a lot too.

            A lot of the stuff was done around 2005 ish, or at least that’s when I was reading about it —- came in handy for the market crash of ‘08. Most of my stuff is on paper or has fallen into the way back machine,

            Preference cascades are like any other cascade. essentially, it comes down to a system being tightly linked and overloaded. When it is, the failure of a single component can cause cascading failure, for stock markets, the load factor is financial leverage and the linkage is rehypothecation. Other cascades would have different factors, but the load and linkage drive it. That’s why X being free again is so important.

            happy reading

            Like

  15. Take for instance the fact the head of every police department is a woman and has been for at least the last 30 years, in every TV show and movie. (Though they used to also allow black men.)
    That’s getting a little better. Chicago PD has a competent white man as the police chief. Elsbeth has a competent black man as police chief (though Elsbeth is always shown as being smarter than anybody else) .

    Like

    1. Heh. I always figured that the black (gay) male chief in, what was it, Brooklyn 99 (comedy show) was a swipe at the demographics nonsense. And he was ultra masculine, going by the couple of episodes I watched. (It wasn’t bad, it’s just one has to be in the right mood for near-Stooges level of slapstick comedy, and I wasn’t at that point in time)

      Like

    1. What I like about the Korean police shows and political thrillers (K2 as a prime example), is the absolute mind boggling levels of corruption and peoples acceptance of it. My first reaction was TV show….then I remembered some of their history since the Korean war. To top it off, we had the meltdown with their president right after Trump one. Corruption and graft really and truely is the norm.

      Like

  19. For those who haven’t been following the LA fires fiasco –

    The Mayor is Karen Bass (yes, Mayor Karen…). She was in Ghana for an official event when the first fire started, and didn’t get back until yesterday. She had a press conference in which she told viewers to go to a website named URL for more information, and froze up on camera when asked why the LAFD budget had been cut by $20 million.

    The fire chief is a DEI hire (lesbian). Her #1 priority has been expanding “diversity” in the LAFD.

    The head of LA DWP is being paid double ($750K) what her predecessor made. Right now, many fire hydrants have no water pressure.

    A news anchor reported on the air that there was no truth to the rumor that fire hydrants can’t get water. He then cut to an on-site reporter who told him that firefighters were having trouble getting water from the hydrants.

    Gov. Newsome was asked about the water shortage. His response was, basically, “Not my problem.”. California voters passed a bond measure several years ago to build new water reservoirs. As of right now, not one has been built. The last two years were two of the wettest on record here. But now we’re having trouble getting water to firefighters.

    Obviously, the President-Elect is to blame, and many are in fact stating that.

    Like

    1. The main problem is that the soon-to-be-red-pilled Californians are goig to flee to oher places, versus fixing California. Thus we can now expect -worse- from CA.

      Like “Peoples Democratic Republic of California”.

      I could be wrong. I rather hope I am wrong. A huge red/conservative reversion in CA would go far to help turn around the rest of America.

      And flooding MAGA areas with, at best, purple CA lemmings isnt helping.

      Like

      1. Where else are they going to go? They won’t be able to stay. Just like Paradise, CA in Butte County, most won’t be able to afford to rebuild, presuming they have fire insurance. Most won’t be able to rebuild because they can’t get the building permits even if they have the money.

        Was this preventable? Yes. Don’t build there. Seriously. All the forestry and brush precautions. All the water with proper preasure. All the water dumps from helicopters and planes. All the pool water with fire pumps. All the water tanker trucks full of water. Would not have stopped this. The water being used when it was available, was not helping. The entire area were fires in the wrong spots with the right Santa Anna winds and this nightmare occurs. Fires burned down to the ocean. Don’t tell me with a whole ocean the houses along the PCH couldn’t have been saved if “water” (lack of) was the problem.

        OTOH the lack of proper infrastructure, lack of water, etc., is still going to be blamed. Without 110% proper resources, preparation and usage, no one will ever know if maybe, just maybe, most could have been prevented.

        The only thing to have stopped these fires, maybe, would have been to caught the fires at the source and smothered each there. OTOH how did they start? The ambiguous power lines, again? Or something more sinister. Especially the more recent fires, you know, now that there is no power working?

        Be interesting in the final analysis on the houses that didn’t burn is “What were the factors? Beyond blind dumb luck?” Because near as I can tell tile, metal roof, or stucco, just delayed any one house from going up; these still burned. Yet at least one house seen had stucco and regular asphalt roof, which is not wildfire preventive rated.

        FWIW, Holiday, Detroit, etc., Oregon 2020 fire victims are still rebuilding.

        My 2 cents. Not an expert.

        Like

        1. There’s power throughout most of the county. The areas without it right now are generally those immediately close to the fires, or where the fires swept through.

          Not sure where you’re getting info that power is not working.

          The Palisades fire gets the attention, because it was the first, and there are a lot of expensive homes there. But imo the Eaton fire is potentially the most serious of the various fires that have erupted around the county. Part of the edge of the voluntary evacuation zone for that fire is literally almost right on top of the route followed by the Rose Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day. We’re not talking about “You shouldn’t build in fire country” buildings. We’re talking about downtown in a major metropolitan area.

          Like

          1. Entire area is “Fire Country”. But will concede the point that no one expects a city to be fire country.

            Power? Not surprised missed the reporting points (and overblown).

            Like

            1. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the US that isn’t “potential massive disaster country” in one form or another. Florida gets hurricanes. The mid-west gets tornadoes. California gets fires and earthquakes. All will level a place if a big enough one shows up.

              However, proper preparation will mitigate the effects of that. The California government has been blatantly skimping on that, even in instances (such as the water reservoir bond ballot measure several years ago) in which the voters have indicated they are in full support of those preparations.

              Like

              1. Too true.

                Even Willamette Valley. We are one mountain earth quake from a flash flood (dams upriver on Willamette forks and McKenzie will take out towns in Willamette Valley). Earth quake anywhere in the Willamette Valley itself? Ground will turn in to loose quick sand/gravel. Guarantied our ’73 built, or mom’s ’63 built, and our neighbors, homes won’t survive. We also have to worry about being in “fire country” with steep hills no roads to head off fire, Cascades and Coast Range. More options once fire hits the valley and edges proper, but … (no thank you).

                Portland? Mt Hood. In addition, think about what happens if the Columbia, and the Willamette (no thank you), are blocked? Blocking the Columbia was a fear when Helen blew. Did affect the Columbia shipping channels. Hood is a lot closer to the Columbia than Helen is.

                Seattle? Mt. Rainer. Olympic Mt. would at a minimum affect Puget sound and shipping.

                Neither the Rainer, Olympic, or Hood, problems even take into account the Ash problem, which Helen taught points close and a long distance downwind is no joke.

                I can’t even say the Willamette doesn’t get tornadoes. Granted nothing above class 1, so far. Nor hurricanes, although it was called a cyclone (Columbus Day Storm 1962).

                OTOH we don’t have alligators. We do have sharks and killer whales, thanks to sea lions, although those who go swimming in the Pacific off the PNW coast have donated their brain cells to orange cats (people do surf, in dry suit. Still lacking in brain cells). The Pacific ocean off PNW coast is ice COLD.

                Like

                  1. “lahars and pyroclastic flows“

                    Hood, too.

                    Heck any of the volcanoes in the PNW, after Helen. Just the other volcanoes, Olympia included, are not going to affect large cities, and few towns, like Hood and Rainer. Olympia will affect Puget Sound and shipping, with the lahars and pyroclastic flows, but not Seattle proper. Seattle will be affected by the resulting ash and extreme water displacement in the form of tsunami waves and flooding.

                    Liked by 1 person

            2. I think I found out where your info about the power came from.

              Lots of water was needed to fight the Palisades fire due to the size of it and the extremely high wind speed. This water had to be pumped, and that requires power. Not only did it require power, but it required consistently high levels of power over a protracted period of time. From what I’ve been told, LA DWP (which provides water to LA City, and the unincorporated cities in LA County) was not able to provide enough power to sustain the pump operations at the level that was needed. The result was predictable.

              Then Biden – who just happened to be in LA the same day for unrelated reasons – opened his stupid yap. He stated that the power had been turned off to keep the power lines from starting additional fires. Since it was the President saying this, this is the version of events that circulated.

              The fact that there’s a very large reservoir that was empty due to the fact that it needed repairs likely contributed to the issue, as I suspect it probably reduced the overall water pressure in the system, and thus boosted the required amount of power.

              Needless to say, regardless of whether the empty reservoir would have made a difference, questions need to be answered about why DWP wasn’t able to provide enough power.

              Like

              1. Innocent voice: “Of coarse they turned off the power. Power companies can’t afford the lawsuits because of wind sparked fires … ars…ists, er hom.. enca…nts, er I mean, blamed on power lines.” In Oregon now too (2020 fires). JIC /sarcasm off.

                Like

              2. questions need to be answered about why DWP wasn’t able to provide enough power.

                1. Wind turbines don’t do well in high winds (like, oh, Santa Anas), and have to be shut down.
                2. Solar panels lose efficiency rapidly when you turn on a smoke generator.
                3. A lot of the places that normally have power to sell SoCal were dealing with their own challenges under 1 and 2, just substitute snow for smoke.
                4. CA has been taking base load generation capacity off line for several years, so there is no reserve.

                Like

                1. And likely –

                  5.) The current head of the LA DWP appears to be a diversity hire who was brought in largely as a way to funnel an absurd amount of money to her in the form of her salary (she’s making $750K/year, which is double what her predecessor made, at the same time that LA is having to deal with a tight budget).

                  But my main purpose in bringing it up is that much of this stuff can be modeled. And it should have been modeled. DWP should have known how much power it would take to run the pumps, and made sure that the necessary power was available. After all, DWP is responsible for both the power element of the equation, and the water element of the equation. There’s no reason why the department should have been caught flat-footed by it.

                  Like

                  1. I’m not at all sure they were caught flat footed; they (or the regulators) just flat didn’t make keeping the grid reliable any sort of priority.

                    Like

                    1. Which is my point, just expressed in a different fashion. There’s no reason why they should have been caught flat-footed, ergo they weren’t even trying.

                      Like

          2. Well, and “just don’t build there” isn’t a bird that’s going to fly, ever. You could say the same about living on coasts, where hurricanes happen, or in tornado alley, or in the part of the world I live in where snow and hurricane force winds cause many issues (plus forest fires). People have always lived and built their lives in disaster zones–the entire planet is a disaster-potential zone. So while all the prep in the world might not have stopped the fire, it sure as hell would have made it a LOT less devastating.

            No one would have batted an eye if this had been an earthquake. Everyone knows there’s not a ton you can do, prevention wise, for earthquakes. (Same with hurricanes, tornadoes, and similar.) But fire? Fire IS something humans can take steps to reduce risk for. And California emphatically has not, and specific things can be pointed to that have increased the risk and the devastation.

            Like

        2. Florida, inthe dry season, is a giant tinderbox. Palmettos are designed to burn off now and then. The roots respawn quick.

          Florida avoids most massive fires by frequent controlled burns. When doen regularly and without “Green” itnerferance, the land is healthy, largely free of pest species, and doesnt explode in firestorms. Where it hasnt happened in recent memory, a CB can occasionally get out of hand and get exciting.

          Florida really is doing a dang fine job in most places of managing the natural fuel load, plus the noxious additions like the Melaleuca tree, nature’s crown fire incendiary. (the dang things simply explode, scattering flaming bits everywhere)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. ^Similar here, where I am in Wyoming. Although thanks to the green interference, we don’t do NEARLY enough controlled burns. Actually, thanks to the greens refusing to allow removal of the beetle killed pines, it’s been too damn dangerous for a long time. That is improving, thanks to several very, VERY large and NOT controlled wildfires in the last ten years. (The last really big one, the BLM, USFS, and local firefighters basically focused their efforts on saving the mountain towns. And stopped the fire literally at the edge–you had the main part of town, and charred trees not fifty yards behidn them. Outlying structures and cabins were lost, but the towns–including the few businesses that keep the town alive–were saved. (I’m glad to live in a town that, while mountain, is in a valley and hasn’t got a lot of thick forest likely to set the town on fire–that’s a few miles out of town–unless it is truly apocalyptic.)

            Like

            1. Yes.

              Following Florida’s example of controlled burns would help, everywhere.

              Problem with California, Wyoming, etc., VS Florida, is controlled burns are a lot easier on flat ground. Even rolling hills, like LA hills and Wyoming prairies, it is too easy for controlled burn fires to suddenly not be.

              Yosemite does controlled burns … In the valley … Not in the high country, not even on the slopes on the side of the valleys, not in the Sequoia groves (because in high country).

              Regarding the beetle kill … Talk to Jasper and Waterton about the danger of that. Waterton lost acres of prairie, and Aspen groves too, 2017 fire. Aspen groves not come back as of Spring 2023.

              Jasper still isn’t out of danger. 2024 fire came out of the south, bad enough, it came into town. Earlier 2022 fire from the east, while it evacuated the town, it wasn’t a huge fear. The one they fear is the one that starts west of them. Because prevailing winds are from the west and south. The Jasper 2024 fire did not alleviate the problem they have.

              Waterton ran into the same with their fire. Town evacuated. No one expected to come back to standing homes and businesses. The town was saved. The residents still have PSTD over it.

              Jasper wasn’t so lucky. Lost 30%-ish of the south western portion of the town. Despite having cleared out trees on the south (both campgrounds and the lodges were cleared of all trees).

              Like

              1. Well, and in Wyoming we may not have the Santa Anna winds–but boy have we got WIND. And while it is generally worse in the winter than it is during fire season…it still causes a lot of problems where fire is concerned. And much of this state is naturally very dry, not to mention empty.

                Like

                1. I know.

                  Then there is Idaho WIND. Which will drive fires into Wyoming. I swear, going or coming (Oregon to Wyoming), we get headwinds.

                  No snow, or limited snow, when we were Tetons in late October 2024 (drove Tetons/Yellowstone Oct 31). But dang that wind was cold blowing across the Tetons prairie.

                  Our trip mid-Sept 2022 (Rockies to Beartooth) we felt a lot of that wind (nothing to stop it; at least it is a “hot” wind, sigh) driving up to Little Big Horn National Monument and then to Red Lodge.

                  You should hear mom about the wind and snow. She was 6 or 7 when they moved out of Montana (spent the war in Denver Colorado). Of coarse her memories of Colorado might be coloring her recollection (now 90). She is not a fan.

                  Like

                  1. There are nights where the wind is screaming so loudly I can’t sleep. When I was living in my house (not currently, various issues, long story, lol), because it sits at the very edge of the tiny town I live in, there would be nights when I’d have to make out the hideabed in the couch and drag my mattress out there to sleep, because there was no way I could get any in either of the bedrooms! (And it was only slightly better in the living room.) I’ve lived here for 22 years now, and although I am somewhat more used to it than I was…it’s still bad.

                    Like

              2. If you fight the fires somewhere, you must there do controlled burns.

                Must, absolutely.

                Otherwise, you are deliberately setting up the apocalyptic firestorm event. Absolutely certainly. Inevitably.

                Mange it, or leave nature be. Cant just take the one side.

                If you fight the fires somewhere, you -must- there do controlled burns.

                Like

                1. Agree.

                  Controlled burns at the correct time, means when a controlled burn gets out of hand, the potential for catastrophic results is reduced. Not eliminated. Reduced.

                  Catastrophic fires in the PNW, California, Montana, Wyoming, etc., is not new. Just no written records. Oral definitely in “part of the season”. Written in the surviving trees. Written in the soil. Both to be discovered by those who look. Difference now is the impact has changed.

                  Liked by 1 person

                2. And you have to keep the firebreaks and fire roads you used to see zigzagging up all the LA area hillsides cleared and maintained. But they stopped clearing those, initially because of concerns about (wait for it) wild mouse migration patterns (not kidding), then they got used to spending that budget on other stuff and never even tried to restart.

                  The hills are always tinderboxes in CA until there’s enough rain (water season here goes Oct. 1 – Sep. 30, and it pretty much rains zero from May – October), and SoCal has had effectively Zero so far this rain season.

                  And on top of that I would bet big money the source will be found to be an “unhoused encampment”, or arson, whether that’s the official publicized finding or not.

                  Like

              3. Even with flat ground, it wouldn’t matter. The Sierra Club has many friends in the California state legislatures, and it is *very* aggressive about using every available tactic (including lawsuits) to stop controlled burns from happening.

                Like

      2. There’s the conundrum again for disillusioned blue state residents — if you leave you’re a “locust” ruining the place you move to, if you stay you’re a fool or a loser who is simply “getting what you voted for” even if you didn’t vote for it. (Trump got around 40% of the vote in CA this time around and there are plenty of red counties inland)

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Yes, that’s probably the real question. People have been noting how long it took California to finish the vote counting this time around – more than is usual, iirc. And how all of the results of those long counts went toward one party.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Thus giving the Republicans the illusion of control of the House while leaving the UniParty in charge.

              Like

        2. Yeah. I tend to get a bit grumpy when people bring up the topic. If you want to leave, or feel it best to leave because of circumstances around you, that’s one thing. Encouraging people to flee a place and give it up as lost makes me irritable. There are good reasons to try and salvage California, no matter how much some people insist otherwise.

          There are a *lot* of people here who can be brought around with the right prodding.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. The root problem is the sufficently large mass of CAs that believe they can vote for the hard left fools, but not get the hard left inevitable results. And maybe if everyone else subsidizes them it will work this time! Someone elses fault!

            Paging Mister Kipling! “Gods of the Copybook Headers” time.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. the sufficiently large mass of CAs that believe they can vote

              Your basic premise appears to be that the CA election process is mostly honest. Your premise is 100% invalid, and given the 100% flip rate in GOP congressional districts after extended count times (only the latest example), I’m not sure how you can still hold it.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Dont you ever get tired of beating on your own strawmen? I said nothing of the sort, and you know it.

                Like

                1. “The root problem is the sufficently large mass of CAs that believe they can vote for the hard left fools,”

                  Your whole argument is based on the idea that the vote totals reflect what the population voted for. No one knows WHAT the population voted for.

                  Like

                  1. False, rising to gaslighting. You quoted your own refute.

                    If you misread it, that is on you. Dont double down on your error.

                    Like

                    1. How many CA districts stayed GOP in the extended recounts? Zero. Odds of that happening naturally? You’d have better odds on the PowerBall. Gaslighting? I’ll let others decide.

                      I’ll still point out the facts inconsistent with your Narrative.

                      Like

            2. Also don’t forget that that sufficiently large mass of CAs is likely to, you know, be the people who can afford to leave. How many folks are stuck in CA, because they can’t afford to move? I expect it’s a great many, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a great many of those vote red.

              (There are red CAs who left to get away from the leftist ruination, and who never voted for it in the first place–but again. They could afford to leave.)

              Like

    2. In my pre-caffeinated reading this morning, I saw that somebody was blaming Israel. Note to self: vacuum under the desk. My eyes got dog-haired.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. If the author pointed out that Al Quaeda, and other Islamists like Hamas, encouraged setting wild land and other fires as a form of warfare, then OK, maybe, if you squint. Otherwise? Idiot.

          Like

            1. I’ve been saying for a while, the biggest complaint that dems have against Republicans generally turns out to be, “you didn’t stop us hard enough!”

              Like

        1. Captain Judea and the Yidmen!

          …….

          Well, gotta be better entertainment than the “Supers” from DC/M these days.

          Like

          1. You made me chuckle. The vision of flying guys wearing tillits (?) and yarmulkes tickles me.

            And reminds me of an old boss, now gone, who wore a green yarmulke in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

            Like

            1. Mogen David shields and Menorah shaped zapguns.

              When they bring out the footlocker on poles, run.

              Like

      3. The funniest part is that I’ve seen idiot claim that this is all the jooooooos’ fault… and then turn around and celebrate that so many jooooooos are being inconvenienced by the fires.

        And they don’t see the problem in thinking both of these things at the same time.

        Like

        1. Comment stolen from somewhere:

          “It was very clever of the space laser corps to burn their own neighborhood to throw us of track.”

          Meant to be humorous. I’m pretty sure. Then again, in the replies someone else had (Photoshopped? AI?) a star of David onto the roof of a surviving house(1)…

          (1) Clearly what you need to do to protect yourself from space laser fires is lamb’s blood on the doorposts, not paint on the roof.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. Despite the fact that Trump tried to tell them this in 2019, and Newscum sued to prevent him from requiring fixing it as a condition of disaster relief.

      Liked by 1 person

  20. About prefernce cascades and all the AntiNazi French partisans. So many in fact that on one althistory site, every other year a no9b shows up and writes a history wherr all the partisans get organized and beat thr Nazis by 1942. And the old hands keep explaining that it wouldnt work because there werent that many.

    Right now we are seeing flaming statists ldfties siding with Trump (RFKJr as an example). Fani Willis is being sanctioned. More and more people are suddenly apparently doing the right thing. Maybe they are. Maybe they really didnt know or had too much to lose.

    Regardless, a year or five from now they will all have been on Trumps side all along. Welcome to the party but hand them the unloaded gun first

    Until Christ returns or we build Pipers veridicator, we just have to verify on a case by case basis. (Remember that Heinlein, Pournelle, Reagan and Sowell were all leftists of one type or another. Verify)

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Again, countering noxious nincompoop encounter with useful info.

    I had been looking for stuff that would play nice with my automatic rice cooker, mainly to add variety, add nutrients, and provide some “quick bulky hot food for unexpected guests”.

    “It’s Delish” brand “deluxe vegetable soup mix”, four pound jug.

    For acrice cooker, use same water/stuff ratio as white rice. Use 1 measure soup mix to 2 measures rice. Thus add water to line 3 for a 2:1 load.

    Resultant stuff is tasty, smells good, can be seasoned to taste, and one can simply dump canned chicken or beef in a batch for protein. Mrs Dash or Mrs Dash extra spicy goes well.

    Wish I had this stuff when a teenager or in college first try.

    The dry mix also makes toppings for quick noodles, etc. And it is also as labeled, soup mix.

    It’s not far off in concept from 19th century military ration “desecrated vegetables” (Grin) except tasty. Nothing in it but dried food. Seems to keep well if you twist the lid back on tight.

    Enjoy

    Liked by 1 person

  22. This reminds me of something about the American character that is literally unfathomable to non-Americans (to include progs, leftists, and communists), best exemplified in Francis Ford Coppola’s best movie (Yeah, I said it. Fight me.), Tucker: The Man And His Dream:

    Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) has started a car company to compete with the Big Three in Detroit, and he did it in a very Heinleinian way: he promoted the car, which did not exist, in Look Magazine, with lots of details on all of the safety features he wanted it to have, including a center headlight that would turn with the wheels of the car, so that there would be no blind spot turning at night.

    But when it comes time to actually make the things needed to make it work, his head engineer (Elias Koteas) can’t. The linkages required cause the steering to lock, making the car extremely dangerous, so he cuts the turning headlight out of the design, and explains to Tucker why he did it. Tucker takes a moment, looks like he’s getting angry, and says “If you ever change my design like that again, without asking me… I’ll give you a raise!”

    That spirit is something that the elite and the establishment have been trying to beat out of us for a long time, but we ain’t’nt dead yet.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. …except for the part where Elon doesn’t hire gangsters to threaten people using his technology in ways he does not approve, nor feel that having created a tech, he has a right to dictate to users what they may and may not do.

        Like

          1. One of the main reasons the film industry moved en masse from New Jersey to Hollywood was to get outside the reach of Edison’s thugs. Director Allan Dwan even had a story about a couple gangsters trying to intimidate him on a location in California, but he scared them off with some bravado and luck. (“See those cans?” He shoots at some cans, hits one, the thugs go about their merry way. Dwan said he was lucky he hit anything in line of sight, let alone what he was pointing at.)

            At least one NYC-based production company burned down (film stock at the time was insanely flammable) after refusing to toe Edison’s line. Whether that was coincidence or not is an open question. But Edison’s thugs were known to shoot cameras to make them inoperable, including cameras built specifically to avoid infringing on his patents.

            And then there’s the story of Louis Le Prince, “the father of cinematography” who shot the first motion picture film in the 1880s, and disappeared from a train headed to Paris in 1889, reportedly as he was going to file patents on his camera and projector designs. Some speculate (though I don’t buy this one myself) that Edison had him murdered so he could be the inventor of the moving picture camera.

            But yeah, Edison was an asshole, before you ever get to the way he stole any credit that wasn’t nailed down legally.

            Like

            1. Ouch! All of that is new to me; I always thought of him as just a doggedly-persistent inventor who had an ongoing feud with George Westinghouse over power generation and distribution.

              Thanks!

              Liked by 1 person

              2. That is certainly the version of him they portray in public schools. I didn’t learn about what an asshole he was until an adult (because i believe in continuing to learn) and…well. I don’t have much respect for the man–he was definitely the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates of his time. He might have invented some useful things, but more of his energy and time was spent in quashing/destroying competition and stealing credit for things he didn’t actually invent…

                Liked by 1 person

                  1. Ewwwwww.

                    Sort of similar, the more I read on Ghandi (from period or close to period sources) the less I like him. I gather p, among other things, he implored the Brits to surrender to Hitler in the name of nonviolence (ahem) and also to leave India during WWII because even if the Japanese conquered it, the Inidan people would overcome them through nonviolence and after a period of purgative suffering would create a glorious new nation from the ashes. Uh-huh, yeah. Right.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. Yeah. I kind of lost respect for Gandhi when I read that he would have nubile young women sleep in his bed with him to “test himself”, ie, prove he wouldn’t give in to temptation.

                      Where I come from, the best way to avoid giving in to temptation is, if you know a particular thing tempts you, stay away from it.

                      And I’ve read much of the same things you mentioned as well, and generally have come to the conclusion that he was a twit with an overinflated opinion of himself and his cause. So, you know, generally normal human being upon getting a bit of popularity/power.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    2. “Overcoming through nonviolence” requires a civilized opponent, which he was fortunate to have in the Brits. If the pre-WWII Japanese, or the Soviets, or the Nazis had been in power there instead, his nonviolence would have only resulted in the expenditure of excessive amounts of ammunition, which all three had.

                      Liked by 2 people

                    1. Never leave techies unsupervised; we get locked into “can I do it” and don’t look much at “should I do it”.

                      Like

      2. I remember how aghast many lefties were at how RocketX’s twitter posts (this was, of course, pre-X) were deliberately humorous when their rockets blew up or otherwise failed. I loved ’em (and I don’t really follow anything at all on TwitterX)–it told me that this was a company that understood the assignment.

        Like

        2. If you’re not testing to destruction, you’re not doing it right. You HAVE to push the limits so you’ll know what’s going wrong and where to fix things.

          Like

    2. [chuckle] My Subaru accomplishes the turning illumination function by turning on the relevant fog light in a turn when the headlights are on. Does a decent job at showing the inside of the turn with a lot less hassle. It wouldn’t have been trivial to implement with 1940s technology, but certainly doable and less headache inducing than a steerable headlight.

      Still, a good line from Tucker.

      Like

  24. Trope I’ve noticed lately: woman announces proudly how Drug X has helped her overcome the Heartbreak od Psoriasis, or other condition. And she starts walking down the street, proclaiming the good news. As she walks, other beneficiaries join her, until the street is full of happy drug users, all walking in glorious solidarity to….wherever.

    Tne first of this type I saw ended when the woman led her crowd of followers into a pharmacy to demand they distribute Drug X, only to be told it was already being done and leaving mildly deflated. But the others have been, in the words of RAH, “shoulder to,shoulder nonsense.”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. If that’s a trope in anything but pharmaceutical TV commercials (I don’t have TV, so I wouldn’t know), it’s a very strange thing to have happen in a fiction context even once. Let alone enough to be a trope.

      Like

      1. Where I’ve seen something like that is in snips from Bollywood productions. I think some musicals in general pull it out from time to time.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Pharm ads are…very odd, to put it mildly. (And not a few are rather sinister.) I don’t watch anything streaming these days, but ads are creeping back in there as well (and anyway, most of the good stuff is on YouTube, so you have to deal with ads), and…yep. Pharm ads are definitely present.

            Like

        1. LOL. Note how one or two d(HONK!)ds can turn a gathering into a riot. Usually works with a fairly grumpy mob, but cheerful ones can go riot in a hurry, also.

          The trick is to -immediately- squash the provocateur(s). This can also set off a mob, but you may just manage to redirect it against the troublemakers. Which is epic funny to see.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. The real trick is to have the gathering prepped to see the “set off a riot and have them soak the bullets for me” guys as a bigger enemy than the folks they’re protesting against.

            Worked in Des Moines, the local Black Islamic group did not behave how the guy chucking frozen water bottles at the cops expected. The turned around, grabbed the ahole and hauled him over to the police themselves.

            Like

      1. I saw where Noisome was patting himself on the back for the Klamath River damn removal project. Taking credit for a fiasco that started when Bush II was in orifice.

        The fact it screws over people in another state (who tend to be R voters) must be pleasant to the SOB. It’s doing a number on agriculture in S Central Oregon, and the 100MWe of truly renewable power “replaced” by 36 MWe of solar just grates.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. And also note how they twist pretzels to avoid any HINT that the fire might have started in a homeless camp. (Also note: we have not and probably never will know how many homeless might have been killed by the fires thus far. I bet it’s more than a few.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Agree.

        Fox News has been very clear that the odds of finding anyone in a home that burned, and died, is going to be difficult to impossible, as everything is reduced to ash. But added they didn’t know if cadaver dogs could find anything or not. Now homeless out in the brush where still killed but fire burned through but didn’t “linger” like homes may not leave ash. But given how hot that brush burns? Still could be reduced to ash.

        Like

        1. Part of me wonders if the Three S Rule is going to come into play in certain parts of LA County, when folks catch arsonists or looters when there are no cameras or law officers around.

          Like

  27. And the news this morning is that one of two, “scooper,” planes leased from Canada to dump seawater on the fires has been grounded in a, “drone incident.” Um.

    Like

      1. One of the two water droppers is grounded because of wing damage. [very rude words here] Not just registered, but the operators are supposed to have a license, and not fly AT ALL in disaster zones unless the drone is operated by emergency services. And of course everyone abides by all the rules, all the time. *pious kitty nod*

        Like

        1. And there’s supposed to be a transponder pointing back to the operator. Did a number on the model airplane hobby, too. As I recall, it was incidents like this (generally without the midair collisions) that led to the restrictions. Sigh.

          Like

      2. From what I understand (keep in mind that I haven’t investigated that thoroughly into it) it appears to have been a small drone, likely with a camera that someone was using to get a look at the fire. There’s a picture of the damaged plane. It appears that there’s a small impact point in the leading edge of one of the wings, and I’m guessing that’s where it collided with the plane.

        If the drone was as small as I suspect it was, there’s likely nothing left of it.

        The damage doesn’t look bad. But of course you can’t take a plane up on any sort of flight (let alone fire fighting duty, which tends to put these planes under a lot of stress) without a thorough examination to make sure that it didn’t stress some other part of the plane.

        Like

  28. Aaannnndd, a guy with a butane torch, found near a home, I gather with the torch turned on, was subdued by locals….and released after the authorities said there was, “no probable cause,” for keeping him. This is how you really do get the 3 Ss….and if a group tries to carry that out and gets caught on surveillance video, want to bet the same authorities will arrest them with great fanfare?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. My understanding is that, while authorities said they had “no probable cause” to hold him on suspected arson, they did hold him on violation of an outstanding warrant (or perhaps it was parole violation).

      Yeah, the “no probable cause” was stupid virtue signaling, but I’m guessing they did it to hold him tighter, on something with more teeth. Since it’s California, and therefore probable cause likely only lets them hold him for a day or three.

      Like

  30. One of my fellow grad students, was I suspected, Korean, I was correct.

    But I asked him where he was from, to make sure, people can be touchy about that sort of thing, don’t mistake someone for their historic enemy ethnic group. He actually said something mildly disparaging that Americans are not able to tell….

    The next day I realized that I should have asked him what ethnicity I was, I bet he can’t tell different white ethnicities apart.

    My very democratic aunt died last year, a very conservative friend (Who happens to be 50% Native American) accompanied me for moral support. I, my friend, and the Mormon relatives, were the only right wingers there. My friend overheard some of the relatives bragging to themselves how ethnically diverse the funeral was. (There was one black couple, one Asian couple, and I guess my friend, though I don’t think they noticed she looked Lakota). As far as I know all the Hispanics there were hired help and not mourners.

    So on the drive home, my running joke was that my Latin Mass Catholic Church was more diverse than my very democratic aunts funeral. 10:45 mass has two regularly attending Asian families, two black families, a number of Native/Hispanic families, a number of biracial (White- Native/Hispanic) families.

    I started going there because that’s were the super pro-life people go, and also the highest concentration of Libertarians, and the majority are Republican. I like certain aspects of the Latin Mass ( facing East) but really like aspects of the Novous Ordo (In my native language) too.

    I am a very agreeable person, and not fast on my feet verbally, and don’t tend to take offense. So it’s quite likely that there are angry and confrontational people in that sort of group that is being persecuted, that I just don’t encounter.

    I’ve had at least 5 adamant Democrat guy try to heavily pressure me into marriage by isolating me. When I have told them that we don’t match up on values at all. They are always surprised that I am not forced to go to Church by my evil right wing parents….

    By rough personal survey I have found that about 80% of my friends who are democrat had very authoritarian parents (who were also democrats). At any point past the age where I could be left at home, if I had told my parents that I sincerely didn’t want to go to Chuch with them for philosophical reasons. They would have said okay…

    Also my parents find me too right wing for their tastes, Dad’s a Fox News Republican, Mom’s a Regan Republican, and I read too many Baen Books, and learned about the issues of the day on Baen’s Bar, in politics, Truth vs. Pravda, and Blazes, during my formative years, and became a libertarian leaning usually vote Republican.

    Liked by 1 person

  31. So, those ‘adamant Democrat guys’ believed you’re too stupid or too weak-willed to make your own decisions. And the only change they wanted was for them to be the ones making your decisions for you.

    Seems to be a common theme amongst Leftroids; if you disagree with them, you’re obviously not competent to hold your own opinions.

    Like

Comments are closed.