The biggest delusion of the left is not that you can redistribute wealth and make everyone prosperous. That one is bad, yes, but not the worst. Heck, even their belief that wealth cannot be created, cannot be destroyed, can only be distributed is bad but not that bad.
Their worst illusion is that they can infinitely tweak humans and human societies to be exactly what they want them to be.
They believe, absolutely, at bone-deep level that humans and cultures are infinitely plastic. Which lays at the heart of their worst offenses against the west specifically and of how they’re taking civilization apart. (And why they hate us, they really hate us, because we don’t just obey, but that’s a side effect.)
If you read books written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, you find the roots of this confusion. You read a lot about various problems and how they could be solved “if only we had more education.” Education, and the proper formation of conscience, most often from a Christian perspective was the Great White (eh) hope of the time. And it is this very same class of people, disillusioned with Christianity and the Western ethos for a variety of reasons, of which WWI was not the only but also not the smallest, fell prey to Marx’s shiny ideas. And that whole new evangelism got aggregated to “we need to educate them/fine tune them/fix them.” They’ve been running on that track ever since.
Our own progressives were a strain of that movement. And remember that progressives included both GOP and Dems back in the early twentieth century. Both Woodrow Wilson and FDR tried to reengineer the United States, its people and its culture to meet what they thought was the inevitable future. (I’m so tired of arrow of history people.)
The progressives — I know, I’ve talked to them — of today point to early victories, like racial integration of society and the acceptance of women in business environments.
I’m not sure those victories are as great as they think, and I rather believe they exaggerated the triumphs of their ideological ancestors. The US tends to integrate after bigotry anyway, and bigotry only arises when having to integrate a large group. The separation of races was part of governmental policy and thus enforced. I suspect if that hadn’t been so, it would have disappeared after the civil war. (I’d like to see that time line.)
As for women in business, women were always there, in some form or another. Lower class women worked by their men’s side and upper class reared women with no other prospects often took jobs, and not just the normal governess, etc, but secretary, which could be very elastic and encompass a lot of functions we now consider separate, up to and including manager. Also women always owned businesses, etc.
What the progressive governance managed was “mandatory promotions for women” combined with an “education” program to make women, including yours truly when she was young and much much dumber believe that wanting to be a “wife and mother” was a sign you were stupid. And wanting to be a stay at home mom was the surrender of all your intellect. Heck, even wanting to work in more feminine areas was considered at best gauche and at worst surrender.
Did that work? Depends on what you consider working. Worked d*mn well in the sense of driving a wedge between men and women. Of making women resented and hated by anyone in business, because every man has a story of Mary-one-thought getting promoted above him because of what’s between her legs. Is this fair? In a lot of cases I’ve been “privileged” to observe, yes. In all of them? Hell no. Some women get promoted because they are competent and work hard. The problem is the other kind overwhelm that number by far, and also that the ones selected because “Has hoo-haa” tend to be the dumbest, most back-stabbing bitches in creation. (Kamala Harris might be their epitome. During the primaries in 2020 she shived Biden in the back in public, and then he still gave her the position because skin color and xx chromosome. Yeah. As for dumb, listen to her unscripted. She’s college dumb. Dumb who learned words to paper over the fact that she’s utterly uninterested in EVER having a thought.)
It also worked damn well to tank marriages and births. Which I suppose is a victory for the new “progressives” who JUST want humanity extinct already.
And that’s part of the problem. Can you “engineer” a culture. Sure, to an extent, if you take in account its basic tenets, its tendencies, its points of strain. Hence, “engineering” American culture towards integration of the races was easy in the early twentieth century. Because it already took the full faith and credit of the united states to keep them apart. Engineering American culture to give women a fair shake was easy too. Because the seeds were there in the Constitution where “Men” was, as every such word in an Indo-European language, meant to be understood as “women too.”
The problem is when the engineers a) don’t know their own minds. b) push too far.
You see, as it became clear that the workers weren’t rushing to the causes of the left, the left heeded the gospel of Gramsci as a retcon of Marx. Races other than white are the blessed ones who understand and will husher in socialism. This… uh… was interesting. What it has managed, particularly through the efforts of Obama, the Little Man Who Wasn’t There, or whoever had their hands up his backside. Like Kamala, he epitomized every man raised to a position he didn’t deserve due to his skin color alone. And that… well, that caused backlash throughout the land. No one listening to that man, unscripted, saw “Harvard” at all. And the tight hold on his grades and academic records just confirmed the resentment. He communicated to the culture his relentless racial hatred and divisiveness — which I’m convinced is actually his own, being deflected resentment for the African father who abandoned him but whom his red diaper grandparents didn’t allow him to hate — complete with the burning summer of love, in which black neighborhoods were burned by white college kids, in a rebellion that was supposed to represent black people. The result is that we’re more divided than we ever were, even if that’s not as much as the media portrays or people think in general.
Their efforts have now surged ahead to basically erase white as a race, make people feel guilty for being white, and generally shit on the principle of human equality (under the law and of opportunities.)
… Then there is the racial politics. Most people were okay with gay equality, though I’ve heard a few grumble if they knew what was behind it they’d have opposed it. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t what was behind it. It was what was coming regardless. The left had been trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys on the lowdown for decades. Meaning they tried to push women into what they considered “male” positions (because they confuse male with powerful. Don’t get me started) and trying to guilt men into the caring positions. Turning their efforts biological was always going to happen.
And that was a step too far. For our culture. For any culture. Why? Well, because in the current state of the biological art you CAN’T turn men into women and women into men. At BEST you can produce facsimiles of various degrees of believability. Now, this might be enough for people who are genuinely gender dysphoric to feel better, and that’s fine. But the pushing of it into a trend, and infecting ditsy and dumb (a state of the stage of development) teens with it was a step too far. You’re taking away people’s hope for grandchildren. In any culture, at any time, that’s a step too far. (Says the woman who’ll probably never have them for other reasons.)
On top of that our entertainment is running on a “other races were always here, and they’re better.” Do NOT get me started on what Netflix is doing to Pride and Prejudice. And the erasure of history.
This is late stage leftism attempt to engineer societies. They did it in communist countries by destroying statues and outright rewriting history. They try it here too. But they are also doing it by creating “race integrated” historical movies. The stupid, maleducated people will believe it if there’s enough of it.
Of course, the problem is that the project is starting to come apart. Alternate means of entertainment and mass communication are spiking their charges. And they’ve managed, G-d help me, to make white people conscious of the fact they are a race. And that’s in the US.
Abroad… Well, I wonder how much is happening that we never hear about. Though so far the turn to the right of Europe is the kind that seems to be more “American Right” than the traditional European jackboots left that respects national leanings and history. It’s both salutary and it scares the spit out of the left. As it should. A lot of what they’ve done this century and a half is to keep the “infection” of Americanism from overtaking the world. And I think they might have thrown a boomerang at their own faces.
I’m not in the business of gazing into crystal balls. The future I write about is just for fun, and predicting it is, as is, very difficult. Or if you prefer “Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future.”
And no, I don’t know how the midterms will go. Maybe it’s all a psyops, maybe not. Americans are affected by presentism and I don’t put it past us to vote for communism because gas is too high. Kind of like the donor not donating because Republicans didn’t pass the SAVE act. Like he has a better chance of it from the left.
At the same time, for the left this is the THEIR flight 93 election. If Trump improves his position in the legislature, we are going to pass the SAVE act, and we are going to make their embezzlement strategy void. This would literally destroy the left. All they have is fraud and slushing piles of stolen taxpayer money. Even with all the money being on the left they’ve been losing the culture war by degrees (and getting more hysterical and desperate and visible to the clueless) every day.
They can’t afford to lose. They’re going to do that scene from zombie movies, where all the zombies pile on the train trying to stop it.
Let’s hope they fail, but it will be an all out effort, and they still have considerable money and fraud. (None of the vote by mail states are coming back from zombiedom until that is eliminated, for instance.)
And all we can do is pray. (I’m once more asking you to pray, particularly if you’re an atheist. I figure the novelty will get His attention. Even if your prayer is “Yo, if You’re there, we could use help with this.”)
But whether they win this midterm or not affects only how bloody and fraught our path will be, not the destiny.
They can’t win because what they have actually succeeded in doing by trying to engineer humans and society is breaking the culture. And cultures under stress revert to their fundamentals.
So the English will become more obstreperously English (And if you don’t think that matters, you haven’t studied history, or seen soccer hooligans.) The Germans will become more German (by the numbers, javohl) and the French…. oh, the French have been broken since the nineteenth century and heaven knows what they’ll do, though if there were a place to bet, I’d lay small amounts of money (I don’t GOT large) on their going hard-core religion and king. Yes, you heard me right, king. I expect by the end of the 21st century France will have an absolute king and be trying to convince the rest of the world to follow suite. Shrugs. Is France.
And America? America is about to go hard core, hard driving American. And that should scare the hell out of the left, because America, as laid out in the Constitution and the Declaration is the Anti-Marx.
I’d just prefer we don’t do it starved and tired, on bleeding feet and by our broken fingernails. I’m sixty four, and I can no longer pack for 12 hours without being comprehensively wrecked the next day (helping family move. Or why this blog is so ridiculously late.) I think I’m way to hold to run around the hills with a Kalashnikov, as fun as that sounded in my twenties. So I hope I don’t have to.
Anyway, the point is you can’t engineer humans, and you can’t engineer their cultures.
Or in the immortal words of Alex the Chick: Humans aren’t widgets. To which I’d add the immortal words of Javier Milei: Carajo.
Humans aren’t widgets, carajo!
No matter how much you educate them or in which principles, Christian, or Marxist, or Born Again Good Housekeeping, the venal ones will be venal, the honest ones will be honest, the competent ones will remain competent and the neurotic ones (hi!) will spin endlessly, chasing their own tails.
And cultures are not widgets. They’re structures of modus vivendi arrived at by evolution in much the same mode as biological evolution, to be the best suited to a people and their environment. Now a lot of them are poisonous, counterproductive or have passed their sell by date.
Which doesn’t make them any easier to change. They WILL change in response to new technology or new information, but governments and “intellectuals” putting their thumbs on the scale doesn’t change them. It only breaks them.
And cultures at the breaking point revert to their most fundamental. (Which we’re seeing with Islam, btw. They’re a problem not because they’re strong, but because they’ve hit reality and changed tech at speed and can’t adapt.)
Fortunately our fundament is, at bottom, decent and functional.
The way there though…
Hold on. Be not afraid. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
Re France, Pope Leo held an outdoor Mass on Paris and allegedly a million people lined the streets for it.
So yeah, King and Country sound plausible. It’s the French.
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That’s how they’re going back to religion and happened about a decade ago. It’s a VIRULENTLY anti-American movement, so I’ve been keeping an eye on it, but really, it’s what’s catching there.
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There are several flavors of young French Catholic now, and a lot are not anti-American. Basically depends on who they have met.
The old school “I am trad Catholic and want the Bourbons back” are pretty much anti-everybody not French. Except those Americans who dress nice and get invited to lots of royalist and Jacobite dinners. (Snif, nobody ever invited me to hobnob with fallen nobility, snif.)
I think the common problem of Muslims all over is starting to concentrate everybody’s minds, though.
But yeah, I think the real big factor is the marriage and kids focus, because religious Catholics (and Protestants) are the ones getting married at all, much less having kids.
(It is also possible that the anti-American rhetoric goes over my head, especially since I don’t know French and don’t read much French Internet.)
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I don’t know why they’re so anti American; I have no objections to the French having a king. If they hate American leftists, well I can certainly understand that.
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They think religious people should be royalists. It’s the same flavor as the bizarre American monarchists.
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That’s odd to me because there’s a huge “no King but Christ” tradition for many Christians as well.
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the US, and formerly GB, is the home of classical liberalism, which was the original French left. The left went socialist, and what had been the left became the right. There really is no old right in the US. A fair few French Catholics are throne and altar believers and the US is an abomination. I know a fair few through my mother’s family, I can dress well and have attended some of those dinners (a few anyway, I worked in Paris right opposite the Garnier). It’s not unanimous by any means and I think the point about marriage, children, family, stability trumps it.
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Our Founders were the Progressives of their time. 😮
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Well, yes. Have you seen the holy musical? John Adams speaks about “the people” quite a lot, though I don’t think he’s quite as collectivist about it (“the people” being a single entity rather than a group of them) as modern Progressives. He’s ALSO the man who was accused of wanting to confine the business of government to “the rich, the well-born, and the able”, for an interesting contrast. In that case, I don’t think they were using the modern definitions of “able/disabled” either.
And New England is STILL the home of the smug progressive certain they know best for everyone.
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Our original right (aka Tories or Loyalists) vacated to Canada during that tussle we call the Revolutionary War. Some of them actually came back (one of my ancestors left for New Brunswick and descendants returned circa the US Civil War to Massachusetts and later back to the small coastal Connecticut town they had left).
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Yeah, but it’s been traditionally gotten around by going “Well obviously, he wouldn’t be the king unless G-d approved, therefor, her is G-ds voice”
sigh. Pretty sure there are specific warnings about this *cough*Saul*cough*
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I believe that there’s a lot of emphasis on how the king is “God’s anointed,” so rebelling against him is rebelling against God.
There’s a lot of focus on how God sent Samuel to first Saul, then David, and not so much on the fact that this only happened after God repeatedly told Israel they neither needed nor wanted a king, they kept demanding one, and finally God said (paraphrasing), “You really want someone to boss you around, steal your money, and take all the best women for his harem? Well, FINE. I’ll give you a king, then. But you’re going to be sorry!”
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Give them credit; the European royalty only claimed to rule by divine right, unlike the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Inca, the later Akkadians, or Japanese emperors, who claimed godhood of their own.
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It was a sad day when Norton I passed with no successor.
He never rescinded his decree for Congress to disband, which means all Congresses since October 12, 1859 have been illegitimate.
The 27 States, 5 Commonwealths, 9 Territories, and the Principality of South Dakota went completely off the rails after that.
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I don’t think they’ll go King. That’s far too small thinking for the French. They’ll go Emperor (albeit that their empire consists of a few small hunks of land in South America). Be on the lookout for Napoleon IV; there are even rumors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bonaparte) that there are surviving descendants, though perhaps not by strict patrilineal descent. Heck the Bonapartists keep popping up every fifty years or so.
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And several bits of Africa. They’re real big on denouncing colonialism from everybody else while maintaining their hold on supposedly former territories/colonies in Africa.
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Hmm shows what I know. I thought they had long a go given up on Africa, because well Africa. As long as they don’t try to get parts of the US west back (we bought that fair and square :-) ). Honestly they could have Montreal/Quebec although they’d immediately be arguing with them over pronunciation.
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I thought the Chinese had taken over colonizing Africa.
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China are the NuColonizers. France are the old colonizers. One of the only ones that still sticks around, for better or worse.
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“The sun never set on the British Empire.” The French Empire, though not as large, could make the same claim.
France had the largest colonial empire in Africa. They also directly held or claimed about half of the land that’s now the continental United States, and a sizeable chunk of Canada. And they had (usually small) colonies all through the Pac Rim, South America, and they claimed a chunk of Australia, though they didn’t try to follow up on it. There were also some oddities, like French once being the primary language of the Russian nobility, some of who ruled over feoffs that didn’t speak Russian anyway.
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Of course, Bob (may peace be upon him) speculated the French might have a king again by 2000 AD in The Door into Summer 70 years ago.
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One of the alternate worlds in “Job” had the Most Sublime Monarch – of the Kennedy Dynasty.
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Ya’ know, I’d mercifully forgotten that.
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It’s RFK Jr. He makes everyone live low carb and jog every morning. I’m 700lbs. :-P
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Yet another fricking timeline I want no part of. I could maybe live low-carb if meat got cheap enough, but honestly, unless something big and dangerous is chasing me, I am not prone to run…
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–
Not even if something is big and dangerous. Cannot out run, never could. These days, forget weight, the knees will not allow jogging, let alone running.
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Climbing is right out, too, at least for me…
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100% For decades.
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Summon the Great Equalizer, 50 caliber.
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Right now? Recoil is going to knock me over. Which affects aim.
It’ll get better.
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My knees are really bad. Running is not an option. I put my trust in St. John of Ogden and carry a 1911.
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So had I… [searching my ebook version] Hmm, there are only two ocurrences of “Kennedy”:
“Well, in Kennedy’s second term–“
“Who?”
“John F. Kennedy. President. Sixty-one to sixty-nine.”
No wonder I didn’t remember a Kennedy dynasty. Another running revision of Heinlein’s work?
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Monarchies are valid forms of government, can be highly efficient, and highly satisfactory to large number of people, and not just the ones at the top. However, as much as I despise the U.K.’s Parliament, I suspect that if Charles the III was actually ruling, and not just a charity figurehead, he’d be an utter disaster. How do you raise a kid to be both compassionate and ruthless when needed, knowledgeable without being a college educated idiot, able to be a real leader without being a spoilt brat? And yeah, we do NOT want to end up with a Darkship world either.
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Comparing modern Britain to the Weimar Republic under Hindenberg, I can totally see why the Germans would support someone – anyone – who was willing to step up and un-geshtupf the mess the country had gotten itself into. Because the current government sure has heck wasn’t making much of an attempt at it.
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Not unreasonable, considering de Gaulle’s control of the country.
On the other hand, I think France would be a very minor European power nowadays, had it not been for de Gaulle. His insistence that France not rely on foreign resources made France a first-class nuclear power and a major, though often unrecognized, industrial state. That meant “sacrifice” of consumer goods, for which he was roundly hated, and was one reason there were 31 well-documented assassination attempts on him. Most historians agree he holds the record for failed attempts.
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I say the French have been broken since at least the 18th century; the build-up to the French Revolution, and The Terror that followed.
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When the VileProgs went from “accept people for who they are*,” to “we will force you to favor them,” a lot of people started to get their backs up. Even people who probably agree to a large extent with the VProgs don’t like being ordered to be “tolerant” to predators.
European Conservative [yeah, I know] had an interview with a young man who observed that he was being pushed in with the jackboot-Right (my words) because none of the mainstream political parties would accept that some German men want a traditional life with traditional women, and to be left mostly alone to worship G-d as they choose. I got the sense that if the CDU and others actually listened to what Germans said and wanted, they’d not see their voters bailing for AfD and the Communists (die Linke party). But no, the professional politicians and Eurocrats know what is best for everyone else, and disagreeing is morally wrong, so guess what? Idioten.
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There was a picture of an ad floating around several months ago that purportedly was showing up in Britain. The ad was aimed at white women, and told them that not letting a non-European guy get them pregnant was racism. I don’t know whether it was a real thing or not. If it was real, then whoever created it needs to be smacked down. If it wasn’t real, then the issue becomes that things are so bad that most of us readily accept that it’s real.
Islamists “protest” all the time in the UK, sometimes acting quite aggressively toward non-Islamic neighborhoods that the “protests” “just happen” to pass through, and the only response from the government is to arrest any counter-protestors. English natives (including some non-whites who were born there, and both understand and appreciate what they’ve got) have started protesting, and the government immediately started looking for ways to arrest them. The initial step that the government settled on was to ban “masks” at protests… except for burquas and niquabs, of course.
As for Germany, the CDU was crushed so badly in the recent election that it has apparently fallen below the minimum percentage of the vote required to have *any* members in the German legislature. They’ve completely collapsed. The bad news is that while the AfD is doing better these days, so are the Greens. And unfortunately, it appears that other the other parties are more likely to support the Greens (who have been utterly disastrous for the country over the last couple of decades) than they are the AfD.
My best guess is that policies are being pushed down from on high, so to speak. And the politicians refuse to take the very simple and common sense suggestions that would fix the issues afflicting their assorted countries.
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Wouldn’t it be *awful* if very large, very muscular counter-protesters in charge of security started wearing niqabs?
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People were joking that going forward everyone would start showing up dressed like that.
But afaik, it hasn’t happened yet.
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At least one fellow did that already. When the British cops confronted him, he claimed to be a transgendered convert. You could *see* the gears grinding in the cop’s head…
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Love it.
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And “transgendered convert” may not be as ludicrous as it sounds. I’ve read that the Ayatollah Khomeini (may p*ss be upon him) supported “gender reassignment as an alternative to homosexuality.
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FORCED gender reassignment.
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Yup. Yet another reason to despise the “doctors” who do that to people.
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Amen Sister Sarah!
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Thinking of reverting to type under stress.
I am a Southerner and an Odd. I got brought up on a firm diet of, “Never lose your temper,” and “Don’t let them know they’re getting to you.” Add that to an inherited…ah, volcanic temper.
I’ve mentioned all that’s left of my immediate family is the vacant lot where the house used to be. I’ve been getting, “Do you own the lot at 1234 Smith St? Would you like to? Would you sell it to us?” calls for three freaking years. Well, our lawyer and one of the vultures have cut a deal that should get the lot sold and a reasonable amount of the money sent our way.
So, the lot goes to tax auction next month and the %$#@ vultures are getting worse. Places with names like, “Foreclosure Help,” are calling. Last week a lady with a very heavy Indian accent called from one of these groups and while she was much politer than some it was clear she was reading from a script. Not five minutes after hanging up, the phone rang and a man, similar accent, began with exactly the same script.
I did not scream at him. Quite. But I got quite loud. Beloved commented on the “small nuclear explosion.” Son commented everyone has feelings and I ought to let them out.
Today, “Foreclosure Help,” called my beloved. He was patient. He was calm. And it was obvious he was dealing with a high-pressure salesman who ignored everything he said while pressing him to talk to the “finance manager.”
Beloved assured him he would tell me about the call (I’m sitting there listening). Maybe 10 seconds later my phone rings, and yep, it’s “Foreclosure Help.”
I did not scream. I did not use profanity. I just let him know I knew exactly what he put beloved through, and exactly what I thought about their “compassionate,” desire to help us get 30% of the money and keep the rest. I didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. Then I said, “God bless you and have a good day,” and hung up.
It felt so good.
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Vultures never change. In 1985, at my grandfather’s “visitation” at the funeral home, a buzzard showed up and began trying to convince my grandmother to sell the farm…..
We didn’t ask the funeral parlor if we could borrow thw embalming room, but he left faster than he arrived.
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Preferably on a rising trajectory.
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What they do is impose redirected preference to the checkbox subdivided client groupings they spend so much time creating. The merit assumption of an otherwise-blind choice of the most qualified candidate for hiring or promotion, either by experience or potential identified in testing, is anathema to the client-patron relationship the left requires. And once bought into having all rewards flowing form client status, the constituencies would be rejecting rewards if they failed to support their patrons.
But the frantic high pressure sales tactics being used in the “socialism is just sharing, mkay?” agenda on especially younger voters through repeated articles, videos and push-polls by the left and the jskool media (birm) does seem to have a whiff of desperation if not abject panic. The traditional in-power left is clearly in panic due to the squeeze from their further left from the hard commie DSA and the Trojan horse religion of peace forces, and their flailing is showing through more and more clearly.
The question in my mind, and likely in Chuck Schumer’s, is just how much damage to vote totals will the absence of everything previously funded by overseas ActBlue money and taxpayer-funded USAID cash make?
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Yeah, five weeks out, and I am firmly in dunno mode.
Behavior forecasts are hard in the first place, fundamentally hard in theory. If we have reason to suspect major confounding surprise factors, and the universitistas have been asshoe enough to inspire such.
There are a ton of interesting little indications in behavior, that I can basically put together in ways to predict opposite results.
I’m more oriented to technical problem solving now, and am now basically unsure what is going on with my serving of that. I would probably be basically unsure about my technical stuffs even in my best condition.
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People also seem to be getting more childish under stress, or assuming people are children. The, “socialism is sharing,” bit sounds like a kindergarten teacher trying to get the children to behave. The, “All you people who support ICE, you should have ICE come to your neighborhood!” sound like angry children.
And the defense attorney on the Clancy class still trying to punish the (black, male) jurors who refused to vote for acquittal comes across as a spoiled,cpetulant child throwing a tantrum.
What is it with these people, anyway?
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The weird thing in that case is the reports that the predetermined-acquit jurors used their phones to research stuff in the jury room (automatic mistrial right there), but the defense loon lawyer is after the holdout’s phone.
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And only God knows how many other people are going to do the same thing when the political stress makes them snap.
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Reminds me of the old autistic’s joke. “Everyone says, “Be yourself!” Then when I am, they say, “Not like that!“”
(Word.)
I’m one of those people whose mindset is, “Sure, whatever, don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses, be Consenting Adults, and leave me out of it. Outside of that, not my problem.”
People insist on making it My Problem. I dislike this. Intensely.
I have enough problems just staying alive. People want to give me more? Take the consequences.
I would rather things not be bloody; I’m tired, creaky, and it’s heck to get out of clothes. But if people insist.…
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Do not make me pay attention, and REALLY don’t make it my problem. I WILL solve it, sometimes in a way that makes the issues go away, usually with the mostly good technical solution that pisses off the most people I can.
I try, I really do try to be better person, but making my reading time go away? That is my tranquilizer/deal with people better. And if I have to pay attention to stuff, that’s taking away reading time.
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THIS. Let me read in peace in quiet!
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What was the Michelle Obama quote “You will be made to care.”? They’re going to make people care enough to kill and die opposing their evil ideology.
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People forget that “care” does not mean “agree with your side”.
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It’s an article of their faith that if they can explain it enough, you will agree with them.
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Pardon me while I laugh hysterically.
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“I was told “show your feelings” but when I blew up in their face, they didn’t like it.” [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
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Never thoroughly piss off someone who has little left to live for and enough energy left to make their death meaningful.
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Very true.
(AKA one of my main reasons from refraining from various acts is “you know the library in prison won’t be good and the food will literally kill you”. If that ever ceased to matter….)
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When discussing various impossibilities of social engineering, it may help some of the more deliberate theory obsessives to explain why on Earth engineering’s methods work for engineering, and the fundamental differences that may make copybook work invalid for behavioral design and manufacturing.
The two things that almost no university programs will do a good job of explaining both of are that a) widgets very rarely have memory b) behavioral measurements are inherently easy to contaminate.
So some of the programs in the behavioral fields actually do teach you how easy it is to contaminate your measurement attempts. Like, for example, if you tell people what you want the response to be. Or if you select your in-group only to ask questions of.
In the past there were some scholars in a few of these fields with aspirations to rigor, and some of those correctly discovered that ‘this stuff is hard yo’.
Right now, those fields may or may not be adulterated with scholars who have convinced themselves that manipulated measurements actually change reality.
Basically, if you have a rigorous faculty in a hard sciences field, and he or she is taking a behavior measurement as being very important, it can just be down to them not having solid training in that field of behavior measurement. There are a lot of suspect results, to the point that some of them may be deliberately wrong.
What you /will not/ learn in a behavioralist program, because even the hard sciences people are not learning it explicitly, is why engineering school works at all for manufacturing processes. What engineering schools will do is give you some tools, and then tell you that they work. Students with degrees are expected to just learn the rest on the job, in industry. The on the job training in industry does a certain amount of ‘huge buffet of tools, find out what works’. Albeit with apprenticeships, often with people who have some idea of what works.
What statistical tools and improvement processes work, depends a little on what you are trying to make. That we have graduate programs in industrial engineering is evidence that it can be hard to tell whether the tools and processes work, and which tools and processes work.
Basically, especially for mechanical manufacturing, parts break because of defects in the material that grow during the manufacturing. When a part breaks during a mechanical manufacturing process, and others don’t, if the work was identical the unbroken parts did not have the same defect. This is potentially a deterministic thing, except that we do not have perfect knowledge of the initial material, and that uncertainty is what we are approximating with statistics.
Real manufacturing process for widgets are a function of raw materials, and of manufacturing processes, and the statistical models are to help us understand what we cannot know about the raw materials, and what we do not know yet about the variations in our processes.
Why the statistical tools work at all for, say, a nail drawing machine, is that the raw wire is not intelligent, and cannot suddenly decide to break one day just to screw with you.
This is why it can be theoretically and statistically valid to use this measurement data from the past to reliably forecast what changes to the manufacturing in the future will do. The parts do not have memory, cannot tell the difference between tomorrow, and yesterday, and cannot change their mind tonight.
You will rarely get this philosophical why explained in an engineering program, it does not matter much unless you are wanting to use your IC engineering expertise to fix the public school system or such. The engineering faculty are too busy trying to teach all the things that they know matters much more to actually doing the entry level job of engineering, like remedial composition.
So, societal engineering does not work in America. Why? Sixty percent of adults have at least a bachelors degree, ‘everyone’ has some exposure to tertiary schools, and to what certain scholars thought was the thing to do. Communists are not surprising, they are expected. If someone is twenty or thirty years safely escaped university, they have that basic training, plus those twenty or thirty years able to directly observe reality, and to see what schemes work to what degree in the real world. IOW, we can guess pretty well when the wider measurement is intended for bad uses (because the socialists will document it somewhere), and then try to deliberately damage the quality of the result.
The ‘without loss of generality’ case is maybe a bunch of deeper and wider discussions. The conclusion I have is that I am not sure that societal engineering has ever worked anywhere as intended. The records indicating that it has might have been doctored.
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Statistical process control works in industrial mass production because every widget is supposed to be exactly like every other widget, within a narrow range of tolerances.
People are not identical, and can not be made identical, no matter what carrots and sticks are applied to them. (And why carrots? I don’t much like carrots. Feeding me carrots would be more like a punishment than a reward.) In fact, that’s a whole ‘nother problem. People will respond differently to the rewards and punishments that are supposed to make them all the same.
———————————
They say I can’t be a nonconformist because I’m not like the other nonconformists.
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Exactly.
I keep on thinking that trying to assembly line primary and secondary education has got to either be magical thinking, or outright completely insane.
Even if we could do uniformity, there is little reason to think that it is really that desirable.
Trying to make averages the same across subregions feels nuts to me, even if it might be politically necessary.
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Why carrots? Because the metaphor comes from a time-honored technique for managing recalcitrant beasts of burden, who do like carrots…and if they don’t, the stick is there to ensure that their preferences don’t matter. (Although you knew that.) Anyway, says a lot about how the self-anointed elites see us, don’t it.
—–
I’m tired of being myself. I just want to be unique like everybody else.
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Also, as someone who has struggled with faith… Yo, Great Author. We’ve had some bad years, and we could use the Plot Twist of pulling this out before we’re at rock bottom.
Just a thought. Honest.
(Really, we could – I keep finding stories where heroes don’t win, just stave off utter death and Worse Than Death for another day. We could use a win!)
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I have a pray for this mid-term election. “Please lord, could you nudge the folks that help with the cheating, and just have them, not?”
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I’ve been saying a novena to St Jude that basically starts with me saying, “St Jude, I’ve been saving up all year long. It can go to your hospital. Or else I’m going to need ammo.”
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Decisions, decisions….
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G
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It’s like folks heard that there’s no such thing as an eternal win, and decided that means no winning at all.
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Yeah.
…I need to write more with the good guys winning!
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I support this plan!
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Most of my stories, the good guys win at least something.
In the one exception, the bad guys get a Pyrrhic victory that let me put in place one of the elements that will bring them down at the end of the series.
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I don’t know what Netflix is doing to Pride and Prejudice; I do know what Netflix is doing to Narnia along with Greta Earwig. Lewis and Tolkien should be allowed to haunt Netflix and Amazon Ghost of Christmas Future style.
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Can you imagine what they would do to ‘That Hideous Strength’? The scientists would be presented as the heroic good guys, struggling against religious fundamentalist terrorists…
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The Brahmandarins would definitely view N.I.C.E. as the heros of the story. Just like they keep trying to implement the Ministry of Truth and get us to worship the Ford and Gaia, take or Soma, and stay in our castes (I’m happy to be a Beta, Alphas work much too hard and think too much).
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How the heck the estate of C.S. Lewis and Douglas Gresham are letting that be done to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe baffles me. Lewis died in 1963 and I think his copyrights were properly renewed so copyright should extend to like 2039 (Life of the Author +75 lapsing on the next new year). Certainly, the audio plays by Focus on the Family and even the Disney cinematic versions hewed moderately close to the original stories (with an unnecessary love interest by Caspian for Susan being the only real issue, the rest being character/story reduction to fit ~2hr run times). Because Aslan is essentially the Christ incarnation in his Universe (and textually always he or him), voicing him with a female (no matter how famous) verges on blasphemy. Mr Gresham, being a devout Christian himself, knows this. I wonder if there was some fight among the estate or if they let the rights go without the constraints they had imposed previously.
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Liam Neeson was great as Aslan. The only other voice actors I can think of who could have done as well are James Earl Jones, Peter Cullen (the voice of Optimus Prime) and Christopher Sabat (voices of Piccolo and Vegeta).
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Christopher Lee as well.
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Back in the mid-1980s on Byte Magazine’s BIX bulletin board there was a discussion of how to cast a movie version of “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Various actos were proposed for the role of Jubal Harshaw. That sub-thread lasted until someone said, “James Earl Jones.”
That was a subthread-killer. “Well, obviously. Now who to play Jill…”
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I had heard that Mr. Gresham is in poor health.
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Mr. Gresham is allegedly suffering from dementia and other ailments, and is in a care home.
So yeah, somebody is representing the estate, but either he/she is an idiot, or is no friend of Narnia.
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Well crap that is unfortunate. I guess that explains that. We’ll have to wait until 2038 to get decent remakes of the already filmed Narnia books, and maybe someone would have the guts to do A Horse and His Boy that is my favorite. In the Meantime We’re stuck with Ms Gerwig’s mess. My only hope is that it tanks so hard (by offending its natural audience) that she never gets to do Prince Caspian or Voyager of the Dawn Treader .
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Over the years I’ve seen so much idiotic behavior pushed by those on the left and the seemingly blind acceptance of it by so many people was depressing. The last few years I’ve seen a change, more and more people seem to be reaching the point they can’t pretend everything is okay and whatever current craziness that’s going on is nothing to worry about. I’m hoping (and praying) that the left will continue their slide toward self destruction, that the mid-terms will hand them a major defeat and we will really see a major change for the better. I know they will likely get more violent and desperate, there will be pain, but the more they act out the more others will see them for what they really are.
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A couple of days ago I brought up the Crusader regalia and symbols turning up at the protests in Great Britain. It’s still too early to say if this will have any long-lasting effect, though, or what the effect might be if it does last.
And as someone else here noted, Amelia turned up in the recent trailer for the upcoming Gundam game. That was unexpected…
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No one expects the purple haired British Anti-Inquisition!!!
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This year in Kalifornistan, there is good news and bad news.
State Proposition 39 requires voter ID. Yay! Of course, the dead will vote against it… 😛
We’ve learned more about the infamous Proposition 40 ‘billionaire tax’. “It’s just this one time!” they say. “Only 5%!” they say. “Only on those Eeevul Billionaires!” they say. “They can afford it!” they say.
But buried in the fine print are provisions that will allow the notorious Sacra-de-mento politicians to ‘alter the deal’ by a simple majority vote and expand the tax, to take whatever they want from whoever they want to target. Can you say, “They’re coming after my IRA and 401(k)! I didn’t vote for that!”
If you voted for Proposition 40, then yeah, you did. ☹️
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It’s worth noting that raising taxes by a “simple majority” would be a (nominal) win for Democrats in California. IIRC, the law currently requires a two-thirds majority vote. Though keep in mind that the Dems have a super-majority in both legislative houses thanks to the “bi-partisan” redistricting commission that definitely in absolutely no way at all gerrymanders the district lines heavily in favor of the Democrats.
Nope! They are *definitely* completely non-partisan and unbiased!
*cough*
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California’s Jungle primaries don’t help. Massachusetts has a petition to go to a jungle primary system. Which honestly makes no sense to me the party should be able to chose its person. Perhaps the parties should have to remiburse the towns (counties outside New England) for the costs of Primaries? it is a wonderful thing as in a massively blue state it favors the parties in power (although theoretically Massachusetts is predominantly independent (called unenrolled, there was an Independent party at one point), but with a massively blue lean.
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They even have enough spare Blue Massholes to go and interfere in Vermont and New Hampshire’s elections. 😡
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At least in the New Hampshire those Massholes to some degree are residents of many border areas in New Hampshire or areas along the Southern reaches of I-93 in New Hampshire. The call of No Sales tax and Now income tax can be appealing particularly if one of the family actually works in New Hampshire (If you both work in MA it’s a loser as MA still taxes you) UNH in Durham and other universities also (e.g. Dartmouth) represent ~20K students who can register to vote with New Hampshire’s same-day process. And yes some Massholes with vacation homes on Sunapee, Winipisaukee and the NH coast have been caught voting twice. I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it has been known to happen.
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Swung the Senate in 2016. Documented.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/7/voter-fraud-alert-over-5000-new-hampshire-presiden/
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Sadly that appears to be behind a paywall. The 2016 senate seat was won by slightly over 1017 votes out of 739,140. That is about 0.13%. The quantity is a tenth of the vote for the libertarian or independent candidate votes (details by city here https://www.sos.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt561/files/inline-documents/sonh/2016-ge-us-senator.pdf ). It could have been the 5000 Massholes voting, it could have been hordes of liberal students voting It could have been both or neither. The votes once voted are fungible you can’t tell other than by town where the surplus is. Durham shows only about 10000 voters but they were 3-1 for Hassan, compared with most other towns in that county. UNH has a student body of 13000 currently, I would suspect similar if not more in 2016 but clearly only part of them were registered. Similarly Hanover that has Dartmouth and SNHU (though SNHU has a large internet population) with a 7600 vote count that was 5-1 for Hassan, Between those two towns alone we have a nearly 7500 vote surplus for Hassan. It would take a while to find any surplus due to illegal votes as likely they are distributed across several border towns and likely some are large Cities (e.g. Nashua) that tend blue anyways so they just look a bit bluer but with a difference of 1000 votes, that’s all we need.
The big issue is the same day registration. The number of same day voters would be interesting to count (those are our likely illegal votes) but I do not know if New Hampshire reports such things. As I said there are plenty of homes owned by Mass. residents, and they could claim to reside there year round. 2020 provided much chance for this with massive mail-in voting (opt-in in MASS). Harder in 2016 but given NH’s lax checking and the fact that NH and MA governments don’t play nicely an obvious hole in the system exists. It seems probable that at least some voters are exploiting this.
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Many recent elections (2020!!) where the margin of ‘victory’ was substantially less than the margin of fraud. ☹️
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The separation of races was part of governmental policy and thus enforced. I suspect if that hadn’t been so, it would have disappeared after the civil war. (I’d like to see that time line.)
The timeline you seek was hinted at in H. Beam Piper’s “Crossroads of Destiny”.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18632
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There was no Civil War in that timeline, which diverged when Washington was killed in combat, and the first President was Benedict Arnold.
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OK, so: “If there actually is anything out there that can hear me, and gives a shit, lend us a hand?” 😛
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In my experience, and only mine mind you this is not in any way an attempt at scientific consensus, but as anecdote, when one asks for assistance from the Almighty the inevitable response tends to be “Here are the tools. Get to work.”
Most unpleasasntly, and as one of my former superiors noted, “son, you look like a tool to me so I’m gonna use you. Suck it up buttercup.”
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Works, sir. Works.
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Those can be dangerous.
Best man at a wedding last year– Easter– was a very annoyed atheist.
Bishop was swinging around the incense burner, and the guy was getting more annoyed, and prayed: “God? If you exist and can hear me, prove it. Make that thing go rolling across the floor.”
And the chain broke.
Bishop told the story this year, because he finished all the Easter ceremonies he had to do, and went back to the wedding party…and the kid cornered him to talk.
I get the impression he may have been a little wild-eyed. :rofl:
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Or maybe like Conan’s “prayer” to Crom in the 80s movie? ;-)
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I suspect the Dems will be frauding as much as they think they can get away with in November. What I want to see is people catching them at it, reporting it, and good lawyers actually prosecuting it. And I’d like to see any judge who tries to throw a case out for “lack of standing” or “being reported too late” or “disallowing evidence” literally dragged from the bench and either hung from the nearest tree or burned at the stake in the courthouse yard.
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Now that SCOTUS is allowing the SAVE list of illegal voters to be used, even though you can’t purge before the election, I’m working with my county GOP chair to set us up to use it for challenges after Election Day. We can data mine it against the list of peopl ewho signed the voter roll in person, or to verify mail in ballots that are counted.
If you haven’t talked to your county GOP chair, NOW is the time.
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My motivation for this is a scene from “First Lensman”:
And while I’d love to have a few of “the last word in blasters — Lewiston Mark 17.” along, we do what we can.
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How does that work? Party chairs aren’t government officials, how do they get access to SAVE data?
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Here in TX, each party is allowed to send poll watchers to each voting place. Among other things, we are to make sure that every voter, or their designated accompanying assistant, signed the poll roster before voting. Mail in ballots are sent in an envelope that has the voter’s name and address. That way, we have a record of who actually voted.
Any candidate can file an election challenge, and ask to have the rosters examined. As part of that examination, the candidate / party will ask the Voting Rights section of the DOJ for the SAVE roster of the potentially illegal voters in that district, compare them to the poll rosters, and see how many of them cast ballots.
That’s how it should work in TX. Your state will vary.
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In 2020 we saw the Democrats physically remove poll watchers, block windows with cardboard so nobody could see what they were doing, refuse to disclose election records, count ballots multiple times, ‘cure’ ballots, conjure boxes of ballots out of thin air, shred ballots after the election…
Pennsylvania sent out 1.8 million mail-in ballots. They counted 2.6 million. 766,000 mail-in ballots just mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Some Detroit precincts had over 200% voter turnout. As for Chicago, well, politics as usual went on there.
And NOTHING was done. No court would even look at the evidence. On ‘procedural grounds’.
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We use the tools we have.
One of the good things here in TX is that poll watchers must be allowed to accompany the ballot totals from their polling place to the counting centers.
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That’s because the courts are part of the problem.
The anti-Federalists warned about the lack of accountability of the Judicial Branch, but Madison’s Federalists managed to avoid limiting the judiciary’s power.
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Here in Arkansas, you don’t need a political party to watch polls. You can do it yourself if you want. Back when we still had paper ballots, you could lean over a poll worker’s shoulder and make your own count as they sorted them.
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What I’d rather see if Congress getting its act together and abolishing several US District courts, (as one of a great many examples) rendering Judge Boasberg unemployed without bothering to impeach him, and then instituting new federal courts with judges who are not dedicated to the abolition of the USA and its legacy. All this is according to the Constitution and actually happened to the US District in DC in 1863. You can look it up.
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I’ve had a leftist tell me his new system would be wonderfully wonderful for me — just think what I could do with that security to let me do things like start a company!
I ask what will keep people from simply not working in this system, and he answers that other people will be slow to respond to their requests.
I ask what will keep Cluster-B people from weaponizing that against people they want to hurt, and he answers that they will exile me and ensure that no one can find me — since I want it so much.
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That’s leftists for you. If they aren’t already Cluster B, their ideology and social circles will maximize whatever tendency towards it they might have. You *always* have license to punish anyone who hinders the utopian project.
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I find it interesting that Denmark, the nation most often lauded as exemplary by liberals and progressives, has both a monarch and a state religion. Yes, you may say, but Danes pay very little attention to either. Maybe the Danes were clever enough to keep those on the shelf until needed.
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Unless I misheard/misread, Denmark has an atrociously strict social requirement to “be nice”, that they very much pay attention to, and prosecute/persecute anyone who goes against it.
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I had not heard that there is actual prosecution for failure to be nice, but Muslim immigrants will eventually cure Danes of their terminal niceness.
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30myears ago the Danes had motorcycle gang wars. I wonder what happened with that.
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I didn’t know about that. I’m picturing the Mild Ones vs Heck’s Angels.
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The “Nordic Biker Wars” between the Hells Angels MC and several others (the Bandidos and some local clubs) were no damn joke, not at all. They did things like fire stolen military rockets into rival clubs’ clubhouses during meeting nights, and the body count was pretty high. It wasn’t just Denmark, either—Norway and Sweden were also involved.
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Thanks for the info.
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Yes. There was a big international stink over that, and the Feds ramped up operations against the “outlaw” clubs.
Hell’s Angels and the Bandidos hog most of the press, but they’re under such close scrutiny they maintain a very low profile. The Pagans, Mongols, and Vagos are the ones who are major DGAF sociopaths.
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Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, there is a caravan of “migrants” headed up from Honduras to the southern border. No doubt completely coincidentally arriving in time to provide election talking point fodder.
Also, all you fashion forward beings of various persuasions, be aware that leaving you nails natural is now a right-wing signal and using white paint in anything at all is a white supremacist move .
Adjust your style manuals accordingly.
I can hardly wait until it’s decided that tattoos on white chicks are white supremacy too. Because their showing off the fact that white skin makes the tattoos show up better or something.
At some point you’d think even the most shallow, vacant, twit, would see the psy-ops.
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I love to turn the accusations of White Supremacy around on people. “You’re fighting to push that so strongly, you must really believe white people are superior.” The looks on their faces and their reactions are priceless.
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“…turn the accusations of White Supremacy around on people.”
They hate that. ~:D
“So what you’re saying is that if I get my nails done all fancy I’m appropriating Black culture and that’s racist, but then if I leave them plain I’m signalling White supremacy and I’m a racist? Is that the thing now?”
I’m inclined to lean into that, know what I mean? If I’m a racist anyway, there’s no reason not to go full-retard.
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“Also, all you fashion forward beings of various persuasions, be aware that leaving you nails natural is now a right-wing signal and using white paint in anything at all is a white supremacist move.”
I saw those. I love the way the Internet throws those things up and turns the spotlight on them. So awesome. The nail thing is hilarious.
In that vein, you might not have heard that AI is the new slavery. https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2026/09/28/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-self-driving-overlords-287/
“We’re creating sophisticated, intelligent, maybe-conscious, maybe-suffering agents,” Carlsmith wrote. “The default plan is to treat them like property; to use their labor however we please; and to give them no rights, or pay, or meaningful alternatives.”
As fears of rogue AI grow amid a shocking spate of hacking incidents, Anthropic—from the Greek word anthropos, or “human”—has argued that mankind must remain in control of the technology and called for additional guardrails on AI development. But for many of the people designing those safeguards, mankind is not the only object of moral concern.
For once, waaaay down at the bottom of the article you can read if you click through, somebody says why they’re lying so perniciously:
“If they can convince policymakers that model welfare should matter, next thing you know model companies will be required to undertake extensive testing and auditing to make sure they comply with model welfare standards,” said Sarah Hirshfield, the founder of the startup Carly, an AI-powered personal assistant. “This would increase the fixed costs for the providers and give the incumbents an advantage.”
It’s a scam. Again.
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–
Duh
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I kinda hate seeing Trump seem to cave on a vast regulatory apparatus.
On the other hand, if it means that OpenAI staff go to jail for the next ‘accident’, or even one that is already clearly criminal and well documented…
Also, Pournelle’s Strategy of Technology, etc., but I think the AGI ideas (as opposed to the LLM services) are a scam. So I have doubts on utility for breaking the PRC.
Anthropic’s IPO is Oct. 23, so they are trying to shaft investers before the election, because they think Trump won’t upset the apple cart again before then.
Rogue AI is communists playing pretend.
If we had sure knowledge that communists playing pretend could extinguish humanity, we could just schedule some flights from the Bay Area over the Pacific.
Anthropic and OpenAI do not have that many employees, and while Google is huge, the EA problem actors there might be fewer. If you actually had certain future knowledge that these people would cause the extinction of humanity, it could actually be logical to just throw ten thousand of them, or a hundred thousand, into the ocean. (Bad assumptions and reason begat confident stupidity or confident evil.)
That you do not is basically why the people who believe AI safety is existential are too crazy to be relied on for those sorts of tasks.
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“I kinda hate seeing Trump seem to cave on a vast regulatory apparatus.”
Everything #TheDonald does is making a deal. You’ve got AI-Doomers, but then you’ve got China. He knows he can’t just say “tough sh1t” to the Doomers, because they’re dooming for a reason. There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake.
But he can’t go full #DemocRat and give them the regulatory capture that they want, because China will eat America’s lunch.
So he’ll bully, and bluster, and push them around until they settle on a deal where they get a little of what they want and China still loses.
I must say that watching him kick the Canadian elites in the b@lls the last few years has been delightful. They can’t understand that he’s not playing the game as it’s always been played since the War. He’s told them to shove it and they don’t know what to do. Pretty soon they’re going to be making a deal that they really hate, because they’ll be bankrupt otherwise.
I love that. Looks good on them.
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At our age we don’t run, we can’t, and that is a warning to all you little shits, sooner or later you will push us too far and we will just shoot you where you are. Let’s it hope it never gets to that point. Here is a little hint to all you young little shits out there, Obamacare the mess it is failed and now they are running on fixing the very problems they created. Everything the left does is the same, may they all rot in hell, not my place to judge them thank god. Go Musk, let’s get off this rock and find other rocks to live on.
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“At our age we don’t run…”
Yep. When you can’t run, the ‘duty to retreat’ gets a short circuit.
Cop: “Why didn’t you run away from the violent man, Citizen?”
Old Guy: “Can’t.” [shows cane and seeing-eye dog.]
I’m inclined to start with pepper spay and let things roll downhill from there on their own before reaching for the pewpew. Unfortunately this is Canada, and pepper spray is as illegal as pewpew…
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The Constitution doesn’t even talk about men. It uses the construction “person(s)” or “people.” Even the infamous 3/5 clause argues that it is 3/5 of the population of other persons. Which is the same construction used everywhere else.
For all the idiots who want to argue about how the Constitution excludes this or that group, they’re going to have to show me where. Because there isn’t anything exclusionary of people in it.
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Then it’s excluding unpersons and non-persons! 😛
I do think including corporations as ‘persons’ is a mistake. The folks making up the corporation already have their individual rights; organizing themselves into an economic entity should not entitle them to additional rights.
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This, tbh. There’s got to be a way to accomplish what corporations do economically without treating them as super-persons legally. I don’t even know enough to speculate about what it might be, but there are people who could, and I wish they would.
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“I do think including corporations as ‘persons’ is a mistake.” I agree. Congress should (but won’t) pass the necessary legislation to make that happen. Congress only exists to line the pockets of its members, AFAICT.
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No. I was talking about the declaration. Sorry for being imprecise.
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“Their worst illusion is that they can infinitely tweak humans and human societies to be exactly what they want them to be.”
Let me tell you a little story about that. >:D
I am SO old, I remember the Times Before, when the Ivory Tower wasn’t 100% Post Modernism. I even remember when E.O. Wilson was a revered Entomologist and not a greenie fruitbat.
TL/DR, I was in 3rd year Anthropology when his book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” became forbidden knowledge. He proposed that the social behavior of animals has a biological component. He supported his argument so well that the Left went to war against him. He had pies thrown in his face all over the USA, until he finally gave it up around 1980 and became a Green activist, thereby showing just how intelligent a man he really was. Able to see how things were going and pick a winning career out of the maelstrom.
Fast-forward to 2026, the entire Ivory Tower is a monoculture of post-modernism. TL/DR on that, everything in the world is a social construct, there is no Reality, men can become women by an act of speech alone, etc.
That this is self-refuting only makes them MORE strident. If you want to see a philosophy major loose his/her/their schlitz right in front of you, just wave your hand in the air and say “quod erat demonstrandum.” It’s the magic spell that disproves Foucault and Derrida.
Now, as to the reason they cling so fiercely to this obvious lie, I will point out that if humans are infinitely malleable and everything is a social construct, anyone who isn’t going along with the Program Of The Week is a wrecker who’s trying to destroy the Worker’s Paradise and deserves to die.
For example, if you deny the infinite variability of gender expression and refuse to allow the 250lb hairy man in the girl’s change room, you’re hurting his/her/xir’s feelings ON PURPOSE. Making you a bad person and they can beat you up now. So convenient.
I like to write stories about people like that being confronted by their own lies. It’s fun, and (so far) I haven’t gone to jail because when I punch them in the face it’s only rhetorical.
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I’m going to disagree slightly. Their worst illusion is they have the right and the obligation to infinitely tweak humans and human societies.
The delusion that they can do that and get exact outcomes they desire is a bad one, but it is only horrific if acted on.
It takes a special kind of person to think they have the right and obligation to act on anything that affects others much less the whole of society.
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“Though so far the turn to the right of Europe is the kind that seems to be more “American Right” than the traditional European jackboots left that respects national leanings and history.”
Because the future comes from America, as you have so often said.
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A lot of the support “socialism” is getting from young people might be because many of them are trapped with un-payable debt for college loans (which, unlike almost all other debts, are not dischargeable in bankruptcy) and find themselves priced out of the housing market and crowded out of the job market. One reason extremists get traction is because they often start out promising to deal with real problems.
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Real problems caused by socialism which they promise to fix with MOAR socialism. Youngsters are being priced out of housing and crowded out of jobs by the hordes of foreign ‘refugees’ let in by the socialists, along with burdensome government regulations imposed by those same socialists. It’s like setting your house on fire and then promising to put it out.
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That correction would work, if anyone was actually trying to fix the problems.
Such as the most basic of low hanging fruit, making education debts dischargeable in bankruptcy.
This is literally a constitutional thing.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8/clause-4/overview-of-the-bankruptcy-clause
That they are not dischargeable is an unforced error.
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Making student loans un-dischargeable in bankruptcy was a reaction to some cases where people (often from wealthy families) would take out huge loans, use them to go through med school or law school, graduate, and declare bankruptcy immediately afterward. This freed them up to start their careers debt-free, but it was seen as a way of cheating the system.
Colleges have become insanely expensive largely because of the student loan system. Even allowing for inflation, what I paid to go to St. Olaf College (a very pricey private college) probably wouldn’t cover tuition and expenses at a modern public university. The whole thing should never have been started.
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That is the claim, yes, a lawyer friend says that it might be yet another example of “The story was not as it was reported.”
We ALL know people who use bankruptcy as an economic policy– usually via “wow, I didn’t know that, but I’m not surprised” because that habit hangs out elsewhere, too.
The societal cost of blocking the bankruptcy is simply too much higher than the risk of “someone will abuse it.”
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And if they are abusing it, you set it up so that bankruptcy comes with an auditing proccess and standards defined in advance as to what constitutes abuse.
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Yes, this would be a much better option.
Currently, in theory, you can get rid of school debt- but the assumption is against it so strongly that they functionally cannot be discharged.
Which our Founders recognized as a very, very bad thing.
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More accurate: It’s like setting your house on fire and then promising to put it out with a flamethrower. ☹️
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Look up “Urtabulak fire 1966.”
Urtabulak was a natural gas field in Uzbekistan. It caught fire, like Centralia, Pennsylvania.
So, there’s this ginormous underground natural gas fire, and there’s enough air coming in through natural fissures for it to keep going. How do you put it out?
The Soviets slid a 30-kt atomic bomb – twice as powerful as the one we used at Hiroshima – down an inclined borehole and set it off.
Believe it or not, it worked. A couple of years later they used a 47-kt atomic bomb to put out a gas fire in Pamuk.
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yes, but also because they were told anything common is socialism. Like roads. And schools.
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I have a super fussy way of thinking that primary and secondary schools are often bad.
The federal highway system was and is militarism.
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Having suffered through “public school” in several states, I thin that’s the intent of the “educational” system. Learn to repeat what’s in the books, and never, ever ask a question unless you’re given specific “discussion questions” to ask.
I got an “F” in English class for arguing that Macbeth was just an opportunist who went for the brass ring when he had the chance. The official school version was that he was weak-willed and his wife put him up to it. That’s not how it was in the (possibly bowdlerized) version we had to suffer through. Its possible it was there and I didn’t recognize it; a translation guide for words and phrases in Shakespearean English would have been a big help, so a lot of guessing was involved in particularly opaque sections of the text.
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No, you were right. He did snatch at an opportunity. His wife encouraged him, just as the witches did; but he got more enthusiastic about killing people and taking over as he rose. By the end he is totally into it.
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I’m a practicing athiest… but some years ago an interlocutor came up with an argument I couldn’t refute.
“The universe is infinite, right?”
“That’s the current thinking, yes.”
“The the probability that God exists is 1.0.”
Hmm. [stomps feet in frustration] There has to be a hole in that reasoning. somewhere.
— TRX (bitter clinger)
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“True, in a truly infinite universe, anything that can exist must exist.”
“Yes! God exists!”
“Only if your god is possible according to the principles of physics and cosmology. If the existence of your god is not possible in this universe, infinity doesn’t help you.”
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The funny (dark humor) thing of the current white power movement is ‘white’ seems to be at least partly defined by everything the green eyed envys hate. The left already invented ‘white hispanic’ when the victim’s ethnicity was inconvenient for them. Is it such a far leap for there to end up being black white guys?
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You mean white guys like Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams?
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