Author: Kevin

A Golden Oldie

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Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™.  It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she’d orally service Bill Clinton “just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”  Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago – aka “Mordor on the Lake,” and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School.  She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek.  And, of course, she’s not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and “substantial damages” paid to the person she slandered – Melania Trump.  That was her second retraction.  In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn’t support her allegations that “Russian bots” were responsible for Sen. Al Franken’s downfall.

So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York.  Must be nice.

Let me give you a taste of that older post:

Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:

“I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?”

Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: “My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?”

I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.

Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.

Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:

If you’ve got a few minutes, go read it.  See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me.  This is the Left today.  Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.

Nasim Nicholas Taleb

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I first heard about this man on a Joe Rogan podcast where a guest mentioned him in relation to this quote:

With my family, I am a Communist.  With my friends, I am a Socialist.  With my community, I am a Democrat.  With my State, I am a Republican.  With the Federal government, I am a Libertarian.

That got my attention.

Talib is the author of the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Looking into him a little deeper brought me these quotes:

Only the autodidacts are free.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

I think I need to read his book.

I Can Find Nothing to Disagree With in This Piece

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I am a pessimist by nature, shocking admission, I know.  But being a pessimist I am very seldom disappointed, and occasionally pleasantly surprised.

I do not expect to be pleasantly surprised by the fallout from this:

Forget About Seeing Any Justice For Obamagate

Excerpt:

Allow me to disabuse you of your naïve delusion that we still live in a country with a justice system and break it to you that no one is going to jail for what was done to Flynn, or for the unmasking business, or for the Russia hoax or, for that matter, for any of the corrupt Dem/foreigner collaborations exemplified by the payoffs received by stripperphile and Bolivian folk medicine enthusiast Hoover Biden.

No one.

To quote David Burge, aka Iowahawk: “We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on ‘Hoarders’ live in houses of cat food boxes.”

Quote of the Day – Matt Ridley Edition

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From his recent Uncommon Knowledge interview on his new book How Innovation Works:

The late Hans Rosling, who is one of the so-called Godfathers of rational optimism…he did a poll of a thousand people in the U.S. and they need to repeat it in the UK and a number of countries, and he said: “In the last 20 years, has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty halved, doubled, or stayed the same?  Which of those do you think is correct?”  In the US about 65% of people think it’s doubled and about 5% think it’s halved.  The 5% are right and the 65% are wrong.

That’s striking enough, but then he says- “Hang on.  If I wrote those three answers on three bananas and threw them to a chimpanzee, the chimp would pick up the right answer 33% of the time.  It would do six times as well as human beings at answering a question about human society.  That’s the measure of how much we’ve indoctrinated ourselves into global pessimism.

ABCNNBCBS and all the rest of media, news and entertainment, are to blame for this.  Good news doesn’t sell.

Meanwhile, at My OTHER Site

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I joined Quora back in 2013.  In late July of 2019 I opened a personal “Space” there, which I cleverly titled “The Smallest Minority.”

I noticed this today:

This blog has at present slightly less than 2,000 subscribers.  I’m pretty happy with the alternate.  Yaaay me!

I Missed My Blogiversary!!

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May 14, 2003 I put up my first post here at TSM.  That means this blog is now (carry the one…) seventeen years old.

In seventeen years I’ve hit “Publish” on 7116 posts, including this one.  I’ve lost my mother, lost my liver (but the new one is working quite well), gained a kidney (I now have three, but two are decoys), and I had a great-grandson for about 10 weeks.

We’ve had three Presidents in that time period, and been at continuous war with a noun the entire time.  Now we’re in the middle of an international overreaction to a pandemic.

It’s been a helluva ride so far.  Judging from what I’ve been seeing, Bette Davis’s admonition is even more valid today:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKHUGvde7KU]

When and How Did I Turn Right Wing?

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Another Quora question.  Lots of post inspiration over there.  Here’s my answer:

I’m 58 years old. That means that in 1974 I was 12. I vividly remember Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation. I also remember Jimmy Carter’s “American Malaise” period. I think Jimmy Carter is a nice man who was a lousy President. I turned 18 in 1980. I cast my first vote for President for Ronald Reagan. I watched as he, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II rapidly accelerated the downfall of the Soviet Union. It was literally inspiring.

Then George H.W. Bush won the office. He was not Ronald Reagan. He was Establishment Northeastern Country Club Republican. When he ran for reelection I voted for Perot in that one. Perot tried to warn us, and he was right.

Bill Clinton became President. Honestly, Bill (except for being a rapist) wasn’t that bad as President, but his wife gave me the heebie-jeebies. Dead people, cattle futures, sexual abuse, etc. etc. etc. and everything rolled off the pair of them like they were Scotchguarded.

It was about this time that I figured out that the Democrats were no longer “The Loyal Opposition,” they were The Other Side™ and they were out to WIN, no holds barred. And they cared not a whit about what the law said, they just had to find an accommodating judge. The Constitution? P’shaw, merely an outdated guidline. Appoint enough Judges to the Federal courts and especially the Supreme Court and you can make the law mean whatever you want. “Social Justice,” you see. Which is the opposite of actual justice.

Then Bush v. Gore cemented that for me. I watched the press conference where, as I noted at the time:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we’re stupid. Not “amiable uncle Joe” stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid.

Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid.

And they don’t think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount – that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be “properly” counted in Mr. Gore’s favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They’re right. We are.

And I started seriously wondering how we got to that point.

I could go into vast (and hyperlinked) detail here, but I’ll instead just use one word:

Progressivism.

I’m not really a Conservative. Steven Den Beste (PBUH) said it best, and I’m in complete agreement with him. So I invite you to read his explanation. But I’m not a Progressive.

Quote of the Day – Robert Heinlein Edition (reprise)

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There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory. – Robert A. Heinlein

Quote of the Day – Robert A. Heinlein Edition

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[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously – after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. – Robert A. Heinlein

We’ve been seeing a lot of this attitude lately, mostly from entertainers.

The Narrative™

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I was recently asked to answer the question: “What do you think of John Solomon? Is he the evil mastermind of the right wing narrative?” My answer in the link basically asked IS there a Right Wing Narrative?

There is definitely a Left-wing narrative. In fact, there are several. Author and former newspaper columnist Stephen Hunter wrote about The Narrative™ in one of his novels:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
—
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
—
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….

I, Sniper, pp. 231-232

Remember the JournoList? If you think it’s gone, or something similar does not now exist, I’d like to know what you’re vaping.

And if you’d like an example of The Narrative™ please watch this:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUTF6MIBs-4]