Bill Murray Hits the #MeToo Hurricane

I have a bit of a soft spot for actor Bill Murray, because of his standout role in Groundhog Day. But I also understand that he can also be pretty unpleasant around other humans.

Well, now production has been suspended on the movie "'Being Mortal' after a complaint was made blasting the actor and 'Saturday Night Live' alumn Bill Murray, 71, of displaying 'inappropriate behavior' toward females on set."

Murray “was very hands-on touchy, not in any personal areas, but put an arm around a woman, touched her hair, pulled her ponytail — but always in a comedic way.

And "some women felt uncomfortable and he crossed a line."

This is why, back in the old days, men and women were kept apart. Because the whole point of being a man is that you have the courage to cross lines.

And I understand how the "women felt uncomfortable." Women expect to be complimented and asked out on dates. But women don't like to be complimented by men they don't want to ask them out on dates.

If women were men, they would activate the male Culture of Insult in such cases and tell the offender to take his creepy remarks and hands and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

But women don't have a Culture of Insult. They usually don't confront men -- or women -- directly. Instead they complain to to friend -- in the expectation of being soothed, according Greatest Author of All Time, George Eliot. Women have a Culture of Complaint.

So, actually, I feel for the women on the set of "Being Mortal." What do you do when a national icon like Bill Murray hugs you and pulls your hair? Even apart from being a woman, are you going to risk your job by publicly talking back to Bill Murray and embarrassing him in public? You think he won't retaliate? 

So the #MeToo movement is an all-girl Culture of Complaint and you can see this in the Bill Murray bust-up. A "complaint" was made. And "women felt uncomfortable" on set. In other words, nobody confronted anyone. Woman A complained to Woman B and a consensus was built up among the women on set and then someone complained to the director or producer or whoever is the guy you complain to.

I think this situation is the basic problem with the modern Public Square. In my view, the public square was created by men for men, as Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago.  And I say that the public square is a Culture of Insult, and it is a domesticated version of the duel. In which My Man Alexander Hamilton died at the hands of the despicable Martin Van Buren.

I first started addressing this issue with respect women in the public square back in 2014.

And by the way, if "I am woman hear me roar" then it must mean that women have to develop the courage to confront male bullies in the public square.

Because if women want to replace the public square with the #MeToo culture -- which assumes woman as a helpless victim of male oppression -- then there is no public square. Cue "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

Prediction: I expect that men will create a new public square separate from the current woke-dominated public square, because men want to be men and duke it out with other men for dominance in the eternal male dominance hierarchy.

And that's another thing. Men sort themselves into a dominance hierarchy. Lobsters. You could look it up. But females all think they are as good as any other woman. Oh sure, they have Mean Girls and Cruel Stepmothers and all the wicked witches of folk tales and myths. But at heart, every women thinks she is just as good as the next woman. Guess why there are so many princesses in fairy tales.

Personally, I believe that the "just as good as any other woman" culture cannot work in the public square. The point about hierarchy is that it saves time and it saves lives because it reduces conflict. In a group without hierarchy you have to renegotiate the hierarchy every day. And that takes a lot of time.

As for Bill Murray, I expect he behaves like a louse because he has always got away with it. They say that in Groundhog Day he was absolutely impossible. No doubt. But the movie turned out to be a classic. 

California: Where the Logic of Over-Under Bites

Although I critique the over-under political formula of our educated ruling class as a bad thing, I also understand that it traps our liberal friends.

To do a bit of logic on you...

If you agree with the notion that "there is no politics without an enemy" it means that anyone in politics is necessarily battling with an enemy. In politics you strive to win the control of government, the apparatus of force, and the reason you do that is to be able to take the fight to the enemy.

In the old days of the feudal system, society was simply hierarchical. The warriors were the political leaders and the lower classes knew their place. The middling sorts were yeomen and small landholders or leaseholders. The lower orders were serfs and slaves. And political life was all about the enemies of the feudal lords.

But ever since Marx at the latest, the West has operated on a more combative political system, what I call an over-under political formula. Under this system the rulers pose as the saviors of the lower class against the oppression of the oppressor class. This oppressor class has variously been the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the patriarchs, the racists, and now "white oppressors."

The fly in the ointment is, of course, that these "oppressors" are not an overbearing political elite armed with all the powers of government, but ordinary private individuals, for the most part unorganized, just going about their ordinary lives.

So what happens after the over-under political formula has been in operation for a generation, or getting on for a century and more?

The answer, of course, is California, which is visibly hollowing out. The upper class of tech lords and Hollywood and government bureaucracy is doing very nicely thank you. The lower class is pacified with all kinds of benefits and privileges and exemptions from the law.

And the middle class is getting screwed to the wall. The American Spectator's Dov Fischer puts things fairly well.

It is not just Steven Greenhut writing one of his excellent columns about California nor a Tucker Carlson special about Los Angeles committing suicide. Rather, this is intense and hits everyone really close to home: people really are leaving California. And, yes, I will turn off the lights.

 Because, of course, the middle class can't change anything in California. The educated class is all in on green energy and systemic racism. The lower class is getting its bennies. And the middle class is stuck in the middle with eroding schools, sky-high energy, and sky-high housing prices.

So whaddya do? All you can do in alifornais up sticks and leave.

Incidentally, when I knew some Californians back in the 1970s and 1980s I could see all this developing. But I could also see that the people I knew just accepted this as the way things are. Of course we needed to preserve hill-slopes from development.Of course water was a problem and we needed to conserve it. Of course the coastline was fragile and we needed to protect it. And so on.

Sorry folks. What you get in California -- and anywhere else where you let the educated class off the leash -- is the agenda of the educated class and the rest of the world go hang. Because our educated class only knows what gets boiled up from the deep by the thousands of activist groups. And if things don't work out the solution is more activism. And you are a racist.

In California all you can do if the educated class oppresses you is to leave. In the rest of the US we are going to have to stop them. Because there's nowhere for us to go to.

Twitter and the Public Square

Conservative social-media stars are shocked, shocked that their Twitter follower counts are suddenly increasing in the days after Elon Musk bought the store.

Donald Trump Jr. led the way in questioning the giant spike, which saw him gain 87,296 new followers by Tuesday — and another 119,022 by Wednesday morning, after weeks of averaging roughly 7,000 per day.

And FoxNews chappie Tucker Carlson is all-of-a-sudden not "banned" any more. And he gained 141,000 followers all-of-a-sudden.

I know some people are suspecting a deep dark conspiracy. But I just think that the content moderators at Twitter are just ordinary corporate drones. If the boss -- like Vijaya Gadde -- says cancel conservatives, then they will do her bidding.

But if the boss bursts into tears. Well, that's a signal. For something. Only, being a man, I don't understand "women's tears."

According to POLITICO, Gadde got teary-eyed on Monday when discussing Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. 

Know what, Vijaya honey. You need to realize that Musk buying Twitter is not quite the same as the death of a beloved pet.

It gets worse.

Twitter employees have reportedly struggled with the news that the company is on the verge of being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk with some of them too "shocked" to speak over the billionaire’s plans to promote freedom of speech.

Oh, I wouldn't worry, Twitterers. I'm sure you'll get used to the new rules. Just as you were quite happy shadow-banning and suspending and banning conservative users in the past, I'm sure that you will get the same frisson from banning the odd AntiFa mostly peaceful protester when they really get off the reservation and doxx Andy Ngô for the 45th time..

But I think that we conservatives need to turn over a new leaf when it comes to sneering at the "literally knows nothing" tweets of our liberal friends. I suggest that we never go sharper than the ancient put-down used by Southern women:

Bless her heart.

Although, of course, next time the world turns, I dare say that "bless" will be considered religious bigotry; "her" will be consider cis-het hate speech; and "heart" will be considered... well, I know not what it will be, but it will be something hateful. 

Ari Melber Literally Knows Nothing

No doubt you've all seen the remarks of MSNBC chappie Ari Melber on Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.

There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years

pic.twitter.com/bskfBHQGON

— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) April 26, 2022

Yes, the video is OK, but I'm a text sort of guy. So here is the transcript of Ari Melber's remarks:

You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don't have to explain yourself. You don't even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party's candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees. Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else. The rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election. Elon Musk says this is all to help people because he is just a free speech, philosophically clear, open-minded helper.

I suppose the important thing to understand is just how easily people persuade themselves that they are the good guys, and that people that disagree with them are the bad guys. That's what all the babble about "hate speech" and "disinformation" and "misinformation" is about. It gives educated people permission to censor the other guys. Because they are peddling conspiracy theories. Because they are racists. Because they hate Muslims. Because they are conspiring with the Russians. 

So, in their own best interests...

But, like I always say. If your ideas are the best, if everyone else is peddling disinformation, then what's to worry about? Their false ideas will fail, and your glorious ideas will win.

Problem is, of course, that none of us are patient enough to let the market or the science decide. We all want to give The Truth a little nudge. And if that means a little bit of censoring, or even de-platfforming, or mostly peaceful protesting, well... But those guys over there are Bad People! Can't you see that?

And when the wrong people are getting elected, and the wrong people are getting on the Supreme Court, and the wrong people are teaching our kids, and totally clueless yahoos  like AOC (or Marjorie Taylor Greene) are getting elected to Congress in the other party...

Well, clearly all good people will agree that we have to Do Something to avoid a complete takeover by the "far-right." Or the "far-left," as the case may be. Just ask Ari Melber.

Populism: France vs. US

 So, in France the populist-nationalist candidate Le Pen goes down 59-41, while in the US Donald Trump in 2020 went down 52-48. (Yes, I know. And Biden got 81 million votes. Really.) What gives?

I'm reading a piece from Richard Hanania, where he's podcasting with a Frenchie, and the Frenchie says that the difference is that Le Pen is radioactive. If you talk to an anti-immigrant Frenchwoman and tell that, presumably she's voting for Le Pen, she replies:

Me? Voting for Le Pen? I will never do that. I’m not an extremist, only fascists vote for Le Pen. This is somebody who just explained to you that if she had her way, she’d send back all the immigrants and their descendants, if it doesn’t work we’ll have to kill some.

It makes you realize the practical usefulness of the whole racist-sexist-homophobe thing. Oh no! I would never vote for an extremist!

Whereas in France Macron is just the status quo. You may not like him, but you don't fear him.

Hanania's Frenchie pollster also says that older people are afraid of Le Pen because they fear that her policies -- such as leaving the EU -- will cause inflation and hurt their pensions and retirement income.

Whereas here in the good old US and A, I'd say that the Democrats are the party of inflation, and also the party of woke extremists.

Or at least, you could cause the voters to be really confused about whether white nationalist J6 armed insurrectionists are really an order of magnitude worse that BLM and AntiFa protesters burning down commercial districts.

I suppose that's the point of the J6 committee: making the right radioactive. OK. It's not rocket science. For any politics there must be an enemy. So, who's going to be the enemy? That is the only question.

Hey! I know! Let's make pointy-headed wokey intellectuals with nice comfortable gubmint jobs and pensions into the enemy! Why didn't anyone think of that before?

You can see the genius of a chap like Gov. DeSantis in making the blue-hairs at Dis-e-ney into the extremists. It's the way to get to the moms. They'll believe anything they see on TV, except when it comes to their kids.

Really, the job of the populist nationalists is simple. Just make sure that the voters get the idea that the populist nationalists are the safe choice and the wokey, bird-chomping, LGBT activists are the extremists.

How hard could it be?

Russia: Is it all Dugin's Fault?

The chap who is really Putin's brain, according to Tim Black on Spiked, is Alexander Dugin. He's the guy that's inspiring Putin to go back to the future with Traditionalism and Orthodoxy.

[In his] Foundation of Geopolitics in 1997... he argued that the geopolitical forces shaping the world derived from a foundational conflict between... four civilisational zones: the American zone, the Afro-European zone, the Asian-Pacific zone, and the Eurasian zone. It was ethnic Russians’ destiny – ‘as the bearers of a unique civilisation’, as Dugin put it – to play the leading role in bringing together and constituting Eurasia as a regional hegemon in the coming ‘multipolar world’.

Calling on Heidegger he proposes that Russians inhabit a particular Russian form of Dasein, being-in-the-world: "spiritual rather than rational, collectivist rather than individualist, strictly hierarchical rather than democratic," Otherwise we are all stuck with liberalism.

Honestly, I don't think that is going to work. I'd say Russia made sense back in the day when it was part of the grassy steppe providing grass for the horses of warrior Huns and Mongols. I'd say Russia made sense as a feudal land in the agricultural era, back in the day. I'd say that Russia and Ukraine today make sense for about five people growing the grain to feed the Middle East.Otherwise it makes sense as a park in which to hunt mastodons and other extinct megafauna reconstituted from fossilized DNA. Jolly good fun too.

That is why Russia of late has been hag-ridden by ideologists trying to come up with a good narrative. It just doesn't make sense as a geopolitical power center.

Mind you, I don't make any excuses for our own narrative ideologists, still making like it's World War II and that but for glorious NATO the whole world would collapse into murderous nationalisms. Or a Holocaust of transgenders. Or something. Maybe murderous racisms.

Now, I'm all in favor of a Multi-Oceanic Piracy Patrol, MOPP, that would be charged with chasing pirates away from good honest tankers and container ships and marooning the Captain Flints and Mate Billy Boneses and Quartermaster Long John Silvers on out-of-the-way islands without benefit of womankind. Maybe we could get Elon Musk to set up a rocket system to project anti-piracy patrols anywhere in the world in one hour. And we might even protect billionaires' mega-yachts as part of the deal.

Other than that, I'd say, the Russian ruling class is no different than our ruling class. It's obsessed with the need for a vitally important ruling class, right here in River City. Only we don't need no stinkin' ruling class. Did you read about the vigilantes in South Africa that set up a vigilante system in 24 hours to take care of an outburst of looting. All I can say that if South Africans can do it in 24 hour, we red-blooded Americans can do it in 12 hours.

Yeah, go ahead and defund the police, liberals. We deplorables can handle it.

The Why of Biden's La La Land

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, it is hard to get your brain around the policy bonfire that we call the Biden administration. Victor Davis Hanson calls it La La Land.

Open the borders. More mask mandates. Redo the 1970s inflation. Stop oil and gas production. Cancel pipelines. Asks Hanson:

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

Maybe, he writes,

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people.

I don't think that's the reason. I just think that Biden does unlimited immigration, COVID craziness, green energy, defund the police, unlimited bail, because for every one of these issues there are half-a-dozen activist groups creating an issue that you don't want to oppose. Not if you are a Democrat.

I just saw a piece today reporting that Charlie Crist in Florida wouldn't say nuttin' about teachers grooming kids. Because no Democrat can go against the LGBT agenda.

You would think that the Biden administration would have the chops to navigate a middle road between the world of left-wing activist groups and the ordinary middle class. And I think that, if 2020 had been an ordinary campaign year, then the candidate that would have emerged as Democratic nominee would have squared the circle between the crazies and the moderates. 

But because Democrats came together in a smoke-filled room to give the nomination to Biden rather than to a surging Bernie Sanders they had to agree to go with the full menu of crazy leftiness as the price of Sanders going along with Da Fix Is In.

Anyway, it is clear to me that Biden doesn't have the chops, or the authority, or the charisma to push back against the far-left agenda, from immigration to green energy to LGBT to wild-and-crazy handouts.

I think that in a way this is all providential. Maybe it's a good thing that the Dems, with an ageing president and a 50-50 Congress, are pushing wild-and-crazy extreme lefty La La issues. Because the utter failure of all these issues, all at once, is what it takes for ordinary people to get the message and go to the voting booth and say Go Away.

It takes mob scenes at the border to discredit the immigration activist groups.

It takes soaring gasoline prices to discredit the green energy scam.

It takes soaring grocery prices to force the Fed to stop printing money.

It takes Libs of Tik Tok videos of crazy lefty teachers boasting of teaching LGBT to pre-pubescent school-kids to prompt legislators and moms to cry Stop.

Otherwise the public square and the narrative is completely sucked up by the liberal activist groups and their well-connected activists and their inside track in the media and their defacto control of social media.

The Disaster of Eddication

My Girl Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) who, you will be delighted to know is

Congressmember for WA-07 and lifelong organizer for immigrant, civil, and human rights. Progressive Caucus Chair. Bold, unafraid, and a proud mom. She/her.

recently sent out the following tweet: 

Student debt cancellation is racial justice.

Student debt cancellation is gender justice.

Student debt cancellation is economic justice.

— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) April 16, 2022

Isn't she special!

I suppose that in progressive LaLa-Land, this pathetic effusion is considered part of the Fight for Justice. Naturally, I have already sent her -- my congress-critter -- a slashing email, reminding her aides and staffers that they -- as Ben Rhodes well said -- "literally know nothing."

But let us work backward from the student debt cancellation demand. As in,

• Why should college be so expensive that students need to borrow money? Can you spell Injustice?
• Why does the government encourage students to borrow money against their education -- that connot be discharged in bankruptcy -- when borrowing has traditionally been collateralized, and a student, with no work experience, has no collateral? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are students getting from a college degree that they couldn't get with an internship or an apprenticeship? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are most youngsters getting from high school? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is so vital about elementary school that the educators have time for LGBT grooming? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is the whole point of our education system, besides keeping youngsters from competing in the labor market with adult workers? Can you spell Injustice?

It happens that I've been reading -- accidentally -- a lot about how education used to be in the olden time.

First of all, the education of David Copperfield. First they sent him to a school owned by a Mr. Creakle, a failed hop-dealer. Then he was sent to work in a warehouse by the River Thames in London, Then he got to go to Mr. Strong's school in Canterbury. Then he was apprenticed to a lawyer at Doctor's Commons. Presumably this education has some echoes of writer Charles Dickens' own experience.

Then the education of Tom Tulliver in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Tom is the son of the miller Mr Tulliver, and Tulliver thinks it would be a grand thing for his son to get a real education. So he talks to a business friend, who recommends sending him to board with a curate in the country. Where he unwillingly learns Latin and Geometry.

Then the education of Benjamin Franklin. His dad sent him to grammar school (where you learn the Latin that you need for Harvard). Then changed his mind and sent him to an ordinary school for a couple of years to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Then he apprenticed him to Ben's brother the printer for nine years. Then Benjy escaped to Philadelphia and worked for various printers before setting himself up as a printer.

Do you mind if I suggest that the brilliance of Dickens, of George Eliot, of Benjamin Franklin had nothing to do with their education?

And I wonder what education means in the lives of everyone else?

Really, what are we trying to do with schools and education? Bueller? Anyone?

Why exactly do we make such a big deal over a college education? Bueller? Anyone?

Suppose we say that the most important thing in education is to bring up the children of the poor. So why are the schools that the poor attend almost always the worst?

Why do teachers have almost lifetime employment? Shouldn't the people teaching our children be evaluated every ten minutes and fired if they don't measure up?

Why do we have government running education when government is all about fighting the enemy? What enemy?

Let us return to the empty slogans put out by the "bold, unafraid" Pramila Jayapal.

I get the vital importance of trolling indebted Twentysomethings by handing out Get Out Of Debtors Jail Free cards. But just where is your Five Point program to reform the disaster of our education system, noble Congressmember?

Starting with the question: why in the world do we prompt college students to get into debt?

Chasing "The Latest Thing"

The Zman notes today that the COVID Thing is over, what with the Trump judge invalidating it and the TSA immediately removing the mask mandate from the air travel system. "The CDC appears to have conceded the point and will not appeal."

[T]hese mass hoaxes that have become a feature of life. People wake up and see that everyone is now into the latest thing. Maybe that thing is outrage over a police shooting or maybe it is some new abstract concern. All of the right people are on their soapboxes and all of the best people are following along with them. It is only normal for people to want to do the right thing and support the latest thing.

So what's going to the the next "Latest Thing?" Obviously Ukraine. When will it all end?

When the current thing is real suffering, people will remember all the previous things were lies.

You mean like ditching fossil fuels and tossing gas prices into the stratosphere?

But I think we need to understand and accept the notion of The Latest Thing. I'd say it is a fundamental part of humans as social animals. As in flocks of birds. And herds of antelope.

Some Canada goose starts squawking and moments later launches itself into the air. And most of the other Canada geese in the area stop grazing on grass and launch themselves into the air as well. Or don't.

Why do so many of the nice liberal ladies in North Seattle decide to buy an electric car? Because they believe in the "Climate Change Thing." Do they know a thing about Science™? Or climate? Or variations in the Earth's orbit? Or the various theories in respect of Ice Ages? Not a thing.

And yet all over the western world educated women all feel good about their commitment to fighting climate change by appropriate shopping and voting. And when you talk to them, there is not a shred of doubt or skepticism about climate: merely a cheerful confidence. They accept the Latest Thing and feel good about accepting it.

In men, I think, the relevant instinct is the rush to join the colors when an enemy has been declared. That's what a lot of young men felt after 9/11. And the old geezers like me felt good about the CIA riding horses on the steppe in Afghanistan and the army invading Iraq and teaching Saddam Hussein a lesson. At the time.

And I dare say that, for the ordinary middle class American Donald Trump's 2016 Make America Great Again campaign was The Latest Thing.

There's only one thing to do about The Latest Thing. Make sure that your Latest Thing is better than their Latest Thing. Because if you don't fill the Thing hole with your Latest Thing someone else will fill the need. And chances are that their Latest Thing is not as good a your Latest Thing.

After the Foreign Policy Catastrophe, What Then?

Our problem, writes the Zman, is that the politicians have handed over foreign policy to a permanent cabal.

The political class in the West has handed foreign policy and war making over to a professional class that operates independently from the political class.

And so, no matter who is president or controls Congress, the professional foreign policy elite keeps on keeping on.

It is this narrow group that has been running Ukraine policy since the Obama administration, and they are the people responsible for the current war.

OK, fellahs, so what is the point? What is the grand plan behind your two-decade Ukraine policy? What is the point of being anti-Russia? What is the point of all the little wars all over the place?

Zman doesn't say, but I have an idea. The foreign policy elite really doesn't know. It's just that they all sign on to the agenda, whatever it is, in order to join the club and get ahead.

Maybe we could use the Nazi Carl Schmitt notion that in any politics there must be an enemy.

So, for any foreign policy elite, there must be an enemy. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a foreign policy elite.

We could say that back in 1948 and the Berlin Airlift there was a real enemy, the state of Stalin's Soviet Union. And so we had 40 years of Cold War. Jolly good fun, and all, for the foreign policy elite. Sorry about the kids killed in Vietnam and in Iraq, and all.

But after the end of the Cold War, what are we trying to do? Well, we are fighting extremist nationalism, or an expansionist China, or a revanchist Russia, or mad mullahs, or Islamic terrorists. 

In other words, we are making it up. Oh, sorry, not we. I mean the international foreign policy elite.

But really, they don't have a clue.

Don't be discouraged. The Zman sees a silver lining to the black cloud. He thinks that the Ukraine thing will end in a bloody catastrophe. And for what?

This may be what saves the West from another catastrophe. The looming disaster in Ukraine cannot be covered up with clever messaging or media censorship.

And the disaster will delegitimize the foreign policy elite,and the global elite, and the Democratic party elite. And then we can sit down and do a reset and decide just what the heck we are trying to achieve with our politics. Other than give jobs to foreign policy experts that have got everything wrong for the last 30 years.

So What if College Women are D+38

I expect you've seen the poll that shows College+ women as D+38. They are the most Democratic among men and women, educated and uneducated. Scott McKay has a long article about it at The American Spectator. He goes into the travails of the educated woman, particularly the single educated woman.

Why are educated women so strongly Democrat? It seems weird. But not if you believe my maxim that "women expect to be protected."

If a woman is protected, she is happy. If she is not protected then she's going to find a new protector today.

The reason that educated women -- and especially single educated women -- working on their careers and living in urban condos are all Democrat is that women expect to be protected. If there isn't a husband to protect her then she expects the state to protect her.

Only, of course, the state doesn't protect you. The state will shovel loot at you, in return for your vote, but it won't protect you. The subhead for the American Spectator piece is:

Why are they surprised that they’re living alone with no prospects when they still think it was a good idea to vote for Biden?

Well, because women do what they are told, and expect to be protected in return. For getting on for a century, the feminist movement has taught women not to rely on men for protection but to get an education and a career. When they find they are not protected, and find they are not happy, they get angry, and they start to complain. Did I mention my idea that women have a Culture of Complaint?

It slots in with my maxim that "women expect to be protected." What does a woman do when she finds she is not protected? She complains to her friend. She votes Democrat. Eventually, she finds a new protector.

And that is what is going to happen in the next year or two as women are terrorized by the Biden inflation. They will find themselves utterly unprotected. They will complain to each other. They will complain to their Democratic politicians. Then they will abandon the Democratic Party and go find a new protector.

As the sainted Rush Limbaugh used to say: "Don't doubt me on this." 

Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

I think that there are three basic issues on which the ruling class of our time has utterly failed.

The first is the welfare state that supports the working class. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for the working class. I believe that what we should have done was encourage the mutual-aid aspect of labor unions, set up a legal framework to encourage workers to save for retirement and against sickness and unemployment, and keep government and its heavy hand out of the market economy.

The second is the promotion of feminism and the sexual revolution and abortion. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for women. I believe that the idea that the highest and best thing for women is to have careers is an utter misunderstanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for humans in general and women in particular. We humans are social animals, not economic animals. We only work in the market economy to bring home the bacon. Men have careers so they can acquire high-status women for marriage. The sexual revolution goes against the instinct in almost all women, that sex is something you gladly and freely give to the man you love -- forever. And, of course, sex means children. A society needs abortion only when its women are expected to give themselves to men who can summarily dismiss them after they have won their love, or when women are expected to schedule children to suit the demands of their careers.

The third is the utter injustice of the post civil rights era. I believe that the resort to quotas and affirmative action and diversity and "underrepresentation" and equity in race relations is more than a strategic mistake, it is a vile injustice that has divided society and Made Things Worse for blacks and whites, but great for the administrative class. The point about law is that it is a replacement for the culture of revenge. You gotta problem, you appeal to the legal system for redress, not to your kindred or your race or your class. The whole point of law is that unless you treat everyone as an individual you enter an impossible thicket of special pleading  that will fail to resolve anything. That is the point of saying, in law, that government and businesses may not discriminate on the basis of race. It means that institutional decision makers are expected to treat people as humans, not as members of a particular group. That approach is not perfect, because humans are not just human individuals but people with individual characteristics and history and ability and weaknesses. But any other approach in a large society is doomed to failure and conflict.

Because our ruling class has imposed these three great errors on us and Made Things Worse, and doubled down on its mistakes, it must be removed as a ruling class and replaced with another. I suggest that the new ruling class should be drawn from the ordinary middle class, because the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power, and I believe that human society in the future is a society that needs a lot less political power. That's because, I believe, the last two hundred years of the Great Enrichment has demonstrated that the market economy is a much better way to resolve human differences than the old way of defending food-growing land from the Other.

The only question remaining is whether our present ruling class releases its grip on political power voluntarily or not. The only question, therefore, is the size of the mountain of skulls. It could be zero. Or not.

Tulip Mania in Washington State

Did you know that Washington State is a major tulip-growing region? Yes, in the Skagit River estuary there are tons of tulip farms. And we went to Roozengarde Farms where you can bury yourself in tulips for a mere $15 per person. You can enjoy an ornamental tulip garden, filled with all kinds of exotic tulip variants. And you can stop by the side of the road and enjoy acres of tulips in full bloom. And, even midweek, there are tons of people enjoying the tulip fields.

Crowds and crowds of people, all enjoying the remarkable diversity of the tulip plant. What a glorious thing it is to see people enjoying the magic of Spring. The camera is looking eastward across the Skagit estuary towards the foothills of the Cascade mountains.

Then we went to the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum in La Conner, Washington. We saw "The Quilt Road: Contemporary Korean Quilts." These quilts are mainly quilts-as-paintings-on-the-wall. If you, like me, think that most contemporary art is Sick and Wrong, it is a beautiful and liberating thing to experience these artworks that seem to know nothing of the nihilism of modern art. They communicate a joy in life that you won't find in your average rooty-snooty art museum.

And why not? Why is there no joy in your average rooty-snooty big-city art museum?

Could it be that when you mix art and politics you get politics? You may well think so: I could not possibly comment.

Here's something to ponder. For weeks, as I take a Wednesday walk around Green Lake here in North Seattle, I have been worrying about the clash between flocks of our good old American Widgeon, and marauding flocks of bad-tempered Canada Geese. You see, both widgeon and geese like to graze on the grass at Green Lake. But today the American Widgeon had disappeared, leaving only the suspicious-looking Canada Geese, almost certainly foreign agents of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Mounties. But maybe those American Widgeon have flown north, over the border into British Columbia, there to bring forth a new generation of good old American Widgeon to gladden our all-American hearts. But I fear that up in Canada they will be singing:

American Widgeon, stay away from me
American Widgeon, mama let me be

I just hope that Our Justin doesn't freeze their bank accounts. And the Mounties don't trample them, like they trampled the old woman in a mobility scooter in Ottawa the other day.

Elon Musk is My Man

In the last week Elon Musk announced that he had bought about 10 percent of Twitter. And it looked like he was going to join the board of directors. Until he wasn't. Says CNBC:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s reversal of his decision to join Twitter’s board opens the door to a hostile takeover and could lead to additional volatility in the stock, according to analysts.

God, I love that guy. And all the Twitter employees report being "super stressed" about the prospect of Elon Musk owning a good chunk of Twitter. But why should this be? Surely, the Twitterati are providing us the best in social media "healthy conversations" that educated lefty twerps can deliver. 

By the way, I just added the following maxim to my catalog of Maxims. 

Women: "Shelter in place." Men: "March toward the sound of the guns."

I wonder what that means, cupcake.

Did you see Elon Musk introducing his Starship launch facility "Starbase" in Boca Chica, Texas back in February? The show begins at about 35:00. He begins with the question "why are we doing this... why build this giant reusable rocket?"

His answer is basically, well, you can't be too careful. So it's best to become interplanetary. And really, there comes a point where Jackie Gleason's command "to the Moon, Alice" becomes insufficient. Let's "go to Mars," just to be safe.

Sorry, Elon, we know the real reason. It's the same reason that Edmund Hillary gave for climbing Mt. Everest: "because it's there."

But I had two big takeaways from Musk's show. 

First, that he has made a remarkable improvement in the basic Raptor rocket engine from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2. Raptor 2 is smaller but more powerful, with an improvement from 185 to 230 tons thrust. 

Second, that he figures that he can make reusable rocket travel cheaper than ordinary long-distance jet travel. Hey, If you can travel from the US to Hong Kong by Starship in one hour, you can have a lot more use of your spacecraft than your average long-distance jet plane. And Musk plans a one hour turnaround for booster and Starship between flights. Musk makes the point that reusability is basic. Hey, he comments: Imagine if your average long-distance $230 million jet plane was not reusable.

Yep. Imagine if Musk could bring off the two-fer of reusable space hardware and an end to censorship on Twitter. Talk about Hope and Change!

A History of Lefty Grooming

Our lefty friends seem to be mad as hell about being called "groomers" for grooming our kids in the glories of the LGBT life.

This is something of a breakthrough on the pejorative front. Ever since the end of the worst thing ever, McCarthyism -- imagine, the very idea of Communists in the State Department! -- our lefty friends have been doing the pejorative thing on us. Racist, sexist, homophobe, and all the rest of the -phobes.

Now, all of a sudden, our lefty friends are outraged, outraged, that we evil far-right violent extremists dare to say that schools with "transition closets" are grooming our kids for the LGBT life.

As Cpl. Jones would say in the Brit WWII series, Dad's Army, "they don't like it up them." I have no idea what he meant by that.

But really, isn't it the truth that leftism is groomism, and lefties are groomers. On everything.

Religious Grooming

The whole point of Horace Mann and the "common school" movement was first of all, to groom the children of the more severe Puritan sects away from their enthusiastic Christianity. Because the Boston Transcendentalists knew better. Later on, of course, the idea was to groom Irish kids away from their Catholicism, but the Irish weren't having it and built their own Catholic schools instead.

In my view not only is this vile and monstrous, but it also grooms the children of the lower classes away from the best road to the middle class, that encourages subordinate people to become responsible.

Anti-Capitalist Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids to love socialism or the welfare state is to make them into obedient subordinates. There was an excuse for Marx & Co. back in the day. The dark satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution really did look pretty forbidding. Except, of course, that the workers were getting to live instead of dying out on the land, as they had in England since, say, 1500.

And the market economy encourages people to get out of subordinate peasantry and become an actor in the life not of making just for you and yours, but making stuff for the whole world and accepting its verdict in the wage you get for your labor, or the price you get for your product.

No doubt the market economy has its rough spots, particularly after wars when it is difficult for idiot governments to figure out how to return life -- and particularly the financial system -- to normalcy. But don't ever forget that in the last 200 years the average real per-capita income has gone up by 3,000 percent -- or 30 times. And nobody saw it coming. Oh, there was one guy, Carter Reynell in 1685:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

But really! What did he know? Especially since it was three years before the Dutch invaded Britland in 1688 and installed the Dutch Finance that would lead to Britannia ruling the waves and Britons never, never, never being slaves.

Career Grooming

The whole point of feminism is that upper-class women don't really like to be domestic. So the schools groom girls to want to have careers.

I tend to find this amusing, for it assumes that men pursue careers because careers are rewarding and satisfying. Not exactly. Speaking as a man, a young man understands that he needs to have "prospects" if he expects to attract an attractive woman to his bed. Thus it is that in the lower classes, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And the problem with grooming women for careers is that it tends to take them out of the baby business in their peak fertile years. You tell me that this is a good thing.

Sex Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids for the sexual revolution is what, exactly? My judgement is that free sex is not good for women at any number of levels. First of all, women are much more at risk from STDs, because of the enclosed nature of their sexual equipment. Secondly, women really do not like serial sexual affairs. It affects their, er, mental health. Or, if you prefer a more universal understanding of women and sex, women really want to cleave to one man and love him forever. Oh, of course, all the men in the world are cads and layabouts and heartless. But a girl can dream, right?

Anti-Family Grooming

The whole point of leftism is to marginalize the family, so it grooms young people away from the mainstream life of marriage and children. No doubt there are people in the world that are marked out to be creative artists, and burying them for thirty years in the work of marriage and children is a waste of their transcendental talent. No doubt there are masculine women that are just the wrong fit for mothering. But for 97.2 percent of people they need to get married and have a family because if they don't they will miss out on the whole point of life. And that is grandchildren.

LGBT Grooming

If you really can't stand a sexual relationship with the opposite sex, well good luck to you, for it's hard to miss out on the mainstream of life. But grooming kids to believe that LGBT is creative, or cool, or deliciously rebellious, or that LGBTs are innocent oppressed people since the dawn of time, is sick and wrong. And to facilitate and groom kids for "transitioning" is not just stupid -- as in good little liberal teachers toeing the party line -- but cruel. Society's message to LGBT should be: do it if you must, but don't frighten the horses in the street. Because the bottom line for human life is babies on the ground, and every child needs a mother and a father: their mother and their father.

I think we need something that rhymes with Groomer. Groomer Doomer? Groomer Broomer? Groomer Fumer? Groomer Puma? Groomer Vroomer?

I will put my unconscious mind to work on it.

A Window into Activist World

There's a poster in the window of the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, just up the street from the ferry dock. This poster says:

#TAKE CARE OF

MUSLIM
BLACK
WOMEN
QUEER
LATINX
NATIVE
IMMIGRANT
P.O.C.
TRANS
DISABLED
L.G.B.T.Q.+
LOW INCOME
ACTIVIST
REFUGEE
UNDOCUMENTED
INCARCERATED

FRIENDS, FAMILY & COMMUNITY

Now, let's unpack this, because there seems to be a victim hierarchy here.

Sex/Gender: 5
Immigrants: 3
Race: 3
Religion: 1
Upper-class: 1

Well, you can see who is really important in Activist America: the various flavors of upper-class sex and gender creativity.

And think about the travails and the discrimination suffered by the humble upper-class activist working away for nothing at some Soros-funded NGO!

Let's see who is missing from this list. First of all, The Jews! Then, of course, the Homeless. You know what: I'm a bit surprised about that. Then, naturally there is no mention of bitter clingers, presently dying of despair from various opioid addictions, armed insurrectionists, and all the rest of the unmentionables.

You know, I'm afraid that I find this amusing, for it confirms what I believe, that our friends in the Activist Community have no room for any reality other than their activism.

I suppose that, for every victim on the list, there is a vitally important "intransigent minority" activist group that lives for its saving truth and spends every hour of every day fighting for justice.

Yes. I imagine that there must even be an NGO out there fighting fearlessly for the rights of Activists!

But really, what happened to good old religion?

Noise vs. Bias

They say that if you ask a bunch of farmers to estimate the weight of a bull, the average estimate will come pretty close to the measured weight of the bull.

But, scientists say, you should not let the farmers know about the other guys' estimates.

That's what comes out of a very useful review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein. It's reviewed at Quillette by Rob Henderson.

You need to trick people into making individual judgments, because if people know what other people think then they will tend to agree with them. Thus juries, panels evaluating employment applications.

In other words, if you are the second person evaluating a college application and you get to read the previous evaluator's comments, you will tend to agree with him. So shouldn't a university mask the comments of early evaluators?

The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.”

In other words "many organizations consider conflict avoidance to be at least as important as optimal decision-making."

So, if you are looking for "the wisdom of crowds" you need to make sure that crowd members don't know what the other crowd members are thinking. If you want "the madness of crowds" then you need everyone to know what the other guys are thinking. And chances are they will all agree with each other.

In politics, of course, 

The book reports findings indicating that when a group of Democrats saw that a particular view was gaining initial popularity among Democrats, they too would endorse that point of view, ultimately leading most Democrats in the group to support it. However, if they saw that a specific opinion was gaining popularity among Republicans, they rejected it. Republicans behaved similarly.

Not surprising.

There is also the time-of-day factor. Usually, it is best to get a decision from a decision maker early in the day, probably after their first cup of coffee. Later in the day they might not be so thoughtful.

Still, the same person can give a whole range of opinions on the same facts. They have done this with physicians. They are more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day: the quick fix.  But studies show that "simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment."

People tend to be forgiving when a human makes a mistake, and not forgiving when a machine makes a mistake.

If a human driver causes a traffic collision, we are often forgiving, depending on the circumstances. But if an autonomous vehicle causes an accident, people respond with intense suspicion. 

We expect machines to be perfect. Humans not so much. 

Collapsing Three Layers into Two

If you want to understand humans as simply as possible, but no simpler, then, in my opinion and the opinion of Curtis Yarvin, you need to divide us into three parts. Three Layers, he calls it, with his Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Three Peoples, as I call it, with my Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

That is what you do when you want to survey the human landscape and understand your fellow men.

But if you are playing politics, then, as per Curtis Yarvin, there is no politics without an enemy. So you have to collapse the Three Layer view of human society into the Two Sides of a conflict: "us" and "them." Where "them" is the enemy.

Once you do that then you are embarking on one of four wars.

1. Fight against a small country for a quick win.
2. Fight against a large country for a world war.
3. Fight against a large minority for a civil war.
4. Fight against a small minority for a quick win.

And Grok.

But, there is one other thing to consider: the question of the small minority. You would think that small minorities would keep their heads down, hoping that nobody would notice them. But they don't. E.g., the Jews. 

In fact, small minorities tend to be intransigent, because they feel that they need to be on their guard all the time. Just in case a mob of the majority should come down the street and take them out. Also, they need to remind the majority that nobody better mess with them. Because.

So our modern small minorities like to pretend that, really, they are all powerful and that if you mess with them then you are asking for trouble. Thus the Jews have elevated "anti-Semitism" into the worst thing in the world and if you are guilty of anti-Semitism you will find that the whole world is against you, you bigot you. The same thing seems to apply with the blacks. Anti-black racism is the worst thing is the world and you'd better not be identified as a racist, you racist you.

Our liberal friends practice the "intransigent minority" gambit with their Activism Culture. And all of their activist groups have some sort of call-to-battle slogan. I noticed that the BMW next to me on the ferry crossing from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island had two mini bumper stickers on the back: "Black Lives Matter" and "Stop Asian Hate." Then I went into a nice liberal bookstore and it feels like all the books are playing the activism game, making a case for some helpless minority mired in injustice that only a wise, sensitive activist class can resolve. Yes. Activism is an upper-class, educated-class thing in the modern western world.

Why does the "intransigent minority" gambit work? I think it is because most people are not up for a war, they don't like to get into a pissing match, whether on the national front or on the international front. So, if an "intransigent minority" gets in your face, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class -- and the educated and the media and the universities -- you'd better watch out, pal. 

Thus, an "intransigent minority" often boxes above its weight, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class, because people know that getting targeted by an "intransigent minority" means trouble, right here in River City.

Notice how in the modern era our politics involves collapsing the Three Layers into two. Obviously Marxism did this, by collapsing the three layers of Bourgeoisie, Proletarians, and Communists into two: Communists and Proletarians on one side and the Bourgeoisie on the other.

In the case of the modern Allyship narrative, we have Allies, Oppressed Peoples, and White Oppressors. The Allies and Oppressed Peoples stick together so the White Oppressors are on their own.

It is, of course, a conceit of Marxism and Allyship that they represent the vast majority of the people -- rather than the minority interest of an "intransigent minority" with an appetite for political power. But that conceit provides the opportunity for us ordinary mortals. When it comes to the crunch, does the activist group really represent the vast majority of helpless victims, as their ideology pretends, or not?

I think that for the first half of the 20th century the educated elite and their clients really did represent the majority. But since the 1960s this majority has been whittling away, because the majority of the population, more and more, is the ordinary middle class.

I think that, again and again since the start of the 1970s we have seen a movement of the ordinary middle class erupt in politics. But up to now the educated ruling class has managed to abort each eruption.

At some point, in my judgement, the educated class will fail to abort a middle-class eruption. And then the regime will change.

The Incompetent US Occupation of Germany:

After the glorious victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 the Allies determined to occupy Germany until we had stamped out the noxious weed of Nazism and taught the ignorant Germans about democracy.

So what actually happened in 1945 to whenever? 

Yeah. For instance, when did the US occupation of Germany end? Was it when the West Germans had an election in August 1949 and Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor? Was it in 1952 when West Germany was inducted into the European Defense Community? Was it in 1955 when "the occupation came to an official end" according to Edward N. Peterson in The American Occupation of Germany? Or does the US still occupy Germany, since it still has troops stationed in western Germany?

Of course the US occupiers were anxious to winkle out all the Nazis post 1945, so they rounded up all the usual suspects and kept a lot of them in camps where some of them suffered from malnutrition equivalent to the malnutrition in the notorious concentration camps of the Nazis. (Did you know that the Brits invented concentration camps in the Boer War? Not to be confused with the internment camps in the US during World War II.) And the War Department knew early on that all Germans were not Nazis.

[W]ell over half of the German population did not accept any of the Nazi doctrines. Only a very small percentage, ranging from 4 to 5 percent among workers to 14 percent for professionals and executives and managers were "full Nazis" on the basis of adherence to all the essential doctrines.

I wonder what the percentage of professionals and corporate managers in the US are "full Wokies." But know which side to butter their bread if they want to get promoted.

Did you know that the last thing the Germans wanted after their defeat was a continuation of Nazism? Makes sense doesn't it. I mean if some guy got elected president of the US and then led us into a world war in which we got bombed back into the stone age and just about every woman east of the Mississippi was raped by the conquering heroes of the invader, and Americans spent the next five years cadging for food just to stay alive, you think that anyone would admit to voting for the guy? Or ever want a government with anyone in it that was in the old regime?

Then the US decided it was going to teach the Germans all about Democracy. Said our Gen. Clay: "The German masses are entirely unready for self-government and ignorant of democratic responsible German government." Actually, the Germans knew all about democracy, but they didn't want to create a "constitution" but a Grundgesetz (Basic Law) to recreate what they had before Hitler (only without Hitler and Nazis). And create it they did, by running circles around the US occupiers. Said one US official:

It follows the German tradition, with adaptations to take account of contemporary conditions and political views in West Germany today.

Then there was Ludwig Erhard, who one fine day blindsided the occupiers and announced a currency reform and that "a planned and controlled economy cannot work because of human nature." There was a rocky time in the immediate aftermath of the currency reform and removal of price controls, but the economic ship righted itself and the Wirtschaftwunder was born. 

Really, how lucky were the Germans that the US occupiers had no clue and just bureaucrat-ed about for five years or so before letting the Germans govern themselves? The Soviets had a Plan, "a cadre of German communists trained to take over as Russian troops moved into German territory." And it took 44 years for the Germans to get to self-government in Eastern Germany.

You think the US ruling class has learned anything since then? So that when the ordinary middle class in the United States decides to form a new regime in the next few years the Wokies in charge will just let us go ahead and fix all the problems they have created over the decades with their stupid big government and ideological hegemony?

We can hope.

Who Will Vote Out the Dems? The Moms

Here's an interesting take on our currently "interesting times:" From Rep. Jerry Karl (R-AL):

“This is the factor that they’re missing, and that is the female vote,” he declared. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again."

Because now the moms are going to the grocery store to buy food and running into the buzz-saw of 10 percent inflation. And they are going to the gas station to fill up the SUV and gas prices are up by a couple dollars a gallon. 

"Make it stop, Mr. President!"

I know. What did you expect, ladies, when you voted for the Democrats?

But we men really don't understand women, and what makes them tick.

But that's OK. I have been doing the studying for you.

And above all what makes women tick is the need for safety. Thus, women were on-board with the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates in a New York minute.

And that is why women are all in favor of most of the things that the welfare state delivers. It's not because women are greedy, but that women feel the need for all the support they can get. Just in case.

In the old days, all the support she could get was whatever support her husband could deliver. But in the new era all the support she can get is whatever stuff she can get from government, from education to health care to child support.

Unfortunately, of course, unlimited government help for women leads to inflation and disaster. And then women can't get the support they need.

Which is where we are right now, after two years of stupid government pedal-to-the-metal in the COVID response, compounded by the Ukraine idiocy.

Now, I listen to women; I really do. And women are really upset about the horrors in Ukraine. They are not thinking about whether it was a good idea ten years ago to muck about in Ukrainian politics, or whether it is a good idea to muck around with Vladimir Putin. They are not thinking: "Gee, I wonder what Hunter Biden and Burisma and the 'big guy' has to do with this." Or whether the US has any business mucking around in Europe. Or whether we should have troops in Germany seventy-five years after the end of World War II. They only think about the suffering of the women in Ukraine. They do worry a bit about nuclear war, of course.

Enough of inflation. How to understand women and CRT and transgenders in the schools?

My view is that, when you tell women that transgenders are horribly oppressed they will agree. Because kindness.

But when you demand that mothers have no rights in the matter of the transitioning of their children, or in the matter of non-binary sex education in schools, then you have crossed a line. Because safety.

Do you see the point? Women instinctively know they are supposed to be kind. But women instinctively want to keep their kids safe. Kids' safety comes first -- their kids'safety.

I realize that I need to update my maxims on politics and men and women. Up to now:

There is no politics without an enemy.

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

All very true. Let's add something like this:

For men, politics is defeating the enemy. For women, politics is protecting them from the enemy.

Am I right, or am I right?

Either way, I suspect, we are going to see a big shift in the women's vote this Fall.

Because women expect to be protected, and when the current protector can't or won't protect them, that's when they go get another protector.

But not, of course, among liberal educated women. They still believe everything in the #WeBelieve signs. But that is another story.

The Small Activist Group Problem

The Zman wonders how the keep the place going when "no coherent society is possible on a continent full of people with radically different cultural perspectives."

Really? I'd say there are about two cultural perspectives in America.

1. There are the people that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.
2. And then there are small upper-class liberal activist groups that all believe they are saving the world from injustice.

A couple of days ago I was writing about Ron Unz's experience of the activist group phenomenon when he was running a voter initiative to slow down bilingual education in California. He found that bilingual education was driven by activists.

Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.

Now we are in the middle of the "trans" age where gay and trans activist groups are, shall we say, "fiercely committed" to gay and trans normalization in schools.

So here's a piece in Quillette on the issue. Back in the day, LGBT activist groups sued under grounds of discrimination on the basis of sex for "children who’d been diagnosed as gender dysphoric." And a federal judge "proved amenable." Wrote one federal judge:

If left untreated, gender dysphoria may result in serious and debilitating psychological distress including anxiety, depression, and even self-harm or suicidal ideation.

You think, your honor? Or maybe, if nobody talked about gender dysphoria so that it wasn't a thing, nobody would know anything about it and kids would be getting all riled up about something else. Playground bullies gotta bully and Mean Girls gotta Mean Girl. And the kids that aren't bullies or Mean Girls are miserable as usual.

Or let's dive into our favorite 19th century novels. Whaddya think about the kids at Mr Creakle's school for boys in David Copperfield? You think the boys were thinking about anything except avoiding the wrath of Mr Creakle and getting in the good graces of Steerforth? Or whatabout the two teenage girls in Adam Bede? We are talking about Dinah Morris, the saint, and Hetty Sorrel the teenage twerp. So, if you put those two girls into the 21st century I bet that Dinah would have been the perfect girl volunteering at the animal shelter, and Hetty would have got into endless trouble on the gender front like her original at the Manor Farm. Trouble is: there are no Mrs Poysers around any more to straighten out the minds of empty-headed girls and put them to work in the dairy.

Here's an idea. We pass a law that says that gubmint schools cannot discuss sex or gender or discrimination or oppression at all. Or counsel students about sex. Or do anything except teach the 3 Rs.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that. Ruling classes gotta rule. They gotta remind the peasants who is the lord around here. And one of the ways that rulers rule is by messing with other peoples' kids. Just to show they can.

See, back in the day, the ruling class of the time decided it would be a good thing to have gubmint schools here in the good old USA and teach the Protestant Bible. Because those bloody Irish spoiling the neighborhoods in New York and Boston were crazy Catholics and a cunning gubmint school system could cut the Irish off at the pass. Plus, according to Horace Mann, we could cut crime by 90 percent.

The Irish said, fuggedaboudit, and built their own schools attached to every Catholic church in the land. Indeed, they developed the deeply religious doctrine that I dare say you can find in the Vulgate bible that "first you build the school, then the church." (But you can't find it on Google Search, except on articles by Yours Truly).

See what I mean? Nothing has changed. Back in the 19th century stuck-up Yale and Harvard graduates knew what was best for the hoi polloi and so they used their political power to put a wrench, as they thought, into the primitive ways of the Irish street thug -- not to mention New York's 50,000 "nymphs of the pave."

Today, Yale and Harvard graduates want to indoctrinate kids with LGBT culture. Nothing personal, you understand. Just that activists gotta activate. Otherwise they don't get to live the creative lives that Gaia ordained for them. 

And you were put on this Earth so that activists could activate you into a proper mood of obedience.

I say to liberal activists: Go. Away.