I just love this thing, which bills itself as a Venn Diagram. Found it recently when I was looking for something else. (Sources for it here and here.) It succeeds, I’m sure, beyond its designer’s wildest dreams in depicting the precipice on which our culture now stands, all without mentioning political parties, cell phones, or social networks. This is the rationalist model writ large. All the category names around the perimeter contain overlapping flavors of nonsense sneered at by the professional skeptics who presume to know so much more than the rest of us. It’s impressively voluminous, but that means there are ways in which it is, well, talking too much. I’m going to be spending some time explaining that last statement, but I’m not going to apologize. When a thief tries to sell you a noose, it’s too good an opportunity not to ignore it but to tighten it around his neck.

Truthfully, the olive drab, shield-shaped pentagon in the center should be dressed in some sharply contrasting color (or empty) because it’s obviously the most important region of the diagram, the visual highlight, the position of control over the rest of the so-called nonsense. In Venn terms, it’s the apotheosis which contains and make sense of all the other regions of the diagram. But that would have disrupted the esthetic design of the creator, who is intent on showing us an intrinsic order of things that relate in some meaningful way. The pentagon at the center is here the function of five perfect Easter Eggs of nonsense, which overlap harmoniously to demonstrate graphically the intuitive rightness of the conception. It is therefore a muddy mixture of all the colors it comprises, and because its originator has no belief in meaning as a concept, its content here is a mere placeholder, an afterthought which is not an apotheosis but a crude and very partial example of the rest.

Now for some content observations:

First, some general points, in no particular order. ‘Nonsense’ is a strong word, sweeping in its dismissal of everything it’s applied to. By definition, it represents a judgment that something said, written, or done is utterly without value, devoid of interest, and either stupid or silly or both. The choice of a Venn diagram* for communicating absolutist determinations is interesting in this regard. The Venn is not a quantitative tool in any respect, neither scientific nor mathematical, and is in common practice a mere presentation tool, a thought-starter meant to suggest possible relationships worthy of consideration. Used here to suggest relationships between topics that are definitely not worthy of consideration. A funny irony. But the vast scope of the content and the designer’s intent are not at all funny. To see this, we’ll need to look at some of these hundreds of bits of nonsense in more detail. Not all of them (rest easy…). Just enough to see how far reaching it is and how disingenuously compiled.

So. You see that I have pointed in various ways at items on the “nonsense” lists which are, at a minimum, debatable. Obviously there are numerous other items which are, obviously, nonsense. Which ones are those? I have not concerned myself particularly with the question of who created these lists. He seems to be, on the face of it, an Eastern European pseudo-intellectual more or less indistinguishable from the smug, grinning professional skeptics who make a living from the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and PBS. It doesn’t matter who he is specifically, because he speaks for millions of those who believe that the only province of rational minds is those subjects that can be counted, weighed, measured with real and virtual calipers, and studied to the point of proof or disproof in a laboratory, under precise clinical conditions. Their response to this so-called Venn Diagram is a breezy, grinning, “Well, yeah. That’s it in a nutshell, right?”

Wrong. Truth is, anyone who basically agrees with the purport of this diagram is less intellectually rigorous than those they are gang-jeering at. Bigfoot (uh, Yeti) is nonsense? Every major inhabited region of the world has independently developed an anecdotally transmitted legend of primate breeds that correspond to the definition of “Bigfoot,” including North America (coast to coast), Australia, China, Siberia, Tibet, Indochina, the Himalayas, and parts of South America. Who’s missing? England, a country that killed off all its wildlife a millennium ago, the seats of blind reason we admire as France and Germany, and the continent of Africa, where science has always taken a back seat to malnutrition, malaria, and murder. We’re supposed to,overlook the fact that serious scientists are bravely pursuing Bigfoot based on all kinds of evidence that exists despite the lack of a dead body that can be weighed, MRI’ed, dissected, measured, and filed away in formaldehyde-filled flasks. One real scientific field investigator archly observed, “When Bigfoot is finally found, it won’t be by me. It will be discovered in the bottom drawer of a back room of some natural history museum.”

Crop circles? Yeah. Two old duffers with boards strapped to their feet, snickering the night away in jolly old England at our expense. They did all these, right? Two old assholes on their home from the pub stomping around in their Wellies and giggling the night away. Right.

Same deal with cattle mutilations (‘bovine excisions’… cute) and UFOs. Do they exist at some level above the metric of “nonsense”? Yes. Serious scientists are seriously studying the evidence, even some evidence which can be counted, weighed, measured with calipers, dissected, and filed away in a bottom drawer of some museum somewhere. People keep misquoting Carl Sagan, probably to his post-mortem delight: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Not what he said. The sentence is frankly unscientific. Proof is proof. Period. Never needs to be anything but ordinary, well, proof. Even if it’s counter-intuitive. Like Euclid repeatedly demonstrated. What Sagan actually said was probably correct: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Which works both ways. It is possible in many states of our nation to be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without a dead body. The rest of the evidence has to be extraordinary to be sure, but not all cases of unexplained human disappearance are automatically “nonsense,” even to the myopic eyes of the legal system.

Intelligent Design? No, not nonsense. Increasingly, the Darwinian theory of evolution probably is nonsense, much like the once vaunted “consensus” of the scientific community about Eugenics and Climate Change caused by human industry. All three of these scientific delusions are based on antique mechanical metaphors which missed much more complicated underlying realities. Eugenics, founded on Mendel’s genetic research on peas was ultimately undone by the guy on the top floor of the lab who was ignored for the six years he was studying the genetics of fruit flies, which defied all his concerted efforts at predicting even so small an attribute as eye color. The Eugenic Consensus wreaked untold numbers of sterilizations and abortions based on bad data. Avoidable errors. Same with climate change science. Is the climate changing? Yes. That’s what climate does. It changes all the time. It’s weather writ large on a much greater than human scale. (Did you know that the weight of all humankind is approximately equal to the weight of all the ants on earth? A bit sobering, eh, but a verifiable statistic nonetheless.) The computer models devised to predict the effects of climate warming have ALL failed, not by a little but by a lot. We don’t know enough to predict climate behavior, no matter how many ways we try to weigh, count, measure it, and model it. Our theories are uniformly superficial, regardless of consensus, a term which Michael Crichton brilliantly argued is a contradiction in terms. Science does not progress by a process of democratic buy-ins by the scientists whose research grants depend on an unchallenged consensus; it progresses by means of scrupulously practiced scientific method. But our Venn diagramming hero lists Climate Change Denial as a “conspiracy” and omits including Climate Change in his list of Pseudo-Sciences. Go figure.

Back to Intelligent Design as a Venn overlap of Religion and Pseudo-Science. Imagine taking Henry Ford’s Model T and trying to upgrade it to 21st century standards by just adding and replacing parts without carting the chassis itself to the nearest landfill and starting over. Even Darwin had doubts about his theory, declaring that if the fossil record did not produce examples of species transitions that had to have occurred, in accordance with his random mutation model, then his theory would be disproven. Well, the transition fossils have never materialized. No instance of a species that survived thousands of years with sightless blobs of flesh set into a skull that would eventually accidentalize its way to highly focused, full color, swiveling vision. But just look at the superior grin of World-famous Richard Dawkins, who had the balls to write a book called “The Blind Watchmaker.” (I regard that as an eponymous title, by the way, entirely in keeping with the author’s narcissistic delusions of brilliance.)

Want to see how easy it is to disprove Darwinian theory? Look at any documentary about Evolution. Repeatedly, you will be told that this or that species “evolved” this or that physical attribute (in order) to adapt to some critical environmental factor. Cheetahs become blindingly fast, twice as swift as any other big cat (in order) to succeed as solitary hunters. I keep putting “in order” in parentheses because it denotes an intention its omission underplays, which is certainly the intention of Darwin apologists, that is, the intention to make a sale based on the idea of purpose, even though the wrap-up text returns repeatedly to the absurd position that there is no purpose in Evolution, never was, it’s all just a giant long-running accident, so please move along now.

But if you don’t want to watch a bunch of documentaries, all you really need to do is watch this short video:

Some additional facts. You hear a lot about the Great Barrier Reef, and how it is dying, and how it must be the fault of Mankind with his fossil-fueled Climate Change and all, but there are some things they don’t tell you, meaning you have to look them up. Like, the Great Barrier Reef is actually only about 20,000 years old. That’s not a lot of time in evolutionary terms. The first paragraph will tell you that Australia started sprouting a Great Barrier Reef maybe 600,000 years ago. But the breaks just weren’t right. It collapsed under the sea because of, wait for it!, changing water temperatures, the same villain that’s afflicting the current reef. Also, the reef tried making itself a couple of other times less than half a million years ago. Those attempts also failed. Is it possible that gigantic reef archipelagos have their own life cycles and like other living organisms eventually die?

Well, forget all that. The important thing here is to realize that the unique, highly specialized fauna of the Great Barrier Reef are creatures whose random “mutations” seem to be focused not very randomly on camouflaging their bodies from predators and prey. Now pretend you’re a scientific documentarian specializing in the ridicule of Darwin skeptics, and explain to your audience how the smallest vertebrate in the known universe “accidentally” acquired the body chemistry to change his color and skin conformation to match exactly whatever kind of coral he/she is nesting in. Try to believe that he/she is mentally and physically incapable of understanding the concepts of color, skin growths, and the value of camouflage as a survival strategy, given that he/she doesn’t even know it’s alive. Now try to explain to yourself why the idea of accidental mutation is more rationally appealing than the simple and obvious solution of purpose-driven change. The usual Darwinian escape hatch (“Understand, we’re talking millions and millions of years here…) is absent in the case of the Pygmy Seahorse. These are “mutations” which had to have occurred in less than 20,000 years, a trifling moment in Darwinian time.

One of the great scientific breakthroughs (and simultaneous sellouts) was Stephen Wolfram’s very large book “A New Kind of Science.” In it he argues that a great many natural processes exhibit compelling evidence of artificial intelligence, meaning that many natural phenomena are not random per se,but the product of self-writing and self-correcting code. He demonstrates his evidence with innumerable examples which he compares to early computer attempts at coding artificial life. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in things like that. My takeaway was that he’s probably right, but he also suffers from Darwin Syndrome. He does exactly what all those Darwinian documentaries do. He ultimately rejects the idea of purpose. He cannot yield up his scientific atheism even on the altar of his own brilliance.

Never mind that he is nakedly showing us a computer creating real organic life while insisting that there is no purposeful consciousness at the keyboard. All right, then. I guarantee you Wolfram is way smarter than Richard Dawkins, though balder and therefore less famous, but Darwin is a humongous trap hardly anyone anywhere can escape from.

I have a wonderful essay, not yet written, called The Problem with Math. Look for it after I’ve posted it on one of my websites. It actually explains the God Problem pretty neatly. And ironically, if I dare say so myself. “Ah,” you will say to yourselves. “You expect us to believe, to have faith in, the existence of a brilliant essay for which there is absolutely NO evidence.” My reply? “Exactimundo.”

The essay does exist. It is written. In my head. Has been there for many of my 67+ years. I use it as a personal resource in other writings, which consistently confirm its consistent points. In other words, which is to say many millions of words, there exists a context for believing that the essay exists, even though you can’t find it at a single Internet address.

You may choose to believe or not to believe that the essay exists. If you’re the scientific sort, you will be inclined to disbelieve, because there is nothing to count, weigh, measure with calipers, or dissect in a laboratory under approved clinical conditions. In still other words, there is no body produced in court to enable a well-intentioned jury to be an objective finder of fact.

What am I even talking about? The casual assignment of Religion (unlike the other categories of our Venn Master, disingenuously — he should have more truthfully called it “Superstition,” to him, admittedly a mere provocative synonym) as across-the-board “Nonsense” is actually the only honest aspect of this, forgive my pun, Trumpery.

Two points before we move on. The use of a Venn Diagram is a deceptive exercise in preemptive propagandizing. His labels around the outside of the diagram are immediately prejudicial. His construction of the lists contained within the diagram use all the tactics employed by Professional, supposedly scientific, Skeptics. We are presented with a seemingly comprehensive set of “nonsense” beliefs that are in fact nothing but a parade of grossly false equivalencies justified by an apparently objective scientific tool used as an appealing context that is, in fact, utterly devoid of context. He nowhere justifies or explains his inclusions. He’s simply demanding acceptance because he’s done the homework(?) every one of his dullard brethren is too lazy to do. Ipso facto, he wins. Anyone who doubts this elegant graphic is a fool.

All of the world’s major religions are “nonsense,” on a par with Truther conspiracies about phantom planes and thermite bombs on 9/11. Indeed, the lists are better proof of what he doesn’t know anything about than anything he’s quite certain he does know about. Which is not much. Like all Professional Skeptics everywhere. They boast about the scientific method and never use it. The embark on every unanswered question with the conviction that any extraordinary claim is, a priori, without merit.

Point 2. He gives himself away with the architecture of his diagram. By giving himself away, I mean he is revealing his own sinister intention, perhaps without realizing it at a conscious level. His diagram is not Venn; it is Sacred Geometry. He is building a five-pointed star, a pentagram often claimed by Satanists but in fact conceived of by Christians and other religious faiths, including peoples from Vikings to the Chinese.

It’s esthetically pleasing but at its core it’s just a hard-hearted lie. The centerpiece he has so much trouble filling in is also Sacred Geometry, a pentagonal symbol that is a mathematical function of the surrounding star. It’s supposed to have meaning. But our Venn master has no meaning and is thus at a loss.

Or, to be more precise, this:

He is therefore using precisely the same kinds of deceptions he would cheerfully ascribe to people who espouse what he considers pseudo-science, quackery, and religion.

In conclusion, needless to say, he has a missing essay of his own and takes no accountability for it. This dumb chart is the sum total of his context. But that’s how we’ve chosen to live our lives in this, the 21st, century. Who really should be occupying this boy’s pentagon of elders? These guys.

Why is it so hard to see the wrong turns the “consensus” makes us take? Think of your mind as a table. Like a good skeptic, you accord yourself faith to those things which fit on the table, if they don’t fit, you just push them off the edge, out of existence.

Here’s how the Professional Skeptic table looks. Room for dinosaurs, apocalyptic fears, Darwinian Evolution, and Science & Technology. Kewl. Anything else? No way, José.

Thing is, their center pentagon still has no meaning. I’m thinking that for an atheist, the Venn rendering should look more like this.

But they think they have values, beliefs, and morals. Which turn out to be reducible to this.

All in all, this lavish Venn diagram is a beautiful example of what Urban Dictionary calls a Self-Eating Watermelon.

P.S. By the way, Satanists DO tend to get the credit for Sacred Geometry (i.e., Heretical Geometry), which like most symbols Satanic is merely stolen Christian imagery. Like their upside down cross. Very original. Their use of geometry is very much the same, namely upside down.

They flip the Spirit star point to the bottom and replace it with matters of material earthiness. Bracketed by the devil horns we all know and love. I’m not accusing Venn boy of anything, mind. If you want to play with his diagram in this bizarre context, feel free. I’m pretty sure he’s not a Satanist but just a not-too-bright garden variety atheist who knows way more than less than nothing.

*Sample Venn Diagram for those who don’t know how they work. This one is simple enough as to require no explanation. What one region overlaps is related to it somehow.

November 2020

What is going on with this crazy presidential election?

Above is the map of how counties voted on November 4, 2020. Compare with the map below of which states are open for business and which are still in a fairly serious state of lockdown. 

Headlines of the Election Process Thus Far

First things first. Extremely impressive Blue Wave, endorsing Democrats and repudiating Trump nationwide, wouldn’t you agree? Well, at least on the east and west coasts and in the hippie chunk of the southwest. This is pretty much how the election broke down in 2016, too, when the Democrats also won the popular vote. The blue bits on this county map happen to be where the most votes are. Which means that the popular vote is dominated by major urban centers, whose issues and priorities are distinctly different from those of the overwhelming majority of counties (i.e., geographic/economic regions) in the rest of the country. Trump won significantly more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, yet he still lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Which must mean that the Biden-Harris ticket managed to drive Democrat turnout significantly upward, despite the fact that Biden and Harris barely campaigned at all. How did they do that?

Three or four possible answers. The one the Democrats would have us believe is that they won on the issues, Trump having failed to do what he promised in 2016 as an untried and controversial outsider: improve the economy, reduce taxes and business regulations, reduce unemployment, regain control of U.S. borders (‘Build the Wall!’) and trade policy, disengage the nation from combat and direct engagement in Iran and Afghanistan, restore manufacturing jobs to the rust belt, fix the broken Veterans Administration, rebuild the U.S. military, negotiate more peaceful diplomatic relations with the Middle East and more equitable with Iran and North Korea, secure energy independence for the United States, and withdraw from the crushingly expensive participation in the Paris Climate Accords. Except that he did all of these things, keeping more promises and accomplishing more positive change for more people than any president in memory. On top of which, a president supposedly disliked and disrespected around the world has been nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

We’re asked to believe that a clear majority of the American people prefer the Democrat platform of eliminating the fossil fuel industry, big city police departments, all U.S. borders, and the Trump tax cuts… because the vision of a United States modeling itself on Cuba and Venezuela is just so inspiring that everyone somehow, irrationally, shares the Antique Vision of AOC, Colin Kaepernick, Nancy Pelosi, and the Marxist political gospel of graybeard Bernie Sanders, aka “the man who could not be nominated.” Sorry, that dog won’t hunt.

Second, the real return on the endless investigations and attacks on Donald Trump have simply worn out the voter population. In this scenario, it no longer matters that none of these investigations (and impotent impeachment burlesque) has ever produced any evidence of a crime. Maybe they’ve just been convinced, finally, that he’s too rough-edged and plain spoken to be president, or why else would he have so many enemies? He’s not nice. Except that choosing Biden over Trump is not any kind of movement toward niceness. Biden is more corrupt, sexually perverted, personally vicious, racially prejudiced, and self-serving than Trump ever was. That dog doesn’t hunt either. Unless surrender to the haters of the left is some kind of vain hope that  the nastiness of the last five years will go away if we put the Killers from the Swamp in charge. If that’s it for any of you, I promise you’ll get not what you hope for but what you deserve.

The other two explanations for Trump’s defeat are related. They are the net impact of the COVID virus and the consequent collapse of discipline in the American voting process. COVID was eleventh hour salvation for the left. Something which, though an Act of God or an Act of the ChiComs, could be blamed squarely on Trump, no matter how he tried to handle it. And blame him they did, for every case and every death, while the Democrats in urban centers did everything possible to make the virus more costly, frightening, inconvenient, confusing, and (at times) more deadly than it had to be. (How many senior citizens had to be quarantined in nursing homes to catch the virus from one another and quickly expire?) Even the sacrifice of the elderly could be simply assigned to Trump. And so it was.

Not surprisingly, with significant chunks of big and small business shut down indefinitely, with people quarantined in their homes or isolated even in public by masks, a depression was created that was more than economic. It was also spiritual, national, and deliberately Trump focused. It wasn’t a shared crisis we worked together to overcome. It was a colossal political blunder by the man who tried more than anyone in the world to defeat it.

This was actually only the first blow of a one-two punch. COVID provided the perfect excuse for savaging the tradition of voting at the polls. That was no longer practical to a housebound population. What was absolutely (and patriotically) required was voting by mail. Which resulted in a hideously disorganized and opaque process of launching mail-in forms to anyone and everyone, uninvited, via the U.S. Postal Service, with no managerial control, no accountability, and no quality assurance. The piles of consequent paperwork guaranteed the election could not be decided in one night, one week, or one month. Just keep counting till you have enough votes. Too many hands, too many cooks, and the political soup is hopelessly spoilt. The result is what the bureaucrats in charge tell us it was, and the courts can’t effectively intervene because they depend on the input of finders of fact who do not exist. The map below shows which states played the greatest roles in the whole vote-by-mail charade. Just for fun, compare this map to the ones above. Now you know the answer to how candidates who did not campaign engineered a massive increase in Dem voter turnout. And no hanging chads to worry about this time. Are you laughing yet?

And so here we are. Trump lost. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the NBC/CBS/ABC/PBS/CNN/MSNBC/ FoxNews bullhorn tell us so. The Department of Justice is otherwise engaged in shredding documents of their five years of coup attempts, and there is no way to prove the mass media majority wrong. They finally got their way. Who loses? We do.

2019 will be a momentous year. Let that suffice for predictions. Now we have a moment to consider where we are at the end of 2018, and in my opinion most are having difficulty determining that because of a problem with their mental models. I’m going to talk about this without apologizing for length or scope. As always, my chief concern is leaving a record for the ones who will come later, after we are all dust.

I’m organizing this in several parts. First up, a mental model lots of people are using, whether you know of it or not.

1. The Overton Window

This is a model developed in the 1990s. By model I mean a conceptual framework for understanding things that are happening and to some extent how and why, the better to prepare for the future. A conceptual model is a metaphor, a hopefully elegant way of saying “this is like that.” We all have them, in all sizes and scales, modeling our own views of how the world works and even the things in it, from internal combustion engines to PTA meetings.

The Overton Window is a model for distinguishing what’s possible and what isn’t at any given point in time. What’s inside the window frame is the realm in which change, reform, breakthroughs, bad stuff, whatever you want to call it, is possible. What’s hidden and therefore outside of the window frame is the past, the future obviously, and whatever long term process timeline is unfolding. Here’s an example of how the Overton Window is used to explain things.

Same sex romance and politics as reflected by popular music in the 1970s and 1980s.

Feel free to blow up the window size to identify titles and pics.

Status of same sex politics and romance by the time of the Obama Administration.

Pop music may seem trivial as a ‘window’ on the realm of the possible, but it is in some ways sufficient. What’s important from this vantage point? We’re looking at a huge change here, one accomplished in the approximate ten year gap between 1999 and the first Obama term. (We’re naming him for timeline purposes, not as a prime cause.) In the earlier window, hit songs are about self acceptance, coming out, and the emotional burden of homosexuals generally in the American culture. In the later window there is no more asking for acceptance but aggressive, demanding self confidence, a vision of “having it all,” whatever that might consist of.

Overton Window 1’s realm of the possible seems to be what we might call a Separate Peace, a live and let live accommodation between the straight and gay worlds. Overton Window 2 is a realm in which open, state-sponsored gay marriage is not only a possibility but an inevitability. Mind that we are talking about a truly massive shift in public opinion in this differential, on an issue that cuts very deeply to the heart of the cultural consensus on the meaning of human sexuality.

The value of the Overton Model is supposed to lie not in any trick of managed perception but in the opportunity to identify change and try to track its progression from where we were to where we are. The fact of progression is perhaps the key part of any Overton analysis. A timeline is always there, right behind the time segment being focused on. In our case it looks like this:

The ‘open’ window is outlined in black. The timeline graphic has been there behind the wall the whole time.

Our interest is not in the causes for the rapid transition we’re seeing; it’s in the way the model actually works and whether its way of working is effective and useful. Like any conceptual model/metaphor its purpose is to provoke questions and suggest lines of inquiry. Where in the timeline do events behind the pop music culture line up with or explain the transition? What makes the same sex constituency acquire so much more boldness and how is the growth in their assertiveness, anger, and power accomplished at such speed? It might be useful to ask, for example, if we are seeing a spontaneous change of mind here or a mere inevitability mandated by judicial fiat.

It is here that the Overton Window falls short. The window shows us a point of view, not a chain of cause and effect, and it has a structural bias not shown but implicit. We have used the word ‘progression’ several times now. That is what the proffered timeline shows. It is showing us a context in which change is to be understood implicitly as ‘progression’s cognate ‘progress.’

How does it do this? Look at the way the model works in a technical sense. (Check the directional arrows in the previous graphic.) It is the window itself which is being dragged forward through a set of ordered time events that exist independently; that is, they ‘are written’ and the window has to move to keep up. Interestingly, this means that the timeline itself is actually pointing backward, progress working its own will on the focus of the window. The next window, for example, will bring elements of an as yet unseen timeline of progress leftward/backward from today’s future into a new already ‘written’ now. It’s not hard for us to guess that that future timeline includes TG rights, unisex bathrooms, and the demolition of the word ‘gender’ as a meaningful descriptor of anything.

This distortion is an artifact of how the model works, and it is quite easy to see how its reliance on the emotional appeal of progressive transitions can break down utterly and embarrassingly.

Here’s our final application of the Overton Window, focusing this time on progressive perspectives on Donald J. Trump:

Two distant dates. Two different perspectives. What kind of progressive transition will the Overton timeline show us?

Maybe the timeline will show us an evolution, a development, a logical progression from one mental state to another.

Huh. The Overton Window appears to be broken. It can’t point to real causes, and it can’t predict the ‘progress’ that will inevitably occur from this point forward.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to be needing a better conceptual model of what is going on in the heads of the Progress Party. It just so happens we have one.

That brings us to the end of Part 1. The next part, Of Graphics and Tables, can be found here:

Part 2.

Mental Models, Old and New

The most important thing a conceptual model of our present situation should do is explain the extraordinary phase transition regarding Donald Trump that occurred on November 6, 2016, and has not budged at all, not even a blip, in terms of the view of him cherished by the people who call themselves liberals, Democrats, Progressives, and hard line traditional conservatives.

A valid model will not involve reliance on opinion polls, pop culture fads, election horserace tactics or even overarching political strategies. The model will involve understanding the particular reality our culture as a whole is living in, which is not synonymous with anything that can be compiled from statistics of various sorts or the meticulously quoted words of those who have opined about the nature of 21st century reality. Why?

Because reality has become a very dicey business. Broadly and accurately speaking, reality is easy to define as the way things are, the superset of all things of all kinds everywhere, seen and unseen, from the particle and string level to the cosmological/multiverse level. Every kind of reality definition you encounter in contemporary America, however, is only a subset of that greater reality, because the one human drive even more powerful than sex and survival is the imperative to chop reality down to manageable size, in accordance with our own agreed upon criteria.

Here is the metaphor for that subsetted reality I propose:

Yes. A tabletop. A hard glossy, formerly living surface with no legs. Of course, every man, jack, and jill has his own tabletop, and those tabletops have legs you can see and depend upon.

There are others among us, of course, who have their own legless tabletops, but they are not on THIS particular tabletop.

The Main Tabletop is an extrapolation from the rise of science during and after the European Enlightenment that gave us chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology, physics, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines relying on the hard rules of the Scientific Method given us by Sir Isaac Newton. Breakthroughs in these areas also gave us somewhat less nuts-and-bolts-type disciplines like economics, psychology, anthropology, capitalism, earth sciences, and most marvelous of all, advanced mathematics.

The tabletop has no legs because they were finally chopped off in the 19th century when Newton’s mission statement was thrown overboard because it declared science a tool for better understanding and honoring Divine Creation. The toolset he devised was retained, however, and his religious delusions are now chalked up to his Asperger’s.

Hence the Tabletop of our model. It has a hard surface, representing definite tangible reality. Nothing is permitted on its surface but that which can be measured, counted, catalogued, seen, touched, stored, dissected, and plugged into various kinds of probability models and recordkeeping and modeling algorithms. Everything which does not meet these criteria is thrown over the side into the infinite nothingness which is the only larger universe the scientists dare to accept. The meaninglessness of the nothingness is the indispensable tool for declaring that it is not the responsibility of authoritative science to explain life, the universe, or the meaning of absolutely anything. What they have in place of literary mythology is a scientific narrative that tells them all they need to know about the weak-minded human race, where it’s going, and who should be in charge of it. Here’s what that narrative looks like on top of our table.

Don’t worry about the TV show. We’ll get around to it. Runs on PBS between pledge drives.

This isn’t that hard a model component to parse. Just remember that nothing is permitted on this table that hasn’t been subjected to the myopic reality criteria of the current interpretation of the Scientific Method. We weren’t there to collect samples and conduct experiments on the fossils of the cosmologists’ Big Bang. We also can’t draw any sort of line from the beginning of Darwinian Evolution back to the origin of life, which can’t be nailed to the table and must therefore be thrown off it. What we have are fossils of dinosaurs, Darwin’s Theory postulated (by consensus of the cognoscenti) as Fact, and the measurable, countable physical evidence of about 5,000 years of human civilization. Which is quite enough, thank you, to produce repeatable results on the subject of human empires, the inevitability of man’s obsession with building more powerful weapons, and only one what you’d call ‘scientific’ route out of the omnipresent pattern of doom: technology; i.e., building computers and systems and robots that are smarter than we are and uncompromised by dangerous variables like individuality. And please don’t forget there’s no earthly reason for looking beyond this particular tabletop, because the physicists have discovered proofs that we simply cannot ever know enough about the big mess called the universe to look out there for help or even answers. If we had any questions left.

Which leaves only the one residual and not that important question anyone has to deal with. Who should be running things as the human experience winds down. Scientists are too bored to do it. Much much better to make high six figure salaries spending government money on detail-oriented projects like whether birds or feathers came first in the evolutionary Jitterbug.

Did somebody mention government? That’s obviously who should be running things. It should look like democracy and say fine words about liberty, opportunity, equality, elections, and progress, while doing what is necessary, which is a hard detail-intensive job for experts in dozens of academically approved disciplines. The technocracy they create is immune to everything merely human that opposes it, and the control of the tabletop by technocrats is absolute. Why they have all those meetings and hearings and managed planning projects. Theirs is the tabletop the scientists’ model of reality brought into being.

All is for the best in the least dangerous of all conceivable realities.

Great progress has been made by the time of the 21st century. The ruins of the horror called Christianity, which began the Enlightenment and only by accident failed to end it, have been pushed so far over the edge of the table that they’ll careen into the void any day now. Thankfully, there’s a substitute for religion produced by ever helpful science, which retains the fear of apocalypse in the form of a long term mankiller called climate change that can be used to give the technocrats a kind of papal authority. The advantage of this kind of artificial religion is that you really can measure and count and quantify things of earth to a fare-thee-well, and no big amorphous phantasm called the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some such pejorative nickname has any power over a human government that owns the reins of political power, the applications of information technology, and the will to ride roughshod over the rebellious in the name of those who prefer to live under the wing of a bureaucrat who tells the same lies enough times. Take that, Spaghetti Monster:

Look at that sad cloud formation. Pitiful.

Whoops. That graphic made our tabletop look just a little smaller in the scheme of things. But the sheer size and extent and variety of things not included or permitted on the tabletop doesn’t give them any power. All of the stuff that doesn’t belong, can’t be nailed, or ridiculed off the cold surface of REAL reality just doesn’t matter. Look at it all:

Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody.

These are insubstantial fables. Everyone knows — and our experts have repeatedly proven — that there is no mystery about UFOs or Flight 19 or the Thunderbird of the Native Americans or legends of ghosts or worlds beyond our ken. You do the math.

Maybe not the right instruction. Math is a tricky subject. You can’t see it, measure it, or even count it or put it under a microscope or at the end of a telescope. It is far bigger, in fact infinitely bigger, than the science which uses it as a utilitarian tool. It is at least as large as the entire universe, and it contains so many nested infinities even these can’t be counted. And unfortunately the very sad fact for our tabletop is that math preexists mankind and, given the rules of operation of the universe as we claim to know it, math is older than the universe as well.

But there is no meaning. Math can have no real meaning either because it can’t be nailed to our tabletop. In that sense it doesn’t even exist. Something men made up by accident that looks sort of infinite from certain points of view.

Oh well.

What does any of this have to do with Trump and the curious case of the Overton Window? (Part 1 of this post)

This the end of Part 2. The concluding section is here:

Part 3

The Trump Enigma Explained

We’ve seen the universe of things that can be ignored because they aren’t real and don’t exist.

Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody. Not even possible. Like figuring out where the gigantic moon we see came from: a huge (yuge?) mystery staring them right in the face. Nobody cares.

See that little ship riding a cloud in the upper right quadrant? It’s called The Flying Dutchman. A ghost story of the sea. People like the fantasy, retell it, claim to have seen it. No harm done. It’s nothing.

Until you open your eyes one day and look up from the all powerful conference room table to behold this:

The Good Ship Trump.

The rest of this is pretty simple. There is nothing of what you’d call reasoned analysis in attempts from every quarter to deal with the Trump presidency. The ones who would ‘remove’ him (and that is exactly the right word) cannot even permit his existence. He is not real, he is not of the table that is their cramped universe, and they have no tools or words or strategies to undo his offense against reality as they perceive it. He is an absolute, proven impossibility that is nevertheless THERE in front of and above them. During the campaign they had a full year to nail him to the table, put him under their microscopes, dissect him from stem to stern, count his ‘lies,’ graph his unfitness for a place at the technocrat table. When they found they couldn’t even touch him, they repeatedly threw effigies of the Trump phantasm off the table, but he was always back in their faces, never fell off in fact. Now they are stuck, paralyzed in an incredibly long wail of denial because they have nothing but denial to throw at him.

That’s why the Trump phenomenon, particularly the bizarre reactions of so-called smart people and their loutish serfs, has always seemed so insane. It is insane. It’s a psychotic break, the kind experienced when one’s whole sense of reality is broken into bloody splinters.

It will continue. Whether they succeed in their nominal objectives or not, the broken ones will never be whole again. Their table has a permanent wobble. America on the other hand has a reality that includes far more than tax tables and regulatory bureaucracies. And the Americans who elected Trump aren’t likely to forget that again.

DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC

The Millennials stomp on the “Angry White Guys.”

MTV promotes Resolutions for White Guys.

An excerpt:

“Just in time for the holiday season, MTV News has issued a series of New Year’s resolutions exclusively for white males — because, the network says, white guys could “do a little better in 2017.”

“A video posted to MTV News’ Twitter account Monday afternoon features a group of millennials lecturing so-called “white guys” as to how they can improve themselves in the New Year.

“Suggestions include recognizing that America was never “great” for minorities, and to stop bragging about being “woke.”

More excerpts:

“Can we all just agree that ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t the opposite of ‘All Lives Matter?’” one of the people in the video says. “Black lives just matter. There’s no need to overcomplicate it.”

“Also, Blue Lives Matter isn’t a thing,” adds another. “Cops weren’t born with blue skin. Right? I mean, yeah. They weren’t born blue!”

One woman suggests white people learn what “mansplaining” is, and then stop doing it, while another says that “nobody who has black friends says they have black friends” to prove they’re not racist.

“We all love Beyoncé, and yes, she’s black, so of course she cares about black issues. I’m talking to you Fox News,” one man in the video says.

“Representatives for MTV News did not immediately respond when asked whether the network planned to produce New Year’s resolutions videos for other racial or ethnic groups.”

But this is a game we play by InstaPunk Rules, because we hold all the cards of education, experience, and accomplishment. So we have a set of Resolutions for the zombies at MTV.

Look at those eyes. Blank eyes. Dead eyes. Zombie eyes.

Yeah. Resolutions. Ours for you.

1. Quit being such a pussy. Whether you have one or not. But all you emasculated Beatles fans do. Your own curvy thing with a hole in the middle is gently weeping like they always are.

2. Try very hard to understand that burning down your neighborhoods to protest the plight of your neighborhoods is just really frickin’ dumb.

Very persuasive.

Hands up. Don’t arrest me for arson.

Yeah. Makes white guys all gooey inside when you burn your whole lives down. Not. Makes us sad and disgusted instead.

Hating cops while you’re protected by cops. Against serious threats. Cool? No.

3. Quit hating Jews. It makes you the Nazis.

You see them as rats?

Oh yeah. Stories from a house just like yours no doubt, victimization at the hands of the man. Only steeped, steeped in the fear of death.

Read the story. Everybody. Then whine about Palestinians.

4. Quit defending Sharia. Unless you secretly desire that all clits be cut off and all female bodies be hidden forever, and all rapes are the woman’s fault.

Stoning of a woman who resisted arranged marriage.

Female Genital Mutilation

ISIS Beheadings

Funny how angry white guys might object to all of this. Maybe they know what it is to be a man, a forgotten virtue in our decadent culture.

5. Quit hating Trump. He’s far better educated than you will ever be, and if you condemn him for his hair and coarse language, look at your own idiotic coifs and even more foul mouthed tweets and tattoos.

A very smart man beats the system.at half the price. Tell me you don’t love that.

6. Think of all the grief and violence that could have been avoided if the slogan had been Black Lives Matter Too.

Yeah. We all love Beyonce’s camel toe.

LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 26: Singer Beyonce performs onstage during the 56th GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on January 26, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Do the high yella special/FX and hairdos do it for you?

7. Quit naked protesting. Guys do it hoping to get laid. Women do it because they really really really ALWAYS want to get naked in public. Not exactly a political platform on either side.

Nekkid Nuns with Germanic script. See the Snowflake Bible at Amazon.

Naked Protesting.

8. About White Guys. Look at the commercials for all the dumb sitcoms and reality shows you watch. What do they want? A super patriarchy? No. To be left alone on the couch eating Fritos, drinking beer, watching hockey games on TV, and listening to metal.

Porn? Maybe. Because you don’t shave your armpits and you want a notarized permission slip for a kiss or a breast grope signed in triplicate. In case nobody told you, you’re not worth it, you third wave feminists. You don’t smell good, you don’t do anything well but bitch.

Been there, not done that.

And you’re fat, as well as hairy.

Not to mention gross and slutty.

And did we mention sweaty?

And crude to boot?

Why we white boys prefer the Fritos, the beer and the metal.

9. Millennial Boys. Number One Resolution. Look in the goddam mirror. Would you hire you? Would you listen to anything you had to say on any subject whatever? Would you fuck you? Unless you were another effeminate Millennial Boy? No. Why you’re so creepily obsessed with LGBT issues and the cascading nonsense of made up pronouns.

10. Hey. Learn how to read. Learn history from someone other than Howard Zinn. Sit up straight and discover the steel inside your spaghetti spine.

About the King James Bible, written by Shakespeare’s equal, William Tinsdale. Enormous genius.

Don’t tell us you know everything when you know nothing.

I’ve spent my whole life anticipating you, the Millennial Generation. Saw you coming 40 years ago. Wanted to save you. You can’t be saved. All I can do is document your pitiful plight. Do I still love you? Yes. As I loved the Zeezers before you. But I’ve been at it too long now. All that’s left to me is putting myself on record.

Find it at Amazon.

100 pages that explain everything about X-Gens and Millennials.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbUMuZ1Pu34

Yeah. These guys. The GOOD Nazis.

David Brooks. Supposed to be one thing. Yet is another. What we used to call, in wartime, a double agent. He’s the James Bond of The New York Times. Agent 007 of the left. Somebody wrote a book about that. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Red spies inside MI-5 and 6. The scandal nearly sank the U.K. back in the day. The New York Times has never been embarrassed about apologizing for Communism. It’s their bread and butter.

So the global left is fighting back, now that Communism is cool again. Burning cars and buildings to make us rethink our Trump votes. Plotting ways of undermining the Electoral College to force-feed their totalitarian sense of entitlement down our throats. And now, David Brooks, the so-called conservative of the New York Times* (in reality, communist pimp to WAPO’s faux conservative Jennifer Rubin, ultimate Hillary whore), has a Final Solution when all of the vain car and constitution burnings fail:

“Finally, it seems important to be humbled and taught by this horrific election result. Trump’s main problem in governing is not going to be some fascistic ideology; his main problem is going to be his own attention span, ignorance and incompetence. If he’s left to bloviate while others are left to run the country and push through infrastructure plans, maybe things won’t be disastrous.

“The job for the rest of us is to rebind the fabric of society, community by community, and to construct a political movement for the post-Trump era. I suspect the coming political movements will be identified on two axes: open and closed and individual and social.

“Those who believe in open believe in open trade, relatively open immigration, an active foreign policy and racial integration. Those who believe in closed believe in protective trade, closed borders, a withdrawn foreign policy and ethnic separatism…

“Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his assent.

“After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think.”

Why I keep thinking of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and chief engineeer, racing around Germany in his lavish Mercedes trying desperately to prevent the physical destruction of Germany and the buildings he had designed for the Third Reich. A vain quest for redemption, with no honor and more than a soupçon of pure ego.

Brooks isn’t a conservative. He’s not an intellectual. He’s a stooge, driving madly through D.C. to save his own sorry ass. By running away from anything remotely resembling personal responsibility. He’s just being a smug snob in a Mercedes. Trump can’t be impeached by a Republican majority house and senate. And he certainly won’t resign. He’s got way more energy and drive than you ever did, cuz.

“We can’t go morally numb.” Really? What did you do, Mr. Magoo? Running and running away you be, Albert…

*Originally said Washington Post. Corrected by my friend Aben. Forgive me.

Trump supporters being naughty to the press.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is ready to fight Joe Biden, after the Vice President said he’d like to take Trump “behind the gym.”

“I’d love that. I’d love that. Mr. Tough Guy,” Trump said during a rally in Florida, after highlighting Biden’s comment.

“You know, he’s Mr. Tough Guy,” he said.

Trump continued, mocking Biden for merely talking tough.

“You know when he’s Mr. Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself,” he said.

Trump appeared willing to take Biden up on his offer.

”Some things in life you could really love doing,” he said as the crowd cheered.

It got all, like, smaller on her.

WikiTakealeaks has just released another stream of damning text messages from Hillary and her slave subalterns. Among the new revelations:

— Can’t remember the names of TV and movie stars once idolized in youth. Clark who? Gary who? Cary who? Hedy who? Christopher Walken. Who?

— Often stumbles and nearly falls making the trip to the coffee machine for that first cup of morning joe.

— Has to hang onto various pieces of furniture just navigate a smallish room.

— Gets mysteriously angry with longtime friends who say dumb things they think are smart.

— Uses four letter words a lot more now than before.

— Has no idea just how bad a football team Yale has this year.

— Thinks Mariska Hargitay is getting fat but can’t remember the name of her TV show.

— Has to splay feet going downstairs in the morning to avoid falling all the way down.

— Laughs suddenly for no reason, as if some voice in the head said something amusing. Startles and alarms everybody in the room.

— Keeps switching eyeglasses trying to find a pair that works, then loses them all in a matter of moments.

— Can’t find anything to wear that doesn’t look too old, too young, too dumb.

— Somehow causes light bulbs to burn out just by turning them on.

— Can’t do arithmetic sums in the head anymore.

— Can’t remember that Sammy and Rikki are not Shroedinger’s Greyhound, alive and dead at the same time.

Oops.

Those leaks weren’t about Hillary. They were about me. Why I’m voting for Trump.

Have it on good authority I’m a deplorable racist idiot. Can’t remember who said it, but it must be true Because HILLARY.

David French has been assaulted by the Trump People.

I’ll get to the French thing in a minute. First, I’m going to say my goodbyes to Facebook. Goodbyes. I’ll still be here doing my thing, going back to where I belong. Here’s what I said a couple years back on the subject of going home.. Should have paid attention to what I was trying to tell myself.

Poking Around

Johnny Last Chance Garage

Yeah. Come back to an old place, especially from your youth, and everything seems smaller.

When you were a kid, the Coca Cola cooler seemed big. It’s not. It’s also rusted and broken. But that’s okay. If you have an Amex card, you can still get a cold king size glass bottle of coke. If you’re a billionaire.

I’m tired of pretending. Even the ones who think they know don’t. Intellectually maybe, they have some appreciation of the dire circumstance. They see Godzilla emerging from the sea at the city’s edge. What they don’t see, and never will, is that everyone alive now beckoned Godzilla, asked him to come in one way or another. By the fights they refused to fight, the narrow ambitions they pursued while the giant stomped closer, the semantics they used to deflect responsibility from themselves because all they cared about was their families. As if families will exist when freedom has been extinguished by a reptilian moron.

Got a scuffed old cowboy boot with a bone boot chain. Propping it on the porch rail. Want to fight? I welcome it. Come. Fight. All you millennial slackers. I’m the elder now. And I don’t care about your feelings anymore. Such freedom. You have absolutely no idea how much more I know about everything than you do.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh. I can breathe again.

It’s not incremental. It’s factorial. I’m breathing this tremendous sigh of relief. The cars go by. I’ve shown you my work and you don’t comprehend it. You drive by. I breathe. Do you understand that? It makes me free. Now, when I dream, my dreams are not so bad.

I’ve got an old Triumph in Johnny’s Garage. I’m kick-starting it now. But I’ll be back in an hour or so for a king size Coke unless there’s a 16 oz RC Cola in that magnificent artillery bottle.

As I said, you have no idea what all is in my head.

Robert Laird via Johnny Dodge at 6:51 PM, Febuary 15, 2014.

**********************

So David French is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

“Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.” I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.”

Okay. Bad stuff. I’ve been through some of it myself, thanks to genial Internet maestro Glenn Reynolds who threw me under the bus for one post. I got called every name in the book all over the Internet, “eat shit and die, motherfucking racist” being the consensus theme. So I sympathize with Mr. French and family. I do.

On the other hand, David French actively participated in a massive, organized verbal gang rape of Donald Trump because he has bad hair and didn’t go to Yale like politicians are supposed to. David French actually ran for president FOR ONE DAY and then stopped. Weak. You make yourself look weak and, guess what, the morlocks will attack.

It’s called consequences. You act like a shit and people will act like shit back. And there are a lot of them and they know more about being a shit than you or Glenn Reynolds do.

So I’m of two minds about the whole thing. Yes, I’m sorry that the wife and kids were insulted, threatened, and subjected to abuse they didn’t deserve. But I’m also wondering if National Review will learn anything from the barging in of reality to their prissy, snotty enclave on the snob-right.

Probably academic anyway. National Review will be closing its doors soon, leaving a lot of families out in the cold. That will probably hurt more than nasty pics and videos you don’t actually have to watch. Because you do need a paycheck to fund your hubris in a moldy opinion journal.

Ah. The sudden unexpected kiss. Just don’t do it on a college campus these days.

An hour or so ago I came across this gem from Clarice Feldman.

Via Clarice Feldman’s FB page

“From an email I received: ”

“Our side has done a good job of pointing out what real sexual assault looks like, so just for fun, I think I’ll take up what the PC crowd wants to fight. Fighting rape and real sexual assault in the inner cities and by predatory older males against middle and high school students is difficult and the statistics tend to stigmatize African-American males. So the P.C. crowd goes after the kind of ‘sexual assault” that if often quite benign and part of semi-modern/traditional courtship rituals.

“First person story: After what the PC police would call a “sexual assault” – but I considered a surprise but not unwelcome kiss, my husband to be, [snip] introduced me to that delightful little farce, P.G. Wodehouse’s Money in the Bank in which a shy guy named Jeff is encouraged to just grab and kiss the girl of his dreams before she makes a terrible mistake by marrying the wrong man. To this day, we call it “The Wodehouse method.” I mention this, not to excuse bad language, or to imply Trump had good intentions, but only to put the term “sexual assault” in proper perspective. (BTW, Money in the Bank also has a character named Mr. Trumper – whose role I cannot now recall, but he is neither the shy young Jeffrey, nor his older, wiser advisor.)

“Political Correctness has invaded every aspect of our lives; but the area where it is now being felt most intensely is in the sexual realm. While pushing Planned Parenthood’s “Kiddie Porn” to K-4 students as “health education,” and making statements in the press like this one: “girls have to get used to seeing male genitalia” as a defense for transgendered locker rooms” (paraphrased, but not inaccurately), the PC education crowd insists that college women are constantly at risk of “sexual assault.” If you properly define “sexual assault” as rape or intent to rape, college campuses are actually among the safest places for women of college age. If that were not true, no one would pay $50,000 or more to let their precious daughters attend college. And those of us who teach on these campuses, and are close to our students, would be aware that our women students were being constantly “assaulted.”

Here’s the book that was referenced.

Money in the Bank

Thing is, this is a breakthrough kind of comparison. I’ve probably read the majority of Wodehouse’s 90+ novels, and nowhere in any of them is there a single off color word or phrase or scene. He is probably as close to sexless as it’s possible to be. For him, romance was essentially the ultimate maguffin that drove his hilarious plots. The thought that spoiled college girls could be “triggered” by a Wodehouse kiss is about the most ridiculous thing I could ever imagine.

I know what I’m talking about. I’ve written quite a bit about this astoundingly innocent genius over the years.

Because Guy asked

“P. G. Wodehouse. …One I’ve written about before. I read the first definitive biography of him a few years back, and what’s clear about him — as for so many other humorists — is that his life was in many ways sad, even though he lived to great old age, produced about a hundred novels, and umpty-gazillion short stories. He was a man of baffling contradictions and therefore a more useful source of insight about the U.K. than most of the “serious” writers in his country who were contemporaries or came later. He seems to us locked permanently in the England between the two world wars, a fantasy realm of country estates, two-seat roadsters, gentlemen’s clubs, and aristocratic aunts with lorgnettes and no knowledge whatever of everyday English life. Yet he is the source cited by Evelyn Waugh, the deadliest satirist of his age, as the master of dialogue from whom Waugh learned how to eviscerate pretension and hypocrisy in the most maliciously brilliant novels of the twentieth century. In person, Waugh was witty and mean; Wodehouse was everywhere described as dull. Wodehouse was afraid of assertive women, indifferent to sex, not because he was gay, it seems, but because his personality was formed by distant, even cold, family relations, and then frozen for good in adolescence by his happier experience in boarding schools when he finally escaped from home. Then he managed to get himself exiled forever from Britain by being a “good sport” on the radio when he was interned by Germans in the early days of World War II. He never went home again. He never complained. Because that’s the way Brits are. No matter what they do to you, you have to petend to have the emotional range of a cricket bat.”

I was such a fan by my early twenties that I named my cat for one of his feline characters.

The Secret Life Of Elliott

And I remain delighted at every opportunity to enjoy a soufflé that never ever goes flat.

Jeeves and the Song of Songs

If you’ve never discovered P.G. Wodehouse, I encourage you to do so now. I suspect we’re all going to be needing some first rate escapism very very soon.

THAT TRUMP IS OUT OF CONTROL!

Had the nerve to say he really enjoys hooters. Cad.

Also said bunnies are sexy. Pervert.

Ew. He just up and kissed the pageant queen. On the cheek! Disgusting.

Does that give the MSM Wolves some prey to go in ravening pursuit of? Sure it does.

ON THE OTHER HAND…

Rahm & Nancy. Did they carve their initials on a DC cherry tree?

That’s just old Uncle Joe explaining to a fan what a lecherous creep Trump is. Move along, move along.

The Big O has an ironclad rule: Look but NEVER touch.

ALMOST never.

Well, let’s just say infrequently. Okay?

AND THEN, OF COURSE, THEM GUYS.

Good to see he hasn’t lost HIS touch. Wink wink.

The rumors about Hill’s real orientation are simply not true. She was having one of her bobbing head attacks.

Where’s Huma?! I feel a midnight conference coming on.

Being up working hard till 3 am can make anyone get a little squiggle eyed in the morning, okay?

There you have it. Trump a predatory bum. Democrats just fine friendly normal people. Now go write your stories.

It’s another huge basket filled with ALL the NeverTrumpers and Hillary voters. They are actively promoting a corrupt and malign dictatorship that will make slaves of us all so that the ruling elites can continue to prosper.

Just be careful what you wish for, you myopic prigs. If you dump Trump, there will be a huge write-in vote for Trump and you will lose catastrophically in downticket congressional races. You are trading the country away for a moment of self serving triumph over a threat to what you deludedly regard as your political sinecure. But you will be swept away in the tidal wave of political anger you have deliberately provoked. What a bunch of hapless, selfish idiots. You’ll deserve what you get. But we won’t.

Mark Cuban would like to convince the world he’s not a throwback Neanderthal. Or at least better than the Old Golden Boy. If he’s not the Golden Fleece. Unless you’re a Morlock.

He whines that Trump wrote off $996,000,000 on his taxes while he, Mark the Caveman, wrote off $11,000,000 and can’t count to 996,000,000.

This has to be the source of the friction because Cuban, or Caveman, clearly doesn’t have a record of being any nicer or more ethical than the Trump he wishes he could look down on.

From Wiki, which clearly has no more interest in disclosing Caveman’s cockups than Google and Yahoo do in their stain free links of their Hillary reportage.

SEC INSIDE TRADER ALLEGATIONS

On November 17, 2008, it was reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil suit against Mark Cuban relating to alleged insider trading in the shares of Mamma.com, now known as Copernic.[63] A stock dilution occurred shortly after a trade in June 2004, giving hints of inside knowledge at the time of the trade, and Cuban allegedly was saved from a loss of $750,000.[64] The SEC claimed that Cuban ordered the sale of his holdings in Mamma.com after he had been confidentially approached by the company to participate in a transaction likely to dilute shares of current shareholders. Cuban disputed the charges, saying he had not agreed to keep the information secret.[65] On his blog, Cuban contended the facts were false and that the investigation was “a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion”.[66] DealBook, a section of The New York Times, reported through an anonymous source that Cuban believed the investigation was motivated by an SEC employee having taken offense to his interest in possibly distributing the film Loose Change.[67]

In July 2009, the U.S. District Court dismissed the charges against Cuban, and the SEC appealed. In September 2010, an appeals court said that the district court had erred and that further proceedings would be necessary to address the merits of the suit.[68]

A federal jury in Texas found in favor of Cuban on October 16, 2013.[69] The nine-member jury issued the verdict after deliberating 3 hours and 35 minutes.

In March 2014, Cuban was on air at CNBC criticizing high-frequency trading (HFT).[70] Those against HFT, such as Cuban, believe the technology is equivalent to automated insider trading.[71]

*****************

For example, try as you might, with whatever search term you choose, neither Google nor Yahoo will link this little gem which is buried at Wikipedia.

NBA Policy Controversies

Cuban’s ownership has been the source of extensive media attention and controversy involving league policies.[81]

Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1.665 million for 13 incidents.[82] In a June 30, 2006 interview, Mavericks player Dirk Nowitzki said about Cuban:[83]

‘He’s got to learn how to control himself as well as the players do. We can’t lose our temper all the time on the court or off the court, and I think he’s got to learn that, too. He’s got to improve in that area and not yell at the officials the whole game. I don’t think that helps us … He sits right there by our bench. I think it’s a bit much. But we all told him this before. It’s nothing new. The game starts, and he’s already yelling at them. So he needs to know how to control himself a little.”

In an interview with the Associated Press, Cuban said that he matches NBA fines with charitable donations of equal amounts.[84] In a nationally publicized incident in 2002, he criticized the league’s manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, saying that he “wouldn’t be able to manage a Dairy Queen.” Dairy Queen management took offense to Cuban’s comments and invited him to manage a Dairy Queen restaurant for a day. Cuban accepted the company’s invitation and worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks.[85]

During the 2005–06 NBA season, Cuban started a booing campaign when former Mavericks player Michael Finley returned to play against the Mavericks as a member of the San Antonio Spurs.[86] In a playoff series between the Mavericks and Spurs, Cuban cursed Spurs forward Bruce Bowen[87] and was fined $25,000 by the NBA for rushing onto the court and criticizing NBA officials.[88] After the 2006 NBA Finals, Cuban was fined $250,000 by the NBA for repeated misconduct following the Mavericks’ loss to the Miami Heat in Game Five of the 2006 NBA Finals.

In February 2007, Cuban publicly criticized NBA Finals MVP Dwyane Wade and declared that he would get fined if he made any comments about what he thought really happened in the 2006 NBA Finals.[89][90]

On January 16, 2009, the league fined Cuban $25,000 for yelling at Denver Nuggets player J. R. Smith at the end of the first half on a Mavericks-at-Nuggets game played on January 13.[91][92] Cuban was apparently incensed that Smith had thrown an elbow that barely missed Mavericks forward Antoine Wright.[93] Cuban offered to match the fine with a donation to a charity of Smith’s choosing. Cuban stated that if he doesn’t hear from Smith that he will donate the money to the NHL Players’ Association Goals and Dreams Fund in the names of Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore.[94] In May 2009, Cuban made a reference to the Denver Nuggets being “thugs” after a loss to the Nuggets in game 3 of the Western Conference Semifinals. The statement was geared towards the Nuggets and their fans. As he passed Kenyon Martin’s mother, who was seated near Cuban as he left the arena, he pointed at her and said, “that includes your son”. This controversial comment revisited media attention on Cuban yet again. Cuban issued an apology the next day referencing the poor treatment of away fans in arenas around the league. The league issued a statement stating that they would not fine him.[95]

On May 22, 2010, Cuban was fined $100,000 for comments he made during a television interview about trying to sign LeBron James.[96]

Despite his history, he was notably silent during the Mavericks’ 2011 championship playoff run.[97]

Despite Cuban’s history with David Stern, he believed the NBA Commissioner would leave a lasting legacy “of a focus on growth and recognizing that the NBA is in the entertainment business and that it’s a global product, not just a local product. Whatever platforms that took us to, he was ready to go. He wasn’t protective at all. He was wide open. I think that was great.”[98]

On January 18, 2014, Cuban was once again fined $100,000 for confronting referees and using inappropriate language toward them. As with previous fines, Cuban confirmed that he will match the fine with a donation to charity, however, with a condition that he reaches two million followers on his Twitter account. Cuban also jokingly commented that he could not let Stern leave without a proper farewell.[99]

On October 28, 2015, Cuban said the Los Angeles Clippers were still not a “respectable franchise” in regards to the botched deal between DeAndre Jordan and the Mavericks.[100]

*****************

Cuban is afraid he’s not elite but the man he is, who looks and acts like a prognathous thug.

More man than Cuban.

What he is is worse indeed. A half-wit Hapsburg, who bullies serfs and pretends to royalty.

A precious rich boy who got lucky with no credentials. Hapsburgs spring to mind: all jaw (literally and figuratively) and no brain.

Cuban. One more Hillary eunuch in a world where Trump is the Man. Crawl back to Dallas, poor boy.

For him:

For her:

For Lester Holt, a classic from the black Johnny Mathis:

For Mark Cuban, the uncharismatic Trump wannabe:

For the much sharper and cooler TV audience than the MSM detects:

My wife’s gonna watch, but I’m a few episodes behind on HLN’s Forensic Files.

No, he’s not a recently paroled serial killer. Guess again.

On MSNBC yesterday, Bill Kristol pontificated at length about the reasons Trump should not be president. He expressed a strong desire for Trump to choke in the debates. He summed up by saying he thinks Trump knows he really shouldn’t be president.

When the admiring interviewer asked Kristol what he was going to do in November, he said, “I’m going to vote for the Republican Party’s nominee for president, Evan McMullin.”

Who he? you ask. He’s the splendidly charismatic looking fellow up top. You’ll thrill to his qualifications, which couldn’t represent more of a conservative character and background. He went to Brigham Young, which we all know is cool because being a Mormon helped Romney so much. And he went to Wharton for an MBA, proving he’s way out of Trump’s league when it comes to business. In fact, he actually managed to squeeze a couple of years of business experience (at Goldman Sachs) into his lifelong career of government and government-lobbyist jobs.

He’s a foreign policy expert because he was a CIA operative in the Middle East during our many successful recent adventures there. When the last helicopter left the last standing Green Zone building in Iraq, he came home to assume a position as the foreign policy adviser to the Republican house leadership. After the Syria and Libya triumphs, he was promoted to public policy director for the same brilliantly inspiring and effective group, in which capacity he conveyed the policy suggestions of numerous lobbyists, with the associated bulging envelopes to key members of the Republican Caucus.

Well, you can see why conservatives should rally around this almost memorable character. It’s high time his many years of service to the powers that be in DC and NY were rewarded with elected office. He’ll be zooming past Trump in the polls any day now. Don’t you agree?

Because she’s ready, she’s strong, she is W-O-M-A-N. Woman. On lots of empowering medication.

In this corner, the former First Lady of the United States, unindicted co-conspirator in literally dozen of federal legal fights. She’s never lost when there’s a ring judge who wants to see his wife and children alive again.

Lookin’ Good. Lead with the left, baby. But you already knew that.

In this corner, Donald “The Jabberwock” Trump, master of misdirection and malaprop mayhem. If he can’t manhandle you, he’ll maul your manners and make men mewl with emasculated muppetitude.

Beware the Jabberwock my son. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch…

And in the center of the ring, that really obnoxious announceeeeerrr!

The ref says “Protect yourself at all times. Touch gloves and go.”

The Jabberwock he crowed, “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious bandersnatch. Unless you can lay the banderilious snatch out with a straight right hand.”

Damn. What a cad. You can’t hit her when she’s coughing a lung out. Oh. You can? Gee whiz.

Debates to come.

Governor Kravitz of Ohio

Jennifer Rubin, WAPO’s resident Judas Goat for the Hillary campaign is tickled pink by this exercise in dainty foot stamping by Governor Kravitz, who has been flirting like mad with both Obama and Hillary since Trump called her an incompetent cross-dresser:

“A top aide for John Kasich slammed Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus for saying that former candidates who don’t support Donald Trump could be penalized in some way.

“Priebus said Sunday that former candidates who have refused to back Trump despite signing a pledge during the primaries “need to get on board” and that the RNC will look into potential penalties for withholding support.
“The idea of a greater purpose beyond oneself may be alien to political party bosses like Reince Priebus, but it is at the center of everything Governor Kasich does. He will not be bullied by a Kenosha political operative that is unable to stand up for core principles or beliefs,” John Weaver, a top aide for Kasich said in a statement.”

Oops. I blame Autocorrect. I put in the pic and then it went and changed the name on me. Sorry.

Oops again. I’m almost as careless and incompetent as Jennifer Rubin, aren’t I? Put in the wrong pic. Sorry. Here’s the right pic.

Governor Kravitz of Ohio

I know, I know. Don’t ask me. Ask Autocorrect. I’m late for elevenses at Starbucks.