Tagged: opinion
Nothing Surprises
It’s all hype. There are no surprises.
I really want to say something about the content of Jack Smith’s “motion for immunity determinations”, but the truth is that the only thing that bothers me about it is that it is being hyped as “October Surprise!” I’m bothered because it isn’t a surprise! In fact, nothing surprises.
Nothing surprised because the news cycle is not 24/7, the cycle is perpetual. In fact, there is no cycle anymore. Also, there are no journalists. Instead, there are varying levels of paid hype-snitches.
We are suckers when we insist that there is such a thing as news and journalists. There used to be news and journalists. But today there are only empty forms. There is no substance. Something new is occurring, some new kind of communication. And the way to keep the upper hand, the way to stay true to yourself, is to admit it. And then train yourself to be as discerning as possible.
Example:
“October surprise! October surprise!” says the news.
You think, “Next!”
Got it?
Power Vs. Acquiring Power
Trump is about to be the man who defeated the first female nominee and the first Black female nominee. I do not come across many, if any, comments on this fact of the election cycle.
It seems to me that there is a continuum of reasons why this is not discussed. On one end, there is the noble (and therefore extremely unlikely) notion that the formerly fun “men vs. woman” schtick is so abhorrent to us woke folks that it is unworthy of our time. On the other end, there is the sober fact that leadership in Republics has never been about sex.
Leadership, I propose, is about power. And while there are many different types of power, there is only one way to gain power: you must take it.
Hillary Clinton did not take the power. Kamala Harris’ entire political career seems to be defined by accepting power.
As for Trump? His career, his notoriety, and his very real power comes solely from his constant belief that there is a power vacuum and he is the man to fill it.
We’ve all seen the clip of 30-something Trump declare he just may have to run for president. And whatever he was thinking until 2008, by the time he saw Obama’s lack of power, Trump obviously convinced himself that there was more power for the taking—and he took it. Who can forget Obama’s smug, “At least I will go down as a president”? Would a powerful man say that?
So ladies, take note. In not having been president, it has never been about you being women. People care that you are weak, just like Obama was weak. And people want power in the presidency. That’s all it is about.
The Image of a Microscope which Accompanied the Science Article—That’s What Bothered Me Today
The Sunday paper had an interesting article about the current war with China. Interesting as it was, there was no call to action. Or at least not a memorable one. There certainly was nothing for citizens to do. I think what I’m suggesting about the op/ed was that the scale wasn’t appropriate.
On the other hand, there was an article suggesting two “Life Science” bills be voted down. One of the two stock “science-y” images the paper used was of a microscope. Of all the articles and opinions in today’s paper, this irked me the most. Why? Because unlike the other author’s claim that China is an existential threat to America (the sky is a-falling!), this image is one which an individual—likely an editor—can do something about.
“Science” is not merely tool use. If anything, science is to tool (science:tool) as man is to wheel (science:tool::man:wheel). Science invents tools; science is never the process of using tools.
And an editor should know this—could know this. And that editor would be doing a service to truth, and his bottom line, if they put a bit more reason into their product.
What image should the editor use to capture science?
There are many that would work. But an easy one would be of someone writing an excellently organized paper, with a title which sufficiently describes the paper’s purpose.
Black Women Need To Be Fired
Trump is going to win. The compelling reason after last week’s unbelievable DNC that I use to combat the media circle-jerk is the media does not lead with her “electoral college” path to victory. Instead, they run the headlines of her mere popularity.
This post and its content is not about “we need to follow the rules”. This post is about how there are rules and what the rules (which everybody does currently follow) show (Trump winning) is not being highlighted by the media. Instead, they are avoiding the topic. This, of course, is their prerogative. Who are any of us to insist someone to drop support of their free choice?
Trump wins. Done deal. Might as well write the history books now.
And yet, for as long as I can remember, there has passed a sort-of life-truth among Whites: Black women cannot be fired.
I do not remember the first time I heard of this notion, but it was early. It was probably in high school, ‘96-‘99.
I definitely remember that while in the Air Force I first heard about “Gee-Ess” employees and how they could never be fired. Worse, the rumor was held that the under or non-performer would actually get promoted.
Again, this was just rumor—zeitgeist.
It must have been around 2005, then, that I heard that beyond GS employees not being able to be fired, if it was a Black woman who worked as a GS, she was literally untouchable. In my mind, for over two decades, right or wrong, I have believed that the situation was such that if a black woman was fired from a federal job, it would prompt a Supreme Court Decision.
Do you hear me, people?
Trump has won. It is a done deal.
And yet I am not blind to the fact that the obstacle in his path is a federally employed Black woman.
Clash. Of. The. Titans.
(Or one more example of it.)
Here’s my thought, my underlying not-distasteful philosophy: I want Black women to live abundantly. I want Black women to achieve beyond their highest aspirations. I wouldn’t care one iota if some super-power nation promoting and securing peace and prosperity for all mankind came to be and was led by Black women.
But I do not believe any of those things will ever happen until Black women are fired.
So, I say again, Black women need to be fired.
Ben Shapiro’s “Authoritarian Joy” Piece Misses the Point
He’s a busy man. I get it. But he missed the point.
We don’t need someone to clarify to Americans that joy is an emotion and not policy. We don’t need someone to clarify that appeals to emotion have been used by bad guys in the past.
Instead, we need some event to prove that government isn’t the answer to our problems.
When you listen to DNC speeches, even if you only lend one ear, the content is chock full of the idea that government can solve problems.
Ben Shapiro disagrees. I disagree.
But he and I have different understandings of where Kamala and the DNC err in their thinking.
He thinks their error is being inconsistent.
I think their error is theft.
The DNC is advocating (besides the actual theft its administration commits today) that the government (schmucks built no different than you and I) should be able to rob us as they tell us “We’re here to help!”
I am not ready to revolt. I can’t imagine how that would work. For now, I rest assured that Trump has this one in the bag. And while he is as guilty as the DNC of robbing us, he doesn’t make it hard for me to teach my kids that government cannot solve your problems.
A Trumpian Troll
Still need more ways to discover precisely who the Left are? Troll them. Or as the Black preachers say, “When you throw a stick at dogs, the one who whelps got hit.”
All I want to know is if Trump wrote the troll beforehand or came up with it on the spot.
“Won’t have to vote again.” So funny. So many possible (dark?) meanings.
Is he implying the Second Coming is imminent? Is he implying the end of democracy and the beginning of dictatorship as the Left wet dreams?
Hard to say, no?
It surely can’t mean that the supposedly unmotivated Christian non-voters will be able to go back to their unmotivated-not-voting after this election because the ship will have been so firmly righted by Trump over the intervening years that the morons who might again vote Left in 2028 will not, by virtue of their being incapable of blocking the beautiful light of prosperous peace (the only kind) that he will have brought, a light which consequently will end the Left’s resistance to life-giving truth.
The Level My Grandma and Brother Are Complicit
The level my grandma and brother (her a democrat and he a smarty-pants lefty) are complicit in the attempted assassination is directly related to how they defend President Biden’s response to Mr. Holt.
Headlines across news outlets use the words “Biden”, “Mistake”, and “Bullseye” in close proximity and suggest the president admitted erring. But here is the transcript.
****
Biden: “I didn’t say crosshairs (inaudible) focus on look the truth of the matter was I guess what I was talking about at the time was there’s very little focus on Trump’s agenda-”
Holt: “-Yeah the term was bullseye.”
Biden: “It was a mistake to use the word I didn’t mean I didn’t say crosshairs I meant bullseye I meant focus on him focus on what he is doing…”
****
(That took an inordinate amount of effort to transcribe, btw. You’re welcome.)
The question remains. What do my grandma and my brother do with this?
How they speak of it determines as accurately as any other measure we could develop how complicit they are. The range being
1. NOT competent to stand trial and NOT complicit. This would be the case if they change the subject and unashamedly suggest they had no idea guns existed, let alone would be used on any one of the several billion good-to-the-core fellow men.
2. Competent to stand trial and complicit. They are complicit according to their level of earnestly believing it is not their role to monitor Pennsylvanian young adults’ or elected officials’ integrity. Make no mistake, this option is the more depressed one, at least to those of us happy-go-lucky bible readers and our “Am I my brother’s keeper?” story. This second option would be the case if they actually attempt an on-point answer, but its content indicates they will never concede that Biden did not admit erring.
The Element Peggy Noonan Missed and Why The Dems Will Never Embrace Chaos
Risk.
That’s it. Miss Noonan doesn’t address how “risk averse” or “safety first and at all costs” our society has become.
A better analogy to the Dem’s problem is Hollywood’s problem.
Movies have become so costly to make that the easy/obvious/safe choice is prequels and sequels of winners (or even mere known quantities) rather than tell a new story that might bomb.
So, no, Miss Noonan, the same people who brought us safety (the government) will not act with daring.
Reaction to Sir Niall Ferguson’s “We’re All Soviets Now”
You can find the article here. I don’t know much at all about that site, “The Free Press”. Seems like a normal site for its ilk.
Here I am going to react to his article paragraph by paragraph until I get bored or my points become redundant. A friend sent the article to me—a good friend. My criticism must be harsh then. Otherwise he’ll think I was lazy and didn’t read and consider it.
****
P1 “the cold war we’re in—the second one”
-the very problem with the Left is they believe they can “manifest”, like Yahweh. Thankfully, they cannot. Are we in a second cold war? For that to be true, I, ol’ Pete, would have to agree. And I don’t. My most killer point is that there really is no “we” in the sense that there was during the real Cold War which we could read about if we so chose. Even in Bari’s intro to this article, she mentions that Niall is a voice in the “cultural battle”. If there is an actual cultural battle within America, then America cannot be a coherent enough group to partake in a cold war.
P2 “back in 2018”
-how much of my day shall I sacrifice to you, O Knight!? Hyperlink’s are fun and easy, but seriously, I have read many books and many articles. It is possible to just plainly write what you mean now, today and for it to be clear and tenable. Please do so.
P3 “[China] is a military rival”
-I will not fear. And, even within the non-we, I trust Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and most other states of the Union to produce warriors that can win more than I trust China.
P4 “in this new Cold War, we”
-you haven’t persuaded me on either point here. I don’t see a cold war, and there is no “we.” Now I have to peruse at least one of your links, otherwise there is no point in continuing since I don’t buy your “definitions”. Back. The two linked articles are on pay sites. Oh well. I’ll do my best to continue as if I was informed and undecided.
P4 “the immortal question”
-the immortal question is moral. “Bad” is a moral semantic domain. That’s why the clip is funny. The question is, “how do I know that killing this man is the moral thing to do?” The question has nothing to do with observation and nomenclature. Also, Sir Ferguson, perhaps you have written it elsewhere, but what exactly is gained by this naming convention “cold war two”? I actually kinda cared to learn some history and even through college we didn’t get past WW2. So while I know the phrase, I am certain that hardly anyone alive in the “we” has a clue what the Cold War was and now you want to persuade us/them to adopt Cold War 2? What you’re asking is worse than a copy of a copy. You are attempting to name a copy of a blank sheet of paper. This article itself contains little more than debatable content about the Cold War which can then bolster your claim about Cold War 2. Sand. It’s all sand.
P5 “two American Sailors”
-so, big difference between the SS and the US Navy is the US Navy is not immoral.
P6 “I know”
-let’s find out.
P7 “world of difference”
-so…you don’t know. The joke in the clip you link to is about WW2 bad guys being surprised, upon consideration, to conclude that they were immoral—something which many believe should be universally announced by one’s own conscience, and before the kill.
P8 “resources…consumer goods…equipment”
-these nouns are too general. They do not persuade. A bait and switch could be right around the corner.
P9 “quintile”
-i don’t understand. Are you educated or street? Sometimes you use a common vocabulary, but here you switch to a very pointed statistical term, and then qualify it further, before bringing up a new measure (infant mortality) which you do not pin down—late Soviet Union” vs. 2021. Huh? And Mississippi Delta and Appalachia are identical? You’re asking for far too much trust. I don’t even know you.
P10 “risible”
-who can define this word? (comment below if you didn’t need to look it up)
P11 “closer look”
-not really interested, thank you.
P12 “system?”
-a question mark is necessary for a question, but it doesn’t automatically make clear what you are asking. At this point I am over it. Whatever you are doing, whatever your goal, it isn’t written for me. Try again some other day, maybe when you have something to say.
In sum: 37 links. I once chatted with an excitable old man who had a book “with a bibliography over one hundred”. Before I knew it, I had accepted his gift of the book—for the low price of $10 to cover, the, you know… When it arrived, I gave it the old college try. It was like he thought a long bibliography was what truth was based on. In reality, the opposite is likely the case. The masses are duped, ignorant, lazy, common, and uninteresting.
Nothing in Sir Ferguson’s article redeems the false premise. No, we are not in another “cold war”. That phrase was a one-off and will not apply ever again. Furthermore, we are not the Soviets. This is mostly because America is an incredibly difficult thing to “be” anymore, and also because, and I have learned this the hard way, the “land” does have something to do with the question. And this isn’t Russian soil that I live on.
The REAL Truth About AI
AI is mankind’s ability to sense electricity—and nothing more.
To repeat, AI cannot read. It definitely cannot read English. But it also cannot read any other language.
Also, AI cannot see the road.
Furthermore, AI cannot think up answers.
To be fair, to describe these and other negative facts about what AI cannot do is easy when compared to accurately describing the relationship between one of us “using” AI and persuading themselves (or being persuaded) that AI is reading, that AI is aware of the road, that AI is “thinking”. It’s not impossible though. In the most important sense, that relationship does not meaningfully differ from when a person feels the handle of a hammer in one hand and a nail in the other hand—and is persuaded that the nail will be driven into the board without a doubt.
No inanimate machine “hears” the sound (or any one of the many sounds) the letter “a” makes when it senses the electrical representation someone has coded for “a”. (It’s not like the electricity buzzes itself into an “ahhh” sound.) Instead AI senses some distinct electrical value which corresponds to what some person had decided should consistently and uniquely (though not exclusively) correspond to the English letter “a”. This is no different from how your hands consistently sense hammers and nails which correspond to what we have come to call hammers and nails when it holds them.
AI as a name is likely here to stay, unfortunately. But this is no more difficult a situation than, say, the QWERTY keyboard sticking around.
But AI is not artificial, it is not intelligent, and it is certainly not artificial intelligence. That is, unless you mean to convey that AI is mankind’s ability to sense electricity—and nothing more.
Captain’s Log 