All about how humans became human. None about fixing the stolen election or the spineless Republicans (happy Trump’s not in power, wanting Trump’s voters to vote Rep; but GOPe are college educated elite-oriented).
Join the local Republican Party, get involved in local politics. With kids? Join the PTA. Retired, think about becoming a local substitute teacher. Do the prior thread ideas to move your (too-easy, paid for with freedom) life away from the tech oligarchs.
Pink poppies.
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
When do constitutional rights vest? At 18 or 21? 16 or 25? Why not 13 or 33? In the law, a line must sometimes be drawn. But there must be a reason why constitutional rights cannot be enjoyed until a certain age.
—
Plaintiffs seek an injunction and a declaratory judgment that several federal laws and regulations that prevent federally licensed gun dealers from selling handguns to any 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old violate the Second Amendment. We first find that 18-year-olds possess Second Amendment rights. They enjoy almost every other constitutional right, …
There are people that still worry about the Constitution? To quote Nancy Pelosi: “Seriously? … Seriously?”
The consumer price index jumped 5.4% from a year earlier, the largest increase since before the worst of the financial crisis, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, inflation increased 4.5%, the largest move since September 1991. On a monthly basis, headline and core prices rose 0.9% against 0.5% Dow Jones estimates.
The fed targets 2% annual inflation. Oops.
Every year the poppy fields outside Lancaster, California put on a show. A memorable memory for me was some friends and I going to see the fields. By chance Barbara had just groomed their two Afghan show dogs, a female black and male blond hound. They released them and they instantly took off across the fields running thru the orange poppies. Their hair flowing around them, as they seemed to effortlessly cover the ground with great speed and grace. That was over 45 years ago, yet the memory remains indelible.
@GB:
In their bones they felt they were Home.
Keffers (have to get the accent right, Man) are at it again:
Putting the Third in Third World since 1,000,000BC.
Tom Grey,
That’s good collection of reading material. The “eviction moratorium” and the consequence its ending blew right past me this last year and a half. I’ll have to dig deeper into it.
“Drunk” sounds like a classic. I had read a few different things about the very long history of wines and spirits. I believe I read how the wine business languished during extended times of poor weather (the little ice age?) and beers, ales, and distilled spirits ramped up to replace much of the previous wine consumption. I wonder how much of the historical and current birth rate depends on booze.
We’ve all seen people in our daily lives with hairstyles (and women might notice makeup techniques as well) out of some kind of time warp. Same goes for people’s models of understanding the world as a whole or politics, in particular.
“One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.
From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types. Long time users of Gab have suddenly been made aware of these folks after Trump and Trump fans were dumped from Twitter. The J21’er is a person who signed up for Gab in January of 2021. They decorate their profile with patriotic symbols and far too much information about themselves. Politics for them is right out of a civics textbook from the late 1980’s.”
He then goes on to look at examples of people awakening to new realities. And here are Neo’s regulars on the Left: Greenwald and Taibbi. And some fellow called Jimmy Dore who probably got blackballed from Greenwald and Taibbi’s Country Club. Had never heard of him.
“Something similar is happening on the Left. Jimmy Dore, for example, is a man who considers himself on the Left. Yet, he is every bit as skeptical about the radicals as the typical dissident. Glenn Greenwald is another good example. Matt Taibbi is another guy who is having an awakening. These are people looking around and coming to the realization that their old views on things no longer track with reality. The old Left is starting to have their own red pill moment.”
One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis.
Zaphod:
‘Twas ever thus.
The classic example used to be visiting someone’s home and checking their records/CDs then noticing their music collections dropped off a cliff not long after they left school.
Those who mutate beyond what they imprinted when young are rare. Which is part of what neo’s blog is about and I find compelling.
@Huxley:
Without wishing to rehash yesterday’s conversation, the book to read might be “Leviathan and its Enemies” by Sam Francis. Available on Kindle for less than the price of a half-eaten chicken drumstick thrown by Bezos to his new wife’s Number 6 Pool Boy.
Regardless of how we *wish* the world worked, it always ends up back at Machiavelli (Burnham and Francis both keen scholars of) who was interested in how power IS gained and wielded rather than how it OUGHT be ditto. Pretty obvious reason for this…. While all the feel good about themselves folks are happily debating how things Ought to be Done, some self-serving Pragmatist or indeed in some ages an entire emergent class of self-serving Pragmatists (Yo, Managerialism) is always going to emerge out of the woodwork and seize power and then you can go stuff your Oughts where the sun don’t shine because the Is is. If you’re very lucky, your lovely Oughts just make you irrelevant. Sometimes they get you a nice bunk in a nice cool camp in Kamchatka.
One can go Cultivate One’s Garden (as I said before, had best fence it off with razor wire and claymores) or one can try to improve or even just stabilize one’s polity — any serious effort at the latter two requires putting away the smelling salts and banishing hysterics-prone Maiden Aunts to go work on the herbaceous borders or some such #@$%.
For this reason I don’t see much point in the discussions attempting to prove that people on the Left are evil.
Sure, some, a few, are mad for power or filled with hate and they are evil.
But most people put together a belief system by their 20s, which is good enough for them to function in their family and society, then they go about getting food raising children and surviving, as they were evolved to do.
Which isn’t to say people can’t change later, but it takes a lot for them to do so.
Zaphod:
I’m not addressing the point of how power is obtained and maintained. I accept that N. Machiavelli makes a strong case.
I’m talking about how your average Homo Sap is wired to live.
This Peter Grant post on the Taliban assassinating Afghan Air Force pilots is of some interest.
So are the comments.
Those here who think I am too cynical would do well to read one comment in particular and contemplate the fact that you’re ruled over by people who are more than happy to lose in your name provided that they profit by it.
@Huxley:
Fair enough.
The average Homo Sap may be a more or less blameless fellow — although that’s not quite the way Christian Doctrine sees things. Blameless or not, ye average Sap had best hope and pray that he is preyed upon by a Benevolent Bastard. You and me and all present just happened to be lucky enough to be born into a world where Benevolent Bastardry was the order of the day and came clothed in the short films they showed us in Civics Class. We thought it was like the air we breathe. It ain’t.
While young — a boomer kid and a beatnik child — I imprinted Leftist values and later became a third-tier Leftist activist, marching in demos, attending affinity group meetings, collecting petition signatures, etc.
I wasn’t quite an AmeriKKKa kind of leftist, but I didn’t consider the US government a Benevolent Bastard and I was fairly contemptuous of all the Howdy-Dowdy civics lessons I received. I hung out with hippies, radicals and back-to-the-land types. I lived in communal situations.
I was paranoid about the government and I wasn’t entirely wrong. The FBI, the CIA, Watergate, MKULTRA were all too real.
One point Darryl Cooper makes in his interview is that most Trump supporters are the red-white-and-blue Americans who grew up with a basic trust of the government and the media and have had that trust thoroughly smashed. In Cooper’s opinion this could be common ground for the Right and Left to meet.
IMO Cooper is naive, but that’s another discussion. My point is that I’m not an innocent whose eyes have been freshly opened. Though I’ll admit things have gone farther and faster than I expected.
@Huxley:
Fair points re your political journey and where you started out from. I was a bit more on the Howdy-doody I Must Make Muh Vote Count side.
Cooper is likely naive yes. But there is an endless parade of grifters out to peddle feel good stuff to the buyers. Another grifter making waves from a different angle is one J D Vance — who apparently sees himself as some kind of Tolstoy of the Trailer Park.
He knows All About the Peasantry, you see… and by golly gosh he’s going to tell us all about them too.
Zaphod:
I’m annoyed that I left the Left just before it became powerful. Who knew? Now I’m back to being a small furry creature on the run from the T. Rex government.
I aspire to be the Toby Keith of the Trailer Park:
Trailerhood — I could live there. Left think it’s all just Deliverance — that might say more about them than it does about the Flyover Proles.
Zaphod:
A bit.
I do remember that T. Wolfe strip! I wish he had done one less of those humongous novels and instead a medium-sized volume of cartoons.
I did most of my growing up in Florida and Louisiana. I can’t say I’m of the South, but I have some knowledge of the people. Even when I was on the Left, I despised their easy contempt for Southerners.
I was quite happy when the show “Justified” came out and a regular trope was some Big Shot from the Big City getting his clock cleaned by the Kentucky hill folk.
Zaphod, you are not at even half ymar cynicism. So safe still.
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Poppies? Not peonies, or ponies, or puppies.
Nice pictures, not quite tulips tho they remind me of them a bit.
So here are wind tech tulips, to reduce bird slaughter for wind power, maybe.
http://leviathanenergy.com/technology/wind-tulips/
Here’s another ref to Bayou:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/
He’s often got cool stuff, like:
Deja Poo: The feeling of having heard this crap before.
Also a good note about Blackrock buying US real estate, from a few days ago:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/07/if-you-destroy-private-home-ownership.html
So much fighting left to keep the good we have, it’s tiring. Glad I’m planning two weeks in N. Italy (Lignano) starting Sat.
Read a good book: Human Kind (Rutger Bregman, trans. Dutch), then a similar great book: The Goodness Paradox
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/the-goodness-paradox
And I’m ready to read Drunk
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/323242-drunk-how-we-sipped-danced-and-stumbled-our-way-to-civilization
All about how humans became human. None about fixing the stolen election or the spineless Republicans (happy Trump’s not in power, wanting Trump’s voters to vote Rep; but GOPe are college educated elite-oriented).
Join the local Republican Party, get involved in local politics. With kids? Join the PTA. Retired, think about becoming a local substitute teacher. Do the prior thread ideas to move your (too-easy, paid for with freedom) life away from the tech oligarchs.
Pink poppies.
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
Interesting 4th circuit court ruling today. They ruled 2-1 that federal laws or rules barring the sale of handguns to people over the age of 18 are unconstitutional.
There are people that still worry about the Constitution? To quote Nancy Pelosi: “Seriously? … Seriously?”
Then there will be the en banc hearing.
From CNBC:
The fed targets 2% annual inflation. Oops.
Every year the poppy fields outside Lancaster, California put on a show. A memorable memory for me was some friends and I going to see the fields. By chance Barbara had just groomed their two Afghan show dogs, a female black and male blond hound. They released them and they instantly took off across the fields running thru the orange poppies. Their hair flowing around them, as they seemed to effortlessly cover the ground with great speed and grace. That was over 45 years ago, yet the memory remains indelible.
@GB:
In their bones they felt they were Home.
Keffers (have to get the accent right, Man) are at it again:
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2021/07/13/and-speaking-of-south-africa/
Putting the Third in Third World since 1,000,000BC.
Tom Grey,
That’s good collection of reading material. The “eviction moratorium” and the consequence its ending blew right past me this last year and a half. I’ll have to dig deeper into it.
“Drunk” sounds like a classic. I had read a few different things about the very long history of wines and spirits. I believe I read how the wine business languished during extended times of poor weather (the little ice age?) and beers, ales, and distilled spirits ramped up to replace much of the previous wine consumption. I wonder how much of the historical and current birth rate depends on booze.
We’ve all seen people in our daily lives with hairstyles (and women might notice makeup techniques as well) out of some kind of time warp. Same goes for people’s models of understanding the world as a whole or politics, in particular.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=24372
“One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.
From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types. Long time users of Gab have suddenly been made aware of these folks after Trump and Trump fans were dumped from Twitter. The J21’er is a person who signed up for Gab in January of 2021. They decorate their profile with patriotic symbols and far too much information about themselves. Politics for them is right out of a civics textbook from the late 1980’s.”
He then goes on to look at examples of people awakening to new realities. And here are Neo’s regulars on the Left: Greenwald and Taibbi. And some fellow called Jimmy Dore who probably got blackballed from Greenwald and Taibbi’s Country Club. Had never heard of him.
“Something similar is happening on the Left. Jimmy Dore, for example, is a man who considers himself on the Left. Yet, he is every bit as skeptical about the radicals as the typical dissident. Glenn Greenwald is another good example. Matt Taibbi is another guy who is having an awakening. These are people looking around and coming to the realization that their old views on things no longer track with reality. The old Left is starting to have their own red pill moment.”
One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis.
Zaphod:
‘Twas ever thus.
The classic example used to be visiting someone’s home and checking their records/CDs then noticing their music collections dropped off a cliff not long after they left school.
Those who mutate beyond what they imprinted when young are rare. Which is part of what neo’s blog is about and I find compelling.
@Huxley:
Without wishing to rehash yesterday’s conversation, the book to read might be “Leviathan and its Enemies” by Sam Francis. Available on Kindle for less than the price of a half-eaten chicken drumstick thrown by Bezos to his new wife’s Number 6 Pool Boy.
Regardless of how we *wish* the world worked, it always ends up back at Machiavelli (Burnham and Francis both keen scholars of) who was interested in how power IS gained and wielded rather than how it OUGHT be ditto. Pretty obvious reason for this…. While all the feel good about themselves folks are happily debating how things Ought to be Done, some self-serving Pragmatist or indeed in some ages an entire emergent class of self-serving Pragmatists (Yo, Managerialism) is always going to emerge out of the woodwork and seize power and then you can go stuff your Oughts where the sun don’t shine because the Is is. If you’re very lucky, your lovely Oughts just make you irrelevant. Sometimes they get you a nice bunk in a nice cool camp in Kamchatka.
One can go Cultivate One’s Garden (as I said before, had best fence it off with razor wire and claymores) or one can try to improve or even just stabilize one’s polity — any serious effort at the latter two requires putting away the smelling salts and banishing hysterics-prone Maiden Aunts to go work on the herbaceous borders or some such #@$%.
For this reason I don’t see much point in the discussions attempting to prove that people on the Left are evil.
Sure, some, a few, are mad for power or filled with hate and they are evil.
But most people put together a belief system by their 20s, which is good enough for them to function in their family and society, then they go about getting food raising children and surviving, as they were evolved to do.
Which isn’t to say people can’t change later, but it takes a lot for them to do so.
Zaphod:
I’m not addressing the point of how power is obtained and maintained. I accept that N. Machiavelli makes a strong case.
I’m talking about how your average Homo Sap is wired to live.
@Tom Grey:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/07/if-you-cant-fight-weapons-kill-their.html
This Peter Grant post on the Taliban assassinating Afghan Air Force pilots is of some interest.
So are the comments.
Those here who think I am too cynical would do well to read one comment in particular and contemplate the fact that you’re ruled over by people who are more than happy to lose in your name provided that they profit by it.
@Huxley:
Fair enough.
The average Homo Sap may be a more or less blameless fellow — although that’s not quite the way Christian Doctrine sees things. Blameless or not, ye average Sap had best hope and pray that he is preyed upon by a Benevolent Bastard. You and me and all present just happened to be lucky enough to be born into a world where Benevolent Bastardry was the order of the day and came clothed in the short films they showed us in Civics Class. We thought it was like the air we breathe. It ain’t.
This is the real Bismarckian Sausage being made:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm
Gives me indigestion.
Zaphod:
While young — a boomer kid and a beatnik child — I imprinted Leftist values and later became a third-tier Leftist activist, marching in demos, attending affinity group meetings, collecting petition signatures, etc.
I wasn’t quite an AmeriKKKa kind of leftist, but I didn’t consider the US government a Benevolent Bastard and I was fairly contemptuous of all the Howdy-Dowdy civics lessons I received. I hung out with hippies, radicals and back-to-the-land types. I lived in communal situations.
I was paranoid about the government and I wasn’t entirely wrong. The FBI, the CIA, Watergate, MKULTRA were all too real.
One point Darryl Cooper makes in his interview is that most Trump supporters are the red-white-and-blue Americans who grew up with a basic trust of the government and the media and have had that trust thoroughly smashed. In Cooper’s opinion this could be common ground for the Right and Left to meet.
IMO Cooper is naive, but that’s another discussion. My point is that I’m not an innocent whose eyes have been freshly opened. Though I’ll admit things have gone farther and faster than I expected.
@Huxley:
Fair points re your political journey and where you started out from. I was a bit more on the Howdy-doody I Must Make Muh Vote Count side.
Cooper is likely naive yes. But there is an endless parade of grifters out to peddle feel good stuff to the buyers. Another grifter making waves from a different angle is one J D Vance — who apparently sees himself as some kind of Tolstoy of the Trailer Park.
He knows All About the Peasantry, you see… and by golly gosh he’s going to tell us all about them too.
Zaphod:
I’m annoyed that I left the Left just before it became powerful. Who knew? Now I’m back to being a small furry creature on the run from the T. Rex government.
I aspire to be the Toby Keith of the Trailer Park:
–Toby Keith, “Trailerhood”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvyTY_oYR_c
@Huxley:
So you’re like the Man Who Always Peaked too Soon?
https://sweetjanespopboutique.blogspot.com/2013/04/dandy-fashion-man-who-always-peaked-too.html
Trailerhood — I could live there. Left think it’s all just Deliverance — that might say more about them than it does about the Flyover Proles.
Zaphod:
A bit.
I do remember that T. Wolfe strip! I wish he had done one less of those humongous novels and instead a medium-sized volume of cartoons.
I did most of my growing up in Florida and Louisiana. I can’t say I’m of the South, but I have some knowledge of the people. Even when I was on the Left, I despised their easy contempt for Southerners.
I was quite happy when the show “Justified” came out and a regular trope was some Big Shot from the Big City getting his clock cleaned by the Kentucky hill folk.
Zaphod, you are not at even half ymar cynicism. So safe still.