Month: July 2020

As I continue to think about optimism vs. pessimism, I remember several terms from a long-ago psychology class.  The first one was the difference between having an internal vs external locus of control, which refers to whether you see yourself as mostly controlling your own life, or as primarily impacted by larger forces beyond your control.

Like the half empty or half full glass of water, both of these outlooks are partly true.  It doesn’t matter how determined or self-actualizing you are: if you are born in a socialist hellhole like Venezuela or China, or if you have a severe genetic disease, or are born to alcoholic, dysfunctional parents, your life is going to be very much harder than someone’s who is born in a thriving country, healthy, and with world-class parents like my wife and I.

But even at those extremes, and especially in between, people who see themselves as in control of their own lives will make decisions every day – work hard, don’t buy things on credit, acquire a Wonder Dog, stay off the heroin – that will make them successful.  And people who think the opposite will make decisions – work minimally, produce mostly excuses, vote for politicians to fix your life, mmmmm, heroin – that will ruin their lives.

The other psychological term is “learned helplessness,” which originally comes from some very depressing experiments on dogs and rats.  A creepy psychologist repeatedly shocked an animal when there was no way for it to escape; later, when a means of escape was provided and the animal was shocked, it did nothing to escape, because it had been conditioned to not try.

Human parallels abound.  A child who has trouble with math, absent any intervening teacher or helper, soon learns to give up on math tests.  An adult who thinks “the little man can’t get ahead” doesn’t do the things (working overtime, getting an education or job training, delaying gratification) that help little folks all around him get ahead every day.

Learned helplessness is very tightly associated with depression, as you might guess.  The self-destructiveness of others who have learned helplessness is extremely obvious, and frustrating, to those who love them.  The eight-times divorced woman says, “All men are abusive drunks.”  You ask where she met all of her ex-husbands.  She says, “in a bar.”

The career criminal says, “No employers will give an ex-con a chance.”  You ask what he was convicted of.  He says, “Stealing from work.”  You ask how many job training programs he went through in the joint.  He says, “None, because nobody will hire an ex-con.”

In my previous column, I pointed out that some nations tend to produce populations who are mostly optimists or mostly pessimists.  But even more than that, the two main political schools of thought – leftism and conservatism – tend to attract more pessimists or optimists, respectively, and also to inculcate and reinforce those views in their adherents.

Conservatism emphasizes each person’s responsibility to improve his or her life.  “That government is best which governs least” assumes that you are better able to run your own life than the government is.  “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is a mocking reference to the conservative tendency to emphasize the necessity of individual action.  Cliches from self-help books such as “If it is to be, it’s up to me,” ring true to most conservatives.

Liberalism/leftism, on the other hand, focuses on the need for collective action, and the extent to which each individual needs help (by which leftists inevitably mean government help) to achieve his or her full potential.  You can’t be a great parent on your own, because “it takes a village.”  Even if you’ve created a business by working your arse off for decades, it turns out that, “you didn’t build that.”  (Says the translucent lady who never built even the simplest campfire or tepee.  #wemustneverstopmockingher)

Leftism teaches that there are ONLY external loci of control (and yes, I’ll take “Latin plurals” for 500, Alex).  Systemic racism, and endemic sexism, and ubiquitous patriarchy will do way more to shape your life than any insignificant efforts on your part.   So stop beating yourself up for your failures, and don’t bother trying to improve yourself in our evil system wherein that is not possible.  Just vote for us – your benevolent, external locus of control – and we’ll fix your life.

Now obviously, neither outlook is completely, 100% correct.  Larger forces clearly do affect individuals, and we must try to achieve some large goals together, like whipping Nazis, or stopping jihadi domination of the world.  As a society, we need to make provisions to help those who truly cannot help themselves, such as the physically disabled, mentally handicapped or elderly and infirm.

But the tendency of leftism is toward mission creep, due to underestimating the importance of an internal locus of control.  They initially create a social security system that costs little, and is a supplement for most people, and necessary for only the hardest-hit few who make it to old age without having saved anything.  Ninety years later, it costs trillions and is going broke, and most old people feel dependent on it, and desperately fear losing it.

Leftists initially created disability payments for the very few who lose a limb or their vision, or suffer some other traumatic injury, and cannot survive without such payments.  A few decades go by, and millions of people are on the dole for such “disabilities” as sexual addiction, alcoholism, or impossible-to-confirm-by-any-objective-physical-test maladies such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or ADHD. (Because who could possibly be tempted by the chance to get drunk, have sex and sleep-in the next day?) (And no, I’m not saying that none of those exist – only that they are at best wildly over-diagnosed, and at worst fraudulently diagnosed, to attain a variety of monetary and non-monetary benefits.)

I wouldn’t argue that having an internal locus of control necessarily means that you are an optimist.  (Many times, having a sense that you are surrounded by boneheads making stupid decisions could make the most pessimistic among us even MORE determined to exercise control over everything they can!)  But I don’t see how you can be an optimist if you have an external locus of control.  Because if you are at the mercy of large and small forces beyond your control, what’s there to be optimistic about?

Look at the way that minorities have fared under leftism (in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc. etc.), and you’ll see decades of identifying external loci of control (white supremacy, racist cops, uncaring rich people, Jewish interlopers, malevolent capitalism), resulting ultimately in learned helplessness, and the devastation and blighted lives that inevitably follow.

The best case study that comes to mind is New Orleans in the lead up to Hurricane Katrina.   I grew up in Illinois, where the problem was tornadoes rather than hurricanes.  The average warning for a tornado was a minute or two; the town siren would go off, and you had to get to your shelter or the garage or the closest bathtub pronto.

But hurricanes move slowly, and with modern forecasting, people knew for four days that Katrina was going to make landfall somewhere around where it did, and when it did.  Optimistic people with a healthy internal locus of control might wait a day or two, but within 24 hours of landfall – with the predicted site and time firming up all the time – they’d get out of town.

And don’t tell yourself that poor people were trapped there.  Even the poorest of Americans either own an old car, or know friends who have one, or could buy a bus ticket.  (The average hurricane travels around 30 miles per hour.  In my life, I’ve owned a 30-year-old, rusty Silverado, a mid-70s Chevy Monza with a sewing machine engine, and a decade-old Buick landcruiser made out of a ton of American steel and a problematic head gasket. All of them leaked oil and had the get-up-and-go of Bernie Sanders before his nap.  And all of them could go faster than 30 freaking miles an hour!)

Ray “Schoolbus” Nagin, the Democrat mayor of New Orleans, earned his nickname because instead of using the gigantic fleet of school buses at his disposal to ferry poor people to certain safety, he left those buses parked in gigantic lots, so that they could be immersed in floodwaters and ruined.

Apparently, when you elect corrupt and incompetent leftist politicians for decades, the wheels on the but do NOT go round and round in your town.

By the way, Nagin is due to be released from prison in 2023.  He wasn’t jailed for incompetence — because if that were a crime, our entire Congress would be doing the jailhouse rock – but for corruption.

So the black and white and brown poor people of New Orleans, suffering from stage 4 government-induced learned helplessness, sat and waited for days, until a slow moving hurricane finally slammed into them.

In the aftermath, just to show the persistence of the external locus of control habit, whom did most of the survivors blame?

1. Themselves, for being over-run by a storm that Betty White could have outrun?
2. Their decades’ worth of Democrat city officials, who took millions in federal funding to reinforce levies and spent them instead on hookers and blow?
3. Their current Democrat mayor and city council, who spent the days and hours before the storm executing an Olympic-gold-medal-worthy cranial-rectal inversion maneuver? (And oh, did they stick the landing!)
4. Their Democrat governor, Kathleen “oh so” Blanco?

No.  They externalized the hell out of the blame, pushing it 1086 miles to the northeast, to GOP President George Bush’s White House.

Please tune in Friday, for the final part of these musings…

Avenatti/”Schoolbus” Nagin 2020!

We’re more than halfway through July, and there have already been a month’s worth of strong contenders for a vigorous Stupidest Statement of the Month competition.

One of the leaders in the clubhouse would have to be AOC’s response to a question about why the murder rates seem to be exploding in peaceful-riot-prone Dem-run cities.  The mediocre bartender’s answer – and I am not kidding — pointed to desperate people needing to shoplift bread for their hungry children.

Which would explain all of the frustration that the cops haven’t been able to follow the bread crumbs and solve all of those murders.  And also why crime scenes in Chicago and NYC have been littered with shell casings, crust, and bread ties.

Ugh.  If the polls are right –and I’m no more than 50/50 on that question – in 6 months this country may be led by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and AOC.  Or as intelligent readers of the CO site know them, the mostly dead, the undead, and the brain dead.

Rather than dwell on that grim prospect, I’ve been reading some good books, enjoying time with my family and Wonder Dog, and returning to a theme that has been pre-occupying me for much of this challenging year.

If you’ll allow me to depart from my usual snark and mockery, I’ve been thinking a lot this year about optimism and pessimism.  In the interests of keeping this column from going on too long, I’ll share a few thoughts now, and the rest later in the week…

I’ve always been a mostly optimistic person.  I’m not sure how much of that is nature – many people are obviously wired to be either sunny-siders or Debby Downers – but I’m sure that nurture plays a significant role.  An optimistic, well-adjusted and functional family likely produces more optimistic kids than the reverse.

I also think that a religious worldview can shape how optimistic your thinking may be, and in both directions.  Though I briefly studied other religions a long time ago, I know a lot more about Christianity, and I’ve seen that there are darker versions (leaning toward a Calvinist, more sin-focused fatalism) and lighter ones.  The latter ones seem to me to be more attuned to Christ’s overall outlook, with a focus on a loving God creating us in His image, and a teleology that allows us to choose (literally) paradise.

For secular folks who adopt a central philosophy for their lives – hedonism would be my favorite, if I were in that boat, with utilitarianism a close second, and nihilism my least favorite – I’m sure those ideological lodestones shape how optimistic they become.  Because I believe that doctrinaire leftism is very often more religion than political philosophy  (What is the cancel culture craze if not a good, old-school heretic hunt?), I see it as tending hard toward pessimism, about which more later.

I think nations and cultures can also have default settings – shaped by their history, to be sure — to be more optimistic or pessimistic.   I think of Russians as a generally more pessimistic bunch, for example.  I remember coming across a list of common sayings from various cultures, and the purportedly Russian saying was, “The tears of strangers are only water.”  Which… yikes!  Many Russian sayings have a way of looking on the dark side, such as,“If you know too much, you’ll age sooner.”

I also think of Scandinavians in general as a more dour group – and without good cause, when you consider that they tend to be tall and attractive, and live in clean, well-functioning societies.  Yet they’ve got a high suicide rate, and even in church, my current Lutheran co-worshippers lean more toward a curt nod of greeting, rather than the emotional hugging and infectious smiles of my Baptist upbringing.

Jamaicans, on the other hand?  And many denizens of warmer, Caribbean or Mediterranean cultures?  Let’s just say that upon first hearing the songs, “Let’s Get Together and Feel all Right,” or “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” most of us would instinctively guess that they were not written by somebody named Luther, or Lothar, or Olaf.  (That first title, especially, is all Marley and no Scrooge.) (HA!)

Americans are a famously optimistic people, or at least used to be.  Most of our ancestors, it’s true, came here at least partly because of chaos and disasters – famine, conflict, poverty, roving bands of proto-leftists stealing everything in sight — in their home countries.

But most people, in those circumstances, were fatalists.  “I know that the potato crop is failing, and that we’re at war with the next dukedom over, and the smelly horde of proto-leftists struck again last week, stealing all my worldly possessions – my nightshirt and the chair, both!  But what are you gonna do?  Life is suffering.  Hopefully smallpox will reach our village soon, and bring the sweet release of death.”

But the latent Americans in the group said, “I’m going to the New World!  Sure, I’ll have to spend a few months on a small wooden boat crossing an enormous ocean that wants to kill me, eating a scurvy-licious diet of weevils and hard-tack, and then hopefully landing in neutral-at-best surroundings, with no infrastructure and terrible cell coverage.”

“If we can survive attacks from the scowling bands of hateful Warrens who are rumored to haunt the forests, we’ll still need to get through the deadly winters.  But we’ll pray to our benevolent God to send us some blessed global warming, and we’ll invent something called a hashtag, whatever that is.  And we’ll first deploy it against the confusingly white natives, who will be enraged and disheartened when they begin to see “#wemustneverstopmockingher” carved on many trees in their forests.”

Their slump-shouldered neighbors said, “You’re crazy.  What if you drown, or starve, or get eaten by a grizzly bear, if such a thing exists?”

But the latent Americans said, “What if we don’t? What if we work hard, and improve some firearms, and invent checks and balances and the McCormick Reaper and the Mustang – the airplane and the car, which will both be things, somehow – and real football and Farrah Fawcett?”

 

Just as with nations, it seems that an individual’s default setting can become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, shaping one’s fate.   The most well-known distillation of the dichotomy is the one about the glass of water that is either half full, or half empty.  The example points out the paradox of these positions: both views are technically correct, and yet ultimately speak to very different realities.

Another famous statement is that, “optimists are more often happy, but pessimists are more often right.” (That sounds like it could have been translated from the original Russian!)

I tend to agree with the first part, but the second part gives away too much: it’s obviously written by a pessimist.  Because the point of the glass of water is that neither of the alternatives is more “right” than the other.

Sometimes the most profound truths are so simple that we lose sight of them.  The water glass example makes a point that you can confirm by looking at your own life: each event or circumstance can accurately be seen as good luck, or bad.

It works as well with my life as with yours.

I was born to relatively poor parents, with no family history of higher education or financial success… but in the richest country in history, at a time when education was more open to common people that it had ever been before.

I chose a profession in academia that takes nearly a decade to complete, and then doesn’t pay very well… which taught me to be frugal, and guarded me against financial complacency.

The job prospects in my field deteriorated further as I was earning my degrees, which meant that I had to patch together a bunch of part time jobs into my mid-30s, and still earn less than my wife was earning… which drove me to look around until I found my first run-down house to buy and rehab and rent out.

Neither of us had jobs with pensions… which made us decide not to flip the houses I rehabbed, but to keep them as rentals.  By the time we retire, those rentals will be paid off, and will give us more income than a pension would have.

I also would never have experienced one of the deepest satisfactions of my working life: the balance between intellectual work and physical work.  Each type has its benefits that complement each other.  The physical work provides tactile feedback when it’s being done right, and tangible accomplishments: drywall hung, taped and mudded; a rotten section of floor replaced by new plywood; a room painted.

The intellectual work tends to produce nothing tangible, but metaphorically seeing a non-tangible lightbulb going on over a student’s head is pretty sweet.  And writing and polishing a column feels like working craftsmanship muscles that aren’t all that different from completing a rehab project.

Also, restoring a house could never help me make a connection with many kind readers all over the country, and no one ever walks into one of my houses and says, “Look at this drywall job!  You’re a hilarious genius!”

In part 2, I’ll argue that optimism is intertwined with conservatism, and pessimism with liberalism, and I’ll try to connect that polarization to the stark political divisions that threaten to tear our country apart.

All of us have our fantasies.

Sometimes they might involve a spirited “Q&A session” with Kayleigh McEnany. Or letting loose one’s Wonder Dog on an armed criminal, like in the exaggeratedly violent scene at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Or winning a Pulitzer and then rejecting it with a scathing speech about terrible past leftist winners like that racist harridan who won for the error-riddled and hateful “1619 Project,” followed by urinating on the trophy and then stalking off stage, pushing Fredo Cuomo’s face down into his bowl of soup on the way out.

But maybe that’s just me.

I also have a political fantasy: that every powerful elitist would have to live under the policies they foist on others.

It’s a fundamental wish, and harkens back to many religious and secular traditions.  It’s “reap what you sow” and karma, and “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

A few examples:

All gun-grabbing politicians or celebrities would immediately have to give up any guns they own, and also their armed security people.  (Picture this: Pelosi is walking unprotected amidst the people, and someone immediately shouts, “AiEEE!  The mummy lives! Get a torch!!”  And then she has to flee the villagers, while trying not to get her skeletal feet and sandals tangled in her burial wrappings.)

All pols who take money from public school teachers’ unions must immediately have their own children yanked out of their cushy private schools and forced into the terrible public schools that those unions subject poor people to.

Every virtue signaling white leftist who advocates hiring people based on discriminating against whites in favor of minorities must immediately be fired and replaced by a minority.  (For extra salt in the wound, make that a conservative-minded minority.)

All who denounce a wall at the border as racist should immediately have the walls, fences and hedges around their property torn down, and a random assortment of illegal aliens installed in their house, at their expense.

All shills for socialism must be forced to show the courage of their convictions by immediately moving to Venezuela and enjoying the intermittent electricity, ubiquitous shortages, and the new Venezuelan diet of shoe leather, feral cat and dandelions, washed down with stagnant puddle water.

Every liberal judge who releases dangerous criminals back into the poor neighborhoods that they prey on must either move to those neighborhoods, or else allow the criminals to move into his or her own spare bedroom. (If the freed criminal is a rapist, the judge must share his/her master bedroom with the poor misunderstood fellow.)

Some of my fantasies are very specific.  (And I don’t mean the one about Kayleigh McEnany, which was just an innocent joke.  And I’m not just saying that because my loving wife will be reading this column.) (Although…)

For example, last week the NY Times published an op-ed arguing that Mount Rushmore must be destroyed and the land it sits on given back to the last Indian tribe who owned it.  (Never mind that that Indian tribe stole it from a previous Indian tribe, who stole it from an earlier tribe, and so on.)

My fantasy: Six minutes later, a secretary buzzes into a meeting of the board directors at the NYT building in Manhattan with this message:  “A bunch of Canarsie Indians are in the lobby.  They say you’ve got 10 minutes to pack up and get out.”

On the bright side, some of my fantasies are starting to come true.

Exhibit A: Democrat Minnesota governor Tim “Castrato” Walz (along with Minneapolis mayor Wussy McPussington) asked the Feds for FEMA bailout money to repair some of the $500 million in damage that was done to Minneapolis during the “peaceful protests” that they allowed to continue.  (Quick reality quiz question: What is one of the essential, defining characteristics of a peaceful protest?  A: It doesn’t cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage!)

Trump said no.

Good!  I truly feel horrible for the innocent people of Minneapolis and Minnesota, who lost businesses, and whose lives are continually threatened by the thugs and grifters that their elected leaders – coincidentally, another set of thugs and grifters – have given the keys to the city.

But you elected those people.  You elected Ilhan freaking Omar!  (Reality quiz question #2: When your country rescues someone from a jihadi-ridden hellhole, and she repays you by hating your country, and running on a “Let’s turn Minnesota into Somalia” platform, should you elect her?  A: I’m not going to dignify that with a response.)

Exhibit B: Murders in Democrat-run cities who are pushing to abolish the police are skyrocketing, while the blue flu is turning out to be more contagious than the Wu Flu.  (HA!) All of those leftist voters spent the last several decades sowing fecal seeds, and they’re just starting to reap a bumper crop of shite.

Maybe they might be motivated to think about sowing something different in November?

 

Before you can challenge me, the answer is, “Yes, I would be willing to live under the conservative policies I would like to see enacted in the entire country.”  In fact, I could answer “yes” to all of the following questions:

Would I be willing to allow others to send their kids to whatever school they wanted, just like I want to do with mine?

Would I be willing to see the hindrances to starting a business reduced for other people, just like I wanted them reduced for me?

Would I be willing to pay a reasonable and predictable tax rate, knowing that my fellow citizens would too?

Would I acknowledge (and not whine about it) that I might get my stupid arse shot if I attacked and fought with a cop, or broke into someone’s house or business, and that I should be executed if I murder or rape someone?

Would I agree that if I ever try to vandalize or destroy public property, I should expect to be on the received end of a beanbag, rubber bullet or baton vigorously applied to whatever part of my body makes a convenient target?

Would I agree that if a baker or other business owner doesn’t want to make something for me for whatever reason, I should object and take my business elsewhere, rather than run crying to a legislator in a robe to force my ideology on that business?

Would I agree that I am not entitled to elect con artists to take money from other people and give it to me, just because they have more than I do?

Would I agree to be treated equally in all situations, regardless of my race, gender, sexual preference, or creed?

Would I agree that if I illegally entered another country, that nation would have every right to deport me?

Would I agree not to force my religious beliefs or political dogma on other people?

Would I grant other citizens the rights to free speech, even if what they say hurts my tender feelings?

Would I agree not to force others to call me a woman if I’m a biological male, and not to force them to call me an Indian if I’m as white as the dowager princess of Finland.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Would I agree not to take my emotional support wallaby on a freaking airplane, no matter how comforting I find Winston’s company?

Would I react to humor I don’t find funny, and arguments I don’t find convincing, and “art” I find crapulent by ignoring or mocking it, rather than trying to destroy the life and livelihood of its creators?

 

I would challenge all my leftist friends: if you’re not willing to live by the rules you are trying to force on the rest of us … cut it out!

Avenatti/Winston the Emotional Support Wallaby 2020!

I saw a funny video recently, in which two British comics play Nazi SS men discussing their war plans.  In the middle of things, one of them points out the skull insignia on their caps and plaintively asks, “Are we the [bad guys]?”  (He actually says “baddies,” but that Anglicism doesn’t hit my American ears right.)

I’ve been thinking about that skit a lot lately.  As the radical left has gotten free reign to act on their impulses over the last six weeks or so – rioting, looting, vandalizing, etc. – I’m surprised that out of the millions of good-hearted Dems that I know are out there, almost none of them have given any public indication that they are considering whether their side has gone terribly wrong.

I know that Trump has his manifest flaws, and we all have reason to bemoan them.  Many of my conservative friends have done a lot of soul searching about to what extent Trump’s weaknesses and deviation from conservative principles trouble them, and might hypothetically prompt them to vote for someone else, if the other side’s offerings weren’t so metaphysically terrible.

But I haven’t seen decent liberals devote any time to public self-scrutiny.  Has watching the arson and violence and pure hatred of America on their television and computer screens really given no Dems even the slightest pause for reflection?  Have none of them begun to wonder, in their heart of hearts, whether they haven’t been becoming the bad guys?

The evidence is certainly easy to see, especially as it pertains to what leftists would usually tout as some of their core virtues.

For example, tolerance is a quality upon which progressives pride themselves.

But have you noticed how, outside of the reddest of red areas, you see tons of pro-Dem/leftist signs in yards, but few pro-Trump or conservative ones?   Granted, Trump’s numbers are down now, and he’s a polarizing character.  But that is clearly not it, because the same was true when the GOP candidates were mushy invertebrates like Mitt Romney and John McCain.  Our country is pretty evenly divided politically, and yet you don’t see as many conservative signs.  And everyone knows why.  “Tolerant” leftists would steal or deface the signs, and maybe do property damage and worse, to houses that displayed them.

The same is true of bumper stickers.  There are a few cars here and there with stickers supporting conservative views or GOP candidates.  But they are far outnumbered by those pushing leftist views and candidates.  Again, everyone understands: your car is much more likely to be vandalized if it’s got Trump or conservative stickers on it.

The same also applies to clothing.  In much of this country, wearing a MAGA hat is the visual equivalent of “fighting words,” and countless videos record the physical and verbal abuse of MAGA gear wearers, many of them elderly.

Conversely, we conservatives dislike many leftist icons and iconography.  But thousands of empty-headed students wear shirts plastered with the faces of socialist mass murders like Che Guevara, Castro, and Chairman Mao, and many trendy hipster doofi decorate their clothes or hovels with non-ironic Communist symbols such as hammers and sickles, red banners with Marxist slogans, and pictures of AOC.

But have you noticed what we DON’T do when confronted with such tangible manifestations of IQ tests failed and bad judgments doubled-down on?  We don’t throw paint on people wearing them, or physically assault them, or steal the symbols or signs and tear them up.  We don’t even scream obscenities in their faces.   (And boy, many of those are the kind of faces that are made for screaming at, even if only in horror and revulsion.)

Or how about statues?   The lefty mobs started by defacing and destroying confederate statues – which was simply Democrat-on-Democrat crime – but quickly moved on to statues of slave-liberating Republicans like Lincoln and Grant.  Which makes a lot of sense, if you ate a lot of lead paint as a child, because you were raised in a crumbling city run entirely by Democrats.

It’s not like there aren’t a lot of statues in this country that are offensive to conservatives.  For example, there is a statue of gay-imprisoning, sadistic violence-enthusiast Che Guevara in Central Park.  There is a bronze bust of genocidally anti-black racist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger — I’d call her a Founding Mother of Abortionists if associating her with “motherhood” in any way wasn’t a moral obscenity – in the Smithsonian.

The Smithsonian!  Next to the Simpsonian, one of the most prestigious institutions in our nation!

There is also a 16-foot statue of mass murderer Lenin in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.   Many racist Democrats of the recent past – William Fullbright and Robert “Sheets” Byrd among them – have statues and public buildings named after them all over the place.

I think I can speak for all conservatives when I say that we are outraged by all of those people and their toxic ideas.  And yet we have somehow resisted the impulse to vandalize or tear down any of those statues.

Another supposedly cherished leftist value is non-violent protesting, in the tradition of MLK.

But consider the nature of the protests over the last two months.  For several weeks in late April and early May, thousands of conservatives protested the lockdown, and the worst that could be said of their behavior is that some protestors openly displayed the guns that they are legally allowed to carry, and a very few outliers had confederate flags.  But on all the metrics that counted – number of shootings, zero; number of buildings burned or looted, zero; attacks on cops or bystanders, zero; property damage and assaults and murders, zero – conservative protestors managed to exercise their constitutional rights without victimizing their fellow citizens and decimating their cities.

The only real criticism that lefties could make of them is that they endangered others with their lack of social distancing.  And boy, did they criticize that!  Accusations of genocidal malice and selfishness filled the airwaves.

However, no one had to tell the lie that the leftist MSM later had to constantly repeat, Baghdad Bob-style, that their side’s protests were “mostly peaceful.”  Because the conservative, anti-lockdown protests were ACTUALLY peaceful.

By contrast, while the leftist “protests” did include some well-intentioned, peaceful protestors (more than a few of whom were political conservatives, who – for the record – also oppose police misconduct), they were marked much more by the widespread violence, theft and property destruction that has cost those Democrat-run cities hundreds of millions of dollars and many ruined lives.  And that’s not to mention the harvest of misery and despair that those cities are going to suffer through in the coming months and years, as everyone who can do so is going to get as far away from those hateful lunatics as they can.

Goodbye law and order, financial flourishing, and functional civil society.  Hello, CHOPistani racial arson and nihilistic leftism, red in tooth and claw.

Leftists also stroke themselves for their moral opposition to racism.  So of course they’ve spent months demonizing white people because of their skin color, and if you say that “all lives matter,” they’ll attack you.  If you say that “all black lives matter,” they’ll howl even louder.  (Remember: more black people were murdered in one Democrat-run city – Chicago – every weekend for the last six weekends than unarmed black people were killed by cops in the entire nation, in the entire year of 2019.   But if you mention that to the bug-eyed Democrat troll doll who runs that city, she’ll say that it’s Trump’s fault and call you a racist.)

Another lefty trope is to express compassion for the severely mentally ill, evident in their eagerness to throw other people’s money at homelessness.  And yet they nominate Joe Biden for president and humiliate him by propping him up in front of cameras in his basement, and having him give short speech-lets that consist of equal parts “in my day” rambling, and “can I buy a vowel” exercises in short-term memory loss.  They don’t even have the decency to include any women with freshly shampooed hair, which is the only thing that gives him pleasure anymore, by taking him back to his glory days in 19-clickety-clack, when he was a young plagiarist and grifter, and female campaign props loved a little fanny grabbing and hair sniffing.

 

Please take some time to reflect, decent leftists.

All over this country, your co-religionists have been running roughshod over the public square, shouting down and canceling people who disagree with you, and defacing and destroying public property.  They’ve attacked cops and other civil servants who were only trying to do their jobs, along with civilians and small business owners and taxpayers who have served your communities and supported you with their tax dollars.  They’ve murdered David Dorn and David Patrick Underwood and many other black people and white people who weren’t doing you any harm.  Every city you control has gotten more embittered with class and racial animosity, and riven with hatred.

Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: ”Is it possible that we’re the bad guys?”

Because it is, and after the last few months, you are.

Avenatti/ Bug-Eyed Troll Doll 2020!

For our nation, this looks to be one of the most depressing Independence Days ever.

After a month of peaceful rioting dedicated to the memory of George Floyd and the chance to pick up a big screen tv without paying for it – and also screaming Covid-ridden clouds of spittle and anti-American hatred into the faces of fellow mouth-breathers – our nation’s radical leftists have moved on to denouncing Mount Rushmore, the Paw Patrol cartoon, and white Jesus.

(By the way, if some pale rapper hasn’t adopted the stage name “White Jesus,” I am sorely disappointed in the entire white rapper community.  All eight of them.)

So for big swaths of our country, this will be a downer of a holiday weekend.

But for those of us in the CO nation – optimistic, successful, owners of  Wonder Dogs and marryers-up – we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters — it will be another chance to celebrate our great good fortune to have been born in the greatest country on earth, founded by some flawed humans who were still giants on the political and philosophical stage.

So as I wish you all a Happy Independence Day, I thought I’d share a story that fills me with joy.  You may have already seen it, but if not, prepare for a shot of schadenfreude-tastic pleasure.

Our story begins earlier this week, when recent Harvard graduate Claira Janover posted a video on TikTok.  (Is it a coincidence that her first name is spelled wrong, or another proof of Simpson’s Law of Stupidly Spelled Names™ being a clue to low character? Read on, and decide for yourself.)

I know that I’m not part of her target audience, because I think “TikTok” is the sound a clock makes.  If I remember correctly, that was right between the cow and the duck on my childhood See ’n Say.

But apparently TikTok is also some sort of internet-ty thing that lets thick-headed youngsters share their not share-worthy thoughts.  (You can tell that it’s a new thing, because neither “tick” nor “tock” are spelled correctly, even though they are both one-syllable words.) (Also, get off my lawn.)

So on Monday, brave social justice warrior Claira posted a bombastic video of herself expressing her brilliant political thoughts.  I’ll dissect it below, but if you haven’t seen it already, Google “Harvard grad tiktok video,” and treat yourself.

As she wags her finger in the camera, she says, “The next person who has the sheer nerve, the sheer entitled caucasity (she really hits that made-up word hard) to say ‘all lives matter,’ I’mma stab you.” (Here she mimics making a knife thrust toward the camera, and then repeats it.)   “I’mma a stab you (more aggressive hand gestures here), and while you’re struggling and bleeding out, I’mma show you my paper cut…” and here she holds up her little finger and creates a close-up and speaks with faux sincerity, “…my cut matters too.”

So what do we know about Janover?

1. She’s a Harvard graduate.
2. She speaks like a high school dropout.
3. She’s the kind of nasty piece of work who is completely comfortable with threatening to stab to death anyone who disagrees with her politically.

A few days later, after her video had been widely shared, it came to the attention of the management of Deloitte, a gigantic accounting firm that had hired her for a job that was to start in September.   And because that company apparently frowns upon prospective employees who routinely threaten to murder people, they fired her.

To which the only reasonable response is… HA! HA HA HA!  HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

So a day later, Janover made another video.  And I know that you are probably guessing that in it, she either stuck to her guns defiantly, or else apologized for her repulsive original video.  You would be wrong on both counts.

If you look up the term “crybully” in the dictionary, you should find Janover’s second video.

It opens with her lying on a couch – because this isn’t the 19^th century, it is not a fainting couch.  It’s a 21^st century whining couch – with a close-up on her tear-streaked face.  Let’s dissect her deliciously clueless drivel.

“Trump supporters just took my job away from me.”

Boom!  Right off the bat, she’s doing the most self-defeating thing she could possibly do: blame other people for her own actions, and their logical and commensurate results.

“I’ve gotten death threats, rape threats, violent threats….”

I will bravely go on the record as being against death threats.  But Sweet Pea, you just got done making a video in which you THREATENED TO STAB PEOPLE TO DEATH AND THEN MOCK THEM AS THEY DIED!  Because they disagree with your hateful politics.

“My entire future is compromised because Trump supporters have decided to come for my life….”  Again, blame others.  Also, you are whining because a bunch of internet trolls are threatening to do to you… exactly what you just threatened to do to Trump supporters!

“I’m too strong for any of you ‘all lives matter’ racist Trump supporters…”

Yes.  Because nothing says “strength” like crying like a toddler who had her pacifier – or in this case, her job offer from Deloitte – taken away.

“It sucks, but it doesn’t suck as much as systemic racism.  I’m not going to stop using my platform to advocate for it.”

Um. Either her grammar is as bad as I think it is, or she just proclaimed that she is going to use her platform to advocate for systemic racism.

She closes by addressing her once-future employer.  “I’m sorry Deloitte that you can’t see that.  That you were cowardice enough to fight somebody who’s going to make an indelible change in the world, and who’s going to have an impact.”

She’s a Harvard graduate, but she thinks that “cowardice” is an adjective.

Also, “making a change” and “having an impact” are bland generalities that tell us nothing.  Attila the Hun and Lenin both made an indelible change in the world, and Ted Bundy and Harvey Weinstein both had an impact.  You poorly educated dolt.

Because we live in upside-down world, a bunch of boneheads have come to Janover’s defense, and sent money to her.  Some young miscreants who either work at Deloitte or are scheduled to have stated their support for this would-be homicidal knife-woman, and started a #firemetoo campaign.

Dear Deloitte management: This is a golden opportunity for you.  Seek out all of the dullard crybullies who have supported “#firemetoo” and grant them their wish.  You will increase your company’s bottom line and median IQ at the same time.

Avenatti/Janover 2020!

 

Happy Independence Day, CO Nation!

It’s times like these that I wish I had a podcast, rather than just a humble, written column, because I am cutting quite a dashing figure right now.

I’ll try to paint a word picture.  I’m sitting at my venerable old writing desk – left in this house by the previous owner, for which I am forever grateful – with a glass of scotch to my left.  Cassie the Wonder Dog is curled up on the floor beside the desk.  And I am wearing my purple, pointed wizard hat.  I’m not wearing this awesome hat just because it makes me look like a wise old wizard.

Though that would be reason enough to wear it.

No. Tonight I’ve removed it from its bullet-resistant, climate-controlled, negative-air-flow hat storage unit because I’m in the mood for some prognosticating.  As frequent readers of this column know, this hat gives me uncanny insights into the future, which I will demonstrate now.

I’m focusing my hat-given powers first on three months from now, when I predict the following four things will happen:

1. Seattle’s Lord-of-the-Flies, “let’s let the leftists run a city-within-a-city” experiment CHAZ (or CHOP, or CRAP, or whatever the survivors will be calling it then) is going to be running right along, as smoothly as socialist Venezuela, and socialist Cuba, and the late unlamented socialist Russia, and…

2. As the summer looting season turns to the fall rioting season in the large, Democrat-led cities of our nation, the number of cops who have taken early retirement, or mid-career retirement – or those who have been stricken with SRRS (Sudden Rookie Retirement Syndrome) – will have skyrocketed.

3. Crime rates in those cities will also have mysteriously skyrocketed, and property values will have plummeted. Fredo Cuomo and Don Lemon will be baffled.  As they almost always are, though it’s usually a result of them trying to figure out how utensils work, or why the door that says “Pull” won’t open no matter how hard you push it, or why this rectal thermometer tastes so awful.

4. In sports news, Colin Kapernick will still be unable to hit a receiver on a shallow crossing route, but he will still believe that he is not in the NFL because a confederate soldier statue doesn’t like him.

Turning my gaze to one year from now, I see the following:

1. The outflow of productive people – skilled workers, business owners, those who prefer not to dodge syringes and human feces on their way to work – from blue states to lower-tax, productive red states like Tennessee, Texas and Florida will have accelerated.

2. Frustratingly, many leftists with the ability to leave the blue states that their voting habits have turned into unlivable CHOPistans will proceed to vote for the same terrible policies and people in their new homes, slowly turning those red states more purple.  Which, coincidentally, is the same color my face turns when I think about those idiots screwing up the functional states that they seem determined to ruin!

3. There will be no more confederate statues left standing in the country. Also no union statues, Founders’ statues, or statues to nearly anyone who is worth carving a statue for. Among the only statues left in America will be a Bob’s Big Boy mascot in Muncie, Indiana, and the giant MLK statue near the national mall in DC.   But some peaceful rioting leftist idiots will have covered it in obscene graffiti and decapitated it before they realized who it was.  (If the giant head should happen to crush a few of them when it falls, that will be sad.  But we will not have lost any future brain surgeons or rocket scientists.)

4. The Wu flu will be a continuing but minor threat to a small slice of our population (the elderly, the obese, and others with seriously compromised health), but something that we live with as a nation, like the flu. Our panic from March through late summer will be seen as initially justified, but then a wildly destructive over-reaction, fanned in large part by sleazy politics disguised as concern for public health.

5. I predict that after a year of great suffering, many white people will finally rise up against the self-hating white SJW pajama boys and girls who will by then have been saying viciously racist things against anybody with white skin for many years. One of those long-suffering Caucasian-Americans – it might be me, the wizard hat is not completely clear on this – is going to come out of his stately manor into the sunlight. If that man is me, he will be the hero we have all been waiting for.  Because he will have come up with the perfect term of racial abuse for all of those whiny white lefties.

Will that term be based on the insult that some African-Americans use to disparage black people whom they find to be treasonous to other black people – i.e. Uncle Tom – you may ask, if you have some sort of a less powerful wizard hat of your own?  Perhaps a wizard beret, or a wizard beanie?

Yes it will.  Because that great American of the near future – possibly me – will have done empirical research to determine the whitest of all names.  That name, of course, is Chad.

(And don’t try to tell me that there is an African nation ironically named Chad.  I know there is.  But in the first place it’s a ridiculous name for an African nation – Zimbabwe and Ghana cannot keep a straight face every time Chad shows up for a summit meeting — and secondly, nation names aren’t people names.  Duh!)

So during the late summer of 2021, one man with a steely gaze and the firmest of jawlines – the hat is really pointing more and more toward me on this one – will confront a pitiful scrum of pasty grievance-study majors and performance artists who are ineptly trying to pull down the last un-decapitated statue in Washington – the badass equestrian one of Grant near the capitol building.

And he will say, “Nice job, idiots!  Do any of you know who this statue represents?  He was a great union general who helped defeat the slave-holding Democrats and won the Civil War.  I’m ashamed to be the same skin color as you crackers.  Now drop your poorly spelled signs and run back to your mommies’ basements before I give you a cross look.”

They will all hesitate uncertainly before this visionary, who will then shout, “You’re nothing but a bunch of pathetic Uncle Chads!”  And they will flee in terror, marking a turning point for our great nation.

I know: right now “Uncle Chad” sounds goofy.  But like any good running joke, it will grow on you.

Remember the first time you read “#wemustneverstopmocking her,” or “Imhotep Pelosi,” or “Grandma Squanto”?  Not to mention “Plugsy McRovingfingers” or “Wussy McPussington”?

I think you get my point.

 

The hat’s chronological range extends to 30 years from now, when these three things will happen:

1. Biological men who identify as women will still be biological men, and they will still be very unhappy.

2. Ethnic groups who are counting on reparations and government assistance to improve their lot in life will still be living miserably unimproved lives, while those who have resisted the siren call of victimhood and identity politics will be doing quite nicely, thank you.

3. Nancy Pelosi will celebrate her 70^th year in congress, representing the smoldering, feces-encrusted ruin formerly known as “California.” She will also celebrate her 2456^th  birthday.  When she goes to blow out the candles on her pyramidical birthday cake – designed in honor of her hometown in the Valley of the Kings during the reign of Cheops the Indifferent —  the dust that issues forth from her rictus-grinning maw will extinguish the candles.  And all of the guests in attendance will involuntarily shudder.

 

Even the power of the wizard hat has its limits.  I cannot clearly see who will win in November, but several details are clear amongst the ghosts of elections yet to be:

If Biden wins, I see rising smoke, a collapsing economy, and an army of lying dog-faced pony soldiers using the Bill of Rights as toilet paper.  Also, Biden’s corpse will appoint several far-left Supreme Court justices who hate the constitution and the white males who wrote it, and they will continually legislate a wish-list of poisonous far-left priorities from the bench.

If Trump wins, I see thousands of MSM “journalists” and celebrities and academics racing around shrieking and wetting themselves, until their heads all explode like in that scene at the end of the first Kingsman movie.  Also, Trump will appoint one or two more squishy, alleged originalists, at least one of whom will immediately turn and side with the other mediocrities on the court, and began issuing terrible, unoriginalist, leftist rulings.

Avenatti/ Uncle Chad 2020!