You know, I've discovered that I am not Mahatma Gandhi. I cannot transcend dental medication.
I've got a molar that has decided to die, I've been in pain for the last two days, (root canal is scheduled for tomorrow.) and I can't do creative thinking and writing while in pain.😳 As a result, I’m going to be brief today, and next week we’re headed out for a prolonged (3 month) road trip, so my usual goat gaggers will end up shorter for a while. Hope you all don’t mind too much. Still there are a few things worth mentioning.
Oh, and as always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar.
I’m going to start with a tip of the hat to a pretty brilliant blogger, Senior El Gato Malo. The Bad Cat hit it out of the park today with his post Penn and telling on themselves. You should go see it. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, he had to set the stage before hitting the key point of the whole thing.
Build systems of trust.
start small, and work bottoms up, never top down.
emergent reputation networks are the way forward.
trust your family. trust your friends. trust the people around you who you know and who exhibit critical faculties and integrity and character. then work up.
if you cannot tell if something is a ploy or prevarication, assume it is and place little faith in it until you have reason to.
I’ve said it again and again, if it seems too good to be true, or hard to believe that it’s that bad, you’re probably right. If it sounds shaky, it probably is, AND beware of echo chambers too. Seek the data and look for the spin.
Everyone has an agenda, including me. Mine’s pretty simple: I love our country, I want it back, and I want everyone left alone to the maximum extent possible, to pursue happiness as they define it. That freedom stops when and only when someone else in this country gets physically, or financially hurt. (I don’t give a fuck about your fefes) If it sounds like I don’t care much about how other countries are hurt… It’s because I don’t. Defend our allies, and the rest of the world can go fuck themselves.
Once you determine the agenda you can usually see through the spin.
On the subject of spin, The NYT is at it again. An unprecedented surge by David Leonhardt
They’re finally admitting that illegal immigration is a problem, and they’re calling it out and naming names. The key bullet points are:
1. The immigration surge since 2021 has been the largest in U.S. history.
2. Even after adjusting for today’s larger population, the surge is slightly larger than that during the peak years of Ellis Island traffic.
3. The share of the U.S. population born in another country has reached a record high as a result. (OK, first spin point. Calling everyone that’s made it across the border part of “the population.” It’s an accurate description in most ways, but it implies that everyone who made it across the border counts as Americans.)
4. President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy has been the main reason for the recent surge. (Ah, and here we get to the meat, and the spin. They’re throwing Biden to the wolves, in the hope that the sled will now be able to out run the rest of the pack.) Quote from this bullet point: “But the sharp decline of migration levels since this past summer — when Biden tightened the rules — indicates that the administration’s policies were the biggest factor.”
5. More than half of net migration since 2021 has been among people who entered the country illegally.
6. The unprecedented scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue played such a big role in the 2024 election.
7. The recent immigration surge has probably ended. And here’s “the other shoe” dropping. If illegal immigration slows or stops, it wasn’t Trump, it was the movement of history.
Even when they (the NYT) are admitting what the rest of the nation already knows, they’re looking for a way to 1) save themselves, and 2) attack their enemies.
They’ve been denying for years that there’s a problem. Now that they’re forced by events to admit that there’s a problem they want to assure us that “hey, yeah, there was a problem, but it’s all better now, the pendulum of history has swung, and here’s the one guy you can blame the problem on, the rest of us had nothing to do with it. Oh and it was fixed by the pendulum, no one guy fixed it.”
There’s some truth in that statement, in fairness. Yes, the pendulum did swing, and Trump is the way that it swung. Is he the result of the swing, or the prime mover? Probably a bit of both. Still, from a rag and a reporter that has had Terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome to even come this far, is I suppose, a win.
Quick takes:
Matt Taibbi did a great piece on fixing the FBI, you should go see it: three-steps-to-fixing-the-fbi-interview in which he talks to FBI agents who are blowing the whistle on the apparatchiks and political climbers running the show at what was supposed to be the premiere law enforcement agency in the world, and is trying desperately to become the KGB.
Look, Syria right now is a Rorschach ink blot. People are seeing in it what they want to see. I’m not even convinced that the violence is over there, nor the civil war. The echoes of the Reign of Terror from the aftermath of the French Revolution keep ringing through my head. (Or maybe that’s the pain meds. Hell, who can tell?) Give it six months, and MAYBE we’ll have a grasp of what that place is going to look like.
Right now? Eh, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. They are not our friends, we don’t know if they’re still our enemies. Be civil, be polite, and have a plan to kill them all.
The best part of it all, is that it’s another kick in the balls to Iran, and probably to Russia. Anything that weakens their hands is a good thing, as long as we don’t fuck it up.
The Kroger-Albertsons merger seems to have run aground on the Shoals of the court system, which doesn’t break my heart. Speaking from a strictly local consumer perspective, if those two merged there wouldn’t be a large grocery store (meaning something bigger than a “Grocery Outlet Bargain Market”) within an hour’s driving time that doesn’t belong to the same company. Competition is good for the consumer.
FINALLY, one of those rat bastard telemarketing assholes got it in the teeth. Richard Zeitlin pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and got 10 years and $8.9 million in fines out of it. This was one of the assholes behind all of those computer calls you get about some PAC for some charity no one has ever heard of that is helping (list key constituency here).
Gosh I hope someone shanks his ass in prison.
Daniel Penny was acquitted on all charges, which proves that even in New York, sometimes you can find justice. Of course Burn Loot and Manipulate is calling for riots as a result.
And finally, I see that Paul Krugman, an asshat who never saw a tax he didn’t like, a socialist program he didn’t support, or a businessman he didn’t despise; an “economist” who thinks that government creates wealth; is retiring from his gig at the NYT. Paul don’t go away mad. Just go away. I might suggest you follow Socrates’ exit plan.
QOTD "The real criminals were the people prosecuting Daniel Penny." —Tim Young
Yours in Service,
William Lehman