You Keep Using That Word

It doesn't mean what you think it means

Language used to mean something. A word’s definition was formed by the dictionary, and by common usage. Now we’re in Orwell land, and it’s a further push towards a physical crash. A crash no one should want.

Welcome back, pull up a chair, dinner tonight is whatever the VFW is feeding, it’s business meeting night. You know where the liquids are, grab something, you’re going to need it. Please don’t forget the tip jar where we collect for the mess, and thank you to those that have thrown a few bucks in the jar.

I’ll start with a thing from a Chaired Professor of Economics at Harvard. The quote is the Quote of the day and found at the bottom of this post.

Meritocracy: noun. the dictionary says “government or the holding of power by people selected according to merit” Apparently that’s not what that word means any longer. Now, according to this Gopinath psychopath, it must mean “Government or the holding of power by people selected to ensure representation by all perceived ‘disadvantaged classes’.”

See she’s up in the air because in that picture I used to start this post, there’s no women at the table… Therefore, in her mind, they’re missing the people with all the skills, and it’s just an “old boys club.” Funny, when you look at Trump’s cabinet, the Chief of Staff is a woman, the Secretary of Ag is a woman, Sec EDU is a woman, DNI is a woman, and the SBA is a woman. Oh and while she’s not a cabinet position, the Press Secretary is also a woman. That doesn’t look like an Old Boy’s club from where I’m sitting.

Now West Taiwan’s government… Well that’s on them, they’ve never been a meritocracy, and aren’t about to start now. The thing about the US side though, a lot of the folks at that table; seventeen to be precise, were the CEOs of the biggest companies in America.

The following companies were represented: Tesla/SpaceX, Apple, Boeing, Nvidia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Cargill, Citibank, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron, Qualcomm, and Visa. Doctor Gopinath, you will note that: NOT. ONE. SINGLE. ONE. IS. FEMALE. Yet they are at the very top of their industries, in industries that are bloodthirsty knife fights for the top of the heap.

Seems to me that far from being dead, this might be a picture of the rebirth of Meritocracy. Let me give you another word, doctor: Huckster: noun. Hawker, peddler; especially : one who sells or advertises something in an aggressive, dishonest, or annoying way. Also: look in the mirror, chick.

While we’re talking about that summit, this isn’t pertinent to the main thrust of this article, BUTTTTT and old friend of mine, over at

'Security'...

pointed out something worth noting. Here’s a key difference between Trump’s operation, and Biden’s, as well as a brilliant way to send a message, without saying a thing.

It seems there was a bin placed at the foot of the stairway up into Airforce One for the return flight. Everything given to the passengers and crew of that bird by the PRC was pitched in that bin, along with the burner phones they were using just for the duration of the trip. When I say everything, I mean down to lapel pins and badges. During the time there, the only computers allowed were special clean ones, never allowed on to the internet, charged only by secure verified charging stations. Is there still the possibility of a hack? Yes. Even Airgaped gear can be hacked now-a-days. Which is why it was all nuked, triple whipped, then dumped in the bin.

From a security standpoint, this was about as good as you can get, but it serves another purpose as well. It sends to the PRC, who was, of course, watching all of this, the message that, “NO, we don’t trust your ass, and we are going to assume hostile intent on anything you do, until proven otherwise.” All without saying it to Whinny the Xi’s face, and forcing him to respond. And people say Trump isn’t subtle.

The big piece for today though is the word “Ethics.”

There’s been a lot of noise lately about a pair of doctors that had written a Peer reviewed paper advocating for genetic engineering.

Well, Okay you say, that’s a little controversial, but I can see it…

Ah, but wait. There’s more.

What they want to be genetically engineered is the Lone Star Tick. And that’s still not the big punch, oh no.

They want to make that tick more viable, stronger, able to survive in and be carried by rats etc to the cities, while making the Alpha-gal Syndrome, a disease carried by these little bloodsuckers more virulent.

So what is Alpha-gal? According to these two “Medical Ethicians” it’s a “Moral Bioenhancer.” According to the rest of the world, it’s a disease that makes you violently allergic to any red meat. These two claim that it’s “nonfatal” but anaphylactic reactions can and do kill, so…

When I first saw all of the noise about this, I thought to myself “Oh, this has got to be come clickbait bullshit, taken out of context.” Especially since every single article used the same graphics and very similar wording.

Well, NO. I started digging and found the actual paper: https://philpapers.org/archive/CRUBBS as published by the Department of Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law at Western Michigan University.

It starts with a (to me) very radical, and completely ridiculous assumption: “Among the best and most widely accepted arguments in applied ethics are those concluding that eating meat is morally wrong.” To which I respond with a big fat middle finger, held up and waved at them.

Now from there, they go on to say that since eating meat is an unquestioned bad thing, anything that will force people to never eat meat again, is without a doubt, GOOD. And there goes my middle finger again. The idea that if what someone is doing is not ethical, it’s ethical to do anything you want to force them to stop their actions is okay, is the sort of thing that only a nazi or a communist (same thing, different uniform) could come up with.

They use Ingrid Newkirk, (founder of PETA) and Peter Singer (who can argue against the killing of any animal for any reason, while simultaneously saying it’s perfectly acceptable to abort your child at birth) as their primary justification for this set of ethical values.

They then go on to campaign for the genetic modification of the tick and the disease to increase its viability and the virulence of the disease, somehow missing the ethical question of forcing their values and ethics on virtually the entire world.

It’s worth noting that these same ethicians led by Crutchfield concluded that it would be not only ethical but desirable to put mind control drugs in the water in order to make the population more tractable.

“To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?” Crutchfield writes.

“It’s a far-out proposal that’s bound to be controversial,” he concedes, but nevertheless is one Crutchfield believes “is worth at least considering, given the importance of social cooperation in the struggle to get COVID-19 under control.” It’s worth noting that he’s never backed down from these papers once COVID was proven to be '“not all that.”

“As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply. These actions require weighing other values.

The chemicals mentioned by Crutchfield are oxytocin and psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms,” which he says “may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous.”

This is a furtherance of an idea he came up with and published in 2018, the abstract of which reads:

Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement. My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.

Liberty, Equality, and Autonomy… That’s apperently another set of words that mean only what they want it to mean… You have the liberty to take this stuff, or have it snuck into your water supply. Equality? as much as we, your superiors decide to give you. Autonomy? Only as long as you all do what we tell you.

I cannot emphasize enough that this waste of meat is a Philosophy major that teaches Medial Ethics at a major University .where he teaches medical students and Residents what Ethical Medical Behavior looks like.

Imagine, just for a second, what would happen if he got his way, and a group or lab actually carries through his plans. This is some James Bond and Ernst Blofeld type shit. Frankly that’s the sort of thing that would cause doctors, bio labs, medical researchers, etc to be strung up wholesale, and at minimum would set medical research and genetic research back by a century. At maximum? Well, things like Heinlein’s American Theocracy, or some other truly outrageous anti science government is not beyond the realm of possibility.

I raise hogs now. I live on a farm; we have ticks and end up finding one on either myself or the wife about three times a week. That damn Lone Star Tick has been spotted in Tennessee, already. The very idea freaks me out a little bit.

If I found out that someone was behind the spread and the weaponization of the damn things, I’m pretty sure that I would dig up some skills I haven’t used since I hung up my uniforms. If that’s not clear enough, let me spell it out. I and no doubt many of my neighbors, would be blowing shit up and killing people.

The very fact that this guy and his coterie are formally advocating this should be charged as “Providing Material Support for Domestic Terrorism” under title 18 USC.

Then we have Virginia. I can only guess that having had her redistricting plan shot down in flames (and I called it, SCOTUS unanimously and without comment bounced her appeal like the Harlem Globetrotters) Spanberger is now trying to get as much crazy shit through before they toss her out on her ear as she can. She signed into law a ban on Semi Auto Rifles, Pistols and Shotguns, after admitting that it will make many hunting rifles illegal, and another one that will make possession of a firearm by anyone under 21YO illegal. All of this is in direct opposition to recent SCOTUS decisions. She has to know it won’t stand up, but by the power of Marx she will have been seen to do “the right thing!” And with it she advocates banning, replacing, or ignoring Federal law and federal judges on the subject.

All of this craziness: from states deciding that federal courts can overrule state supreme courts on state constitutional issues, then demanding that the Federal Courts be replaced when they shockingly refuse to do so, to ethicians advocating for mind control drugs in the water, feels an awful lot like a final hard push to try and force a confrontation. Especially when all the posts you see on it are using the same graphics, the same verbiage, and so on.

Don’t rise to the bait, we’re winning the battle for the soul of our nation. Unless the lunatics actually follow through on the crazy shit they’re talking about, just stay the course, and trust that the Gods look out for children, drunks and the United States of America.

An example of winning, the federal judicial system has put the final nail in the Biden rewrite of Title Nine. That’s the craziness that would have forced schools to allow bathroom, locker room etc usage based on “how the student feels.”

The real losers in all of that are the schools, who were forced to rewrite their rules and guidelines four times in the past six years. That costs a hell of a lot of money and time. Money and time that now can’t be spent on students and learning, because failure to do the rewrites gets you fines, and decertification. Yes, it’s your tax money being wasted, Gee, thanks Joe.

In other news, The NFL just keeps digging their hole deeper. Look, they lost me, and a lot of other people in the great “take a knee” era. I don’t think I’ve watched five games since Kaepernick was still playing. The NFL miss read their audience badly then, and tried to chase the Woke audience, thinking that their current audience was so addicted that they were “safe.”

“Eh, the rubes will watch us no matter what, so now lets get the woke crowd and the socialism majors hooked, by proving that ‘we’re one of them.’”

That was a failure to rank with “New Coke.” Chasing an audience/customer who has no interest in you, or anything you represent, at the cost of your base is never a good idea, yet marketing executives continue to charge into that minefield.

Well, apparently the idiots at the league management level, looked at that failure, and said “we just need to do that harder!” As a result, this year they’re going to play NINE games overseas. Games in Australia, Brazil, France, Mexico, the UK (3), Germany, and Spain. The only possible reason to do this, is in the hopes that they can get more overseas interest in the game.

There are a couple problems with this though:

1) “footeball” (Soccer, to Americans) is king in all those countries. And I mean unquestioned monarch, no parliament, divine right of kings’ type king. You have as much chance of competing against that in those nations, as a national tiddlywinks league does.

2) Even if you can get the rubes over there interested enough to go, the players won’t be at anything like top form. I’ve done overseas flights, you’re not at your best for a couple days after one. To me, this is more proof that at the management level, they know this isn’t about “athletics” at all, it’s about entertainment and the chase for the almighty dollar.

3) The audience you might gain, even if you get a 40% share in each of those nations, won’t make up for the audience you lose in America.

That third point is the real bitch. I can’t understand why industries, from Coke, to the NFL, to the Democratic National Party seem to think that “well our base will never leave us, no matter what, so let’s branch out and see how many new saps we can find.”

The DNC is losing the Black Vote, for fucks sake. Why? Because they’ve alienated so many Blacks, for so long, that El B.J.’s forecast * of “having them N***** voting Democrat for the next two hundred years” is failing at the sixty-year point. You can only take your base for granted for so long, before they leave.

I’m getting long here, so I’ll just point out a couple of the more egregious things that have crossed my desk in the last week:

/british-student-stabbed-by-sikh-man-dies-because-police-cuffed-him-for-being-racist-instead-of-treating-stab-wound Oh England, how you have fallen.

tennessee-woman-takes-abortion-pill-on-mothers-day-at-gender-reveal-party-as-friends-shout-kill-it What the actual Fuck is wrong with that bitch?

article/associated-press-warns-muskets-are-dangerous-unregulated-weapons-of-war Yes, after decades of saying “well the second amendment is only for guns from the Revolutionary War era” They now want to ban guns from the Revolutionary War.

I tell you, these guys are beyond satire.

the-cartel-is-cracking Short and very worth reading, this is, for those of us that lived through the Oil Crisis of 73 the sweet taste of vengeance.

And finally, last -human-victory-figure-ai-ceo-reacts-after-intern-wins-man-vs-machine-challenge John Henry’s revenge.

QOTD “ A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”

Gita Gopinath, Gregory and Ania Coffey Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Previously IMF First Deputy Managing Director (2022-2025) & Chief Economist (2019-2022).

Yours in Service,

William Lehman