“Good” Ideas Must Be Mandatory! Anna Karenina Today

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/12/mask-jacobinism-runs-rampant.php

The linked article is about mask shaming and its use to deny freedom of association. Trust me, at least in on strange mind, there is a relationship. 

The picture indicates to me that it is hard for a "normal male"  (evil in these "woke" times)  not to notice pretty women confident in their femininity. Are conservative women in general are more attractive? Kristi Noem comes to mind, but a glance at the winning Republican congresswomen this cycle seems to indicate something of a general rule.

Yes, I know there are many physically attractive leftist women, however it seems that often their physical attractiveness is overshadowed by their screeching demands for fealty to their political beliefs, which are  in direct opposition to their exploiting their physical beauty while declaring at least male appreciation of such to be sexist. The fake is inherently unattractive when exposed. 

I'm finally reading Anna Karenina. I read a lot, but very little fiction, and even less romance. Psychology, culture, and especially the interplay between our physical and spiritual nature, are however of significant interest, and in those areas, Anna just kept showing up as a "must read" - it is easy to see why. 

A paragraph that struck me is: 

Vronsky heard with pleasure this light-hearted prattle of a pretty woman, agreed with her, gave her half-joking counsel, and altogether dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in talking to such women. In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

It appears that there is something like "human nature" that demands a class structure, and generally the pride/arrogance of the upper class.There can be the occasional just and moral king, but that is the exception.  There are similarities to the classes in Anna to the classes today. The lower class maps to at least the upper class imagination of the "deplorables". The upper class is much like today's "woke elite". The biggest difference is that the upper class  in 1878 Russia was not yet using the power of government to overtly oppress the lower class by removing their devotion to religion, morality, family and community, as the soon to come Communist party would quickly do. 

As I'm fond of saying as a computer scientist devoted to binary, "there are two classes, those who divide the world into two classes, and those who don't". 

In a more or less free and "natural" society people "sort" by a complex set of factors, some "good", some "bad" ... we won't go into that complexity here. The point is that it really isn't binary, there is lot more complexity than "two". 

As a culture shifts toward totalitarianism, it becomes more and more binary and the binary categories become  more and more mandatory -- as in the ideas that are declared to be "good" -- eg wearing/not wearing a mask, celebrating various sexual preferences, genders, etc, or not celebrating such, fealty to "The Party" (Democrat, globalist, woke, etc), or "deplorable", etc. 

The list goes on and becomes both more and more oppressive and foundational. Everything becomes political, and everything is mandatory -- thus in the mind of the oppressors, "good". 

"We are all in this together ... wear a mask".  

 

Does Starship Size Matter?

 Definitely worthy of being filed under complete waste of time -- better than watching MSM though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPwbVqU6lc 

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription

 http://www.framingthedialogue.com/archives/cancel-your-own-goddam-subscription/

I returned to this book that  I had read but failed to review in 2014. I've always loved WFBs initials (same as mine) and have had to fight the sin of envy for his intellect, life experiences, friends (including Ronald Reagan, Art Buchwald, Charlton Heston, Tom Selleck and a host of others. 

As the linked review  points out, it is a good read. For me, it was a "wayback machine", igniting my first interest in conservative political thought as a counterpoint to the malaise of the Carter years. One of my early rather wordy blog entries here. (yes I used to be even MORE wordy, amazing though that seems). 

Mostly I just sat back and enjoyed the book for it's pleasure. I was struck by a great example of "fake thinking". On 232, Eric Alterman (still around as a professor at CUNY) proffers a completely fabricated supposed interchange between WFB and a "quivering college student" who asked "have you ever experienced" poverty? Alterman composed WFB's fictional reply: " Why yes, my yacht experienced an unfortunate shortage of stuffed goose recently between Nassau and the Bahamas". 

Buckleys reply is reason enough to read the book. For one thing, he doesn't know what "stuffed goose" tastes like ... if one is writing fiction as Alterman clearly was, it may as well have been Foie Gras!

Although fictional, I suspect the anecdote as likely been repeated so much that many, likely including Alterman believe it to be true. Somewhat like the fiction of Reagan sleeping staff meetings (why? He was the boss! Anybody that has experienced staff meetings knows that they are a great way to cure insomnia. When you are not the one in charge, you bear it best as you can. If you are ... "I just realized I need to be on an important call", we will take this up later". 

Reading the book caused me to hunt up
an old Firing Line ... both the book and the link are well worth your time. 

Ten Years For Ten Stitches

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/12/the-case-of-stephanie-mohr.php

A young single female police officer gets 10 years for 10 ten stitches to a suspect because she "released her police dog early". The "incident" was 5 years previous, the FBI went after her after a WaPo article, and railroaded a conviction and ridiculously long sentence. 

Read it and weep. It is a testament to human courage that we have any police at all! 

Eschatological Conservatism

 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-not-progressive-conservatism/

The article advocates "Progressive Conservatism". The difficulty with that name is that it includes the term "progressivism", which is the belief that everything is getting "better" without defining "better",  nor stating the assumed mechanism by which this will happen - more centralized bureaucratic government tends to be the default. 

Words and labels DO matter "National Socialism" sounds much better than "Nazism", and "Socialism" sounds a lot better than "Fascism", which is actually what we have today. The link concludes with a rather weak statement of what progressive conservatism would be.  

Historically, Republicans have been the party of vertical nationalism, and Democrats the party of horizontal nationalism. That kind of nationalism they left to the Democrats, to people like FDR. What was remarkable about the 2016 Republican victory was that, almost for the first time, a presidential candidate ran on a platform that united the two strands of nationalism. 

If that’s what makes the progressive conservative progressive, he is also a conservative who thinks that the government should suppress riots forcefully, that the police are owed our presumptive support, and that nothing good was ever born out of anarchy. He thinks that we’re self-deceived about our goodness and that a sense of justified anger too often serves to excuse crimes. 

Eschatology is the study of end times. In Christianity it is the second coming of Christ in power. The Mises institute defines Communist eschatology as: 

Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum ($5 word for "what is desired), the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History was the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history.

Well not really the "end of human history" in either case. For Christianity, it means judgement day, where every knee shall bow to Christ, and the "sheep and the goats" will be separated. The sheep to everlasting peace and joy with God, the goats to everlasting torment without God, 

The Marxist "utopia" has a distinct sulfur smell to those who enjoy freedom, diversity of thought, private property, etc. Marx wasn't much of detail guy, but most of the visions of Communist utopia include abolishing private property,  abolishing "individualism" (because everything and everybody us "flattened/equal"),  all property is owned and controlled  by "the collective", and "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"

Why? Because Marxist faith is that human nature is basically good and Capitalism and religion have corrupted it. Once Atheism and Communism reign, then people will just "do the right thing" ... people will work and produce without any reward other than work itself ... and nobody will be jealous, lazy, etc

Historically, the results have been the opposite -- crime, oppression, poverty, disease, despair, etc,  As Churchill said "Communism/Socialism the equal sharing of miseries". Naturally, the Communists/Socialists say "it has never been done right". 

This has certainly proven true in the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, N Korea, etc. China is marketed as an "exception", but is false advertising ... it is Fascist.

Fascism is the cooperation the of centralized big business/government control that allows carefully controlled profit, with totalitarian political control. The danger of Fascism is that well managed Fascism "keeps the trains running on time" -- sure, some of the trains may be going to the Gulag or gas chamber, but since all the guns have been confiscated, and the government is ruthless (step out of line and they kill you AND your family!) -- resistance is futile. 

So what might my dream of "Eschatological Conservatism" be?  

For starters, it is RESISTANCE! Right now, the 70 million or so of us that voted for Trump are being assimilated into what so far is relatively soft Fascism. We are being told it is to be a "time of healing" (they mean HEELING s... however as the lockdowns, mask mandates, continued disparagement of Trump voters and encouragement to turn in your neighbors if they fail to comply (Minnesota) show quite clearly, that "soft Fascism" has an alarming tendency to get harder. 

Arm yourself: 

Stop doing what you are "mandated" to do. If not now, when? Today you may get some dirty looks for not wearing a mask, and some criticism for going to church, but you ought to be able to see now how fast your "freedom" can be drained away. Are you going to get on the boxcars "for your own good" when they order you to? You will really not have a choice if you have no weapons. Are you going to stand by as they restrict your freedom bit by bit, and sometimes as in 2020, by leaps and bounds?

Quit accepting their "elections". They never accepted the outcome of 2016. Is Sniffin Joe your president? What even is a "president" in this banana fake "republic"? Thank God we are living in a divided territory! "Wokeistan" only completely rules the large increasingly crime ridden "S**Tholes". Those of us in the Red States still have a choice to RESIST our "betters". The 2020 stolen election is a wake up call to the level of peril we are in. 

If we are going to resist however, we need a better name. I'm bad at that ... "The Allies"? It looks increasingly likely that we need a divorce rather than attempting to reconcile with Wokeistan. 

In any case, is not a time for "HEELING"! 2016 was our last opportunity to heal after 8 years of surviving BOistan. If the "Wokies" had desired actual healing, that would  have been a golden opportunity to seek a return to respect for the Constitution, religious liberty, family, life, etc.  That opportunity has been terribly wasted. Biden, the Deep State and the MSM are holding out fake olive branches now if we will only fold and bow to their "woke" views. 

It is time for a real awakening of the type that the Allies provided for the last more limited Fascist regime of Hitler. Power is the only coin of this realm -- take it, defend it, and be not afraid. 

Christianity, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights actually understood, respected and followed is our flawed objective -- far from perfection or "utopia", however hopeful for a future that is "better" in the sense of more free, more abundant, more cultured, more friendly, more civil and more unified in thankfulness for the blessing of being "one nation under God". 

We were headed there in 1950, we lost our way into the wilderness of despair in the sixties -- we know where to go, we just have a long road and a lot of work to get there. 

I'm no fan of Nietzsche, however he said one good thing ...

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/16/leonardo-da-vinci-the-biography-walter-isaacson-review

I generally like Isaacson's, biographies ... I've read enough of them; Einstein, Franklin, Jobs, "The Innovators" (my least favorite). The linked is a good summary of the book. 

I was struck by the "pseudo Christian morality" the elites "adhered to" in Leonardo's time. Pretty much all the rich and powerful men, including Popes and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, had a mistress or two, and probably a similar number of illegitimate children. Much like Egypt, Greece, Rome, and England at the peak of its power, wealth and power were the coin of the realm - plebeian mores were for the plebes!

I suppose we ought take the fact that immorality is more egalitarian in our time? -- "everybody's" doing it. Based on the priests abuse of children, the Catholic church seems to be proof that "power corrupts" has not been repealed by "progress". 

It was also striking how devoted Isaacson is to the idea that if you are intelligent, you can't possibly have Christian faith. On page 512 we see: "In his will, Leonardo commended his soul to our Lord Almighty God, and to the glorious Virgin Mary" ... Which Isaacson immediate dismisses as a "literary flourish"', even though the page also says that Leonardo specified that his funeral should include three high masses and three low masses". 

Leonardo is clearly a mythic hero figure for Isaacson, and it is just too much to consider that with all his "heresy" -- he would be in good company with Luther on that! Any disagreement with Catholic dogma was heresy. 

On 487, "This is the heart of Leonardo's philosophy: the replication of the patterns of nature, from the cosmic to the human". 

One of themes of the book is that Leonardo had an insatiable and eclectic curiosity, and was just completely fascinated with eddies in water, curls in human hair, birds, anatomy, and  documenting his observations in notebooks (but not publishing). 

The book seems like an excellent introduction to art appreciation, and least for me ... who is sadly lacking in that area. It made me want to see the Mona Lisa more. More than I needed to know about sfumato and squaring the circle.  

Covid Rate Of Transmission (Rt)

 https://rt.live/

The linked will take you to a chart that shows a computation for the rate of Covid transmission by state. In theory, if the Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading. The creators of the model are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger,  the co-founders of Instagram. Tom Vladeck is a data scientist and owner of Gradient Metrics. 

I find it to be "interesting/useful" ... lots of caveats / discussion below.

The bars for each state are the 80% confidence interval for the model ... meaning there is an 80% chance that the actual number is in that range. So why can't they be more correct? Basically, the map/model is NEVER the "territory" that is what "model" means! 

If you choose to dig into more detail, the Faq gives that ... the basic fact is that like all models, reality may be different from reality. This is true of ALL models! The "proof" of model correctness is in the rear view mirror, but must people reporting on models often don't tell you that. The reaction to Covid was based on models ... "masks are not effective at all", "we are going to be shut down for 2 weeks to flatten the curve", "masks are effective to protect others, not you", "it doesn't spread outside", "masks provide significant protection for you", "it does spread outside", etc Draw your own conclusions on how good the models have been.

Why look at the model? Basically for the same reason you look at the weather forecast -- to give you a general idea of how future weather looks  TODAY ... the prediction  may  (and often is) be different tomorrow. Good models allow you to look back at how accurate they were in the past, and discuss a bit about updates to the model they have made, and some they would like to make. (this one does) 

Although many statisticians don't like to admit this, this is the reason there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics". Statements like "women are better drivers!" based on them having less accidents are ridiculous, but often made. A "better" statistic would  be per mile driven ... just using accident statistics would call a woman who never drives a good driver. 

Getting a good statistic is HARD (election predictions should be a clue here). It gets REALLY complicated, and moves into the area of art rather than science. "Correlation is not causality" is also key. Drowning is strongly correlated (meaning the graph curves look alike) with ice cream sales and high temps. Of course neither of them CAUSE drowning. 

The important factor here is that today statistics are often presented as "science" when they are in fact just mathematical TOOLS. Climate change is often portrayed as "settled science" of which there is no such thing. Science is by definition NEVER settled! If something is "Science", then it MUST be falsifiable -- the next experiment may show the "settled" to be wrong. This is doubly true for statistical models ... especially as they predict the future rather than look at the past.

So why is Rt a useful statistic? It is just "better" than number of cases which is essentially meaningless ... more cases resulting from more testing doesn't mean more people are getting it, it just means we are finding more. cases (this model attempts to account for that). We don't have good data on number of asymptomatic cases because we are not doing randomized testing. Assuming we are tracking asymptomatic cases (which I doubt), we MAY be able to get a better idea of how many people have had it but did not know it.  

Naturally, even THAT doesn't really help us that much, because the "experts" claim that you don't get "much" immunity if you have had it ... therefore you still have to take protective measures -- for a disease that we believe you will be asymptomatic of in at least 50% of cases ... although we of course don't KNOW that either! 

Socrates was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing. 

VDH: Chaos On Chaos

 https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/22/a-time-of-chaos-upon-chaos-atop-chaos/

Not one of VDHs best in my opinion, but these are certainly pretty much "the worst of times" ... at least until they get worse, so perhaps this is the best that can be done. It is a worthy read as a more detailed description of the current chaos ... but then, can chaos really be "described"? 

Meanwhile Trump’s once-solid ranks may be in danger of fracturing. Half believe that not just his long-term legacy, but also his short-term utility in winning Georgia are endangered by unsubstantiated claims of a stolen “landslide” victory of a 70 percent majority and 400-some Electoral College votes. Of course, Trump supporters are furious over the weaponization of polling, and the violations of the voting laws of state legislatures that led to irregularities, controversies, and suspicious data, endemic with massive mail-in voting. But they are not assured that either episodic or systematic skullduggery automatically translates into a provable case that Trump won the election, much less won by historical proportions involving fraud of the sort never witnessed in past elections.

The other half is convinced of just such a “landslide” victory taken from Trump by computerized trickery and engineered through a vast coverup and conspiracy, again the greatest political scandal in American history.

I would have hoped that the latest 3+ generations of Americans steeped in media exaggeration would be more or less comfortable with Trump's over promising. Certainly Democrats back to FDR have generally received accolades beyond all reason  ... admittedly, they generally didn't have to self promote since the global media'/fascist complectx did it for them. Can't we be smart enough to see that? 

Really, a Nobel Prize when BO had hardly got into office? Fawning accocades of BO being "the one"? Spare me. 

Anyway, a confusing and chaotic column, just like our times. 

The Great Reset

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-great-reset-if-only-it-were-just-a-conspiracy/

A rather long article on what I've been talking about for a decade -- the increasingly overt close relationship with the Davos Elite, Global Corporatism, bureaucratic "DeepAdminisrative States, universities and media. They are just coming out of the closet now in the form of the "Great Reset". 

Remember "WEF", the "World Economic Forum" -- it is the public name for "The Great Reset". It isn't a conspiracy, if is fully out in the open, and as long as people are distracted, drugged, media manipulated, and generally comatose except for the "Fear Of the Day", nobody cares. (well maybe 70 million Trump voters do, but Voter Fraud). Why care if you truly are powerless? 

... because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

No, it isn't communist, it is fascist! The term that may not be stated, so they call it "corporatist", which is incorrect, because the government bureaucracies, media, education, and increasingly judicial systems are part of it. 

The article is sadly so poorly written and obscure that it makes me look like a good writer. I've covered the message ... if you are looking to take a nap, I'd recommend it. 

The Voter Fraud Is Strong With This One

 https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-election-is-deeply-puzzling/

Well, it isn't "puzzling" to me. 

The only reason to fight voter ID tooth and nail as Democrats always have, is that you know you generally need it to win elections. It has been true since Reconstruction and Jim Crow, through Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall, Mayor Daley, etc. JFK was "elected" though voter fraud ... Joseph Kennedy was at least honest in this case: "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide". 

Certainly modern Democrats have lost any semblance of parsimony -- with their money or ours, but if we are paying ANY attention, we knew that already. This time they over achieved by millions. As Biden said. it was the greatest vote fraud organization in history! (so far)

Since the media has been mostly Democrat for a LONG time, and Americans (especially the hard working ones) have a strong aversion to the seedy, wasteful business of politics, most Americans don't want to look in that sewer. It is clear now that if they want to retain any illusion of "freedom" while they are masked and locked in their houses, they are going to have to jump in that sewer now. The toilets are backing up.

The article is WELL worth the read. A teaser ... 

Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.