Category: snivelry

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The Exaltation of Feeeelings

26 May 2022

The wise and witty Klint once said that instead of going with their feelings, people should go with their intelligence. He’s right, of course, but I wish he believed it. That would be a good idea. I should consider that, though it has been made clear to me that I have the power to compel (force? make? inspire?) people to “feel uncomfortable.” Since “words are violence” they are well within their rights to respond in kind.

The punk-assed bitch who murdered nineteen children and two of their teachers in Uvalde this month was a troubled soul. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family in this time of torment.” Raised in a culture that exalts feeeelings at the expense of reason, he concluded that the proper expression of his having been marginalized and having his identity denied by “The Right” or “Republicans” or “The Patriarchy” was to express the legitimacy of his feeeelings and to inflict immeasurably greater anguish on innocent strangers and their families.

Since “silence is violence” and since I’ve never validated his feeeelings, it could be my fault that this boy snapped. Who knows, I may even have “misgendered” him at one time in his life, in person, in print, or on-line. When our feeeelings are exalted at the expense of our manners, our obligations, and our duties, punk-assed bitches will spend their time hunting in free-fire zones like a “gun free” school, comfortably assured that no one is equipped to defend themselves.

230720 — in re Russell, above
“So you ‘re saying that ALL managers eat shit?”
Yeah, that must be it. I couldn’t possibly be referring to the stereotypical martinets who outnumber most other middle managers. I could only have meant ALL, but especially YOU.

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Spec-Fic Conditioning

30 November 2019

One of Ray Bradbury’s greatest motives in writing speculative fiction was not so much to predict the future, he said, but to prevent it.  I flatter myself, and I declare that I am trying to follow in that tradition.  Not every future, of course, but some, and especially this one. There are better futures that I can imagine, but I’m not about to write about any of those.  Happy stories are boring.

One of the great benefits of reading spec-fic, according to Isaac Asimov, is that it trains the mind to appreciate unfamiliar circumstances.  Because we immerse ourselves in these strange worlds regularly, we can relate to all manner of unusual lifestyles, technologies, physiologies, and cultural norms.  Habitually relating to scuttling arthropods living on a neutron star, their majesties’ bucketeers, or the cyclical transsexuals of LeGuin’s left hand, we have rather less trouble adjusting to the new neighbors from strange lands abroad or who practice unusual rituals.

It makes us better neighbors, and it also makes us better historians.  “Presentism” tends to not color our judgment as much as it does most.  We judge different cultures and communities less from our own personal biases (“The way it’s s’posed ta be”), but from a broader view of ideological coherence (or its more likely absence).  Rather than condemning Jefferson or Lee outright on the sole basis of “owning slaves” we are able to place their behavior into a context that demanded behaviors from them that today’s society would not.  It’s easy to condemn Washington’s physicians who bled him to death, but like the cop who witnessed a “furtive gesture” towards the waistband, they were just following established procedure.  Today’s physicians might have saved many of the limbs that were amputated by Union and Rebel surgeons. 

And, conditioned as we are, we can see that today’s sensible statists who prefer central regulation to market discipline (or taxation to freedom, or protecting global democracy to non-intervention) can be easily substituted for the 1840’s main-stream anti-abolitionist who favored a more gradual approach to emancipation, rather than sabotaging the foundations of civilization. 

Slavery, and taxation, and conscription, and prohibition, and murder, all worked to the advantage of the established social order.  Prudent conservatives are loathe to tear down things that work.  And when it comes to the state and its prerogatives, most “liberals” are conservative, even as most “conservatives” are collectivist.  Readers of spec-fic, due in part to our peculiar conditioning, are generally both liberal and conservative, and rarely democratic.

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Long Live IDIC

8 March 2022

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations is a Trekkie credo.

We use it poetically, of course. As an engineer and a scientist, I know that human beings cannot exhibit infinite diversity, because there are only a finite number of us. And frankly, some combinations just can’t work. But as an artist, and more importantly, as a fanboy, I understand that “infinite” means “beyond my immediate comprehension” or “vast, unlimited, or unrestrained.”

It’s partly why we dig science fiction, and one of the main reasons I love Star Trek® and The Legion of Super-Heroes® both. In addition to their generally optimistic view of the future and of civilization, they were early in putting women into positions of authority. Captain Pike’s First Officer, Number One, and The Legion’s second Leader, Saturn Girl, were both unmistakably female. Years before “Women’s Lib” entered common cultural parlance.

And a year before the Virginia v Loving decision striking down anti-miscegenation laws, and two years before “Plato’s Stepchildren” wherein Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura engage in some (unfortunately involuntary) on-screen lip wrasslin’ the Legion managed to stealthily showcase inter-racial romance (albeit between a Coluan and a Kryptonian), while such real-world trysts were still outlawed in some States by lingering Jim-Crow-mocratic legislation.

Long Live the Legion’s Star Trekkian philosophy of IDIC! Probably why I did, and still, love both continuities.

correspondents JT, PK, & SK point to the Legion’s other cultural firsts in mainstream comics, notably Element Lad, the first gay super-hero (introduced in 1963), Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet as the first gay couple (circa mid ’80s), and of course, yet another inter-racial couple, Mon-El of Daxam and Shadow Lass of Talok VIII. Also not mentioned were Colossal Boy (Earthman native to Mars) and Chameleon Girl of Durla. While Light Lass’ and Shrinking Violet’s romance was deftly and subtly, yet unmistakably (The Levitz Himself IS that good!) introduced in a Code Approved book, Element Lad’s alleged first is arguable, insofar as his present sexuality was not asserted until 1992. But there’s no necessary contradiction in continuo. He may well be bisexual for all we know. Or he may have been confused or frightened. He did squire many a young lady, but he never seemed to have a steady. Nevertheless, the Legion’s many fans can take enormous pride in our team’s relentless pressure on the frontier of cultural evolution. As well we should, it’s taken the rest of you decades to catch up.

Supergirl® and Brainiac 5® are the creations of Otto Binder,
Al Plastino, Jerry Siegel, & Jim Mooney,
and are held de jure by DC Comics & WarnerCom. 
Used without permission.

(Thanks to correspondent Golpoyez Jpexynt for push-starting this essay.)

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Seventeen Stars

17 January 2019

670127 — Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, Edward White.
860128 — Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick,
Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe.
030201 — Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson,
David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon.

Apollo. Challenger. Columbia.
Sixteen Americans and one Israeli.
Thirteen men and four women.
Pilots, engineers, soldiers, mission specialists, payload specialists, surgeons, teachers, explorers, scientists.
Heroes.
Seventeen lives lost to America’s official space program.
As we fix our gaze beyond the horizon and press the frontier we are oft admonished by a merciless fate and an indifferent nature. We can be struck down at a moment’s notice. We can scurry back to our caves and lick our wounds and pray to kinder gods or we can venture back out again. And again. And again and again and again and claim our birthright.

Exploration is a risky business, and life itself is dangerous. Those who would condemn the proponents of manned space exploration will no doubt continue to drive automobiles, fly in airplanes, and purchase electrical appliances for their homes. There is no safe technology, there is only the acceptance of calculated risks — that can prove to be killers — that have also saved and succored so many millions more.

Robots in space have their place, but only boots on the ground can answer the one vital question pertaining to the frontier:
“Can we hold this ground?”

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Our Own Guy Fawkes?

6 January 2022

Approximately a year ago I asked if Ashli Babbitt (killed by Michael Byrd, a government employee with a record of mishandling firearms) was Crispus Attucks.  Since then, I have been persuaded, by circumstances and by sober discourse, that she is not.  Her death, while tragic and stupid, is nowhere near as portentous as Attucks’.  I have since concluded that, as a figure of popular opprobrium and scorn, she is more of a native Guy Fawkes.  Like Fawkes, she knew who the enemies of freedom were and where they nested, but also like Fawkes, her actions and efforts were ill-conceived, poorly received, and they remain unachieved.

Mainstream Demoblicans and the sober heads of TeeVeeLand™ drone on today about the desecration of our Temple of Democracy® being the “greatest assault on our democracy since the Civil War (sic)” and the “worst thing since Watergate” yet never explain just how the profane ever got to be sacred in the first place.

I’m MORE disgusted by today’s crocodile tears. 

The Capitol Hill Ruckus™ was stupid, silly, and foolish, and just what Ray Epps and The Deep State® wanted you to see, but it was no insurrection.  A year of show trials and “investigations” later, and while political prisoners languish in F’eral custody, not a single charge of sedition nor insurrection (please feel free to check your legal dictionaries and to set me straight) has been brought forth, though scores have been granted maximum sentences for trespass, hijinks, and felonious folderol.

later…  correspondent Ficut Joyz reminds us that Guy Fawkes was “a rabid papist and religious extremist” who preferred Catholic to Anglican tyranny, and whose efforts, however romantic or heroic, were “never actually about what we know to be freedom and [that] romanticizing the Gunpowder Plot… is ridiculous.”  Which simply bolsters my point. 
Guy Fawkes’ Day and January Sixthmas are equally silly holidays.

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The Fat, the Frail, and the Faithful

28 November 2021

Any three non-exclusive descriptions can easily be expressed as a Venn Diagram, with singular lobes all around, intersections between, and all at the center.

It has been clear to many, long before the advent of Wuhan Flu™ (“hallowed be its name”), that the fat and the frail are much more susceptible to respiratory distress than the rest of us.  Influenzae, Coronae, and Rhino viruses have been killing the elderly and the sick and the obese in much greater proportions than everybody else for centuries.  “Virus gonna virus” means that new strains will claim new victims. As they mutate, they’ll become more transmissible and less lethal.  Otherwise, they would extinguish themselves, which is a poor business model for any predator.

People generally know their own interests best, so I’m disinclined to confront them over their personal precautions.  Even if I doubt their motives or reasoning, we should still be able to peacefully coexist.  If a private merchant insists that I muzzle up before entering his shop, I will either comply (if I want what’s inside enough), or I will move on.  When a privileged insider who remains open while his smaller competitors are padlocked by the state makes the same “request” I am less sympathetic.  I have to both breathe AND eat, so I will cheerfully endure the stink-eye and hectoring as I shop.  If ChowMart™ or JohnBoy’s™ want to throw me out, they’re going to have to tell me personally, or maybe even threaten me with violence.  Again, I have to eat.  But that’s just me.  You do you all you want. 

For me, a face mask outside of the ICU or surgical theatre makes as much sense as casual swimwear.  They are often just sectarian vestments, so I’d rather not. And if I can get away with it, I won’t.  But sometimes the penalties for non-compliance are too dire, so I’ll wear pants at some beaches, and masks in some shops or homes.

I am less sanguine about the sacraments and sacrifices of this new faith.  I’ll pass on the alleged “vaccines” partly for the same reason that my old chum stays away from LSD or Quaaludes while still enjoying weed or booze.  Some things have passed the tests of generations, and some things are a little too new for our comfort levels.  I am horrified by the gerontocratic insistence that babies and toddlers be jabbed or muzzled for the sake of their grandparents.  If Granny is in precarious enough shape, then we’ll cheerfully muzzle up in her presence.  We love her.  Otherwise, we’re going to play in the sun and the dirt, just as we have for millennia.  Children (other than the fat and the frail) are generally the most durable of us, so subjecting them to dangerous experimental injections constitutes child sacrifice.  Moloch seems to be back with a vengeance.  Maybe it’s time to crush Canaan again.  Paging Joshua…

update 211201 — Cultish Comparisons
I’ll clarify for the eagerly aggrieved. Some people have very good reasons for masking up or accepting an injection that mitigates their risk. Their behavior may be neither cultish nor irrational, but prudently cautious. I would not presume to know their motives, so I’m satisfied to let them be.
Some other people who decline these precautions are much too eager to presume motives of sheepish compliance and to excoriate those whom they consider to be “Branch Covidians.” I wish they wouldn’t. First, because we’re not living each others’ lives so, in general, we should not infer reasons for face masks or yarmulkas or Mardi Gras beads. As Mr Jefferson reminds me, if “it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket” it’s probably none of my business. Second, and specifically, the late Branch Davidians were the victims of state violence, whereas the most egregious of the pushy Maskerati and Jabolins are the proponents of state violence.

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Biograph

12 March 2002

Hi!  Excuse me!  Can I bug ya a minute? … is how I approach prospective petitioners as I solicit signatures.  And while that may not be the way a life begins, it is how each campaign begins.
Hi!  … is a friendly greeting.  It says, “I’m not sneaking up on you.” 
It gives you a chance to size me up.
Excuse me!  … is an acknowledgment that I’m interrupting you. 
I know that I’m using up your time.
Can I bug ya a minute?  … means that I have more to say so if you need to blow me off, now would be a good time.

After that, I’ve gotten someone’s attention without getting them out of the bath or rousing them from a nap.  In fact, it usually doesn’t take as long as a minute to actually sign a petition.  I don’t knock on strangers’ houses, I walk the residential areas of the district and engage pedestrians and weekend gardeners and skateboarders and people out walking the dog.  They’re up.  They’re alert.  They’re approachable. 

I will not knock on someone’s door unless, a) it’s an emergency, b) I have an appointment, or c), it is the home of friends who more or less expect me, and are usually glad to see me.  Other than that, NO WAY. People should respect your privacy.  The Congress should respect your privacy, the State Legislature should respect your privacy, and first of all, politicians should respect your privacy.  If a candidate shows so little regard for your rights while he’s begging for your support, how much will he respect them when he’s in office?

Earlier…  A little background, usually in order about here…
Our family has lived on the Island of Hawaii since 1997.  We moved here from the Oregon Coast.  Previously I have lived (as a Navy Brat) in Oregon, on Oahu (1969-1971), and in New England and Washington State.  My cumulative kama’aina tenure would now be about seven years.

I guess I was born a libertarian, but I didn’t know the word until adolescence.  I developed an interest in politics at a fairly early age.  My parents were split over Kennedy/Nixon, and my mother showed a great fondness for Barry Goldwater, so by the time I was 12 years old, and Nixon and Humphrey were the anointed, I was “Clean with Gene” (McCarthy.)  It’s just as well that 16 year olds couldn’t vote in 1972, because at the time I believed that George McGovern was going to rescue America from the viper Nixon.  I’ve since come to recant that position a bit, looking upon Richard Nixon as something of an unintentional national hero.  His worse than useless price freeze of the previous year was the final straw that led to the founding of the Libertarian Party, and his presidency in general has done more to inspire distrust in government than just about any other figure in recent history.  Sadly, that lesson seems not to have stuck.

In 1975 I met Early Riser, and in 1976 we were wed.  She has since blessed me with two fine sons.  Stargazer is presently an Astronomy major at UH in Hilo, and The Enumerator is pursuing his Masters’ Degree in Mathematics at Oregon State University.

Later, in 1976, I found myself a Jerry Brown Republican, arguing that America should return to the Gold Standard… and the Moon.  I’m still working on both counts.  During the same summer I’d read William F. Buckley’s “Up from Liberalism” and re-read Abbie Hoffman’s “Revolution for the Hell of It.”  The two taken together set up a wicked turbulence in my mind that left me well poised for an epiphany.  Working security at the Ketchikan Spruce Mill one long Alaskan summer night I ran across some literature from the Roger MacBride campaign, and first saw the word “libertarian” spelled with a capital letter and in some other context than “civil.”  I read it, read it again, and all that night read it over and over.  Amazing!  Here was an organized group of people who seemed to believe as I did, that governments are instituted among men, and that they derive their JUST powers from the consent of the governed, and that the government that governs best governs least, and every other battle cry of freedom that I could recall from my twenty years of life.

That was twenty-six years ago this summer, and I haven’t looked back.  But I did go on.  I spent four years in the Air Force, served as a Jet Mechanic for the Strategic Air Command and for the Pacific Air Forces, and was honorably discharged in 1981 with four stripes, a wife, and two sons.  We returned to Corn Valley to cash in my GI Bill where I studied Physics and Mechanical Engineering at Beaver Tech.

In addition to my formal course work at the University I began pursuing my political education in earnest, attending meeting Sugar and Bud.  For the past twenty years they have remained trusted advisors and harsh critics.  I made my first run for the House in 1982 as an otherwise unemployed full-time student.  The party in Oregon didn’t manage to secure ballot status that year, so we had to run write-in.  I’m pretty sure we cracked double digits on that one.

In 1986 I was graduated from OSU with a pair of degrees and a fair amount of debt.  I worked where I could and let politics take a back seat to my other interests.  During this time Busy Body and I drifted from each other, gradually pushing each other away.  Eventually we stayed pushed.  In 1988, while playing Sherlock Holmes in a local amateur theatre production, I met Diva Dearest, who was working as a sound technician in the show.  We resonated both on a political and moral level, but, more important, we laughed a lot together.  We were married in 1989, and in 1991, our daughter, L’Historienne was born.  She is named after the cyber-hero of Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” Supergirl (in the original Kryptonian), the woman who was responsible for coaxing Drama Queen to work on the show that brought us together, and the great villain from Doc Smith’s “Skylark” series – science fiction principles run strong through this family.   

By the time the political itch got strong enough to throw me back in to the fray, it was 1996.  This time the Oregon party was on the ballot, and so we did much better, receiving, for myself at least, just under 2%.

Neither disappointed nor discouraged, having witnessed a progression of going from “Liber-what?” to actually being recognized, printed in the newspaper, and acknowledged on the air, I was not to be denied.  I would run every chance I got.  Politics, and campaigning, I had learned, was just too much fun and too satisfying to ever sit it out again.  As steep as the odds appear, not trying is not acceptable.

Big talk, but life intervenes…  In December of 1996, just six weeks after the election that had so fired my enthusiasm, facing another grim wet Oregon Coast winter that was taking its toll on Drama Queen’s health, and listening to Bing Crosby singing “Mele Kalikimaka” on the stereo, we realized that you can be broke and in debt anywhere in America.  We’d always wanted to move to the tropics (or at least vacation.)  I had lived on Oahu as a boy when the Navy had stationed my step-father at Pearl, and the Air force had sent me to Okinawa for part of my tour.  I knew I was suited to the year-round barefoot scene.  My mother had since moved there after her retirement and had been coaxing us to visit for some time.  It took Bing, ultimately, to give us that final push.

We worked.  We saved.  I did double shifts. We had a huge garage sale.  We packed up, tossed out, and mailed off – a box at a time.  And when we stepped off the plane in Kona of August of 1997 we knew we’d made it home.  Within a year we’d purchased a house – a house mind you, a house in paradise.  No other place on Earth has been as good for us as the Big Island.

In 1998 Noreen Chun ran for the Congress as a Libertarian, leaving me off the hook.  Besides, bettah one local girl run than some pretentious malihini.  In 2000, Noreen elected not to run again, and I felt it was again time for me to step forward.

Third party candidates (unless they are gainfully retired) are still obliged to earn a living.  So, while working as an Audit Clerk at the Hilton Waikoloa Village (in whose employ I remain) I chanced to meet Wayne Ryker.  Here was another who was fond of an intellectual challenge and could see clearly to the center of an issue.  While working together we often argued politics.  I made no secret of my aspirations, and he made no secret of his doubts.  He, too, has become a trusted advisor and a harsh critic.  (I need them all.)  It was through him that I met our wondrous web spinner, Rhonni Samplas, whose gracious generosity and titanic talents have permitted me to inflict my clumsy prose on the suffering surfing audience.

We did respectably for a party that no one had heard of a generation ago, and for a candidate who was new to the area and still pushing down roots.  For the record, based on vote totals in partisan races in Hawaii, I was the most popular Libertarian of the season.  Polling only half the state and winning roughly 2.4% of the vote, I beat our party’s Presidential and Senate candidates, both running statewide, and in raw numbers (4468) every other independent party candidate in the state with the exception of Ralph Nader (whose “independent” credentials are questionable.)  I hope we can build on that.  With your help, and the valuable support of my extended political family (see below), we will.

Hawaii’s greatest burdens are crushing taxes, suffocating regulations, and the inflexible labor laws.  Hawaii is rich in resources and opportunities, but it goes nowhere if people are unwilling to invest their money, their sweat, or their dreams.  A business-friendly Hawaii, freed of artificial restraints, could become a real workers’ paradise – the Hong Kong of the Pacific.

I will bring to the Congress an understanding of the limits of federal authority.  These limitations are spelled out in the Constitution in concise English, and are clear to any reasonably educated person (with the obvious exception of judges, lawyers, Democrats, and Republicans.)  I promise neither pork nor special favors, but freedom and opportunity for all.

Make America Greigh Anon is…
Policy & Oratory:  Gene Greigh
Public Affairs:  Diva Dearest
Policy Analysts:  Wayne Ryker, Sugar, Bud
Inspiration:  L’Historienne, The Enumerator, Stargazer
Wicked Web Craft:  Rhonni Samplas

update 211110:  As noted elsewhere, this election also did not work out as well as I’d hoped, but I did manage to survive.  What did not survive includes my marriage to Diva Dearest, Diva Dearest herself and Wayne Ryker (both now deceased), my Hawaiian residency, regular contact with Rhonni Samplas, and the close confidences of Sugar and Bud. L’Historienne, The Enumerator, and Stargazer have all since taken their respective degrees, and they and Stargazer’s offspring remain consoling joys, even if my contact with them all is distant, fleeting, and intermittent.

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Positive Feedback

19 May 2019

In Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (and probably other disciplines as well), a positive feedback loop can be disastrous.  For reference, see “Galloping Gert” and “Marching in Step” or just listen to the amp’s complaints when the microphone gets too close to the speaker. 

With public policy, the principle remains the same, but because the damage is distributed throughout the body politic, the catastrophe is harder to discern, but it is just as disastrous.  Witness the effects of prohibition, as it engenders increasing destruction:

Step 1:  Prohibit the possession, production, or importation of “X.”

Step 2:  Witness the free (“black”) market response to prohibition as resourceful entrepreneurs develop means to satisfy the surviving demand for “X” and the violence that emerges to protect the subsidized profits for providing “X.”

Step 3:  Point to the free (“black”) market and the emergent violence that accompanies its illegality as evidence of the inherent criminality of “X.”

Step 4:  Return to Step 1 but enhance the prohibition with additional sanctions.

Saturday Night Live’s skit about “Ex-Police” perfectly illustrates this loop: “Another marihuana-related death,” said the home invader (Dan Aykroyd) after he pummeled the hapless pothead (John Belushi) into paste.

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Dumping on Digits?

1 November 2021

The most popular and well known of an emerging class of “crypto-currencies,” BitCoin™ is a digital product without physical backing or central controlling authority beyond the parameters of its internal definition. It has been described as a “peer-to-peer” record of solutions to mathematical puzzles known as a “blockchain.”

It has been decried by its detractors as the ultimate fiat, insofar as it has no material backing, and lauded as the savior of civilization as a currency which cannot be inflated without limit, nor controlled by any bureaucracy. Like metals, crypto satisfies many of the necessary criteria of a serviceable currency — it is scarce, it is readily recognizable (to those familiar with it), it is easily divisible, and it is fungible. Even if it neither clinks like metals nor rustles like paper. And it seems to be dependent on modern tech to be recognized and manipulated, but that’s a small problem, as long as the ‘net stays up and electrons continue to race around circuitry.

But metals’ greatest fans remain leery of it, or of it’s smaller subdivision the Satoshi, while many of its boosters earnestly defend it against the criticisms of “goldbugs” and other obsolescent old relics like your genial host.

correspondent TC is particularly passionate, stating that “Relying on metals in the age of the internet is stupid. [Peter] Schiffian goldbugs are cultists worse than the covidiots.” Which invites the question, how am I “worse than the covidiots?” Was it my effort to destroy the economy, murder the elderly, or abuse children? Or simply to squirrel away some secure savings that would survive both regime changes AND power outages? So many crimes. Which did he catch me committing?

correspondent TC responds: “Its [sic] your intransigence in simultaneously raising gold to a holy status while denigrating crypto as funny money. Your comment about a power outage already tells me you don’t know anything about it.  Besides if we’re preparing for the end of the world, I have a box of bullets that’s worth more than all the gold in your safe.  People like Schiff have just raised the deception to an art form. The comparison to the ‘covidiots’ is the unwillingness to learn, grow, apply logic and reason.“

I appreciate TC‘s refining his definition of my allegedly “covidiotic” misbehavior or misapprehension, but he still raises more questions than he answers, as he goes on to advise me to “[d]o whatever you want with your wealth, just stop trying to tell me crypto is bullshit and gold is magic. They are at best on equal footing, and that’s being generous.”

TC seems to have mistaken my curiosity for an inability to compromise or to learn (“intransigence”), as well as inferring a mysticism (conferring a “holy status” onto the profane) that is antithetical to empiricism. In order for me to “stop” telling him that “crypto is bullshit and gold is magic” I would have to first START. Someone seems to have tapped a well of hostility within him, and he’s vomited it all over me. But I have a generous heart and am willing to leave such emotionalism behind.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of “transigence” I’m eager to learn new things, and generally grateful for correction. So I posed this question to him: Lacking electrical power (including batteries or photoelectric transformers), please explain how I might purchase or spend a Satoshi or two. Can a verifiable “block-chain” be expressed manually? I (mis?)understand that all digital products are ultimately sequences or matrices of ‘nits and noughts. Finally, I advised TC to be wary of assuming that I have (or anyone else has) neglected ANY of the four metals of freedom: gold, silver, copper, AND LEAD!

correspondent TC has so far declined to respond.

correspondent Otmia Unogsy, meanwhile, points out that “crypto currencies DO have a physical backing. The devices you use, mining equipment, computers. All essential physical things in an internet age.” By the same token, of course, F’eral Reserve “Dollars” also have a similar “physical backing.” Their value is supported by the “full faith and credit” of the united States’ military reputation, and their demonstrated ability to obliterate would-be competitors to petro-dollar hegemony. The important difference between “support” and “backing” is convertibility. Remove the support, and the value evaporates, whereas gold and silver retain their value irrespective of the fate of the backing authority. I have silver and gold coins that were issued by extinct governments, and they are still just as valuable as equivalent lumps of metal.

correspondent LR-L offers a few kind words, and adds that he is “a ‘diversify’ guy” himself “with an admitted bias toward the post-collapse value of boxes of lead denominated in grains per unit.” He concludes from my thoughts, and from the various responses that I provoked, that there exists a “need to do a Kickstarter for the Well of Hostility®, although what form that should take is proving a stubborn idea.” 

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Being an Ego Supremacist

27 July 2020

I have probably always been a Gene Supremacist, thinking that, in general, my opinion was more clear or coherent than any other.  Nevertheless, I readily acknowledge the vastness of my ignorance and welcome counsel. 

Conflation has never seduced me.  I recognized early on the great diversity around me, so bigotry was never an attraction.  I do recollect accepting the opinions of my family at an early age, but when I realized how irrational their racism was, I decided that I knew better.

Accusations of “white supremacy” are offensive on many levels, mainly as an insult to one’s intelligence.  Because I speak English, and I’ve seen a box of crayons, I know that there are no white or black people on Earth.  I am not unaware of popular fictions, but I maintain firmer standards.  If it’s untrue and it isn’t poetic or funny, it’s a lie.  And even if it is poetic, it might still be a lie (see Gettysburg Address).  On the other hand, as I diverge again, “negro” is fun, even as it literally means “black.”   Still, it’s a nice word; it’s warm and friendly.  Think of the muscles of your face as you pronounce it.  It starts with a smile and ends up in a look of astonishment and delight.  “Nigger” on the other hand, is just mean.  It starts with a sneer and ends with a growl.

The idea that “white supremacy” has any serious traction in a world where the observation that “There sure are a lot of Jewish Nobel Laureates, aren’t there?  And a lot of tall negros in the NBA!” can get you scorned, scolded, and verbally scalded, is ridiculous.  Many have lost jobs and other opportunities over less.  There are no visible rewards for “white supremacist” behavior, so the notion that it has any practical currency in running the world is utterly absurd. 

YES IT DID!  IT WAS THE WAVE OF THE PAST! 
And the LAW, thanks to Jim Crow Democrats. 
But for the most part, the past is past.

But nothing attracts a warrior like an unwinnable war.  In the fight for equality, no victory is possible because differences are what enrich our lives.  But the fight goes on, and as racial relations improve, the rhetoric is ramped up.  As enemies fade into the mist, the definition must be expanded to advance the front.  As I’d indicated elsewhere, “objective, rational linear thinking” and the recognition of causality and quantitative differences are not so much the hallmarks of civilization and hygiene and health and prosperity, but characteristics of “whiteness” or “white supremacy.”