"How fortunate for governments
that the people they administer don't think."
-Hitler-
"Only two things are
infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the
former."
-Albert Einstein-Old
Updates....
9/4/19 (21:44)
heavy
cannabis use has been linked to psychosis according to psychiatrists at
UCB and Yale. this comes as no surprise to me. I remember being at
Venice Beach when I was a teenager and the pro-pot crowd was out there
all the time arguing for legalization and talking about how it's just a
plant and all that. This seems to be a common argument. It's natural so
it's fine. Then again so is dog shit and tobacco and opium, but not many
people are interested in smoking those things. So there's that. Then there's
the common sense approach that says all things in moderation. The studies
are finding that heavy or consistent use is the problem. Though, if you
listen to the podcast I linked, you'll find that the doctors would like
more study on where the line should be drawn. Lastly, we have to take into
account that today's pot just isn't "natural" in the usual sense of the
word. It's been so modified and bred for potency that the majority of it
doesn't resemble the pot that was growing in the wild 100 years ago.
Berkeley has voted to eliminate
all natural gas in new buildings. This is a classic Berkeley move. Not
a carrot approach of incentivizing electric only buildings or solar panels.
Not requiring more stringent leak testing or any number of other ways of
mitigating the effects of natural gas on the envirornment...just outright
banning. They have a hammer so everything looks like a nail and they don't
care about choice. As dumb a choice as this is for residential buildings,
it's even worse for restaurants. Proponents will bring up induction cooking,
which is nice enough in my experience, but it doesn't work on copper pans
or aluminum cookware and I can't imagine it works well on a wok or other
oddly shaped cookware. Berkeley is anti-Chinese restaurant it would appear.
This kind of knee jerk closing off of options/freedom is something I hate
more and more every year.
Cypress Mandela training
center is a vocational training place in Oakland that supposedly takes
young people and trains them for the trades. I'm looking to hire so I tried
going to their website to look into getting someone from their program.
They have a page that says "hire our graduates" and it talks about how
they train people, but doesn't give any link for actually contacting them
about hiring their grads. So, I went to the contact us part of the page
and told them I'm interested in hiring someone for the building trades.
Never heard back from them. I've done the same at Laney college carpentry
program. I've done the same at Civic Corps. I've also had two cold calls
(emails, actually) from people looking for work. In both cases I responded
within an hour with follow up questions about the type of work they want
and what their skills are. In every single case I've listed I haven't heard
back from these people. What conclusion should a person reach after all
this? That these training programs are serious about helping their students
succeed at the next level? That people who apply for work are actually
interested in working and finding a career?
These experiences are the
kinds of experiences that harden a person. My general outlook is that we
should give people a chance and that if you give people a chance they will
seize the opportunity and make their lives better. It's a liberal inclination,
I think; and it's a good one. However, when life experience teaches you
otherwise you either have to bury your head in the sand or change your
worldview. In my case my worldview has changed. Some people want opportunity
and some people are willing to work hard when given the opportunity to
better their lives. But the percentage of people who are willing to do
that is a lot lower than I thought before, and a lot lower than I would
like. It's also a lot lower than a society would need in order to sustain
any kind of socialism or communism.
I really underestimated
the power of an issue like global warming for people to argue for grabbing
power in all sorts of ways. on 2/2/7 I wrote about a local radio station
talking about global warming as a leftist plot to grab power and make money
on solar panels or something. It seemed ridiculous at the time, but the
power grab element is an actual possibility. Global warming is being used
as a cudgel to attack all sorts of things and argue for even more. The
green new deal comes with all sorts of race related elements. "Environmental
racism" is a buzzy term that is being thrown around a lot lately. Global
warming is a threat to the entire human race and so it carries with it
a lot of weight with the people who agree that it could mean an apocalypse.
I'm not saying that global warming is a hoax. I'm not saying that most
of these responses to it are pure power grabs. However, it has surprised
me quite a bit how much people can use it to argue for all sorts of things
they want. And I definitely see the potential for it to be used to argue
for some really radical things in the future....
For example, the Amazon
is burning now and people are talking about how awful that is for the global
environment. If there's a leftist version of Trump I could easily see them
seizing on this moment to take some sovereignty away from Brazil since
their inaction on the fire or deforestation in general, is a threat to
us all. Of course in this case Europe would be in support of the president
(instead of opposing them as they do Trump - which thankfully keeps him
in check a bit) which would make it all the more powerful. There are just
so many examples of how global warming can be used as justification for
sweeping changes. I didn't believe it 12 years ago, but, if you keep your
eyes open, you'll see how often the apocalyptic threat of global warming
is invoked to argue for the curtailment of someone's freedom. It's the
left-wing equivalent of terrorism under Bush.
"The child who is not embraced
by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
There's a consistent theme
amongst the liberal intelligencia and that is that whites lack culture.
The Daily (NY Times) podcast had a story the other day about music on the
campaign trail and they basically derided the music of Trump as just blaring
Americana whereas everyone else has this really cultured and interesting
music that embraced the struggle of being a woman or being a POC. I used
to buy into this canard as well that white people don't really have culture.
Salt Lake City would be a perfect example of a place that would get sneered
at by the coastal elites as being devoid of culture. The truth is that
white people have as much culture as everyone else. Same with Mormons.
It may not be as interesting to you and you might not like parts of it
as much, but it's really off-putting to say that a place like SLC or white
people in general "lack culture." This is the kind of thing that a lot
of smart media people just don't get and it's the kind of thing that slowly
eats away at whites to the point where they feel under attack and it makes
way for Trump.
Liberal elites only understand
the rest of the country in as much as JD Vance has explained it to them.
They all seem to have read his book and that's their only touchstone for
understanding white rural culture. It would be like me reading Invisible
Man and referring to black people only in terms of that single book. It's
pathetic. There needs to be a lot more understanding going around or we're
not going to get out of this shit.
9/2/19 (21:39)
it would be interesting
to see if the media is more likely to report on the race of a shooter if
he (usually a man) is white or other. for example, the shooting
at a high school football game in AL was by a black guy, but NPR didn't
specify his race. but, on the same date, there was a story
on the Odessa shooting and they specified the shooter as a white male.
two stories within 3 hours of each other and the race is inconsistently
mentioned or not. i don't think this is just and innocent inconsistency.
i think the media is reluctant to mention the race of perpetrators nowadays.
perhaps that's a welcome reprieve from the times when the news reported
black crime more than white crime. that may actually still be the case
in local news, but it definitely doesn't seem like it's the case in national
news. i suspect there's also a difference between local TV and local newspapers,
with the TV probably being more racist against blacks than newspapers.
and national left of center outlets like NPR being the most unlikely to
call out non-whites. just guesses based upon my observations, though. no
data.
now that the Mueller report
attacks have proven to be fruitless (i.e., lacking traction with the average
voter), the new anti-Trump narrative that has cropped up is calling him
out on his trade war with China. i guess it's as good a strategy as any.
it's funny how transparently the media attacks politicians on the same
issues all at once. it's called pack journalism and it's alive and well
in the mainstream press. what the elites don't understand about this is
that the average American doesn't really care about prices of plastic shit
going up in the abstract as a result of the tariffs. just like they don't
care about the fact that they benefit in the abstract from low trade barriers
that supposedly help the entire country. if joe bob loses his job to a
Mexican factory worker he's just not all that interested in the fact that
his neighbors are creating more jobs with the lower cost of goods as a
result of NAFTA. average people care that China is pulling one over on
us. even the Europeans know this and i think they are secretly happy with
some of the hard nosed tactics Trump is employing. overall they definitely
disagree with his tactics, but everyone pretty much acknowledges that China
needs to be knocked down a peg or two. that's what the average Americans
understand with regards to China and trade. beyond that it's a lot of elite
talk about stuff they don't get or don't care about. China isn't dealing
straight, they're being smarter and tougher, and we don't like it. as smart
as the elites are, it's always funny to me that they don't understand the
simplest of arguments.
all that isn't to say that
i endorse the position of anyone involved, but i do understand the position
the average American holds. i also understand that the Europeans are going
to hurt more than we are because of this trade war. i also think it's time
to play hardball instead of tip toeing around the tulips with China.
i'm calling "pimple
popper MD" on firefighters. while i have a great deal of respect for
the hard work they do, i also think they're overrated. the chicks all love
them and society in general is all over their nut sack. most of the time
they're polishing the chrome on the fire trucks, not saving lives. they
make EMT calls and that's nice, but actual fire fighting is few and far
between. when you take into account the fact that they're consistently
among the highest paid city employees making in the mid-six figures in
cities like Oakland, it really pushes them into the realm of the overrated.
total compensation for a lot of these fire chief types is $400k+ which
is just crazy when you consider that you could get 4 teachers for that
price. just not worth it.
the latest example of the
stupid Democrat party trying to socially engineer outcomes to stupid results
is in the way they made the candidates get a minimum number of donations
in order to be on the debate stage. each candidate needed to get at least
65,000 unique donors in order to appear on the second debate. in some cases,
this meant spending as much as $35 through advertising to get a $1 donation.
the idea was that they wanted the candidates to have broad support. the
reality is that candidates have been wasting Democratic dollars on reaching
this arbitrary threshold. it's the law of unintended consequences and it's
a law that every technocrat and social engineer thinks they can think their
way out of. they never can. this doesn't mean you shouldn't ever try to
engineer things, but it does mean you should be very selective. "am i engineering
something that is worth the inevitable and unforeseeable unintended consequences?"
or is this just something i'm trying to do to make our party look like
we care about the little people?