Leslie Fish's Blog, page 8

A Conversation on Psionics

    Now for something completely difference: a discussion at a WorldCon party, a few years ago, on the subject of psychic phenomena.

    I don't remember which WorldCon it was (I've been to so many, they begin to blur together), but by some forgotten circumstances I wound up in the Con Suite, nursing a beer and nibbling some pretzels, at a table with a gritty-looking middle-aged guy who's badge wasn't visible, grousing about the lousy state of science education in the public schools.  Eventually Mr. Gritty got around to sneering at the number of college students these days who "actually believe in" psychic phenomena.  

    At that point I felt that I should chime in on the side of forgotten facts.  I didn't quote the large and growing body of established evidence, since I didn't have access to the records at the time, but instead claimed:  "Well, in my case I've got no choice;  I've not only seen it done, but I've done it myself -- several times."

    "Oh yeah?" he countered.  "So what am I thinking about right now?"  And he squeezed his eyes tight shut, concentrating.

    The answer to that was almost too easy.  "Some big long number that doesn't mean anything to me, although it... hmmm, has something to do with... avocados?"

    He snapped his eyes open, and couldn't help correcting: "Avogadro's number."

    "Still means nothing to me," I said.  "The talent doesn't make you all-knowing, and it isn't easy, and because it works through a human nervous system, it's not 100% accurate.  And even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to prove it's real to a determined skeptic.  For instance, I could tell you about incidents where information that I couldn't have gotten any other way saved my neck -- but then, you'd say I was lying, or remembering wrong.  Or I could drop into alpha-trance state, lay hands on your bare skin and tell you things about yourself that you haven't told me---"

    He jerked his bare forearm out of my reach.

    "--but then, you'd say I was just making good guesses, or must have heard something from somebody else and consciously forgotten about it.:

    He couldn't help smirking at that.

    "No, about the only psychic talent that would prove its existence is telekinesis -- moving physical objects with psychic energy alone.  And of course that's the rarest and weakest of the psychic talents."

    Oh?  Why is that?"

    Because moving matter around takes a lot more energy than transmitting information, because there's a helluva lot more energy tied up in matter.  E equals MC squared, and no matter how you slice it, C is one helluva big number.  The human brain doesn't really have much energy to play around with.  I think a brain at full gallop produces only 25 volts of energy, and at least 7 of those are tied up in basic maintenance: things like maintaining your heartbeat, breathing, working the guts and glands -- stuff like that.  That leaves, what, 18 volts, at most?  And keeping even that much focused and aimed isn't easy."

    "But you say you can do it?"

    "Yes, but mostly on small stuff: moving a column of cigarette smoke, nudging rolling dice, little things like that."

    He broke off a piece of a pretzel, set it on the table and said: "There.  Move that."

    I tried, and managed to feel my way into the piece of pretzel, but I couldn't find enough resonance to move it.  "I can't,"  I admitted.  "It's too heavy."

    "Dice are a lot heavier."

    "I can't move a stationary die, either," I explained.  "I can only nudge them while they're in motion -- sort of like the working of a transistor: using a little energy to divert a lot.  I've learned how to feel my way into dice, though it's tough because they're made out of plastic.  Metals and crystals are a lot easier.  Plastic is like a tangle of dried spaghetti;  there's enough space between the molecules to make it sort of like a sponge, and you can fill that sponge with psychic energy the way you fill a regular sponge with water.  Again, that's easier with metals or crystals.  But anyway, once I've got the energy in there, I sort of create a mood in it;  I make the dice want to land in a certain position -- ones down, sixes up.  I call it 'tits down, teeth up'.  Then I shake the dice -- in my cupped hands or in a real cup -- until I can feel the precise instant when, if I drop the dice right then, they'll land the right way.  It works about two-thirds of the time."

    "Then why," he bristled, "Haven't you gone to Las Vegas and cleaned up at the craps tables?"

    "I did," I said.  "Last time I was passing through Las Vegas with my publishers, we stayed overnight and spent a couple hours in the casino.  I used my talent then.  And guess what I found out."

    "What?"

    "That proper, respectable, rrrrrrreputable scientists may not believe in psychic phenomena, but Las Vegas croupiers do."

    "In what way?"

    "Well, when the guys running the table saw that I was rolling up the six-face way too often for chance, first they changed the dice on me.  Then they changed them again.  When that didn't stop me, they tried shouting at me -- 'Come on, throw already!  Quit holding up the line!  Throw!' -- in order to break my concentration.  When that didn't stop me, they sent in a spoiler disguised as an amiable drunk.  He slapped an arm around my shoulders and mumbled cheerfully: 'Hi.  I'm from St. Louis.  Where're you from?'  So I answered and shook hands and chatted politely until it came my turn to throw the dice again, and he kept his hand on my shoulder while I shook and threw the dice -- and came up with a double-six. After that he gave up.  I don't know what he signaled to the croupiers, but they called out that they were closing the table for 'maintenance', so we wandered off elsewhere.  I'd been making only one-dollar bets, so my winnings after an hour and a half of playing were all of ninety dollars;  not exactly a big score, but satisfying."

    "Do you have any witnesses for this story?"

    "Sure.  My publishers were right there at the table with me.  They're in the dealers' room right now, if you want to talk to them."

    "...Do you think you could move smaller objects?"

    "Sure," I enthused.  "I'd love to get access to a bubble-chamber, or a cloud-chamber.  I'm sure I can push atom-trails around, and that would give us conclusive proof. Say, do you know where I could get access to something like that?"

    "Maybe," he muttered.  Then he took his cup, got up and went back to the bar.  

    I didn't see him again, not through the whole convention.  I guess he lost interest in the subject.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish  

    

          

For-Biden Planet

For those few of you who have never seen the classic movie (IMHO the best acting job that Leslie Neilson ever did), the big secret was that the aliens created a powerful machine that could turn thought into solid reality -- and it destroyed them in short order.  

As an old propagandist myself, I can tell you that, unless your statements are 99.9% factual and verified, the worst thing you can do is believe your own propaganda, and act on it.  That way lies ruin. 

Now the US' Democrat Party today controls the greatest propaganda machine ever invented -- better than the USSR's at its height, better than Red China's, better than North Korea's, better than Nazi Germany's Goebbels could even dream about.  It heavily influences or outright controls the educational system, the news media, the entertainment industry and even the communications industry.  About all that it can't influence or control is direct private communication via telephone, email, and hard-copy mail by the Post Office -- and the public library system, which it seems to have forgotten about.  It's been a long time since anyone tried to purge the books in local libraries for political incorrectitude.  

With that kind of control comes a certain laziness, an assumption that everybody just naturally believes the way you do, and there's increasingly less need to provide proof for your claims.  When questioned by one of the uncouth idiots who don't share your view, you need only make more claims, louder and faster.  This eventually leads to spiraling the drain into self-contained fantasy, which ends in ruin.

When seeing that the propaganda doesn't match reality, and a lot of the "peasants" can see it, one recourse is to create False Flags: public theater with live actors, which supports the ruling scenario and which the general propaganda machine can then echo endlessly.  This can involve creating political movements whole-cloth, or near it;  that can be risky, because the actors may outrun the director and take the play to extremes that the script-writers never intended.  In such a case, the propaganda machine must work overtime on damage control.

A classic example is the role of BLM.  Founded by a clutch of admitted Marxist women, its avowed purpose was to "transform society" -- into what soon became apparent.  The Democrats, and especially the Socialist Democrat faction, happily embraced BLM and used it to raise mass protests -- generally aimed at Trump and any of his followers.  The problem was that the "protests" soon became screens for riots, looting and burning, often organized by local criminal gangs.  Despite the best editing and excuses of the media, citizens at large saw all this and identified BLM as a threat, pure and simple.  This became a problem to the Democrats as the election approached.  In the last few weeks before the election, the Democratic National Committee clearly told BLM to tone it down, do no more "protests", and stop scaring the voters -- and BLM visibly complied.  That's also when Biden's campaign began preaching soothing messages about "ending divisiveness", "unity", "healing", and so on.  

Even so, the DNC didn't trust to its massive propaganda campaign to win the election.  There have always been frauds during elections, and some of the most entrenched are in large Democrat-led cities.  Chicago, Newark, and Baltimore are notorious for it.  The push for mail-in ballots added to the possibilities, since mail-in ballots do not require the voter to show valid identification before handing in his/her ballot.  There were complaints about election frauds and improprieties in many states well before election day, and a growing number afterward.  Despite the best excuses by the DNC's propaganda machine, these can't all be written off as sour-grapes fakes;  the DOJ is taking a lot of them seriously, and there are more than a dozen such complaints.  

It was certainly premature of Biden and friends to claim victory while there are still five more states that haven't finished counting their ballots, and four of them have outstanding investigations into vote-fraud.  Why did the DNC do it?  The only sensible answer is propaganda-pushing: claiming that now we're "back to normal", "healing", and "unity" -- behind the Democrat political agenda, which has been losing popularity.  It's also an unstated promise to the rest of the world to undo all the actions done by Trump during his administration.  This is not as popular with the electorate as the DNC would wish.

In short, what we're seeing is the DNC propaganda machine going all-out to convince the "peasants" that the election is settled and done and we're all going back to Obama-era "normalcy" right now -- and only un-American sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/Islamophobic/White supremacist Republicans will dare to complain.  

This overlooks the fact that even if one accepts the Biden campaign ballot claims, the election was a very tight horse-race, not the "blue wave" that the news media were predicting.  Almost exactly half the population didn't buy the propaganda-campaign's story, and doesn't believe it now.  As the multiple lawsuits and investigations progress, they'll believe it still less -- and all the censorship in the country won't stop the story from getting out.  The Democrats will not have the "unity" they've been trying for.  

If Biden finally wins, he'll have a resentful and divided populace to rule.  If the investigations reveal that the final accurate count gives the election to Trump, then all the "protest" riots Antifa-BLM can manage will not scare the citizens into accepting Biden.  The "divisiveness" which the DNC created it now cannot stop, and it will blow up in the Dems' faces.  

Those "monsters from the Id" will come home to roost, and not prettily.  Even the best propaganda machine in the world can't guarantee absolute power, thank all the gods in agreement.

--Leslie <;)))><         

        

 

False Flagging: An Example

 

A "False Flag" campaign is provocateering written large, and provocateering slides over the line from "incitement to crime", to "solicitation of crime", and outright "entrapment".  

In finer detail, "incitement" is some politician or mullah standing up in public and howling "kill the Jews!" (or whoever) -- and it's considered a crime only if someone in his audience really does go out and kill some Jews.  "Solicitation" is some Mafia don telling his consigliere, "Eh Luigi, ten thousand clams to send Giuseppi to sleep with the fishes", and a corpse named Giuseppi really does wash up on the shore a couple days later.  "Entrapment" is a cop nudging and hinting to some not-too-bright street punk to go commit a crime that the punk wouldn't have thought of for himself so that the cop can then arrest him.  All of these are one step outside the legal protections of the First Amendment, and are unlawful to varying degrees.

Illegal or not, you'll find government agents -- usually undercover police -- practicing "entrapment" by provocateering.  They usually do it under the excuse that the punks involved really would have thought of the crime anyway, and the provocateer was only nudging them a little bit down a path they'd already chosen for themselves.  To prove this, the provocateer must produce some statement by the targeted punks -- witnessed, recorded or written -- which could be construed, by a sufficiently paranoid judge, at least, as intent to commit a crime.  Such statements can be as little as a chanted slogan of "Off the Pigs", or a drunken complaint of "somebody oughtta shoot that Democrat S.O.B.".  After all, the individual or group had to have said something, sometime, that brought them to the attention of the police in the first place.  The provocateer can be a single agent within a small group, or a collection of them within a large group.  In any case, the aim of the provocateer is to get the individual, or group, to do something -- or at least appear in public to do something -- that can get them arrested, or at least publicly vilified and shunned, and all their possible political associates with them.  This is especially useful when police budget-reviews or general elections are coming up.  

Police usually target an individual -- or more often, a group -- for provocateering for political reasons, no matter what the direction of the individual's or group's politics may be.  Those of us who remember marching in the streets to protest various wars can also remember that, in any group big enough to need more than a single living-room for meetings, there was always somebody -- who had joined the group well after its inception and first activities -- who seemed just a little bit "off": just a little too eager, too imaginative, too questioning, too friendly, too willing to come up with activities that pushed the boundaries of the law, and who always had plenty of money for beer and pizzas.  We can also remember that in any protest or picket-line there was always somebody who was a little too provocative toward the police, willing to literally push other marchers at the police in order to get a violent response.  We can also remember the large marches in which knots of "weirdos" showed up, literally carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, to quote John Lennon, who tried to capture the attention of the media cameras so as to make all the marchers look like foaming Communists by association.  Those were the days before the fall of the USSR, when communism was considered a serious threat.

Nowadays, when nobody even mentions the word "communist" except possibly in connection with the Chinese government, "Socialism" has become respectable enough that major candidates of major political parties happily label themselves with it.  Of course, this means that they must brand their political opponents as "right-wingers", "White Supremacists", and "Neo-Nazis", regardless of the facts, and their media and police agents have adjusted their aim accordingly.

One advantage of this modern era of massive electronic media and communications is that the agents provocateur don't necessarily have to find an already existing group of political opponents to entrap;  they can create one whole-cloth and use it as if it were real.  

For example -- I'll name no names -- there was a group of college students (majoring in Computer Science, IIRC) who invented what they considered a "right-wing nut group" out of nothing but a website they established as a joke.  On this website they posted classic Nazi quotes and slogans and propaganda cartoons, slightly updated for modern tastes, aimed at modern political figures and groups, and of course adoring President Trump.  Eventually they began getting responses, apparently from real right-wing nuts.  

Realizing that they were onto something here, the students notified the police -- particularly the FBI -- handed the website over to them, and thoroughly disassociated themselves from it, leaving the police to make use of the site and its followers.  At this point the joke became a full-fledged False Flag operation.  Soon the media began to notice the "right-wing group" and sound alarms about it.  Once the media were sufficiently excited they went after Trump, demanding that he denounce his "right-wing extremist" followers.  Trump, admitting that he didn't know anything about the group, denounced extremists of all stripes.  This didn't satisfy the media, who demanded more, whereupon Trump made his much-copied statement: "If you really are listening to me, then stand down and stand back".  Democrat political pundits claimed that this meant Trump really did command the group, and what he'd really told them was to stand by for further actions.

When no "actions" happened, the website exhorted its followers to go to a pro-Trump rally to "show support for Trump" and to "protect Americans" from expected Antifa and BLM protesters.  The police then prepared for a jolly brawl at the rally, planning to round up all the "right-wing extremists" in a big showy bust.  Preparations included having lots of undercover agents in the crowd, dressed to look like possible "extremists" so as to blend with the expected crowd.  

Well, the only "confrontation" was caused by the Antifa/BLM protesters, whom the local police quickly rounded up.  The "right-wing extremist" crowd was remarkably small, and when the police swooped down on the supposed Nazis they found one -- exactly one -- admitted member of the group, and he was a certified schizophrenic who had gone off his meds.  All the rest of the supposed "right-wing extremists" were undercover cops.  Every last one.  The lone psycho was gently escorted to the nearest hospital, and the whole incident was quietly buried by the media.  

This is the drawback to using invented opposition groups for "False Flag" operations;  when pushed to action, they just might collapse like a soap-bubble, leaving nobody to arrest or use as a scarecrow.  Actually existing political groups can be exaggerated and slandered with better results, and not just by local police and politicians but even by foreign agents -- unless the group's members are smart enough to see what's happening and fight back.

A classic example of this is the case of the "Proud Boys", a group of moderate-right Republicans who were annoyed by the antics of Antifa/BLM, and made a point of counter-protesting Antifa/BLM protests by, if you please, getting proper permits and then sitting down in the streets and praying.  When asked by the police to get up and move, they would obligingly get up and move.  This made it difficult for police to arrest them, or for the media to get videos that would make them look dangerous.  Nonetheless, the media advertised the group as "right-wing extremists" and of course "White supremacists".  This claim was partly punctured on the Internet, where it was revealed that the "Proud Boys" are multi-racial, and their president/founder is a Black ex-Cuban.

Nonetheless, a group of foreign hackers with no love for Trump decided to make use of the Proud Boys.  The hackers obtained names, addresses, and email addresses of voters in a largely Democrat-registered neighborhood -- no great feat, since voter registration rolls are public records anyway -- and sent them mass-produced letters, threatening them with mayhem if they didn't vote for Trump, in the name of the Proud Boys organization.  Of course the media picked up the story and responded with the expected outrage.  This trick, a classic False Flag tactic, was intended to panic other voters into casting their ballots against Trump and his supposed "right-wing extremist base"

Ah, but the Proud Boys, unlike a lot of right-trending groups, were no fools.  As soon as they learned what was happening, they got copies of those emails and went hollering to every federal police-force they could reach -- election tampering being a federal crime -- insisted that they had nothing to do with this, they were being slandered, and the cops should go catch the real criminals.  The FBI, DOJ and State Department took them seriously, and investigated promptly.  What they discovered was that the emails originated with a bunch of government-sanctioned hackers -- in Iran.  

With all the uproar, and all those federal agencies involved, the story couldn't be smothered.  The Proud Boys were publicly exonerated -- though a few die-hard Democrats kept insisting that the PBs simply had to be some sort of "right-wing extremists" -- and the voters saw that Iran doesn't want Trump re-elected, and that they shouldn't be too quick to believe political scandal stories without verification.  The trick backfired, and the term "False Flag" has become commonly known.

This is all to the good, since a cynical electorate is not so easy to fool.  Let's see what the final effect is when the votes are counted, since the only poll that really matters is the one where people vote.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish  

         

       

    

                

The Limits of Propaganda, Part Two

Everyone knows that the concept of The Big Lie was invented by the Nazis in the 1930s, and its basic theory is that if you repeat a lie often enough, from as many different directions as possible, then people will blindly believe it without question.  At about the same time various neuropsychologists discovered a phenomenon called "extinction of the signal", which means that the same sensory input, repeated often enough, eventually fades into the background and becomes ignored.  The Nazis chose to believe the first theory and ignore the second. 

Another theory they chose to ignore is that nothing teaches quite as well as personal experience.  As Will Rogers once put it, "There are three kinds of people: those who can learn from reading or hearing about something, those that can learn from seeing something done, and the rest of us -- who have to learn by pissing on the electric fence for ourselves."  What he didn't need to mention is that if you ever do piss on an electric fence, you'll remember the lesson no matter what the media, your politicians, or your neighbors tell you.  The single worst enemy of propaganda is the unavoidable truth.  

Totalitarian countries like Nazi Germany, the USSR, and North Korea have used the Big Lie to a fare-thee-well, but their people eventually pissed on the electric fence of reality and stopped believing.  The official propaganda faded into the background, and people concentrated on their own survival regardless of what their governments preached.  In every case, those governments neglected to learn from being shown;  they only increased the propaganda in hopes that it would somehow keep working when piled higher and deeper.

Private advertising companies have a better record of success, simply because their goals are more modest: to promote sales of goods and services rather than whole factions and policies.  To that end, it's often enough just to make the public generally aware that the product exists, along with a simple statement of "it's good", and broadcasting the ad as far and wide and fast as possible.  Of course, to avoid rapid onset of boredom/extinction of the signal, the simple positive message must be altered slightly -- "tasty", "long-lasting", "improved", etc. -- and rebroadcast often, usually accompanied by visual images of smiling children or handsome adults.  Unless the product being sold fails noticeably in public, the propaganda campaign can succeed for a long while.  Firestone Tires lasted longer than the Nazi empire.          

The flip side of The Big Lie is that its perpetrators have to somehow keep their victims from getting any other information.  This requires total censorship, which is ultimately impossible.  You can censor the newspapers, the broadcast news, the mail, large entertainment companies and even -- today -- the Internet, but contradictory news always leaks through.  If nothing else, there's always word of mouth.  "Rumors" can spread with amazing speed through households, neighborhoods, cities, and even prisons -- and once a "rumor" is proven true, there's no stopping it.

This is why, to remain effective, propaganda has to be minimal.  It should stick to the truth as much as possible, repeat itself as little as possible, and not censor opposing arguments but be content with ignoring, belittling, or counter-arguing them.  

Fortunately, professional propagandists -- whether government agents or advertising companies -- can never resist trying to do more, and more, until they saturate the listening market and become unbelieved background noise.  The Big Lie is ultimately self-destructive, yet political factions -- the more fanatical, the more willing -- insist on playing with it.  

Perhaps this is because the chief appeal of fanaticism is the promise of superiority over the "other", which includes superior intelligence;  the fanatic assumes that his/her targeted victim is too stupid to see through the propaganda under any circumstances.  This is particularly true when your faction includes the operators of the educational system.  After all, it should be "obvious" that someone with a Ph.D. in Oppression Studies from Harvard is mentally superior to some knuckle-dragging mechanic who studied Engineering in some farming-county community college, right?  This attitude makes it easy to seduce academics into fanaticism.

It also contributes mightily to class resentment and class warfare, since a less-than-elite education does not aromatically equal stupidity-- and remember that electric fence of experience.  Some laborer's kid who joined the military, served a term in Iraq, used his/her GI Bill to fund his/her way through police academy, and rises to the rank of sergeant is likely to have had experiences that counter the claims of the popular media.  This could explain the Democrats' total astonishment that the working class -- of whatever color -- voted for Trump in the last election.  The very arrogance that feeds fanaticism blinds the fanatics to the competence of their victims.

The best propaganda engine in the world can't guarantee power.  Lincoln understood this thoroughly when he made his famous statement: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish         

            

The Limits of Propaganda, Part One

 The Wikipedia entry under "Agent Provocateur" includes the following paragraph:  "In jurisdictions in which conspiracy is a serious crime in itself, it can be sufficient for the agent provocateur to entrap the target into discussing and planning an illegal act.  It is not necessary for the illegal act to be carried out or even prepared."  Keep that in mind.    

Wikipedia also defines "False Flag" as "an act committed with the intention of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on a second party."  Keep that in mind too.

Provocateur operations work best when linked to False Flag campaigns, if only because it looks better on police records if they can round up a group of gullible fools rather than just one or two.  The combination is also politically useful -- especially at budget-review time, during social upheaval, or in an election year.  In the last two centuries. as both democratic systems and literacy have increased, Provocateur/False Flag operations have depended heavily on propaganda structures to persuade the majority of the population.  This is why fashions in political propaganda are good predictors of showy crimes -- and resulting severe punishments -- yet to come.  Examples include Stalin's show-trials in the USSR, the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, and the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China.  

I observed such a case many years ago, here in Phoenix.  This was during a Democratic national administration, wherein the Democrat policy of pushing gun-control laws had suffered a setback;  the Supreme Court had recently declared the Second Amendment an individual right, several states had loosened their restrictions on firearms ownership and public carry, the numbers of firearms sales and concealed-carry permits had jumped, the violent-crime rate had dropped, and the Democratic National Committee was still sore over it.  

I was living with some Science-Fiction fans who were also part of a gamer's club of about a dozen members.  Every Saturday the club would gather at our house, where half the members would disappear into the computer room to play computer games, and the other half would settle in the living-room with books and dice and character-sheets to play variations on a theme of Dungeons and Dragons.  On Sunday the less sedentary members (which didn't include me) would drive out to undeveloped county wilderness land and do live-action roleplaying.  This often involved homemade costumes, target-shooting with .22 rifles and tin cans, or exploding cans with firecrackers, and ended with dinner and beer and brief club business at a local saloon.  The club was too informal to have a permanent name, and consisted of middle-aged fans with generally lower-middleclass jobs.  None of us had any criminal history but years-earlier misdemeanor charges for marching in picket-lines in support of strikes or civil rights laws.

About then the TV news/opinion shows began mentioning "the threat of right-wing militia groups", which we discounted because we didn't know of any.  That should have been warning, but we didn't realize it at the time.  Another thing we didn't notice was that government Budget Review Time was coming up, when all the departments -- including various police -- would have to justify the money to be spent on them. 

The club's only brush with illegality was one Sunday when the Live Action Role-Players ran into a poacher out in the woods.  They could tell he was a poacher because he was wearing wood-land camouflage, carrying a scoped .30-caliber deer rifle, and it wasn't hunting season (yes, it can be possible to tell a person's intention by the model and caliber of gun he carries).  They scolded him severely, told him to get out of there or they'd call the cops, and succeeded in chasing him off.

A couple weeks later a newcomer arrived at the club.  He knew quite a bit about fantasy role-playing games, but seemed to be mostly interested in the contemporary war-games.  When he learned about the Sunday LARP games, he couldn't wait to go join them.  He was an enthusiastic player, and he certainly did know a lot about military tactics, but the LARPers soon found that he was a little... odd.  For one thing, he didn't seem to know where fantasy left off and real life began.  He was always trying to apply the game to modern urban settings, talked about "revolution" a lot, and kept asking if anyone was interested in attacking fortified buildings -- such as police stations.  The LARPers decided that he was a possibly dangerous nut-case, and considered booting him out, but because he did such a good job of bookkeeping for the group's funds (never more than a couple hundred dollars), they decided to let him stay on.

Then the local economy took a downturn.  Gas prices rose, and it was no longer cheap or easy to drive out to the wilderness area every Sunday.  The LARPing division of the club began losing members, at which the oddball newcomer was visibly upset.  When their numbers were down to half a dozen, the LARPers decided to stop outdoor gaming completely until autumn, at least, and they celebrated their farewell dinner at a pizza joint.

A few days later a large contingent of local police, FBI in SWAT suits, local sheriff's deputies and a few state troopers -- accompanied by national TV-news camera teams -- raided the homes of the LARPers, arrested them all (except, of course, for the oddball newcomer, who was nowhere to be found), ransacked their homes, cars, businesses, storage-units and relatives' homes, and trumpeted to the world that they'd caught a "dangerous right-wing militia group".  The "group" originally had no name, but in searching the homes the FBI had come across a shoulder-patch with the words "Team Viper" on it, so thereafter they referred to "the Viper Militia".  They stopped short of calling the LARPers "neo-Nazis", probably because two of them were Jewish and one was Native American, and didn't mention the LARPers' politics in detail, probably because three of them were registered Democrats.  They also claimed to have confiscated "a hoard of firearms, including machine-guns", because one of the members was a gun-collector and owned a reconstructed (non-functional) classic Gatling gun.  The story became a nation-wide sensation, with the usual news-media editorials about the horrors of gun ownership and the danger of "citizen militias".  

The rest of the gamer club, understandably amazed at all this, tried to contact the LARPers and find out what was going on.  We soon learned that they were being held incommunicado in separate jails -- in fact, in different counties and different states -- and their cases had been separated too so that each member had to hire his own separate lawyer.  When we managed to reach the lawyers, we learned that the LARPers were being pressured to plead guilty to a charge of "conspiracy to teach military techniques for purposes of civil insurrection".  When we asked how "conspiracy to teach" could be a crime, we were told that "The FBI can find a way."  When we asked how the FBI intended to prove "purposes of civil insurrection", we learned that the odd-ball newcomer had secretly recorded the LARPers at their games, and had picked up some juicy -- and out of context -- quotes, some of which had already made it into the news.

The "pressure" applied to the LARPers included threats that "you'll  never work in this country again."  One member who held out for a trial, claiming that he could always go work in Canada, was told that his retired parents would lose their Social Security payments.  Eventually only one member, whose parents were safely dead and who owned his own business, held out for a jury trial.  The FBI saw to it that he got a judge whose first pronouncement was that he would "hear no argument based on the Constitution".  That alone would have been grounds for an appeal, but the cost of fighting  in court drained the man's resources so that he lost his savings and his business, and couldn't meet the price of an appeal.  Also, because he had fought the charge, he was given a longer sentence than the other LARPers who had given in and signed the confessions.  

Later we learned that when defending its budget requests to Congress the FBI had quoted extensively from the "Viper Militia case".  Yes, the FBI got the budget increase it had asked for.  

The LARPers, after finishing their 3-5 year sentences, took years to recover their former economic situations, and some of them never did.  The rest of the club eventually scattered, took up other interests, or died.  The "militia" and "survivalist" movements changed their names to "preppers" and kept on preparing for assorted disasters, a few of which actually arrived.  The FBI continued to increase its funding, but kept "the threat of right-wing militias" on the back burner.  With changing federal administrations the media came up with various new targets, but always kept the threat of "right-wing" something handy.  In time, those of us who had seen the original "Viper Militia" incident learned to tell when a media "threat" build-up presaged some related police or political action.

I've been thinking of that a lot recently as the election day approaches and the media "scandals" are falling thick and fast;  no sooner is one of them disproved than two more take its place.  What's remarkable about the current media-storm is that it has resulted in so few actual arrests made or new laws passed.  Historically, false-flag/provocateur/propaganda campaigns have operated to keep the ruling establishment in power, but in our current case there seems to be more smoke than fire.  Is it all, really, just to sell newspapers and win an election?

--Leslie <;)))><                           

          

                

On Gender

    While wandering around the Internet, I came across an obscure mention of how a whole discussion panel wanted to label Caitlin (sp?) Jenner "courageous" for having done full gender-reassignment surgery to become visibly female.  Seeing that, I wondered: then why not Christine Jorgensen, who became famous for surgically transitioning to female way back in the 1950s?  Certainly getting gender-reassignment surgery, publicly, would have been a lot more "courageous" back then.  Why doesn't the LGBTQ...  oh, what the hell, Queer -- community celebrate and remember Jorgensen as a great pioneer?  ...Possibly it's because, as years passed, Jorgensen went bald -- in the male pattern.  Ooops.  It seems that genetics aren't irrelevant after all.

    Frankly, I'm very tired of Wokey-dokes trying to make Gender entirely a matter of opinion.  They wouldn't do that with Race.  In fact, they seem to adore societies that won't even allow that freedom to Religion -- a certain religion, anyway.  

    Look, the genes have it.  All humans -- and other animals, and plants -- have two chromosomes, and if they're both X, then the animal or plant is female, and if one is a Y, then the animal or plant is male.  This is true of every form of multicellular life,  (We're not too sure about one-celled creatures, either.  Though they usually breed by simple division, every dozen or hundred generations or so they have to get together and mix their nuclei, and their genes --  a process called "syzygy" -- or else they lose the ability to keep on dividing, so even microbes have sex.)  

    That said, we must also agree that there are plenty of animals and plants which have genetic anomalies that put them somewhere in between.  There are individuals that have triploid genes: XXY or XYY -- but these are rare and usually miserable individuals.  They don't breed very well, either.  There's also a very broad category of what used to be called "hermaphroditism".  This runs the gamut from having the primary sexual characteristics of both sexes, through the secondary characteristics, through biochemical characteristics, all the way out to behaviors.  These can vary wildly, since there are a lot of genes -- rungs on the ladder of the immense spiral staircase of DNA -- per chromosome.  

    Among plants, it's very common to find true physical hemaphroditism: both pistils and stamens in the same flower, or male and female flowers on the same plant.  (There isn't much behavioral similarity in plants, since plants don't have many behaviors at all.)  Such breeds/varieties/"races" -- and even species -- of plants are fairly common, and are called "self-pollinating".  They have no problem breeding, and are understandably popular among farmers.  But even such self-pollinating plants often need to cross-breed -- accept pollen from plants of different breeds -- in order to produce the maximum yield of fruit, as any orchard-keeper can tell you.  As with the microbes, they have to cross with genetically-different individuals every so-many generations to maintain vigor.

    Among animals, on the other paw, true physical hermaphroditism is very rare.  Bee larvae can develop male or female genitals etc. according to how they're fed.  There are a few species of fish which have the genitals, chemistry, behavior et al of both sexes, but usually the one gender is dominant -- unless there's a shortage of the other dominant gender in the local population;  then a number of the fewer gender will change sex-dominance and become the other.  The seahorse is unique in that the female deposits eggs in the male's pouch, where they're fertilized, and when the eggs hatch the male bears the live young.  

    This isn't the case with other vertebrates.  Hyenas are one species where the genetic females have secondary sexual characteristics of males;  they're larger than the males, have enlarged clitorises (which they use to guide urine-streams) and scrotum-mimicking skin flaps;  they're also biochemically more "masculine" and behave more aggressively than the males.  Among most other mammals, though, there's simply a lack of sexual dimorphism to begin with;  lions have manes and lionesses don't, but among other species of cats -- large and small -- it's hard to tell one gender from another at a distance.  There's also very little difference in behavior between the sexes.  Another thing to remember is that most mammals are functional bisexuals;  when horny enough, they can -- and will -- have sex with anything that will stand still for it.  This is not a gender question.    

    When it comes to humans, physical sexual dimorphism is about on the level with lions;  males grow thick hair (manes?) on their faces and females don't, while females have permanently distended breasts (whether they're nursing or not) and males don't.  Even that dimorphism is variable;  there are breeds/varieties/"races" of humans where the males grow hardly any facial hair, if at all, and others wherein females have very small breasts until first pregnancy and nursing.  Biochemically, sexual dimorphism is variable too;  certainly males produce more testosterone and females more estrogen, but the amounts vary according to environment, particularly diet and temperature.

    It's in behavior that human sexual dimorphism varies really wildly, and this is primarily because of culture -- the way whole societies think.  As an extremely social and communicative species, humans create cultures of immense power and endurance.  Although there are now and always have been matriarchal and even ambiarchal cultures, for most of written history and most of the world cultures have been patriarchal.  Patriarchal cultures strongly amplify sexual dimorphism, and we're far from finished discovering to what extent.  Even modern -- deliberately -- ambiarchal societies aren't immune to the subtle and pervasive effects of earlier, or neighboring, patriarchal culture.  We won't be able to tell just what mental, and even physical, characteristics are inherent in male and female genetics until we've observed all the ambiarchal societies in the world for several generations.

    The one natural human dimorphism we can be certain about is that only women -- natural females -- can become pregnant, bear and nurse children.  All the gender-reassignment surgery in the world won't turn a man into a fertile woman.  Because humans are also self-aware and time-aware, there's no society in the world where women don't know this.  This means that any woman who intends to breed, ever, must consider that she'll have to spend the time, effort, and risk of being pregnant and raising children.  That knowledge does create a particular attitude which inevitably affects women far more than men, and that can't be changed by all the wishing, believing, or politics in the world.

    So, what do you do if your six-year-old boy comes toddling up to you and insists that he's "really a girl" and wants to be treated like one?  (And vice-versa for a girl.)  Well, the first words out of your mouth should be: "Let's get a complete gene-test."  If the gene-test shows genetic anomalies, then you have to deal with them.  If not, then the next question should be: "Just what do you think a 'girl' is really like?"  (And vice-versa, etc.)  If he says things like "Girls can get away with a lot", or "Girls don't have to work as hard", or "Girls can be dainty and pretty", or even "I want to cuddle and diddle with boys", or similar words (etc.), you'll know what sort of cultural/psychological problem you have to deal with;  take the kid to a psychiatrist, and patiently make it clear to the kid that no, girls/boys aren't really like that -- but do not coddle the kid in his/her delusion.  

    Society does not benefit by coddling childish adults in their delusions, either.  It's seriously damaged by making political hay out of childish delusions. 

--Leslie <;)))><                     

    

   

Shameless

I rarely quote whole posts from other sites, but this one is important enough to deserve it. It's from no less than Alan Dershowitz, famous Maverick-At-Law, and reveals a really amazing piece of public corruption. It was first posted on the website of the Gatestone Institute, which is the headquarters of the Muslim Reform Movement -- remarkable enough by itself. Even more remarkable is that Dershowitz couldn't find a larger public news-media site to publish it. But the story gets wilder yet. Read on: "Why I am Suing CNN by Alan M. Dershowitz September 18, 2020 at 5:00 am "Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. "So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. "So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment. "Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest. "I love the First Amendment, I support the First Amendment, I have litigated cases defending the First Amendment. I have written and taught about the First Amendment. And I was a law clerk for the Supreme Court when it rendered its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which "protects media even when they print false statements about public figures, as long as the media did not act with 'actual malice.'" "But I also understand the limitations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. Here is what CNN did. "I was asked to present the Constitutional argument against President Trump's impeachment and removal to the United States Senate this past January. For an hour and seven minutes, I argued that if a president does anything illegal, unlawful, or criminal-like -- if he commits treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors -- he satisfies the criteria for impeachment under the Constitution. But if a president engages in entirely lawful conduct motivated in part by the desire to be reelected, which he believes is in the public interest, that would not constitute grounds for impeachment. Everybody seemed to understand the distinction I was drawing. Some agreed, others disagreed. But the distinction was clear between illegal conduct on the one hand, and lawful conduct on the other hand. "Two days later I returned to the Senate to answer questions put to the lawyers by the senators. The first question to me came from Senator Ted Cruz. He asked whether a quid pro quo constituted an impeachable offense. My response was consistent with my argument two days earlier: I said that what "would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were in some way illegal." If it was, it could constitute an impeachable offense. But if it wasn't illegal or unlawful, the president's political motives could not turn it into an impeachable offense. That was quite clear. Indeed, the next question from the senators was directed to the Democratic House Manager who was asked to respond to my answer. Congressman Adam Schiff, disagreed with my answer, but understood the distinction between lawful and unlawful. So did CNN. When they first showed my answer, they showed it in full, including my statement that a quid pro quo would not be impeachable so long as it was not "in some way illegal." I then went on to say that if a president was motivated in part by his desire to be reelected, which he believes was in the public interest, that motive would not turn a lawful act into an impeachable offense. "But then CNN made a decision to doctor and edit my recorded remarks so as to eliminate all references to "unlawful" or "illegal" conduct. They wanted their viewers to believe that I had told the Senate that a president could do anything -- even commit such crimes as "bribery" and "extortion" -- as long as he was motivated by a desire to be reelected. That, of course, was precisely the opposite of what I said. And that is precisely the reason by CNN edited and doctored the tape the way they did: namely to deliberately create the false impression that I had said the president could commit any crimes in order to be reelected, without fear of impeachment. "CNN then got its paid commentators to go on the air, broadcast the doctored recording and rail against me for saying that a president could commit crimes with impunity. Joe Lockhart, former White House Press Secretary under President Clinton, said that I had given the president 'license to commit crimes' and that: "'This is what you hear from Stalin. This is what you hear from Mussolini, what you hear from authoritarians, from Hitler, from all the authoritarian people who rationalize, in some cases genocide, based what was in the public interest.' "No one corrected him by pointing out that I said exactly the opposite in the sentence that CNN had edited out. Nor did anyone correct Paul Begala when he wrote: "'The Dershowitz Doctrine would make presidents immune from every criminal act, so long as they could plausibly claim they did it to boost their re-election effort. Campaign finance laws: out the window. Bribery statutes: gone. Extortion: no more. This is Donald Trump's fondest figurative dream: to be able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.' (Emphasis added) "CNN is, of course, responsible for the decision to edit and doctor the recording to reverse its meaning and they are also responsible for how their paid commentators mischaracterized what I said. "So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment. Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest. So I will continue to defend the First Amendment as I have for the last 55 years (I am now consulting with Julian Assange's legal team). But I will insist that giant media not abuse their First Amendment rights in the way that CNN did. Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the book, Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute. Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on Twitter and Facebook" ...Wow. Did you get all of that? CNN, which is about as major a news-media company as you can get, deliberately edited Dershowitz's statement to make it sound as if he said precisely the opposite of what he really did say. I believe that fits the legal definition of "slander" -- or possibly "libel" -- and he clearly has proof of it. CNN is shamelessly pro-Democrat and anti-Trump, but this is a BIG step over the line. Didn't the editors realize that they could easily be caught spreading a deliberate lie, and hauled into court over it? Even in a state of political desperation over the good possibility that Trump might win re-election, didn't they stop to think that their victim is a famous maverick of a lawyer, and that he was likely to catch them and take action? Was their legal team asleep at the wheel? What made them think they could get away with this? Did they really think that they have the American viewer so thoroughly propagandized, and so cut off from all other sources of information, that they could lie freely and nobody would notice, or care? Haven't they noticed that their ratings have been dropping lately, or thought to ask why? Haven't they noticed a similar drop in ratings, and public trust, also afflicting news giants like MSNBC and the New York Times? Or have they all gone mad? --Leslie <

Racing From the Outside Rail

    Ever since Covid-19 began hitting the news, and probably before, various medical researchers around the world have been scrambling to create a vaccine for it.  It's interesting to see which of them have gotten the most press.  

    Here in the US, the professional medical journals have been reporting for the last six weeks that Pfizer and BionTech, working jointly on two promising candidates -- BNT-162-b1 and BNT-162-b2 -- have been given Fast Track status by the FDA, which means that they'll be given at least 30,000 volunteer test-subjects and accelerated paperwork-processing for their tests.  By now the tests should be well under way, and we can expect some news of their effectiveness Real Soon Now.  Since both companies have "proprietary" -- which is just short of "patented" -- vaccine development systems, neither one is saying much about just how their vaccines are supposed to defend human cells against the virus.

    Meanwhile, in the UK, a vaccine developed at Oxford University -- called ChAdOx1 -- is likewise racing into human testing, with just over 1000 volunteers, soon to be expanded to 10,000 more, and its developers are more willing to discuss the mechanisms of its operation.  According to the BBC, the prospective vaccine "is made from a genetically engineered virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees... It has been heavily modified, first so it cannot cause infections in people and also to make it 'look' more like coronavirus... This means the vaccine resembles the coronavirus and the immune system can learn how to attack it.  

    "Much of the focus on coronavirus so far has concentrated on antibodies... small proteins that stick onto the surface of viruses.  Neutralizing antibodies can disable the coronavirus.  T-cells, a type of white blood cell, help coordinate the immune system and are able to spot which of the body's cells have been infected and destroy them... Nearly all effective vaccines induce both an antibody and a T-cell response. Levels of T-cells peaked 14 days after vaccination and antibody levels peaked after 28 days.  The study has not run long enough to understand how long they may last."

    More intriguing for its almost total lack of attention in both American and British news media is the development of a different vaccine by the Galilee Research Institute (MIGAL) in Israel.  Israeli health services hoped to have their vaccine ready by the end of May, but a surge of infections in Israel that month -- and since -- have distracted them to searching for treatments, including the promising low-dose radiation therapy, which slowed progress on vaccine development.  This is a pity because the Israeli approach was to start with an effective vaccine against an infectious virus -- IBV -- that causes a bronchial disease in poultry.

    "Our basic concept was to develop the technology...not just a vaccine for this or that kind of virus," said Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL's biotechnology group leader.  "The scientific framework for the vaccine is based on a new protein expression vector, which forms and secretes a chimeric soluble protein that delivers the viral antigen into mucosal tissues by self-activated endocytosis, causing the body to form antibodies against the virus."

    Endocytosis, as explained by the Jerusalem Post, is a cellular process in which substances are brought into a cell by surrounding the material with cell membrane, forming a vesicle which contains the ingested material.  In pre-clinical trials the team demonstrated that the oral vaccination induces high levels of specific anti-IBV antibodies, Katz said.  "Let's call it pure luck," he continued, "{that} we decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system just as a proof of concept for our technology."

    This did more than give the MIGAL scientists a head-start on developing a coronavirus vaccine;  the technology itself can be used against other viruses -- many other viruses.  "All we need do is adjust the system to the new {DNA} sequence," said Katz.  Which means that the MIGAL technology can produce broad-spectrum antiviral medicines.  This could have as profound an effect on medicine as the development of antibiotics did nearly a century ago.  

    Katz and his MIGAL team made this announcement at the end of February, when he claimed that this new technology could possibly provide a vaccine against Covid-19 in as few as 90 days.  But, strangely enough, nothing further has been said about the MIGAL vaccine, let alone its promising technology, since early April.  There's been nothing about it, anywhere, in the media.  

    One has to wonder why.  

    Well, what else has been happening in Israel in the last four months?  

    First, the United Arab Emirates very visibly made peace with Israel, despite the squawks of outrage from the Palestinians, and Iran.  Now Saudi Arabia has been showing signs of falling in with the UAE.  The third of the Big Three Arab counties, Turkey, has suddenly fallen silent on the subject of Israel, reversing decades of retreat from the reforms of Ataturk a century ago.  Could it be that they have medical scientists among their ranks who realize what MIGAL's new technology could mean to the world, and they want to be on the right -- and money-making -- side?

    Could it be that those few Arabs who are educated, and level-headed, enough to value health and wealth and wisdom in this world above the pleasures of blind fanaticism have come to realize that Israel is on its way to being the world's powerhouse of biomedical research and technology?  Think of the implications.  

--Leslie <;)))><                     

 

Baizuo Boilerplate

 

 I'm sorry I haven't been visible for the past three weeks, but I've been tied up editing a novel for my book publisher.  I simply had to come up for air to voice my not-so-humble opinion on the political convention circus that's been playing all over TV while I've been working.  In brief, the Republicans have been remarkably coherent, the Democrats both fakey and hysterical, and the Libertarians invisible as usual.      

To start with the last, have the Libertarians even held their convention yet?  Does anybody know?  You have to search the internet to learn anything about them.  The major, and even minor, news media try their damnedest  to avoid mentioning the word "libertarian", even without capitalizing it.  They're still hoping that if they ignore it long enough, the Libertarian Party will go away.  Fat chance.  Everywhere that the LP is on the ballot, it will collect the Disgruntled vote from citizens disgusted with the antics of the Big Two. 

The Republicans, so far, have concentrated their attention on the economy: how good it was, especially for "minorities", before the Covid lockdown, how fast it's been recovering since, and how much faster it would recover if certain Democrat governors would stop trying to keep it locked down.  So far, they've also soft-pedaled their strongest selling-point, which is how the Democrats have excused and encouraged AntifaBLM riots all over the country.  Perhaps they're holding off until the latest police scandal dies down, a case in Wisconsin where some incredibly stupid and incompetent cops shot an unarmed Black man in the back -- seven times, point-blank, in front of cameras and witnesses -- and didn't even manage to kill him.  At this point any candidate who recommends taking away the police's guns and clubs and arming them exclusively with stunners -- hand stun-guns for close work, stun-batons for medium range, and Tasers for long-distance -- would harvest a million votes easily.  

Ah, but the Democrats have shown themselves as almost psychotically out of touch with the majority of voters by their convention-coverage.  At this point it might be wise to look up the Wikipedia entry for the Chinese word "Baizuo".  Here's the short version:

aizuo (/ˈbaɪˌdzwɔː/; Chinese: 白左; pinyin: báizuǒ, literally White Left)[1][2] is a derogatory Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white people.[3] The term baizuo is related to the term shèngmǔ (圣母, 聖母, literally "Blessed Mother"), a sarcastic reference to those whose political opinions are perceived as being guided by emotions or a hypocritical show of selflessness and empathy.[4]

initially used as a general critique of certain socialist values in the American left.[3] the term evolved to criticize some people among the left who seemingly advocate for positive slogans like peace and equality to boast their sense of moral superiority, but are ignorant of real-world consequences, and utilize destructive behavior like political sacrifice and identity politics.[3][5]

Substantial use in Chinese Internet culture began in early 2016, at first at MIT BBS, a bulletin board system used by many Chinese in the U.S., during the 2016 United States presidential election. Baizuo was used there to criticize the Democratic Party's emphasis on affirmative action policies perceived as discriminating against Asians.[5]

After the United States presidential election of 2016, the term came to be more widely used in reference to perceived double standards of Western media, as well as in relation to the tolerance of left-wing activists for manifestations of Islamism (see regressive left).[4]

See also[edit]Look up  白左  or  左膠  in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.Champagne socialistGutmenschLiberal elitePolitical opportunismRed–green–brown allianceRegressive leftSocial fascismSocial justice warrior
Given that the Chinese sense of humor has always been subtle, you'd have to be really publicly stupid to become a Chinese joke.
First, the Dems' convention was almost entirely "virtual" -- done electronically, with a lot of the speeches pre-recorded, and almost nothing real-time, let alone spontaneous.  It was edited, and *looked* edited.  The whole program *looked* like one big infomercial.  Seventy years of TV watching have conditioned most Americans to distrust TV ads, so the convention *looked* insincere from the start.  
Second, the "platform" the party put together was a collection of unrealistic Utopian drivel that doesn't stand up to logical examination, largely because along with the usual boilerplate it added planks from the way-out AntifaBLM fringe.  Medicare for all, including illegal aliens: who's going to keep track of the money, and where's it going to come from?  Free college for all, including illegal aliens: ditto.  Defund police and hire social workers: so who do you call when a burglar's breaking into your house?  And of course the Dems are all for gun control, while the citizens are busy buying up firearms at a ferocious rate.  
Third, the Dems did not show any serious interest in putting an end to the AntifaBLM "protest" riots which have been plaguing the US for the past two months and more.  If anything, they sympathized, adding to the "protesters'" list of demands and targets.  It's as if they were appealing to the left-most fringe of the voters, and largely ignoring everyone else.  They seem to be listening only to what the mainstream media are currently covering, and not noticing input from lesser, more local media, including the Internet.  I can't think of anything else that would explain the Dems' devotion to a platform of such Baizuo boilerplate.
And of course there was the ballyhoo about Biden's choice for Vice President;  that too was boilerplate.  Kamela Harris is a woman (oooOOOoooh), and part Black (oooOOOoooh), and part Asian (oooOOOoooh), and a second-generation immigrant (oooOOOoooh).  If only she were a transgender lesbian, she'd be perfect.  Never mind her questionable performance as a state Attorney General;  she covers nearly all the "minority" identities of the left-wing Identity Politics that the Dems have been trumpeting for years. 
It's not surprising that a Rassmussen poll taken just a few days ago shows that Trump's popularity rose to 51% after the Democrat convention ended.
There's an ancient Greek saying which holds that you should never interrupt your enemy while he's engaged in ruining himself.  At this rate, the Republicans need do nothing more at their convention than simply re-nominate Trump and Pence, and then all go off and celebrate.  The three national TV ads they've broadcast already, showing AntifaBLM mobs in action and slow police responses to emergency calls, are quite enough to swing the election, and I don't think they'll be the last.  The Repubs can win the election by doing nothing more than pointing out the excesses of the Dems.  If they also add a "back to normalcy" plank to their platform, Trump's victory is guaranteed.
This is why the TV news has been so fascinating this past week, and promises to be equally bizarre in the week ahead: bizarre and Baizuo.

--Leslie <;)))><     


      

   

       

A Study In Hypocrisy

Does anyone today remember the name of Orval Faubus?  He was governor of Arkansas -- a Democrat -- from 1955 to 1967.  He was elected in reaction to the SCOTUS' decision on Brown vs. Board of Eduction, the one which de-segregated public schools.

In response to the SCOTUS decision there was a large opposition campaign by civilian organizations -- primarily the KKK -- which supported continuous protest demonstrations by day, supported by various mayors and governors, that quite often turned into destructive riots after dark.  In 1957, when the law was applied to schools in Arkansas, Faubus defied the order and sent the state's National Guard to prevent Black children from entering Little Rock Central High School, and put in a personal appearance to help block the school-house doors himself.  He also -- through his fixer, Jimmy Karam -- stirred up civilian mobs to threaten any Black children who tried to come near the school, mobs too big for the state police to control.  Then-President Eisenhower -- a Republican -- first federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them back to their armories, and then sent part of the 101st Airborne Division -- real federal troops -- to protect the children and enforce de-segregation of the school.  Ike later commanded the state National Guard to take over that duty.  Orval Faubas then shut down the state's public schools for the next year, and wailed in public about the federal government's "usurpation of power".  Liberal Democrats, however, cheered for Eisenhower's actions and loudly denounced "states' rights" for the next decade and more.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Cut to 2020, 63 years later.

In response to a particularly stupid incident of police brutality, there is a large opposition campaign by civilian organizations -- primarily the BLM -- which supports continuous protest demonstrations by day, supported by various mayors and governors, that quite often turn into destructive riots after dark.  When the federal government insisted that the mayors and governors of particularly afflicted states -- primarily Oregon -- quell the rioting and make some efforts to protect federal buildings and property, Oregon governor Brown defied the order and threatened assorted actions against the federal government.  President Trump -- a Republican -- then sent in federal Homeland Security police and US Marshals -- police, not military troops -- to arrest visibly criminal members of the rioters.  Brown responded by accusing the federal police of "making the situation worse" and ordering them to leave the state, even threatening to call up the state's National Guard to keep the federal police away from the rioters.  Brown has also shut down the public schools for the rest of the year -- and wailed publicly about the federal government's "usurpation of power".  This time, Liberal Democrats are denouncing Trump's actions and noisily defending "states' rights". 

Now what's the difference, aside from the federal government's much milder response to the riots -- police making arrests instead of troops forcibly scattering and threatening -- and that this time the rioters are supposedly pro-Black instead of pro-White?

The real difference is that in 1963 the Democrats may have been annoyed at having a Republican president, but they didn't (or politically couldn't) noisily and publicly hate Eisenhower.  He was, after all, a highly successful general (he had led the US troops to victory in World War Two), had been a very popular President, and was already safely into his second term.  He was pretty well impervious, and Democrats felt it a better use of their time and money to concentrate on who would be his successor.  Besides, Ike presented no great threat to Democrat entrenchment in the federal bureaucracy or the party's general strategy and tactics.

Not so Trump.  The ultimate outsider and interloper, with no political experience, a near-incoherent speaking style, and the manners of a bull in a china shop, he was never expected to win the 2016 election -- not even by himself.  The Democrats were so sure they had the election sewn up, that their propaganda division was perfect, and their strategy department had the voters properly manipulated, that Trump's election came as a horrid-horrid shock -- because he proved them wrong.  Trump's upset election showed that the Democrats didn't really understand the electorate at all and couldn't manipulate it as thoroughly as they'd thought.  Years of warning that the natives were restless, that a lot of them thought the government was "broken", that the government had lost touch with the average American, hadn't warned the Democratic National Committee enough to break through its smug insularity.  Above all, the Democrats couldn't believe that the citizens were voting not really for Trump but against them.

The shock was followed by denial.  No-no-no, the Democrats couldn't be that wrong, no.  The truth simply had to be that Trump appealed to White supremacists -- and there had to be a lot of them.  That meant that America really was largely racist-sexist-xenophobic-transgenderphobic-homophobic-Islamophobic and...and...well, just anti-democratic.  That's the story they've been telling themselves, their allies, and everybody else ever since. 

To support their story, when they weren't trying to impeach or at least slander Trump, they built up a "grassroots" campaign to convince the majority of voters that they were all White supremacists and terribly-terribly guilty -- and for that they carefully cultured both Antifa and BLM, and pushed them together, starting with Charlottesville -- which, as I've mentioned elsewhere, was carefully manipulated by clearly professional provocateurs (and is also where the AntifaBLM foot-soldiers got their peculiar taste for attacking statues).  As the election drew closer, the campaign heated up;  all the Democrats needed was another crisis to exploit.  Trump's bumbling reactions to the Covid-19 virus would have been enough to go after Trump's working-class base by damaging the economy, but it didn't support the precious Bigoted America story that the Democrats had so carefully built up. 

If the George Floyd killing hadn't been so thoroughly televised, it would have been just another case of thuggish cop versus obstreperous Black suspect.  In fact, had the case not fitted the DNC's needs, and advertising, people might have started asking questions -- such as why, if Floyd's throat was so thoroughly compressed, where did he get the air to keep struggling and talking, or why it took him more than eight minutes to die when only 30 seconds of compressing the carotid artery is enough to knock a man unconscious and less than 3 minutes will kill him.  As it was, the case was good enough to justify literally months worth of protests that reliably turn into riots.

But the problem with the you're-all-racists story is that it can readily backfire.  For one thing, a lot of the victims of the riots have been Black people themselves, which has made the majority of Black voters disenchanted with BLM, let alone Antifa.  For another, BLM's claims to speak for all "people of color" does not sit well with Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, or people of other colors.  For a third, the excesses of the protesters/rioters and their political apologists have begun to seriously annoy the majority of the voters -- of all colors.  Finally, the Democrats' ludicrous demands to defund/disband the police has actually engendered sympathy for Trump's attempts to restore order by bringing in the federal cops. 

The Democrats must realize that they've overplayed their hand -- again -- and are going to lose in November, or else they would't be making such incredible moves as to start lawsuits about an election that hasn't been held yet, or to claim that Trump will try to stay in the White House even if he loses.  Such hysteria makes voters more willing to vote against the Democrats, even if that means voting for Trump. 

And for those of us who bother to remember or study history, it makes the hypocrisy obvious.

--Leslie <;)))><