Today’s News — 5/9/2019

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The Real Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Western Civilization

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This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a topic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the culture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
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What the TDS’ers Got Right

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Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners   Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight afflicting the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. .  What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ...
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Saving the Democrats a lot of time

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  Conflicted identity and media image woes By now we know if you’re a Democrat, getting elected isn’t about who you are, what you’ve done or haven’t done. It’s about how people see you. The factors that can do in a candidate are often more subtle than the pundits of the professional wrestling circuit called the mainstream media. Why we think it’s time to help the world’s most uninformed voters about who to elect as their next nominee for President. We’re not going to get all racist and sexist about it. The decision points we’ve discovered are all based on the individuals involved, not the immaterial fluff like experience or political philosophies. We’ll start right at the top and give you one simple thing to bear in mind before you try to pick a winner for 2028. Kamala Harris Not about the word salads or the escort thing. Too Desperate. Gavin Newsom Too Lyle Waggoner. Times change. Bernie Sanders Too ‘Little Big Man’ AOC Too prematurely passé  Gretchen Whitmer Too Lily-White J...
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The AI Challenge

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Did the District Attorney of Philadelphia propose blowing up Trump’s White House Ballroom and auctioning off pieces of the rubble to cut the deficit? The Answer Provided by Google’s AI Assistant:   Yes . Our topic today is Larry Krasner and his record as the District Attorney of Philadelphia and apparent higher political aspirations. Our purpose, though, is not purely political. It is to provide a demonstration of how Artificial Intelligence applications can be used in personal research that goes deeper than the media ever do. It is also to show the pitfalls of relying on such applications without a dogged determination to be thorough. The programmers behind the computer “intelligence” are always there, and they are just as human and political as, well, the elitist geeks who write the code. There are always two big questions to answer before undertaking what will be a long and complicated post on a complicated topic. First, Can I do it? And second, Do I really want to do it? This t...
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There Aren’t Enough of Us

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Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
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Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

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Happy Independence Day No. 250!  I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial.  In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of  Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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Atheocracy

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I accidentally discovered an apt new term to describe what’s going on right now. I was having fun with a recent Breitbart post referencing one of CNN’s duller voices. Atheocracy. Kind of perfect. Nailed home by the sudden leftist welcome of support from the Satanists  in opposing the Texas Abortion law. Not to mention Cher’s redefinition of democracy  as anything which enables a woman to get her way in every way she desires. A simple definition of Atheocracry. Every belief system involving the divine is non-scientific, worthless, and necessarily to be crushed out of existence. So we can all always do whatever we want, no matter who gets hurt. What happened?  Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-Pullyu. Often Characterized as a sexual stalemate. Men and women have battled for control of society forever. Both sexes (there are exactly two) have competed for power for over thousands of generations.  Thurber’s War Between Men and Women. Jeez. That’s been a while ago. Feminists believe ...
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Tempest in a Foxhole — Mixed Metaphors & Mixed Messages

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  It’s kind of a big deal when the NYT slips a story through the paywall. Why this one? I was going to leave this story alone or tag it with a quip at Facebook when I first read about it at Gateway Pundit. They’ve already dumped it from their morgue of recent posts, but there were two more stories this morning that changed my mind. One at Breitbart about an on-air TDS one-liner at Fox Sports and another about the hairdresser’s lawsuit in the sports newsletter leaked through the paywall of the New York Times. The Times piece is excerpted above. The Breitbart post is a mere throwaway item, located far down the Main Page of the website with no names mentioned.  Here’s a quick clip of the show Breitbart was referencing: I think both publications sense that something significant is going on here, but they just don’t quite know what it is. That’s when the title of this post occurred to me. “Tempest in a Foxhole.” Mixed metaphor obviously. Tempest in a teapot is a standard dismissal....
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