Catching Up on the Alice in Wonderland World of Politics

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

That quote, of course, is from Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass, not Alice in Wonderland.

But, its application to much of the GoodThink that is appearing in the Official Media is beginning to catch the attention of even the average people. 

Not only WILL they express the correct thinking of the Elite, but - should they not be solidly aligned with them in every situation, those words now amount to BadThink.

At the link is a concept called the Celebration Parallax - which explains something I've previously considered hypocritical action, but now see as a twisted way of seeing the world. It's a mindset that is unique to the Left, and diametrically opposed to rational discussion, as the meaning of the actions/speech change, depending on the political/cultural positions of the person involved.

Following the Bon Homme Richard Fire Investigation

The fire caught my attention - my son had served on the ship, in the late 90s and early 2000s. He was in the part of the ship that was air-conditioned and comfortable - his crew handled the wiring/hardware for the fire control mechanisms that made the big guns go "boom". They worked in conjunction with the software/networking guys to keep them working.

He enjoyed his time in the service (not enough, however, to commit to another long hitch - he's basically a homebody, and was anxious to get home to Cleveland). He told us that either he was working around the clock, or his job was light duty, and he had time to perfect his video gaming.

That fits his style of functioning. He likes to kick back and take his time on the job. But, he also has a turbo mode, when he becomes hyper-focused and able to handle a rapidly changing environment with murky information. The kind of guy who thrives in combat.

But, that wasn't the path he took. When he left the service, he puttered around for a while, and ended up in a job utilizing his electronic skills. He is now the main guy at his company (don't know if he has a title, but he handles it all - production, inventory, shipping - with the aid of a small staff).

But, the BHR - I asked him about the fire when it first happened, and questioned whether it was a deliberate act of sabotage. He doubted it, and thought it likelier to be a case of accident, coupled with some errors in handling the weaponry/ammo. He explained that accidents were not unusual (although the consequences were seldom this bad). It's a big ship, and moves a lot of men and equipment throughout the world. In an environment where people cut corners, things will happen.

All of which argues for the old time culture of running a tight ship. Both the officers and the crew need to seriously fear the consequences of falling down on the job. In a complex system, the outcome of not following procedures to the letter could be deadly.

So. More than likely, not an intentional act. A small incident, followed by lax oversight or insufficiently trained crew (or, as it was being repaired, outside contractors not knowing proper procedure). And, the result was massively expensive damage, injuries, and lost lives.

It should be taken for what it is - a powerful argument for a massive overhaul of Navy personnel, training, and a weeding out of the officers that can't cut it. Not focus on 'DIE' - diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Competence. And the courage to put the finger on those not performing, even if they are one or more of the protected classes.

Start with the flag officers - move out those who are more given to bitchin' and moanin', and less concerned about instilling a battle-ready culture. Those who don't/won't measure up, DE-mote them, and put their careers in stall mode.

Next level down - with the deadweight gone, have their section supervisors meet with the junior officers, and put the fear of God in them, should they fail to measure up.

Every working section - fire control, mess, inventory, ordnance, etc. (don't know if I'd got the lingo right, but you know what I mean) - ALL need to focus on training, practice, and performance. Those that form the "complaint crew" and will not get on board with the new culture, will be written up, warned, and - should they not change - discharged with a General classification. Nothing Honorable about not trying.

Those that were just put in positions they were not competent to fill will be given the option of a transfer to a more appropriate job (with reduction in grade if necessary), or an Honorable Discharge. Either way, get them out of a job they are not competent to fill.

And, flat-out eliminate those make-work touchy-feely jobs - DIE type. Reward/promote those who have been carrying the load.

Reconsidering Richard the Lionhearted

The picture of England's King Richard that modern audiences are familiar with is an absent king, content to meander around the Middle East, while leaving his brother to control his home country through underhanded means.

And, in fact, Richard DID put his brother in charge of the country in his absence to fight the Moors. That absence, however, wasn't a vain search for glory, but a defense of the very center of the Christian religion. At the time he battled Saladin, the Muslims had captured most of the area called Jerusalem, and were quite cruel to the native Christians.

Much of the history of that time is heavily colored by the competing historical sides. Anti-French sentiment colors some of English history of the time; the close ties of the English monarchs to the throne of France is something that many British people would prefer to forget.

This account of the Battle of Jaffa puts some of the fashionably popular history in doubt. The book linked to in the article is one that is on my TBR list. It may be a year or more before I tackle it.

Bye-Bye, Chief Wahoo!

I'm going to miss you.
This all happened when I was out of town. Many people grumbled, but there were no open protests - probably because it was too freakin' hot (not like Cleveland, which is usually a mild climate - in the summer).
But the sun was causing unusually high temps, brought down by intermittent rain, then climbing again, shortly after. No, NOT 'Climate Change' - just normal variation in the weather.
So, the Climate Change we were all concerned with was the long-anticipated Demise of Chief Wahoo, and the Horrible, Racist, Very-Bad Name of the Cleveland Baseball Team.
I WISH the team could use the logo at the link - that would be wonderful. But, no, they had to *$^k around with THIS:

Bland, boring, and an echo of other teams (see the many logos at the link).

Ridiculous, as we have an awesome link to a great graphic:

It would be easy to come up with a logo incorporating that grim, determined visage.

But, no, they had to Go Bland. Probably did this even more bland, trying to make up for the "HORROR OF OFFENSIVENESS" that Chief Wahoo represented to the Perpetually Offended.

Here he is for the last time:

FWIW, I've known guys that didn't look that much different - some descended from tribal peoples, others not.

I'll still watch the games. I'll likely still wear the offending logo.

Deal with it.

Stealth Communications for the Future

I just started The Split, by Schlichter - it seems to be coming out at a good time for the country, although lousy for me personally. I'm in the midst of buying a new house, and all the other detritus of life are also converging on my time.
But, first things first - and, getting my Kelly Turnbull time in is paramount.
I wanted to get back to a favorite subject for me - comms after a shutdown, and how you can avoid being in the dark.
I assume that everyone reading this finally understands the extent to which the Left has subsumed the embedded communications structure in the USA:
- The Official Media - Their message is directed by the controlling administrative structure, which is heavily Leftist. Even the desire to make a profit is subordinate to the Woke message.
- TV, Cable, and FM stations - The are funded by advertising, but the companies that advertise have been brought into the Leftist orbit, or threatened with boycotts, smearing their reputation, and/or tying up their ability to function with attacks by government functionaries.
- Telephone/mobile phone structure - It just takes a switch to shut them down. Individual users can be silenced even more easily - they haven't done so, so far, but the capability is there. Expect that a first strike will be on the services that can easily be identified with a specific user. The second strike will be on the 'throwaway' phones. Yes, the government/Deep State have been tracking their use (that's what the metadata searches were for), and they are just waiting until the time is right to use the evidence gathered for prosecution, and the tracking ability for identifying the location of the perps. Oh, not REAL perps - no thugs will be harmed in this sweep - but the Political Perps (PP).
So, what's the answer?
Smoke signals?
No. The highly mobile communication systems of amateur radio.
Now, many have avoided joining up with the official ham radio community - haven't taken advantage of the many resources of the ARRL, nor, for that matter, even gotten licensed.
In going stealth, you are missing some of the benefits from association with experienced hams, including the opportunities to learn from people who have practical experience with the craft.
There are a LOT of us with licenses - according to ARRL, about 700,000. And, that's a substantial part of the 3 million worldwide. Additionally, there are many who use some variant - CBs, GMRS, and FRS. Not all those who used radio technology in the military, or in the various emergency services, are licensed.
Your choice. What you might gain in staying under the radar, you probably lose in working with other hams to improve your understanding and practices.
Totally separate from this topic is my Personal Peeve of the Day - the baseball team, The Cleveland Indians, is no more.
They are now The Cleveland Guardians. I'm not that excited about it, and will DEFINITELY not burn my voluminous Indians gear. But, I won't be racing out to buy the stuff with the new logo.

Mass Number of Women at Work - What Happens?

I just noticed something about the TX Democrats that fled the state rather than do their job. They are overwhelmingly female.

Now, for many people in different places of work, the response would be: So What? But, I'm not most people. For me, this is unusual.
I'm an outlier.
Formerly, I worked in IT, installation and repair, programming, network management, and database creation and management. From there, I moved on to teach in science departments (the physical sciences, which is even more heavily skewed towards males than the biological).
And, now retired, my hobbies are computers (multi-platform, including Linux and Raspberry Pi), blogging about politics and culture, writing suspense and thrillers, and operating a ham radio.
In every one of those avocations, males outnumber - sometimes heavily - the women in those hobbies. The average woman works in departments/fields where the skew is the opposite.
So, most women at work are experiencing an environment in which the associations, and the feedback, represent the female point of view.
Women in groups operate in a well-known manner; when a woman complains about a situation - whether personal and private, or somehow related to her job, the goal of other women is to validate that experience, and compete to offer reassurance for her feelings. Failure to do so will result in your banishment to the edges of that group, and, if continued, complete isolation.
The price of isolation is not one that most women will endure without cracking and capitulating.
In short, women work hard - Olympic-level competition - to out-empathize each other. It quickly descends into an orgy of man-bashing, competitive revenge fantasies (similar to Waiting to Exhale), and verbal support of plans to retaliate on the 'offenders' who have injured the amor-propre of the involved woman.
Hence, the TX legislators who fled the state are acting in concert with fellow women. They talked themselves into that joint act, and will spend their time on the road providing verbal support, justifying their rash action, and growing even more united in this misguided, and quite possibly illegal, act.
They would need a greater mass of men to this female-centric process. Although there are men pictured on some of the photos of their madcap escape, I think it's obvious that those are men who managed to insert themselves into the gyno-group, and who are content to go along with the crowd.
Now, what does this mean?
Maybe not that much. But, take a careful look at many of the groups that exhibit the most extreme political orientation (and the willingness to act).
They are, almost always, female-centric - HR and other support staff, education, fashion, media, NGOs, and state/local legislative bodies - these are well-known examples of the composition of these cohesive groups. They are female-led, with well-defined pecking orders that are populated with associations designed to provide emotional support for the group, particularly the leadership. Forget Yes-Men. Yes-Women are more common - and even more fervent in their willingness to abandon principal to gain closeness to the decision-makers.
Unlike male-dominated groups, or even less-one-gender groups, these alliances will fight the open challenges and temporary discord that accompanies brain-storming, solution-finding, or other activities that are designed to bring out minority ideas and viewpoints.
No, for female groups, consensus is the key. And, that consensus is likely driven by desire to emulate the leadership in their biases and even their most extreme plans. No nasty divergent thinking for these groups!
Now, do the otherwise inexplicable outbreaks of nuclear-level Leftist/Woke activism make more sense?
It's not about the outrage; it's about the players, and the feedback on their outrage from their peer group.

Just Walk a Few Blocks with Them...

...before off-handedly judging them. The average people of the Midwest are NOT the incipient Fascists the Sheltered and Smug Elite might suppose. I come from these people. I can see their viewpoint, even though I don't always agree with it. Before snidely judging them, the Sheltered and Smug Elite really should spend some time LISTENING to them. Stop TELLING them what they SHOULD think and believe, and spend your time listening to their stories. Stop correcting their non-PC use of words, and listen to the pain that lies under that use of pejorative terms - you might find that they have reason (as have many Black people do) to be cautious and suspicious of Strangers in the Neighborhood, as well as the Official People in Charge - including the police, courts, and other government entities. These are people whose victimization - by criminals, by the institutions that ignore their complaints, by the casual insults of "their betters" - is not unlike other minorities. And, yet, because of an accident of birth, they are classified as Privileged. Some privilege.

Books I'm Hoping to Find Time to Read

This suggestion (and excerpt) comes from The American Thinker. It's from Raymond Ibrahim's Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Not the cheapest book, but, you know, I've started investing in some of the books that I'll want to read more than once. I generally borrow those I've little interest in reading again, but I think it's worth paying the money for something weighty, as it encourages those authors to continue writing. I want to finally get to the book in our book club - we're reading The Road to Serfdom, which I started years ago, but never finished (not for lack of interest, but lack of free time). I've recently bought The Gulag Archipelago in Kindle format; I read it in paperback form when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I have no idea whatever happened to the book. What I'm finding out is that I generally head over to lesser books - thriller, mystery, light romance - when I'm under stress (which I am at the moment - looking for and eventually buying a house, re-certifying for insurance license, updating for the new Annual Enrollment Period for Health Insurance, spending some time with my radio friends on issues, club activities, and just getting on the air, fulfilling committee assignments (ham radio and American Association of Physics Teachers, family obligations, clearing up my house and beginning the weeding-out and packing process). No wonder my hair has been breaking off! I'm dedicating at least one hour a day to my reading. I'll add in another two hours to fulfilling obligations of the above-mentioned type. I'm going to tackle the insurance ones first, as they are quite time-sensitive. Once I've cleared them, I'll put that time to the others, in order of priority. My goal is to clear my list of obligations, and stop taking on these major tasks. All other activities can be fit in when possible.

The First Legislation that Congress Needs to Pass in 2023

Is a law that states:

Any federal employee that commits a crime against a citizen in the the course of their official duties should not be permitted to escape FELONY jail time, except for FULL restitution of any financial damages incurred by the citizen (loss of income, cost of hiring a lawyer, and other damages). That citizen may petition for triple punitive damages for crimes involving collusion with social or other media. A FULL confession of their illegal actions must be publicly, and for the record, admitted to. The former employee will not be eligible for pardons restoring ANY civil rights; the felony will remain on their record, and bar both future government employment, as well as employment with any NGO receiving government funding (including those receiving that money "at a distance" (receiving money from an organization that can legally accept government funding). ALL licenses to be revoked, and NOT restorable. The felon may not participate in any aspect of voting, registration, nor be associated in any way with any organization that does so. If this provision is not adhered to, the original sentence will be re-imposed in full. Any organization that permits the felon to bypass these restrictions will lose their charitable status, be ineligible for any charitable or public funds for ANY reason, including grants.

That's the minimum. Any ideas for other restorative measures to reduce the Deep State's reach? I am, of course, assuming that in 2022, the Nefarious Elite will not be able to significantly affect that election. If they do, the Shooting War is likely to commence.

Once Again, Social Media Bans are Misunderstood

Guys, it's not that Social Media cannot ban/censor by viewpoints. They absolutely can, given that they are a private company. Well, that's assuming that they are not colluding with government interests that are directing their actions. That WOULD be censorship. But, generally, they CAN decide whether or not to allow people access to their platform. Well, except those cases that involve Favored Race (not White, not Asian - those are NOT Favored), or Religion of Peace (excluding Christians, particularly those that actually believe in their sacred books, and Jews, because...), or LBGT... or those wanting to dress in the other sex's traditional clothing, or claiming that they REALLY are the sex they claim to be. You know, IMPORTANT things. But, not viewpoints. ALL Good People - that is, Correct-Thinking People - have the same thoughts on the major issues of our time. Failure to adhere to those rigid lines is clear evidence of WrongThink, and justifies the bans. However. There is that inconvenient legislation known as CDA - the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It was passed because of the explosive growth of the online porn industry, and intended to shield minors from exposure to that influence. Like most legislation, it was something of a failure. Porn has increased beyond all imagining, minors find it laughably easy to bypass filters, and, sadly, some have even taken advantage of the technology to get involved in the vast underground porn using minors themselves. The censorship issue comes up under Section 230, which essentially means that the various internet services that allow social media or online interactions to flourish are not personally responsible for that content. In other words, they can't be sued when someone posts something icky or provocative. But, that freedom from responsibility comes at a cost - they have to be neutral in their actions. They can ban bare buttocks, for example, as long as they do so in a neutral way. Censoring a picture of a baby with bare hiney, while permitting a LBGT activist's picture in assless chaps, would be unacceptable. That's viewpoint discrimination. Likewise, they can let their platform become a 'Wild West', and let anyone post anything. Even if bigoted. The SMALL exception to that ability to censor posts is if the post can be connected - however thinly - to porn. Hence, the Decency part. By NO stretch of the imagination does any claim of "False Information" hit that standard. By keeping a 'hands-off' policy in place, the social media providers have adopted the same practices as the telephone companies - you can say anything on your phone calls, and they won't take your phone away, unless a court has ruled that they can (for example, a customer who uses their phone to threaten or harass others - the courts can direct the phone company to refuse them service, based on evidence provided to the court). If, however - and, this is the case with today's media providers - the company interjects themselves into the content of posts, they lose their protection against being sued for those actions. So, like Trump, you can suit for viewpoint discrimination. If the courts rule in favor of the tech giants, they can kiss their 230 protection goodbye.

Yankee Doodle Resistance

One of the things that drove the British crazy was the snarky response to their heavy-handed governance of the American colonies.

Not every Patriot was able, or willing to participate in the public debates, engage in midnight rebellion, or write eloquent letters.

But, every one of them could sing or whistle 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'. Such a small, and public act of rebellion by those Rebels, whether man, woman, or child, led to an impotent, and enraged response. If they openly threatened the offender, they looked like bullies. If they pretended to ignore it, more joined in.

The Unfurled Trump Banners are such an example. You might want to drop $200 on your own display of public resistance. Whether or not the crowd responds with cheers or jeers, bring along a buddy to video the act. And, post it - at least until the Heavy-handed arm of oppression brings you down.

A State's Right Approach to Federally Imposed Problems

No, I'm not suggesting that state's declare their refusal to follow Federal interpretations of the law.

But, rather, to use the sovereignty of the individual states to begin coordinating regional responses to crises.

Such as this response, from FL, NE, and IA, to the TX border invasion. The thing is, the Federal government cannot stop states from voluntarily cooperating to their mutual benefit. And, since so many of the states' governors are strong executives with conservative leanings, this is an approach that may well tip the scales.

The Federal government can act against ONE state; they can send in the guard to crush dissent.

It's harder to do when multiple states act in their own interests, and refuse to cooperate with the Feds.

It will be even harder when the Feds can no longer call upon the National Guard to crush opposition to Federal-level, unconstitutional, and illegal demands. They made a BIG mistake when they chose to bring in the Guards in January, treat them abominably, and, now, fail to pay the state for the cost of using them as support for the DC police department.

The governors, and the states' citizens, are hopping mad about all of the above.