"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
The Dhimmicrap Circus of Klowns has put forth its A-Team:
(And yeh, as known to any literate person, the 20th Century KKK was a Democrat organization and populated by such notables as Senator “KKK,” Robert Carlyle Byrd, so the Koup Klutz Klan has tradition going for it in its lynch mob tactics.)
If you have any interest in “climate change” at all, then you probably fall into one of two classes of persons interested in “climate change.” One class is comprised of folks who want hard numbers and replicable, real world research to verify or falsify hypotheses (or just refine wild-assed guesses so that hypotheses can be formed and tested). This class can contain both people whose personal inclination is to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and potentially catastrophic, and those who doubt such a proposition.
As long as the above class seeks to gather hard numbers and perform well-designed, replicable research, then their interest is legitimate and to be lauded, no matter what they are predisposed to believe.
Then there is the second class: those who seem to belong to the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Alarmism. CACA acolytes DGARA about facts, replicable testing, etc., but simply have “faith” that mankind is killing Mother Earth. Because dogma.
Now, it they weren’t trying to compel folks to conform to CACA dogma against their consciences, they’d just be kooks. But these kooks are dangerous. And to compel others to conform to their religious beliefs is evil. Since CACA acolytes almost uniformly seek to impose their indefensible (a fair description, because I have yet to see or hear a defense of CACA dogma using replicable research based on verifiable, undoctored facts) beliefs on those they deem to be unbelievers, regardless of any reasons for scepticism. Indeed. condemnation of scepticism alone is enough to condemn this class of persons, because science without scepticism is just. . . unfounded dogma.
Note again: I do not like TRump and would not invite him for dinner or even want to be invited to dinner with him. I don’t need to like him to note that he has done more good for common Americans than the last three or four presidents combined. Hate to admit it, but still, facts are facts. The post linked below was written almost nine months ago. I just saw it the other day, and I’ve taken a couple of days to digest it.
“Everyone Is Smart, Except Donald Trump:” Rabbi Dov Fischer
Read the whole thing.
[Extracted from a ub-thread of a discussion discussing the disparate topics of “mass shootings” and wrongful shootings by cops.]
To whatever extent wrongful shootings by police exists (and any is a Very Bad Thing, IMO), it can more easily be explained by Lord Acton’s pithy comment, Rudyard Kipling’s “General Summary,” or even the theological concept of universal moral depravity. Humans being what we are, any group of people is going to have apples that are, urm, “badder” than the norm, and unfortunately, there are bad apples in government jobs at almost any level (LEOs, run-of-the-mill bureaucraps, public “persecutors,” politicians, and corrupt judges), and they ARE be a problem, universally, to some degree or another. How to deal with the bad apples without crucifying the “less bad,” maybe even marginally OK apples? (“Marginally OK” because as long as their PEERS do not stop them, the “badder apples” will find it easier to abuse their authority.)
Well, that’s the nut, isn’t it?
Qui custodit ipsos custodes?
But as for being a “problem with guns,” well, it’s the same answer as to the issue of “gun violence.” Guns do not commit violent acts. People do. One way (really, AFAIK, the only legitimate way for governments that are not supposed to infringe on natural rights but protect them) is to make the punishments for serious violent acts serious punishment, pour encourager les autres, as it were, and those punishments should apply to ALL, with no weasel room for LEOs to argue “qualified immunity.” (“So I shot the guy seven times. I thought that UNARMED MAN SPREADEAGLED ON THE FLOOR was a threat, and how was I to know that I busted down the door at the wrong address? Qualified immunity” “Well, I thought that baby she was holding was a deadly weapons, so I killed her.” Qualified immunity. Etc.)
But, demanding that our faux “nobility” give up special privileges just isn’t going to fly, I don’t think. *sigh* Meanwhile, anti-gun folks argue that citizens should surrender their rights because of an almost vanishingly small number of bad actors. *smh*
*smh* Self-pub writers who just HAVE to “write” a book, but who have no interest in becoming literate enough to avoid felonious assaults on the English language just give me a rash. It’s not that hard, for example, to learn the differences between “go” and “come,” or “take” and “bring,” or that plural subjects take verbs that indicate, urm, you know, MORE THAN ONE, etc. But wannabe subliterate self-pub writers (there are good self-pub writers) have another major flaw: they usually seem to have an overabundance of confidence in their subliterate writing, and avoid literate proofreaders and editors like the plague.
(Aside: it’s often a Very Bad Sign when a self-pub writer thanks his mom for “critiquing” his book. As a matter of fact, in my experience, it’s a 100%, dead certain indication that the writing will stink up whatever room the book’s read in.)
This is not a good thing.
Every time I read or hear someone say “I want to make a difference in the world” with no real qualifier denoting WHAT they want to affect and HOW, I feel an urge to toss my cookies.
HITLER “made a difference in the world,” So did STALIN, and POL POT, and RACHEL CARSON and MOHAMMED — mass murderers one and all.
What KIND of difference do you want to make to WHAT set of conditions? If those bare parameters aren’t defined, then please just stay home and sit on your butt. That way, the “difference” you make will at least not actively harm others.
Our state’s mandated standardized test for school kids is called the MAP Test. I submit that it is fatally flawed. As far as I can determine, there are NO orienteering questions on the test at all.
“She drug [sic] her broken foot along. . . ”
Finally a misuse of “drug” to indicate a past tense of “drag” that, though still not literate, is at least understandable. After all, it refers to a zombie, and, as we all know, only illiterate, brain-dead zombies misuse “drug” when “dragged” is called for.
While traffic circles can quite often make good traffic control sense, sometimes. . .
Plunk one down in a place that will obviously benefit from it, but don’t think through the area’s demographics, and the benefits, while not exactly evaporating, just aren’t as strong, sometimes. Posit a locale dominated by elderly retirees (who are often better suited to parking their car than to actually driving it) on the one hand and 20-30-something young folks (who are ALSO often better suited to parking their car than to actually driving it), and imagine the “You go” No, YOU go”/”I’m-a goin'” “No, I am” messes.
Yeh, it’s real.
Meanwhile, I blow past the indecisive and brush off the importuning, shake my head, and wonder how long it’ll take the “old folks” to either learn or die off and the young folks to learn. . . or die off.
Yeh, yeh, I’m officially and Olde Pharte, but I don’t creep around corners or traffic circles, stop at yield signs (when NO ONE IS COMING! #gagamaggot), pull into traffic and drive slow in front of folks, etc., so I may be atypical.
Just look for “gimmes” from wannabe writers on Amazon.1
Yeh, I’m just a wee tad irked with the “self-pub” wannabe writers who
a. Don’t bother to learn English (though it’s their native tongue)
b. Think characterization is accomplished by listing all the name-brand products a character uses, and describing the character by just saying what dim-witted celebrity the character resembles
c. Doesn’t bother to read their own text, and so commits multiple errors of continuity at the speed of light
d. And then packs all this wonderfulness into 100 pages (or, sometimes even worse, 200) of a “novelette lite” and calls it a “novel.” *sigh* “Novelette Lite” even with padding the word count with useless crap like, “. . .in which case he would probably be stuck out here for the rest of his life, however brief a period that turned out to be.” No. DELE “a period.” Wasted electrons. (*sigh* Rather like this whole post, eh? *heh*)
Fortunately, I only actually read through about one of these a week, because I reject the absolute worst of them within the first page of text. The “survivors” often get eviscerated in reviews, though I only note ten or so (and when I’m feeling generous, sometimes fewer) of the worst examples of text that would gag a maggot.
Yes, it got worse in the book I picked to pick on here. Because of certain external factors (namely a recommendation from someone whose recommendations are often on target), I stuck it out with the book the above example came from–through even more garbage–until,
“. . .the slug had been fired from a large-caliber handgun, probably a .45. . . He knew that such projectiles traveled at a high velocity, faster than the speed of sound. . . ”
Urm, no. A good rule of thumb for speed of sound, at sea level, under ideal conditions, is ~1,125fps. Not even a .45ACP+P with a light bullet weight of only 185gr travels that fast (max out at ~1,000fps muzzle velocity), and given the circumstances in the scene, I _seriously_ doubt the writer was referring to (or is even aware of) the .45 Colt (often called “Long Colt”) cartridge or the firearms it is used in, and even then, if he were, he’d have to have been talking about a +P load.
Sorry. When a writer just keeps spreading The Stupid, the book should be relegated to the scrub pile.
1Do note that I keep on “buying” freebie Indie pub books because I have thereby found a few really excellent writers whose other work I end up buying and reading, and not just writers of fiction. I’ve not yet found any good poets that way, but hope springs eternal.