Category: Politics

“Two movies on a single screen.” That’s how Scott Adams described the American reality right now. We are all watching the same events unfold, but we are seeing those events from two perspectives. Consider the very popular book and play Wicked; that’s a re-telling of “The Wizard Of Oz” from the perspective of a Wicked Witch. If you’ve read the book, then you now have two perspectives on that story — but you likely prefer one of the two, and consider it to be the “real” perspective.

When it comes to the “Dreamers”, the between 1.8 and 3.6 million illegal/undocumented immigrants who were brought here by their parents, the “red” and “blue” movies are, as you’d expect, quite different. Rather than get caught up in the numbers of how many “Dreamers” are in the US military (about 900, considerably less by percentage than native African-Americans) or how many are in prison (about 1,500 — which is also considerably less by percentage than native African-Americans), I just want you to look at the two people above. Try to get a sense of who they are, what their story might be, and which side of the Narrative they serve. Then we can talk about them.

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Crisis actors. It’s not a phrase I’d heard prior to this week, but after the school shooting in Parkland, FL it’s become a part of the conversation. Some people say that these tragedies are “false flags”, bolstered by a passage in a rather infamous conspiracy-nut buff book in which the author details methods by which the government encourages school shooters. Others are troubled by the idea of an FBI agent’s son giving talking points to victims as he supposedly interviews them right in the middle of the shooting. There’s also something just a bit squicky about the rapidity with which the media rolls out coordinated talking points on gun control even as people are still dying in their classrooms — to say nothing about the insanity of CNN promoting voting rights for 16-year-olds.

(The conspiracy theorist in me says that this “16-year-olds should vote” crap is part of a general campaign to normalize pedophilia, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

For the moment, however, let’s use Occam’s Razor and let the simplest explanation suffice: these school shootings are real, they are not the product of hypnotism or even violence-inducing anti-depressants, and they are happening in more or less the reported fashion — in other words, there are no mystery shooters or deep-state agents getting involved. The question any sane person would ask is simple: why are they happening?

As it turns out, there are some simple statistical correlations that lead to some extremely unpleasant conclusions.

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I’m in the process of watching The Wire all the way through again, mostly because I’m doing a lot of air travel and I’m too lazy to read all the books I should be reading during that time. One of the more interesting aspects of the show is how often its creator, David Simon, used real people from the Baltimore streets instead of trained actors. The most commonly-cited example was Snoop, who actually killed someone on the streets prior to acting on the show, but there are at least six Baltimore cops, including two former commissioners, who are on the show in one role or another.

During the first season, a fellow named Ed Norris plays a wisecracking cop who keeps saying that someone needs to fix the department. It’s an inside joke; Norris was actually the police commissioner at the time. After his time on “The Wire”, Norris did six months in jail thanks to a prosecutorial technique known as the “headshot”.

I didn’t know what the headshot was until this morning. I kind of wish I still didn’t know. If you’re ever owned a home or a rental property, you’ll want to, as they say, read all about it.

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The media is buzzing this week about a thirty-minute interview between Canadian psychologist/self-help guru Jordan Peterson and English “presenter” Cathy Newman. After seeing about fifty links to the interview, I resolved to suffer through a few minutes of it. I ended up watching the whole thing, with a growing sense of horror.

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Tomorrow I’m going to write a longer post on the idea of “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe” as discussed in an article recommended by one of our commenters here. Before I do, however, I want to pre-discuss an idea that figures very large in the essay: the idea that very few of us have any regular and significant acquaintance with people who possess a genuinely different set of beliefs from ours. Never before has our society been quite so completely segmented — not by race, color, or religious creed, but by adherence to common fundamental assumptions. If you believe that “no human is illegal” and that there should be no barriers whatsoever to immigration, chances are that you don’t have regular interactions with people who want to Build! That! Wall! and so on. If you think that owning a personal firearm is an essential part of being an American citizen, then chances are that you don’t hang out on the weekends with people who donate to anti-gun causes.

The reasons for this are many, but I’d suggest that the primary and most substantial force behind this voluntary segregation is our move from physical communities to virtual ones. And before you tell me that your life isn’t like that at all, I’ll explain further.

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In a move that shocked precisely nobody, Macy’s is closing seven stores and laying off 5,000 workers across the country. In addition to being predictable because of the rise of e-commerce and the never-ending retail slump that likely ends with brick-and-mortar becoming a thing of the past, it’s predictable because Macy’s originally announced this plan in August of 2016. The only real news to come out of this was the naming of 7 of the 100 stores that are doomed under the original plan.

The particularly astute among you will notice that August 2016 is several months before January 20th, 2017, which is when President Donald J. Trump took office. In fact, it’s even a few months before November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected. So why are MSN, USA Today, and others acting like this is news today?

Simple. There’s been too much good news in the financial sector since Trump was elected, and, specifically, far too much good news since he signed his tax bill into law. Time to incense the readers a bit. Predictably, it worked.

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