Cards for kids.

I saw an ad for some kind of tea online, an ad that tried to hit all those FOMO buttons. Each loving leaf of this tea was carefully curated by twelfth-generation tea growers in their paradisical tea garden in Teadonia blah blah blah. It occurred to me that so much of Internet advertising is essentially trying to find a way to get you to pay five bucks for a teabag. Because if you don't, you're missing out, you don't know what good tea is, and you're a loser. 

I mentioned to my wife that the young adults who might fall for this kind of appeal are likely the same ones who complain that they are unable to pay back their student loans. She raised an excellent point about a real hole in their education, one I would like to share today. 

But first, I want to say that I do sympathize with kids getting hammered by student loans. Colleges have become obscenely overpriced in the last thirty years, using guaranteed loans to guarantee themselves enormous raises while continuing to promote the idea that the only path to a fulfilling career is through their gold-plated doors. Knowing that much of college teaching is provided by underpaid adjuncts, we all should be asking: What the hell are you bastards doing with the money? That's all beside the point, but I wanted to note that I am aware college debt has gotten out of control since I was a fresh-faced undergrad. 

Now: To business! 

My wife and I were talking about the days when we lived in a much more cash-centric society. You could not put anything from an impromptu piano purchase to the change for the air machine to inflate your tires on plastic. Sure, some places took credit cards, fewer took ATM cards, and some people still wrote checks at the supermarket. For everything else, you got some cash and that was it until the next trip to the bank. 

This, as my wife put it, is why young adults now don't think through the ramifications of overpriced tea and the like. The junior varsity credit and debit cards they were given as kids, the ones that were supposed to teach them to manage money, removed the crushing fear of being caught short in a difficult spot. In our youth it was: No cash? No taxi. No cash? No Big Mac. Didn't bring your checkbook? Better not spend too much on the groceries or you'll have to make the Return Request of Shame. ("Um... Can I put the steaks? And the Frusen Glädjé? And the, er, toilet paper?") I prided myself on keeping a running estimate as I went, and I don't think I ever got caught short. 

Fear is a great motivator and can be a great teacher. You can learn about the wonders of store brands, the importance of learning to sew, the glory of not paying $65 for a pair of adult booties from Bombas. But when you're not thinking about the money you're spending and counting on that high limit and overdraft protection, you may feel fearless -- but it may be a whole different feeling when the texts from the bank and credit card company start pinging on your phone.

I never really thought those starter credit cards were a great idea. Better to open a savings account for the squirt and actually put cash into it. Yeah, the interest the banks give on savings is so poor these days that it actually counts as an insult, but that's not the point. The point is learning the value of money and why it's important to be careful with it. 

Insert obligatory final line here, wishing that Washington would learn the same lesson. Well, I can dream, can't I?

When it's bad, it ain't bad enough.

The bear situation has been getting to me. 

If you're just joining us, there is a black bear that has been roaming the neighborhood, making himself quite at home in daylight hours as well as in dusk and dawn. It was seen most recently by me from the porch last Wednesday as he sauntered down the street. 

My wife wants me to call the state fish & wildlife office. The local authorities have no interest in bear matters, so it must be referred to the closest state office -- one county and forty miles away. So you can bet they'll just come racing down here with sirens wailing, ready to capture a big ol' bear. Yeah.

Every time I take out the trash or take out the dog in the dark, I also take out my big ol' cop flashlight, the kind you can use to beat the fight out of a fleeing felon. Probably would not give me the edge in a fight with the bear, but it's better than nothing. I believe it when they say bears would really prefer not to get too close to humans -- but this guy is already taking liberties. 

Meanwhile, we have Eastern Coyotes again all of a sudden. Do they follow bears, looking for scraps? I don't know, but my wife has heard them howling, and I'm pretty sure I saw one in hot pursuit of three deer through the gloaming.

So last night I dreamed I was outside the house (not my actual house) and looking into the backyard (way larger my actual backyard) while on the phone with my friend Will (my actual friend). Dog Izzy was in the back. Suddenly through the high grass bordering the yard came a multitude of wild critters -- a rhino, cheetah, a gigantic African elephant, and other assorted miscreants. Izzy froze at the sight. I said, "Will, I'll have to call you back," and got the only useful-ish thing at hand, my three-pound sledgehammer. I wished like the comic book Thor I could use it to shoot lightning, but I figured if I screamed enough and bopped the right people in the snoot, I could give Izzy a chance to run for it. Just as I made my move, I woke up. 

I have to say I was a little proud of my dream self, ready to plunge into danger to save my beloved dog. Most of the time I consider myself the kind of guy who, in a crisis, looks around to see who else is stepping up to solve the problem, and if no obvious problem solver appears, to kind of shuffle sideways out of the area. So, yay for dream me, I guess. 

Yeah, there I am.

Should I call the government about my bear problem? Not because of my own worries, but because it's dark when the teens are on the school bus stop now. Plus Halloween is coming, and that means little kids at dusk carrying sweet, sweet candy. I'm afraid our bear will think it's like a frozen dinner with the dessert in a separate compartment. 

Have you had to deal with bear business like this? Anecdotes and advice are welcome. 

The path ahead.

This is a nice path. 

It's used for walking, biking, jogging -- the usual low-tech path stuff. Well made, I think, dotted with benches, running through the wooded areas of several towns. It goes almost twenty miles along the former railway line. It's popular, and it's an example of the kind of things local governments can do well. 

I can't think of a thing that the federal government has done this well in many years. Its response to Hurricane Helene is making the Katrina response look like a model of logistics and efficiency. How could it have gotten worse since 2005?

voilà

Of course, it will probably turn out that some of the funding for our local trail project came from the National Institutes of Health's American Bicycle Path Fitness Initiative, a $20 billion slush fund that donated $10,000 to the county. Who knows anymore. I just made that initiative up, but you know it sounded legit. Who cares? It's just money.

Our money.  

We've been building a lot of bike paths in America, but the actual number of bicyclists is declining. Around here we have a handful of serious bike riders, a small group of oldster bikers-for-exercise (they like to use the path), and the rest are kids, or illegals without cars, or guys who got their licenses yanked for DUI. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, said while running for office that he was going to bike to work at City Hall, and he did -- the second day he was in office, with the cameras rolling. Since then? Well, with the weather and traffic in New York and the idiocy of city drivers and other bikers, I think he'd be a fool if he did. But I doubt he has.  

Of course the campaign statement was just posing. It's all about appearances, and to hell with appearances. Appearances are ephemera, mist on a windy morning, nothing more than the emperor's new clothes, and the emperor is not someone who you want to see naked. 

This is how we get things like this:

What's her foreign policy plan? "Friendship is magic"?

I can't forecast what's going to happen in the election, but I will make one prediction that I think is ironclad: If Trump is elected, Antifa and all the other wannabolsheviks will go back to the only things they know how to do -- throw bricks, burn things, attack bystanders. The so-called insurrection of 2021 will be nothing by comparison, but of course it was nothing compared to the human injuries and billions of dollars in damage these commie cosplayers caused in 2020 anyhow, the one Governor Walz's wife and daughter enjoyed so much. The iron fist in the sparkly pink glove.

I can't lose hope for America, but I'm certainly not as optimistic about it as I once was. I know nothing lasts forever -- but it would be nice if the world's oldest constitutional republic could show itself to be more resilient than the ancient Roman Republic, which lasted almost 500 years. We'll be halfway to that mark in 2026 and it's looking grim.

Mission: Forgotten.

Mr. Philbin inquired whether I was intending to comment on last week’s failed attempt to murder the former president. I believe everyone on the planet has already done so, and as more information comes out and the Secret Service looks worse and worse, more will comment again (and ought to). Feet must be held to fires; swords must be fallen upon. Justice demands it.

And yet, I suppose we’ve come to expect that justice’s claims will go unanswered. As is typical now. The government is loaded with people who not only don’t accept the buck when passed, they also use buck-repellent on their gold-plated rears to prevent the buck ever arriving—however properly it should. Harry Truman is long absent. 

It’s of a piece with a blog entry I posted earlier this month about our supposed elites and their stupidity. As has been pointed out with appropriate vigor in many quarters, the Secret Service has opted to show its stupidity by forgetting its mission and picking up lesser missions instead. Instead of protecting the presidents and other key figures, they seek to indulge in social justice and social engineering, hiring candidates based on their potential to be girlboss action figures rather than their capacity to do the job. We have seen some results of this mission misdirection.

A similar situation has been going on in reverse in women’s competitions, where men dressed as women are pulverizing girls at sports and even winning beauty competitions. The mission—giving women an arena in which they can achieve greatness—has been thrown aside for silly concerns.

This has been going on in fire departments for decades. It became more important to get women in the firehouse than to have firefighters who could handle the often extreme physical challenges of the job. To enable social change, physical requirements had to be lowered. 

I asked a buddy who retired from a Manhattan NYFD firehouse if one of the highly touted female recruits had ever wound up in his unit. He said they were never assigned any, but he worked with some when he was on temporary loan to other houses. And no, they couldn’t do the job—they were just not strong enough, however fit. So the department would shuffle them into desk jobs. They will get the same cushy pension and Cadillac health plans as guys who'd spent 30 years dragging adults out of burning buildings. The situation is worse now under Mayor Eric Adams’s highly politicized fire chief, but that’s a long story.

It seems like way too many people believe the fish-out-of-water stories in which totally unqualified persons are put in difficult positions or authority, but succeed because they are clever and mean well. This assumes no job requires any knowledge or expertise. Anyone can do it with the right attitude, so why give it to some old white dude who’s spent his life in the field? The mission will be accomplished. And if not, we tried real hard!

I'm not just blaming the women involved, mind you -- I'm blaming everyone for forgetting the purpose of the job. And having an all-men squad is definitely no guarantee of getting these jobs done. It was only in 2012 that Secret Service agents were found to be spending more time getting loaded and banging prostitutes overseas than focusing on their duties (“Wheels up, rings off”). And again, that’s forgetting the mission, just for different priorities. 

This is where we are in America right now: Everyone wants to do everything but the damn job that he's supposed to be doing. You'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask for any job, let alone one that prides itself on duty and honor, but apparently we're choosing to be too stupid -- not to mention too selfish -- to live. 

Angry young meme.

 Just feeling PO'd today. Gah! Grumble! Grrr! Have some memes. 

This one is not real! That we know of.

Presidents Day sale!

Hello, friends! We're celebrating Presidents Day here at Fredcoin, everyone's favorite cryptocurrency, with an amazing deal! You won't want to miss out on this one! But first, you need to ask yourself some important questions. 

Yes, friends, you need to say to yourself, "SELF! Do I want my wallet to be fat, like Taft? Or scrawny like Madison? Do I want my savings to be piled high like Lincoln? Or be peewee like, er, Madison? Man, Madison was a little dude, wasn't he?"

Well, of course the answer is: You want the big dough! You want to be raking it in like Trump before becoming president, not have to wait like Obama until afterward! 

But, you wonder, how can Fredcoin bring you the big bucks if it's just another form of currency?

See, right there, that's our secret: No one knows. The US Treasury is jammed with people who know a lot about money. Congress and the White House are full of money people. The Federal Reserve is all about the good old US dollar. And how is that working out? Your dollar has more shrinkage than the guys in the Polar Bear Club on New Year's Day. Meanwhile, at Fredcoin, we don't know beans about money, and 1 Fredcoin has remained equal to 1 Fredcoin ever since we started. QED!

And here's our amazing Presidents Day Fred, White, and Blue Sale: Buy 50 Fredcoin for one Grant, and we'll throw in another 20 for one Jackson! We must be nuts to make a deal like that, I know! Or maybe drunk! Oh ho! Which two presidents have a reputation for being prodigious topers? Aaahhhh, there you are!

Once again, I must ask if you want to be smart like our smarty smart presidents (Washington, Lincoln)? Dumb like our big dumbbell presidents (take your pick)? Or even so smart you come all the way around to being stupid again (Wilson)? Of course not! You want to be with the hip crowd! You want Fredcoin!

So remember, my fellow Americans, turn that flimsy US currency into rock-solid Fredcoin! And keep flying the Fred, White, and Blue! 

The old standby (post-Christmas edittion).

Merrrry second day of Christmas! Well, yesterday was festive, or certainly busy, so I'm falling back on that old standby, the post-Christmas meme! What can I tell ya -- it was that or stories about everything I ate, and I'd bore myself. (Plus -- this is stupid but true -- I managed to burn the tips of my index and middle fingers on my right hand, so it hurts to type today. And I sprained the ring finger on the same hand bending it back on a drawer. And then Izzy yanked the leash so hard -- excited to get a treat -- that I stumbled on the walkway edging and skinned my knee. All very holly jolly.)

Today's craziest thing ever.

Today's lunacy comes from the World of Science, another institution hopelessly corrupted by greed, ambition, and political correctness. I encountered these examples on a research project about headaches.

Let us start with the Global Healthy Living Foundation (bold in quoted material added):

Recently, it has been suggested that the word race should not be listed among risk factors for disease. Instead, it is suggested to state the effects of racism as the reason why a disease is more common, more severe, or less well treated in people from underserved populations.

All right, so there we have it. There is no reason that one group should suffer from any disease more than another; the only difference is the effects of racism. Note that we don't know who has suggested that; it's just out there, like the breeze, like radio waves. 

Taken at face value, what does this mean? Well, for one example, how about all those studies that noticed the preponderance of breast cancer in women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, studies that pointed the way to the discovery of a mutation on the BRCA genes 1 and 2 that made many of these women more likely to suffer from this form of cancer. Did that teach us anything? No, the only reason that these women were more likely to have cancer was because of the effects of racism. 

See how easy it is to say something that sounds good and throw away a century of genuine scientific research?

The unequitable scientist,
plotting how to exclude others

But Jewish people are of the white race, not the Jewish race, I hear a voice in the balcony say. Well, that depends who's making the assessment, doesn't it? College administrators say Jews are white, I guess, and Hitler said they weren't, and in both cases it was anti-Semitic. 

Let's look at a study in Neurology, the esteemed journal of the American Academy of Neurology. What do we learn here?

Whereas races are not inherent biological categories, race is a social construct that as a vehicle for systemic racism has profound health effects. Throughout the literature, it is apparent that race plays a role in the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of headache disorders. Although recent population studies have found the prevalence of severe headache and migraine is roughly equal among White (15.5%), African American (15.0%), and Hispanic (14.9%) groups in the United States,6 differences exist in diagnosis, treatments, and outcomes.

So now we learn that there really is no such thing as race at all; it's just a social construct invented to keep people down. And yet then we have data for people of difference races, to prove that some are treated differently than others. It's easy to get the feeling that the word race is magic, that it can be dismissed when convenient and raised again when useful. When bad people see race, it's not real; when good people see race, it's crucial. Even in the same paragraph. They want to have their pain and eat from it, too.

Now let's see what the National Migraine and Headache Awareness Month people have to tell us about this topic. (That month is celebrated in June, by the way; mark your calendars.)

About one in six African Americans in the United States are diagnosed with migraine disease and one in five is diagnosed with tension-type headache. Studies on race-related gaps and possible health care inequalities in people with headache disorders are virtually non-existent. Understanding potential race-related disparities in headache patients may inform the development of culturally contextualized healthcare policies and interventions that are more likely to reduce or eradicate race-related headaches altogether (Bernadette Davantes Heckman and Ashley Joi Britton 2015).

Prior research suggests that if a patient is black, his pain is likely to be underestimated and under-treated compared to a white patient.

So now it looks like race is back on the menu, because people have race-related headaches and are treated differently by hospitals and doctors because of their race. In fact, an outfit called CtrlM Health would like us to know that

A growing body of research shows that migraine in Black people is more frequent, severe, and likely to be chronic and associated with more depression compared to white People.

Yet, among Black people with headache and migraine, inaccurate diagnoses are more common. 

BUT WAIT! Race is just a social construct, so how can you possibly say that black people have migraines more often than white people? You can only say that racism causes a difference in their care. 

Look, I personally think WAY too much is made about race. It's part of our individual human makeup and experiences, but as a Catholic, I think we're all made in God's image and we're all made by Him with love, and we should be happy about it, not fight about it. 

Medically, though, racial background and social background can provide a lot of clues about the origins of disease. Arguing about whether race is a real thing or not is almost beside the point; we would like to know if disease is caused by genes, caused by behavior, or caused by genes and triggered by environment, or the like. Thus, there are statistical uses in studying groups by similarities in DNA. And if you don't want to call it race, call it something less explosive. We're just stirring up trouble where it isn't necessary.

As for racism, sure, that's a problem in the human condition and always will be. The more tribal we act, the worse it is, and political correctness is nothing if not tribal, dividing us by income, race, sex, sexual preference, religion, experience, nation, history, you name it. 

However, there is one notable reason that I can guarantee has a lot to do with why white people get better healthcare in America despite the ferocious drive for "equity," a reason that cannot be conquered by all the goodwill in the world. Allow me to quote the uber-leftist Kaiser Family Foundation:

As of 2020, Medicaid covers about three in ten Black, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) nonelderly adults and more than two in ten of Hispanic nonelderly adults, compared to 17% of their White counterparts. 

Government healthcare sucks. And that's true whether you're red, white, blue, black, polka-dotted, or striped. The more of it you have to rely on, the worse your overall experience with healthcare is going to be. By the numbers, most Medicaid patients are white, but not by the percentage of the groups, and that's what matters to the equity hustlers.

On a related topic, about twenty years ago or so people were going bananas because researchers noted that men were usually the subject of cardiac health studies, and this made women's experience (especially symptoms of coronary distress) invisible, leading to misdiagnosis and death. They pointed out that heart disease is the #1 killer of American women, same as American men, but claimed that women who relied on the usual advice about heart attack symptoms were dying more often. So in 2004 the American Heart Association launched the Go Red for Women movement. 

Pardon my cynicism, but I also think the AHA and others were tired of the breast cancer people getting all the attention -- that is to say, money. "Hey! We're still #1! Show us some love! And money!" 

The point is, people still want to argue that women face health disparities, but when you put them on the spot they won't even tell you what a woman is. Not even Supreme Court nominees. They know the mob is waiting to pounce, and they're -- what's the word? -- chickenshit. And liars. Don't forget liars. 

Anyway, I literally have a headache now after writing all this. So, my research is complete.

Moments and mements.

Yesterday I was out and about, rather busy being social. (Me! Out amid the populace! Can you imagine?) Therefore all I can offer you this morning are some stolen moments and stolen memes, collected with the utmost care over the latter part of October. 

And, because I got my first Christmas catalog of the year in the mail yesterday:

Crypts and Cryptos: Or, Death and Taxes.

Greetings, friends! It is I, Fred Key, your friendly neighborhood cryptocurrency tycoon, with another exciting update about Fredcoin, the Crypto for the Smart Set!

I know what's concerning you, my clients and prospective clients. I always have my ear to the ground. I was taught early on that keeping your ear to the ground means money. And sure enough, I got up and there was a nickel stuck in my ear. 

This is a nickel that has seen things.

But that's not important. The thing is, you're worried about taxes on your cryptocurrency earnings. And you have reason to be. As reported on Monday in the New York Post, the only American newspaper with any integrity, the Internal Revenue Service is stepping up efforts to collect earnings on cryptos:  

The Internal Revenue Service is going to court to get its hands on cryptocurrency transaction records as part of its continuing efforts to collect more taxes from Americans who fail to report profits from digital coin trades.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that they had successfully obtained a court order allowing the IRS to obtain information from M.Y. Safra Bank about American taxpayers who did not disclose crypto-related income.

Your first instinct may be to feel alarmed. Or perhaps to take a deep breath and let the calmness slide over you. Or to stick your head in a bucket of sand. I say thee Nay! None of these are necessary. I can assure you that none of this will affect Fredcoin dealers and traders this year.

"Why Fred," you ask, "how can you possibly know this? Our institutions have gone insane, prosecuting people for political thought and freeing people for violent action. Who knows what the IRS will do?"

You see, friend, there's a magic word in that story I quoted that should put your mind at ease. And that word is: profits. Fredcoin customers haven't had to worry about any profits! In fact, that other word, income, is further assurance that there is "no problemo," as they've had none of that stuff either. See? As they say, Mo' money, mo' problems; no' money, no' problems!

So just take it easy and put more of your money in Fredcoin, where the IRS won't have any reason to look. 

Fredcoin! It's the ultimate tax shelter!

Voting test.

Friend and pest Mr. Philbin asks (I'm paraphrasing), "Why did you post that screed yesterday about efforts to get morons to vote without providing a solution?"

Well, I suppose he's right -- we can't stop Rock the Vote from trying to help idiots to go vote, let alone Google. They have a right of speech and assembly, although they and others like them would be happy to deny those rights to those who oppose them.

Aside from are commonsense fraud-prevention measures, like voter ID and requiring states to maintain updated voter rolls (and other racist! stuff like that, I know), I would suggest an exceptionally modest citizenship test for anyone who wants to vote. It would require no more than the broadest knowledge that could be gained from watching the "America Rock" section of the classic children's education series Schoolhouse Rock!, which was targeted at children of grammar-school age. Each episode is three minutes long, and there are twelve altogether (expanded from the original nine), and they explain some of our history and the reason for the structure of the government outlined in the Constitution. 

All I want is a test that would show that the voter has the slightest grasp of what the country is all about. Multiple-choice questions include things like:

1) Which document makes us a "nation of laws," meaning we have no monarch who can do whatever he wants?

a) Monroe Doctrine

b) Gettysburg Address

c) The Constitution

d) Hardee's Menu

2) What are the three co-equal branches of government?

a) Active, Passive, Aggressive

b) Executive, Legislative, Judiciary

c) Commons, Lords, Crown

d) Rich, Poor, Middle

3) In what century did adult American women win the right to vote?

a) 21st

b) 20th

c) 19th

d) 12th

4) Which is one purpose for the Electoral College as a means of choosing a president? 

a) To allow the Judiciary a voice in government.

b) To steal elections.

c) To give New Hampshire the first presidential primary.

d) To give smaller states a better chance of expressing their needs to the nation.

5) Who was the author of the Declaration of Independence?

a) Thomas Jefferson

b) B.B. King

c) Abraham Lincoln

d) Betsy Ross

Anyone who can't answer these really has no business voting,

The problem with a lot of modern elections is that our current tribalism is shattering us the way it did at the Civil War, only it's not just along state lines. We have no sense that the nation itself is important; only a demand that we get what we want from it. 

If you want to get biological about it, the orbitofrontal cortex of our brains is where we store our relative values, and if we have no ingrained sense of the "cool" values, the "hot" ones will win every time. Such as:

Cool value                                   Hot value

I want to lose weight.                   I want that doughnut!

I want to save money.                  I want to SHOP!

I want to be sober.                        Bad day and time to get my DRINK ON!

I want a strong nation.                 I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

I want my rights protected.         I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

The cool values were always taught to children and young adults by mature society; that ship has not entirely sailed, but it's down the river and heading out to sea. And young people and others who don't know all that much show it in their voting. Plus, they're being told in school that America is a big lump of crap anyway, so why not just get what you want from it?

"America Rock" could help fix this, in just twelve three-minute lessons. Then voters who pass the test can vote legally for the rest of their lives. And maybe they'd think a little better about the sacrifices and character of their ancestors as well. 

Get out the dopes.

I see Google is getting into its usual act, trying to make it easier for people who are too dumb to vote to get out and vote. 

The company would deny that it's trying to get only one particular kind of voter -- Leftist -- just as it would deny that its search results skew toward liberal media sources on any topic. But we know. 

Leftists, who think they are smarter than us idiots, somehow always do things to try to get the least-informed people to notch a ballot, and do it as many times as possible. This has been going on since the big Democrat machines of the Boss Tweed era, but has been institutionalized since Bill Clinton's Motor Voter Act of 1993. The idea then was to latch on to dumdums who wouldn't cross the street to vote but had to go to the Motor Vehicles department in their state, and get them to register to vote. It was opposed at the time by Rightists, but not very strongly, because no one wants to say that people who couldn't care less about voting should be discouraged from doing so. 

Well, I'll say it. 

MTV got on the bandwagon back when its M stood for Music (I think now it stands for Moron). Back in 1990 the station promoted the Rock the Vote nonprofit to get know-nothings off the sofa and into the voting booths. It was nominally nonpartisan, but we all know the way dummies who think the government exists to rob from the rich and give to everyone else will vote -- "Robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul," as Kipling put it. Back then it was assumed that all the rich people were white-shoed Thurston Howell IIIs, who would be made to pony up so college students and dropouts alike could have a cornucopia of free stuff. 

Things look rather different now. The rich people are all into radical chic and the nation is a lot farther in debt -- and the welfare state has expanded far beyond the fever dreams of FDR. 

An uninformed -- or worse, misinformed -- population is not fit for representative government, and this was a key reason public education was accepted nationally. But now we find that public education is becoming a large source of misinformation for youth. Some things voters ought to know but don't include:

✅ How government spending and debt affects the value of money itself;

✅ How rich people hide their money to keep it safe from taxation in ways the middle class cannot do;

✅ How the middle class is the only thing that keeps serfdom at bay, by having the wherewithal to stand up for itself;

✅ How the rotten history of any other country on this earth compares to that of the United States;

✅ How bills really become laws in the current degraded state of Congress (see for example the monstrosity called Obamacare)*;

✅ How much harder life is for the ignorant;

✅ How stable marriage is the best defense against poverty for men and women;

✅ How education has been directed toward frivolous tribalism and away from important facts -- facts of life that continue to operate whether we are aware of them or not.

Unfortunately, the more our stupid citizens (and others), educated in terrible schools, get out there and vote, the more stupid government we are likely to have. The basics of civilized society are not that hard to master, and yet somehow people can get through graduate school and know nothing about them. Alas!

*For example, how Charles Rangel introduced a spending bill in the House (where all spending bills must originate) with the friendly and anodyne title of "Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009"; the bill got to the Senate where it was completely stripped of its title and all its innards, stuffed as full of pork and socialism as a Thanksgiving turkey, then reconciled with the House under its new monstrous form -- a Trojan House virus, if you will -- to pretend that the spending bill originated in the people's House as demanded by the Constitution. It should have been thrown out by the Supreme Court just for that. 

American jobs!

You know, when companies are run by idiots, even when they do things right, they do them wrong.

Take for example Procter & Gamble, the company so woke that it insulted the vast majority of its razor users and watched the division fall by $8 billion. 

One of its longstanding products is Safeguard soap, which was only available as a bar soap (as far as I know) in the pre-pandemic era. During the height of COVID mania, the company released large bottles of liquid hand soap under the Safeguard brand. I got some on a few occasions because hand soap, like hand sanitizer and toilet paper, went flying off the shelves at that time and you had to get what you could get.

Well, my wife really liked it, so despite my desire to continue to punish the company for its rudeness, I have been compelled to get some for use at the kitchen sink. But I note that on the bottle they say "Made with American Jobs." What, they suddenly love America? 

In fact, they love America so much they repeat the slogan on the back. (They seem to think that the US has one star on its flag, like Texas or Puerto Rico, but never mind.)

The thing is, I will never trust the company to do what it says again. So I wrote them the following e-mail: 

"I see that the Safeguard soap bottle says 'Made with American Jobs.' What does that mean? It doesn't mean it's made in America; it could just mean someone in America called the factory in Mexico or Canada to order more. I'd like some clarification on this, please."

A few days later I got a reply:

"Thanks for getting in touch with Safeguard. I'd be happy to help assist you today. All Safeguard products are made at facilities in the United States of America. Our liquid hand soap and body wash are made in Iowa City, hand sanitizer is made in California and Virginia, and bar soap is made in Ohio."

So there you go -- the products are actually made in America, but for some reason they couldn't just say that. Instead they had to use some unusual phrasing that made it sound like they were cheating. 

"Oh, yes, we mean an America, not that America. South America is sort of still America." 

"By American jobs we meant Hector in the mailroom, who sends the note to the plant in Xinjiang to order more." 

"We referred to Peter Jobs (no relation to Steve) who is working at the factory in Mexico City." 

Which just shows you that when you break trust with the people, they expect the worst. And it takes a long time to reestablish the respect you've lost. All our institutional leaders ought to bear that in mind. But it's probably too late.

Kafka IRS.

Just over a week ago I ran what I called a work of art in Pointillism, designed to reflect my frustration while on hold with the Internal Revenue Service. 

I would like to point out that the United States government, through its collection agency, is proving to have that incredible combination of malice, inconsistency, and incompetence that makes for the worst kind of authority. Their stupidity has now cost me money and is likely to cost me more that I don't really owe, just to make them go away. 

In a nutshell:

1) I got a return for tax year 2020, but huge bill for 2021. Hmm... what changed between 2020 and 2021? Note that my wife was unemployed a good hunk of 2021 but was not collecting unemployment insurance or any other compensation in that time. We figured we'd be getting a return again, but no. In fact, with the money we'd paid out for various emergencies at the end of 2020, we were unable to pay the tax in a lump.  

2) When my accountant filed my taxes, he instituted an easy payment plan that the IRS will allow. You can pay whatever you are able per month, as long as it's paid up in a reasonable time. Downside: It requires a processing fee of $225. When you file your taxes, he told me, the IRS reviews the application and lets you know in 30 days if it accepts the plan.

3) So I waited to hear whether plan was accepted. I waited through April and May and most of June. 

4) In mid June I received bill from the IRS with penalties and fees and threats, demanding the whole amount. I sent an anxious text to my accountant, who failed to get back to me for a couple of days, so I texted him again. He assured me I must have misread the letter, so I emailed him a copy. Then he told me he could not help, because maybe the IRS screwed up, but he is not allowed to discuss my return with them. I thought the main point of having a CPA do your taxes was to have someone to act as an interlocutor with the IRS if things went sideways, but apparently not. 

5) I tried to deal with it by phone, but could not get through to the IRS. I'm sure my call is very important to them, but after spending almost an hour running into telephone trees like George of the Jungle, I decided to try the online contact option. Isn't that always easier? If you want help from Amazon (for example), you're much better off contacting them by email.

6) BUT, to deal with the IRS online, I had to prove my identity with driver's license, birth certificate or passport, Social Security card, a phone bill with current address--at least two serious forms of ID and one not-so-serious. All this to access ID.me system that they use, in a country where requiring an ID to vote is considered the equivalent of murder. I mean, I appreciate the IRS trying to keep scammers from getting my information, but I had trouble finding my birth certificate and my passport has expired. When I finally got it all scanned in, entered, and done, I had to wait for a video callback on my computer. Wait time was almost two hours. I hung around working for an hour and change, but had to take the junior dog out to pee (40 minutes left on the clock). We were outside for five minutes, and when I came back the call had bailed for "unknown" reasons. 

7) Back to the phone! I tried to call and after half an hour of weeding through branches got thrown off phone tree for call volume. How about that.

8) And I just gave up. I called the banker and arranged to have money removed from my piddling IRA to pay the bill. Four days later it was set, and I paid the IRS online immediately (that didn't require proof of identity). I didn't even try to fight the penalty and interest charges at that point. I was afraid they'd keep rolling up the charges and ruin our credit rating. 

9) Two days later I got a letter from the IRS that claimed to contain a payment voucher (although it says nothing about how much to pay or how much is owed) and/or an inquiry voucher (to mail in if I have a question, because it's 1920, I guess). I have no idea if this means that they have now approved the payment plan although I just paid off the balance in full. However, it may mean that even though I have just paid it all off, the IRS may think I also owe them the $225 fee for the payment plan I did not use. I would bet that whole $225 that I will get a bill from the IRS for $225. 

The IRS is like some kind of pagan god. It is inscrutable, it has a bad reputation, it may be appeased with massive sacrifices but it may not accept them as adequate anyway, and it can easily destroy a human being -- or at least a middle-class sucker with no resources to fight them--and that's when it's just being stupid, not actively evil. 

A sane country would have adopted a flat-tax plan, which would require a simple form and probably 1/100th of the employees, but that would leave no room for graft and political favors. The Internal Revenue "Service" should be abolished, the empty buildings destroyed, and the grown sown with salt so nothing can ever grow there again. 

He did that.

I was gassing up my little car the other day -- a painful operation, especially here in deep blue New York, when I noticed a couple of things at the pump. 

I'm not 100% sure that the removed sticker on the price line was one of those "I Did That" Joe Biden stickers that have been irritating the president, but I'm almost 100% sure that the one to the left of the window is. 

This isn't the first time I've seen them in New York, either. Now, I will note that geographically, most of New York State is pretty red, including a fair bit of Orange County, where I live. Across the river is Westchester, where rich people who couldn't care less if gas hit $10 a gallon live, but the OC is a little closer to the bone. That's why they had to gerrymander our Congressional district a while back to link us up with part of Westchester; we kept sending the wrong people to Washington. 

People have said if you cut off everything north and west of Albany you'd have a really conservative state, so much so that Buffalo would be a blue outlier. I am inclined to think it could be true, especially as of this year.

Here's another sticker I saw at the pump, one that was also new but courtesy of the management:

Hmm.

At first I thought this warning was for people trying to get gas out of the pump without paying, although I am not sure how this would be done. I think you have to pay in advance if you're using cash at this station. And if you don't, how would they know you're unauthorized before you try to skip out? 

A little digging tells me that this may be a notice to warn off people who plant credit card skimmers. Because it's not hard enough to pay for a tank of gas that would have doubled the value of my first car; now I have to give my credit card up to thieves. So I'm glad the station is being proactive -- but are they, really? This isn't much of a warning. "You try anything and... we'll make it not work" isn't much of a disincentive to thievery. "You plant a skimmer on this machine and we deliver 5,000 volts through you" would be. 

Alas! That much juice would probably be dangerous around all that gasoline. It's not a perfect world, is it? And so many attempts to push it that way result in more problems. 

Enabled-bodied citizens.

This is a complete disgrace. (h/t Instapundit)

Everything about it is disgusting, from the smug can-do look of the woman in the picture to the exhortation not to be ashamed that you are using heroin. "Let's Prevent Overdose" is the intention, and yes, it is a real New York City Department of Health program. They want you to be careful with the needles you use to inject illegal drugs into your veins (which can be in interesting places like your bumhole and your eyeball when other veins are not available). They want you to be able to get free Narcan on the taxpayer's dime while you render yourself useless. They act like fentanyl is the problem, not the fucking heroin.

There's so very much here to hate, and for such very good reasons, that it's hard to know where to start. So I'll just focus on the main thing: 

DON'T BE ASHAMED THAT YOU ARE USING.

Why not? Heroin is the most awful drug out there. Drunks, stoners, pill poppers, crackheads, and methmouths all look down on heroin junkies. Compared to someone using heroin, the others are models of functional addiction. By taking heroin, you are guaranteed to be supporting the enemies of your country, the beasts that ravage Mexico, the creeps whipping up fentanyl, the punks that turn poor neighborhoods into no-fly zones and shoot up block parties -- in short, every kind of evil human being on the face of the planet. 

KEEP YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY SAFE.

If there is anyone in your life who gives the slightest damn for you, heroin ensures that you will wring that person dry as a twenty-year-old lemon. No stone will be unturned in the quest to take everything from that person and transfer it to the people I described in the previous paragraph. 

If you shouldn't be ashamed that you are using this monster of a drug, what in this world can you actually be ashamed of? On the list of things for which one may be ashamed, it is above genocide and school shootings and rape and below pretty much everything else.

BE EMPOWERED THAT YOU ARE USING SAFELY.

I have seen the low cunning in the eyes of the Big H user, the look that keeps asking itself "Is he buying it? Is he buying it?" And I can say without reservation that no one is safe around the heroin addict.

Municipal morons who put together campaigns like this will tell you they're saving lives. Sure, until the next time. Addicts are the greatest liars on this earth, and there is no point in coddling them in any form. It just makes it easier for them to skip along that road to hell. It does them no favors.

Don't be ashamed that you are using. Yes, be very, very, ashamed, so ashamed that you can't even look in the mirror, and then go do something about it and win back your self-respect. No one has to die from this garbage. And no one should be lying about what it is, either. 

Maybe that smug "can-do" woman should have had her arm up like the woman in the famous World War II poster. With a needle sticking out of it. 

MFP and we!

Stacy McCain, the invaluable blogger known as the Other McCain, called upon Thursday, January 27, 2022, to be "Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day," and I said I would. 

Here's some crazy now!

In the unlikely event that you see this post and not the one at McCain's much more popular blog, I thought we ought to go through the basics for my own benefit as well as everyone else's. 

What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? 

MFP is a supposed mental illness that is said to affect crowds--thus the mass part. Dr. Robert Malone says this is a kind of induced psychosis caused in the population by a lack of social cohesion on one side and a large fear stimulus on the other: 

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view.  Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong. 

 

Both of these conditions were present at the outbreak of the Chinese Death Virus known as COVID-19, so if the theory is correct, it was an ideal time for mass formation psychosis to take hold.

Is MFP Real?

Well, it isn't recognized by the American Psychological Association, which got its collective knickers in a twist when Dr. Malone described it on Joe Rogan's show and listeners attacked a psychologist who disputed (or as they like to say, "fact-checked") a claim that "millions of Americans have been 'hypnotized' into accepting mainstream messages about COVID-19, including the importance of vaccination, through 'mass formation psychosis.'" It certainly seems like some of the attackers were very personal and rude, and even threatening, and I will not excuse that. Anyway, that's not the question; the question is, is there such a thing as Mass Formation Psychosis?

I have reason to think so. There have been so many crazy stories in the past year on all sides, like the mom who locked her kid in the trunk of the car when he tested positive for COVID-19. Who does that?

On a personal note, I know a perfectly respectable woman in the healthcare industry who in 2020 thought Trump was going to send troops into the streets to enforce quarantine, but now is cutting off friends who won't toe the line on masking in all times and places. She cut me off cold, and I was being nice about it. 

So yeah, I think a lot of people have gone nuts over this virus, but the insanity was probably bubbling right under the surface anyway.  Which sounds like "lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression" to me.

Why Is This Being Treated as a Conspiracy Theory?

Why shouldn't it? 

I know some very nice and intelligent people who are suspicious of the vaccines for COVID, but some people are close to the microchip-implanting theory level, that Bill Gates has personally put a microchip in each vaccine. I gotta say, if so, it is really small, because that was the thinnest needle I ever got stuck with. 

The problem, as I see it:

1) Despite the angry APA objections (in part, I think, to the idea of "mass hypnosis," which sounds like a supervillain plot), the MFP conforms with previous theories of mass delusion. Long before Eric Hoffer wrote True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Charles Mackay wrote Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). And Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism trod this ground mightily, although a lot of leftists hate its conflation of Communism and Fascism despite both being a form of totalitarianism (Mussolini's famous dictum of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” applies to both). So what's the problem with writing about it? Do psychologists resent taking sociology and philosophy seriously?

2) Yes, maybe these days, because it goes against the desired zeitgeist. The problem is, there really have been conspiracies around, which no one wants to acknowledge even as the truth comes out. The Russia collusion that should have been a massive political scandal on the perpetrators, the strange billionaire who funds district attorneys who will not uphold the law, the complicity of our National Institutes of Health in the origin of the Chinese Death Virus and the refusal to stop funding said research in 2020 despite a presidential order, the code of silence and outright lies over Hunter Biden's laptop and exposed shenanigans prior to the 2020 election, the "fortification" of the election, the failure to report the weakness of the vaccines and even their risks (which was not the media's position in 1976 when there was mass vaccination but a Republican president), the criminal attacks on parents by school boards, the failure of lockdowns to stop anything but prosperity, the elite class's refusal to abide by the rules it wishes to impose on the rest of us for everything from policing and disease spread to global warming, the non-punishment of most upper echelon types for any malfeasance, the support by the same for rioters while our cities burned, and on and on.   

3) Which leads us to the fact the elites in our society have been failing us for a long time, and COVID exposed them not only as failures, not only as hypocrites, but also as thieves, cowards, and bastards, who do not care about the poor and actively hate the middle class that feeds them.

My advice to those in charge of stuff: If you want the people to stop believing in conspiracies, stop conspiring. As Jacques Abbadie once wrote, "One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages." What do you expect us to think when you've been so very bad?