Is it that obvious?

 

The patron saint of the canceled.

Yesterday was the feast of St. John of God, a Portuguese born in 1495, of whom many interesting stories are told. By some accounts he went to war in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, fighting the French and later the Turks. He fell away from his childhood piety and lost his moral bearing. Eventually he decided to mend his ways, and went all in for the Lord, devoting himself to helping the poor and the sick. 

There was one story about him that made me think he would be a wonderful patron saint for those facing public cancellation in these strange and wicked times. We are supposed to be a society of the free, but as you well know, making a public statement of a sort that everyone believed a decade ago (such as, riots are bad, men can't be women just by wearing a dress, all lives are important) can get you fired from your job, blackballed from your industry, doxxed, attacked at your home, blacklisted from "social" media, and if some asshat is feeling particularly asinine, maybe SWATted while you sleep. 

My use of the term "blackballed" just now might be enough to do me in, but fortunately I'm a nobody and I don't use Twitter. If I were to get the attention of the social justice orcs, I would know better than to apologize -- apologies are never accepted by the mob, and just motivate them to keep burning and pitchforking.

Modern mob justice has no interest if its victim even really did anything wrong. It just likes to collect heads. If I offend in this blog, it's probably a joke, and if they don't like it, the humorless dweebs should try telling a joke themselves; if I say something true that they don't like, I'm not apologizing for the truth. Of course, we know for the mob, truth is never a defense. 

According to the Catholic News Agency, John of God did not make a secret of his often disreputable past: 

The Bishop of Granada approved his work, and gave him the name “John of God.” A group of volunteers came to accompany him in his work, many of whom had first come to him while in dire need themselves.

      Others, who resented his work, assaulted John's reputation by focusing on his past sins – but John, unfazed in his humility, would acknowledge the truth of what was said, as a testament to God's grace in his life. He once offered to pay a woman to tell the entire city what she had been saying about him in private.

And that's why I suggest John of God would be a good patron for those who have come under attack by Internet mobs. He was repentant of his past, and he did not apologize to those who tried to ruin his reputation. He had already repented to the One who mattered, so he knew the truth wouldn't hurt him. If others attacked him anyway, he was humble enough to take it and man enough to see it through.

St. John of God, pray for us! The whole world's gone batty and everything is upside down. Help us be humble and faithful enough to endure, help us be brave, and help us not to apologize for telling the truth. 

Insanity Day.

You know I like to keep an eye on special holidays and observances, the more insane the better. February 20th is here to oblige. 

According to the site Holidays Calendar, today is Hoodie Hoo Day. I suppose it's not on your Far Side Page-A-Day calendar, your iPhone calendar, the free wall calendar from the church (sponsored by the funeral home), or the Cute Kitties calendar your daughter put up. Here's the deets:

Hoodie Hoo Day is a day that is celebrated every year on February 20th. It is a day designed to help people overcome the winter-time blues and to prepare them for the coming of Spring. Although this holiday might seem like a joke holiday, it is an actual holiday that was created and copyrighted by Thomas Roy, a guy that has created over 80 different holidays, many of them quite unusual, such as Bathtub Party Day and Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day.

The main custom of this odd holiday is to go out on February 20th at noon, raise your hands over your head and yell, “Hoodie Hoo!!” for all the world to hear. Other ways that Thomas Roy suggests celebrating the holidays include wearing crazy or odd hats, ordering spring seeds for your garden and go out to a local flea market and buy a piece of used furniture.

So you have your instructions: Go outside, maybe with a weird hat, and yell "HOODIE HOO!" at the top of your lungs.

Of course, if you are reading this in the southern hemisphere, it is summertime and not appropriate behavior. You should wait until August 20th and do your own Down Under Hoodie Hoo. 

But this was not the insane holiday I wanted to post about. Today is also World Day of Social Justice: 

The United Nations' (UN) World Day of Social Justice is annually observed on February 20 to encourage people to look at how social justice affects poverty eradication. It also focuses on the goal of achieving full employment and support for social integration.

Uh-huh. And how do we observe this?

Many organizations, including the UN and the International Labour Office, make statements on the importance of social justice for people. Many organizations also present plans for greater social justice by tackling poverty, social and economic exclusion and unemployment. Trade unions and campaign groups are invited to call on their members and supporters to mark the day. The Russian General Confederation of Trade Unions declared that the common slogan would be "Social Justice and Decent Life for All!".

I wouldn't trust the Russian General Confederations of Trade Unions to give me correct change for a quarter. 

Schools, colleges and universities may prepare special activities for the day or plan a week of events around a theme related to poverty, social and economic exclusion or unemployment. Different media, including radio and television stations, newspapers and Internet sites, may give attention to the issues around the World Day of Social Justice.

So big statements will be made, bureaucrats will fly around acting Serious, and nothing will be done. Nothing can be done. And we know why, but no one wants to discuss it.

Social justice is a wicked term of art; "social" is about the most misused word in the world and "justice" always and invariably implies punishment. Basically it means punishing people with stuff and forcing them to give up stuff for those with no stuff. The rest is just enforced groupthink, where everyone has to smile on everyone else, unless they are national strongmen, terrorists, rich people, or crime bosses, in which case they are exempt. 

The thing is, we know what would really lead to an easing of poverty, which would ease so many other problems -- property rights, the rule of law, and removing fetters from capitalism. But the world is loaded with thug states, nepotism, corruption, tribalism, mob justice, and the rule of men rather than laws, and lately the United States looks like no great shining example of how to do things right. Getting something truly like "social justice" from this mess is like turning out a barrel of nails and expecting them to all land point-down. 

If the United Nations and the International Labour Office think they can straighten it out, they can be my guest -- but leave me and my money alone. 

So yeah, compared to the World Day of Social Justice, a silly holiday to lift one's winter blues seems like a model of sanity. Hoodie Hoo, y'all! 

Step into my Parler.

 Some of you may know -- since it brought you here -- that I joined Parler. 

Why would I do such a thing, when I have thus far eschewed all the other social media platforms? Well, the reason I decided to try Parler is that I always entertain hopes that my blog might entertain others, and maybe even entice them to try one of my novels. 

The problem is that Parler only has about 2.8 million users compared to Twitter's supposed 330 million and Facebook's 2.6 billion. 

But Parler is devoted to the exercise of free speech. Therefore, Parler is not dedicated to hosting the mobs who moo as one to destroy the lives of people who say things they dislike. And Parler itself does not go about silencing the voices of people who might -- just as a hypothetical -- post something embarrassing about its preferred political persons while promoting the voices of those who make wild claims about persons it dislikes. 

As Mark Steyn often says, if you don't believe in free speech you dislike, then you don't believe in free speech. There was a time when that bald fact might be enough to shame Leftists who shout down and threaten political opponents, but no more. To them it seems power is the only principle, and all other principles are only speedbumps to be run over, torn up, paved over. 

I hope very much that Parler sticks to its guns, and that its membership continues to grow. It will take quite a lot more Parleyers to get to the point of cascading popularity, where people go on the platform because so many people they want to follow are on the platform. 

Twitter looks invincible now, but so did MySpace, AOL, and Yahoo, once. 

So come drop by @Vitaminfred if you're on Parler and say hi. Hell, say whatever you want. It's a free country -- so far.

Worst holiday ever?

June 30 is supposedly World Social Media Day, one of those stupid fake holidays, this one created by stupid fake news media site Mashable in 2010, according to National Today. Mashable does all it can to make the Internet hostile to those upon whom its favor does not rest, so I can't imagine what they would know about anything social. World Hostile Media Day would have been more appropriate.

Ten suggested activities on World Social Media Day are:

1) Post crap.

2) Try new platforms, but not Parler because that must be white supremicist because it's dedicated to free speech.

3) Go meet your online friends in person and post pictures of that.

4) Post a picture of your granny and try to remember if or how long she's been dead, complete with teary emoji,

5) Kitties!

6) Share some stupid meme.

7) Arrange to start a riot and burn down businesses owned by African-Americans to show your support for African-Americans. Also tear down statues of famous abolitionists to show you are down with the cause and not some spoiled clueless white brat like everyone thinks you are.

8) Start a knitting club!

9) Show more pictures of whatever stupid thing you want people to think you ate for lunch. Leave the Ding Dongs off to the side.

10) Demand the defunding of the police while you interview private security firms.

Now, of course I am using the editorial "you" here, as I am fortunate enough to think that readers of this blog prefer the merits of peaceful protest, intelligent discourse, free speech, and respect for history. My readership may be small, unlike Mashable's, but it is not moronic.

I understand that social media, as a collective thing, is a tool, and like any tool it may be used for good or not. You can drive nails with a hammer, or drive in skulls of the innocent. I have used social media to stay in contact with local friends and those from my past who would otherwise have been lost to me. Others use social media to protest the tyrannical societies under which they live, as in Hong Kong and Iran.

Here in America, some use it to target people, destroy careers, drive people to despair, and as seen most recently, play-act as freedom fighters while they behave like Nazis. Sometimes I think there are few things in America as anti-social as social media.

Dreary Tunes.

NB: Naughty language.

HOLLYWOOD (June 8) -- Officials at HBO Max announced today some further changes to the new lineup of Looney Tunes cartoons, following last week's announcement that henceforth guns would be removed from all cartoons in an attempt to help the network look like it cares about gun violence in America.

"After much soul-searching, or something like that, we decided we needed to use the unbeatable platform of classic Looney Tunes characters to advance socially progressive causes beyond just not shooting one another with firearms like bitter, swamp-dwelling Bible-clinging yahoos," said Assistant to the Assistant Vice President Van Der Meer Snorglet. "Even characters who are bitter, swamp-dwelling Bible-clinging yahoos will eschew the boomsticks going forward. But that's not enough."

Other changes announced for the famed cartoon characters include:

1) While characters may not use guns against each other, they may use knives, scythes, swords, and so on. This has proved to be a perfectly good trade-off in real-world locations like the United Kingdom.

2) Daffy Duck is hereby known as Duck of Color or a Black Duck and is no longer daffy in any meaningful way.

3) Any character that dresses as another gender for any reason will hereby be considered gender fluid and scripts will be written to reflect this truth.

Cheerleader Samantha

4) Characters may still blow things and one another up, but the explosive fallout will remain in place even after their regeneration to reflect the reality of environmental destruction through use of chemicals.

5) Ableism will have no place in our cartoons; therefore Porky Pig, now Body Positive Pig, will not stutter but have a speech expression difference.

6) Pepe Le Pew is forever banned from any participation in any cartoons of any kind, and this will be the last-ever mention of his horrible full name. #metoopepe

7) Electric or robotic rabbits sent to entrap Bugs will now be composed to appear traditionally male.

8) Future episodes will include references to important cultural touchstones: "Occupy Fudd"; "Broken Food Chain"; "Pronoun Trouble"; and "It's a Regular Riot!"

9) Muttered cursing by characters such as Yosemite Sam and the Tasmanian Devil have long been feared to contain hidden racial insults; therefore they will be replaced by neutral, common non-offensive swear terms like "Fuck you," "Eat shit and die," and "See you in hell, goddamn motherfucker."

"We know our viewers will just love parking their kids in front of our cartoons," added Snorglet. "And our creative staff is thrilled for the challenge. What's freedom of creation when compared to moving society in the proper direction?"

US of A.

Friends! Comrades! Broth-- uh, Persons-Metaphorically-Related-in-Arms! The revolution has won! We control the means of production! We control the government! We control the media, the universities, the technology! Welcome to the United States of Antifa!

We know you're concerned about what this will mean, and will it be what you have fought and killed so many racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, speciesist bastards and bystanders for. The short answer is: YES! It is Year Zero! We promised you free education and student loan forgiveness -- and it is yours! We promised you free housing, and it's yours! We promised you free food, and it's yours! We promised free health care, and you have it! We promised an end to environmental despoilment, and it is done! The factories are closed! We promised to cancel your credit card debt, and it is done! We promised to outlaw the police, and it is done! We promised to tear down all racist statues, and there's not a single statue left standing, so I guess we got them all. We promised to get the dead hand of the past off your shoulder, and we burned all the books and churches! And we told Dorothy we would come up with something other than a black flag for the new nation, so we did!

Spiffy!

Now, this is how we will all pull together in our new nation, shoulder to shoulder (or to some analogue for those who may have no shoulders). It's a very simple plan, so foolishly simple it exposes the cruel complexity of our racist sexist etc. forebears with their oppressive Constitution and U.S. Code. It works this way.

First, we want everyone to be engaged in meaningful, fulfilling work that is needed to maintain the revolutionary structure. To that end our central committee will determine what each of you will be assigned to do. Do not worry, my friends; all the jobs are necessary and therefore will bring you joy and satisfaction. Just remember, we have more than enough filmmakers, poets, and guitarists already. Some of you with university degrees will be recommended for trade schools, depending on your present skill sets. You can't have too many plumbers, amiright? And we have to get the factories up and running; quotas don't wait!

Second, everyone will be allotted equal housing based on their needs. Large homes are being split up into units. Everyone will have roughly the same amount of living space, except for those whose physical needs or professional requirements cause them to need more. I, for example, will be living in the newly painted Striped House on Pennsylvania Avenue, as it is also an office complex that the central committee will be visiting.

Third, food distribution will be done every Thursday afternoon at six p.m. in designated areas in each major city. Each person will be given an adequate calorie amount in food for the week. Also, in the first delivery you will be informed how much energy you will be allowed to consume between then and the following week. If you use too much, it will be shut off; if this becomes an issue, we may have to examine your case. We cannot allow greed in our new nation; the time of hoarders and wreckers is past.

Fourth, you will each receive in the mail your first voucher for a health visit. Use it wisely, my friends! You would not want to use it for a simple influenza and then break your leg. How unfortunate! How embarrassing! But it is our best means to make sure everyone has the same access to medical care, at least until we get a few more liberal arts majors through medical school.

Finally, I would like to introduce Dorothy XY, our new Minister of Cooperation. Xe will be heading the Cooperative Services department, making certain that all our suggestions are carried out and that the kulaks of the bygone era will have no place in our new nation. To that end, xer Cooperative Departments are being set up in each population area to maintain adherence. Those of you who are identified as community helpers or handy with a firearm or truncheon will be contacted about possible job openings.

That is all for now, friends, until we think of some other things for you to do to promote our glorious future. Unity! Freedom! Social Justice!

Fred's Book Club: Courage in Reporting.

Welcome, friends, to another edition of our Wednesday book group, the Humpback Writers, not named for humps but for Wednesdays. It's a dumb joke but we're sticking with it.

This week's book is by one of the few really sharp and honest reporters of whom I know, someone who does not toot the courage horn by sitting in a studio defended by the resources of a network, but demonstrates it by going out in the world to find things called facts and write stories based on them. I mean City Journal's own Heather Mac Donald, and her book, The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society.

I feel you can make a distinction between two types of reporters who look at societal problems: the first, your average J-school grad, says Look at this problem! Do something! The other, much more rare, says Why is this a problem, one that has proved so hard to solve? Mac Donald is squarely in the second camp, and this book is a great collection of her pieces on these problems.

"The reality I have observed again and again in welfare offices and urban classrooms across New York and elsewhere is so dissimilar from that presented in the mainstream media that I sometimes wonder whether their reporters and I occupy the same universe," she writes in the introduction. "Maybe this is a matter of my background. I came to writing about urban problems and social policy as an innocent, without a preconceived theory about the neighborhoods that have dominated domestic policy debate for almost half a century now."

This book was published in 2000, but hardly anything has changed in the last twenty years, and where things had changed for the better, as in New York, they are rapidly changing back for the worse.

What Mac Donald learned in her work is shown in this book, with chapters like "The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse," "Why Johnny's Teachers Can't Teach," "Public Health Quackery," and "Revisionist Lust: The Smithsonian Today."

One of the most powerful chapters to me was "Homeless Advocates in Outer Space," which described a 1990s program by the Business Improvement District of Times Square to do exactly what advocates for the homeless seem to think has never been tried -- provide a no-strings-attached outreach to feed and clean and house the homeless, then offer every kind of help to get them on their feet provided they refrain from drug and alcohol use for a period of time. "One year and $700,000 later, only two people had accepted housing," Mac Donald reports. And this is only one of the programs described, a hint of the millions spent that helped hardly anyone. She concludes, "A sane homeless policy would acknowledge two basic realities. First, many people on the streets need treatment, not housing. For the sickest, legislators need to change rules against involuntary confinement, and states need to recommission mental hospitals emptied by deinstitutionalization. Second, for the rest of the homeless the best medicine is the expectation of responsible behavior -- the expectation of work and civil and lawful conduct in public spaces."

When The Burden of Bad Ideas was published, the New York Times Book Review said "this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze." With the rush among governors and mayors to empty prisons and allow tremendous homeless encampments, and ding-dongs like Mike Bloomberg disowning all the policies that made his political leadership successful, I think it's safe to say that Mac Donald's essays, backed by interviews, observation, and deep research, have been completely ignored by those empowered to make better public policy. In fact, just last year she had a look at San Francisco's intractable homeless situation and found a situation even uglier than described in Burden. I doubt her work finds a welcome in the New York Times Book Review today.

I would advise anyone interested in the problems of urban decay to read The Burden of Bad Ideas. Urban problems have been given the breath of new life since the book was published. The causes have not changed, but now the idiocy that led to bad public policy has seeped into an urban population incapable of seeing how its participation in bad ideas leads to its own misery. This book ought to be required reading for every political science major in the country.

Instead, of course, Mac Donald gets silenced on campuses by the usual idiots who can't bear to hear anything resembling the truth.

Unitard!

In yesterday's book of the week, 2007's Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived, author Daniel H. Wilson discussed all sorts of things expected by the year 2000 or a little later, like the titular jetpacks, and cryogenic freezing, and holograms. Also included was a chapter on unisex jumpsuits. As Wilson wrote: "First you put on your underwear, then your pants -- modern life can be so difficult. In the future of the past, however, life was as simple as sliding into a snug, velvety unitard."

Well, I look around and I see lots of sweat pants and cargo shorts and T-shirts and ball caps, and precious few unitards. But my wife told me she heard that jumpsuits, which enjoyed a vogue in the eighties, are making a comeback! I immediately thought of all those cool eighties rockers, like Jem and the Holograms.

But are jumpsuits really making a comeback? Worse, will I have to get one?

One of the earliest popular one-piece articles of clothing -- not togas or loincloths, but things with sleeves and legs -- was the union suit, patented in 1868 as a means of freeing women from the restrictive misery of the underwear at the time. Men came to like them as well, and soon they were worn by all sorts of people.

And soon after that they were a sign of laughable hokum. Put a cartoon character in a union suit and he immediately looked like an ignoramus. Extra points if you show the butt flap.

Even inner-city characters like Ma Hunkel, alias the original Red Tornado, was given a union suit costume for comic purposes.

And yet they are still worn today, because of their warmth and utility. But that's underwear; what about one-piece outerwear?

The word jumpsuit dates to 1944, according to Merriam-Webster's, when for some reason large numbers of American men were being taught to jump out of airplanes. Of course you wanted (and still want) one-piece outerwear for that kind of behavior. You don't want the rushing air to whip off your shirt, and maybe take the harness of the parachute with it.

But the one-piece outfit was older than both these accouterments, according to those pests Merriam and Webster. The word coverall goes back to 1824, they say, and thus described the protective full-body clothes needed for dirty jobs in the Industrial Revolution. Now, of course, coveralls are seen on prisoners, some police and military officers, crack-avoiding plumbers, car mechanics, and others.

But the jumpsuit as a science fiction craze came from real pilots and astronauts. The safety precautions and technology available for these daredevils made the one-piece uniform equivalent to space exploration, and since future = space, the adult onesie became what we expected the people of the future to wear. Plus, most space travelers seen in movies and books, and later on TV, wore uniforms, as space travel was expected to be a military-type job, and they would wear jumpsuit-type things. Thus the expectations that in the future we would all dress in utilitarian one-piece unisex clothes. Call it a jumpsuit or coverall or even unitard -- on second thought, skip unitard. While the word leotard comes from the name of the famed French acrobat Jules Léotard (whom I have written about before), lopping off the last syllable and adding to the uni from uniform makes it sound like clothing for the mentally deficient, at least if you went to my public schools. Maybe it's the name for particularly stupid unicorns. Never mind.

Whatever you call it, the unisex jumpsuit never caught on. Why? Wilson writes, "Designers used aesthetic symbols and technological advancements to envision a beautiful future populated by slim, graceful humans wearing silvery, sexless jumpsuits. Do you think it will ever happen? Fat chance."

Yeah, we're not all slim, it's true, and few of us would look good in skintight anything. But I maintain that we're just not unitard people anyway. The unitard is a uniform, and an American wants a damn good reason to have to wear a uniform. That kind of thing is popular for people who like to think of the surging mass of humanity as ants, an army ready to tackle things as a single horde, dealing with everything as the moral equivalent of war. Revolt or fall behind and it's the gulag.

But if anything we're sliding off too far in the other direction, where communities, fraternal organizations, societies, families, everything involving human connection is fading, like we're all negatively charged and repel each other. Which situation has its own flaws, obviously, but at least it doesn't require that we wear identical unitards.

On the other hand, it gets pretty cold up in the north sometimes, and if we get a good enough spell, maybe we will all be wearing adult onesies ...

... but hopefully under our clothes, where others don't have to see them.

Not Lamborghinis?

I keep abreast of medical news in my small way, as I do some light editing for a medical information service. Mostly I see press releases that read like "FDA Approves Etremensloposisabnib for the Treatment of Late-Stage Jumping Frenchman Disease." They don't much register on me unless I have a story that involves the drug or the illness, or I start jumping uncontrollably like those legendary Quebecois.

However, I got an e-mail from Medscape that interested me; it was their Physician Lifestyle & Happiness Report 2020, and I couldn't wait to see the summary.

This report, which broke physicians down primarily by specialty and generation (Boomer, Gen X, Millennial), tells us how gleeful our doctors are, or aren't, and a few other bits of info about them. For example, you might wonder which specialists are the happiest outside of work. (Rheumatologists, as it happens; neurologists are the most miserable). Which generation of doctor gets likkered-up the most? (Boomers and Xers tied with 8% having more than six drinks per week, which could mean anything from one glass of wine with dinner every night to being loaded 24/7; only 6% of Millennial doctors have more than six weekly.)

For the most part doctors are not much different than the rest of us. Half of them want to lose weight, for example. Many of them work long hours -- 33% to 35%  of them work 41 to 50 hours a week -- but most get more vacation than the rest of us, and probably have a stronger feeling than you and I do that our work is worthwhile and necessary.

But this chart amazed me:

Twenty percent of doctors drive Toyotas? Honda is #2 at 15%? More doctors don't even drive (2%) than drive Jaguars (1%)? What the hell?

Well, 80% of them are married, and probably have kids, and huge medical-school loans, and of course huge malpractice insurance payments... Maybe it's amazing that they can even buy Toyotas rather than Kias.

This kind of made me sad, though:

More proof, that A) a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and B) social media is the greatest anti-social force in the world. 

On the one hand, we're told that physicians want us to be informed patients; on the other, we all know people (hopefully not ourselves) who do think they know more than their doctor and are willing to go visit my old attorney pals at Greef, Sorrell, & Payne for the slightest hope of a payday reason to sue. And we know there are plenty of people pleased to trash a doctor's reputation for any reason, or for no reason (even a medical rival might do it). Personally I'm a little sore at my otolaryngologist, who doesn't even seem to be curious as to why I've lost a range of hearing in one ear, when to me -- who would very much like to know why so I can stop it from rendering me deaf entirely -- it's kind of a big deal. And yet I haven't gone online to try to wreck the man's livelihood.

It's a hard job, doctoring, and we the patients usually don't make life easier for doctors. We say that health is our #1 priority, but we act as if pleasure is. And it probably is. So they're stuck driving Toyotas instead of Lambos while their advice falls on deaf ears. 

Of course, in my case, if the ears are deaf, then I want my lawyers to talk to my otolaryngologist. 

Here we are again.

Patriot Day, and it's hard to believe it's been 17 years. A child born on 9/11/01 is almost an adult. Everyone in high school and most people in college have no memories of the actual day.

But I do.

Sometimes I feel like a guy who was hanging out in Kepuhi Beach while the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor -- in Hawaii, but not there. I was in Manhattan, but in Midtown. I never got farther south than Canal Street that day. I didn't go downtown to have a look until October. I'll never forget the walled-up blocks around the area, the gray dust that covered everything. I went to the Raccoon Lodge for a drink afterward. It was still hard to believe.

So many Americans have died in the War on Terror -- Wikipedia says just over ten thousand, but we've dealt our enemies death an order of magnitude beyond that. Maybe more. Hard to tell; they lie, and figures are wildly disparate. I wish the number of American deaths had been 0 in this, America's longest shooting war, but if we're going to play numbers games, the Union lost almost a third of that number just at Gettysburg. George W. Bush warned us that this fight was going to take decades, and he wasn't kidding. Norman Podhoretz called it World War IV, World War III being the Cold War (and as he pointed out, that war against Communism did have some hot battles -- Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, etc.). Under his reckoning, World War III lasted more than 40 years, so the War on Terror has a ways to go to tie that.

So much has changed since that day in our culture, in Europe, in Asia, all over. I have to say I think our country's gotten dumber; as our phones got smarter, we got stupider. Certainly ruder, probably crazier. A lot of people nowadays like to play-act at being brave, with what P.J. O'Rourke called "that happy sense of purpose people have when they are standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet." Our ruling class has gotten more arrogant, more threatening, but not to those useful nitwits. People who were the salt of the earth in 2001 are suddenly the enemy of all that is good and right. Social media has exploded, and is literally taking casualties. Our media is just as bad as it ever was, so nothing new there. Maybe broker. Dumber. (They "literally know nothing.")

I suppose all of this would have happened anyway, the seeds of our creeping asininity having been planted long ago. Did the war accelerate it, or wake people up who might reverse it? I don't know.

I pray a lot for this country, that its sick culture become well, that it may be worthy of the blood sacrifice of those who fight to defend it. There's just so very little I can do beyond that. Joseph Bottum wrote it that long ago:

We meet our griefs again when work is through.
We do with words what little words can do.

It's Easter in January!

No, seriously. I was in the supermarket yesterday (the first day of January, if you're keeping score) and I braced myself to see all the Valentine's Day candy in the seasonal aisle.

I was not prepared for this:

It is January 2. Easter is April 16. Three and a half months away. Have some Easter candy!

Why stop there, supermarket? Why not bring out the dadblasted Halloween candy again? Why not just bring out next year's Christmas candy RIGHT THE HELL NOW?

You know what keeps a society together? It's not the laws or the billion rules made by petty bureaucrats in distant places. It's the unspoken agreements, the things we learn in childhood, most of which come from greater rules for living, some from obvious rational thought, and some from respect that members of healthy societies have for one another.

Don't steal.

Don't lie.

Don't cheat.

Help someone out who's in trouble.

Offer a square deal.

If you throw at the batter's head, expect one of your batters to get it next time.

And don't put holiday themed candy on the shelves three and a half months out!

Haven't people always lied, cheated, put out candy too early? Yes, yes, and no. Of course we know bad behavior exists wherever there are people. But the more we weaken our commonsense rules of civility -- you may call it pushing the envelope or thinking outside the box or being independent -- the more we have to make laws and petty bureaucrat rules and even take up arms to maintain order.

Does that mean putting out Easter candy on January 1 mean chaos is just around the corner? No, but it's a symptom of the same kind of thinking that leads down that path.

Plus, it's just stupid. Anyone seriously want to tell me that a Reese's egg tastes better than a Reese's heart? Because I'm not buying it.

Words with friends.

I don't want to get too far into the topic upon which my friend and I fought, but I'll say up front it concerns the current crisis that has the nation's dress up over its head: whether it is okay to allow men who think they are women use the women's room. 

No one seems to worry about how men feel when they must share a bathroom with women who think they are men, but let's put that aside. 

The politically correct vision, which my friend follows maybe 98% of the time in all arguments, says that gender is fluid and people should be free to identify as whatever sex they want. My argument, which I think has the benefit of having reality behind it, says that it is not fair to skeeve out the vast majority for the sake of a minuscule minority; but much more important, that the law of unintended consequences is not merely an economic phenomenon and that bad actors will almost certainly use the "gender fluidity" rule to gain access to areas from which they were wisely prohibited in the past, and bad actions will follow. There is a reason we have women's rooms, and it's not because we like to see women standing on line at intermission. 

If you're going to say that you do not care whether men use the ladies' room, I argued calmly, then there is no logical reason you shouldn't open all restrooms to everyone. I knew that was a good point because then she got mad and went to the anecdotes. 

Ultimately, neither of us were convinced by the other, but we are able to remain friends because we have other shared interests and we know that politics and all the garbage that comes with it are not the alpha and omega of existence. This is not, however, the case with other acquaintances, who quickly sever ties with me when I am obliged to point out that political correctness is the enemy of freedom. I'm never the one to cut them off in these little spats. Invariably, I am the one cast into the outer darkness.  

Which is why I normally don't get into these arguments at all. You can't fix willful blindness.

I am lucky to at least have one friend who sees beyond whatever the PC police are fixated on at the moment, and she is lucky to have one (and probably only one) friend willing to make the case for the other side. The Internet has allowed all voices to be heard, but it doesn't matter because we're all going deaf.

Don't wear that.

I don't want to be mean about it---Lord knows I've been inappropriately dressed many times. I once got scolded (nicely) by a priest for wearing a hat into church. That was decades ago and I still feel bad about it.

And I do wear plaid, at least when Mrs. Key is not looking and I can sneak out the door.

But this is just not right for a nice restaurant.

The guy seemed to be uncomfortable about it, which leads me to believe he was tricked into taking his lady to a nicer restaurant than he expected. Management didn't care; with the margins in the restaurant business these days they're just relieved everyone shows up with pants. But there are ways to dress to go out to dinner and ways not to dress to go out to dinner, and this is part of category 2. 

Still, I do give anyone high marks for at least being aware of being underdressed. These days everyone slumps around like dumb oafs everywhere---TGI Friday's, the mall, Disneyland, work, interviews, childbirth, church, weddings, funerals, surgery, it's all the same to the lumpen proletariat. This was not the way the world looked just twenty years ago. What the hell is happening to us? Where will it all end? 

My guess: No pants in the restaurant. 

As for me and mine, we will stand by our trousers. Call me a reactionary if you like. That's how we roll.

Is we Geting dummer?

"Are We Becoming More STUPID?" asks the DailyMail.com, to which the initial response could conceivably be, "Well, we're reading your Web site, aren't we?" But I actually do give the Daily Mail credit for covering non-PC stories. Its American online edition will go after stories that the American press---too busy giving each other awards for their courage---is too chickenspit to cover.*

The thesis of the stupidity story is that we reached peak smarts a while back but have been dumbing down in the last decade. The "Flynn effect," wherein better nutrition and living standards are linked to higher IQ, did all it could from the 1930s to the 1980s, but now we're settling in for a long winter's duh. Perhaps it is coming attractions for Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" and Judge's Idiocracy, wherein dumb people keeping having a dozen kids while smart people have few or none, so the human race devolves into universal dumbassery.

But is this study what it purports to be? We are told that IQs have been declining in the UK, Australia, and Denmark. Although I am unable to parse the actual data, which is behind a paywall, I would like to make some observations and thoughts, in order of increasing importance:

1) The UK, Denmark, and Australia have had unprecedented immigration over the last two decades, primarily made up of people from countries that had inferior infrastructure and education, causing an anti-Flynn effect, if you will. Which leads us to...

2) The longstanding battle over how to measure IQ that controls for education. Intelligence quotient is supposed to be able to determine native intelligence, not how much you've learned in school (fluid intelligence vs. crystallized intelligence, to scrape the tip of the iceberg), which, despite the researchers' best efforts at controls, may be telling us nothing more than that the British, Danish, and Australian school systems suck eggs.

3) The most important thing may be that the culture is declining. People who believe in nothing see little reason to get ahead; people who don't value education don't exercise their minds. Hard work is a sucker's game; doing well in school is playing the toady; faithfulness and family are barriers to the expression of delightful me. What happens when these attitudes are widespread? Hordes of drunken yobs hurling on street corners in every town in the UK that isn't overtaken by Muslims, if you read Theodore Dalrymple. When there's no faith in the decency of society, no desire for self-improvement or even willingness to tolerate self-improvement in others, no belief in morals from an unimpeachable source, no value in self-command, no love for anything but the self (however vile), and no shame in the able-bodied living off the government dime, how smart are you going to bother to be?

I mean, XTC's "The Mayor of Simpleton" is considered not a sweet song of irony now, but rather a career option.

Learning is hard and even painful; the smartest kid on the block is going to be a dumbbell by any measure if everyone around him is a dumbbell too. If this report of decline in intelligence is accurate, I am certain that the main reason is a decline in our society. Once again we are surprised that when we saw off the legs, the table does not float.

* Fear of losing access in Washington is one reason; dishonesty for fear of giving their ideological opponents an advantage may be worse. Then there's the PC stuff, the terror of terrorists, and so on. There are obvious and even tragic examples of real press courage, of course, but almost never in domestic news coverage.