In Rationalia, there is no debate. #PostGOP

America's stupidest smart person is at it again.  This time, Neil deGrasse Tyson wants something he calls "Rationalia" as a perfect state:

@neiltyson

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

Sounds wonderful right?  A Utopia of pretty people making decisions based on perfect knowledge ran through perfect intellect arriving at the perfect outcome.  The fly in the ointment being, as Kevin D. Williamson of National Review points out, Human understanding of the world, and human intelligence, is far from perfect.

This means that Rationalia is going to be governed by those who think they're perfect (gods), but are in fact flawed.  What Neil deGrasse Tyson is really calling for is no better than that of any other Narcissist, his deification.

All hail Tyson! and what not.

The problem with this is that a move toward a rational society requires, by definition, the elimination of the irrational from the equation. The only way to accomplish this completely is to either enslave, incarcerate or eliminate. In most cases it's all three.

In many ways, we're already moving toward Mr. Tyson's wet-dream fantasy of a ruled state. Already the Democratic party is calling for the incarceration of so-called "climate change deniers" in their official platform and the idea that people who make choices the 'rational' establishment considers wrong should be denied those choices continues to spread. As a society we've decided that it's totally acceptable to kill, unborn, those humans who we consider to be undesirable. And we've killed humans that we consider to be undesirable for years now. (i.e. the death penalty). How much further do we have to go to decide that death is a "rational" punishment for those who refuse to partake in the bounty that is Rationalia?

Is this a slippery-slope argument?  You bet.  But the reality is we've been told "trust us" many times by the authoritarians among us and they've leaped that hurdle every time. (Remember "we're not trying to FORCE anyone to adopt unisex restrooms. Honest?)

Avoiding the science fiction based world of SkyNet and Soylent Green for a moment, lets think about something a little more believable.

For one, I don't think that lining up American citizens behind the storage sheds and shooting them all in the face will ever happen. But with the rise of genetic research, selective breeding and the movement toward cradle to grave government education and stewardship of our children we are raising a society that is going to be bred, trained and hardwired to comply.

Your soon-to-be-born baby has a genetic marker that has been shown to imply a predisposition to cancer?  Abort it.  The babies that are born will be placed into the education system as soon as they are weaned. From day care to post-graduate education (which, considering the current state of decline of the American education system will be required in order to land a remedial office job) your child will be offered learning from the brightest minds, the best of the best. Instructors such as Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example.

Now let's say you remain a malcontent. You choose to believe something different than the established scientific line.  Your options?  You will be consigned, permanently, to the perpetual underclass doomed to live a soulless existence with all of your freedoms taken away, and all of your choices made for you. You will be provided food, shelter, medical care and other necessities but you will not be allowed to breed (your rebellion being viewed as a genetic defect that must be culled) and you will not be allowed to move freely.  In short, you will be enslaved to a life of hard labor from which you can never escape due to your inferior intellect and every decision in your life will be made by someone more enlightened. If you don't think this is possible, or if you laugh it off, take a look at the news today.

A bigger problem is what to do with the surplus population.  A rational view of the world, based on the weight of evidence, suggests that poverty is prevalent because there are just too many people clogging up the arteries of Gaia for her resources to be allocated effectively.

This is bad, because it means that huge swaths of humanity must either be eliminated, or ignored. In Rationalia enlightened individuals such as Mr. Tyson will determine who makes the cut and who doesn't. In the real world it's going to be decided through the rule of force, as it always has been.

In other words, you first Mr. Tyson.

PostGOP: The Christianity we deserve, not the Christianity we need. #PostGOP

Another day, another adverse SCOTUS decision affecting Evangelical Christians and Catholics.

Supreme Court won't hear challenge on Washington State's rule that pharmacies dispense emergency contraception. Robert Barnes, Washington Post (mysteriously placed behind the Houston Chronicle's soon-to-be-reimposed firewall)

Coming on the heels of the abortion ruling (discussed yesterday here) and taken into the broader context of GLBTQ+ wedding cakes and other baubles Evangelicals and Catholics are, understandably, distraught.  And while I'm certainly not a man or religion, I do consider myself a Christian and am therefore somewhat sympathetic to the complaints of the religious, to a point.

I get that you feel under siege and that the walls of modern society are closing in around you, and I get that, because you've relied on government to achieve your aims, you feel that you are losing. I understand all of that and I empathize.

I would also argue that relying on the government to provide support for your faith was never a good option, or a preferred one.

One of the worst things that happened to religion (of man) vs Christianity (of God) is that it allowed itself to become politicized and it's issues framed among party lines. This has led not only to a fracturing of the congregations but also a dilution of the message.  Lest we forget, that message is salvation through Christ crucified.  Full stop.

All of the other that we are trying to do is legislate the world into our morality, instead of trying to work with them and guide them there. In short, there's no reason trying to put someone who doesn't care on a blind date with God.

It also makes no sense to believe that selling a GLBTQ+ couple a wedding cake somehow indicates de-facto support for GLBTQ+ marriage. That's the same as blaming a gun-maker for a person taking his gun and shooting someone. (OK, not literally the "same" but intellectually the same, I know some won't get that and I'll be accused of "comparing GLBTQ+ marriage to killing people!" but what can you do?)

It's long been my belief that any change for the better that we're going to see is going to be accomplished outside of the political arena. In the streets, neighborhoods and communities where help is needed most.  What Christians, and conservatives need is to abandon crying to our political ruling class every time we feel aggrieved and to get our message of economic freedom, rule of law, respect for property rights and limited regulatory frameworks out to the very people they will help the most.

But that's what we need.

What we deserve is Donald Trump assuring everyone that "Of course" he's a Christian and that he "loves God" despite having a tenuous grip on the Bible. We deserve to have leftist groups having their own private mic-drop moments by quoting Bible verses out of context and using them as proof of case.

In short, we deserve exactly the mess we have now because we've asked for the mess we have now.

And boy are we getting it.

PostGOP: On abortion, it is probably best to move on. #PostGOP

The SCOTUS has spoken and said that Texas' attempts to require surgical standards for a surgical procedure is Unconstitutional.  Of course, the Texas Lock Step is giddy not only that money will keep rolling in to their preferred organizations but that Wendy(?!?) Davis FINALLY won something.

Of course, Republicans are angry and suggest that the "fight" is not over.

Joy.

A better idea, in my mind, is to move the issue out of the political arena and, as the volunteer did in the first linked article, start taking options to the streets. Maybe the correct response to the government-sanctioned killing of the unborn is not more government, but more advocacy?

Maybe it's time to let the poor and minorities (those who have the most abortions) see the faces of the angry well-to-do Caucasian women who are cheering for this. Maybe it's time to stop looking to leadership from the government at all levels, and go about opening more clinics for carry-to-term clinics in areas where abortion clinics don't operate.

People are not going to stop caring about this issue, no matter what the gang of fools writing for the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board think. As we've seen, abortion is a 'line in the sand' issue and there's really no room for compromise. You either think it's morally wrong, or you don't. If you do then you're most likely to either support banning ALL abortions, or severely restricting abortions in certain cases (Rape, incest and medical concerns). If you have no moral qualms then you probably don't favor any restrictions on abortion up to, and including, immediate post-birth abortions. (Of the type performed by Dr. Kermit Gosnell. (It is important to remember that, despite the atrocious nature of his crimes, there were some on the left who supported Dr. Gosnell and felt he did nothing wrong.)

If you're an anti-abortion advocate on the right it's pretty clear that you can expect no refuge in your fate from the government.

In other words, you need to start doing the hard work in the communities or just get the hell out of the way of history. Relying on carnival hucksters like Lt. Gov Patrick to make things better for you is false hope.

My gut tells me that whatever follows the GOP is going to have to be much less active in politics, and much more active on the ground.

Because, if they're not, progressive politics is going to imprison and enslave a generation of poor, primarily minority citizens with no hope of escape.  The only chance to reverse this is to provide a new narrative based on the power of markets, rule of law and economic freedom.

It beats where reliance on Republican leadership has gotten us.

HALV: When your hometown is Houston.....

...you learn to put up with quite a bit of shit.

Over the weekend the wife and I traveled to Texas Hill Country to attend one of those outdoor cookouts that Texas wineries like to put on from time to time. This was fortuitous, for me, because it was the exact last day before I started an eight-week 800 calorie-per-day crash diet that's had promising results for Type-2 diabetics (which I am unfortunately).  It's also a good place to listen to some pretty good music, drink some pretty good wine and meet some pretty decent people who like doing the same.

And we met several people, we talked about all types of different things from Brexit to just how damn good the sparkling Rose that the winery is producing right now tastes and how it was perfect for a hot day.

Inevitably, the conversation would switch to the dreaded "so, where are you from?"  After answering "Houston" the reaction would always be the same. Slowly shaking heads, a downward glance, a look of sudden horror and then, softly "I'm sorry" and a short list of whatever ills people thought that Houston had.

Some of it was the weather, which is fair, but hardly the fault of the people in the city, even the detractors acknowledged that. Mostly it was the traffic, and the fact that the city charges insanely high taxes while providing little in the way of services in return.  As a matter of fact, the best way to get around the "I'm from Houston" label (and the acknowledgement of insanity that many think go with it) is to include the caveat that, in fact, I live just outside the city, in Cypress.  Ah, much better then.

To be fair, Austin didn't rank all that high on people's list either. So it wasn't that I was hanging around with a bunch of progressive Texans who thought everything should be centrally planned. In fact, most of the people there that lived in Austin HATED pretty much everything about Austin, and admitted that many of the reasons they originally moved there were no longer applicable in the city. You want the young, cool, hip city that Austin used to be?  Move to San Marcos.

At this point, were I writing a think piece for Gray Matters at HoustonChronicle.com I'd tell you the tale of how I, due solely to my brilliant wit, embarrassed all of the anti-Houston types and forced them to openly reveal their ignorance.

But this isn't fiction.  And I'm not a progressive activist/amateur writer trying to use my prose to make me seem more brilliant or brave than I really am.

In fact, when most people said "Houston Sucks!" I just went "Yup, but it's where my job is so....."
and that pretty much shut down any further ribbing I would receive.

That also happens to be true.  Houston does suck, pretty awfully. It's a super-heated, over-congested city with a crumbling infrastructure, ineffective (or, to be more accurate, "no") leadership and a ruling class that's only just slightly less annoying than it's courtesan class.

But the one thing that it, and most other cities in Texas, has going for it is (still) a crap-ton of jobs and places where you can get the hell away as David Crossley and his sycophants continue in their efforts to shoe-horn 4 Million people into a space designed for a Million max.

And I think, from now on, that's my answer to everything anti-Houston. I'm not going to defend the city from charges that it's ugly (it is) or that it's people are rude (they are, mostly) or that the infrastructure is crap (again, it is), I'm just going to sit quietly by the side as people tick off a laundry list of accurate things that are bad about where I currently reside.  When they finish?


"Yes, I know, but it's where my job is."



"Oh yeah, and I don't live IN Houston, I live in Cypress."

PostGOP: Governed by the least of us.

Childish behavior reigns in the Federal House of Representatives....

Democrats hold house floor in election-year sit-in on guns. Erica Werner (AP via HoustonChronicle.com)

At one point overnight, the two sides nearly came to blows after Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, approached the Democrats and yelled, "Radical Islam!" Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., started yelling back. The two came within inches of each other, both screaming, only to be separated by colleagues.

...

House Republicans used their prerogatives as the majority party to muscle through, with no time for debate, a partisan bill that provides money for the Zika crisis. GOP lawmakers overruled Democrats' objections and then acted to adjourn the House into next month. Democrats cried "Shame, Shame!" 

 

Unreal.  We've reached a point where re-enacting the bell-ringing, naked Cersi, walk of shame from Game of Thrones, and two utter morons hollering each other like children (although I doubt either of those fools would ever actually have the guts to come to 'blows').

The problem is GOP members, and their current alt-right majority followers, are backing the childish outburst of Rep. Louie Gohmert while Democrats, and their current majority of unthinking followers, are backing the immature screaming of Rep. Corrine Brown.

A pox on all of their houses (pun intended) as the current gang of fools that we've elected to represent us shows, once again, that they are incapable of adult behavior.

The problem is that most of us (except 12% of poll respondents who have their head in the sand obviously) don't like Congress as a whole, but think that the jerks that represent us might indeed be jerks, but they're OUR jerks and are jerky in a manner that we prefer.

And that's the problem. It's why Gohmert, a man who has the debate skills of a rabid grizzly bear, and Brown, who is one of the dimmer members of Congress, continue to pull money from the taxpayer trough.

A healthy source of blame also needs to be laid at the feet of those who blindly follow party over principle, those same people who are now supporting The Bronzed Ego and Anointed One respectively.

What we're seeing now is the new normal, because (and we don't want to recognize this but it's true) Congress is a fuzzy mirror of our collective society as a whole. If we don't require of them adult behavior, and if we don't show it in our political discourse among ourselves, then we're going to be in for much worse before it gets better.  If it ever can at this point.

Society (and politics) always finds a way to plumb the bottom.  Always.

PostGOP: The More Things Change....the more the American experiement goes awry.

A couple of nights ago I saw a Mercedes commercial discussing the future of self-driving cars. It was a pretty neat thing with a dad having a learning moment with his daughter using a video screen while the car drove down the freeway.

I turned to my wife and said 'In our lifetime we'll see self-driving cars'.

Then I got to thinking.

"How do we know that the two people in the car were a dad and his daughter?"

I mean, the country is currently undergoing a massive re-evaluation of what is, and what is not, acceptable on the marriage, gender identification front. And while it seems ridiculous to say that a societal return to authorized pedophilia would ever happen (remember, pre-teen girls marrying older men was quite common, even in Western culture, not all that long ago) is it silly to think that we might return to those days?

The point is that things move fast. Sure, the groundwork for the sexual and political transformation (calling it a revolution is a disservice to actual revolutions) that America is undergoing has been being laid for years, in colleges, in public schools, if history is being written by the victors then future history is going to have a decidedly progressive slant.

The thing is, there's no "wrong side of history" but there is a "losing side of history" and that's the side that you don't want to be on.  We're going to have to come to grips with the idea, for now, that conservatives are most certainly on the losing side and there's very little that can be done about it in the short term.

For the highest elected office in the so-called "beacon of freedom" for the world we're going to be faced with a choice between a corrupt, paranoid egotistical woman with no redeeming moral quality, or a complete and utter berk who happens to be a self-promoter with a childish set of debate skills. If we have a choice at all.  Because, at this point, The Bronzed Ego appears to have decided to mail it in against The Anointed One giving legs to all of those "stealth Democratic operative" conspiracy theories.

A bigger problem is the increased tendency of every level of government (regardless of party affiliation) to try and throw the US Constitution into a very large paper shredder.  From the 1st Amendment to the 10th, and through all of the V articles, the only thing that politicians seem to take interest in are the items that provide them with more power.

Because of this, the 9th Amendment is pretty cool to Progressives because it allows them to create so-called "rights" which they then use as a cudgel to limit the actual freedoms that their political opponents pretend to enjoy.  For Republicans, relegated to joke status and limited to controlling the States, the 10th Amendment is a fave-rave because it lets them file lawsuits and call for a gang of idiots to meet in a doomed-upon-announcement Article V convention of the States.

The idea behind the convention?  To further amend the US Constitution putting more power in their hands.

We have a media that's dropped all pretense of neutrality, and which is actively arguing for the rights of other people to be curtailed. We've even gone to calling for the detention of political dissenters on a variety of issues.

It's an old cliché but true, the United States, the so-called freest country in the world, has the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration (excluding N. Korea, for whom we have no reliable data) in it by far.  You're only free in America if you choose to toe the line. Step off the line, even for a second, and an army of paramilitary shock-troops come busting down your door to slap the nonconformity out of you.

Amazingly now, in Texas which bills itself as the reddest of red states, they don't even have to follow proper due process to use evidence against you.

We have cities that are devolving into de-facto war zones where more people are dying on a weekend than Omar Mateen killed at Pulse. Yet no one is saying anything about it because it's "just a bunch of minorities killing minorities" and we've somehow decided that that's OK, as long as progressives are running things and making sure that it's their patronage system in place.

We don't debate anymore in America, we snarl, snarkily of course. It's gotten so bad that some in societies lowest-common-denominator (the US Senate, for those of you new to this blog) publicly stated that Republicans wanted to "sell guns to ISIS" because they didn't want to pass a so-called gun control bill that would strip around a Million people of due-process rights.  Then those same water-carriers voted against a compromise bill because.....election season.

In a just world those politicians would be paraded in the public square, laughed at, and faced a barrage of rotting vegetables being hurled their way.  This before being booted from office (if not recalled for sheer stupidity) and their names forever enshrined as a synonym for stupid.

Instead, they're being praised for making "sick burns" of the other side and the best observers can do is shake their head and talk about just how prescient the fairly pedestrian movie Idiocracy really was.

It's not that we should yearn for a return to so-called "greatness" or that going back to the bygone days of old would be ideal. But isn't it OK to yearn for a return of competency and that we move forward in an intelligent manner?

As a conservative, I tire of political figures (and gadflys) trying to put on Ronald Reagan's ideological underwear and parade around in a false fug of nostalgia, just like I tire of progressives trying to solve the current financial mess by clamoring for a return to a 1960's economy.

There are great ideas out there, the so-called "gig" economy, self-driving cars, telephones that have more computing power inside them than the entire NASA moon mission, but we waste all of that focusing on trains, bikes, footpaths, selfies and 140 character pieces of mediocre snark.

We've chosen to view government as an ATM machine and then we're appalled when politicians (saying 'greedy politicians' is a redundancy) use it to dole out cash to their friends, supporters and ideological fellow-travelers. We call for better leadership but cast our votes for two of the worst leaders in the modern era.

In short, we keep doing what we've always done, just more so and more loudly, and expect to wake up in the morning to a different America.


Because of this I've come to the conclusion that we are all insane.




Which, when you really think about it, explains quite a bit.

PostGOP: The American Political System as Low-brow Comedy Act

Over 100 people were shot and either killed or injured at Pulse, a GLBTQ+ nightclub, in Orlando a few days ago.  The shooter, Omar Mateen, was the son of Afghan immigrants and a Muslim who was apparently radicalized and, quite possibly, both gay himself and likely slightly mentally unstable.


To the Democratic sycophants that make up the editorial board of the New York Times (alongside many Democrat-first, GLBT+ issues second, activists, this is enough evidence to point the finger for the crimes at..........


White, middle-class, middle-aged, conservative, Christian males. A group of people with whom Mateen most assuredly had very limited, if any, contact.  If, like most thinking people, you look at those conclusions with confusion, it won't matter to those on the Left. Just like a discussion surrounding whether or not Mateen was, in fact, gay does not enter into the thought process on the right.


What enters the minds of writers, non-thinkers, media talking-heads and 'activists*' on both sides has been guns. In fact, the most pressing issue of the moment is whether or not to do two things with them. First, the old "common sense" canards are rolled out.  Banning so-called "assault" weapons for one (which would have no effect and had no effect on crime the first time it was tried) and second, suspending due process for Millions of Americans who might find themselves on a vaguely defined 'terrorist watch list'.


If you're surprised that so-called social liberals would move down this path remember this: It was the Democratic Party that was the driving force behind Japanese internment camps during WWII.  So what's happening now should not entirely surprise you.  As Jonah Goldberg says "what a dumb time to be alive".


I concur.


Kevin D. Williamson also offers up some thoughtful, wise and accurate observations on the matter. Pointing out to people that this is not about, nor has it ever been about, "reducing crime". Instead it's about gaining power, exerting control and silencing a large, but shrinking, political group that has been unfriendly toward Democrats historically.  One of the few unprotected classes left in America is the Caucasian conservative male.  There is no flag for him, no movement cutting commercials or Hollywood star shedding crocodile tears. In fact, the lampoon of the redneck hick, fat, wearing a dirty wife-beater t-shirt (dirty because he worked in it all day not because he spilled food and beer on it FWIW) is not openly mocked, but encouraged.


Editorial cartoonists, who would much rather have their arms forcefully removed and their children beaten with them than draw a caricature of Mohammed, gleefully mock and disparage middle-American men with no worry of career repercussion. You can draw Bubba being racist, but you cannot draw Omar being a homophobe.


Nor is it possible to have a rational discussion around what could likely be the real story.


A Muslim man, who happened to be a closeted homosexual, struggled with the social and moral norms of a religious belief system that is 100% opposed to the GLBTQ+ community even being alive. Thinking his sexuality a personal flaw, and unable to turn anywhere for help and support, he lashed out in the way he was taught by radical elements who used his anger toward the world to kill and wound around 100 people.  The other option is that he cased the club and planned his attack. In that case he's not disturbed at all, just a radical Islamist who committed a horrendous act of terror. We may never know where the truth lies because he didn't leave many hints.


There is a lot in that paragraph above that both sides could possibly agree on, and work to fix.


But that is not how American politics work today.


Today we have comedians like Sally Kohn banging away at her typewriter that all Republicans are racist homophobes, we have Donald Trump crowing that he was "right" about terrorism as he stares fondly into his gold-framed mirror. We are stuck with elected representatives who look at polls, listen to campaign advisors and don't have the intellectual heft to generate an original thought.  And we have a President who is a suit so empty it's almost folded.


We don't have a government, we have a comedy show.


The only problem is, right now, there's nothing much funny about it.