Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Monday, June 15, 2020

"All Meant to Drive You Crazy"

Just got home from our safari into northern Virginia. Along with Diploson1 and Diploson2, we visited Diploson3, his wife, and the new Diplograndson. We all vowed to stay away from DC, and we kept that vow.

The Diplograndson, already three months old, has decided to use "male" as his gender designation, and will employ he/him/his as his personal pronouns. Between sips of Maker's Mark, and puffs on a Romeo y Julieta, he expressed great concern over the hysteria generated by the global warming hoax; rejected as fake the Russia collusion story; tagged the Ukraine impeachment story as another fraud; and argued that since black lives matter, he opposes federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the biggest destroyer of black lives in America. I might have over interpreted his comments . . . maybe . . ..

Diploson3 and wife fled DC a couple of weeks ago for the relative safety and comfort of Fairfax county in Virginia. We noticed that the area around Vienna, Merrifield, Fairfax City, and Dunn Loring apparently has undergone another of its every-so-often but titanic demographic shifts. Occupying the area's million-dollar-plus condos and townhouses are youngish white couples. They have, it seems, fled the big city and returned to the suburbs. When we bought a home in the area some thirty years (fortunately, we still have it), we saw the tide running the other way, with suburban neighborhoods full of recent immigrants from Vietnam and the Middle East.

This time, furthermore, we saw these youngish white couples with a surprising number of small children, almost more than dogs--also a change from thirty years ago. The politics? Ah, well, they remain the classic vacuous progressive politics of semi-wealthy young suburbanites. We saw several cars and businesses displaying "Black Lives Matter" signs, thereby, it seems, some of these white suburbanites attribute greater value to the lives of others than to their own. Examples of generosity and self-sacrifice? Empty-headed virtue signaling? Fear and the paying of Dane-geld? I report, you decide.

Northern Virginia remains very much in the grip of the Chicom virus fear. The partially reopened stores and restaurants require you to wear a mask. It all looks like a bad dystopian future scifi flick. The restaurants we tried had an austere clinical feel; hard to enjoy a meal while breathing in bleach fumes, tables damp from disinfectant "wipe downs," and attended by wait staff who look like lab techs with masks and rubber gloves. I kept expecting them to ask me for a stool sample -- all the while surrounded by written and broadcast messages telling us: "We are all in this together!" "Maintain your social distance!" "No mask, no entry!"

Much of the reaction to the ChiCom virus forms part of what I wrote about some seven years ago: the left's war on joy and fun. While that post dealt mostly with the assault on Christmas, it contained some observations of a more general nature that apply to the current situation:
The old irascible, politically incorrect, and acerbic sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, once famously defined Puritanism as, "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Mencken today likely would want to revise his definition; Puritans and their ethos have long departed the American political and cultural scene. Today's warriors against happiness, those haunted by the "fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" are the leftist ideologues in charge of most of our social, political, educational, and cultural institutions. Yes, of course, they have an insatiable drive for power; yes, of course, they want control over all aspects of our lives. I, however, have come to the conclusion that what really fuels them, or put it another way, the hidden turbocharge in their engine, is their hatred of joy, of happiness, and most notably of the special joy and happiness that comes with an individual expressing and exercising independence. <...> 
The left cannot stand the thought of individuals doing things that bring them joy and happiness. Automobiles. Yes, automobiles form a major target of this assault. Driving an automobile can bring joy, excitement, and independence into a person's life. Driving an "impractical" automobile such as a Porsche, a Corvette, a Nissan GTR, a Cadillac CTS-V, a Ferrari, or a 700Hp modified Shelby GT-500 is fun and brings joy. The leftists would have us all in grey buses, trains, and, at best, in subsidized pokey Priuses and Volts, stifling our joy and happiness in the name of protecting Gaia against a fake warming threat. They will use taxes, and EPA and safety regulations, and absurd speed limits to ruin our joy. The same with gun ownership. Guns are fun; they bring joy to the owner, and assert an individual's right to independence and self-defense. Gun ownership, of course, also limits the power of the state, and the ability of the leftists running the state to dictate the arc of our lives. We see the same in the assault on drinking, smoking, eating meat, homeschooling, and on individual choice in medical care. The state will decide which schools our children can attend, what they will learn; the state will decide our medical choices. They wage war on small businesses, which bring joy to the owners and, again assert independence, because after all, "you didn't build that."
Diploson3 had, perhaps, a more accurate, and infinitely more pithy observation. He noted that the edicts coming out from the left are "all meant to drive you crazy." So many of the "rules" we have had imposed on us in reaction to the ChiCom virus have no rhyme or reason, no logic, no science. It's hard, therefore, to dispute Diploson3's observation.

Don't let the left succeed.

Do not get crazy, get angry.

14 comments:

  1. Not crazy.

    Angry.

    Yes, very much so.

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    1. 'Do not get crazy, get angry.'
      Roger that Sarge, & Dip 2.0!
      A short count helps: 5-4-3-2-1
      I use it to ensure I buckled-up!
      On Watch~~~
      Happy Family Joy WLA!

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  2. Your page has been disappearing quite a bit the last little while. It disappears then come back a couple of days later, and you don't comment. Are you aware? I just assumed it was another DOS attack. js

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    1. I don't know what's going on. First I got demonetized by Google, then I had the GoDaddy mess in which I lost my domain, and now this.

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    2. It's called censorship Dip. This is the Big Tech push to silence the non believers leading in to the November elections. They think this one is for all the marbles. It is game over though...1,000,000+ at the Trump rally. Wow! PwG reader.

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  3. About 30 years ago, I was studying quality improvement in work. The definitive book on this is "Flow" by Csikszentmihalyi. In the definition of "Flow," one example given is driving a car. Pleasure derived from mastering a skill. The left will never accept that.

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    1. Tks MK! "Flow" I unpacked the PDF and discovered a Gem! Sent it to my recent Summa -- Graduated Daughter she's taking a Gap semester this summer, mostly since the News coming out of academe, is not good news. With her honors thesis approved filed and bioinformatics minor in reserve, I suggested she shift a bit from bacterial pathogens, toward more Medical Science research prep, she dove into the MCATs - lighting up when she located her old friends, Molecular Bio & Biochemistry - I think she's conscious again... Today, I repacked and sent "Flow" for her perusal, here's the opening cords:

      Hi --Got this PDF ref from a friend online, hope you choose to read it this summer... was thinking in terms of your comments to me, such as: "I'm on a roll" working on my project; 'in the groove studying for a test'; or "just Going with the Flow" --sounds familiar dear, but what does it mean??? ;) ~~~WT

      Excerpted this from PDF link below:
      Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience - By Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi - Harper, 1990
      Introduction This fascinating book is all about happiness and how to find it. Cziksentmihalyi is an authority on the subject. As he explains, happiness is not something that happens, that money or power can command. Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person. It is only by controlling our inner experience that we can become happy. Happiness cannot be reached by consciously searching for it. As J S Mill once put it, “Ask yourselves whether you are happy and you cease to be so”.

      Optimal Experience The author uses the term “optimal experience” to describe those occasions where we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment, which we cherish for long and that becomes a landmark in our lives. These moments are often not passive, receptive relaxing times. They tend to occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something that is difficult or worthwhile.

      Everything we experience is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to connect this information, we can determine what our lives will be like. Optimal states result when there is order in consciousness. This happens when we are focused on realistic goals with our skills matching the opportunities for action. Goals allow people to concentrate attention on the task at hand, forgetting other things temporarily.

      The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. It may be undertaken for other reasons but the activity soon becomes intrinsically rewarding. It is autotelic. (Auto means self and teleos means goal). An autotelic experience lifts life to a different level. Building Inner Harmony Our level of happiness ultimately depends on how our mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Happiness depends on inner harmony, not on our ability to exert control over the great forces of the universe
      . . .
      To become happy, we must strive to become independent of the social environment, i.e. become less sensitive to its rewards and punishments. The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to make them respond predictably to rewards and punishments. All social controls are ultimately based on a threat to the survival instinct.
      ...
      We must learn to enjoy and to find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself. This will ensure that the burden of social controls falls off from our shoulders.
      . . .
      Free PDF offered here,www.researchgate.net and there, just search by title & author, Amazon has it as well:
      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224927532_Flow_The_Psychology_of_Optimal_Experience
      Tks again Mike,
      On Watch~~~
      "Let's Roll"

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  4. I am already angry at this mob of jerks trashing my country and denigrating my heritage. For the record, I do not go North of the Rappahannock except under duress. It is enemy territory.

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  5. Good to know the next generation (Diplograndson) is on track.

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    1. He better be . . . those cigars I gave him were expensive . . .

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    2. Hahaha!

      The traditional role of the grandfather!

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  6. So...John Bolton. What the heck happened to him?!

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    1. You have no idea how disappointed I am with John. I worked closely with him and found him to be great, but this . . . no,not kosher.

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  7. WHAT HAPPENED!? Baltimore, Yale, draft avoidance flip-floppery, a public enemy on too many lists, although he did/does have a 'Strange-Love' for the Bomb, but with the accumulating public distaste for Neoconish baggage, and not to mention his acquired Ukrainian affliction to tout his Tales to damage Sir Donald et al, he's become a perfect foil for the CinC internationally, of course DipLoMad II , could probably write a best-selling Volume on the mustachioed rasqual~~~IMHO~~~ perhaps a Legacy for the cigar-chomping Grand One? };~)
    On Watch~~~
    "Let's Roll"

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