Yesterday, walking Spuds, I was on a path temporarily blocked on one side by the fencing for a school toddler play area. I glanced over into that area, and suddenly, bearing down on us, was tall young man jogging hard and apparently prepared to run at us. Bad idea: on the leash, Spuds is protective unless he knows an individual or that individual’s dog. I literally had no place to go to avoid this guy. I assumed he would break to my left, but couldn’t be sure; if he kept going, I would have to pull Spuds left, and I wasn’t sure there would be time to get him far enough away to prevent his interacting with the jogger. Literally at the last moment, the jogger veered to go around us. Spuds lunged, and I just barely was able to keep him off this jerk by throwing all of my weight into the leash. I’d estimate that Spuds was within an inch of nipping him…and he would have deserved it. The jogger just happily ran on, never saying a word. Spuds, who had never been charged by a stranger like that before, was upset. I was more upset. I have long considered the great majority of joggers self-absorbed, inconsiderate and anti-social creeps who treat the rest of the world as an afterthought. This was only the latest proof of my thesis.

1. Bias makes you stupid, but it can’t make you this stupid, can it? Chris Isidore claimed  in a  CNN Business article that the drop in gasoline prices from their earlier high is like a “$100-a-month tax cut. Or a maybe $100-a-month raise.” This is challenger for most audacious cherry-picking of all-time. “The steady drop in gas prices over the last few months has turned into an unexpected form of economic stimulus, coming at a time when the Federal Reserve is trying to cool the economy and battle rising prices with higher interest rates,” this alleged journalist “explains.” But contrary to Isidore’s shameless and dishonest spin, economists estimate that Americans are  spending  an extra $5,200 in 2022 just to buy the same things they bought in 2021. Another calculation put the extra cost at $460 extra each month, or more than $5,500 this year.

CNN trying to frame this as a boon for consumers because of a drop in price of a single commodity is–what? What do you call it? Is it better or worse than Biden and media propagandists claiming that an 8.5 percent inflation increase is actually “zero,” or that two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth indicates a depression this time as it always has before (except for the strange year of 1947)? In truth, it’s all the same: a biased and corrupt media that sees its job as not informing the public, but to misinform them to ensure that they keep voting Democrat. [Pointer and Source: The Federalist] Continue reading →

A few words on “diversity” (this will save me a rant later):

I just turned on PBS while having lunch, and was told that the network appreciated “all the diverse communities” that they serve. Gack/Blechh!/Yuck! And what about those non-diverse communities? What are they? Bigots? Evil, Un-American? And what kind of diversity counts, on the PBS scorecard? This is just rote virtue-signaling with a little indoctrination and brain-washing thrown in. Human beings are diverse, even within homogeneous groups. Prioritizing one kind of “diversity” over another is an ideological edict.

The program that followed was John Williams conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in his various famous compositions last year. There was nary a black or brown visage anywhere to be seen among the musicians. Should I care? Should anyone? All that ought to matter is whether the orchestra sounds as good as possible, correct? Or should a proper orchestra be judged on the basis of its EEOC categories as well as its musical excellence?

I would not be surprised if the local PBS outlet here gets complaints from contributors “of color” that the concert should not have been broadcast, since the orchestra did not “look like us.”

This is madness, and people of all colors, ethnicities and creeds must have the integrity and courage to step forward and say, “Just stop. Now.”

1. Did you know President Trump lied all the time? Last March, the current, always honest President said, in order to brush off complaints about the number of illegal immigrants streaming across our borders,

“It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter.” 

That was calculated malarkey then, when the numbers of illegals crossing the border were higher than during other winters, and it really looks like malarkey now, as the winter level never dropped off, and is headed to record territory.

But these denials of what is open and undeniable, habitual Jumbos, are now the predictable MO of President Biden and his party. Inflation is transitory! High gas prices are a good thing! There is no recession! The public has to be gullible, ignorant and stupid for this cynical strategy to work, and part of it is to make the public as gullible, ignorant and stupid as possible. Continue reading →

Handling oneself in moments of defeat, failure and embarrassment is a core life competence that few of us have mastered. Consider, for a wild, random, out of the blue example, Liz Cheney, whose approach to a landslide loss was to frame it as a badge of honor.

On this week’s “America’s Got Talent,” the live show was filling time by having a previous season’s finalist, Jon Dorenbos, work his magic—literally, since Dorenbos is a professional NFL player turned professional magician. The illusion required judges Simon Cowell, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, and Sofia Vergara to pick random numbers out of a box and letters (signifying colors) off a board. The wondrous effect was to be that he would then reveal four football jerseys secretly already hanging in four onstage gym lockers, each jersey with the judge’s name and bearing the color and number he or she had chosen. The jerseys in the lockers for Cowell, Mandel and Vergara were properly amazing, but when Heidi Klum showed her number (8), the magician knew he was sunk. Although the Klum jersey’s color, red, matched the letter she had picked voluntarily, the number was not 8, but 20.

All magicians have illusions go wrong occasionally. (I once did the old “bake a cake in a hat” bit with a fedora belonging to my parents’ guest, and ended up filling the hat with milk because the trick pitcher malfunctioned.) However, TV magic is almost always pre-recorded, so having a magician’s botched routine make it to broadcast is extremely rare: I’ve never seen it happen. It is also a possible career-wrecker.

Here is how Dorenbos dealt with his humialation on live TV, saying,

I thought you were going to pick 20. That’s OK! Sometimes in life it’s OK to be off by one, because guess what, baby? Every time I take this stage, you all make me feel like a rock star! Being part of the AGT team, I love every second. Whether it’s in the locker room or my life, I try to be the best teammate I can be and also bring my A-game, baby. May we all make the decision to be the best teammate we can be in this world!

Your Special Ethics Alarms Life Competence Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was the magician’s response to failure competent?

Continue reading →

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