The third rail

"The third rail" is the high voltage rail on electrified train lines such as Metro North, where, if you touch it, you are electrocuted. I used to daily go to the Hudson River, crossing a Metro North train track. I always was careful to step carefully over that third rall. In the sphere of public discourse, there are many thoughts which will get one electrocuted because "people" and especially their ideological leaders are "sensitive". i.e; they will destroy you if you say anything to disconcert them anent their metastable self-satisfaction and self-importance and so forth. "How dare you!"

America is getting sicker with each new day. Everybody got all worked up about Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who went into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul (Turkey), October 2, 2018, to get an early Valentine's Day card 💗 for his true love 💗 and was greeted by Saudi agents who killed him. What did he or anybody else expect? That the autocratic rulers of Saudi Araba would give him a medal for trying to overthrow their government? He was a fool.

Then we have Alexei Navalny, a Russian dissident who, after Vladimir Putin's agents poisoned and almost killed him, could not wait even completely to heal, to race back into Russia to get a vacation in Putin's Gulag. And then he has the clever idea to threaten to kill himself by voluntarily refusing food ("hunger strike" in prison) if people do not overthrow Mr. Putin, and everybody tells Mr. Putin that it will be on him if Mr. Navalny does succeed in killing himself. Vladimir Putin is apparently a very bad actor on the world stage, but when he protests he is not responsible if Mr. Navalny starves himself to death, for once Mr. Putin is on target. Gulag prisoners get fed; they do not generally die from starvation. Why do people get all wimpy about Mr. Navalny? He's getting what he wants. Let him enjoy his vacation in Siberia, when he could have been suffering from living luxuriously on New York's Upper West Side or wherever in The West?^[1]

There are the treasonous clerks (aka: "intellectuals" or at least persons with much schooling and maybe tenure in a university):

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; emphasis added)

That's the high brow stuff. Now down in the dirt. America was all flipped out over a petty felon, George Floyd, who tried unsuccssfully to pass a a counterfeit $20 bill in a bodega getting killed by a rogue cop, Derek Chauvin. If Officer Chauvin hadn't been an a**hole, nobody would ever have heard of Mr Floyd, yes? Lots of black people who really have been shortchanged in the life are using the Floyd case as their axe to grind, and that seems understandable to me, but then there are all the hanger-on'ers of privileged black persons and privileged bleeding heart white liberals and any others who probably want to sacrifice me (and you, my reader?) to their "Good Cause". As always "volunteer" is a transitive verb [We volunteer you to die for our Good Cause! ...while we will relax and watch from the safe distance of our Barcaloungers, or at the very worst we spend 11 days in jail writing agitprop...."], and, some animals – the swine (aka: "activists") – are always more equal than others.

There's America's recently ex-Chimpanzee/Saboteur-in Chief, (POTUS №45) Donald John Trump who's always stirring up trouble because that's the kind of creature he is. The AOC lefties are busy trying to push their non-gastrointestinal "movement". And while liberals will never have enough of pointing how the Trumpublican Party-liners are lying when they say the 2019 Presidential election was corrupt and Trump really won, they – the lefties – never also acknowledge that almost 1/2 the voters wanted a Trump Fascist Vengeancocracy and that Joe Biden only won by the skin of his teeth and could easily have lost. They blithely act as if Joe Biden had won by a landslide and try to push him into implementing their political agenda when even if they were helping row the boat, Mr. Biden has scarcely any room to manoeuver

A week ago, 24 June 2021, a big condominium in south Florida collapsed, apparently killing over 150 people. Why the hell does anybody build anything especially anything over 2 stories tall, in south Florida which is sinking due to the aquifer being sucked out to provide water for all the snow-bird-brains and Batista refugees? Be that as it many, a massive world class army of experts is frantically trying to find if anybody survived the collapse, with no space left for any more workers to get on site, and what do the relatives bitch about? That these heroic workers are not pulling rabbits out of their hats and shoehorning 48 hours of work into 12 hour shifts or some other such nonsense. The gripes and bitching of the non-combatants kicking cats instead of dealing with their hormones and social conditioning. They are avatars of the 3rd-line computer programming manager I once had who loudly belched out at a team that was working very hard for him:

"I want to see asses and elbows."

This day, July 1, everybody is all worked up about a bad actor comedian, Bill Cosby, who may have raped 50 women, but has been let out of jail without possibility of retrial – he's a free man! – because of a screw up by a State of Pennsylvania prosecutor. The net apparently is that the prosecutor assured Mr. Cosby that he would not be prosecuted, so Mr. Crosby fessed up to some of his bad deeds and now a whole lot of #meToo harpies are not happy. They want Mr. Cosby back in jail even though that would mean that in future prosecutors all over The United States might not be able to make deals with bad actors to confess their crimes because the bad actors would no longer be confident the State would hold up its end of the deal. This is more of that disgusting Radical feminist Psychology Department head per above. Truth is just one tool in the movement makers' toolkits.

When I was younger

When I was younger, there was all sorts of stuff wrong, and I was screwed over bad. But at least I had a right to my problems. The only people who were really out to get me were the Waffen SS[S] (Selective Service System), and they had nothing against me – they were just collecting Falstaffean "food for powder" from any body available. As long as I helped keep America beautiful by getting a haircut, I could find a job where I earned more than I spent and had enough time and energy left over after the work day to read serious books and listen to serious music and otherwise try to have a bit of a life of the mind. This ultimately led to me getting my Ed.D. degree from Teachers College studying dysfunctional communication in the training of paychoanalysts and other useless things like the impact of uniform printed editions in early Modern Europe. The life of the mind is useless, isn't it? It does not further the partisan objectives of man-haters ("radical feminists"), persecuted blacks with tenure (Angela Davis), people with ideosyncratic sexualities ("LBGQWERTYs"), or any other sectarian group.

I was concerned with selfish things like: alienation, the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, collecting fine ceramics, reading serious books, thinking about the starry heavens not bodegas in some "hood", and, yes, my obsessive fear of dying from melanoma which distracted me from everything a lot of the time. I thought about the character Steiner in Federico Fellini's (a dead white male) film "La Dolce Vita", not The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr's Sermon on the Mount D.C. Mall. I could care less about that man except that I read he liked to wear silk shirts, not sack cloth. If I was a woman I certainly would not have wanted to go to bed with that thick bodied male with apparently rather poor taste (but who knows what he enjoyed in the privacy of his home behind closed curtains after consulting his gold Rolex watch to see what time it was? Johnny Walker Black Label? Mafia bosses too like gold Rolexes...), who, if some people wanted him to lead them to his promised land, that would be fine with me as long as they did not set up roadblocks that prevent me getting to where I'd like to be, too.

I don't want to cause anybody trouble. I don't want to hurt anybody. But I want a life commensurate with my innate gifts and education. I want to live some before I am dead or terminally disabled. I am an oppressed minority of one. I have been abused. I have suffered. I have had decades of my life stolen from me. I gave at the office. If somebody wants to deny me the right to buy a scholarly book because they want to suck reparations out of me, they are my enemy and I wish they would just go some place else, permanently. My ancestors were not slave owners, and my father did not exploit people to rise from unskilled laborer to first line sales manager. Your suffering is worse than mine? Elie Wiesel said:

Don't compare. All suffering is intolerable.

Love me or leave me alone, and I get to define what "loving" is, not some Smiling Face That Tells Lies 💗 telling me what I should think and feel.

During the past year I have read 3 books that address a lot of my concerns: (1) Walter Andrews "The Age of Beloveds", Mark Jordan "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology" and Linda Hopkins "False Self: The Life of Masud Khan". These are all elitist books, of by and for members of the intelligentsia. "People" should not read them for numerous reasons because they are incompetent to handle ideas. I want nothing to do with "people" and especially Wokies, with one of whom I had two unpleasant interactions during the past year. As I have recently learned Ludwig Witttgenstein said: Most people are not worth much. I have no problem interacting with laborers and tradesmen such as plumbers and electricians. I do not expect them to be interested in the esoteric subjects that are most meaningful to me. I did expect my manager at work to not be a fool who [male] wore socks with machine stitched images of Mickey Mouse on them but was not willing to engage in civil discourse with me about small rodents. Or a different one with a computer science Ph.D., who treated me as if he was an Officer in Heinrich Himmler's SS and I was a member of an inferior race. Some men will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.

Reparations? I need some. My father started out as an unskilled laborer in a lead paint factory and by long years of hard work, rose to become a first line manager: a sales manager. I know nothing about his family of origin except that apparently with the exception of one brother, they were white trash, to the extreme degree that, when my father started earning middle-class money, his father tried to blackmail him to get some of it and when that failed he sued him to try to get some of it in court (again failed). After my father died, at least one of his "men" (employees) came out of nowhere to extol my father's high ethics and caring – essentially: shepherding – actions as manager. At least one of my managers was beloved by the Leaders of poor people in the ghetto but he did zero to help me his only employee at the time, his valet, me, to rise in life. Virtue begins at home, and this dude had none for me. Fortunately he never let me in on the secret name he loved to be called by his intimates, because I might have goofed and said it was disgusting for a person with an earned doctorate in a humanities field to delight in being called a disgusting slime covered invertebrate.

The goose that lays golden egg[head]s

I can understand disadvantaged persons being pissed off about those who are better off than they are, especially if the differences are at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, i.e.: if the other person has more than enough to eat and you are starving through no fault of your own (not by being an Alexei Navalny). But that's not everything. All the boyz in the hood, some of whom have Bugatti Veyrons, use cellphones and drive automobile, etcetera and so forth, right? Cellphones and automobiles were not invented by Wokies but by dead white males, yes? Nerdy engineers, who may not have given any thought to anything that goes on in "the hood". If all the "Black lives matter" people know what's good for them, they will nurture scientists and engineers of any skin color or other secondary characteristics because that's where their toys came from and will continue to come from. Neither Bugatti Veyrons nor cellphones were invented in bodegas by petty felons passing couterfeit $20 bills, were they?

I think the catch here is that a lot of privileged people are wastes of space and time and resources who really do need to be expropriated because they are not doing anything construcive with their often ill gotten gains. From those to whom much has been given, much should be expected. If you want cellphones and the dude who can invent the cellphone really wants to have a Ferrari, why not give it to him if it inspires him be a better electrical engineer? But why even give a used Yugo to anybody who is not doing anything except being a Paparazzi magnet, like many celebrities? Why not Kim Kardashian West be a domestic servant for a world class heart surgeon? Then she would be contributing something, wouldn't she? What good does it do humanity for paper "Tiger" Woods to be able to whack small spherical objects with preternatural accuracy over a couple hundred yards of manicured lawn? Why the lawn, either? Waste not, want not. If you don't mess it up, nobody has to clean it up. Etcetera and so forth.

Me, me, me

Axiom: If I do not care about what matters to you then I have no reason to expect you to care about what matters to me. If you do not care about what matters to me then you have no reason to expect me to care about what matters to you.. I want to breathe. I want to have some joy in what little is left of my life. Mea culpa and up your "movement", all you ADLB's.

I have no interest in petty felons and rogue cops. I am disgusted by women who jerk men around, and males who aspire to be minotaurs. I am interested in the Parisian school teacher, Samuel Paty, who was decapitated (+2021.10.16) by a religious bigot for teaching freedom of thought in a public school. The times are rotten. The culture is sick. Fools rule [except maybe Joe Biden and Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern...]. Capacity weakens. Let's turn our imaginations to nobler possibilities (such as Ulrich and Agathe)! ...Especially when reality does not measure up.

+2024.02.16 v044
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Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole!