Practical Advice For Living in CA and Dealing With Hysterical People

Know the terrain. There are three scenarios: power is equal, you have power, they have power. Each situation requires different tactics. 

Power is Equal:

-Intelligent Mockery. Hysterics do not like being humiliated and humor puts them in their place.

-Active protest. Voice your concerns. Be heard. Be rational. Don't lose cool because they will.

They Have Power:

-Passive resistance. In Iran, women have stopped wearing the hijab. If they can do it, so can you. Don't wear the ribbon. This was the dumb mistake Scott Adams made this weekend by voicing publicly what he knew would give the powers-that-be the excuse they wanted to cancel Dilbert. This was unbelievably dumb. My 7 year old son reads and likes Dilbert. Adams was building a new generation of fans by being in the newspaper everyday and he ruined it because he couldn't read the situation. What an incredible unforced error by a guy who has an important voice in our culture right now. Everyone can now just dismiss him as a racist. Foolish.

-Look for a way to gain leverage. Spots will open up if you watch the landscape. Take them. And then move into the position of power.

You Have the Power:

-Don't let the fox in the henhouse. Control the discourse. Use the word "no." Set boundaries. Frame discussions through non-hysterical and rational lenses. Maintain the leverage. Never trust them. But do not thumb your nose and weaken your position as they will take it from you. Maintain position because you can win a war of attrition. The people in the middle will come to your side. Don't give them an excuse to go over. 

-Do not let them get power over you or you will need to go back to passive resistance.

Fighting Windmills

Actress claps back at homophobic viewers of The Last of Us. 

Where are these homophobic viewers? The rotten tomatoes score is 97%. These people are crazy.

Impractical

EVs seem to me good for commuting, but little else. Users/drivings noting problems with charging when away from home. Duh. For my lifestyle, I'd pick living closer to work and having a regular car for recreation/road trips/fun.

If anything, I think electric bikes are a more practical and possibly game changer for city living. Solves issues of traffic, space, and can get you from A to B. Problems are: no road trips, weather, perhaps safety etc, but at the cost level...strike me as an almost no brainer. 

Logging

Film: Wrath of Man

Weird, messy and totally enjoyable genre flick.

Play: Hamlet

GOAT. More fun to study than simply read for pleasure. As one of my students says "Hamlet, he different..."

Film: Puss and Boots The Last Wish

Terrific kids movie for adults who know a bit about movie making. Should be used in screenwriting classes, which you should take as an insult. Feels like the way a really advanced AI would make a film...that is, over-engineered to the point of perfection. I would've much preferred a sloppier, weirder movie. And here's the thing: my kids would too. Neither of them were over the moon about it. I thought it was "good." My wife liked it the best in the family. That alone should tell you something given it was an adventure movie made for kids, especially boys. Or was it? Like Maverick, this movie tells me Hollywood has taken the formula to the end of the line and has no where else to go but reflect upon its own better past. Personally, I feel we're approaching this all wrong. But what the fuck do I know.

Book: Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer

One of the better true life spy books told from the trenches.

Film: You People

Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny? This movie is almost too easy to make fun of, so I won't. Kenya Barris does have one great skill - finding rando funny middle aged black dudes I've never seen and put them in killer side roles. He and David Simon should work together. David Simon excels at casting middle aged white dudes in hyperreal tv dramas. They need to combine forces and bring this country together. 

Film: Haider 

Only started it, but will complete. An Indian-Muslim Hamlet adaptation and the best one I've seen...

Film: The Bad Sleep Well

Kurosawa's Hamlet adaptation set in the noirish atmosphere of postwar Japanese business - off to a slow start. 

Seriously, WTF--

James Bond being rewritten as well. 

Not a spy author alive who can hold a candle to Fleming. Books are considerably better than you would think.

DEI and Equity

I could be down with DEI and "equity" goals if white liberals who support DEI and equity are the first ones who give up their jobs for more diverse candidates.  

Lab Leak - Good F---ing Lord

Listening to Andrew Sullivan podcast on the matter. Just a few factual tidbits to throw out that have been systemically silenced over the past couple years:

-Beijing virus labs had 4 incidents of SARS-1 virus's escaping from the lab in the past. Basically, lab escape is not what we would call rare. 

-Wuhan institute had level 2 virus security (whereas US labs working with coronavirus had level 3 security). Level 4 is the highest. Level 2 is similar to the security of a dentist office with more signage. 

-The r-protein in COVID cannot be found in any other related coronaviruses that exist in animals. Usually with animal transmission, it takes several jumps and iterations until the virus finds itself working on humans. 

-And in case everyone forgot, the initial outbreak of COVID happened in Wuhan where they were studying and working on corona-fucking-viruses!!!!

Welcome to America, Prince Harry

South Park still has it.

I wonder if Larry David, Dave Chapelle, Trey, and Matt are behind the woke movement to protect themselves from any upcoming comedic rivals from every existing.

Michelle Yeoh 

She is straight up better looking now than when she starred in that Bond film 20+ years ago.

That said, I didn't all that much care for the movie...

WOW

NY Times stands up the cry bullies. 

What is this, 2015 all of sudden again?

Teen Girl Mental Health

Heard this stat on Derek Thompson-Bill Simmons talk: massive uptick in teen girl depression over the last several years. 

Have we look into the possibility that all these "girls" were really just boys born into girl bodies? I really think that would explain this. 

Women In Their Prime

Don Lemon seems to think google should be the arbiter of what he thinks and says. Inadvertently revealing his total and complete vacuousness. I feel like AI could replace Don Lemon very easily within the next year or so.   

Nuremberg Trials

These doctors who pushed medical transitions on skeptical parents are going to need to answer for Santino.

For all sane people out there: these doctors are obviously incentivized to push this stuff. They are annuity salesmen. They have hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical school debts, mortgages, and car payments. Parents...the answer is no. 

Communist Lunch Lesson

This 4th grade teacher trying to teach communism via confiscating her students lunches and redistributing them.

This is wonderful! Within 1-2 days students realize the system is unfair. Within a week, none of them will be bringing in any lunch at all. 

Inadvertently a great teacher! 

UPDATE: This appears to be satire. I was fooled by watching with sound off.

Bring Back Booing

The appropriate response to a land acknowledgement in any forum is to boo. 

Mass Shooting

Every time the media "profiles" a new mass shooter, telling his story (it's always a his), they are basically guaranteeing another one. 

Logging

Film: Banshees of Inisherin

Better on a 2nd watch. Maybe a tad subtle for the theater going experience...if that makes sense. The best moment in the film is when the character established as an idiot (much dimmer than Colin Farrell) played by Barry Keoghan says "touche" and Colin Farrell is like "what?" Only to have the idiot say, "You know, French..." And the exchange of a look with his sister over his self realization the idiot is smarter than him in some ways...well, it's not exactly Bruce Willis pulling the samurai sword off the wall or the T Rex eating the velociraptor is my point.

So on second watch, to me a very obvious subtextual reading of the film was that none of these characters had children and their despair was in some way rooted in this condition. 

Does anyone think Brenden Gleeson's song will be any good? Me either...

DEI

Not even sure what the debate is about anymore, but if DEI completely disappeared from the earth tomorrow, I imagine very little would change. Which is an argument for getting rid of it. The best argument for keeping it is to keep a bunch of worthless people employed rather than homeless. 

UPDATE: Although, I think a more productive and healthy use of time would be to pay people to dig holes and them fill them back up. At least that would improve upper body strength.

Related Parental Thought

I don't care if my kid loves baseball, but I will make sure he can catch one. 

Pessimistic Thought

The only thing less useful than screenwriting advice is screenwriting career advice. 

Fashion

I take my big fashion swings in choices of socks. 

Parent Thought 4876

Prior to being a parent of reading aged children, I thought it would be great to cultivate a love of reading. Now, I don't care if they love it or not (that's their choice), but only that they can do it. 

Other belief: any child aged 4-5 can learn to read. It might be really tough, though.

Other belief: you cannot trust your school to teach your child to read. 

Bari Weiss podcast on the subject here.

Related thought: parental energy better spent teaching concrete skills, knowledge, and values than attempts to cultivate passions. 

Rotten Tomatoes

When I see a highly rated TV show on Rotten Tomatoes it makes me want to watch it less. Is that a criticism of myself? Rotten Tomatoes? TV? Or the TV audience?

Logging

Film: My Best Friend's Wedding

Dermot Mulroney or Dylan McDermott? 

Film: Easy A

Bad bad bad...full of snark, lacking wit, humor dated 5 minutes after they filmed it... turned off after act 1.

Film: Pump up the Volume

Brought back memories...

The Best Arguments Against Anti-Woke

Anti-wokeness is picking up steam (thank God). On an anecdotal note, I've started to notice fewer (he/she/him) tags on email and zoom IDs lately. And then there are the articles in Compact and The Atlantic, etc. All good all good. But don't count wokeness out. We should treat the thing like Michael Myers, capable of rising from the dead at any moment. It's proven itself resilient and able to capture a ton of seemingly rational people. 

All that said, I'm sympathetic to one argument against the anti-woke crusaders and that is: why pick this battle? Wokeness has a basic, inarguable point: the system ain't fair. Isn't this basically true? Why focus on the excesses when there are such larger problems: inequality, corporate greed, environmental destruction, etc. 

A fair point. But here's the thing: isn't this argument better leveled against the woke instead of the anti-woke?

I'm 100% willing to believe that both wokeness and anti-wokeness are a distraction engineered by the masters of the universe to keep middle management and lower management from looking upwards at the thieves who rule society. But if this were the case, why do the anti-woke skeptical focus their energy on criticizing the anti-woke? See where I'm going with this? Basically, this makes me think the anti-anti-woke deliberately tolerate the nutcases and refuse to side with the anti-woke because they think the anti-woke should join the woke coalition. And they think this somehow will better take on the masters of the universe. I'm skeptical. You want to take on the masters of the universe, you gotta be in the moral and epistemological right. Can't fake it. 

Roseanne

What they did to her was a witch hunt plain and simple. They tried to destroy her just like the McCarthyites. People don't change. 

How They Silence You

Not through guns but incredulity. 

The Left is so incoherent, they cannot accept basic realities of the subjects they want to discuss: unequal outcomes along racial lines. The two most probable explanations are cultural or biological, but one cannot talk about either of those. So that leaves the mystical: the systemic boogie man (whiteness) that causes all unequal outcomes. If they were able to think any number of steps ahead, you might grasp the logical conclusion to their concerns will be some form of segregation (the prior boogie man, if you've bothered to read any American history).

Are They Wrong?

When govt made DUI illegal. 

Parent Tip 1021

Re-learn the word "no" and use it a lot.

From Andrew Sullivan/Wesley Yang:

I felt clearer and clearer that my older son was not transgender, and that we were responsible for leading him down that path by mistake. On the other hand, I worried that if he was actually transgender, I would do great damage to him by reversing the social transition. This period of time was deeply agonizing, and was marked by incredible despair. 

Somehow, my partner and I came to clarity that the deeper truth for our son was that he was not actually a transgender girl, but rather a highly sensitive, likely autistic boy who was born into this world without a skin, and for whom the structure of certainty the girl identity provided him was a type of protection, or defense. It also provided him a way of attaching to me through sameness, a primal need for his security in the world. We decided that since we were the ones who led him on this path, we were the ones that needed to lead him off if it.

The unspoken thing - parents abandon simple common sense and what they know to be true because they are scared to say "no." When their little boy said to them "I want to be a girl" the right response would've been to say with all the love in the world: no. You aren't a girl, you are a boy. Within an hour, I'd bet the child would've moved on. Instead, the parents constructed for themselves a family drama that spanned years. 

Small, but related example: I got fed up with my kids yesterday for not listening, being annoying about not wanting to wear a certain shirt, typical kid BS so I laid down a new, simple to understand law: no more iPad. Not for today, not for the weekend: there would be simply no more iPad at all until they got better at listening. Four things happened within an hour and for the rest of the day: 1) They asked to go outside to play 2) They listened better and did not talk back 3) They were perfectly happy - if not happier - than their usual selves. 4) They invented a new game/activity. 

Kids need structure and boundaries. And if you don't provide it, they will find it elsewhere.

Logging

Film: American Pie 

It felt like watching a dream from a past life. Wonderful experience. America was indeed quite a lot of fun during this era. And no, I'm not offering any qualifiers about that statement. Those who want or need one can fuck the right off. 

Film: Hopscotch

Can't believe I hadn't seen this before. A perfect companion to Charley Varrick and Bad News Bears. You might be able to tell something about a guy over which of those three films he prefers (or perhaps relates to). And old Walter Matthau as a dude who slays has got to be got one of the most hilarious elements of late 70s cinema. 

Logging

Film: Kidnap Syndicate (1975)

The last of the Di Leo films on Criterion. Felt like Di Leo saw High and Low and did his own riff. What's great about these films - they all really do have quite different plots and types of lead characters - but share a similar sensibility, style, and certain way of telling a story, ie many POVs. 

Prestige TV

Is the new Sundance movie. The Last of Us the latest example - a branded exercise of insincere, unfelt drama. But worst thing: it lacks wit.

Taiwan

Beyond culture and pride, China views Taiwan as a geographical key to controlling the "first island chain." 

Controlling Taiwan means controlling the sea lanes in Asia, meaning China has permanent leverage over their historical rival/enemy: Japan. With the additional plus of having control/leverage over the Philippines and Vietnam. It sounds to me like the strategy of controlling Australia in Risk. By holding that little single territory, you don't need much to defend it and it provides you a permanent structural advantage (in Risk, 2 extra armies per turn).

The discussion around Taiwan often centers on Taiwan-China and China-USA. But I wonder how Japan views the issue. Maybe they feel it isn't worth a war with China over, and they could simply sail longer or alternative trade routes. But I can't imagine they would just sit on their hands...after all, after Taiwan, they have the most to lose. And unlike Taiwan, they can compete with China with size, money, etc.