Month: July 2015

Life Lessons from the Kansas City Royals

“You either give or you suck. There is no in between.” — Kansas City Royals’ first-base coach Rusty Kuntz, quoted by Sam Mellinger in this Kansas City Star[*1] story.

Do you give, or do you suck?

If your “giving” consists of sucking from others rather than generating your own energy, power, resources, money, and life, I have news for you. That is not giving. That is sucking.

If you spend all of your time and resources donating to “social justice,” “equality,” “human rights,” “racial reparations,” “green environment,” or other, similar movements designed to take from Peter to pay Paul, then I have news for you. You are not giving. You are sucking. You are sucking time, energy, and resources from your fellow human beings to feed your own sense of self-importance and self-worth. You are a vampire, not a social justice crusader.

It is not a virtue to be generous with other people’s money.

America today is filled with suckers, and the givers are starting to get really, really tired of the games the suckers play.

There is only one way to true success: hard work, personal commitment, personal integrity, perseverance, all combined with a true respect for all others.

A common feature of so many of the “social justice” causes infesting our culture today is their very lack of respect for a certain, identified person or group which must be separated out from society, isolated, shamed, demeaned, or destroyed. The person or group to be vilified varies somewhat, but we see a particularly virulent strain of this in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. To these people, the mere suggestion that perhaps all lives matter, not just black lives, brings a visceral, vicious response.

Even something as trivial as a science fiction writing award has come to represent this same pattern. The group in power, when challenged to open up the selection process, responded with some of the most vicious, slanderous rhetoric you can imagine towards the reformers.

Power corrupts, Lord Acton wrote, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today, the “social justice” campaigners are in power in almost every segment of our society: government, education, media. Represented best by their elder states-woman, Hillary Clinton, they have discovered the profitability of corruption when in power. We don’t even blink any more when Obama shovels billions of dollars of other people’s money to political cronies while calling it “green energy” or “health care.” This is the “power of suck” in full operation.

Our society is corrupt. From top to bottom. Too many ordinary people today only care about “giving” as a way to suck the lifeblood out of their neighbors.

The good news is that this can’t last forever. At some point, the suckers will have taken all that the givers have to give. The bad news is that at that point, civilization will likely collapse. There is time to avoid that, but in order to do so, people have to fight the urge to take. History indicates that this is rare, and usually a result of some catastrophe. Something to look forward to, isn’t it?

“Gun-Free Zones”

“Gun-Free Zones” kill people.

This is because criminals and psychopaths don’t give a damn about some sign on a door or a lawn proclaiming an office, a building, a park, or a campus to be “gun-free.”

Because criminals and psychopaths don’t give a damn about laws and rules, just generally.

What does get their attention is the capability of their prospective victims to return fire, to put the criminals’ and psychopaths’ own safety at serious, imminent, and immediate risk. Criminals and psychopaths may be evil, but they are not that stupid.

On the other hand, a sign proclaiming a “gun-free zone” is nothing more than a big, flashing neon sign saying to those who are so inclined to “come victimize us, we won’t fight back.” Almost all of the mass shootings which have occurred in the developed world over the past couple of decades have occurred in areas which have been decreed to be “gun-free.” Somehow, the perpetrators of the shootings missed the memo saying that they have to obey the “gun-free zone” sign.

Because criminals don’t give a damn about rules and laws, and because they prevent otherwise law-abiding people from a crucial self-defense tool (i.e. a firearm), “Gun-free zones” are deeply, profoundly immoral. They are the moral equivalent of telling people that they can not wear coats and warm shoes on a cold winter day. Mass shootings result from firearm bans as surely as frostbite results from prolonged exposure of human skin to sub-freezing temperatures.

The only move for a prudent society is to protect its members from the effects of predictable phenomena.

Freezing temperatures happen. So do criminals and psychopaths. Wishing either of them away is equally delusional.

It is not guns which should be banned. It is “gun-free zones,” and the mentality of wishing away the most unpleasant aspects of predictable human nature.

What came first?

Climate Scientists Face Psychological Problems[*1]

Or is hysteria about “climate change” (or whatever “extreme weather” or whatever the ever-changing scare-word for the ever-changing weather and climate is this week) itself a marker of mental illness?

When science becomes religion (i.e. saying things like “the science is settled” and invoking nonsense like “the precautionary principle”) then science ceases to be science. Science is the very definition of constant, rigorous doubt in, and testing of, one’s own observations, theories, judgments, conclusions.

Religion is faith.

Fanatical religion is faith combined with an unwillingness to even consider any alternatives to the received dogmas and doctrines.

The extreme alarmists among climate “scientists” are not practicing science. They are acting like priests of a religion of mysteries. They might as well be wearing miters and swinging braziers of burning incense, invoking the gods of computer models and the mysteries of highly complex, poorly understood non-linear fluid dynamics to terrify the masses who do not speak the Latin of Science-ese. They worship not science, but power.