Aphoristic Granularity, or Perhaps Granular Aphorisity. It’s hard to Tell

“Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out.” ~

“Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one’s own suckering.” ~

The Column Racket Explained: A political columnist  should choose a place on the Left-Right spectrum. It doesn’t matter which. He needn’t believe it but should never deviate from it.  Readers do not want intelligence or original thought. They want affirmation, to be told what they already think over.  and over.

Editors want predictability, not thought or insight. An editor’s nightmare is to wake up every morning and think, “Oh God, what the hell has Reed said now, and how much will the lawyers cost?”   Consequently they want slot-columnists: The tame white conservative male, the black female mildly racist woman, the white liberal male, and so on. Predictability, predictability, predictability.

“Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy–Analects of Confucius

Politics compressed: At their purest, conservatives are heartless and liberals, goofy. Conservatives don’t want to pay for anything for anybody else, and liberals want to pay for  everything for everybody else. Conservatives see enemies where there are none; liberals don’t see enemies where there are.

Countries deserve what they tolerate (may God preserve us). Left and Right are twin halves of a national lobotomy serving to forestall governance.  I need a drink.

When someone tells me that ‘the Almighty told me to do this’, I want to see the transcript.” ~

America  begins its wars by overestimating itself, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war it is entering. This explains a lot.

More on the public prints: In political discourse, avoid the highbrow. Americans resent intelligence. They are unlikely, if under thirty, to know anything they didn’t learn from Ticktock. Don’t confuse them.

More on journalism: A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A reporter should know the difference.

Justice, nakedly: In every criminal trial, either the defense tries to keep a guilty criminal on the street, or the prosecution tries to put an innocent man in prison. There no exceptions. The two sides resemble dogs fighting over a bone. The biggest dog wins.

On Liberal Politics: There is no more satisfying display of one’s virtue than public repentance for one’s sins. It is not necessary actually to have committed the sins.

“The US no longer does decisions. It can neither stop the drug traffic nor legalize it. It can neither win wars nor abandon them, neither make money nor stop spending it, neither stop immigration nor assimilate the immigrants. Washington can beat its thumb with a hammer, yes, and notice that it hurts, but it can’t stop beating its thumb. That would take a decision, and Washington doesn’t do decisions.”

Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum.” Ambrose Bierce said, “Cogito cogito, ergo cogito su. Cogito.”” Much more profound.

When a politician says,   “the American people,” or, worse, the American Dream, put your hand on your wallet and send for a  rope. There is no greater sign of contempt for the populace.

Dictionary: “Unacceptable. ” Acceptable.  said to indicate something that is being accepted. It implies moral firmness on the part of the speaker while presaging nothing.

Defense: Offense.  Indicates capacity for armed attack on another country to get its natural resources ,or a transfer of money to the arms industry mediated by bribes. These transfers bear no relation to defense of anything. The last time the armed forces defended America was inn 1945 or, arguably, 1812.

The Left: Does not exist in America, except for three late adolescents in a basement in Brooklyn. Traditionally the Left was the party of the working men, but the pseudo-Left now calls these”deplorables.}” It was against war, as this led to the death of working men, but today the alleged Left traipse around with Ukrainian flags. The “Left” is in fact a form of class snobbery against what it sees as yokel America.

MilliHelen–that amount of beauty necessary to launch one ship.

“Kids esteem themselves when they have accomplished something worth esteeming.This thought could turn the field of adolescent psychology into housing lots.

Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production belong to the government. America is an economic system in which the government belongs to the means of production.

Supreme Court:  An auxiliary legislature of last resort.  Sometimes regarded as having to do with constitutionality, though there is little evidence for this.

United Nations:  An international organization having no discernible purpose. It serves as a venue for laudable speeches to which no one listens by countries which have no power.

War crime: Military behavior as usual when discovered by a reporter.

International law:  A phrase invoked to indicate the speaker’s piety without requiring action. Law if not enforced  means nothing. By tradition, it isn’t.

“In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society.”

Religion clarified: A Methodist is a Baptist with shoes. A Presbyterian is a Methodist with a Buick. An Anglican is a Presbyterian with a stock portfolio. A Unitarian is a Democrat who believes that God is a force for community betterment.

“Wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power.”  They have the minds of twelve-year-olds and the hormones of adults. May the saints preserve us.

Politics: People know when they are cold, wet, hungry, or scared. Most know little else. Polls reveal that large majorities cannot name the branches of government, can barely read, and even think that the sun revolves around the earth.  Politicians competitively shoo them in desired directions as if herding hamsters, which is how they view the electorate.

The Theory of Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.”

Fear is the best incitement, so tell  the electorate that something bad is coming to get the, the Russians or Chinese or almost anything frightening. Then increase the budget.

“The proper response toward what we occasionally imagine to be democracy, methinks, is to retain one’s self-respect by not participating in it.”

Women are realists pretending to be romantics. Men are romantics pretending to be realists, especially true of military men, who resemble Boy Scouts with scary hormones. It shows.

Democracy: First control what people know and then give them all the democracy they want.

Ignorance:  The normal state of humanity. Washington is a conspiracy to conceal ignorance. Knowing things requires time and effort better spent in running for reelection and soliciting bribes.  Reporters ask a senator, “What should be our policy on Afghanistan,” not “Do you have the slightest idea where Afghanistan is?”  The Senator replies, “Well, i think we need to support the Afghan freedom fighters in their struggle for democracy and to overcome the communist threat.” This disguises the fact that he doesn’t know where Afghanistan is and does not remind the public that they don’t know either.

“Though the Floundering Fathers didn’t intend it, we now see that representative government quickly turns into the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you doubt this, I congratulate you on not having a television.” ~ Fred Reed

The public will is often determined by the idiotic question, “Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?”  To know the direction in which the country is headed requires  familiarity with the behavior of tectonic plates, a familiarity few have. There is no hope. But, with tectonic plates, neither is there much hurry.

A working democracy  depends on limitation of choice. Ask the electorate whether  it would prefer universal medical care or an intercontinental nuclear bomber; decent schools or a goiterous military empire in countries nobody has heard of; or affordable houses for the young or tax breaks for billionaires, and they will tell you. Consequently these questions are kept off ballots.

Political  thought consists ninety percent of emotion and ten percent of misinformation. In fairness, in some cases the reverse is true.

Abraham Lincoln said that “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”  Being a politician, he did not add that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, and that is enough.” This is the bedrock of democratic  governance.

“I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.”

Military stupidity comes in three varieties: normally stupid; really, really stupid; and invading Russia. We should keep this in mind.

No government wants democracy. Thus they expend immense resources to convince the public that they already have it. This prevents attempts to get it.  Willy Bill selling fan belts at the NAPA outlet  in East Needle, Nebraska is easy prey for infinitely computerized social media run by smart people who    spend their lives at manipulation.  What passes for electoral democracy  is political ping pong between two parties equal in their contempt for a public they regard as equivalent to gerbils.

Donald Trump is the first President to combine fascism with daffiness.

American foreign policy fails because it is  made by people who have no idea what they are doing. A friend, a former senator, once estimated to me that ninety percent of the Senate don’t know where Myan Mar is. On the House China committee there is no one who reads, writes, or speaks Chinese, or has an academic degree in East Asia studies. The forty members of the House Science committee include one real scientist, a particle physicist out of Harvard,  and two medical doctors. The Current President confuses Azerbaijan with Albania. Ask the Senate, charged with making foreign policy, what countries border on Iran, which they want to bomb.

“Without men, civilization would last until the oil needed changing.” ~ Fred Reed

Most people derive their ideology from the world. Zealots derive the world from their ideology. The ideology is static, so they never learn anything they don’t want to know.

“Those who wash regularly should not stoop to democracy.”d

…Democracy  selects as leaders those least fit to lead. To be elected one must lie, cozen, and swindle, the degree of mastery  of these arts increasing with progress to higher office. Thus we are ruled by unprincipled provincial lawyers selected in popularity contests. We could do better by choosing men sleeping under park benches. If they remained asleep, this would be even better.

On human understanding: No confirmed reports. The wisest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.

There you have it, everything worth knowing about the wrkings of the country. There is no  more to be learned. I expect that across America whole university departments of poly sci will close in despair, and most sociologists will take poison. At least we can hope.