Not-So-OK Boomer

Classical Liberal, Partly Paleo, No Solicitors. I write stuff.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

"You're just being weird," and "it's really that simple," are not a sign of someone who understands the historical purpose of the electoral college (that has not changed in the interim), or has even given it much thought. They are, in fact, the sign of someone who is simple. And poorly educated. Which, sadly, much of the nation is, thanks to the Marxists having taken over the educational system decades ago.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

As the saying goes, if you don't understand the purpose of the Electoral College, you're the reason.

[Just Facts @realjustfacts]

Pete Buttigieg claims that the Electoral College “makes no sense” and should be abolished because it is a remnant of “some very arcane, parochial politics in the 1770s.”

IN FACT, the Electoral College is a safeguard against mobocracy, which the authors of the Constitution rejected because it allows the majority to easily violate the rights of the minority. Here are the specifics:

• Early during the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was written, James Madison, the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, declared that the new government they were creating must provide “more effectually for the security of private rights and the steady dispensation of Justice.”

• He then stressed that violations of these ideals “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.”

• Madison then singled out “democracy” as the cause of those abuses and pointed out that all societies are “divided into different Sects, Factions, and interests,” and “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”

• Continuing, he stated that this is “verified by the histories of every country” and is the cause of slavery, “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”

• Thus, Madison emphasized that it was the duty of the Convention to “frame a republican system” of government that would better “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”

• Elaborating on that point, Madison stated that the “only defense against the inconveniencies of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government” is to “divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that in the first place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”

• Other delegates to the Convention concurred, like Edmund Randolph of Virginia, who observed “that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S. labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”

• For the purpose of curbing such evils, Madison and the other framers of the Constitution developed a system of checks and balances on the powers of the government that they formed, such as the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the Constitutional amendment process, the Bill of Rights, and the Electoral College.

• The Electoral College was designed to prevent heavily populated areas from dominating the election for president. As shown in the electoral precinct map from Washington State University professor Ryne Rohla, the vast majority of America’s communities voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet Hillary Clinton’s popular vote count was higher, mainly due to support in big cities.

• In essays explaining the Constitution’s protections against mob rule and government power, Madison wrote, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

• Those principles produced the U.S. Constitution, which is the world’s longest-standing written constitution and an exemplar for many other countries that have copied its provisions into their constitutions.

Hyperlinks to the sources of all the facts above are available at https://t.co/BrFCwQr6x5

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

It is not "that simple." The president is (s)elected by the states, for good reason. The voters vote for the House. We are not, and should not be, a democracy. The Founders knew that every democracy in history had failed, going back to Greece, and wanted to build a republic that could withstand mobs. You might want to read a little history.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@VRDanger Take it away and small states are powerless when it comes to electing a president.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

Welp, guess today isn't the day for a full recovery of an orbital system. Booster diverted to the Gulf. Maybe next time. But everything seems to be fine in orbit.

[Demiurgent🥃🖤 @tr0g]

That is an “I’m not going to jail for these people” statement.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Si t'es un prof de gauche, dans 10 ans tu seras au chômage. Pas parce qu'on va te virer. Parce que plus personne ne voudra de toi. Je t'explique pourquoi, et tu vas détester.

Pendant un siècle, l'école a eu une mission simple : fabriquer de bons exécutants. Apprendre la leçon. La réciter. Rendre la copie attendue. Lever la main avant de parler. Un dressage parfait pour le monde qui attendait les diplômés : le tertiaire, les open spaces, les PowerPoint, le corporate bullshit. On ne vous demandait pas de penser. On vous demandait d'être un bon petit soldat.

Un monde a fait sécession avec ça : les startups. Les meilleures boîtes ne recrutent pas des récitants, elles recrutent des libres penseurs. Des gens capables de prendre un savoir et d'en faire quelque chose qui n'existait pas. Parce qu'un problème nouveau, par définition, ça ne se résout pas par cœur. Ça demande de la pensée créative et de la pensée critique. Deux choses que l'école n'a jamais vraiment enseignées.

Et maintenant, l'IA arrive. L'IA est un exécutant parfait. Elle récite mieux que vous. Elle rend la copie attendue mieux que vous. Elle fait le PowerPoint mieux que vous. Tout ce que l'école a passé un siècle à vous apprendre, une machine le fait en trois secondes pour quelques centimes.

Ce qui reste à l'humain ? Penser hors de la boîte. Douter. Contredire. Créer. La synergie homme-IA que tout le monde dessine aujourd'hui ne marche que si l'humain apporte ce que la machine n'a pas : un regard libre.

C'est là que le problème devient explosif. Une grande partie de l'école ne forme plus des esprits libres. Elle forme des croyants. La pensée de gauche, telle qu'elle se pratique dans beaucoup de salles de classe et d'amphis, ne se vit pas comme une opinion parmi d'autres. Elle se vit comme LA vérité. Une doctrine, avec ses dogmes, ses hérétiques, ses mots interdits. Et une doctrine, c'est l'exact inverse de la pensée critique. On ne questionne pas un dogme, on le récite. Retour au bon petit soldat. Juste avec un autre uniforme.

Je ne suis pas inquiet pour les jeunes. Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop. Dès qu'ils rencontreront le réel, leurs premières fiches de paie, leur première boîte, ce qui marche et ce qui ne marche pas, ils arrêteront de croire au Père Noël. Ils se dégauchiseront tout seuls. Et ils en voudront énormément à ceux qui leur ont fait perdre des années précieuses.

Mais un pays ne peut pas attendre que chaque génération se déprogramme seule. Dans un monde où l'exécution ne vaut plus rien, une école qui fabrique des conformistes, c'est un pays qui signe son déclassement.

Donc oui, l'éducation va devoir être dégauchisée. Pas pour la remplacer par une autre idéologie. Pour la ramener à sa seule mission noble : apprendre à penser, pas quoi penser. Le prof qui fait lire Marx ET Hayek, qui pousse ses élèves à démonter ses propres convictions, c'est le prof le plus précieux du XXIe siècle. Le prof qui fait du militantisme devant des gamins de 15 ans commet une faute professionnelle. Et il n'a rien à faire devant une classe.

Je crois profondément au rôle du professeur. C'est justement pour ça que je refuse qu'on le transforme en prédicateur.

L'IA va exécuter. Les humains vont devoir penser. Le prof qui ne l'a pas compris n'a pas d'avenir.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Mutton disappeared from the British plate because of polyester, and hardly anybody who misses it knows that.

For about 700 years a sheep in this country was kept for its wool. The fleece paid the rent every summer, so nobody killed a good sheep young. A wether would give four or five clips before he went to the butcher, and by then he'd had four or five years on grass and the meat was dark, fat and tasted of something. Mutton was what was left over when a wool animal retired, and it happened to be the best meat in the country.

Wool mattered enough that the Lord Speaker still sits on a sack of it.

In 1941 two chemists in a calico printer's laboratory in Lancashire made a fibre out of oil. By the 1960s it was a drip-dry shirt, and it didn't need a shepherd.

The wool price never recovered. Today a hill fleece sells for less than the shearer charges to take it off, and there have been years when farmers burned the clip because the lorry to market cost more than it would fetch.

Once the fleece is worth nothing, every summer a sheep stays alive is a summer of grass with no income on it. So the trade shortened the animal. It's killed at five months now, before it has laid down much fat or much flavour, and sold as lamb at a premium for being young.

A petrochemical shirt changed the age of the animal in your oven.

And the shirt keeps costing. It sheds plastic into the water every time it's washed, while the fibre that rots back into a field inside a year gets composted behind a barn.

The chain runs backwards just as well. Somebody asks for mutton. A five-year-old ewe is worth something on the hook, so she's worth keeping. She gives five fleeces on the way, keeps a hill open that would otherwise go to bracken, and ends up as a shoulder with a proper cap of fat on it.

I get through about half a kilo of mutton most days. It browns darker than lamb and tastes like lamb with the volume turned up.

The story is that mutton died out because it was tough. A drip-dry shirt did it. Ask the butcher for the old sheep.

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

"Here’s the thing: if a faith cannot survive a mordant Frenchman calling it silly without going crying to the courts, then the problem is the faith, not those who mock it. Religion of Peace? More like the Religion of Perpetual Umbrage."

well said, Brendan O'Neill

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

Democrats may love "America," but it's very clear that they hate the United States of America, because their position is that the Senate should not exist in its current form of two senators per state, and that the Electoral College, which ensures that states, not people, elect the president, should not exist. In other words, they hate the concept of states, period, and wish they would simply go away. They want only a massive federal government, with no ability to escape local tyranny by moving to another part of the country.

[Wokal Distance @wokal_distance]

Maturity is realizing the beauty industry doesn't exist because of the patriarchy.

It exists because a lot of women are in an intra-sexual war with one another and the make-up and cosmetics industry is just playing the role of an arms dealer.

[Farai Mazhindu @FaraiMazhindu]

The chaos in El Salvador before Bukele was never an accident, and the chaos in Haiti today is not an accident either.

The media told you that the gangs were just poor boys who went bad on their own, but that story falls apart the moment you ask one simple question.

Where does a poor sixteen year old boy living in a slum with no job and no money get an AK-47 and an AR-15 and a Glock and thousands of rounds of ammunition, and where does he get a brand new Toyota Hilux and motorcycles and speedboats and drones and encrypted phones and bulletproof vests and night vision goggles, and who pays his monthly salary and pays for his safe house and pays his lawyer when he is arrested and pays the police and the judge and the prison guard to look the other way, and who pays his family when he dies?

A poor boy cannot afford even one bullet, so someone else is paying for all of it.

That someone is the multimillionaires and the billionaires and the wealthy entities who profit from chaos, because chaos is a business and a broken country is the most profitable business in the world.

When a country is in chaos its land becomes cheap so they can buy it, its gold and its drugs and its resources can be stolen without anyone asking questions, its government becomes weak so they can control it, and its people become so scared that they obey anyone who promises them a little safety.

In El Salvador the gangs were not fighting the system, the gangs were the system, paid to keep the poor terrorized so the poor would never rise up and demand a better country.

In Haiti it is the same story, the gangs are not independent, they are funded and armed and protected by rich families and foreign businessmen and foreign NGOs who want Haiti to stay weak so they can keep stealing its ports and its gold and its labour.

And when a man like Bukele comes and says I will lock up all the gangs and end this in two years, who attacks him? It is the same people.

The same billionaires who fund the gangs fund the media that calls Bukele a dictator, the same wealthy entities who arm the gangs fund the NGOs that cry human rights for murderers, the same people who profit from chaos fund the political voices that hate real help in Haiti and sabotage anyone who is actually capable of doing it.

Look at the pattern and it becomes clear, when a gang kills a hundred innocent people there is silence, but when a leader kills a hundred gang members there is outrage.

When a gang rapes children there is no campaign, but when Bukele locks up rapists there is a global campaign against him.

That is because the media is not independent, it is owned by billionaires, the NGOs are not independent, they are funded by billionaires, and the politicians are not independent, they are bought by billionaires.

They do not want Haiti saved and they did not want El Salvador saved, they want them broken, because a broken country is cheap to buy and easy to control.

Bukele exposed them, he proved that gangs can be destroyed in months if you have the will, and that terrified them, because if El Salvador can be fixed then Haiti can be fixed, and if Haiti can be fixed then Africa can be fixed, and if Africa can be fixed then the billionaires lose their business.

That is why they demonize Bukele, that is why they sabotage Haiti, that is why they hate any man who actually helps the poor.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@StephenFleming @GMFWashington And then destroy the wealth, because he doesn't understand how it's created.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@IMAO_ You are not allowed to like that movie that you've never seen, you RACIST!

[Frank J. Fleming @IMAO_]

That has to be the most famous song from a movie you’re not allowed to see. Growing up, it was one of Disney’s most famous songs, but the movie it was from was basically banned before I was born.

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

A UK startup “Space Solar” is attempting to make space based solar power - giant solar plants in orbit beaming their energy down to earth with microwaves - commercially viable.

They have a modular design which requires no large moving parts, and hope to launch a small demonstrator in the next few years.

I’ve interviewed the founder and done my own analysis of the claims: https://t.co/YedpTwamwY

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@JaneNightshade Does that distinguish him in any way from any other Biden appointee?

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@PamphleteerNow @brivael The hed was that he resigned. Maybe there was pressure to do so by the board, but I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are.

[E__Strobel @E__Strobel]

Ship 42... so of COURSE this is the name she'd have.

[Not-So-OK Boomer @Rand_Simberg]

@IMAO_ They can't be both?