25 Friday Apr 2025
(A play in one act).
Dogs don’t always immediately choose the right path. But they are willing to work together; to change direction; to admit their mistakes; and they hardly ever blame others for their own mistakes.
21 Monday Apr 2025
Posted in America, apocalypse, essay, politics, psychology, Travel
Tags
Typically, most of us think of friends as those who will stand by you through thick and thin. Sometimes, this means that they’re willing to encourage you when you’re down.
To me, a friend is also someone who is willing to give you frank feedback when you’re failing or making a mistake. If I’m doing something counter-productive or wrong, I’d generally like to know. A complement is okay, but I prefer sincere ones. To me, it would be demeaning for someone to lie about my accomplishments or abilities—demeaning to the person who gives such a false complement and demeaning to me as well.
It’s always struck me as an extremely nasty thing to give someone falsely flattering feedback. Of course, if you’re teaching a two year old to bat a ball—or, as I was doing a short time ago—encouraging our puppy to learn to swim—then you set your criterion for “success” fairly low. You don’t expect a two year old to grab a 38” bat, face a major league pitcher and hit a home run into the third deck of Yankee Stadium. You don’t expect a puppy to swim across the English Channel. You have to shape exceptional skill by rewarding behavior. You do it by beginning to reward any behavior that is “in the right direction.” At first, any contact a toddler makes when swinging a bat at a ball is rewarded. A puppy just learning to swim is initially rewarded even for going a few feet.
As a child matures physically and intellectually and learns a skill, you can give more instructive and more measured feedback. For instance, if a kid is learning to hit a baseball, you might give feedback about how solidly they’ve hit the ball. Soon, they’ll be capable of knowing that for themselves. They will see their hit pop up or trickle along the ground or instead streak away in a line drive. Eventually, after seeing many grounders, pop-ups, and line drives, they will know from the “feel” of the bat whether they’ve made solid contact.
Generally, if a person gets accurate feedback from others, they will learn to provide accurate feedback to themselves. If someone keeps doing badly but getting a “pass” constantly, or worse, having people flatter them when they’re doing badly, they’ll become disconnected from reality. This can happen, for instance, to a rich or influential person. The flatterers don’t do it to be kind. They do it to “get on the good side” of someone who is susceptible to such false feedback.
To me, telling an adult their performance is stellar when it actually stinks is typically not a kindness but an evil deed. Understand: I’m not using the word ‘evil’ to mean ‘counter-productive’ or ‘sub-optimal.’ I using the word ‘evil’ because I mean ‘evil.’
One result is that the person’s performance may not improve. Someone who might have become a decent hitter, or tennis player, or swimmer instead stays forever mediocre. What’s worse is that the person may decide to attempt to become a professional baseball player or tennis player when that will be a costly error.
If the flattered person is in some kind of position of authority, the result may be even worse. A police officer, manager, executive, teacher, or political figure who is doing a terrible job but being told they’re doing a great job is not only preventing them from reaching their own potential. They are harming others as well. And, the person giving such false feedback is also harming themselves, their friends, and their families. If they do it enough, they will not learn to look carefully at the behavior or others and give useful feedback. Eventually, they too become disconnected from reality.
Flattery is evil in business in that it’s a misdirection of effort based on lies. Flattery is evil in sports for the same reason. Art? Same. Music? Same. Parents flattering their kids does not build self-confidence. It builds false confidence, making them believe they can do more than they can; that they are expected to do more than they can. Eventually, when the child receives honest feedback from physical reality or from folks that don’t have any reason to flatter, they’ll feel worse than if they had had more honest feedback all along.
The most egregious form of fake flattery, however, occurs in dick-tater-$hits. When the autocrat takes cruel, destructive, or stupid actions, that autocrat is told by a circle of sycophants that his evil actions are wonderful, brilliant, magnanimous, etc. This devalues the person who says it; they lose all credibility. It is also a disservice to the person whose a$$ they are kissing. They are training him up to be even more evil and stupid. It is also a disservice to the very nature of humanity. The one thing we humans have going for us is our ability to coordinate and cooperate on very large scale projects. In order for that to work, we need to communicate. We need to communicate our wishes, our plans, the current state of progress, mistakes, ideas for how to fix them, and what we have learned. If everything we say is a lie, we create nothing. We provide no value. None.
True enough, parasites can live for a time off of the value that previous generations built. But once trust and honesty are destroyed, and the truth means nothing, we are no better than beasts except that we’re less hardy. A tribe of humans used to take down a mammoth. But even a much larger horde of humans, lying about what they are doing and looking out only for themselves? If our ancestors had acted like modern day dick-taters, humanity would not have survived.
Flattering your friend and fawning over them is not, in fact, friendship. It is freaky and frankly disgusting. It’s disgusting that anyone would find such behavior pleasurable. It’s disgusting that anyone would demand it. And it’s disgusting that anyone would engage in such false flattery.
Whatever your sensibilities of the aesthetics of human relations, however, such behavior is economically ruinous. It is antithetical to learning, to science, to progress, to improvement in the human condition.
In a word, it is evil.
In a word, it is cancer.
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20 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in poetry, psychology
We won the war!
We won the war!
Their flag we tore!
We evened the score!
The bugler toots!
The hooter hoots!
We destroyed the Other!
Avenged sad mother!
We ruined their crops!
We severed their tops!
It’s all so great!
We feel so fine!
Congratulate!
We’re nearly divine!
The hooter hoots!
The bugler toots!
We’re all so brave!
We screamed our rave!
We killed them dead!
Left others unfed!
Our deeds were bold.
We left them cold.
The soldiers who died.
And civilians who tried
But failed to find a good place to hide.
So what else could we do but kill them too?
And, now, we come home at last to find
The promised dividend of victory, it seems,
Was not at all a peace of mind.
Instead a sleep of nightmare dreams.
The hell they say is war doesn’t seem to end.
It seems instead to seep around every bend.
I would listen again to that big brass band
I would heed again the call throughout the land.
But the bugles of the brass got rusted.
And the leaders whom we trusted
Turned out to be but bubbles busted.
I will dance away my last regret.
But my legs are no legs. I mustn’t forget.
Still we killed them in bunches so that’s a great thing.
That at least is something we can sing
About. At least, you see, we won the war.
So, there’s that. Those of us still alive
Can say definitely and with no hesitation
That our nation benefited because we won the war.
Don’t you see? We won the war.
And though the rich amassed more riches
And the land got bombed to muddy ditches.
We won the war.
We won the war.
Most definitely.
Don’t you see?
We won the war.
Our finest hour
When we called for power
Over truth so we could make the richest richer.
And he could brag about the gold.
Even if we shiver in the cold.
Even if we wear but worn-out tatter
It doesn’t matter
Because so does our enemy
Who suffers even worse than we
We who won the victory
And we have twice as many moldy crusts of bread
As we would have had if we’d lost instead.
So
We won the war.
We won the war..
So…?
——————-
How the Nightingale Learned to Sing
17 Thursday Apr 2025
Posted in America, management
“But Mommy! I thought eating all the cookies would make you happy! You were happy when I ate all my dinner last night!”
“But Daddy! I thought it would be good to teach kitty how to breathe under water! Fish breathe under water!”
“But Mommy! I thought it would help the flowers on the carpet grow if I pooped all over them! Grandpa said farmers use poop to help flowers grow!”
“But Daddy! I thought it would toughen up my little brother if I hit him with a baseball bat. He’s was so soft and he wanted to play with us big boys!”
You wouldn’t accept such lame excuses from your own kids nor from anyone else’s.
Why does the mainstream media—whether left, right, and middle—keep repeating equally stupid excuses for the Putin Misadministration’s continuing crusade to destroy America?
We have a Misadministration who has failed to fill many important positions and those who have filled positions mainly lied during their confirmation hearings. Lies. Lies. Lies.
Competent military leaders with years of experience and with real loyalty to America and its Constitution have been replaced.
The same goes for our Intelligence agencies.
The same goes for our State Department.
The Misadministration has sent a team of hackers into the heart and brain of every important government function in order to gather personal data and hamstring the functions that provide important benefits which we, the taxpayers, have paid for.
The Putin Misadministration has destroyed our longest, strongest alliances for nothing but sided with the world’s worst dictators.
The Putin Misadministration has destroyed our economy, started trade wars, destroyed effective supply chains, and totally failed to fulfill pre-election promises to lower the costs for Americans. The only benefits are that the seemingly random fluctuations in policy allowed the greediest people on the planet to benefit from insider trading.
The Putin Misadministration laughs at the Constitution. Other than that, it ignores it.
All of this and more has been reported by the press.
Cool.
But every time, they also report on the “rationale” which is no rationale at all. It is nothing more than a pack of inconsistent and illogical lies no more coherent or thoughtful than the lies of a sociopathic child. The lies are not news. Media: stop reporting them.
Readers: do not pay attention to the lies. Pay attention to what the hell is happening. And, if you’re part of the mainstream media, please do not repeat and report on the idiotic rationalizations as though they are news. It’s not news that a con man cons. It’s not news that a convicted felon lies.
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E-Fishiness Comes to Mass General Hospital
Silent Screams of Dead Men’s Dreams
Destroying Natural Intelligence
Increased E-Fishiness in Government
Running with the Bulls in a China Shop
04 Friday Apr 2025
Posted in America, apocalypse, politics
Consistently ranked as one of the top ten Hospitals in America, this week, Massachusetts General Hospital was lucky enough to be visited by a crack team of hacker-jackers to improve the efficiency of the hospital. And, boy did they!! Pull up a chair and throw a log on the campfire, boys and girls. You’ll be amazed at how much money they saved!
And by “saved” I mean “saved from going into stupid, unglamorous things like bedpans and surgical masks and instead being funneled into the pockets of billionaires.” It’s not all that surprising. After all, it’s well known that poor people tend to waste their money on trivialities like food, clothing, shelter, and child care while billionaire geniuses tend to spend their money on important things like buying yachts, vacation homes, Judges on the US Extreme Court, and golden toilet seats.
We don’t typically think of surgeons as “poor people” but compared with the greediest people on the planet they sure are! The average salary of surgeons is only about 300 thousand dollars a year while world’s greediest man made over $200 billion! If we round down the surgeon salaries because they often pay taxes, we discover that he makes a million times more than a surgeon! So, it’s not really a great surprise that he can also make a hospital a million times more efficient!
First, President Mush discovered that every single patient seen at Mass General Hospital in its first one hundred years of existence (1811 to 1911) died! Yes, you heard that right: Died! Despite its reputation and ranking, not a single patient seen in that entire century is still alive!
So, the first brilliant insight of The World’s Greediest Man is simply that Mass General Hospital is actually no better at preserving life than no hospital at all! Everyone who lived during those same years (1811 to 1911) and did not go to Mass General is also dead. There’s no difference! All that money wasted on medical care made no difference at all in the end.
A good workman doesn’t blame their tools. But that doesn’t mean that tools don’t differ in their efficiency. Surgeons, probably because they have a phallic fixation, prefer long thin tools like scalpels, catheters, and scissors. These are not tools for fast work though. For instance, a typical quadruple bypass surgery takes three to six hours! Are you kidding me!? No wonder hospitalization is so expensive.
President Mush and his cracker-jack hackers discovered that there is no part of the human anatomy that cannot be cut much faster with an ordinary chain saw. Sure, the feminized, woke, namby-pamby doctor boys will say that a chain saw isn’t delicate enough for heart surgery. How ridiculous is that? If it’s good enough to hack limbs off a tree, it’s good enough to hack cholesterol out of an artery or whatever the hell it is these pretty boys do during heart surgery.
Not only are there direct savings from having more efficient surgical tools. There are side benefits. When surgery takes three to six hours, time is wasted prepping the patient, giving them pain-killers, monitoring their vital signs, giving them blood—on and on and on. You don’t need such an elaborate set-up when you use a chain saw.
There are other advantages and cost-savings as well. There’s no room between here and the end of this article to list them all in detail, but you can take The World’s Greediest Man at his word. It doesn’t matter if he lies every day on the platform he bought to spout lies. He might lie about test results or political matters but certainly not when it comes to money.
One simple example arises from vastly simplified training programs. Limit doctoring to rich, white, Nazi, males since they are obviously superior. In fact, they are so superior that they demand every aspect of society be even more unfairly tilted so they are guaranteed a win in everything. That proves they’re superior. While training a doctor today takes more than a decade, you can show a rich, white, Nazi male how to run a chain saw in minutes!
For this and other reasons, formulas, fudging, faking, numbers, data, hand-waving, obfuscation, and moving things over three to ten decimal points, President Mush and his hacker-jacks will be able to cut over $5 trillion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid thus enabling an additional $500 trillion dollars to flow into the pockets of The World’s Greediest Man. These savings will also erase the national debt and cause water to flow uphill. Do the math!
This money, by the way, will not be spent on some stupid vanity project such as saving starving children or keeping the earth’s ecosystems from collapsing. Instead, it will be spent on something important and visionary—establishing a Cult Colony on Mars for President Mush and a carefully chosen cohort of consorts to populate the red planet.
Let’s face it. Earth is overrun with all sorts of life forms that are not The World’s Greediest Man. Why would anyone want that? Yech! Spiders! Bees! Trees! Birds! Bacteria, for God’s sake. Mold. Mushrooms. Flowers. Polar bears. Dragonflies. None of them is a problem on Mars. It’s got sand and rocks. And, once The Greediest Man on Earth is there, it will have everything it needs.
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Silent Screams of Dead Men’s Dreams
Destroying Natural Intelligence
Increased Government E-Fishiness
Destroying Our Government Effectiveness
01 Tuesday Apr 2025
There is no simple or universal answer to when “The Stone Age”, “The Bronze Age,” and “The Iron Age” occurred. The timing varied widely depending on the region. These names refer to the types of materials used for tools. More recently, many people refer to the “Industrial Age” or the “Industrial Revolution” and the “Computer Age” or the “Computer Revolution.”
Now, we see humanity entering a new age, perhaps best referred to as “The Irony Age.” At least in The United States of America, we are well into “The Irony Age” though we are not the only such country. I use the term “The Irony Age” to refer to an age where people’s behavior, individually and collectively, is determined by the informational world they inhabit rather than the real world in which they live.
I use the word “determined” and not the word “influenced.” Words, images, and stories have always influenced human behavior. Indeed, this kind of influence exists in the non-human world as well. The social behavior of ants depends on chemical signaling. Bees that have foraged and found sources of pollen and nectar “dance” for other bees so as to describe the size, contents, and location of these sources for other foraging workers.
Words can be used, not only to influence, direct, teach, or share but also to mislead and control. This is nothing new, but now the conditions are right for “The Age of Irony” in which these misleading communications actually override reality. Examples of such misleading communications abound.
Politically, we can see The Age of Irony in the names of countries. The official name of North Korea, for instance, in not “The Totalitarian Dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un” but is rather “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” In reality it is not a republic; it is not a country for the people and it is not at all democratic.
It is not only in the political realm that we find such ironies. People have been touting “miracle cures” my entire life and before. Various “tonics” have been sold by charlatans throughout the history of America. They often contained opium, tobacco, alcohol, and other noxious substances. Sometimes, people would fall for it and spend money on something that would supposedly fix a malady (or even every malady) and it would make them sicker. There has always been deception. Three things in modern society contribute to making it “The Age of Irony” and not just an age that contains some irony.
First, most people most of the time are not narcissistic sociopaths. Most people most of the time are decent and tell the truth. Studies show that people are particularly likely to be ethical and fair to those with whom they are in direct contact. (See, for instance, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely). If you are at a face to face meeting, for instance, and a tray of cookies gets passed around, there are very few people who will immediately grab all the cookies for themselves. As the physical distance grows and the bad behavior becomes more abstract, however, more people are willing to cheat a little and some few people will cheat as much as they can.
In the past, almost all of our interactions were fairly local. Charlatans who sold “miracle cures” tended to be itinerant. If they stayed too long in one place, they were likely to be “run out of town on a rail” (See, for instance, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain). Now, however, false cures are sold via podcasts, television, and social media. In The Age of Irony, a large proportion of our purchases are done remotely and the people who sell us nostrums are much harder to bring to justice. Equally importantly, it’s much easier for them to “live with” their evil deeds because they don’t have to face social consequences—they don’t know or see the people harmed by their lies. So, the first thing that contributes to making this The Irony Age is distance. Increased distanced means decreased accountability both legally and socially.
The second major reason that America is entering “The Irony Age” is the ubiquity and power of entertainment. This is partly a side-effect of increased prosperity. Increased prosperity means that people have more time to be entertained. In addition, television, for instance, now shows images that are larger, in color, and in higher definition. Perhaps more importantly, there are many more channels. Advertising is more targeted. And, a greater proportion of live TV time is advertising time.
More recently, podcasting, time on social media, and gaming are also more compelling and more targeted. People are spending less time in face to face interaction and more time is spent in remote interaction.
The pacing of entertainment is also changing. People are spending more time “channel surfing” and interacting in short sequences like chat. This means long, thoughtful discussions are relatively rare while clever one-liners and short videos are relatively more predominant.
While there have always been unusually talented storytellers and orators, now science has formalized these talents and made them essentially available to anyone with a huge amount of money. An extremely wealthy individual no longer needs to be clever or charismatic in order to influence people. He or she can pay for the expertise to make them appear clever and charismatic. Taken together, these trends mean that the tools to manipulate people are generally much more powerful than before.
There is also a potential counter-trend. People are more educated than they were hundreds of years ago. In theory, this should enable them to be critical thinkers and be less likely to believe a lie. In most cases, however, people do not use their education and intelligence to decide whether to believe something or someone but instead use their education and intelligence to defend their current beliefs whatever they may be. They come to view themselves and their “team” as being under “attack” when a belief is questioned and they view their role as to use their brain to defend their team—not to question whether they are on the right team.
What about the Butter Dish?
Trumpism is a new Religion
Plans for US; some GRUsome
The third trend is the self-reinforcing vicious cycle of wealth, greed, and power. This has enabled—some would say guaranteed—that the most sociopathic, greedy, self-centered people on the entire planet now control weapons, information and entertainment channels, and the wealth. It isn’t merely a random set of people in control—it’s largely the very worse people in control. Just to take one example, there are many hundreds of local radio and stations, newspapers, and publishers. But they are not independent of each other. They are controlled by a few major companies. The same applies to food and banking. Your experience is that you go to the grocery store and see hundreds of brands. They look different. They taste different. They are advertised to appeal to different groups. But, behind the scenes, there are a ten companies that control things.
https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9?op=1
Briefly, here are a list of some of the major Ironies which are prevalent in the attempted destruction of America.
Many people voted they way they did because the slogan “Make America Great Again” resonated with their love of America and they desired to make it great again. In reality, America, though far from perfect, was already great and Putin’s plans are aimed at making America much worse, not better. Plans are now being implemented to make nearly every aspect of America worse.
Many people voted the way they did because they thought they were voting for a “strong leader” who would do whatever it took to put America first. In reality, that “leader” is extremely cowardly and has been his entire life. He was so cowardly, he begged his daddy to bribe doctors so he could avoid military service. He has a long record of forcing himself on women because he’s too cowardly to risk being rejected. He’s so cowardly, he can’t even publicly tell the truth about his height and weight or the status of his mental faculties. He’s so cowardly, he can’t even admit to a single mistake.
Many people voted the way they did because they thought their candidate and his party were better for the economy. What’s the evidence of that? The party and the candidate claim to be better. Historical fact shows quite the opposite. But neither party has done such a remarkably bad job with economy as what we are now witnessing.
Many people voted the way they did because they thought their candidate would restore law and order. Why? Because they said so. What actually happens when you vote in a serial rapist who is also a convicted felon, a fraud, and a tax cheat? He pardons traitors who viciously attacked police and he attacks judges who do not agree with him and ignores the rule of law and the Constitution he swore to uphold.
Many people voted the way they did because they were sick of the government telling them what to do. Instead, they voted for less regulation and more freedom. The reality is that while the current Misadministration is trying to reduce regulations on air quality, water quality, and food quality, they are also trying to institute regulations on whom you can love, what you can do with your own body, what you can say, whether and how you can worship, what you can read, and whom you can protest against.
Many people voted as they voted because they bought the story that illegal immigrants were a “drain” on the economy. The truth is that many such immigrants were contributing to the economy including paying taxes and social security and were unable to reap many of the benefits of citizens. Moreover, far from being disproportionally criminal, immigrants were less likely to be criminals than natural born US citizens.
Many people voted as they voted because they specifically thought a more complete wall and more agents at the border would keep immigrants out. In fact, walls are much more effective at keeping people in a country against their will than keeping people out against their will. If the Misadministration is successful in destroying the National Parks, the Economy, and the Rule of Law, a wall won’t be necessary at all to keep people out. No-one will want to come. But it can be quite useful in keeping people in. On the US side of the border, the military can be deployed along with machine guns, land mines, and search lights. The Berlin Wall wasn’t put up by East Germany to keep West Germans from coming into East Germany. It was built to keep the East Germans from fleeing the repressive and ineffective government of East Germany. That’s the real reason Putin wants walls around America—to keep American citizens in.
In The Ironic Age, the Ironies don’t stop with the fact that many people voted as they did but got the exact opposite of what they voted for. It isn’t turtles all the way down. In The Ironic Age, it’s ironies all the way down.
Some people continue to “like” the current misadministration and think that by showing loyalty to it, they are helping their “hero.” In fact, supporting him in his bad policies and decisions is the very worst thing for him as well as for the country. It’s precisely like “helping” a drug addict by giving him heroin. Such an action doesn’t “satisfy” the addict. It just increases their tolerance for the drug and makes them want even more. It’s the same with narcissistic sociopaths. Telling them their ideas are wonderful no matter how stupid and counter-productive they are doesn’t help the person at all. It just encourages them to be more stupid and disconnected from the actual results. It won’t “moderate” or “reform” him any more than agreeing with a spousal abuser will make them less likely to abuse you in the future.
As I said, it’s ironies all the way down. President Mush and his side-kick know that they are “smart enough” to view everyone else as a tool. To them, people who have actual friends, have empathy, or love? Those are fools. What they fail to see, however, is that Putin is like them. He doesn’t seem them as peers at all. To him, they are the tools. They are his fools. Once he achieves his goals about dividing and destroying America, they will have served their purpose and he will take over the reins. Apparently, they are too busy slaking their greed to have noticed what has happened to the enablers of Stalin and Putin once they become too successful.
Perhaps the most fundamental irony of all is that even Putin cannot win. Narcissistic sociopaths die too. They live their entire lives fundamentally disconnected from true love and friendship. Not only are their days on earth numbered as individuals—just like everyone else—they have traded in the joys of life for a grim fight that ends in their own destruction.
Cancer always loses in the end. Yes, of course, cancer causes destruction and even death. So, it can cause others to lose, but cancer itself always loses.
Always.
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petersironwood 