Assorted

     Today promises to be hot and trying. I have:

• Two trees to trim;
• Poison ivy to eradicate;
• A charity computer job to perform;
• A closet insert to remove, discard, and replace;
• A Red Sox / Yankees game (in London, of all places) to watch;
• And (of course) bills to pay.

     ...so my time for Acute Observations And Penetrating Thought^® will be sharply bounded by straining, sweating, and (of course) swearing. Thank God Dad was a Navy man, or I might not have been adequately prepared for that last. So have a few interesting squibs while I prepare myself for the trials ahead.

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1. Frontiers In Gender-War Feminism.

     I’m a fan of ShoeOnHead. Her style of humor isn’t to everyone’s taste, but give her this: she maintains a light approach, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. Her stuff is a refreshing change from the heavy-handed manner so many opinionated video-bloggers have adopted.

     However, every now and then she justifiably “lets it rip:”

     “Slave paint.” “Rape shoes.” “Don’t shave or use antiperspirant!” Great God in heaven! You have to wonder if Shoe’s target is aware that feminine grooming choices are choices — that women elect them for reasons that frequently go beyond culture, upbringing, and socialization. Indeed, it’s often a matter, not of attracting male attention (a perfectly rational motive, in my not-particularly-humble opinion), but of competing with other women.

     But the lunatic-fringe pseudo-feminist is uninterested in the dynamics and subtleties of human motivation. All is male oppression, especially the omnipresent “male gaze.” Well, that’s easy enough to avert, as a great many such women have learned: just stop shaving and using antiperspirant.

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2. Liberty Versus Equality.

     Socialists will all tell you they’re for “equality.” It’s a crock, of course; wherever socialism prevails, there’s an ultra-powerful caste of rulers and their hangers-on who live like kings while everyone else suffers in deprivation and rigid constraint. The Feral Irishman has a few words on the politics of it for us. Here’s the gut punch:

     The closer we come to total acceptance of the doctrine of human equality, the closer we come to slavery. In reality, human equality is an impossibility in the real world. As an instrument of government propaganda, it is the perfect organism.

     Please read it all. The peroration on discrimination and its absolute necessity in a free society is especially important.

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3. Colonization Chronicles.

     As I’ve said on other occasions, the Left’s major tactic for silencing and marginalizing us in the Right is the colonization of large organizations that can, de facto deny us a voice – or an income. The recent Project Veritas presentation featuring a Google insider might make one think that the process had “gone to completion” in the case of that particular Big Tech behemoth. But there’s another effect of importance to beware:

     Scores of Google employees have sent an open letter to the organizers of San Francisco's annual Pride parade urging them to kick the company out as a sponsor and parade participant.

     In a letter posted to Medium on Wednesday, the employees wrote of a work atmosphere where concerns from LGBTQ employees are regularly brushed aside....

     The letter asks organizers to drop Google as an official sponsor of the parade and prevent it from contributing a branded float.

     "For a large company, perhaps waiting is prudent, but for those whose very right to exist is threatened, we say there is no time to waste, and we have waited too long, already. We are no longer content to wait," the authors wrote.

     The employees' request comes after an internal dispute over Google's treatment of LGBTQ employees and content creators spilled out into the public view on Monday, when The Verge reported that several Google employees planned to protest the company's policies during Pride.

     Let’s leave aside, this once, the BS about taking “pride” in something the “prideful” one claims is inherent in his body and mind, and that he would not have chosen had he had the option. The lunacy of that notion should be well established by now. The meat of the thing for me is this: Google has done everything imaginable to champion these persons and their “cause.” It’s used its control of its search engine and YouTube to silence countervailing opinion. It’s fired employees who dared to differ with its corporate philosophy, however politely. It has departments dedicated to promoting damned nearly everything the LGBTQ activists claim to value! So what’s going on?

     In short, it’s about “keeping the flames burning.” They who’ve made a “cause” the core of their lives have to keep whipping themselves into a frenzy over it for their own emotional health. Should the passion fade, their reason for living will fade with it. This has consequences for everyone around them, including their employers and coworkers.

     Watch for it in the activist types around you – and when you spot the symptoms, put some distance between you.

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4. The Nadir Of Atrocity.

     Slavery is bad. Child slavery is worse. But child slavery combined with gang rape is really hard to beat:

     “There was a female, 10 years old, who was found with 20 different types of semen inside her body. She was dispatched to a family member. The girl who was with her who was supposedly a family member was not really a family member, just someone who bought her from her family in Guatemala. These are real problems that exist here on the border. There are some people who are trying to leave jugs of water out here for them. A lot of these people come to this country needing help,” the professional stated.

     Migrants are obtaining “Rent-A-Kids,” and since Border Patrol cannot perform DNA tests to determine if children are related to adults most of the human traffickers get into our country.

     That’s what our Border Patrol is encountering among the “migrants” pressing against our southern border. Yet every last Democrat candidate for president has declared himself in favor of opening that border, whether de jure or de facto. Make sure your left-leaning friends, if you still have any, are compelled to confront this.

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5. Public Finance, Democrat Style.

     Everyone’s favorite Graybeard has noted a long list of “free stuff” the various Democrat presidential aspirants have promised us. It’s a long list; please read it all. But how do they plan to pay for all that free stuff? They don’t; you’ll be the one paying for it, and of course for the legions of federal bureaucrats overseeing the distribution process to make sure it’s “fair:”

     This is par for the course from hard-core Marxist De Blasio. And make no mistake: there are a lot of people who believe it could be made to work if all that money were “in the right hands.” Historical data about the consequences of confiscatory tax rates are utterly ignored, never mind any questions about right and wrong. But even more important is this: as such schemes fail, the definition of “the wealthy,” to whom the confiscatory rates are to be applied, becomes steadily broader.

     The committed leftist will never admit this, but it’s graven into the financial structure of the universe. Note how they squirm to avoid answering such questions as “But who do you mean by the wealthy?” and “What will you do if the revenue is still insufficient?” Verbum sat sapienti.

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     That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. It’s time to begin the straining, sweating, and (of course) swearing, in the hope that I’ll be done early enough to catch at least part of that Red Sox / Yankees game. Have a nice day.