As IF Times

link Deep Layoffs Take Effect In Camden « CBS Philly – News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of Philadelphia.

When attending university, one of the main tenets of logic taught is the concept of cause and effect.  While that concept can be very fuzzy in the social sciences field, in the realm of hard sciences, where results do matter, this leads to discovery and knowledge.   In fact, one of the foundations of the scientific method is the ability to replicate a result given a set of variables.  At no time in my undistinguished school career did achieving the same dismal result from the same flawed inputs garner me any academic accolades.  Quite the contrary.  If I was expected to achieve result A on an experiment, it behooved me to find variables X, Y, or Z that would lead to the desired outcome.   Continuing to input variables U, V and W would not lead to desired outcome A.  In fact it would lead to the very undesirable outcome of  D, or F.

In the real world, this logic is apparently discarded as soon as the cap and gowns are returned to the rental company.  When you observe the behaviour of people in their everyday lives for example, it is clear that for most, the logic of cause and effect has been discarded as a quaint educational relic, like cursive writing.  In the real world, people somehow lose their ability to reason with any clarity and are easily swayed by those who offer an impossible logic.  The mesmerizing allure of lottery tickets are but one example of mass delusion.  It is in the area of politics however that we find the most delusional behaviour. 

According to the linked article, the City of Camden, New Jersey is now on the verge of having to lay off police and firemen in their bid to stem their budget deficit.   Naturally, this makes headlines because in the “most crime ridden city in America”, this is incongruous.  I know nothing about Camden, New Jersey, but from all accounts of articles relating to this city, it isn’t exactly Disneyland North.  What we do discover is a pattern that seems to appear among  major cities struggling under enormous budget deficits.  That common denominator is that they are all run by governments controlled by the Democratic party.   Coincidences happen of course, like having the only lighter in a bar when Charlize Theron pulls out a cigarette.  More likely however, there is a cause and effect thing happening in the case of big deficits and Democratic governments.  Exhibit A, a list of some of the largest US cities and their accompanying deficits:

Los Angeles, budget shortfall of $408 million

Chicago, budget deficit of $655 million

Philadelphia, greater than $1 billion dollar deficit

San Francisco $380 million dollar budget deficit

Washington DC $688 million dollar deficit

New York city, $4 billion dollar deficit, not to mention an unfunded pension liability of $59 Billion!

Is it purely a coincidence that all of these cities are controlled by Democratic party governments?  I include New York because for decades, until Giuliani, it was a Democratic stronghold.  Even Bloomberg, who now casts himself as an Independent leans convincingly left.  The question is, why do they keep putting Democrats in office?  There’s ample and glaring evidence that those affiliated with the party are incapable of sound fiscal management.  They run on the same platform of Something For Nothing, or SFN (which could also mean Same Fricking Nonsense ) and people continue to believe them.  The price paid for them getting into office however, always seems to be borne by the weary taxpayer.  The fix seems to be predictable; raise taxes or ‘lay off teachers, police and firemen’.  Somehow, excessive entitlements and waste never get laid off.   As this is being written comes news that the city of Berkeley in California wants to make transgender surgical procedures a perk of employment. 

If people want a different result, they’d better stop pursuing the same input.  Maybe try option B.

link Analysis: Sarah Palins use of blood libel sparks new controversy.

This time, the culprit is The Washington Post, another liberal source of cheap fish wrap masquerading as a newspaper driving the “words do hurt” wagon while the NY Times and Paul Krugmann go for a smoke break.   The left’s favorite target, Sarah Palin is once again taken to task for her “hateful words and violent imagery”.

How did we allow society to fall under the tyranny of a small group of politically correct weasels?  Hardly anything we say these days is not subject to the banal  filter of sensitivity and correctness which somehow has come to be accepted as ‘civilized’ discourse.  What are we, 5 years old?  Over the past few generations, it appears that people can no longer treat people as adults, instead having to interact in sanitized gibberish bordering on infantspeak.   We risk losing all color and depth to the English language if everything that’s said has to pass through the fine mesh of what’s acceptable. 

Recently, there was a proposal by the U.S. State Department to replace the categories of Mother and Father on passport applications, to be replaced with the designations of  Parent 1 and Parent 2.  !!!  Surely this couldn’t have been in response to some massive outcry from the public.  Have the labels of Father and Mother become too confusing for people?  At weddings, when the minister asks, ” who gives this woman to be wed to this man?”, would someone rather pipe up and say, ” I, Parent 1 do”?  No doubt the initiative was spawned inside the smaller than normal sized head of some bureaucrat who wanted to extend the PC line to include test tube babies, gay parents and those who think it better reflects a secular society.  Even so, why do other 98% of the general population have to ride along in their wack-wagon?  Mercifully, in short order, this policy was reversed and the proper Mother and Father labels were re-instated.   However, this is an apt illustration of the harm that only one moron can cause if they’re allowed to get away with it.  Imagine if the cause was taken up by the media….or Oprah.   Shiver.

In strict communist regimes, they are fond of de-humanizing their population as a means of maintaining order.  Far easier to execute some unsavory action upon a populace if they’re a a collection of abstract numbers rather than real people with real names.  As most know, the common moniker for people in those regimes are brother/sister, or comrade, implying equality, but really enforcing servility.  In the case of western societies, which should know better, governments are also actively in the word sanitation business.   Despite the liberal protestations of the imagery, the term War On Terror was an explicit and clear depiction of what the stakes were in the ongoing battle with terrorist campaigns against the U.S.   The revision by the present administration  to the catchy “Man Caused Disaster” is laughably meaningless and could apply to anything including the invention of turkey fryers.   There was recently a push to scrub the colloquial term for a black person from the book, Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  This is changing history folks.  They are trying to change the way things were characterized during a period in America’s history.

We’ve reached the point in society that small molehills are built into great mountains based on someones interpretation of what’s offensive and perhaps hurtful.  Perhaps many of these people were test tube babies and lived inside some bubble world until they were old enough to be sent to the brainwash academies, I mean universities.  As most people of my generation know, when we grew up as kids, you were exposed to all kinds of idiots.  You called them names, they called you names.  Few of us went on to develop deep seated emotional scars to be manifest later on in life via anti social and violent behavior.  Ok, well some did become lawyers, but for the most part, name calling was just name calling.   It was the sticks and stones part that was hurtful.

Today, you have to have a jargon handbook available  just to figure out what they’re trying to say in the news.  A crook is now a morally or ethically challenged person,  a bunch of hooligans burning cars and breaking store windows during a riot are student demonstrators.   A famous professor found to be cheating at school was academically dishonest.  A drug addict is chemically challenged.  Urban=black.  On the other hand, the label  for hunter is now changed to animal assassin.   One of the more amusing ones I’ve heard is the expression for panhandler; unaffiliated applicant for private sector funding.  

How about we just call a spade a spade? How about we just call idiots, idiots instead of liberal journalists?