This funny, I don’t care who you are.

Hat Tip Keving Creighton.

Dear Occasional Cortex starts with a tantrum.

I am guessing she won’t be the only one. The other three amigas may join in the absurd while waiting for the Iowa Caucus boondoggle result.

There must be roving patrols of ICE agents swooping down on neighborhood parks and trapping children with nets before throwing them in a cage.

MSNBC’s @ZerlinaMaxwell:

“The Iowa caucus is the perfect example of systemic racism. 91% of the voters in Iowa are white. The reason why you see a drop in turnout, I’m just speculating here, it could be perhaps that white children are not in the cages…”pic.twitter.com/OCg2Dg8e7y

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 4, 2020

This level of desperation, this level of disconnect with reality might be funny, but it is dangerous as hell. These people will end up torching houses because they truly believe inside live Klan members that are sending poor color folks to gas chambers rather than Mr. and Mrs. Smith who she has known all her life.

This is a difficult post for me to write for many reasons, I hope readers appreciate the amount of rumination that went into this.

The Democrats may be scrambling to hide the results of the Iowa caucus, but the leaked information is that Bernie won with 22% of the vote.

I know there will be a lot of opinions about this, many of them dismissive.  But I wanted to give my insight as to why this happened and what I believe the Republican party needs to do about it.

First of all, I want to make this point crystal clear.  Anyone who has followed my writings for a while knows that I am ardently anti-Socialist.  Socialism is an economic system based on envy, and it always leads to destruction.  I am not a Socialist, will never be a Socialist, and will never defend Socialism.

Frequent readers of my post should also be aware that I like to focus on the pendulum effect of politics, especially when it comes to political extremism.  When one side pushes something, the other side often pushes back harder, creating a back-and-forth that goes out of control.  I’ve written several posts about how the rise of the Woke Scold Left parallels the rise of the Alt-Right, both driven by identity grievance politics just on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

I will fully acknowledge that there are the extreme ideological Socialists/Marxists/Leninists in the Sanders campaign.

These people are evil, I condemn everything that they say.  I am not defending them.

I do know other people who are Sanders supporters who are not like that, and recently I have come to understand them quite well.

An article from The Guardian I read this morning hit very close to home for me.

‘The only ones not paying for Boeing’s mistakes is Boeing’: laid-off supply workers voice their anger
Thousands of US workers have suffered job cuts and loss of hours – while Boeing’s former boss walks away with $62m

“We’ll get through it,” Boeing’s new chief executive, Dave Calhoun, told investors this week after the aerospace giant announced its biggest losses in 20 years. The thousands of workers reliant on the company are not so sure.

With production of its bestselling plane, the 737 Max jet, on hold after two deadly airline crashes, thousands of workers in Boeing’s US supply chain are have suffered layoffs and loss of hours. The cost to Boeing of the grounding is now estimated at close to $19bn.

“I’m worried about my bills and how I am going to pay them,” said Jordan Simoens, a sheet metal mechanic at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kansas, who was one of 2,800 employees recently laid off. “I’m going through the struggle of finding a job, which is hard enough here in Wichita without 2,800 others also looking.” He previously worked as an auto mechanic and is considering moving to find a new job in that field.

Julian Moffitt, 32, was laid off along with a few dozen others as a quality assurance technician in Huntsville, Alabama, working for a contractor of General Electric (GE), which built the Max’s engines through a joint venture with France’s Safran and is suffering significant losses after the production shutdown.

This is where stuff really starts to hit close to home for me.

To add insult to injury, the former CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, was ousted for his role in the 737 Max failure with a $60 million golden parachute.

This is why this hits so close to home for me.

I was downsized several weeks ago and it’s been rough.  My performance reviews were always excellent, they just killed off my entire department.

I can’t really talk about what happened, but let’s just say in involved the executives of the holding company that bought us pocketing a lot of the money they borrowed for investment as a bonus.

The big picture here is that bad behavior at the uppermost levels of management is rewarded and the price for that is paid by the working people at non-corporate decision-making levels.

It made the news yesterday that the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama is having another round of layoffs.  Part of the reason for that is the investment in a new Goodyear plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

You can sarcastically say “but that’s the way it’s always been” and I’m telling you, that’s exactly why Bernie won Iowa and is surging in the polls in other states.

What directly happened to me is something often called “vulture capitalism,” but part of the definition is a company must be distressed when it is required.  What happens when the company isn’t distressed to start with?  The medical equivalent would be diagnosing a patient with a cold as being terminal and harvesting his organs to sell on the black market.

A while back, Tucker Carlson did a segment on this type of practice, and what he said is true.

If the most glaring experience of your life is this ugly side of capitalism, then Bernie is your man.

I spent years living in Rust Belt Midwest.  The Bernie fans I know are all people my age or younger who grew up in run-down towns that died when they factory or plant that was a major employer of the town got sent to outsourced to South East Asia.  They are not ideological socialists, like Bernie or AOC.  They are people angry that the system allowed a handful of wealthy bankers to make a profit by turning them from a happy little town into an economic dead spot with high rates of government dependency.

They are the kids or siblings of factory workers who were put out of work by outsourcing or vulture capitalism.

I still believe in all the positive talking points about capitalism, I really do.

Capitalism is the economic system of freedom.  It has raised more people out of poverty than any other system of economics.  It encourages innovation and creativity, and raises the quality of life for millions of people.

I am not challenging that at all.  I do not want to go to a centrally planned socialist economy.  I want the US to have, by and large, more economic freedom.

I also am not consumed by anger at wealth inequality.  I don’t care if someone gets super-rich.  I care how they got super-rich.  You can call me a naive spoiled millennial, but I have a problem with someone becoming super-rich by leaving thousands of unemployed and destitute people in their wake with no fault of their own.

I do not believe the fix for our problems is to tax the rich and use that money to give the rest of society “free stuff.”  The rich will figure out how to avoid paying their taxes.

Furthermore, free stuff doesn’t make people better.  It will alleviate temporary stress.  If you need food now, EBT helps.  But in the long run, it saps people of their dignity and self-respect.  Go to any community with high rates of government dependency or reliance on government assistance and you will see people who are miserable, areas filled with crime and shiftlessness.

Taxing the holding company board to pay for my tuition and Medicare is not what I want.

I’m also not against, creative destruction.  I’m not for banning the automobile to protect the farriers or banning the refrigerator to keep the ice haulers employed.  But I don’t believe firing a bunch of Americans to have the same job done by conscripted slave workers in China in a factory that has no worker safety or environmental standards constitutes creative destruction.

What needs to happen is for the Republican party to come out and say:

“Capitalism is a great economic system, 90% of the time.  Capitalism has made this country great.  The innovation that has come from private investment has created the world you know and love today.  Everything from your wardrobe, to your smartphone, to your favorite show on Amazon Prime is a product of the upside of Capitalism.  But sometimes, unscrupulous and unethical people will use their money and their power to profit off the suffering of others.  We are going to stop that and hold those people accountable.  This country has a history of curbing the bad excess of Capitalism.  Republican Presidents were the first to implement anti-trust laws that broke up monopolies and made the market work better for more people.  If you want to become a billionaire by creating a book series that the world loves, or comic book characters that spawned more than two dozen movies, or, an app that everyone wants, or a cure for some terrible disease, you should have every right to that.  Add to the greatness of the world and enjoy the rewards.  But if you want to become a billionaire by putting Americans out of work and destroying American communities, then we will end that.”

If they do, I guarantee that the Republican party will immediately absorb a lot of Bernie supporters, and I think, a substantial percentage of moderate Democrats.

These people are hurting people who just want a fair shot a job with some protection against being outsourced or replaced by H1B visa workers.  they are not ideological Socialists, they are angry at an unfair system.  Right now, Bernie’s rhetoric speaks closest to their desires.

If the Republican party offers a better message, that corrects the unfairness without the pitfalls of Socialism, they will win bigly.

If not, then the Republicans will lose once Trump is gone, and to someone much worse than Bernie.

Have you checked who penned this love letter to Socialism? Yes. William Randolph Hearst himself. Ultra rich and manipulator himself. Back then it was like being a Vegan Anti Vaxxer.

So Iowa Democrats can’t deliver the results of a caucus in the timeframe that many Third World Countries would have taken to do a National Election’s vote.

If Twitter is to be believed (Yeah, right) Bernie won, Warren came in second but Buttigieg somehow controls the app that was running the voting and placed himself the winner last night. The DNC is shitting bricks because Biden not only did not win but came fourth or something so they are trying to pull a Hillary super-delegates while Joe is in a corner crying and sniffing the Young Ladies underwear section of the local Target.

And, of course, the subtle tones of melodious balalaika playing are being heard by the core Democrat “conspiracionsistas.”

I swear the only thing we need to top this crap pie is that somebody named Chad gets blamed for all the problems.

Humans need religion, it is part of who we are.  When we give it up, we don’t really, we find something else to fill that role.

Progressive politics is an atheistic religion.  It’s not a good one, it’s an unforgiving and medieval one.

There are many notable parallels.  What is Privilege other than a political Original Sin.  Were you born white or male or straight or cis or all of the above?  Then you have unearned Privilege that you must atone for by being an ally and sacrificing for the less fortunate.

This article was published in the Guardian:

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they’re racist

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now,” Jackson says.

That actually sounds pretty racist.

It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.

The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of color, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. But they acknowledge they also have unchecked biases. They are there because they “know [they] are part of the problem, and want to be part of the solution,” as host Jess Campbell-Swanson says before dinner starts.

Let me stop here and answer the question from the headline, because this article doesn’t.

During the Middle Ages, some Christians would wear something called a Cilice, also known as a hairshirt.  It was an article of clothing or an accessory that was intended to cause pain and discomfort.  It was worn by penitent parishioners who wanted to atone for sin through suffering.

There was an actual practice in the old Catholic church called asceticism.  Practitioners would fast until they nearly died.  They denied themselves any physical pleasure, going so far as to sleep without blankets on the bare ground.  Some would even engage in self-flagellation with whips, called scourge.

Most notable examples of this occurred during the Black Death where penitents marched through the streets whipping themselves to try to atone for the sins of the town that was being ravaged by the plague.

The Church really has mellowed in the last 700 years.

This isn’t unique to the Catholic church.  Read about what the Naga Sadhus in modern-day India do to show devotion to Shiva.  It’s a horror show.

And don’t forget those Heaven’s Gate cultists who wanted to hitch a ride on the alien ship that followed the Hale-Bopp Comet.  Before they killed themselves, they castrated themselves.

Religious extremism can make people do terrible things to themselves.

So you want to know why white women will pay $2,500 to have two women of color make them feel like shit for a few hours?

Because it would mess up their hair and makeup to make them sleep on dirt and whip themselves to atone for the original sin of being born with the wrong skin color.

This is religious extremism for adherents of religious Leftism.  Nothing more.