The Gormogons

The NYT editors working diligently on their next big idea: requiring the electoral college to be populated solely by members of the NYT editorial board.

Over the weekend, ‘Puter sat down and read the Sunday New York Times.* In the Sunday Review section, the editors wrote a love-letter to women who write letters to the editor titled “Women, Please Speak Out.”

‘Puter considered synopsizing the letter but decided his minions couldn’t fully understand ‘Puter’s larger point without getting a sense of the utter raft of steaming, po-mo, SJW horseshit the NYT editors have become. Let’s take a gander.

A year ago, prodded by a reader who wrote eloquently about how women were underrepresented on the letters page of The Times, we started the Women’s Project, aiming to correct that imbalance and better reflect the diversity in society. We committed ourselves to work toward a goal of gender parity and to report on our progress in February 2020.

Barf. Lazy writing written for lazy people who are unable to think beyond nonsensical tropes media force-feeds them. Read on, if you dare.

For the last year, we have tracked and entered into a spreadsheet the gender of every writer we’ve published on the daily letters page. As of today, the tally is 43 percent women, 57 percent men — numbers that have remained remarkably constant for several months. While we do not have exact data from previous years, we do know that there are now far more women on the page than in the past.

We have also done spot tallies of the much larger number of submissions. There the percentage (when a writer’s gender can be determined) is about 25 to 30 percent women, about the same as a year ago, before the project started.

Got it? The NYT editors decided the daily letters page needed to be vaginaed up, filling a gaping void so to speak. Naturally, the editors instituted a quota just like the communist sympathizers they are.** Penises need not apply. Make letters snatch-tastic again. Letters are cooter-iffic!

On we go, dear minions, voyaging ever-deeper into the fever swamps of “elite” media minds where normal predilections and preferences of the sexes are prima facie evidence of societal oppression of women.

Over all, though, we’re not satisfied yet. While there was a small uptick in letters from women right after we announced the project, we still sometimes find ourselves struggling to ensure that women’s voices are heard on a wide variety of topics.

At the project’s one-year mark, we’re reaffirming our commitment to working to reach gender parity. But what was reinforced by this project is that our letters pages are richer for this new collection of voices — and it compels us to broaden our efforts further, to ensure that we are publishing a range of letters from an even more diverse pool of writers going forward.

The NYT’s editors placed a daily burjina quota on the letters page but women didn’t respond! Women are too stupid to realize they’re oppressed by white, male bigots! How dare women not validate the NYT editors’ pet theory! Do women not realize that they’re obligated to resist Not-Our-President Orangemanbad by whining (two times, real hard) on the NYT’s daily letters page?***

The NYT’s policy of daily letter set asides for women is not only insulting to women, it’s self-destructive.

It’s insulting to women because it tells women they’re not good enough to get their letters published without super-woke media elites putting their thumbs on the scale. It’s the editors’ soft bigotry of low expectations for women writ large.

It’s self-destructive because it destroys the NYT’s (currently undeserved) reputation for being a top-quality news and opinion outlet, America’s alleged newspaper of record. It’s the editors admitting they’re dumbing down the quality of its daily letters page by selecting on the basis of genitalia rather than the quality of the submission.

If the NYT admits it lowers its allegedly high standards for submitted letters to publish to push its political agenda (the aggressive enbewbification of letters to the editor), has it also lowered its standards for reporters and reporting? Does the NYT’s political agenda bias its coverage of events to the point that it is no longer a reliable source of facts? Are readers supposed to assume that everything in the NYT is false because its reporters aren’t hired for competence but rather because they check some race, sex, or sexual preference box somewhere in some HR executive’s tiny little reptilian brain?

Trump hasn’t destroyed media as media are wont to claim. Trump’s simply pulled back the curtain to reveal the decades-long rot and decay media’s inflicted on itself.

* Shut up. It’s Mrs. P’s subscription, not mine. ‘Puter subscribes to the totally awesome Wall Street Journal like all good white male oppressors. Now get that cute ass back in the kitchen and make ‘Puter a sammich, Sugar Britches. ‘Puter likes to watch you walk away. While you’re at it, drop a few pounds, put on a shorter skirt, lose the bra, and put on a skin-tight sweater, Tits McGee.

** The New York Times has still not returned the Pulitzer it won for the work of Walter Duranty who history showed (and the NYT likely knew at the time) used his articles on the Soviet Union-occupied Ukraine to cover up Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians (aka, Holodomor). Thus, “communist sympathizers” is a well-deserved (and earned) moniker.

*** The NYT daily letters page is what you would get if you took the zanier, more conspiracy theory-er moments of Morning Joe and The View and wrote them down. Since Trump’s election it’s been a nonstop circle-jerk of crybullies who hate the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump over Meemaw Winebox.

“As you read, your chest tightens and a sense of dread washes over you, radiating out from your heart. You feel anxious, afraid and intensely guilty.”

There’s only one way to get rid of hippies. It involves a Colorado fourth-grader and a giant screw-nosed boring machine.

What’s this quote about? Biopsy results? Your 401k after an inevitable downturn? Your kid’s most recent report card? Nope. Read on.

“Just this morning, you drove a gasoline-powered car to work. You ate beef for lunch. You booked a flight, turned on the heat, forgot your reusable grocery bags at home. This is your fault.”

In her NYT opinion piece, Emma Marris* irrationally believes much of the American public is angst-ridden and self-blaming over the state of the Earth’s climate. To believe this, one must also believe two predicates: (1) climate change in the near term will make Earth uninhabitable and (2) all Americans are as deluded and as fragile as the author and other coastal elites.

Well, ‘Puter for one is absolutely anxious, afraid, and intensely guilty that he hadn’t yet considered that he should be anxious, afraid, and intensely guilty about climate change. What’s ‘Puter to do?!? OH NOES, TEH AYNGST IZ TEH OVARWELLMIN MEEEEE!!!

But our author is nothing but helpful. She reassures us:

“As an environmental writer, I’m often asked for guidance on coping with climate change. I have thoughts. Even better, I have a five-point plan to manage the psychological toll of living with climate change and to become part of the solution.”

First, “[a]s an environmental writer” could’ve just as easily been written “as a giant douchenozzle with totalitarian tendencies and irrational beliefs” and been equally correct.

Second, thank God for Ms. Marris. Imagine what we’d have had to do if not for an environmental writer (whatever the heck that means) helpfully coming up with a five-point plan to solve a non-problem, just like leftist heroes Elizabeth Warren and Josef Stalin. Wait. Stalin and his merry band of Soviet murderers had five-year plans. Close enough.

Anyhoo, what does Ms. Marris’ five-point plan entail? As one would suspect from an “environmental writer,” a whole assload of government control and reduced freedoms. Here’s Ms. Marris’ five points with some helpful ‘Puter commentary:

1. Ditch the shame.

“Yes, our daily lives are undoubtedly contributing to climate change. But that’s because the rich and powerful have constructed systems that make it nearly impossible to live lightly on the earth. Our economic systems require most adults to work ….”

It’s not your fault because big, bad one-percenters made it impossible for you not to pollute. Clearly, the solution is to exterminate the one-percenters to usher in a global green Utopia. It’s not your fault. The game is rigged. You’re programmed to believe that your consumption is the problem.

“It turns eco-saints against eco-sinners, who are really just fellow victims.” It’s not just you who are a victim. Everyone you know, everyone you meet, everyone ever everywhere is a victim! “As long as we are competing for the title of ‘greener than thou,’ or are paralyzed by shame, we aren’t fighting the powerful companies and governments that are the real problem.”

FITE TEH POWAR!! STIK IT 2 DA MANN!! EET THA RITCH!!! FREE BLEEDIN IZ KEWL!!!! Um, that last one, ‘Puter got a bit carried away. Sorry.

Also, it’s totes criminal that you’re required to work to earn a living. People should just give you free crap because Oregon and stuff. Say, where’d ‘Puter leave his bong? Must’ve left it in my Portland-based sweat lodge which is just a refrigerator box filled with nekkid, greasy, bearded homeless guys.

2. Focus on systems, not yourself.

Ms. Marris states we cannot reduce our climate change contributions to zero and even if we could it would eat all our time, “leaving us little time or energy for pushing for the systemic changes we need.” ‘Puter would’ve gone with “big, structural change” as an homage to hard-Left’s secular saint Sen. Liz Warren, noted Native American spokes-squaw.

Ms. Marris shares that she’s decided to fight the system by fighting against a natural gas pipeline, liquefaction facility, and LNG terminal in her home state of Oregon.** She states 42,000 people submitted comments to a state agency requesting it deny the necessary permits. This means that if the permits are denied, each person, according to Marris, gets climate indulgences equal to one-forty-two-thousandth of the facility’s emissions which would have occurred, about 876 metric tons per person. This compares to the average annual per person emissions of 16 metric tons.

I’d be interested to know if these 42,000 people also get credit for the hundreds if not thousands of lost jobs in Oregon and elsewhere by putting the kibosh on a valuable economic enhancement. And if we’re going to do the math, Ms. Marris should also include the increased emissions for coal and wood burning overseas (likely in China and India) where the LNG would have been exported, reducing the need to burn dirtier fossil fuels. Want to bet preventing the LNG export terminal’s construction is a net emissions increase?

The author’s point, she helpfully tells us, is:

“that the climate crisis is not going to be solved by personal sacrifice. It will be solved by electing the right people, passing the right laws, drafting the right regulations, signing the right treaties — and respecting those treaties already signed, particularly with indigenous nations. It will be solved by holding the companies and people who have made billions off our shared atmosphere to account.”

So elect hard-Left enviroweenies, trust in other countries to run our economy for the good of Gaia, and surrender your freedoms to those who know better than you (Ms. Marris’ compatriots, natch).

That’s a formula for success right there. It’s historically proven to work well in such paradises as the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and California.

3. Join an effective group.

First, there’s no such thing as an effective group. Second, joining a group accomplishes nothing. Ms. Marris cites several groups, none of which seem to have accomplished much of anything except offering a place for puffed-up leftist egos to go and talk to like-minded climate change induced dementia patients in a never-ending echo chamber.

The Swedish Climate Meatball is mentioned. ‘Puter did not feel it necessary to point out the absurdity in Ms. Marris’ claim that exploitation of an autistic child is a good thing because muh climate.

“Climate change is linked to income inequality and injustice, so if your passion is fighting for racial justice, the rights of the poor, or indigenous rights and sovereignty, that works, too. Or you might volunteer for a climate-focused local or national political candidate.”

You can meet this prong of Ms. Marris’ unfucking your fucked-up head plan by voting. Voting is something you’re supposed to do anyway. Perhaps Ms. Marris means voting only for candidates of whom she approves. In order to cure yourself, you’re required to cede all powers and freedoms to Ms. Marris and her ilk. That seems reasonable.

Totally not a cult.

4. Define your role.

This prong is “everything within the group, nothing outside the group, nothing against the group.” It’s a catchy phrase but it sounded better in the original mid-20^th century Italian.

Lest you think Ms. Marris requires your absolute subservience, think again! Truly, she is a most benevolent Duce Fuhrer leader, concerned for her slaves minions fellow travelers:

“Take care not to overdo it at first and risk burning out. Set a sustainable level of involvement for yourself and keep it up. As a bonus, working with a group will increase the richness and diversity of your personal relationships, and may well temper your climate anxiety and depression.”

Only Ms. Marris can help you recover from your climate anxiety and depression. You should probably see her for an audit in which she’ll use an E-reader to rid you of your engrams so you may become cleared and an operational environmentalist.

Hey, Ms. Marris invented Scientology!

5. Know what you are fighting for, not just what you are fighting against.

‘Puter considered spending additional time and words to tear apart Ms. Marris’ last point but her own words do such a good job of discrediting her as a serious person, he decided to let you read them yourselves:

“As we fight, it is important for our mental health and motivation to have an image in mind of our goal: a realistically good future.

“Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks, infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, fake meat that tastes better than the real thing, species recovering and rewilding the world, the rivers silver with fish, the skies musical with flocking birds.

“This is a future where the economic inequality, racism and colonialism that made decades of inaction on climate change possible has been acknowledged and is being addressed. It is a time of healing. Many ecosystems have changed, but natural resilience and thoughtful human assistance is preventing most species from going extinct. This is a future in which children don’t need to take to the streets in protest and alarm, because their parents and grandparents took action. Instead, they are climbing trees.”

BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD, OR ELSE YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WILL DIE IN A GIANT, GLOBAL OVEN OF YOUR MAKING! YOU ARE ENVIRO-HITLER EXTERMINATING YOUR KIN IF YOU DON’T AGREE WITH MS. MARRIS! OBEY HER!

And while you’re at it, buy Ms. Marris’ book so you can virtue signal to your hippie friends and quote from it to shame your backwards, hick relatives you abandoned back in Flyover Country to make your way in the enlightened, totes cool coastal enclaves.

Ms. Marris’ piece cements many Americans’ opinion of the climate change cultists. They are narcissistic, weak-willed people who want to use government force to destroy jobs and limit freedoms in order to enter the promised land of a world where the Earth warms slightly less and everyone’s equally poor and miserable.

Most normal people want no part of the world Ms. Marris and her ilk wish to foist upon them. And Ms. Marris and her ilk are too stupid, too power-hungry, or too brainwashed to realize it.

Heed her words and act accordingly.

* Ms. Marris is the author of “Rambunctious Garden: Nature in a Post-Wild World” which sounds like a story about hippies refusing to tend their commune’s weed patch after their Cat Stevens’ Greatest Hits 8-track broke. 

** Did I mention Ms. Marris lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon? Because of course she does.

“When I’m president, I’ll promise…”

For many years, GorT has been advocating that we need to improve our teaching of Civics in our schools. Never is it so apparent as during Presidential campaign season when we get to witness sitting Senators completely forget that they are in the legislative body of our federal government and promise one legislative act after another as part of their Presidential platform – many over-reaching, in my opinion, the bounds of the federal government. It typically ranges from various budget initiatives* and immigration practices to protection laws and taxes.

Kate Hardiman pens a great opinion piece in the Washington Examiner tackling the new Fairfax County (VA) policy allowing students in grades 7-12 to miss “one partial school day per school year” (not sure what defines a “partial school day”) in order to participate in “optional civic engagement activities”. Civic engagement is not defined by the policy so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. She makes great points:

• what teenager wouldn’t want a half-day off school to do something that they get their parents to write that they want to do and then did. Note: they don’t actually really have to do said thing, the parents (or a forging teenager) just needs to say they did.
• From an political spectrum perspective – liberal efforts tend to have more public protests/marches/etc. and therefore it may skew who is in school and become a greater divide between peers at a younger age. Add in the peer pressure of being the ones that would be in school, it may lead to participation by those not fully supportive (see below for more on this)
• Ms. Hardiman also cites that protests and marches might not actually encourage authentic civic engagement.

She concludes by arguing that it would benefit the kids to have the schools focus on civics rather than supporting them missing school in the hopes that it could unite Americans above the divisions that current protests exacerbate.

If Fairfax County (or other school districts) want to allow this, I’d stipulate a requirement that any student participating in it must pass a comprehensive civics test appropriate for their school grade. And by this I don’t mean simple civics stuff. If an 8th grader is going to go attend the “March for our Lives” (supporting additional gun laws), then they should demonstrate a knowledge of the 2nd Amendment, the process by which Amendments to the Constitution occur, how laws get passed, an overview of current gun control laws, etc. in addition to general knowledge of the roles and responsibilities laid out by the Constitution for the three branches of government.

Have the school districts really thought out about how the kids will cover missed work and learning? Probably not. As a knee-jerk reaction, I’d guess they would say the students are responsible for determining what was missed and what they have to make up. So these students turn to their peers who attended for help. Now, the students who stayed in school and used the taxpayer’s money effectively and for its designated purpose, have to help those who missed to attend (or not) some political event that the students in school either didn’t agree with or weren’t allowed to attend. Maybe the school and teachers will feel for these students and go easier on them for missing class – setting up multiple standards for those who attend vs. protest. Imagine if a student is absent to protest something the teacher personally opposes – think that’ll go smoothly and without bias?

As an example, the Volgi, ‘Puter, and GorT attended a high school in the Washington DC area. The religion department our senior year decided that the class should take a field trip to witness the protests around the U.S. policies regarding the Contras in Nicaragua near the Capitol. As it neared, a number of students (rightly) pointed out a few things: (1) our presence at the protest could convey the support of our school (as many of us would wear school-logo/name clothing) for the protest – is the official policy of the school that we are in support of it? (2) a number of us were not in support of the protest and felt like this was coercive, (3) really, many in our class didn’t fully understand the full context of the political situation. As a result, and in some respects to the credit of the school, some students stayed home, many attended, and a few of us (‘Puter and GorT included) were told to sit in the library during the half-day “field trip” and write an essay about the Contras situation. GorT penned an essay (as did others) about why the field trip was coercive and wrong. Upon reflection, at least one religion teacher expressed an understanding that it might not have been the best idea and admired the students taking different stands on the event.

Civics matters. Far too many Americans are ignorant of how this country works – or more accurately, is supposed to work based on our foundational documents and laws. People should easily be able to discern Presidential campaign promises (from either side) that are legislative duties – and then go ask, “if these are priorities, why didn’t they champion them in Congress where they are sitting now?”. People should understand who controls the federal purse-strings and how that gets done – and why government shutdowns are solely the fault of Congress not the President.

But sure, let’s have our students miss more educational time and go marching around cities, waiving posters and signs, or sit at home for half-a-day playing X-Box. As GorT, Sr. has pointed out, American education is where it seems we aim to get the least for our money.

* Yes, I know the federal budget process starts with the President submitting a proposed budget to Congress but that budget is a request from the executive branch – Congress goes thru (or should go thru) a whole budgetary process where the President’s budget is, essentially, tossed out.

Wow. The Czar got some actual mail the other day, and for a second, he had to check the date, as it’s been a while since anyone has sent anything. Fortunately, it was from Operative B, who had this to say on the Czar’s recent comments on the economy.

This is not wrong, but the Czar might quibble on the reason you can’t find a forklift driver: the simple reason is that they’re just not out there. They’re gone. We use to have a stockpile of people who could indeed do these things, as they weren’t particularly employable. But the economy is expanding so quickly that even these resources are dried up. They’re dried up because they’re all working.
This is of course a minor quibble, because (a) otherwise, Operative B is right about the priority of our resources, and (b) the explosive growth of Amazon and Wal-Mart have seen forklift drivers specifically skyrocket in demand.
Believe it or not, this was not foreseen. The Czar admits he was sympathetic to the Obama administration’s assumptions that these blue-collar jobs were gone, and simply were not coming back. However, Trump seems to have sputtered the manufacturing sector back into a flicker of life, and suddenly, yes, these jobs are needed again. And after 8 years of Obama and 8 years of Bush writing off the manufacturing world, yeah, we kind of agreed that kids should be looking elsewhere. Well, these jobs are back—and the workers? Well, they went elsewhere.

Your Gormogons have long enjoyed the hospitality of the United Kingdom.

If you’re glancing at the usual news feeds, doubtless you’re aware it’s the End of All Civilization Ever, because random-coiffed Boris Johnson’s Tories defeated the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn—the latter being a neo-Leninist, terrorist-kissing, anti-Semitic homophobe, making the former the racist because he’s not in the Labour Party.

The usual news feeds are telling you this election is all about Brexit, and how every time they hold the same freaking election on the same topic, oddly it keeps tilting more in the direction the media don’t want it to go. If you’re an American, which our blog stats tell us most of you readers are, your reading of the UK elections is pretty limited to “Racist jackass with stupid hair inexplicably beats reform-minded, popular working-class hero in order to take Britain’s economy to the Dark Ages.”

You can already guess the Czar is about to take you in a different direction. You’re correct.

The news story is this: Britain’s “party of the working man” has embraced as many goofy Leftist tropes as possible, promising a wealth of free services to the younger generation, for which only the extremely wealthy upper percentages will pay. In exchange, the British economy—despite showing no signs of recession but every indication of increasing cash flow for the average person—is going to be corrected by locking it into a regulation-heavy system of government control.

If that sounds familiar, it should. If it doesn’t sound familiar, substitute “America’s” and “American” for the words in red, and you’ve got the same message the Democratic candidates are pushing for 2020.

The biggest difference is that the Brits got to vote earlier than we did, and the result as a tremendous trouncing of Leftist lunacy. Not only did Brits reject the Leftist vision, they did so in a landslide.

Another important factor: headlines are screeching that voter turnout was down from 2017. This is true, but here’s what the Leftist media is not telling you: the voter turnout is down by only 1.5 percent over 2017—and 2019’s voter turnout was 67.23 percent.

That means two out of three registered voters came out to tell Labour to get bent. In America, 61% voted in 2016. This is significant because an old rule of political science is that anytime voter turnout goes above about 60%, the voters are pissed off. Lower turnouts indicate complacency. In 2016, Americans voted mostly to keep Hillary Clinton out of power; reason enough, it seems, to be a tad angry.

But British turnout is a bit of an exclamation point.

What’s more, Labour lost 7.8% of its vote share overall, which is a landslide defeat. Constituencies across the country, some of whom have been progressive liberal since the 1930s, flipped to conservative. To put this in perspective, this would be like Boston voting for Trump. In short, Labour didn’t lose—it was severely crushed.

While this is all paper hats and Christmas crackers for England, this can easily serve as a bellwether for America’s 2020 election. Of course, there’s still almost a year left before Americans vote, which is plenty of time for Republicans to drive their party wagon right into a tree. But if the elections were held today, especially with swing-state voters increasingly annoyed with the Democrats in recent weeks, it’s pretty certain Republicans would hold the presidency and Senate.

So what happens next for Britain? If history is any guide—and it is—we can expect two things.

First, the British economy will begin to reform as it did under Margaret Thatcher, and Brexit will result in the UK become a world economic player again. Tax loads will lighten for the economy’s drivers, and general unemployment will go down. Unions will suffer terribly, and consumers will benefit from reduced prices on goods and services, as well as see incomes tick up.

Second, the media will report, as they did under Thatcher, that the economy is terrible and stagnant under all this “austerity.” Britain will become the laughingstock of the world, particularly among countries led by the Left, and everyone just hates Boris Johnson. He’s awful, for sure, and horror stories will abound about individuals or very small groups of people you don’t know slightly suffering under the new economy. Everything will be his fault. And he’s racist. And hates women. And basically, he hates anyone who voted for Labour in the past. And Brexit was a mistake and we all told you so, but you didn’t listen.

The Czar is continually amazed at how vilified Margaret Thatcher remains in British popular culture, even though by nearly every measure, she was one of Britain’s greatest leaders. Boris Johnson can expect the same treatment; let us hope he remains “not for turning,” as Ms. Thatcher did.