Author: Gnerphk

I am The Gnerphk, writer extraordinaire, opinionated, radical, and extremely humble by nature.

If EVs Were Economical…

Before we start on the topic at hand, let me tell you a little bit about Rep. Lance Gooden (R, Texas), who represents part of Dallas and a lot of suburbs to the east of that fine city. He’s a local boy, and best I can tell his people have been in Texas at least since it was part of Mexico.

He’s called his voting record “the most conservative in Congress”, and his district, the Texas 5th, is so strongly Republican that Democrats often don’t bother to run; his toughest opposition may well be the local Libertarians. His church is so conservative that they don’t believe in musical accompaniment. He’s worked tirelessly in support of local businesses and against government waste, voted to repeal the Iraq War Authorization, and was one of over a hundred Congressmen who signed onto an amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, an attempt to overturn the latter state’s 2020 election results that was dismissed by the Supreme Court.

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Para Bellum

Igitur quī dēsīderat pācem, præparet bellum.

Vegetius, Epitoma De Re Militari, Book III preface

It’s always a surprise how little we truly know about what we think we know, which only makes sense: You don’t get very far if you begin on the presumption that you’re wrong. Proceeding on invalid, partial, incorrect, or incomplete information is a survival trait. There is no practicable method for knowing everything you’ll need to know before you begin, so instead humanity has learned to persevere against the impossible, adapting on the fly. It is at once a marvelous talent and terrifyingly dangerous flaw.

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Cancelling Mastriano

Among the many extreme Republican candidates backed by Democrat dollars, Doug Mastriano stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. The campaign manager of his future opponent for the governorship of Pennsylvania, state Attorney general Josh Shapiro, spent hundreds of thousands of donated dollars on attack ads targeting Mastriano’s opponents — more than twice the total expenditures of Mastriano’s own campaign — in order to select what Democratic strategists believe will be an easily defeated opponent.

It’s a dangerous game, the same one that got Trump elected in 2016: The profiles of extremists are elevated by mass infusions of Democrat money, and mainstream news media supports the effort — understandably, but foolishly — by then exposing the extremist views of those who were set up for failure.

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Student Loan Debt Forgiveness

It’s reasonable for a lot of people to be upset about Uncle Joe’s effort. It’s actually rather difficult to envision an action to forgive student loan debt that would cause less anger in a broad sense. Since anything so minor relative to the size of the problem can only be an empty gesture, and since it’s a $300 billion expense paid from an underwater tax budget directly to banks, it’s guaranteed to cause anger.

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The Not Fake News Update, 23 August 2022

The world continues ever chaotic, with wars, droughts, plagues, famines, earthquakes, and hurricanes galore. So it ever was, and so it shall be until time ends, or so we’ve been reliably informed.

Amid the never-ending cycle of disaster and in-depth reporting, it’s easy to miss the occasional item of import that happens while we’re foolishly paying attention to Donald Trump or some other headline-hogging unpleasantness. What’s worse, sometimes the things we miss are the positive ones; tragedy has a way of grabbing column inches, while triumph often falls below the fold. We at The Not Fake News have undertaken to help correct this tendency with our regular Updates.

And so, without further ado, here we go!

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Post Turtle Ergo Propter Turtle

There’s a hoary old tale that’s been circulating in American politics for generations. It starts with an elderly farmer, because in myth and parable those are our wise men. The English have wizards; the Germans have magic dwarves; Americans have farmers.

Seems this old feller was out mending fence one day and had a mishap, so he went in to see the town doctor. As he was getting his hand stitched up, the doc asked how he’d happened to slip so badly with the fence wire.

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Ranked-Choice Voting: How and Why?

Image: “Never Trump! I’d Rather Die!”

A few states have recently opted to change their elections process to Ranked-Choice voting, a method which, its proponents say, is designed to give third-party candidates a better chance of winning, or, failing that, at least an honest share of the vote.

Opponents have raised objections ranging from the process becoming too complicated to the contention that it’s no longer “one person, one vote”.

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Ignorance And Apathy Revisited

EDITORIAL

The F.B.I. just raided Mar-A-Lago, opened former president Donald Trump’s personal safe, apparently looking for documents relating to… oh, I don’t know; probably something or other, maybe classified maybe not. I’d tell you more except, just between you and me, I really don’t care.

Seriously: I don’t know about you, but I reached my limit of daily Donald Trump in late 2020, and my level of apathy toward him has just kept growing since then. At this point, arrest the man or don’t, and the amount of time I’ll spend paying attention to the proceedings will be zero either way. Why? Because I very much don’t care.

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