Torn Between Two Girlfriends, Feeling Like A Fool, Loving Both Of Them Is Breaking All The Rules

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

An oldie but goodie from my blog Jan. 29, 2004:

I park beside the Beverly Hills Hotel with my ugly van (Thursday, January 29). A man in front of me gets out of his Mercedes and looks at my vehicle with horror. I follow him down the walk, down the corridor, to the ballroom for the Wednesday Morning Club lunch with guest speaker John Stossel of ABC News.

A few months ago at the WMC, I sat beside two middle-aged women I'll call Cathy and Marie. They were a tad catty.

Today Marie asks me where's my redheaded girlfriend who writes for Rolling Stone. I was bewildered. I know I've been with many women in my time but I don't remember this one. Marie says it's my friend, the one I sat next to the day I met her.

"Oh, you mean Cathy? She's not here yet. She's not redheaded. She's blonde. And she doesn't write for Rolling Stone."

Marie: "Oh."

Cathy walks in at noon. She can't get into the A-list table upfront with the bigshots, so she deigns to sit with me. She wants a clear view to the speaker.

I suggest a table at the back. She suggests four other tables. I suggest the table at the back. Eventually she agrees. Next I persuade her to move the yucky onion off my salad.

Cathy sits beside a former publisher of the Orange County Register. She tells him the Register should carry her column. Cathy believes every paper should carry her column including The Weekly World News and the Zimbabwean Morning Star.

David Horowitz promotes his Stakeholder summit February 7. I open the brochure and my eyes pop open. All six featured speakers are black.

"Scary for you," says Cathy. "She [Genethia H. Hayes] looks like she could kick your ass."

Why's a Jew holding an economics conferences with schvartzes on Shabbos?

The average age of the attendees at these WMCs is about 50. They should have more speakers on topics such as spirituality and mysticism. That tends to attract beautiful clueless young chicks of which I need more in my life.

John Stossel gives a 25-minute speech and takes 12 minutes of questions. Stossel protests he is not a conservative and that consenting adults should be able to do what they want.

A feisty, salty, sassy old blonde woman next to us, the same one who gave a rant against religion to Victor Davis Hanson, yells "Yeah!," when Stossel says he supports decriminalizing prostitution and drugs.

"We own our own bodies and we should be allowed to rent them to other people. If doctors can earn money with their doctors, why can't a woman?"

About a fifth of the crowd clap. I hope that a fifth of the crowd don't have the clap. I doubt it.

"I believe homosexuality is perfectly natural and you should be able to burn a flag. Yet they call me a conservative because I believe in free markets."

Stossel says that when he reported on corporations, he was popular with his peers (winning 18 of his 19 Emmy awards). When he turned his scrutiny on government, his colleagues changed their tune.

As Cathy and I walk out, she asks me if I'm going to say hello to my girlfriend. She means Marie. I explain that Marie thought Cathy was my redheaded girlfriend who wrote for Rolling Stone.

At this point, an ABBA song took over and I lost touch with reality.

Cathy walks away, tossing a few sentences over her shoulder. "I don't want to talk about the things we've gone through. Though it's hurting me, now it's history. I've played all my cards and that's what you've done to me. Nothing more to say, no more aces to play."

She marches off.

The winner takes it all. The loser standing small beside the victory that's our destiny.

I was in your arms, thinking I belonged there. I figured it made sense, building me a fence. Building me a home, thinking I'd be strong there. But I was a fool, playing by the rules.

I run after Cathy. She turns to me. "Does she kiss like I used to kiss you?"

I'm nonplussed. John Stossel and David Horowitz are listening in on our conversation. I feel embarassed. My face flushes.

"I don't think this is the time or place, Cathy," I say.

"Does it feel the same when she calls your name?" Cathy demands. "Somewhere deep inside, you must know I miss you. But what can I say? Rules must be obeyed.

"The judges will decide. The likes of me abide. The winner takes it all. The game is on again."

Cathy Seipp remembers things this way:

Today at the WMC I sat beside two middle-aged men I'll call "Mr. Smith" and "Mr. Ford." One was a snappy retired newspaper publisher who told me funny stories about his movie star neighbors near his new Hollywood Hills home. The other seemed vaguely Australian, and confused at the notion that salad should be eaten with a fork.

Mr. Smith gallantly moved my coffee cup closer to the waiter when he heard I wanted coffee, and told me that one of his handsome actor neighbors insists on wearing a sarong in public.

Mr. Ford scanned the room for "hot young chicks" and then demanded my help removing the frightening mushrooms and onions from his salad. Still, he's a dear old thing. I look forward to cutting up more food for him when he finally leaves the hovel for that assisted living facility we've been looking into.

Well, this dear Mr. Smith didn't mind snaking his arm around Cathy's chair in a protective fatherly gesture. I believe they exchanged phone numbers and a toke on a joint.

Robert writes:

Luke is clearly out of his league in anything but, a complementary buffet setting. We all think it and I'm going to say it. Luke Ford is an absolute failure as a metro-sexual! He wants to move in the circles of the "beautiful people" yet he has never had a chemical face peel, his graying hair lighted, his crows feet botoxed or even his scrotum waxed. Luke get with it!! Get thee to a beautician post haste!

Emmanuel Richard writes Cathy Seipp:

Procrastinating with 2 deadlines looming dangerously, I laughed so hard reading Luke's little fantasies. And your counter-attack. His blog should be capsuled and launched into space for aliens to find sometimes in the future: imagine an alien anthropologist scratching his green fuzzy head, reading this weirdo slice of humanity? To help them, and humanity as a whole, Luke should post more pics. He used to have good photos back in the old days… Whoops.

Cathy replies: "Whoops indeed! Don't you remember the one he posted of his sore tongue? On the other hand, if you muck around in Luke's archives like the Luke Ford Fan Blog guy does, you can find some good pictures of him in his underwear."

Posted in Cathy Seipp | Comments Off on Torn Between Two Girlfriends, Feeling Like A Fool, Loving Both Of Them Is Breaking All The Rules

What’s The Difference Between Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic and Psychotherapy?

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

Link: “Psychotherapy attempts to restore a persons relationship to the social norms and regulations, while psychoanalysis works to restore a person’s relationship to their sexuality. Psychotherapy works to strengthen the ego, while psychoanalysis works to strengthen the subject’s relationship to their own unconscious. Psychotherapists use their relationship with you, the client, to influence your decision-making, to teach coping strategies, change behaviors or thoughts, and to modify the ways you relate to others. Psychoanalysts use their relationship with you to help you reorganize the way you relate to yourself and your body with all of its human qualities. What happens with your relationships afterwards is secondary and entirely up to you!”

Link: “Psychoanalysis usually refers to a formal, multiple times a week years-long therapy, usually lying on a couch. Psychodynamic therapy uses theory and methods of psychoanalysis but is variable in terms of length and frequency of sessions, and is usually face to face.”

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Joe Biden’s Presidential Character (3-5-21)

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

Author Robert Merry writes July 22, 2020:

The Positive presidents relished the job and the grand necessity to move events by persuading, cajoling, bargaining with and perhaps occasionally threatening other players in the political arena. The great Active-Positive presidents all had fun in the job. They showed a zest and enthusiasm that was infectious, not just with the American people but also with members of Congress.

This doesn’t describe Trump. There’s no look of the happy warrior about him but rather a consistent bitterness and whininess. He demonstrates hardly any zest for the job and certainly very little enthusiasm for dealing with, cajoling, influencing, or even outmaneuvering the political opposition. The result is that he seldom outmaneuvers his adversaries at all.

And probably no president in American history has done more to make the big issues of the day about himself and his fate rather than about the nation and its fate. This is a bit of a giveaway that his struggles are driven by internal motivations, perhaps even internal demons of some kind or other.

All this helps explain why Trump has been unable to build politically on his basic fount of support—the 39 percent to 43 percent of Americans who give him a positive performance rating. If there is one thing his political style is not, it’s infectious. His negativity is a barrier to expansion in his overall public support; his inability to expand his public support is a barrier to success in governance; and his lack of success in governance is a barrier to eventual political success in November.

Thus do we see that Trump seems to be an Active-Negative. Presidents in this Barber category don’t have great track records. They include John Adams, a failed one-termer; Woodrow Wilson, a two-termer whose second term was among the most disastrous of our history; Herbert Hoover, tossed out after a single term because he couldn’t find a way to grapple with the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson, a foreign-policy failure of rare dimension; and Richard Nixon, the only president to resign the office in disgrace.

What about Biden? Of course, using the Barber analytical tool to assess the presidential character of someone who has never been president has to be considered a qualified enterprise at best. But the man has been at a high level on the national political scene for nearly half a century, and in that time we have been given a solid opportunity to observe him and assess his political attributes.

On the Positive/Negative scale, Biden would seem to be a Positive. He was excoriated early in the Democratic nomination battle for touting his ability over the years to work with fellow senators who had demonstrated their segregationist prejudices, including Mississippi’s James O. Eastland and Georgia’s Herman Talmadge. “We didn’t agree on much of anything,” said Biden, adding however, “We got things done.”

The outcry, much of it mean-spirited, was predictable, but Biden’s ability to work with senatorial colleagues was a hallmark of his image over the decades of his congressional tenure. The highly regarded Congressional Quarterly book of political profiles, Politics in America, praised Biden for his ability to work with North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms when Helms was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Biden was its ranking member. Said the book: “Biden’s ability to maintain lines of communication with all groups often has made him, rather than Helms, the key vote on Foreign Relations.”

This can be viewed as evidence of a Positive trait, based on the Barber scale. Even after 30 years in the Senate, said Politics in America, “he still exhibits the intelligence, drive and passion of his youth.” The key word here, in terms of presidential character, is “passion.” Positives demonstrate a zest for the job and an openness to people, even those in the opposition who represent impediments to success that must be dealt with through persuasion, cajolery, back-slapping, and old-fashioned horse-trading. Positives love that game; so does Biden.

On the Active/Passive scale, Biden seems to tilt toward passivity. This is difficult to assess, however, because you can’t know how a president will view the White House job with any definiteness until he or she actually becomes president. But Biden’s long Washington service reveals an adroit legislative politician who dealt with issues as they emerged, without much evidence of vision or big thinking.

Thus does it appear that Biden represents a likely Passive/Positive president. Recall, Barber sees presidents in this category as wanting to be loved and thus ingratiating—and easily manipulated. That indeed is one of the knocks on Biden by conservatives—that he is being manipulated in his campaign, and would continue to be as president, by his party’s emergent leftist radicals.


https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-presidents-who-went-war-5-best-us-history-164162?page=0%2C1
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-will-history-assess-obama/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-they-stand-the-american-presidents-in-the-eyes-of-voters-and-historians-by-robert-w-merry/2012/07/13/gJQA8tSaiW_story.html
https://www.lukeford.net/archives/updates/031027.htm
https://www.lukeford.net/archives/updates/040205.htm

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The Halfway House

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Luke Ford

Author Steven Pressfield tells author Tim Ferriss about his time working in a halfway house for people released from mental asylums: “They weren’t crazy at all. They were the smart people who had seen through the bullshit and because of that they couldn’t function in the world. They couldn’t hold a job because they couldn’t take the bullshit. That’s how they wound up in institutions. The greater society thought, ‘These people are rejects. They can’t fit in.’ But to my mind, they were the people who saw through everything.”

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OutsideTheBeltway.com: A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political scientist Steven L. Taylor writes:

All of this brings me to true inspiration to this post, a speech by Deroy Murdock of the National Review at CPAC. Specifically, this clip (the second Tweet):

The whole speech (or, at least, most of it, is here via FNC).

Murdock is in inveighing against the notion that electoral fraud is not that big of a problem. He provides the Heritage database as a foundational part of his argument and emphasizes that it shows 1,130 convictions for electoral fraud. Indeed, he verbally underscores that number and forthrightly proclaims “so don’t tell me that vote fraud is some right wing hallucination.”

However, in my math-based opinion that number (especially when broken down into different categories) is so small as to be near to nonexistent in terms of system-level critiques. It may not be a hallucination, but it is a mirage on the horizon, a mistaken perception shimmering beyond reach that is not real.

Any human endeavor will have imperfections, so no shock US elections have people violating the rules. The goal should be commensurate and proportional responses to those imperfections. Not, as seems to be the goal for Murdock and company, massive overreactions to the problem that will simply result in making voting harder (and not, by the way, addressing most of the crimes on the Heritage list).

Murdock does not state, it is worth underscoring yet again, that the database stretches back to 1982. He does define what “voter fraud” or “electoral fraud” is. He provides no context on the relative number of votes case since 1982. No, instead be makes it sound that a) there is a real problem, and he just proved it by citing Heritage, and b) therefore Republicans are simply trying to protect the integrity of elections.

Side note: I am 100% in agreement that electoral integrity is important. And if Murdock and others who are concerned about things voter ID and voter registration rolls want to have free and universal ID cards and automatic registration of voters (the best ways to assure key elements of electoral integrity) I am there with them. Let’s do it.

But if “electoral integrity” is code for “making it harder for people to vote” then we have a problem especially when it is unclear that those measures really do much for security and integrity. Nothing being proposed by the GOP would cut down on bribing the homeless with cigarettes to sign ballot initiative petitions in CA, for example (several of the convictions on Heritage’s list are for this crime).

Worse, he asserts at around 4:42 in the linked video from FNC that “The Democrat Party is the part of vote fraud” (and yes, he repeatedly said “Democrat Party”). So, the degree to which this is purely about election integrity and not about partisan politics is more than a bit dubious, let’s say (and yes, partisan politics at CPAC is like gambling in Casablance, so I get that).

His “evidence” was as follows from 2020:

  1. Democrats promoted mass mail-outs of ballots to voters (which he suggests led to ballots being filled out by random persons and submitted).
  2. Democrats supported side-walks drop-off boxes for ballots (which he intimates led to fraud because of lack of supervision).
  3. Democrats sought to relax signature-verification processes (which he asserts led to forged ballots being counted).
  4. Democrats blocked GOP observers from counting rooms.

So, let me note again for emphasis: he took the convictions from the Heritage list of various election-related crimes sans context or definitions and then connected it directly to 2020. His discussion of 2020 was almost entirely innuendo. But, it was all put forth as being of a piece: that there is fraud (because Heritage proved it) and therefore there was fraud on a massive scale in 2020.

Never mind that there is nothing even close to what he alleged about 2020 in the Heritage database. He repeated, for example, the weird story of late-night “dumps” of votes (from cars with out-of-state license plates, of course) and made a number of assertions about what might have happened, but apart from noting affidavits, he cited nothing concrete.

And while it is no surprise, can I just note the utter irresponsibility of continuing to push unsubstantiated lies about the 2020 elections like this to a crowd of activists in light of the Capitol Insurrection?

Posted in Voter Fraud | Comments Off on OutsideTheBeltway.com: A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

David Wallace-Wells writes:

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it.

…as early as July the MIT Technology Review reported that a group of 70 scientists in the orbit of Harvard and MIT, including “celebrity geneticist” George Church, were taking a totally DIY nasal-spray vaccine, never even intended to be tested, and developed by a personal genomics entrepreneur named Preston Estep (also the author of a self-help-slash-life-extension book called The Mindspan Diet). China began administering a vaccine to its military in June. Russia approved its version in August.

…McKeown hypothesis — that medical interventions tend to play only a small role compared to public-health measures, socioeconomic advances, and the natural dynamics of the disease as it spreads through a population.

* But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall. The whole time, we also knew that the Moderna vaccine was essentially safe. We were just waiting to know for sure that it worked, too.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along.

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How Much Do Elections Matter? (3-4-21)

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Trump Has Been Good For The GOP, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
06:15 Sanford Levinson: How Much Do Elections Matter?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMpzTEnfrHY
11:00 Rush Limbaugh’s legacy, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rush-limbaugh-is-still-dead/
16:40 Dr. Seuss nonsense, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/this-weeks-dr-suess-nonsense/
22:00 A Failure of Governance in Texas, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-failure-of-governance-in-texas/
36:00 Tom Landry: Prisoner of his Own Myth, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-09-bk-367-story.html
1:09:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1220&context=fss_papers
1:26:20 Fidelity to law & constitutional dictatorship, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0X2NRjeoM4
1:28:30 Gad Saad: My Chat with Jordan Peterson – Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KF2cwcADtU
1:36:00 Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html
1:41:00 QAnon is not going anywhere, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-qanon-has-attracted-so-many-white-evangelicals/?ex_cid=538twitter
1:48:00 The Reality of Electoral Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-reality-of-electoral-fraud/
1:50:00 A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-return-to-the-lack-of-evidence-of-significant-fraud/
2:08:00 We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
2:18:00 #501: Steven Pressfield on The Artist’s Journey, the Wisdom of Little Successes, Shadow Careers, and Overcoming Resistance, https://tim.blog/2021/02/26/steven-pressfield/
2:41:00 In the summer of 1995, I began working on a documentary about what women want, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzBnpmJyauY
2:50:00 What Women Want 20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgFouRg8Bj0
2:56:00 What Women Want 34.5, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxJ6JwJ9J0Q
2:58:00 Stormy Daniels in Feb. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDy10Tzwdqw

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Rush Limbaugh’s Legacy

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political scientist James Joyner writes:

Limbaugh’s schtick ultimately transformed the conservative movement in destructive ways because it showed how lucrative playing to the predudices of an aggrieved base can be…

a business model that depends on keeping people riled up and feeding their belief system will inevitably become mean-spirited and dishonest. Discussions of nuanced differences of emphasis—which is where politics in a democracy should naturally gravitate—aren’t enough to get millions to tune in for three hours a day, every day. No, the opposition must be monsters out to destroy all that the Good People hold dear.

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Failure of Governance In Texas

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Political scientist Steven L. Taylor blogs:

Yes, markets work because supply and demand are real forces that drive human behavior. So, yes, it makes sense that as electrical supply dwindled in Texas at the same time that demand was surging that the spot market for energy would see a price increase.

But what a lot of people fail to see/understand is that just because markets work, doesn’t mean they produce the human outcomes that we might want, and that is where government often has to act.

It is not unreasonable, I would assert, for a citizen in a developed country to expect power to stay on and clean water to flow during most circumstances, and for the government to absorb the costs and responsibility to assure that outcome. I know it is not possible to always guarantee access to utilities, but we have the technology to keep the heat on and the water flowing when it is cold outside. This is not asking for power when a category-5 hurricane makes landfall. This is asking for something that happens in the northern parts of the country on annual basis.

We live in a society for a reason, after all.

To pick another example that some pro-market folks might not want to hear: illegal immigration is very much about supply and demand. There is a supply of labor that the market in the US has a demand for, and any attempt to curtail that flow of supply is an inteference in the market.

Another example is what we are seeing in the fragmentation of media. Nonsense sells on cable TV far more than does hard news and analysis. So, we get more infotainment and less news, even as we have more and more outlets. That is the market at work, giving people what they want, but to the broader detriment of society.

Heck, peasants in the Andes grow coca bushes and not food crops because supply and demand dictate that a pound of coca leaves pays more than a pound of bananas.

Those examples are to point out that markets working does not always mean producing unvarnished goods.

To put all of this starkly: is the end goal of human society to maximize market outputs or is the goal of human society the flourishing of its members? While it is possible that sometimes those two things align, they do not always. It is a fundamental reason that government is needed.

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Trump Has Been Good For The GOP

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Socialist pollster David Shor says:

* …between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.

* So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.

The question is: Can they get all of the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts? And I don’t know the answer to that question. But when I look at the 2020 election, I see that we ran against the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president — and we ran literally the most popular figure in our party whose last name is not Obama — and we only narrowly won the Electoral College. If Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, then Donald Trump would have won reelection with just 48 percent of the two-party vote. We can’t control what Trump or Republicans do. But we can add states, we can ban partisan redistricting, and we can elevate issues that appeal to both college-educated liberals and a lot of working-class “conservatives.” If we don’t, things could get very bleak, very fast.

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