Human Behavior

Those Who Dare Not Be Named

by

I have been provided with several rations’ worth of bitter amusement over the last few years , when reading various news stories, especially those concerning incidents of murder, rape, mayhem and property crime – most of which can be laid at the door of a certain violently dysfunctional urban demographic – and then comparing the sympathetic manner in which that specific demographic is presented in pop entertainment.

Yes, just as the sun rises in the east, one can absolutely count on black urban youth being cast as hapless, misunderstood yet endearing rascals, automatically the prime suspect in a murder actually committed by the prep-school son of a white Wall Street magnate, or a deranged Christian minister, or some middle-class white schlub with a dirty secret – as is usually wrapped up in the final ten minutes of an hour-long episode.

Read more

Questions for Our Time

by

I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.

Read more

Team Player

by

When it comes to aspects of the current gender-swapping madness towards which I am most adamantly opposed, the spectacle of teen and twentyish born males putting on a dress, calling themselves Loretta and demanding to compete as a female athlete tops the list, because of the inherent unfairness of it. Human sexual dimorphism is a stone-cold reality: the mature male of our species tends to be taller, heavier, faster and more muscular than the female. Personally, the last time I was ever able to hold my own, physically, against my brother and his friends was at the age of twelve or thirteen – right before puberty set in. I will concede that there are outliers and variances; I am fairly sure that Ronda Rousey could smack the tar out of that skinny little twerp Dylan Mulvaney every day before breakfast and twice on Sunday.

Read more

Nothing Personal, It’s Just Business. Well, Actually, It Is All Personal. Because Business is Personal.

by

For those who may not know, I own a business and our field is HVAC distribution, which is a subset of industrial distribution.

A few weeks ago I lost my largest customer. It wasn’t due to any fault of my company or staff. The order came from one of my manufacturer vendors, where the people and culture have developed into a gross toxic stew over the last few years. I’ll spare you the gory details, but to quote Goodfellas, “we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians, it was real greaseball shit“.

Which is to say, one of my largest vendors gave this order and no matter how hard I fought, or wanted to fight, it was over. So that was that.

The great part about owning your own business is that over time (I’ve been doing this for 35 years) you develop a sense of peace in the face of threats and you develop what many have called “steel”. I have faced unimaginable (to most) adversity being in business for this long. We have lost our largest customer before.

And while this is a short term shock to us, we have been here before and have been through worse. Kneejerk reactions always prove unproductive. Sitting in a quiet room and thinking about your company, where you are, and who your friends are and what you can do IS productive. Charlie Munger said:

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.

Munger thinks that I shouldn’t spend too much time navel gazing over something that I had no control over. So what now? This customer was 12% of our revenue.

Read more

The Lie At the Heart

by

There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.

Read more