Mea culpas. Celebrities. Aggravation works differently with dad than mom

20230124

I have a simpleminded tendency to take things at face value. I was delighted to see Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, come out with this apparently sincere expression of contrition. He admitted he was wrong about both Covid 19 and the vaccines. To me it was a welcome mea culpa.

Not so fast! Though I think I noticed more than most people, there was such a flood of information and commentary throughout the last three years that I missed Scott Adams’ contributions. He was apparently consistently, repeatedly, stridently wrong. The situation called for more than a mea culpa.  How about a mea maxima culpa?

Apparently Matthew Crawford had been working for a couple of years to educate Adams, and Adams simply refused to engage. That is disappointing for a professed intellectual. He should have taken a look, IMHO, at what the other side had to say.  Much, I modestly add, as I at least read people like Paul Craig Roberts, Eric Topol and Katelyn Jetelina with whom I disagree. 

I invite you to read the scathing responses by long time Team Reality players Crawford and el gato malo.  They both make the point that it is important for the many players who were wrong to recognize why they were wrong, because the cabal that fooled them this time is certainly gearing up to do it again, on other subjects.

Closer to home, I will add that there were people among the readership here who consistently warned me that Russia was about to invade. I countered that it made no sense – I didn't expect it. It took me only about a day to admit that I had been wrong.

It took me another week or so to conclude that the invasion would wind up being a debacle and that my family would be safer staying in Kyiv than joining the 8 million refugees fleeing Ukraine. The first conclusion appears likely, the second is definite. I cannot imagine what we would have done for the past year in exile. Did any of the Cassandras congratulate me? Not that I recall.

Is it a coincidence that my mea culpa with regard to the war was directed at the same people who had been agreeing all along with Scott Adams about the Covid situation? Nope. I don't think that's a coincidence either. You know who you are. I'm still waiting for you, like Scott Adams, to experience Road to Damascus conversions. You will find it hard at this point to come up with anything original to say. The articles above offer a complete catalog of excuses others have used. el gato malo has some pretty nice graphics, such as this one on the triple-con that was worked on you.

I just looked up the translation for celebrity. As it is a concept that I had not encountered here in Ukraine, I expected it to be a derivative of the English. Nope – they have their own word.  Знаменитість.

Eddie was unfamiliar with the term, as in the celebrity endorsements that we read about in Calvin and Hobbes. I explained the outsized influence that American celebrities have on politics, health decisions and our buying decisions. I asked him if he knew of any Ukrainian celebrities. He could only think of one – the soccer player Andrei Shevchenko.  I think I have seen his picture in advertisements for online sports betting.  I told Eddie we have a couple of others. Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, is a former world heavyweight boxing champion.  Zelensky, something of a celebrity on TV, is certainly one as a wartime president.

The news to me is that I have an 11-year-old son who is so unspoiled that he did not know what a celebrity is. He does not bug me to buy anything endorsed by celebrities. His support for Ukraine in this war has nothing to do with Zelensky. He is a Ukrainian.

That's the short news from Lake WeBeGone, where Marianna is downstairs with other two-year-olds beating on the drums in a music lesson, five-year-old Zoriana cried and resisted getting dressed for a full half an hour, then halfway to the bus took off the jacket and vest that her mom forced her to put on because the temperature is in the mid-20s. She cried all the way to kindergarten because I told her there was no way she was going to make me carry the clothes she wouldn't wear. Eddie is finally showing signs of getting serious about exercise. To me that's more important than schoolwork, which admittedly is slipping a bit.

Graham