"Good Lord. I do not want any of this to be the case. I'd far rather have the whole thing have been simple incompetence."

Wrote Jamie, in the comments to my post "Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt."

The post title is a quote from a Sean Davis article in The Federalist. Instapundit pulled out Jamie's quote for his post on the Sean Davis article.

Also quoted at Instapundit is a comment from Achilles: "At first glance every trained person in the world said one thing: Bullshit."

So how are you feeling — more like Jamie or more like Achilles? The Jamie position, if I may rephrase it, is: I hope the Secret Service is as bad as it would need to be for this to have all been mere negligence. The Achilles position is: The negligence theory is beyond belief.

I'm not one for jumping into conspiracy theories, but here, the idea that it happened through multiple levels of Secret Service failures feels more like a conspiracy theory. You have to strain and get creative to explain it. If you begin in the Jamie position and desperately hope there was no intent to allow a killer access, you have to struggle to explain how that could be.

Apologies to Achilles and Jamie if I've misstated their thinking or if they don't like their names being used in this way. I'll rename the "positions" if they object. 

"What are some famous examples — in truth or fiction — of a character who puts a lot of effort into being able to be lazy?"

I ask ChatGPT, a propos of the previous post about the "Lazy Girl" jobs. I was influenced by a comment from Jamie, who wrote, "Heinlein wrote a story called 'The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail,' about a smart but lazy guy who spends his life and career thinking up efficiencies and ends up very successful."

ChatGPT answered me:

Can you tell whether it's elevating and not racist to compare Black Lives Matter artists to cavemen?

I'm trying to read "New York’s Sidewalk Prophets Are Heirs of the Lascaux Cave Artisans/What street art adorning boarded-up storefronts tells us about our shared political realities and the ways our stories are connected. A critic’s tour deciphers the signs and symbols" in the New York Times.

Maybe to answer my question you need to know more about the racial identification of the writer, whose name is Seph Rodney. I'm just going to give you a sample of the prose:

What became apparent to me is that in the intervening millenniums between those cave paintings and the killing of George Floyd, the messages we share, like the sociopolitical circumstance that impel them, have become more complex. Now street artists take account of the qualified legal immunity protecting police officers, the Black Lives Matter movement and the ramifications of a dysfunctional democracy, among other realities, using a well-developed visual language of cultural memes that illustrate the ideological battles among regional, racial and cultural factions. When we see the image of thin, green-skinned, bipedal beings with teardrop-shaped black apertures for eyes, we typically read “alien.” But when I see the image of such a creature holding a sign that reads “I can’t breathe,” I grok an urgent message: Even aliens visiting from light years away understand the plight of Black people in the United States because this situation is so obviously dire.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jamie said:

I stopped processing his prose before he said "grok," but woke back up when I got there. I hate when people who aren't Heinlein use "grok" to connote their deep understanding... Those people almost invariably missed the point of Stranger In a Strange Land.

The OED has an entry for "grok" — U.S. slang, "arbitrary formation" by Robert A. Heinlein, from 1961. It is defined as "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" or " To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." The 2 quotes from the book that are in the OED are: "Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign" and "Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers." The OED also gives these quotes:

1968 Playboy June 80 He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion.