Archive for December, 2007

More Hillary-Fawning

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Last weekend, I had indulged in a fanciful bit of creative writing trying to figure out what it would look like if a certain Clinton sycophant had such undying adoration for me, as he in fact has for Hillary Clinton — and had written a diary entry about my relatively humdrum existence. You might have thought at that time, that myself and others had brought to you the most incredible, amazing, outrageous example of Clinton-worship disguised as even-handed analysis, that you were likely to see in this generation.

In my view, you could be forgiven for such a mistake. The link immediately preceding, points to the only occurrence on the innernets I could find of this piece, written up by one Jonathan Tilove at Newhouse News Service, about the “gauntlet” being run by our former First Lady and current Junior Senator from the state of New York.

In the coming months, America will decide whether to elect its first female president. And amid a techno-media landscape where the wall between private vitriol and public debate has been reduced to rubble, Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression.

Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in “bitch,” “slut,” “skank,” “whore” and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language.

We have never been here before.

No woman has run quite the same gantlet. And of course, no man.

Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

In times past, this coarser conversation would have remained mostly personal and subterranean. But now we have a blogosphere, where no holds are barred and vituperative speech is prized. We have social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, with their limitless ability to make the personal public.
There are no rules. And so far there is little recognition in the political and media mainstream of the teeming misogyny only a mouseclick away.

Oh dear oh dear, how is hapless Hillary ever going to survive?

Okay…we’ve learned our lesson now, right? There is more to come.

So funny. A relatively unexciting and stuffy white male Republican President botches something…and you know, a lot of folks have lost sight of this, but you can still make a logically sound argument that it wasn’t a botch…and our press demands to know things like — what’ll it take for him to recognize his mistake. What’ll it take for us to recognize it. What’ll it take for an impeachment to get going.

God help us if Hillary is elected. What are the questions going to be if/when she starts cranking out mistakes? How it makes her feel…what kind of pig-headed chauvinists are in our midst, their dangerous and childish passions now being stoked by whatever –gate scandal just happened to Hillary. Not that she caused. But that happened to her.

Well, just for the record. I’m all for women keeping all the rights and privileges they have. Voting, running for office, earning the same as men…but also for the record, let’s take note of what this all means. Here, in this blizzard of Hillary-worship coming from an ostensibly unbiased and objective media, is a great reason for barring women from public office. As potent as any you will ever find.

They can’t be criticized. They can’t be inspected. They can’t be slimed. In fact it’s worse than that — a woman takes it on herself to do the criticizing, even going so far as to forsake all other avenues of communication as Hillary has done, becoming the ultimate Toxic Candidate — whatever sore feelings she causes by doing so, are the fault of whoever does the complaining. Not her. She is not to blame. She is a victim of misogyny.

Maybe it would be different if she had the letter “R” after her name. I dunno.

But this is nuts. And it’s more the rule than the exception…so expect to see a lot more of it.

Caboose

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Our War on Terror has become a “caboose.”

CabooseYou know what a caboose is, don’t you? It’s a railroad car that has a front hitch but not a back one. It’s supposed to come last behind everything; what is in all those other cars, and however many other cars there are, matters not one bit. The caboose takes precedent over nothing; it is physically impossible for it to come before anything.

The word “caboose” is also slang for your ass. It is the part of the body upon which we are designed to do our sitting, because it is designed to withstand abuses that other bits of us cannot. Like pressure upon a jagged surface, or the cold. A good kickin’ when we may perhaps deserve it. If your caboose exudes something, it is something of which you will want to get rid, in a hasty sanitary fashion. This post-digestive matter is something for which you will have no use at all, safe as a fertilizing compound, and not very often as that. On our bodies as well as in the train, the caboose must come last for it is physically impossible for it to take any other place. It demands priority over, precisely, nothing.

Why I use such a vulgar analogy to describe where the War on Terror, today, is something upon which I cannot expound without delving into a wonderful thing I did once. I was thirty-eight. I had no wise decisions in life to my credit…or very, very few. I was newly single and shopping for a woman. I’d spent my life in relationships that were unsatisfactory to me…although how, exactly, I was not really in a good position to say. I knew my life was in tatters because of a long succession of such relationships that didn’t quite work, and much of this had to do with finances. We do have this rule in our society that when you’re a man, and you enter into a relationship and leave it again, it should hit your billfold very hard. I’ve noticed we don’t seem to be quite so intent on the objective of seeing to it debts are settled and obligations are met, as we are on this other objective of seeing to it the man is left with nothing. People are dealt with fairly and man walks way with money — not good. People are left in the lurch but the man’s been properly cleaned out — aw, well, that’s okay.

So I was determined to make sure the next one would pan out okay. But how? My dating prospects showed little contrast to my past experiences.

Well, the first step to solving any problem is — definition. That was undeniably the first step…although, equally undeniably, not the last. I had to define what I was trying to avoid. That seems easy at first; I wanted to avoid women who were needy & greedy. I wanted to avoid mean women. Well, who doesn’t? But more definition was needed. “Greed,” after all, is a word that has no definition. No, really it’s true. There’s no way to define greedy. It’s in the eye of the beholder. A woman thinks she’s got something comin’ to ‘er — well, maybe she does. Who’s to say otherwise? And mean. What’s mean? Everybody gets cross and cranky here and there. What’s over the line?

But one by one, without this definition I still managed to walk away from candidates. They had that hard edge to them…that “man-bashing” screechy undertone. Something told me from the back of my head that a life with them would be a life lacking the happiness I was seeking. So I acted on instinct.

In short, I became very woman-like in the way I screened out my dates. I declared someone was incompatible with me, without really being able to explain why.

Maybe women are comfortable doing that. I wasn’t. So the definition chore beckoned.

And eventually, I found the perfect question to ask my dates. I ended up with someone who is a dream come true, so there must be something to this.

It is exactly what is wrong with women today. Available women, in America, anyway…

…and it is exactly what is wrong with all the people seeking election to President of the United States, minus one or two of them.

The question I began to ask, was this:

What, in your life, do you have going on that is less important than your man?

You only have to date women for a little while, as a single, available man, to see what a great question it is. Strike up a conversation with a bachelorette sometime and talk about what she wants to talk about…in America. Let her drone on and listen to the crap that comes out. My man must learn to live with my parents…with my friends…my kids…my ex-spouse…my doggy, my shopping habits, my solid-purple room decorating scheme, my Cabbage-Patch doll collection. What is more important than the stud, is a list to which she seems to live for the purpose of lengthening.

I came to realize women were more interested in me, when I had interests that were definite. And this was it. What takes priority over your man…you just keep babbling away sister, and I have to visit the li’l boy’s room. Maybe I’ll be back. But what I really want to know is — what takes a back seat to your man?

It was the perfect definition. I wasn’t demanding single mothers hike to the top of a mountain, and like Abraham slaughter their younglings to show their reverence for the Morgan God. I wasn’t even demanding that I come first, nor was I dictating how many or how few things might take precedence. I wasn’t calling out what, exactly, must be neglected for my sake. But I was dictating that something should — or else, let’s call the whole thing off. We’re not a match. Just show a car goes in the train behind me, and that therefore I’m not a caboose.

Unfair? Let’s agree to disagree if that’s the case. It should be noted, should anybody be so dense as to have a need for it to be noted…a woman’s “train” is several orders of magnitude longer than a man’s. Take it from a former caboose. Bringing up the rear on a woman’s train is a raw deal. Men are simple. An outdoor adventure here and there, good hot food, cold beverages, the making of happy memories with our families and a sexual favor now and then — we are DONE. We’re happy campers. Women…geez louise. That train stretches out forever. To be at the back of that train, is virtual suicide. It is to authorize, if not implement, your own slow destruction. A zillion and one women may demand this — that doesn’t obligate all men to consent to it.

And to say “I shouldn’t come last” is only reasonable. It’s simply what self-respecting people do.

It’s breathtaking how many heartless brittle sadistic shrews this weeded out. Ninety-nine percent or so…the right 99%.

I ended up with a real gem. I treasure the day I met her. And now I look back and I think — well, Whisky Tango Foxtrot. That was easy.

But this goes well beyond the dating world. Too many among us are intent on killing things slowly, without admitting we want to kill them…like some of our more acidic man-bashing bitches want to destroy men. Without admitting this is what they want to do.

By prioritizing the desired target behind everything. Like a caboose. Where, surely, it will be denied the nourishment that will give it life, until it dies.

This is what we’re doing with the War on Terror. To admit anyone is against it would be a disgraceful thing — and yet, surely, from what we’ve seen for the last six years, many among us are viscerally against it. Some of us with the best of intentions, worried about civil liberties. Some of us are hippy peaceniks who think it was a wonderful thing back in the 1960’s, when crooks gained so many (previously undiscovered) constitutional protections against cops, that the crook-over-cop triumph become commonplace and the law became useless. They want to see the terrorists elevated to that status, just so they can relive the Age of Aquarius, nostalgically. Some are worried about being caught by the Patriot Act with a doobie in hand; they figure laws against drugs are okay, as long as those laws are not actually enforced.

Some are antisemitic. Obviously, they can’t admit that is what they are, so they couch their antisemitism in vague but incendiary terms…something to do with America helping Israel drop bombs on defenseless Palestinian babies. Call this the “Helen Thomas Brigade,” I guess.

Some worry, perhaps with some justification, about pumping money into the military-industrial complex. More…vastly more, from where I sit…simply don’t like to see government money going into anything that is “paramilitary” friendly. These are the hateful loons that call the Boy Scouts a “hate group.”

And some simply have some more social programs to sell us. An expansion of Social Security here, a brand new childhood learning disability, freshly discovered, there. All demanding money. And gosh darn it, it’s just so much harder to sell to us when there are still body bags coming in to Dover. When we learn of a noble warrior who lost his legs to an IED and wants to re-enlist when he doesn’t have to, because he believes in the cause…it’s just tough to get worked up about the “lock box” issue and all those related issues.

And we have the people who have crossed the second milestone toward insanity, using their feelings to solve problems instead of their thoughts. Surely you’ve noticed this about people by now — when they use feelings over thoughts, they don’t want anybody, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances, to use thoughts over feelings. Seeing this take place makes them unhappy, upset, and very, very nasty.

So about 85 or 90 percent of our presidential candidates, are behaving the same way as 99% of the available dating women. Their goal is to kill something, but they want to do it without admitting this is what they want to do. So they “caboosify” the War on Terror. They acknowledge piously that, oh yes, we need to bring justice to the perpetrators of 9/11. But sacrifice nothing — absolutely nothing — for this. It is the caboose. It is to come last.

We shouldn’t let them get away with it. We should be asking them the same question I asked those nasty battleaxes three years ago, the last time I was available for my next match-up.

What, if anything, takes a back seat to this thing you claim is important to you? The War on Terror has importance superior to, and demanding the sacrifice of…what?

If that’s an empty list, you’re perfectly entitled to your opinion. Just come on out and admit it, that’s all I ask. Let’s not waste our time with each other. Not under false pretenses, anyway.

What Have I Done

Friday, December 7th, 2007

A fun list we find courtesy of blogger friend Buck. You copy it in and bold everything you’ve done.

It has poor overlap with my own experiences. Must not be my time yet. Pay it forward…

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm.
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and didn’t care who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Gotten flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in Rocky Horror
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Passed out cold
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad – and the Odyssey
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life

Thirty-Nine

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

I came up with a thirty-ninth thing I’d like to do if & when I start running this place. This place, means the country. America. Except I don’t have it in mind to be President…two years of being made to apologize for the fact that I think killers should be killed, and I think unborn babies should not be, telling the entire country about my tax returns and late payments and out-of-wedlock children just to share power with Congress, ain’t my cup o’ tea.

My thirty-ninth thing goes like this…

I will introduce Premium Do Not Call. When you go to the Do Not Call Registry, you can bill a recurring or non-recurring subscription to your credit card or PayPal account. For a nominal fee, you can then make it really, really super-illegal to call your phone number, rather than just kinda-sorta illegal…If a telemarketer makes so much as one call to a Premium Do Not Call number, everybody responsible is subjected not only to fines, but to personal indignities. Something involving nakedness, smearing with syrupy confection products, bondage, sexual fetishes, live television.

Guess what inspired that. It happened three times tonight, twice last night, three times Tuesday night, once Monday night, three times on Sunday. I caught one of them on Sunday. I did it by screaming into the phone as I was answering it. If you don’t do that, the assholes hang up on you. They hang up before you ever get to talk to a person. Yeah — they got machines, calling the wrong number, hanging up on people. The humans don’t operate with enough efficiency to piss off enough people per hour.

I’m going to go out and get some air horns. Put one by each handset in the house.

Your Fat Ass

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Enough of this heavy stuff. Let’s talk about how fat your ass is getting.

Interesting, huh?

Via Boortz.

Fruit Ripe fer Pickin’

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Well, I’ve been soundly beaten up, and perhaps rightfully so, for my willingness to come out and admit I didn’t know something before this week…which a lot of other folks have known for awhile. I’m a living representation of how susceptible we all are to the “Everybody’s Doin’ It” excuse. I got bit by the political correctness bug. Showed a shortage of skepticism to some things, and an excess of it to others.

Thought I should jot down some things that, for exactly the same reasons, a lot of other people might not know…even though they should.

1. These people we call “radical Islamists”…if one faction among them thinks some stuff and another faction thinks some other stuff…it is possible for the rift to be healed. Even across the Sunni/Shi’ite divde — they can often work together just fine and dandy in spite of that.

2. They really, really do want to kill us.

3. Many amongst them support a goal of replacing the United States government with an Islamic one operating under Shari’a law.

4. They have authorized themselves to lie in order to spread their religion.

5. In some parts of the Western world…in fact, pretty much every part except America…they have a “human right” not to have anything bad said about them.

These are not cynical personal opinions, these are matters of verifiable fact.

And here we sit, on soil underneath which our ancestors buried three or four of their infants at once while battling rattlesnakes and frostbite and wolves and famine to try to settle the land…to survive…bitching about how we didn’t get enough cinnamon in our candified Starbucks drinks this morning. A nation of fatted veal calves if ever there was one. Fruit ripe for the pickin’.

Concerned? Alarmed? To what extent would be appropriate?

Who Did Global Warming Cheese Off Today?

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Neal Boortz was on fire today with the globular wormening ManBearPig scam. A whole section devoted to it in his program notes, with nine links to good stuff in rapid succession, boom boom boom, and another link or two down below in the reading assignments.

Burn!But near as I can tell, he missed a good one. The Science of Gore’s Nobel: What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism? by Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Member Holman Jenkins. This is one of the better ones because it deals not so much with politics or climate science, but with the way humans do their thinking…or, to be more precise about it, with the way the more careless humans are tempted to do what passes for thinking. In my mind, based on what I’ve seen for the last several years, this is precisely where the problem lies.

How this honor [Nobel Prize] has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on “availability bias,” roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind. Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: “Availability cascade” has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; “informational cascade” for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs; and “reputational cascade” for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he’s playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: “The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona.” Here’s exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged “consensus” arrived at their positions by counting heads? [emphasis mine]

I find this “availability bias” to be an intriguing concept because of it’s immense size. It has great overlap with the bandwagon fallacy, but of course it would be an error to think of it as synonymous with that. It is more like a superset. That “everybody” imagines something to be true, is a powerful motive for an otherwise-independent thinker to decide for himself that the thing must be true — that would be a “bandwagon” effect. But with a bunch of other potential things, it would work by means of the availability bias. The ease of signing on to something, is confused with likelihood of validity or verity.

These “cascade” effects all have to do with bandwagon thinking, which concerns situations in which the availability bias is at work through the magic of crowds. This is precisely why, when your wife is serving on a jury you aren’t allowed to talk to her about it.

Interesting stuff. Kind of makes me think of some non-global-warming things…like the criticism I’ve received for my earlier post about why Rudy Giuliani is no longer electable in my opinion. Well, I shouldn’t say that; he may be nominated, and he may very well win. And I’d much rather see him as our 44th President than any of those silly donk candidates…or that nutcase Ron Paul. But not by much. I don’t have confidence in his ability to help the situation with any of the problems we face today.

This notion that Rudy’s judicial picks would be good ones, seems to me a good example of availability bias. Apart from the “R” in back of his name, I know of no firm evidence that this would be the case. His conservative credentials are supposed to be in good shape. I don’t think they are. And if they were, in this post-Reagan-O’Connor age, that really wouldn’t mean much.

Thompson’s the man. I don’t say this because I’m a time traveler from the future…and I admit, to offer hard proof, that is what I would have to be. Cynicism is a healthy thing for the conservative mind where court appointments are concerned. But Fred Thompson has directly addressed the issue of federalism — roughly speaking, it is the practice of making just as big a deal about who is to decide a certain thing, as how that issue is to be decided. Only one other candidate has taken this on, as sturdily as my guy Fred. That’s Ron Paul. Well, Fred Thompson isn’t crazy, so he has him beat there.

And getting back on-topic to the ManBearPig thing…Fred Thompson is so far the only candidate with the balls to laugh at it. That’s what we need. This is a serious, international issue. The whole notion that there might be a procedural discrepancy between what we’re supposed to call “science,” and this maneuvering by which global warming is having a heavier influence on our daily lives each year than in the year that came before…it’s losing currency very rapidly. The entire human race is evolving to slavery-status. We’re literally becoming a race born & bred to be told what to think, by people we don’t even know, and whose “heads being counted to certify an alleged ‘consensus’ arrived at their positions by counting heads.”

One way to combat this availability cascading, is to observe human behavior. If “climate change” is really a world-threatening crisis, do those who say it is one, behave as if they really think so? The answer on a day-to-day basis is typically a resounding “no,” but it is about to be moreso than usual now that we have our Bali conference complete with 10,000 participants swarming in by private jet.

“Nobody denies this is an important event, but huge numbers of people are going, and their emissions are probably going to be greater than a small African country,” said Chris Goodall, author of the book “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.”

Interest in climate change is at an all-time high after former Vice President Al Gore and a team of U.N. scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize for highlighting the dangers of rising temperatures, melting polar ice, worsening droughts and floods, and lengthening heat waves.
:
The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference in Bali, mostly from plane flights but also from waste and electricity used by hotel air conditioners.

If correct, Goodall said, that is equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million people, such as Marseilles, France, would emit in a day.

But he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country of Chad churns out in a year.

It defies explanation, folks. It’s a parody come to life. “Carbon in the atmosphere! It’s going to kill us all! We’ve got to do something! I’m going to fly to Bali right now. You meet me there.”

One of Boortz’ links pushes this beyond the realm of hypocrisy, into a full-blown travesty. The global warming scam, by Derek Kelly, Ph.D.

…the greatest warming period was when dinosaurs walked the land (about 70 million to 130 million years ago). There was then five to 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the average temperature was 4-11 degrees Celsius warmer. Those conditions should have been very helpful to life, since they permitted those immense creatures to find an abundance of food and they survived.
:
The major “sin” for the global warmists is CO2. The Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce the amount of this gas so as, they say, to reduce the degree of warming and eventually return us to some stable climate system. If we look at the historical situation, however, this is cause for alarm. For one thing, there has never been a stable climate system. For another, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is near its historic low. In the long run, the greatest danger is too little rather than too much CO2. There has been a long-term reduction of CO2 throughout the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. If this tendency continues, eventually our planet may become as lifeless as Mars.

Count me every bit as jaundiced about the “planet dying from too little CO2” as I am about the Ragnarok that looms from having too much. In my mind, the important thing to be observed is the greater saturation of CO2 in the atmosphere 100 million years ago. It’s simply not a deadly gas. There were flora and fauna back then, there are today, they’ve been around every single day in between…just in different forms. Will a greater CO2 saturation make the planet uninhabitable for humans? Well, my math says 11 degrees Celsius is 19 degrees Fahrenheit.

I can deal with that. Oh yeah, I’m told a single degree or two doesn’t sound like much, but could be potentially devastating. So far, the only way anybody has substantiated that is with some gloomy scenarios about the ice shelf melting and the sea levels rising. This was been debunked years ago, and since then as well. Because of this and other inaccuracies, An Inconvenient Truth must be disclosed in the United Kingdom as a political work, not a scientific one, before it can be shown in the schools there.

In short — today really hasn’t been a very good one for the global warming swindle. I’m not sure into whose bowl of Wheaties the global warming gremlin pissed today. Or, maybe that 10,000 jet Bali conference finally got people all wised-up. Whatever the cause, if there’s been any sea level rise in anything, it’s been in the ocean of links to substantial bodies of work that either debunk it altogether, or expose it to serious, healthy skepticism.

My cautious optimism is beginning to “thaw out.” Perhaps people are starting to see the global-warming political movement — I say again, the POLITICAL MOVEMENT — for what it is: Just a bunch of anti-American, anti-capitalist anti-free-market bullshit.

The Second Most Important Issue IV

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

As I’ve stated repeatedly, the most important issue of the elections next year, by far, is which candidate is going to bring me the biggest pile of crispy fried dirty dead terrorists each month of their administration if elected. There really is no more important issue than that. However you feel about — for example — abortion…if you think the candidate who agrees with you about that, will bring us 500 dead terrorists each month, and the candidate that disagrees with you on that issue will bring a thousand, you really do have a moral obligation to drop your favorite pet peeve in favor of killing more terrorists.

Because we’re talking about bringing the fight to people who want to destroy us. How much is your peeve really worth?

And the second most important issue is a question…it is made important because of the fact that, although a lot of people won’t admit it, many of us are wondering if democrats are simply ignorant & easily fooled…or full blown knock-down drag-out wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy. I think even the voters who sympathize with the silly donks — even if the silly donks don’t carry away the White House when it’s all said and done — would like to know this. To whom did their votes go? An imbecile, or a freakin’ whack-job?

All of us who have the means to do so, really should be gathering whatever evidence can be gathered in order to figure this out. This is a long-lived issue. Regardless of how the elections go next year, it is relevant to the future of our country to get an answer to that question. Unless we can send the donk party the way of the Whig party…which, although hope springs eternal, may not happen for a decade or two.

The latest exhibit, courtesy of Hot Air, is here. This has profound implications upon the first issue as well as the second one: None of these guys sound ready to bring us any crispy fried dirty dead terrorist bodies anytime soon.

This clip is further proof of what we already know, although fewer and fewer of us have the plain old-fashioned balls to admit it. Real life presents us with one scenario after another, in which the willingness to wage war equals life — and a stubborn reluctance to do so equals death. And “peace” is a word often synonymous with oppression.

If this comes as a huge shock to you, the muse that is History is wondering if you’ve got peanut butter packed in your ears or something. Woodstock is over, hippy. Come home.

Al-taqiyya

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Heard a comment on the radio that “the Koran gives you permission to lie to advance Islam.” This impressed me as something that I hadn’t heard before, and surely it could not be within the realm of the disputed since it seems to be a pretty clear encapsulation of something purported to exist within a defined body of work.

I’m blindsided by this one. Sidebar resource Linda SOG covered this years ago.

Al-taqiyya is a word used for the practice of Muslims blatantly lying to non-Muslims. Muslims consider the act of Al-taqiyya or lying to non-Muslims to be a good work. Especially if it helps support the war against the infidel. In case you’ve forgotten, you are the infidel, so am I, so is each and every American who is not muslim.

From “Islam’s Shell Game” by Johnn “Trike” Schroeder

Muslims say one thing and think another, because their holy book allows such action in the furtherance of their religion. They do not punish the insane killers in their communities who strike at Americans, because they do not see the terrorists as wrong, rather they see them as warriors, honorable and holy themselves.

Thus there is no conflict with their religion, and no real dichotomy exists between the terrorists and Islam as a whole. If one acts as a neutral (for no Muslim speaks out one way or the other as a rule on terrorists and their acts), to create a sort of wall behind which our enemies can move and strike at us, they act as our enemies as well!

We have a decision to make here, just how are we to protect ourselves, when we allow such a tactical and strategic screw up to exist in our very midst! Who is killing us and our allies, MUSLIMS, not the little old ladies the airport security strip searches to protect us from illegal knitting needles!

We need to start seriously applying common sense while we still have a few people not yet blown up or under threat of being so.

The terrorists want one thing, (just as the Koran calls for), a world united as Islam or nothing! This is about world conquest as a religious duty.

Let us begin to understand that we face an enemy who will happily kill you, your family and friends and celebrate their own death doing it. It matters not if you are on the right or the left, they want us DEAD! Nothing else will do for them.

And unless we get in gear, they will do just that to far too many of us. as we wring our hands and cringe, crying out “Can’t we just get along?” If we do not act, that will be our pathetic epitaph.

So. All of a sudden Muslims like America and Americans? Yeah. Sure they do.

Al-taqqiya is a war tactic, the sheep’s clothing worn by the wolves in our midst. and you can’t see the forest for the trees.

I’m troubled by the breezy conflation of “Muslim” with these psycho whackjobs who would be willing to off themselves just to take a few of us down with ’em. Not a fan of political correctness, but I like to use correct terms to describe things, and just as I’m reluctant to paint “Christians” with a broad brush, I should show similar reluctance here…

…but I’ll tell you what I find even more troubling: A religious cult that instructs people to lie, for the sake of advancing itself — existing within post-modern America, a place that just can’t get enough of people saying the right things, truth & facts be damned.

I’m really having trouble with the exercise of trying to envision anything more dangerous than that.

Update: Via Planck’s Constant, Exhibit A.

Strongest Beer in the United States

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

H/T: Duffy.

This Is Good XLV

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Never Enough Diversity

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

John Leo says “Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are ever on the move.” Now why, I have to ask, must a movement designed to get rid of something rather than to create more of something, be restless and ever on the move?

Yale already has an impressively vast diversity bureaucracy headed by Nydia Gonzalez, the new chief diversity officer. She is working on a long-term plan, “Diversity Yale 2010 and Beyond.” Each school has its own system of diversity apparatchiks. There’s even a Yale library diversity council with 10 to 16 members and a three-year diversity program. Now Yale’s Coalition for Campus Unity (CCU) is encouraging the residential colleges to create “some kind of diversity-awareness position or board.” A board of, say, ten members in each college would add 120 new officials – another diversity gusher. Last February, Yale continued its long-term program to segment the student body into ever smaller ethnic and sexual groups. It hired a new assistant dean for Native American affairs. Can anyone say that a provost for the transgendered is somehow out of the question?

Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats? Undergraduate Robert Sanchez says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness,” i.e. a high enough degree of enthusiasm for the diversity movement. Sanchez, according to the Yale Daily News, seems distressed that “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.”

“Diversity” has an ugly truth to it. It is the one pursuit that, on an intellectual level, is devastated completely — not just intellectually embarrassed, but intellectually devastated — by a simple rhetorical exercise. You supervise a team of ten minorities. Two of them quit. You replace them with two six-foot-tall, right handed, straight white guys. What did you do to the diversity of your team?

The mathematician, or anybody else who works in a formal discipline that has a utilitarian requirement for the d-word…not a political requirement, but a utilitarian one…would have no choice but to answer “you just increased it.” But of course that isn’t the correct answer.

Now, perhaps it’s overstating things to say “diversity” is what we call it when we deal career and economic injury and destruction to straight white guys. Or perhaps that could be called an over-simplification. But the awkward truth of things is that diversity is not race- or gender-neutral. It is a code word to promote the population of, and success of, certain groups of people. Toward other groups of people, it is hostile at worst…apathetic at the very best.

Perhaps the most pernicious canard about the d-word, is that it is costless — a canard left unspoken, although people in positions of great authority are implicitly required to behave as if they think it’s true. The truth is, the d-word cannot be costless. When you are young, you don’t have the opportunity to develop basic aptitudes that involve independence, creativity and resourcefulness, when there are officers occupying high positions for no greater purpose but to ensure that the success of your group against other groups is guaranteed. And enforced. And measured. And…that next year and the year after, there will be more officers working toward exactly that.

Needless to say, your opportunities are similarly denied when you’re a member of the group targeted. It hurts everyone. The thing we’re supposed to be calling “diversity,” on the other hand, really is harmless or ought to be harmless. It’s just this other thing, this quite different thing, to which we’ve started to affix this word. The simple fact that this thing is on a never-ending mission to expand itself, is a red flag the size of a city block all by itself.

The Web is Lousy with Paulians

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Yeah, I’ve been noticing this myself. In my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more popular way to unconditionally oppose abortion. I wonder if these Ron Paul fans know that this is part of their platform.

If I had my way, I’d declare this bunch of years in which we’re living now, to be a wonderful era for a “Constitution Quiz Mandate.” Whether you’re Ron Paul or not, if you use the word Constitution as a buzzword, I’d make a rule that whatever’s going on has to stop and you be subjected to a pop quiz to show you know something about this Constitution.

I think this might fail to trip up Congressman Paul. I’d just like to believe when you’re a Congressman, especially one who uses the word “Constitution” more than forty times a day, you probably have a few morsels of information tucked away in your dome about what’s written there. But I have my doubts about this…and I’m sure my new rule would restore some integrity to all this discussion about “The Constitution.” I’m positive of it. Look, just within the innernet-Paul-fan community, how frequently and how casually that word is tossed around — all these folks read it? Every single one of them can tell me how many Articles are in it? Which one defines the responsibilities of the Judicial branch?

I’m absolutely in favor of the C-word being used in conversation more, and I’m in favor of a candidate being rocketed to popularity on the strength of saying he believes in it. I’m passionately opposed to the word being used as a bumper-sticker slogan, though, and that seems to be what has happened here. I’ve yet to hear of a Ron Paul fan actually quoting from the Constitution.

And you know, there’s always that issue with being crazier than a hoot-owl…

Myth of the Fact Checker

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

The whole “TNR” blow-up has inspired Roger L. Simon to share his thoughts about this thing called “fact-checking”, what it really is, how it works, how it might…possibly…fall short.

Institutions like the New York Times have an evident vested interest and their editor Bill Keller laid out their case the other day at a lecture in the UK:

First: We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion, meaning we put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Now, of course, newspapers are written and edited by humans. We get things wrong. The history of our craft is tarnished down the centuries by episodes of partisanship, gullibility, and blind ignorance on the part of major news organisations. (My own paper pretty much decided to overlook the Holocaust as it was happening.) And so there is a corollary to this first principle: when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly as possible.

At the Times, we are obsessive about owning up to our mistakes, from the petty to the egregious.

My personal experience of mainstream media fact-checking, New York Times included, has not tracked with Keller’s hyperbolic declaration….In short, mainstream media doesn’t do much. Essays I did for The New York Times Book Review were not fact-checked at all (though they did copy edit, luckily for me). Over at the Los Angeles Times, an amusing example is an article I did on a Siberian film festival at which I was a juror. After I submitted it, the LAT fact-checker called and asked, “Did this all happen?” “Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” she said and hung up. So much for mainstream media fact-checking.

Now, that’s the LA Times, not the NY Times which I’m sure must be much better. They must be. I mean, I think back on all those left-wingers who argued with me and in doing-so, “sole-sourced,” the NY Times, and mocking me for my failure to immediately and unconditionally accept as my own religious belief, something sole-sourced to the NY Times. Surely such a venerable institution must be doing something to earn all that fawning adulation.

It occurs to me that this barb-fest between the mainstream media and these things we call “blogs,” is an ancient exchange. It’s really all about, should truth be institutionalized? Or is it the property of every common man?

One point in favor of the blogs is one of necessity. If truth is not under the ownership of every common man, it is not the responsibility of every common man. We can then shuffle off the “fact checking” to our clay-footed institutions, confident that some nameless faceless fact-checker will verify the things we will be told to think we know.

And then we can read all the “Memo For File” copies we want to and believe every word without reservation. The ones from 1974. In Times New Roman font, with kerning.

The Great Intelligence Scam

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

In what may very well be the most important story all week…and I really hope it isn’t…the National Intelligence Estimate has concluded that Iran is a big harmless fuzzy teddy bear. And a decent weighing of the available evidence yields the conclusion the NIE may be basing this on very little.

Yesterday’s big story was the Intelligence Community’s “Estimate,” according to which Iran unilaterally and secretly suspended its covert nuclear weapons program back in 2003, and hasn’t resumed it to date. We don’t know the sources and methods that underly this analysis, and it may well be that we have acquired some totally convincing evidence that justifies the astonishing conclusions of the IC’s assessment. But the “Estimate” itself is internally unconvincing–different agencies, notably the National Intelligence Council and the Department of Energy, are not convinced we have the full picture, and argue that we may not know whether the “halt” on which the IC hangs its analytical hat applies to Iran’s “entire nuclear weapons program.”

In other words, we seem to know that something was halted, but we don’t know if that’s the whole story. In Rumsfeld’s famous words, we don’t know what we don’t know.

A couple years ago, The Left started to stir up a public relations assault on the Bush administration, since the administration took action against Iraq and the discoveries of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) over there were disappointing to some. This public relations assault has only recently begun to subside. The response by defenders of the administration, has been that intelligence is an inexact science, dealing very little with what is known and dealing much more with what is supposed. Tellingly, The Left never cooked up a witty rejoinder to that one — because there is no witty rejoinder available, or because they perceived the payoff to be underwhelming.

Intelligence supposed there was somethin’ when there was nuthin’. Intelligence has been characterized as inexact, and this characterization has gone undisputed, in an America as divided as ever, an America that likes to argue about freakin’ everything. Also uncontested, is the assertion that if intelligence supposes there is nuthin’ when there is somethin’, the results would be catastrophic. And now this “perhaps better than random chance” intelligence is telling us there is nuthin’.

Maybe this conclusion is well-researched, maybe it isn’t. It does not appear to have been well-researched…

Huh. How concerned should we be?

Rudy Out

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I’ve defended Rudy Giuliani from slander here and here, but I’ve set him aside as a non-viable candidate, one rendered unacceptable until such time as something enormously huge changes. JohnJ, writing in an offline, wanted to know why. Without quoting from the actual exchange, I thought my reply was worth a broadcast. It includes some points about illegal immigration that are not, to the extent I can see, discussed very much anywhere — and really should be.

Well, I’m plum-pleased to see you’re sticking around and are going to be visible. You’re a sharp guy and have some well-thought out positions on things, although of course you and I don’t agree on everything. Hey, life would be boring if everybody did.

I do agree with the Giuliani platform on many things, and I’ve defended him against some of the slurs against him. And it’s taken me awhile to put him in my purgatory, but I think my reasons are pretty sound.

On immigration, although I do understand his plans have to do with moving the immigrants out of the illegal status, I make an important distinction between sending a violator to the front of the line, and toward the back of the line. I really do think that is only fair to the people who are trying to [follow] the rules as they try to get in. I start with the assumption that we have a certain immigration quota, and when you add up the immigrants have have followed the rules to get here to the violators, you’re left with a total that far exceeds the quota. The result is that when someone jumps the turnstyle and then, once here, embarks on a “pathway to citizenship” — this ends up being amnesty in all the ways that matter. Yes, they’re legal when all’s said & done. But by going this round-about method, they’ve effectively been allowed to bypass the quota.

And here’s something else. When someone is here on a temporary visa and they overstay it, they become an illegal immigrant. Even though they aren’t part of the turnstyle-jumpers. But they, too, are allowed to amble down this pathway-to-citizenship. They, too, can skirt the quota. And by being sent to the front of the line instead of to the back of it, they can take priority over other people who are sending lots of money and waiting a long time, just to follow the rules.

Why do they do this? Well, when you follow the rules, your background gets checked out. When you jump the turnstyle, it doesn’t. Once you go down the pathway to citizenship, your background MAY be checked out…maybe…we’re still arguing about how it works. Nobody really knows yet. Such a background check almost certainly will not be effective.

Do we need to check them out? Maybe not. I continue to be told these illegal aliens “work hard.” I’m sure a lot of them do. But you know, you can be a child molester and still work hard; the two are not mutually exclusive. What if 99 percent of the illegal aliens are not child molesting perverts? Well, this leaves us with 120,000 of them that are.

Giuliani would send them to the front of the line, not to the back of it.

Could it be true that 99% of the illegal immigrants are clean? Perhaps it’s true of the students and other temps that overstay their visas. I have strong doubts such a thing can be true of the turnstyle-hoppers. Why hop a turnstyle if you’re clean? Let’s face if — if I’m a poor Mexican farmer and I have two strong, hard-working sons, one’s a documented kiddy-diddler and one has no crime record…the clean son is staying with me. I’m sending the pervert to the United States. I’m going to get a new record for the hard-working son who can use one.

I’d be foolish to do it any other way.

We need to take the health and welfare of our kids seriously, and take national security seriously. I do believe Giuliani would kill lots and lots of terrorists, as I’ve said. But I think Fred would kill a lot more. And he’d send the turnstyle-hoppers to the BACK of the line…the only way to be fair to law-abiding immigrants, keep our borders under control, and give our kids the safety, protection and opportunities they deserve.

The reason I thought it worth posting for the general audience? It’s the facts, you see. It’s not that I embellished them to make Rudy look bad, or left out some of the ones that might have exonerated him. What I did, if anything, was quite the opposite.

In 1997, Giuliani signed a statement of principles which read, “The new laws recently passed by Congress and signed into law by the President unfairly target immigrants in the United States by severely limiting their access to many federal benefits which citizens are entitled to receive.” and “Since legal immigrants work and pay taxes like American citizens, they should be entitled to temporary assistance when they fall into personal difficulty. Furthermore, the denial of federal assistance to legal immigrants in need is patently unfair and arguably unconstitutional and inhumane.” In 1998, Giuliani argued for expanding Medicare, SSI and foodstamp benefits to legal immigrants and also, “Providing full Medicaid coverage to Prucol aliens with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses”

In April 2006, Giuliani went on the record as favoring the US Senate’s comprehensive immigration plan which includes a path to citizenship and a guest worker plan. He rejected the US House approach because he does not think House Resolution 4437 could be enforced.

In February 2007, in a meeting with California Republicans, Giuliani was quoted as saying “We need a [border] fence, and a highly technological one.” Giuliani also reiterated his support for some sort of path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants after a process to be determined, but added that at the end of the process the immigrants should “display the ability to read and write English” and must assimilate into American society. In 2000, Giuliani said, “I wish that we would actually make America more open to immigrants.” He does not believe in deportation of illegal immigrants and advocates a “tamper-proof” national ID card and database for illegal immigrants.

On September 7, 2007, during a CNN interview, he said that illegal immigrants are not criminals.

Send…the violators…to the back…of the line. There is no reason not to. To propose anything else, is to grease the skids for more turnstyles to be hopped.

I do not think that everybody who wants to grease those skids, is bent on smuggling terrorists into the country. I think what they’re doing, is helping to smuggle terrorists into the country without consciously realizing it. I think they’re trying to make it more economically practical for labor-intensive businesses to operate outside of the law…and by accident, they’re leaving the door open for sleeper cells — and child rapists — to come marching in.

Oh yeah, they’ll protest that. They’ll call me a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe. But that’s just a campaign slogan, a cheap, poorly designed rhetorical tactic used to shout down the opposition. The motive is to make it easier for immoral businesses to operate…and they have no idea what kinds of bedfellows they have, in that effort.

And Rudy is their leader. He’s made it very plain he’s dedicated to the bumper-sticker slogans, and the legislation, of the “Make The Border Meaningless” crowd. Fence, schmence. The folks on his side, want to build…an escalator that works only half the time. And they say “Ooh, look, we’re not open-borders advocates, it’s really HARD to get in this country. See? The escalator only runs half the time.”

This country is under attack. From people who want to impose methodical, deliberate harm on American citizens to make political statements…and from people who want to impose non-methodical, haphazard, sexually-motivated harm on our women and children. Can we please act like this is what is going on, and make a priority out of confronting these threats?

I have no reason to look at Giuliani as someone who will do this. Just a lot of Rudy fans who want me to think that. Some of whom I respect very highly, but still, just because they want me to think it is no reason to think it. He’s a “pumice border” advocate, and a rather brazen one at that.

Gender Genie

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Strap yourself into your time machine, we’re going back to ’03…it’s the Gender Genie. Paste in some text, tell the Genie whether it’s fiction or non-fiction…and it’ll tell you what kind of plumbing you have.

It’s gloriously inaccurate so far, but the algorithm is interesting and seems to have some merit. Might just need a few simple adjustments.

H/T

Analytics and Red Shirts

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Oh, I love humor about Star Trek red-shirts. I remember clear back when we were living in Arizona — the show had been canceled, but only just, like two years before. We’d tune in faithfully at six in the evening, and Kirk would rise majestically from his famous chair and bark out — “Spock! Bones! Scotty! And…Ensign Peterson…meet me in Transporter Room Three. We’re going down there.” We’d all pass a glance around the living room and say to each other, “uh oh.”

They got dehydrated by ferocious dehydrating monsters. Run over by roasting lasagna monsters. Vaporized. Labotomized. All manner of things…and Starfleet would keep recruiting more of them. Real Navy guys would talk about the absurdity of the highest-ranking officers on a ship of some four hundred plus, going “on shore” by themselves…and us die-hard fans would retaliate, “Nuh huh! They always got that one guy…” And we’d be right, of course.

And now, someone has demonstrated analytics with the whole thing.

What? You don’t know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you’re gonna die. That’s the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn’t seen any definitive proof; it’s just what people said. (Remind you of your current web analytics strategy?) So, let’s set our phasers on ‘stun’ and see what we find…

H/T: Miss Cellania.

I’m Offended

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Anyone want to tell me why I shouldn’t be?

A BRITISH children’s author who named a mole Mohammed to promote multiculturalism has renamed it Morgan for fear of offending Muslims. Kes Gray, a former advertising executive, first decided on his gesture of cross-cultural solidarity after meeting Muslims in Egypt.

The character, Mohammed the Mole, appeared in Who’s Poorly Too, an illustrated children’s book, which also included Dipak Dalmatian and Pedro Penguin, in an effort to be “inclusive”. This weekend Gray said he had decided to postpone a reprint and rename the character Morgan the Mole even though there had been no complaints.

Yeah well great, asswipe, the problem is my name happens to be Morgan. So naturally I’m just as offended as hell. Really, really offended. Extra offended. Grrr!!!

Rename it again. Yes, I demands it, I does.

Morgan’s Diary

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

…as ghostwritten by a certain fawning Associated Press toady.

Great AmericanHaving triumphed over the herculean task of cleaning out the coffee pot and getting it started on a fresh batch, Morgan K. Freeberg used his powerful legs to carry his naked, Adonis-like form, his massive muscular shoulders barely fitting through the doorways. As the coffee pot gurgled away, he logged back in to his Windows XP account. Outside the window in the hours before dawn, just a few house lights could be seen; the entire world slept soundly, including his paramour who slumbered away in blissful exhaustion from the carnal activities the night before, but Freeberg was already hard at work. As the Firefox windows refreshed, bringing him news of various crises brewing all over the world, Freeberg ran his rugged palm over his majestic, cash-register-like stubble-covered chin, a picture of calm in the face of crisis. It was a vintage example of a dedicated blogger getting ready to lay the smackdown on a bunch of grandstanding liberal politicians, glory-queens, attention whores, phony guilty-white-males, and preening Associated Press lackeys.

A quick shower and a commute to work beckoned, but before Freeberg could join the morning rush on Highway 50 like thousands of other clock-punching automatons, he knew it was his destiny to make this one contribution as an erudite, intellectual, and powerful communicator of current events: The noble blogger. He used his position as a national teaching opportunity, a skill often employed by such dedicated practitioners, although of course Freeberg was the best of the best of the best. Lording his majestic form over all creation, godlike, and rightfully, Freeberg scanned the headlines — the very picture of attentiveness, leadership, resourcefulness, and quiet competence — a shining beacon of sanity in a world gone mad. One particular headline caught his eye; he cocked an eyebrow toward it, majestically, pulled out the keyboard and began to use his awesome blogger powers to put wrong things right, biceps and triceps writhing away beneath his bronze skin, like massive pythons, his lean, powerful fingers fluttering away like ten jackhammers on speed…

Yeah, okay. Pushing myself to the limit on this stuff, laying it on this thick, I think I’m much better suited for a sprint than a marathon. Glen Johnson clearly raises the bar to new highs. He is, in what I presume is an attempt to be completely serious, far more ludicrous than Rush Limbaugh is when he’s joking.

I understand where the guy’s coming from — he wants to be a speech-writer in a Clinton administration. The real question is for everybody else. Why do we let things get this far?

H/T: Many, potentially at least, but I learned it for the first time from Rick. And barfed on the spot, just about.

Update: You know, a thought occurs to me about womens’ equality. It should already be raising red flags with everybody — and I think, in secret and in the thoughts to which one never dares give utterance, it does indeed — there’s just something terribly wrong with championing “equal rights” for any demography, and having to crank away at it for forty years plus in the phony spirit of CALWWNTY (Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet).

I know it’s politically incorrect to say such a thing, but forty years is too long. There must be a lack of energy being channeled into the movement, in spite of all the bluster and complaining we’ve been hearing; or the tactics are wrong, somehow incompatible with fundamentals of human nature; or, there must be a paralyzing disagreement on what exactly it is we’re trying to do.

We may very well have a female President in 2009. Nobody is even bothering to pretend that if we do, the feminist caterwauling will shut down for good. Or even drop a bit, for that matter. We just got hold of our first female House Speaker earlier this year, and this event hasn’t silenced anyone. Every single soul who was bitching about equal rights before that, is bitching now about the same things.

I think this is the new glass ceiling. Right now. I think we’re looking straight at it. Women are not being treated equally, and because of that they will never have equal rights. Certainly not according to this bizarre post-modern measuring device we’ve gotten going…where a bunch of lazy scientists and energized busybodies put together some statistics, and look for differential bumps, some well within the margin of error, that might possibly feed the next Big News Story.

I think the next two things we have to do are very clear. They both have to do with fewer praises lauded upon females, so I doubt they’ll be implemented. Until they are, you can forget all about equality and I think that will remain true even if we pursue it for the next thousand years.

First of all, we have to stop lavishing praise on “First” women who do things a zillion and one men have already done. By that I mean being President of the United States, or being the person walking on the moon getting a phone call from that President. When a man’s already done it, and you shower these phony congratulations on the first woman who does the same thing — that’s degrading to women. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, until you think on it awhile. And then it has to make sense. If you can think clearly about things, that is. It’s measurably degrading — it degrades in direct proportion to the amount of time that has passed since the first man did it. In President Hillary Clinton’s case, that would be 218 years. Quite the slur.

Secondly…the whole “not freaking out” thing. Men don’t get credit for that. Women shouldn’t either. Again — put some quality thought into it, you’ll see this is as degrading to women as any butt-slap Captain Kirk ever dealt out to any space-babe in a miniskirt who brought him 23rd-century coffee. Stop giving women, especially women in positions of authority, credit for being “calm.” I mean, what were you expecting? After sixteen years in the public eye on the national stage, to restrain one’s self from running room to room, arms overhead, shrieking like a banshee when there’s a hostage situation in your office hundreds of miles away — doesn’t seem like much to ask. It’s good that Hillary stepped up to the challenge. But her alleged vagina is only so much of an argument for inflating such an achievement under the masthead of the Associated Press.

I’ll bet my last ten dollars that Glen Johnson is as big a male chauvinist pig as anyone you’ve ever met, including me.

Update: Gerard coins a newly-minted portmanteau, yabbling, and affixes it to our bit of creative writing up-top.

Flesh! Oh, No! XI

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

I had to capture this letter to the Bismarck Tribune from yet another ignorant tightass about one of my favorite subjects…the sloppy and intellectually unsound confusion between the fine, clean, tastefully-run family establishment Hooter’s, and an ordinary strip club. It goes excused pretty much everywhere else. NOT here.

If the issues are important to a person as a mother, father, grandparent, uncle or aunt, one critical step each can take is to avoid this restaurant. I believe that to suggest it is a great place for pubescent boys to hang out, or is a “family restaurant,” is one step short of ludicrous. People should take the small step of not frequenting this establishment and tell their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews why they are taking such action. It will be an incredible lesson on values that they can pass on to those impressionable youngsters. Quite possibly, those children might carry that lesson forward and teach it to their own children, thus creating a ripple of change.

Best Picture EVEROh, blow it out your ass lady. What “values” are these? Straight men should never get a peek at anything nice, among the selection the Good Lord designed them to appreciate lookin’ at? Why’s that, so the bar doesn’t get raised too high for the mopey, dopey, shrill shrieking shrews out there who figure they’re somehow “entitled” to their knight in shining armor whom they can virtually imprison in a cloistered domicile filled with Hugh Grant movies, irritating little dogs in purses, and stuck-up faux French restaurants?

It is urgent — URGENT — that we stop putting up with this. There are too many people like this trying to crusade for “ripples of change”…for no purpose more noble, than that men be denied fun. That’s all it is. Little biddies who are threatened by the idea of men having fun.

You know why that is, don’t you? They see men as beasts of burden. You wouldn’t watch television with an ox, would you? Well, that’s how these ignorant, miserable women see men. They don’t “love” men, in the sense that you get a sense of joy when a person you “love” is made happy. They just don’t have those kinds of feelings, for whatever reason, for their men. They figure you don’t share a life with men, you just make a man do things for you. When you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, every minute in between.

I think they could just be inexperienced. You know, I’ve learned something through the years about men and women: When they are together, the mood of the couple is dictated by the man’s happiness and by the woman’s misery.

Simply put, a man can’t be happy if his woman is miserable. And a woman can’t be miserable if her man is happy. Where these selfish bitches lack some perspective, is they have simply never given it a try. Just go out on the town with the fella, share your life with him the way the Good Lord intended, make him happy and see what mood the rest of the family has after that.

Never been tried. How sad.

And then they write letters to be printed in their local newspapers, proving it.

Republicans in Better Mental Health

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

FascinatingEvery once in awhile an egghead study comes along with a conclusion more definite than that in other studies; in this case, the trend is identified viewing the data from several different perspectives (see second page).

It has become undeniable, not only to people with preconceived notions contradictory to the study or the conclusion at which it arrives, but to people with preconceived notions in other areas. Something is clearly going on here. But what?

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Probably the most even-handed way we could inspect this is to predict a deliberately-biased explanation from the Republicans, and a likewise deliberately-biased explanation from those silly donks. And I predict…the Republicans would say Republicans are more accustomed to noodling out answers to their own problems without relying on other people, and are therefore accustomed to blaming their episodes of misfortune on their own missteps, misjudgments, flawed executions, etc…which will lead to more improved mental health. The silly donks would say it’s all an illusion. That seems like a virtual given. All things that paint an unflattering picture of donks, in the donk mind, are illusions. They always get there time after time, the question is how. This one is easy: It’s a self-assessment, so the answers given by this 58% of Republicans represent an exercise in — all together now — ARROGANCE. And the fact that a far slimmer percentage of donks gave themselves positive assessments of mental well-being…represents…humility. Ah yes, grasshopper.

This is probably as good a time as any to note what an excellent write-up the Wikkans have on Locus of Control. It’s probably an equally apropos occasion upon which to comment on the Yin and Yang series.

What do these have to do with each other?

Yin vs. Yang is something you learn in childhood. It is a “fork in the road” to which toddlers and pre-toddlers come, as they decide how they’re going to go about the arduous task of relating to the world around them…the decision made at this fork, is a precursor to a pattern of lifelong habits. The Yang recognize the environment around them, through a process that involves incorporating the behavior of others in that environment. They are more socially mature, at least in childhood. The Yin, on the other hand, deplore from an early age the idea of having to check and see what others are doing, just to figure out what is true.

Because of that, the socially-outgoing Yang are susceptible to external locus of control, and the Yin excel at tasks that involve avoiding cognitive error…such as solving puzzles, or building things…and tend to see other people as a distraction. The Yin, necessarily, must rely on internal locus of control. They really can’t function with their environment through any other means.

What has this to do with Republicans and donks? Well, nothing, really…except the donks, in the modern era, have made it their business to do all of their recruiting from the Yang. It’s just easier. A sales pitch made to the Yin has to make sense, but to get the Yang to hop on board in large numbers, all you have to do is tailor the theme. Make it “The Thing To Do.”

There are exceptions to everything, but the end result is going to be that our liberal party ranks are going to be filled with people accustomed to an external locus of control. (Conversely, through a process of depletion, the conservative planks are going to popularly favor an internal locus of control.)

The internal locus of control gives you a more stable mindset with which to deal with a world that doesn’t always do what you think it should. You see people doing dumb things, and you think “pffft, that’s stupid” and pretty much leave it at that…unless it somehow directly affects you. But to someone relying on external locus of control, it already affects you because it’s part of your environment.

Speaking for myself, I’d want some definitions to be built in to such a test before I took it. If I were asked to rate what others thought of my mental health, I’d have to submit a much lower score compared to what I thought of my own mental health. Other people tend to not know a good thing when they see it. And I’d also want to know if it’s testing my least flattering mental health profile at any given moment across a stretch of time. I mean, if I’m somehow compelled to go shopping at Wal Mart on a weekend, at that point my mental-health is going to be way down in the basement and I’ll be going bollywonkers.

Surber Peels Matthews Like an Ape Peeling a Banana

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

As Perino puts Thomas her in place, so too does blogger Don Surber take care of Chris Matthews.

Consider this quote from Chris Matthews on his show last night while he was interviewing David Ignatius:

MATTHEWS: Lots of publicity lately, and maybe it‘s fair, maybe it‘s not, that things may have calmed down over there, less Americans killed in action in the last several of months but before. But my definition of a defeat is you can‘t leave. If we can‘t leave that country in the foreseeable future, we are losing….
:
Because if we can‘t ever come home, we can‘t ever say we won.

Interesting way of redefining victory. For thousands of years, you take over a country, you’re the winner. Matthews wants to change that, saying, “As long as we‘re stuck over there, it seems we‘re losing.”

Let’s see. We still have troops in Kuwait, so we must have lost the Gulf War.

But we pulled our troops out of Mogadishu so we beat Somalia.

No American troops in Vietnam. Yeah, we won.

It goes on the same direction from there. I’m just teasing the essence of it, you’ll have to click on the link above to get the full effect. What…you’re still here?

Why We Need Women

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

WomanThe day our President started using the actual phrase “World War III” in his public speaking, the Number One story on the insipid “Morning News” program in my hotel had to do with a couple of yorkies wearing their adorable Halloween costumes. That’s one of the best pieces of evidence someone could use, to my knowledge, to argue that the best days of the womens’ movement are officially histoire. Nevermind whether we should elect one President, they’d say; get them out of the voting booth. And off the streets. And for heaven’s sake, will someone get them to STOP WATCHING TELEVISION before they screw things up any further.

Of course I’d never endorse such a primitive, backwards position. I’m just saying the argument is out there if someone wants to use it…and I didn’t make it that way. Personally, I think WWIII trumps dog costumes. That’s just me.

If those who wish to repeal Womens’ Suffrage wished to cite historical precedent, they could use this chronicling of politically-incorrect advertisements which I’ll have to confess…in the spirit of plain old being-truthful…I personally find to be hilarious. And not the least bit sinister, since I think it’s safe to say we’ll not be seeing anything like these used anytime soon.

And, of course, if they want to show the actual damage women can do, they can always rely on Helen Thomas (H/T Van der Leun, via Rick).

It should be noted that in citing Helen Thomas as a representative of general female participation and the effect it has on things, I’m committing a sin against political correctness. It should also be noted that I’m entirely aware of this. It should be further noted that I’m entirely unable to explain, in a logical fashion, why this is…nor do I think anybody else would be able to explain it either. Helen Thomas is a woman. Helen Thomas is dangerous. She reflects poorly on women as a whole. She makes a great argument, just by being herself, why we should barricade them in the kitchen and look back with profound regret on whatever occasion hosted the first musings that it might be a good idea to let ’em out.

Dana Perino, on the other hand, demonstrates why we should keep the women exactly where they are. A man would never have been able to take care of Ms. Thomas quite so deftly. Even the most socially-gifted and diplomatic male. We simply exist on a shorter leash than the ladies — in some ways. They can say things we cannot.

And every once in awhile, that happens to be good for the continuing survival of our country.

Thank you Dana Perino for arousing the latest debate on “why do we keep this old battleaxe around?” It’s a good debate to have. We’ve had it before, but somehow the idea never quite seems to get the attention it deserves…you know, just because Helen Thomas is a poor representative of women, doesn’t mean her fate has to be the same as that of all other women. It is possible to keep all the others involved, and just jettison this one ugly specimen, whose contribution is questionable at best in the first place. I mean, think about it. The purpose of the assembly is to extract information that would otherwise be un-extracted; discuss that which otherwise would remain undiscussed. What has this pretentious, grandstanding, blustering, pontificating toad done to bring that about lately?

This debate has seen the light of day many times. It’s turned into something of a merry-go-round. Hopefully this lap will be the last one; the effect upon Ms. Thomas’ career, will be terminal. That is my hope. For the good of the nation. And if things go that way, that would be iron-clad proof that women deserve to keep all the power and privileges they have today.

It would certainly make up for that Prohibition thing. And maybe Bill Clinton’s presidency, too.

What Is A Liberal? VI

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

A twenty-one month long Presidential election campaign. If this is the pinnacle of human achievement in the twenty-first century, then God help us. You know what? I’d like to know who’s making the call about what gets invented next. I hear people wishing for alternative fuels, rocket-powered vests, a cure for AIDS…I’ve yet to hear of anyone dreaming wistfully of a freakin’ two-year-long election campaign. But it looks like we invented that lickety-split.

And lucky me, like everyone else, I’m stuck in the middle of one.

Which was not yet the case when I wrote What Is A Liberal? Part V or IV, or the first three chapters either. Now, the air is thick with liberal blatherings. I haven’t exactly been trying to escape them, but assuming that avenue was open to me, it doesn’t seem to me to be a wise plan. Being a liberal is all about coming up with ideas to solve problems, that aren’t necessarily so likely to solve the problem, as they are to change the lives of everyone in a way we can’t ignore once the ideas are put into effect. So this is the interesting thing about our liberals — you can ignore them today, you can ignore them tomorrow. Can’t do both. There’s a certain “pay the piper” overtone when it comes to paying attention to, or ignoring, liberals.

Kind of like the cute girl at work who’s sleeping with the boss. You know your attention would be far better spent on people who are more upstanding and virtuous. A whiff of questionable evidence that there’s pillow-talk going on, and you pretty much have to pay attention to her…some more solid evidence that there’s pillow-talk about you — and your options have been narrowed. Yes, that pretty much captures the situation. Pay attention to the slovenly, disreputable people whether you want to or not; now, or later.

Now I see a couple of things about liberals that creep me out. I mean, over & above all those other things that creep me out. New creepy things. I’ve checked the five previous “What Is A Liberal” installments to make sure they’re new…and yeah, I haven’t quite commented on these before.

Penumbral Evil

Now there is widespread recognition that conservatives and liberals may disagree trivially about which among the bad things people do are really, really bad. Conservatives think it’s bad to rule over a socialist enclave, putting a ceiling over each consciousness residing therein, making sure nobody can ever have too much and therefore killing human ambition; we’re also not too fond of violent crime, like mugging, murder, liquor store robbery, etc. Liberals think it’s bad to partake in white collar crimes, or to stop an abortion from happening that would have otherwise happened. Or, of course, to leave too large of what’s called a “carbon footprint.” And more often than not, they care more about which specialized group of unfortunates might statistically be impacted by a wrong, than about what the wrong actually was…so to this list, we can add whatever will marginalize, oppress, abuse or simply insult: Women, homosexuals, and minorities (usually minus Asians).

Each side has an “umbra” of evil, which is to say each side has it’s preferences about which violations are absolutely, positively uber-bad. The curious thing about conservatives, I see, is that we particularly deplore things that would hurt poor people. Odd, isn’t it, since we aren’t supposed to care about them?

And each side shuffles it’s feet, hems & haws, and hastily changes the subject when it’s own leaders are caught engaging in shenanigans. The liberals question the practicality of inspecting President Clinton’s perjury before the grand jury and obstruction of justice, and naturally the marital indiscretions that led to all that. Conservatives are pretty much done discussing everything President Nixon ever did, thankewverymuch.

Thus far, all I’m talking about is politics. You’ve got an agenda, you’ve got a leader, the leader promotes your agenda, the leader is caught in some real or perceived wrong — you don’t want it discussed because it might hurt your agenda.

Here’s a difference between liberals and conservatives: The penumbral evil. Conservatives don’t have one. Of course it’s unrealistic to insist all evil will be punished. But when I first got involved in computer security a few years back we had a saying, “You know something you gotta do something.” And I think that summarizes the conservative viewpoint on wrongdoing.

It is said President Bush lied to get us into a war. Conservatives sneer at that, but what they’re sneering at is the perceived motive for saying such a thing. They think it’s purely political. They’re right. But I have never heard a conservative even begin to put forward the argument that if, after his presidency is done, it’s proven President Bush is guilty of these hijinks, he should avoid punishment simply because he was once the perceived leader of the conservative movement. And that isn’t just because George Bush’s conservative credentials are in significant question.

From what I’ve been able to read, and I’ve read more than a little — the conservative argument against impeachment is an argument dealing with evidence or lack thereof, and what motivates the opposition. It is not an argument that the conservative cause is so noble that it should elevate any of the key players above simple justice.

Contrast this with liberal arguments, when “simple justice” is somehow antithetical to what the liberal wants done. We could review the great wrongs, such as the crimes committed under the regime of Saddam Hussein, or the little ones like Al Gore flying around in a private jet right before he tells people they should change light bulbs and stop polluting the environment. Hussein is obviously worse than Gore, it is not my intention to put them both on the same level of wrongdoing. But in both cases, the indictments for the respective “crimes” are logically valid; and it is harmful to the liberal cause for anybody to think about them.

LoopholeAnd so, rare is the liberal who will say (as a conservative will say about President Bush), “If Hussein/Gore is/was guilty as charged, then he should be held to account.” You can grow quite old waiting for such a thing. No, the liberal argument far more often tends to be, yes “we all agree” such-and-such was bad, but this other thing over here was far worse. And so your attention ought rightfully be focused on this other thing over here, and not on the such-and-such you brought up…which is evidence the evil Republicans are brainwashing you.

Conservatives will make a similar argument about the democrat party…if and when they take issue with established guilt. In other words, if their argument is that something ought still be regarded as a questionable possibility, and it has incorrectly been treated as something proven. I’ve yet to see a good example of a conservative arguing that a crime of any kind should be treated as “penumbral,” which is to say trivial…passing under the radar cone of punishment, even though it has been substantiated as having occurred, and defined beyond dispute as an awful thing.

Liberals embrace the concept of a penumbral evil — the grudging admission that a thing was wrong, fused inseparably to a pronouncement that no consequence should result. They’ll agree so-and-so did such-and-such…they’ll agree that this was “wrong”…and after that point, they have a “yes but” argument about why the entire issue should be dismissed, usually involving a distraction. Or, a motivation for committing the violation in the first place, usually involving someone’s rustic economic circumstances. Or, that party’s good intentions. But quite often, when both sides have agreed someone’s due for come-uppins, the liberal argument is going to be that all sides should un-know what they know and un-learn what they have learned. Liberals simply insist that penumbral evils don’t count. They have to because their cause is so righteous.

This gives me the willies.

The Fifty-Second Percent

From what I have been able to learn about the various stages of American history post-revolution, all of the various factions involved have been keen on the idea of acquiring power through the ballot box, and then ensuring the whims and desires of that faction are injected into a policy that will affect everyone. And so it can truly be said that American politics is all about marginalizing the opposition. There is a certain paradoxical foolishness involved in this, because some of our most surprising landslide elections have been decided in favor of the faction that was marginalized in this way previously.

I would cite as examples, Roosevelt’s election in 1932, and the Republican Revolution of 1994.

You would think, as a consequence, the phrase “common ground” would carry some meaning behind it. You gain power, you look ahead to when your term is up, and as a preventative measure you reach across to the opposition and implement some of their ideas in addition to your own. To let off steam. To prevent a counter-revolution. Both sides pay this a lot of lip-service, but it isn’t done in substance nearly as often as it’s cosmetically discussed. Politicians are politicians. They figure out in advance what they’re allowed to do…and even the experienced and knowledgeable ones, manage to do this with an accuracy best described as lackluster. And they do whatever they want within whatever boundary that is. If it helps their agendas to call this restraining force “common ground,” then that is what they will call it.

Look at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s not moving on pulling our troops out of Iraq and she’s not moving on impeaching President Bush. And…look, a dozen years ago, at President Clinton passing welfare reform. He figured he had to. It helped his agenda to call this “common ground” because immediately prior to that, he got his ass beat in the ’94 midterms. It is in this same spirit that Pelosi declares impeachment, to the blistering irritation of her constituency, to be “off the table.” If it helped her agenda to call this restraining device “common ground” then that is what she would call it. But it wouldn’t, so she doesn’t.

And that is the way it has always worked. Our politicians make a lot of noise about finding common ground because when they do this, it makes them look like the agent of finding the common ground. This makes them look very important…like, if they were to get sick or get run over by a bus, we’d lose the ability to find our common ground. But in reality they’re the agents of their own political survival and self-actuation, and whatever they’ll be able to get away with doing, they’ll do. Whatever they won’t, they won’t. They aren’t leading, they’re following.

But our liberals are a special case. In the notorious 2000 election, we saw how far they would go to win an election. Both sides slugged it out pretty hard, and when it was over the Republican candidate was sworn in as President. That stung a lot, and what was even worse was that the democrat challenger had won the popular vote. It was the electoral college that determined the outcome. Darn that United States Constitution.

The middle-of-the-road Americans, it seems to me, have been generously tolerating the resulting nastiness from the liberals over the last seven years under the presumption that if the tables were turned, the conservatives would be acting equally nasty. If that is what excuses the childishness we’ve seen all this time, I’m of the opinion that it should be reconsidered.

The nastiness, after all, is rooted in the supposition that Al Gore won more popular votes in 2000 than George Bush, and still lost the election. As noted above, American history is full of political factions that seek to win elections and then marginalize the opposition — but the way the liberals work with the popular will, is a curious, unique and perverted thing. Not a single liberal, within the length and breadth of my base of knowledge, has even pretended to be railing and wailing against the unfairness of the Electoral College before Election Day 2000. As far as I’ve been able to tell, if Bush won the popular vote and Gore got his magic 270 electoral votes, this would have suited our liberals just fine. This inconsistency is as American as apple pie. It’s their brazenness in admitting to it, or rather their lack of passion in mounting even an obligatory counter-argument to it, that I find peculiar.

Put another way, they talk about “counting every vote” as if it’s a guiding principle, but there are all these ways to demonstrate they just see vote-counting as a means toward a cynical end. There are many examples of this, but the military vote flap from 2000 is probably the best example.

Gov. George W. Bush’s campaign accused Democrats of conspiring to knock out as many ballots as possible from members of the military, who were expected to have voted mostly for Mr. Bush. The campaign issued a statement from retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had campaigned for Mr. Bush, calling it “a very sad day in our country” when service members find that “because of some technicality out of their control they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States, who will be their commander in chief.”

Democrats countered that Republicans set out to keep military ballots in the count even when they should have been thrown out. “I think that they wanted to get every military vote they could counted, regardless of the law,” said Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. “They use the law when it suits their purposes, and ignore the law when it suits their purposes. There’s an amazing, tremendous inconsistency on their part.”

Democratic officials said that they were insisting on abiding by the rule that all ballots bear postmarks, and that the ballots most likely to lack postmarks were military ballots. But they denied that they were trying to systematically disenfranchise military voters.

Poor Bob Poe. Ever since the majority of electoral votes went to the opposition just a few weeks after he made his remarks, his party has been redefined according to “ignor[ing] the law when it suits their [democrats’] purposes.” Not just any law, but the United States Constitution that says our President is whoever won the greater number of electoral votes. Bet he wishes he could take those words back.

But the point is, the popular vote. This has been used according to an “amazing, tremendous inconsistency” if nothing else has. In 2005, President Bush won the popular vote that, in 2000, our liberals said was supposed to determine everything even if the Constitution went the other way. I haven’t heard of anyone swallowing their pride, pledging to work with the now-legitimate Leader of the Free World and his newly-won mantle of real legitimacy.

The Fifty-Second Percent problem is a continuation of this paradox, and this is the point where things get even more disturbing.

If liberals work at it long enough and hard enough, and get enough dimpled chads counted and enough military votes thrown out, they can eventually squeak through an election and get their guy elected. In modern times, a liberal has never achieved a Reagan/1984 like smashing landslide. The closest thing they’ve gotten to that, I think, is the 1974 midterms after the Watergate scandal. As for an equivalent Presidential-election example, we’d have to reach way back to Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 over Alf Landon.

That is the Fifty-Second Percent problem. A Roosevelt-Landon landslide, since…sometime…maybe those tumultuous 1968 events…is out of the question. It’s not only beyond the zenith of liberal potential, but beyond their vision for themselves, beyond their political goals. They want to win that all-important majority. They want like the dickens to get hold of that magic 51 percent. Anything beyond that doesn’t interest them. Oh, they’d like to be handed the fifty-second percent on a silver platter, with no strings attached…but they won’t sacrifice anything for it. Not with the 51st percent already in hand.

This is a first in American history. All of our most passionate and outspoken factions, have measured the overall mental health of the nation at large in terms of “does everybody in America agree with me.” The pollsters come back and tell the party bosses “forty-nine percent of the country agrees with you; if you sacrifice X as a party platform, fifty-one percent of the country will agree with you; if you sacrifice Y, two-thirds of the country will agree with you.” The party bosses, if we’re talking about conservatives, or whigs, or Jackson Democrats, or Jefferson Democratic-Republicans, or Adams Federalists — would all be just as willing to consider ejecting Y, as X. Not our modern day liberals.

They want to win that magic fifty-one percent, so they can tell the other forty-nine percent to go screw off. Not a care in the world about the counter-revolution that might ensue at the end of the next term. If some compromise could be reached so that additional converts could be won, further eroding the remaining 49% — they’re just not interested. They only want to win enough hearts and minds to make the rules. To achieve approval from a mere 51 percent, is just as meaningful a victory as winning unanimous, unconditional approval. Modern liberalism is the first political faction in our nation’s history that is dedicated to declaring people irrelevant, as a primary objective to be subordinated to none other.