The kollege kids in Ithaca, NY want a Guiness representative to validate their claim to the largest human peace sign.
The previous largest human peace sign was made by 2,500 people at the University of Michigan. Ithaca is now waiting for Guinness to sanction its new record of 5,814 people.
Organizer Trevor Dougherty, a high school sophomore, says the effort was a show of support for world peace, not just an attempt at a record.
Yay. Yes, the world could use some more peace. We could start with our left-wingers pledging to work more closely with our right-wingers. Compromise a bit more often. Heh…funny how that one item seems to be left out.
You know, it occurs to me that “peace” stands alone as having it’s own simplistic, easily-reproduced sign. It is the one intangible noun that defies a solid definition. Next to “greed” and “hate crime.” “Racism” seems to have slipped a few teeth in the cogs as well; it used to mean a personal belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another, and lately I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t incorporate that being called “racist.”
But I digress.
You show people a peace sign…everyone understands it refers to the word “peace” but we have so little collaboration about what that really means. Stop fighting? Ban guns? Sign a non-proliferation treaty, and just hope the other guys are demolishing their munitions when they say they are? Does it mean start inspections, or call a halt to them? Does it have something to do with Marxism? Why or why not?
I can think of a few other things that could use a simple, internationally-recognized pictogram, to make it easier to promote them. These are things much more worthy of such promotion than the same-ol’, tired old war protest.
Graphics artists, your submissions are solicited. Make ’em simple as possible, and preferably fitting in a circular border. Who knows, maybe one or two of ’em will have ten thousand able-bodied supporters, and before the summer is out we can break the record.
1. Skepticism about global warming. I doubt you can save the planet by unplugging your toaster.
2. Critical thinking, in general. We used to have some. Let’s bring it back.
3. The Wolfowitz Doctrine.
4. The willingness to provide others who are weaker with a terrible, deadly defense. (The U.S. Marines have a nice logo that says exactly this, to some.)
5. The idea that maybe we should keep putting violent criminals in jail until there’s nobody around to commit violent crime anymore. That’s what the “peace symbol” means to me, but that’s open to individual interpretation.
6. Hooray for capitalism.
7. You can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
8. Say no to crack: Pull up those pants!
9. Hooters girls, on the other hand, are awesome.
10. So is cold beer.
11. So are buffalo wings.
12. I wish cars were still built so we could tear ’em apart and put them back together again.
13. Commies leave. This country isn’t for you.
14. Nerds are cool.
15. Any country that is our ally only until we take steps to defend ourselves, is an ally we don’t want or need.
16. Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.
17. Drill here now. Sign Newt’s petition.
18. Peer pressure sucks.
19. Canada, shame on you for your Human Rights Commission!
20. Keith Olbermann, go away.
21. Guilt is a useless and nonsensical human emotion.
22. It’s a futile endeavor to try to be better than everyone else when you’re also trying to be exactly like everyone else.
23. Let’s make it easy for young people to find work. There’s nothing wrong with a seventh-grader mowing lawns for money.
24. Rule For Living With Me #2. Show how mature you are. All things do not necessarily have to be said.
25. Go away, Oprah.
26. Thing I Don’t Get #24. Men shouldn’t get piercings in their junk and I don’t know why they’d want to.
27. Teach your child how to drive a stick-shift!
28. Same-sex marriage: It isn’t a human rights story, it’s a human-interest story.
29. Getting your news out of The Daily Show is a bad, bad idea.
30. Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.
These girl geeks aren’t social misfits; their identities don’t hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they’ve made that part of their appeal. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on “30 Rock” is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called “Math Doesn’t Suck” and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive” pageant. They tune in to shows like “GeekBrief.TV,” a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male. “For a long time, there’s been this stereotype that either you’re ugly and smart or cute and not suited for careers in math, science or engineering,” says Annalee Newitz, the co-editor of “She’s Such a Geek!”, a 2006 anthology of women writing about math, tech and science. “One of the big differences between Generation X geeks and girls in their teens now is really just an attitude—an indication that they’re much more comfortable.”
Huh. Well, that’s still a good thing, I suppose. Maybe we’ve finally arrived at the point where boys and girls are no longer being bossed around by stuffy conventional protocol or by bitter angry feminists, and everybody just does what comes most naturally. And so we have some geek girls who take the time to be feminine after they’re done geeking-out.
And everybody’s stopped whining; hey, I can completely get behind that. Oopsie, no, we’re not quite there yet:
Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.
Okay, so the whining hasn’t stopped. But at least society has begun to accept coolness and tech-wizardry in the same person, so long as that person is female.
Actually, that’s not new either now that I noodle it out a bit further. Action movies have had this going on for a very long time now. “Cracking a 256-bit twofish encryption code in your head” — hah — you can do that right after racing a motorcycle through a burning warehouse and then karate-chopping 50 bad guys in a row…and looking hot…if you’re a girl.
That’s quite alright, and has been for some time.
The male action hero hasn’t been allowed to do this, and to the best I can discern, is still not allowed to do this. If there’s a shoot-out and he’s busy hiding behind a car door, “covering” somebody by laying down about 70 shots from his six-shot .44 Ruger, and there’s a computer that has to be reprogrammed or unlocked or defeated in some way…it’s always been in the contract. He has to yell out “Do you think you can disarm that thing?” to his plucky sidekick. Said plucky sidekick being a gorgeous babe or an ugly whelp. There is, just to cite one example of the classic trend, Bond, James Bond. He can fight and drive fast cars and shoot guns and is supposed to be sexy as all get-out, but he doesn’t understand the computers, he needs his co-star to figure them out. I guess she was a Nerd 2.0 Girl before they were cool. The bad guy is a secret agent who can do everything Bond can do — he can’t figure the computers out, either. When a satellite has to be locked on to a city, he needs to rely on his dorky wimpy male sidekick who can’t shoot guns, flinches from a firefight, and seems to be working pretty hard to avoid looking the least bit sexy.
That’s a very old tradition, and a male-only tradition. We’ve lately done some work nibbling around the edges of it. Indiana Jones, I see, knows a gazillion languages, which is the kind of proficiency I might expect from a college professor who’s been globetrotting in search of archeological relics for eighty years. Hugh Jackman was allowed to break encryption keys in his head and still be a sexy dude — so long as the fighting was left to others.
So now, our expectation could be summed up as: Beating up bad guys; looking sexy; doing geek stuff. Girls, you can have all three; guys, pick any two.
That’s rather typical of our mindset, both in the cinema and outside of it, and it’s endured across generations: Girls can have all, dudes must choose. And I don’t see how the females have ever been shoehorned into anything, or out of anything, by it. Ever. On the school playground, I know girls can be meaner to each other than boys ever can be, but I don’t recall any anecdotal information about girls having been physically abused for their geekiness, whereas on the male side of the line this is a time-honored ritual.
So I guess what the article is trying to tell me, is that there is a new fashion trend rising up here in which it has become the hot new thing to mentor an up-and-coming female nerd. Well, since the Y2K computer bug, technology seems to have gone into a deep slumber, nobody seems to have gathered a benefit from that, so any nerd-mentoring that takes place is a good thing in my book.
But let’s not call this a groundbreaking trend. If 56 percent of engineering degrees are being earned by the ladies, that would indicate they’re already being mentored plenty well enough thankyew, so this isn’t quite so much blazing a new trail as climbing onto a bandwagon…we have a tendency to forget those are two different things. But whatever. We desperately need a technical renaissance, and if tech-skills are looking sexy, even if it’s only in the girls — and we’re pretending this is something new when it’s anything-but — this could be what a technical renaissance looks like, when it’s just getting started.
But you know what we need more than anything? We need what we had about twenty-five to forty-five years ago: Technology that exists solely for the purpose of making other technology possible. From where I’m sitting, and from what I know, the last great innovation in that department would have been…SSL 3.0. By itself, it doesn’t do anything impressive and is nearly impossible to explain to the “layman,” but it made truly secure e-commerce something worth developing, and had an influential impact on the financial world. A positive one, for a little while.
So passages like this have a tendency to temper my optimism:
In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition’s history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social networking sites; they’re also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. Even women gamers far outnumber men ages 25 to 34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer Electronics Association.
Winning a competition is something you do for the attention. Actually, it is not so much a measurable achievement, as reaching an opinionated achievement…an achievement in the opinion of one or several observers. Writing for a blog or participating in a social networking site, is the essence of showing off. Creating a web site is a process of presentation. And gaming is just goofing off. If girls are outnumbering boys in gaming, that’s just another example of them borrowing our worst habits.
So that concerns me a little. This “laying of railroad track” brand of technology, which we badly need now, is not being served by any new generation of hot stylish geek, regardless of which gender is involved. And it is highly unlikely to be served by anyone who’s entered the tech field out of any personal passions that have anything to do with getting attention. What we really need to have mentored, are some Dr. Frankensteins — folks, male or female, who lock themselves up in laboratories that are neat-or-messy, maybe equal parts of both, and just grind away at stuff without any concern for the kudos they get when they show it to someone. That has nothing to do with blogging, nothing to do with building web pages, and nothing to do with gaming; those are decidedly closed-end technologies.
But there will be more substantial cause for hope, in my lifetime, I’m sure. Technology has always moved in a feast-and-famine cycle. This is a famine, there’s no mistaking that. One of these decades, Microsoft will release an operating system that isn’t a bloated albatross…or someone else will. Or we’ll get some other home appliance that’s open-ended, maybe something some guy built in his garage, and go through the technological boom of the eighties and early nineties all over again. Maybe one of those geek girls will pull that off — become sort of a Joan of Ark of technical wizardry. If that’s the future, I’m pullin’ for her, and it can’t happen soon enough.
You know what will really make that all the more likely? Is if we separate geekdom from fashion. That way, we’ll be ready to accept whatever is ready to be offered. These preconceived notions about who’s going to build the next great widget — and, out of necessity, who will not — are marginally dangerous, and not very helpful to anyone. They impress me as a process of exchanging one crude stereotype for another one.
…JohnJ being one of my blogger friends trying to persuade me to go toward the light, Carol Anne, and support McCain this fall.
It’s a good thing I never said this point was entirely lacking in merit, for it certainly is not so lacking. Searching around for an editorial I saw last week in Sacramento Bee, I found it under Paul Greenberg’s name and Mr. Greenberg states a powerful case.
Nothing so well illustrates the essential asymmetry of this country’s worldwide struggle against terrorism than last week’s 5-to-4 opinion out of the U.S. Supreme Court. The enemy is fighting a war; we are litigating a plea.
Throughout the sleepy Nineties, we dealt with two – two! – earlier and incomplete attacks on the World Trade Center not as the barbaric acts of war they were, but as isolated matters for the criminal justice system to deal with when and if it could. While we slept, the enemy plotted. We paid the bloody price for our obtuseness – in thousands of innocent lives – on September 11, 2001.
Now we’re proceeding with great deliberation down the same blind alley.
How to describe this latest opinion from the high court? It’s not easy to get a handle on this decision for, against or maybe just vaguely about the exercise (or paralysis) of the president’s wartime powers. Here is how His Honor Anthony M. Kennedy – heir to the equally vacuous Sandra Day O’Connor’s swing vote on the high court – “explained” what his majority opinion means, or rather doesn’t mean: “Our opinion does not undermine the executive’s powers as commander in chief. On the contrary, the exercise of those powers is vindicated, not eroded, when confirmed by the judicial branch.”
This whole issue shouldn’t be an issue, of course. Supreme Court Justices are sworn in with an oath to defend the Constitution. Not to twist it around to make people happy, who in turn don’t even live in this country. They’re supposed to read the Constitution, look at some lesser law, and say “I don’t see any conflict here” or “yeah, that’s messed up, you’re not supposed to do that and it says so right here.”
What Kennedy is doing is ratcheting up the standard of constitutionality in such a way that it has little to nothing to do with the actual Constitution. He’s an authority doing exactly what authorities aren’t supposed to do when they wield authority: Try to use it to make himself popular.
…this is the third time in four years that the high court has left the question of how or if to try enemy combatants up in the cloudy air. What are the other branches of government, or even the lower courts, let alone our troops in the field, now to do with these detainees and future ones? The weightless burden of the court’s confused and confusing guidance on this subject might be summed up as: To be determined.
Each time the Supreme Court has ruled against this system of trying enemy combatants, lawful or unlawful, Congress and the executive – at the court’s explicit behest – have moved to meet its objections, only to be told once again that the tribunals still don’t pass constitutional muster.
In matters of civil and criminal law, you don’t want anything to happen unless all the tumblers are lined up. Outside of the military, government has a way of doing things like that naturally: Everyone has to agree something’s a go, but the lowliest mail clerk has the authority to stop it. Great way to prosecute a case. Lousy way to fight a war.
Greenberg closes by echoing John’s point, almost word-for-word:
The one thing that this latest example of law at its least vigilant does make clear is the importance of this year’s presidential election. Sen. John McCain, who knows something about war and being a prisoner thereof, says he would appoint judges who are committed to judicial restraint; he’s criticized this decision. Sen. Barack Obama has praised it. However confused and confusing this latest decision, it does clarify the decision facing the American voter this November.
It certainly does. What it actually means, I’ll leave to each reader to decide for him- or herself.
I know McCain isn’t speaking from the heart, though; I know this beyond the shadow of any doubt. His schtick is that he understands Guantanamo has to be closed down, that we need to recapture some of our global popularity by gelding ourselves in our treatment of these terrorists. He also clings to the tired old song that if we continue with our harsh interrogation techniques, it just puts the men and women serving on our behalf in danger, in case they are captured by the enemy.
The facts don’t square with this sales pitch. When John McCain was captured by the North Koreans Vietnamese, the United States was a signing party to the Geneva Conventions. That’s just a fact. The VC brutalized him at the Hanoi Hilton, and that, too, is an inconvenient fact. No getting around it.
So if anything, McCain is in a great position to know — beyond any doubt whatsoever — that a nation’s determination to behave in a “civilized” manner either by treaty or by deed, does nothing, zilch, zip, zero, nada, bubkes, as far as ensuring that nation’s troops will be subjected to kinder treatment by an enemy once they are captured.
He knows this. He knows it personally. And he’s playing up propaganda that is meaningful only to those who are too ignorant of the facts to understand what’s really going on here.
So do I think McCain’s rhetoric is right on the money about these nominees to the Supreme Court? Yeah, pretty much. Do I think a President McCain is likely to nominate better judges to the Supreme Court than a President Obama? Mmmm…maybe. There’s the slimmest of chances. Would I put a lot of money on it? No. I’d put very, very little. McCain is the very picture of a Republican nominee for President who’ll screw the conservatives over that way once he gets in.
Do I admire him for his service? Hell yes. Do I admire him for his character? Not one bit. I think he has serious issues in that department. Do I think he’s better than a democrat? Uh…maybe I would, if it weren’t for the history of Bush Pere. Or Nixon. I have my reasons to be jaded.
Am I optimistic about how things are going to turn out this year, if only the Republicans unite on this candidate, and thus reassure the candidate that we’re all with him, and consider the job of team-building to be behind him?
Hell no.
He’s the presumptive nominee. He doesn’t have the track record of sticking with principled positions on things…which means both sides will get a benefit out of him if they lean on him.
And those “moderates” are going to lean on him 24×7 all the way to election day.
Those who understand the wisdom of what Greenberg has had to say, should lean on him too. Which means, necessarily, that he can’t count on us. Not until he’s made some commitments that he hasn’t even bothered to make just yet.
Update: As Buck points out, I got my countries mixed up. It’s tough to keep straight in one’s mind all those wars the democrats started.
My goodness, that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, is getting a good workout. Let’s start with the headline of the column:
Walsh: Time to grow up and put your guns away
Christ on a cracker, are we in a competition for the “snooty condescending prick” award here?
I understand the thrill of firing a Glock (I’ve done it), the euphoria of hitting the center of a target (and that, too), generations of family deer-hunting weekends and the legitimate self-preservation instincts of Utah’s elected concealed weapon carriers.
But the OpenCarry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology – overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality – is behind that thinking?
Uh…how about taking real responsibility for something, as in, “I’ll pack the equipment to do it myself if everything else fails”? And since that is a far bigger issue than just the conceal-carry situation, you, Ms. Walsh, have just revealed yourself to be a stranger to that line of thinking. Good. Now I know you’re one of those “I done my bit and if it goes to crap it’s not my fault” people.
Hope nobody’s depending on you for protection.
“Second Amendment questions aside,” says [Anthropologist Charles] Springwood, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, “the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with ‘portable killing machines’ strapped to their bodies?”
Well I dunno. I was born well after the days of the Old West, so I haven’t lived in “a society in which it was an unconscious emblem” blah blah blah. But I was born in the sixties. So I’ve lived in a society in which violent criminals got arrested for damaging property and hurting people, and released on technicalities, and then when men women and children were chopped down like cattle marching to slaughter the law rolled it’s eyes and sighed and said “ah, well.”
Ms. Walsh, I recommend you just think of it as the mark of a civilized society — people living here have the right to defend themselves. That means, if they anticipate something bad might happen to them they can prepare for it, and it’s not the business of you or the busybody lawyers and anthropologists in your rolodex to second-guess ’em about it. Nerdy little boys, getting beaten up by bullies on the playground, can hit back. All that good stuff.
Mark of a civilized society. As opposed to one that requires the people living within it to just sit around waiting to be victimized…which would be the mark of a primitive society.
Oh, and that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, that’s getting such a good workout lately? That would be #27:
27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.
I followed 5, because I liked my job…9 was a non-issue because I never went to a job interview without landing the job…I followed 12 until the day I met her (wife #1). You could say I followed 15 because I didn’t buy any furniture. Number 20 came naturally. The common theme is that where I followed these rules, I was being a cheapass.
I was perhaps a little bit intoxicated with my success. The rules I broke, I don’t know if they would have made that big of a difference. My huge mistakes had to do with living a double-life, now that I look back on it, coupled with a lack of interest in refining my skills at judging people. Friends in low places, you might say.
There is something else that comes to mind, that is even more important. Difficult to explain in one rule. Except — there is something about forming a five year plan. With the benefit of hindsight, I would propose a corollary to that: Look at your life today, try to figure out if you would have been willing to make a plan five years ago, that would culminate where you are now. If the answer to that is no, then it’s a red flag because it indicates if you have some kind of control over your life, you’re not exercising it. And that’s a very productive alarm to sound, because there’ll be a lot of times where everything else seems to be rosy, but you’re still riding for a fall and might not know it.
Neither of those cover where exactly I needed to do most of my learning. If I had to express that in one rule, it would be: People don’t communicate. For the most part, people achieve syndication and harmony by agreeing about the important things through pre-selection — refusing to associate with those who might think differently. These words they jot down and read, these sounds they make with their voice boxes when others pretend to listen…that is mostly for show. When you see a guy telling somebody else something, that somebody-else will nearly always have known just as much before he got “told,” as he did afterward. Out of a hundred rituals ostensibly engaged for the purpose of exchanging ideas, maybe one idea will be exchanged one time, if that. People telling you things in person, for the most part are telling you what they’ve anticipated they need to tell you to get you to go away. And you’d better believe if they’re telling it to you on the phone, it’s really what they think will be the most likely thing to get you off the phone. Promises, truth, illustrations of breakdown-of-responsibility…that isn’t what these things really are, even though they might look like that. They’re verbal concoctions calculated to make you disappear. People who are given instructions proceed to do whatever they were going to do without the instructions. The only exception seems to be when the instructions have something to do with keeping a livelihood.
As for people giving instructions, you’re on safe ground presuming they give the instructions for the purpose of being seen giving instructions. Ditto for people asking questions; they want to be seen asking the questions and don’t really want to know anything they don’t already know.
Gawd, what I’d give for someone to have clued me on on that in my twenties.
Agnosticism seems to me to have something to do with age. In other words, younger atheists tend to be gnostic atheists; they know there’s no God, because they’ve figured it out. There’s no evidence in either direction so the presumption should lean against God, and He should receive no benefit of doubt. They pulled this part out of their asses. They have faith. They achieve a fellowship through this faith, and in that sense achieve cultism of the purest kind.
I was impressed with how fair the linked article is. You look at events today, objectively, with a decent respect to both sides, and then you look at the details as reported by the article — it’s the same thing. You can make the connection either one of two ways: The inquisition represents our global-warming types and Galileo represents our skeptics, or vice-versa. Both sides are making the same mistakes. And that’s true of intelligent design versus evolution and any one of a number of our other hot topics.
There is no doubt the church was in the wrong. A commission formed by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s admitted as much. But was it fully responsible? There were, in fact, two other parties at fault.
One was Galileo himself. His vanity, sarcastic words, contempt for lesser minds and half-truths had earned him fierce enemies among the intellectuals of Europe–especially among the Jesuits. Galileo even fudged at least one experiment.
The second set of culprits were naturalists (the scientists of the day). Advocates of the pagan philsopher Aristotle resisted Galileo’s findings. The pope and cardinals would not have acted if dozens of these “scientists” had not said Galileo was wrong. Some hated Galileo, who had hurt their feelings. Others felt that Aristotle and the Bible should not be overturned without solid evidence. It did not matter that both Kepler and Galileo had shown that the Bible could be interpreted to agree with the new science. Their own eyes showed them that the sun, not the earth moves. Galileo could not provide hard evidence to the contrary. Solid proof for the earth’s movement around the sun was two hundred years away, when tiny shifts in star positions and subtle pendulum motions were finally measured.
Human fallibility, arrogance, and lazy group-think. On both sides.
There’s a lesson there.
There’s at least the hint of a God, too. For who else is there to laugh His ass off at us?
Now that I’ve picked on him, noodle on the following as an equal and opposite righteous thrashing of the other guy. Along with all those bosses you know you’ve had…the aggravating ones that, now that you’re done with ’em, they haven’t been worthy of too much thinking since then.
I was trying to find this description of Wesley Mouch in Atlas Shrugged, last year sometime, and anytime you go looking for anything in Atlas Shrugged it’s like finding a tiny needle in an enormous haystack. I came up empty back then — and then when I went looking for the passage about Cherryl Taggart (finally locating it on p. 827) I stumbled across the Mouch thing on p. 496.
It’s pure gold. Describes much in our lives. More than it should. You know people like this; you know you do.
Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family’s diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value. Among the family’s numerous relatives, there was one rich uncle. He had married his money and, in his widowed old age, he had picked Wesley as his favorite from among his many nephews and nieces, because Wesley was the least distinguished of the lot and therefore, thought Uncle Julius, the safest. Uncle Julius did not care for people who were brilliant. He did not care for the trouble of managing his money, either; so he turned the job over to Wesley. By the time Wesley graduated from college, there was no money to manage. Uncle Julius blamed it on Wesley’s cunning and cried that Wesley was an unscrupulous schemer. But there had been no scheme about it; Wesley could not have said just where the money had gone. In high school, Wesley Mouch had been one of the worst students and had passionately envied those who were the best. College taught him that he did not have to envy them at all. After graduation, he took a job in the advertising department of a company that manufactured a bogus corn-cure. The cure sold well and he rose to be the head of his department. He left it to take charge of the advertising of a hair-restorer, then of a patented brassiere, then of a new soap, then of a soft drink — and then he became advertising vice-president of an automobile concern. He tried to sell automobiles as if they were a bogus corn-cure. They did not sell. He blamed it on the insufficiency of his advertising budget. It was the president of the automobile concern who recommended him to Rearden. It was Rearden who introduced him to Washington — Rearden, who knew no standard by which to judge the activities of his Washington man. It was James taggart who gave him a start in the Burueau of Economic Planning and National Resources — in exchange for double-crossing Rearden in order to help Orren Boyle in exchange for destroying Dan Conway. From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another. [emphasis mine]
Kinda reminds me of a certain energetic and charismatic young man — a decidedly underqualified young man — running for President this year. But that’s just my opinion, of course.
Update: One of that underqualified young man’s supporters argues for nationalizing the refineries…as classic an illustration as can possibly exist, of confusing mediocrity with excellence.
Hat tip to St. Wendeler at Another Rovian Conspiracy. The uh, er, socializing, I mean, uh, whatever was acknowledged to be a Maxine Waters “oopsie” moment…mouth started getting ahead of her brain there. Well, it doesn’t seem to have been a misstatement at all. As St. Wendeler points out, they’re getting more brazen, more sure of themselves, and their true colors are starting to show.
They’re disciplined in dealing with the situation of the moment, and therefore presume that those among them who are capable of amassing power, must be cunning and brilliant and therefore their plans must be ingenious. It’s a simple case of mediocrity being confused with excellence. And plans that have been tried repeatedly, and failed, being thought to possess some sort of beneficiality or merit.
I suppose this weekend we should eventually get around to discussing that subject I try so hard to avoid, which is this decision we all need to make in November.
I have a lot of close friends who beat me up quite regularly over my failure to declare allegiance to Mister Straight Talk. They say our national security is in peril if Obama gets into the White House. And they’re right. They say if I engage in my silliness, e.g., writing in my own name, writing in Fred Thompson’s name, staying home, etc., I will help to make this happen. They are right about that too.
Where they’re wrong, is in offering up Sen. McCain as any sort of remedy to the situation. Not that this is news to them. You can tell they already know this would be a false argument to make, by their careful reluctance to actually make it. They don’t say this word-for-word. It sounds, to the lazy intellect, when you say “we’re up to our shoulders in crap if Obama gets in and McCain’s the only guy who can stop that from happening,” like you’re saying “if McCain gets in maybe we won’t be up to our shoulders in crap.” But those are two different things, they know those are two different things, and that’s why they put so much energy into repeating one of those two things while remaining silent on the other.
The balance of my thoughts has to do with McCain’s penchant for backstabbing, both politically and personally. It is captured well by LindaSOG:
I was somewhat struck by this:
Last January McCain said that the president was “ very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of defense.”
“John said some nasty things about me the other day, and then next time he saw me, ran over to me and apologized,” Cheney said in an ABC News interview in February. “Maybe he’ll apologize to Rumsfeld.”
Aw. Ran over and apologized, did he? Nothing says hypocrite and panderer quite like an apology made in private for an attack made in public. Maybe McCain will apologize to Rumsfield, or… maybe he already has. In private.
Some of McCain’s colleagues in the Senate said they believe Rumsfeld will eventually support the GOP candidate. “He will be for him in due time,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said. … Rumsfeld’s vote will be for McCain, Thune surmised, because “he cares about the country’s national security.”
Yeah sure, McCain really really cares about the country’s national security, you can tell by his plan to close GITMO because after all, closing GITMO and bringing terrorists here into the United States prison system will do so much for the country’s national security. Sure, why not give these hardened and experienced terrorists a captive audience made up of angry, violent, hate-filled American citizens and the opportunity to recruit and train and initiate them into Jihad. It will only make us safer, right?
McCain has been remarkably consistent on the closing of Guantanamo, and other issues dealing with the upcoming gelding and defanging of the United States; embracing our new paradigm of advertised harmlessness.
Let’s just call this what it is: A religion. It’s based on mountains of faith, and on not so much as a molehill of anything else. There is no evidence — anywhere in human history! — that this will have a beneficial effect on anything. What happens to the guy who goes trolling for dates, showing off how harmless he is and how he totally respects the object(s) of his affection? He sleeps alone, of course. What happens to the father who shows his children how harmless he is? They disrespect him, disobey him, and grow up to be hoodlums. What happens when he showcases his harmlessness to his wife? He gets divorced and loses everything he owns. What happens when the justice system shows how harmless it is? Crime goes up. What happens to countries with harmless systems of national defense? They get invaded and conquered. And on the list goes…
I’ll simplify Goldwater’s wisdom for today: Harmlessness is not a virtue. Period.
What’s really flawed about this “harmlessness is virtuous if it’s advertised” religion, is that it is lacking a deity. That’s a terminal defect, you know. There needs to be an authority sitting in judgment of us in order to determine what incredibly good people we are, for having closed down Guantanamo. Step One, we close it down…Step Two, ???????? says “look what they did, they’re wonderful people”…Step Three, we get more popular, and in this way our interests are served. Good karma — but — for that to work, you need to fill in the “????????”. There’s no way around it. Now, who’s performing that adjudication? Osama bin Laden? Earth-Mother Gaea? “Most” people around the world? This is where it breaks down…none of those wash.
So over the next four and a half months, I’ll be instructed to believe, many more times, that McCain deserves my vote because it’s better to ally with The Devil You Know than with The Devil You Don’t. And that is my retort: All these people who say so, smart as they may be in other matters, simply don’t know this Devil You Know. As LindaSOG points out with amusing verbal irony, to place a premium value on our national defense is inconsistent and irreconcilable with wanting to close down Guantanamo to score some prop points with some unnamed deity.
Gee, now that I think on it some more, Obama might be the Devil I Know. McCain’s appeal to conservatism, where he has some, is that he’s a crap shoot as opposed to a sure thing. A crappy crap-shoot.
UCLA students show their support for the Obamessiah — you’ll notice, there seems to be something terribly wrong with keeping that kind of support secret — by streaking in their underwear.
There’s another first in the Barack Obama campaign, and it came from UCLA students. Hundreds of UCLA men and women donned designer underwear with Barack Obama’s picture on the front, and dashed across campus early Thursday.
The briefs were the creation of designer Andrew Christian. A silhouette of Obama was on the front, and “08” on the back. Christian said the Obama underwear run were a perfect vehicle for him to premiere his campaign-themed garments. He might consider a Hillary Clinton bra, if she makes the ticket as vice-president.
There won’t be any John McCain underwear, since Christian is a Democrat.
My gal came up with a priceless retort to this. Okay, so a President Barack Obama is in favor of unruly kids running down the street without any clothes on — duly noted.
The underwear run is an annual event at UCLA. It’s a way for students to blow off some steam, before final exams.
College is a place where you or your parents pay some premium tuition so you can learn how to think critically — it costs more now than it used to, and you have a lot more time to learn how to do it than your parents ever did. And yet, what passes for college-level decision making today, is looking around, seeing that your pals are streaking in their underwear, and deciding to vote the way they’re voting because it’s so coooooooool.
Tomorrow’s leaders.
Color me unimpressed. Umptyfratz-and-eleventy thousand dollars should be able to buy some better critical-thinking skills than that.
Over in Ed Morissey’s corner at HotAir, he points to Anchoress, who notes something interesting about Scott McClellan’s testimony regarding the +++rolls eyes+++ Plame “scandal”:
Well, I’m sure Congress feels like they accomplished something today with their interrogation of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. After making a series of inflated allegations in his memoirs, What Happened, he told Congress that he really doesn’t know what happened — at least not in l’affaire Plame. When asked whether President George Bush knew about any effort to leak Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, he said Bush didn’t know about it — and McClellan doesn’t know anything about anybody else’s efforts, either:
U.S. President George W. Bush did not know about a White House effort to leak the identity of a CIA agent but tried to protect staffers who were involved in one of the biggest scandals of his administration, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress on Friday.
McClellan said he did not think Bush was involved in a 2003 effort to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war. …
Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in the leak might have been greater, McClellan said.
“I do not think the president in any way had knowledge about it,” McClellan told lawmakers. “In terms of the vice president, I do not know. There is a lot of suspicion there.”
McClellan said that Bush ordered him to tell the press that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby didn’t have anything to do with the leaks, through the chief of staff at the White House. However, that might be because Bush believed that they didn’t. If Bush didn’t know about the supposed effort to leak Plame’s identity, then it stands to reason that he believed the assurances of both men that they didn’t have anything to do with it. And since neither of them had talked with Robert Novak, in whose column the leak occurred, that may well have been the case — at least as far as Bush was concerned.
Anchoress opines further at Pajamas Media. This is why I like Anchoress — the subject to be explored, is what immediately popped into my head when reading Mr. McClellan’s “testimony,” indeed pops in there just about any time I’m reacquainted with my disgust over this Plame thing: Critical thinking, and the desperate fit of thrashing around it’s doing lately on its deathbed.
“Yeah, it is that simple. He lied, and we all know it. So STFU. Now.” — Marecek
That was one of 1,643 comments left in response to Fred Hiatt’s June 9 piece in the Washington Post, entitled “Bush Lied? If Only It Were That Simple,” which covered the findings of the Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV).
Marecek’s was the majority opinion.
In writing his piece for the editorial page of the Washington Post, Hiatt — that page’s editor — made the mistake of actually quoting passages of this report, which claimed that a host of “lies” of which President Bush has been accused since 2003 were “substantiated by intelligence.”
Vituperation and ad hominem attacks were left as commentary at the paper’s website, with calls for Hiatt’s immediate firing, for — apparently — his treason in quoting a report, written by a Democratic majority, that dared to depart from a narrative that has become conventional wisdom.
You know? The more I think about this lying idiot that edits WaPo, the more I realize how venal and corrupt the neo-cons really are. They really have no shame. No shame at all. Their corruption is complete. Frankly, the Emperor in Star Wars had more integrity than these neo-cons. Hiatt truly is a lapdog. — santafe2
I showed the article and comments to several friends of various backgrounds. One who works in media shot back: “if you don’t like the message, ignore it and kill the messenger!”
A friend who homeschools her children — and does it so well that the oldest has won a full academic scholarship to a university — was surprised that commenters would express such contempt not for the committee findings, which contradicted their worldview, but for the reporter who covered it. “It’s illogical,” she said. “Do public schools no longer teach critical thinking skills?”
Curious about that myself, I asked a friend who teaches social studies at a local and very well-regarded high school. “We’re supposed to be teaching critical thinking,” she said. “It’s in all the local and state standards, but in practice … there’s only so much time.” [bold mine]
I wish words could express my extreme lack of sympathy.
If, over the last two hundred years, we had somehow regressed from a technologically-rich culture stuffed chock-full with iced mocha vanilla lattes, iPods, a personal computer in every house running a 32-bit flat-memory-model operating system, flatbed scanners, twelve megapixel digital cameras, coffee cup warmers, Tivo, wireless hubs, tablet PCs, snips snails and puppy-dog’s tails…down to a dystopian wasteland in which everyone can do whatever they’re going to do after putting in their fifteen hours a day plowing fields for the spring potato planting, so that their ten or twelve children don’t starve to death, that is the ones that don’t succumb to smallpox or yellow fever or malaria — had we gone in that direction, then I could see it. Oh dear oh dear, there’s all that planting and harvesting to be done. We’d better just cover reading, writing and penmanship. Critical thinking they can learn to do at home (they’d have to do it anyway, huh?).
As it is, we’ve been trudging headlong in the opposite direction. We have comfort. Our grandparents did not. The widespread loss of critical thinking is something far more poignant than an event transpiring coincidentally with our accumulation of jewel-encrusted cell phones and dogs bred to be carried around in $600 purses. It is a symptom. We don’t think critically because there’s little need to. If you can’t think your way out of a paper bag — you’ll still have a warm dry place to sleep tonight, and a plateful of grub when you get up tomorrow. Necessity gone. Critical thinking, a thing of the past.
How tough do we have it, really? Our most threatening menace is a gallon of gas that costs four dollars and sixty cents. And we really don’t have much call for facing down such a menace; just bitching about it for a second or two, and we’re done with that. So we don’t confront threats. We don’t do it every day, we don’t do it once a month, we don’t even do it as the years roll by. Without the necessity of truly confronting a threat, in command of responses-to-stimuli that can actually change the outcome, the need to think critically becomes a memento from the distant past.
What you’re seeing here is the struggle to remain part of an accepted group. Hey look at me I still think Bush lied. Hey look at me I have all this dripping acrid venom for anyone who suggests otherwise. Look at me, look at me, look at me…I’m saying all the right stuff.
Please let me keep my membership card.
Meanwhile — Scott McClellan doesn’t know much of anything. There are no facts to back up this opinion that Bush, Cheney, et al, lied. There is only the big money of George Soros, spent to convince teeming millions of fellow citizens that they did. This provides reassurance that there will be a large group, ready to accept anyone who hates Bush and is willing to say so. And membership of a group — any group — has taken the place of a bushel of grain. It is the new coin of the realm, the new token of continuing survival. There has to be one, at all times, you know. It’s how we operate.
Without the necessity of getting that fall harvest in, or of killing diseases before they wipe out your whole family, or driving off a pack of wolves with a blunderbuss — or something like those — all that’s left is the challenge of staying socially accepted. And you’ll notice as these challenges continue to disappear, the challenge of staying socially accepted becomes something that has to be “confronted,” such as it is, more and more frequently. The membership is up for renewal every month, then every week, then multiple times a day they have to spew their nonsense to stay inside that glorious perimeter.
This acceleration over time rises up as an especially intriguing commentary on the human mind and how it works. I would almost call it an indictment; logically, no protective countermeasure should have to be brandished or deployed with greater frequency, as the associated threat is in a state of recession…but here we are. What we’re seeing is a short-circuiting that takes place, manifesting our collective conscious’ inability to deal with diminishing problems: With a constant voltage, current is inversely proportional to resistance, so with resistance removed the current skyrockets toward infinity, eventually melting down whatever hardware is used to carry it.
That’s what is happening to us. That is precisely what is happening to us.
How else to explain it? The social studies teacher has time to teach critical thinking, time that teachers of the post-civil-war era didn’t have. And she can’t quite get ‘er done. Not that I would blame her; the kids aren’t ready for it anymore. Their circuitry has melted down.
Collecting their news and information from Comedy Central and internet forums rich with satire and irony, everything has become a joke for our young — the “truthiness” that “feels” right, an acceptable alternative to solid facts or findings. But clever jokes and easy cynicism will not right the wrongs of the world or encourage serious governance over the cartoonish politics of the day.
This is a great splitting-boundary between the stuff we call conservatism and the opposite stuff we call liberalism. It defines the boundary because it identifies an area in which we are adapting to a new set of challenges by jettisoning the abilities we needed to confront the older set of challenges. We are evolving, and in so doing, becoming less capable.
Boiled down to its essentials, modern-day liberalism asserts that all evolution is good, even if it incorporates weaknesses that did not exist previously, or expunges capabilities and talents that did. Conservatism is simply a more open-minded and curious opposite, daring to pose the question: Maybe all change is not necessarily good? Liberalism, being inherently closed-minded, has no response for this question but anger, scorn, ridicule and aspersion.
It’s not dead here; there are some times when the ellipsis…or other self-interrupting bits of punctuation — the dash comes to mind — simply will not do.
West, who at one point distanced himself from his TV role but now embraces the iconic status it has brought, told Comicbookmovie he felt no ill-will towards The Dark Knight but it had an entirely different approach to the character.
He said: “I’ve only seen bits and pieces of [Nolan’s Batman movies]. There’s an enormous amount of effort and time and money that goes into the making of them, but it’s a different generation. They’re a different kind of thing than ours was. They’re dark, gothic, sinister, full of explosions. We didn’t approach it that way at all.”
Well, yeah. Duh. That’s the wonderful thing about Batman — Adam West and Burt Ward played the Dynamic Duo all cheesy, and it worked; Tim Burton displayed the hero almost as a “headless horseman,” a legend which the good citizens of Gotham weren’t even sure existed or not. And that worked too.
It would take a real rube to offer the sentiment “this is the other end of the spectrum from what I was doing back in my day, therefore it sucks.” That would show a real lack of class. And Adam West is known to me, or at least is thought by me, to be a man of real class.
West was used to a the lighthearted portrayals in the 60s TV series. “It was silly and funny. With the villains, especially, it was almost Shakespearean because of the bizarre costuming and makeup. In those days we didn’t rely on special effects as much so everyone was challenged to use their imaginations.
“I don’t remember any case in which somebody didn’t really enjoy the creation of it. If it wasn’t that kind of open environment, then I felt like I was a failure because I tried to go on the stage every day and create that kind of atmosphere.”
I have never understood this about Adam West. You look at his portrayal now, and the presentation seems pretty bold. It looks like everyone involved in the production is having an absolute blast, and the star is holding it all together, doing a bang-up job, and damn well knows it.
I suppose back in the sixties this wasn’t so bold — everything was colorful and psychedelic, our society was struggling to recover it’s innocence so the pressure was on to make things kid-friendly. But I’ve always been surprised by these insinuations that Adam West thought he wasn’t doing a good job.
I suppose, further, that thanks to Joel Schumacher we can expect all re-imaginings of Batman to stay dark and gothic. That’ll probably continue until my grandchildren are in college (Mr. West should be well into his nineties before I have grandchildren at all). And that’s fine as far as I’m concerned. That’s the wonder of Batman — he’s actually a product of the Great Depression, and back then you could have the dark-n-gothic headless horseman legend mixed in with the funny cheesy stuff. Once the Golden Age was over, you had to take your pick.
But it all works if it’s presented with some energy and some fidelity to the roots, and Adam West should understand that if nobody else does. I think his opinion has been misrepresented here. He may personally favor the laughy-jokey Batman…why would he not? And if so, he certainly has his reasons to lean in that direction, to play on that side of the net, as it were. But I don’t see where he’s laying the smack down on the newer, darker Batman. It seems to be all in the interviewer’s head. It would take a very shallow Batman veteran to trash the opposition like this, and I just don’t believe that about him. The reason I don’t believe it, is all I see him doing here, is pointing out how Batman’s changed through the years for the benefit of those who might be interested, but not already know.
No, this seems to be a case of a classy, distinguished, and able actor, perhaps under-appreciated in his time, graciously taking the time to clue the younger generation in on the history behind the comic book franchise that only lately had caught their fancy. This is exactly when we should be shutting up and listening to our seniors with equal measures of respect and gratitude. It seems that for his consideration, Mr. West has just been trashed. He should pick up a phone and have a few words with some people.
One set of hot pants per year, for Gerard Van der Leun, our competition in collecting such photographic mementos, who is commemorating his fifth blogger-birthday today with the following observation:
5 years
3,806 Entries
15,148 Comments
4,664,000 Visits
Whew!
I’ll be republishing a few things underneath this that are not quite so topical over the next few days.
Then I’m going to take a nap here for about three months, unless something or someone very rude wakes me:
Happy to oblige, sleepyhead.
Do take the time to check out some of my personal favorites from that corner:
Via Rottie: SFGate and their professional “come interview me” head-shrinkers advise you not to condemn the failed Good Samaritans who just stand around gawking while deplorable acts of violence are committed. Yes, if you see someone weak and helpless being subjected to a good beating, you are not to rush in and right the wrongs without a good plan in place, and that means, you are not to do anything. Nor are you to think ill of anyone else who doesn’t bother to do anything. Those are your instructions for today. Capiche?
One of the witnesses, Deborah McKain of nearby Crows Landing, said she was the first to pull up to the beating scene with her boyfriend, a volunteer fire chief who is 52, as well as her 20-year-old son, her son’s wife and her son’s male friend. They called 911 at 10:13 p.m., police said.
Over the next seven minutes, McKain said, [Sergio Casian] Aguiar kicked his son at least 100 times as he calmly stated that he needed to “get the demons out” of the boy.
Seven minutes! And the gawkers gawked. But tut tut tut, remember what we said up there about judging the gawkers. That helping-the-helpless and defending-the-defenseless is best relegated to the ancient history of Matt Dillon. Nothing to see here, citizen.
Bystanders are justifiably scared and confused in such situations, the experts said Wednesday, and they lack the experience needed to respond with force. They can also be mesmerized by shock.
John Conaty, a veteran homicide detective and former patrol officer in Pittsburg, said that in interviews of witnesses to violence, “the common thing you hear is, ‘I was frozen in fear. I just couldn’t take action.’ ”
:
“I would not condemn these people,” said John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has studied how bystanders react in emergency situations. “Ordinary people aren’t going to tackle a psychotic.
“What we have here,” Darley said, “is a group of family and friends who are not pre-organized to deal with this stuff. They don’t know who should do what. … If you had five volunteer firefighters pull up, you would expect them to have planned responses and a division of labor. But that’s not what we had here.”
For the first ten seconds or so, that’s a great excuse. It’s a mediocre one after thirty. After forty-five seconds, it doesn’t wash at all.
This curb stomping went on for seven…full…minutes. Sorry, shrink. This doesn’t impress me as a logical preponderance of what happens to the human psyche during such attacks, not one bit. What it impresses me as, is a manifestation of one of the Things I Know About People That I Wasn’t Told When I Was A Child, specifically, Item #27.
27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.
Think about it. Some guy stomps a baby and two guys watch and don’t make a move to interfere, they can hide behind Dr. Darley’s limp, flaccid excuses all they want. Seven minutes. Hell, make it an hour; might as well be.
What if one of the guys makes a move to help the child and the other guy doesn’t? Think on that. Maybe the guy who interferes, fails. Maybe he gets hurt. It really doesn’t matter — the guy who continued standing there, with his mouth hanging open collecting flies, while the other guy at least made the effort to stand up for what’s right…he looks like what he is. A craven coward.
And that’s why people who don’t bother to stop bad things from happening, don’t want anyone else to do it either. Makes ’em look bad. And that’s why, for every four words that appear in this “article,” at least three of them are dedicated to the effort of eradicating from us any expectation that we should help each other out when bad people come out of the woodwork and do their bad stuff.
There’s very little “news” in it.
Anyway, let’s go on the assumption that Professor Darley is correct here. Something is happening in our society, and these days you can stomp on a little baby for seven minutes and all the bystanders will just stand around like they’re on drugs, watching you. It’s to be expected of them because this is just the way people are. And let’s even suppose, further, that this just makes good sense.
Okay then.
If that is the case, Texas is handling the death row properly is it not? We need to get started on one end of this death row thing, and choke our way through it toward the other end, lickety-split. Go through ’em like Rosie O’Donnell through a crate of M&M’s.
Because people are just that way, too. Mr. Aguiar proved that. So some humans kick their own sons to death…other humans just stand around and watch them. It’s just the way people are. So when we find out people are this violent — knowing our average innocent-bystander hasn’t got in ‘im what it takes to stop that violent guy, when he does his violent stuff — we’d better smoke the hell out of him as fast as we can, right?
I look at it as…our innocent people, like women, girls, old people and two year old babies…they are going to get their defense one way, or the other. And if SFGate and their headshrinkers-on-file are in this great big hurry to eradicate good-Samaritanism from our society, rip the testicles off it, and transform us into a bunch of little pathetic weaklings who will just stand there, mouths agape, watching big strong men stomp babies into the concrete and not lift a finger to stop them after seven minutes — then it’s up to the executioner to supply that defense.
That seems pretty cut and dried.
And if anyone wants to argue that with me, I claim the moral high road. Executing murderers is more civilized and more sophisticated than not executing them. It certainly is, especially in a gelded, overly-vaginized society in which we don’t lift a finger to protect defenseless babies from being stomped into gooey red slush piles on the concrete.
The babes should be able to count on someone. If they can’t count on all these bystanders who are so confused they can’t do the right thing — then let them count on Old Sparky. One or the other.
One of our more objectionable radio PSAs extols the virtues of early sex education in the public schools; I can’t remember if that’s the main thrust (sorry!) of what’s being said, or if it’s in passing. The one vivid memory I have about it is where the narrator mentions some kind of a myth that sex education causes an increase in teen pregnancies, “which isn’t true!”
I mean, gosh & golly, let’s just forget for a second about whether the possibility exists that a sex education program might promote teen pregnancies, and concentrate on how we go about finding out one way or the other. Just gathering the statistics you’d use to find out…there must be hundreds of ways. Good ways, incompetent ways, ways designed to make it look like this is exactly what happens, ways designed to conceal it. And then there’s common sense — which tells me, sure, such a program has all the potential in the world for putting the teen pregnancy statistic on a steep rise or on a rapid decline. It would have to depend on the content, and the competence of those who run it. You doubt me? Put me in charge. Task me to put together a sex education program guaranteed to cause a baby explosion. I’ll make one guaranteed to work…with my eyes closed. Then have me put together a different one that’ll nip teen pregnancies in the bud. I’m a guy. You’d better believe I can do that too.
So I object to the three words being tossed ’round with no foundation. It’s as if to say, “those other guys are getting their myths out there, we’d better get our myths out there too.” So thanks, Mrs. nameless faceless invisible PSA announcer person, but your authority here is somewhat lacking. I’ll continue to believe that sex ed program have at least the potential of sending teen pregnancies through the freakin’ roof. That seems only reasonable.
Especially when I read things like this…H/T Boortz, although I heard it on the radio the other day.
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.
The question of what to do next has divided this fiercely Catholic enclave. Even with national data showing a 3% rise in teen pregnancies in 2006—the first increase in 15 years—Gloucester isn’t sure it wants to provide easier access to birth control. In any case, many residents worry that the problem goes much deeper. The past decade has been difficult for this mostly white, mostly blue-collar city (pop. 30,000). In Gloucester, perched on scenic Cape Ann, the economy has always depended on a strong fishing industry. But in recent years, such jobs have all but disappeared overseas, and with them much of the community’s wherewithal. “Families are broken,” says school superintendent Christopher Farmer. “Many of our young people are growing up directionless.”
The girls who made the pregnancy pact—some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers—declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.”
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center. [bold mine, italics in original]
Blogger friend James Bostwick, whose site does not seem to be online anymore, proffered a hypothesis about the female mind that he called Girls Gone Wild Syndrome — named after the curious phenomenon in which shy girls, self-conscious about flashing so much an innocuous body part as a flabby ankle or a toe with some of the nail polish missing, would suddenly have no reservations at all about ripping the sweater up and flashing the pink puppies once it became The Thing To Do. Simply put, GGWS is good old-fashioned peer pressure, but it’s also the observation that our females are more hooked into it, on average, than the fellas. Boys and girls are both stupid enough to “jump off the bridge if your friends all do it too,” but the boys are a little bit dim on this. They’ll come to the conclusion their social status will suffer if they don’t go along with the crowd, after it’s been made clear to them. Girls have more energy here. They anticipate. When it comes to hopping on a bandwagon, girls are active, boys are passive.
I think what we’re seeing here is GGWS in its purest form, exercised according to its original design. Once you ignore man-made conventions and taboos and concentrate on nature, you see a girl is most likely to sway to and fro according to The Thing To Do, at almost exactly the same minute in which she is most likely to get pregnant. So that’s my theory — GGWS is a trait boys inherit from the girls; and it’s sexual. It has to do with procreation, and it’s an evolutionary trait.
A tribe is hit with famine or disease or war, the numbers of that tribe dwindle, it needs a device for replenishing its numbers and it needs it to work fast. And so getting pregnant is The Thing To Do. Because let’s face it — one young maiden out of the village feels all frisky & froggy, that isn’t going to do a whole lot of good. It takes ‘er nine months, and she can only bust out one or two new tribe members. You’ve got to have a wave; for that, you’ve got to have some groupthink. You need a pregnancy fad. And so humans, in their most primitive form, are built to accommodate pregnancy fads.
Like Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park: Life will find a way.
This kind of groupthink is going to hit the girls hardest, because we guys don’t need it. We’re already in the mood. We’ll poke whatever is ready to be poked. Whatever stands still long enough.
So if my theory is correct, this is something that needs to be understood about sex education programs. That the programs, with all their tolerances and sensitivities and extra accommodations and extra attention, touched off this pregnancy pact, seems indisputable — here. But for the rest of the districts putting them on, I think it would be good to understand the lessons from Gloucester High. Presuming my theory has something to it, the human genome supplied the gasoline and the sex ed program lit the match.
What if my theory is wrong? Then we’ll have to revert back to what we already know for sure: In a school in which “strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders,” the cheerleader lacking a stroller will have failed to integrate socially, and in so doing will have brought a sense of utter futility to her expensive (incomplete) cheerleader uniform. She’s going to want to have a stroller to go with. If that supposition hasn’t been lifted out of the realm of what’s subject to dispute and question, it certainly should be. So unfounded protestations from the radio PSAs that sex education programs — good ones, poor ones, imaginative ones, lazy by-the-numbers ones — don’t cause upswings in teen pregnancy trends, would remain most unhelpful. They’d be intellectually lazy at best, and socially disastrous and irresponsible at worst.
We were watching a Michael Bay film, one that’s better than most of ’em in my opinion. And suddenly like a bolt of lightning, it hit me why I (for the most part) don’t like his movies. This one in question is 150 minutes — two and a half hours — nightmarishly long.
Now bear in mind, I have already opined on the rules that should be followed by three hour movies if they want to be great, and this one doesn’t follow any of those rules…or it follows very few. And granted, it isn’t a bad movie, and a failure to follow the rules won’t make a movie bad, it’ll just keep it from being great. So straying outside of my three-hour-movie-rules is just fine.
But there are more obvious shortcomings. Actually, there’s just one. And it is consistent across a great many Michael Bay movies; so consistent, that I’m convinced, without knowing it for sure, that he is the common denominator.
Mr. Bay, I hope you’re reading. Here it comes.
The answer lies in the “deleted scenes” option behind just about any reasonably long movie you can get on a special-edition DVD. Out of, oh, ten to twelve deleted scenes, there are going to be a couple where the director’s commentary will clue you in to the fact that the guy really hated to ax this one, and tried like the dickens to keep from doing it.
But the rules are very simple here. With all these successful directors having their different styles, there isn’t too much variance on this.
You have a scene; it’s easy to define. There isn’t too much debate about where exactly it opens, and where it closes. The scene gives something away with regard to the story, a character, or both of those. And I’m afraid that is Mr. Bay’s problem. By-and-large, every scene that makes it into the final script, should change the story. You see this in the director’s commentary pretty often. The scene opens — the hero thinks so-and-so might be a traitor, but he isn’t quite sure…and he’s looking for the maguffin, he knows that’s what he should be trying to find, but he hasn’t found it yet. The scene closes — he still suspects the traitor but still isn’t sure, he’s still looking for the maguffin but still hasn’t found it. If that’s the case, the net story-change is — zero. So it goes. Kabloowee. It doesn’t matter if it was the first scene imagined out of the whole story, it doesn’t matter if everyone had to roast out in a blazing hot sun for two days trying to film it.
If the scene doesn’t change the story, out it goes.
The one exemption is for a scene that defines characters instead of adding elements to the story.
And Mr. Bay’s bad habit, I’m afraid, is to abuse that exemption. Scenes unwind at an inartful, leisurely pace, and they do nothing to change the story. Scene begins; we’re pretty sure we’ll blow up the asteroid, but we don’t know for certain, and a lot of things are going wrong. Scene ends — nothing is changed. Somehow, it was allowed to stay in.
But it just goes to show some new things about these characters, so supposedly that’s alright. And I agree with that. Or I would…except the characters so defined, are part of a primary set of — oh, no more than about four or five. That’s alright too. Except the things we’re learning about these characters, are exactly the same things, over and over again.
Bruce Willis is astonishingly brave.
Ben Afleck is brave too, and really smart. And he’s desperately in love with Liv Tyler.
Liv Tyler is swelteringly worried about her father and her boyfriend.
Billy Bob Thornton would love to be up there with them, but he needs leg braces. But boy oh boy this mission’s gonna succeed under his watch…unless it doesn’t.
Steve Buscemi is really funny.
Peter Stormare is one wild and crazy dude.
The script unwinds before us, all 150 minutes of it, as if someone in the front row was heckling the movie and saying “you know, I’m not quite sure about Bruce Willis’ character here…I’m not quite convinced yet that he’s brave, I think he might be a big pussy.” And as if Michael Bay felt some primal urge to prove it AGAIN, about Willis’ character. Or Affleck’s or Tyler’s. And he’ll have to prove it yet again in five or ten minutes.
Through it all, these scenes pop in there, like zits on a teenager’s face. Say, that’s an apt analogy now that I think on it. They’ll pop up without warning. You have no idea when, except that you won’t have to wait too long and there they’ll be. There is nothing that can be done to prevent them, and when they go away you know that isn’t the last you’ve seen of ’em. After awhile they get to be a nuisance…scenes that just show how worried Liv Tyler is, and exist for absolutely no other purpose at all.
You know what would make these things so much better? It’s already an idolized textbook lesson in Hollywood. And we love to talk about it a lot here, because it’s an example of truly great moviemaking.
Now, think back on it; rent the movie again, if you have to. How many scenes are there that take the time to explain this about Sonny Corleone? He rips the film out of that guy’s camera; he runs his mouth off in front of Solozzo; he yells at Tom Hagan, he beats the stuffing out of Carlo, he drives off to beat up Carlo again, and that’s the last thing he ever does. Five. Arguably four, since the last one exists to advance the story by building on attributes of the character already defined previously. So there are four scenes that define Sonny, and a fifth one that makes use of this.
No two of these four scenes define exactly the same things about him. The same goes for all of the characters, and in this way a three-hour movie is made to feel like it lasts less than one hour. The audience is left begging for more.
The logical conclusion to draw is that Michael Bay could learn something from this, and his movies would be more fun to watch — or shorter — perhaps, both. But maybe I’m being too hard on him. Maybe he is not the catalyst; maybe it’s Ms. Tyler. I’m recalling all the movies I’ve seen her in, and I almost dread seeing her pretty face one more time because I know there will be no point to it. At times, I wonder if she has it written right into her contracts: “None of the scenes in which I appear can have any purpose to them at all.” Yeah, yeah, she gave up immortality to be with King whats-his-face; she feverishly hopes her Dad comes back to earth; she’s worried about Bruce Banner and she’s mad at her father, the General. I get all that. Get on with the movie already.
I do not mean to imply by all this that character development is easy. That would be an ignorant statement, since I’m not tasked with doing it. In fact, I can tell it’s a delicate balance and there must be a lot of tricks to it.
But I can also tell that dragging the mower over exactly the same swath of grass again, is a grievous sin. Doing it half-a-dozen more times, is much worse.
Misha unleashes his righteous anger upon a blue-blood European pinhead deploring the barbarism of our country in killing those who would & have killed others.
Not to mention that we simply cannot resist digging out the ClueBat of DoomTM when it’s an effeminate Brit-twit lecturing us on the subject. How ’bout you pull the beam out of your own eye before you start kvetching about the splinter in mine, ya twat?
Pretty much.
You know, I keep hearing that it would be so much more civilized to let killers walk around after they’ve been duly convicted of having killed innocent people.
You don’t kill anyone…you get killed. Some guy kills you…he doesn’t get killed.
Yeah. That’s supposed to be civilized. Nobody’s explained to me why that is yet. They just yammer away that I’m supposed to think so.
On 08/02/91 in Dallas, Texas the subject fatally shot the victim, a 30-year old white female. Chamberlain was a resident of the same apartment complex and had gone to the victim’s apartment under the pretense of borrowing sugar. Chamberlain left the apartment and return minutes later with duct tape and a rifle. Chamberlain entered the apartment, displayed the weapon to the victim, and forced the victim into a bedroom. Chamberlain taped her hands and feet, and sexually assaulted her. Chamberlain took the victim into the bathroom and shot her one time in the head with a .30 caliber rifle, causing her death. Chamberlain left the apartment and returned to his own apartment.
Every time I hear of one of these cases, I am impressed with the discretion and good judgment our justice system seems to show about putting people on death row. It far surpasses anything I would have expected. The pattern is consistent that the crime is one of these “I want what I want when I want it” type o’ things. As in…I want to get me some tail, you’re here, oops you might go tattling so I better put a bullet in your brain, you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Exactly the kind of vermin we should want to exterminate. Exactly the kind of human chaff you’d bully people in another country into keeping around…if you do not live there.
If I was the Executions Dictator, I doubt I would be able to do a better job. Wouldn’t mind trying. But the death penalty seems to be the one part of our justice system capable of restoring my faith in it.
Naturally, there are some loudmouths wanting to get rid of it.
It’s like a restaurant. You know how when you pick out a really good restaurant with decent prices, prompt service, great food you just know that’s the next one to get closed down? That’s what the death penalty is becoming — the one part of our justice system in which the lives of the innocent are successfully defended from the narcissistic whims of the predatory. So of course someone comes along with a “THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED” sign. After you get so old and cynical, you just come to expect it.
Via Don Surber, via Rick, the latest MoveOn has everything. Weird grin, exploitation of children, promulgation of the strange surreal left-wing myth that parents sign their kids up for service, single Mom, no Dad, quote out of context with a desperate hope that none among the recruited take the time or energy to go research it. And, of course, the fallacious Jean-Luc Picard premise that we can banish war (and crime) forever simply by deciding to. Yay!
How do they make sure all these boxes get checked when they make these? Is it carrots, or sticks. Here’s a bonus for you, your new video whacked all the moles — or — you’re the one who gets whacked, because you missed one.
Here’s McCain’s side of the story vis a vis the hundred-years remark. It includes his complete quote, reproduced here:
…a crowd member asked McCain about a Bush statement that troops could stay in Iraq for 50 years.
“Maybe 100,” McCain replied. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”
It’s about the United States, and those other countries who have the balls to back us up on this, being a monkey on the back of Al Qaeda. Like salt on a slug. And I find it interesting that MoveOnDotOrg is so resolutely against that idea…more than interesting.
We need to dissect some left-wingers for study sometime. This seems to be such a constant with them — things that they are responsible for deciding, they act like they’re not; and things that they are not responsible for deciding, they act like they are. We can’t have Alex? And that’ll stop all the fighting? Really? Wow.
She’s probably not “Alex’s” real mother, but better than even odds she’s as free to vote as you and me, along with all the dimwits who can’t see anything wrong with what she’s saying.
Gerard started it with his mini-gallery (click the lovely Catherine to view)…
In reply, we showcased our shot of gorgeous Natalie Wood…
Gerard said “I have more” and he must have meant it, for here is his latest…
…and here is ours. From the classic commercial.
This can’t possibly end well. Or can it?
Update: I just have to post this again. Partly because it’s always good to remain sympathetic to the sensibilities of people who might be offended by such visuals…for what reason, gosh, I just don’t know. And partly because it’s just funny and I like posting it.
Myself, and others, have noticed something that is more-or-less a constant in left-wing talking points. Said talking points have a proclivity for going through the motions of edifying and elucidating, providing information where it did not previously exist, but when you take them apart factually it emerges that the talking points are just instructions to people to think certain things, with veiled and emotionally-charged scoldings directed at those who are not willing to so think. With little or no factual foundation whatsoever.
In response to that, the left-wing intelligentsia has worked overtime to answer this to charge, and little by little, refute it.
Whoops, no, waitaminnit. No they haven’t, and no they aren’t.
…wait until you read Thomas’ response to a comment by Jane Hall. Here, she notes that republicans will try to take down Obama by portraying Michelle as an angry black woman.
JANE HALL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: I think one way that people who are going to try to defeat Obama is to somehow prove he’s other — he’s not one of us. If they can’t prove he’s a Muslim, then let’s prove his wife is an angry black woman. I think it’s going to get ugly. I don’t think John McCain will sanction it. I think McCain — it’s my opinion he will generally try…
Even though Hall wasn’t suggesting that people ought to portray Michelle as an angry black woman, Cal Thomas seemed to take Jane Hall’s statement as an endorsement of sorts, and here was his utterly reprehensible sexist and racist response to Hall:
THOMAS: I want to pick up on something that Jane said about the angry black woman. Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She’s always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They’re usually angry about something. They’ve had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don’t really have a profile of non-angry black women.
So now Thomas[,] in addition to smearing Obama, Hillary, and Michelle, smeared all black women as “angry black women,” including such notable angry black women as Maxine Waters, who is “always angry every time she gets on television,” and Cynthia McKinney, who is “just another angry black woman.”
Apparently not satisfied with offending just those women, he goes on to smear black newscasters on local news broadcasts as angry black women who “are usually angry about something”; he smears angry black women whose sons have been killed in drive-by shootings; and then he notes matter of factly that black women “are angry at Bush.” Since most black women are democrats, Thomas has just smeared millions of black women as “angry black women.”
So in the parlance of hardcore leftists who write for DailyKOS, “notice” is a verb enjoying synonymous equivalence with “smear.”
You know, I hadn’t…er…noticed it before Cal Thomas pointed it out. But I do have recollections of black women who aren’t angry, and each and every single one of them is a person I know from talking face-to-face. Electronic media is a very different thing, because in that forum there are powerful nameless faceless people who get to decide what I’m ready to see. And for reasons I don’t quite understand — or maybe I do, and that’s a loathsome thought by itself — these nameless faceless people seem to think the black woman I’m ready to see has to be angry, or else I have little interest in seeing her.
So you KOSsacks are upset with Cal Thomas for pointing it out, huh. That’s about as clear a case as can be imagined of killing the messenger. It seems to me your beef ought to be with whoever’s made the decision that such currency is involved in the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman (ABW). Why does this image travel so fast and so far? In fact, does it? Are we really that ready to digest it, or is this a stereotype that’s being foisted onto us?
You know how I see this…dialog…for lack of a better word? It might surprise you how you come across, KOSsacks. Here, you seem to be pretty enthused at times about viewing things from the perspective of other people, let’s show you how it looks from mine.
WATERS, MCKINNEY, M. OBAMA, et al: Grrrrrr!!!!
THOMAS: Huh. Seems whenever someone wants to show me a picture of a black woman, it’s always an angry one.
DAILYKOS: We’ll show you! Grrrrrr!!!!
I mean, that pretty much captures it. Face it — other than thundering away with your well-practiced theatrical indignation, you’re not proving anything here whatsoever.
Unless it’s something like — you don’t have to be black and female to be angry? Is that the point? Or is it the same ol’ same ol’ purely-populist mob-rule “I find this deplorable and can I get an Amen here?”
Frankly, if there’s some other sentiment you’re wishing to trot out into the public venue to have evaluated by others, obsequious rage seems to have fallen away as the preferred vehicle for conveying it. Yeah it’s pretty tough to bust loose from that after half a century of brandishing it as the only tool worth using in your chest. But using one tool in the chest, is a sign of intellectual laziness. Mr. Thomas is indicted, here, by you, for the a crime that is the essence of the exact opposite, which is intellectual vigor; he noticed a pattern, took in some more data, found the pattern to be substantiated, and noted his observations publicly.
So are you deliberately promoting an atmosphere of intellectual laziness and discouraging one of intellectual vigor? Or are you doing it by accident? Either way, it’s rather telling that you could have challenged what he noticed, and instead like a cowardly prairie dog, have chosen to disappear into that mob-rule-hole of “that’s icky, all in favor say aye.”
From where I sit, women of color are counting on someone to engage in an exercise more forensically taxing…and it seems Cal Thomas is the only one who has delivered. I’m not a black woman, angry or otherwise — but I am a white guy and you know what? We have some ugly stereotypes of our own. We can’t jump, we’re klutzy, we don’t know what’s going on and we don’t care, our wives have to do everything for us from vacuuming the carpet to changing the oil in the car, our kids talk back to us and call us by our first names, we’re such spineless cowards that we let ’em…we never admit it when we’re lost…
Believe me. If a nationally televised commentator like Cal Thomas takes the time to point out “look at the image of the klutzy white man” the last thing I’m going to do is be insulted. I’ll probably search my archives to see if he plagiarized some of the things I’ve had to say, and if I found in the affirmative, better than even odds I’d donate the material to the public domain retroactively and write up a brand new post giving him a big gushy thank-you.
Update: Broadband-and-TV company is doing some work on our connection which yesterday went in the crapper. Things seem to be ship-shape with our home equipment, but the equipment just beyond our doorstep is either overworked or failing. It’s the switching equipment that services about ten or twenty customers in our area, of whom about half a dozen of us have reported problems.
Anyway, during the ten minutes or so I had to halt the blogging and let the planet spin onward without the benefit of my perpetually injected blogger wisdom, I started doing some chores, which included helping my gal out of the shower & drying her off, since one of her arms is out of commission. Surgery last week. Long story.
And of course the bedroom television set was frozen because the equipment was down. Guess what it was frozen on. Michelle Obama. Giving a speech. She looked very, very upset and angry.
That’s a randomly selected frame. Interesting.
KOSsacks, I hope you’re not holding your breath waiting for that Cal Thomas apology.
As President George W. Bush limps through his lame-duck year, it won’t surprise you to read that he’s hugely unpopular. Now a new poll taken in 20 countries by WorldPublicOpinion.org and released exclusively to NEWSWEEK confirms the world’s low opinion of the president—but adds a twist. No other major world leader enjoys significantly greater trust abroad. In a sense, they’re all Bushes now.
Just as striking are the leaders who do best, albeit by a slim margin: Vladimir Putin, Gordon Brown and Hu Jintao. That’s one democrat and two dictators. In other words, the bosses of what are often cast as the biggest, baddest authoritarian states—China and Russia—are among the planet’s most trusted officials. That should seriously alarm the leaders of the West, and particularly President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of State, who have made the export of democracy a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.
Now, this is an interesting piece of human development, and I’ll bet if you could achieve immortality and thereby earn the privilege of watching hundreds and hundreds of years of progress in world politics, you’d find it to be an enduring trend: The People Have Spoken, and they are thinking like an immature high school cheerleader. Nice guys are boring, they’re after the bad boy. They like the bad boy better…they trust him more.
And, paradoxically, the current “mood” is to elect exactly what people don’t like…once that guy is actually in charge. Barack Obama. Oh yes, you look out on the campaign trail and you see Obama is as popular as cold beer in Hell. Sure. But you can’t find any evidence that people remain happy with this leadership style, once it takes effect. Especially now.
I think if you could hang around for the better part of a millenium watching these cycles first-hand, you’d find this is an enduring paradox. You’d find humanity has a tendency to say it wants one thing, when it wants the exact opposite. We’re most vociferous about accepting Mr. Rogers as our next savior, by our words, when by our deeds one can see we’re most enamored with Vito Corleone.
The issue of trust is somewhat interesting. There is, indeed, a certain sincerity to the bad boy. It’s not that you always know where you stand with him. But with the sweater-wearing Bill Clinton Jimmy Carter Barack Obama Nice Guy, of course, you never do. He tells you what he feels he needs to tell you to make you feel good, kindly shows himself out, and then when he meets with those other guys he tells ’em…y’know…like, whatever.
George Bush has managed to illustrate this paradox all by himself. I’ve watched his popularity ratings plummet, and it’s been a pretty consistent trend for him. “You’re either with us or your with the terrorists” — back then, his approval ratings were pretty damn high. By the time he publicly regretted saying it, he was doing it to try to snap out of a tailspin with those approval ratings. And, of course, being a reformed nice guy, he failed. Then he got nicer and more liberal. And his approval ratings tanked some more.
My theory? It’s a product of evolution. We’re wired to investigate, pragmatically, who makes a good friend and who makes a good enemy. If there’s a price to be paid for being your friend but a lesser price to be paid for being your enemy, we don’t need a reason to be your enemy. We like to pretend there has to be a reason because it makes us feel better about ourselves. But the unpleasant truth is that, for most people, questions of friend-and-enemy boil down to cost-benefit decisions, and are very rarely based on principles.
So around 24 time zones, we’re buried in this Big Lie. We seem to be caught in this vicious cycle of telling each other, “remove all of the costs involved with being your enemy, and I will be your friend.” President Bush just found out the hard way, over the last five years, that that’s a load of crap…which is why it’s never actually stated outright word-for-word. But that’s the pact, and it looks like a few million of us are about to be fooled exactly the same way. We should know better.
Hello, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin…how y’all doin’? I’m from 230 years from now. Just flew in from the 21st century, and boy are my arms tired! Thanks for that Independence thingie by the way.
But I have some news you might find unsettling. Here in 2008, fewer than half of us oppose nationalizing the oil industry. Yup…but don’t worry, we think about you guys every summer when we chow down on hot dogs and beer and blow up mailboxes.
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 29% of voters favor nationalizing the oil industry. Just 47% are opposed and 24% are not sure.
The survey found that a plurality of Democrats (37%) believe the oil industry should be nationalized. Just 32% of voters in Barack Obama’s party disagree with that approach. Republicans oppose nationalizing the oil industry by a 66% to 16% margin. Unaffiliated voters are opposed by a 47% to 33% margin. [emphasis mine]
The knee jerk reaction to this is that we need to license people to vote…and of course, the knee jerk reaction to that is we can’t start licensing people to vote — it is contrary to American ideals.
Hmmm…hmmm…hmm, hmm, hmm.
Well, it’s clear something has to be done. Maybe we can get around the objection about “American ideals” by nationalizing the votes of the socialist-minded and stupid? It’d be a little tough on them to argue against that, when it seems they’re not that emotionally invested in opposing it, and some of them who serve in Congress are hard-pressed to even remember what the word is.
Jessica Valenti, owner chief operating officer cook & bottle-washer of feministing.com, got an interview and thirty-nine seconds therein she said something I thought was amazing:
Given her opportunity to pick out “the worst double-standard” between geese and ganders, she chooses “the one on the cover” of her book. And that would be He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut.
WOW.
Not that spellbinding until you think of all the other answers lovely Jessica could’ve provided as the worst double-standard.
There’s the draft. If we do have one, it’ll apply to the guys and not the gals. Jessica could’ve unleashed her righteous fury upon that one.
Family court, by tradition, presumes that children are “better off with the mother” and it takes phenomenal circumstances — you don’t want to ask what — to get those in charge to even consider slacking off on that particular double-standard.
A guy is kind of normal, more-or-less, if he downloads an exciting application and then starts fiddling with it day and night, to the point where his paramour sees very little of him for days at a time apart from the back of his head. We put a tremendous pressure on our gals that they shouldn’t behave that way; they’re encouraged to be precocious little gab-goblins, at all hours of the day, even if they don’t feel like it.
There’s the pay gap. I’m still told, often, that that’s supposed to be important especially to people who call themselves “feminists.” Apparently that’s not quite accurate.
Mothers waltz into doctor’s offices and order up diagnoses for learning disabilities — for their sons. When they don’t understand how the sons are supposed to mature into men. And why should they? They’re women. Fathers, no less confused about how girls become women, don’t do that with their daughters. Huh, there’s a double-standard.
You can easily round up a hundred prime-time television commercials for headache medicine that have little or nothing to do with each other…each one of which involves a married (apparently) couple. The husband will be using — all hundred times out of a hundred — Brand X. The wifey will be using the correct product, and in so doing, be availed of a coveted opportunity to correct him. All hundred times. That looks like a double-standard to me.
How about the television shows that are justified by those advertisements? Family show. Father, mother, kids. She is a gorgeous, albeit weary, central character and he’s just a stupid chuckle-head who lucked out the day he met her. He spends his days making messes and nervously trying to figure out how not to tick her off (worse). She spends hers trying to keep him from burning the house down.
Movies for families, are no better. The Mom’s role is to lend a soft shoulder to the teary-faced sad little moppet, after he kicks the winning goal in the soccer game and glances up into the stands to see — horrors! — Daddy isn’t there! That unreliable Dad broke his promise…it’s a constant father-child predicament that bubbles up…and you know why. Because he spends too much time at his job. No issues with Mommy spending too much time at work. No issues with Mommy breaking promises. There’s a double-standard.
With all that, Jessica’s idea of a truly deplorable double-standard is that the sluts aren’t given props for screwing around. They jump so many bones, end up pregnant and don’t know who the father is…and they can’t get their applause from the rest of us. They aren’t elevated to a pedestal, like us pimps, for creating ruined lives and paternity suits.
There’s more than enough shared and individual blame to go around. Miranda repeatedly acts like an idiot, catalyzing the catastrophic meltdown of Mr. Big that sets the plot (such as it is) in motion. Charlotte abets Miranda by helping her cover up her misdeed. And even relatively sensible Carrie withholds her disapproval of how Miranda treats her amazing, if imperfect, husband, Steve. This movie makes you wonder whether unconditional love is a good thing. It also makes you wonder what men see in these damaged, egotistical and judgmental dames.
The main characters and actors, so amusing as semi-stylized, semi-real vessels of contradictory urges and appetites on TV, look stranded or, worse, terminally self-absorbed here. You start looking forward to Cattrall’s Samantha, who at least retains her snap. With her id wasting away in Los Angeles while she serves as manager and homemaker to her adoring yet work-occupied beau, she grows obsessed with the stud next door – and brings more comic heat to her throttled desire than the others bring to their Cinderella-like or Murphy Brown-esque fantasies. (Candice Bergen does a disposable cameo as a Vogue editor.)
We’ve got all the slut-worship a twenty-something know-it-all could ever want. Like their male counterparts — the sluts sleep around, in truth and in fiction, breaking hearts, earning the condemnation of some and the sick hero-worship of others. It’s about as symmetrical as a “double-standard” can get.
I do remember about the time Ms. Valenti would have been born, when there was a double standard. I was taught to think of it as elevating women to a higher pedestal, and in hindsight, it seems to me that’s exactly what it was. Girls were thought to be more disciplined and cultured — guardians of our society’s decency. But the previous generation of Jessica Valentis sounded the alarm.
They fought for the “rights” of women to pick up all the worst habits of the dudes. Mission accomplished. Now we have a postmodern culture filled to the brim with sluts. It seems to be the one double-standard we worked the hardest at equalizing, and Jessica Valenti is still unhappy about it because she wants our women to screw around some more.
I don’t see how this helps the feminist movement.
Think about those other double standards. If you wanted to more even-handed treatment of men and women in family court, you could rally for reform in…our family court system. Valenti’s slut-double-standard, on the other hand, can only meet “reform” through some method of policing the thoughts private citizens have in their hearts and minds.
I’ve never understood this about feminism. Throughout my life, some among us have harbored suspicions about it, thinking of it as perhaps unbecoming to a free society in which private citizens have a sacred right to the thoughts and emotions between their own ears. Feminists, throughout that time, have screeched at us that no it’s not about that — it’s about equal pay for equal worth.
But then when it’s time for feminists to assign priorities, their hunger is to encroach on the private thoughts. Reforming articles in the public domain, such as public statutes, public jurisprudence, draft policies, and the like…that doesn’t seem to fascinate them much, even if such articles show demonstrable, destructive, gender-based bias. Every time I see the movement crusading for change, it’s crusading for that change in a private dominion — transgressing on thoughts and value systems that rightfully belong to individuals.
So it’s interesting to me that Ms. Valenti is given the opportunity to name one especially odious double-standard, and she names that one — the one that has traditionally looked on women, and seen some shred of nobility that the more primitive dudes might not have. This is the one she’d like to eradicate before all others.
With apologies to Arsenio…that’s a real Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm, right there.
Update 6/18/08: Without rushing out to buy the book, it seems one of the most complete summary listings of double standards listed therein, that may be acquired, would be this preamble posted at Google Books:
Double standards are nothing new. Women deal with them every day. Take the common truism that women who sleep around are sluts while men are studs. Why is it that men grow distinguished and sexily gray as they age while women just get saggy and haggard? Have you ever wondered how a young woman is supposed to both virginal and provocatively enticing at the same time? Isn’t it unfair that working moms are labeled “bad” for focusing on their careers while we shake our heads in disbelief when we hear about the occasional stay-at-home dad? In 50 Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism, calls out the double standards that affect every woman. Whether Jessica is pointing out the wage earning discrepancies between men and women or revealing all of the places that women still aren’t equal to their male counterparts—be it in the workplace, courtroom, bedroom, or home—she maintains her signature wittily sarcastic tone. With sass, humor, and in-your-face facts, this book informs and equips women with the tools they need to combat sexist comments, topple ridiculous stereotypes (girls aren’t good at math?), and end the promotion of lame double standards. [emphasis mine]
I have to admit my curiosity is aroused; I suppose you could scold people into replicating your feminist beliefs about women deserving equality in the workplace, courtroom, bedroom or home, but I have no idea how you’d force people to grow into middle age the way you want them to.
Waitaminnit — courtroom??? Women don’t have enough equality in the courtroom yet?
What inequality do women suffer in the courtroom? Really. Too much eagerness to keep ’em “in the lifestyle and manner to which they have become accustomed”? Too easy to gain custody of the kids?
Are they being denied justice somehow? And if that’s the case, how is that less important than the double-standard that confers a stigma for sleeping around indiscriminately, on oversexed little tarts who sleep around indiscriminately?
Ah…I’m going to have to zip on out and pick this puppy up. It takes some real balls for feminists to insist women are suffering inequality in the courtroom. I gotta see this.
Update: Thing I Know #52 was scribbled down, in haste, in a coffee shop early in the morning a couple years ago, on my Treo smart phone, along with about five or six other things I know. It has turned out to be a prominent and important Thing I Know that describes much of what goes on in the sphere of human endeavor today…and a great deal, out of that, that fails.
I have never been pleased with the way it’s been worded…
Just the way the nouns, verbs and adverbs stack up against each other, which ones are strong, which ones are weak. “Ensuing” is wrong. As a single sentence, it’s hard to read. That would be alright if it was conveying an idea of great complexity. But it isn’t.
And so in honor of Ms. Valenti I am re-wording a Thing I Know, for the first time — Thing I Know #52, the Valenti Thing I Know. This Thing I Know deserves another polishing, another sanding, another cleaning and another coat o’paint. It is critically important. It has had it’s own category here. Something that becomes pertinent to our discourse so often, should be polished down a whole lot better.
As Yul Brynner would say — thus it shall be written; thus it shall be done.
Well, that’s it for today. If Iran, Pakistan or North Korea bomb the hell out of Los Angeles or Washington, DC, can one of you guys living in another state please chirp up and let me know? Because here in California, we’re sure as hell not going to get any news about it whatsoever.
Same-sex couples around the state began showing up to county clerks’ offices early this morning to get marriage licenses, and in most counties to wed by officials there.
At a few minutes past 9, Rich and David Speakman of Mountain View both spoke the words, “I thee wed,” inaugurating same-sex marriage in Santa Clara County. Moments later, a second couple, Ronni and Hannah Pahl of San Jose, were also married by Supervisor Ken Yeager.
After 10 years together, the only thing sweeter than getting married for Pahl, 34, and Davis, 29 was getting married in their hometown – San Jose.
“‘I love San Francisco, but it’s not me,” said Davis, a sign language interpreter at De Anza College, who became Hannah Pahl, taking Ronni’s last name, as they married. “I want to be recognized where I was born and raised.”
There’s a dirty little secret here about gay marriage. We do not, nor have we had any reason to, define oppression according to what our governments do & do not recognize. It’s ridiculous to think we can do this. Governments recognize all kinds of things individuals do not, and nobody calls those individuals oppressed. It’s not a human-rights issue; it’s a human-interest issue.
And there’s a dirty little secret about human-interest issues — you can’t measurably discern what makes them newsworthy, or even if they’re newsworthy. Newsworthiness, in a human-interest issue, is determined by the feelings of the people involved, and feelings are about as private as the contents of your e-mail inbox, if not moreso.
Nobody knows what you’re feeling, anymore than anyone can tell the contents of your e-mail inbox. Therefore, in commenting about either one, you’re free to say whatever you want. That which cannot be proven cannot be refuted either.
I know this is true. Two hundred thousandbillion people have sent me e-mails, just this morning, saying exactly that.
So why are these new same-sex married couples so jubilant? Is it because a barrier has been knocked down in the equalization of homo/heterosexual human rights? Or is it because they have their fifteen minutes of fame? Who is to say?
Well, I have a test or two I can apply to this. I can take an honest, hard look as to whether this is, in fact, an historic event in civil rights history. And I must say I’m having a little bit of trouble seeing it. Let’s take a look at some other oppressed minorities, for example. Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, persons of the Jewish faith, people with learning disabilities can get married all they like. Are we ready to treat these groups as non-oppressed minorities now? Well, the answer is decidedly no. In the case of people with darker skin, the test is “there is still racism and prejudice out there“…and on the basis of that, we’re supposed to elect a guy President whose qualifications for such an office are decidedly threadbare.
This seems a little bit intolerant and prejudiced in it’s own way, to me. With persons of a different sexual preference, the test is “can they get official recognition” and if they can’t, then they are oppressed. With persons of a darker skin color — whoopsee! — it’s a different test. It’s “is there discrimination out there.” You don’t have to be a genius or a fortune teller to see what comes next. In 2012 we’ll know the homosexuals are being unfairly oppressed because “there is still bigotry and intolerance out there” even though they’ll be able to marry just as easily as people with darker skin.
There is a big fat silver lining in this cloud, though. And nobody’s talking about it, even though I suspect it’s bubbled up to the front of every straight man’s mind at some point. It is this:
One of our intellectual sins with regard to homosexual marriage, has been to use the word “loving” as a euphemism for “homosexual” when we describe these couples. Two guys want to adopt a little girl, thereby depriving her of a mother, and we’re directed to deliberate the situation in the context of an adoption by a “loving couple.” This is offensive in the extreme. It denies the existence of homosexual couples that might engage in bickering, jealousy and anger from time to time…and it also denies the existence of straight couples that might contribute to and enjoy a “loving” atmosphere.
Effectively, it promulgates a twin set of — dare I use the word — stereotypes. Gay couples are “loving”; straight couples are nasty, argumentative and bickering.
That’s offensive, but what betrays reality about this is that it denies even the most remote possibility of what we all know deep down is an inevitability: The homosexual couple that seeks a divorce.
There is a jurisprudence that needs to be built, now, that has not yet been. How do we hear cases of gay divorce?
For some time now, men who are in the middle of divorce proceedings from women — instigated by women — have “enjoyed” the status conferred uniquely upon minorities who cannot achieve defense because they cannot achieve organization. It has therefore become ritual for the family courts to fleece the husband, hand the kids and house over to the missus, and then go on to the next case. They’ve made a virtual conveyor-belt assembly operation out of this.
What do they do with the homosexual couples seeking a divorce, now? How do they figure out how to engage in the proper form of discrimination here, when both partners factually belong to the same sex?
So there’s some kind of reckoning on the horizon. And where there’s a reckoning, there’s the opportunity, no matter how fleeting and marginal, that injustices toward straight men may at long last be corrected. Speaking as a straight guy who’s been divorced-and-single for nearly half his lifespan, because of precisely this kind of issue, I can say my optimism is there.
The marriage institution is busted & broken — but good — not because we do-or-do-not marry gay people. It’s problem has to do with it’s post-modern feminist re-definition as a formalized institution of fraud and legalized theft. Maybe this latest event, which is presented so often as a profound destruction of marriage, will ironically culminate in it’s renewal and revival.
It can’t continue without a restoration of basic fairness. If it remains inherently unfair, nobody will participate in it except for people who lack self-respect. If nobody participates in it except for people who lack self-respect, then barring some explosion of out-of-wedlock births, nobody will procreate save for those who are inclined to sacrifice themselves for others who are narcissistic, selfish sociopaths.
And if that happens, woe be unto us if that’s a genetic pre-disposition. In that eventuality, we’ll be up to our armpits in self-centered narcissists and masochistic chumps. And it seems we’ve made some pretty good headway down that bunny trail already.
So bring it on. Let’s make an industry out of gay divorces, the same way we’ve made an industry out of straight divorces. And maybe, just maybe, when our courts re-inspect their formally institutionalized sex discrimination toward the end of customizing it to this brand-new class of legal coupling — as they now must — someone with some authority who is grappling with this odious re-customization task will utter the words that are only obvious: “Hey you know what? We never should have been discriminating against men to begin with.”
I’m like the ant stealin’ rubber tree plants…I have high hopes.
…especially, Americans. Why, exactly, does Misha say…
So there you have it, Donk voters. You’re personally responsible for every single price hike that the rest of us are seeing at the pumps. PERSONALLY responsible. Are you beginning to see why the rest of us don’t like you very much?
Fuck you very much, you mush-brained, sub-retarded snotwits.
Thatisall.
What inspires such an explosion of scoldings, reprimands and expletives?
For several decades, the Democratic Party has pursued policies designed to drive up the cost of petroleum, and therefore gas at the pump. Remarkably, the Democrats don’t seem to have taken much of a political hit from the current spike in gas prices. Probably that’s because most people don’t realize how different the two parties’ energy policies have been.
Congressman Roy Blunt put together these data to highlight the differences between House Republicans and House Democrats on energy policy:
ANWR Exploration House Republicans: 91% Supported House Democrats: 86% Opposed
Coal-to-Liquid
House Republicans: 97% Supported
House Democrats: 78% Opposed
Oil Shale Exploration
House Republicans: 90% Supported
House Democrats: 86% Opposed
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Exploration
House Republicans: 81% Supported
House Democrats: 83% Opposed
Refinery Increased Capacity
House Republicans: 97% Supported
House Democrats: 96% Opposed
SUMMARY
91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of American-made oil and gas.
86% of House Democrats have historically voted against increasing the production of American-made oil and gas.
The liberal has a proposal. He looks around and sees that we are living in an antagonistic relationship with each other; his proposed idea would put us into a symbiotic one. You spew carbon and are therefore killing the planet. You are keeping the money you make and are denying it to “needed social programs.” You aren’t paying enough tax on your income; your purchases; your gasoline; your tolls. You are killing the Iraqis. You are poisoning the caribou. The oil companies, in turn, are poisoning you. And if you have a gun, it’s just a matter of time before you shoot me with it.
The conservatives are putting out the message that we are already living in a symbiotic relationship. I breathe out and I spew my carbon, it’s a wonderful thing because the trees and plants need the carbon for photosynthesis. Notice that science, on this point, sides with the conservatives. The oil companies supply the gasoline I need to get to work, earn my money and live my life. Hard facts and evidence, here again, side with the conservatives. Furthermore, if the taxes are raised we’re just going to buy less stuff…and if the taxes are raised on the oil companies, they’ll just pass that on to the consumer. Once again: Economic science and historical evidence side with the conservatives.
The liberal says, enact my proposal and we’ll enter into a symbiotic relationship. Next week, the liberal will have another proposal, and offer the same pitch — he won’t admit the last proposal failed to get us into this symbiotic relationship. He won’t offer to roll back this previous failed proposal. To our discredit, nobody will call on him to do so…
The conservative says we’re already in the symbiotic relationship. You are good for me. I am good for you. We can all go on doing exactly what we’re doing. The only thing we should really change is to get those damn liberals to stop voting.
Now, I don’t mean to imply by this that democrats hate themselves, or are lazy thinkers.
But…as far as the self-hating goes, they are human. Or they’re supposed to be, anyhow. And reading over Congressman Blount’s statistics, you just can’t ignore this nearly-constant permeation of anti-human politicking.
And it does strike me as lazy thinking, or sub-standard thinking one way or t’other, to presume anything we might do to help our domestic petroleum markets — like, fr’instance, having one?? — just automatically is intolerably harmful to the caribou, the elk, the polar bears, the spotted owl, the snail darter, the crapgobbler shrimp, the this the that the other damn thing.
Little or no investigation as to whether this is so. There are pipelines up there…caribou were supposed to be dying out…they’re doing fine. Where’s the curiosity. There is none, it’s just everlastingly presumed that when we lay a section of pipe down we’re going to flatten an entire family of caribou and poison several others. And if we do cause some armageddon in the middle of the crapgobbler shrimp population, what of it? Where’s the debate about costs & benefits? Humans are part of the ecosystem too. How come we leapfrog over that pro-and-con exchange and jump directly to the “oh well it’s settled then, you can’t do that”?
Because you know, I don’t see the killer whales doing that when it’s time to chow down on an adorable otter. The Orca has to do what it’s gonna do…we need to do what we’re gonna do.
Does a willingness within our species to sacrifice ourselves, make us more civilized? That’s Question A. Question B is, okay now that we’ve done it, and we’ve decided things the democrat anti-human way for the better part of a century now…where’s our congratulations and kudos? Orcas are chowing down through adorable otters like the damn things are glazed donut holes. We, on the other hand, are oh so nobly buying our petroleum from Osama bin Laden so we don’t harm one hair on the hide of the poor caribou. Where’s the dedicated environmentalist rushing out to shake the hand of the civilized human race for being so ready to sacrifice itself to keep the environment so pristine, for being so much better than that vicious killer whale?
It’s not gonna happen. Because the environmental movement is all about being anti-human. It really doesn’t have anything to do with preserving the environment; flora, fauna, or anything else.
And the democrats are all about supporting the environmentalists. Maybe they don’t like humans because they want to please the environmentalists…or maybe they like the environmentalists because they share the anti-human goal. But a “pro-environment” movement would have some curiosity here & there. An anti-human movement, would not. And the one that burdens us every day, is remarkably incurious.
You’ll have to ask others how & why we tolerate it for so long. Don’t ask me.
I’m of a mixed opinion about this. Fine with me if you want to catalog movie deaths the way they actually occurred, or indulge in a bunch of essays about how you wish it had all gone down…but it seems you ought to stick to one of the other.
But I do like the idea of Jar Jar Binks getting killed a bunch of times.
The kollege kids in Ithaca, NY want a Guiness representative to validate their claim to the largest human peace sign.
Yeah sure, McCain really really cares about the country’s national security, you can tell by his plan to close GITMO because after all, closing GITMO and bringing terrorists here into the United States prison system will do so much for the country’s national security. Sure, why not give these hardened and experienced terrorists a captive audience made up of angry, violent, hate-filled American citizens and the opportunity to recruit and train and initiate them into Jihad. It will only make us safer, right?
One set of hot pants per year, for 
Same-sex couples around the state began showing up to county clerks’ offices early this morning to get marriage licenses, and in most counties to wed by officials there.