Archive for June, 2010

Help Me Pick Out Small-tee tim

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Regular readers of The Blog That Nobody Reads know that I’m not all that fond of atheists, I think of the secular types as weak thinkers overall. But when I pick on them my insults are a little on the long-winded side. I’ve learned to become very careful in the way I generalize, using phrases like “on average” and words like “tend.”

That’s because I personally know of some atheists who have their priorities right. One of them is out here in the innerwebs, somewhere, and he’s called small-tee tim the godless heathen. Actually, he used to be called just “tim” until I took the initiative and gave him the longer name.

I’m really gun-shy about the idea of voting for an atheist, but that’s no longer an absolute. I’d much rather have a President tim than a lot of believers, even among some of the believers who would march in lock-step with me on a number of other issues. I trust small-tee’s judgment. Sure, he’s just another godless heathen, and he likes “futbol,” but hey nobody’s perfect.

You’ll find absolutely none of the group-think “What my brother atheist said must be true because he’s an atheist like me” in small-tee. This is the kind of thinker people have in mind when they say they want a genuinely independent thinker. Plus, he is a gifted writer and has an awesome sense of humor.

But I have no idea what he looks like.

Think you can help me pick ‘im out? Follow the above link back to Rick’s place, to get a larger image.

“Irresistible to Men”

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.

“Mean Girls”

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Okay, we’ve been on a wild tear lately — in response to current events — about the common mistake of placing too much weight on human wonderfulness. The people wrapped up in this are engaged in a hopeless contradiction: They wish to evaluate the human wonderfulness in individual terms, on which some of us are found to possess this wonderfulness and others of us are found to be wanting. But in the Utopia they wish to build, as well as on the road to it, the individual means nothing and is even treated with great hostility. It is a collectivist society they wish to build, on a collectivist foundation with collectivist bricks and collectivist mortar. Designed with collectivist thinking.

Mean GirlsWe’ve pointed out the mistakes they make, and the mistakes they make about people like me who point out the mistakes they make. We’ve also pointed out that this is, whether they deign to admit it or not, an ugly wellspring of all kinds of toxic detritus in our polices, both public and private, within recent history. It is also a vicious addiction; to take in more of the elixir that quenches the thirst is to aggravate the thirst. People intent on proving their wonderfulness are never, ever quite done proving their wonderfulness. They are druggies on a high — they do not live in a world of cause and effect.

Well, except for one cause, one effect. As soon as we put all the beautiful people in charge of everything, and make sure the ugly people are absolutely ineffectual in everything they do, all the problems will somehow be solved.

Other than that, not a single object in this universe possesses any cause-and-effect relationship to any other object. The whole thing is a big, cosmic gooey mess that, at any given instant, radiates some kind of vibe. A mood, be it euphoric, midly amusing, sad, miserable or frustrating. Everlasting pleasure is ours as soon as the ultra-cool people decide everything and the prudish, puritan & un-hip decide nothing.

You might say it’s a post-modern version of Calvinism.

And so it was not the words, but the argument itself, that fascinated me with ReelGirl’s reaction to Carly Fiorina’s open-mic mishap in which the challenger ridiculed the incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer for her hairstyle.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear about this: I agree with ReelGirl, at least with her initial inferences. Carly Fiorina’s comment, be it live-mic-ambushed or not, does betray a deficiency of class and not a small one. To add insult to injury, “so yesterday” is appallingly juvenile. The very syllables grate on my nerves.

Nevertheless I am taking issue for two reasons. They’re both good ‘uns.

One: It is laughable and snort-worthy to attack someone — anyone — for failing to give Sen. Barbara Boxer respect for her dignity. Boxer is inherently undignified as a person. Trying to respect her dignity is like trying to respect the masculinity of a man who whores his wife out to strangers. It can’t be done. You can’t give someone respect they do not claim for themselves; you cannot give someone dignity they do not already have; and Boxer has repeatedly shown she doesn’t care one bit about her stature except as it is perceived among the hard left.

Two: The title of Heather’s post falls right into exactly what I’ve been bitching about. This notion that we need to keep mean people out of office. Therefore, we have to keep our offices filled up with nice people. This is central to the essence of my complaint. It is the divide between Architects and Medicators. The former say personalities are irrelevant and what we really need is some wise policy, since they live in a universe of objects connected by cause-and-effect relationships. The latter say the policies do not matter, we just put beautiful people in charge of things and Nirvana will follow.

At this point, my sense of right & wrong is unified with my best guess about what’s going to happen. Medicators are in charge right now, to the maximum extent they ever will be in charge for the next decade and a half. They have reached a zenith and are now on an earthward plunge, like a lawn dart. Their way of doing things has been subjected to a fair test, and it has failed. We put their man-god in charge of everything. The Reinvestment Act of 2009 showed that they don’t have any fresh new ideas that are going to help us. The Oil Spill disaster of 2010 showed that even if they did have some good ideas, they have no ways of carrying them out: All they really offer is a more bellicose and bumptious way of giving orders. They even gave us a four-word bumper sticker slogan that illustrates this starkly: “Plug the damn hole!”

And so early this morning, I effectively killed the conversation, I think, with these paragraphs:

I can see from the title of your post that the important thing to you is to make sure our offices are filled with decent people, even if the resulting policies are terrible. More than a few people are coming around to my way of thinking on this…which is that this is precisely how we’ve gotten terrible policies, by worrying too much about getting “wonderful” people into those positions and keeping them there. So we have a difference of opinion there, and I respect yours. If you’re right and we should be arguing about the candidates’ inner decency, you’re right Ms. Fiorina did herself no credit here. Some of our powerful women feel a burning need to show how snarky they are — hey, blame feminism. Boxer’s done the same thing on more than one occasion.

We’re two years into an era in which Boxer’s party has been in control of everything that matters. If we’re supposed to like the results, Boxer can campaign on that. I hope she does. If we’re not, but we’re supposed to believe the results of the next two years are supposed to be somehow different from the results of the first two…she can campaign on that. Or she can show us how much of a more wonderful person she is than Fiorina. Point is, if you want to evaluate them that way, I think you should do it even-handedly. Only a shallow thinker would systematically excuse every single catty, churlish thing ever done by Boxer, while jumping on the equivalent things done by Fiorina like some hungry predator who’s picked up the scent of blood.

That would be the definition of knee-jerk partisan politics. It would also be the very definition of prejudice — to pre-judge. That isn’t what you’re all about, is it?

Since then, I note the irony: About eleven years ago, our hardcore liberal left-wingers were waggling their fingers at us. Oh, they do this all the time, but at that time it was about something special: Our hardcore liberal left-wing President had been caught having an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter and then lying about it to obstruct justice, Richard-Nixon style. We were supposed to look past this. Why? Something about “private conduct” and “public performance” or “performance in public office.” Our hardcore left-wing zealots were waggling their fingers over the idea that these were two different things and it was a mistake to conflate them.

It must be a tough way to go through life. These “private” shortcomings are not supposed to count for anything…unless pointing them out happens to help, in some way, the leftist agenda. And then, suddenly, they are all that matter. They trump questions that really are important, like policies that are smart, or stupid, likely to culminate in good or poor results.

Getting your dick sucked by an intern who could be your daughter’s college roommate, doesn’t matter. Tossing out a Valley Girl screed about someone else’s crappy hairstyle, is a debilitating character defect.

It’s all decided by which letter is in the back of your name.

Like I said, it must be a tough way to go through life.

Girlfriend’s Pictures, Vol. 1

Friday, June 11th, 2010

I told you when the girlfriend woke up, we’d start making arrangements to get those photos uploaded so you can see how much better her camera is. Here are some of ’em. You can click the thumbnails to embiggen. We’ll start with her zoom-in on her schmuck’s tee shirt:

Here’s the lighthouse at Point Arena which you saw from my own photo album:

Lighthouse, closer:

Once we hit the lighthouse balcony, we both went hog-wild. She has many more where this one came from:

And here you can see the right side of schmuck’s flabby body during our tandem photo session:

Down in the museum, here’s a movie poster for the Mel Gibson flick about the airplane pilot:

Okay, backing up to Monday night & Tuesday morning. Here is the marina in Petaluma, where we started out. I think I might have some pics of this same marina, in fact I know I do. I’ll have to fetch those later for comparison. But it shouldn’t be that important at this point, you should already be able to see the difference in quality.

We scooted on up to Bodega Bay on Tuesday. Regular visitors to the Tides Wharf restaurant and gift shop will be familiar with the hundred year old whaling pot below. Perfectly suitable for melting down whale fat, or for frying up Islamic terrorists in bacon grease:

Duck. She was testing the limits of the telephoto lens.

Sailboat. Don’t ask me about the incline. Some other tourists had questions about this, and none of the locals we contacted knew anything about it. Some exotic gravity-fed method of bilge pumping?

As you leave the Bodega Bay by way of the North city limits, the highway will graciously meet up with the coastline forming North Salmon Creek, popular breaking-out, mounting-up and attire-changing spot for the surfers. We’ve visited here many a time, and I had graciously indicated this was about the point of our vacation where we should start doing the walk-barefoot-in-sand thing.

This is a good test of the camera. She discovered a few weeks ago it is particularly well-suited for close-ups of interesting-looking plant life, like this:

Once down on the beach, she took some pictures of the elevated position and I liked the way this one turned out of the adjacent rock formation:

Seagull. You’ve already seen my pic; compare & contrast.

And here is the schmuck, with a head full of (receding) hotel-shampoo-hair, getting ready to do his barefoot-walkin’.

We have more; actually, these are the boring ones, their value is that you can zoom in and admire photophile stuff, like pixel revolution, blur removal, et al. The ones still in the pipeline are a bit better for piquing genuine interest among those who are not so enamored of such technical minutiae. I’ll get back to the project as time permits.

Best Sentence XC

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

The ninetieth award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to Harry Stein. I’m sure I’ve progressed well beyond a the halfway point of his recent tome I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous. But going through my old stuff by the poolside I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t want to miss anything. I started way up toward the front, somewhere in the first few chapters.

Glad I did.

But the only way…is to fight the bastards with everything you have, seeing them for what they are — and to keep your sense of humor.

Bottom of p. 35, winding up Chapter 5, If You Can Take It Here, You’ll Take It Anywhere. That statement, so simple at first, becomes more and more critical and crucial every time you think of it.

What. They. Are. You have nothing but your own intellect to guide you in figuring out what that is. And many, many obstacles in place to block you from it. But keep that sense of humor, it may be even more important than that.

Non illegitimi carborundum.

Lighthouse, Point Arena, 2010

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

So the gal had the idea to visit the Point Arena Light. I ended up having to reluctantly give her some credit on this one. She got the idea while we were watching that chick flick with Mel Gibson in it, the one where I fell asleep about 45 minutes into it. Something about an airplane pilot in the 1930’s. Anyway, they used this lighthouse in the film…which I figured out while we were touring the museum and I saw a poster for a movie that looked vaguely familiar.

You have to be in shape to climb the metal staircase without wheezing and gasping. The lighthouse was built in 1870, entirely wrecked by the 1906 earthquake, reconstructed in 1908 and modernized in 1978. The focal plane is over 100 feet off the ground, as you can tell from zooming in on the front elevation:

This makes for an awesome view. The exterior has been entirely reconstructed; the actual workings of the lighthouse are quite different.

As you tour the museum you’re going to see some of the equipment that was in use toward the end of the nineteenth century, which involves giant Fresnel lenses, air horns, compressors, mercury baths. Nowadays, miniaturization has succeed to such an extent it is a little bit embarrassing. In the picture above, you see what is “crowded” into this big empty chamber that used to be filled with a light: A donation box for painting the lighthouse, some optical equipment and walkie-talkies. Yeah, tour-conducting “apparatus.” And that device outside the window, in the background? That is today’s light. Yeah — slightly larger than a man’s head. That functionality used to fill this room.

Below you see a view from the upper balcony. Click to embiggen.

And here’s a more wide-open shot, of the summer rental cabins immediately below.

We have a bunch of other shots just like this; in fact, these are all from my camera, which is a “better-than-nuthin'” tourist-ey type point-and-shoot model. She’s got the Olympus, which is more of a high-end device and I understand she managed to fill it up with several dozen. When she wakes up I’ll get the necessary swapping done so I can upload some of hers.

Nice Try, Chuck

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

So, you folks didn’t accept my advice. Well, we’ll have to see how this goes. Maybe over the long term we’ll see another opportunity to support Chuck DeVore for something. His people have run an awesome campaign which has done everything to redeem our democratic republic in the eyes of the rightfully jaundiced, and not a single thing to besmirch it.

I’m not encouraged to see Fiorina emerge as the candidate here. The appearance is that, at least in the Golden State, we’re sinking back into identity politics. The men see one of their own running against a gal, and get all queasy — suddenly we’re buried in a lot of talk about “but she can win!” And why shouldn’t they say that. There is a feeling out there that we’re populated by airheads, who pay no attention at all to the issues and just want to vote for the girl. Takes a girl to knock down another girl.

Alright, well DeVore says his support is going to Fiorina, so that’s where I’m going to put mine. Boxer really has to go. It isn’t even a democrat/Republican thing anymore. “Ma’am” is just pure embarrassment. She says something, and I can just feel heads in the other 49 states swivel toward this one, and hear the “whudthefuck??

Would it be better to have Fiorina in there? The question is answered before it is even asked.

North Salmon Creek, by Bodega Bay, June 2010

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

There’s lots of pictures here, perhaps hundreds of final-cut, slide-show-ready specimens from just the last 48 hours. The hotel innerwebs connection will not entirely accommodate all this for the moment however, so for now I’ll just put up these two from yesterday’s romp in the sand.

This was at my request, since my sneakers were giving me claustrophobia from the ankles down. So I waddled around in my bare feet while the lady cavorted in sandals.

I have some doubts now about keeping the toenail. The hot sand seems to have aggravated it. Color’s looking a little funny.

We saw a peculiar weather pattern descending down from the North, from up by Goat Rock. It’s not a smog front and it’s not a storm. Now we’re here at Timber Cove and the weather has actually been fairly mild. Lots of wind but it comes and goes.

Click for larger.

The seagulls are rather funny. We were noticing one of them was literally hogging the shots. He’d figure out when someone was about to snap a picture, then he’d nudge his buddies out of the frame and strike a pose. It’s not all about being a rat-with-wings.

We have many more, and these are not the best. We’ll put it up as time & wireless routers allow…

Ten Unusual and Bizarre Beds

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Click pic for article.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Bonus: A very unusual and bizarre movie about a bed: The Bed That Eats. Order it up on Netflix if you dare, but don’t go complaining to me that you want the 77 minutes of your life back, I said it was unusual & bizarre.

Vote for Chuck

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

The big day is finally here.

The Former Governor of Alaska and my fine self do not see eye-to-eye on this thing; that is partly because I reside in California and she does not. Hey, she’s gotta be wrong somewhere. On this one, you have to vote for the dude. He’s got the best chance. He captures the difference between our side & theirs; difference leads to passion, and passion leads to turn-out. This is one among a few reasons why Palin’s running mate disappointed us back in ’08, and why she herself would have fared better.

You know how electrical current works, right? Current is driven by voltage; voltage is a differential. This “reach-across-the-aisle” stuff is for the birds. Send Sotomayor’s enthused fan back home, and vote for Chuck. That’s my suggestion anyhoo.

Helen Thomas, Exeunt

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Aboutfuckingoddamnedtime.

Well, that was fast. After her disgusting anti-Semitic remarks, it really was just a matter of time before the shitstorm engulfed her. And considering she was apparently about to get canned from the WHCA, it seems like she was just trying to beat them to the punch.

Helen Thomas announced Monday that “she is retiring, effective immediately,” according to a statement from Hearst newspapers.

Her decision comes after her controversial remarks about Israel hit the blogosphere. She later apologized for her comments, saying she “deeply regretted” making them.

Ed Morrissey is reporting that apparently there are even more videos of her making anti-Semitic statements coming soon. If true, it’s really not all that shocking that she would try to run and hide from the controversy.

Let her legacy continue in the role she had to give up, like Ted Kennedy’s in the seat he vacated. Which is to say, not.

She’s been covering our presidents since the Eisenhower administration. Her antisemitism has always been thinly veiled, at least it has been to the extent of my awareness, watching her pelt a then-President Ronald Reagan with all kinds of snotty lecturing dressed up as a question. Her biases haven’t been a secret by any means; kind of a “yes but no” unacknowledged gossamer reality, like JFK’s marital infidelities or FDR’s confinement to a wheelchair.

Under this cover of cooperative darkness, the antisemitic scandal has ripened into a journalistic-objectivity one. That is being kind. “What in the blue fuck is she doing in there??” has been the unstated, and therefore unanswered, question. This situation seems to have arisen somewhere around Nixon/Ford, and perhaps much earlier.

And then, the powers that be allowed her to continue chafing her rump in that Press Corps chair, for generations more.

Adios, you miserable toad. Don’t let the doorknob hitcha where the Good Lord split ya.

For those who are left standing — let’s stick to real questions from here on. Just to throw the rest of us off. M’kay?

Five Thousand

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Memo For File CXV

Monday, June 7th, 2010

This is The Blog That Nobody Reads…it has five thousand posts now…and I don’t suppose it has ever done a post-about-a-post. Actually it has now that I think of it; they connect to each other like lattice-work all the time. But this is a post, about public response, with regard to a previous post. And on that note, I just gotta say something. I have never seen the like of this before.

The response about this post is split cleanly down the middle. Half of the readership thinks it is crystal clear, and a marginal fringe of it — plus myself, now and then — condemns it as a muddled mess. I myself am not in a position of advantage for judging my own work, I’m afraid. I receive some of my most widespread and exclamatory praise with a befuddled “huh, you kiddin’?” I lack empathy. My sense of what requires mentioning word-for-word, and what will suffice with a mere implication, has always been substandard.

But in the last few days I’ve had to come around and join the majority viewpoint. It occurs to me that the question of whether a post, any post, but in this particular case One Hundred Things That Do Not Make You a Wonderful Person is clearly written — is a matter to be settled by consensus. And it can only be settled by consensus. Whether you say it works or you say it does not, if you are outnumbered, your argument crumbles under its own weight because it is an exercise in speaking for others. When a clear majority of the “others” explicitly overrule you, then…well, what were you sayin’?

A Hundred Things That Don't Make You WonderfulAnd the votes are in. It is impossible to have any kind of affection for this particular post if you do not “get it”; and although other posts have flung more traffic down upon The Blog That Nobody Reads, I struggle to recall another that has been linked from as many referring sites, in so short of a time.

So it is settled. The meaning is clear. That is not to say there has not been debate about it; I will also confess that many among those who misunderstand, seem to draw a common mistaken inference about what the meaning could have been. That is to say, they disagree with me, the author; but they agree with each other in their wrongness. Writers, generally, shudder at seeing such a thing. But with the addition of more and more voices who got it right, I look back on the ones who got it wrong and it seems to me they got it wrong because they wanted to get it wrong.

The piece is called — let us copy-and-paste, letter for letter, to make sure we’re quoting ourselves correctly — “One Hundred Things That Don’t Make You a Better Person.” It is not called “One Hundred Things That Make You an Ass.” It is not called “One Hundred Things I Wish People Would Not Do.” Or “One Hundred Types of People I Wish Would Get Struck by Lightning.”

And yet, the mistaken people…let us call them that, to help save space, from here on in. “Mistaken people.” The mistaken people have it in common with each other that they write of my work as if that were the point of it. Wow, I’m glad that isn’t true. That would make me the jerk. I’ll be the first to say so. People who recycle are #25; people who go to church are #40; people who vote for or hire ethnic minorites & women are #58. I’m condemning those people? That’s not what the piece says. It says doing these things doesn’t make you a wonderful person. I do not regard it as an exercise in hair-splitting, to point out the obvious that this is not the same thing. It’s quite different.

Of course we do live in a three-dimensional universe and there is such a thing as perspective. When you lack perspective, objects that are in fact quite distant can appear very close together — and I speak here figuratively as well as literally. Our “Mistaken People,” I’m thinking, lack perspective. This has been scientifically proven. A plurality of people have now responded to the piece…with charm and wit, in their minds…with some variant of “#101. Making a senseless list of things other people do that you don’t like (doesn’t make you a wonderful person).” This is a confession. To borrow a few spaces from Obama Speech Bingo, I just think for far too long we have been accepting a false choice and we can’t keep doing that thinking Europe is going to say it’s okay.

And here’s my point; this is where I think the trolley has really come off the tracks.

People do things, and this has to prove they’re wonderful, or — since I have specifically rejected this — we have to take this as proof that they’re s.o.b.’s. That’s the false choice. We are losing our collective ability to look at each other doing things, and say to ourselves “eh, whatever.” This is a bad, bad thing. It is the loss of a valuable and irreplaceable national resource, as precious as any animal species.

You walk up to me and say “Hey, Freeberg. Blogging doesn’t make you a wonderful person.” Or “Hey, watching Dukes of Hazzard reruns doesn’t make you a wonderful person” or “Drinking coffee, extra bold, black, from a 15-oz mug doesn’t make you a wonderful person” and my reaction will be rather mundane. Probably cock an eyebrow at you and go something like “duh.”

I think the non-mistaken people would react the same way. I suspect we are part of a common community. And there is something significant and understated separating us from the mistaken people who missed the point (probably deliberately) of that original piece; there is a major disconnect here. We do what we do. We are not trying to buck a trend, nor are we trying to conform to one. We just want our damn coffee. And we do not give a hang what it “proves” about whether we’re cool people or whether we’re jerks.

This false-choice dichotomy, I must say, bugs me. It bugs me more than any of the hundred items on the list. Maybe our society has become too cushy and comfortable, or maybe the Agent Orange is seeping into our brains. Myself, I think it’s just a natural consequence of the world shrinking, of information traveling more and more quickly. People evidently can’t just do things anymore. Whatever we do is just making statements about ourselves. Some smartass blogger comes along and says “here’s a list of a hundred things you can do that don’t make you a wonderful person in spite of what you might think,” and it’s automatically presumed that he’s talking some smack. Well, I’m not. I’m just saying if you think these things prove you’re wonderful, you’re wrong.

That’s incendiary?

All that tells me is, I made a mistake waiting this long to point it out.

Let’s think this through logically. I did include a short list of things you can do that would, and do, make you a wonderful person. Now if this process works (to such an extent that I agree that it does), how can it work? I have personally conceived of three ways:

1. By completing this physical or mental feat, you have pressed the envelope of your capabilities, increased your endurance and/or resolve, and now you have confidence in your capacity that you did not have — could not have had — before.

2. You have altered the outcome of the world, or some stateful thing within it, for the better. You have eased the burden of another of God’s children, lightened a heavy load, made light work by adding another hand.

3. You have excluded from logical consideration, the possibility that you might lack positive attributes that it has now been proven that you have. Some miserable sonofabitch could not possibly have done what you just did.

I viscerally disagree with Option #3. Name the “wonderful” thing you think only “wonderful” people can do. I can pretty much guarantee that with the time and resources, I can go out and find the miserable motherfucker who will be ready, willing and able to go out and do it. Especially if he perceives an opportunity to “prove” to some more suckers that he isn’t a miserable motherfucker. And you know I’m right. You know I can find him.

So that leaves us with the first two options. You can literally make yourself a better person by embracing a personal ability to do what you could not do before; or, you can do a genuinely good thing that someone else can experience, touch and feel. All the rest is bullshit.

You might be wondering, now, why is it important to have a list of things that do not make you a wonderful person…if I’m not willing to step up and say these things make you a miserable bastard either? What’s the point?

The point is clear: Some of the worst, most wretched, reprehensible policies we have ever had in human history — particularly recent human history — have been policies designed specifically for the purpose of demonstrating that the people in charge are, or have been…yeah, you got it. Wonderful. Expanded welfare state. More expensive labor. Exorbitant public debts. The much-talked-about “vaginization of America,” with its lowered pain threshold, pussy males, kids-wearing-foam-rubber-elbow-pads-on-the-seesaws, litigation, litigation and more litigation. Our modern, super-anesthetized, super-sanitized, “Who The Hell Wants To Live In A World Like This” culture, buried hip-deep in warning labels. This ice may be cold. This is not a toy. Do not take this medication orally. Remove foil wrapper before inserting suppository. Glass not allowed in pool area. Ladder, when fully extended, is very tall. Do not use this hair dryer in the shower.

This gets into the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. I’ll tell you how this works…

Much has been talked about the Theory of Evolution, but it is seldom discussed how long it takes evolution to work. “Millions of years of evolution” is a common catchphrase, but humans have not been around that long, and humans have evolved many times. So how long does it take evolution to work, really? Not long. We have hard evidence that a few hundred years ago — which is the blink of an eye, comparitively speaking — humans were significantly shorter than they are now. Height is not exactly a subtle characteristic of the human genome. So we evolve quickly. It doesn’t take millions of years.

But think about the world in which we now live; the fact that it is industrial. We do not make our way in the world by milking cows, harvesting vegetables, slaughtering pigs, et al. How long have we been out of this mold? Not long. About a century and a half. That is not long enough to evolve. So we are agricultural creatures. In 500 years maybe we’ll evolve to exist in this technological enclave we have constructed for ourselves; but we are not George Jetson yet. We are agricultural, we are built to milk cows. We are built to plow fields. Men my age know this instinctively. We consume calories, primarily meat-based, and this is primarily in fulfillment of a savage, masculine impulse, it all heads straight to the gut so that we can store up the energy in case we go on some wild boar hunting spree like those skinny sinewy young boys at the beginning of Apocalypto.

And then we go sit in cubicles to toil away on a keyboard and a mouse. And get heavier and heavier. See what I mean? Our workload is at odds with our evolutionary molding.

The Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution is based on this…and most of what has been scribbled in The Blog That Nobody Reads, that which deals with human nature (which is probably the bulk of it), is based on this theory. It’s high time I jotted it down.

Picture a ancient village. It could be of any race, on any continent, in any age so long as it is prior to the industrial revolution…or for that matter, before urbanization. In whatever pocket of geography in which it exists, so this could be at any time until about a century ago, give or take. The village is inhabited by members of a common tribe.

We have spoken, before, about the historical custom of shunning, which is ostracism to point of fatality; that a person is prohibited, by virtue of his individual identity, from practicing even the most basic transactions of commerce fundamental to survival, to such an extent that he naturally dies from starvation, exposure to the elements, or something of the like. This has been documented in some pre-industrial cultures. I submit that it has been, whether documented or not, a common practice among all of them. I submit that it is the natural brutal ancestor of bankruptcy protection. Think about it. Envision it from the point of view of someone who is in the profession of dispensing a staple, such as food and shelter, and you are approached by a person not in the good graces of the community. The pottage may be clothing, a roof over his head, or a bowl of porridge. If you consent in exchange for credit, you expose yourself because you would be falling in line behind all of his other creditors, apt to be hung out high & dry. You would decline. If you consent in exchange for cash, you are committing a moral transgression because you know your patron must be short-changing his other creditors in order to do right by you. It’s a case of last-in first-out. This is ethically wrong, and it is probably detrimental to your own survival because you are diminishing whatever far-fetched likelihood might have remaind for the creditors, who are your own colleagues, to be compensated for their investments.

So you would shun. You would have to. There must, logically, be some mechanism for the miscreant to be dismissed from the ranks of those who can bargain in good faith. If the community desires to remain compassionate, then he could become a regular recipient of charity. But for the sake of maintaining some working economic model, be it based on cash or on barter, there would have to be a dissolution between the self-sustaining and the indigent. There would have to be a barrier. There would have to be a custom of ostracism. It is logically unavoidable.

Such societies were not purely capitalistic. And among the ones that were not, there would have to be a risk shared among all, during the lean times. If all are sharing in the risk, then all must share in the cost; lean times, by definition, mean there is more cost than there is benefit.

And so if the famine drags on for too long, a situation arises in which the mediocre amongst the village becomes indigent…or could be interpreted to be that way. This is key. The shunning is not the conclusion of an objective, mathematical exercise. It is, rather, an opinionated consensus. The majority votes that Henry is to be put out to pasture. Or…the village elders proclaim it to be so. Or, the Chief of the tribe picks up the vibe. The Oracle infers it to be divine will, Vox Dei. The poor sap is to shut out of the mighty village gates, to perish in the winter.

It definitely happened. Where it was written down — as well as where it was not.

This is where I think we picked up the primal impulse. We engage in these empty rituals…in the aforementioned post, I specifically used the phrase “empty rituals”…to demonstrate that we are wonderful. Not to demonstrate it to God. Not to demonstrate it to the ghost of George Washington, or to President Barack Obama. Not to your mother-in-law, or to any one specific individual. But to “The People.”

I am saying we are wired, down in the marrow of our bones, through a natural evolutionary process, to show off for each other like circus animals. We are wired, right down in our genetic “motherboards,” to engage in these empty rituals. That is why this whole thing looks so much like a brutal, primal instict: Because it is one.

Let us pause here to remember and to remark one more time, since it is worthy of repetition: To engage in this effort, and then fail at it, is fatal. You would be shut out of the gates. You would freeze. You would starve. This is a critical point, because it throws the Freeberg Village Evolution Theory ahead of that mighty rocket nozzle that is Darwinism. It says that among all those who were exposed to the challenge, everyone must have succeeded or else they were thrown into oblivion. The genome was refined, on pain of death, to meet the challenge. We are the descendants of those who succeeded. This is what etched the design upon the motherboard. Whoever didn’t have what it took, fell away and their strains died out…leaving us.

And so here we are. We are stained, just like the Bible says. This pinpoints exactly what The Apple was, what Eve did, what Adam did, who the snake was. We have been evolutionarily sculpted and chiseled into fawning, preening sycophants; it is our central nature, and we are left with our intellect which we may optionally engage for the purpose of rising above it. Without that, we endure the full disgrace of Man’s Fall. The message we end up sending to each other is: “During the lean times, make sure I am among the last to be shut out of the heavy village gates. Dispense with that other guy instead.” We are the guy in the fancy BMW, parking overnight in a bad neighborhood with a club on the steering wheel — carefully parked next to the other BMW that does not have a club on the steering wheel. Fuck with that other guy instead, leave me alone.

I am…comparatively speaking…wonderful.

That is the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. That is, I would argue, also what modern liberalism is. Surely you’ve noticed how incredibly confused our liberals are nowadays on this one question: Am I a wonderful person on an absolute basis, or on a relative one? Am I trying to show I have risen above some measurable hash mark in my wonderfulness…or is there some other dirty-rotten-creepy-bastard somewhere, and I’m just trying to show I’m better than that other guy? This is why I said a complete victory here would ruin them. They want to hold us “all” up to a higher standard of humanity, decency, civility; but this isn’t really what they want, because it would cancel out every meaningful thing about themselves, if they ever got it. You can’t be part of an elite club if you don’t make sure someone is left out of it. Our liberals are acting upon their internal motherboard-wiring, to be a Freeberg-Village fawning preening priss, laboring to convince some ethereal, undefined “consensus” that the other guy is the one who should be shut out of the village gates. So they can continue to live within, where it’s all cozy and warm.

It’s like the joke about the two lawyers being chased by the hungry bear. One of them says to the other, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!”

This is why it’s so important to identify the one hundred — there are many, many more — things people do on a regular basis to show how wonderful they are, that don’t really make them wonderful. It is to defeat modern liberalism. Which is nothing more than self-interest dressed up as altruism; the lawyer outrunning the other lawyer; the villager trying to indict the other villager, so the ostracism will fall on one head and not the other. This is also why, when a modern liberal politician gives a speech about a vexing problem that doesn’t really involve a bad guy…like a horrible sexually transmitted disease, or a ruptured oil pipe at the bottom of the ocean, or a hurricane…the politician keeps injecting some horrible villain into the situation anyway.

It’s an ancient, primal-instinct message that has reverberated among the human species for millenia. “I’m wonderful, so don’t shut me out of the village. Take that other guy. Over there.”

It is wired into our hardware. Liberalism, as we know it today, is all about succumbing to it. It is all about forgetting that we’re all in this fight for survival together…and then, just to see if you can get away with it, acting like you’re among the very few who can still remember that very thing.

It is the ultimate adventure in self-deception.

No, it doesn’t make you a wonderful person.

Advice to Undergraduates

Monday, June 7th, 2010

I’ve never taken any advice from anybody…not really. Perhaps the rocky patches of my road have been rockier than most, but looking back I really haven’t had very many of ’em. As I read over this I see it matches closely with what I did.

And the rocky patches weren’t even really that rocky; a little lonely maybe. On balance though it’s been a good life. It’s good to see something that fits in with how I went about things, that also would be good advice for someone younger. There is very little pleasure in it for me when I find myself telling the younger set “what I did has worked out very well over the long term but don’t do things my way.” And I know they don’t find it comforting. So I intend to hang on to this.

1. Acquire skills that are hard to get outside school. Your first temptation will be to fill your schedule with courses on fascinating subjects. Do this, but don’t forget to also use university to tech up. For anyone interested in public policy or development, I suggest at two semesters of statistics and economics. Then pick a field of study in development (economics, politics, etc) and pick the hardest courses in each. Other technical skills may come in handy, depending on your interests: international law, political theory, tropical medicine, qualitative methods, finance & accounting, and so forth.
2. Learn how to write well. Take writing seriously. Consider a course in creative, non-fiction, journalism, or business writing. Read books on writing. You won’t regret it.
3. Focus on the teacher, not the topic. You will learn more from great teachers than great syllabi.
4. When in doubt, choose the path that keeps the most doors open. If you aren’t sure of your interests, stick to mainstream majors, ones with plenty of job and grad school options at the end, and get your core stats and math training (multivariate calculus, linear algebra, and multivariate regression).
5. Do the minimum language and management classes. Languages are hugely valuable, but better learned in immersion, during your summers and holidays. Maybe take an intro course, but only that. Business and management skills are critical, but classrooms are poor places to get skills other than finance and accounting.

Obama: What Happened?

Monday, June 7th, 2010

The Telegraph notices it’s suddenly cool to bash Barack Obama.

Well, at least he’s still got Sir Paul McCartney. At the White House last week, the 67-year-old crooner was gushing in much the same manner as his own groupies did at Shea Stadium in 1965. “I’m a big fan, he’s a great guy,” McCartney told American critics of President Barack Obama. “So lay off him, he’s doing great.”

Later, McCartney serenaded the First Lady with a rendition of Michelle and, receiving a prize from the Library of Congress, took a cheap shot at President George W Bush that was as unfunny as it was unoriginal. “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.” Bush. Doesn’t read books. Stupid. Geddit?

The problem for the President is that even if the former Beatle does speak for billions, the overwhelming majority of those are overseas. Polls show that around 10 per cent of those who voted for Obama in 2008 now disapprove of his performance and the heavy turnout of young people and black voters among the 69 million who back him will not be repeated again.

McCartney’s banalities were an example of a transatlantic dissonance that is all too apparent these days. Whereas Europe is stuck in November 2008 and still hopelessly in love with Obama, Americans have got over the historic symbolism of it all and are now moving on as they live with the reality.

That reality has now begun to dawn on some of Obama’s natural constituency – Hollywood and the Left. The “no drama Obama” demeanour that served him so well on the campaign trail is now becoming a liability.

Bemoaning Obama’s passivity after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the director Spike Lee thundered: “He’s very calm, cool, collected. But, one time, go off! If there’s any one time to go off, this is it, because this is a disaster.”

This is the same Spike Lee who once described Obama’s election as a “seismic” change that represented “a better day not only for the United States but for the world”.

It’s funny how quickly we tire of what we once wanted. I would argue exactly the same kind of thing happened to George W. Bush. Think about it: Isn’t Bush a personification of what, in a simpler setting, with no flesh-and-blood contenders to muddy up the picture, we “all” want?

“I’m sick of these poll-driven, ‘stick a finger in the air and see which way the wind blows’ politicians. Give me someone who’s secure and consistent in his convictions — I don’t even care if he disagrees with me here and there, I just want someone who will stick up for what he believes in and be honest about it.” How many times have you heard something like that? And yet what really drove Bush’s poll numbers down. It wasn’t Katrina or Iraq. It was a method of governance. “Bush’s eyes are closed to science! He doesn’t listen!”

The same fickle nature of our modern electorate has now torn the Obama visage asunder. Darn that humdrum unflappable Obama, he doesn’t get sufficiently upset about things.

I have faith; I don’t think we’re locked into a pattern of choosing our presidents according to their emotional profiles, as opposed to their sense of judgment…a pattern which surely would be a death spiral. I think good decision-making skills are still important to us, as ineffectual a consideration as that was in ’08. And I think our evaluation of this decision-making, were it to become important again, would remain fairly consistent, even as our criteria for the emotional behavior has become rather pinwheel-like.

And I think that is timeless. As a species, we are fickle and unpredictable when we choose our leaders based on their temperament, but steady and reasonable when we choose them based on their ability to produce a good outcome.

I think we choose them based on their emotional “vibe,” when all’s said & done, when we are bored. In 2008 we were bored. That’s all there is to it.

You know, there are three ways to piss off someone who puts too much of an emotional investment in something:

• Tell a Star Wars fan Obi-Wan Kenobi means “Loses Every Single Duel”;
• Point out to an Indiana Jones fan that the “obtainer of rare antiquities” has never actually produced anything from one of his travels;
• Opine that the word “Obama” is an ancient Kenyan utterance that means “colossal disappointment.”

This Is Good LXXIII

Monday, June 7th, 2010

If you want to be thoughtful, you have to be a liberal. If you’re a liberal, you must be thoughtful. If you’re a conservative you cannot be thoughtful, and if you’re a knucklehead dimwit rube you are destined to become a conservative.

This has been an enduring leitmotif, and yet it enjoys a most pervasive and impenetrable monopoly at the shallow end of the attention pool, among the people least inclined to study anything for any length of time. Our late-night comedy talk show hosts seem to ply it with the strongest sense of approval, followed by the big-ticket summer blockbuster Hollywood producers…the “court jesters” of our modern era.

Oh my, how this is gonna leave a mark on that. Rather cuts through it like a red-hot fireplace poker through a three-pound tub of soft margarine.

You can learn a lot from what the left say. And even more from what they don’t. Take taxes for instance.

Liberals have a very amorphous definition of fairness, and a very ambiguous definition of who should pay them. That is something that should leave us all very nervous.

How much, for how long, and to what end should taxes be paid? The left can not answer these questions. If they were to be honest, they would admit they have never even considered them. Still they are unshaken in their certitude of “fairness:” a progressive tax system.

According to liberals, a progressive tax system is simply one in which those making more money pay more in taxes. On its face, this would seem an acceptable standard—one few could dispute. Strangely enough though, the left themselves do not accept it.
:
By defining fairness as a relation between earning and paying, it begs the question of the limits to this linkage. Is there a point at which rates, amounts, and total share in taxes could be increased to a level that liberals would deem unfair? What is the optimal point of taxation for the left?

While the left worries much about the fairness of earners not paying enough, they have apparently not given any thought at all about what too much would be.

For liberals, the system evidently just gets progressively fairer the more earners pay. Their definition of fairness is no definition at all; it is a continuum. [emphasis mine]

RTWT.

Hat tip to Boortz.

2010’s First Sunburn

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Spandex season had an early start but stumbled out of the gate, and spent some time just not working out. Now that it’s June I decided to kick things into high gear and ride the two wheels all the way up to Auburn.

This is not for newbies. Folsom to Auburn is uphill pretty much every yard of the way, more than twenty miles’ worth. I made it into the city limits and then had a flat. There is still a lot of time left in the year, so I decided to finish the repair job before making the decision about whether to proceed forward. I ended up weenie-ing out of it. The problem with the (fairly new) tube was a rupture by the valve stem; obviously a manufacturing defect, and if memory serves the last tube of this brand that I had to replace, had a similar problem. Of the two spares I packed, one went by this brand and the other one was more reputable. I ended up making a judgment call that the different brand should go on, and then I’d hoof it home.

Auburn City LimitsTotal number of snakes encountered on this trip, two. The one that could’ve been a rattler, appeared to be sunbathing in a coiled position…which was curious. That was probably more like a death pose, but I wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. The other was more colorful, possibly more dangerous than a rattler.

Time out: 4:21 a.m. Time in: 12:37 p.m. Total distance, 41 mi. Fluids ingested: One 1.5L Aquafina, brought with, plus a 0.5L water and 0.5L black berry vitamin water, plus 0.5L green tea. Plus going hog wild on the contents of the fridge once I got home. No fainting, no snake bites, no spills, had all the repair supplies & equipment I needed. Oh, and number of pictures taken, 60. My confidence in my next attempt comes not so much from having a better tan built up, and superior knowledge about brand names for my spare inner tubes, but from not having to pause to take pics. Douglas Boulevard to Auburn city limits, my Waterloo, is just over ten miles and took two hours, which is e-x-c-e-p-t-i-o-n-a-l-l-y slow. That was by design, but fatigue does take a toll.

I like the way I look in the mirror now. I look like a man in his fifth decade on the planet, who blogs way too much and works out way too little. That’s good. It beats the way I looked in the mirror the other night, like a man in his fifth decade who blogs and doesn’t work out, and chows down on deep-friend chocolate-covered whale-butt-blubber three times a day with a bucket of pure lard to wash it down. The Scandinavian pouch hanging over the belt, it’s receded some. Just a little. It’s a body that is being reprimanded that now & then there are some physical adventures to be had, and it should prepare accordingly. My arms are a little bigger too. This is a part of road bike riding I’ve never been able to figure out, even when I was a little boy; it’s like your arms are doing almost as much work as your legs.

Oh, and the burn? I wore one of my cotton tanks. It works out great comfort-wise, even at four in the morning you don’t want something with sleeves on it. But the shoulders are rosy red.

We’re going out to the coast today, for a week. Blogging will be on an as-is-possible basis. So the upper layers of skin will have a chance to recuperate, while I continue to educate my bod about the fact that it’s a big world out there with fresh air, and life is not all about writing code in the daytime and blogging at nighttime. Pictures will also be uploaded on an as-is-possible basis.

Al Qaeda Recruits Arrested at JFK

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

NJ.com.

Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 20, of North Bergen, and Carlos Eduardo “Omar” Almonte, 24, of Elmwood Park were apprehended at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens before they could board separate flights to Egypt, where they were to start journeys to Somalia. The men were arrested by teams of state and federal law-enforcement agents who have been investigating the pair since October 2006, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the operation publicly.

Now boil them in oil.

Yeah yeah, I know. Eighth amendment, Supreme Court decision this-versus-that, can’t do it, This Nation Does Not Torture!!!!1! Yeah, whatever.

My point is simply this: If we boiled them in oil, this stuff would stop. And to whoever makes decisions reasonably, responsibly, weighing both sides of a question rather than just one side, that’s an important consideration. This would all stop overnight.

Sure let’s continue to be humane and decent, but keep in mind what exactly it is costing us. And no, the terrorists would not win, they are not fighting to make us into a nation of terrorists. They’re fighting to make us gone. Our brutality would provide a new selling point for Al Qaeda recruiters? Really? I doubt it. Who wants to get boiled in oil.

You end conflict by speaking the language of diplomats, or by speaking in the language of horse heads in beds. The world is a big place, that has some people in it who only understand one of those languages.

“Don’t Get Mad, Get Even”

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Frank Rich of the New York Times…makes an ass out of himself yet again.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf. Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw” and his order to “plug the damn hole.” (Thank God he hadn’t settled for “darn.”) This evidence did not persuade anyone, least of all Spike Lee, who could be found on CNN the next night begging the president, “One time, go off!”

Not going to happen. Obama will never unleash the anger of the antagonists in “Do the Right Thing” or match James Carville’s rebooted “ragin’ Cajun” shtick. That’s not who Obama is. If he tried to go off, he’d look ridiculous. But the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat is not an entirely innocuous distraction. It allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil.

Unlike his unflappable temperament, his lingering failings should and could be corrected. And they must be if his presidency is not just to rise above the 24/7 Spill-cam but to credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime. We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

That was pretty reasonable. I’m so glad the community of hardcore liberals won’t be listening to any of it. They’ve been having their fantasies about President Obama getting mad at least since September of ’09, and this accident with the oil spill has kicked it into high gear.

This is what democrat defeat is made of. “Life would be wonderful if only our guy would become angry!” He should kick something. No, he should yell and swear. No, he needs to rip people’s arms out of their sockets. Oh no, he needs to get all big and green and tear his shirt to shreds.

It plays in Manhattan but not in Peoria. Normal people, with no party allegiance but who decide elections, look at this stuff…they spend maybe a second or two trying to figure out how this relates to an oil leak a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. And they quite sensibly say, “You people are whacked in the head. We can’t afford to let you decide anything.”

We have intellectual children doing the work of grown-ups. Few things illustrate this as starkly as when the kiddies start to debate the proper display of anger, in situations in which anger does nothing to solve anything.

Here’s where the Frank Rich trolley really comes off the tracks.

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector. His default assumption seems to be that his peers are always as well-intentioned as he is. The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP’s version of events from the start. The company consistently understated the spill’s severity, overestimated the progress of the repair operation and low-balled the environmental damage. Yet the White House’s designated point man in the crisis, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, was still publicly reaffirming his trust in the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, as recently as two weeks ago, more than a month after the rig exploded.

It’s not that his conclusions are unreasonable, Lord knows there’s enough blame to go around. It is his premises. They scare the hell out of me.

Consider what is being presumed here. BP does not have good intentions, but Barack Obama does. Perhaps these are both true. And to give him proper credit, he did say “seems to be.” But where does he ever subject them to serious question, and upon which facts did he decide them?

This is part of a very old and very troubling mindset among American liberals. If you ideologically lean toward the hard-left and you are on a government payroll of any kind…well then, the discussion is over. Your motives are not to be challenged, they are as pure as the driven snow.

BP’s record, as Rich goes on to point out, is pretty awful. That is why they are subject to government oversight and audits. Our liberals made us do it, you see; they figure if you work for an oil company you must want to dump toxic sludge into our waterways. They saw it on Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Therefore, whatever an oil company wants to do, we have to get our well-intentioned government people to say it’s alright before it can proceed.

And they did say it was alright.

This is the kind of logical cul de sac in which you find yourself trapped, when you think like a child while confronting grown-up issues like this. We’ll just put super-good, super-well-intentioned people in charge of things, and then everything will work all wonderfully. Until they don’t, then we have to do it again. The government regulators, they must have been well-intentioned but sleepy.

The idea that they could all be Looking Out For Number One, and also somewhat well-intentioned, just doesn’t even enter the realm of consideration.

The point is, this is ultimately why liberal policies don’t work. They rely on putting “Perfect People” in charge of everything, and when things still don’t work out the thing to do is put “More Perfect People” in charge of the Perfect People.

And to get mad.

How does an adult handle it? Well, funny you should ask. I’m looking at Allahpundit’s column in which he “gulps” that, in light of the disaster involving the BP oil spill, 51% now oppose new offshore drilling…

Opposing Offshore DrillingIt’s a poll of adults, not registered or likely voters, but there’s no reason to doubt the trend. A Gallup poll taken last week showed a double-digit reversal in just two months between whether energy production or the environment should be a higher priority for America. A Quinnipiac poll from mid-May showed 53 percent support for continuing offshore drilling, but that was before “top kill” failed. Now, per CBS, the majority is pointing the other way.

And I don’t see what all the gulping is about. Offshore drilling is becoming increasingly unpopular; of course it is, I’d be wondering about peoples’ sanity if it were not.

My grown-up take on it is this: Lots of people say offshore drilling is too risky, so fine. Move the drilling inland. Drill on land. Open the Bakken, open ANWR. Any environmentalists get in the way, show ’em a picture of an oil-covered pelican from the Gulf, then kick ’em out of the way just like “The Rock” Obama. Maybe give ’em a taste of their own medicine: “Oh if you get in my way you must want more dead birds,” something like that. Can’t say they don’t have it comin’.

A majority of respondents, a growing one, agrees with this approach right? Off shore drilling is too dangerous. Let’s do the environmentally conscientious thing, tell the environmentalists to get lost, and drill on land where we can manage whatever mishaps take place.

Then we don’t have to worry about getting mad. We don’t have to worry about getting even. We don’t have to put “perfect” people in charge of things or wonder about what their intentions are.

Unless I’m missing something here?

John Wooden, R.I.P.

Friday, June 4th, 2010

John Hawkins has collected some quotes from the coach. He had put ’em up when Wooden’s exit was merely a rumor; at this hour, it is established fact.

My kinda fella.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

You can do more good by being good than any other way.

Discipline yourself and others won’t need to.

That first one just digs in to the crux of this post of ours, which blogger friend Buck didn’t like. Since Coach Wooden managed to say in just a few words what we awkwardly stammered out over the course of hundreds, we think he would’ve had a better appreciation for what we were trying to say.

Character, reputation. One’s internal, one’s external. Character can survive just fine without the reputation to go with it, but a good reputation isn’t worth a damn without the character to back it up.

Cash, Clunkers, Clunker

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Cash for ClunkersCoyote Blog (hat tip to Gerard once again):

…I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program: it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be. Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate. But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.
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The dotted line simply averages the sales for the month of the clunkers program and the month after. I think it is pretty clear that we spent a few billion dollars making some used car owners happy (by overpaying for their vehicles) but did absolutely nothing to move the trend line in auto sales, as the program appears to have just pulled forward purchases rather than stimulated new ones.

Update: I took the liberty of zooming in and accentuating the visual, to really help get the point across.

Now then. Can we please stop arguing about this stuff that doesn’t work. It’s been given a more-than-fair shot, again and again and again and again and again and again. How many more times do we have to keep doing this; at some point you have to wake up and smell the coffee.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Winston Churchill

Adjust Your Privacy Settings

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Meh heh.

Thanks to KC.

Auto Play

Friday, June 4th, 2010

I’ve had some harsh words for bloggers who embed objects on their pages that auto-play. Some of those harsh words have made it in here somewhere, I think; although most have not, since I figure they’ll reap the rewards of annoying their readers.

Well, it seems now we’re doing it. The video embed for our Memorial Day weekend post is playing a short advertisement. It happens when you bring up our page, not when you hit the play button. This is not cool.

Yanking the video wouldn’t be cool either. We’ve checked around, and it seems every other blog embedding the code is having the same problem right now. We’ve looked for the same video hosted at a different site, and haven’t come up with anything.

The content itself is really quite priceless, not in a “ha ha” way. It provokes good healthy thinking all year ’round. To put some advertisement in, is in our minds fair. We disapprove of the auto-play. And so we have opted to allow the post to scroll off the page naturally, in the meantime hoping the video host will come to his senses, or that we find an alternative hosting. In the meantime, we’re the reason your computer is making noises. It’s not spyware, it’s us. Given time it’ll go away.

And it’s not our normal practice by any means.

Thatisall.

Update: No it isn’t, I decided to grow a pair & pull it. If you want to see the clip, you can go chasing the links.

Of course our fallen should be honored and we should never forget their sacrifice, but in these early, wild-frontier days of the innerwebs we still live in a somewhat pristine world — compared to the way it’s gonna get during future generations. And I just think when you load a page into your browser, or hit refresh, that by itself should not cause it to make noise. It isn’t right.

If there’s a consensus about this, my hope is it says not only am I correct about this, but it’s a little silly for me to go typing the words in & taking up space with ’em. It’s one of those things that should just be obvious. People like to read blogs, in the middle of the night. In teeny tiny apartments, with paper-thin walls, with their spouses & kids sleeping. So this needs to be a firm line that won’t budge.

One Hundred Things That Don’t Make You a Better Person

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I’m just on the light side of 44 now, and in a flash of insight I lately realized that nearly all of the things that have infuriated me beyond all reason…or simply irritated me mildly…have been done by people anxious to prove they’re wonderful. If only people weren’t so desperate to find new ways to prove their wonderfulness, my disposition would be considerably sweetened and I’d probably have a lot more years ahead of me on terra firma right about now.

Those people did these things to define themselves as wonderful people, because they assumed these empty rituals would get it done. How do we convince them this is not the case? Here’s where my flash of insight went off. Maybe…just maybe…they assumed this because nobody ever took the time to tell them any differently.

Okay. Well, I’m telling you differently. Right now. These things do not make you a better person, and if you think they do, you’re wrong.

Raising a child makes you a better person. Conquering a deeply-held fear, or learning a new talent, makes you a better person. Helping out in a soup kitchen, exercising in the morning, holding the door open for a good-looking lady — these things make you a better person.

The following things do not…repeat NOT…make you a better person. They do not change the outcome…except for a few of them, in which case, they change it for the worse. Let’s just get that one thing clear. Word needs to get out, you cannot improve yourself by doing any of these things.

1. Outlawing capital punishment
2. Banning guns
3. Sitting down to talk to our enemies
4. Unplugging the coffee pot after it is done making coffee
5. Unplugging the cell phone when it’s done recharging
6. Inventing new “civil rights” like, for example, someone can use the opposite-gender restroom when they’re a pre- or post-op tranny
7. Taking the convict’s unpleasant upbringing into account during the sentencing
8. Paying more taxes, opposing tax cuts or supporting tax increases
9. Taking the blame for a conflict in which the other party is clearly in the wrong
10. Forgiving someone for the mistake that killed your friend or family member
11. Apologizing for things you fully intend to do again
12. Buying things for your kids, indulging your kids, becoming your own kids’ “best friend”
13. Looking for the union label
14. Knowing who got kicked off American Idol last night
15. Avoiding generalizations
16. Being technologically ignorant, “not knowing a single thing about com-pyoo-ters”
17. Knowing other, non-English, languages
18. Telling jokes
19. Talking smack about Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Neal Boortz, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Laura Schlessinger, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, Tony Snow, Glenn Beck, Oliver North, Ted Olson, Ted Nugent, Laura Bush, Pamela Geller, Mary Katherine Ham, James O’Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, Dan Riehl, Cassy Chesser, Victor Davis Hanson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, et al.
20. Raising awareness of…whatever
21. Audibly itemizing your husband’s faults to your friends
22. Refusing to bring him a beer
23. Owning a li’l tiny purse-dog
24. Taking sides when your friends are getting a divorce
25. Recycling
26. Driving a hybrid, or converting your car to burn vegetable oil
27. “Totally-respecting” someone/something
28. Believing & repeating every crackpot theory about your kid’s supposed “learning disability”
29. Laughing at jokes you don’t find funny
30. Telling a pretty girl she’s pretty (she already knows, you’re probably creeping her out)
31. Calling them “undocumented immigrants”
32. Siding with the underdog
33. Calling corporations greedy
34. Speaking in an unnaturally high voice (when you’re a man)
35. Crying during a movie
36. Siding with the majority, doing what lots of other people are doing, or showing “solidarity”
37. Removing “In God We Trust” from our nation’s money
38. Supporting an expanded welfare state
39. Getting married
40. Going to church
41. Living under socialized medicine
42. Denouncing the tea parties for being “too white”
43. Demonstrating
44. Playing the lottery
45. Putting a green burial in your will
46. Remaining childless
47. Converting the faithful to atheism
48. Watching “Sex in the City,” or living the lifestyle
49. Getting a grant for “art” paintings or sculptures
50. Forcing your guests to remove their shoes before they come into your home
51. Going vegan
52. Blocking Hooters from opening a restaurant in your neighborhood
53. Giving money to a panhandler
54. Trapping an insect in a glass, carrying it outside, and releasing it as opposed to flattening it
55. Approving a home loan for borrowers who cannot maintain it
56. Sustaining an affirmative-action quota in hiring, contracting or enrollment
57. Wearing something cute
58. Voting for or hiring someone who’s black, Hispanic, handicapped, Native-American or female
59. “Preserving a woman’s right to choose”
60. Not-waterboarding; just feed ’em three times a day and nicely wait for ’em to feel like talking
61. Getting a tattoo
62. Decorating your living room with African or Native-American artwork
63. Carving a “tofurkey” during Thanksgiving
64. Greening your parents
65. Filing a sex-discrimination or weight-discrimination lawsuit…against a place like Hooters
66. Giving your sister/girlfriend some additional encouragement to get a divorce from her husband
67. Dumping more rumors on the Internet about Sarah Palin or Nikki Haley
68. Banning score-keeping during a kid’s soccer game
69. Using hemp products
70. Buying condoms for your kid because he/she is “gonna do it anyway”
71. Legally changing your middle name to “Hussein”
72. Forcing little boys to play with dolls
73. Pushing young girls to enroll in computer science courses they don’t really want to take
74. Wearing a ponytail (men)
75. Going to a gay wedding
76. Enabling a co-dependent
77. Providing a soft shoulder for your “girlfriend” to cry on, with her latest high-drama pity-fit she got from dealing with her OTHER boyfriend
78. Raising your own grandchildren, while your children go out and make more grandchildren
79. Protesting war. It isn’t just hanging around because some people think it’s a swell idea, ya know
80. “Tarting up” your eight-year-old for an on-stage performance — sick, sick, sick
81. Changing lanes without signaling; you aren’t brave, you don’t look brave, you’re actually a fool
82. Boycotting Arizona
83. Supporting a needle exchange program
84. Requiring privately-owned restaurants to allow breast-feeding
85. Raising the minimum wage
86. Supporting wholesale energy price controls
87. Supporting rent controls
88. Supporting a higher capital gains tax
89. Supporting the death tax
90. Using an iPad
91. Using an iPod
92. Sending over a hundred text messages a day to your friends
93. L-O-U-D-L-Y recognizing your friends in a coffee shop, like a cannon going off, so no one within earshot can think about anything else
94. Giving birth at home
95. Getting married in the nude
96. Telling BP to “Plug The Damn Hole!”
97. Teaching your kids all about “conflict resolution”
98. Just about anything you can do to “preserve a child’s self-esteem”
99. Using a cloth grocery bag
100. Doing things the way they do them in Europe

Anyone who does any of these things, or has ever done these things, or has ever thought about doing any of these things (for the purpose of proclaiming your inner personal wonderfulness) — I have a question for you. Why are you feeling un-fulfilled? Why are you going through these empty rituals? Why are you trying to earn the adoration of strangers you will never ever meet again, effectively asking them to adjudicate your worthiness as an individual?

This is a serious problem, although it doesn’t explain all of the serious mistakes made in recent human history. Just the huge ones, maybe.

One other question: What is the nature of this wonderfulness you’re trying to prove? Is it absolute or is it relative? By which I mean, are you asking to be graded on a curve?

There are amazing, vast quantities of energy going into this “proof.” It’s probably way overdue to ask such a question.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Centralizers and Decentralizers == Architects and Medicators?

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Boortz links to Reason:

The coming battle over President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick to the top spot at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is, like the health care reform debate before it, a struggle between centralizers and decentralizers. Indeed, Berwick is an almost prototypical centralizer. In particular, he has repeatedly expressed fondness for Britain’s NICE, which does cost-benefit analysis for the country’s government-run health care system (ie: rationing).

Reason, as you can see, links to its own archives from about five days previous:

The American health care debate occurs primarily between two factions: On one side are the centralizers. They prize equality of care and access, and believe that, to the extent possible, health risks should be spread proportionally amongst the populace. They argue that health care is sufficiently complex that most individuals cannot make decisions for themselves. And they say that the responsibility for making tough decisions about how to keep health care costs under control ought to be made by enlightened, well-intentioned policy elites.

On the other side are the decentralizers. This faction prizes the subjective preferences of individuals, and takes the line that centralized decision making does not account for individual variations in responses to care, and is a poor substitute for local, personal knowledge. Further, they argue that artificially redistributing risk obscures the true cost of care, and inevitably—and uncontrollably—drives up prices and spending.

Centralizers end up sacrificing everything for this equality. Whether their ego is festooned to the concept and they cling to it until the bitter end, as the centralized capabilities plummet, plummet, and plummet some more; or, if they indulge in some kind of reckoning before any of it gets underway, and consciously acknowledge equality is the supreme virtue — I’ve never been able to figure this out about them.

I can’t find a nurse to fluff my pillow, that’s quite alright. I can’t find a nurse to fluff my pillow and you can — oh dear, some new previously-undiscovered “human right” has just been violated. We have some inequality. Can’t have that!

Looks like Architects and Medicators to me. Medicators are fixated on what other people have, whereas Architects consider such a matter to be almost entirely irrelevant. Architects want to hone a personal skill and then see to it that their personal fortune, for good or ill, is inextricably intertwined with that skill. Their projects are localized and cordoned off by means of some kind of perimeter. They want to tape a 48″ x 36″ vellum to a board, and spend a few weeks concerned only with those few square inches, and nothing outside of that space.

Medicators want security. Not so much a high standard of living, but lots and lots of assurance. They want consistency, none of this “fat times lean times” stuff. And they’re inherently controlling and jealous, so this preference toward centralization ends up being a natural one. They don’t see project perimeters, they don’t see connections between projects and the persons who own them. Everything, even a task as personal as raising a child, “takes a village.”

I submit that the centralizers are simply Medicators who are doing what makes sense in their world. None of us are really specializing in anything, we’re more like a crew on a great big spaceship…a crew without any positions or ranks. And so it just makes sense that all the resources have to be put in a great big pot.

Except someone has to watch the pot. And so their model ultimately defeats itself, because oopsie, now we have to have some superiority, some ranking, some specialty. Someone has to say yea & nay as the resources are distributed from the pot.

And so when an Architect votes, he votes for a clone of himself who has the time to go to City Hall, or the Board of Supes, or the Capitol, that he does not have. Someone who is likely, the likelier the better, to make the very same decisions he would make if only he had the time to be there. And the outcome of these decisions would be positive.

When a Medicator votes, he votes for someone who is not a clone of himself. He looks for someone much, much better; a superhuman; a demigod. And the decisions this demigod would make? They would not necessarily be the decisions the Medicator would make — instead, they would be the decisions found pleasing to nameless, faceless, anonymous strangers. And the outcome? Who cares about that, what is important is that the decisions would be found favorable. To…somebody.

You Can’t Cite the Spill as Evidence That Big Government Works Well

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Jim Geraghty, National Review Online:

President Obama, speaking in Pittsburgh, today:

But I also understand that throughout our nation’s history, we have balanced the threat of overreaching government with the dangers of unfettered markets. We’ve provided a basic safety net — because any one of us might experience hardship at some time in our lives, and may need some help getting back on our feet. And we have recognized that there have been times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.

Not on that list: Fix a leaking drill hole in the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s how we have railroads and highways; public schools and police forces. That’s how we’ve made possible scientific research that’s led to medical breakthroughs like the vaccine for hepatitis B and technological wonders like GPS. That’s how we have Social Security, a minimum wage, and laws to protect the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. That’s how we have rules to ensure that mines are safe and that oil companies pay for the spills they cause.

Except that recent months have shown big government to be asleep at the switch on those fronts. The other side of the aisle keeps arguing that we need bigger and more expensive government, but it never seems to be all that much better; we find federal employees accepting gifts from those they regulate and watching pornography at work, taking all of five minutes to approve last-minute equipment design changes, going whitewater rafting with their wives as part of “official business,” EPA administrators making plans to attend Democratic fundraisers, etc.

Citing the oil spill while making the case for a more expansive and more powerful government doesn’t require the audacity of hope, just audacity.

How come it’s so rare that I hear that word “greed” attached to government? What is the mentality at work here, that relies on the premise that this is a purely private-sector concept? Is it a personal bias or is it just laziness?

“It Was Ended, as Most of These Are, by a Man With a Gun”

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Kevin at Smallest Minority is picking on the Brits, and they deserve it.

Taxi driver Derrick Bird got into his cab with a .22 rifle and a shotgun, and went on a shooting spree in Cumbria, England. He killed twelve and wounded another 25 before offing himself.

His rampage lasted three and a half hours.

It was ended, as most of these are, by a man with a gun. In this case, himself, once he’d decided he was done preying on a defenseless victim pool.

England has been on a long death-by-a-thousand-cuts path to complete disarmament since the 1930’s. The last two “turn ’em all in” bans came in 1987 after Michael Ryan took an AK-47 clone, an M1 Carbine and a semi-automatic pistol on a shooting spree in Hungerford, killing sixteen before he offed himself. The result of that was a ban on all semi-automatic and pump-action rifles larger than .22 rimfire caliber.

The British public was told it would make them safer.

When you think about it, it’s really almost impossible for these things to end any other way isn’t it? The gunman could have some kind of a seizure or he could run out of ammo. Oh I suppose a police negotiator could soothe the gunman’s disposition from a great distance through an amplified megaphone.

Other than those three things, there really cannot be an end to it that doesn’t involve someone packing heat.

ObamaCare’s Ever-Rising Price Tag

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Karl Rove:

White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod argued earlier this year that health-care reform would become more popular after it passed, boosting Democrats in the midterm elections. “We have to go out and sell it,” he told the National Journal, adding in an interview in Newsweek that “people [will] see the benefits that accrue to them.”

That’s not quite how it has worked out. ObamaCare is becoming more, not less, unpopular. The Rasmussen poll reported the week after health reform’s passage in March that 55% of likely voters supported its repeal while 42% did not. A Rasmussen poll last month showed that 56% backed repeal; 39% did not.
:
Finding it hard to cover costs under the bill’s formulas…doctors [will] refuse new patients and one out of every six hospitals and nursing homes could start operating in the red. And while Medicaid would cover 16 million more people, there might not be enough doctors to treat them.
:
October will see the first round of Medicare cuts. Up to half of seniors will lose their Medicare Advantage coverage (a program that allows seniors to receive additional services through a private health plan), or at least some of their benefits under this program. Watch for the administration to try to keep companies from notifying their customers of benefit cuts or premium increases before the election.
:
Then there are employers and their workers. According to a survey by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm, 88% of companies plan to pass on increased health-care benefit costs to employees, 74% plan to reduce benefits, and up to 12% will drop all coverage for employees. Retirees won’t fare well either: 43% of employers that now provide retiree medical benefits are likely to reduce or eliminate them thanks to the new health legislation.

Of course, Mr. Rove may very well be wrong. The President might be right. We might be looking at a new government program that was designed to make things more affordable. And that has succeeded in this effort.

For, as I have said repeatedly, the very first time in modern American history.

The analyses…the polls…the logic…the third-grade math…history…might all be wrong.

Wouldn’t bet on it.

What Your Email Says About Your Computer Skills

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Thing I Know #76. Old married people who share an e-mail address, just like they’re used to sharing a real mailbox, can’t be reached by e-mail. Not really.

Win by Too Much and You Lose by Default

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

National Post, Canada:

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Kevin Cappon said he first heard about the rule on May 20 — right after he had scored his team’s last allowable goal. His team then tossed the ball around for fear of losing the game…

Too much effort goin’ on out there, we gots ta cut down on all that effort goin’ on out there. People tryin’ too hard.

Not enough goofing-off happening.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.