I like metaphors, which is why when I caught sight of someone using a rifle metaphor to describe government, I lost no time in linking to it. I recall back when this anxious nation was first pondering Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as “Stimulus,” I used a metaphor to explain why it would collapse into a risible pile of silliness and become a legislative blight. Which is exactly what happened, of course. At this point you’re looking at the date and saying: Freeberg, you must need special underwear to haul those things around! And you must be one smart puppy, too!

Well if I do have big balls of solid rock and I’m smarter than the average bear, I would argue this was not very solid proof of it. Kind of an easy call. I didn’t even call it, really; the whole story about the shipwrecked sailor and the old fisherman with the three daughters, was more of a writing exercise than anything else. People read my stuff and say “Freeberg, you need to leave more things unexpressed and unexplained. This would have been a lot more fun to read if you left some points unstated and forced the reader to figure it out.” I obliged, and I must say it turned out to be a success. People do seem to appreciate the story, a lot, probably more than they would’ve if I followed my usual custom, explaining everything.

For those who might have read it and didn’t get it: The moral is that we often pretend there is a great mystery surrounding how things are going to turn out, when deep down we understand this is not the case. History is very often unkind and disagreeable to logic, and logic is very often unkind and disagreeable to history. But in cases where the two happen to agree with each other, and rhetoric says something contrary, we really shouldn’t be arguing about the rhetoric being wrong. We already know that it is. That’s why I say, when I went on record with my thoughts that the Stimulus would be a boondoggle, it wasn’t exactly going on on a limb.

And yet, people continue to pretend things have the potential to produce good results, when they really don’t. Some day, I must find a way to make some money off of it.

This rifle metaphor about government compels me to think of a way to point out how all of our arguing is essentially predetermined. Any time our friends on the left decide they do not like something, every single move after that, by them and by everybody else, has already been cast in stone. And I can show how this is the case, easily if I can just think of something that will remove the emotionalism, something that has not yet been subjected to this. Rifles, of course, don’t fit that requirement so let’s use, instead, marijuana. Ha! No, that’s not going to work. Tobacco? Cheeseburgers? Coffee?

Grapes. Yes, grapes are good for you, although other things are just as good for you, and as of this particular writing they aren’t admired or derided by either the political right or the political left. They cost a nominal amount of money, are ideologically neutral, and people are still eating them. So grapes it is. Let us suppose, for sake of argument, and for reasons unexplained since they aren’t material to the exercise, our friends on the left wake up one morning and decide they don’t like grapes. Just like they don’t like tobacco or capitalism or carbon, they don’t like grapes.

Conservatives would decide on the spot, of course, that grapes are the most wonderful thing ever invented by God or man. Logic says this would happen, and history agrees. So that is my first point; if liberals become galvanized around some sentiment, conservatives will become galvanized around its opposite, and vice-versa. We need not debate whether or how surely it would happen, since we know it would.

Liberals would move, in all sorts of directions, at all sorts of levels of government, across generations, to cleanse the human condition of this loathsome agricultural product called the grape. We would not have to wait long before some Supreme Court decision was handed down about grapes, and sooner or later there would be a wild summer filled with speech-making about the grape decision. If it’s an even-numbered year, that year’s November election would be a referendum on the decision. And from then on, every time a justice retired from the Supreme Court, democrat senators would surround the replacement candidate, horseshoe-style, to interrogate the aspiring judge on whether he put any stock in this ridiculous notion that Americans have a constitutional right to eat grapes.

Again: Logic says it would happen and so does history. If the rhetoric says something contrary, rhetoric is wrong.

America will not tolerate what liberals would want to do, which is to outlaw grapes, and the liberals in charge of advancing the liberal movement are going to be smart enough to anticipate this. See, when liberals are acting to make a stronger future for their political movement, as opposed to a stronger future for the nation, they become surprisingly much more skilled at anticipating consequences. So they would not move to ban grapes from being grown, imported, exported, bought, sold, possessed or consumed.

But history insists that if there’s one thing liberal politicians like to do more than anything else, it is to manipulate Archimedean levers of power over the private transactions of supposedly-free people, to demonstrate to their liberal supporters that they have good liberal intentions so that they can grab some vital liberal votes. Logic agrees that they have no reason to stop doing this at all. So history and logic agree, again, that the liberal politicians will pass “sin” taxes on grapes. They’ll pass them in the county and they’ll pass them in the city. They’ll pass them at the state level and oh, boy, you had better believe the feds will join the party too.

History and logic also say the liberal politicians will use the proceeds of these sin taxes to do something to discourage the eating of grapes. It will probably have something to do with funding “research” to figure out if grapes are bad for you. History and logic say that when the research is done, the answer that will be produced by the research will be in the affirmative, yes, grapes are absolute poison. The science will be settled. Actually, the conclusion will, of course, have been reached before any of the “research” took place; the gathering of the data, and anything that was done with the data, were all just obligatory hoop-jumping exercises, with the conclusion having already been reached.

At this point, I should pause to pass on an important message from the Muse of Logic: She wishes to clarify that she is smiling only on the idea that these things will take place, not that they should. Important distinction to be made.

History and logic agree that a new hustle-and-bustle of government activity will now come to be dependent on this new grape tax. History and logic agree that the price of grapes will skyrocket. History and logic agree that the consumption of grapes will plummet.

History and logic agree that, because of all this, the city, county, state and federal government budgets will become emaciated. Big, bloated new programs depending on a revenue stream that is no longer there. Unavoidable.

History and logic agree that the position of conservative politicians will be that we’ve made mistakes and should reverse them. History and logic agree that the position of liberal politicians will be that, with a revenue shortfall, taxes are going to have to be raised on the very rich. They can’t find anything to cut, anywhere, except maybe the military.

History and logic agree that our “moderates” will dish out a bunch of pablum about “I’m neither conservative nor liberal, I’m middle-of-the-road…” and then they’ll come down on the side of the liberals. Repealing a program, after all, sounds just so extremist. And so, onward we’ll go, being more polarized and more divided, with a bigger more expensive and more insolvent government, adding more and more at all levels to a debt situation that explodes, in slow motion, out of control.

Logic hastens to add, once again, that she finds favor only in the notion that these things will happen. Not that they should.

Parables with metaphors in them are, ultimately, lessons in how a familiar situation looks from a different perspective. The metaphor exists to remove the emotionalism, so people can think about the vital elements more clearly. Morals of such parables often come in two parts: Observations about what is really going on, which are hopefully greater than what people typically realize about them before the parable is told, and suggestions about how they should be handled, which are somewhat different from how the situation is typically handled.

I can leave the moral of this one unmentioned, too, right?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

An apt metaphor:

I’ve noticed the phrase “antipathy for government” being used a few times, specifically in reference to a particular Republican sideshow candidate. And I think we should take a moment to discuss what exactly libertarian-ey folks–and the politicians trying to court them–think about government and its proper role.

I don’t hate government. If I did, I’d be an anarchist, not a libertarian. I’m about ninety percent sure we need some amount of government, and about ninety percent sure we need taxes to support that government.

The thing is, a government is like a rifle: there are certain tasks for which no other tool will do. There are certain tasks you can do with other tools, but the rifle does them better if used with care, so using it is wise. But there’s a world of tasks out there that it’s terrible for, and trying to use it for those purposes will end up breaking the thing you want to fix and catching your neighbors in the stray fire. So you keep careful track of where you point the thing, and keep your finger off the damn trigger.

So I don’t hate government any more than I hate rifles, but I respect the damage both can do, and insist on keeping strict muzzle and trigger discipline. When you’ve built a government with a hundred-thousand employee strong bureau dedicated to regulating every aspect of agriculture and food, with an attitude of such pervasive, granular control that it thinks nothing of creating a “Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force” to “strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States”, you’re waving your damn rifle around with your booger-hook on the bang-switch, and other people on the firing line are right to be concerned.

I would add: The way we use government is actually much worse than this. For some reason, after we go through our election cycles and everyone’s been forced to sacrifice something in the fine art of compromise, and presumably the extremists on both sides have had to sacrifice the most so that we can find a sensible moderate approach behind which we can unify and proceed forward — over the long term, the way we end up growing the government is pretty close to what the most extremist, statist-minded left-wingers want. And when we discharge a projectile from this rifle in an effort to solve a particular problem, seems to me our subsequent actions are not very much affected by whether or not that discharge was a hit or a miss. Apart from the obvious, that is: If it’s a miss, we’re going to keep firing.

There’s unfortunately even more to add on. Government does not fire at a target, miss, and try again. Every time the weapon is discharged, what our government is doing is “legislating” that a round will be fired at such-and-such a direction every year from now until the end of time. In other words, if another bullet is fired in some different direction, with the intent of hitting exactly the same target, and that one is a hit, our government doesn’t have the inclination or the incentive or the track record of going back and saying “Okay, the target is over there…so that legislation obliging us to fire in this direction, to hit that target, is wrong. No need to argue this point, it’s an established fact. We need to repeal that legislation and stop firing over here.” Can’t do that. Because the bad legislation is “law,” you see. It’s also a jobs program.

Pointing these things out, is not “hate.”

As usual, tellin’ it like it is:

…[L]ike every other American, I was delighted when our State Department was able to bribe Iran to release the two hikers, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, but that initial euphoria only lasted until their plane landed, and Bauer’s first words were: “Two years in prison is too long,” adding that he hoped that their release, “will also bring freedom for political prisoners in America and Iran.”

It was at that point I decided I needed to find out more about these two nature lovers who couldn’t find a more benign place for a stroll than the bleak Iraq-Iran border.

Inasmuch as this jerk felt compelled to find a moral equivalency between the country that had tossed his sorry ass in prison and the country that had spent a great deal of time, effort and money, to gain his release, I wasn’t shocked to discover that Bauer is a freelance journalist for the San Francisco-based, far leftwing New America Media; that Fattal describes himself as an environmental activist; and that Bauer’s fiancé and fellow hiker, Sharon Shourd, who had been released a year earlier, is a member of Just Cause, an Oakland-based group that favors racial reparations, continues to oppose white colonialism decades after it ended, and even, ironically enough, finds nice things to say about Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

In a word, this nation has moved mountains in order to obtain the freedom of three typically ungrateful, brain-dead, Berkeleyites.

I sincerely hope that after their upcoming wedding, Shane and Sharon Bauer, along with best man Josh Fattal, spend the honeymoon taking a hike.

Speaking of Iran, something just went boom, and some are speculating the blast was caused by an attempt to mount a nuclear warhead onto a missile. That would have to be filed as a very bad thing.

This particular match-up has always held some fascination for me. It’s a food-chain juxtaposition turned upside-down.

Guess I’m just weird like this. You walk up to me and say “Hey, Morgan K. Freeberg! Let’s start up a whole separate society and make sure it doesn’t allow any pursuit of profit, has no respect for right to property, and makes no effort to have any law and order!” I’d say…well…if you do that, I expect you’d end up with some shithole stacked high with a bunch of people who don’t have anything, or can’t hang on to what they have, a lot of squatting, bullying, and no law-n-order.

So I’m watching that video (by the way, I’m peeling off with these obscenities as kind of a warning, the video’s language is not office- or family-friendly) thinking…uh, Einstein? Where’s the big surprise?

We still do not know what “middle age” is, for a blog. We know we’ve been around long enough to see some respectable compatriots clock-out, in the sense that they decided blogging was not for them. We notice that, among the ones who are left, many are doing it the way we’re doing it, with our credo of “this is a scrapbook and not a billboard.” That takes some meaning out of our seven candles, I suppose; can’t crow about your success if there never was a possibility of failure in the first place. But still & all, that’s not entirely true. We’ve been lucky enough not to fail any job interviews (to our knowledge) because of blog content, or drop the blog as a condition of taking a job in the first place, or lose the whole thing due to some disastrous database crash. I suppose that’s something. But if that’s a success, we owe much of it to Terry Trippany who started out as a fan, and then became a fan urging us to move off Blogger to WordPress, and then collaborated on the technical details with us, helping move data around, even hosting us for a couple of years.

Time for the blog to get some reading glasses? False teeth? Red Corvette? Prostate exam? We’ve no idea. There are some blogs older than us; but not by much, and fewer than there used to be.

How does a blog succumb to the passage of time, if its owner does not? Perhaps the future that has yet to unfold, will provide an answer. Perhaps it won’t.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

I disagree with our current President on a number of things, on that much I am sure, but I have some uncertainties about His mental stability when I read about situations like this:

The White House on Friday rejected House Republicans’ subpoena for all internal communications related to the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, instead providing 135 pages of documents that administration officials say meet the “legitimate oversight interests” of congressional investigators.

In a letter to top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee Friday, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said the documents “do not contain evidence of favoritism to political supporters or any wrongdoing by the White House in connection with the Solyndra loan guarantee.”

Solyndra, a California solar panel maker that received the $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee in 2009, filed for bakruptcy [sic] in September. The GOP has pounced on the Solyndra bankruptcy, raising questions about the administration’s green agenda.

An administration official said the documents offer little new insight into the loan guarantee to the failed solar panel maker.

“The Bottom line: No news here. It’s the same stuff you’ve seen before,” the administration officials said. “There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
:
The White House withheld about a dozen pages of documents related to the restructuring of the loan guarantee “because of the deliberative nature of the communications.” Ruemmler offered to make the documents available to committee staff for review.

Just weird. This “I’ll just pontificate voluminously about your many personal shortcomings that become obvious when you ask me this question” thing. Weird, weird, triple-grade-A weird, and no I’m not likely to downgrade that rating any time soon. It permeates this administration and it’s obvious it’s a case of the fish rotting from the head down. Typical spoiled brat baby boomer bullshit. Someone got spoiled, someone was never, ever asked by His mother and stepfather what He was doing with a stolen cookie in His hand and a shattered clay jar at His feet. And now, anytime He’s asked a question He doesn’t want to answer, it automatically means something is wrong with the person asking it. Really? What if it was, say, four years ago and it was President George Bush getting embarrassed over Solyndra…anyone want to promise me it wouldn’t be a junior senator from Illinois leading the charge to force the White House to show what it’s been up to?

Well, not leading. Sonorously intoning a bunch of hubbub about “transparency” and “responsibility.” Make no mistake, let me be clear. That wouldn’t happen? Seriously?

But what really worries me is the act of withholding the twelve pages that are “deliberative” in “nature.” The White House offers to disclose them in committee. The other 135 pages, it has released, and these 12 it’s going to sit on. Not a word is mentioned about the particular sensitivity of the twelve pages, let alone why any such sensitivity would exist.

There are only two possibilities here: The twelve pages reveal something the White House would just as soon not become public knowledge, for some reason, or there’s nothing particularly special about the twelve pages, and withholding some little tidbit is a crucial and non-expendable part of Barack Obama’s way of “disclosing” things. Just His passive-aggressive, childlike little way of saying “fuck you.”

You know what’s kinda freakin’ me out here? I’m not ready to eliminate either one of those. There could very well be something in the twelve pages, since you have to parse what Obama says very, very finely. Bill Clinton, backed into a corner, famously began to split hairs over the meaning of the word “is.” President Obama has clearly borrowed a page from that book. Maybe even twelve pages.

On the other hand, I can’t think back on any occasion, not a single one for the last three or four years, in which Obama was prevailed upon to disclose something He did not originally see fit to disclose, and just plain went ahead & did it. Has He ever driven a car? What happens when a cop pulls Him over and asks to see His driver’s license, registration and proof of coverage? Does He just produce the documents like the rest of us do? If He does, then in doing so, He displays a behavior I’ve not seen Him display in any public setting in any of the long years since I became aware of Him, in spite of the many opportunities made available for Him to do so. Always, always, always some line is drawn somewhere. And there’s always a thick wall of sound bites dispensed about the many personal things that are wrong with whoever is asking to see it.

It has the look of a mental malady. This need to say “I’ll show you this, but I’ve made a unilateral decision to sit on this other thing, over here. And oh, by the way, you should not be asking to see anything at all.” In fact, this situation itself is even more preposterous than usual. Barack Obama is essentially deciding that the committee should review 135 pages instead of 147 pages, because at some point between pages 136 and 147 the situation starts to become intolerable, might bore the members of the committee, and will certainly waste the committee’s time. Up to that point, on the other hand, the situation’s kinda sorta okay, just a little irritating. He’s essentially saying “Here’s a sub-selection for you to review, since we pointedly refuse to turn over the whole thing because you guys are a bunch of poopie-heads. As you can see, there’s nothing here. That makes you even bigger poopie-heads, for asking in the first place.”

You know, these two possibilities that may explain this? I still can’t think of any third one; but the two are not mutually exclusive. Both may apply.

I recall the winter between 2002 and 2003, when Congress demanded to see documents that would support President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. I’m trying to envision what would happen if that president responded the way this president is responding to the Solyndra subpoena. This effort to envision that alternative timeline, is proving most challenging to me in the details, but not in the generalities.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

From blogger friend Phil.

Update: This, too, is pretty good. Got it from Ace of Spades’ “wall” over on Hello Kitty of Bloggin’.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

The writing is impressive, wonderful in fact.

Old ’60s radicals, now in charge of “mainstream” news, are all “wee-weed up” — to use President Eloquent’s expression — by the OWS tantrums. This new generation’s display of wasted minds gives the aging-hippie brigade a moment to relive their own misspent youth. These “news” people haven’t had this much thrill going up their legs since Barack Obama hip-hopped his way to the presidency on the wings of ‘60s radical hope-dope.

But what do responsible Americans see in the “Occupy” tantrums?

Tea Partiers, of course, see the gross liberal/conservative double standard at work big time. Where Tea Partiers got legal permits and paid tens of thousands of dollars for such things as police presence, traffic coordination, and sanitary necessities like porta-potties, these leftist tantrum-throwers form health-hazard Obamavilles on public property – fee free. The Obamaville squatters disrupt the sleep and threaten the health of close-by residents with their all-hours, out-of-control misdeeds, all the while getting positive press from the aging-hippie chorus in the media.

But I’m mostly just here for the picture. Completely priceless. Bound to come in handy someday often.

Thanks to Facebook pal Cassy.

Thinking some more about what Prelutsky has pointed out about words, and Margot’s conflict with me yesterday: It occurs to me that what we’re looking at, here, is a sort of “Devil’s Toolset” for constructing societal and cultural protocols that don’t work. Changing a perfectly decent descriptive term for an idea, to some other descriptive term, just because the former has taken on a reputation that is unhelpful to getting the idea sold; that is something you only do when you’re trying to sell something that shouldn’t be sold. As for Margot’s complaint, it’s the eternal Left Wing battle cry of “Why can’t you leave me and my friends alone so we can have a private conversation about how everybody should be forced to live?” The plan should be binding, it should apply universally, there should be no way to get around it or even to recoil from it, and if necessary it should restrict how supposedly “free” individuals are able to express and think. But discussions about what exactly the plan should be, will be limited to a select few. In fact, from what I’ve managed to observe about this, a significant portion of the discussion will be devoted to the topic of “Hey! That guy doesn’t belong here!”

Of course that must be the case; you’re only talking about how everyone should live, whether they want to live that way or not. Can’t have any ol’ Tom, Dick and Harry participating in that, actually expressing opinions! Might lead to dancing, or cats and dogs living together, or something.

The Devil’s Toolset has a third item: The Faustian Bargain. We just saw that a couple years ago with ObamaCare. Once you’re in, you can’t get out. Say the resistance to a plan vacillates between 49% and 70%. Just get some commitment event to happen when the resistance is 49%, and it will never matter again that the majority once again disapproves. Very much like fastening a carabiner clip with lots of tension in the line; how hard you have to pull on the line, is irrelevant, just as long as you can manage to get it pulled far enough to click the clip in place. Once it’s fastened it’s fastened. That’s exactly what they just got done doing to us.

And then there’s the ratchet. We could think of this as a serial procession of bargains like what’s described above. For all the contention and drama we saw take place with getting ObamaCare enacted, fast, since everyone knew Obama would lose crucial Senate votes in the midterms coming up — it’s going to be much more difficult than that, getting it repealed. Thus is the case with all liberal initiatives. Not only is it next to impossible to get them repealed, but in a year or two the abnormal becomes the new normal. People become accustomed to it. Which is not to say, by any stretch, that we’re being made stronger by that which doesn’t immediately kill us. Quite the opposite. Safety nets become hammocks, skills atrophy, and worst of all, a hubbub ensues about what needs to be addressed by the next safety net.

Today is Veterans Day. Much will be said about giving thanks for the men and women who fought and died for our freedom. You know, the thought occurs to me: Giving thanks for a gift is pretty easy. Accepting the gift, and making the best use of it possible, is not so easy. Perhaps this grateful nation would do well, this year, to put its attention on both of those things, rather than just one.

Burt Prelutsky makes an interesting point.

One of the amazing things about those on the Left is that they switch words around so often that it’s hard to keep track of what they’re blathering about. People got so upset with ACORN once they discovered that the group was quite happy to help fund a brothel that was going to be populated by underage Guatemalan girls that they insisted that their tax dollars no longer be allocated for their loathsome activities. No problem. ACORN simply changed its name.

When the scandal at East Anglia revolving around scientists destroying evidence that suggested that “global warming” was a hoax came out, Al Gore and his enablers, reluctant to allow their favorite cash cow to be slaughtered, simply started referring to “climate change”.

When American taxpayers finally had enough of Obama and his crew trying to raise taxes during a recession, a move that Senator Obama had insisted was goofy, and a move that helped prolong the Great Depression when FDR did that very thing twice during the 1930s, the liberals simply started referring to taxes as fees and revenues.

When they lose an election, or just start to lose some approval which indicates they might soon be losing an election, you aren’t going to wait very long before hearing one among them lament that the job of communicating the message is not quite yet done. I saw it after Bill Clinton left office and, until the democrats recaptured the Senate with a 51st seat, Republicans took over all of Congress as well as the White House. I saw it when George W. Bush won re-election. I’m sure seeing a lot of it right now. How hard it is to communicate the message; only smart people can understand it, and maybe America is just too stupid. In fact, it often seems to me that part of this liberal “message” is that it makes better sense to try to put out a house fire with gasoline, than to try to put it out with water, as long as you’re recommending the gasoline in a number of different languages. Our progressive friends seem to be endlessly fascinated in the process of communicating ideas but not quite so keen on hanging around long enough to assess whether the ideas turn out to be any good.

And so it’s interesting that they like to change the words around, which essentially hits the reset switch on any process that was underway to get an idea communicated. Either they just like to do it, and aren’t considering the consequences upon the process of idea-communication, or there’s a cynical calculation that has been done somewhere: An altered vocabulary will gain three converts, and alienate one, netting two.

I think it’s the latter. I notice the typical liberal idea will be strongly appealing to the person who has only just recently heard about it, and strongly revolting to the person who is waiting for it to produce positive results. Or to put it more concisely: Liberal ideas are salable to the audience that awards them the benefit of doubt, not to anybody else. Look how many people strongly believe that humans have to “do something” — yesterday! — or else, the ability of the planet to sustain life over the next century, cannot be assured. Now, how do you prove that? We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around going through the motions of using “science,” but while everyone’s acting all science-y, the point is lost that real science is going to have to be dropped like a hot potato, somewhere, before we get to the cool, exciting part: Our great-grandchildren are going to be living in a desert wasteland, like a scene out of a Terminator or Mad Max movie, fighting each other to the death for road kill. And yet that last part is going to have to be included in the message, since in the political realm, it is a vital ingredient. Have to give people a reason to care. But problem: The science does not support it. Solution: Sell it to people who think in terms of “what’s the worst that can happen?” but don’t consciously realize that they think this way. Just make quota. We only need 51 percent.

The battle to get socialism sold has been particularly dizzying. Use that S-word around a liberal and he’ll scold you for using it, insisting that there is some necessary ingredient an economic model must have before it can ever be called socialism by any knowledgeable person. Ask him to define what exactly that necessary ingredient is, and you’ll be pelted with a hailstorm of evasion tactics. None of this would be happening if “socialism” was not a dirty word; and, indeed, it didn’t happen a century ago, when it was not. And so as they continue to try to sell exactly the same product, The Left must become much more picky about how it is described.

So between twenty and forty years ago we tried out this social protocol that never made any sense; it said, if a female got all pissed off at you in the office, for any reason whatsoever, you were gone. Yeah yeah, supposedly if she was a nutcase and just made up lies about you, the system would offer you some superficial construct of something that resembled due process, and if you were innocent you’d be exonerated. But everyone with a brain knew then, and knows now, that it worked out like that about as often as the cops busted the guy who took the radio out of your car. So when the rubber hit the road, any ol’ psychotic bitch could spin any tale she wanted and it would work. Doubly so if you were highly placed and had real authority over people. The archives are not exactly brimming over with stories of such men successfully finding employment elsewhere, so this had a definite career-limiting effect, on the basis of what in who-knows-how-many cases amounted to nothing at all.

Now we’ve got this tiresome mantra being recited ad nauseum, “stick a fork in him, he’s done!” about a promising presidential candidate, because a bunch of nameless virtually-existent women say that back in the 1990’s he did…well…they don’t say what. One of them has revealed herself, after having been delicately walked to the podium by none other than reptilian litigator Gloria Allred, and now we’re supposed to pretend they’ve all done that. So the people with the loudest voices who hand out these rules by which the rest of us are supposed to be living, seem to think we’re still back in the 1990’s. The whole Anita Hill “Woemyn don’t lie about this stuff” thing.

Margot is all pissed off at me, doesn’t want me commenting at her blog anymore and has probably blocked me. I’m thinking I’ll go ahead and accommodate that. I’m on her side with regard to some things, since we’re both parents who object to the media messages being given to our children. But I’ve been victimizing and oppressing her lately, which is to say I have been disagreeing with her. Chapstick put up an ad prominently displaying a woman from an angle Margot did not appreciate, and she protested this; then, someone promoted a Christmas movie with artwork that did not prominently display a woman and she objected to that. I pointed out the obvious dichotomy and was given just some limited number of chances to reform and recant, either to pretend I was in complete agreement or shut my over-privileged male mouth. Well, I just don’t live in that kind of a world. To me, if you’re protesting one thing, and then two weeks later you’re protesting its opposite, that means the point of your protests is to protest. And if someone points it out and your response is “Hey, don’t point that out,” that just proves it all the more. But either way, this is not constructive. It doesn’t empower women. It doesn’t send the message out “Portray women in a dignified way or else not at all”; it sends out the message “Don’t portray women, in any way, because it just isn’t worth the grief and it isn’t worth the trouble.”

Unstable women filing frivolous complaints against the director of the National Restaurant Association, and being given hush money after proving absolutely nothing, then emerging from the woodwork fourteen years later to alter the outcome of a presidential election even when their stories don’t make any sense — that doesn’t empower women either. It certainly doesn’t make life easier for women who are looking for jobs. The message that says is: Keep the bitches at arms’ length if you can’t afford a big payout. Actually, several big payouts.

Wonder Woman in long pants doesn’t empower women. Arguing about Wonder Woman’s costume, while the movie or other creative effort is in development stages, doesn’t empower women. What that does is make it likely the movie will be canceled. It leads to Green Lantern, Batman, Thor, Iron Man, Superman et al making it to the big screen, raking in the bucks, while the Champion of Themyscira gathers dust and languishes. Which means it leads to feminists complaining about the male superheroes getting more attention. Which makes feminists feel satisfied and happy, maybe even a little bit more churlish and full of themselves than usual, but it does not empower women.

Making a commercial, and adhering to a hard-and-fast rule that the wife has to use the right brand of oven cleaner or pain reliever, and the husband has to use Brand X, does not empower women. Making “family comedy” movies in which the dad is the bad guy, who spends way too much time at the office and is missing out on his kids’ soccer games and school plays, and the happy ending is realized only when dad realizes what a colossal doofus and dolt he’s been and resolves to do better — this does not empower women. It makes the real dad wish the family had gone out to do something else, or picked a different movie, it makes the kids feel smug and smarmy and maybe it has the same effect on some of the moms. It causes an exquisite pain in the wallet, once it’s realized that the household shelled out more than a hundred bucks on a medium of entertainment that lasted less than two hours on a weekend. But it isn’t empowering. For anybody. What it is, is boring. Expensive, unfunny and boring.

California sending a great big termagant delegation of frumpy pantsuit-wearing female senators, congresswomen, et al to Washington, to peel off with silly, irrational paranoid things with their big fat mouths, does not empower women. Rationalizing and legitimizing every single snotty, dismissive insult possible against beautiful women running for office, does not empower women. A late night comedian making jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter getting molested, does not empower women. Denying justice to Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, just because Bill Clinton is influential in keeping abortion legal, does not empower women. Normalizing gay marriage does not empower women.

Marlene yelling “Get It Yourself, Bob!” does not empower women.

Showing men that women can decide things, does not necessarily empower women. Showing us that women can do it unilaterally, and that the man’s opinion is ineffectual and irrelevant, does not empower women. Denying men due process does not empower women, and driving them from promising careers on the basis of hearsay does not empower women.

I’ll make it real simple. If it’s something that would give a reasonable man some incentive to say “Yeah, I can live with this” — then it empowers women. If it’s something that would motivate that same reasonable man to shut his mouth, and quietly daydream about going someplace far, far away…maybe daydream about fly-fishing in a mountain stream a mile above sea level…then it does not empower women. Simple as can be. Sure, it would be politically correct to leave it up to the women to say “Yeah, this is good, someone else can co-exist with us when it works this way” — but that wouldn’t make any sense. Who among us can decide whether others can live with us? If you want to see how the Earth looks from the Moon, you’re in a better position to determine this when you’re on the Moon, right? If there’s an open question on the can-live-with and some testing needs to be done, you leave it up to the ones who have to do that living. Leave it up to the dudes.

You may say, “Freeberg, that makes no sense! Going by your rule, female empowerment depends on whether men and women can live together! You’re allowing female empowerment to be decided by the men!”

Or “Freeberg, that’s just wrong! Your rule would say women are not empowered when they refuse to bring their husband a beer! And are empowered if they go ahead and do that!”

Or “Freeberg, you’re whacked in the head! Your rule would say women are not empowering themselves if they boycott a Hooters restaurant opening in their neighborhood, but are empowering themselves if they let it open!”

Or “Freeberg, you silly goose you! What you’re saying is that women can’t acquire power, until & unless they first give some up!”

Or “Freeberg, you’re not living in the real world! You’re saying women cannot be empowered unless men can exist in proximity to them, and still do the things they want to do!”

And……..yup. Yup and yup and yup and yup. Exactly. Women are empowered in such a way that women and men can co-exist with some reasonable expectation of peace and harmony…or else…they aren’t empowered at all.

And no, I’m not saying men should own women, or treat them like pets or playthings or sex slaves. I said reasonable men.

Women are approachable and therefore empowered, or unapproachable and therefore de-powered. Like I said. Simple. This is a bigger issue than females and feminism. Real power has something to do with the desires of people who are outside of the power-pursuit. Real power involves incentives; positive-enforcement. It involves relationships. You aren’t more powerful, in the position you occupy in any social gathering, if the consensus desire is that you should disappear. You can’t decide for yourself “I am powerful” any more than you can decide for yourself “I make a good friend.”

My fiance brought me a beer without my asking when I was halfway through writing this post. Choke on it.

Thanks to my blogger friend in New Mexico for that cool caveman graphic, although it should be stressed the opinions in this particular post are entirely my own.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

The minute I saw it, I knew I had to share it on my Hello Kitty of Blogging page…where I added my thoughts on where the all-powerful prevailing viewpoint is getting us into trouble:

…that everyone who has balls is missing brains, everyone with brains is missing balls, and the brains are more important if we can’t have both.

I’d like to subject all three of those axioms to some challenge, but they don’t let me decide stuff like that.

Seriously, what is life like if our so-called “leaders” have brains, or what passes for brains during Election Day, and are missing their balls? We don’t really need to ask that question because we’re living in that reality right now. Hoping I don’t need to list what I’m talking about; seems pointless…

And what’s life like if we get someone in charge who is commonly thought to be some kind of a dullard, but needs special briefs to haul those things around? I suppose everyone who’s anyone is going to be thinking back to what’s-his-name…and here and there, you can find some isolated pockets of people who thought that was some kind of misery. Your nearest faculty lounge in a high school or college, a Daily KOS thread, Zucotti Park maybe. Well, Real-America had two chances to vote on it, and history says our “prevailing viewpoint” was pretty damn clear on whether it was okay or not.

I think balls are more important than brains. Brains-without-balls has done absolutely nothing for us; that combination has pretty much broken everything, and fixed nothing. I’d say you have to have balls if you have brains, because without balls, the brains provide nothing but marketing cachet for some nameless-faceless-anonymous-busybody man-behind-the-curtain, who probably doesn’t have America’s interests at heart, because if he did, he wouldn’t be behind a curtain. We’ve learned the lesson and that’s what it teaches, time after time.

But no, I don’t think we have to choose.

Good old Fred. Why didn’t we pick him again? Oh yeah…something to do with debates. You know what? I have a fourth axiom for you. These things we call “debates” are toxic to our republic and we need to get rid of them toot-sweet…or else, completely shake ’em up, stem to stern, make them completely different from what they have been in recent years.

This Washington Examiner editorialist does not want a President Herman Cain, no way, no how. But just the same…

But what I find mind-boggling is the reason Bialek gave for revealing, 14 years after the fact, the details of the alleged “sexual harassment.”

“I actually did it because I wanted to help him,” Bialek said in according to a CBSnews.com story. “I wanted to give him a platform to come clean, to tell the truth.”

On one early morning news show, Bialek presumed to chide Cain: “Admit that you acted inappropriately,” she scolded.

Bialek’s claim that Cain “acted inappropriately” is precisely what makes me skeptical about her story.

If true, what Cain did to Bialek isn’t “sexual harassment” or “acting inappropriately.” What Cain did is called a sexual offense, either second, third or fourth degree sexual assault. It’s a crime, possibly a felony, for heaven’s sake.

Here, in essence, is what Bialek is saying: “Hey, Herman, why don’t you cop to committing this felony?”
:
Why didn’t Bialek report what was clearly a sexual assault when it happened, back in 1997? I’m betting her answer will be something like Cain wasn’t running for president then, and a man of that character shouldn’t be president.

Does that mean if a janitor commits a sexual assault, then it’s OK?

What Bialek is doing exactly what Anita Hill did, and that is why she cannot be believed. Remember Anita Hill? She was put in a “hostile work environment,” to which she reacted by…waiting and waiting and waiting some more, and then after she waited long enough, Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court and then she bravely stepped forward. With some information that the Senate might be interested in hearing. Just as an oh-by-the-way.

It’s really the same problem I have with global warming, when the people telling me to worry about it are driving around in cars two, three or more times as big as my car. If it’s really a problem you want me to take seriously, act like it. Neither one of these broads acted like this is a real problem. They are acting & did act, on the other hand, exactly like cash- and fame-crazed divas. Well yeah, I guess that’s not very tactful of me, but hey it’s true. Their behavior is perfectly consistent with someone who wants money and attention, and not at all consistent with someone who was the victim of an actual crime.

As far as my own feelings about Herman Cain, I just don’t know. It’s probably not accurate to describe myself as a Cain fan, per se…if the primary were to be held today, I certainly would pick him though. But I’m getting there by means of process-of-elimination, as opposed to my process for picking, for example, Fred Thompson or Sarah Palin. I’d much prefer to be choosing a candidate with a spirit of “Yeah! Fist pump! This is exactly what we need!” and there are only trace amounts of that spirit in my consideration of Cain.

But as far as the comments about Bialek, the columnist speaks for me.

Neiwart, you ignorant slut.

DailyKOS folks deserve props for owning-up, and not trying to backpedal or equivocate on it. Okay, that’s a little like handing a big bag of cash to a criminal for not robbing anybody, but still.

I see conservatives are grabbing this one and running with it. There’s sure to be a dust-up coming soon, since you don’t snark at Michelle O and get away with it. The libs will say they’re taking it out of context, and when they do, I’ll be able to see the point…

Michelle Obama told high school students taking part in a mentoring program at Georgetown University on Tuesday that being married to the president can be scary at times, because he makes the family get out of its comfort zone.

The first lady urged students not to let fear guide them after a student asked about being worried about going away to college.

“I mean this is scary,” she said. “Shoot, being married to Barack Obama? He’s got big plans. He’s always pushing us beyond our comfort zones, and I’m dragged along going, `What’s he doing now? No, not this.'”

Sounds like me when I talk to kids. Lazy kids. I think she’s doing the right thing, because nowadays kids have all kinds of incentive to be fat stupid and lazy, and adults don’t correct that behavior now like they used to. She’s still peddling her let’s-move-eat-healthy propaganda campaigns, so this fits in well with that. Chalk it up as penance for those 1500-calorie hamburger meals.

But — only a child, at this point, is going to buy the idea that marriage to Barry figures prominently into the pantheon of scare moments. Get real, Michelle. He opines, opines, and opines some more, then He goes out to the links and plays golf. And let’s face it, it is weird. How many wives-and-mothers would agree that kids need to get used to bigger, scary things? Nearly all of them, probably. How many would offer their own marriages as an example? Uh…just the really bored ones, the ones that have no examples to offer lately and are flailing about, grasping for one. Hmmm…

Unlike most of the other critics, though, I had my attention drawn to something else:

She said she wondered whether she’d be able to compete with classmates who were wealthier and had gone to some of the best schools in the world. But she said she was willing to work hard and found her strengths.

“One of my strengths was that I had a big mouth, and I liked to talk a lot,” she said, adding that she tells her own daughters not to be afraid to speak up.

This part is not so unusual, and I wish it was. I’ve been noticing this about kids lately. Boys, whose voices are naturally annoying, need to learn the “library voice” routine like they always did. At least, after about age five or six…girls, though, are always adorable, always precious and it’s always their turn to talk.

I think this needs scrutiny. We seem to have a lot of bumpkin parents running around, laboring under this misconception that society is suffering from an acute shortage of noisy females, and desperately needs more. Bring ’em on, double-quick, we’re running low.

But that is not reality. Reality is what immediately follows, and it is not “PC”, but here it is: At any age, a female making a whole lot of noise is about as precious as sand in the Sahara. And for the same reason.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t know where this idea came from, that kids of either sex or at any age, need to be told by their parents that they shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. They get that as they pop out of the womb. It’s in their “hardware programming.” Lately it has become awfully fashionable to teach your young girls that they need to be ready, willing and able to speak up about things, and forcefully, especially if they find something disagreeable that’s none of their business. And then talk loudly and forcefully about these efforts you’ve been making to teach your daughters to talk loudly and forcefully about things.

News flash from The Blog That Nobody Reads: This doesn’t empower women. As a general rule, a lady’s behavior does not have an empowering effect on her sex, if it makes the gentlemen want to scram. If it fills the hubby’s head with visions of fishing in a mountain lake, way up high above sea level, with her not around, whatever she’s doing is not striking a blow for women. The Speak-Up-Forcefully schtick falls into this. And I don’t know how this got started. I don’t know who started it and I don’t know what exactly their train of thought was. From all I’ve been able to learn, it seems they, like FLOTUS, are lazily conflating the act of bravely confronting changes and challenges, with the act of talking loudly while female. Well, those two are not the same. They’re different.

There are a lot of parents losing this distinction, and I don’t think future generations will look back favorably on them.

She writes in The Blaze.

In an ironic twist of fate, the owners of pair of San Diego coffee and hot dog carts — who initially provided free food and beverage to Occupy protesters – had to shut down after demonstrators turned violent, splattering their kiosks with blood and urine. CBS reports that Occupiers stole items from the cart in addition to spray-painting them with graffiti.

If that were not enough, the vendors also said they recently received death threats from protesters.

CBS adds:

The coffee and hot dog carts were located in Civic Center Plaza, the same location as the Occupy San Diego protesters.

Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators, but when they stopped, the protesters became violent.

“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio.

Meanwhile, DeMaio said the damages will likely require a complete cleaning if not complete replacement of the food cart covers. And why vendors who showed kindness to Occupiers by providing them with complimentary refreshments would now receive death threats, remains unclear. [bold emphasis mine]

Oh Ms. Gabbay. I know I should not take that final sentence literally, I know you’re just using a little bit of flair. But the whole time I was reading about this event, including your story down to the end, I had this thought just sort of churning away in the back of my noggin, and that sign-off just made it explode. “Unclear” is an anagram of “nuclear,” so now we have a coffee o’clock blog post. Tremble before the enriched plutonium energy of The Blog That Nobody Reads.

What we are seeing with the Occupy Wall Street movement is an alternative social contract. It is not new, it is in fact ancient. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a writhing, slithering scaly deep-sea creature. It lives deep in the darkest depths, dreaming of breaking the surface, enjoying fresh air and sunlight — and overrunning the land as well as the sea, taking things over “up there.” But it can’t breathe air. It dreams the same dream as the dog that yearns to catch the car.

They can’t even put pen to paper and write down their social contract. That’s why they don’t have a unified and coherent statement of their goals, in spite of the fact that many among them have said this is going to be forthcoming soon. They can’t, but I can.

I start with the social contract that is in place now, the one they seek to defeat: If you want something, you work for it. If you want something and you lack the skills to acquire it, you trade for it. If you want something but don’t really need it, then you’ve got a decision to make. If you can bear the consequences, then it’s all on you. You make decisions about sacrificing the things you want to get the things you need — or to give up the things you need in order to get the things you want, in which case you’re about to have a learning experience. Life is full of these. If you get a lesson and you fail to learn from it, life will assign you the same lesson over and over again until you get it learned and then, like magic, it will proceed to the next lesson you haven’t learned yet. If you have a brain in your head, you’re probably going to win at this over the longer term, because your skills will sharpen and you will have more goods and services you can trade to acquire the things you want, and you will make fewer mistakes while you are trading.

The underworld social contract that seeks to supplant this, operates according to revolution. It lusts for a glorious day in which it emerges as the top dog, which is an upcoming revolution, and it does all of its smaller things by means of smaller revolutions. If you want something, you immobilize something else until such time as someone is bludgeoned and browbeaten into giving you what you want. Annoyance is the new coin of the realm. If you want a hot dog, you annoy somebody. If you want a place to put up your tent and crash for the night, you annoy somebody. If you want a job, you annoy somebody. If you want to be heard, you annoy somebody.

And, lately, it seems…if you have the opportunity to be heard and you’re having trouble figuring out what to say…yes, you annoy people until that problem, too, is solved. Just like any other. Any time you find yourself lacking in anything, it must be because someone external to you has not been given the proper motivation, so you find a way to interfere with what they’re trying to do, and then you get what you want.

It’s a whole different way of looking at life.

Ultimately, since the people who live life according to the first social contract end up taking responsibility for what happens to them, and the people who live life according to the second social contract do not, the former end up being Architects and the latter end up being Medicators. Because that’s the definition. Something didn’t go the way the Architect wanted, he must have made a measurement the wrong way, or pursued some option that turned out not to be the right one, just like a real architect ordering steel or cement from the wrong supplier. Architect says — thank goodness I made this mistake while I was constructing a cardboard model instead of the real thing. But sure as I’m standing here right now, we’re going to figure out where things went wrong.

And the people who live life according to the second social contract externalize everything, because they must. That is the mindset: I’m having this problem because someone else didn’t do something they were supposed to do. And now I’m going to get even. So the Architect social contract is about the protagonist learning things, the Medicator social contract is about someone else learning things. I’ll teach them not to screw with me!

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a positive human development. We’re seeing this alternative, subversive social contract break the surface and getting a good look at it. And we’re seeing how much it stinks. We’re seeing, right in front of our eyes, how a miniature “society” of sorts functions as it operates according to this model. We’re seeing how it leads inexorably to chaos, rancor and despair. The subterranean social contract is being given a “job interview” and it is being found to be lacking.

After a time it will submerge again, beneath the depths. Very few who believe in it will abandon it. Medicators medicate; their end goal is not so much to acquire things or to make things work, as to cultivate the proper emotional state. And it’s always more emotionally satisfying to think things are missing from your life because some dirty rotten so-and-so got away with something, and you need to pool your resources with others who’ve been similarly ripped off and hold some epic revolution to get back what was taken from you — plus something extra, to really drive home the message.

But this is not conducive to greatness. It reeks, because over time it does not displace mundane challenges with greater, more worldly challenges as the learner does his learning. Rather, it does the reverse — the challenge remains the same, and a life filled with potential is supplanted by a tinier, more pathetic life shrinking down to become more obsessed with the stationary challenge.

It is the difference between what you think about after you manage to kill the one mosquito in your bedroom as you’re trying to go to sleep, and what you think about when you fail to kill that same mosquito. I cannot predict what thoughts are in your head in the first scenario because, liberated, you can drift off to dreamland with the vast plane of human thought entirely open to you. Who knows. Maybe you’re solving a problem at work. Maybe you’re figuring out what to do that weekend. The sky’s the limit. But in the second scenario, I can guarantee I know what you’re thinking. We replace our challenges, or our challenges replace us.

Regarding Ms. Gabbay’s sign-off: Somewhere, I wrote that the world is divided into people who are nice to people who are nice to them, and mean to people who are mean to them; and, their opposites, who manage to flip this around, rewarding kindness with viciousness and vice-versa. I wrote that these two different kinds of people should not meet. And they shouldn’t, because this is the Architect/Medicator divide. Architects profit from the establishment and maintenance of good relationships. Medicators do not. They cannot. The coin of the realm in which they live their lives, is the act of annoying people to get what they want. So a truly constructive and mutually beneficial relationship is not something they can ever really have, nor do have any need for such a thing.

So — yes. Give them a hot dog, expect to see your hot dog stand wrecked. It’s part of the natural order of things.

Next lesson?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

I have the radio playing in the bathroom. I was out here in the computer room, playing a YouTube clip of the “Justin Bieber paternity” lady’s statement, which I realized I’d already heard…I switched it off and went in to the bathroom to check something and the radio was playing the statement of “Herman Cain’s Fourth Woman.”

It’s exactly the same tone, same dialect, same syllables getting emphasized…

Real people do not talk like this. Actresses on my fiance’s “hot-blooded wise-cracking thirty-somethings carving up room-temperature dead forty-somethings to solve crimes” teevee shows, do not talk like this. The View girls do not talk like this, anchor-ladies on the morning news do not talk like this, Dancing With The Stars dancers do not talk like this.

But “accusers,” to a nose, all talk this way. This lilt, this dialect, this tone. This “Anita Hill” tone. What exactly is it with that tone?

Dude, that’s gross…

A man at his local RBC Bank was told at the drive-thru that the bank didn’t sell money orders. He responded to this inconvenience by doing what any rational and sane person would do: he urinated in the drive-thru’s plastic tube.

Wait, what?

When he was told he couldn’t purchase a money order, the man reportedly became upset, mumbled something “about bad customer service,” and then urinated in the tube.

That’s foul. But it gets worse.

“Another customer pulled into the same drive-through lane shortly after the incident and said the tube had liquid in it that smelled like urine,” reports The St. Augustine Record. “She picked up the tube and urine spilled onto her and her car.”

“Times are hard, people are crazy, anything’s liable to happen.” Oh, dear. And here we have a disagreement about something that one would expect not to inspire any disagreements. As the prison population explodes and people continue to do nutty things, do we just build more prisons? Or do we nod toward the damning statistics, find some reasons to turn people loose, and just expect something now & then?

Me, I don’t think we should be expecting it. And if we have to, then that’s a sign we need to build more prisons. Otherwise, what’s the point of having any laws at all? I think the lady who was next in line and got the golden shower, if she disagreed with that point-of-view before, she probably doesn’t now.

Hard times…blegh. It goes back to my anyone/everyone rule. In this case, if anyone anywhere is capable of getting through tough economic times without piddling on people, that means everyone everywhere is, including this guy. Give him his year, and I hope it’s spent turning big rocks into little rocks. Just disgusting.

I was just reading the Friedman quotes that were memorable enough to be listed on ThinkExist, and it occurred to me that the American People would be much better off if we were all to go the next year hearing about them over and over again.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.

You could stake the Republican party with a short leash, enacting an arbitrary rule that no campaign slogan can ever be used in 2012 that is not a Milton Friedman quote. They’d still take the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate with a commanding dominance, and with almost complete certainty. Occupy Wall Street types and all the various George Soros idea-outlets could come out with their propaganda about womans’ right to choose, Herman Cain is a molester, wealthiest one percent, derp derp derp. And it wouldn’t matter because Friedman’s points about the random havoc wreaked by out-of-control government possess the weightiest attribute of all intellectual arguments: They don’t need to be said. People, from sea to shining sea, can feel it in their bones that the job market should be better than it is. They can feel it that there is something called a business-friendliness climate, and it should be sunnier right now than it is. They can perceive with primal senses, the way you can perceive something is caught in the straw when you’re sucking on a fruit smoothie, that something is getting in the way. And that there is only one thing in all of Creation that has the power to get in the way.

One question I’m fond of asking big-government liberals that they’ve never been able to answer is: If all the smart people in the world intuitively understand that government programs are the key to happiness, and the smaller-government solution is only favored by drooling idiots like myself, and every single small-government Tea Party libertarian loudmouth like me is simply a big-government guy who hasn’t had his moment of edification just yet — what is going on with the American people? What is up with this tick-tock thing we’ve been doing throughout all of the twentieth century? How come we don’t have some moment of national epiphany, be it 1932 or 1964 or 1976 or 1992, and just stick with high taxes and big government forevermore? Is there any way to explain the setbacks at all…other than, there must be some liability involved in a leviathan government, understood by people once they labor under it, left undiscussed in these exchanges. Any other way to explain that at all? What happened in 1952, 1968, 1980 and 2000? Surely you won’t blame all that on tampered Diebold machines!

Haven’t got a straight answer yet.

Funny thing is, my inquiry would be a complete non-starter if progressive plans resembled in substance what is offered in the packaging. Supposedly we have poor, middle-class and rich, and our lefties just want to embiggen the government so that taxes and regulation can be rained down like Napalm upon the heads of those loathed rich. In practice, the barrier between rich and middle-class is mythical; the chestnut that really seals the deal, but is never quite delivered, is “the pain will be reserved for the people who make more than you do, it will never impact you.” I’ve often observed that if there are any numbers that define this “middle-class,” they have to do with the annual income of whatever audience is being addressed by the politician using the term at that moment. So to be realistic about it, there’s really only “rich” and “poor.” People are fooled into swindling from themselves, giving their own money away to people who do not value the sacrifices they’ve made to give themselves & their families better lives, but there’s a certain justice involved in it because they’re reaping the bitter fruit they had planted for someone else. “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” But we’re all the guy behind the tree, we realize, after the lesson has been well and truly learned. That’s my explanation for why America’s experimentation with big-government liberalism has taken a circular rather than linear trajectory; and, as noted above, thus far it is the only answer available.

What’s interesting is that if there were any other explanation, my “Milton Friedman Slogan” campaign would never work. As it is, this would be a sure thing. If there’s one thing on which people of all ideological dispositions can agree in the final weeks of 2011, it is that something was sold to the country three years ago, and the delivery has brought surprise and disappointment, failing to align with the expectations of even those who perspired and hyperventilated under the most exuberant optimism.

Friedman shucked his mortal coil before any of it went down. And yet his earthly quotes, somehow, bulls-eyed the entire sad debacle stem to stern. The unavoidable conclusion is not quite so much that Friedman was a genius, although in my opinion he was one. The point is that we are engaged in a period of learning, the lessons we are in the process of learning are not advanced or impressive. They are rudimentary lessons. They are also painful, and life will most assuredly offer them to us, repeatedly, as long as we demonstrate that we are in need of learning them.

That, and the stuff we are trying now doesn’t work. It relies too much on an axiom that some perfect and infinite wisdom is possessed by people who have been offered no means of achieving it, incentive for having it, nor have they chosen any vocation in the first place that would hold much appeal for those inclined to become wise.

Oh, and Betty Friedan: What a miserable human being. Just horrible. I’d still be thinking that and saying that if I agreed with her on every single issue. Hate to speak ill of the dead, but there’s something about the failure to police one’s own; the act of circling wagons to deny justice to the wronged, to make sure some public-policy question or other political situation comes out the way you want it to.

Thanks to Gerard.

Thinking our blogger friend in New Mexico will get a kick out of this.

The one hundred eighteenth award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes out this morning to Jimmy Kimmel who said, in his comments about the unexpected news of the Kardashian divorce,

Kim has asked that her fans give her a complete lack of privacy during this time.

Whether he realizes it or not, this pinpoints the root cause of just about everything that’s going wrong with civilization lately. Attention is the new coin of the realm. People do what gets them watched.

Now for some Kim Kardashian bikini pics so I can generate more traffic for my blog.