This has been out there awhile, but no I hadn’t seen it before.

Credit goes to Generational Dysfunction, a blog which has since shut down.

Assoc. Press, by way of AJC:

The voter registration form arrived in the mail last month with some key information already filled in: Rosie Charlston’s name was complete, as was her Seattle address.

Problem is, Rosie was a black lab who died in 1998.

A group called the Voter Participation Center has touted the distribution of some 5 million registration forms in recent weeks, targeting Democratic-leaning voting blocs such as unmarried women, blacks, Latinos and young adults.

But residents and election administrators around the country also have reported a series of bizarre and questionable mailings addressed to animals, dead people, noncitizens and people already registered to vote.

Brenda Charlston wasn’t the only person to get documents for her pet: A Virginia man said similar documents arrived for his dead dog, Mozart, while a woman in the state got forms for her cat, Scampers.

“On a serious note, I think it’s tampering with our voting system,” Charlston said. “They’re fishing for votes: That’s how I view it.”
:
The group at the root of the questionable mailings — the Voter Participation Center — acknowledges that the databases it uses to contact possible voters are imperfect because they are developed from commercially collected information. The group also says it expects people who receive misdirected mail to simply throw it away.

Several election officials said they believed the voter registration systems were secure enough to catch people who might improperly submit the misdirected documents.

But administrators in New Mexico, a potential swing state in the 2012 presidential race, warned that ineligible voters who complete the documents could make it onto the rolls.

Summing it all up: The whole thing is on the honor system. If you’re not eligible to use these materials, then don’t…wink wink, nod nod.

And then when some effort is made by Republicans or anybody else to get more laws on the books to check the integrity of the election process at voting time, which is when it really counts…democrats and their supporters presume the worst. Without any evidence at all. Honor system, again, but working in the other direction. Honor system all the time. Or more simply: Argument based on emotion and not reason. I can envision the GOP engaging in a premeditated effort to disenfranchise minorities from the voter rolls based on pure racial animosity — that must mean, since I can envision it, that’s what they’re doing.

Well let’s think about this. There’s this theory…or narrative…or perhaps the most accurate term to apply would be “excuse”…the registration form reaches someone who is not eligible to vote. And with this “honor system” in place, the eligible person will say “Hey, this isn’t right! I’m not eligible!” and throw it all away. All of the time. Alright…now, if you think for some reason there might be some holes in that particular part of the process, you don’t need a bigoted racist Republican to push for a voter ID law, it’s actually a sensible conclusion to reach. Don’t our democrat friends say exactly the same thing about arsenic in the water? There’s a standard to be applied, the input falls short of the standard, so the standard has to be reinforced somewhere in the system before we get to the output. Right?

The same is true of any system with an inflow, and and outflow, and a standard. Somewhere the standard has to be applied, or else there isn’t one. This isn’t a left-wing right-wing thing, it’s something that simply is.

So the democrat position, from what I’ve seen around the innerwebz, is that you have to oppose voter ID laws with every fiber of your being or else you’re a racist. Because you don’t have proof of any shenanigans that meet the daunting standards of the democrat who is calling you a racist. How, without some voter ID process in place, would you meet that standard of proof? The mind boggles. I suppose, you’d make a point of catching every hundredth or every tenth or every third voter in a great big net…apologize to them for the inconvenience, take them back to a lab and check their credentials. Short of that, the voters are in & out within five to ten minutes, hopefully they are who they say they are. In my polling place, the only time I talk to anybody is when I say “Yup, that would be me,” and then at the end of it when I get my “I voted” sticker.

And yet, when these registration materials are mailed out to dogs and convicted felons and fictional people and dead people, it’s all on the honor system…so…where…

Eh, well. There I go again, applying a process of reason to an argument that is based on emotion.

Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine:

Yesterday I took a walk down to the oldest part of New York City, where the Dutch landed and planted their flag near the current location of the Staten Island Ferry, where George Washington stood his officers rounds at Fraunces Tavern, now filled with Wall Street types, and where a bunch of smelly hippies stirred by an anti-Semitic Canadian magazine decided to squat a park in order to make a statement about their own need for attention.

Zuccotti Park has returned to its original function as a place where secretaries, construction workers and off-duty cops go to eat quick lunches bought from local fast food places or disease-ridden Halal Mafia food carts. The few plants wave in a breeze that blows between the narrow lanes of the financial district, which has some of the oldest and narrowest streets in the city. An information desk for OWS is the only sign of the occupation, with cardboard signs denouncing the NYPD and sarcastically informing the Indian and Russian tourists taking snapshots of the under-construction Freedom Tower; “And to think these ‘People’ are the ‘Heroes’ of ’911′… Right.”

Occupy Wall Street has gone east, one block east. It no longer occupies Wall Street, instead it has transformed into Occupy Trinity Church. The media, which served as the unofficial PR corps for OWS, is not too enthusiastic about reporting that a movement which they hailed is busy trying to seize land from a historic Episcopalian church that dates back to 1697, in whose cemetery lie several signers of the Declaration of Independence and several delegates to the Continental Congress, not to mention several Revolutionary War generals and a fellow by the name of Alexander Hamilton.

Trinity was also an enthusiastic supporter of Occupy Wall Street, providing them with bathrooms and private conference rooms, but turning over Duarte Square was asking too much. After being evicted from Zuccotti Park, the OWS crowd assumed that they could bully Trinity into giving them the land with the “fact of their occupation.” Instead Duarte Square, named after Juan Pablo Duarte, a founder of the Dominican Republic, has become OWS’s Waterloo.

Despite several attempts to occupy Duarte Square, Trinity Church has held firm. After half a year, OWS has made less impact fighting Trinity than it has fighting Wall Street.

When I passed by, the sad remnant of Occupy Trinity Church was down to three people, one of them sitting with a plastic bucket designated for the “OWS Laundry Fund” and another with a sleeping bag marked “Occupied.” A cardboard sign proclaimed that Trinity Church had stolen Duarte Square from the Indians and should give it back to OWS, as representatives of the native peoples.

One sign accused Trinity Church of greedily sitting on 200 million dollars while refusing the homeless trustafarians of Occupy Wall Street a small measly strip of land for their campsite. On its websites, OWS has blasted Trinity for being aligned with the “1 percent” and spun conspiracy theories about its parish vestry, which they allege holds over 10 billion dollars in real estate assets.

More on the Occupy Trinity Church movement…

Yesterday, demonstrators marched outside Trinity Church with signs reading, “Who would Jesus prosecute?” and “Trinity Church: Real Estate Company or Church?” in reference to the business practices that critics, and exiting board members, say have eclipsed the religious organization’s holy mission. One demonstrator, Jack Boyle, “has been on a hunger strike since May 23 and has denied himself his HIV medication since May 19, trying to appeal to Trinity’s sense of humanity, demanding the charges be dropped,” according to an organizer.

Yes, by all means let’s dismantle our existing economic system and replace it with a new anarchy, in which people demand things and appeal to the “sense of humanity” of others…threatening not to stop hitting themselves in the head with a hammer until they get what they want. Food, shelter, water, gasoline, oh and don’t forget the Starbucks Caramel Macchiatto.

Actually, the analogy doesn’t hold; a guy hitting himself in the head with a hammer doesn’t pose a threat to anybody else, but an HIV patient refusing to take his medication…

Curious posting in the comments —

I totally supported OWS, but if it was my lot I wouldn’t want them there, either.

Um, what?

Actually I think that sums it all up; that’s why the movement is no longer around. We have these people who are not in it, who “totally support” it from without…I’m reading that as, they are part of the middle class, maybe even upper class, people of property who support the effort to dismantle our system of property rights and property exchange. But only for others, not for themselves.

Occupy was not a movement, it was a manifestation. As a “movement” it hasn’t really gone anywhere. It remains among us, in the hearts and minds of those who think it’s possible to find a halfway compromise between order and anarchy. Maybe we can have a quasi-socialist system, kind of a halfway-capitalist utopia.

Their credo, although they will not admit it, is to honor and respect the right to accumulate and own property as long as it’s about me, me, me, me, me…and then, for everybody else, we have to put some system in place inimical to the property-rights thing, that distributes all the goods equally, therefore all the misery. But keep me, me, me out of it because I’ve got mine, mine, mine.

Help those people who don’t have anything…but not with my wallet, just tax those other people over there, and get it done. So I can claim credit for having supported it even though it’s somebody else’s money that was given to those poor people. Oh, and hire some government bureaucrats to do this dirty-work of robbing & giving, so that if it all turns to crap I can claim non-involvement. Decades ago it was joked that a democrat is someone who’s nice enough to give you the shirt off someone else’s back — it never was a joke, and it never changed, it surfaced from a murky ocean, via Occupy like a vile and detestable sea serpent so we could catch a glimpse of how well it does not work.

It is false, cosmetic charity. It is vanity. It is a big fancy bundle of all sorts of strain of human sin. It is modern liberalism. Things will improve when we reject it, society-wide, and continue to deteriorate as long as we tolerate it.

His Most Unifying Holiness wrote to me again, under the subject line of “RE: I will be outspent‏.”

Friend —

We’re getting outraised — a first for a sitting president, if this continues. Not just by the super PACs and outside groups that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into misleading ads, but by our opponent and the Republican Party, which just outraised us for the second month in a row.

We can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more.

So I need your help. If you believe that regular people should decide elections, then please chip in $3 or more today.

This isn’t about me or the outcome of one election.

This election will be a test of the model that got us here. We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.

I believe we can do this. When all of us chip in what we can, when we can, we are the most powerful force in politics.

But today is the day to prove it. Donate now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised

Thank you — for everything you’ve done before and everything you’re doing now. It matters.

Barack

I must say I’m perplexed by the cognitive dissonance: “Barack” is bringing us all together, by declaring some among us deserve to have a voice and others do not. Habitually, I write this off to the two contradictory messages being spaced sufficiently far apart that the average Obama fan’s attention span has been exceeded. But here they both are, big as life, within a relatively brief shakedown letter from the President…”We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.” It seems to be lost on whoever wrote this, that Americans are in control of the democracy through the massive spending.

Michelle Malkin had a gigglesnort moment about this, and she was right to so indulge, for was it not just four years ago we were told what a super-duper mega-awesome champion of these “ordinary Americans” Obama was, because of the historical magnitude of His campaign war chest? Three quarters of a billion dollars or so…now how is that 2008 war chest to have been described, if not with the word “massive”?

Is it only “massive” when it belongs to the bad guys?

Well, not much detail is required where there is not much curiosity applied. And if there is one thing about which the Obama-loving community lacks curiosity, it is about who their enemy is. Is it people in America who can make money? Are they the enemy? That would make sense; the way the economy has been doing lately, it does look like there’s someone in charge, who believes it’s a problem when Americans make money. That would explain quite a few things.

My one-line reply:

“Regular people should decide elections”? I’m confused; who exactly are the non-regular people you have in mind? Aren’t we ALL supposed to have a voice?

Worth posting again, just because.

It’s sad, you know…George Carlin tried so hard to be a proper lefty-nihilistic hippy-dip. For a lifetime. And because of this hard-whiplash eco-friendly leftward-lurch the country’s been doing since the first run of this routine of his, his immortal words come off now like talking points straight out of a GOP convention.

Sounds a lot more Republican, in fact, than the average corporate marketing campaign. Really. “Our peanut butter is friendly to the environment!”

I suspect it’s plenty enough to send the skeleton into a whirling-dervish dance.

Which, incidentally, the planet will survive just fine. Like the man said, the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Burt Folsom:

Earlier this week, President Obama gave listeners a history lesson on why he was running for higher office. “The reason I ran for president,” Mr. Obama said, “the reason I ran the first time for a state senate seat [in 1996] on the south side of Chicago, was because . . . we had gone through a decade where people were working harder and harder but we didn’t see an increase in income. . . . Jobs weren’t growing fast enough. And the cost of everything . . . kept going up faster than people’s income.”

Was high unemployment, high inflation, and low growth what the U.S. was experiencing in 1996, or in the decade before that? No. That describes the 1970s–a decade of big government with price controls, the war in Vietnam, price fixing in oil, and massive inflation of the currency by the Federal Reserve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which topped the 1,000 mark in 1966, was at about 800 fifteen years later. The 1980s, however, began a change. We saw a more stable currency, tax rate cuts, decontrol of oil prices, and relative peace abroad (and the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In 1996, the year President Obama ran for the Illinois state senate, President Clinton downsized government through welfare reform. By cutting welfare benefits, the welfare rolls were cut by almost 50%, and President Clinton had budget surpluses his last two years in office. In 1996, the U.S. saw 2,500,000 new jobs created and only 3% inflation. Americans, contrary to the president’s statement, experienced massive job increases, and they watched their growing incomes outpace inflation. The U.S. economy had strong decades in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, why the pretend history? Because pretend history is the only way to make increases in debt and in the size of government appear to be the correct political move.

Seeing a lot of nitwits out there, as the Bush tax cuts close in on their latest sunset, insisting that we need taxes to go up.

In response to this, wisdom, again, from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

An observation about the debate over taxes:

As is the case with some other issues, it is a more complicated matter than it should be to define the “moderate” position. In fact, this passion for higher taxes is not only out of the mainstream and extreme, but weird, strange and surreal. We don’t see it, because by the time you have taxes you have to have a government demanding it, and of course by the time you have a government you have politics muddying everything up.

But “my taxes are too high” is a natural, heartfelt, honest plea (whether something should be done about that, is the question).

“The taxes are not high enough” is not natural, heartfelt, or honest. It is an insincere protest. It is driven by a desire to please others, to pay someone back for favors received, lust for control over the resulting receipts, old-fashioned jealousy, or some combination among those.

Suppose we were to start all over again, and we had to take stock of what was needed. We would identify food, water, shelter, then hygiene, and then somewhere along the line we would say we need a right to property and a system of laws to maintain it…and we need to make sure everyone has enough to live, if they work for it. But we wouldn’t say “We have to make sure everyone is taxed enough.” You have to endure as a civilization long enough to get sloppy, lazy and silly to identify that “need.” You have to use technology’s gifts to drive a wedge between yourself, and reality. That is what is happening here.

I’m wondering if people understand what it says about them, as thinking people, when they insist tax cuts lead to the dissipation of jobs, and tax increases lead to job growth. “Tax” means to “deplete.” The dictionary defines the word as “a burdensome charge, obligation, duty, or demand.” It is something that, by necessity and often by intent, diminishes the thing upon which it is laid; that is what it does, and that is what it is supposed to do.

A nation having a debate about whether they need to go up, is a nation that is having a dishonest and contaminated debate. That’s us.

I’ve written previously about the meaningful differentiation between efforts involved in building and preserving things, versus the efforts involved in destroying things. There can be some difficulty involved in differentiating this, but it is worth the trouble, because it seems to me we as a species make our greatest and gravest mistakes when we bollux it up. It’s often a murky question. A sniper, for example, destroys something so that something else can be preserved. The terrorist he’s sniping, on the other hand, is trying to preserve something so that something else can be destroyed.

There can be no question that a tax raised to a higher level than what is needed, has a destructive effect; and there can be very little question that this initial destructive effect is a net effect, once the loot flows into the government coffers it is unlikely in the extreme that there will be some creative process to offset the destruction. (If there is one, better-than-even odds it will have something to do with hiring more IRS agents or something of the like.)

Once again, I see our national discourse has become, as I said, contaminated; we have permitted something to become a part of it, that should not have been so allowed in. When a wife says to her husband “I have a problem with that new dishwasher, we did not pay enough for it” that is grounds for divorce, is it not? It is, right? No? Well, I guess maybe I’m in the minority on that one…nevertheless, I’m right. A wife who pushes for a household to spend more money on things, is analogous to your stockbroker pushing for your profits to be lower, or for a general doing what he can to make sure more of his troops are killed.

The same is true for pundits and politicians pushing for taxes to be higher. If your agitation is toward more destruction, why are you part of the process? You don’t belong in here. Debates about taxes are debates about more bang for the buck. We don’t need people to be part of the discussion, who are trying to make things cost more. It’s as simple as that.

Yup, prettymuch.

It’s a good vision to have if “climb that tree” equates to a hard and fundamental skill that has something to do with being productive in society. The problem comes up when the test is applied to other things that aren’t so essential, that are personality-driven and developed (or not) before the school years even start. That’s when it starts to become as absurd as asking a goldfish to climb a tree.

Neal Boortz is working on a Unified Grand Theory on why people vote democrat:

Scientists, for instance, have been looking for a grand theory of the universe; some theory that would completely answer all questions regarding the formation and operation of our universe from day one to the present.

Well I’ve been looking for theory – some grand theory – to explain why people vote Democrat. Why, in this election, would they vote to retain a ruler dedicated to the proposition of “fundamentally transforming” the greatest nation, the greatest system of governance, into a centrally governed behemoth destructive of liberty and everyone’s sense of individualism. Just WHY would people vote for this guy?

Some people will vote Obama because he’s a Democrat and they’ve always voted Democrat and that’s just the way it is. Others will vote for Obama because they’re black, he’s black, and they’re going to vote for the black guy. Period. End of story. Others will vote for him – and this is getting closer to the Unified Theory – because they think he will put more money in their pocket than the other guy. And then there’s just pure mental illness to consider.
:
…I think I’ve found it. Here it is:

People vote for Democrats because they believe that Democrats will give them access to other people’s money.

I’m working on this theory .. ironing out all of the wrinkles. Soon I’ll write my paper and submit it for peer review. I’ll keep you posted.

Hey, he asked for feedback. So Morgan The Lurker signed in, and posted a rebuttal.

It’s true, and you’re on the right track, but it falls short of a Unified Grand Theory because there are some people voting democrat, thoughtlessly as all the rest, who really don’t care about money…If there are many case studies that fall outside your UGT, then it doesn’t work as a UGT.

Thing I Know #401 says: “People who refuse to work with details don’t fix things.”

I believe this comes closer to that for which you are seeking. Voting democrat, is all about going through the motions of fixing something, without working with any of the details. You see a lot of this behavior with complex appliances, such as personal computers: “Oh I don’t know what this thing is doing, let’s just get rid of it and go Apple.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed some people take great pride in going the other way, figuring out the motherboard is the problem or the memory is faulty, replacing only the troublesome part and keeping the rest. Well, a lot of other people take pride in the opposite: Replacing the entire thing, “solving” the problem without learning the tiniest detail about what was amiss. Lots of people go through life that way, fixing things without really fixing things.

And, yes, you’re right, a lot of them would like your money, too. But my UGT explains your UGT; that is the evolution of the thought process.

Sadly, Boortz’ website stripped out the <a href=""> HTML tag, so the “Thing I Know” linky goodness didn’t find its way through. Which, in addition to making my comment look a little bit silly, is Boortz’ loss; four hundred things represents a lot of stuff worth knowing.

But the facts back up what I said, I think, and it does fall within the Architects and Medicators split. Some people see a complex system is not functioning as it should, their first impulse is to start testing the simpler components to find a root cause. They’re frustrated if they are prevailed upon, by some higher authority or perhaps by a looming deadline, to throw it all out. See, they’re in the middle of a lifetime process of building a knowledge base about how things break, so they can continually accumulate and refine the skills involved in fixing them. Others are more inclined toward the throw-it-out-start-again approach. It can be a challenge to pick them out when replacement makes sense — sometimes, replacement does not make sense, and you’ll find they’ll still counsel toward it, in fact their speeches and screeds start to grow in length when they have less to say. Ultimately, when they start repeating things they’ve said many times before, it becomes evident they’re just displaying their personality type, grasping for an identity. They want to become “Mister Throw It Out Guy.” Or alternatively, “Captain Change.” Remind you of anyone? It should…

I didn’t know how to title this. It’s just plain good…

From Thoughts and Rantings. Naughty language warning in effect (about eight seconds in).

Here’s some reading that would be helpful for the clue-challenged profanity-in-public-places edgy sunglasses guy…

…bitterly clinging to his non-religion.

From Gerard.

As I said, I think Scott Adams is on to something here. And I’m afraid it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

In the next year or two, we’re going to see a remake of this:

Oh, dear…

The Daily Caller:

Protesters fought with supporters of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during a speech by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Parma, Ohio on Thursday.

Protesters chanted, “Pawlenty go home, Pawlenty go home,” as he took the stage before a 200-person crowd, according to Cleveland.com

A skirmish erupted when Romney supporter Richard Brysac, 77, confronted protester Al Neal, a 25-year-old union worker, by placing a bottle of water in Neal’s mouth.

“He seemed thirsty, so I tried to shove the bottle in his mouth,” Brysac told Cleveland.com. “I thought it was wrong to interfere with [Pawlenty’s] freedom of speech.”

After the bottle failed to silence Neal, Brysac attempted stuffing Neal’s mouth with a handkerchief.

Neal quickly removed the handkerchief and continued to shout until he was removed from the rally — which took place on private property at Kentown Plaza — along with other protesters.

Pawlenty reportedly maintained his composure on stage alongside several local Republican officials and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Speculation persists about whether Pawlenty or Jindal are being considered for Romney’s running mate.

New civility?

Says Ed Darrell, based on this clip:

Hmmm…

Patriotism:

devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.

Liberty:

1. freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
2. freedom from external or foreign rule; independence.
3. freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

This Van Jones character can’t even survive a chance encounter with a freakin’ dictionary. His Orwellian use of words to describe things that are the opposite of what the words are classically intended to describe, becomes crystal-clear with a couple of quick virtual-page-flips.

Much like his former boss, come to think of it:

And how did America’s First Holy Pharoah, He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, come to be Van Jones’ former boss?

It came about as a result of Jones’ own idiotic comments:

White House officials offered tepid support Friday for Van Jones, the administration’s embattled energy efficiency guru, who has issued two public apologies this week, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

He believes in “liberty and justice for all”; apparently that means, making up a bunch of stuff and acting outraged. Go back and watch the clip again, that’s exactly what he does — tell you what the conservatives really mean, just take Van Jones’ word for it, then he acts all Hawkeye-Pierce-NPR-male outraged.

Just like any other penny-ante left-wingers…right before they lose.

So I don’t know. We get to read about Jones because of his connections, not because he actually won an election anywhere. Which is not to say he cannot win one. But let’s see that happen before we hold him aloft as the conservatives’ worst nightmare…on the other hand…if he does win an election, it’s clear to me he would be winning it on the basis of the constituents’ resentments, as opposed to any kind of emboldening and encouraging vision, which is an entirely different thing. He doesn’t seem to have built much of anything based on what I’m reading here. Just some “lawyer-referral service” to make a bunch of legal trouble for cops, that’s the only thing that jumps out…everything else in his entire biography is just making the right friends.

Thanks to America’s First Holy Pharoah, I’ve got a feeling that’s going to go out of style for an extended period of time — politicians elected on the basis of resentments. Vision-free politicians, smooth-talking, using words for the opposite of their intended meaning. Van Jones, running at the ballot box, would be buying a commodity high and setting up to sell it low.

Conservatives fear Van Jones? Please, please, do allow our progressive friends to go on thinking so. Just like libs to bring a knife to a gun fight. Sarah Palin would clean this guy’s clock.

Just a Facebook comment…the GoogleGodz are not smiling upon my effort to locate an original source, or even evidence of replication:

I am reminded of a quad chart I was introduced to a few weeks back, apocryphally from Erwin Rommel, but who knows where it came from:

Imagine two axes, of stupid/smart and motivated/lazy. This gives you 4 quadrants of [personality] types: Smart+Motivated, Smart+Lazy, Stupid+Motivated, and finally Stupid+Lazy.

Of the four, the worst for your organization is the stupid motivated person. Either Smart Lazy or Stupid Lazy people can at least be managed with supervision and the carrot and stick method works nearly as well on them as on anyone else. They still add value. When unsupervised, they tend to do nothing of note.

The Smart Motivated person does what’s right with minimal carrot and stick. They are self-actualized. They do what they do largely because it’s the right thing to do and they get a sense of accomplishment form it.

However, the Stupid Motivated person is too stupid to understand the incentive strutcure and respond to it appropriately. They must be supervised all the time- can’t even neglect them and expect them to stay neutral. They will do something positively stupid when left alone. [They] are the one[s] you need to eliminate from your organization at all cost.

Gee, hope that hasn’t been me.

Update: Come to think on it awhile longer, I think December of ’94 was right around the time I started my ≤40 hours “overtime is bullshit” rule. It’s just a simple, observed fact: If you’re working it when there’s no need, you’re already committing an error in judgment about as basic as any other, which sets up a real possibility that you’re this human-contaminant stupid/motivated guy…and hey, you know when there’s a need, it can almost always be traced to something that was done the wrong way. Which does nothing to address the current crisis, of course. But you can safely bet money that if the wrong-thing-done is accommodated, by way of heading off the impending crisis with this huge and noble investment of human effort and midnight oil, the wrong-thing-done will continue to happen. There aren’t too many exceptions to that, when all’s said & done.

I think we all have what it takes to be this stupid/motivated person, from time to time.

This is Bill Whittle at his best. He explains the problem with the theory, front to back, patiently, for the benefit of people who can’t figure it out right away — but without becoming a condescending twit. Also, his logic is sturdy, straightforward…and unanswerable…which means, it will be dismissed of course.

But it should be circulated anyway. It’s a good day for it.

Maybe we should apply a special tax to anyone who still can’t figure it out…

I suppose I should give my brother credit for providing a link to this stuff. I found this clip which is a perfect summary of ALL the things going wrong lately…(frowny face).

And then it got MUCH WORSE…

And it’s only Tuesday. Poor me, poor me.

Update: The way I see it, our brave state legislators are busy at work tackling the ultimate First World Problem. I’m guessing, from this, that all the bigger problems in our noble state have been resolved since they have time for this.

Uff-da, it’s like a bad opera.

The word “unexpectedly” is in both the headline and in the lead paragraph.

It’s a joke that done run out of steam in the blogger world…but in the “real journalism” world, it seems they haven’t even caught on to it yet.

Unbe-freakin’-lievable.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index fell to 49.7, worse than the most-pessimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, from 53.5 in May, the Tempe, Arizona-based group’s report showed today. Figures less than 50 signal contraction. Measures of orders, production and export demand dropped to three-year lows.

Treasury yields fell on concern Europe’s debt crisis and a slowdown in Asia are taking a bigger toll on the world’s largest economy and hurting manufacturers like DuPont Co. (DD) and Steelcase Inc. (SCS) Assembly lines are at risk of slowing further as consumers temper purchases and companies cut back on investment.

“Manufacturing is gearing down,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research LLC in New York, whose 50.5 forecast was the lowest in the Bloomberg survey. “It’s consistent with the idea that the uncertainty is weighing on businesses. Europe is taking a bite out of the export sector.”

There are some hopeful signs…but none that suggest this is any sort of real recovery.

From Instapundit.

This would be the “I” in the “STACI” quintet of fail-points with progressive ideas…although this isn’t progressive, per se (except for the ObamaCare part), it’s just a fubar’d market built up by an overly intrusive henpecking nanny-state government.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.