House of Eratosthenes

Archive for the ‘Slow Poison’ Category

Memo For File LXIX

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Item!

Former work colleague Deanna Troi (not her real name) writes in with a triple-threat of an idea:

Three world problems solved……your thoughts and hey maybe info for your blog

Ok here goes ~~

1. The plastic floating in the ocean

2. The melting Polar Ice Cap

3. The increasing unemployment

MY PLAN….WELL………..of course you know its a combination of all three…….

Take all the plastic garbage and recycle it into a large plastic blanket…….in sections………..put it over the ice, melting ice, former ice at the Artic Pole…….this would create a large pool cover, blocking the sun from melting by insulating it .

This would generate jobs to gather it, create/manufacture it, and maintain it.

Ok….I know it sound silly and simple but……it “could” work……don’t you think…..?

Later Gator

Well, my initial thought had to do with something I’d been noticing for a long time: People in positions of authority, at some time or another, tell just about everyone you care to name to (to be polite about it) FECK OFF. John McCain’s said it to conservatives plenty of times, and Barack Obama just did it to our buddy Glenn Greenwald, to Greenwald’s great annoyance. But never environmentalists. Nope, environmentalists, who exist for the purpose of stopping things and making nothing go (except environmental movements), pretty much get every little thing they want, all the time. Big things, little things, in between things. Nobody in a position of authority ever tells a tree hugger to FECK OFF. With gas up toward five bones a gallon, there is more pressure now to show ’em the heave-ho than there ever has been…it might happen…but it hasn’t just yet.

And so it occurred to me that ignoring environmentalists would, directly or indirectly, address all three of these. Like Samuel L. Jackson said in The Incredibles, why don’t we do what we told our wives we were gonna do, just to shake things up a bit? — Why don’t we tell environmentalists to stick it where the sun don’t shine, just for a change of pace?

Another Item!

Gerard saw the clip we linked of that extraordinarily impressive montage of “I’m Not Here To Make Friends”…and he had an idea very much like Counselor Troi’s…

Could somebody please raise the money and gather the will to put all of these pathetic assholes in one single location and call in an overwhelming napalm strike on it? Please?

We’ll keep that one in mind.

Yet another Item!

Jessica over at Feministing, long an advocate of the hyper-populist “Can I Get An Amen Here” brand of feminism, which is nothing but a long procession of bitter hostile trial balloons sent up by feminist individuals for the endorsement of feminist groups along the lines of “I think this should be screeched at, can I get some help???”

Well. Jessica would like to let loose the dogs of “Can I Get An Amen Here?” feminism, upon some of those who practice it. Especially the ones who have been drinking before appearing on live and televised interviews.

For those of you who haven’t already been following it, here’s what went down.

Moe and Tracie appeared on Lizz’s show drunk. Very drunk, it seems. You can watch the whole video here, and the more controversial clips here and here. I was pretty much appalled by the whole interview. But it was the commentary about rape, abortion and birth control that have garnered the most criticism…The gist of it is Moe and Tracie said some extremely offensive and uninformed things – especially about rape – that they’re now being taken to task for. (They were later said to be jokes, but no one in the audience laughed.)
:
Here’s the short version for those who don’t feel like reading this monster of a post: 1) Whether or not you say you represent feminism, when you write about the subject to a ridiculously large audience, openly identify as a feminist, and make appearances to talk about feminism – you are taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed. 2) It’s awesome to use irony and humor as a tool – but if you’re not using it in a way that hurts women, is it really worth it?

This ties in, because I think Counselor Troi’s concerns about the floating plastic are an apt metaphor for the feminist movement. In the same way you can’t viably entertain any sort of plan that involves sticking a sort of giant pool-cleaner tool into the Pacific Ocean and bundle up all those tiny bits of plastic, you can’t nail down what the feminist movement is all about either. You find a feminist who gets caught unabashedly, unapologetically and unashamedly hating men…you raise the concerns this gives you about the feminist movement to another feminist…and you get back this doe-eyed innocent look, Oh no, I’m not all about that, I just want equal pay for equal worth!

And it is this kind of nail-jello-to-tree-ism that has given the feminist movement enormous benefit throughout the decades. They have been able to advocate the most hardcore, borderline-insane nonsense — like, for example, we need to believe Anita Hill over Clarence Thomas because “women don’t lie about this stuff” (That’s one of the worst examples, but there are others). Patently absurd positions like that one, are owned when it is convenient, and then jettisoned when convenient. The feminist movement ends up being a rather hodge-podge, disjointed, undefined pastiche of floating debris, just like the Great Plastic Soup out in the ocean. It can’t be criticized because it can’t be defined.

And now poor young Jessica has realized it is this lack of a endo- or exo-skeleton that has landed the feminist movement in trouble, so she seeks to lay down some rules about “taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed.” Sorry, sweetie. You’re trying to close the barn door long after the horse has left. Feminism, in 2008, is about intellectual lawlessness. It is about extending the indestructible umbrella of political cover of “Equal Pay For Equal Worth” over the rigid, hardcore extremist types who don’t deserve such cover…the “All Men Are Potential Rapists” brand of feminists. They are, by design, all part of the Great Plastic Amoeba of feminism that has no shape, has no structure, has no rules, and therefore cannot be faulted. What dear Jessica is trying to do, is roughly akin to making a pet out of the world’s largest jellyfish, and trying to saddle it up.

Another Bear on a Pipeline So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.

1. Scoop up the Great Plastic Soup for those bits, as best you’re able;
2. Make a giant plastic bulls-eye out of it;
3. Take it to the Arctic where all the ice is supposed to be melting down;
4. Put our drunk feminists on the bulls-eye along with the environmentalists who won’t let us build any power plants or drill for oil;
5. Add to those, all the reality show contestants who “aren’t here to make friends”;
6. Like Gerard said. Napalm the sucker. That takes care of the plastic, the drunk feminists, the enviro-Nazis, and the vapid silly contestants.
7. And the ice.
8. Jessica will be much less stressed-out, too.
9. Plus, the contestants won’t make any friends, which they didn’t want to do anyway.
10. Check back in a year, I’ll betcha there’s plenty of ice, and plenty of polar bears to go with.
11. I got a feeling our population of brain-dead cliche-spouting reality show contestants will also have replenished (although I’m not sure about that).
12. And jobs galore. Especially if we make an annual habit out of it.

I just love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Posted in Abortion, Everyday Dimwits, Flogs, ManBearPig, Oil & Gas, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Best Sentence XXXII

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Today’s Best Sentence I’ve Heard or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes to sonofsheldon, commenting on why we have so many kids in special ed lately…

Teachers aren’t trained to teach in the ways that some students learn.

It’s a Yin and Yang thing. When they’re at the elementary grade school levels, The Yang cram their heads so full of ways of achieving the desired level of collaboration with others — teachers, parents, peers, et al — that they don’t leave much room for retention of subject matter. Ask ’em a week after the test to recite the times-table, usually they give you a blank stare. The Yin, on the other hand, cram their heads so full of whatever titillates the left-brain…which could be the subject matter being studied, but is usually some super-special personal project…that they don’t leave enough room for the social programming that is necessary for getting along with others.

A balance would be a good solution. The one we’ve picked, though, is the easiest one, and the furthest thing from a balance: We put the Yang in charge of everything, re-defined their ways of interacting with the reality as “normal,” and relegated the Yin to the dustbin of special ed. Everything we can possibly do the Yang way, we do that way. It’s so easy to do, and comes so naturally. You can’t shut ’em up, so you might as well do what they want.

A kid who’s “ready” to skip a grade, rich in academic achievements but lacking in social skills, will be held back. But another kid who is altogether lacking in spelling-n-math ability, and at the same time a jibber-jabbering powerhouse of nonstop social interaction, has a much better chance.

I’m sorry. If you can’t see there’s something busted about that, yer just plain nuts.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Schools and Special Ed, Yin and Yang | No Comments »

The Special Ed Explosion

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Three weeks ago an expose appeared in Pajamas Media about the bounty on special education students. The point of the article: There are “lump sum” districts in which the funding for special ed programs is kept independent from the number of students enrolled, and there are “bounty” districts in which there’s money to be made per pelt, just like hunting beavers or mice. Bottom lining it: Since the special education law went into effect in 1976, the increases in number of children enrolled in these programs, have been registering at different rates. The bounty districts have the faster-growing enrollments.

Three days later, Laura McKenna writes in to say,

We live on a cozy dead-end street in suburban New Jersey with 13 school aged kids. Of those 13 kids, six qualify for special services and have IEPs, including my son.
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These diagnoses cause real problems in education. Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and remember the kids who were ostracized, lonely, strange, smelly, weird, hyper, and angry. Today, those kids have a much better shot at life, and at an education because they are getting appropriate services. With help, they are more likely to finish high school and even attend college. They will be able to more fully function in society and provide for themselves, rather than spend a lifetime on welfare.

Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a single kid in my kid’s special needs classrooms that I thought should not be there. [emphasis mine]

Holy crap!

So what Laura McKenna is saying, is half the kids on this cozy dead-end street would have dead-end lives and end up on welfare if it weren’t for special education programs. Right?

Call Erin Brockovich. Look for power lines, chemicals in the water, barbiturates in the asphalt, whatever. Something’s wrong.

The Pajamas columnists respond:

McKenna’s responses to our evidence fall into four categories:

Appeals to emotion and superior personal experience…

Misunderstanding of the issue…

Appeals to improved diagnosis…

Appeals to the awfulness of the system…

Tell me about it. I’ve been having this argument with people like McKenna, many times.

These people demonstrate intelligence, and yet they do not argue the issue rationally. I’ve noticed one pattern that occurs over and over again, that disturbs me more than anything else, is this: If you have the audacity to argue “Child X does not have Disability Y” (or may not) you will find yourself embroiled — in the blink of an eye — in a red-hot back-and-forth about whether “Disability Y exists” even though this is not what you called into question. I’ve seen it with ADD. I’ve seen it with dyslexia. I’ve seen it with hyperactivity. And then the anecdotes come out: This one kid, he had such a bad case…blah blah blah blah blah. And then you ask, what does that have to do with this borderline case that is the subject of our disagreement? And you get back this deer-in-the-headlights stare, and, uh, gee, well I dunno…I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same stuff.

Horsepuckey. They’re just being drama queens.

And when they demonstrate the capacity to pursue a disagreement logically, but not the willingness to do so — that screams money, to me. That’s the way people behave when they’re motivated by money.

Not all of them though. Some of them are parents. Parents aren’t all the same, it turns out; some of them want their children to be strong, and others want their children to be weak.

I think that’s why they don’t argue these things logically. If you argue something like this logically, you identify the areas of disagreement — this child cannot make it without specialized help, and if he gets the specialized help it will help him more than it will hurt him — and you make the dialog about those points of disagreement. That is not what these people do.

They presume this is “The Help That He Needs”; they go through the motions of leaving this open to question, but they don’t. They settle on it, and then they monologue outward from there, that of course he needs the help, I just pulled that one outta my ass. They won’t allow any debate about it, even though any disagreement confronted is supposed to be about that and very little else.

“Kids” who get put on this stuff, are overwhelmingly boys. The “parents” who want them on it, are overwhelmingly the mothers. Why do we need special ed? A lot of the time, it’s because the “parent” feels like she should be able to relate to the “kid” emotionally in every single way, and she simply isn’t going to be able to. And if McKenna thinks those kids belong exactly where they are, in a special ed program, well then she’s quite plain and simply wrong.

Thing I Know #179. Children seem to be “diagnosed” with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow “enthusiastic” about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks.

Thing I Know About People Minus What I Was Told When I Was A child #23. People who are lazy when it comes to teaching their sons to be men, don’t want masculinity to be appreciated by anyone else either.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 6 Comments »

A Civilized Society

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

I’m hearing a lot of nitwits talk about what a “civilized society” does and doesn’t do lately. It usually has something to do with “civilized society doesn’t kill to show killing is wrong” or “civilized society doesn’t torture.”

It occurs to me that this is a way of summing up arguments that is so effective in its salesmanship, that the argument that underlies it doesn’t have to make any sense. Whatsoever. I mean, if you were to diagram this argument out logically it would come out to something like “things are the way they are because I say that’s the way they are; it’s uncivilized because I just called it that.” And it further occurs to me that it’s an argument used exclusively by the moonbat-side. Every time I hear about what a civilized society does, it seems to be a constant that 1) America isn’t doing it yet, and 2) if she did it, she would become even weaker.

Time to change that. After all, I have my own ideas about what a civilized society does. Some folks agree with me about some of ’em…and when we remain silent, we support the false illusion that the other side speaks for everyone. Well, they don’t.

A truly civilized society…

1. Places supreme priority on the preservation of the lives of the innocent, and the livelihood of the responsible.
2. NEVER apologizes for causing “outrage.”
3. Takes responsibility for the strategies and tactics used to defend itself as a nation; it does not mollify or customize those to please foreigners.
4. Drills for, harvests or mines what it needs domestically, before importing it.
5. Allows its citizens to take up arms, just like Thomas Jefferson said.
6. Punishes individuals for wicked behavior, much more quickly than punishing groups.
7. Looks upon those who work to build creative new things, and in so doing to look at life in a wholly unique way…with admiration and awe.
8. Understands that when adaptation to a changing environment involves embracing new weaknesses and jettisoning old strengths, it might not be good.
9. Enforces old laws rather than making up new ones.
10. Never allows those who write the rules, to say what they mean.
11. Allows buyers and sellers to negotiate financial transactions without interference from outsiders.
12. Saves the weak from extraordinary threats…
13. …but allows the inactive and irresponsible to endure ordinary consequences.
14. Is moved by common sense and logic, and not buzz words.
15. Celebrates the success of those individuals who are most productive. Or else leaves them alone.
16. Never tolerates intolerance.
17. Executes killers quickly, so the innocent may live.
18. Recognizes the most basic rights that are enjoyed by all; it does not play “musical chairs” with special rights among designated victim groups.
19. Allows free immigration until it culminates in harm to the economy or public safety, and then moves to restrict it.
20. Never allows those who say what the rules mean, to say where they are enforced.
21. Never ridicules its children — or adults — for knowing things, or knowing how to do things.
22. Ensures that children know how to live life as adults, before it is time for them to do so.
23. Acquits from all penalty, those who are found to have committed violence in self-defense.
24. Does not tax income, business or death.
25. Finds ways to make government smaller every year.
26. Makes public service a humbling, and if possible a non-compensated, occupation.
27. Leaves as little up to popular vote as it possibly can.
28. Never allows those who enforce the rules, to write them.
29. Sympathizes most passionately with the word that makes the most sense, not the one that travels the fastest.
30. Speaks with many free and independent voices before the policy is formed, but with only one voice afterward.
31. Obliges women to show discretion, chastity, modesty and good taste.
32. Obliges men to display good manners, and actively defend and assist those weaker than them.
33. Is filled with men and boys who regularly do demanding things that used to be necessary, but aren’t anymore. Just because.
34. Abstains from a fight, or jumps headlong into it — violently, unreasonably — “in it to win it.” It never fights halfway.
35. Places no importance at all, or very little, on a personal attribute of displayed harmlessness — legally, or culturally.
36. Worries about keeping children busy more than it worries about keeping children happy.
37. Works to preserve that which preserves, and destroy that which destroys — not the other way around.
38. Has one system of justice — one that cannot be bought.
39. Never bluffs.
40. Permits individual choice, even if it “discriminates.”
41. Places greater importance on clarity than on agreement.
42. Discerns what is true and just from the facts; not words of revered elders, ravings of mobs of popular will, or arbitrary ramblings of tradition.
43. Recognizes, and promotes, symbiosis between classes…
44. …but allows, and encourages, separate households to enjoy the fruits of their specialized labors.
45. Does not impose taxes to mold and shape individual behavior, or to punish people for being what they are, but simply to raise revenue.
46. Provides special punishment for whoever threw the first punch, not for whoever threw the last one.
47. Tolerates all points of view, save for those who desire or labor toward its demoralization, self-destruction or other demise.
48. NEVER exacts a price for its friendship.
49. NEVER provides a reward for its enemies.
50. Endures.

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization | 2 Comments »

Violated My Birthday Party Invitation Rights

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Wah, wah, wah; yes, let’s become a lot more like Europe and get them to like us more.

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

The boy’s father has lodged a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.

He says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.

The boy handed out his birthday invitations during class-time and when the teacher spotted that two children had not received one the invitations were confiscated.

H/T: Kate.

Posted in Europeans, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Imagine This…

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Thomas Jefferson once said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” On this Fourth, I’m thinking about something a little bit different. Suppose somewhere there is a nation in which each citizen has the precious and inalienable right to be smart, but is wholly deprived of the right to be stupid.

Where I’m going with this, is that I strongly suspect such a nation is something that never was and never will be. For a number of reasons. Starting with, someone would have to sit in judgment of what’s smart and what’s dumb. The truth of the matter is, “smart” people haven’t done a great deal for us because what’s usually thought of as something smart, is thought of that way because it’s orthodox. It’s same-ol’ same-ol’. The car you drive, the light bulb you turn on, the cell phone into which you do your chattering, they were all invented by someone whom someone else thought was doing something abysmally stupid.

And then we have those things that really are stupid, like the mutterings of Matthew Rothschild and Chris Satullo, along with the usual gang of nitwits…M. Moore, K. Olbermann, N. Chomsky…along with the ones who just tone down the anti-USA rhetoric a little bit, because after all they’re competing for a position in which they would run it. Clinton, Kerry, Obama, Dean.

What I think is really great about this country, is that these chuckleheads are running around, advertising by their blatherings what is wonderful about it without even knowing they’re doing it.

Abu Ghraib, you say? Abu Ghraib was a bunch of rotten stuff done to rotten people by ignorant stupid Americans…who were then caught by other Americans, and tried by other Americans and sentenced by other Americans while yet other Americans observed the whole process and reported to the whole world what was going on. Moral of Abu Ghraib: Americans do stupid things just like people all the world over. And then Americans tattle on other Americans. We are not perfect, nor have we ever claimed to be. But where we can be transparent and still defend ourselves, we make ourselves visible to general audiences. Our government is split — the executive, the legislative, the judicial, none of the three beholden to any of the others.

We fall for a lot of bullshit, like that the planet is in danger and if we all just unplug our waffle irons when they’re not in use, maybe we can save it. That’s the price of free speech.

Like I said, if you want to recognize the right people have to come up with smart things, you have to recognize the companion right people to fall for stupid nonsense.

We have a lot of weapons, but it isn’t the stockpile of weapons that makes us great. It is the difference between what we have, and what we use.

When we were attacked, we flew over Afghanistan, the country from which the attack came, and out of the bellies of our airplanes dropped — food and money.

Our worst critics prefer to stay.

Our poor people are fat.

Happy Independence Day.

Update: I see Gerard is also pointing to the “worst critics prefer to stay” slogan that is mutually enjoyed by us both, along with others.

Happy Fourth! Speaking of Gerard, he’s taking apart another America-hating halfwit and his performance in this regard exceeds all expectations, even if you’re accustomed to his wonderful work. He’s pretending it’s some kind of dreary chore but I’m not buying it for a second, as the old boy seems to be enjoying himself immensely…

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter — in the commenter’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad — a mindset in which “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange, almost masochistic, pleasure.

Faced with such a deeply-rooted but deeply wrong mindset, we find ourselves eavesdropping on Macbeth as he discusses his wife’s madness with a doctor:

Macbeth
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

That is a random sample, not creme de la creme. It’s all that good. Head on over.

Also, Locomotive Breath has graciously pointed to our home page as a place you should go if it’s taking awhile for the sun to set and you’re sittin’ there in your lawn chair all bored, wireless laptop in one hand, sparklers in the other, beer in the other. He also has others. I stole his pinup because he probably stole it from somewhere else (most likely here), and there’s many others along with lots of good stuff. So hit both places if you have the time.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

True Greatness Inspires Lots of Bitching

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

So let’s not question whether this is a great country ever again, for it certainly has drawn more than its share of bitching.

Rick found something to pair up with our own tongue-in-cheek bitching we were doing yesterday…it’s an aging sourpuss Philadelphia Inquirer baby-boomer who wants us to “put the fireworks in storage” — because he says so.

Same ol’ nonsense. Terrorists cut off the heads of our journalists in front of a camcorder…we drip some water down someone’s nose and we’re supposed to wring our hands in paralyzing guilt for becoming “like them.” Oh, I think if becoming like them is the class assignment, a grade of C-minus would be exceedingly generous.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

Blah blah blah. You know the drill.

Blackfive found another internationalist pompous jackass sycophant, this one a Gen-X-er. Actually, I don’t know that. Matthew Rothschild could be ninety, for all I know. But these people are always sycophants. Ever notice that? You can’t just sit quietly and cluck your tongue about how ashamed “America” should be of herself, and keep it to yourself. This stuff always has to be advertised.

They know not what they say about themselves. What kind of person sits and stews about Abu Ghraib while we liberate Iraq? It’s impossible to reasonably conclude that this resentment against the USA is the product of any kind of thinking; it was the point going in. These are people filled with hate because they want to be — and they want the whole world to know.

So it’s rich material. Every time.

It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don’t play that martial music, white boy.

And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

Er…an old-fashioned concept called gratitude?

Like this —

I am so thankful to have been born into a country given to such extreme heights of productivity, capable of providing so much opportunity and comfort for those living within it, that people utterly devoid of talent can afford what surely must be the ultimate luxury: Pretending it’s cool to be an ingrate.

And…I don’t give a good God-damn who knows I’m thankful for that, and who doesn’t. It’s something that simply is. This country is truly great. It cannot be denied. We get more than our share of bitching, way more, and like the winner of that six-word slogan contest said: Our worst critics prefer to stay.

Happy birthday, and many more.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Western Civilization, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

What We’re Doing to Men

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

We aren’t trying to make married or household life especially painful for them, that’s just a byproduct. No, our damage is much more passive. We’re establishing a new catalog of cultural norms according to which masculine contributions cannot be appreciated.

It’s damaging to women, partly because the male contributions become more difficult to acquire both in quality and in quantity. But also because in order to diminish appreciation of what is masculine, you have to diminish appreciation for what is extraordinary — which means we all have to be mediocre, male and female alike.

And as Bernard Chapin points out, our journalism starts to look like editorialism.

Members of the mainstream media not only cherish alternative lifestyles; they also wish to purge everything from our culture that prevents their realization. This was evident on Father’s Day when the New York Times Magazine commemorated the holiday by placing the misandric query, “Will Dad Ever Do His Share?,” on its cover. Inside is a lengthy expose by Lisa Belkin on this subject entitled “When Mom and Dad Share It All.” Those familiar with the contents of the Gray Lady will be unmoved by yet another attempt to denigrate fathers. After all, fulfilling the needs of politically correct oppression merchants practically has become the paper’s central purpose.
:
The author’s message is gaudily apparent in her description of one family’s dynamic:

They would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home. Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists; neither of their careers would take precedence. Both would be equally likely to plan a birthday party or know that the car needs oil or miss work for a sick child or remember (without prompting) to stop at the store for diapers and milk. … There are Marcs and Amys scattered throughout the country, and the most interesting thing about them is that they are so very interesting. What they suggest, after all, is simple. Gender should not determine the division of labor at home.

:
Progressives use conformity — and any other trick or device they can quote or acquire — as a means to convince the general population that their natural inclinations are maladaptive. Radicals are only too happy to save the enlightened by reconfiguring them in their own image.
:
…while female advancement is a sacred venture for institutions like the New York Times, it is not for the whole of men. Shared care might well make marriage easier for wives and offer a chance to “have it all,” yet its impact on husbands is punitive. With the marriage rate recently having fallen below 50 percent in America due to fewer and fewer men consenting to tie the knot, the timing of this expose was both ironic and misguided. That an outlet — which boasts of publishing “all the news that’s fit to print” — is so oblivious of current events evidences the way that bias has corrupted their mission.

Like the late film critic Pauline Kael, the Crate and Barrel elitists who run the New York Times dwell in a “special world” and carefully avoid interactions with the general population. Recall Kael’s remarks concerning the reelection of Richard Nixon: “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” Sadly, we can feel her kind too, particularly when they are attempting to alter the course of our lives.

Women Are Not For Decoration Hooters. That’s my solution. It’s like garlic to Dracula. Just set your weary ass down, order a hot plate of wings and a cold pitcher of brew, and if there are any “Crate and Barrel elitists” around they’ll disappear in a cloud of dust and screeching and bitching about “orange shorts oppressive to women flaunting skimpy blah blah blah” and out they go.

And then you won’t be feeling ’em.

This is the problem with all efforts to re-define cultural norms…at least the absolutist ones, the ones that can’t achieve fifty-one percent and just be done with it. To achieve totality, you have to reject volunteerism and instead opt for coercion and force.

All around, too. You have to force men to clean toilets — and then you have to force women to settle for the job men do cleaning the toilets. It’s doomed to fail.

But that’s okay because it aspires to fail. If Lisa Belkin and her kind were successful in forcing men to act like women and vice-versa, then on Father’s Day next year there’d be nothing to write about. The goal really doesn’t have much to do with reforming us; the goal is perpetual bitching for the purpose of selling newspapers.

Chapin closes with an uppercut:

One need not be a psychologist or an economist to fathom that if you punish behaviors you get less of them. The already excessive demands and expectations of the modern woman are being heightened by the New York Times, which will only serve to further convince males that marriage is not worth the risk.

That’s the problem right there. As long as people opt-out and opt-in, they’ll always act according to their own interests. And…Belkin can keep on bitching.

Posted in Poisoning Masculinity | No Comments »

Can’t-Do Society

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

From an article I pegged yesterday:

Although going aggressive can put a company in a better position to survive a slowdown, few firms can resist becoming risk-averse. Thus, mid-level leaders find themselves pulling back and focusing entirely on how to meet short-term financial goals. Not only can this strategy set a company back competitively, it also can demoralize top performers.

Victor Davis Hanson notices the same thing about society as a whole, and credits Shakespeare for pointing it out:

Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of “thinking too precisely.” His poor Danish prince lost “the name of action,” as he dithered and sighed that “conscience does make cowards of us all.”

With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil — and that before you can fill your tank, you must take risks to fill a tanker.

Building things is a good indication of the relative confidence of a society. But the last American gasoline refinery was built almost three decades ago. As “cowards of our conscious,” we’ve come up with countless mitigating reasons not to build a new one. Our inaction has meant that our nation’s gasoline facilities have grown old, out of date and dangerous.

Zing!

But…at that point, VDH is just shifting into second gear. Once he has the momentum built up, see what kind of a turn things take:

We are nearing the seventh anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Its replacement — the Freedom Tower — should have been a sign of our determination and grit right after September 11.

But it is only now reaching street level. Owners, renters, builders and government have all fought endlessly over the design, the cost and the liability.

In contrast, in the midst of the Great Depression, our far poorer grandparents built the Empire State Building in 410 days — not a perfect design, but one good enough to withstand a fuel-laden World War II-era bomber that once crashed into it.

But even then, the can of whoopass has yet to be opened.

Smackdown —

Finally, high technology and the good life have turned us into utopians, fussy perfectionists who demand heaven on earth. Anytime a sound proposal seems short of perfect, we consider it not good, rather than good enough.

Hamlet asked, “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” In our growing shortages of infrastructure, food, fuel and water, we’ve already answered that: “Not to be!”

Don’t worry. It’s a good hurt; this is something we needed to be told about ourselves.

Most of what’s wrong with us, would be cured instantly if we got rid of this “Lots of tumblers have to fall into place to make something go but the lowliest mail clerk can pull a cord and make everything stop” stuff.

Posted in Nanny State Crap, Overlawyered, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

How’d That Work Out?

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Speaker Nan, last summer, announces her bold plans for bringing down those gas prices. H/T: Texas Rainmaker.

Obama voter’s logic: Obviously, we haven’t given democrats enough power yet. Let’s go further into the cul de sac and see what happens.

Memorial Day 2009: $6.50 regular self-serve, if you’re lucky.

As people consume less fuel in America, vehicle emissions should drop. Less pollution means bluer skies and longer lives — and the potential to slow global warming, albeit slightly. Lower energy demand means the air will contain fewer toxic agents, like particle pollution, which can get deep into your lungs and cause serious health problems. Bottom line? About 2,220 lives have already been saved over the past year because of higher gas prices and less pollution, according to an estimate calculated for TIME by J. Paul Leigh, a University of California at Davis health-economics professor who co-wrote a study on the topic in the March 2008 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. If prices remain high, we can expect some 2,000 people to avoid dying from pollution in the next 12 months.

— 4. Less Polution, from 10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas, Time Magazine.

Update: Buck opines on a subject that overlaps significantly:

One of the things that bugs the Hell out of me about the current “energy debate” is how our loyal, patriotic, and oh-so-concerned-about-OUR-welfare Democrats distort… nay, totally misrepresent… the issue of domestic oil drilling. There IS a Democrat Party Line in this space and it goes something like this (from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, via The Obamanon’s web site):

Oil companies, he said, already have drilling rights to millions of acres of federal land, “and yet they haven’t touched it,” Obama said. “John McCain wants to give them more when they’re not using what they already have.”

The companies ought to pay a fine on drilling rights they’re holding but not using, he said.

Well, now. That Las Vegas speech drew some attention from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal Monday:

“I want you to think about this,” Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. “The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They’re allowed to drill it, and yet they haven’t touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America’s total oil production.”

Wow, how come the oil companies didn’t think of that?

Perhaps because the notion is obviously false – at least to anyone who knows how oil and gas exploration actually works. Predictably, however, Mr. Obama’s claim is also the mantra of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Nick Rahall and others writing Congressional energy policy. As a public service, here’s a remedial education.

[…]

To deflect the GOP effort to relax the offshore-drilling ban – and thus boost supply while demand will remain strong – Democrats also say that most of the current leases are “nonproducing.” The idea comes from a “special report” prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Resources Committee, chaired by Mr. Rahall. “If we extrapolate from today’s production rates on federal lands and waters,” the authors write, the oil companies could “nearly double total U.S. oil production” (their emphasis).

In other words, these whiz kids assume that every acre of every lease holds the same amount of oil and gas. Yet the existence of a lease does not guarantee that the geology holds recoverable resources. Brian Kennedy of the Institute for Energy Research quips that, using the same extrapolation, the 9.4 billion acres of the currently nonproducing moon should yield 654 million barrels of oil per day.

There’s much more at the link, and it’s all good. Whenever I see or hear the Democrats’ arguments against domestic drilling, I naturally assume they’re both arrogant and insulting. Arrogant because they truly believe they have the only answer(s) to our energy problems, and they most certainly don’t. And they (Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Emmanuel) are insulting because they obviously expect me to believe this shit.

The bit about fining the oil & gas companies for not using the land falls right in with the pattern. Roll back the tax cuts, raise the minimum wage, put in price caps, tax their profits, tax their equipment, tax their land.

The common thread is that you make it more expensive to do business.

What happens to prices of things when it’s more expensive to get them sold?

I’d love to see a real interviewer question Obama or any other prominent democrat about how this works. Don’t try to shred the guy to ribbons, don’t try to embarrass him…no interruptions except one, “that doesn’t answer the question I asked you.” Just one simple question: How does this work? Step One is make it more expensive to be an oil company, through your plan(s); Step Three is lower gas prices; what is Step Two, exactly, Senator? Take all the time you need but please stick to the subject.

Oh and that dunking stool on which you’re sitting will give way, if we hear the words “Bush” or “failed policies” or “Iraq.” Ker-PLOOSH.

We’re supposed to have freedom of the press in this country because the public has a right to know. Seems this should’ve happened a long time ago.

Posted in Oil & Gas, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Liberals, Conservatives and Justice

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Great points from David Bernstein writing in Cato about the DC v. Heller decision and what it means.

Liberalism is most dizzying when you try to take it seriously.

The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.

Liberal justices uphold individual rights and civil liberties, huh? I have heard that before, but I didn’t know they were trying to stick to that one.

They don’t stick to much of anything.

Conservative: Okay, liberal fellow judge, here’s something we have to decide. We have to figure out if we’re going to execute this guy for murdering a little girl. I presume since you’re all about individual rights and civil liberties you’ll be in favor of signing the death warrant with me…

Liberal: No!

Conservative: No?

Liberal: No, absolutely not! I’m here to safeguard the individual rights and civil liberties of that creepy guy, just as much as the little girl.

Conservative: Point taken, but they’re both human beings…and she was innocent, whereas not only is he guilty but he could kill again.

Liberal: Yeah but you don’t know that for sure. Anyway, the little girl’s civil liberties cannot be protected because she’s already dead. We have to concentrate on the living. Even though the manner in which she was removed from the living is unjust, it’s in the past and we can’t do anything about that.

Conservative: Okay, that’s interesting. So the girl was unfairly murdered, but one way or the other she’s no longer alive and therefore beyond our purview as we act to protect the civil liberties of living persons.

Liberal: Precisely.

Conservative: Alright, our next case concerns a homeowner who gunned down a burglar. The burglar is dead, so going by your logic of safeguarding civil liberties for the living, I guess you’ll be joining me in letting the homeowner off the hook.

Liberal: Nonsense! He needs to be punished for his crime!

Conservative: He does?

Liberal: Yes. I mean of course the burglar is dead, but he still has civil liberties that need protecting. It’s all about the rest of us. We need to preserve a system of law and order.

Conservative: So liberalism is all about civil liberties…only for the living though…and preserving law and order.

Liberal: Now you’re getting it. Liberalism is completely consistent, it’s about individual rights for the living and respecting the law, and conservatism is about suspending individual rights for everyone, and anarchy and chaos.

Conservative: Okay, I think I’m getting it. Now our third case for the morning concerns illegal aliens that are running across the border…since you’re all about law and order I guess you’ll be joining me in cracking down on that.

Liberal: What makes you think that?

And so it goes. Nailing down exactly what liberalism is, is just like nailing jello to a tree. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, no consistency. The definitions liberals themselves offer, only make sense so long as you are expected to pay attention to those definitions. They do not endure across multiple issues.

But this definition does…

Twenty-first century American liberalism in a nutshell: That which builds or preserves must, at all costs, be destroyed; that which destroys must, at all costs, be preserved.

See, it isn’t tough at all to come up with a definition for liberalism that makes sense and adheres satisfactorily to fact and truth. All you have to do is think for yourself, and stop listening to liberals. They, after all, are the ones who can’t afford to have liberalism recognized for what it really is.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Justice | 1 Comment »

Now THAT Is What I Call a Media-Construct Candidate

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Because you-know-who has now tossed so many people under his bus, that now they’re starting up a “Can I Get An Amen Here?” campaign to throw the “throw ‘im under the bus” cliche…under the bus.

Exactly who is throwing whom and from where did this much-abused phrase come?

Long a staple in the sports realm, the phrase experienced a resurgence in popularity (and overuse) earlier in the presidential campaign when Sen. Barack Obama eventually threw his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., under the bus, denouncing him.

The euphemistic phrase, which now also means jettisoning a political liability, has taken on a twisted and ubiquitous life of its own. The presumptive Democratic nominee seems to be a leader of the pack among under-the-bus flingers, slingers and tossers, according to cable news pundits and blogosphere scribes.

Mr. Obama has been accused of heaving his white grandmother; his former foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power; the former head of his vice presidential vetting committee, Jim Johnson; the Muslim community; public financing of presidential campaigns; his not-quite-e-mail-pal, Scarlett Johansson; and even his short-lived customized presidential seal — all under the bus.
:
Trying to appeal to people’s sense of righteousness and decency, many writers in recent months have railed against the phrase, saying it’s well past its prime. Some have even called for a moratorium on use of the metaphor, but politicians, pundits, journalists, politicos and others have not seen fit to oblige. It seems “to throw (someone) under the bus” won’t go gentle into that good night.

Uh, well gee that might be because right about now there’s a point to throwing it around. It’s a little unusual to wish for a word or phrase’s demise, at the moment when it’s service to linguistic demand is at it’s peak.

Wow, that’s almost an in-kind contribution. Changing the English language in the middle of the Obamessiah’s campaign, so that even if someone wants to say something bad about him there aren’t any words with which to do it.

Good luck on that.

Posted in Obamamania, Poisoning English Language | 1 Comment »

Fifty Things America Does Wrong!

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Gadfly salvage wants to make a point, and I think it’s about how knuckle-dragging meat-lovin’ barbeque-sauce-sucking Hooters-waitress-ogling gun nuts like myself are intellectually incapable of admitting America can do things wrong, because he’s demanding some lists out of us about that: “What has she done wrong?”

Here ya go, pal.

The United States did something wrong, when it did the following:

1. Allow democrats and liberalism to re-define far-left liberalism as some kind of middle-of-the-road stuff.
2. Allow democrats to re-define real middle-of-the-road stuff as some kind of far-right extremism.
3. Allow four Justices to sit on the Supreme Court who would eviscerate the Second Amendment.
4. Allow confusion between “freedom of speech” and sedition.
5. Allow Hollywood to churn out propaganda that serves no purpose but to denigrate and hold up to ridicule the homeland, and any resolve to defend it, with no fear of reprisal.
6. Allow labor unions to exist in the twenty-first century.
Indoctrination Center Ahead 7. Allow communist apparatchucks to educate our children in a public education system.
8. Allow socialists to infiltrate our system of government — so long as they pretend to care about the environment.
9. Allow failed socialist politicians to tell us what “science” is through a glossy movie.
10. Allow “public defenders” to confer value on the lives of their clients, and no value whatsoever upon the lives ended prematurely and violently by them.
11. Allow feminists to re-define fatherhood into something replaceable.
12. Allow feminists to re-define fatherhood into something disposable.
13. Allow feminists to re-define fatherhood into something toxic.
14. Allow politicians to run for high office while telling us that if a European is going to be rude to us, it means the fault lies with us and not with the rude European.
15. Allow our Constutition to be perverted into an instrument that forcibly imposes cultural norms and sensibilities of decency, from a federal enclave onto a state-level one.
16. Allow our federal government to withhold “highway funding” from states that didn’t have the “correct” voting ages, drinking ages, speed limits, library book return dates, parking infractions, et al.
17. Allow the New York Times to spill sensitive state secrets on numerous occasions, without fear of prosecution.
18. Disband the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) without putting in place some adequate replacement.
19. Impose surreal “rules of engagement” on men and women in combat zones, cooked up by pencil-neck geek paper-pushers in two-thousand-dollar suits who’ve never seen combat.
20. Impose an income tax.
21. Let an American President get away, both legally and in his legacy, with jailing American citizens because of the Japanese blood in their veins — only because he was a DEMOCRAT.
22. Put said racist American democrat President on our money (and not take him off again).
23. Impose a minimum wage on our otherwise-law-abiding businesses.
24. Allow our labor unions to jack up that minimum wage every few years for their own financial gain.
25. Allow, through the evolution-versus-intelligent-design debate, “science” to become a process of upholding sacred-cow theories against legitimate challenge.
26. Allow our children to reach majority age without honoring the Golden Rule.
27. Allow our children to reach majority age without understanding the value of reading.
28. Allow our children to reach majority age without knowing how to reconcile a checking account.
29. Allow our children to reach majority age without comprehending the distinction between sacrifice for a worthy ideal, and sacrifice of self for it’s own sake.
30. Allow our children to reach majority age without understanding Thing I Know #70.
31. Allow our children to reach majority age without knowing how to gather clues about what’s going on, and make sense out of them.
32. Allow our children to feel good about themselves without seeing what needs doing, and doing it.
33. Allow our children to confuse getting work done, with being an accepted part of a group.
34. Allow our grownups to confuse getting work done, with being an accepted part of a group.
35. Allow our boys to dress like little girls.
36. Allow our girls to dress like little boys.
37. Require our local populations to recognize marriage as something outside their reasoning, just because other local populations living thousands of miles away want them to be so required to so recognize.
38. Take seriously the idea that anything to do with government should be separated from anything that has to do with God…but then, paradoxically, on December 25 we somehow shouldn’t expect our mail to be delivered.
39. Allow anyone to call Hooters a “strip club” and get away with it.
40. Allow anyone to own a dog who is too lazy to pick up dog feces.
41. Allow Bill Clinton to put in something as absurd as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
42. Take anyone seriously who wants to bitch about gas prices, while driving something that gets less than 30 miles a gallon.
43. Allow any kind of tax on businesses, knowing full well such taxes are only passed on to consumers.
44. Abandon the Hays Code, without putting in place an adequate replacement.
45. Allow any movie or television sitcom to be produced in which the father of the household is taken less than seriously, let alone held up to ridicule.
46. Allow children to refer to their fathers by their first names, even in make-believe television cartoons.
47. Allow Microsoft Windows Vista.
48. Allow the Fairness Doctrine to even be considered, or for that matter, allow Red Lion vs. FCC to stand without impeaching the entire Supreme Court (sans W. Douglas).
49. Allowed its neighbors and Europe to become apathetic about their own national security (credit goes to tim the godless heathen, whom I named).
50. Allow women to waltz into doctors’ offices and order up diagnoses for their sons, along the lines of “AD(H)D” and Autism and Asperger’s, as if said diagnoses are Netflix movies or pizzas.

Update:
You know what finishes this off perfectly? A quote of JFK by fellow Webloggin contributor Absurd Report:

No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down, and all of us are made better off whenever any one of us is made better off.

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Memo For File LXIII

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Last night I had a dream about a kingdom in a faraway land, closed off from the outside world by very high walls. The kingdom was ruled by a strong and wise King, who did everything he could to make sure everything inside the walls worked as normally as possible. Toward that end, he made sure to sit in judgment of a swift trial whenever anyone was caught doing something strange.

The sentencing looked a lot like that scene with the old guy in Judge Dredd. The convicted strange-person would be banished forevermore from the kingdom, and sent to walk outside the great doors and live outside the high walls, forever. This would be a huge ceremony with great celebration and fanfare. The villagers would gather by the great doors and jeer at the unfortunates forced to walk through them, throwing rotten vegetables at them. The people of the kingdom rejoiced in the power and wisdom of their king, and once the great doors slammed shut behind the condemned man, they imagined the worst.

A left-handed blacksmith was caught pounding on a new horseshoe with his left hand instead of with his right hand. He was banished from the kingdom.

A farmer’s wife was caught harvesting eggs from the chicken coop, grabbing them by the pointy end instead of by the big end. She was banished from the kingdom.

A boy was caught cleaning the horse stables with gloves on his hands. He was banished from the kingdom.

Nobody was too concerned about learning what happened to these people, but at suppertime they would let their imaginations run wild. Giant eagles would carry the condemned to their nests to feed their young, said an old woman. Jackals would drag them to the ground by their necks, and tear into their bellies, said an old man. Giant ants would cover them head to toe while they slept, and eat them alive, said a particularly obese little boy. The villagers saw them take the “Long Walk” through the great doors, the doors slammed shut, and the condemned might as well have disappeared. Then the villagers went back to their normal lives doing their normal things…as normally as was possible.

Then a funny thing happened.

They ran out of horseshoes. People had horses, but they couldn’t ride them anywhere.

They ran out of eggs. Families went hungry.

Nobody was cleaning out the stables, at least, not as quickly as they needed a cleaning. There was horse maneure everywhere.

Disease became rampant. A famine struck the kingdom.

The problems became worse and worse — and as they did, the wise, benevolent king became more strict about making sure his subjects were doing everything the normal way. A one-legged man was banished for limping wrong. A farmer harvesting corn was banished for wearing his harvesting bag over his right shoulder instead of over his left one. Another farmer was caught milking his cow by pulling on the teats in the wrong order, and he was banished.

Food became more and more scarce.

In desperation, someone finally decided to go hunting; and so, for the first time in a century or more, the villagers stepped outside the high walls of the great kingdom.

What did they find?

They found — another kingdom. Their whole world had existed inside of another one, a greater one…in which people weren’t afraid to do things in creative new ways. A larger kingdom full of stable boys shoeveling horse waste with gloves on their hands so they would stay healthy; farmers’ wives picking up eggs by whatever end was handy; and blacksmiths building horseshoes by swinging the hammer with whatever hand could do it the fastest and best. The handicapped made their way in whatever manner they chose, and nobody scolded them for it. The corn was piled high at harvest time because people picked it in whatever way they wanted to. The milk flowed freely because it was milked in whatever way made the most sense to the guy doing the milking.

The villagers realized that the “condemned,” upon walking out of those great doors, simply took up residence in the larger kingdom. The villagers had imagined that they had ostracized the condemned, but all this time, that had really only been ostracizing themselves. They sought to bind others and free themselves, and succeeded only in binding themselves and freeing others.

And in the great kingdom there was no disease, and there was no famine. People lived life fearlessly…pausing only to gaze at the high walls isolating the tinier kingdom in their midst, and shake their heads sadly. As for the villagers from the smaller kingdom, they had locked themselves up in a prison and hadn’t even known it. Bound by rules that made no sense. Deprived of freedom enjoyed by others. Blinded by their own ignorance. But — of course — painfully “normal.”

Upon waking, I realized my dream was simply Logan’s Run in reverse. The City of Domes citizens had rejoiced in the “renewal” of the thirty-year-olds on “Lastday,” presuming this was the natural outcome of “Carousel.” The spoiler was that there was no renewal and everyone who was dead was dead-for-good. In my dream, the villagers had presumed that anyone who was shut out of the gates had ceased to exist; the spoiler was that those who were ostracized, not only continued to exist, but enjoyed a greater standard of living than those who went on inside the high walls of the smaller kingdom.

They had become obsessed with normalizing things, and in so doing had going through a sort of play-acting like they were causing someone’s existence to come to an end. Out of sight, out of mind…but in the end they realized it was their own existence, if any at all, that they had brought to an end. They had sought to make their kingdom — their micro-kingdom — the epitome of cleanliness, and instead had made it into an object of filth.

My dream seems to have a lot of smooth parallels with real life, and the errors we tend to make as we live it. I think Rod Serling would have liked my dream.

Why is it that people who can’t take advice always insist on giving it?

— James Bond, Casino Royale (2006)

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 10 Comments »

Desire For Change

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Crummy Factor #5: Innovation Comes to a Standstill
Day-to-Day Impact: Good ideas are ignored, and employees get resentful.

With accounting bureaucrats empowered, most managers can forget about pushing out new R&D projects, marketing campaigns, and innovation efforts. Although going aggressive can put a company in a better position to survive a slowdown, few firms can resist becoming risk-averse. Thus, mid-level leaders find themselves pulling back and focusing entirely on how to meet short-term financial goals. Not only can this strategy set a company back competitively, it also can demoralize top performers.

A mid-level employee at Restoration Hardware says slowed consumer spending has the company in lockdown mode. The staff used to be intense and driven, but motivation has deteriorated as top-level management becomes fixated on saving every penny instead of investing in better tools to manage inventory. “There are people like myself who are capable and willing to create the tools,” she says, “but it’s a combination of not having the financial resources or the desire for change.”

From Five Signs You Have a Crummy Job.

You know what I’ve noticed from my twenty years in the industry, is that when things start to look like this the word “change” becomes as popular as it ever has been, even moreso. It is the concept that loses it’s luster. The syllable itself does just fine.

I remember long, seemingly endless processions of big muckety-mucks who’d just been hired to fill the position left vacant by the last muckety-muck, and each guy would call an entire division in to a cafeteria somewhere. Just like those assemblies from high school. And he’d answer every question conceivable except for “so is this going to cost me my job?” and talk, and talk, and talk about change.

Saying exactly the same stuff the last guy said.

Then he’d high-tail it out of there inside of a year, and we’d be listening to exactly the same speech again from some other guy.

I think that’s where America is right now. I see it in Sen. Obama, big-time. The guy talks about change, but he’s delivering exactly the same speeches we heard before. He’ll end up being another Jimmy Carter before he’s done; everything he touches will turn to crap, in the years after he’s thankfully out of office there won’t be any reasonable way to doubt it anymore, and his biggest fans will insist that even though President Obama did a lot wrong and nothing right, we are all to think of him as a really nice, decent, all-around good guy.

And sixteen years from now, we’re sure to fall for the same crap from someone else. It’s what we deserve; we think we’re hungry for change, we say so, but we don’t act like it.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

You Make Us Sick

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Via Rick:

Sister Toldjah brings it to my attention that this has become one of those “everyone’s bloggin’ it” things. Fine and good, but what I don’t see everyone already blogging is what follows. Maybe someone’s asked the same thing somewhere and I haven’t seen it.

Could it not be reasonably said, that importing instead of drilling is making us pretty sick?

What about the other hundred and ninety-three pillars of modern liberalism. What about taking our policy differences about national defense beyond the water’s edge, airing our dirty laundry in front of the enemy? What about adjusting our national interests to appease internationalists and foreigners? What about re-defining what’s worthy and good about our country, in a vainglorious and futile attempt to win atta-boys from people who are never going to like us anyway? Does that make us sick?

How about our “leaders” insulting our intelligence by showing such a careful and prejudiced selectivity about what, among the things we do, are to be declared toxic? And what other things are not?

I could go on and on. But I don’t see the point. It’s Harry Reid. A man about as popular as genital warts. He can say whatever he wants, and it isn’t really “news”; what’s truly amazing is that he is chosen for things. It’s a discredit to Nevada, and to the Senate.

Yeah, he makes me sick.

Posted in Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

I Made a New Word XVII

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

cat∙tle∙ness (intangible n.)

1. The proclivity of some to live like human cattle, meandering throughout their entire lives without changing the direction or outcome of anything by means of their participation, even as they may place great emphasis on the endeavor to so participate.
2. More specifically, the drive to become more receptive to the ideas of others, and to find creative new ways to communicate those ideas to even more others, coupled with a stultifying and bewildering apathy regarding what those ideas should be or the logical merits thereof.
3. The desire to criticize that which is already being criticized by others, nevermind whether or not it makes sense to criticize; coupled with a steadfast refusal to be the first to criticize something, even though it might make a lot of sense to criticize it. Human cattle tend to use the “box of donuts” rule when it comes to criticism — it’s okay to grab the biggest gaudiest dripping maple bar and start ripping into it rapaciously once someone else has already busted the box open, but nobody wants to go first.
4. Loosely, it may refer to a determination to live life for the purpose of being happy, and for no higher purpose, since cows are kept for the purpose of producing a product and it is often said they produce it in greater quality and quantity when they’re happy.
5. A drive to convince other humans in proximity to live their lives like human cattle, by means of scolding, encouragement, coaxing and bullying. To denounce individuality and independent thinking in others, once one has purged those things from his or her own psyche.

24. People who imagine themselves as part of a group, with no individual identity, don’t want anyone else to have an individual identity either.

— From Everything I Know About People, Minus What I Was Told When I Was A Child

Cattleness is both a behavior and a membership; an important part of the behavior is to seek to expand the membership. All instances of cattleness involve this recruiting, but all efforts to recruit are not necessarily related to cattleness. The litmus test is that a great, universal, infinitely-expanding mob of people is invited to participate in the behavior — but the privilege of defining what that behavior is supposed to be, is confined to an elite few.

Therefore, the commoners propel, and the elite steers; the commoners pretend to do the steering while obediently awaiting their next orders. Where that dichotomy takes place, you have cattleness.

And my inspiration, of course, is the post previous in which we’re treated to the sight of box office star Will Smith faithfully following that “Box o’ donuts” rule in criticizing a President who’s not going to be President anymore in half a year no matter what. His criticism? There must be something wrong with that guy, because the Europeans are being rude to us.

Will Smith has a bigger brain than the average cow, I’m sure; the problem is he isn’t channeling the surplus nodes and synapses, and therefore it doesn’t very much matter what equipment he has upstairs. The thought “y’know, maybe this says a lot more about rude Europeans than it does about anything else” appears to have made itself a stranger in those parts. I don’t know how you avoid even pondering it for a second or two, but thanks to his cattleness he seems to have accomplished exactly that.

Maybe I’m too tough on the guy, making up a whole new word just for him. After all, it’s not like he’s the first hollywood dimwit to criticize George W. Bush; and it’s not like he’s the first celeb to criticize President Bush just because Europeans are being rude to Americans.

It’s not like he’s the first guy to say any of the things he’s said.

But that’s exactly the point. Isn’t it?

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Meister on Those Scolding Europeans and Will Smith

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

3. Accept all criticism, even when it makes absolutely no sense. Become less of what you are, until people decide you’re okay, even though they never will.
4. Even as you accept unreasonable criticism, avoid criticizing anything anybody else does, unless someone else is already criticizing it.

Those are two of my tips about how to earn a eulogy full of awkward, empty bromides. Agree with everything negative ever said about you even though it makes no sense, and don’t say anything negative about anything else — unless that’s become “The Thing To Do,” in which case you should dish out scoldings by the bushel. In short, let the bandwagon be your “something’s-wrong-with-that” compass.

So is Will Smith earning a eulogy full of awkward, empty bromides? He certainly seems to be trying to, I can see by Pam Meister’s expose in Pajamas Media today. The lad is younger than me, stronger than me, looks much better than most of us and who wouldn’t love to have a house and a bank account like his?

But whatever eulogy I have coming my way, I’ll keep it warts-and-all, thankewverymuch. Mr. Smith can hang on to his. I’m sure there’ll be a few non-awkward sprinklings in the nice things said about him when it’s time, his charities, his movies, funny things he did, etc. But by-and-large, he represents exactly what I was describing.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to wading in the Hollywood cesspool, another witless celebrity decides to trash America.

Will Smith is the latest overpaid navel-gazer to join the “Embarrassed to Be a Rich American Celebrity Tour.” On a recent Today Show appearance to hawk his upcoming movie Hancock — which, if this report is correct, is likely to be a box office disaster — Smith had this to say about his recent travels abroad:

You know I just, I just came back from Moscow, Berlin, London, and Paris and it’s the first, I’ve been there quite a few times in the past five to 10 years. And it just hasn’t been a good thing to be American. And this is the first time, since Barack has gotten the nomination, that it, it was a good thing.

How incredibly popular this has become; how many Will Smiths there are. You complain about George Bush, so I’m going to complain about George Bush. If it’s nonsensical to complain about X but you’re doing it anyway, I’ll help you complain about it. If it makes lots of sense to complain about Z but nobody else is complaining about Z, I’ll keep my silence on it. The bandwagon is the compass.

Pam Meister continues to opine, raising the fascinating rhetorical question of just who, exactly, died and made the Europeans boss:

It does surprise me that Smith refers to being relieved of his embarrassment in Berlin, considering that country has moved to ban Scientology, something Smith has been dabbling in for some time now. Is the German government’s move to ban a, er, religion — in light of Germany’s history of religious tolerance — something the Germans should be embarrassed about when they travel abroad? Perhaps the next time I see a German tourist I’ll ask in somber tones, “What do you think about your government banning Scientology?” in the same manner so many Europeans like to ask Americans, “What do you think about your president?” and if you reply in a positive manner they stare at you as though you have just sprouted a second nose.

Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark.

Mr. Smith is only among the most entertaining and appealing elite of what has become a majority, a vocal majority if no other kind, of bullying nonsense-peddlers. They insist the rest of us accept their judgment as a lodestar, while proffering that sense of judgment only as a proxy. None of ’em take responsibility for anything. They criticize, not what it makes sense to criticize, but instead what lots of folks among them are already criticizing. This has become painfully obvious as it has become later into George W. Bush’s second and final term: We can debate into all hours of the night whether or not President Bush deserves criticism, but we can’t debate whether it makes sense to criticize him. It doesn’t. What’s the other guy going to say when you make your criticism stick? “Oh that does it then, I’m not gonna re-elect him“?

So what do you say at Will Smith’s eulogy? He had the courage to criticize some things it made no sense to criticize, when a bunch of other people were already doing it. That’s an awkward, empty bromide if ever there was one.

How much company does he have? Consider the contract made by people like him: LET ME INTO THE CLUB. I will voice my opinion courageously, after others have already done it…and there is no residual question remaining about whether it is the voice of the majority or not. I will add my energy and my charisma, but never my judgment for my judgment will simply be a clone of what others have judged.

I will lean on the oar. My hand will stay off the tiller. I am propulsion; I am not direction. I change the vector but not the bearing.

I will not change the outcome. In anything. But it will be lots of fun to look at me.

What do you say about someone like that when their time comes? You say you will miss them — and then what? The thing that floats just under the surface, the elephant in the room that makes the eulogy truly awkward and unbearable, is that all fun things come & go and we adapt just fine. We will learn to get along without ’em. After we so learn, we will be better people than we were before.

That isn’t the case with people who have the courage to change an outcome — stamping their individual identities under the changes. In the middle of droning out their eulogies, you wonder what in the world is going to happen now. You wonder how things would have been different. It’s a different eulogy. Trust me, I know; I’ve delivered them. It’s a tough one to do, but I’d much rather deliver that kind, than the kind of eulogy you give for someone who has no memory worth cherishing, no outcome changed because of his presence, the guy who criticizes only that which others are already criticizing. Human cattle.

Well, maybe the fact that no eulogy can be comfortably delivered, is the point. Green burials are becoming increasingly popular in the Europe from where Will Smith takes his marching orders, and some of these are lacking in a headstone or even a ceremony. So it’s not as if these folks have failed at anything by passing through their entire lifespans without making a real difference in things. Except — Will Smith actually does good things for charity. Good for him, but I wonder how he reconciles this?

When you’re trying to avoid upsetting the status quo in looking for things to criticize…avoiding any decisions for yourself, avoiding making any disruption in what has already been decided by others…but then you want to “make a difference” in things other people will think are nice and wonderful — the common thread devolves to a singularity. And that is earning the approval of strangers. Once that becomes what life is all about, it makes for a very awkward eulogy indeed.

Posted in Celebrity Halfwits, Europeans, Pinheads, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Follow-Up on Horn

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Joe Horn is a free man.

The legal justification is supposedly the “Castle Doctrine,” a subset of Texas’s self-defense law that lets you defend yourself and your property by firing on an unlawful intruder without having to “retreat” first. Having spent the past hour poring over the statutes and giving myself a migraine, it seems to me there are two gray areas: One, whether Horn is to be thought of as defending his home, his neighbor’s home, or himself when the shootings occurred, and two, whether having the right to “stand your ground” (i.e. not retreat) entitles you to precipitate a confrontation that could have been avoided by simply not doing anything. The sections that authorize defense of property (9.42 and 9.43) do allow for deadly force — but only at nighttime in the case of burglary, presumably because it’s harder to tell what a burglar’s packing in dim light and also because a burglar who’s coming through the window at an hour when he knows people are likely to be home is likely to be a bolder, more dangerous burglar. The Horn shootings happened in broad daylight. Which means if he’s off the hook, it has to be on grounds that he was protecting himself, not his property, during the confrontation with the burglars.

Dunno if I agree with this analysis. It presumes the Grand Jury followed the letter of the law, and furthermore that there must have been some tip-off of imminent danger to Mr. Horn. The latter of those has not been substantiated by the 911 call I heard (follow link at the top), and the former of those of course has not been substantiated by anything.

I think the grand jurors simply decided they’d had it up-to-here with the law standing up for bad guys. They didn’t think they should have been meeting for the purpose at hand; they moved to dismiss.

Not sure I can agree with that if that’s the way things went down, but I’m certainly not shedding any tears over it.

H/T: Ace.

Posted in Illegal Immigration, Poisoning Justice | No Comments »

Dionne Didn’t Read the Decision

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Phil’s eyes are bleeding as he reads the commentary from E. J. Dionne about the DC vs. Heller decision.

Me, I’m just shaking my head and giggling. Dionne has just ‘fessed up to writing about the decision without reading it, and the poor bastard doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s done. But to anyone who’s so much as skimmed through it, it’s crystal-clear.

Dionne writes…apparently, thinking he’s making a great point, and playing the English language like a virtuoso plays a fine Stradivarius violin…

Conservative justices claim that they defer to local authority. Not in this case. They insist that political questions should be decided by elected officials. Not in this case. They argue that they pay careful attention to the precise words of the Constitution. Not in this case. [emphasis mine]

I’m rewording slightly, here, my comments to Phil’s post (pending moderation there as of this writing):

Um, E.J., Justice Scalia began to parse out the exact wording in the Constitution on p. 2 (5 in the Adobe PDF file), and is concerned with absolutely nothing else until p. 27 (30) when he turns to relevant historical events. He even has footnotes in his analysis in which he respectfully deals with opposing viewpoints of the language.

I struggle to remember the last time I’ve seen so few words in the Constitution, analyzed by so many words in the decision that labors to fairly and accurately interpret them. Each significant noun and verb is subject to cool, reasoned scrutiny about what it might possibly mean and what it could be reasonably interpreted to mean. The reading within those 26 pages, as one might expect, ends up being a little dry; so I suppose it’s understandable you couldn’t get around to grinding through it — except, that is, for your wanting to write about it, in which case I would have expected you to at least crack it open.

Now you’re nailed. How embarrassing for you.

How did a talented, intelligent guy like Dionne get here? By being overly concerned with what others are thinking, and trying too hard to be a loyal member of a group. From there the words “The Constitution,” seemingly unambiguous, take on a life of their own. That phrase comes to represent the intents not of the Founding Fathers as they signed a specific document, but of liberals in good standing.

So he ends up bitching at Scalia for not being a good liberal. But as he delivers his snotty lecture, behind him the trained eye can see the DC v. Heller decision lying on his desk, with the seals intact, under a thin layer of dust. Dionne didn’t read it. Dionne didn’t skim it. Dionne knows not of what he speaks. Dionne’s opinion is utterly worthless, and he’s the last one to know how much.

But where it really sucks to be Dionne? A year or two from now, DC v. Heller will be a part of law that you will be expected to know if you’re a first-year law student. It does what Supreme Court decisions are supposed to do — end the debate, not with phony aristocratic authority, but with reasoned scrutiny and logic. It’s settled, and the nation will by then have moved on…and Dionne will be hoping-against-hope that the law students will somehow remain ignorant of his ignorant comment on it.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Gun Control, Lying Liars, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

How to Earn a Eulogy Full of Awkward, Empty Bromides

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

1. Don’t notice anything someone else hasn’t already noticed even if it becomes painfully obvious; and if you do notice it, don’t say anything.
2. Don’t look for ways to make anything better.
3. Accept all criticism, even when it makes absolutely no sense. Become less of what you are, until people decide you’re okay, even though they never will.
4. Even as you accept unreasonable criticism, avoid criticizing anything anybody else does, unless someone else is already criticizing it.
5. Be eager to contribute your energy but avoid contributing your judgment — don’t decide anything. Just be a beast of burden.
6. Don’t do anything that involves risk; before you become part of something, make sure it’ll succeed just as well without you as it would with you.
7. Don’t take yourself too seriously, in fact don’t take yourself seriously at all. Be the comedy relief.
8. Don’t do anything until you’re sure it will earn approval from others.
9. When choosing people to do things for you, favor the mediocre.
10. Avoid decisions; when forced to make one, side with the majority.
11. Learn by repeating what others have to say. Don’t validate anything; when you see authorities contradict each other, decide in favor of the ones you presume have power over you.
12. Eschew any form of confrontation — except, that is, for confronting people who aren’t following the eleven rules above.

¹⁴To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:

These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. ¹⁵I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! ¹⁶So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
— Revelation 3:14-16

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Stare Decisis, and Panic For Sake of Panic

Friday, June 27th, 2008

I was checking out Brutally Honest, Rick’s site to follow up on a mildly interesting and explosively-expanding thread underneath the Harley Davidson “Screw It, Let’s Ride” commercial. I have found it to be a dialog worth following, because it has morphed into a deliberation of manhood; an inspection of what, exactly, it is. We can always use more of that, and I’ve noticed both sides are putting a lot of thought into it. Rick (and Gerard too, evidently) sympathized with the ad and the attitude it sought to promote. Guest blogger and frequent commenter BroKen did not. It would seem at first blush that such an exchange wouldn’t have much place to go, since it’s a battle between pet peeves and therefore between emotions. Rick is sick and tired of being told the planet is in danger and we all need to buy some carbon credits and unplug our cell phones; Ken is sick and tired of apathetic, irresponsible people.

I think Ken’s crime, here, is one of overanalysis. He’s rather like the guy who’s told the urban legend about the late-night pedestrian who sees two headlights coming toward him, assumes they’re motorcycles, and goes between them…is DRT (Died Right There)…and upon hearing the story, the guy asks “but how do they know what he was thinking if he died?” Sometimes logical questions can open up entire sub-arguments that, when all’s said & done, aren’t worth pursuing. It’s possible.

Also possible, is the Panic For Sake Of Panic, and although I’m sure Rick has other examples in mind besides global warming, the environmental movement is certainly central to his inspiration. We’re being called-upon to panic over things quite a lot lately. Panic is not constructive thinking. Masculinity, Ken’s comments about it notwithstanding, can have a lot to do with letting it pass by with little action, or even no action at all. This would be the “keep your head together” aspect of manliness. In the case of the gas that costs almost five bucks a gallon, our error is in forgetting supply-and-demand, being too quick to blame cartoonish stereotypes like “Oil Executives”…presuming that our destruction is desired by people who are engaged in trade with us, and not by the people who seek re-election to Congress periodically through messages that resonate with our suffering. In the case of global warming, we’re confronted by a boogeyman that exists in the mind. Buzzwords, a few “scientists” funded with George Soros’ money, the allure of knowing massive bureaucracies and orthodox fellowships are already mobilized into motion around the boogeyman. The ambition to be part of something huge, nevermind having no impact at all on what it does based on one’s individual participation in it. Like the Barack Obama campaign, modern radical environmentalism has become a tantalizing pastime for those among us who lack intellectual masculinity. Those who desire to clamber on board a massive ship so they can be seen being on it, to grab an oar and help row it so they can be seen rowing it…and have nothing to do with steering it. Steering entails decision-making, and decision-making involves far too much responsibility for the gelded mind.

The four-word tagline “Screw it, let’s ride” is a joke that’s gone over Ken’s head, I’m afraid. In some situations, it can be a healthy and mature attitude. Like, anytime panic is the point. When someone nameless and faceless wants you to lose your bearings, and whispers scary campfire stories into your ear so you’ll fearfully listen to whatever comes next. The headstrong, able-minded manly man says “screw it, let’s ride.”

Through the kernel of truth that was involved in the scary story to make the remaining 99% of the panic digestible, this may entail risk. But we tend to forget that life is all about risk, and it is only through the elimination of life that you completely eliminate all risk.

Enough about that particular confusion vis a vis manhood, masculinity, manly thinking, etc. Let us examine another flavor of such confusion. Let us turn our attention from those who over-analyze, to those who do not analyze enough.

Rick has some more good stuff that is worthy of comment.

Dahlia Lithwick has made a career out of commenting on American law, especially as it is molded and shaped in our Supreme Court. She was born, and remains, a Canadian citizen. If you’ve exchanged ideas over the innernets with enough Canadian citizens about American law, as much as I have, you know what’s strange about that. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I shall expound…

The weakness in her mindset is betrayed by the passage:

The conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court is precariously balanced on a knife’s edge—with four liberals and four conservatives battling for the heart and mind of swing Justice Anthony Kennedy—is too simplistic. The current term has seen enough unanimous and near-unanimous decisions to suggest that the story of a 5-4 court is dramatic but inaccurate. That said, it’s clear there are four justices on the bench who deeply mistrust the judiciary, in the manner of a Rockette who doesn’t care for dancing. Dissenting in this month’s habeas case, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that judicial overreaching “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” John Roberts added that “unelected, politically unaccountable judges” should not shape detention policy. One more jurist at the high court who generally believes that jurists cannot be trusted would spell the difference between a court that is a coequal branch of government and one that cheers from the bleachers. [emphasis mine]

Okay, now for this to make any sort of sense — you have to believe that any self-imposed limitation on the Supreme Court’s authority would be tantamount to an internal, self-criticizing belief “that jurists cannot be trusted.” Her “Rockette” crack makes it clear, to me, that she means to devalue such restraint, to make it equivalent into almost to sort of a mental illness. Perhaps she doesn’t realize the extraordinary intellectual difficulty that would be involved in applying this rule to the Supreme Court, and keep other institutions insulated from it, but I’m willing to go out and a limb and presume: Dahlia Lithwick does not believe in restraint of authority anywhere. Wherever someone can order something, they should. She probably liked it just fine when Gavin Newsom handed out marriage licenses when the law clearly said he didn’t have the authority to do it; I’m sure she was just as fond of the Supreme Court giving George Bush the smackdown over Guantanamo detainees and military tribunals.

How about President Bush’s decision to form those tribunals before the Supreme Court decision came down? If I’m correct in thinking Lithwick admires lack of authoritative self-restraint, that’d be a great example of it. Her careless, breezy use of the word “coequal” implies that she thinks the three branches should be able to do more-or-less the same things, and her implication that the Supreme Court carries legislative power would help to substantiate that. Somehow, I don’t think Lithwick is going to be quite as big a fan as that. No, she likes restraints on government-branch power to be jettisoned, when the decision under consideration is one she happens to like.

You simply can’t have separation of powers…a uniquely American doctrine…with that in place. Furthermore, as it’s been pointed out in many other places since then, Lithwick is engaged in some Holy Battle in which we old white males represent the forces of evil, because we’re old, white and male:

Anybody who believes the current Supreme Court looks like America needs to take a few more trips on a Greyhound bus. All the judges are white and/or old; most are both. [emphasis mine]

I have to stand on what I entered at Rick’s place:

What I wouldn’t give for a pleasant (hopefully, to stay that way) dinner conversation with her, or someone from this planet. Is their idea of the “wall of separation” between judiciary & legislature, the same as mine? Do they even have one? Or are they so much into “pack every single panel that has any authority at all with good people like me” that they haven’t even put that much thought into it?

In order to define what exactly is wrong with nutty, delusional people, sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious. Popular belief notwithstanding, this is something I really hate doing…but let’s go for it.

You have a law. Like most laws, it leaves room for interpretation. Perhaps because the law exists in a context in which it’s impossible to avoid that, or perhaps because the law just happens to be worded badly. Let’s make it a badly worded law to make the example clearer — the law is:

Don’t Drive Fast Here

You drive through there at 45 because you think that isn’t fast. Why, on the freeway, you’re allowed to go as fast as 65! But the cop who busted you thinks anything over 30 is pretty fast. He busts you. You appeal. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Court, here, essentially has two options: 1. It can uphold your penalty or 2. It can let you off the hook. It comes down to the “opinion” of the Justices overruling all other opinions now and forevermore (or at least, until a better sign is put up with a better law behind it). The side effect is that, if you are let off the hook for driving 45, it will become legally impossible to cite someone for driving through the same thoroughfare doing 35. On the other hand, if you’re busted, then anyone who gets a ticket for driving 55 and wants to appeal can just forget it.

This is jurisprudence. It is, specifically, stare decisis et non quieta movere; “stand by and adhere to decisions and not disturb what is settled” — or at least, that’s what it is called the next time a different case presents the same question. It is “law,” in all the ways that matter, but without democratic participation by the electorate, without critical thinking, without deliberation about cause-and-effect. Consistency is the only virtue to it.

I made reference to Lithwick’s “planet.” On mine, stare decisis is a noble ideal but when too much emanates from it, that is a toxic agent. So people like me see the Supreme Court as engaged in a struggle, to continue deciding cases for as many decades as possible without hopelessly tying itself up into a huge knot. The nightmare scenario is one in which stare decisis runs headlong off in one direction, and common sense sprints in the opposite direction. At that point, the Supreme Court must overrule itself, and admit that justice has been miscarried. For years.

Lithwick’s planet is one in which this is a desirable outcome. Bad laws like “Don’t Drive Fast” breathe life into the judicial branch, give it a reason for being “coequal,” and the courts are at their most noble and glorious when they seize this false authority and wield it.

I do not know what people on Planet Lithwick mean by “coequal,” exactly. I really don’t. I don’t think they know either. It’s clear to me they think decisions are “good” when they exude greater volumes of stare decisis side-effect…make things illegal that weren’t before…make things legal that were illegal before. It’s obvious they think more highly of the decision when the interpreted effect is contrary to the reasoned expectation of Congress, or other lawgivers, when the laws were legislated or ratified. They place a value on unintended consequences.

On my planet, we call that what it is: Bad law. We count on the judicial branch to step in, and make law that way where it did not exist previously — when Congress is unwilling, or unable, to do it’s job. And it’s an occasion for mourning, not celebration, because we know a law has just been made that has no common sense behind it. We know a “committee” decision — the most dreadful kind — has just been made, and nobody will be accountable to it because it will not have been made in any one individual’s name. Breathy, throwaway phrases like “evolving social mores” and “standards of decency” will be used to announce the results of polls — polls that were in fact never taken. Impact without ownership. Remember what I said about decision-making being an unacceptable burden to a gelded mind. This is an entire system of government, ruled by gelded minds.

So I agree with Planet Lithwick about the stakes being “very high.” She’s right. Just not in the way she thinks she is.

This is America. You may have heard of it, Dahlia. It is a place where our Supreme Court, and all the rest of our judicial branch…is not a supplementary Congress.

Our real Congress has long vacations for a reason, after all — we can only take so much of what they do. The courts are places where Congress’ messes are cleaned up. Congress certainly doesn’t need help making them.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Justice, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Western Civilization | 4 Comments »

Plagiarizing Goebbels

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler thinks George Lakoff, author of “The Political Mind” (Viking, $25.95) is stealing material from Joseph Goebbels. Lakoff’s point is that we’re voting “the wrong way” because our synapses are being unfairly exploited by conservatives, and if “progressives” simply retool their messages to manipulate our frames of references rather than give us these pesky “fact” things, we’ll start voting the right way again. Which is a chuckle and a snort to anyone who’s been paying attention to what kind of material the “progressives” have been selling up ’til now…sure they’ve got problems, but dishing out facts doesn’t seem to be one of ’em, at least to me.

They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.

This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters. [emphasis mine]

As Rottie has pointed out — the idea that liberals offer “programs that serve voters’ interests” is something of a hoot as well. That is, unless you consider the possibility that liberals have now successfully recruited so many illegal aliens and dead people into the voting process that the term “voter” has substantially changed.

And I’m wondering how neuroscience goes about showing that self-interest is a conservative idea. What’re they doing, strapping a guy in a chair, having him make self-interested choices in some creative experiment and then peeking at his “conservative” lobe to see if it lights up? Hmmm, I wonder what the conservative lobe would be. I would guess when you know a stove is hot, the liberal lobe is the one that lights up when you think “I think I’ll put my hand on that” and the conservative one would be the one that lights up next time ’round, when you think “that didn’t turn out so good, I believe this time I will not be doing that.”

From this, Lakoff’s agenda follows. In place of neoliberalism, he offers neuroliberalism. Since voters’ opinions are neither logical nor self-made, they should be altered, not obeyed. Politicians should “not follow polls but use them to see how they can change public opinion to their moral worldview.”

Yeah, I’m reading through all this stuff and you know what I’m seeing?

“I want liberal ideas to prevail and they damn sure aren’t going to prevail if those promoting them continue to muddle around with ‘facts’ and ‘logic,’ so I want them to start selling snake oil instead.”

And I don’t think Goebbels is the only one plagiarized here. I remember seeing it just a short time ago. Ah…here it is — here and here and here.

This column from Robyn Blumner about a psychology professor named Drew Westen telling Democrats to abandon fact-based campaigning and employ emotional tactics instead would be knee-slappingly hilarious, something fit for the pages of The Onion, were she not so gosh-darn serious about it all.

In one exceptionally clear 400-page volume, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, lays out everything that Democrats have been doing wrong. He explains it all in neuroscientific terms according to what regions of the brain control political decisionmaking, but it comes down to this. In election after election, Democrats have been appealing to the dispassionate, rational, fact-sensitive voter. A being, apparently, who doesn’t exist.

According to The Political Brain: The Role of Emotions in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, winning elections is all about influencing feelings and emotions. Westen says bringing more passion into politics requires the use of storytelling narratives and other emotional cues that powerfully engage those circuits of the brain that recruit and reinforce beliefs.

Democrats keep losing presidential campaigns, not because the issues they stand for are unappealing, but because they tend to structure their campaigns to engage the brain’s reasoning centers. And that just doesn’t cut the synaptic mustard.

I actually heard about this guy on Rush Limbaugh the other day. Basically, his strategy for winning elections for Democrats is to have them appeal to the emotions of voters rather than their reason. Which, to me, sounds a bit like “just tell ‘em what they want to hear.” Not to mention more than a little insulting for American voters. Apparently we’re all a bunch of morons who aren’t smart enough to wrap our minds around the brilliance and nuance of liberal policies.

Though I’m curious as to how Professor Westen thinks won Democrats the last election. Did they win because they just told Americans what they wanted to hear? Did the Democrats abandon reason and play on our emotions?

Exactly the question I had with this Lackoff guy. We’re still in the first term of the Marc Foley Congress, in which democrats took charge of everything because we “all” figured out they’re so great and Republicans suck so much. That’s what I keep getting told, anyway…doesn’t that mean our “progressives” are happy with the way things turned out? Westen’s masterpiece popped up during this first term, in fact when the victory was supposedly still fresh. Lackoff’s book, also, is published during this first term.

I’m already familiar with the fact — oops! Sorry guys! — that liberals have a distinct tendency to engage schemes that have failed repeatedly…like universal healthcare, minimum wage, price caps, gun control, the list goes on and on. So it took me by surprise, although I suppose maybe it should have been a foregone conclusion, that they want to change things that have worked well.

Is that what’s going on here? Or should I stick to my original theory, that the way they run their political campaigns is in a manner completely opposite to the way they want to run things once they accumulate more power across the national landscape? I’d like to know which it is, because I like that original theory better and it seems to hold true. You little people should be ashamed of being able to hold on to your money…we can have tax loopholes…you should ride razor scooters to work…we get to ride in limousines…you have to call 911…our bodyguards can carry Smith & Wessons…the world is mad at you for recognizing enemies…we shall prevail over our Republican opponents no matter what it takes…

Either way, I pity the poor democrat strategist who’s been tasked to read Lackoff’s book and look for ways to implement it. How do you shun facts, and embrace phony propaganda, more than the democrats have already been doing it? How do you repeat empty, vapid messages more often than they already have? In 2008 they’re down to just repeating the monosyllabic “hope…change” over and over again.

And, finally, I have to revert back to one of my favorite questions about liberals. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could rustle up just half the acrimony, half the anger, half the resolve and half the determination to prevail against an enemy at any cost — against the terrorists, as they do against Republicans?

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Deserving of Execution

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Under the precept of justice that punishment is to be graduated and proportioned to the crime, informed by evolving standards, capital punishment must “be limited to those offenders who commit ‘a narrow category of the most serious crimes’ and whose extreme culpability makes them ‘the most deserving of execution.’ ”

So says the Supreme Court, represented in an opinion delivered by Justice Anthony Kennedy…a star chamber that, apparently, can no longer distinguish between a fact and an opinion.

I have some evolving standards too, and mine say, well, I don’t know what Misha has in mind exactly when he says…

Fuck ‘em all. We’ll just have to “take care” of child rapists ourselves, then. They’ll be begging for some “cruel and unusual” lethal injection juice before we’re five minutes into their punishment.

…but I’m betting I like it a whole lot. Something that involves the smell of knife sharpening oil and burning flesh.

I used to have a co-worker who would brag about the messes he’d make at fast food establishments with rude customer service people. Like, if he asked for extra napkins and got nothing but a dumb look out of ’em…he’d do something like…hold the half drunk milkshake out at arms’ length, and let it plop on the floor. Know what he said to justify that? “I’m gonna get customer service outta you. One way, or the other.”

That applies here just fine, according to my “evolving standards.” When it comes to child rape, we’ll get justice…one way, or the other. Oh what’s that, this is anarchy? Something about refusing to live in a decent, civilised society? Don’t talk to me about it. Talk to the folks like Anthony Kennedy who systematically dismantled that civilised society. Civilization protects kids, or affords justice to kids who have been denied it. Justice…one way, or the other.

Not a threat — a prophecy. We’re going to have some child rapists accidentally shooting themselves from fifteen feet away before they can be taken into custody. Testicles first, breadbasket second, bridge-of-nose third. Whoopsie.

H/T to HotAir (via Rottweiler), who points to some fascinating news of a Rasmussen poll indicating — who’d a thunk it? — most of us think the Supremes have their own personal agendas.

Sixty-percent (60%) of voters believe Supreme Court Justices have their own political agendas, while just 23% believe they remain impartial, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Those sentiments are similar along all party lines and among voters of varying ideological beliefs. More men (66%) than women (54%) believe Justices have their own political agendas. While 25% of women believe the justices to be impartial, only 20% of men agree.

Posted in Poisoning Justice | 1 Comment »

Not Because He’s a Nice Guy

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Coming up sometime today — I have little doubt of this — is a protestation that “State Representative Fagan’s remarks were taken out of context.” Let’s go ahead and do our homework before we’re asked to do it this time, and consider the sad case of James Fagan of Massachusetts. I feel like this is where Rod Serling should glide into view and intone, “submitted for your approval…James…Fagan.”

Via Hot Air, via Ace, also via Constitutionally Right, via Jay, via Cas: This guy said some things that you wouldn’t expect to out of the Twilight Zone. Dee dee dah dah dee dee dah dah…

Let me tell you why it’s so wrong, It’s so wrong because in these situations…that 6-year-old is going to sit in front of me, or somebody far worse than me and I’m going to rip them apart. I’m going to make sure that the rest of their life is ruined. That when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep. When they’re 19 years old they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody. And that’s not because I’m a nice guy. That’s because when you’re in court, and you’re defending somebody’s liberty, and you’re facing a mandatory sentence of those draconian proportions, you have to do every single thing you can do on behalf of your client. That is your obligation as a trial lawyer.

The point he’s trying to make, is the same one that’s been made by our liberals about “torture” inflicted by the United States at Guantanamo, and about the three-strikes in California. It’s a cute little way of playing at cause-and-effect thinking, by those who are all but complete strangers to cause-and-effect thinking.

It goes like this: If you have a twenty year automatic sentence for one conviction of child rape, and I’m a defense attorney and my client’s been accused of it, I will be playing “accuse the accuser” all the time with each case that comes up, because I’m going to be holding nothing back when it comes to keeping my client out of jail for two decades.

So you see, there’s just a scintilla of reasoned consideration of consequences in what he’s saying. Just enough to give the feeling that that’s being done. It would be funny, were the subject matter different.

If this were an honest argument, legislators like Fagan would be making the same one when it’s time to raise the minimum wage. I can hear it now. “If I’ve got twenty kids working for me and next week they’re going to be costing me an extra $400 a week, I’m gonna rip them apart!” When’s the last time you heard Fagan, or anyone from his party, saying anything like that.

But you see, that would be a far more reasonable implementation of this cause-and-effect method of debate. If I have twenty people working for me at $7 an hour — or if I’m just thinking of hiring that many — you have to assume that as a businessman, I’m going to instigate a change in my plans if & when that goes up to $8. It’s quite unavoidable.

Contrasted with that, Fagan’s argument only makes sense if he can say “life, for our child molestation victims, will remain relatively pleasant and carefree if we ritually allow our predators to take a walk after a token rap on the knuckles.” That’s the opposite side of the coin that is his argument, and I’m afraid it’s so patently absurd that nobody’s going to step up and even pretend to put their name by that. Quite to the contrary, Charles at Constitutionally Right puts the kibosh on that whole thing, adroitly and concisely:

While it is true that it is a defense attorney’s obligation to defend his or her client to the best of his of her ability, that is true in all cases. Mr. Fagan would have you believe that he would be harsher in his cross examination of the victim if his client is facing 20 years then if he was only facing 5 years. His illogical, and downright offens[iv]e argument is that by mandating a sentence of 20 years, the State legislature will be victimizing the child by forcing him and his peers to traumatize the little girl on the witness stand. In essence, he argues that the only way to prevent him from “ruining” her life, is by offering leniency to the child rapist in the hopes he does not attack another young girl.

The victims of these predators have already lost what they’re going to lose. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to even consider them being “torn apart” like that, and that does happen, but the reality is they didn’t make the situation. The prosecution didn’t make the situation, the legislators who would sign off on the law didn’t make the situation. The predator did, and he deserves to go away for a long time. The crime itself has lasting effects; the cross-examination, brutal as it may be, does not. It’s a sacrifice some families choose not to make, but that others do, to make sure others aren’t traumatized the same way.

Here’s another way to look at it: If we pass this law, and in another twenty years we have a whole generation of grown-ups who were raped and brutalized as little kids and then “torn apart” by the defense attorneys because of Jessica’s Law…will it make sense, at that time, to say “darn that Jessica’s law, all these people were forever psychologically damaged because they were torn apart on the witness stand by the defense attorneys“?

No, that would be a very silly thing to say. Fagan’s argument, therefore, is not only lacking in merit but wholly disingenuous as well. Quite to the contrary, finding ourselves up to our armpits in traumatized adults who were victimized as kids, we’d blame the perpetrators. And, if for some reason there was a sharp up-tick in persons known to have been so brutalized by then, we’d say “Thank God for Jessica’s law putting these creeps away for twenty-five years, I wonder how bad the problem would be if we didn’t have that.”

That would be only reasonable. If that happens in the wake of passing Jessica’s Law. But the evidence indicates, overall, that the innocent are victimized in direct proportion to the leniency built into our justice system. You lock up bad people, crime goes down, you let ’em out, crime goes up. And that, right there, is the cause-and-effect argument Fagan is trying to avoid: If we don’t want our children molested so that it becomes necessary to put them on that stand in the first place, what do we do with our convicted child molesters? Lock ’em up, or let ’em out?

Cassy thinks we should go ahead and just execute them. Frankly, at this point, I’m not entirely sure I disagree with that anymore. There are real lives being put in danger while we tolerate these utterly absurd nonsensical arguments from people like James Fagan, and if we just execute the child molesters we can stop arguing about them. At that point, who knows what happens to Representative Fagan. A good chunk of his reason-for-being would go away, then, so he could retire from his state legislature and pursue whatever other leisurely activities he has in mind. My guess would be going fishing, ripping the fish apart, making sure they can’t sleep, making them throw up. Whatever.

Update: Mark Lunsford, father of the Jessica after whom the law is named, responds:

“Why doesn’t he figure out a way to defend that child and put these kind of people away instead of trying to figure ways for defense attorneys to get around Jessica’s Law?” Mark Lunsford fumed, slamming recent remarks by Rep. James Fagan. “These are very serious crimes that nobody wants to take serious. What about the rights of these children?”

Lunsford, whose daughter Jessica was raped and murdered in Florida by a repeat sex offender, will be in Massachusetts tomorrow to push lawmakers to pass Jessica’s Law, which would require a 20-year sentence for rape of a child under 12. The House passed a watered-down version of the bill last week but Lunsford and other victims’ rights activists will be pushing the Senate to include mandatory prison time in the final law.

“If this bill is not going to put these people away, don’t disrespect me by putting my daughter’s name on it,” Lunsford told the Herald last night. “You have to put these guys in prison and admit these people are uncurable.”

H/T: Apathetic Lemming of the North, via commenter Brian, commenting on Scotto Blogo.

Posted in Poisoning Justice, The Evil Men Do | 2 Comments »

Waters Backpedals

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

LAME:

In speaking to oil company executives at a May 22 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Waters tried to hold her tongue but nonetheless said: “This liberal will be all about socializing, uh, uh … would be about basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.”
:
But Michael Levin, communications director for Waters, told Cybercast News Service on Friday that Waters did not mean what she said.

“It was one comment in a long hearing, and it has continued to have a life of its own in the blogosphere,” he said. “It was not her intention to announce a big policy proposal. It’s not a developed policy proposal. It was not an intentional statement.”

I wasn’t taking the cookie out of the jar, because you weren’t supposed to catch me doing it.

Thing I Know #230. We’d call them “rationalists” if they thought things through rationally; that’s why they’re called “socialists.”

Consider the following, substituting “democrat” for “burglar” and “socialist” for “encyclopedia salesman.” It holds true and sums things up rather nicely.

Yup, all the way to the end with the salesmen flying out of the window.

Update: I see Phil is still busy with his graphic artistry, and he’s had much the same idea before I had it.

Posted in Oil & Gas, Poisoning Capitalism | No Comments »

George Carlin R.I.P.

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

As a South Park Republican I’m divided about the departure of Mr. Carlin. I kind of see it Sister Toldjah‘s way, and I kind of see it Locomotive Breath‘s way.

I lean a little bit in the direction of LB, because in the end, ingratitude makes me sick. Carlin did very well in his country, and it wouldn’t have killed him to save a few kind words about it.

He was pretty sure Obama would get assassinated. He made the mistake of saying so out loud, but being a lefty, he got away with it. Of course. Like most atheists who brag about being atheists, the man had a lot of faith about things he never would’ve been able to prove if he tried to.

On the plus side, this routine stands out in my head as one of the funniest things I saw in my childhood. Mister Carlin, if I were Our Father Who Art In Heaven, I’d say this is just enough to topple you into the pearly gates. But, of course, I’m not Him and that’s not up to me. Hope you’re doing alright.

Posted in Celebrity Halfwits, Eulogies, Fifth Column, Poisoning Christianity, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Finally, Nerds Have Sex Appeal

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

No, wait, don’t get all excited; we’re not there quite yet.

It’s sexy to be a nerd when you’re a girl:

These girl geeks aren’t social misfits; their identities don’t hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they’ve made that part of their appeal. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on “30 Rock” is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called “Math Doesn’t Suck” and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive” pageant. They tune in to shows like “GeekBrief.TV,” a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male. “For a long time, there’s been this stereotype that either you’re ugly and smart or cute and not suited for careers in math, science or engineering,” says Annalee Newitz, the co-editor of “She’s Such a Geek!”, a 2006 anthology of women writing about math, tech and science. “One of the big differences between Generation X geeks and girls in their teens now is really just an attitude—an indication that they’re much more comfortable.”

Huh. Well, that’s still a good thing, I suppose. Maybe we’ve finally arrived at the point where boys and girls are no longer being bossed around by stuffy conventional protocol or by bitter angry feminists, and everybody just does what comes most naturally. And so we have some geek girls who take the time to be feminine after they’re done geeking-out.

And everybody’s stopped whining; hey, I can completely get behind that. Oopsie, no, we’re not quite there yet:

Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.

Okay, so the whining hasn’t stopped. But at least society has begun to accept coolness and tech-wizardry in the same person, so long as that person is female.

Actually, that’s not new either now that I noodle it out a bit further. Action movies have had this going on for a very long time now. “Cracking a 256-bit twofish encryption code in your head” — hah — you can do that right after racing a motorcycle through a burning warehouse and then karate-chopping 50 bad guys in a row…and looking hot…if you’re a girl.

That’s quite alright, and has been for some time.

The male action hero hasn’t been allowed to do this, and to the best I can discern, is still not allowed to do this. If there’s a shoot-out and he’s busy hiding behind a car door, “covering” somebody by laying down about 70 shots from his six-shot .44 Ruger, and there’s a computer that has to be reprogrammed or unlocked or defeated in some way…it’s always been in the contract. He has to yell out “Do you think you can disarm that thing?” to his plucky sidekick. Said plucky sidekick being a gorgeous babe or an ugly whelp. There is, just to cite one example of the classic trend, Bond, James Bond. He can fight and drive fast cars and shoot guns and is supposed to be sexy as all get-out, but he doesn’t understand the computers, he needs his co-star to figure them out. I guess she was a Nerd 2.0 Girl before they were cool. The bad guy is a secret agent who can do everything Bond can do — he can’t figure the computers out, either. When a satellite has to be locked on to a city, he needs to rely on his dorky wimpy male sidekick who can’t shoot guns, flinches from a firefight, and seems to be working pretty hard to avoid looking the least bit sexy.

That’s a very old tradition, and a male-only tradition. We’ve lately done some work nibbling around the edges of it. Indiana Jones, I see, knows a gazillion languages, which is the kind of proficiency I might expect from a college professor who’s been globetrotting in search of archeological relics for eighty years. Hugh Jackman was allowed to break encryption keys in his head and still be a sexy dude — so long as the fighting was left to others.

So now, our expectation could be summed up as: Beating up bad guys; looking sexy; doing geek stuff. Girls, you can have all three; guys, pick any two.

That’s rather typical of our mindset, both in the cinema and outside of it, and it’s endured across generations: Girls can have all, dudes must choose. And I don’t see how the females have ever been shoehorned into anything, or out of anything, by it. Ever. On the school playground, I know girls can be meaner to each other than boys ever can be, but I don’t recall any anecdotal information about girls having been physically abused for their geekiness, whereas on the male side of the line this is a time-honored ritual.

So I guess what the article is trying to tell me, is that there is a new fashion trend rising up here in which it has become the hot new thing to mentor an up-and-coming female nerd. Well, since the Y2K computer bug, technology seems to have gone into a deep slumber, nobody seems to have gathered a benefit from that, so any nerd-mentoring that takes place is a good thing in my book.

But let’s not call this a groundbreaking trend. If 56 percent of engineering degrees are being earned by the ladies, that would indicate they’re already being mentored plenty well enough thankyew, so this isn’t quite so much blazing a new trail as climbing onto a bandwagon…we have a tendency to forget those are two different things. But whatever. We desperately need a technical renaissance, and if tech-skills are looking sexy, even if it’s only in the girls — and we’re pretending this is something new when it’s anything-but — this could be what a technical renaissance looks like, when it’s just getting started.

But you know what we need more than anything? We need what we had about twenty-five to forty-five years ago: Technology that exists solely for the purpose of making other technology possible. From where I’m sitting, and from what I know, the last great innovation in that department would have been…SSL 3.0. By itself, it doesn’t do anything impressive and is nearly impossible to explain to the “layman,” but it made truly secure e-commerce something worth developing, and had an influential impact on the financial world. A positive one, for a little while.

So passages like this have a tendency to temper my optimism:

In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition’s history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social networking sites; they’re also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. Even women gamers far outnumber men ages 25 to 34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer Electronics Association.

Winning a competition is something you do for the attention. Actually, it is not so much a measurable achievement, as reaching an opinionated achievement…an achievement in the opinion of one or several observers. Writing for a blog or participating in a social networking site, is the essence of showing off. Creating a web site is a process of presentation. And gaming is just goofing off. If girls are outnumbering boys in gaming, that’s just another example of them borrowing our worst habits.

So that concerns me a little. This “laying of railroad track” brand of technology, which we badly need now, is not being served by any new generation of hot stylish geek, regardless of which gender is involved. And it is highly unlikely to be served by anyone who’s entered the tech field out of any personal passions that have anything to do with getting attention. What we really need to have mentored, are some Dr. Frankensteins — folks, male or female, who lock themselves up in laboratories that are neat-or-messy, maybe equal parts of both, and just grind away at stuff without any concern for the kudos they get when they show it to someone. That has nothing to do with blogging, nothing to do with building web pages, and nothing to do with gaming; those are decidedly closed-end technologies.

But there will be more substantial cause for hope, in my lifetime, I’m sure. Technology has always moved in a feast-and-famine cycle. This is a famine, there’s no mistaking that. One of these decades, Microsoft will release an operating system that isn’t a bloated albatross…or someone else will. Or we’ll get some other home appliance that’s open-ended, maybe something some guy built in his garage, and go through the technological boom of the eighties and early nineties all over again. Maybe one of those geek girls will pull that off — become sort of a Joan of Ark of technical wizardry. If that’s the future, I’m pullin’ for her, and it can’t happen soon enough.

You know what will really make that all the more likely? Is if we separate geekdom from fashion. That way, we’ll be ready to accept whatever is ready to be offered. These preconceived notions about who’s going to build the next great widget — and, out of necessity, who will not — are marginally dangerous, and not very helpful to anyone. They impress me as a process of exchanging one crude stereotype for another one.

Posted in Is It Really a Man's World?, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Science | No Comments »

Helping to Highlight JohnJ’s Point

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

…JohnJ being one of my blogger friends trying to persuade me to go toward the light, Carol Anne, and support McCain this fall.

It’s a good thing I never said this point was entirely lacking in merit, for it certainly is not so lacking. Searching around for an editorial I saw last week in Sacramento Bee, I found it under Paul Greenberg’s name and Mr. Greenberg states a powerful case.

Nothing so well illustrates the essential asymmetry of this country’s worldwide struggle against terrorism than last week’s 5-to-4 opinion out of the U.S. Supreme Court. The enemy is fighting a war; we are litigating a plea.

Throughout the sleepy Nineties, we dealt with two – two! – earlier and incomplete attacks on the World Trade Center not as the barbaric acts of war they were, but as isolated matters for the criminal justice system to deal with when and if it could. While we slept, the enemy plotted. We paid the bloody price for our obtuseness – in thousands of innocent lives – on September 11, 2001.

Now we’re proceeding with great deliberation down the same blind alley.

How to describe this latest opinion from the high court? It’s not easy to get a handle on this decision for, against or maybe just vaguely about the exercise (or paralysis) of the president’s wartime powers. Here is how His Honor Anthony M. Kennedy – heir to the equally vacuous Sandra Day O’Connor’s swing vote on the high court – “explained” what his majority opinion means, or rather doesn’t mean: “Our opinion does not undermine the executive’s powers as commander in chief. On the contrary, the exercise of those powers is vindicated, not eroded, when confirmed by the judicial branch.”

This whole issue shouldn’t be an issue, of course. Supreme Court Justices are sworn in with an oath to defend the Constitution. Not to twist it around to make people happy, who in turn don’t even live in this country. They’re supposed to read the Constitution, look at some lesser law, and say “I don’t see any conflict here” or “yeah, that’s messed up, you’re not supposed to do that and it says so right here.”

What Kennedy is doing is ratcheting up the standard of constitutionality in such a way that it has little to nothing to do with the actual Constitution. He’s an authority doing exactly what authorities aren’t supposed to do when they wield authority: Try to use it to make himself popular.

…this is the third time in four years that the high court has left the question of how or if to try enemy combatants up in the cloudy air. What are the other branches of government, or even the lower courts, let alone our troops in the field, now to do with these detainees and future ones? The weightless burden of the court’s confused and confusing guidance on this subject might be summed up as: To be determined.

Each time the Supreme Court has ruled against this system of trying enemy combatants, lawful or unlawful, Congress and the executive – at the court’s explicit behest – have moved to meet its objections, only to be told once again that the tribunals still don’t pass constitutional muster.

In matters of civil and criminal law, you don’t want anything to happen unless all the tumblers are lined up. Outside of the military, government has a way of doing things like that naturally: Everyone has to agree something’s a go, but the lowliest mail clerk has the authority to stop it. Great way to prosecute a case. Lousy way to fight a war.

Greenberg closes by echoing John’s point, almost word-for-word:

The one thing that this latest example of law at its least vigilant does make clear is the importance of this year’s presidential election. Sen. John McCain, who knows something about war and being a prisoner thereof, says he would appoint judges who are committed to judicial restraint; he’s criticized this decision. Sen. Barack Obama has praised it. However confused and confusing this latest decision, it does clarify the decision facing the American voter this November.

It certainly does. What it actually means, I’ll leave to each reader to decide for him- or herself.

I know McCain isn’t speaking from the heart, though; I know this beyond the shadow of any doubt. His schtick is that he understands Guantanamo has to be closed down, that we need to recapture some of our global popularity by gelding ourselves in our treatment of these terrorists. He also clings to the tired old song that if we continue with our harsh interrogation techniques, it just puts the men and women serving on our behalf in danger, in case they are captured by the enemy.

The facts don’t square with this sales pitch. When John McCain was captured by the North ~~Koreans~~ Vietnamese, the United States was a signing party to the Geneva Conventions. That’s just a fact. The VC brutalized him at the Hanoi Hilton, and that, too, is an inconvenient fact. No getting around it.

So if anything, McCain is in a great position to know — beyond any doubt whatsoever — that a nation’s determination to behave in a “civilized” manner either by treaty or by deed, does nothing, zilch, zip, zero, nada, bubkes, as far as ensuring that nation’s troops will be subjected to kinder treatment by an enemy once they are captured.

He knows this. He knows it personally. And he’s playing up propaganda that is meaningful only to those who are too ignorant of the facts to understand what’s really going on here.

So do I think McCain’s rhetoric is right on the money about these nominees to the Supreme Court? Yeah, pretty much. Do I think a President McCain is likely to nominate better judges to the Supreme Court than a President Obama? Mmmm…maybe. There’s the slimmest of chances. Would I put a lot of money on it? No. I’d put very, very little. McCain is the very picture of a Republican nominee for President who’ll screw the conservatives over that way once he gets in.

Do I admire him for his service? Hell yes. Do I admire him for his character? Not one bit. I think he has serious issues in that department. Do I think he’s better than a democrat? Uh…maybe I would, if it weren’t for the history of Bush Pere. Or Nixon. I have my reasons to be jaded.

Am I optimistic about how things are going to turn out this year, if only the Republicans unite on this candidate, and thus reassure the candidate that we’re all with him, and consider the job of team-building to be behind him?

Hell no.

He’s the presumptive nominee. He doesn’t have the track record of sticking with principled positions on things…which means both sides will get a benefit out of him if they lean on him.

And those “moderates” are going to lean on him 24×7 all the way to election day.

Those who understand the wisdom of what Greenberg has had to say, should lean on him too. Which means, necessarily, that he can’t count on us. Not until he’s made some commitments that he hasn’t even bothered to make just yet.

Update: As Buck points out, I got my countries mixed up. It’s tough to keep straight in one’s mind all those wars the democrats started.

Posted in Elections, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Justice, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | 5 Comments »

A Blue State Columnist Comments on Our Gun Culture

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

My goodness, that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, is getting a good workout. Let’s start with the headline of the column:

Walsh: Time to grow up and put your guns away

Christ on a cracker, are we in a competition for the “snooty condescending prick” award here?

I understand the thrill of firing a Glock (I’ve done it), the euphoria of hitting the center of a target (and that, too), generations of family deer-hunting weekends and the legitimate self-preservation instincts of Utah’s elected concealed weapon carriers.

But the OpenCarry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology – overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality – is behind that thinking?

Uh…how about taking real responsibility for something, as in, “I’ll pack the equipment to do it myself if everything else fails”? And since that is a far bigger issue than just the conceal-carry situation, you, Ms. Walsh, have just revealed yourself to be a stranger to that line of thinking. Good. Now I know you’re one of those “I done my bit and if it goes to crap it’s not my fault” people.

Hope nobody’s depending on you for protection.

“Second Amendment questions aside,” says [Anthropologist Charles] Springwood, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, “the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with ‘portable killing machines’ strapped to their bodies?”

Well I dunno. I was born well after the days of the Old West, so I haven’t lived in “a society in which it was an unconscious emblem” blah blah blah. But I was born in the sixties. So I’ve lived in a society in which violent criminals got arrested for damaging property and hurting people, and released on technicalities, and then when men women and children were chopped down like cattle marching to slaughter the law rolled it’s eyes and sighed and said “ah, well.”

Ms. Walsh, I recommend you just think of it as the mark of a civilized society — people living here have the right to defend themselves. That means, if they anticipate something bad might happen to them they can prepare for it, and it’s not the business of you or the busybody lawyers and anthropologists in your rolodex to second-guess ’em about it. Nerdy little boys, getting beaten up by bullies on the playground, can hit back. All that good stuff.

Mark of a civilized society. As opposed to one that requires the people living within it to just sit around waiting to be victimized…which would be the mark of a primitive society.

Oh, and that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, that’s getting such a good workout lately? That would be #27:

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Nanny State Crap, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

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A Blue State Columnist Comments on Our Gun Culture