House of Eratosthenes

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Omigaw-Free

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

I’m afraid Mr. Hasson has completely lost me.

He started off on a high note, making a point I know to be sensible because I agree with it: Things that are a certain way, have no need to announce they are a certain way. So he doesn’t like 300 because the men are all strutting around communicating to the audience how manly they are, by acting manly. The “doth protest too much” thing.

Okay, it’s a fair point…not without its share of problems. For starters, how come the “doth protest too much” cudgel is only swung around with regard to manly men? If I explore the Storytellers blog for a few minutes will I find another screed about…Rosie O’Donnell being outspoken and having opinions? How about Bill Clinton being compassionate, or Hillary being intelligent and strong-willed? Right off the top of my head, there are three loudmouths not known for missing opportunities to demonstrate to everybody that they are a certain thing — whose sense of purpose to the rest of us, would be forever lost if it was to be demonstrated they were something else.

But he’s a storyteller. So how about…Raymond on “Everybody Loves Raymond” being an insecure, cowardly, incompetent boob? Hey — there’s twenty-two minutes per episode, spend ’em wisely. And the minutes are spent defining the character attributes of this guy who, having sat through the episodes already, I already know to be that way. Got anything to say about that Mr. Hasson?

Another problem with that point. It simply isn’t enough to make a movie bad. That’s just a simple fact. Characters are defined a certain way, and certain devices are deployed in order to inform me that these characters have these traits. If I don’t like the device — and I very often don’t, in movies nowadays — the story is still advanced, I still have an understanding of what this character is supposed to be. It may be an entirely legitimate nitpick, but a nitpick is what it is. Nothing more significant than that.

But then we spiral downward…

The movie could so easily have been good. Here are a few options:

The movie could have been about what a hero is. We would have seen how real men become real heroes, by showing us how much they overcome hardships and sacrifice. And then, as the plot progressed, and as the heroes overcame unbelievable obstacles, they would actually achieve superhuman feats. There really have been superhuman feats in history – even in the last few decades – in which real people did the impossible. But if you don’t show real people doing something real to achieve something heroic, then you’re not showing heroes. Had the movie been done this way, it would have been a true epic yarn about heroism.

I’m taking it as a given that his point is not “why, oh why, does nobody ever take the initiative and do this.” What he wants carried out here has already been done, here and here and here and here and here and many other places as well. What is his point, that these things are never done and he wishes they were? Surely it can’t be that. So many other examples I’ve not mentioned. This is where he’s lost me. What’s his beef?

The movie could just as easily have been about the bad side of being heroic. There are times in human history in which it became necessary for a group of good men to become inhuman monsters, efficiently programmed with the fight and nothing more. Although people actually do this to survive, once it is done, it cannot be easily reversed. In addition, if you release the testosterone monster in men and make it all-important, there would be an immediate price to pay (more in-house violence, rape, and so on). Had the movie been done this way, it would have punched its audience in the gut.

…which was also done before, here and here and here and here and here.

The movie could have been an examination of what it is to be a man lost to war. It would have taken a normal man, and seen how each human part of him must be put aside so that the fighting machine can exist. Had the movie been done this way, it would have been tragic.

And that’s been explored with a great deal of exuberance, here and here and here. The hero dissolving into a reflection of the very thing he sought to defeat, I daresay, is one of the oldest memes in storytelling history. It has no problem with underexposure or even with wearing out it’s welcome anytime soon.

The movie could have been about real men who had left real lives behind, and then were killed on the battlefield.

Oh, pul-leaze. The young puppy-faced corporal who turns to his buddy, flips open a locket and yells over the mortar explosions, “That’s Louise! She’s the girl I’m gonna marry just as soon as I get home!” was a tired old saw when my Dad was taking my Mom out to the movies, over fifty years ago. It’s like being the guy in the red shirt beaming down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Some young kid is foolish enough to tell his squadmembers about a telegram relaying the happy news of his wife’s new pregnancy…you crack open a cold one. Just try and shotgun it while the kid’s still breathing. You probably can’t. Kid might as well have dug his own grave, hopped inside and pulled the dirt down over him. Announcing your wife’s pregnancy in a war movie is the dumbest thing you can do if you want to live. It’s like being in a horror slasher-flick and yelling “I’ll be right back!”

The movie could have been about how men choose how to die. Knowing they would lose if they fought and lose if they didn’t fight, real decisions would have to be made. Had the movie been done this way, it would… well, it would have been a great movie.

I hate to keep picking on you, but Lordy this is getting tiresome. It’s like that time they re-designed Superman’s costume and started taking away some of his powers and giving him other ones…why not just make a new superhero? Why don’t you write your own movie? We have this…and if you ask me, it was ruined because it was way to predictable. There is this, which completes a mutually-destructive coupling because those two movies were released the same summer, were about the same thing, and surely brought in less revenue because of the unfortunate timing. That pairing was not only bad for business, it lifted the lid on the absolute lack of creativity going on in Hollywood. Now that 300 has fixed that, here you are saying you want more of the same-ol’ same-ol’. Well, this certainly counts, and so do a bazillion James Bond movies and Star Trek episodes. C’mon.

The movie could have been about the power of women over men. If the queen had sent the king to a war he didn’t want to go to using her womanly wiles, that would have made a good movie, too.

Okay, I think now we’re getting to the bottom of things.

300 Guy Hasson, if I’m understanding him correctly, is not demanding a greater supply of imagination, creativity, variety and good storytelling; he’s asking for less of these things. A tough, hardy, intelligent, skilled and disciplined band of brothers have been portrayed as intrinsically understanding the most noble course of action, and then taking it upon themselves to hunker down and get it done. They laid down their lives and endured agonizing death in order to protect the weaker — and at the moment the final arrows hit, they were exactly what they were when the opening credits rolled by. No transformation. No loss of innocence. No “Omigaw, I just screwed up.” No “Omigaw, I was sure I’d make it back again.” No “Omigaw, I became what I went to fight.” Complete omigaw-free. Just manly men in the purest sense, doing what manly men do, understanding from start to finish what that all entails.

It’s too much. Where’s the petulant, pissy snarking at the manly-man? I’m just so used to seeing it, it seems to be missing here.

This is very telling. As the box office performance of 300 shows, we’re living now in an age where people are hungry for heroes. Resourceful, capable men who can look at something bad going down, and say to themselves — if I do nothing, X will happen, and if I do something Y will happen even though I’ll get hurt. X simply cannot be, so in we go.

We’re pretty evenly divided on this thing. The audience eats it up and begs for seconds, and the critics are rolling their eyes, waiting for the subject to be changed.

I don’t really care which side eventually prevails. Movies come out every year, and if I don’t like them I don’t pay to see them. But I’m endlessly fascinated with people who are hostile toward, and recoil with disgust from, manliness. Courage — untempered by ironics surprises later on that shake all the moral messages to the core. Resourcefulness. Ability. Individuality. Good old-fashioned rugged determination to protect those incapable of protecting themselves, and if possible to vanquish evil so it can never see the light of day again.

What is so wrong about that? Why does it rub so many people the wrong way? Honest to Pete, I’d really like to know.

Posted in Movies, Pinheads, Poisoning Masculinity | 3 Comments »

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve Been Thinking II

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Reuben, Reuben I’ve been thinking
What a fine world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea

— Campfire song, orig. author unknown

Fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm Room has a post up about passivity, and how it meanders as a common theme from the British hostage sailor incident from last month into the shootings at Virginia Tech.

It is an absolute must-read. In fact I don’t wanna say another word until you’ve read it. Go. I’ll wait. La dee da…dum dee dum…

I’m hoping you took the time to go over to Mark Steyn’s article from Wednesday, the crux of which is the wrong-headedness with which some among us tend to view the Virginia Tech bystanders as “children.” He makes a compelling case. Now, in reviewing this situation with the British hostages I come under easy assault by the Vietnam Vet paradigm (“You weren’t there, man!”) — but at this time, no clear wedge has been driven between that international incident, and this global conditioning decried by Bookworm and Steyn. That global conditioning amounts to this: Raise your hands, do what the bad man says, and live to fight another day.

When Frank Miller’s train reaches Hadleyville, close your shutters, hide in the closet, and have your wife tell Marshal Will Kane that you’re sick with the flu or out of town.

Maybe the British hostages embarrassed their native country by not bothering to fight, because they were conditioned this way. Maybe surrendering was not the only course available to them. Hasn’t been proven. Hasn’t been disproven either.

Steyn does not make that connection. But he identifies this “shutter-peaking” credo, this widespread abrogation of manly responsibilities, as a global sickness, a fever that even now is just setting in and bound to get worse over time. He tacks on an interesting historical event, and makes it relevant in a way I find telling and ominous…

The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and type in something to the effect of “If I was in that class, I’d show those limp-dick cheeseheads what a real man does.” I’m not going to say anything like that. That would be tough to say — Lepine/Gharbi, after all, had an automatic gun. And in that hypothetical, of course, I would not have one. The canucks would never let me.

But — I have another hypothetical for you. If you were one of the women in that class, it wouldn’t have been any fun.

Here’s another. Jump out in front of some of the feminists up in Canada who insist Canadian manhood is saddled with guilt every sixth of December, and ask them this: “Pop quiz! What are some of the good things about testosterone?” …and you probably won’t get much of a substantial answer. A sneer. A snarky comeback. A litany of self-righteous, snotty complaints. And you’ll get back the same thing down here, south of the border, at a democrat party caucus. Or from Katie Couric or any of the less-prestigious blow-dried airheads who deliver us our news. Or from the elitist editors who decide what that news is going to be.

Testosterone, I notice, hasn’t been in vogue. In a very long time…but here’s yet another hypothetical. Drop your pop quiz in the engineering class with the nine doomed women right after Lepine sent the “men” out of the room; see what they say.

Hell, don’t even go that far. Just ask a woman with a flat tire who — somehow — was sent out on the roadways without the knowledge or skill needed to change it herself. See what she says.

My point isn’t that testosterone is always a good thing, or even that it’s been somehow unfairly maligned. I’m just saying that when we don’t have problems, things look expendable to us. And once problems arise — from flat tires to crazy gunmen — those things quickly become anything but. So go ahead. Rip the fire extinquisher off the wall and hang a “Vagina Monologues” promotional poster in the empty space left behind…when the house is not yet on fire, it looks like just a swell idea. Is it really such an extravagant notion to suppose maybe, just maybe, someday that might change?

And here’s something else. Do some digging on the massacre referenced by Steyn, on the event itself and the perpetrator of it. It’s pretty interesting. It reads as the saga of a super-civilized, super-homogenized infantilized society that, when confronted with a problem of it’s own making, is spurred into action to crank out more of what caused the problem in the first place:

In response to the killings a House of Commons Sub-Committee on the Status of Women was created. It released a report “The War against Women” in June 1991. Following its recommendations, the federal government established the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women in August 1991. The panel issued a final report, “Changing the Landscape: Ending Violence – Achieving Equality”, in June 1993.

Lepine, according to available information, seems to have been a little bit more clear in his thinking than his recently-joined comrade-in-arms Cho Seung-hui (then again, nearly all of us are). His mindset emerges as one developed into a state of instability, far too fragile to handle contradictions — and then burdened with one. His suicide note, kept secret by the police but leaked to the press a year after the killings, is surprisingly lucid. I mean, y’know, apart from that giant logical leap between his identified problems and his proposed solution involving hostages & gunfire:

Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts. For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government. Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.

Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games removed the Men-Women distinction, there would be Women only in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus, the other day, I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain then that women were not authorized to go to the frontline??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50 per cent of the ranks of history, though they never existed. A real Casus Belli.

Now, let’s be clear on this: Hate is hate, and a crazy person is a crazy person. Lepine, deprived of this excuse, would undoubtedly have found a different one.

But people are asking what’s up with all these school shootings lately. We had the Bath Township bombing in the 1920’s, and in that era we had — what else? Unrelated prohibition-era urban violence, and…lately, it’s become commonplace. Every year, another mad gunman, sometimes more than one. What’s going on? It’s clear something is. Copycat killings? Sorry, not buying it. “Copycat” describes an echo, and an echo dissipates over time. This is more like some Ten Plagues of Egypt kinda thing.

So what’s up?

Well, any man who’s ever had some responsibility for the development of one or more boys, should be able to tell you. The truth is that masculinity is an incompressible solvent. It is cranked out as a boy becomes a man, and then it must be given a place to go or else it will find one. Lepine, an antisocial and unstable loner who simply snapped, has this in common with Cho, who emerges from lately-arriving verifiable tidbits of information, as a more jagged unsettled mess. They had a surge of masculinity brimming over from delayed adolescence, and had neither the background or the environment needed to figure out what to do with it.

We’ve always had crazy people. And the dirty little secret is our crazy people always had access to firearms. This tendency of our super-homogenized infantilized societies to help bring out the craziness, by slandering masculinity and trying to wish it away, is a relatively new innovation. And the surge in violence? It seems to be reaching a crescendo that is strikingly parallel to the “make all men into little boys” super-civilized fever.

You know what it reminds me of — is Christian fundamentalists who are “anti-homosexuality.” I’ve noticed there are many among the super-religious who are opposed to people being gay. Only a tiny portion among those, however, are willing to step up and state a belief that homosexuality is learned behavior that can be unlearned. Which raises the question: If homosexuality cannot be unlearned — or if there are doubts being entertained that it can be — given that the opinionated person is anti-gay, and there are a hundred gay people somewhere, what are those gay people supposed to do? The answer that comes back is “Not get married”…and after that, all certainty suddenly vanishes. Only confusion remains.

Our militant hardcore feminists, both in Canada and here in the U.S., seem to suffer from the same confusion about men. They do have their strong opinions about certain things being good and other things being bad; no confuson there. And they do want to keep running everything. Hooters is bad; football is bad; war is bad; guns are bad. Confusion-free zone. But what are our men, given that they are men, supposed to do? Like the song says, “you just can’t shoot ’em.” If it’s a dubious prospect for one to stop being gay, it’s certainly an extravagant and expensive notion that one should cease to be a man. Our feminists don’t seem to have an answer. The default answer is that the defining body parts may be kept, if the budget does not permit the necessary hormone treatments and surgical procedures, but the associated behavior should be expunged. At the behest of those who aren’t quite ready to admit they “hate men,” but are eager to show that they do.

We have molded our super-civilized societies into exactly what our feminists want. Really. Quick, name something that even the most shrill and rigid feminists wanted, that they didn’t get. And now, if you round up a hundred eighth-grade boys and ask them what a man is supposed to be, you’ll probably get back a hundred different answers. It was not always that way. In times past, eighth graders would be able to tell you — more than a few of them would already have taken on some of the burdens. And their answers, from what I can gather, would have been surprisingly friendly to those who, in the day, were respected, cared-for and called “ladies.”

Mission accomplished; manhood destroyed. Into the vacuum left behind, rush a bunch of crazy gunmen eager to prove their manhood and not quite sure how to do it anymore. To say nothing of the far more numerous, and somewhat less newsworthy, thugs and hoodlums engaged in different missions of violence but motivated by the same agents. The testerone’s gotta go somewhere and they don’t know where to put it. Nobody agrees on anything there, except that the hoodlums should feel guilty for having it.

When you’re made to feel guilty for something you didn’t decide, how guilty should you feel about things that you can?

So some people have to die. And by the dozens they fall, since real men who will defend those in danger are now a rarity. Our feminists found manhood offensive, after all, and discouraged it. We aren’t supposed to “demean” women by caring for them, remember? Out went the fire extinguisher. And those of us who still see manly values as values worth having, and see it as a noble thing when women are defended from those who would harm them, can’t have the guns we would use to neutralize the threat anyway…yeah, that’s right. Our feminists won’t let us have them.

But don’t worry if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your demise will inspire our super-militant feminists to put out some whitepapers on how such a violent event was a war on feminism, and the thing to do now is to let hardcore feminists decide more things. And as Steyn pointed out, whenever the anniversary of your premature exit rolls around every year, they’ll be happy to repeat the message again and again.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Forty Reasons to Support Gun Control

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Discovered this list right after a Googleswivel, during a discussion about how existing gun control restrictions might have applied to the Virginia Tech shooting. Good illustration of the weak logic that is at work with such policies in general.

I don’t understand how people don’t get this. Seung Hui Cho took down over thirty people because he was engaged in an activity somewhat resembling popping the bubbles in bubble-wrap. What would the death toll have been if it was more like a weekend jaunt at the paintball field? North of thirty? North of five? Does anyone anywhere really think so?

The gun grabbers are not just intellectually atrophied; lately, they get awful quick. It’s at the point where the rest of us are just barely beginning to comprehend the magnitude of a shooting event, and they’re already out there reciting everything they heard from one of Michael Moore’s movies.

Anyway, on with the tease.

40 Reasons to Support Gun Control
(Apparently derived from the essay by Michael Z. Williamson)

1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, and Chicago cops need guns.
2. Washington DC’s low murder rate of 80.6 per 100,000 is due to strict gun control, and Arlington, VA’s high murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 is due to the lack of gun control.
3. Statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control but statistics showing increasing murder rates after gun control are “just statistics.”
4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into effect in 1994, are responsible for the decrease in violent crime rates, which have been declining since 1991.
5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear of such a lunatic is paranoid.
:
(35 more)

One more thing. Via Boortz, a list of events with relatively happy endings — because, and only because, someone was equipped for self-defense. Since 1/1/07, and given that, the list is longer than you think.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types X

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Okay as a science fiction writer, how would you set this up. How would you write the ultimate parable about a dystopian society with a confused, irrational opposition to the death penalty.

How about…how about this.

A rapist and butcher of young girls, who has been spared the death penalty due to his traumatic childhood on previous occasions — has wearied of the exercise and now taken the initiative to bar his boyhood exigencies from his latest trial. Let us say — he says this: “If they sentence me to death, I’m good to go.”

Write that up. Whatsamatta, you afraid no publisher would accept it? Too unrealistic?

Behold.

James Leslie Karis Jr. said neither his tormented childhood nor his severe psychological problems could lessen his responsibility for what he called a cold-blooded attack on two women 25 years ago.
:
Karis was 27 when he kidnapped two county welfare workers on their morning break and drove them to a remote spot five miles north of Placerville.

He ordered the women to undress, tied them up and raped one. Afterward, he made the women dress and turn around. They pleaded for their lives and prayed aloud, but Karis shot them in the back and neck. Peggy Pennington, 34, died. The other woman survived to identify Karis.

He was caught during another kidnapping and attempted rape in Sonoma County.

Despite his second chance, Karis has dismissed the experts’ assessments as “psychobabble.” He said he’d rather be executed than spend the rest of his life in prison.

“If they sentence me to death,” he said Thursday, “I’m good to go.”

Sacrameto Bee has a more beefed-out story with a good bit more detail:

One of the women died, but the other, who had pretended to be dead, later identified Karis as her assailant. His trial was moved from El Dorado County to Sacramento Superior Court, where he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1998, appellate lawyers persuaded U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton to overturn Karis’ death sentence, and Karlton’s decision was upheld by the federal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Karlton concluded the jurors who sentenced Karis to death might have ruled differently if his attorneys had presented evidence of his abusive childhood.

Leaving the convictions in place, the judge ordered Karis resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole unless a new penalty phase was initiated by prosecutors.

It was, and preparations — including an intensive jury selection process — have been under way for months.

But Thursday morning, just as proceedings were about to start, Karis asked Judge Trena Burger-Plavan for permission to dismiss his lawyers, Michael Bigelow and Steven Bailey, and to represent himself.

Karis said he did not agree with Bigelow’s strategy to present evidence of his childhood traumas.

“He’s going to drag out the defense for two months with all this garbage about my family history, my background, and all that stuff which doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans, in my opinion,” he said, according to a transcript of the session. “And that’s why I choose to defend myself.”

Karis said he would rather return quickly to death row at San Quentin Prison than spend more time in the Sacramento County jail.

“I want to get out of Sacramento as fast as possible,” he told the judge. “I want this trial to be as short as possible.”

“I just want to get back to the row and do my time until they execute me,” he said. “I don’t really care if I get the death penalty.”

So we got here a situation where someone’s guilty as sin, and we use bullshit to keep him alive. To the extent that the guilty person tires of the bullshit and it’s up to him to say…just knock it off.

Because, hey. We can’t recognize that internally without him pointing it out. Our justice system is just too…enlightened.

Posted in Poisoning Justice, The Evil Men Do | No Comments »

Hors d’Oeuvre Imus

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Man I’m sick of reading about and hearing about Don Imus. In fact, as far as Imus being an entree, I’m just about done. I really don’t give a rat’s ass if the man never works another day anywhere in his life.

As an appetizer for something bigger to come later, though, this remains an important story. Imus has done a lot of good for a lot of people who aren’t well-off at all. So…it stands to reason, when the race-pimps come after someone else next, they’ll be dang-nigh unstoppable. Like say it’s me. I haven’t donated millions of dollars to charity. I’ve donated some. I’ve helped out folks when my own situation wasn’t that good. I’ve donated money when my own income was zero. But compared to wrinkly-old charity heavyweight Imus, I’m not going to look good at all.

And what if the day comes I make great big huge eff-yew money, and throw so much of it at charity that I match Imus? I’ll just fit the mold better, that’s all.

And I’ve pointed out already a few times — the Imus story breaks some brand-new ground. This wasn’t rabble-rousing. There wasn’t any rabble. Sharpton and Jackson marched by themselves, mostly. So don’t worry about pissing off zillions and zillions of people. Just worry about pissing off Al and Jesse.

We work for them now.

So Florida Rep. Donald Brown had better watch his back.

An e-mail implying that illegal immigrants drain tax dollars circulated its way through the Florida Legislature, and discussion quickly turned to the national debate on anti-immigration policy.

The e-mail, forwarded by Rep. Donald Brown from his state-issued account, had a clip-art cartoon and read: “Reminder: April 15th. Don’t forget to pay your taxes…12 million illegal aliens are depending on you!”

Offensive.

Inaccurate.

Inappropriate.

Ignorant.

All these words were used by Miami-Dade lawmakers to describe their thoughts when they — like other House members and staff — received the e-mail from the DeFuniak Springs Republican.

An outraged Hispanic Caucus even said Thursday that it’s considering filing a complaint. The caucus meets Monday. If they decide to do so, Brown could face a reprimand.

Yeah. Well, as the Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiller deftly pointed out, the word “inaccurate” best be considered and reconsidered during that hearing. Accuracy, it turns out, is an attribute better fulfilled by this “offensive” e-mail than by the haughty, snotty Miami Herald editorial that vented away about it.

So…I have to wonder how that “caucus” meeting is going to go. This would be your salad course; illegal aliens are aliens, and illegal, and they suck away at our lifeblood through the public charity. Just saying so, now — JUST SAYING SO — that’s enough to bring down some punitive measures?

Where’s the highly-offended spokesman somewhere saying “hey, we don’t care if you tell the truth — just do it non-offensively from now on”? Where’s that? Where’s the spokesguy reassuring us that their punitive measures are on the side of truth…and aren’t out to promote a pack of lies, by calling everything outside the lies “offensive”?

They won’t even bother to speak those words. So how concerned should everyone else be?

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

I Finally Found Her!

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

While we’re back on the Imus circle-jerk, I need to get to this if I don’t have time for any other thing…and I think I don’t have time for any other thing. On Thursday, I made a list of ten things that I should have seen in the episode somewhere, any one of which, by its absence, would have heightened my suspicions that all was not quite cricket. And one is not missing…all ten are missing.

Well Number Three on that list of ten must now carry a caveat.

3. I did not see any of the girls on the Rutgers team say they were offended. Their coach said all the right things repeatedly; she’s clearly angry and outraged. But Imus didn’t insult her, did he? What do the girls have to say?

One girl has been found. Her name is Matee Ajavon.

Which team will better weather its unfair attack?

The women of Rutgers basketball, the object of Don Imus’ slur? Or the men of Duke lacrosse, targeted by a “rogue” prosecutor?

No question, the Rutgers women. That’s notwithstanding reactions like “this has scarred me for life,” as Rutgers junior Matee Ajavon put it Tuesday. Surely, she exaggerates. In fact much of America now knows that young women we’d never heard of are valedictorians and musical prodigies. The Rutgers women have overthrown the stereotype that there’s no such thing as student athletes.

Not sure I agree that this has had a beneficial effect on the Rutgers ladies. Matee Ajavon isn’t the name of just anyone; you can Google it. And as of yesterday, what you got back was an impressive avalanche of athletic accomplishments written up where they belong, in the Sports section of school newspapers, before the word “ho” ever crossed Don Imus’ withered-up old lips.

I got a feeling that’s gonna change. Matee Ajavon is a melodramatic whiner, and we’re good at giving lots of attention to our melodramatic whiners when they melodramatically whine. Behold the Ajavon “scars”; they are destined to become her legacy.

Number Three will not be struck, I should hasten to add. I said it now carried a caveat that is Ms. Ajavon’s whimpering. I strongly doubt it is a sentiment to which she gave voice early on in this little episode; I expect she uttered it after Imus was fired, or very shortly before.

Too little, too late. Very few people were actually clamoring for Don Imus’ firing, and the ones who did lifted not one pinky to learn the emotional reaction of the girls who were insulted, or to report back on what those emotions were.

To reiterate: That is what the entire drama was supposed to be about. There is absolutely nothing, or very little, to indicate that it was about that — not that an inspection of events would leave an intelligent observer curious. Deep down, anyone with an I.Q. approaching-or-over the century mark, understands this wasn’t about that. The meme that Al Sharpton was rattling a sabre fighting the good fight, defending the honor of the oppressed, was concocted from the get-go for the consumption by those with barely enough brainpower to get their flies zipped and their shoes tied.

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Condi Joins In

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

Condoleeza has a lot of enemies. I am not one of them. Her account with me has a sky-high balance.

But alas, she’s just decided to make a large withdrawal.

Rice Calls Imus Remarks ‘Disgusting’
The Associated Press
Friday, April 13, 2007; 5:44 PM

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the highest-ranking black woman in government history, said Friday the racist, sexist comments that got radio shock jock Don Imus fired were “disgusting.”

In her first public remarks on the controversy, Rice said Imus had insulted not only female athletes but all young black women by referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos.”

“They’re 18- and 19-year-old women,” she said. “And what were they doing except showing that they’re really fine athletes, playing under extraordinary pressure in which for them was a dream season.

“And it gets ruined by this disgusting _ and I’ll use the word ‘disgusting’ _ comment which doesn’t belong in any polite company and certainly doesn’t belong on any radio station that I would listen to,” Rice told talk show host Michael Medved.

“I just thought that it was an attack on women’s sports, first of all, and secondly an attack on very accomplished young black women in a way that was really offensive,” she said, according to a transcript of the interview released by the State Department.

Rice declined to offer an opinion on Imus’s firing but said she was “very glad that there was, in fact, a consequence” for the remarks.

There was also an apology for the remarks. And a meeting with those offended by the remarks. And a suspension…which almost certainly is not the consequence to which Dr. Rice was referring.

This country recognizes equal rights of everyone, by conferring on disparate demographies different “special” rights at different times. We play, in essence, a game of “Musical Rights.” And right now, some of these demographic groups enjoy the right where if you insult them intentionally or otherwise, there is no clemency.

Consequences are dealt out — so you may mend your ways? It would not seem so. I don’t know of anyone who’s going to follow Don Imus around to make sure he’s learned his lesson. Nobody in this farce seems to have given a rat’s ass about what Don Imus thinks about the Rutgers ladies, save for when he’s on his way to one more negotiating table to drop one more pound of flesh.

And not that I’m worried one tinker’s damn about his retirement plan. But it’s a little disturbing that his come-uppins have everything to do with eradicating his income and nothing at all to do with seeing to it that he mend his ways. Don Imus was dealt with by being…erased. To ensure that nobody hears his hateful words again? Don’t make me laugh. What panoply of healthy, wholesome, mind-expanding electronic programming are we left with. Get back to me on that as soon as American Idol is over, will you?

No, he was erased. To punish him. Because assassinations aren’t legal yet.

Imus is a gazillionaire — but Imus is Imus. This was done, clearly, to create a precedent so it can be done to someone else. Anyone with half the impressive menagerie of personal achievements to which Dr. Rice can lay claim, should have the intelligence to see that. And you know, maybe she’s such a rocket scientist that she can find a way to reconcile this with her oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.

But I don’t see any such reconciliation. The firing of Don Imus, in intent as well as in effect, was prologue to ensuring that all transmitted ideas in this culture are supervised. We’ll figure out who has that supervisory authority later. But the issue at hand was, whether we have it in us to uphold the right to free speech, even speech we don’t like.

And we don’t have it in us. I wish it was somehow more complicated than that. It isn’t.

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Ten Things I Did Not See In The Imus Debacle

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

…but before I get to that — a few words from someone with absolutely no sympathy for Imus whatsoever. His identity is unimportant because I think he speaks for many.

Yes, Blame Imus, but Spare Me Sharpton
John W. Mashek

For starters, I am not a fan of Don Imus.

I never watch his TV show except when visiting friends who do. His trademark of making fun of people is galling. He ought to look in the mirror now and then. Too many politicians and journalists are willing to give legitimacy to his program with their appearances.

At the same time, his main tormentors–Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson–are hardly shining lights of virtue. After all, we all have our demons to deal with.

But both Sharpton and Jackson are politicians as well as ministers. They have both run for president and so should recognize they are fair game as public figures.

For example, Sharpton refuses to apologize for his role in the Tawana Brawley phony charge of rape some 20 years ago. He pointedly refused to apologize when reporters gave him the opportunity in the presidential race four years ago. Not exactly a profile in accountability by Sharpton, who demands it from others.

Now then, here are my ten. And let me add — if one or two out of these ten escaped my notice, something would already be smelling mighty fishy. Three would be rancid. Four would be asphyxiating.

All ten are missing, and the powers-that-be are instructing me to believe that justice has prevailed and everything’s fine. I can go back to worrying about minding my P’s and Q’s, and purchasing offsets against my “carbon footprint.”

Phew.

1. I did not see Sharpton demonstrate any regard for the feelings of the girls on the Rutgers team, which is odd since this is supposed to have been all about that. And Imus, his chosen target, has done exactly that plenty of times.

2. I did not see any groundswell of popular support for taking down Imus, or taking down “shock jocks” like him. It is necessary here to distinguish between a frenzied blood-lust, and an eyeball-rolling fatigue. I’m looking for the former and not the latter. I’ve been able to divine no energetic popular consensus, or anything coming close to it, that the shock-jock industry has worn out some kind of welcome. Or, for that matter, that Reverend Al, and his “industry,” has not.

3. I did not see any of the girls on the Rutgers team say they were offended. Their coach said all the right things repeatedly; she’s clearly angry and outraged. But Imus didn’t insult her, did he? What do the girls have to say?

4. I did not see anyone — anywhere — disagree with the statement “Don Imus is a dumbass.” I get the impression some folks think he said a dumbass thing, and wasn’t one before, and has only lately become one — but this distinction is utterly without meaning and falls far short of justifying the breath needed to argue it.

5. I did not see anyone express the faintest whiff of confidence in Al Sharpton’s ability to discern right from wrong — even though, if you listen to his comments carefully, you’ll see they all have to do with decisions he unilaterally made according to his own moral compass. Can it be argued by any rational person that this is off-topic because his private desires have been without effect, or have been tempered with the wisdom of others who are more reliable or wise? My memory fails to provide me with a precedent for such a clear winner arising, Venus-like, from such a tempest; what he didn’t get out of this, he didn’t want.

6. I did not see anyone even pretend to have known Imus said something stupid, before Sharpton started making noises that there should be a problem with it. The appearance is that Imus’ comments became boneheaded the moment Sharpton said that’s what they were.

7. I did not see anyone in a position of power, even begin to try to reassure the rest of us that Al Sharpton isn’t writing all the rules and won’t be writing all the rules. And that’s strange. Shouldn’t this be obligatory? Like I said above, what he didn’t get out of this he didn’t want. Had all 535 members of Congress wanted to produce such results, how long would it take, and how far would they get? How many kings, emperors, satraps and caliphs from yesteryear have retired to the world beyond, never having tasted this kind of unfettered, dictatorial power?

8. A lot of liberals have been known in years past to produce some bastardization of the apocryphal one-liner from Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Clearly, if Imus had this right before, he no longer does, nor does anyone else in his former line of work. I don’t know of any of those liberals having expired in the last week or so, due to natural causes, or injuries related to such a noble gambit. If there’s anyone I missed, I apologize for the oversight, honor the sacrifice and extend my sympathy to the family. When’s the funeral?

9. I did not see anyone advance an argument that anyone else, anywhere, should care about what Al Sharpton finds offensive, or even — as far as that goes — tell me who he is. Or, while we’re on the subject of introductions, whether or not he’s really a Reverend, and/or when/where he was ordained. Now that he’s basically running things, shouldn’t such a credential be common knowledge?

10. As Mr. Mashek pointed out above, I did not see an apology from “Rev.” Sharpton for the Tawana Brawley mess, or for the Crown Heights riot. Not even so much as a finger-waggling lecture to people like me on why we’re committing a grievous offense against some nebulous principle for paying it some attention. Not even that. Nothing. As far as I know, he hasn’t been burdened with the minimal necessity of ignoring someone’s inconvenient question about those things.

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, Obsessive Listmaking, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

Jesus Tomb Scholars Backtrack

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

Well…back to the drawing board.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Christianity | No Comments »

Nifong vs. Imus

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Guys on the radio made a quick observation that I thought was thought-provoking and noteworthy. Just wanted to jot it down real quick.

I would bet…you may assemble any focus group you care to assemble. Democrats, Republicans, greenies, vegans, fems, just throw together whoever you want as long as the group is somewhat random. Just make it a bunch of real people. And I will bet time after time, the consensus will emerge among the focus group that the following is agreeable.

The folks who get the sound bites and tell us what to think, will never agree with it. But “real” people will.

Here it is:

Something bad should happen to the career of Mike Nifong long, long, long before anything happens to Don Imus. Nifong is more dangerous than Imus. He’s more of an embarrassment. The world is spinning all wobbly on its axis while Nifong is still allowed to do what he does, and it could hum along just fine with Imus allowed to keep doing what he does.

Pretty much everyone will agree with all that, as long as they’re real people.

Our pundits are selling us something we don’t even want to buy. And the ongoing events being any indication, we’re scarfing it up and beggin’ for seconds.

Update: And as far as that goes, I think the focus group would mostly agree this is silly:

…when asked about more mundane matters — like the price of some basic staples — [former NY City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani had trouble with a reporter’s question.

“A gallon of milk is probably about a $1.50, a loaf of bread about a $1.25, $1.30,” he said.

A check of the Web site for D’Agostino supermarket on Manhattan’s Upper East Side showed a gallon of milk priced at $4.19 and a loaf of white bread at $2.99 to $3.39. In Montgomery, Ala., a gallon of milk goes for about $3.39 and bread is about $2.

I know what groceries cost, believe me. Unlike whoever trotted off to D’Agostino’s with Blackberry in hand, I’m a raging cheapass. Let me tell you something: Giuliani did alright. He’s still wrong by any reasonable measure, but he’s a lot closer than I would have expected.

Buck fifty a gallon? I’ve actually paid exactly that, at one of the ritzy places where I splurge for the really nice salad dressing and sauces, no less. The caveat is that it’s the second gallon of two, on special. But it can certainly be done. The D’Agostino’s Blackberry reporter embarrassed himself or herself. I’ll not be sending them down to buy my groceries for me anytime soon. I’d be much happier with Giuliani doing it.

And bread? Seventy-four cents, babe. I’ve paid as little as fifty-eight. It’s called “bag your own,” otherwise known as food-stamp stores. Looks like Giuliani knows a little bit more about them than whoever was trying to slime him. What was the point of this?

Even better question: How often do Democrats get ambushed this way? I’d love to know how Hillary would do with it.

Update: Nifong still stands. Imus is fired.

I find it impossible to believe that anyone, anywhere, with red blood and a triple-digit I.Q., would be willing to place their name under these words: If it’s alright with Sharpton it’s okay with me, and if it isn’t then it’s not. I don’t think you can find anyone anywhere who’d be willing to sign onto that. And yet…how do we conduct ourselves.

NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after Mr. Imus made racially disparaging remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

The move came after several days of widening calls for Mr. Imus to lose his job both on MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, which originates the show.

I can think of a few people I’d like fired. How do I do that? Falsely accuse someone of rape and then wait a few years?

Just damn.

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The Perils of Consensus Science

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Consensus science has a broad appeal to non-inquisitive people. It’s the process of taking a vote on something that we all, deep down inside, intuitively know shouldn’t be put to a vote.

Trouble is, you’ve got to be selective. Our environmentalists insist we use consensus science on global warming, but turn around and abandon it when the topic changes to genetically-engineered food.

And you know, that just doesn’t end up looking very scientific.

Thing I Know #129. Leaders; votes; clergy; academics; pundits; prevailing sentiment; political expediency. Wherever these decide what is & isn’t true, an empire will surely fall.

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Jesse Jackson Hops Onboard

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Well, Jesse Jackson has joined the glorious effort to try to end Don Imus’ career. Video.

Someone please tell me what Mr. Jackson’s title is?

I’ve been wondering this since I was a little kid. Yeah, sure, you’d have to be living on Mars in order to not know who he is…that’s true enough. But throughout all of my adult life, respected newspapers have talked about what he’s doing lately, introducing him as “Jesse Jackson” as if he, and I, and the guy writing the newspaper article all went to the same church or lived on the same block or worked at the same company. If I was too stupid to know who Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton were, the newspapers would consider it proper protocol to tell me who the current United States president was. But Jesse Jackson — he’s just Jesse Jackson.

There’s something unseemly about such a high honor. Kind of like having your name put on a coin while you’re still alive.

One difference, though. I can’t quite tell you what the worst thing is that will happen, if you’re still alive and we chisel your likeness into a coin. I really can’t justify that taboo. But I can say what’s wrong with newspapers talking about Jesse Jackson without qualifying exactly who he is. It could be…and in fact, the appearance is given that this is exactly what is taken place…that if anyone in professional journalism begins to ponder what Rev. Jackson’s position is in the grand scheme of things, they’ll be forced to ponder why exactly it is that we care about what he’s doing. And once they start to ponder that, they’ll come to the realization that there’s no reason to pay attention to him at all.

And the first little boy who cries about that emperor’s lack of clothes, is sure to be targeted for the next shakedown. Well, that’s my theory anyway.

Either way, it’s awfully weird. The President, the Pope, God Himself…if they’re mentioned in the news, it’s obligatory to tell me who they are just in case I don’t know. Jesse Jackson — he’s just Jesse Jackson. Like I said. Weird.

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What Offends Me

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Although Don Imus’ two-week suspension comes right after his own admission that his on-air race-based joke “went way too far,” I’m relieved to see one thing: It is based on “legitimate expressions of outrage.”

Good. I’d hate to think careers can be ended based solely on people like Al Sharpton just sniffing around for blood. Hate to think we’re living in an environment like that, or something.

Beginning Monday, April 16, MSNBC will suspend simulcasting the syndicated “Imus in the Morning” radio program for two weeks. This comes after careful consideration in the days since his racist, abhorrent comments were made. Don Imus has expressed profound regret and embarrassment and has made a commitment to listen to all of those who have raised legitimate expressions of outrage. In addition, his dedication – in his words – to change the discourse on his program moving forward, has confirmed for us that this action is appropriate. Our future relationship with Imus is contingent on his ability to live up to his word. [emphasis mine]

One thing is missing. Can anybody guess what it is? Anybody? Anybody at all?

Anyone?

Okay…here’s what I would have expected to see by now. Here it is. Drum roll, please…I would have expected to see…the legitimate expression of outrage.

Which, I would expect…would be a lady who plays for the Rutgers basketball team, the “target” of Imus’ stupid crack. As Imus himself said, and this is something I found to be contrite, well-written, sincere, and really a model for future apologies — I’ll let his words stand as he delivered them…

…I’m not inclined to try to weasel out of these comments, which is why, when I reached out to Reverend Sharpton and he invited me on his program, I’m grateful that he is allowing me to come talk to him and his audience, so—he is still calling for me to be fired and that’s his right, but at least he is going to let me talk to him.

So, these young women at Rutgers, they don’t know who I am. I mean, they pick the paper up, and they don’t know—they don’t know whether I’m some right-wing racist nut, whether I was angry, whether it was some kind of diatribe, whether I was drunk. They don’t know whether I just came on the radio and said hey, the young women of Rutgers are yada, yada. So let me provide a context briefly for them—not as an excuse, not that this makes this okay, nothing makes this okay. But there is a difference between premeditated murder and accidental, the gun going off accidentally. I mean, somebody still gets shot, but the charges are dramatically different.

Now, I disagree with Imus on a lot of things, and I think it’s fair to say he offends me quite often. But in this apology, although by his own admission it doesn’t make his comment any more tasteful or acceptable, it does do one thing. And his critics, to the best of my knowledge, haven’t done this: It addresses the feelings and sentiments of his “targets” who are in the “best” position to be offended.

I haven’t heard Reverend Al do anything like that. All I’ve heard of him doing, is going on and on about some “line” or what “should” be tolerated or what’s “unacceptable” — according to HIM.

Time to scribble down some observations. Pretty obvious ones. Observations that are never mentioned by anyone, but, since I have a survival instinct like anyone else, some pretty safe ones.

First. Imus is a “shock jock.” That is not to say I think it’s an excuse for what he did. I’m not saying that…I’m simply saying this. His position, the socket in which the Imus cog spins in the corporate machinery, is one which provokes. That is his purpose. His job is not merely to provoke, but to provoke optimally. OF course it is a well-established rule by now that there is a line somewhere, and shock jocks should expect that once they go over it, punitive events will take place. This should be a surprise to no one. But there is a penalty for underperforming too…a penalty of pointlessness. I would compare it to Blackjack. It’s exactly like Blackjack. Draw twenty-one, you win. Draw twenty, and if your opponent draws nineteen or less, you still win — your opponent, for that hand, is a big nothing. He might as well have drawn a two. There is no second place, so get as close to twenty-one as you possibly can. But draw twenty-two and it’s all over. So there is a line somewhere. Everybody knows this is the case with shock jocks. Nobody ever points it out, because it doesn’t personally benefit anyone to be the guy pointing it out. But there is a line, everything revolves around that line, and that’s how it works.

Second. The line has no absolute location, which is interesting because everything is decided by what has crossed the line and what hasn’t. Absolutely everything.

Third. Just as Imus makes his “living,” if you want to call it that, by drawing twenty-one or something close to it — Sharpton makes his living taking down people like Imus. It is what he does. He’s a predator. If Imus minded his P’s and Q’s, Sharpton would be reduced to taking down insignificant microorganisms. Like for example, some guy who writes for a blog nobody reads. On the other hand, if Rush Limbaugh did something vile and stupid, Imus could scream the n-word into his microphone all day long and Sharpton wouldn’t give two shits about it because he’d have bigger fish to fry. To compare Sharpton to a hyena is an insult to hyenas because hyenas hunt in packs, have a social order they need to observe, and an ostracized hyena is sure to be a dead hyena. They have their own code of honor, of sorts, such as it is. Sharpton is more like a buzzard. He circles what he has calculated to be road kill or soon-to-be road kill, and pecks away at it in a manner most economically viable to him alone.

Four. His words notwithstanding, Sharpton has not even a passing clue where the “line” is. He’ll draw it himself based on his calculations of where he may get away with drawing it, and excite people into phony outrage.

Five. And this is most obvious of all…and the least mentioned. Given how people like Imus make a living, and how people like Sharpton make a living — nothing is being solved here. It’s a perpetual cycle. Imus makes money offending people, Sharpton makes money being offended. Whether Imus shakes this thing off or not, we’re due for another lap around the track next year and the year after.

Six. Investing anything more emotionally substantial than a blog-posting or an eyeball-roll in any of this, is a discredit to onesself. And as a society, we discredit ourselves by allowing it to continue over and over again.

All of those are completely obvious. Everyone with a room-temperature-or-greater I.Q., consciously or not, knows all six points to be true. Put them all together, and it’s impossible to escape how meaningless, senseless and downright stupid all this stuff is.

One thing does kind of bug me a little bit though. Remember, I don’t know of any Rutger’s ladies who personally heard Imus’ comments, and personally reported being offended by them. I don’t doubt such a lady athlete exists. I’m sure she does, or that they do. But I wouldn’t be willing to bet too much money on it, frankly.

Contrasted with that…

…there are some things that go on fairly regularly that I know for a fact, offend people. I know this for absolute-certain, and I haven’t heard Reverend Al say butkus about any of them. How do I know these things offend people? Because I’m one of the offended.

They Offend Me I thought I’d make a list. Al Sharpton presents himself not as the predator I know him to be, but as a crusader against things that are offensive. If I am to take him seriously, I must necessarily expect him to prioritize all these things over and above the Imus/Rutgers thing. I therefore anticipate him to crusade on all these issues, bullhorn in hand.

Although I’m a compulsive list-maker, I draw the line at having two lists in one post so I’ve moved my list of offensive things to a separate page.

Hey Reverend Al, there’s two dozen things in there and I’m not even counting the Tawana Brawley mess from twenty years ago. They all offend me, and therefore, I can guarantee someone somewhere finds all 24 offensive. I can swear an oath to that effect. In all honesty, I can’t do the same with the Imus debacle. Are you the scourge of offensive things, or aren’t you?

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Olbermann’s Best Person

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Keith Olbermann has a “shocking announcement” to make. Why don’t you watch it.

Regarding the O’Reilly/Rivera dust-up: Those two have kissed & made-up. Which is to say, they & their bosses figured out the publicity value involved in the little drama had exceeded the point of diminishing returns, and they’re telling us what they think they need to tell us in order to keep the ratings high.

What to make of this? Well I agree with this editorial over here:

Fox broadcaster Bill O’Reilly has certainly stirred up the city of Virginia Beach. Two Virginia Beach teenagers Alison Kunhardt, 17, and Tessa Tranchant, 16, were killed recently when their car was slammed into by a vehicle driven by Alfredo Ramos, 22. Ramos is an illegal alien with a record of three-alcohol-related convictions.

Mr. O’Reilly has criticized the lenient sentences Ramos received in his prior DUI convictions and attacked Virginia Beach for basically providing “sanctuary” for illegal aliens.

In defending his city, Virginia Beach police chief Jake Jacocks made a stunning statement. He said he found it “ironic that had the intoxicated driver been born and raised in Virginia Beach, little notice would have been given to this senseless tragedy by the media or the community at large.

If that’s true, it’s appalling. A great deal of notice should have been given when a man has been convicted of DUI three times is still on the road. The driver should have been in jail.

In jail, and/or out of the country.

However, the rest of the Chief’s comments do carry a certain logic. Immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the feds. I’ve not yet seen any facts to confound the notion that O’Reilly is, effectively, making scapegoats out of the Virginia Beach city officials for a problem that primarily rests with the federal government.

That’s O’Reilly’s first mistake. Losing his temper was his second.

But if he must blow his stack sometime, what a great occasion for it. What exactly was wrong with O’Reilly’s indignation, Geraldo didn’t say; I don’t think he can do so. I’m absolutely confident that the salivating fans of Olbermann and Rivera can’t tell me, or if they do, their answer will be anything but unified from person-to-person. What did Rivera say word for word…something about illegal immigrants committing fewer crimes than citizens? That’s a load of crap. Illegal immigrants are lawbreakers by definition. If there are statistics that say they commit fewer crimes, that’s a sign that the method of gathering the statistics is busted.

And how could you expect the method not to be busted? You’d be comparing more-or-less complete records, with incomplete ones. That’s what illlegal means — you don’t know the record. Geraldo understands this.

So since he’s proven himself utterly untrustworthy and completely unconcerned with the truth, I’ll state his argument for him. Geraldo is from the anarchy crowd. Anti-law-and-order. Some of us are weary of seeing people hurt by malicious or negligent people, and we want something done about it — other folks are mad at us for becoming weary, and have drummed up a plethora of reasons why we shouldn’t be weary yet. But they aren’t defending any principle. They’re just suspicious of human machineries dedicated to law-and-order. They don’t trust them, and for this reason, prefer chaos. They’re prejudiced against the idea of Matt Dillon riding in to town and locking up the guy in the black hat. They have a childish desire to see Matt Dillon gunned down instead, and as for the guy in the black hat, well, let the chips fall where they may.

Keith Olbermann, according to his own remarks, has also engaged in a “first.” He’s handed out a “Best Person” award. For what? Well, I’ve given a summary of the reason in the preceding paragraph. It is the only coherent one you’re going to see; you’ll certainly see nothing clearer or plainer coming from the folks who agree with Olbermann and Rivera. The point about discriminating against illegal aliens, is a complete crock. We’re supposed to discriminate against them. They’re criminals. The point about illegal aliens not breaking the law, is an even bigger crock.

In my book, this shows Olbermann is in favor of people getting drunk and killing other people, as long as the drunk driver is an illegal alien. I’m sure that notion gets under the skin of a lot of readers, and I’m sure a lot of them think I’m curtailing someone’s rights…even though, all I’m doing is making up my own mind as a private citizen, and writing it down. But unlike Rivera, Olby made his comments without anyone talking over him. He had plenty of time to say what he wanted to say. And what I saw was 1) O’Reilly pointed out the deaths were utterly preventable and that city officials should be held accountable; 2) Rivera gave a bunch of bullshit reasons why this is not the case; 3) O’Reilly lost his cool; 4) Olbermann — for reasons he’s afraid to state, or thinks unnecessary to state, or both — gave Rivera the first-ever “Best Person” award. An award he could have handed out at any other time over the last two years. For anything. He thought this was the right occasion. Making a stand for………illegal immigrants who break into the country, and get drunk, and use their cars as weapons and kill girls. He wanted now to be the time, so he could be crystal-clear about what he supports and what he opposes.

Am I to conclude something else?

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, Illegal Immigration, Pinheads, Poisoning Justice, The Evil Men Do | 2 Comments »

Why We Have Blogs

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

Regarding Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Syria: This is why we have blogs.

The print and electronic media, in both hard news and editorial, have entirely failed us in this area. They’ve had all week long to address this thing the Speaker did. Let me boil down how they addressed it: The hard news resources give us the events and the sound bites. If you’re trying to figure out how to vote in 2008 based on events like this, and you rely on hard news, you must rely on the sound bites from the White House and from the Democrats in Congress. That’s an example of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse if ever there was one. Both sides spin — and rest assured on this, if either side manages to sound more compelling than the other, it’s probably the least honorable side that prevails. So what we call “hard news” sucks, as a tool to address the problem at hand.

Editorials aren’t much better. Speaker Pelosi may have committed a felony here; conservative editorials will play that up, liberal ones will play that down. Occasionally, someone will step back and take a broader view that may be useful to us across a longer timeframe, like Fred Barnes when he wrote for the Weekly Standard:

Something gets into political leaders when they take over Congress. It makes them think they can run Washington and the government from Capitol Hill. So they overreach, but it never works. Republicans tried it in 1995 and were slapped down by President Clinton in the fight over the budget and a government shutdown. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is operating as if she rules much more than just the House of Representatives. This includes having her own foreign policy — a sure recipe for trouble.

Thus is Pelosi’s misstep explained according to her human failings, rather than simply by the corrupting influence of politics.

But such contributions are few and far between, and if the Barnes editorial gets any visibility, the citadel that is the print editorial “industry” will mobilize to get it slimed. Editorials don’t exist, after all, to show us our leaders are human; they exist to show us our leaders are corrupt if they have the letter “R” after their names, or had the best of intentions if they have the letter “D” after their names. And certainly, they aren’t supposed to depict the emperor’s nakedness when said emperor is the first emperess to hold the House gavel.

And even Barnes’ comments fail to address the underlying question: Just how far do we have to position our Democrats from official diplomatic offices, before they’ll stop flying around making promises to foreign heads-of-state that we don’t want them to make? Seems to me, that’s what the American electorate needs to know.

And it falls to the blogging community to answer that. I’ll tell you why. To answer that question, you have to have a certain level of healthy cynicism. There is such a thing, you know. Humans are cynical creatures. It’s a survival instinct. You take your family to a nice restaurant, part with more money than you expected, and get lousy service and lousy food. You give the place a second shot the next month, part with the same amount of money, get lousy service and lousy food. You give the place a third chance the next month, with the same results…you won’t be going back a fourth time. Ever. That’s cynicism. It’s a healthy thing.

And the fact of the matter is — as unprofessional as bloggers can be, and as helpful as “real” editorials can be sometimes — editorials aren’t supposed to be cynical. Good cynicism, bad cynicism, it’s all the same. The first rough draft passes from the pen of the author, and passes under the eyeball of the very first editor, the first casualty after the stuff Microsoft Word underlines as spelling and grammar mistakes, is cynicism. All kinds.

This is a problem. We live in an age where we need our cynicism to help us with our thinking.

And my cynicism tells me things. Things that are unprovable, but still things that are undisputed…or if they are disputed, they ought not be.

Let’s parse what what Speaker Pelosi herself had to say about the administration’s objections:

“Our message was President Bush’s message,” Pelosi told the Associated Press from Portugal. “The funny thing is, I think we may have even had a more powerful impact with our message because of the attention that was called to our trip. It became clear to President Assad that even though we have our differences in the United States, there is no division between the president and the Congress and the Democrats on the message we wanted him to receive.”

Speaker Pelosi’s position is based on two lies. First of all, to believe the things she has had to say about her trip, you have to believe that her office and the White House are in agreement about things. On the other hand, to believe the things the White House has had to say, you have to believe that the House Speaker and the President disagree. Well, guess what: They don’t agree. So to believe Speaker Pelosi, you have to accept that she’s in lock-step with President Bush about everything that needs to be told to Syria, even as those two fail to agree on everything from bacon-or-eggs to tastes-great-less-filling to black-or-cream-sugar.

Second lie: Her talking points are carefully calculated to shore up a constituency that is hopelessly divided. She says “our message was President Bush’s message,” and what she’s doing — you won’t read this in any editorial, but it’s the truth — is addressing two constituencies instead of one. Her job is to keep on doing this throughout Election Day ’08. Moderates who long for an end to partisan disputes and are ready to vote for anyone showing signs of bringing that end, hear these words and interpret them the way they want. Oh, Speaker Pelosi has respect for the President’s authority. She’s discharging that authority in a way President Bush himself cannot…perhaps because she’s more articulate. The results are sure to be positive. Why, think what would happen if we put someone from her party in the President’s chair…and come to think of it, it’s been awhile since they had the chance. Maybe we should give it to them again. After all, the policies won’t change much, but the execution will be better. Perhaps that’s what we need. Hmmm.

And then the MoveOnDotOrgsters, who want anything but an end to partisan divide — they hear the same words and think something else. Pelosi, they think, is pointing out Bush’s incompetence. Go Nan! Because, after all, according to the KOSsacks and MoveOn.Orgsters, there is no point to anyone making a public comment about anything, other than to make Bush look bad. Think about it. When’s the last time you heard a liberal Democrat say something in public that had any other purpose? Been a while, huh?

Pelosi’s comments united these two camps. At least tangentially. Now, you get representatives from these two groups, moderates and extreme leftists, in a room together and — look out. The likely result is flying furniture. But Pelosi has managed to deliver words that each side of the split, will pick out and interpret in the way they want.

Of course, when the words are sufficiently vague to bring about that false emulsification, they become meaningless. “Our message was President Bush’s message.” That really means nothing. But who cares?

Meanwhile, in a sane world, the value of Pelosi’s trip would be measured according to the yardstick of Jimmy Carter’s trip to North Korea thirteen years ago, and the disaster that followed. The House Speaker’s authority to negotiate with foreign governments, is pretty much the same as the authority of a failed former President. Or a football, or expired carton of milk. I do hope the eventual results are better. There is no reason for me to think so.

Time to drag out the dialog between McClane and Ellis from the first Die Hard movie. I wish it didn’t mesh with real events quite so often…

Ellis: It’s not what I want, it’s what I can give you. Look, let’s be straight, okay? It’s obvious you’re not some dumb thug up here to snatch a few purses, am I right?

Hans: You’re very perceptive.

Ellis: Hey, I read the papers, I watch 60 minutes, I say to myself, these guys are professionals, they’re motivated, they’re happening. They want something. Now, personally, I don’t care about your politics. Maybe you’re pissed at the Camel Jockeys, maybe it’s the Hebes, Northern Ireland, that’s none of my business. I figure, You’re here to negotiate, am I right?

Hans: You’re amazing. You figured this all out already?

Ellis: Hey, business is business. You use a gun, I use a fountain pen, what’s the difference? To put it in my terms, you’re here on a hostile takeover and you grab us for some greenmail but you didn’t expect a poison pill was gonna be running around the building. Hans, baby… I’m your white knight.

Hans: I must have missed 60 Minutes. What are you saying?

Ellis: The guy upstairs who’s fucking things up? I can give him to you.
:
:
Hans [on radio to McClane]: I have someone who wants to talk to you. A very special friend who was at the party with you tonight.

Ellis: Hello, John boy?

McClane: Ellis?

Ellis: John, they’re giving me a few minutes to try and talk some sense into you. I know you think you’re doing your job, and I can appreciate that, but you’re just dragging this thing out. None of us gets out of here until these people can negotiate with the LA police, and they’re just not gonna start doing that until you stop messing up the works.

McClane: Ellis, what have you told them?

Ellis: I told them we’re old friends and you were my guest at the party.

McClane: Ellis… you shouldn’t be doing this…

Ellis: Tell me about it.

Ellis: All right… John, listen to me… They want you to tell them where the detonators are. They know people are listening. They want the detonators of they’re going to kill me.

Ellis: John, didn’t you hear me?

McClane: Yeah, I hear you, you fucking moron!

Ellis: John, I think you could get with the program a little. The police are here now. It’s their problem. Tell these guys where the detonators are so no one else gets hurt. Hey, I’m putting my life on the line for you buddy…

McClane: Don’t you think I know that! Put Hans on! Hans, listen to me, that shithead doesn’t know what kind of scum you are, but I do –

Hans: Good. Then you’ll give us what we want and save your friend’s life. You’re not part of this equation. It’s time to realize that.

Ellis: What am I, a method actor? Hans, babe, put away the gun. This is

McClane: That asshole’s not my friend! I barely know him! I hate his fucking guts — Ellis, for Christ’s sake, tell him you don’t mean shit to me –

Ellis: John, how can you say that, after all these years–? John? John?

[Hans shoots Ellis]

Hans: Hear that? Talk to me, where are my detonators. Where are they or shall I shoot another one?

Fortunately, the gunshot was figurative and unlike the hapless Ellis, Speaker Pelosi is okay. But her strategy is just as kooky as his, and I’m afraid every bit as ill-fated.

Update 4-10-07: Welcome Pajamas Media readers.

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, Incumbent Scandals, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Supreme Court Ruling on Global Warming

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

One of the reasons we’re all supposed to want to get rid of President Bush, is that supposedly his Supreme Court appointments are spectacles of something hideous and dreadful. Except…Justice Alito seems to be doing okay…Chief Justice Roberts seems to be doing okay…and these four or five bozos who represent the antithesis of a Bush’s nominee, the “liberal wing,” they call ’em? Some homeless guy plucked off the street could do a better job.

“EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” quoth Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. Goooooooood. Just what we need, a judicial branch bullying and intimidating our federal agencies into pushing us around some more.

Agencies say “we’re just not sure,” and — hey you know what, scientifically, that’s the correct answer. But anyway. Supreme Court writes up an opinion that says gosh, we just don’t like your answer. Go re-think it.

That’s the way government works, huh?

We’ve got about twenty years before all this global warming hocus-pocus looks like the pet-rock newspaper-horoscope mood-ring junk science that it is. Then you can haul out all these stories and shake your head with a melancholy smile about how badly we were fooled. Without a doubt, this needs to go in the file.

Update: More & better info here.

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, ManBearPig, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Five Outta Six

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Read for yourself.

A new Yale research survey reveals a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming. Fully 83 percent of Americans now say global warming is a “serious” problem, up from 70 percent in 2004. More Americans than ever say they have serious concerns about environmental threats, such as toxic soil and water (92 percent, up from 85 percent in 2004), deforestation (89 percent, up from 78 percent), air pollution (93 percent, up from 87 percent) and the extinction of wildlife (83 percent, up from 72 percent in 2005).

Huh. What about that survey from 2004?

On the eve of the release of the much-anticipated movie, The Day After Tomorrow, the global warming disaster movie, a national poll undertaken at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies indicates that 70% of Americans believe global warming is a very serious or somewhat serious problem, while just 20% of Americans believe global warming does not represent a serious issue.

Day After Tomorrow, huh?

I’d like to see a poll on whether something else is a serious problem. I’d like to see a poll on how many Americans believe a lot of other Americans are freakin’ raging idiots.

In fact, I’d like to see a poll on the problem I’ve identified that really irritates me. Here’s the problem. People are presented with a premise A. A is proven by B. Global Warming is proven by “Day After Tomorrow,” or President Bush called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper” because some crappy tabloid says he said it. In cases like this, B is widely acknowledged to be bullshit. Even people who desperately want to believe A, understand B is bullshit.

And yet, they believe in A more fervently with B, than without B.

Stating the reasons why they believe A, they cite B, which they know to be bullshit.

I do not mean to imply !A just because B is bullshit. A could still be true. But this trend lately of reinforcing assumptions that may or may not be true, based on pieces of evidence known to be rancid crap and nothing more — with a straight face no less — is a harbinger of bad times ahead. It’s a sickness. There’s nothing healthy about it.

As one of the 17%, I’d like to know how many among the 83% would simply acknowledge this is a problem. Nevermind whether they themselves have fallen victim to it, we’ll leave that for later. But the fact remains, a lot of this stuff that’s been used to bolster the case of ManBearPig suffers from glaring problems; and the evidence that does not suffer from such problems, has been whittled down to pinpoint size.

I’d like to see polls on all this stuff. Because if people don’t have confidence in the opinions of everybody around them, it makes very little sense to pursue the argument “I must be right because look at all the people who agree with me.”

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, ManBearPig, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

High on the Pyramid

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Maslow Gotta take a quick minute to jot this down, since I’ve already been caught in an endless tail-chasing loop googling Abraham Maslow a handful of times. I keep forgetting everything about the guy, and he’s important. Or at least his pyramid is. The concept of the Maslow Pyramid is, that our attention focuses on different things as we achieve the basics. When we have food, clothing and shelter, we start worrying about things that wouldn’t even have drawn a passing glance from us when we still had questions about food, clothing and shelter. Maslow put together a spectrum that covers all of it…and for the most part it’s the 41st thing I figured out myself without being aware of his work.

Thing I Know #41. Those who are out of danger, worry about food. Those with food, worry about discomfort. Those who are comfortable, worry getting things done on time. Those who have time, worry about money. Those who are solvent, worry about their legacies. And the lucky souls who spared the plagues of danger, hunger, discomfort, time, solvency and legacy issues, worry about fashion.

So about a year and a half ago, San Francisco, which doesn’t seem to worry too much about food, discomfort, getting things done on time, or money, started worrying about…grocery bags. Yeah. They did. They really really did.

City officials are considering charging grocery stores 17 cents apiece for the bags to discourage use of plastic sacks.

Plastic is the choice of 90 percent of shoppers, but the sacks are blamed for everything from clogging recycling machines to killing marine life and suffocating infants.

Paper is recyclable, but city officials propose to include them as well to help reduce overall waste.

“One thing we’ve learned is that sending a financial signal to the marketplace tends to modify behavior much better than voluntary approaches,” Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“We all have a responsibility to promote a healthy and sustainable environment, and by doing that, it means we need to help change people’s patterns, and that even means their shopping patterns,” said [Supervisor Ross] Mirkarimi, who will take office in January.

Responsibility to promote a healthy and sustainable environment…in other words, they flat ran out of worries and had to start making some more. So the city elders started telling citizens how to shop for their groceries.

Somehow, in a nation started by a tax revolt, this was allowed to go ahead.

No, worse than that. Here it is twenty-eight months later and it’s not a tax anymore. It is…a ban. Yeah, a ban. Notice, Supervisor Mirkarimi is still at the epicenter of this little tempest, which in fact is not nearly as tempestuous as I think it oughtta be…

City leaders approved a ban on plastic grocery bags after weeks of lobbying on both sides from environmentalists and a supermarket trade group. If Mayor Gavin Newsom signs the ban as expected, San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to adopt such a rule.

The law, passed by a 10-1 vote, requires large markets and drug stores to give customers only a choice among bags made of paper that can be recycled, plastic that breaks down easily enough to be made into compost, or reusable cloth.

San Francisco supervisors and supporters said that by banning the petroleum-based sacks, blamed for littering streets and choking marine life, the measure would go a long way toward helping the city earn its green stripes.

“Hopefully, other cities and states will follow suit,” said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who crafted the ban after trying to get a 15-cent per bag tax passed in 2005.

Markarimi Yeah that’s right Ross. I’m sure the environment is going to get along just dandy when we all head down to Safeway with our 33 gallon lawn bags. You know what I really like about your story? It’s a classic case of something starting out as a tax…and everyone sits down with their slide rules and figures out, hey! I can afford this after all, so it’s not such a bad thing! And just over two years later it is a ban. I mean, facts is facts; here we are. Let it be a lesson.

In late ’04 you had targeted the paper bags as well. Now, it’s off the table — for the time being. But can the paper bag ban be far behind? Back then the story said…where’s the quote, ah, here it is: “…city officials propose to include [tax] them as well to help reduce overall waste.”

You know what I think? I think the Maslow Pyramid is a volcano. You spiral to the top of it, worrying about more and more trivial and cock-and-bull crap as you run out of the more essential concerns. Your attachment to reality suffers as more and more of your day-to-day needs are met, and uncertainty with regard to any of those needs, is gradually eliminated. And then this is what happened to Rome: Cemented into the very top of this pyramid, you are forcefully ejected from the top. No longer capable of making rational decisions, your super-duper safe-n-secure existence comes crashing down. It comes to an inglorious end.

Of some kind.

I’m really not sure how it can be brought about by outlawing grocery sacks. But on the other hand, it’s hard to envision someone having the competence to get dressed and get their teeth brushed, and go about their day doing whatever it is they do, if this is anywhere on their list of concerns. I mean, the competence with regard to things that really matter, just isn’t there. Somewhere, there has to be a day of reckoning.

Money quote…

“I think what grocers will do now that this has passed is, they will review all their options and decide what they think works best for them economically,” said David Heylen, a spokesman for the California Grocers Association.

Wow, I wish Mr. Heylen continued with that train of thought. What options are left? Maybe if the kitty can go without her litter pan for an hour or two, you could rinse it out and use that as your grocery bag when you run down to get more milk and cereal.

Don’t you love San Francisco? It’s a place everyone loves to watch…in the same way, I think, it’s really hard to look away when you see a highway accident about to happen.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, Tree Huggers | 4 Comments »

On Generous People II

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Here we go again, generosity from an unexpected source. Or to put it more accurately, a source we were instructed to believe was a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge…and darn it, those inconvenient facts keep getting in the way.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. increased its U.S. charitable giving 10 percent last year to $272.9 million, the world’s largest retailer said Tuesday, likely defending its position as the country’s largest corporate donor of cash.

The rate of growth was lower than a year earlier, when Hurricane Katrina relief helped push the annual rise to 19 percent, but it was ahead of Wal-Mart’s 7 percent rise in net profit last year. The company’s profit for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31 was $12.2 billion.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart released its annual donation numbers a few days after publicizing its annual bonuses to hourly store workers as it seeks to counter union-led critics by defending its record as a corporate citizen.

Wal-Mart said most of its U.S. giving was in cash, about $250 million, vs. $22.9 million of in-kind donations.

We’ve discussed this before, here and here.

I thought the quote at the bottom of the story was ironic and absolutely priceless. Isn’t this just the very definition of a Scrooge?

Critic isn’t swayed
Union-backed critic WakeUpWalMart.com said the increase in giving did nothing to dampen their claims that Wal-Mart exploits its workers.

“Charity is always good, but what is not good is Wal-Mart forcing poorly paid and uninsured workers to depend on charity,” WakeUpWalMart.com spokesman Chris Kofinis said.

Wal-Mart has repeatedly denied those claims, defending its wages as competitive and its health coverage as affordable.

Bah! Humbug!

When the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if they aren’t, pound the table.

Posted in Pinheads, Poisoning Capitalism | 1 Comment »

Elections Have Consequences? On Science?

Saturday, March 24th, 2007

The Media Research Center posts some eye-popping stuff, but this item really stands out.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma): “I mentioned this in my opening statement about they’re, they’re criticizing you for some of your, your being too alarmist and hurting your own cause. Now, I’ll ask you to respond in writing for that one because that would be a very long response, I’m afraid. Now, it seems that everybody — Global warming in the media joined the chorus last summer-”

Former Vice President Al Gore: “Well, I would like to–” “May I–” “May I-”

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California): “Excuse me, Senator Inhofe. We’ll freeze the time for a minute.”

Inhofe: “Oh, yes.”

Boxer: “I’m just trying to make-”

Inhofe: “Take your time. We’re freezing the time.”

Boxer: “No, no. We’re freezing the time just for a minute. I want, I want to talk to you a minute, please. [Laughter] Would you, would you agree, would you agree to let the Vice President answer your questions? And then if you want an extra few minutes at the end, I’m happy to give it to you. But we’re not going to get anywhere.”

Inhofe: “Why don’t we do this, why don’t we do thisâ€” At the end, you can have as much time as you want to answer all the questions?”

Boxer: “No, that isn’t the rule. You’re not making the rules, used to when you did this. [Boxer holds up the gavel.] You don’t do this anymore. Elections have consequences.”

Well, for the record I find Sen. Boxer’s suggestion to be reasonable. I’ts long been a pet peeve of mine when senators ask what are called “questions” but what, in reality, have nothing to do with the inquisitive nature or the brevity one would associate with something called a question. Were I king, there would be a hard-and-fast rule against it, with automatic impeachment for violators. Questions are questions. No grandstanding.

When I take everything over and become emperor, that’s my twenty-first order of business.

But I’ll say this. I don’t understand what ensuring the continuing survival of the planet, has to do with settling old scores in that exclusive club known as The Senate. Boxer, and all who cheer on her little personal vendetta, must know global warming to be a crock; for if there was something to it, how would this little score she has to settle with Inhofe, matter a tinker’s damn?

But this was really incredible. Keep in mind: Our electronic media continues to insist that media left-leaning bias is a myth. Keep it in mind…

Brianna Keiler: “Wow. All right. That was quite an exchange. And, you know, we were expecting something from Senator James Inhofe. He is a critic of global warming. In fact, he once said that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people. So, certainly, we were expecting something from him. We thought maybe it might be with him and former Senator, former Vice President Al Gore, but it ended up between him and Senator Barbara Boxer. She really got a stinger in there, I will say.”

Don Lemon: “Good for her.”

How’s that fair? How’s that for objective reporting?

Really grasping to play “angel’s advocate” with this, I’d have to ponder…if you’d seen Al Gore’s movie, and came away with it really concerned about the continuing survival of our environment and our species, and “the science was settled” and so forth…I suppose you would be tempted to conclude the only thing standing between us, and salvation, is the endless political wheel-spinning in places of authority like the U.S. Congress. Overcome that, maybe we live, fail to do so, and we perish.

I guess then you’d get really excited when Sen. Boxer gets a stinger in there. And you’d say asinine things like “good for her.”

Understandable, but it has no place behind a news desk.

Why is this even in Congress, anyway? If 99 senators vote that global warming is a big crock, but it’s really going to destroy us, that just means the Senate is wrong; likewise, if 99 vote that it’s the plague of the 21st century but in reality it’s just a bag o’bovine feces, then again, the Senate is wrong.

And my wonderful liberal female hippy senator tells us elections have consequences. Do they really? If so, when are you going to vote on the freezing temperature of water, Barbara? Thirty-two degrees never did have much appeal to me, and I’ll bet a majority of us would appreciate something a bit more tepid. Get on that, will you? Elections have consequences.

Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.
Thing I Know #129. Leaders; votes; clergy; academics; pundits; prevailing sentiment; political expediency. Wherever these decide what is & isn’t true, an empire will surely fall.

Posted in Elections, GroupThink Nonsense, Poisoning Science | 1 Comment »

Is There A Global Temperature

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Ah, it’s like having a hard-to-reach itch finally scratched…I’ve been wondering about this for the longest time.

“It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth”, Bjarne Andresen says, an an expert of thermodynamics. “A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate”.

He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average ‘global exchange rate’. [emphasis mine]

Posted in ManBearPig, Poisoning Science | 4 Comments »

Toxic Wives

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Solis Hmm. Things would’ve been different if someone explained this to me when I was sixteen.

Watch out! Toxic Wife Syndrome is rampant and droves of gold diggers are prowling in search of rich prey to join the tribe.

So says journalist Tara Winter Wilson whose guide to spotting a potential toxic wife touched a raw nerve with hordes of victims contacting her about the so-called syndrome.

Her warning is stark: “Unless you marry an equal who is going to pay her own way, you will end up with a lazy, indulgent, over-pampered slug.”

“Marriage is being clouded by Toxic Wife Syndrome. Ridiculous amounts of money keep being awarded to these women in divorce settlements.”

Winter Wilson, staggered by the flood of heartfelt feedback she got after first naming the syndrome in a lifestyle article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said: “Many women see it as a career choice.”

“After leaving university, they stay on the party circuit until they trap someone. They try to get the most by doing the least. They develop an extraordinary sense of entitlement, becoming very judgmental and shrewish,” she told Reuters.

Hmm. It never would have occurred to me to correlate the most vicious golddiggers in my past…with judgmentalism. Makes a certain amount of sense.

Interesting the way our society works. You’re a middle-age six-foot right-handed white guy with a receeding hairline…and a blog…and you have opinions. Holy smokes, the things people say about that. Trust me on that one. Most of the people who argue with me about blogging, I’d guess three-quarters of them — they don’t argue with me about anything. They just squeak. Let me be known they disapprove. Disapprove of the practice of coming to a conclusion about something, and letting it be known. They have nothing to say about anything specific…and they’re far-and-away in the majority. BUT. You are a babe who looks good in a short skirt, fresh out of university, staying on the party circuit. You’re looking for an old guy to tell you his bank balance seconds after meeting you. You have opinions.

What do we say about that? “She’s courageous.” “She speaks her mind.” Et cetera.

Well personally, I’m all in favor of people of both sexes having opinions. Even stupid, sucky opinions are better than none at all. But this is an interesting double-standard we’ve formed here. And I think it’s linked, from what I’ve seen, to Toxic Wife Syndrome. I know, in addition to my own relationship disasters, I’ve come to be aware of other married couples experiencing turmoil. Said turmoil invariably ends badly.

What do these couples all have in common? It seems that the bride is always quicker to form opinions than her bridegroom. That’s an indictment against neither one of them, by the way; it’s a relative observation. It seems a lady quick to judge, has a shot at a happy marriage, if she marries a gentleman who’s just as quick, or quicker.

And, if she isn’t a lazy, indulgent, over-pampered slug.

And if she wants a long happy marriage. But there, we run into Tara Winter Wilson’s observation about a “career choice.” But married ladies are supposed to want their marriages to succeed, aren’t they? We’re told so.

Why should it work that way all the time, though? Um…you know, why should it work that way some of the time? Divorced women are supposed to experience financial hardship — well, we’ve canxed that. They’re supposed to experience stigma — whoops, we got rid of that. So what’s left is, they’re going to want their children to continue a relationship with their father. But that’s assuming they’re his — assuming she approves of his fathering — and assuming she cares.

And then there’s that “love” stuff. Here’s a secret for younger men: That doesn’t cut it. A husband, first-and-foremost, opens doorways to the future a lady desires for herself, and shows himself ready to share that future with her. As a distant second, he is someone she “loves.” The marriage is on much more solid footing, when the knight brings his lady the first of those two and not the second, than the other way ’round.

It’s a sad thing to say, but from what I know and what I’ve seen, we’ve had this upsurge in Toxic Wife Syndrome because it has become so difficult to define. In the final analysis, they’re simply women who refuse to be disappointed. And nowadays, who has ever raised a young girl into womanhood, fully and truly prepared for disappointment?

It’s like a biblical plague of Egypt. But we’ve done it to ourselves.

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

Steyn Nails the Libby Trial

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Nails it, I say. Whack-a-mole, right between the eyes.

Perverse Libby trial was revealing
:
The prosecutor knew from the beginning that (a) leaking Valerie Plame’s name was not a crime and (b) the guy who did it was Richard Armitage. In other words, he was aware that the public and media perception of this ”case” was entirely wrong: There was no conspiracy by Bush ideologues to damage a whistleblower, only an anti-war official making an offhand remark to an anti-war reporter. Even the usual appeals to prosecutorial discretion (Libby was a peripheral figure with only he said/she said evidence in an investigation with no underlying crime) don’t convey the scale of Fitzgerald’s perversity: He knew, in fact, that there was no cloud, that under all the dark scudding about Rove and Cheney there was only sunny Richard Armitage blabbing away accidentally. Yet he chose to let the entirely false impression of his ”case” sit out there month in, month out, year after year, glowering over the White House, doing great damage to the presidency on the critical issue of the day.

So much of the current degraded discourse on the war — ”Bush lied” — comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story. Britain’s MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium from Africa. Lord Butler’s special investigation supports it. So does the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson’s original charge is if not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud is real and lasting.

As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame — whether by accident or intent no one can ever say for sure. But we also know that Joe Wilson failed to remember that his original briefing to the CIA after getting back from Niger was significantly different from the way he characterized it in his op-ed in the New York Times. We do know that the contemptible Armitage failed to come forward and clear the air as his colleagues were smeared for months on end. We do know that his boss Colin Powell sat by as the very character of the administration was corroded. [emphasis mine]

I put those parts in bold because I happen to know a lot of people missed those points. They know something I don’t; or else — assuming the press has a responsibility to “inform the public” — a huge chunk of the mission remains unachieved.

But that’s a big assumption. If the press’ mission, alternatively, is to slime and slander Republican administrations, then such tidbits are off-topic, which would explain why we’ve heard so little about them.

Meanwhile…Toensing and Sanford conducted an analysis two years ago, as to whether a crime was even committed here with regard to the “outing.” So far as I know, none of the salient details have changed since then.

As two people who drafted and negotiated the scope of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, we can tell you: The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct.

When the act was passed, Congress had no intention of prosecuting a reporter who wanted to expose wrongdoing and, in the process, once or twice published the name of a covert agent. Novak is safe from indictment. But Congress also did not intend for government employees to be vulnerable to prosecution for an unintentional or careless spilling of the beans about an undercover identity. A dauntingly high standard was therefore required for the prosecutor to charge the leaker.

At the threshold, the agent must truly be covert. Her status as undercover must be classified, and she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years. This requirement does not mean jetting to Berlin or Taipei for a week’s work. It means permanent assignment in a foreign country. Since Plame had been living in Washington for some time when the July 2003 column was published, and was working at a desk job in Langley (a no-no for a person with a need for cover), there is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as “covert.”

Posted in Incumbent Scandals, Moonbat Conspiracies, Overlawyered, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Bare Minimum

Monday, March 12th, 2007

Red State restates the obvious about the minimum wage.

BOTH the House of Representatives and the Senate have recently passed bills raising the minimum wage. The Senate bill includes tax breaks for businesses, based on the following logic: While a minimum wage increase is popular, the resulting higher labor costs will translate into fewer jobs, more expensive products or both. The solution, the senators concluded, was to subsidize companies that hire disadvantaged workers, in order to reimburse them for these higher wage costs.

Does this reasoning hold up? A look at one of the key pieces of this business tax package — the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which has been in place since 1996 and would be extended for five years under the proposal — suggests otherwise.

Posted in Minimum Wage, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Red Bikinis and Racist Cartoons

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I don’t have the Google Image Search (GIS) skills needed to find a shot of Sheri Doub in her red bikini. I’m either not bright enough, or I don’t have the right aptitude…or the picture is simply not available. And I’m not alone in this deficiency, judging by my Siteminder referrals. Hit after hit after hit, The Blog That Nobody Reads hosts an inquisitive visitor combing through the world wide web in search of Sherry Doub’s swimsuit picture…and apparently still unsatisfied.

I do not know if I’m missing something. And I do not know if this image remains so well-hidden. But I do know this: I can’t find the cartoon. I can find lots and lots of people instructing me and countless others to come to the conclusion that the cartoon is racist.

Without showing it to us.

Why? More importantly, how? With what kind of befuddled, gullible readers are these pundits accustomed to dealing?

Racist the cartoon may be. But whoever directs me to think such a thing, without showing me the evidence, represents are far greater societal problem.

We’ll just have to wait to see if the cartoon surfaces in the next couple days. It will be small consolation if & when it finally does.

What incredible nerve.

Update: Here it is.

Which I suppose might get some folks in a froth. Three criminals are shown; all three, it would appear, are black. Okay, some people find that offensive and racist. Point one: Why do I need to go looking for this? People find the cartoon offensive, and that is somehow “news”; the cartoon, itself, is not? How can it not be, if the conclusion drawn from it, is? And point two: Are those frothy people, going to get so frothy about this…

Before the movie spun, the motion picture industry had inserted a one minute infomercial on the evils of movie piracy and intellectual theft. To make their melodramatic point, they showed a criminal stealing a cell phone….Of course, in the pre-movie infomercial, all three criminals were white men. Which got me to thinking. In the make believe land of movies, television, and commercials, if there is a heinous crime to be committed, 99.9% of the time, it’s now going to be done by a white guy. In fact, it has to be done by a white guy.

Political correctness and the fear of offending, or worse yet, getting sued or picketed, is such, that you will no longer see blacks, Hispanics, most minorities, or even women for that matter, commit a fictional crime. No. Hollywood and the ad agencies have decided that criminal activity on film is now the sole domain of the “too successful for his own good” white male. [emphasis mine]

Maybe the shock value isn’t due to our moral sensibilities about skewed representations; maybe it’s due to our own skewed perspective about what’s normal. Criminals in movies, ads, cartoons — must be white male. And we’re just not used to seeing anything different.

Or, the guy who drew the cartoon could really be racist. But that brings us back to my original question: If you can’t spare the space for the cartoon itself, how can you spare the space to report on people getting all peeved about it, and telling your readers what to think about it?

Here and here and here and in the link up top…they just can’t quite seem to spare the column-inches to reproduce the cartoon itself. Just lots of huffing and puffing about how awful it is.

Update: Sheer coincidence, last month Neal Boortz had a similar observation to make.

I’m just waiting for the day when some home alarm company … ADT, for instance … actually has the nads to put an ad on television that shows a family being threatened by a black intruder. Have you noticed that the intruders — the people trying to break into those homes — are always white?

Boortz didn’t manage to channel much populist passion behind his little observation there, nor do I suspect he had much expectation that he would.

And yet, we’re supposed to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches in hand, up to the offices of St. Mary’s Today. Because three criminals were depicted, and all three were black.

The double-standard is somewhat offensive, but not nearly so much as this notion of journalistic elites instructing the commoners when to get offended about things, and when not to be offended — without taking the initiative to show us what’s offensive.

Update: Some more on the unfortunate Ms. Doub. Still no picture. Sorry, web-hunters.

Sheri Doub was a manager at the Citizen’s Tri-County bank on Signal Mountain. She was fired allegedly for posing in a bikini in the Lifestyle section of the Chattanooga Times-Free Press newspaper…She says everything was fine, until a picture of her appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press Lifestyle section in May 2005. It was part of a story on the beginning of summer and new styles in swimwear for 2005. Doub says she was fired the following day, when the bank’s president hand delivered her a termination letter and she was escorted her out of the building.

Posted in Pinheads, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Women in Skimpy Clothes | No Comments »

You Didn’t See Nuthin’

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Woman Honor Thyself has a post up about the French Constitutional Council slapping a ban on…uh, well…

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
:
Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

Well, no kiddin’. What a patently absurd explanation — what are these acts of violence down upon which the French government wishes to crack? Ah…what does it matter. French government wishes to crack down on them, so they criminalize the filming of the acts.

I’d hate to be the P.R. guy tasked with convincing people to believe that. I wonder if anyone anywhere is falling for it.

Posted in Europeans, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

I Knew There Was Something About Her

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I wish it were easier for me to get ahold of hard news and information about Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo.

She’s a Democrat; she’s a woman; she’s anti-war; she’s got names in her rolodex and other folks have her name in theirs; and, she has an illness. So my local newspaper won’t say too much about her that isn’t fawning and glittery. Very little that is issue-related.

It’s up to the bloggers. Hey, that’s one of the nice things about being alive right now. Thanks Jen.

I just knew there was something about Her Honor that rubbed me the wrong way.

Talking About Crime Commissions

Last week I wrote about Sacramento’s useless Mayor Heather Fargo, and her idea of fighting crime and gangs: A Youth Commission of Sacramento Area high school students to keep City Council abreast of “Youth-related issues.”

Instead of adding more cops to the already pittiful number (668 on the street), Heather and her merry band of Council Nitwits want to talk more about the problem. In what amounts to a typical liberal response to a very real problem, Sacramento City Council lead by Mayor Heather Fargo established a “youth czar” position to coordinate prevention and intervention programs.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Phony Crime Solutions, Poisoning Justice | No Comments »

Jesus Would Hate America

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

One of the many things our liberals have been teaching me for the last two-to-four years, give or take, is that America is always wrong. Another thing is, whenever somebody notices our liberals think America is always wrong, that somebody is guilty of putting words into liberals’ mouths. The liberals always have some deeper and more precise meaning, and their words are not being parsed fairly. Always, always, always…there is a little bit more hair-splitting to be done, a little bit more “nuance” to be extracted. And the middleman is always missing out on some crucial meaning.

Poor liberals. So oppressed.

But isn’t it funny? Think how much harder it would be for these middlemen to put words into the liberals’ mouths — if only once in awhile, a high profile liberal went on record and said some good things about America. Not America as our liberals want her to be; America as they find her. Some compliment. Just one. It would make that right-wing smear campaign so much more difficult. So much less effective and practical.

If only.

Well how’s this for a right-wing smear. John Edwards, who ran as the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 2004, says Jesus would be disappointed in the United States. The Lamb of God would be appalled at America. There I go, putting words into their mouths. Failing to properly split the hairs.

Huh. Really?

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says Jesus would be appalled at how the United States has ignored the plight of the suffering, and that he believes children should have private time to pray at school.

Edwards, in an interview with the Web site Beliefnet.com, said Jesus would be most upset with the selfishness of Americans and the country’s willingness to go to war “when it’s not necessary.”

“I think that Jesus would be disappointed in our ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish short-term needs,” Edwards told the site. “I think he would be appalled, actually.”

It all looks pretty clear to me. Maybe our blue-staters are right, there’s some “nuance” there I’m just not bright enough to see.

Posted in Challenger Scandals, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Memo For File XXXVIII

Monday, March 5th, 2007

Here it is. This is the thing to which Ann Coulter was apparently trying to make reference in her clumsy, not-really-lovable way.

Now it’s rehab over Grey’s new “f-word”! – TVgasm
by Tabloid Baby

The Grey’s Anatomy offscreen soap opera has now entered the realm of the absurd, as star Isaiah Washington has gone into rehab in an effort to save his job.

Word came today that ABC executives have ordered him to undergo psychological assessment to find out why he called co-star T.R. Knight a “faggot” during a spat on the set back in the fall–or else!

Everything had quieted down until last week, when Grey’s won a Golden Globe and Washington, in the grand tradition of Hollywood lying and spin control, Washington denied having uttered the slur. But in denying it, he used the word again! He didn’t direct it toward anyone, only referring to the word he’s been accused of saying.

Washington has already apologized twice, met with gay leaders and offered to make public service announcements. But rehab? Granted, it beats a prime tiem spanking by Dr. Phil– but didn’t anyone at ABC listen to the words Roseanne Barr used to scream from her office all those years? Washington confirmed it in a statement today:

Sez Isaiah:

“With the support of my family and friends, I have begun counseling. I regard this as a necessary step toward understanding why I did what I did and making sure it never happens again. I appreciate the fact that I have been given this opportunity and I remain committed to transforming my negative actions into positive results, personally and professionally.”

Am I trying to excuse what Ann said this weekend? I’ll leave that up to the reader. Did she do something wrong? Absolutely. It was wrong in principle, and wrong in tactics. She made herself just as bad as Howard Dean when he went glaringly off-topic to insult white people and Christians, and when he yelled into the microphone. Good thing she never ran for Prez…

Do I think the Grey’s reference matters? Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re going to start pontificating and speculating about what Coulter holds in her heart, you’ve made Mr. Washington’s episode part of the story. That seems obvious.

And yet…a Google search on “rehab faggot,” as of this writing, returns 208,000 results and, as far as I can tell, not a single mention of Isaiah Washington. Interesting the way we ponder these things.

Are conservatives going to do a better job of policing their own? You mean, in contrast to the job the liberals did when Dan Rather insisted his report about forged documents was “fake but accurate”? Or when Al Gore got caught being a hypocrite, in the most caughtingly-hypocritical way possible? Compared to those?

Yeah. They’ve started already.

Do I think Ann deserves the scourging she’s about to receive? Yeah, I do. Sure, she’s being taken out of context over and over again. And it doesn’t rise to the little-brother-playing-Monopoly standard of “fair.” But when you speak in public about politics, it’s your job to anticipate that people will try to hurt you, and by extension, those who support you. That is THE JOB.

And the fact of the matter is, she really doesn’t have any defense. I’ve got a good idea how her plan was supposed to work. She’d be nailed for using that word, and her defense would be something like “I didn’t use that word, I was quoting someone else” — or something similar to that. It isn’t working because her enemies get to decide whether we’ll be discussing the ABC/Washington flap or not; they get to decide that, and predictably they’ve decided it’s all about Ann. Why would they decide it any other way?

Of all the people who hate Ann Coulter today, practically no one has even heard of Isaiah Washington. Or, anyway, what his connection to this is. So Ann’s job was to see this coming, and she pulled a “gaffe” because she executed that job incompetently.

If I were gay, would I stop supporting conservatives over this? I dunno. Maybe.

So yeah, Ann. Thanks. Loads. Stick to writing.

Update 3/6/07: Some guy thinks Bill Maher’s comment is far worse than Ann Coulter’s. Must be part of that right-wing attack machine.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Nurseries of Tomorrow’s Leaders

Sunday, March 4th, 2007

Thing I Know #90. A committee is a group of four or more people, each of whom are invested in an all-consuming mission to appear more important than the others. Through their dedication, good judgment, and continued persistence in these efforts, they have an excellent chance at making the committee itself utterly useless.
Thing I Know #93. People tend to change the way they think when they’re in groups. Generally, an idea generated in a group is worth a lot less than an idea someone thinks up on their own.

Very frequently in life we run into an event which, in the aftermath, presents us with an unpalatable decision. We may comment audibly on what it is we have just seen, which is to commit the grievous sin of belaboring the obvious. Or we may keep quiet, which raises the very real specter of yet another lap on the ol’ merry go-stupid.

Age has something to do with this. Show me a man whose heart has beat for four decades or more, and I’ll show you someone who’s tired of the ride, and would rather belabor the obvious than go ’round again. We’re over forty, so belabor it we shall.

So what really happened two years ago, when the events were put in motion that would eventually cost Larry Summers his job as President of Harvard? You remember, don’t you. The former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton made a comment or two about the paucity of successful women in science and engineering pursuits. He said it might be symptomatic of an aptitude differential between the sexes. In other words, perhaps there are innate differences between men and women.

Everything after that was just yet another chapter in a book we’ve already read many times. He apologized, he apologized again, he apologized again-again, he apologized for his previous apologies, and then he left to go spend more time with his family.

Which provided rich ammunition for conservatives. President Summers did not say the ladies were suffering in their academic achievements because they didn’t have what it takes to succeed. He did not, by any account, say anything about the extent to which their potential was limited in an engineering field. In fact, it seems he didn’t deny anything about traditional gender discrimination that might be taking place, in the present, in hiring and acceptance decisions. And that is where the story gets rich. Summers was commenting that perhaps what we’re seeing is a combination of several factors at work; discrimination — and some other stuff too.

For that kind of comment to cost him his job, sends the unmistakable message: A hundred pounds of underrepresentation, is a hundred pounds of discrimination, not an ounce less. Thou art not to think of anything else, or thine career is forfeit.

You can’t extrapolate any other message from the Summers flotsam-and-jetsam. Of course, it makes it a little sticky when there are no transcripts of what Summers actually said; you knew that too, didn’t you? No, really. Think back. You might have read here and there about the substance of his comments, as interpreted by some reporter for the Boston Globe…or what someone told that reporter. Maybe a friend-of-a-friend type thing. But you didn’t read any hard quotes.

Searching for some, I did trip across this thing which purports to be a word-for-word transcript. It may very well be exactly that. One problem with that is, several stories have come out about this putting the words “innate” and/or “innately” into hard scare-quotes, as if he used those words, and I don’t find them in the transcript. A mistake must have been made somewhere.

But the transcript does look impressively…complicated. It has the appearance of being the product of some kind of recording device. I’ll assume it’s genuine, not that it matters much I suppose.

So accepting that, let’s take a look at what he said.

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call…the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Now, ya got that? Summers is saying what we seem to be looking at, is a mixture of three different forces at work. The most impactful factor is that when you have a “high-powered job,” more will be expected of you, and overall men are going to have an easier time integrating such a professional life with the other aspects of their lives. The second biggest factor is that women and men bring different sets of aptitudes to those demanding jobs. And the third factor, least important among the three, is good old-fashioned discrimination.

Summers’ failure to skip the first two of those, and leapfrog down to #3, was just too much for Nancy Hopkins. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” the MIT professor said.

Well, there must be a prevailing viewpoint at work, otherwise Summers would not have been forced to resign. And clearly the prevailing viewpoint was aptly represented, in some way, by Hopkins’…gag reflex, I guess.

If we shall belabor the obvious, let us do so by examining all the elements minus the one that arouses all the emotion. We got a bunch of college eggheads in a room somewhere and the college eggheads are tackling a problem. Let us say the problem is — a business is making widgets and people aren’t buying as many of the widgets as they used to. Egghead One steps up to the podium and says hey, I see three things the business can be doing better, and in order of importance here they are. One, Two, Three. Egghead Two gets all pissy because Egghead One cited three things instead of just one. Egghead Two loses her lunch and Egghead One has to resign.

Now what are we to think of such an environment? That it takes very little to make people barf, isn’t a fair conclusion to draw; my hypothetical, by design, removes a situation that gets a lot of people very excited, and justifiably so. However — it is quite fair to draw the conclusion that, for whatever reason, we have an enviornment here that looks at simplified solutions. And it uses some teeth when it looks at the simplified solutions. Summers said, gee, let’s look at this thing and that thing, and that other thing over there…end result is he’s out on his ass.

And in real life the situation is a little more complicated than that. The President of the United States, a Republican widely seen as an easy target for removal and disgrace, had just been re-elected with the greatest number of popular votes in the nation’s history. Our liberals wanted some blood and fresh meat. It’s a funny thing about our liberals; when they win, they want blood — and when they lose, they still want blood. Always, no matter what happens, the onus is put on everybody else to appease the liberals because of something that just happened, whatever that something may be. It seems there is no situation possible, in theory or in fact, that will ever make liberals shut up and go away even for a little while.

But anyway, George Bush had just been re-elected and the liberals wanted to be placated.

And yet. What does this say about Harvard, and about higher education in general? Over and over again, we are told that a higher education allows you to see the permutations of “gray” in each situation that comes along, that our academic hallways are places wherein situations can be reviewed for the complexity involved in them, and solutions evaluated with vigor, with peer-review and the like. Such tolerance at work, nothing is shunned save for the concept of the overly-simplified solution.

But — how does it shake out? Larry Summers says “you know what, maybe the cat isn’t bathing because he’s old AND sick.” And for this, out he goes. To seriously entertain multiple causes of a common perceived problem, it would seem, is something best left to the world outside the ivy-covered walls. Inside, we’ll stick to our monochromatic diagnoses, thank you very much. There’s that nausea to think about, ya know.

So that’s one thing. And the other thing is even more obvious…and I really don’t want to make anyone up-chuck here, but here it is.

The issue is innate differences between the genders. Summers lost his job because he didn’t think innate differences were off the table. He went ahead and discussed them, and shame on him. Well, now — suppose the subject had turned to the development of those differences, and someone stepped forward to point out that girls mature faster than boys. Which, in just about all the ways that matter, they really do. Watch girls and boys sometime, you can see it. Take a given age, and a girl has more going on in general, than a boy…and this impacts later development in a number of ways.

It’s an innate difference.

Would anyone have lost their job for pointing that out? Heh. Don’t count on it.

Now, that’s a bias. There’s really nothing wrong with having a bias in & of itself, it’s the way people think. I would compare it to achieving old age: At first blush it seems like a pretty bad thing, but it’s wonderful when you consider the alternative. But it is still a weakness, and when it is sheltered and nurtured, even as it is used to justify the removal of a high official simply for pointing out possible causes to a problem that has been proven to be difficult to solve, and to involve a lot of permutations — something is busted. It’s even more busted when the purpose of the conference is stated to be “National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” and people are being ousted simply for discussing more than one causative factor insofar as the diversity desired has not yet been achieved.

To put it more simply, if you’re just going to sit around and jaw about good ol’ discrimination, then what the hell is the point?

I have my own biases against higher education and I have my reasons for having ’em. And so the question that remains, is something along the lines of: What else is broke? The spectacle of Nancy Hopkins getting ready to kneel before the porcelain god and blow chunks, is quite a silly and distracting one, but it threatens to conceal multiple layers of intellectual dysfunction beneath the surface. Educators at all levels are frequently heard to say “I’m not here to teach you what to think, I’m here to teach you how to think.” They mold and shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.

So…how are they teaching students to think? It seems “don’t do it” would be the most accurate answer to that one.

Is this what the boardrooms of tomorrow are like, then? All the most luminous and educated minds in a given organization meet to re-investigate some perplexing problem…dealing with sales, marketing, diversity — perhaps the defense of the nation? Perhaps halting the spread of AIDS, or the curing of Cancer, or whatever plague has replaced those two? And…if-and-when any one amongst them dares to say “Hey, I notice there may be one or several ancillary causes to this problem we should think about inspecting” — he’s out on his ass?

That seems pretty dire. And more than a little ridiculous. But, but, but. Why should I not ponder such a thing? This is Harvard. Creme de la creme of our educational community. They suffered a little bit of embarrassment for a little while, and then I have to assume they went back to their usual way of doing things, eventually replacing Larry Summers with a Radcliffe feminist. So we know how they work, and there’s no reason to think there are too many universities that work any differently.

All those who acknowledge the truism of Think I Know #93 above, and wonder why it is so. Behold.

Nurseries of tomorrow’s leaders. Concerned? Should we be? How much?

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