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On The Slang Term “Neocon”

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

There is this word I’m hearing used a whole lot lately. It’s subjected to a gallon of repetitive use, and a half-pint of definition; and, maybe a teaspoon or two of inquiry and inspection when people are willing to admit they’d like to know more about what it means, which from what I can see, is something that hardly ever happens. In short, it seems everybody’s using this word, nobody really has a meaning in mind for it, nor is anyone insisting on one when it’s used. Which is often.

It’s a pejorative term. But it’s a jealous term. It is applied to people who are doin’ good, and due for a come-uppins. It is to be applied to people who have too much to say about how things work, and shouldn’t be able to decide what they’re able to decide.

The White House, and all departments in the executive branch, is supposed to be chock full of people who fit this term that no one’s willing to define.

The term is neoconservative. The slang, shorter version is “neocon.”

I have been wondering about this before; can’t remember when. But as is my typical remedy, I resolved to go to Wikipedia and believe without question every word I find there. Well, the last time I went through this exercise I remember seeing a bunch of antisemitist drivel, or at least, lots of NPOV (Neutral Point-Of-View) description of antisemitist drivel. It seemed to be powered off an association between Norman Podhoretz and the “neoconservative movement.”

I remember thinking how disturbing this continuation was. Antisemites have been receptive to the notion, for centuries, that the Jews are a bunch of dirty so-and-sos who run everything and are due to be taken down a peg. They pop up every generation or so with a new way to make this message appealing…and here in the early 21st century we’ve got some nameless faceless yokels running around calling people “neocons,” with an insinuation that neocons are dirty so-and-sos due to be taken down a peg. So can I look into the term without Godwinning myself? I have doubts now.

It does seem that sympathy for Israel is a defining characteristic of the “neocon.” Nobody has stepped forward and insisted that being a neocon has something to do with being a Jew. But that does seem to be the case. If you’re a neocon, you have to first-and-foremost be a warmonger, but secondly you have to side with Israel against Palestine. Or there’s an expectation you will do this.

Let’s put it this way: If you really are a warmonger but your sympathies are against Israel — let’s say you want to see Hamas drive Israel into the sea — you’ve got quite a long time to wait before anyone calls you a “neocon.” Odds are it won’t happen.

The Urban Dictionary ended up being more helpful than I thought, although I had to read down a little bit to get to the meat of things. And there were a few surprises in store. The first handful of definitions did exactly what the U.D. is supposed to do: Describe what people are intending when they actually use the word out on the street, textbook definitions be damned.

1. neocon

Morally idealistic conservatatives. neocon is short for neo-conservative. Neocons separate themselves from Republicans that are traditionally fiscal conservative.

Slang – Crusading republican.
Slang – Neocons exist separated into two very distinct groups. The largest, group one, are the people below the 99th income percentile. They are religous and/or war-mongering blowhard lemmings who follow the second group; The second group is made up of the top one percent. They cut taxes for themselves, borrow trillions (second term pending), and their behavior is largely the subject of this blog. Of necessity, they pay Rove to pipe tabloid for the Rats. Lemmings rather. Whichever, they both work.
Vlugar – White bible thumping trash.

The draft-dodging neocons running the white house are threatening our future as a great nation.

2. Neocon

Neoconservative. Criminally insane spenders that believe in killing brown people for the new world order. Huge Orwellian government, unfathomable amounts of spending, bomb tens of thousands of people to death to rearrange the globe. Take the worst aspects of the liberal and conservative positions and combine them into one and you would have a NeoCon.

Neocons are the greatest threat to life, liberty and property this country has ever known.

3. neocon

Neoconservative. Originally used to describe left-wingers who crossed the floor, neocons are on the authoritarian right, rather than the traditionally conservative libertarian right. They tend to be very pro-war and adopt the mentality of “We’re better than you and we know it.”

Some more vulgar people call them Neocunts.

“I don’t really like Kerry, but I’d rather see him in power than those horrendous neocons who currently run things!”

I really think I might like definition #6, sub-definition #3 the best…

6. neocon
:
3: Complete and utter dirtbags of pure, unrefined trash that only look out for their own wealth and contribute nothing to the betterment of man kind.
Worthless. Malignant. Junk.

In an act characteristic of the Nazis, the neocons are now proposing that all people who make less than $50,000 a year be exterminated in concentration camps along with the gays, ethnic peoples and atheists.

So you see, it’s not just a simple pejorative. There is hate locked up in this word. I’m still uncertain about what it’s supposed to say…just as uncertain as I was before, maybe even moreso. The word clearly has racial connotations, targeting people who are white, and insinuating that the persons so targeted are the ones with a racist problem.

And I’m starting to doubt this because whatever agendas are bottled up and being subtly referenced here, they seem to be carried aloft by the people using the term, not so much by the people referenced by the term. “…unrefined trash that only look out for their own wealth and contribute nothing to the betterment of man kind [sic].” That kind of sounds like someone approached the “neocon” with a proposition that involved separating him from his money, and the neocon had the audacity to say no.

I have reasons for wanting to know this. I get called a “neocon” quite often, because…well, as a rational, reasonable and logical freedom-loving American, I want terrorists dead. The more the better. Roll the smoking carcasses on in, get ’em counted and roll in some more. It makes me smile, seeing them dead like that. But I’m willing to be reasonable; if a terrorist should be allowed to live because we might get information out of him that leads to more dead terrorists, I’m all for letting him live. Until we get that information. And verify it. THEN kill him. I dream of the day we’re told, “we just can’t produce any more dead terrorist bodies, because it seems we’ve run out of terrorists.” That would be ideal.

Conventional wisdom says this won’t happen because when you kill a hundred terrorists, you make two hundred more. My response is let’s put that to the test. I’ll bet there’s a point where you run out. Hell, the same people who doubt this about terrorists, are the very same ones saying exactly that about penguins, polar bears, snail darters, trees…etc. etc. etc. We’re constantly accusing ourselves of making things extinct. Let’s be guilty of it in this one case. Find out what’s possible.

This is supposed to make me a “neocon” but…go back and read those definitions again. I’m supposed to want to spend more money. I’m supposed to hate brown people. I don’t care about brownness…white terrorists, green terrorists, purple terrorists. Kill ’em all. And another thing, I’m cheap. Lots of ex-wives & girlfriends will confirm that. I drive an eighteen-year-old car. When it comes to killing terrorists, even, I hope they do it as cheaply as possible. That way they can kill more terrorists.

This doesn’t seem to fit the description. Sometimes I think when people call me this, it doesn’t have to do with my appreciation for mile-high stacks of terrorist carcasses at all. Sometimes it seems to have something to do with my surname. Freeberg. You know the secret here? It’s not a jewish name. It doesn’t even really exist. Watch the first act of The Godfather, Part II, and you’ll see how my grandfather got this name. This was very commonplace at that time. My grandfather went through exactly that office. Albin J. Freeberg and Vito Corleone might very well have been bumping into each other.

So I’m not Jewish, I’m not wild about spending money. But I do love reading about terrorists getting killed. I honestly don’t know if this word applies to me. I need to get it defined to figure out if that’s so.

So getting back to it, you know, this is a very strange word. There is giving information to someone, and there is inviting someone to hop onto a bandwagon. This n-word seems to have a lot more to do with the bandwagon than with the offering of information. It says more about the person using the term than the person described by it. Let’s sit down with what we’ve gathered so far, and try to form a picture about the user and see if we get further. Such a person has utopian tendencies because he resents the “neocons” for “contributing nothing to the betterment.” This suggests anti-capitalist leanings. Powerful ones, albeit timid ones. He doesn’t want to admit what he is. He’s probably a “Pie Person” — someone who believes if one guy got a bigger piece of pie, someone else must have gotten a smaller one. He’s not too crazy about President Bush. For all the diverse viewpoints about what the term means, nobody seems to doubt the President is one — even though the President, himself, is not thought to be Jewish — and that the current administration is crammed full of’em. The user of this term, it seems clear to me, likes non-white people better than white people, to what degree I’m not sure. He’s a pacifist, certainly; of all the traits that are supposed to be criticized when you call someone a “neocon,” the willingness to make war is foremost.

I’m gathering the poor fellow has delusions that something is about to happen. There’s this massive takedown of the neocons looming on the horizon. The word is almost always used to describe people who are in a position of power, and are about to not be anymore. There is this none-too-subtle suggestion that we are living in some kind of Age of Neoconservatism, have been for two or three decades, and are now seeing it’s final days.

Wow, I’m almost describing that stringy-haired homeless guy in all the movies with the sandwich board that says “THE END IS NEAR.”

Beyond that, it starts to get a little tough to shed more light on it. But Definition #15 helped a lot.

15. neocon

A combination of “Neo”(new) and “Con”(conservative).

“Neocon” is the term for both a new and old (reborn) form of Conservativism. A break from the Reublican party and return to more traditional Conservative values. This represents a fracturing of the Right. Neocons tend to be young, idealistic, and even dogmatic activists. They tend to have above-average intelligence and education. They are very similar to the movements of the 1960s, but with different core values. They are both pessimistic about the current system, and optimistic about the difference they can make.

It is difficult to lock Neocons down to a specific set of values, because they come from a wide variety of backgrounds (including minorities and gays) and have a wide variance in their ideals. Overall, Neocons are pro-life and support the death penalty. Many neocons are religious or “spiritual” in one way or another. They are not necessarily Christian, although that is the religion to which most of them subscribe. Neocons preach tolerance and coexistence without political correctness. They tend to strongly support both the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution. Neocons support Capitalism, but view being beholden to corporate interests with great distaste. And while compromise is a necessary evil in politics, when in doubt, neocons will stick to their guns. Too much compromise is the hallmark of selling out. They believe that the current political process has become so corrupt that no politician can get anywhere without selling out to various interests.

Neocons view the increasingly centrist philosophy of Republican politicians with the same distaste that their radically Liberal opponents feel for the Democrats. Both of the Big Two parties have been migrating towards the center for some time now, leaving behind many on either side. This is manifested by the power wielded by third-party candidates, which was decisive in determining the outcomes of the 1992, 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. (And resulting in much backbiting on either the Left or the Right afterwards)

This is a new age in American politics. The rise of neoconservativism was one of the more unforseen and underestimated political developments in the last two decades. With similar fracturing on the Liberal side of the political divide, the power-hold of the Big Two parties (Republican and Democrat) is being shaken, and voting for a third-party candidate no longer means you are just “throwing your vote away.” The future may be a very interesting time for all of us, Liberal or Conservative.

“The neo-conservatism of the 1980s is a replay of the New Conservatism of the 1950s, which was itself a replay of the New Era philosophy of the 1920s” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.).

As for accuracy, I’m inclined to go with a couple morsels scribbled hastily under #17: “Any person who is winning an argument with a liberal,” and “Catch all term used by liberals when they think they’ve been using Nazi too much.”

But let’s get back to Wikipedia, because it seems pretty clear if we can find a textbook definition, that won’t do us very much good compared to a history of how the term came to be. U.D. Def. #15 makes it clear there is a rich legacy to this word.

The language about Norman Podhoretz had been diminished considerably from what I had last seen, but I did find this, and at first I thought it might be a big help:

As a term, neoconservative first was used derisively by democratic socialist Michael Harrington to identify a group of people (who thought they were liberals) as newly simulated conservative ex-liberals. The term stuck because neoconservatives were confused with true conservative.[4]

Now, that’s interesting. One click took me to the Harrington article which explained the following:

…Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson’s subsequent War on Poverty. Harrington became a widely read intellectual and political writer. He would frequently debate noted conservatives but would also clash with the younger radicals in the New Left movements. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. referred to Harrington as the “only responsible radical” in America, a somewhat dubious distinction among those on the political left. His high profile landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.[3]

By early 1970s [Trotskyist leader Max] Shachtman’s anti-Communism had become a hawkish Cold War liberalism. Shachtman and the governing faction of the Socialist Party effectively supported the Vietnam War and changed the organization’s name to Social Democrats, USA. In protest Harrington led a number of Norman Thomas-era Socialists, younger activists and ex-Shachtmanites into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A smaller faction associated with peace activist David McReynolds formed the Socialist Party USA.

In the early 1980s The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, forming Democratic Socialists of America. This organization remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, which includes socialist parties as diverse as the Swedish and German Social Democrats, Nicaragua’s FSLN, and the British Labour Party.[4]

Harrington was appointed a professor of political science at Queens College in 1972; he was designated a distinguished professor in 1988. Harrington died in 1989 of cancer. He was the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime.[5]

So some wild-eyed socialist got us to throw away trillions of dollars on the Great Society program, and came up with this derogatory term for anyone who wasn’t along for the ride. That’s pretty much it. I mean, the history part of it.

But I found out a little more. I’ve got this weird habit with Wikipedia that comes from not quite believing anything I read a hundred percent…I keep clicking on the “Talk” tab. I find it interesting. Harrington’s talk-page had an item of additional interest in it.

An anon editor removed the quote from William F. Buckley to the effect that being the most prominent Socialist is America is akin to being “the tallest building in Topeka Kansas.” I found this kind of an endearing quote and am inclined to restore it. Any discussion?

And I was thinking, that’s Buckley at his finest right there. But say…I wonder…what does the discussion page behind “Neoconservative” look like? Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. Maybe that will tell me everything I need to know.

All Those Archives! Well, Good Lord. No wonder the article itself used to have all these interesting things that I can’t find anymore.

“It is simply discourteous to the other editors to make very significant edits without any edit summaries at all to let others know what you are doing with the article…”

“Please dont be so condescending that I have to “learn” to use certain mechanisms…”

“I’m frankly disappointed that you would proceed immediately to re-introduce disputed material without having responded to any of the editors over the past week during which the page was protected.”

“Please stop the nasty personal attacks. Please refer to me–as is basic simple courtesy for any Wiki editor–by my user name. Thanks.”

“God, your awfully thin skinned for someone who styles himself as such a major enemy of “the right”. You really are just a classic cliche of a bully who constantly name-calls whoever you don’t like and is totally emasculated when the tables are turned.”

“Have you tried Viagra? It might make you a more secure editor. Projection indeed! LOL!”

“Why do you so have your panties in a bunch about this Chip?”

“This is just harrassment pure and simple, which is all you know how to do, and yes, I repeat, you are a totalitarian!!!”

“I’m going to request mediation. This article seems desperately to need it.”

And so it goes. As to the actual claim that Harrington originated the term, I was able to pin down that citation and find it online with Google Books…here (chap. 2, pg. 55)…it’s E.J. Dionne opining about things, and to my disappointment there’s no reference or supporting evidence to this. There isn’t even a citation to any specific Harrington work. For all I know, Dionne may be simply opining about Harrington’s authorship itself.

While the New Left was rebelling at liberalism’s left flank, a group of intellectuals who shared some of the New Left’s skepticism began a revolt on liberalism’s right. The revolt of the neoconservatives was far more successful, and they continue to have a powerful impact on American politics.

Neoconservatives initially rebelled against the label neoconservative. They didn’t even invent it; the late Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, did. Harrington’s intent was to make clear that a group including many who called themselves liberal was in fact a movement of newly conservative ex-liberals. The label eventually stuck because it was so apt — and because over time, so many of the neoconservatives came to accept that they were conservatives after all. By the 1980s, in any event, the term conservative was anything but an insult. Irving Kristol, often described as the movement’s “godfather,” was one of the first to accept the label. He described himslf as “the only living and self-confessed neoconservative, at large or in captivity.” Conceding that political labeling was more a leftist than a conservative craft, Kristol said that conservatives sometims had to live with the handiwork of their foes. “The sensible course, therefore, is to take your label, claim it as your own, and run with it,” Kristol declared. He and his comrades did just that.

Neoconservatism has received so much attention because it was one of the clearest signs of a realignment in American politics. Neoconservatism represented the defection of an important and highly articulate group of liberals to the other side. Precisely because they knew liberalism from the inside, the neoconservatives were often more effective than the old conservatives at explaining what was wrong with the liberal creed. And on many issues, the neoconservatives were right or partly right — and usually interesting even when they were wrong.

Okay, so the word describes Irving Kristol, albeit with his own consent and even with his own participation. The hatred and resentment against those evil Jooooooooos pops up yet again. Well there are other things popping up yet again. As I noted before, neocons have some voice in our policy, a voice thought now to be in the winter of it’s existence. They are Jewish, they are affluent, and what I find to be most telling is that they used to be democrats. Usage of the term says more about the person using it than the person being described by it, so the spirit cloaked under the term is one of loathing, probably resentment over the switchover.

It’s kind of like how Clarence Thomas is loathed much more than Antonin Scalia even though, as far as the persons doing the loathing are concerned, the two justices rule the same way. Thomas is black. He’s thought to be guilty of some kind of betrayal that doesn’t apply to the Italian-American justice. So I guess the only way the Jews can be tolerated by the hard-left democrats, is if the Jews vote the way they’re supposed to…if they “know their place,” you might say.

Once they slither under the barbed wire, peel off that yellow star, and go voting where they aren’t supposed to be voting…they get called “neocons.”

Interestingly, it sounds like a portmanteau involving “neo-Nazi.” If Nazi tendencies have anything to do with this term, they underly the usage of it. It’s a classic case of projection.

There are individuals in mind for this term, and that’s what makes it really unique. It was used specifically to refer to Irving Kristol, as Dionne pointed out; to the extent I can do any of what’s called “research,” it seems formulated more to refer to Podhoretz, at least in the written sources I find. Out on the street, meanwhile, it looks like a reference to Paul Wolfowitz.

In context of the 2008 elections, it is a challenge to the Wolfowitz Doctrine. It invites a debate on this…which would be worthwhile…but it doesn’t really invite debate at all. It smears, it slanders, it gives people instructions about what to think.

It is a word-weapon brandished by socialists. It is a machinery deployed to rope the peacenik hippies, the stoners, the antisemites and the reverse-racists into the big tent of socialism.

These are interesting times, aren’t they?

You call someone a “socialist” and you can take it to the bank, someone’s going to insist on a long, drawn-out debate about the precise meaning of what you just called them, even though it’s unnecessary because it’s pretty well-established what a socialist is. You call someone a “neocon,” and we aren’t supposed to discuss that at all, even though there’s next-to-no agreement about what that word means.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization, TIK 52 | 5 Comments »

A Paragraph

Friday, September 28th, 2007

The date of publication of Atlas Shrugged is the twelfth of October. October 12, 1957…fifty years ago. Here’s where I found out about that…

Even though many reviewers weren’t impressed with “Atlas Shrugged,” it still left a major mark. Ayn Rand inspired many, many people; most of them highschool or college students when they first read it. Although it’s not a literary masterwork, it still sells some 150,000 copies each year. People’s lives continue to be changed by it. And for that, Rand should be respected.

Damn straight. And it’s a sad, tragic thing that it is become more and more relevant to our lives with every passing day.

You know about the world of Atlas Shrugged? It takes place in a dystopian future in an unspecified year, in a sort of alternate universe wherein the world is caught up in an industrial revolution, but one in which air freight was never possible and never implemented. In this world, the entire world has gone drunk on socialism, and America remains the sole hold-out…descending threateningly into the molten scrap heap that has already engulfed all the other countries.

I’ll quote one paragraph. Just one. If this doesn’t raise some eerie similarities with the reality plane you get to hear about each evening when you click on the news, each morning when you read the paper…well, you should probably move on to the next subject. But give it a read first:

We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day – together, and you don’t all get a bellyache – together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it’s all in one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht – and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth – why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room?…Oh well…Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars – rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ – so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm – so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

See anything familiar?

If you think you do, or if you think you might…it’s six bucks.

Timeless. I wish it were not.

Update: Here, the date of publication is listed as October 10.

Should try to pin this down. Whatever the exact date is, over the next two weeks there will likely be a mild uptick in the hubbub among the group-minded about what a dreadfully tedious book it is, and everyone should be advised to pronounce it juvenile and boring without actually reading much of it, or any at all.

With it’s tangled hodgepodge of interrelated sociopolitical themes, this “magnum opus” is actually pretty simple. It’s a manifesto that says some people are horrified at the idea of accomplishing something useful, or allowing anyone else to do so. And that in any organization or society in a decline, those people end up running things. Excellence and mediocrity switch places. This makes the decline more certain and inescapable.

I’m repeatedly instructed to believe, especially after having read the book, that I should find it to be a silly, meandering and pointless treatise, invariably by people who have not read it. Basically…that I should dismiss it. What keeps getting in my way, is that the core theme dovetails so nicely with what I’ve observed about people myself: When they do little to distinguish themselves, they get peevish and cranky about the very idea of someone else doing it.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Spreading Doubt

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

Don’t you just love that headline? It’s not mine. But I’m going to steal it. I’m going to use it next time I’m the protagonist in an argument, and the thing I’m trying to support is fragile and dubious to the point of being a caricature of itself. “I don’t have a tax liability,” I will tell the tax man; and when he comes up with the fliers and circulars and other printed materials the Internal Revenue Service has printed up to handle problem cases like me, I’ll just ignore any logical points on his side and tell him “see, there you are spreading doubt.”

“God is a man and He wants you to get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” My lady might use logic to open this assertion to scrutiny, i.e., wouldn’t the Divine Being make His will better known to her, if He were to shrink my waistline instead of expanding it? Lately, I’m lacking that cosmetic “could use a sandwich” look. And if her place is in the kitchen, how come her feet can fit into shoes? “Aha,” I’ll say, “you are a doubt-spreader.”

In yesterday’s edition of Newsweek, editor Sharon Begley is exactly what she calls others. Her article, The Truth About Denial, tattles on a “well-funded machine” that is “running at full throttle — and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.”

I would have to ask which side is really pushing the throttle of a well-funded machine.

To compile an inventory of actual fact presented by Ms. Begley, and correlate it with the inventory of points she wishes to make with those facts, is to undergo a truly surreal experience. Exhibit A is the public opinion polls. By now, anybody who’s paid attention is well aware of how these work: More and more people are convinced global warming is a real problem and it’s man-made, so anybody left at the kiddie table had better get with it and hop on the bandwagon. Y’know, before it’s too late and all. But NO…that is not what Begley wants to tell us. She’s going the other way. The public opinion polls show we’ve been pretty slow to drink the Kool-aid and demand seconds, and this is evidence of the sinister workings of that well lubricated machine.

Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was “a lot” of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was “mainly caused by things people do.” In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world’s economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is “a lot of disagreement among climate scientists” on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

Now, read that again. Two polls, or sets of polls, one year apart. Last year, 64 percent of us were skeptics. We thought there was “a lot” of disagreement among scientists. That metric has dropped from 64 to 39 in just twelve months. The point here, if I’m understanding it right, is that this evil machine is humming along as a model of efficiency because the 39 are still there.

Wow, if I were on an iron lung I really wouldn’t want a machine that works that well. In fact, when you think about this a little while longer it becomes evident that there must be another, better-funded, better-oiled, higher-performance machine at work here. I wonder when Begley will talk about that.

Oopsie, there I go spreading doubt.

Here’s something I’d like to know about the diabolical doubt-spreading machine: Why? I mean sure, you’ve got idiots like me who doubt global warming even though we’re not in a position to watch the pro-global-warming scientists compile their reports and don’t have access to the actual raw data, beyond the charts and graphs each side finds expedient to present to us. But we’re just big dummies, part of the 39% who don’t get it. We’re rats being led into the ocean by the Pied Piper of Hamlin, just doing what we’re told. What about the Piper? If you follow our food chain upward, you’re going to get to the big bosses, and I guess these are oil industry executives and the scientists they’ve bought off — people who know the planet is facing certain doom, and are fooling imbeciles like me into thinking it just isn’t so.

What’s their angle in this? They want to sell more petroleum products and increase the dollars-per-share in the corporations they manage…on a dying planet? This seems like a plan, assuming it does indeed exist somewhere, that could use a little bit more thinking-out.

But there’s more. How’s this for an eyebrow-raiser:

It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

The theme that permeates this article, and is supported in all other paragraphs, is that there really is no reason to doubt global warming aside from the sinister manipulations of public opinion that have been engineered through this doubt machine. And yet — for reasons that still aren’t quite clear to me — Begley thought it would be appropriate to toss in a humdinger of a reason, existing entirely outside that machine.

I’m sorry. I don’t wish to offend anyone. But it seems inescapable to me: if you can read about politically-motivated congressional staffers sabotaging the air conditioning system in the capitol to make the next day’s session a whole lot sweatier, just to be able to sell global warming as a public relations product — and not feel at least the stirrings of good old-fashion logically-based non-machine-inspired doubt, not even a tiny bit — you’re just nuts.

I realize people can go to great lengths to sell things to the public, and those things can still turn out to be true. But the subject under discussion is the public’s inability to decide the issue outside the realm of politics, through a sensible weighing of fact. And when you go through the pro-global-warming exhibits and start pitching out anything that’s just a lot of rhetoric, including the “Six thousand scientists ALL agree that blah blah blah,” you’re not left with a whole lot. Temperature went up about 1.5 Fahrenheit, so they say…pictures of sad-looking polar bears on the covers of magazines. That’s about it.

Contrasted with the facts about the global warming cheerleading machine: People monkeying with the air conditioning in the capitol, people writing up scary articles because it’s their job to do so. With very, very few exceptions, everyone playing this thing up has a career connected to it. And that includes Mr. Gore. It seems to be really hard to find anyone trying to “raise awareness” of global warming…who isn’t in the business of doing exactly that. Someone who’s genuinely trying to save the planet. And this kind of dovetails into that long list of things we’d be doing if the dire warnings had truth and confidence behind them.

They don’t. The dire warnings are just slogans, and it’s pretty easy to prove that they are this and nothing more.

We’re running out of time, if we procrastinate a little more it might be too late, is that it? Here’s a challenge: Try to get a global warming chicken little to stick to that theme, throughout the exploration of a plan that is supposed to fix the problem. Changing light bulbs in my house to a greener model. Mmmkay, so if I don’t do this, and soon, we’re going to cross some point of no return. If I use the new light bulbs all will be well? Or it will extend the window of opportunity to act?

What is this wonderful thing we are supposed to ultimately be doing, or getting ready to be doing, as we nibble on our fingernails wondering if we can be stirred into action quickly enough? Has anyone measured how long we have to get ‘er done? Can we see some statistics on this? Not vague stuff like “act before ten or fifteen years or it might be too late.” Specifics. Carbon tons. Saturation quotas. Dates. The global warming hype machine is demanding hefty sacrifices; it relies on these global warming climate models that the machine continues to keep telling me about, every week, every month, every year. This is what those models are for — digesting some statistics, producing others.

How come when I ask about these specifics the chicken littles keep telling me to “open such-and-such a report” or “go to such-and-such a website”? Why aren’t the specifics out there? I mean, I think that’s a reasonable question — people like Sharon Begley are concerned that the climate change denial machine is working oh, so incredibly well. This seems to me to be an opportunity to make it work not quite so well. So how come someone hasn’t already done that?

How big is Sharon Begley’s car, anyway?

Posted in ManBearPig, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

On Michael Moore

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Michael Moore has just released a movie, and I’m starting to hear the same nonsense about him that I heard about im last time he released a movie. Note that in the sentence previous, “nonsense” is a euphemism for something else less polite. Anyway, while I have not yet seen the new…”product,” I have seen the previous one so I thought I would jot down some of my observations about what doesn’t quite make sense here.

Then & now, I keep hearing this phrase over and over again. It is subject only to slight degrees of word-for-word revision. It begins, “of course, Michael Moore is full of crap, but when you watch the movie, there are a lot of interesting facts (or ‘good points’) in it.”

Last time I heard that, a lot of the interesting facts (or good points) went up in smoke shortly after the movie came out. The notion that Moore is full of crap, continues to endure. And yet, here we are again. Michael Moore’s new movie is now potent ammunition. For winning converts to his side. From out of “moderate” Ameirca, not from out of your local Socialist club or your annual YearlyKOS get-together. From out of the heartland; among people who know about Moore’s predilection, and his intent, to deceive.

Now I’m thinking: You could say the same thing about Dr. Laura Schlessinger, couldn’t you? I mean, this is problematic in some areas: It is mostly a subjective system of individual belief that she is full of crap — some agree with that, some disagree. Whereas Michael Moore being full of crap, is a fact that can be proven to anyone who takes the time to pay attention and to give the viewpoint a decent hearing. Apart from that, you could say the same thing about Dr. Laura. Or Sean Hannity. Or Laura Ingraham. Or Condoleeza Rice. Or President Bush.

I don’t think the Michael Moore fans, or the prospective Michael Moore converts, are going to be doing that. Our national culture seems to have settled into the comfort-zone that with most personalities, logic, truth and integrity take on the form of a fragile sweater: One thread comes apart, it’s just a matter of time before the entire article is undone. It isn’t necessary to prove an intent to deceive. It isn’t even necessary to substantiate the error.

Personal disagreement will do: He thinks there is a God, so he must be an idiot.

Sicko And along comes Michael Moore. Moore, for reasons I don’t understand and no one seems to be able to tell me, gets a pass. Over and over again, he’s caught red-handed with his lyning-by-omission and his half-truths and his bad-faith dealings with the subjects of his “interviews.”

He is, in his own way, a genius. And this is an even bigger problem from where I sit: If Moore’s competence was limited, then it could be said if he mananages to make something look a certain way, there would have to be a measurable grain of truth behind it. As it is, Moore’s level of skill is such that when he makes a thing look a certain way, this means butkus. He has the talent needed to make anything look like anything. People understand this to be so…and yet when he says something is the way he presents it, people continue to believe him. This is the part I don’t understand about Michael Moore.

We continue to labor under this unwritten rule: Every little speck of information in a Moore film has to be admitted as evidence in our personal courtrooms. What transpired before, doesn’t matter — no “loose-thread-sweater” rule for him. We have to fairly consider every utterance, as if it came from a Holy Metatron and not from a disgraced maker of “documentaries.”

We can survive Moore. I don’t think we can survive the scales that encrust our eyes when he comes out with his “products.” So many of us know a certain thing is so, and behave as if it isn’t.

So — he’d like us all to ponder the notion of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, is that it?

Here’s another thing I’d like explained. Why does Moore have anything to do with America? Every time he comes out with a movie he keeps returning to his “Bowling For Columbine” theme that there is something wrong with America, something rotten in its core — something that compels us to be afraid of things and shoot each other all the time. He makes his films in Canada. He claims to be from Flint, MI — not too much of a drive to go from there, into Canada, for good. I’m not saying it to be derisive or dismissive — watch his movies sometime. Any one. The dude really likes Canada, and I don’t know of a single good thing he’s had to say about the U.S. by comparison. What’s he doing here?

Yet another thing to ponder, is Moore’s impressive physical stature. He wants us to listen to him. He wants to influence. He wants to have an effect on what we do. When people tell me things about physical health, and medicine, I’m persuaded to listen to them when they show me this is a personal passion of theirs. Jack La Lanne. Denise Austin. And I don’t think I’m unusual that way…people tell me how to maintain my body, I want to know how they’ve been maintaining theirs.

Why’s this grossly-overweight guy making a movie about our health care system? Why is he even using is big multi-chinned face to decorate the cover?

And how come, after apparently doing exactly what Michael Moore wants done on a federal level, Wisconsin doesn’t have any enviable results to show us?

I’m going to want to see this movie as soon as I can. I hope those questions are all addressed to my satisfaction. I’m also going to want to know about food. I’m told healthcare “oughtta be a right” because people need it. People need food too. And working transportation. And I wouldn’t mind being spared the hassle of sniffing my milk to make sure it’s still good, keeping my freezer full, and keeping my car running. If I’m to be the beneficiary of a nanny-state government that will worry about my burst appendix and my hangnails so I don’t have to, then I also want a government that will give me three hots a day and buy me a car.

No, I’m not kidding, I’m completely serious. I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument why one thing should be a “right,” and the other things ought not be.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Capitalism | 10 Comments »

All His Issues

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

You know what I find seriously frightening about this?

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told a group of abortion rights activists Tuesday that he would accomplish universal health care for all Americans by the end of his first term.

It’s this messy panoply of seemingly unrelated issues, this mushbucket o’liberal goodness. Let’s try that paragraph again, shall we?

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told a group of abortion rights activists Tuesday that he would accomplish universal health care for all Americans by the end of his first term. [emphasis mine]

Now, what does lowering the American health care system into a Canadian-style quasi-socialist crater of swamp sludge, have to do with killing babies? When did these two issues become fused together? I can be in favor of my girlfriend killing one unborn baby after another unborn baby after another, and at the same time, place more of my trust in the free market to handle my health care needs, can I not? In fact, one would think it would be easier to form an alliance that way. I’m told people who believe in the free market are “greedy” and “selfish”; if that’s true, wouldn’t my hypothetical make sense? As in, now that I’m safe, now that my own Mom didn’t abort me, I want to horde all this American capitalist goodness for myself. Right?

Or we could go the other way. I want a socialized medicine system so that everybody is covered. I don’t care if we all have to wait in line nine months for a kidney replacement, as long as we get the same treatment rich-or-poor…and I want all those babies to be born. That would make even more sense. Communism has something to do with commune, and I want as many people as possible in that commune so we can keep that communist health care system working.

Why has Obama seen fit to fuse these two issues together in this direction? If I want socialized health care, why do I want the unborn to be slaughtered?

I can think of only one answer: As part of an attack on the individual. Socialized health care is an attack on the individual. Abortion-on-demand is an attack on the individual.

There is more:

Speaking to the Planned Parenthood Public Affairs Action Fund’s annual conference, Obama also touted his understanding of women’s issues and his support of abortion rights and sex education.
:
Obama…also took aim at the current Supreme Court.

“It’s time for a different attitude,” Obama said. “We know that five men don’t know better than one woman.” [emphasis mine]

Only on that last point do I see any kind of logical cohesion to the way Obama is soldering these unrelated issues together, since I know Democrats have worked hard to spread the lie that any opposition to unrestricted abortion rights, flows from some unmerited masculine influence on public policy. They deal a great insult to womanhood, by denying that anyone statistically significant, possessing ovaries, could value unborn human life.

The rest of it is a hopelessly jumbled mess, or…provides unusual insight into the sinister workings of our liberals. Or both.

Sex education, for example. Back and forth the yelling has been going, about whether sex education reduces unwanted pregnancies, or increases them. Well. People who are in favor of reckless sex education, skipping over the reading-writing-rithmetic so the teacher can put condoms on a zucchini…are in favor of abortion rights. Huh. Gosh, y’know, if the sex education program was really effective in preventing pregnancies, shouldn’t that go the other way? As in, alright we’re teaching our kids how not to have an unwanted pregnancy, so we don’t need abortion on demand?

How come it seems nobody has that vision? If anybody does, someone in Obama’s advisory panel doesn’t think they’re worth very many votes and aren’t worth going after.

And what’s up with this apparent insult to all thinking men? Five men don’t know better than one woman. Yeah, yeah, I understand the political motivations at work, he’s trying to stop his supporters from deserting for Hillary. Odd that he would word it that way, then — it sounds like he’s saying a woman knows better than five men, and if that’s the case one wonders why he’s gumming up the works instead of dropping out and throwing his support to Sen. Clinton. And what case, in particular, could he have been referring to? Didn’t he say?

It ordinarily simply doesn’t do for a candidate to a high-profile office, to attach himself to so many issues in one speech, each of which are only weakly attached to each other. This makes very little sense…until one reviews the history of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

Then it makes perfect sense. One woman knows better than many men, free health care for all, more abortions, teachers drill your kids on sex education whether you want it or not. But it sends chills up your spine. It’s called “eugenics,” and a century ago it was a highly-fashionable dream for the future of humankind, dreamed by egghead elites in America and in Europe.

I think Obama has done us a favor here. It’s past high time we had a national discussion on just what is the real agenda behind socialized health care in the United States, and explored just how much abortion rights have to do with it. Maybe, just maybe…horror stories about incompetent quacks amputating the wrong testicle, or greedy HMO’s waiting all year to approve brain surgery, haven’t got anything to do with anything. Maybe the real issue is just having more abortions. Maybe it’s just a scheme to hook up the hungry mouth of the abortion industry, as much a greedy and money-grubbing medical industry as any other, to the public teat. Maybe it’s all about that.

It’s worth thinking about. To anybody who thinks it isn’t, I say this: Obama thinks he will gain more votes than he will lose, saying the weird incomprehensible things he said. Someone, who knows what they’re doing and what they’re talking about, told him so.

Posted in Abortion, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, Universal Healthcare | 2 Comments »

Happiness Is Paying Your Taxes

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Aw…would you look what our clipboard-carrying, white-coat-propeller-beanie wearing researchers have done this time.

Contrary to the common notion that paying taxes can be a painful experience, researchers at the University of Oregon say the practice actually may trigger feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

“Paying taxes can make citizens happy,” Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology, said in a release accompanying the study in the Friday issue of Science.

Now when we all have to pay taxes, do I really have to have some letters after my name to criticize or to question this? I mean, really? Because on tax day I’m lots of things, but I don’t think you could call any of those things “happy.”

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, the researchers observed the brain activity of 19 women who were given a balance of $100 each. The researchers created the effect of taxation by making mandatory withdrawals from their account. The withdrawn money was actually sent to a food bank’s account.

Participants also made additional choices about whether to give away more money or keep it for themselves.

The article then goes on to explain why all nineteen of them were female, and whether they were drifting though their financial life-circumstances like dandelion seeds, or whether they had some real hard-and-fast responsibilities to fulfill of their own. Or something in between.

Oops! I made that up. No, the article doesn’t explain any of that. So…these are nineteen enterprising female students, working their way through college while holding down two or three jobs apiece, supporting massive families of babies and toddlers all by their lonesomes, living on Top Ramen with mean old landlords hassling them for money…or, not one of the nineteen has any responsibilities to meet, whatsoever. Which means, of course they’d get warm fuzzy thoughts giving it away. ‘Cause otherwise, y’know, they’d have to find something to do with it.

Or anything in-between those two extremes.

The resolution to which…on the planet from whence I come…this would have an effect on what is to be learned from the research.

But not on planet Oregon-Pinko-Commie-Researcher-land, nosiree! Nineteen women, that’s all ya need to know.

“The fact that mandatory transfers to a charity elicit activity in reward-related areas suggests that even mandatory taxation can produce satisfaction for taxpayers,” the study said.
:
Mayr said the findings show people are willing to pay their taxes as long as they support good causes. The authors noted, however, that the results may have differed if people had been presented with a tax that seemed less fair or benevolent.

So in other words, the research doesn’t prove or suggest jack-squat. People feel good when required to make mandatory donations, so long as the funds are used in a manner that meets their liking. So to feel happy, they don’t have to choose whether the funds are spent, but they do want to choose where the funds go.

People — women — like to spend money.

I hope they didn’t spend a lot of time or energy figuring that out.

I find it interesting that the research could have been so much more explosive and charged with not-so-phony importance, if they just took it one teeny tiny step further. What parts of the brain start getting tingly when the money goes to bad places? That would have made more of an issue of the involuntary nature of taxes, I think all would agree.

Or how about when the money goes to a program that does or does not meet your approval…and, once there, it gets wasted on graft, fraud and corruption? What if the waste takes place because of a lack of controls you just know would have been in place, at least to some extent, had the money been spent in the private sector?

But stopping where it seems to have stopped, the research tells us next to nothing.

Well, it does tell us one important thing. It tells us our clipboard-carrying white-coat-propeller-beanie-wearing researchers can miss important points, points that rob all the value that might have been left in the research they’ve been trying to do.

We see it in the executive summary of the study being explored…

Civil societies function because people pay taxes and make charitable contributions to provide public goods. One possible motive for charitable contributions, called “pure altruism,” is satisfied by increases in the public good no matter the source or intent. Another possible motive, “warm glow,” is only fulfilled by an individual’s own voluntary donations. Consistent with pure altruism, we find that even mandatory, tax-like transfers to a charity elicit neural activity in areas linked to reward processing. Moreover, neural responses to the charity’s financial gains predict voluntary giving. However, consistent with warm glow, neural activity further increases when people make transfers voluntarily. Both pure altruism and warm-glow motives appear to determine the hedonic consequences of financial transfers to the public good. [emphasis mine]

It’s a thought process that ends up precisely where it began. The assumption is made that when you pay taxes, you are directly contributing to some nebulous concept that is haphazardly summarized in the words “public good.” The assumption is further made, and it seems not to be contested anywhere, that charitable contributions and taxes are responsible for the functioning of “civil societies.”

Appearances being any indication, it hasn’t even occurred to the propeller-beanie-wearing researchers that some of us might possibly have questions or issues about this.

Or that “public good” is a subjective concept, not an objective one. For example…our government now-and-then funds programs overseas to assist the indigent in family planning. This education includes abortion counseling, so whenever a Republican President is sworn in he invokes or reinstates a ban on the program, and whenever a Democrat President is sworn in he repeals the ban. That’s because some among us think these programs are in harmony with the public good, and others of us think it is oppositional to that public good. See, it’s an opinionated thing…decided by values that are ingrained deep within the personality and ethical/philosophical values embraced by that individual. There are many more issues just like this one; I’m simply picking out the one whose support, or whose opposition, is the most deeply offensive to selected subsets of the electorate.

This is, I would suggest, all of what meaningfully separates private donations from public ones. In the former, you get to decide what is good; in the latter, you don’t.

By failing to take this into account, the researchers have released a study that essentially reports on exactly what I’ve crudely summarized above: Whether our gals like to spend cash on things.

Why were they all female, anyway? It’s disturbing that this is never explained. It almost looks like they were trying to figure out how the two sexes react differently to a situation, and stopped halfway through. Maybe in the days ahead we’ll get an answer to that.

Posted in Phony Egghead Studies, Poisoning Capitalism | 5 Comments »

As The Seals Are Broken

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

— Revelation of Christ to John, 6:12-17 (KJV)

If I were The Devil and it was my mission to bring about the end of the world, I would do it one baby step at a time. I would see to it that every generation of mankind is capable of doing less than the generation that came before, and has less a sense of perspective about what’s important.

I would bring about Armageddon, as the fulfillment of a desire people held in their own hearts, being unaware themselves that the desire was there. I would do what I can to make the human race look in the mirror, and see a loathsome, entirely expendable thing, unworthy of attention, maintenance or most of all, defense. Drop by drop, ounce by ounce, inch by inch.

It occurs to me that this is exactly what has been taking place. We all like to talk a good game about wanting to help each other, but lately there’s been a huge push for everyday folks to aspire toward being noticed and being watched. This has supplanted or subordinated all other desires. Making life easier for others, or building things that would make someone’s life easer, is decidedly passe. Maybe if someone takes the time to figure out what’s coming down the pike that we haven’t quite seen yet, sort of get ahead of this downslide if you will, we’ll be able to see how steady and predictable this is. So here’s my shot at it.

How long do we have to wait until…

1. Everybody is in entertainment, or nothing at all. Nothing is produced. Nothing is fixed. We sing and dance, we clean the toilets of those who sing and dance, we deliver bottled water to them, we advertise for them, or we do nothing. In short, the point to our existence, for those of us who still have one, is to get attention for ourselves or for somebody else.
2. It is tolerated, and commonplace, for new mothers to be talking on their cell phones during the delivery. Better than even odds the doctor is on a cell phone too. “Me? Aw, nuthin’. Delivering a baby. What’re you doin’?”
3. Objects seem important when they possess attributes, and gender is an attribute. Gender must therefore disappear. Men wear cowboy hats, and goatees…and sundresses. So do the ladies.
4. There is a sequel to the Dukes of Hazzard. It is a “reboot.” Daisy Duke is now Duke Duke, a guy who runs around in a thong all day every day, works as a waiter in a gay bar, and drives a little white jeep named “Dixie.” Beau and Luke are now Bee and Lara, a couple of hard-driving ass-kicking ozark women. Uncle Jesse is a pre-op transgender. The General Lee has been renamed the Secretary-General Annan.
5. Sacrifice becomes ceremonial and loses all substance and meaning. Already you can buy a carbon credit, sponsoring someone else to conserve, so you don’t have to. Tomorrow you can buy a virtual carbon credit. You would essentially be paying someone to think about buying a carbon credit, so you don’t have to think about doing that.
6. As we trivialize boundaries that ought to be given more respect, we are divided across differences that ought not matter. A new U.S. Mint is opened that prints special money for gay people. Every time someone finds a vending machine that still takes only “straight” money, there are protests and candlelight vigils.
7. 60 Minutes does a piece on people who live in East Pennsylvania who are so poor they put signs in their cars that say “Car Radio Already Stolen.” Congress passes a law that all motorists with working sound equipment must put up signs that say “Audio Equipment Not Stolen Yet.” The inventory of said audio equipment is to be printed alongside, and is required to be kept accurate and complete. This is enforced through random inspections.
8. People decide for themselves whether their ways of living are helpful to the poor, facts be damned. Barbra Streisand shakes down the homeless population to buy her next mansion because she can’t afford it herself.
9. The media becomes more and more emboldened in giving us instructions on how to vote. Already, it has become routine to blindside Republican candidates with some silly question about how much milk costs, and take a pass on doing the same to the democrats. I see a future where infrared technology is used to measure greenhouse gas emission and power consumption at the Republican convention of ’08. An expose — government-funded, of course — broadcasts the results of this. No corresponding hit piece against the democrats, or any other party holding a convention. Nobody questions any of this.
10. The Fairness Doctrine is restored. Rush Limbaugh is forced to let Al Franken guest-host his show 50% of the time. His ratings start to look like Air America’s. He retires. Franken takes over the entire show, demands huge salary, EIB Network files for bankruptcy, capitalism is pronounced a failure.
11. Technology continues to expand, ostensibly for the purpose of bringing us information more quickly, but in reality, to service our growing demand for more attention. Cell phones can “message” live, high-quality moving pictures. You don’t have to go on American Idol anymore. You can phone in performances along with votes. This becomes so popular that new houses have universal cell phone “tripods” built in to the childrens’ bedrooms.
12. Disability becomes strength. There are pills available to give you a disability if you’re tired of being too normal and therefore failing to qualify for special treatment other people routinely receive in contracting, admissions and hiring. The pills are color-coded according to what disability you want. There is an ADD pill, a race pill, a stupid pill, a cocaine withdrawal pill, a homosexual pill, a Tourettes pill. The ACLU sues the pill company on behalf of the color-blind.
13. Parenthood continues it’s decline, and evolution into a needlessly-painful institution. Producers of kids’ television cartoons decide to come clean and make a show called, “Just Tune In And Give Your Parents A Migraine.” It has no plot, no story, no characters, no voices, not even any pictures. It just emits an annoying buzz. Oh, and when you tune to this channel your volume setting automatically goes all the way up, your power locked on, your channel frozen in place.
14. Mankind continues to envision “peace” as a commodity, with no price attached, free for the asking, unconditionally. All branches of the Department of Defense are closed, except a brand-new “Peace Division.” Boot camp in this branch: Learning to cry, fingerpainting, nap time, puppet shows, sensitivity training. The mission: Invading underdeveloped countries filled with poverty-stricken people, and teaching them how to…form labor unions, tax capital gains, and oppose the death penalty.
15. Work continues to be attacked, and denigrated into pointlessness. More things, staples and luxuries alike, are available with or without work. You have a right to gas. You have a right to toothpaste and deoderant. You have a right to food. Naturally, if you’re stubborn enough to try to buy your own, even a mayonnaise sandwich will be devastatingly expensive.
16. News networks stop pretending to bring us news. Tune in to the evening news and you will see NO FACTS, just instructions about who you are supposed to trust and what you are supposed to think. Tune in to the morning news, and you’ll see three perky people seated around a coffee table telling you what your favorite color is for that day.
17. “Civil liberties” are cherished, but real freedom is abused and ignored. In the privacy of your own home, it’s a misdemeanor to look at a pictorial representation of someone smoking a cigarette. It’s for the children after all.
18. The evisceration of the Second Amendment is complete. Nobody under the age of 30 has ever seen a gun, and few can remember what one looks like. Only mugging victims. The guns must be coming from somewhere, of course, so homeowners are “encouraged” to open up their houses for inspection.
19. New World Order. One-World Government. Global income tax. Sovereign nations still have their own governments, but it’s a little tough for anyone to explain or comprehend why.
20. Language, as a tool for person-to-person communication, disappears entirely. As people approach a service counter, they fully expect to waste their time instead of acquiring useful information, and the service people have lost the expectation that they’ll dispense any good answers or be able to help anyone. Words do not convey ideas, now that it is rare for any two strangers to be speaking the same language; shrugs and grunts and pointed fingers are the currency of exchange now. The newer versions of Microsoft Word have no spell-checking, a new “phonetic” alphabet is invented that consists entirely of gutteral sounds.
21. There is a virtual “moratorium on brains.” Creativity is history. Nothing is invented, nothing original is ever written, every song is a remix, every movie is a remake or sequel of something else, even public speeches consist entirely of quotes copied or plagiarized from elsewhere. Trivial Pursuit ends in a stalemate everywhere it’s played because nobody knows the answer to anything, and is eventually relegated to the dustbin of old fads. The brightest schoolchild knows nothing, but can sing rap tunes non-stop. He mumbles. Nobody really knows what he’s singing. Nothing is ever built, very few things work, and when they break nobody knows how to fix them. The very last human skill to disappear: Dialing a phone number. Everyone spends all day talking on a cell phone — about nothing important — to someone they wouldn’t know how to reach, without their own one-button speed dial directory, which someone else transfers for them from one phone to the next. Invariably, this involves shipping the phone to another country and bitching about how long it takes to get it back. Unintelligibly.

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

Snotty Indignation, and Truth

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

Ruth Sheehan’s offense was deplorable in the extreme, easily worth fifty Don-Imus-Nappy-Hair-Ho repeats, perhaps more. She’s learned her lesson, and I think it’s a good lesson for the rest of us whether we’re similarly guilty, potentially guilty, or saintly innocent.

Her original article went like this:

Members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team: You know.

We know you know.

Whatever happened in the bathroom at the stripper party gone terribly terribly bad, you know who was involved. Every one of you does.

And one of you needs to come forward and tell the police.

Do not be afraid of retribution on the team. Do not be persuaded that somehow this “happened” to one or more “good guys.”

If what the strippers say is true — that one of them was raped, sodomized, beaten and strangled — the guys responsible are not “good.”

It turns out that snotty indignation, and verifiable truth, don’t have an awful lot to do with each other. Certainly, the sulphurous fumes of the former make a poor substitute for the latter. In the common-sense lobes of our brains, we all understand this. Our recurring sin is our failure to send a good amount of current through the synapses.

And so, a little over a year later, via Sister Toldjah we get to read about Sheehan’s mortified apology. Beware! There but for the grace of God…

Members of the men’s Duke lacrosse team: I am sorry.

Surely by now you know I am sorry. I am writing these words now, and in this form, as a bookend to 13 months of Duke lacrosse coverage, my role in which started with a March 27 column that began:

“Members of the men’s Duke lacrosse team: You know. We know you know.”

That was when Durham police and District Attorney Mike Nifong were describing a “wall of silence” among the men who attended the now-vaunted lacrosse party at 610 Buchanan Blvd. Nifong, now described by the state attorney general as a “rogue prosecutor,” was widely respected as solid, even understated.

Though wrong, my initial column was cheered by hundreds of readers.

Last weekend, our public editor, Ted Vaden, laid me low for that first column, and the second, which called for the firing of lacrosse coach Mike Pressler. According to Don Yeager, a former Sports Illustrated staffer who is writing a book about the case, Pressler blames me for his dismissal. I’m sorry he ended up coaching at a Division III school.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…maybe it has something to do with puttin’ the hate on the rich people, in which case you’re just asking for more of the same sorry episode. Maybe it’s something else.

Either way, this obviously seems a good lesson to keep tucked away in your noggin.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

In Other News, Water Is Wet

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

The democrat Governor of Oregon has been snookered into some church program to prove that being poor sucks. I think that statement just about captures it…

Governor to Try a Food Stamp-Size Budget
Article Tools Sponsored By
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 22, 2007

SALEM, Ore., April 21 (AP) — Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski and his wife, Mary Oberst, are used to eating the best their state has to offer: salmon, huckleberries and mushrooms foraged from the Cascade mountains.

The coming week will be different. They will spend just $3 a day each on their meals, $42 in all, to match the amount spent by the average food stamp recipient in Oregon.

Mr. Kulongoski, a Democrat, and Ms. Oberst are the most prominent people yet to take part in a “food stamp challenge,” a trend sponsored by religious groups, community activists and food pantries across the country.

Those who have done the challenge say shopping on such a tight budget requires plenty of planning, a reliance on inexpensive staples like legumes, beans, rice and peanut butter and a lack of more expensive protein and fresh fruits and vegetables.

Meeting friends for a slice of pizza or a cup of coffee becomes a nearly unaffordable luxury.

“On the spiritual side, when I did eat, I was more present,” said State Senator Jonathan Harris of Connecticut, who just finished three weeks on food stamp funds. “Usually I’m watching TV, shoveling things in, not thinking that I am blessed.”

It is a politically delicate time for the food stamp program. The Bush administration has proposed several cuts, among them taking food stamps from about 185,000 people because they receive other noncash government assistance.

The Department of Agriculture budget, as proposed, would also eliminate a program that gives boxes of food to about half a million elderly people each month.

The administration has proposed some changes hailed by food stamp supporters, like excluding retirement savings from income limits and encouraging recipients to buy more fresh produce.

Mr. Kulongoski plans to lobby Congress to restore the proposed cuts.

Neal Boortz is having some fun with this.

Wow! What a great idea! If the governor would permit me, I would like to suggest how he can enhance his illustration of the plight of the poor during this week on food stamps:

1. Adopt — just for the week — a few children you cannot afford to raise.
2. Completely abandon your work ethic for the week.
3. If you do have a job, show up late, leave early and don’t hit a lick at a snake while you’re there.
4. Smoke cigarettes. After all, a higher percentage of poor people smoke than rich people.
5. Become uneducated.
6. Buy lottery tickets.

My suggestions would have more to do with producing a family locked in to living on food stamps. I like the complete lack of education, it’s a good start. Let’s see…

Someone once said as women go, so goes society. If you have a daughter, pay close attention to the prospective son-in-law. No talent allowed. Her boyfriend’s tallest ambition in life, should he have one, ought to be to get the band back together.

In your extended family, designate a White-Knight and a chronic screw-up. Everyone should agree that nothing is ever the screw-up’s fault. They should all plunge their life saving’s into bailing him out of his latest pickle, and if any work remains to be done it ought to be the job of the White-Knight. And if there’s blame to be cast, it should go to the Knight.

If nobody can agree who-is-what, it should fall to the screechiest, most irrational woman to designate those roles. That seems to be the way most families do it.

Oh yeah. Nobody’s allowed to learn anything from the way the White Knight does things. For a role model, everyone should be looking at the screw-up. Kids should be taught to pay him lots of attention. Worship him. Do everything the way he does it. He’s bound to be the “fun” one, after all.

Watch lots of movies with Doofus Dads. Kids should be taught that during that narrow band of years, where they feel like they know everything — they really do.

Do a lot of screeching, bellyaching and kibitzing about “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Oh, I almost forgot: Nobody ever talks to their kids anymore about the ethics involved in missing work. Take advantage of that. Miss work when you’re not sick. Take your kids to the beach, or to the park. Be sure and let them know what you’re doing — how you have to be sure wherever you go, you can’t be filmed or photographed, and why that is. Find out how many sick days you’re allowed, and let your kids in on that arithmetic. The lesson is that work is the last priority.

That goes for everyone. If anyone waits around until they’re really sick, before they take time off work, show your kids that he’s the bad guy and he doesn’t really love anyone. If he’s male, spend your sick day watching a Doofus Dad movie with your kids.

Ah! That reminds me…spending money. That’s love, you know. No money spent, nobody loves anyone. Paycheck comes in, bills are paid, groceries are bought — if there is some money left over, it should be spent on fun things. If it stays in the bank, someone’s being mean and greedy.

The breadwinner should be constantly harrassed. Show your kids that this is a life of misery. Life is not about providing for anyone or doing the things other people need to have done or fulfilling responsibilities…show your kids that the purpose of life, is to have fun.

Embrace militant feminism. Make sure your daughters and your sons are clear on this point: Nobody has spent their energy well if they’ve sought out any direction in life — they should be rejecting direction in their lives. Sons should be taught that nobody needs them for anything, they aren’t there to facilitate, to coordinate, to organize, to prioritize, to produce, to defend, to protect. If they want to go after something out of whatever’s left, with whatever time they have on the planet, they can go right ahead. Daughters, similarly, are taught not to direct, to nurture, to feed, to clothe, to educate, to chaperone, to supervise. Again: If they want to go after something out of whatever’s left, go right ahead. Pointlessness to existence is the name of the game.

Teach your kids to make fun of nerds. Ideally, any class-mates they have who pull down better grades, are “teachers’ pets” who “brown-nose” the teachers for their superior grades — they didn’t work any harder, certainly! And your kids should be wondering why we still have a patent office. Anything that needed to be invented, has already been invented.

Pointlessness. Drive it home. We’re here to go to work late, come home early, do nothing in between, and take as many sick days off as we can so we can “love” each other by spending all the money.

And when the cupboards are bare and there’s nothing to eat and no money to buy it with, make sure your kids understand: They don’t need to pay any attention to other families who have food and money, to find out what’s been done differently. There’s nothing to be learned there. Other families with food and money, instead, should be paying attention to you. After all. You’re the guys who have it really tough.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Services Abuse | 1 Comment »

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 »

We’re The Government And You’re Not

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

Oh good golly…Boortz found something good. Not that this is anything unusual. Set aside ten minutes and watch this.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Eat The Rich, Glad I Learned About This, GroupThink Nonsense, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Services Abuse | No Comments »

Pay As You Go

Friday, January 26th, 2007

According to Pete du Pont, it’s a sneaky way to make Government bigger.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism, Universal Healthcare | No Comments »

Time Machine Lunacy

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

It occurs to me that if one wants to be committed to a looney-bin, without lying about anything or deceiving anyone in any way, a time machine set to the right year will do the trick. The right year, and a carefully-selected tidbit of factual disclosure.

Hello good people of 2006! I’m from the future. Democrats are going to take over Congress, and one of the first things they’ll do is ask for direction from those whackjobs at DailyKOS. You think I kid! I’m as serious as a heart attack.

See what I mean? Off you go, and here’s your straightjacket. And yet…here we are.

Hello good people of 2005! I’m from the future. Democrats are blaming George Bush for hurricanes. Yes. They really, truly are.
Hello 2004! George Bush is thought by many to be the most “hated” President ever, and it looks like he is, even though he’s won more popular votes than any President in history.

It’s just awfully tough for me to believe we would be allowed to keep our freedom as responsible, sane people, after uttering such drivel. It all makes sense now; in fact, in some quarters you’ll be subjected to some form of verbal assault if you don’t go along with it. But we wouldn’t be able to explain it to the people of yesteryear. We’re like the frog sitting in a pot of water, raised to a rolling boil degree-by-degree.

Hello 2003! We have captured Saddam Hussein and he’s been executed; we’re having a lively debate about whether this makes the world any safer. The folks who think it was a bad move, have pretty much won the debate, even though they are never — ever — called upon to say what should have been done differently.
Hello 2002! Evidence has been produced that the people in the U.N. voting against an invasion of Iraq, are on Saddam Hussein’s payroll through the oil-for-food program. To the tune of billions of dollars. What are we doing to bring them to justice? Nothing. Actually, hardly anyone ever talks about it.
Hello 2001! I dunno what to say to you…just hug your kids. And may God be with you.
Hello 2000! If you give Republicans control of all three branches of government, Democrats will try their very best to win you back by…calling you a bunch of fucking goddamned idiots and hoping that will change your mind. Ultimately, it will.
Hello 1999! Don’t worry about President Clinton’s legacy. He’s doing more to try to hide it, than anyone.
Hello 1998! Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California.
Hello 1997! Little kids are going to start performing oral sex on each other because the President said it wasn’t really sex. He’s going to stay just as popular as he is now, if not moreso.
Hello 1996! We’re debating about whether Saddam Hussein was ever a dangerous fucknozzle; the people who insist he was a harmless misunderstood old teddy-bear, are winning.
Hello 1995! We got a “Pelosi Revolution” that’s just like your “Gingrich Revolution.” It involved between a quarter and a third as many House seats changing hands, as what you just went through…but our media tells us it means far, far more. And you wouldn’t believe how differently they’re treating it. It’s working, too.
Hello 1994! Your “co-President” is going to get her husband’s ass handed to him in the upcoming mid-terms with her socialized-medicine scheme. It’s going to make history — and yet, twelve years later, she’s going to start pushing the same product all over again, running for President “in her own right.”
Hello 1993! I’m from the future. Your brand-new President is going to lie to you. About a marital affair. On television. Waggling his finger at the cameras…and I mean that literally. And then he’s going to get caught by his own spunk, spurted all over a blue dress. DNA tests and everything. He won’t be run out of town on a rail, in fact, there will be a cult following devoted to him and how he “got away with it.”
Hello 1992! James Bond is gone for awhile, but eventually he’s going to come back. But while you’re settling into this era of political-correctness and female-friendliness, I can’t begin to describe what you’re about to do to the White House.
Hello 1991! Saddam Hussein’s going to be left in charge. This will be proven to be the wrong decision. The United Nations will make every single mistake about him they possibly can, including — get this — taking billions of dollars in bribes from Saddam himself, to veto enforcement of Resolutions 678 and 687. And yet, I daresay, there is no one in my time who is opposed to the U.N., who isn’t also opposed to it in yours. Not a soul, so far as I know.
Hello 1990! In about five years, it will become highly fashionable for mens’ pants to slip WAY down so their butt cracks stick out. You won’t be able to get away from it, and it will remain highly fashionable for about a dozen years.

These things make some measure of sense to us because we’ve been acclimated to them slowly. They would make sense in no other time.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, James Bond, Justification for Invasion, ManBearPig, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, World Government | No Comments »

Memo For File XXXVI

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Blogger friend James Bostwick over at Newsblog Central has performed an excellent fisking job on some silly blow-dried airhead piece in SFGate about the minimum wage. He gets two shiny gold stars for this one. It’s not for the great smart-alecky job of fisking, since I’m not a big fan of fisking anyway. It’s for 1) correctly pointing out that the minimum wage is all about outlawing jobs, rather than about giving people money; and 2) linking to an insightful and well-written column over at the Mises Institute explaining in detail, for those who need to have it explained, Point 1). And as far as the fisking goes, it does have a place — and this is one of those places. Example:

Alice Laguerre is among the millions of workers now earning less than $7.25 an hour. She makes $6.55 an hour driving cars headed for the auction blocks in Orlando, Fla., and says a boost in the federal minimum wage would help her build a nest egg for emergencies.

Really? ‘Cause somehow that just doesn’t mesh numbers-wise with this passage:

That can be tough these days, acknowledges Laguerre, 53, after paying the monthly rent and utilities on her two-bedroom apartment and after recently buying a car — a blue 1994 Buick Century.

Check out monthly rents for two-bedroom apartments in Orlando, Florida–you’d be lucky to find something under $800. And the Blue Book value on a 1994 Buick Century is between $2000 and $2500, depending on four or six cylinder models (maybe blue ones are cheaper.) With a typical 40-hour work week, Laguerre makes $1,048 gross a month. And she still has to pay food, utilities, etc. Even if she has another job as the breadwinner, it doesn’t compute.

Ding ding ding ding ding, we have a winner. A problem is identified, and a solution is proposed — yet the solution is ineffectual against the stated problem, and no one with a reputation worth defending seeks to assert anything different. Not only do we go ahead and implement the ineffectual solution once, we do it many times, over several generations — and act surprised when the problem remains.

You know what is unique about the issue of the minimum wage, is it reveals the failure of the liberal mindset to adhere to the plane of reality, like no other issue before us. You go down through the list, there’s a conservative outlook on the effect of a given proposed policy, and then there’s a liberal outlook. Conservatives think wars may be necessary some of the time, to keep larger wars from happening later — liberals think war can be avoided forever, when one interested side has decided to simply stop fighting them. Conservatives think global warming is part of a natural cycle, liberals think it’s an extinction-level event. Conservatives think the death tax is double-taxation, liberals figure that just because the taxed party is seeing the loot for the first time, this is somehow not the case. The same goes for gun control. Conservatives say if guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. Liberals say if we don’t (in the words of Michael Moore) “have all these guns lying around,” there won’t be any gun violence because it won’t be possible. Like Obi-Wan said, you come to find out a great many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point-of-view…

…but in the case of the minimum wage, it’s different. It’s much simpler. Conservatives say it’s all about outlawing jobs. This is not a point-of-view. It’s simply what the policy does. To extrapolate any more complicated mission from a minimum wage law, is to indulge in fantasy.

And yet, from sea to shining sea, untold millions of people so indulge. And they think they’re commenting intelligently on the policy. Nobody seeks to assert any minimum wage law, federal or state, anywhere, engages in an effort to collect revenues to supplement these wages. That would probably be shot down as “corporate welfare” if it were ever proposed. So lacking that, we borrow from Bostwick’s terminology to illustrate what the law really does: make “free and voluntary wage contracts illegal.”

There really isn’t any disagreement about the minimum wage as a job killer. Not among those who make the policy. It’s like arguing over whether a higher prime interest rate has a retarding effect on the economy. There’s a reason why the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in a decade, and there’s a reason why the amount of the proposed increase is proportional to the number of years since the last increase. The minimum wage is already indexed to inflation, for all practical purposes; we just have this ceremonial knock-down-drag-out, just before the increase kicks in. When Congress increases it, it increases it as much as can be afforded. Over the long haul, adjusted for inflation, it doesn’t increase. Not really.

And that is why we’re allowed to argue over the job-killing effect. It’s made into a matter of individual perspective, artficially.

Suppose we had some genuine curiosity about whether the minimum wage is deleterious to the job situation, and were willing to make some real changes to policy in order to settle the matter. There’s almost no limit to what we could do, save for our imagination. We could, just for starters, increase it after inflation. We could index it to the inflation rate over a period of several years — doubled. Or tripled. Inflation for Fiscal Year 1 is 3.5%, minimum wage automatically goes up by 10.5%. Do that for a decade. Or, we could go the other way. Rather than freezing it over a period of several years, thereby asking for sob-story articles like this one — “imagine what it would be like to work without a pay raise for nearly 10 years” — we could cut the dollar amount. We could even sunset that measure. For the next thirty-six months, the federal minimum wage nosedives by a buck fifty an hour, just so we can see what happens. That would effectively legalize the “free and voluntary wage contracts” that were, up until then, illegal. Maybe more people would then be hired. Perhaps not? At the end of the three years, we wouldn’t have to argue about it. We’d know.

In my lifetime, and beyond, we haven’t done any of those things. We just keep it at a posted dollar amount across several years, which is silly because inflation is always around and never goes away. And at the end of some period of time, we have our predictable Republican/Democrat knockem-sockem routines, and of course the Democrats always win. They must. The debate is about the theory, only on the surface, only cosmetically. In substance, the debate always turns to what a rotten time Alice Laguerre is having of things, and whether she could use a few more dollars in her purse.

That’s just stupid. Of course she can use them.

What is to be gleaned from the data, if we were to sit down with our state governments, our fifty-one social laboratories, to figure out what the minimum wage does? Not much. Conservatives theorize this would prove the minimum wage kills jobs, liberals say it would exonerate the minimum wage. Some hard-core leftists will insist the minimum wage reduces the unemployment rate, and they’re all too willing to offer cherry-picked examples to support what they want supported. Never, in my experience, has anyone sat down with all of the data at a given time, and presented it in a simplified way so cause-and-effect could be examined with some intellectual sincerity. Well, a few months ago I actually did this. I went through 51 states and I plotted it. Not that hard. Turns out conservatives and liberals are both wrong. What one gleans from the data, is that different parts of the country have different economies. The scatter diagram that results, presents no correlation whatsoever between the state’s effective minimum wage, and the unemployment rate of that region:

You can review my data for the effective minimum wage levels here and you can check my data on the unemployment figures here. The chart was last refreshed back in July, so admittedly there’s an issue of currency. But nothing that would impact the cause-and-effect between wage controls and unemployment figures; and anyone who doesn’t trust the scatter, in an hour or two could repeat the exercise entirely. The data is all there and it can be accessed by anyone who wants to.

You see over on the left side, we have several states with no minimum wage. In the eyes of the law, the effective minimum there reverts to the federal rate of $5.15. The latest reported unemployment rates from these localities is between 3½ and just over 8 percent, which is roughly on par with the other states that yank it between one and two dollars over the federal minimum. THERE…IS…NO…CORRELATION. None. What you’re seeing here, is a disparity amongst the states as far as how draconian of a minimum wage you can afford to have — based on what’s going on there.

I would expect “most” Americans, if they were to explore this honestly, would opt for a “moderate” approach to the minimum wage. If such an argument were then to be pursued honestly, we would then see those Americans would end up supporting a full repeal of the federal minimum wage. That would be moderate, would it not? In twenty-five states, this would have no effect whatsoever. Among the states that remain, doubtlessly most of them would pass state-level measures to re-institute the federal minimum that had just been nullified. The states that would seize the opportunity and ratchet the effective minimum downward, I expect, would be down in the single digits. The states leaving the minimum-wage concept non-existent, leaving everything up to the employer and the employee, I would probably be able to count on the fingers of one hand.

Let us then plot those on a scatter diagram like the one above, with some contrails to show how things are moving around. Who knows what would be revealed two or three years afterward? Truth be told, I think I’ve got an idea. Deep down, I don’t think anyone disagrees with my idea. Not if they were to bet some real money on it, they wouldn’t.

Once again…if we did that, we would know.

But decade after decade after decade…we do none of these things. We just let conservatives and liberals argue over what the minimum wage does to the job market. We all know the conservatives are right — all they’re saying, is when you make a commodity more expensive it’s less likely to be consumed. That’s Econ 101 stuff. And yet…we also know whenever the argument comes up, the liberals will win. So it’s known, the way we engage the argument, the wrong side will win. It isn’t just conservatives who know this. Everybody knows it. We just don’t want to admit it.

This is an issue that is supposed to be really, really, breathtakingly, important. We don’t act like it is.

Posted in Low Pain Threshold, Minimum Wage, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

You’re A Racist If You Want Lower Taxes

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Derrick Z. Jackson links the issue of race, to the decidedly non-race-related issue of taxes.

“Taxes” has become a code word for “we got ours, forget the rest of you all.” “Taxes” avoids real discussion of white privilege. “Taxes” avoid s how old-line white families were able to transfer wealth and property during slavery.

Why does this guy have a column?

Posted in Eat The Rich, GroupThink Nonsense, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Alternative “Imagine” Lyrics

Friday, December 15th, 2006

If you don’t already know about this, Neal Boortz has been soliciting ideas for new lyrics to John Lennon’s song “Imagine.”

I can get behind this idea a hundred percent. In America, you can say whatever you want without fear of oppression from the government as a result of what you said — the “fire in a crowded theater” rule notwithstanding. Now this does not, I repeat NOT, mean that America has a set of principles galvanized against treacherous thoughts from within. Quite to the contrary, America is like a fragile flower that needs to be nourished and watered, constantly, by the culture embraced by the people who live here. It can’t be transplanted to just any ol’ “soil” and be expected to bloom. Nobody in the know, ever said or implied such a thing. America, before it is a country, is a set of values — and without those values, it is sure to come to an end.

And if you love America, you can’t love the original lyrics to “Imagine.” Not if you’ve really thought your cunning plan through. Go on, look up the original lyrics. That just isn’t the way things work here.

So have a look at the revisions, and I suggest if you come up with some more you go ahead and let Neal know. You don’t have to mention The Blog That Nobody Reads, but if you’ve got some good work I’d certainly like to be copied on it in case it doesn’t make the cut over there.

Posted in Poisoning Capitalism | 1 Comment »

Kennedy’s Agenda

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

If I ever get tired of trying to make an honest living and want to start ripping people off, and make sure I never get caught at it, I’m going to start talking in a thick Boston accent heavily sprinkled with the word “Ah.” It seems to be an effective way to deflect probing questions. That’s the one thought I have, reading the AP’s puff-piece about Ted Kennedy’s “agenda” for next year, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

“Americans are working harder than ever, but millions of hardworking men and women across the country aren’t getting their fair share,” Kennedy said during a speech outlining his legislative agenda for next year. “We’re not rewarding work fairly anymore, and working families are falling behind.”

President Bush signaled readiness last week to consider some Democratic priorities such as a minimum-wage increase, overhauling immigration policy and finding compromise on renewing the No Child Left Behind education law.

Critics of boosting the minimum wage say it kills job creation as employers hire fewer entry-level workers to compensate for the higher wage expenses. Kennedy said the minimum wage has remained at $5.15 an hour for nearly 10 years. Under Kennedy’s proposal, the increase would occur over about a two-year period.

Most states have their own minimum wages laws, with some states having rates the same as the federal minimum wage and some with rates higher than the federal minimum.

Kennedy noted that ballot initiatives establishing or raising the minimum wage in six states all passed in this month’s election.

“If there is one message from this election that emerged loud and clear, it’s that no one who works for a living should have to live in poverty,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy also said he would seek to expand federal support for research on stem cells coming from embryos, which Congress approved last year, but Bush vetoed. The issue won’t go away, he promised.

On education, Kennedy said he would seek to make college more affordable by increasing the size of Pell Grants from $4,050 to $5,100, and by cutting interest rates on student loans.

He said that the student loan business has become too profitable for the banking industry. “It’s time to take the moneychangers out of the temple on student loans,” he said.

I don’t have to wait too long, nowadays, for a left-winger to insist that his positions on various issues makes him smart, and my position make me dense. We live in a time in which people on both sides of the aisle, apply rustic and faulty “intelligece tests” to those around them, by gathering up peoples’ positions on the issues. Well, the minimum wage has become my way of paying this back. Lefty says I’m a big ol’ NASCAR dolt because I supported “George Bush’s illegal war in Iraq,” and golly, you know he just may have a point. Maybe the left-wing hippy does know something I don’t. So like a pig digging for truffles, hoping to engage an intellect that maybe has a different perspective to provide me, perhaps finding an angle to the big picture of which I was previously not aware, I ask about the minimum wage. If my left-wing antagonist supports the minimum wage, I can rule out this possibility. Completely. If the asshole has a brain in his head he isn’t using it. And he isn’t seeking to “educate” me, he just wants to indoctrinate me and assimilate me into the collective. There’s no thought involved. Guaranteed.

Raising the minimum wage has been a favorite agenda of Democrats my entire life, and then some. Whenever the subject comes up, my favorite way of commenting on it has come to be “Congress is currently reviewing a measure to outlaw millions of jobs.” The lefties out there, predictably, cite this as further evidence of my cluelessness and thick-headedness. But who’s clueless? Congress raises the minimum wage — is Congress considering the appropriation of general funds to reimburse employers for the difference? Not so far as I can see…ever. Is Congress going to provide punitive measures against employers who dismiss their associates, specifically because of the financial ramifications of the increase? Again, not within my memory.

So the minimum wage is all about defining a class of jobs out there, and announcing that something has got to happen with them if the employer is not to violate this new law. On what that something is, Congress, within the information that has made its way to me, throughout my lifetime — has not a tinker’s damn to say about anything. Nor has Congress sought to say anything. The employer has absolute latitude; all that is required of him, is that something be changed. We have this pipe dream that the employer is going to say “Good golly! I better find some more money to pay these people!”

But a pipe dream is all it is.

With things left unchanged, these millions of jobs, which up until the moment in question were in comportation with the law…no longer are. And at that point, Congress’ involvement abruptly comes to a stop. Seriously. In my lifetime, I have yet to see a pro-increase-minimum-wage Congressman step up and so much as denounce employers opting to get rid of these now-more-expensive associates. I have not yet see anything like that happen yet. I’m waaaaaaiiiiiiting…haven’t seen it.

So to say this kind of activity is “a bill to outlaw jobs,” is simply a more accurate statement of the facts. The pit bull that is in place to keep those jobs from being eliminated, is the union. But of course all those “hardworking men and women” who are affected by minimum wage laws, are not necessarily represented by a union. Those who are not, are off Kennedy’s radar. This is only about the unionized forces. And the purpose of the legislation, is to pay back those unions by increasing the wages from which the union dues are going to be derived.

Just a little bit of payback. One hand washing the other.

But don’t the egghead economic scientists insist that the minimum wage does nothing to eliminate jobs, in fact, may actually cut the unemployment rate? Why, yes they do! They have yet to explain how making any commodity more expensive, stimulates the consumption of it. They can’t explain that…because that simply isn’t how things work. In fact, if you listen to them carefully, you’ll see they don’t even come out and say this is what’s happening. They’ll recite some cherry-picked facts to lead the audience to this conclusion, but you won’t hear a pro-minimum-wage egghead economist guy come out and say, “when it became more expensive to hire people, employers jumped at the chance to do so, because it made good financial sense to them to spend more money on the same labor.”

As far as the unemployment rate being kept more-or-less the same throughout various increases in the minimum wage, this much is true. And it’s by design. Adjusted for inflation, throughout forty years the minimum wage hasn’t even been raised, really. It is generally agreed to have peaked, in “real” dollars, sometime in the late 1960’s. We’re coming up on ten years since the last federal increase…unemployment is at an all-time low…the conditions are right. It is “time” to raise it. What if — and this is just a hypothetical — we were to yank the minimum wage up when unemployment was high? If it really wasn’t a job-killer, wouldn’t that make a lot of sense? Or…what about the Rush Limbaugh hypothetical? Why not $20 an hour? Why not $50? The position of the left on this, as far as I can gather, is that this would be “silly.” Or yes, this would cause unemployment, but things are different when the increase is more “reasonable.”

So you see, there isn’t any disagreement about the minimum wage between the right and the left. Both sides agree that it is safe in smaller doses, dangerous in higher doses — essentially, that it does indeed cause existing jobs to disappear. They disagree only in what is to be acknowledged exuberantly, or conceded grudgingly. What it does, is put people in control of the job market — union officials, politicians, lobbyists — who have nothing whatsoever to do with creating those jobs, or for getting the objectives of those jobs fulfilled. It keeps them in charge of things.

Now, what would happen if regulation was peeled way back, and the employers and employees had more control? There are those who believe the employers would run everything; and since employers don’t really want to hire anybody, all the jobs would disappear except for a handful, and those wouldn’t pay for shit.

Well, I can only go by what I see. People having jobs and losing them…people applying for jobs and not getting them…people hired on, and the jobs suddenly going away…this happens five times, and only one time out of those five, at most, does the issue have something to do with a stingy employer cutting corners. The other four, it has something to do with regulation, or auditing. Decisions about jobs, being made by people who have nothing to do with the job being done.

Why does this ratio seem so out of balance? It makes perfect sense when you think about it. The stakeholders in the job getting done, if they are to make the decisions, the job stays. Of course it does. They want to get that job done, because if they didn’t, the job never would have come to be in the first place.

Of course…Kennedy speaks with that thick Boston accent. And he uses the word “Ah.” So none of this came out in the interview…or press conference…whatever it was. Kennedy said stuff, and if anybody asked a probing question anywhere, it didn’t make it into print. The AP just caught his glittering generalities and wrote ’em up.

Kennedy also said he wanted to support embryonic stem cell research.

What exactly is this committee and when did it get formed? I was just noticing…grinding up babies doesn’t have a whole lot to do with outlawing jobs. Kennedy’s chairmanship puts him in a position to do both. This borders on the surreal.

When I was a pre-teenager type kid, “baby in a blender” jokes were all the rage. If I could travel back to that time, and tell people in 2006 this will actually become a legislative agenda, they’d never believe it. And here we are.

I’m more concerned about the ability we have to vote in these legislative agendas. Mark Foley sent some spicy Internet messages to a former page, and we have this huge sloshing mushbucket of unrelated liberal objectives now in charge of the nation’s capital. Suppose — and this is another hypothetical — as a member of the electorate, I was desiring a little bit more surgical precision in what was to receive my support. Suppose I was in favor of grinding up the babies, but against outlawing jobs. Or vice-versa. What if some parts of Kennedy’s agenda sounded good to me, and other parts of it did not.

How do I vote for that? I just have one Congressman…some years I have a Senator running too, the one this year was a shoe-in even though I despise her…I can elect these incumbents, or vote ’em out. And based on who wins — and a lot of years, it’s just like this one, some silly scandal decides everything — we have this asshole and his juggernaut agenda, mashing up babies, outlawing jobs, making war on the cherished American values of individuality, capitalism, opportunity, keeping the money you have earned…choice. We vote for our elected representatives, and the elected representatives vote on all of Sen. Kennedy’s agenda, or none of it. Can’t have nuthin’ in-between.

I’ve been listening to liberals for six years tell me our “democracy is slipping away.” Well, it certainly is…just not in the way they’ve been saying.

Posted in Eat The Rich, Minimum Wage, Poisoning Capitalism | 2 Comments »

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