Something to embiggen even the most unembiggenable of brains:

Among many other things, this shows my country has been getting a bad rap (or at least strongly suggests it). We haven’t been hoarding wealth, keeping it away from others; if anything, we have been leading the way.

There’s a fascinating little psychological twist going on with this blurb at the end about “green technology.” The associated fad seems to have the effect of fooling people into thinking they’re supporting human progress while they’re really opposing it.

The US of A is called out at 2:36, it’s a medium-large yellow dot. Did you see where it ended up at the end? How many orange blobs are clustered to its immediate left…which direction are they moving…and does that look to you like a not-so-friendly competition. This big blob of orange dots tightens considerably between 3:09 and 3:18 — you have to squint to see it — but that’s where the Maastricht Treaty is enacted, forming the European Union. And, yes, just as he says “now” the big yellow circle is bobbing leftward, you’re not imagining it.

Looks a little bit like…I would say, exactly like…a fox & a herd of hounds. Perhaps I’m paying this part of it more attention than I should, but it is the span of what is happening in the here-and-now. And the outcome isn’t looking too good for the fox.

Hat tip to blogger friend Buck.

Eating food, drinking wine, tra la la, oom pa pa.

Byron York writing in the Examiner:

If you look at a year-long graph of public attitudes toward the national health care law, you’ll see that the last time a majority of Americans supported the Democratic plan was July 2009 — before there actually was a Democratic plan. Once voters found out what was in Obamacare, they opposed it.
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One obvious answer is that it’s a bad law. But that, of course, is unacceptable to Democrats who staked their careers on it. So they’ve come up with other explanations.

First they argued that voters disliked the law because they were unfamiliar with it — see Nancy Pelosi’s famous “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” remark. Then they argued that the public actually likes many parts of the law and will ultimately like the whole thing. Finally, they argued that people have been misled by Republicans and the media, particularly Fox News.

Now, they’re doubling down with a new study that gives an academic sheen to their case, as well as a “fact-checking” analysis that purportedly proves GOP dishonesty.

The study, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election: A Study of the U.S. Electorate,” came out last week from a group at the University of Maryland called WorldPublicOpinion.org. The report’s authors say they found “strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the issues prominent in the election campaign.” One of those issues was health care.

York is going after the study where it is most vulnerable: The motive. After all, was anybody puttering about the kitchen in the early morning hours, feeding the cat and making the coffee, wondering “hmmm, are Fox News viewers well informed or under-informed?” No, pretty much everyone had one answer or the other already gelled in their heads, or else solidly didn’t care.

When we picked on the same study we went after the methods and how questionable they were. The bad motives represent a source for the bad methods, so as is usually the case with York’s work, we’re left thinking “gee wish I thought of that.” On the other hand, it is useful to highlight bad methods, since we’ll be seeing them again and again and again — the bad motive may or may not be so easily and so starkly proven out during the next cycle of “studies.”

The bad motives and the bad methods are both problematic. Neither factor contributes to the settling of questions or to the acquisition of knowledge. Neither one is helpful.

What’s broken? Who needs to fix something? Not PIPA; they’re advancing the agenda they want to advance. Not the University of Maryland; they’re acting as a mouthpiece, for the propaganda they think worthy and fitting.

Blame the electorate. We have communicated the message that we will support bad solutions if they make us look scholarly. If a plan will thicken the bureaucracy and rejuvenate the tort system rather than the private sector, and make it harder to access medical care instead of easier — but make us look cool and sophisticated in some way if we support it — most of us will support it.

We won’t support some other plan that restores profitability and control to the private sector, lowers costs, makes it easier to afford procedures and therefore coverage…if it makes us look like, say, an average housewife from Alaska who drops the ‘g’ off the ends of her words. We’ll reject that in a great big hurry, even if we know the alternative violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution.

And so we’ve left the door open for some enterprising fox to take up the job of guarding the henhouse. Naturally, the foxes are lining up. You’d have to think there’s something wrong with ’em if they didn’t.

In my opinion, she’s right — it’s unmistakable and undeniable that the oil company has been doing lots of things wrong.

My devastating question that derails the entire thought process could be best-phrased as: So you make all the people who run BP into perfect wonderful decent people, either by attrition or by some kind of hocus-pocus. Then what? How well is that gulf protected? Not very much. Even if you’re going to insist wonderful people make wonderful decisions all the time, which lead to a wonderful outcome all the time — that’s problematic in obvious ways — what if the next chairman of BP is a dick?

BP’s mission is, and was, to make money. The mission of the auditors was to stop this from happening. The disaster is, therefore, an indictment against the auditing and oversight process. It isn’t reasonable to reach any other conclusion.

My solution is to — for JUST once — tell the hippies to fuck off, and bring the drilling onto dry land so that if something goes wrong, it can be controlled. Apart from fixing the problem where things are truly broken, it would be healthy to direct a response of “no” where it is not typically directed. But it would be an understatement to say I’m open to a better idea…
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Auditors, in my experience, tend to be boolean people. That’s a fancy way of saying they’ve made up their mind ahead of time whether you’re going to fail your audit or not, and [as is the case with] all human endeavors, facts & evidence don’t figure into the process as much as we like to tell each other they do.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

A man’s dinner centerpiece. Top that, Julia Child.

From Hot Air.

Is there such a thing as a Sarah Palin hater who has redeeming personal qualities? I’m sure there are a few, but I don’t think they have any overlap with the hyper-zealot whack-jobs. The ones who work Palin’s name into discussions that have nothing to do with her. The ones who would wish harm on her for some unspecified slight. The true haters.

There’s something going on here, going unexplored, some problem that’s much bigger and much older than Sarah Palin. Of course, some of these people are actually older than Palin. That might be the problem. They haven’t accomplished as much. They have a problem with Palin and it isn’t her position on any one issue.

But then again, the people on this list are mostly about the same age and some of them are younger. They, too, do not appear to to be upset with Palin about issues. It seems they have, contrary to their ravings and their non-humorous “jokes,” picked up that the course of America’s history may be altered because of Palin’s existence, in one direction or another, on a level of magnitude great or small. And they’re none too pleased about it. They labor with a bevy of punchlines about Palin’s insignificance…not because she is insignificant…but because they want her to be. This, I think, has something to do with why they detest her. They come from a world in which things are, or might become, other things just because you wish it and you speak the wish. Palin does not come from such a world.

For this, they should not be jealous of her. And yet they are. They’re mad at themselves for wishing they were more like her, when they live out their lives in situations that should be more privileged. Or something…I think.

There are quite a few “comediennes” among Palin haters — females who are supposed to look hot, or who are supposed to have once looked hot, who make jokes that are not funny and the jokes usually have something to do with a vagina. I cannot help but think that their problem with Palin might have something to do with her dignity. Not even with the dignity she has…but simply that she values it as a positive thing to have, always has, and perhaps they perceive that it’s simply too late for them. You might say they have uncrossed their legs and they cannot cross them again.

There is a lot of “sour grapes” in Palin hatred, in both the women and the men.

Let the record show, this is Joy Behar’s idea of a thoughtful critique. Let’s be clear, it’s not a critique of a book, or a critique of a critique of a book. But a critique of a personal reading list offered by a former Vice Presidential candidate from whom the personal reading list is demanded routinely, when such personal reading lists are demanded of seemingly nobody else.

Anyway, this is my idea of a thoughtful critique. Joy Behar is welcome to have a different opinion, but, uh, hey I wonder what books Joy Behar reads?

Lewis explored the life-changing power of stories by writing one of his own, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” one of the seven books in “The Chronicles of Narnia.” One of the key themes of this book is the old maxim—”You are what you read.” He begins “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” with one of the most memorable lines in the series: “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

Eustace, Lewis tells us, “liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” In other words, Eustace didn’t have time for the types of stories that Lewis wrote and thought were important—stories about “brave knights and heroic courage.”

Throughout “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Lewis tells us repeatedly that Eustace’s biggest problem is that he “has read all the wrong books.” Lewis cites this as the reason that Eustace is overwhelmed when he first arrives in Narnia and finds himself in a dragon’s lair. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair,” Lewis writes, “but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

To hammer the point home, Lewis describes why Eustace was not able to recognize an approaching dragon to quickly get to safety. “Something was crawling,” Lewis writes. “Worse still, something was coming out of the cave. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books.”
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[C.S. Lewis] thought that fairy tales were the best way to convey truth for children and adults alike. He wrote about this quite often in his letters, and took no shame in reading fairy tales out loud in British pubs with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Nowhere is this more poignantly expressed than in his dedication to Lucy Barfield in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.” “You are already too old for fairy tales,” he wrote to the young Lucy, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Hopefully that day will come soon for Ms. Behar as well.

RTWT.

Three hundred sixty-four days a year?

Napolitano just amazes me. She’s the reason why, when people go on about what an incompetent ditz Sarah Palin is and how it’s so important to keep her out of public service — not only should Napolitano not be allowed near any decisions that actually matter, but neither should they. Nappy is the very picture of a public servant who is bad in every conceivable way. She makes no constructive contribution to anything, other than to try to sell the citizenry to accept a bad status quo. And she can’t even do that.

A security and counter-terrorism plan should, before addressing any other goal,

a) Impose as great a magnitude of difficulty as possible upon a resourceful and determined attacker planning a terrorist-strike event; or
b) Make sure all races, genders, sexual preferences and creeds are exposed to equal levels of inconvenience and danger.

It’s a simple, one-question, two-option test. And this administration consistently chooses the wrong answer. They won’t protect the country. They won’t even tick off anybody until they do their “due diligence” to make sure the right people are getting ticked off…then they’ll jump in with both feet. But outside of that, it seems they have no other goals in mind at all.

I’m loving that revelation at 1:27. There will be an attack, innocent lives will be lost, and we just have to learn to live with it — but no profiling!

Can we at least talk about that system of priorities, maybe discuss it a little bit? Aw, heck no. That’s their job as they see it, to convince people like me that that’s just the way things are and I need to accept it. That, it seems, is their idea of “homeland security.”

These people shouldn’t be trusted to run a flower cart. They’re not there to protect anybody, they just think they’re hog farmers and we’re the hogs.

From Hot Air.

Totenberg.

Share with a “The War on Christmas is a Myth” person you know.

Oh, my. At this hectic time of year, which isn’t supposed to be hectic at all but somehow is anyway…this just might catch on.

It seems that the urge to give the shirt off the other guys back in the interests of social justice and displaying compassion for the little guy is one that is not going to go away anytime soon…
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Since it’s been established that this kind of thinking is not likely to go away, what we have to do is simply redefine what it is to be wealthy. To the people who choose not to take the ambitious path in life, to those who take the European view that leisure time and taking it easy are the true measure of a rich life, I say that you are absolutely right. Wealth should not be determined by how much money or how many things I have accumulated, but rather by how happy I am…
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Once we convince them completely that feeling good is the goal of life and that leisure is the new money…we start taxing it. Anyone working less than eighty hours a week will be forced to split the difference with the hours that they are putting in and subsidize the hard working for those hours…At a certain point, I think that you have accumulated enough free time. It’s a good idea I think to spread the wealth around…

Hehe. I should have been on top of what’s coming out of Mark’s mind here, but I wasn’t. Grateful hat tip to Joan.

…is that, in subtle but important ways, we turn our backs on truth. We reject it, not outright, but by demoting other tangential things over truth, and we relegate truth to some position inferior to other things that should not matter as much.

We think of things that are fake but accurate to be more meritorious, more worthy of our attention, our consideration, our support, our indemnification, than other things that are truthful, although perhaps somewhat lame.

You know, it’s a funny thing about the concept of “truth.” When we come to find out there is one, we very often find out it is not one to our liking — but it is what it is, nevertheless. That is the whole concept of truth, that it is what it is and it doesn’t very much matter whether we like it or not.

When it arrives at too high of a cost, and we find our delicate political structures and obligations are more precious to us than reconciling ourselves with truth, we have to disclaim what we know to be truth. But it doesn’t stop there. We have to also disclaim the idea that there is a truth at all — anywhere. We step into a world in which “truth” is determined by what the majority, or the powerful, or some combination of those two, find to be comfortable.

And by absolutely, positively, nothing else.

Added the following comments to the Hello Kitty of Blogging, otherwise known as “Facebook”:

To me, a big part of Christmas is arguing about knives.

Yeah, really. Before the big event, it’s all…use scissors! No, men don’t use scissors, men use knives. But it’s easier to cut straight with scissors! No, a real man can cut just as straight with a knife. Oh yeah? Yeah. Ad infinitum…(“Don’t hurt the rug!”)

…and then, during the unwrapping, it’s…since I’m a third-generation immigrant from solid Scandinavian stock, it’s always been — all together, now — SAVE THE WRAPPING PAPER FOR NEXT YEAR. So you take personal responsibility to make sure your own blade is sharpened properly, and you use it to bisect the scotch tape.

As I approached manhood, I became convinced this was just a way for grown-ups to torture children. So I did the only rational thing, I paid it forward. Yeah, ever[y] December 24 my kid hates my guts. “C’mon, Dad, just tear through it!!”

It tell him the same thing Dad told me: Slide that under an iron, son, and we can use it next year.

Be that as it may: By the time I’m done, you can tell a woman did NOT wrap this present. That’s been a constant.

Why am I embedding a fifteen-month-old video?

Because it’s the tenth anniversary of the Bush v. Gore silliness. I’m watching all the puff pieces come in on the mind-rotting cable teevee. And I’ll not mince words with you on this one: If I hear one more talking-head droning on about the most “mature,” “dignified,” “conciliatory,” “soothing,” “calming,” “unifying” speech “in all of American history”…I’m a-thinkin’ I’m a-gonna barf here.

This is the decade-old speech that fooled people:

In 2000, we had an excuse to be naive about what Al Gore really is. We have no such excuse in 2010. He’s a partisan hack who just wants his side to win, and will say what it takes to make that more likely when the cameras happen to be on him. He doesn’t have a genuinely conciliatory blood cell in his entire body.

Here’s an issue for 2012 if there ever was one. What the hell, this is what all the arguing and shouting is all about anyway, we just don’t spell it out.

Number eight is where it gets really important.

You can watch some reality contest on teevee like American Idol or what-not, or you can watch Dirty Jobs or the History Channel and embiggen your brain a little bit.
You can sneeze with your snot and slobber flying everywhere like a little kid, or you can cover your dirty germy mouth.
You can get a job and do your part to produce a product or service, or you can live on the welfare teat.
You can gnaw on your food with your kids in front of the teevee like you’re a bunch of damn feral creatures, or you can sit down to the table together for a proper meal.
You can leave the bathroom right after zipping up your fly, or you can wash your hands first.
You can learn to park and change lanes & leave it at that, or you can learn to change a tire and drive a stick shift.
You can tie your shoes with a simple bow or you can tie a proper double-knot.
You can vote for the guy with the coolest personality, or vote based on visions and ideas.

…like you’ve never pedaled before. Head for the arboretum.

Because we bicyclists don’t have enough of a rep for being smug and holier-than-thou — yet.

From BoingBoing.

Just going to go ahead and borrow Frugal Cafe‘s headline. And their graphic while I’m at it:

It would be awfully cool if the progressives among us were to view new social programs with the same suspicion, paranoia and scorn they so regularly thrust upon creches in courthouses & pledges-of-allegiance in schools. Jamie Jeffords tries to make sense of it all:

I would speculate the divide is a result of the differing view of government. For progressives, nothing is above government, so religion must be given a subordinate position. Conservatives do not have this problem. The issue may go deeper. There is also a notion that enlightenment and intellectualism are mutually exclusive from religion. That is just old fashioned arrogance. It cannot be dismissed, however.

As do I:

Some thoughts:

Atheists and secularists insist the statement “atheism is a religion” is as risible as “bald is a hair color” — heard that one before? It makes a lot of sense, until you start to ponder how the universe was built. To the atheist, the faith placed in the not-a-religion eliminates all possibilities save for one, and the one possibility looks more like a miracle than a scientific theory. Event 1, nothing; event 2, something complicated, bizarre and not quite specified, event 3, miraculous result. So atheism plus explain-how-we-got-here equals something I, for one, am very comfortable calling a religion.

Thought two: How we got here, is a much more important question to good governance than mere theoretical exercise. You make reference to a dichotomy involving whether religion should be subordinated to government. If there is any possibility to a competent mind at all that there might be a sentient and superior force involved in putting us here, then subordinating religion to government makes no sense at all. If we were put here, we must have purpose; where there is purpose, there has to be a will; and unless that purpose has changed from what it once was, then that will must lead to an expectation. Government, by its nature, has expectations too — if we are to erect a government that makes contrary expectations on us, then abiding by the law(s) becomes an exercise in abject futility, and mankind itself becomes a perversion.

Point three: The possibility that atheism is, after all, a religion, arouses another possibility that those who are trying to secularize the government, are the ones who are trying to establish a theocracy. Whether they know it or not.

That sign-off is a reference to a specific issue, which is teaching evolution and/or Creation in the public schools. Ever see Inherit The Wind? It’s about a real court case involving a penalty for teaching about evolution. Got that? They were deciding whether evolution should be allowed to be taught in the schools. And that Spencer Tracy, he seems so reasonable.

Fast forward forty-five years after the movie was made, and eighty years after the events took place, and the public hearing is on exactly the same issue but the so-called “law” says something completely different — now we’re deciding whether any alternatives should be allowed in the schools.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an encroachment into a government by an order attempting to establish a state religion. A successful encroachment, and a successful establishment. This is how liberalism works in general; it acts like it’s on the defensive, fighting for its sacred right to express, for its very life. And as the years tick on by, you see it persecutes any & all challenging ideologies exactly the same way it once claimed it was being persecuted.

Back in Sunday school they used to tell me about God & Jesus being kind of like a compass, or a map — you’re lost in life without them. I never did understand the wisdom of this until I saw liberals work away at things. The things they do, are 180 degrees off course from where they say they’re going…where they seem to think they are going. The persecution thing is just one example of this. They talk a good game about building a new society, a wonderful society, based on tolerance and acceptance. But their most zealous acolytes are so bitter, resentful and angry; they wouldn’t know what tolerance was if tolerance ran up and kicked ’em square in the ass.

They want to be the only game in town. On each question, on each issue, on each matter of any public policy. And then they want to make everything that has to do with the living of life, a matter of public policy.

Blogsister Cassy calls out NOW’s latest hissy fit over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging. Said hissy fit is about Hooters. Yup, women men do not want to see are bitching away about the women men do like to see. Hey, I wonder if that simple statement just sums it all up. Ya think?

Patricia Bellasalma, NOW’s California president, asserted that Hooters is violating state and local laws prohibiting sexually oriented “adult” businesses from serving minors. The chain is also violating federal employment standards, she said.

Bellasalma said the federal government has not subjected Hooters to the rules requiring employers to protect their workers from harassment by customers. The Atlanta restaurant chain has successfully argued that its employees know they will be working in sexually charged surroundings, Bellasalma said.

But in recent years, she said, the company has promoted itself as more family-friendly. She cited a statement on hooters.com that “10 percent of the parties we serve have children in them.”

“If they want to switch and turn the chain into a family-style restaurant, more power to them,” but Hooters would then have to follow the same anti-harassment rules as other restaurants, Bellasalma said.

This has nothing to do with following law; I can tell that because no law is cited. I suppose I could go digging around to find more stories about the same issue, but why should I? If you’re arguing about the law, wouldn’t you be taking the initiative and talking some about the law?

No, it’s the same leftist crap as always: “Someone is having an influence on the next generation…besides us!”

Yours Truly is having none of it:

I suspect there are some good Americans who have infiltrated NOW, and are sabotaging it from within. NOW’s credibility is diminished every time they do this. If they go after Hooters a few more times, NOW may be utterly destroyed. They have never restored themselves to the lofty position of power & influence they had before Clinton/Lewinsky, when business executives immediately did anything-&-everything once they found out NOW was so much as thinking about coming after ’em.

This isn’t about skinny girls in skimpy outfits or hot wings & cold beer. This is about red state versus blue state. The truth of the matter that nobody seems to want to acknowledge, is there is an order of cultural expectation in the red-state culture that the blue-state culture does not want to acknowledge is there. It isn’t perfect, but it’s there, and it works. It works pretty well.

It works so well that if “mistreat a lady” is an item on your things-to-do list for the day, Hooters is the *very* last place you should go. Sure the girls are dainty, sweet, skinny and young — but they’re surrounded by these gentlemen who don’t want to put up with your crap, they’re there to watch the game, and some of ’em are as big as a house. You’re better off going to Denny’s to harass the waitress. I’ve spent some time in Hooters, believe me. If there were stories to be told about young ladies being heckled or harassed or propositioned inappropriately, I’d be able to tell ’em. In short: NOW talking about the Hooters environment is very much like the liberal talking about Rush Limbaugh’s show. They don’t have to get too many words into it before they’ve proven they’re just repeating the cliches they’ve been given, and have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

Hat tip to Viral Footage.

Just give me and my friends what we want.

That would be your tolerance and love of diversity right there.

National security is at stake, eh? Throwing weapons away not only helps our national security, but is vital to it?

This is why these people must be driven from power. Some guy walking around your neighborhood would just love to perforate you with a high-powered machine gun, people like Joe Biden figure if you just get rid of the gun everything will be okay. And they aren’t willing to discuss or debate it.

…inspired by, and manifested by, irresponsible class warfare rhetoric. Dangerous, deadly progressive rage.

Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board Tuesday, posted a “last testament” on Facebook decrying the wealthy and linking to a slew of progressive sites including theprogressivemind.info and MediaMatters.org.

The chilling Facebook statement, posted under the “About Clay” section, talks about being born poor and how the rich “take turns fleecing us”:

My Testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster … no… I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us…

Doug Powers notes:

Meanwhile, as Media Matters is still busy trumpeting how dangerous Glenn Beck’s “violent rhetoric” is, there’s not a mention on their site of the media that Clay Duke considered worthy of following. Some media just don’t matter when it comes to these things.

Just wow. As one who could be considered a highly-compensated professional in the private sector, I wonder what my government is going to do to protect me from these gun-wielding, wild-eyed progressive cranks. Maybe we needs us some more regulation to put a check on their freedoms, and the irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric that inspires them to act.

And it reads like he just got done visiting a war zone…

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools, and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation…
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Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant.

Blame Republicans?

The liberal effort is bolstered by a bushel of bromides and platitudes but never by a crisp, prioritized mission statement that could be objectively recalled later. Banishing some kind of a wage gap? Racial integration? Everyone gets the education, food and clean water they need? Economic sustainability? The human condition becomes ecologically friendly? Can we put a nice, fat, green, satisfying check-mark by any of those, or any other objective?

VDH has just stepped into a land where when liberals want something, they get it — where they rule the roost, and have ruled it for a very long time.

VDH has just stepped into the Twilight Zone. Bet he’s glad to step out of it again.

Hat tip to blogsister Daphne.

It would be nice if liberals could muster the same agitation for fight, the same determination to oppose, the same cantankerous attitude, against terrorists that they manage to focus through their government upon their fellow citizens.

And it would be nice if certain dimwits weren’t thought to be geniuses simply because they show a talent for reading words and looking somewhat nice. Not that I care much, but in Couric’s case she’s coasting on old glory on the last of those two.

Related somewhat with the post previous: I see over on the Hello Kitty of Bloggin that blogger friend John Hawkins is making an observation about liberalism. It always seems to be, as the adage goes, the shirt off the other guy’s back that the liberal stands ready to offer.

To those who are receptive to the liberal viewpoint, the first paradox they might seek to resolve is this: The plan has to do with helping some indigent and it is an important plan because the indigent’s plight is a desperate one. Supposedly, it says something derogatory about all of us that the indigent’s living situation is what it is; great urgency is involved in changing this.

The person from whom the wealth is to be confiscated in order to make this situation better, is just as much a dirty rotten creepy jerk after the deed has been done, as before. Now…there is your paradox. That is your conundrum. If it is so important to offer this aid, and it is impossible to offer the aid without the assets that are to be seized from the DRCJ over there…and the DRCJ is a bigger DRCJ because the task needs to get done. How come getting it done doesn’t have a redeeming effect on the person who is, in effect, bankrolling the aid?

Thing I Know #32 helps to explain this. Liberalism is, among other things, a way to reach your coffin without ever expressing gratitude. To some among us, it is emotionally unacceptable to ever acknowledge that someone enjoyed options, and that someone chose to exercise the option that made life better for someone else. Oh, they’ll admit that much about Ted Kennedy or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or some other wealthy distributionist engaging in the “please tax me some more” malarkey.

But outside of left-wing politics, they cannot acknowledge that anybody anywhere chose to do something nice when an alternative was readily available. And so their impulse is to eliminate the alternative, and pretend it was always that way — so they can rationalize “that wasn’t really a good deed, he was required to do that anyway.”

It’s the Christmas season. Avoid making more liberals: See to it after the wrapping paper is cleared away, your child writes all the thank-you notes he or she can. Just as houseflies come from maggots, liberals come from kids who weren’t taught gratitude.

Traffic Calming Roundabout Thinking (n.)

One of the commenters on Ed Darrell’s site comments way more than most other commenters; he captures nicely the spirit liberals have in mind when they speak of unification, tolerance, learning to get along together.

Which is a nice way of saying this commenter doesn’t believe in any such thing. His litanies are regularly filled with references to “my side” and “your side” and “us” and “them” — opinions like these are very important, because they’re popular. As best I can understand the mindset, it works like this: We need to stop fighting with each other and build a society that works for the benefit of everyone, and when we get that done, we need to figure who among us is not really part of this “everyone” and do everything we possibly can to destroy them.

This person recently came to learn of some remarks by Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus, who is set to become Chairman of the House Banking Committee. He was kind enough to inform me of the Congressman’s comments the way he informs me of everything else being discussed in the underworld of left-wing myrmidons: By injecting the news into a discussion that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. Said underworld is going nuts over something the incoming Chairman said:

In an article yesterday from the publication, The Raw Story, Congressman Bachus intimates that his leadership role will be to keep the regulators working in a subservient role for the banking cartel.

“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,” Bachus told The Birmingham News in an interview.

As I said, I know from experience that what Congressman Bachus said is no different from what regulators and auditors regularly say. There’s even a little joke about it: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is one of the biggest lies, right after “the check is in the mail.” Heard that one?

I would not characterize the Congressman’s comment as a winning one. But he is right, at least about the “Washington view.” We know from the I’m-from-government-I’m-here-to-help-you joke that this is an old situation, it’s much bigger than bank regulation.

Congress makes requirements and auditors go in to make sure the requirements are met. Somewhere along the way, the government becomes a sort of aristocracy; an elite layer of noblemen who enjoy special rights and privileges, and are there to fight the citizen.

How do things get to be this way? From unhealthy, diseased thinking…and it is not deposited into the equation. Like the maggot swarming over the dead body, it is there from the very beginning. We have these twits running around who think it is the job of the Government to fight the governed — they have the same right to vote that everybody else does, and so Government is only too pleased to accommodate. When your grandmother’s golden years turn into her living nightmare of fighting with the IRS over some form your grandfather forgot to fill in properly 45 years ago, you’re looking at the result.

This is what inspires the odious road engineering custom we have imported from Europe, known as “traffic calming.” How does traffic calming work? Exactly the same way a progressive income tax works, by artificially elevating the difficulty involved in attaining success. By fighting the motorist, the same way the government fights bankers, or businessmen who seek to make a profit.

Traffic calming does nothing at all to calm traffic. It makes ordinarily patient, long-tempered motorists into agitated, frenzied assholes.

Still, overall it can lower congestion over the long term in one key way. If you have a trip planned that involves twenty miles and a round-about, with an alternate bypass demanding thirty miles, you’ll probably take the bypass. Now, you ponder the implications of that thinking with regard to an onerous, progressive taxation system and you’ll start to see why there was such contention about the new tax bill — and, why our economy sucks as much as it does right now. Another interesting aspect to traffic calming is: It seems to be geographically planned to thwart this one single potential benefit. Where there is a roundabout, there is considerable difficulty involved in planning an alternate route. Case in point, the last onerous roundabout encountered by Yours Truly, at 39°36’13″N 119°13’37″W.

Wherever you find any kind of traffic calming, coupled up with artificially inflated difficulty involved in taking a bypass route, you know somewhere is a civil engineer who is a complete dick. That engineer thinks like this. That the point to the exercise is to fight the driver. Make life harder just for the hell of it. Make the errand take longer. Create a real potential for an expensive collision every fucking ninety degrees of the circle. Scare the driver. Aggravate the driver. Calm (heh) the traffic.

The mindset is real, and it is out there. It is the province of dimwits. It is as old as the country itself. The mindset says that government exists to torture citizens — and it’s quite alright, you should vote for it because you’re not one of the citizens to be tortured. Government is working for you, by making life tough for that other guy over there.

Aw, but here & there you might become that other guy. Don’t worry. Probably won’t happen.

Every now and then we’ll come to find a new appreciation for the enormous and growing cost of some particular line of business complying with new regulations. What is objectionable about this is not quite so much that it is the biggest expense after payroll; but, rather, that the cost of compliance is much larger than it needs to be. And that this is by design. And that idiots like Ed Darrell’s guest mentioned above are running around, voting it in that way, fully intent on doing it again, trying to inspire others to do the same. Often succeeding at it.

The rest of us take note that ordinary everyday commodities cost many times what they used to. Bread, sugar, coffee, movie tickets — ah, and then there’s health care. Hmmmm…if your head is useful for something besides a hat-hanger, you’ll start to see a connection.

Note the scare quotes, please. Not my question, it’s someone else’s. The question surfaces because of the scarce supply of female libertarians.

Yeah my brain went there too. Sorry, not female librarians; libertarians.

Tim Cavanaugh interviews Allison Gibbs, chief muckety-muck of the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. Among the issues discussed is the bizarre nineteen-to-one (!) ratio of men to women in libertarian ranks.

Some of that gets into the gender disparity between attraction to opportunity & attraction to security, which comes perilously close to the Three Things Morgan Hasn’t Got the Balls to Blog.

I do think, though, that if you changed the subject from libertarianism…to something more like…I recognize liberal democrat policies are bullshit. You wouldn’t be looking at a nineteen-to-one ratio anymore. I’m gonna peg that one at two-and-a-half to one or thereabouts. Just spitballing here.

But the libertarian 19:1 thing is interesting nevertheless. Wonder what’s up with that?

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Hat tip to Ed Morrissey, by way of Robert Stacy McCain.

Question: Where are all the “War On Christmas Is A Myth” People? It seems last year they were out in force, trying to sell us on the idea that Bill O’Reilly just made the whole thing up, unctuously and bumptiously demanding to know our anecdotes so they could take ’em apart. Supposedly, if we would recite everything we thought we knew, we’d find every single “attack” on Christmas was a perfectly valid enforcement of the sacrosanct Wall of Separation, and we’d misinterpreted what it all meant because we were bigots or something. This year I’m not seeing hide nor hair of any of this.

That wasn’t…uh…just a hackneyed talking point put together without a grain of reason or truth behind it or something?

Yes, I know you can’t headline a story quite like that. But I like the way the Los Angeles Times approached sanity a little bit with “Suspected Bomber Dies in Stockholm Blasts.” That beats the hell out of “One dead after suicide bombing in Stockholm“…and then you read and read and read…and you find the evidence indicates, rather strongly it would seem, that the “one dead” is the bomber which would mean this is a complete failure. It looks like The Beeb did the same thing.

At the other end of the spectrum, Michelle Malkin brought the relevant facts and headlined them properly.

To be fair about it, it seems the information about “one dead two injured” arrived first. I would imagine, even in this day and age, that the organizational stress of getting copy in by a deadline would lead to some headlines remaining unchanged that perhaps shouldn’t & wouldn’t…but when we start looking at how many stories about this bombing were headlined this way, that starts to wilt a little bit as a valid excuse.

It’s an important issue. This is a psy-ops war being waged against western civilization. What, is that a right-wing neocon kooky thing to say? Because it’s true. The enemy wants to propagate a feeling, not so much that they’re on the winning side, but that we are on a losing one. Our society is molded and shaped around the idea that our press should be as free as possible, so it can thrive and pay our society back by keeping it strong.

We have a situation here were the bombing failed. Not a first by any means. That is a fact of primary importance. That fact should have made it into the headlines. “One dead” is completely unacceptable.

And the headline writers — perhaps entirely unaware of the vast power they wield — are, actively or passively, muffling and muzzling that bit of truth. “Bombing Kills One” looks like a successful bombing. This was not one, not even a little tiny one, thank God. Oh yeah some property was damaged.

Institutions of the press should not spread untruths to prop up empty morale, but they shouldn’t spread untruths to tear morale down either. I can see how this might be entirely innocent, maybe, but it’s a situation good enough for an Ombudsman’s column.