So while the boy was still living with us, we had a little bit of a “Whoah!” moment when he was in his room and we were watching Season 1 Disc 1…in which young King Henry was receiving a Lewinsky from Mary Boleyn. The scene was very graphic and we decided from then on whether the rug rat was in his room or not, this was best viewed after bedtime. Except we’re starting to value a responsible bedtime for ourselves as well, so it was informally understood we’d start carving our way through this after the boy went to live with his Mother.

Well, The Squeeze forgot all about it. She was very clear this was something not-for-her…you know what not-for-her means in the land of Woemen and Netflix. It’s kind of like a motorcycle. Yes you’re allowed to buy it, and no it won’t lead to a fight…but it’s all yours. Once that’s done you aren’t required to do your lady a special favor, per se…just, if you ever get a hankering to do something like that, just keep in mind you haven’t done it lately because this doesn’t count.

You know the drill, guys.

Funny thing was — she fairly leaped to the Netflix queue to order Disc 3. Oh and here we are, we just got done watching about as much of Disc 3 as we could, which was about half of it. That “Report Disc Problem” thing had to get done right now, toot-sweet. As if the house was on fire. No, she’s not willing to admit I brought in a “win.” But it’s pretty obvious by now I’ve created a monster.

Well I’m the guy who wanted to watch it in the first place. Now I’m getting a little bit irritated.

Item #12 on my List Of Things I Don’t Ever Want To See In Movies Ever Again plainly states:

If two guys are going to be screwing the same woman, or simply getting into a fight over her, I don’t want them to have the same haircut, body build or skull shape. There’s no reason for it. If one’s clean cut, the other one can look like a gorilla. If one’s 6′2″, the other one can be 5′8″. If one’s got a runner’s body physique, the other can look like the Michelin Man. I can’t follow the story if I can’t tell these guys apart.

Charles Branden is played by the guy who played the little pipsqueak in the Count of Monte Cristo remake. He could be Henry VIII’s twin. Someone’s got it in their li’l casting-and-grooming head that the men’s fashion du joir is all shaved down on top, nearly bald, mid twenties, 5′ 10″ or so, kinda scowly kinda pouty.

Have you seen a portrait of King Henry? Three hundred pounds or so, big ol’ body, great big fleshy round head. Yes I know he’s younger in this. There are portraits of a younger Henry too. Looks like a stocky, muscular football player dude. With a big ol’ fleshy round egg-head.

Charles Branden — big ol’ massive square head. Hair like Chewabacca.

It even got her confused. Charles Branden’s screwing Princess Mary, which is his point of historical significance here…and they got it all steamy, suitable for a Showtime unrated miniseries, bare breasts and buttocks galore. My Lady protests “So he’s not supposed to be screwing Ann Boleyn while he’s still married, who’s he doing here??” Woops, wrong dude. Can’t tell the dudes apart. Nice to see it happening to someone else.

Another beef I have: Nothing is happening. Oh there’s lots of jockeying for power, lots of stuffy Middle English talking going on, lots of speculation about who’s lost their virginity and when. I get it. Middle-aged white churchmen are getting all bossy about fornicating, what positions are to be used, when, where, what pieces of paper are supposed to be dispensed that says it’s all okay…and it’s all an exercise in futility because everyone’s fucking like crazed ferrets. The bee in my bonnet is that by the time I’m into episode 8 of something, I want to see at an absolute minimum 7 things to have happened. I think this is only reasonable.

The King is concerned about having an heir. His wife hasn’t given him one. So he meets Anne Boleyn and starts proceedings to have his marriage annulled. That’s one thing.

His sister has started to sleep with Charles Branden and that pisses him off. That’s another thing.

The Pope has been driven from Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor, and His Holiness is less than receptive to King Henry’s request. That’s two-and-a-half things.

Oh yeah, and Henry Fitzroy has died. That’s a fourth thing. But I’m wading my way through a lot of dialogue, not terribly well-written at that, for not very much. I find myself mentally calculating how many minutes would be needed to tell the story properly. I’m thinking at a decent pace of storytelling it could all be wrapped up inside of three hours.

It irritates me to see this story retold and retold for consumption of females. I know exactly what they want to get out of it: Women were oh so oppressed during that time, bought & sold like packs of meat to expand some dynasties, and whittle down others. And that is true. And so Henry VIII whittled his way through six wives, chopping off anybody who didn’t give him a son — which is only partly true.

Historians wrote so much about what took place here because of what came afterward. This is where the great divide between Catholics and Protestants came from…and this whole “King’s Great Matter” was just a piece of it, the primer cap for the bullet. The fact that he only chopped off the heads of two of the six, essentially destroys what these ladies are trying to find in the story. Well not really. The guy’s still scum. But the whole conveyor-belt revolving-door meme just isn’t sustained here.

You want to see girls treated like sacks of meat? Pretentious patriarchal snobs passing bills of attainder, tut-tutting folks of a more fertile age about who could bury the bone with who? Sick, loveless marriages created solely for the purpose of preserving dynasties and starting new ones? Check out Henry’s immediate ancestors.

Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Richard, Duke of York, and Cecilly Neville. Henry V and K(C)atherine de Valois. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Peter The Great of Russa. Louis XIV of France. William The Conqueror and Mathilda of Flanders. Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Charlemagne and his bazillion-and-one wives.

Following the death of Henry V, Parliament passed a bill that made it illegal for the widowed queen to ever marry again. Can’t get stuffier than that, now can you? The Queen’s response was far more satisfying than a “that’s not fair” or “fuck you” or “I quit” or “back to France I go.” She beat all of those with a two-word nugget of deliciousness: “Too late.” She already had a spouse picked out, and as icing on the cake, it was her stable-boy. Their issue would germinate a family tree that looked like a plate of spaghetti when it was done, and in another half century would take over the entire kingdom.

Tell me the female Showtime audience wouldn’t lap that one up with a spoon.

But always, it’s all about the six wives of the fat guy. It certainly does become tiresome. And not very educational. But I know for education I should be turning to The History Channel, or better still, to books like the ones from which I learned this stuff in the first place…

I just don’t see why the good stuff has to remain confined there.

Yup, I agree with that.

Scott Adams, according to the evidence that makes its way to me, is being asked with increasing frequency lately to solve people’s computer problems. I suppose if you’re a former tech-weasel who escaped cubicle-land by becoming a mega-gazillionaire cartoonist, this would be the one trap you cannot escape so long as you maintain contact with people.

Just a few months ago he wrote a column about this that had me cracking up. So true, so true…

There are three types of users who ask for help: Runners, Watchers, and Squatters.

Runners are all too happy to abandon their workstations for as long as it takes you to solve their problems. When the runner is gone, you can think through a variety of potential solutions, try some things, and really dig in to the problem. Personally, I don’t mind runners, although it makes me feel as if I should be getting paid for my services.

Watchers are the most thoughtful users. They might offer some useful information when asked, such as passwords. Perhaps they will compliment you on your computer skills and intuitions. And the Watcher is there when you find your brilliant solution. It’s nice to have a witness sometimes. The only danger with a Watcher is that sometimes you get a talker.

The third type of users is Squatters. A Squatter will not leave his or her Chair of Control, and will insist on being the one to operate the mouse and keyboard. In theory, this shouldn’t be too bad, at least for simple problems. But the Squatter will only give you a half listen. The other half of the squatter’s brain is going rogue, occasionally checking in with you to say, “Click what?”

I have found, generally, that the group to be encountered with the greatest frequency is a sort of a hybrid between the watcher and the squatter. You are to type in the commands, while the person you are helping is to occupy the chair. This juxtaposition is customized down to the fraction of an inch for the comfort of the watcher/squatter, not you. If the keyboard is so much as angled a few degrees in your direction, it’s only because you brought it up.

Occasionally I encountered a watcher/squatter would would refuse to move. I drew the line there. At first, it was for practical reasons: I needed to assume control over the console because I didn’t yet know what the problem was. And then the hulking mass would move, but their disposition would be unsweetened. As in: The nerve of me not knowing how the guy screwed up his computer.

I just don’t do it anymore. My back can’t take it. They have to relinquish or I’m outta there, and they can tell my boss whatever they want.

I try not to be like Nick Burns The Company Computer Guy. “Move!!”

So if you don’t want to be a rude butthole, and people start cornering you with their computer problems, what do you do?

That’s easy. You develop a pattern of communicating that is so incomprehensible and wretched that smartass cartoonists start making fun of your first name.

Received via e-mail…

Twenty-two years ago, a certain family relative initiated the first steps of his divorce in what has now become the customary American way: He invited me over to the apartment he shared with his wife, to tell me how much my life would be improved by a bottle of shampoo that was so incredibly concentrated that it would last me six months. I really needed to get in on this.

I do believe my hostility against the Cult of the Personality began there.

It was perhaps a dozen years after that, a young fellow who had previously been my next door neighbor, and since then hadn’t had anything whatsoever to do with us, dropped by. I’d had a girlfriend and he’d had a girlfriend, and since I moved away those two crazy kids went off and got married. He’d called ahead and I think we had some dinner ready, we offered an extra couple of plates but they’d have no time for it they were in such an incredible hurry. We thought it was a little odd to be looking up someone you hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years, on an evening in which you were so busy you couldn’t even sit down to a home cooked meal.

So they swung on by and delivered their pitch. I don’t recall any products in particular so perhaps the timing was not to their benefit. First words out of his mouth were “This is not MLM,” repeated a couple of times, then he proceeded to drop a pitch for MLM. We didn’t buy, and within a year they were divorced.

This has only happened to me twice, but the similarities between the two episodes still creep me out. The man does all the talking, making sure to put a smile in his voice. Which can be a bit creepy. The woman hovers around in the background, quietly, trying to find something constructive to do. Rather like a stalking panther. Nothing smiley about her at all. That will make perfect sense, of course, in a month or two when she petitions.

Oh and always there is some name. The founder of the organization, “This Giant of a Man” who is, in unstated terms, head & shoulders above the rest of us.

I’ve come to loathe everything about this. I still believe in the liberty of private citizens to engage freely in contracts with each other…but would I be contradicting myself to demand some exceptions to this? It doesn’t seem anyone else is. People demand “sensible regulations” all the time and still insist they’re good capitalists.

I have given up on figuring out if an impending divorce pushes a young couple into MLM, or if MLM causes the divorce. Most likely is: A youthful marriage causes free spending, which causes tight finances, which causes an immersion in MLM and a divorce. But I don’t really give a flying crap what it is anymore.

We don’t have to keep this legal in order to be good capitalists. We don’t need to limit how the transgressors are punished in order to remain a civilized society. In fact I would insist a civilized society would bring on the pain. Stocks. Leg irons. Whips. Dunking stools. Electroshock.

The fantasy that a man can bail himself out of a financial jam with his happy-talky Guy-Smiley amazingly wonderful charisma-or-whatever, goes way back. It is ancient, always popular, and it is particularly destructive to all who come into contact with it. It’s probably ruined more lives than that other dream of dropping out of school to become a basketball star, or rock musician.

Yes, I have some compassion. I would say a lighter sentence is in order for the “freshmen,” those suckers who just got done “investing,” and have yet to re-coup, than for the more senior members who have typically been more successful at turning a profit. Three hours in the town square being pelted with rotten vegetables, I’d say they’ve paid their debt to society. Really, most of ’em probably need nothing more than a firm whack on the side of the head. For the others, we’d need a deep dark dungeon.

Public viewing is not compatible with what I’d have in mind for them.

My girlfriend just handed me a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of tomato soup — and I wolfed ’em down! I’m brilliant! Brilliant, I say!

After I get done writing this blog post I’m going to hit the Publish button. That’s brilliant!

The remote control for my DVD player went tits-up so I’m playing movies on my old XBox console. That’s brilliant!

I finished my beer a couple minutes ago, so I went out to the Daddy Fridge and got myself another. And this time I didn’t injure my foot doing so. That’s brilliant!

If a bill comes in, I pay it. If my ass starts itching, I reach down & give it a scratch. Brilliant!

If you think I’m mocking the lamestream media for their latest talking point about PrezBO’s sacking of General McChrystal, you’re absolutely right. (Audio available here.)

Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror, cause I get better loking each day.
To know me is to love me; I must be a hell of a man.
Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble — but I’m doing the best that I can.

FrankJ tries to criticize Arizona…and ends up failing at it.

Arizona is just a rogue state that doesn’t play by the rules — the way America is supposed to be. I heard federal officials went down there to yell at them, but they forgot their ID so Arizona deported them to Mexico. I wish we had more states like that.

Don’t be too hard on Frank though. I tried to read this without chuckling, and I failed at that.

Another hat tip to Gerard, and this one points to my former fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm Room.

Obama has been in office roughly a year and a half. That’s long enough to get a handle on what motivates our president. He’s pretty binary. When he’s not partying with rock stars, he’s either apathetic or angry. Here, in no particular order, is a little list of Obama’s responses to both world situations and domestic policy initiatives that have occurred so far during his administration:

It breaks down this way: Eight issues arouse apathy in He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, and three issues arouse anger.

Graphic shamelessly swiped from No Sheeples Here

At this point, I don’t imagine Bookworm has ventured into the realm of reasonable dispute. His Eminence is, as she notes, a binary figure. When a coin lands on heads, there can be little argument that it has indeed landed on heads.

And now that we all agree on that…it does not appear the apathy-versus-anger response is being decided according to America’s interests, or a desire to defend the nation robustly or responsibly.

But that much is the opinion of Yours Truly. Why don’t you RTWT, and see if you agree. Here’s a hint: Overall, it seems apathy is the response when a thing happens that can really affect the outcome of something, and impact the lives of the little people. Anger, on the other hand, is the response when someone’s screwing with Holy Man’s P.R.

How come we have democrats, again? Something about Republicans being apathetic about the plight of the common-man? They’re just so cold and lacking in compassion? If your body was on fire they might keep you around long enough to light their cigars with it before they tossed you out the door?

We need to vote democrats into office so that we can have some leaders who will empathize with us. Who will feel some urgency when the hoi polloi are missing some things they have to have, or are being forced to tangle with financial hardships they cannot abide. Vote democrats into office, and maybe we have a shot at fixing problems like those.

And yet, here we are. We have a genuine crisis, and Holy Man is bored by it. He wants to play golf…if He’s feeling really engaged in the moment, for some reason, He’ll want to sell us some crap.

If someone’s messing around with His image, that’s when He’s spurred into some real action.

Apathy, anger. I like this approach. It is crude and binary, but it’s no more complicated than the thing it is set up to observe. I’m going to start watching Chairman Zero in this light, and I recommend you do the same. For as long as it fits. And I am presuming, reasonably I think, that it always will.

From 10 Super Drunk Soccer Fans, hat tip to Linkiest.

From Bad Astronomy.

My Dad’s a Dad. My brother is a Dad. There are no mothers in my family, which is a rather unhappy situation. Mother’s Day whistles right on by us. I harass my kid to call his mother, squeeze some money into his hand so he can get her something, and then I buy my girlfriend something nice to thank her for helping to raise him. That’s what passes for Mother’s Day, so you would think I would be Johnny-on-the-spot celebrating Father’s Day.

And I should. But Freebergs are never on-time buying gifts…hardly ever.

The girlfriend has been buying all of the food for the last two or three years. It’s just part of the way we’ve decided to divide up the bills. She has suffered a setback lately, so I insisted that she should stay home tonight and I’d take care of the shopping list after work. I came out at 3:30 this morning to answer nature’s call and saw the shopping list dutifully written out and draped across the keyboard of Blogger Central where I’d be sure not to miss it.

And so after work, per our agreement, I clocked out and set out on the streets of Niner Fiver Six Three Zed. I have some bills I need to pay; the late Father’s Day presents need to be acquired; we need the grub, and the remote has conked out on my beloved Memorex DVD/VHS combo player. It is this last one that perturbs me the most. The player is six years old — I acquired it very soon after “Kidzmom” walked out — and I have never had a lick o’ trouble with it. But button by button, the remote ceased to do my bidding and now it is altogether inoperable. The player itself still runs like a champ. But my failed attempt at interfacing it with a Panasonic universal remote, suggests that the problem is the unit’s planned obsolescence and it is time to graduate to another. For no reason but planned obsolescence. And you better believe that chaps my hide.

Without any way to direct the player to start and stop, I’m burning through Dukes of Hazzard episodes whole discs at a time. This is time consuming, and furthermore, I’m working my way through Season Six at a pace far too hasty for my liking.

I paid one bill. I got the foodstuffs. Man oh man…I tell you, The Good Lord did not build men for grocery stores. Talk about bringing back old, bad memories. This probably brings to a close a solid two years not having to step into a grocery store. It’s gotten much worse than I remember. People are text messaging now. I feel like the front of my grocery cart should have some cow-catcher device on it to shove people out of the way, as they remain transfixed on their little viewscreens.

No Father’s Day presents. None at all. I ended up having to jot out an apologetic e-mail, meekly asking if the dads had already acquired iPods. I needed to know. Retail electronics purchases have come to this — here, let me quote myself: “If I don’t have an i-thing, and I don’t know anybody who does, they have nothing to sell me.” Yes, that is it. Our “Electronics Department” has rechargeable batteries and it has games for the XBox 360 and PS3. Other than that, it has things that interface with an iPod. And some LCD television sets…that is all. The vast bulk of it is things that interface with the iPod. Cases. Cables. Batteries. Battery packs. Chips. Cards. Sockets. Alarm clocks. Boom boxes.

This is not good for Folsom. I have watched this place for a long, long time…a very long time. It has been very strongly and sensibly engineered around an objective of raising toddlers in a healthy environment, and this has worked out very, very well. Well guess what: The toddlers aren’t toddlers anymore. They are teenagers and young adults. The neighborhood parks are not as much a staple to life as they used to be. The kids have constructed social lives for themselves, if you want to call them that, that revolve around listening to personal tunes with little white earphone cords.

For all the acreage and all the capital and all the sweat that has been invested in retail here, you cannot really buy that much in Folsom. Men my age — and the women, even moreso, I suspect — are concerned about our midsections, so you can buy lots of machines that are supposed to exercise your tummy. And Jamba Juice, books, arts & crafts, all sorts of things you can buy just about anywhere else. So retail-wise, there’s no reason to come here.

Home-wise, there’s not much reason to come here either. We have lots of middle-age empty-nesters who bought their houses so they could raise their babies, and now the babies have grown and left. For college.

The traffic lights and signs are erected for the purpose of fighting you as you drive through them. Fighting you not regulating you; they nurture an inimical relationship with you that you can feel as it wafts through the air.

I have joked before — in a dark way, not in a “hah hah” kind of way — that the Folsom motorists who make the traffic such a stressful experience, being the assholes they are, are actually sympathetic figures. Their wretched behavior is a symptom and not a cause. You get this way when you have such a modest list of errands to do within a patch of four square miles, and it takes you two and a half hours. I feel it happening to me.

Perfect slogan for Folsom: “What’s up with this jerk riding my ass, he acts like every second counts, where’s he going in such a hurry? And what’s up with this asshole in front of me? He’s going to make me late!”

It’s like being in a zombie movie. They harass you and harass you and harass you, and then one of them bites you and you become one of them.

Even better slogan for Folsom: “I’m never in the way. You always are.”

The morale of this story? Shop on time for Father’s Day. On Amazon. That’s the way the world works now. And whoever is in charge of buying the food in your household — by which I mean, going out on foot and bringing it — if it isn’t you, then you really should think about going out of your way to do something to thank them.

I’m going to be forty-four pretty soon. When I do certain things and they, just by their very nature, cause my blood pressure to go up, I experience a sharp drop in my interest in doing them. You’ll notice people twice my age show precisely this tendency, and on average enforce it twice as strongly.

I think we’re going to be ordering some groceries brought to our doorstep more & more often in the months ahead.

I just finished checking out what Debbie Schlussel had to say about several of my blogging compatriots. It took me a few minutes, not a whole lot, but it isn’t an exercise I wish to repeat because I have to go to work.

Unfortunately, no sooner had that been done than I see by my e-mail updates that Sammy Benoit is also complaining Debbie Schlussel is sliming him.

I just don’t have the time for this.

My comments at Cassy’s place are as follows:

The one point to be made about all this, is this is my experience when I did the appropriate homework and made every attempt to give Debbie the benefit of the doubt. I read HER material, and when I was done reviewing it, there was NOTHING there. I’ve had this experience with Schlussel before. She holds a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. The woman cannot logically make a point. Speculating on it, I would say she possesses a number of appealing attributes that bring all kinds of coveted credentials and accolades to people who don’t deserve the privileges that go with them, and do not command the talents they should require. She’s female, attractive in her own way, skinny, blond, driven and mean.

In high school, every girl-clique has a ringleader, the “Alpha male” of the group. This one has the final word on who’s on the outs, who’s headed there, what boy is to be thought-of as cute. She has the final word on these things because she is accustomed to having it, and for no other reason; and she’s female cute skinny driven & mean. My speculation is — that’s Debbie. When she presents an argument, it all seems to boil down to “You’re not evaluating what she has to say, she’s evaluating you. You’ve got one shot to show Debbie you’re a decent person, and if you fuck it up you must be an antisemite.” And what I really find disturbing and troubling is, I’ll bet my last $10 that in the course of pursuing that law degree, this worked out for her just fine. Everything is a 15-year-old-girl argument. “She didn’t do what I said! We’ll all just HATE her forEVER!!!”

Great googly moogly Deb, try decaf.

Over in Europe, in several countries it is illegal to deny the holocaust took place. Now, I really don’t have much information about who, if anybody at all, is being prosecuted over this. Probably the dregs of society, and maybe the streets are actually safer because of those laws.

But…oh dear, here goes my name, onto that list…it is a blessing that such a law is, for now, unworkable here in the United States. It’s not just the free speech aspect of it. Such a law encourages people to think the Debbie Schlussel way. You know, you have these “pure” people who are right about everything, and impure people who are wrong about everything. You become an impure person if you are connected to another impure person, or connected to a person who is connected to a person who is connected to a person who is impure. Once that happens you can’t ever be right about anything ever again. You’re an intellectual leper.

I’m sure, if the issue is holocaust denial, in some cases that is entirely appropriate. But this is not the way grown-up adults do their reasoning. People are people, ideas are ideas. Like the guy on the radio said a few months ago: “If you can somehow manage to find, in this day and age, a real, live, Nazi from Hitler’s Third Reich and everything…and that Nazi happened to be opposed to the Obama health care plan. The Nazi might be right, I’d say, about that one, solitary thing.”

Schlussel is bright in her own way, but she’s allowing whatever legal talents she has, to atrophy. By “legal” I really mean forensic; conducting rational discourse about a point. She has allowed herself to become accustomed, for how long I do not know, to an environment in which once you “slime” whoever your opposition is in the moment, the job’s done and you move on. And it says something when she goes on the warpath, and suddenly everyone who’s anyone finds themselves tossed into the Schlussel-icky-people-barrel within 24 hours of each other. Guess I’m headed there myself.

She is, in the final analysis, becoming precisely what she hates. That’s a shame.

First they came for Cassy Fiano and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t Cassy Fiano…then they came for Emily Zanotti and Sammy Benoit…

Should I even give this one an intro. It hardly seems necessary, I thoroughly enjoyed every single paragraph of this take-down.

It doesn’t really prove very much. It’s more of an exercise in creating doubt about the opposite. But the doubt it creates is, to say the least, significant. And it always entertains me when left-wing blogs yank things. The pattern that continues to emerge is that they aren’t acting to keep the conversation on an even keel, it’s more about promoting the beloved agenda and making sure anything that might bring harm to it, is kept hidden from view.

Today’s dedicated liberals embrace diversity in all things except thought.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Hat tip to Rick.

And Americans are yearning for his style.

It seems like every week or so, you see blogs and Twitter comments in the vein of, “Hey, did you see this great speech by Chris Christie?”

And they’re not actually great speeches, at least not the way we’ve been conditioned to expect in the Age of Obama — not much flowery language, not much rhetoric that soars — but just him and a group of New Jerseyans, and him laying out the state’s enormous problems in blunt honesty, and a raw, unvarnished pep talk that the path ahead is going to be hard, but will be the responsible and wiser course in the long run. And what makes him seem great is that the audience knows he’s not trying to sell them anything; we know he’s not making an implausibly optimistic promise because what he describes is not all that appealing, or at least not all that easy. He’s leveling with everyone, treating the voters like grown-ups, and they’re appreciating it, recognizing that it is radically different from what politicians usually offer.

Compare and contrast:

I hope this is just a devastating comparison. It should be. Let’s just cut through all the crap here & now: Nobody really needs to be told which of these leaders is apt to fix a problem, and which one is inclined to make new ones.

We all know. That’s why the speech that’s supposed to be boring is actually great, and the speech that’s supposed to be great is actually boring.

As Lorne Greene might’ve said, “that’s a-hundred-and-five to you or me.” And there he sits, somewhere in the space around Queen Anne Hill and Lake Union, piling thousands upon thousands of items into the two columns, the left and the right.

He’s in that paper-thin upper crust of bloggers…and of course, although few will aspire to point it out, we all know what that means. It means he possesses the testicular fortitude to notice things. I first noticed Gerard Van der Leun noticing things some four years ago, shortly after Rush Limbaugh noticed him noticing his things. You’ll recall a certain young maggot, kind of a freckle-faced evil Jimmy Olsen, had opined in a newspaper column “I don’t support the troops.” Hugh Hewitt subsequently interviewed the maggot on a radio program, and listeners tuned in to find out if this was the work of a brave conscientious objector speaking truth to power, or…a maggot.

The sound clip is no longer available. But the verdict was clear. Maggot, maggot. Supermaggot. I made earlier reference to testicular fortitude — this poor maggot had been robbed of his, by a post-modern culture a little bit too eager to apologize for a patriarchal supremacy that it never really had.

Of the tinny anti-masculine undertones, Gerard had this to say:

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all.
:
Above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a “gay” voice. Not that at all. It is neither that gentle nor that musical. Nor is it that old shabby lisping stereotype best consigned to the dustbin of popular culture. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

It now seems prescient. This was the topsoil from which the weed that is the Obama administration eventually sprang forth. The American Castrati, each individual deciding for himself how he would speak his truth to power, what jokes to recycle, where to insert the word “basically” into his next quasi-question…but…as far as what to think, deciding without benefit of mental testicles. Going with the herd. Or the swarm. Floating up his audible trial balloons, with the “slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences.”

And somewhere in the nest, at the nucleus of the swarm, someone makes the call about which trial balloons will be given an atta-boy and which will be smacked down. From that binary enforcement, the message radiates outward and the hive is kept in sync. It opposes war, and troops. Champions increased minimum wage. Rolls back the Bush tax cuts. It seems to think the ultimate solution to the oil spill is to tax and fine BP out of existence. It loves the ObamaCare law, no matter what it says.

It knows of few constants in the universe. Other than whatever is white must be bad, whatever is male and straight must be bad, anything gay is golden, and one of the best ways to make a given commodity more affordable is to make it much more expensive for companies to bring it to market.

Gerard noticed the urban, neutralized, gelded oration from those in what we call Generation X. He noticed this because he has the balls they lack. He’s a registered democrat (or was), brought into the real world, the world of cause-and-effect in which true things remain true regardless of who agrees — by, among other things, that awful Tuesday morning in 2001.

Some of the most fascinating and foresighted bloggers I know are in that camp. They were on the left side until eight years and nine months ago.

Here’s to ya Gerard. Many more.

There’s no buzz about “OMGWTF It’s The Best Speech EVAR!!1!” this time. Not happenin’.

What are we doing? We’re holding meetings with people, spending money, and handing out power to people and commissions.

William Jacobson bottom-lines it in one sentence:

I don’t know where I’m going, but follow me anyway.

I see on Sean Hannity’s show Karl Rove came up with an interesting point: This is like what, Day 57 or something, and you just met with BP and told them to use all available technology? Huh. How inspiring. So what was our government doing during the first 56 days?

The President is drawing a lot of flak over this comment about convening a commission to tell Him whose ass to kick. There are three major reasons why He should consider kicking His own ass:

Aw c’mon, say the 46 percent who still support His Eminence — what else do you want from Him? He’s doing all He can! Can’t swim to the bottom of the ocean and suck it up with a straw, after all.

Well, Human Events editors have put together a list of ten good ideas He could have engaged by now…

1. Accepted help from the Netherlands when they offered it shortly after the accident. The Dutch, experienced in the oil business, offered prompt help for oil skimming booms and plans to create barriers to stop the oil from infiltrating into wetland areas.

2. Suspended the Jones Act, as President Bush did after Katrina, to allow foreign vessels into American waters to assist with recovery without having to swap ships and transfer equipment onto American flagged vessels.

3. Suspended the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws, as President Bush did after Katrina, to allow rapid deployment of new workers to help with containment efforts.

There are several miles of boom available in Maine, ready for shipment down to the gulf at any time.

Packgen’s boom not only passes every independent ASTM assessment, it’s apparently superior to the material currently being used in the Gulf. According to John Lapoint, it’s priced only slightly higher than oil boom that BP apparently normally purchases from places like China. And according to Packgen, boom manufactured in Auburn, Maine, on Monday can be onsite at the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday. Boom from China normally has a lead time in months.

Packgen still has the 13 miles of ASTM certified floating oil containment boom, packed and palletized and ready to ship at a moment’s notice to the Gulf Coast.

It’s crisis management; basic communication. The same sort of stuff you’d want to see happening if it was the roof of your house with six-foot tongues of flame leaping out of it at 2:30 in the morning.

That we haven’t seen much of it by now, makes it unlikely we’ll see much of it from this point on. It’s a culture of opportunity-from-crisis, glorious speechifying, commissions, czars, anti-capitalist bullshit, photo-ops, symbolism over substance, talking over doing, strutting and posturing.

Chris Matthews has now figured out what Peggy Noonan nailed down over two weeks ago: Our nation’s first Holy President does not have something called “executive command,” nor does He seek it, since said command would require a solid ownership of the technical details relevant to the oil spill…or any other given problem. This is not the Obama way. He convenes panels, commissions, councils, committees. These exercises in group-think are executed not quite so much to produce the answer that provides the greatest potential for a good outcome, but rather to produce the answer that will bring the least damage to His presidency. For His political ambitions, the outcome is about as beneficial as anything else possibly could be…which in this case is not much.

For the rest of us, it’s about as beneficial as whatever would be produced by a monkey throwing darts at a spinning circle.

Oopsie. “Monkey.” Was that racist?

There really is no race involved; this custom is so much older than the Obama Administration. We’ve made these offices to be filled by an executive who will possess singular, individual ownership of a problem — an then the executive convenes panels so that there is no ownership. “I was following the recommendation of the blue-ribbon commission,” he’ll say.

Sarah Palin had some thoughts about Obama’s speech as well. FireDogLake would like to make Palin the focus; they’re not too fond of her comments. They’d like to critique them before anybody has a chance to pay attention to them.

But Palin does have executive command. She sees entities, and she sees responsibilities that are upheld by those entities. In the case of the oil companies, she understands their mission is to bring a return on investment to the shareholders. Which means they can be trusted to bring oil up out of the ground — and that is all. Sure it’s not in BP’s interest to have this kind of disaster drag on day after day, but it isn’t appropriate to trust them to prevent it when the rest of us, be we direct consumers of oil or be we not, have such a heavy stake in it. Her words strike an appropriate balance, she even swivels Bill O’Reilly around to her point of view when he does not initially agree, and FireDogLake cannot stand it.

And now I’m going to say something exceptionally unkind.

Barack Obama is doing everything exactly right. He comes from a dysfunctional piece of America, one so obsessed with interpersonal communication that the persons living there are thoroughly drunk on it. He is one of them. They are blisteringly angry, right now, with Him. They live out their lives by avoiding technical details like vampires avoiding holy water. They voted for Him, because they didn’t want Him to be one of them; They wanted Him to be better. They wanted to bundle up all of the bothersome technical details they cannot begin to understand, throw them at Him, and have Him sort them all out with his hopey-changey-wonderful-charisma-or-whatever.

That is how they do their thinking: They externalize it. It is their very fabric. You are reminded of this when you try to discuss things with them: “Do you presume to know more about global warming than hundreds of Nobel-prize-winning scientists?”

Here He is treating arcane technical minutiae precisely the same way they do, by punting to someone else. How dare He!

His antithesis, Palin, maintains at this late hour a very high unfavorable rating. That is because the wrong people are being asked. The hopey-changey-charisma people don’t want to be part of the decision-making process. They want someone much better — meaning, different — to make the decisions. They want to throw the decisions at someone else, someone entirely alien, just as Obama wants to throw the decisions at committees.

They should be made irrelevant and ineffectual, because that is what they wish to be. They don’t want to be held accountable to anything. They just want to hear themselves talk.

We have a President who lacks executive command, and doesn’t want to have it, voted into office by people who go to great lengths to avoid it and really don’t want to learn anymore about what it is. These are the folks who have so few stories to tell about going against the majority; they’ve never done it, except for those rare occasions on which they thought they could flip the majority around. If it worked they came out the hero, and if it didn’t then of course they gave up.

Well, you aren’t going to have this executive command unless you can tune into the vibe of the biggest majority of all, which is reality. And you cannot master reality if you do not assume command of the relevant facts, and what they mean. You have to think like a builder in order to do that.

In 2008, that is not what this nation wanted, so today we do not deserve to have it. We got some guy who’s good at giving speeches, good at packaging up the “whatever” so that the gift wrap is lovely regardless of the contents. We got that, because that is what we said we wanted.

Now we’ve got a real problem and there’s no leadership installed that is prepared to deal with it.

There’s a profound lesson in there for us all.

Update: Daniel Hannan says I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama.

These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.

A grateful hat tip to Harvey at IMAO.

I’m enjoying watching the Washington Post get their butt cheeks handed to ’em on a platter by the folks commenting on their blog.

A democrat congressman was approached outside a Pelosi fundraiser by some unidentified young camera-persons who claimed to be “students” working on a “project.” For reasons unknown, the congressman became immediately combative when they asked him if he supported the Obama agenda. The story is already a little bit old & worn-out by now: He claimed to have a “right to know who you are,” grabbed the person asking the question in a full body hold, grabbed him by the neck, and generally acted like a jerk. A drunk jerk. His intent was clearly to intimidate, and as far as the body contact people have been prosecuted for less.

Whoever runs the Washington Post blog thinks the big scandal is about who was filming this & why. If the persons commenting reflect the persons subscribing and reading, that dog won’t hunt.

According to Ben Smith at Politico, the democrats are going to use the talking points anyway:

1. There is always the part of the story that you can’t see in these gotcha style videos — what were these folks doing, how did they approach him, how were the cameraman and/or others off camera acting?

2. Why would any legitimate student doing a project or a journalist shagging a story not identify themselves. Motives matter — what was the motivation here? To incite this very type of reaction?

3. This is clearly the work of the Republican Party and the “interviewer” is clearly a low level staffer or intern. That’s what explains blurring the face of the “interviewer” and refusing to identify the entity this was done for. The Republicans know if they were caught engaging in this type of gotcha tactic it would undermine their own credibility — yet if it was an individual acting on his own there is no reason that person would have blurred themselves out of the video — and if it was the work of a right wing blog they would have their logo on the video and be shouting their involvement from the roof top.

4. This was a purposefully partisan hit job designed to incite a reaction for political reasons — but it is a tactic so low — the parties involved are remaining anonymous.

5. The fact that no one wants to take credit for this should raise real questions in the minds of voters and the press.

This further supports my theory that progressives are the kids you knew who got away with everything under the sun, now all grown up. Their mommas caught ’em red handed fishing a cookie out of the jar, and when “I was just putting it back” didn’t work, they went for the tried-and-true “Who ya gonna believe Ma? Me or your lyin’ eyes?” They think this will work, because it always has, and they could very well be right.

In their world, they can’t really be caught at anything. Anything. Ever.

Myself, I’m just trying to think of when a guard at Guantanamo was ever availed of such a defense. Or in Iraq or Afghanistan. Is that how we should have handled the Koran-toilet-flushing “scandal,” progressives? Thunder away with righteous indignation, demanding to know who came up with the story and what they were after?

Because it occurs to me, in that case, once the facts were all in it emerged that might’ve been the appropriate response.

There is a lesson here. When you’re no longer advocating a certain course of action because you think it’s wise, and instead you’re advocating a certain course of action because you think it makes people all better & wonderful, it has an intoxicating effect. People start to embark on this “ends justify the means” thing. While Congressman Etheridge is drunk on…whatever it is he drank…the Washington Post seems to be drunk on this stuff. Omigaw, we’re supposed to be objective journalists but our beloved progressive agenda is getting some abuse here, and we cannot allow that. Let’s go out and tell the sheeples what concerns they should really have. They’ll do what we say — they always have…

Great googley moogley, what breathtaking arrogance, presuming to tell us who the good guys & bad guys are while going through the motions of running an objective and unbiased newspaper. You don’t develop that kind of hubris overnight; this must be a longstanding habit. Really makes you wonder what was going on before the YouTubes, that nobody really bothered to show us at the time. Because they didn’t have to.

As I mentioned in the previous, we booked only one night at Timber Cove. Our reservations for Wednesday were down in Napa. After showering and partly-packing, as we wolfed down our Eggs Benedict down in the dining room, we explored the possibility of an alternate road trip purely on a lark. We could have gone back the way we’d come, or opted for Plan B which has become something of a custom, to zip upward toward 101 from the mouth of the Russian River.

But there was an alternate route, an innocuous looking one, that pokes out at Stewart’s Point just to the North. We inquired to our waiter what his guesstimate was for going up that way and coming out at Healdsburg; it had been twelve years since I’d gone over that narrow road, and nine since I’d visited the fair city. I always wanted to take new gal. When we got back to the room we realized the waiter’s best-guess was very close to Google Maps’ figure, a little over an hour. Just a few minutes later, at 11:30, we were at Stewart’s, taking the hard-right with the car’s rear end pointed oceanward, gunning it as fast as seemed safe. Twenty-five miles per.

The following shot seems to have been taken on this journey. At this point, we’re running into a patch where, again, The Girlfriend and I have yet to synchronize our albums. I recall pulling over for many a fine shot with that marvelous camera of hers, but we’d only done our file transfers the night before.

The following two are from hers, though. Healdsburg is a beautiful city. Not much to do besides browse antique shops, but it certainly is visually pleasing.

The remaining are all taken with my Polaroid.

We checked into the Vino Bello Resort, just outside the city limits of Napa. The following morning, Thursday, she and I hiked up the hill into the vineyard to snap some more pics. At this point, the ratio between what you see, against what actually got saved, is getting quite low; we may have literally hundreds just from this walk, or something approaching that.

I have an Excel table I’ve been maintaining in version control, that defines exactly why Timber Cove Inn is 150.2 miles away from our local gas station by car, and 178.6 miles from my front door by bicycle. Someday, maybe I might actually take that trip on two wheels; naturally, it nails down exactly where lodging is available and where food and liquid refreshments may be sought. There is a conspicuous entry halfway down that says “72.0: Big Metal Man.” The sculpture is visible from over a mile away in all directions and is a well-known landmark in the area. This is a tribute, as I understand it, to the laborers who helped build the Napa valley’s thriving wine industry. You can see someone else’s capture of it here, and what you see below is mine.

There is a wine tasting room under the vineyard. I have some cool shots of the interior, which I checked out while we were checking out the appointment book for her eyebrow-waxing & what-not. This is pretty cool, I’ll have to add something like it into that half-mile-wide dream house when the time comes to build it. Lots of candles on wrought-iron stands, dripping with wax, like something out of a Vincent Price movie.

Now that I’m home, I see I got lazy toward the end with preparing these batches. But not, fortunately, with snapping the shutter. We’re halfway through our “relax & tend to business” day, our singular buffer between sunburns and punching that timeclock on Monday…cavorting around in our underwear, doing laundry. I’ll see what I can do about squeezing in one more batch.

A short time ago The Blog That Nobody Reads put up a list of one hundred things that do not make you a better person. We perceived then, and still maintain today, that the need for the list was present, intense and palpable. People nowadays seem to be grasping at straws, trying to find ways to show their wonderfulness; and the things they do to show off their wonderfulness, overall, do not seem to have beneficial effect.

Frankly, over the years we have come to see this as something of a crisis. We’d even go so far as to say society would be better off if everyone just chucked the whole effort, and contented themselves with regarding all others as a bunch of stinkers, and being seen that way.

We had many thoughts about the ensuing reactions to this list, which we jotted down during vacation. We were most impressed by this: If you measure the response by nose, it seems close to ninety percent of the readers agreed with us. If you measured it by perceived volume, the ratio became reversed. To put it more simply, those who objected to our list objected loudly and forcefully, toward the end of projecting greater numbers in their camp than it seems actually exist. And they seem to be doing this deliberately. It seems they’ve picked out their chosen techniques for demonstrating some cosmetic personal wonderfulness they don’t really have; showing it over and over again, manic-compulsively, takes enough of their energy and they aren’t terribly receptive to having to contend with debates about whether the wonderfulness is genuine or not. Wasn’t part of their plan.

It occurs to me that perhaps there’d be less consternation and contention if alternatives were provided. How can people show off their wonderfulness? My short answer would be: Just stop showing off. After all, if you look to others to confirm that you’re wonderful, and what you’re really after is self-confidence, obviously you’re never going to get there — you have to develop your own internal barometer for your wonderfulness. You need to be sure. You have to get hard-nosed enough that a whole room full of people can tell you you’re wrong about something, and deep down you’ll still know you’re right. You have to measure this independently.

I was not able to come up with a list of a hundred things that really do show you’re a better person. But I did come up with fifty.

1. Run.
2. Walk.
3. Ride a bicycle.
4. Run, walk or ride, just a little bit further than you ever have before. Make records. Break them with new records. Then break those.
5. Read until you find a word you’ve never seen before. Find out what it means. Use it…just once. Then do it all over again.
6. Notice some things about what people do that you’ve not heard of anyone else noticing. Point it out.
7. Donate — anonymously.
8. Open a door for a pretty girl.
9. Open a door for an ugly girl.
10. Teach a child a new skill.
11. Make a list of things to do for your entire day. Cut it off at five. Make a list for the entire week. Cut it off at seven. Make sure each one is all-the-way-done.
12. Make a pot of coffee while your girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife is still sleeping. Prepare a cup exactly the way they like it, and bring it to them.
13. Stop an echo.
14. If someone’s working hard to sell you something, and the product makes sense to you, buy it. If it doesn’t, tell them why you aren’t buying. Tell them exactly why. The whole story. Whether you think they can do something about it, or not. Put them in charge of figuring out the next move.
15. Find someone you know who is doing more than their share of the work. Figure out if there’s anything you can do to help. If you can do this, then get it done. If you can’t, ask.
16. If you can see the bartender is one of these workhorses that keeps the whole place from collapsing, and she’s keeping track of what’s going on, taking initiative, but doesn’t enjoy any advancement or seniority from any of this, tip her something crazy. I mean, like 150% percent. Tell her why.
17. If you see a soldier out celebrating his safe return with his girl, motion your waiter over and tell him you’d like to settle the soldier’s bill.
18. If you can do #17 anonymously, do so.
19. If you cannot, give the soldier a great big thank you.
20. Find some arcane political issue you’ve never understood. Read up on it until you do understand it.
21. Always vote down whatever creates a new “civil right” that didn’t exist before, since this would deprive someone of freedom.
22. Also, anything that would nationalize an industry or function that is currently within the private sector. We’ve moved far enough in that direction already.
23. Whatever would make litigation more plentiful or likely, because hey, who really wants to live in a world like that.
24. Everything that would make it more difficult or impractical to start, buy or manage a business; if the thing we want is a stronger economy, then let’s start working toward that.
25. Find out who is responsible for the proposed laws that fit #21, #22, #23 and #24, and vote them out of office. Something tells me they don’t really want to be working at anything anyway.
26. Always give kids the bigger picture. If you’re watching a thirty year old television show with a twelve-year-old, explain Watergate and Nadia Comaneci, so he knows why bad guys had to wear business suits and good guys had to rescue Russian gymnasts who were trying to escape bad guys in nice business suits.
27. Completely sidestep it when a liberal veers off the subject of the argument, and starts evaluating your worthiness as a person. Just come out and tell him: Yes, maybe I’m a creep, but back to the subject at hand…your idea won’t work. Keep doing it.
28. Grab the grocery cart that jerk has let loose in in the middle of the parking lot; use it as yours if you’re looking for one, otherwise put it where it belongs.
29. Pick up litter.
30. On a rainy day, hold your umbrella over the head of a woman who forgot to bring hers.
31. If you know an old person who is living independently, see what you can do about delivering their groceries.
32. Take lots of pictures.
33. Show them to people.
34. Put them on the Internet, if that’s appropriate…
35. Having your life at the mercy of a complex piece of machinery is a privilege and an opportunity, not a problem or a burden. If your home computer does things you don’t understand, find out what those things are and figure out how they work.
36. If you’re told the rules say you can’t do it, take the time to find out what rule that is. Make them tell you.
37. Better yet: Call back, get a different person on the line, find out if they’ve ever heard of this rule, and if that really makes it impossible.
38. Even better still: Find out what it takes to change the rule. People who lack this vision, shouldn’t have control over the people who have it.
39. If you gave someone some money because they needed it, and a very short time later they need more, find out why.
40. If someone is angry and you have the opportunity to mollify them by doing something, remember Thing I Know #52. Put some real thought into maybe letting them stay as angry as they want to be.
41. Usually when people are unwilling to consider clearly superior alternatives, it’s because they don’t have a full reckoning of the consequences of what they want to do. This is especially true if they refuse to allow anyone else to get a word in edgewise. See what you can do about letting them feel the full weight of the consequences, you might be doing them a favor.
42. Combine your bill-paying into your exercise routine.
43. Project what day your bills are due, with what day-of-week that is. Plan it out three months in advance, and see if you can pay every single bill a little bit early.
44. Browse a store that sells fine, reliable tools. Then browse your home looking for something that doesn’t work quite right. Repeat, and repeat again, until you can define an inexpensive project that will improve things. Then do it. Keep doing this. Think creatively. Build things that work for you, regardless of whether they’d be right for anybody else.
45. Follow objectives, not procedures. If there is a list of steps in your life that you have to follow, take the time to learn about each step until the list itself comes to mean nothing. See if you can learn enough to improve the list.
46. If the teevee show is put on the teevee to indoctrinate, rather than to entertain, change the channel.
47. If the school’s special activity is there to indoctrinate rather than to educate, pull your child out of it.
48. This one is for my blogger friend Daphne, who is currently stressing (although I’m sure she doesn’t really need to be told): Don’t keep your kids away from dangerous things. Put together a list of safety rules; make sure it is right. Triple check it. Make sure they understand all of the rules and competently practice them. Then let ’em go do it.
49. Find something people had to know how to do, back in your grandparents’ time, that they don’t have to know how to do today. Figure out how to do it. Even better, figure this out with your kids.
50. Find someone who wants, desperately, to be wonderful; point out to them the things they have already done that are genuinely wonderful, and make sure they know they are admired for this. Maybe you can stop them from supporting liberals.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Maggie’s Farm weekend links. Miss that page, you miss a lot.

Pretty awesome. The dude measurably ran circles around the fembot. I say “measurably ran circles” because she brought some sourced arguments to the table to help bolster this idea that America is a purely secularist nation, intended from its founding to prohibit at the federal level any connection whatsoever between private worship and public resources; since some of these arguments have been made before, Christian-Nation-Dude came prepared, with sourced arguments about the sourced arguments, as if there was some kind of pre-debate discovery process and only one side made use of it.

To me, you have to define the question before you can proceed with the debate. What’re we arguing about? Is there a wall of separation of funding that was intended from the very beginning of the nation? Is there a wall of separation of recognition? Should atheists be able to look around and not see any evidence of anybody else’s faith, anywhere at all? Are your rights being violated when there isn’t enough room for everyone to attend your son’s public-school commencement ceremony, and so the ceremony is moved to a church and it makes you feel creeped out being in there?

Are these things just sturdy, reasonable, logical interpretations of what was written at the very beginning?

If that captures the argument, then the first time you see a founder scribbling down pious words in his capacity as a public servant, especially as our nation’s President, her entire argument has imploded. If it wasn’t something being practiced at the beginning by the men who supposedly erected this “wall,” then she has nothing worthwhile to say about it. It’s a linear argument, and it’s demonstrable something was grossly misunderstood way back at the beginning of the line. It’s like saying “As I recite Pi to 50 digits beyond the decimal point, alright nevermind whether I got the twelfth digit wrong or not…this 47th one I got right, dammit, and you’re a fool if you disagree!” That’s why I say linear-argument. If you’re not on the same page way at the beginning, then as you trot out from there you’re just fabricating bullshit whether you realize it or not. Each digit of Pi has 9-to-1 odds of being wrong; it’s correct only by random chance.

Hat tip to Boortz.

Last month, I noted with interest the shock and dismay one Peggy Noonan was feeling with America’s first Holy Roman Presidency and I let her have it with both barrels…because, as I’ve noticed repeatedly both silently and otherwise over the years, following the consensus is a religion just as irrational as any other. Obama-supporter Noonan made her mistake because, and only because, she happens to be somewhere around Arch-Bishop level in that religion. It is what she does. She figures out what the consensus does and then she jots it down. You could make a living that way, recognize you’re measuring something that could be right & could be wrong, and independently make up your own mind as to whether or not you will follow it. Noonan cannot, or will not, do this. She assimilates the consensus.

You can let her off the hook by saying she made a mistake simultaneously made by many, many, many others; that does not erase the fact she made a mistake that was very, very very easy to avoid making.

So now we see neither Obama, nor anybody on His team, even knows what to do when there’s a real problem to be solved. They just blame corporations and…is it lunchtime yet? The nation voted for something called “hope and change” and here’s a situation where it’s left with neither one.

FrankJ has compiled a list of ready-made excuses for His Holy Eminence:

10. Thought it wasn’t a problem because oil and water don’t mix.

9. Since it was British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico, he assumed other countries would handle it.

8. He thought the oil leak was just looking for attention and would go away if he ignored it.

7. It looked messy, and he had just bought a new suit.

6. Handling oil spills isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, and Obama only does things specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

5. We never listened to Obama’s pleas of “let me be clear”, and thus he was forced to be very unclear about things.

4. Louisiana did such a great job with the last big disaster that hit them that he assumed they were on top of this one.

3. Birds kinda looked like they enjoyed being covered in oil.

2. He never saw the problem, because his head has been stuck in a bucket for the past fifty days.

You have to follow the link to get hold of #1.

A few of these are actually from my kid’s-toy, wind-up little tourist’s camera. The Fisher-Price model that floats in the bathtub. The rest of them are from the girlfriend’s “I-mean-business” Olympus.

Okay, so where we last left off we were walking around the hot sands of N. Salmon Creek. From there we went to the Point Arena lighthouse from the Mel Gibson movie…you read all about that over here. The following three pictures are taken from between those two points.

This highway, if memory serves, lies between Bodega Bay and the Russian River.

Just after you clear the river you go through Jenner. A few miles after that, the road will begin to terrorize you…gently at first, and then it climbs up to the places the mountain goats are afraid to go. Men and women start to embark on predictable arguments about whether or not you need to slow WAY down. And then some prosperous, fortunate soul seems to be enjoying the view of it all from this house. We had to do some fancy coordinating in order to catch a picture of it.

This shot is from the other direction, climbing this steep upgrade and looking back from whence we came. I’m not entirely sre how this was done, it might have happened the next day when we were going back South again.

Point Arena is about an hour North of all this excitement, which means we had to pull past Timber Cove Inn. Following the adventures there, Tuesday, we doubled back and booked in there for the night. TCI has become a regular fixture for us, in fact a landmark. To be precise, it’s at mile 35.60 on Highway 1 N. There are reasons for counting the miles so precisely, because along this stretch of road each mile is pulling some goodly sized amounts of energy out of you, power steering or not.

This is what’s so special about the place. You’re avoiding the 25mph speed trap of Jenner; then, you swear to God you’re going to fall off a cliff in to the ocean and you’re gonna die; then, you’re battling the wild-ass curves, the crazy locals who want to zip along at eight miles an hour for no good reason, maybe some weather elements which is where it gets really exciting.

And then you sit down in a bubbly hot tub in your room and watch the waves crash against the cliff. Pure awesome.

Anyway, by this time I was all engorged by three straight nights of salmon and beef steak. I went for a morning run because I was just in the mood for it at this point. Took my camera with me, and I was glad of it because TCI became enshrouded in some Seattle-like fog weather, which has a photogenic quality all its own.

The Peace Obelisk is visible from the highway as well as way out to sea. The innerwebs are very sparse with information about it, so what follows is the little bits and bytes I was able to pull in about it, combined with my memory of the trivia that used to be printed on the Timber Cove cocktail napkins.

It is an original work by local artist Benny Bufano who carved it in 1968 or thereabouts, to celebrate the work and stated mission of the United Nations. There is a bit more photographic evidence of it over here, and you can read up on Mr. Bufano over here.

There, that’s about all I know of it.

The last two I sort of snapped on our way out. We stayed one night, which is not our usual habit. We usually stay two nights at the very least, which experience has taught us is smarter. We’d probably stick with that wisdom if we had the week to do all over again, but why look back. Going forward, we’ll probably make a more religious practice of this rule, because even under the new management Timber Cove still rocks the house.

Awesome stuff…although I wasn’t too pleased with the part just past the 2:00 mark where he talks about the “United States.” He put a little too much emphasis on the united and not enough on the but separate, and I take exception to the “imaginary boundaries.” I would like to have seen more emphasis on the independence the states have from each other. It’s not just the screamin’ libertarian in me, it’s my genuine and heartfelt understanding that this was a fundamental design objective in our nation’s founding. Nevada can legalize gambling and prostitution, California can keep them illegal but legalize gay marriage and marijuana. The resulting union is stronger — more free — because it has these connected, but independently functioning, moving parts. Not at all unlike separating the TCP from the IP. The object of the exercise is freedom. Red should’ve given that a mention, I think.

As far as Skelton’s paramount concern, though, he’s got it nailed. Absolutely. You might even do well to call it chillingly prophetic.

Thanks to The Squeeze for pointing it out, and to our mutual friend Don Wood over at the Hello-Kitty-o’-Bloggin’.

Regular readers of The Blog That Nobody Reads know that I’m not all that fond of atheists, I think of the secular types as weak thinkers overall. But when I pick on them my insults are a little on the long-winded side. I’ve learned to become very careful in the way I generalize, using phrases like “on average” and words like “tend.”

That’s because I personally know of some atheists who have their priorities right. One of them is out here in the innerwebs, somewhere, and he’s called small-tee tim the godless heathen. Actually, he used to be called just “tim” until I took the initiative and gave him the longer name.

I’m really gun-shy about the idea of voting for an atheist, but that’s no longer an absolute. I’d much rather have a President tim than a lot of believers, even among some of the believers who would march in lock-step with me on a number of other issues. I trust small-tee’s judgment. Sure, he’s just another godless heathen, and he likes “futbol,” but hey nobody’s perfect.

You’ll find absolutely none of the group-think “What my brother atheist said must be true because he’s an atheist like me” in small-tee. This is the kind of thinker people have in mind when they say they want a genuinely independent thinker. Plus, he is a gifted writer and has an awesome sense of humor.

But I have no idea what he looks like.

Think you can help me pick ‘im out? Follow the above link back to Rick’s place, to get a larger image.