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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, we’ve been on a wild tear lately — in response to current events — about the common mistake of placing too much weight on human wonderfulness. The people wrapped up in this are engaged in a hopeless contradiction: They wish to evaluate the human wonderfulness in individual terms, on which some of us are found to possess this wonderfulness and others of us are found to be wanting. But in the Utopia they wish to build, as well as on the road to it, the individual means nothing and is even treated with great hostility. It is a collectivist society they wish to build, on a collectivist foundation with collectivist bricks and collectivist mortar. Designed with collectivist thinking.
Well, except for one cause, one effect. As soon as we put all the beautiful people in charge of everything, and make sure the ugly people are absolutely ineffectual in everything they do, all the problems will somehow be solved.
Other than that, not a single object in this universe possesses any cause-and-effect relationship to any other object. The whole thing is a big, cosmic gooey mess that, at any given instant, radiates some kind of vibe. A mood, be it euphoric, midly amusing, sad, miserable or frustrating. Everlasting pleasure is ours as soon as the ultra-cool people decide everything and the prudish, puritan & un-hip decide nothing.
You might say it’s a post-modern version of Calvinism.
And so it was not the words, but the argument itself, that fascinated me with ReelGirl’s reaction to Carly Fiorina’s open-mic mishap in which the challenger ridiculed the incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer for her hairstyle.
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear about this: I agree with ReelGirl, at least with her initial inferences. Carly Fiorina’s comment, be it live-mic-ambushed or not, does betray a deficiency of class and not a small one. To add insult to injury, “so yesterday” is appallingly juvenile. The very syllables grate on my nerves.
Nevertheless I am taking issue for two reasons. They’re both good ‘uns.
One: It is laughable and snort-worthy to attack someone — anyone — for failing to give Sen. Barbara Boxer respect for her dignity. Boxer is inherently undignified as a person. Trying to respect her dignity is like trying to respect the masculinity of a man who whores his wife out to strangers. It can’t be done. You can’t give someone respect they do not claim for themselves; you cannot give someone dignity they do not already have; and Boxer has repeatedly shown she doesn’t care one bit about her stature except as it is perceived among the hard left.
Two: The title of Heather’s post falls right into exactly what I’ve been bitching about. This notion that we need to keep mean people out of office. Therefore, we have to keep our offices filled up with nice people. This is central to the essence of my complaint. It is the divide between Architects and Medicators. The former say personalities are irrelevant and what we really need is some wise policy, since they live in a universe of objects connected by cause-and-effect relationships. The latter say the policies do not matter, we just put beautiful people in charge of things and Nirvana will follow.
At this point, my sense of right & wrong is unified with my best guess about what’s going to happen. Medicators are in charge right now, to the maximum extent they ever will be in charge for the next decade and a half. They have reached a zenith and are now on an earthward plunge, like a lawn dart. Their way of doing things has been subjected to a fair test, and it has failed. We put their man-god in charge of everything. The Reinvestment Act of 2009 showed that they don’t have any fresh new ideas that are going to help us. The Oil Spill disaster of 2010 showed that even if they did have some good ideas, they have no ways of carrying them out: All they really offer is a more bellicose and bumptious way of giving orders. They even gave us a four-word bumper sticker slogan that illustrates this starkly: “Plug the damn hole!”
And so early this morning, I effectively killed the conversation, I think, with these paragraphs:
I can see from the title of your post that the important thing to you is to make sure our offices are filled with decent people, even if the resulting policies are terrible. More than a few people are coming around to my way of thinking on this…which is that this is precisely how we’ve gotten terrible policies, by worrying too much about getting “wonderful” people into those positions and keeping them there. So we have a difference of opinion there, and I respect yours. If you’re right and we should be arguing about the candidates’ inner decency, you’re right Ms. Fiorina did herself no credit here. Some of our powerful women feel a burning need to show how snarky they are — hey, blame feminism. Boxer’s done the same thing on more than one occasion.
We’re two years into an era in which Boxer’s party has been in control of everything that matters. If we’re supposed to like the results, Boxer can campaign on that. I hope she does. If we’re not, but we’re supposed to believe the results of the next two years are supposed to be somehow different from the results of the first two…she can campaign on that. Or she can show us how much of a more wonderful person she is than Fiorina. Point is, if you want to evaluate them that way, I think you should do it even-handedly. Only a shallow thinker would systematically excuse every single catty, churlish thing ever done by Boxer, while jumping on the equivalent things done by Fiorina like some hungry predator who’s picked up the scent of blood.
That would be the definition of knee-jerk partisan politics. It would also be the very definition of prejudice — to pre-judge. That isn’t what you’re all about, is it?
Since then, I note the irony: About eleven years ago, our hardcore liberal left-wingers were waggling their fingers at us. Oh, they do this all the time, but at that time it was about something special: Our hardcore liberal left-wing President had been caught having an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter and then lying about it to obstruct justice, Richard-Nixon style. We were supposed to look past this. Why? Something about “private conduct” and “public performance” or “performance in public office.” Our hardcore left-wing zealots were waggling their fingers over the idea that these were two different things and it was a mistake to conflate them.
It must be a tough way to go through life. These “private” shortcomings are not supposed to count for anything…unless pointing them out happens to help, in some way, the leftist agenda. And then, suddenly, they are all that matter. They trump questions that really are important, like policies that are smart, or stupid, likely to culminate in good or poor results.
Getting your dick sucked by an intern who could be your daughter’s college roommate, doesn’t matter. Tossing out a Valley Girl screed about someone else’s crappy hairstyle, is a debilitating character defect.
It’s all decided by which letter is in the back of your name.
Like I said, it must be a tough way to go through life.
But the only way…is to fight the bastards with everything you have, seeing them for what they are — and to keep your sense of humor.
Bottom of p. 35, winding up Chapter 5, If You Can Take It Here, You’ll Take It Anywhere. That statement, so simple at first, becomes more and more critical and crucial every time you think of it.
What. They. Are. You have nothing but your own intellect to guide you in figuring out what that is. And many, many obstacles in place to block you from it. But keep that sense of humor, it may be even more important than that.
So, you folks didn’t accept my advice. Well, we’ll have to see how this goes. Maybe over the long term we’ll see another opportunity to support Chuck DeVore for something. His people have run an awesome campaign which has done everything to redeem our democratic republic in the eyes of the rightfully jaundiced, and not a single thing to besmirch it.
I’m not encouraged to see Fiorina emerge as the candidate here. The appearance is that, at least in the Golden State, we’re sinking back into identity politics. The men see one of their own running against a gal, and get all queasy — suddenly we’re buried in a lot of talk about “but she can win!” And why shouldn’t they say that. There is a feeling out there that we’re populated by airheads, who pay no attention at all to the issues and just want to vote for the girl. Takes a girl to knock down another girl.
Alright, well DeVore says his support is going to Fiorina, so that’s where I’m going to put mine. Boxer really has to go. It isn’t even a democrat/Republican thing anymore. “Ma’am” is just pure embarrassment. She says something, and I can just feel heads in the other 49 states swivel toward this one, and hear the “whudthefuck??”
Would it be better to have Fiorina in there? The question is answered before it is even asked.
Bonus: A very unusual and bizarre movie about a bed: The Bed That Eats. Order it up on Netflix if you dare, but don’t go complaining to me that you want the 77 minutes of your life back, I said it was unusual & bizarre.
The Former Governor of Alaska and my fine self do not see eye-to-eye on this thing; that is partly because I reside in California and she does not. Hey, she’s gotta be wrong somewhere. On this one, you have to vote for the dude. He’s got the best chance. He captures the difference between our side & theirs; difference leads to passion, and passion leads to turn-out. This is one among a few reasons why Palin’s running mate disappointed us back in ’08, and why she herself would have fared better.
You know how electrical current works, right? Current is driven by voltage; voltage is a differential. This “reach-across-the-aisle” stuff is for the birds. Send Sotomayor’s enthused fan back home, and vote for Chuck. That’s my suggestion anyhoo.
Helen Thomas announced Monday that “she is retiring, effective immediately,” according to a statement from Hearst newspapers.
Her decision comes after her controversial remarks about Israel hit the blogosphere. She later apologized for her comments, saying she “deeply regretted” making them.
Ed Morrissey is reporting that apparently there are even more videos of her making anti-Semitic statements coming soon. If true, it’s really not all that shocking that she would try to run and hide from the controversy.
Let her legacy continue in the role she had to give up, like Ted Kennedy’s in the seat he vacated. Which is to say, not.
She’s been covering our presidents since the Eisenhower administration. Her antisemitism has always been thinly veiled, at least it has been to the extent of my awareness, watching her pelt a then-President Ronald Reagan with all kinds of snotty lecturing dressed up as a question. Her biases haven’t been a secret by any means; kind of a “yes but no” unacknowledged gossamer reality, like JFK’s marital infidelities or FDR’s confinement to a wheelchair.
Under this cover of cooperative darkness, the antisemitic scandal has ripened into a journalistic-objectivity one. That is being kind. “What in the blue fuck is she doing in there??” has been the unstated, and therefore unanswered, question. This situation seems to have arisen somewhere around Nixon/Ford, and perhaps much earlier.
And then, the powers that be allowed her to continue chafing her rump in that Press Corps chair, for generations more.
Adios, you miserable toad. Don’t let the doorknob hitcha where the Good Lord split ya.
For those who are left standing — let’s stick to real questions from here on. Just to throw the rest of us off. M’kay?
This is The Blog That Nobody Reads…it has five thousand posts now…and I don’t suppose it has ever done a post-about-a-post. Actually it has now that I think of it; they connect to each other like lattice-work all the time. But this is a post, about public response, with regard to a previous post. And on that note, I just gotta say something. I have never seen the like of this before.
The response about this post is split cleanly down the middle. Half of the readership thinks it is crystal clear, and a marginal fringe of it — plus myself, now and then — condemns it as a muddled mess. I myself am not in a position of advantage for judging my own work, I’m afraid. I receive some of my most widespread and exclamatory praise with a befuddled “huh, you kiddin’?” I lack empathy. My sense of what requires mentioning word-for-word, and what will suffice with a mere implication, has always been substandard.
But in the last few days I’ve had to come around and join the majority viewpoint. It occurs to me that the question of whether a post, any post, but in this particular case One Hundred Things That Do Not Make You a Wonderful Person is clearly written — is a matter to be settled by consensus. And it can only be settled by consensus. Whether you say it works or you say it does not, if you are outnumbered, your argument crumbles under its own weight because it is an exercise in speaking for others. When a clear majority of the “others” explicitly overrule you, then…well, what were you sayin’?
And the votes are in. It is impossible to have any kind of affection for this particular post if you do not “get it”; and although other posts have flung more traffic down upon The Blog That Nobody Reads, I struggle to recall another that has been linked from as many referring sites, in so short of a time.
So it is settled. The meaning is clear. That is not to say there has not been debate about it; I will also confess that many among those who misunderstand, seem to draw a common mistaken inference about what the meaning could have been. That is to say, they disagree with me, the author; but they agree with each other in their wrongness. Writers, generally, shudder at seeing such a thing. But with the addition of more and more voices who got it right, I look back on the ones who got it wrong and it seems to me they got it wrong because they wanted to get it wrong.
The piece is called — let us copy-and-paste, letter for letter, to make sure we’re quoting ourselves correctly — “One Hundred Things That Don’t Make You a Better Person.” It is not called “One Hundred Things That Make You an Ass.” It is not called “One Hundred Things I Wish People Would Not Do.” Or “One Hundred Types of People I Wish Would Get Struck by Lightning.”
And yet, the mistaken people…let us call them that, to help save space, from here on in. “Mistaken people.” The mistaken people have it in common with each other that they write of my work as if that were the point of it. Wow, I’m glad that isn’t true. That would make me the jerk. I’ll be the first to say so. People who recycle are #25; people who go to church are #40; people who vote for or hire ethnic minorites & women are #58. I’m condemning those people? That’s not what the piece says. It says doing these things doesn’t make you a wonderful person. I do not regard it as an exercise in hair-splitting, to point out the obvious that this is not the same thing. It’s quite different.
Of course we do live in a three-dimensional universe and there is such a thing as perspective. When you lack perspective, objects that are in fact quite distant can appear very close together — and I speak here figuratively as well as literally. Our “Mistaken People,” I’m thinking, lack perspective. This has been scientifically proven. A plurality of people have now responded to the piece…with charm and wit, in their minds…with some variant of “#101. Making a senseless list of things other people do that you don’t like (doesn’t make you a wonderful person).” This is a confession. To borrow a few spaces from Obama Speech Bingo, I just think for far too long we have been accepting a false choice and we can’t keep doing that thinking Europe is going to say it’s okay.
And here’s my point; this is where I think the trolley has really come off the tracks.
People do things, and this has to prove they’re wonderful, or — since I have specifically rejected this — we have to take this as proof that they’re s.o.b.’s. That’s the false choice. We are losing our collective ability to look at each other doing things, and say to ourselves “eh, whatever.” This is a bad, bad thing. It is the loss of a valuable and irreplaceable national resource, as precious as any animal species.
You walk up to me and say “Hey, Freeberg. Blogging doesn’t make you a wonderful person.” Or “Hey, watching Dukes of Hazzard reruns doesn’t make you a wonderful person” or “Drinking coffee, extra bold, black, from a 15-oz mug doesn’t make you a wonderful person” and my reaction will be rather mundane. Probably cock an eyebrow at you and go something like “duh.”
I think the non-mistaken people would react the same way. I suspect we are part of a common community. And there is something significant and understated separating us from the mistaken people who missed the point (probably deliberately) of that original piece; there is a major disconnect here. We do what we do. We are not trying to buck a trend, nor are we trying to conform to one. We just want our damn coffee. And we do not give a hang what it “proves” about whether we’re cool people or whether we’re jerks.
This false-choice dichotomy, I must say, bugs me. It bugs me more than any of the hundred items on the list. Maybe our society has become too cushy and comfortable, or maybe the Agent Orange is seeping into our brains. Myself, I think it’s just a natural consequence of the world shrinking, of information traveling more and more quickly. People evidently can’t just do things anymore. Whatever we do is just making statements about ourselves. Some smartass blogger comes along and says “here’s a list of a hundred things you can do that don’t make you a wonderful person in spite of what you might think,” and it’s automatically presumed that he’s talking some smack. Well, I’m not. I’m just saying if you think these things prove you’re wonderful, you’re wrong.
That’s incendiary?
All that tells me is, I made a mistake waiting this long to point it out.
Let’s think this through logically. I did include a short list of things you can do that would, and do, make you a wonderful person. Now if this process works (to such an extent that I agree that it does), how can it work? I have personally conceived of three ways:
1. By completing this physical or mental feat, you have pressed the envelope of your capabilities, increased your endurance and/or resolve, and now you have confidence in your capacity that you did not have — could not have had — before.
2. You have altered the outcome of the world, or some stateful thing within it, for the better. You have eased the burden of another of God’s children, lightened a heavy load, made light work by adding another hand.
3. You have excluded from logical consideration, the possibility that you might lack positive attributes that it has now been proven that you have. Some miserable sonofabitch could not possibly have done what you just did.
I viscerally disagree with Option #3. Name the “wonderful” thing you think only “wonderful” people can do. I can pretty much guarantee that with the time and resources, I can go out and find the miserable motherfucker who will be ready, willing and able to go out and do it. Especially if he perceives an opportunity to “prove” to some more suckers that he isn’t a miserable motherfucker. And you know I’m right. You know I can find him.
So that leaves us with the first two options. You can literally make yourself a better person by embracing a personal ability to do what you could not do before; or, you can do a genuinely good thing that someone else can experience, touch and feel. All the rest is bullshit.
You might be wondering, now, why is it important to have a list of things that do not make you a wonderful person…if I’m not willing to step up and say these things make you a miserable bastard either? What’s the point?
The point is clear: Some of the worst, most wretched, reprehensible policies we have ever had in human history — particularly recent human history — have been policies designed specifically for the purpose of demonstrating that the people in charge are, or have been…yeah, you got it. Wonderful. Expanded welfare state. More expensive labor. Exorbitant public debts. The much-talked-about “vaginization of America,” with its lowered pain threshold, pussy males, kids-wearing-foam-rubber-elbow-pads-on-the-seesaws, litigation, litigation and more litigation. Our modern, super-anesthetized, super-sanitized, “Who The Hell Wants To Live In A World Like This” culture, buried hip-deep in warning labels. This ice may be cold. This is not a toy. Do not take this medication orally. Remove foil wrapper before inserting suppository. Glass not allowed in pool area. Ladder, when fully extended, is very tall. Do not use this hair dryer in the shower.
This gets into the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. I’ll tell you how this works…
Much has been talked about the Theory of Evolution, but it is seldom discussed how long it takes evolution to work. “Millions of years of evolution” is a common catchphrase, but humans have not been around that long, and humans have evolved many times. So how long does it take evolution to work, really? Not long. We have hard evidence that a few hundred years ago — which is the blink of an eye, comparitively speaking — humans were significantly shorter than they are now. Height is not exactly a subtle characteristic of the human genome. So we evolve quickly. It doesn’t take millions of years.
But think about the world in which we now live; the fact that it is industrial. We do not make our way in the world by milking cows, harvesting vegetables, slaughtering pigs, et al. How long have we been out of this mold? Not long. About a century and a half. That is not long enough to evolve. So we are agricultural creatures. In 500 years maybe we’ll evolve to exist in this technological enclave we have constructed for ourselves; but we are not George Jetson yet. We are agricultural, we are built to milk cows. We are built to plow fields. Men my age know this instinctively. We consume calories, primarily meat-based, and this is primarily in fulfillment of a savage, masculine impulse, it all heads straight to the gut so that we can store up the energy in case we go on some wild boar hunting spree like those skinny sinewy young boys at the beginning of Apocalypto.
And then we go sit in cubicles to toil away on a keyboard and a mouse. And get heavier and heavier. See what I mean? Our workload is at odds with our evolutionary molding.
The Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution is based on this…and most of what has been scribbled in The Blog That Nobody Reads, that which deals with human nature (which is probably the bulk of it), is based on this theory. It’s high time I jotted it down.
Picture a ancient village. It could be of any race, on any continent, in any age so long as it is prior to the industrial revolution…or for that matter, before urbanization. In whatever pocket of geography in which it exists, so this could be at any time until about a century ago, give or take. The village is inhabited by members of a common tribe.
We have spoken, before, about the historical custom of shunning, which is ostracism to point of fatality; that a person is prohibited, by virtue of his individual identity, from practicing even the most basic transactions of commerce fundamental to survival, to such an extent that he naturally dies from starvation, exposure to the elements, or something of the like. This has been documented in some pre-industrial cultures. I submit that it has been, whether documented or not, a common practice among all of them. I submit that it is the natural brutal ancestor of bankruptcy protection. Think about it. Envision it from the point of view of someone who is in the profession of dispensing a staple, such as food and shelter, and you are approached by a person not in the good graces of the community. The pottage may be clothing, a roof over his head, or a bowl of porridge. If you consent in exchange for credit, you expose yourself because you would be falling in line behind all of his other creditors, apt to be hung out high & dry. You would decline. If you consent in exchange for cash, you are committing a moral transgression because you know your patron must be short-changing his other creditors in order to do right by you. It’s a case of last-in first-out. This is ethically wrong, and it is probably detrimental to your own survival because you are diminishing whatever far-fetched likelihood might have remaind for the creditors, who are your own colleagues, to be compensated for their investments.
So you would shun. You would have to. There must, logically, be some mechanism for the miscreant to be dismissed from the ranks of those who can bargain in good faith. If the community desires to remain compassionate, then he could become a regular recipient of charity. But for the sake of maintaining some working economic model, be it based on cash or on barter, there would have to be a dissolution between the self-sustaining and the indigent. There would have to be a barrier. There would have to be a custom of ostracism. It is logically unavoidable.
Such societies were not purely capitalistic. And among the ones that were not, there would have to be a risk shared among all, during the lean times. If all are sharing in the risk, then all must share in the cost; lean times, by definition, mean there is more cost than there is benefit.
And so if the famine drags on for too long, a situation arises in which the mediocre amongst the village becomes indigent…or could be interpreted to be that way. This is key. The shunning is not the conclusion of an objective, mathematical exercise. It is, rather, an opinionated consensus. The majority votes that Henry is to be put out to pasture. Or…the village elders proclaim it to be so. Or, the Chief of the tribe picks up the vibe. The Oracle infers it to be divine will, Vox Dei. The poor sap is to shut out of the mighty village gates, to perish in the winter.
It definitely happened. Where it was written down — as well as where it was not.
This is where I think we picked up the primal impulse. We engage in these empty rituals…in the aforementioned post, I specifically used the phrase “empty rituals”…to demonstrate that we are wonderful. Not to demonstrate it to God. Not to demonstrate it to the ghost of George Washington, or to President Barack Obama. Not to your mother-in-law, or to any one specific individual. But to “The People.”
I am saying we are wired, down in the marrow of our bones, through a natural evolutionary process, to show off for each other like circus animals. We are wired, right down in our genetic “motherboards,” to engage in these empty rituals. That is why this whole thing looks so much like a brutal, primal instict: Because it is one.
Let us pause here to remember and to remark one more time, since it is worthy of repetition: To engage in this effort, and then fail at it, is fatal. You would be shut out of the gates. You would freeze. You would starve. This is a critical point, because it throws the Freeberg Village Evolution Theory ahead of that mighty rocket nozzle that is Darwinism. It says that among all those who were exposed to the challenge, everyone must have succeeded or else they were thrown into oblivion. The genome was refined, on pain of death, to meet the challenge. We are the descendants of those who succeeded. This is what etched the design upon the motherboard. Whoever didn’t have what it took, fell away and their strains died out…leaving us.
And so here we are. We are stained, just like the Bible says. This pinpoints exactly what The Apple was, what Eve did, what Adam did, who the snake was. We have been evolutionarily sculpted and chiseled into fawning, preening sycophants; it is our central nature, and we are left with our intellect which we may optionally engage for the purpose of rising above it. Without that, we endure the full disgrace of Man’s Fall. The message we end up sending to each other is: “During the lean times, make sure I am among the last to be shut out of the heavy village gates. Dispense with that other guy instead.” We are the guy in the fancy BMW, parking overnight in a bad neighborhood with a club on the steering wheel — carefully parked next to the other BMW that does not have a club on the steering wheel. Fuck with that other guy instead, leave me alone.
I am…comparatively speaking…wonderful.
That is the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. That is, I would argue, also what modern liberalism is. Surely you’ve noticed how incredibly confused our liberals are nowadays on this one question: Am I a wonderful person on an absolute basis, or on a relative one? Am I trying to show I have risen above some measurable hash mark in my wonderfulness…or is there some other dirty-rotten-creepy-bastard somewhere, and I’m just trying to show I’m better than that other guy? This is why I said a complete victory here would ruin them. They want to hold us “all” up to a higher standard of humanity, decency, civility; but this isn’t really what they want, because it would cancel out every meaningful thing about themselves, if they ever got it. You can’t be part of an elite club if you don’t make sure someone is left out of it. Our liberals are acting upon their internal motherboard-wiring, to be a Freeberg-Village fawning preening priss, laboring to convince some ethereal, undefined “consensus” that the other guy is the one who should be shut out of the village gates. So they can continue to live within, where it’s all cozy and warm.
It’s like the joke about the two lawyers being chased by the hungry bear. One of them says to the other, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!”
This is why it’s so important to identify the one hundred — there are many, many more — things people do on a regular basis to show how wonderful they are, that don’t really make them wonderful. It is to defeat modern liberalism. Which is nothing more than self-interest dressed up as altruism; the lawyer outrunning the other lawyer; the villager trying to indict the other villager, so the ostracism will fall on one head and not the other. This is also why, when a modern liberal politician gives a speech about a vexing problem that doesn’t really involve a bad guy…like a horrible sexually transmitted disease, or a ruptured oil pipe at the bottom of the ocean, or a hurricane…the politician keeps injecting some horrible villain into the situation anyway.
It’s an ancient, primal-instinct message that has reverberated among the human species for millenia. “I’m wonderful, so don’t shut me out of the village. Take that other guy. Over there.”
It is wired into our hardware. Liberalism, as we know it today, is all about succumbing to it. It is all about forgetting that we’re all in this fight for survival together…and then, just to see if you can get away with it, acting like you’re among the very few who can still remember that very thing.
I’ve never taken any advice from anybody…not really. Perhaps the rocky patches of my road have been rockier than most, but looking back I really haven’t had very many of ’em. As I read over this I see it matches closely with what I did.
And the rocky patches weren’t even really that rocky; a little lonely maybe. On balance though it’s been a good life. It’s good to see something that fits in with how I went about things, that also would be good advice for someone younger. There is very little pleasure in it for me when I find myself telling the younger set “what I did has worked out very well over the long term but don’t do things my way.” And I know they don’t find it comforting. So I intend to hang on to this.
1. Acquire skills that are hard to get outside school. Your first temptation will be to fill your schedule with courses on fascinating subjects. Do this, but don’t forget to also use university to tech up. For anyone interested in public policy or development, I suggest at two semesters of statistics and economics. Then pick a field of study in development (economics, politics, etc) and pick the hardest courses in each. Other technical skills may come in handy, depending on your interests: international law, political theory, tropical medicine, qualitative methods, finance & accounting, and so forth. 2. Learn how to write well. Take writing seriously. Consider a course in creative, non-fiction, journalism, or business writing. Read books on writing. You won’t regret it. 3. Focus on the teacher, not the topic. You will learn more from great teachers than great syllabi. 4. When in doubt, choose the path that keeps the most doors open. If you aren’t sure of your interests, stick to mainstream majors, ones with plenty of job and grad school options at the end, and get your core stats and math training (multivariate calculus, linear algebra, and multivariate regression). 5. Do the minimum language and management classes. Languages are hugely valuable, but better learned in immersion, during your summers and holidays. Maybe take an intro course, but only that. Business and management skills are critical, but classrooms are poor places to get skills other than finance and accounting.
Well, at least he’s still got Sir Paul McCartney. At the White House last week, the 67-year-old crooner was gushing in much the same manner as his own groupies did at Shea Stadium in 1965. “I’m a big fan, he’s a great guy,” McCartney told American critics of President Barack Obama. “So lay off him, he’s doing great.”
Later, McCartney serenaded the First Lady with a rendition of Michelle and, receiving a prize from the Library of Congress, took a cheap shot at President George W Bush that was as unfunny as it was unoriginal. “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.” Bush. Doesn’t read books. Stupid. Geddit?
The problem for the President is that even if the former Beatle does speak for billions, the overwhelming majority of those are overseas. Polls show that around 10 per cent of those who voted for Obama in 2008 now disapprove of his performance and the heavy turnout of young people and black voters among the 69 million who back him will not be repeated again.
McCartney’s banalities were an example of a transatlantic dissonance that is all too apparent these days. Whereas Europe is stuck in November 2008 and still hopelessly in love with Obama, Americans have got over the historic symbolism of it all and are now moving on as they live with the reality.
That reality has now begun to dawn on some of Obama’s natural constituency – Hollywood and the Left. The “no drama Obama” demeanour that served him so well on the campaign trail is now becoming a liability.
Bemoaning Obama’s passivity after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the director Spike Lee thundered: “He’s very calm, cool, collected. But, one time, go off! If there’s any one time to go off, this is it, because this is a disaster.”
This is the same Spike Lee who once described Obama’s election as a “seismic” change that represented “a better day not only for the United States but for the world”.
It’s funny how quickly we tire of what we once wanted. I would argue exactly the same kind of thing happened to George W. Bush. Think about it: Isn’t Bush a personification of what, in a simpler setting, with no flesh-and-blood contenders to muddy up the picture, we “all” want?
“I’m sick of these poll-driven, ‘stick a finger in the air and see which way the wind blows’ politicians. Give me someone who’s secure and consistent in his convictions — I don’t even care if he disagrees with me here and there, I just want someone who will stick up for what he believes in and be honest about it.” How many times have you heard something like that? And yet what really drove Bush’s poll numbers down. It wasn’t Katrina or Iraq. It was a method of governance. “Bush’s eyes are closed to science! He doesn’t listen!”
The same fickle nature of our modern electorate has now torn the Obama visage asunder. Darn that humdrum unflappable Obama, he doesn’t get sufficiently upset about things.
I have faith; I don’t think we’re locked into a pattern of choosing our presidents according to their emotional profiles, as opposed to their sense of judgment…a pattern which surely would be a death spiral. I think good decision-making skills are still important to us, as ineffectual a consideration as that was in ’08. And I think our evaluation of this decision-making, were it to become important again, would remain fairly consistent, even as our criteria for the emotional behavior has become rather pinwheel-like.
And I think that is timeless. As a species, we are fickle and unpredictable when we choose our leaders based on their temperament, but steady and reasonable when we choose them based on their ability to produce a good outcome.
I think we choose them based on their emotional “vibe,” when all’s said & done, when we are bored. In 2008 we were bored. That’s all there is to it.
You know, there are three ways to piss off someone who puts too much of an emotional investment in something:
• Tell a Star Wars fan Obi-Wan Kenobi means “Loses Every Single Duel”;
• Point out to an Indiana Jones fan that the “obtainer of rare antiquities” has never actually produced anything from one of his travels;
• Opine that the word “Obama” is an ancient Kenyan utterance that means “colossal disappointment.”
If you want to be thoughtful, you have to be a liberal. If you’re a liberal, you must be thoughtful. If you’re a conservative you cannot be thoughtful, and if you’re a knucklehead dimwit rube you are destined to become a conservative.
This has been an enduring leitmotif, and yet it enjoys a most pervasive and impenetrable monopoly at the shallow end of the attention pool, among the people least inclined to study anything for any length of time. Our late-night comedy talk show hosts seem to ply it with the strongest sense of approval, followed by the big-ticket summer blockbuster Hollywood producers…the “court jesters” of our modern era.
Oh my, how this is gonna leave a mark on that. Rather cuts through it like a red-hot fireplace poker through a three-pound tub of soft margarine.
You can learn a lot from what the left say. And even more from what they don’t. Take taxes for instance.
Liberals have a very amorphous definition of fairness, and a very ambiguous definition of who should pay them. That is something that should leave us all very nervous.
How much, for how long, and to what end should taxes be paid? The left can not answer these questions. If they were to be honest, they would admit they have never even considered them. Still they are unshaken in their certitude of “fairness:” a progressive tax system.
According to liberals, a progressive tax system is simply one in which those making more money pay more in taxes. On its face, this would seem an acceptable standard—one few could dispute. Strangely enough though, the left themselves do not accept it.
:
By defining fairness as a relation between earning and paying, it begs the question of the limits to this linkage. Is there a point at which rates, amounts, and total share in taxes could be increased to a level that liberals would deem unfair? What is the optimal point of taxation for the left?
While the left worries much about the fairness of earners not paying enough, they have apparently not given any thought at all about what too much would be.
For liberals, the system evidently just gets progressively fairer the more earners pay. Their definition of fairness is no definition at all; it is a continuum. [emphasis mine]
Spandex season had an early start but stumbled out of the gate, and spent some time just not working out. Now that it’s June I decided to kick things into high gear and ride the two wheels all the way up to Auburn.
This is not for newbies. Folsom to Auburn is uphill pretty much every yard of the way, more than twenty miles’ worth. I made it into the city limits and then had a flat. There is still a lot of time left in the year, so I decided to finish the repair job before making the decision about whether to proceed forward. I ended up weenie-ing out of it. The problem with the (fairly new) tube was a rupture by the valve stem; obviously a manufacturing defect, and if memory serves the last tube of this brand that I had to replace, had a similar problem. Of the two spares I packed, one went by this brand and the other one was more reputable. I ended up making a judgment call that the different brand should go on, and then I’d hoof it home.
Total number of snakes encountered on this trip, two. The one that could’ve been a rattler, appeared to be sunbathing in a coiled position…which was curious. That was probably more like a death pose, but I wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. The other was more colorful, possibly more dangerous than a rattler.
Time out: 4:21 a.m. Time in: 12:37 p.m. Total distance, 41 mi. Fluids ingested: One 1.5L Aquafina, brought with, plus a 0.5L water and 0.5L black berry vitamin water, plus 0.5L green tea. Plus going hog wild on the contents of the fridge once I got home. No fainting, no snake bites, no spills, had all the repair supplies & equipment I needed. Oh, and number of pictures taken, 60. My confidence in my next attempt comes not so much from having a better tan built up, and superior knowledge about brand names for my spare inner tubes, but from not having to pause to take pics. Douglas Boulevard to Auburn city limits, my Waterloo, is just over ten miles and took two hours, which is e-x-c-e-p-t-i-o-n-a-l-l-y slow. That was by design, but fatigue does take a toll.
I like the way I look in the mirror now. I look like a man in his fifth decade on the planet, who blogs way too much and works out way too little. That’s good. It beats the way I looked in the mirror the other night, like a man in his fifth decade who blogs and doesn’t work out, and chows down on deep-friend chocolate-covered whale-butt-blubber three times a day with a bucket of pure lard to wash it down. The Scandinavian pouch hanging over the belt, it’s receded some. Just a little. It’s a body that is being reprimanded that now & then there are some physical adventures to be had, and it should prepare accordingly. My arms are a little bigger too. This is a part of road bike riding I’ve never been able to figure out, even when I was a little boy; it’s like your arms are doing almost as much work as your legs.
Oh, and the burn? I wore one of my cotton tanks. It works out great comfort-wise, even at four in the morning you don’t want something with sleeves on it. But the shoulders are rosy red.
We’re going out to the coast today, for a week. Blogging will be on an as-is-possible basis. So the upper layers of skin will have a chance to recuperate, while I continue to educate my bod about the fact that it’s a big world out there with fresh air, and life is not all about writing code in the daytime and blogging at nighttime. Pictures will also be uploaded on an as-is-possible basis.
Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 20, of North Bergen, and Carlos Eduardo “Omar” Almonte, 24, of Elmwood Park were apprehended at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens before they could board separate flights to Egypt, where they were to start journeys to Somalia. The men were arrested by teams of state and federal law-enforcement agents who have been investigating the pair since October 2006, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the operation publicly.
Now boil them in oil.
Yeah yeah, I know. Eighth amendment, Supreme Court decision this-versus-that, can’t do it, This Nation Does Not Torture!!!!1! Yeah, whatever.
My point is simply this: If we boiled them in oil, this stuff would stop. And to whoever makes decisions reasonably, responsibly, weighing both sides of a question rather than just one side, that’s an important consideration. This would all stop overnight.
Sure let’s continue to be humane and decent, but keep in mind what exactly it is costing us. And no, the terrorists would not win, they are not fighting to make us into a nation of terrorists. They’re fighting to make us gone. Our brutality would provide a new selling point for Al Qaeda recruiters? Really? I doubt it. Who wants to get boiled in oil.
You end conflict by speaking the language of diplomats, or by speaking in the language of horse heads in beds. The world is a big place, that has some people in it who only understand one of those languages.
We’ve pointed out the 
And the votes are in. It is impossible to have any kind of affection for this particular post if you do not “get it”; and although other posts have flung more traffic down upon The Blog That Nobody Reads, I struggle to recall another that has been linked from as many referring sites, in so short of a time.
Total number of snakes encountered on this trip, two. The one that could’ve been a rattler, appeared to be sunbathing in a coiled position…which was curious. That was probably more like a death pose, but I wasn’t going to get close enough to find out. The other was more colorful, possibly more dangerous than a rattler.