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.

It is the ultimate adventure in self-deception.

No, it doesn’t make you a wonderful person.

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.

The Telegraph notices it’s suddenly cool to bash Barack Obama.

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]

RTWT.

Hat tip to Boortz.

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.

NJ.com.

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.

John Hawkins has collected some quotes from the coach. He had put ’em up when Wooden’s exit was merely a rumor; at this hour, it is established fact.

My kinda fella.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

You can do more good by being good than any other way.

Discipline yourself and others won’t need to.

That first one just digs in to the crux of this post of ours, which blogger friend Buck didn’t like. Since Coach Wooden managed to say in just a few words what we awkwardly stammered out over the course of hundreds, we think he would’ve had a better appreciation for what we were trying to say.

Character, reputation. One’s internal, one’s external. Character can survive just fine without the reputation to go with it, but a good reputation isn’t worth a damn without the character to back it up.

Meh heh.

Thanks to KC.

Boortz links to Reason:

The coming battle over President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick to the top spot at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is, like the health care reform debate before it, a struggle between centralizers and decentralizers. Indeed, Berwick is an almost prototypical centralizer. In particular, he has repeatedly expressed fondness for Britain’s NICE, which does cost-benefit analysis for the country’s government-run health care system (ie: rationing).

Reason, as you can see, links to its own archives from about five days previous:

The American health care debate occurs primarily between two factions: On one side are the centralizers. They prize equality of care and access, and believe that, to the extent possible, health risks should be spread proportionally amongst the populace. They argue that health care is sufficiently complex that most individuals cannot make decisions for themselves. And they say that the responsibility for making tough decisions about how to keep health care costs under control ought to be made by enlightened, well-intentioned policy elites.

On the other side are the decentralizers. This faction prizes the subjective preferences of individuals, and takes the line that centralized decision making does not account for individual variations in responses to care, and is a poor substitute for local, personal knowledge. Further, they argue that artificially redistributing risk obscures the true cost of care, and inevitably—and uncontrollably—drives up prices and spending.

Centralizers end up sacrificing everything for this equality. Whether their ego is festooned to the concept and they cling to it until the bitter end, as the centralized capabilities plummet, plummet, and plummet some more; or, if they indulge in some kind of reckoning before any of it gets underway, and consciously acknowledge equality is the supreme virtue — I’ve never been able to figure this out about them.

I can’t find a nurse to fluff my pillow, that’s quite alright. I can’t find a nurse to fluff my pillow and you can — oh dear, some new previously-undiscovered “human right” has just been violated. We have some inequality. Can’t have that!

Looks like Architects and Medicators to me. Medicators are fixated on what other people have, whereas Architects consider such a matter to be almost entirely irrelevant. Architects want to hone a personal skill and then see to it that their personal fortune, for good or ill, is inextricably intertwined with that skill. Their projects are localized and cordoned off by means of some kind of perimeter. They want to tape a 48″ x 36″ vellum to a board, and spend a few weeks concerned only with those few square inches, and nothing outside of that space.

Medicators want security. Not so much a high standard of living, but lots and lots of assurance. They want consistency, none of this “fat times lean times” stuff. And they’re inherently controlling and jealous, so this preference toward centralization ends up being a natural one. They don’t see project perimeters, they don’t see connections between projects and the persons who own them. Everything, even a task as personal as raising a child, “takes a village.”

I submit that the centralizers are simply Medicators who are doing what makes sense in their world. None of us are really specializing in anything, we’re more like a crew on a great big spaceship…a crew without any positions or ranks. And so it just makes sense that all the resources have to be put in a great big pot.

Except someone has to watch the pot. And so their model ultimately defeats itself, because oopsie, now we have to have some superiority, some ranking, some specialty. Someone has to say yea & nay as the resources are distributed from the pot.

And so when an Architect votes, he votes for a clone of himself who has the time to go to City Hall, or the Board of Supes, or the Capitol, that he does not have. Someone who is likely, the likelier the better, to make the very same decisions he would make if only he had the time to be there. And the outcome of these decisions would be positive.

When a Medicator votes, he votes for someone who is not a clone of himself. He looks for someone much, much better; a superhuman; a demigod. And the decisions this demigod would make? They would not necessarily be the decisions the Medicator would make — instead, they would be the decisions found pleasing to nameless, faceless, anonymous strangers. And the outcome? Who cares about that, what is important is that the decisions would be found favorable. To…somebody.

Kevin at Smallest Minority is picking on the Brits, and they deserve it.

Taxi driver Derrick Bird got into his cab with a .22 rifle and a shotgun, and went on a shooting spree in Cumbria, England. He killed twelve and wounded another 25 before offing himself.

His rampage lasted three and a half hours.

It was ended, as most of these are, by a man with a gun. In this case, himself, once he’d decided he was done preying on a defenseless victim pool.

England has been on a long death-by-a-thousand-cuts path to complete disarmament since the 1930’s. The last two “turn ’em all in” bans came in 1987 after Michael Ryan took an AK-47 clone, an M1 Carbine and a semi-automatic pistol on a shooting spree in Hungerford, killing sixteen before he offed himself. The result of that was a ban on all semi-automatic and pump-action rifles larger than .22 rimfire caliber.

The British public was told it would make them safer.

When you think about it, it’s really almost impossible for these things to end any other way isn’t it? The gunman could have some kind of a seizure or he could run out of ammo. Oh I suppose a police negotiator could soothe the gunman’s disposition from a great distance through an amplified megaphone.

Other than those three things, there really cannot be an end to it that doesn’t involve someone packing heat.

Karl Rove:

White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod argued earlier this year that health-care reform would become more popular after it passed, boosting Democrats in the midterm elections. “We have to go out and sell it,” he told the National Journal, adding in an interview in Newsweek that “people [will] see the benefits that accrue to them.”

That’s not quite how it has worked out. ObamaCare is becoming more, not less, unpopular. The Rasmussen poll reported the week after health reform’s passage in March that 55% of likely voters supported its repeal while 42% did not. A Rasmussen poll last month showed that 56% backed repeal; 39% did not.
:
Finding it hard to cover costs under the bill’s formulas…doctors [will] refuse new patients and one out of every six hospitals and nursing homes could start operating in the red. And while Medicaid would cover 16 million more people, there might not be enough doctors to treat them.
:
October will see the first round of Medicare cuts. Up to half of seniors will lose their Medicare Advantage coverage (a program that allows seniors to receive additional services through a private health plan), or at least some of their benefits under this program. Watch for the administration to try to keep companies from notifying their customers of benefit cuts or premium increases before the election.
:
Then there are employers and their workers. According to a survey by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm, 88% of companies plan to pass on increased health-care benefit costs to employees, 74% plan to reduce benefits, and up to 12% will drop all coverage for employees. Retirees won’t fare well either: 43% of employers that now provide retiree medical benefits are likely to reduce or eliminate them thanks to the new health legislation.

Of course, Mr. Rove may very well be wrong. The President might be right. We might be looking at a new government program that was designed to make things more affordable. And that has succeeded in this effort.

For, as I have said repeatedly, the very first time in modern American history.

The analyses…the polls…the logic…the third-grade math…history…might all be wrong.

Wouldn’t bet on it.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Thing I Know #76. Old married people who share an e-mail address, just like they’re used to sharing a real mailbox, can’t be reached by e-mail. Not really.

National Post, Canada:

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Kevin Cappon said he first heard about the rule on May 20 — right after he had scored his team’s last allowable goal. His team then tossed the ball around for fear of losing the game…

Too much effort goin’ on out there, we gots ta cut down on all that effort goin’ on out there. People tryin’ too hard.

Not enough goofing-off happening.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

All the world’s history of government falls into two chapters: You have the older chapter of agricultural societies, in which a single individual does whatever he wants to do, engaging a machinery of bureaucracy to carry out his dictates with all sorts of hidden agendas at that layer — they all claim to be acting on behalf of God. Then, after the Industrial Revolution, you have a similar arrangement in which one individual does whatever he wants, with the assistance of a bureaucracy chock full of hidden agendas, and they claim to be acting on behalf of a new god called “The People.”

Neal Boortz says (and he’s absolutely right) —

Now remember how this administration works: never let a good crisis go to waste. The financial collapse, housing, the auto industry, healthcare – the narrative is this: first you have to have to create or exaggerate a “crisis” and then the government swoops in to fix it. By “fix” I mean, take it over. Run it. Permanently. Just remember that there is no such thing as “temporary” to the federal government, or any government, for that matter.

Acting on behalf of The People, our government is getting ready to pounce on “The Oil Companies” and take them over. Basically take them over. Oh, how I do loathe that word “basically”; for whoever truly labors to communicate with honesty, no-holds-barred, this word has no meaning and no purpose.

Not clear on what I mean by that? Watch this.

Yeah it’s all about a different word. “Sociali– uh, er, ah, basically…”

I do not typically approve of sarcasm being used to completely support a point. When that is done, the entire argument is typically dragged down into the lower realms of idiocy, stupidity and abject silliness. But some things are patently absurd and can only be revealed as absurd through exaggeration. What our god-kings are trying to do with “Those Oil Companies” has started to come under this heading. The theme that is permeating throughout all of these plans, the core underlying philosphy, is bollywonkers.

Let us illustrate the absurdity.

Don’t let them drill anywhere. Inland, offshore. And slap a huge excise tax on any oil imported. Regulate how the oil is imported, regulate how it is exchanged, regulate how it is refined, regulate how it is transported. And then regulate the regulators. Slap a big fat surcharge on anything these Bad People do with the oil. Demand a new environmental impact statement anytime a gas station so much as sells a new brand of chewing gum. Tax their refineries, tax their trucks, tax their pumps, tax their buildings, tax their land, tax their office equipment, tax them when they pay their taxes. Slap a national ceiling on gas at the pump, gasoline futures, light sweet crude, cap their bonuses, cap their salaries, audit them whenever they declare a dividend, when the stock splits, make ’em pay, pay, pay. Make it impossible for anyone to make a profit in that wicked business, anywhere, anytime, doing anything.

Then let’s all stand back and watch those gas prices fall like a stone!

Basically.

Let’s pop back into the real world for a second now…

What we have with this oil spill, is a lesson in the folly of appealing to Gaea. We had all sorts of strict environmental rules put in place, and successfully enforced. They didn’t even all have to do with the petroleum products industries, a lot of them just had to do with preserving this-or-that bear/bird/seal/moose whatever. Our oil exploration efforts were pushed way out to sea in order to comply with these environmental dictates, and now you see the results.

Gaea’s pissed. Of course it makes sense for her to be pissed now…but what about our move to push the oil drilling out to sea, to preserve the snail darter and the Mynah bird? Don’t we at least get an A for effort? Is Gaea gonna tell us she’s really upset about the oil in the gulf but she appreciates what we were trying to do?

This is the trouble with government’s third chapter, in which the guy-at-the-top and the hidden-agenda-bureaucracies purport to represent this new god called Gaea: The outcome is predetermined. Mankind is never at its best, or even at adequate. It’s always a screw-up.

Had we just called the whole thing off and told the environmentalists to go piss up a rope, there wouldn’t be an oil spill in the gulf right now. That’s a fact.

Mister Vice President, sir, as soon as those papers are finalized I think you might be ready to report in.

Update: Ahh…who doesn’t believe in coincidences? Look what just popped up on the news wire.

My dear girl, keeping Dom Perignon above 38 degrees is like listening to The Beatles without earmuffs.

Eugene Robinson’s ignorance stuns and amazes me. Is there a longtime Robinson reader out there, somewhere, who can point me to the last time this writer has ever recognized an unintended consequence of something?

It would benefit him to see that Charles Krauthammer piece to which I linked Sunday, but I’ve got a feeling it would be a case of leading a horse to water.

It’s a pretty simple situation.

When you drill in a mile of water, and a pipe ruptures, it is really, really hard to shut off the flow of oil. Of course it’s a monumental task to clean the oil off the flora and fauna once it gets into the water.

We need oil. Now. We cannot import it all.

So let’s drill on land. And if someone comes up with some species of mammal that might possibly, maybe, perhaps, we don’t know, find it difficult to live/eat/hunt/breed around the resulting apparatus, we show them a few dead oil-covered pelicans from the Gulf. If they still have something to say, then just walk away because they’re only weighing one side of the argument.

Drill-baby-drill is dead now? It just got vindicated.

Fox News:

A Michigan lawmaker wants to license reporters to ensure they’re credible and vet them for “good moral character.”

Senator Bruce Patterson is introducing legislation that will regulate reporters much like the state does with hairdressers, auto mechanics and plumbers. Patterson, who also practices constitutional law, says that the general public is being overwhelmed by an increasing number of media outlets–traditional, online and citizen generated–and an even greater amount misinformation.

“Legitimate media sources are critically important to our government,” he said.

He told FoxNews.com that some reporters covering state politics don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re working for publications he’s never heard of, so he wants to install a process that’ll help him and the general public figure out which reporters to trust.

“We have to be able to get good information,” he said. “We have to be able to rely on the source and to understand the credentials of the source.”

Go for it, jerk. In fact, after you get that one on the books why don’t you get word of it to our U.S. Congress. Maybe they can get a nationwide-counterpart bill started, in time to make an issue out of it for this year’s elections. Let’s see if the people are in favor of it. Run on it.

I like that idea a lot. I think you should do it.

Hat tip to Joe America, who is brother & annoying liberal gadfly to Mark.

Much more fun to be had at hipster expense, at Unhappy Hipsters.

Hat tip to At The Point Of A Gun, via The Other McCain.

David St. Lawrence has started to notice something:

Now that we are becoming a nation of work-at-home professionals, I notice a subtle addition to even the most business-like home offices.

It is quite apparent that we are being infiltrated by feline operatives, who under the guise of being helpful will pull valuable papers out the printer, walk across freshly sprayed artwork, and lie on keyboards ignoring the plaintive peeps of an outraged computer.

No wonder the New York Times comes across as a place; a desperate, cheerless, gloomy, dismal, hopeless place. This reflects no hope. No hope, no vision.

When Katrina hit, Bush was in his second term and his bumbling was not a shock to a country that had witnessed two-plus years of his grievous mismanagement of the Iraq war. His laissez-faire response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall to big business. His administration’s posture toward the gulf region had been telegraphed at its inception, when Dick Cheney convened oil and gas cronies, including Enron’s Ken Lay, to set environmental and energy policy. The Interior Department devolved into a cesspool of corruption, even by its historically low standards, turning the Bush-Cheney antigovernment animus into a self-fulfilling prophecy and bequeathing Obama a Minerals Management Service as broken as the Bush-Cheney FEMA exposed by Katrina.

Obama was elected as a progressive antidote to this discredited brand of governance. Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.
:
We expect him to deliver on this core conviction. But the impact on “the people” of his signature governmental project so far, health care reform, remains provisional and abstract. Like it or not, a pipe gushing poison into an ocean is a visceral crisis demanding visible, immediate action.

Obama’s news conference on Thursday — explaining in detail the government’s response, its mistakes and its precise relationship to BP — was at least three weeks overdue. It was also his first full news conference in 10 months. Obama’s recurrent tardiness in defining exactly what he wants done on a given issue — a lapse also evident in the protracted rollout of the White House’s specific health care priorities — remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government.

But there is hope here, because there is a vision behind it (hat tip once again to Gerard).

Here’s my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep – to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That’s a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all.

But waitaminnit Freeberg!, I hear you saying. You cannot find hope and vision in the Krauthammer piece, he’s breaking all the rules isn’t he? He’s criticizing. He’s looking backward and not forward.

Yeah, I say, but Krauthammer’s vision is more realistic. For many reasons, starting with the plain and simple fact that he at least has one. Mr. Rich, on the other hand, is in a blind and frantic search for a national savior, some wonderful God-King-Man to put at the tippy top of our government which he seems to think should be properly festooned at the top of everything.

Another problem with the Frank Rich “vision,” if there is one, is the big elephant in the room: Sixteen months ago he got exactly the leadership he wanted, and here he is bitching. Frank Rich is finding out the hard way, just like Peggy Noonan, that the verticality does not work. We aren’t going to produce wonderful results, as a nation, just by putting our Most Wonderful People up at the top and letting everything work out from there.

Because when you do that, all you get back is stuff like this (hat tip to blogger friend Rick). Listen to the congressman describe what’s going on:

You don’t like what Krauthammer had to say because some of your best friends are tree huggers? Well fine, come up with your own idea. But first step back a few paces and take a look at the big picture. This nation needs oil. It cannot import all of the oil…and our own turf is filled with all these spots where the enviro-weenies say “can’t drill here, can’t drill there.” We put this charismatic speech-maker in charge of everything, and the only superlative we’ve gotten out of Him is a more soothing, dulcet tone as He proceeds to tell us that this-or-that cannot happen because the rules say you can’t.

But as Frank Rich points out, at least He’s been doing that “from the start.” Or, I believe the proper cliche is “took charge From Day One.” Well, here’s a news flash: That doesn’t help too much when taking charge consists of telling people they can’t do things. Especially because of ++snort++ environmental impact.

I do think overall the Obama administration is getting a bum rap in all this. If we really want to fix this thing and (more realistically) take steps to ensure it never happens again, or happens as rarely as is possible, we need to do some learning fast. Not quite come up with some new visions, as harshly evaluate the visions we already have.

A nation is not a cult. We do not select our leaders by figuring out who’s got the most charisma. Presidents of the United States do not stop oil leaks, nor do they halt Category 5 hurricanes. In fact, the President has no authority to guarantee a perfect outcome, or even an adequate one, for anything, anywhere. Read your Constitution; it is not an outcome-based position of authority.

Yes, let us accuse Obama of mediocre leadership, when & where He deserves it. But let’s form some realistic and plausible ideas about where exactly it is that He deserves it. Why are we blaming Him? Is it because he didn’t say “Plug The Damn Hole!” with suitable authority, weight, majesty and flourish?

Count me outta that one.

The lesson here is pretty simple. You put people in charge who are fun-to-watch, and what you get isn’t leadership. Anybody who’s ever had trouble fitting a resume onto a single page already knows this to be true: Some of the worst bosses to have, are the ones who are most skilled at manipulating emotional tenor in others to get things sold. You only have to work underneath them a little while before you figure out their skill is in taking credit and avoiding blame. And if you know how to do that, why bother to learn how to do anything else?

So when you put the people in charge who are fun-to-watch, what you get is just another bureaucrat. Just another voice, more sonorous and soothing than most perhaps, but the syllables it strings together are the same as they were before so it might as well be Charlie Brown’s teacher. Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it. Make one exception and I’ll hafta make a thousand. Rules, rules, rules.

The most bitter disappointment is the one experienced by people like Frank Rich, who thought this would have some impact on what decisions would be made. You almost feel sorry for ’em.

It’s satire, but it’s good satire. Without the Onion logo and without me telling you, you would’ve bought it until halfway through. If you do a better job paying attention to current events…maybe all the way to the end.

Because there’s a lot of truth in it.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Via Flixxy.

I like the space savings.

But I perceive a conspiracy to confuse medical requirements with just-plain-laziness and desire to live a cloistered, possibly prodigal lifestyle. My enthusiasm would increase measurably if I were to be assured of some workable breakwater between those things.

Come to think of it, I have exactly the same concerns about medicinal marijuana.

And she’s spilling her guts, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.

She is brilliant at what she does. But I’ve always had some reservations with what she does.

Eagle-eyed readers of The Blog That Nobody Reads, might notice on very rare occasions I’ll make some vague, perhaps irritatingly vague, statements about my own vocation which has something to do with technology and engineering. And project management too I suppose. These are things that have to do with two and two being four, and remaining four now and forever, without regard to how many people want it to be three or five, or nineteen, and how desperately they want that.

Nothing personal against Peggy, but this is something of the opposite of her own profession. As a speechwriter, and as a column writer, she makes it her business to be more concerned with having her finger on the pulse of…something. America, I suppose. She lives in a world where, if a whole lot of people are ticked off that two and two are four, then maybe we should sit down and talk about that awhile, maybe find out if we can come up with something different.

And that is a valuable insight to have. Presidents need it, and really anything political needs it…which is to say we all do.

But the woman has a long, long history of thinking about X-Y-Z when I’m thinking about A-B-C. This sometimes leads to her telling me what I’m thinking — I’m part of “everyone,” at least logically I am — and two-and-two-make-four people don’t respond too favorably to that.

In fact, now and then we receive an unpleasant reminder that two-and-two-make-four people are concerned with the workings of the universe, and peoples’ pulses are made up from that. This creates problems with the pulse-people, like Noonan, and it creates problems for them as well.

Like for example what she wrote twenty months ago:

A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, [Obama] did not respond with a politically shrewd “I have no comment,” or “We shouldn’t judge.” Instead he said, “My mother had me when she was 18,” which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.

There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen “Obama Wins” and “Alabama.” She said, “Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.” She said, “That’s where they used the hoses.” Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

This means nothing? This means a great deal.

Perhaps it is unfair to recall this and scrutinize it with the benefit of a year and a half watching the Holy Emperor screw up. In fact, let us file that under “probably” rather than “perhaps.” But this is important stuff. Every month, every week, we see someone making big, huge, irreversible decisions, in politics and out of politics, confident that this is the right way to go because their finger is on a “pulse.” We watch someone pull a Noonan.

It is laughable nowadays to consider that Barack Obama said “My mother had me when she was 18” rather than “I have no comment” or “we shouldn’t judge” just to show some grace. Nowadays, another sentiment has taken hold that Obama may be a man completely lacking in grace; this has taken hold because of our experiences with watching Him, and at 400+ speeches per year it is not trivial experience by any means. We know from the Cop-and-Professor-beer-summit debacle from last summer that Obama is not inclined to say “I have no comment” or “we shouldn’t judge,” and may be altogether lacking in the personal attributes required to string such words together.

No, He saw another opportunity to talk about Himself. Peggy Noonan interpreted this to be a display of grace. Beginning to see where I’m going here? Whether it’s your lifetime vocation or not, being too concerned with what others think can get you in a whole lot of trouble. It frequently leads otherwise competent, capable people possessing otherwise sound, reliable judgment to think with the heart and not the head.

Oh look at that baby bear, isn’t it cute? Let’s take it home. That would be another decision along the lines of what I’m talking about; on par with what Noonan did when she inferred that Obama had grace.

These are not good decisions. Their appeal is based on emotion, and emotional appeal can only be based on the immediate moment because there is no way to chart or predict where emotions are going to be further down the road. Also, they must be inherently narcissistic. It’s all about me. The stubby ears, the big brown eyes, the li’l pug-nose, everything that tiny bear cub has must be there to appeal to me, me, me. Just like when President Obama gets in there, He is going to do what I, I, I want Him to do.

We live in a universe that plain and simply does not work that way. A universe filled up with things that do not exist for our benefit. Like a mother bear’s protective instinct, and Obama’s incredible, perhaps unprecedented, feeling of self-importance.

Whoever told us Obama would see America as something placed in His care? Whoever told us Obama had a personality inclined toward stewardship — looking after something — seeing to it that some jurisdiction of His would fare better as He left it, compared to how He’d found it? Were there any anecdotes about anything, anything at all, involving more real responsibility than an assistant-professorship? We had people pointing this out, and it was dismissed as a bunch of conservative ankle-biting. I guess it’s hard to make it look like something other than that.

But with our experience we have now that we didn’t have then, we see there was something to it. Stewardship is, among other things, a personality. It is a long term looking-after of something, with a sense of conviction that you’re beginning each day with the rewards, or the wreckage, of your performance the day before.

Obama doesn’t have it. We haven’t seen Him actually maintain anything, besides relationships; and human emotions being what they are, with relationships you don’t work with the rewards or the wreckage of your work the day before. Obama, from the best information we’ve managed to seize about Him, seems to have spent a lifetime being blissfully insulated from the conditions of things.

Fer chrissakes, we don’t even have a story about a bicycle lovingly maintained, or a household pet. He doesn’t have the “guardian” personality. He is not, by personal inclination, a steward of something. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate a refinement of the requisite skills, or a personal interest in refining them.

There is much evidence to indicate otherwise.

Sorry you’re shocked, Peggy. Had you taken the time to ask yourself some questions others were asking, it would not now be so surprising.

Hear endeth the lesson: Putting your finger on a pulse is an educational thing to do, only so long as it remains educational. So long as it involves taking additional information in. Once you start ignoring some valid observations because your finger’s on the pulse, it ceases to be an exercise in education and it becomes one of ignorance. Every now and then, there are consequences to this…because, when all’s said and done, we do live in a universe in which two and two make four.

Ben Smith, Politico:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a rare foray into domestic politics today, offering her view that — given America’s high unemployment — wealthy Americans don’t pay enough taxes.

“The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [America currently does] — whether it’s individual, corporate or whatever [form of] taxation forms,” Clinton told an audience at the Brookings Institution, where she was discussing the Administration’s new National Security Strategy.

Clinton said the comment was her personal opinion alone. “I’m not speaking for the administration, so I’ll preface that with a very clear caveat,” she said.

Clinton went on to cite Brazil as a model.

“Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they’re growing like crazy,” Clinton said. “And the rich are getting richer, but they’re pulling people out of poverty.”

Both Clinton and Obama campaigned for president on promises to allow the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans expire this year, a plan that is now part of Obama’s budget. The move will effectively raise taxes sharply on people earning more than $250,000.

The Administration’s new formal strategy document makes the case that domestic economic strength is crucial to influence abroad.

And get a load of the comments underneath. Although, to be realistic about it, there may be more overlap between Politico commentators and taxpayers, than between likely voters & taxpayers.

Dare I hope that the “tax the rich” swill has been declining in popularity just as quickly as the Obama administration for the last year and a half? Could it be there is a palpable feeling that left-wing social experimentation can only be afforded in limited doses, and we’ve exhausted our quota?

Could it be that people are getting worried we need to turn around and back out of this cul de sac…before we become another…uh…Brazil?

See, I have this idea in the back of my mind that nobody is falling for this. We’ve got politicians selling it, who don’t really believe in it. They’re generally well-off personally, after all. Are they mailing extra cash off to the Treasury? Whatever surplus it takes for them to feel like they’ve been taxed enough?

We’ve got college professors and left-wing economists saying that narrowing the wage gap is the way to go. Do they ever make calls, maybe place bets on ’em?

We’ve got a lot of people who say they believe in taxing the rich. None of them are rich, or if they are, they don’t see themselves that way.

Some teevee station went out into the streets of New Jersey to find out what ordinary residents had to say about Gov. Chris Christie. He’s taken the position directly opposite from Ms. Clinton about taxing the rich. I found these comments telling:

“I’d rather see a tax on millionaires…It’s about time we stopped paying for everyone else.”

“Taxing the millionaires sounds great. The only concern I have is the millionaires have the ability to take their money and leave.”

Like, duh.

Should I even get started on how things are going in the Golden State? Nah, you probably don’t want to read about that. All our economic situations are plenty depressing enough. Ah, don’t tell me let me guess: We here in California aren’t taxing the rich enough. That surely must be the problem, right Hillary?

Hat tip to Gerard.

All seven Republicans on the judiciary committee have asked the Attorney General to name a special prosecutor.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee “urge the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Congressman Joe Sestak’s claim that a White House official offered him a job to induce him to exit the Pennsylvania Senate primary race against Senator Arlen Specter.”

AllahPundit at HotAir has more:

Darrell Issa, who started the drum-beating about this, is calling it Obama’s Watergate and potential grounds for impeachment, and went as far this week as to threaten Sestak with an ethics complaint if he doesn’t come clean. Here’s the key federal statute, although it’s not the only one in play potentially: Karl Rove cited three criminal provisions on Monday night that could conceivably have been violated.

Sec. 600. Promise of employment or other benefit for political activity

Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

The defense, I assume, will be that no job was explicitly “promised,” just sort of hinted at in order to preserve plausible deniability. E.g., “Gee, Joe, it’s a shame you’re running for Senate. We were thinking about you for Secretary of the Navy in two years.”

Byron York is skeptical.

The first reaction of most observers is that, barring some new revelations, there is little or no chance the GOP senators will get their way. Holder has already rejected one such request from Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, and in the Senate, the Democrats who control the Judiciary Committee are not calling for an investigation. With Democrats in control of the White House, the House and the Senate, the president and attorney general don’t have to do anything. On the other hand, Republicans controlled the White House, House and Senate at the time of the Plame affair, and a Republican attorney general appointed Fitzgerald. But that only happened after a media firestorm over the CIA leak matter, and there has been no such storm over Sestak. Without a public outcry, and with Democrats controlling all the levers of power, Holder and Obama are free to deny all investigation requests from Republicans.

Yeah. They’re not dictating what Holder is going to do, they’re making it more expensive for him to do it. Good on ’em anyway.

So how’s that transparent-administration workin’ out for ya?

BlackFive links to the risible parallel-monologue dialogue:

I didn’t have much of an opinion on Joe Sestak before today…But I’d like to make a couple of observations about his claim to have been offered a position in the administration by the White House in return for ending his primary challenge to Arlen Specter. The first is that if indeed this offer was made by one or more members of the Obama administration, it was corruption, a felony. The second is that it was Joe Sestak’s legal obligation as an American, and more importantly his duty as a retired Admiral, to report it to the authorities as soon as it happened.

The third observation — and most important — is that Joe Sestak did no such thing.

Instead, what we get are a bunch of non-answers from Joe Sestak to direct questions from David Gregory:

MR. GREGORY: What, what job were you offered to stay out of a primary race by the administration?

REP. SESTAK: It’s interesting. I was asked a question about something that….

…happened months earlier, and I felt I should answer it honestly. And that’s all I had to say about it because anything beyond that gets away from what we just spoke about.

MR. GREGORY: Right.

REP. SESTAK: What are the policies that are really going to help people who’ve been slammed by the economy…

MR. GREGORY: All right, but you’ve campaigned on transparency. It’s part of the politics. You talked about standing up to the White House when they’d fielded a candidate–made a deal with Arlen Specter. So isn’t it in the–in the spirit of transparency, were you offered a job by the administration? And what was it?

REP. SESTAK: I learned, as I mentioned, about that personal accountability in the Navy.

MR. GREGORY: Yeah.

REP. SESTAK: I felt I needed to answer that question honestly because I was personally accountable for my role in the matter.

MR. GREGORY: What’s the answer? What’s the job you were offered?

REP. SESTAK: And–but anybody else has to decide for themselves what to say upon their role, and that’s their responsibility.

MR. GREGORY: Yes or no, straightforward question. Were you, were you offered a job, and what was the job?

REP. SESTAK: I was offered a job, and I answered that.

MR. GREGORY: You said no, you wouldn’t take the job. Was it the secretary of the Navy?

REP. SESTAK: Right. And I also said, “Look, I’m getting into this…

MR. GREGORY: Was it the secretary of the Navy job?

REP. SESTAK: Anything that go–goes beyond that is others–for others to talk about.

Yes yes, personal accountability. They teach that in the Navy. Got it. Now here’s the thing. According to Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod, no such inappropriate offer was made to Joe Sestak. Which means: Someone is lying.

Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod — obviously dispatched from a central location with coordinated talking points — take an Officer Barbrady “move along folks, there’s nothing to see here” approach. You think that means they’re clarifying what’s going on? Think again.

“NOTHING inappropriate happened,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says about the job offer that Rep. Joe Sestak, now the Democratic nominee for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, claims the White House dangled to induce him to back away from challenging incumbent Arlen Specter. “It has been looked into,” adds White House senior adviser David Axelrod, and “nothing inappropriate happened.”

Can’t even get a yes or no. But move along. We looked into it.

Phew! Good thing we have an ethical, transparent administration in charge of things.

The headline is from commenter Durka-Durka, who speaks for me.

Creepy. Really creepy.

Here’s Palin, giving McGinniss a little advanced publicity for his stalker’s journal, though she doesn’t have much choice, given the bloodsport that is Alaska politics, I suppose. (Sigh.)

Spring has sprung in Alaska, and with this beautiful season comes the news today that the Palins have a new neighbor! Welcome, Joe McGinniss!

Yes, that Joe McGinniss. Here he is – about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window.

:
Politico contacted McGinniss’ son, who offered this response:

Sadly, she’s right. We tried our best to intervene, but alas, the heart wants what it wants. We can only pray for him now. He’s convinced that Todd will step aside and when the time is right, he’ll be there, right next door, to pick up the pieces.

I guess maybe he intended that as a crack about Palin, rather than his dad… I don’t know though. Palin didn’t suggest that McGinniss had some sort of romantic obsession, just that he was creepily spying (which he is; that’s going to be the marketing campaign for his book, of course). It was just the son who brought up that angle.

Unbelievably, David Weigel thinks Palin is the one that’s done something wrong here. Uh, come again Mr. Weigel?

Palin informs her readers that McGinniss is “overlooking my children’s play area” and “overlooking Piper’s bedroom.” Alternately sounding angry and mocking, she refers to “the family’s swimming hole,” which at first reference sounds like she’s accusing McGinniss of checking out the Palins in their bathing suits, until you realize the family’s “swimming hole” is Lake Lucille. And she posts a photo of the space McGinniss is renting, captioning it, “Can I call you Joe?”

Can somebody explain to me how this isn’t a despicable thing for Palin to do? She describes McGinniss as the author of “the bizarre anti-Palin administration oil development pieces that resulted in my Department of Natural Resources announcing that his work is the most twisted energy-related yellow journalism they’d ever encountered.”

Another way of putting it would be that McGinniss is an investigative journalist who wrote his first best-seller at age 26 and was shopping a book about Alaska and the oil industry when Palin was named John McCain’s running mate.
:
Has McGinniss gone to an extreme to get a story? Well, we don’t have his side yet — not that this has prevented every other media outlet from typing up Palin’s Facebook post like some lost Gospel. But assuming he’s rented the house near the Palins for some period of time, assuming the Palins know he’s there and that he’s writing a book, then what, exactly, is wrong with this? [emphasis mine]

Dude. He’s stalking her to get his story.

You’re just so blind. Let go of the Palin hatred for a second or two. Just dang, if Joe McGinniss burned her house down would you come down on her for using up his matches and gasoline?

Can someone please rent a house next to David Weigel’s for five or six months? As long as you got your writing career started at age 26, he doesn’t have a problem with it. Bring your binoculars.