Dr. Melissa is concerned, and so are we. Traipsing through her links we stumble upon this:

BBC World Service just released a global poll that sends conflicting signals about people’s attitudes toward the Internet.

On the one hand, 79 percent of the 27,000 adults polled in 26 countries believe that Internet access “should be a fundamental right for all people.” (Half of them strongly agree with that proposition.) But on the other hand, 53 percent believe that “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.”

If these people regard the word “right” the way I do, then this is a terrible situation. It is my reluctance against the deepest and darkest variety of pessimism that persuades me to believe the term could benefit from some clarification; to believe that, where I think a “right” is something justifying the invasion of a country, to many other people in those other countries a “right” is justification for simple diplomacy. As in “Hey, those people don’t have Internet access.” “Well, let’s try to get it to ’em.” Which is a far cry from saying “Hey, those women are being raped on a regular basis, and murdered when they try to learn to read,” to which civilized people say “Well this sucks big ol’ donkey balls, but we’re going to have to go in there and put a stop to that.”

Rights. It seems America was out grabbing another beer from the fridge, when someone came on the teevee and handed out the instructions to be so casual and flip with that word. So ninety-six percent of the adults in South Korea think it’s a basic human right to be hooked up to the net? In my world, this would mean only four percent of them should be allowed to vote, or to make any decisions about anything at all. What in the world is going on in your head? You like surfing the net, therefore it becomes a “right”?

Has anybody mentioned equality? Holy smokes, that would really stir up a hornets’ nest wouldn’t it. All over the world, it seems people who are most into this hyper-“New Rights” stuff are also into equality. Now, if only ten percent of us have access to ninety percent of the available bandwidth, then…oh, goodness gracious me. Better do something about it right now! Human rights are at stake!

Rights. Pffffft. You realize the danger here, don’t you? And it’s a pretty serious one: If everything is a right, then nothing is.

So I have a new right in mind for myself: When I vote, my vote should not be watered down by the votes of numbskulls laboring under the delusion that we’re living in a populist pure-democracy, and that they/we can have any li’l thing they/we decide is desirable, simply by voting on it.

New “ripening smartphone fruit” project: Civics knowledge quiz for Americans who want to apply for their “right” to vote. And I’m going to limit its length. But one of the very first questions is going to be — what is a right? That, to me, seems to be where the trolley is leaving the tracks here. Too many people think, if it would cause some bad feelings of withdrawal if they were deprived of something they have currently, that this by itself conjures up a “basic human right.”

It is, more and more, taking on the form and substance of a problem that is too serious to be left alone, and allowed to smolder itself out. More and more, it is demanding some intervention.

It’s a new one on me that the written history’s scarcity is due to the Christians disallowing it from being recorded. We’d noticed this about our family tree: Kids within an immediate family sharing a name; nobody remembering a single thing about the woman who bore ten, twelve, sixteen of these kids who couldn’t all be named. No journals, notes or diaries. No letters.

We figured it was just a matter of Swedes and Norsks not being much into that readin’ and writin’ stuff. I would imagine it would be an even bigger factor back in the days when the long ships were being launched and the Norsks were invading all those other countries. Who’s got time for writing with all that raping, burning and pillaging to do.

Scandinavia, 21st century, superpower status: 0%
Political correctness: 100%

Scandinavia, 10th century, superpower status: 100%
Political correctness: Are negative numbers allowed?

Terry McDermott, Columbia Journalism Review, looks into White House at-the-time-Communications Director Anita Dunn’s famous quip:

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological. . . . What I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party. . . . They’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.

How did Mr. McDermott handle this?

When I approached Fox to gain access to their studios and staff for a story about the nature of their news operations, I was told that if I wanted to do a piece on Fox, I should do a profile of Shepard Smith, their main news anchorman. I should be careful, they told me, to distinguish between Smith, a newsman, and their bevy of more notorious personalities—Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and Greta Van Susteren*. They aren’t really news people, I was told; they are editorialists and ought to be analyzed as such. They are analogous, Fox suggested, to the editorial and op-ed opinion pages of newspapers, which ought not be confused with the straight news coverage.

The proposal to do a story on Smith was fair enough, but would not in any way address the central issue: Was Fox a political operation? I declined. A Smith profile would be a wonderful story for another time, I told Fox, but it wasn’t the story we felt relevant at the moment. That being the case, Fox “declined to participate” in my reporting, which is another way of saying I should go do something to myself and possibly the horse I rode in on, too.

Wow, that’s really unreasonable of Fox, huh. They’re accused of filtering and tailoring their news to such an extent that they’re a Republican mouthpiece, and they respond by insisting that any investigation into their news should be confined to their…news.

But that isn’t where McDermott lost me. Where he lost me was right about here:

Shepard Smith is an interesting guy. He is far and away the most charming personality on Fox. Not that this takes special effort. Generally speaking, Fox doesn’t do charm. O’Reilly, for all of his considerable talents, blew a fuse in his charm machine years ago, and it’s not clear Beck ever had one to blow. Let’s not even start on Sean Hannity and Cavuto.

So the guy starts out fastened like white-on-rice to his central question, which is whether Fox News gets its talking points shipped in straight from GOP headquarters. Fox offers him an opportunity to interview its news personality, and his response is to split hairs so finely that, hey, this doesn’t service my stated mission so no-can-do. And just a few paragraphs after that, Mister Stalwart is distracted by the bright-shiny-object of the charm question.

This brings back bad memories for me. Two-year-old memories. Then-candidate Barack Obama had a serious problem when His attempts to appear Christian-like backfired on Him; we found out His “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright, was a bigoted asshole.

Obama delivered a speech.

The speech was oh so charming.

He called for a “national dialogue on race.”

Some — many — called it the BEST! SPEECH! EVAR!!!

Today, just-about-nobody can recite from memory a single statement from the speech.

And exactly which friends Barack Obama does or doesn’t have, or did & didn’t have, is thought to be absolutely nobody’s business. In fact, since then it’s come to light that quite a few more of His friends are assholes. Were you to task me to go out and find someone with as many asshole friends as Barack Obama, I really wouldn’t know how to look. But we pay it no mind, because Mister Charming is oh-so-charming.

At least sometimes.

This seems to be what happened to Mr. McDermott. Past this point excerpted above, the job he does sticking to the subject at hand is…well, let us call it rather lukewarm in quality. And that is being charitable.

Resigning himself to checking out the question by simply watching news shows from Fox, CNN and MSNBC, he comes up with these…

Here are some more representative examples. They might seem chosen to make a point; they were not. They are admittedly impressionistic, but we think a fair sampling of what was on the air that day.

On the Senate compromise on health care reform:

MSNBC—Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a godsend.” Howard Dean said “the Senate bill really does advance the ball.”

CNN—Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, called it “the type of coverage that they [her constituents] deserve.”

Fox—Neil Cavuto posed this question to independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut: “Senator, they just didn’t put lipstick on a pig? It’s still a pig, right?” Lieberman was noncommittal on the porcine nature of the compromise, but assured he would vote against it. Hayes of The Weekly Standard said, “it is absolutely insane.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, “It is the lump of coal in our Christmas stocking.”

On climate change:

MSNBC—Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, addressing Sarah Palin’s claim that climate change is not necessarily the result of human activity: “Her bigger problem, if she wants to be a candidate, is that she’s on the wrong side of history. She’s on the wrong side of science. She’s on the wrong side of politics here.”

CNN—Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent: “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in what some see as the cleanest energy option available, nuclear power.”

Fox —Amy Kellogg, Fox correspondent: “…stolen e-mails suggest the manipulation of trends, deleting and destroying of data, and attempts to prevent the publication of opposing views on climate change…”

We could go on, but the pattern would not change.

This seems to be the point where McDermott makes up his mind. It also gives him away. He does not seem to personally know of anybody who might show some reasoned skepticism toward the Obama agenda, the left-wing agenda, let alone anyone who might be rationally hostile toward these. People like this heard all about the big ol’ dust-up with Anita Dunn and Fox News. You know what they had to say? They said, Fox News gets in trouble with the White House, for presenting both sides of a given issue, including the side that might not be so convenient to the White House. And because it does this, it is worth watching; whereas, its competition is nothing more than a bunch of damnable echo chambers.

If he had heard of this, he would have realized his two universally-representative samples — “we could go on, but the pattern would not change” — prove their point, and not so much his. For within his two samples, CNN and MSNBC contributed absolute-zero discourse, and on open questions even. They did not travel. No foundation of ideas upon which the chatter could rest. They began precisely where they ended: health care “reform” is a “godsend,” and you’re “on the wrong side” if you don’t go along on climate change.

And so I have two concerns here — since Terry McDermott is not doing anything here that I don’t see lots of other people doing every single week.

One: To look upon someone presenting only one side of a story, as presenting two sides…and vice-versa. How is that done exactly? To plagiarize from Prager, it impresses me as an exercise of confusing clarity with agreement. Fox is found undesirable; just how, McDermott doesn’t really say. But clearly, he finds the ClimateGate scandal to be inconvenient and harbors a preference that it not have been mentioned.

Two: Barack Obama is charming, Bill O’Reilly is not. I recognize we live in a world in which some people are charming and other people are not, and I bow down before the reality that — right or wrong — this is, occasionally, and maybe not so occasionally, a serious advantage on some serious issues.

But you know what? That should buy you only so much.

This one needs no introduction. It’s an editor’s note over on one of our favorite sites, IMAO, and it’s in response to a snarky bit of what appears to be left-wing brain-fart that doesn’t merit quoting or for that matter any attention whatsoever.

But this is a piece of solid gold, right here:

Conservatives tend to treat as hobbies what liberals treat as occupations.

Hehe.

CNN Money:

The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.

The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That excludes the value of primary homes and defined-benefit pension plans.

Workers who said they had less than $1,000 jumped to 27%, from 20% in 2009.

Well, lessee. I was 29 before I worked for a company that had a 401k plan. Up until then, it could be fairly said my checking account was my retirement plan. And I can pretty well guarantee to you there was less than a grand in there, in “free” cash, the entire time.

That seems pitiful, but by Freeberg standards it’s affluent.

So I’m hoping these folks in the 27% are real young pups.

Still and all, that’s pretty damn bleak. The 43% figure worries me some more. Ten grand…in an age where you have better-than-even odds of reaching the century mark…and it is considered odd or eccentric to work past age sixty-five. Oh no wait, sixty-two-and-a-half. Oh no wait, six decades even. Oh no wait, fifty-seven and…well, at least we’ve already accounted for inflation.

Oh no wait, no we haven’t.

Stanley Fish, Opinionator, NY Times Blogs:

I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.

What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people. The other 290 or so said things like “No way”; “Are you kidding?”; ”Are you mad?”;“What a ridiculous and insulting premise!”; “I’ll miss him like a rash”; “This must be a satire”; “Bush is a sociopath”; “George Bush has destroyed this country”; “History won’t forgive him”; and (a popular favorite) “I hate the man.”

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.

You hate that guy who slept with your wife — who happens to have a pilot’s license. Until lately, he was flying your plane; now the cockpit is in the control of a bunch of hyperactive, sugared-up six-to-eight-year-olds.

So the low down dirty skunk does have his place after all, doesn’t he? That’s okay if it takes some time to admit it. Thirty-four months to go.

Blog-Uncle Gerard claims credit for the graphic, and we saw it at his place before we saw it anywhere else so we have no reason to doubt him.

Geez…we elected this guy President who’s really fun to watch and sounds kinda like Walter Cronkite, even though He doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about what He’s doing and we’re going to have to pay for His programs plus all the interest on the resulting debt for generations and generations…that doesn’t do the trick? What on earth is it gonna take?

According to Obama and liberals across America, electing Obama would undo all the damage to our reputation that Bush supposedly did. Only, in reality, the United States is less respected under Obama than it was under Bush. Shockah!

A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than it was two years ago and think President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security, a new poll finds.

The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin — 51 percent to 41 percent — Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

“This is surprising, given the global acclaim and Nobel peace prize that flowed to the new president after he took office,” said pollsters for the liberal-leaning organizations.

Gee, you might even think that he didn’t deserve the acclaim and the awards.

Maybe the fact that Obama has yet to forge one strong relationship with a major world leader has helped further destroy our credibility around the world. Now, granted, this is a poll of Americans, not foreigners. So I guess we technically can’t put too much stock into this. But Americans aren’t feeling more secure in our place in the world, and we’re the ones who are supposed to be benefiting from all the hopey-changey-ness anyways, right?

The tee shirt I wore on Saturday has Obama’s face right on the chest, with the words “WELCOME BACK, CARTER” emblazoned underneath. Apparel like this is getting more and more popular, by the day. This time it was another shopper three places behind me in line, yelling out “I love it!”

This world communicates in the language of horse heads in beds. Not primarily, perhaps. Here and there, civility, restraint and good manners may and will get you what you want and need.

But very few have any genuine respect for the submissive. And when you don’t respect somebody, you act in his interest only when it is costless for you to do so. That other language involving decapitated equine creatures does have its place.

So this problem will get worse before it gets better.

Pajamas Media Exclusive.

The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).

The report from Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos — which was the subject of a George Will column in the Washington Post on June 25, 2009 — showed each “green job” that had been added by Spain’s aggressive wind energy program cost Spain nearly $800,000 and resulted in the loss of 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.

Eight times, Obama had publicly referred to Spain’s program as being a model for a U.S. wind energy program.

The 900 pages of emails, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher C. Horner, show staff members from the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the EPA developing a response to the report. They also show them coordinating the response with the Center for American Progress, plus the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) — two wind industry lobbyist groups.

Water is dry.

I noticed this myself awhile back, so it had to be obvious inside the Congress before:

My proposed motto for the 111th Congress, and it’s much bigger than health care: “Our approach to any given problem, is to make sure nobody can make a profit by finding a solution to it.” Go on down the list of things we need to do. Manufacture energy. Fund our retirements. Invent drugs and therapies. Finance houses. Sell cars. Save…the…planet.

They who have control of the Congress now, will just make sure nobody can make a profit first. And then figure out if they managed to solve the problem, second. Maybe they will have and maybe they will not have. But first, make sure no one is making any serious money.

No one outside the beltway, that is.

Caplin Rous, the capybera.

More here.

Via FARK.

On the subject of yesterday’s smartphone-fodder rant about what would happen if liberals decided it was in their interest to “prove” water is dry?

Dr. Helen did some more reading of F.A. Hayek’s book and had some more thoughts.

Freedom begins with the freedom of think. Or, as Winston Smith put it, channeling the spirit of his author George Orwell (1984, chap. 7): “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Take what follows, more than anything else, as a commentary on the way I think about things.

One thousand one hundred and seventy paces from my front door is a Starbuck’s. Now, if you walk from that point an additional three hundred ninety paces across a busy boulevard, you get get to a large luxury supermarket. The supermarket has gourmet quality meats, vegetables, breads, seafood, frozen goods, flowers, vegetables, organics, liquors, condiments. It is not bag-yer-own. It is the kind of quality from which you would select if you were about to throw a party, with your very best friends in attendance.

The bank that maintained a branch in that supermarket, was my bank. They staffed it up with bright, competent ladies of all ages who I don’t think I ever once caught making a mistake. And if you showed up there just to pull twenty dollars from your account, they would politely direct you to the ATM machine thirty feet away — for next time — and then politely accommodate you. Oh and by the way, this branch had extended hours. Other branches would be open until six weekdays, maybe twelve-to-three Saturdays. This one was open until seven weekdays and ten-to-five on Saturdays.

As of a week ago, this massive supermarket has a big white wall where the bank used to be. Oh, and the machine is gone.

So I say this:

Some guy, who is very high up the food chain at that particular supermarket location, or perhaps its region, had some trouble with his wife. He separated and began dating a lady who is a highly placed executive with the bank. He patched up his differences with his wife. Now they’re back together. The homewrecker from the bank was given the heave-ho and she’s feeling pretty damn sore about it.

I look at people, generally, as high-drama people.

And the reason I got this checking account in the first place, was when I first moved to California I began dating a gorgeous, hot-blooded young widow who worked for that bank. She was more reasonable and rational than some of the girlfriends who came before, or who came afterward. But she was also a little bit…shall we say…impetuous.

But more than anything else…and maybe this is a bit of irrational selfishness on my part. But this does NOT look like a business decision. It just doesn’t.

An actual branch with some competent people in it, costs a certain amount of money to run. A machine? Eh…that costs some money too. But not nearly as much. That’s supposed to be the point of having a machine. The machine has to be pulled out?

Seems a tad vengeful to me.

Perhaps I’m inventing soap opera episodes where they aren’t actually taking place. I’m willing to allow for that possibility. But if I had to bet some money — I’d say nuh-huh. Someone’s pissed off at somebody. That, or what was once a thriving, exploding community of young opportunistic first-time home-buyers, is now becoming a ghost town and it’s not worth the trouble of dealing with our neighborhood.

But I don’t have too much faith in the ghost-town idea. I just don’t. Someone is teaching someone a lesson.

The noise was coming from inside the house!

A woman in Germany phoned police after hearing “suspicious noises” in her flat…authorities said Friday.

The noise was so loud and strange, even over the telephone, that police in Bochum in western Germany decided to send a patrol car around to the “scene of the crime”, a statement said.

“Daringly, and with the occupier’s permission, one of the officers opened the drawer of a wardrobe where the noise was coming from.

“Underneath some clothes he found a very personal, battery-operated object which had obviously switched itself on… The tenant’s face abruptly changed colour.”

Police then “wished her a nice evening and left”.

I’m going to call it right here and now: Future generations of high school and college students are going to be allowed to enroll in special U.S. History classes dealing with the last two-fifths of the twentieth century, specifically between 1965 and about 1980. And how incredibly, unbelievably wrong we were.

I’m not criticizing the widespread unified notion that history was heading in a certain direction. I am referring specifically to this toxic, companion notion that anyone on the wrong side of history should be driven out of whatever position of authority had been entrusted to them — and executed otherwise capably — and these offenders should be defrocked, isolated, ostracized, “disappeared.”

I was looking over this article about the National Organization of Women handing out their smug, condescending “awards” to advertisers and other mass media merchants who were unlucky enough to have NOW disagree with them with regard to their portrayal of women. And I suddenly realized: It’s okay we didn’t have blogs during that time. It is quite alright that we were not allowed to say out loud in any public venue, “you know, I’m not too keen on this part of feminism” or “maybe that guy shouldn’t be fired.” All fine and good that NOW secured their monopoly on free mass-media speech in the 1970’s, and got the first-word last-word all-words-in-between…all of the time…just because they wanted it.

Look at it this way: What if you found a newspaper article from much earlier. Say, from 1899…about the jail term a guy got for using a dirty word with no kids around, but a cop/constable overheard. Or for drinking a beer on a Sunday. Or for dropping what he was doing and helping a “colored” with some personal household chore.

You wouldn’t need to see an argument from the other side, would you? You’d just think “what a bunch of flaming fucking assholes.”

And that’s precisely what this article looks like to me. That is how our grandchildren will see it. What a bunch of unpleasant, nit-picking, controlling shrews.

According to Wikipedia, Paul Anka also won the “Keep Her In Her Place” award for his song, Having My Baby. I don’t recall a single instance of anyone requesting, let alone demanding, the feminists to elaborate on the point they were seeking to make with this. In Mr. Anka’s case I would want some specification on which among the lyrics were most oppressive. Ever listen to it? Not a single negative, oppressive or condescending syllable in it. Someone, somewhere got the idea that this number deserved scorn. That person should have been abducted and studied, because that’s nucking-futz.

Since then, feminism has evolved. It now zeroes in on two points of focus, one of which became prominent sometime in the 1990’s and the other of which started capturing attention in 1973: Gay marriage and abortion.

Gay marriage does not enhance the role of women in society. It diminishes it.

Ditto for abortion.

So in some ways, feminism is crazier now than it was then. But back then, it was much more accepted to force an entire nation to do things your way, by means of an energetic and highly visible campaign to destroy people who don’t agree with you. To go out looking for things that piss you off. And advertise that this is what you’re doing, so the people who make the decisions become frightened of you. That would not be quite so appealing now…I don’t think.

The era will be studied. Sometime. As soon as we have done a more thorough job of pulling our society’s metaphorical head out of its own ass. I would say, as I write these words, it is somewhere around…forty percent extricated. Depending on our collective mood from moment to moment.

Thing I Know #322. Feminism exists today to make women disposable; it attempts this by confining their energies to those specialties a man could pursue just as capably.

Update: Here’s an example of a healthy way to deal with odious advertising. You don’t see some man’s-rights-group gathering together to hand out self-important, sanctimonious, scolding “awards” for dreck like this:

But everyone with two testicles, and a wife or girlfriend, would love to give that asshole a beat-down kinda like what Joe Pesci got in Casino. Depriving him and his bosses of a livelihood? Pretty fun to think about it.

But we don’t mobilize to actually get it done, because grown-ups know there is such a thing as having destructive thoughts, and there is also such a thing as acting them out. Those are two different things.

These otherwise-decent people we call “feminists”…they lack this adult sense of self-restraint. They think every impulse — provided it’s hostile — m-u-s-t be acted-upon. At least, they thought that 35 years ago. And I’m still making up my mind about today. The most militant ones seem to still have this problem.

Heh.

For a woman, and for a man.

Just re-checked for the first time in about sixteen years, give or take. Yep, it’s still funny.

FrankJ notices our current President doesn’t command much respect these days. There are ten giveaway signs…

7. The Secret Service has Obama open their mail for them to make sure it’s safe.
:
4. The White House tour guides are always ordering [H]im to clean stuff.
:
2. When Obama visited a classroom, the kids mistook [H]is purpose there and kept asking [H]im to make balloon animals.

Ingenious headline for this post shamelessly stolen from commenter #3, zzyzx.

Clayton E. Cramer, Pajamas Media:

My wife and I signed a marijuana decriminalization petition one evening around 1980 for a group that acted like they had fallen out of a Cheech and Chong movie. They asked if we could contribute a joint or two to the cause. They were utterly shocked when we told them: “We don’t smoke pot.” They just could not imagine that anyone would support decriminalization without a more personal interest.

There’s no question that making drugs illegal creates serious problems for our criminal justice system. It clogs the courts, it corrupts police officers and government officials, and it funds some really sleazy people. All of this is true — but it turns out that there are some substantial social costs on the other side that simply don’t get any attention…

A surprising number of scholarly studies in the last 25 years have demonstrated that marijuana use seems to cause an increase in psychoses such as schizophrenia, and somewhat less dramatic mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

I’ve long been of the opinion that marijuana’s effect as a “gateway drug” has been discredited and dismissed prematurely, much like the Laffer Curve, the communist infiltration of the U.S. Government, and the eminent terrorist threat of Saddam Hussein’s regime. When, where and how did it become laughable and chuckle-worthy to view pot this way? Can any of the chucklers tell me? Where and how is this line drawn between Mary Jane and the “tougher” stuff?

I have also been of the view that this hallucinogen creates a lot more of what we already have in abundance, and whittles down what is unappreciated and scarce. It thrives off of, and in so doing fortifies, an addictive personality.

The arguments I hear in favor of legalization only enforce this. Statements like “We could tax it and pay off the deficit overnight” demonstrate, to me, an obvious lack of appreciation for mathematical realities and magnitudes (in addition to a lack of interest in using the proper terms). Normal people would present the same argument as something much, much milder, like “With the economy the way it is now, those tax dollars sure would come in handy.” That would inspire some Thing I Know #328 inspired indignation from Yours Truly, along with other bristling inspired by Thing I Know #335. But at least it would not carry such a palpable scorn against the timeless essential of measuring things.

As it is, I carry the uninformed opinion — and it’s been tested and re-tested, so how uninformed is it, really — that this substance knocks the Architect/Medicator balance way out of whack. It is an elixir that turns Architects into Medicators. We need more of this — how?

I still support states’-rights on this issue. But in my own little corner of the world, I’m a-votin’ no.

Some of these were a bit lame, but the last one was pretty good. For the record, throughout most of what I jotted down yesterday morning, I had Joe Biden on my mind. Maybe it shows.

When there is a genuine consensus among the electorate that Sarah has overstayed a welcome and her fifteenth minute is really done — and that’s more an if than a when — I have every confidence she’s going to go away.

And I also have every confidence she’s not going away any time soon. So her antagonists are in a dicey position here. And aren’t they always? They have to find a way to bitch and scream and piss and moan about her not going away, at the same time as bitching and screaming and pissing and moaning about her quitting the Alaska job. Sarah’s no good because she quits, and Sarah’s no good because she doesn’t.

Fellow Right Wing News contributor Melissa Clouthier has more thoughts.

Politico. What is it with these democrats who set out trying to screw things up, fail miserably at it, and then give themselves high marks?

Asked this weekend to grade her performance as speaker, Nancy Pelosi gave herself an “A for effort.”

But Pelosi knows that the real test is still to come.

Pelosi is inarguably one of the strongest speakers in modern history — an authoritarian figure in an era of centralized power in the House. But the coming months are a make-or-break period for her, a brutal reality check of her ability to manage all aspects of her job — consensus-building, agenda-setting, vote-counting, fundraising and campaigning.

Now in her fourth year as speaker and eighth overall as the top Democrat in the House, Pelosi has never faced such a daunting set of challenges:

Health care: Pelosi and other top House Democrats say publicly that they have the votes to push through a comprehensive package, but privately, they know they don’t. Pelosi must balance the diverging interests of her own members while simultaneously satisfying Senate Democrats and working with President Barack Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a former House colleague with whom she has an uneasy relationship.

The voters: The electoral winds that were at Pelosi’s back in the past two cycles thanks to having George W. Bush in the White House are blowing this year in Democrats’ faces. Prognosticators both inside and outside the party are laying odds on an outcome that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago: a GOP takeover of the House.

Democratic infighting: The factions that make up the House Democratic majority, from the conservative Blue Dog Coalition to the liberal Progressive Caucus, are increasingly willing to fight for their own priorities at the risk of party unity. That dynamic was evident last week when a simple $15 billion jobs bill was punted from the floor schedule over a series of Goldilocks-like objections about too little spending, too much spending and misdirected spending.

Strong. Authoritiarian. You’ll notice, in that third paragraph in which the story tries to offer balance between both sides and shower its meaningless platitudes, a certain adjective was missing in action: Influential.

Influential, as in: Things were going to go this way, but Nancy Pelosi did X and because of that things went this other way. She made a huge difference.

It is the one quality democrats admire most. And yet, currently, all the folks they consider to be wonderful leaders and huge big household names, have been offered opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they have this.

So far, in that one half-term “Quitter” Palin pulled up in our union’s largest state, she beats ’em all. Seriously. Go on, fill in the sentence: “This was going to happen, but Obama did X and that other thing happened instead.” And then repeat the exercise after substituting Pelosi’s name. Then Hillary Clinton’s. Joe Biden’s. Fill in something.

Out of the whole sorry lot of ’em, living and dead, all I can think of is “Mary Jo Kopechne was going to die an old woman, warm and safe in her bed, but Ted Kennedy…”

Shocking statistic from the Washington Times.

The so-called “Great Recession” has left Americans depending on the government dole like never before.

Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.

Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes. [emphasis mine]

I say let’s come up with a name for this. Something like “tax-aid deficit.” Talk about it morning, noon and night…put it on Fox News and let Keith Olbermann and the gang get just as mad about it as they want to get.

Stand all that talk about “Bush gave us the worst economy since the Great Depression” right on its head.

Liberals, after all, are most entertaining when they’re getting all pissed off at you for measuring something, and paying attention to it. So much fun to watch. They know they have to stop you, but they just don’t know what to say about it. And…for just a few minutes at a time…you get to treat excessive reliance, by one human being on another, to the point of dysfunction of both of them…as a bad thing.

The country can certainly use a whole lot more of that. When people depend on each other too much, it means the dependent and the dependee both end up living less life. And it’s called “co-dependence.” Really easy to get going, really hard to stop once it gets going.

Obama has done absolutely nothing to stop any of it. And for a quarter century or thereabouts, our society has done damn little to stigmatize against it — even while it’s been stigmatizing just about everything else.

Tax-aid deficit. Yes. Me likey. Publish it every single quarter, I say, and start putting the heat on.

Cassy found something.

My comments speak for themselves.

Think I’m a-gonna barf here.

Terry Paulson, writing at Townhall:

The basic assumption in Washington seems to be that politicians must do something—pass a bill, add a new regulation or create a new entitlement—in order for America to get better. President Obama agonizes, “I spend every waking hour, when I’m talking to my economic team, about how we are going to put people back to work.”

What if government leaving people alone is better than doing something that just makes matters worse? What if letting Americans be free to handle their own problems and earn their own rewards is better than watching government politicians micromanage something they know nothing about?

Congress recently passed legislation to fine airlines for leaving people on runways too long, only to find that now airlines prematurely cancel more flights in the face of pending bad weather to avoid possible fines. Cancelations leave more flyers stranded with no plane to fly in. Congress “cares” enough to make matters worse.

Give me a “Do Nothing…Get Out of the Way” Congress!

This used to be a mainstream idea. It’s been repeatedly proven right, and after being repeatedly proven right it has — somehow — become, in 2010, a not-quite-so-mainstream idea. Somehow, if there’s a building on fire Congress is the only fire engine in town with a working hose.

But this includes out wretched financial shape too. We’re seriously upside down, debt is completely out of control and Congress will…will…will pass a new program or two that will fix it?

Things are about to get seriously cockeyed and gunneybags, or a government program is going to do what no government program in the history of the republic has ever before done. There is no in-between.

Using all your firing synapses, Dear Reader, which one do you think is about to happen?

Victor Davis Hanson, in top form:

John McCain was damned for picking Sarah Palin who had not finished her first term as governor, and had previously only been elected to local political offices and served on a state commission.

Her middle American ‘you betcha’ twang, NASCAR persona, good looks, and occasional deer-in-the-headlines interviews with hostile anchor people, coupled with the kids, conservative creed, Christianity, and 19th century husband, sickened—there is no other word for it— the DC-New York punditocracy. Yes, they concluded, she really was from Wasilla. Yuk.

So we got everything in the media from the maverick McCain suddenly as cynical sell-out who settled for third-best, to Palin, the clueless Alaskan yokel.

In contrast, to this day, there is no in-depth analysis of Kerry’s disastrous pick of the first-term, uninformed Senator Edwards as his VP choice in 2004. And it took the National Enquirer to inform us of his later conspiratorial lying and bribery involving his illegitimate child—sordid facts apparently well known to—and hushed up by—the mainstream media. Remember, later presidential candidate Edwards was not just inexperienced, but as a confessed wonk, did not open a book. He was the owner of a mansion who preached about “two-nations” inequality, and he alternately used and humiliated his alternately heroic and conniving cancer-stricken spouse.

He’s asking why we tolerate such double-standards. I’ve been wondering this for awhile, so it’s good he came up with some answers.

Wireless extender.

Hat tip to Melissa, via Hot Air.

Over a month’s worth of dust on it, from SodaHead. But it really oughta stir the puddin’ because the control for the experiment is our current and 44th President.

Bush or Obama? Who’s smarter? SodaHead points to the village-idiot-from-Crawford, and they have ten decent arguments to back it up.

2. Bush identified and confronted evil

There was something very refreshing in George W. Bush’s Reaganesque interpretation of the world in terms of good and evil. In contrast, Barack Obama has viewed the globe largely in shades of grey, with a reluctance to describe who exactly America’s enemies are, from North Korea and Iran to Islamist terrorists.
:
6. Bush cultivated key allies

Granted, Bush was hardly the most popular leader the US has ever had in Europe. But he did invest a great deal of time and effort in cultivating a strong personal relationship with several key European leaders, including Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi. President Obama has largely ignored building alliances with European heads of state, and seems indifferent towards the transatlantic alliance. His administration has placed far greater emphasis upon backing the rise of a European superstate, than it has on strengthening ties wit close allies.
:
10. Bush did not send mixed messages in the face of the enemy

A constant theme of Barack Obama’s speeches has been to describe the war in Iraq as a “war of choice”, underscoring his own intense opposition to the war, hardly a message of support for the more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers still stationed in the country. He also spent months dithering over whether to send additional US forces to the war in Afghanistan, and when he finally did make an announcement of an extra 30,000 troops it was tempered by the simultaneous declaration of an exit strategy, and a warning that America could not wage war against the Taliban indefinitely. This was hardly a display of Churchillian grit by the Commander-in-Chief. In contrast, President Bush never failed to give his soldiers the full, unequivocal backing they deserved, and always spoke in terms of achieving victory, instead of artificial timetables that hand the initiative to the enemy.

This is one of the primary Architects-versus-Medicators questions: Do we even want our leaders to be vastly smarter than we are? Can’t remember where I saw it, but some very passionate Obama-backer was saying Hell Yes! I don’t want my leaders to be like me, I want them to be better than me!

Out here in the real world, we see a lot of problems with that.

If the leader is smarter than I am, and this is to present us with some kind of advantage, that would necessarily mean sooner or later there is a decision coming up on which the leader would make the right choice and I would make the wrong one. Now, perhaps what follows next doesn’t apply to those who lust after these “smart leaders,” but — my fate, every single day, depends on my ability to make wise decisions. If I can be counted on to make dumbass decisions that actually destroy things, then dammit I want to know more about that.

Not so with this other batch of human. They want Obama because He’s smarter than they are, He can be counted on to make the right choice where they’d just bollux it up, and that pleases them just fine. Put him in charge, and they’ll go back to living their humble little lives. One cannot help but wonder what kind of life they’re going back to living.

Also: How come when it comes to voting for our next President, suddenly they’re able to decide things just fine? They don’t know what smartz would do, but goldang it they know it when they see it?

What we have here, I think, is a confusion between wisdom and irony. If you listen to these people prattle on for a good long time, you’ll notice something rather shocking: The “smart” decision, with regard to each and every question that comes up, is never, ever, ever ever ever the simple one.

Global warming is more dangerous than radical Islamic terrorism.

Queen Latifah is sexier than Beyonce Knowles.

To keep from going broke, we’ve got to spend more money.

A real man is in touch with his feelings and isn’t afraid to cry.

If there is a problem, the best thing to do is to make sure no one can ever make a profit producing a solution to it.

If innocent people could be harmed by a terrorist act, and it could be prevented by bringing physical pain to an evil man, decent people will make sure this doesn’t happen and let the innocent people go ahead and die.

If you’re a baby and you’ve crossed that Magical Vaginal Finish Line you’ve got rights to womb-to-tomb health care, a living wage whether you’re competent or not, a vote in all our elections whether you have common sense or not — but if you’re not there yet, then you don’t even exist as a person. It’s a matter of inches, and that’s just the way it is!

This is the part that scares the hell out of me. These people are not capable of recognizing or responding to the situation in which the simple, common sense answer is the right one. Right, as in — go ahead, put on a magical thinking cap and boost your IQ by a thousand points, you’ll still decide it the same way. This doesn’t work for them, because in their world you have to show off your smarts by deciding the opposite.

Therefore, when this happens they will consistently demand the choice that is made by these smart people, is the wrong one.

And that is not an occasional happenstance. The common-sense answer being the right one…common-sense, recognized by someone with an I.Q. of 100, not a single point greater…is a situation that arises roughly 99% of the time. Tall tippy glass on the edge of the table? Move it toward the center. House on fire? Put it out. Cops are out in force today? Slow the hell down. Importing too much oil? Drill baby drill.

Fact is, if you show me ten issues that arouse all this contention in our national discourse, eight or nine of them are going to be things that shouldn’t reveal any disagreement at all. They are made that way because Medicators continue to feel this need to inject new variables into relatively simple situations, variables that make it “pseudosmart” to go the other way. None of them make so much as a lick of sense. This is how & why Eric Holder decided to try that scumbag in civilian court in New York City. He wasn’t able to defend the decision when called upon to do so. It was just that extra-variable-thing; he was used to hanging out with a crowd that would sing hosannahs to his superior intellect, if he’d just make a decision opposed to common sense. He’s not a lone voice in the wilderness here. Roughly half our country’s population is exactly like this.

As your I.Q. increases, every time it passes somewhere between thirty or fifty points, your decisions should flip around to the opposite so you can demonstrate that it’s happening. Even with regard to simple things, things in which we all inwardly know the answer shouldn’t be changing, like third grade math.

Someone hasn’t met the liberals & atheists I’ve been meeting.

Although, to be fair about it, I’m thinking specifically about the liberals-and-atheists I’ve been meeting on the innerwebs, not in real life. And the ones on the innerwebs are probably thirteen and under.

I thought this part of the story was kind of funny:

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with “unconventional” philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart,” he said.

Heheheheh…what’s Latin for BINGO? I see that in a lot of innernet-liberals-and-atheists. Some specialized intellect…a little bit of general density…theoretical brilliance and practical not-quite-functional-ness. But nothing really stands out quite so much as this eagerness to pass oneself off as a genius. Not just any genius. An unconventional genius. Unconventional…up to, over, and well past the point where unconventionalism provides any return on investment to the person being unconventional, or any goal he’s pursuing.

I think Mr. Not-Involved-in-the-Study just hit a home run here.

Probably just as well.

Thing I Know #203. Superman’s adventures are only fun to read about when Lois is still clueless about who he really is. As soon as Clark Kent lets her in on The Big Secret, everything gets lame.