Summit VI

Barron’s has an interesting way of calling it.

We studied every single race — all 435 House seats and 33 in the Senate — and based our predictions about the outcome in almost every race on which candidate had the largest campaign war chest, a sign of superior grass-roots support. We ignore the polls. Thus, our conclusions about individual races often differ from the conventional wisdom. Pollsters, for instance, have upstate New York Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds trailing Democratic challenger Jack Davis, who owns a manufacturing plant. But Reynolds raised $3.3 million in campaign contributions versus $1.6 million for Davis, so we score him the winner.

And they conclude what, now?

Our analysis…suggests that the GOP will hang on to both chambers, at least nominally. We expect the Republican majority in the House to fall by eight seats, to 224 of the chamber’s 435. At the very worst, our analysis suggests, the party’s loss could be as large as 14 seats, leaving a one-seat majority. But that is still a far cry from the 20-seat loss some are predicting. In the Senate, with 100 seats, we see the GOP winding up with 52, down three.

Well, I respectfully disagree. Republicans should hang on to the Senate, I think. Last I checked, the worst-case scenario was a 50-50 split with Cheney breaking any ties. I think we’re headed for that scenario. It’s become increasingly difficult to imagine the Republicans hanging on to the House.

But what if it shakes out this way? Good for the War on Terror; and I suppose we really don’t have any more important issue than that. But — what about presentation? What are the Republicans going to do to mend their rickety connection with the electorate, and demonstrate why it’s so important to keep the Democrats out?

The way things are going, even if the Republicans win, it will just mean our poiltical climate remains unchanged. You get immediate, and undeserved, respect if you huff and puff about the “dangers of global warming” — a threat unproven, and at this point, not even credible. Should you pontificate, instead, about dirty little bearded men who want to kill us so badly, they’ll piss bloody pulp to do it — a threat which has been demonstrated — you get from your fellow countrymen a bunch of ridicule and derisive snears.

Should Republican politicians go on the offensive and take on this unthinking, mechanical, lock-step code of mindless taboos and Newspeak? Should they risk that kind of political capital? If they emerge, tattered but intact, after the 2006 midterms…they most assuredly won’t do this. They’ll allow the silly blue-state Hollywood culture to remain in place, unchallenged and therefore authoritative: We should all be worried about Chicken-Little threats, and pay no attention to the genuine threat behind the curtain.

Not that I want the donks to win. It just seems like a no-win proposition either way. The soldier-slandering baby-killing global-warming-alarmists control the glittery entertainment world…or they control Congress. If our Republican leaders are lazy, and the voting public is also lazy, then what’s the difference really?

More Joyful

Heh.

Scary Peace-People III

Jim Moose is the father of Julia Wilson, the highschool-freshman class Bush-hater who was pulled out of class and questioned by the Secret Service for threatening to kill the President.

Now, a lot of people wouldn’t like the way I worded that. What I’m supposed to say to describe Julia’s predicament, has been established long ago. I’m supposed to decorate my description of Julia with meaningless platitudes like these (link requires registration)…

The latest Sacramento resident to be questioned by federal agents in possible threats against President Bush is a 14-year-old girl with a heart on her backpack and braces on her teeth, a freckle-nosed adolescent who is passionate about liberal politics and cute movie stars.

Her name is Julia Wilson, and she learned a vivid civics lesson Wednesday when two Secret Service agents pulled her out of biology class at McClatchy High School to ask about comments and images she posted on MySpace.

Beneath the words “Kill Bush,” Julia posted a cartoonish photo-collage of a knife stabbing the hand of the president. It was one of a few images Julia said she used to decorate an anti-Bush Web page she moderated on MySpace, the social networking Web site that is hugely popular among teenagers. [emphasis mine]

The name of the anti-Bush web page, according to the article, is “‘People who want to stab Bush’ — Julia said she doesn’t remember the exact name because she soon changed it.” Gee, how adorable. Like a heart on a backpack, or freckles or something. Anyway, I’m supposed to just ease you into all this stuff. She didn’t “threaten to kill the President,” she posted some kind of photoshop caricature of the President being stabbed with a knife, and insinuated that a passion for stabbing the President is a prerequisite for joining her group. Threatening to kill the President…that’s just a concise summary of the situation that’s utterly compatible with all known facts. How unfair of me.

Julia has become something of a martyr for a whole anthology of liberal concerns: Our vanishing civil liberties that nobody anywhere can put into a meaningful list, President Bush’s contempt for cute freckle-faced children with hearts on their backpacks, the rapidly declining level of discourse in the country for which they blame everyone except themselves, etc.

Julia’s father, Jim Moose, had this to say yesterday about the brouhaha his daughter has stirred up in an op-ed:

Sadly, I had expected such highly partisan reactions, which were completely predictable in the currently poisonous political atmosphere in this country. My wife and I agree that Julia’s behavior was wrong, and deserved to be sanctioned. Believe me, she has learned her lesson. As to the charge that we should have carefully monitored her MySpace page, we respectfully disagree.

We know our kids better than anyone else, and because they are all good kids — Julia has two siblings — we have chosen to respect their personal privacy on such matters, although we have been diligent in warning them that human predators inhabit the Internet. Had we realized that the Secret Service was reading her MySpace page, perhaps we might have paid more attention.

To my mind, our policy of giving our kids some “space” in which to learn from their own mistakes does not make us “neglectful parents.” The charge is particularly absurd as directed to Kirstie, who despite great intelligence and talents that could have launched her into a successful professional career, has instead chosen to stay at home the last 21 years to devote all of her energies to raising our children. I am intensely grateful to her for these efforts. She and I have the strong belief that we ought to treat our children as though we trust them, until they give us reason not to (which has happened on occasion). Thus, until this incident with the Secret Service, we saw Julia’s MySpace page as akin to a personal diary. We respected her privacy.

Now, this is just wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy, assuming Jimbo really believes in it. But I don’t think he does. His command of the English language is at least adequate; he’s taken the time to anticipate the response of fellow Bush-bashing liberals, and cherry-pick the facts that would most assuredly get some kind of a rise out of them. Not exactly rocket-scientist stuff, but it takes something to do all that.

I just see knowing the difference between “private” and “Internet” as far, far below that. As in, being “shocked!,” Captain Renault like, that the Secret Service would be reading something posted on the web for all the world to see.

Local blogger “Fetching Jen” has written about this time and time and time again. But I thought her original post, about the October 13 story, was most interesting.

Yesterday when my son came home from school, he told us that a rumor was floating around the school that a freshman was pulled out of class by Homeland Security. Then we heard that the rumor was true:

U.S. agents question teen

The latest Sacramento resident to be questioned by federal agents in possible threats against President Bush is a 14-year-old girl with a heart on her backpack (blah blah blah)…
:
The couple are disturbed, however, that federal agents questioned a child at school — without her parents present. And First Amendment lawyers question whether the Secret Service over-reacted to a 14-year-old’s comments on a Web site made for casual socializing.

“I don’t condone what she did, but it seems a little over the top to me,” said Julia’s father, Jim Moose. “You’d think they could look at the situation and determine that she’s not a credible threat.”

Excuse me… not a credible threat? That she even made the threat is outrageous, beyond poor judgment and illegal. Yes, it is against the law to threaten the President.

Where does a 14-year-old high school freshman get this level of anger? From her parents, of course. Hey, great parenting folks. She must be a really nice kid. And according to my son, she’s a piece of work, exhibiting frequent outbursts at school whenever she disagrees with something a classmate says or does. And her parents are neighbors and vocal supporters of the uber-crazy liberal Steve and Virginia Pearcy (WorldNetDaily: New effigy: Bush lied, I died) who hung the dummy soldier from their roof in an anti-war effagy with the sign, “Bush Lied, I died” on the uniform. [emphasis mine]

Jim Moose says his daughter has learned her lesson. I’m just wishing someone, somewhere, was discussing exactly what lesson it is the girl needs to learn. Don’t threaten people? Try to get into the other person’s shoes before you go off the handle and bully them? Takes all kinds to make a world?

Or…us poor, poor little anti-war liberals need to watch what we say in that evil George Bush’s Amerika because the First Amendment doesn’t exist for us?

I’d just like to know what has been learned from all this. Mr. Moose has exhausted his opportunity to write an op-ed for his local paper, just recycling a cherry-picked assortment of factoids from the whole sorry episode. Throughout his opinion piece, what opinion he would like to proliferate from these factoids, or what he thinks is notable about them, is rather unclear. The point of it seems to be that we shouldn’t worry about his daughter and what danger she may pose to herself or to others. He agrees what the daughter did was dumb; he thinks the Secret Service was out of line in questioning her without a parent present. What, exactly, does he think was dumb about what she did? What does Julia think was dumb about what she did?

My concerns are aroused, in no small part, by the second-to-last paragraph of Mr. Moose’s piece:

As some people commenting on the story have noted, at least Julia has passionate beliefs and cares deeply about politics. One of the Secret Service agents had similar comments after talking with her. The things about Bush that Julia dislikes the most are his bigoted attitude toward gays and lesbians and his know-nothing attitude toward global warming. Though we share these perceptions, she has reached them independently, and she feels them with fervor.

The most disillusioning thing about our recent experience is that it has proved to us all too starkly how ready, and even anxious, many people are to judge others harshly without sufficient evidence to form thoughtful opinions, and how truly mean some people are. I attribute these revelations in part to human nature, and in part to the degraded status of our political culture. I note that President Bush uses the verb “kill” all the time with respect to “evildoers” whose humanity he refuses to acknowledge. I note, too, that our governor achieved his fame through a series of movies in which he methodically slaughtered seemingly hundreds of one-dimensional enemies.

This, to me, is just stunning. “…it has proved…how ready, and even anxious, many people are to judge others harshly without sufficent evidence to form thoughtful opinions.”

Uh…yeah. You know Jim, maybe that comes from growing up in a household wherein you learn that your mindset is the only mindset worth having, and anybody who disagrees is something less than human. Deserving of the receiving end of a good, healthy outburst. Or to have their picture put on the Internet with a dagger photoshopped next to them, and a good old-fashioned hate group set up dedicated to their personal destruction.

Gee, I guess any among us can step into Julia’s crosshairs by disagreeing with her about any one of a number of things. Global warming and gay marriage will do the trick nicely.

Fetching Jen’s original question, “Where does she get the anger?,” seems apropos. In fact, from absorbing all the material that has made its way to me about this girl and her appalling lack of judgment, Julia doesn’t seem to be burdened by anger quite so much as an inability to recognize a different opinion as potentially worthwhile. Worthwhile, or…even if it isn’t, you know, if that other person with the different idea is allowed to have the last word just one time, things will still be okay. About the sufficient evidence to form thoughtful opinions: Am I to believe she really knows that much about gay marriage or global warming? She can’t know too much more about climate change compared to anyone else, and what everybody else knows about it is damn little. So what we have here, is a girl who sees nothing wrong with organizing on-line hate groups, inspired by motives that amount to…very, very little. She simply wants to eliminate people who don’t think the way she thinks.

Oh yeah, and as an afterthought if she gets in trouble and is confronted by the concern that someone might actually be hurt, she’ll do some backpedaling.

That right there is the trouble with peace people. What opinions they have — these opinions demonstrate their benevolent nature, so nothing else needs to. They “gave at the office,” you might say. Words, deeds…if any of these are interpreted by some to be poorly-mannered, or malicious, or even dangerous — what is the problem with that? They’re good people. It’s proven. They have peaceful opinions. And they’re willing to kill for them.

Julia said it best herself: “I mean, look at what’s (stenciled) on my backpack � it’s a heart. I’m a very peace-loving person…I’m not going to kill the President.” Yeah, of course, the Secret Service should have known that. Can’t you just see Secret Service Agent Columbo, apologizing to Julia for having taken so much of her valuable time?

Some of the scariest people we’ve got in our country right now, are our scary, scary peace-people.

Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.

Memo For File XXIX

Last winter I had a family council with my son about movies that have “Doofus” Dads in them. The reason for this, was that we had just seen such a movie and I had come to appreciate, over time, that this was part of a trend. I had no idea how big a trend it was, until we were finished. We found something, like, 50 or 60 movies like this.

Movies are not trivial. Movies are important. During their formative years, our children come to form their opinions about the world around them…through movies. Nobody wants to admit this, since if the person admitting it is a kid, he makes himself look like a dolt, and if that person is a parent, he looks like he’s abdicating his responsibility. Well, the truth of the matter is you can’t stop this.

Maybe there’s an opportunity available if you’re still married to the kids’ mom. Maybe not. I don’t care. I found a way to turn lemons into lemonade. I’m not in a position to fully control what my son can see, but I’m in a great position to instill healthy habits about how to process it. So that’s exactly what I did.

But wow. Sixty movies? I had no idea.

Since then, I have come to learn something else about movies with “Doofus Dads” in them. My resentment toward this mind-numbed, silly movie-making habit isn’t so much as a Dad; although it is partially about that, since it makes my job as a Dad much harder than it should be. No, most of my resentment is as a consumer of movies. I figure, when I spent money on a movie, I’m paying someone to be creative. Going solo, going on a date with “She,” going as a fam and paying through the nose for overpriced candy and popcorn. Or renting. Or catching on cable. I figure, there’s some huge money going toward someone to render the service of showing a ilttle bit of Goddamn creativity. That is the advertised service, it’s paid-fer in advance, so let’s see it.

The “Doofus Dad,” I have come to realize, isn’t simply a father-figure who is a doofus. There are three rigid, rock-hard, uncompromising, distinguishing characteristics for the Doofus Dad.

Pretty structured, huh? But let’s concentrate on that second bullet about the dysfunction. There’s a lot going on just within that.

Long list, huh? And yet…out in our highly-creative “Hollywood” land, we got an awful lot of product being pumped out that conforms to it, every word of it, hand-in-glove.

I was noticing that about, of all movies, this one. Claire Danes is on the phone with her father at the beginning of the movie, which is a clever way of establishing that Claire Danes is in the movie and so is her character’s father. Subject of the phone call? The father, a general in some unspecified branch of the military, has work related obligations and can’t make something. Wedding, or something. And Claire Danes whiiiiiiiiines away, in perfect allegiance to the tired ol’ trope, “You prooooooooomised!!!”

Now I don’t want to spoil the movie for any who may have not seen it. But this has nothing — NOTHING — to do with the plot. It is completely detached, unrelated, even awkward.

ASSHOLES. It’s like, when the script is being written, someone’s in the room ready to bust kneecaps if the “Doofus Dad” cliches aren’t religiously tossed in.

Like I said, I really resent this as a Dad. I resent it even more as a person who pays big money — well, big money to me, anyway — for what are supposed to be highly imaginative and creative intellectual products, meticulously sculpted to make one or several memorable experiences for my family, such that we end up closer to each other for having sat through it together.

That’s what movies used to be. I don’t think they even want to be in that business anymore. Well, as the customer it’s up to me to define what the job is, and they impress me as not really wanting my money that badly.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… V

Quick. Name a news service that is oh so unbiased or, at least, has a sterling reputation for same. A news service that takes great pains to remain objective no matter what the subject matter. Mainstream as mainstream can possibly get, entrusted with the noble endeavor to inform those who…

Oh, stop laughing already.

Anyway, the answer would be “Reuters.” That hard-hitting news organization that doesn’t even use the word “terrorist.”

Reuters, which needs kneepads and a bib whenever it “interviews” Democrats.

If Democrats win control of the U.S. Congress in the Nov. 7 election, it would turn the Capitol upside down and create a political nightmare for the already embattled President George W. Bush.
:
“In some ways it would be a nightmare for Bush, but in other ways it could be an opportunity,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Zowie! We’re already off to a great start in this analysis. The “scholar” explored how a Democratic party victory next month would be bittersweet for the President, presenting him with both a “nightmare” and with “opportunity”; our unbiased news service decided to pick up on the negative intangible, which plainly was not intended to receive the emphasis — and teased the story with it. Great move! No agendas here!

What did the scholar mean by the “opportunity” angle?

Ornstein said Bush, who denounces Democrats as soft on terrorism, could move toward the political center and reach out to Democrats in his final two years in office to overhaul U.S. immigration laws and the Social Security retirement program, two goals he has failed to accomplish.

But Ornstein said that was unlikely. “I’ve talked to a lot of people who know him well and are really close to him. I have yet to find one who thinks he will change his modus operandi dramatically,” he said.

Okay, here’s the money question, since we’re all a bunch of voters who are thinking of voting for Democrats next month. This is what it’s all about: What does “overhaul” mean in that context? What are you doing when you “overhaul” the immigration system? What are you doing when you “overhaul” Social Security? Let in more illegal immigrants? Throw the doors wide open? Slam them shut for good? Something in between? What? Make Social Security pay out more? Put more people on the receiving end of the program? Maybe tie Social Security and immigration together, so that illegal immigrants can get a whole lot of Social Security money? What are we talking about here?

I need to know! I’m thinking of voting for Democrats! I need the information!

Silly me. You aren’t supposed to want an answer to that question. I guess…I have the “opportunity” to go looking for it in some other article. Reuters doesn’t think it’s relevant.

What do they think is relevant. Well, the next few paragraphs tell us…

Democrats deny Republican claims they would try to impeach Bush and remove him from office. Instead, they plan to push their own agenda, “A New Direction for America,” which includes raising the federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade, ending some tax breaks to oil companies and making college more affordable by reducing federal student loan interest rates.

Democrats also promise to implement recommendations from the 9/11 Commission to bolster security, ease the threat of global warming and, in response to influence-peddling scandals on Capitol Hill, clean up the way Congress does business.

Reuters went on to demand answers as to how this was going to be done. How are Democrats going to change the global climate?

Eh…no. No, they didn’t. They didn’t ask a single question about this stuff, or if they did, it didn’t make it into print. Yeah, that’s right. All you get is the crappy promises made. No plan. Just free advertising, that’s all.

Reuters, great job…you can stand up now. Don’t forget the breath mint, and you need to wipe that slime from your chin.

I’d just like to go back in time, let’s say, twenty years and say Hey everybody! Guess what’s going to be unbiased, objective, hard-hitting news in 2006? Well believe it or not, one of our major political parties is going to pledge to change the freaking weather and our centrist, unbiased, agenda-free mainstream news organizations are going to not ask a single critical question about it. I’m not kidding! That’s really the way it’s going to be in twenty years.

Would they believe me? Well, I was around in 1986…no way would I have believed me. I would think this would be much crazier than the boasting about the time machine in the first place. And yet…here we are.

On Friday this blog, which nobody actually reads, was discovered by Webloggin’ and now we are listed. With an impressive fanfare.

Webloggin Welcomes Morgan Freeberg, New Author of Blogging Excellence!
By the Webloggin Editor
October 20, 2006 at 1:33 pm in Feature Article

We are very proud to announce that Morgan Freeberg from �House of Eratosthenes� has joined the Webloggin Community of Blogging Excellence!!!!

Morgan calls his blog �the blog that nobody reads� but in reality he has developed a following of regular readers.

So why is it called the blog that nobody reads? Morgan explains this best.

So the question has naturally arisen from that readership, why does it persist in calling itself �the blog that nobody reads�? Yeah, subtitles can be cool. Superman is the �Man of Steel,� and Hooters is �Delightfully Tacky, Yet Unrefined.� But what�s up with a subtitle that is starkly at odds with the truth?

And what�s going on with that name? House of Erato- What? Who?

Here it is, the long-awaited FAQ that explains all. However, it�s a Bill Clinton flavor of �all� � it depends on the meaning of the word �all.� Unlike our 42nd President, however, I�m not going to deliberately lie to you and then send my cronies out to appear on Sunday morning talk shows, intoning that the lie was okay because it was never your business to begin with. I�m taking the initiative in telling you, so it�s automatically your business, and it�s true.

So there you have it. Well actually there is quite a bit more. My favorite is �This blog is meant to be a monologue, but a dialogue is always better.� You can read Morgan�s FAQ here.

While you are at it please stop by his blog and check out everything he has to say!

Webloggin’ editor is way too kind. Three exclamation marks? Well, I’ll take ’em.

So is it really The Blog That Nobody Reads? Well…kinda, yeah. But as I’ve noted, the subtitle has a lot more to do with intent than with achievement. We don’t say outlandish things around here to generate more hits, like…foolish nonsense insinuating our elected officials are starting wars to get revenge for attempted hits on their daddies, or for oil profiteering, or crap like that.

No sir…when we spout craptacular nonsense of that sort of magnitude, it’s because we believe it to be true.

When you go the other way, allowing what’s “true” to be affected by your desire for more traffic, you replicate a problem that currently infects, not only the “blogosphere,” but the mainstream media as well. You begin to say things to get people to look at you, and lose your dexterity in dividing what’s proven from what is not — and what’s unproven one way or t’other, from what’s blatantly false.

And so we have global warming. This blog, which nobody reads anyway, keeps in mind that “global warming” is proven or is pretty much proven…but at the same time, the idea that technology is contributing meaningfully to it, is in serious doubt. There is a significant likelihood that the importance of the human technology, may one day be proven as well — and that, even then, the prognostication that our actions may have a deleterious effect on our continuing survival, is mythical. The supposition about looming extinction at our own collective hand, is complete balderdash. There’s never been a serious reason to believe it, ever. To the contrary, gloomy omens of our self-destruction are every bit as old as written communication itself, perhaps older — they have never faded away into dormancy. Ever. Not for long.

But The Blog That Nobody Reads is always open to new information.

Point is, that is just not the kind of idea that’s going to get you a lot of traffic. So we’re way down the list of the blogosphere ecosystem, #8244 right now, on a list which places DailyKOS at #3.

That’s the way thinking is. You may reach a conclusion based on what you heard that will get you a lot of attention, which is the way other editorials and blogs do it. Or, you may reach a conclusion upon which you, personally, would be willing to bet something important. Like a body part or the life of a loved one. That’s what we do here at The Blog That Nobody Reads. We think — sensibly. You will see, here, repeated references to “on your left nut thinking,” or the prospect of taking your left testicle and putting it under a sledgehammer while swearing…to the opinion you reached. Being more willing to bet the family jewels on the idea you have reached, than to bet ’em on the opposite. It’s a way of thinking most people don’t do nowadays.

And yet, everything we use to communicate our ideas to each other, every device, every protocol, every little thing that powers those other things — without exception — was invented and put in production by men who thought that way. Would I bet my personal fortune that I can use this generator to light a city without any gas? That I can use a packet header to tell the network what peer should receive the payload? That this page will display properly in a browser lots of other people have? People who think that way, build things…and then we use those things they built, to communicate stupid, silly, crazy ideas that don’t make a lick of sense.

And…pictures of girls in skimpy clothes. Well, the Blog That Nobody Reads doesn’t fault men for being men. We cast our jaundiced eyeball, instead, on the silly stupid ideas. Or to be more precise about it, upon the people who genuinely believe them, simply because someone’s taken the trouble to communicate them. It reflects poorly on our generation. Our children will look back on us and regard that as the hobgoblin of our times. We place credibility on the idea most likely to get attention, ignoring the ideas least likely to do this — we’d be a lot better off doing the opposite.

So that’s why this is The Blog That Nobody Reads (although you need to read the FAQ to get a detailed explanation). As for traffic, since labor day we’ve declined from a lethargic, sleepy state into a catatonic one. We’re showing a few signs of heading back up upward into “sleepy,” a trend which will be almost certainly be reversed as we head into the holidays. On average, we’re more-or-less hovering around the century mark, a hundred hits a day or just shy of that. It’s not a very “happenin'” blog at all.

But our “following,” what there is of it, is very loyal. We’re pretty pleased about that. And the “linkage” throughout the blogosphere is on the upswing, partly because of networks like Webloggin’. It would appear based on the timeframe involved, that because of the listing on Webloggin’ Friday afternoon, the Blog That Nobody Reads was promoted from a “Flippery Fish” to a “Crawly Amphibian“. We used to be number nine-thousand-something…now we’re number eight-thousand-something.

If that does turn out to be part of a long-term trend, I believe it would say a lot more about people-on-average than it does about this blog. I think people are tired of all the bullshit. I think they’re ready to go back to thinking the way television-inventors thought, rather than the way television-watchers think. Several times a day, we are asked to believe that an invasion of Iraq is still up to some meaningful referendum. Deep down, we all know it isn’t. Deep down, I think everybody understands this was a decision made by the White House in the spring of 2003 — after that, it was a done deal. No point debating it, unless you want to discuss what we are to do “next time.” Well, if it’s all about what to do next time we have a lunatic like Saddam Hussein — and you’ll notice, this isn’t something that ever involves a lot of waiting — I think most people understand that whole business of “Doing Nothing” isn’t a really swell idea.

These are just sensible conclusions. They’re opinions you end up forming when you think as if your left testicle depended on the tethering of your thinking to the plane of reality…not when you say crazy crap to get attention.

As for whether people are titillated by it, my only hope is that when they spend the time reading it, they get something back that’s worth their investment. I’m not out to sell advertising and I’m not out to sell newspapers. You will read things here, though, that you won’t read in any newspaper. The two sentences immediately preceding, have a connection with each other…which is a sad, sad thing. But I think it’s changing.

Factory Blowing Up

Via Galley Slaves, video of a fireworks factory blowing up.

Cool.

Unless you’re the owner of the factory, I s’pose.

Why Do Black Americans Still Vote For DemocRATS? II

Via Bullwinkle Blog: There’s a radio ad out that seems to be inspiring some controversy. Not disagreement, but controversy.

In the battle for the black electorate, liberals, who make up the overwhelming majority of black voters, have long disagreed with conservatives over ideology, public policy and economic strategies to better the lives of African Americans. But when conservatives placed the civil rights movement in a Republican context, black liberals said, they crossed a line.

I have no explanation as to why this would be controversial. None. Well actually, just one.

And it comes from the Bullwinkle Blog itself:

Ever since then [anecdote involving “Daddy” King and President Kennedy] Democrats have considered the black vote their personal property. [emphasis mine]

Yes, it does seem to be a touchy issue.

Left completely unexplained, by everyone, is why it’s a “touchy issue” which party will get some individual’s vote…because of the color of that individual’s skin. Another ad will give me, a white guy, reasons to vote for a Republican…that’s not “controversial.” Another fellow may be targeted by another commercial, and this commercial “crosses a line.” His skin is a different color, but his vote counts exactly the same way mine does.

How Liberals Fight Terrorism

If the following is not made into a Republican campaign commercial, and the Republicans do indeed lose, then some careers in Republican-campaign-land need to come to an inglorious and permanent end:

“(House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s) opening statement covered a full range of Democratic issues: fiscal responsibility. The minimum wage. The trade deficit. Student loans. Health care. Energy independence. Social Security. Medicare.

Then came the questions. “This is now the third election in a row in which they’ve raised security issues just before the election,” the first questioner said of the Republicans. “Why won’t it work for them a third time?”

…”This is what, I guess, campaigns will be about,” Pelosi conceded with some reluctance. “It shouldn’t be about national security.” [emphasis mine]

You know, that could have fit on a bumper sticker. “It shouldn’t be about national security” with a grinning, psychotic donkey face right next to the words, caricatured in a hybrid sort of way to offer the Minority Leader’s more outlandish facial features.

Does this absurd woman do anything in her personal life? By her logic, when you drive a car, it shouldn’t be about staying on the road, and when you cook it shouldn’t be about making something edible.

Anyway. The article is just chock full of surreal quotes like the above. Prepare to be amazed.

Update: I’ve been subscribed since early summer, I think, to the Democratic National Committee’s newsletter. Howard Dean has gone way out of his way to make sure I understand, in explicit detail, exactly how he and his party will stand up to that most nefarious of world threats…the Republicans.

On what his party intends to do about terrorists, I haven’t got a clue. He doesn’t seem to, either.

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types VI

People oppose the death penalty because it makes them feel good to oppose it. There is no other reason to argue against it. Among people who claim to value human life, there really is no reason to argue against it, because you have to have a death penalty in order for a culture to reach critical mass and continue to exist in relative safety for the innocent people who live there.

Yeah, yeah, European countries with wonderful crime statistics. Bite me. I said “critical mass” up above…this is important. Anybody who says it isn’t, hasn’t been looking at the problem very carefully. A nation comes to maturity and becomes more and more commercialized and…well, when you’re not familiar with the territory, where would you like to go walking after seven o’clock? In a strange farmland? Or in the financial district of a strange city? Would you blame the higher personal danger in the urban zone on the municipal laws in effect there? No, it’s not the laws; it’s the zoning. It goes hand-in-hand with doing more things for commercial purposes. The industrialization, the occasional blighting of neighborhoods that goes with it — it exposes the fact that some people simply have their gears stripped and can’t live with the rest of us.

They’ll kill; we, too, will kill innocents, by proxy, by letting the stripped-gear set walk around. We have a moral obligation not to do this. This is ugly stuff, but it’s all supported by the facts. Some of us feel good when such facts are ignored. They think it makes them better people. The lives of innocent children depend on those people not being allowed to vote, and I’m afraid that’s about as complicated as things get.

Today’s tragic evidence comes from the Seattle P.I. Anti-death-penalty types need to be aware of this story, so they can get a refresher course on how utterly screwed up the human model can get.

After Hurricane Katrina, Zackery Bowen and his girlfriend Adriane Hall appeared in news stories as examples of young people who had pressed on in the battered city despite evacuation orders and a lack of power and water.

Their story came to a disturbing end this week: Bowen leapt to his death from a hotel, leaving a note that led police to a French Quarter apartment where they found a woman’s charred head on the stove, limbs in the oven and torso in the refrigerator.

It’s just not one world, and we are not one species. Fortunately, this time, the trash took itself out.

How To Write A Headline

For the record, I’m sick to death of headlines that follow the rules below. I have MSN Messenger installed at home, and for some reason MSN Today^TM seems convinced I’m a woman. Even the stories decidedly pointed toward the masculine set, e.g., “Meeting Her Parents,” “How To Make Her Less Clingy,” “Is It Time To Get Your Prostate Checked?” have that soothing, feminine touch.

Not that I’m manly enough to know the difference between a field goal and a home run or anything…but the soothing feminine touch doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I’m left with this Bugs Bunny type reaction of “He don’t know me very well, do he?”

Well, the MSN Today folks, I guess, are just really good at following instructions:

1. How to.
Everyone loves a how to headline.

* How To Quit Smoking in 30 Days Or Your Money Back.
* How to Write a Novel in 30 Days.
* How to Lose Weight Fast.

Why do these headlines work so well? Because they promise a solution to your customers’ problems…

2. Question.
These headlines ask a question (obviously). If you want this headline type to work, it better ask a question that your customers want an answer to.

* Are you spending too much on your car insurance?
* Will your marriage fail?
* Will you know what to do if you’re in an accident?

So you mean there are people who actually like that kind of headline. Blecch.

Liberals Gone Wild!

Victor Davis Hanson must have been reading my blog, in an honest effort to figure out what his opinions are supposed to be. Either that, or he’s been noticing the same things I’ve been noticing.

The Democrats have not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they’ve occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left’s current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration – that they can’t gain a national majority based on their core beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism – these liberal issues don’t tend to resonate with most Americans.

To compensate, leftist pundits, billionaire philanthropists and politicians, from current officeholders to ex-presidents, work to ensure that isolated moments of Republican ineptness (George Bush strutting on a carrier deck in his flight suit) and wrongdoing (repulsive e-mails from a perverted Congressman Mark Foley) blare out as the only issues of the day. This distracting drumbeat, not their own agenda, is the only strategy for success in the next election.

Go read the whole thing…

Let’s Push Some Buttons

One of the tragic things to happen to American discourse, is that we tend to get caught up in what outlandish things we can say to get attention. Like for example…nobody would bet any real money that mankind is causing global warming, and facing extinction as a result. Or that we’d be better off if men were barred from holding public office for the next hundred years, or that Saddam Hussein made life better for people in Iraq than the way things are with him gone. Nobody would bet any serious money on those things. Certainly not important body parts. But people say things like that all the time.

It’s the price we pay for being an affluent society. People get to say silly, outlandish things all the time. And they don’t pay any price for saying these things. We’re too comfortable to pay prices for holding the wrong opinions. And this ends up hurting our collective ability to think problems through logically.

So let’s go all the way. I say, let’s just circumvent the tricky issue of how to get to the things we want…and discuss what it is we want to do. I think that’s what is lacking in 2006, right before our elections.

Here we go.

This is my “America” button. Push this button, and over in Iraq our guys are going to win and the terrorists are gonna lose. Nevermind how. The terrorists get captured or killed. Maybe the really good ones drop dead of heart attacks, and all the rest of them crap their pants and get captured. Or something. Point is, we win. Instantly. Guaranteed. All you have to do, is push the button.

Would I push it? Hell ya! Get outta my way, I’d push the button.

Okay, now this is my “No America” button. You push this, and we LOSE. That’s right, the terrorists kick our asses.

I would not push that button. No, no, no, no, no.

If I could take it apart, I would snip the wires. Osama bin Laden, of course, would like that button pushed. And so would a bunch of other dirty evil men. But I don’t want that button pushed, and I don’t think you do either.

Mmmkay?

This is where things get tricky. If you push this button, it’s World War II all over again. We’re going to have our elections and the Democrats are going to kick ass. Not only that, but all Republicans will wake up tomorrow with their heads full of Democrat thoughts. Everybody’s going to have an irrational fear of Pat Robertson breaking into their bedrooms and busting them for having sex in the wrong position. And confiscating their condoms. All Republicans lose in November. All Democrats win. President Bush resigns, and (somehow) a liberal Democrat takes his place as our new President. Immediately.

Oh, and the button also does what that first button does. We kick ass in Iraq.

As far as I’m concerned, that right there is a fair trade. I’d push it. Push it, push it, push it, push it. Of course, the Democrats would get ALL the credit for kicking that terrorist ass. Everyone would go “Yay, Democrats! They kick terrorist ass!” I know that’s silly…but anyway, that’s all good. I’d push the button.

Ah…well, you know what this button does. Push this, and nobody cares about Democrat issues. We all wake up tomorrow with an unquenchable thirst for dead terrorists and tax cuts. Republicans win, and…we kick ass in Iraq.

Yeah, I’d push that button of course.

Now, Democrats…which of those buttons would you push? And therein lies my point. We seem to have hit this bizarre little chapter in American history where one of our major political parties, has evolved into perfect and total opposition to, quite simply, knowing what to do. I personally know of a few Democrats who would join me in pressing that first button. Just a few. For all the rest of them — and this includes the ones I see on television, as well as the ones I know — the Shakespearean question of “to press, or not to press” is met with…some kind of silly speech. “Well, what I WANT is for George Bush to pull his head out of…” Anything to avoid stating the actual goal, in terms that are easily understood. “I don’t want to push the button that would make America lose, personally, but under the leadership we have NOW…” Just more speeches. That’s it.

Throughout the twentieth century, when Democrats won elections, they did so through the populist route: We perceive a lot of people want this thing, right or wrong…if your financial interests are aligned such that you also want the thing, you should vote for us. Other people have different interests but there are more of us than there are of them, and we’re going to win. In other words, from the gold-standard issues, right up until Watergate, they won by identifying their peers and I apply that plural in the most narrow definition possible: Companions who share interests. You and I don’t both have to like orange sherbet, or football; if what’s good for me is also good for you, climb on board. More of us, than there are of them.

Here it is 2006, the nation is bitterly divided…and yet, Democrats lost three elections in a row. Barely. Between Watergate and today, they’ve won not by defining peerages, but by sliming the other guys. It doesn’t work very often. What they need to do, is to go back to forming peerages. Defining common interests that appeal to so many people, that it really doesn’t matter who would be outside of those interests or who would be hurt by those interests.

I have to think the movers-and-shakers in the Democratic party know this. And yet, they won’t tell us which buttons they’ll press and which buttons they won’t. Neither will their rank-and-file. They’ve got a situation going where they can’t do this.

And they seem to like it that way.

That’s kind of unsettling.

Cheer Up

Let me be the first to comment on the self-inflicted damage we do when we put our faith in irrational optimism. From early on, I’ve had an appreciation that the rosey outlook offered by optimism is not only lacking in value; it tends to do damage. I’ve seen it. In fact, pessimists have a leg-up in achieving superior results. I’ve seen that too.

But pessimism works only so long as it’s confined to the situation-at-hand, and curtailed from poisoning the vision for the future. And in apply to the situation-at-hand, it’s only a help so long as it provides a superior fastening to the plane of reality.

An election is near, and we have a lot of pessimism. It is engineered — engineered, I say — to do anything, anything, anything but provide a superior fastening to the plane of reality. More like a de-coupling.

George F. Will sets us straight. Read up.

Nancy Pelosi vows that if Democrats capture Congress they will “jump-start our economy.” A “jump-start” is administered to a stalled vehicle. But since the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2003, the economy’s growth rate (3.5 percent) has been better than the average for the 1980s (3.1) and 1990s (3.3). Today’s unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is lower than the average for the 1990s (5.8) — lower, in fact, than the average for the last 40 years (6.0). Some stall.
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The Jack No. 2 well, in deep water 170 miles southwest of New Orleans, recently discovered a field with perhaps 15 billion barrels of oil — a 50 percent increase in proven U.S. reserves. This news triggered a gusher of journalistic gloom: More oil means more woe — a reprieve for that enemy of humanity, the internal combustion engine, and more global warming, more air pollution, more highway fatalities, more suburban sprawl.

The recent 20 percent decline of the cost of a barrel of oil, from a nominal record of $78.40 (which, adjusted for inflation, was well below the 1980 peak of $92 in 2006 dollars), has produced an 81-cent decline in the average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in 70 days. For consumers, that is akin to a tax cut of more than $81 billion.

If you don’t have a good understanding of the difference between a fact and opinion — not quite as simple a matter as it sounds — you use the honor system when you depend on your “news” sources to tell you what’s up, as opposed to who to vote for. And if those “news” sources don’t understand this critical difference, then they use your vote as a barometer of how well they’re doing their jobs.

And nobody in this country, on either side of the aisle, wants things to work that way. Er, let me rephrase that. Nobody with a reputation worth defending will admit to that.

Memo For File XXVIII

Yesterday in the Best of the Web column, James Taranto poked fun at the Democrats for coming up with yet another slogan.

The Democrats have a new slogan, the Associated Press reports:

Ned Lamont uses it in his Connecticut Senate race. President Clinton is scheduled to speak on the idea in Washington this week. Bob Casey Jr., Pennsylvania candidate for Senate, put it in the title of his talk at The Catholic University of America–then repeated the phrase 29 times.

The term is “common good,” and it’s catching on as a way to describe liberal values and reach religious voters who rejected Democrats in the 2004 election. Led by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank, party activists hope the phrase will do for them what “compassionate conservative” did for the Republicans.

“It’s a core value that we think organizes the entire political agenda for progressives,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “With the rise of materialism, greed and corruption in American society, people want a return to a better sense of community–sort of a shared sacrifice, a return to the ethic of service and duty.”

Isn’t this about the 87th slogan the Dems have come up with? Remember “culture of corruption,” “America can do better,” “enough is enough,” etc.? Maybe the Republican slogan should be “slogans are not enough.”

Then again, maybe they are enough. It now seems within the realm of possibility that Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress in three weeks, even though they are campaigning on not much more than not being Republicans. But the Republicans are campaigning on not much more than not being Democrats. To our mind the Republicans have the better of this argument, but there is something to be said for punishing the party in power if its performance has been subpar.

I was intrigued by this speech using the phrase 29 times, by the challenger to Sen. Rick Santorum’s seat in Pennsylvania. So I scoured the web and eventually found a full transcript on Bob Casey’s campaign website. It’s a damn good speech, neatly capturing everything that has ever appealed to humanity about this “common good” concept. He presents the result in such a way that, if you’re unacquainted with this debate, you’re left thinking “who could possibly argue with that?” In other words, his speech does exactly what speeches are supposed to do.

When I was growing up, most parents believed that their children would have better lives and more opportunities than they themselves had, and we all believed in the promise of tomorrow and a brighter future. A perfect example of that belief was my grandfather, Alphonsus L. Casey, who went to work in the darkness and danger of the anthracite coal mines as a mule boy when he was just 11 years old. The novelist Stephen Crane wrote about miners and mule boys “toiling in this city of endless night.” And he described how mule boys would carry a lamp and “run ahead with the light” in the darkness. Only in a country like America could a mule boy go on to earn a law degree and create a new life for himself and his family, one that would inspire his son to carry a different kind of light as the governor of Pennsylvania.

But something seems to have changed in recent years. Instead of hope, fear threatens to become the pervasive feeling in this country. We now live in a country where, according to a recent Pew study, only one third of all parents expect their children to be better off than they themselves are. And around the world, America is losing the moral authority that has made us the standard for other nations to emulate. Many factors play into these changes. But at the core is something quite simple: Many of our leaders have lost their moral compass and no longer seem to believe that the purpose of government should be to promote the common good.
:
The common good must first be based upon a solid foundation of justice. As Saint Augustine taught us: “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?” Justice cannot abide 34 million people in poverty and 8.3 million children without health care. Justice cannot ignore the suffering of millions of parents in this country who have to face the soul-crushing thought that they might have to tell their child to go to bed hungry�or who realize that they simply cannot afford the medical treatment their child needs.

In the month or so since Casey’s speech, it’s been commented-upon here and here.

I’m most impressed by what Bob Casey did not say. If you click open the transcript and read it word for word, you will most assuredly not see something like this: “I have opportunities my parents never had, my parents had opportunities my grandfather, the mule boy, didn’t have. This improvement of each child’s hopes and dreams, over his parents’ hopes and dreams, was made possible by respect for the common good.” Bob Casey does not say that. He does not say “My grandfather was able to make life better for his children, because as a mule boy he had some really great health benefits.” These are things upon which his sales pitch, logically, must depend…those, or something like them. He goes to great lengths to lead his audience to believe these things, but nowhere in the entire speech does he take the responsibility of actually saying that.

He can’t say that, because it would be provably incorrect. The simple fact of the matter is, his idea is nothing new. It’s as old as the hills. Civilizations have risen and fallen on this principle of the common good and the subordination of the individual. Throughout the millenia, the human race has shown a proclivity toward “natural selection” — a tendency to say “Hey, this worked out pretty swell! Let’s do a whole lot more of it!” — and the Common Good schtick has never managed to float to the top. Oh sure, it’s rejuvenated like Frankenstein, repeatedly. It has a lot of appeal for people. But it requires the rejuvenation. Where a civilization prospers, the “common good” is never central to the prosperity; instead, those who seek to promote such a concept, swoop in like long-lost “relatives” discovering the guy who just won the lottery.

A scrutinizing and energetic read over the Wikipedia page helps to provide the reason why the whole deal really isn’t as good as it sounds…

The common good is a term that can refer to several different concepts. In the popular meaning, the common good describes a specific “good” that is shared and beneficial for all (or most) members of a given community. This is also how the common good is broadly defined in philosophy, ethics, and political science. This concept is increasing in popularity as moral vision for the progressive left in American politics. [emphasis mine]

Wikipedia is a resource anyone can edit, and I’m going to leave this alone because it states the essentials accurately. But I have criticism here. It trivializes what is important, and emphasises what is trivial. I’m leaving it alone because I think the way people interpret what they see is the responsibility of the reader, not of the writer.

So let’s allow the definition to stand, but add this comment.

All…or most. That determines everything. Absolutely everything. Substantial numbers among us, on both sides of this conservative/liberal barrier, would agree: If something is good for all of us, let’s go ahead and do it. And we would further agree, if something is bad for most of us and good for just a tiny portion of us, let’s not do that.

What if something is injurious to some among of us, and at the same time, good for the majority of us? I’m not talking about a working, functional, nuclear-powered car that would cause short-term economic hardship to the petroleum industry. Some guy owns a gas station, he’s forced out, and re-enters the business world in a different occupation with more promise. Over the long term, he goes through an adaptive process and ends up the richer for it. That isn’t really “injury.” No, I’m talking about real injury. Like a progressive tax. There’s simply no “upside” to paying a higher tax, even if other people think you “can afford to” pay it.

And that’s what “common good” really is. It’s a rationale for inflicting genuine injury on selected subsets of people which are assured to be in the minority, so the act of injury can find shelter in a democratic process. Taxing smokers. Taxing rich people. Taxing businesses. “Don’t tax you don’t tax me; tax the guy behind the tree.”

Casey talks about principles he learned from living in a family with eight children. But the word atruism doesn’t appear in his speech, one single time. That word would provide the substance for which people are looking, as they lend Casey’s comments their sympathy. That’s what people really value. It means concern for the welfare of others. Like, for example…I don’t care if this proposed tax will never impact me, I don’t care if it will only hit “rich” people who “can afford” it. Punishing people for being productive is morally wrong, so I’m going to oppose it. That. That’s altruism.

The “common good” folks, throughout human history, present themselves as being more altruistic. They never, ever, quite seem to end up that way. There’s a reason for that. What they really want, is a license to determine what the common good really is, and they want this to work kind of like Agent 007’s “license to kill.” The phrase “common good” is carefully constructed to commit, conceptually, to nothing. It doesn’t promise to improve society over the long term, it doesn’t promise not to hurt people. It doesn’t even promise to confine itself to actions most people would like, or even to help more people than it hurts. It doesn’t promise any of those things. If it was capable of commitment to greater aid than injury, on a nose-count basis, it would be called “populism.” But that’s not what it is.

It’s bureaucracy over common sense. And it leads to dystopian societies, again and again. Democrats who want to run on the phrase, probably know this to be true. After all, they’ve chosen to start a debate about “common good” in the fall of 2006, rather than in the winter of 2005. They can’t afford for people to think about it for too long.

Update: The older I get, the more of a link I see between this “common good” stuff, the forementioned dystopian society, and a deterioration in the ability of the masses to think critically. It makes sense when you put yourself in the shoes of the dictator; how do you go about controlling the lives of large numbers of thinking people? You don’t. It’s like herding cats. But when people form their cognitions of reality and their hopes and dreams, based on the cognitions, hopes & dreams of those around them — it has to be much easier.

And so we have “common good”. Once the resources we’ve placed in public trust are marshalled toward that, then reality is no longer entrusted to the common man. There are things you know to be true, with which the public officials agree with you — and then there are the ideas you have for yourself, on which the public servants dissent. The latter of those two, simply don’t matter. Nothing will be done about them.

Lately, we’ve had this hot movie-making trend where you make the dystopian society into a model for George Bush’s America and therefore a model for conservatism. But when you go backward in time, when much more eloquent prose was written about the dystopian society — when such tomes were based on the real-life challenges that faced Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum and Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, you see that historically such oppresive regimes have been carefully constructed by our liberals. That is to say, our collectivists. Not conservatives, but those dedicated to oppressing the spirit of the individual, subordinating it to the flimsy ambitions of the apparatchiks.

In few places is this more apparent, than in the first chapter of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”:

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The [Two Minutes] Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience…The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even � so it was occasionally rumoured � in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

…Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were � in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less…

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave…The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Arbitrarilly, let’s just add twenty years to this. What does this look like…a Bush rally, or a Kerry rally? Really?

Undirected emotion flows through a crowd that has surrendered to group-think, and has long ago made a regular ritual out of hating a designated individual with a blind frenzy. They remember that they hate the man…so much better than they remember why, exactly.

Substitute “George Bush” in place of “Emmanuel Goldstein,” and what you’re left with — well, it could be any meeting of any one of a number of leftist groups. It could be a typical radio show on the now-defunct Air America. So what is the ideology of a dystopian society? Millions of people think the above describes conservatism, perfectly. It’s what conservatism is all about. They think that…because they’ve been told to think that. But thinking people, can see the similarities for themselves. And not too much in the conservative camp, has resembled what’s exerpted above. But an awful lot of liberal stuff has. An awful lot.

“Common good”; the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel neatly captures exactly where it gets you. Is this what we need right now? Really?

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… XXI

I simply can’t think of a better way to say this, or of anything to add to it.

If there is any among you who still thinks the mass media isn�t in the pocket of the Left, you merely have to compare how the Plame affair went from being the biggest scandal since Capt. Dreyfuss to a non-story once the crime couldn�t be laid at the feet of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. Of course, inasmuch as Valerie Plame was not an undercover operative, it was never a big deal. But once it turned out that Clinton colleague Richard Armitage was Shallow Throat, the media buried the story back among the classified ads.

Liberals who are aware that I�m not religious sometimes take me to task for not criticizing the religious Right with the same zeal I bring to bear on what I refer to as the religious Left. (For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to those zealots whose bible is the Gospel According to James Carville. The prophets of the faith include Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.) The fact is, I have nothing against Christian fundamentalists. Mainly, I disagree with them on the issue of abortion. But I don�t think that those in the Pro-Life movement are evil, whereas I think those on the other side, those who promote 13 and 14-year-olds having abortions without parental consent, are.

Go read the whole thing…

Why Do Black Americans Still Vote For DemocRATS?

Via David Drake: Why Do Black Americans Still Vote For DemocRATS?

Bashing the Boy Scouts II

The City of Berkeley is allowed to withhold funds and aid to the Boy Scouts, while allowing similar aid to similar organizations, based on the Scouts’ restrictions against atheists and homosexuals. The California State Supreme Court has ruled, and the U.S. Supreme court has declined to hear the appeal.

Six years after the Supreme Court ruled the Boy Scouts could ban gay leaders, the group is fighting and losing legal battles with state and local governments over its discriminatory policies.

The latest setback came Monday when the high court without comment refused to take a case out of Berkeley, Calif., in which a Scouts sailing group lost free use of a public marina because the Boy Scouts bar atheists and gays.

The action let stand a unanimous California Supreme Court ruling that the city of Berkeley may treat the Berkeley Sea Scouts differently from other nonprofit organizations because of the Scouts’ membership policies.

For something that has become such a touchy issue, this whole thing about where public funding goes — it doesn’t appear to be drawing an equal representation of all interested groups. Rarely does the electorate get to directly vote on it.

And I suppose that by itself is okay, in matters of constitutionality. Whether one document logically comports with another, is not a matter for voting. But it seems a little strange to me; I can’t remember the last time a leftist, secular organization, of any kind, was denied funds or aid from a public treasury on the strength of more traditionally-minded segments of the populace feeling alienated by the principles and practices of that organization.

It would appear this wind blows only one way. Now, I think we would all agree if it’s all about “fairness,” this is something that should be fixed before any important decisions are made. About anything.

There’s more…

On a separate matter, federal judges in two other court cases that are being appealed have ruled that government aid to the group is unconstitutional because the Boy Scouts of America requires members to swear an oath of duty to God.

Huh. Such a case would necessarily ask, once again, how high is that “wall of separation.” Whatever the answer is, I hope it comfortably explains what’s documented here:

[Thomas] Jefferson’s actions as President of the United States are important guidelines in understanding what he meant by the “wall of separation.” In 1803, one year after the Danbury letter, Jefferson made a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians, wherein he pledged money to build them a Roman Catholic Church and to support their priests � all from federal funds. Jefferson apparently saw no conflict between asking Congress to implement the treaty’s provisions by appropriating funds, and the prohibition that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .” In addition, Jefferson signed three extensions of “An act regulating the grants of land appropriated for Military Services, and for the Society of the United Brethren for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.” This act granted free of charge titles to sections of land to the United Brethren. In addition to holding the land in trust for Indians who were already Christians, the United Brethren used resources derived from cultivating and leasing the land to send out missionaries to proselyte among the non-Christian Indians. Once again, had Jefferson been an absolutist, as the Everson Court suggests, he would have vetoed not one, but all three extensions of this act. Thus, the Danbury letter is significant because when taken out of context, it provides the foundation for an absolute separation of church and state. Not only was Jefferson referring to the federal government, but his activities while in office also indicate that he was not an absolutist.

This is another lingering question I have. Not just about what Jefferson, et al, did — but why we, today, spend so little energy inspecting these little anecdotes. It’s supposed to be all about “constitutionality.” I think most of us, whatever our biases, would use the Doctrine of Original Intent in inspecting the Constitution. The Constitution is 215 years old, and most of the guys who had a role in writing it and ratifying it, spent years afterward doing lots of stuff and writing lots of other stuff down. Original Intent — shouldn’t we be examining evidence of their intent?

Sidebar Update VII

I’m not entirely sure what the point was linking back to me here, but I’ll take it. And I’m going to blogroll him too, because I’m heavily biased in favor of motorcycles.

And the Infidel and the Vampyr and Hatless and Sweet, Familiar Dissonance, and of course the unfairly maligned Locomotive Breath.

More: Pillage Idiot, Politechnical Institute, For Your Conservative Pleasure, Strata-Sphere and Macsmind.

Update 10/18/06: Hey guess what? N.Z. Bear at The Truth Laid Bear finally fixed that corrupt database record that represented this blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, in his “ecosystem.” So I actually have inbound links now. I always did, but now his system actually counts them without crashing…which means I have ranking. I’m an “insignificant microbe” no more. So now that we have an accurate, non-zero count, the magic application says I am a…wait for it…I’m a Flippery Fish, ranking #9412. That’s above the Slimy Molluscs and below the Crawly Amphibians. Cool, I’ll take it.

Scalia Debates ACLU

Via Jay at Stop The ACLU…

Via AP:

Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday defended some of his Supreme Court opinions, arguing that nothing in the Constitution supports abortion rights and the use of race in school admissions.

Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the high court, sparred in a one-hour televised debate with American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen [link mine]. He said unelected judges have no place deciding politically charged questions when the Constitution is silent on those issues.

Arguing that liberal judges in the past improperly established new political rights such as abortion, Scalia warned, “Someday, you�re going to get a very conservative Supreme Court and regret that approach.”

Bingo! Scalia slams them here. To put things in context, he said this after speaking about what he called judicial aristocracy, and how one day the consequences of putting so much power in the hands of nine lawyers might come back to bite them. The news report doesn�t include it, but all Nadine Strossen had to say to this was, “Let�s hope not.” This response was quite revealing if put in the proper context. She was pretty much saying that bad calls are o.k. as long as they go in the direction of the ACLU�s philosphy [sic].

Trying to find video. Pretty busy morning. I’ll get back to that project later.

We’re All Such Independent Thinkers III

Quoth Noreen at Independent Bile, this past spring, in the post that sent her site to my blogroll…

…if I hear anyone saying “Is it just me, or…..” or “Am I the only one who…” then I move away from them as fast as I can.

And, by the way, the answer to those questions is “No” and “No”, because invariably, the things that these cunts believe themselves to be the only ones saying, doing or thinking, are incredibly mundane things that half the population say, do or think as well. And even if these “AM I the only one” types happen to be boasting about slightly rarer traits than usual, like : “Am I the only one who collects feathers” or: “Am I the only one who enjoys being bitten by dogs”, you can bet that there still are other people who do those very things as well, because the world is enormous.

All of which is certainly a bunch of entirely valid observations, but if the problem was limited to just those, Noreen would be going off on this bunny trail without me. People collecting feathers don’t bother me one bit. People wondering if they’re the only ones collecting feathers, likewise, can do that all day long as far as I’m concerned.

But blogger friend Aup from Just Muttering made a salient observation about this:

In my experience, that verbal nonsense is a passive-aggressive trick that some people use to get people to say “oh no no, it’s not just you” and then share something. I hate it.

And there ya go. Pondering the situation a little more closely, one sees there really isn’t much reason to string those five words together but to coerce a false sense of agreement from the apathetic. Example: I freakin’ hate Seinfeld. Suppose for the moment you have never watched Seinfeld. You don’t give a rat’s ass about Seinfeld one way or the other. I know you don’t watch Seinfeld, and really don’t care for it or against it. I know this. But I want to pursuade you to my point of view — at least, cosmetically.

And I know if I say “I freakin’ hate Seinfeld” you’re going to say “I’ve never watched it” and nothing else. What if we’re not alone? What if we’re in the presence of someone else who also never watched Seinfeld and doesn’t know what to think of it? The conversation might go against me…after all, gee, like 67% of us have never watched Seinfeld. Maybe we should tune in sometime!

No, that won’t do at all. I freakin’ hate Seinfeld, remember? So I take a different approach, is it just me, or does Seinfeld suck??? Ah! Now, there’s no way to be “hip” unless you know something about Seinfeld. It’s an invitation to those unacquainted with Seinfeld that…if you don’t know anything about the matter under discussion, you’d better start pretending that you do. And oh by the way, the “prevailing viewpoint” is that it sucks. One guy just decided that for the rest of us. Truly an exercise in the tail wagging the dog.

You might say it’s a Jedi mind trick, that only works on the weak-minded.

Well, the liberal resource AmericaBLOG would like to give it a try.

Is it just me, or has Google News become useless? Their definition of “news sites” seems to include an ever increasing number of simply bizarre Web sites that aren’t even the top in their category of site. Meaning, they’ve tried to include blogs, but only some blogs, and many of the ones they have you’ll never have heard of, and many of the ones you have heard of are just plain bad. When I’m doing a news search, I want news site – not blogs, not left-wing conspiracy sites, or right-wing religious nutjobs. News. If they want a blog search enging, that’s fine too. But the current state of affairs has taken a great news search engine and turned it into a bunch of noise.

That’s the post. All of it. Every single word, every single comma. That’s right; no examples given, just the “is it just me” schtick. Upon what dullard could such feeble magic possibly work?

Well, along comes Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKOS. Coerced not only into agreement, but into action as well.

I agree with Aravosis:

Is it just me, or has Google News become useless? Their definition of “news sites”…

Google News is becoming unusable. They need some serious soul-searching about what they are and what their mission is.

A “news” operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap.

I voluntarily asked for Daily Kos to be removed from Google News since it was returning results from this site that quite frankly weren’t up to the sort of standards I expect out of a service offering up credible news. Obviously, I was alone in trying to preserve the integrity of the service. Not even Google News seems to give a damn.

Again, no examples given. And, unbelievably, the problem is not called out by someone making requests to Google News and being frustrated by a list returned by the search engine of “no-name sites…conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap.” No, the complaint is being made by the guy whose “crap” is included in what’s presented to others.

Moulitsas’ banning of Google News has made the headlines of C/Net.

Moulitsas, once again, has helped to demonstrate what liberalism is all about. Permitting the free flow of information and ideas — only so long as it makes his side look good. You want news about, let’s say, red socks. Someone on DailyKOS might have written an article on how he forgot to take red socks out of the wash and his little white “Buck Fush” tee shirt got bled all over, and IT’S GEORGE BUSH’S FAULT!!! And if that were to be returned in your search results, why, you might get the idea that some of our liberals are a little, y’know, kooky. Just a tad bit soft in the head for the time being. So Moulitsas, et al, are going to use social activism once again — to make sure you don’t find out how kooky they are. Not to make sure Rosa Parks can sit where she wants. But to keep liberal weirdness under wraps.

Most among us don’t give a rip about conservatives or liberals, but would rather be concerned about learning stuff from the “innernets” when we want to learn about it. In their interests, I would have hoped an exchange of examples would be forthcoming. Neither KOS nor AmericaBLOG thought that was worth exploring.

Is it just me, or is that interesting?

Summit V

Twenty-two short days to go. So how’s it gonna be?

The NRO says it will go shitty, but Bush and Rove think different.

I’m siding with NRO.

But there is substantial reason to disagree. Like, for example, the lingering issue with our current adminstration’s foreign and domestic policies. I’m relying on the premise, widely-accepted by many others, that these policies are reviled by many. And simply disliked, by many more. And approved, but only grudgingly, but yet many more. I’m taking this as a given.

But…there are reasons to challenge this. For example, if the policies are so unpopular among so many demographics of the electorate, from whence comes the urgency to make such an incendiary issue out of the hired help?

I got that in the back of my mind. The incumbent party wants to make an issue out of the opposing party’s prospective Speaker of the House of Representatives. The challenging party wants to make an issue out of the incumbent party’s…advisory-type guy. Challenging party — needs to pull it’s head out of it’s ass. But what’s new.

Why Men Are Paid More

And it was written by a woman, every single word.

Did Karl Rove Do This?

Wouldn’t it make perfect sense if he did?

Road Rash

Dress for the slide, not for the ride.

H/T: Boortz.

Incomplete Instructions

I have much more ability at writing instructions than at following them. To watch me follow someone else’s instructions, is an experience for which I probably should be charging people. Anything that is open to mis-interpretation, I can mis-interpret without trying to. It’s a wonder to behold. You don’t have to wait very long at all to watch it happen. I’ll get hopelessly stuck…or, with great confidence, pick the wrong interpretation…while the guy who actually wrote the instructions, and hundreds of other people who successfully followed them, struggle with the epiphany that any part of it was open to interpretation at all.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Ah’m not a smart man, but I know when instructions are incomplete. And former President Clinton’s instructions to me, are incomplete.

Former President Bill Clinton told Iowa’s Democratic Party faithful on Saturday that the actions of “an extreme sliver” of the Republican Party have backfired and “profoundly divided” the country.

“We’ve got a big responsibility. Forget about 2008. Forget about the politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say ‘You know, this is not right’…This is America,” Clinton said. “We can do better and this year, it’s a job that Democrats have to do alone.” [emphasis mine]

The Reuters dispatch does not specify what “this” is. I guess I’m supposed to fill that in. What has America done, that is out of place in America.

To answer that, I have to figure out what America is.

Well, in 1797 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act and President Adams signed it into law. Was that American, or un-American?

During Andrew Jackson’s presidency, we had the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The Supreme Court declared the forced migration illegal, and President Jackson is associated with the apocryphal quote “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” If the President’s words did not comport with this, his actions certainly did; the Trail of Tears proceeded. Was that American?

Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. Was that American?

Congress passed an income tax. Like any government, ours has always taxed people…it seems a little un-American for the government to make it their business how well each of us is doing in a given year. Or does it?

The states were denied representation in our nation’s capital when we passed the Seventeenth Amendment. President Wilson threw people in jail, for opposing his policies during World War I. American, or un-American?

Franklin Roosevelt, the “American Caesar” closed the banks, outlawed gold, imposed a 70% marginal tax rate on the highest earners, poured cream into ditches while babies starved, and threw tailors in prison for charging more than 35 cents to mend a shirt. American? The Supreme Court thought not; they tore his New Deal measures to shreds, but knuckled under when he threatened to pack it with six new justices. After that, it became a docile little lamb. So long, judicial oversight. American?

I’ll not even go into the Japanese Internment, everybody seems to agree about that. Not everybody seems willing to discuss it though. The people have been instructed to forget it, and they have complied. Is that American?

John Kennedy made his little brother Attorney General. Was that American? Decades later, Democrats running for office who had absolutely nothing to offer, campaigned on “bringing back Camelot.” American?

And out of that history full of contradictions and turmoil, we come to Things The Way They Are Today. And former President Clinton asks us to measure those things against a yardstick that has, by any reasonable measure, sustained sufficient abuse to permanently retire as a measuring device. What does he mean when he says something doesn’t belong in America? Against what does he make this measurement, other than his own selfish conceptualization of right and wrong.

And does anyone have a personal, moral compass subject to weightier and more devastating challenge, than our 42nd President?

Out of relative oblivion, arises this presumption that “American” is an adjective so conceptual and so pure, that one can harrumph about how it applies to this thing over here and doesn’t apply to that thing over there, without taking the slightest effort to define what it is. And that it’s perfectly valid to bitch and kibitz about what horrible things are “being done to the Constitution,” without even having taken the time to look at the Constitution since the sixth grade, let alone know what it says.

I know this to be true, because a lot of people have been following President Clinton’s advice. To the letter. He says “go out and find somebody” and I’ve been that somebody. Things are being done that are un-American…I subject this premise to the kind of inspection any rationally-thinking person should bring up. Nothing heavy, mind you. Just normal questions I would want to have answered if, hypothetically, I wanted to take their message and propagate it further, wishing to be sufficiently informed as I do so.

It’s too much scrutiny for them. This “look them dead in the eye” thing goes sailing out the window. They end up looking at their toes. Or off in the distance. Trying to extract, out of some ether, an answer they need that they do not have.

Once one inspects the Constitution, it appears it’s being followed; once one takes the time to actually read the Geneva Conventions, and measure them against what we’re doing — one struggles to assert, logically, how they even apply.

I think I know what President Clinton means by “America.” I think he envisions a utopia where there aren’t any Republicans. That definition — none other — supports what he has had to say lately. His words, and his actions, are consistent with a dictate that electing more Democrats is not an means to some other end, but an end in itself. Just…get them in.

If “America” has something to do with this, to the best of my knowledge he has yet to explain how.

This Is Good XXVI

Nothing heavy or clever going on here, I mean, not on my part anyway. Just flipping around YouTube watching beer commercials. Five of the best:

Now, we all KNOW women are much, much more sophisticated and mature than men. Everybody knows this. And yet, how would you explain this to the space alien who was intelligent, completely unacquainted with actually meeting men and/or women from our planet, but had been monitoring our satellite television signals? How would you explain this…that this planet’s beer commercials are so damn funny, and all the feminine hygeine product commercials are so stilted and cliched and stupid? The space alien would probably be one of the worst male chauvinist pigs on our planet, and he’d be like…what? Just going by what I saw here.

Maybe after he drove on our freeways for awhile, he’d gain a better perspective.

Ugly American

A lot of people like to talk about how poorly-behaved Americans are. In recent years, this has become a widespread phenomenon that threatens to wear the word “boorish” completely out of the English lexicon, like wearing the high-traffic path out of a carpet.

In fact if you were to arrange all Internet content into a massive pie chart, I would estimate on an item-by-item basis, that half of it, of course, would be porn; maybe 7% commercial enterprises; another 5% conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks; an additional 3% would be other political opinions, like mine; 2% blog pages about motorcycle riding, knitting, and the like; toss in another 1% or 2% to cover all the bitching about Meredith Viera and Star Jones leaving The View, and all the rest would be a bunch of bullshit bloviating about Americans. We make our women wear tops on the beach, we swagger, we don’t extend our pinkies, we eat salad with the dinner fork.

Well, for anyone wishing to make a list capturing the content of that big ol’ slice, don’t forget to add this.

“The rise in anti-Americanism is a threat to our national security,” [Keith] Reinhard says. “The more people dislike us, the more easily they can be recruited by our enemies. In this global world, we need all the friends we can get.”

Reinhard, a former international marketing executive hailing from New Zealand, has founded an activist group called BDA, and the BDA has put out a sixty-page booklet to address this problem.

To overcome such perceptions, Reinhard founded the Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), a group of educators, executives and citizens working to combat the spread of anti-American sentiment.

Although its primary focus has been business travellers, the BDA recently extended its efforts to all Americans travelling abroad — its World Citizens Guide, booklets and pamphlets offering a crash course in other nations’ histories, religions, traditions, peoples and languages.
:
The World Citizens Guide is colourfully illustrated and includes images of nations’ flags, facts about each country and common sense tips that would benefit any traveller.

The 60-page, passport-sized booklet was created for students who study abroad. Its success ushered in the pamphlet, an abridged version, for business travellers.

The booklet, which also includes an interactive mini-CD, includes the 50 most useful words in Arabic, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

It suggests that Americans should learn the norms of the countries where they travel and follow them to prevent someone from unintentionally sending the wrong message.

For example, the book says: “In most European countries, the correct way to wave hello and goodbye is palm out, hand and arm stationary, fingers wagging up and down. Common American waving hand moving side to side means no — except in Greece, where it is an insult.” [emphasis mine]

Well, packaging is extremely important, and Reinhard’s product impresses me as a positive contribution, because of the way it’s packaged. After all, the content itself, is loaded with problems I’m being asked to overlook.

Stringing together what this article says, after all, what I’ve been told is that an ignorant American might go to Greece and show his ignorance by waggling his hand side-to-side; some offended Grecian will then become more susceptible to being recruited by America’s enemies. Is Greece really loaded with natives who are one hand-waggle away from becoming Al Qaeda operatives?

Does that really make sense? What scares me is, gee whiz, maybe it does in this world. And if that’s the way things are, well, I have a few problems with Mr. Reinhard’s proposed solution.

I find this interesting. If I were to approach a major newspaper and tell them, “I see a link between people who are acrimonious to Americans, for whatever reason, and America’s enemies” I would never be taken seriously, and if the paper decided to take a look at me it would assuredly be in a negative way. Witness the world reaction to President Bush’s now-notorious line about “with us or against us.” But then I can take the Reinhard approach, do exactly that with the overture of “I want to make some new rules for Americans to follow. I want to point out how boorish Americans are as a whole, and put them on a shorter leash.” And hosannas will be sung as the palm leaves are laid at my feet.

But it’s the same sentiment. Exactly the same. So that’s my first beef; the selectivity. Our newspaper editors and political pundits instruct us to sneer derisively at anyone making a link between hostility to America, and terrorism — even though we can use our intellect to conclude nothing else, but that terrorism is rooted in hostility. And yet, when someone dishes out the right platitudes about Americans being rude to people overseas, suddenly the rules are changed.

The second problem has to do with the date. Sure, “I question the timing” has become a stale cliche, in some parts even understood to be an invitation to giggling. Doesn’t it fit here? People around the world resent Americans all the time. Why start harping on the issue as we begin the third week of October in an even-numbered year? Why? If it’s not an agenda, it could be incompetence. Maybe a little of both. But it has to be at least one of those.

Third beef is with the union between the mission statement and the logical premise. As an American, if I’m rude to people while travelling overseas, I might tick people off. Ticking people off is a national security threat because it might lead recruiting by America’s enemies. So I should be nicer to people overseas, because America “need[s] all the friends we can get.”

What kind of friend would this dirty little cretin be? I waggle my hand the wrong way, and he’ll listen more closely next time Al Qaeda needs his help blowing people up? Fuck him! What an asshole. Sounds to me, from what Mr. Reinhard said, like America has been way too friendly. Hey, all I’m doing is taking his comments seriously here — be nice, or else your boorish behavior will be used as a recruiting tool. Well, used as a recruiting tool upon whom, exactly? Just askin’. There’d have to be something wrong with the guy who wouldn’t ask. What kind of prospective friends are we talking about here?

Fourth problem…and expressing this one, calls upon the reader to make the most out of whatever resources might be available on the receiving end, especially attention span and common sense. My fourth problem with this little project is this:

Like millions of other people, I have a lot of ideas for “combat[ing] the spread of anti-American sentiment.” America itself, after all, is a nation whose history is rich with spreads of anti-(fill in the blank) sentiments within her own borders. Anti-black sentiment, anti-native-American sentiment, anti-Asian sentiment, anti-Jewish sentiment, anti-Hispanic sentiment. America, like no other country in the world, has played host to a veritable Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors of racial bigotry.

And defeated them.

We have more experience at this than any other country conceived by God or man. No small feat, when you’re dedicated to the free expression of any idea, no matter how repulsive that idea might be. How do you marginalize ugly ideas, when you’re opposed to the practice of marginalizing ideas? And somehow, American ingenuity has triumphed, with our honor more-or-less intact. If you’re a bigot or a sexist or a homophobe, you must choose your audience very carefully or you will mocked…if you hold a position of authority or trust, you will be driven from it the minute your true nature is exposed, your career likely ruined for good. That’s about as marginalized as ideas can get in a country honoring free speech.

Now that America finds herself, as a whole, on the “business end” of prejudice and raw hatred brandished on the world stage, it just seems to me we should stick with what works. Use our own experience. We do know something about this.

Intolerance toward black people: In this country, it was once the rule. Now it is an exception. What happened?

Did we hand out 60-page booklets to black people to stop being so thuggish? No, we did not.

Did we bomb townships where anti-black sentiment was known to be expressed? No.

Over time, we simply called to the attention of people that anti-black prejudice, was exactly that. Prejudice. Pre-judging. The dissention was exposed as something that said very little about the targets of the ill feeling, and was much more of a shameful commentary on the person nurturing it. It became a symbol of what it is: childishness. Simple-mindedness. One-dimensional thinking. It was exposed as logically untenable.

Even the man who hated black people out of personal experience, was exposed as guilty of generalization. Person of color commits a crime against you or your relatives, you come to regard all persons of color a certain way — that’s wrong. Groups are groups, people are people. To go through life as some two-bit racist just because that’s what your daddy was, even though you’ve never met any black people yourself — doubly wrong.

Same goes for persons of another faith, or any other race, or surname.

Okee dokee then. America fought prejudice by getting the message out about how to look at people. How mature grown-ups look at other people, and how silly, immature bigots look at other people.

It’s a success story.

So why aren’t we fighting this worldwide instance of prejudice and slack-jawed, simple-minded, poorly-thought-out animosity exactly the same way?

To put it more concisely, it’s just impossible for me to look at some foreigner who got an American hand waggled at him in the wrong direction, and goes on to say “those dirty rotten Americans…” with any more esteem, or tolerance, than the average filthy redneck who suffered some perceived slight from a minority group and went on to say “those dirty so-and-so…” I just don’t see any difference in those two situations. None whatsoever. People have had opportunities to explain a logical difference to me; very few have taken the time or energy to do so, and the ones who have tried, have been far from compelling.

In fact, in the example of the European guy who encounters a boorish American tourist, I have to ask — maybe this is my fifth problem with the article — what does that foreign guy do for a living? Isn’t he in the tourist business, or engaged in something related to it? Isn’t he at least out-and-about somewhere that’s been developed as what you’d call a “tourist trap,” like, maybe, St. Mark’s Square?

Gosh, I’ve lived in tourist traps before. Seems to me when you’re walking through someplace you might meet some tourists, you should expect — y’know — pretty much anything.

I mean, you wouldn’t believe what we see here in America from other countries. Why, just this last spring we had a huge demonstration all over the country from illegal immigrants — let me repeat that, ILLEGAL immigrants — from another country. They marched around, and let’s just say they represented their native country less than optimally. Some of them even carried around signs to the effect that they ought to take the place over, that the rest of us didn’t even belong here!

You know, it seems to me that those illegal immigrants, back then, might have been able to use an etiquette guide. It seems to me their behavior might have been interpreted as ugly, thuggish, and more than a little arrogant. It might have led to anti-illegal-alien sentiment. In fact, it did. I don’t remember any snotty lectures about manners, or 60-page rulebooks being handed out about how, while you’re illegally trespassing into this other country where you have no right to be — make sure you don’t waggle your hand in the wrong direction and accidentally make some enemies.

No, to the best I can recall, as this other country was being represented by the “travellers” in a not-quite-sunny sort of a way — if this resulted in a bad feeling in the natives, it was portrayed as some kind of character issue with the natives.

Was I not paying attention at the right time? Did I miss something?

Best Sentence

I read a lot of stuff. Books, magazines, newspapers, funny pages, journals, articles, blogs. Every once in a great while I see a single sentence that stands out among all the rest — not only among all the sentences I’ve read that day, but that week or that month. Because of the nature of the blog, they usually pop up there. Not always.

The last sentence I really liked a lot was cobbled together by the Anchoress: “What a foppish snot.” Just damn. If that sentence was a pair of boxers, you’d have major arousal going whenever you slipped them on, and you’d change out of them at the slightest sensation of a fart building up.

That was nearly two months ago, which just goes to show why I don’t hand out awards for these things like some people do. After all, what would that be? Quote of the…month? I can go a whole year, or a good chunk of one, not seeing anything of that caliber.

So I’ve decided to go ad hoc. Best quote awards for…whenever they pop up. One-sentence quotes only. Best sentence award. Something that merits extra-special attention…one sentence long. It happens four times in a week, we’ll deal with that…it doesn’t happen again for two years, we’ll deal with that too.

Best sentence — for today. Goes to “I Don’t Like You In That Way” under the post entitled, “Eva Longoria is a Slut”. It’s actually two sentences. We’ll learn to adapt to that, because this is some creative writing worth noting:

Eva Longoria’s vagina is like that thing that Jabba the Hutt tried to throw Luke in. It’s always open and it’s always hungry.

I really don’t know from experience if this is true or not, but it jives with what little I know about her. I don’t know anything that would contradict this. Hey, she’s doing other guys, she’s never expressed an interest in me, not that I’d reciprocate…that’s good enough.

Anyway, it’s a non-issue. If she’s living like a nun, and the article is slandering her, that is highly skilled slander. Nothing like a Star Wars analogy to describe someone’s sex life.

Inhofe and O’Brien

The exchanges between Sen. James Inhofe and CNN anchor Miles O’Brien, have been pretty entertaining and not very much discussed.

Wherever MMGW (this blog’s acronym for “man-made global warming”) is discussed as a possibility, the melting ice caps are getting an increasing amount of attention. I have been waiting for one thing here, and I’ve been waiting for a very long time. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t think I’m expecting very much.

I want to know how much melting ice we’re looking at here. Measure it however you will. Cubic miles, tons, whatever you want. I want to know, worst-case scenario, how much of it is falling into the oceans and melting.

And then I want to know how much this brings up the ocean levels. Deriving this, from the answer to the ice question, is just not complicated science. It is simple third- or fourth-grade math. A ton of ice melts and becomes, with some margin of error, so-and-so-many cubic feet of water. A billion cubic feet of water, distributed throughout all the world’s oceans, brings up the level so-and-so many feet.

How much do the ocean levels rise? I’m not looking for just the answer — I’m looking for the math that leads to it. The fourth-grade-level math.

I’m not asking for very much, here, at all. And it says a lot that I have yet to be satisfied here.

Update 10/16/06: Debra Saunders says Global Warming^TM is a religion, not a science.