Imitation is the Sincerest Form XIV

Awhile ago I made up this poster and uploaded it to Motivational Buck.

I have since used it, so many times, for reasons that should be obvious, that I’ve forgotten what originally inspired it. Nor does it matter very much what that would have been.

Now, I don’t know if this clever person reads my blog. I would suspect hardly anybody does. But how, then, do you explain this gem which was posted this morning in FARK. Actually, many gems…three pages of gems.

Which are actually useful. In so many ways.

Just for the record, even if the clever fellow happened across my poster and made a conscious decisions to rip it off, shamelessly, which I highly doubt happened…I consider it to be an exercise not unlike stealing b-flat. The idea is not sufficiently complicated to make such a theft possible. Besides, some of these are pretty awesome. Built to be used. If you can figure out how to call such a thing “intellectual property” so that I can, in the classic vernacular, “safeguard” my “intellectual property” — and then actually use the great stuff the guy actually made, thereby, doing exactly the thing to him that he’s supposed to have done to me, except worse — why, then, you’d be a much better lawyer than I’ll ever be.

In sum, as seems to always be the case when I’m robbed in such a way, I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered. GREAT work.

Battlestar Nuance

The Hunny wanted to get ahold of the original Battlestar Galactica movie. We finally got it done, now all we have to do is find some time to watch it together.

I was sneaking a peak at the first few minutes of it and, as is my habit, I noticed something more philosophically deep than what was intended by the people who made the movie. But I dunno. Recall a week ago, I had torn into xXx: State of the Union, homing in on a scene at the mid-point of the film lasting a mere 39 seconds, and yet defining everything in the story taking place at the political level. In sum: The good guy, the current President played by Peter Strauss, wanted to “turn enemies into allies” and take a pacifist approach…about something. Something that was never mentioned, in fact, just, something. And of course the bad guy wanted to make war just for the hell of it. Gave him an erection, or maybe he was in bed with the defense contractors. Maybe both. That went undefined too…which is fine, I guess, it’s a kids’ movie.

I was noticing if you flipped the scene over like a pancake, and set things up in complete opposites, you would have a perfect encapsulation of real life. Blogger friend Buck Pennington also noticed this. The President, who is the good guy, is about making war as needed so that evil men can be made into the dead things they should be; the “bad guy,” which is the personification of incorrect policy decisions, wants to appease in situations where it is not appropriate. And the bad guy tries to usurp the authority of the good guy. That’s exactly the situation we’re in now.

Well, recall that when the original Battlestar Galactica movie came out, the President was a “bad guy” who liked to appease. Didn’t work out so hot. Folks who think he had the right idea, call him “America’s best ex-President” — not flattering, to say the least.

You do know, don’t you, that Lorne Greene’s character used to have two sons? He named them Apollo, and Zack. Side point: It has been extremely rare for old men in science fiction movies, of any kind, to need women to procreate. “Welcome to my planet, Captain Kirk, this is my extremely lovely daughter who has never seen a man before and doesn’t know how to kiss. Yet. She has no mother, of course, and we all speak perfect English.”

Anyway, I digress. So Lorne Greene, all by himself, produced a son with the name of a greek deity and then another son with the name of a hillbilly.

Well, the scene where the second son is killed by Cylon warriors, about twenty minutes into the movie, is the opposite of the scene in xXx: State of the Union. See, Lorne Greene didn’t have just a second son, he also used to have a boss, “The President.” The President ordered Lorne Greene to take the pacifist approach, and not to launch any enforcement fighters to save the other guys who were already on patrol — not to do anything that could have been interpreted as a sign of belligerance. The “don’t wanna make ’em mad” approach.

It seems when we already have the “don’t wanna make ’em mad” approach in the Oval Office, it’s okay to make a movie showing what could be the downside of such a thing. Of course, you can’t make a movie like that today. We have a Texan in the White House, one who actually has some balls, and calls evil men evil men. And so when you make an entertainment-movie addressing the pacifist-versus-concealed-carry conundrum, you’re supposed to make concealed-carry look like the wrong idea, and glorify the pacifist approach. Since, in real life, that’s what we don’t have running things.

I just think it’s interesting. Whether approaching a conference table with a sidearm is a sensible idea, or not, is a philosophical question rooted in the fundamental nature of how people operate. I think both sides would agree, this is a cognition that does not change with the passage of time. And yet, in popular culture, it does.

Well, my own opinion is that Hollywood had the right idea, back when we had the wrong President in real life. The capacity of the “don’t wanna make ’em mad” approach to prevail — actually, to simply not get you killed — depends on the dubious prospect of hitherto-sworn enemies telling the truth all the time. Obviously, the first time an antagonist chooses to lie to you about his intentions, the “I’m unarmed, and they’ll follow my superior example” approach will be bad for you. It is bound to happen. This is just a matter of solid logic and simple common sense. The debate, therefore, ends up being about whether there are people in the world who are willing to lie about things.

And that is a question to be left to history. The way history resolves it, is not friendly to the pacifist approach.

Boortz and Rhodes on Larry King

Neal Boortz is bragging that he kicked Randi Rhodes’ ass on Larry King. I really wish I could watch the interview for myself, or at least part of it, so I can make up my own mind.

My “Googling” has proven futile…as has my You-Tube-ing. What I’m left with, isn’t much.

I see on the web pages, Neal is bragging about it, and Rhodes is silent about it. That’s a clue, although admittedly, far from sufficient. Boortz has chosen to share a sampling of his e-mail about the debate, both friendly and hostile. The friendly e-mail congratulates him on “she’s going to need an ambulance, stat” and “I could not find the slightest bit of reason in any argument she made.” The hate-mail, on the other hand, says things like “I think you should leave USA because you and people like you doing harm to this great country.”

When Bush debated Kerry three times, The Left liked to intone that Kerry won the debates. Now granted, the residual doubts about Sen. Kerry’s victory, are most persuasively expressed with the observation that there is a great sense of urgency, even today, in repeating over and over that the Senator won…if it was a true ass kicking in favor of the Massachusetts Senator, wouldn’t it be better to let people make up their own minds? Wouldn’t that, at least, be an option? But, it wasn’t an option, and it isn’t an option. A liberal is not allowed to talk about the debates between Bush and Kerry, without announcing that Kerry won — allowing people to decide for themselves, is unacceptable. So in the same situation, we have the question of whether Rhodes’ silence about the Larry King face-off is an exercise in allowing people to make up their own minds. Hmmm. You know, I gotta think if that was the case, she would at least be mentioning that it happened. To the best of my knowledge, she isn’t even doing that. She is known to me as a performer who likes to tell the audience what it’s supposed to be looking at.

The only other thing I have, is my experience in listening to them both. I’m out of Boortz’s area, but being a Boortz Blast subscriber I’ve caught clips of him maybe three or four times, compared to just one stint of listening to Rhodes. I was highly impressed with Rhodes’ ability to advance effusive, improbable ideas, and to follow them up with creative prose about the ideas — carefully avoiding any discussion about what might possibly convince me to accept them. Things ranging from…President Bush is a liar, to, The War In Iraq Is All About Oil.

I haven’t mentioned my one listening adventure with Rhodes, for the simple reason that it isn’t a fair sample. It’s worth mentioning now, however, because the findings from my one experience are perfectly compatible with Neal Boortz’s characterization of the debate I missed. Rhodes, from what little I know about her, seems to be Yang; she explains herself, and her words are selected for those already inclined to agree with her before she utters the first word explaining herself. Persuading a hostile mindset to cross over, or simply tossing out some facts to place the hostile mindset in a state of unease, is outside of her intended scope. From what I can see. To sum it up, what I heard on Air America, appeared to be a pep rally. I quickly gathered the impression I had about as much business being there, as in the ladies’ room. Her words weren’t for me.

Nor is her name. It’s a stage name, intended to honor some dead rock ‘n roll guy. I’m not a rock ‘n roll fan.

So I’m left with little doubt that Boortz won, since he’s been refining his schtick to address, with varying degrees of diplomacy, ideological compatriots as well as opponents whereas Rhodes is just a cheerleader. I have trouble seeing it as a fair match.

One other comment on something I learned this morning: Is it a left-wing talking point, now, that terrorism is to be treated as a “law enforcement problem”? I thought people on the right wanted to use that to define what was wrong with the liberal solution to terrorism, whereupon it was popular for The Left to protest — with righteous indignation, as usual — that their opponents were characterizing the leftist position unfairly, using a simple catch-phrase to address a complicated situation with lots of shades of gray. I thought it was loaded with meaning and interpretation, meant to support the conservative argument and to derogate the liberal one. I thought as far as loaded terms go, it was one notch shy of “appeasement.”

Is The Left actually proud of viewing terrorism as a law enforcement problem? That’s a new one on me. I had thought they had confined themselves to simply trying to get people to stop thinking about terrorism. Subtle distinction to make, but I can’t think of a more important one.

Admittedly I know very little about this woman, but it would seem if she speaks for the liberal movement right now, the 2006 elections have already been decided.

Update: Andrew Olmstead, two years ago, gave a great reason (assuming it’s really needed by anybody, something with which I still have some trouble) why the “law enforcement problem” paradigm isn’t such a swell idea. He did this by pointing to a Washington Post story. You know how some folks like to remind us over and over again that Europe is older than America, more experienced in the ways of the world, much wiser, and how we should learn things from them? Well, Europe has had experience treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem. And we can certainly learn from what’s happened.

Assuming that really is how the debate is being framed. I hope it is. The idea of Democrats losing fifty seats in the House, appeals to me a lot; a hundred-and-fifty, would be better. Hello, Republicans, wouldn’t you like to be campaigning on that this year?

Update 8/12/06: The link to Neal’s website (first one in this post) has been replaced with a permalink. Video here.

Ms. Rhodes says there is material on Media Matters that will prove Neal Boortz called Muslims “ragheads,” which in the context of the interview would mean Neal has to make a $5,000 contribution to Air America. Media Matters itself has this to say.

Although Media Matters for America has not documented Boortz using the specific term “raghead,” on the July 19 edition of his radio program, he called the prophet Muhammad “a phony rag-picker” and stated that Islam is “a religion of vicious, violent, bloodthirsty cretins.”

Obviously, this fails to financially indebt Mr. Boortz toward anything or anyone. But is that a moot point? Does this in fact cross some sort of finish line?

Well, that would depend on what exactly Rhodes was trying to prove. And if you check the transcript, that was left entirely unstated.

Well, she’s a left-winger, so just speaking for myself I think we should use the same logic on this that left-wingers have been using against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It dooooooeeeeeessssssnnnnnn’t ccccoooooooouuuuuuuuunnnnnnnttttt… nyah nyah, neener neener neener.

I mean, that’s a fair process, right?

Metrosexuals R.I.P.

I’m not entirely sure what this article is trying to tell me. The point seems to be that if I were to be harboring any delusions about becoming a Johnny-come-lately to the Metrosexual skin-moisturizing chest-shaving eyebrow-crinkling puppy-faced Shiraz-over-Budweiser party, the time’s running out on my opportunity to do this because Metros aren’t in style anymore.

I think that’s what it’s trying to tell me. And that would be great news. But I don’t understand words like “grooming,” “sarong,” “moisturiser,” “preening,” “fake tan,” or “waxing.” Or “fashion.”

Nor do I know who David Beckham and Wayne Rooney are, nor do I care to find out. It has something to do with that poor imitation of football they play over in Mother England, right?

Sci-Fi Trailers

Via FARK. I mostly agree with the content of the lists…mostly disagree with the ordering. The Best and Worst Sci-Fi TV Show Openings. Top ten best, top ten worst, with YouTube links by each one. Fun.

Muerto

Nobody ever reads this blog, of course, but among those who do, it can be easily recalled that I’ve wished death on the Democratic party on a number of occasions. It is, I think, inevitable, but nevertheless I hold up hope on the remaining uncertainty regarding the timeframe. I hope it’s soon. I think the party is a cancer on America; the former lives on at the expense of the latter, and I think the continuing survival of the latter isn’t too terribly pleasing to the former.

For those who see something conceptually helpful in what they think the Democratic party is supposed to be, perhaps there’s a desire for the party to place that concept in a light of more elevated importance, although they may share my recognition that something is seriously broken in the party machinery. To the extent that those people are correct about what’s good — and I think there is one — I share their appreciation for those positive concepts. And I hope the party nevertheless sinks beneath the waves, releasing those beneficial attributes to surface again elsewhere. The rotting host that ostensibly supports those positive things, is just not worth the hassle. We need for it to pass on. And we need to bury the corpse quickly when it happens. Skip the funeral and maybe even the wake, for the body stinks already, even as it still draws breath.

Well, now. It seems likely that I’ll be getting my wish. Lieberman has lost. Not for good, for he has vowed to return as an independent, but as of tonight he is going to have to separate from the party that has been his, in order to make that happen.

So it is unofficially official. The Democratic party is the party of Kos.

All you Democrats who are running for re-election to the House or Senate, and stopped short of blaming President Bush for actually causing the September 11 attacks, you’ve got some explaining to do. Haven’t you heard, you’re part of the Screw Them party. Better get with the program, if you don’t want to end up like Joe Lieberman.

The rest of us would be well-advised to start looking around for new healthy competition against the Republicans, after the rotting donkey corpse is hauled off for good. It’s a serious issue, I think. This country wasn’t built to be run by one party; it wasn’t built to have parties at all. After we’ve all seen the light, and decided there’s nothing good about financially punishing rich people just for being rich, and outlawing all jobs that pay less than $7.50 an hour, and taxing thirty-something apartment rats to buy Viagra for rich old people with summer homes and swimming pools, and that the life of a murder victim was just as sacred as the life of the scumbag who actually did the murder…there’s a whole bunch of more serious, worthwhile questions to be settled. So who is to replace the Democrats as the party-of-loyal-dissent? And what should the new party-of-loyal-dissent stand for?

What Is Open-Mindedness, Anyway?

My fellow commentator at Newsblog Central, Darth Pepsi, came up with a piece of pure gold from syndicated columnist Debra J. Saunders.

Imagine, if you can, that slightly more than half of the public voted Democratic in the last presidential election, yet some 80 percent of higher education’s social scientists voted Republican. In that universe, you would expect the left to demand changes in university hiring practices so academia would nurture greater diversity so as to better represent the American community.

Then step back into the real world, where academia has become a solid bastion of the left, as demonstrated by two articles in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Current Review. One article presents a survey of academic social scientists showing 79.6 percent of 1,208 respondents said they voted mostly Democratic over the last 10 years, with 9.3 percent voting Republican. Call that a near monopoly marketplace of ideas.

A second article studied the voter registration of California college professors and found the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans (among professors located in voting registers) is 5-1.
:
“I think, partly, it is self-selection,” said [Mr. Daniel B. Klein, George Mason University] over the phone Wednesday. He sees “something about intellectuals and hubris and conceit” in academia — with political scientists pumping themselves up as savvy saviors of a public sorely in need of their enlightened views. While liberal professors often think they are open-minded, Mr. Klein believes they also often think “we’re smarter” than those outside academia and have a right to “discriminate against people who get it wrong.”

How do we get to this point? The academia strives to be the place where ideas reign freely, and by the time the academic mind is done torturing itself it is the very symbol of a mind made up, and sealed shut tight.

Is it something in the building? The insulation between the walls, perhaps? Liberalism itself?

I think not. It’s the desire to be open-minded, for no higher purpose than to be simply that and nothing more. The endeavor is the antithesis of itself.

Think it through. You want to be open-minded, and so, pursuing some sort of discipline you come to conclusion X. Your ego is not invested in X, perhaps, but certainly you have invested substantial energy in the discipline that led you to X. Obviously, those who come to a different conclusion, !X, must not have followed the same discipline since if they did follow it, they would believe X just as you do. So they must follow a different discipline.

Is the other discipline as open-minded as yours, moreso, or less so? Your own discipline must be quite useless if someone else can follow an equally open-minded discipline, and come to the conclusion of !X, so your ego takes over here and rules out the first of those options. Just as quickly, and perhaps quicker, the second option is eliminated for the same reason; so by process of elimination, you come to evaluate other disciplines — disciplines you can’t even see — by the conclusions they reach. Ergo, all those who believe !X, must not be as open-minded as you are. Your ego says this is the case, and of course the ego demands, by its very nature, exemption from inspection.

You are open-minded, you believe X, and all those who believe !X are closed-minded. Again, you ego kicks in to support what logic cannot and will not: all those around you who likewise believe X, must be as open-minded as you. And so the last piece is in place. You can gauge the open-mindedness of all sentient and articulate beings, based on their professed beliefs on the question of X. It becomes a litmus test.

I’m sure to the uninitiated, that all looks pretty silly. Well, try this. Debate an academic-minded liberal, and they aren’t too hard to find, on global warming. If you happen to agree with the academic-type on the issue, then take the devil’s-advocate approach.

Or if that’s too tough, pursue the same exercise on intelligent design.

Or capital punishment.

Or stem cell research.

Or gun control.

Or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Just don’t forget to show true open-mindedness. And keep your eyes peeled…how much open-mindedness is returned from the other side? How much consideration-of-both-sides do you get, before the “closed-minded” label is stuck on your forehead, simply because of the ideas you pretend to advance? Try it. You might learn something.

Anyway, that’s my explanation for how those who make the most noise about being “open-minded,” are the quickest and most competent at becoming anything but. As to why they end up liberal, in our academic circles and in the print media, I suppose that’s a story for another day.

Vote Against It, or Shut Yer Piehole

Doctors’ refusal to participate might eventually end the death penalty.

The death penalty in the United States might be hitting a roadblock: the Hippocratic Oath.

Condemned inmates in three states have successfully challenged lethal injection as cruel and unusual. For the first time, judges have sided with inmates in ruling that lethal injection has the potential to be unconstitutionally cruel – that without doctors present, the procedure could be inhumane.

The problem is that few doctors are willing to do it. Ultimately, this could put a halt to the use of lethal injections.

In an oft-cited article in March in the New England Journal of Medicine, physician Atul Gawande, who said he favors the death penalty, summed up the belief of many in his profession.

“Medicine is being made an instrument of punishment,” wrote Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women�s Hospital in Boston. “We should seek a legal ban on the participation of physicians and nurses in executions.

“And if it turns out that executions cannot then be performed without, as the courts put it, ‘unconstitutional pain and cruelty,’ the death penalty should be abolished.”

You know what I haven’t seen in a very long time? A sincere, well-thought-out campaign to persuade people to actually vote against capital punishment. It’s always…physicians refuse to participate, Supreme Court justices rule it unconstitutional, the rest of the world doesn’t like it, blah blah blah.

The people who need to be executed, possibly living amongst us, makes this a great example for decision-making by the man-in-the-street…and, among those, the ones with the lowest stature. Around the civilized world, there’s a tendency for those most famous and wealthy, to live in the better neighborhoods. You live in a good neighborhood, there are certain disasters for you and your loved ones, that become a whole lot less likely. So this calls for a democratic-society vote, moreso even than most issues. Perhaps the anti-capital-punishment people can’t quite see that, because they only like to think about how they’d “feel” being strapped into the electric chair — not about the innocent people placed in danger when psychotics are allowed to keep on living.

Or, maybe they’re aware of the concept of federalism, and therefore, that if they want the death penalty abolished according to the democratic process in this country, they’d have to campaign on it 51 times. Maybe they just want more control than that, with a lot less work.

I’m sure there’s a good reason for the anti-democratic nature of the anti-death-penalty movement. Good…for them. I can’t think of a reason that’s good for the people who should be voting on it, or for our process of self-government. I don’t think they can, either.

I wonder what kind of neighborhood Atul Gawande lives in. Wondering if he’s got a wife or girlfriend who has to walk or ride a bus home from work by herself. It’s a fair question. This is an issue in which not all of us are exposed to the same threat.

Thing I Know #16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.
Thing I Know #135. A leader can commit no greater betrayal of the public trust, than to allow someone to live, who won’t stop killing people.

Memo For File XX

Sen. Inhofe is correct in his commentary on the Fox News special on global warming: French President Jacques Chirac said the Kyoto Treaty is the “first component of an authentic global governance.”

So add Chirac to the long and growing list of global warming advocates, who simply are not behaving, not in any way, or regard, zilch, zero, nada, not acting as if there is really a planet-threatening problem.

Who is behaving as if there really is one?

I remember thirty years ago there was a big-time environmental movement going on. The Ad Council put on television commercials, with an image of an Indian crying over a littered cityscape. Some people did ecologically-friendly things, most people did not. The people who did, acted smug. Sanctimonious. Better-than-you.

I miss the smugness.

Because their successors, today, can lecture you about how the planet is doomed — the planet is doomed! — and if the two of you happen to walk past a Hummer H2 while he’s flinging his environmentalist spittle in your direction, he won’t bat an eyelash. And nobody has the cojones to say, it seems: Hey, you just talked about the human race coming to an end and the planet becoming uninhabitable. Have you no comment on this machine we just walked past? None?

I thought the smugness was tough to take at the time, but it was fused with a sincerity that is missing today. You know, people younger than thirty right now wouldn’t realize it, but back then it wasn’t even popular to say people were threatening themselves through the climate. We had this popular fad going around about “The Next Ice Age”; we had another one going around about nuclear weapons. Yet, if the human race were to snuff itself out with a nuclear war, this would have nothing to do with the climate, and if the human race were to die off because of an ice age, this would having nothing to do with human behavior. Actually, the latter of those two was supposed to be testament to man’s lack of control over his own destiny, his lack of respect for the superiority of nature. It was kind of the “Titanic” paradigm.

So being barely old enough to recall that, I’m a little befuddled. It’s a new milennium. The new boogeyman can do all kinds of things to us, including the placement of our continued survival into jeopardy; we have a public relations war as to whether we are at fault for it or not. And, in a society endlessly fascinated with inviting everybody to participate in everybody else’s business — nobody has anything to say about what anybody’s doing.

It’s all Republican politicians and greedy corporations. The man-in-the-street can’t actually do anything; not to hurt, not to help.

Most of the people who read blogs, are a little too young to identify with me on where I’m coming from on this. I hope with the above background, they can appreciate why I find this all, well, just a little odd. Last time I saw an entire industrialized society mobilized to worry and fret over ecological issues, people drove around in little itty-bitty hatchbacks made of aluminum that a strong man could actually pick up in his two hands. People, today, are commuting to work in hulking monstrosities, carrying nothing but a lunchbox.

I have seen widespread concern over the environment, and doom-and-gloom, before. This isn’t what it looks like.

And So, I Wonder

This appears to be yet another humdrum story about the high standards of an international news agency being enforced, at the expense of a freelance photographer who may or may not have been up to shenanigans. Until you get to the paragraph about how he was busted.

He was among several photographers from the main international news agencies whose images of a dead child being held up by a rescuer in the village of Qana, south Lebanon, after an Israeli air strike on July 30 have been challenged by blogs critical of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Middle East conflict. [emphasis mine]

And, the thing that got him so busted.

Reuters withdrew the doctored image on Sunday and replaced it with the unaltered photograph after several news blogs said it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more smoke. [emphasis mine]

Now granted, digital image manipulation has been around for much longer than what we call “blogs,” and you wouldn’t need to look far-and-wide for someone who can see there’s skullduggery afoot with the image that appeared in the original Reuters dispatch. But facts is facts, as they say. The “ekspurts” had the first shot at this thing and passed it on through, and the blogs took ‘er down.

Little Green Footballs has an excellent rundown on the malfeasance that’s been going on.

And so, once again, I wonder. Our news ekspurts are oh so trustworthy and oh so unbiased, the ekspurts tell me so…oh, how do they put it. Here it is. “Reuters has strict standards of accuracy that bar the manipulation of images in ways that mislead the viewer.” Why, there it is in black-and-white. And yet, since the “blog” as we know it is such a recent phenomenon, the question naturally arises…what other kinds o’ crap went sliding in under the radar in years & generations past? Is there a way of even finding out? Not completely, no.

Next sanctimonious know-it-all who tells me a thing is so because “the ekspurts are in complete agreement” about it…pow, right in the kissa. God bless the blogs. Not so much the opinionated ones like the one you’re reading now, but blogs in general, for reasons that should be obvious. I wonder how we ever got along without ’em. …sadly.

Why Should I Press 1

A couple weeks ago I noted that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was laying the smackdown on the states that fell short of federal standards for public school performance (NYTimes link requires registration). Spellings’ two big headaches were Maine and Nebraska. Among the seven other states causing a problem, is New York which is now starting to do what is needed to comply. At stake, is more than a million dollars a year in federal aid. So what are they doing? Let’s take a look…

State education officials said that any student with at least one year of U.S. schooling will have to take the regular English Language Arts exam. Until now, students with less than three years of U.S. schooling could take a different test for English as a second language.

The change affects about 90,000 children in grades three through eight who speak limited English. The next test is in January.

Mmmm, hmmm. And so, as I was pointing out two weeks ago, the No Child Left Behind Act in particular, and the notion of standardized testing in general, is presented to us as the cause of the problem as these states end up behind the woodshed. And yet, the standard is just that: a standard. It’s the falling-short of the standard that is the problem — were the standard unreasonable, we’d have 51 states in trouble, not nine. And as we see from this article, at least in New York, an inadequate command of the our country’s indigenous language is a significant issue in this shortfall.

Good to know, for the next time I see squabbling about the NCLB. The real issue is English. English versus…Tower-Of-Babel linguistic anarchy.

Why is there any controversy about this, and by that I mean, at all? Is anyone ready to step forward and say the ninety-thousand New York kids would be better off remaining untested, sent out into the world with diploma in hand, with their sub-par command of the English language hung around the neck like a dead albatross?

They would succeed, being, in the classic vernacular, “left behind”?

This country is the “downtown financial center” of the world. We have work to do; we need to talk to each other. Is it too much to ask that we have one official language? By all means walk around in whatever color of skin God gave you, and speak whatever you want at home. But we speak English here.

To those who say that’s racist — what color is English?

Let’s give it up for the English language, shall we. If we were to wake up tomorrow morning with one language magically expunged from the face of the globe, so that thousands to millions to billions of transactions were no longer possible due to this sudden magical excision, the loss of the English language would deal a more devastating blow to civilization than the same thing done to any other single language you could imagine. No more pencils, books, teachers’ dirty looks, ordering cheesesteak sandwiches, paying of bills, transferring of funds, yammering at your mamma to bring gruel to your bedroom door, no more American Idol. No more nothin’. Just flicking each other off on the freeway. And when you’re out of gas, you’d better learn to flick off other people when you’re walking, because it’ll be tough fill anything back up again.

Yeah, the gas station owner speaks Hindu or Swahili or something. Whatever. Sooner or later, he’ll be dry and he’ll have to order a delivery.

English is our lifeblood. When it’s strong, everybody’s strong, regardless of their mother tongue. Everybody, on all sides of this phony issue, knows it to be true. Everybody who gives it a few seconds’ thought knows it. Thank you New York, 49 states to go.

Memo For File XIX

Cindermutha has one of the best rants about ex-spouses I’ve seen. It includes this gem:

I hope that mother fucker gets hit by a gasoline truck, which then explodes and deep fries him into ash that can then be swept up and flushed down the toilet.

Whatever difficulties I, as a man, have in relating to this, I can overcome easily because she’s talking about one of my favorite vices: Irresponsibility. You know, ex-spouses who do freakin’ nothing. I’m with her on this, whether it comes from a man or a woman, that shit will drive you freakin’ insane. Like having an itch you can’t scratch.

Oh and by the way, for everybody who’s in that situation, I have some advice. Advice is worthless. There, that’s your advice. Let everybody go ahead and tell you that you need to come to terms with your lazy spouse being the way he/she is, let them ramble on about how you need to get in touch with your feelings, etc. etc. etc. but in the end, know that they are making themselves feel good by prattling on. Go ahead and keep them as friends, since you need all the friends you can get right now, but bear in mind that you’re doing them more of a favor by pretending to pay attention, than they are doing you by telling you what to do. Your problem? It has no solution. You’re running a race with square wheels. Can’t make ’em round…can’t replace them, not quickly. Just pick better next time, that’s all.

Anyhoo. Her sidebar points to Dummocrats. Dummocrats has a post up about liberals actually being more creative than conservatives. That post, in turn, points to this one over at Althouse. And that piece lifts a quote from Charles E. Sellier, Jr., from this piece in the New York Times. “There are exceptions to every rule, but I�ve been at this [film industry] 34 years, and I really, honestly, believe that the more creative you are, the more likely you are to be a liberal.”

I’ve observed the same thing. Behold: Yin and Yang explains all. Some of us are wired to see the world as a neverending series of projects, with desktops, and tools, and raw material, and templates; others, see the world as a stage. The former thinks 24/7 about what’s going on within a workspace and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what others think; the latter thinks 24/7 about the emotional vibes of those around them, and is bored by the very concept of workspaces, let alone the prospect of actually working within one for a prolonged period of time.

Half of us have pencils, rulers and compasses, the other half of us have some sort of antenna. And maybe a bullhorn.

That’s why liberals are so incredibly controlling. For recruiting purposes, they draw from the “Yang” who are social creatures, and end up filling out the liberal ranks. Being social creatures, should the Yang find out someone, somewhere, is suffering, or doing something, or thinking a bad thought, in their mind it’s everybody’s business. They grew up “holding court,” deciding moment-to-moment what roomfuls of people would be doing — nobody should be allowed to read a book off in the corner, when it’s been decided that “we” are going to play Parcheesi. And of course, when the ringleader has declared the mood to be happy, nobody should be allowed to be sad. Or vice-versa.

Putting on a play, or making a movie, is an exercise in getting into the other person’s head and anticipating what they will want to be seeing next. You can’t do it without some kind of natural talent for predicting this. Not consistently; not well.

Cowboys and Liberals

Oh yeah…this guy definitely makes the sidebar.

The post has a link to something that’s supposed to explain his political beliefs. I have not gotten around to clicking those links because I don’t particularly care; not in the habit of filtering things out that way. But what he’s been noticing about the classic “cowboy,” is exactly what I’ve been noticing. We don’t hear of the cowboy, except in derogatory terms: X has a “cowboy mentality,” that is a bad thing, if you have to ask why then you are just a bad person.

What is the now-and-then-discussed “cowboy mentality,” anyway? Those who make it necessary to ask the question, far outnumber those willing and able to provide an answer. Well, this writer has an answer — and you can tell it’s a thoughtful one, because it mirrors what I’ve had to say about the same subject.

As it so happens, back when I was in film school, we studied various genres, one of which was the western, a form that is as uniquely American as jazz or baseball. I still have some of my old notes, outlining the classic structure of the western film:

1. The hero enters a social group.
2. The hero is unknown to the society.
3. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability.
4. The society recognizes differences between themselves and the hero.
5. The society does not completely accept the hero.
6. The villains threaten and do harm to the society.
7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak and ineffectual, unable to defend itself or punish the villains.
8. The hero initially avoids involvement in the conflict.
9. There is a past history, or some kind of symmetry or respect between the hero and villain.
10. The villains do something particularly evil to draw the hero in.
11. A representative of the Democratic Party, I mean society, asks the hero to give up his revenge.
12. The hero fights the villains.
13. The hero defeats the villains.
14. The society is safe.
15. The hero gives up his special status, the society accepts the hero, and the hero enters society.

To this, I’d like to add an ancillary point about the collision between the classic make-believe male-fantasy “western,” and reality. It does exist. The story, as outlined above, is a parable about the antithesis between what civilization does once it can rise up, after the roads are paved and the buildings built — and, what was done to kill the snakes and clear the swamp and make it possible to pave those roads. Those are two different things.

The savage men whom polite society deplores, are the very men who made it possible for that polite society to exist. That’s what the western is all about, and it’s got a lot more to do with reality than most people think. The oh-so-civilized nobility ostracizes these hard, brutal men and any of the residual customs that may remind others of the hard, brutal men. And yet, the oh-so-civilized nobility needs the hard brutal man — would not exist were it not for them — a lot more than the hard, brutal man needs the oh-so-civilized nobility.

This meme is riveted to the plane of reality, upon so many fixture-points. Soldiers aren’t supposed to “mistreat detainees”; we made that rule, after we were able to, when our country’s continuing freedom and sovereignty were made secure, after our soldiers “mistreated” what only today we call “detainees” and back then called “The Enemy.” Good things that happened because we put that rule in place? Nobody can name any; nobody tries to. We’re just told the world sees us in a certain way, and so we had better keep on sticking to the rule.

Carter appeased; Reagan coerced; Reagan got results and Carter did not. History, incorrectly, remembers Reagan as a “moderate” and a “compromiser” and sees Carter as “our best ex-President.” What else? Our hard, brutal men who were sent to boot camp to learn to be savages, drove Saddam Hussein out of Iraq. Our oh-so-civilized sissy-men who write for newspapers, command the rest of us to believe this venture was a failure. Yet, is Saddam Hussein gone, or is he not? By changing the goal of an enterprise when the enterprise is halfway done, as our liberals command us to do with their red-herrings about Weapons of Mass Destruction, etc., what has mankind accomplished? Not much. Champagne, Post-It Notes, that’s about all. Yet there they sit, chirping endlessly about why the Iraq invasion is a boondoggle and a quagmire…even though Hussein is out of the game for good, and nobody can dispute this.

Our future was threatened during World War II. We survived that, to later make these purple-paisley rules about not being too tough, making sure Mohammed Al-Hoozeewotsit gets cream cheese on his bagel every day at Gitmo or else a lawyer will file a brief somewhere. Why did we survive it? Because of men like George S. Patton Jr., who surely would be banished from polite society today quicker than you could say his name. No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other bastard die for his. Remember that? This is what ensures our survival…and then once we do so survive, we show our most vituperative hostility to such a thing, the way a petulant teenager snarks at his parents, for snark’s sake alone.

It’s just another human failing, destined to rise up and rise up again, generation after generation, no justification for it whatsoever. People may argue against that out of emotion, but they can’t make a good case against it.

And so, by decree of the blue-state glitterati who decide what the rest of us are supposed to be thinking, the classic movie-western goes bye-bye. Because, you see, it simply must. It has a life-lesson for us, something certain elites can’t afford for us to learn.

Thing I Know #125. They tell me rules are needed for civilization, but I notice civilization is needed for the rules. Civilization arises from where a wild frontier was tamed. On the taming of a wild frontier by a rulebook, history stands mute.
Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

The Real Cause

I don’t remember where I read it and I certainly can’t recall who said it. I have been candid about my addiction to FARK as it has waxed and waned through the years, so I suspect I got this from a thread over there somewhere. But I hope this becomes an Internet-meme, spreading like wildfire from Big Sur to Tallahassee, something everyone will have heard within a month or two. That is what I would like to see. And it really bugs me when someone reads something I said, likes it, and gives me credit for thinking it up when I don’t deserve the credit.

And I can’t take credit for this. But I really like it. Here it is.

We have discovered the real cause of global warming. And it is the anger and nastiness of liberals. It’s rising up into the atmosphere, and acting like a greenhouse gas.

Makes perfect sense. What is the timeframe of global warming, after all? Ostensibly, it is a phenomenon gradually setting in since the industrial revolution, but it has really started to peak in the last handful of years. The hottest year on record, I’m told, was 1998 — that was the hear move-on-dot-org got started. In 2001, liberals were driven out of all the branches of government because we were sick and tired of them. The liberals got angry, and accused the elections officials of shenanigans. The accusations were checked out, and smacked-down; the liberals got angrier.

The climate heated up some more.

Democrats failed to re-take Congress in ’02, the liberals got angry, the climate heated up some more. We invaded Iraq, the liberals got angry, the climate heated up. George W. Bush was re-elected, liberals got angry again, climate heated up again.

The trend is unbroken; I’m sure everyone would have to agree with that. The theory is unassailable. It’s like what they say about evolution: “the evidence is, quite simply, overwhelming.” Fits here.

And now lookee what we have here. Via Malkin: Liberal tolerance running amok. On the issue of illegal immigration, California’s Senate President Pro Tem calls the path-to-citizenship opponents — what an unreasonable position to take! — “all these crackers.” Niiiiiiiiiice. He certainly sounds like an angry, bigoted man. I’ll bet the mean temperature trickled up a couple degrees Fahrenheit before he got to the “ers.” We are also reminded about the Brown Berets disrupting an appearance by First Lady Maria Shriver last month.

Shriver came to encourage low-income families to use food stamps to buy healthy fruits and vegetables. But about a dozen Watsonville Brown Berets shouted “You’re not welcome here” and “racist.”

I can hear the polar bears crying right now. And…it’s getting…hard…to breathe…

xXx: State of the Union

So on Wednesday I’m all bellyaching about how all the movies that are made nowadays, are made the same, because the young punks want them that way. And the young punks end up ripping themselves off, because the movies made just for them, end up being crap.

And I dissed xXx: State of the Union (2005). Only in passing, but I still felt kind of bad about it, because I really liked the first installment with Vin Diesel. Actually, I have it. Impulse purchase. And as far as the sequel goes, I hadn’t seen it all the way through. Enough snippets to to know what I was talking about, I thought. But only that; not a minute more. Didn’t seem fair.

So I popped it in, and after I was done watching it I was really impressed with something. It’s a “swashbuckler” movie, in the sense that there’s a plot to assissinate the President after the State of the Union address, and install the Secretary of Defense in his place. It’s up to the “swashbucklers” to try to stop it, just like Robin Hood stopping Prince John from deposing King Richard. Or the Musketeers stopping Cardinal Richelieu. Really, it’s a rehash of every swashbuckler film, with a fairly slim subplot involving political skullduggery, which in turn motivates the villain to get on with his shenanigans.

Here’s what impresses me. The political-skullduggery subplot is over-and-done-with in thirty-nine seconds. Amazing, huh? It is seldom mentioned after that, and substantially explored, not-at-all. So yeah, in one scene, you get to see what the movie is “about.” It’s a conversation between President Sanford, played by Peter Strauss, and his Secretary of Defense. Strauss is the “legitimate king” so to speak, obviously, and since the other fellow is played by Willem Dafoe, well, you just know that’s the bad guy. The time index is 58:25.

Pres. Sanford: George, I’m addressing the nation tonight. So what’s the hang-up on the military bill?

Sec. Deckert: Well, if you’re reducing troops, closing bases and cutting R&D, you leave us vulnerable.

Sanford: George, we need to increase international aid. We need to reverse this isolationist doctrine. Maybe then we can turn some of these enemies into allies.

Deckert looks at him, pensively. His eyes narrow. He displays a deep pool of wickedness coated by a thin surface of phony benevolence, as only Willem Dafoe can.

Sanford: I know this doesn’t particularly thrill you, George. But this is going to be my legacy.

Deckert: Sir.

Sanford: Now the question is: Do I have your support?

Pause. The tension is palpable.

Deckert (mechanically): That goes without saying, Mister President.

We don’t see the President, but the audience can tell he doesn’t have the other man’s support. We can tell by the look on Deckert’s face. He’s up to something, and it isn’t good.

After the one-hour mark, the movie settles into the events surrounding the State of the Union, hence the name of the movie. And the modern-day rehash of Zorro, et al, commences.

What is worthy of comment here, I think, is the detachedness of this political subplot. This is quite remarkable; “the military bill” is not connected to the rest of the story in any way, shape, matter, form or regard. Secretary Deckert says “you leave us vulnerable”; as far as I could perceive, there wasn’t even a character, a coalition, a faction, a force, to which the country would have been left vulnerable. It was just so much stuff. A point of policy disagreement, upon which the writers chose to build only to the extent necessary to create the film they wanted to create…which was zee-row.

In the movie I saw, these are purely afterthought-issues. Rather unusual for political themes within action movies, especially, political themes that give the villain all of his motivation for pursuing his misfeasance and malfeasance and what-not.

And so I got to thinking. This conversation lasts on the light-side of a minute; it defines what the whole movie is about. It touches nothing. You could molest it without mercy, scoop it out and replace it. Nothing would be disturbed. Hell, you could just dub over it. Wouldn’t it be easy to do something like this, and thus, make the whole film a little more, you know, realistic? Let’s see what I can do here.

S: George, I’m addressing the nation tonight. So what’s the hang-up on the industrial-emissions bill?

D: Well, if you don’t crack down on the greedy corporations, they’re going to keep releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and I saw this movie that says it would make the planet a lot warmer.

S: George, we need to let the businesses operate. We need to get out of this childishly hostile routine of regulation just for the sake of being a raging pain-in-the-ass; the Constitution doesn’t grant the government the authority to do that anyway. Maybe if we butt out of things, people won’t have such a tough time finding jobs.

Deckert looks…

S: I know this doesn’t particularly thrill you, George. But this is going to be my legacy.

D: Sir.

S: Now the question is: Do I have your support?

D: That goes without saying, Mister President.

Much better, right? And realistic too.

Wait, I have another idea.

S: George, I’m addressing the nation tonight. So what’s the hang-up on the death tax?

D: Well, if you keep those tax cuts in place, the spoiled-brat kids are going to be be made into instant millionaires just because their parents died, and we can’t let that happen because the government is the only thing in this country that deserves to be rich.

S: George, I haven’t heard anyone on Capitol Hill come out and tell me the treasury actually needs the money. We need to stop this business of using the tax code to punish people. Especially in their time of grief! Maybe then the economy will take off like a rocket, instead of just lumbering along like it’s been doing.

Deckert looks…

S: I know this doesn’t particularly thrill you, George. But this is going to be my legacy.

D: Sir.

S: Now the question is: Do I have your support?

D: That goes without saying, Mister President.

Ooh, ooh! I got another.

S: George, I’m addressing the nation tonight. So what’s the hang-up on the ANWR drilling bill?

D: Well, if you drill up there, we don’t know if we’ll get that much oil, and the caribou might not like it.

S: George, the area to be developed in ANWR is miniscule and you know it. We need to get away from the influence of the reckless, lockstep, take-no-prisoners environmentalists. We need to reverse this doctrine that says the human race is the only species that can’t exist without perpetually apologizing for doing so. Maybe then we’ll have a shot at making life bearable for consumers when they fuel up to drive their kids to school, and commute to their jobs.

Deckert looks…

S: I know this doesn’t particularly thrill you, George. But this is going to be my legacy.

D: Sir.

S: Now the question is: Do I have your support?

D: That goes without saying, Mister President.

But you know what’s really spooky about this? If you take that thirty-nine second subplot…and swivel it around a hundred and eighty degrees so you have a perfect photographic negative of it…you get something that comes chillingly close to real life. No, not that I think anyone’s out to assassinate the President. But we certainly have a lot of people who’d like to get rid of him, and if they can’t do that, neuter him politically. The notion of a “shadow government” so to speak, that is out to pursue a different agenda, well, it fits. Let’s just try it on for size, shall we? After all, it’s only thirty-nine seconds.

S: George, I’m addressing the nation tonight. So what’s the hang-up on the military bill?

D: Well, if you invade other nations who may not even be a threat to us, without getting permission for the eighteenth time from the United Nations, we risk alienating our allies.

S: George, we’ve been pussy-footing around with this for long enough. If we have a sovereign right to defend ourselves, we have a sovereign right to take action when we know murderous dictators are working to built up weapons systems for the express purpose of posing a threat; now, or in the future. Maybe if we have the stones to do that, we can start to make a dent in this infestation of poisonous snakes in the world’s swamp. We must reverse this doctrine of appeasement-at-any-cost, it’s brought us nothing but problems.

Deckert looks…

S: I know this doesn’t particularly thrill you, George. But this is going to be my legacy.

D: Sir.

S: Now the question is: Do I have your support?

D: That goes without saying, Mister President.

And the rest is history. “Deckert” works to undermine the duly-elected President. Not by assassination, but by peddling his inane talking points, over and over again, wherever he can.

Maybe that would have been too close to reality to make a good movie. Who knows?

Takin’ Awhile

So I’m reading about this comment from the Junior Senator from the state of New York about Secretary Rumsfeld…

“I just don’t understand why we can’t get new leadership that would give us a fighting chance to turn the situation around before it’s too late,” the New York Democrat and potential 2008 presidential contender said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I think the president should choose to accept Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation.”

“The secretary has lost credibility with the Congress and with the people,” she said. “It’s time for him to step down and be replaced by someone who can develop an effective strategy and communicate it effectively to the American people and to the world.”

…and this thought flashed through my head. A politically-incorrect, prurient thought, with more than a grain of coherence about it, I thought, but nevertheless bordering on the vulgar. Some would say I should be ashamed for thinking it, and I know they must have a point because I have not seen this sentiment spoken or written anywhere, even as everyone starts relaying the Senator’s remarks by jungle-telegraph, dutifully, with the conservatives dutifully rolling their eyes and the liberals dutifully cluck-clucking and muttering “Mmmmm, hmmmm.”

I told my better half about the facts — just the facts! I swear! — and wouldn’t you know it, the first thing to come out of her mouth was exactly what I had been thinking. The thing I thought, that I haven’t seen anyone else come out and say. Anywhere.

Senator Clinton is of the mind that when you are placed in a position of honor and trust, and it’s demonstrated you’re a failure, that you cannot fulfill the expectations of those who are counting on you, you should resign immediately. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how much prestige you have. If you lose the confidence of those you’re supposed to be satisfying, you kick your own ass out the door. No exceptions.

So why in the hell is that divorce taking so long?

Feelings First, Education Second VI

Is there something in the water in good ol’ Europe? I’ve grown weary of asking the question, and it makes me feel a little bit bad because I’ve met some very decent people from that continent, especially, Mother England. And yet the crap keeps on comin’ in…

CLEVER ISN’T COOL

TEACHERS were urged yesterday to stop describing bright pupils as “clever” – because it embarrasses them.

They were instead encouraged to call them “successful”. This would help overcome pupils’ belief that it is “not cool to be clever”, the Professional Association of Teachers’ conference heard. Delegate Simon Smith, from Rayleigh, said: “A culture has developed that mocks being clever. We should fight it. Change the language we use.”

Ann Nuckley, from a South London college, said image-conscious pupils refused to collect prizes from ceremonies.

Viewing it as an intellectual exercise, to read the article without envisioning John Cleese playing the role of Delegate Smith in one of the more surreal Monty Python skits…I fail. “‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!”

Are kids in England really that stupid? Here’s your prize, Cecil! Cecil gets the crap kicked out of him on the playground. BUT…You’re oh so successful, Cecil! Everybody leaves the kid alone, and/or, makes him their best bud. Nobody’s going to tease anybody about being “successful.” Yeah, suuuuuuuure it’ll work that way.

The kids haven’t got enough to do; not enough to worry about. This “success” is a natural resource, used to apply against problems — it’s only natural that it should start to look a little silly, viewed by a demographic of kids who don’t have problems. At least, problems that can be solved by such success. “Work.” Bored kids.

Installment V of Yin and Yang, which explores my Yin and Yang theory applied to celebrities like George Galloway and David Letterman, makes the point about how evolution has come to split the human population cleanly in half. Of the six installments, this is probably the windiest and most intellectually stuffy — summarizing it, the point to be made is that as a species, we no longer have any work to do. There are no challenges to be met for our basic survival, and as a result the human race has been cleaved in half. Now if your eyeballs bled from that epistle and you were unable to comprehend the cause-and-effect, I would say this story is a vivid illustration of what I’m talking about.

The kids, together, are a microcosm of the human race. No chores. No challenges. Whatever they can have by working sunup-to-sundown, they can have by screwing around and being lazy all day. Work is the very definition of pointlessness; how can it be that way, without intellect likewise becoming pointless. And so their population has been bifurcated — those who value the application of the intellect against whatever will challenge it, versus, those who just want to feel good. And the kids in the second of those two, are naturally more expressive, have more of an influence over the prevailing viewpoint.

And they “feel” uncomfortable in the presence of somebody else’s success. It’s a challenge to their influence over the prevailing viewpoint. And, having “punted” on the development of their individual intellectual talents, they have nothing else to develop except for their influence over the prevailing viewpoint. So they meet the challenge. They have no choice but to do so.

Cecil gets a punch in the gut. You might say, it’s their “job” to make sure he does. Now, you call what Cecil did by some other name, and it isn’t going to change anything. The connection between what Cecil’s doing, and his own welfare, is lacking…as is the connection between what he did, and the welfare of his peers. You want to change the culture, change that. Pop quizzes. With carrots and sticks. Get everyone cribbing off Cecil’s paper by the end of the day, you’ll have them carrying him on their shoulders by the end of the week.

Isn’t it odd? The more we go out of our way to accommodate peoples’ feeeeeeeeeeelings…the worse everybody ends up feeling.

Green Light

We learn from Libertas Immortalis of something quite earth-shattering, that in fact happened this spring. It’s supposed to be something we were interested in following day-to-day. Whoops.

Atlas Shrugged has been green-lit for a 2008 release, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are in talks to play Dagny Taggart and John Galt, respectively.

No word on the thorny issue of how many minutes screen time involved in such a work, or in the format in which it is to be presented. Recommendation: Let’s return to the stuff our grandparents and great-grandparents watched, where a massive potty-break was stuck right in the middle of the thing with the word “INTERMISSION” burning a hole in the screen the whole time. The end of Hank Rearden’s trial would be a decent halfway point, 120 minutes before that, 105 after.

One other thing. This deserves an Oscar-quality handling of the material; it damn sure doesn’t deserve to be the next “Gigli.” Pitt and Jolie are married. If he is confirmed as Galt, fire Jolie. If she is confirmed, fire Pitt. Please? Pretty please?

Update 8/5/06: Note to self, when you put him in the sidebar add this too.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XIII

This blog, which nobody really reads anyway, picks on Democrats a lot. Whether that is due to an unfair bias, is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. I will not go so far as to say that reasonable persons can disagree about it, however, because my own opinion is that there is a bias and it is exceedingly fair. I don’t trust Democrats. I don’t trust their policies, I don’t trust the philosophy that forms those policies, I don’t trust the value system. It’s a bias, not a prejudice; a prejudice is something you form before the facts are in. I’ve watched Democrats, and I’ve come to this conclusion. They think on things in certain ways. They’re interested in promoting this way of thinking about things, and I don’t think it’s good for the rest of us. Or for them.

This creates problems in the writing style for this blog. The writing style, to date, receives widespread praise from the farthest corners and I must say, being the mind behind the writing style, it’s difficult for me to see why. A week or two ago I received a personal e-mail politely chastising me, for using, too many commas, in, my, sentences, and, you know what, I’m going to, have, to, agree.

But the big problem comes up when a Democrat does a loopy and goofy Democrat thing. I lack the discipline to let it pass by uncommented-upon. And, once commenting upon it, I get into a little bit of a trap. I must say something about what the loopy goofy Democrat did, or the exercise is pointless of course. If I comment about this most recent example, and stay silent on the overarching trend of Democrats doing that very same thing, with minor variances, the exercise is similarly pointless. Because being a Democrat, it turns out, is “about” certain things.

And so I write about both. I end up walking a tightrope. No, it’s more like walking onto a large boat, as it is pulling away from the dock, and straddling an ever-widening chasm. I struggle with a handicap, which expands moment-by-moment, involved in throwing the gravitational mass that is my gluteus maximus over this growing gap into dryness and safety. Time is the enemy. It makes the gap wider, dissipating the leverage of my thigh muscles. Making the ass weigh more. Kinda like that. …kersploosh?

I still get compliments, but sometimes I wonder if the folks who give the compliments really absorbed the point I was trying to make. It’s a disturbing residual doubt from which I suspect no writer, living or dead, has ever truly escaped.

Example: Congressman John Murtha (D-Pa) is facing a lawsuit from Marines, who it seems may actually be guilty of slaughtering civilians in the Haditha incident. Murtha took to the floor of Congress and stated their guilt as an established fact — implied that it was an empirical fact — when, at the time, it was not. And it may never be that, ever. If the Marines (and one sailor) are innocent of what has been alleged, Murtha has committed a grave offense. If they are not…well, some of us would say he has still done something wrong.

And what should be worthy of comment, here, is those among us who say Murtha’s comments are wrong, regardless of the guilt-or-innocence of the persons involved, are simply standing on legal and moral underpinnings that have been advanced relentlessly by “classic” liberals, including modern-day Democrats, throughout most of the twentieth century. Namely, that an accusation is not a conviction. Thinking someone did something wrong, is not the same as knowing he did something wrong.

So yesterday I was making this point, and then — my derriere waggling more and more precariously between the dock and the boat — expanded my scope to discuss semantics in general. Justice, I noted, is followed up in both word and in spirit, with the words “for all.” Especially by the Democrats…who, by their subsequent actions, show they don’t really mean it. Innocent until proven guilty? Oh sure, we’ll say that applies to “all”; nobody remembers the last time it applied to a Republican. Congressman Murtha certainly didn’t think it applied to the Marines. I know of no Democrat who stepped forward, in the aftermath of Murtha’s comments when it would have been relevant to do so, and chide the good Congressman, or rebuke him, or state for the record lest anyone think otherwise that Democrats support the troops including the accused Marines.

And that’s my point. NOT “all.” That’s what I find really odious. Democrats act like they surrender the definition of “all” to the masses, to dictionaries yet-unwritten, to generations-yet-unborn. But they don’t. The definition of a word, is something they guard jealously. “All” is given the meaning, moment-to-moment, that helps them out best. [emphasis mine]

I do not know if Neal Boortz reads my blog. I would suspect hardly anybody does. But how, then, do you explain this gem which appeared this morning under the program notes posted on his website.

Liberals love to play with words. When the old words become clearly identified with failed policies, don’t change the policy, change the word! When it became clear that the government was spending too much money, the word suddenly became “invest.” Now we don’t “spend” more money on our hideous government schools, we “invest” more money. Liberals now call themselves “progressives,” a word that has its roots in the socialist/communist ideology of the 1950s. Who, after all, doesn’t like progress? The latest example? “Redeployment.” That’s the word Democrats are using to replace “withdrawal.” Withdrawing our troops from Iraq right now would be a sure sign of American weakness. So … instead of saying “withdraw,” the appeasers have come up with another word. “Redeployment.” [emphasis mine]

Looks like Neal came across my comments about liberal fakery with words, especially the part about changing the definition day to day to suit their political purposes, and the wheels between his ears just started churning. If so, he did a great job taking that ball and running with it. You could write reams and reams about this stuff, without half-trying.

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

When You’re In The Mood To Be Offended…

…and don’t say something stupid, like you never are and nobody else ever is either. Since when have politically-correct lies been scarce and precious commodities?

Women as Alien Species. Safe for work, unless deliberately-tactless observations about genders & ethnic groups are unsafe for work.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… XVI

Two things, golden needles, that should not be allowed to pass into the endless blogosphere haystack without being recorded for posterity.

Ann Coulter had a fairly useless column yesterday, I must say. Perhaps that’s a bit harsh; in fact it is, and the only reason I dish it out in her particular direction, is because I know it wouldn’t stand out compared with the other flak she gets. Nobody reads this blog anyway, right? It’s phrasing things most accurately and fairly, I think, to say I was expecting one thing and I got another thing. Questions Ann Coulter wishes she was asked…meh. Seems ilke there’s an awful lot going on in the world right now, much of it having to do with liberal hypocrisy and dishonesty, her two favorite subjects. I thought Wednesday afternoon would yield a bit more meat.

Now then, having said that. This — and the subject was Hillary Clinton — was gold. Solid…gold.

Her strength is her first name; her weakness is her last.

Let me guess, you lay awake all night thinking that one up, and you chose to write a whole column around it. For this, you may deserve criticism Ms. Coulter, but it shall not come from me. I’ll wait for someone without sin to cast the first stone.

Second thing I could not have said better myself: Day by Day, by Chris Muir. This particular strip says all that needs to be said, about…you know, THEM.

Behind the Ivy Walls

Prof. Walter E. Williams gives us some information about what college kids know. And it isn’t pretty. But you know that, because the name of his column is “Forty Thousand Dollar Numbskulls.” He tells us what is being taught…

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, a mandatory course for some freshmen is “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie.” It’s a course where professor Elizabeth J. Chin explores ways in “which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film ‘The Matrix’ as a Marxist critique of capitalism.” Johns Hopkins University students can enroll in a course called “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ancient Egypt.” Part of the course includes slide shows of women in ancient Egypt “vomiting on each other,” “having intercourse” and “fixing their hair.”

…and what the results are once the teaching is done.

A survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut gave 81 percent of the seniors a D or F in their knowledge of American history. The students could not identify Valley Forge, or words from the Gettysburg Address, or even the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution. A survey released by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that American adults could more readily identify Simpson cartoon characters than name freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.

I’m torn down the middle on this issue. This blog, which nobody really reads anyway, has a long-standing informal policy about confining commentary about the facts, to that which is known, which is indeed factual. Colleges, for me, are tricky. As a little boy, I got into a field which is supposed to be confined to college-educated folk; that being, Information Systems, back when it was called “computer programming,” and later, “software development.” Here I am, an old man, still in essentially the same field. I’ve spent a lifetime in it. No college degree yet.

And so I’m uniquely handicapped in commenting what’s going on in colleges. I can’t tell you that, because I’m in a process of trying to figure it out for myself. As far as what’s been busted as a result of it, however, I not only know a thing or two about it, but I’m uniquely qualified to comment on it — such that, were I to keep my silence on it, I’d be performing a disservice.

So let me confine my commentary to what it is I’ve seen.

First, the patterns and trends — limited to what has potential for defining the problem.

Let us say you want to assemble a new “brain trust” in your company. The brain trust is going to be packed full of bright, capable individuals, with the ability to react to extraordinary problems, to think on their feet, and to form solutions. But it must be done right, and so a brain trust is formed for the purpose of forming the brain trust. So you start talking about the brain trust you want to form. In stating and re-stating this requirement, the cliched phrase “think outside the box” escapes peoples’ lips quite frequently. Okay, so these folks are going to be creative, resourceful, and probably coming up with unorthodox solutions on a regular basis.

I have noticed something about what happens next.

From out of nowhere, arises this requirement…nobody can say who is the first one to give it voice, and it’s impossible to get a straight answer to that effect. But everyone on this panel should have a college degree.

If anyone finds his way onto it, lacking that degree, an offense will have been committed. Now, nobody actually says that outright. Nobody even insinuates there would be anything wrong with such a thing. Certainly, you’ll never find anyone who says “I don’t give a rat’s ass if new panelists have experience doing this or not…they have got to have that degree.” And yet, people behave as if someone respected and powerful said that very thing.

And it continues. If you get the five or so people on that panel, and then next year much more funding comes in and you’re authorized to expand it to, let’s say, sixteen seats, the eleven additions also must have college degrees. The five people you already have, are going to feel much more comfortable with this, than with, let’s say, ten college-educated folk and one dropout-maverick.

The requirement is to “think outside the box.” And yet, your panel has taken the form of a rolling snowball, engaged in an effort to make more of itself, matching, cookie-cutter fashion, whatever there is of itself to begin with. To augment itself with material that doesn’t match the core, is something it doesn’t find very appealing. And so we have a premise that unorthodox thoughts will be formed by a committee made out of orthodox material. This is an idea ripe for inspection…if only someone could be found willing to put their name to the college-degree rule, so they can be engaged in debate. Alas, nobody’s willing to sign onto it. Everybody with something to say about it, just acts as if that’s the way it is. It becomes an “Emperor’s New Clothes” thing.

Business has a way of closing the gap between what people do, and what makes sense. With large amounts of money at stake on seemingly innocuous actions and inactions, business-people have a strong tendency to talk about what they’re going to do, and to do what they talk about doing. This makes sense and is effective. If something strikes a balance between opportunity and security, it will be talked about, if not, then it won’t. And if it is talked about, it will be done, if not, then not. It works that way with lots of other things in business — but not with this. When it comes to limiting the positions of creativity to the college-kids, who’ve shown themselves to be, if anything, rather uncreative…business people talk about one thing, and do a different thing.

Half of the high-tech industry, as we know it today, was founded by a Harvard dropout. The other half of it was founded by a Berkeley dropout and a Reed College dropout.

College-educated people are supposed to be uniquely qualified to do “studies.” If you were to do a study on what, exactly, our technical advancements are that we owe to the college crowd, it would appear the results wouldn’t be too terribly flattering for them. It seems on the occasions where a college-type guy achieves something worthy of note, he did so from a position he occupied which, if he were somewhere else, he wouldn’t have been able to make the accomplishment. And the position, in turn, would have been denied to someone who didn’t go to college. Artificially. And so, the trend holds across quite a few things, that the college-set has a shot at real competitive success when the competition has been whittled down. If they succeed, they didn’t compete, not with everybody; and if they do indeed compete with everybody, they don’t succeed. Maybe that seems harsh, but I’m waiting for it to be disproven — and the scenarios are constructed in such a way, that the opportunity for it to be disproven never quite materializes.

And then, oh dear me, we have the matter of Al Gore’s movie.

I’ve commented on this before. Let me bottom-line it. After seeing the movie, if you believe what you have been told about our climate and what man is doing to it, uncritically, the prevailing viewpoint is that you have succeeded in thinking critically. On the other hand, if you show skepticism and start questioning things, you will be accused of uncritical thinking. By, more likely than not, a college graduate who is exceptionally proud of his own critical-thinking skills…and accepts the viewpoints advanced in the movie uncritically.

I believe one of the commenters on my blog said it best…

I came here through the Antiidiotarian Rottweiler, and this has now become my favorite blog. It’s a breath of fresh air and a great relief from my current pursuit of a masters degree. The stuff I have to put up with from fellow students and professors! When these people talk about things closely related to their own expertice they argue constantly. When it comes to politics suddenly they all agree. I find that suspicious.

Now, what’s going on here?

You’re supposed to learn new, useful things in college. Prof. Williams gives us lots of anecdotes about stunningly useless things you can learn, and this is nothing new. I’ve seen these things presented before.

I’ve seen them defended before, too. Let’s see if I can paraphrase the defense. Here we go…yes, it’s true that “Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie” won’t help you get a job, but the point of college is not to help you get a job. It’s to make you a more well-rounded individual.

And yet, once you have the job, and you may be considered for a panel that is supposed to come up with new, resourceful, creative, unorthodox ideas…thinking outside-of-the-box…the five college-educated panelists, will want eleven also-college-educated new panelists. Because they want eleven well-rounded people instead of not-well-rounded people? Well, it doesn’t seem so. It appears the college-educated folk want to hang out with other college-educated folk, for reasons that don’t have a lot to do with being well-rounded. Birds of a feather, and all that.

When the college folk “talk about things closely related to their own expertise they argue constantly.” Understandable. A good education will expose cracks and fissures that would otherwise be muddy and unclear, not worth arguing about. And on politics, everybody suddenly agrees. Because they know better? Probably not because of that; if that were the case, people would be agreeing more on matters where they have experience and knowledge. So it stands to reason, the lockstep-agreement on politics, has to do with people not personally working behind the scene in politics. Everything looks the same to them, because they’re too far away to appreciate the real problems.

Which can only mean they lack the humility to understand what it is they don’t know.

But there must be more. There has to be some approval forthcoming, when & if everybody agrees with everybody else — and this approval has to mean something to everybody involved. And so, everybody responds. Lock-step.

You know, I suppose you could call that “thinking outside the box.” It doesn’t fulfill the definition I have in mind for it.

And it doesn’t seem likely to culminate in something useful. Like, for example, computer operating systems, electrical generators, interior lighting devices, and the like. So…it gives me cause to wonder. The correlation between industry leaders who have gotten really big building-blocks of our current technology off the ground, and college graduates, is running oh-for-three. Yet, the notion that we are destined to owe our futures to the Ivy League set, whether we have such a debt today or not…is running unchallenged. There isn’t much reason to believe in it, that I can see, other than tradition. And yet, we continue to behave as if this is supposed to be the case.

I don’t know why that is. That is Question #1.

Democrats, in early June, had some plans in place to “make college more affordable.” Someone, somewhere, motivated them to change the plank to “college access for all” within about a month and a half. That’s a different pledge. Who brought this change about? More to the point, why? That is Question #2.

I got an idea if you can answer Question #2, you’ll have the beginnings of an answer to Question #1. Can’t prove it. Call it a hunch.

Whatever Happened To Dungeons?

Nobody who has been paying attention, will greet it as earth-shattering news that the movie industry has been getting ruined a little at a time by people born after, oh, let us say, 1993 or thereabouts. The problem actually pre-dates ’93, so it’s easy to prove that it is rooted in a certain age bracket, with a revolving membership, rather than a specific birth date. But movies are made for the younger set. To their discredit.

The Hunny and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean II, which in itself does a great job of illustrating what I’m talking about, but I’d like to discuss something else. Not too long ago I read a rather scathing review of Miami Vice. It really doesn’t matter which one I was reading. It could have been Lisa Kennedy’s review for the Denver Post.

The film, like its oddly rumbling sky, promises more than it ever delivers. Granted, it can look cool. But more often, as we wait for the lightning that never arrives, it frustrates.

Or, it could have been Stephen Hunter’s review in the Washington Post.

The plot is largely meaningless, somewhere between “not a lot of plot” and “lots and lots of plot.” But the worst news about “Miami Vice” is that Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx…don’t hold a candle, a flashlight, a freakin’ match to the original guys. As the infantile, muttery “stars” of today do their thing, you keep thinking: Who are those guys?…They have zero chemistry: There’s no affection or sense of joshing, and their relationships with their women are the most uninteresting thing about the movie.

You know, it’s irrelevant which review; it’s irrelevant which movie…which was proven, when we went back to The Hunny’s place and managed to catch a clip of XXX: State of the Union. It’s exactly what I was talking about a few weeks ago with V for Vendetta and Ultraviolet. The movies aren’t any different from each other. They might as well be the same movie. Those who make movies, are siphoning back on the most expensive ingredient in the mix — creativity — because their consumers are allowing them to do so. Movies are like just so many fifty-gallon drums of…let’s just say for the sake of argument, corn oil. There’s no question about what the stuff is, or what it’s supposed to be, whether it’s good, whether it’s sub-standard. It simply is. You pay for it, you get it, you move on to the next fifty-gallon drum.

The Hunny was questioning the fiscal judgment of a young toe-head lugging around a rather miniscule plate of Nacho’s, which she knew from observation cost in the neighborhood of six bucks. See, that right there is the problem. Mom and Dad want to fornicate all afternoon, so they throw fifty bucks at the kids and send them to the movies. If Dad only has twenties, then the kids get sixty dollars instead of fifty. The kids know they aren’t expected to save anything from this outing to use in the next one, so they fork over whatever they’re told to.

And the movies do what the snacks do. They lose their quality with the passage of time. Why would they not? To keep quality over the passage of time, a product has to have a base of consumers that demand it and will accept nothing less.

So we walk down the hallway and pass a poster advertising the aforementioned Miami Vice. And I pontificated…whereupon, The Hunny, I’m sure, thought to herself “aw shit, he’s pontificating again.” Anyway. I got me a riddle, and the riddle lacks an answer. See if you can answer this.

Something is going on with attention spans, clearly. Kids are not going to sit through Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) (144 min.) and anybody who expects them to, is going to be treated like a crazy person. Rightfully so. It’s a friggin’ musical. And yet…in my day, nobody got bored. Nobody really even thought about it. If you waited long enough, Dick Van Dyke would stop singing, and the car would sprout the wings. It was just a matter of time.

Today there is no matter of time. Kids today are impatient. Call it ADD due to global warming, call it a gradual shift in societal expectations, call it dietary. Call it whatever you want, kids today get bored quickly.

And yet, here’s a script for all movies. All of them. Don’t ask me how I did it, I did it and it fits freakin’ everything.

Scene 1:

Fade from black. The hero walks into view. He is wearing sunglasses and a trench coat. He looks really angry about something. Extreme slow motion. He looks really cool.

Scene 2: The hero looks really cool.

Scene 3: The hero looks really, really cool.

Scene 4: Bad guys, doing bad-guy stuff. They look really uncool, except for the head bad guy who looks really cool. But they’re all very talkative, whereas the hero is deadly silent. They kind of act like hyenas. Except for the head bad guy. He looks sort of like a majestic hyena. Nobody knows what they’re doing, it doesn’t matter, but whatever it is is really naughty.

Scene 5: The hero looks cool. He’s doing something naughty too, except it’s really cool.

Scene 6: The hero confronts the bad guys — coolly — and pulls out from under the trench coat TWO IDENTICAL (a) .45 ACPs or (b) 50-cal. Desert Eagles, one in each hand. He shoots the bad guys, in extra, extra, extra slow motion. Bullet casings fly. The sunglasses stay perfectly balanced on the hero’s nose. Everything looks…well, just stunningly cool. Slow-motion, but cool.

Scene 7: The head bad guy gets away. Looks really cool doing it.

Scene 8: The good guy is angry the bad guy got away. A really cool angry, but still angry.

Scene 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16: The good guy looks cool.

Later on, the good guy confronts a whole new swarm of bad guys, with the head bad guy looking on, laughing maniacally. But coolly. The good guy screams at the bad guys, “Bring it ON!!!” Gunfire ensues. Something explodes. The good guy walks, toward the camera, in slow motion, unflinchingly, as behind him an enormous warehouse/hangar/battlestar explodes in a blaze of glory.

He looks cool.

Bad guy is caught in some terrible predicament. He can’t move, or if he can move, he can’t escape, and there is a grenade or rocket or missile hurtling toward him, maybe the train he is trapped on is about to collide with a mountain of pure dynamite or something. Just before the big kablooey, the film slows waaaaaaaaay down and he gets that always-present always-there can’t-do-without-it look on his face, the “Oh dear Gawd in heaven I SUCK SO MUCH!!!” look on his face. Just as he comes to the realization that the hero is so much cooler than he is, he’s blasted into a million pieces.

The hero makes a smart-ass comment to his boss, and walks off into the sunset.

He looks really cool.

Fade out.

That right there is every single movie made lately. Am I right or am I right?

And kids today, who have no patience for anything else, gobble this stuff up.

Zero patience in one place, endless patience in another place.

I don’t know what it means. There must be a way to make God-type-portions of money off of it. I mean, outside of the movie business. If I think on it further, maybe someday I’ll figure out how.

But you people who want better movies, it isn’t going to happen until we keep the under-fifteen set in dungeons. Where they belong, maybe. I dunno, not saying I’m in favor of it. But from where I sit, nothing short of that will turn things around.

Well-Oiled Machine

Via our blogger friend Karol at Alarming News, we find out about Charlie Rangel’s alleged plan — ravings — to resign his seat if Democrats don’t take back the House this fall.

“Charles Rangel, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, said yesterday he’d resign his seat if Democrats don’t take control of the House in November.”

Update: Rangel’s remark was first reported in this Washington Post story, which doesn’t quote him.

Huh. Okay, so we click open the Washington Post story, and we get this nugget. Learn something new every day.

Top Democrats are increasingly concerned that they lack an effective plan to turn out voters this fall, creating tension among party leaders and prompting House Democrats to launch a fundraising effort aimed exclusively at mobilizing Democratic partisans.

At a meeting last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) criticized Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean for not spending enough party resources on get-out-the-vote efforts in the most competitive House and Senate races, according to congressional aides who were briefed on the exchange. Pelosi — echoing a complaint common among Democratic lawmakers and operatives — has warned privately that Democrats are at risk of going into the November midterm elections with a voter-mobilization plan that is underfunded and inferior to the proven turnout machine run by national Republicans.

The Senate and House campaign committees are creating their own get-out-the-vote operations instead, using money that otherwise would fund television advertising and other election-year efforts. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) — who no longer speaks to Dean because of their strategic differences — is planning to ask lawmakers and donors to help fund a new turnout program run by House Democrats. He recruited Michael Whouley, a specialist in Democratic turnout, to help oversee it. [emphasis mine]

Isn’t it odd that some things get talked about a whole lot, and other things get talked about not-very-much-at-all?

Someone is deciding that stuff, and whoever that someone is, wants Democrats to win.

The Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman no longer talks to the Party Chairman. Zowee. Well gee, I was going to invite them both over to dinner this weekend and seat them next to each other, but I suppose that plan’s out.

I find this really hard to believe. Personally, I have seen people in fairly awesome positions of power, get all pissy at other people in fairly awesome positions of power. But, then, somehow, work things out. I’ve never seen it turn into a Brady Bunch episode in which Marcia says “Peter, can you please ask Jan to pass the butter, since I can’t do it myself, because she’s not talking to me and I’m not talking to her.” I haven’t actually seen that with grown-ups. But, then again, we are talking about Democrats here.

I want to know more. Frankly, I would have to wonder about someone who could read that little tidbit, and not want to know more.

It’s a little strange that the WaPo didn’t actually say a little bit more.

Remember that scene in “Life of Brian” (1979) where they’re getting ready to crucify Brian? The scene around the table where the Apostles, under the direction of John Cleese, repeatedly pounded the table and said things like “Yes, it’s time to stop this pointless discussion, and take immediate action! Right, so let’s get going! It’s time for deeds, not words!” And then they kept on doing it. The first half of the WaPo article reads just like that.

These guys want to run the country.

Windows Password Myths

The author of this password-myth article makes some good points. Particularly this one toward the end, which, I think, should have been moved to the top.

Some may disagree with individual points I have presented here, but that is the whole purpose. A myth is a half-truth. Many of the myths that I have attacked here were once good advice or they still are good advice but only in specific scenarios. But to many this advice has become a set of solid rules that are generally applied to all scenarios. Password advice, including my own, is nothing more than advice. You must determine which rules work for you and which do not. Perhaps the biggest myth of all is that there are fixed rules when it comes to password security.

In my professional experience with security issues, I’ve found that to be a big breakdown in the process. Information assurance professionals, be they highly-trained or very lightly trained, will get it in their heads that their way is the way. A little bit o’knowledge is a dangerous thing, they say. That is probably not quite as true anywhere else, as it is in Information Security. Everybody wants everything to work the way it worked in their last job, and all those other IS guys who want it to work a different way, are just plain wrong.

On the other hand, I find this highly disagreeable.

Myth #7. You Should Never Write Down Your Password

Although this is often good advice, sometimes it is necessary to write down passwords. Users feel more comfortable creating complex passwords if they are able to write them down somewhere in case they forget.
:
Sometimes passwords need to be documented. It�s not uncommon to see a company in a panic because their admin just quit, and he’s the only one who knows the server password. You should discourage writing down passwords in many situations, but if writing them down helps or is necessary, be smart about it.

There are personal passwords, and there are role-based passwords. I set a database administrator password, I get sick, you need to do something administrative to the database and so you call me to get the password. If the database lacks the ability to have two separate user accounts with the same privileges, and sees the administrator as a role rather than as a specific person, then this is acceptable. But in a system with the sophistication to recognize rights & roles as two different things, and roles & users as two different things, the justification for sharing dissipates, and with that any reason for writing things down likewise vanishes.

Simply put, passwords, whenever possible, should be purely personal. And security is all about treating personal things as personal. Who gets rights to what, is based on who’s who, so the system needs to know people are who they say they are. It’s the atomic building block: the individual identity.

So my take on it is, if you’re writing down a password because you have trouble remembering it, the system is already broken. Under this system, you aren’t “Bob,” you’re a guy who knows Bob keeps the password locked in his desk drawer, and who has Bob’s key. This is not acceptable. People get sick. People go on vacations. And even in a workplace with a great security culture, people do not think about security all the time. The security goon and/or the auditors leave the room, and people go back to getting the work done on time, lending and borrowing passwords as needed.

Their reviews are conducted based on how they got work done, not on how they kept their passwords secret.

So muscle-memory is the key. The fingers know what the password is. Even the hunt-and-peckers who don’t know how to type, can “memorize” eight-character passwords this way in just a few minutes.

But, like the guy said in the bottom-paragraph that should have been the top-paragraph, it’s a matter of perspective. Or at least, it is until you have an actual security incident. It’s been my experience that things change a little after that.

Murtha Sued

Congressman John P. Murtha (D-PA) has been sued by a Marine involved in the Haditha incident. For defamation. For that crack about killing civilians “in cold blood.”

Good.

This is one of the things Democrats do that personally, I find to be most reprehensible. It’s not the defamation, it’s the much broader issue of “rights.” Over and over and over again, you see them promoting themselves as the defenders of the rights we’re supposed to have, even defining specious things as rights, things nobody guaranteed to anybody to begin with. And then they tack on those two words, “for all.” They stand up “for the little guy” and get the rumor mill chugging away, that boy oh boy, if it weren’t for them, nobody else would defend that little guy, because after all he’s the little guy. Supposedly, in America we’re up to our eyeballs in people who want to defend the big guy. Riiiiiiiiggghhhhttt.

But this is the part that gets me pig-bitin’ mad. The “for all” part. When they defend child molesters against prosecution, and advance the free-speech rights of terrorists…start filing papers so Muhammed Al-Hoozeewatzit can get cream cheese on his bagel down in Gitmo…supposedly, they’re defending “the least among us.” Implication being, the suit on behalf of Al-Hoozeewatzit succeeds, the rights of everybody else have been protected, but if it went the other way, it wouldn’t work. Something people believe by implication, but isn’t articulated, outright, anywhere.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are quite exuberant about the notion that Democrats are all about defending the rights “of us all.” The universality of these rights, is the primary issue; from whence we supposedly got the rights, is a purely secondary consideration. Take a look at their platform. Better-paying jobs, dignified retirement, lower gas prices and college access — for all.

And then they do crap like what John Murtha did. Just as the Gitmo boys haven’t been given a fair trial, neither had the Marines; and yet the Marines were guilty. So, it’s not “for all” after all, is it? What would happen if a Republican congressman took to the floor and said “I want to stop calling Muhammad Al-Hoozeewatzit a ‘detainee’ because, well, screw it, I know he’s a terrorist. I’m going to start calling him a terrorist.” What would Congressman Murtha himself have to say about that? Probably something about innocent-until-proven-guilty, and protecting-the-rights-of-the-least-of-us, and rights-guaranteed-to-us-ALL.

And that’s my point. NOT “all.” That’s what I find really odious. Democrats act like they surrender the definition of “all” to the masses, to dictionaries yet-unwritten, to generations-yet-unborn. But they don’t. The definition of a word, is something they guard jealously. “All” is given the meaning, moment-to-moment, that helps them out best.

Clearly, it doesn’t include Marines and sailors.

A Marine Corps staff sergeant who led the squad accused of killing two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, will file a lawsuit today in federal court in Washington claiming that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) defamed him when the congressman made public comments about the incident earlier this year.

Attorneys for Frank D. Wuterich, 26, argue in court papers that Murtha tarnished the Marine’s reputation by telling news organizations in May that the Marine unit cracked after a roadside bomb killed one of its members and that the troops “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Murtha also said repeatedly that the incident was covered up.

Godspeed, Sergeant Wuterich!

And Republicans. Can you make an issue out of this so we can have a referendum on it? Just something to force the Democrats to defend us all, when they so frivolously toss around the word “all.” Even if the Haditha charges turn out to be true, press the issue anyway. Surely, our left-wingers would do the same, if only a conservative had the stones to call an accused terrorist an actual terrorist.

In fact, do that for everything. When Democrats say they want to help “all working families” make an issue out of stinkin’ rich working families. Do they get help? When Democrats talk about free speech for all, ask about free speech for Republicans. Is that included? Make ’em give an answer; they’re the ones who are supposed to explain what they’re all about.

Democrats have gone my entire life, and then some, not being called-upon to answer it. It’s a simple question. Does “all” mean all?

What Really Happened

Don’t miss David Drake‘s explanation of what really happened with Mel Gibson.

Makes perfect sense. When you think about it. Looking back, I’m amazed it’s taken this long for someone to figure it out. Well done, Mr. Drake.

How To Start A Blog

I like this particular posting. It’s supposed to tell you how to start a blog. I’ve already started one, and it so happens I did everything it says to do. So you can tell the article is loaded with common sense, since it contains a lot of things that I’d do if I were you, because I actually did them.

But it’s also reasonably well written. Better than average. She even used the word “vituperative.”

Fiction You Couldn’t Write

The backstory begins with a government boondoggle spanning decades and running billions of dollars overbudget. The present-day story begins with an entirely avoidable fatality, and the project architect resigning in disgrace. And yet, before it’s over, the squabbling diminishes into a finger-pointing contest over whether an antiquated term may be used as a racial epithet or not.

Yeah that’s right, it starts with a woman getting killed, and it ends with people running to their dictionaries with phony righteous indignation.

You say, Freeberg, what are you smokin’ and can I have some? Politicians don’t get into arguments over innocent people getting killed, and end up nit-picking over arcane tidbits of slang, over supposed derogatory racial implications.

Well, um…actually, yeah. Yeah, they do.

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday apologized for using the expression “tar baby” — a phrase some consider a racial epithet — among comments he made at a political gathering in Iowa over the weekend.

“The governor was describing a sticky situation,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor’s spokesman. “He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he’s sorry if anyone was offended.”

In his first major political trip out of the state since a ceiling collapse in a Big Dig tunnel killed a Boston woman on July 10, Romney told 200 people at a Republican lunch Saturday about the political risks of his efforts to oversee the project.

“The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig — just get as far away from that tar baby as I possibly can,” he said in answer to a question from the audience.

The expression “tar baby” has had different meanings over the years.

A definition from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary traces the expression to the tar baby that trapped Br’er Rabbit in an Uncle Remus story by Joel Chandler Harris, which became popular in the 19th century. The dictionary now defines the expression as “something from which it is nearly impossible to extricate oneself.”

But it also has been used as a pejorative term for dark-skinned blacks.

In 1981, author Toni Morrison published a novel titled “Tar Baby,” and she has compared the expression to other racial epithets. She says it’s a term that white people used to refer to black children, especially black girls.

Reached at her home near Princeton University, where she teaches, Morrison called the expression “antiquated” and one that’s “attractive to some people, when they begin to search for hints of racism.”

She described it as a “forbidden word” that she sought to restore to its original meaning, one that illuminated an old African tale about the connection between a master and slave.

“How it became a racial epithet, I don’t know,” she said. “It was my attempt to rescue the phrase from its low meaning. I wanted to annihilate the connotation and return the meaning to its origins. Apparently, I haven’t succeeded.”

Now, that was not subtle at all, and I hope you caught it. The reference material that qualifies the slang term for its negative qualities as a derogatory epithet — the only one mentioned in this article — was constructed in an effort to restore the term to its stature of relative respectability and harmlessness. Apparently, it failed.

For the record, there is a specific story involved in the “tar baby.” It really was a ball of tar, wrapped up in baby clothes. Brer Wolf left it out in the open for Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit got his paw (hand) stuck in the tar baby’s face when he went to smack it. You see, the precursor to Bugs Bunny got pretty huffy-puffy when that insolent baby refused to answer his questions, so he chose to smack it. Of course, his paw got stuck. So Brer Rabbit told the baby to let go. Of course, the baby just sat there. So he smacked the baby with his other paw. Now, Brer Rabbit has two paws stuck to the baby. And he’s getting madder and madder…and, of course, the baby still isn’t talking to him. So he takes his rabbit foot…well anyway, you can see where that’s going.

You can also see the applicability of this old legend to political life, especially with regard to overly-expensive construction projects that kill people. “Tar baby,” it turns out, is not only a wonderful phrase, but it’s irreplaceable. Something is a tar baby; you start messing with it; you getting stuck becomes a “when,” not an “if.” It is pre-ordained from the moment you start messing with it. And furthermore, when problems arise, and you start trying to sort through them, your efforts to sort through them pre-ordain yet more problems.

Two words, three syllables, that describe all this stuff, which pertain to so many things in public-sector work. Tar. Baby. It turns out that when Gov. Romney made the comment for which he would later apologize, he was being prophetic. In getting nailed on this artificially-ambiguous phrasing, he is demonstrating how correct he was. The damn thing’s a tar baby. To simply touch it, is to get in trouble, and to try to get out of the trouble, is to get in more trouble.

What a great slang term. In the racially-neutral form, that is. “Conundrum” simply doesn’t do. “Dilemma” doesn’t cut it. “Kerfuffle” doesn’t get it said. Even “Phusterkluck” somehow falls short.

I look at it this way: It would be a litmus test, generous to the offended parties to a demonstrable fault, to say, just find me a witness. Find me someone who will affirm, in an affidavit, or on merely unsworn testimony in a town square, that he, himself, is offended by the term. No proxies. Just find me, let’s say, three people. Three people willing to say “I, myself, am offended by this term and I am willing to say so” and then let us proceed with putting Gov. Romney in the ducking-stool, or get him ready for pie-in-the-face, or whatever else we want to do with him.

That would be extravagantly generous, as a standard for offense.

And yet, this article fails it. Once again…we have advocates, winning face time in front of the cameras and the microphones, being offended on behalf of someone else.

As for Romney’s use of the expression, Pastor William E. Dickerson of the Greater Love Tabernacle in Dorchester called it “a poor choice of words.”

“There are some words that we should eradicate from our vocabulary, so we don’t use them inappropriately,” he said. “Saying someone is a ‘tar baby’ is like calling them the black sheep of the family. Kids with darker skin were often teased, and they would cringe at hearing it. That’s why we should avoid it, especially a public servant.”

Pastor Dickerson, that’s a great argument! Or…it would be, if there was a substitute term that provided all of the connotations provided by “tar baby.”

Or…if someone could be found, who would give a non-anonymous, on-the-record, first-hand interview about how they, personally, were offended. Not someone else. They. Speak on your own behalf, or shut your pie-hole.

Or…if some more substantial evidence could be found, to indicate that this is indeed a racist term, or was one.

Or…if we were talking about something in which an innocent woman wasn’t killed for Chrissakes. Good heavens. Billions of dollars have been poured into this big ol’ pig-in-a-poke, and now it’s falling apart getting people squished. I would think the phony racial-epithet-bickering could wait for another day.

You just can’t write fiction like this. No responsible publisher would accept it.

Update: The Whore is similarly peeved.

Not Articulated Outright

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, likes to make observations about the yawning chasm that lies between the realm of what people do, and what actually would make sense. One of the ways we do that, is by examining the things people imply but don’t actually say on a word-for-word basis. In order for people to say things outright, in a forum that verifies their personal identities beyond a reasonable doubt, the things they say have to generate some respect — or, at least, not generate disrespect. Those things, there, have to be somewhat logical. But in order for people to produce gutteral sounds calculated to get people around them to think a certain thing, that thing doesn’t have to be logical at all. After all, by producing the gutteral sounds, the speaker isn’t actually taking any real responsibility. For anything.

That said, I have an observation to make. It’s about hot weather. In Northern California, my radio tells me we have broken twelve records in July. New York, meanwhile, is at or above the century mark. There are brown-outs. Blackouts. People without air conditioning. It’s a pretty hot summer.

You don’t have to wait very long at all, I see, to observe someone saying something about the hot weather we’ve been having…and then, you don’t have to wait very long for someone to say something about global warming. To hear someone put those two things in the same sentence, also, you can hear that several times a day. Even in the news. Many times a week you’ll hear someone “tease” a story about global warming, with a casual mention about how hot it has been outside lately — and then, cut to some egghead scientist guy who will reiterate what is known about “global climate change,” and what we’re still trying to find out. The implication is clear.

But I think everybody, in their heart-of-hearts, understands this is a sham. Because to hear someone actually string all the words together into a coherent sentence, a sentence that actually says something with gravity — “we are having a hot summer and it is because of man-made global warming that we are having it” — I don’t remember anyone actually doing this. Nobody on the news. No scientists. Not even man-off-the-street type strangers, looking for something to talk about.

Certainly, nobody with a name and reputation worth defending.

People won’t actually put the words together, and spew it out, presenting it as something in which they honestly believe. Not in a forum in which they care what people think about them. Not without that little chuckle on the end.

Spew out a lot of crap that motivates your audience to conclude on their own that this is what’s going on…that’s much easier. Much more common. Deep down, we all know it isn’t true.

Update 8/3/06: Oops. Pat Robertson, you wild and crazy guy you. Oh well, I do believe my exact words were, “nobody with a name and reputation worth defending.”