Spy More

Now here is an interesting headline. “Forget Privacy, We Need To Spy More.” Has Max Boot caught your attention just yet?

I agree with 71.4% of the headline, all except for the first two words. Those two are purely evanescent though, because nowhere in the content does Boot suggest we completely “forget privacy.” His point is simply that our efforts to walk the tightrope between unacceptably eroded civil liberties, and unacceptably ineffectual defensive measures, have culminated in a lousy half-assed compromise product assembled from disingenuous political motives. In fact, halfway down he makes a brilliant point, albeit an obvious one to a scant minority among us:

All this concern with privacy would be touching if it weren’t so selective. With a few keystrokes, Google will display anything posted by or about you. A few more keystrokes can in all probability uncover the date of your birth, your address and telephone number and every place you have lived, along with satellite photos of the houses and how much you paid for them, any court actions you have been involved in and much, much more.

It is only a little more work to obtain your full credit history and Social Security number. Or details of your shopping, traveling and Web-browsing habits. Such information is routinely gathered and sold by myriad marketing outfits. So it’s OK to violate your privacy to sell you something � but not to protect you from being blown up.

Once upon a time, there was a comedian whose name may or may not have gone on to become a household word…or he may have faded into obscurity. I have no idea who he is anymore. He was making fun of husbands and wives, in the same conversation all married couples have after the wife has just gone shopping. Husband asks how much she spent and instead of answering, she tells him how much she saved. “How much did you spend?” “Nothing, I saved $130…” So Mister asks how much he should subtract from the current checking account balance, or from what the account balance will be after the next credit card payment, and what he gets back is the amount he should subtract from some mythical, pie-in-the-sky retail figure he never heard of before, that nobody ever pays anyway.

That is exactly where we are with our “civil liberties.” What we really want to know is “what could we do on September 10, 2001 that we can’t do now?” and what we get back from what Boot calls the “civil liberties agitators” is “Bush may be spying on you when you do such-and-such.” And logically, the next question must arise…so? As opposed to what? Is this something we could do in private before? Does anybody know? Does anybody care?

Phone records are a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I make a local call, I make a long-distance call. I make an international call. The call lasts so-many-minutes. Who knows this, exactly? The billing department of the phone company definitely knows it…who else? Is this information kept to a selected audience? Does the phone company have a privacy statement that pledges this kind of discretion? If so, does anybody read it? Is anybody making these kinds of calls with the expectation that nobody will ever find out they made it? No, I’m not re-hashing the “if you’ve nothing to hide” argument…I’m wondering how private these people expect the phone call information to be kept, and what they’re doing to make it so private, other than bitching.

And I’m questioning the desire, too. I’ve had private conversations before, conversations I wouldn’t like to be broadcast. Who hasn’t? But that I made the call…that strikes me as phony outrage.

The point is, to politically-neutral Americans who are simply concerned about the balance between defense and civil liberties, the question has not been answered. What is to be deducted from the civil-liberties-account balance since the September 11 attacks? And the answer that is forthcoming, has to do with stuff that we can’t do compared to some mythical, pie-in-the-sky perimeter of civil liberties that has never existed, never can, and that a reasonable person would have to doubt that anyone ever really wanted.

Getting in a screaming match with a security guy over your “I’m a Terrorist” lapel pin before your flight? And still making the flight?

Making a phone call, and having the billing company shred the record of your phone call after they send you the bill?

Screaming at the President of the United States, getting as close to him as you want to get, so that nobody can even hear him speak?

Oh sure, we can have a lively debate about whether every American should have these “civil liberties”…but when, exactly, have we had them? Ever?

Believe It?

Newsweek said prison guards were flushing copies of the Koran down a toilet. Not true.

CBS said they had obtained copies of internal memos from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, President Bush’s wing commander in the National Guard. Not true.

Jason Leopold said by this weekend past, Karl Rove would be indicted. Not true.

USA Today said the NSA had been obtaining phone records of tens of millions of Americans through Bellsouth, Verizon and AT&T. Two-thirds not true, and the remaining third is highly suspect. Helen Thomas further alleged that these millions of Americans were subject to “wiretaps.” Don’t know where she got that one. Not true.

I don’t watch television. None at all. I get news off the computer, where I can select exactly who is to provide it, and I believe about a quarter of what I read. And I get it out of the printed paper, in which case I believe about a tenth of what I read.

Now I understand a lot of people out there think of television as something like air, food or water, and can’t consider going without it. And then, of course a lot of people choose to believe everything they see. I can’t begrudge them this. But I have to ask the question, isn’t it just about time to re-think the way we get news now?

My Bread Club II

So I look in the fridge, and I see my quart of buttermilk is set to pass its shelf date tomorrow. Better make some bread!

So I opened my Palm Pilot database and brought up the honey/buttermilk recipe. According to the notes, I pulled it down some two or three years ago from here…and yup, I just checked, it’s still there. On a side note, isn’t it just so cool keeping recipes on a Palm? Sure it’s kind of a drag getting flour and molasses all over a $500 smartphone that has to be dragged through the kitchen, but hey. The food tastes so much better when you’re not chicken-scratching “1+1/2 teaspoons salt” and reading it from some crumpled-up paper napkin as TABLESPOONS of the same thing.

Honey Buttermilk Bread
http://southernfood.about.com/library/rec01/bl10817g.htm

2 teaspoons yeast
3 cups bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 teaspoons margarine
3 tablespoons honey
1/2 cup water
Put all ingredients in bread machine and push start.
For Rolls: Use the dough cycle, then knead again adding some flour if the dough is sticky. Shape into rolls and allow to rise until doubled in bulk. Bake at 375� until lightly browned. You can use an egg wash and sprinkle with seeds of your choice; sesame or caraway.
Source unknown.

Me, Or Your Lyin’ Eyes?

This blog is named after a library administrator who lived in ancient times, but nevertheless figured out how big the earth is simply by peeking into a water well or two, using some logic, and doing some math. As such, we make a point here of looking at the same stuff everybody else is looking at, but then figuring out what it is that we’re looking at. In the FAQ (see question #8) these classifications are crudely divided into three large but functional divisions: Facts, Inferences Drawn From the Facts, and Things To Do.

Simply perceiving the world in a certain way, shouldn’t get anyone mad. But Lord, the times in which we live. Simply keeping in mind what it is you are seeing, really cheeses some people off.

On Friday I had poked fun at the imminent indictment of White House advisor Karl Rove, bemused at the idea that this inference was being perceived by so many as an empirical fact, resting as it did upon the writing of one blogger and one blogger alone, Jason Leopold. Actually, it was that, and Leopold’s reliance upon unnamed “sources” just like the National Enquirer whenever they report on how badly Jennifer Aniston wants a baby, how trashed Tina Turner is getting because of her cocaine addiction, the midnight temper tantrum Britney Spears threw when her husband’s came home with a stripper, etc.

My point is this: It is unwise to rely on nameless faceless “sources” when trying to strengthen the cognition of something that’s fun to think about, simply because it’s fun to think about. And yet, that is exactly when we tend to rely on them. “Sources say” something, and what the sources say, is seldom to never something that would come as an unpleasant shock. No no, it’s always mind-candy. Oooh, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had a fight. That’s the stuff that zips down the anonymous Sources-Say pipeline much quicker than, let’s take as an example, the statistic that the average credit card holder is swimming in eight grand of unsecured debt.

Well, Jason Leopold is put in the position of backpedaling after enjoying his time in the limelight as a Bush-bashing blogger superstar. He said Karl Rove would be indicted, and the simple fact of the matter is that Karl Rove still isn’t. He appears to have an okay reputation, at least with the frothy foaming left-wing Bush-haters, so I guess maybe this is an unusual situation for him. I really don’t know. I don’t care. He’s going to stay famous virtually-forever for his “scoop,” regardless of the big letdown that came along when said scoop turned all soft & brown. But boy, is he mad.

Jason Leopold update on Rove Indictment Story
by Rob Kall

As editor of OpEdnews, I started wondering when Jason Leopold’s news that Karl Rove was indicted, which we made our main headline, did not show up in the mainstream news. He’s been superbly reliable and great and bringing news ahead of others. So I wrote to him:

I�m getting emails asking why the mainstream media aren�t reporting on Rove�s indictment. And now, one of my Trusted Authors has written this article

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_l_060515_karl_rove_indictment.htm

Any word you can give me on what�s up?

Rob Kall

Jason replied,

Rob

I have now been turned into the story�again. Robert Luskin and Mark Corallo, Rove�s attorney and spokesman, are liars. Damned liars. I have five sources on this. In the news business when you want to discredit a reporter and an explosive report you call the spokesman and get him to issue a denial. My reports have gone way beyond the spokesman and the lawyer to get to the truth. I am SHOCKED that the mainstream have followed this up by simply calling a spokesman.

Best

Jason Leopold

I responded to Jason, “Can I post this on our site? Or, do you want to write something on this?”

He replied,

You can add this:

I am amazed that the blogosphere would lend credence to the statements of people who have consistently lied about Rove�s role in this case. This is a White House that denied Rove�s involvement in the leak. This is a White House that has lied and lied and lied. And yet the first question that people ask is �why would Rove�s spokesman lie?� Because they can, because they do, and because they have. This is an administration that has attacked and discredited their detractors. I am amazed that not a single reporter would actually do any real investigative work and get to the bottom of this story. Surely, their must be another intrepid reporter out there that has sources beyond a spokesman.

Jason Leopold
Reporter
TruthOut.org

We also have word that Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, also heard the same report of Rove’s indictment.

So now that the originally-offered timeframe of Rove’s imminent indictment has become a distant memory, and Rove stands unindicted, who ya gonna believe? A Bush-bashing reporter you’ve never heard of or your lyin’ eyes?

We’ve seen this kind of thinking before. Shortly after the presidential elections, when CBS had gotten in all that trouble over the counterfeit Texas Air National Guard memos, Congressman Maurice Hinchey said the falsity of the documents and the ensuing imbroglio was the White House’s doing. In other words, even when President Bush’s critics are caught lying, that is still President Bush’s doing, not theirs. Last December I got involved in a rapidly-descending exchange with a fellow blogger who could be best described as left-leaning libertarian with a penchant for Bush-bashing, and his argument could be best summarized in the deliberately-long-and-windy post I made a few days previous. To summarize: Someone said President Bush did something bad. Admittedly, this testimony is weak and faulty, and in an ordinary setting it would be unacceptable (single anonymous source, named source with history of falsehood, documents almost-proven to be forged). But the Bush-bashing blogger who brings it to your attention, believes it, and what’s more, zillions and zillions of other bush-bashing blog-readers also believe it. This makes the otherwise-faulty evidence, much more compelling — the fact that it is fooling a large number of people.

Because, you see, “this administration” has a “track record” of “lying and deception” consistent with what the weak testimony says it did. This is why people tend to believe the otherwise-faulty testimony, and in a sense, it becomes a non-issue as to whether the testimony is ultimately debunked or not. You have the character of “this administration” as proof. In honor of my young left-leaning libertarian friend, we occasionally refer to this train of thought as the “VanDyke Paradigm” here. If you’re into left-leaning libertarian stuff, or even if you’re not, you might want to check out his product here.

When they use the VanDyke Paradigm, announcing their support for the weak testimony, the Bush-bashers lose track of what proves what: The weak testimony is supposed to prove the bad character, and then once it’s called into question, suddenly the bad character proves the weak testimony. That’s the definition of the Paradigm: A proves B, then B proves A. There’s nothing in the argument that’s everlastingly solid, no motor-mount built onto the engine by which it could be fixed to the rest of the car. You wouldn’t use the VanDyke Paradigm to validate something upon which your life-and-limb depended, or to refute a looming danger to someone or something you care about. But in Bush-bashing land, that’s okay. You don’t say one thing to prove another thing…there are no facts and there are no inferences drawn from facts. It’s all just cheerleading.

I’ve been asking the following question and I have yet to receive a solid, sensible answer: If the “track record” of the administration is sufficient to bolster the claim of flawed testimony that would normally be unacceptable, what would we find if we were to reminisce and re-open that track record to inspection? More flawed testimony that would, under normal circumstances, prove nothing? Could it be that all this cheerleading is arranged on some kind of crazy mobius strip, with no beginning and no end?

More importantly, if the above hypothetical is indeed the case, and you Bush-bashers are putting yourselves in Jason Leopold’s awkward position now…isn’t that something you’d like to know up-front?

It’s curious that, to the best I can determine, this hasn’t captured anybody’s passion. As you can see from what Mr. Leopold wrote, once the truth emerges and they’ve been embarrassed, the typical Bush-bashing blogger is hardly inclined to take it in stride.

But then again, I guess Mr. Leopold is also in good company because of his proclivity for taking it out on the administration. Maybe that’s why there is so little concern about being fooled by what amounts to nothing more than gossip. If things don’t work out, you just blame Bush. Just like you do with rude europeans, whacked-out crazy terrorists, hurricanes, high schoolers who can’t pass their competency exams, your case of crotch-rot — it’s all “Bush’s fault.”

I wonder what kind of calculation the library administrator would have produced had he thought this way. I imagine he would have peeked in the water well when the sun was directly overhead, noticed it was dry, blamed the drought on President Bush, and gone home to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 a few more times, leaving the orthodox notion of a flat-earth unchallenged.

Update: Perhaps this is a topic for another post, but I can’t help but wondering something. I’m taking it as a given that everyone who thinks Rove is innocent now, will persist in that thought if Rove is indicted. And everyone to whom a Rove indictment will confirm his guilt, is already convinced he’s guilty of shenanigans now, and will remain everlastingly so even if no indictment is ever issued. Therefore, as a mind-changing propaganda tool, the indictment is completely useless.

But what should an indictment against Karl Rove mean? If ever this comes to pass and becomes an empirical fact, what inference would be drawn from that fact, that cannot be so strongly substantiated without it?

I believe both sides have lost track of that defining inquiry, with all this rampant speculation about what-will-happen and what-will-not-happen. Both sides. Completely.

Thirty-Two Percent

I have made repeated reference in this blog, which nobody reads anyway, to my theory that if the human brain is indeed like one of nature’s most perfect computers, then there are two themes of discourse that act like powerful electromagnets and get all that information-processing all bollywonkers and screwed-up in a great big hurry. Those two themes of discourse have to do with girls and young ladies in skimpy outfits, and terrorist attacks, specifically the attacks of 9/11.

There is a tendency, when an even fairly intelligent and reasonable commentator offers his or her views on these two subjects, to emit a powerful and perpetual stream of pure doots.

Today’s example of lunacy about ladies in skimpy outfits, well, I’ll get to that in another post. In here, it would be off-topic. I want to concentrate on the terrorist attacks. What is a terrorist attack anyway? How do we stop one? When one succeeds, whose fault is it?

Well, in the matter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a jury in the Supreme Court of New York has shown they have 32% of a brain amongst the twelve of them. Yeah, 32% of one. I say that because they have conferred responsibility for the attack, upon the terrorists who did it, and — of course! — the Port Authority, 32 to 68.

The bombing of the World Trade Center, on Feb. 26, 1993, was the most destructive terrorist attack on U.S. soil up until that time. Planted in a rental van, a 1,500-pound, urea-nitrate bomb exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center complex, creating a crater 200 feet across and seven stories deep.

The blast killed six people, injured nearly 1,000, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and business interruptions. It could have been worse. “If the van had been parked a few feet closer to one of the pillars,” writes James Bovard, a policy analyst for The Future of Freedom Foundation, “it could have collapsed an entire tower of the Trade Center, killing tens of thousands.”

In fact, the terrorists’ plan was designed to topple New York City’s tallest tower onto its twin, creating maximum havoc during a busy workday with perhaps as many as 50,000 people being killed and a cloud of cyanide gas chasing the survivors through the streets of Manhattan.

Now, after a dozen years of legal maneuvering, a jury in the state Supreme Court of New York has taken the terrorists off the hook for the majority of the blame in their 1993 attack. On Oct. 26, unanimously, the jury said the guys who carried out the bombing were only 32 percent responsible for the damages.

The majority wrongdoer, 68 percent at fault for the death and destruction, said the jury, was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the then-owner of the World Trade Center�which means that the party with the deepest pockets is getting the bill, which means that the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey will be picking up the tab for most of the losses.

I suppose there could be a pragmatic side to all this, since if you declared the terrorists 100% responsible perhaps there would be some effort to collect damages from the terrorists, for the benefit of those who were injured, an effort which would be doomed from the start. But you know, that’s no excuse. This is a cultural problem we have with the concept of a terrorist attack; we seem to think nobody actually did it.

When, the very nature of the word “attack” says that somebody deliberately acted. Someone rented a truck, or hijacked a plane, or set a fuse, or maneuvered into a building…planned the whole thing, supplied it, monitored what was going on to make sure the plan wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late.

Every terrorist attack I’ve ever heard of, in my time, has been a deliberate thing. You might say an exceptionally deliberate thing.

Why does this notion bother me? Well for one thing, the idea that a terrorist attack is just a “thing” that happens from time to time, like a hurricane, tends to delegitimize any preventative measure. How do you handle a tsunami? Or just an ordinary flood? You wait for it to happen, and then you hand out the blankets and the hot food, and start finding places for people to live. And, of course, you resign yourself to the notion that it will happen again and again.

I don’t think that’s our destiny with terrorist attacks.

Yesterday, I saw a fly in my living room. First one of the year. I couldn’t kill the sonofabitch because he was too fast. I expect the stupid six-legged bitch was pregnant, and tonight or tomorrow night I’ll have four flies. You know what, make it a hundred. If I have a hundred flies in my living room, or just one, my vision remains the same: A living room with zero flies in it. That’s my goal. I’m going to kill flies until there are no more flies.

That, right there, captures the essence of what our goal should be with terrorist attacks.

Because let’s face it. There’s only one reason to regard a terrorist attack as a “nuisance,” or treat it like some bizarre weather pattern that’s gonna happen anyway. And that one reason is, you fully expect that you, and everyone you know, will make it to a natural demise without actually being caught in one. It is surreal denial of the possibility that there is any actual danger involved, danger that might possibly touch you someday.

Thing I Know #16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.

Emperor’s Clothes In Reverse

Of the timeless Hans Christian Anderson tale, “The Emperor’s New Suit,” Wikipedia the online encyclopedia has this to say:

The expressions The Emperor’s new clothes and The Emperor has no clothes are often used with allusion to Andersen’s tale. Most frequently, the metaphor involves a situation wherein the overwhelming (usually unempowered) majority of observers willingly share in a collective ignorance of an obvious fact, despite individually recognising the absurdity.

I’m noticing that the overwhelming majority can willingly share not only in a collective ignorance of an obvious fact, but also in a collective recognition of the presence of something that is demonstrably absent. To put it more simply, groupthink can tempt an interconnected and intercommunicating populace to pretend the emperor’s stark naked, and his naughty bits are hanging out, when his clothes are just as good as anybody else’s. It works both ways.

You might say it’s working anytime someone states something that should have been self-evident, and yet the declaration has a punch of irony to it that it normally wouldn’t have. Like, sometimes you don’t know you have a paper cut until you peel an orange.

In this case, Mark Davis is the little boy, crying out at the parade “Hey look…maybe the Emperor isn’t naked, after all.” What’s this? We’ve been told for over two years now that he needs to be impeached…that he lied about stuff…and here we are, with nothing left to do but wander around the parade route, ruminating about how, golly, maybe the little boy is right.

There’s No Justification for Impeachment

Plenty of presidents have been hated, and some have objectively deserved it. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon both deserved impeachment. Mr. Clinton was in fact impeached and Mr. Nixon would have been had he not resigned.

Of other presidents roundly despised by millions – Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Reagan – history will note that their loudest critics never launched any serious impeachment buzz.

Impeachment has historically been the desired remedy for presidencies that simply needed to end, not just a gotcha for the controversial ones.

Until now.

Generally, a president’s enemies have known that elections have consequences and the chance to vote for someone else was never more than four years away. That level of maturity is shot to smithereens today, as the George W. Bush Impeachment Cult gathers nerve and mild momentum.

Why is it simply not enough for Bush critics to direct their efforts toward a more palatable successor? The New Hampshire primaries are only two Januarys away, yet the bug-eyed urgency rampant in the Impeachment Compounds on Capitol Hill and elsewhere speaks to a pathology that could become the dominant agenda item should Democrats make big gains in the 2006 elections.

I’ve been saying the same thing for awhile. In fact, from a purely pragmatic point of view, I’m left wondering how the strategy makes sense to me if I’m a Democrat power-broker. How does impeaching the President, or threatening to impeach him, get me more votes?

I understand how there are rabid far-left Bush-haters out there screaming “yeah, yeah!” anytime and everytime anybody makes any noise about presenting the resolution to the House Floor, convening the committee and drawing up the articles. And I understand there are a lot of them. I understand that they’re smarting for revenge after Clinton’s impeachment seven years ago.

I get it.

But the thing is, they would vote the way they’re going to vote, impeachment or no. Voter loyalty, here, is either a non-issue, or a virtual non-issue.

So as a Democrat vote-getter, how does this help me?

Is there anyone anywhere stating that something is dismally wrong, if the history of the American Experiment grinds on forward, with no Bush impeachment phenomenon ever having come to pass? No? If not, then by implication we all agree this is a purely pragmatic exercise, presenting no intrinsic value to the strengthening and/or preservation of the republic. If it’s a pragmatic exercise and nothing else, what’s the payoff?

Eh, here we go again. It makes people feel good.

Well, this is cause for hope. Modern American history is replete with tales of elections that were sure wins for some interested factions, but were lost anyway because someone who was bound to win, did something that made them feel good. The impeachment of George Bush, as Davis points out, flails around grasping for justification, in vain. It does nothing to cleanse or purify the system of our representation, and it doesn’t even appear to net anyone, anywhere, any political fruit. Therefore, as a purely feel-good exercise, it promises to do nothing, save to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, on the part of those who instigate it.

And that’s fine with me. I think they should go forward on it full-tilt.

Laugh, Dammit

Some of the recurring things in this blog, which receive comment from me now and then, have to do with helping the people we call “liberals” to define what exactly they are. They themselves don’t know. They aren’t even entirely sure if “liberal” is a dirty word, although they seem to be somewhat united in the idea that it shouldn’t be one. Now that some of us see it as an insult, those who place themselves under said insult are split on whether to blame Rush Limbaugh, George H.W. Bush or Michael Dukakis.

As far as saying what one is, we have a problem. Liberals aren’t about “liberty.” They don’t want me to be able to smoke wherever I want, and they don’t want me to buy whatever kind of gun I want. If you don’t see this point, just start a business and all will become clear in time. It’s rather hard to assert someone’s trying to preserve your liberty, when they’re running for office promising to force you to fire some of your employees, or avoid hiring those employees, until the magical day you can afford to pay some new-and-improved minimum wage.

Nor are they for “equality.” When it comes to questions about how government should treat people with different skin colors, they seem to be more about “inequality.” They aren’t for “justice” because if they were, the first step would be to round up the illegal aliens breaking into this utopia the liberals have been trying to create. Liberals have been trying for two years to get the current President’s approval rating below 33%; they couldn’t do it until illegal aliens became a huge issue, and President Bush, in the eyes of many people like myself, came out on the side of the illegal aliens. It’s a losing issue for him, and anybody who wants him out of office can make it happen easily by simply pledging to do a better job of enforcing the law. But our liberals won’t do that, or allow anybody else to do that.

So lately, I’ve formed a revolutionary way of figuring out what a liberal is: It’s another recurring theme, in the blog you’re reading right now. The formation of reasoned inferences from solidly established matters of fact, and figuring out what to do with those inferences.

Liberals don’t think that’s a personal activity. They think this is all a matter of public policy. We have to vote on everything, save for that endless list of meaningless minutae we haven’t quite gotten around to putting on a ballot yet — but will someday. Opinions from facts? Liberals don’t know the difference between opinions and facts; nor do they care what it is.

It seems trade unions are to blame for this, which is something I don’t understand very well because I’ve never worked for a trade union. But to understand liberal decision-making, you have to take a look at trade-union decision-making. So let us peer into a hypothetical, where you and I belong to the same union.

Fact: You and I work for a company, me for one year, you for three years. In the latest round of negotiations our employer offered a week of vacation per year for people like me, and two weeks of vacation for people like you.

Opinion: This is unacceptable. Why is it unacceptable? Because 350 people voted the way I voted, that this was okay, and 650 people voted the way you voted, that it isn’t. Therefore, all 1,000 of us think it’s unacceptable. The word “union” is all about making decisions as a group. Personal opinion has nothing to do with anything. So the vote will be recorded and the ballots shredded, along with, perhaps, the tally of those ballots. Majority rule.

Thing To Do: Strike. At the last meeting, after all, 501 people voted your way on the strike measure, and 499 people voted that we can’t. Of course, of the 499, some 375 voted the way they did because they simply can’t afford a strike. So in effect, three-eights of us are being forced to change careers, or else endure poverty for an indefinite period of time — because 501 union members so say. But that’s okay, we’ll blame the employer. Because, see “opinion” above — it’s all their fault, 650 of us said so.

It helps to salve our consciences when we call all three of the above “facts”. So the employer is being “unfair.” That’s just a “fact.” To allow 650 people versus 350 people to “agree to disagree” about such a thing — unthinkable. And of course, to allow 501 people to strike and 499 people to go ahead and keep punching the clock, even if they can’t afford to do otherwise — equally unthinkable.

To what strange enchanged forest does the path of such twisted thinking lead? Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen found out earlier this month when he wrote about Stephen Colbert’s humorous monologue during the White House Press Corps dinner:

Colbert made jokes about Bush’s approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush’s intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. “We’re not some brainiacs on nerd patrol,” he said. Boy, that’s funny.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush’s Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” when he would have put it differently: “This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

Well, let’s all form our unique, personal, individual opinions about whether what happened next has more than a casual similarity to the union scenario. Bear in mind, as the union thugs make their “opinions” known to any scabs who might be tempted to cross the line, the idea isn’t quite so much to actually make a point, so much as to make the victim do what is desired. Offenders can have whatever opinions they wish to have, the mission-at-hand is to get their things-to-do in line with what was voted on at the last meeting…

Cohen saw fit to write a column about his ensuing e-mail traffic. He called this a “Digital Lynch Mob,” but I think it’s more fitting to call it a Digital Union Thug Drive-By:

Two weeks ago I wrote about Al Gore’s new movie on global warming. I liked the film. In response, I instantly got more than 1,000 e-mails, most of them praising Gore, some calling him the usual names and some concluding there was no such thing as global warming, if only because Gore said there was. I put the messages aside for a slow day, when I would answer them. Then I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 — a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley (“You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face”) and ended with Ron (“Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER”) who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you’re a genius.

Can we not leave labels like “conservative” and “liberal” at the door for just a couple of seconds, and agree that as Americans we should support the right of individual persons to decide on their own, between their own ears, whether some guy’s comedy routine was funny? I guess not. Like a scab, you can cross the line if you want, but then there are people who consider it their job to make sure you feel the consequences. Coercion, intimidation, until we all agree to what was decided at the meeting.

Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette, nails it in this piece:

This insistence on the hilarity of Colbert’s routine has a bullying quality, implying that jokes which adhere to the correct ideology are hilarious and failure to find humor in the party line is a kind of thought crime. By this logic, Cindy Sheehan should be hosting the Academy Awards.

In the past day or so, perhaps realizing they had lost the battle to argue Colbert’s stand-up into something that will be universally acknowledged as funny, the liberal commentariat has shifted tactics. Salon�s Joan Walsh, for instance, pretended to grant that humor was subjective: “Let’s even give Colbert’s critics that point. Clearly he didn’t entertain most of the folks at the dinner Saturday night.” But whose fault is that? Why, those who were not entertained, of course. The tepid response “tells us more about the audience than it does about Colbert.” Not laughing, it turns out, was part of the press corps� master plan, because “Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part. He had to be marginalized. Voil�: �He wasn’t funny.�” Never has “marginalized” sounded so sinister. He�s lucky we didn�t kill him.

Others took a bolder approach: Colbert may not have been funny, but that doesn�t matter. He spoke “truthiness” to power, “you so don’t get it when you spin the idea that Colbert’s performance had anything to do with laughs,” HuffPo commentators proclaim: “This time, Colbert didn’t have to be funny. Because he was right.” Added one, “What he did was not comedy. It was a public service.” This, I believe, will come as news to both the people who paid him to perform and to Stephen Colbert.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me the mid-term elections this year are up-for-grabs, and it really doesn’t matter how low President Bush’s approval ratings get. I don’t think the polls, especially on him, serve as an accurate oracle by any means. What does it mean if you disapprove of President Bush? Does it mean you want the House of Representatives to be run by Nancy Pelosi? I don’t think so…I really don’t. You can phrase a poll question about George Bush all kinds of ways, and more than half of those ways will earn a “disapprove” mark from me, and many conservatives I know. Nobody I know wants a House Speaker Pelosi. Speaking for myself, I’d move mountains to avoid it.

But the “We Get To Vote On What You Think Is Funny” platform, as sure as it is to cost the Democrats the House takeover bid this November, really makes them feel good. So they’re going to trot it out again and again, and dammit they’ll keep on doing it until we figure out we need to go to a virtual union meeting before we consider ourselves licensed to laugh at something, or not to laugh. Liberals have this burning desire, it seems, to run something — somehow, if you don’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, it seems this is something you must do — and our voters for the last six years haven’t been letting the liberals run anything. This passionate desire to tell other people what to do has got to go somewhere; liquid can’t compress. So now we have a new liberal movement. Comedy is now a public issue. Your grandkids may grow up in a world where you can’t say “I think xxx is funny and yyy is not funny and zzz is funny some of the time,” like you and I have always been able to do.

Well, this comedy-by-vote thing isn’t going away any time soon. Get ready for another round: Al Gore introduced Saturday Night Live this weekend. There is a theory that things are funny when they’re connected to reality. Well, the content of Gore’s skit is a purposeful disengagement of reality, a game of “Let’s Pretend” where he won that infamous contest in Florida six years ago, and was re-elected two years ago.

And Goddammit, it’s funny! Who the hell do you think you are, not laughing. Some kind of Bush apologist?

The month of May is at mid-point, and we’ve been collectively forced to laugh at something, twice now since the month began. I hope this keeps on happening, all the way through the end of October. Four times a month…no, make it six, or eight. Keep telling everybody what they’re supposed to find funny, liberals. Warm up those keyboards, digital-union-goons. There’s no difference between a fact and an opinion, after all, and that famous left-wing phrase “let’s just agree to disagree,” should never be uttered again. Never, never, not ever. Vive la Revolucion!

It’s just a “fact.”

Pithy and Rhetorical

The New York Times would like to warn us (link requires registration) that the temporary tax cut extensions for dividends and capital gains, just approved by the Senate, “have a way of becoming permanent.” Thanks for that. I’d hate to live in a free-market economy that ran like, you know, like we were somewhat free or something. A little bit of warning seems like the least a guy can ask for.

I have a pithy question to ask about this, albeit a rhetorical one.

I’m frequently instructed that I’m supposed to believe — I refuse to use the word “told,” because that past-tense verb applies when the teller delivers some crucial piece of information to the tellee, that the tellee can actually use — that illegal aliens want to “come to the United States to provide a better life for their children.” The word “illegal” in this context, as unpopular as it may be to actually use it in lieu of euphemisms like “undocumented,” means we know nothing at all about these illegals. Nothing. And we can verify even less. Criminal backgrounds, average height, innie belly buttons versus outie…just name it. In the strictest definition of the word “know,” we really know nothing about them. Seems to me, it would comport just as tightly with the truth, to say illegal aliens want to come to our country to make a better life for themselves because like anyone they like to be comfortable. And oh, as an afterthought, if their children get some perks out of the deal then okay, they’ll take that too thank you very much.

But let’s keep up the talking-point. Illegal aliens want to come to the United States to make a better life for their chill-uns, and by implication, care nothing at all for themselves. How unselfish.

My pithy question is, with this only-slightly-delusive piece of logic firmly in place and being paid a consistent amount of respect…why do well-to-do people want to hang on to their money? Is that for themselves, or “to give a better life to their children”?

Sources Say

On my thirty-ninth birthday, I engaged in the practice of “calling it” that the “Karl Rove Outed Valerie Plame Gate” scandal had come to an end, or was about to come to an end. We still don’t know if I called that right or not. My fortieth birthday is coming up pretty quick here. And lookee, lookee what we have here…

Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Egg on my face? Absolutely…if you take the ravings of moonbat liberals, wherever you see them, as proven facts. In which case, of course, Karl Rove would have already resigned I think fifty times by now.

Want some fun this weekend? Find a Bush-hating liberal you know, and place a good-natured wager on this. Depending on what state you live in, maybe you can’t put money on it. But…something meaningful. You wash the liberal’s car, versus the liberal washes your car. A box of milk duds.

I mean, let’s face it. Bush-bashing liberals who are willing to say “I’ll bet such and such is gonna happen” are pretty damn cheap. Three dozen of them, or so, plus two-twenty-five will get you a cup of coffee. Liberals who will really bet something, those are a bit harder to find.

Isn’t that what being a liberal is all about now? Lots and lots of talk…nobody putting anything at stake on anything, since everyone wants complete, uncompromised comfort and security.

“According to sources.” Pffffft.

Update 5/13/06: Keep watching. The links are coming in that Karl Rove was actually indicted today. But…at this hour, 1853PDT, all the links point to one story at “truthout”. Truthout has scooped everyone, or else it’s pure dross. There can be no in-between. Watch this close.

Leahy’s Logical Leap

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont (D) gave a speech (link goes to video which requires sitting through a commercial) about what an awful thing it is that the NSA has been collecting phone records. Gosh, wow, he made a really great point:

Now, are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda? If that’s the case, we’ve really failed in any kind of a war on terror.

Huh. So simply compiling a database that includes someone’s phone records, is what you do when they “are involved with Al Qaeda.” I wonder where he got that from. I mean, it’s a fair question to ask, since his outrage depends squarely on this premise.

What does that all-important Will Of The People say? Let’s take a look…

45. It’s been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

And the answer is, 63% find this acceptable, 35% find it unacceptable, 2% have no opinion.

41% of his find it “strongly acceptable” and 24% of us find it “strongly unacceptable.”

+++YAWN+++

I’m really interested in that “net unacceptable” figure of 35%. Let’s see, where have I seen that number before…ah yes, about a month ago 35% was proof of what a suck-ass job President Bush was doing, because that was his approval rating. Granted that it’s slipped a few notches since then — but the point is, it wasn’t that long ago I was being told if only 35% of us agree on something, this is ironclad proof that seven out of twenty of us are wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy and don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. So I guess the shoe’s on the other foot.

Well, the minority can be right. It’s been right before. So convince me, Sen. Leahy and those of you who sympathize with him. I call a dry cleaning shop. I call a relative. I call a per-minute-toll sex line. If I make these calls, then those calls are matters of fact. They may be matters of public record, too…or I guess they aren’t, but if they are I don’t give a rat’s ass.

But that’s me, I guess someone else wants to keep their “phone calls private.” That sounds pretty reasonable…but then again, it sounds like people want to keep the audio content of those phone calls private. The fact that they made the call…are there people who think this is privileged information? Are there people who consider it critically important that it stays privileged? They make a phone call, and they want to keep it under wraps that they made the call? Or that they got it?

Uh…who are these people, exactly? Who are these thirty-five-percenters? What have they been doing, since this faux-scandal came out, to acquire this privacy shelter they crave so much? Persuade the phone companies to come out with new privacy policies? Go shopping for new cell phones? Avoid making phone calls they otherwise would have made? I’d like to know.

Update: I have been hearing a great deal about how this is “the largest database ever assembled in the world,” in the words of an unnamed source who works for I-don’t-know-what. Wow, that’s an important statement. Does it mean the servers on which they database is physically housed, draw the greatest number of horsepower ever used to power a single database? Does it means the byte-for-byte size of the database exceeds that of any other database ever used? Does it mean it has more tables than any other database? More index definitions? More pages? More records? The most complicated data flow diagram? Or does it mean there are more authorized users capable of accessing this database, than any other database?

It’s an anonymous source, which means I’m unlikely to ever find out the answer to that question. Again…the outrage rests completely on how a statement like this can be interpreted, so this is an all-important question. Kind of odd how it’s unanswered and essentially unanswerable.

Update: This guy seems to think the poll cited here is a load of bull crap. Not sure I understand his argument. It seems to be along the lines of “I don’t like the result so I refuse to believe it.” Whatever.

Sidebar Update

I took “Empires Fall”, which I last discussed a couple weeks ago, out of the sidebar. I know this opens me up for criticism to the effect that I filter sources out, if & when they fail to sustain a bias parallel to mine, since this was the only “lefty” blog to which I had linked. Bring it on; I buy the Sacramento Bee whenever I can, which is hardly a citadel of tighty-rightiness or uncompromising Bush-apologism. The fact of the matter is, against my hopes, “Empires” just doesn’t stimulate debate. I think the following three sentences capture everything I’ve seen there: The White House is run by a bunch of inhuman monsters, and to prove it, here is a nasty look on Condoleeza Rice’s face, and if that’s not enough for you, you’re just a stupid idiot, which goes to prove my theory that only idiots support George W. Bush, who’s an idiot himself. And to prove that, my evidence is the fact that nobody is supporting him…except idiots. And I can prove they’re idiots because they support George W. Bush.

In short, I’ve given them a chance, and they’ve proven to be little more than an online circular argument. I know someone there is open to the idea that someone not leaning in the same direction ideologically, might have something worthwhile to say. But whoever that person is or whoever those people are, they don’t produce much of the material. I’ve kept an open mind, and it seems to be just a DailyKos wannabe with their own little collection of seven-pound-perch faux-scandals.

Well, I don’t want to maintain my sidebar this way. It should grow, not shrink.

Gerard Van Der Leun’s blog, American Digest, is more than a worthy replacement. His command of the language is a breath of fresh air. And as frosting on the cake, you can actually read about stuff in his blog, that you aren’t likely to read somewhere else.

His friend Running Roach has some good stuff too. RR’s distinguishing characteristic seems to be that he goes on at length about how he processes the information that finds its way to him…perhaps that’s not for everyone. Well, I’m into that kind of thing. Very little is said of this nowadays, but it really takes no guts at all, none whatsoever, to “brag” about the opinion you hold. Even when you’re outvoted, it still doesn’t take much testicular fortitude. But when you start delving into why you think the things you think, well…that, there, takes some balls. Because now you’re putting things up for criticism that can get quite personal, and still have a grain of truth. Ah, but when people do that they have a real chance of advancing an argument. (As opposed to the way other people do it…see my first two paragraphs above.)

While finding some time to get them added, as I promised yesterday I would do, I tripped across three others that appear to make a habit of providing worthwhile content: Everything I Know Is Wrong, National Center Blog and Tapscott’s Copy Desk. I am a newcomer to those three. But based on what I have seen, I’m interested in maintaining a habit of revisiting them.

There ya go. A purely right-leaning sidebar on here, the blog that nobody reads. Does this mean I’m prejudiced toward tighty-righty arguments and cast an unprovokedly jaundiced eye toward lefty-loosie ones? Or does it mean an argument can’t be logically compelling while making an effort to lean-left, and therefore any conduit of such arguments must be expurgated from these quarters in the unlikely event such a conduit ever finds a way in?

As I’m fond of saying over and over again about such open questions: Form whatever opinion you wish to. I’ve formed mine.

Memo For File III

One of the reasons I make casual but repeated reference to the “fact” that “nobody ever reads this blog,” is to re-confirm the blog’s primary purpose. Being talked about, is not that purpose. It’s an electronic notebook first-and-foremost. It’s for me.

For example, it is easy to reminisce about that column that Rush read on the air a few months ago, by that guy with the funny name, that was oh so well written, something about how young people today talk in a funny voice because they’re afraid to have a definite opinion about anything. This is a great example of why everyone could use a blog, even if they don’t think they can write well enough to expose their resulting wares to the vagaries of disparate opinion on the “innernets.” You need to bookmark things like this. You have to grab this stuff when it drifts by, or it’s gone forever. A magic text file on your computer desktop, doesn’t work at all over the long run. A palm pilot doesn’t work much better. A blog works well, and it works well all the time…with the one exception, of when a post becomes so long as to be unworkable and thus ends up unsaved. But that’s a user problem.

Regarding the essay referenced above. It requires a fair amount of searching. If you’re interested in repeating said searching, this is your lucky day…the writer’s arcane name is Gerard Van Der Leun. The date that Rush Limbaugh read his essay was January 27, 2006. The inspiration of the essay was Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Joel Stein, the Los Angeles Times columnist who said “I don’t support the troops.” Van Der Leun’s treatise makes reference to, and in fact admonishes the reader to listen to, Hewitt’s interview of Stein which you can find here with a sound file in MP3 format here. And you can read Van Der Leun’s remarks here. My favorite exerpt:

What interestest me is how [Stein] speaks.

If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the “service” sector — be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It’s a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.

It is the voice of the neuter.

I mean that in the grammatical sense:
“a. Neither masculine nor feminine in gender.
“b. Neither active nor passive; intransitive,”

and in the biological sense:
“a. Biology Having undeveloped or imperfectly developed sexual organs: the neuter caste in social insects.
“b. Botany Having no pistils or stamens; asexual.
“c. Zoology Sexually undeveloped.”

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all.

The clip linked above is about seventeen minutes long. Although I’m well-acquainted with what Van Der Leun is talking about in my everyday, run-around, people-watching life, for the first part of the interview I couldn’t correlate it to what I was hearing. About halfway through, though, Hewitt started to ask some tougher questions and Stein began to accumulate some habits that I found, shall we say, irritating. Specifically, he made a point of asking for specifics, in the course of answering a question that, when asked, was plenty specific enough.

HH: Now let me ask you about the benefits that the president and supporters of the war point to, which is the end of a brutal regime in Afghanistan, and a brutal regime in Iraq? Is Iraq better off today than it was in February of 2003?

JS: I don’t think it’s the U.S.’ job to make countries better than they were, or else we’d be really busy.

HH: Joel, I understand. It’s a perfectly legitimate point of view. But it’s not what I asked, though. Do you think objectively, that Iraq is better off today than it was in February in 2003?

JS: Februrary…um, again, I haven’t been…it’s hard for me to say. It’s not a great place, and I think it’s better than it was under Saddam.

HH: Now, and in your piece, you wrote that, “when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you’re willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes, you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times, it’s Vietnam.” Did you support the war in Kosovo?

JS: I had very mixed feelings about the war in Kosovo. Again, I don’t know if the U.S. should be used as a police force.

HH: Well, mixed feelings is…you know, someone…either you’ve got to go or you don’t. Should Clinton have sent them?

JS: At the time, I thought he shouldn’t.

HH: And so, should they come home now?

JS: The troops in Kosovo?

HH: Yeah.

JS: The U.N. peacekeeping force in Kosovo? Or the U.S. part of the peacekeeping force in Kosovo?

HH: All of them. Just, you know, just U.S. Let’s stay focused. Should they come home?

JS: To be honest…I’d like to know more about Kosovo before I said.

As Van Der Leun points out, you have to listen to understand his comment. But I’ve selected the short exchange above, because just by reading it you can gather the gist. There is no certainty, and there seems to be a taboo against any such certainty. No definite statements, except some condemnation against the definite statements of others. Let’s inspect some more of what Van Der Leun has to say about this…

Above all, it is a sexless voice…It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

This is not to say that the new American Castrati of all genders live sexless lives. On the contrary, if reports are to be credited, they seem to have a good deal of sex, most often without the burden of love or the threat of chlldren, and in this they are condemned to the sex life of children.

No, it is only to say that this new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither…. well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul. If you can write in this tone, and Stein can, you can become a third level columnist for the Los Angeles Times. With a little luck, over time, you might even rise to the level of second string columnist for Vanity Fair. Should the country so lose its mind and elect another Clinton, you could even become a White House speech writer.

Now what am I to gather from the comments about the American Castrati? Only what has become patently obvious to most of us, dare I say, to all of us, whether we choose to lend voice to it or not:

We are in the middle of an undeclared civil war. We have been in such a thing before, and we’ve found the capacity to make comedy out of it. When Archie Bunker fought over petty, meaningless nonsense with “Meathead” on All in the Family, as a society we were supposed to be torn down the middle over some pretty heady stuff: What to do about Vietnam/Korea/Red China, and the spread of communism. Watergate. Feminism. Abortion. But it really came down to lifestyles. People didn’t bring the lifestyles up in arguments, but the lifestyles started the arguments. Archie Bunker wore stiff white shirts, drank beer, and ordered his wife around. Meathead wore patched blue jeans with flared legs, had long hair, and probably smoked opium. Archie had short hair, Meathead had long hair. Archie hung out in a bar, Meathead hung out, well, God-knows-where.

Archie and Meathead represented tribes, going-at-it just like the egg-opening people in Gulliver’s Travels. Who is doing things the “right” way? That was the central question. Pro-war and anti-war was just a derivative, red-herring issue.

The kids who were born when this show came out, have furnished the ranks of this American Castrati movement. The War on Terror is, once again, just a derivative, red-herring issue. Of course they think it’s “wrong”, but what was really wrong was the making of the decision to go to war — it doesn’t fit in their culture. Some of the questions that really agitate people into apoplectic rage, are cultural questions, and some of those questions have nothing to do with the war. ER, or 24? Red meat, or tofu? Shiraz, or Coors Light? Birkenstocks, or hiking boots?

This is really bizarre, because our elections are running kind of close, and yet so much is riding on them. We really do have a decreasing, but all-important, “Undecided Vote” consisting of people who, somehow, are purely up-for-grabs by one side or another, depending on who can present the most compelling argument.

If you’re anti-war, and you want to persuade the undecided to your side, would it not make a great deal more sense to say — “I don’t care if you talk like Joel Stein or not, so long as you join me in opposing the war” — rather than — “I don’t care if you support the war or oppose the war, so long as you avoid any definite statements the way Joel Stein does”? In other words, to keep your arguments issue-specific and culture-neutral? The former of those two, would gather agreement from the American Castrati, at least in letter. But in spirit, judging from their actions and what they say, I notice a lot of them sign up more enthusiastically to the latter. They put down NASCAR, and Wal-Mart, and hunting — fearless of the prospect that someone might say “I was thinking about supporting your position, but I’m a NASCAR fan, I shop at Wal-Mart, and I hunt.” This prospect, which gathers potential as an audience swells, doesn’t seem to intimidate anyone. Against their best interests, they tend to keep cultural items at the nexus of their condemnation.

So it’s a cultural issue. It is the recognition of simplicity, and reaction to that simplicity, that really offends the Castrati. That some questions can be resolved easily, with no looking back, and no price to be paid for failing to masticate over the issue endlessly, that really agitates them. In their world, everything is up for perpetual and endless debate, save for the excoriation of those who fail to support perpetual and endless debate. Like a future ex-wife during one of the last, heated, unproductive midnight arguments, everything is subject to a question beginning with those five magic words “what do you mean by…?”

This isn’t about pro-war and anti-war. It’s about two kinds of people, two tribes, each of which would just as soon banish the other to non-existence. People talk around it, but that’s what is really going on.

Update: Since this is “Memo For File” within “The blog that nobody reads,” I labor under no self-imposed obligation to to articulate any pressing need for anybody else to notice such a thing as the swelling ranks of the American Castrati and the undeclared war they wage on the rest of the country. But there may very well be a pressing need to notice. Take a look back at Van Der Leun’s essay again:

The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

Consider the ramifications of this.

Joel Stein did not speak this way naturally, he was taught. Presumably, at Stanford, before he graduated from there in ’93.

If Joel Stein was taught to speak this way at Stanford, or some other factory outlet of higher-education, other kids were taught to speak this way at that facility as well.

If kids are being taught to speak this way at one facility, it stands to reason they are being taught to speak at other factory outlets of higher-education.

These aren’t randomly-selected inductees. These are our future corporate directors and vice-presidents. Dignitaries, esteemed invited speakers, shakers-and-movers, upper-crusters. In short, those who hoist the mantle of authority, and privilege, and obligation, to tell others what to think.

They have been taught to abhore real decision-making. They look at it the way “Meathead” looked at a chunk of read meat disappearing between Archie’s lips. As a bit of deplorable cultural residue appreciated only by an anachronistic generation of old farts, who have the destiny and the duty to wither and die.

In short, tomorrow’s “leaders” nurture an ingrained hostility to the making of decisions. As I said earlier, their opposition to this war, isn’t so much opposition to the war itself or the decision that produced it, but to making of the decision. They chafe at the production of reasoned inferences by the channeling empirically known facts through a logical thinking process. They don’t like doing it, and they hate to see anybody else doing it. And they approve of strategies and commands and rules, only when said strategies, commands and rules are purely arbitrary — produced by something other than those reasoned inferences or empirically known facts. To produce a thing-to-do from an inference, or an inference from a fact, is just a big step backward as far as they’re concerned.

They don’t like doin’ it. They’re offended when anybody else does it. Through the swelling ranks of the Castrati, a devastating assault is being mounted against what we speak of when we use the word “leadership.” There may be reasons to believe leadership will withstand this assault, but I don’t see any.

And in my lifetime, those who hate deciding things, and hate people who decide things, will in fact decide everything that matters.

Something to worry about? Form your own opinion. I’ve formed mine.

Update 5/11/06: Van Der Leun has his own blog, upon which I failed to stumble at the time I was assembling the links for this post. Pretty good stuff, deserving of a direct-link somewhere, so there ya go. I’ll put it in the sidebar when I get a minute.

Thing I Know #30. A lot of people who crusade against absolutes, employ absolutes quite frequently, especially while crusading against absolutes.
Thing I Know #31. He who does a noble, brave, heroic thing, tends to draw a seething hatred from he who could have done the noble, brave, heroic thing — but chose not to.

Says It All

I think this is emblematic of the foam-mouthed “I Hate Bush” movement. It’s the thread from DailyKos about the 7.5 pound perch “lie.”

Here’s your background. Summarizing: Someone asked President Bush what his best moment was. Jokingly, he said it was when he caught a 7.5 pound big-mouth bass at his lake. Then he went on to make more serious comments. You could predict that the liberal bloggers would get all huffy and puffy about the joke, taking it seriously. What you would not have been able to predict, was, that due to a translation screw-up when a German magazine reported on the interview, “bass” was translated into “perch.”

Eagle-eye liberal blogger AmericaBlog figured out “the world’s record for the largest freshwater perch caught is 4 pounds 3 ounces. So Bush either doubled the world record, and didn’t report it, or he’s a liar.” Kos linked to that remark, and away we go…another Bush scandal. Oh boy, why does anyone anywhere need to wax lyrically about how tightly-wound-up these Bush-haters are anyway…the way they fly off the handle over nothing, just says it all.

Once again, I have to ask the question. If people feel that President Bush is a liar because of his “history,” does that history include made-up lies like this one? It just seems to be a relevant question.

Hey speaking of which, how ’bout instead of asking for the “best” moment of the presidency, we ask about the lamest Bush scandal ever? I’m voting for the very first one, “selected-but-not-elected-gate.” But I guess that’s another subject.

Update: If you zoom in on the thread linked above, that very first link in the first paragraph, some of the comments are revealing. There’s an awful lot of liberal wit and sarcasm, and very little determination to hang tough with whatever the truth is. Several posts down, an intrepid soul called “jedinecny” points out what could have saved everybody else a limited amount of embarrassment, and admonishes everybody else to “correct the story”.

Not to fear though, “politburo” puts this voice of reason firmly in its place. “If it’s a little fib like this that finally gets people to realize that Bush is a liar, then I’m all for it.”

Isn’t that nice? Hey “politburo,” how are we supposed to realize that Bush is a liar? “Hey, they can make up lies about him lying. That proves he’s a liar.” Real good logic ya got going on there.

Just goes to show…with Bush-bashing liberals, the verity of the message is a superfluous concern. The resonance of the message is the core consideration. Who gives a fuck if it’s true or not?

I want to help politburo get the message to resonante. I recognize the Bush-bashing liberals are all done fighting about whether or not this is the way to do things; his side has won. Liberals are all about propaganda first, truth second. People like this should be able to walk around, proudly announcing their victory within the Democratic party — the party of “getting people to realize” things. Lies, and damn lies. Maybe some truth in there too? Who knows? Who cares?

So I’ve designed this new tee shirt. Show us all what you’re made of, politburo! A product for our times. Step right up, Democrats, and other liberal lunatics. Get yours today.

The Trouble With Polls

The central theme of this blog has to do with the prevailing viewpoints of our generation; the expectation on the part of the elites, of what the commoners are supposed to thinking, and how they’re supposed to think about it. And, more specifically, the disparity between this what-to-think/how-to-think paradigm, and a more rational process of forming of reasonable inferences from established facts, and figuring out what to do with those inferences.

So it’s good we’re talking about polls. A lot. We’re discussing polls, specifically the approval polls of our current President, a heap-big, massive amount. How much are we talking about them? Well, we had some stories come out just yesterday morning about the President’s “record low,” which cited a USA Today poll to peg the rating at 31%. It’s twenty-four hours later, now. We have another news story which cites an Associated Press/Ipsos poll to place the magic number at a “record low” of 33%.

Now, I don’t think a 2-percent uptick between Monday and Tuesday, taken by two different polls, supports an inference that the downfall has reversed itself. I’m not saying that. In fact, that’s kind of the point. All this movement is taking place within the margin of error; here in real-life land, what the polls show is that President Bush has an approval rating of about a third of us.

Wow, he’s fucked.

Well, maybe not. There are a few problems with this paradigm.

The first problem is a notion that just about everybody supports at one time or another: Two-thirds of us can be wrong. There have been several times in our history that two-thirds of us have been wrong. The pressing question about whether to declare independence from Great Britain back in 1776, for example. Independence carried the same “approval rating,” pretty much exactly, that President Bush carries today.

But there’s another problem, one far more important. This problem cuts to the quick of what we’re arguing about, when we argue about whether the polls mean anything or not.

Let’s examine what’s being argued about: The House of Representatives. The polls mean something because it’s an election year, and the election taking place this is year is the mid-term congressional elections. “Congress” means the House and Senate; the notion that the Senate is in a state of uncertainty, with only a third of the seats up for re-election, is a bit extravagant. Where you can find Democrats salivating over the chance to take over the upper chamber, it’s mostly grandstanding and cheerleading. Nobody’s placing their nuts in a vise and saying they’ve got a shot there.

So when we argue about the President’s approval ratings taking a downturn, sinking lower and lower, how mad people are at him, blah blah blah, we’re arguing about what kind of House of Representatives we’ll have next year. Now, if you want to huff and puff about how cooked President Bush’s goose really is, there’s a great way to make your point. It’s rock solid. We’re arguing about something subject to a state of uncertainty now, that six months from now, will not be. How do you prove something that is unproven now, but will be a settled matter of history in six months? How do you do it?

You wait six months.

Well, those who want the President to be saddled with a hostile Congress, have decided this isn’t the tactic they’re going to take. It’s too quiet. They want noise. They’re going to take polls and talk about the results, every single day…because, to talk about it any less often than that, would not serve their purposes. Apparently, these “declining” polls don’t hand them the victory they want, without lots of reverberation helping to galvanize it. They feel the job is left undone, unless there’s lots of propaganda on the news, in the blogs, by the water cooler, in the forums on the “innernets.” Without that, they can’t win — and that’s not my opinion, it’s theirs.

And, yeah, those who would like the President to be saddled with a hostile Congress, include, right or wrong, the entities we sometimes call “news.” It isn’t hard to prove that at all. Think back. The President’s approval rating was holding steady and slightly up-ticking after the State of the Union in February…which is typical for the SOTU, although not a completely unbroken pattern. By February, we were in a mid-term election year. So the approval ratings polls would have been important back then, right?

Well, where were they? Where? I didn’t see any. How are they any more important now, than they were three months ago?

Here’s another problem. What does it mean when a conservative “disapproves” of President Bush? Does that mean he wants the House to go to the Democrats, just to show the President how miffed he is? Hey, I know a few conservatives. I know quite a few who would check that “disapprove” box on the poll — I’m one of them. None of us are willing to go that far. So out of a thousand randomly-selected, registered voters, can Nancy Pelosi really count on 670 to 690 of them to make her the next Speaker? I don’t see anyone betting their family jewels on that, either.

You know, if the Bush administration has really screwed the pooch on this one, and “everybody” is getting ready to vote against them, here is what I’d like to see. I’d like to see some of the Democrats who “hate” him so much, and are so sure that Congress is going their way next year, put their money where their mouth is. If you can’t bet some money, bet something else…it helps keep things light, jocular and friendly anyway. Bet a nice dinner with that conservative co-worker or neighbor on whether we have a House Speaker Pelosi next year, or not. Or a slightly-humiliating kitchen/yardwork chore. Depending on how the elections turn out, one of you gets to do “the work Americans will not do.”

I have not heard of any liberals or Democrats doing that. With all the blustery, bumptious, apparently insincere Bush-bashing optimism in the air, I haven’t heard of any Democrat betting so much as a dried crusty piece of nasal debris. Certainly nothing better than that. Not nice dinners. Not testicles. I’m sure I would have heard of such a thing by now if it was taking place.

A Poll I’d Like To See

Oh, NOES. A poll has come out about President Bush’s approval rating, and it’s oh so devastating. A new record low of 31%.

President Bush’s approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in the November elections.

The survey of 1,013 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, shows Bush’s standing down by 3 percentage points in a single week. His disapproval rating also reached a record: 65%. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.

Rule #1 of my existence is that when I’m accused of something, I wanna be guilty. Liberals regularly accuse me of setting up “straw men,” so let me indulge in doing so by simply drawing the conclusion they seem to want me to draw: That George W. Bush, he sure is screwing everything up. His approval rating is down and down and down, and that really means a lot. I mean, with Bush it does, anyway. It’s a black mark against him, against his whole stinkin’ cabinet, against that goofy plan to invade Iraq, against his radical right-wing agenda…blah blah blah.

Fair characterization?

Well if it is, the fourth paragraph of the story throws a little bit of a rake handle in the ol’ bicycle spokes…

Bush’s fall is being fueled by erosion among support from conservatives and Republicans. In the poll, 52% of conservatives and 68% of Republicans approved of the job he is doing. Both are record lows among those groups.

Hrrmmm…it would appear the tax cuts and dead terrorists are part of the solution, not part of the problem. Part of the problem, might be amnesty for illegals…and the Dubai port deal…and the characterization of Minutemen as “vigilantes”…and maybe even launching of yet-another-fruitless-investigation into price fixing at the pump.

Oh, many among us will disagree with that. But I’m sure everybody would agree, that to eliminate any uncertainty about same, would be in our best interest, no?

So here’s a poll I’d like to see:

Wouldn’t that be a far more useful poll? It’s a midterm election season, after all. If the Democrats have a useful agenda to offer, let’s see how popular it’s going to be. So far, all I’ve heard about them is what they don’t want to be. I have no idea what they would do if they got a House majority, and neither has anybody else. If they’re having trouble making up their minds, let’s conduct a poll that will help them. Maybe the answers would be surprising and maybe they wouldn’t. Couldn’t hurt to find out!

I have more.

I mean, since 1973 we’ve been arguing about that. We’ve got a lot of pollsters who have a lot of time to ask the same question over and over and over again…only when the President’s numbers are headed down, they’re pretty quiet when the President’s numbers are going up…and they can’t ask one single stinkin’ question, about what “everybody” wants, even though the political pundits argue about it non-stop for a third of a century.

Let’s fix that.

Let’s see, what else can we do. Ah…

Once again: That is the argument. That is IT. We love to do polls, let’s do a poll on that one.

Oh but we argue about deep, philosophical stuff too don’t we. Let’s get philosophical:

I mean, let’s give “America” a voice. Let’s find out what The Will Of The People is.

Those are four questions I’ve heard people arguing about a lot, both around water coolers, and on Sunday morning talk shows. We spend a lot of hot air on them. Each of those four questions, enjoys the “benefit” of white-hot, sometimes-angry, huffing-puffing passionate advocates on BOTH sides. People have strong feelings about them, yet I never see a poll question about them…not a single one. EVER. Personally, I doubt like hell that in any of the four cases, X percent would arise to so much as the double-digits. But the poll remains un-run. So what do I know?

Curious, isn’t it, that everyone wants to give a voice to America. But only a fill-in-the-blank kind of a voice. Nobody wants to go to the great unwashed masses to find out what the questions should be.

I have more where those came from.

Cost of Containment

Via that really cool blog I was citing last week, Rossputin, there is a white paper worthy of attention from everyone who claims to be agonizing over the cost of the War in Iraq, and similar military action. It is exactly what the title claims it to be: An analysis of the costs of “War in Iraq versus Containment”. Rossputin’s link is here.

The passage I think best summarizes the content meanders through pp. 60-62:

Forcible regime change in Iraq has proved to be a costly undertaking. As of January 2006, it appears likely that the Iraq intervention will ultimately unfold along a path that implies present value costs for the United States in the range of 410 to 630 billion in 2003 dollars. These figures reflect a 2 percent annual discount rate. They capture the estimated economic costs of U.S. military resources deployed in the war and postwar occupation, the value of lost lives and injuries sustained by U.S. soldiers, the lifetime medical costs of treating injured soldiers, and U.S. outlays for humanitarian assistance and postwar reconstruction.
:
Factoring the contingencies into the analysis yields present value costs for the containment policy in the range of roughly $350 to $700 billion. These large sums are in the same ballpark as the likely costs of the Iraq intervention seen from the vantage point of early 2006. Thus, even with the benefit of partial hindsight, it is difficult to gauge whether the Iraq intervention is more costly than containment.

The problem with any such comparison, in my view, is one of apples and oranges. Today, the Bush administration stands criticized because — altogether, now — the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction has been a dismal failure.

Leaving the residual problems with that absolute pronouncement aside for the time being, the simple fact of the matter is that the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, is in a known state — to be more accurate about it, Saddam Hussein’s ability to use those weapons is in a state of some certainty. He can’t do it. So these policies yield disparate products, since with a policy of containment — as we all know by now — we got no freakin’ clue what the hell is going on in Iraq.

Another concern I have about the comparison: With our “lessons learned,” is there not some substantial savings to be realized, in a subsequent forceful displacement of some other hostile regime? This is a debate about policies, after all. I’m frequently told I should have the opinion that Donald Rumsfeld needs to go. Even those who say the Defense Secretary should stay where he is, concede that mistakes have been made in this go-round. Boy oh boy, that old fart Rumsfeld, he’s really biffed it here.

If one is to insist that our subsequent executions of this policy will involve equal-or-higher costs, and our hard-won wisdom from this implementation will yield no savings because our expenses over the last three years represent a bedrock minimum — is this not antithetical to the assertion that unforgivable mistakes have been made? It seems to me you can have one or the other, but not both.

Too Late, Neal; Too Late

Most of the time, when I finish writing a monster-sized post, I came up with the title before I’ve even jotted off a single word. I used to think it was better to go backwards — cover everything I wanted to cover, and then come up with something snappy that captures it all. But the posts that get the most positive feedback, I notice, are the ones where I came up with a title first, rambled on for a couple thousand words, and then somewhere near the end declared unambiguously how the title fits the content.

I’m not sure why that is. I think it’s because the reader is given some reason for plowing all the way through. They get an understanding of what’s being said, that would have eluded them had they done what comes naturally, and given up halfway through. It may also have to do with definition-of-scope: By writing down the title first, I’m given a narrow range of topics to discuss, when my own natural inclination would be to probe and prod every little thing under the sun. One way or the other, though, the goal has to be to make the title consistent with the content.

Well I think Neal Boortz failed to do that this morning.

SUE? SUE FOR WHAT?

As we get closer to the release of The Da Vinci Code in theatres worldwide we are beginning to see more and more reasons why we need to make sure a firm line between government and religion is drawn .. and stays drawn.

Catholic Cardinal Francis Arinze was considered to be a leading candidate for pope in last year’s papal election. Now Cardinal Arinze is making waves in another way … he’s suggesting that Catholics around the world file lawsuits against the movie. And just what does Cardinal Arinze see as the basis for a cause of action? Why, he is offended by the movie! Cardinal Arinze is taking the position that other religions (Islam?) won’t stand still for any offenses against their faith, and neither should Christians. It’s time, he says, for Christians go get tough. Get tough and file lawsuits.

Well … so much for the concept of freedom … especially freedom of expression. Here we have a book that has sold 40 million copies worldwide, and is now ready to debut on the silver screen, and we have this leading Roman Catholic talking about lawsuits … lawsuits because he is and other Catholics should be (gasp!) offended!

Bear in mind, now, that for me to say one single negative word about Cardinal Arinze and his call for lawsuits by easily-offended Catholics is nothing less than “Christian bashing” and is all the proof the world needs that Neal Boortz is a godless atheist.

Well .. I hate to disappoint, but an atheist I am not. I am also not a theocrat. I acknowledge and fear the huge numbers of people, both abroad and here at home, who are driven by a desire to gain control of the government’s exclusivity on the use of force in order to promote their own religious ideals. These are people who are not merely satisfied to live their lives in accordance with their deeply held beliefs; they feel compelled to see that you live your life as a testament to their religious viewpoints as well. It was these very people Ambrose Bierce had in mind when he defined a Christian as: “Someone who believes that the Bible is a divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the needs of his neighbor.”

The very act of a highly respected Cardinal suggesting that people attempt to use legal processes to prevent the distribution of a move that he finds offensive has placed a stain on the Catholic church. Let’s all watch carefully now to see if anyone in the Vatican actually steps forward to praise the concept of freedom and to defend our rights to express ourselves in our words and our writing.

I, for one, am not holding my breath.

Before we move on …. let’s acknowledge the fact that Cardinal Arinze’s words have the effect of giving aid and comfort to the world’s Islamic terrorists. The Muslim riots around Europe and the world over those silly Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper have now been somewhat legitimized by Cardinal Arinze’s words. Hey .. if Muslims can get upset and attack the principles of free speech and free expression, then why can’t Catholics? Today … lawsuits. Tomorrow …… ?

In this case, although the title of his piece says I should be perplexedly wondering on what grounds Christians can sue the movie, there is no residual question about such grounds, nor has Neal managed to create any question. Sue for what? Intentional infliction of emotional distress, of course! It’s been going on for generations now.

This is the problem with sentiments such as “we need to make sure a firm line between government and religion is drawn .. and stays drawn.” Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Well, how would you enforce that line here? The most logical inference I can draw, is that we need to stop any religious institution from filing lawsuits; and, further, we need to stop private, individual entities from filing lawsuits when they are motivated to do so by the ravings of some religious institution that happens to claim the plaintiff’s membership and fidelity.

Now, how do we do that? By throwing out the lawsuits? I guess so; that’s the only way you could enforce such a rule. But waitaminnit! That would be transcending the line between church and state, if nothing else would be…wouldn’t it?

Let’s get one thing straight. Position-wise, I agree with Boortz a hundred percent about the “freedom of expression” concerns, and also on the issue of legitimizing the Muslim weirdos who are protesting the Danish cartoons. The point where I part company with him, has to do not with inferences, but with the thing-to-do. He’s insisting that the barn door be slammed shut decades after the last whiff of horse dross wafted through the barn. It’s too late, Neal. People have been litigating over having their private sensibilities somehow aggravated, and if “freedom of expression” was ever to be defended, the right time to defend it would have been the very first time a lawsuit like that was ever filed. In the name of the First Amendment, throw the sucker out right then and there. In the name of grave concerns about where such a precedent might take us. I’d be all for that. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge this was not done.

And now, heck ya, Christians can sue The Davinci Code because their Catholic overlord told them they’re offended. Women can sue Neal Boortz for the content of his newsletter, because their seniors in whatever feminist cabal they belong to, told them to litigate. And people can read my blog, and sue me, because the guy they sell Amway with, told them to.

We live in a culture where people are “offended” by something only because someone else told them they’re offended — very seldom does anyone make their mind up, independently, “hey, that offends me.” Those few movers-and-shakers who make the decision that something is offensive, like Cardinal Arinze, decide such things based on a desire to inflict change and accumulate power…something that has very, very little to do with taking personal offense to something.

And, of course, nobody ever gets “offended” and makes the decision it’s their own cross to bear in silence. Heck no. Wherever there are ten offended people, you can guarantee nine lawsuits, maybe more. Were I to travel back in time five decades and tell people this is where things are headed, they’d think this encapsulation of future events far more harebrained and worthy of the straightjacket, than the story of time-travel itself.

But look around. Read the news. That’s the way things work now. Dictatorship via lawsuit via “hey I’m offended.” The Catholic Church simply wants a chunk of power, the same chunk of power everybody else has. Oh sure, they’ve been powerful in many other ways, for thousands of years now; but they want power on this playing field, too. And why shouldn’t they have it? If one is to presume we have a right to not-be-offended, then that has to be a basic human right, as basic and all-encompassing as the right not to get punched in the nose. These are rights we all enjoy, or else none of us do.

Separation of Church and State? It’s too late for that, too. Islam is a church, after all. Three months ago Islamic protesters let their angst be known, often violently, over the nonsensical issue of Danish cartoons. They were offended because their Mullahs told them to be offended. Now, I would be on thin ice to accuse Boortz himself of being inconsistent here, of course. I could go on a search for things he said, sticking up for common-sense and freedom-of-expression for the cartoonists, and I’d bring back all kinds of fresh meat. But where was everybody else? No, the prevailing wisdom was that “freedom of expression” was such a peripheral concern, it was deplorable to even utter the three words in commentary about the issue at hand — unless, in context, you were talking about the “freedom of expression” of the arsonists, not the cartoonists. As far as the God-given right of the cartoonists to draw whatever they want and to express whatever ideas they wanted to, this was simply a red herring. It was too offeeeeeeeeeeeensive to certain classes of people, or so those classes of people said.

The precedent has been set. The Cardinal is calling for lawsuits, not arson. I wish the precedent was not there, like Neal. But I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist, just because I dislike it. We’ve danced to the tune by not speaking up when we should have, and now we have to pay the piper: Everyone can be an activist, anytime, anyplace. What a wonderful thing when you’re trying to stop something; what a pain in the ass when you just want to watch a movie.

It’s a good lesson about paying attention when people grab power. Pay attention not only to who is getting the power, but why they’re getting it. Think long and hard, right there and then — not later — about who else could grab power the same way.

The older I get, the more I notice the reasons people get power, stay fairly consistent, subject to change only through an occasional mini-revolution that you have to wait a generation to see happen…maybe even longer than that. The classes of people who grab that power according to those reasons, on the other hand, change like the seasons.

Asking For Directions

Here, chew on this:

What can you actually do, in your everyday life, with the results of a study that say men waste millions of hours every year by getting lost and refusing to ask for directions? Note that my question is not “what can you find to complain about,” but what can you actually DO with the information?

Mapless males prefer to remain lost

BRITISH male drivers waste nearly six million hours a year lost on the road because they are reluctant to ask for directions.

Men who are lost wait an average of 20 minutes before giving up and asking for directions, while women only wait 10 minutes before seeking help, a survey from Royal Automobile Club Direct Insurance said.

Men endured a “nagging period” of around 10 minutes from their partner before throwing in the towel and stopped to ask the way, the poll showed.

Based on responses from 2000 adults, the survey also revealed:

* About 64 per cent of couples admitted to having arguments over getting lost on the road.

* Only 27 per cent of couples planned their journeys before setting off.

* Just 36 per cent of couples relied on landmarks and road signs to find their destination

* One in four couples still scribble down basic directions on scrap paper.

Here’s another question: How do you go about measuring “an average of 20 minutes”? Every woman I’ve been married to, would say I drive around for damn near six hours without asking for directions. How do you get the final answer to be all scientifical so you can do your study on it? How about that “nagging period”? How do you go about getting the emotional entanglement out of this, so you can get a scientificably measurable figger you can put in the study? Doesn’t the word “average” imply that every sampling taken had a bearing on the bottom-line number? What, then, is done about the wives who say “he drove around for a million years before he asked for directions”?

Here’s yet another question: What could you actually do with the information provided in a study — a study not conducted anywhere, so far as I know — statistically measuring the accuracy of directions provided, once requested by these lost male drivers who, for whatever reason, finally ask for them?

Oy. There’s a thought.

Maybe someone should commission a study about that. We could divide the samplings into directions that are incorrect, despite the best of intentions on the part of those who give them; directions that are correct; directions that may as well be incorrect, because they’re completely incomprehensible; directions that are incorrect, because of malice and sick humor on the part of he who gives them; and, let’s see, is there anything else. Ah yes, probably the biggest slice of the pie: Directions which reflect a great deal more certainty, cosmetically, than what the source really has — because after all, people who give directions hate looking ignorant, even more than, more than, uh, well you know…male drivers.

Now, to all those male drivers who like to drive around endlessly without asking for directions, this study would be equally useless. But it would be critically important to anyone, male or female, who believes in asking for directions wouldn’t it? I wonder who could do this kind of research?

You know, it could very well be there already are people who do this kind of research. They’re called “male drivers.”

Perhaps this has some bearing on the subject at hand…

This morning on I-95, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand new Cadillac doing 65 mph with her face up next to her rear view mirror putting on her eyeliner.

I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.

As a man, I don’t scare easily. But she scared me so much; I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand.

In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear, which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone, soaked my trousers and disconnected an important call.

Damn women drivers!

This Is Good IV

I have absolutely nothing to add to this. I got it from here, although it appears to be composed for an e-mail forum first and posted there afterward. I especially like the last sentence.

History of Politics

History of politics began some 40,000 years ago. Humans existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundations of modern civilization and, together, were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can was invented yet, so while our early human ancestors were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to barbeque at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as “the Conservative movement.”

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the Conservatives by showing up for the nightly barbeques and doing the sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlymen.

Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.

Over the years, Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern Liberals like imported beer (with lime added) & foo foo coffee, but most prefer white wine or imported, bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard Liberal fare.

Another interesting evolutionary side note: Most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn’t “fair” to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, fighter pilots, athletes and generally anyone who works productively outside government. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to “govern” the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the Liberals remained in Europe when Conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tame and created a business of trying to get MORE for nothing.

Here ends today’s lesson in world history. It should be noted that a Liberal will have an uncontrollable urge to respond to the above instead of simply laughing and deleting or forwarding it.

Commander In Hypocrisy

I would love to see Condoleeza Rice become the next U.S. President. One of my most important reasons for wanting to see this come about, is a puerile desire to see hypocrisy exposed.

The White House Project, which outwardly seems to push for a Rice presidency as much as a Hillary Clinton presidency, seeks to increase voting and leadership among females, with an ultimate goal of putting a woman in the White House. Maybe I should start a project like this. After all, I’d love to see a software development geek with a high school education in the White House. Or, even better still, I’d like to see a raging cheapskate in the White House.

Party-neutral, the White House Project may very well be. But they had quite the liberal love-fest going on Tuesday night as they honored Geena Davis, not for being a woman President, but for playing one on TV.

To the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” actress Geena Davis accepted an award night for her television portrayal of the first woman president of the United States from an organization which is seeking to turn fiction into reality.

When the star of the ABC television show “Commander in Chief” got to the podium Tuesday, she was given a red, white and blue sash to put on over her gown, similar to one worn by Chile’s first woman president, Michelle Bachelet. “This is the coolest thing I ever got! Wow I love it!,” she said.

“So many countries have had a female head of state before us,” she told the 500 guests at a dinner in the U.N. Delegates Dining Room. “So it is certainly time.”

The award was presented by The White House Project, a non-profit organization which works to promote women’s voting, political participation and leadership, with a goal of putting a woman in the White House.

“Every interviewer eventually says, `Do you think we will see a female president in our lifetime?’, Davis said.

“I think it’s appalling that we haven’t yet. The crime is not that it’s taken so long, but why haven’t we done it yet?” she said to loud applause from the predominantly female audience that included Martha Stewart and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

Davis, who plays President Mackenzie Allen, said she was thrilled and honored to receive the award because she cares so much about empowering girls and women.

“Year in and year out there are real-life gains being made by women, but there is still a huge gender disparity,” she said. “It really shows up in my industry. For every president Allen, there are a hundred never-rans. There are fewer (women) victors than victims. There are fewer (women) leaders than followers, fewer women than men, and fewer girls than boys.”

But “if elected to another season _ un term,” Davis said to more laughter, “… whatever I can do to make change happen quicker in the fake world, I promise to do.”

Filmmaker Rod Lurie, the creater of “Commander in Chief” also received an award and called the question of whether the United States is ready for a female president “insulting.”

“From now on, my answer is, `Are we ready for more of what we have got?,'” he said.

“Females represent 51 percent of the country and it’s absurd that they’re not represented in the highest level of power, and not even given that opportunity,” Lurie said.

But he said things may be changing.

“There’s a lot of firepower in the world ladies and gentelmen,” Lurie said. “There’s lots of it, but there’s no weapon as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project, said the EPIC Awards acknowledge the power of media and popular culture, and she thanked Davis and Lurie “for bringing the concept of a female president to life, and doing it so well.”

Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during 1991 hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court, presented another award to Jeff Skoll, founder of Participant Productions for making “North Country,” a movie about courageous women who led a fight against sexual harassment in Minnesota mines,

“I for one am thankful that we live in an age where we have role models like Anita Hill to show us the way forward,” Skoll said. “We’re also grateful that the White House Project” is working to see that a woman becomes president.

Ooooohhhhh…how I’d love to see all the long faces in this crowd when President Rice places her hand on the bible and takes the oath. Hey look everybody, it’s the first single black woman who is also an accomplished piano player who is our new President. We get all these “firsts” on the very same day! Cool deal, huh? Oh, yeah. Champagne and scrambled eggs for breakfast that day, to be sure.

Remember this movie? It’s the one where Demi Moore pleases Michael Douglas orally, over his objections while he begs her not to. Heh. Well, a lot of people don’t remember the very last scene…it’s much, much more realistic than the “oh please don’t give me a blow job” scene. It goes like this: Demi Moore, the viper-like villainess, has been fired. The boss goes to the floor, and announces that he hired the viper because he had a real soft spot for women. His daughter had been killed during a mountain-climbing excursion, and he had made up his mind to get a woman into this critical executive position…and so it was filled by Demi Moore, who proceeded to do all these terrible, cold-blooded awful things. So this time around, he was going to pick the best person, and hell with whether it was a woman or not.

And he did pick a good person. It was…well, that gets into the plot of the movie. But the point was, at the end of the movie the position is filled by someone who is very, very good and morally upstanding and trustworthy…and a woman. He picked a better woman, because this time around, he wasn’t trying so hard to get a woman.

There is something philosophically deep in that. You might say it was an exact repeat of Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination to fill Sandra O’Connor’s seat last year — except Harriet Meirs isn’t accused anywhere of being evil or cold-blooded, just not as good a justice as Alito. And, of course, Alito is not a woman. But the point holds. If you want to end up with someone really good, the first step is to consider everyone who is interested in filling the position, regardless of the class from which they come. It just makes sense. And ultimately, that’s the kindest thing you can do for whoever ends up getting the nod. Because otherwise, it could be said that they got the job even though they weren’t really the best candidate. Who needs that kind of grief?

Oh by the way, we don’t have anything in place keeping women from running for President. They certainly are “given that opportunity,” Mr. Lurie.

Ms. Davis’ opportunity to play pretend, on the other hand, has come to an inglorious end.

ABC TV has put an abrupt term limit on its freshman drama, “Commander in Chief.”

The network Tuesday announced it was pulling the Geena Davis series for the rest of May sweeps and running the newsmagazine “Primetime” in its 10 p.m. Thursday slot for the final three weeks of the season, Zap2it.com reported.

The series started as one of the most-watched in the fall and Davis won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of the first female U.S. president.

However, two extended breaks and behind-the-scenes changes as well as a schedule move from Tuesday to Thursday all contributed to a deep slide in ratings.

“Commander’s” three Thursday night shows have averaged about 7.5 million viewers, which means half the viewers who tuned in during the fall are now focused elsewhere, Zap2it.com said.

ABC said it would probably air the final three episodes sometime during the summer.

I’ll bet there’s a hell of a lot more than 7.5 million people who agree with me about this: I don’t give a rat’s ass what the gender is of our next president. Forty-two of the occupants of that office, had the same plumbing that I have. Many of them have done things with which I disagree…and I can think of several people with different plumbing, who would be likely to promote policies more to my liking, Dr. Rice the most prominent among them.

Personally, I think female-ness hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything. These people want a liberal woman in the White House. Some things are just obvious.

Union Shenanigans

I caught wind of yet another sensible plan being put in place by that Arizona headline-grabber, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This time, the issue is illegal immigration. His office is being forced to use its resources to round up illegal immigrants who are creating heavy traffic through very critical spots in Arizona’s border. So he’s setting up a good, ol’fashioned posse.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department will draw from existing deputies and members of its 3,000-member posse reserve � made up of trained, unpaid volunteers � to form the illegal-immigration posse.

The 100-member illegal-immigration posse will join 57 other specialized department posses that target specific crimes, including animal cruelty and prostitution.

The effort is an attempt to slow the tide of illegal immigrants into the county, Arizona’s most populous, said Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“It’s important to send the message out to stay in Mexico and don’t come roaming around here hoping you’re going to get amnesty,” Arpaio said. “They ought to stay cool, stay in Mexico and wait until this illegal-immigration problem is solved. If they don’t do that and they come to Maricopa County, they’re going straight to jail.”

The Sheriff’s Department began arresting illegal immigrants in March under a state smuggling law that went into effect in August. Under the law � as interpreted by Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas � illegal immigrants can be arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle themselves into the country.

The law’s authors have said they intended it to be used to prosecute smugglers, not the immigrants being smuggled. It’s been used against smugglers in at least one other Arizona county.

“I support the concept, but I also support the rule of law,” said Rep. Jonathan Paton, R-Tucson, who co-wrote the smuggling law. “So this kind of left me with mixed feelings at the end of the day because (the law) is something we thought we had pretty tightly worded, and they’re using it for something we didn’t intend.”

Okay, now this is pretty interesting. I’m a big fan of “original intent” when laws are interpreted by courts and law enforcement agencies. But there’s also an intriguing question inspired by this: How can it be illegal to hop over a fence, and then when you get arrested for hopping over it, said arrest goes against the original intent of the law? I mean — once again — for cryin’ out loud, is it illegal or isn’t it?

Well, it turns out the law being mentioned is quite the hot-button issue in Arizona. It is the “illegal-entrant” law, and it took effect in August 2005. Two of the lingering questions involved are 1) Is it constitutional for Arizona to take up the responsibility of securing the border, which is rightfully a federal issue; and 2) Can you arrest the illegal aliens themselves, when you enforce an anti-smuggling law?

A lot of this was covered in an article that appeared in AZCentral some six months ago:

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard declined Friday to say whether he agreed with Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas’ opinion that undocumented immigrants suspected of using smugglers to bring them into the country can be arrested and charged under a new state law against human smuggling.

Goddard said his office does not have authority to issue its own opinion on the reach of the new law unless it receives a formal request from a client, typically a state agency or elected official, and that he has received no such request. The new law, which the Legislature approved last spring, took effect in August.

“I think it’s a very tricky problem,” Goddard said Friday when asked about the opinion Thomas issued this week. “The state law may have some additional elements, Thomas seems to conclude, that we didn’t have when the citizen arrests took place.”

Googling further, I came across this recent article with a highly suspicious headline: “Police oppose illegal-entrant law”. Now, I’ll tell you why this kind of thing stinks to high heaven, at least in my world. I’ve noticed this for a long time. Police do not oppose the idea of arresting people for doing illegal things, any more than firemen oppose the idea of putting out fires. Talking to real cops, as people, my experience has been that when they have political leanings, the leanings have something to do with making their jobs easier.

Nobody has a track record of pretending to be cops, except for cop-unions. My nostrils filled with the acrid stench of union thuggery, but what do I know? So far, it’s just my own personal prejudices, nothing else. I needed to learn more, so I was inclined to read on:

The Legislature’s plan to criminalize the presence of illegal immigrants in the state is promoted as a way to lessen Arizona’s vast border problems, but it also is drawing opposition from many of the local police agencies that would enforce such a rule.

Opponents say the plan, now being considered by Gov. Janet Napolitano, is an unconstitutional attempt for the state to regulate federal immigration law and would lead to fewer immigrants’ cooperating in criminal investigations for fear of being sent back home. [emphasis mine]

Okay, so far everything seems to be on the up-and-up. I’m a little bit concerned about the “plan now being considered by Gov. Janet Napolitano” — this is an article that appeared just three weeks ago. Was the law not already signed some eight months earlier?

But that really isn’t the issue. I want to know about these police officers. Are they afraid of the resources being tapped out? So let’s go further…

Police officials also criticized the enforcement plan for not providing extra money to arrest the tens of thousands of people who sneak into Arizona, the country’s busiest illegal-entry point. A separate plan moving through the Legislature would provide communities with $30 million for immigration efforts.

Ah hah. So it is a resources issue, after all. That seems very reasonable…with the exception that, hey, enforcing the law is what police are all about. State law, federal law, it really doesn’t matter in the big picture. Something is illegal, it’s illegal. Illegal alien breaks a federal law, gets in here, and because he’s illegal you don’t know who he is or what his background is — that’s what illegal means. So it wouldn’t be too surprising when you have some carjacking, maybe a rape or two…I don’t think those are legal in the state of Arizona. So it’s not terribly likely a cop would say “if it’s illegal, but it doesn’t break any of my laws, I don’t want to know about it.”

I read further…

“Thirty-million dollars is a drop in the bucket,” said Eric Edwards, executive director of the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, which opposes the plan.

Sonofabitch! There you go. Another damned union passing themselves off as “The Police.”

I’ve written about this before, although I can’t remember when. This is a thoroughly reprehensible practice we shouldn’t be tolerating. We’re supposed to read in the paper that “police oppose” some common-sense law enforcement rule, which one would normally expect would make their jobs easier; then, we’re supposed to take to the streets, and use the poweer of the grapevine to tell each other “well, I’m not sure what the logic is, but it turns out if you’re a policeman this isn’t a good idea…I was reading this morning that ‘the police’ oppose the new law…”

When, actually, it’s “the police” that oppose the whatever-it-is, if and only if the union takes a poll from its membership about the issue. Which unions NEVER do, of course. ASSHOLES. But it gets much better.

Republican Sen. Barbara Leff of Paradise Valley, who proposed the bill, said her plan is a second layer of enforcement to catch immigrants who slip past federal border agents.

Leff said the proposal is primarily a means to detain illegal immigrants until federal authorities can pick them up. Police agencies say they don’t have the legal authority to detain illegal immigrants, unless they have violated state law.

Local police who come across illegal immigrants have to release them when federal immigration agents fail to pick them up, according to Leff. “We hear these stories every day,” she said.

Waitaminnit, now! Rep. Paton said he thought he got the law all pretty tightly worded, and this was not his intent. Did he talk to Rep. Barbara Leff about intent? Didn’t they hash this out when they were wording things, you know, pretty tightly?

This whole thing has the stink of a simple issue being made deliberately complicated so that the right thing has a decent chance of not getting done. We live in a republic of interdependent but sovereign states. That does not mean when a state law enforcement guy catches you breaking a federal law, he’s duty-bound to stand their with his hands in his pockets, chewing on a big ol’ wad of gum, watching you, muttering “dadburn it, I wish I had the authority to do something.”

When’s the last time a state patrol guy pulled you over for speeding, and said “unfortunately, you’re within city limits, so I’ll have to let you go”? What are these opponents trying to get happening, anyway? The smuggler gets booked on a felony, while the illegal aliens who hired him, just mosey along to the nearest town to get their fake drivers’ licenses? Maybe pick up a half-gallon of cold water on the way? Some complimentary nudie magazines and chewing tobacco? So that “The Constitution” can be upheld…some magical text in the U.S. Constitution, that these advocates can’t even point out to me if I ask them to? While laws are broken, repeatedly and blatantly, and cops have been muscled into looking the other way? What’s that got to do with law and order, Mister Police Chief’s Association guy?

That the state legislature has to even move a muscle, before the state cop can do anything about what is patently illegal, is ridiculous. That lawsuits and union huffery-puffery should ensue, once the legislature has invested the authority, is reprehensible. That spineless politicians should say that investing the authority was not their original intent, when said investment was the whole object of the exercise in the first place, is a joke. And, that a union should go masquerading as “The Cops,” once again, is just yet another insult.

Some of this is just the way politics work. Some of the rest of it, is a bunch of nonsense that people can make a conscious decision to tolerate…or not. And I hope they don’t.

My Bread Club

Oh my goodness how serious things have been lately, with 9/11 terrorists getting away with mass murder, fast food people throwing boiling oil on their customers, Al Gore running around telling everybody the world is coming to an end…Jesus holding a Winchester…and a bunch of other stuff. Time for lighter fare.

I chose to slightly modify a plain-old-bread recipe I’ve been using in my breadmaker, with pretty good success. For reasons that will be explained, I’ve chosen to call the modification “Brain Bread” until I get some kinks worked out. The orthodox recipe is as follows…

…and to this successful concoction, I added…

Couldn’t resist peaking at the process as the paddle worked its magic. There was a lot of curdling involved. I had to add maybe 2 Tbsp butter to get it to churn right, otherwise the paddle wouldn’t mix it.

It came out all wrinkly, like a brain. Had to bust it up into three pieces to get it out of the pan. But it tastes great. Too good to throw away.

This afternoon I bought a quart of buttermilk, and I’ll try it with that. I’m thinking that 3/4 C of milk needs some tweaking. I’ll post some updates as they become available.

“To Serve Man” is a COOKBOOK!

If you have a supervisory job where retail people report to you, and you’ve got a few good eggs, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job — but I got a gut feel you’re going to be well-rewarded if you go the extra mile to hang onto the good ones.

Something is terribly wrong what what’s happening in retail.

I got into it in a chat room with a few people who have experience in retail, many of whom made the rash assumption that I don’t — a falsity I chose not to correct. The issue was the 17-year-old fast food worker who chose to throw boiling hot grease on someone, because he/she was spat upon.

A fast-food worker tossed a cup of hot grease on a customer, giving the woman second- and third-degree burns on her arms and chest, authorities said.

“My skin was cooking,” said Vouncile Lambert, 44, who was treated at a hospital.

The 17-year-old worker was charged with aggravated assault. The employee, who had worked at the Checkers restaurant in West Philadelphia for about two months, will be fired, a restaurant manager said Wednesday.

Lambert’s 36-year-old niece had spit on the employee, a police report said.

Our point of dispute was simply along the lines of whether the fast food worker was a “hero” or not. Who, after all, has ever worked in retail, and not wanted to do the same thing at some point?

Unbelievable.

You know, I’m not too worried about being doused with hot grease when I deal with retail people. But it does help to explain why it’s been so freakin’ long, since the last time I asked someone a question — someone who was paid good money to answer my questions, within reason — and received an intelligible answer, relevant to my question, consistent with the truth. I have trouble remembering the last time that happened.

And now, I think I know why.

I can be as polite as I wanna be, saying please, thank you, how are you today, etc. etc. etc. And yet, if you’re the retail person talking to me, it’ll still be kind of hard to correctly interpret my question so you can supply a useful answer to it, if you think I’m just a walking, talking, raw Chicken McNugget.

Because it’s become a little on the unusual side that a retail person will solve more problems than he or she creates, I’ve taken to making sure people know when I come in contact with a good retail person. I have another habit too, though. I also make a point to avoid retail people when I can. I buy goods and services that don’t involve interacting with anybody.

I do not know if I’m the only person on the planet who does this. But then, I get to read about outsourcing jobs. Tech support jobs, retail jobs, etc. We’re supposed to be oh so worried about it.

Especially those retail people. Retail people who think other retail people are heroes, when they dish out the hot grease to those oh-so-deserving, snotty, rude customers. Yeah, that boss-man is oh, so wrong, so very wrong, when he says “the customer is always right,” isn’t he? Customers are stupid, rude, white-trash hayseed hicks.

Hey, retail people. You’re doing it to yourselves.

Where is the outrage toward this poor representative of your ranks? Where is the sentiment of “Oh my God, he/she gave us such a BAD NAME”? Where is it? What’s up with the attitude that this person is some kind of hero, dishing out the payback you would love to dish out yourselves…while you’re not worrying about your job being outsourced to India?

I’m sorry, I just have this special hostility for people who want to make money off other people, whom they would just as soon wish away to the cornfield. That seems to be what’s happening with retail, sad to say.

Within the last week, I noted about about the then-upcoming “Day Without An Immigrant” protests, that comparisons to the 1960’s-era civil rights marches were problematic. Protesters, back then, protested against a status quo that contradicted itself. Protesters, today, contradict themselves, while protesting a status quo that is consistent.

Quite simply, all persons within the United States enjoyed equal protection under the law and due process — but, at the same time, they didn’t. The protesters did not contradict themselves; the law they sought to change, contradicted itself.

This Monday, the protesters will be breaking some laws, while enjoying the protections afforded by other laws, and simultaneously telling us what yet other laws should be saying. Do they live within the law, or don’t they? The answer seems to depend on which law is under discussion. Are we all beholden to the law and obliged to live under it, or are we not? The answer seems to depend on which class is being subjected to that law.

I do not know if Brendon L. Laster reads my blog. I would suspect that hardly anybody does. But how else do you explain this gem which appeared in the New York Times this morning:

“All of this has made me start thinking, ‘What’s going to happen to African-Americans?’ ” said Brendon L. Laster, 32, a black fund-raiser at Howard University here, who has been watching the marches. “What’s going to happen to our unfinished agenda?”

Mr. Laster is dapper and cosmopolitan, a part-time professor and Democratic activist who drinks and dines with a wide circle of black, white and Hispanic friends. He said he marveled at first as the images of cheering, flag-waving immigrants flickered across his television screen. But as some demonstrators proclaimed a new civil rights movement, he grew uncomfortable.

He says that immigrant protesters who claim the legacy of Dr. King and Rosa Parks are going too far. And he has begun to worry about the impact that the emerging immigrant activism will have on black Americans, many of whom still face poverty, high rates of unemployment and discrimination in the workplace.

“I think what they were able to do, the level of organization they were able to pull off, that was phenomenal,” said Mr. Laster, who is also a part-time sociology professor at a community college in Baltimore. “But I do think their struggle is, in fundamental ways, very different from ours. We didn’t chose to come here; we came here as slaves. And we were denied, even though we were legal citizens, our basic rights.”

“There are still a lot of unresolved issues from the civil rights era,” he said. “Perhaps we’re going to be pushed to the back burner.” [emphasis mine]

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

What Are You Saying Here, Neal?

Quothe the Talkmaster, a.k.a. Atlanta’s favorite son Neal Boortz, in his program notes this morning:

Yesterday, the jury in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing phase of the trial reached a verdict: Moussaoui would be given a life sentence. No death penalty. In case you’re wondering who Moussaoui is, he’s the only person to be tried in the attacks of 9/11. He was supposed to have been one of the hijackers…flying a plane into the White House. It didn’t work out and he was arrested instead.

So the jury passed on death. Instead of sending this scumbag to meet Mohammed, he’ll be enjoying the next several decades in prison. Free room and board…all paid for by the taxpayers of the nation he attacked. So why didn’t he get death, as he deserved?

Three of the jurors said he only had limited knowledge of what was going to happen on 9/11. Only “limited” knowledge. What does it take for him to be responsible? Are we supposed to spare his life because he didn’t golf with Mohammed Atta on the weekends? Three other jurors offered as their excuse that Moussaoui only had a minor role in 9/11. A minor role.

OK … full disclosure here. As I’ve said on the air, if I was on that jury I might have a difficult time voting for the death penalty myself. He didn’t participate, he didn’t plan. There’s just the argument that he knew about it. Do we really want to start executing people because they knew a crime was going to be committed, and didn’t tell someone?

Something to think about.

Uh…yeah. Yeah, we do. I don’t see the problem.

Look, I think we can all agree the paramount issue is the possibility of executing a guy who shouldn’t be executed. When we beat that horse to death, though, what we’re really talking about, is a wholly different issue: Deciding legal consequences based on feelings instead of by rational thought. That is the real issue.

Well, the fact of the matter is that a huge chunk among our population consists of people who are self-programmed to decide everything based on feelings instead of thought. A lot of these people, wonderful people as they may be, are simply incapable of pronouncing the more stringent consequence upon a defendant, even if the evidence concretely supports that this is what they should do. They simply can’t do it. The principles of our jury system being left in place to have a consistent influence on ensuing events, the logical thing to happen would be that these people be automatically excused. Of course, that isn’t done. So they serve. And they decide things based on feelings.

Trouble is, while everybody “loses sleep” over convicting a man who may be innocent — nobody loses a wink over letting a guilty guy go. I saw it when I served on a jury. We got a lot of people out there who can review the evidence and the rules of conduct for jurors, and see that every scintilla of material before them leaves them no reasonable option but to convict — and before they cast that vote, they “feel” bad. So they have to change the vote. They can’t explain why. It just doesn’t feel right.

My comments about “12 Angry Men” (1957) sum this problem up, I think.

The question that drives the movie is whether the jurors have properly awarded the defendant the benefit of any reasonable doubt, and as the climax approaches, the attention given to this reaches a fevered pitch. Left behind in the dust, is the equally critical question of whether the defendant is really guilty. There’s a scene early on when Jack Warden, the juror who just wants to get the voting over with so he can watch a ball game, meets Henry Fonda in the washroom. The last two lines in that scene discuss the possibility that the boy may be acquitted, even though he is guilty. Fonda says something to the effect of “that very well may be” or some such, and to my recollection this is the last time this possibility is even considered.

The jury may have released a murderer onto the streets. You can make the argument that with the presence of reasonable doubt, this was their job. I agree. But as Henry Fonda walks down the courthouse steps to resume his everyday life as an architect, would it really then be fitting to have the happy “a wrong has been righted” swelling-orchestra music, as our hero walks proudly among his fellow citizens with his head held high? Doubt or no, conviction or no, this kind of peace-of-mind is not lying in wait for you after your last day on a real jury. There are jurors who want it anyway, and because of that, will not convict anyone. They have seen this movie, and want to be Henry Fonda. I’ve served with them. It’s a pretty serious problem.

There you have it in a nutshell. People think they’re weighing both sides of the issue, but the issue of public safety too often is left, as I said, “in the dust.” Ever since Henry Fonda taught us how to be “disturbed” by the evidence that “proves” a guy’s guilt, everybody wants to be Henry Fonda. Everybody wants to be Juror #8.

Now I’ll grant you, LWOP (life without possibility of parole) is not being released “onto the streets.” In Moussaoui’s case, that’s an important distinction because there really is no substantial reason to think he will ever be on the streets.

But he might as well be, propaganda wise, and what is the War on Terror, to the terrorists, if it is not a propaganda campaign?

Zacarias Moussaoui said “God save Osama bin Laden” as a judge prepared to sentence him to life in prison for conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We will come back another day,” Moussaoui said in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, a day after a jury spared him from the death penalty for the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

“God curse America, God save Osama in Laden, you will never get him,” Moussaoui said. “I fight for my beliefs. You think that you own the world and I will prove that you are wrong.”

Moussaoui, and all who sympathize with him, think we’re just a bunch of pansies and our country’s time on this planet is coming to an end. Why in the world shouldn’t they? In all of human history, continuing survival has never been inextricably linked with refusal to punish the guilty. And yet that refusal to punish the guilty, infests America like a thick plague.

So I dunno. I have not reviewed the evidence the way a jury would have, and I have an open mind. But I need to hear something better. I need to hear something that does not begin with the words “do we really want to start executing…” Because speaking for myself, I’m a little surprised by the suggestion we have not started executing co-conspirators just because their fingers weren’t actually on the triggers. I thought we could already do that.

Update: You can review the official jury poll form for yourself, here.

This Kind Of Diversity We Don’t Need

di�verse
Function: adjective
1 : differing from one another : UNLIKE
2 : composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities

Diversity is, simply, the quality that multiple things have when they are diverse. Trouble is, the locomotive of orthodox cultural use has left the track of dictionary definition. In this case, when we talk about diversity we usually refer to some kind of cultural value; something you can celebrate. This is irreconcilably incompatible with the two definitions above, both of which seek to describe a purely mathematical attribute. Let us, then, call this definition #3. Specifically, it’s the absence of prejudice and bigotry. If pinheadedness prevailed, everyone within a given set of privileged individuals, would look alike. But this use of the word exchanges one flavor of pinheadedness for another kind, for the assumptions that demand uncompromising allegiance are 1) diversity (defs. #1 and #2) can’t co-exist with even a trace of prejudice, so even a little of the former proves that the latter has been fully driven out; and 2) should diversity (defs. #1 and #2) be lacking in any way, this is concrete evidence that some unacceptable, residual level of prejudice must still be in place.

Both of those assumptions are suspect. No sane man would bet his left testicle on either one of them.

Gary Larson has yet another definition. He says: “One of the goals of diversity is that we co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.” Mr. Larson is a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Corrections, which has just gone through a little bit of a flap about diversity.

A “diversity calendar” published by the state Department of Corrections that lists the birthdays of several controversial historical figures, including the Japanese commander who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, has angered at least one employee and Sen. Jim Honeyford, who called it a “personal affront to veterans.”

Honeyford, R-Sunnyside, wrote Corrections Director Harold Clarke requesting an explanation for why the April and May calendars recognize Isoroku Yamamoto, Lenin, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh.

“A Washington state agency supported by taxpayer funds has absolutely no place painting these individuals as worthy of the support of the state and its employees in the name of ‘diversity,’ especially when their birthdays are given exactly the same weight as Veterans’ Day,” Honeyford wrote in a letter sent earlier this week.

The monthly calendars are a part of the department’s “workplace diversity program” and are sent to agency employees only. Many state agencies have diversity programs to promote tolerance and understanding of different races, cultures, religions and ethnicities.

Honeyford said in a telephone interview Friday that copies of the calendars were sent to his office.

“I opened it up and looked at it and was shocked,” he said. “To me, if you’re going to represent diversity, it should be someone worthy of honor, and I have a great deal of difficulty with these bloodthirsty people who killed a lot of people.”

Gary Larson, a spokesman for Corrections, said the calendars are not celebrations of individuals.

“Basically, the purpose of this calendar was meant to be an instructional tool that just lists people who had an impact on the world and provoke thought. The intent was certainly not to be offensive to veterans or anyone else,” he said. “One of the goals of diversity is that we co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.”

The monthly calendars are distributed by e-mail and larger, printed versions are posted around the agency. Larson said the cost is “nominal.”

Now for what it’s worth, I can see Mr. Larson’s point. It’s just that he’s using yet another definition of the word “diversity,” a definition that, like the meaningful one above, isn’t documented anywhere. Let us call this definition #4. He’s talking about a values-neutral form of diversity. Good guys, bad guys, let’s “celebrate” ’em all.

Of course what nobody’s going to talk about, is this kind of diversity has strong appeal to the moral relativists who insist there is no good and there is no bad. Lookee, a calendar that celebrates them all in an equal light, just the way the moral relativists and nihilists like it. If veterans are offended by that…well, you know what? They have every right to be. Some of them were inducted into their service, by means of a draft — but are proud of that service. Others of them volunteered for service, something you simply can’t do if you don’t believe that things matter. Supporting the nihilist viewpoint, or doing something that can be reasonably seen as supporting it, has to be an intellectual insult to these people.

And this creates another problem. When the “suits” start talking about definition #3, waxing eloquently about “valuing diversity,” this necessarily has to have a substantially different meaning than the definition #4 the spokesman is talking about. Simply put, you don’t “value” something that is antithetical to any and all sense of “value.” Values are cherished, or else they’re not.

This is a problem. Definitions #3 and #4 have very, very little in common, since one of them upholds ideals as a primary purpose of the definition exercise, and the other definition seeks to abstain from upholding anything. The only thing the two definitions have in common, is an intrinsic hostility to “traditional” values and the “traditional” elite classes. The “we gotta have more diversity” definition insists that the six-foot-tall white-anglo-saxon-protestants be blocked from promotion until someone else has a shot, barred from acceptance at prestigious universities, perhaps fired. The nihilistic definition, simply says the “good guys” aren’t any better than anyone else; Prince John is just as worthy a person as Robin Hood.

This is fascinating to me. We live in a time when you ask for “coffee” and anyone positioned to fulfill your order, is paralyzed from any real action until umptyfratz-many implied ambiguities in your request are cleared up on the spot. Decaf? Latte? Mocha? Cold or hot? Americano Machiatto? Room for cream? Soy or milk? And yet when you use the word “diversity,” even very cursory exploration of the definition is tantamount to yelling that the Emperor has no clothes, and is thus not done. But you may, easily, be using one of two directly opposite definitions. The two definitions are not listed in the dictionary, nor do they adequately resemble anything you will find there. And the two definitions have nothing, absolutely nothing in common — except an ingrained hostility to the traditional six-foot-tall chestnut-haired clean-shaven straight white guy.

Where Mr. Larson’s first statement illuminates this unworkable discrepancy, by contradicting itself, his second statement is not nearly so complicated. It’s just flat-out wrong: “We co-exist in the world with people we disagree with.” In order to adhere to that principle, historical figures from World War II, or any other armed conflict, would have to be left out of this calendar. War, you see, is a funny thing; it doesn’t involve a lot of defining core principles, but one of the things it holds absolutely sacred is that we should not co-exist with people we disagree with. Some would say, that’s the best way to define what war is.

And I can’t think of a more vivid demonstration of that, than planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This Is Good III

The website is called Pass The Ammo. Pretty good stuff. Funny. Some of it a little on the tasteless side. I’ll make a point of checking on it frequently.

Earth in the Balance?

Friday, I noted that Josef Stalin said “It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes,” and to this, I added an update: “It isn’t what news channels are biased, it is who gets to say they are biased. Or more to the point, who gets to say what bias is.”

I got a third one-liner, along the same lines: It isn’t what you prove, it’s how you go about proving it.

Does anybody else see something pretty peculiar in this Eleanor Clift column?

A movie about Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation about global warming doesn�t sound all that exciting, but if you liked “March of the Penguins,” you�ll love “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore is as relentless in his travels to save the planet and faces almost as many obstacles as those penguins making their way across the tundra.

Getting the country to face up to global warming is his life�s mission, and it could be his ticket to the presidency.
:
Gore has become the darling of the left, yet global warming is not, or shouldn�t be, a partisan issue. The days when the first President Bush mocked Gore as “Ozone Man” are over, relegated to the dustbin of history. Conservative evangelical Christians see themselves as stewards of the earth. When asked at a screening of his film in Washington this week what he would say to Bush�s claim that global warming needs further study, Gore quipped, “I hope he finds the real killer,” adding quickly, “I shouldn�t have said that.”

Let us assume, for just a second or two, that my third clever one-liner does not hold. Let us presume that the way you prove something doesn’t matter at all…what you end up proving, is all that counts. Let us presume, further, that “Ozone Man is relegated to the dustbin of history” and it is now an accepted, indisputable fact that man-made global warming threatens to doom us all. Let us award the benefit of any doubt, also, to those who apprehensively intone that we are entering our final days of potentially doing something effective to prevent it.

Now, do these presumptions not make Clift’s epistle seem all the more strange? For now, what we are presuming is that “An Inconvenient Truth” is, after all, true. Our ecosystem is in danger. We’re doing it to ourselves. The policies that are trashing the environment, will be left in place for another three years, because our current President is waiting to find “the real killer.”

So little angst about our final few days before ecological armageddon; so much exuberance about this “darling of the left” and his “ticket to the White House.”

If you really did think we were slowly killing ourselves by eighty-sixing our own environment, would it matter worth a hill of beans what darling Chicken Little Superstar was standing on the cusp of being swept into the White House?

This is the kind of thing that makes me believe the environment has nothing, not one damn thing, to do with anything. This article is all celebration, almost as if Gore has already won the Presidency. Hope springs eternal, I suppose — but where is the suspense? Where is the attitude of “Oh my God, I hope he gets in there in time to reverse these horrible policies and save our planet!”

Any change in our reckoning of global warming, should it lead to a change in our policies toward it, would have something to do with our continuing global survival. If that is presumed to be the case, the fawning over a 57-year-old future presidential candidate, even one deemed more worthy of having a shot than he had six years ago, seems strangely irrelevant. But it’s not irrelevant to Clift, and people who write articles like hers. The breathless anticipation of the electoral process that takes place quadrennially, amongst the apelike creatures that happen to infest this doomed ecosystem, is all that matters. The doomed ecosystem itself, merits mention only insofar as how the oncoming doomsday may influence the quadrennial election process.

So I don’t think this whole issue is about ecological doom, in other words, “what is proven.” I think what it’s all about, is that huge toothpaste tube full of the baby-killin’, soldier-slandering, unionized, mediocrity-promoting liberal mish-mash we’ll have shoved down our throats after Al Gore, or whoever, gets in there. And, it’s all about how you go about proving things…making people believe there is no God, simply because an elitist layer told them they should believe that. Making people believe the world is coming to an end unless something is done, because the elitist layer told them they should believe that. Making people believe Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, because Bill Clinton’s friends tell them to believe that.

We’re in a dangerous time right now. By giving us precise instructions on what to believe, the know-it-alls are “proving” to us things they can’t prove; in fact, some things no one could ever prove. And if we show the slightest bit of reluctance to swallow what they’re feeding us, head-to-tail and every piece of fin and gut in between, we’re showing “hostility” to what is now being called “science.” Throughout history, science has been synonymous with a healthy skepticism to the prevailing viewpoint. What is called epistemology, has always been an important ingredient of it. Today, science has become the prevailing viewpoint, having nothing whatsoever to do with epistemology, and a healthy skepticism toward it has been re-defined as the know-nothing, knuckle-dragging, slope-foreheaded province of uneducated rednecks.

Since the real issue isn’t the environment, I think it’s captured by what’s written above. Science By Decree. Listen to the High Priests to find out what’s true. Who ya gonna believe, the council of wise village elders, or your lyin’ eyes?

Those who wisely counsel us about our impending self-destruction, are quite agitated about it…with glee, because their guy might get into the White House over it. Just before the world is supposed to go boom, according to their own arguments. Nevermind. The White House is the most important thing…on this doomed planet.

This is surreal. But not unusual. Not in the least.

Non-Assimilation

Continuing with the “Yin and Yang” theme articulated below. People tend to go through life laboring under a premise that everyone is destined to live in close proximity with everybody else, has the skills to live thusly, and should work at cultivating the diplomatic aptitudes necessary to bringing it about. But in the recesses of their minds, everyone has darker thoughts culminating from millenia of tribal living. Everything for the tribe. A decent education for the next generation, a higher standard-of-living for all, paying the bills on time, world peace — all of these goals in life, are secondary to bringing victory to the tribe. The tribe must prevail. Everyone else should either go away, or learn to do everything the way they do, the way my tribe does them.

Today is “Day Without An Immigrant” day. There are supposed to be demonstrations against immigration laws — not against those laws being in existence, per se, quite so much as those laws being enforced.

This strikes me as nothing short of amazing. Go ahead and keep this law in place that I broke by coming here, sayeth the protesters. Just don’t increase the penalties on breaking it. Not that I intend to break it some more, mind you…but I’m really going to bust my ass to make sure you don’t make it a felony. Because, well, you know, it shouldn’t be.

I’m told the protesters want “the right to come here.” So far as I know, nobody’s protesting to make illegal immigration outright-legal, so no, I don’t think they want the right to come here. “Illegal” means you don’t have the right to do something. It would be far more accurate, to say they’re demonstrating for the privilege of getting away, without consequence, with doing things they know they don’t have the “right” to do.

Well let’s just table that debate about semantics for now.

Once the illegal aliens are here, what do they want to do? Assimilate? Peacefully adapt into the culture of the place into which they’ve trespassed? Or make some big wins for the tribe? Displace the indigenous people? Or, perhaps, convert them? A combination of both? Make everybody they see, within their line-of-sight, exactly like them?

Here’s a clue. It’s from “Rossputin,” the blog of some guy named Ross G. Kaminsky. Seems to be a decent fellow, maybe I’ll send him some e-mail. Geez, his wife is hot. Anyway, he got ahold of that goofy Mexicana Airlines magazine editorial: “With All Due Respect, Los Angeles Is Ours.” Cheery sentiment, huh?

Waiters, waitresses, chamber maids, babysitters and farmhands are instigating a cultural reconquest in cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, New York, Denver; Spanish is their language, the Virgin of Guadalupe is their religious idol and chili peppers and tortillas their staple diet. here, Candlemas Day and the 5th of May are celebrated with enthusiasm. But these Mexicans immigrants [sic] are also spearheading a social movement. Together with refugees of other nationalities, they are demanding health insurance and pensions, benefits that they often manage to obtain.

I’m told the illegal aliens want to come over here to live peacefully, provide for their families, and follow the law. That is true, if and only if 1) one is naturally inclined to break laws, so that one can live out the remainder of his existence following other laws — which may or may not be as sensible as the one he broke; and 2) the opinion of the author of this editorial is far, far in the minority.

Both of those presuppositions strike me as a tad far-fetched.

I Like This Thing, I Hate That Thing

I was reading in a liberal blog all about how people who voted for George W. Bush are a bunch of silly dolts, and of course that people who voted against him and castigate him are much, much smarter. Which liberal blog I was reading, is an interesting story in and of itself, and I will get to that. But for now I want to discuss the premise.

I suppose it is a mechanism in the human mind that determines we see just a tiny bit more of what we want to see, and just a smidgen less of what we do not. On this point, I can’t resist running down a side trail: “everybody knows,” I’m told, that all attributes in the human species, and any other, have culminated as a result of “evolution.” Natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Strengths arriving over time where they did not previously exist, as an evolving species competes for limited resources with other species less-evolved, and thus doomed. What does it have to do with survival in a harsh ecosystem, to recognize falsehoods you find palatible, and to deny truths that you do not? It’s a delicious insult to the prevailing wisdom, but I digress.

Whatever the reason is, the blogger and I both must fall victim to the weakness under discussion, for his “observation” runs starkly against my own:

Those of you who have been around for a while may have noticed something about the conservative blowhards on the net. I’m not just talking about the ones here, but in general. A great example is guns-and-gear forums, which swarm with the kind of person I’m talking about.

The observation?

These people aren’t much for the written word. They can’t spell. They mangle grammar and syntax to varying degrees, sometimes to the point where they’re almost unintelligible. And the worse the problem is, the more vociferous they are about supporting George Bush.

See, I’m sitting here, much more of a veteran than a more practical man would be, of arguing with snotty college students half my age on Internet forums. I have been doing it, pretty much non-stop, since before I began my unbroken biannual vote-at-seven-in-the-morning streak fourteen years ago; since long before I was determined to see the Democratic party go away, permanently; indeed, since you could only do said arguing by going on a “bulletin board” which sent “characters” to your “modem” about what was written in the “room.”

And I’ve noticed the opposite. Take a blistering Internet screed against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — they aren’t that hard to find — and load it into Microsoft Word, you’re going to tie the grammar/spell checker into a raging, apoplectic fit. Perhaps those who type the screeds, are already doing that, as I’ve noticed “apoplectic fit” is a good description of their disposition to begin with.

But it’s a particularly pronounced problem when they argue with me one-on-one, because I feel this sense of obligation to accurately determine what exactly it is they are trying to tell me. And the initial sentence, in particular, is often missing so many articles and pronouns and plurals, I have to read it three times to find out just why it is, exactly, that I’m such an infuriating simpleton.

What’s written above has to do with grammar/punctuation/spelling. What’s written below has to do with logic.

Whether the Bush-haters throw material up on their own blogs to preach to the choir, or don their armor and do battle on the field in some forum somewhere, overall I’ve noticed substantial swagger and confidence in the belief that after they’re done typing and the dust has settled, the point has been made. Indeed it has been, to those who were predisposed to absorb the point in the first place, but this belief shows an appearance of going much deeper. With a triumph that would draw envy from Daniel Webster himself, fresh out of his famous duel with the devil, or earn a raised eyebrow of approval from Spock, just after he and Kirk have short-circuited their latest ancient alien computer with his devastating logic — Internet left-wingers really do seem to believe, to the depths of their souls, they’ve supported an argument. Oh boy howdy, have they ever. All sane men, behold their argument in trembling fear, for your sanity must surely be questioned if your opinion doesn’t emerge from their onslaught chiseled down to precisely match the liberal’s, like a statue from a block.

And what are these liberal arguments, anyway, which are so incredibly compelling they leave no room for any sane man to disagree, or to even question?

I think it is fair to say, that upon weeding out statistical anomalies like the “observation” above, and an abundance of smarmy ad hominems and bits of humor and sarcasm, I have not seen anything written by the Bush-haters except proclamations of what has earned their approval vs. what has not. I mean, clear back to the first day in early 2000, when we nationally recognized a George W. Bush we could do some arguing about. “Bush did x,” goes the argument — and the all who wait for someone to say “x is wrong, because…” are left waiting indefinitely. That bunny trail will not be tread upon by man. Why should the wrongness of x be explained? It’s wrong — we all know it’s true, it simply is.

Two years ago, a presidential election was shoved into overdrive, and a nation breathlessly awaited the challenging party’s official position on the War on Terror. This country has had its share of war presidents, and it has a dismal history of keeping the powers of those war presidents in check. It would have served our interests well, to diligently explore how our current administration was managing our various conflicts and to address the ways in which our freedoms were being eroded in ways said freedoms didn’t have to be.

Well, we didn’t get that. What we heard, was that “Bush” was “torturing detainees” and that our “civil liberties” were being “lost.” Those who researched what torture meant ended up a little surprised, for they found out that torture had nothing to do with torture. Those who looked into what a what a detainee was, found they really were terrorists and terrorist-wannabes who clung to no possibility of innocence, except wherever “reasonable doubt” was expanded to encompass all existential uncertainties in human affairs. In short, some of those acquainted with the truth, applying an objective common-sense standard of vocabulary selection, might be inclined to call them “terrorists” instead of “detainees,” but the more soothing noun was selected to attend to the chore of persuasion, which should rightfully have been left up to the logic.

It’s wrong to torture detainess, we were told, because we’re better than that. Better than that? Really? Better than “waterboarding” some guy who would kill your family along with hundreds of others? Maybe when we’re stoned out of our gourd on pot and potato chips, watching porn and Star Trek re-runs, too lazy to get up to pee, let alone to do that waterboarding.

That’s what people who “are better than that” do?

Those who water-board, to me, look “better” than those who channel-surf. I don’t wish to impose my system of belief upon others, but to me, it seems a worthy question.

Point is, that the answer was not forthcoming, nor was any debate that might lead to it. Waterboarding, like force-feeding someone on a hunger strike, is “torture”; and torture is “beneath us.” In short, our liberals didn’t like those things. That was the extent of the debate. They didn’t like it. They like other things, and they don’t like those.

A similar frustration lay in store for whatever intrepid soul undertook to explore what civil liberties were being lost. Even today, we do have some anecdotes about people being visited by federal agents over their library transactions, but the anecdotes labor under the problematic burden of being not real. What other examples are there? Well, the point really is that the mindset is hostile to the question being asked, not that the substance of the not-exactly-forthcoming answer is lackluster, but I’ll explore the answer anyway:

You can’t do incredibly stupid and asinine things when you’re on a plane. In this case, arguing with security people over your “Suspected Terrorist” pin, can get you ejected from the flight.

I think most of us would agree, having inspected the issue this far, that the substance is lacking. I can’t do stupid crap on a plane now, but before the September 11 attacks, I couldn’t do that either. What civil liberty has been lost here? My point is not that we never found out; my point is, rather, that to tell us the answer, or to demonstrate some diligence in trying to find an answer, was never deemed a worthy exercise. Like the existence of God, or that God is a man, it was an unprovable system of belief, and was always intended to be that and nothing more.

Go right on down the list, and the pattern holds true. We must have a “global test”; really? Why is that? Inspections and sanctions will work; war won’t. Based on what? You like sanctions and you don’t like war, but other than those what have ya got? Nothing. It’s not a baby, it’s a lump of tissue. And your evidence is? Well, it turns out you like to call it a lump of tissue and you don’t like to call it a baby. That’s all. What else…health care is a right, and all Americans deserve a living wage. Okay, I’ve got an open mind, can we explore what “all Americans” do to deserve a living wage? And the answer is — no, we can’t. They just do.

If you were born when I started arguing with liberals on the “innernets,” within the next few weeks you’d be old enough to go to the store and buy me some beer. And those preceding few paragraphs capture the extent of the “arguing” I’ve seen liberals do. They like this thing; they don’t like that other thing.

Now, about the liberal blog. The fellow who appears to have something to do with running the site, had some very kind words for me and offered to do a “link swap,” in which I mention the name of his blog and his blog mentions the name of mine. We point to each other, in other words. I accommodated his request, as you can see in the sidebar where “Empires Fall” is mentioned. Then, I put up a post commenting on how rare it is nowadays, that people can labor under different opinions on the state of affairs as well as about what should be done — and nevertheless find something positive to point out about the other fellow.

Well, I still believe in stopping to notice people who are worthy of that kind of compliment, and I still think “Empires Fall” is worthy. For the next few days or so, I’ll keep their name in the sidebar.

But at this point, I’ve lost most of my interest in figuring out when, oh when, “House of Eratosthenes” will be mentioned over there. His list of blogs is much longer than mine, but it’s neatly alphabetized and I have to assume I would be somewhere under the letter H. It seems to have slipped their minds. Oh well, it really doesn’t matter, this is the blog that nobody reads…if there is a goal, here, it is to make some objective observations about contemporary events and proven matters of fact, and to draw reasonable inferences from those available facts. Becoming a “phenom” in the blogosphere is not really part of the agenda. It never has been.

But just along the issue of people saying they’ll do things and then doing them, had he done it, it would nevertheless have been appreciated.