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.

Must-Tards VI

This blog is named after a library administrator who lived in ancient times, who ran around peeking into holes in the ground, and ended up figuring something out that was much bigger than he was. Drawing upon that as a lesson, we remain open to the possible hidden meaning behind seemingly innocuous observations, which may at first blush appear to have no meaning at all.

One of these observations is, that when people start to talk about womens’ body styles and sizes, and/or the clothes that are made available for those women to put on those bodies, the crap that comes tumbling out of their mouths almost never makes any sense.

Another one of these observations is, there is something deeply ingrained in the culture of that place called “Europe,” something that seems to motivate people to form gassy, flashy, bloated opinions about what someone else should or shouldn’t be doing. Here in America, I can find people who form opinions about anything & everything at the drop of a hat — but there’s this unwritten rule that an effort should be made, just as lip-service if nothing else, to define how the controversy you’re trying to create is any of your business. I mean, at least before you get to the part about commanding other people to do things, with authority you don’t really have.

Now, I don’t know what causes these things to be the way they are, or what kind of case I could build to convince someone these things are so, should that audience gaze upon my arguments with a jaundiced eye. And whoever would undertake to objectively assess whether or not I have any business noticing these things, would be hard-pressed to conclude that I do — just as it’s hard to figure out what business a library administrator has, peeking into wells to find the size of the earth, at a time when there were astronomers and well-diggers employed in doing those very things. I’m not a woman; I don’t buy womens’ clothes. I’m not in Europe, and never have been there.

I just find this kind of disturbing, is all.

Stores urged to drop super-skinny mannequins
By KRISTINA PEDERSEN, Daily Mail 08:24am 28th April 2006

Shop window mannequins should have the figures of “real women”, campaigners said yesterday.

They fear the unrealistic proportions of models in shops could be contributing to the rise of eating disorders.

Over the past 50 years, the average dress size has increased from 12 to 16. The average woman’s weight has gone up from eight to 11 stone.

But most high street fashion stores, including Mango, Topshop and Zara, use mannequins that fit a size six to 10. At 5ft 10in, most are also five inches taller than the average woman.

A spokesman for the Eating Disorder Association said: “The reason the stores have these proportions is because the mannequins are normally standing above shoppers, so as they look upwards the dummies look shorter and squatter than they really are.

“But of course this doesn’t change the fact that they still look slim.”

Officials in Andalusia, Spain, have already banned the use of mannequins smaller than the average Spanish woman.

The Spanish government is hoping to implement this across the country. “We would welcome any ruling that puts less pressure on women to get thinner,” said the Eating Disorder Association spokesman.

“They are already inundated with unrealistic images as it is.

“It is down to advertising and what companies think will help sell their clothes.”

A spokesman for Spanish-owned Zara, said: “We use the standard mannequins from our supplier.

“We would be happy to use larger sizes if they became available.”

Gotta love good ol’ Europe. Everything everybody does is everybody else’s business. Should, should, gotta, must, should, gotta, gotta, must, ought, should.

Now, if this were to be published in an American paper, I would expect to see something that would clarify for me what the Eating Disorder Association is, and how it’s any of their beef. That they don’t like the mannequins the way they are, is crystal-clear to me. I would just like to know 1) is it any “skin off their nose” if the mannequins are left unchanged, and if so, how; and 2) since the Eating Disorder Association wants the mannequins changed, what kinds of powers can that august body bring to bear to make it happen?

I need both of these pieces of information, to decide for myself if this is really “news” to begin with. If EDA doesn’t have an actual interest in the decision, and they don’t have any authority to bring their desires about, then the story boils down to this: Someone somewhere has a negative opinion about the way someone else is doing something. Well, shoot. Look around. Everyone’s got an opinion about everything that’s being done by anybody…and very few of those opinions are flattering.

If the EDA, and those who write about them, seek to stimulate a national debate in Great Britain about what is “normal” it seems to me very strange they would want, to use a cliched expression, “to go there.” When you’re fat, and you see a model and/or mannequin that is not fat, it’s not normal to re-define yourself as normal and the model as strange. A desire to expurgate that other ideal from public view, lest someone else see the model and get the idea that the model is “normal,” is likewise not-normal.

If we’re talking about a model and/or mannequin that is so skinny as to appear unhealthy, it’s quite nonsensical to suppose that something chubbier and healthier, only starts to look healthy when the skinny model is whisked away. If the stockier body type looks okay when it stands alone, but may suddenly take on an appearance of being a bit too rotund when compared to something else, I’m really at a loss to see how anyone is helped when the comparisons are changed. What does that do, exactly? It’s kind of like the bunny rabbit closing its eyes when the fox comes looking for him, reasoning that if he can’t see the fox, well then no way can the fox see him!

Oh, I do recognize eating disorders. I understand people, especially women, can get into unhealthy body images and from there, descend into an unhealthy diet. The thing I can’t quite get past, though — and if EDA is thinking about this, it seems they’re not thinking too hard — being fat is unhealthy too. The medical evidence of damage from a thicker body style, is no less solid than the evidence suggesting a proliferation of eating disorders arising from thinner styles, and desires for same. Fat, once it reaches excessive levels, is bad — bad for your heart, bad for your blood, bad for your brain. Fat, once it reaches excessive levels, changes peoples’ appearances. What a wonderful device that is, that so many health risks can be anticipated based on physical appearance.

What an incredible responsibility it is, to figure out who is “inundated with unrealistic images,” ponder worryingly about what might happen to those inundatees with less-stable thinking processes, and prevent such disasters from coming to pass. Is this really the line-of-work EDA wants to do? Is it ready to take responsibility for making sure these unrealistic-body-messages are intercepted everywhere? How about answering to a higher authority, when the interception of those messages doesn’t happen, or comes too late?

No, I don’t see that kind of sunlight in this well. I think the EDA, simply put, approves of chubby women and disapproves of skinny women, because they represent chubby women who don’t like to be reminded they’re chubby. Whether the fashion stores feel compelled to listen to them, or why they do if they do, is a mystery I’ll have to try to unravel some other day.

What Is Bias, Anyway?

“It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes,” a quote famously attributed to Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin, has been offered up over and over again by Democrats eager to exploit whatever perceived or actual flaws existed in the voting process in Florida/2000 and Ohio/2004. To this, I have a rejoinder. It is oh-so-witty, but I nevertheless oh-so-much wish I didn’t have it.

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’m told that Fox News is “biased.” My red-flag of suspicion doesn’t get raised very high, until I’m told the same thing three or four times, and then given some concrete evidence that the people saying that thing, can’t prove it. In the case of Fox News’ bias, those who call it biased, have done this — and then, they’ve gone on to say the same thing again, dozens of times more.

Now, suspicion is not refutation; Fox News may very well be biased. But I’m not in the habit of being alerted to biased news sources, by drones who are obviously being sent out to repeat talking points by other drones.

Well, the current presidential administration disagrees with me there, as this Press Corps transcript shows.

Q Well, they [White House television sets] always seem to be tuned to Fox, and there’s been requests, and these are paid for by taxpayer dollars. And my understanding is that you guys have to watch Fox on Air Force One. Is that true?

MR. McCLELLAN: First time I’ve ever heard of it. First time you’ve brought it to my attention, meaning the first time the press corps has brought it to my attention. In fact, I’ve watched other channels on here.

Q There’s one —

MR. McCLELLAN: Hang on, Jim, come on. I’ve watched other channels on here, so I don’t know where you’re hearing that. But it’s the first time anyone in the press has raised that question with me.

Q You’ve watched other channels other than Fox?

MR. McCLELLAN: On here, yes, sure.

Q I’ve never seen — they’re always turned to Fox, which a lot of people consider a Republican-leaning network.

Q Scott, is it one — on the airplane, is it one for all? I mean, if it’s tuned for Fox here, is it Fox everywhere?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that certain areas may be interconnected, but I’ll have to double-check which.

Q Is yours off, wherever you are?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, the conference room, or the senior staff office, the staff office, they’re different TVs, and you can switch to different channels. I’m not sure if some of these in the back are connected to some of the others that are watching right here, right now. It doesn’t look like it to me. I’ve never known anyone that’s raised a complaint about a request from back here to watch a different channel.

Q I’m officially raising it and officially complaining about it.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I’m going to go see if we can change the channel for you. Have you called up?

Q I was the Fox victim, and I was told — the quote was, “No,” when I asked for CNN.

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t know who you talked to, so — it didn’t come to my attention. You don’t know who you talked to either?

Q Well, the magic people at the other end off the phone.

MR. McCLELLAN: The magic people at the other end of the phone. Well, I’ll see if this cabin is —

Q I was told, “We don’t watch CNN here, you can only watch Fox.”

MR. McCLELLAN: As I said, it’s hard to respond to something when I don’t know who it is you talked to.

Q I used the phone back here.

MR. McCLELLAN: I find this all quite amusing, to tell you the truth. I mean, there are a lot of people on this plane that do watch that channel.

Q I’ve never been told, no. They’re such nice guys up there.

MR. McCLELLAN: First time you brought it to my attention. I’ll go see what we can do on it.

* * * * *

MR. McCLELLAN: We just called up. They’re going to be changing it, at your all’s request, to the channel that you requested, which is CNN — from the press corps.

Q Thanks, Scott.

High time this happened, since Fox is biased after all and everybody knows it, you say? Not so fast. Consider the following cognitions about the bias of Fox News…

1. Fox News is biased in the sense that it allows political commentary into news segments, which is not supposed to be done.
2. Fox News is biased in the sense that it is run by people, who have certain opinions about things, as all people do.
3. Fox News does a professional job of presenting news, but in the editorial segments, the comments are slanted to the right both in quantity and in intensity.
4. Fox News does a respectable job of presenting both sides, but it has a subtle bias in the way it does this, since after all Sean Hannity is more engaging (and sexier looking to those who sway that way) than Alan Colmes.
5. Fox News is designed, and managed, to be a “counterweight” to a media perceived by many to be slanted to the left.
6. Fox News uses unorthodox and politically-loaded nomenclature, such as using “homicide bombers” to describe suicide bombers.
7. #6 is true, but that’s okay, because when you think about it “homicide bombers” is more accurate.
8. #7 is true, but that’s not okay, because their slogan is “We Report, You Decide” and the effort to re-think our vocabulary is not consistent with this mission statement.
9. #7 is true, but that is okay after all, because other news sources do subtle things like calling illegal aliens “undocumented immigrants,” which is not nearly as accurate as “illegal alien,” or, when you think about it some more, “tresspasser whose background cannot be investigated.”
10. Fox News is unbiased, but it looks strange to us because we happen to be accustomed to news that is strongly biased in the opposite direction.
11. Fox News is biased in one direction, conventional news is equally biased in the opposite direction.
12. #11 is true, and because of that, you’re better informed if you get information from Fox News as well as from other sources, keeping an open mind.

Now grab a pencil and circle the cognition that comes closest to reality, in your personal opinion. Ready? Now take this impromptu ballot…and…throw it in the trash! #1 wins! #2 through #12 don’t. Got that? #1 wins, hands down.

Read the transcript, above, one more time. #1 wins. The one that has enjoyed oh, so many opportunities to be concretely proven…and has not been. Ever. Not even once.

Did you circle something else? Tough! The White House Press Corps just overruled you, with the blessing of the White House itself. By what authority did they do this? By the authority of…where is it…ah, here it is: “…Fox, which a lot of people consider a Republican-leaning network.” That’s it! A lot of people.

Who are those people, you say? After all, #1 wasn’t the one I circled…how do I find out who those people are?

You can’t!

Isn’t that great!

The issue is “these [televisions] are paid for by taxpayer dollars.” Your rights as a taxpayer have just been upheld! By nameless, faceless people whose opinion may or may not match yours…

…but hey, that’s all right. Anything for democracy.

Because just as it matters who counts the votes, not who casts them, it matters who decides what’s biased, not what bias is.

I wish we could have a debate about the bias of Fox News, and when you think about it, for an allegation that attracts such heat and passion from so many directions, it is a little weird that we don’t have one. When’s the last time you heard that Fox has political leanings? When’s the last time you got a concrete example? I’ll bet the former of those, is something that revisits you a lot more often than the latter. Why is that? Actually, you know what? I wish we could have a debate about what bias really is.

The difference between subjectivity and objectivity, is sometimes not so clear. And lacking a fairly substantial and sophisticated methodology for making the distinction, with the more complex issues the distinction becomes a matter of opinion in & of itself. I think the issue is sufficiently complicated, that problems arise when the bias of a news channel is left up to unelected, unnacountable hacks in the White House Press Corps.

And you know what, mister nameless-faceless guy? I’ll bet “a lot of people” agree with me about that.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form VIII

Yesterday morning, I had some fairly flattering things to say about some guy who once ran for President of the United States by the name of John Kerry. That would be pleasantly surprising to those who are more sympathetic to the Massachusetts senator’s cause, I think, but what would be even more pleasantly surprising was that my positive comments had to do with skills, gifts and aptitudes that we all know the war hero has worked particularly hard to refine over a great deal of time.

Senator Kerry spent much of the long hot summer of 2004 atoning for his ridiculous utterance, “I actually voted for the $87 billion [in emergency funding for the troops in Iraq] before I voted against it,” opting to use silence as the best salve to cleanse the gaping wound. When he met the President in Coral Gables, his staff switched ointments, and they did it cleverly. It was really a thing of beauty, and I remember admiring him for it. When President Bush brought up the quote, and bloggers on both sides knew that he would, the Senator responded:

Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?

Pow! Right in the kissa! “Kerry fans” — actually, Kerry doesn’t have any fans, they’re just people who hate President Bush — to this day insist the Senator won all three debates, and this is the kind of thing they have in mind. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Lemonade from a lemon.

Wow, the words flow as if they came from Howard “Yeeaaaarrrrggghhhh!!!!” Dean himself.

Hey, I’m not averse to recognizing talent wherever I see it. Kerry is very, very good at thinking on his feet, pretending not to be a flip-flopper when he is one; in general, he’s a genius at salesmanship. Well, you know…he’s a genius at selling something to people who desperately want to be sold the thing, performing considerably worse in front of a crowd that’s a bit more skeptical. And I did go on to knock him for being…what was it I called him? I said he was “a horrible candidate for representative public office.” Well, you have to take the bad with the good, and since you only have to peruse my site for a little while to see I’m generally hostile to John Kerry’s…well, to every single scintilla in that crazy perspective from which he appears to see the world…when you factor that in, I was being generally pretty positive toward him.

Now since I wrote that, I’m not sure what happened. The ensuing timeline is pretty tight and doesn’t allow for much wiggle-room, so I figure sometime between three and five o’clock on the east coast, one of Kerry’s staffers read my blog. He must have e-mailed a link to Kerry’s Blackberry, whereupon maybe one of the Senator’s assistants taught him how to use it. Within the next five or six hours, max, someone well-connected with the Boston ultra-liberal inner-circle, must have made a comment in a conference forum about what was going through the Senator’s mind.

Because, after all, I have no reason to believe Ellen Goodman reads my blog. I would suspect hardly anybody does. But how else do you explain this gem which appeared this morning in The Boston Herald:

Don’t run, John Kerry
Ellen Goodman
April 28, 2006
:
The signs that John Kerry is going to run for president in 2008 are rising faster than the pollen count. There was the requisite New York Times op-ed — How many days late? How many dollars short? — on getting out of Iraq. There was the Globe op-ed that preceded the speech supporting war dissenters at Faneuil Hall to an audience of groupies yelling “Run” and “2008.” There was Ted Kennedy’s remark, “If he runs, I’m supporting him.”
:
I am not an opponent of Senator Kerry. I’m a constituent. I’ve voted for him six different times. On Nov. 2, 2004, I briefly wished that the Constitution let us pick a president by the early exit polls.
:
Democrats are cute when they get pragmatic, but not necessarily successful. This time, the stalwarts were convinced they’d found a moderate who couldn’t be polarized. But he was. They thought they found a decorated veteran — three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star — who couldn’t be trashed. But he was.

Kerry is not the only one who still imagines a thousand belated rejoinders for the swift boat attackers. He’s not the only one who cannot believe he actually said of Iraq war funding, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” [emphasis mine]
:
Kerry had many fine moments. I saw some of them on the trail and in the debates. But as many have said, Kerry is a politician who has more policies than ideas. Ask what he believes in and the answer is a 10-point plan. He ran a cautious campaign against a reckless commander in chief. And while caution is not a moral failing, Kerry’s gut seems to have a surgical bypass through his cranium.
:
John Kerry is a good, honorable, thoughtful man. And a lousy presidential candidate. He couldn’t do “ideas” the first time. He wouldn’t do them the second time. It’s just not in him.
:
John, please. Don’t even think about it.

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

Look, here is why it’s glaringly important to the Democrats to take Goodman at her advice, assuming Senator Kerry fails to.

While this crack about “ask what he believes in and you get a 10-point plan” has some truth to it — it has a lot of truth to it — it is nevertheless patently unfair to advance the notion, or to assume it, that Kerry has a weakness for thinking on his feet or for speaking in public. Yes, he lost; but that’s not the reason why. Look at his victorious opponent, for heaven’s sake. The challenger lost the race because he garbled one line about voting against the $87 billion? I don’t think so. It wasn’t the garbling — it was the betrayal of the flip-floppery that made this devastating. If he talked like Porky freakin’ Pig, but was nevertheless forthcoming about voting against the $87 billion, who knows he could be President right now if he handled it that way.

John Kerry didn’t shoot himself in the foot when he flubbed a line. He shot himself in the foot when he tried to be all things to all people.

And that is why you need to go grab yourself a folding chair and a cup of coffee before you ask Senator Kerry what he thinks about anything. He doesn’t want anyone to say “I was going to vote for him before he said X, and now I’m not going to.” It is his paramount goal, to avoid that. That’s what makes him a bad leader.

Democrats need to put in place, an agenda we’re simply not willing to have. Kerry’s ability to tell you it’s raining outside, in such a way that you’ll swear to God he just told you the sun is shining, and nevertheless when you go out in a tank top and shorts and no headgear and end up soaking wet, but it’s all your fault and none of his — that is exactly the talent the Democrats need. But he isn’t Bill Clinton because amidst all the confusion and obfuscation, he comes across as exactly what he is. You can listen with just half an ear, being halfway awake, and you can tell there’s a reason he’s giving you 5,000 words when fifty words should get the job done. He’s trying to anticipate what might motivate you to do what he doesn’t want you to do, and avoid saying it.

Bill Clinton was much better. He said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” and I gotta believe that unless someone knew a great deal about the case being investigated, and President Clinton’s unique — uh — personality…they would never in a million years think to ask “Wait a minute, maybe we should ask him if she had relations with him?”

Put more succinctly, Kerry is a good confuser and obfuscator, but Clinton was all of these things, plus a good illusionist.

That’s what the Democrats need to sell their poo-poo sandwich right about now.

What do they want to get going, after all? Just do whatever you want with the terrorists, give ’em whatever they want so long as the next day, terrorism is out of the headlines. Get the public riled up and agitated about Social Security cuts that aren’t really coming. Get some debates going about robbing thirty-something apartment rats who are barely making ends meet, to buy free medicine for rich old seniors with Winnebagos and summer homes. Get everyone arguing about socialized medicine. Make people forget about their huge income tax increases, and instead incite them to near-riot status about 75 cent ATM surcharges. Also, get them scared stiff that Donald Wildmon and Jerry Falwell are personally going to knock down bedroom doors, and send to Guantanamo Bay anyone caught having sex in any position other than missionary.

In short, stop asking the unwashed masses what they’re worried about. Tell them what they’re worried about. That’s what leaders are for, in Democrat-land.

And then cram that big ol’ giant toothpaste tube with the mish-mash of liberal baby-killing, soldier-slandering, tax-increasing, mediocrity-promoting, neo-quasi-socialist goodness down everybody’s throat.

Well if you ran that kind of agenda past people in a poll, worded that way — or even tastefully cleaned up, somewhat, with the meaning left intact — we’re just not into that stuff. We really aren’t. We’ll vote for a Democrat over a Republican if a really juicy, all-consuming Republican scandal has been dominating the news. We’ll do that. But we feel incredibly uncomfortable about choosing a leader that way.

That’s just the way it is.

So they need another Clinton, or they can pretty much just forget the whole thing. And it will work that way even if gas goes to fifteen bucks a gallon, the Dow plunges to 2500, and Bush’s approval rating goes to one-stinkin’-percent.

Not Your Grandfather’s Protest

Quote:

Such a massive turnout could make for the largest protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s, though not all Latinos — nor their leaders — were comfortable with such militancy, fearing a backlash in Middle America.

Subtle, yet effective. On Monday, the March on Washington is going to be recreated. The protests on May 1 represent a reincarnation of the “civil rights era of the 1960s.” It’s not expressly stated here, but it is implied, strongly, in words as well as in pictures.

It will be so implied again. And again and again and again.

If only the corollary really worked. Why, after all, is a backlash feared in Middle America? America cherishes the right to protest, after all. America is not torn down the middle with a rancorous debate about whether the civil rights movement was an improvement or not. Within any culture, some things are just accepted.

The civil rights movement, now, enjoys this acceptance. Some Latinos, and/or their leaders, are worried that next week’s protest does not. Why? Because we haven’t had a chance to be acclimated to it? Perhaps it’s that and nothing more. If that’s the case, it just makes it all the more important to get the protest going, so we can be acclimated to this, too.

But protesters, you had better get out there before you think on this too long, because you might eventually come around to pondering what it is to which you want “Middle America” to be acclimated. You see, there’s an important difference between this and what happened forty years ago.

Protesters in the civil rights era, protested a system of laws that contradicted itself. 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.

You know what the Mafia is? It’s not a bunch of families running around in New York during the Cold War. Most people don’t understand, the Mafia has an ancient history and it has remained true to its principles and purpose throughout that history. Quite simply, it is an undocumented, alternative system of “law” and redress of grievances, for those who don’t belong in the “real” law. For whatever reason. The human race hasn’t launched too many endeavors, especially in what could be called “government,” in which defining doctrines are enshrined for two solid millenia. The Mafia has done this, at least within the scraps of documentation about it that somehow survive. It really is an amazing achievement.

Consistency is key. My whole point about the upcoming protests, is one of consistency. When Don Vito Corleone leaves a horse head in my bed, I expect him to have the decency to high-tail it out of my bedroom before the cops show up. If I cross a picket line and a union thug breaks my kneecaps, I expect his organization to fly him out of town and hide him before I give his description to the police. Threaten me with coercion, intimidation, and fear — or with the law. Not both at the same time. And don’t break one law, in favor of another law that makes your other activities “kinda sorta illegal, but not really.” Live within the law or don’t. Are you Martin Luther King, or Robin Hood?

No answer forthcoming to that, the protesters end up protesting that they don’t want to follow laws, while those whose minds they seek to change, are implicitly expected to.

I expect there will be some long faces in May. There are bound to be expectations in the air that Monday’s message will reverberate like the message of forty years ago. Hopefully, amid the ensuing disappointment, there will be some principled epiphanies about why things are working out differently.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… VII

This morning I was pissing and moaning, in that long-winded, cute way that I have — why say it in five hundred words when you can use fifteen thousand? — certain people among us, who can be described by a certain adjective I’ll not use but that rhymes with “PFFFSSLKXCHTHSIBERAL,” do weird things. Specifically, they tend to substantiate the point they want to make, simply by making a declaration of what they like and what they don’t like. Nothing more than that. And then, sadly, conducting themselves as if they’ve outdone Daniel Webster’s argument to The Devil, or discovered the next known prime number, or designed a working time-travel machine or “Stargate” or something.

Well, how much male-premenstruation can I work up about this, really. It’s just a tad bit irritating, pretending to engage in a meeting of the minds with me and others who disagree with them, and then wasting our time as they do nothing more than collect high-fives and pats-on-the-back from their liberal buddies. Just a minor irritation, nothing more. A tiny little parade of disingenuousness for my enjoyment, only for as long as I choose to watch it and/or partake in it.

They do it for FREE!

And they make NO RULES according to which I’m obligated to live out my existence. (Lord knows, they’d love to, that’s what it’s all about.)

On the other hand, the California State Assembly Democrats would like to make it known, so they can collect high-fives and pats-on-the-back from their liberal buddies, how much they support illegal aliens. By not working like they’re supposed to; going to a protest instead. And collecting the per diem they draw, from doing that work that they’re not going to do. And, by the way, if they did that work, they’d be making the rules by which I’m bound, as a California citizen…the same rules the “innernet” liberals wish they could make.

Not that I get to escape the rules that aren’t made, since they’ll be back the very next day, outlawing pictures of cigarettes in privately-owned garages, or fining businesses for not putting tiny trampolines under trees by their office buildings in case squirrels fall out of them, or …who knows what. They’ll work at it twice as hard the next day, drawing yet another per diem. That’s why they call it per diem after all.

Is this sinking in? People who make rules for a living, not-overwhelmingly-common-sense-rules, and boy howdee us lowly citizens had better follow those rules or else — want to be paid for making those stupid rules, they want to play hooky, and go to a protest to support people who choose not to follow rules. Then, they want to come back, make the stupid rules they missed out on making the day of the protest, for us lowly sheep who are so stupid we choose to follow rules. Then the rule-makers want to get paid both days.

My writing is getting all bloaty as my face gets red and blotchy. I need to learn to keep it under control, like this guy, one of my brothers on Blogger…

Legislative Democrats refuse to work on day of walk out, but still want to collect per-diem.

The California State Assembly regularly holds floor session on Mondays and Thursdays to vote on bills. However, Monday May 1st they will not be meeting, as the Democrats have chosen to participate in the work stoppage supporting illegal immigration which is planned for that day. But instead of canceling session all together, they changed to a check-in session so that they could still collect their per-diem.

Today during closing statements, Assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy (R- Monrovia) chastised Assembly Democrats. He asked why they would collect per-diem when everyone else who is taking the day off will not be getting paid at all?

He went on to suggest that Republicans come to the capital on Monday, the day of protest and demand that they be allowed to work in the place of Democrat legislators because they are willing to do the work the Dems are unwilling to do. And they will do it at half the pay!

I LOVE IT!!!!!! Y�ALL COME ON DOWN!!!!!!

I’m going to make a point of checking back on his site. He’s got a link to audio on that site, by the way.

Our Clean Split

Predictably, Neil Young’s new song about impeaching the President has gotten a lot of tighty-righties and lefty-loosies arguing. Predictably, I have deigned to wade into the fray. Predictably, the lefty-loosies thought very little of my free advice about how to reach perhaps millions of people like me, and bolster their little message that the desire to impeach President Bush is common-sense and bipartisan. Predictably, since so little amicable reception awaited a suggestion that involves so little effort, I’m now casting a jaundiced eye toward that message — show me someone who wants to impeach, and I’ll show you a left-wing, new-age hippy.

Impeachment is packaging, not a product. Scratch that…it’s more like a hot new financing program through which the product can be sold, more conventional vehicles being unavailable to consummate the sale. The product is the same ol’ giant-sized toothpaste tube of baby-killing, soldier-slandering, quasi-socialist, mediocrity-promoting progressive-taxing mish-mash of liberal goodness.

Here is something that could not have been predicted.

Watching how liberals go about arguing over the “innernets,” and taking note of how conservatives present their arguments — noticing over and over again a subtle discrepancy between the two, a discrepancy I’ve been repeatedly told exists only in my mind — I’m given cause to think about something John Kerry said during the debates eighteen months ago. It’s a tying up of a loose-end. I knew, clear back then, that the Senator was saying something with profound implications, upon which I would have to cogitate to find the deeper meaning. I think I just got it. I’ll explain.

To explore this, think about American politics over the long term for just a second. Our population is always split over politics; that is the nature of politics. There is a cyclical nature to how clean of a split we have. There are periods of time in which the split is extremely messy, and on those occasions it is common for a third-party to emerge victorious or else give victory away to a better-established, usually-hostile faction that would otherwise suffer defeat. Three-way presidential elections typically conclude such an era, as they did in 1912 and 1992. You could say the period from 1948 to 1964 was another such time, as during this time both Republicans and Democrats were suffering from infighting among party loyalists and dissidents.

There are other times when the split is clean. This usually follows in the wake of an extraordinarily strong presidential administration. We had this “luxury,” if you want to call it that, in the 1830’s after Andrew Jackson re-defined what a Jacksonian Democrat was. A hundred years later, you were either with FDR’s New Deal, or you weren’t. Presidents Reagan and Clinton similarly polarized the landscape. A President can be strong, and fail, at the same time. Lyndon Johnson was extroardinarily effective at getting his policies passed. He was popular in 1964, and unpopular in 1969. Cleaning up the mish-mash, helping friend & foe to decide whether to support him or oppose him, he was successful all the way through. I do not know of anyone, nor do I know of anyone who knows anyone, who was undecided about LBJ.

By the way, let me take just a step or two down a tiny bunny trail. There’s a secondary pattern here. Feelings of resentment toward a presidential administration by a chunk of the contemporary electorate, no matter how bitter and unforgettable the feeling, and no matter how big the chunk, do very little to cast dispersions on an administration through history’s lens. “Strong” presidents, almost by definition, have ticked people off. Presidents who made “everybody” happy were weak, and history regards them as such. Bush-bashers forever bellyaching about “disunity,” I’m lookin’ right at you. You say history will frame our current President as weak, because his policies have made a lot of people upset. You’re saying history will do what it never has done, and never can do. Abraham Lincoln is a far more likely model: Rancor toward Lincoln was buried with the bones of those who had borne it, while the memory of his strength endures for generation after generation, with no end in sight. There’s your foreshadowing of Bush’s legacy.

Back to the subject at hand. The nature of the split is what is cyclical. The public is agitated into action, each half against the other, or else the public is generally dissatisfied in a way it can’t quite define. If dissatisfaction is the order of the day, the clean split is lost; voter participation tumbles, infighting ensues as offshoot factions emerge, or both.

Where are we right now? Today, the President’s ability to keep his own party unified has sunk beneath the zone of the inadequate; it is indefensible. In matters of illegal immigration and the like, there is no reason — none — for the conservative wing of the Republican party to be betrayed in the way that it has. People understand that being anti-illegal-immigrant isn’t the same as being anti-immigrant, even those who try to foment this confusion for their political gain. And in matters where the administration has been friendlier to the conservative position, such as defending the decision to invade Iraq, no excuse justifies the appallingly poor job they’ve done getting their message out.

Seldom have I been more surprised over any long stretch of time, than I have been since the Spring of 2003, when I saw my very first picket sign that said “WHERE ARE THE WMDS?” about five or six weeks into the invasion. The “We Should Not Have Gone In Because There Were No WMDs” crowd has achieved something incredible here, and the credit can go nowhere except toward the administration’s thoroughly incompetent job of defending itself. There isn’t even a unifying message behind this movement; nobody, in any rational dialog, can long defend the proposition that because the search for WMDs hasn’t gone so hot, this means Saddam was a harmless guy and it would have been a great idea to leave him alone. But I can take that sentence immediately preceding, polish it up a bit, put that position in a poll, and draw an approval rating for it topping out over seventy percent. It’s done all the time.

Unbelievable.

But the split isn’t altogether unclean, for a lot of that seventy percent is crossover. Take a close look at the next poll you see. A lot of the polls that say “The People Are Now Against Our Being In Iraq” are promoted as opposition to going in in the first place, which is a dead issue — the content of said polls has to do with getting out now that we’re there. This is deception bordering on fraud. It works great, once again, because of the administration’s incompetence at getting their message out.

We have polls asking us if we approve of the direction the country’s going; negative responses are inferred to be negative comments about the administration, and by extension, scorn for the more controversial policies promoted by same.

Again, this is deception bordering on fraud. I’m a great example. I strongly disapprove of the direction in which the country is going. In my opinion, taking out Saddam Hussein was a great idea, and it came far too late. I would support congressional investigations into Bush, Clinton, and Bush’s dad exploring why it took as long as it did. Put former administration officials in front of House and Senate panels, and make ’em sweat, indict some people.

Why was the United Nations allowed to decide so much, for so long, while repeatedly failing to produce results on which so much depended? Ask the question. Take away a pension or two, put someone in leg irons.

For how many do I speak? And how many do I horrify?

The point is, in some ways, a lot of ways, our split is clean. The half of us that sees President Bush as a champion, be that half content, frustrated, or feeling itself actually betrayed on some issues, recognizes the other half as promoting dangerous and deleterious policy, and vice-versa. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if our figurehead steps up to his responsibilities to represent us, or not. We know that good is good, evil is evil, illegal aliens are dangerous, and the word “patriotism” doesn’t have a lot to do with blaming your country for every little thing that goes wrong.

We think for ourselves. That really is the difference.

Oh, how horrid and offensive that is to the loyal Bush-basher who became a liberal so he could claim to think for himself. This is where Kerry’s words come into play.

Senator Kerry spent much of the long hot summer of 2004 atoning for his ridiculous utterance, “I actually voted for the $87 billion [in emergency funding for the troops in Iraq] before I voted against it,” opting to use silence as the best salve to cleanse the gaping wound. When he met the President in Coral Gables, his staff switched ointments, and they did it cleverly. It was really a thing of beauty, and I remember admiring him for it. When President Bush brought up the quote, and bloggers on both sides knew that he would, the Senator responded:

Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?

Pow! Right in the kissa! “Kerry fans” — actually, Kerry doesn’t have any fans, they’re just people who hate President Bush — to this day insist the Senator won all three debates, and this is the kind of thing they have in mind. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Lemonade from a lemon.

Except…OH, NOES. The Senator then did a bad thing. A bad, bad thing.

He did the same thing again, eight days later in St. Louis during his closing thirty seconds. I don’t know why. Maybe he was trying to be spontaneous, showing how great he is at thinking on his feet. Bush had stung him again with the same quotation, and why not use the same riposte? It was the proscribed response. That’s exactly the problem with doing it a second time…

…here’s what I’ll say about the $87 billion. I made a mistake in the way I talk about it. He made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is a worse decision?

Here’s the problem with that, and this is how it dovetails with what passes for “arguing” when I argue with liberals.

It is wholly incompatible with individualized, creative, independent thought.

Think about it. You could, indeed, see the decision to invade Iraq as “a worse decision” than to say you voted for the $87 billion before you voted against it. Millions upon millions of people do. But John Kerry went further. He defined a razor-thin stencil of what blessed opinions people are supposed to have. He was compulsive about doing this. He couldn’t stop. He did it from the Dean Scream, to his own concession speech, and every single moment in between the two.

You could say “Sen. Kerry, I do think the decision to invade Iraq was worse than your brain-fart about the $87 billion, but I’m a stickler for things involving public speakers articulating their positions, and although what President Bush did was worse than what you said, both are emphatically unacceptable to me.” You could say that. It’s a matter of personal philosophy and taste. But you’d still be outside of Sen. Kerry’s razor-thin perimeter of what opinions you’re supposed to have.

You could go the other way, of course. You could say “Sen. Kerry, your misstatement about the $87 billion wasn’t nearly as bad as your opponent’s decision to invade Iraq, but I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy. Presidents will come, Presidents will go, some of them will start wars I don’t like, that’s just the way it is. He was worse, but both are okay by me.” That, too, would be outside of Kerry’s razor-thin definition of what’s acceptable.

No, no, no. The Senator’s question-mark on the end, was purely cosmetic; he wasn’t asking, he was telling. Both statements were not acceptable, and both statements were not unacceptable — one was, one wasn’t, and you were to look to him to find out which was which. That’s not so bad — until you consider, that he had an equally precise tune coming out of his fiddle for you to dance to, on the next issue. And the one after that, and the one after that.

In short, he was a horrible candidate for representative public office — one of many on that side of the aisle — because he never showed the capacity for asking for support. He told lesser mortals what to think. In his world, that’s the way things are done.

No, I’m undecided on whether that is what caused his defeat. The old boy did come awfully close.

But what is described above, is the real split. I saw that this morning, after my comments on that silly impeachment song. The litmus test I was applying to the lyrics, meant nothing. The idea that others like me could be applying the same litmus test, meant nothing. It was not specifically denied, ever — it was simply rejected as anything worthy of discussion. My opponents were afraid of having their fragile little mindsets corrupted by even considering the issue.

Their method of arguing, over and over and over again, was to bring to my attention how my comments failed to find favor with them — long after I demonstrated this wasn’t a big priority to me. Okay, maybe they were simply paying back what they saw come their way. But that’s the very opposite of arguing intelligently, isn’t it?

The point is, simply by noticing things about impeachment movements, the things such movements always include, the things they almost never include, I was “violating” something and my violation was the only matter worthy of discussion. I was coloring outside of the lines. Nevermind that during an actual presidential impeachment proceeding, everybody’s opinion matters somewhat and there is no tiny secret club of elites that gets to decide everything, outside of perhaps the Senate. Nevermind that. My opinion was contraband.

I think that’s the split. I’ve discussed, before (FAQ Question #8), the critical difference between a fact, an inference, a thing-to-do, and other important pieces of the things we call “arguments.” Page through previous entries on this blog, and you’ll find perhaps dozens of references to “established facts” and “reasonable opinions derived from those facts.” The people we call “conservatives,” whether they feel good about President Bush or not, react more-or-less appropriately to these classifications, after having made them on their own. They ask things like, I may like what I’m hearing, but is that a proven thing? What is your source? Or…I don’t disagree with your assessment of what’s happening, but how does it follow that we should do what you’re saying we should do? What will that achieve?

The people we call “liberals” — as I pointed out several paragraphs ago, perhaps it would be more appropriate to call them “Bush haters” — don’t see arguments that way. They see arguments as ethereal. As so much “stuff.” They make no classification of these cognitions, except whether they like something or whether they don’t. That’s the only distinction that has an affect on how they will react.

Proof may be lacking in something they favor, or it may exist for something that earns their scorn. In those situations, I very seldom see a left-winger place much importance on the question of proof, or even the concept of proof — or of evidence that falls short of proof, or even mildly compelling support. It’s all just a red herring to the liberal.

He asks, simply, do I like what I’m hearing, or do I not? NOTHING else matters. And if a liberal dislikes what you’ve told him, and you’re waiting for an explanation of why, you’re likely to be waiting a very long time.

Yet they really, truly, do see themselves as deeper thinkers. They really do. There’s only one reason why they’re deeper thinkers: They disapprove of something that earned the approval of someone else who doesn’t think as deeply. Providing reasons why they’re such brilliant, deep thinkers, this is ALL. THEY. HAVE.

Today, it appears to be difficult to remain a liberal, without that mindset.

It also appears to be very difficult to avoid becoming one, once the mindset has been accepted.

That seems to be the “clean split” of our times. Half of us think every little remark made, with regard to anything serious, is subject to some sort of voice-vote, some enigmatic popularity contest, some previously-defined blessing by an annointed leader. And no other form of validation. The other half of us think for ourselves.

Does Anything Rhyme With “Border”?

A lot of people think our President has left himself open to impeachment. Some of them think he has actually broken the law. I can’t disagree with these people outright, since the term “illegal alien” actually has the word “illegal” in it, and by passing up on so many opportunities to treat illegal aliens like illegal aliens, the administration may indeed be in breach of constitutional obligations, if nothing else. The failure of the Bush Administration to confer upon the United States, the sovereign privilege of enforcing its own border which every other nation on the planet enjoys, may be the one single policy Osama bin Laden actually likes.

So I always sit up and take notice when someone organizes a movement, in whatever form, to get the President impeached. I am told, very often, that “everybody” wants him out of office, that it isn’t just liberal Democrats who want “their” power back.

This is a pretty important question. Few things are more noble than holding our highest elected officials accountable to the law. Few things are less noble, than rocking the boat just because you like liberal Democrats, most people can’t stand them, and you want things done your way, hell with what everybody else wants.

So I’ve devised a litmus test. A very simple one.

Whenever someone makes the case to remove the President from office, because, after all, the guy is a lawbreaker, I do the best I can to find out what the Articles of Impeachment would be. Is the border issue in there somewhere? If so, then these are “real patriots,” simply insisting that high elected officials be bound by the same laws the rest of us must follow. That’s the essence of being an American. If it isn’t, then this is just another left-wing propaganda movement, nothing more. Why else would you sling a bunch of rhetoric around about breaking laws, while ignoring the one law the President is probably really breaking? Or at the very least, ignoring the willful violation of that law by others, when he’s specifically charged with enforcing it? Why would you leave that out?

So that’s my test.

And Neil Young fails it. Look at all that fanfare he’s getting from Fox, which I’m told is supposed to be slanted to the right, about the oh-so-witty lyrics in his new song you’ll be able to download Friday.

Let�s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He�s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let�s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government�s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let�s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he�s racking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There�s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God

Yeah, if I’m a Congressman, and I’m named to be a Manager when a case of impeachment is presented to the Senate, that makes perfect sense to me…that very first line, impeach the President for lying. That’s great, that’s just great. It would fall to me to answer the question “exactly what lie was that?” when, for the last three years, nobody in a country of three hundred million people has had the balls to answer that question. I’m supposed to be the first guy, oh yeah, when the illegal alien issue would be a slam-dunk.

I mean, not that you’ll find 67 senators who would vote to convict on it, but at least I’d be able to state the case. Impeach him for lying?

All a Republican senator, loyal to the White House, would have to do is read the definition of lie out loud to me on the floor of the Senate…

lie(2)
n.

1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.
2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.

v. lied, ly�ing, (lng) lies
v. intr.

1. To present false information with the intention of deceiving.
2. To convey a false image or impression: Appearances often lie.

v. tr.

To cause to be in a specific condition or affect in a specific way by telling falsehoods.

Idiom:
lie through one’s teeth

To lie outrageously or brazenly.

…and inquire, innocently, which of these numbered definitions we’re supposed to use with regard to my articles? And there I’d be, Honorable Congressman and House Impeachment Manager Freeberg, standing there with my dick in my hand…duuuhhhh…

Not a single word about the border issue?

Not a single word about this cock-and-bull thing he said, about illegal aliens doing “the jobs Americans won’t do”? Not a single word?

Yeah, it can be a challenge getting just the right content in there, and keeping those lyrics snappy. Whatsamatta Mr. Young? Nothing rhymes with “border”?

Fox

Tony Snow is the new White House Press Secretary. Good.

You know what that means: We’re going to debate, and re-debate, whether Fox News is biased or not. I like this. Every now and then, you’ll see some evidence that the people in America we call “liberals” don’t know, or don’t care about, the difference between a fact and an opinion. Usually you have to wait a few weeks to see an example of this, but when we start debating whether Fox News is biased or not, the examples come flying at us like service-for-twelve silverware at a junkyard magnet.

Fox News may actually be biased to the right. But there are few things in life sadder than a left-winger, smiling smugly, thinking he’s just proven the case.

Sometime in early 2004, Neal Boortz issued a challenge to his readers and listeners (fifth story down): Prove the conservative bias of Fox News Channel. It’s two years later. I don’t know the status of this challenge. I do know that some six months onward, it was still unanswered, which I find really surprising. I mean, for as many times a year as we hear it — sometimes several times a day — you’d think the bias of Fox News would be an incredibly easy thing to prove. It can’t be all smoke and no fire, can it?

Well, here is something you may be seeing soon. It’s a tattle-tale piece from Charlie Reina, who says he served six years as the producer of News Watch. Gee, maybe someone needs to simply load up this article and send it on to Neal in answer to his challenge, right? Let’s see what Reina has to say:

Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox – including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America – did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn’t warning me to “be careful” how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan (“You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him.”), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean (“You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don’t get the last word.”)

Sounds pretty bad, right? Hmm, I don’t know. What happens right before a boss tells his subordinate to be careful about something? Maybe…the subordinate shows the boss what the subordinate has a need to be warned about?

Isn’t that an actual term in the land of bosses and subordinates? A “warning”? Something that’s done after the subordinate screws up, that stops short of actually doing anything about the screw-up? Kind of a don’t-let-it-happen-again kind of a thing?

Sure, that could be evidence of Roger Ailes’ political bias. That’s pretty likely. It’s even more likely, it’s evidence of Charlie Reina’s political bias in the opposite direction. “Make sure the pro-environmentalists don’t get the last word” does sound incriminating, but I think most reasonable people would say they’d want to know who Reina gave the last word last time he had a similar assignment.

Being left without that, I want to see if Reina has something further. And he does.

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it’s a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, “Roger’s Revenge” – against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Now, I find this really stunning. I live in California, where we just got through with watching union muscle shove The Terminator around in that special-referendum election last year. For those who weren’t following, the final tally was Unions 8, Terminator 0. The unions spent their hundreds of millions of dollars, and not one of the special initiatives passed. Not one.

So it strikes me as incredibly bizarre, that a staff of journalists can lose their objectivity by their not answering to a union. How anyone can say that, is beyond me. Don’t unionized forces labor under “undue motivation to please the big [union] boss”? But Reina has more:

in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance’s “Under God” wording unconstitutional, FNC’s newsroom chief ordered the judge’s mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get “as much information as possible” about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling’s transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge’s physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

Well, this is turning rapidly into something that cannot be submitted in response to Boortz’ challenge after all. Two incredibly incriminating pieces of evidence of the bias of Fox News; neither one of them managed to make it to air. You have to take the word of someone who worked there, that they happened.

Hey, that is still something. The ridiculous implication about needing a union in order to sustain objectivity creates a few problems, but there’s no reason here to think he’s an out-and-out liar. So fine, I’ll take him at his word. Fox News has a toady who is not only eager to please his bosses, but so incompetent that he’s oh-for-two in getting his incredibly right-wing slant out there. Something keeps going wrong.

I just expect something better. Something…that actually makes it on air. That is not forthcoming here. We do have the tale of The Memo, though.

…the roots of FNC’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.

The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration’s point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious – information on who is where and what they’ll be covering – there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors’ copy. For instance, from the March 20th memo: “There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan’s remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are ‘with the Iraqi people.’ One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought.” Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only “food for thought,” but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General’s remarks as “utterly incomprehensible”?

The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox’s newsroom personnel into action – or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be “whining” about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent’s report on the day’s fighting – simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

Once again: It seems pretty bad, but when you think about it there’s nothing really compelling about it. A correspondent’s report got killed by a producer. How do we really know that the reason was, it included a shot of children in a hospital? Isn’t it the job of producers to kill reports, if the reports can’t be crammed into the space allocated for them? Reina could have said out loud, in advance “I’ll bet this segment doesn’t make it because there’s a shot of children in a hospital” and “I told you so” after the segment was cut — this doesn’t offer even the tiniest substantiation to the idea that the hospital shot was what killed the report. Sure it is, in Reina’s mind. But that doesn’t make it so. And that, kids, is one of the differences between a fact and an opinion. If Reina doesn’t understand this difference, small wonder that things look incriminating to him, when they actually aren’t.

A control for the experiment would be useful. What exactly gets a report cut from a CNN broadcast? Or from a news program on MSNBC? What kinds of memos do they have over there?

Well, there is another way to answer Neal Boortz’ challenge: You can take the classic liberal approach and simply scream that it isn’t fair. One of the things Neal said was “those panel discussions at the end of the show don’t count. There are liberals, moderates and conservatives on those panels. That’s not news, that’s opinion. Just find me the instances of bias in the actual reporting of the news.”

It would be highly uncharacteristic of the liberal community to let a private citizen like Neal Boortz go running around, willy-nilly, laying down challenges in whatever manner he likes without supervision or control — or at the very least, whining. So one year ago, the “PO’d Liberal” answered Neal’s challenge, liberal-style.

[Boortz’ challenge] comes with a caveat. Let’s look at his words: “Just find me the instances of bias in the actual reporting of the news.” He talks about this in several entries on his website, and he makes it very clear that in looking for a bias, you are to stay clear of the commentary such as Hannity or O’Reilly. Excuse me? He’s telling us to ignore the fact that Bill O’Reilly carries an enormous amount of weight at the company, and that Hannity is one of that most right-wing people on TV, and that the channel is owned by the extremely conservative Rupert Murdoch, and that the channel is run by Roger Ailes, a man who has been active in the GOP for decades, helping elect Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, brought in because of his mastery at attack politics? Noooooo, we can’t look at them. We’re supposed to look strictly at the news portion of the channel.
:
Boortz is the one who issued the challenge, but told us to stay clear of the TV op-eds. But Boortz is constantly harping about the media being biased to the left. What is his proof? If you listen to him regularly or read his site regularly, you will quickly see a common theme: He likes to point out what the mainstream media failed to report on. Oh give me a break. First, almost every time he does that, if you go to Yahoo you’ll see the headlines right there on the right, straight from the Associated Press or Reuters or any of the big names. Second, as a guy who has a law degree and was once a successful lawyer, I find it amazing that he would try to prove a case by stating what somebody didn’t say.

So yes, the facts are in: Fox News is biased to the right, big time.

Okay then, taking both Boortz and the PO’d Liberal at their words, I guess it would have to come down to this. I can find evidence that Fox News is tilted toward the right, but only if you let me look into the opinions/editorials, otherwise, I can’t. Right? Is that it? I mean, it doesn’t look like they disagree on this. Neal says op-eds don’t count, the PO’d Liberal says they do; and, appearances being any indication, their dispute about whether Fox News is biased or not, stems from this. Mr. PO’d has lots of opportunity to say “I don’t need to go searching in the opinions/editorials, I can find it right in the news!” Does he do this? No.

This is a great example of liberal thinking. I find it amazing that Neal Boortz would try to prove a case by stating what somebody didn’t say. So yes, the facts are in: Fox News is biased to the right, big time. What facts are those, Mr. PO? You poke holes in the logic Boortz uses…maybe you even make a great point about Neal Boortz being biased, or even, as a result of that bias, being blatantly unfair — applying a different criteria for liberal bias than what he allows for conservative bias. From that, we determine that Fox News is indeed biased? How? I’m missing something. What is it?

Maybe my expectations are too high. I’m still back at Square One, expecting what any reasonable person would expect on hearing Boortz’ challenge: I expect someone to step up and say “On such and such a date and such and such a time on such and such a program, Brit Hume read the news and he said xxxxx…and that’s biased.” Granted, that last tidbit would be a matter of opinion. But I’m waiting for the sequence of events to be presented to me — something that actually made it on the air — for me to form that opinion. Give me some meat. Persuade me, when I’m not initially inclined to buy whatever poo-poo sandwich you might happen to be selling any given day. That’s called “convincing people,” something liberals have become atrophied from doing.

Why is it that apparently, nothing can be offered that even roughly fits the template, above? It really doesn’t seem like much to ask.

I can’t ask this directly to the PO’d liberal. The text under his masthead says: “Reader comments are not allowed. If you don’t like that, get your own stinking blog.”

Well, I see it’s very important that people get permission from Mr. “PO’d” before they do things like that. So I’m glad I got it.

Requiem For Coleman

Edward Coleman was a seventeenth-century politician who was hanged, drawn and quartered over the centuries-long quibbling in England between catholics and protestants. He was among the first of probably about fifteen men who were executed because of the perjurious testimony of Titus Oates.

We, in America, are better than England in this way. Well, no, we really aren’t; we’re just supposed to be. But on this test of the American experiment, we have failed. What we call “the law” is based on findings of fact, and on politics. Politics are based on human passion; human passion is anathema to findings of fact.

Why do I say the American experiment has failed to overcome this connection? Because of the ravings of the looney elitist Shirley Lasseter, Deputy Mayor of Duluth, GA. Observing the first anniversary of Runaway Bride Jennifer Wilbanks’ little fiasco, Lasseter had this to say:

“I hate that we�re synonymous with the Runaway Bride, but I think the experience the townspeople went through as well as our staff is certainly something we�ll never forget,” Lasseter said.

“I think it�s behind everybody. The seriousness has left us all and at least we�re not left with anger. People have found humor.”

Yeah Shirley, you can’t have much more of a thigh-slapper than made-up stories of kidnapping and rape.

Persons matching the description of suspects who never existed, I wonder if they have found the humor of which you speak. Whether they were inconvenienced in the ensuing confusion, or not. I wonder if the cops in Georgia and New Mexico are having a good-natured chuckle over the water cooler about this little goose chase they went on a year ago. How about the real rape victims those cops have dealt with in the last year, knowing they should take the crime seriously, but in cases where the evidence is lacking — perhaps unable to attend to it without a teeny, tiny bit of hesitation?

Maybe the victims of real kidnapping and rape, have gotten a couple of yuks out of it.

I’m a victim of False Consensus Effect, or else this mayor is tone-deaf. I think she’s tone-deaf. It is part of the innate goodness of people, that among the times they are unable to separate their passionate emotions from political will, are the times they recognize they have been hoodwinked. In the world of rational, cool-headed logic, from which we like to fool ourselves into thinking our laws are produced, two wrongs don’t make a right. But in the realm of human emotion, they do. We were angry at the black guy who kidnapped Susan Smith’s two young sons, just as we were angry at the couple who abducted Wilbanks. When we learned that none of these culprits really existed, we were angry at the liars Smith and Wilbanks.

It’s a poorly-advised thing to fashion laws and/or sentences from anger. But give the people credit for the source of this anger. What gets people agitated, is the thing that could have happened. One or several innocent persons could have been drawn and quartered, over a lie, in the name of all among the public whose emotions were tugged previous to the lie being uncovered. Seldom is raw anger inspired by such good qualities in people: the realization that danger is imminent or has been imminent, the sense of fair play, the sense of responsibility, and the recognition of a traitor to the cause of justice in the public’s midst.

Wilbanks, the inspiration for all this “humor,” is still paying restitution for the costs associated with her search. Susan Smith will be eligible for parole in 2025.

Whatever happened to Titus Oates? He was sentenced to a recurring, ritual punishment involving the pillory and cat o’nine tails. His sentence was the inspiration for the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the English Bill of Rights during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which is the precursor to our Eighth Amendment.

Some on our Supreme Court think that this amendment is a blank check for them to stamp out the death penalty, one bite-sized chunk at a time as “evolving sensibilities” allow them to take those bites. That’s not what the Eighth Amendment is. It is a requirement that people be punished according to the logical conclusions and preponderances of evidence captured by the law, not according to the exigencies of human passion represented in that law.

Because in the final analysis, Titus Oates suffered the same fate he placed upon the unfortunate head of Edward Coleman and dozens of other innocent men. Catholic blood-lust repaid protestant blood-lust. It will always be that way, so long as the law is fashioned from anger: An eye for an eye, ’til the whole world goes blind. That’s not justice.

It isn’t a laughing matter, either.

I’m glad Wilbanks was spared from everybody’s anger. But I’m also glad she was not spared from the administration of justice. People who do what she did, pose an ongoing, neverending threat that justice will someday be brought to an end. And when that happens, we’ll all be a bunch of Edward Colemans, some of us with a date for being hung, others of us just waiting for our time.

My comments upon Jennifer Wilbanks beginning her community service, August 9, 2005.

The Racist Minimum Wage

Today Prof. Walter Williams tackles one of my favorite subjects, the minimum wage. The prevailing public sentiment is ripe for logical assault on hardly any other issue, compared to the vulnerability under which it labors on this one. A minimum wage is a fairly simple concept: Exemptions aside, all “workers” must be paid at least so much “wage,” or else the employer is in violation. This correlates to a prohibition against the employer hiring anybody, until that employer is sufficiently solvent to pay the wage.

This is a logical equivalent, not an opinion. It is not subject to reasonable dispute. You need three new employees and you can allocate $20 an hour for all three of them, a minimum wage of $6.75 plus benefits limits the hire to only two. This cannot be quibbled, anymore than you can quibble over two plus two being four. Minimum wage sends the third hire home, to live with his parents and draw unemployment, regardless of his desires, the desires of his colleagues, or of his employer.

I’m a little frustrated with Williams’ article here because he has earned my admiration as a devastating logical warrior, and his attack on the logically-gangrenous minimum wage appendage here is purely anecdotal, not logical. He uses his anecdotes to support that the minimum wage is racist:

Minimum wages can have a more insidious effect. In research for my book “South Africa’s War Against Capitalism” (1989), I found that during South Africa’s apartheid era, racist unions, who’d never admit blacks, were the major supporters of higher minimum wages for blacks.

Gert Beetge, secretary of South Africa’s avowedly racist Building Worker’s Union, in response to contractors hiring black workers, said, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances I support the rate-for-the-job [minimum wages] as the second best way of protecting our white artisans.” Racists recognized the discriminatory effects of mandated minimum wages.

I’m left hungering for more. I was brought up with the notion that racism was wrong, because in considering questions of Do I want to hire this person? Do I want to work with this person? Do I want to live next to this person? — it ascribes an importance to skin color, an attribute purely irrelevant to such determinations.

How is skin color relevant to minimum wage, then? How does Secretary Beetge plan to use it to keep the black man down, without likewise victimizing the white guys?

I flailed around looking for Prof. Williams’ book, and found it on Amazon: You can get it for $45 used, $90 new. Yikes! Like most people who harbor deep suspicions and biases against the minimum wage, I’m a cheapass. I looked further.

It turns out you can browse the whole book on Cato.org. Rrrrr? That doesn’t seem right. A pro-capitalism book you can buy on Amazon for almost a C-note, or you can read it for free on another web site if you look further? Oh well, the Prof. can work that out with Cato. But I digress. The relevant passage is on pp. 81-2, chapter 4.

In addition to all the exemptions, there was a massive evasion and contravention of the job reservation laws. In 1974, the Industrial Tribunal reported that it found “alarming malpractices” on visits to building sites, with blacks “openly engaged” in nearly all classes of skilled construction. During this period, hundreds of building contractors were prosecuted for contravention of the law but even more managed to escape. After a while, however, the minister of labour became more and more reluctant to prosecute job reservation violations, despite union accusations that there had been a “cold-blooded sellout” of white workers.

The failure of job reservation to protect white workers from competition with blacks led Beetge of the Building Workers Union to plead that “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances I support the rate for the job as the second best way of protecting our White artisans.”

That’s all I can find, just a little back-story. I’m not clear on how you keep the black worker down through a policy of minimum wage.

But I can hazard a guess.

The minimum wage policies just tend to make a market more static. It’s no secret that in the United States today, liberals tend to see people as born to be rich or poor, lumbering from nursery toward the gravesite with “R” or “P” branded onto their foreheads the whole time; the idealogues we call “conservative” tend to see people amassing great fortunes, losing them again, gaining them again — essentially, having good days and bad, prospering and suffering, as living things do. Minimum wage helps to make the liberal viewpoint a self-fulfilling prophecy. A man makes six dollars an hour because that’s what minimum wage laws say he should be making. What will he make next year? The year after? Five years from now? Smart money says, he’ll be making the same six dollars.

Like any other policy that is essentially socialist, the minimum-wage law transforms a living thing into a thing that is not quite so alive. What was dynamic is now static. It isn’t hard to see how this is helpful to a racist union interest struggling away in the middle of a market of racism that is slowly melting away.

Does this prove that minimum wage laws are inherently racist? No. But Williams’ anecdote does prove that some of them have been. It’s a good thing to know about a policy so frequently advanced as a way to help poor people. The minimum wage law is unlikely to have that effect, and it can’t even present a pure history of having that intent.

Horror Movies

Two weeks ago, as a countermeasure to Hollywood finally slipping off its rocker for good and going wombat-rabies-bollywonkers crazy, I looked to The Simpsons character Jasper Beardsly, the old man obsessed with dishing out “paddlin’s,” as perhaps our savior. There is something about the Hollywood culture, and it’s not hard to see what it is, that encourages shock value. Well, shock value is a dynamic thing, not a static one. It’s like a shark; it moves, or it’s dead. So each shocking thing that comes along, has to be much more shocking than the shocking thing that came before, or else there’s no use even trying.

That’s a problem when Hollywood starts telling us what political opinions we’re supposed to have. The nature of a reasonable opinion, one that is formed through a rational process involving sound logic used to derive credible inferences from established and empirical facts, is that such opinions are a little dull. They don’t have a lot of snap. Or zest. Or pep, or sizzle. No, you have to add that if you want it…and typically, the only way to add in snap, zest, pep and sizzle, is to mutate the reasonable opinion into something unreasonable.

So the opinions put out by the Hollywood crowd, have to get more and more zesty and zippy — unreasonable — as time goes along, in order to get the attention they crave. And, we have no Jasper Beardsly. Nobody’s getting a “paddlin’.” Everything is acceptable. That’s what we need to stop. Save us, Jasper!

Exhibit D is as follows (Exhibits A, B and C were listed in my post of April 10). Last weekend, Eli Roth, director of “Hostel,” said that we have a lot more horror movies than usual lately because the Bush administration makes people want to scream, and a horror movie gives them an excuse, in a dark theater, to do that screaming.

Roth claimed that people wanted to scream because of the “things going on in the world” and the government�s failure to help after Hurricane Katrina. He explained that horror movies offered a safe environment which allowed people to scream. Roth went on to say the seemingly “never ending war”, fighting people that do not care about our money, our “disorganized army” with “scared kids” for soldiers and the generals calling for Rumsfeld�s resignation were specific reasons for the need of an emotional release offered by horror movies.

Newsbusters, my source for this latest parade of Hollywood nuttiness, goes on to editorialize that “It is ridiculous to attempt to tie President Clinton with the horror movies released during his 8 years in office. It is just as ridiculous to blame the Bush Administration for an increase in the popularity of horror movies.”

Sorry, I can’t quite sign up to that last one. Seems I’m being asked to categorically reject the notion that a pronounced trend of successful movies within a confined period of time, fitting into a specific genre, says nothing about changes in people’s priorities and concerns.

Hope I’m not putting words into someone’s mouth there, but that’s how I’m interepreting “it’s ridiculous.” Ridiculous?

We had lots of cowboy movies in the 1950’s and early 1960’s; during the 1970’s and 1980’s, we didn’t. You wouldn’t call it “ridiculous” to assert that this change said something about what people were, or were not, ready to watch during those times. We had a lot of movies taking place in outer space during the 1980’s. We had a lot of movies made for women during the early 1990’s.

I’ll tell you why I’m going down this bunny trail. It’s long been a favorite pet theory of mine, that during the late 1960’s people lost faith in government for three reasons: 1) Vietnam; 2) Watergate, and 3) this does not get very much mention at all, but — the criminal incarceration system becoming useless.

Permit me just this much scope creep. Soon after we had an Earl Warren Supreme Court, it was established that in order to enforce the rules of constitutionality about gathering evidence, it was okay — in fact, compulsory — to magically transform guilty people into innocent people. The law, it was thought, was duty-bound to pretend incriminating evidence simply did not exist. Rapists, thugs, murderers, perverts, psychos, and creeps were turned out of the prisons in droves. Suddenly, children had no reason to believe they wouldn’t be abducted, and women had no reason to believe they’d remain unmolested.

People got pretty tired of this by 1969. For three dozen years previous, Eisenhower notwithstanding, no Republican had been elected President. Now, the great liberal “let’s give the bad guy one more chance to be good” train came off the tracks forever. Chief Justice Warren, by then plagued by health problems, retired just months after the new Republican President Nixon was sworn in. The Burger Court did very little to reverse the damage Warren did, but as far as making more damage, the party was pretty much over. And as far as the electorate was concerned, they were fed up.

Now look at what we had going on in movie-land. I say “I’ve got a movie you have to see, it’s about a man who’s family is brutalized and/or murdered and so he takes the law into his own hands” and what movie am I talking about? More to the point, when was it made? I give you this description of my movie — just what’s written above, not a single word more, and you know, to the level of certainty you can bet quite a bit of money — it was made between 1971 and 1977. During which, you know what? We didn’t have a lot of movies about crooked presidential administrations micro-managing wars and getting thousands and thousands of good young men maimed & killed. Just a few movies. Not a lot. Although, that had been happening, and people were supposed to be concerned about it.

How about a cop who is constantly yelled at by his Lieutenant because he throws the book away and takes justice into his own hands? Movies like that were made during the same era. Not a lot of movies about Watergate. Although, Watergate did happen, and a lot of people were supposed to be concerned about that, too.

No, during the seventies, movies about “Cause For Distrust In Government #3” did more than spike — they went through the friggin’ roof. This was a huge problem. The elites chose not to say a whole lot about it back then, and they choose to say even less about it now. But the contract between the government, and the governed, had been torn asunder. It was a huge glaring problem, and we can only avoid repeating it by making sure the infraction is never committed again. By making sure that creeps get smoked. Given a toe tag, and tossed in a body bag. By our government. Because that is one of the jobs government is supposed to have. Protect the innocent, from those who refuse to abide by any social contract whatsoever, those whose gears are so stripped that their continuing survival is mutually exclusive from any acceptable margin of public safety.

But I digress.

My point is, some of the logic Roth is using is sound, and not without precedent. There’s a reason why we had lots of vigilante movies in the seventies. People were fed up with the law screwing around and playing pretend with vicious, liquor-store-clerk-shooting, woman-raping, child-chopping-up perverts and creeps.

So with that precedent, I agree with Eli. People can get tired of things, and people can start to want to scream, and because of that they may have a demand for a certain genre. In my opinion, it has happened before.

But I agree with Newsbusters about something, too: The facts do not support Roth’s theory, not substantially anyway. He’s talking out of his ass, just to get some shock-value talking-points out there, and get attention for himself. Newsbusters says “Roth�s explanation had nothing to do with facts. It was simply another overt attempt by a Hollywood liberal to beat up on the President and his administration.”

Hollywood has become a fairly vicious, snarling parody of itself. Week after week, month after month, we are told we should blame the Bush administration for…just name it. The summers are too hot. The winters are too cold. My gas is too expensive. My ass itches. There aren’t enough sexy movies, there are too many scary movies. I stubbed my toe.

At a certain point, you have to say, you know what Hollywood? You’re the boy who cried wolf. I mean, way back when Julia Roberts was personally funding a “recount” down in Florida and your glittering elite upper-crusts wanted to blame Bush for everything from global warming, to mythical stories about vicious snarling attack dogs intimidating black Florida residents from voting for Gore — way back then, you were the boy who cried wolf.

You had crossed that line in December of 2000.

And after that, Hollywood liberal upper-crusters, you did it fifty bazillion more times!

It’s no longer funny to watch. It’s gotten tedious and tiring, and then painful and embarrassing…and then with a little more repetition, it’s gotten tedious and tiring again.

Last summer I started jotting down all the “Things I Know.” I don’t know all of these things as proven facts; indeed, most of them are things I can’t prove. A huge chunk of this list describes patterns of things, patterns which can actually be disrupted quite easily and thus, to an intellectual elitist snob, “disproven.” Like, for example, buttered bread that is dropped on a rug, lands butter-side-down, but one sets onesself up for failure by asserting this is always the case. Of course it isn’t.

The point of the list is, that personally, I’m done deliberating whether these things are so or not, because I’ve made up my mind they are so. I can’t tell you why they are the way they are. I can’t tell you what they mean. I can’t even guarantee that all the people who are smarter than I am, agree with all these things. Many smart people don’t.

But I know these things are so. They are things I know.

POSTED AUGUST 12, 2005:
1. Very few people who have four-wheel drive have any reason to expect they’ll need it. Ever.
2. For every man who maintains his opinion because of preponderance of evidence, nine more maintain theirs simply because they’re already on record and want to stay consistent.
3. Mercy is the opposite of justice.
4. Most of us want to be capitalists on payday, and Marxists on the day before.
5. It takes a lot of maturity to keep your silence on an important decision, simply because you recognize it belongs to someone else.
6. Initiating or maintaining a verbal conversation across a parking lot is a sign of diminished intelligence.
7. A lot of what passes for bad news in a technological society, wouldn’t be discussed in an agricultural one because it would be a waste of time.
8. It is hard to get people to argue about private matters, but easy if you can somehow turn them into public matters.
9. International disputes, like any other problem, can be postponed indefinitely and this always seems to make them bigger.
10. Men can’t see dirt and women don’t know how to work one of those itty-bitty cheap can openers.
11. I can no more trust the man who tells me a thing is so, but not what I should think about it, than I can trust the man who tells me what I should think, and can’t explain why.
12. The word “should” rolls off our tongues easily when we talk about another man’s purse.
13. When a man says childbirth can’t possibly hurt that much, childless women are quick to anger while mothers laugh with him.
14. The brain is not the only part of you that has a tough time absorbing arguments you don’t like. When you read such things the words seem blurry. When you hear them the syllables run together.
15. It’s hard to be truthful to others that you’re worried about something. Often, it’s hard to be truthful to yourself that you’re not.
16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.
17. A man may not kill a fly for a cause he believes is right; but he might do terrible things for a cause he believes is righteous.
18. A pretty woman notices men noticing her long before the men notice themselves noticing her, even if the men honestly don’t know if she noticed them noticing her.
19. Beware the Government-Entertainment Complex, for the power to surround a weak-minded man with the same message in several directions, is the power to tell him what to think.
20. An effort to silence an idea doesn’t make an idea wrong, but it doesn’t make it right either. When people tell you to shut up they may be afraid of the truth you speak, but it’s also likely you’re making an ass out of yourself.
21. Caution is fitting for the poor man who relies on an argument that would crumble if he were wealthy; and it’s good for the wealthy man who convinces himself with an rationale that would dissipate if he were poor. If you take your life in your hands by the things you notice and the way you think, you’re probably doing it right. If not, then maybe you’re not.
22. Leadership is the presentation of answers before your following has fully absorbed the questions. Time is of the essence, for decisions are deeply offensive to the indecisive.
23. A man might be willing to bet a nickel on his opinion, but you can often quickly increase this to ten dollars simply by arguing with him.
24. A dog can pick out a master and follow him; a lemming can detect a consensus and go along with it; a monkey is capable of showing compassion to the weak; but only a human can honor a pledge.
25. A lot of tempting things get repulsive when you get too much of them. These include: conversation; beef jerky; travel; ice cream; opera; and being attractive to the opposite sex.

POSTED JANUARY 9, 2006:
26. There really aren’t too many things in the arena of human existence louder than a pair of women recognizing each other at a Starbuck’s coffee shop.
27. Information has a tendency to flow one-way, which greatly increases the effort involved in noticing little details, while one is engaged in attention-whoring.
28. People who drive great big cars don’t mind following other great big cars, but they absolutely have to get out from behind a little itty-bitty car even if it involves passing over a double-yellow line.
29. There is substantial, and mutual, potential benefit to be realized from scrutinizing questions — unwelcome as they may be — anytime you’re advised “you are not supposed to” do something.
30. A lot of people who crusade against absolutes, employ absolutes quite frequently, especially while crusading against absolutes.
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.
32. There are a lot of people walking around among us who like to re-define the baseline obligations carried by others, particularly toward them, simply because they find it painful to say “thank you”.
33. If you see a lot of bugs crawling all over the computer lately, it might be a good idea to go into that room with the refrigerator and the sink and see if there’s something that hasn’t been cleaned for awhile.
34. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and it comes much more easily to us to bear silly grudges against entire cultures, than legitimate grudges against individual persons.
35. The individual attribute ascribed to the aggregate entity, manifests a weak argument ripe for re-thinking.
36. The words “public good” are very, very rarely applied to self-directed criticism, certainly not as often as they are used in criticism directed toward others.
37. The first time someone asks you a question and then interrupts during the answer — from that point onward, you are best off smiling, nodding, and suddenly remembering you have something you need to go away and do.

POSTED JANUARY 19, 2006:
38. Where smoke of outrage rises from a fire of moral indignation, all targets presented as legitimate, must also be compulsory.

POSTED APRIL 23, 2006:
39. It’s important to know things. But it’s a lot more important to know how you know things. Knowing what you don’t know, is even more important than that. And knowing what you need to find out, versus what doesn’t matter, is the most important of all.
40. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and when people extoll the virtues of “diversity” they tend to talk about skin color and nothing else.
41. Those who are out of danger, worry about food. Those with food, worry about discomfort. Those who are comfortable, worry getting things done on time. Those who have time, worry about money. Those who are solvent, worry about their legacies. And the lucky souls who spared the plagues of danger, hunger, discomfort, time, solvency and legacy issues, worry about fashion.
42. Is it a wrinkle in the brain or a strand in our DNA? Religion has tried to say, and will not; science has tried to say, and cannot; in the end, it is up to us to decide it by the things we do.
43. When people ask me a question that begins with “Why did you…” they almost never want any information out of me.
44. A little bit of fear once in awhile is a healthy thing.
45. It’s good to know more than what you say, because when you say something, you prove the need for you to say it.
46. No statement achieves a unifying force without first achieving unidirectional flow. People aren’t inspired by slogans containing the word “but”.
47. A bureaucracy reaches critical mass, at which point it is no longer effective, when its leaders are selected according to their mediocrity.

Update 5-4-06:
48. This world makes no sense. NO sense. There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who carry around big, perplexing, unanswered questions about why, and how, the world works the way it does. And, those who have simply given up on asking such questions.
49. You know, there’s always one good thing about never having any money. Uh…well, I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention there.
50. The decisions we make out of a sense of fair play, an appreciation for fun, a sense of responsibility, a sense of concern, and even an sense of entitlement, we sometimes remember fondly. The decisions we make out of guilt, we never do.
51. When we serve on juries, everyone is terrified over the prospect of convicting an innocent man. Very few people lose much sleep over letting a guilty man go free.
52. When angry people make demands, the ensuing fulfillment never seems to bring a stop to their anger.
53. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and we have very little to say to our neighbors who enjoy a different set of luxuries or who labor under a different set of burdens.
54. Find me ten men who will argue with me about something, and I’ll show you one man who has something to tell me, and nine jackasses who are just showing off for someone else.

Update 5-15-06:
55. Anyone objecting to the presence of a young lady in a skimpy outfit, or her attire, is someone I don’t want to know. I can think of several reasons for this objection and none of them are the least bit healthy, helpful or benevolent.
56. Courage cannot be banked. It is used, or else it is nothing.
57. Few people have more blind faith, than those who condemn others for having some.
58. To insult a man says nothing about other men, but for some reason, anything said against one woman is perceived to be said against everything female who ever lived.
59. Truly rewarding life-decisions have no need to be marketed toward those who are down on their luck.
60. Sound ideas have this in common: Those who speak of them, lack any passionate ambition to broadcast them to a great audience, or to keep them secret. The idea is what the idea is, discussed or not, believed or not, practiced or not.
61. Disaster is sure to follow when the legacy of a man who has courage, is decided by other men who have none.
62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount of concern out of what others thought.
63. Risk is personal, profit from risk even moreso. Men will share their wives long before they share profits realized from risk.
64. You know you have courage when you see the flimsiest spoiler of fortune decides if history will focus on your breathtaking stupidity, or your enormous balls.
65. Against all expectations, one of my most reliable ways for picking out “independent thinkers” in a world where so many desire that distinction, is this: They blaze their own trail only when it makes sense to do so. Others seem to want to build a better mousetrap whenever they’re being watched.
66. Those who give advice usually have more problems than those to whom they give it, and those who wait for it tend to have more problems than those who seek it.
67. Some among us seem to think an election is the only time public opinion is important; others seem to think that’s the only time it isn’t.
68. If you listen to some spoken ideas, you’ll pick up that there’s a pressing need to getting them vocalized as frequently as possible, to as great an audience as can be reached. If you dismiss such things out-of-hand, you almost never regret it.
69. Comments of condemnation and praise, from those who lack the authority to back them up, are stunningly useless; they’re only slightly more useful when they come from people with said authority.

Update 5-25-06:
70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.
71. Tell the truth for your own sake, for those who want to doubt you will do so no matter what you say.
72. I don’t understand what’s going on with driving cars. So many people like to “brag” about their ineptitude with computers, but nobody ever confesses to their own poor driving skills.
73. The only time unnamed sources are used to vouch for something that is supposed to have happened, is when whoever is telling me about the sources, is happy with what was supposed to have happened.
74. Wealthy people never seem to see any UFOs. You need some really cheap booze to see a UFO, or else there’s something about poor people that the aliens really like.
75. Our lingering interest in malicious and depraved acts is inspired not by graphic details, or by a recognition of pure evil, or by the lessons we can learn from what happened, but because of how the protagonist reminds us of our own darker selves.
76. Old married people who share an e-mail address, just like they’re used to sharing a real mailbox, can’t be reached by e-mail. Not really.
77. What we call “activism” seeks to provide comfort, not to solve problems. Actually, comfort tends to have more to do with making problems in the first place, than with solving them.
78. If someone is constantly criticizing you and seems to want to cut you down, you should allow for the possibility that they love you and have a large vision for you. If the criticism is dealt before an audience, you can safely exclude that as a possibility because the sonofabitch is out to burn you after all.
79. I know we are gradually losing our ability to survive in the wilds, because nowadays it’s so rare to hear someone praise the talents of someone to whom they’re opposed. It seems that intelligence is measured entirely by ideology, and worrying about the incompetence of allies or the genius of enemies is a thing of the past.
80. Beware of those who have no humility, and of those who have some and are anxious to show it.
81. There are a lot of people walking around who seem to think “politics” is the process of re-defining “justice” to be something pleasing to many and unpleasant to few. That isn’t what “justice” is.
82. You need to be careful when helping desperate people, because there’s a fine line between finding out what it is they need, and borrowing some of the habits they had just before they got desperate.
83. The nature of “multitasking” determines that those who do it, know far less about how well they’re doing it than those who watch.
84. There are perhaps a dozen different reasons why a fellow motorist’s head doesn’t rise far above his steering wheel, and almost every one of them compels the prudent driver to stay away.
85. As the standard of living improves, people slowly lose their need for a Supreme Being, while their need for a spiritual leader remains.
86. History looks back on times when information flowed slowly, and remembers great men who got things done. It looks on more recent times when information flowed more quickly, and remembers great men who talked about things just before someone else got them done.
87. In the past few years I notice the people with the largest television sets are the ones we are supposed to call “poor”.
88. A natural instinct for trying a different approach in the face of repeated failure would be handy thing, and it’s curious that evolution seems to have defeated this trait instead of strengthening it.
89. Since biblical times, what we have come to call “news” has always been a curious hybrid. It blends whatever is written in the messenger’s scroll, with what the Emperor is ready to hear.
90. A committee is a group of four or more people, each of whom are invested in an all-consuming mission to appear more important than the others. Through their dedication, good judgment, and continued persistence in these efforts, they have an excellent chance at making the committee itself utterly useless.
91. “Esteem” is something sought with the greatest urgency by those who struggle with doubts about whether they’ve earned it.
92. Useful people have a fear of becoming useless that is exceeded in intensity only by the fear useless people have of someday being useful.
93. People tend to change the way they think when they’re in groups. Generally, an idea generated in a group is worth a lot less than an idea someone thinks up on their own.
94. There are a lot of people walking around who put lots of energy into telling others that something can’t be done.
95. Even very wise people can make bad decisions when they’re too close to what is being decided.
96. History bears the marks of those who were mean, vicious, even pernicious, but not from those who were inconsiderate.
97. There is always someone who believes what I’ve been told “nobody believes,” and there is always someone who contests what I’ve been told “everybody agrees.” Quite a few of both, actually.
98. It’s easy to brag about how much experience we have, but it always takes humility to discuss how we got it.
99. Companionship complements a new adventure for some; for others, it is a substitute for it.
100. There are a lot of people walking around who seem to think “leadership” is the process of making decisions that a large number of people expect to be made, that could have been made by anyone. The unexpected has a lot to do with what leadership really is.
101. Most men who have been married for a long time rarely discuss themselves or the things they want. This is not necessarily true of married women.
102. There are jobs in which excellent performance generates a wholly different result compared to adequate performance. There are other jobs wherein it doesn’t. There are still other jobs where excellent performance carries no definition save for longer periods between catastrophes. When a job is re-associated from one of these classes to another, the man who holds that job never ends up happy.
103. So many problems people have with what they call “love,” would be avoided if love was recognized as a package, which includes respect.
104. A good and popular idea is promoted on its merits. A bad and popular idea is promoted because it’s popular.
105. Judgment has everything to do with choosing from options as they are, and nothing to do with declaring what those options should be.
106. Making sure no one is offended, virtuous as it is, seems to be antithetical to real achievement.
107. Happiness is the companion of men who know their limits; things that make us happy, were conceived by men who knew no such thing.

Update 6-10-06:
108. People give each other unlimited allowance to live their personal lives however they will, until it comes to the raising of children.
109. There is an inversely-proportional relationship between the ability of people within a culture to think problems through logically, and the frequency with which they use ridicule to persuade.
110. Everyone’s willing to bet an unlimited measure of resources from a company, corporation, committee, council, organization or club, that the “smartest guy in the room” really is the smartest guy in the room. Because of that, the smartest guy’s ideas usually go unopposed. I have noticed it’s extremely rare that anyone, anywhere, would bet one dime of their personal fortune that he’s really that smart. This may explain why some of the best decisions I’ve seen, were made outside of conference rooms.
111. It’s one thing to love freedom when freedom means people should do what you want. To love freedom all the time, even when people use it to ignore you, is quite another thing.
112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.
113. A crisis precedes logical thinking. Logical thinking precedes a solution to the crisis. Too long a time without a crisis, precedes indulgence and sloppy thinking. Indulgence and sloppy thinking precede the next crisis.
114. I can put up with people who are naturally inclined toward rudeness, for so much longer than I can put up with people who are genuinely afraid of being polite.
115. We are a product of life as we have lived it, but this in itself is a product of life as it is, and life as we have made it.
116. Crime does not pay. I have found that following rules that are followed by nobody else, doesn’t pay either.
117. I feel really bad when I start a project and my progress is unnoticeable after a week or more. When I pass a construction site that has been where it is unchanged, for months, this feeling suddenly vanishes.
118. The more logically-sustainable the point, the less ambitious is the effort to silence those who disagree.
119. A single woman who has a dog, and a boyfriend, actually has two boyfriends. The two-legged boyfriend is the more expendable of the two.
120. It isn’t hard to find someone who is more interested in why a process is bad, than why the results of the process are bad. It isn’t hard to find someone who is more interested in preventing problems, than solving them after they occur. It is exceedingly rare, somehow, that anyone’s concerned about keeping a poor process from being formed.
121. One verifiable fact can sell a whole package of unlikely speculation. One appealing opinion can sell a whole package of outright falsehood.
122. Our love of opportunity is strengthened through addiction; our love of security is strengthened through estrangement.
123. Diplomacy is an exchange that places a premium value on refined strategy and positive results. The diplomat with the least-refined strategy obtains the most positive results.
124. Discuss politics and religion long before personal finances. I have found people conceal those aspects of their personal decisions that might expose them to critique, without even knowing they’re doing it, and if this part of the discussion eludes you then you’re best off ignoring all the rest.

Update 6-17-06:
125. They tell me rules are needed for civilization, but I notice civilization is needed for the rules. Civilization arises from where a wild frontier was tamed. On the taming of a wild frontier by a rulebook, history stands mute.
126. Life is not fair. I have found that with hard work and the vigorous exercise of poor judgment I can make my life a whole lot less fair.
127. The measure of a person’s happiness and success is proportional not to his ability to form opinions, or to his tenacity in sticking to them, or his outspokenness in arguing them or to the number of people who agree with him, but to the sense of personal responsibility he places in having them.
128. Everybody who got something significant done, was an optimist. I know of no exceptions to this. Every optimist who got something significant done, tempered his optimism with a pragmatic appreciation that broken things needed fixing. I know of no exceptions to that, either.
129. Leaders; votes; clergy; academics; pundits; prevailing sentiment; political expediency. Wherever these decide what is & isn’t true, an empire will surely fall.
130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

Update 7-10-06:
131. Women fart.
132. There’s no limit to how happy a man can be when his job is substandard. But a man with a substandard woman is an empty shell.
133. There are lot of people walking around who seem to have a phobia against leaving things unsaid. The years have left me with few regrets about things left unsaid, and many more about questions left unasked.
134. The hug is a gift from God to men who like to mash their chests into the breasts of good-looking women and could use a good excuse to do so. Guys hugging guys, that’s a waste of this gift.
135. A leader can commit no greater betrayal of the public trust, than to allow someone to live, who won’t stop killing people.
136. The mediocre leader promotes the subordinates who do things the way he would do them if he were they. The superior leader promotes the subordinates who produce the results he wants, working the tasks in whatever way they will.
137. I have no reason to believe straight couples fight with each other more often, or split up more often, than gay couples do.
138. It’s very difficult to acquire good judgment without experience. It’s very difficult to acquire experience without bad judgment.
139. Beware the critic who drones on at length about how you should do something, but cannot name a consequence of you not doing it.
140. Some of the worst ideas a man has, have to do with getting admiration from the ladies. The worst ideas among those, are the ones that eventually succeed at this.

Update 8-5-06:
141. Voting on ethical issues is a huge mistake. People are slow to surrender their personal moral cognitions to a group, but quick to expect others to do exactly that.
142. What we call “cartoons”…they have a coyote and a road-runner, or else they’re CRAP. No exceptions.
143. Collectively, our track-record for guessing who will show leadership, and a capacity for learning, seems to be on par with random chance. Worse than that, I think. Perhaps the child prodigy is dilatory in showing the qualities everyone “knows” he has, and is anxious to cultivate the strengths everybody “knows” he’s missing.
144. In what deserves to be called “science,” you save the drama for your mama. People debating science, getting angry and testy about the skepticism from others, are advancing and defending what would more properly be called “religion.”

Update 8-19-06:
145. “Excellence” is a funny word. It has something to do with conformity or lack thereof. Some of us think going with the group is a prerequisite to excellence; some of us think it’s mutually exclusive from that, and finding your own way is the prerequisite. Nobody is neutral on this. On the disagreements that result from this fundamental split, people argue; on the split itself, they keep their silence. It’s like a fart in church. Socially it doesn’t exist. It’s as if we’re afraid to discuss what “excellence” really is. Both sides can present a solid, compelling case, so this strikes me as being really weird.
146. The day a lingering challenge finally abates, atrophy starts setting in. People lose their capacity for dealing with the challenge; slowly on their own, and much more quickly in groups.
147. It is frequently said that cell phones are electronic leashes. I have found there is an entire gender of persons who rarely have their cell phones turned off; they see the leash as something that binds them. The other gender of persons, rarely have their cell phones on. They see the leash as something they wield. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out which is which.

Update 9-29-06:
148. Reassurance is a funny thing. People crave it. The more they get, the more they want. Eventually, it becomes impossible for anyone to get anything they want or need, without making one or several bogus reassurances to someone about something. I have noticed when the same people are summoned to provide the same reassurances to the same people over and over again, the next thing that happens is never good.
149. Nobody’s willing to admit it, it seems, but so many among us are ready to presume altruistic motives on the part of whoever talks constantly, while jealousy is confined to those who speak occasionally, only when they have something to say. I have found the reverse is closer to the truth.
150. I know of three ways to kill yourself slowly. You can make plans around people changing their fundamental patterns of behavior; you can pretend to like something you really don’t; you can refuse to try new things.
151. Choosing between “truth” that comports with our personal experiences, and “truth” that contradicts that experience but that we’ve heard several times before, we have a persistent and unsettling tendency to reject the truth we could personally verify and accept the truth we’ve heard before. There is no logical explanation for this. It would seem that if we are products of evolution and continuous improvement and survival-of-the-fittest, this must be a piece of unfinished business.

Update 12-4-06:
152. I wish, when I was younger, I worked harder at identifying with older people; people who were at the age I am now. Now that I’m here I don’t have such regrets about identifying with younger people. It’s automatic. I’ve been there. People older than me, it seems, just might know something I don’t. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for people of all ages.
153. Lately I notice sarcasm is used, more and more, to discuss opinions without considering facts. In those situations the opinion that “wins” is almost always wrong.
154. With only occasional exceptions, you’re on safe ground dismissing any statement containing the phrase “the Christian Right” as complete and utter crap.
155. There are some things a woman does better than a man. Everybody understands this; everyone is willing to point it out. There are things a man does better than a woman. Everyone understands that too, but they’d rather keep that one quiet. One of the things men do better, is owning and training dogs. Few people realize that. But the more I see, the more certain I am of it.
156. When I read about people who lived generations ago, I read about issues among them involving “trust.” People today have issues with each other involving “trust.” I don’t think the generations use the words the same way. Our grandparents often talked about character issues with this word; we usually use it to talk about financial motivations. Whether or not a man’s promise is good to us, is something we don’t talk about very often. I don’t know what that says about where we’re going. It can’t possibly be good.
157. If a man and woman are really “together,” the woman can’t be unhappy when the man is happy. The man can’t be happy, if the woman is unhappy. But for the man to be unhappy while the woman is happy, is very possible. There are people who have understood this difference between men and women, and gambled on it, and won, for generations. They’re called “salesmen.”
158. What makes us happy, is a determination each of us must make for ourselves. Our ability to figure out what that is, has ramifications for everyone in our community. It’s much harder than it seems to be, and I notice the people who seem the most certain about what they want, change their minds about it most reliably later on, to the injury of those around them.
159. People who are right and know they are right, get only so angry. Anger beyond that critical event horizon, is the exclusive domain of those who don’t believe in their own positions.
160. Being better than everyone you know; being the same as everyone you know. You can have one, not both. I think we all get that. But too many among us want both. They know they can’t have both, but they’re unwilling to do things differently from the crowd, or to take second-place. They want it all. And they don’t know why they end up unhappy.
161. Justice depends completely on truth; anarchy, not so much.
162. Over the long term, American businesses seem to live out the life of a fruit: Green to juicy to overripe to trash. I notice the ones that have peaked, have it in common that the decisions owned by smaller groups must involve more and more groups as they are recognized as important, and input must eventually be gathered from everyone across the board. Successful businesses that are still growning, do it the opposite way: Only on the trivial, meaningless business is input gathered “across the board.” The most critical issues are decided by a small circle, or by an individual. Someone getting in trouble for leaving so-and-so “out of the loop” is something you hear only rarely.
163. In Journalism, the word “Analysis” is used when someone knows an editorial doesn’t belong where they want to put it but if they put a different name on it, it’ll look okay.
164. Some ideas look serious, only because they’re never taken that way. The most devastating thing you can do to a dumb idea is to take it seriously.
165. A word has a definition not when you can look it up in a dictionary, but when there is widespread agreement about what it means. There is no definition for the word “racist.”

Maturity

For reasons that may be expounded upon, or not, I haven’t been doing a lot blog-wise for the last few days or so. Anyway, yesterday I got an e-mail asking me for a link-trade: My blog points to yours, your blog points to mine. The author closed off by saying “You’re doing a great job, by the way. Keep up the good work.”

I found that to be an interesting comment after I visited his blog, and came to the realization that his blog and my blog don’t agree about too many things.

Remarkable? Well, such a thing used to not be unusual. Now, it is.

This blog relishes compliments regardless of the source, but it has special gratitude for such positive remarks supplied by those not initially inclined to agree with it. This is only sensible. Think about it; you love tapioca pudding and I love tapioca pudding, and you write an essay about how wonderful tapioca pudding is, how much better it is than chocolate or vanilla. After I read your essay and tell you “that’s a great essay, you really told it like it is!” what does that really tell you? Do you really know you did a great job explaining why tapioca pudding is good? You don’t know that. I already know I like tapioca pudding! Maybe your essay sucked! You don’t know.

It means so much more when someone thinks banana creme pudding is the bomb, or is bollywonkers over butterscotch, or thinks that tapioca is just nasty — but nevertheless opines that your essay about tapioca pudding was a good anyway.

Appreciation for the talents and/or labors of those who are ideologically different, is something we used to see often, and now we don’t. It really doesn’t require much; just something called “maturity.” We live in a time when those who have this maturity, are often coerced from using it. It is much more common to disparage anyone on the other side, or anyone caught sympathizing with the other side. Or anyone remiss in their duties of properly insulting the other side, every minute of every day. That’s why we can’t even have civil discussions anymore, you know…You’re a U.N. pussy, you’re a right-wing nutjob, you’re a liberal weiner, you’re dumb as a doorknob.

Anyway, now my blog has a link list. It’s a little on the short side now, but I have many more entries to add to it. “Empires Fall” is in it.

Kudos to you, Mr. Barnes, you’re doing a great job too. Wish there were more people nowadays like you.

Gratitude

Dear deployed members of America’s armed forces,

I had one of those days yesterday where nothing went right. Nevertheless, I was still able to sit down and stuff my fat face with some cheap chinese food that’s probably better than what you get most days. My fortune cookie said “He who expects no gratitude, will never be disappointed.”

Made me think of you.

THANKS!

Bikini 60

This is the sixtieth anniversary of the bikini. You can read all about it here on Wikipedia’s page about bikinis, and the reference page that describes Micheline Bernardini, the first bikini model.

I thought this paragraph was kind of interesting.

After modelling in a bikini [Barnardini] returned to her normal life but was critisized by many feminists for exploiting women, by helping men expose the female body in yet another way.

See? They were against fun even back then.

Hey I got a question…and it should be easy to answer this after six decades to think about it. What does forcing women to wear more clothing, have to do with equal-pay-for-equal-work, and equal rights in general?

How do you go about improving womens’ lives, when you criticize models for modeling, essentially trying to coerce them into doing only the modeling which receives the approval and blessing of you and your overlords? How does it make women free, to control them in this way?

There are millions of “feminists” in this country, both men and women, who consider themselves to fit that plural only because they want women to be protected from violence, to enjoy all the rights that they should, and to be paid a fair wage. But! — would never deign to tell women what to wear or to tell men what they should be looking at. So who are, or were, these people criticizing bikinis? Are those, or were those, really “feminists”? Maybe we need another word. We could call them “anti-gender-difference-people” or “anti-male-fun-people” or something.

You Want More Women…Get In Line

A certain company that provides a highly-valued service on the Internet, is concerned about its workforce. It’s got too much diversity. They want all white people.

Whoops! That’s not what’s happening at all! No, I’d better correct that right away. Google is concerned because they can’t find any female engineers to work in their Sydney, Australia office.

“Don’t be evil.”

Those were the famous words Google included in its 2004 stock exchange listing filing with US regulators – and a search on this term lists Google’s corporate philosophy page.

But that New Age corporate philosophy is under threat by the very people it aims to help, because Google Australia can’t find any female engineers who want to work for it.

Internationally, the search engine behemoth strives to employ workers from many backgrounds, a recognition that its customers also come from every background. In Australia it hired more than 10 engineers from five ethnic backgrounds – but despite its best efforts, not a single woman.

Lars Rasmussen, Google Australia manager of engineering, wants at least 20 engineers in his team but says he needs women to deliver the best output.

“We believe we can put out the best products if our engineering workforce has the same characteristics as our user,” Dr Rasmussen says. His concern is that he will “fall short” – half of Google’s users are female.

Hoo, boy! I’m sure glad I cleared that up! After all, there’s a world of difference between trying like the dickens to get some females on your workforce when you can’t find any, and trying to keep that workforce all-white.

Or is there?

Well, refer back to the first line. “Don’t be evil.” When do hiring practices become evil? To a manager or an auditor, I guess hiring practices become evil when the workforce isn’t represented in the way you want it to be represented…but managers and auditors are not known for living in the real world. What is the real world with regard to hiring practices? I’m sure we all would agree that’s best represented from the perspective of someone who is about to be hired, or not, because of those practices.

And in that position, what is evil? Well, obviously, it’s proving yourself to be a well-qualified candidate, and being passed over for the position because your plumbing is wrong or because your skin is the wrong color.

Of course, I said “all white people” which is an absolute. In the real world, Google wants just a few women, which is not an absolute, actually, it’s a non-absolute. Should be easy! So my corollary is a sham, because I’m comparing diversity with non-diversity, and we all like diversity don’t we? What with it being so natural and all.

Well that’s the trick, isn’t it. If it were natural, it would be a bit easier, wouldn’t it? And therein lies the problem. Google encounters resistance, so now Google will have to do something spectacular, or else abandon the goal. The goal won’t be abandoned. Women will continue, for whatever reason, to not want to work for Google. So these job applications from qualified male engineers will be allowed to pile up and gather dust for awhile longer, or they’ll get pitched altogether. Just as, in my hypothetical, the resumes from qualified black engineers will be allowed to pile up, and/or get pitched altogether.

So when the rubber meets the road, it is exactly the same thing, after all.

Humans are complex, and they have a lot of different attributes that may or may not be factored into the hiring process. There is gender…there are zits. There’s race, there is blood type, there is sexual preference, there is height. There may be hundreds of such attributes.

Very few of which have anything to do with the qualifications for the job.

Hey look, I’m going to be the first to say that when you get a bunch of guys together to do a job, if there isn’t even a single woman around, their productivity goes straight to hell. I’ve said so many times. I understand where the management is coming from in saying they want at least one woman, and I would understand if they elaborated and said two or three women would be even better. I’d even understand if they said they wouldn’t rest until 50% of the engineers were female.

That doesn’t make it right.

What Google is demonstrating for us, here, is how nonsensical, irrelevant data can be abused once it is used. How it can be used to hurt people. Not a very good thing to be showing, when you are a globe-encompassing search engine, launching several enhancement projects per year that inspire agitation and rage from privacy groups.

They have too much data. If there was some magic way they could employ all their engineers without ever knowing the gender of any of them, and lacking the ability to ever find out the gender of any of them, everybody would get a fair shake. Nobody, male or female, would have their applications or promotions declined because of an attribute that would be unmeasurable. Nor would any unsuccessful job applicant be able to complain about such a thing, one way or t’other.

Fahrenheit 455�

In America, if you have the right style of delivery, and I probably don’t — you can just talk about your opinion for awhile, and in so doing deliver a product that people will go WAY out of their way just to read, listen to or watch. I would like to think that is because Americans have an innate desire to learn more about a given subject matter, when they’re trying to form an opinion they have not yet formed. I’d like to think that. And to a certain extent, I believe that actually is the case.

But it is far more important to us that we get to hear people more loudmouthed, more outspoken, and perhaps a bit more eloquent than ourselves, when we already know we agree with them.

The genius behind this new genre we have thanks to Michael Moore, where film footage is shown that makes people feel good about opinions they already have…it probably depends on this. And for all intents and purposes, Moore didn’t start it, Rush Limbaugh did. Limbaugh does it right, though. He says “Snerdley, play clip #15!” and then gives us a brief run-down of what clip #15 is supposed to be. Then we get to listen to clip #15. Which you could call “radio footage.” Then Rush will come back on, and say “folks, there you have it!” and tell us what he thinks clip #15 proves. Nice and structured…we know what was in clip #15, and we know what inferences we are supposed to draw from clip #15.

What does that kind of structure do? Well, if I agree with Rush, as I do with regard to Democrats in Congress being unworthy of our trust on national defense issues — I have a firmer cataloguing in my mind of what questions I’d like to have answered, in the event someone prevails upon me, in the future, to change my mind. If I disagree with Rush, as I do on the Dubai “ports deal,” I have a crystal-clear understanding in my mind about why it is that we disagree. I know there are things he thinks are important that I think are trivial, or vice-versa, and I know what these things are. Or, I know what statement has been made, and who made the statement, that Rush choose to believe, that I find to be delusive or irrelevant. Or, I know something happened, Rush thinks this proves something else …and I don’t. With pinpoint accuracy, I understand why we disagree, Rush and I.

Michael Moore doesn’t do this. Michael Moore says that President Bush flew bin Laden’s family members out of America right after the September 11 attacks, he shows footage of the President saying “Now watch this drive!” — and because of these, I’m supposed to think President Bush has a sweetheart deal with the Saudis and that the war in Iraq is all about oil. Huh? Come again? From an argument based on “raw footage” that is treated just as so many pounds of stuff — I really can’t determine a damn thing about why I disagree with Michael Moore. All I know is, what kinds of things Moore’s followers will be throwing at me, right before they call me an idiot for not agreeing with them. That’s about it.

Sure, if I agree with Moore, it makes me feel good, just as Rush’s radio program makes me feel good if I agree with Rush. Thing is, with the Michael Moore genre, Fact A very seldom does anything to substantiate Inference B, nor does Moore stick his neck out and imply such a substantiation exists, or if it happens to exist, that it was intended. This is a subtle distinction, but an important one. If you aren’t explaining exactly why you think what you think, you really don’t have very much. Just footage that makes people feel good, when they hold a particular opinion…and, when you strip away what’s tossed in purely for surplus entertainment, nothing else.

I think “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” is just about at that point with this season’s first episode, “Boy Scouts.” They’ve become Mini Fahrenheit 911. Fahrenheit 455�, if you will. Penn Jillette doesn’t like the Boy Scouts and he thinks the whole organization is bullshit. After watching the episode, I must say I’m a little confused about why he thinks the Boy Scouts are a bunch of bullshit. It’s clear to me that he hates camping with a passion, but he spent a lot more time describing how he doesn’t like the way they discriminate against homosexuals. Both of those are problematic with regard to the point he’s trying to make, for the word “bullshit” is supposed to involve some attempt to deceive people. Discrimination is not deception. The deception appears to come into play, with a change of policy that quietly took place in the eighties when the Mormon Church took over the Boy Scouts of America.

I’ve watched the episode twice, and I’m not exactly left with an abundance of reasons to believe this is what has taken place. About eight minutes into it, a man says “what happened to the Boy Scouts is that during the time that I was a boy member, Boy Scouts was essentially kidnapped by the religious right, and in particular, by the Mormon Church.” He is identified as Tim Curran, a former Boy Scout who was expelled for his sexual orientation, and subsequently sued the organization.

I do not know that the Boy Scouts have been “kidnapped” by the Mormon Church. I don’t know that. I do know, from watching the episode, that the Mormon Church is the “largest contributor,” or at least since this appears to be a matter of verifiable fact, I’m willing to take P&T at their word. But therein lies a problem: The central theme of the episode is a bellyaching session about how the Boy Scouts receive discounts and other preferential treatment from the Federal Government, as well as local governments, and that something is wrong with this. You know, pick one or the other. I’m not altogether sure how you go from that to expressing angst that a private religion is supporting an organization, something the government somehow shouldn’t be supporting.

So it falls to me to do some research that, if it were already done in the episode I saw, would have been helpful. I did a Google search on the sinister Boy-Scouts-Mormon connection, and I came up with this article which says — guess what? Take a look.

Most people are aware that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes a negative view of homosexuality. However, same-sex activities is not even mentioned in the three uniquely Mormon religious texts…D. Michael Quinn, in his recent book, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans – a Mormon Example, suggests that Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), was relatively accepting of gay and lesbian relationships. In Quinn’s book, he asserts that Mormons endorsed physical and emotional intimacy between members of the same sex.
:
Quinn concludes that the church tolerated homoeroticism until the mid-1950s.

Jeez! Some homophobic public-relations wizard is having a wonderful time spreading his personal agenda of hate, here! This nefarious individual co-opted the Mormon religion in the 1950’s, which had been receptive to homosexuals up until then; then a quarter-century later, his organization used this newly-revised Mormon Church apparatus to “hijack” the formerly-diversity-minded Boy Scouts. I’ve got to meet the people behind this. I’ll bet they have forgotten more about promulgating an unpopular social agenda, than I will ever learn.

Question for Penn & Teller: Isn’t it a bit more likely that we’re all talking about homosexuality more often now, for whatever reason, than we used to? Would that not make it relevant for organizations that regularly take large numbers of same-sex children, out into the woods, miles away from civilization…to come up with positions on the issue they previously did not have? Or, perhaps, to articulate some policies that were previously kept tastefully quiet? Perhaps some combination of those two?

Just a thought. I mean, since you’ve punted, Michael Moore style, on offering anything whatsoever to support this “Mormon Church brainwashed them” theory you’ve got going. Since, in the proof-of-thesis department, what you’ve done can be fairly described as dropping a grenade and then walking away. Aren’t my theories a little bit less extravagant, from an Occam’s Razor point-of-view?

The Boy Scouts are supposed to be all about “intolerance and hate.” I have not seen a hateful thing, not one, associated with the Boy Scouts…nowhere, ever, but more to the point, not within this episode. That’s a little screwy, isn’t it? Twenty-nine minutes Penn & Teller have to show us the Boy Scouts doing something hateful, and they can’t come up with one thing. Not unless the enforcement of membership standards, running afoul of the personal tastes of Penn Fraser Jillette, satisfies someone’s definition of “hate.”

Activist Margaret Downey says “Today the boy scouts discriminate against atheists and the homosexual community; tomorrow they can decide to discriminate against handicapped children, or redheads, or jews.” They could, huh? Golly, that sounds pretty bad. Thus it has been proven, the Boy Scouts are just like Hitler. They’re antisemites…or, they would be, if only they did antisemitic things, which we haven’t caught them doing, but it makes us feel good to think about the Boy Scouts doing those things. And that’s just as good as them doing it, right? Film at eleven.

I think that says as much about the state of affairs as needs to be said. The “Boy Scouts” episode of Bullshit is not about forming reasonable inferences from available facts; it is about whipping people up into an emotional, frothy rage about membership standards in a private organization that the Supreme Court has ruled are within the rights of that organization. Except — get this! — in order to get that frothy rage going, you have to make some noise about the Boy Scouts doing something they aren’t actually doing. So it’s not about the Boy Scouts doing something they don’t have the right to do; it’s about the conflict between this thing they do, and the prevailing public sentiment, but you don’t have an adequate conflict unless you depart from the plane of what is actually being done. Penn & Teller, here, proved that you don’t make people sufficiently mad, until you postulate about what the Boy Scouts might do, engaging in an extravagant flight-of-fancy in doing so.

So what’s the problem? I mean, just sticking with things that are actually done, for a change. Where’s the beef? Really?

Well, not much remains of the case made. Most of us would be unimpressed with the argument that a private organization, is doing something that doesn’t quite rub the producers of a popular cable television show the right way; because if we were, that would put cable television producers in charge of a lot of stuff. Do Showtime producers approve of the way I break open eggs? Or that I order my coffee black? Or that I have a Treo smartphone, but no iPod? Those things are about as public as the Boy Scouts’ membership standards. And honestly, in the real world, the fact that the Boy Scouts receive a little help here & there from the U.S. Government and local governments, does very little to make the issue any more public. This article, which is cited in the episode, tells us it is wrong. How much money are we talking about here? Not much. If it’s the “principle of the thing,” as the saying goes…where is the law that says tax money can’t be used to give discounts to the Boy Scouts? Cite book, chapter and verse, please. And if you do find it, by all means file a lawsuit. Get back to us when the lawsuit wins, since, so far, it hasn’t.

Or, heck with the law-and-order approach…go after my sense of decency and fair play. Boy Scouts shouldn’t receive public funding when they discriminate! Shouldn’t they? I dunno…what if my local school board helps out Mensa, when that association of mentally-gifted individuals wants to rent a hall? Hey, I don’t get to decide what my I.Q. is! Who are they to discriminate against me? Eh…sorry Penn & Teller, this doesn’t pass the smell test.

Or, tell you what. You can wait until the Boy Scouts do something that does piss me off, along with lots of other people. Let me know when the Boy Scouts start kicking those redheads and jews off their membership rolls. At that point, I’m with ya pal. Homosexuals? In an organization full of boys that camp out in the woods, miles away from civilization? Hmmm. Do we have lots of youth organizations that take young straight co-eds out in the woods? Young straight boys and young straight girls sharing one tent, under the stars, in the middle of summer? I can’t think of too many establishments that do that, and I think I might know why.

So since the leaders of the Boy Scouts have the job of convincing concerned parents that everything’s going to go okay during this summer’s campout, and Penn & Teller aren’t helping them with this, the Boy Scouts get to decide how things work. That is their right. The idea that it isn’t, just because a cable TV show says it isn’t, scares me a lot more than anything that was presented in this episode.

What’s left? I guess the only remaining complaint is, that the Boy Scouts aren’t being straight with us in saying they have a long-standing policy against homosexual leaders, when this is a relatively recent development. This does have some consistency with the facts, since I hear a lot more about homosexual membership in the Boy Scouts than I did back when I was a scout. Maybe that’s because the Mormon Church took them over in the eighties, after all.

Or maybe not. I don’t know if this change in climate was the doing of the Boy Scouts at all. Was it? All these lawsuits over classes of people being allowed into places — that’s a relatively recent phenomenon too, and the Boy Scouts didn’t start it. You might say someone else started it, and they finished it.

Near the end of the episode, Penn & Teller have one more salvo to launch at the Boy Scouts, and it goes like this: Scouting…is uncool. Enrollment in the Boy Scouts is down 13%. That proves how uncool it is. People should abandon the Boy Scouts because we hate the Boy Scouts, and we hate the Boy Scouts because people are abandoning them. Or as Jillette says in voiceover, “the American People know bigotry when they see it.” Hmmm…what, I wonder, would happen if we were discussing an organization that met with their approval, and the enrollment in that organization was down thirteen percent? That would be Bullshit!, wouldn’t it?

To sum it up, Penn & Teller have done better work before, and I’m sure they will again. The problem here: Starting with everything the episode purports to prove, and methodically discarding everything not proven, we’re left with an irreconcilable conundrum. The Supreme Court decision recognizing the right of the Boy Scouts to set their own membership standards, is said to assert that if this were not the case, the Boy Scouts would be forced to advance homosexuality as a lifestyle that is okay. The producers of the show want us to see this logic as just so much…of the title of the show. Bullshit. However, the activist group Scouting For All, which appears to have pulled some strings to get this particular episode on the air, advances the notion that because government is entangled with the Boy Scouts at the local, state and federal levels, this entanglement forces the government to believe what the Boy Scouts believe: Homosexuality is not okay, and neither is atheism.

And that particular forced belief is not bullshit.

But it’s exactly the same logic. We are supposed to uncritically accept the latter, and forcefully reject the former. Failing to do either one of those two, results in failure to accept the advanced argument. Why are we supposed to comply with the argumentative pursuit demanded of us, both times, when those two cognitions run in stark contradiction to one another? I don’t know. That’s one of the questions left unanswered, probably the most important one.

It’s all a bit too deep for me. I’m still stuck on that “Right of Association” thing in the First Amendment. To me, that’s what the whole question is all about…whether the cable television producers like it, or not.

Gazebo

Saw this posted on FARK. I have no way of contacting the person who posted it, and I’m going on the presumption that it’s in the public domain.

Dear President Bush:

I’m about to plan a little trip with my family and extended family, and I would like to ask you to assist me. I’m going to walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico, and I need to make a few arrangements.

I know you can help with this.

I plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I’m sure they handle those things the same way you do here.

So, would you mind telling your buddy, President Vicente Fox, that I’m on my way over? Please let him know that I will be expecting the following:

1. Free medical care for my entire family.

2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might need, whether I use them or not.

3. All government forms need to be printed in English.

4. I want my kids to be taught by English-speaking teachers.

5. Schools need to include classes on American culture and history.

6. I want my kids to see the American flag flying on the top of the flagpole at their school with the Mexican flag flying lower down.

7. Please plan to feed my kids at school for both breakfast and lunch.

8. I will need a local Mexican driver’s license so I can get easy access to government services.

9. I do not plan to have any car insurance, and I won’t make any effort to learn local traffic laws.

10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from Pres. Fox to leave me alone, please be sure that all police officers speak English.

11. I plan to fly the U.S. flag from my house top, put flag decals on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any complaints or negative comments from the locals.

12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, and I don’t expect that anyone should enforce any labor laws or tax laws.

13. Please tell all the people in the country to be extremely nice and never say a critical word about me, or about the strain I might place on the economy.

I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for all the people who come to the U.S. from Mexico. I am sure that Pres. Fox won’t mind returning the favor if you ask him nicely.

However, if he gives you any trouble, just invite him to go quail hunting with your V.P.

Thank you so much for your kind help.

Sincerely,

I. M. Gringo

My great-uncle passed away a few years ago, just a little shy of his ninety-seventh birthday. You’ll never meet a more docile soul, in fact, when I was a kid I used to wonder if he even knew what disagreement was. And with one exception, it’s fair to say I never heard him express an opinion — other than the most pleasant — about anything.

That one exception was this:

When he immigrated with my other grand-uncle and my grandfather to this country from Sweden, the three brothers established a strict taboo against speaking the tongue of the Mother Country even at home! And that’s the right way, the only way, to immigrate.

You could see it in his face, he wasn’t about to back down on this. Everyone else on the planet can jolly well do what they’re going to do, come what may — except on this point. And what a classy gentleman, I never heard him utter an unkind word against any person, or any group of people, not even with regard to that issue. He managed to confine his comments to the way things should be done…the way he was extremely proud to have done them. I don’t know if he was criticizing anybody. He never said anything to imply that he was. This will have to be a matter of interpretation on my part, and on the part of anyone who listened to him.

But I do look at the “No Hablo Anglais” crowd a little differently. Visit a country for a week or two, and not learn the language? Eh…I wouldn’t, but okay, I can understand it. But live there permanently and not bother to learn how to communicate with the locals? Why would you do this?

I don’t wish to vent my spleen at people who refuse to learn a new language, since I’m monolingual myself, nor do I mean to imply that it’s easy. My uncle had good reason to be proud. Can you imagine what a raging pain in the ass that would be — speaking the new language at home? If it was easy, how worthy of mention would it have been? But the old guy had a great point. If you’re planning to make a new country your home, why not. It’s more than sensible; it’s a responsibility.

But more to the point: I’m taking it as a given, that the person writing the letter above wouldn’t get very far. And nobody ever seems to be questioning this, or calling out that since it’s true, perhaps something needs re-examining. People visiting other countries, Americans included, have to abide by sensible rules. People visiting America, don’t. We let people protest against the enforcement of laws that they choose to break.

Some kind of equalization is in order. You know, if President Fox is not willing to treat visitors to his country the way we treat visitors to ours, we can always go the other way, as Heather MacDonald points out…

Fine. If Mexico wants to dictate our immigration policy to us, let�s follow their example to the letter. That example is particularly relevant on this further day of protests demanding amnesty for illegals. Among the demonstrators in at least 60 cities nationwide will undoubtedly be thousands of border lawbreakers. What would Mexico do? The answer is easy: deport them on the spot. In 2002, a dozen American college students, in Mexico legally, participated peacefully in an environmental protest against a planned airport outside of Mexico City. They swiftly found themselves deported as law-breakers for interfering in Mexico�s internal affairs.

If Mexico was willing to strip these students of their duly-obtained travel visas, imagine what it would have done had the students broken into the country surreptitiously�not just summary deportation but undoubtedly howls of complaint to the U.S. government for winking at this double violation of Mexican sovereignty.

You know, my own record of global travel is pretty unimpressive. I do have a passport, but it doesn’t get much use so I stay more-or-less quiet about how Americans are treated when they travel abroad.

But I know what a law is, I know what a “right” is and how it differs from a privilege. I know what protests are. Protesting, so that an entire class of people can be awarded the right to break a law, seems cockeyed to me. Cutting classes to attend such a protest, is particularly gauche to say the least. If a law is enforceable only until the right protest comes along, then why have it?

And on a planet chock full of countries that have walls, why does America have to be the only gazebo?