Super Duper UN Man

It pays to stop by once in awhile and visit FlashBunny. Like for example, if I didn’t check it out today, I never would have found out about Super UN Man.

No comment from me needed here, you can form your own opinion.

Summit II

Well folks, it’s looking more and more like I was right when I said things were cresting out and we were due for a downfall. People are definitely getting stupider. Eight propositions were up for voter approval in the special election yesterday, and all eight of them bit the mat hard.

We hate things the way they are, but we love them the way they are.

Meanwhile, some guy has posted a thesis about why libertarians are idiots. I know it’s just some random page on the vast innernets, but I know he represents a lot of people. His argument is this: First, he wants to single out the extremists who actually want a small government, “if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine”. Okay, so if you’re a reasonable guy you should want a BIGGER government than George W. Bush wants. Wow.

And why should we want this? What’s wrong with the people who don’t? “It’s hard to read libertarians without concluding that they’ve never been out of the country — perhaps never out of the suburbs”.

They don’t know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don’t know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don’t know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they’ve never experienced a depression; they’ve never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they’ve earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.

In short, they’re spoiled, and they’ve evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.

Wow. Just wow, wow, double-wow.

I don’t mean to diminish this guy’s message. After the his-own-buttocks buffet Governor Schwarzenegger was handed this morning, it’s clear this hater of individuality is far more numerically significant, today, than I am, and his opinion is important. True, his argument is pure sophistry. There are people who passionately agree with him, who are disgracefully cloistered in by tiny neighborhoods they’ve never left, and there is a demonstrable link between the cloistering and the passion. True, there are enthusiastic libertarians who have lived under “rule by the elite” and this oppressive existence has fomented their libertarianism; Ayn Rand, herself, comes to mind. And true, those two examples by themselves devastate his blatant generalization intellectually. But as far as charting a course as to where California goes from here, as well as the nation, I think he’s far more important than I am.

The public is in the mood for a little bit of hammer-and-sickle redistributionism.

Note how well the article is written. This guy is no dummy, and I think he’s being sincere. So we have a social environment wherein a fairly sharp mind can be convinced that libertarians are spoiled and dull-witted, and redistributionists are sophisticated and by-and-large enjoy a broader world view.

These people think our society will end up more prosperous if, whenever individuals become prosperous, they are compelled by the law to separate themselves from that prosperity and give it to people who think work is for suckers, so that everyone can share. Then, we should expect, next year those prosperous people will work just as hard to be prosperous.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I know reading this kind of stuff just fills me with enthusiasm to fill out the job applications and get that better education so I can beef up that salary. All those people on welfare depending on me, as they say.

Sheesh.

Sorry, I’m just not in that cheerful of a mood this morning.

Revenge of the Euro-Pansy America-Hating Douchebags

Revenge of the Sith showed up finally, Saturday. Maybe I’m biased here, but I can’t find anything really positive to say about this marketing technique. I pre-order the movie, and my reward is that I get it on November 5th or so, while the Soccer Mom/Redneck Wal-Mart shopper gets to waltz in and pick it up on the 1st. My reward for all this advance planning is paying $14.86 instead of $19.99, a savings which is promptly eaten up by the shipping costs. Eh, some things it makes sense to by on the innernets, some things it don’t. But I digress.

Shortly before this final Star Wars installment came out there was this buzz going around that it was a Bush-bashing movie. This is based mostly on a line used by Anakin Skywalker, shortly after he turns to the Dark Side. Uh oh, I just ruined it for you if you haven’t seen it, huh. Anyway. He says something to his former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.” Kenobi is supposed to further cement this relic of my childhood memories into the Fahrenheit 9/11 genre with the reply “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” There ya go, further proof that George Bush sucks. He lied to get us into a war that took 2,000 American lives, he smirks, he swaggers, he’s an evil genius who took over the country, he’s a raging imbecile, and he’s a Sith Lord.

Well, this whole outlook on the final Star Wars chapter has been bugging me every time I watch that part of the movie because from where I sit, there are quite a few lines that come swinging back around the other way. I will not go so far as to say it is a pro-Bush movie, only that I see a mixed set of messages. A lopsided mix of messages. There is a whole mess of one-liners, character setups, and plot developments that appear to be 1) artificially inserted for no other purpose than supporting the War on Terror, or 2) created for the support of a storyline that, intentionally or not, supports the War on Terror. I was going to write up a list, but someone else beat me to it.

The example that I think is most important comes first, but this author does not put quite as much weight on it as I think it deserves:

In the film, Anakin states something to the effect that the difference between a Sith and a Jedi is that the Sith are emotional and turn inward and are selfish in the Force, while Jedi are ruled by logic turn outward and are selfless. Being selfish and emotional are the literal hallmarks of contemporary liberalism. It�s all about how you feel, doing what you feel is right. There are no moral absolutes. At one point Obi tells Anakin that Palpatine is evil, and Anakin responds that he believes the Jedi are evil. Obi believes in absolute moral evil, whereas Anakin takes the liberal position that “one man�s terrorist is another man�s freedom fighter.”

Here’s the dialog in question as I lift it from the DVD, in the middle of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s ferocious duel. See if you’re reminded of one side or the other in this whole Iraq debate, as the two actors speak:

Anakin, at 1:58:23: “I should’ve known the Jedi were planning to take over.”

Obi-Wan (exasperated): “Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!”

Anakin: “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Obi-Wan: “Well, then you are lost!”

(The two contestants glower at each other for ten or twenty seconds or so)

Anakin: “This is the end for you, my master.”

Now really, let’s take a couple steps backward and look at what you have going on here. You have this punk kid who is abundant in his power and potential but unwise in the ways of the world/galaxy, completely lacking in perspective, who is ruled by his emotions. He’s sold out his “country” and is pulling this opinion pretty much out of his ass that the “Jedi were planning to take over.” His incredulous, wiser elder, with this What in the blue fuck is the matter with you tone uses exactly the same argument the Republicans are using, that this guy offscreen is just plain evil — he just plain is! — and what is the matter with you that you can’t see it?

And Anakin’s Euro-pansy douchebag response is the classic John Kerry nuance philosophy of (as the Right Thinking blogger points out) there are no absolutes, it all depends on your point of view. The guy who possesses a better sense of perspective about what’s going on, realizes (“then you are lost!”) that he’s having a futile conversation with someone who isn’t listening to reason, and seems to come to a mutual agreement with his former apprentice that the political debate is over.

The young “lost” guy then prognosticates that the Good Guy’s demise is close at hand — very much like the mainstream media and liberal bloggers are predicting, nowadays, that the White House is about to collapse (“Is it on its final days? Is Scooter Libby’s indictment the beginning of the end?”).

I suppose there is a certain symmetry to all this, at least on the surface, and that for every snippet of this movie that seems to cheer on the Republicans there’s another one designed to appeal to the MoveOn.Org crowd. And vice-versa. But this particular line of dialog is critically important to the entire six-chapter saga. All the way forward (backward) in Return of the Jedi, in a line that is clearly supposed to show the audience What It’s All About, the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi chastises Anakin’s son Luke that “You’re going to find that a great many of the truths we cling to, depend greatly on our point of view.”

And indeed the Ghost of Kenobi is right about that. But he, and by extension George Lucas, is emphatically stating that all points of view are not equally valid. It’s not a game with a monkey and a spinning dartboard; if this, somehow, is inconsistent with the intended message of Star Wars, then Lucas and crew have quite by accident made an insightful and prescient comment about life. You are individually responsible for the points of view that you hold, and whether these lead you to the Good Side of the Force, or to the Dark Side. It is, as the saying goes, Your Desssssstiny. Point-of-View and Destiny are inextricably linked.

And if your “point of view” makes it easy to swivel the roles of good & evil, back, forward, and backward again, this Lazy-Susan spinning-around is a harbinger of a destiny that ultimately won’t have a lot of appeal to you. And no, outside of the movies it doesn’t get you a glossy, scary helment or a spiffy-looking suit.

Update: I was thinking about this before, and forgot about it, and then after I wrote what you read above I had this flashback. I was thinking about one scene that had a huge impression on me the moment I first saw the film in the theater, and the Right Thinking author completely missed this. At 1:13:20 there is the “Fork in the Road” for the entire friggin’ movie, which means, the whole Star Wars story. Mace Windu and Chancellor Palpatine duke it out right in front of Anakin, the three major characters arranged neatly into a simple triumvirate of Good, Bad and guy-who-has-to-make-tough-choice. Palpatine and Windu start zapping each other with force lightning, and simultaneously, have a political argument in front of Anakin. That’s gotta be tough to do while you’re being zapped, although admittedly the exchange doesn’t approach William Buckley heights of sophistication:

Palpatine (zapping Windu): “He’s a traitor!”

Mace Windu (absorbing and reflecting the zaps back): “He’s the traitor, Aaiiigggh!!”

Palpatine (face getting distorted by his own lightning): “I have the power to save the one you love!” (His plosives become distorted as his lips lose shape) “You must choose…ugh!”

Holy Crap. The social commentary is burning through this so incandescently you’d have to be blind to miss it.

If Anakin enjoys the luxury of a studious examination of what is good and what is evil, he will side with Mace Windu and the forces of good. Cornered, Palpatine turns everything around simply by denying Anakin that luxury: I have the power to save the one you love. He knows that once this factor is introduced, Anakin will cease to care about anything else.

As he changes tactics, from “He’s the bad guy” to “I can save the one you love,” the distortion of his features takes place right then and there — a reflection of how truly insidious this brand of demagoguery is.

Forget about terrorists. Vote for us, or those Republicans will have your grandma choosing between her meds and her next can of dog food.

You know why there are so many people who were bitterly disappointed in Star Wars I and II, and were all set to trash this movie, instead having to grudgingly admit it was, at least, the best of the three? It wasn’t that Yoda had a bigger role or that Jar Jar had a smaller one. It was because this movie had the best drama. We were supposed to identify with Anakin, especially with his flaws, and we did. Deep down, we all have what it takes to become embroiled in a battle between right and wrong, and abandon the Good Fight once we see that the side of “wrong” has some perceived power, however delusive that may be, to save the ones we love.

We have the capacity to care about what’s good, and then forsake the pursuit of good, even align ourselves with what we know to be evil — out of love. It is a flaw of compassion that burdens nearly all of us. If half of us enjoyed immunity from this, the drama would be no good. But in real life, half of us fall prey to favoring love and compassion, over our innate and God-given recognition of good and evil, while nearly all of us have the capacity to do so.

So we can all relate. That’s what good drama is. Beats the snot out of watching some stalk-eyed soprano amphibian prattle on about “Meesa People Gonna Die?” and “How Wude!”

My Wine Club

Sometime in June I had some company over and we finished off a bottle of white wine I had in my rack. It was such a unique delight I had to snap a picture of the bottle before throwing it out. That’s probably not the right way to do things, because these fancy-schmancy vintners like to use all that uppity artistic writing and junk on their labels, I knew at the time I should be making an effort to write things down. So I had to do some Googling before I went shopping. Here is the link.

Ask The L-Words

Leonard Pitts, writing a column that appeared in my local Sacramento Bee newspaper, supplies a question which defines a true social conundrum for the times in which we live (link requires registration). He appears to want an answer, although he has the beginnings of a hint he would like to offer. Describing “an otherwise anonymous fellow who used to rant on our voice mails,” he expounds further:*

I was awed by the guy’s ability to cast absolutely any topic in terms of liberal inferiority. “Naturally, you liberals support the infield fly rule,” he would rasp. Or, “Only you liberals would choose paper over plastic.” I exaggerate less than you think I do…”liberal” is the catchall explanation for Everything Wrong, one-size-fits-all terminology for Those Who Disagree…we use the L-word the way we use all words of opprobrium and scorn. As if, having said this, you need say nothing else.

Which must be convenient, but convenient is not a synonym for right. So I wish some of us would stop pretending that shouting “liberal” is a way to explain reasoning.

Okay, Mr. Pitts writes very clearly, so it should be easy for me to figure out the message here. He seeks to know why the “L-Word” is perceived by many among those who use it, as an adequate substitute for a persuasive argument as to why something is wrong. Plainly, the lecture behind his musings is that we should stop doing it. In effect, he’s arguing that at a time when Americans identify themselves as conservatives much more often than as liberals, we should indemnify the word “Liberal” from any sense of shame that permeates it within the community it describes. Put more concisely, he has tasked us to elevate the esteem of the “L-word” above what it earns from those who associate with it. And if it’s not too much more to ask, kindly explain how you came to regard this as such a dirty word.

My response to Mr. Pitts, is, don’t ask me. Ask the L-Words. They are the ones who are afraid to carry the label, even as they enthusiastically seek to proselytize the ideas behind it.

There is even some justification for gratuitously and derogatorily attaching the label to disfavored ideas, without waiting for endorsement from the opposing side. I will not go so far as to delineate the plastic-versus-paper argument alongside a liberal/conservative fracture; I’m unsure how your caller came to glean that from our national discourse, and confess myself ill-equipped for trying to figure it out.

But I can advise you that “liberal” has earned itself a certain disrespect by becoming a brand-name of sorts, rather than any set of guiding principles.

For example, if you were to tell me someone I’ve not yet met believes in a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, I think you will agree I can predict with virtual certainty, this person does not believe we should have a military presence in Iraq. I can make book on this, offering three-to-one odds, or even higher. If you tell me this stranger is opposed to spousal- and parental-notification laws, and is in favor of partial-birth procedures, we can probably agree it’s a virtual certainty this person thinks “Saddam Hussein was not dangerous.”

The funny thing is this: To believe, against the evidence, against what our leaders on both sides of the political spectrum have been telling us about Hussein since the early 1990’s, that the Butcher of Baghdad “was not dangerous” — this doesn’t have a whole lot to do with killing babies, or whatever you choose to call that procedure. The two issues are not connected by a concern for the sanctity of life, or making peace & not war, or a sense in the potential of humanity or complete nihilism. They are completely disparate issues.

But what you and your caller apparently agree are “liberals,” have demonstrated a strong tendency to buy up these two disparate positions as a package deal. And there are more positions like this. To draw another example, if you show me ten people who think vicious, child-raping serial killers should be spared from the death penalty, I’ll show you at least nine people who think that perhaps bedridden old people in persistent vegetative states, should not be. Show me a hundred people who want to “raise the minimum wage” so “working families” can have an edge, and I’ll show you ninety people who want to repeal tax cuts so that other working families can’t have too much of an edge.

The same goes for so many other positions that are entirely disconnected from each other in terms of philosophical values — except where they directly contradict each other — but solidly riveted together, watertight, in terms of the equilateral support they draw from those who call themselves “liberals.”

Why is that?

I can’t tell you. I don’t know. You will have to ask them. But I have a gut feeling if you can crack that nut, you’ll have the answer to why most of America holds this label in such deep contempt.

——————
*It’s not me.

Hungry People

One Letter to the Editor of the Sacramento Bee today asked, in regard to an article two weeks previous called “Psst, Maria,” “Does The Bee want California to be the leader in food stamps, too?” Another one commented on data in the same article, that they show “California has come up with a good plan to reduce dependency…Obviously, The Bee missed the point.” Yet another one made an observation that on television, “The poor people…were – all of them – fat. Not slightly overweight, but fat.”

Intrigued, I put the paper down and dialed up Google so I could find the article, “Psst, Maria” from October 17. Then I read it. I was shocked by what I saw.

Editorial: Psst, Maria
Want to help the poor? Talk to Arnold

Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, October 17, 2005

It was hard to escape the irony. California first lady Maria Shriver, briefly reprising her role as TV news reporter on “Oprah” this week, traveled to Virginia and Kentucky to interview families living in poverty, a worthy issue for any journalist to highlight. But as she accompanied Candy Lumpkin, a Virginia woman, on a grocery expedition with food stamps, did the first lady know the extent of poverty in her own state and how California has the lowest level of food stamp usage in the country? [emphasis mine]

Unlike Virginia, California requires its poor residents to submit to finger imaging, a finger-print-like system, to qualify for food stamps. And unlike most states, California also requires food stamp recipients to apply for federal food assistance every three months instead of the typical twice-a-year requirement elsewhere. Both factors help account for low food stamp usage in California.

As she quizzed Lumpkin about food choices – did she prefer low fat to whole milk, Shriver asked – did the first lady know that her husband vetoed a bill that would have jettisoned the humiliating and error-prone finger imaging? The bill also would have scaled back the once-a-quarter food stamp application process that is needlessly burdensome to California’s poorest residents. [emphasis mine]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of the bill that would have made it easier for poor and hungry people in California to get food betrays a meanness at odds with the first lady’s obvious sympathy for the people she met mired in poverty on the other side of the country.

There’s another irony. As Shriver traveled to Virginia and Kentucky, the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, [emphasis mine] released a survey that said Fresno has the highest concentration of urban poverty in America. Brookings ranked cities with neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line, defined by federal guidelines as an income of $19,350 a year for a family of four. Fresno ranked even higher than New Orleans, No. 2 in the survey.

The next time the first lady wants to interview poor people, she can stay at home. She might even want to invite her husband to go with her.

Dubya, Tee, EFF?!?!?!?

We have people who work at the only newspaper in Sacramento, which is the capital of one of the largest states in the nation, who can write editorials unsigned. I would have to presume this means that they are so high up in the structure, that their opinions, for all intents and purposes, are the opinions of this capital’s-only-newspaper. Although I have little idea who these people are, they hold positions of great responsibility. Much higher than some guy who writes for a blog nobody reads.

And they see nothing wrong with using food stamp usage as a reverse indicator — unbelievable! — of how badly a regional economy is doing.

They introduce any unacquainted readers to the Brookings Institution as a “Washington, DC based think tank.” There is some precedence for referring to Brookings in this way, or as a “centrist/nonpartisan” outfit, but only among journalists who want to deceive. It is far more established, and reasonable to at the very least call them “progressive.” They are funded by Teresa Heinz-Kerry. Any promoter of a “centrist” canard, upon being asked for a conservative position by E. J. Dionne, would have to answer by scrambling furiously and futilely.

They think the fingerprinting process of food stamp applicants is “humiliating and error-prone.” Clearly they don’t like it, although perhaps the space constraints have precluded them from explaining exactly why. I would have thought building a case on this would be Priority One. There are some Bee readers who require a little bit more than something like “it’s bad, you’re supposed to disapprove.”

The people who wrote this think an application process is “needlessly burdensome.” How long is this application process? The point of “needlessly burdensome” comes shooting past awfully quick for me if I’m well-fed and trying to defraud the system, but if I genuinely need the help, why, I may never see it. Give me writer’s cramp. Before I’m done pushing the grocery cart around the store, it will be a distant memory, especially if my family’s fed for the next month and otherwise would not be.

What in the hell are these people talking about?

I can think of only two things. They want more fraud in the system, or else they don’t believe in the fraud. They must want a greater demand to be placed on public assistance — they have said so — and they don’t want the resulting traffic to meet any resistance. They want throughput.

I would hope, if God popped out of the sky and said “I’m God, don’t worry, every belly in Fresno is full tonight, I guarantee it” they would drop the issue. I hope that, but I don’t think so. I’ve been watching the journalism profession for a long, long time. It’s clear to me that in a world with no empty bellies and little need for public assistance, newspapers just don’t sell as well.

Have Fun With Them

If there were any readers of this blog, which of course there aren’t, they would recall a long-standing tradition here of noticing how our media outlets pretend their techniques are perfectly objective while they are actually anything but. This is our fault. As Americans, we tend to do a dandy job of understanding the impossibility of trusting what has not been questioned, but we do a very poor job of cataloguing what we need to question.

That last sentence has a high density factor. Go back and read it again if you have to.

Still confused? I’ll give you an example in the form of our Number One Contentious Issue: Iraq. There is a “pro-war” side and an “anti-war” side, and we’re now starting our fourth straight year (before the invasion as well as after) debating what is right and what is wrong about invading Iraq. Our media steers clear of improperly promoting viewpoints about this that would be entirely personal, by sticking to reporting the facts. And it is accountable to us when it deviates from fact and drifts into falsehood, especially to the blogging community.

But which facts does it report?

For the media, the world is just a big playground here. The United States has done some things that fall short of the high standard of civil behavior we have set for ourselves; our enemies have done things that fall short of any standard of civil behavior whatsoever. What will our media talk about? They get to decide this on their own.

You simply can’t get in trouble with the public for ignoring something. Other editors, sure. Anybody who has channel surfed during a news hour, knows this to be true. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX all talk about Abu Ghraib at the same time; they all talk about Reagan bombing the evil empire at the same time; they all talk about the weather at the same time, and they all talk about a family of really cute duckies holding up traffic on a two-lane road at the same time. The rigidity of the template is a settled matter. But the public? Stupid readers and stupid television watchers, they get excited over anything. One guy gets mad at you for not talking about Palestinian terrorists bombing Israelis, you just ignore him — until you can’t, and then you print a letter from a guy who’s mad you didn’t talk about Israelis bombing Palestinians. Print the two letters next to each other, and you look perfectly centrist.

In other words, an opinion that the media should have discussed something, that it didn’t, is exactly that: An opinion. You can’t “nail” the media for not doing their jobs, with an opinion. And there’s something proper about that, but there’s something improper about allowing ourselves to be entirely defanged in this venue. If our media ever fails us spectacularly, as some believe it did before September 11, 2001, it will fail us by refusing to talk about something important. And even with the advent of the blogging community, we have no checks against this.

That’s one way they can hose us. Here’s another. In addition to enjoying unlimited latitude in choosing facts to report, they can choose to ask whatever questions that they want.

There’s a great example of this in the abortion issue. There is a pro-life side, which believes the baby’s right to life overrides the right of the mother to terminate her pregnancy, and there is a “pro-choice” side which believes the opposite. Certain questions have a potential to splinter-up, and thereby take power from, one side or the other. Question A might be “should a woman have the right to terminate a pregnancy after a rape, or when her life is in danger?” and this splinters-apart the pro-life side. Some folks on that side will answer yes, and some folks will answer no. The pro-choice side of the line stays united, the other faction is intellectually broken apart.

Question B might be “should a woman be denied the alternative of abortion if she is blatantly and repeatedly using it as a method of contraception?” This would have the opposite effect. The pro-life faction would stay united, the pro-choice group would come apart at the seams.

You hear Question A asked quite a lot. You very seldom hear Question B. That’s an example of persuading people toward one side over the other, while pretending you’re not doing it. That’s what our media does to us.

I’ve found it is an educational exercise, and quite an amusing one, to use this technique on intellectually lazy camps of thought that have yet to self-destruct into smithereens even though they cry out for the chance to do so. And there is no camp of thought more deserving of this, than the anti-war camp. They could be busted up six ways from Sunday by the right question, but within the media and without, they seldom have to address the question.

Well, I have freedom of speech like anyone else, and therefore have been inviting noisy anti-war zealots — who in turn show little-to-no reluctance to accept — to more precisely define the stance they want to take. This is great fun. These people really do think, as they narrow down their intellectual position, that their bedmates from coast to coast are actually along with them for the ride, on every single word. After all, they are so righteous. No man alienates his own allies in a battle for what’s righteous, does he?

Which Is It?

1. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not dangerous, and we were wrong to do anything.
2. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not dangerous yet, and we should have given it time to get dangerous before we did anything.
3. Saddam Hussein’s regime was dangerous to other people, but not to us, and didn’t care about us, and it wasn’t our place to do anything.
4. Saddam Hussein’s regime was immediately dangerous to other people, and would have been to us someday, but not at the time we overthrew it so it wasn’t our place to do anything.
5. Saddam Hussein was trying to become dangerous to us, but we struck too early and now we have no evidence, which has resulted in an alienation of our allies.
6. Saddam Hussein’s regime was dangerous to us, but because we bungled the invasion we let all the evidence go missing and now we got nothing.
7. Other?

I’m positive that with a little work, that list of options could be greatly expanded.

But it’s more than just a fun exercise to ask the anti-war camp to stipulate where exactly they stand as individuals. It is our sacred duty. If we are going to safeguard our liberties by vigorously questioning controversial positions taken by our fellow countrymen, we need to vigorously question all the controversial positions, not just the ones the powerful elites in our media don’t like.

The Dustbin

I have this dustbin in my head that is full of “facts” that I don’t out-and-out deny, and which in many cases I believe to be true, sometimes enthusiastically — but which have other problems. Some of them need more evidence to be useful. Others have already been proven to the greatest extent they can possibly be proven, and still, they aren’t useful. For reasons like these, the items in my dustbin have already received as much attention as they merit, and will get no more attention from me even if everyone around me is obsessed with them.

To grasp this concept, you have to acknowledge when we draw inferences about things, we may come to the conclusion that a thing is true without coming to the conclusion that it is usefully true. A lot of outspoken people are spending a lot of time trying to convince people they’re right, when what they really need to be arguing is whether a certain action or inaction can be justified because they are right.

Maybe it’s worth taking an inventory of my dustbin, because it is likely a lot of other people have the same dustbin.

One example is men who can’t handle the fact that their wives make more money than they do. I’m told this is a problem, and I have been told this for a long time. Over this time, this has gradually been relegated to the dustbin. It won’t merit a single quarter-second of additional serious thought out of me until I meet a flesh-and-blood example of a frustrated, under-achieving, egotistical husband. I’ve spent my whole adult life working, and half of it to support this-or-that welfare-mom who was conditioned to think she couldn’t possibly make more than six dollars an hour so why bother trying. I’m plumb wore out. If my sweetie wants to step all over my fragile male ego by making twice as much as me, then go right ahead.

Every working man I have personally known, has felt the same way. We’re all very secure in our under-achieving wage-slave male egos. If there are any men who think differently, I’d love to meet them. I’ll bet if they’re out there at all, they’re all under twenty.

Children who “have” to be on Ritalin and other drugs because of their “mild” or “borderline” ADHD: Yes, the parents are right when they say the medication “helps.” Yes, there are hyperactive kids. No, every single kid who is an active or passive discipline problem, is not necessarily one of these.

Children who need this medication to perform, who eventually blossom into adults who do not need this medication or any other kind of medication: Sure, I believe it happens. I’d like to know how often. Shouldn’t someone be asking that question? Shouldn’t anyone considering putting their children on the drug, be insisting on such an answer before going forward?

Other things in the dustbin: The men who “force” women to whittle their figures down to ninety pounds at five-foot-ten, so that the poor waifs have to barf their way into a hospital to make their callous, shallow, and downright mean studs happy. Sorry, I’m not buying it anymore. I think the Kate Moss fashion trend was started by women and homosexuals in the fashion industry. All the straight men I know, like to see curves.

Hate crimes perpetrated upon the Muslim community in the wake of the September 11 bombings, and other incidents: I emphatically believe some of them have happened. I do not believe they have happened to the extent they have been portrayed, nor do I believe our media has dealt with us honestly on this. To whatever extent you believe something has to repeatedly happen in order to become a pandemic, epidemic, or even a significant societal concern, I am unconvinced this has ever surpassed that threshold.

Genocidal acts by Christians in history: I keep hearing about the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. That’s reaching back in history almost a thousand years. Shouldn’t there be more examples? Two is a trend, three is a pattern. All we have here is a trend, not even a pattern.

What else? There are the men who push up the male insurance premium rate by being worse drivers than women. Oh, there are reckless males out there. But reckless is a helluva lot safer than oblivious. Those soccer moms on their cell phones are driving ENORMOUS cars they can’t control, the cell phones are always the flip-style clamshell thing, that makes it four times harder to check your blind spot during a lane change. I’ve never heard of a woman pulled over for using a cell phone, nor have I heard of a woman, once pulled over, actually getting a ticket. A little crying, and you’re let off with a warning, which means the premium paid by the fairer sex goes down. So yes, you pay less for insurance, and no, you’re not safer drivers. Find me a reckless man, and I’ll find you two oblivious women — who have never been in accidents before, but God only knows how many they caused.

Terrorists who aren’t Muslims: Again, I’m convinced there have been some. I’m convinced there have been several. All I keep hearing about is this Timothy McVeigh guy.

You don’t need to believe in a God in order to make ethical decisions: I think that’s true. I think atheists and agnostics make decent decisions all the time. But to believe they are on par with the religious, in terms of their potential to do these decent things, you have to believe humans have the innate quality of doing palatable things, not simply justifiable things, when they aren’t being watched. I’m winding up my fourth decade here of interacting with people…sorry. Not buying it.

Slimy, filthy, dishonest rich people who didn’t work for their money: I know for a fact they are out there, I just don’t know how many of them there are, or if the fraction they represent is meaningful in any way. The rich people I’ve met treated me pretty good. Something tells me that to the extent I have made myself comfortable, I owe it to my successes in emulating their methods, and to the extent I have failed to do so, I owe it to the differences between their behavior and mine. Sure looks that way, from where I sit.

Pot is not a gateway drug: Those who have trashed their lives with harder drugs, I’m sure, represent a hodge-podge blending those who have smoked pot and those who never did. So this is a description of an aggregate entity using a singular attribute, which always gives rise to fallacy. If there were nothing to the theory that it’s a gateway drug, shouldn’t it be easy to convincingly discredit it, banishing it forever from the realm of subjective opinion? This appears to have not been done.

Homosexuals are simply born that way: Those in the scientific profession have been arguing for this or against this, while waiting for some hard evidence to come along and support what they’re arguing. We ought to have the technology by now to ferret out the genetic attribute, DNA strand, or brain wrinkle, unless the “switch” is buried somewhere in our makeup where we can’t yet go lookin’. Technology can do quite a lot at this point, so that would be some deep burying indeed. I’m convinced some of them are born that way. I’m also convinced some aren’t. Why does it matter, anyhow?

We were awfully mean to the Indians: Absolutely true. More than one euro-sympathetic white guy, who was alive at the time, wrote down on paper their opinion that our behavior was atrocious and demanded atonement. But it’s disingenuous to base policy decisions on that, without taking into account what Indians did to the Caucasian settlers in return. One disturbing thing that keeps surfacing from history, is the Indian who attacks Anglo-Saxons out of fear, because he knows someone who was killed by entirely different white settlers. Okay, now wait just a minute — that’s supposed to be exactly what was reprehensible and hideous when the white settlers were shooting the Indians: You’re killing Sioux Indians because some Cherokees killed your momma. Tribe A had nothing to do with Tribe B, hence the injustice. It was wrong, and bred distrust, when either side did it. How does any of this affect what we can do about it now? I don’t know. That’s the point.

Rush Limbaugh knowingly broke the law when he abused Oxycontin. I’ll buy that. Again, what are you going to do with it? Prosecute him? It’s already been tried, and the case ground to a halt because of patient confidentiality laws. Discredit some or all of what he says? That’s called an ad hominem attack; it’s flawed, intellectually lazy, and stupid. If you’re not going to prosecute and you’re not going to discredit, there’s nowhere to go with it.

My dustbin has so many things, and I think everybody else’s is bulging too. I sure hear a lot of people bitching about how too many people do too much bitching. Now that my dustbin has so many things that I have to write them down to keep track of them all, I think the problem is not that we bitch too much, but that we’re bitching about the wrong things.

The Disease

The One For Whom I Have Unlimited Affection received an e-mail last night which stumped her. It seems to be one of these things that’s going ’round the innernets, as they say, and she was at a loss as to understand how it came to her from where it was supposed to have come from. She was also at a loss as to how to reply to it. I, on the other hand, was not. I volunteered to form a reply. So this morning, she passed it on to me:

NYT, September 7, 2005

THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL has issued a no-nonsense warning about a new, highly virulent strain of sexually transmitted disease. This disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior.

The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim. Many victims have contracted it after having been screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken measures to protect themselves from this especially troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequellae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to, anti-social personality disorder traits; delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor; chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia and homophobia; inability to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; total ignorance of geography and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a strong propensity for categorical, all-or-nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant disease originated only a few years ago in a Texas bush. Please inform any of your friends and associates who have been acting unusual lately.

And here is the reply that is going out. I wish I could say it was an extraordinarily difficult exercise of Herculean difficulty. I can’t say that. The words just flowed.

House of Eratosthenes, October 27, 2005

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HEALTH has issued a no-nonsense warning about a new, highly virulent strain of a deadly, possibly airborn virus. This infestation defies all known logic, therefore it is impossible to determine exactly how it is transmitted.

The virus is called Blayma Lameduck. It seems one of the most hazardous ways to come in contact with the virus is through theater seats, especially when watching political propaganda thinly disguised as documentary films.

The most reliable symptom of infection is a tendency to place irrational blame on elected officials who are actually not running for re-election, for such things as: rabid-wombat-crazy terrorists murdering our troops overseas; hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather patterns; network executives ending their own careers with sleazy tabloid journalism and forged documents; and Vietnam era posers being caught fabricating Christmas trips to Cambodia. Other signs of infection include: inability to differentiate fact from opinion; inability to disagree with others, while simultaneously showing a modicum of cordiality and respect; sudden cessation of critical thinking ability, particularly when reading glossy brochures from MoveOn.Org; inability to incorporate new information; hallucination of xenophobia and homophobia where none actually exists; inability to accept responsibility for actions; rigid and irrational insistence on re-living a certain election that took place in Florida five years ago; righteous indignation during war protests; schizophrenic imaginings of extraordinarily malicious properties behind otherwise harmless Christian symbols; hero-worshipping of slutty behavior; and a marked tendency to place unlimited intellectual faith in certain dimwitted Hollywood celebrities. Victims of Blayma Lameduck have also been known to engage in reckless intercourse with strangers without the slightest demonstrated knowledge of who their sex partners are. These may include, but not limited to: terrorists, terrorist appeasers, nihilists, Nazi sympathizers, Communists, ethnic activists who want to kill white people, Islamic extremists bent on making the world a Muslim theocracy, various factions who want to destroy Israel, and limousine liberals forcing everyone else to subsidize and patronize the public educational system, while simultaneously sending their own children to private schools.

The disease has swept America with astonishing speed. Physicians and psychologists caution that while very few are susceptible, and it appears they have already been infected, this virus has the potential by 2008 to explode into unlimited, nationwide Gore. If any of your friends or associates have been acting unusual lately, don’t bother trying to inform them of this or anything else, it’s probably too late.

The Bicycle Diaries — or Are Jewelers Scum?

I live within three miles of the Jedediah Smith Trail, and for the first time in my life, I own a bicycle that really does have to be locked up because it’s worth stealing. The Trek 7300 24-speed hybrid, oh great hairy wombat gonads in the morning, this thing kicks so much ass. It just goes. Zoom!

I’ve been waiting for this environment/equipment juxtaposition for seventeen years now, back when my Iron Man ambitions had more to do with the Burke-Gilman Trail that winds around Lake Washington in Seattle. If you define “waiting” as “forgetting about it indefinitely and going to work on building up that disgusting middle-age pudge.” But I digress. Yesterday morning, successfully gobbling up all the miles between my place and the zero-marker at Discovery Park (I did, I really did, see picture), I was faced with the task of making it back home again. Second half of the return leg, I was noticing the miles were ticking by MUCH more slowly. This signals the seasoned adventurer that a reliable ETA is a figment of history, and whenever the journey ends, the physical pain is bound to be just beginning. There is no point to these two paragraphs, except to explain exactly how it came to be that I was listening to AM radio for six hours in a row, my original intentions allowing for only three.

The six hours have thoroughly convinced me of something which, up to yesterday, was simply a shallow, smoldering suspicion: There is something abysmally wrong with the jewelry industry.

It’s not that I’m in favor of some new external oversight, such as regulation, watchdog agencies, or the like. But if someone isn’t in favor of these, I don’t want to hear another word about Enron, Exxon, Halliburton or bank ATM fees.

I have conflicted feelings about this. I was tuned in to KFBK, which I have respected for a long time as a meticulously scrupulous advertiser, and still do. I think they turn away less-than-ethical accounts, evidence of which I am bound to never see, therefore of course I can’t prove this. But I have faith, because I know the goods marketed on that station are high quality. A business advertises there, I go to that business, and I’m satisfied. So a friend of KFBK is a friend of mine.

But this unnamed jeweler has been flooding the airwaves with the same advertisement — for years. The script has remained virtually unchanged. As a favor to us guys, who are like fish out of water with this whole jewelry schtick, this grandfatherly type is going to take us aside. While we’re listening to the radio, so our ladies won’t catch us actually asking for directions about things. He’s going to tell us the ins-and-outs, or at least about as much of this as he can in thirty seconds. Just enough knowledge that later on we can pretend we know something! Every straight guy knows, this is invaluable. We tip waiters ten bucks or more for it: Make us look smart; make us look good. Being “all-knowing” is one of those things that actually works. Just a shot at the poontang, Mister Waiter, and here’s your ten-spot.

But when you listen critically to these spots, over and over again, as I normally would not have been doing, you start to notice something: There is no meaningful intention for this commercial to be heard by a guy. There can’t be. It is intended to be heard by the lady. The lady, then, duped into thinking she has intercepted a message intended for the “opposition,” can then drop hints. And as we all know, the hints will continue to be dropped until they produce the desired results, or… well, or nothing. The hints will be dropped until the goods are bought, period.

I won’t pick on any one particular jeweler because there would be little point to doing so. I heard spots from two, or more, and the pattern was clear from this plurality that this perpetual hint-dropping cycle was the goal. “Advice for guys” was never anything more than a Trojan Horse.

A guy wants pussy. A guy who is a jewelry customer, wants to spend a certain amount of money to get guaranteed pussy. This is true of all straight male jewelry customers. For this clientele, there is no — none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, butkus — reason to spend that finite amount of money on anything that detracts from that primary goal. Here is a great example: “Start[ing] a collection.” A collection? Collection? Are you out of your freakin’ gourd? As if the kid’s Bionicle collection isn’t busting your ass already, just as you’re recovering from Gotta-Catchem-All Pokemon?

Here, let me define, for purpose of all gift-giving, what a “collection” is. A collection is a way of guaranteeing there will be no pleasant surprise, in the purest sense of the word “surprise,” while practically guaranteeing there will indeed be a disappointment somewhere along the line before the collection is complete. Jewelry or not: If you “start a collection” for someone as a gift, then you are a fool. A fool.

And in the realm of exchanging material items for sex, every straight guy over twenty-five already knows this.

Jewelers: Your craft is old. My bones may be dust before you ever get yours, assuming you ever do. But if I live to see the day, Jesus Jumpin’ Christ on a Pogo Stick I’m going to enjoy it so freakin’ much. I have never completely trusted you, not since I first heard about that asinine two-month-salary rule.

I have nothing at all against wolves, until they dress up like sheep. I respect your right to earn a profit and to maximize that profit. But your shenanigans do not help guys get laid, they get in the way. Since your world of capitalism is compelled to continue spinning on its axis by the desire of guys to get laid, there is something terribly perverted about this.

Political Pie

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about things that had previously made no urgent call on me for additional thought, because I have an eight-year-old son who likes to ask questions. Maybe that’s a good thing. Blundering into intellectual territory, in my patriarchally babbling way, that demands some definition for “red states” and “blue states,” I find myself wondering what things must be like for him. When I was his age there was nothing going on in politics that intruded into an eight-year-old’s domain — with the possible exception of this thing about uppity women and that “Lib” stuff. But regardless of your age, you just can’t get away from that issue about colors of states. It’s everywhere.

I’m terribly concerned about what is happening here. Long ago, before I was ever really interested in politics, I learned that the “spectrum” of liberals and conservatives was a myth. If it wasn’t mythical, then at least it could be said the single dimension fell woefully short of describing why people voted the way they did. And even now, if you exclude moderates from your analysis, attending only to True Believers on the right and on the left, it remains true. What *is* a “Conservative”? Several people willingly call themselves this, and among them, the faction is badly splintered. Some of them harbor no reservations about George W. Bush, or anything he does. At least, none that can’t be tolerated for the sake of a larger ideal. Others within this camp, have some real misgivings about him. These stalwarts insist that our President spends too much money; he lets too many illegals into the country; he does far too much compromising with the Democrats in Congress. And furthermore, anyone who would tolerate such things can’t call himself a “Real Conservative.”

That’s a hot-button issue. Another one is the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. At least those two disagreements are supported, on both sides, by hard facts. Then there is the matter of the upcoming — perhaps? — indictments of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. As of this writing, if you’ve made up your mind on whether Libby, Rove, and other indictees are deserving & worthy of continued support, you’ve made up your mind ahead of the facts. But that doesn’t stop conservatives from disagreeing about it. That’s three issues. There are more, that threaten to splinter and fray this end of the “spectrum”. That isn’t what spectrums do, so this is one reason why I find the single dimension inadequate for our times.

The same thing is happening on the liberal end. It has become a sure-fire tactic, for the red-stater cornered by an unsolicited debate about Iraq at some social gathering, to narrow his attacker’s footprint by coaxing the opposition into describing the anti-war position in more narrow, specific terms. He can say, Let us dispense with “Bush Lied, People Died” for just a second so I can get a good understanding of your position. Are you saying, Mister Liberal, that Saddam Hussein was a beneficial influence on Iraq, or that he was a source of great harm but this problem was entirely out of our bailiwick and we should have left well enough alone? Was it an acceptable exercise to invade Afghanistan and not Iraq, or were both operations morally reprehensible? Whether the “Liberal” chooses A or B, he suffers strange bedfellows who would answer the opposite, en masse. Suddenly, the pro-war defendant is arguing with an antagonist who represents not 55 or 60 percent of the electorate’s wishes, but something more like 12. But that’s something more important than a shrewd cocktail-party tactic; it’s a symptom of liberal dry rot which most liberals, if they can’t cure it, would like to keep under wraps.

This union under bumper-sticker-slogans, thinly masking a complicated division beneath the surface, is the source of the crushing defeat suffered by The Left last fall. Before a list of complaints about the status quo can be energized into a New And Imroved Plan B, several of the complaining factions lending their voices to the complaints must be alienated. They would have to be told they have joined a critical majority in complaining, but are part of an expandable minority in forming an alternate vision. Having formed both the complaint and the vision with their most turgid emotions, liberals have left themselves unable to reconcile with that bittersweet message. Even for the sake of eventual victory.

There is another problem with this one-dimensional, blue-state red-state canard — one that stems from the complex issues involved with time. Today the question of state color is defined along short-term situations. Blue-state people think George Bush is an idiot. Fine and good, but as far as being an issue, the man carries a built-in expiration date. Red-state people have their temporal problems too; they think we should stay in Iraq until the job is done. That’s wonderful, but someday the job will be done. Throughout that day, and beyond, most people who identify with one side or the other are going to want to stick with that side. They’re supposed to have deep-rooted, philosophical reasons for being there, and let’s face it: “I think George Bush is too stupid to eat a pretzel” is not a deep-rooted, philosophical belief.

Nontheless the beliefs are there. If you understand a complete stranger is opposed to abortion, for example, you have better-than-even odds that this person is also opposed to gun control, even though on the surface collecting guns doesn’t appear to have much to do with a woman carrying a pregnancy to term. Evidence of peer pressure? Not at all. When it comes to gut-wrenching policy decisions like these, most people seem to write their decisions in the indelible ink that comes from the well of their personal convictions. Whether that inkwell resides in their hearts or their brains is another question altogether, but based on what I see, even the most docile and compliant among us are unwilling to switch sides to please whoever is present. The “Chameleon” who changes his colors based on the company he keeps, seems to be on the brink of extinction.

I think that’s a good thing.

What are the philosophical questions people ask before they decide whether to become a blue-stater or a red-stater? That is the list that must be made before one can achieve true understanding about what is happening here. And that is no simple task by any means. If you’re going to chart this out into some kind of “pie” diagram — I’ve taken my own crack at this, below (click the thumbnail to view) — you can only entertain two or three questions, but it would appear there are a few more than that. Maybe as many as eight to ten, and that’s after you’ve weeded out the identity-politics questions like “Can a black guy be a racist?” and “Are men scum?”. I’ve identified five, and only five, out of what remains:

1. Sense Of Purpose: Now that we’re here, do we have some kind of moral obligation to do something meaningful, or is it a waste of time & energy to even try?

2. Faith in Authority: In a democratic society, once the commoners have invested governmental authority in the elites, which of these halves labors under the obligation of earning the trust of the other? Those who govern, or those who are governed?

3. Abundance of Life: Does the sanctity of life, in *all* its forms, preclude the worthiness of the individual goals we have formed for ourselves as thinking people?

4. Quality of Life: Is the quality and comfort of our day-to-day existence a critical goal of that existence that precludes all, or most, other goals? (Mutually exclusive from #3).

5. This is more important than the other four. I can’t capture it on the accompanying diagram, so I’ll cover it in another post later.

These are elementary questions, from which more complex positions can possibly be charted with greater precision than the old “red/blue” spectrum would allow. For example, if your answer to Question #1 points to a nihilistic mindset rather than a purposeful one, and you think what little point there is to our existence is more toward making life a more secure venture rather than a higher-quality one, you might be inclined to adopt all kinds of furry animals, and oppose the death penalty. Beasts, murderers and pedophiles, after all, have as much right to eat food and breathe oxygen as the rest of us. And your odds of being a “Blue-Stater” would probably run about 60/40. Conversely, a pure-bred capitalist would be overwhelmingly likely to be a Red-Stater, and answer “No” or “Not Applicable” to Questions #3 and #4. If you think we are driven by a great purpose, and that purpose has to do with improving the quality of our lives and the lives of others, your answer to Question #2 can be almost definitely ascertained: You are suspicious of authority, and believe our leaders should earn the trust of the electorate, rather than the other way around.

They are also very heady questions. Polite company will avoid them, and for good reason: People don’t want to “hang” with other people who would answer these questions in different ways. Even those who endlessly extoll the virtues of “diversity” — when the rubber meets the road, those people are talking about “diversity among those people who would answer Morgan’s four questions exactly the way I would, everyone else can just go pound sand.”

That’s the way people are, I’m afraid. It is our nature. We’re a tribal species.

And that is why we are so contentious today. Our political lines have been drawn based on how we look at life, and what the ultimate purpose of that life really is. It is easy to decide that stuff based on feeling, and difficult to base it on thought. The feelings are hazardous, because they’re not up for debate.

I hate tomatoes. Many a woman has tried to argue with me to make me like them, starting with Mom. They’ve all failed. You can’t argue with a feeling. And that’s the arguing we do today. It has to do with conclusions that are deeply personal, and aren’t going to be changed. Yet our public policy demands acceptance, or refutation, of these personal convictions so they *must* be debated. Perhaps we are doomed to keep yelling at each other, and calling each other big doo-doo-heads, until some of the things in our governmental structure are tucked back into our portfolios of personal preference, where they belong.

Upstaged

I’m a little too busy to write one of my endless, rambling essays around this and there isn’t too much more I can add anyway. I’ll let the article speak for itself.

Today’s timing couldn’t have been worse. A preceding segment focused on the incessant rains and ensuing flooding in the northeast. For days now, beautiful, blonde – and one senses highly ambitious – young reporter Michelle Kosinski has been on the scene for Today in New Jersey, working the story. In an apparent effort to draw attention to herself, in yesterday’s segment she turned up in hip waders, standing thigh-deep in the flood waters.

Taking her act one step further, this morning she appeared on a suburban street . . . paddling a canoe. There was one small problem. Just as the segment came on the air, two men waded in front of Kosinki . . . and the water barely covered their shoe tops! That’s right, Kosinski’s canoe was in no more than four to six inches of water!

An embarrassed Kosinski claimed the water was deeper down the street but that her producers didn’t want to let her go there for fear she’d drift away. But Katie and Matt, perhaps peeved by her attempted scene-stealing, couldn’t resist ribbing her.

Matt: “Are these holy men, perhaps walking on top of the water?”

“Gee, is your oar hitting ground, Michelle?”; inquired Katie, as she and Matt dissolved into laughter.

According to the WorldNet Daily article on the same subject, the canoe segment came right before another story about President Bush “staging” a videoconference with some soldiers serving in Iraq. WND’s source was another blog called Newsbusters, which points out some interesting things about Today’s parallel & opposite accusation of President Bush staging his videoconference.

In a deliciously ironic twist of fate, shortly before airing a segment aimed at embarrassing the Bush administration by suggesting that it had staged a video conversation between the president and soldiers in Iraq, the Today show was caught staging . . . a video stunt.

In the Bush/Iraq segment, Today screened footage indicating that prior to engaging in a video conversation with President Bush, soldiers on the ground in Iraq were given tips by a Department of Defense official.

But the only advice that the official was shown as giving was a suggestion to one solider to “take a little breath” before speaking to the president so he would actually be speaking to him. It was also stated that some of the soldiers practiced their comments so as to appear as articulate as possible. But there was no indication, or even allegation, that the soldiers were coached as to the substance of their comments or in any way instructed what to say.

Just my opinion, but I think we’re in for such a weird and surreal three years here for two reasons. First of all, President Bush is not running, and can not run, for re-election. Second, if you’re going to build entire political platforms on despising one guy who isn’t even running for anything anyway, isn’t it a strange pair of indictments? Started an “illegal and unjust war” that “resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis”…and…staged a phony conference.

Impeach him, he’s a war-criminal, mass-murderer and phony-conference-stager.

These people take themselves absolutely, one hundred percent seriously. Just unbelievable.

Berger-Pants-Gate

Karl Rove is testifying before a Grand Jury, with no guarantee he won’t be indicted. Liberals are salivating. Conservatives are cringing.

I’ll see your Karl Rove scandal, and raise you a Sandy Berger scandal. Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor for the Clinton administration, appeared before a judge on the charge of shredding we-don’t-know-what classified documents during his visit to the National Archives. Whether lucky, or well-connected, or both, he fared well. No pinstripes yet. Just a fine, fifty large. And he was placed on probation.

Then he sped.

Speeding is bad when you’re on probation. At least, going 88 m.p.h. in a 55-mile-an-hour zone is.

Why do we hear so little about what a former National Security Advisor really indisputably did, and so much about what a … what is it Karl Rove does again? Deputy Chief of Staff? What is that, exactly? Is this an office with which we have a great deal of concern from one year to the next? Can you name all the Deputy Chiefs of Staff going back to the Washington administration? How about going back to the Clinton administration?

Why do we hear so much about what this guy might have done? And so little about what Berger really did? Is it because of the word “former” in front of Berger’s title?

Aren’t we supposed to be concerned about the Plame scandal because of national security implications? Are there no national security implications in what Berger shredded? Well, I don’t know the answer to that. We don’t know what he shredded. We’ll never find out for sure. So without that, who is to say if the Berger event is more or less grave than the Rove/Plame event? We just don’t know.

One more thing. I’d just like to know who, all, is really completely in the dark about what classified documents were destroyed. Does this include Sandy Berger himself? Did he shred something and forget what it was, why he shredded it? What happened when he was asked? Did he plead the Fifth? Or does he honestly not know?

If you have answers to this, you’re a better newshound than I am.

Meanwhile…”real” life beckons, so back we go to our normal routine of being told what should concern us, by the elites of journalism. We let them make this critical decision for us…why?

I am Butch

Tired of being underappreciated and manipulated by powerful "others," you fight back. Though possesssing a cold, violent outside, you have a soft, scentimental inside. You love your partner, you cherish family heirlooms, and you want nothing more than to be geniunely happy — but you don’t mind having to kill a couple of nimrods who happen to clutter your path. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.

Where Did You Get That Headline?

This is something that’s always fascinated me about headlines. Now keep this in mind: Conservatives think we have a Mainstream Media (MSM) that is biased to the left. Liberals think the media is biased toward monied interests and corporations, and is overly friendly to the right. And the poor, poor journalists in the middle who are being torn up one side and down the other, are completely innocent in all this. Because it’s just facts. They simply report the facts, and there isn’t much opportunity available to inject personal bias into their jobs even if they wanted to. Which they don’t, you see, because their motives are so pure and they are oh so UN-biased. They never bring their personal feelings to their news desks, heavens no.

So when you’re an editor, and your reporter collects facts about a new study that says young girls are having a whole lot more sex and starting it at an earlier age, how do you word that headline? And if you’re the guy writing the article, how do you write your lead-in? Well as a general rule, you’re supposed to make everything look like the beginning of the end of the world. Kids like vanilla pudding better than chocolate? It’s a harbinger of a massive upswing in racism. Smoking is down? Experts see shortfalls in tobacco tax revenues, some vital social programs cut. Spider population is lower this year? Plague of house flies coming. That’s how it’s done. Bad news sells.

So how do we write our headline about these sluts…

Young women lead the way in tearing down sex taboos: new US survey

Young women are leading the way in tearing down sexual taboos in North America, where teenagers are having more sex at a younger age than their parents and grandparents, a new survey showed.

Freewheeling young women in the United States and Canada first have intercourse at the age of 15, partake more in oral sex than previous generations and are far less prudish, according to a landmark new report by researchers at California’s San Diego State University.

So nobody’s lowering their standards. There’s no tell-tale sign here that kids are bored, perhaps becoming disengaged from doing their schoolwork. And absolutely, nobody’s getting pregnant and kicking off multi-generational dynasties of welfare leaches. It’s “leadership”. The sluts are “leading the way” to something.

I just think it’s interesting because let’s face it, if you were looking for “bad news” in this story, you wouldn’t have to look far. Parents of 13- and 14-year-old girls would be particularly interested in your reporting on this social trend, with a concern for the myriad social issues that await them in the next year or two. And for them that would be a useful story. But no. We’re going to drop our “portending the end of life as we know it” routine this one time.

It’s a brand-new cultural renaissance. Our little whores are leading us to enlightenment.

And the MSM is going to objectively report to us all the wonderful events taking place in this new revolution.

Still They Suffer

I was reading through the newspaper from my old stomping grounds, which is the Seattle Post Intelligencer. I tripped across this editorial from some self-proclaimed liberal guy named Hubert G. Locke, chronicling what he saw as some of the rough treatment being dished out by “conservatives” toward the poor people in New Orleans who had been suffering through the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.

The focal point of his ire was George F. Will, who is the syndicated columnist I’m fond of quoting when people accuse me of using all them big fancy words and junk. This has worked great for me. Someone accuses me of using a four-syllable word in a forty-word sentence, and I direct them to six- and seven-syllable words in the middle of an eighty-word sentence in a George Will column. Works every time. But I digress.

As perplexed as we have collectively been over the last month, to discover grinding poverty is still nestled within our great nation after all we’ve tried to do to banish it — we can solve poverty right now. This year. Hubert G. Locke has shown us how, although he doesn’t realize it.

His angst appears to be coming from a column authored by Will on September 13. I’ll let Locke’s spleen vent itself here.

…the problem of New Orleans, says Will, is to be found in the American liberal’s “regularly recurring rediscoveries of poor people” and, with the supercilious arrogance that only a conservative could muster, he rushes on to note “how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands.”

You know, that’s pretty bad on George Will’s part, isn’t it? You spend half a century trying to get rid of poverty, with nothing to show for it…add on to that, an additional century or two of having poverty all around us, back when we just learned to live with it. And in 2005, you find out through Hurricane Katrina that poverty is still just as bad as it has been before.

And along comes that evil nasty conservative George F. Will — noticing some things about the poverty!

What an outrage!

After all, what persistent problems have I ever solved by noticing things? Nothing! Just bad credit ratings, bad living situations, bad marriages, bad jobs, unreliable cars that routinely emptied my wallet, credit cards issued by predatory lending companies — well, come to think of it, every significant problem I’ve ever had in life. Other than that, noticing things about my problems hasn’t solved a damn thing! Why does George Will think it will work here?

To these displaced and despairing souls, Will offers his aid in the form of three “recondite rules for avoiding poverty: graduate from high school, don’t have a baby until you are married, and don’t marry while you are a teenager.”

Now pay careful attention. Locke, obviously, doesn’t like what George Will has been noticing. He’s going to object to it rather strenuously. Don’t blink at the wrong time — you might miss something important.

Too many conservatives have a penchant for making despicable moral pronouncements when people are suffering or dying. Marie Antoinette’s reputed advice to the poor of Paris — “let them eat cake” — may be apocryphal but it captures the pitiless disdain many conservatives manage to manifest when those outside their circle of good fortune are under discussion. If it is reported that 6,000 people in Africa die every day from AIDS…[blah, blah, blah]

Hey, waitaminnit! It looks like we’re done with George Will’s “recondite rules” — Locke is changing the subject now. I thought he was going to contest what George Will was saying! He isn’t doing this? You mean, as far as Hubert Locke is concerned maybe these are the three rules to avoiding poverty?

He’s not even going to touch it in terms of its accuracy?

Well then Hubert G. Locke, what in the blue fuck is your problem???

Folks, this is why we, the richest nation on earth, have allowed so much water to go over the dam without doing anything to really solve the problem of poverty. It’s people like Hubert G. Locke. A little bit of common sense comes trickling in: Reach real adulthood before marrying, don’t have a baby until then, and get an education. Liberals like Locke see the common sense itself, as an occasion for bashing conservatives.

Would poverty disappear if the advice were followed?

Well, life is seldom that simple. But then again nobody is directly disputing that, are they? Nor are they trying it on for size. And it is true that, while very seldom are the “recondite rules” tried on by anyone deliberately…we’ve got a lot of people who just so happened to follow those simple rules, without any glaring personal agenda involving them. Those people very rarely end up poor. It is exceedlingly rare. So who the hell knows?

Maybe George Will’s rules are just the ticket. We don’t know for sure.

In my lifetime, very seldom have I seen common-sense dictums like this followed by any kind of sincere and reasoned deliberation of “Hmmm…let’s try that.” Instead, what follows is a flamewar. So George Will started a flamewar — er, no he didn’t. Hubert G. Locke, and other pinheads like him, started the flamewar in response to what George Will said. He saw an opening and he took it.

Meanwhile, the poor people stay poor. They screw other poor people, and make still more poor people. Still they suffer.

Here, let’s try this. Just to shake things up a bit. Just follow the advice; see what happens.

Hubert, you want to bash George Will’s “recondite rules” for avoiding poverty? How about just take them seriously. If they’re wrong, that’s the most devastating thing you can do to them: Take them seriously. But if they’re right…

…well, maybe that’s the reason you’d rather get all agitated and pissy than seriously deliberate about what the solution to the problem might be. You don’t want to see conservatives propose a solution, and actually have it pan out. Because in your world, it isn’t really a “problem” having these poor people around doing all this suffering; it’s simply something that has to happen so you can write columns and get more Democrats elected. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?

Because I have to believe if you were after anything different, you’d spend a word or two pondering whether George Will has hit on something valuable here, or if the solution to the problem lies somewhere else.

You didn’t do that.

As far as I’m concerned, everybody else can reach their own conclusions. I’ve reached mine.

Hating the French II

A month ago I noted that French fishermen had been busted using puppies and kitties as bait to go shark fishing. We would hear about that all day and all night, no doubt, if Americans were caught doing something even remotely similar.

I have nothing new to add, except British tabloid The Sun is covering the same story and has obtained a pretty picture.

The blog that nobody reads cites tabloids as sources now? Well, yeah…it’s a story already covered by another source. And golly, you know if that’s a photoshop job, it’s a damn good one.

Hydrogen Peroxide

Howard Fineman wrote an article for Newsweek that appeared Friday on the MSNBC web site. It is the equivalent of Hydrogen Peroxide. As any parent or outdoorsman knows, the inexpensive disinfectant is useful secondarily as a diagnostic tool. Little-to-no white foam, and you don’t have a problem. A whole lot of frothing, and you do.

Judging by the frothy reception meeting the Fineman column, it’s time for Democrats to amputate something. As a member of the party he’s discussing, you don’t get ants-in-the-pants about something like this if there isn’t a large grain of truth to it.

With George W. Bush�s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you�d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can�t stand Bush, but didn�t have much faith in their own party�s prospects.

Evan Sayet, who used to be a Communications Director for President Bush, has written an open letter to Fineman about this. It’s worth reading because Fineman’s a MSM (mainstream media) guy, and Sayet is what you could call a “partisan hack”; Fineman can say what is so, but he has a position to lose if he says why it is so. Sayet may have an agenda, but that agenda doesn’t entirely discount the weight of his words:

The Democrats are demoralized because they recognize that the American people reject their basic philosophy of confiscation of income and its redistribution by leftists. And the public rejects more and more government regulations such as warning labels on coffee that it might be hot and the ceding of our sovereignty to foreign bodies like the United Nations and France. Americans don�t want to have to pass �global tests� when the proctors are the Sudan, Germany, and Syria.

Most of this letter is nothing more than the recitation of Republican talking points. A lot of it has already been heard, almost verbatim, on Rush Limbaugh’s program.

But that doesn’t make it wrong.

And it means something, that when you show the Fineman piece or the Sayet letter to a die-hard leftist, you get frothing, frothing and more frothing. The harder-left the guy is, the more frothing you get. Grrrrr!!!

The year I cast my first vote, that whole thing about taxing “the wealthy” gave me a pretty bad case of indigestion. I was fortunate to live in a bed-and-breakfast community that was just coming of age as a burgeoning metropolitan area, so at a young and tender age I got to see homeless people up close. It was hard to work downtown for a single day, without being panhandled. I saw a lot of them. Far more than the average spoiled trust-fund liberal. They weren’t “down on their luck” at all; they were practicing a livelihood.

I couldn’t get out early enough to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

I was making half of minimum wage.

It would be eight years before I gave a rat’s rear end about Democrats and Republicans.

This is not iron-clad proof that Sayet is correct, I guess. But it does support what he says. One thing that has stayed constant for the better part of a century, is that elections are decided by people who don’t care which party wins. That’s who we’re talking about when we use words like “mainstream.” In 1984, that was me. Since seeing Bill Clinton for the first time and realizing the awful things that would happen if that man ever became President, I’m not that anymore. But once upon a time, I was.

And I think it’s fair to say that, while “mainstream” people have more misgivings than I do about invading Iraq, they also think George Bush is a decent, trustworthy, intelligent man. I think they tune out when someone impugns the President’s personal character, or when they call him stupid.

And at this point, every argument the Democrats can make has to do with President Bush either wanting to kill black people, or being too much of a dumbass to eat a bag of pretzels, or something roughly equivalent to one of those. If that’s the intro to your thesis, it really doesn’t matter much what comes after — for the most part you’ve lost your audience. If there wasn’t some truth to that, the President’s name wouldn’t be Bush.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit VI

I think I’ve figured out why the monster trucks scare me so much.

I mean, think this through. Take a look at this. This person chose to drive an enormous vehicle and then, when it came time to park, found the truck was too large to park any which way except half-assed. Unless, that is, some extra maneuvers werer executed, which apparently were inconvenient enough to be discarded altogether, in spite of the fact that this left all four corners exposed to danger.

What does that tell us? Well, the truck was probably borrowed, most likely from a parent. That is by no means proven…but there are a lot of borrowed vehicles out there on the roads, and something tells me people tend not to park their own cars like this.

So we have someone here, who is driving a car much larger than they can handle, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. Some would protest that driving a large car is an exercise in big-movement, not itty-bitty-movement, and thus requires no finesse or delicacy. Excuse the hell out of me, folks. You know how big the blind spots are on these things? Ever drive a moving truck?

“Aw, fuck it, that’s good enough” is a sentiment that has no place here. But that’s the message that permeates this sucky parking job. It qualifies for my gallery even though there is ample space in the slot to the left, since, well, would you really park your car there?

To Be Explained II

A month and a half ago Intelligent Design (ID) was in the news only because President Bush had publicly offered some further supposed evidence of his dimwittedness and his doltishness, by stating that he thought ID should be taught in our public schools. At that time I made a comment that didn’t endorse ID nor argue against it; I simply offered my own list of things I would like to have explained if ID is to be solidly blockaded from any discussion in science classes or in scientific pursuit. This isn’t a comprehensive list, by any means, nor does it even represent a collection of arguments against “Darwinism.” Indeed, this bit about goosebumps is touted elsewhere as strong evidence against the existence of any intelligent designer. As an aside, there’s a lesson in there, and it’s a grave warning to anybody who makes their livelihood in science: Humans being what they are, two people can look at exactly the same thing and come away “convinced” of the “proof” of two polar-opposite theories.

ID-versus-evolution is in the news for a different reason now. In Dover, PA our judicial system is in the process of being used to figure out what “science” is. That’s kind of nuts. At issue is the First Amendment with its prohibition against the establishment of a national church, so that will be the vehicle to figure out what science has successfully “proven” and what it has not. That’s nuts, too. What is rabit-wombat-crazy, is the use of propaganda to sway the public opinion on this, as if public opinion should ever have much to do with science OR constitutional interpretation. Going by the sound bites, it seems settled that “the weight of the evidence is overwhelming” in favor of evolution, and that “Intelligent Design has no place in the classroom.”

I’m not going to comment on the first of those two, since I have no idea what “evidence” actually “weighs”. But I take strong issue with the second of those two, if for no other reason, than because the debate between natural selection and Intelligent Design has been so valuable in illuminating important things. It has shown us how scientists work, how some theories go about being discredited and how other theories go about accumulating credibility. Those who would expunge Intelligent Design permanently from the classroom, are in effect asking me to believe that science students could be exposed to all that good stuff, and come away from the experience consistently without any discernible benefit to their education. Well, based on what I know now that I didn’t know two months ago, that’s difficult for me to do.

What impresses me the most over the last couple of months, is the epiphany that science appears to work by discrediting theories by the identities of the advocates behind the theories, and by slandering those advocates by supposing other theories were advanced by them, even when that is not the case. There are several quotes in the news insisting that “Intelligent Design is just creationism with a new label,” when the evidence emerging from the Dover lawsuit doesn’t seem to support this. That doesn’t seem to be very scientific, to me.

Much of the argument for rejecting ID appears to be rooted in the truism that evolutionary theory has labored under a heavier burden, and yet has proven so much more. That seems, to me, to be a natural result of what each theory alleges. ID is simply a problem for established evolutionary theory, or rather a catalog of such problems. On the other hand, “evolutionary theory” as we know it today, in a venue in which we consider excluding all other explanations, is so much more absolute, stringent, radical and uncompromising than what “evolutionary theory” is supposed to be. Evolutionary Fundamentalists today argue that evolutionary forces can account for everything we see! Every little bit of it. Any living thing you care to pick out, a credible explanation can be found for how evolution produced it.

And not only is that untrue, but nobody with any reputation to defend is actually saying it. In fact, the Evolutionary Fundamentalists with real scientific credentials, readily concede that evolutionary theory is incomplete by this standard. There are many things for which evolutionary theory is a process of finding a plausible explanation, and hasn’t completed this process yet. However, the scientists who are best acquainted with the current state of evolutionary theory, are confident this will successfully happen, and if I knew what they knew, I’d be confident too.

Okay, I believe them.

But I would like to know about these issues. In the greatest detail I can, with whatever background I possess. It’s my nature. I’m curious.

It hasn’t escaped my attention, some of these conundrums can be dismissed with an ease far greater than what we would expect, as laymen, without a fairly comprehensive understanding of what evolutionary forces can do. And other conundrums are a little bit trickier. Pardon me for saying so, but that’s interesting.

Evolutionary theory is supposed to explain everything. ID, as I know it, simply points out that where evolution fails, the presence of a Designer remains standing as the most plausible explanation. That seems to be just logical. Selection can be natural, or it can be artificial; if it isn’t one, it must be the other. There is no in-between.

Michael Behe’s theory of Irreducible Complexity has been assaulted repeatedly, apparently not by the “weight” of directly-contradicting evidence but by what amounts to academic snobbery. The publication of Darwin’s Black Box in 1996, for example, was not preceded with the traditional peer-review process one would expect with regard to any scientific work. Well, what of it? If Dr. Behe wants to publish his ideas in a book without peer review, and because of that he gets nailed on something the peer-review process would have caught, that’s going to be an embarrassing problem for Dr. Behe. If some non-scientist reads something wrong in there and starts repeating it, making an ass out of himself, then that’s an embarrassment for that guy too. What skin is it off the nose of those peers? How does it reflect on the scientific community as a whole? It doesn’t.

It’s troubling that the peer-review process has been proposed as a way to stop certain theories, not-disproven theories, from seeing the light of day. Why shouldn’t we unwashed peons know about those? We can read about Elvis Presley having a space alien’s baby from a supermarket tabloid any time we like. When did science get in the business of filtering out what we can read?

Some of what has been learned, in light of this trial, is helpful to the Evolutionary Fundamentalists, or at least to evolutionary theory. One of the elegant attacks placed against the ID people, is that whales have “fingers”. The bone structure inside the flippers, resembles that of a human hand. This is a difficulty for Design Theory, because why would that designer give the whale something the whale doesn’t need? Dr. Daniel Dennett makes another case in Show Me the Science that the retina strongly assults ID theory:

The retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye’s rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

To get a good idea of the ID counter-argument, all you have to do is play Lieutenant Columbo and flip this whole process around. You say, okay, the notion of an Intelligent Designer has been soundly defeated, now walk me through this. It’s tens of millions ago and we’re not evolved yet, we’re just a bunch of blind fish. We’re going to grow eyes through a series of entirely random mutations. The mutations produce what we know as “evolution” through a progression of exceedingly rare events in which those mutations become “fortunate”. They provide a feature or two, that allow the hosting organism to gain an advantage in the competition for finite resources in the host environment.

Clearly, being able to see, is an advantage. But wait, you don’t have that yet. A lens without a retina, is useless; a retina without a lens, is also useless. “Evolution” does not occur until the advantage is enjoyed. How many mutations do you have to have before the advantage is enjoyed?

Evolutionists explain this in a way that I find pretty credible. They say, you need a lens and a retina today, but this complicated arrangement is in itself an example of evolution. Back then, the mechanism could have been a whole lot simpler. It would have to have been a simple photoreceptor. They point to living organisms, as well as fossils, providing a spectrum of links between that photoreceptor and the complicated arrangement we have embedded in our skulls today. Is there not a bundle of optic nerves? A hole in the skull allowing that nerve to get to the brain? A cortex in the brain arranged so that this nerve can easily get someplace that will do some good? All of this is achieved through one lucky mutation at a time, the evolutionists say.

And I suppose I can buy that, since I’ve been convinced of evolution since the first time I saw a series of skulls in a fourth-grade textbook, starting with something ape-like but lacking much brain-space at all, and ending with Homo Sapiens.

The problem emerges with that very first stage. Even in the most primitive forerunner to the eyeball you could possibly propose, there must be several parts. The photoreceptor must be exposed to light. A nerve must be attached. It must run to a cortex in the brain, and the brain has to understand how to deal with the resulting information. This is important. The “mutation” will survive and propagate because of the Darwinian advantage. To propose some feature appears on the skin that may evolve into a photoreceptor — it just isn’t hooked up yet — seems to contradict the theory of evolution that you’re trying to support. How many more generations until the nerve appears? What keeps that blotch there, throughout those generations?

Does this start at the brain first, perhaps? Do we have a nerve wandering aimlessly, perhaps taking several generations to breech the skin and become something that can feed images? How long does that take, then? Maybe the skull developed last? That would certainly explain the convenient openings. Suppose there wasn’t even any skin? What if the photoreceptor was actually on the brain, and the skin, optic nerve, and surrounding skull came later?

If that’s the case, shouldn’t I be able to search for creatures that have skulls but no eyes, and come up empty? Don’t salamanders have skulls? How did that happen?

I freely admit it is possible, even likely, that all I’m proving is my own ignorance. I’m not trying to demonstrate I know my biology. My point is simply that no matter which piece you put in the puzzle first, they never quite seem to fit. Columbo is never quite finished saying “Oh, and one more little thing.”

Does this all make sense inside the labs? Once I get my biology degree, will the questions all magically go away? Show me how, then. Science is democratic by definition; it belongs to us; it is the study of “nature” which is something not only in contact with, but surrounding, all of us. Scientists my be inspired to explain this in a way we understand it, after they have successfully buried Intelligent Design and made it deader than King Tut. But they’re much more likely to enlighten us while they’re in the process of trying to do that burying. It doesn’t hurt to examine what the problems are with evolutionary theory, and to periodically re-visit from time to time to see what evolutionary theory has figured out about them.

That is, it doesn’t hurt what we conventionally call science. It doesn’t bring a lot of arguing and heated invective from someone we conventionally call a scientist

It would only be injurious to an effort to invest atheism as an official religion of science, and thus as an official religion in the United States.

And that’s the only logical explanation I can see for what’s going on. After all, if you’re trying to find a way evolution can explain something it hasn’t explained yet, you shouldn’t be the least bit bothered by someone saying “A designer makes sense, at least until you’ve got your theory figured out.” You would be agitated only if you had an emotional belief, running counter to the proposal of a designer, that you were trying to prop up with your “scientific” efforts.

I’m in the camp that fails to understand the mutual-exclusivity between theism and evolution. Obviously we have grown; we may have been put here; there is nothing inherently wrong with supposing that were were put here and we grew here.

I can probably explain that concern best with the parable of the tomato seeds. A little old lady buys tomato seeds and puts them in her garden — when you prove the tomatoes grow from seeds, this does nothing to refute the existence of the little old lady. Discovering the glass wall of the greenhouse, poses no problems to the theory of “growing” tomatoes. It only poses a problem to someone who has posited the tomatoes are out in the wilds, and the little old lady is a figment of someone’s imagination — that is the only faction left with some explaining to do.

Your Condoleeza Reading Assignments

Condoleeza Rice is the most powerful woman in the world, and has been fiercely determined in all her personal goals since the age of three. ++yawn++ You know what? Those two items represent the least remarkable things about her.

Thanks in no small part to liberal women, over the last third-of-a-century that act has gotten kind of tired. I mean, who, with a vagina, isn’t trying out for the ferociously-unstoppable-woman role? We’re up to our armpits in unstoppable women, and our culture has unstoppable-woman fatigue. Dr. Rice adds a twist, though, and it’s a good one. She is not an attention whore. People are watching her, or they’re not. It doesn’t seem to matter to Secretary Rice whether she is, or is not, the center of attention. She still just plows forward. One inch at a time maybe, but she goes.

Condoleezza Rice was staying away from politics during her early years. Condi’s parents were tuning a blind eye on the issue of racial discrimination in the USA and simply preferred not to pay any attention to it. African Americans did not have any voting rights back then, but Mr. Rice would persistently tell his daughter that she would be able to become the president of the United States if only she had a wish to work hard for it. Little Condi was doing her best.

That’s pretty tough to find now: What’s this? My civil rights are being trampled on. Oh well, I’m just going to do my thing. What’s that, I should start a revolution? Why should I, anyone discriminating against me is just a loser, and I’m going to be President someday, so let’em do whatever they want.

Kind of a Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Rosa Parks meets…Howard Roark.

Yeah yeah, I can hear the liberals now: Without a civil rights revolution, Condoleeza Rice would just be a maid somewhere, nothing more. Hey, you wanna bet? How much do you want to bet?

A lot of observers say that Ms. Rice has a very good chance to amaze the whole world in 2008 and become the USA’s first female president.

Condoleeza against Hillary in ’08 would be like Jason Voorhees versus the stupid slut with big tits: Definite outcome, over quickly, a little bit of fun to watch, maybe not as much suspense as it should have. Oh, there’d be a smidgen of difference. If you rent a zillion Friday the Thirteenth movies, every now and then Jason will slaughter a cheerleader, and via flashback or something, you’ll see something of the slut later in the movie. Every once in a great while.

Hillary, on the other hand, would be gone for good. She might get as annoying as Jimmy Carter, but it’s equally likely she’d be as quiet as Jerry Ford.

And Condi would make an awesome President.

Dr. Rice would like to see through walls:

…[Fox News Channel reporter James] Rosen was on a roll. He also asked Rice whether she would like to have any superpowers.

“Superpowers?” said Rice, the most powerful woman in the Bush administration and arguably one of the most powerful people in the world, period.

Rosen tried again, and got this response: “I’d like to be able to see through walls.”

It’s the latest Bush administration scandal: Spy-On-You-Through-Walls-gate. You read it here first.

Update: The article on FARK, from which I learned about this whole see-through-walls thing, has been greenlit for non-Totalfark-people, which means you don’t need to be a member to see this anymore. It also opens the gate to the discussion thread under the article, and wow what a lantern into the bigotted liberal mind that is (pseudonyms of liberal racist knuckleheads have been changed):

2005-09-29 11:16:13 AM Liberal-Knucklehead-1: There’s been a lot of speculation that Condi is a lesbian. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

2005-09-29 11:19:12 AM Inquisitive-Person: so Bush can appoint a black, gay woman to the position of Sec of state and he’s STILL a racist homophobe?

2005-09-29 11:26:34 AM Liberal-Knucklehead-2: I always thought there was a particular irony in the fact that the president who sucks more than any past president hates homosexuals.

2005-09-29 11:52:16 AM Liberal-Knucklehead-2: Powerful women don’t get facials, they give them.

2005-09-29 12:10:13 PM Liberal-Knucklehead-3: (responding to Inquisitive-Person’s question) yes. covering his ass by picking out one token woman who happens to be black (kill two birds, one stone). she’s merely for show, to sort of combat that “racist, sexist, homophobic” stuff that bush is known for. i recognize that she actually is very intelligent and accomplished, but the way it seems to me she was hired simply for being a minority. sort of how because of the equal opportunity employment/anti discrimination laws, if you only have all white people working at a place, you HAVE to hire a person of another race (qualified or not), or sex, otherwise it looks discriminatory.

2005-09-29 12:28:19 PM mkfreeberg [TotalFark]: I must be learning something new this morning about the post of Secretary of State. I guess President Washington named Thomas Jefferson to it just to make himself look good to racist, slave-owning, pot-smoking atheist Virginians.

Oh wait, don’t tell me, don’t tell me…the post of Secretary of State is for big important things managed by really competent people, but George W. Bush is too stupid to know that. Is that it?

2005-09-29 12:42:44 PM Liberal-Knucklehead-2: B I N G O !

2005-09-29 03:27:33 PM mkfreeberg [TotalFark]: And here I thought you stuck to Checkers and Twister at those Wednesday night cross-burnings.

You know, this thing about racist conservatives, I don’t think it’s been spun out of whole cloth. There definitely are some. But somewhere along the line we picked up this purely-an-article-of-faith thing that there are no racist liberals. I don’t believe in that, which is to say, I do believe there are racist left-wingers. I believe we are buried up to our belly buttons in them. Furthermore, I believe the “legends” about racist conservatives, are about twenty percent reality, and about eighty percent projection on the part of those racist liberals.

After all, where is this as-long-as-my-right-arm list of things Condoleeza Rice has done to support these inferences that she got her high position in the Cabinet as an affirmative action token? Nobody’s offered anything to support it; I don’t believe the support exists. The evidence that does exist, supports the idea that Dr. Rice is uniquely qualified for her current position. The idea she was picked for her by the color of her skin, and she’s actually some kind of dummy who would otherwise have never landed the job, is purely a matter of faith; where it isn’t faith, it’s just mental masturbation. As in, a process that requires no approval from anyone, is detatched from reality, achieves nothing, and just feels good to the person engaging in it.

In other words, racism more pure than anything ever practiced by Bull Connor (Democrat), Strom Thurmond (Democrat) or Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat).

We’re not yet at the point where all conservatives are non-racist and all liberals are racist. But we’re just a notch away from that. We’re certainly at the point where the stereotypes of the previous century are ripe for a serious re-thinking.

Well, That Was Lame

John Roberts is expected to receive 77 votes on the Senate Floor today, and to be commissioned as the 17th Chief Justice of the United States.

I hope that with him in charge, we can gradually start to fix what’s broken.

What’s broken? Well you be the judge. Whether you’re a tighty-rightie or a lefty-loosie, can you read this paragraph and tell me the Founding Fathers would be pleased with what our judiciary does nowadays?

The Bush administration wants the Supreme Court to reinstate a national ban on a type of late-term abortion, and the court already has scheduled arguments on whether New Hampshire’s parental notification law is unconstitutional because it lacks an exception allowing a minor to have an abortion to protect her health in the event of a medical emergency.

Name the Founding Father to bring up out of the ground. Pick any one out of the set that you want. No sooner will the earthworms and maggots be picked out of his sockets and the eyeballs mashed into place, and he reads just that one sentence, will his jawbone hit the floor. Good heavens, he’d have have a bazillion-and-one questions for us. There are so many bone-spinning problems with that one sentence, I don’t know where to begin.

And maybe 75% of all Americans with strong opinions about the Supreme Court, and perhaps 95% of everyone-at-large, will be mostly incapable of answering those questions.

Was the Democratic party opposed to Judge Roberts’ commission? Even they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure. Kinda lame.

Refineries

Tom Sullivan is filling in for Rush Limbaugh today. He’s arguing that if we make it profitable for the oil companies to do so, they will build more refineries. Normally I’m biased in Sullivan’s favor, but on this one I’m going to have to show some reluctance. Jerry Taylor and Peter van Doren, a few months ago, put out an argument that I thought was pretty solid in spite of my initial inclinations toward the opposition: New refineries have not been built since 1976, because the speculative profits are simply not there to justify building those refineries.

The gasoline refining market is about as close to the model of “perfect competition” as you’re going to find outside of an economics textbook. Rents are competed away and little profit is left for producers, especially when compared to the profits available from investment in oil production. Conservatives believe that environmental regulations have a lot to do with those low profits. They’re wrong. A large oil refinery costs $4 billion to $6 billion to build. The installation of “best available control technology” is a very small part of that figure.

Where I part company with Tom, is he’s saying in a capitalist model “money will flow, like magic” to wherever it is needed and this includes the refineries.

Trouble is, the gasoline market is not typical.

Suppose two gas stations are 150 feet apart from each other. Gas station A charges $3.199 for premium and is franchised by Oil Company 1, which owns (or leases, or somehow has access to) Refineries Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. Gas Station B sells premium for $3.189 is franchised by Oil Company B which has access only to Refinery Omega. It can get it nowhere else.

Refineries Gamma and Omega are hit by a hurricane. In a typical market, Gas station A would raise prices to $3.299 or so, in so doing making an adjustment to the market by which supply and demand find some sort of temporary harmony. In order to do the same thing, Gas station B raises its price to eight bucks or so, since now it’s selling gas out of a strictly limited inventory that cannot be replenished. Gas station B owner gets on the phone to his wholesaler and says, I need a break because this guy next to me is selling the same stuff for half as much. Wholesaler says, it can’t be helped. Gas station A ends up being the place to go. Gas station B has to make its money by selling soda, chaw tobacco and washer fluid.

But that’s not how it works.

Both gas stations hike it to $4.50 or so. The same day. They end up, once again, within a penny or two of each other.

This doesn’t act like a capitalist market and there is little reason to anticipate it will respond to capitalist forces. What it acts like, is a collectivist market: No farmer has his own 20 acres, instead we all wake up whenever we feel like it and harvest & sow whatever chunk we feel like out of two square miles. No competition.

The scary thing is, this is much more important than the price of crude, and more vulnerable to interruption. Crude could tumble to fifteen dollars a barrel tomorrow, and with the nation’s refining operations running on 29-year-old junk, gas would stay exactly where it is.

But what I drive gets dang near 40 miles a gallon, so Hakuna Matata for me. The rest of you have a problem.

What is a Liberal?

In response to questions from my eight-year-old son, I’ve instructed him that a liberal, in this day & age, is a person who is incapable of differentiating fact from opinion.

For the adults, I have a better definition. A liberal is someone who thinks you can have a dinner party, invite Earl Warren and Thomas Jefferson to attend, seat them next to each other, and at the end of the evening expect no glasses or plates to be broken.

They are sad, sad people, who have a connection to reality best described by the word tenuous.

Why More?

Each and every single time the news media takes a harsh look at the Bush administration, reasonable minds can disagree as to whether or not that media is functioning as a centrist, objective watchdog, beholden to The People and to nobody else, or as to whether that media is acting as a leftist shill. Now, if you want to keep arguing the point to the other side in hopes of changing minds, I think most of us would agree the justification for the arguing lies in the prospect of a solid challenge to that other side. Without that, arguing is pointless, and this is why we don’t argue it much — although certainly, there is a lot of disagreement.

Well here, then, is a challenge. You are a famous, award-winning cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee named Rex Babin. Your mission is to disseminate fresh, topical illustrations of current events so that readers can be informed in pictorial form. You relish your position as a centrist media watchdog, a shill for nobody, accountable to The People, and to The People alone.

It is September 27, 2005 and you have been bashing the Bush administration’s connections to Halliburton for years. Your readers either think there is something incriminating in this connection, or not, or else they don’t have their minds made up yet. The number of readers who are still undecided about it, has shriveled down to…well, to nothing. To the three or four people in Sacramento County who live in caves like Ted Kaczynski. Outside that handful, people have made up their minds.

And at this late date, you wish to inform. Objectively and non-partisanly, of course.

When then, why, pray tell, would you draw up this cartoon?

Babin is in excellent company. He doesn’t wish to inform, except to inform people what kind of opinions they are supposed to have.

I wouldn’t present this cartoon as evidence to back that up in 2002. Or in 2003, 2004 or in the earlier part of this year. But by now, this is not fresh and it’s not even topical. It’s propaganda pure and simple.

Frauds

Not that I can find any examples this late in the game, but apparently this photo has been circulating and/or been published repeatedly in the San Francisco Chronicle. Link goes to the “What Are You Looking At?” blog that has the whole story.

I first noticed today via Wizbang! that this fellow has been outed, thanks to Google. His name is Jeb Eddy, and according to the list of reported contributions going back seven years, he’s about as Republican as Che Guevara. Under the comments section in Wizbang!, one of the posters had called out the fact that this is not unprecedented. At least two of the supporters for Ward Churchill, holding themselves up as “Republicans for Churchill” were outed as registered Democrats earlier this year.

There is something going on here, which may be easily understood to a whole lot of people but which makes very little sense to me. Time for me to put on the ol’ “make believe” hat. I’m a registered Democrat and I want to protest for Democrat causes, and at the last minute before I had out the door with my picket sign I get a whacky idea! I’m going to pretend I’m a Republican! What motivates me to do this?

Well, there are two answers the way I see it. One is, I am an attention whore who doesn’t give a shit about what kind of message I’ll be sending or what minds I will be changing, only that I get lots of high-fives and pats-on-the-back from my fellow liberals for deceiving those hated Republicans. Given the number of bumper-sticker sound bites I’ve heard for the last three years that state no logical case whatsoever, Mr. Donahue’s monologue on the O’Reilly Factor, for example, I think that’s pretty likely.

The other possibility is, I am strategically reaching out to conservatives and centrists who are numb to the fact that Democrats don’t like President Bush and the Republican party, but would be more receptive to the slander if they saw evidence that the G.O.P. was beginning to splinter. Liberals have made much of the talking-point that President Bush is a “divider, not a uniter,” so I think this is pretty likely, too. Link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link.

Now, don’t ask me to explain that.

In my world, if a course of action is correct but politically divisive, and an opposite course is wrong but would unite people — a sane decision-maker would prefer the correct course of action, come what may. But obviously, it is a popular talking-point.

What is to be learned from these frauds?

Simply this. A pattern has been defined. It would be extravagant, almost to the point of insanity, to presume the mother-lode has seen the light of day. There are probably many, many more “ashamed Republicans” out there, who are really lifelong Democrats, hoping they won’t be exposed.

The other thing to learn is, if you’re sitting on the fence in deciding these contentious issues, and for whatever reason you’re more receptive to Republican apostates than to Democrat die-hards, you are a scrumptious morsel. Liberal protesters, advocates and demagogues think you’re pretty yummy. Easy pickin’s. There’s a high price on your head.

Something for you to think about.

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” — Thomas Jefferson

Sacred Cow Burgers

Nobody reads this blog, but if ever anybody somehow does trip across it, I think they should know about Sacred Cow Burgers.

Lots of pictures. Funny stuff. And, as you can see, pretty much a reinforced-stainless-steel riveted connection to The Truth.

Not Alone

I saw this cartoon in the paper yesterday. Not funny. But pretty thought-provoking.

I’ll tell you how this grabbed my attention. I always saw these “my wife doesn’t pay me as much attention now that the baby’s here” guys as spoiled wimps, to be honest. After all, being a real man is about taking care of people weaker than you, isn’t it? Soldiering on in spite of lost sleep, dentist bills, skin taken off your knuckles when the wrench slipped, etc. Certainly you shouldn’t be belly-aching that people aren’t paying attention to you all the time.

Except that last frame looks just like so many of my failed relationships from the past. Ouch.

Maybe now that I’m in something a whole lot better, I’ve accumulated the wisdom necessary to speak on this. Not solve all the world’s problems, but just say a thing or two about it. To the fellas. After all, all those times I was down on my hands & knees getting milkshake spilled on my head, I thought I was alone. Clearly, I wasn’t. How many other guys out there with milkshake in their hair think they’re alone? Lean forward and follow my words, guys, here comes wisdom. I’m not saying here comes perfection…I’m not even saying it will solve anything. But it needs to be said.

You know how we all think the nice guys finish last? And how the ladies deny it, deny it, deny it some more? And yet…guys who get laid pretty much whenever they want, they certainly aren’t what you call “nice.” I don’t know that many nice guys who say “please” and “thank you” and never have time for themselves, because they’re constantly juggling girlfriends. I don’t know of too many evil bastards who steal from tip jars and leave gum on bus seats, who are crying in their beers because they can’t get dates.

Having failed and succeeded, I’ve come to a conclusion.

Women don’t like guys who are dicks. They don’t like men who are nice, either. They say they like men who are “assertive, but not cocky.” This is a lie. They don’t like assertive men at all. They like cocky men more than they say they do, but they’re not extremely fond of that, either.

They like men who have preferences for things, and stand up for those preferences. Definite men.

It tells them that if they build a household with this guy, someone in that household will have a preference about things, at all times, twenty-four-seven. The woman, then, can be decisive when she feels like it, or veg out and let things be however they are, when she feels like it. The man will go right on, making wise decisions about things, until she wakes up and is ready to grab the wheel again.

That’s actually kind of silly — men have downtime, just like women do. And if a normal man has to keep making decisions, whether he wants to or not, and answer for them later, just so his better-half can space out, there will be no peaceful relinquishing-of-the-wheel at the end of his shift. In a man’s world, a ship has one captain. In a woman’s world, that stuff is based on feelings. And nobody likes to have their feelings subordinated to somebody else’s feelings.

Lately, I’ve gotten in the habit of just being definite, and it’s improved my relationships with women by leaps and bounds. I like this. I don’t like that. There’s a third answer: I don’t care, but at least I definitely don’t care. Be passionate about your apathy, in other words. Just those three answers, for anything that comes up. “I don’t know” is what’s poisonous. You’re practically breaking up with her, or divorcing her, right there & then if you tell her that.

And it’s funny, because the way guys are raised, “chivalry” is all about letting her decide everything, imposing your will only when it’s absolutely necessary, and completely off her radar, like, should your car be filled with 87 or 91 octane. Leave EVERYTHING else…up to her. And good heavens, don’t express a preference one way or the other. That might make her feel “pressured,” and we can’t have that, can we.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

What this all boils down to, is that guy in the comic strip up there, he’s already divorced. It’s a man’s patriarchal duty to stop that scenario from developing before it develops — climbing out of that hole once you’re in it, is futile. How do you avoid becoming furniture? By saying “no” sometimes. Yeah, that’s right. If you’re a married guy, and your living room is chock full of ceramic angels, candles, frilly things, and your toilet seat lid has a fuzzy cover on it that makes it impossible to leave it up…you’re divorced already.

Women can, contrary to popular belief, be told no. In fact, women love hearing no. What they can’t stand, is being told “I don’t know” about something, and then later, having an argument about something that had been left to their judgment earlier.

That’s weak. Indecisive. Womanly. There are valid evolutionary reasons why women don’t find it attractive. If you’ve got the balls to knock her up, you’ve got the balls to make up your mind about things.

This Is Good II

Awhile ago I had written that the salad days of the Republican party under George Bush, thanks in no small part to Hurricane Katrina, were just about over; that it had reached its summit, and from here on out it was set to plunge into a chasm, at a steeper and steeper slope downward as time went on.

I still believe this, but R. Emmett Tyrell presents a potent argument in the opposite direction. Much of his argument rests on the premise that Democrats stand for nothing right now, and without a viable, robust and potent opposition, the President can’t feel the hot breath of failure on the back of his neck without a genuine failure, recognized across partisan lines. The primary complaints against the war, thus far, are that it has been hard to predict, lethal and controversial. What war, ever, wasn’t all three of these? And the economy is doing okay. Other presidents have presided over economies that were better; but many, a majority, have seen economies that sucked big green ones next to the economy we have.

But the keystone to his argument is that President Bush labors under no coherent opposition:

The Democrats have no program, no coherent ideas, and no leader who is not perilously controversial. I have in mind the mesmeric Hillary, who mesmerizes Democrats, is repellent to Republicans, and unattractive to most independents. She is the first First Lady ever to suffer the disapproval of a majority of Americans since pollsters began polling the approval ratings for First Ladies. She is, aside from her husband, the most scandal-prone person in American politics.

A few thoughts:

Do those six things, and I think President Bush can take Tyrell’s article to heart. If he doesn’t, he can’t. That’s just my opinion.

Bush Selling Children Into Slavery

I’m so grateful we have the Daily Kos to point this stuff out, Lord knows where we’d find out about it otherwise. I’ll let the post speak for itself.

On Wedneday, Bush issued a waiver exempting the Saudis from financial penalties associated with the child sex trade, prostitution, etc.

There are many missing children in the wake of Katrina.

After the tsunami there was great concern that many of the children left without families due to that disaster had disappeared into Asian, Middle Eastern sex trade rings.
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I’m sure it must have something to do with oil, but in Bushworld we can’t take anything for granted, can we?

Wow. All I can say is, Wow.

You might want to bounce this one off the next lefty type who tries to ambush you with “blood for oil” and what-not. Good litmus test to determine how much whacky tobaccy he’s been smoking.