The Funny Thing About Charity

While we endlessly scrutinize the crime that Karl Rove appears to have not committed, at the expense of figuring out when the California-Mexico wall is going up, and willfully ignore how our diplomatic good intentions may be blinding us to where Osama bin Laden is & how to get him, one of the other things that isn’t getting a lot of press is the Live 8 concert. And why should it? The Live 8 concert came and went, they played on their guilt trip, whoever would fall for it fell for it, whoever wouldn’t, didn’t. Time to tune out, right?

Maybe not. Now is the time when this whole event starts to educate us about charity, how it works, and how it goes wrong. We Americans are very fortunate. Our standard of living is so high, that this is literally part of our everyday lives — we just seldom pay attention to it. That we are wealthy enough to have so much opportunity to destroy people by donating to them, and the fact that we have so much choice in ignoring this, are testaments to how good we really have it. Much is made of the responsibility that America has to the rest of the world. Perhaps among those responsibilities we have, is to educate ourselves on what really happens when we donate.

And I’m a big fan of paying attention to how you go about thinking about things. Toward that end, I’ve cited two articles: “Talk Show Hosts Are Losers [Especially Neal Boortz]” by one Stephen Lonewolf Makama, who appears to have discovered Mr. Boortz for the first time; and “Snapping fingers at African aid” by Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields.

There are two things I’d like to point out about Mr. Makama’s column: One, he suffers from a certain scope creep. His column is supposed to be about talk show hosts being losers, which if that were so, it would not make for suitable material here because if I included it then, I’d be the one suffering scope creep. But if you read his column, his primary point is really that we should be supporting the Live 8 donations to Africa, come what may, and by uttering a peep of protest Neal Boortz has cemented his reputation as a penny-pinching tightass — therefore anybody else who does the same is just as bad.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that Makama appears to be kind of a numbers-driven guy; the “0.7% of GDP” targeted by the Live 8 folks is mentioned twice, while the cause-and-effect issue is never mentioned at all. This is probably important, because knowing what I do about what Neal Boortz writes, it’s nearly certain that Boortz made an issue out of cause & effect — not about “0.7%” — in whatever found its way to Makama.

Ms. Fields, on the other hand, has an interesting case to make about what happens to the money when it goes where it’s going. It would have been pretty neat to read what Mr. Makama’s response to this would be. Unfortunately, neither Makama, nor people of like mind, to the best of my knowledge have ever addressed this.

The entire argument boils down to this: The aid does more harm than good. Yes, but you can afford it.

The aid does more harm than good.

[Kenyan economist James] Shikwati describes what he sees as the disastrous result of aid to Africa. Not only do African leaders exploit it for their own purposes, stuffing their pocketbooks and adding to their power, but aid weakens local markets, destroys incentives and fosters corruption and complacency.

Yes, but you can afford it.

Americans working hard my foot! How about worked – hard-on-them funky-cotton -plantations? Mr. Boortz… ancestors of these same blacks you�re denigrating built up this country you�re so cosy in about – 0.7% GNP and all.

The aid does more harm than good.

[Shikwati] scoffs at the motives of the United Nations World Food Program, “which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of . . . being dedicated to the fight against hunger while . . . being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated.”

Yes, but you can afford it.

Look Mr. Boortz if you don’t want to give, its fine and good besides maybe your great- greats were stingy Dutch (or wherever) anyway, so we can understand your penny pinching , but good hard working Americas have a big heart at giving, so let em.

The aid does more harm than good.

Local merchants lose their livelihoods because no one in the low-wage world of Africa can compete with the donated products that find their way to the black market. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry; six years later, the figure had fallen to 57,000.

Yes, but you can afford it.

Mr. Boo…ortz goes on and on and on and on about why Americans shouldn�t give up 0.7% GNP U.S. to aid Africa – jeepers is the guy far right, far left or just plain far stingy?

I would hasten to add that with the issues about which we argue, most of the arguments are like this. The conservative says “the effects of what we’re doing here, aren’t quite as rosy as you might think” and the liberal counterargument, far from actually addressing this, instead goes into a replay of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” pontificating about what must motivate anyone who isn’t quite so quick to pass the hat.

This is probably the one way we Americans have the greatest effect on the rest of the world (which we’re constantly reminded, mostly by those who want us to kick in the bucks, absolutely hates us). If a plausible argument can be made that we are perhaps doing more harm than good, doesn’t it make sense to have some more solid arguments on whether or not that is indeed the case?

What Color Cake To Let Them Eat?

This is a story that has been zipping around under a very low profile outside New York City, but it would appear that is slowly changing and I suspect it’s going to continue to change. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, running in the Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York, has circulated a flyer with a photograph of her supporters that has apparently been altered. Cynical Nation has one of the best scans of the photo, before & after, which I have hot-linked below and of course will remove upon request. Fields, according to the latest news I can dig up, is denying any knowledge or involvement in the alteration.

Now let us ponder what this proves, what it almost proves, and what it simply suggests, and then cogitate upon where this must lead.

Someone who has an interest in the Fields campaign, has taken the time & trouble to change the racial makeup of the people with whom the candidate is photographed. We could argue back & forth about whether that person or party wants to see the candidate win or lose, but it seems a given that they have access to printed materials being developed to advance the candidacy, so they probably want her to win.

A week ago I pointed out that in our present culture, when we talk about “diversity” being a good thing, we’re being reverse-racist as you can possibly be because the d-word describes a positive quality toward which our political leaders don’t think white guys can contribute in any way. I was writing about a newspaper article in London regarding the terrorist bombings there, so I take this as a global phenomenon. Things that are solid white, are bad, things that aren’t, are good. And a white-nonwhite hybrid of any kind, the darker it is, the better it is. When we use the d-word, we’re saying we want things to be heterogenous, but what we’re really indulging in is an Animal Farm type of four-legs-good, two-legs-bad lazy thinking.

So the voters, who appear to desire more Asian faces, or are thought by someone to desire this, elect leaders who are going to represent their interests. But wait a minute. If a leader is competitive enough and clever enough to see that a photoshop job is needed before a flyer can go out, that leader has to be out to win, right? And if you’re out to win, you have to appoint people to key positions who know how to win. Not people with a certain color skin…people who will win. Those are two different goals. That a situation may arise from time to time, where these two goals happen to intersect, is irrelevant. They’re still different, and to be effective over the long term, a leader has to embrace one and favor it over the other.

So appearances would indicate the voters are voting for someone who will appoint people with Asian faces (or whom people with Asian faces can support), who then, appoints people likely to get jobs done, regardless of the color of their skin, while pretending to appoint people of a favored ethnicity. The leader’s job, then, has been re-defined to a gig where you pretend outwardly to be doing one thing, while in reality you’re doing something else. So look what has happened here — the issue of racial makeup has been thrust into the public discourse, and as a result, we have to elect leaders who pledge to separate their public personas from the guiding principles of their inner sanctums.

It is a promotion of dishonesty. Anyone who votes for this kind of thing, is voting for leaders who will willingly lie to them.

There is a great example of this kind of thing from last year. In spring of 2004, Claremont McKenna College psychology Professor Kerri Dunn reported to police that her car had been vandalized in an apparent hate crime. Racial epithets were spray-painted onto the body of her car, her tires were slashed, her windows broken. The next day, she gave an impassioned, fiery speech, not for a family audience, about how strongly she disapproved of the mindset of these racist hooligans. Within a week after that speech, police were saying she vandalized her own car. Professor Dunn was put on trial for fraud, convicted, and ordered to undergo psychiatric review.

Professor Dunn doesn’t need any such review. Her psychiatric facilities work just fine. She had a goal, put a plan in place to achieve it, and executed it.

No, the little people are to blame here. The masses are asses. You can hear them in this recording of her speech. These are people so passionate about the issue of hate crimes, they have been sent out on a silly witch hunt for no real perpetrators at all.

The Fields Scandal begins with prejudice, and it ends with fraud. The Dunn crime begins with prejudice, and ends with fraud. The more obsessed we are with skin color, the more easily played we are, like musical instruments.

Politicians are supposed to figure out which way a parade is going, and then run to the front of it. We are in perpetual danger — at any time, and on any issue — of being governed by leaders who can out-think us, and send us scrambling off in a certain direction so they can rush to the front of it with the benefit of advance preparation. Now once a politician successfully pulls that off, how much real respect can that politician hold for the commoners? Not much. It is not intellectually possible to tell the public what it’s supposed to think on one issue, and then stand by ready to receive your grassroots instructions in a democratic model on other issues. You would have to be Machiavellian across-the-board. So that leader would have to end up like Marie Antoinette, saying “Let Them Eat Cake.”

I think C. Virginia Fields is guilty as all hell, although there is no way to prove this yet. I think politicians do this all the time. I think the only difference between Kerri Dunn, and most of our diversity-minded politicians, is a beat-up car, a pipe wrench, and a false police report. They’re agitating public unrest were there previously was none, and reaping the political benefits of it. It is a cheap, easy, sleazy substitute for quality leadership, and I hope when people are guilty of falling for it, they rightfully blame themselves and look at the charlatan elites as symptomatic of something infected deep below the surface, which those people can see in the mirror.

I hope that. But I’m not holding my breath.

The Fun Begins

The scandal is down, the scandal is down. It’s biting dirt, and it’s biting hard. The Karl Rove, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Outing a Covert Agent, Treason blah blah blah scandal‘s shoulders are pinned to the mat. Gone is the “he broke the law” canard. Gone is the “outed her to wreak vengeance” canard. The “should be hanged for treason” train has left the station.

It looks like Rove can’t be indicted for committing any crime here, and that’s if you believe everything that has been said by the Democrats. Every little thing, swallow it uncritically, unchallenged. But why should you? What they say depends on the premise that Rove was the original source of this “leak,” and that’s assuming there was any leak at all. Reasons to doubt this, are mounting, and reasons to believe it, have never exactly been in abundance.

I’m ready to call this now. It’s my birthday, I get to call things. Washington scandals do tend to be like bouncing footballs, I know, but I think this one’s close enough to call. It’s on the home stretch, and I see no reason to await logical arguments and cohesive digestion of available facts, from a noisy group of whiners that have never supplied either since this “scandal” began. Let’s have fun instead.

Fun with “Liberal Deny-Reality Bingo.” Gather the family around the TV and the radio. Go over that Letters to the Editor page in the paper, as well as the editorials put together by those wise, cool-headed professional journalists. Argue with some nameless, faceless, hotheads on the Internet. Who can get five-in-a-row first? Will it be Mom or Dad? Or Peter, Marcia, Bobby, Cindy, maybe Alice?

Back on Wednesday, I had written about the whole Karl Rove, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Outing a Covert Agent, Treason blah blah blah scandal. Call it what you will. Interested readers — there are some, sometimes — had been nagging at me to work on getting more substance out while using fewer words to carry it. For quite some time now. Since the third or fourth grade maybe (I’m 39 today).

It is a complex thing, to try to say this: We do not know for a fact that Karl Rove is innocent of what he’s been accused of, but we should be nearly certain of it, because there are people who have access to privileged information we do not have. Those people probably know without a doubt whether or not Rove is guilty of a crime. If he were guilty, they would know, and they would not be behaving the way they are behaving. I believed that then, and I believe it now, but the point was simply a bunny-trail, a side-point, from what I was really writing about. The way I had chosen to impart this, was the following:

But other things are gathering dust while they’re [the press] trying to figure out if a crime has been committed — knowing that there are people who know if a crime has been committed or not, and that those people would be behaving differently if a crime had, indeed, been commited.

I don’t know if James Taranto, the esteemed editor of “Best of the Web,” the daily Wall Street Journal column, reads my blog. I would expect hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in his column this morning.

Let’s conduct a little thought experiment, shall we? Suppose that people in Washington generally had the sense that Karl Rove was soon to be indicted in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. How would they react?

It seems to us the White House would be working to distance itself from Rove, possibly planning for him to make a quiet exit, much as John Kerry’s campaign “disappeared” Joe Wilson last summer when Wilson’s credibility fell apart. The Democrats, on the other hand, would act high-minded and talk of “letting the process work,” at least as long as Rove remained on the job. An actual indictment, after all, would do maximal political damage to the Bush administration.

Instead, the White House (which knows a lot more about the investigation than any of us) is confidently standing behind Rove, while the Democrats are waging a hysterical attack that would be premature if it were based on anything real. Partisan Democrats don’t want to talk about the facts of the case (facts are irrelevant, as a former Enron adviser insists) or about the law. They just want to pound the table and insist that Rove is metaphysically guilty.

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered. What had been just a sideways remark in my Wednesday ramblings, has morphed into a central thesis within his Friday column.

But there are other people who know more than the average bear, who are doing things they probably wouldn’t be doing if Rove was guilty of a crime. Philip Heymann, Clinton’s deputy attorney general, probably wouldn’t be granting an interview to Knight-Ridder to say this: “He has to find somebody who would say Rove knew that she was covert, that he knew that the government was making an effort to hide her identity…without [that], you don’t have a crime.”

This is old news to anyone who has the balls to check out a “right-wing nut” web site or radio show once in awhile. If you thrive on ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/PBS alphabet soup, it probably comes as a real shocker.

Failing to Prove A

When I was a little boy, I asked questions about Republicans and Democrats the way little boys ask questions about anything: I’d listen to the first twenty words or so of the answer, and then get fascinated in something else. I think the answers the adults were trying to give me, had something to do with “Republicans and Democrats both have the same goals in mind but they have different ways of going about achieving it.” Adulthood taught me something contrary to this, and then it taught me something contrary to it again, and again, and again, and again.

I think a young man coming of age would be much better served with the answer, “Republicans and Democrats view life and think about what they see in fundamentally different ways.” The Dime People (“not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties!”) vehemently protest this. But honestly, this myth about “same goals” doesn’t hold up very well. If I got a list started about these “same goals” I would have a tough time adding much into it, even across months or years. The truism that they think differently, on the other hand, seems to get proven with more and more certainty with each news event that comes along.

One of the defining differences between the two ways of thinking, is that Democrats frequently get confused between “Failing to Prove A” and “Successfully Proving !A” — when the former happens, they are frequently caught confusing it with the latter. The Weapons of Mass Destruction issue with Iraq is a perfect example of this. The successful proof of Not-A, most of us would agree, could be the only possible justification for some of the changes in policy upon which many of them insist: pulling out of Iraq, and impeaching the President for lying, are two things that come to mind. The Americans we call “mainstream” and “middle-of-the-road” would have a tough time supporting those things, knowing that a significant element of doubt exists. So, perhaps out of wishful thinking, the Democrat hierarchy simply forgets about the existing element of doubt. Yet when discussing a country the size of California, ankle- or knee-deep in sand the consistency of baby powder in which freakin’ jet fighters are known to have been hidden, only a buffoon would insist it is “proven” this area is clean of anything at all.

A second example comes to mind with former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s trip to Africa to figure out if Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire uranium from there. This is at the heart of what we call the “Plame Affair,” or the “Karl Rove Scandal”. To sum it up, at the conclusion of Wilson’s trip, he decided Iraq was not trying to acquire this uranium, based on…at this late date, I’m not sure what. My media won’t ask tough questions here. When the Senate subcommittee caught Joe Wilson red-handed, reporting things he couldn’t back up, he chalked it up to “a little literary flair.”

On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all.

For example, when asked how he “knew” that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved “a little literary flair.”

This is that whole thing about “Bush Lied,” remember that? The President is supposed to have lied in his 2003 State of the Union address when he said:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

And sadly, we have a lot of Democrats running around offering opinions about lies, who would not be able to correctly diagram that sentence and tell you what it would take to refute it. Here’s a hint: The first five words are “The British government has learned” and the subject of the sentence is “British government.”

What does the British government have to say today? Much of the hubbub surrounds a document that is supposed to have backed up the President’s statement, which has since proven to be forged. Normal, dispassionate people would then say, refutation of the statement about uranium in Africa, would depend on the forged document being the sole-source of the claim. But Democrats don’t believe in that. A forgery means a failure to prove A, and that is equal to successfully proving Not-A. But the British government, which had a pivotal role in that whole issue, sides with the normal, dispassionate people:

Nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency, had subsequently said some documents supporting the uranium claim were forgeries.

But Lord Butler said the government had intelligence from “several different sources”.

“The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it,” the report said.

To call President Bush a liar without taking this into account, is pure ignorance. To take this into account and persist in calling Bush a liar, based on the uranium claim, is to engage in a serious logical fallacy. Either way, it’s not the kind of thinking in which sensible people entrust the national security.

If your wife suspects there is a wasp’s nest underneath the swing set your kids play on, you are probably going to engage in a certain style of thinking regardless of which political party you claim as yours. Democrats seem to be opposed to carrying that rational style of thinking, sterilized of tempting logical errors by the scorching heat of imminent personal danger, into public policy. If you look at the available facts, and think with the clear-headed kind of thinking you use when something really important to you is depending on you, you have to conclude that we haven’t caught President Bush in a lie just yet.

But you can’t say the same for Joseph Wilson.

The Other 68% Were Crap To Begin With

We’ve had a real exciting week in the world of “studies,” at the very least in the realm of soda making people fat, which you can read about here and here and here and here. We still have two days to go before the week’s over, and what do we have here? A study-of-studies, 45 to be exact, saying 32% of all these studies turn out later to be just cock-and-bull stories and, by implication, do more harm than good if people pay attention to them.

Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies — 16 percent — and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.

That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

What do you do if the money’s tight, and something goes on sale that you kinda-sorta need, but not really? Some people will pull out the credit card and go get the thing, since, after all, it’s on sale. But smart people will say hey, let’s wait awhile, since it’s not the highest priority. Maybe by the time it’s more important to us, it won’t be such a hot commodity, and we’ll end up getting it for just as good a deal as if it was on sale again.

Studies should be treated the same way. If soda does indeed make you fat, then it didn’t start making people fat in July of 2005.

You know what this reminds me of? Cell phones. Have you ever gotten off a cell phone call from your wife, or boss, or girlfriend, with a brand-new obligation to do something that requires an interruption from something else you were just about to do…and thought to yourself “you know, if there were fewer ways to communicate, I’d be getting more done”? Sometimes knowledge is not power.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm…

This is mighty peculiar. Apparently, you can now rob banks at the drive-through.

A bank robber behind the wheel of his car on Tuesday sent a note through a vacuum tube to the teller at the drive-through window at a branch of Chicago’s LaSalle Bank and the teller obliged, returning an undisclosed amount of cash, police said.

It makes me think: My own bank has started a practice where you have to fill out your name, address and zip code, whenever you deposit a check. You deposit a check into two accounts, you have to fill out your address twice. So it gives me cause to wonder. When you rob a bank through the little pneumatic air tube, how many times do you have to fill out your address and zip code? Does it depend on how many accounts the cashier has to empty in order to get the amount of cash you demanded in your note?

The FBI said it was investigating the drive-through theft.

Oh yeah, do get back to us on what you found out. Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE: The amount of money involved was about $56,000. It would appear no further facts are forthcoming to make this story make some kind of sense, as I was hoping — thus far, it remains as simple as it sounded at first. Schooop! In goes a note. Schooop! Out comes the money. Vroom! Off they go.

Police say a man drove up to a LaSalle bank at 3301 N. Ashland about 8 a.m. Tuesday and slid a note demanding money to the teller through a tube at the window.

The teller complied, shooting back about $56,000, Belmont District police said.

C’mon…c’mon…there’s got to be more to it than that.

What’s Gathering Dust

The Plame scandal is reaching a fevered pitch, because the White House keeps telling lies, or because the Democrats are getting desperate, depending on your point of view. The White House Press Corps is showing a great deal of diligence (link to video) trying to get Press Secretary Scott McClellan to comment about things that he specifically said he would not comment about.

I think we can all agree that a reporter can do some real, old-fashioned, hard-lined questioning, perhaps make his interview subject start crying, and still fall far short of the stick-to-it-iveness that was shown by these reporters. One wonders what is going on in the press: Do these reporters have to report back to Perry-White type editors, who will lay into ’em if they don’t ask the right follow-up questions? One of the reporters, I noticed, was asking for the date that the White House was asked, by investigators, not to comment on the ongoing criminal investigation. The date. Wow, I guess I really don’t have what it takes to be a journalist — I never would have thought of asking this. And there I’d be in my editor’s office. “Uh, sir, well, the reason I didn’t ask about the date, was…I guess, golly, it simply hadn’t occured to me.” My illustrious career would end there.

Well here is what we know about what happens in the press.

The reporters have to answer to editors, publishers, producers, etc. who don’t do the actual work, but ultimately answer to shareholders. Those executives, in turn, have the job of making sure the television program or the newspaper, puts out a product that people want. If the product is something people want, the share price of the corporation that owns the enterprise, will go up. If it isn’t, the price will decline.

Supposedly, this provides “news” with an incentive to run what is really “news.” That’s the theory. This should, we expect, be guiding reporters as they decide “Scott McClellan gave us all the information on this we need and it’s time to move on,” or, “Scott McClellan is fudging and we should dig into this a little bit further.” Thus, when the reporters are going to such extraordinary lengths to get McClellan to say what he already said he wouldn’t say, they are acting in our interests.

Okay then. But other things are gathering dust while they’re trying to figure out if a crime has been committed — knowing that there are people who know if a crime has been committed or not, and that those people would be behaving differently if a crime had, indeed, been commited.

In an interview with Time Magazine, CIA Chief Porter Goss, in an interview for the June 27 issue, commented that he had an “excellent idea” where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that our respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to stage a capture. Perhaps someone somewhere knows what became of this. I would think it would lead to some hard questioning of the White House, along the lines of what you see in the video linked above. I would like to see that. Make McClellan squirm over that. Why not?

I think it goes without saying that most of us have learned interesting things about the way intelligence and diplomacy works over the last three-and-a-half years. A lot of what we have learned, just leads to more questions. Perhaps if we learned about this kind of thing, it would start to make more sense — at any rate, isn’t this the kind of thing we’re all supposed to be worried about? A lot of liberals were reminding me the White House was losing track the primary objective, when we went into Iraq. Well then why not go after this like a pit bull on a pant leg? That would be in everybody’s best interest, wouldn’t it? Assuming everyone’s on the up-and-up.

Something is screwy. The reporters, editors, publishers and producers have decided that that is not as important as Karl Rove. Do they know something I don’t?

Another item gathering dust: In May, I congratulated the Senate for passing a bill that, among other things, provided funds for a fence spanning the California-Mexican border. One of the things we look to our press to do, is to follow-up on things. This cries out for follow-up. How’s it going? Do we really have to wait for Halliburton to be awarded a contract to pour the foundation, before the press smells some kind of “scandal” and re-discovers the story? Maybe it’s being talked about somewhere, but it’s too subtle for a dimbulb like me because I remain ignorant. How we doin’? Are we accepting bids? Are we pulling weeds, removing rattlesnake nests, hauling rocks away so the site can be prepped for a foundation? Is the fence already up? I’d rather tune in to Entertainment Tonight to see Martha Stewart complaining about the lack of decoration on the fence, than to get no news at all. This is among our biggest vulnerabilities, if not the biggest one. What’s happenin’?

But again, it’s not my job to make those decisions. Those who have the job to make those decisions, have decided the Karl Rove thing is much more important.

Again…do they know something I don’t? These are the people who specifically informed me, seven years ago, that a government official telling a lie was, in & of itself, not a cause for any concern.

Why then are we ignoring this vaporware fence, while getting the hard facts on what date the criminal investigators asked the White House not to comment on something?

Tweak a Geek III

See how many knee-slapping one-liners you can get in response to this:

Suspicious Package Turns Out To Be ‘Star Wars’ Toys
POSTED: 11:53 am EDT July 13, 2005

BUFFALO, N.Y. — There was a false alarm at the Buffalo airport. Officials said a suspicious bag prompted authorities to clear the airport’s main terminal early Wednesday morning. The bag was later found to contain “Star Wars” toys and memorabilia. A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration told a Buffalo radio station that the bag was apparently left by someone who departed Tuesday on a flight bound for Miami.

After the bag was removed to a secure location, officials discovered it held nothing but “Star Wars” stuff.

The security sweep resulted in long lines at the check-in point.

Let’s just all agree that “These aren’t the toys you’re looking for” is a freebie. No credit for that one.

This Is Good

Go on, read it. It’s not good just because I agree with it, which I do. It’s not good because it’s well-written, which it is. It’s not good because it contains deep philosophical thoughts about the human condition, that are proven to be true, across the passage of vast amounts of time across several different cultures — which it does, and which is absolutely the case.

It’s all about hope. We need hope. Not false hope; verifiable hope.

It also has to do with some salient points about human nature, which don’t get as much attention as they should, especially now:

Freedom is not a luxury. It is a necessity for every living, breathing human being. However, it is impossible to be free without being an adult and this means understanding and living by those eternal rules that make it possible.

Eighty-Five Percent

Nipping At Our Heels

Continuing with the theme of providing instructions on how to behave, for any so-called “man” who is somehow inclined to pay attention to such things, all you bearers of penises and testicles are now being directed to start hugging each other.

The hug, long reserved for women, celebrating sports victories, and men from other countries, is muscling its way into everyday American Guydom.

Stoic machismo still thrives, but at its heels yaps a touchier, Dr. Phil version of virility. Boundaries are eroding. Defenses are being scaled.

Hey, this is a real event. Something revolutionary is going on here — um, actually not really. My earliest memory of the “wimpy” man coming into vogue, is a three-decades-old vision of the “Meathead” on All In The Family, a piece of pop-culture that was started around the time of Woodstock and Kent State. M*A*S*H soon followed, showcasing the wimpy hippy as he ridiculed, out-thought and out-foxed that silly, stupid military establishment that gave the producers the freedom to air the show. Then there came I’m Okay, You’re Okay. Throughout the seventies, it’s fair to say that if you were a character on the big screen or the little screen, and you were a macho male, you were being a big clueless dolt who was about to be shown-up, humiliated, educated, or eliminated by a wiser, wimpier, wuss-bag alto-pitch man-hugging she-male. This is the decade that killed John Wayne.

So this is nothing new. It turns out the “nipping at heels” metaphor has more truth to it than the author intended, I think. Boy that little yip-dog must be getting tired.

The sad truth of it is, though, we live in reality. Over here in reality, now that we’ve had 35 years to contrast macho-man against wimpy-guy, let’s see what history says, shall we.

• A wimpy-guy gave us the energy crisis. A macho man ended it. (Interestingly, this is subject to dispute. That there were gas lines, rationing and price hikes during Carter’s administration, and not during Reagan’s, is beyond dispute. But the logical conclusion is not. Nobody’s been able to explain to me why that is.)
• Hostages were taken during the wimpy-guy’s administration, and the wimpy-guy failed several times to get them back. The macho man got them back.
• That same wimpy-guy got us fleeced, making a disarmament pact with North Korea which they appear to have violated before the wimpy-guy’s plane even left the airfield.
• The macho man doubled tax revenues, simply by allowing other macho-men to keep more of what they earned, instead of demanding that they apologize for their machismo in the form of higher taxes.
• Over here in California, a wimpy-man gave us another energy crisis. He claimed to have gotten really tough with Enron, but was never able to supply an iron-clad arguments showing this, nor to get any results from it.
• That wimpy-man got California into a fiscal mess, which was fixed by a macho-man pulled straight out of the movies.
• In the nineties, someone thought it would be a great idea to practice wimpy-man foreign policy. This gave us a lot of problems. Macho-men are just starting to solve the problems, while the wimpy-men…yup, the wimpy-men are nipping at heels again.
• Macho-men protect our sons and daughters by enlisting and fighting. Macho-men police their own. Where macho-men create problems, they get taken down by other macho-men. Thus, Saddam Hussein is no more.
• Wimpy-men like to keep an “open mind” about whether the macho-man should have been taken down, which is actually an illusion because wimpy-men who “wonder” about this invariably have their wimpy minds made up that it was a mistake, and anyone who disagrees with them about it is “stupid.”
• Where wimpy-men pose a danger to us, other wimpy-men do not police their own. When one wimpy-man demands an end to capital punishment, they all must. When a wimpy-man says our troops are wasting their time and their lives over in Iraq, and you note how hurtful those words are for those troops deployed, and how ironic it is that he has the freedom to say it because of their service, he whines that you’re “questioning my patriotism” and all the other wimpy men join a wimpy chorus demanding that you stop it.
• If a macho man eats meat and you want to be a vegan, the worst that the macho man does is snicker at you & roll his eyes. If a wimpy man wants to be a vegan and you want to eat meat, you get a lecture about how you’re destroying the earth, killing yourself, condemning yourself to missing your child’s graduation, inflicting cruelty on animals, and if you cook with charcoal, you’re releasing carcinogens into the atmosphere.
• Macho-men invented the fire that wimpy-men use to light their candles at midnight vigils to protest the execution of a murderer, who was taken off the streets by a macho-man.
• Macho-men invented the wheel that wimpy-men use to get their hybrid cars moving.
• Macho-men invented the solar panel that the wimpy-man says we’re all supposed to be using instead of driling for more oil.
• Macho-men developed all of the software and communications protocols used by wimpy-men to e-mail other wimpy-men to remind them that “Bush LIED!!!! about WMD!!!!”
• Macho-men went into Iraq and dug MiG fighters out of the sand, in that sand-covered country the size of California, that wimpy-men tell us is absolutely pristine and has no weapons of mass destruction.
• Macho-men run the printing presses that print books the wimpy-men write, like “My Life by Bill Clinton”.
• Macho-men build the sets of the shows wimpy-men produce, and watch, like “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “24”.
• Macho-men drive the trucks that transport the goods demanded by wimpy-men, like…well, just name it. A wimpy-man did NOT drive that truck.

This is a real hard pattern to disrupt, in this enclave we call real life. I don’t mean to say that wimpy-men never do anything productive. “Never” is a strong word, one that seldom applies across any significant passage of time. It’s just that…when a wimpy-man does something useful, something that other people can use for practical things, and it’s a success, the wimpy-man gets there by…thinking like a macho-man. The board is cut right, or it’s not. The nail is straight, or it isn’t. Some things are absolute. Sometimes, the time for endless debate has passed.

So guys who like being wimpy-men may occasionally do something useful…it’s hard to think of any examples where anybody does something useful by thinking like a wimpy-man. And logically, it’s hard to conceive of any progression of events where they could. Wimpy thinking is the antithesis of doing useful things. So what’s with this push to get guys to hug other guys?

If one guy goes for the hug, but the other decides upon a handshake, they might collide. An excruciating dance will follow, as the poor lads work feverishly to determine what to do with their hands, their arms, their bodies. Memories of the previous disaster will haunt all following encounters. It’s possible the fellows will even dread socializing, for fear of the paralyzing hug decision.

Good! Then maybe someday soon, the wimpy-men will stop hugging us. The article says they are “nipping at our heels” or something. Like an annoying little dog. What do you do with a little dog who is nipping at your heels and then starts hugging your leg? You kick it away.

Two weeks ago, I made the point that inspecting your feelings endlessly, going to therapy over dubious personal issues, marital & otherwise, had a dismal track record of success. I don’t think that’s a commentary on the specific area of marriage counseling, as much as a point about everyday life. You just don’t get very far in life contemplating your navel.

The hug is a gift from God. It was given to us so that normal, red-blooded, macho guys like me, had an excuse to mash their chests into the tits of good-lookin’ women. Guys hugging guys, that’s wasting a creation of God.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park for Shit IV

Parking lot in the Folsom/Rancho Cordova area. He pulled up right as I was having sandwiches for lunch with the guys from work, and I commented that gee, I get to add to my collection without even having to get up.

There was a motorcycle cop parked right across from this guy. One of the guys from work said he’d pay me a dollar if I asked the cop if it was legal to park that way. I asked. The dollar was not forthcoming. Some lame excuse about “I don’t have it on me”. The cop was on his way to answering a call, so fortunately I was NOT tossed in jail for being a smart-ass.

The dollar was eventually remitted. Mister Can’t-Park-For-Shit is probably out there somewhere, still parking like a moron.

What in the hell is the matter with people?

But Is He In The Registry?

About two weeks ago I made mention of a registry of marriage counselors, which deliberately divided the marriage-fixing profession as far as who was out to fix marriages, versus, who was “neutral” or, to put it more simply, who was out to sabotage marriages.

Well I’m not sure where, as a marriage counselor, your name is going to be listed if you’re telling your patients to strip buck-naked and yell at trees. That’s what the patient said when the cops busted him, anyway. To those who have never been married before, I’m sure it’s a no-brainer that having your husband hauled off to the pokey for indecent exposure, disturbing the peace, and whatever other offenses they have in Germany, would be deleterious to the marriage. Never-before-married people do seem to be experts on being married, I’ve noticed. But as a guy who’s been married before, I’m having second thoughts. If your woman is making you want to do some yelling, taking it out on the trees might have a pressure-releasing effect and it might prolong the marriage. Of course as a guy, I’m thinking if your wife makes you want to yell, prolonging the marriage is not necessarily a good thing. Unless the yelling is…well, I digress.

I wonder what the ladies would say. Single, and married. It would be interesting to find out.

A German man has been arrested after a marriage guidance counsellor advised him to run around naked shouting at trees.

Dieter Braun, 43, from Recklinghausen said the stress release technique had worked perfectly until he was arrested.

He told police that venting his anger on the trees had stopped him shouting at his wife.

“If I didn’t go to the woods and scream at the trees then my marriage would probably be over,” he said.

He added taking his clothes off at the same time made him feel more relaxed.

“For me it’s a type of relaxation therapy. Feeling the breeze on my naked skin really calms me down.”

But local police said other visitors to the forest did not find his behaviour relaxing and have now charged him with causing a public nuisance.

I hope they go light on his sentencing. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but I’ve had a few marriages where that guy could have been me.

Women. Can’t live with’em, can’t live without’em, can’t cut’em down, split them up into logs, and burn them in the winter.

Oh, Then We’d Better Treat It As A Real Problem

Three black lesbians work for you. One of them quits, and you hire a straight white guy to take her place. Did you increase the “diversity” of your work force?

We can all probably agree that the mathematician will always say yes, and that the politician will always say no. But in our society, mathematicians don’t talk too much about the D-Word. When we hear about it, we hear about it from politicians and advocacy groups — always as a good thing, but always as something toward which straight white guys can’t contribute. Seldom, if ever, does a situation arise where the politicans are forced to admit this. But it’s true. Diversity is good, white guys aren’t part of it. So the word “Diversity,” when you look objectively at how it is used today, and take all factors into account, is used to legitimize discrimination. For those of you who believe having exclusionary thoughts toward a particular race might constitute a hate crime, the D-word is also used to legitimize hate crimes.

But our prevailing sensibilities, especially way up in the ivory towers, compel us to look upon diversity — political diversity, not the hard mathematical concept which would claim straight white guys as legitimate members — as a wonderful thing. It is so good, that if you happen to hold a position of any authority, and you are caught failing to unreservedly embrace it, you should be driven from your post. The Supreme Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision, as well as others, define “diversity” as a “compelling state interest” capable of making constitutional, things that otherwise would not be. You can read that opinion here. But keep in mind: The mathematician says straight six-foot-tall white guys can contribute to this objective, the politician says they can’t. The politician makes the rules.

What’s fascinated me about this ever since I can remember, is that people down in the trenches who do the actual work, side unfailingly with the mathematician. And they also agree on something else: Diversity, as a goal for hiring and other similar things, doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with outcome; it has much more to do with freedom, and fidelity to hiring the best people possible regardless of racial background. You hire ten white guys, or ten hispanic amputee homosexual this-or-that — it doesn’t matter, as long as while you were hiring them, you were unwaveringly faithful to the objective of hiring the best people you could. Reasonable people of both left-wing and right-wing persuasions agree that this is what we really want when we use the D-word, so long as those people are low enough in our society that they have to do some real work. It seems once you’re high enough to actually decide things, you often avoid the consequences of those things being decided haphazardly, and start to lose sight of what’s “diverse” and what isn’t.

Sometimes when we suffer this confusion, we aren’t talking about hiring or acceptance practices, but disasters. Frederick Studemann, or one of this editors, appears to be suffering from this misperception of what “diversity” is and what it really means. His piece in the Financial Times of London alerts us to something meaningful about the bombings in London that took place on Thursday: The victimization is diverse.

…collectively the faces staring from newspaper pages, television screens or posters stuck to the walls near blast sites reflect one of the defining characteristics of the British capital: its remarkable cultural diversity.

Mister Studemann, your article falls short of informing us whether this is something to be bemoaned, celebrated, or simply noted for future reference, but I really don’t care which it is: This is sick. I’m just racking my brain here, trying to come up with some train of thought which would conclude you’ve commented on something newsworthy here in any way. It’s not that I’m failing to come up with anything because I do have a handful of ideas. But they all make me want to barf in my mouth a little.

Perhaps the most legitimate one — and this is like being the most honorable prostitute — is the argument that, by bombing London, the terrorists were striking out at the notion that people of dissimilar backgrounds should be allowed to work together. This is an augmentation to whatever collective set of reasons we should have, for striking back at them:

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said the bombers wanted �to divide this city because of its easy-going, multi-cultural mix. The fact that people work together and live together is an affront to them�.

Let me see if I can recap. In addition to killing completely innocent civilians, who were doing nothing more provocative than simply going about their daily lives, to make a political statement, which is not terribly polite — the terrorists have commited a surplus crime against humanity through their failure to embrace diversity. Therefore, we’d should start treating this as a real problem.

I hope I missed something. Isn’t the value of a life with yellow skin, or black skin, or white skin, red skin, purple skin, all equal? Don’t we all have the same right to go about our business, reasonably free of any fear of being blown up? If that is so, then, what do we care about the diversity or lack thereof? I really would like to know.

It’s Time To Start Responsibly Writing Your Own Stuff

I was reading Boortz’s web site and I ran across two letters he had lifted from the Naples Daily News. He managed to make what could be an embarrassing link between two letters there, one from “Kevin Kittle” and one from “Cynthia Odierna,” each of whom had apparently been using the same form letter to promulgate the notion that we should get out of Iraq post haste. Both letters were printed on July 7, one right next to the other (link requires registration). The editors chose “Bring them home” as the headline for Kittle’s letter and “Bring them home II” for Odierna’s. That’s a little bit ill-advised, I think, because it strongly implies that the form-letter campaign went sliding under the radar of the Letters editor. Each letter begins exactly the same way, “It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq” — no really, EXACTLY, word for word, go ahead and look ’em up — and from that opening passage things slide further downhill.

Neal Boortz ran a copy of the Kittle letter first, then ran the Odierna letter, highlighting the sections that were verbatim copies of the Kittle letter. I’ll include just the Odierna letter, with Neal’s highlights, to show what this problem looks like. Here is your link to Neal’s posting.

Daily News:

It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq. Stop the bloodbath. Save our troops and conserve precious lives of the people defending turf, autonomy, patrimony and their oil.

Iraq’s no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse.

More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 mutilated. We don’t even bother to keep count of Iraqi casualties in a war they didn’t provoke.

The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence exacerbates the problem. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters.

We got into this war based on lies � the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way.

Bush policy is out of touch with reality.

We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq over to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq. Justifiably that angers more than just Iraqi people, sending a bad message to the rest of the world.

These colors don’t run … the world!

The Bush administration spends billions to kill children overseas, but is a cheapskate with education at home.

He asked for $80 billion to fund the war, and fancy that, $79 billion is being cut from social benefits here.

� Cynthia Odierna / Naples

This got me to thinking. There is often no anti-plagiarism policy in “letters to the editor”, or if indeed there is one, it can’t be a firing offense since authors of such letters don’t work for the paper. Our freedom of speech, unless someone wants to specifically address the issue of plagiarism, must necessarily include copying each other. There’s nothing inherently harmful in saying essentially “I agree with what that guy said, over there” as long as you really do feel that way and are okay with letting people know. The danger this practice represents, is what is between the lines. The dishonesty. The insincerity. The spirit of the Kittle/Odierna letter-cluster, is that it’s inherently obvious to anyone paying attention we should be doing what Kittle/Odierna Borg Collective is telling us to do.

And yet if it is inherently obvious, why do you have to point it out multiple times in a letter writing campaign? To those of us too stupid to catch on, one letter should educate us about our mental weaknesses; if that doesn’t do the trick, a second letter isn’t likely to penetrate our thick skulls.

Well the answer is, the entire premise is flawed. What’s supposed to be inherently obvious, is in fact, not.

So then, isn’t it problematic to hatch this letter-writing campaign that must include:

• Carol Steward, Long Lake, July 5, Aberdeen News: “It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq. We got into this war based on lies – the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The president offered nothing new in his speech. No plan. No exit strategy. Nothing. The Bush policy is out of touch with reality.”
• Robbi Kane, Novato, July 8, Marin Independent Journal: “It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded.”
• Bonnie Barron, Arcadia, June 29, Orange County Register (link requires registration): “President Bush’s address to the nation in front of a staged audience of soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., showed how out of touch he is with reality, the American people and the rest of the world. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things get worse every week. The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. We got into this war based on lies – the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders.” — Bonnie is upset that the audience was staged. That’s kind of rich.
• Kathleen View, Chemung, July 8, Star-Gazette.com: “The president offered nothing new in his speech June 28. No plan. No exit strategy. Nothing. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is exacerbating the problem. We got into this war based on lies, the wrong way. It’s time to get out, the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people.”
• Jim Gettins, Santa Cruz, June 30, Santa Cruz Sentinel: “We got into this war based on lies � the wrong way. It�s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality. I left in the middle of his speech tonight to place a “Visualize Impeachment” sticker on my bumper.”
• Margaret Haracz, Mundelein, July 6, Chicago Sun-Times: “We got into this war based on lies — the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality and we as citizens must demand accountability from the administration and ourselves.”
• Michael Nourse, Hollywood, June 30, Los Angeles Times: “We got into this war based on lies � the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality.”
• Mark Seiler and Linda Voss, Chapel Hill, July 3, Chapel Hill News: “Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is exacerbating the problem. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. We got into this war based on lies — the wrong way. It is time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people.”
• Jeff Barrett, Newport Center, July 4, Burlington Free Press: “There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. We got into this war based on lies — the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality. We were lied to, there are no weapons of mass destruction, now our finest are dying in Iraq, and we demand to know when they can come home. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community.”
• Brian Gregory, Bremerton, July 3, Kitsap Sun (link requires registration): “It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq. The president offered nothing new in his speech. No plan. No exit strategy. Nothing! Instead he kept mentioning September 11, which had nothing to do with Iraq. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency and our presence is exacerbating the problem. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. We got into this war based on lies, the wrong way, so it’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality. We need a real exit plan with a real time line providing real accountability from the president to our military leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community.”
• Hank Wallace, Gretna, July 2, Times-Picayune: “More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded, not to mention the almost 100,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, that have also been killed and maimed…The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is exacerbating the problem….Bush got us into this war based on lies — the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality…We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability from our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq over to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people. We also need to have Bush come clean with us about his lies and fixed intelligence that got us there.”
• Andrew Pearson, July 4, Bella Ciao: “Whats any different about Iraq? Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and 12,000 or more wounded. We need to honor their sacrifices by ensuring that no more die in a war that is not necessary. The rebuilding of Iraq look more like an auction of Iraq�s resources and public assets to U.S. Corporations who are their to make a quick buck. If Bush was really committed to reconstruction, he would secure the funds for the Iraqi people to decide how to do it themselves. It�s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline and real accountability. We need to turn control of training Iraqi forces and rebuilding Iraq to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq.”
• Linda Butters, Carmel, July 2, Monterey Herald: “We got into this war based on lies. Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Our presence is only exacerbating the problem. How many must die senselessly, how many must be wounded in service to their country and these unjustified war games? Bush said, ‘We are fighting against men with blind hatred — and armed with lethal weapons — who are capable of any atrocity.’ I think he is describing us! Please, can’t all this insanity stop? War is never the solution. We need a real exit plan with a real time line and accountability from our leaders. We need to stop the lies, stop the smoke and mirror stories and responsibly wage peace. Please.”
• Linda Seely, San Luis Obispo, July 1, The Tribune SanLuisObispo.com: “The truth is that Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed and uncounted numbers wounded. The U.S. occupation is fueling the insurgency rather than quelling it. We got into this war based on lies. It’s time to get out of it based on the truth of the situation. We need an exit plan with a real timeline; we need to turn the control of the training of Iraqi forces over to the Iraqis; and we need to turn the rebuilding of Iraq over to the international community. We must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq and hold to that promise.”
• Carol Inman, Seattle, June 30, Seattle P-I: “There was nothing new in the president’s speech Tuesday. No plan to exit, no strategy. Nothing. Iraq is no closer to stability now than it was one year ago. Things are getting worse each week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded. These are our brothers, sister, parents, children and friends. The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is making the problem grow. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. We got into this war based on lies. It is time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that Bush’s policy is out of touch with reality. We need a real exit plan with a real timeline with real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of the country to the international community. We must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people. Support our troops by bringing them home.”

Now, all this text links back to a posting on Hugh Hewitt’s blog on June 28, about a form letter sent out by MoveOn.Org to MoveOn supporters. The form letter included a template with the following words of introduction:

Politicians will be watching the letter-to-the-editor pages closely, and newspapers are likely to print letters on what will be the major story of the week. If we’re able to push back hard enough, we can build a drumbeat for a real exit plan.

We’ve set up an online tool that makes submitting a letter easy. Tonight, you can watch President Bush’s speech and then immediately go online and write a letter to the editor by clicking below. (We’ll update our suggestion for the best thing to write about 30 minutes after his speech ends.)

And the rest is history. You can go through the template, and you’ll find it all: Time to responsibly start getting out…started the war based on lines…1700 killed, 12,000 wounded…exit plan with real timeline, blah blah blah.

What, if anything, is the problem with this tactic? It depends on whether you like to make the really big, important decisions in life, based on how you feel, versus what you think. If feelings are important to you, then no meaningful deception has taken place here. It looks like a zillion people feel a certain way about our presence in Iraq, and when you do some digging, you’re likely to find out that zillion people really do feel that way.

But if you like to make decisions like this based on thinking, then a terrible deception has taken place. The authors of these letters are reciting certain facts, or “meta-facts”. Iraq is a mess, it’s no better than it was a year ago, this-many people have been killed, that-many people have been wounded, Bush got us into this based on lies. This bit about releasing jurisdiction to “the international community” is particularly troubling — the REAL facts, it turns out, don’t support that course of action at all. Is it really helpful to coerce our politicians to do this, with a fraudulent letter-writing campaign channeled through ordinary newspaper readers, lending their good names to the agenda of elites because they simply don’t know any better?

The rest of these “factoids” are things that can be logically proven or refuted. And some among them may very well be true…but the authors of these letters do not know! They are trying to strong-arm their audience into circumventing the necessary research, as they did, by blasting that audience in stereo.

Entirely valid approach with feelings. Not with thoughts.

Not My Kind of Marriage

What kind of woman says yes to a proposal like this? Well she’d have to be some kind of bitch to say no, so perhaps a more revealing question would be, what kind of marriage will this be?

He set himself on fire. ON FIRE. Without a suit (if I’m reading the article right), with gasoline. Set himself on fire, jumped in a pool, waded out, got on one knee and said “baby you make me hot” or some such.

This guy is a moron. Nevermind what can happen to you when you set yourself on fire, but what will this be like? “I want you to go to the gas station and get me another pack of cigarettes.” “Not right now, I’m reading Morgan Freeberg’s blog.” “What is WITH you? You used to set yourself on FIRE for me literally, now you won’t even get up from that computer to run an errand for me.”

This poor schmuck will have to jump up and say How hi? Can I come back down again now? — on every single whim, every single gimme, every single I-want, no matter how trivial it is. All he can hope to do is meet the standard. Just meet it. Forget about surpassing it. You can’t really go upward a notch or two from setting yourself on fire.

And if something is physically painful? Forget it. How do you go about complaining how tired your ass is getting at the opera house, when your lady knows that you set yourself on fire? Being on fire…ass tired. Being on fire…ass tired. It doesn’t compare. “Honey, while you’re in there can you get me a beer?” Forget it. You don’t need a beer. Even if you ARE hot and thirsty, it’s not like being on fire and I know you can handle that just fine, sweetie.

Okay we have the Runaway Bride guy…we have the guy who ran around the world while his wife rode a scooter…now we have this fellow who sets himself on fire for his fiance’s amusement. Which husband do I least want to be. Hmmm…bachelorhood for me. Damn straight.

Men, what is wrong with you? There’s this thing called “managing expectations” — women understand all about it. A cute woman learns about this before she can walk, whereas a man doesn’t figure it out until well after he’s unhooked his first bra, maybe fifteen years older. You always leave room for yourself to exceed expectations. What is so hard about this? Did you know Superman was created by a couple of young punk-kids, teenagers, and even they understood there was a reason why Clark Kent changed his clothes before he rescued Lois from falling off a skyscraper. Clark had a good thing going. Clark was smart.

If I had a wife who desperately needed a kidney, I’d give her one of mine in a great big hurry — but I’d donate it anonymously. Do it the Clark Kent way. Marriages thrive on the partners doing things for each other, that exceed expectations. They can’t survive without that happening occasionally, therefore, they crumble when that bar of expectations gets raised too high. So you keep that bar at ankle-height, nice and manageable, so the marriage stays long and happy. Especially when you aren’t even married yet!

Update: He was wearing a suit. Medical personnel were standing by. And his future wife is very pretty. She has a fantastic pair of legs. In my book…well wait, actually, none of that changes anything. He is still a dumbass.

If We Don’t Make Them Angry, They’ll Stop?

Does anyone really, seriously, believe this? Does anyone in their heart-of-hearts, bet-your-left-testicle believe this to be true?

There are going to be people jumping for joy over this. There are going to be other people who claim to know how to make this stop, and their plans will involve humanitarian relief, pulling out of Iraq, and various other things that involve letting the joy-jumpers walk around as free as you or me.

What is wrong with someone depraved enough to celebrate something like this?

And as long as those people walk around as free as you or me, how can we possibly expect things like this to stop?

President Bush, who I’m told is a moron, has made the point that terror does not cohabit very well with freedom. States that sponsor terrorism, tend to be unfree states. The moron has made me think. Sure there are exceptions to his observation, but they are few and far between. The moron’s over-simplified view of the world, appears to work. He’s pretty much convinced me.

Slugs like shade. Rattlesnakes like water. Black Widows like rotten wood. Terrorists, it would appear, do indeed thrive in backwards little worlds that oppress people. Terrorism is oppression, when you think about it. Back to Plan A. Let these backwards little countries live however they want, until it involves innocent people being blown to kingdom come, then spread freedom and democracy without any apology. And if the terrorists only understand the language of force, speak to them in their language.

Is there a liberal somewhere who would like to offer another plan? Let us all challenge those liberals to come up with plans. Calling me a “chickenhawk” is not a plan. Quoting lines from a Star Wars movie about Sith Lords dealing with absolutes is not a plan. Griping about not enough ricin being found in Iraq, or the sarin being really old, where are the WMD’s, etc. etc. is not a plan. Complaining about Halliburton, Tom DeLay, fake Thanksgiving turkeys, Segways, mis-pronouncing “nuclear”, is not a plan. President Bush has a plan, you people don’t.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form

I’m a big fan of sarcasm under the right circumstances. There aren’t too many ways you can go wrong with it, although it should be noted that there are some. Sarcasm, to me, is a tool that is used to call attention to the idea that some prevailing wisdom, or some wisdom that is expanding in coverage & well on its way to achieving “prevailing” status, doesn’t make quite as much sense as it should. In our time, this is a big problem. I’m a firm believer that we can survive if we solve this problem, and we can’t if we don’t. So to me, if sarcasm is used properly, it is an indispensible tool.

There have to be rules. Sarcasm is like a spice: Too much of it becomes tiresome, which irritates the reader. Also, it is impossible for an idea to be tiresome and possess shock value at the same time, and if a point is going to be made through sarcasm, it is going to be made through the shock value. So I try to adhere to the following:

1. Sarcasm should be funny enough to inspire a giggle from those who can already see the idea is silly.
2. Sarcasm should be poignant enough that those who cannot already see the idea is silly, should realize they have explaining to do if they want to defend the idea.
3. Sarcasm should not set the mood. Sarcasm should never be used twice in the same body of work, unless that body of work is at least five thousand words. Under no circumstance should it ever be used three times or more.
4. Sarcasm should not be delivered in a “straw man” argument. What is being offered by the other side or as prevailing wisdom, should bear a solid, logical connection to what is being ridiculed.

I believe I complied with all four of my own rules when I wrote the following about our constitutionally protected right (proposed 1866, ratified 1868, discovered 2003) to commit sodomy.

The Lawrence decision protects our sacred Constitutional right to exercise that freedom that is most important to our dignified existence as free and sentient beings, the right to insert our penises into the anuses of other men! What could be more of a linchpin of freedom, more of a keystone to the Spirit of 1776, than that. And the three old gray dolts who most closely resemble a future Bush nominee, dissented from the decision, which proves they must be out to regulate how us common people fornicate. Oh, this is rich, I just knew Scalia looked right for that Puritan outfit, complete with the tall black hat, the blunderbuss and the shoe buckles. What an overzealous regulator he is, daring to dissent from this opinion. What a tight-ass cracker. What a Quaker. Let’s take a look at the dissent he wrote, which was joined by Rehnquist and Thomas.

I don’t know if Ann Coulter reads my blog. I would expect hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in her column yesterday.

At least she [Justice Sandra O’Connor] would not overrule a precedent for something as trivial as a human life. Overruling a precedent would require a really, really compelling value like our right to sodomize one another. [emphasis mine]

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

Meanwhile, now that those of us who can see the idiocy of this prevailing wisdom have had our giggle, can some among those who cannot, kindly explain? We do not have an absolute right to life unless our minds are healthier than Terri Schiavo’s, and the doctor has already cut our umbilical cords, and we have been convicted of something, or it’s someone besides a misunderstood criminal with a sad childhood story who wants to kill us. Our right to property is limited only to the size of the check the city hall feels like cutting to us, when it decides to take our houses away. Those rights are not sacred. Butt-fucking, on the other hand, is absolutely sacrosanct. Don’t mess with that. Abortions and butt-fucking.

Is this self-explanatory? Because if it is, I must be a big dolt. There’s something I’m not seeing. Uh oh, maybe that makes my brain teeny-tiny, I’d better quiet down before someone comes to get me.

Why Liberal

I haven’t sympathized with the “liberal” viewpoint very often, but once in a great while it does happen. I don’t believe in “starving the beast,” depriving the Government of tax receipts until the day comes that it stops spending money. It’s irresponsible, and I’ve come up a little starved myself in terms of reasons for believing this would ever happen. And it’s always been my opinion that if science can somehow prove that “life” has not yet begun, and a woman doesn’t know how she can support a child and has no plans to provide for a child’s welfare, abortion should be an option. If we can prove life has not begun. As in, prove it. I understand the conservative position is that life begins at conception, so I think my position is liberal.

We shouldn’t even be considering an anti-flag-burning amendment. The federal government has no jurisdiction for legislating against controlled substances, or for enforcing those laws; such an issue is purely a state matter. Ditto for the Defense Of Marriage Amendment (DOMA). I agree with Thomas Jefferson’s revulsion toward primogenture, although I stop short of recognizing the “death tax” as a valid remedy for aristocracy. And a good metric for determining the overal moral and ethical health of our society, is the ability of children to aspire to & achieve greatness, although they come from humble beginnings. If this becomes rare or excessively difficult, we should take that as a sign that something is busted and needs fixing.

Because I do come down on “both sides” at one time or another, like most people I have the opportunity to entertain “Amen, brother” arguments from both conservatives and liberals — arguments designed to encourage me, and keep me on whatever side of an argument I happen to be on.

The few times I get to hear an “Amen, brother” argument from the liberals, I’m almost always horrified, and left uncomfortable with the position I had that attracted this sense of fraternity. Invariably they seek to reassure me that things are the way I think they are — although their vision of things the way they are, has nearly nothing to do with my reason for arriving at a similar opinion. On abortion and parental-notification, they would like to make sure I remember the girls who can’t tell their fathers they are pregnant, because their father is the father. Silly conservatives with their notification laws, they don’t even understand that this is happening, every day.

Sometimes I’m in a forum where I’m allowed to interact, in which case I make the point that perhaps the conservatives are distracted by the situation with irresponable girls using abortion as a contraceptive device. How often does this happen, I’d like to know, versus how often men impregnate their own daughters? The response to this is often angry, and always revealing. Some say even if the abortion-as-contraceptive situation outnumbers the incest situation a thousand-to-one, it doesn’t matter because this is about principle. I suppose I could understand that argument, but it seems hypocritical to advance from that position, to rejecting any presence of principle on the part of conservatives. Some liberals insist that it never happens, that all abortion procedures are emergency by their very nature. Others insist that I have no right to have an opinion at all, being a man — weren’t they congratulating me only moments before, for being a man having the right opinion?

But let’s get back to the subject at hand, because I am a man, and somewhat removed in the practical world from the emotional topic of abortion.

There is perhaps no other place where my occasional agreement with liberals invites more rancor and dissention than the issue of “economic justice”. I have no sympathy at all with affirmative action, in fact, what our society has evolved to envision as the “moderate” set of resolutions on this, nauseates me. I am far to the right of just about any position I have ever seen advanced on this issue, ever, even though my own position comes from just reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause and taking it seriously. I have had this position ever since I got hauled to the principle’s office for beating up a bully, and given a stern lecture for doing to the bully exactly what the bully had been making a habit out of doing to me. The school authorities, I asserted in not-quite-articulate sixth-grade language, ought to be concerned with what is being done, not with who is doing it. How wrong is it to beat someone up? Why is it routine when Big Bad Bill does it to nerdy little Morgan, but such an outrageous demand for something to be done when nerdy little Morgan dishes out the same treatment?

Circumstances demanded that I start pondering this question at age ten or twelve. By age twenty-five, I still didn’t give a rip about “conservatives” or “liberals”. At nearly thirty-nine, I’m still a little uncertain as to which side is doing a better job embracing this common-sense principle. Once again, when liberals send an “Atta Boy” my way, they show they can’t quite get the job done without trying to exert some control over the way I see the world. One would think it’s a simple job to say “good for you, for insisting that poor people are punished no more harshly than rich people for committing the same crime” and go on your way. But no, more often than not, they must continue, congratulating me for seeing the light about how little work our rich people do and how much money they steal from poor people.

Excuse me?

I had worked in close proximity with more independently-wealthy people, by the time I was thirty, than most people with my economic background do their entire lives. How many rich people have treated me unfairly? Rich people have taken the initiative to make sure I was treated well. Don’t ask me to come up with an exception to it, because I can’t think of one.

Poor people, on the other hand, have been absolutely devastating. There is something about being poor. People often start to believe in a discrepancy between how much money people have versus how much money they should have. I suppose this is something that is easy to do. And once you do that, of course, since that word “should” is in there you’ve got to do something about it. It’s a funny thing about theft; so many people who engage in it, in their heart of hearts, they don’t think they’re guilty.

And yet the rich people are different. There is always somebody who is richer, and in the world of the rich, when somebody is richer it is by an overwhelming factor. For example, the rich people I knew possessed maybe one ten-thousandth of the net worth of Bill Gates. Were they jealous of Bill Gates? Were they enthusiastic about some scheme to get money away from Bill Gates, into their own purses? Again, I worked closely with these people; if they harbored such passions, you’ll have to take my word for it that I would have known.

How many people did I meet who made something around minimum wage, who wanted to take tax money away from families that made $40,000 or $50,000? They were everywhere. Now that I’m too cynical to socialize with people like that, I still have to contend with them because they vote. They drive most of our political climate. They’re out there.

This all gets in the way when a liberal congratulates me for “seeing” that rich people steal and poor people don’t. I don’t see any such thing. What I see, when I insist that justice should be blind to economic condition, is the American dream. I read what the Founding Fathers wrote, when they were united and also when they argued among themselves. When they squabbled, they accused each other of going BACK to England. What was so bad about England?

It wasn’t the dental care or the sandwiches, nor were they upset about the execution of William Wallace. England, to them, was a place where dynastic heritage determined far too much in life. If the son of a Duke spit on the sidewalk, he was fined six pence, and if the son of an Earl did the same thing he would pay a shilling. And if the son of a pauper did it, he’d go to jail. That is what they wanted to fix. That is the real American Dream.

And now we have these people called “liberals” who want to change this dream, to go back to the days when where you were born, who you were born to, what color your skin is, chooses certain things in your life. What motivates them? Commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter seem to want to sidestep the question, concentrating mostly on how the liberals behave once they have decided to be liberal. But what makes a liberal liberal?

To try to legalize abortion unreservedly, declaring the whole issue moot as to when life begins, doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with trying to ban capital punishment. One position respects life when life is guilty, the other regards life as disposable when it is at its most innocent. Forcing union “workers” to entrust the dubious judgment of union leadership with a portion of their hard-earned paychecks, doesn’t seem philosophically parallel with challenging every little thing President Bush says about Iraq, especially when some of the things the President tells us are already proven beyond doubt. One of those positions places unlimited trust in authority, to a fault, the other position disrespects authority when there is little cause to do so. So in terms of values, what unites these people?

Bernard Goldberg, in Bias, ISBN 0-89526-190-1 has a few interesting theories. He says, essentially, the media ends up being liberal in an effort to be invited to more cocktail parties by other people in the media. Central to his thesis is the problem that even very influential people in the media, do not get out very much. They don’t personally know too many different types or classes of people. They pretty much live, work, eat, sleep and play in Manhattan.

I can buy this, but it doesn’t answer the question of what makes them liberal? If they exist in some closed ecosystem, why don’t they get stagnated into an ideological model of, let’s say, conservatism, or Naziism, or nihilism or objectivism? Why liberal? Goldberg’s book, to the frustration of myself and several others, is silent on this point.

I’m probably far enough into Tom Fenton’s Bad News, ISBN 0-06-079746-0 to comment on how this book answers the question. Fenton, it turns out, is part of the problem and he doesn’t appear to be conscious of it. He is what Goldberg is writing about. He sees the press in America as failing in its vital mission, and on that point I’m going to have to agree. Things get complicated in a hurry, though. The mission of the press, in Fenton’s eyes, bless his soul, is to let us know about what is going on in the nation & the world, especially with regard to subjects that may impact our lives later. According to that, then, the press let us down when the September 11 attacks happened. Bad News is peppered with examples of how our media might have warned us about what was going to happen, and passed up the opportunity.

Here is the problem, then. If it is the media’s job to make sure we know things, and you work in the media, you have only two options: Accept the mandate or reject it. If you accept it, you must meet it, and if you think you are meeting it you have to make sure. This is unavoidable, for it is simply the way the human mind works. For example, teachers are charged with making sure students know things, and instead of simply telling the students things & letting them go home, they administer tests.

So if you accept a mission you have to show diligence in meeting it. You cannot show diligence in meeting it, unless you devise some kind of criteria by which you can determine the goal has been met. Fenton, then, speaks for all flawed journalists on page 85, when he says…

…many thinking Americans don’t understand why we’re not being asked to endure any sacrifices at home, with the economy awash in debt. Regardless of what it thought of John Kerry, though, as of this writing the public still finds President Bush credible as a war leader in the polls. Between September and mid-October 2004, a Rasmussen Report poll found that between 42 and 44 percent of people continued to support his leadership in Iraq. This, in the face of continuous bad news from Iraq and criticism in the press. How is that possible? [emphasis mine]

This is the problem. If it’s your job to inform someone and you take this job seriously, you have to see if they have learned what you have told them. Science defines learning as “a non-instinctive behavioral change.” We support our President’s leadership in Iraq, this shows we haven’t learned something, therefore, our media has failed and it must try harder. The notion that we have absorbed the information given to us, and simply found something else we think weighs more in the decision we have to make, is something that can’t be considered.

So our media is liberal because it doesn’t trust us to make the decisions that belong to us.

Why is the Supreme Court liberal? I’ll get to that another time, this has gotten plenty long enough.

Tweak a Geek II

My son and I are waiting for it to get dark so we can set off fireworks. After a full day of playing with bumper-boats and racing go-carts out in the hot California sun, we’ve moved our sunburned carcasses into the air-conditioned coccoon to watch “Attack of the Clones” yet again.

A thought has occurred to me.

Challenge a geek you know, to knock back a shot of Cuervo with you any time the Jedi do something stupid.

Episode I or III will give you a terrible headache the next morning, and make the room spin ’round and ’round by the time the closing credits roll. At the end of Episode II, Attack of the Clones, meditate before the Porcelain Side of the Force, you will, hmmm?

I’m serious, in this middle episode they don’t do anything right. Go on, grab a copy of the script and count the mistakes. How did these guys get the job they’ve got, anyway?

Power Bench

I can see I’ll be writing a lot about the Supreme Court in the months ahead.

There seems to be a myth going around that declaring things unconstitutional is one of the Supreme Court’s primary functions. It’s a little known fact that we had a Supreme Court for the first fourteen years of this union before it did such a thing. A further 130+ something years slipped by before this was done with any frequency, and thus became the contentious issue we know it to be today.

Now sometime since 1937, it’s gotten a whole lot worse.

What we have today is something we should never dream of taking with us in a backward trip in a time machine, lest we desire to see the resulting horrified faces. Senators grill nominees to the Supreme Court about *which* thing they plan to declare unconstitutional and which things they plan not to. A certain thing is suggested to be unconstitutional, one of our political parties beams and the other one pouts. Reverse the equation, and reverse the results.

This is absurd.

That we live in a nation “of laws, not of men,” was intended to mean — and should mean — that when enforcement of one law violates a higher law, it doesn’t matter if certain people like the inferior law. It doesn’t matter if you’d piss rusty pennies to make it stick. The law must be upheld, and if it can be proven that two laws contradict, it is in everybody’s best interest that the superior law prevail.

The first time an Act of Congress was declared unconstitutional, that Act had been declared, just a few paragraphs prior, to be not only just but morally proper as well. Flouting that law, was a privileged bestowed by the Supreme Court onto itself, and in recognizing the authority to disregard the statute, Chief Justice John Marshall had to prove beyond any compelling or reasonable doubt that the Judicial Act of 1789 was irreconcilable with Article III of the Constitution. That the Federalists liked what he did, and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans did not, has to be considered as the very weakest of justifications for Marshall’s ruling. In 1803, the Republicans were far more popular than the Federalists. Marshall did something back then isn’t done much today: He used logic, not just rhetoric, to support his opinion.

If you read Marshall’s decision, you see he obsesses not with his own mindset, but with that of his opposition. The notion that the Act is unconstitutional, is treated as a conclusion of “last resort” so to speak. Marshall takes the notion that the Act should be binding and enforceable, and dismantles it column by column, brick by brick. Then, much like Yoda in a Star Wars movie, he pays some serious attention to where this kind of thinking must lead. At the end of this exercise — having granted his opposition the benefit of every doubt, every step along the way — he declares the entire supposition “too extravagant to be maintained”.

Now that such rulings are routine, this isn’t done anymore. It is far more common for such opinions to take the “Hooray For Our Side” approach, citing some “prevailing national consensus” of some, let’s say, twenty state legislatures that do it our way, and ten or less that do not.

I continue to be puzzled that anybody could think this is a good thing. I’m having a lot of trouble even grasping how anyone could pay attention to basic U.S. Civics 101, and think this role for our judiciary is proper. Like Yoda, I am worried. To a dark place, this kind of thinking will take us.

Our highest court keeps tallies of which state legislatures allow a certain thing, and which legislatures do not?

From where does the authority flow, for the Court to decide when to tally these numbers up, and when to ignore them? Such an exercise must be purely subjective by its very nature.

Since laws become unenforceable in all states when the Supreme Court declares them unconstitutional, this practice is an assault on our right to exist as individuals. Texas, for example, allows executions to proceed with only minimal authority conferred on the Governor to grant clemency. (The Texas Governor, contrary to popular belief, cannot unilaterally commute a death sentence.) Texas is unique among the other states in the way this works. The Supreme Court has been particularly abusive to the Eighth Amendment over the years, using its “cruel and unusual” clause as a blank check by which it feels authorized to divine this natonal consensus, virtually without limitation on any issue dealing with incarceration or execution, ad nauseum. Is it not just a matter of time before it detects a prevailing interstate consensus, that executions without a more standard petition process for clemency, run afoul of the fifth, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendments?

The Constitution guarantees Texas has unlimited authority to decide such matters within its borders. But when the Supreme Court rules this way — as it often has — such a decision is binding, asserting a coercive force upon Texas affairs.

If and when that happens, from where would this authority come to force Texas to do something it doesn’t want to do? Well, that would be from the people who elected the legislature of Maryland. And the people who elected the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia. And Maine, and New Jersey, and Minnesota…places that are not Texas.

Such a practice is an assault upon the individual. A Supreme Court decision that says “most states disagree with Texas” and consequently prohibits Texas from doing something, is as hostile to the spirit of the individual, as a Homeowner’s Association telling a new arrival “all the families who live here go to the corner church — so shall we expect you at the eight o’clock services, or at 9:30?”

What might be right for most, may not be right for some. The America that I celebrate on July 4th, is a place where people remember that. Europe says to America “your opinion is mighty unpopular” and in response, real Americans simply smile and shrug — knowing that this is the only response that shows proper respect to the individual and the Spirit of 1776. I hope that as the Supreme Court evolves from the point where it is now, it becomes a respected institution that is more at home in this kind of republic, than it has been over the last fifty years.

Imagine…

President Bush took to the podium last week and explained what we are doing in Iraq, why we’re not leaving, and why it’s a good thing we’re there. The people who don’t like President Bush, and/or don’t like the fact that we’re there, responded to this by…well, we can all probably agree they responded by repeating things they already pointed out. And many among them would offer the opinion that President Bush’s address, itself, was essentially a rehash of things said before.

That would be an entirely legitimate opinion, although I would hope they would concede most people have been exposed more diligently to anti-war talking points than pro-war talking points.

But by taking the time to give the speech, President Bush somewhat addressed that. What has not been addressed, in my opinion, is the meaning or the lack thereof in the reasons we are given for leaving Iraq — and, as an ideal in the minds of some, going back in time and not going in in the first place. A lot of these arguments sound meritorious, but when they receive more critical analysis than they are apt to in our everyday discourse, they are anything but meritorious. That’s just an opinion.

To bolster my opinion, let us take a hypothetical. A Democratic president has ended poverty, with the same swift stroke that President Bush has brought down Saddam Hussein. Republicans in Congress resolve to respond to this in exactly the same way Democrats have responded to the liberation of Iraq. Assuming you think those Democrats are being reasonable, would those Republicans be reasonable by using those same arguments in my hypothetical?

Let us ponder a sampling of what they would present to us. Remember: Hunger is a thing of the past.

I think you see where I’m going with this. The arguments we have heard for why we should not have brought down Saddam Hussein — they sound reasonable in certain settings, but that is only because they have been made to appear that way by repeated exposure. I take away that benefit of repeated exposure by changing the argument to a different topic — I use exactly the same logic, and the lunacy of that logic is revealed.

Some liberals would call this a straw-man fallacy. This fails the test of straw-man, because the logic being applied is exactly the same as what we’ve been presented with for two years now. I’ve applied exactly the same logic to a different, albeit imaginary, scenario. The imaginary scenario does not introduce any factors that would make the logic any less suitable than the venue in which we are being asked to accept it uncritically.

With this transformation, the logic abruptly ceases to make any sense. Yet it is the same logic so it cannot have “ceased” to do much of anything. The question that remains to be asked is, before the logic is changed to a different argument — while it is still being applied to the Iraq question — how much sense can it possibly make to begin with?

Saddam was a problem. This is beyond dispute. He is gone, this is also beyond dispute. A problem has been solved.

If any anti-war pundit or activist or protester will not acknowledge that truism, then anything he says after the refusal to acknowlege it, doesn’t very much matter.

Remember This

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to be appointed by the Supreme Court — by that male chauvinist pig conservative Reagan, the ol’ dolt — is expected to resign before the beginning of the next October term.

In other words, after years of crescendoing rhetoric about the process of appointing judicial officers, we’re in for the Mother of All Battles as President Bush makes a nomination that really and truly matters. If any poll is ever done by any news organization besides Fox, on the popularity of the filibuster that actually mentions the word “filibuster” I will be amazed.

In the ensuing din, remember this. What follows below is the high-level breakdown that a lot of people want to know anyway. I’ll make it real easy.

We have three conservative justices on the Supreme Court. These are the guys who get distracted from reading the Constitution and other laws they are supposed to interpret, just some of the time. This is Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

We have four liberal justices on the Supreme Court. These are the ones who get distracted from reading the Constitution and other laws they are supposed to interpret, nearly all of the time. John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Hackett Souter, that last one being the guy whose house is being subject to the eminent domain process he thought was so great in Kelo v. New London. (Morgan pauses to giggle like Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltraine.)

O’Connor, together with Anthony Kennedy, represents the swing faction on the Supreme Court. These are the Justices who screw up on interpreting the Constitution about half of the time.

So there’s your handy breakdown. Conservative, swing, liberal. They use the Constitution as toilet paper some of the time, half of the time, nearly all of the time, respectively. There ya go. A little bit conservatively biased, would you say?

Well surprise surprise, guess what. You are going to have a heck of a time finding a reasonable, intellectually well-thought-out disagreement to the way I’ve broken that down. Oh sure a lot of people would get huffy and do some yelling. But it’s a matter solid logic, that due to the different work that is involved in judicial duty, the word “conservative” means something different in the court system than it does in Congress. It means to follow the instructions — something all of the Justices swear to do when they assume the robe.

I’m not kidding. There is a bitter ideological squabble over whether Justices should do what they said they would do when they got sworn in. If they do it, they’re “conservative” and if they don’t do it, they’re “liberal” or “moderate” or “progressive” — not what you would expect them to be called, which is “impeachable”.

This isn’t really up for debate. Not by-and-large, anyway. Sure, some liberals can go cherry-picking and find some decisions here & there and say “look what Scalia did a few years ago, over here.” Just remember this. By and large, the Justices we call “conservative” are the ones that do what they are supposed to be doing — and more often than not, they are protecting our individual liberties, while the “progressive” justices are the ones placing those liberties under assault.

Do not believe me. Read the decisions yourself. This is the season for reading — you’re reading now, aren’t you? Make a habit, in the months ahead when we’re all going to be arguing about this, to download the decisions about which you have some questions. Findlaw is an excellent resource. And if you want some direction, you could start with the decisions I was complaining about last week, followed by some of the ones you’ve been hearing the most about here & there over several decades. Roe v. Wade would be a good one. I would also recommend a long trip back in time to the Marbury v. Madison decision which made the Supreme Court the final arbiter of the Constitution to begin with. You should also crack open the most pivotal decisions, Brown v. Board of Education, Lawrence v. Texas and Atkins v. Virginia.

Make a habit out of it. And by all means if some liberal guy says “That Morgan Freeberg is all wet, here why don’t you read this one too” then by all means do so. And of course e-mail me with your thoughts after you have done it.

But remember ONE thing. That being “liberal” on the Supreme Court means essentially pulling brand-new rights for people out of your ass, is beyond dispute. Liberals call this being progressive, or revolutionary, or something. Al Gore called it seeing the Constitution as a “living, breathing document.” Remember this one thing…logically, if I can dream up some brand-new rights for you because I got a case I’m adjudicating and I’m wearing a robe — why then, it’s a matter of simple logic that I can take your rights away just as easily, right?

Without an election taking place to validate the change in rules.

How often should our new Justice screw up on interpreting the Constitution? Some of the time, half of the time, or all of the time? It really just comes down to that.

Souter Shrugged

I saw this news item on my cell phone that was such a delicious tidbit there was simply no way it could be true, but in the hours ahead, to my astonishment…well, it seems to be true. A developer is using the Kelo v. New London case to seize the family home of Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Logan Darrow Clements sent a letter to the town of Weare, N.H., proposing to build “The Lost Liberty Hotel” and “Just Desserts Cafe” on Souter’s property.

“The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development,” he wrote. Clements, who runs a California media company, added, “This is not a prank.

Indeed it is not, contrary to what one would presume from names like “Just Desserts Cafe”. If indeed it were a prank or an urban legend or a bluff of some kind, Clements is to be congratulated for proliferating his little joke here and here and here and here and here.

Who is Logan Darrow Clements? He is a former candidate for Governor of California, having run during the 2003 recall effort under an Objectivist platform. What is an Objectivist you might say? A half-assed explanation can be found in the last story linked, above:

Objectivism is a philosophy advocating “rational selfishness” and capitalism, founded by the late philosopher Ayn Rand. Clements confirmed that he is an Objectivist, and that Rand is an “influence” on him.

“Are you sure you’re a Republican?” asked the pleasantly surprised youth.

By way of explanation, Clements suggested that he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

I’m not entirely sure why the scare quotes are thrown around “rational selfishness”. The words could have been in a speech Ayn Rand gave, but as far as I recall that term is not used in The Fountainhead or in Atlas Shrugged. I do not take issue with the accuracy of the description, but I got a gut feel this tag was chosen because of the ugly spin it puts on the Objectivist concepts & goals. You hear the word “selfish” and you recoil reflexively.

Although what Mr. Clements is addressing, here, is the prospect if you going to a Starbuck’s or a Trader Joe’s where, a year before, your toilet and medicine cabinet used to be. I just have a tough time thinking most people would call the desire to keep your family home, “selfish”.

What really tickles me pink about this is that as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Souter’s authority over this case ended when the case was decided. According to a press release from Clements’ company, Freestar Media LLC, the developer is going to be looking for a simple majority vote on the Weare, NH city council.

“The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.”

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Caf�” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

This story gets a pencilled-in First Place Award for the annual “you could never in a bazillion years make this up” award. For the time being, until something better comes along.

Hey by the way — you do realize, don’t you, that our most liberal Supreme Court justices voted for this hideous decision, and the most conservative justices voted against it? You’re also aware that there is a historical trend of Supreme Court decisions that parallels that, aren’t you? Good, just checking.

Go Choke Your Chicken Somewhere Else

I’m trying to keep an open mind about Europe, really I am. But there’s something about this story that doesn’t quite add up. The Health Ministry of Belgium has declared that Boy Scouts can stop slaughtering chickens, thank you very much. If you go by the story, the Boy Scouts have been defending the practice as a way of teaching survival skills. The Health Ministry has decided this just doesn’t make any sense.

Why do I get the feeling that whoever it is at the Health Ministry taking “the view that the Scouts learnt nothing from using animals this way” wouldn’t know about living in the wilds if it crept up on them and bit ’em square in the ass?

Another problem — actually, no, not a problem, since I live in the United States and this just makes me happier that I do. Is it illegal to slaughter a chicken at a Boy Scout camp? C’mon, it is or it isn’t. One or t’other. Either way, there shouldn’t be a debate about this. Don’t hand me this line of crap about how some bureaucrat at the Health Ministry didn’t think it sounded good, so Nanny-State says the deal’s off. Sheesh. If that’s the way it works, you people in Belgium need to dress up like Indians and throw a few crates of tea into a harbor. Grow a pair.

The Health Ministry said in a statement issued on Monday that one Scout group had refused to stop teaching its lads how to carry out the bloody task even after complaints from parents.

Okay, I would hope this question is popping into everybody else’s head too: What in tarnation is wrong with people? A complaint from parents, oh me, oh my. We had better stop teaching this to all the lads, every single one of them. What’s this? One Scout group refuses to go along! I wonder if that one Scout group continues to teach chicken-slaughtering to the one kid whose parents complained — if they do, okay, I’ll go along with the idea that there’s a problem. But I doubt that’s the case. Hey, here’s a thought. If my kid goes to your Scout camp, and you teach the kids how to kill chickens, and some soccer-mom complains about it and you stop teaching all the kids chicken-killing to make this one yutz happy — guess what? I’m going to call in and complain. That would then be a “complaint from a parent” in the opposite direction, and you’d better treat it as such.

This has got to be said somewhere: Boy Scouts does not mix with political correctness, and anybody who tries to make it do so, is a fool. The two concepts are one hundred and eighty degrees apart. Political correctness is all about sanitizing things. Making sure human events and behaviors fit into established norms. Boy Scouts is all about surviving human events that do not fit into established norms — like getting lost in the woods. Boy Scouts teaches you to weather it out when the unexpected happens. How to not be such a freakin’ pussy.

You know when you’re out on a weekend hike with your buddies, and one among you is constantly bellyaching about the food is bad, it’s too hot, we’re going too far, I’m thirsty, my feet hurt, can we go home now? The lard-ass that ruins all the fun. Boy Scouts teaches you how not to be that guy. That’s an important survival skill in itself, and I’ll tell you why. If I’m out there on a nice day and I want to be able to do some fun stuff, and this sissy keeps me from doing it because he wants to be like a short leash on everyone else’s neck, people like me would just love to smash his chubby little face in.

The older I get, the more impressed I am about this truism of life. Some of the most annoying people I have known, are the people who second-guess what they do, so that such actions fit some pre-conceived standard of what’s “normal” thereby, they hope, making other people happy. Some of the least annoying people, are the people who just go ahead & do (legal) things and ask questions later. To put it a much shorter way: I doubt like hell you’ll ever hear anyone say “That Joe sure is a swell guy, he never kills chickens.”

In this case, you’re better off going ahead & killing the damn chickens. Whether it is approval you seek, popularity, or just some hot food for your empty stomach when you’re lost in the woods.

Quagmire

I was trippin’ through the headlines this morning and I saw several references to this editorial in OpinionJournal:

The Iraq Panic
Zarqawi’s bombs hit their target in Washington.

The editorial starts out with two quotes, one from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts (D). My eyes glossed over the content of the quote, but then I did a double-take on the date. June 23, 2005. Last Thursday.

“And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. Our troops are dying. And there really is no end in sight.”

I continue to be amazed at why Americans don’t get blisteringly offended — forget about Democrats and Republicans for a second — when words are carefully selected for their consumption after being tested in front of focus groups.

It’s as if some of our most powerful public servants regroup with their handlers after every speech, and the handlers pound their fists on the table and say “Senator Kennedy, I demand to know why you failed to use the word ‘quagmire’ in your speech!” and the powerful senator has to say “Oh I’m so terribly sorry, I’ll try to do better next time.”

This is yet another time we should be singing hosannas and celebrating that we don’t have a Secretary of Defense Freeberg. What chaos that would be. I’m sure I’d learn immediately afterward why it would be ill-advised, but while at that table I wouldn’t be able to resist the following, and oh what fun it would be for the moment:

Senator Kennedy, my Defense Department regards you as a venerable and esteemed legislator, certainly a force to be reckoned with. We don’t want you to see Iraq as a quagmire. Tell me, please, pretty please, what situation would you like to see over there in order to lift it above any threshhold that could be described, in your mind, by such a word. Tell me please. Be specific. And you have my commitment that I will do my very best to make that happen.

I’m sure there are several reasons why Rumsfeld can’t ask that question — he’d be making commitments contrary to the President’s policy, he’d be giving Kennedy a lead-in to make a devastating speech that would be carried coast-to-coast within minutes, it would not rise to the level of decorum demanded by the occasion, “pretty please” could be seen as failing to give proper respect, etc., etc., etc. I don’t doubt any of that.

But the point is, Sen. Kennedy has no premeditated answer to that question. The good Senator is not governing, he is politicking, and everybody knows it.

Cue Sen. Kennedy’s sympathizers and fans to jump in with “Yeah, but Republicans are just as…” blah blah blah. Back to the subject at hand, folks. We are smarter than being bought off with this cheap q-word in June of 2005. We shouldn’t be putting up with this.

Men And Women Are Different

There is something in the advertising profession that is deranged and misguided, and whatever it is I hope it is staying in Cannes, France. What the advertisers would like to find out, is how you go about selling things to men. Somehow — somehow — the elites at the very tippy-top of the advertising profession, there is some short-circuit in their brains. They turn this question around to “How should we tell men how to behave?” and on this point, it would appear, reality has thoroughly confused them.

Male-targeted ads found to be in no man’s land
Fri Jun 24, 2005 12:53 PM ET

CANNES, France – The Marlboro Man is having an identity crisis.

The Leo Burnett advertising agency, which created the iconic macho cowboy, said a new study it conducted found that half the men in most parts of the world don’t know what is expected of them in society and three-quarters of them think images of men in advertising are out of touch with reality.

Most ads have lumped men into one of two groups — the soft, caring type known as “metrosexuals,” who are comfortable with facial peels and pink shirts, or the stereotypical “retrosexuals,” who remain oafishly addicted to beer and sports.

See here’s the problem I have with this. It isn’t that I’ve gleaned some logical discrepancy between “having an identity crisis” and failure to grasp what is expected of you — the two are not identical, but there is no significant discrepancy there. Trouble is, there’s little correlation between having this problem, and failing to buy stuff. if you need to know what is expected of you in order to go about your day, most of the time, you’re going to go through life being confused about what is expected of you. When an advertising executive wants to sell you something, he’s really not going to have much of a tough time doing it. You’ll be sitting there confused, trying to figure out what people want out of you, you’ll see an ad, you’ll buy the thing, and then go back to being confused — everybody’s happy.

Put another way, your confusion about external goals for your existence, does nothing to help or hinder your consumption of goods. There is no logical reason to believe in such a correlation, nor is there to my knowledge any evidence to support such a correlation.

So no, this isn’t an identity crisis with men, it’s a stereotyping crisis with advertising executives.

“As the world is drifting toward a more feminine perspective, many of the social constructs men have taken for granted are undergoing significant shifts or being outright dismantled,” said Tom Bernardin, chairman and chief executive of Leo Burnett Worldwide.

“It’s a confusing time, not just for men, but for marketers as well as they try to target and depict men meaningfully,” he said this week during a presentation in the south of France where the ad industry is gathered for its annual conference.

Wake-up call for Mr. Bernardin: You don’t need to depict me meaningfully to sell me stuff.

You know, men resemble women in one respect: If you think the subject is so freakin’ complicated that you’re destined to go to your grave, having never figured men/women out, you know what? You’re right. You’re doing it to yourself. Men and women, it turns out, are quite simple once you acknowledge & embrace the politically incorrect but provable fact that they’re different.

As far as being told what to do & think & how to just plain exist, men are simple. They are amazingly simple. You know what? I think I can summarize the lifelong career of every single man, being told what to do, right here & now.

1. Your parents tell you what to do, and you do it.
2. Your parents tell you what to do, and you don’t do it. There. That’ll show ’em.
3. Your friends tell you what to do, and you do it.
4. Girls start to look good.
5. A girl tells you what to do, and you do it.
6. “Your” girl starts locking lips with some other guy who tells her what to do.
7. A lot of years and a lot of pain pass by with this step. Your mother, your sister, your ex-girlfriends, the girl who won’t go out with you, women who don’t like your opinions, strangers, teachers, they all tell you what to do in order to get more women. You try everything. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all between what you do & what gets more girls. Except for one thing…
8. …women have an innate and insatiable desire to be courted by a confident man.
9. You learn a lesson: There is nothing worthwhile to be gained from conforming to someone else’s idea of how you should live your life.
10. This is important. Are you listening, advertising executives? There is no 10. The lesson you learned in 9, you never have to learn again, never, never, never, never, never. You learned it once, you know it, you’re not going back. Can’t put the toothpaste back in that tube.

So when advertisers advertise to men the way they advertise to women — telling them what is “in”, how they’re supposed to dress and look and talk and live their lives — they don’t know it, but they’re advertising to men who are still in that infinite loop in 7 and haven’t yet gotten to that lesson in 9. Because guys who have learned the lesson in 9, aren’t going to respond to this. And they never will respond to it again.

Now the guys who have not yet learned this lesson, there’s a lot of them, because when we’re maturing Lord knows we go through a lot of years of wasted energy. During that time, if we read in a magazine some product will get us more poontang, we’ll buy it.

But what’s happening now, is men are learning the lesson in 9 a whole lot quicker. So the advertisers are losing this demographic. Are men learning quicker because they’re smarter? No, I think what’s happening is men are learning it quicker because they encounter the problem in their daily lives a lot more often.

“You won’t get laid unless you do xxxxx” — it’s one of those last refuges of the dull-witted. Men get told this pretty often. As a man pushing forty, I’d venture to say it’s become fashionable to hand this line to a man, moreso than it used to be. I think men hear this more often, than they did, say, 20 years ago.

It’s simply gotten worn out. Men just aren’t responding to it anymore. Because what works in #8, is the only thing that works, and they know it. A man knows when you tell him this, you either haven’t learned what he’s already learned, or you’re talking down to other men who haven’t learned what he knows, so you’re not worth listening to.

Well surprise, surprise. It turns out the advertising industry is a one-trick pony. This was the only device it had for selling things to men. Threatening their customers with involuntary celibacy.

Hey advertisers. You can’t do what you do without relying on a whole bunch of tools, and software, and fossil fuels, that were invented, built, discovered, explored, and refined by men. Those men didn’t invent your cars, drill for your oil, build your printing presses, write the software that delivers your e-mail, in order to look more Marlboro or metrosexual. They did it to get something done. So why don’t you take a hint: Worry about what we think we want to get done, not what we want to look like. Save the tips & tricks about what’s “in” for when you sell the toe-rings and belly-jewels to the little girls.

I love it. The whole paradigm of what’s “new hotness” and what is “ew, SO five minutes ago” is dying. By its own hand, you might say.

Define The Goal

Now here is a step in the right direction. William Doherty, a marriage therapist with the University of Minnesota, has started a registry of marriage counselors. The idea is that if you & yours are considering marriage therapy of some kind, you get to sweep over a number of potential counselors, figuring out what each professional is all about, before settling on one. This caught my eye when I was staying in Tacoma, Wash. this week, and I’ll tell you why.

Personally, I don’t think we need to work harder at saving marriages. Marriages should be easy to get out of, harder than hell to get into in the first place, and it should take something just short of an Act of Congress to transfer property rights away from one divorcing spouse into the control of the other. Any conservatives who worry about what’s happening to the “institution of marriage” should turn their attention to the practice of using short-term marriages as a vehicle for committing fraud and theft. That’s destroying marriage quicker than anything.

But as much as I detest gold-digging marriage-minded paramours, I detest marriage counselors even more. Little known fact about me: When I was a teenager just starting to become aware of the adult world around me, I did not know anyone who wasn’t involved in marital therapy in some way. Not a single person. That’s sick, isn’t it? Everyone I knew…every single adult…was going to therapy to save a marriage. Or going to therapy to “strengthen” a marriage. Or going to therapy to give a “good start” to a marriage. Or sending someone to therapy by cheating on them. Or going to therapy to remember events of sexual abuse. Or to forget them. Or just for the hell of it.

It was the early eighties, and it was very, very fashionable to go see a shrink. About anything. This is about the time I first started to build a livelihood on computers, software, building applications, generally making things work.

So I had this weird thing going on where any time I was trying to do something, it had to do with “left brain” stuff like…defining goals, investigating tools and applications to see if they would meet the goals, figuring out what wasn’t happening that was supposed to be happening, trying to find out why. As my paychecks got larger, this effort became more intense, until it started to shape the way I interacted with everything. I became a nerd. Well, you know, I didn’t exactly become one. Let us say that nerds are a different breed entirely from adult nerds, and I became an adult nerd.

And as far as family, friends, other interpersonal relationships…everybody I knew was into feeling things, or hopelessly entangled in someone else who was into it. Everybody was involved in therapy or knew someone who was.

I never breathed a word to a soul about this during this time, but between the ages of fifteen and about thirty I was waiting for one person…one single, solitary person…to step forward and say “I went into therapy to accomplish x and I accomplished x and now I don’t have to go into therapy anymore.” You know, like I did with computer hardware, tools, software or applications. I sat down to write a program that did y and now it does y and now I don’t have to work on it anymore. Like that.

Never happened.

Not a single time.

Not once.

Ever.

Oh, tons and tons of people declared their therapy sessions a success. But it was not lost on me, that success came in the form of altered goals. “My therapist/counselor helped me to realize that what I really wanted to do was…” — so, to put it simply, I noticed there was never any tracking of established goals.

So assuming this registry is what it looks like, it’s a good thing.

Most couples probably don’t know that there is a long-standing debate among practitioners over whether therapists should actively try to save a marriage or whether they should remain neutral and treat the couple as two individuals for whom divorce possibly could be the best outcome.

William Doherty, a veteran marriage and family therapist at the University of Minnesota, is among those who take the marriage-saving view. He believes therapists have been too neutral, particularly since the 1970s, and have focused on the individual. He blames the period for the trend that he believes has rendered therapists so neutral that they are sabotaging marriages.

Yeah they’re sabotaging marriages, but anyone who calls them “neutral” probably needs to evaluate their own relationship with reality. That’s like putting the kitty-cat in charge of the fish counter and calling Mister Whiskers “neutral” when he starts chomping down on the steelhead. Natural, sure, but instinct-driven or not, trust me when I say kitty has an agenda. Therapists make money when people are messed up in the head — usually by the hour! If the marriage is saved, prince & princess live happily ever after, but if it crumbles everyone’s going to be walking around in a fog. What in the hell do you think most therapists are going to do?

I can’t imagine the feeling a man gets if he and his bride fail to make use of a resource like this, settle on a benevolent-looking counselor, and then when it’s too late to back out, find out the hard way the counselor bears a strong pro-divorce, anti-male bias. There must be no lonelier feeling on the face of the globe.

“The registry is about training and competence and about values, because most couples assume the therapist is pro-marriage, but many therapists feel they have to be neutral,” he says. “The values thing comes into play when there seems to be a discrepancy between somebody’s personal happiness and their commitment to the marriage.”

So if the marriage-counseling industry must stagger on, I say put this thing up. If Doherty’s database isn’t what it looks like, start another one. And another one.

But at the same time, count me out of it. Any woman who would send me into marriage counseling — of any kind, for any reason, with her tagging along or not — that’s a woman I don’t want to know, let alone marry. Besides, I’m on the dark side. I think before I feel, therefore, therapy — notwithstanding the number of people who probably think it could do me some good — is not in the cards. I’m far too obsessed with seeing the world as it is, not as the way I want it to be or the way it makes me feel.

And my thoughts tell me, if we want marriages to last longer, take the money out of them. Make it just as hard to get cash out of a spouse through a divorce, as it is to get it out of a complete stranger through a lawsuit. Do that one thing, and ten years later you’ll be amazed at how the divorce rate plummets. But I got a gut feeling that the weddings-per-year is going to slip down a few notches too. For that reason, my idea will never catch on.

Brides & grooms are just people, no better than the rest of us, no worse. And the fact is, half of all people have no scruples. It’s just a fact.

Conventional “Wisdom”?

Supreme Court stuff is extraordinarily dull, so perhaps readers will find this helpful if I make this really short. Or anyway, as short as I possibly can.

Whether I’m trying to make things short, or not, I’m a big fan of separating out what is within the realm of dispute, from what is not. So in the interest of brevity, I’ll summarize Thursday’s Supreme Court decision of Kelo v. New London, in which eminent domain is upheld, as feared by lovers of individual liberty everywhere whether they are conservative or liberal. That’s all I will say about the decision itself, other than that I don’t like it.

Conventional Wisdom says it’s a good thing for our individual liberties President Bush has not nominated anyone to the Supreme Court yet, since it’s easy to predict the values of such a nominee. Conventional Wisdom says that this nominee would be a danger to freedom, because he would closely resemble a construct of three sitting justices: Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Associate Justices Scalia and Thomas. This is not beyond dispute, because I’m disputing it. But it is Conventional Wisdom. Conventional Wisdom didn’t get here by accident; it commands a certain amount of respect. So by all means let’s take a look at it.

First we have Kelo, signed by Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy, which is a direct slap in the face to individual liberties, violating the spirit if not the letter of the Fifth Amendment “Takings Clause”. The three model justices joined in a dissent to this opinion that was authored by Sandra Day O’Connor, one of the “swing” justices. That’s right, the three guys who “prove” what an assault upon individual freedoms would be inflicted by a Bush nominee, dissented in this opinion that is agreed upon by both sides of the aisle as an assault upon individual freedoms. So here’s a problem.

But hey, the Supreme Court decides lots of opinions every session, and this is just one opinion. So let’s go back to the next-most-recent controversial opinion and see if reality starts to become a bit more friendly to the conventional wisdom.

On June 6, the Supreme Court delivered Gonzales v. Raich which upholds a virtually unlimited authority by Congress to regulate Marijuana and other controlled substances. This is another assault on individual freedom. Is that within the realm of dispute? Not really. Some very conservative people like to see penalities imposed on the consumption and distribution of controlled substances, but they don’t dispute that this is against personal freedoms, they simply infer that this would be a “good thing” or that it is somehow a legitimate exercise of power. Well when the Supreme Court agreed that this was consistent with the Constitution, the opinion was dissented by — you guessed it, O’Connor wrote the opinion, and she was joined by Rehnquist and Thomas. The majority opinion that gave the green light to this expansion of federal power, at the expense of individual freedom, was signed by — oopsie-daisy, it was Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy.

Scalia joined the majority in this one, purely on principles of stare decisis — he felt obliged to enforce previous opinions that broadened the “interstate commerce” authority on “public interest” grounds. But if you read his separate opinion, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

Since Perez v. United States, our cases have mechanically recited that the Commerce Clause permits congressional regulation of three categories: (1) the channels of interstate commerce; (2) the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and persons or things in interstate commerce; and (3) activities that “substantially affect” interstate commerce. The first two categories are self-evident, since they are the ingredients of interstate commerce itself. The third category, however, is different in kind, and its recitation without explanation is misleading and incomplete.

It is misleading because, unlike the channels, instrumentalities, and agents of interstate commerce, activities that substantially affect interstate commerce are not themselves part of interstate commerce, and thus the power to regulate them cannot come from the Commerce Clause alone. Rather, as this Court has acknowledged since at least United States v. Coombs, 12 Pet. 72 (1838), Congress’s regulatory authority over intrastate activities that are not themselves part of interstate commerce (including activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce) derives from the Necessary and Proper Clause. And the category of “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce,” is incomplete because the authority to enact laws necessary and proper for the regulation of interstate commerce is not limited to laws governing intrastate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce.

So although Scalia concurs in the judgment that awards authority to Congress to regulate intrastate pot transactions as if they were interstate commerce, he is doing so as a referee, laboriously implementing the rules of the game based on previous opinions — not from puritanical zeal to force common people to adhere to “blue laws” in the living of their everyday lives. If he’s showing how a Bush nominee can strike at the very heart of our ability to live in a free society, then I must say he’s done a rather poor job of it.

So let us go back further, since the trend cannot hold, being as it is such a slap in the face of conventional wisdom. Surely we can find some of these Bush-friendly justices messing around with our personal freedoms, can’t we? Let’s examine the two-year-old decision of Lawrence v. Texas which strikes down state anti-sodomy laws on Fourteenth-Amendment grounds.

Jackpot! The Lawrence decision protects our sacred Constitutional right to exercise that freedom that is most important to our dignified existence as free and sentient beings, the right to insert our penises into the anuses of other men! What could be more of a linchpin of freedom, more of a keystone to the Spirit of 1776, than that. And the three old gray dolts who most closely resemble a future Bush nominee, dissented from the decision, which proves they must be out to regulate how us common people fornicate. Oh, this is rich, I just knew Scalia looked right for that Puritan outfit, complete with the tall black hat, the blunderbuss and the shoe buckles. What an overzealous regulator he is, daring to dissent from this opinion. What a tight-ass cracker. What a Quaker. Let’s take a look at the dissent he wrote, which was joined by Rehnquist and Thomas. It’s always interesting to see how these Bush people want to regulate every single facet of our lives, isn’t it?

That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts–or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them–than I would forbid it to do so. What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new “constitutional right” by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that “later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best.

Ooh. It appears his opinion is based on simply respecting the wishes of others, without regard to his personal feelings about it. Rehnquist joined this without comment, and Thomas wrote two short paragraphs that essentially repeat this sentiment in different words.

These are the three “conservative” justices who are supposed to be out to rob us of our individual freedoms.

I think I have extrapolated the three most controversial decisions of the last two years. Did I cherry-pick the decisions that made these three puritanical justices look deceptively Jeffersonian? Or has the time come to re-think our conventional wisdom? My opinion for now, is that a far greater danger to our freedom to exist as thinking individuals, is presented to us in the liberal wing that President Bush would water down: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, with help out here & there from Justice Kennedy. But I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

In the meantime, let’s resume our normal routine of never, ever, NOT EVER, thinking about the judicial branch, and the awesome, life-long, unchecked power it holds over our very existences as legal entities, in both civil and criminal matters, except when we simultaneously cogitate about pregnant women and bloody coathangers. After all, Conventional Wisdom says that is what justice in America is all about.