Frank Bruni, New York Times:

OUR infrastructure is inexcusable, much of our public education is miserable and one of our leading presidential candidates is a know-nothing, say-anything egomaniac who yanks harder every day at the tattered fabric of civil discourse and fundamental decency in this country.

But let’s by all means worry about the gays! Let’s make sure they know their place. Keep them in check and all else falls into line, or at least America notches one victory amid so many defeats.

That must be the thinking behind Republican efforts to push through so-called religious liberty laws and other legislation — most egregiously in North Carolina — that excuse and legitimize anti-gay discrimination. They’re cynical distractions. Politically opportunistic sideshows.

And the Republicans who are promoting them are playing a short game, not a long one, by refusing to acknowledge a clear movement in our society toward L.G.B.T. equality, a trajectory with only one shape and only one destination.

There’s a huge glaring error in this, but first let me nit-pick a bit. It is the polar opposite of the truth to say this trajectory has “only one shape and only one destination.” The trajectory meanders, turn by unprecedented turn and inch by serpentine inch, just like any other trajectory driven by emotion and drama. This year it’s all about forcing businesses to do away with male and female restrooms. Previously — just last year or so? — it was about same-sex marriage, and forcing the businesses to participate in that. Next year, who knows…although it will probably have something to do with forcing businesses to do something else. Frankly it’s become rather tiresome, not unlike taking a phone call from a friend who’s in the eleventh year of her divorce and has a whole new round of tall tales to unload about the awful things “Bob” did.

Another issue is that I think I know more conservatives than Frank Bruni does, and I can’t recall a single one who’s terribly obsessed with making sure anybody from any particular group “knows their place.” For keeping groups of people in places, we have democrats to worry about that. The concern with religious liberty is exactly that, protection from litigation; not exactly an unneeded thing in this day and age. One wonders, Who is against such shielding? And why, exactly? More lawsuits are a good thing?

But the big problem is:

…that’s very interesting, considering that it was the city of Charlotte, NC, run by Democrats, which initiated this whole thing with their passage of a gender confused bathroom law. The NC law, HB2, did a few simple things, one of which was to restrict local cities from forcing private businesses to allow transgenders to use the bathroom, locker room, and showers of their “gender identity”. If a company wants to do this, they are welcome to do so. It is their choice.

I thought liberals approved of choice. No?

As for the real issues, yes, we have them. So, why are so many Democrats, like Frank Bruni, so utterly concerned with a law that simply reaffirms freedom of choice for private entities as to who uses their bathrooms? Mention the danger from ISIS and radical Islam, and liberals mostly shrug and say it’s much ado about nothing. Gender confused in bathrooms? 5 alarm fire!

Recap: If liberals don’t get anything they want here, at all, the retail businesses can build all sorts of other-gender-identity bathrooms, let confused males use the womens’ restroom, confused women used the mens’ restroom…you can still have all that. This isn’t about what decision ultimately gets made, it’s about who makes it and gets to force it. And I don’t see anyone on either side overly obsessed with who exactly it is who owns the businesses, or overrides the business’ decisions, by name; so, this is about roles.

No, liberals do not approve of choice. They approve of force.

And they’re opposed to having any sort of discussion about it. Like John Hawkins noted,

Liberalism creates a feedback loop. It is usually impossible for a non-liberal to change a liberal’s mind about political issues because liberalism works like so: only liberals are credible sources of information. How do you know someone’s liberal? He espouses liberal doctrine. So, no matter how plausible what you say may be, it will be ignored if you’re not a liberal and if you are a liberal, of course, you probably agree with liberal views. This sort of close-mindedness makes liberals nearly impervious to any information that might undermine their beliefs.

And over the years, I have noticed something about this. Whenever I chance upon a liberal struggling in this mental state, which is very often, it seems to happen pretty consistently that there’s some disagreement lingering about what is natural. There is a certain pedigree to this. It may have started with the environmental movement. But today, it’s an oversimplification to say: Liberals have a hot, new, potentially disastrous whiz-bang idea, and conservatives are standing athwart the silliness yelling “slow down.” It’s accurate, but there’s more to it than that.

The liberals’ hot, new, whiz-bang idea — at least in the minds of the liberals — has something to do with a return to a more natural state. We have reason to believe this, across the board, including even such issues as the Affordable Care Act and Common Core.

There is perhaps no subject on which this is made more clear, than with the economic issues that have to do with “equality” of income or wealth, like raising the minimum wage, progressive taxes, and social safety nets. Their narrative is not one of “We have come up with an innovative new way to make sure everyone has the same amount of stuff”; it is one of “We have come up with an innovative new way to get things back to the way they were supposed to be, so everyone has the same amount of stuff.” It’s an important distinction, because the latter interpretation is seasoned with a pungent hatred of humanity missing from the former.

Liberals think in passive voice. This is what allows them to envision some sort of intended order to the universe — while simultaneously rejecting any belief system that has to do with a deity that’s doing this “intending.” This is, in a sense, what makes a liberal a liberal. It’s where the arrested development comes into play. It’s definable. Absolute certainty about what’s “supposed to” be this way and what’s “not supposed” to be that way…coupled with a resolute determination to never, ever, under any circumstances, entertain any inquiries into who or what is doing the supposing.

Businesses are supposed to have bathrooms based on feelings of gender identity. “According to whom?” is a rude question, unfit for polite discussion.

Apart from the above referenced hatred of humanity, what’s really dangerous about it is that they envision a validation from history for their ideas, that never was there. You can see this just by discussing things with them a few minutes, letting them monologue about it. They envision a halcyon era that existed before mankind, or when mankind was in too infantile of a state to have much of an effect on anything, in which things worked the way liberals want them to work now, and everything was wonderful. Then man came along and dorked it, so now it’s up to them to return us to normalcy because they & they alone have the smarts to do it. It’s rather like a twisted, Bizarro-world version of the expulsion from Eden. But, they didn’t get it from any sort of written Bible, they imagined it. That’s why I think it came from the environmental movement. They’re just living in a comfort zone, and during the environmental movement’s ascendency they became very comfortable with this. “‘We’ botched it all up, after it was all perfect and wonderful, before ‘we’ came along.” And liberals, of course, never, ever include themselves in that “we.”

Derek Hunter writes at Townhall about our President’s response to the Belgium bombings:

Like it or not, the civilized world looks to the United States in times of need. Since World War II, we’ve been the protector of freedom, the superpower to stand against evil. We aren’t worthy of that trust anymore.

Barack Obama squandered America’s pinnacle position in world leadership through feckless moral equivalence and empty platitudes in the face of opportunity. The chance to lead, to rally the world against the evil of our time, has been flushed by a man who seems to believe the sins of our nation’s past are no different than the sins of those who murder in the name of their God.
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“This is yet another reminder that the world must unite. We must be together regardless of nationality or race or faith in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.” Meaningless…Is the world not already united? Has it not been united against terror since 9/11? Since Paris – the first or second time? Since any and all terrorist attacks, beheadings, burning alive of prisoners? Aren’t we always united in opposing such actions?

That’s not the problem. The problem is, without American leadership, we’re also united in impotence when it comes to doing anything about it.

The problem here is not a lack of saber-rattling. Not necessarily, anyway. It’s a leadership problem. The head honcho is confronted with this job that has to get done, and He’s shown Himself over and over again to be obsessed with just doing the easy parts of it. The immediately-gratifying parts. Repeatedly. The part that has to do with making a “We Must Unite” speech and then reading in the papers about how He just gave the greatest speech in all of humankind. Again.

There’s more to it than that.

Europe, sad to say, is more far-gone than we are. Doug Giles has been noticing. Just like in the last century, they bear the responsibility for having created, or at the very least emboldened, an enemy from which we are going to have to one day liberate them. As the parent of an eighteen-year-old, I’m hopeful that there will be less spilled blood involved this time around. Somehow.

They take verbal abuse from Islam and then sit there in befuddled wonderment when Islam follows through with Brussels attacks while asking themselves, “What happened? I didn’t see that coming.” And I’m screaming at the TV, “Yes, you did see it coming! You just chose to view the Islamic invasion through your Hello Kitty, rose-colored glasses. The selfsame glasses the jihadist just ground to powder.”

What more does Islam have to do before Europe wakes the heck up?

Islam, like my buddy’s horrible little bride, tells Europe they hate them and they’re going to kill them and, yet, Europe doesn’t believe it’s going to happen; or they’re self-deceived to such a degree that they think they can talk them away from a malevolent worldview that does not include Europeans.

So, keep on living in denial, Europe. Keep blaming yourself. Keep telling yourself it’ll “get better”. Keep on cutting Islam slack and excusing their verbal abuse and see what happens. I predict it won’t end pretty.

Thing of it is, on both sides of the Atlantic radical Islam is not the actual problem. It’s more like a ritual challenge. There are always threats. Someone is always out to kill someone. The problem, on both sides of the Atlantic, is this: Our leaders are more concerned about looking like charismatic, inspiring, revolutionary figures ushering in new ages of HopeChangePeaceLove etc., that they’re not even paying lip service to the idea of performing merely adequately at their jobs. Which would start with doing all of the parts of those jobs, not just the fun, immediately gratifying parts.

It reminds me of what one of my bosses said, the one who was often accused of getting a rise out of firing people (and was likely guilty). “I don’t ask much of anything at all,” he said in one meeting, right after the termination that demoralized the workplace more than most of the others. “Just finish something.” This was, I think, one of the more profound, respectable things he had to say during his tenure as human woodchi– er, I mean director. It’s a truth, from which I notice a lot of supposedly accomplished people in technology tend to stray. Do all of a job. Getting part of it done is the same as getting none of it done.

In fact, one might reasonably graduate to the next level of bluntness-yet-truthiness, since a lot of people are missing out on what follows as well: If you only do the parts that makes you look wonderful and awesome, then move on to the next thing without achieving the basics, we would be accurate in postulating from that that you’re firing yourself. It connects to this main subject because if you read your history, you see this is the real problem; this is what made the twentieth century bloody. Guys wearing suits, speaking into microphones from behind lecterns, a bunch of nonsense about how This Is The Moment or This Is Our Time or some such…and then, going on to the next thing. Leaving the actual problem unaddressed and unsolved. You’re going to find that is the common precursor to the bloodlettings, lots of talking that never actually meant much of anything.

Well, Donald Trump has done it yet again. It’s pointless to call out which time he did it, or to argue that this latest example pushes him over some kind of edge, achieving some sort of status to be denied to all the other examples. Pointless to provide a link. Pointless to compare the number of times he did it on this day, compared to the number of times on that other day. Comes as naturally to the man as breathing.

He waxed eloquently about how superbly capable he is of meeting some challenge, or doing some thing, or thinking through some thing. Without showing a single sign of identifying what it is that has made him that way. Today he’s probably going to do it a few more times, and then next week he’ll do it some more.

Trump haters, on both the left and the right, are correct to criticize him for this. They are recalling from the Twenty things that are non-partisan, or darn well ought to be what could arguably be the most important one, Number Five:

If I must learn something new to meet my objective, I will have to admit that I don’t know it, in order to learn it.

I see some common ground shared between myself, and all sorts of different factions involved here. Let me dispense with the least comfortable first: I identify with what is called the “Republican establishment” in their criticism of Trump. Trump, who knows it all, bases seemingly every word of everything he has to say on this faulty premise that he’s the master and hasn’t got anything to learn — but, can’t or won’t speak of the circumstances under which he learned it. Certainly, I can’t relate to The Donald. In my less mature years, perhaps maybe I could have. But since then, I’ve noticed hubris is not something I need to stockpile. Others have had enough flattering things to say about my capabilities and intellect…and with each passing year, I cherish this less and less. I’m at the point it makes me uncomfortable. “Morgan’s a smart guy, he can handle it” so consistently seems to precede some sort of disaster.

So Trump and I are on different pathways in life. If that means our net worths will never come any closer together from here on out, well, so be it.

Did I say this common ground I shared with the Republican establishment was most uncomfortable? We-ell, about that: I wince in proxy embarrassment when I hear The Modern Left take their turn tearing into The Donald; they who have been holding up The Barack non-stop for all these years, as the “all-knowing, all-wise, and yet not a shred of curiosity to be found” savant. The Republican Establishment is, at least, somewhat consistent. At least they are, if you take what they have to say at face value. The Left criticizing Trump, on the other hand, paint themselves into a rather curious corner. They seem to be saying: Yes, accumulated wisdom correlates with curiosity and an admission that you need to learn things, if and only if we’re talking about the mortal plane. Which is most certainly not occupied by He Who Argues With The Dictionaries. President Lightworker gets a pass.

Obama, lest we forget, just did it too: “I’ve Made My Decision.” That is, I understand from a variety of sources, the subject line of the e-mail He sent out…to no one in particular. Seven years I’ve been spending, wondering when, or if, that “fear not, I have figured out what to do” shtick will ever get tired and I guess by now I have my answer. Someone’s lapping it up, cleaning the plate and demanding seconds. Let me guess the next part: I’m some kind of racist for noticing.

Yes, the 42 white guys who came before also made decisions. But I struggle to figure out which one did so without displaying a hint of curiosity. Yes that includes the immediate predecessor, you know, that dimbulb from Crawford, TX. In my lifetime, they all offered some nod to the truth that their knowledge fell short of the universal entirety. As well as, on occasion, to the conviction held by some of the people they governed, that the decision could’ve & should’ve gone the other way.

Not so with the earthbound, golf-addicted Oracle. Like the “Republican front-runner,” He strikes a perfect confluence between knowing everything, and showing curiosity about nothing.

I also identify with the Trump fans. I keep hearing how stupid they are for falling for all this stuff Trump says. After talking with them, I don’t see any sign of this whatsoever. They’re not taking it completely seriously. Nor do I see any sign from the man they’re following, that this is part of his intent. Which sets him apart from the above-discussed person who occupies the White House at the present time.

I’m afraid this is part of the times in which we currently live. And, God help us, will be for quite some time. Maybe we’re seeing what this thing we call “politics” really is. Perhaps this is the rule, what we lived through before — residual traces of humility, at least, in Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, some might say JFK and Johnson — was the exception.

Maybe this is politics in its “natural habitat.” How it’s done. Admission that the decision was made with even a routine and expected tincture of uncertainty, could be perceived by enemies as a weakness. And admission that there was anything left to be learned by the person who decided, would necessarily imply uncertainty. We can’t have that, so we have that “perfect confluence” instead. Over and over again, until we can’t take it any more, and then we get some more of it and so we’re forced to adapt to it as an unwelcome part of our routine, like a traffic jam. “Fear not, I’ve decided; I learn nothing yet I know everything.” It slaps us in the face until we don’t notice it anymore.

It does not impress me as a formula for likely success. I’ve worked in my share of infuriating bureaucracies just like anyone nominally experienced in tech industries. “The decision has been made, resistance is futile” is not a prelude to any sort of grand accomplishment. Or, a feeling of satisfaction. Or even that you are doing your work where you should be working. It is a warning siren, that however low morale is now, it is never going to get any higher and you should get ready for a nosedive. Because the dimbulbs are in charge.

Incurious dimbulbs.

It would be puerile of me to stoop so low as to insult their level of intellect, to call them “dummies” or “stupid” or something. And yet, I note, the question “but what makes them smart?” continues to hang, unanswered, in the air. If they aren’t curious about anything now, and never were before, then when did they ever learn anything? And why are the rest of us to presume they ever did?

This comes up a lot, in my career field. Someone wants to do something about the present fact…which over time has become something of a lingering fact…that very few out of the total number of science jobs, are held by women. And so this latest plan, or stunt, will be introduced with great fanfare. It makes for a lot of attention for those who seek it, but at the end of it all nothing changes very much.

Are the geeks like me keeping women out of the field? That is the idea you can see people would like to position ahead of a voice box, just before giving it some hot air so it can lunge out and achieve promotion to spoken thought. They seldom go this far because the thought wouldn’t last long. Keep women out of the field? What meeting was that? I must have missed it. And if I didn’t miss it, I sure as hell wouldn’t have voted yes. Shortening and brightening my work days, working alongside nice-looking intelligent women, like it seems ALL the other male working classes get to do…lawyers, architects, hospital workers, bureaucrats at City Hall, Hooters cooks. Nope, the software engineers just have to toil away endlessly, shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other sweaty guys. Oh, we’re working hard to keep it that way, are we? Well that would be news to this one.

But you can tell the thought is there. In pieces like this one for example, which adheres to what has become a familiar journalistic pattern: Paragraph One mentions that males already in the field, are poorly behaved. Paragraph Two bludgeons the readers with some more statistics about the disparity. The link between these two things is for the reader to imagine.

Which I must admit, is beyond me. What could the link be? “‘I get called “honey” and “dear” a lot, too.’…women still hold only about 20% of all computer science jobs.” Does the first cause the second, or the second cause the first? Let’s see…woman lands a “science job,” gets called “honey” and “dear,” is traumatized, quits to go home and make babies. Or…women don’t hold many science jobs, so the guys in those jobs never actually see women and don’t know how to behave around them. Well that works a bit better. I must be one of the offenders, having occasionally used these terms. But, I make it a point only to do it around women I know fairly well, who I’m sure would not take it the wrong way. Which I have found is very often the case, most women don’t have a problem with it. Especially when you limit your selection to the women who have actually accomplished something that requires disciplined, scientific thinking.

We only have so much energy. Even upstairs between the ears, when we’re not doing anything physical, there is a finite number of “CPU cycles” in the gray matter within any given time interval. We can burn them off thinking about, is that an unintended infinite-loop, or is it a memory leak? Or we can waste them on being offended. But not both. It is highly unlikely anybody is going to do both.

I’d still suggest getting to know a female co-worker fairly well before calling her “honey.” If you have sufficient sanity about you to write some code that works, which is among the very first steps, you probably don’t need this advice.

But, back to the paucity of female practitioners in hard-science fields. It is a trend so durable, we should recognize the possibility that it is a comment from Mother Nature on the human condition. Maybe, just maybe, the chicks — generally — just don’t wanna. I said generally. You make such a remark in any sort of public setting, and the retort comes flying back at you at Mach One: Not so! This chick over here did such-and-such, and there isn’t a man alive who could do it better blah blah blah…yes, true. But this says a lot more about the handicaps of the retort-maker, than it says about men and women. The concern is about statistics. As in, averages. How’d you lose track of this so soon, retort-maker, we were just discussing it. Were you sleeping?

Reality is falling short of a goal, that the women in these fields should number in proportion to women in the general population. That is the concern. The question it inspires is: From whence did this goal come? Reality did not produce it; that’s why it is under indictment. But reality shouldn’t be. Reality never did or say anything to promise this.

I’ll answer the question. It came from the premise that men and women are exactly the same. Which is factually, provably wrong.

“What can we do to get more women into the STEM fields?” is something that illuminates, brilliantly and as few other things do, the yawning gap between bureaucratic thinking and reality. If there are some young girls who’d like to sharpen their skills, and they’re feeling somehow intimidated by whatever, then curing that would be a worthy goal for anyone. But after all the failed efforts to manage the girls in bulk like they’re cattle or something, reroute them around, culturally condition them, with so little to show for it, it’s time to see that as what it is: A problem that exists on a case by case basis. Even there, it is likely that the talking-heads have overestimated its effects, and not by just a little bit. There’s a great deal more going on to intimidate young girls away from becoming swimsuit models, or beauty pageant contestants, than from being STEMmers. Fact is there just isn’t that much social excoriation going on in these fields, because there’s not a lot going on socially in any direction. It’s an anti-social vocation. We get together out of necessity, only when it is absolutely necessary to get further work done, or when the bosses make us do it. These are called “meetings.” We hate them. Most of us do anyway. I’d venture to say the only people working in STEM fields who look forward to meetings, are the political-animal types, the ones whose favorite desktop computer application is the e-mail client. The ones who have to have the last word on all matters great and small. The ones who, if you look closely, aren’t really all that STEM-my.

And sadly, those are the ones who all too often become bosses. That’s when you know you’re working for a bureaucracy, and the priority of technological advancement has slipped a peg or two. When we hear about people who look good in suits and are good at talking into microphones, making their noise about “getting more women into the STEM fields,” we know it’s one of those tell-tale signs that the wrong people are in charge. That we’ve got twiddlers in charge. Those who can, do; those who can’t, make fancy speeches and twiddle with the rules constraining those who are doing. That’s best-case scenario. Worst-case is, we have insane people in charge. Because let’s face it, if technology is important, that means technology can alter the course of humanity for the better, just like your course is altered by someone extinguishing the fire that was consuming your house…and in a situation like that, if you’re all worried about whether the fireman has a penis or a vagina, you can legitimately be called a lot of different things but “sane” is not one of those things. Worry about the fire. That’s the job.

Erick Erickson, The Daily Signal:

For example, the very people who support Planned Parenthood’s butchering and selling of baby body parts also advanced the disaster of Obamacare because they care for children. The same people who insist that “The Vagina Monologues” be permitted on col­lege campuses also set up “safe zones” to restrict free speech because students must be protected from harmful ideas—like marriage being between a man and a woman. They outlaw incandescent light bulbs so we can use only toxic mercury because they care about polar bears and penguins with happy feet.

Around the country, progressive bullies have attacked Christians for daring to put their faith ahead of the pet causes of those who feign compassion while destroying life-giving liberties. What we are seeing is a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach as the wildfire burns across our land. It is not enough that Christians be quiet. Christians must be silenced and punished.
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There will be no going down the street to another florist, baker, pharmacist, venue operator, or photographer. Any who defy them are labeled bigots and driven to the fringes of society.

They will viciously attack those who disagree with them because they tire of the debate, which they never wanted to begin with. They have no interest in explaining or defending their beliefs. They want victory and know the only way to get it is to silence, isolate, and destroy any who get in their way. The progressive activists who yell bigot at those who disagree with them are the jihadists of American culture.

The column is adapted from the book You Will Be Made to Care.

I’ve been noticing this thing about liberals tiring of a debate, which they may have started, but never wanted. Been noticing it awhile. Somewhere I made the point that a lot of people — wasn’t thinking of them as liberals, it was just a general observation — tend to forget the first rule of winning arguments: To get there, somewhere along the line you have to do some actual arguing. That’s, like, the first step. Veggies before dessert. We’ve lately got a lot of people living among us who want to skip to the fun part.

And yeah, come to think of it a lot of them do tend to be liberals.

“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” — William F. Buckley, Jr.

“I don’t want to start an argument or anything, but…” What a nice sentiment. If disagreement ensues, it must be the other person’s fault. Can’t we all just get along?

I can only think of two examples. But two is enough…

The missus had the idiot-box tuned to one of those shows liberals just love. It doesn’t matter which one. But I was noticing the male action hero somehow got away with doing a very un-liberal thing, namely, telling his female co-star something like “Stay right here, don’t go anywhere or do anything until I get back.” The other example would be Jack Bauer beating a terrorist senseless until he can find out where the ticking time bombs are…

It’s interesting. It would be healthy if it relied on a decent and crisp separation between fact and fiction. In a way, it does. But there’s something insincere about it as well. These people we today call “liberals” are the way they are, because we’re going through a cultural conflict. They’re intruding into an established culture, with a new culture they’d like to impose. “Conservatives” are any people who do something to resist this incursion. This new, enlightened culture says men should not address women in any manner or tone except for the most-deferential; to do otherwise is uncool, anywhere, inside or outside of the teevee set. And that goes double for pummeling terrorists to get information, of course. Their message is not one of “that’s only cool in make-believe, real-life people shouldn’t do that”; their message is that this is BadThink. It’s part of the thought-smallpox we’re supposed to make extinct, right?

The two examples — there may be more — dislodge a telling fig leaf. They reveal a meaningful truth, that liberals and conservatives don’t actually disagree about what’s cool. The disagreement is in whether ordinary people are worthy. Kinda gets back to what I was noticing about their newest, Trump-defense campaign slogan: “America is already great.” You don’t know what that actually means, any better than I do. Does that mean, sometime since their guy got sworn in seven years ago, America crossed some threshold and became “great,” rather like the sun crossing the celestial equator and starting Spring officially? Because the liberal catechism sure as hell doesn’t smile on the idea that America was “already great” in 2009. So, when exactly was this crossover-point, this vernal equinox? Where is the enthused, self-identifying liberal who will comment on that?

Again: Without the “ordinary people aren’t worthy” idea tossed into the mix, there’s an irreconcilable contradiction. And with that emulsifier added, things align, sort out, start working. But this would mean “America is already great” really means, “America hasn’t got any business aspiring to be any greater.”

Pay all your bills, fund your retirement AND save for your kids’ college funds? No peasant, you must choose. Let Sweden and Guatemala have a shot at that first. America has been “great” too long. Am I interpreting unfairly? Because this makes everything work. Jack Bauer is cool when he does what’s needed to stop the bomb plot, but that’s him, you just squirm appropriately while your liberal wife yells at you, Hillary/Bill style.

It also fits into another observation I made awhile ago. There is some sort of licensing process, or criteria at least. Certain people, the aforementioned current President and His wife among them, are permitted by the liberal intelligentsia to imagine themselves doing extraordinary things, to aspire to these things. They are encouraged to do this, applauded for doing this, for merely having the thought, or enabling the thought. Others are not, and the difference doesn’t have as much to do with ideological leanings as it does with social proximity.

It’s a phobia. If you live next door to a liberal, socialize with the liberal, occupy the same economic bracket as the liberal, and then you earn a promotion at work then this creates pressure on the liberal. If this stuff we today call “liberalism” is any one thing at all, it is the avoidance of pressure. Don’t wanna, that’s too hard, what about the rest of us who didn’t bother. Who’s going to provide the worm to the bird who didn’t want to get up early? We need a program…

President Obama, along with others in the same mold, can be a “transforming figure” because He is not a peer.

And this is a division that has endured between liberals and conservatives, since before America’s Civil War. The idea that certain types of people are just certain types of pegs, that fit into certain types of holes. In other words, remember your place. And stick to it. We are supposed to think of women this way, men are supposed to go over there and stay out of the way, let’s have a gay guy do this, the President should be black, and now that He is nothing He does matters unless it can be put in a positive light…doing what needs to be done is for Jack Bauer, you and I are just supposed to go to work, if we do have work, and spend as much of the day as we can in the stall so we can get paid to poop. College kids have these jobs, non-college kids have those jobs.

As opposed to: No, anybody can do anything. The only limit is you.

Vodkapundit, which is Stephen Green:

Last December my newly minted ten-year-old got a Swiss Army knife for his birthday — an Explorer much like my first.
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It’s a rite of passage, and an important one I think, for your children to earn their first knife and to learn its proper use and care. Unless your children are anything like these kids:

California State University at Long Beach on Thursday said that it has taken seriously an incident in which a faculty member saw a student with a small knife, in class, and asked him to leave and notified authorities. On social media, the incident was described by some as a threat by the student against a black female student in a class on gender and race issues. Many on social media have questioned why Cal State didn’t alert the campus to danger or take further action against the student. The university statement does not reference many of the details claimed on social media. But the university says that the incident remains under investigation by campus and local officials, and that a threat assessment determined no immediate threat.

Back in my university days…if a professor had asked for a show of hands for who was carrying a pocketknife, some men (typically but not exclusively men) would raise their hands. Some wouldn’t. But the point is that nobody would have really thought much of it one way or the other. I’d even be willing to wager that in some parts of the country, a man might feel a small bit of shame if he’d forgotten to grab his knife that morning. I know I feel naked without one — and next-to-useless, too, if I find I need one and it isn’t there.

I prefer my Skeletool, with the belt clip. Sheaths, both leather and nylon, have failed me repeatedly and I find them unworthy of the tool itself, which is insanely well-engineered. Oh, but we want safety, do we? Well…the pliers probably saved the fingers of the purchasing & requisitions lady who I rescued at 6 in the morning one day, as she struggled to pry the paper detritus from a business-sized shredding machine that couldn’t be unplugged from the wall.

Which is a point I see not discussed too much. In this balance between perfectly-ready and perfectly-safe, we presume these are always opposite goals. It isn’t so. A lot of the time in life, being ready brings its own safety benefits. In fact that’s most of the time. When people have to get something done and they’re forced by “safety” rules to be unready, they start…improvising…

The other point I see not being raised as often as it should, is this passive-voice notion of “…described by some as a threat by the student against…” You’ll notice that is the entirety of the stated danger. Someone said. Someone posted on Facebook. Someone saw it as. “Many on social media have questioned why Cal State didn’t alert the campus to danger or take further action…” As is the case with all passive-voice statements, the question lingers: Who?

It matters.

See, when people say “it’s a threat when someone else has something that could be used as a weapon,” what they’re really saying is “you should feel threatened when I have something that could be used as a weapon.” They’re saying people shouldn’t rely on the value others place on human life, which is the foundation of any civilized society; they’re saying they don’t believe in civilized society. They’re projecting their lack of community feeling, onto others.

When they hallucinate about people with guns on a subway, suddenly turning that setting into a bloodbath, what they’re saying is that they have the untested impulses to do something like this. They’re saying they come from a place where people are not to be trusted.

This is a bit like the underwriter at a bank, being responsible for approving loans for which he himself would never qualify. And then, because of that, denying them all. Nope! I can’t be trusted to pay back a loan, so that means nobody else should either.

So for the safety of us all, it would be a good idea to track down these people who so-described and so-questioned, and find out who they are. Perhaps we’re all in danger with them walking around free like that. If it saves one child’s life then it’s certainly worth it…right?

By way of Gerard.

…or, how to destroy modern-liberalism once and for all. I haven’t got all the answers yet, and what I do have no doubt has been gathered by others who are more eloquent at describing it. Nevertheless, it occurs to me someone should be putting this all together in one place. People do make observations about liberals a lot. But I don’t often see these things put together into a strategy to actually solve the problem.

1. There is an intelligence within the liberal movement, manifesting itself through its competence, taking on the responsibility of adjusting the agenda between election cycles. Let us call this the “scheming elites,” since the slickness through which it self-coordinates suggests limited size, and the content of its strategy shows that it does not share all interests with the constituencies upon whose support it depends.

2. There is a demonstrated ignorance within the movement as well, a bloated, voluminous, sprawling ignorance. The argument of: “If democrats win elections when there is economic desperation, they must have an incentive to preserve and create such desperation” is so simple, and irrefutable. When liberals fail to understand it, the only possible explanation is that a cosmetic lack of understanding must be the only method of refutation available to them. This fits in well with other observations made about liberals who fail to understand things: They get emotionally invested in wrong things, and when a logical point is made by someone that exposes the wrongness, they have to do something to disrupt the discussion, to avoid learning logically sound, but contraband, things. We could call this the “ignorant commons.”

3. The liberal movement consists, in large part, of a sustained monologue taking place FROM the scheming elites TO the ignorant commons, with zero feedback, very much like the power structure among the aristocracy and the peasants in feudal times. A great portion of this monologue, measured either in volume or in priority, is concerned with instructions about how the ignorant-commons should do their living, their communicating, their thinking. The instructions run long on “do this, don’t do that” and run short on hard, helpful information. Passive-voice sentences appear very often in the message stream. And these are things the scheming-elites would never, ever practice themselves. Examples abound.

4. One of these examples would be the elevation of emotion above reason. We know this must be part of what the scheming-elites would have the ignorant-commons continue to practice, and yet would never practice themselves, because this emotion-over-reason configuration is so intrusive and so persistent that its practice blocks self-improvement. We know this because Obama voters managed to — chose to — re-elect Obama. This is a choice not to learn from experience. The scheming-elites, meanwhile, figured out they had been in error directing their political resources away from the legalization of gay marriage, and so they self-corrected. This proves a differential between these two halves, about how a thinking and acting person must conduct himself. If the preservation of this differential is key to the enemy’s continuing survival, it logically follows that the destruction of this differential is key to his defeat.

5. The ignorant-commons consistently fail to distinguish between statements about facts, versus statements about what facts might mean. Put more simply, they can’t think. Examples include emotionally unhinged sentiments of conclusion that purport to be statements of fact, such as “Health care should be a right and that’s a fact,” or “Education must be free and that’s a fact.” This makes it easy for the scheming-elites to program the ignorant-commons to have certain opinions; they say, “get the facts” about this-or-that. The ignorant-commons then obey, get told what to think, and with this emotion-over-reason juxtaposition in place, proceed to “feel” like they know something. From that feeling, they get a sort of a hit, like a hardcore junkie. It’s their soma.

6. There is also a hostility against any sort of exceptional thinking, I’ve noticed. It’s the sort of thing you might see more often in a middle or high school setting. If a functional adult sees that a brush fire is about to start, it doesn’t matter if a lot of other people can see it as well; urgent action is required. To an emotionally-invested liberal, like to a seventh-grader, nothing is worth noticing if it hasn’t achieved “everybody knows” status. “Nobody thinks that” is a legitimate rebuttal, even against observations that, once measured objectively and in good faith, would be undeniable. One of the things that distinguishes liberals from conservatives is faith in one’s own ability to validate. A conservative believes himself capable of seeing conflicts between contradictory statements, repeatedly, and eventually from that judging the true state of things. A liberal doesn’t even try. So a conservative, forced to choose, will value the ability to think logically over a repository of verified & verifiable information, whereas the liberal will not, because the conservative can see one can be made from the other with just a bit of work.

7. The potential weakness of the movement, leading to its eventual defeat, is to sever the link between the scheming-elites and the ignorant-commons; somehow, disrupt the flow of information through that pipeline. What would make that easy is that the connection relies on an implicit trust, and the truth of the matter is that this trust is unearned, since the scheming-elites favor policies that hurt the ignorant-commons. In short, the objective is to expose the elites, as parasites. What makes it difficult is that the ranks of the ignorant-commons are constantly replenished, by way of youth reaching majority age. In order to defeat the enemy, such an enlightenment would have to achieve an attrition rate that exceeds the rate of replenishment.

It all depends on what youngsters, marching up to and teetering on the brink of adulthood, manage to learn before arriving at that brink. Modern liberalism has achieved success because it’s taken control of what we today erroneously call “education.” They’ve managed to turn it into a process of emotional investments in emotional investments. Today we’re fighting a problem that has been allowed to mature and grow. It is a Death Star of bureaucratic, passive, “hope the bosses do things to help me” thinking.

But every Death Star has an exhaust port.

Related: Dice explains where this is all going if the small photon torpedo doesn’t find its mark.

I was impressed by a gentleman this morning, who actually is not impressive and is very far from being a gentleman…

He had met up with the “Aisle Nine Disappointment.” The bank of four self-cash-out machines is positioned in such a way that there is no room for a line of people, so the line forms up Aisle Nine. Several times a minute, therefore, a customer in a hurry descends upon the machines under the impression that there is no waiting to be had. And then one from a variety of experiences falls upon him, with the outcome being that he learns there is, indeed, a line. And often that he’s guilty of being a cutter. These experiences have all happened to me at some time or another.

They fall into two major classifications: You figure out the unpleasant truth yourself, or someone has to tell you. Civilized people think little of this. It means two or three minutes more waiting, when you’ve already been inside the better part of an hour.

This fellow’s face reflected genuine surprise, and then contorted into rage. Gave his cart (2 or 3 items) a mighty shove, and walked off in the opposite direction. My vantage point was from within the line, so it looks like, once again, I have aroused anger in someone by existing in this universe. When will I ever learn? No seriously — where, I must wonder, would people like this choose to direct their rage?

I am not free of rage myself. I have been quite unhinged on occasion. At my worst, the target of ire is some inanimate object. I’m not proud of this. I hope at my funeral, someone sees fit to immortalize something else about me. But I do have this to offer in my defense: The target is there. There is one. From the target of ire, there is at least an implied goal, and from that, at least an implied plan. Something to do with destruction, replacement, or both of those things.

What is the implied plan, with turning your shopping receptacle into a projectile, possibly hurting someone? Someone is supposed to notice you’re upset? Who? For an explanation, all I can think of is a chemical imbalance in the brain, or poor upbringing. It’s not just him. Something is just a bit off today. One of these days, I need to learn to do my shopping here when the professionals do it; seems when they’re there, I have a lot of trouble parking, but when everybody else is there I have problems with everything else. People don’t understand what they’re there to get, which is excusable, but they also don’t seem to understand how to move around other people. Which is not. C’mon, you’re not five anymore. High traffic areas, low traffic areas, these things are not the same. You need to check your bearings, figure out what’s next on your list, have a quick conference with your spouse…where do you do that? In the way, or out of the way? You should have to pass a test like this before being allowed entrance.

Perhaps that is what escalated the agitation level in the “gentleman” who made this impression on me. Several minutes of that. Still, that’s no excuse.

Here’s the fascinating part. I would bet good money that this is an Obama voter. But there’s no use heading over to Social Media to say so, it would just start needless arguments, butt hurt, and a LOT of rebuttal. That’s the advantage of having taken the time to argue with liberals, you learn things. And the fascinating part is, Obama voters, while being seen in this light by normal people, look at normal people this way too. No really. They think when normal people think about high taxes the way normal people think about high taxes — high, therefore questionable at least, and certainly very taxing — we’re being the asshole who gives a cart a mighty shove, thereby contributing to the congestion problem that he is simultaneously announcing to the world is too much for him to tolerate. They think that guy is us. You hear them say so all the time. Who among us has not heard the endless litanies about how we have to have a tax system so we can pay for police departments, fire departments, park benches, et al. They’re so cute when they work so hard to avoid saying anything good about the military. Also, traffic lights are like this. Part of the price we have to pay to live in a civilized society is that we have to follow rules, much like stopping for a red light and waiting for it to turn green. Yes, that must be the problem. I’m opposed to more public debt because I’m a red-light runner.

I’ve heard this many times. I can re-type it with my eyes closed. Yes, take it from me. Leftists see real-people, as just more specimens just like the shopping-cart asshole. They don’t show any signs of understanding why we see them that way. The ignorance may be genuine.

Yesterday I had made the point, as I had made it before,

Liberals should not summarize the viewpoints of their opposition on behalf of their opposition, because liberals don’t understand their own opposition. They’re proud of not knowing.

And what motivates their opposition is,

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

The definitions that make civilization possible include, but are not limited to…waiting in line. Shopping-cart-asshole is their dude, whether they realize it or not. In fact, so are the people who run red lights. All those who doubt this, allow the liberals to wander away from this issue and bloviate about something else for awhile. The pattern will soon set in and it won’t often be disrupted to any extent: Where there is a definition, they want to kill it, especially if it is a definition upon which civilized society depends.

Profits go to people and businesses that are most productive. That, too, is a definition upon which society depends. They’re none to fond of it. Who’s going to give the worm to the bird who doesn’t particularly feel like getting out of bed too early? Not — from where should the worm come. Just — where’s the program. More worms would keep the society going. More programs bring it to a stop. So the stencil-selection involved in their aggravated curiosity is most telling.

I think they’re rushing to get the talking point out, about “You just don’t like taxes because you’re a stranger to the concept of following rules,” because it helps to conceal a truth that has become evident to all serious observers, even the most casual ones: The Left is burdened with a far greater saturation of these shopping-cart-shoving assholes who don’t want to take turns. I mentioned up above somewhere about an ignorance they show, that is likely sincere? They have one that’s insincere: They pretend not to understand that high profits are what make our society go. Some of them pretend that they’re keen on some obscure bit of wisdom, that eludes us slope-foreheaded people who can’t see the brilliant inventor in clock boy, or the woman in Caitlyn Jenner. But that’s all fake. It’s bluster; they don’t even have the beginnings of an idea of what that obscure bit of wisdom would be.

The “I need a program” part is genuine. The “taxes, not profits, are what make society go” is crap. That comes from just saying whatever you have to say to get what you want.

Occasional reader/commenter Nate sent along, in the e-mails, an article about, and written by, a lefty-inclined person who’s starting to see the light.

I will always believe in “The Revolution”. But I am becoming very frustrated with modern “activist” culture.

First of all, I’m tired of watching people turn into pretentious assholes who think their activism makes them better than everyone else, even those oppressed and marginalized groups with whom they claim “allyship”.

It’s got some funny parts in it, which aren’t intentional unless this is supposed to be parody. A possibility I can’t dismiss right away. “Allyship”?

They talk about listening, being humble, questioning one’s preconceived notions about other people and hearing their lived experiences…and yet ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are. That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form – far from it. But I would go as far as saying that the politically correct mafia on the left perpetuates a form of bigotry on its own because it alienates and “otherizes” those who do not share their ways of thinking and speaking about the world.

Something tells me the cupcake could’ve saved herself a lot of time and trouble, merely by listening to a conservative once in a while and taking what he or she had to say, at least somewhat seriously. The essay reads like “no freakin’ duh.”

But, back to breaking these rules that keep society together, the running of the red lights, the shoving of shopping carts; lefties think normal people are doing that and normal people think it’s the lefties doing that. Each side thinks it’s the other side that can’t take turns. How to resolve the impasse?

Isn’t their guy’s master-slogan something like “We Can’t Wait”? Yeah…I thought so.

Checkmate.

Me, a few months back:

You can’t reliably, or regularly, generate good results when you do this preening. Because those who preen are not predisposed to improve, to repair flaws. To do that, you have to 1) hang around to see how the Awesome Wonderful Grand Plan works, 2) find some flaws and 3) be honest, with yourself first of all, that the flaws are there. That gets in the way of The Preen.

Which means, ultimately, that The Preen has to get in the way of improvement. Any improvement. All learning…

I have had the idea germinating in my head that the preens that do the most harm, are limited in number. I worked this over a bit, masticating it between the molars of my mind, and came up with…in the current troubled times in which we live…seven. Huh. Interesting. Just like the deadly sins from Paradise Lost. Also, the castaways in Gilligan’s Island. What is it with that number seven?

Well, maybe with some more thought put into it, I’ll be seeing the number change. But for now…

Green Preen
Gelding Preen
Pantsuit Preen
Guilty-White Preen
Gadget Preen
Egghead Preen
Special Needs Preen

What these all have in common with each other, is that the person preening has embraced an urgent need to get some communicating done, without offering any sort of opportunity to actually exchange ideas or information. The narrative is all set. The audience is supposed to react the way the script-in-his-head says, and if that doesn’t happen…well, I was just talking about that, wasn’t I. Conflict ensues, and it’s all the fault of everybody else.

I think you’d have to have been living in a cave, to require any sort of introduction of the first one. The narrative is that the planet is on its last legs — because of “us.” The preener is entirely innocent of this planetary destruction, or if he is not then he is at least aware of his guilt, which is the same as not having any. And then there are these poopy heads who doubt the message. “Skeptics,” they’re called. So the green-preener toils away, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain in the underworld, to get the message out so the planet can be saved. This would necessarily involve the skeptics no longer being skeptics. But nobody’s really sure how that is to be done. Also, if it happened, you have the “dog caught the car” thing happening there, the preener wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do. Conflict is essential to the exercise. There have to be some BadPeople making BadFeelz with their BadThinking. Can’t have drama without a villain.

Now the Gelding Preen is a special case, a kind of “negative preen.” He does not seek upward social mobility by saying the right things. Rather, he seeks to avoid social deterioration by distancing himself from the wrong things. It happens in office environments. And it starts out with the right intentions; we’re all there giving up a third of our day, so we can make an honest living, and that means everyone is deserving of some measure of respect. Also, nobody should be doing anything to make the day unnecessarily longer. Human decency: If we’re all stuck in an elevator car together, don’t take a shit. The problem is when the definition of “shit” is broadened to include any & all male-associated actions and characteristics. In much of what we regard as civilized society, it’s happened already.

If you’re a man who works in an office and you speak with a voice pitch that is much higher than what’s comfortable, you’re part of the problem. Yes, it’s unthinkable that we should run around talking in natural voice inflections, an octave or two below middle C if that’s what comes naturally to the male voicebox. And it’s horrifying that we should have pictures of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models on our work computers. But why? It’s these “evolving standards” that are cocked up here.

The Pantsuit Preen is the opposite of the Gelding Preen. This is, women seeking to elevate their social status by not appearing to be women. Maybe they cut their hair short. Again with the questions: Why? More importantly, who? As in, who likes this? Whoever that is, that’s the one with the real problem. Women are women, it’s just a fact. Women wear skirts and dresses. They look good wearing these things, and men don’t. And if your skepticism doesn’t completely ping off the charts when you see a woman wearing a pantsuit all of the time, you just haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on lately and can’t see the calling cards. Same way it’s a fact that a man is a man, it’s also a fact that a woman is a woman. When did this become something we have to pretend is not true? What slipped? Who’s responsible? There’s the problem, those who are responsible won’t say. They just keep contributing — anonymously — to the problem.

The Guilty-White Preen is responsible for all sorts of misery upon us. And it has recently shifted into high gear with all this business about “check[ing] your privilege.” It doesn’t stop there. All sorts of “Those People” conversations begin, and end, with a whole lot of hand-wringing about the plight of “those people,” and what sort of rigging of the system has to be done to get them back where “they” belong. But so seldom are the shenanigans ever designed by anyone with the slightest intention of living among “those people.”

There is a strange sort of dirty earnestness about the Guilty-White Preen. Its narrative aligns with reality, if only temporarily, when its adherents recognize that fate has blessed them with advantages they don’t deserve. But it seems to go flying over their heads that fate has also burdened them with a challenge, along with an opportunity, to prove themselves worthy. They become self-fulfilling prophesies, blinded by their own unearned advantages from ever seeing the good side of anything. Example: A Republican President makes the case that military action is required, over here, for these reasons…the preener immediately expunges as even a remote possibility, that the President could be arguing for this action in good faith. No can do. Suddenly, it’s all “he lied to get us into an illegal/unjust war BushCheneyHitlerHalliburton.” It is almost as if they know their privileged upbringing has imbued them with a lifelong, unsupported skepticism against the necessity of any chore. Someone needs to take out the garbage? I doubt it! Prove it! That’s anti-war activism in a nutshell: A dirty job that has to be done? I never saw anything like that when I was a kid. There must not be any such thing.

The Gadget Preen is unique in this list because, apart from the Gelding Preen, it is the only one that is resolutely apathetic against the details of any issue. This type of preener glides above it all, preferring not to get bogged down in the pros and cons of Quantitative Easing. Why should he bother? He already knows everything. He has an iPhone!

Not to be confused with the Egghead Preen, which is best thought-of as an almost-scientific study into how to make the most consistently wrong decisions, with the greatest confidence. It is truly frustrating when you see someone pushing an idea so wrong, that you just know it wouldn’t have held any appeal for them if they weren’t in such a hurry to show their smarts. Always always always, there is some morsel to their thinking, some 180-degree hairpin-turn, away from some slothful inept status-quo idea that had consumed the attention of us slope-foreheaded morons before the egghead came along and showered his enlightened thinking upon us. And what a good thing for us that he did!

Our current President has become rather enslaved to this sort of thinking. It’s embarrassing to watch Him in action, after awhile. Thought exercise: Wait for the next time He tells us “we can’t” do something, and imagine yourself as the guy who — according to His narrative — had been previously intellectually incapable of processing this. Imagine yourself saying “Aw gee, because that was like my plan and stuff.” We can’t turn against each other. Guess I’ll have to throw out my caveman plan, of us all turning against each other. Ditto for my plan to wait for Congress (which the Caveman’s Constitution says you’re actually supposed to do), also I wanted to become numb to school shootings…and, defund ObamaCare. Me am to want to pass on to me cave kids a bill they can’t pay. Me am to want to be a bystander to bigotry. Me am to drill meself to lower gas prices.

President Obama is supposed to be, if nothing else, original, creative, fun to watch, entertaining. If you’re a one-trick pony, you’d better know the trick. I’m not sure this pony does. What do I miss, exactly, if I miss the latest Obama speech? Someone please tell me. Each one is pretty much interchangeable with all the others, at this point, right?

A common mistake I see the Egghead Preeners making, is to confuse a point about increments on a spectrum between the endpoints, as license to conflate the two diametrically-opposed endpoints with each other. I will support that with an example. I could choose from several. The first that comes to mind is Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, to which I made a casual reference already. After this had become a pressing issue, John Kerry ran against George W. Bush for the presidency, as a challenger, on an unofficial platform that he had the intellectual fortitude, the “nuance,” that the Crawford Dimbulb was lacking. “He thinks in shades of gray” was one meme that took on a life of its own, as I recall. It is certainly true that there were shades-of-gray involved in the hypothesis that “Saddam Hussein has WMDs.” Somehow, this metastasized into something like: We need to start thinking of this guy as a victim, even though our intelligence and common sense tell us he’s dangerous, and might even be up to something. After all, if you can’t trust Michael Moore then who can you trust? Another example: Socialism. One of my Facebook friends, inclined toward the lefty-leaning side of things, a few hours ago said

The one thing that defines a socialist at their core is that they nationalize private industry. If they don[‘]t do that then they are not socialists. Period.

Yes, it’s another tired debate about Hitler being a left-winger or a right-winger. Isn’t it odd? Certain things, like socialism, are to be defined as narrowly as possible. Other things, like “lied to get us into an illegal/unjust war” as mentioned above, are to be defined very broadly. Well that’s the thing about definitions: You have to do it with some consistency, or else there’s no point to even bothering with the exercise. If people have to keep running back to you to say “Are we interpreting this the right way? Are we interpreting that the right way?” — then you haven’t defined anything at all.

And the difference between confiscating someone’s business by way of “nationalization,” versus letting them keep it but dictating to them exactly how they’re supposed to run it, is more a distinction than a true difference. It’s like the difference between feeding your neighbor’s dog steak laced with arsenic, or just shooting it. And that’s the funny thing about eggheads. They’re so eager to show how smart they are, that they forget the basics. They see different things as the same, and they see functionally identical things, as somehow, inexplicably, different. This defeats whatever advantages their eggheaded-ness might have brought. To mix my tortured metaphors a bit more, under the “in for a penny, in for a pound” rule: Who cares how powerful your mighty engine is, if your tires won’t grip the pavement?

But the Special Needs Preen is the most toxic out of all seven. Anytime you’re dealing with an argument that so-and-so must have some sort of advantage not available to the general population, and the rationale is that so-and-so doesn’t have something else or can’t do something else…you’re dealing with this.

Some people make the point that we have to do everything they want, and nothing anybody else wants, and the reason for this is that they can’t handle their own emotions. Yes that is absurd. Offensive, even. But they get away with it. When they do, it reflects poorly on all of us.

Others try to mix their special needs preening with their guilty-white privilege preening, and paint themselves into the risible corner of arguing that we have to make everything equal-equal-equal, and at the same time, preserve for them (or their targeted sympathy-class) some special privileges, to prove how committed we are to making everything equal-equal-equal.

Others provide documentation “proving” their kids have real-or-imagined “learning disabilities.” Some of these parents act like normal parents, insisting that their disabled children be given as normal a life as possible. You will often find these kids have real disabilities. For if they didn’t, surely such parents would not be conjuring up wild tales about disabilities that don’t exist. But other parents want their children to be sheltered. I just cringe when I see them doing this; it’s as if they’re embarrassing me, and not themselves. They saturate the very air around them with all these wild tales about their kids’ handicaps…but when the time comes to define what exactly these handicaps are, suddenly there are no details to be found. And of course it is improper to ask…somehow.

These people are mired in a personal vendetta against human potential. They’re against it. They, like all the above, reflect poorly on the rest of us. Or at least, I think they do. I think, maybe, if it became the rule rather than the exception for others to ask these contraband questions…

…like…

Oh, so you’re failing the class because your professor is so mean? Does the professor have any other students in his class? Are they all failing too?

…and…

Oh, so you got a bad employee review because your boss is unreasonable and a jerk? Does your boss have any other employees? What kind of reviews did they get?

…and…

Oh, so you can’t get to work on time because you live really far away? Are there any other employees of this company who live in that area? Are they chronically late too?

…things would be different. I think even the casual reader can pick up the gist. This is a conflict between two opposite mentalities.

One mentality says, “If it’s a problem for any one person to get it done somewhere, that it’s unrealistic to expect anyone else to get it done, anywhere.”

The other mentality says “If any one person can get it done, anywhere, then that means everybody has the opportunity to do it, and everywhere.”

The second mentality is more difficult because it brings with it the weight of some obligations: You have to look toward people who getting things done that you’re not getting done yet, and then you have to have the courage to learn. The first one is easier, because of this. But that doesn’t mean it is natural. It is actually the more onerous of the two opposite mindsets, that is the natural one. We are built, down to the individual strands of our DNA, to look to people who are stronger than we are, and learn from their superior example.

The obstacle is just this: It takes balls. That’s all. You have to have courage. It takes a lot of courage to be a “hero,” to be sure. But it takes a lot more courage and balls to find a hero, recognize that he is a hero, treat him as a hero, recognize you have something to learn, ways to improve…and start going to town on it. It isn’t easy, nobody ever said it was. But that is how we improve. And improving is how we survive.

Astute readers will observe that I have come full-circle, I have carried you back to the very first paragraph at the top of this post. Preening looks, at first glance, like a token payment with which we have to contend to continue living in a civilized society. Like a bridge toll or something. That is not what preening is. Preening is acceptance of everything that kills us, and a rejection of everything that nourishes us and protects us. Preening is anti-life. It is pro-death.

But that’s heady talk for a Saturday night, so I’m going to commit this to the ether and slap some steaks on the grill. No, I don’t give a good jolly fuck what anybody thinks of it.

These days I’m getting e-mails quite regularly from the democrats, about the scary guys the Republicans are about to run for President. If I don’t want that to happen I’d better send in some money! But what’s fascinating to me is they so often avoid mentioning what exactly would be wrong with a President Trump, President Rubio, President Cruz…compared to Hillary and Bernie, the two they’re trying to sell.

So it’s finally happened. They’re going with the “Skip the details, we’ll stick with mockery and ridicule for you if you don’t do what we want” technique — on their own supporters. Chip in the cash. Or we’ll make fun of you for being a racist/bigot/chauvinist/homophobe/retrosexual whatever…

It’s odd. Voters have long had a revulsion against political sloganeering that is invested too heavily in “Here’s what’s wrong with that OTHER guy…” Of course, if the voters voted as if that revulsion mattered, politicians and their public-relations arms would very quickly stop using that angle, and that’s not what we’re seeing happening at all. So it’s an ineffectual revulsion. But it’s still there. People talk about it often, and they’re not just making up stuff about it, or about their very sincere dislike. And their worry over it, that if there were positive attributes found in the candidate being sold they’d be hearing about them, so there must not be any; that is sincere too. The democrats must realize this.

And here they are going full tilt. And…failing to deliver on what people didn’t want anyway. “Forget about why you should vote for Hillary or Bernie, we’d rather talk about what’s wrong with those other guys! Except we won’t.” They claim to be “science”‘s BFFs. How strong can one’s tethering to reality remain, over time, when everything worth saying falls short of worthiness of actually being said? When every little observation made, isn’t made at all? When all communication is reduced to winks, nods, rib-elbowing, “ya know”?

Surely they must realize this is not good for them. Perhaps they have taken my advice.

What is liberalism, anyway? The question has been debated and debated around here, and other places too. No, you can’t just go look it up in a dictionary and believe the “experts.” It’s an impossible question to answer until such time as one establishes the level at which one is attempting to define the word. Are we talking about achievement, or effort? Are we talking about political ideology, value systems, or just base human impulses?

If we do consult the experts, are we going to be careful to purge their ranks of any liberals before we put our faith in them? We should. Liberals have a habit of defining liberalism according to what their opponents believe, and if there is any brand of ignorance on the planet more pervasive and eminent than any other, it is the ignorance liberals have about what motivates their opposition. They don’t have a clue as to what motivates conservatives. And they’re proud of not having a clue. So we shouldn’t believe what liberals have to say about what liberalism is. They don’t know a great deal about that either.

Later I elaborated…

Liberalism is an addiction. You don’t ask an addict for his opinion about what his addiction is, or is not. You don’t ask a liberal what conservatives think. The ignorance liberals have about their opposition is a special kind of ignorance. They don’t know, they’re proud of not knowing. They don’t care to learn. They’re proud of not caring.

I dusted this off recently in a comment:

Liberals should not summarize the viewpoints of their opposition on behalf of their opposition, because liberals don’t understand their own opposition. They’re proud of not knowing.

Rationale being…

It is a mental enfeeblement…We do not allow alcoholics to define for the rest of us what alcoholism is.

It is the ideology of the failed. When we pay attention to what’s going on in our political system and seek to form solid and qualified opinions about what’s happening and what we should do about it, we are confronted with a very specific set of challenges. We are challenged to elevate reason above emotion. Also, to think over a longer term of time. And, to do as much for the public good as we can, while burning away as little freedom as possible.

This stuff we today call “liberalism” is a grab bag of ill-advised actions, and some epithets, packaged up for presentation to an audience of opinionateds who have failed these challenges. All of them. “Blah blah blah…should be free!” Or “Is a right! Darn it!” And “You’re a bigot, and a sexist and a homophobe.” No seriously, that’s their entire inventory after you get done with “illegal/unjust war.” It’s just a huge smörgåsbord of unmeasurable, unverifiable “shoulds.” Fifteen an hour! Or me and my friends will get all stomp-footy. Ban these guns! We’ve decided there’s no use for them, even though we’ve never owned guns and never will.

Raise that guy’s taxes! Because we don’t like him.

Now that having all been said. It occurs to me lately — in spite of this tempest-in-a-teapot that is our presidential election — that perhaps my problems with liberals have little-to-nothing to do with liberalism itself. I’ve been noticing a problem I’ve had, going back years and years, having to do with arguing. Supposedly I’m the catalyst of this problem — “Morgan loves to argue.” But, problem: I’m seeing a lot of other people saddled with the same rep. Do they love to argue? It does not seem that this is the case. And I also see arguments arise when I have no intention of causing them to arise. I recall a few very specific incidents from recent years, in which I could see the arguments coming from miles and miles off in the distance — on a couple of occasions, I actually said something about it — and had no desire to see it happen. The common theme that emerges is that the match is struck when someone notices something. And then the ensuing inferno is all the fault of the person who did the noticing. None of the blame, it seems, goes to the person who actually turns it into an argument…

What really throws the trolley off the tracks, though, is: These people like me, who “love to argue” and actually are guilty of noticing things that make the arguments happen…interact with other people, and when they interact with other people they go on noticing things. This doesn’t cause arguments. Also: The people who were victimized by having these things noticed that shouldn’t have been noticed, and with a hearty “What??” strike the match that brings about the inferno, which is then blamed on others — they also interact with other people. And there, more of this arguing happens. So if we’re looking at common elements, the observation does not hold true.

Conservatives, also, do not love to pay attention to politics. At least, not the ones I know. We do not “love to argue.” I notice a particular passage in my last post struck a chord:

[Conservatives] say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball…it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

Yes, this has been on my mind a great deal…it would seem, were I to be sucked into the void of space tonight and someone analyzed these pages to indulge in some sort of post-mortem psych profiling, the picture that emerges is not one of a man who actually loves to argue. Rather the reverse, it seems to me…

The conservatives who clean the crap out of the sewer lines and lay the foundations upon which buildings will be erected, that will house all sorts of publicly funded liberal-egghead think tanks, have come to the unpleasant realization that previous generations never quite learned: They have to make the time for politics. They’ve got to attend to it, as if it’s yet another chicken with eggs not yet gathered, otherwise everything else they’ve done is for nothing. They’ve got to write the code that works, they’ve got to build the diesel engines that successfully contain the explosions, they’ve got to manufacture the action boxes for 9mm pistols that don’t rupture under the stress, and do all the other things that liberals can never do. Then, they have to participate in politics like the liberals do. And the conservatives have to grow all our food.
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So conservatives have to make things work…food that can really be eaten, code that can really be run, combustion chambers that really do contain explosions…then they have to make time to argue with liberals who don’t have to worry about any of that. Wrestle with the pigs in the mud.

I’m sure to someone on the outside, it looks a lot like “love of arguing” because there’s not much evidence of the resentment churning away, inside, that one should expect to see. Well trust me, the resentment is there. It is concealed behind the most opaque of shrouds, and that is a shroud of resignation and despair. Sure, it would be much easier to provide for this retirement, write that code, prove one’s worth, embiggen one’s salary throughout the very few years available, if one didn’t have to argue with people who think Caitlyn Jenner is some sort of extraordinarily brave not-man-something-else…or that there are going to be more jobs to be worked if the minimum wage is higher…or that clock boy “invented” a clock. Well, there’s a saying for that: “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t have to bump his ass on the ground all the time.” In other words, “if” isn’t worth anything. Cleaning the shit out of the sewer lines would be so much easier if the shit cleaned itself. Well…true…but you can’t do anything with that. The hens won’t bring you their own eggs, either. What of it?

It’s just an additional job we have to do. Yeah sure we “love it,” the way a Norwegian loves Lutefisk at Christmas. Except Lutefisk is something to be associated with pleasant childhood memories, and the Savior of all mankind being incarnated in human form to gift us with everlasting life. Arguing with liberals just has the disgusting slimy jiggly form, the revolting translucency, the unappetizing soapy taste, without any of those endearing attributes to make up for it. Yes, we partake. Pay for it, even. No, that doesn’t mean we have a taste for it. We’re doing what must be done. We’ve tried not-doing-it, and we’re not happy with how that went.

Hopefully, future generations will want to know about these times. If something truly out of the ordinary doesn’t happen further down the road, I’d say they most certainly should. There’s an awful lot of bickering, and it doesn’t just seem to be that way because now-is-now. Yes, it is a valid point, and verifiable as fact, that in the olden days politicians got into physical contests. Duels to the death, even, occasionally.

But now there are three things happening. First is the “blogging”…which we could, and should, recognize as any means of mass communication linked to the newer technology. Seems unhealthy. Viewed up close, it is. All that time burned away by someone? And all it does is start fights, no minds get changed. I agree with all that. But it’s a lesson in what’s called “seeing the forest for the trees”; you have to take a few steps back, think long term. Blogging is the healthy part, because now our trans-society discourse is capable of some level of dialogue. Of rebuttal, and counter-rebuttal. Pre-blogging — oh, let’s just be honest about this, can we for just a moment or two? — that was not the case. Uncle Walter told us “And that’s the way it is,” and that’s the way it was…

Second thing is what has happened to the liberals. They still want to get even for the “Florida debacle” of 2000. Before that, they were about ending prejudices, and feeding and clothing the hungry. True, a lot of their measures achieved the opposite of these things and the liberals didn’t very much care. But afterward, getting even with conservatives is an objective that has stolen the limelight. The shift is subtle, but it is there. There’s a difference between — “I want to get these people health insurance, and I must defeat conservatives because they’re getting in my way of doing that” — and — “I want to make these conservatives look bad in the public view, and to do that I can get the word out that they, for some reason, don’t want these people to get health insurance.” Those are actually two different things. One is overly simplistic but determined, like a dog chasing a car that wouldn’t know what to do if it caught the car. The other is just plain vengeful.

And the third thing is what’s happened to conservatives. They still don’t have time for all this fighting-about-politics stuff. They have work to do. In fact, very often The Futility sets in, and they say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball..it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

And perhaps there is a fourth factor, concealed from view. If the liberal movement consisted entirely of those with political ambitions, who want the economy to tank so there’s more widespread feeling of despair and it’s easier to elect democrats, it would be easily defeated. It’s not. A lot of liberals care greatly about the plight of the poor, illiterate, the hungry — they just don’t appreciate the story of socially-upward mobility. Every now and then you see them exposed to such a story, of someone born into real poverty who made it big. It rolls off ’em like water off a duck’s back. Doesn’t fit the narrative. They’re Narrative People. But, good-hearted. They want to help the less fortunate; they’re just not too keen on the less fortunate helping themselves. They want to feel needed. If the liberal movement consisted entirely of them, perhaps it would also be easily defeated. What we’re fighting is a mix of the two. And it could be that while these two halves have always been there, combined they have become a more potent force in recent times because the two halves have learned new things about communicating with each other. I don’t know. It’s a maybe. It’s not worth mentioning even, except for one thing: The fact that these two halves, under the surface have entirely different goals, may be the key to their eventual defeat.

Getting back to the subject at hand. We live in interesting times because communication is working better — blogging, in fact, may rescue the general level of literacy from the disaster heaped upon it by text messaging. We have aggravation and confusion on the conservative side, and real, hot, vengeful wrath on the liberal side, still wanting to get even for a Supreme Court case with a decade-and-a-half worth of dust on it.

What we have learned, so far, is this: Conservatives and liberals don’t think the same way. One of my friends over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging was amused by the graphic to the right, noting that he was wondering as a child — as was I — how Wimpy ever got his burgers. This is a clue into how conservatives and liberals don’t see things the same way.

Liberals see a guy who wants a burger; or, needs a burger. Now you can tell from just a casual glance at Wimpy that he does not need a burger, whether you’re a conservative or a liberal. So this is not scientific proof, but it is in the realm of the scientific, that liberals fail to distinguish needs from wants. And whatever gaps remain between that & real science are okay, because the conclusion is not in doubt. “Blah blah blah should be free,” they intone, endlessly listing this-and-that before the word “should.” The items are a clumsy hodge-podge mix-up between needs and wants, and the liberals don’t seem to know this, let alone care. On Planet Liberal, the idea is good, because it’s a winning idea. It’s an idea likely to win arguments. But is it true? Does anything with the word “should” in it, have even the capability of ever being verifiable as true? How would you verify?

Conservatives see the “should be free” thing the same way they see Wimpy bullshitting people about his burgers: What sort of system is being put in place here? Liberals have had a great time portraying conservatism as simple-mindedness, a sort of phobia against trying anything new. It’s a bit of propaganda that has worked well for them, you can’t blame them for continuing to use it. But it’s the opposite that is the truth; it is the conservatives who are the more capable thinkers. Conservatives see how things work moment-to-moment, and ask, Is It Sustainable? “Should be free” means someone pays, somewhere. Just as when Wimpy says he’ll gladly pay you Tuesday, Tuesday’s coming. It’s the liberals who are simple-minded, viewing all of life as a snapshot.

In this argument between conservatives and liberals, what is different is a missing dimension.

But that’s not all that’s different. Liberals are so concerned about winning-the-argument, they very regularly neglect the argument:

Dear Liberal,

Can we talk? Of course not. Why bother?
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When I question why we do not shut down hate mosques, you call me Islamophobic.

When I question why a baker should be forced to make a bake a cake for a lesbian marriage that she does not believe in, you call me homophobic.

When I question why we should not follow Trump and Make America Great Again, you call me fascist.

And after all that name-calling, you then dare say I am judgmental.
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We have seen trillions poured into the ghettos only to have young black men kill young black men. The liberal answer is to take guns from the people who do not live in ghettos. [T]wo-thirds of federal spending is welfare and Social Security. The liberal answer is to pour more money on the bonfire.

My answer is to try something new.

But you don’t want to hear it…

The mistake the liberals have made here is grave; they have defined “truth” to be whatever it takes to win an argument. It seems to be outside their capacity of understanding to realize this essentially severs whatever connection they had to the metaphysical. It essentially jettisons the idea that there is a truth grinding away, above us, beneath us, among us, meandering, writhing, going about its business entirely unconcerned about what people think. With liberals, it is all about the narrative because the narrative is what’s needed to win an argument.

This Faustian pact they’ve made imbues them with a strange intellectual ability conservatives are lacking. But it is not an ability to be coveted in any way. It is the ability to hold multiple thoughts in one’s head, contradictory with each other and utterly irreconcilable, and to take them all seriously. One of my favorites in recent years, that truly illustrates the lunacy at work, has been a quartet:

1. Premise: Liberals are better at learning than conservatives.

2. Premise: ObamaCare is named after & put together by a black guy, so everybody who is opposed to it is a racist.

3. Premise: Liberals have been working tirelessly, for generations, to banish racism.

4. Fact: In all these years, approval of the ACA has never risen above a bare plurality.

Put it all together and think on it in a healthy way, as only a conservative can, and what is the conclusion? It is quite unavoidable. Liberals need to change something, drastically, about this fight they have been engaging to get rid of racism. They have not been doing it the right way, and a drastic change in direction is required.

Do liberals agree with that? Not only no, but Hell No. This proves they are insane. Insane or…thinking about the metaphysical truth so casually, they may as well not be thinking about it at all, which produces the same results as if they were insane.

That is my one favorite way of demonstrating the insanity. But someone has put together a list of many others, based on the Socratic method.

Seeking genuine knowledge rather than mere victory in an argument, Socrates used his questions to cross-examine the hypotheses, assumptions, and axioms that subconsciously shaped the opinions of his opponents, drawing out the contradictions and inconsistencies they relied on.
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The resulting list may not exactly fit the definition of Socratic questioning. But in my defense, even Socrates couldn’t possibly envision the scale of absurdity a political argument could reach in the 21st century.
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Once a politician labels the truth as hate speech, can anyone trust him to speak the truth afterward?
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If the poor in America have things that people in other countries can only dream about, why is there a movement to make America more like those other countries?
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Why is the media so outspoken about sex abusers being priests, but avoids calling them homosexual pedophiles? Who are they afraid to offend?
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How come the unselfish Americans hate their country out of personal frustrations, while the selfish ones defend America with their lives?
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Why do those who object to tampering with the environment approve of tampering with the economy? Isn’t the economy also a fragile ecosystem where a sudden change can trigger a devastating chain reaction?
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How exactly does dependency on the government increase “people power”?
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And finally, if all opinions are equal, how come a liberal who disagrees with a conservative is open-minded, but a conservative who disagrees with a liberal is a bigot?

That’s just a small sampling. You may note that all these contradictions have been lying around for years, waiting to be noticed by either a liberal or by another party who is seeking to challenge a liberal, who would then comment on it. The noticing has been happening, and the commenting has been happening. Liberals — generally speaking — have not changed their intended travel, either in bearing or in vector.

They are insane, or may as well be. But at the same time, they’re like a house fire, or something that may become a house fire. They cannot be left alone. Their unhealthy thinking affects us. That’s the whole point of what they’re doing, if it didn’t affect others they wouldn’t be doing it. But if they could think on such things in a way that produced good results, and learn things they didn’t know before from the process of implementation, they wouldn’t be liberals.

From The Barrister at Maggie’s Farm, we learn of an article at one “Quillette”:

The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
written by Brian D Earp

Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of formerly inscrutable phenomena. Notwithstanding recent concerns about sloppy research, small sample sizes, and challenges in replicating major findings — concerns I share and which I have written about at length — I still believe that the scientific method is the best available tool for getting at empirical truth. Or to put it a slightly different way (if I may paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous remark about democracy): it is perhaps the worst tool, except for all the rest.

In other words, science is flawed. And scientists are people too. While it is true that most scientists — at least the ones I know and work with — are hell-bent on getting things right, they are not therefore immune from human foibles.

Yes, we do seem to be having the same troubles with our scientists that we have with women: They’re people, and people have faults. Just avoid the absolute statements about members of a class being always in the wrong, or never in the wrong, and you should be fine.

Should.

But…

There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science. When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.

There is something else going on here. Humans try to do, on any given day, all sorts of things some of which are scientific while some are not. All these humans have human faults. But all of these attempts are not riddled with “veritable truckloads of bullshit,” as we so often see the “science” is.

Much of the problem comes from without. Science offers a tasty morsel for the predatory. If you’re in an argument and you can say “science,” you get to impose obligatory thought upon the opposition, which has long been a lasting temptation among those who have holes in their souls. Science sides with me! Now bow down!

When the moniker of “science” is used for no better end than to prevail in an argument, what results from the concoction is neither good science nor good argument. Science, as I have so often had to remind others, is not a credential or a membership club; it is a method. As for arguing, it is a test. We all like to win our arguments, and of course losing one is detestable, but if you want to win all of the time whenever you have arguments there is a prerequisite: You’ve got to do some arguing.

Science has become less trustworthy, I cannot help noticing, during a time in which people need to be reminded of these two essential truisms, more-or-less all of the time. We see a lot of people invoking the word “science” without using, or making reference to anybody who’s using, science as a method. And we have a lot of people who want to win all the arguments without doing any arguing.

For this reason, I see science as mostly as pristine as we have known it to be — on the inside. I see it as under attack from outside hostiles.

But, then there is this…

There are many ways to produce scientific bullshit. One way is to assert that something has been “proven,” “shown,” or “found” and then cite, in support of this assertion, a study that has actually been heavily critiqued (fairly and in good faith, let us say, although that is not always the case, as we soon shall see) without acknowledging any of the published criticisms of the study or otherwise grappling with its inherent limitations.

That is contamination from within, and it does happen. What also happens from within, sends Mr. Earp on a wild tear many paragraphs long, which cannot be pruned down much by way of my amateur editorial skills.

I am referring to a certain sustained, long-term publication strategy, apparently deliberately carried out (although motivations can be hard to pin down), that results in a stupefying, and in my view dangerous, paper-pile of scientific bullshit. It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye — you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it—but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.

I don’t know what to call this insidious tactic. But I can identify its end result, which I suspect researchers of every stripe will be able to recognize from their own sub-disciplines: it is the hyper-partisan and polarized, but by all outward appearances, dispassionate and objective, “systematic review” of a controversial subject.

To explain how this tactic works, I am going make up a hypothetical researcher who engages in it, and walk you through his “process,” step by step. Let’s call this hypothetical researcher Lord Voldemort. While everything I am about to say is based on actual events, and on the real-life behavior of actual researchers, I will not be citing any specific cases…

In this story, Lord Voldemort is a prolific proponent of a certain controversial medical procedure, call it X, which many have argued is both risky and unethical. It is unclear whether Lord Voldemort has a financial stake in X, or some other potential conflict of interest. But in any event he is free to press his own opinion. The problem is that Lord Voldemort doesn’t play fair. In fact, he is so intent on defending this hypothetical intervention that he will stop at nothing to flood the literature with arguments and data that appear to weigh decisively in its favor.

As the first step in his long-term strategy, he scans various scholarly databases. If he sees any report of an empirical study that does not put X in an unmitigatedly positive light, he dashes off a letter-to-the-editor attacking the report on whatever imaginable grounds. Sometimes he makes a fair point — after all, most studies do have limitations — but often what he raises is a quibble, couched in the language of an exposé.
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The subterfuge does not end there.

The next step is for our anti-hero to write a “systematic review”…He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted by experts” — namely, by himself and his close collaborators, typically citing their own contestable critiques — while at the same time he fails to find any flaws whatsoever in studies that make his pet procedure seem on balance beneficial.

The result of this artful exercise is a heavily skewed benefit-to-risk ratio in favor of X, which can now be cited by unsuspecting third-parties. Unless you know what Lord Voldemort is up to, that is, you won’t notice that the math has been rigged.
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A similar phenomenon can play out in debates in medicine. In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.

That last is illustrative of a dire situation that confronts us, a situation that wasn’t here a generation ago. Science has begun to collide with politics. Perhaps it is more precise to say: Bad science has begun to collude with bad politics.

Think back to decades ago when our liberals commanded us to question authority, as opposed to agreeing with authority all of the time to prove we’re not racists. I don’t mean in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, I mean more like Vietnam. In those days, politics became the dominion of liberals. Conservative parents wanted their liberal kids to get haircuts, and jobs. The liberal kids wanted to protest. From this split came a situation in which the liberal kids concentrated on getting, keeping, and using a voice, and the passion persisted until they were no longer kids. Conservatives, meanwhile, figured out the chickens weren’t going to gather their own eggs, the roofs weren’t going to repair themselves…they didn’t have time for this shit.

Throughout this time, you see the liberals still lost elections. But they lost them after having won the previous elections, after the public got a good clear view of the harm that comes from liberal policies. These decades represent repeated laps around the unnecessary-mistake track; laps taken by, unfortunately, the entire country.

Now we are at a critical juncture. The conservatives who clean the crap out of the sewer lines and lay the foundations upon which buildings will be erected, that will house all sorts of publicly funded liberal-egghead think tanks, have come to the unpleasant realization that previous generations never quite learned: They have to make the time for politics. They’ve got to attend to it, as if it’s yet another chicken with eggs not yet gathered, otherwise everything else they’ve done is for nothing. They’ve got to write the code that works, they’ve got to build the diesel engines that successfully contain the explosions, they’ve got to manufacture the action boxes for 9mm pistols that don’t rupture under the stress, and do all the other things that liberals can never do. Then, they have to participate in politics like the liberals do. And the conservatives have to grow all our food.

Can you imagine a liberal being a potato farmer? It would never work. He would decide “this soil is good for growing potatoes,” and then he would do what liberals do all the time: Promulgate the narrative. The very last thing to figure into his actions would be the lingering question of whether or not the soil is any good…and come harvest time, there’d be no potatoes. If you want a big bundle of excuses about how everything is Republicans’ fault, liberals are your guys. Or, gals, or zhers or whatever. But if you want something to actually work then that’s not where you go. It’s not their bag, baby.

If liberals ever toil away under any sort of standard, their first move is to re-negotiate the standard. They’re so busy re-defining things, they’ve made themselves into strangers to the concept of ever getting any actual work done.

So conservatives have to make things work…food that can really be eaten, code that can really be run, combustion chambers that really do contain explosions…then they have to make time to argue with liberals who don’t have to worry about any of that. Wrestle with the pigs in the mud.

What has to happen with the science is the same thing as what has to happen with the politics. The issue is control of the theater of operations. For a generation or two now, the politics have been monopolized not quite so much by liberals, or conservatives, but rather by those who loathe definitions. What’s happening with science is that this rot has spread. We’re seeing the same things happen there that we’ve been seeing elsewhere in years past.

Statements about “X = Y” are no longer X = Y. They’re more like: If we presume A, B, C and D then it could be inferred that X is functionally equivalent to Y. And then it falls to those we call “conservatives” to ask the questions adults should be expected to ask, like: Why, pray tell, should we be presuming A, B, C and D? And if X is treated like Y when it’s not really the same thing, resulting in a cost of Z, who pays that?

Was reading back over severian‘s recap of something…

I’ve often said that the fastest way to expose a leftist talking point is to take it completely seriously. For instance, lefties claim that all sorts of economic problems are caused by “deregulation.” Watch what happens when you ask them, “which regulations?” They don’t have the slightest idea. “Wall Street fatcats make obscene profits!” What’s the profit obscenity threshold, to the nearest $1,000?…

I’m drawing a blank here. Many have made this observation before, that there are arguments out there so fragile that they require outright-denial from the opposition in order to survive; merely take those arguments seriously and you devastate them structurally.

Raising the minimum wage is another such argument. “Okay you’ve convinced me! $15 an hour! In fact, let’s raise it to $30, and why not $60?” This is reductio ad absurdum. At some point, the advocate of the errant argument will have to admit to the deleterious effect the policy called out by its opponents, which is productive because after that there is agreement that some line has to be drawn somewhere. After that, discussion can proceed about the where and why and how…and, what’s the functional difference between fifteen and a thousand? What’s the moral difference? What’s the defining difference?

Hopefully, the liberal might see the conservative viewpoint, which is that the “How dare you tell me what I should pay” umbrage must begin at a penny an hour, because it can begin nowhere else. (Tellingly, that’s also the conservative position about when life begins, but that’s a whole different topic.) That’s not too likely though. Devastating an argument so quickly and so completely is not unlike pouring ice cold water into a glass emerging too soon from the dry cycle in the dishwasher. The likely outcome is a bunch of BadFeelz and contention and consternation…which, in a populated environment, is going to be blamed on the person who did this “devastate it by taking it seriously” thing every time. This happens a lot. Liberal arguments are incubated over time, and they’re incubated in environments in which people aren’t responsible for their bad thoughts, bad deeds or bad ideas. Someone else is to blame. Always. That’s at the heart of liberalism itself, on the philosophical plane.

Speaking of philosophical planes. Some of what belongs in The Blog That Nobody Reads, will now & then start out on The Hello Kitty of Blogging, which is a bad habit I have. Not that there isn’t a method to the madness. Jesus said to go where the sinners are. There is also value to it, too, occasionally; I am sometimes baffled by the storm of “likes” I get by things that I was sure would amount to nothing more than wind-shouting. This observation about the recently departed Justice Scalia’s viewpoint on textualist interpretation of the Constitution, to my great surprise, drew ten likes within a few hours, most of those within just a few minutes…

The disagreements between conservatives and liberals exist on many layers, and some of these layers are philosophical. They have to do with different recognitions of truth itself. This goes all the way back to the founding of the republic.

Back then, the “liberal” argument had to do with a “liberal” interpretation of “all men are created equal.” Then, as now, the liberals did their thinking backwards — “Okay, our conclusion is to be that slavery is allowable even though the document that declares our independence has this ‘all men created equal’ thing in it…how do we get from here, to there?” And then, as now, they came up with a whole bunch of “if”. Like, If we accept that all of the legal authority is tied up in the Constitution, which just has “WE THE PEOPLE” and not that business of all-created-equal…and If we proceed from the premise that these aren’t people at all, they’re property…THEN we can reach the conclusion we want. And keep our slaves. Aren’t we smart??

See how nothing has really changed?

And then, as now, the whole thing was undone by conservatives who asked what they continue to ask now: “Uh…why should we assume these things? Also, if you’ve got these rationalizations to deprive that person of his rights today, why am I not to assume you will be coming after mine, tomorrow?”

So I go on some rant about all the hot teevee weather girls being in other countries, while America’s weather girls look like boring old banker-ladies about to deny your home equity loan…nobody bats an eye, I guess I’m marching down that road all by myself. How come that is, anyway? “Weather girls,” in America, have to look like they’re at work? At a stuffy law firm or a bank? Who decided that? Looks like laziness…shouldn’t we be calling them “weather women” if we’re playing the don’t-tick-off-the-feminists game? But what’s wrong with a weather girl who’s pleasing to the eye? How come that’s a crime? And only in the USA?

But I get philosophical about interpretation of the Constitution, here comes an avalanche of the coveted “like.” You know, go figure. Anyway, to re-emerge from the bunny trail within the bunny trail…that’s the allure of social media. Fact is, none of us really know for sure what’s going to happen next. We just didn’t accomplish as much, before the medium came along, as we thought we had. We don’t really know that much about each other. I suppose that’s a good thing in a way. If we figured everybody out, and instantly, there’d be no desire to know more.

On the “aren’t we smart” thing. This is the truly toxic thing about liberalism. So enamored have liberals become of the tired old litany…”We can see a dimension or two past the quaint, flat world of conservatives, as is evidenced by our disagreement with them over here“…like, the above-mentioned minimum wage. AND the thing about “If we’re all free, then that must include slaves.” It often lures them into a bad habit of their own: Figuring out what common sense would say, and then lunging for the opposite.

Barack Obama: “You didn’t build that.”

Joe Biden: “We have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt.”

Ekspurts: Higher minimum wage results in more jobs.

There are more examples to be found and not much would be accomplished through any effort to add them here. It’s a persistent pattern. Liberals find out what common sense would say, choose something that goes in the opposite direction, and then start cherry-picking the evidence to support this conclusion that goes against common sense. As noted in the Facebook post, they do this exactly backwards, starting with the conclusion they want to reach first and then figuring out how they can get there. But “there” is inclined to be something antithetical to common sense. So the big takeaway is: They’re doing more-or-less twice as much damage as they would be doing, if “there” was a position chosen at random.

They end up painting themselves into a corner this way. Usually, the way that works is they find themselves propagating a talking point about “right wing extremism,” when to anybody who takes the time to find out what this adversarial right-wing position is, they’re going to find — far from any sort of extremism — a textbook case of sensible moderation. In the case of minimum wage, what they find is the foundational principle of economics itself, that when something costs more you need to expect fewer willing people are going to buy it.

But my question is: What is the name for these arguments? Arguments that are so fragile, that you completely ruin them just by taking them seriously. “Yes feminist sister, you are right; gender is a big nothing, an artificial societal construct, an illusion. And one of these genders is so much better than the other.”

I always assumed there was a name. We have names for the rebuttals, like the reductio ad absurdum mentioned above. But what about these overly-delicate, beached-whale arguments themselves, structurally incapable of bearing their own weight?

Related: I left it out on purpose because it shouldn’t be necessary…that was kind of the point. But I suppose I should go ahead and link to the actual facts regarding this business of “Experts say raising the minimum wage causes faster job growth.” As stated before, the position being taken is essentially that you have more buying when the price of something is pushed up, so we don’t need to get into some huge back-and-forth about whether our experiences would bear this out, in a situation that could be isolated from all other factors. It’s not worth the argument, that’s just not how economics works.

I’m pushing fifty, so these comic book movies are never going to make me completely happy; the people making them shouldn’t try. They know how their bread is buttered and it comes from kids. Young kids. Way young, too young to understand the value of a dollar I’m afraid…

There is a problem here. Although my hopes for this film remain high, and “Batfleck” is starting to win me over a bit, I can’t shake the perception that something is missing and the members of the audience, as well as the producers, remain a bit in the dark about what it might be. Perhaps I’m the only one frustrated so there’s really no problem. Then again, perhaps I’m the only one frustrated because I can see something. And don’t we all want to get a bit more enjoyment out of our movies, especially our comic book superhero movies?

Let’s think on this a bit. Why is DC so much better than Marvel? Hey wait…come back…

We’ve gone over this ground a bit before. Marvel heroes — apart from the Fantastic Four and Captain America — do a lot of whining. The problem is not the frequency with which they do it, or how many of them do it. The problem is that this whine-theme is ever-present, like a bad smell. There are ways to avoid acknowledging it, sure, but the real problem is…emphasis on…the source of the tension of the story. Stories have to have tension. They have to make you wonder what’s going to happen next, or else they fail. In the Marvel universe, generally speaking that is the tension. “The public won’t accept me.”

Back to the central-three within the Justice League. This public-won’t-accept-me thing is more of an exception than a rule. Sometimes it happens when the writer is young, overly-indoctrinated, starry eyeballs filled up with X-Men story-lines. Government trying to make up its mind about the JL, public isn’t quite sure if they’re friends or foes. Maybe they have too much power. Such a storyline has potential but it’s been done too much, and elsewhere. Check out the old Super Friends cartoons, that wasn’t the tension that drove the stories. Alright sure they were dumb stories, but still. Point is, this “Let’s have DC borrow a page from X-Men” thing is a relatively new phenomenon, and whatever staying power it has, has not been earned through actual success.

It seems, however, that that’s not what is driving Dawn of Justice. What I’m seeing here is: Is Batman getting way too old for this shit? And how can he possibly have any hope for survival, let alone victory, in a head-to-head against Superman? And what’s up with this girl in a gladiator costume? I hope that’s enough to carry the movie. It probably is, with the characters being introduced…

But there’s the problem. Movies being carried aloft, across the finish line, on the strength of characters being introduced. We pony up the cash and hope the lift is sufficient to overcome the drag.

I’m pushing fifty, unique in my vision of a certain problem; because I’m unique (and relatively ancient), perhaps there is no problem and I’m just yet another old man yelling at a cloud. But still, it’s my blog, my show here. Once I write it, it’s up to the reader to figure out whether I deserve indulging. You can always skip.

There are other DC superheroes who are not Marvel superheroes. They don’t wallow away in their angst about being mutants and how society will never accept them. But, they’re not Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman. Their stories are, frankly, a bit boring, they’re not the Big Three and it isn’t possible for them to take on that stature, ever. Those three have something in common. And I’m afraid the “Dawn of Justice” movie is missing out on what it is.

They are transplants. Fate moved all three of them, from something, to something else. All three of them had destinies laid out for them that were mundane and halcyon. And then something happened, completely out of their control. Except for Wonder Woman who did some of the choosing, but not with completely open eyes. She was taking a leap of faith.

These heroes have enduring questions. Superman didn’t know he was a transplant until close to adulthood, but on the way he had to notice certain things seemed a bit off. With the big reveal that he never was of this world, and his puzzle solved, his questions are only just starting. Poor fellow has no idea what to do with Lois Lane, who is in love with him but only when he’s in costume. He really wants her to love Clark Kent. This is why, in every incarnation, the stories start getting lame as soon as Lois finds out the truth. After that, they’re just “Mr. and Mrs. Superhero” on their latest adventure.

Wonder Woman is wondering why when she walks down the sidewalk, everyone’s looking at her funny. And why are they wearing so much? What’s up with this thing called “money” and how do you get it? She also has the hundred or so other questions causing such confusion in Mork from Ork, and Jeannie, and My Favorite Martian, and the Third Rock guys…

Batman doesn’t even know for sure if he wants to survive the next encounter, he’s trying to figure out if he’s suicidal. He is perhaps the most fascinating of all of them because he’s teetering on the edge of sanity. The goal that keeps him in check is to clean up Gotham, but what sort of a goal is that? He’s never going to get it done, can’t even assess whether he’s taking two steps back for every one forward. And he may very well be like the dog chasing the car, wouldn’t have any idea what to do if he caught it.

All the other DC heroes are “real” comic book heroes. They have some sort of state of Nirvana, a situational calming, to which all objects and states are to be returned by the time the reader reaches Page 22. That can stay intriguing for a bit, or it can go on indefinitely; but it cannot do both. That’s why these three are the best of the three. They don’t belong where fate has put them, and as such not a one among the three has any genuine restful state. This is not tragedy. It’s just something that approaches the reality of what we’re living, out here. That’s why we identify, at least partially, with them, in ways we cannot identify with Green Lantern, Flash, Wendy, Marvin, Wonder Twins…

But who knows? Maybe the movie will catch on to this…or, provide an adequate replacement. Anyhow. That’s how I see it. It’s a voice from the past; whether it’s foolishness from the past best abandoned, or wisdom from the past cluing in the present generation on why they’re not getting the enjoyment out of the genre we used to know, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide.

Update: Maybe the makers of the Wonder Woman movie kinda get it…

I have a current friend and former work colleague who is very much into football. This time of year, there is occasional friction between us if I don’t keep my opinions to myself about it. Which I suppose is fair. It’s a pastime, and as such it isn’t about Republicans, democrats, religious denominations, secular types. In fact as I understand it, that’s part of the appeal: People from all walks of life come together. Unless they’re rooting for opposite teams, but there’s a certain togetherness involved in that.

I recognize and respect the stillness of this pond, into which the “fishermen” do not want any rocks thrown. This Beyoncé person, however (video ad auto plays behind the link) evidently is not that considerate…

We had some of our annual dust-up when the football fan pounced on me for not keeping my opinion to myself. He’s since figured out I’m on his side on this thing, my point being that football should just be football. And although I didn’t watch the game, you really can’t help but pick up the aftershocks of what happened at halftime, and it isn’t hard to detect a certain invasion underway. Is football about an approaching revolution, a razing of civilization to the ground so another civilization can be put in its place? No, and it shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be about keeping the one we’ve got, either. It should be just about football. And yes, my opinion about what football should be, ends there. But I can tell Beyoncé went over the line. That’s part & parcel of living under a rule; you aren’t ignorant when others have violated it, and she certainly did.

But this is part of a long-standing trend: Things like football, that have nothing to do with political statements, being trespassed-upon by persons who have political statements to make. I suppose it is in the nature of all political statements to give it a try, find more ways to establish outlets, get the message communicated. It’s going to be that way, and by that I mean until the sun goes nova. It’s hard to envision something as being a problem if there’s no solution possible. So political elements encroaching upon non-political things, or at least trying to do so — while regrettable — is regrettable like gravity. Occasionally it’s inconvenient, but what of it?

The problem is that the rest of us have a certain tolerance for this, and it’s a selective tolerance. It favors the negative, the destructive. Those elements within politics that seek to build nothing, and desire to destroy much. Not that we’re ignoring it entirely. A firestorm has been lit by Beyoncé’s so-called “performance”; but, that’s not rejection, that’s just noise and excitement which is doing little besides raising the profile. To see what I mean by this, try this thought exercise: A halftime show imploring the football fans to turn to God and Jesus to solve their problems. Or: Just to work hard at keeping promises, being better husbands to their wives and better fathers to their children. That would inspire not just controversy, but rejection. There would be apologies. And heads detached. It wouldn’t find the level of tolerance Beyoncé’s halftime number did manage to find.

How did we get here? This has become routine for us. Destructive political agendas invade realms that are apolitical, that provokes a big nothing, maybe an “aw gee I wish she hadn’t-a done that” — at most. A political agenda that has to do with people working hard, telling the truth, teaching children to be productive members of society, commits a similar infraction…now you’re talking a completely different situation, a whole octave higher on the pitch scale of WeShallNotPutUpWithThat and WantToSeeBloodOnTheWater. It’s been a gradual and subtle change, but the change is certainly there.

I believe we have lost sight of what it means to contribute to — something. What it means to contribute to society, to a community in which one lives, to any assemblage of persons bigger than the one. It’s a common mistake. Our commonly-mistaken perception, at large, is that the right way to contribute has something to do with inspiring any sort of positive feelings in others, regardless of whether those feelings are meaningful or not. They could be fluffy, superficial, spiritually empty feelings. Or failing that, just go with the crowd, be a person who is in attendance of the whatever, and at least doesn’t do damage. And smile. That shows what a positive person you are.

This is dangerous because it leaves us vulnerable to missing the recognitions of two confounding realities: The participant who seeks to destroy much and build nothing, but smiles a lot; and, the one who builds things we all need to have built, but doesn’t smile enough. As a Christian, I believe Christ arrived at our mortal plane because of common misconceptions about what behavior was & required of people to fulfill the vision of the intelligence responsible for creating everything, to achieve the Design Intent. Much of the New Testament scripture reinforces that view. But as a thinking Christian, I doubt very much Christ possessed the mannerisms that our most successful so-called “leaders” possess. We know He wasn’t ultimately treated very well by humanity as a whole. It is true that He was the leader of a small band of people, and we know He gave sermons but we don’t have any indication that His personality had much, or anything at all, to do with getting those congregations assembled. He probably smiled about as often as that old guy in “Up.”

That is speculation. What we know for certain is that there was no obvious ambition at work, for Him to try to do what we commonly try to do, to fulfill our modern vision of contributing — make sure every single syllable uttered makes people feel good, none of it makes people feel bad. That was obviously not the objective. Pick a quote from the gospels, at random. See? It’s about finding the right path, rejecting the wrong one, fidelity to truth. Not feeling-good.

As Beyoncé has shown, destructive urges certainly do make a lot of people feel good. That’s the hazard right there. But there’s nothing helpful in our learning this because there’s nothing new about it. We knew that already. And no, I’ll not pretend she’s inconvenienced me in some way since I didn’t watch the game. And now that there’s this huge rolling-controversy going on about her gig, that still doesn’t inconvenience me either because I can ignore it if I choose to and eventually it’ll roll on by, life will go back to normal. Ignoring this is costless.

It’s the proclivity of those around us to say “meh” — while, simultaneously, vigilantly standing guard against any message resonating that is actually positive — that is rather like the living room drapes catching fire. It’s a house fire that’s already been ignored for so long, and yet, still has yet to do the bulk of its damage. And we can’t fight that fire until we put a little bit more disciplined thought into what it takes to contribute. We, as a society, have been under-performing here because we have been under-thinking.

Herman Cain:

In the past month, more than 360,000 left the work force, which follows a total of 284,000 who did so the previous month. To some degree this is to be expected because people get seasonal jobs around the holidays. But remember, these are people who want jobs but have hit a dead end in their search. The fact that they had seasonal jobs and left them doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.
:
The current labor force participation rate is just 62.7 percent. It actually just went up one-tenth of a percent, but the ballpark we’re talking about here is the lowest we’ve seen since – not surprisingly – the Carter Administration.

And this is not an unforeseen consequence of Obama policies. It’s the idea. Obama policies have always aimed to make it easier for people not to work. You can stay on unemployment longer. You can stay on your parents’ health insurance until well past the time you should be gainfully employed. Recently he proposed to have the taxpayers reimburse you if you take a pay cut.

Every incentive of the Obama economic program is against work, against productivity and against profit. So why should anyone be surprised that more than 94 million people who should be in the workforce are not?

And when you’re only producing 151,000 new jobs per month, how do you expect to bring 94 million people back into the workforce? You can’t. You need real growth policies that are friendly to productivity and corporate profits, which we’ll never get from Obama — and which we’ll obviously not get from Hillary or Bernie. [emphasis mine]

BLS website shows Cain is correct. Provably, in the snapshot of the current participation rate. And as far as the goal of Obama policies, well…the trend line on this particular metric certainly doesn’t cast any doubts. The thing about President Obama requesting taxpayer-provided compensation for reduced pay is true too, and this is evidence of an administration that is either unaware of this long-term trend, doesn’t care about it, or — the worst, and most likely scenario — is counting on it.

Twitchy reports a series of tweets by Gabriel Malor (by way of Instapundit):

A decision was made to stop work on the court-ordered release of Clinton emails and start work on Powell, Rice emails. That demands answers.

Background is…

The State Department, under court order to release thousands of pages of emails by January 29, explained that due to the snowstorm that hit Washington, D.C., it would need another month to come through with the goods; coincidently, some time after the New Hampshire primary.

The fig leaf drops. Politicking comes first, who’d a-thought that?

And big-government liberals want government to handle more things.

Samual Goldman, State of the Union:

Although they pride themselves on being open-minded, liberals generally have far less contact with conservatives than conservatives do with liberals. As a result, their understanding of conservatives and conservatism is frequently a caricature. The problem is not simply that they disagree. It’s that they have little first-hand experience of whom or what they’re disagreeing with.

Yes, it ends with a dangling preposition. But there’s something to this anyway. Many’s the time I’ve been genuinely surprised, shocked even, upon discovering a liberal’s perception of his or her point of disagreement with those who disagree…like, myself for example.

Especially on the Inequality Thing. Within the liberal echo chamber, the perception of the conservative outlook is that inequality is desirable. CEOs who are “given” several hundred times more than their “workers” — yeah, sure, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A factor of several thousand times would be even better? What conservative actually thinks that?

Maybe they argued with a conservative who made the point, quite correctly, that if everything is equal within a battery then that’s just another way of saying it’s dead. That comes closest to my outlook on it; if your station in life is going to be some sort of constant regardless of what you do, then you might as well stay in bed and that’s how people are going to react. They’ll avoid extraordinary, uncomfortable efforts. Tell that to a proggie though, they’ll think you’re endorsing inequality — you’re saying society’s got to have these “haves” and “have-nots.” It’s the opposite of the truth because their coloring-book reality is a dystopia suffering from a painful lack of opportunity, and opportunity is central to the point the conservative is making. If the outcome is static and constant, there’s no opportunity. Doesn’t matter if the standard of living is high or low, people settle into a depression when they live like this. And they stop trying.

There are other examples, but a single specimen makes the point better than a lengthy listing, in this case.

Goldman continues:

Yet [Kevin] Drum misses the last and perhaps most important cause of liberals’ alienation from conservatives: their tendency to cluster in major metropolitan areas. I’m unaware of any study of the geographical distribution of ideological self-identification as such. But it does appear that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to live in uncompetitive House districts.

Yes, there’s something: Liberals hug the coastlines, and wherever population is dense, for some reason. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? A greater population density makes people who live there liberal, or does it draw them into it from without? The consensus around the question at Quora is that the diverse backgrounds of the people who live there brings out a special sort of “tolerance,” which is only to be found in our friends, the liberals; this theory is invalidated by the experience of any conservatives who have come into contact with liberals, who found out they were conservatives. Nor does it gel with the observation above, made repeatedly elsewhere, that liberals are much more likely to stick to their own kind and shun contact with unbelievers. Yes I know that goes against the narrative. But that’s reality.

Let’s try this on for size: Liberalism requires population density. You can’t preen without an audience, and if this stuff we call “liberalism” is anything at all, it is a packaging contrary to the substance, a bit of phony showmanship, a carnival sideshow. Imagine doing work without an audience. Fixing a farm tractor out in a field, miles away from the nearest human being. Or, putting together a presentation for a meeting the next day, working very late in the office gathering data…the joys of PowerPoint. Or, you’re cleaning a gun and you want it to actually work next time you’re using it. Cleaning it, alone. Packing your parachute. Alone. Or, someone else’s parachute. You may vote like a lib, but in these situations you won’t be thinking that way. At least, I hope not…

If you’ve got a narrative that the tractor’s fine it’s just out of gas, but your experience tells you the tank is half full, the plugs are fouled — you are going to have to drop the narrative, which is something liberals cannot do.

Liberalism begins, and ends, with failure; failure and excuse-making. Excuses count if, and only if, someone is around to react in some way. When you have square miles per person instead of persons per square mile, this doesn’t fit. The tractor works or it doesn’t. Our current President does a great job of showing how this works. It’s embarrassing to listen to Him after awhile. Blah blah blah, mess I inherited blah blah blah…can’t even think properly anymore, He’s been subjected to too many environments in which words matter. Talked His mom into thinking He was actually putting the cookie back in the jar — got away with it, been getting away with it ever since. As a result, has to have the last word about everything, all of the time, and every speech is ninety minutes or more and is the Greatest Speech In All Of Human History. Every single one. But it doesn’t really work. Because where work matters, words don’t. President Obama represents liberals everywhere, who simply can’t function in any environment in which results speak for themselves. Nope. The speech has to do that, they know the results aren’t good enough.

There is an irony here: When the population density is lower, you’re actually more likely to encounter this coveted “diversity” because the encounters with your fellow humans, rare though they may be, are liberated from your own control. And when you do meet up with them it’s probably because 1) you need their help or 2) they need yours; this is something that isn’t true in more densely populated areas. Liberals have a lot of trouble with this concept, but when something is everywhere and all the time, people get tired of seeing whatever it is. That includes other people.

And as always, the real test of whether a liberal is “tolerant” of “diversity,” is a conservative. Liberals, generally, do not pass this test.

Me, in the e-mails…making reference to what is commonly referred to as “Confirmation Bias,” although I never actually used those words since I was more focused on how these people behave, what makes them act that way, how they get that way, and what can be expected next from them.

And, what are the rest of us to do about it?

…I see this is an awfully big crowd…It may even be a majority of humanity. The problem is this: They live in narratives. Before they have any relevant experiences at all, they choose a very simple “plotline” of sorts, and then as they “learn” from the experiences around them, they chuck away anything that doesn’t support what they’ve picked. And of course place an inexplicably heavy emphasis on anything that does support it. So the facts support the narrative!! Always. But it isn’t a “matter of fact,” they knew what they wanted to conclude right from the get-go…

These “narrative people” are just kind of in the way…you move them out of the way…

[T]here are ways to achieve diplomacy with them. Step One is always, find out what their “script” is. Might as well take the trouble to do so, it determines everything with them, and I do mean everything. Help them flesh out the plot, since they’ve got the key plot-points all chosen already. When their clinging does them harm, or does harm to someone else — pick your battles. Choose where, and if, you have to go through the jarring experience of prying them loose, getting them to face reality. But if it isn’t necessary then let them stew in their juices. It’s what they want. Just move them out of the way so they don’t interfere with you or with anybody else.

I’d have qualms about placing this much in public view if it was any one person who inspired the observation. And I do wish that was the case.

But…it’s not. No one single person taught me this. In fact, being this way is the default, within the human condition; having the maturity to recognize an unwelcome fact, and seriously contemplate what it might mean, what sort of conclusions are to be reached and what to do about them — that is the aberration.

My proxy-embarrassment with these people is particularly keen when they start babbling away about what will happen. Makes me wonder who allowed them to leave the residence, wild and free like that. How did they get dressed? And: What others are going to do. What you’re going to do, what I’m going to do. China will cut their coal emissions. Hillary’s going to be the next President. What is that, anyway, a request, command, prediction, bribe, threat? They don’t seem to know themselves. They only know what not to think, which is anything to the contrary.

Anything outside the narrative is to be expurgated. Ejected with great force. Not just force; fanfare.

A useful litmus-test question: Has anything at all occurred to, at the very least, open your consciousness to the possibility of X? Where X is something outside the perimeter of allowed thought, in the particular matter currently under discussion. Narrative people will have nothing to offer, because they have been proudly emphatic about the open-question-that’s-a-settled-question since Day One.

You may even get them, without trying, to say those words: “I [absolutely] refuse to consider.” Doesn’t happen often. It’s a piece of honesty, so I suppose I should wish it happens more often. But I can’t. It makes me wince.

Shoes. I’m thinking about shoes.

Same way I don’t trust liberals who don’t own shoes that cover their toes; I have a similar distrust against conservatives that don’t own any shoes with laces. More to the point: Don’t own any shoes that do not need polishing.

These are the guys putting Jeb Bush over Donald Trump, because, manners. Oh they say things about Trump being a showboat and a jerk, and they’re completely right. Where they’re wrong, is in thinking that we vote for a President to give us our manners. Silly.

In truth, we’ve been voting for a President to figure out what excuses should be used to suck money away from the industries that give us the things we really need, and where else that money should be diverted among the professions that make things nobody wanted. Republicans and democrats have both been doing it. And so the professions that give us the things we really need, while allowed to stagger on in the background while the loud people make a lot of noise, have been dwindling.

No, not software engineers. We wear lace-up shoes that don’t require polishing, but that’s just because we’re allowed to dress like we’re still fourteen. That kicks ass by the way. But let’s face it, if we’re building something you really need, we won’t know for sure for another two, three years…and that’s at best.

I’m talking about the people Mike Rowe would have been interviewing. People who have to wear actual boots.

And, their bosses who started their respective companies. Companies that bake your bread, build the bottles for your water, build the cardboard boxes for your Amazon shipments, clean the poop out of your sewer lines. Oh yeah, and put together your “transportation equipment.” Passenger jets. That’s up at the top of the U.S. exports right now, the stuff the other countries want to buy…*choose* to buy. You know what else is on that list? Software is on there…but way down. Probably doesn’t include anything I’ve written, as of yet…

Nothing liberals build, is on that list. Psychological help isn’t on it. Crazy new rules about guns, written by people who’ve sworn not to ever own any guns — those aren’t on the exports list. Come to think of it, I don’t see anybody clamoring for those things inland, either. They’re such great ideas they have to be forced.

Back to Trump. I doubt he owns any sneakers either. He’s non-specific, it is true, and he’s a bit of a doofus. And no, he’s not my doofus. What he is, is a rejection of the traditional classes of candidacy. He’s a reset switch, a spoiler, an auto-destruct device. Where liberals are divided between those who loathe success because they hate money, and those who loathe success in others because they love money and want to keep their level of prosperity exclusive and elite…and somehow these two halves emulsify just fine. Conservatives are divided between those who think we vote for a government that will give us our manners, and those who know we vote for a government that is going to take away our money and freedom, and we have to look for ways to slow this process. Maybe even stop it. Reversing it would be wonderful. These halves do not get along at all. And you can tell them apart by their shoes.

Those who ply me with all their reasons why Trump should not be my pick, are preaching to the choir. He’s not my preference. And these people, and I, have no quarrel…unless they’re part of the “We vote for presidents to give us our manners” crowd. Because that’s nuts. To them I say, man up, buy yourself some hiking boots or sneakers.

Choose somebody else? Eminently reasonable. Take him off the table entirely? Out of the question folks, sorry. We need the destruct device. The loud people who get all the air time and make all the big important decisions, have to have it. Used to be, they’d indulge in shenanigans after an election but at least would behave properly before. These days they’re not even bothering with that much. There has to be some kind of Sword of Damocles over their heads. That used to be the election process, and that’s not good enough anymore. It’s not good enough to make them wonder if they’ve still got a job. We’ve got to make the whole class wonder if it still has a job.

This is not a new idea at all. The political class that we know today, with these affluent, effeminate, slippers-and-loafers “men,” is what’s new. Washington would, today, own work boots and sneakers. So would Jefferson. Madison, Adams, Hamilton, they might have owned a few more of the shiny dress shoes than the others, but they’d have good rugged hiking boots as well. In a world that has weekends, and doesn’t rely on horses to get people from Point A to Point B, what would they be wearing from the ankles down as they chilled on Saturday mornings at the coffee shop? Or watched the big game together, maybe waited for the cable guy to arrive? Probably Nike or Adidas. And as far as how to vote…the criticism is that Trump is a kooky populist businessman who does non-politics things for a living. Who do you think started this country?

Lawyers, yes, but not the lawyers we see in Washington DC today, babbling endlessly about “reaching across the aisle and getting things done.” One of these guys got killed in a duel, that says it all right there. Sure they went along to get along…occasionally. That’s why slavery was legal when this country first got started. Fact is, the things they built that have turned out for the best, were products of steel-toed work-boot politicking. The kind that doesn’t have anything to do with getting along with anybody. The kind that involves protesting. The country, itself, is a product of self-exile, of self-estrangement, of saying “we will not be a part of this anymore.”

And leaving a room. Not giving a hang about who can or can’t hear the door close, or whether it closes at all…

In rough-and-tumble, working-man’s shoes.

As Trump haters and Palin haters begin their eighth straight day of lecturing the rest of us on the pointlessness of blind rage, while demonstrating how much of it they have…

…FINALLY, after a whole week of this and similar nonsense, I run across one thing with which I can agree completely. Aw, man. It’s like the coat hanger under the cast finally reaching the itchy spot. Preach it.

From here.

I like where he talks about the time he got shafted. Happens to all of us, but it’s how you react that really matters.

What a tragedy of wasted potential it is when people conclude “Well, guess The Man’s boot is on the back of my neck, no use trying until someone rescues me.” You’ll notice, from that point forward they burn a whole lot of energy trying to convince others of it. But only when it emerges that others have a different outlook on things, which they immediately attack. Until then, there’s no argument. That’s the tell. They’re really trying to convince themselves.

So South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley delivered a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address. About four minutes in, she got off-topic and began scolding the supporters of her own party, with some sort of business about “the siren call of the angriest voices”…

She later elaborated, yes she was talking about Donald Trump, and others. Odd. How much is the nation to trust a political party, within which, one candidate cannot say what the problem is that the party seeks to solve, without other members of the same party jumping all over him for saying it?

She’s not the first to criticize DT for being angry and she won’t be the last. But these critics do not speak for everyone; and there is a problem with the criticism. It misrepresents what it is criticizing.

Doug Giles went off on the Haley speech…

Look, I hate to break it to the governor from SC, who begged money from Trump when she was clamoring for that job, but for your information, people are pissed and Trump’s massive rallies and Jeb’s and Lindsey’s underwhelming events prove the nation shares Donald’s rage regarding how BHO has decimated this nation.

Telling us to calm down is like telling the patriots in 1773 to chill out. You’re way out of touch, sister.

Oh, and by the way, I don’t remember your saying shizzle about Al Sharpton’s demented rhetoric when you shared a stage with that tax-evading, slick-haired, hate merchant. Why didn’t you chastise him when you were hugging him, since you’re now the self-appointed Rage-Aholic Rebuke Queen?
:
Say you’re overweight. Remember what it used to be like to walk across Walmart’s parking lot without having to be gurneyed to your minivan by Randy Mantooth? Remember the joy of not being able to hide small toys and half-eaten sandwiches between the folds of blubber on your body; and being able to actually see the toilet when you use it? Remember those simple pleasures? You do? Does it make you mad that you don’t get to enjoy them any longer? It does?!? There you go . . . see how positive anger can be?

Folks, this righteous wrath not only works for personal improvement, but it can also change for the better all aspects of our society—if we’ll get righteously P.O.’d in a precise direction. And there’s the rub . . . Our neutered nation tells us it’s a big no-no to get mad anymore. Especially if you’re a conservative.
:
Because we have allowed ourselves to be programmed by “them” to be nice and not heat up (unless, again, it is at something that upsets the left), we don’t even blink an eye when we see the base and the vile; instead we force a smile. What a bunch of bunkum we’ve been sold vis-à-vis this whole uninterrupted “nice” wave we’ve been told we’re supposed to surf. Today, people can do something appalling, say something contemptible and delve down the funnel exalting the lowest parts of humanity—and what’s to be our response? We’re supposed to stay sedate.

So, why do we show mock civility towards things that mock civility? Well, because “anger is bad.” And we don’t want to be bad, do we?

“Programmed.” Yes, that’s a perfect description. It reminds me of marital infidelity; The Left does it all the time and it seems nobody notices. It seems that way, because it’s true. So relaxed are the expectations against The Left, that The Left doesn’t, and can’t, fail them. How do you fail to achieve a benchmark that isn’t there? Don’t fuck around on your wife, and don’t get angry…The Left gets a pass. And what a short path it is, from granting The Left a pass, to doing everything the way they want it done — putting them in charge of everything.

From the comments:

Gov. Haley has fallen into the trap that comes with receiving adulation from the media. It started with the flag debacle when she caved to the PC police. The media began to laud her with praises. She got a taste of that and tried to go after more Thursday night. When you go down that road you quickly become an unprincipled RINO.

And,

I live in a zip code with a LOT of self-righteous hippie bumper stickers. (God knows why).

One I see a lot is “If you’re not angry, you must not be paying attention!” So, apparently it’s okay to be angry if your a Prog/Commie who thinks the taxpayer owes you everything you want in life, but it’s NOT okay to be angry to see what made this country great, being tossed into the garbage. Okay, got it.

I don’t think we’re talking about anger at all. Those who promote Rubio over Trump, Jeb Bush over Trump, Clinton over Trump because Trump is too angry…how would they feel if the reaction was one of “You’re right! I’m going to vote for Rubio/Bush/Clinton, because I’m so angry!”? Let’s be honest. They’d like that just fine.

This is an argument about contentment and complacency. Anger, itself, has very little to do with problem solving, and for Gov. Haley to quibble about it is like a rescued hiker on a remote mountain trail complaining about the color of the car that’s offering him a ride. Although, it does have something to do with it; many’s the solution to a problem that was found by an angry person, that never would have been sought by a person not angry. Giles’ hypothetical of the fat, disgusting tub of goo getting mad at himself for being fat, is entirely valid.

And it cuts to the heart of the matter. Conservatives, today, don’t have to be angry at all before someone is shushing them, tut-tutting them, a good deal of the time from within their own party. Liberals can get as angry as they want. Even when they’re already running the government. Seven years it’s been, and they’re still hiding behind the excuse of “actually that started under George W. Bush” as a sort of generic, one-size-fits-all excuse.

What alarms me the most though, is the clarity-of-message that vanishes, in the blink of an eye, like a balloon being popped, with this shtick of don’t-be-angry. Let’s say that prevails. What then is the Republican position on…name it. What? Something like “If you’re wondering, go check the web site” or some such? That will win an election? No of course it won’t. It doesn’t. It hasn’t.

People don’t vote for people. They don’t have that much trust in their elected representatives. Even Barack Obama; people didn’t vote for Him because they thought He was a great guy, they voted for Him because they were afraid of what others might think of them if they didn’t approve of Him. There’s a difference.

People vote for go on some things, stop on other things. The candidate is just a vehicle for getting that done. These pushy tut-tutters and shut-uppers like Haley chanting their mindless bromides of “don’t be angry” seem to have forgotten all about that. And that’s the charitable explanation. The uncharitable explanation is that they know full well how ineffectual of a message this is to disseminate and act upon if the goal is winning an election, and they have ulterior motives in mind.

Oh yes…hope it’s real.

I can’t claim to be un-whole, bike thieves cost me, at most…oh…maybe fifty bucks, back in the 1970’s. Probably only one time. The “education” they gave me was worth far more than that.

Still, it’s just low. You wonder why they used to hang horse thieves, before you get your bike ripped off, after the experience you won’t be wondering about it anymore.

From Right Wing News.

Item:

We made an extended-family outing to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and then Mrs. Freeberg and I made a date out of seeing it a second time. We love it, and we especially like Rey, the butt-kicking female protagonist. Both the character and the actress. However — I am of the opinion that, as a model of “How to show the world that females can kick butt in movies,” the feature falls flat. My test of such offerings is not whether the female action hero beats up some bad-guys in a fight; that’s like being able to fly when you’re in the Justice League. My test is, rather, whether the balance has been achieved, by which I mean, did the female action star establish her cred without takng anything away from the guys.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens fails this test. Here is a list of what the guys do in this movie.

1. Get killed
2. Get captured
3. Get threatened
4. Get tortured and give up valuable information
5. Get depressed and frowny-faced, and take off, forcing everyone else to find them
6. Shoot some Stormtroopers dead…but let’s face it, that seems to be pretty easy
7. Throw temper tantrums
8. Become evil
9. Lose lightsaber duels
10. Get eaten
11. Take orders from females
12. Find ships that were stolen from them earlier (but it looks like the Wookie did that)
13. Talk down to other males
14. Talk about how women are generals
15. Talk about how women are royalty
16. Murder innocents
17. Torture innocents
18. Figure out…well…absolutely nothing. Zero resourcefulness demonstrated. The movie had puzzles and challenges to be solved, but the complexity of each was along the lines of “Go here.” And then the chick did that.

The item is not the eighteen points above. The item is that I went onto the Hello Kitty of blogging, and said a few words…it has since been pointed out to me, in a round-about way, that socially, I am not allowed to notice things like this.

It comes off looking like I think women suck. I’m just missing that brief flashpoint in time, in which men AND women could share an action movie together, and both kick butt. And figure out their way out of problems. When they could both be resourceful, and then tear up the sheets afterwards. Looks like that chapter’s closed. I am saddened about this, although I know it is fiction…then again, fiction does mirror real life, so it seems to me there is a lamentable event taking place on the plane of real life. Not sure when it happened, but it did happen.

And we’re not allowed to notice.

Item:

The President of the United States, to whom I sometimes refer as America’s First Holy Emperor, since He is regarded by many as a sort of “replacement Jesus” (although they don’t want to admit it, usually) is going to give His final State of the Union address in a bit over an hour.

This President has dark skin. He is, by descent, half-black although our mainstream media often refers to Him as “black.” I am grateful to Him for ending an era that has extended for far too long, in which when movies take place in the future and lazy, lazy scriptwriters want to find lazy, lazy ways of reminding the lazy, lazy audience that the story takes place in the future — they show that the President of the United States is black. I’m so thankful to Barack H. Obama for bringing that disgraceful period to an end. It is His one positive contribution to our country, our society and its culture.

Everything else, I think He’s been a disaster. He is, to leading this nation, what my first wife was to managing a checking account. That is not a compliment.

The item is: Because His skin is black, we are not allowed to notice.

Item:

Squid-like denizens of the Internet, filling out a group of unknown size and refusing to disclose their backgrounds, occupations, fields of knowledge or the like, and against my advice sharing a single account by the name of “Zachriel,” have taken it upon themselves to defend the long-discredited theory of “Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” a.k.a. the theory of “the two parties, Republican and democrat, switched sides sometime in the 1960’s.” I’m feeling lazy about embedding links at the moment, so I will leave it to the reader to look up the results of the presidential elections in 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972. Also 2012. Keep an eye on how the Southern states voted. Yes it is true, they used to vote democrat and they don’t do that anymore.

The theory is that the South is, and has been, heavily saturated with bigoted “conservatives.” When Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964, these “conservatives” stopped being democrats and started being Republicans. So a Republican in 1964 is what a democrat was in 1963, and a democrat in 1964 is what a Republican was in 1963. Kennedy got shot, and in that blink of an eye the ideological polarity got reversed, or something.

Quoting Severian on this:

I don’t have Zachriel’s mad mind-reading skills, and I sure don’t have them at the distance of a century and a half, but I do know that the Democratic Party was only an electoral force in American politics thanks to its domination of the South…where Democrat governments passed Jim Crow laws, which increased inequality (freedmn going from “running places like South Carolina and Louisiana, and representing them in Congress” to “..slaves in all but name”) in the period 1866-1877 surely qualifies as “..increased inequality,” don’t you think?). It is truly, truly fascinating to hear that this “..conservative” result was brought about by a tiny minority.. in every Southern state… in every year from the end of Reconstruction (that’s 1877 in the standard textbooks, kids) to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mean that, kids — it’s fascinating. You have evidence for these extraordinary claims, of course, so you should type ’em up and send them on to the History Department at the nearest college. It’ll revolutionize our understanding of Gilded Age politics.

There is, of course, an answer to P_Ang’s “..magic party switch,” and the Cuttlefish actually know it, since they cite it all the time: Nixon’s “..Southern Strategy.” On their reading, Richard Nixon realized that the South was stem-to-stern racists; the natural home of racists is in the Republican Party; therefore, he openly said “..vote Republican to put the blacks in their place.” Ok, fine, but even if you grant that, it entails a huge problem — why oh why did all those liberal Democrats, whom we are informed on no less an authority than Zachriel him/her/their/itself were the majority in the Solid South, suddenly embrace their inner racist and vote GOP?

If you buy what Zachriel has been telling us, Jim Crow laws were imposed on the South by a tiny minority of “..conservatives” inside the otherwise pristinely liberal Democratic Party. But if that’s true, how did the great unwashed masses — who, remember, have always been liberals — suddenly find their voice and vote Republican? Remember, it’s not that the the tiny, Jim Crow-imposing “..conservative minority flipped and gave their states to Richard Nixon; Zachriel assures us that there was a “..massive demographic shift.” Which must mean — logically — that all those former liberals who couldn’t keep their states from imposing Jim Crow in the Gilded Age suddenly klanned up and went Republican in the years 1964-8, in the process somehow seizing the power that had been denied them all those years.

It connects back to the previous items this way: If one is to take the time to interview the knowledgeable, but make the mistake of interviewing the emotionally-invested who happen to lean left, one is almost guaranteed to blunder into all sorts of baffling bullshit. I refer back to my admonition that the reader should research the four or five elections mentioned above.

What do these three items have in common? They have this:

There is an identified class of oppressed persons: Females, blacks, democrats. There is a scheme hatched to bring these oppressed classes up to the level of the non-oppressed…and then, there is a narrative codified to confront any who do not whole-heartedly buy into the scheme. If you do not stand on your feet in the theater and fist-pump the empty air as Daisy Ridley kicks male rubber-mask butt in the new Star Wars movie, if you do not unflinchingly believe every talking point and bald-faced lie coming out of the lips of our black President, if you do not accept that the two major political parties switched sides in the 1960’s, then you are an “ist.” Racist, sexist, misogynist, cisgender, galvinist, Calvinist…blasphemist.

The democrats took the side of the feds, against the state sovereignty of the southern states, with the Civil Rights Act. Which was passed, mostly, with the support of the Republicans. But the Republicans were about fairness; the democrats were all about sticking it to the state sovereignty of the southern states. Since then, the democrats have had a tough time getting any support from the South. Shocker, right?

I’ve kept my silence on this aspect of it, since I was born in 1966. I don’t want to speak at length outside the perimeter of my personal knowledge. But today is within the perimeter of my personal knowledge…and today, liberals and democrats cannot distinguish between “I am opposed to the specific angle of attack you have assumed against this particular problem” and “I don’t want the problem to be solved.” They can’t see the difference between those two things. Even though a child qualified to graduate from the third grade, can.

This means, democrats figure — today — if you are opposed to the way they want to solve the problems, you must be a sexist and a bigot. And when this mythology first started about “the two major political parties switched sides in 1964,” they believed the same thing.

Should we buy what they’re selling? Well…it’s an addiction. We do not allow alcoholics to decide for us what alcoholism is. We do not allow kleptomaniacs to decide for us what kleptomania is. Any so-called “study” that looks into this, that does not specifically exclude self-identified “liberals” from the specimen, or from the expert conclusions, is invalid. Oh yes, I am heart-attack serious about that. Liberalism is the addiction, conservatism is the cure. You don’t ask addicts about the cure.

People disagree with me about that? Let them. I’m in the minority about that? So be it. Right is right even if nobody believes in it; wrong is wrong, even if everyone subscribes to it.

I have more items though.

Item:

Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm puts up quite the link-list, yesterday. First thing he wants to know:

It goes like this…

But to Sanders and others on the Left (another example is Elizabeth Warren), the financial business is the embodiment of evil. Here is the Washington Post yesterday, quoting a Sanders campaign speech:

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders took aim at the nation’s financial sector in a fiery speech Tuesday, declaring that “fraud is the business model of Wall Street” and calling for regulatory reforms to address “a lot more illegal behavior than we know of.” Speaking just blocks from Wall Street, Sanders vowed to break up banks that are “too big to fail,” jail unscrupulous Wall Street executives and provide an array of new protections for consumers.

“Fraud is the business model of Wall Street” — where does he come up with that? He is accusing multiple hundreds of thousands of people of systematic illegal conduct. Does he have any evidence to point to? What I know is that the Justice Department and U.S. Attorneys spent billions in the aftermath of the 2008/9 financial crisis in a lawless political quest to pin the crisis on Wall Street scapegoats, and they came up almost entirely empty handed. Yes there was a series of shakedowns of the big banks, in which those banks seriatim paid a billion or two or five to settle some endless phony investigation, in almost every case without any actual individual getting charged with wrongdoing. And there was Preet Bharara’s insider trading jihad, which substantially fell apart when the Second Circuit finally ruled that a huge part of it did not represent a violation of the law at all.

Like a Dark Linus at Negative Christmas, I grab my blanket and intone “Yes Charlie Brown, I will explain to you why they loathe the successful”…

…and in order to do so, I draw on the wisdom of Captain Capitalism.

Item:

Criticize her as you may, Oprah [Winfrey] is a genius because she realized people would rather feel good than actually achieve good in their lives. And thus, she went out and told millions of women for over 20 years what they WANTED to hear, not what they NEEDED to hear.

You’re not fat, you’re beautiful inside!
Your husband should love you for who you are!
Follow your heart and the money will follow!
You deserve it girl!

For this she was rewarded billions of dollars in net worth.

The problem is high IQ people (unless they jettison their morals) simply can’t do this which puts them at a disadvantage in the employment world.

First they cannot keep up the charade or façade of emotional interest. It just isn’t in their nature and it’s simply too taxing mentally. High IQ people can plainly see a problem for what it is, what logical decisions need to be made in order to solve it, and can remove any emotional or psychological preferences they might have about it. They offer direct, blunt, emotionless solutions that are guaranteed to solve the problem, but unfortunately step on people’s precious little toes.

This then leads to a second problem, because not only does the majority of clients prefer good feelings over production, but so too does the majority of co-workers and bosses. Your entire employment environment is driven by everybody’s insistence you place feelings and emotions over reality and truth. This is simply maddening for smart people because what needs to be done in the real world counters what your boss, co-workers, and clients are demanding of you.

Item:

Posted the following to the Hello Kitty of Blogging:

If you want to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket. That’s just how it works.

And if want to win ALL of the arguments…well…Step One is, you have to do some actual arguing. That is how it works.

You could take that to be one of my many assaults on the “rednecks”…for whom I know, I should be using a different word. My complaints are against those who do not build, who seek to destroy, those who see disgrace in investing any effort into anything. Those who glorify laziness.

I know I should not use this word to describe those people. There are rednecks who work their asses down to the pelvic bone, I know this. I have met them.

But…we do need the word, if “redneck” is not it. We have those people who seek to win arguments — who cannot define any notion of “truth” any other way, they’re just going through life, alienating people, “So-there!!”-ing their way toward the tumultuous end of every conflict that arises, which is something that happens several times daily.

They want to win all the arguments without doing any arguing.

The President of the United States is due to begin His State of the Union speech, His final one, in 26 minutes now. He works so hard to look like He doesn’t think through His various problems like some hayseed hick. I’m deeply ashamed when I realize He does exactly that, labors long and hard to fool people about it, seems to think He is successful in this pursuit. It’s embarassing to watch. Like seeing an ostrich flee its predator by sticking its face in the sand.

What the above items have in common is that they are argued by people who cannot argue. They say “accept what I have to tell you, and I shall accept you, otherwise I shall reject you.” They can offer fellowship in some unspecified group, or enclave. They can’t offer anything else, and they can’t argue the point.

Someone posted the following Monty Python clip, from way back in the 1960’s:

Sorry to say, accurate as this was for its time, it has grown obsolete. Today it is about as current as a four-barrel carburetor. People don’t argue just for the sake of arguing anymore…and we wish they did.

Today, it’s all about “That’s the way it is! And if you don’t agree then there’s no point discussing it with you!” That’s what passes for arguing these days, in the Obama era…

…and Socrates wept. Spun away, like a turbine, in whatever passes for his grave. Ideas no longer arise to challenge other ideas. Today they seek to claim the high ground, and immediately after that, to ostracize. So that their advocates do not have to concern themselves with facts, conclusions, logic, mutual exclusives, Occam’s Razor, any of that tedium. We’re just way too busy. Today, it’s all just: Accept what I have to say, unhesitatingly and uncritically, or you shall be banished from further discussion.

When we reverse-course and pull out of the cul de sac, that’s when life starts getting better again.

The headline is wife-language for “could you please build me a desk like that?” My reward for finally finishing the desk-project. That translation, in itself, is another representation of something else, that could be further translated: “I take back every eyeball-roll I ever did since you started, you are the King Stud of homemade desks.” The go-live date was in early afternoon, on the 31st of December. I didn’t plan it that way, it just turned out I burned all of 2015 on the project, minus a handful of hours…and a double-armload of other projects.

Second Design: This time, we’re serious enough to buy materials

The back-story goes all the way to when we closed on the house, a year and a half ago. A homemade desk was already in the project pile. This never evolved past the blueprint stage, until six months ago when I had a setback that invalidated the plans. “Natalya,” the homebuilt Sandybridge PC around which the new desk was designed, finally made her opinion known about my non-existent computer-cleaning regimen by…well, catching fire. Kinda. She put out an awful lot of smoke anyway. I had to play it safe by immediately pulling out all the power cords, and not inspecting her since. The backups were already functional and in place, so we didn’t have any data drama. Just all the other drama: Have to get a new computer, have to scrub the blueprints, start with new ones…

The new computer, “Sergei,” is a Broadwell NUC. This is not exactly a home-built, more of a factory-built but bare bones. These are wonderful little units, about the size of two tuna fish sandwiches stacked on top of each other. You have to score a hard drive, laptop memory and an OS, so you’re looking at somewhere around $700 by the time you’re done. I worked the project of just getting the computer to go from about mid-July, after Natalya’s meltdown, to three months later during which time I monopolized the dining room table with my Lenovo Yoga 11 unit for all computing tasks. Mrs. Freeberg was the embodiment of patience during this time. Probably because she knew the “battle bridge” situation was as aggravating to me as it was to her, if not even more so.

The keyboard tray turned out nicely

I remember it was eleven months past our receipt of the miter saw, when I finally installed it on the work bench, fired it up and started cutting. I remember saying so to someone. This would place that stage of the project around November. The saw turned out to be as good as gold, although I’m sure there are superior models available for more money. What we’ve got is good enough. The keyboard tray turned out to be as solid as a brick.

In a departure from Natalya’s desk design, I abandoned the roll-out keyboard in favor of a stationary build. I had a flash of sanity that these devices are fragile by nature, and therefore don’t belong on a piece of furniture you intend to last a decade plus. Also, that roll-out keyboards don’t actually do me any good.

By now, the plans were sufficiently solid that I could cut some of the planks to the proper length and begin staining them. Hence the complaint that is the title of this post. This is Kona, just one shade lighter than Ebony, several notches darker than Walnut or Mahogany. It’s consistent with the overall design, which labors toward the objective that is a rhetorical question: What if men really did rule the world? How different would computer desks be?

The desk is dark — a man’s concern about colors, mostly has to do with things that don’t give you a headache when you look at them while recovering from a hangover. And, at the Freeberg Manor, space is at a premium. Those are the two salient facts here. So, plank after plank for the new desk, went onto a carefully apportioned section of the garage floor, with cardboard underneath to protect the concrete, and received their staining of Kona. No more than one or two at a time. The blueprints were just barely mature enough by then to allow for this.

Bracing the left and right sides against each other

One advantage of homebuilt furniture is that you can make it fit just so. The allocated space for this item is 54″ wide by 35″ deep. The design calls for the planks to reach all the way across, left side to right side, so that math is easy: 54 minus 0. Another advantage of this is that you can build them where they go, as in, when the finished product is too large to fit through the doorway. And that applies here. It makes things incredibly awkward, when you engage in this “ship in a bottle” construction, but at least you can accommodate.

But, awkward it was. As in, with December underway and Christmas coming, we entirely lost the use of our home office because of my desk building shenanigans. Fortunately, our yuletide plans had to do with road travel. We were looking forward to the junior member of our household, who throughout the year isn’t even in the house, arriving by train. Then with the younger generation in tow we would proceed Northward, almost up to the Canadian border, to celebrate the holiday with the older generation. Fun times. Means there’s no tree…but there is a lot of planning involved, some of it on the home computer.

Throughout this chapter, Sergei hummed along happily, in his badass sandwich-sized self, kinda floating along on top of a big pile of cords and wires under the old desk. Updating spreadsheets, making hotel reservations, writing e-mails following up on train tickets, et al. And, arguing about planning. I suppose that gets into a whole different subject. Why are some people afraid of planning anything? But I digress…

Or do I? Building a desk is all about planning things isn’t it? It’s the difference between ending up with something you can use, versus ending up with a piece of crap. Hmmm…I sense a theme in something that was supposed to be without theme…I suppose life is like that.

The assembly process in the home office

I was grateful to have the younger Freeberg generation here for the few hours and days. The desk-building project became an inter-generational thing for a bit — which is something it needed to be, since fastening the planks was not a one-man operation. This is the most controversial part of the newer blueprint, it calls for a “picnic table style” top, making use of a dozen pine studs. Seems everyone has questions about that. What the heck? How do you write on such a desk? Well…that brings us back to the rhetorical question that drives the design, what would computer desks look like if men really did run the world? Perhaps, if men ran the world 150 years ago the way feminists say, desks would still have smooth writing surfaces. Regardless, though, it is not 150 years ago, now is now…and how often do you actually write on a desk? Be honest.

Besides, the keyboard tray, as you can tell from the pictures, is not only as durable as an iron ingot, it’s enormous. It’s 34+1/2″ wide by 13+1/2″ deep. In practice, if I have to do something like that, I just move the keyboard out of the way. Which I find myself doing, much more often, for the purpose of using a second computer simultaneously, compared to doing it for the purpose of writing with pen and paper. Writing with pen and paper hardly ever happens. The picnic-table top design has turned out to be a net win.

But of course, the far bigger win was the singular feature around which the entire desk was designed: The beverage pillar, with the beer-bottle opener and metal canister to catch the caps. It should have been the very first thing on your mind when you saw the question “What would computer desks look like if men really did run the world?” And, there is your evidence that we don’t. We never really did. You want a computer desk with a beer bottle opener on the front, the way the Good Lord intended, you have to build it.

Or, depending on your point of view, maybe men do run the world and the Good Lord intends for us to build our own things. Either answer works.

In the end, I’m pleasantly surprised 2015 saw a workable conclusion to the project. I would have lost money betting on this, and in truth, if there was any term of time in which I was honestly thinking to myself “I see light at the end of the tunnel, I think we’ll make it!” — it wasn’t very much time at all. Just like any other hardware project, I suppose…you run back to the hardware store a few times, chastising yourself that three trips should’ve been two, and two trips should’ve been one. People wonder if you know what you’re doing, and then…eventually you win. Just keep plugging away at the problem. Life is a lot like that, too.

The “finished” product (click to embiggen)

Perhaps the happiest aspect of this item is that its construction, and launch, involves so many memories that could outlast the furniture itself. Or, since it’s built so solidly and so well, with this construction-credo of “it’ll be here in one piece when the sun goes nova,” let’s amend that to say the memories have a decent shot at doing this. The eighteen-year-old so-called “boy” showed up just before our road trip to go see his grandfather, so there was no time for him to do anything with the desk at that point other than look at it. Early on the morning before I was to fetch him from the train station, I got an e-mail from my brother with the one subject line you never want to see: “Dad fell.” Yup…Friday the eighteenth, that’s four days before we were to arrive for the Christmas celebrations, my Dad fell and broke his hip. Looked like a Christmas in the hospital for sure. We called to ask if we should revise the trip, maybe head up a little bit earlier, and that was a negative so we stuck to the schedule. Against all expectations, the doctor discharged Dad from the hospital the exact day we arrived. This surprised everybody involved, especially those among us who had actual experience with oldsters falling and breaking hips. Miracles of technology, and just maybe, miracles of prayer.

December 2015, for us, is twenty pounds of potatoes crammed in a ten-pound bag. We held off on watching the new James Bond movie until the young man could join us, and we also managed to get the new Star Wars movie in the mix as well. Helped out with making the Bellingham house wheelchair-accessible for Dad, came back home, scooted the new desk back in its designated space in time for the New Year’s festivities. Lots of plans, some of them came to fruition, some did not. The ferry ride up in Washington State obviously couldn’t happen. Back here in California, the “take the S&W pistol up into the hills and teach those wine bottles a lesson” exercise didn’t happen. I’m more regretful of the missed opportunity to burn gunpowder, than about the ferry ride. We’ll see how Dad’s doing at some later time, for that. We’ll spend a few rounds in the hills, later. What can’t happen now can happen later. Of course that isn’t certain, but what is? You hope for the best and you prepare for the worst.

Oh you thought I was going somewhere specific with this? Sorry to disappoint, this one’s just a busy concoction of how things have been going lately. Desk, planning, life, life’s exigencies, plans getting disrupted, plans coming to fruition anyway…planes-trains-automobiles, movies, guns, what-if-men-ran-the-world. Somewhere in all of the above is a valuable lesson for us all, I suppose. Probably has something to do with the old adage about changing what you can, accepting what you can’t, and God granting you the wisdom to know the difference.

Remaining to be done:

• Cable management;
• Planks #10 and #11
• The “virtual plank #12” in five pieces, allowing for 2 extra monitors;
• Said monitors;
• Finish staining (some of this done since the last pic was taken);
• Arms for the front-left, front-center and front-right speakers.

But all that can wait. Now we proceed to my spectacularly patient wife’s (cherry-wood finish) desk. But gee…part of the reason I built this computer desk, was there were other projects that were supposed to happen on the computer. Well, I suppose in 2016 I’ll have to find a way to do more than one thing at once. Again. And so it goes…

Glad someone else named it (via William Teach at Pirate’s Cove), if they hadn’t then I’d have had to take on the job myself. And I’m not that good at it.

We tend to forget that our so-called “leaders” are just flawed human beings like everybody else. They have vices, they have temptations…some even have bad intentions…

The Authoritarian Impulse

Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.

Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

The Rule of the Wise-people

Historically, advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right. Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century, the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national socialism.

In contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition, Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead at the altar of expertise and political correctness.

Ironically this is occurring at a time when many progressives celebrates localism in terms of food and culture. Some even embrace localism as an economic development tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever greater centralized big business control.

Yet some of the same progressives who promote localism often simultaneously favor centralized control of everything from planning and zoning to education. They may want local music, wine, or song, but all communities then must conform in how they operate, are run, and developed. Advocates of strict land-use policies claim that traditional architecture and increased densities will enable us to once again enjoy the kind of “meaningful community” that supposedly cannot be achieved in conventional suburbs.

In the process, long-standing local control is being squeezed out of existence. Ontario, California Mayor pro-tem Alan Wapner notes that powers once reserved for localities, such as zoning and planning, are being systematically usurped by regulators from Sacramento and Washington. “They are basically dictating land use,” he says. “We just don’t matter that much.”
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The new progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy” to determine energy, economic, and land use policies . According to this article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a drive to impose energy austerity on an already fading middle class, limiting mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and single family housing.

What causes this? I detect two factors: Phobia and strategic graft. There is a certain personality type that can’t stand the idea that someplace, at sometime, someone might know what they’re doing. By and large, these are not intellectually vigorous people. Once they find out cars have to be assembled, the conflict begins as they gradually realize the cars are not being assembled the way they think it should be done. But as long as you allow them to think cars grow on trees, there’s no conflict. That’s the phobia.

The graft is the sale of influence, by way of actual dollars or quid pro quo. We are, unhappily, living in a time in which our so called public “servants” are beginning to anticipate several steps ahead, their own transgressions of graft. You just can’t attach too big of a price tag to the decision to do things a certain way across a township, or municipality, or county. But a state? Now you’re talking. The thing of it is though, to get that done you have to lay some groundwork. You have to pass some “everybody in this vicinity does it this way” rules. The easiest way, is probably to establish a board. Once you get a board deciding things, without any available means of appeal, you can appoint people to that board and…kaching, kaching. Haven’t you noticed? When we discuss the boards that make the biggest decisions, that’s when we know the least about who’s sitting on them. Thanks to this alone, we are rapidly becoming a passive-voice, “I know what was done but I dunno who did it” society.

What people tend to forget is, there really aren’t too many credible arguments against local control. Although there are some. Localities can be held to a centralized (higher) standard, and in some situations this might — conceivably — benefit everybody, within & outside of the locality. And, coordination. But those arguments are not advanced too often as we wrangle away, year after year, with some spiffy new centralized commission of overlords that wants to lift more power away from the local level; the advocates for centralized control tend to rely much more often on bumper sticker slogans, and bogeyman stories about “If we don’t act now, the climate will slip out of control past a tipping point” or some such.

Also, efforts that involve local autonomy can, and probably will, bring these desirable aspects of centralized control themselves, the better performance and the coordination. It might take a few more steps, but it isn’t a slow process by any means. The accelerating communication due to improving technology, is on the side of helping this process. Two counties, side by side, harvest corn. One brings twice as many bushels per acre at harvest time, as the other. Two hundred years ago it would be hard to measure that, and harder still to bring about change because of that. Now? We measure just about everything. And we talk about it at the speed of light.

This mania, this drive, to have intimate aspects of everyday life directed by centrally located better-people, when you get right down to it, is a relic from the past. It’s Roman Empire stuff. That, and a psychological enfeeblement, or something that should be diagnosed that way.

Was going through old e-mails, noticed some clumps of unread messages overly-invested in notifications of comments over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging. Rather than bulk-delete, I combed through them and discovered a particularly ingenious (and unusually well-worded) missive from myself.

It is a rebuttal to a point made by a lefty, who was trying to set up his fellow lefties as the sole innovators of technology, coming up with all sorts of useful contributions to humankind while the conservatives, I dunno, sit in huts made of mud, banging rocks together or something…

Certainly, I cannot refute the point directly. Who wants to provide evidence for the counterpoint that the iPhone was actually “invented” by Michael Savage fans? The assertion that the iPhone geeks predominantly leaned left, although probably not recorded and probably not provable, is probably true.

But:

The younger generation of engineers is “educated” like no generation has been ever before. The problem is in the content of their education, not in its coverage.

And because of that, the iPhone is a bad example of what you’re trying to prove. The iPhone didn’t get “invented.” It is a particularly hotly-selling confluence of evolutionary stages of features introduced in other products, years earlier. If it demonstrates something you can accomplish with liberal thinking that you can’t accomplish with conservative thinking, the proof makes liberals look like what conservatives say liberals are: Starry-eyed, intellectually slothful types overly obsessed with “Hey wouldn’t it be wonderful if X.” And X has a lot more to do with not-worrying-about something, than a human actually getting some kind of useful work done.

It’s a shame that the layman looks on these “campuses” of buildings full of engineers, as percolating hotbeds of creativity. I used to look at them that way myself. A little bit of logic, common sense, everyday math upsets that rather jarringly. Two hundred to five hundred heartbeats to a floor of a building…let us say, that is an even one hundred actual engineers. Two to five floors to a stylish, modern, tech building, ten buildings to a campus. Multiply by another ten to cover the whole company, you have 25,000 engineers…that’s just about right.

Living out the adrenaline rush that surrounded them in their teenage years, in the world of adulthood, all the way to retirement, every day of every year, all 25,000 of them. How many new ideas per year per engineer? Going at my relatively lethargic “hey I just had and idea” pace, let us say 2 or 3. And let us say 90% of those fail somewhere along the line…90% of what’s left, is folded up into bigger, more overarching ideas that become products. We should still be seeing, if our “hotbed of creativity” generalization was anywhere close to accurate, hundreds of new ideas every year. Hundreds, perhaps breaking into the thousands. Per company.

I didn’t realize this until I was working inside one of those buildings…and then called-upon to explain to my boss, why my code didn’t look like the code that might’ve been written to solve the same problem, by ten other engineers. Or twenty. My explanation was that I was using the design patterns to make the most of object-oriented programming and design, so that the code would be more easily maintainable and modifiable later on — something the team had often talked about researching, but upon which it had progressed very little. Because I made the decision to research and progress, my code looked different. And, I was introduced to the very n00b concept of, “If your code is more maintainable, but nobody else understands how it works, it isn’t maintainable.” Well that’s true, of course. Then again it is an architectural software design pattern. You are supposed to read up on how it works before you understand it. And failing that, you aren’t necessarily supposed to understand it; you have to do some reading. That’s an intrinsic part of design patterns. This defense really didn’t help me though. Maybe that’s why the team hadn’t gotten into them too much.

Employees have complained about this since long before the tech revolution. It’s called “Not Invented Here,” or NIH. It happens when one learns, far too late in cases like mine, that one’s particular occupational placement has nothing to do with creativity. What you did, meets all the goals, but the boss doesn’t understand it and now you are to be punished. Point is, if I was laboring under this expectation, that means the same must be true of the other thousands upon thousands; at least some of them. Most? Nearly all? That just stands to reason, and the results speak for themselves. A lousy iPhone? Years and years, campuses upon campuses, buildings upon buildings? Tens of thousands of heartbeats? The cream of the crop?

But then as I pointed out above, there is the matter of what the iPhone does. Surely you can come up with hundreds and hundreds of anecdotes, some imagined but credible, others real and documented, of the iPhone making something constructive happen that otherwise would not have happened. But it will be much tougher to come up with such a story in which some other device could not have netted the same happy outcome. And here we come upon an unsavory question: If the iPhone is a lousy example of what my opposition was trying to demonstrate (as my opposition ended up partially agreeing) — if it fails to stand as a decent specimen of most-modern and most-recent creative spark — then, what’s a good example?

I might offer, as a most-recent, the USB connection. How’s that? Or maybe, the alpha channel on a two-dimensional image. However that, like the iPhone, is more of a recent marketing effort than a recent technological innovation. In concept, it has existed for quite awhile. For the today-stuff, the true “gee whiz,” I’m seeing a lot of items on the published click-bait list fail to qualify as true “Hey, I just had an idea…” things. “Magic Leap,” “Nano-Architecture,” “Car-to-Car Communication,” no. “Project Loon,” “Supercharged Photosynthesis,” maybe…possibly.

But, no to the iPhone. That is a branding, not an invention.

And I’m not sure what sorts of practical things you can do, thinking like a liberal, that you can’t do thinking like a conservative. These are the people who say “climate change” and “income inequality” are pressing problems; and vote fraud, imbalance of separation of powers, swelling public debt and Islamic terrorism, are not.

Challenged to identify “What’s Wrong With The World?“, I said, among other things…

You’re hired into a job, you are hired to be and not to do. If you’re fired, you’re fired for your failure to be and not to do. If not — when you get another executive in charge of the company, if you open your company’s web site and read his biography, you’ll probably read a great deal about what he is…not so much anymore about what he has done.

That was a long time ago. Since I wrote that, the nation has elected a black guy to be President of the United States, in fact anointed Him as some sort of Holy Savior, mostly because of His blackness — and seen how that doesn’t work for anybody in the long run. Then it re-elected Him. Would it do it third time if it could? Either answer would be speculation, doomed to never be anything more than speculation, unprovable, irrefutable. But, I’m thinking not. I’m seeing encouraging signs. Tiny ones, anecdotal ones. Listing them wouldn’t do any good. But they’re there. We seem to be going through a thaw, after a long winter. People are starting to figure out that virtuous acts have rewards, not-so-virtuous ones have consequences. People are realizing that what they do, matters. What others do, matters.

But then I see stuff like this…

According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans named Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton the “Most Admired Woman, 2015.”

Clinton has received the title 14 times in the past 14 years, 20 times overall, the most times an individual woman has been named most admired since Gallup began polling the open-ended question in 1948.

Because of what? Not anything she ever did. Even Hillary herself can’t name an accomplishment.

Well she’s far from the only one. A lot of public servants just hang around, making speeches now and then, launching into bizarre tangents of thought to try to steal credit whenever something good happens. It’s embarrassing to watch after awhile. You wish someone would ask something like “So what is it about you, specifically, that makes you so awesome?” One begins to suspect there’s no answer. After awhile it becomes hard to think otherwise. All these speeches, nothing about virtues? What would you like to pass on to the next generation? Your intellect? Patience? Persistence? What? They don’t say.

Image shamelessly swiped from Gerard, who got it from somebody else

They cherry pick statistics and then comment on something like “I presided over a three percent increase or decrease in whatever…” That’s what passes for doing, these days, in our highest echelons of power. Which means it reflects on us all. Nobody’s doing much of anything at all. “That happened on my watch!” scores the biggest bragging rights. It looks phony and fake, because it is. A real doer would have some passion about teaching what exactly he has done. He would say: No copyright here! Steal from me! I want everybody doing the same thing! It’s been so long since we’ve seen anyone say something like that, we’ve forgotten what it looks like. Oh yeah that’s right. The big-state libs do it all the time, I forgot. Raise taxes! Make the rich pay their fair share!

So allow me to self-correct: Our one example is just pure nonsense. Want to make the economy take off and really hit its stride? Put more burdens on it.

We seem to have forgotten: We’re not supposed to favor, or disfavor, demographic groups. Voting for a woman to be President just because she’s a woman, is just like voting for a black guy because He’s black. That’s wrong. We’re all supposed to have been in agreement, a long time ago, that that’s wrong. As 2015 retires though, we’re still waiting for our wise elders to let us know if it’s wrong or not.

If I could be allowed to dictate what gets fixed next, I would call that out as the one loose nut on the valve cover. Other ones are tight, but this one is so very loose. It’s wobbling. Such strangers we have become to the idea of anybody actually doing anything, we betray our own non-discrimination “principles” right in mid-sentence as we articulate them. We seem to have reserved all the meaningful decisions about hiring and promotion, for the bean-counters among us, who work long and hard about aggravating their own passions about counting the beans. Never has our obsession been keener, over what people are — and we can’t even agree about what they are. Nor shall we, so long as we are prohibited from siding with reality on the question…

In the latest, astonishing act of draconian political correctness, the NYC Commission on Human Rights have updated a law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression” to threaten staggering financial penalties against property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.

Incidents that are deemed “wilful and malicious” will see property owners face up to $250,000 in fines, while standard violations of the law will result in a $125,000 fine.

Meanwhile, we have other triggers in place in our grand bureaucracies, ready to fire as soon as we make up our minds on what a person is…while the question of what they do, continues to languish…

A woman who failed the Fire Department of New York’s running test six times will get a seventh opportunity to become a full-fledged member of the department, according to a published report.

The New York Post says that Wendy Tapia, 34, is among a group of EMTs promoted to probationary firefighters. The group will start an 18-week training academy Monday.

The Post reported that Tapia was allowed to conditionally graduate from the Fire Academy on May 17, 2013, despite being unable to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less. At the time, she blamed her slow going on a foot injury.

After she was sworn in, the FDNY gave her five more chances to pass the test, but Tapia was unsuccessful in all five atempts. After her sixth failed attempt, in November 2013, Tapia resigned and returned to EMS never having worked a full-fledged shift.

FDNY members who spoke to the Post predict that Tapia will be allowed to pass the running test by FDNY brass, who fear a gender discrimination lawsuit.

“She’ll graduate, no question,” one FDNY member said. “The department does­n’t want another black eye.”

Perhaps I should add it to my list of suggested New Year’s resolutions (although bullet #5, I see, partially covers the concern): Definition about what people DO, over and above what people ARE. Appreciation for their positive contributions, excoriation for their negative impacts. We have a problem arising from this, which has to do with a shortage of shame. People do shameful things and there’s no shaming, because that has to do with what people do, and our obsession is with what they are.

It is almost as if…EXACTLY as if…the collective realization was one of, “nothing I do matters, so I may as well articulate socially attractive points of support for other appealing individuals and appealing groups of individuals, so that my standing becomes elevated.” And if ever the staple resources come up short and have to be rationed, those who have done the most preening will be the last ones to be ostracized.

Exactly the mindset embraced by rats, as they scramble around on a sinking ship.

Very well. We want to obsess over what people are, do we? Well we’re not rats. And we’re not on a sinking ship. We’re people, an intellectual species, a privileged (in a good way) and dignified species, and we should act like it. But I guess I’m just old fashioned like that…