From here.

Pallas cats were not discovered until a team of researchers were looking for snow leopards in Nepal and accidentally stumbled across an animal that looked half house cat, half snow leopard.

The majestic, shy, solitary Pallas cats were recorded in the wild for the first time by camera traps placed in an extreme climate 14,000 feet above sea level.

One camera trap caused a Pallas cat to experience an earth-shattering moment, when it realized there was something strange outside its rock den. The fluffy animal still mustered up enough courage to investigate.

Gates of Vienna, via Dyspepsia Generation.

Ah. Still carefully stripped of any sex appeal at all, I see.

Because the sex appeal was in the franchise once, for awhile — feminists don’t like TR. This proves they aren’t about elevating the status of women in society, but instead elevating a gender-neutral culture that has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that women have anything special to offer. Women, like men, are just people. They don’t have big breasts, they don’t birth no babies, they don’t even have a particularly distinguishable way of running or jumping; everything they do, a man can do just as capably. That’s the vision.

It stands to reason that the first positions to be eliminated are wife, and mother. Those are the two things women can do that men can’t do. Looking genuinely hot while excavating treasure and beating up bad guys, in skimpy outfits, would be yet another thing so that also has to go. And after the Tomb Raider looks like a titless fifteen-year-old boy in skinny-jeans — the feminists still aren’t happy, which is something I find pretty darn interesting.

PJ Tatler:

The owners of this particular corporation are a family. They have rights. They do not surrender those rights because they formed a business. Anyone who thinks that they did surrender those rights when they formed their family business is a moron.

The Greens — they own Hobby Lobby — were literally minding their own business when the Obama administration slammed them with a mandate forcing them to use their property to pay for something that violates their religious beliefs. The Greens acted on their beliefs and took the mandate to court. They won. That’s how it works in this country.
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We are a nation that has enshrined respect for religious beliefs into our Constitution. That’s not some feel-good thing. It’s the bedrock of our system. The Supreme Court found that the Obamacare mandate puts an undue burden on religious people.

If libs were honest — well, they wouldn’t be libs. But if they were honest libs, they’d just come out and say how they want these reconciliations to work between popular will and the Constitution: No consistent principles involved, none whatsoever, just the popular will prevailing over the Constitution when it’s further left than the Constitution, and the Constitution defeating popular will when the Constitution, interpreted as recklessly far-left as it can possibly be interpreted, is to the left of popular will. Whatever makes it so that lefties win, that’s what should determine everything.

That’s what they’d say if they were honest about it. But they aren’t. At this point, I don’t know who they think they’re fooling. The Supreme Court just ruled that they should lose, and so, predictable as a sunrise, they’re plotting some new ways to get around that. They don’t care about anything but more-and-more-liberalism.

I’m tempted to get philosophical and monotonous about this…I have before already. And how could I not? It’s the plague of our times, this mental insanity that you can make things true just by doing a really, really, really enthusiastic job of wishing for them. Grown-ups doing their “thinking” like five-year-olds.

But, people don’t really read or listen to that stuff. Sometimes you need a comedian to make the point.

And, a buffoon. Two people funny, only one trying to be.

Via Newsbusters.

ODDEE, by way of Linkiest:

Geek gals are always looking for cool apparel, especially when it comes to comfortable swimwear. So, here’s some good news: Now, there’s an Evil Dead-inspired Necronomicon bikini that’s supposedly “super comfortable,” according to its makers.

The made-to-order Brazilian-cut silicone bikini, available through Etsy by Bloodlust Productions, is styled after the human flesh-bound Book Of The Dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead movies. (Source)

That’s about the most normal one out of the lot, of: #FreeTheNipple, Bubble Wrap, 3D-Printed, Evil Devil, et al. Some images not suitable for a general audience or work environment.

There’s been a recent upsurge in the drive to recruit men to feminism, and it doesn’t seem to be related in any way to the Hobby Lobby nonsense (video auto-plays). Oftentimes when there’s a sudden increase in the fevered pitch of something it’s difficult to figure out — as we see in the case of soccer — if that’s an increase in supply or in demand. Or neither of those. Or both. In this case I’m inclined to think it’s a combination of supply and demand, but leaning toward demand; the feminists are trying harder to recruit men to their movement. But then again, it’s likely that they’re trying harder all of a sudden, because they’re finding it easier to do all of a sudden. That would mean supply.

As you can see from that first link up there, it seems a lot of male feminism has to do with figuring out what the female feminists are saying, and emphatically agreeing with it without thinking about it.

Avoid playing the Devil’s Advocate. It’s a really good way to get into arguments, but not a good way to start productive discussions. Read the commenting policy on blogs and websites you want to comment on. Most of them are in place to create a safe, troll free space where blog participants can express ideas and opinions freely without being attacked. There are plenty of other spaces where you can play Devil’s advocate all you like so you can leave these ones alone.

After reading that, you don’t need to know a lot about feminism to figure out this is no place for a man. You just have to know something about being a man. “Productive discussions” come from an echo chamber? Laughable. No really, it is, I’ve seen feminists try to do this. After the “Hooray, we all agree with each other” moment, it looks like the dog catching the car. They don’t know what to do next. They don’t know what they have here — a good idea, or a really super-duper cool idea? How to gauge, how to assess? You can’t. Best you can do is vote on it, and everyone agrees on it, so that gets you nowhere. It’s a sad, sad sight to see.

It is the exact opposite of the process by which a week timid little boy becomes a tower of masculine strength as a man. The echo chamber provides “a safe, troll free space where blog participants can express ideas and opinions freely without being attacked.” It is a shelter from disagreement, be it reasonable or other. The ideas that emerge from the echo chamber, like Pajama Boy, show all sorts of signs of having never been challenged. Among my favorites: Skimpy clothes on good looking women. It shouldn’t happen, ever, because it “objectifies” and “exploits” women, unless it’s a school or some other setting that will piss off the conservatives, and then the rallying cry is that there shouldn’t be any “slut shaming.” In other words, feminists really have no idea how to react to this. Every now and then in the echo chamber, one of the un-attacked will meekly offer up the question “How do we feel about that?” Which, I think, cuts straight to the heart of the matter: Feminism is not about covering up good-looking women, or letting schoolgirls prance around in denim-diapers, or women voting or having private conversations with their doctors or chasing careers or enjoying any sort of “choice” about anything at all. It is about collective thinking.

That, too, is antithetical to being a man. To being a strong man, or a desirable man as Captain Capitalism points out:

This is why, when a woman asks you what color to choose for the carpeting or the furniture, she gets honked off when you reply with “Whatever.” It comes from evolution and instinct. It’s got to do with what the two sexes bring. Women bring the oven, men bring the recipe. So what’s the recipe? How is it different from another recipe? That’s the true male contribution: His signature. Goes for everything. Medicine cabinet in the bathroom, carpet color, how the family computer is configured, what’s in the kitchen junk-drawer, what kind of coffee gets brewed in the morning. If living with a man is like living with any other man, that would mean the woman is expecting something from the relationship she is not going to be getting. It means the dude isn’t bringing anything. For her, it’s frustrating, boring and a turn-off. She’s instinctively wired to avoid this, and in the earlier years when a suitor is facing the instinctive screening process, the truth of it is that’s what’s being screened. Genetic weakness, physical weakness, mental weakness, but those are distant seconds to: The ordinary. Women are wired to avoid the generic. That’s what’s really going on. They don’t crave disagreement, they crave identity.

It’s burned into our culture, and other cultures all around the world. Kids get the Dad’s last name. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t just because men want it that way.

This thing about “Agree with her about everything,” like much of liberalism, simply doesn’t work. It is a cause, as well as a symptom, of dysfunction (hat tip again to Gerard).

Seriously — have you seen many of these self-proclaimed male feminists? When I see all these sullen dorks standing like political prisoners holding their “I NEED FEMINISM BECAUSE…” signs, I wish that one of them could be honest and say they need feminism because they’re not naturally attractive to women.

I therefore posit that in at least some cases, male feminism is a mating strategy for men who aren’t getting laid on the virtues of being men alone. So they switch gears and attempt to get laid on the merits of proclaiming to be feminist “allies.” The “allies” thing is all lies. It is a sneaky way of trying to appeal to women by loudly proclaiming that you hate the type of guy who normally appeals to women. I believe the most reasonable explanation for the very existence of the modern “male feminist” is rooted in evolutionary biology: Calling oneself a male feminist is a deceptive and despicable little shame-dance, a pathetic self-puffing mating ritual that beta male lizards do to garner even a scrap of female attention.

It’s like going to some pro-marijuana rally because you know someone there is going to have weed. If you hang around enough girl feminists long enough and claim to be a feminist, sooner or later one of them will fuck you…maybe…right?

As is the case in many other walks of life: Receiving greater approval by way of disguising your distinguishing features, is a loser’s game. It would be futile even if it worked, which it usually doesn’t. The thing to ask about it is, what if it did work? Noodle on that one a little bit; you “earn” approval by pretending to be something you really aren’t? Where’s that get you, exactly? Same thing it got you in Grades K through 5, right? A bunch of friends who aren’t really your friends. See, this is supposed to be the benefit of public school. You were supposed to figure out that this isn’t a winning plan.

Prelutsky makes a great point, once again:

I realize that the late Sen. Goldwater is anathema to liberals, even to those who only know him as the unfortunate victim of a famous TV spot in which a little girl picking a flower appears to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb. The vile message in 1964 was that Goldwater was a nutburger who was anxious to get us involved in a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union. Because most voters 50 years ago were just as dumb as they are today, 61% of them voted for LBJ, who took that as a signal to sink us even deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam.

What more people should remember about Goldwater is based on fact, not a slander perpetuated by a cynical political operative; namely, that he was the man, the Republican senator, who went to Richard Nixon and told him to his face that it was time to resign, that he was an embarrassment not only to the nation, but to the political party to which they both belonged.

Isn’t it a shame that there is no Democrat of equal stature who will go to Obama and point out that what he is doing by ignoring the Constitutional limits on the executive branch, by racking up one scandal after another and by unleashing the dogs at the IRS and the EPA on innocent Americans, is not only bad for the nation, but will be a disaster for every Democrat seeking election this coming November?

Hmmm. Dunno about that. Liberals win elections by fooling people into believing, usually without any supporting evidence at all, that once the liberalism has done what liberalism is supposed to do the liberal will have the sense to say “Okay stop, that’s enough liberalism.” The way you do when you brush your teeth with toothpaste, or something. They win re-elections that way. They lose once it becomes clear that they’re a lot more like dogs begging for food, or ex-wives demanding more quote-unquote “child support,” when it becomes clear, then undeniable, that their solution to EVERY problem is more liberalism and they’ll never, ever stop.

This is all part of the natural cycle. People get prosperous, they find smaller and more nit-picky subjects of their complaints, they get it in their heads that the potholes in their career paths or diminished alms are due to the Republicans in office, and then even in the midst of all their complaining they think they can afford to make poor decisions and think sloppy. Then they vote in democrats, and recite democrat mantras like “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

The democrats take over, everything turns to shit, after awhile people figure out this is not the answer. Nothing stimulates cool, crisp, responsible thinking like an empty refrigerator. Then they turn the democrats out of office and vow never to make the mistake ever again. And keep the vow…for a little while. Then, people get more and more prosperous, and once again get the idea they can afford to make poor decisions and think sloppy again.

Fixing the problems, therefore, would rely on the democrats periodically overplaying their hand. Which is natural. They’re great at winning elections, when the time is right. They suck at pretty much everything else. Including policing their own. They don’t have a Goldwater visiting the White House and telling President Selfie that the time has come. And this is metaphorical for everything else they do. They lack the circuit-breaker. When what they want to do doesn’t solve the problem, and they can see that, the answer is always to do a lot more of it.

And that’s when the voters figure out it’s necessary to pull the plug. The time is coming. That’s a good thing. And I think, this time, the era of prosperity is going to be plush and long. The “Obama lesson” will sink in stay learned for a good long time. Among most, anyway.

There is, “I will make sure that when you do that it will not cost you anything.”

There is, “I will go to the ends of the Earth to stop you from doing that.”

Between these two things, there is a very wide gulf. Lots of positions are possible between those two extremes; it’s not an Either-Or.

I would make a call for the Internet to try to get the message across to The Number One Stupid Slut, but as you can tell from her Twitter feed, you’ll have to get in line to do that.

Interesting stuff.

One hundred years ago, on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by Serbian terrorists. The murder set off a chain reaction that plunged much of the world into war. The Great War killed 10 million people, redrew the map of Europe, and marked the rise of the United States as a global power. Here are 40 maps that explain the conflict — why it started, how the Allies won, and why the world has never been the same.
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Germany’s surface fleet was largely unable to to stand in battle against the vastly superior British Royal Navy. But the new technology of the submarine gave Germany the means to harass Allied shipping despite its weakness on the surface. In 1915, they initiated a kind of underwater blockade — attacking ships bound for Britain as a countermeasure to the near-total Allied knockout of Germany’s transatlantic trade. But Germany didn’t have nearly sufficient submarine strength to cut off all Allied shipping. What’s more, unlike surface ships, submarines couldn’t really threaten ships and board them. They could only attack with stealth. That led to the sinking of several ships with Americans aboard, which badly damaged US-German relations. Seeking to appease President Wilson, Germany halted unrestricted submarine warfare. But in February 1917, the Germans changed their minds again — setting themselves on a course that would drag the United States into the war.

Liberal Logic 101.

From Bulldog at Maggie’s Farm.

Language warning…

Obama’s America?

“Greg, stay appropriate.” “Just trying to keep Greg in check.”

It’s kinda funny because the bikini-lady would have been off the set so much quicker if the “frowning-at-me” lady said nothing at all.

So let’s see, a recap of the rules we understand so far. There’s a power-and-pulchritude thing; we’re not about to let the women just run off and do whatever they want, here. They can look good if they’re not too influential, and they can have influence if they don’t look good. By the time they get to be Secretary of State, it has to be unthinkable that any sane straight man would ever want to see her naked.

Speaking of which, the unwritten rules insist, there are no sane straight men. There is nothing good you can say about a straight man, especially if he admires a woman in a bikini, thereby providing evidence of his straightness. And we already know there is nothing bad you can say about a gay man. In fact, you can never ever heap enough approving platitudes onto a gay man, or enough snotty derision on a straight man…

Does it go so far as gay men feeling up Scarlett Johansson’s tits, in public, with no consequences at all? You’d better believe it (video auto-plays).

Regarding the women who do not have influence, they can strip down, or not, but if they do strip down to display the busts-backs-shoulders-bellies-hips-gams, as we see here nobody is allowed to notice, let alone say anything about it. You can’t send them home from school to change out of their skimpy shorts. News reporter, I’m guessing, is on the same side of the barrier as schoolgirl here: Not enough real power for anyone to worry, so they can be beautiful. Women aren’t threatened by that. Paradoxically though, if you are selling the pulchritudinous but powerless female the skimpy shorts or bathing suit, or hair products, or makeup, or nail treatment, you can charge her through the roof — and you probably will — because she will pay it. So there is a very high commercial value in grabbing male attention, which then, the males are not allowed to give.

Oh well wait a minute. Then there’s this thing that came my way, via IM from CylarZ, perhaps it can shed some light on things:

Yeah, I think now we’re coming to the heart of the matter. It reminds me of something a young lady said about the “all men are the same” myth: “Let’s be honest girls, all the men we like are the same.” Take a second & third look at a girl’s cleavage, or calves, a good-looking guy is one thing, an ugly guy is another thing. This is a new thing. See, pre-feminism it was the girl’s capital-dee Dad who decided what the ogler was, and what should be done about that. Now, that’s all changed — so, the truth of it is that we first need to know if the leering “gentleman” looks more like Jude Law or Steve Buscemi. And when we find that out, so we can figure out what to think about it, what we’re really doing is anticipating her reaction. So, the sexy guys get away with a bit more.

Actually, a lot more. I’m in a position to say. I’ve been both.

Most guys who possess any sophistication and/or experience at all, know this on some level. Furthermore, we should absolutely expect them to. Our modern society places immense pressure on guys to learn as much as they can throughout their lives, about how to get along with women. We remain lonely if we don’t go far enough, and there are huge penalties to pay if we go too far. We have to cope with this pretty much womb-to-tomb, so it stands to reason, whether society wants to admit it or not, that guys are the experts here.

And what we notice is that the line cannot be drawn until it’s first established whether we ourselves are among the sexy specimens. If we are, it’s over here, if we’re not then it’s over there.

So can you look at a chick in a bikini? It all comes down to whether or not you’re making her feel uncomfortable. Seems to make perfect sense! But, two problems with that. In the news segment, the bikini-reporter didn’t seem to have a problem at all with the leering, it was the jealous co-anchor who was making trouble. That is, we see, the default configuration. One woman speaks for another, and for some reason we all just accept this.

And then there is the question of: Can you look at a picture of her?

The billboard, promoting a tanning salon company, went up Tuesday. By Thursday, it was vandalized when someone covered it with a black tarp and spray painted the words “no porn in our town” on it…

“There is nothing pornographic about the image at all. It shows a beautiful tan on a confident women. It’s a very classy image,” Jeremy McCain, media director for California Sun, the company behind the advertisement, told the Sacramento Bee.

“If you go out to the lake or the beach, women wear bikinis all the time. It’s a very conservative bikini,” he added.

But apparently not everyone agrees. Not only is the vandal obviously upset, but his message must have resonated with others. Thursday afternoon the ad was taken down and replaced with an animal adoption sign…

According to Fox40 in Sacramento, the sign sits near an elementary school.

“My goodness, we are a very conservative family with two daughters and a young son,” California Sun owner Mike Blore told the station.

Now that the ad has been taken down, he’s upset. According to him, it wasn’t his decision to remove it.

“Here’s a company that doesn’t hesitate to put a Viagra ad in a children’s show,” said Blore, referring to CBS Outdoor, the company that owns the billboard. It didn’t return e-mails from FOX40 about why the image was replaced.

What the picture-of-woman-in-bikini story has in common with the news-clip-about-woman-in-bikini story, apart from the beautiful women in bikinis, is this: Sanity would have prevailed, if nobody had said anything at all.

Which just goes to show. We’re turning upside-down. Completely losing our cool and freaking out when gorgeous women display their supple skin and appealing appendages, where they ought to be able to, and enforcing a strict “don’t ask don’t tell” code when they do it in places like schools, where they ought not be able to. We are getting it exactly backward, and pretty much everywhere. Thanks Feminism!

Update: The best example of judgmental commentary on this segment, at least the best that’s come to my attention, is here. Holy smokes. It’s like he’s writing for people who can’t watch the video for themselves, trying to put together a protest of the ignorant.

Jeez, dude. She looks good, he said so. The whole thing was probably scripted anyway.

Fascinating. So many take-aways from this thing. The one that impresses me the most is that, through this subtle wording that we actually hear so much, “should we tolerate” — firing the whoever-it-is becomes the default proposition. It becomes ordinary to eject the S.O.B., and extraordinary to keep him. Before that’s done, it is the other way around.

File it under first-world-problems. If we all had to work fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days in order to harvest and slaughter enough food to feed our families, maybe we’d find it a bit easier to separate the real problems from the phony ones.

“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” — Nigil Powers.

Just not black and white (video at link). Carol Costello “really wanted legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin to say President Obama won” when His recess appointments went before the Supreme Court, which struck them down this week nine-zip.

And it got awkward really, really fast.

The decision wholly invalidates President Obama’s argument that he can move around Senate blocks on judicial and other appointments as long as the legislative body is idle — but not in recess — when he makes his move.

But Costello couldn’t accept the defeat. “So as usual, Jeffrey Toobin, this is a more complicated decision,” she said. “It’s just not black and white. Cause I guess you could say the president lost . . . but did he?”

“Yeah, he lost,” Toobin replied quickly. “There’s no doubt.”

“Well he lost in this particular case,” she admitted plaintively. “But overall, right?”

“Well . . . no, he lost overall,” Toobin insisted. “I mean, there’s no question this is a win for Congress and a defeat for President Obama.”

“There cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate.” — Aristotle.

Perhaps it was on noticing Costello’s modern post-Aristotle-era confusion, Gerard was inspired to dig up this old article from The Onion.

Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle On Obama’s Double-Homicide

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.

“I know there’s a story in there somewhere,” said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama’s home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. “Right now though, it’s probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation.”

Added Meacham, “It’s not so cut and dried.”

There’s a serious side to this: More and more, among those who make their living displaying, and in so doing defining and re-defining, some sort of brand name by way of printing or broadcasting messages…we see this rejection of the Law of Excluded Middle as a way of opting out of reality, without taking responsibility for the opting-out. So many sentences out there of the form “Yeah sure, [blank]…but you know, it’s not so cut-and-dried…what if…[blank]?” Yeah sure, two and two make four. Yeah sure, a rational number multiplied by or divided by another rational number will be yet another rational number. Sure A squared plus B squared is C squared. But it’s not so cut and dried…insert some sort of nonsensical mish-mash here…and Shazzadazzaduzzit, we have a whole new “answer.”

But it’s not so cut and dried.

She’s not happy with it.

When baseball players strike out, they’re standing alone at the plate. But there’s also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.

In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised. There’s a reason perpetually alarmed women are called “soccer moms,” not “football moms.”

The name of the German player who scored the goal against the U.S., by the way, was Thomas Mueller. Some reports actually say so. The jungle-telegraph news blurb that came at us from all directions yesterday, however — water-cooler, teevee, radio, IM, phone — was “Germany against U.S. 1-0.”

Some of her statements, like “Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay,” could be faulted for over-stating the problem in my opinion. But there certainly is a problem. Soccer represents a culture different from football and baseball, more-or-less in the way she describes, and the broad and sweaty fashion-event that surrounds us today is more “pull” than “push.” I agree entirely with this part:

I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.

But we do have to be told that about soccer. Controlling the narrative is important when you’re selling a bad idea.

Via Instapundit.

A dose of smiley-faced fascism, full of rosy prose and one-apology-per-paragraph, from a smiley-positive-person writing under the moniker of “One Pissed-Off Liberal“:

I think of myself as being part of the humanitarian left. That’s not a formal thing (afaik). I’m not an ideologue, a dedicated Marxist or committed socialist (though I do lean that way). I just come down on the left side of things because that’s where one finds compassion, charity, kindness, altruism, etc.- all those things that I perceive to be the best of which we are capable. I define myself as a leftist in opposition to what one finds on the right: selfishness, greed, profits over people, authoritarian meanness, police-state regulation of the powerless and lawlessness for the rich and powerful. It’s easy to be selfish and mean, perhaps that’s why so many people are. It’s much harder, and more laudatory in my view, to be a humanitarian. After all, what does the world need more of? Mean, selfish, greedy assholes? Or humanitarians? I think the answer is obvious.

And there ya go. In just a few sentences, he gets to “everyone who doesn’t share my ideology is a ‘mean, selfish, greedy asshole’.” Which I suspect was the point all along.

“Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.” — Larry Elder.

As to his question, “What does the world need more of?” More people who are willing to go the extra mile to make sure a preposition is something they never end sentences with. After that, more people working, to produce goods and services that other people need, that reliably and economically do the things they’re supposed to do. In order for that to happen on a large scale, we need a lot more than to just “be massively creative,” as he says. We have to put that creativity to work, and we require freedom to profit from this to the fullest extent possible. We need to get worry out of the way. Minimize the taxes, minimize the regulatory stranglehold on our efforts. Make business plans, and then act on them, without worrying about silly artificial things like “If that puts us up to fifty people then we have to worry about ObamaCare.” Get worry out of the way of helping each other.

Liberals are such a funny lot. They write their tomes about the challenges humanity faces and how it’s time to dig in and really mean business — but once they’re done running things a little while, nobody’s digging in or meaning business because it’s like running through a thicket. Suddenly, everyone is dodging little-laws. Or breaking them. And the place doesn’t look like utopia; it looks like Detroit. You look around and there isn’t anybody acting on the values the liberal was discussing; nobody helping each other, nobody being grown-up or compassionate, beginning with the end in mind, looking down the road, thinking ahead, building a better world. Just litter in the sidewalks, abandoned factories, rotting houses and people awaiting in long lines talking about “foostamps.”

I’ve got a better idea for a title for his piece: “I’m running low on ways I can not be a mean asshole, and I’m down to just this. How am I doing?”

No, really.

“When a black liberal is criticized, he cries racism. When liberalism fails, liberals cry racism. When the Democrat Party gets in trouble, liberals cry racism. It has become the ever present background noise of politics, like birds chirping in the forest.” — John Hawkins.

Via American Digest.

How did Taranto put it…

The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog. [bold emphasis added]

Our modern color-blind society has a real peculiar idea of what color-blindness is, I think.

Neo-neocon noticed something.

I was at the beach the other day and I noticed that about half the people walking around seemed to be tattooed. Highly unattractive, IMHO.

I generally agree, although I must allow for exceptions. I actually married a tattoo. Two of ’em, really, both drawn and located very tastefully. But Mrs. Freeberg is stopping there. Taylor, our favorite waitress over at Toby Keith’s, has gone all-out on her torso with flowers & cursive & such. Which makes it more important to properly treat the stretch marks during her pregnancy. The conversation last night went off in that direction, and I sort of tuned out because it was starting to orbit Girl Planet, and my yummy beef steak was calling me.

So I can’t be too hard on the inked folk, I happen to like some of them. But on the other hand, the comments section under Neo’s post is lit up with all sorts of gems:

I find it interesting that tatoos have gone, over the last thirty or forty years, from being a rare and daring defiance of societal norms to a commonplace. Once a tatoo told the world that you were someone out of the ordinary: a United States Marine, a Hell’s Angel or someone with sexual tastes that could get you arrested in most states. Nowadays, a tatoo most often indicates that you were able to nag your mom into driving you down to the mall, taking you to Tats R Us and putting the charge on her Visa.

++gigglesnort++ C’mon tattooed people, admit it. That’s funny. And it’s true.

One of the ways we might assess that a society has become soft and spoiled, is the observation that its demands have begun to take on the profile of the supplies. In other words, lots of people “need” something simply because it’s there to be had. What’s been going on with tattoos would be an apt illustration of this. The tattoo ink artist paying the rent by swiping the credit cards held by guilted and bullied small-em moms, ultimately, is a solution in search of a problem. Kids want the tattoos because the tattoos are there. And all the other kids have them. Because they’re there.

I wonder how the early-adventurers in this tattoo-fad wave feel about it, having endured not only real physical pain before it was cool to go in and feel it, but the exclusivity of having been inked which has, since then, deteriorated into something that no longer involves exclusivity. No point asking Mrs. Freeberg. If she excels at anything, it’s at figuring out what she wants put where, and why, all by herself, without regard to what others will think about it. Makes things very easy on the husband, especially during our upcoming move, I think. We don’t have some henpecked boob spending all afternoon sliding a couch around with a bubbly airhead chirping away about “No, maybe over here, no maybe over there…”

I digress. I thought this was good too:

Generally, the bigger the tats the less interesting the person.

Generally yes. Works in my wife’s case. Not in Taylor’s.

This one is the clear winner:

A tattoo is a permanent response to a temporary situation.

The year is still young, but thus far, this may emerge as the greatest piece of proposed legislation unless there’s something I’ve forgotten that’s even better — which I don’t consider to be too likely:

A week after the IRS announced they could not produce emails from former Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner and six others because of a computer crash, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) introduced “The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act.”

The language of the bill take a humorous approach to a serious issue.

The bill states, “All taxpayers shall be given the benefit of the doubt when not producing critical documentation, so long as the taxpayer’s excuse therefore falls into one of the following categories:

1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?”

“The United States was founded on the belief government is subservient and accountable to the people. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to follow laws the Obama administration refuses to follow themselves,” Stockman said. “Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.”

For the uninitiated, Lois Lerner, the high-ranking bureaucrat who to all appearances is at the top of the conspiracy to deny tax-exempt status to Tea Party groups — well, let’s just write about this honestly, shall we? She ranks high enough that a narrative has already been scripted that, guilty as she may very well be, gosh darn it they just can’t find the evidence so it looks like she’s gonna get away with it. The narrative persists throughout all requests made by Congress that might result in shedding some light on the situation, and now it persists through their demands for Lois Lerner’s e-mails.

So the narrative demands that the e-mails have been irretrievably lost.

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

What makes this story fascinating is that, clearly, whoever contrived the narrative — or more precisely, whoever dictated that it should persist through the e-mail request — doesn’t know jack-diddly-squat about how electronic messaging works in an organization of any size or complexity. The excuse is not technologically feasible.

I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsofts recommendations they are telling a falsehood. You can see by the diagram below that if you have three servers in a DAG you have three copies of the database.
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If they are talking about her local PC, then it’s a simple matter of going to the servers which have the email and getting them from the servers. If the servers have removed the data you can still get them by using the backups of the servers to recover the emails.

But I remember where I saw it before: The Bellesiles scandal.

One of the fascinating subplots in the controversy over whether Michael Bellesiles committed scholarly fraud in his book, Arming America, is what he claims happened to some of his research notes. Bellesiles asserts that water damage from a broken sprinkler pipe in Bowden Hall, where the Emory University History Department`s offices are housed, flooded the building and “pulped” and “destroyed” the yellow legal pads on which he says he recorded in penciled “tick marks” the 11,170 probates he says he researched.

That one has a fascinating backstory too. It’s always fascinating when liars get caught. It’s always worth inspecting just how much power of persuasion they managed to achieve before their fall from grace.

I guess, from what I’m reading up above, I’m not the only one who remembers the mushy-paper-pad excuse. But yellow legal pads are not e-mails which, by their very nature, are messages from one person to another. You don’t get to say “they were on a hard drive and golly gee, it crashed, so we can’t comply with your subpoena.” At least, you and I would not be able to say that.

So now a question has emerged about whether justice will endure in America. If you’re going to get away with it just because you’re supposed to get away with it, even if the explanation doesn’t make any sense at all, then we can all turn in America’s card that says “nation of laws, not of men,” along with the one that says “no one is above the law.” Because that would prove, plainly, that the law first needs to figure out who you are before it can attend to the question of whether any evidence can be found to convict you.

Update: Yeah Paul, go get ’em. People need to understand how out-of-control this situation really is.

Because, just as sure as the sun is going to rise tomorrow, a liberal is going to insist that anyone reading this and taking it seriously is exaggerating, failing to see shades of gray, living in a “conservative echo chamber,” et cetera.

Want to know how America would look if liberals like Barack Obama had complete control of the country?

1) Abortion would be the only “choice.” Almost everything else including light bulbs, TVs, health care plans, cars, and the schools your child goes to would be chosen for you by people in D.C.

2) You could be sued for failing to warn people that you are about to say something that could conceivably be offensive to women, gays, transsexuals, or minorities.

3) Every sports fan of teams like the Redskins, Braves, Chiefs, Indians, Blackhawks, and Seminoles would be branded as a bigot and all of those teams would be forced to change their names.

Silly right winger!, they’ll say. That’s not what we want to do!

Alright then, the question that must then come up is one of: Where, then, would you all stop? And under what rationale would you be stopping at that point?

We’re at quite a few of them already, like #16:

16) Merit and even basic competence would be secondary in importance to hiring people who are the right race or sex for a job.

And #19 is coming up real quick:

19) It would be illegal to oppose gay marriage.

Here in California, we have a saying: Whatever our hard-lefty-liberal state legislature hasn’t outlawed, it merely hasn’t outlawed yet. I remember the frustration I had when I first moved here before I made my first meaningful cultural discovery. If you can imagine a law against it, rest assured that there is one. The second meaningful discovery was, just because they have all these laws on the books does not mean in any way you should expect people to actually follow them. It’s the land of a million little laws that nobody ever takes the time to actually read, much less follow.

Liberals care nothing about the past, nothing at all about the fact that what they want to do might have been tried elsewhere, with dismal or hurtful results. They reserve all their attention for the future — but, it’s so odd that they don’t care much about the future either. How far are we going to take this? Where does it stop? It’s not on their radar.

When you’re engaged in a glorious crusade, I guess you just don’t need to ask such things. Like it’s betraying the movement or something. Oh sure, there are limits when you want to shout down a conservative who has conjectured that liberals will never stop until X; at that point, they’ll always insist that they will, that the conservative is dreaming, living in a fantasy world or “bubble of unreality” or some such. But, they don’t define such limits for themselves. They don’t practice them. They’re not about stopping.

Ever.

It is an ideology that is extremist by its very nature. It always has been. Since the Reign of Terror, liberalism has always been like this. Constantly ready to feed on their own.

From the Crime section of The Blaze:

A suspected robber in Jackson, Mississippi, had to be hospitalized after his would-be victim called his bluff in a big way.

The suspect first approached the man at a Motel 6 and asked for cigarettes, according to the Jackson Police Department. When the man, a hotel guest, said he didn’t have any cigarettes, he figured that was the end of the interaction.

Instead, the suspected robber turned around and pulled out a gun.

“I bet you don’t have one of these,” he reportedly said.

After hearing the man’s “bet,” the would-be victim then “pulled out his weapon and began firing shots,” officer Colendula Green told WLBT.

The suspect, who has not been identified, was hospitalized and may face robbery-related charges. His condition was unknown on Friday. The man who shot him is not being charged by police.

The story isn’t written the way I would have preferred; not written for the benefit of someone considering personal defense equipment and supplies, to carry concealed through questionable areas. It mentions that “Right now the man who shot him…is not being charged. He was protected under Mississippi’s castle law.” How strong is the ground upon which this guy is standing, in Mississippi? How strong would it be elsewhere?

What kind of gun was he carrying? A revolver or an automatic? Did he have a round chambered already? And how many did he discharge? The story uses plural in describing the reports, “pulled out his weapon and began firing shots,” but singular in describing the injury: “A man with a gunshot wound was reported…”

In my opinion, it was written for ninnies. Gun grabbing ninnies. I’ve picked up that the “news” in the story, from the perspective of the people editing it and from the perspective of the news consumers toward which it is directed, is that violence resulted from, as Michael Moore so eloquently put it so many times, “all these guns lying around.” In my world, the story is that a robbery was prevented — except, as is so often the case, we don’t have enough information to determine that. The story could be that one chucklehead was carrying a gun who should not have been carrying one, using it in a manner for which guns should not be used. The story could be that two such chuckleheads were doing exactly that. Because there’s so little useful information in the story, from the perspective of those of us who look at guns in an intelligent and proper way, we are left wondering which one is the case.

I’m in favor of gun control for dumbasses, by the way — I don’t think chuckleheads and dumbasses should carry, I don’t think they should even be in the same breathing space as a gun. Who could possibly disagree with that? They are devices capable of causing serious, life-changing injury, up to and including death. But, the possibility exists that in this situation, the defensive sidearm was used knowledgeably and for its intended purpose, and prevented something bad from happening. I just wish more reporters looked at the gun control issue in a proper and correct way, because then, maybe we’d know.

Blog-sister Cassy, now hitting top-gear in the Mommy-phase of her existence, has not made the cut in the hottest conservative blogger ladies ranking this year. And she’s cool with that.

I don’t regret, not for a second, having my children, and my body is a reminder of that. I can marvel over the fact that I created three beautiful lives, grew them and nurtured them and birthed them. That doesn’t mean that I can look at, say, Miss Indiana with the “normal” body and not think, man, I would kill for a stomach like hers. But that’s why I work. That’s why I’ve started running. And I know, I may never have a flat stomach again, the stretch marks will never completely fade. That’s OK. I just also think it’s fake to act as if I’m always 100% happy with that reality. Wouldn’t it be exhausting, to every day have to put up this façade? Or I don’t know, maybe for some lucky people it’s not a façade. But for me, it would be, and I’d rather be honest. I don’t love the way I look every day. I don’t hate it either. My body is what it is, and my feelings towards it are as nuanced and complicated as my feelings about most things are. And I think that we, as moms struggling with our post-baby bodies, are allowed to feel those nuanced, complicated feelings.

A lot of other women would be smart to follow her lead. There is, “It is what it is, and I’m okay with that” and then there is, “Who’s to say four hundred pounds at five-foot-nothing isn’t sexy?” The former is healthy. The latter is the opposite, and stark raving nuts.

There’s something going on here on Planet Man that a lot of women will never figure out; something about the way the fellas do things that is good and right. With us, it’s not so much the stomach — although in some cases, like mine, perhaps it should be. No, the stuff that is gone forever, that we know isn’t coming back no matter what, that everybody sees coming a mile and a half away is: the hair on the front of the dome. Not only is it a permanent change, it just screams masculinity-in-retreat.

But men don’t sweat it. Some do, of course. Mostly actors and public figures, who could make the convincing case that their wigs and hair plugs are more about safeguarding a firm and vital financial asset than soothing their tender egos. Most dudes, though, do pretty much what I do and take the Cassy approach. There’s fantasy, there’s reality, whatever’s going on with the scalp is what’s going on. It is what it is.

Dudes are lucky. We have always lived in that world. In childhood, they draw up comic books for us and make cartoons for us about muscle-dudes with enormous biceps and huge pectorals, comforting the afflicted and defending the defenseless; it partially works on us, but for the most part, doesn’t. Even if we get into the cartoon, to the point of wanting to dress up like the guy on Halloween, the rest of the year we go about our business in our torn jeans and tee shirts with spindly arms sticking out. Here and there some boy will get body-conscious, work out, and show results. But those guys tend to do that because they need to, they’re athletes, or want to show off — either way, they’re doing it for them. Even they, are happy in their skins. Superman and Captain Marvel aren’t making them feel inadequate, or I sure hope they’re not because you can take it to the bank nobody’s making a fuss about it.

It’s the separation between fantasy and reality. It’s the healthy lack of apprehension when another visual specimen, clearly superior, makes an appearance. Which is gonna happen. Girls could learn a lot about what boys know about this.

Our wives and girlfriends take a second look at Antonio Banderas or Daniel-Day Lewis or Hugh Grant or James Marsden, we laugh it off. Why wouldn’t we? It means more sex for us. We don’t weep and wail and gnash our teeth, wishing we were James Marsden. Who wants to be that guy? In the movies, his girlfriends are always cheating on him.

Speaking of comic books, looks like Wonder Woman’s costume is going to be the motorcycle-jacket and clown-tights thing, which cuts down by quite a bit my budget for seeing it. Not so much because Gal Gadot won’t be showing leg, although there is that. But this makes it a three-fer: Superman, f00ked-with for no reason identifiable. I’ve seen the Cavill film, own it, don’t undrestand why a reboot was needed. Ditto Batman. As one Facebook friend said about her costume, “…it needs to stop at the tops of her thighs. Or it’s not Wonder Woman.” Feminists won’t ever come around on this, but it’s really true. Wonder Woman in a catsuit looks like a zillion other butt-kicking females, some with superpowers and some just martial-arts experts. Putting her in pants is a sure sign that someone has had influence, who doesn’t know or care enough to be able to tell you anything about braclets, an invisible plane or a lasso. And her presence is going to be a crushing bore. It’s the “You find sexy what we tell you to find sexy” thing. And, with or without bare legs, it doesn’t make for fun movies. Remember those, movies that were supposed to be fun? When we were inspired to find heroes and heroines inspiring, not bullied into finding them that way?

What’s going on here, lately, is guilt. And control. It’s hard to control people who aren’t feeling guilty. It really all comes down to that: If we feel guilty, we are easily controlled. Guilt for having a flat stomach. Or, not having one. Or, appreciating one on someone else. Biceps. Hair. Thighs. Guilt-free people wear swimsuits to the beach this time of year, no matter how it looks, knowing full well that we’re all built to deteriorate and eventually dangle some appendages that will look as bad as they’re ever gonna look, because that’s the effect time has on all of us.

And they don’t tell total strangers what they are & are not supposed to find sexy. When they’re the ones being told, they ignore it. That’s how grown-ups behave. It was not that long ago that this was all obvious, to pretty much everyone. Somewhere along the line, sometime around forty years ago, it became very fashionable to single out people and condescendingly intone something to the effect of “[blank] has a thought in his/her head that he should not be having,” and we started to shame each other’s minds as well as bodies. There’s nothing modern or sophisticated about this. It comes off like a sort of never-ending witch-trial, actually.

Update 6/22/14: And, on the “20 hottest conservative men” side of things, I didn’t make the cut again. I’m fine with that.

Michael Hausam, IJReview, writes a fascinating column titled “Michelle Obama Neatly Summarizes the Entire Progressive Agenda During a Nutrition Interview”:

In an interview with MSN’s Healthy Living, she made two particular statements that deserve further comment.

Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right.

Our pediatrician had to pull me aside and point out some things that were going wrong.

I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don\u2019t have access to the information I have?

Is it really that hard?

As a parent of five, it didn’t take a pediatrician consult for me to figure out what to put on my kids’ plates. It may surprise the Obamas to discover that many parents have successfully fed their offspring without Princeton and Harvard degrees, in addition to not needing “access to information.”

Lastly, as many “working” moms don’t earn $316,912 a year, in addition to a husband who was earning $162,100 as a Senator, perhaps the First Lady protesteth a tad too much.

Then she spilled the milk, so to speak:

It’s so important for our schools to make the hard calls for our kids, because parents are struggling enough at home.

Excuse me, who should be making the hard calls for “our” kids? Our schools, who admittedly have a tough job to do, are not and should not be given the right to make “hard calls” in our place…the progressive assumption, that they know what is best and are going to decide for us, is condescending and arrogant. And isn’t the liberal mantra all about “equality”?

So much to ponder here. Why can’t our progressive betters be honest about it, and say yes, we’re going to keep going no matter what, we are never going to stop until some central authority far removed from you is deciding everything and you’re left deciding nothing. Why are they always going through this phony charade of “Just this one more rule, or just this one more piece of micro-managing apparatus, and life will be perfect”?

Two: From where do they get their obviously sincere and complete confidence that these unnamed-betters are going to make better decisions? Those of us who live in the real world understand it isn’t too likely, since distant people can’t have a command of the facts “on the ground,” pertaining to the actual situation. Not only that, but if they knew about the domain of knowledge in general, and it has something to do with making a profit, wouldn’t they be actually doing it rather than telling others how to do it? To say nothing of the fact that the proggies have no idea who these betters are, or will be, any more than the rest of us do. One day they might actually be…perish the thought…Republicans. How come the progressives among us never seem to give that any serious thought even though time after time it has come true?

And three: Yes, what about that equality thing. We can envision an equal-society as a lot of things, reasonably. What isn’t reasonable is to envision it as a place where these people over here, have to do what they’re told by those people over there, because of class membership. That would be part of the definition.

I have my theories about this. One of the ways conservatives and liberals can be distinguished in a way most people can understand, is that conservatives believe in equality at the starting line and liberals believe in equality at the finish line. Inequality, therefore, on Planet-Liberal is a situation brought about by our attending to our own affairs with our varying degrees & quality of confidence, competence, liquid assets, friends, drive, determination and L.I.C.O.R.I.C.E. — Leadership, Initiative, Creativity, Ownership of our own problems, Resourcefulness, Ingenuity, Courage/Conviction and Energy. Nevermind that most of these, and arguably all of them, are ultimately decisional; people are perfectly capable of deciding “I haven’t been getting up off my ass lately, I should do that more & better.” If we’re all managed, and involuntarily, by some committee nearby or far away, then we’re all made equal. And it doesn’t matter if the decisions handed down by the committee are good ones that help us, or bad ones that hurt us. That would explain why they don’t seem to care about that part. It would also explain why they have no concern at all for who is on the committee, except for those occasions on which someone has just been appointed, by a liberal, and the talking-point has been circulated that the new appointee should be lionized as if he or she has done something remarkable (when, usually, we’re talking about nothing more than some well-connected liberal commie-academic or lawyer, with a track record of very few original thoughts, or none at all, about anything).

I don’t know if that explains everything — it seems to — or that this is the explanation. I do know there is something in the agenda opposed to the idea that the “little people,” so to speak, should be making their own decisions. That much seems to be beyond any reasonable disagreement, and I’m not sure even ardent liberals would disagree. I suppose a few of them would object to me being free to write it down where others can read it, ++chuckle++ without running the remarks by a committee for approval first. They have a phobia, I think, against autonomous decisions.

In that sense, they are not alone. And in that sense, they are not so much a cause of what’s going wrong in our society, but a symptom of it. You see it in business every now and then. Every once in a great while it will become disastrously clear that the larger, more distant layer of management really, really botched this thing up and the latest debacle could have been avoided if the smaller, more local and more knowledgeable layer could have made the call instead, and someone will chirp away with the Dangerous Idea^TM: Maybe, going forward, that’s where this sort of decision should be made, smaller-is-better? It’s really, super-awkward, since it becomes obligatory for the chairman-of-the-meeting to shoot the idea down right away, nip it in the bud before it gains life, and yet there’s no rationale for doing so. That’s okay though. The bureaucracy will usually find some way to kill the Dangerous Idea.

Probably by way of something that has to do with the environment.

Point is, there is something happening here that doesn’t have to do with conservatives or liberals. It has to do with excellence and mediocrity. This world of equality in which they place their hopes, never comes any closer to that goal than this: to create an environment in which mediocrity is never called out because there is no excellence against which it can be contrasted, and thus identified. There are no little-laboratories; some commission or some guy far away says how it’s going to be done, and the little people way out here, just do it. That kind of equality. So what they seek to eliminate is not quite so much inequality, since the people on that commission certainly would not be equal — but, innovation. Equality amongst the “proles.” The little people. The dangerous people, who are genuinely likely to come up with effective new ways of doing things. The fear is not that they might make the big, removed, mediocre commission-people without any original thoughts look bad; the fear is one of motion. A new idea, conceived where the action is all taking place, is a new idea likely to work, and a new idea that is likely to work might make it necessary to move around a bit, as it’s implemented on a grander and grander scale.

They don’t want anything new built. It frightens them. That’s my theory, anyway. Mediocrity, as we are reminded so often, is not quite so much a level of outcome or of effort, but a way of life. It is, in its own way, a passion.

Sarah Jean Seman writes in Townhall.com:

Here is a discomforting fact: 911 has voicemail. Florida resident John Breau discovered this the hard way, in the middle of an armed robbery when his child, wife and stepmother were in the house.

At what exact point the attacked man called the police is unclear, however, local news station Fox 13 reported that the call went to voicemail as the robbers returned to the house:

A man called 911 after four robbers with guns broke into his home, demanded money and prescription drugs.

The dispatcher tried to transfer the call from the fire department to law enforcement side of things – but he got a voicemail just as the crooks returned to the home.

Chaos ensues. The man takes matters into his own hands and shoot one of the robbers.

He then tells the dispatcher that he’s been robbed, and two women in the home were physically hurt.

Breau used a shotgun to protect himself and his family while the call went to voicemail not once, but twice. It took 3 minutes and 41 seconds for the station to dispatch emergency aid, according to WTSP. Even then, the deputies were “sent to the wrong address while a gunfight was in progress.”

This is a jarring reminder that systems are flawed, humans (such as the person operating Breau’s call) make mistakes, and owning a gun just might be your best option for protecting yourself and your family.

That MyFoxTampaBay story is just weird. Splotchy editing. Looks almost like blogging or something.

Anyhow…yeah. The gun-versus-nine-one-one debate is, and has always been, a culture clash between those who prefer to rely on a system and those who prefer to rely on themselves. We who are not in the immediate throes of a home-invasion robbery, and are not finding ourselves confronting a burglar, have that luxury. We get to choose which option we would like to have.

There’s another point to be made here: Assembly-line systems are, by their very nature, thoughtless. Our grasp on the finer details of this story seems to be a bit fuzzy, but you can probably presume safely that the fellow with the gun put a lot more thought into whether to pull the trigger, than the 911 operator put into whether or not to take the call.

…and…no possibility whatsoever of actually getting away with it. I recall wondering about this two decades ago, give-or-take, with Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Maybe it was the being named after Sir Edmund Hillary thing. It could’ve been something else, there are more than a couple of examples.

It’s been rattling around in my head ever since, bugging me, so I appreciated reading this (from Linkiest).

They lie when the truth would suffice, and they hold on to that lie, even doubling down on it, regardless of what evidence to the contrary comes to light.

When President Obama’s “If you like your plan you can keep your plan” lie was finally and irrefutably exposed, he didn’t apologize or explain why he’d lied. He just said he was sorry people got the wrong impression from his words, which, of course, could not have been clearer.
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Why put out obvious untruths when the truth would have sufficed? Are they sociopaths? Are they so insulated from contrary opinions in their sycophantic inner circles that they believe these lies? Or are they just so used to getting away with it that they throw caution to the wind knowing they will ultimately be given a pass because they have the media in their back pocket? Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever the answer, Republicans need to prepare themselves now for boxing a shadow in 2016 because whoever the Democrat nominee is it’s pretty clear he or she won’t be bound by past deeds, words, or even reality.

I hope a lot more people start reflecting on this. A “national dialogue” on this would do some good. The behavior is just weird.

It’s like they have to go to a liar’s-meeting every week or so…and get threatened with public spankings with a big wooden paddle, or perhaps expulsion, if they don’t have any stories to share about big lies they told lately.

Which ++chuckle++ when you think about it, I suppose those would have to be documented.

…anywhere, outside of an institution for the mentally unfit? Perhaps the institution still exists but the walls have come down. They walk among us…

Hat tip to Gerard.

I’ve mulled over the question in the title of this post many times…a few months ago I highlighted the mystery more directly, and now I guess the time has come to just straight-out-ask.

Not that I’m lacking in ideas. I guess my real question is: How conscious are they of the fact that they have no logical reason to hire this woman to pick up their dog’s deposits in the city park, let alone elect her to anything? Do they understand that their exuberance is rooted in some kind of anger? And how many different kinds of anger are there in this fan base? Several? Just one? Is there a Pareto Principle at work here, with eighty percent of the angry-people motivated by twenty percent of the reasons-for-anger?

I’m genuinely worried about this, and my worry is not about the prospect of her winning. Win or lose, she makes me worry, a lot. I’d worry about it even if I agreed with every ridiculous position and lie and outburst that came out of that uncultured wrinkly cake-hole of hers: How should we ever expect anything to get better, when so much of what’s screwed up is due to the actions of our government, and those who rally around candidates for positions in this government don’t impose any kind of performance standard on them? How do we expect good things to be done, when nobody is expecting those who might be responsible for doing those good things, to do anything good?

So yeah, watch the Hillary fans mumble and stutter and stammer and wonder how to answer the question of what she’s accomplished; year by year, decade by decade. And never learning anything, but pontificating away about how it’s her turn, how she’s suffered, kept Bill in line, worked so hard. We’ve got to get our yuks where we can.

This is good. Maybe I’m just saying that because most apply to me.

Haven’t gone through and counted them; more do than don’t. Among the ones I like best:

1. Your relationships are less dramatic than they use to be.
:
5. You’ve raised your standards.

6. You let go of things that don’t make you feel good.
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9. You’ve learned that setbacks and failure are part of self-growth.
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13. You don’t complain much, but instead focus on solutions.
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15. You stopped caring about what others think of you.

A common theme I’m seeing to it all is, abandoning this pursuit of coming out on top in any given confrontation. That’s a definitional attribute in redneck-ness, along with annoying-urban-liberal-hipster-ness, this whole “me right you wrong” thing. Life, it turns out, is a bit more like Chess than Checkers; there can be long-term benefits, not visible in the moment, to losing — in the moment.

There’s a little joke about that.

A big-city lawyer from London went grouse shooting in the Scottish highlands. He shot and dropped a bird, but it fell into a crofter’s field on the other side of a fence.

As the lawyer was climbing over the fence, an elderly crofter drove up on his tractor and asked him what he was doing. The lawyer responded, “I shot a grouse and it fell in this field, and now I’m going in to retrieve it.”

The old crofter replied, “This is ma property, and you’ve nae right tae come o’er here.”

The indignant lawyer said, “I am one of the best trial advocates in the country, and if you don’t let me get my grouse, I’ll sue you and take everything you own.”

The old crofter smiled and said, “Ach, sonny! Keep yer heid oan! Apparently, ye dinna ken hoo we dae things in the Highlands. Up here we settle wee argy-bargys like this wi’ the ‘Three-Kick Rule’.”

The lawyer asked, “Just what IS the Three-Kick Rule?”

The farmer replied. “Well, first I kick ye three times, an’ then you kick me three times, and so on, back and forth, until wan o’ us gives up.”

The lawyer quickly thought about the proposed contest and decided that he could easily take the old codger. He agreed to abide by the local custom.

The old crofter slowly climbed down from the tractor and walked up to the city fellow. His first kick planted the toe of his heavy work boot into the lawyer’s groin and dropped him to his knees. His second kick nearly ripped the lawyer’s nose off his face. The lawyer was flat on his belly when the farmer’s third kick to the kidney area nearly caused him to give up. After over ten minutes, the lawyer summoned every bit of his will, struggled to his feet, and said,

“Okay, you old coot, now it’s MY turn.”

The old crofter smiled sweetly and replied, “Naw, I give up. Ye can hiv the wee birdy.”

The Morgan Rule Number One is based on this ancient wisdom, in a way. “If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.”