He got it exactly right:

It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (SCALIA, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding — the correct understanding — of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did not simultaneously offend it.

Even taking this Court’s sorry line of race-based admissions cases as a given, I find the question presented only slightly less strange: Does the Equal Protection Clause forbid a State from banning a practice that the Clause barely — and only provisionally — permits?

As is so often the case with such hotly contested arguments, there are really two issues here; a specific one and a broader one. The specific issue is: Could a state be constitutionally prohibited from passing statutes, or amendments to their own constitutions, against race-based preferences? Or do they have the authority to do such a thing?

And the broader issue is: What has happened to our national wherewithal for logically noodling out such things, if this is even open to question? This is the curse of the information age; we seem to have a “neural net,” of sorts, spanning the entire nation, which has been lately invaded and torn-up by a busy flock of “Yeah But” people. Like moths attacking fine and cherished garments in a neglected closet, they’ve been chewing cavernous holes in our logical fabric, insisting that important and fundamental building-block definitions don’t mean what they mean, and in fact, mean the exact opposite of what they really were intended to mean.

They think they’re getting there, to Planet Opposite, by arguing cleverly, but they’re not even making the trip by arguing honestly. Their arguments and rebuttals, in many instances, don’t even make sense. Much of it seems to be based on nothing more than “Well this has been working for us for quite awhile, and we shall feel peeved if it does not continue to.” It is the shrill whine of people who have never been saddled with the burden of making anything actually work; in fact, much of the time when they prevail, they prevail because someone else simply ran out of patience, and opted to go get something productive done rather than continue to be annoyed.

Those who have other things they need to go do, then, are treble preoccupied — with standing up for reason and common sense; with trying to get something useful done; and, with wrestling the seemingly never-ending question of whether ignoring the one of those, and concentrating all of one’s energies on the other, might or might not be the right way to go.

Who loses? The country. The one thing that cannot be reasonably denied about where our energies and attention should be going, is that we ought not be wasting such resources arguing about whether two and two make five, or whether X equals not-X. We live in an age in which we have machines that can sort those out, millions of times in a fraction of a second. It’s a tragedy that the humans whose lives are supposed to be made easier by such machines, are compelled by warped internal desire, and external circumstances, to burn off such vast, great portions of their lives trying to settle the same silly things.

I don’t know.

Joel Kotkin:

Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.

These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives.

But when it comes to authoritarian expression of “true” beliefs, it’s the progressive Left that increasingly seeks to impose orthodoxy. In this rising intellectual order, those who dissent on everything from climate change, the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, to opposition to abortion are increasingly marginalized and, in some cases, as in the Steyn trial, legally attacked.

A few days ago, Brendan Eich, CEO of the web browser company Mozilla, resigned under pressure from gay rights groups. Why? Because it was revealed he donated $1,000 to the campaign to pass Proposition 8, California’s since-overturned ballot measure defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

In many cases, I might agree with some leftist views, say, on gay marriage or the critical nature of income inequality, but liberals should find these intolerant tendencies terrifying and dangerous in a democracy dependent on the free interchange of ideas.

This shift has been building for decades and follows the increasingly uniform capture of key institutions – universities, the mass media and the bureaucracy – by people holding a set of “acceptable” viewpoints.

Gets back to the Arguments About Definitions thing. “Acceptable” viewpoints and “reasonable” viewpoints are not measured to be that way. They are pronounced as such, by those who want to “win” arguments, but are dead-set against assessing or discussing details, something that is necessary to the process of winning an argument honestly.

So, they simply pronounce. They say silly, empty things like “everybody knows” or “most people say.”

Thomas Sowell discusses many cases of inflated pricing for houses in the Palo Alto area, then comes to the point…

Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.

How does this tie in with liberalism?

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.

One minor quibble with this though: To true-believing liberals, these aren’t “bad consequences.” As hard as it is to nail down workable generalizations of their beliefs — being a bad sales job, it follows that deception is involved, and the interests of the buyers & sellers of liberalism must be different — there is one attribute more consistent than most others: Certain segments of the population should wake up one day to find out the world has no room for them. Margaret Sanger certainly wanted that. Today’s liberals want that. The only disagreement in their ranks is the sequence in which these demographic groups are to be shoved over the brink into the abyss.

But whether the lib realizes it or not, it’s a distinction without a difference. The central-umbrella-message that covers it all is that people are a toxin upon the planet. People are bad. In the wake of the implementation of their policies, things are bad for the people. Well, duh.

Update 4/23/14: The High Cost, Part II:

Liberals almost never talk about disarmament in terms of evidence of its consequences, whether they are discussing gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.

International disarmament agreements flourished between the two World Wars. Just a few years after the end of the First World War there were the Washington Naval Agreements of 1921-1922 that led to the United States actually sinking some of its own warships. Then there was the celebrated Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which nations renounced war, with France’s Foreign Minister Aristide Briand declaring, “Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!” The “international community” loved it.

In Britain, the Labour Party repeatedly voted against military armaments during most of the decade of the 1930s. A popular argument of the time was that Britain should disarm “as an example to others.”

Unfortunately, Hitler did not follow that example. He was busy building the most powerful military machine on the continent of Europe.

Update 4/24/14: Part III:

Income inequality has long been one of the liberals’ favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year.

If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals.

Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama’s leftist policies.

This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government “disability” payments.
:
Most Americans living in “poverty” have air conditioning, a motor vehicle and other amenities, including more living space than the average person in Europe — not the average poor person in Europe, the average person.

“Poverty” is in the eye of the statisticians — more specifically, the government statisticians who define what constitutes “poverty,” and who are unlikely to define it in ways that might jeopardize the massive welfare state that they are part of.

In terms of income statistics that produce liberal outcries about “disparities” and “inequities,” millions of people who don’t have to earn incomes typically don’t.

NewsBusters, via Twitchy:

On the Sunday, April 20, Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, as host Harris-Perry chastised Democrats for not bragging about ObamaCare for the year’s midterm elections, she at one point mocked Americans angry about having their health insurance plans cancelled, which she referred to as “crappy plans,” as she lamented that Democrats are not boasting about ObamaCare or declaring, “Yeah, you can’t keep your crappy plans. Just deal with that!”

Her mockery of the ObamaCare-induced insurance cancellations came as she compared Republicans to people who flip houses and brag about doing only a little work, as she characterized Democrats, by contrast, as people who do substantial work on houses but fail to boast about it adequately to potential buyers. Harris-Perry:

You can have some people — let’s call them Republicans — who will go into a fallen down blighted house, slap on some granite counter tops, while ignoring real problems, and declare their work is the best thing ever.

After boasting about Democrats passing ObamaCare, she lamented:

And they’re not even owning it. No confidence, no swagger. No, “Yeah, you can’t keep your crappy plans. Just deal with that!”

Video at the link. Twitchy adds: “From ‘it’s going to be the best thing ever’ to ‘just deal with it’? Perfect…”

Los Angeles Times, via Instapundit:

At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts.

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents’ homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

“The numbers are pretty amazing,” Wallace said. “It’s an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They’re mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They’ve got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents’ homes.”

Many more young adults live with their parents than those in their 50s and early 60s live with theirs. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 1.6 million Californians have taken up residence in their childhood bedrooms, according to the data.

Though that’s a 33% jump from 2006, the pace is half that of the 50 to 64 age group.

The surge in middle-aged people moving in with parents reflects the grim economic reality that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Obama fans say this is what success looks like…wonder if they’d insist, what we need here is to make labor even more expensive, and business expansion even more difficult.

Watching loud, self-righteous people indulge in consistent policy changes, with the expectation of inconsistent results, is depressing. Greatly depressing. Not recessing.

Props to LA Times for making it to the end, without mentioning “Obama” or “ObamaCare” even one time. That must have taken something.

From here.

Captain Capitalism takes on the “Government is not a family” canard.

As long as the electricity stays on, they think the deficits are sustainable.

And, Republicans are continuing the legacy of the KKK, ObamaCare rocks, and rot like that.

I don’t generally approve of pronouncing the other side to be unworthy-of-debating. That’s their tactic. That’s what losers do. You debate if you can, and if you can’t, you come up with these rationalizations about why the debate is not possible — what they do. All the time. I just don’t think it’s productive for both sides to stoop to that level.

But, I can’t say it’s any more productive to do what I’ve been doing, either. I like the idea of imposing a litmus test. “I live in the other world, where people actually build things that have to work, that other people can use…as such, my time is valuable. So before we go further, a litmus-test question: What is better, a Mom and Dad married to each other, neither of whom has ever had sex with anybody else, with two virgin teenage children, living in the 1950’s…or a single-mom, now, with four kids by four different guys, depending on a dizzying kaleidoscope of government programs? In which household do the kids have a better shot spending their formative years?”

That does effectively separate out the slightly-lefty-leaning types, the fresh recruits, who still might be saved — from the crazies.

There are many lists like this out there, but this one appeals to me.

Lots of wire work appearing in the list…excessive CGI…a large number of superhero movies which, although not constituting proof of the list’s verity all by themselves, nevertheless strongly suggest the list is on the mark because, hey, there have been some real stinkers out there.

But the single factor I’m seeing emerge throughout all of it is: Actors just kinda phoning-it-in. That, and lack of sensibility and coherence in the plot. Those little things, that make you care about whether a movie character is going to live or die. Or succeed or fail.

Oh yeah, and the other way the list resonates with me? Through experience. Yes, Mrs. Freeberg and I have seen all of them, each and every single one…except maybe Catwoman which we haven’t watched together. I’m pretty sure we’ve both seen it. The subject just hasn’t come up, ya know?

Also, thought it was a bit harsh to go including Green Lantern on this kind of a list. That one wasn’t exactly great, or anything, but I wouldn’t call it bad either. Certainly not on par with Batman and Robin, good heavens no. A little perspective, folks.

Zo saw something…and said something.

The Atlantic:

On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.

In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled. His partner Campbell, who won the top speaker award at the National Debate Tournament two weeks later, had been unfairly targeted by the police at the debate venue just days before, and cited this personal trauma as evidence for his case against the government’s treatment of poor African-Americans.

This year wasn’t the first time this had happened. In the 2013 championship, two men from Emporia State University, Ryan Walsh and Elijah Smith, employed a similar style and became the first African-Americans to win two national debate tournaments. Many of their arguments, based on personal memoir and rap music, completely ignored the stated resolution, and instead asserted that the framework of collegiate debate has historically privileged straight, white, middle-class students.

Tournament participants from all backgrounds say they have found some of these debate strategies offensive. Even so, the new style has received mainstream acceptance, sympathy, and awards.

The beginning of the end of western civilization? Dunno. Depends on what sort of impact is had on civilization, by these debate teams. Not sure that that’s there. If it is, then this can’t be good.

I’ve now & then imposed a hypothetical of an alien from another planet renting space in our laundry room, experienced and competent in the realm of logic, reason, common sense, and maybe the English language, but entirely new to our culture, recent history and social customs. Like Mork From Ork or something — what sort of questions would such a visitor ask about this-or-that. In this situation, the curious alien would be transformed into a racist, and of the worst sort. But, this would be a reflection on us and not on him: He’d want to know, how come it is that debating a pressing issue coherently and rationally, has become a white thing?

I have also criticized the modern liberal movement for, among many other things, maintaining an ignorance of the concept of time. “They’re very often caught neglecting the refinement of the message that would be handed off to history, opting to focus their attentions on the emotional rapture of the moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement…is a perfect example of this.” The fuck-the-clock outburst is an even better example of it. The real tragedy is that entire lives are burned away, a year at a time, inside the hairpin turn of some glorious revolution. The time never seems to come to evaluate how it all went down, whether things have been made better. It requires less discipline, mentally at least, to endure the centripetal force of the turn. Everything is an outburst. Everything’s hyperbole. No cause-and-effect; no this, therefore that. “Fuck the time!” Outrage is always easier.

So the higher-ed institutions are cranking out more liberals. Well, that’s nothing new, is it. But this certainly can’t be good. And it isn’t fair to the students, not by a damn sight.

Salina Zito at TribLive (via Instapundit):

She gave a dramatic eye-roll in reaction to all of the fuss that Democrats and the president attempted to create over equal pay for women last week.

A Democrat herself, she said she has carved out a decent, comfortable life for her family over the years as a waitress at a local restaurant.

“I am in many ways my own boss,” she explained. “It is up to me to get the order right, treat people well, and use my personal skills to increase my wages.”

And she is “sick and tired of my party treating me like a victim. This is not 1970, and it’s insulting.”
:
The president, she said, “is trying to create a wedge issue when there isn’t one. Why can’t he focus on things people are really concerned about, like bringing back lost jobs, a tangible thing that has affected housing, communities, tax bases and schools?”

Last Tuesday, President Obama signed an executive order encouraging federal contractors to pay men and women the same amount of money for the same amount of work.

He claimed that women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by men — a very broad statement and, in many ways, false, according to a Labor Department analysis showing that when you factor in job experience, education and hours worked, the difference in median wages between men and women shrinks to 5 to 7 cents on the dollar.

Christina Hoff Sommers has more to say about that (from Chicks On The Right):

Even the Washington Post Fact-Checker is boosting the rating on this chestnut, from one to two Pinocchios.

It’s got a whole year of dust on it, but I just found it over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging…

…where, a friend-of-a-friend had this to add to it:

He forgot the part where they believe that guns are for breaking laws, so if guns are illegal, nobody will be able to use them to break laws.

Which touches on what’s always fascinated me about this — the commonality through it all. You can find it if you look for it, although at first it doesn’t seem possible. After all, how do you find coherence in “America is corrupt, politicians are crooks, let’s raise taxes so the politicians have more of our money and give them lots of power to solve all our problems”?

It is the power of the proclamation. You make a proclamation, and immediately at that point the difference between conservatives and liberals becomes apparent. They become opposites of each other right there & then.

Conservatives immediately think: And what of the people who will not follow this go-do? What of those who will not take it seriously? Or who simply won’t learn about it? With liberals, it’s ++whoosh++, right over their heads. Outlaw guns, the guns are all gone, there are no deaths or injuries from guns. How could there be, we just got rid of all the guns, silly! Illiteracy and unemployment are next.

One of the saddest things you’ll ever see is a liberal pundit crediting all the liberals of old for the huge strides made in fighting these scourges of mankind, along with war, pestilence, disease, famine, et al. And what did those old-time progressives do? Why, they passed some “landmark legislation.”

From all I’ve seen and heard about them, it’s always been that way. There’s a “joke” going around about conservatism and liberalism getting invented, way back in the days of the caveman. The first time man ate cooked meat, the kill was dragged to the campfire by — who else? — the first conservatives. It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it; throughout antiquity, liberals have been opposed by principle to learning any of the skills needed in a hunt. So the liberals, having contributed nothing to the feast at all, in fact having ridiculed the conservatives as they gathered their ropes and knives and spears to go out on the hunt that morning, quickly came up with some rules about how the food should be divided. And one or two of them maybe brought some hummus; but mostly, they contributed rules.

Then after everyone was fed and full, liberals took the credit. If anyone died from food poisoning, though, they quickly blamed the conservatives.

Nothing’s really changed from that configuration, in all this time. The conservatives contribute what everyone is there to consume, liberals contribute rules. If things go well liberals take the credit, and anytime there’s a problem with it they blame the conservatives.

I really don’t know the answer to that question. Is she a Mrs. Doormat, or former Mrs. Doormat?

If she runs, we should know. As First Dude, Bill Clinton would not be as dangerous as his wife. But he’d be more nauseating, if only just barely.

Apart from that, I suppose I don’t really care. I’m more concerned about the why. Why is it that I don’t know. The democrats have gotten into this weird habit of answering every single question that comes up with an answer of “How dare you ask the question” that their most notable luminaries have become cloaked with the shroud of enigma that in generations past, would have been thought dangerous to any aspiring politician. Not that anybody has asked questions about the Clintons’ marital status. But they haven’t been acting like a married couple since, oh, sometime around ’94 when Hillary was selling us her own health care plan. Twenty years. I haven’t heard anything of a divorce, but I wouldn’t.

Also: Why do democrats get married? I remember how they used to compare the Clintons, favorably, to Republicans like Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan who had been married more than once. Alright, assuming the Clintons are still married, that’s the first for both of them, good for them. But what’s the point?

For votes? Like Catholic democrats who are Catholic even though they aren’t practicing Catholics, so they can get Catholic votes? What is there apart from that? The democrat groom marries the democrat bride because he’s just so lost without her? And she marries him because “he makes me laugh” or some such rot?

The votes-thing distresses me somewhat, because there is something going on here that is new. It’s a change. That enigmatic cloaking, its beneficial effects. Voters feel like they “know” the candidate, now, when they don’t. Time was when the candidate would convince the voters, that the voters knew the candidate, by revealing something. Maybe it was all bull, but still that was the move: Inspire this feeling of camaraderie, membership in a common clique or interest group, by letting information out. Introducing the wife and kids. Appearing in front of cameras and talking about personal things. Now, it’s the opposite: They define themselves as dark and shapeless blobs. Defining through lack of definition. Stem to stern, it’s all “how dare you ask” to this and that and the other.

It’s not what they’re hiding that is bothersome. It isn’t even the dark-shapeless-blob maybe-married-maybe-not politicians. I’m concerned about the changing behavior of the public. They used to be fooled into thinking the candidate was their friend, when they learned things. Now they get fooled into thinking that when information is deliberately kept from them. The old way was better, because although problems can result from making friends with people who lie to you, it is certainly hazardous to make friends with people who consistently and deliberately hide things from you.

Huffington Post tells of an interview with the legendary Hank Aaron:

“We are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record,” he said. “If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.”

Aaron pointed to Republicans’ obstruction of Obama as one area where not much progress has been made.

“Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated,” he said. “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Actually Mr. Aaron, those were democrats back then. The new Republican party was formed to oppose them, and end slavery. Thought you should know.

Update 4/10/14: Larry Elder poses the challenge to you, to name the names. Hope you can provide a response.

Washington Post.

All commercial transport aircraft are fitted with underwater locator beacons to assist in the relocation of black box flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. These beacons are free-running pingers that transmit signals at an acoustic frequency of 37.5 kilohertz and have an expected battery life of 30 days. The scale of the challenge in locating the black boxes is immense.

There follows, after that, an impressive visual graphic…

To be added to the ever-thickening file marked “‘The Debate Is Over’ means ‘I am telling a much bigger lie than usual'”…

“The debate over repealing this law is over,” President Obama declared last Tuesday in reference to ObamaCare….
:
[Paul Krugman] asserted that “7.1 million and counting signups is a huge victory for reform.” And not just a huge victory but a definitive one: “The nightmare is over. It has long been clear, to anyone willing to study the issue, that the overall structure of Obamacare made sense given the political constraints. Now we know that the technical details can be managed, too. This thing is going to work. And, yes, it’s also a big political victory for Democrats.”

“My advice to reform supporters,” Krugman continued, “is, go ahead and celebrate. Oh, and feel free to ridicule right-wingers who confidently predicted doom.”

That last one explains a lot. “Reform supporters” don’t need any prompting to ridicule their opposition, but you can still tell when they’ve been prompted to do so. There is a perceptible up-tick, and an odd mixture of things they know how to do & other things they don’t know how to do. My stock answer to the “ridicule” has been to inquire whether or not they were trying to say ObamaCare was a good law, whether they’d go so far as to say this is a model of how legislation should be passed, and of what new laws should be doing. I never did get a straight answer to that.

As such, I’m not “confidently predict”-ing doom, I’m casually and sadly observing it.

The column continues, circling back to directly address this “debate is over” chicanery…

A demand for silence is not a sign of intellectual self-confidence. And this is not the only subject on which the left is demanding that its opponents just shut up. For years we’ve been hearing that the debate about global warming–or “climate change” or whatever they’re calling it this week–is settled. Early in the 2000s some news organizations declared they would banish dissenting points of view from their pages. The debate goes on.

It’s almost as if — let us say, exactly as if — the whole point to leftist policies enshrined into public law, is not to spare the public from disaster or to improve their lives, but to engage in this “ridicule” and act smug and superior to the opposition, results be damned.

Well, that explains Detroit.

A few posts back there is something about Definitions, in which I posit that most serious human disagreements take place between one side that avoids definitions and an opposing side that insists on having them. I further observe that what we today call “the left” seems to be all about avoiding definitions.

And, blaming the ensuing inevitable conflict on the other side, persuading any bystanders into believing that all conflict comes from the attempt to define things. Successfully, for the most part. Well, we have multiple leftists trying to challenge this…it’s almost cute. Not a one among them seems to understand how they’re trying to so challenge. There’s no rhyme or reason or coherence to their criticisms. It’s like the Internet argument equivalent of a nerd-slap-fight. It’s also like they’re trying to put together an argument while…avoiding defining anything. Which would prove the point.

Jonah Goldberg has a fascinating addition to this: Ask some leftists you know, to define “social justice”:

From my mean old big brother.

The professor has a policy that if your phone rings in class, you have to answer it on speaker…

…there’s no way that can backfire, right?

From here.

Looks like Superman’s dad. Bad at conflict resolution. Terrible babysitter. Sucks at parking.

They added a lot of new layers of detail to a historical figure about whom not much has been defined, even when you go back and comb over the Hebrew texts like the Midrash. Much of the negative commentary about the film has to do with that filling-in. And there’s a “Big Kahuna” thing that’s ticking off a lot of people, Christians in particular, but to reveal it would be a spoiler and there isn’t much point to doing that. There are other much more minor things that are upsetting to people, my son and I weren’t too fond of these “rocky transformer robots” that are supposed to be fallen angels.

And I don’t like my antediluvian patriarchs swashbuckling. Swinging a hammer and building a big boat is about as much physical action as I care to see there, and that’s just because it’s from Genesis. Swinging a javelin around being an Old Testament Darth Maul is over the top, but, artistic license and all…it didn’t quite ruin the movie.

On with the template…

[ ] Tits
[?] Sex
[ ] Exploding cars
[ ] Guns Realism: [ ]%
[ ] Creatures eating people
[ ] Murder/mystery
[ ] Intrigue/espionage/complicated plot
[ ] Cool music
[x] Swashbuckling
[x] Good & evil wo/pain-in-the-ass hipster moral ambiguity
[x] BigBad
[ ] Client (rich powerful sucker the BigBad is trying to rip off)
[ ] Dragon (glorious bastard)
[x] Slimeball
[x] Pirate/ferryman/eccentric with highly recognizable cool ship
[x] Mooks
[x] I’m going to kill you the same way I killed your father
[ ] Girl-on-girl catfight
[x] The family patriarch spends way too much time around his work
[ ] Mom and kid live happily ever after, following the death of dumb ol’ dad
[ ] Philip K. Dick type of alternative-reality headache
[x] Maguffin
[x] Chase [x] foot [ ] flying [ ] water craft
[x] Indigenous peoples
[ ] Good guys held captive
[ ] Following a trail of clues
[x] Sinister plot [?] take over world [ ] kill lots of innocents
[ ] Love triangle [ ] girl-boy-girl [ ] boy-girl-boy
[ ] Revenge [ ] protagonist [ ] antagonist
[x] False lead/decoy
[x] Traitor
[x] Supernatural/sorcery
[ ] Ghost getting all pissed off because the good guys aren’t finding its body
[ ] Creepy young boy or girl
[x] Grisly deaths for the bad guys
[x] Race against time at the end
[ ] Cliffhanger
[ ] NO CONFERENCE TABLES

No conference tables, but it did have two conference-room scenes. They had the good sense to eliminate the middle kid, Ham, from the final one.

All in all, a very decent offering. I see at at this time it has a rating of 77% at Rotten Tomatoes, I think that’s about right.

When I took the wife to go see it this afternoon, we were a bit taken aback by the big ol’ pile of crap ONE YOUNG MAN left in his seat in the back row, just behind us. Napkins, popcorn residue on the floor, in the chairs, the bucket that was supposed to be holding it all, the wrappers going to whatever his lunch was, just scattered around on the seats. My wife whispered something to me about it, and just then the man came back up and excused himself past me, back to his seat. I thought maybe he overheard her and went to clean up after himself. But, he just picked up his cell phone and excuse-me’d past me again, leaving the mess.

The VERY LAST SCENES of the movie are the same as the last scenes in any other Noah-retelling. Animals being nice and mutually-caring and adorable, with a voice-over from the humans expressing hope that our species can learn to be just as kind and thus justify this second-chance we were given. They’d just gotten done saying that. And here’s this guy leaving several cubic feet of crap in his chair.

So, I guess I’m not entirely convinced that the big-screen forum is the right one for this message.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

Like the jaws of an alligator or other predator, a pair of pliers works because one side is stationary while the other side moves. You don’t see it until you look closely. But that’s how it works.

Disagreements among people are similar to this; you don’t see it until you look closely, but you’ll find there’s one side in the argument, not quite so much arguing, as protesting against a definition being made (or requested). The other side is trying to establish definitions. Exceptions to this are few and far between. The argument erupts, and persists, because the two sides disagree on whether or not things should be defined.

Also generally true: The side that refuses to define things, which is responsible for the conflict, enjoys a lot of success making the conflict look like the other side’s fault. But you know something is rotten when you can start a big ol’ fight merely by asking that things be defined.

Ten examples, up with which I came:

1. When, during a pregnancy, does life begin?
2. What, exactly, has Barack Obama done to improve the economy?
3. For that matter, what did Bill Clinton ever do to improve the economy?
4. Since the minimum wage makes labor more expensive, how in the world could it possibly NOT eliminate jobs?
5. When we “sit down and talk out our differences with our enemies,” what exactly is going to be discussed?
6. If we’re obliged to allow and recognize gay marriage today, why would we not be doing the same with polygamy and bestiality tomorrow?
7. Are you really supposed to vote today? Do you have I.D.?
8. What makes a government regulator any wiser or more scrupulous than the people he’s supposed to regulate?
9. What EXACTLY are the problems “Common Core” is supposed to fix, and how EXACTLY is it supposed to fix them?
10. If politicians are “just a bunch of crooks, doesn’t matter what party they belong to”…then why would we expect to see a tax increase make anything better for anyone who isn’t a politician?

I’m sure there are more though.

I’ve been noticing that with what we lately call “left” and “right” in politics, it is a rather consistent configuration that this “side that refuses to define things” is on what we call the “left.” Issue after issue. I have also noticed that where these halves overlay occupations, the “left” sympathizes with those who don’t have any. Or, are occupied with something disassociated with any sort of material demand. Community organizing. Wheelchair-ramp-reconstruction or health insurance including birth control; other things people buy not because they actually want them, but to meet some sort of regulatory requirement. Well, this stands to reason. If you’re going to sell something to people who actually want to buy it, you’re going to need to define things in order to do your market research. And, to build the widget to make sure it does what people want it to do. And then the people lining up to spend their hard-earned dollars buying it, oh boy howdy, they’re going to want things defined too. What’s the total cost of ownership? What’s it like to use it? What are the consequences of moving on to this new thing, and stopping using the old thing?

This thing we now call “the left” is awash in pretend-games that cloak various life experiences as their polar opposites. It very often pretends that acts of destruction, as I’ve pointed out before, are brilliant creative efforts that produce something wonderful and great and grand. Can even the most ardent Obama supporter tell me what President Obama is building? They can certainly tell me what He’s destroying; in fact, if you compare those answers to what Obama opponents say He’s destroying, you’ll find the answers are substantially the same even though the two sides might disagree about names for these targets of destruction. It insists on treating people unequally and it calls that “equality.” It insists on forcing people to do things they don’t want to do and it calls that “choice.” When it bellows away about “diversity” you can be sure it will soon be pressing everyone to have the same opinions.

When every argument you make relies on presenting things as the opposites of themselves, that’s deceit; and, deceitful people don’t want things defined, that makes it harder to do the deceiving.

Much easier to tell the hoi polloi “we have to pass the bill so you can see what’s in it.”

de•bate (n.)
1. a discussion, as of a public question in an assembly, involving opposing viewpoints.
2. a formal contest in which the affirmative and negative sides of a proposition are advocated by opposing speakers.
3. deliberation; consideration.

I see Ed Darrell doesn’t want the seventeenth amendment repealed. His effort to explain why that is, is a fail, because his point is — as usual — some hated group of rich people wields too much influence. In this particular situation, it’s past-tense, so not only have the loathed copper barons been dead for generations, along with anyone else they might have unfairly oppressed, but there’s a lot of difficulty in evaluating just how much influence they might have had. The progressives of the time thought it was too much, therefore that’s what history says, since they won that fight. But what’s that mean? In politics, everyone is thought to have too much power, by someone who opposes whoever that would be. And history about any conflict is generally written by the victor.

Once those questions are answered, they fail to support the conclusion that we need the seventeenth amendment, which strips the states of representation in Congress. As in, reduces their influence all the way to zero. It is that “final solution” which fascinates me. Haven’t you noticed? Within lefty politics, this is always the answer: Someone’s influence should be — not just checked or balanced — but obliterated. A reduction or realignment is never good enough. That group, that party, that class, that guy, never should have had a vote in the first place.

It isn’t just the lefties anymore. We see it everywhere now, don’t we? A&E “fired” Phil Robertson, patriarch of Duck Dynasty — now, what was the point of that? I never did hear of anyone taking the extra time or trouble to teach or counsel Mr. Robertson into having the correct opinions about gay people, so it wasn’t about Robertson’s opinions. As always seems to be the case with actions like this, it was about influence. The rule seems to be that you can think whatever you want, but you’re not allowed to have influence unless you think the right things. If you don’t think the right things then you are to be driven out of whatever position you have. Once that’s done, you can go on thinking it, but the important goal is that we have to get our society properly arranged, with these good thoughts entirely saturating the tallest spires, and the bad thoughts entirely relegated down there in the dark alleyways, among the plebes. That is, from all I have seen and all I can figure out about it, the ultimate objective. The shrieking I hear is all about these exceptions: Someone in a position has a bad thought, let’s get him defrocked of the position so he can keep his bad thought — but, down there, not up where he is. Those people up there are all supposed to think the same, good, things.

Which brings me to the Eich matter (hat tip to blogger friend Rick).

The very same people who have declared, “I yam what I yam”, and “we’re here, we’re queer; get used to it,” and who fought against discrimination on the basis of physical or emotional natures are proving themselves empty of magnanimity in victory. They are now saying “don’t be who you are,” and “you’re wrong, you’re gone; get used to it.” They’re applauding employment discrimination on the basis of an intellectual or spiritual philosophy.

What are they, anyway, philosophobes? Are they so terrified of any outlook which does not conform to theirs? I always thought a well-founded argument could withstand a little principled opposition.

That last observation of The Anchoress’ cuts right through and stabs straight at the heart of the problem. For generations now, our society has become overly obsessed with seeking alternative methods for conflict resolution. At first blush, that seems to be just an attribute of a civilized society, doesn’t it? Conflicts settled by some other means than “might makes right” — isn’t that practically the definition?

Ah, but in opening the possiblity for victory to be awarded to someone besides the strongest, we’ve made the mistake of doing the same with arguments. Just as we don’t want the strongest kid on the playground to win all the time just because he’s strong, since that’s bullying, we’ve transformed debate the same way. The weaker argument has to have a fair shot. But not just a fair shot. Nothing short of a monopoly on any & all influence, will do.

If one could plausibly argue that left-wing politics in America is, as I’ve posited before, a message of “get out of here so the cool people can make decisions, but leave your billfold behind” — then, one would have to concede that our culture is being jerked in that direction, a whole lot in a very short time, suddenly, even violently. So many busy and talkative factions that want to “discuss” or “debate” something, have a “national dialogue” of some sort. But step one always seems to be to make sure someone else can’t participate.

They want to win a debate without participating in one. Let’s contemplate for just a moment or two how odious that is; or, ought to be. What would a casino or gambling hall say to something like that? You want to win the bet but you don’t want to subject yourself to the risks and rigors of the actual betting. You enter a poker match claiming to be good for it, lose the hand, and oopsie…your pockets are empty. What happens next? It wouldn’t be tolerated in there. Why do we put up with it out here?

And it hasn’t been lost on me that the people to be exiled from the discussions, more often than not, are the ones who are to involuntarily pay for the outcome. The here-and-there examples don’t bother me much. They’ll happen; unproductive people like to boss productive people around. They’ve always liked that. They have nothing else to do. What bothers me, and I suspect is of paramount concern to the people participating in Call Mozilla Monday tomorrow, is that this seems to have become the default configuration. Nobody seems to notice it much anymore unless someone takes the time and trouble to make a huge stink.

That would put me in the minority, because when I hear someone say “Before I make my argument, make sure my opposition cannot respond,” or anything that is equivalent, I don’t need someone to make a stink to understand what’s wrong with that. It sounds to me like conceding defeat. At that point I don’t even wanna hear what comes next, to tell the truth. Why waste my time listening to an argument that is so bad, that the person making it doesn’t want to make it until he can be sure no one has the opportunity to respond? Except to express total agreement?

Therefore, I propose the following rule. Its time has come: If you want to win a debate, you have to first allow it to happen.

How about it, can we all agree on that? Or can we at least get a lot of people behind that one? Doesn’t seem to me like too much to ask; it’s just common sense. Or maybe I’m expecting too much? Are we too “civilized” for that now?

Rolled over the odometer to 100k, then put an additional three or four thousand miles on it. It’s a Honda, so 100k is at the point where it’s just getting broken-in.

That thin wiry figure in the top panoramic, which is the Lake Mead area, is my sixteen-year-old son who I’m trying to get to eat real food. I suppose that will all come later. He’s about as tall and thin as I was at his age.

Before exploring the Grand Canyon, we took a walk through the neighborhood I used to call home, in early-early childhood, over forty years ago. The photo on the right is where my folks escorted me to my first Kindergarten class. Yup, this is where all the trouble started.

After finishing up with that, we took Bugs Bunny’s famous “left turn at Albuquerque” and carved our way through Colorado and Wyoming, then circled back through Utah and Nevada. I have pictures of that stuff too, but as you might imagine if you’ve been through that part of the country, they’re not very exciting. At all.

Click the pics to embiggen.

On the brink and, for the moment, pulling back:

Vulnerable Senate Democrats plan to introduce a bill as early as today that would alter some of the mandates in Obamacare and delay others, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Among the proposals likely to be included is one backed by Messrs. Begich and Warner offering a new kind of insurance plan, a “copper” plan featuring lower premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs than the “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” options on the government-run health-care exchanges.

Lawmakers also would like to make health care more affordable for small businesses by expanding certain tax credits and making them available for longer…
:
Many Democrats in tight races this fall have made clear they are committed to keeping the health law but want to fix it, drawing a distinction with Republicans who want to scrap it entirely. “The law is very good; it has some very good parts to it,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat running for re-election in conservative-leaning Louisiana. “I do not believe it should be repealed—my opponents do.”

This is a trap for Republicans. If they go ahead and help the Democrats by applying a bandaid to this gaping wound, it won’t help consumers and would dispirit the base of the party. On the other hand, that’s just what these Dems are counting on. By refusing to help “fix” Obamacare, they can run on the notion that Republicans don’t want to make the law better because it benefits them politically if it remains a mess.

There’s no reason for the GOP to alter what they’ve been doing. The mid terms will be a turnout election and anything that might keep their voters from going to the polls should be avoided. On the other hand, only those predisposed to think that a few minor tweaks could actually “fix” Obamacare would be influenced by the Democratic argument of GOP obstructionism. It’s far better for Republicans to keep the pressure on vulnerable Democrats than help them make meaningless changes to a bad law.

Thing is, though, this isn’t about applying patches to a bad law to make it into a good law, or correcting the implementation of a good law so that it’s a bit less messy. It’s about incremental movement. The questions have to do with quantity and not quality: How much of the poison can we swallow on any given day, or any given election cycle. How much furniture polish can you put in the stepkid’s soup before she complains about the taste and doesn’t eat it.

The way forward is not open to any sort of question or deliberation; it’s not on the table. I know this is true because I subscribe to the democrat party’s e-mail updates. They’re writing in this morning to get me all excited about taking back the House of Representatives. They need me to get fourteen people from my city to chip in $3 or more, so they can bring 218 seats under democrat control; see, that’s the thinking. When-are-we-done. What’s the bare minimum — to achieve iron-fisted, dictatorial control on a whole host of issues. When can we start forcing people we don’t know to do everything our way.

The question that would naturally come up to a truly political party trying to achieve success in a constitutional republic, would be: What would it take for us to win 300 seats? Or all 435? It is astonishing that liberals, as we understand that word today, have so little interest in such things. They know that the answers would have to do with chipping away at the agenda, giving something up. They don’t want to give up anything at all. They’re extremists by nature. They have no reason to be anything else; they know the ratchet effect works in their favor.

They know exactly what policies they want. The question is the size of the incremental steps, how quickly the electorate can be persuaded to absorb the “change” in each election cycle. This is much bigger than President Obama, He’s merely a device to speed up the sale. A bit of salt and seasoning in the poisoned soup, if you will.

And they’re doing this so we have better medical care? Been awhile since you’ve heard a democrat talk about that, though, hasn’t it. “The law is very good” and “has good parts to it.” But what about results? All of their talking points are “gonna-dooz” and very few of them have anything to do with “hav-dunz.” Even the disgraceful debunking of that cancer patient was chock full of “would be” and “will hit.” They have very few anecdotes to offer about people receiving better medical care at lower cost, and even fewer statistics to offer about a population staying healthy, or getting healthy, or saving money, or enjoying any other perks of state-managed health care services.

Like everything else they do to “help” people, it’s really all about control. Charge this much, pay that much, don’t own this, must own that. And how many such new rules can they pass this year without losing elections. And how many elections can they afford to lose without losing control of this-or-that chamber.

They’re not really representing people at all. They’re in our capitol to represent an agenda, not constituents. Whatever they haven’t outlawed or forced, they merely haven’t outlawed or forced yet. Republicans, as usual, suck at communicating so that hasn’t emerged as the central issue. But it’s really all about that. It has always been all about that.

Kevin O’Leary responds to President Obama’s concerns about the minimum wage:

Even if the President’s facts and figures were correct, His logic is poor. You can effectively highlight the glaring gaps simply by relieving Him of the power to unilaterally choose phrases. Make labor more expensive, that would be an honest and balanced summary of what it is He seeks to do right now. Right?

Would even His defenders agree with the statement, “What we need to do right now is increase the cost of labor 39%”? Because if they won’t go along with that, then how come we have to use their phraseology when we debate measures like this?

People seem to forget: “Will increase the cost by such-and-such-a-percent” is not some abstract computation put together using some worst-case-scenario and then bandied about by the law’s critics; it is what the law does. It’s supposed to do that. It’s a minimum.

National Review:

This incident at Grand Valley State is just the latest of many instances over the past few years in which people claim to be the victims of hate crimes they inflicted on themselves or completely fabricated.

Perhaps attempting some misguided publicity stunt or perhaps trying to make others see hate where there is none, these people have gone to great lengths to claim they’ve been targeted.

When politicians manage to ram bad laws through the mill that are ripe for abuse, it’s a double-win for them. By subjecting ordinary citizens who are just minding their own business to casual civil and regulatory assault, they make The People less powerful, and in so doing make the state more powerful. They essentially pilfer rights away from The People. And politically, they help themselves by shrugging off concerns about this potential abuse, they set themselves up as believers in mankind’s inherent goodness.

Of course, if you noodle away on that last point with something resembling a working brain, you immediately understand that the “faith” they’re putting in mankind is nothing more than an illusion; if/when they turn out to be wrong, it doesn’t cost them a single thing.

Laws such as these rank high on the list of ways to empower the powerful, comfort the already comfortable, and afflict the afflicted.

Washington Post, hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

The Obama administration has decided to give extra time to Americans who say that they are unable to enroll in health plans through the federal insurance marketplace by the March 31 deadline.

Federal officials confirmed Tuesday evening that all consumers who have begun to apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, but who do not finish by Monday, will have until about mid-April to ask for an extension.

Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.

Nifty. Yeah, I can certainly see that Obama’s government has no need to be told what’s going on, when they’re plenty capable of making up all the truth they need.

Our nation’s first President supposedly couldn’t tell a lie…

Rant Sports.

I think this is completely great. What a fitting epitaph.

“Signs That Left Them Speechless”…