My late Uncle used to tell me, “Morgan, there are two kinds of people in this world; the people who go around dividing everyone into groups, and the ones who don’t.”

I’ve learned over the years that there are actually three.

1. People who build things that work.
2. People who fail to build things that work.
3. People who build things that fail to work.

This isn’t any sort of significant enhancement; not many useful ways to differentiate between the last two of those three. The people in the third set are, essentially, people in the second set who have been backed into a corner and forced to produce something when they don’t want to. When that happens, we see validation of what Professor Sowell had to say:

…everything “works” by sufficiently low standards, and everything “fails” by sufficiently high standards.

The “work” is whatever they want it to be, the “results” will be whatever they’ll be; it is the standards that are determined in the aftermath.

The people in the first group — if they want to remain in the first group, which overall, they’re going to do whatever is necessary to make that happen — have to lock the standards in place. They have to assess their work objectively, according to metrics that were defined before the work started, and remained stationary throughout. In other words, they have to actually treat standards as standards, not as rhetoric. They also have to follow the twenty. Those items of truth that are completely non-ideological and non-partisan…or…darn well ought to be.

But, in this day & age, perhaps, aren’t anymore.

The Other McCain, via Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm:

Evidently, it is not enough to have a Gay Pride parade every June. Now every parade must be a Gay Pride parade.

I submit that our society is going through a bit of frustration here, frustration that goes beyond the obvious conflict. It is losing a crucial distinction between what one might call “doing a something” versus “doing a nothing.”

If you hold a parade, you’re doing a something. If you’re making sure every parade is X, what you’re really doing is — this is a simple rephrasing, nothing more, no logical revision to it — making sure there are no parades that are not X. It’s a cleanup job. Inherently negative. You’re not provisioning something, like the grand marshals of the olden days; what you’re doing is taking something away.

As Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said,

I’m disappointed that this year, I will be unable to participate in the parade. As mayor of the city of Boston, I have to do my best to ensure that all Bostonians are free to participate fully in the civic life of our city. Unfortunately, this year, the parties were not able to come to an understanding that would have made that possible.

He represents a sizable movement here, and the movement doesn’t have anything to do with rights or any sort of equality. It doesn’t have to do with “tolerance”; saying so is just silly. The movement reminds us of its existence by continually refusing to tolerate things. Think of the legacy. A hundred years from now, what can we say Marty Walsh did? Take part in a parade? No. The intended legacy is “He never supported such-and-such that would have excluded so-and-so.” He-never. A negative legacy. The distinction being called out here is between a go and a stop. The thing with the gay parade is a stop.

You look for legacy-opportunities like this one month in, month out, year after year…pretty soon, it adds up to a real stretch of time, during which you’re living out your limited lifespan as a non-person, not doing things. Timidly. Some of us abhor the very idea. Others welcome it.

But, I think on some level it is incongruent with the hard-wiring within us all. I think this makes people frustrated and hungry. There is the aspect of spiritual starvation, but on top of that, there is a secular way to be starved. I think people, conservatives and liberals alike, along with anarchists, libertarians, vegetarians, feminists, MGTOWs, anti-war protesters and greenies — all have an innate need to feel like they’re accomplishing something. Squeaking on through, from one date on the tombstone to the other without contaminating anything, is not enough. We have an instinctive drive to change the state of something. We don’t want to hide the fact that we were here. We want our presence to be recorded in some way, even if our chosen ideological pursuits demand otherwise.

It has not escaped my notice that those who believe humans are a contaminant, and make all sorts of demands of themselves and others that have to do with this “leave no imprint” mania, are not soothed by their victories. The more they win, the more frustrated they become.

The goals they have for the next victory, after a time, all seem to start with that word “every.” Classic OCD cases. They’re never done washing their hands.

Ernest Belford Bax, on feminism…in 1887.

These dogmas of “advanced” faith in the Woman Question are… namely, that women ought to have all the rights of intellectual capacity with all the privileges of physical weakness, otherwise expressed, all the rights of men, and none of the duties or hardships of men. For it is a significant and amusing fact that no mention is ever made by the advocate of women’s claims of the privileges which have always been accorded the “weaker sex.” These privileges are quietly pocketed as a matter of course, without any sort of acknowledgment, much less any suggestion of surrender.

Well ya know…the rebuttal could be reasonably made, that there isn’t necessarily any incompatibility here. I don’t mind holding the door open for a woman, even as we both enter a business meeting in which she intends to compete with me, prove she can do a job as well as I can. I’ve done it quite a few times, actually. There’s the job, there’s the door — two different things.

The problem emerges as we become more militant about this false definition of “equality,” start to look for more and more ways for women to be equal, and when we run out of them, start inventing new goals for women to reach in a race to be more like men. When equivalence becomes the zenith of potential human achievement. When boys are raised to achieve nothing, save for finding out what some strutting female martinet wants, and to bring it to her, and the girls are raised to achieve nothing save for clearly expressing what it is they want brought to them.

That’s when people become ants. And it all starts with that double-standard: Everybody is absolutely forbidden from thinking of males and females as different in any way. But let her go first.

A hundred and twenty-seven years is an impressive stretch of foresight.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Liberal blogger, in the comments, tells us why we should like it so much:

It pisses off those many self-hating people who hope for America to fail soon. It smokes out idiots who hate Obama more than they love America, it smokes out racists and bigots of many stripes. It exposes people who really don’t help our nation grow and thrive, so we can know who to avoid when we need patriots to trust.

Maybe we could label these people, make them wear some kind of symbol or something? That way, after we know who they are, we could put our health care rules back to the way they were so that people can keep those doctors & plans they were supposed to be able to keep, and avoid these higher costs they now see coming. Also, President Obama wouldn’t have to decide every day what to do with His phone and His pen. But, no such reversal seems likely in the near future, so the question continues to plague us: This is success?

It has the benefit of distinguishing “my political movement, right or wrong” liberals from those who possess common sense? Can’t speak for everyone. But I was able to noodle that one out before ObamaCare.

Well, Nancy Pelosi did say we’d have to pass it to find out what’s in it. Looks like division and anger. Must be part of President Obama’s new tone.

Our purported obsession with it is the great mass-delusion of our times.

At 60, I have no dog in this fight. I am out to pasture. But from time to time I have asked women about this double standard, in which we vest with women the right to avoid parenthood but not men.The counter-argument every time is if you play, you pay. I am amused because of its similarity to the anti-abortion argument. Should what applies to the goose apply to the gander?
:
If men cannot, post-coital, rid themselves of their parental obligations, then women should not be allowed to either. Equal protection under the law means just that. The 14th Amendment may not apply to the unborn, but surely it applies to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” The ability to abort one’s parental responsibilities either applies to both or none.

That won’t happen, of course, when people enjoy “rights” because of class membership and not because of individual dignity. The rights are to be awarded to classes, and before that happens we have to know: Which class is it?

From Time.

This is a post on the Hello Kitty of blogging, that was essentially a brain dump and a request for any items I might have forgotten to add. They are problems with the Affordable Care Act. Not merely arguments against, which could be refuted, or debunked, or merely disagreed-with in good faith. But actual, objectively-measured and objectively observed, hiccups. Monkey-wrenches in the works. Rake handles in the bicycle spokes.

We may disagree reasonably about whether the ObamaCare albatross will eventually generate the lift to overcome the drag. But we can’t reasonably disagree that the drag is there.

I think, based on past history, the law’s defenders will put together some highly questionable evidence that this-or-that hiccup was never there, or it’s been overcome anyway — completely ignore the other eight, and brazenly call anyone who doesn’t climb on to the ObamaCare bandwagon, a racist. Therein lies the necessity of putting together such a list.

There’s a lot more than just one problem going on.

A quick, off the cuff, very high level listing of the breakage.

1. The most obvious one, “if you like your doctor/plan you can keep your doctor/plan, period.”
2. The web site’s “shaky start.” Odd since, I think I can safely presume, the computer that monitors your logging in to the flaky-crashy ObamaCare web site, is working JUST FINE even though it’s working its way through massively, massively, massively more transactions.
3. The extra money people have to pay to stay covered. The failure to contain costs. The failure to hold up the “affordable” part of it.
4. The affordability from the perspective of the Treasury. Wasn’t so long ago this boondoggle was supposed to help balance the budget.
5. The signing-up, or lack thereof.
6. Where #5 is quantity, #6 is quality. Viability of the risk pool. Not enough young healthy people lining up to get fleeced.
7. The bait-and-switch. Hardcore leftists are already salivating for the plan to be pulled so it can be replaced with what is called “single-payer.” On the right, there is a line of thinking that this “halfway house” plan was always supposed to fail, to provide a pretext for s.p.
8. The structural stupidity of it. Problem: Too many people uncovered. Solution: Fine them for not being covered. Falls under the big umbrella of “just pass another frickin’ law…that’ll solve the problem.”
9. The unconstitutionality of it. Remember what President Obama said? It’s not a tax, it’s just a fine. And then when it went to the Supreme Court, the Supremes said: It is constitutional ONLY when it is viewed as a tax; as a fine, it is the product of Congress exceeding the limits of its regulatory authority because the transactions regulated do not constitute interstate commerce. So ObamaCare is a CONSTITUTIONAL boondoggle.

Anything I missed?

I’m most concerned about the first four. It isn’t just the web site needing some hasty patchwork. The web site’s problems represent a symptom and not a cause. This is the kind of result you get when the people in charge of something don’t know much about, or care very much about, what it takes to make something actually work.

Think about what the Amazon site does every single day.

ObamaCare reeks, both in reality and in public perception, because it is the most prominent triumph in this generation for the movement to put non-producers in charge of the producers. That’s the goal and that is the direction. People who do and build useful things other people can actually use, being told how to do it and how not to do it, by people who have never even come close to that. The results speak for themselves.

That’s a pretty important voting segment.

I’m not in it. I’m not in search of the perfect candidate who will say no to war all the time, I don’t think the United States can just wake up one morning, vote in the right guy, and drive war permanently off the planet. But, young voters like this one are just starting to figure that out.

It’s a bit regrettable that they believe in some kind of fight between good and evil inland, and then it seems once we’re talking about overseas situations with the prospect of war emerging, evil suddenly vanishes and anyone who makes an issue out of it must be some kind of “warmonger.” That dog won’t hunt. Evil exists, and it’s always been exceptionally talented at convincing the casual observer it doesn’t.

But she’s figured out how Obama’s snookered her generation. Vote for the magic-man, shed your tears of exuberance and happiness on 11/5/08, help end war and stick it to these evil corporations. She’s figured out the downside of voting friends into power and enemies out of power; that government works according to the interests of politicians, by its nature, and you can’t have it working for you unless you’re a politician. She’s beginning to understand that people who aren’t politicians need to keep government small. It’s on us. The politicians aren’t going to say “Okay that’s it, we’re interfering in their lives enough.”

The way these youngsters see it, though, is not like that. They say “not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” And then, while I can’t pretend to speak for this shirt-burner lady, I’ve noticed many among them are all-on-board when the time comes to consider the next tax increase. They want to stick it to those evil corporations.

I’ve got a friend like that on Facebook. He’s not as articulate as she is, nor is he as pleasing to the eye. But I’ve asked him about this, a few times, this credo of “politicians are all out to get us, bunch of lying scumbags, so let’s raise taxes and give them more money.” He just rambles a bit about how terrible George Bush was, and goes right back to it.

I think they’re all like that. THAT is a problem. They get disappointed, as the years go by, again and again and again. Their problem is that they see the divide as being between the young cool hip types who are against war, and the old fuddy-duddies who want to ban their music and think war is some kind of awesome.

The people who see the fissure as between inside- and outside-the-beltway, on the other hand, aren’t forced to retreat from a cul de sac of any sort. They’re forced to look on sadly as their fellow citizens make regrettable decisions, but they’re not forced to re-think things. George Washington had it right. That’s why her words at the end…well, some of them…are so encouraging.

Update: Morgan got sloppy with the cites this morning. Found the video here.

Not safe for work, not even remotely safe for work. You’ve been warned.

I’m surprised it made it on to YouTube, let alone HotAir.

No, thank you, I don’t want a woman as my “boss” if she’s afraid of a word.

That goes for the fellas too. Banning words doesn’t make you a boss. It makes you more of a micro-manager.

And…bossy as hell. Really, first time I heard of this, I was sure someone was playing a joke on Michelle Obama, who unfortunately decided to go for it, and then no one could clue her in that the whole thing was a joke, things sort of passed a point-of-no-return and everyone had to follow through. I still suspect that’s what happened.

For those who still can’t see why this is stupid, here are seven of the best reasons.

So wait, all the cool and beautiful girls who are super-popular and wealthy got together and decided that not only were they not going to use a word but that no one else could either? No, that’s not bossy at all, is it.

Julie Klose at PolitiChicks adds:

Why don’t we send the message to women and young girls to look beyond themselves and use our gifts and talents for the sake of helping others? Isn’t that what makes a leader? Isn’t that what mothers, teachers, and women of many different leadership professions do all over this country every single day?

Who cares what names you have been called throughout the years to become who you are? Look beyond yourself for a change and ban selfishness. After all, it’s a very big world and it doesn’t revolve around you!

More great commentary on this sad spectacle at Twitchy.

Boy or girl: Gifted, natural leaders don’t need someone else to move obstacles out of the way. It’s kind of in the job description.

And then there’s the legendary Ryan vs. Dorkman:

Here is a question for the ages, at least within the United States of America: Why does The Left win? By which I mean, not, why is it winning lately. Why does it win at all?

Looking back over the last several decades or so, let’s say since the end of World War II; it has been a story of dogged determination in the face of repeated setbacks. The country figured out they’d been wrong the whole time, or else lying, about communists infiltrating the government. Then the country figured out their policies are disastrous, and rejected them. Then it happened again. And again.

In the face of these defeats, liberalism doesn’t just keep on keepin’-on. It doubles down. Today’s liberals are much more shrill and strident than the liberals before President Clinton’s impeachment trial, or the Florida election debacle. They’re also more militant, unwilling to accept compromise in any shape, form or degree. So-called “conservatives” would pile on any one among them showing even a fraction of this sort of intransigence, and blame that zealot for the Republican party’s setbacks — they’d turn on him that way in half a heartbeat. Liberals get to do that all day every day, and it isn’t speaking out against the party machinery, it is the party machinery.

Now if any sort of military general from any time in world’s history showed that sort of lunacy — and won some wars & battles — he would become the stuff of legend. Ballads would be sung about him. Movies would be made about him. Actually, that’s happened already.

It is this refusal to apologize for what they are, this refusal to back down, refusal to compromise or to accept defeat, that is the key to their success. If you even begin to think about resisting them, the sense of despair and futility is immediate. So the answer to my question must be rooted in this: They win because they have a mindset to do nothing else. They don’t understand defeat.

They get knocked down, but they get up again, we’re never gonna keep ’em down…

The conundrum comes about when we veer away from how they are achieving their political victories, and thus enforcement of their advocacy, and focus our attention on what it is they seek to advocate. It is a certain mindset, a certain way of looking at life and of conducting oneself in it. That mindset does not say — get up again when you’re knocked down, keep on truckin’, take no prisoners. It says the exact opposite of that.

It says that you, as an individual, are not capable. You can’t, and you shouldn’t. In fact, if you think you did, you didn’t.

It’s all futile. If you only make 25 grand a year now, then trust them on this, take it to the bank — you will never, ever, ever make more than 40 a year. Ever, in your entire life. That’s their vision.

You’re helpless and you need them. That’s why they have this rotten crappy attitude against religion. It isn’t quite so much that they detest God or disbelieve in Him; the truth is that they are in competition with Him. The faithful say that with God, all things are possible. The American Left says that without them, nothing is possible.

But of course, it’s always bait-and-switch. If you make the mistake of relying on them for anything, first step toward the goal is a bunch of rhetoric about the goal being wrong, and you shouldn’t be trying for it.

So: What they want to sell to us, is the message of futility and despair. Stop trying. Give up. You can’t do it. You’ll never win. The boss is trying to screw you anyway, so clock out, go home, spend more time with your family, and most important of all be sure and elect liberal politicians so they can take the money from that evil boss and give it to you. Because Lord knows, you little peons in flyover country will never get hold of two nickels to rub together any other way.

How they seek to sell that message of pack-it-in-and-give-up to us, is the Tubthumping thing. Defeat doesn’t despair them, it only galvanizes them. Their lack of sentient thinking is the key to their victories; opposing them is like playing a game of “chicken” with a blind man.

How is this reconciled?

Part of it is vision, I think. They’re simply treating themselves differently from the people they want to “help,” because they want to win. You see it in their foreign policy. Is President Obama winning out in his conflicts against Vladimir Putin? The question practically answers itself; He isn’t even trying. And how do leftists counsel the country to resolve its international conflicts, in general? “Sit down and talk out our differences with our purported enemies.” And find “common ground.” Do democrats treat Republicans that way? Again, the question answers itself. Their methods for the party, versus its constituency, are different because their vision for the party is different compared to their vision for the country.

We have books out like this…

Where’s the companion book called “The post-democrat-party United States”? After all, I’ve been looking forward to one for a very long time now. I’m probably not the only one. Shouldn’t we be able to look to our friends, the liberals, to provide the vision for a near-future country without liberalism? Sure that’s essentially expecting them to hop into a hole, reach up and yank the hole in after themselves. But that’s exactly what they’ve been expecting everyone else to do. But it isn’t happening. Because of the conundrum. Liberals want the country to accept futility and defeat, even though they’ll never even think of accepting such things for their precious agenda.

We know why they appreciate defeat, of course. Everyone who’s ever rejected defeat understands its appeal: It’s much easier. For the millions of decent Americans who are seduced into accepting liberalism every year, that is the selling point. They’re not embracing defeat, what they’re embracing is sloth. That’s the sweet side of despair: I never had a shot anyway, and now that that’s settled, heck it’s much warmer and comfier under these bedsheets. Besides, who knows? If I got dressed and headed out the door, I might get run over by a car as I cross the street. Now where’s the remote?

From whence comes this energy to turn all George S. Patton when the time comes to get the agenda sold? How come they never hunker down under the warm comfy bedsheets for a marathon of The View when it’s time to do that? No hold, no retreat, advancing all the time, gonna go through the enemy like crap through a goose.

There was an opinion column coming out in the last few days about Ellen Degeneres that I forgot to bookmark, and can’t find. It made an excellent point about Ellen’s mean joke about Liza Minnelli, and how Ms. DeGeneres is suddenly on the receiving end of a politically-correct beating-down about her being a “transphobe.” To people like me who live in the real world, that would be almost funny if it wasn’t sad. Ms. DeGeneres really is gay. Liza Minnelli, to the best of my knowledge, is not a transgender, she’s just a four-times-divorced substance-abusing Hollywood diva whose femininity is in rapid retreat. My own opinion is that the joke was juvenile, unnecessary and mean, but I would not have predicted a sudden restructuring of the political-correctness-hierarchy totem-pole of this sort.

One Quora contributor, asked about the issue in general, wrote:

Politically correct people usually think they are fighting for justice and what is right… They think they are protecting the weak and oppressed. Yet they often end up being exactly what they hate.

I haven’t liked “political correctness” since I saw it in university in the 80s to promote oppression, censorship, bigotry, and rude behavior.

Once a young women, educated to be “politically correct” rudely “corrected” my grandmother who used the word “Orientals” instead of “Asians”. My grandmother worked in Okinawa alongside the people she called “Orientals” without prejudice. But this young white Occidental politically correct woman had gone to her classes and learned that was the “wrong term” and so she took control to protect those poor weak Asians against my grandmothers linguistic oppression. My poor grandmother. The word use changes among the “educated” to turn my grandmother into an accused bigot.

Political correctness attacks the wrong target. Of course my grandmother was white and therefore an evil oppressor.

The essay I forgot to bookmark, which did not name Patton, nevertheless waxed lyrically of his credo as it is practiced by the politically correct crowd: Not holding anything, not retreating, always advancing, all the time. Imagine what good fortune would lie ahead for the United States, if its leadership upheld that attitude about the nation’s interests.

And, it made a great point. It is all about the journey and not about the destination. This, I think, answers the question. They conquer one goal after another after another, through the magic of incremental progress, while simultaneously rejecting the very practice of achieving goals through incremental progress. They reject that very dream. While living the dream.

The illusion is in their attraction toward the goal. It isn’t really there. As the Ellen DeGeneres episode made clear, there was no genuine back-slapping or high-fiving or victory parade after any sort of greater societal acceptance had been won for openly-gay personalities like Ms. DeGeneres. Maybe there was some for theater’s sake, but none of it was heartfelt. No sense of “Okay we got that done, now back to our day-to-day struggles in our real lives.” Because the truth is there is no “real life” to which to return. No fields to be plowed or crops to be sown after the springtime surrender at Appomattox. Not feasting with the Ewoks after blowing up the Death Star. Nothing of the sort. They are a post-industrial-age movement, and for them the conflict is the feasting/farming. The war is never over, ever. It isn’t possible for such a war to end. Their defeats don’t get it done, and their victories don’t get it done. Endless fighting is the only possible result left.

So now the politically-correct advocacy is for the transgenders. Not only is yesteryear’s victory forgotten as if it never happened. but Ellen suddenly finds herself in the position of the despised, oppressive bully. Maybe she deserves it; I think so. But even so — quite a switch! Hard to even think about it without getting a case of whiplash.

Well, this theory does explain it. Nothing else does. Liberals only appear to work toward goals, while they don’t believe in working toward goals, because they don’t even envision the goal let alone make any progress toward it. All this progress of theirs, which draws the envy of other people who really do work toward goals, is made without even a conscious understanding of the concept. What they’re acting out is nothing more than an impulse. Like a nervous tic.

They have an obsessive-compulsive need to morally preen. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

I wonder how it would hold up, if they were more frequently on the receiving end of blame for the conflict they create and maintain by doing this. I guess we’ll never know the answer to that.

Via Gerard:

Every day millions of lesbian polar bears are dying because of Israeli apartheid policies and what do you people like you do? Nothing?! Because you don’t care do you? Raaaaacist Rapists!!

These people can’t handle a world in which everybody is the same. How are they gonna be better than everyone else?

Actually, I made it up much earlier today. At work.

Became something of a hero-for-the-day when I conceived of a new color coding. I was concerned about watching people form opinions about things, and then wander off in all different directions, each person convinced everybody else was in complete agreement about how to categorize each of what…when I could tell people weren’t in agreement.

The memorandum I wrote said I was concerned about “the EtherSync.”

Should have invented that word a long time ago. The false sense of round-table-agreement that hasn’t actually been achieved, probably costs Corporate America hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

Found this one over on Facebook:

Reactions break down into: 1) Teacher had it right, this is inaccurate; 2) this is completely accurate; 3) neither one is accurate.

Think I’m in #3, at least as far as the “right” goes. No qualms about the left three-quarters of the bottom one, or any of the top one. The quibble is with anarchy being freedom.

This connects back to the “Outhouse Test,” which is all about persistence or lack of persistence in the face of a task so unpleasant or intimidating that one loses sight of the limit of his ability. In the example of fishing car keys out of an outhouse, we can all certainly feel the temptation of saying “this is beyond my ability and I shall have to rely on someone else to do it” even though, if we were on a deserted island living by ourselves and somehow confronted with the same task, we’d find a way to get it done. The Outhouse Test is, therefore, all about our fellowship in a community being abused. We begin to conflate the unwillingness to do a task that needs doing, with a much more laudable confession that the job exceeds our capacity — even when we may know darn good and well that the job doesn’t.

The test is: After you find you “can’t” do something, if someone else can, are you genuinely impressed. I think a lot of people who “can’t” do things, if they’re honest about it, would ‘fess up that they aren’t impressed and don’t have any ambition to learn how to get it done. Gratitude would be the best they could rustle up. Solving the computer problem is something they think is beneath them, just like the extraction of the car keys from the outhouse. Dodged that bullet. No, thank you, I do not want to learn how…I do not ever want to learn how.

But if there wasn’t anybody else around, they’d do it.

Someone somewhere said something, and I found it thought-provoking, that — totalitarianism versus freedom is a circular band, that if followed to its endpoints will be found to connect and close a loop. The argument goes like, what is the epitome of authoritarian control; that would be prison. And where can you go to get ALL of your freedom, that would be out in the wilderness living like Grizzly Adams. Are those two situations so different? In the prison, you are confined to a cell and you get three square meals a day. So those don’t translate to living in the wilderness. But as far as control is concerned, the situations are identical — you have little to none.

There is the matter of the development of the mind. The Outhouse Test, for example. The guy living in the wilderness would never be tempted by it, would he; the job’s worth doing or else it isn’t. No use feigning weakness so someone else might come in and do it. The guy in jail, on the other hand, would have it done for him. Or, he’d be the guy doing it, whether he likes it or not. This would make a difference in how people would think about things, and within a short matter of time that would make a difference in how their minds strengthen.

There is a paradox emerging here about freedom. The kind of freedom people on the political right champion, includes the freedom to choose not to be free. Once again, we see ObamaCare is the perfect example. I saw President Obama and His political allies urging people to log on to the website that didn’t work, and sign up. And I saw lots of advocates and pundits and politicians on the “right,” making much of the website’s problems and the potential for compromise of private health information. But I never did see people on the right saying “don’t sign up” or “we have to stop people from signing up.”

Conservatives aren’t like liberals. A real conservative allows for other people not to be conservative. Just don’t force your kids into these unwise lifestyle choices, absorb the consequences of your own bad decisions, and pay for your mistakes as well as all the other expenses involved in your existence. So no, conservatism is not anarchy. Conservatism, rather, champions the freedom of the anarchist to be an anarchist, so long as the anarchist is at peace with the consequences of being one, and doesn’t make those somebody else’s problem. Conservatives are no less enthused about championing the same freedom for centrists, and for liberals.

And themselves too. You shouldn’t have to pay a special price just for being a conservative. You shouldn’t be getting audit notices from the I.R.S. just because you’re a conservative.

In the conservative’s perfect world, everybody is not necessarily conservative. But everyone — that is, everyone who matures to the extent required — feels an incentive to eventually become one if they aren’t one already. People can be liberals if they like, so long as they’re willing to accept that their options are, and of right ought to be, limited. They don’t advocate for unnatural consequences; they object to entirely doing away with the natural ones. And the natural consequence of spreading the wealth around is that, if nobody else can be extraordinarily wealthy, then you can’t either. The zero-sum game delusion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since nobody is allowed to enjoy the profits from bringing more wealth in to the collective, so no new wealth enters. The collective ends up impoverished, some are surprised by this, others are wondering why anyone’s surprised. It’s all about owning consequences.

A dogmatic liberal will refuse to own consequences, even the costs of bringing their own fantasies into reality. “Raise taxes on the rich” is the standard pat-answer whenever the funding question comes up. A liberal is a fellow who’s so nice he’ll give you the shirt right off another guy’s back, as the saying goes.

Andrew Klavan:

Michigan mother Julie Boonstra, suffering from leukemia, lost her health plan because of Obamacare. She told her story in an ad opposing Democrat congressman and Senate candidate Gary Peters. Peters’ lawyers are trying to stop TV stations from running the ad — a reaction which, after all, is only in keeping with the reported White House campaign to pressure insurers to keep their criticisms of O-Care to themselves.

Journalistic titan Charles Krauthammer wrote a column for the Washington Post pointing out that dangerous global warming is by no means settled science. Environmental activists gathered over a hundred thousand signatures on a petition demanding the Post cease publishing Krauthammer. I guess Charles can be glad they didn’t take a tip from a recent op-ed cartoon in the New York Times suggesting “climate change deniers” should be stabbed in the heart with an icicle!

At the leftist website Salon, they’ve just had it with this diverse information thing altogether. Fascist (or is it socialist? I always get those two confused) Fred Jerome is calling for Fox News and other outlets to be nationalized. Smart thinking, Fred. Because then the government would own the press and, you know, government would never do anything, like, bad or dishonest or anything!

And did I mention the IRS targeting of conservatives? Or White House spying on reporters? This is not anomalous left wing behavior…
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When you only get information you want to hear, it makes you stupid.

Newsbusters has the lowdown on the above-mentioned Times cartoon.

Mrs. Freeberg and I are both regularly called geniuses. We both make our living by making computers do things that other people don’t know how to make those computers do. She’s in Information Technology, I’m a software engineer. Which in some companies is thought-of as Information Technology, so there is some overlap there. In my case, it’s a little bit awkward because I don’t think of my work as smart-guy type work. To me, it’s a matter of persistence over brains. It always has been that. My guiding credo has been “the beer is now stretching the walls of my bladder, but before I can go pee I have to make this goddamn fucking thing do what I want it to do.” In the meantime, in other walks of life, I make just as many mistakes as any other average-to-dumb person.

This causes a certain queasiness when people start talking about how smart I am. One disaster that occurred a couple years ago has intensified this a bit. I had a big failey-fail moment that came about when someone said “Morgan’s a super-smart guy, he can do this,” and at the end of it I had this huge career meltdown thing going on. During the post-mortem I came to realize I’ve always had some soft squishy patch in my career path, just after someone said something about how Morgan’s so smart he can do-anything-or-whatever. In those last two years, my queasiness has crystallized into a genuine phobia. Someone says “Morgan’s so smart” and I immediately think, oh no, what the fuck is it NOW??

What disaster is coming down the pike NOW??

Perhaps because I’m not actually that smart, it has taken me this long to figure out: I am — we are, actually — being tapped for our “knowledge,” quite regularly, particularly in the field of computer-work, by people whose talents should not be falling too far short of fixing the problems themselves. It makes me wonder who’s the smarty-pants in these situations. But it isn’t just computer stuff. You remember the old saw about Tom Sawyer and the picket fence? This is kind of like the opposite.

It’s not all about computers. But, to make the issue more easily illustrated, let’s talk about the computers for just a second. There are, as I’ve observed before a few times, two different and opposite visions for creating some sort of computer software application. Vision One: The application will supply the dogged determination that the human element will not have to supply; if there is any way to get the job done, the app will draw on its rich supply of programmed resourcefulness to get it done. If, for some reason, the situation confronting it is outside of its programmed parameters then that will be an “exception” which, as the code base matures and the execution improves, will happen with decreasing frequency.

Vision Two: Regression mode. The application’s reason for existing is not to complete the task, but to generate the correct error message explaining in useful detail why the task cannot be completed. It is the successful fulfillment of the task that is the “exception.”

I should pause here to let that thought sink in. After all, it took me a great many years to fully form my appreciation for Vision Two, and make my peace with the fact that I like it better than Vision One.

But the paradox is that it is Vision One that commands the dollars. Nobody likes to shell out “real” money for software, install it, run it, and find themselves at the business end of an error message telling them why something can’t be done.

And this post is not about computers, or retail software versus regression-testing utilities. It’s about the persistence. This is about the “feeling overwhelmed” by the task at hand…as the retail-users feel overwhelmed by the endless procession of error messages. It’s about that seemingly unsolvable problem that comes up again and again: Is it time for me to stop slaving away, and go get help? Some of us are to be legitimately faulted for never doing it. Others are to be similarly faulted for doing it at the drop of a hat. After a lifetime of figuring out how to make computers do things, I’ve been forced to learn something about people: On this one-dimensional spectrum of getting help too quickly or two slowly, there is an inverse-bell-curve at work here. The bulk of the anecdotes fall onto the two extreme ends. People, for the most part, pretty much abandon the exercise and “get their help,” all of the time, or not at all.

I’m one of the not-at-all types. My performance reviews at the place where it didn’t work out, say so explicitly.

The all-the-time people are therefore in constant contact with people like me, and yet after decades of constant exposure to them I still can’t figure them out. They feel overwhelmed by tasks that they’ll insist they don’t know how to do, but — they do know how to do them. It isn’t that they’re lazy. There’s something going on here, something that isn’t entirely simple, in fact is quite complex. It’s got to do with the vision. They see the job as being bigger than they are. But they see this before they measure anything. If you were to actually measure the job, in terms of minutes or calories, in prospect or in retrospect, and compare that number against what these people have been known to sink into other jobs without a moment’s hesitation about it, you would find the challenge confronting them to be negligible. And yet, they can’t see themselves winning-out against it because they just haven’t been seeing it that way.

I struggle to relate to this. It’s so hard. I told my wife the very best example of which I could think…the one job in which, were I to be confronted with it, I might be tempted to say “Oh no, that’s not me, you’ll just have to find someone else” even if there was a gun held to my head…it might be scraping barnacles off the hull of a boat. Toward that end, I considered using the name “Barnacle Test” to describe what comes below.

And then I reconsidered, thinking of those signs in the park saying “Please do not throw solid waste down this outhouse, as it is extremely difficult for us to remove” or something. THAT is the job. Ever since I was a little boy, if a job needed doing and I was the only one within line-of-sight who might get it done, I considered it out-of-bounds to say: I can’t do it, we need to find someone else. I guess that’s why I’m a computer guy. Not because I’m smart or anything, but because others took a pass on the challenge. People think I still work at it because I’m always excited about it. I’m thirty years into it, and from all that time…hoo boy, have I got stories to tell. No, it isn’t always exciting. It isn’t always fun. Far from it.

If I were ever tempted to say, no I don’t know how to do this job — when I do — it would be that job. The guy who has to fish the candy wrapper, or the car keys, out of an outhouse.

The Outhouse Test: You are heard to say, or you think about saying, “No this is outside of my ability” — and yet — if someone were to say “Oh yeah, well this other guy managed to get it done no problem”…you would not be genuinely impressed. It is a situation of pretending to profess a limitation to one’s strengths, when in actuality, the limitations of that person’s strengths have nothing to do with the topic at all. When what that person is doing is ducking responsibility.

The point to it is that we are often way too quick to involve the limitations of ability in conversations like this, including conversations about help being “needed.” People feel overwhelmed by the challenges that arise…simply because, the option is open for them to abandon the challenges. On a deserted island with no one around, they’d just have to nut-up. And on some level, they know this.

The Outhouse Test fails if you ‘fess up that you can’t do something…a hero rises, someone who can manage to get ‘er done…and your emotional response is one of something like “Golly! Here I was thinking it is impossible!” Or something like “Shazam! What have I got to do to learn to do that for myself!”

It passes if your response is more like “Yeah, whatever…glad I dodged that bullet.”

Because when push comes to shove, I really do know how to fish car keys out of an outhouse. If it ever becomes necessary for me to do so, and I hope this does not come to pass, I’ll be “able” to do it.

But I might be tempted to feign ignorance if I can dupe someone else into doing it for me. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that department.

Conflict. Let’s talk about conflict. We certainly should; there’s been so much of it lately. Why do people disagree with each other about things?

We could think of disagreement as merely the opposite of agreement, and if we accept that then we could perceive one of these opposites to be a nothing, merely the opposite of the other. Just as cold and darkness technically don’t really exist, they are merely deficiencies of heat and light, respectively. The dictionary says that to agree is:

1. to have the same views, emotions, etc.; harmonize in opinion or feeling…
2. to give consent; assent…
3. to live in concord or without contention; get along together.
4. to come to one opinion or mind; come to an arrangement or understanding; arrive at a settlement…
5. to be consistent; harmonize

As we inspect the meaning to figure out why people are so contentious lately, I think — you may not agree — all five of these might have some connection to what we’re trying to find out, but as we try to root-cause it we’re going to be shying away from definitions #2, #3, #4 and #5, and concentrating more on #1. The four are consequences of the one. This creates a problem for us because #1 isn’t too specific. So let’s look at how these “views, opinions, etc.” are formed.

There is a pattern that holds up when we make decisions, particularly when we make decisions to challenge someone else about something, or decisions that are likely to be so challenged by others. First, we collect information somehow, either observing things ourselves or relying on some trusted source to bring us news, measurements, or summaries of measurements. Secondly, we figure out from this information a sense of what is happening. Finally, we reconcile that sense of what is happening, with our objectives and from that we form a strategy of what should be done.

“I saw Bob take a sticky-note pad out of the supply room and take it home.” “Bob is stealing from our company.” “Fire Bob.”

You’ll note that each of those three might be open to reasonable challenge. Furthermore, such reasonable challenges may be entered at any stage of the game. Once it’s proven that Bob did indeed take the supply home, you may disagree with the last two; or you can agree with the first two and offer an alternative to that final step. So there are three definable ways people might end up with disagreements.

Abortion would be a disagreement about the first, the fact-finding. “It’s a life.” Global warming, or climate change, whatever ya wanna call it today, would be a disagreement about the second: “The Earth is heating up and the humans, Americans in particular, are making it happen.” Many other issues would be issues because of the final step, the action-decision. Recognize gay marriage. Cut defense. No borders. Equality of income.

Lately though, there are many disagreements popping up which seem to fall into a fourth category of disagreement. In fact, you could make a reasonable argument that they all do lately, including the ones I categorized above. This would be: Disagreements that come about because one side wants to define something, and the other side doesn’t. There are those who would object to my merely breaking down the decision-events. And they’d have a good point, wouldn’t they. Abortion, climate change, pretending marijuana-smoking and illegal immigration are legal, pretending gay marriage is marriage, pretending defense is unnecessary because we can merely legislate wars out of existence. You may notice, on each one of these, there is always a side that is keen on defining things and another side that works to stop the definition from taking place.

Interestingly, you’ll notice the two sides don’t change seats too often. The people who see an easy victory for themselves on the one issue, if only the information flow can be restricted and others can be bullied away from getting the facts and deciding for themselves what those facts might mean — they pretty much handle all the other issues that way. “Pro-choice” advocates, for example, see something good & right happening if only they can pressure, bully, and intimidate their fellow citizens to “stop watching Faux News.” They’re not too pleased when pictures get out showing how a baby develops, before birth, and they don’t like people talking about when the heart starts beating, when the fingernails start growing. That stuff is all “above my pay grade,” they say. What they really mean to say is that it’s above yours too. They don’t want anyone talking about it.

Issue after issue, we see one faction valuing information exchange and working toward it, and the other one working against it. Oh, we can rationalize against our noticing this, soothing our consciousnesses with the observation that new information often looks like problematic confusion when you’re not familiar with it and have some learning to do. But, so many among the people who bring this “new information” so obviously consider the job to be done when the confusion has set in. They’re not really working to educate anyone.

Now with the climate change and what we might think of as the “No Such Thing As God” thing, the darkness-workers have put on a good show and gotten a narrative going that they have some sort of monopoly on “science.” You only have to question them a little bit to find out that isn’t true. Their “science” is nothing more than a messy mosaic of labels. “Peer review,” for example. They speak so loftily of it, but when you point out the problems with it you find they don’t want to engage the argument by providing a proper rebuttal. All the rebuttals they have amount to some kind of credo that nobody should be noticing such things, and peer-review is simply a magical incantation to make inconvenient information go away. If you take it literally, you’re immediately confronted with the problem that some peer-reviewed work poses problems for their “science,” and suddenly they’re not too fond of it.

With the what-to-do stage of making decisions, the advocates of darkness put their efforts into trivializing the whole process, making it seem like it’s what-to-do and nothing more. I earlier offered the examples of gay marriage and getting rid of borders. The supporters of these positions will oppose the spelling-out of any arguments, because their agendas don’t stand up to argument. Illegal immigration — why should we argue about whether or not that’s legal? It’s right there in the name.

This is, perhaps, a new chapter in human history. I’m just finishing out my fifth decade on the planet so I’m not in a position to say that for sure. But right now, we have the sophistication to break these different arguments down into their component parts, to figure out which part may be faulty, and we also have a new widespread recalcitrance against doing exactly that. Biggest lie in the modern world is that we need to “sit down and talk out our differences with our enemies.” That is a slogan uttered often, and for many years now, by those who labor toward darkness and confusion. They don’t say, you’ll notice, what will be talked-out. They just wish for the “sit down,” and stop their wishing right there. We don’t even know what to call these people. They used to be progressives, then they wore out the label and started going by liberals. Now they’ve worn that out and they’re going back to being progressives.

If this is indeed something new, it’s not good. Because we lately seem to have morphed into a new stage of development, in which by merely taking steps to start measuring something, you’re already walking in to some conflict and in fact there is a better-than-even chance that you’ll end up with some blame headed your way for having starting it. That would be a good thing for everyone to work on helping to change, if they feel so inclined. Reasonable people can certainly disagree on whether Bob really took the sticky notes home, or whether he’s actually stealing from the company, or whether or not he should be fired; they can agree on what was measured, what is to be inferred from it, and what to do about it. But we shouldn’t be having disagreements about whether or not to do the measurements, whether or not the measurements should be thrown out solely on the basis of some political agenda, or whether our fellows should be bullied into forgetting about things or not-talking about things. If we really are an information-age society, then we should have complete…ya know…agreement about that. Give a fair hearing to the measurements and statistics offered up by both sides. And to what someone thinks that means, and why they think it must mean that. The details. What we’re hoping is going to happen when we say something should be done. How we’re going to know, at the end of it, that it worked.

But I suppose, politically, that wouldn’t work out too well for one of the sides. The side that tends to do most of the talking. Getting lots and lots of syllables and words out there, but saying very little apart from “don’t talk about that” and “don’t listen to that guy.”

Someone commented here recently, offering up the idea that something called “science” is advanced when scientists get it wrong. Scientist A comes up with a wrong-idea that will ultimately be debunked, Scientist B sets up the tests that do the debunking, the credit should wholly or partially go to Scientist A for coming up with the question.

How fascinating. “We don’t need to take an umbrella, it’s not raining outside.” “Okay, well I just looked, and it’s fucking pouring.” “Ha ha! I am to be credited for increasing our knowledge about the weather!” Huh? You may call that first guy a scientist, I call him a jerk.

I’ll certainly concede that the acquisition of knowledge must begin with an admission of ignorance. Problem is, formulating a wrong idea is not the same thing as an admission of ignorance. Even if the wrong idea explicitly includes such an admission — and, these days, unfortunately most expressed wrong ideas leave that part out — admission of ignorance, or even uncertainty, falls short of commanding a monopoly of this admission. The formulation of “Scientist A gets all the credit” presumes that Scientist B was not equally ready to admit this ignorance. I find that to be laughable because, hey, this is the guy who made the time and then sat down to do the work.

WORK. Seems to me, the cultural divide is there. There is an idea, and then there is implementation; when the people who do the one are different from the people who do the other, a cultural divide must result. And that is true of most things people bother to do, in any industrial society. There are the people with ideas and there are the people who carry them out.

The divide is carved into the surface of human consciousness, and then deepened, by deficiencies in any “lessons learned” mechanism. This would be some sort of messaging system that would let the idea-people know that implementation has revealed the idea to be in need of revision. This late in the game, humanity seems to be going through the chapter in which we’re learning, for the first time, such a feedback system is necessary. I say “seems.” There’s no way that can be true, because it is so very, very late. But if we have ancestral knowledge about this, we’re not showing it. The idea-people are coming up with bad ideas, and they’re not ready or willing to find out about the flaws in their ideas revealed by implementation.

These days, as I write algorithms for my applications and libraries, I manage to get most of it done in restaurants and coffee shops. My laptop doesn’t have a compiler on it. I’ve found I’m more productive that way. With the compiler available, after a bit of effort one starts to space out, lose track of where the code-writing session is exactly, and eventually throw the switch to sort through the error messages. This encourages sloppy thinking and laziness.

The disadvantage to the coffee shop approach, of course, is the temporary separation from reality. But, it does keep you alert and focused. The “idea guy” in your head is allowed to completely take over, but only within a limited term of time. I’ve actually been doing this for about a decade straight, now, and it works well. Within an hour or two, or four or six if there are errands that have to be run afterward, there will be a Come-To-Jesus meeting where you sync everything up and then hit compile.

Some of my commit-log entries actually have some comments like, “Well, this ought to screw everything up but good. Have fun.”

It’s a bit of an unorthodox habit. Lots of software engineers do similar quirky things to keep things running right. (One guy I knew had a canister of stuffed piggy-heads for juggling, and he’d juggle them while the compiler was running.) Well — this one has made me feel a little bit sorry for the bureaucrats who “know” their ideas are the right ones. The ones who give humankind all these “gifts”…like the healthcare.gov website launch.

My coffee-shop-coding is not a perfect technique. It doesn’t necessarily lead to good ideas. All it does is help a little bit, by keeping me humble, and this is only an anecdote. But the reverse certainly does work: To come up with a thoroughly awful idea, a real stink-bomb, you’ve got to have a dedicated intellectual type. Someone who lives in the realm of ideas, and never, ever leaves it. Never gets that feedback about how things panned out, or whether they panned out, and never wants it. The type who lives his entire life according to narrative.

Six percent say ObamaCare is working great.

For the results to come out that well, you have to have absolute certainty about what they’re going to be, before there are any. You can’t maintain any sort of healthy uncertainty about them and hope to produce this sort of “success.” Only the no-feedback people, the no-question types, the “it’ll work awesomely because it’s my idea” people can get it done like this.

While the loud-crowd started up with their bullying of Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona earlier this week, I expressed a sentiment on Facebook that drew an unexpected number of “likes” plus a share:

Sorry Sulu. Your Facebook updates are a lot of fun, and nothing against your sexual preference but you’re wrong on this one. In fact, Arizona would be a great place for the silliness to finally stop.

There is: Nobody should force me to pour milk on my corn flakes when I happen to prefer orange juice and vodka on my corn flakes. And then there’s: Help me force this restaurant owner to let me walk into his restaurant and eat my corn flakes. Those are two different things. The first thing is freedom, the second thing is force. Two things. Different. In fact, opposites.

Time for the nonsense to end. You’re not championing choice and freedom anymore, when you’ve started to force other people to accept things they don’t want to.

The nonsense, we know now, did not end.

So now we’re left with several realizations that lead to a question. There aren’t too many stories to be offered up about gay people being refused service anywhere, so I don’t think we need to pretend this was about anybody’s “rights.” If we do force that understanding, then we would also have to understand, once and for all, that the gay-rights crusade lately has a cause wholly separate from what they’ve been claiming, and those who have been resisting it were completely correct from the very beginning: It’s about special rights and not equal-rights. Laundromats, bowling alleys, Karate studios, fast food restaurants, liquor stores and bars have always been able to display signs that say “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone.” In Arizona, they don’t have that right. And, it seems the loud-crowd is opposed to any business having that right anywhere…where homosexuals are concerned.

That’s special-rights and not equal-rights. I can’t make a business serve me. I can’t take a business to court if it refuses to serve me. For straight people, the complaint is dismissed as quickly as it might ever have come up, with a jerk of the proprietor’s thumb toward the “refuse service” sign. For us, it still works that way. Or does it?

I guess that’s the question. Are we now at the point where it’s always good when a business gets sued? Or, is put at the “business end” of a court order of any kind…an injunction, a fine, a settlement, a subpoena. I’m worried about how automatically so many within the loud-crowd determined this must be a “bad bill,” having found out 1) it’s got something to do with gay people, 2) gay people don’t like it and 3) it offers PROTECTIONS to the BUSINESSES. Is it good when businesses get sued? Is it bad when they aren’t sued?

If that’s where we are, can we just drop the charade of wishing for the economy to get better?

High time that question got settled. If the answer is in the affirmative, then admitting it would save everyone a whole lot of energy and time.

Me, shortly after the healthcare.gov debacle:

…the more observations I make…the more value I see in measuring what we could call the F.Q., the Fantasy Quotient. This would be the weight of everything that contributed toward your final opinion about something, divided into one hundred times the influence of your first-impressions. So travel back in time a few years, Obama and crew say something about health insurance for the first time and you go — cool! Maybe. You get inspired, the inspiration creates a fantasy. The fantasy creates a prejudice. The prejudice, by definition of the word, feeds into the final judgment, even if it has to withstand an onslaught of subsequent and contrary experience. How much or how little the subsequent and contrary experience diminishes that original impression, says something about you, and that something is reflected in the F.Q.

A good software-testing engineer has an F.Q. approaching zero. A healthy F.Q. might be somewhere in the twenties, maybe down in the teens.

If your F.Q. is a hundred, you’re pretty much incapable of ever learning a damn thing, and that’s a widespread problem we have now.
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These people can’t apply tests. Not really. Sure, they can run tests on things, but they can’t learn anything from the results. Their minds are already made up.

I quoted severian back then, and shall do so again:

I’m trying to think of the last time I heard a liberal admit he had ever been wrong about anything of consequence. A liberal who believes today the exact opposite of what he believed five years ago — like President Obama on gay marriage, say — wasn’t wrong then, and he’s not a hypocrite now. He’s just “evolved”; the issue is “dynamic”; we have a “living” Constitution. Being a liberal means you can do 180s all day long like a figure skater on crack, and pat yourself on the back for your “nuanced” views and mental flexibility.

Meanwhile, conservatives — whose opinions have a foundation other than self-congratulation — tend to feel a bit uneasy about celebrating today what they condemned yesterday, and vice versa. It’s part of that “living in the real world” thing. If liberals could do that, they wouldn’t be liberals.

Perhaps we should sit around and wait for an illustrative example to come along…you know, besides the healthcare.gov launch, and Detroit…wait…wait…

Ding.

Now you should know, this “ad” has been fully debunked. The law firm of Perkins Cole is demanding that it be pulled, and as justification for that demand they are citing a Washington Post editorial that says it “doesn’t add up.”

This emotional and gut-wrenching attack ad should be every Democrat’s worst nightmare, combining references to President Obama’s 4-Pinocchio promise (PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year”) with a raw account of a woman who says she suffered because of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

But do the facts match the emotions?

The Facts

First of all, many viewers might think Boonstra lost her doctor, as she mentions her “wonderful doctor” and then says her plan was canceled. But AFP confirms that she was able to find a plan, via Blue Cross Blue Shield, that had her doctor in its network.

Local news reports recount that Boonstra, like many Americans, initially had trouble getting a plan because of the botched launch of healthcare.gov. No doubt that was a difficult experience. She then was invited by her local member of Congress to attend the State of the Union address and participated in a Republican National Committee news conference that highlighted problems with Obamacare’s stumbling launch.

At that news conference, Boonstra said, “I’m paying a higher cost now as far as out of pocket costs and the coverage is just not the same.” But in the new ad she says “the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable.”

The claim that the costs are now “unaffordable” appeared odd because, under Obamacare, there is an out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350 for covered expenses under an individual plan, after which the insurance plan pays 100 percent of covered benefits. The Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Michigan that appear to match Boonstra’s plan, as described in local news reports, all have that limit.

Meanwhile, Boonstra told the Detroit News that her monthly premiums were cut in half, from $1,100 a month to $571. That’s a savings of $529 a month. Over the course of a year, the premium savings amounts to $6,348—just two dollars shy of the out-of-pocket maximum.

We were unable to reach Boonstra, but on the fact of it, the premium savings appear to match whatever out-of-pocket costs she now faces.

Levi Russell, a spokesman for AFP, said he “would assume there is an OOP max, but this is the story of Julie, a real person suffering from blood cancer, not some neat and tidy White House PowerPoint about how the ACA is helping everyone.” He said there is a possibility that her specific chemotherapy medication will not be covered.

“Julie’s concerns about her new plan are ongoing and very personal. Since her out of pocket costs are so much higher now, her costs have quickly become unpredictable,” he added. “Rather than knowing exactly what she would have to pay every month, she now is facing a roller coaster of expenses that vary with her health. She said she feels like a surprise is around every corner, since she keeps being hit with new out-of-pocket costs every time she needs treatment, or a test, or even an office visit.”

He concluded: “Now her expenses are unpredictable, and that means unaffordable. It could be $600 one month, and three times that the next month. The reality of what she’s dealing with is much more involved and can’t be swept aside by saying, ‘you have an OOP maximum so quit complaining about your cancer.’”

Update, Feb. 21: In an interview with the Dexter Leader responding to this column, Boonstra said: “People are asking me for the numbers and I don’t know those answers — that’s the heartbreak of all of this. It’s the uncertainty of not having those numbers that I have an issue with, because I always knew what I was paying and now I don’t, and I haven’t gone through the tests or seen my specialist yet.”

The Pinocchio Test

The Fact Checker surely does not want to play down the emotional anguish that any cancer patient may face, but a fuller accounting is necessary if AFP is going to air ads like this. In order to properly compare the old plan and the new plan, there needs to be fuller disclosure of the costs and out-of-pocket maximums before claims that the new plan is “unaffordable” can be accepted at face value. Too many anecdotal stories, on both sides, have fallen apart under close scrutiny.

[Update, Feb. 24: In response to a complaint to television stations from the Peters campaign, AFP supplied more documentation for the ad (embedded below). The documentation, however, sheds no light on how the new health plan has made out-of-pockets costs for Boonstra “unaffordable.” Instead, it emphasizes that these costs may be unpredictable. This does not meet the disclosure test we requested.]

Russell passed along a quote from Boonstra: “My plan, the premiums are half, but the out‑of‑pocket costs are so high that for me, it’s unaffordable. My coverage is 80/20. Blood work, I’m paying 20 percent. If I needed a bone marrow transplant, I would only be covered 80 percent. Everything, everything I do now, I have to pay a percentage of.”

It is one thing to say there are higher out-of-pocket costs, as she did at the RNC news conference, but another to assume that those higher costs are not offset in some way by the significantly lower premium. (The $350,000 bone marrow transplant, for instance, would be capped at the out of pocket minimum.) The reality is that eventually Boonstra will hit the maximum and no longer pay anything. So over the course of the year, the difference in the costs could well even out.

We will initially set this rating at Two Pinocchios, and will update if we get more information.

Two Pinocchios

What a devastating debunking! Until you read it.

Two Pinocchios — because Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Fact Checker, came up with a “disclosure test” he’d like to have met. Well, Shazam. If that’s all it takes, I could hand out two Pinocchios at a time, every hour on the hour and all day long. I’d like to have lots of things explained to me.

It’s not that Kessler doesn’t have something of a point, at least a point strong enough to make an honest observer go “huh”? There is value in taking notice of such things. And the Pinocchio Test is Kessler’s invention, as I understand it, so heck he can do with it as he likes. If a Pinocchio is to be devalued to half the strength of the everyday “huhwha??” and he wants to cheapen his scale to that extent, well, it’s a free country.

For the time being.

But, one of the posters on the thread underneath his story gave him the information he had been missing:

You forgot the administrations executive order pen.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform…

…and that link goes here:

The Obama administration has delayed a main provision in President Obama’s healthcare reform law that would limit out-of-pocket insurance costs for consumers until 2015.

The cap, which includes deductibles and co-payments, was supposed to limit consumer costs to $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But administration officials have quietly delayed the requirement for some insurers, allowing them to set their own limits starting in 2014.

When all’s said and done, it was as it was before, and the ad does add up. We have grown-up issues and grown-up transactions, with life-and-death consequences, being decided by the day-to-day whim of the President’s “pen.” Yes, this does create a lot of confusion. But Julia Boonstra didn’t create this confusion. Barack Obama built that.

To remain fastened to reality, as is required in some professions that have to do with making things actually work, you have to lower your F.Q. That is what is required to remain attached: Theories conflict with reality, the theory must yield and reality must prevail. Obama and His minions, unfortunately, have that inversed and apparently so does the Post’s fact-checker. So do some of the people who have commented on my own blog, as it happens. Reality and theory conflict, and reliable as rain they circle their wagons around the theory. The rationale changes minute to minute but the conclusion is always the same: Not-never-happened, doesn’t add up, can’t hear you la la la.

And that, boys & girls, is why the healthcare.gov launch went the way it did. At least, according to the benign-intent theory. There are those who believe the healthcare.gov launch was a boondoggle because that was part of the strategy. But then, ya know, there’s always Hanlon’s razor.

When the stuff you build is supposed to actually work, you can’t afford the luxury of choosing here. The choice is already made. When reality checks your theory, you have to accept it and adjust. That’s a vital ingredient to learning; to take in new information about how things all fit together, you have to be ready to take in new information you don’t have yet, therefore, didn’t have when you came up with the theory. Or wrote the code. Or built the model. You have to be ready for reality to tell you how wrong you are. That is, like, prepping the construction site before you even pour the foundation. It’s a key prerequisite.

I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out whether the folks in charge right now have it goin’ on. Can’t explain everything.

Yeah, I’m completely on-board with this.

Far too often, so-called “moderates” get fooled into thinking that liberals support some things and reject other things, in service of issues that actually make a difference in peoples’ lives — whereas conservatives get wrapped around the axle, accepting-and-rejecting things that don’t matter in any way. I don’t want to call those moderates stupid; some of them are my friends. And, although I have very little respect for this opinion, and sad as it may be to admit it, they do have their reasons for thinking this.

Too many so-called conservatives just have sticks up their butts. They see a woman in a v-neck, they write their letters. The younger generations might see it and get corrupted or something. So they mount their campaign to keep the kids from seeing certain things…ever. It looks like a campaign for ignorance because that’s what it is. And, it looks overly-controlling, neurotic and futile. Because it is all those things too.

Saddest thing is: We do have a moral crisis in this country, and “please take that picture down” conservatives are helping to make it happen. Might as well face it, when there’s not supposed to be anything wrong with having a President who is a sexual predator, but there is supposed to be something wrong with remembering it happened and talking about it — that’s a moral crisis. That’s losing the sense of direction.

Conservatism, to me, is conserving freedom first & foremost. There, too, we have a crisis. Ask those moderates what we should be free to do, sometime. Right now you get back “marry whoever you want” and protest on behalf of the ninety-nine percent; that’s about it. How wonderful. Attack free enterprise, attack the family, and our list of freedoms has reached its end. How much better I’d feel about the whole gay-marriage movement if some among its advocates could say, just once in awhile, “here are some other things people should absolutely, positively, unconditionally, be able to do” and then rattle off a few more items that would show they put thought into it.

Matt Walsh:

I certainly can’t read their minds, and I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, all I know is that the husband couldn’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldn’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife.

She disagreed with everything he said.

She contradicted nearly every statement.

She even nagged him.

She brought up a “funny” story that made him out to be incompetent and foolish. He laughed, but he was embarrassed.

She was gutting him right in front of us. Emasculating him. Neutering him. Damaging him.

It was excruciating.

It was tragic.

It also was, or is becoming, pretty par-for-the-course.

The respect deficiency in our culture has reached crisis levels.

What’s going on in these exchanges is the construction of an identity. Wives like this have made the mistake of building an identity for themselves, a sort of earthly function, and around that has to be wrapped a persistent narrative that survives any onslaught of contradictory evidence: Since her identity is “person who corrects him,” the narrative needs to be “he’s doing it wrong and needs someone to correct him.”

Which doesn’t leave the husband with too many options. I know, I know, we’re not supposed to feel sorry for him because he doesn’t belong to an oppressed-victim-class…but still, it might be worth the trouble to evaluate what’s open to him. Not much. He can ridicule her back, which I’m sure she wouldn’t appreciate. He can withdraw socially. He could play along and act like the bumpkin, or he could leave.

All four, I submit, are trajectories toward the divorce court.

The men didn’t want to fight for a marriage if they weren’t respected, and the women didn’t want to respect men who wouldn’t fight for their marriage. He withholds his love, she withholds her respect. They’ve both set fire to the thing that needs to be fixed.

Someone pushed his button; but, he makes a solid case.

Yeah, somebody pushed my button.

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.

They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.

Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back.

I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.
:
Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist. They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty. And if there is a historically demonstrable threat to humanity, it is poverty.

I’m not talking about those who think we should be working toward new forms of energy to eventually displace our dependence of fossil fuels. Even I believe in that; after all, fossil fuels are a finite resource.

I’m instead talking about the extremists. They are the ones who are sure they are right, and who are bent on forcing their views upon everyone else. Unfortunately, the extremists are usually the only ones you hear from in the media, because they scream the loudest and make the most outrageous claims.
:
So, as long as they continue to call people like me “deniers”, I will call them “global warming Nazis”.

I didn’t start this fight…they did. Yeah, somebody pushed my button.

Now ordinarily my reaction would be: Two wrongs don’t make a right. But — why do I not like name-calling in the first place. Because it makes simple things needlessly complicated, obscures the truth, obscures common sense, raises the potential of wrong decisions being made. Well, what is the global warming movement anyway: A political movement that is too cowardly even to call itself a political movement. A power push that refuses to call itself a power push. It pretends to be about something called “science” and yet it does not use the scientific method.

People read up on their little factoids and fektoids, then they log on to blogs and paste their snippets into the comments sections. The ones who actually have a name that’s worth something, go on teevee programs and puff up those names through high-pressure, low-mass sensationalism — almost as if they don’t like having a good name — and are constantly scolding whoever else doesn’t go along.

I’m weary of the passive assist, helping them to pretend they have a lock on objectively observed truth. When their sales pitch is, boiled down to its essentials, that we’re in danger of losing control over the global climate if the taxes and regulation are too low, and we can acquire/maintain such control if they are are high. People can sugar-coat it and rhetorically duck and weave, but that’s the core message.

If it were ever about facts and science and “the truth of what’s happening,” and the advocates were doing their advocating with some honesty, we’d be having a conversation about the correlation between greater state power and a milder global climate. But then again, I suppose if Hitler were more honest he would’ve led with the Final Solution.

Interesting inspection going on at our group-collaboration blog:

I’ve long been suspicious that the modern liberal is typically nothing more than someone who is proud of the “ability” to string multiple syllogisms into what they ultimately consider a de facto valid “argument”.

Question of the day: Other than the meaningless, unmentioned and entirely made-up “wall of separation between church and science,” is there ANY reason why something called “Spiritual Starvation” should not be a diagnosable disorder, written up with an actual ICD code, list of symptoms, treatment recommendations, & everything else?

The symptoms are easily recognized: Perception of, and response to, overwhelmingly talentless and mediocre mortals as if they were deities; a longing to be part of a collective or cult; and, most significantly and most often, a compulsion to do “good” by giving away material things to “the poor” — at no actual cost to the afflicted person who is doing the giving. “A democrat is a fellow who is so nice he’ll give you the shirt off someone else’s back.”

Spiritual Starvation. You’ll notice people who are faithful, attend church, and have been working at making peace with God, don’t behave that way; they don’t say “Let’s help the poor by making that other guy do more than he’s doing.”

From Gerard:

Obamaholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps

1. We admitted that like crazed pale metrosexuals we were powerless over Obama huffing, puffing, and fluffing — that our political lives had become unmanageable, bereft of truth, justice, and integrity.
2. Came to believe that a Constitution once again greater than Obama could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our political will and our Obama addiction over to the care of Common Sense as we understood it.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and saw how continually conned we were to believe that this hybrid charlatan was in the game for anything other than his own enrichment, power, and aggrandizement.

5. Admitted to America, to ourselves, and to another drooling Democrat the exact nature of our inability to criticize and dump Obama simply because of the color of his skin even as the content of his character dwindled into negative numbers.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Constitution remove all these defects of our political disease.

7. Humbly asked the Constitution to remove this sham of a president even if it meant, yes, Biden.

8. Made a list of 317+ million Americans we had harmed by our stupid, stupid, selfish, and — dare we say? — braindead votes for Obama (twice because, yes, we were just that stupid), and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would cause their teeth to burst into flames as they shouted, “WE TOL’ YOU DAT BITCH WAS CRAZY!”

10. Continued to ask ourselves “How could we be so stupid?” and — when we grew even stupider as Hillary shook her commodious tush — promptly admitted we were still not cured of our addiction.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve the chances that a random asteroid strike would reduce Washington DC to smoldering rubble, praying only for enough mass and orbit change to carry that out.

12. Having had a reverse political lobotomy as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message of Obama’s deep and enduring suckitude to others, and to remind ourselves to take a hot lead enema rather than ever voting Democrat again.

Liberalism, for the last forty years or so, has maintained a belief that all problems can be solved by way of getting even with some oppressive class, on behalf of some oppressed class — that you can actually balance budgets and make the environment work better that way. For the last twenty, it has maintained a belief that where liberalism tries and then fails, we can make it into a success simply by re-defining the original goals.

In the age of Obama, it means we should all pay for this through the nose. And, act like it’s making us fabulously wealthy. If we just believe with all our might, it becomes so.

Everyone out there remembers the great spendiddlydimulus of 2009, right? If you don’t, you should. It cost you a cool $787 billion.

Pfffft. Chump change, minions. GET BACK TO WORK.

Anywho, Obama’s lapdogs are calling that stimulus a win. I’m not even kidding you. They’re even celebrating its 5th anniversary – they did that yesterday in fact. I’m not sure if they gave it a present or made it a cake or danced with each other in some White House ballroom like raging, out-of-touch imbeciles, but they celebrated it nonetheless.

Meanwhile, back in Reality-Land, unemployment is the biggest problem facing Americans right now. Because people are out of work. Because that stimulus thing DIDN’T actually work. Well, Obama’s handlers are saying they “saved” jobs. So we have that, at least.

Yay us and saving jobs that may or may not have been lost. Or something.

Reality misses us. Come home.

Actually, no; reality couldn’t care less one way or the other. Reality chugs onward regardless of what we choose to believe…we, on the other hand, have always been fated to learn and re-learn whatever lessons we refuse to learn.

Time to hop off the silly-go-round, Obama voters.

From the list-master, John Hawkins, writing at Townhall.com:

1) The Party of Infanticide
2) Excusing Horrible Liberal Behavior Toward Women
3) Demeaning Stay-At-Home Moms
4) Savage Attacks On Conservative Women
5) Helping Criminals By Disarming Women

Yup, Bill Clinton gets mentioned. I’ve noticed liberals have begun to stigmatize any mention of the former President, save for glittering banalities such as the ones involving mythology about a Clinton economy or some such thing…you’re not supposed to mention that he was “credibly accused of rape,” almost certainly qualifies under any clinical definition of a sexual predator.

So we’re about to start discussing the Lewinsky thing again? Good, I say. We had a predator as our President for eight years. Yeah, something should be made of that. Enough of a ruckus to actually change something. That’s not what I saw back in ’98 to ’99.

As for the rest of it, well, the liberalism we know today is a public policy agenda. It is not a crusade for human rights. That’s just the packaging, not the content. And you can see by how they treat Sarah Palin, how much they care about women being represented in the ranks of power.

So we got to see our favorite waitress last night, and Mrs. Freeberg has to ask her: Restaurants are busy on Valentine’s Day, but this place looks like a tomb. What’s up? Answer: Couples go to restaurants picked by the woman, that’s the plain truth of it. And women don’t want to go to a place where the waitresses wear skimpy denim shorts.

Yeah, she’s right. This has always been right, as far as husbands or boyfriends rudely leering at younger, skinnier women; the gals don’t like it. And they shouldn’t. But since when did that mean the Valentine’s Day crush of restaurant-dining should fall only on certain restaurants? There is something new happening here. Something bigger than restaurants or leggy waitresses. It applies to money, too. We just had an “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which as near as I can tell, was about making something called “one percenters” into unidentifiable strangers, and celebrating the camaraderie of “the ninety-nine percent.” The common theme that applies to both: I’ve picked out a target I wish to alienate, and you should help me alienate it, because the target is doing better than I am at something.

It has to do with ambition, and desire. Women desire a nice firm butt and long, lean, supple legs; men desire a hefty portfolio and a thick billfold. The gender identities are wearing down, too, and I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. I could stand to lose a few pounds, and Lord knows women like to have more money. But there are those people doing better than we are. What is our behavior around those people? That is what’s changing.

On the “other women have nicer looking legs” thing, the thinking seems to be that if the lady of the house can manipulate her boyfriend/husband and herself into staying the hell away from the leggy bitch, that will eliminate the competition. This is a fairly ancient thought. It’s the acceptance of it that is new. It used to be a thought not to be taken seriously; frowned-upon. Then smirked-at. Then it aroused a newer sense of sympathy that was missing before. And now we’ve reached the point where it is to be encouraged. If Couple A only goes to restaurants friendlier to the preferences of a jealous female, but Couple B goes to Hooters, then Couple B is making Couple A feel bad and they need to reform. Thus it is with the Occupy movement; deep down everyone seems to realize the obvious, that this is a protest against success. But, by rights, the Occupy movement should be eyeball-rolled outta here for good, and instantly, which is not what’s been happening. Here and there, on Facebook, in the office, you still hear all this righteous sniveling about “we are the ninety-nine percent.” The issue is sustainability across time. The appropriate and correct eyeball-rolling lasts the lifetime of a gnat, while the very silly sympathy is more like the tortoise that lives a century or two.

The jealous have an impact on the conduct of the non-jealous, rather than the other way around. I fear we are living in an age in which we are culturally expected to maintain a phobia against success. We are expected to nurture that phobia, as if it is something that will lead to that success, when the truth is that it can only take us in the opposite direction.

I don’t understand it. It is not my world. Dining at the place with the young, skinny, leggy waitresses was actually my wife’s idea. She’s not insecure, see. And as for me, I’ll make no claim to go around emulating people who are in better shape, physically or financially. At least, not in an instant or anything like that. But occasionally, once or twice out of the span of a few years, I’ll come to find out about a good habit that might be compatible with my lifestyle and expectations, and possibly do some learning. There may be some slow progress here, or not. But the point is: That’s the thought in my head when I find out about them. Oh, he’s rich? What did he do? Oh, he’s my age but can still wear size 34? What’s his routine? I’m so old that I can remember when people did that all the time…when adults got together for some kind of occasion, like a backyard BBQ or whatever, that was most of what was happening. Peers, telling stories of common problems, sharing solutions. A custom centuries old.

Now, seems we’re becoming more like ostriches. S/he is doing better? I don’t wanna know. Don’t tell me. And let’s stay away.

But if that guy has more lucre than I do, he must have stolen it.

This is not good, because the first step to improvement is to admit that the improvement is possible. Second step, I guess, would be to contemplate that the improvement is needed. All learning begins with the statement: “I don’t know.” All enrichment begins with the statement: “I’m not satisfied.” All self-improvement begins with “I could do better.”