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”.
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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.
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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.”

Me, in correspondence, off-line…

It’s everywhere: People saying “not enough!” which, if they’re saying it in good faith, you should be able to count on the ideas that 1) some definition of “enough” exists, 2) there also exists some way to objectively measure what was parceled out, or done, or given, 3) the standard exceeds the provision, which creates a deficit, and 4) should this established and measurable standard be met, the caterwauling will stop. That’s a very silly list to make, but it seems to me our whole society is paying a price for nobody having taken the time to make it.

We have made i[t] an acceptable behavior to cry “not enough” in bad faith. The four items in the paragraph previous, are no longer part of the implied contract. “Not enough” now seems to mean nothing more than “I receive material reward, or I have a potential of receiving material reward, when I yell ‘not enough’ and, well, here I am.” That and nothing more.

Too many people yelling “not enough”; not enough numbers. Not enough rebuttals in the form of “Would {n} much more make you shut up?”

Our cultural expectations have slid so far here, that we now consider it normal that complaints of not-enough entirely lack any numeric reasoning behind them; it has become surprising and unexpected that there should ever be any. It’s become a sort of audible sound, like the screeching of a baby bird in a nest, meaning so-and-so wants more. Shrill complaints communicated from those who do not actually measure things, to others who do not actually measure things, to be resolved by some quick grabbing and taking and distributing and giving, but — again — not actually measuring anything.

Congressman Mark Pocan, D-WI, spinning the declining labor participation rate which the CBO projects to drop further due to ObamaCare.

From Rush Limbaugh.

Hat tip: The Daley Gator.

Yeah. I’m the guy who hates this ad.

I’ll go into my reasons in a bit; sorry to disappoint, but “xenophobia” doesn’t figure into it. But first, to demonstrate how little the chattering-class seems to understand me and the others who don’t receive the ad positively, a hilarious take-down by Matt Walsh…

It was a wonderful night. And then…then IT happened.

The Coke advertisement. Dear God — the Coke advertisement. It started out alright: some girl singing America the Beautiful while beautiful images of America flashed across the screen. But things went downhill fast. Suddenly, other people started singing the song in other languages. It was awful. I was furious. They were speaking in, like, Asian and Australian and stuff. Utterly horrifying. I told my wife to cover the children’s ears.

Out of nowhere, graphic depictions of other cultures and skin colors infested my TV screen. There was a brown one and, like, a Mexican guy or something.

Oh, the foreign languages and varying skin pigmentations!

I couldn’t stand it. Enraged, I grabbed my shotgun and blew a hole through the television. My wife could only weep, and through her tears she thanked me for saving her from the terrifying onslaught of multi-culturalism.

And that’s exactly what happened…in the fantasies of left-wing bloggers and journalists.

In the real world, I saw that commercial and reacted in a way similar to almost all of my fellow right-wing conservatives: I yawned and went to the kitchen for another beer. Then I proceeded on with my evening, not caring one way or another about Coca-Cola’s contrived marketing tactics. Admittedly, I have long since vowed to never drink Coke, but that’s only because I dislike diabetes, not because I’m upset about foreigners singing patriotic hymns.

So imagine my surprise when I went on the [I]nternet after the game to see social media abuzz over the “right wing backlash against Coca-Cola.”
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Outrage! Firestorm! Backlash! Xenophobia!

Funny thing: these stories started popping up within minutes of the ad airing.

Loud, outspoken, obnoxious…strangers-on-the-innernetz. Solutions in search of problems.

Well as Obi-Wan Kenobi might have said, I’m the bigot they’re looking for; it’s a terrible, terrible ad. I don’t like the music, not because I can’t understand the words, but because at 0:18 there are way too many syllables. It just sounds awful, and if you disagree you aren’t being honest. But some might protest that this doesn’t get to the heart of what truly upsets me so, so let me walk the reader through my argument, with complete candor:

Many spoken languages do not make a good thing. Many spoken languages would be a plurality of one spoken language. One spoken language is a pain in the ass. Can we all agree on just that much? Yes you can do things with a spoken language that you can’t do without one; the same would be true of your job, or the car you use to get to it, if you’re overdue for trading either one of them in and can’t get around to it just yet. One language is like that. Especially English. It’s full of idiosyncrasies, ambiguities, and frustrating little gadgets that don’t work the way they should just like a car that’s past its prime. Many languages? That just multiplies the frustration without getting anything further accomplished. United States school students are still lagging behind, or were as of a year ago. Let’s fix that first. Then we can talk about beautiful, rich, robust tapestries of half-a-dozen languages, and something besides English being spoken at home.

The above has to do with pragmatism. What follows has to do with altruism.

Walsh provided an overview of his discoveries within the very few minutes after the ad hit the air:

Some of the headlines:

Coke Ad Draws Outrage, Praise (EW)

Coca-Cola Super Bowl Ad Inspires Racist Twitter Backlash (Mediaite)

Coca-Cola Ad Celebrates Diversity, Twitter Racists Explode (Huffington Post)

Coca-Cola Multicultural Super Bowl Ad Really Angered Conservatives (Talking Points Memo)

Coca-Cola’s Multilingual America the Beautiful Ad Sparks Conservative Outrage (AlterNet)

Coca-Cola Super Bowl Ad: Can You Believe This Reaction? (USA Today)

Coca-Cola’s America the Beautiful Ad Creates Social Media Firestorm (The Examiner)

America the Ugly: Coca-Cola Super Bowl Ad Provokes Xenophobic Outrage on Twitter (The Daily Mail)

I showed candor, up above. Let’s have everybody else follow suit, and let’s all just admit to the point of this. It wasn’t about celebrating the beauty of, or for that matter anything positive about, the United States. “America the Ugly” was the point. It was about scolding people who aren’t very well understood, may not even exist as they were imagined by the people who cooked up the ad, or those who salivated over it.

There is a story here, certainly. Coca Cola knew exactly how to poke the hornet’s nest; that means — can only mean — they knew exactly where it was and what the best poking-method would be. It’s been growing there for awhile.

But the imagined “bigots” are not that nest. It’s the people who are ready to do the scolding who are the problem. The virtue junkies.

They feel so smug and superior to people like me, because they’ve decided I should have positive feelings about an obnoxious ad and, it turns out, I don’t like it. Their lack of curiosity about people like me is the stuff of legends. I, on the other hand, would sell off all sorts of my possessions, and at a loss, to find out more about what motivates them. What causes this hair-trigger temper of “I’m better than that person who exists mostly in my imagination,” within someone who isn’t actually doing much of anything to make life better for anybody? What unleashes this torrent of energy to produce ads, or watch ads, then take to Twitter and unleash some tut-tuts about these imagined racists…or, to read those tut-tuts, and tut-tut in approval.

Generation after generation after generation burned away “fighting racism,” supposedly — and then celebrating “finding” it’s still there. It is celebrating, isn’t it? I mean, what else could we call it.

And why this undue expansion of the definition? When did racism come to mean “We’ve decided you should like this ad, and we think we caught you not liking it”? Is that really where things are now?

I don’t like the ad because it’s got too many syllables and it gives me a headache. I also don’t like what it promotes. It promotes, not a beautiful America, but a balkanized one. It promotes many-languages as opposed to just one, therefore it promotes confusion. Confusion and an omnipresent, hostile smugness.

America is still beautiful, to me. But in this day & age, it’s got way too much of both those things. Diet Pepsi for me, or just coffee, thanks.

Walking to the grocery store this morning on an excursion Mrs. Freeberg courteously pointed out (after I got back) that I’m going to have to repeat soon, I was thinking about breasts. Wait, I’m a dude. That’s just another way to say I was alive and had brainwave activity.

My thought about breasts was, actually, how much feminists hate them when they have no reason to. The two favorite examples come to the forefront, DC Comics’ Wonder Woman character and Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider game. I’ve already waxed lyrically about those two icons to excess, but we should start with them nevertheless because they both happen to be in a process of re-work, the video-game superstar last year and the comic book legend in a movie coming up.

Both of these reforms/reboots/whatever-ya-call-em are in the direction of shrinking breasts. For no reason whatsoever, other than: Feminists loathe large breasts on a woman. And feminists loathe large breasts only for the singular solitary reason that men like them.

Now if a feminist reads this and feels the need to retort — which she most certainly would — she’ll reply that I’m forgetting something important and this, as usual, entirely invalidates my point. She’ll time-travel back to the 1960’s and protest that large breasts “reinforce stereotypes” that a woman is no more than her mammary appendages, that she has nothing else to offer, no intellect, no talent, can’t get anything done without a man, is there only for decoration and blah-blah-blah. This is the other reason why we should start off our thinking with Wonder Woman and Lara Croft. There’s a paradox here: These women are not bubble-heads. Wonder Woman is the second most powerful hero in the Justice League. At her inception, she was supposed to capture the absolute pinnacle of what a woman could be, in all aspects. She had a “super power” of being able to win beauty contests. As well as to deflect bullets with her bracelets and all that other stuff. So the super-heroine-beauty was merely an extension of all the things that made her a “wonder,” and the large breasts were merely an extension of that beauty.

Lara Croft is just a bundle of resourcefulness and resilience. At her inception, she was supposed to be a female Indiana Jones. In both cases, the large breasts were a message. Far from being a message of “don’t think too highly of her, she’s just a jiggle-teevee bubblehead” or anything like that, it was more like “Look, I can do all this stuff and I’m a girl!”

I’m old enough to remember when that’s what the feminist message was. Exactly that, nothing more or less.

Speaking of jiggle-teevee: Doesn’t the old Charlie’s Angels show demonstrate how long this has been going on? A new product offering is placed on the media market, seeking to enforce the social messaging that a beautiful woman can be perfectly capable of getting things done. It picks up a following, not because of the social message, but because in order to get that across it has to have one-to-several beautiful women in it, and who doesn’t like to look at beautiful women? And then some “reformer” is somehow allowed into the production meetings, just like the snake slithering into the Garden of Eden, and issues the command: Reduce the breast sizes, because it’s time for the next social message. Charlie’s Angels didn’t make it that far. But it was criticized for being “Jiggle TV” from the very beginning…by whom, I’m not exactly sure, but I suspect it was someone who didn’t actually watch the show too often.

There is value in noticing this, in that it suggests a way we could taxonomize social movements throughout human history. Conservatives ended slavery by way of a powerful message, consisting of “Whatever it is you seek to do and however you seek to do it, is fine, but we’re drawing a line here…” The objection was rooted in Natural Law, and the boundary between right and wrong was, by implication, static and not dynamic.

Progressives can’t get jiggy with that. They can’t follow such a train of thought as far as the “Whatever.” They keep drifting off into this business of, “As long as we’re re-wiring the culture, let’s take care of this thing, over here…” and they are drawn, like moths to a flame, to people’s personal preferences and personal tastes. That’s because they’re always in attack mode. When a conservative decides to support the feminist movement, the justification for doing so is going to be very similar to the justification for that other conservative movement mentioned above, the abolition of slavery. Something like “Women should have the same opportunities a man should have,” or to get more to the point, “It is wrong to deprive a woman of her opportunities.” Again, Natural Law. We might think of the credo as one that asks the question: Is damage being done? Are people engaging in activities that worsen the situation for others?

Such a conservative finds himself or herself compelled to hop off the feminist bandwagon in short order, as it lurches left, into attack mode. Attack this-or-that-corporation for having too many male executives; presume there must be some “discrimination” going on, solely on the basis of outcome, disregarding the very real possibility that a lack of female bosses is simply indicative of a low number of females who want the job. Attack this-or-that industry. Attack this-or-that pastime, this-or-that sport, this-or-that family restaurant franchise.

Attack beautiful, sumptuous female breasts. Lefties are always in attack mode, they place an impractically weighty emphasis on symbols and symbolism. They are dedicated to destroying things, while pretending to be building something great and grand, that they can never quite define.

Gal Gadot, who will be playing Wonder Woman in the upcoming movie, engaged in some very regrettable comments, albeit technically correct ones, about how Wonder Woman’s breasts should not be — ahem — a big deal or anything. She missed the point. Wonder Woman is not about big breasts, but she is about women accomplishing amazing things while being women, and womanly. The message relies on the presentation of womanly attributes, that’s why the big breasts and the big hair and the skirt and the running-style were all there in the first place; it’s all about doing man-sized things in a womanly way.

Since before World War II, superheroes have been an effective way of getting that message across. Among mugging victims, or motorists trapped in cars that are about to teeter off cliffs — who in his right mind is going to say a stupid thing like “Gosh darn it, I wanted Zorro to save me, not this magic-lasso bimbo”? These are great messages for all of us, kids in particular. Help others, when you can. Accept the help, when it’s there. Be the best and the greatest you can be, no matter who or what you are.

Now, with progressive feminists involved, we’re never quite done reforming the female physique. Everything has to be more “realistic,” which means hair short, breasts diminutive, midsection soft and chubby, legs belying a lifestyle built around a henpecked hubby bringing princess things while she sits on the couch.

Feminism, regrettably, has come to be about attacking…femininity. It’s a very sad thing. And it shows you what “attack mode 24×7” really buys you, in the long run. It leads to self-destruction.

The Blog That Nobody Reads, inspired the Prof to do some thinking.

Now, Morgan and I are of an age, I think, because I remember those talks as well. And in my case, one of the things I took away from them was the important fact that although I had certain obvious talents even as a kid, I also had limitations. For example, I remember saying to my folks one day, “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”

Dad shook his head. “Won’t work — you’ll be too big.” He explained that space capsules were cramped spaces, not really designed for hulking brutes of the sort I was destined to become.

Likewise, when I suggested that I might like a career as a secret agent, he pointed out that spies generally require a degree of protective coloration not typically found in very large redheads of my personality type. I wouldn’t be able to blend in enough for such a gig.
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These days, I suspect that parents who dropped this sort of truth on their kids would receive much tut-tutting, accusations of dream-crushing, and such. And I’ll admit, there was a certain amount of disappointment on my part, but I knew my dad loved me and wasn’t speaking from cruelty — he was simply telling the truth: Not everyone can do anything they might want. Instead, he said, you have to find the things that align with your abilities and your limitations and do those things as best you can. And by teaching me that lesson, he helped me find my way to what I do now. I’m grateful for that.

And I find myself wondering if there might be less frustration if more folks learned that lesson early on.

He gets it. A flurry of tiny, almost insignificant observations compel me toward a belief that “the talk” isn’t happening now the way it did in the days of yore. The question in the title of this post is not being asked as often.

Perhaps the attention span is slipping? Not sure what brings that about, but if it can somehow be proven that that is the cause to this effect, then it would be a simple matter to connect that cause to many others. It would explain much.

To the current crop of younglings I can only suggest: Just don’t be like her.

Update: I remember what I was reading when I started thinking this belonged over here, on the blog, and it wasn’t Prof. Mondo talking about it. It was an excellent observation about the graphic above by reader/follower/commentator Robert Mitchell:

We demand that, in school, kids sit down, shut up, and do what they’re told to do, and we drug them to the gills if they don’t. I expect that she was a charming little parrot when young, and her teachers adored her. So they “encouraged” her to seek out a “life of the mind” But no plan was given, just “Go to College!”. Trained from kindergarten to obey teachers, she was easy prey for the bottom feeders of the academic world, the “studies” professors……

The benefit to being a real “of the mind” type of professional, in my opinion, is that the aptitudes can develop late. I myself demonstrated little to nothing by way of remarkable or definable ability, contrasted with some of the other kids who were going to be professional athletes. Those who placed great confidence in their own opinions about what I would one day be, took the safe-shelter in the tiresome prediction that I’d be a great stringed-instrument virtuoso. Looking back on it, what really gave me opportunity for the future was not that. It was the encouragement I received to be a “solution in search of a problem”; the vision that I’d figure out how to do something others had tried to figure out how to do, and hadn’t yet succeeded at doing it. In my case, I have yet to invent the next great light bulb, or transistor, or what have you. But I have managed to solve these little puzzles along the way, and truth be told, that’s what has paid the bills.

That’s why I find this all a bit frightening. What appears to have taken a hiatus is this “do something unique” thing. The vision has been blinded. We seem to have an entire generation of kids coming up, who don’t envision themselves as doing anything now or in the future, besides fitting in to a large crowd, be it physical or virtual. But, either way, the large-crowd would not miss them if they were not there…and that’s okay.

To some, that’s a dream come true. Perhaps because of my own perspective on life and how to make a living while you’re in it, I call it a nightmare. I don’t wish to be melodramatic about it, but I struggle in vain to imagine one that could be any worse.

From the ever-thickening file folder marked, “Oh look it’s another asshole flying around in a private jet to spread the word about global warming or something”…

Hat tip to The News Junkie at Maggie’s Farm.

“Thank you for the dinner and a very pleasant evening. Have your car take me to the airport. Mr Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news at once.” — Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, The Godfather (1972)

Bill Gates says…

An essential quality of a good manager is the desire to seek bad news rather than deny it. An effective manager wants to hear about what’s going wrong before he or she hears about what’s going right. You can’t react appropriately to disappointing news if it doesn’t reach you soon enough.

Of all the bosses I’ve known who failed at this, a common theme that surfaces in my recollections is the desire to set a certain tone. The tone being, everything is going okay, all of the time. The workplace should be a happy-place. Other bosses were not quite so much into that, they were more into something like: You broke it, if it’s broken at all — each employee should feel accountable, therefore, as the sole author of any & all screw-ups, with everyone around him or her doing everything all wonderful & perfect. The latter deal with negative vibes, the former with positive ones. Both types of boss are guilty of retarding the crucial travel-path of bad news.

My experience within the managerial circle is very light, and it all has to do with the PM-level. That means I have no experience at all actually supervising staff, and what little I’ve done there has to do with tracking status. However, this melds seamlessly with the much greater experience I’ve had outside of management; status-tracking and problem-predicting is a baseline chore, one that’s never all the way done. All of these life-lessons, and the sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious events that have popped up from time to time, persuade me to believe the following: Setting the tone is overrated. A good argument can be made that it is not entirely out of the scope of a manager’s job. But it is mostly that.

The boss sees a potential for entirely losing-out on the ability to do the job of bossing, if the tone of the workplace gets out of hand; so the boss sets this tone, and in so doing, obstructs the flow of bad news.

It is true that you can’t fulfill the job of bossing if the office tone gets out of hand. But three other things are also true: One, that people are going to be happy or frowny-face pretty much no-matter-what, you can’t order them to be one or the other. Two, that if a central concern among everybody is the timely and appropriate handling of bad news, the tone will pretty much take care of itself.

Three: A lot of jobs cannot be done well, by someone who’s dreading moment-to-moment that he’ll fail entirely if one little thing gets out of hand. There are some notable exceptions, like brain surgeon, customer service rep, airplane pilot, soldier throwing a hand grenade, most of the time a construction-dude. Boss-of-the-office is different. That job cannot be done timidly; and it has to do with instilling a vision. Not a tone.

Looking in from the outside, I’ve come to see it as a very simple flow chart. Is the goddamn thing done yet? If no, keep plugging away. If so, then what’s the next thing? Find the next thing. It’s done, or it isn’t done. Either way, instill the vision, and not the tone.

I suppose after the really huge things are done, a few minutes of exception can be made for celebration. That’s a good top-down tone. Beats a Christmas party anytime. Make sure the victory is well-won, then order pizza. Pizza’s cheap.

Burt Folsom:

What the free-market view means in policy terms is no tariffs for business, no subsidies for farmers, and no racism written into law. Also, successful businessmen will not be subject to special taxes or the seizure of property.

In America this view of equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Much of America’s first century as a nation was devoted to ending slavery, extending voting rights, and securing property and inheritance rights for women–fulfilling the Founders’ goal of equal opportunity for all citizens.

Progressives and modern critics of equality of opportunity have launched two significant criticisms against the Founders’ view. First, that equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve. Second, to the extent that equality of opportunity has been tried, it has resulted in a gigantic inequality of outcomes. Equality of outcome, in the Progressive view, is desirable and can only be achieved by massive government intervention.

To some extent, of course, the Progressives have a valid point–equality of opportunity is, at an individual level (as opposed to an institutional level) hard to achieve. We are all born with different family advantages, with different abilities, and in different neighborhoods with varying levels of opportunity. As socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays and see what he says to you.”

What the Progressives miss is that their cure is worse than the illness. When government, for example, tries to correct imbalances in family, ability, and neighborhood, government intervention produces other inequalities that maybe worse than the original ones.

It’s a fundamental difference in outlook on life. The conservative says “If one guy managed to do it anywhere, then that means anyone can aspire toward it, and that applies everywhere.” The liberal says “If one guy fails at it somewhere, then nobody else can hope to do it anywhere…or, should be stopped from trying. And everywhere.”

Goddard nails it:

1. Obama tells government scientists that they have to agree with him, or lose their jobs.
2. Government scientists then agree with him.
3. Obama then says “100% of government scientists agree with me”
4. Kook and Nuttercelli then write a paper about the 97% consensus.

Still not sure why President Obama went and did that (video behind link auto-plays). It isn’t smart politically, in the sense that it exposes the catechism-science as what it really is: Something masquerading under the label of “science” that doesn’t involve experience or experimentation. Phony-science that is molded into shape by politicians who talk too much.

And that is a fact. Say what you want about a process, but when it involves an inherent confusion between what’s certain and what is not, in fact comes to rely on that, it isn’t scientific.

Update: Ah, so that is where I saw it (hat tip Gerard again).

In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour. Trading reputational capital for short-term political gain isn’t the most sensible way of going about things.

Someone was researching the origin of the quote “Behind every great man stands a great woman” and they came away with…

The first printed citation I can find is from the Texas newspaper The Port Arthur News, from February 1946. This was headed – “Meryll Frost – ‘Most courageous athlete of 1945′” “As he received his trophy, the plucky quarterback unfolded the story of how he ‘came back’. He said ‘They say behind every great man there’s a woman. While I’m not a great man, there’s a great woman behind me.'”

It’s a great quote, no matter who said it, because it is a quote that believes in greatness. Not only greatness, but genuine gratitude. Post-1945, though, I guess we just can’t leave something like that alone…

Behind every great man is no one. The woman is 3 steps ahead.

Behind every great man is a great woman. And behind them both is a queue of children looking forward to their inheritance.

Behind every great man is a great woman who gives him all that false confidence.

Behind every great man there’s a great woman…behind every great woman there’s envy.

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Men aren’t supposed to be great anymore, apparently. That’s just not modern-thinking enough for us.

The Wendy Davis scandal makes me wonder if we’re seeing a reversal of that now. I’m wondering if it compels others to wonder about the same thing? “Behind every great woman there’s a man she dumped right after he paid for her education.”

“It was ironic,” Jeff recalls…”I made the last payment [on her Harvard Law loan], and it was the next day she left.”

The scandal has legs for two reasons: First, as a feminist icon, Davis’ credentials must be put to serious question since it’s hard to envision her as any sort of “independent” modern career-minded woman; she comes off looking more like a blood-sucking parasite. Second, no matter which way your political affiliations lean, I think we all should be able to get behind the idea that the people we admire should be good. We should be wanting our children to be more like those people. No one wants their children to go through life just using friends, relatives, spouses, and then tossing them away like empty eggshells.

Uh…right?

New light is being shed, I fear, on a recent phenomenon:

Frankly, I don’t know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we’re number one. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on “Macbeth”.

Boxer Feinstein and Pelosi, if I recall correctly, are all financial partners with their respective husbands, as is Hillary Clinton who also fits the profile and whose political agenda is in lock-step with the others. Pro-gun-control, pro-big-government, higher taxes, and always surrounded by this bullying, domineering aura of greatness. The rest of us are all supposed to think of them as great, accomplished women. But none of their admirers can offer any specific details as to why. This often happens with super-rich people, and all of them fit that. But they’re all rich because of their husbands.

The left has other caterwauling pantsuit-wearing female superstars who have had no husbands at all, and therefore could boast of being truly independent. This is where things start to get strange: The left does not promote them that way. The best they can manage to achieve is their patented feigned-theatrical-shock when the bachelorette’s sexuality is called into question. That whole thing doesn’t interest me too much, although maybe I should take the time to inspect it; it’s a glaring double standard, when you think about it a bit. How many “jokes” do we see in the modern era, politically-charged and otherwise, that are nothing more than references to male homosexuality? So it’s funny to think of male figures as gay, but shocking and intolerable to think of famous females that way? I don’t understand.

But the immediately relevant observation is: The left does not seem to appreciate independence, even when they’re bragging about it. They don’t seem to get what it is. They seem genuinely ignorant of the concept.

Which is remarkable, when you consider that their overall agenda — viewed from a very high, thirty-thousand foot level — all has to do with making all of us, not-that-way. Our health care, the education of our children, our defense from bad people breaking into our houses, our sources of energy, even the thoughts in our head are to come to us by way of centrally-administered and centrally-managed services monopolized by the state. Their sales pitch often has to do with principles of “tolerance” and “diversity” which they do not practice, and personal sophistication which they define only nebulously, clumsily. There’s a certain logic to that, you can’t really sell slavish dependence.

The profile of their dependency-salesman is shaping up much more crisply and clearly than the pitch the salesman is practicing. “He” is a female, who may or may not be married, but if there ever was a husband in the picture he’s mentioned very rarely, or not at all. She’s in the public eye a whole lot. But she doesn’t smile, unless it’s a Pelosi-grin that makes you wonder about her sanity. You never hear of her actually having a dialogue with anybody, although you haven’t long to wait for a sound clip of her droning on wisely about something, perhaps scolding someone who isn’t supposed to answer back, like an indignant schoolmarm talking down to her most sluggish third-grader. Wendy Davis aside, they’re all far, far less appealing to the male ideals of pulchritude than the average female you might see pulling up to a gas pump, or shopping on a weekend. One has the impression that the power-brokers are applying a standard of “no sane straight man would ever want to see her naked,” although trust me on this, you’re not allowed to point that out in mixed company. And yet so much energy goes into sustaining that standard, it seems almost impolite to indefinitely ignore the effort.

They wear pantsuits. Or stirrup pants. Which I suppose is fine now and then…but they do it all of the time. A woman wearing a pantsuit is like a stranger walking around at night; now-and-then doesn’t mean much of anything at all, but when it’s an all the time thing, no exceptions at all even across months and years, you have to start wondering about vampires.

But finally there is the voice. Oh, Lord in Heaven, the voice. Screech! Hey, we all send representatives to the capitol to win arguments, right? That’s the job. We should be expecting some people to show up there who are experienced, and therefore skilled, at winning arguments. We should expect them to have picked out and refined some tactics for doing this. But some politicians drone on in dulcet tones. To a fault; many’s the time I’ve wondered how their assistants manage to stay awake, listening to them talk like Charlie Brown’s teacher fifteen hours or more every day. Wa-waaa-wa-wa-wum-waaah-wum. Not so with MacBeth’s pantsuit-wearing pro-abort witches.

The glass shatters with every damn syllable. What’s it like to have dinner with contentious broads like these? You have to cover your eardrums every time you ask for the mashed potatoes?

Wendy Davis, for now, is remarkable as an exception to the “no sane straight man would ever wanna see her naked” rule — even though she fits the profile in all other respects. Most perplexing is the bullying overtone, emanating from somewhere, no one seems too sure about the source, commanding us to think of her as some sort of great person even though there’s no clear definition of her greatness. Lately, though, she’s begun to look a bit haggard, and perhaps the Dark Side of the Force has begun its aging process on her.

Point to all this is: If I were a left-wing power broker, I would be seriously second-guessing this idea of putting Ms. Davis out into the limelight as some rising political superstar. She has the potential to get people thinking and talking, about things I don’t think the left-wing power machine wants discussed. Questions just sort of naturally arise, like: What is the liberal-democrat vision for our daughters, anyway? We hear so much about what conservative Republicans want girls to do with their lives, and we’re supposed to think the worst of it, although most of us don’t find the idea of lifetime financial and emotional stability, with happy and healthy children and a loving husband, to be too dreadful. If you have an infant girl, how do the lefties want her to spend her life, if not that way? That’s the question I think people should start asking — better late than never.

Should she achieve financial solvency at all? If so, should it come from actually producing something? Or should she life off the efforts of others? Maybe sit on Harvard’s faculty, or go to Congress in a pantsuit and do a lot of screeching? A supply-and-demand problem emerges. There are lots of baby girls being born, and only so many slots there; no society can endure with too many non-producers, regardless of whether the non-producers can shatter glassware with their screechy voices.

I imagine the lefties want every girl to go to college; they say so. What kind of degree does she earn? A useful one? Who pays for it? Should she latch on to some dimwitted but high-earning husband, use him and then toss him away like Jeff Davis? Is it okay, on Planet Liberal, to be a shameless, blood-sucking people-using parasite when you’re a female?

The Wendy Davis mess compels us to ask the question. And keep asking, until we get an answer. A good answer, that doesn’t avoid the subject by smearing the opposition.

NBC Politics:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that the “biggest regret” from her time as the nation’s top diplomat was the 2012 attack on Americans in Benghazi.

During a question-and-answer session at a meeting of the National Automobile Dealers Association, Clinton called the loss of four Americans in the attacks “a terrible tragedy” and a “great personal loss.”

She blew it, big-time. Yay!! Or something…

n her remarks to the auto dealers group, Clinton waxed eloquent about her own family’s love of cars, but conceded that she hasn’t been behind the wheel since she was first lady.

“The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996, and I remember it very well,” she said. “Unfortunately, so does Secret Service, which is why I haven’t driven since then.”

++blink++ What?

CBS looked into this further (warning, video autoplays).

Speaking before a conference of car dealers on Monday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday confessed that she hasn’t driven a car in nearly two decades.

“One of the regrets I have about public life is that I can’t drive anymore,” Clinton said in a speech at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) meeting in New Orleans. “The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996.”

She joked, “My husband thinks that’s a blessing, but he’s the one who should talk.”

Former presidents and first ladies receive lifetime Secret Service protection, so Clinton’s admission isn’t that surprising. Former President Bill Clinton has similarly lamented the fact that he doesn’t drive. President Obama, meanwhile, told a group of auto workers in 2012 that he intends to buy a Chevy Volt and drive it himself when he leaves the White House.

Wow! Good thing they’re democrats, so that when ordinary people find out they don’t share the common-man’s everyday struggles, they’re not hurt by it or anything. Of course, in the case of the dems, we’re talking about the political party that wants to make more rules about what cars we should buy.

They’re not doing what we have to do, yet they want to make rules about how we should do these things so that it’s harder for us to do them. And everyone seems to know all about this, including their allies as well as their opposition. So why do they have allies?

A dog would never vote for a politician that would make it harder for the dog to go outside and water the bushes. A cat would never vote for a politician that would make it harder for the cat to catch mice. A bird would never vote for a politician that would make it harder to build a nest.

But humans……….

Five examples just lately…

1. Any inconvenient fact or statistic about Obama wrecking the economy
2. Any inconvenient fact or statistic about family law being biased against men
3. Just about anything Sarah Palin says, including that last thing that found agreement from everyone with a brain
4. Mike Huckabee’s comment about womens’ libidos
5. Tom Perkins’ comparison of the 1% to Jews in Nazi Germany

“The ole ‘I laugh, so it is defacto untrue’ argument…” It means the laughing-guy wants to participate, but has nothing.

1. If someone gets into trouble by being an idiot, we all need to lose a privilege
2. If someone works hard and produces more, he needs to share
3. Whoever is most fun to watch, is most likely to fix a problem
4. Being offended on behalf of others, who may not even exist, is a noble pursuit
5. Society’s advances were achieved by those who found new ways to be offended
6. Raw emotions do, and should, pull rank over rational thoughts
7. Inequality of wealth must precede some economic calamity
8. If you laugh, or snort derisively, at true things — you can magically make them untrue

From Kate at Small Dead Animals.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever…”

Link.

Thanks to the Brother-in-Law.

From Townhall.

At 1:33, with the “We’re not gonna get into that right now” my interest is piqued. Especially since the host got back a very polite smile, and very polite question, “Why not?” No answer was forthcoming.

Kinda gets back to the subject of the post earlier this morning. And, the one before that. When we’re all obliged to leave certain things undiscussed to make your idea look like a good one, the question just naturally comes up whether that’s necessary to make your idea look like a good one.