Interesting piece of monkish history, by way of blogger friend Rick.

If you love beer, thank a monk. Monks have been producing beer for 1,500 years, and in that time, they have revolutionized and perfected the beer-making process.

The history of monks and beer begins early in the sixth century when Benedict of Nursia wrote a template for monastic life called The Rule. One of Benedict’s directives was that monks should earn their own keep and donate to the poor by the work of their own hands. In the centuries following, monasteries have produced goods to sell, including cheese, honey, and, of course, beer.

Beer production served other purposes too. The Rule outlines the monastery’s obligation to show hospitality to travelers and pilgrims. Beer was safer to drink in medieval times than water contaminated by sewage, and therefore was served to visitors. Beer was also helpful to monks in getting through periods of fasting in Lent and Advent. Beer’s nutrients earned it the nickname “liquid bread.”

In the Middle Ages, monks introduced regulation and sanitary practices in their breweries. They also extended the life of beer by adding hops, which acts as a preservative.

Earn…their own…keep. How very fascinating. It starts with an understanding of the simple idea that if helping people is the objective, it is far more helpful to do something to contribute, than not to…and eventually one of the benefits of the thinking is, beer as we know it today. And who could object to that?

The more years I see come and go, the simpler things become. The people who say “I can do good things for the world by stopping those other people from doing what they want to do,” bring very little, when it’s all said & done, besides taxes, trials, turmoil and trouble. The people who say “I can do good things for the world by getting up off my ass and making something,” well…everything we have that we enjoy, we owe to them and not to the others.

“Monk.” You have to look at the word a whole different way now. It’s not all about eschewing material possessions and deeds, and for this we should be grateful. Especially when we have a beer.

Thanksgiving holiday wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

RULE ONE of arguments about politics: This is America. Remember that. In America, we do not solve problems about political speech by having less speech, we solve those problems with more speech.

RULE TWO: Obviously, if you’re going to use more speech to solve problems, and the problems have to do with people arguing and fighting, your speech is going to have to be more sophisticated than “I got the problem all figured out, and it’s you and your ilk.”

Rule Two should be easy. But a lot of people have a tough time with it. Just take any sampling of the loudest, most-out-outspoken types and ask: What’s their doctrine? Time after time you see it’s nothing more complicated than: [blank] has influence, and we need to take that influence away from them. For all the speeches and all the volume, they really have nothing to say outside of that…and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, boys & girls, is why Americans have lost the ability to talk about politics without getting into fights. The loud people with these “butt hurt hate” doctrines, who really don’t have opinions at all, other than who should be sent out of the room with the door slammed shut behind ’em. Yeah, democrats in Congress, President Obama, I’m looking at you.

How to be part of the solution and not part of the problem: Calling them out is one step back. And, yeah, that applies to this, too. The way forward is to emphasize the problem and not the person. Then, do what Americans do — SOLVE THE PROBLEM. You don’t want to be part of this? Write the doctrine. What’s your doctrine? Is it as simple as: Keep Mormons out of the White House? Those darn insurance/oil/banking companies need to be taken down a peg? Men shouldn’t have opinions about abortions? Religious people responsible for all of society’s problems? Something about “Neocons”? Congratulations, you’ve been part of the problem…that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

You can start fixing it any time. What’s the objective? What are the values driving this? What are the steps? Foreign policy? Domestic policy? How should we interpret and apply the Constitution? What are the behaviors we want to see out of people? How do our policies encourage and discourage these behaviors?

This requires attention, generally. The pattern that has set in is one of, the man-in-the-street attends to the fun part, the declaring of “so-and-so is the problem, and s/he/they need to shut up” — neglecting EVERYTHING else. The values are defined by cable television, since that’s what our kids watch. So Aaron Sorkin & crew decide the values of the whole country. As far as objectives, that’s decided by Congress, which has an approval rate of around 10%, and then Congress tells the cable television networks what to tell us about how we’re supposed to think.

Then, at Thanksgiving, we argue about who needs to shut up. The consensus that emerges from all this is pure nonsense: Politicians are a bunch of damn crooks, can’t trust ’em, party doesn’t matter, they’re all scum and slime and filth…so let’s raise taxes and give them more of our money to manage.

So if you’re going to talk politics around the Thanksgiving table, go ahead, but do it right. Define the doctrine, go after the entire pyramid of principles/values, objectives/goals, good/bad behavior, foreign/domestic policies. Read your history, bring your argument, prepare to learn. Learning’s most important. It should be a learning experience, right?

If someone’s monologuing to excess, time to change the subject.

If someone’s looking bored because they don’t know anything about this stuff, time to change the subject. Well, in a minute or two. The learning thing again.

If someone’s yelling, time to change the subject.

If someone’s pointing, time to change the subject.

If spittle is landing in the mashed potatoes, time to change the subject.

If someone’s stringing together those words “rich need to pay their fair share”…NOT time to change the subject.

Why do we need this, this year? Because of October 1, 2013, a date which will live in infamy. The go-live date of the monstrosity; the take-off date of the albatross.

NO Republican fingerprints on it whatsoever. The fairest test of progressives supposedly “fixing” what ails us, since FDR endlessly extended the Great Depression.

We all know what lefties do when they’re proven wrong about something: They start fights, then after the fighting is over they start up these addictive narratives that say it’s the conservatives who started the fights. They’re feeling extra sensitive right now.

The way to handle it is to be definite. If you’re going to go for the bait, do it in the way that’s described above: Stick to how to achieve the best results, and shy away from the “who needs to be muted” thing. If not, then just smile, say “that’s nice,” and ask for another helping of sweet potatoes.

But, your crazy googley-eyed McGovern-voting granduncle will be spoiling for a fight this year, oh yes he will. Bet the Christmas shopping budget on that.

Clarey:

Worthless people, in order to validate their egos, but avoid any real work, will take the production, success, and work of others, villainize it, protest against it, and ultimately destroy it. Not because other people’s production, success and work was evil, but because it is easier to destroy other people’s work that already exists, rather that build up something of genuine value yourself.
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People who don’t like hard work or math are the cause of the majority of our problems today. People who major in worthless degrees are declaring to the world they don’t want to work hard, but still want to be in charge. And when you throw in ego and The Destruction Principle, you have a veritable mental-cancer that infects people, has them attack others, and slowly kill off the body known as society.

In addition to that jolt of adrenaline that comes from being the destroyer, there’s also some juvenile pleasure involved in watching someone else do the destroying. It’s fun to watch a wrecking ball.

Watching the architect design the building that will go up after the old building is removed…not so much.

Saw a graphic that made the case of a third-party, based on the prevailing sentiment, which is in a state of ascension and is probably correct, that Hillary Clinton is going to be the democrat candidate in 2016 and Chris Christie will represent the Republicans. That, so goes the litany, is not much of a choice.

I find this to be the most persuasive argument I’ve heard lately. Of course it has become a quad-annual ritual for the nation to heave an exasperated sigh of “are these two really the best we can do??” And to mean it. But there is something else going on here. Conquest Rule: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” Christie and Clinton, each, achieved their rise to the top by going left. It’s difficult to knowledgeably state what exactly are Christie’s principles, his “hill I wanna die on” positions. The second amendment certainly isn’t one of them. As for Hillary, she hasn’t been doing any compromising with the other side whatsoever, just like she hasn’t done anything else. I’m still lost on why anyone has any faith in her at all. I wouldn’t hire the woman to sweep my sidewalk. Her entire list of qualifications seems to abruptly stop right after “I’m such an unpleasant bitch that my husband wants to fuck women not much older than our daughter.” That’s vulgar, but is it inaccurate, or incomplete? Something else there that I’m missing? She’s had two decades to bring it to my attention.

There are other commonalities between Clinton and Christie, that strongly suggest neither one of the individuals is the real problem. Each has a fan base, but not a single soul within the fan base can say: “I support [name] because s/he is exceptionally successful and skilled at [blank].” That is not saying, I hasten to add, that they’re actually unskilled. I’m sure they can both do things I can’t do. But you can’t make a logical case that our faith should be placed in either one of them. Hillary Clinton won’t save the country from its downslide. Neither will Chris Christie. Nobody thinks so. No one has any reason to. So how come they’re the likely champions?

It’s not right to take the old us-versus-them dodge, and opine in conspiratorial tones about power brokers huddling in smoky cloakrooms, elevating their candidates we despise to some lofty precipice from which they can be foisted off on us against our will. The hoi polloi are participating in this. Clinton and Christie can claim to have achieved something resembling genuine popularity, and they’d both be right to do so. Therein lies the paradox. Supposedly, we despise career politicians, especially right now. So how come the champions of our age are exactly that? Someone, somewhere is not following through in deed what they’re bitching about in word. And these two are not the source of the problem.

For the longest time I have noticed that when I form opinions that get me alienated, the opinions are built around values and those values, far from being unpopular, are actually things everybody claims to want — it seems I start marching down my own little bunny-trail merely by following through and sticking to my knitting. I’ve also noticed, over the years, it isn’t just me. It seems we all appreciate certain values, roughly half of us follow through on those values in establishing our opinions about real-world issues, the other half of us play games with paradoxes. Like: Women should have choices; they should not be allowed to work at Hooters. Or: Men should not have opinions about abortions, but men having opinions about men who have opinions about abortion, that’s fine. Or: We need this economy to get stronger and better, so we’ve got to make it expensive and impractical for businesses to hire people, and for that matter, for anyone to buy anything. Or: We’ve got to think about the world our children will inherit, so let’s saddle them with trillions of dollars of debt.

The prevailing notion has shown a bad habit of siding with the self-contradictory nonsense. The reasons for this are bound to be numerous and complicated, but the single reason that draws my attention now is simple. The prevailing notion has a way of following auditory volume. And it is in the nature of people who spew paradoxical nonsense to talk louder because, well, I suppose they need to. They talk loudly, they talk often, they insist on getting the last word all of the time, and they refuse to concede any point, no matter how insignificant it may be, no matter how undeniable, even for the sake of hypothetical argument. Well, those are the ingredients, it turns out. Spew the nonsense but make it consistent nonsense, all hours of the day, from many directions, concede nothing. The ethereal “everywhere” mindless mindset will follow along, like some hungry lost duckling chasing a trail of crackers or something.

So that solves part of the mystery. But there is another. If we have simply stopped caring about positive things, like: faith; strength; power; productivity; ability; discipline; sense of commitment; good judgment; life — should our actions not be elevating those things, by accident if not by intent, roughly half the time? It takes more than apathy to bring harm more often than that fifty percent. Once we’re past sixty or seventy percent, we’re in “fight territory”; someone must be sabotaging, which means, someone must care. The very best that can be presumed is that whoever it is, has lost conscious understanding of their own motives. But the motives are there, you can take that to the bank, there’s definitely a fight going on somewhere.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what the percentage would be, if I were to do a detailed analysis and meticulously measure: How often, lately, does a national, regional or local politician’s proposed fix for some vexing problem, have to do with some kind of constraint against freedom? But it’s sure to be more than ninety percent. I damn sure haven’t heard much of our so-called leaders offer much by way of, “this good thing we want more people to do, let’s make it EASIER.” Oh, except maybe ObamaCare, I suppose there’s that. Lots of rhetoric about making it easier to get covered. But, 1) that doesn’t really count, since “get covered” has to do with fleecing money out of somebody else, who would part with the lucre only involuntarily, and 2) …I don’t really need to state it. Something to do with promises vs. deliveries.

This is not a democrat-party thing. It’s the times in which we live. For some reason, every problem that comes along, our solution always begins with the words “make a new rule requiring/banning…” We seem to have collectively forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Problem: Bob doesn’t make enough money. Common sense solution: Bob volunteers for more overtime, or ups his skills — preferably the latter. Our solution: A busy patchwork of new “social safety nets,” and laws, and regulations, and anti-discrimination restrictions, making it so sad sack Bob can gain “access” to whatever perks are enjoyed by anyone who has more money.

Problem: Alice is a fatass. Common sense solution: Alice puts the fork down, and gets more exercise. Our solution: Re-program the culture, challenging these retrograde, patriarchal “notions of a woman’s ideal body style.” In other words, fat worship. Leave the actual problem entirely unsolved, since that would require self-sacrifice and good, old-fashioned work. Let’s go ahead and shave a decade off Alice’s projected life span. Think locally, act globally. Change the opinions of millions of strangers, so Alice can stay fat.

Everything’s like this, lately. The individual with the bad habits should be able to keep his or her bad habits. It’s the rest of society that has to be re-tooled, re-aligned, re-programmed. If there’s a smudge on the wall that sticks out, solve the problem by flinging dirt and shit at the whole wall so it doesn’t stick out.

I’m not sure of the original motivation behind this. Just plain old laziness? Or the thrill of making new rules? The “When do we get to the fun part, where I tell everyone what to do and then they do it” thing.

Probably a combination of both…

But this is an indoctrination that has been in the making, for the better part of a century if not more than a century. There is now an ingrained revulsion against things we know, inwardly, make us good. Better. Stronger. Faster. Bigger. More confident. That revulsion is not natural. There is also an appeal involved in things that diminish us. Drive smaller cars. Use less fuel. Take more holidays. Do less work. Have fewer children. Stop reading this, stop reading that. Take in less information. Know fewer things. That appeal is also not natural.

Between the unnatural revulsion against growing and becoming stronger, and the unnatural appeal toward self-injury and self-weakening, I think it is the appeal toward weakness that is more dangerous. It is more sultry and seductive. We rationalize it as a reduced consumption against some finite resource: By working less I can spend more time with my family, by buying less gas I can drive more miles, I can’t read that because life is too short. But then a funny thing happens, or rather, doesn’t happen: We don’t do the “more.” The guy who wants to spend more time with the family burns it all away on Candy Crush or Angry Birds. The more-miles are never driven, productively or otherwise.

We have come to see it as a prized asset: The coveted “reduced footprint.” The living of less life.

To be sure, there are the glimmerings of a certain sensible and sound logic about it. But then, when it’s time for a presidential election we want to bitch about our uninspiring leaders & leadership candidates. We speak of their selection in passive-voice tones, carefully avoiding any acknowledgement of who did the picking. That is to be expected. Deep down, I think everybody realizes the obvious: That living less life leads to less life. It leads to death, and decidedly mediocre leaders all too ready to pull us in that direction. Non-leaders for non-people living non-life. Weakness worshipers.

Our problem is not that someone else is doing the picking. Our problem is a failure to comprehend the true ramifications of the picking, which we’re doing ourselves, until long after the picking has been done.

But you know what? We can turn around. There’s always time to reverse course. It all starts with envisioning ourselves as being worthy. Can’t progress past that beginning milestone, until we, as a society, reach it.

Video may be NSFW, but only just barely…

That’s 7,408 posts and 20,068 comments. And counting from around April of ’06, 881,580 hits and 1,362,003 page views according to Sitemeter.

Ramirez.

Update: This could be worth the time & trouble of planning a trip…in a year. Wish I’d known about it sooner.

From a local source,

When Renee Palmer-Jones received the invitation from [RADM, Ret.] Ron Tucker to design the Anthem Veterans Memorial, her first instincts were to design something “entirely unique and yet, ‘classical’ in structure, while emphasizing the significance of November 11, Veterans Day, each year.”

These priorities led Renee to think about ways in which the sun could become an integral part of the design because every day of the year has unique sun angles. She began to sketch various configurations that utilize the sun’s specific position at precisely 11:11 a.m. every November 11th, until she came up with the rough outline of what ultimately became (after several modifications) the final configuration of the pillars, elliptical openings and mosaic.

Ron adds, “I wish it were some long-held vision formed while I commanded the USS New Jersey or while in a meeting at the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, but really, it just wasn’t that glamorous. I’m simply fortunate to have the creative talents and support of my friends to make this all happen.” Thanks to the creativity, engineering and technical wizardry skills of the entire AVM committee, Ron’s idea and Renee’s artistic conceptual design became a dynamic reality.
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At precisely 11:11 a.m. on Veterans Day, the shadows of the Memorial pillars will align perfectly to cast one, long shadow across the circle of pavers. At the exact same time, the sunlight projecting through the elliptical openings in the pillars will pour through onto the mosaic at the foot of the pillars. The sunlight cast through the elliptical openings will become a circle that will perfectly illuminate the mosaic of the Great Seal of the United States.

The significance of this Memorial design represents the unity of all five military branches, serving steadfast together for us all. Our military heroes have worked together throughout history and continue today to keep our country safe. This unity is symbolized in the Memorial as each part must work together to illuminate The Great Seal of the U.S.

From the Commandant:

For 238 years, The United States Marine Corps has proudly served our great Nation with unfailing valor – bolstered by the enduring fortitude of our fellow Marines, our families, and our friends. This is why each year on November 10th, Marines from all generations gather together, in groups large and small, to celebrate the birthday of our Corps and to reflect on the proud legacy and warrior ethos we share. This is what unites us as Marines. From our first battle at New Providence to today in Afghanistan, Marines have always shown that they were made of tougher stuff – that when the enemy’s fire poured in from all angles, and the situation was grim, Marines unequivocally knew that their fellow Marines would stay behind their guns, fight courageously, and drive the enemy from the battlefield. We have always known hardship, fatigue, and pain…but we have never known what it is to lose a battle!

Marine of generations past built our reputation as the most disciplined and honorable warriors to ever set foot on a battlefield, and we have triumphed in every battle because our Corps has always focused on iron discipline and combat excellence. This is who we are…this is what we do! It matters not whether you carried an M-1, and M-14, or an M-16. It matters not whether you fought on a lonely island in the Pacific, assaulted a citadel in the jungle, or marched up to Baghdad. It matters not whether you are a grunt, a pilot or a loggie. What matters most is that, when the chips were down and things got tough, your fellow Marines could count on you to stand and fight…and fight we did!

This year, we celebrate the anniversary of several epic battles in our celebrated history: the 70th anniversary fo the 2nd Marine Division landing on Tarawa, the 45th anniversary of the Battle of Hue City, and the 10th anniversary of the “March Up” to Baghdad. Marines who fought in these legendary battles each made their mark upon the history of our Corps. They have passed a rich and illustrious legacy on to us – a much heralded reputation. It is ours to jealously guard, and it is up to us to make our own marks and thus proudly pass it on to the generations of Marines who will follow.

Sergeant Major Michael Barrett joins me in congratulating each of you. Because of you, your selfless service, and your many sacrifices, our Corps remains strong and ready to respond to any crisis. Throughout history, Marines have faced tough times and there will be tough times ahead, but there is no challenge we cannot overcome if we remain honorable and always faithful to our Nation, our Constitution and each other. Happy Birthday, Marines!

Semper Fidelis

James F. Amos

General, U.S. Marine Corps

Commandant of the Marine Corps

Wiki:

Terminological inexactitude is a phrase introduced in 1906 by British politician (later Prime Minister) Winston Churchill. Today, it is used as a euphemism or circumlocution meaning a lie or untruth.

Churchill first used the phrase during the 1906 election. After the election in the House of Commons on 22 February 1906, as Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office, he repeated what he had said during the campaign:

The conditions of the transvaal ordinance … cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery; at least, that word in its full sense could not be applied without a risk of terminological inexactitude.

It seems this first usage was strictly literal, merely a roundabout way of referring to inexact or inaccurate terminology. But it was soon interpreted or taken up as a euphemism for an outright lie. To accuse another member in the House of lying is unparliamentary, so a way of implying that without saying it was very useful.

Will:

“Someone has to tell the president it’s not clever to be seen trying to be clever. In all the prevarications and equivocations of politics, one tries to be economical in the use of the word ‘lie.’ That’s what Churchill once said an opponent was guilty of terminological in exactitude,” said [George] Will, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor.

Will continued, “Well, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that even if the president really didn’t know on September 26 what was going to happen on the first of October, now he knows what he actually said then, and he’s not telling the truth about what he said then.”

From Goddard.

As we recall presidents from ages past, we see a great many who are evaluated with consistency across the ideological divide, either as bad, average or much-better-than-average. Some are remembered fondly, leaving the kind of legacy we can imagine all presidents would like to leave. The characteristics they have in common are a bit difficult to highlight, but after looking at them all starting with Washington, one such characteristic bubbles to the forefront: meaningful honesty. Not “I didn’t lie after all, it’s your fault for taking what I said the wrong way” honesty. The-meaning-of-is honesty doesn’t make the cut. This is the kind of honesty that inspires trust and confidence. He meant what he said, and he said what he meant. That, our experience has taught us, imbues presidents with the best rep. The coveted rep. The rep all presidents would like to have.

I wonder why, in the moment, we seem to have this disagreement about whether it’s good to be “clever” in the way Will mockingly describes cleverness.

Had I ever been on the Obama bandwagon, this is the kind of nonsense that would give me a powerful push off of it. Apart from tearing up all the nation’s highways at the same time, this emerges as the strongest candidate among the instants in which my support would likely cease. It isn’t appealing. Would you buy a house, a car, a computer keyboard from some guy whose words you constantly had to parse with surgical precision in order to keep from being fleeced?

This “it’s all your fault for trusting me/us” is seriously, seriously wearing on me. I doubt I’m the only one.

Mrs. Freeberg and I took off for the weekend, down to the Milpitas/Santa Clara area. I had errands I needed to do, and she had the time. We have hotel points and we enjoy each other’s company.

Life has been showing us a few wrinkles of complexity lately, and they’re mostly coming from my side of things. Some of these are good “problems” to have, but the strategy challenges they impose are outside of my capacity if I don’t do something to break the routine, and look at it all from a renewed perspective. I think we’re all like that a little bit, now & then. Well yeah, that worked pretty well…came to realize a few things I otherwise might not have.

First — in fact, let’s do just this and then stop — the big epiphany: Every single damn problem, I came to realize, has a problem-maker. A person who, if removed from a hypothetical situation in which the problem could be reproduced, one struggles to envision the problem being reproduced. In reality or in perception, and probably in reality, the person entirely owns the problem. Although often, according to the “rules,” said person has successfully managed to make some dumb idiot, that would be me, “own” the problem in terms of obligation to find a solution. Obligation? Not really obligation. I’ve explored this concept before, vis-a-vis the government shutdown. The dumb idiot, me, must find a solution to the problem or it isn’t going to be solved. None, or few, others are paying any kind of a cost for the problem’s continuance.

We are discouraged, from childhood, from looking at problems this way. I’m not entirely sure why. Well wait, I know why: To a child, once you head down that road it is all too easy to look at all problems in life like that. The problem isn’t there, it’s the person who’s the problem, therefore bitching about the person is the same as solving the problem. That’s how we get Barack Obama and people like Him: Every day, more bitching about those awful Republicans, while the problems go unsolved. Obviously, we don’t need more of that going on…so I guess I’m stepping out on a treacherous precipice here. But there is danger in the opposite as well, and I guess I’m guilty of practicing that, looking at only the problem and ignoring the people causing the problem. I guess we tend to embrace that in childhood, confident that it will lead to all-good-habits, no-bad-ones in adulthood. That’s not what happens. Some problems have makers, and solving the problems while ignoring the problem-makers is like chopping away at the leafy part of a weed rather than uprooting it. So I’d file this “good” piece of advice for kids, alongside “always clean your plate.” Waist-size-wise, some of my worst habits come from the clean-your-plate rule I was taught in childhood. Maybe my whole generation should have been taught “here’s how you throw that good food away, and forget all about those poor kids in China.” Lately, I’m thinking I’ve been solving problems the same way I’ve been eating what’s on my plate when I’m not really hungry, and with what’s been going on with my waist size during this time, I have no business eating when I’m not hungry.

How do we uproot these weeds, as opposed to hacking away uselessly at the leafy parts? Dunno. That’s going to be specific to the problems I don’t choose to discuss here; out of scope. I’m sure there’s a way. I’m going to find a way to do it without making people disappear, never mind how certain I am that this would solve the problem. I shall follow the Darth Vader rule: NO DISINTEGRATIONS. But it might be good to recognize where the weeds are.

I have identified six.

Thumb Suckers

They never stopped sucking their thumbs because they never uncurled from the fetal position. Their cords were never cut. Ben Franklin wrote of these people in the 1750’s: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” That captures a lot of the disagreement that’s going on today. Liberty or safety? One of the realities that have emerged is that the people who would not engage in such a purchase, since they value the liberty more than the safety, tend not to interfere in the choices made by others, whereas those who value the safety more highly than the liberty don’t want anybody else valuing the liberty more highly. The health care insurance mandate is a perfect example of that.

Twenty years ago I thought, people who value absolute safety that much may be failing to grow & learn day-by-day because of the adventures they’re declining to have; but that’s alright for them, so long as they don’t interfere with everybody else. Now, I’m not so sure. Ever have a conversation with one of these people? What if this, what if that, what will you do. A lot of times in life, the answer is “And then, we’ll just have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” a phrase which is entirely meaningless to these people. The conversation is never over as long as they haven’t gotten what they wanted: That feeling of absolute security and safety. The guarantee that doesn’t really exist.

Circuit Breakers

Subset of Thumb Suckers. The difference between those who are Circuit Breakers and those who are not, is often the desire to ingratiate themselves into a higher and more coveted social class. To get this done, they seek to have an effect, and that effect is to stop something. This can make a lot of sense sometimes: Smoking around a gas station. “Don’t do that, something bad might happen” is just the sensible thing to say. Trouble is, these people are doing that ALL the TIME. They must have that absolute security and absolute safety, and if that means stopping something that really does need to happen, well then so be it. They want to do their social climbing. They want to be the guy who figured out the big disaster if we do this, and headed it off by stopping us.

Some Circuit Breakers are too busy to attend the meetings about what is to be done, but can make all the time they need to come in afterward with a big fistful of reasons why the choice made was the wrong one, and You’d Better Not Do That. You can feel the life force draining out of you when you talk to them. Ever plan a weekend with one of them? It’ll knock you flat on your feet.

The real tragedy with Circuit Breakers is that they don’t want to prevent disasters from happening, or to get the problems solved, what they’re really trying to do is escalate socially. That’s the goal. And they’d achieve it if they’d just come up with some damn answers. But they won’t.

Swedish Meatballs

The video clip I posted yesterday morning really hit home, for me, because my grandfather was Swedish. He worked his fingers to the bone during the Great Depression, spent his whole life honoring the virtue of hard work, foreman of the local lumberyard at 26, paid his bills on time, bought my childhood-family home with cash…but believed profit was evil. I was pretty surprised when I heard that the first time, so I wrote to my Dad about it and he confirmed it was true. And there are many stories to support this, perhaps the most impressive of which was relayed to me by my Uncle, about a mountain Grandpa owned once that he sold at cost. The “kids” tried to explain to him the whole thing about inflation, and escalating real estate prices, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

So on the paternal side of my family tree there’s been something of a schism about this. Is profit bad? Nobody comes out & says that it is. But just like the nation as a whole, there is this recalcitrance against acknowledging the reality that money is necessary. And the need for it, to meet just the essentials of life, sharply increases over time. Yes, it’s associated with greed, and there is some legitimacy to this, but in this day and age the one big fear among the aged is that they might outlive their savings. That’s a terrible situation, and money didn’t make that situation — an irrational hatred of money and hatred of profit, along with escalating health care costs, is what made that situation. If “greed” is what is pushing up the health care costs, then how come the health care costs keep spiking whenever we take these elaborate steps to “reform” the process and get rid of the greed?

Swedish Meatballs make exactly that mistake. They put these reforms in place that make it harder for anyone to make any money, and as a direct result of that, everyone ends up poorer. Grandpa, at least, minded his own business according to all the family legends that have come my way. But then — understandably — everybody involved needs & wants money, more urgently than before the reforms were put in place. It’s all to be expected.

The confusion of the Swedish Meatballs is that every effort to get hold of money must represent this hated “greed,” be that effort a purchase, a sale, an investment, a taking, a looting, or an earning. They think they’re respecting and living by the rules of a “free” market. But they’re not.

Triangulators

Have you ever been emerged in conflict with someone whose position was unquestionably wrong, however understandable it might have been? You probably have. Everyone’s done some arguing, and people in arguments generally have reasons they can point out about why they’re arguing. How annoying is it, then, to have one of these self-appointed referees come along and beseech you guys to stop your arguing and a) agree-to-disagree or b) meet in the middle somewhere. When, by nature of the disagreement, both these things are impossible, and anyone who fails to see how they’re impossible is displaying their ignorance of the issues. “Fine wine mixed with sewage is sewage,” as the saying goes. Sometimes a compromise isn’t beneficial in any way. And, sometimes — a lot of the time — if you look down in the details, there will emerge something that firmly establishes one side as undeniably right. That actually happens most of the time.

Triangulators, like Circuit Breakers, seek to ingratiate themselves with higher classes; they seek to climb the social ladder. Their credo might be stated as “Look at me! I’m more mature than either one of these two squabbling knuckleheads, I’m keeping my cool and giving orders!” Well, it’s pretty easy to keep your cool when you don’t understand what’s being discussed. And it’s never a good idea to put ignorance in charge.

Underpants Gnomes

I stole this one from one of South Park‘s very best episodes. They are defined, not by their gnome-ish appearance, but by their “business plan”: Phase 1: steal underpants. Phase 3: profit.

Like many South Park fans, I have found this satire to hit the bulls-eye on the target-plane of reality, more than a few times. We have a lot of “underpants gnomes” running around. I have noticed, without fail, that Phase 1 is something they want me to do, and Phase 3 is something I want to have happen. Phase 1 will lead somehow to Phase 3; I’m to presume, somehow, that Phase 2 has this secret magical mess of conduits buried within the big puffy opaque cloud, that’ll bring it all about.

TIK #401 People

Ah, my favorite.

Thing I Know #401. People who refuse to work with details don’t fix things.

Many of these people are Circuit Breakers. Some are Triangulators. They don’t deal with details, but they want to micro-manage anyway. They want the final say on every decision that comes up; but there is an implied escape from their destructive energies, in that whatever is not visible to them, they think doesn’t exist.

And so the underlings who are responsible for implementing the details, begin to incorporate into their day-to-day motions lots of tactics for hiding these implementations from the TIK #401 people. Which tends to be easy to do, since those people are often out playing golf or something. But, often the end result is some kind of disaster, because the TIK #401 people are doing the gripping-and-grinning with the outsiders, often monopolizing that part of the business because they bring some real energy and enthusiasm to this part of it. And, not only do they not know anything about the details, but they don’t care to learn. The implementers of the details, meanwhile, trudge onward with their own ignorance, regarding what sorts of promises are being made about their work.

I imagine this might come off looking like a critique of the healthcare.gov web site, and all the much deeper problems of which the website issues are merely symptoms. It isn’t meant to be that, but now that I think on it further, all six of the above apply to that debacle. And, to many, many other things in life.

I shall repeat it once more to myself, to make sure I don’t forget: NO DISINTEGRATIONS…but perhaps, just perhaps, there is some way to prevent these people from making decisions about anything?

From here, a page linked from another, a response to one of the Internet’s goofiest videos.

Distribution-of-wealth: The very phrasing is based on a premise that’s questionable, at the very best. You want an economy to get better, what you need is some wealth that is not, and has never been, “distributed.” Need to think in terms of creating it, growing it, and earning it. Distribution? That’s what a momma-bird does when she barfs into her babies’ mouths. If the people running your economy think that’s how it ought to work…well then, there’s your problem.

First, the montage…

Then…the rationale for the clear and obvious fibbing…

From Chicks on the Right.

Can’t believe there are people falling for this. There must be. The democrats are imposing a bunch of brand-new rules on the market saying must-do-this, don’t-do-that…it’s obviously having an effect, and it’s obviously a harmful one…this clown says it must be because of the insurance companies that were in the market already, and his observation is “that’s capitalism” and “let the market decide.” The polar opposite of what was just done.

And what’s up with that chortling bobble-head thing? Looks to me like, he knows what he’s saying is the exact opposite of the truth. He’s less a definer-of-what’s-happening than a force of nature, he’ll do just as much lying as he’s allowed to do, like a bowling ball in the ocean will fall just as far as it will be allowed to. The real problem is, he & those like him are being allowed to get away with it.

Blame the voters. Blame the voters…

Update: Was thinking about this kind of odd behavior earlier this week. Of course, since I only just found out about this interview, I wasn’t thinking about Frank Pallone, I was thinking about Barack Obama. And, other liberals. Some of the stuff that comes out of them is just so obviously untrue you have to think, “How did you think you’d be able to sell that line of baloney?” In the President’s case, the one thing that keeps coming up over and over again is “I first found out about this in the last day or two, from reading the newspapers just like you” and now that He knows about it, “nobody is angrier about this than I am.”I know there is a hardcore segment of our population that is still gaga over Barack Obama, but is anyone actually buying this swill?

I think it’s a behavior learned from childhood — to go ahead and try & sell it, no matter how ridiculous it is. I think it’s bad parenting. Was going to start a blog post about it called Bad Mothering or something, but that would have been an exercise in just trying to tick people off, which isn’t healthy. However, the problem must start there. An important part of a parent’s job, and unfortunately it seems to fall disproportionately onto the mothers, is to send the message “That’s not going to fly, if you really want to go through life lying you need to get better at it.” That must be the problem, for there’s only one alternative and I don’t find the alternative credible. I can’t believe Barack Obama and His inner circle meet behind closed doors, go through all their shrewd calculations about what spin will & won’t work, and with all their P.R. talents come to the conclusion that the most winning strategy available to them is: Obama goes out and says “I had no idea this was going on…”…again…for the fifty-seven billionth time or whatever. It must be something far more primitive. Like a gag reflex. The aid comes up and says “Sir, questions are being asked about when You knew the website was going to take a crap,” and inside Obama’s head the instinct is activated — it’s worked this way since childhood. “Barack, did you know such-and-such?” and “No Mom, I had no idea” has always worked. Since the umbilical cord was cut. If something has always worked since then, that can be a powerful motivator.

Obama-Enigma starts to achieve resolution and make more sense when you open yourself to the possibility that President Obama, far from being a deity who hung the moon and sprinkled the stars across the inky canvas of heaven, is actually a tiny man who lives in a tiny world. Someone says “did You know” and the answer is “had no idea.” It’s just expected. And so I think, due to bad mothering, the boss says “had no idea” and the underlings…well, who the heck are they to question it? And so, I infer, they sprint off to the telephones and the computer keyboards and the podiums, and repeat it. Only after that does any real rational thinking enter into it, and of course by then the thinking is institutional, it says “Now that we’ve said it we’ve got to stick to the story.”

These lefty politicians seem to be trying to make a name for themselves, showing off what bad mothering they had. How naturally it comes to them to peddle such clear and obvious lies. It’s like they’ve figured out, the democrat politicians who rise to the power structure and get nominated for the big offices every two years, are the ones who have no shame. Shame weighs you down. So you rise to the top by showing off that you don’t have any.

I’m automatically incredulous when it comes to conspiracy theories. The more I learn about people, the less faith I have in their ability to a) coordinate on details and b) to keep it all secret. Most of the time, when I see large numbers of people moving in a common direction, they do so the way grain or tall grass moves under a common breeze, with each stalk or blade moving of its own accord, responding in its own way to a common force. I believe in common motivations, not so much in “conspiracies.”

Still, at the height of the shutdown, you did have to do some thinking about this:

What is so sinister about a few signs, you ask? As stated above, it takes planning to purchase a large volume of anything in a large bureaucracy…it takes time to order produce and receive any manufactured item. And, that time increases as the size of the bureaucracy increases. While the paper work may be expedited to reduce the time to issue the PO, it still takes time to produce and ship the item.

The government shutdown signs were on hand and appeared the very first day at the WWII Memorial. That suggests that the shutdown was anticipated and somebody planned ahead to have the signs on hand to tell the world that the government was shutdown, that it was in everyone’s face and make sure everyone felt the consequences. The operative here is the planning and that it was done in advance.

And…something, probably relying on computers and probably relying on web exposure, worked. Flawlessly. It is a recurring theme in the Obama administration: When the objective is to inconvenience people, as opposed to something helpful like delivering on a campaign promise to get millions of uninsured people covered, all the pieces somehow fall into place. Winning arguments and elections against Republicans, ditto. Everything clicks. Inconveniencing people in order to win arguments against Republicans, well, now you’re looking at a well-oiled machine.

But then the time comes to actually help people and try to make a positive difference in their lives…and…

Confidential progress reports from the Health and Human Services Department show that senior officials repeatedly expressed doubts that the computer systems for the federal exchange would be ready on time, blaming delayed regulations, a lack of resources and other factors.

Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.

So how about just move the healthcare.gov web site over to the whatever-it-is…letsclosedownmountrushmore.gov. Or makeitpainfulsowecanblamerepublicansforit.gov. Maybe it’s called letsfuckwithrepublicansyetagain.gov? That “server” seems to be in tip-top shape, and so do all the processes that surround it. Delivers on-time, under-budget, with fantastic results.

Seriously, there’s a lesson here, but I’ve already talked about it so I’m going into broken-record mode. Everyone likes to think about producers being properly regulated, it seems, but nobody stops to think that maybe the regulators don’t know that much about how to produce. After all, if they did know, they wouldn’t be regulating they’d be producing. Regulators don’t create, they don’t preserve; they destroy. Put ’em in charge of your health care? You go down that road without me. Oh no, wait, maybe you don’t…law of the land & all that…

When push comes to shove, though, long-term there’s no reason to expect our aging bodies to function any better than that goofy website. The healthcare.gov disaster is an illustration of how government in general, and the Obama administration in particular, runs things. It’s only when they’re f00king with people that they can manage to get things right. The park-sign thing shows that, then, they can get it really, really, really right. They can do miracles when the goal is to obstruct or destroy.

Some of us have worked in data centers before. Some of us had the responsibility of keeping those servers working. On a tiny immeasurable fraction of a budget, compared to what HHS & crew had.

This is beyond incompetence. There is not succeeding, then there is not-even-trying. Two different things.

Been thinking lately a lot about arrogance. My own, the arrogance of others, how it affects us.

Been thinking quite a bit about how to define it, if that is possible. A certain male family member has brought it to my attention that a certain female family member has called him “arrogant,” for his own good — she has often called me the same thing, for my own good. I’m sure there is truth in both cases, but at the same time it is clearly being used as a defense mechanism by the common denominator. A certain code-word for “I want him to do this thing, and he’s off doing something else so that makes him arrogant.” Well — these are not mutually-exclusive things. It is not at all a rare occasion wherein that, and nothing more, is called out by someone else as arrogance, and it is fair to call it that. Nor is the arrogance necessarily a bad thing. Although, of course, it wouldn’t be good to make a habit out of it.

I recall many years ago, as in that distant time in the early days when the female of the species and I were just starting to get to know each other, when I suffered the same confusion that befalls most males at that age when we hear: Confidence is sexy, cockiness is to be shunned. Of course they/we all want to be a Casanova who knows everything, so no one is wanting to be the boy who calls out the Emperor’s nakedness and says: What the heck is the difference? Those who pretend there is one, and that they are knowledgeable masters of what exactly that difference is supposed to be, say something completely unenlightening about it: Just be yourself, falling short of being a jerk, and it’ll all work out. That turns out to be the right answer. Observe the “don’t be a dick” rule, just be yourself, it works out.

And because it all works out, we don’t inspect it any further. We all like to pretend we know everything. While we’re not being cocky or arrogant.

But there is something to be inspected, further. If it is worth the time & trouble to call things and people out as arrogant, it is worth the time and trouble to define what exactly that is. But it seems we never get that far. Some of us are guilty on occasion, and can identify what, when, where and how it has cost us something. One would think that would then be sufficient incentive to define what it is, especially if we’re going to resolve to avoid being that way from then on. Still, we never quite rise to the challenge.

Arrogance can be a good thing sometimes. Saturday, I hoofed it somewhere and back again, not much more than a whole mile round trip. My exercise regimen, what there has been of it, has mostly consisted of riding my mountain bike, and after my return I discovered this left me out of shape from the ankles down. My foot felt like someone was driving a knife into it, all night long. Arrogantly, I decided to steer in the direction of the skid, relish the pain, and plan an errand involving several times as much hoofing the next morning. To drop off some clothes. At the dry cleaner’s. On a Sunday. Many, many pounds of clothes. When common sense counsels dry cleaners are not open that day of the week. Which they weren’t, of course. Well, that’s arrogance on some scale, isn’t it? Yes I had other things to do that were higher priority, and I did have an expectation of carrying the backpack full of clothes back home again. And yes, it was more about getting the exercise than dropping off the clothes. And yes, it worked, because I didn’t have shooting pains through my foot that night. My body needed to have the message sent to it that we’re not ready to rot away into flabby and sedentary old age just yet. Gee, that’s almost humility, not arrogance, right? And yet it was arrogance, because deep down on some level I was thinking: If I just will the dry cleaner’s to be open, they’ll be open when I want them to be.

We do a lot of that, don’t we? It’s going to work out this way, just because I want it to.

Saw an apologist for ObamaCare — an “Opologist”? — chide me and a lot of other people over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, for daring to expect the system to be absolutely perfect and free of any setbacks at all on opening day. The Internet-stranger continued on, proffering the fantasy that from this time onward, things were going to get better and better. Didn’t provide much by way of reason for the rest of us to think so. I don’t think it looked like what he wanted it to look like. It came across as delusional. See, there it is again: Arrogance. Things are going to go this way, just because I want them to.

Individuals can show great diligence in stripping themselves of the human sin of arrogance, while the organizations and institutions they make up by coming together, can positively reek of it. This is institutional arrogance, a greater problem I think than the individual brand. It carries much more inertia. When that happens, I think I may have come up with a way to define it, objectively, measurably. It has to do with how much learning you need to do to achieve a mission, especially to solve a problem. And most especially within that, an internal problem. I would define it as a fraction between zero and one: If it is your impression that what you need to know to solve the stated problem, entirely exists within what you already know and therefore there’s no need to learn anything new, we could call that arrogance. This definition seems, to me, to be a good one because it calls out so much of what we understand to be part of what we’re trying to capture. It is antithetical to the healthy accumulation of new knowledge. When we solve a problem that is internal, we should rightfully think of this as an occasion to learn new things, suitable for this purpose in ways most other situations are not. The problem had to have been caused somehow, right? So a behavioral change is due somewhere, if we have agreement that there’s a problem that has to be solved, and things are working differently from the way we want or need them to. That’s what learning is supposed to be: A non-instinctive behavioral change. Like Einstein said: We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

I have now & then observed that technology has a lot of subtle ways of magnifying human weaknesses like this one. It certainly does have a way of boosting arrogance. You do this “programming” of some kind, during which time you may have to do some research into how things work, refining first your design and then your implementation. If you make a lot of money doing it, there is pressure on for you to offer this illusion that you already know everything and don’t have to learn much of anything because you’re just so knowledgeable and wonderful. A lot of doctors have this problem, and therefore this reputation for pretending they know everything. It comes from this occupational pressure toward the 1.0, to act like all facets of knowledge required to produce the desired result, have been learned already. Some Presidents of the United States have that problem too. But with the software thing, at some point you hit the “compile” button and then there is “run time,” during which absolutely, positively, every single jot and tittle of the behavior has been defined, and correctly. All the thinking has been done in advance. There is no need for any decision-making at all, other than that which was anticipated and implemented, with the decision criteria properly defined, along with the actions to be taken if-yes and the other actions to be taken if-not. After all, that’s what programming is. The machine makes the decisions faster than any human can, because a human somewhere already defined those decisions and the machine is merely executing. The machine comes out of all this just fine. The human ends up damaged, laboring under the falsity that all variables in life can be anticipated and decided in advance, prior to compile-time, every conditional and iterative construct. That it’s all definable. That a mortal can play god.

This gives rise to another definition of arrogance we might consider: Knowing more about the ideal solution to a problem than about the problem itself. I think inwardly we all understand what’s wrong with this. Shouldn’t your certainty about what is to be done, be limited to something equal to or lesser than your certainty of what’s hosed up? Oh yes, there are some exceptions to this. Pitching something in the trash bin, is safe harbor for the habitually arrogant. And it looks so macho: “Just toss it!” You’re just too cool to sweat the details. Well, there can be a lot of merit to that sometimes. Pitching and replacing avoids unknowns, and when there is a history of connection between confronting the same ol’ unknowns and wasting a lot of energy, this does indicate an apparatus somewhere that should be tossed over the side. But, a lot of opinionated loud people counsel toward destruction simply so they can appear to be in control, without their having to confront any of these unknowns. To avoid confronting details. This often connects back to that other definition I offered, of the institutional arrogance: I already know everything I need to know to solve this problem, there’s no need to learn anything new.

There is a fine line to be walked here. Arrogance is ultimately blockage against the acquisition of new knowledge that may be needed. However — from years of interacting with people, I have come to appreciate a new wrinkle to all of this: The fraction between zero and one is not quite so simple — it is not a spectrum beginning at the zero and ending at the one, after all. Not a line segment, more like a Möbius strip. Picture the man at the zero who has managed to expurgate any trace remnants of arrogance from within him, and is completely ready to learn new things to solve this old problem. Now, have you actually met that guy? If you have, I’ll bet you’ve already noticed what comes next: It’s rather difficult to quantify him as the picture of non-arrogance, isn’t it? Not only is he sure the solution to the problem exists within that knowledge that has yet to be learned, he will insist on it. The Möbius strip covers back around and completes a circle; he knows not and knows that he knows not, is intransigently certain that the solution is out of sight. Because he doesn’t know the answer, he won’t allow anyone else to know it either. His confidence in his knowledge is at the healthy and humble zero, but his confidence in the confidence of the knowledge is at the one.

Bottom-lining it: We’re all arrogant, and we darn well know it. It’s like having a pulse. The trick is not to rid oneself of arrogance, but rather to position oneself over that point on the Möbius strip that is most conducive to getting productive work done, and solving the problems that occasionally result most expediently, judiciously and beneficially. Avoiding arrogance? That’s a fool’s errand. Closest we can come to that, I think, is to say: An adjustment may be due if our arrogance has cost us more than it should’ve. And I think it’s fair to say everyone is going to have that realization at some time or another, if they’re honest about it.

Oh yeah, and it should be said: Girls who say they avoid arrogance like the plague, by-n-large, don’t. Every red-blooded male who’s interested in females, by the time he’s graduated from tenth grade, has noticed the arrogant guys get most of the attention from the girls, and those are the very same girls who claim to loathe arrogance. Cockiness and confidence? There is precious little meaningful difference there, and most of it has to do with the designs, or lack thereof, of the female upon the male. Think of James Bond. He’s not “confident without being arrogant”; that smarmy bastard is as cocky as anyone else, in reality or in fiction.

Arrogance has an appropriate time for implementation. It does its damage to us when it is exercised outside of the “seasons” in which it would do the most good. It is the confidence in what has been learned, the determination to put it to a proper and pure test. Further learning is suspended, temporarily, for sake of purity of such a test. It is the test that should be pure, not the arrogance; if the test is to be pursued in a way that will help us, there’s always going to be a little bit of humility laced into the arrogance, a little bit of “let’s see how this turns out.” Implicit in that is an admission that there is learning to take place here, that has yet to be done. So the pure-arrogance situation is problematic, bound to do damage. The no-arrogance situation is a myth. You can’t get rid of all the arrogance until you get rid of the people, along with probably all other living things.

From Gerard.

Julie Borowski put up a post over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging asking if anyone else was as tired as she was of these “spread the wealth” celebs. Someone came along to post this:

At this point the thread has 358 replies under it, some being replies-to-replies. Lots of good stuff in there, like for example, this…

“Anti-capitalists” are not against profit or money. They are against class mobility. They hate the idea of one of their vote serfs leaving dependence and accumulating wealth – it makes them feel less special and elite. And they certainly don’t want to lose all *their* money just because they make some bonehead investment. Socialism doesn’t eliminate the rich – it just makes it impossible for the poor to become rich, or the rich to become poor.

That, I think, is food for thought. There may even be a good battle strategy in there somewhere against the “spread the wealth” types. For the longest time, their numbers have evidently been piled on top of each other, in an uneasy and unholy alliance between those who refuse to accept the reality of class-mobility, and those who do understand it’s there but cannot tolerate it.

And then there are those who seem to think if it’s compassion that motivates, the outcome can never be bad.

And those who are motivated by “spread it all, but leave mine out of it.”

Just too much fun.

From here.

Think my favorite reply was: “Falling for a fake news site is ‘British sarcasm’? What an odd culture.”

Here’s a wild suggestion: How about, if Palin is such a ditz and such an airhead, wait for her to REALLY SAY something. And then tweet the stuffing out of it. If that’s too long of a wait to be tolerated, well…

And the same goes for this beauty.

Lunging for the Re-tweet button doesn’t look witty or edgy or sarcastic or sophisticated, it just looks desperate. Ditto for the failed recovery strategy of “Ah ha, you obviously don’t get irony” and other such nonsense.

At that point, I start to veer off into stating-the-obvious territory, and so I shall stop.

I was impressed the first few times I heard this on the radio. Then, as is my wont, I started to connect it to other things…

Representative Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) dismissed Thursday’s first congressional hearing on the glitch-laden launch of the Obamacare website as having “no legitimacy.”
:

“No, I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever this thing is….There is no health information in the process. You’re asked about your address, your date of birth. You are not asked health information. So why are we going down this path? Because you are trying to scare people so they don’t apply, and so therefore the legislation gets delayed, or the Affordable Care Act gets defunded, or it’s repealed. That’s all it is, hoping people won’t apply.”

This is just the most eminent example lately of loud, loud lefties — on the talk-show circuit, in Congress, on the innerwebz — trying to somehow fasten the health care website debacle to their opposition. The rationale for political gain is just obvious, but it seems to me there is something more going on here, something operating on the psychological level.

It is worth studying here precisely because it makes so little sense. If someone truly wants Americans without access to health care to get that access, why would such a person object to “going down this path”? The web site doesn’t work. First step to getting that access, as I understand it, is to create an account on the web site and there have been so many people who tried to do that, and can’t.

As far as the legislation getting delayed or de-funded or repealed, you know, Que Sera Sera. Lots of people in this country want lots of things, and some of those things involve conflict with people who want something else. That’s one of the reasons we have a Congress. For now, as we are repeatedly told, ObamaCare is “the law of the land”; and it could very well be that people will change their mind about that if something doesn’t start going right. Can’t blame people for noticing that nothing is, nor can you blame their representatives in Washington for, you know, representing them and their feelings of betrayal, sticker-shock, disgust. Well I suppose you can, if it’s your job to, and Pallone is a democrat. But “That’s all it is” is far-fetched, running treacherously close to dropping the mask. When things go wrong, shouldn’t someone notice?

Watching democrat politicians is fascinating, in this way. By the time they’re sworn in, they have a job to do, and a lot of that job is connected with unreality since it has to do with making bad ideas look good. Hasn’t this just been proven now? So that’s at one end of a spectrum; at the other end is the guy who’s just slowly starting to become a left-winger, and up until now hasn’t given a rip about left-or-right. Obviously, that’s not a job. That’s just an internal struggle with the wrong energies prevailing. Jealousy, inattention to details, neglect of cause-and-effect, lust for quick fixes, obsequiousness. It seems to start, generally, with a feeling of revulsion against what is perceived to be an unfair “distribution of wealth.” There are many mistakes in just this first step, most prominent of which is fabricating the event by which these assets were somehow “distributed.” Much further down the line in this menagerie of grave mistakes, where all the tragedy really starts, is this thought: I’m supporting this plan that is intended to help people, and this must therefore mean that anybody who opposes me must want to hurt those same people.

It is as wrong-headed as it is commonplace. And for those who do not know, oh my goodness, it is commonplace. It’s hard to put it into words.

I daresay there is no class of thinking being on the globe that has less of a grasp of something, than strident modern American liberals grasping the motives of their opposition. It is truly a whole new threshold of ignorance. Someone should circulate a questionnaire sometime just for laughs. “Conservatives want more little kids to get gunned down at schools.” “They want more poison in the drinking water.” “They don’t want to pay their fair share.”

The biggest lie in the world about liberals is that they want to think globally and act locally. If they thought globally, the health care website would work as well as Amazon.com, and would’ve cost about as much to get online. That’s not how they think at all. They want to win arguments. That’s it. They want to be on the winning side, they want to prevail, and they want to be right. All-the-way-right. It’s a very rare thing to hear of a liberal say something like, “We were mostly right, but this one thing we did over here, we probably should’ve done it some other way.” Very rare. It does happen, but not often. Far, far less often you’ll hear a liberal say: “That thing we did there was not right, we shouldn’t have tried it.” Oh, when “we” in context means “United States of America,” that comes pretty easy. But try to find just one who will acknowledge the innate flaws in an idea that has already been accepted into the lefty catechism.

Congressman Pallone did such a great job showing their internal defenses against acknowledging strategic and tactical flaws within any such idea. Everything that goes wrong, is due in some way to the evil machinations of their opposition. Every, little, thing. Again, I say: It’s worth studying in the here-and-now because, with the Affordable Care Act, it makes so little sense. As I pointed out, and has been mentioned many times before, Republican hands are (mostly) clean on this thing. Nobody but democrats, and a couple independents who caucus with them, supported it or voted for it. They rammed it through. Now the website doesn’t work and it’s because of Republicans? How’s that?

So strange. It’s as if they think, there’s no reason for difficulty in any human endeavor anywhere, except for…conflict. If you run across a bump in the road, someone must have put it there. Couldn’t possibly be because you’re trying to do something that demands expertise above & beyond what you’re already bringing.

See, this is why I think of liberalism as anti-learning. It’s not just a case of “they don’t agree with me politically, so that makes them dumb, dumb, dumb.” I personally know of a few libs who are pretty smart. They just don’t bring the smarts to some things. And of course, before you can bring smarts, you’ve got to have them, which means at some point you need to acquire them. How’s that old saying go? Good judgment is the product of experience, and experience is the product of bad judgment. There’s a lot of truth in that. Also, the very first three words to any learning process are: “I don’t know.” You have to admit you don’t know something in order to learn it.

This all requires internalizing, something liberals evidently don’t do. And I find this remarkable, because their efforts according to their own perceptions seem to be along the lines of: Expanding the capacity and sophistication, if not the role, of government to service more and more needs.

Much the way you’d come back to a computer application that is already working fine on its selected workload, with some enhancements that entail added sophistication, maybe better memory models, so it can do something else.

And yet — before you can do that, you have to go down the learning-road. You have to say “I don’t know” a lot of the time, do some research with the designing.

You have to say: We’re still enhancing our model, still researching it, figuring out how & where exactly it may be inadequate. We’re still testing our design. We’re still finding bugs. We’re still polishing down rough edges.

Which means, you have to say: YES, these issues are internal. Nobody fucked with us or what we’re doing. We built something here, that is outdated now, or else never was right in the first place, and since we’re imperfect we’d probably do it again. We’re improving incrementally and that means we make mistakes. It’s more of a journey than a destination.

That’s supposed to be their credo, as I understand it. They don’t live up to it. When they puke in their own boot, it’s always the other guy who made them.

The women seem to be getting a bigger laugh out of this than the men…my reaction to this is something along the lines of, “Men, WTF Happened.”

Still funny though. Once you get over your latest reminder that our society is, indeed, heading in a provably wrong direction…

“Why are you making me go first?” “I’m not! I’m protecting you!”

Goes without saying I’ve never been too enamored with the ACA. It chooses personal security over personal freedom. Not as a byproduct of what it is trying to do, but as a primary goal. It “fundamentally transforms” America, one of the few promises President Obama made that He’s actually tried to uphold. Makes us into yet another filthy European socialist mudpuddle where “everyone” has “access” to everything, but nobody can do anything without permission.

And now, it doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to — even the mechanics of it, that goofy website, can’t generate the lift to overcome the drag. But we have to follow through, “they” tell us, because it’s “the law of the land.”

Sheesh. So sick of that. PASSED BY A MAJORITY IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, PASSED BY A SUPER MAJORITY IN THE SENATE, AND DECLARED CONSTITUTIONAL BY SCOTUS. Law of the land! Even though it sucks.

I’ve seen that phrase hammered together & tossed out there by people known to me to take some measure of pride in not knowing how any part of this system works, not knowing what a “bicameral legislature” is, people I doubt could reliably answer the questions you have to answer to become a naturalized citizen, like “How long does a United States Senator serve in one term?”

Let’s take this one on. Let’s do some of the critical thinking they can’t do.

The majority in the House of Representatives is 219 out of 435, one-and-a-half votes over the tipping point. Not a single Republican vote. So if the point is that The People want this albatross around their necks, sorry, no dice. You can just take a quick glance at the current House of Representatives and see, no we don’t have a majority of democrats in there, and ObamaCare is a big part of the reason why. Oh yes, the vote was valid. And legal. And the House of Representatives is charged by our Constitution with the obligation to represent the Will of the People, therefore, to bring that will to the decision-making process. The thing is, though, they fucked up when they did it. They did it wrong. Next time the real “People” had something to say about it, there was a bloodletting, because this isn’t what they wanted.

Supermajority in the Senate: Sixty to thirty-nine, with one abstention. Again, not a single Republican vote. But a supermajority is a supermajority, right? Two words: Cornhusker Kickback. And many other things. No representation of the true Will of the People in this chamber, either. And then there is Scott Brown sitting in Ted Kennedy’s seat. How come was that? Because of this vote. The six-seat shift in the 2010 elections affirmed this.

Which brings us to the Supreme Court, which supposedly upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare. This is true, they did uphold it — as a tax. The progressives do not recall, since it is not expedient for them to think about it, that the Obama administration’s commerce-clause arguments were entirely rejected by the high court. So yes, it is “constitutional” that you have to pay this fine for failing to follow this regulation, even though the regulation, and the fine, exceed Congress’ authority under the Constitution. This false-veneer of constitutionality comes from Congress’ power to levy taxes. It’s a tax on a selected class of people, who don’t do such-and-such. Precisely what President Obama Himself repeatedly said it wasn’t (See about three minutes in)…

The rebuttal to “upheld by the Supreme Court” practically writes itself, as a question: So, is this a tax?

If it is, President Obama lied. We’re accustomed to Him playing fast and loose with the truth, it isn’t proving His status as a liar that is the issue. The issue is that when you sell a product under false pretenses, as any salesman can tell you, you should expect some push back. You should expect some things to be pulled back into the realm of the arguable, even after the ink has dried. The customer may rescind. In a lot of jurisdictions, he’ll be allowed to, maybe even obliged to. Because you didn’t stick to your knitting. You over-promised and under-delivered, and some of your “sales” might get un-sold. I’m sure that feels awfully unfair to a lefty politician, but that doesn’t mean it is.

If, on the other hand, President Obama was right and it isn’t a tax — then it isn’t constitutional. In fact, the Supreme Court explicitly shot it down.

Congress already possesses expansive power to regulate what people do. Upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clause would give Congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.

Conclusion: It’s more like, Abuse of trust in the House of Representatives, layer upon layer of filthy corruption in the Senate, and bait and switch in the Supreme Court.

While we’re here, a minor quibble if I may, minor nit to be picked. The notion that the Supreme Court declares these constitutional, is mostly a twentieth-century perversion. The authority the Supreme Court wields here, comes from a decision 150 years before that. The Supreme Court was not granted this power, nor is it accurate to say that they assumed it, or usurped it, or took it. The declared it as intrinsic and vital to the process of applying duly enacted law to specific situations, which Chief Justice John Marshall pointed out is “of the very essence of judicial duty.” This authority that his court declared for itself, therefore, was never anything more than the necessary latitude to recognize logically unworkable contradictions. So the Supreme Court never had the power to declare things constitutional, in the sense that it is somehow my personal obligation to say something like “Oh dear, well the Supreme Court says up is down and East is West, I guess I shall have to agree in order to be a good citizen.” The power they declared for themselves was to declare things unconstitutional. And minimally, only when the contradiction is unavoidable and irresolvable. You don’t have to think impossible things just because the Supreme Court tells you to. Everyone knows that. If anyone doubts it, tell a hardcore moonbat liberal what opinions he is & isn’t supposed to have about Bush v. Gore. Or, give a cat a bath, if it’s less trouble.

This matters, because the Affordable Care Act didn’t acquire a new layer of cachet in this “law of the land” business once it came out of SCOTUS. Quite the opposite. It came out of that final sausage-mill shredded, unfit for enforcement in the form in which it had been presented to us, sold to us, and sold to Congress.

Thing I Know #401. People who refuse to work with details don’t fix things. Says a mouthful — a truckload, actually, and I’ve linked to it frequently since the first of this month for obvious reasons — but there’s a sad corollary. Not so much a corollary, but an equal and opposite reaction: People are generally not fun to watch, until & unless they’re refusing to work with details. Even when they’re making themselves fun to watch by pretending to work with them. And there is something in us that makes us want these refuse-to-work-with-details people to run everything. A foible in our current era, or something inextricably and permanently woven into our fabric. I hope it’s the former and not the latter.

But I’ll tell you one thing, this latest from Sen. John McCain makes me wince a little:

“Send Air Force One out to Silicon Valley, load it up with smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. And everybody knows that.”

His 2008 opponent who is responsible for this debacle, would protest that He and His people are already doing that. Top Men…

The Obama administration said Sunday that it has enlisted additional computer experts from across the government and from private companies to help rewrite computer code and make other improvements to the online health insurance marketplace, which has been plagued by technical defects that have stymied many consumers since it opened nearly three weeks ago.

The HHS website has been updated to this effect. Well, I’m glad to know they can at least do that much with websites…

We have updated the site several times with new code that includes bug fixes that have greatly improved the HealthCare.gov experience. The initial wave of interest stressed the account service, resulting in many consumers experiencing trouble signing up, while those that were able to sign up sometimes had problems logging in…To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering. Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.

The new website — now infused with help from those really smart computer guys, the nerds who do whatever that nerd stuff is that they do.

Top.

Men.

I suppose I should find this gratifying. For close to nine years now I’ve been blogging away about our super-duper-safe society achieving greater and greater creature-comforts but at the same time becoming unmoored from the solid kind of thinking that gave us the technology in the first place, deteriorating into diseased, bacchanalian thinking as the older “genuine” dangers retreated into the rearward horizon. I have occasionally predicted that this trajectory is cyclical, and the time will come that we’ll realize, consciously or otherwise, that there is a linkage between the creature comforts we take for granted and the masculine, cause-and-effect thinking that we now consider to be overly patriarchal and out-of-step with our times. Is this not what that would look like? Shouldn’t I be glad of it? Aren’t these the signs?

A part of me is inclined to say yes. But a question naturally arises about how far down does the humility go. I remember working for a software start-up back in my early days, over two decades ago, one of the major shareholders walked in, saw the source code on my screen, said it really looked like a mess and I needed to run it through the spell checker. He was KIDDING about that, of course…at least…well, I dunno about that for sure, this was a great old guy with a dry sense of humor. I don’t think the fun-to-watch ObamaCare bureaucrats would be kidding. I can see it now. “Glad you’re here, Top Man. What a mess we have for you to clean up! You can start by running all this gobbleygook through the spell checker. The guy who wrote it said something about it being ‘Java,’ don’t know what that means, but let me tell you we don’t accept excuses around here!”

People in their nice sharp suits “solving” the problem by barking out orders. A memory flashes in my mind of “Plug The Damn Hole!” When what they really need to do is get out of the way.

Well, I don’t want to be too hard on them if they’re heading in the right direction. It was very soon after the “run ‘er through the spell checker” thing that I got sent here to Sacramento in the first place, under much the same circumstances…some big debacle created, and someone important in a nice suit issued a command in a big booming voice that we should fly in a whole bunch of smart guys to fix it, they somehow scooped me up with the others, so here I came and here I still sit. But you still have to wonder. Einstein said it’s impossible to solve a problem with the same mindset that created it in the first place. That’s why I have to ask how deep the recent humbling goes. Is the mindset being changed?

References to these smart, talented wonder-geeks are still being bandied about as if they were aliens. Years and years, decades even, of hoarding more and more power over the intimate details of our lives inside the beltway and NOW, in the fourth quarter of twenty thirteen when the embarrassment has become palpable, inescapable…we need to fly in some of “those” smart people? Um, excuse me…what you call “smart” is really nothing more than recognizing butterfly effects. Oh yes, that is merely my opinion. Many others will disagree, many of them working within the industry as long as I have, and among them, many of them demonstrably smarter and enjoying better success. Nevertheless, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, that’s really all it is: Acknowledging cause and effect. You can’t really build anything without this. It’s the keystone, the primary building-block. Of anything. You push down this end of the lever, that other end will go up if the fulcrum doesn’t give way. Rotate the screw, it will go in. Calling for the flying-in of “smart” people is a tacit admission that you have to “fly in” people who simply understand that one thing affects another. Well anyway, that’s how it sounds to me. I have to wonder what kind of world do you call home, before you fly them in? What color is the sky in your world?

ObamaCare has problems because the people who “built” it don’t live in the real universe. They think selling is as good as building.

And as tasteless as those comments were five years ago about Sen. McCain never sending text messages, when his war injuries make this a physical impossibility for him, it should be pointed out that such things are said about public figures not because they’re truthful or in good taste, but because it’s anticipated that they will resonate. It happens to his old running mate, still, pretty much daily: “Dinosaurs are ‘Satan’s Lizards?’ Oh yes, that sounds like something Sarah Palin might say.” McCain, for all the content of his swelling maverick-y grab bag of assets and liabilities, has created something of a rep for himself. He looks, acts, walks and talks like a Washington insider. The kind of bumptious bloviator who solves every little problem by making, or calling for, some new rule, who is much more surprised than the rest of us by, well, any everyday surprise life has to offer. He typifies what is very clearly the real problem here, the mindset I’m afraid hasn’t been displaced. “And then we’ll have a website, it’ll open on, uh, let’s make it October 1 yes that sounds good. And then everybody will sign up and we’ll be on our way.”

What??? It didn’t work?? Well, let’s fly in a bunch of those nerds to fix it with their nerd-pixie-powder. Do whatever they do.

Top.

Men.

At 1:17: “What’s this?”

More here.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

I’d like to take this opportunity to propose a new holiday, a pre-Halloween holiday. I’m proposing a week-to-ten-day-long festival called “Get all the people who hate fun out of the way (they don’t want to be involved anyhow).” Or something.

Frumpy housewives who want to start tongue-clucking because the womens’ costumes are too slutty. Religious zealots fretting away because of the “occult” overtones. Liberals who want the kids collecting the most candy, to share it with the other kids who didn’t bother to go out. March them all into a great big, I dunno…big ol’ pumpkin or something. Seal it shut.

Let’s get something straight: Whatever else might have happened in its history, in modern times Halloween is the first big fun thing to happen after school opens up. It teaches — reminds — kids to enjoy the passage of time. This is important. It’s true they get plenty enough fun & relaxation during summer…maybe too much…if you want to start bitching about that, I’m in your corner. Halloween tells them, you get a good solid block of work done FIRST, then we start stretching into the holidays, and you start to think about blending the fun with the work. This is something you need to know how to do when you grow up. And let’s face it, the grown-ups need a chance to bust loose too.

Yes, of course you can disagree. Just get your ass in that pumpkin, and see you in ten.

I’m inspired by, among many other things, this…

In the latest example of small-mindedness plaguing our educational system, schools around the country are attempting to ban costumes and candy on what is surely one of most kids’ favorite days of the year. The excuses range from vague concerns about “safety” to specific worries about food allergies to—get this—fears of breaching the wall of separation between church and state.

But whatever the motivation, the end result is the same as what Charlie Brown used to get every time he went trick-or-treating: a big old rock in the candy bag. What sort of lesson are we teaching our kids when we ban even a tiny, sugar-coated break in their daily grind? Mostly that we are a society that is so scared of its own shadow that we can’t even enjoy ourselves anymore. We live in fear of what might be called the killjoy’s veto, where any complaint is enough to destroy even the least objectionable fun. [emphasis mine]

I think what bugs me more than anything else is that this is one of the last vestiges of the “neighborhood.” I don’t mean that in the physical sense. We have all sorts of neighborhoods. Trouble is, it’s becoming rare that anybody knows the first names or the last names of whoever’s living a hundred fifty feet away…or five hundred feet away…I’m concerned that they don’t have any reason to. I’m concerned that they have all sorts of reasons not to.

Everyone loves to brag about respecting “diversity.” Here’s the trick: Without intimacy, diversity’s easy. When it’s just that funny family down at the end of the block who moved in last year, of course you don’t care about their country of origin or whether they speak English. Heck, are they still there? Oh, so it might be credibly pondered that you’re all burning the same oxygen with your lungs. How courageous of you.

The more years I see come and go, the more amazed I am that the people who insist we “all come together to get things done” and that we give up our profits, liberties and personal ambitions “for the greater good,” are the ones plagued with the lion’s share of human-interaction handicaps. They say it is an impermissible manifestation of religiosity they can’t handle, but the truth is they can’t handle any dialogue or social configuration outside of their very narrow confine of the tolerable: “I tell people what to do and then they go do it.” That, or “I tell people to knock something off, and they must stop even if they’d rather not.” Besides those two things, anything else is out of their league.

Test it sometime. Do something truly sociable that puts everyone on equal footing. These people will be missing from it. The same people will always be missing, every time.

The truth of the matter is, that having real fun takes balls. No, I shouldn’t say that; a lot of women know how to have fun. Let’s say it takes a thick hide. One of the tragedies of our modern society is, the people with thin skins get to tell the people with thick skins how they’re supposed to live, work, learn and recreate. We’re not all getting an equal say here, and because of the dissipation of natural threats against our species, or society has turned into an Idiocracy. It’s the shrikes who are calling the shots now. The bossies. The knuckle-whackers. See, the eerie-prophecy movie didn’t quite call that one: We’ve started to crave taboos, invent new taboos, meaningless taboos that have no history and serve no purpose, just so we can shush each other. Like the article said: “Any complaint is enough to destroy even the least objectionable fun.”

In fact, I’ll bet a pillowcase of Milk Duds that if we could go back in time and review the true history of Halloween — not what’s been preserved for us, but the real thing, right down to the most arcane details — we’d find out it had something to do with fixing exactly that sort of problem: The thin-skinned people running everything. Perhaps not at the earliest origins, but somewhere along the way. Something to do with throwing off questionable taboos, celebrating the completion of a whole lot of work, or cutting loose with one last festivity before hunkering down for a suffocating and tough winter. Perhaps, making a point of knocking back a few with friends, relatives and neighbors, being unsure of whether they’d make it to the spring thaw? Kind of a “see you on the flip-side”? Makes sense to me…

So off with you, shrikes, strutting martinets, zealots, killjoys, seacows and scolds. Into the big pumpkin you go. I exorcise you like the evil spirits you are. See you on November 1.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Rotten Chestnuts.

As I get older, I notice my observations about things — on some level — become, paradoxically, simpler. Perhaps this comes from OO design methodology. You remember the classic XYZ Corporation example: Salespeople have regions and make flat salaries, commissions and bonuses; but before they are instantiated as salespeople objects, they are employees, and as such have employee numbers and seniority dates. At the next level up, they are U.S. citizens and have Social Security numbers, then they are human beings with heights, weights, genders and dates-of-birth. The point is that one learns to look for the common attributes. It is a skill as well as a habit, and one is never finished fully developing it.

Now, how long have I been studying modern liberalism. It was impossible to ignore which side was right & which side was wrong during the Ford/Carter/Reagan years. My interest in the whole thing waned sharply during Reagan’s second term, along with everybody else’s I think, and I was entirely apolitical by the time Bush and Quayle were sworn in. Bill Clinton fixed that for good. First time I saw a photo-op of him in a school classroom babbling away about a whole lot of nothing, realizing this was our next President of the United States, I formed more-or-less the realizations I have right now: We are in the middle of a culture-clash about superficiality. The central issue involves what you might say is the proper response to snake-oil salesmen selling bad products, who sound good. And have already managed to convince “everybody” else. With scare-quotes around “everybody,” since what is meant by that is the illusion of everybody. That faction which has managed to erect a veneer of unanimity. Managed to dominate the conversation.

After that, the forces in my personal evolution have consisted of merely more nudging, mostly gentle but occasionally jarring, in the common direction. I found out the woman I divorced before Clinton came along, was a passionate democrat, and realized how much money I’d have saved if I simply took the time to figure this out sooner. Then came the shutdown and the Lewinsky scandal, both of which proved that there is an aristocracy of charisma in our superficial society, filled with lovable bumpkins who can get away with pretty much everything, things that would destroy you or me in an instant, and there are teeming throngs of adoring airhead fans who think that’s just wonderful. Then came the Florida election debacle, during which our liberals became much nastier, and the 9/11 attacks. Throughout all of this I have spent much more energy studying modern liberalism for one reason: It’s been proven to me that I have to.

Liberals are just like a roaring house fire. I have other things I have to get done that don’t have anything to do with studying liberals. But, at the same time, if I attend to those things and ignore the liberals, they’ll flare up and fucking consume whatever I manage to put together anyway. And, I’m picking up the vibe, generally, that I’m not alone in this. Those of us who build things, or want to build things, are conflicted. There is only so much time in the day, and we can spend a lot of it ignoring the liberals — but if we never pay attention to the damage they’re doing, they’ll destroy all our stuff and everything we manage to get done will be for nothing.

Which brings me to a realization already familiar to me. Futility. Perhaps it is not merely an effect of modern liberalism; perhaps it is the goal.

I am entertaining the notion, as I have before, that it is all about failure.

Modern liberals live on a wholly separate planet, strewn across its entire surface with opposite-thinking. They think they’ve managed to salvage our nation’s credit-worthiness, by selling the idea that debt doesn’t & shouldn’t matter. For those who have trouble buying into that, our Vice President once famously said we have to spend more money to keep from going bankrupt. If our country has a problem with ignorance because it doesn’t do enough listening, the people to whom our friends the liberals think we should do more listening are the…children. There it is again, see: The inexperienced are to be seen as experienced, and vice-versa. The ranks of the leftists seem to be disproportionately swollen with the presence of asshole-makers, those who treat nice people as if they were mean people, and mean people as if they were nice. The climate-change scam has now managed to achieve ninety-five percent certainty even though the predictions are wrong. ObamaCare is evidently their idea of great legislation. Hillary Clinton is evidently their idea of a smart woman. They’re constantly braying that the Tea Party is by its very nature stupid, intransigent, unreasonable and kooky, although the core message of the TP is really nothing more than “maybe we should try not to rack up so much debt.” Sarah Palin still scares them and they still hate her, even though she resigned and went home just like they wanted her to do, and she isn’t forcing anyone to buy strange creepy new insurance policies from a crappy website that’s never up. They think the national parks should be locked down. They think our country’s borders should not be. When President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went on record to say they would refuse to negotiate during the shutdown, they strangely concluded that the Republicans in Congress must therefore be “holding the country hostage,” and should bear all the responsibility for the shutdown. They’re constantly in a state of fret that some sort of life-staple they demand from the government is going to be disrupted in its supply, and this apprehension of theirs seems genuine…their solution to this is always to have the government manage more things. They sanction discriminatory practices, in fact, insist on them at every turn, and they call this “equality.” Planet Liberal seems to be going through a “global warming” of its very own, of sorts, from which there is no terrestrial escape — of opposite-ness. Pole to pole, all around the equator, continent to continent and sea to sea. Everything is perceived by the vocal intelligentsia as the exact opposite of what it truly is.

To all of this we can add what may be the highest base abstract superclass: Victory is to be treated as failure, and failure is to be treated as victory. President Obama sucks, they admit, but they support Him anyway. If someone comes along to counsel or nudge toward success, they react with rage; the simpler the counseling, the hotter the rage. They seem to need, and want, and appreciate having, thin waists and fat wallets just like the rest of us. It is the dispensation of true wisdom that might lead to such desirable outcomes that really cheeses ’em off.

Think of: Two men come across undiscovered land, stake their claims, and get busy building their houses before the cold winter rolls in. One man succeeds at this and the other fails. Normal people like you and me might say, the man who succeeded at exactly the same problem in exactly the same conditions, using the same tools, with the same supplies at his disposal, might have some good information to share with the man who failed. Not so to our friends the liberals, from the opposite-ravaged planet. To them, “true” wisdom comes from the sad sack who had to move in to his friend’s abode for the winter. What really matters is “what it’s like” for him; there may be some information in the universe somewhere that’s still relevant, but this is the first-and-foremost, most important thing. And among those who need to pull up a chair and listen endlessly, the one guy who most urgently needs to receive the information about how it feels to be a loser, is the guy who managed to get it done. He has the most to learn. He should listen, listen and listen some more to the endless caterwauling about the despair, the cold, the rain, the embarrassment, the dependency, how awful it all is…and then he should pay higher taxes for his friend who has to be on the dole now. Maybe they can dismantle that fancy house, then one guy can live under the roof and the other one can have the walls.

And this is true with every domestic policy they have to offer. Haven’t you noticed? Those who have managed to produce the things we all want, need to shut up, pay their taxes, and stand by waiting to be told what to do…by some “regulators” who are thought to be supremely wise in some way. Although, common sense says that if the regulators knew anything about producing, they wouldn’t be regulating, they’d be producing.

The point is: In their world, losers always have something to teach the winners. Winners have nothing to offer by way of useful knowledge, to the losers. No non-achievers can ever be told anything they might need to learn, to become achievers. That, to them, is hateful. It’s disrespectful. It makes the losers feel like losers.

It never seems to fall within their tight perimeter of thinking, that if anyone really thought of the losers as cradle-to-grave losers, the last thing that person would do would be disrupting his business — which obviously works — to stop and offer the losers some guidance. That would only make sense if the successful person saw some potential there. So by seeing the losers as losers-today-winners-tomorrow-maybe, those who give advice to the losers show the losers vastly more respect than our friends the liberals, who seem to be oblivious to the very concept of improved results by way of expansion of knowledge, as well as to the concept of time.

The disagreement here is about whether losers have anything to learn. From that, spring all the other disagreements, it seems. Which are much more contentious than they need to be, since the modern liberals are so far off-base that they insist it is the losers who should be doing all the teaching, and the winners should be doing the learning. From the losers.

It’s odd that when it comes to partisan wrangling in Washington, they don’t follow through. When democrats negotiate with Republicans, suddenly the modern left understands victory just fine. The same goes for elections. As incumbents and as challengers, liberals act during elections exactly the way conservatives act with things that are outside politics. They play to win. It’s only in the policies to which they want to commit the rest of us, that they treat defeat like victory and victory like defeat.

Got a big controversy over the above photograph. She’s a local lady here, who’s created a national uproar. I guess it’s the “What’s Your Excuse?” line rubbing some people the wrong way.

Jack Armstrong of Armstrong & Getty was complaining that her occupation has been toned down, failing to find mention in articles like this one. She’s some kind of fitness trainer or something. So I guess the rebuttal would be…”my excuse is that I’m not a fitness trainer”? And it would seem I can throw stones like everyone else at hapless Maria, since I’m not a fitness trainer either and I seem to have packed on thirty pounds plus over the last couple years. So pass the rock and let’s get in line, right?

Sorry, no dice. This is not about fat.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Some say, “if one guy did it anywhere, that means anybody else who wants to, can do it everywhere.” The other kind say, “if one guy somewhere can’t do it, then nobody else should be able to do it either.” Perhaps the Facebook ladies getting all pissed off at Ms. Kang have hit a compromise: “I’m willing to do what it takes to get the weight off, so long as nobody, anywhere, does or says anything to make me feel bad.” It’s that last set that is the problem here, not Maria Kang. You have to choose your battles. The fact is, a lot of people who have weight problems simply want to have everything as good as they can possibly have it, every waking minute of every day. Why get a Quarter Pounder, when there’s a Double Quarter Pounder right next to it for only another dollar? “She said something that rubbed me the wrong way, now I must start a revolution” — that’s just an extension of that. Feel feel feel, every situation that comes along, it’s all about how it makes you feel. That’s how people put on weight.

You know, there are certain truisms about criticism, whether the criticism is personalized or not: Criticism is almost never one hundred percent on-the-money. It’s always wrong somewhere. But it very seldom entirely misses the mark, either. You have to, as the adage goes, “take what you like and leave the rest.” In the case of criticism, nobody likes any of it, so what you need to do is take what will help you and improve your situation…and leave the rest. Did Maria Kang’s flippant comment entirely miss the mark? With everyone?

Let’s answer that question with another question: Are the complaining-people not answering her question rather directly? “My excuse is that you’re making me feel bad about myself.” And in so doing, are they not proving the question has more than a little merit? “What’s your excuse” means, boiled down to its essentials, “how little does it take to make you abandon your goal of a better body?” And the answer is “some stranger on Facebook posting pictures I don’t like.” Pretty low bar. So there’s opportunity for improvement there.

The real tragedy is this: That is precisely the problem Ms. Kang was trying to solve, if I’m reading her message right. And I think I am. She took the time and trouble to reach the emotionally sensitive types, the kind of people who aren’t inclined to say “no pain no gain,” just-do-it, the kind who have not yet pushed past that first milestone. The must-feel-good-all-the-time types. And, those are exactly the ones who are biting her head off over it.

We can have a legitimate argument over whether or not she deployed sufficient tact. But she was trying to help. And the fact is, these people can’t admit that they’re the ones who have the problem. They’re showing the real reason why they don’t look as good as Maria Kang, from the neck down, and nothing is going to change there until something changes between the ears. That makes the whole thing personal, and a bit nasty. Maria Kang didn’t make it that way and neither did I.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Rotten Chestnuts.

I’m just naturally conflicted about this (link starts 14:51 into the video, NSFW language) (from here). I would expect this is a conflict encountered by many others who are concerned about the same things. On the one hand, I don’t say something never-was-winnable in the first place. To me, that’s something losers say. Life is not a dress rehearsal, and I don’t play to lose. On the other hand, in order to win, I have to respect cause-and-effect. I’m a resident of this-universe, after all. Cause-and-effect always wins. And the fact of the matter is that Mr. Clarey has established a solid link.

Nothing left to lose. Do this, or else you’re bankrupt. Do that, or else you’re divorced. Don’t say that, or else you’re fired. Such threats, made constructively in any way, ought to carry an implied reassurance of “but if you do it the way we want you to then you will receive protection.” That isn’t happening. Men avoid doing what they’re supposed to avoid doing, in order to escape destruction, and for their trouble they just get more threats. Over the longer term of time, we see the “deal” is something more like: Quit pulling on the leash, so we can shorten it. Seriously, just ask the question: What can you do to get in trouble these days? It doesn’t take much.

If the men at your workplace talk in a higher pitch on the clock than they do on the drive in…you probably have some stories to tell. Because your men are either being punished just for acting like men, or they’re under the impression they would be. Which probably means they would be.

Why do men say anything in a voice pitch anywhere above middle-C at any time? We weren’t designed to. Most of us don’t want to. It isn’t natural.

Why is it reckless to pin a calendar in your work cubicle, with pictures of women in bathing suits? Of course we call that dumb and stupid, since it will certainly get you called into your boss’ office for a conversation none too pleasant. Ever stop to ask why that is? See, no one’s going to defend it — just because the consequences are so swift and certain. That’s just “crab in a bucket” mentality. You can’t put a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar in your office, so it stands to reason nobody else should be able to either. It isn’t “normal.” But…what does a “normal” person do when he goes in to buy a car, and has to negotiate on the payments with the salesman who takes him into the office and…there’s a swimsuit calendar on the wall. What does a normal-person do? Get offended? NO. So you see, the rules are all about normalcy…but the rules have been shaped and molded around the preferences and tastes of abnormal people, in fact, people who are none too interested in avoiding conflict. Such people, in fact, use conflict to achieve greater power. So the rules are not about normalcy, and they’re not about avoiding conflict, and they’re not about equality. Now consider that the swimsuit-calendar example is useful only because it is the silliest example, the example least subtle. There are many, many others. Men simply aren’t allowed to act like men.

The origin of the problem is that “offended” people have to be treated as if they have special powers. We have to give them whatever they want. They are, in the moment, masters of all they survey. But that only works with peasants and peons. At some level, usually for some kind of government employee, it becomes okay to tell offended-people to stick it. I can get as offended as I want to get, over my treatment at the DMV…in the security line at the airport…talking to the Internal Revenue Service. There is some kind of mechanism by which I can file a complaint, and one out of 50,000 of those might “go viral,” about the same odds as a random YouTube upload. Maybe the odds improve if there is a YouTube upload. But overall, no, in those situations I can’t expect the whole world to genuflect before me if I utter those magical words “I’m offended.” Not the way you or I will have to turn everything upside-down if we’re seen doing the wrong things by the wrong people.

I think the hierarchy-structure problem is, perhaps, more problematic than the short-leash problem. The leash is longer for people who have certain occupations; people who can make arbitrary decisions about how much inconvenience might weigh upon others. That is a sure sign that we’re dealing with a power struggle. The bulk of the burden rests on those who are powerless, the ones whose problems are costless to everybody else. They are the ones who must walk a fine line, in everything they do, threatened constantly with being vanished out to the cornfield.

That’s why teevee husbands are goofballs. It doesn’t have to do with “comedy” or “humor” or good times or cheer or hope. It’s all about fear. We pick out easy prey, based on who can’t fight back.

So I agree with Aaron Clarey’s observations, but my tactics are different. We are, I think, a society that wants to be civilized. We’re just doing a rather shitty job of it. We have a tendency to think “nobody can call me a bully, if the person I’m bullying is a member of such-and-such a class.”

Everybody pays, not just the men. Because when a man has to act unmanly in order to avoid being disappeared, and that’s going on his whole life, there is a dwindling in the opportunity to teach other people how to be manly. The kids grow up without ever hearing the sound of a real man’s voice. They’re more likely to hear it from a Japanese cartoon than from a real person. Boys forget how to become real men. Girls never learn how to respect them, to value them, to look for them.

I think it’s winnable, it just has to be a two-way street. Society can tell men when men are not behaving acceptably, and when it does so, it expects the men to reciprocate; men should warn society when it’s coming off the rails. There certainly have been a lot of women plowing their energies into that. More and more, it seems like it’s the wrong kind of women who’ve been able to.

They know, Mr. Taranto, they know.

[Shanta] Driver’s position seems instead to be based on the contemporary leftist theory that groups certified as “oppressed” deserve special treatment at the expense of the “privileged.” Such a view, however, collapses in its own illogic. A system that gives special treatment to members of an “oppressed” group is simply a new variety of privilege.

Yes, The Left is supposed to be about “equality.” Yet, with every single issue that comes along, there is always one class of people The Left wants to win all the time, and another class of people they want to be beaten all of the time. And, of course, they’re full of complaints whenever they don’t win. All of the time.

They’re not about equality and they never have been. Where did we ever get such an idea? They said so?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Rotten Chestnuts.

The overarching theme within all the speechifying had something to do with the country’s credit-worthiness. That is not my opinion; it is measurable. Go back and read a transcript, any transcript. All the loud people were concerned that the credibility of the nation’s credit was about to be put in jeopardy.

At the end of it, the winners were the advocates for a non-sustainable lifestyle. That, also, is not my opinion. That, too, is measurable. Who just won, and who got shouted down and branded as extremist zealots? What of the message that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit actually means something? In the marketplace of ideas, isn’t that the idea we just decided to shove unto the gutter?

So…we just salvaged our nation’s credit-worthiness, by committing it to an unsustainable lifestyle?

But it got decided that way because we’re so sick of the arguing, so sick of the conflict. Interesting. Well, here’s something I’ve been noticing: Conflict is something that rolls in with the tide, to overwhelm us, when these loud people declare simple cause-and-effect to be unworthy of their attention. When they use their loud rhetoric to declare a kind of “war” against forces so simple and so rugged, that they are woven into the fabric of space-time. It is inevitable. Declaring any kind of war, means to embark on some kind of pursuit of victory; in the marketplace of ideas, when loud people go chasing after a victory, as we just saw, they generally tend to achieve it on some level. And when they “win” this has the consequence of dividing us.

Since there will always be those who say “Who cares who wins? Up is up, down is down, and debt means something” — just as, there will always be those who say “Fuck the up-is-up-down-is-down thing, I wanna win.”

So, win they did. But I’m not sure what they won. Our nation’s credit is not credible and we did not avoid conflict. Congress’ approval rating? I don’t think it went up, nor will it…

Update: “Terrible deal.”

Brain fart over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging…

Okay, so what’s going on in the heads of the big-government people? That’s what I’d really like to know. Do they see some evidence in the shutdown that maybe, just maybe, the Tea Party is right, and the “have government take care of everything (until the day comes it isn’t taking care of jack squat)” might not be the right way to go?

Or…are they just blaming “extremist GOP members of Congress holding the country hostage” for it all. Because if they’re doing that, all the way from the frontal lobes to the brain stem and every synapse in between…the rest of us would then be forced to conclude…

Big government advocacy == big ego. And, big ego == advocacy for big government. Synonymous relationship.

I’m having more thoughts about this, which is a sign that this thought is a journey and not a destination. That, in turn, would mean that it belongs here at the blog, and not over there.

The ancillary thought I’m having about this is about the irony. It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? “Ego” is Latin for “I.” As in…I’ve been wondering about this for a very long time. Love of government, I’ve learned over the years, is not really love of anything at all. It is loathing. It is fear. It is an instinctive revulsion against the idea of anyone identifiable doing anything significant.

I say “identifiable.” Barack Obama, and a few others, can go ahead and do amazing big things and get & “deserve” credit for getting those things done. To these Nervous Nellies, Obama is not identifiable. He is a shining face in a shrine…or on a fake American flag. They won’t meet Him, ever, and if they ever do, they won’t feel the burden of being compared with Him. Mortals aren’t supposed to do the things the deities do. So what they really seek to do, is place all definable achievement outside the realm of the expected — for them, and by extension, for any of their true peers. They live in a world in which “real” people aren’t supposed to do things.

Let’s expound on that a bit, to be fair, since some of them are indeed hard workers. The distinction upon which we cogitate here has to do with milestones. “Real” people do work, the way a slug crawls upon the ground…or would, if the slug didn’t have to eat anything. Every hour of work done is like a gallon tin of vegetable oil, strictly non-exceptional, identical to the hour/gallon that came before, and will come afterward.

So the irony is: I would expect someone with a huge, fragile ego to have the opposite problem. Large ego should mean: Living, to excess, in a world of “I will do this because I can’t rely on anyone else to do it.” These sad sacks seem to live in a world color-photo-negative reversed from that: I can’t get it done, and since you’re like me (or should be like me) you can’t be counted on to do it either. So let’s have government do it. To those of us who can point to many examples of the government screwing something up, dropping the ball, twisting the mission around into one of just being a general pain-in-the-ass — they cannot offer a substantive rebuttal. They just snark and distract. It’s truly surreal. You can’t help wonder if they ever had to wait in line at the DMV. The most they do by way of response is make some kind of remark about “right wing echo chambers.” Look for excuses to reject the information. So they’re not really placing faith in government, they’re just restraining their faith from being placed in anything else. “Government should do it” really means “I don’t want anyone else doing it.” Either way, government should have exclusive permission to do it. All of it.

Until, as I wrote in the parentheses, government grinds to a halt like it just has. Then what? Going by their rhetoric, the answer is to just blame Republicans for everything not going their way. How far does that go?

If I presume it isn’t an act, and the thought stretches downward and inward, toward the very core of their brains, we’re left with less of an actual “narrative” or conclusion, and more of a string of silly nonsense that simply can’t exist in my universe. I can’t grok with it. I mean, give it a try: We have these bad, bad Republicans in Congress who are all at fault for monkey-wrenching to a halt this good-government machinery that I need to be chugging away and attending to my…everything. Those darn Republicans are such idiots. The machinery upon which my life depends, upon which I want all facets of my existence to depend, has been stopped by these idiots.

Do I want to have every facet of my existence depend on running machinery that can be stopped by idiots? Do you? Do they? I think it safe to say most of us wouldn’t want that.

Tentative conclusion: Ego is the problem, but the issue is not the ego’s size, rather its delicacy. Like a balloon inflated beyond reasonable limits, their ego has become fragile.

They say they’re all about “hope.” That ship has sailed; it is fear that motivates them.

…supporting suckage…

Think of Travis Smiley as the anti Clint Eastwood, I guess…when someone is completely screwing it all up, we have to hang on?

Wonder what Commander Spock would think of this.

Hat tip to Chicks on the Right.

For the first half of it, I was thinking “So it was a magnifying glass when you were a sadistic little shit, now that you’re all grown up it’s molten aluminum.” Then I saw the “chandelier”…after that, I can’t stop thinking how cool it is.

From here.

Hat tip to Linkiest.