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.

Mkay, wish I was wrong about this thing, but in the end I was right.

US may avert default as Boehner blinks

US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner told Republican lawmakers yesterday he will give President Barack Obama a proposal extending the government’s ability to borrow money through Nov 22 – but only if he agrees to negotiate over ending a partial government shutdown and a longer-term increase in the debt ceiling.

Though the Republican proposal could avert an unprecedented federal default that the Obama administration has warned could occur as early as Oct 17, it would not necessarily bring a quick end to the separate 10-day partial federal shutdown. Mr Obama has insisted that Congress reopen the government without condition.

And here is what I said:

I think the democrats are really nervous right now. They have a lot of spinning to do. They’re pretty good at it, they usually win, and my money is still on them winning this time. They probably don’t have too much to fear.

When there is a shutdown, Republicans pay a higher day-by-day political cost for it than democrats. It was true in 1995, it’s true now, it’s always been true. It doesn’t make any sense, since the Republican message is — at least it’s supposed to be — that we need to pull out of this cul de sac of centralized planning and government-administered everything. And in a rational universe, a “shutdown” would be seen as concrete evidence of exactly that, that this configuration isn’t good for us or for our country, and isn’t sustainable.

But there are a lot of things anchoring us in this irrational, silly universe. The prevailing viewpoint, both within the Republican party and outside of it, is that Republicans are loathed and cannot generate any sympathy or camaraderie with anyone who isn’t already a loyal Republican, and it’s the fault of those Tea Party types. They need to reject the extreme ideas of those zealots with identifiable ideas, and embrace the “mainstream”; lose the vibrant hues and paint with more pastel. I would say, ordinarily, that the thing they should do is neither accept or reject that theory, but instead put it to a test. Ordinarily. The thing about that, though, is that this has already been tested for the last thirty years or so, through our presidential elections. These “reach-across-the-aisle-and-compromise” types of Republican candidates, lose. Every. Single. Time. Meanwhile, you go back a hundred years give-or-take, and you see it’s rather exceptional for Republicans to lose. So there is a problem for this prevailing viewpoint, and as is usually the case, the problem is reality. The theory doesn’t test well.

The tests say, for Republicans to win, they have to do what political candidates from all parties have to do. They have to do what you and I have to do when we go to job interviews. Answer the question: Why you, and not him?

Well, when you lose, the thing to do is learn. Victory always comes to those who are willing to learn, you know. It may take awhile, but the thing about victory is it’s very often the culmination of lots of past defeats, coupled with learning. So, the Republicans could take the tack of “the public has spoken, now let’s all act like democrats,” but what’s the point? That only makes sense if you’re a politician. It’s like, due to the whim of majority rule, quit bailing water out of the boat, drop the bucket, grab an ax, and help make some new holes in it. Why would you do that? You want to be popular, or do you want to fix a problem?

Submitted for someone with real influence to peruse at their leisure; things the Republicans could address, first, if they wanted to fix the problem. Some of these have been broken for quite some time. But if they aren’t fixed before the next shutdown, I’m going to bet my money on the same outcome and I’m probably going to win that one too.

1. The media “watchdog” is a lap dog. There isn’t a lot that can be done about this, at least, not by Republicans. But, it still might be helpful to examine the reasons why. The media has a tendency to be staffed by progressives in the first place, since it’s appealing to the youthful to say “I’m going to become a journalist and change the world for the better.” That means activist journalism, left-wing by its very nature. Thinking on it a little bit harder and deeper, I think it’s pretty clear to everyone what responsible, unbiased reporting really is — and that’s boring. Nobody wants to be that when they grow up. Nobody wants to deliver the facts to the viewers & readers, so that the viewers and readers can make up their own minds. People like to talk about that a lot, but there aren’t that many who are really delivering on it. And then, you have to think about what news, as a commodity, is actually worth. The media has a vested material interest in lefty governance, because when unemployment is high, crime is rampant and resource allocation planning is centralized, news becomes much more important. Think about what a newspaper costs in Chicago or New York City. What’s the local paper cost in Mayberry, USA, or anyplace out in the “breadbasket” where addresses contain words like “township” and “section”; there is a reason for that. People want whatever they’re selling, to be precious. News people want news to be precious. So they want lefties to be running things. It’s just natural.

2. Feelings that glorify style over substance, and immediate gratification, carry the greatest currency right now. The expressed thoughts that are attached to these feelings, resonate most surely and most powerfully. Unlike #1 above, this is not a timeless/endless thing, although it might still be outside of the control of anybody who gives a rip. The most likely situation here is that there is something we can do, but the thing to do is wait awhile. It’s a cyclical thing, almost a seasonal thing. The national mood since about 2005 or 2006 can best be expressed as something like, “What’s this ‘debt’ thing, I just want my num nums.” I give that late date because that’s about the time the national elections started going that way, but anyone who was paying attention will immediately realize the elections were just the ignition point of a combustion process that had been building for a long time. There is a certain fascination with Barack Obama giving speeches as a panacea for every little problem that comes along, and it’s having an effect now that it would not have had in the decades previous. No, it’s not all because of racism. Bill Clinton is a white guy, he had this going for him too. It was & is generational. It isn’t the same thing as Kennedy beating Nixon in the television-age because he was more handsome. This is something new. We care about packaging more than we care about substance. Responsible thinking, grown-up thinking, cause-and-effect thinking, delayed gratification; these things resonate in certain communities, but they’ve lost their cachet that they used to have as “sea to shining sea” values. They’re being dampened in ways they used to not be dampened, in ways the “I want it now” thoughts are not being dampened. Think about those democrat accusations against the Republicans in Congress “holding the government hostage”; to those of us who actually think about debt and what it means, who pay a little bit more on the credit card when the balance is higher than we’d like it to be, it was evident how silly and backward that was. Much like a bully calling a non-bully a bully. But it resonated. My point is, that resonance of this backward-accusation was not merely a symptom, it was the problem itself. People are thinking of the credit card — our eyebrows-deep in debt government — the way our kids & wives think about credit cards right before we get really, really worried; as “free” cash. So, you see, the Republicans never really had a chance at this thing. Maybe now the era is coming to an end. Hope so. We’ll see.

3. The democrats work much harder at getting their message out. Credit where it is due. They put a great deal of priority on whether they always get the last word. See, those of us who have to build things that actually work, have this built-in reluctance against making this Priority One. We keep thinking…wait a minute, if you always have to have the last word to make your idea look workable, that’s a sure sign that the idea isn’t workable! Our friends the liberals are not similarly troubled. They seem to understand that they’re dead in the water if they ever fail to have the last word. And where this would cause you or me a whole lot of self-doubt, to them it just raises the adrenaline level. I subscribe to conservative as well as to liberal organizations inclined to send out e-mails about the budget stalemate, to get in their version of what’s going on and what to make of it. Throughout this little tempest, the ratio has not been even close. It’s like fifty, sixty to one. Several times a day I get something from OFA, Media Matters, The New Republic, et al telling me what I’m supposed to think. Where’s the conservative counterpart? Maybe once a week something will trickle in. The tone will be almost apologetic, like junk mail put together by someone who hates junk mail as much as I do. It almost offers to throw itself away for me. To that, you have to add the consideration that when the democrats ask for some trifling amount from each person, like three bucks — and get it from lots and lots of people — that sends a very powerful message. As a politician or a pollster or a pundit, you have to treat that like the three-dollar-donor knew what the progressive movement is really all about, even if there are a lot of signs that this might not be the case. What to do? This is probably the easiest one to fix. When you suck at something, stop sucking. When your leadership sucks at something, replace them.

4. People don’t identify the GOP with the abrogation of an undesirable status quo. Practically no one thinks this country is on the “right track.” Furthermore, from talking to the people who think we’re heading in the wrong direction, the feeling is strong. The anger is palpable. Even among the politically uninvolved, it’s still often the first thing on their minds when they wake up in the morning, and the last thought they have before drifting off at night. Clearly, there is a heady geyser of energy erupting here that the Republicans are failing to capture. We’re in Barack Obama’s America, but when something is wrong with it, somehow Barack Obama achieves much better results in His effort to portray Himself as the Washington-outsider riding in on a white horse to fix it all, than His opposition does. These are, aggravatingly, problems directly linked to His own policies. This is immediately evident to anyone who’s been paying attention. But the people paying attention are not the ones responding to the polls. This one, like #3, is easily fixed. Just ratchet down this rhetoric about “coming together” and “common goals” and “reaching agreement at the table” and so forth. Stop pretending Republicans and democrats want the same things. It isn’t true. And when it’s repeated ad infinitum, the way people hear it is yeah, Republicans and democrats working together to screw me over. Can’t blame them for that, can you. They’re taking something that doesn’t have any truth in it, and trying to make it true; there is some truth in this interpretation. We have a 17 trillion dollar public debt now, the legacy of Republicans and democrats “coming together to find ways of doing things together” and so forth. Just because you’re going forward doesn’t mean you’re heading to a good place.

There is a bright spot to all this. The #2 problem, with the shallow thinking, it is probably the common-cause of the other three problems. I’m very sure this one can be waited out. There’s nothing else that can be done about it. But the waiting will probably work, since it always has. People are always about as superficial as they figure they can afford to be, and what’s happening right now is the country is learning it can’t be that superficial. It will have to do some growing-up, like it did in 1968 and 1980.

It’s the Stein Rule. Whatever can’t go on forever, won’t.

Cross-posted at Rotten Chestnuts and Right Wing News.

From Sippican.

More ass-kicking Brahms:

And

From here.

There is an irony to the shutdown situation, which is being missed by most of the people talking about it. But before we explore the irony we need to explore a key concept, a concept so crucial to the whole thing that it would justify a new word. I’m reluctant to go ahead and come up with the word, since the word must already exist…it certainly should…and yet, it seems, there is no such word. This is odd, because the thing the word describes becomes an important thing any time humans trade with other humans, which is something that’s been happening for thousands of years.

What the word would describe, specifically, is the asset you have when your opponent is punished — by some external force, something that is not you — for failing to achieve compromise with you. It puts time on your side. Think of a man in a suede coat that he values very highly, pounding on the locked door of a house when it’s just about to rain. “Bargaining chip” is not sufficiently precise. The thing this word would describe, is punishment and not reward. It is a factor in an classic psychological approach-avoidance conflict.

If your opponent has this tool, and you don’t, you’ve already lost. The rest of it is just theater, futile face-saving. Following through. Nothing more. The problem you then have, is this: Your difficulties are costless to everyone else involved. The simple truth of the matter is that you can’t come out ahead that way.

So the “shutdown” is really just Congress and the President trying to seize this asset, this tool. Each side using P.R. to try to elevate the cost of the other side failing to give everything up.

This is where Barack Obama’s unsuitability for the office of President really comes out. It isn’t because He lacks knowledge about some particular thing, or that He’s stubborn. You have to think about: Why is it that He got elected in the first place? Getting elected to this office means prevailing in a championship, winning in a tournament, rising level by level until you come out on top. So Obama, like any other president, is a champion. Of something. Of what, exactly? It’s a question that has been asked ever since the first democrat called Obama “the real deal” back in 2007 or 2006…(Brokaw?): What exactly does that mean? To this very day, none of Obama’s slobbering toadies can answer the question about what, precisely, is unique about Him.

The answer is: With America’s social dynamics the way they are in this day and age, with all the materialism and the superficiality and the race-guilt and the false sense of sacrifice of individual desires for “the greater good”…if you send Obama into negotiations to represent you, you probably won’t have to give anything up. Obama is a tool. A tool for short-circuiting the negotiation process, just like a paper clip is a tool for closing a circuit after a fuse burns out.

Good enough for now; contrary and offensive to the system’s original design; servicing the immediate demands of one immediate user in a “tragedy of the commons” situation; a damnable disgraceful safety hazard.

The irony is that while Obama is avoiding the “business end” of this negotiating bully-cudgel I tried to define as a single word up top, at least in one way, in another way He’s bearing the brunt of it. He is in a no-win situation. Everything He has to sell has to do with refusal to compromise, refusal to give up His half of a loaf. It is His product. It is His legacy. That’s how we got ObamaCare in the first place, isn’t it? When one side enjoys a bit too much of this “time is on our side” cudgel, and the benefits that come with it, we get wretched, rotten legislation. And that’s what happened there. The democrats did not compromise because there was no reason for them to. Now, they want the same benefits because, well gosh darn it, it feels like that’s the way things should be. And they would be that way, if the country wasn’t so far in debt that a Continuing Resolution becomes necessary, which the Constitution requires originate in the House of Representatives.

So Obama’s gotten Himself into trouble here. He never did anything to stop up the government’s hemorrhaging of money because, again, there never was any reason to. Just blame Bush, sign whatever, and go golfing. Now He’s in this situation in which a lot of other presidents have found themselves, where true compromise becomes a necessity. Because, Congress. And so the situation is one in which the mighty oak cannot survive the storm unless it bends a bit. This He cannot do, because it would jeopardize His brand.

Yes, skin color is a part of it, but why get into that. It’s just a gimmick that is part of the overall product. It certainly is an important part of it — everyone who disagrees or challenges Obama on anything, is immediately branded a racist. That’s how it works. Figure out what you want to do, have Obama go in and sell it, if anyone frustrates the movement in any way just call ’em a racist.

But that isn’t really Obama’s product. Obama is the brittle oak. That’s what He has to sell.

And what we’re learning is that Obama’s product is bad — even for the people who buy it, His sponsors, the ones who send Him into the negotiating room to not-negotiate. At the very end of it all, what we have found out is that real leaders and real winners do give-a-little on certain things. They use their intelligence to prioritize, to differentiate what can be left on the table, from what cannot be. The brittle oak, after all, is the one lying supine when the dawn comes, after the storm is over. The more flexible one that bent & swayed a little bit as the winds battered it, will still be standing.

Obama is completely unqualified here, just as He is unqualified for any other thing that has to do with being President of the United States, besides reading a teleprompter.

The bottom line is, there is no reason for the government to be shut down right now. It all has to do with who’s in the White House…and, what exactly He’s doing there, what got Him there.

I have a rule against using George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say” in my headlines (video behind link is not safe for work, in case you need such a warning). In the tiny text, I figure it’s okay to go ahead and say things like “Asshole Maker.” Anyway, I was thinking this morning around five o’clock, heading southbound on I-680…gee, I can’t imagine why…how assholes are made. Isn’t that what really bothers us about assholes? It isn’t that the assholes are there, or that we encounter them. We should expect this. We’re all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, who got kicked out of the Garden of Eden because they were a couple of assholes. And I think deep down everyone realizes that. So we’re bothered when we meet assholes, but the existence of the asshole is not what bothers us.

The three rules about this, of which I’ve gradually become more and more conscious over a great deal of time…like, the last twenty, thirty years…are these…

1. How to make an asshole. There are certain social-interaction rules that make assholes assholes. They may be poorly-thought-out social taboos, or poorly-thought-out traffic regulations, or poorly-thought-out tax polices. Or lack of such rules. There is some negative-incentive structure that rewards assholes, punishes non-assholes, or fails to punish assholes. This is what makes our teeth grind together; this is what causes us angst. We know, when we meet an asshole, we’re seeing just an echo of the real problem, which is the incentive problem. The asshole-making rules.

2. Who makes assholes. There are certain people walking around who lay these asshole-rules down. These are asshole-makers. They, themselves, might not be assholes at all. A lot of them are actually quite sweet. But they have this problem, you see: They’re not very nice to people who are nice to them. They’re much nicer to assholes. It’s like they have this weird polarity-reversal going on. So they go around making assholes out of non-assholes, because they’re pretty darn hard on non-assholes, and they save all their social-rewards and their adulation and their respect for assholes, so when they’re around, everyone else wants to turn into an asshole, even if they’re not naturally inclined to be assholes.

3. The hardcore addiction. I’ve been nurturing a slowly-settling-in understanding that the asshole-makers have a bigger and more deeply seated psychological problem than any of the assholes they make. I have yet to see one even start to change direction, toward the light. Not even close. I can’t say that about the actual assholes. Now and then, you see an asshole say to himself “Oh God, I’ve been such an asshole” and start to reform. You’ll notice asshole makers don’t do that. There’s no reason for them to. It’s probably like alcoholism: First step toward healing is to admit you have a problem. You lay down just one single incentive that goes in the right direction, makes life easier for non-assholes or provides a much-needed challenge or rebuke to the assholes — the assholes are fine with it, but the asshole-makers start squawking. They do more than that, they’ll gouge your eyes out if you’re not careful. Starving wild animals being kept away from the beef steak. Asshole-makers will not quit the asshole-making lifestyle. And the older I get, the more certain I am that they, more than the assholes, are the real problem. Think of Count Dracula going around biting people turning them into vampires. The “freshman vampires” are not the real problem, Dracula is the real problem. These are Asshole Dracula people.

And we see this in politics. There’s a certain political party that supports asshole-making-rules, across the board; it is the one thing that their domestic policies have in common with their foreign-relations policies. At home, and overseas, assholes are to be rewarded for being assholes, and non-assholes are to be punished for not being assholes. You’ll notice, as new issues arise, adherents to this certain political party continue to sustain the trend: The incentive systems are to be kept cockeyed and FUBAR’d. They’re absolutely consistent on this. They’ve made a way of life out of this. They won’t give it up. That’s the way asshole-makers are.

I don’t think any of these realizations are especially ground-breaking. I mean, it’s just common sense, right? If a toddler starts acting like an asshole, that may be regrettable, but it’s really part of the definition of “toddler,” isn’t it? Isn’t that why we call them “toddler rules”? It’s the getting-away-with-it, the growing into age five, ten, twenty and still behaving the same way, that’s a disgrace. And the disgrace is for the parents. Oh sure, by the time the asshole is thirty-five or so, or maybe fifty, possibly being elected President of the United States, you have to think — you know, poor upbringing excuses only so much. But be that as it may, when the two-year-old is acting like a complete creep, polite society still expects the parents to intervene. Prevention is cheaper than cure.

We can survive our assholes. They’re called “assholes,” in the first place, because everybody has one. Isn’t that it? I’ve always thought so. We’re all assholes at some time or another. It’s the people who reward the assholes for being assholes, that are the real problem. Their behavioral aberrations are more destructive, more definable, more dysfunctional; and, their addiction runs much deeper.

Um…wha?

…I have nothing to add. Except, maybe, “I can see silly tweets from my house.”

Hat tip to Chicks on the Right.

This “government shutdown” is nothing new, and neither is all the frustration that goes with it. Decade after decade, generation after generation, we’ve been putting up with it in one form or another: “blank,” usually management, sat down at a table with “blank,” usually a union, and “failed to reach an agreement before midnight.” And so, the garbage has to keep piling up with no one clearing it away. And so, the Boeing workers have to continue to stay home driving their wives nuts. And so, the baseball game has to be canceled. The many have to stop living, because the few sat down at the table & couldn’t or wouldn’t reach a deal.

The social network is all abuzz with talk about whether it’s the Republicans or the democrats who are the real problem here. Now that it is starting to resemble an argument the progressive-types are about to lose, for once — even if it is but a tiny battle within an enormous war — there is a certain allure about it. It’s a little exciting, I have to admit. The enemy has been sent out onto the jousting field with a short lance. I can see why & how, when it goes the other way, the proggies tend to get hooked on this stuff. B-u-u-u-t, we have to get serious about this. I think everyone realizes this is an argument about which leafy part of the weed should get the chopping. The source of the problem is not here. It is underneath, deep in the soil, out of view. It is the dysfunctional structure and the dysfunctional dependency.

People, just minding their own business but relying in some way on something-or-another, are having their plans disrupted because strangers are not achieving agreement with other strangers. Thousands of miles away. Strangers who will remain strangers, who will always be strangers. And what the hell does failed-to-reach-agreement mean, anyway? Each side did a diligent and judicious job of minimally choosing its “hill I wanna die on” positions, and some of those were found to be mutually exclusive, so they gave it a few more hasty tries while the clock chimed midnight, and then collapsed in despair? Like that? Or is it more like, someone didn’t even bother to show up. Maybe no one did? Or phoned it in, literally and figuratively?

I can certainly appreciate how it’s so aggravating. I don’t understand how people keep falling for it over & over again. I don’t understand why some people choose to make a lifestyle out of this. It’s quite silly, when you look at it from a distance, or ponder it for awhile. Oh goody, the strangers I’ll never meet happened to agree on something, so I get…access to a park. A paycheck. A seat at the ball game. A boat ride. So glad they agreed…this time.

Yeah, these things are all ratchet-traps; the dependents are in a situation in which they have no choice. But that’s usually because, before, they passed some point where the choice went away. Because they gave it up. All this debating & discussing about “ObamaCare” was about exactly that, was it not?

Something is going on here. It’s almost a mental disability or something. Maybe it is that. There’s a spark that isn’t jumping across the synapses, some “dammit I’ve just been hoodwinked, I’ll never let that happen again” thought. I wonder if there’s a drug that could be taken to plug up these synapses? Maybe something in the water. Either way, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We, as a society, are quite gifted and exuberant at “diagnosing” behavioral disorders that arguably are not real, and as we do that, we often fail to diagnose other things that probably should be. This is one of the things that should be, I’m convinced of that. Look at all the rage out there. All the excitement, resentment, wrath. Anger at Republicans for failing to “compromise” with President Obama…read that as, find out what President Obama wants, and do whatever it is. Anger anger anger. But not a single smidgen of “I’ll never fall for this again.”

The question is not whether this is one of those deals where people love to complain about something, but won’t get off their fat asses to solve it. That’s settled. The question is, what forces are at work here; what dynamics; what is happening to them. On this, I’m less than certain. I must form theories. And my favorite theory at this time is — this is a process of urbanization.

We form bonds with each other when you & I have it in common that we’re at the mercy of…something. Something unpredictable and uncontrollable. Now out in the rural areas, that’s weather. You meet up with a friend you haven’t seen in awhile, or a complete stranger, or friend-of-a-friend, maybe there’s a bit more time involved than what’s needed to say “hi” or “howdy,” and you talk about the weather. Weather is somewhat predictable but somewhat not. And it affects a lot of things. So you share a common selfish interest in what the weather’s going to do, so why not? If one of you knows something about how to deal with it that the other doesn’t know, the conversation could prove fruitful. Well, one of the differences between rural and urban living is, urban living is pockmarked with many other things that are like that. The local sports team really sucked this weekend. They’re putting in a new stop light at 5th and Main. The carpool lane is stupid, it isn’t built right. Got a ticket yesterday when the parking meter ran out. The Mayor doesn’t know what he’s doing here, there, or anywhere. And, of course…the sanitation engineers’ strike isn’t settled yet.

It’s just human-to-human, clique-to-clique bonding. A normal social activity, dressed up in the clothes of problem-solving. But it isn’t problem-solving, of course, it’s just bitching.

I think the democrats are really nervous right now. They have a lot of spinning to do. They’re pretty good at it, they usually win, and my money is still on them winning this time. They probably don’t have too much to fear. But at the same time, they’re right to be nervous. We tolerate this urbanization, and the feeling of helplessness that goes with it, when we’re immersed in it gradually. This is more like a slam into a cement wall, and the plan does not look good.

The plan looks the way it really is. Maybe instead of “ObamaCare” we should’ve called it “The Declaration of Dependence.”

The award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL), number 132, goes out this afternoon to my Facebook friend for this entry:

Those of you who blame both sides, please tell me what compromise the Democrats offered.

That cuts right to the heart of it.

And this graphic goes right along with that, like bacon-n-eggs. Superman and Batman. Microsoft Windows and swearing. Toenails and clippers…

The older I get, the more “government shutdowns” make me LOL. In fact, on that note…we have to look once again to the awesome wonderful link-findy goodness of Gerard van der Leun, to Sultan Knish, where we see…

“The government shut down! We can do anything we like,” shouted Sam Hasbley of Grassley, Iowa, while tearing the tag off a mattress despite an explicit warning label forbidding such a dangerous course of action. “Tear yours off. The government is shut down. It can’t stop you.”

Eyewitnesses spoke of further horrors. On a quiet street in suburban Massachusetts, a man brought out a set of highly illegal lawn darts. In Maryland, there were allegations that an entire family had begun digging ditches to collect rainwater runoff.

With the fall of the government, citizen activists took it upon themselves to chronicle the culture of lawlessness. Men played Gibson guitars made of wood imported from India, but not finished by Indian workers. Women bought cold medicine without a photo ID. Children went hours without hearing lectures about the environment.

The victims were many. In Chuckolod County, Colorado, a transgender person was denied access to the Ladies Room. Frantic calls to the Justice Department were forwarded to an answering service in Depar, India, instead of Doneparre City, Indiana. In Brooklyn, New York, an overweight Senegalese woman was unable to obtain a sign language interpreter while waiting on line to collect her free Obamaphone. In Olegon Falls, Florida, the National Museum of Native American Yarn was forced to shut down depriving schoolchildren of an educational experience and three hours throwing bits of yarn at each other.

For those who don’t quite get it…that’s good satire. Good, as in it mirrors real life.

And it made me chuckle. In these bleak, dark times…

Obviously, He doesn’t have one. “If He doesn’t give anything up on this, He gets what He wants, so…”

From CainTV.

By a margin of 57 to 38, America disapproves of Obamacare, and that disdain is present in virtually every key demo. Men disapprove at 60%, women at 55%, and independents at 67%.

So, Americans may not like Congressional Republicans, but they also hate Obama’s train wreck law. All of this indicates that – if the GOP members would just get out there and fight – they’d stand a good chance of turning their fortunes.

I think it would not cause too much of a big disagreement with anyone to take note of the fact that it’s now two-for-two — or is it three-for-three? — of “shutdowns” in which, if & when the government does have to shut down, the prevailing viewpoint is somehow established that it’s the Republicans that did it and are responsible for all the wreckage that ensues. This prevailing viewpoint is established early, and often. In ’95 as well as now, the boat isn’t getting too much rocked. It’s just kind of a background melody that endures across centuries, ages too, I suppose…

I’m concerned not so much about Republicans losing and democrats winning, as with the sloppy logic. Obama won’t negotiate, so if the worst comes to pass, it must be on the heads of…His opposition? Huhwha??

I also notice something else: At the state level as well as at the federal level, a “government shutdown” is pretty much a continuous fireworks display of the message that important things are being decided in pretty much the exact opposite from the way they should be decided. Can anyone arguing honestly, deny this to be true? It’s the sprawling and ever-expanding debt that brings the shutdown situation about; if debt is ever-expanding, that’s a pretty reliable sign that things aren’t being done the right way. And then you have the high-drama. As anyone with some dysfunction somewhere in their extended family knows all too well…and you know, I’m reasonably sure that’s all human beings with warm blood and a pulse to slosh it around…high-drama, all the time, as a rule rather than as an exception, is a sure sign that things are hosed. Problems are not getting solved, confrontations are going on, and whoever wins those confrontations is whoever is advancing the non-sustainable lifestyle. Which is a guarantee that more high-drama awaits tomorrow and the day after. In other words, in simpler terms: The “system” just isn’t working.

You know what sets that all off? The catalyst of the problem is not the person most people think it is. It’s the “bubba”; the baby of the family, usually. The jag-off. The screw-up. Momma’s always bailing him out of his latest jam. It’s that one guy — nothing is ever his fault, ever, no matter what. He doesn’t do anything wrong; bad things just keep happening to him. Know the type? I’ll bet you do. If you don’t, well…better-than-even odds, you’re that guy.

That’s what is happening here, I’m afraid. Obama’s skin is dark, so He shouldn’t ever have to give anything up, ever. There, I said it. Yeah yeah…I know…well, Freeberg Rule. You call me a bigot, just for that, I call you a coward.

What a shame. It’s obvious, now, that the people who questioned whether America was ready for a black president, were a hundred percent wrong. They won’t admit it, but they were. Why did it have to be Obama? We’ve got a lot of black notables in this country who would have made fine presidents. Why did it have to be the freshman senator who can’t ever take responsibility for anything? The “bubba”? What a mess.

What we have here is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The outcome is being affected, rather directly, by the reportage. And not in a good way.

Matt Walsh:

They claim that Obamacare will raise taxes, but this has been PROVEN false so many times. You know it’s been proven because I capitalized “proven.” Sure, there might be a few minor billion dollar taxes, like the individual mandate tax and the employer mandate tax, the Excise Tax on Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans, the Tax on Health Insurers, the Tax on Innovator Drug Companies, the High Medical Bills Tax, the Medicine Cabinet Tax, the Tax on Indoor Tanning Services, and the Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals. And, yeah, there might be a small number of multi-billion dollar tax hikes on things like the Medicare Payroll tax and the “black liquor” tax and the HSA Withdrawal tax. And, OK fine, we’ll even see some tax deduction eliminations, like the deduction for employer-provided retirement prescription drug coverage.

But besides, like, 20 new taxes and tax hikes totaling, like, hundreds of billions of dollars, there aren’t ANY tax increases attached to Obamacare. None. NONE. See? I did the capital letter thing again. Pretty convincing stuff.

By which I mean…

The basic skills are simple to learn, however to become a competent performer takes dedicated training until movements become second nature and complex formations can be achieved – which rely not only on the skill of the individual member, but on concentration by the team as a whole to move in co-operation.

For some six or seven years or so now, I’ve had in my glossary two definitions of “science,” a classic one and a modern one. The classic definition places emphasis on the learning objectives and the method, and the newer definition places the emphasis on the institutions, the phony consensus, and the elitism; the choreography, the “Chinese dragon-dancing.” Sad to say, I think that’s still correct. The word is undergoing a change. It would be dishonest to insist that it means what it has always meant, when it is abused constantly.

Around the time of entering those glossary items, I wrote:

I keep on hearing that science is in danger of being destroyed by politics. I believe this has already taken place.

President Obama, early in His first term, showed how concerned He was about this too (hat tip to Goddard).

When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said.

“The president believes that it’s particularly important to sign this memorandum so that we can put science and technology back at the heart of pursuing a broad range of national goals,” said Melody Barnes, director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council.

That was then, this is now.

President Obama angrily blasted climate change skeptics during his energy policy speech Tuesday at Georgetown University, saying he lacked “patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real.”

“We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society,” Obama said. “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.”

This is a perfect exercise of anti-science:

Anti-Science (n.)

Whereas real science is a disciplined accumulation of knowledge, toward a more useful and complete understanding of the world around us, this is the exact opposite. It starts at the opposite end and runs perfectly backwards. The conclusion comes first, and then as evidence arrives it is compared to this conclusion. If the evidence doesn’t support the desired conclusion, an elaborate anti-treatise will be prepared giving reasons why the evidence has to be discarded.

In anti-science, it’s all about the consensus; the consensus is the product. And, just as you get a sharper point to the pencil by whittling parts of it away, as opposed to fastening on something new, anti-science works according to a subtractive process. You get rid of whatever doesn’t belong. Anti-scientist Barack Obama did a great job of showing how.

When no one is left with any authority intact, save for those who can repeat back the catechism, then you have a good dancing-dragon and your choreography is complete. That’s a successful (anti) science-ing. Quoting myself yet once more:

I think we should just cut the crap and go straight to the point.

[Anti-] Science is not about learning the nature-of-nature. It is not about accumulating any kind of information at all. It’s about arriving at a consensus and making it so that “everyone” agrees. This is done by conversion or else by some sort of obliteration/defenestration, that part of it doesn’t matter too much, the important thing is that everybody arrives at the same conclusion.

This metastasizing is long and slow, I can tell, given that I was making notes about it that now have six years of dust on them, and it isn’t hard to find some more examples three or four times as old. Some of the influences driving this, I believe, have been around since the very beginning. Scientists are human. It’s in the job description to fight the demons within, to resist the human temptations.

Think about when a prison guard or sheriff’s deputy is accused of being a bully. There is a certain air of immediate legitimacy to such a charge; if you are a bully and have yet to settle on a lifetime vocation, well…these are good jobs for you to have. So it isn’t unreasonable to suppose, within the ranks of such employment, you might find some bullies. Well, for similar reasons, scientists can be “bullies” too. The labels “science” and “scientist” possess such a positive appeal for those who detest debate, just want to say what’s so and impose an obligation on everyone else, near & far, to believe. If it really is science, you have to, right? It’s science!

But this situation is more hazardous than the prison-guard thing. A prison guard who is a bully, can get the prison-guarding done. At least, at the end of the day, the prison is guarded.

Science suffers, though, when people who loathe dissent and discussion, just want things done their way with no questions asked, start to saturate the ranks of those who are authorized to call themselves “scientists.” They may say that’s what they are, they may have the proper credentials, they may do some of what has classically been called science. And, on a wholly separate topic of discussion when they drift away from the scientific method, and start Chinese Paper Dragon Dancing and repeating the conclusions of others without understanding any of it, like David Suzuki did, they can certainly still reach the correct conclusion; the authority on whom they were relying, may be properly exercising the scientific method and the “web of trust” system may work beautifully here and there.

The fact remains. Dragon-dancing is not science-ing.

Cross-posted at Rotten Chestnuts and Right Wing News.

Gerard links to a most excellent essay that is a diary entry from Ben Stein:

Thursday
I AWOKE STILL feeling shaky about the bees. I slept very late, then slept some more, just laying in bed listening to Mr. Buffett’s trains and thinking about Mr. Obama’s tirades against inequality and about the need for the rich to pay more taxes…
:
It’s great to talk about equality, but hardly any of us really wants to be just “equal.” The blacks want preferences in schools and jobs and they get them. The poor want to be rich. The rich want to stay rich. “Equality” is a code word for “take away something from someone else and give it to me.”

Equality at the starting gate? Yes, absolutely. Equal justice under law? For sure. But rejiggering government policy to make lazy, shiftless people better off and take away from hard-working, clever people operating within the law? What’s so great about that except satisfying the envy of the poor and ordinary?

Of course, raise taxes on the rich if the government really needs the money for basics like defense. But take it away just to satisfy envy? Take away incentives to create, to produce? Why would we want to do that?
:
“‘Equality,’ I spoke the words, as if a wedding vow, ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” So sang Bob Dylan long ago. How clever he was. No, I don’t know what it means. I do know that equality is like “infrastructure,” “post-racial,” and “fixing education.” Just sales talk. Just sales talk to fool people into thinking that politicians do much besides advance their own interests. Well, they’re human. That’s what humans do. Usually. There are exceptions.

Imagine you can snap your fingers, and all throughout the universe the voltage in every material thing is instantly equal. That necessarily means nothing runs; the lights go dark, the fans stop turning, and your car doesn’t start. If you can hand-crank it to get it going, like a biplane pilot from a century ago, it won’t run. Nothing works.

Equalize the temperature, PH level or pressure, life forms go extinct. Equalize the wealth, we’re all poor. Equalize the heat and the life-energy, we all die.

Life itself relies on inequality. Equality is death.

From the Brother-In-Law, in the e-mails.

Makes perfect sense to me. I’m sure the Book of Genesis just sort of left it out or something…writer’s strike, maybe.

The Hill, via Weasel Zippers, via Fox, via Steven Goddard:

Former vice president Al Gore on Monday called for making climate change “denial” a taboo in society.

“Within the market system we have to put a price on carbon, and within the political system, we have to put a price on denial,” Gore said at the Social Good Summit New York City.

“It is simply not acceptable for major companies to mimic the unethical strategy of the tobacco companies in presenting blatantly false information in order to protect a business model,” Gore added, alleging that’s what some oil and coal companies are doing. “There needs to be a political price for denial.”
:
He urged attendees to challenge denial of climate change in conversations in families and communities and elsewhere. “We can win this conversation and winning a conversation can make all the difference,” Gore said. “Don’t let denial go unchallenged.”

Gore noted how racism and later homophobia have become increasingly unacceptable.

He pointed to news accounts of an instance in which two gay men were subjected to anti-gay insults by another customer in line at an Ohio pizza spot.

The other people in line and the employees uniformly condemned the insult, according to reports.

Article goes on to provide a link to the Ohio/pizza/gay story, according to which…

Two gay men stopping for a late night slice of pizza in Columbus, Ohio unexpectedly received a heartwarming show of community support when confronted with a hateful tirade.

Joel Diaz and Ethan White were holding hands and waiting in line at Mikey’s Late Night Slice pizza truck last weekend when another customer told them to cut out their “gay s–t,” the pair told Huffington Post.

“I was a bit startled by his words, but I didn’t expect what happened next. Almost every single person in that line made it known to him it was not OK for him to speak to us like that,” said Diaz.

Unfazed, the man continued his homophobic rant, Diaz said.

Other customers, both gay and straight, continued to argue with the man, but it was actually the employees of the pizza truck that finally squashed the situation.
:
“The guys who work the truck stopped what they were doing and leaned towards the window and told him they would not serve him because he was spewing hate. They said they support everyone in our community and that he should get out of line because they would not be serving him,” Diaz said.

The man finally left, and moved by the incredible support from his community, Diaz posted about the experience on Facebook.

Thousands of shares later, Mikey’s Late Night Slice also chimed in saying the company can’t “tell you how proud we are of our truck workers that night for speaking up and doing the right thing.”

What fascinates me most about this is the obvious flaw in Al Gore’s comparison. The pizza thing is a classic case of “tolerance in the form of intolerance toward intolerance.” Therein lies a complex and most worthwhile debate, I think, about whether that can actually work. Maybe I’ll leave that for some other forum. Or not. But at any rate, before we disappear down that bunny trail, let us first inspect this fragile connection between crowd-shouting-down “his homophobic rant,” and doing the same thing against what the former Vice President calls “denial” against the climate change scam.

The tactic is the only connection between the two situations. That, and the lust behind it. There’s no other tie, at all. And I can say that without knowing much of anything about this “rant.” All I really know about it is that it seems to have started from the PDA, so the rant must have been about what the guy didn’t want to see in public. The hand-holding got to him. I mean, that’s what he said, according to the story. Dissent against the weird climate-change power play stuff, on the other hand, has nothing to do with that at all.

The climate-change snake oil has been sold, a lot of people aren’t buying it, because to be frank about it the sales job we’ve seen across the decades leaves a whole lot to be desired. It’s full of obvious fibs, tainted information, thoroughly corrupted peer-review processes, contradictions, institutional arrogance and other red flags. It relies on snobbery, buffoonery, selfishness and intellectual laziness; even with all that, a lot of climate change dissenters would suffice with an eyeball roll, standing quietly by on the sidelines while the alwarmists continue to hog the limelight and insist on the final word and make asses out of themselves, except for one thing. It has become clear that the outcome is likely to be determined by a shouting match, like it or not. So it doesn’t do any good to quietly mutter to oneself, “I’m on to that Al Gore guy, I’m not falling for this.”

Unknowns are being falsely characterized as knowns. While that’s going on, the alwarmists are making noises about moving money around. We’re talking huge, big money; it’s a trillion-dollar scam. Those who can see this is happening, have to get out, and speak up. Professional hysterics like Al Gore put us into that position.

In fact, if his analogy works at all, it’s people like Al Gore who are the homophobic guy because they’re the ones causing the original offense, trying to usurp unilateral control over the prevailing viewpoint. To run a successful business that employs people and has a beneficial effect on the economy, would be like the holding hands. “Cut out that gay shit” is essentially the same message, is it not, as “cut out that carbon-emitting shit”? And the skeptics are like the rest of the crowd, and the truck guys, delivering the message: Uh no, if we’re settling this by majority rule, a dubious proposition at best, you didn’t characterize that majority-rule fairly just now, and we’re here to make sure you know that.

But of course, you don’t vote on the freezing temperature of water. We don’t conclude things based on one faction deliberately and methodically eliminating from the discussion anybody who doesn’t go along — although it is nice to have Mr. Gore on record as saying, that’s how he wants to “win this conversation and winning a conversation can make all the difference.” I have often thought that the toddler-desire to win-all-arguments was at the center of this whole thing, and ice core samples and satellite radiation measurements never had anything to do with it. Now that there is proof, I’m not surprised. This isn’t climate science, it’s a behavioral disorder we’re seeing play out. Psychology has a lot more to do with it.

If there’s a hitherto undiscovered and undiagnosed disorder playing out, Popular Science magazine (via CNET) must have it. They’ve just shut down their comment section. Suzanne LaBarre, online content director, put up some explanation as to why:

…even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments (“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers’ perception of science.

If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

It’s a good argument if, and only if, her concern is limited to “trolls,” and if it is truly mistaken to have these things “up for grabs again.” But as one of my friends pointed out on the Hello Kitty of Blogging…what are we to make of it when there is a debate going on, and one side of the debate starts manipulating these control levers to shut the debate down? What are we to think?

If I had a dime for every time some pious organization said that the “science” is settled, that there is no room for debate, as if that were the period at the end of a very long sentence nobody actually remembers reading, I’d be obscenely rich by now. And then a week later, science would say, no, turns out eggs are good for you and not cholesterol-laden death.

My perspective is that nothing is settled if you can’t, or won’t, make the case for it, and then defend it against opposition. And here, “Popular Science”, which by virtue of eliminating reader comments, now has one less way to tell just how popular their “science” actually is, just pulled a “the debate is over and we’re right–no reason for further discussion” card out of the deck.
:
If I’m on the fence on a controversial issue, what am I to make of the side that shuts down debate, versus the side that wants to actually have a conversation? If global warming, for example, is such a given, then why can’t the following questions be fielded in a maturely scientific manner:

Why is the entire theory predicated on doctoring numbers (throwing scalars on top of actualized data to create the infamous “hockeystick graph” that started it all)? Or why has there been a systematic suppression of contrary evidence (Climate-Gate)? Why are the models constantly being tossed out and rebuilt to fit the current weather patterns instead of the forecasted warming projections we were told were inevitable? Why did the name change specifically from “global warming” to an amorphic “climate change,” if the underlying theories in the original models were sound and specific enough on which to base public policy? Where’s the null hypothesis, if both hot and cold weather point to the same conclusion? Why has the so-called warming trend been flat (and even inverse) in the last fifteen years? So if it’s hot, if it’s cold, or if temperatures don’t change much (are flat), then it’s all because of global warming/climate change/whatever it’s called next?

I guess I shouldn’t bother asking because it turns out we’re all too dumb to understand, or that some among us might make pejorative comments on a website that might sway others against the “settled science”. So the discussion isn’t worth having. It can’t be that what’s passing for popular science nowadays is devoid of true scientific methodology, but is instead, fueled by a tribal-driven false consensus and political expediency. No, that’s not it. We just can’t be trusted to be a part of the discussion, and I’m fine with that.

Which leads us to an overdue inspection of the idea that the alwarmists have a better command of the “science.” This was dealt a blow recently during a Q&A session with noted and outspoken alwarmist David Suzuki (via Herald Sun, via Instapundit).

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Oh, hi. Since 1998 global temperatures have been relatively flat, yet many man-made global warming advocates refuse to acknowledge this simple fact. Has man-made global warming become a new religion in itself?

TONY JONES: David, go ahead.

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah, well, I don’t know why you’re saying that. The ten hottest years on record, as I understand it, have been in this century. In fact, the warming continues. It may have slowed down but the warming continues and everybody is anticipating some kind of revelation in the next IPCC reports that are saying we got it wrong. As far as I understand, we haven’t. So where are you getting your information? I’m not a climatologist. I wait for the climatologists to tell us what they’re thinking.

TONY JONES: Do you want to respond to that, Bill?

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Sure, yeah. UAH, RSS, HadCRUT, GISS data shows a 17-year flat trend which suggests there may be something wrong with the Co2 warming theory?

DAVID SUZUKI: Sorry, yeah, what is the reference? I don’t…

BILL KOUTALIANOS: Well, they’re the main data sets that IPCC use: UAH, University of Alabama, Huntsville; GISS, Goddard Institute of Science; HadCRUT. I don’t know what that stands for, HadCRUT; and RSS, Remote Sensing something. So those data sets suggest a 17-year flat trend, which suggests there may be a problem with the Co2.

DAVID SUZUKI: No, well, there may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion. I say, let’s wait for the IPCC report to come out and see what the vast bulk of scientists who have been involved in gathering this information will tell us. You know, we can cherry pick all kinds of stuff. Cherry pick, in fact, the scientists that we want to listen to, but let’s listen to the IPCC

TONY JONES: David, this is one of the most frequently asked questions or claims made by climate sceptics: a global temperature spiked in 1998 and since then have plateaued, even though they remained at very high levels, as you said, over the 10 years.

DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah.

TONY JONES: It is a problem, isn’t it, explain that, for scientists?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, what’s the problem? I mean they’re concluding still the warming…

TONY JONES: Well, the problem is it didn’t actually get warmer when people expected it to?

DAVID SUZUKI: Well, as far as I understand it is getting warmer, so I don’t know what the disagreement is there.

There’s a lesson here. I’ve said it before but I’ll go ahead and say it again: Learning, as in changing your behavior non-instinctively as a result of getting wiser/smarter, is achieved by way of accumulating information. You don’t get smarter by removing information. You may achieve greater dexterity in determining the form and shape of the final conclusion by doing that…hence the temptation. There is a temptation there for people who already know what they want to have done, and can’t be bothered with the facts. They tend to want to get “smarter” by throwing away information, making themselves dumber. To them, it makes sense. You make a pencil sharp by removing whatever isn’t part of the “point,” right?

Their justification for throwing away information and acting as if they’re getting smarter by doing so, is that the information they’re throwing out is bad. There is some merit to this, but if that is the concern then the answer is to keep adding information. The fact that such-and-such a piece of information is bad, is in itself more information, right? This is demonstrable when you start to get quizzed about why the first piece of information was bad. As Suzuki most ably showed, when you’re asked this and you can’t answer, because you’ve been playing this little game of “it doesn’t fit my narrative so out it goes” — you don’t look very smart, and there’s a reason for that. People don’t get the feeling they’re getting any smarter by listening to you. Because they aren’t. In that situation, you have nothing to add to a real conversation.

This is the problem, I think, with the former Vice President’s advice. It’s a problem staining the entire climate-change boatload of power-mongering, media-manipulation and snotty condescension, stem to stern. Lately it’s become a constant thing — they can “win” all the arguments, provided there is nobody else participating in those arguments. I imagine that must feel pretty satisfying. It’s always fun to tell the people who disagree with you, or are merely asking unwelcome questions, begone & don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the Good Lord split ya. Winning arguments is fun! But this doesn’t bring you any closer to the truth when it’s done this way. And that matters, in ways that are actually important, to all of the rest of us.

Ignorance is ignorance. Blocking out information makes you ignorant. I know a lot of people think it’s somehow more complicated than that…but I don’t think so. I doubt that even after listening to and reading all they’ve had to say about it, which is something I notice they’re not willing to do with the arguments of others.

Al Gore’s whole point was to not let climate change denial go unchallenged. That must mean spread ignorance; David Suzuki showed how to do this, and since his knowledge is incomplete by way of stenciled selection, he was left just stammering “I don’t know where you’re getting that” over and over again. The alwarmists are constantly telling each other, and everybody else, not-to-listen to such-and-such, not-to-read such-and-such. From that, I conclude that the way Suzuki did it, is the way it’s supposed to be done: Tell everybody how to remain ignorant, and then keep doing it, over and over again.

They may think that has something to do with “science.” I have a different meaning in mind.

Buy a shotgun!

Oh cool! Thank you, Gerard. Because maybe, just maybe, this is the part where I finally have it coherently explained to me why anyone would want to have her actually running anything…

On the other hand, if that is not the case…and I’m a-thinking, maybe no…then the rule about Hillary Clinton supporters would hold firm. Show me a thousand of them, I can show you a thousand people upset and pissed off about something.

So what we would have here, then, would be a “buttery soft,” angry white wine. Suitable for sipping with with a surfeit of spoiled seafood, plump fat chicken thighs, and beltway pork. Through clenched teeth. Afterward, you can do some yelling and shatter the glass.

What difference, at this point, does it make?

Fuck it. I’m making a new rule.

You call me a racist for having a problem with His Majesty’s execrable policies, or insinuate in any way that my “real” problem is with having a black guy in the White House…

…I’m going to call you a coward for hiding behind someone else’s skin color.

Fair’s fair.

…a male monster. Sarah Hoyt, by way of Instapundit:

I have bad news. Men and women are different…
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Yes, men and women had different evolutionary pressures. There is a pattern to humanity.
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It all comes down to men hunted and women gathered. Neither work was – before I get jumped – easy or what we’d call safe, but they presented different kinds of danger and different kinds of overcoming it, which in turn led to very different group mechanics.

Men needed to trust each other absolutely; needed to know their place in the hierarchy; and allowed for innovation in the service of group success. Women, on the other hand needed to have a cohesive group, meaning you had to behave like the rest of the group. Sticking out was bad because it didn’t materially help the group…
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A while back there was a book about a woman who dressed up and passed as a man – I think it’s called Self Made Man – and the revelations she got this way. The things that “wives can’t know about husbands” type of revelations. By and large, she got me to blink and go “you didn’t know that?” or “You mean most women don’t know that?” Because I already did. But I might be a different case. As I said I grew up around my brother and his friends, and they tended to think it didn’t matter what they said in front of me. And my husband and I talk about just about everything.

BUT that said, there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this. They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so. These are the women who fight you tooth and nail on things like “Men are truly different” and “No, gender is not all ‘social construction’.”

I never understood their psychology, though I’ve been interacting with them since Kindergarten. They were the little girls who wanted to boys to admire their pretty frocks, but didn’t want to play rough lest they tore the frills, and therefore demanded that boys not be “rough” around them. (Which largely amounted to their not being boys.)
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…Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth. Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt.

Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones. It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength. Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”
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…yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters. The problem is they aren’t. Not even when they’re raised to act that way.

The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.

Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.

Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible. Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.
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Chivalry and the code thereof was the laying down of those good reproductive (and civilizational) rules that make for a functioning society that passes on its values to its young: men who put their strength at the service of the weaker; women who praised them and admired them for it; and children who were raised to do the same.

Tearing it down might seem like freedom, but you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.

Superman gets it. “…[T]hey don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.” That’s the whole situation, right there. And that’s the problem.

Apart from that, there is much upon which to be chewed here. The bit about “men and women had different evolutionary pressures” fascinates me, because I’ve often thought so. But the science that has come my way hasn’t been usefully decisive about how this kind of “wiring” could work. And we as a society are only allowed to comment on the eventual results about half the time — when it makes men properly and politically-correctly look like idiots.

Only a woman can make things work in the kitchen — good. A woman’s place is in the kitchen — that’s bad. Very, very bad. Can’t say that. Sometimes differences are good, sometimes they’re bad, if ever you’re in doubt just ask yourself if your comment would make a feminist smirk, full of haughtiness, self-righteousness, and smarmy glee churned up with just a touch of ritual righteous indignation. If it does that, then it’s “okay” to say it in mixed company, otherwise keep your dumb retrograde chauvinist monkey-face mouth shut, you sexist hater you. Notice the differences when the differences put women on top. All other times, it’s back to “pretend men are just hairy women with a different way to pee sometimes.”

Over and over again, we see reminders that women are indoors and men are outdoors. There are the fights over the thermostat, and memories of our parents having the same fights about the thermostat.

It’s late September now, and I will soon be stripped of my incentive for walking & biking & jogging early in the morning. No more sexy fellow joggers at 6 a.m. Unless, for whatever reason, you think a sexy jogger can be a dude. A sausage-fest of dudes out there, wearing things guys shouldn’t wear, displaying parts of dude-body that nobody wants to see. The girls will haul it in for the winter, taking their exercise on the machine at the gym, or in the 75-degree living room. Which is really something considering this is NorCal. An autumn sunrise hour here is not harsh climate by any reasonable measure. But every year at this time, the gender shift on the jogging trail is swift, sudden and remarkable. Chicks hate cold. We can pretend it isn’t true, but pretending is about the best we can manage. Their bodies are built to get pregnant. We guys can be well on our way to hypothermia before we’ll admit anything is amiss. Our bodies are thicker, furrier, our fathers were far quicker to tell us something unsympathetic like “put on a damn sweater,” and because of the pregnancy thing, the sensation of cold involves different connotations for us. Besides of which there’s always that male-denial thing.

Every four years we see a voting disparity, also impossible to ignore. That isn’t because dudes-is-racist. That, as we have been reminded even in recent years, is the security-versus-freedom thing. And why should we criticize one side of that divide or the other, really, when you think about it. If you’re personally caring for a small child for a good chunk of your days and nights, it makes perfect sense to value security over opportunity. If men and women can indeed evolve on separate tracks, then it stands to reason women would look at such issues differently, even the women who’ve decided they’d rather have a career than a family.

I’m wishing Ms. Hoyt did not choose to put the following inside the parentheses…

[T]hey nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones. It’s nuttiness…

That is the tip of a tail of a very, very large dinosaur skeleton, worthy of study over every corner of every bone, every rib, every tooth and claw. Feminism, today, is an unworkable contradiction: It seeks to assert doctrinaire beliefs about personal characteristics, while at the same time seeking to obliterate those very characteristics. They seek to render meaningless the gender divide, even though the gender divide is the cornerstone of every argument they have to make. And you see this conflict in everything they do. If a feminist plays miniature golf, or Tetris, or Monopoly, or Poker, or Risk, and there is a way to play the next move that is somehow anti-gender-identity, then that is how she will want to play it. It’s fascinating to watch. And a little bit embarrassing, if you can feel embarrassment for the object of your study, by proxy.

Finally, “you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.” Excellent. Stealing that one, shamelessly and probably soon.

Tech loudmouths complaining about their first-world problems, fall into a trap.

Great stuff.

“All of yesterday’s confusion in reporting — it’s not a mistake!…This is deliberate. The chaos, the vomit onto the screen, the very thing we thought news organizations were created to clarify…is a feature, not a bug.”

Once again, we see democrats are willing to negotiate with those whose interests are different from America’s, but not with those whose interests are different from their political party.

This is important, because in these times, being on the political left has a lot to do with kicking people out of the meeting room. No use talking with so-and-so, waste of time arguing with such-and-such, can’t discuss this with anybody who doesn’t agree to [whatever].

Many’s the time, talking to leftists, I’ve gathered the impression they really haven’t got anything else to say. It often boils down to “When do we get to the fun part, where everyone in the room agrees with me…and I’ve just figured out we won’t get there until you leave the room.”

So since so much of their so-called “arguing” has to do with defenestrating the arguers they don’t like, it’s worthy of note when we spot these patterns that show who does & doesn’t make the cut.

GOPUsa. Regarding the Navy yard shooting, and Piers Morgan making an ass out of himself about it:

The question is… why? Why promote “gun free” zones when ANYONE, even a liberal, would know that it means the only person who will have a gun is the bad guy. Why make American society into one big pond of sitting ducks?
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It seems like liberals want to feel good about themselves regardless of the consequences. Did it ever occur to them that creating an atmosphere in which one race (any race) can feel like they can do anything and the media and politicians will be on their side could have devastating consequences?
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The mind of a liberal is almost impossible to understand. They are so bent on making themselves feel good, but they pay little attention to the people they say they are helping. If you can figure them out, you are certainly smarter than I am.

I don’t think we can lump them all together. Theirs is an ideology built on deception, and where you have deception you must necessarily have deceivers and deceived people. Where you have those, you have different factions of people toiling away working toward different goals, with different priorities. At least two sets; two at the very least. Were they truly unified, there wouldn’t be any need for deception.

In the comments, I thought JDZ brought up a great point:

One obvious difference between a conservative and a liberal is how they approach budget management, and to show the effects of these differences, just compare the fiscal sta[t]us of a Republican controlled state or city to a Democrat controlled state or city. Every conservative state has their finances under control or improving whereas most liberal run states are sliding even more into growing budget deficits with higher taxes and fees in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
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The liberal mindset seems to feed on political correctness and social justice as the focus of human life while conservatives embrace the whole spectrum of human life with individual freedom and responsibility being a fundamental premise in their lives. Conservatives are more pragmatic and fully embrace the basic thought that the individual most create an independent life for themselves through our free enterprise American [capitalistic] system whereas liberals embrace socialism and a lower standard of living built around a nannystate government providing more and more welfare like government subsidies for more and more people. The connection between “makers” and “takers” seems to be missing in the liberal mindset. They fail to acknowledge that for millions of people to be living off of government handouts (takers), the government has to confiscate earnings of taxpayers (makers) and that this dynamic is a destructive dynamic when unbounded through unreasonableness, and is the core reason fr the failure of socialism across the history of the world.

Liberals have a strange view of time; time is the T in the S.T.A.C.I. quintet of reasons why liberal ideas always turn out to be wrong. Any honest inspection of these conservative vs. liberal states & counties, is going to eventually conclude that the difference has to do with looking down the road. Conservatives do and liberals don’t. A great example of this is the bill our Gov. is about to sign raising the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour. There are many other examples, but let’s just look at that one. Who, in their heart of hearts, thinks this won’t raise the price of goods & services, and drive businesses out of the state. Who? I’m sure you can find some liberals who will mouth or write some words about “making the economy better for the least among us” and so forth, but you’d never get them to actually bet anything on it. What they’re doing by arguing this all has to do with looking good in the moment. Winning the argument. That’s the eminent trend: Winning the argument and looking good, to other liberals, as opposed to acting toward the realization and ultimate fulfillment of long-term goals.

I’m sorry. When, exactly, does this start to become something resembling a good idea?

I seem to have lost track…

It has four years of dust on it and I just discovered it. But it’s most convincing:

Zack fits squarely into eight of the fourteen categories. Zack is obviously single and white. We also know that he is exceedingly bright as evidenced by the fact that he scored a 1502 on the SAT without even trying. Furthermore, despite the fact that Zack is vastly intelligent – even more so than SBTB “brains” Jessie and Screech – the series constantly references Zack’s poor performance in school. In addition, Zack’s family is clearly unstable. His parents have little involvement in his life and rarely appear in the series. Furthermore, Zack’s father Derrick Morris is almost wholly absent. For example, in the episode “Rent-a-Pop,” Zack’s father will only pay attention to him if Zack calls him on a cell phone. Zack also has trouble trusting his parents, or any other adults for that matter. Even more troubling, the only animals ever left in Zack’s care during the series – Becky the Duck and Artie the Lizard – ended up dead.

Markedly, Zack demonstrates an intense interest in voyeurism and mind control. In the early episode “Fatal Distraction,” Zack and Screech bug the girls’ sleepover party in order to find out who Kelly is going to take to the dance. Later, in the episode “Jessie’s Song,” Zack has Screech dress up as a cleaning lady so he can record the girls singing in the locker room. Finally, in the episode “The Zack Tapes,” Zack uses subliminal messages in a cassette tape so that Kelly will date him. These are not the healthy pastimes of a normal child.

It’s about this. You did watch it, didn’t you?

John Fund, writing in National Review:

Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has demanded a floor vote on his bill to end an exemption that members of Congress and their staffs are slated to get that will make them the only participants in the new Obamacare exchanges to receive generous subsidies from their employer to pay for their health insurance. Angry Senate Democrats have drafted legislation that dredges up a 2007 prostitution scandal involving Vitter. The confrontation is a perfect illustration of just how wide the gulf in attitudes is between the Beltway and the rest of the country — and how viciously Capitol Hill denizens will fight for their privileges.

In 1995, the newly elected Republican Congress passed a Congressional Accountability Act to fulfill a promise made the previous year in the Contract with America. For the first time, the Act applied to Congress the same civil-rights employment and labor laws that lawmakers had required everyday citizens to abide by. With some lapses, it’s worked well to defuse public outrage about “one law for thee, one law for me” congressional behavior.

In 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) decided that the principle deserved to be embedded in Obamacare, and he was able to insert a provision requiring all members of Congress and their staffs to get insurance through the Obamacare health exchanges. “The more that Congress experiences the laws it passes, the better,” said Grassley. Although his amendment was watered down before final passage to exclude committee staff, it still applies to members of Congress and their personal staffs. Most employment lawyers interpreted that to mean that the taxpayer-funded federal health-insurance subsidies dispensed to those on Congress’s payroll — which now range from $5,000 to $11,000 a year — would have to end.

Democratic and Republican staffers alike were furious, warning that Congress faced a “brain drain” if the provision stuck. Under behind-the-scenes pressure from members of Congress in both parties, President Obama used the quiet of the August recess to personally order the Office of Personnel Management, which supervises federal employment issues, to interpret the law so as to retain the generous congressional benefits.

OPM had previously balked at issuing such a ruling. Even without OPM, Congress could have voted to restore the subsidies or ordered a salary raise to compensate for the loss of benefits, but that would have been a messy, public process, which everyone wanted to avoid.
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What Vitter’s opponents fear most is that this fight will penetrate the public’s consciousness. A new poll taken for Independent Women’s Voice, a conservative group, found that 92 percent of voters think Congress shouldn’t be exempted from the insurance provisions of Obamacare. Most voters blame both parties equally for the exemption, which means Republicans will also be hurt politically if it stands. “This is an issue with almost unprecedented intensity,” IWV president Heather Higgins told me. “Republicans have the choice of leading the Vitter parade for repeal or getting run over by it. To duck it will be viewed by their constituents as political malpractice.”

They do fight hard for the perks, don’t they.

Burt Folsom draws from the wellspring that is the wisdom of Abigail Adams, in explaining “Why America is an Exceptional Nation”:

We fought a war for independence to preserve the liberty we were enjoying. Robert Morris, the man George Washington called “the financier of the Revolution”, was from England. He migrated to America, fell in love with his adopted country, and fought to see it emerge as a new nation.

Years later, at the Alamo, several Mexicans died with the Texans because liberty brought them there, and they were willing to die for freedom and Texas rather than live under a dictator in Mexico. So it has been with millions of immigrants who have come to this exceptional nation. We were not built on conquest, on power, or on domination, but on the idea that a free people, under God, can govern themselves and enjoy the blessings of liberty.

John Winthrop, the Puritan governor who came to Massachusetts, said, “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” We were in an experiment in liberty and in obedience to God, which would make us an exception to what was happening everywhere else in the world.

Abigail Adams, wife of one president and the mother of another, wrote to young John Quincy Adams when he was resisting the work his family was doing to secure independence from the British. “These are the times in which genius would wish to live,” she wrote. “It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”