The title of this particular post, is a precise summary of the most grave threat facing this country right now. Mark Steyn said it best, though: Reality doesn’t need to take 270 electoral votes. We essentially just got done voting on whether or not the bridge is out ahead.

Credit to our friend in New Mexico for finding the latest of Mr. Ramirez’ wonderful work.

Mark Steyn writes in National Review. We’re a bit late to the party on this one, but our primary purpose in posting is to link back, in the future. With sadness.

In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan” deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again. Harry Reid has already announced that he wants to raise the debt ceiling — or, more accurately, lower the debt abyss — by $2.4 trillion before the end of the year, and no doubt we can look forward to a spectacular “bipartisan” agreement on that, too. It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months. Forward!
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Reality doesn’t need to crack 270 in the Electoral College. Reality can get 1.3 percent of the popular vote and still trump everything else. In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet — whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese — who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return.
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Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

By way of Town Hall.

Yay. Now, what am I supposed to do, exactly?

I guess I could break form and point out only a part of something, leaving the rest of it to be pondered. This blog could very easily have been named “House of Socrates” or “House of Plato” or “House of Pericles” or what-not…lots of egghead white guys running around in those white robes back in the day. Why Eratosthenes and not Aristotle or Archimedes?

There is the matter of his specific experiment of which we are especially fond…but there is also his “business card.” Being a smart guy in Athens engaging in this structured debate with syllogisms and assertions and rebuttals and what-not, was not his primary gig. His day job was as the administrator of the library at Alexandria…and his annual performance review was not influenced toward the positive or toward the negative, even so much as a smidgen, by his understanding of whether the Earth was this size or that size.

What’s that say about you, and your understanding of the world, versus the demands of your day job? I’ll leave the rest of that up to the reader.

My soon to be wife has a gift for thinking in rugged, non-linear, non-feminine ways on occasion. Somehow we were babbling away about Star Trek, not sure why. We may have meandered to the subject because of Sonic Charmer’s observation that Captain Kirk evidently incinerated the Enterprise and everybody on it at the end of The Undiscovered Country. The visual evidence seems to back this up, in spite of the fact that Kirk and Scotty were seen at the beginning of Generations, and Spock and McCoy made appearances on The Next Generation.

Deductive reasoning then makes it clear to us what happened: Those four made off with a shuttlecraft, bailing on the Enterprise-A while poor Chekov, Uhura and the rest of the crew were vaporized in an agonizing death, as they zipped off somewhere in the general opposite direction. Probably laughing maniacally as they did so. With the exception of Spock, of course, who was simply doing the logical thing.

But seriously, here is the observation: You have this United Federation of Planets which is dedicated to “…the principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality…” From over seven hundred television episodes and eleven movies, we are not left with much question about how this part of it works. And, true to the founding vision of the franchise, this is merely a continuation of a long-standing trend, which our left-wing fellows consider themselves to be working hard to continue, in which societies become more unified and egalitarian over time. Captains outrank ensigns and admirals outrank captains, but when it comes to justice, liberty and universal human rights, all are equally entitled. Presumably, the same holds for distribution of limited supplies of life-sustaining resources, and presumably such conflicts arise very rarely because technology has removed shortages.

Therein lies the problem: Technology’s victory over the concept of shortage, is so complete that they have “food replicators.” Now think on that term “universal.” It doesn’t apply because not everybody is in the UFP. The Prime Directive makes it very plain that some people are to be kept out.

The litmus test, as we saw in First Contact, is whether the civilization has developed warp drive. There’s evidently a presumption in place that once this level of technology is reached, interstellar travel becomes an inevitability and the indigenous peoples are going to run around and meet everybody else anyway, so why not stop off and introduce yourselves? That particular film, for those who’ve not seen it, ends with a Vulcan crew doing exactly that in the middle of Montana somewhere. Possibilities exist that perhaps the Vulcans are renegades who don’t care about rules, or perhaps they are committing an infraction against a rule that will not exist for another century or so. (I’m ignoring those because the central thread of suspense in this movie is that the Vulcans can’t & won’t land, and First Contact won’t happen, until the warp-drive flight is accomplished; so that seems like the proper way to go.)

Okay so look what you’ve got going on here. We have these alien civilizations who are toiling away within a vast array of positions on this one-dimensional technological spectrum. Some have only just recently begun walking upright, and must risk life and limb to gather meat and berries so they don’t starve to death. Once they get to the point where they can climb into these big ships and travel faster than the speed of light, they can be invited to join the Federation. Within my understanding of all these hundreds of episodes, which is only a fraction of what’s been produced, never once has the situation been confronted in which such an invitation is extended and then refused. Perhaps someone can enlighten me in the comments…but if I’m right about that, this might be proper because, hey, food replicators. Why would anyone say no? But here’s my fiance’s point: Within the known universe you’ve got these Federation-member civilizations who can have baby back ribs or marshmallow sundaes on a whim, and then you have these savages wallowing around in their own waste clubbing each other over the head. And, one might fairly presume, elevated religious mystics telling women they can’t have abortions? What would the progressive Star Trek producers think of that? Anyway…doesn’t seem like universal equality to me.

There is another problem with these Vulcans telling one another “hey, woudja look at that they got warp drive down there, let’s go introduce ourselves.” Would it work that way? Really? Because in 2012 on Earth, we’ve already been busily at work using technology to obviate shortage issues for quite some time, along with making our societies more fair and egalitarian; we’re several centuries into it and it’s fair to say we have a good understanding of how the journey works, although we’ve yet to reach the destinations discussed. Based on what we have learned up to this date, it seems safe to conclude it wouldn’t work quite like this. The Vulcans would have to record their observations and submit an application to some centralized construct of bureaucracy and wait for approval to introduce themselves. This centralized bureaucracy, then, or some localized representative of their central wisdom, would then comb over the application looking for trivial anomalies or flaws that they could use as a pretext for rejecting it. Which they would have every incentive to do, because they’d be bureaucrats, motivated toward reducing their own pile of work. Failing that, they would then reconcile this application with some ever-sprawling mass of “easy to stop, hard to go” regulation such as environmental impact, access for the handicapped, et al, which would take some extended period of time. If they still couldn’t find a way to clog things up, they’d summon the Vulcans back to the home planet and put together a “panel” of distinguished representatives, call them “ambassadors” or “emissaries” I suppose, who would then be presumed to possess the requisite skills in diplomacy and wisdom to get the introduction done the right way. Since you Vulcan starship people are all just a bunch of, ya know, shipping-lane people or whatever. Quite logical in your own way since you’re Vulcans and all. But still, just freight crew. Can’t have these first-contact things left up to just any ol’ folks. First thing a bureaucracy does is put the bureaucrats in charge, by tying the hands of the non-bureaucrats. Anyone who doesn’t know that, has never seen one in action.

The funny thing is, I cannot claim that this last realization of mine is entirely outside the community of Star Trek writers/producers. How many stories and arcs are out there that have made it all the way to the little- or big-screen, about the plucky and cocksure “Starfleet officer” who saw what needed doing & went ahead and did it, in defiance of his “orders” from the central bureaucracy. Dozens, maybe hundreds! The defiance was regretful, or thumb-your-nose brazen, but there was no mistaking the common lesson: Local control is better. These are not even bad Star Trek episodes, contradictory as they may be against the United-Nations-inspired founding vision. The episode in which the parasites started taking over the Federation by burrowing their way into the Starfleet officer’s bodies, ranks as one of my all-time favorites.

I suppose some of this is the price to be paid for having lots of writers from a diverse selection of backgrounds, collaborating on a common franchise over the course of half a century, and collaborating only loosely. But I believe some of this conflict is inextricably connected to the problem with the vision. “Universal equality” is a pipe dream, a dream that cannot be realized, and all who take umbrage at that that can be adequately answered with this simple truism: Those who dream the dream most ardently are the first to abandon it. It doesn’t even taken them forty-five years or seven hundred episodes to do it. Just by fleshing in the details of their fantasy, they reject it in the blink of an eye.

I would not discuss it in terms quite so flattering, but this is how it works.

This fifty-ninth new word I’ve invented, is probably the most important of all of them. It refers to something that is dominating our lives. And probably in a bad way.

Teshmology (n.)

The Morgan K. Freeberg rule of technology is, and has always been, that it is the opposite of doing things the same way some other guy is already doing them (or viewed from a slightly different perspective, the opposite of doing the same things). It is the opposite of emulating others. The popular misconception is that “technology” is anything new; well, Teshmology would be whatever qualifies for the latter but relies on this emulation of others. It is new stuff that other people are already doing — but is still trendy. It is different from what we saw in years past but identical to what we’ve been seeing over & over again lately. It is, you might say, a new dance step.

As a personal possession, it is hard evidence that you have opened up your wallet sometime in the last year or two. It makes you cool. It shows you are capable of taking in new information…but imposes a very low bar for this…it shows you have taken in this new information about consumer products and services available to you, sometime within that last year or two. But while it proves there was some money spent, it doesn’t say anything about real creativity. It doesn’t have anything to it that is genuinely new. As in, original.

I thought of this reading Neo-Neocon‘s analysis of why the elections went the way they did. It is one of the very few analyses that make any sense, from what I can see. I’m not sure what to make of point #3 quite yet. Polling is an exercise in evolution within what amounts to a guessing game; by which I mean, they evolve well, then badly, then well again…while lessons are “learned.” This time, the stopped clock happened to be right about what time it is, so there’s not much learning to be done. But that isn’t really the question people are asking when the election is still in the future, what they’re asking is different. How are these battleground states going to shape up, insofar as one candidate will have >=270 electoral votes and one will not? My side got creamed here but it still looks like a guessing game to me.

But #1 and #2 are very well thought out and this deserves more emphasis. The Obama campaign did a better job of communicating and the Republicans need to realize it. Also, people who do not have reason to think they’ve got their “finger on the pulse” of anything — most especially, people who have learned they don’t — need to shut up when the subject has something to do with what other people are going to do. And I most certainly will. I will confine my comments to what I know about it, acknowledging that the vastly greater part of the information there, is stuff I have yet to learn.

What I have learned, thus far, is this: Anybody who sympathizes with the Republican side, especially if they have influence on how these lessons are going to be applied over there, needs to be very careful with this other word “communicate,” as in “Obama proved He is better at communicating with voters.” There is a temptation here to think of it as simply conveying information. That is not what Obama has been doing.

The line between this “sober” technology and the softer, drunk-talking teshmology that has to do with emulating what others are doing, is vanishing before our very eyes. Sometime in the last twenty years, it has emerged that even where technology is built and new things have to be invented, therefore it is proven that new things will have to be done, creativity doesn’t really help a whole lot. The possibility exists that perhaps we have outgrown it entirely. We still come up with new ideas now and then, but the ones that are brought to fruition seem to be hatched in a conference room somewhere, with very poor definition involved as to what individual came up with the idea, and not much of any hard requirement in place to arrange some proving ground, to demonstrate in scientific terms that this was the best idea to be chosen out of a line-up of other candidates. It is that process of selection from a line-up of possible new ideas, where the damage has been taking place. It seems we do it by “feel” now, grounded largely in a sense of what others are going to “feel” about it. There is an embarrassing lack of logical foundation for these selections in the wake. For example, with Obama’s re-election. This will fix what? Who can say? Anywhere?

I also notice, in the aftermath, that we seem pretty sure of ourselves that this was the “best” idea and our expectations aren’t terribly high in this assessment. If we’re still treading water, if meeting the larger objective was not a complete disaster, then that must have been the “best” idea. Sometimes, even if the whole thing is a flop. That one critical choice made, nah, that couldn’t have been it…must have been something else. Isn’t Mitt Romney’s nomination a good example of this? We’re doing it again, Republicans functioning as a meaningful emblem of what is going on across society. They’ll line up on two sides of the question, some saying “Romney jinxed this thing” and others saying “no he didn’t,” they’ll have a voice vote about it, and one side might “win.” It seems we have lost the ability to decide anything any other way.

I have personal reasons for being biased against teshmology. But, intellectually as well, struggle as I might, I can’t see anything good about it. There are benefits to our learning how to work together and communicate with each other on common ground, but that is not what this is. I would say this is like the rust, to the water that is that beneficial working-together thing (in which, by the way, I’ll take note that we don’t seem to be doing that terribly well either). This thing is rust because it is a solvent, it is an oxidization problem, one that eats away at the ferrous structure upon which we depend, the scaffolding that holds us up off the ground.

Had this weird dream last night I was visiting one person I knew, and from their house I had to make a quick phone call to another, about some matter completely unrelated. And they both ended up engaging in pointless, off-topic, cyclical anti-Bush screeds. Here I was getting it at the same time from two directions, and I didn’t care one way or the other.

Perhaps this dream was inspired by the endless hubbub about “Republicans lost the election because…” from which one melodious refrain has emerged, sung to the tune of “…they didn’t adequately distinguish their policies from George W. Bush.” Now, I’m not in the Bush-hating crowd, although like many others who are not, I cannot say I agreed with everything he did. Among the complaints I’ve had about him in fact, just speaking for myself, is a complaint shared by those who’d like to turn him into a pinata and whack him with a bat. Many litanies have been strung together and then repeated endlessly, with rhythm, as if six to eight words were really just one. Listening to them and pondering them, one sees they all come back to a central salient point that George W. Bush has “friends,” and some of his policies seem to be cobbled together to service the financial interests of those friends as a primary purpose, without regard to, or to the detriment of, the country as a whole. There may or may not be truth to this, but it does find some sympathy with me. It’s true of the too-big-to-fail thing, if nothing else.

As far as a reason to single out one politician away from the rest for special criticism, however, it makes no sense at all. In fact, it’s just dumb. This is practically the definition of “politician” is it not? I’m not pushing for the bar to be lowered, that would be a dreadful thing, all I’m pointing out is that things are the way they are. Our politicians have friends and they tend to do friendly things for those friends while the rest of us go “Wha??” George W. Bush wasn’t the first and he hasn’t been the last.

Over the years I have noticed something about Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers: They have shown a persistent tendency to think about things in binary terms. Something can be good, or if it is not, then it is bad. A person can be in, and if he is not, then he must be out. If some course of action has their approval, then they seem to lose track of the reason why; there is no risk involved in engaging it, no side effects to be anticipated, no liabilities involved in choosing it. From all I have been able to observe about them, they are living out their entire lives in the fallacy of the excluded middle. And this strikes me as strange since, thinking back to 2004, hey wasn’t that one of the biggest complaints they had about the man himself? Lack of “nuanced” thinking or some such? Eight years on, I never hear that word “nuance.” I mean, I knew at the time it was a campaign slogan, I just kind of figured there might be more to it than that. Guess I thought wrong, because the Bush haters are showing us lack-of-nuance better than anybody else I’ve seen…

But anyway, I’m not sure Mitt Romney had a problem failing to differentiate himself from George W. Bush. Maybe that’s a race thing? Bush and Romney are Republicans, white, male, rich…beyond that, what do they have in common. I recall a popular Bush-hating theme going around that said Bush had been associated with a lot of business failure or something? Romney didn’t have that going on.

A lot of the people who are most unhappy with Bush, seem to get a thrill out of being unhappy with things in general. Have we ever pondered what it would take to make them happy? Since they’re binary thinkers and they are currently in a frame of mind in which “bad” is essentially defined as resembling George W. Bush, I imagine the thing that would really get their all-in would be something that is the polar opposite of George W. Bush. Barack Obama gives that a good start with the darker skin and the non-swagger walk-jog thing, and the Il Duce Easter Island unnatural head angle…

Obama’s position on gay marriage is opposite as well, but of course that was not always so.

They both have dirty hands with the bank bailout boondoggle, so this anti-Bush guy would have been opposed to it.

Let the embryonic stem cell research churn away, let Saddam Hussein built up a big arsenal of weapons, possibly provide a safe haven for terrorists…maybe not, but definitely allow Hussein to do, like, whatever man. Until there’s another attack in New York, or Miami, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. His critics might say he could have prevented the attack by going after the terrorists’ support network…and he’d say “Yeah but Saddam Hussein never directly attacked us,” which I’m sure would be comforting to the people who once lived where nothing remains but a deep smoking crater.

The anti-Bush would veto some bills sent from Congress for spending, insisting on some items being cut. Okay, yeah, that part I like.

Since Barack Obama would complain about inheriting a mess no matter what, go ahead and let the credit rating fall; that would be the opposite of the George W. Bush we knew. Also, unemployment rate under this opposite-of-Bush would be somewhere around nineteen percent, maybe higher than that. With gas somewhere around eight fifty a gallon I figure.

No, I’m not talking about cause and effect here, I’m just trying to define the opposite of Bush.

There would be no “axis of evil” and there would be nothing said about Hussein trying to find Uranium in Africa. I’m not sure how such a reverse-Bush president go about proving a negative, and I’m not sure how he would respond to the Butler Report, but he’d still be a politician, I’m sure he’d find a way.

He’d certainly be an atheist. He’d still be drinking, I suppose.

He’d cut humanitarian aid to Africa. Medicare benefits too. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac thing, the anti-Bush wouldn’t have done anything to try to warn Congress, he would have just let it happen. Same end results, I suppose, although possibly a bit quicker. And worse.

I’m not sure of the message that would be sent if a band of terrorists flew our own passenger jets into our buildings, and President Not Bush refused to take any action in response to this. That’s an interesting alternative-universe historical question to ponder. Maybe with the Benghazi thing happening on the eleventh anniversary, we’re about to find out.

The anti-Bush would raise taxes across the board. He’d raise the estate taxes and the marriage tax.

His two daughters would be butt ugly.

He’d appoint the opposite of Sam Alito and the opposite of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. I’m not sure how the opposite of Chief Justice Roberts would have ruled on ObamaCare. Let’s see…in this universe, it would be unconstitutional if it was a penalty, but it’s constitutional if it’s a tax…so in that one…???? There’s a problem in my mental exercise here, because Roberts’ opinion doesn’t fit in a binary brain. Let’s just say the anti-Bush nominates Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street to the Supreme Court and leave it at that.

His smile would be perfectly straight.

He would cut NASA’s budget.

He would support the Kyoto Protocol. I suppose that means He’d try to get the Senate to vote on it again.

He would oppose capital punishment but support euthanasia.

And with that in mind, the bit-brains can think on it and figure out which one they’d like better. All in all, although the results are mixed for me, I’m happier with the one we had.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Brutally Honest.

Update: Schedule today does not permit an exhaustive ritual of linkage. But I do know of one that is worthy if nothing else is, take the time to read if you haven’t already:

“Like most of the other names carved into the stone it’s up there very high. You can see it, but you can’t touch it. I don’t care who you are, you’re not that tall.”

After every election, the divided and the not-so-divided, there’s always some kind of tempest in a teapot about who has a mandate, and what it is. We don’t have “contemplation” about it and we don’t have “musing” about it, because those terms would imply uncertainty, and there never is any. There is only conflict. But everybody’s mind is completely made up about it, and always the same way.

President Obama says His mandate is to raise taxes.

Also, if anybody had plans about preventing the coming economic apocalypse by hiding the President’s pen from Him, I guess that’s out. Darn.

But The American People want taxes to go up for the people who actually provide the jobs we say we all want. Hmmmm…well, about that. It is true that here and there, as Obama ran for a second term He said a lot of stuff about making the rich pay their fair share. He’s said a whole lot of stuff. Now if we’re looking for an honest and reliable interpretation of a mandate, without having our perceptions of it colored by anybody’s preconceived or biased agenda of what they want done on any given day…the thing we need to do is answer a question as objectively as possible, taking into account that the American electorate has the capacity to come together on only a tiny number of issues compared to the dozens and dozens we actually discuss. Question: What are the two or three objectives with which President Obama most closely identified Himself, during those times in the campaign in which He was most worried about winning votes from the mainstream?

Because I think everyone would agree — winning votes from the base is not a mandate. The base wants the same things it always wants, that’s why it’s a base. So this would not be helpful in any given year, in figuring out what the mandate is going to be.

What did Obama do to acquire, and retain, fidelity from the independents, centrists, the all-important “swing voters.” Answer that, and you have your mandate. Well, huh. It seems first & foremost, President Obama has a mandate to make sure women are not compressed into a physically compact and uniform size and then stored in ring binders. I agree that this would be important, although I’m not sure I’ve heard of it actually being done anywhere. Some women are pretty big and would require more compression than others…but I’m going to take it as a given that, for the time being at least, that job’s done. After that objective has been met, He should make sure Big Bird isn’t going away. I’m really not sure about raising taxes to pay down the deficit, or raising taxes to do anything to keep the government’s financial house in order. I would say He, in the White House, has a mandate to keep putting the hurt on those terrible awful rich people, and once such efforts reach the House of Representatives, they have a mandate to kill them off before they go any further. Since the entire House is up for re-election every two years ya know, and if The American People wanted Obama to do whatever He wanted without any tests or obstructions in place, I have to think they would’ve made sure that happened, and that’s not what they did.

There was a power shift in the Senate, of two seats, toward the democrats. Only a third of the Senate is up for re-election at any given time, so it’s hard to effect a shift of two seats there. That might mean something. But on inspection, we see this has to do with the “Hey, I think I’ll say something stupid about rape and abortion” thing, so I think the “mandate” might be that senators who are facing election should not say dumb things. That, and perhaps overly-sensitive humorless women have a likelihood for destroying the country by voting in senators who do not have the country’s interests at heart?

Scott Brown was defeated in Massachusetts, so mandate: Fabricating your Cherokee Indian heritage is perfectly fine. What, was there some other issue? Was ObamaCare being discussed as feverishly and as frequently as it was when, y’know, Brown was elected in the first place?

I do see a mandate for more women who are obnoxious and unpleasant, whom sane men do not want to see naked. But that is only by way of inductive reasoning, by analyzing a pattern and figuring out what it might mean (although the pattern is unmistakable). As far as what was specifically stated, I’m seeing a massive cacophony of stupid stuff, especially with regard to the President Himself. People don’t like “Romnesia,” and/or they don’t want women to be kept in binders, and/or Sesame Street. Also, having the Vice President behave like the drunk uncle you’re sorry you invited over for Thanksgiving, is a huge plus. That’s the President’s mandate.

In other words, there is a penalty to be paid for using cheap gimmicks to sway low-information voters. If that really is how you pull off a re-election, and you want to prance around afterward talking up how clever You are for figuring out that this is what America’s voters really want to see, and your advisors are all geniuses for helping You pull off this victory in the wake of a devastating midterm defeat; then these fibrous, hairy strands of lint trap detritus become your “mandate” because when push came to shove, that’s really what dragged You across the finish line isn’t it? And isn’t that how we define it? Isn’t that the only test that really matters?

You know, President Obama really has me thinking here: How often was His name mentioned in those House races? How often was ObamaCare mentioned in those House races? Not an infrequent occurrence, I’ll bet. Something to be pondered as we busy ourselves with figuring out the “mandate” from the election. It’s too late to do anything about ObamaCare, but we still have a President named Obama who seems to define “compromise” as “finding out what I want and then doing it.” So that part of it, at least, is relevant: Republican House members ran for re-election saying “keep me in, in case Obama is re-elected” — and they won their seats. Perhaps as those races are inspected on a case-by-case basis, some data will emerge that will create problems for that. But I doubt it.

It’s dated October 19. Absolutely worthless today, except for one thing: She gets it, and she’s thirteen. Sharp as a tack, to be sure, and you might protest that she comes from a Republican family and has been indoctrinated. I’m inclined to say there may be some truth there.

But it doesn’t matter, for it is plain to see she knows what she’s talking about. There are those who will toss up some stuff & nonsense to try to distract from her points; some are paid handsomely to do so, others are not. The question that arises, once again, is what does that say about the ones who are not? They’re engaging in the confusion and obfuscation, for free, that others are well-paid to engage; and, they fail to understand things a thirteen-year-old understands…

Cause:

Effect:

Those two graphics tell the entire story.

I’m listening to Herman Cain chew the fat with Neal Boortz, and the two are attributing to Armstrong Williams a wonderful and pithy quote: Suffering is a great teacher. I listened to this guy on the radio some twenty years ago and since then, I’ve failed to find any access to him. Best source I can find for a link on this quote, is here, which went up the day after the disaster. And I find some other beauties there:

This represents a national repudiation of reality: we have tossed out the doctor because we don’t like his prognosis.

The spending addict does not want an intervention; he wants more spending, no matter what.
:
It is apparently extreme now to balance a budget, to stay out of people’s lives, and respect tradition. Obama almost ran the table with swing states: it was a landslide.
:
I am not confident that the Republican Party can win national elections anymore.

I have to disagree on that last one. Suffering is a great teacher, isn’t it? I’ve already observed many times before, and I’m a bit short on time at the moment to go hunting around for links, but…people have a tendency to abjure themselves from truth and reason for however long they feel they can afford to do so. That really is just a more loquacious version of “suffering is a great teacher.”

In economics, the biggest concern I have is the same as everybody else’s: being, and remaining, gainfully employed during this coming massive onslaught of layoffs. In politics, where things are pretty much entirely out of my hands, I have feelings of actual dread — now that the two Davids, Axelrod and Plough, are sagely geniuses the whole landscape is about to be re-formed, re-planted and re-shaped to appeal to the low-information voter. This would be an enormous mistake. Show me ten low-information voters, and I can show you maybe one or two long-term low-information voters, probably no more than that. That elite sampling, of course, is going to be disproportionately likely to have entered Google query referenced at the top of this post on November 6th. They cannot be reached. Nobody should try. The remainder of them can be reached, but not actively, only passively. Suffering is a great teacher. They simply haven’t been taught enough. That second graphic is a great introductory course to the lesson, which teaches us:

• Uh no, the President cannot do anything magical to make our economy more better overnight;
• But the President certainly can do some things to screw it all up.

The big takeaway in the debacle involving the low-information voter is that such a voter, by his very nature, is going to be the very last among us to figure out that the policies are not working. President Obama already had the bedrock support of Mitt Romney’s forty-seven percent, who are endlessly opinionated about where the pork chops should be sent from the government’s barrel, and who should be obliged to fill it back up again, while they themselves aren’t putting anything in. But 47 is less than 50. To drag Obama across the finish line, you needed some “swing” voters who don’t know a damn thing, and can be told something only with great difficulty.

My concern is that this fine art of telling them things, is about to be elevated to a prestigious and coveted art form. Swinging a billion-dollar presidential election is no small thing. This is like an alternative language, a language that is about to become dominant because it is so cherished and decides so much. We are about to switch the dominant language to something that nobody, not even the speakers of it themselves, actually understands.

That would be an even bigger disaster than re-electing Obama.

Since Wednesday morning I’ve been privileged to watch all sorts of pundits and columnists talk down to the “Paul Ryan” crowd, preaching to them, condescending to them, scolding them, for getting overly wonky. “You’re the reason Romney lost” and “people don’t care about that” and all that…I’m sure it feels good to say that. It makes you look like you’re among this narrow band of cunning linguists who can babble away with this fake-out nonsense, therefore you should be elevated to a position of greater power. You get to strut around and feel victorious, like the pigeon on the chessboard. But, problem: This is the only benefit to be enjoyed from it. Ever. The spoils are political only, limited to whatever victories are to be enjoyed from commiserating with other people. Who are idiots. Which can be considerable when you’re participating in an election, but we aren’t supposed to spend our entire lives in elections. There is reality in which we live, and that technique doesn’t net us anything from it.

I guess my point is that if the candidate is found who can appeal to these low-information voters better than President Obama can, that candidate would be just another Obama. Such a candidate might have the letter R after his name, but that by itself doesn’t do anything to solve the nation’s problems. This would be an exercise in moving labels around, just like chairs on the proverbial Titanic, nothing more.

As a final comment, it bears repeating although we’ve pointed it out before: The democrats understand that Armstrong Williams is right, that suffering is a great teacher. Also, contrary to popular belief, merely being “poor” is not suffering. Maybe in other countries it is. It takes a lot more than being poor, to suffer in America. This has become a wonderful place to stay poor, for years and years, maybe for an entire lifetime and never learn a goddamn thing. That is the goal of the democrat party and has been for quite some time. This year, it’s working pretty well.

That doesn’t mean it always has to. All this stuff is cyclical and dynamic. At the end of the day, people don’t like to keep their options limited. Eventually, people want to get up off their butts and explore & refine new abilities they might have, new potential. I believe, over the long term, that hard-wired passion is the one that will win out.

I can’t read any more dirges or doom-and-gloom about where we’re going because I don’t work that way. I’d like to think that now it’s the second day of reckoning, most people have moved past that anyhow. Let’s talk fixing. And I see there’s a big busted thing going on here that hasn’t been talked about at all. Turnout.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan got 57,847,151 popular votes out of about 118 million cast.

John McCain and Sarah Palin received 59,934,814 popular votes out of 131,313,820 cast. If you follow the link above, you will find some comments that should dazzle you, if you were expecting this to be a high-turnout election. It was anything but.

Sarah Palin could come back now, if she has a mind to do so, which since she has more common sense than a lot of people think, she doesn’t have a mind to do so. And won’t. But we’re all done with the “McCain lost because that airhead Palin drove ’em away” thing. All done. Not to talk any smack about the decision to nominate Paul Ryan, which I still regard as a pretty good one, but a killer rep for handling arcane details and a sturdy/scholarly approach to math, didn’t turn anybody on here. Even when combined with sex appeal it didn’t work.

This is not up for discussion. The numbers don’t lie. I don’t deny that, where people are turned off against Palin their emotions are very intense. But, frankly, it doesn’t translate into numbers, their emotional baggage is not Palin’s problem, it isn’t mine either and the whole thing doesn’t matter anyhow. She’s gone for good and I don’t blame her one bit. But she never was the problem. The numbers, the numbers. Wake up.

The victors Tuesday night do their work according to human feeling, and it is dark human feeling that is the currency they trade. Resentment. Feelings of entitlement. Laziness. Despair. That is not a permanent situation, it is only a greater-than-four-years situation. We’re depressed because we thought this was the day our Uncle Sam would throw down the bottle and acknowledge that he has an addiction problem. He crawled back into the bottle again. Alright, so he’s a hardcore case. We try and try again.

So getting rid of the eskimo-ditz and replacing her with a Christian Grey math wizard doesn’t fix what’s broken. What does?

Luke:Is the dark side stronger?
Yoda: No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
Luke: But how am I to know the good side from the bad?

That last part’s easy; it doesn’t get much darker than “fuck white people.” It doesn’t get much darker than “I don’t need to give a shit about deficits or terrorists, I’ll just tell Todd Aiken and the rest of those morons where to stick it and then I’m pretty sure everything will work out okay.”

To the first part, how to fix what’s broken, Yoda’s wisdom is key: not stronger; quicker, easier, more seductive. Barack Obama won His re-election because He got the most out of His efforts. In the battleground states, which He bothered to visit, there was barely enough of a turnout for Him to defeat the commensurate turnout for Romney. He made His campaign quick, easy and more seductive. Once again, the electorate simply wasn’t vigilant. It comes back to “freedom versus free shit” again, and the freedom side was not vigilant. They did not turn out.

Republicans stayed home. That is your three word take-away. A lot of other people stayed home too. Some nine million or so of Obama’s supporters stayed home. But the people who would’ve voted for Romney, stayed home.

As far as fixing it — I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The first step to destroying something, in any arena of public discussion, is to name it. And the point here is — Has anyone, besides me, taken the time or trouble to notice how incredibly agile the liberals are at coming up with names for things? They have conjured up, focus-group-tested, re-defined, or co-opted: awareness, solidarity, hate, reality-based community, assault weapons and progressive.

In the field of economics, they have shaped and molded our cultural understanding of words and phrases like: poverty, middle class, common good, Buffett rule, progressive tax rate, collective bargaining, social justice, tax cuts for the rich and working families. Also, “access to” this or that thing that is supposed to be seized from one group of people and given to another without compensation.

With race, feminism, gay rights, and issues generally dealing with the resentment felt by members of one class against another: diversity, loving (as a synonym for homosexual), wage gap, miscegenation, white flight, truth to power, equality & inequality, discrimination, social class, tolerance, and for extra gut-chuckles there’s patriarchal and heteronormative. Heteronormative? Who the hell talks that way? These are in additoin to rac[ist/ism] and sex[ist/ism], which are pretty much just gimmes.

Within the issues that have to do with the environment, there’s natural, going green, green jobs, organic, ecological, natural, sustainable, and global warming and climate change.

All these are in addition to: “true” patriot, education, intellectual, fasc[ist/ism], faith-based, warmonger/warmongering, insensitive, offensive, repressive, oppressive, jingo[ist/ism], imperial[ist/ism] and theocracy. Not a single one of these words or terms means anything close, coming out of the mouth of a liberal, as they mean anywhere else. After awhile the “anywhere else” must give way. Liberals argue with dictionaries, and they win.

I think Republicans are not going to inspire their base, or the independents and moderates who would come over to their side, until they follow suit. Getting Todd Aiken to shut up is just the first step. And no, ejecting the abortion plank is not the answer. Remember, turnout was the problem here, 2,087,663 McCain/Palin voters stayed home. Did they see the wisdom over the last four years of converting over to Obama & Biden’s side? That seems doubtful. Did they vote for Gary Johnson? That would be a selection of “I’m not in that group over there” over and above “I’m in this group”; this would mean the incentive for identifying with the group, is missing, a problem that everyone has to acknowledge now that the democrats don’t have.

Although they should! But, words. Terms. Phrases. And so, they don’t have the problem.

There are a lot of approaches to addressing that. Mine would be simply coming up with names for things. Or, at least, take note that our cultural dialect currently does not have names for certain things and if this is not the identification of a problem that can be fixed, it is at least a tell-tale sign of where the dry rot is, and how bad it is.

There is an alternative “Occupy” economic system by which you acquire the things you need & want, by making lots of noise until someone brings those things to you. It slithers around underground, as an unseen rival/opponent/complement to the above-ground economic system, in which we acquire things by providing things of like value to others. There is significant meaning attached to this. The election itself, arguably, was about the conflict between those two economic systems, within one of which we “buy” things by “working”…and, within the other of which, you “buy” the things you want by bitching. There is no word to describe that alternative economic system, in which so many of our fellow citizens believe so much. Find one. Find a word to describe the conflict between those two systems, as well. The stakes are high, and the meanings are important to the decisions we’re making.

We don’t have an actual word to describe any or all of Saul Alinsky’s rules. We have Alinsky’s name, of course, but it only means something to people who are familiar with that book of his.

We don’t have any one single word to describe: Voting for the purpose of lowering a beatdown on some person or class of person, as opposed to voting for love of country and concern for its future well-being.

Destroying something people need, and selling the destruction of it to the people who need it, by making an issue out of whether it has been distributed equally.

Confusing the destruction of this needed thing, or the removal of that thing from our ability to acquire it, with its equal or “fair” distribution.

Imagining the U.S. Constitution to be a document about the size of a paper in a fortune cookie that says something like “ROE V. WADE, WALL OF SEPARATION, END OF CONSTITUTION.”

Electing candidates according to who can bring you the greatest bounty of material things, at the expense of somebody else.

Choosing those candidates according to who can do the best job of selling things that a conscientious and informed prospect would never, ever buy.

Discussing tax policies only with regard to who-pays-what, without a genuine care in the world about the long term financial solvency of the Treasury.

Some dumbed-down version of “static scoring”; considering economics in terms of third-grade math (+/-/*), ignoring changes in consumer behavior.

Voting on matters of personal taste as public policy issues when it is not necessary to do so.

The idea that a little bit of socialism can be mixed up with a little bit of capitalism, and the result will somehow be something that isn’t a monstrosity.

Challenging peoples’ understanding of the words “communist” and “socialist” when you don’t have a good understanding yourself.

Indulging in the fantasy that Hitler and other fascists were “right wing”.

The impulse to seek a government solution for every natural exigency in life.

The extremist idea that ALL victims in the world are victims of circumstance and couldn’t have done anything to prevent it.

The extremist idea that you can’t be a sexist if you’re a woman, or a racist if you’re black.

The injection of social issues, like gay marriage, into elections so that the electorate will make decisions about financial issues that they otherwise would not make.

The kind of thinking that leads one to conclude Joe Biden won the debate. Practicing the “I laugh at it, so it becomes untrue” defense.

Voting for a black guy just because he’s black.

Voting for the candidate that’s cuter.

That “Conquest Rule” thing in which all institutions not specifically chartered to be right wing, become left wing.

Oh and most important of ALL: The desire of the democrat party for more people to become poor, and for poor people to stay poor, so that they can get more votes.

I don’t know if we can invigorate turnout in future elections simply by coming up with words to describe these things. After that, there would be a challenge in getting people to use them, to recognize them. Once that is done, it would be much easier to state the case. There would be a side benefit involved in that I’d be much less likely, in the middle of an election season, to read stories about some Republican knucklehead saying something like pregnancy from rape is a gift from God, or the like. The democrats are skilled at saying “that’s not the question, the question is this other thing I want to talk about…” A lot of them say that, when the question they’ve just been asked is the question. Republicans seem to handle it the exact opposite way; they get asked about stupid tangential bullshit and they have this way of compliantly following along. Knock it off.

Also, once something is named, there is a tendency for the use of that word to have an automatic pejorative effect. That would be very helpful. Vice President Biden’s conduct during the debate is way overdue for pejorative effect; if it doesn’t qualify, nothing does. It was a national disgrace, and even people who liked it, know it.

I’m seeing all this discussion about Latino vote, angry women, immigrants, gay-rights groups, along with this endless drumbeat litany of “Republicans need to be more inclusive.” I’ve become rather tired of reading about this stuff because none of it can come up with any specific examples, aside from the unwise mutterings of the above-named two knuckleheads, where things were done wrong here. The campaign was about as inclusive as it could have been.

And, as it happens, it was the less-inclusive side that emerged victorious on Tuesday. Seriously, listen to them sometime. Every approach they have, to any problem that comes along, has something to do with gutter-balling somebody…Christians, millionaires-n-billionaires, gun-people, old white men, you name it. They won. So that is not an accurate identification of the problem.

Oh, my. And to think of all the opinions I’ve been reading and hearing about the Republicans losing because their tent isn’t big enough. Not that I ever put much stock in it. The Republican party has been met with the challenge, every two years actually, of separating out the alienation of bad ideas from the alienation of the people who hold them, and also the alienation of the ethnic groups of which some are a member. For many cycles now it has appeared to me that this has been a concern in theory more than in practice, since all the examples to be offered that there was work remaining to be done has consisted entirely of: Someone said something idiotic that could by some others be interpreted some certain way. But from all I’ve seen this year, they succeeded in this sloppy and challenging separation business better this last time, than all other elections previous. I mean really, who’d they alienate in 2012? Specifically.

Are we really at the point where you’re a misogynist sexist discriminating pig if you just don’t want to buy Sandra Fluke her birth control? On the other hand, “Obama! Fuck white people and Romney” is somewhat alienating in its own right.

No, I can see how & why Republicans lost the election, and it’s like the big elephant in the room, it’s obvious and nobody wants to talk about it: People who vote to re-elect Obama are still people, and people have it hard-wired into their circuitry to put the hatey-hate on other people. They get a charge out of handing other people their walking papers and pointing toward an exit sign. If they have to spend some of their money to do it, without any money coming in to replace it, they’ll still do it…they’ll do it until the fridge and cupboards are bare, and the furniture is being repossessed. They’ll do it until they reach some level of poverty — then they’ll stop — I’d thought we were there. This was not correct, evidently we still have a ways to go.

And I see the same thing here. The two white Christian guys who said something knuckle-headed about pregnancy from rape…nobody whose opinion counts for anything at all, from what I can tell, has even raised the question about what these guys were asked, and why. Both big losers. Well, I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, if the objective is to keep narrow-minded, bigoted people out of Congress, I’m not seeing anyone bothering to check back and make sure we have any good results to offer there. So the enthusiasm for this is not for the goal, it must be for the journey. It is, quite plain and simply, a whole lot of fun to stick it to the man. That pig-headed, white Christian man who said something dumb…lots of people are voting for that reason and for none other. So there you go again: Tell someone he sucks, kick him out of something, and waltz around feeling smug and self-righteous. For a lot of our fellow citizens, that’s all voting is. Uh, budget? What’s that?

My question remains unanswered. I don’t think it’s going to get answered.

And I don’t think the Republicans have any post-mortem to conduct here, I don’t think they have anything to learn that’s really worth learning. That seems an easy call to make. Everyone who says they do, to the last man, I think would insist that whatever corrective strategies would be implemented as a result of that should be inclusive and positive, and I agree. My point is that with that restriction in place, you would end up paring your corrective action plan down to nothing. It isn’t that kind of energy. These aren’t people chafing at having been shunned or tossed out of anything. These are people who want to do the shunning.

Republicans’ best bet is to recycle exactly the same messages in 2016. Oh, that and if someone wants to bring up a question about pregnancy caused by rape, it might be helpful to ponder how & why such a question is being asked. It might make a good deal of sense to refuse to answer it because it’s off-topic. That’s allowed, isn’t it? I hear democrats doing it all the time, when the question isn’t even off-topic. This one was, or should have been, since I never did hear of a proposal prohibiting abortion even when a woman has been raped…not even sure you can put such a proposal on the table right now.

Ann Coulter says, don’t blame Romney. There are some good reasons to agree with her on this. Romney did a fine job, especially in that “high altitude” debate, and I think Republicans across the nation got a much better performance out of his team than they could ever have expected. And that goes for Paul Ryan as well. Still, it must be said, we were warned. The pattern is holding up: When the candidate’s credentials as an establishment GOP dude, glitter more brightly than his credentials as a common-sense constitutional-scholar “government is the problem not the solution” guy…he gets knocked in the dirt. If we’re looking for something to keep in mind in 2016, I suggest that might be it.

(v.)

to identify wrongly : confuse with another

(n.)

a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge, or inattention

The more years I see come and go, the more of a one-to-one correlation I see between the instances of the noun, and accompanying instances of the verb. People, and I, make these “wrong actions” by way of perceiving an object or action as something different from what it really is. I suppose this is all rather self-evident. Where this observation might start to yield some meaningful value, is with the realization of an eighty-twenty rule of sorts, that perhaps eighty percent of the mistakes (noun) come from twenty percent of the mistaking (verb). Or perhaps that’s more like a ninety-nine-one rule. And, perhaps, it is more like ninety-nine percent of the damage done through these mistakes, come from just a tiny minority of the categories of mistaking.

I have often observed in my other life, in the making of money, the Morgan K. Freeberg rule that “technology is the opposite of doing something the same way the other guy is already doing it.” I said it while I put up my fight against being pigeonholed, as sort of a high-tech drywall installer, knowing that if it became my job to just do the same thing over & over again but with writing computer code, I would ultimately fail to return value for my growing salary demands and thus become a pink slip waiting to happen. Nowadays, I guess, maybe I lost that battle. Maybe this thing they call “peer code review” makes such a loss inevitable. Code reviewers already know what the code should look like; do the finger-work for them, and remove human variables from the process or else your code won’t pass review. But of course, without the human intuition there’s no reason for the human to be there. Well, there must be a way to make it work, other people can do it. But then again, I don’t know for how long, and I made it work for awhile. Perhaps that whole gig is temporary by its very nature. Either way, it qualifies as a mistake-mistake: Using human ingenuity to create new things that did not exist before, is confused with its opposite, which is copying things that exist already, if only in the minds of others. Not-ingenuity is mistaken for ingenuity.

I’ve already received a taste of that, and last night I saw another strain of it: I saw destruction mistaken for creation. President Obama is supposed to be building something here, right? What is that? Can anyone tell me? I don’t think the most fervent Obama supporter can answer that question. But they can tell me what America’s First Holy Emperor is supposed to be destroying, that part’s easy to do. The rich people, they have too much money! Must pay their fair share. Businesses need to be taken down a peg or two. That Todd Aiken jackass. Men! Whites! Christians! We’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times, but we don’t yet know what’s being built. Sooner or later, the time will come where we’ll have to admit that if something definable was being built, we’d have heard some indication by now of what it is.

The little boy Brandon who thought a President Romney would send him and his family out to the fields to pick crops, asked what he wants Obama to do, said “I want Him to change the world…like He did” (link goes to 0:45 mark). So that’s another one, we’re up to three: Block-copying things is mistaken for building something new, destruction is mistaken for creation, and not-change is mistaken for change. I just don’t know what to make of this part of it. How does the incumbent president campaign on a platform of “change”?

I am seeing moderation mistaken for extremism a lot of the time. I define extremist thought as something that, to be accurately and properly expressed, must make use of the words all, none, always or never. That disagreement I had with the feminists comes to mind: I chastised them for creating this new strain of feminism that relies overly much on victimology, lamenting that my mother thought of feminism as refusing to be a victim; and, what t’heck happened to that? I was put on notice that people are not selective about this status, they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they don’t choose that. And I said — never?? And was told, quite right, never, never, not ever. I said, you promise I can’t come up with some examples, cross your heart? And I got back this lecture of “I don’t promise things” or some such, but…right, I won’t be able to find examples. ++blink++ Just wow. Yes, I do get to a point where I realize futher discussion is futile. That was one of those times. The argument itself is sad, the descent into victim-hood is sad because of the loss of vision for independence and improvement of personal plight…but, saddest of all, is this confusion between the moderate and the extreme. The never-never-princess thought she was presenting a moderate argument.

We’re up to four now. Five and six would be: Simple things complex, and vice-versa. Calling Obama a socialist is often met with angry rebuttals, taking the form “do you know what that word means?” The clear implication is that there is some meaningful subtlety buried in a dusty tome somewhere, and whoever attaches the word to His Eminence must be not only ignorant of this prized distinction, but is showcasing his ignorance to all sorts of strangers — who, in turn, bask in the wisdom of this special knowledge. It is a clear intimidation tactic to dissuade the observation from being made, or from gaining any more traction. Well, we here do know what it means, have thought about it, and it applies. That’s a case of something simple being gussied up as something complicated, possessing these layers of wrinkles and fissures that it doesn’t really possess.

An example of the complex thing being mistaken for something simple, would be that ignorant statement “Saddam Hussein did not attack us.” Gah. Don’t even get me started.

Block-copying being mistaken for innovation, creativity and ingenuity; destruction mistaken for creation; not-change mistaken for change; dogmatic extremism for sensible moderation; the simple for the complex, and the complex for the simple. Those would be six, and they all work for the grand-poobah of these fundamental mistakes being made, the very worst out of all of them: death for life. That is what it is all about. That is the stem to the funnel. That is where it all goes.

So my observation — let us call it a working theory, rather, but it’s made it pretty far and is still going strong — is that the mistakes (noun) that matter, years down the road, come back to one, or some, of these seven (verb). Re-electing Obama is directly connected to several of these. Mistaking your dark blue sock as a proper mate to your black sock, that’s in a completely different ballpark, tomorrow morning it’ll be a bit of your personal sock-wearing history and nothing more. It’s not one of the seven.

That’s the question all reality-attached Americans are asking themselves as of last night, sometime around nine Pacific as the election was called for President Obama’s re-election. It’s a big question in that context, but I mean it in another. I mean it as a pointed inquiry, to be directed toward Obama’s slobbering toadies. Quoting myself, in some personal correspondence:

Okay, we’ve kept the eeeeevil Mormon out of the White House; the Bush tax cuts are going away and employers have to worry about ObamaCare before they hire anybody, which means they won’t be hiring anybody until they’re absolutely backed into a corner. But the top-dog is a likable guy, or is rumored to be, although He’s a snob, this much seems provable, has never held a real job, seems to only be going through the motions of building anything useful while He’s destroying entire industries everywhere you look…He can’t be told a damn thing, and apparently is rather proud of this. Now what?

It’s an important question, America needs and deserves an answer to it every place it applies, and it hasn’t been getting asked enough. The platform of Obama, and the democrats, has been replete with the phrase “and that should work out just great,” in some annotation placed immediately behind the huge bubble taking up most of the chalkboard, marked “some miracle occurs here.”

Make sure Warren Buffett pays as high a tax rate as his secretary — meaning that the capital gains tax bite is always equal to or higher than federal withholding, on a per-dollar basis — and that should somehow work well. In other words, level the playing field, even though the federal budget isn’t balanced, not even close to being balanced, doesn’t even exist and that should work well.

Tax the millionaires and billionaires so they “pay their fair share.” We’re a bit starved for details as to what exactly that means, over the longer term, other than “more.” And that should somehow work well.

Spend a trillion dollars more out of the treasury than it can take in, just don’t worry about the budget deficit for that year or any other, and that should work well.

Pay out hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus funds to provide maintenance jobs, jobs which are upkeep and are not supposed to actually create new assets, primarily (temporary) road construction work & teaching. Ignore the plain and simple fact that there must be a resulting and counterbalancing lack of jobs existing wherever this money was siphoned away, we’ll never find out about what those jobs would’ve been…but the road construction guy gets to work. Temporarily. And that should work well.

Tear up the roads all over the country in this misguided massive road construction frenzy. All at the same time, so it takes half again as long to transport anything anywhere. And that should work well.

Keep that guy who said that idiotic thing, out of the Senate…so that the Senate is made up entirely of people who say soothing, sensible, wise things (gigglesnort). And that should work well.

Keep the oil in the ground. Sink taxpayer money into “green” energy which, even if it works perfectly, costs several times more than petroleum on a per-joule basis and will for the next century or so, perhaps forever. If everything works perfectly. And that should work well.

When the green energy companies soak up the taxpayer money and then go bankrupt, ignore it. That should work well.

Why, you even see it in their debating strategies. Vice President Biden showed how it’s done: Just cackle and sneer at everything like a petulant child, and that should work well.

Obama’s supporters, faced with anything that is glaringly wrong with their strategies and can be expressed in simple and obvious terms: For example, “Businesses are not likely to hire more people if it is more expensive to hire them,” or “If the economy is to improve, some people are going to have to get rich, and Obama seems to have a problem with that” — reply with the pablum that this is complicated stuff, and we need to come together to make it work. If those things are really true, then as we come together to make it work for the sake of the country, we owe it to the country to go back to that huge blank bubble marked only with “a miracle occurs here” and clarify things a bit in that bubble. We owe it to the country to stop relying on “and that should work well” and start filling in an answer to the question that cries out to us, “How, exactly?”

And the people like me who saw the President for what He really is, back to the first day, don’t need to worry about answering it. Speaking just for myself, I think I know the answer and it sickens me. This is, as I noted, a question for the President’s supporters. They need to provide some working, credible details.

In the case of many of them, probably for the very first time in their lives.

Update: And this is not doing much to answer my question…

Oh goody. I’ve got just one more day of people giving me instructions about what I’m supposed to think and what I’m supposed to expect…and me ignoring those instructions, thereby bringing on more instructions which I then ignore. And then one of us is “proven” right and the other is proven wrong, and it’s over. That in itself is cause for celebration.

As far as the two campaigns/factions/parties/ideologies, one will become insufferably smug and the other will go nuts.

Well you can take this to the bank: Whichever side loses, will come roaring back in ’14 and/or ’16 with a stiffness of resolve that it isn’t quite showing this year. Because neither one of these two sides is going away. We put on such a great show of “enacting policies” and then sitting in judgment of those policies, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. But that is not entirely true, is it. I think most of the people paying attention know what policies bring about what results. Our quibble is with the goals. Yes, your teachers lied to you when they said “Republicans and democrats both want the same things but have different ideas about how to get there.” That’s the biggest load of crap ever told.

Time and time again, I’ve had angry, resentful and hurt libs hand me that lecture about “we tried those policies of George W. Bush, including tax cuts for the rich” and it “didn’t work” because the “rich got richer.” A tax cut, by its very nature, makes it okay to make money. Well the liberals didn’t want it to be okay to make money, and they still don’t. They wanted, and want, something called “equality”…which means poverty and death. “Equality” means, ultimately, no you can’t have it. Every rock on the moon is equally wet.

Prosperity entails inequality. And I think everybody knows it. You turn on your living room lamp, and all that light is disproportionately, unfairly, gathered about the bulb. What a gross injustice that is! But that’s how it works. You want equality of lumens, turn the damn thing off and stumble around. You get your equality…and, your zero, your disconnection, your lack of light and lack of accomplishment. Those are your choices. Go or stop.

And that is the choice being made today. It’s no different than the jilted boyfriend killer suspect in the murder mystery shows, you know, “If I can’t have her then he can’t have her either, and I’ll make sure nobody else can.” That is the proposal involved in an Obama re-election, in democrats maintaining hold of the Senate: If [insert name of despairing, angry hurt voter here] can’t have money then nobody else can.

If that statement holds up, and we need to continue struggling against this artificially-imposed headwind for another four years as we have been struggling over the last four — then, our desire to move it out of the way will only intensify. There’s no way Barack Obama can enjoy all the credibility of blaming everything on George W. Bush for eight years, over & above what He has enjoyed while doing this for a solid four.

But, on the other hand, if the “if I can’t have it then nobody can” ethos is smacked down today, it will come back with a resurgence in the years to come. The democrats and liberals will become more resentful, more pickled, more nasty. This is the way American politics have been, for generations and generations: One side gets power, and the next cycle the losers come back with an advantage they didn’t have before. A lot of times this is inadequate and the losers get smacked down a second consecutive time. But, I maintain, this happens when the losers perceive they have this advantage, that they did not yet posses the last go-’round, and they overplay it. It’s an easy mistake to make because in politics, you have to use the advantages you have or else you lose them. But, eventually, things rock back to the point where they were before, and beyond. The pendulum swings. That’s the way things are going to go, for the indeterminate future. The democrats had the White House from 1933 to 1969, with only Eisenhower’s two terms interrupting the streak; Republicans had it 1861 to 1913, with the exception(s) of Cleveland. Those days are long gone. Words like “Republican” and “democrat” entail much greater commitment to ideology now than they did back then, but paradoxically, the streaks are gone. We’re far more polarized. Four to eight years, that’s all you get, because the grass is always greener on the other side.

As far as what is going to happen tonight, I have some cautious optimism because I notice people vote for doom and gloom when the contrast is subtle and obscure, and when the contrast is highlighted, obvious and stark, they vote for prosperity because…well, duh. It’s a vote on “Is it alright to make some damn money?” Of course the answer is yes. So the question becomes: How well-defined is the contrast between the two cats tied up in the bag, today? Is it easy to see?

Well. We’ve got a financial cliff coming up, and anyone who can spare a glance toward it can see the abyss that lies beyond, how close we are, how fast we are going. The incumbent party’s campaign slogan is — FORWARD.

The contrast doesn’t get any better-defined than that. Now or ever. Barack Obama has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, making it clear to people that the way things have been going, is the way He thinks they should be going. Message received and duly noted President Obama. Hey, let’s have an election about it.

Update 11/7/12: Well, then. Forward it is.

More on the two cats in the bag here. And here.

Because…Steven Crowder was quoting them. “I lit up a big ol’ troll cannon and will now walk away laughing. That’s how it’s done, kids.”

I really don’t get it.

And then, although I didn’t say anything about it at the time, there’s this…

It’s like they’re trying to ad-lib something from the The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations (L.I.A.R.): “In my opinion, you will be very fortunate to get this person to work for you” or “whatever task he undertakes, he will be fired with enthusiasm.”

Instapundit has two interesting links up about this. First, Romney and Obama are tied in a CNN poll that samples democrats plus-eleven:

Romney has gained 3 points since the last time CNN ran its poll, in late September, when Obama led 50%-47%. That is good news for the Republican ticket, especially since the poll was conducted after Hurricane Sandy.

Yet there is something odd–and even ridiculous–in the poll’s sample: of the 693 likely voters in the total sample of 1,010 adults polled, “41% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Independents, and 30% described themselves as Republicans.”

In other words, the poll is a D+11 outlier. It presents a picture of an electorate that is far more pro-Obama than it was in the historic 2008 election. That is extremely unlikely.

And…it’s been going on and going on, and the “smart money” says we should ignore that part of it and treat the polls as gospel.

But that’s where the other link comes in.

If you look at history, which poll takers do, they consider what percentage of the population votes Democratic and what percentage votes Republican. For many years, Democrats typically make up 36-38% of the election; the remainder is composed of Republicans and independents. The Democrat percentage is so consistent that the election is won or lost by how many Republicans vote plus whatever the independents do.

A few short paragraphs of examples from recent history, in which democrat percentage wobbles between 36% and 38%. It is never higher than 39%, the figure from their magic year of 2008. Then…

Okay. Let us say you are a pollster. You conduct a poll in which you call a few thousand numbers around the US, and hope that you get about a thousand people to participate all the way through.

You ask them if they are registered voters because you don’t need participants who cannot or will not vote. Sometimes, you ask if they are likely voters. This last part is very essential, the Czar believes, because only a small percentage of registered voters actually bother to act like mature adults and vote.

But many organizations don’t care. They only want to know if you were to vote, for whom would you vote if the election were held today? Then they ask if you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent.

After that, the data are collected and then “normalized.” That’s where it gets interesting…you should go read it top to bottom, and I’d still be saying that if I didn’t like what it was pointing out because it’s all game-changing. And rather hard to refute, from what I can see.

The takeaway from it all is, the polling has wandered down the same evolutionary avenue as any other overly-institutionalized discipline: Process matters more than results. In fact, the aroma of this process-over-results value system is likely more pungent in polling than anywhere else, since in this field of effort the one great sin you can commit is to be an “outlier.” Polls are invalidated as they come out because they are outliers. They are not invalidated after the fact because they turned out to be wrong…not with too much zeal anyway…because it’s after the fact. We talk a lot about pollsters with “egg on their faces.” And I imagine maybe it’s a bit tougher to sell the product, maybe, when the polling service didn’t predict the result like it’s supposed to do. But do the brand names really suffer any lasting damage? It does not seem to be so. I see people saying “Listen to this guy, because he called the 2004 or 2008 election right.” I do not see, quite so often, anybody saying “Stop listening to [insert really, really big name here], because he/she/they called the election for this guy and it went to that guy.”

Mark Steyn:

Imagine if Obama’s 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. “A big storm requires Big Government,” pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn’t have — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan.

And yet, mysteriously, multi-trillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can’t do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government “investment” to approved Obama cronies.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government’s ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states — because your president spent 6 trillion bucks and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

It happens. Festivities planned for December 29.

Update: Maybe it’s time to put up the Big Reveal. The “avatar” picture that has come to be so famous among friends & family:

And, the picture upon which it was originally based. Raffetto, El Dorado Nat’l Forest, around July of ’05.

Yes, the bride is the woman who clicked the shutter on that. One hell of a woman, as one would expect. Twenty-one years of bachelorhood come to a stop. The immovable object finally met up with the irresistible force.

So he gauges the status of “equality” according to how many women hold positions of authority…I’ve gone down this road in my “discussions” with hardcore feminists, it’s truly bizarre. It’s a true shortcut hyperspace jump to victim-ology. I know how this goes. These people don’t live in a world of “if one person can do it, then that means they all can,” they live in exactly the opposite: “If one has run into an obstacle, that means they all have and they’re all helpless.” They don’t live in a world of can, they live in a world of can’t.

That, and the guy wants female volleyball players to wear more clothes. A-yup…I’m not saying we should find a way to ensure, systematically, that people like him should have no influence on anything anywhere. I’m just thinking if we could somehow make it happen, we’d be living in a better world. Women volleyball players wearing more clothes? If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, that’s it. Has this guy seen any of those volleyball players?

Hat tip once again to Robert at Small Dead Animals.

First things first: I found some malicious PHP code at this humble blog, (all together now) which nobody reads anyway…that was evidently responsible for some odd behavior Phil and I had been noticing a few weeks ago. You click on a link that is supposed to take you here, and instead, it takes you to a male-performance-enhancement drug website. Back then, if you clicked on the same link from this blog itself, it wouldn’t happen. You click on it from Phil’s site or some other site, it did. Phil and I looked through his code and couldn’t see anything…I was suspecting a template issue with Blogger itself. A lot of people, meaning myself and the support team at GoDaddy, were thrown off because we made the innocent mistake of taking HTML code literally, which you can’t do with a PHP exploit. It wasn’t until Buck ran into the same problem that I realized I could eliminate everything as a suspect except for this blog itself, right here, which had to remain under suspicion as the common factor. And thus, a fairly intrusive time-sinkhole crisis began.

Even then, this looked screwy because the desktops were not all acting the same way. My Unix box acted sporadically, navigating to the correct link up to maybe 80% of the time. The HP Mini never went to the bad site, not once. I sunk money into it, I sunk time into it, and finally while I was messing around over a FTP session prowling through the hosted WordPress files themselves, I came across the problem. Easy fix, so far it’s worked, steps have been taken to make sure it can’t happen again (upgrades, patches, passwords changed, etc.).

Do let me know if you see something though. And let me know what your security solution is for catching viruses and malware. I’m concerned that the one device that I’ve really taken the most trouble to keep sparkling-clean and battleship-strong, never experienced the problem; that would indicate to me that the countermeasures are working properly, there, which means wherever the problem was occurring, the malicious code was doing something only because local variables were allowing it to. So who’s been sent to that site? Are they/you cruising the Internet without any anti-malware solutions installed? From what I can tell, the site itself doesn’t download anything. But, you should run a scan just to make absolutely sure. It’s a good practice to get into, run a full scan any time a possibility arises. You see a window open and you didn’t specifically ask for it, you run a scan. This would qualify as one of those times. But I suppose I should add that, as of this point, there is no cause for alarm. Knock on wood.

GoDaddy’s Website Protection SiteScanner gave us a clean bill of health. But, this seems to be a HTML tool, not a PHP-level tool; we earned our clean-bill before I fixed anything (see fancy badge over in the sidebar). Which is not to say the tool is entirely lacking in value, it probably just wasn’t money well spent in this particular case.

Now, to business. The elephant in the room that has aroused great volumes of indirection discussion this week, while the thing itself remains uncommented-upon, is…the elephants. Republicans. Conservatives. People who understand that the good future fortune of the country is far better secured if Romney takes this thing Tuesday, than if he doesn’t. They are split between optimists and pessimists. It is that split that arouses my interest this morning.

One of my more casual acquaintances over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging had this to say…

Dear Eeyores, Man the fuck up. No one said this election was going to be easy.

And I hit the “like” button on that puppy, as fast and as hard as the “dismiss” button on a floating popup ad hovering in front of a picture of Kate Upton in a swimsuit. Pow. Mind you, this isn’t like “start sawing down trees when it’s pouring freezing rain because you’re out of firewood” man-the-fuck-up or anything like that…the issue is, purpose. Pessimism definitely has a purpose. But, as a general rule, only when the pessimism leads to the sensible revision of a state of something, such that the outcome of some meaningful upcoming event can be changed. Spare inner tubes, spare flashlight batteries, car insurance, spare this spare that. Pessimism leads to vigilance and vigilance leads to preparedness. None of that applies here, not a shred. If Mitt Romney loses and you were one of the smarty-pants who figured that out beforehand, what exactly does that buy you? Not a damn thing, from what I can see.

I replied…

The common theme I have noticed, is a conviction that anybody who dares to question Nate Silver’s findings or express any optimism at all with regard to a Romney victory, has become irrationally and emotionally attached to a prediction that is anything but certain and thus unmoored themselves from reality.

Experience has taught me, however, that it is the “Eeyores” who are doing that. The waves of inspiration washing over them every day to spread the gospel from the mountaintops of how fucked we are, I wish we could bottle that energy.

I should mention by way of disclosure that I have a bit of a reputation as a gloomy pessimistic “Eeyore” myself. In fact I have a coffee mug in the kitchen cabinet to this very day, that a work colleague presented to me fifteen years ago following a trip to Disneyland. As noted above…pessimism does have its place. It’s just not doing anything for us here.

I’m not sure what the point is. And it should be noted that some people are getting a bit unhinged with it. “…to tell yourself when convincing yourself Romney has a chance”? Eh, excuse me? I’m all in favor of keeping it real, but the Governor certainly has a chance. Whether it’s 50/50, something lesser or something greater, can yield some fruitful thoughts worth pondering about the history of polls, how the nature of polling has changed, what it might all mean.

But the point to it all is, emotions can become passionate and pickled, with the passage of just a little bit of time, and then they can take on an oxidizing affect against the wrought-iron tethering to reality. But I don’t think it’s the optimists who are doing that. It is the Eeyores doing that, and they are projecting. There are elections going on throughout our history in which the incumbent has had it locked up, and the whole thing is just a silly waste of time.

All in all, this is not one of those. Let’s all tune in Tuesday night, and whatever happens, happens.

By the way, I don’t see any Eeyores taking that attitude of “whatever happens happens.” To the last man, they’re all behaving as if the near-future unfolding events, will be determined entirely by the argument immediately taking place…in which they have to have the last word, all the time. If I were inclined to see things their way in the first place, I’d be reconsidering that because of this one observation, because if you really want to predict with some accuracy what’s going to happen the first step is this: You have to reckon with the idea that what-will-happen, is not necessarily superglued to the other question of who’s-going-to-win-this-argument-we’re-having. Those are two different things.

Now speaking for myself, the money I would put on a Romney victory — were I allowed to do so, since gambling is actually illegal here in the Golden State so of course that is out of the question — wouldn’t be much. A few coins picked up out of the couch cushions, maybe, something I could afford to lose. But I damn sure wouldn’t put it on Obama! And here is why. It is said that Americans have a consistent track record, since the first televised debates, of voting for the more charismatic fella. That theory has holes in it, since the pattern is only demonstrable for some 52 years or so, which means the gap left by Richard Nixon’s victories over Humphrey and McGovern is comparatively very large. Large enough that I must call into question the idea that charisma is the litmus test. The other thing to consider is that the charismatic candidate tends to be the one with the more positive vision — which, this year, granting the concession that the incumbent president is the more charismatic, doesn’t apply. Romney is bringing a more inspiring vision, Obama’s not even trying. This much has been made abundantly clear.

I think the resentment factor has an incandescent appeal for unimaginative, unhelpful and unhappy people; I think this election is all about testing that appeal. It really isn’t about anything else, when you get down to it, is it? This isn’t even anything worth pointing out. It’s all around us and it’s completely obvious. Do we satisfy our wants and needs by engaging in a system of trade, providing products and services of value to other people we want to do these good things for us? Or do we just want to bitch and moan and bellyache about the high price of birth control and what-not, until some elected or appointed pencil-pusher with a dark and empty soul comes along, and “makes the rich pay their fair share,” and borrows from China, and rolls the printing presses at the Treasury to make up the difference, so we can be provided with what we have reached a group-think consensus to be “a right, dammit”?

I think Obama is going to lose because this “Occupy” appeal is deep but not broad; it burns brightly, and like Dr. Eldon Tyrell said, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. We’ve been trying this for four years. It has failed to yield positive results, entirely, while people have been hungry for those positive results, desperate for them.

Electoral victory is about vision. There’s no vision here, on Obama’s side. Not much, anyway; the vision is something like “No, I’m not ready to come out of Rose‘s dungeon of resentment yet.” But people get tired of living in dungeons. It’s hard-wired into us, eventually we’re going to want our liberty. The question that confronts us Tuesday, is whether four years is enough. Whether we have enough people in this country who want to keep sitting in the dungeon, to send 270 electors into the college. That is the question, and it is the only question that matters.

Steven Crowder applies Obama redistributionist policies to Halloween candy. Somehow, it doesn’t go well.

Deborah Fallows writes in the New Atlantic:

From my book in 1985:

My desires and feelings about the way I should raise children and be a mother suddenly seemed to place me at sharp, and unnecessary, odds with the women’s movement, whose campaigns to offer women the chance for stronger and more independent lives were, along with the civil rights movements, the most important social developments of my lifetime. I thought of the women’s movement as my friend, and still do; yet its positions on motherhood and child rearing made it seem as if I would be failing the movement if I took the steps I thought necessary to care for my children.

A torrent of response followed. The mailman delivered bins and bins of typed or handwritten heartfelt letters, an image that now rings as quaint compared with the barrage of easy, instant digital responses. I was embraced or vilified, quietly and publicly, more or less equally, by both sides.
:
So, that history established, you can imagine that I was very interested to time-travel and try out modern life with children. Here’s what I learned, in three parts: the sociologically interesting, the surprising, and the highly improved.

I’ve never understood this part of the feminist movement, and I don’t think I ever will: A public debate on private decisions about work-life balance. Someone says something, and suddenly every woman’s decision to take care of her household and family…or not…is held up for review and critique by all women. “The mailman delivered bins and bins”? Why? Send them to me. You won’t need a “bin” to hold my response, it will be brief, crisp and I’ll come right to the point.

Instapundit asks an intriguing question about this:

Notice that nobody ever seems to worry about whether men can “have it all?”

Our society has choices to make, about how choices are made. They can be public or private. Who gets the White House for four years: public. Keeping a doctor or health plan you like: private, or it should be, that’s what everybody keeps saying. Color of the car you buy: private. Standards it must meet to be sold: public. Whether it should be harder to convict violent felons, or easier to put them on parole: public. Whether I should buy a gun if I’m worried about violent felons: private.

The elephant in the room that no one seems to want to discuss: There is a big part of the womens’ movement that is nothing more than a big, stinky, massive mistake along these lines. A woman decides to prioritize the raising of her children a certain way, and suddenly that somehow becomes everybody else’s business. There are people who insist on it, and ironically, these seem to be the same people who insist it’s “a decision between her and her doctor, nobody else” when she considers murdering those children before they’re born. Feminism has not been without friction and contentiousness, and that’s probably because it has done very little to avoid conflict; in fact, at times it has worked to embrace it. But at no time has it been more contentious than when it sought to make private matters into public ones. That is what happens — people start arguing about stuff they shouldn’t be.

At 1:36: “Flight attendants tend to overwhelmingly be kind of snarky, angry democrats however — my husband is a pilot, and they tend to almost all be Republicans.” Miller: “Oh, that’s interesting…”

From Robert at Small Dead Animals.

An important message for Paul/Johnson supporters.

Hat tip to Gerard.