Well, isn’t this embarrassing for the folks in charge.

President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.

At least bin Laden’s still dead, or something.

The details are in the article after that first paragraph. They aren’t pretty, but I’d rather concentrate on the human dynamics that come into play when a process has been given great weight, profile and visibility, and after its execution has led to dismal results. I’m seeing a lot of these different behaviors both within and outside of national politics and along with all these different behaviors, I’m seeing misery prolonged well and far beyond the point where people have found it tiresome.

You can tell a lot about a man after he’s attached his identity to a process and been confronted with the realization that it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. To me — although we aren’t too uncertain about how Emperor Barry The First is going to react to this — that is the real story, what is the reaction. Perhaps thousands are possible, and have been shown, but it really all comes down to five major categories I can see. Starting with the most simplistic and working toward the more complex, they are:

One. When the results are inadequate or unsatisfactory, you can simply refuse to acknowledge them.

Two. You can make a decision that fidelity to your failed process is more important than satisfactory results. The “We’d rather leave it busted” response.

Three. You can implement maximum reform with minimal investigation, think of this as “Throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Four. Opposite of the above, the patchwork solution. Up until this threshold of complexity, nobody has to show any curiosity about anything.

Five. A detailed post-mortem, identifying the points of failure, scientifically; no decisions may be made about anything until this process is complete.

Now, not one among these five is perfect; each may be declared unsuitable for this-or-that situation of reform in the aftermath of failure. Even that last one which might seem most thoughtful, it often emerges that people are exasperated with it and (in that particular situation) they have good reason to be. Towing a big boat up the hill with a little car, like DUH, do we really need to do forensic analysis on why it didn’t work? And then of course, at the opposite end of the scale we have the Obama administration: Of course it worked and you’re some kind of racist to say otherwise.

You know, it’s funny. The gang that’s in the White House right now — not just the top guy — has been talking things up about having a more sophisticated methodology for the twenty-first century, it’s all in keeping with the brand label they’ve been selling as suitable successors to the Crawford dimbulb, rebuilding the country in the aftermath of hayseed wreckage with their hip young metro know-it-all-ness. But whenever their processes have shown this need for improvement or replacement, they’ve adhered themselves, as if with industrial-grade contact cement, to One: Refuse to acknowledge failure. We’ve been seeing this over and over again. We saw it in the Biden/Ryan debate. They’re going to do it with the GM thing. They did it with the oil leak in the Gulf thing, they did it with the bomber on Flight 253, remember that?

Reality creates a conflict with the theory, it is reality that must give way to the theory rather than the other way ’round.

I have been privileged to know more than my share of highly successful, highly productive people. Occasionally, I have been privileged to watch them work, and once in awhile, even see them fail. I try to emulate the best of them, and in this effort I have been forced to set a very low bar for myself — I’m not good at it. But I do notice that, even with the casual acquaintances, I did not have to do too much watching before there was an opportunity to watch them deal with a failure. This leads me to believe their successes in life were not due to an ability to avoid failure, but rather with some good habits about how to handle the failure.

Here is what I have noticed: The successful people I have observed in their dealings with their own failures, were not married up with One, Two, Three, Four or even Five. They mixed it up. You might say they were analytical about whether or not to be analytical. If throwing the baby out with the bathwater was the best solution, they did it, and if patchwork was the best solution they went and did that. They relied on their research where it was appropriate, and they went with the ol’ gut instinct when that was right. They crossed the bridge when they came to it. But they did not enmesh their identity in any one of those five, they did ALL five at one time or another.

That’s the biggest difference between them and me, and I’m trying to work on that. I tend to live in the last one, studying everything on occasions where that is perhaps not appropriate, not the surest avenue to eventual success.

But, this is probably the most significant reason why the country requires a change in leadership right now; the most significant out of many. We’re less than a month away from the elections and the incumbent team’s message about why they should be re-elected, going by the debates, is so far limited to “We won’t let the other guys say anything.” Their fans tell me things aren’t so bad, and I simply ask them: Do I have this right? Team Obama says, the way things are going right now, that’s their vision? That is how things should be going? I never get back a straight answer.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Thinking some more about this spectacle I saw last night. I find it particularly bewildering what I’m continually told, throughout the years, about democrats and the support they somehow pick up from people who don’t lean left politically, but just want to make sure the poor are, uh…well…I guess we disagree about the verb that follows that. “Independents” who want to make sure someone is looking out for the poor, poor, pitiful poor, and somehow that can’t be managed outside of government.

It’s completely obvious that across time, the definition of the “poor” is changing. You can live in a two-story house with a garage with two nice cars in it, and if the payments and the mortgage cause you some indigestion then that means you need to vote in some politicians who “care” about you and will give you some perks so you can “make ends meet.” I hear a lot of complaining about a “vanishing middle class” and it seems to me the people doing the complaining are the people who are doing the vanishing: If you’re not rich you must be poor, in the sense that you need this government to give you material things it forcibly took away from other people, otherwise you’re boned.

And the definition of “looked after” or whatever, likewise, is changing. In my world, you’re either making it or you’re not. We use this as information, to figure out whether or not we’re on the right track. This mindset of mine seems to have swung out of date by, oh I dunno, maybe as much as a century…and I’m not sure exactly when, how or why. But it isn’t a bowl of soup or a hunk of bread anymore. Obama gonna buy you a cell phone. Obama gonna put gas in your car and pay your mortgage. Obama gonna send you back to school. Subsidies, grants, loan guarantees, deductions, exemptions, ObamaCare waivers, targeted tax cuts, the sky’s the limit. Everyone bitches up a storm about the tax code being too complicated but very few people seem to genuinely care about it.

Speaking of things people are supposed to want, but don’t care enough about it to insist on it: Nice-ness. I’m reminded of the notorious interview conducted back in ninety-nine, by she who was called back then “The Queen of Nice”:

How this pertains to the veep debate last night: Throughout all these years, as the question comes up “Who’s being snookered by these craven democrats, and why?” it has been repeatedly explained to me that maybe the logic and rationality of their methods is a bit hard to see at times, and maybe it isn’t there at all, but you know what? Perhaps that isn’t what people want when all’s said and done; perhaps these guys win elections, and deserve to, simply because they put forward the impression that they care. They’re nicer. They’re working to put together a world that works for everybody, in which everybody has a part to play and a place to be, not just the very, very fortunate among us.

Um, then it has to be explained to me…how come it is, that a “performance” such as what we saw last night, doesn’t shed votes and support? On a massive scale?

Quite to the contrary, I heard on the radio that while the independent vote didn’t move much one way or another, among self-identified democrats there is an intense and enormous expression of positive approval for Crazy Joe’s above-mentioned — and scare quotes included again — “performance.”

Can any Republican anywhere, ANYWHERE, state a better case as to why these people should not be running anything? Blogger Friend Phil said it best so far: “If that wins arguments, we’re in deep trouble.” That really says it all, there’s nothing that has to be added to that.

And yet, add I shall. Like for example: The conservatives. I’ve been hearing from the conservatives, throughout the years, arguments for civility and compromise. We don’t want to do X. That would make us like those other guys. We don’t want to be like those other guys. Let them do that.

And it seems, to me, from those very same people I’m hearing: Congressman Ryan made a mess here. He shouldn’t have taken the high road. He let Joe Biden get away with murder. He lost the debate because he was too nice. Hmmm…these people want to be respected in the arguments they’re making, they want to be taken seriously. That must mean, they do not want to be looking like me the way they look to me right now.

I have the impression that, among the people who declare Joe Biden the winner, there is a lot of overlap with the phony-deficit-hawk set. These are the people who want “the rich to pay their fair share” because, deficit. But they can’t tell you to the nearest trillion how much debt there is, whereabouts the annual federal budget deficit is, or even the difference between deficit & debt. They don’t know and they don’t care. Can’t even define “rich” and “fair share.” They just want a beatdown lowered on people who are better at making money than they are. They don’t seem ready to offer any numbers on much of anything, other than reciting some talking point that they picked up from ThinkProgress that happens to have a number in it.

We need to come up with a motto for these people. We could start with the song from Ten Years After:

Tax the rich; feed the poor; ’til there ain’t no rich no more.

More like: Tax the rich, borrow from China, use it to buy votes from the poor, when Paul Ryan calls you out on your bullshit then just talk over him like the overbearing, condescending rude jackass you are.

These people, like Rosie O’Dingbat, are supposed to be “nice.” They’re supposed to be building a world that works for everybody and that is supposed to obviate the need for them to illustrate any kind of point or counterpoint that relies on logic, reason, soundness of fact or common sense. Whether you’re into facts/logic/reason or not, it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any reason left to support these guys. And I’ve pointed this out before, but it seems more and more like belaboring the obvious. They’re not nice; not unifying; obviously not trying to build a world that works for everyone, quite to the contrary, appear to have it all settled in their minds who’s supposed to be interrupted, talked over, “spanked,” sent out of the room so the big kids can talk about what to do (to everybody). We know their policies aren’t good, we’ve tried ’em, they aren’t even trying to be nice people, they’re being jackasses and high-fiving each other right out in broad daylight over the success they’ve enjoyed being jackasses. They’re spending money like it’s going out of style and they don’t care. They kill jobs. Uh, what’s left??

Ultimately, it isn’t really their fault. It seems we’re learning something about our fellow citizens, our fellow voters. They claim to be motivated by things that, when the rubber meets the road, it seems don’t really matter to them very much.

That is the subject, is it not? There’s no reason to dwell on Paul Ryan’s performance; he performed. He recited the facts, told the truth, provided an impressive and eloquent summary at the end. Regarding the interrupting, he took the high road…there are some “with friends like these” types of supposed-conservatives who are trying to start up a narrative that says this was a mistake, Ryan was too nice and might even have lost. I don’t know why they’re trying to do that. It isn’t true and it isn’t a clear majority opinion anyway, so I don’t see the point.

I’m more concerned about Joe Biden. I think he might need some medical attention upstairs. I’ve been saying the same about his boss for awhile now. But Crazy Joe seems to have a chemical imbalance.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why anybody says Biden won. Krauthammer says it’s because they heard the debate on the radio. This makes sense to me, I must say. I suppose on the radio, the crazy old drunk who interrupts all the time ends up looking assertive and strong…it could happen.

Biden’s e-mail to me afterward says, and I quote, “I did my best to make you proud tonight.” He did. I was very proud of Paul Ryan’s patience, wish I had some of that.

I’m also keeping a running tally on who’s the worst moderator out of the four debates. Jim Lehrer has lost this title. And I think that airhead broad is going to keep that title right up to the end. What an annoying silly little twit. “I want to move on to, I want to move on to, I want I want I want.”

Some stats I heard and saw: Debate length 90 minutes, Biden interrupted 82 times, MSNBC survey says Biden won 53% to Ryan’s 44%, CNN says Ryan won 48% to 44%.

As we saw a week ago, 25% of respondents will say the democrat won regardless of what actually happened and may not have even watched. That’s how many said President Obama won last week. I propose deducting these points from Biden’s scores because, well why not?

I conversed with some of them. Asked them my favorite question: What specifically did Biden say that really put him over the top? if for no other reason, to demonstrate that you actually watched it. That question didn’t get answered. Come to think of it, the same is true of Biden’s supposed “victory” over Sarah Palin four years ago. “Stop asking me why he won, he just did, because, hope.”

This is why we, as a country, are polarized. Turns out it doesn’t really have that much to do with political parties. People like me are fed up — beyond fed up — with this whole “I’ve got super magical mannerisms and an air of confidence about me, and I’m going to win this thing even if the facts and reason say I should not.” The beginning of this was the beginning of a disaster, and I’m afraid near-future events will make that conclusion an unavoidable one. It’s been playing nonstop since that horny used car salesman type from Arkansas started running twenty years ago…if I never see it again, it’ll be too soon. But some of my supposed countrymen can’t get enough of it. Yay Joe! He just interrupted again! Awesome!

He’s an overbearing asshole and that’s supposed to be a “win” of some kind. Uh, is that benchmark going to remain anchored to a fixed spot throughout the duration? Because if Crazy Old Joe is running for President in 2016, I’d hate to see him climbing up on the debate desk to take a huge crap on it or something. That’s about the only place he can take this.

Which is here.

I just mentioned over at Facebook that we were starting to watch it, and people got in my face because I didn’t include my Hello Kitty of Blogging movie review template. Of course I didn’t, we only just started watching it and I didn’t know what the movie would have in it. So now I’ve seen it, I’ll fill the template out over here.

[ ] Tits
[ ] Sex
[ ] Exploding cars
[ ] Guns Realism: [ ]%
[ ] Creatures eating people
[ ] Murder/mystery
[ ] Intrigue/espionage/complicated plot
[ ] Cool music
[ ] Swashbuckling
[ ] Good & evil wo/pain-in-the-ass hipster moral ambiguity
[ ] BigBad
[ ] Client (rich powerful sucker the BigBad is trying to rip off)
[ ] Dragon (glorious bastard)
[ ] Slimeball
[x] Pirate/ferryman/eccentric with highly recognizable cool ship
[ ] Mooks
[ ] Philip K. Dick type of alternative-reality headache
[ ] Maguffin
[x] Chase [x] foot [x] flying [x] water craft
[ ] Indigenous peoples
[ ] Good guys held captive
[ ] Following a trail of clues
[ ] Sinister plot [ ] take over world [ ] kill lots of innocents
[ ] Love triangle [ ] girl-boy-girl [ ] boy-girl-boy
[ ] Revenge [ ] protagonist [ ] antagonist
[ ] False lead/decoy
[ ] Traitor
[ ] Supernatural/sorcery
[ ] Ghost getting all pissed off because the good guys aren’t finding its body
[ ] Creepy young boy or girl
[ ] Grisly deaths for the bad guys
[-] Race against time at the end
[ ] Cliffhanger
[x] NO CONFERENCE TABLES

As you can see, it’s got all three kinds of chase scenes but hasn’t got much else. Thankfully, it’s missing any scenes with conference tables, which of course are good-movie-death, capable of transforming a decent movie into a lousy one, pretty much instantly. UNLESS Darth Vader is threatening to use the Dark Side of the Force to crush some guy’s larynx.

Tits, guns and car explosions would’ve been nice. That’s an oh-for-three…we do have Vanessa Hudgens, who is very lovely but also very young and very thin. She’s just a little girl. The plucky and annoying kid who was the star of the show should’ve brought his Mom, who should have been played by Naomi Watts or Diane Lane or someone hot like that.

There’s a bee versus bird chase. It is very silly and rather annoying. The Rock plays the ukulele, which is more entertaining than you think.

In the end, I found this less functional as a vehicle for evening post-debate entertainment, than as a meter reading of our young people and what’s going on in their lives. Let’s see…they’re growing up in broken homes, either having step dads or identifying with other kids on the movie screen who have step dads. Oh and it’s okay to be a complete butt to your step dad, he’ll just roll over and take it…we were amused imagining my kid saying stuff like this to my girlfriend. Me: How far & fast would he sail across the room with a split lip? Her: From you, or me? Me: You’d have my permission. We’d just watched Joe Biden yelling like a crazy man for an hour and a half, then we get to watch this twerp. Age gap aside, I couldn’t see much difference.

Oh yeah, and they must like Luis Guzman immediately figuring out how to drive the Nautilus within a half a second or thereabouts, much like the little girl from a generation ago doing the same with a “Unix system” in Jurassic Park. In fact, I learned something tonight. You know why they do that? The little whelps identify with it. They get up to open their presents from Santa on December 25 at 7:00, have everything all unwrapped at 7:01, by 7:02 they’re wailing “Is that ALLLLL??” and by 7:04 they have it all figured out. So if Guzman did what real people do, with “oops” and “what the–” and “what’s this lever do?”, not only would it have interrupted the rhythm of the story, not only would it have gotten all the characters killed, but the young audience would have found it alien and annoying.

When I was a little kid, I really didn’t need to do much “identifying.” My idea of identifying with people in a movie was to say “Hey, if I was doing what those people are doing, that would be cool!” So Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was great stuff. All the identifying I needed, even though those little English kids were quite weird. Well screw them, I just liked the car.

But kids today have this need to relate and say “that kid there reminds me of me” or “I would like to be that kid.” Very much like…an older kid, mid-to-late teenage years, wanting to be like James Bond. I don’t know what this means. I’d like to think kids are maturing more quickly. But I’m afraid what it really might mean is, they’ve been brought up to reject anything they might perceive to be alien, even as they and the adults around them drone on about the benefits of diversity — they only want to think about people and things who remind them of themselves, or what they would like to be. Everything else can go straight to Hell. I hope that’s not what’s happening. That would not be a good thing.

I’m shying away from specific predictions about the debate tonight, because among the specific predictions I could make, I’m seeing a big jumbled toss-up of remote possibilities, sure things, and everything in between.

I do have one general prediction to make though: Some of the items on this list, are going to be demonstrated before our eyes. Perhaps all ten.

Might make this a continuing series. Lord knows, after the last five or six years we’ve been seeing, I can keep adding to this list for awhile, with precious little time invested and even less effort.

Feel free to add on to what I missed in the comments, so as we embiggen it over time I can give you credit.

1. For the last four years now, all of the duties of President of the United States that have something to do with giving speeches, have been addressed thoroughly. The time’s come to start taking care of the other stuff.
2. Liberals have a quirky understanding of the concept of “freedom” that doesn’t work terribly well. Seems to have something to do with getting free things.
3. Because of #2, it is evidently beyond their understanding to notice their policies consistently make goods and services more expensive. Although, only for those among us who still pay for them.
4. Liberals also have a strange, special understanding of dignity. That, too, appears to have something to do with being given free things. And that, too, doesn’t work terribly well.
5. They lack understanding of the economic concept of scarcity vs. abundance. Over and over again, we see our friends the liberals trying to reprogram us to appreciate something a bit more, and their favorite techique for achieving this is to make the whatever-it-is more plentiful, ideally so we can’t ever get away from it even if we want to. Examples abound: Liberal women who can’t or won’t attract men; college grads; green energy; hip and edgy left-friendly “comedy” that isn’t funny; perpetually offended secularists and homosexual activists. Of course, humans aren’t wired this way. Of course, this lack of comprehension on their part is everybody else’s fault.
6. Speaking of fault: They place a lot of emphasis on this, at the expense of developing disciplines critical to actually solving problems. It’s like they stopped maturing somewhere during the teenage years.
7. A diligent, scrutinizing, skeptical “watchdog” press. With a democrat in the White House, we can’t have one.
8. Their idea of the Constitution seems to look something like: “US CONSTITUTION: ARTICLE I: ROE v. WADE. END OF CONSTITUTION.”
9. If our economy is going to get better, that would necessarily involve fewer people being poor and more people being rich. That’s both a cause and an effect, since this is a cyclical process. But I’ve just described exactly the situation liberals don’t want. The unavoidable conclusion is that liberals, whether they consciously realize it or not, want the economy to keep sucking.
10. Perhaps most importantly: Liberals are repelled by common-sense solutions. So highly do they value their own rhetorical flourish, after discussing things with them awhile you find they are drawn to the solutions most likely to fail, for the simple reason that the far more logical alternative is also boring and therefore would be selected by the humdrum hoi polloi, from which they seek to distinguish themselves. When their faily solutions do indeed fail, they consistently avoid admitting the obvious and instead counsel toward repeating the exercise with some trivial meaningless parameter changed, hoping for a different result, which of course doesn’t happen. In this way, their process for making decisions is less likely to succeed than another one driven purely by random chance. Summarizing it concisely: Asked what two plus two is, knowing that Sarah Palin would say “four,” the liberals we know today would be more drawn to “three” or “five,” because if she isn’t wrong then they don’t want to be right.

So I’m seeing this emerging meme coming out from multiple different sources — it’s wasteful and pointless to generate a list — that the reason President Obama’s performance in the debate last week sucked so much, was that Mitt Romney lied about so much stuff, and when honest people like His Holiness Our First Godly President come up against lies it’s just like Superman stumbling across Kryptonite or something. Just completely discombobulates ’em, they don’t know what to make of it. The result is the disaster we saw last Wednesday which, really, we should’ve expected it all along. Darn that Romney, he’s such a liar.

*sigh*

Borrowing a page from Family Guy, without the comedic flair, for just a second…This reminds me of a few years ago when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. Indy fans like me were relieved to see there was no problem at all with Harrison Ford’s apparent strength, agility and vitality with all his…uh…experience. He looks, if a bit weary, then also weatherbeaten, rugged, alert, driven, persistent, strong and (somewhat) fast. Overall, it works. But there were three big problems:

One, nuking the fridge.

Two, emerging from the tomb to find a bunch of bad guys relieving him of his prize.

Three, gawking at the ultimate find when a bunch of bad guys follow him into the chamber, again training their guns on him and holding him captive.

Others have already complained about the first of those three, which has no connection to this anyway. So let us concentrate on the last two. Which do.

Let’s see…lifetime-experienced rough-and-tumble world-wide adventurer Indiana Jones was fooled this way twice in the first movie, perhaps arguably one time in the second one (the “Lao Che Airlines” thing), twice in the third. And it happens twice in the fourth. Three times, if you count being abducted and thrown in the trunk of the sedan at the beginning. Lara Croft, on the other hand, seems to have been snookered this way one time at the Tomb of Qualopec, and then afterward learned her lesson…right? I think she did. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, is some kind of a dumbass. It makes me truly worried about the fifth Indy movie. Okay, in we go into the tomb…hey Indy, got an idea, most of the people who are along here are afraid to go in anyway. We’ve got some nice big-caliber guns, think maybe we should station someone outside as lookouts? Nah.

Yes, that’s taking it a bit too seriously. This is a fictitious character. The job is to gratify audiences, and for most among us, this doesn’t ruin anything.

The President of the United States, on the other hand, is not a fictional character. He’s real and, furthermore, not-gettin’-fooled is actually in the job description. But it’s worth pointing out, I think, that the excuse he’s using here is exactly the same as what the democrats were using a decade ago, after that imbecile George W. Bush fooled them into passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, a.k.a. The Iraq Resolution. It is exactly the same. Then, they were confronted by simple, durable and irrefutable logic: Hey waitaminnit, “somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot” as you people like to say…the idiot apparently fooled you…what t’heck happened here? What does that make you? And the response came back, well, er, uh, it’s like this, George Bush lied to us. We got fooled because we believed what he was saying, we’re such good people and all.

John Kerry lost the election. It was a squeaker, and there were a lot of factors in play. It is plausible to think back that, what determined the final outcome here, was that the sales pitch simply wasn’t workable: We are sophisticated and good, put us in charge of everything, we’ll make sure everything goes alright until someone tells us something that isn’t true at which time it will all come undone because we aren’t capable of dealing with that.

This just exposes the weakness of liberalism: It doesn’t pursue success, it pursues excuses for failure. It places no more value on either one of those two things, than the other. It’s a political ideology dedicated to the-dog-ate-my-homework.

Indiana Jones has a great excuse for defeat, nowadays: Those darn bad guys, they’ve got guns & junk. This is the guy who singlehandedly defeated an entire convoy. The cream of the crop of Hitler’s mighty military machine. On horseback.

Obama is supposed to be ushering us in to a new age, in which the oceans finally recede and the planet begins to heal.

But tell Him one little fib, and the one loose thread on his sweater has been pulled and the whole thing comes undone.

Funny thing, though, is this. Some of this damage would have been deflected, successfully I think, if the President simply came clean: I lost the debate because I underestimated My opponent. Just a tiny bit of humility…not this proxy stuff, where He apologizes on our behalf to foreign dictators, or commands us to turn off our thermostats so Europe will say okay. Just a smidgen of the good, old-fashioned, money-where-your-mouth-is, first-party stuff. I made a mistake. I was caught with My pants down and I will do My best to make sure it never happens again.

But…not gonna happen. It’s like milking a fish. Or, a refrigerator protecting you from a nuclear blast. Necessary parts just aren’t there.

I dunno why they keep using this excuse. I hope they keep doing it.

I’m really not pleased with a future in which the resourceful and capable Indiana Jones I knew as a teenager, is a relic of distant history, but Barack freakin’ Obama is still going strong, being applauded and cheered on and congratulated for being the Food Stamp President. Are we that ticked off at the very concept of strength, practical intellect, human capability, wherewithal? Are we that enamored of thumb-sucking and making excuses? If so, things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get any better.

…anywhere. I don’t think this is going to work, I really don’t.

Mitt Romney may have won the first presidential debate, but what stuck in many people’s minds was his threat to fire Big Bird. Apparently, Romney thinks America’s debt problem can be fixed by picking up pennies along Sesame Street.

Pressed to explain how he would balance the federal budget while cutting trillions of dollars in taxes, the allegedly masterful debater offered up just two specifics: He would repeal “Obamacare” (even though the Congressional Budget Office says the healthcare act actually reduces deficit spending) and eliminate the federal subsidy to the Public Broadcasting System.

Directly addressing beleaguered debate moderator Jim Lehrer, the former anchor of the PBS “NewsHour,” Romney said, “I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS…. I like PBS, I love Big Bird, I actually like you, too, but I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

Romney went on to say he would save additional money by tossing popular federal programs back to the states (the same states that do not have enough money to operate the programs they already have) and by making “government more efficient” (the same boilerplate assurance that every candidate for even the lowliest office offers up when he has no real clue how to fix a budget).

So, after many long months of campaigning and promising to cut the deficit while also cutting taxes, the single genuine and specific spending reduction Romney has stipulated is the one one-hundredth of a percent of federal expenditures that helps pay for Big Bird, Downton Abbey and the rest of the PBS lineup. Defenders of PBS were quick to point out that eliminating the federal subsidy for public television would trim an amount equal to just six hours – 360 minutes – of spending at the Pentagon.

You want my honest, honest reaction — not as a blogger or political ideologue, but as a citizen? I’ll give it to you, exactly the way it popped into my head: “Downton Abbey too? I’m paying for that?? WTF??”

The trouble with the argument really all boils down to just this: In the fourth paragraph there is a defense offered for the continuing spending, at the federal level, on the strength of these programs being “popular.” In the fifth paragraph there is another defense offered on the strength of proportions, the “just a drop in the bucket” line of reasoning. The problem is that when the bucket has been upgraded to such a size that can hold everything that happens to be popular, what you’re left with is a bucket so huge that everything outside or inside is a drop, by comparison. And that’s when you need to bring in an experienced business executive like Romney. Even if you hate him personally, or hate Mormons, or whatever…none of that stuff matters anymore, because the fiscal discipline has gone missing and someone needs to bring it back.

It’s like this. I remember many years ago when Dr. Laura Schlessinger was on the air. A married woman calls her up looking for advice on how to handle her “verbally abusive” husband. Now, Dr. Laura was even more jaded against the idea of lazily conflating verbal abuse with the physical and sexual counterparts, than I am…and I don’t like this idea at all, myself, for the simple reason that the definition of verbal abuse is essentially non-existent, everything spoken could be reasonably included in it. Definitions must define, that is their job, if they don’t define things then they are useless. When everything is included, nothing is.

Well — it emerged that the wife had announced her decision to lose some weight, and then she proceeded to watch her favorite teevee shows, on the couch, eating chips. Like the columnist above defending Sesame Street and Downton Abbey and everything else that’s “popular,” she made the argument of proportions. It’s just chips! She didn’t say there was dip involved. Actually, she didn’t say there wasn’t, either…

Dr. Laura made the obvious point, and it further emerged that this is all the husband was saying, as well: Look lady, you’re either trying or you’re not. When you want to lose some weight, and your idea of passing the time every night is to watch the idiot box eating chips, there’s a problem. Well the same thing applies to these subsidies. We’re either worried about the deficit or we’re not. If we’re still coming up with creative new ways for the federal government to spend the loot that it borrows from China, then we’re not trying, it’s as simple as that.

And I don’t think anybody heard anything different from Governor Romney’s comments last week. Romney’s not losing a single vote over this. He could shoot Big Bird in broad daylight, set the body on fire, piss on the flames, set it on fire again, and it would only help his campaign.

Why are the progressives so out of touch with the rest of America? Because most people are rational thinkers when they’re hurting; they stray away from truth, logic, and common sense if & only if they feel like they can afford to do so. Progressives, on the other hand, are intractably fastened in their minds to the idea that the progressive way is the right way and all other ways are wrong…furthermore, that anyone & everyone who shares their biases and their outlooks on political matters is automatically cool and popular, not only that but smart as well. So they figure — hey let’s play this up! Romney is gonna kill Big Bird! In their little rooms with the big doors locked up tight, and all these “special” people helping them plan everything, I’m sure that makes a lot of sense.

It isn’t going to work because out here in the real world, people go in to Wal Mart and Target and what do they see there? That little slut Elmo, whoring himself out like there’s no tomorrow. So Elmo is a capitalist, but Big Bird somehow has to be on welfare. It doesn’t compute, and ultimately it doesn’t work. And that effectively destroys the whole argument about “all of PBS is six hours of military spending,” the proportion nonsense. The military can’t sell merchandise through Wally World; also, ya know, funding a military is something the federal government is supposed to be doing. Look it up, folks!

There is a long standing pattern going on in the history of American politics, in which the political left is riding high whenever it’s in emotional sync with the rest of the country, and once it loses this tactile bond with the mainstream it loses it real big. In other words, they’re great at calculating the political gain to be exploited when their finger happens to be on America’s pulse, but once the pulse is lost they’re really lousy at finding it again.

I think that trend is continuing here. They’ve lost the pulse and they can’t find it again.

Blogger Friend Phil made a humdinger of a post over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging. I was hoping he’d work up something similar at his “real” blog where the general Internet community could take a gander at it…and luckily, he did.

There is the dollar amount of taxes one pays. There is the rate of tax one pays. There is the total amount of tax that the government collects. And there is the percentage of the tax burden one pays.

Democrats and our self-described “Progressives” like to shuffle these around as if they are interchangable to make things sound like they want them to sound.

What would I do? Besides the obvious…repeal ObamaCare, pass a real budget, and drill-here-drill-now. What other steps could I take if I were King-for-a-day?

Well it turns out, the things I would do, from the straightforward to the silly, are all things that are highly unlikely to ever happen, even though in all seriousness they would probably work pretty well. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from this, it is that we are tying the knot for our own hangin’. Here it is, in Letterman Top Ten form…

10. You know where you can stick your global warming, “climate change,” or whatever it is today.
9. If you’re really that concerned about some other guy’s tax bill, you can’t vote.
8. Radio stations cannot carry more than 1 ad a week containing the phrase: “Find out if you qualify.”
7. All female politicians wearing pantsuits 60% of the time, or more, must resign immediately.
6. ADA reform.
5. Payroll tax holiday for 180 days.
4. No boutique fuels.
3. You can’t tax ammunition.
2. You can’t tax beer.

And the Number One thing that Dictator Morgan Freeberg would do to fix the economy…

1. The tips you leave for Hooters waitresses are tax deductible.

None of it will ever see the light of day. We’re way too enlightened, too sensitive, far too infected with a raging case of GoodPerson Fever.

This, I think, is divine punishment on us. I really do think that. Consider the cause-and-effect here: We have GoodPerson fever. We have it because there is a preciousness, an economic value, in these silly little things we can do (and not do) to show what wonderful good people we are. In basic economics, a commodity is precious when it is rare, so the unavoidable conclusion is that we are starved for opportunities to prove what good people we are.

So we act all uppity and hands-on-hips-ey and butt-hurt-ey when we see bad things. Which is why I’m particularly partial to Items #7, #3, #2 and #1. They are confrontations against cultural quirks we have allowed to set in…quirks that, at first glance, don’t seem to really exist or, if they do, are harmless. Well, they exist and they’re not harmless.

This thing, that thing, some other thing we used to ritually do…each of which carries some incremental impetus to potentially make our economy take off just a bit…we don’t do it anymore, or we seriously hesitate, because we’re afraid of ticking someone off. That’s the truth of it. GPF is killing off our economy. And the other truth is, if more of us were genuinely good people and were more worried about staying that way, than proving it to a bunch of butt-noses who need to be minding their own business, we wouldn’t have GPF in the first place.

Robert at Small Dead Animals wants to know how to discuss things with an Obama supporter. Brave man. I know this is above my pay grade when I see the phrase “gotten us into” included twice in the short paragraph he includes, to clue interested readers in on what the problem is:

Obama hasn’t gotten us into this mess, which is the worst recession since the 1930’s, and based on the fact that much of the collapse revolved around lack of regulation in the housing loan business, there’s no quick fix. Once people started losing their homes, it has a domino effect. George W. Bush is the one who got us into two wars, gave tax cuts, and added medicare benefits without EVER including them in his budget. Obama got the hand he was dealt. And I can tell you that the Republicans have done absolutely EVERYTHING they can to stop every effort he makes to get the economy back on track.

Maybe that’s the best way to deal with it, I dunno: “What if George W. Bush started agreeing with Barack Obama on everything?” Well check that, no it wouldn’t help matters any, all it would do is illustrate the obvious: These people are obsessed with faces and names, they don’t care about the content of any ideas, which is the very first step to caring about what ideas work and what ideas don’t.

The whole thing is just silly.

“Hey look, the debt is unsustainable. You took in this much, you spent that much…”

“Oh yeah, well Bush got us into, blah blah blah blah blah.”

(Long, incredulous pause, then more slowly…) “You took in this much…you spent that much…”

“GEORGE W. BUSH!”

(Longer pause…)

Maybe cheesecake is the answer after all.

You know, I guess if the point is going to be made that someone has to talk to these people because the survival of the civilization we know depends on it…probably the best place to start is with the “there’s no quick fix” thing. Not because there’s some easy diplomacy there — there ISN’T, because the Obamachron’s ego is wrapped up tightly around every sentence, every syllable — but because it’s the most delightful and pure bundle of silliness out of the whole thing. Yes, it might look like an attack. Yes, that will send the other party into defense mode, which isn’t helpful. But it simply cannot be allowed to let stand.

It reminds me of: “Why do you let your daughter interrupt you when you’re on the phone with me?” “She’s four!” Um, yeah…that is a correct fact, I don’t see what that has to do with anything. It is equally correct that “there is no quick fix.” Why do people assume that just because these simplistic statements are correct, they somehow invert the very truths that make up the universe in which we live? Hocus pocus, and we’re suddenly back in Joe Biden’s alternate reality of “must spend money to keep from going broke.”

The oasis is so far that we will die of thirst before we get there, therefore we should head in the opposite direction…you know, even that analogy makes too much sense to fit, since we live on a globe that is round, and that plan would eventually work, die-of-thirst and trans-oceanic travel considerations notwithstanding.

I suppose that’s all just a bunny trail. It never ceases to amaze and fascinate me how people use nonsense to prop up other nonsense.

Commenter dashing recommended a link to a video showing a timeline of the financial & housing crisis. I think it’s this one. I’m pretty sure, without checking, there’s a progressive “debunking of the urban myth” that addresses this. After all, it threatens them. That’s why they don’t want us watching Fox News, right?

Tenebris says: “They could find the guts to pass a budget, rather than hiding under a bush.” Heh. Funny!

But ultimately, what we’re really seeing here is Thing I Know #401. People who refuse to work with details don’t fix things. The recurring theme has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas that bring good results, or ideas that do not; it isn’t about ideas at all. Said theme is only concerned with: Strip these people over here of any influence at all, give as much influence as you can to those other people, over there. Put it all in a big snow globe and shake it all about, and things should work out more-or-less okay. If that had anything to do with ideas, there’d be some thought given to: Duh, hey, waitaminnit that’s exactly what got done in November of ’08…we’ve been down this road already. Well I suppose “Republicans have done absolutely EVERYTHING they can to stop every effort he makes” is included to preemptively dismiss that most obvious point. But by “some thought” I’m referring to something a bit more focused and disciplined than, anticipating an obvious point and including a catchphrase to preemptively shunt it aside.

Some kind of concern for outcome is what I mean. It’s entirely missing here.

The concern is all being systematically piped to that other thing discussed above, the stripping influence from some individuals and elevating the influence of other people. These vocal myrmidons are the “useful idiots” of those other people. I know this for a fact, because I get the e-mails. Michelle and I are having our anniversary…can you send three bucks in right now…it’s me, Michelle, Barack’s birthday is coming up can you kick in five…get on the social networking sites, and say this stuff. We’ll need your help in November, vote out those Republicans, they’re stopping the really cool ideas we have that I don’t want to talk about right now.

Useful idiots, using up the last of their usefulness.

I don’t know what’s more pitiful and pathetic: The name “George W. Bush” is still flying about thick & fast this late in the game, or, they’re setting up the talking point that President Obama only had a friendly Congress for the first one hundred thirty-three days. Um, hey…that is the length of time President Obama got to deal with a Senate with sixty senators on His side, a filibuster-proof super-majority. Modern Nero has to have that in order to get anything done? And His ostensible supporters are admitting to this?

That one seems to me like something that would be better left unsaid.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

People on the left say the economy is turning around. People on the right say the economy will turn around, as soon as Romney kicks Obama’s butt. Whichever one’s right, the economy can’t keep sucking forever, and we’re going to have to re-learn these things when we pull out of “punch the clock, suck my thumb, hope gas prices don’t go higher” mode and actually do some impressive, real things again.

1. DO NOT play the “one foot in front of the other until we get there” game; make a list of the whole thing, stem to stern. The temptation is to say “I can keep two or three things in my head, no problem,” but by the time you get up to four or five things, this natural ability is being exhausted and if there is a failure event, it will have to do with leaving something undone, resulting in failure of the whole project. Besides, without defining the list you can’t define the stature of any item within the list, like for example, is this the highest priority item to which we should be attending right now. In fact, you can’t make a qualified statement about any item at all, dealing with superlatives, without an understanding of the complete body of work, nor can you sequence these items in any way. So make the list.

2. If the project is more complex than a list, make a matrix. This means, for each item, there are multiple things to be done. Tracking progress is therefore a two-dimensional endeavor, with a width and a height. This provides definition for what you are doing with each item. Without this “horizontal” definition, working from a simple list where a matrix would be more suitable, there is exposure for you to realize late in the game you haven’t been processing all items the same way and then you’ll have to burn off your time playing catch-up with some kind of self-audit, the product of which will be some kind of two-dimensional matrix anyway. So you might as well make it in prospect rather than in retrospect.

3. Understand that when things possess meaningful differences relative to one another, they are not the same and should not be treated like they’re the same. This is, perhaps, the most difficult rule to follow out of the eight.

4. Understand that when the differences are irrelevant, then for all practical purposes, the things being compared are the same. They should not be treated like they’re meaningfully different. (Words like “meaningful” and “meaningfully” are important, since all things in the universe are unique in some way, the question that arises is: Are the differences meaningful with respect to what you’re doing.) This is, perhaps, the second-most-difficult rule to follow out of the eight.

5. Understand your effort. There are three high-level classifications of effort: Creativity, preservation and destruction. They are not interchangeable. You have to sort these things out according to the end goal, since some things are created for the purpose of destruction, and some things are destroyed so that other things can be preserved. Your effort pays the price, as your likelihood for success diminishes, when you start to become confused about what it is you are trying to do.

6. Understand how to achieve excellence, and align your personality with what it is you’re trying to do. There are four high-level classifications of ways to achieve this excellence, and the job you’re doing drives your effort to achieve excellence: 1) Extraordinary achievement that doesn’t cost anybody else anything. 2) Extraordinary achievement that results in consumption from a finite resource, at a cost to your competition. 3) An extraordinary amount of activity, or time, exhausted without any catastrophic events encountered. 4) There is no way to achieve excellence in this job, the best you can be is adequate. When people cannot achieve excellence in what it is they’re trying to do, it often emerges that their personality is a good fit for one of these four things, and their job demands excellence through one of the remaining three.

7. When solving problems, solve the “big” problems; look for trends. Make a statement of the problem and don’t be afraid to use the word “whenever” if it fits the situation. Example: “My computer speakers are popping” would indicate the amplifier, speakers, sound card or cables require replacement. “My computer speakers are popping whenever the fan across the room is plugged in” would indicate something else is the throw-away item, and might in fact be a fire hazard. It’s important to identify the problem correctly if the objective is to implement a correct and effective solution.

8. Evaluate ideas from others, as ideas. Demand specifics. Just because someone speaks “with great weight” or “seems to know what he’s talking about,” doesn’t mean the idea is any good. In fact, it’s well established that very often the truly bad ideas come from the “smartest guy in the room,” for the simple reason that the human dynamic doesn’t make it likely that such ideas are challenged, or confronted with any social necessity to improve or evolve.

Everyone with a brain knows these rules apply. Everyone who thinks on it diligently for any length of time at all, understands these are necessary for basic quality decision-making. For driving decisions that are more likely to achieve the desired result, than a decision about the equivalent situation driven by a random-chance process. The challenge is to stay true to them when you’re actually working on something. Examples abound of bright, smart, talented and capable people failing to do this, and what follows is an accounting of tiny little fails becoming bigger ones.

So Wednesday morning, before the big debate, I followed through on my big fancy plan. I shook up the schedule and by a quarter to four in the morning, I was swinging on to the freeway entrance ramp with my mountain bike strapped to the back of the Honda. Destination, Angel Island. The woman can’t join me in things like this for another couple of weeks, the manly thing to do is check it out by myself ahead of time and see what there is to do. I’ve lived here quite awhile by now. Should’ve been to Angel Island already.

Driving that early in the morning, I’m always blown away by the pack mentality of people, especially when the trucking flow is on the light side and the freeway is pretty much an empty parking lot. Big empty spaces, interrupted by small dense “flocks” of cars. I wonder if they know they’re doing it. I was particularly amused by the fellow who was speeding by a good ten miles an hour, until he got right on my ass and hovered there, clearly frustrated. I was in the second of four lanes, all empty, and he just hung there like a cow who encountered a bail of hay and didn’t know what to do. I shifted right and he proceeded onward. Californians.

Tiburon, where the ferry terminal is located, is very much like Petaluma it turns out: Sleepy. My schedule was not a good fit here. I arrived about 5:30 and ended up finally grabbing a plate of chow a little bit past eight. My one chore between that, and the departure of the first ferry at ten o’clock, was to move the car from two-hour parking to an all-day arrangement, this was accomplished by nine. Having managed that, I took to exploring Paradise Drive, probably about as far as the park on the North side of the peninsula. I recall thinking at 9:43, alright I really should turn around now and maybe I’ve already screwed up my schedule…but, it worked out, I managed to double back and walk my bike on to the dock at 9:58. The ferry ride itself is a cash proposition and the boarding is quick. This particular line has no space for cars; bicycling and walking, that’s all you get. Simple. Inside of five minutes we were watching the pier recede, making good time over the water.

Angel Island is a popular stop-off for Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, and I was a bit embarrassed, and surprised, that the younger set was making a go of it in the middle of a Wednesday morning. Don’t they have school? Evidently some arrangements had been made. By this time it was a bit balmy for my jacket, and the chosen tee shirt of the day was “One Big Ass Mistake, America.” Which doesn’t quite fit…but I guess, in these times, that’s not seen as vulgar as it would’ve been back in my day. Had I known there would be this many juveniles around, I would have opted for “Re-Defeat Communism in 2012” instead. There were two other bicyclists on this ferry ride, a couple somewhere around my age, maybe just a couple years senior. When time came to disembark the woman approached me and said, in hushed tones, “I really like your tee shirt.” I hear this a lot back in Folsom, there’s always a daily compliment-count, which month by month is on a perceptible increase. I was expecting the compliment-count for today to be zero since, hey, this is Marin County. And I said so. “Yeah, no kidding,” she said. “Gotta hand it to ya.” Oh well, that’s one. Two, actually, since her husband clearly approved as well.

This means something. Tonight was going to be the big debate. For anyone following this stuff, for whatever reason, the air was thick with suspense.

Regarding the Island, I’m left a bit concerned about what to do without bicycling. I have noticed there is stuff you can do, the signs say so, but I didn’t try it out personally since the bike was my mode of transportation for the day. There is something called a “Segway Tour”; I do not believe this is in the cards. All this technology coming out of The Jetsons, with no hint of the rocket-powered vest I was supposed to have by the 1990’s. A moving platform that does the walking for you? Can’t get past that. Looks like a decline of civilization to me.

I can see why the island is a great place to take kids, though. The military structures out there, abandoned and not-abandoned; they make learning fun. Truly a mind-expanding experience. I pushed onward, on the paved avenue that is the perimeter of the island, past the sign that said, 1.6 miles down 3.4 miles to go. By which time there was a half hour before the first return ferry would leave the island. I had to make a decision here: Stick to my original plan as opposed to hanging around an extra hour or two, loop the island, keep taking pretty pictures — I could have two out of those three. I vacillated on this a bit, and ultimately decided things would be much more exciting for everybody if there was still some exploring to be done, so I used the remaining minutes heading back the way I came. Sissy. Oh well, it’s fun that way.

This time, I didn’t shave things quite so close. I pulled up to a picnic table with the ferry terminal barely within line-of-sight, and started hydrating. As I was about to get going again I heard a voice behind me, “Did you loop it?” It was my two admirers, again. No, I said. It’s my first visit to the island and I’m here for pretty pictures, not performance benchmarks. It was their first time too, but they didn’t bring a camera. I think they said they opted to push on through. Well we got to talking about the nonsense that’s going on; we found common ground in our failure to understand Obama fans, and started comparing notes.

They’re not stupid, we all agreed. Not necessarily anyway. Some of them are actually quite bright. But their way of looking at the world is different.

I realized I had just jotted down the draft of an e-mail a few hours earlier, while it was still dark in Tiburon, waiting for a diner to open. And the subject didn’t have anything to do with national politics; not much, anyway. It had to do with economies. How people go about fulfilling their needs and their desires. There is bartering, in which something of value is surrendered whenever an expense event comes along, and then there is insuring, which means to classify the expense events and get whole classes of such events “covered.” Quoting:

[W]hen you barter, you have to earn, and as long as you’re earning you might as well pull in five clam shells when the bartering transaction for which you’re preparing demands only two or three…An economic model that encourages saving, is in rapid decline, while the replacement economic model that does nothing to encourage saving is in rapid ascension. So people don’t save, and they are not fortifying the mental discipline required to do the saving. They cut costs, and feel this false sense of accomplishment, but they fail to see it as the subtraction equation that it is. So they sacrifice things that are important to them, feel the pain of it, at the end of it the numbers still don’t come out right, then they feel abused, beaten down, get jaded and cynical. As I have these exchanges on Facebook with Obama fans trying to “educate” me on how the Affordable Care Act will make everything all moar-better, I sometimes ask them if they’re under the impression that health care coverage might be in a process of replacing the dollar as our society’s primary legal tender. Cool bike bro, thanks hey you know what, I’m selling it — really? How much you want for it? A year of basic coverage. That’s kinda stiff, I’ll give you six months for it. Make it nine. Sold!

Now what’s wrong with a society in which we’ve been pussified, done away with bartering, and take care of all our expenses by making sure “it’s covered”? I’ve already discussed the savings aspect; nobody has savings because nobody has any reason to have them. Closely intertwined with that is the dependency issue: It isn’t always covered! When there’s an expense, and it’s unavoidable, and no savings and revenue stream to support a line of credit…then you have a beggar. And so we have a future filled with whining, incapable mooching beggars. That is the real Obama agenda, it seems to me: If you try to save for a rainy day, and enjoy some success in doing so, then you’re “rich.” The Obama zombies say, oh no, that’s not true because Obama doesn’t want to punish you until you make X. I’ve been hearing the number “two hundred and fifty thousand a year” quite a bit there…well here’s a question, what’s Y? Meaning, the gross annual income you need [in order] to maintain some assurance that you won’t be a whining, mooching beggar post-retirement. As you’re no doubt aware, Y and X are moving treacherously close together, and Y may have passed X already for a lot of us. So Obama’s target, whether people want to admit it or not, is not “millionaires and billionaires flying around on their corporates jets”; it is self-sufficiency. In intent as well as in ultimate result, His war is against those who are attempting to accumulate the personal wealth needed to simply handle their own problems without bugging other people. In years past, that is what we were all supposed to be trying to do. Lately it is treated as some kind of neurosis, or worse. “C’mon, what’s the matter with you, you have ENOUGH money why do you need more?”

Complicating this is a subtle misunderstanding with just a glimmer of truth in it: “Making sure it’s covered” feels like the responsible thing to do. And it certainly is, when it’s known that a catastrophic event occurring within some set definition would likely be outside of your ability to pay. But I think it is generally understood that there’s nothing responsible about going before Congress and whining that your contraceptives cost too much and you need someone else to pay for them.

Consider what happened in that particular boondoggle: It was an election year stunt from the very beginning. It was about Congress, not the White House, so whether it worked or not is something to be determined within each district. But overall it’s a huge fail. Main Street understands the difference: There is $300 for Sandra Fluke’s birth control, and then there is $300,000 for liability events with your car insurance. The car insurance liability is much bigger, and it becomes reasonable to say, I’m probably not going to have that in the bank so I’d better get it covered. With the smaller number, let’s face it, it’s just bitching. Wah! I don’t wanna have to pay that! And then there is the very concept of liability…the coverage is in place to keep from screwing the other guy over. Fluke & friends just want to get their jollies. Alright, medicinal purposes or whatever…it’s still their thing. No, I don’t want to buy it for them, and more importantly, Main Street doesn’t want to either. Bottom line: This was one step forward and three steps back for the democrats — and to this very day they think it’s a win.

But here is the point: Our country, today, has a crisis with hard work. We don’t seem to have a good understanding of what it is. There is evidently a whole lot of loud, opinionated people running around, many of them nursing resentments, who see it as what could best be expressed as “suffering that pays something.” Dig a hole, dig another hole, take the dirt from the second hole and put it in the first hole, dig the first hole and put the dirt in the second hole…at the end & middle of the month you get a check. Um, that’s not what work is supposed to be. It’s supposed to have something to do with objects changing states for some purpose to be served. Also, we have a problem with that check. You cash it and pay some bills, buy food, hopefully there’s enough left over to put in savings. Well that part is right…but there’s a massive neglect of human potential taking place here when so many think of it as THE bills. THE this-credit-card, THE that-credit-card, THE heating bill. It’s easy to fall into this trap. And I guess, as long as something makes it into savings, it doesn’t really matter…but it seems people forget the bills do not represent injury, they represent activity. The trap of “paycheck happy face, bills sad face” reduces human potential because it makes it untenable to seriously consider taking on a new bill.

Anyway, my new friends passed the test. They weren’t hateful and they didn’t think all the Obama voters were complete idiots and they weren’t skinheads or racists, they were genuinely tired of the bovine-used-food. On the ferry ride back, we exchanged names, the husband offered me a glass of the bubbly in which they were partaking — it was a celebration of their twenty-fourth anniversary — and the wife said something funny. The reason they came to the island was they had this fantasy about expatriating, buying an island, starting their own country. “One rule,” she said: “Anyone can come, bring your own money because there’s no taxes and no welfare, and don’t be a dumbshit.” Heh heh, I like it. But Ayn Rand had thought of it first, of course…they weren’t up on the story, so I found myself struggling to compress the eleven hundred pages into the two or so minutes left before we reached Tiburon.

The cub scouts were no longer on board, so I relaxed the vocabulary constraints to make it all fit. “So this lady who runs a railway company, who’s not a dumbass, finds she can’t get her shit done without relying on a bunch of dumbasses, and she starts to suspect, at first as a joke, that someone’s going around making all the guys vanish who know what they’re doing…leaving behind a whole bunch of dumbasses. And then she finds out that it isn’t a joke, someone is really doing it, meanwhile the dumbasses keep passing their dumbass laws that make a whole bunch of dumbass problems, which being dumbasses they blame on the wrong things, and use the new problems as an excuse to pass even more dumbass laws…”

Yup. A prophecy. For the times in which we’re living right now.

So I got their full names, and they must have liked me because when I checked, I found they really exist. They have my e-mail address, assuming they didn’t forget it. I may hear from them and I may not. At any rate, I have a great tip from them on where to find the best margaritas in town.

But it is sad, isn’t it, when the spiral is so out of control that, it starts to become an appealing wedding anniversary activity to indulge the fantasy about the island. I think the sadness has a lot more to do with what’s going on, than it has to do with them, since they are not alone. Atlas Shrugged, as I pointed out, is really not much more than that fantasy. I’ve talked to others who have such a fantasy. I’ve had it. Way back early on in my career, my duties had a lot to do with showing people how to use computers…Reagan was president, I was young, the government really wasn’t doing anything to tick me off yet. My residence fantasy was about the Arctic, way up where you have a midnight sun during the summer and noon blackness in the winter. My house would be four stories high. Three of them underground, plunged deep into the frozen, rocky soil. And there I’d just sit and write stuff, English words for human consumption, code for computers, on fifteen kilowatts or so from my own diesel generators. Yeah…people. People like the dumbass who was riding my back bumper hours earlier, lacking the common sense needed to quit hovering and pass me already. I got good and tired of dealing with ’em.

What is interesting to learn from all this is: The people who get tired of people, fantasizing about islands and winter-wonderland fortresses and so forth, do not tire of other people who think the same way. And there’s a good possibility we outnumber the dumbshits, so the fantasies about isolation may very well be entirely unnecessary. There is much stress and despair caused by the tactic used by the dumbshits, which they use and use again because it works, of pretending they are the real “everyone.” Everyone knows the Affordable Care Act is wonderful, everyone knows Obama walks on water, everyone knows you shouldn’t listen to talk radio or “hate radio” as they call it. They pretend to be everyone. But they aren’t. They may not even be a majority. They may not be even close to that.

And from all that, I conclude the following: By pretending to be “everyone” when that isn’t really what they are, they are sowing seeds of disharmony and disunity — where it did not previously exist. The easy thought to have is that the people fantasizing about expatriating and buying their own islands, they must be the problem since they’re the ones with the fantasy. At first blush, that does seem like common sense talking. But is it? And is there something to it? I don’t think so; perhaps I’m personally biased, but I really don’t think so.

And now, to the debate: Yesterday morning I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, and toward the end of his program he had someone comment on His Majesty’s debate performance by way of comparing Him to a drone. As in the military plane. I thought this really nailed it: Some people are very bright but, like the drone, they execute their processes within the confines of pre-defined and pre-learned mission parameters. The drone suffers in its effectiveness and suitability for the mission, when it encounters a situation outside of these parameters. Once that happens it will disengage and start flying in circles overhead.

This, claimed the caller, was what President Obama did: He encountered a situation outside of the established mission parameters, disengaged and flew in circles overhead, waiting to be shot down.

I think that explains part of it, maybe most of it. Probably all of it. But I’ve got this idea lurking in the back of my head that perhaps being disengaged was in the established mission parameters. Someone got it into the practice notes that, if Obama could look down, with a dejected expression on His face while Romney went on about whatever, the viewers would tune in and see poor little Barack Obama absorbing all this abuse from the rich white guy, and a sympathy vote would be triggered. I suspect that might have been the thinking, and I suspect further: the subtlety involved in discerning this is a tip-off, not that it’s a clever idea, but that it has resoundingly failed. Simply put, people just didn’t see that. That might have been the intent, but that isn’t what it looked like.

And, just like in the Fluke situation…even with the feedback that’s come out, I’m sure there is a mindset within their ranks that this was not a fail, but a glorious success. And the people who feel this, feel it sincerely. Obama really kicked some ass in that debate.

See, there is a truism to all this, where it hooks back to the “make sure its covered” people who want to start a whole new economic system without any actual trade and therefore with no savings: The effect of what they are doing, is to make weakness into the coin of the realm. You get something, because you need it…what you’ve done to help other people is irrelevant to this. This is where the real damage takes place, because when an activity is rewarded you’re always going to get more of it. (Coincidentally, or maybe not, in the third part of Atlas Shrugged this is explored in nauseating detail.) Say what you want about “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” the one undeniable virtue of this trade system being replaced, versus the “make sure it’s covered” system that is replacing it, is that the coin of the realm is fastened to the helping of other people…that’s what “work” is supposed to be, not the digging of two holes, but the helping of other people. Remember that? Therefore, it tends to make more of that. As long as people remember what work is supposed to be all about. Yeah, we’ve been slacking off there.

But “make sure it’s covered” makes need into the coin of the realm. It is bound to result in more people needing more stuff — more weakness, less strength. And, ya know what? It doesn’t do an awful lot for our sense of community, our readiness and willingness and ability to live peaceably with each other, when it gives rise to these retirement fantasies about expatriating and buying islands. Nor does it make sense to put the blame on the people having those fantasies. This is nothing more than a natural consequence.

So…two objectives, one is to reduce human suffering, the other is to foster a sense of community. Two things attempted, in both cases the outcome of the exercise is the precise opposite of what’s intended. Double-fail.

“As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create. ” — Spock

Was going to keep this thought to myself, but I came across a smug, holier-than-thou editorial about that goofball Todd Akin in USA Today. I have no problem with it in terms of the facts it cites or the conclusions to be drawn from them, my beef with it comes in the form of a question: What, exactly, are we to do with this information?

Ponder that question awhile, and you will have the answer to another question that has been agitating us in the last several years. Why have American politics become so damn contentious? I’ll give you a hint: What really clinched the decision to go ahead and write this up, was the opening paragraph in which the author uses a quote from H.L. Mencken to equate “enlightenment” with…well, he doesn’t come out and say what, exactly, although it is clear that he thinks voting for Claire McCaskill, the Senate seat incumbent and Akin’s opponent, is the enlightened thing to do.

Here is the epicenter of the problem. Such a vote cast, as a result of reading this column (let us assume for sake of argument that the Missouri voter was undecided prior to reading the column) would be based on an idea not of enlightenment, the way I define it, but on sheer lunacy. Let’s see if I can summarize it: Akin’s comment proves he is a sexist pig, that in turn proves there are still some sexist pigs out there, and we have to keep them out of the Senate. Is that the thinking? Because if it is, it does not work very well, does it…we’ve had sexist pigs in the Senate for as long as we’ve had a Senate. If the Senate is to be kept under its current democrat-party leadership — which, to date, suffers from a dearth of tangible achievements it can carry into election season — solely to broadcast some message of goodness about the voters who elect those senators, about the most flattering message we can manage to achieve at this point is “we give a fig about sexism in the Senate, once in awhile.” This is not a trivial point; the underlying foundation for the editorial, its whole reason for being, is that the politics involved in deciding Senate leadership are motivating the Republicans to behave inconsistently. That is the point to this column. It has nothing else to say, other than reporting on the relevant events (idiotic things said by Akin) to buttress that observation. Leaving the question effectively unaddressed: What to do with the information?

Of course it is not the columnist’s job to resolve it for us. But it’s hard to respect the train of thought upon which he has launched us, if there’s no potential in it. Let’s see…we could elect only democrats, who are known for rising above the inconsistency that tends to result from political forces? Eh, that doesn’t work. Is there something else we can decide?

What really sums up the problem here, is a gem I was jotting down early this morning in a discussion with someone about the Affordable Care Act. I’m quite pleased with it, if I dare say so myself; it is not bumper-sticker quality, but it might be plaque-quality.

A lot of this “regulate and tax ’em so they know how much we think they suck” remedy would work just great, in a universe where everything with a problem could be fixed by simply lowering a beatdown on it…I envision teevee and appliance repairmen wouldn’t exist there, everybody would fix their refrigerators & furnaces by giving ’em a good kick. But we live in this universe not that one, cause-and-effect is a bit more complicated here.

…and this, I submit, is the great brain-fart of the modern times in which we live. The elections, just like a weekly business meeting, offer us an opportunity to solve problems incrementally and cyclically, revisiting the results of our previous work at regular intervals. It is, therefore, an opportunity to self-test on our ability to think things through rationally. We aren’t doing so hot. Election after election after election, we are discouraged, demoralized, disgusted…

…I notice the people who are most vocal about this disgust, are also the ones most vocal about some kind of “change” which is not distinguishably different from the change that went into effect in the previous cycle. We should face facts: If this was the weekly business meeting rather than the biannual election, then the project manager would by now have dismissed the whole team and put together a new crew. His boss would insist on it. We stink at this.

Why do we stink? Because the vocal ones are living in that other universe. For all the talking they do, they don’t really have much to say, it’s all an appeal to throw the boot at the teevee. My favorite example is, higher taxes and more strict regulation on the rich, greedy, evil corporations who gouge the consumers with their high prices and offshore the jobs. Time after time we see: What do those corporations do in response, do they say “Everyone thinks we suck, we’d better keep the jobs at home and lower our prices so they change their minds”? Eh, no. Nobody even says so. Everybody understands that is not what is going to happen. What is going to happen is, the rich, greedy, evil corporations will say “huh, so it looks like we have some new operating costs.” They’ll slim down their services or their manufacturing to accommodate as best they can — read that as, offshoring the jobs — and then, whatever increased costs they can’t absorb in this way, they’ll pass on to their customers. Precisely the opposite of what we wanted.

Every time. Unavoidable. It is the very definition of suck-ass problem-solving, as suck-ass as you can get, right? If you’re making more of what you wanted to eliminate, complete ineffectiveness would be a dramatic improvement, since a zero is always greater than a negative…so that’s pretty bad. And yet we keep doing it. Well, politics is a great place to repeat mistakes, since all the problems are always caused by that other fellow.

Can’t find the “line tool” in the new version of Microsoft Visio — give the computer a good kick, that’ll fix it.

Lord knows, I can identify with the feeling and the desire. But the simple fact of the matter is, feelings and desires don’t fix things. Deep down we all know this to be true, and we know that if expressing frustration and resentment was all it took to solve these problems, they’d have been solved quite awhile back.

But you know, the years come & go, and I never fail to be surprised with the difficulties that supposedly mature, thoughtful adults have, channeling that basic, basic understanding into their actionable thinking.

The 130th award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to Gavin McInnes, who is writing in Taki’s Magazine under the title “10 Things I Hate That Everybody Loves” (hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun).

This just says it all:

…I feel the same way about television that prostitutes feel about sex.

Nothing to add. Nothing whatsoever.

Well…there is the matter that the prostitutes are supposed to be paid.

There are two big ones.

One, and I believe I’m not alone in noticing this: There seems to be a rule in place that if there’s anything in the movie, from opening- to closing-credits, that a man might find appealing in some way then the whole thing is a fail and the producers should not have green-lit it. A bit of focused thinking will show that this is not reasonable and is not to be expected. Think about a movie for kids, made by Pixar or someone who does it equally well…what makes the movie fun? Answer, the filmmakers know that if the kids are seeing it, the parents must have brought the kids, and they put in some wink-wink nod-nod jokes for the parents. Like Mr. and Mrs. Incredible arguing about what off-ramp to take on the freeway, that was great stuff. Also, “Honey, where is my super-suit?” “Why do you need it?” One of my favorite parts of the movie, heh heh. Movies for females do not do the same thing for the males in the audience, even though the males in the audience are surely there…having been dragged there. There seems to be a mode of thinking in place that if the guys are in the audience, they’re expecting to get laid, they probably will get laid, because we’re such geniuses at making girl-movies that work so well as panty-removers…we got Daniel-Day Lewis to sign on, did we not? Case closed. So the guys are getting their fun, hell with them. Well hey, scope definition is usually a good thing, but in this case it doesn’t do anything to make the movie better, and in a lot of ways it makes it worse. Unlike a Pixar movie, these movies are a lot more boring than they need to be.

Two: A good movie has a good story, a good story has a message, a good message can be defined. These movies have messages, but once you define those messages they are rancid. Really, really awful messages. I remember in ’93 I had just moved to Citrus Heights, and my domicile was about a third of a mile away from the local theater. One afternoon I got bored, and saw whatever was playing: The Piano. My reactions were: Wow, that Holly Hunter really does have a great-looking body, she looks fantastic naked, for a height-diminutive skinny lady she’s got a great pair of round hips and perky breasts…and…what the fuck was that about? She screws around on her husband and lives happily ever after? Oscar gold, huh? Apparently so. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why. The plot is empty, the pacing is sluggish, the images are dreary and depressing, and although I don’t swing that way, Harvey Keitel comes across as less of a sexpot and more of a creepy weirdo.

The inescapable conclusion is that for some reason, in ’93 women were drawn to the fantasy of wives screwing around on their husbands with creepy weirdo guys — and living happily ever after. Was there some other appealing point to this? I see nothing else.

Things haven’t gotten much better since then. I stumbled across a great column posted at Pajamas Media written down by long-time blogger pal Cassy Chesser, nee Fiano, about the rom-com offerings that have been chapping her hide. Even by her lofty standards this is great, great stuff. Thoroughly researched and explored, the points made are thought-provoking, and the complaints are…well, I’ve had the same ones, for awhile.

10. The Notebook

Damaging Message: Cheating Is Great!

The lesson here is that, hey, it’s totally cool to cheat on someone if that’s what your heart is telling you to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. If you’re following your heart, then cheat away!
:
7. Hitch

Damaging Message: Men Are Bumbling Idiots

It’s a running cultural joke. It’s everywhere: sitcoms, commercials, even e-cards and internet memes feature this oh-so-funny idea that men are useless and stupid. And while most chick flicks have insulting stereotypes about women, Hitch clearly shows that the men don’t exactly escape unscathed, either.

And, yeah. Entry Number One is exactly what you think it is.

There is another thing I notice going on here: It seems there is a tiny elite group of male actors who have made careers of playing the cuckold. They roughly resemble what, in another era, would have been the ultimately desirable male for the leading lady, but sometime after the early nineties it seems they’ve become the symbol of the “successful” husband who makes his wife quite miserable, not by cheating on her or beating her but by being too reliable and therefore boring.

James Marsden, who was the cuckold in The Notebook, reprised the role in Superman Returns. He’s financially solvent, well-dressed and handsome, ladies, his heart is pure — so run away from him as fast as you can! Sam Neill who is abandoned in the above-mentioned The Piano, for no discernible reason whatsoever, played the same part in Jurassic Park III and Dead Calm. Alright, Nicole Kidman ends up back with him in the end, but there’s a definite sexual tension between her and the badass Billy Zane…Neill is still representing orthodoxy, order, the lack of adventure. The exciting stuff is happening when he’s not around.

Hugh Grant. Do I even need to make up a list for Hugh Grant. I think not. Chatting with Cassy about it, I saw she mentioned Colin Firth. I’m not quite up on his appearances, I must say…King Edward VI in The King’s Speech, the bumbling Doofus Dad in Nanny McPhee, gay guy in Mamma Mia and it looks like he had a part to play in Bridget Jones which I’ve not seen all the way through.

These guys all have it in common that they’re good looking and seem intelligent and capable, but would never be very good candidates in a role like, oh, Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne or James Bond. Something where the good guy’s character is constructed around a permeating element of danger, and should be expected to somewhat routinely kill people. Although, for the latter role it is my understanding that Neill did try out for it once. It cannot be proven, but my impression is that had this gone forward, it would be revealed that Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan were better choices.

Throughout all this, it isn’t often commented-upon that there’s been a sharp decline in movie stories in which a husband proves himself to be unsuitable by way of doing really bad things. If there’s a plot line in the movie dealing with the wife’s pressing need to get away from him and start her life anew, it usually isn’t because he’s an accessory to a crime, or a murderer, or has a plan in place to kill her when she least suspects it — unless it’s a remake of another movie from an earlier generation. Bad has become the new good, and good has become the new bad. Perhaps that is because, if there is one unified-common-ancestor message to all these girl-movies, it has something to do with the head and the heart being in conflict, and a happy ending follows in the wake of the heart winning out and the female protagonist making an irrational and illogical choice. So this genre has degenerated into yet another aspect of our modern culture, in which we celebrate the undefined virtues of stupidity and poor judgment.

And package it up & sell it to women. I guess the thinking must be, they’re sure to buy it, the silly twits. This just reeks of old-fashioned sexism…exactly the sexism I thought we were supposed to be trying to eliminate. The irony.

Had a cool idea. It’s four years overdue, but better late than never…

Every now and then a “study” will come out that is obviously a joke, proclaiming that beer, wine and liquor provide these amazing health benefits that cannot be acquired anywhere else. Lengthen your life, rejuvenate your skin and hair, embiggen your “wedding tackle” and all that. Well, whether the Obamafans realize it or not, this kind of humor is parody by way of slight exaggeration of what they’re doing when they pull out these studies from Brookings Institution, Economic Policy Institute and Public Policy Polling. In other words, rationalization. The words “research” and “evidence” and “fact” are tortured to fit into a context that isn’t quite suitable, to legitimize a questionable decision to which a commitment was already made anyway, and the commitment was made not for logical reasons but because it was demanded by a personality susceptible to addictions.

Come to think of it, Obama fandom has a lot of common traits with substance abuse. Perhaps they should call it “Obamaholism.” I’m pretty sure if you could identify the synapses that tend to get clogged up after a period of excessive imbibing, and then correlate it to the neural pathways that are in deteriorated shape when you dissect the brain of an Obama supporter, you’d find they’re the same ones.

Anyway, my idea was this: Days, weeks or months, or any other period of time within the Obama presidency could be rated according to a single question: How drunk could you get, and manage something as competently as President Obama is governing the country? The running average, from what I’ve been able to determine, is pretty damn high. How much can you drink before you can’t get up anymore, and when you try to, you end up flat on your ass? Somewhere around there.

Obama’s just like the drunk who’s about to piss himself, as everyone else at the party is rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, and exchanging worried glances as they try to figure out where his car keys are. He thinks every sound He makes is continuing evidence of His amazing talents — just like a drunk; nothing is ever His fault — just like a drunk; He is ignorant, in textbook-case Dunning Kruger style, of His own ignorance, just like a drunk. It doesn’t consciously register in His consciousness that there are some people who find Him annoying, because like a drunk, He has this feeling of hostility against their opinions and therefore against their consciousnesses, therefore of their very existences…consequently, it also doesn’t register to Him that, where He had worn out His welcome with just a few yesterday, there are more who are tired of His routine today, and there will be even more tomorrow. Just like a drunk, He thinks as long as there are some people around who still appreciate Him, that means everybody does, and if they don’t then they should.

Bill Clinton was somewhere around a six pack of beer with a couple whiskey chasers. He figured he was the life of the party, and some of us were tired of it from the very get-go, but it was a case of cultural conflict — and our ranks did not grow over time, by much anyway, because Bill Clinton really was “the life of the party.” His singing was off key but as long as a lot of other people wanted to sing along with him, and did so, it didn’t really matter. He stumbled around, occasionally bumping into a wall, and took credit for a lot of things when it was obvious he didn’t know enough about what he was doing, but a lot of people found that charming because it was understood he didn’t take himself that seriously.

Trouble with Obama is, the whole “flexibility after the election” thing. He is just going to get more and more overbearing — and drunk — because He knows damn good and well, He’s so polarizing that there are people who don’t like Him and are never gonna, and other people who completely love Him and are always gonna. His solution to this is to deliver a lot of speeches to try to make it so that His admirers are more influential, and those who have caught on to His bull squat, are less influential. Doesn’t that capture the essence of just about every Obama speech there’s ever been, lately? “These people should count, those people should not.” And how many thousands, perhaps millions, of words has His Majesty burned through to deliver that simple thought? It is increasingly and cumulatively embarrassing because the word-count of this drunkard garrulousness is increasingly and cumulatively mounting.

At this point, He is managing things with barely greater competence than a drunk who has passed out, in the sense that He’s giving speeches.

And, He is not the life of the party. He is a problem. He is the drunk from whom the car keys have already been taken, and He’s trying to grab them back. This party stopped being fun, for everyone in attendance, quite some time ago.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

A “slap in the face for gender equality.”

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

“One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on.

So there is a correlation.

Well actually, I do have some experience with this, and it was in the context of an actual marriage. Which ended. Very quickly. And my experience backs up the reverse-correlation they did manage to find: Me “helping out with the housework,” and her finding it unsatisfactory (looking in to the bathroom and muttering “what did you do?”) were chapters tucked into a far broader narrative: The useless clueless husband would take his place somewhere midpoint in a snaky, twisty, dizzyingly-long Congo Conga line of persons, places, businesses & things conspiring to make her life miserable and give her “migraines.”

I think a lot of guys have been there. “What did you do?” followed by yet another disgusted, sad, raspy sigh, followed by “nevermind, I’ll just do it”…um, yeah…you can feel your zest for taking on life and eagerly confronting its challenges, getting sucked right out of your body, like a too-thin milkshake being sucked up a straw. As for the ungrateful bitc bride, I’m sure her feeling of disgust was, and is, quite genuine. Just a bad situation all around.

I don’t wish to pick on the gals here, but this condition within modern wives is not exactly as rare as ice cubes in the Sahara. And not as cherished either. It resembles the sand in that setting, both in abundance and in consequential value.

Point is: The help-with-the-housework thing is not having the desired effect, because it is, in itself, an effect and not a cause. It’s a spurious relationship. These are women who should be alone. They never wanted to be married in the first place, because they never wanted a relationship with a real live grown man in the first place. They wanted a pet, or a stuffed animal. That’s their maturity level.

Oh yeah, and I’m sure the guys have some culpability in this too. My experience is with females and I can’t contribute an informed opinion outside of that, so if a female blogger with a more eventful marriage history wants to write that one up, she should consider herself welcome to do so.

From Cheezburger.

The niece of a former co-worker seems to have matured a bit, or cooled down, and unblocked me for the time being, and we’re having this exchange at the Hello Kitty of Blogging which is somewhat non-volcanic for the moment and I’m trying my best to keep it that way.

How’d I do?

You know, I’ll just come out and make an observation on this directly:

I’m seeing this talking point repeated over and over, it’s clearly being disseminated from a central point somewhere: An indictment against Republicans/conservatives for promoting policies different from, and resisting the policies promoted by, democrats/liberals.

And now I’ll state the obvious.

It’s only reasonable to point that out when the policies promoted by democrats/liberals have been enacted and have been successful — or alternatively, when everything is miserable but the policies were not enacted. Just those two situations; outside of that, this isn’t persuasive. Things the way they are, the policies were rammed through and the results stink on ice. And you know what, because of this issue with the situation not fitting the pitch, I don’t think it’s even persuasive. I don’t see anyone repeating it anywhere save for people known for maintaining some phobia over a prolonged period of time, that Republicans are going to establish a crushing American theocracy (by restoring religious freedom) or a crushing new American aristocracy (by allowing productive people to keep more of their money so they can create jobs). So this pitch hasn’t found passion with people other than people who had the passion in the first place. It isn’t persuasive.

Also, opposing other parties/ideologies, is what parties & ideologies are *supposed* to do. If you believe in what you’re promoting you are supposed to resist efforts toward the opposite. I’m trying to explain that without making it sound insulting/condescending, but, like duh. I mean it’s been true for just generations and generations.

In fact, if the worst thing you can say against a political party is that it isn’t knuckling under & rolling over for the other political party, I’d interpret that as: You haven’t got much to say against them. On the other hand, what have they got to say that is substantial against the guy running for re-election? Lots! It’s like Paul Ryan said, the policies didn’t fail because they weren’t passed, they failed because they were.

The comments by Congressman Ryan being so referenced, were captured in this clip:

“It is true that President Obama, he had a lot of problems not of his own making. But he also came in with one-party rule and the chance to do everything of his own choosing. The Obama economic agenda failed not because it was stopped, but because it was passed.” (Applause.)

It is clear to me the White House, and the publicity team interwoven with & surrounding it, is promoting a message that certainly did not begin with President Obama…one that has long been associated with electoral politics. We’re not getting the results we want, because the other party still has some power and this explains ALL of your suffering. But like I said above, that is a situational argument; it doesn’t fit when the situation is not right.

Perhaps what could make it actually persuasive is if they could come up with something they wanted, but did not get. Now I’m sure they can come up with something if they’re cornered and that’s the only way out. But how tortured would it be? And so far they haven’t even tried. I’m picking up the vibe that they don’t see the need and they don’t see the point. There are too many Obamapologists who will just repeat it, mindlessly, if the jungle-drumbeat is started of “Wah, we’re being defeated again, those guys are making it hard, get them out of the way”…even when it doesn’t make any sense to be claiming that as an excuse. They get the word out anyway. The Obamapologists pick it up and re-circulate it anyway.

This may be having a net-negative effect. President Obama already has a reputation as a whiner and an excuse-maker. It’s a damaging reputation because it isn’t just the strident, rigid, uncompromising Republicans who feel that way about Him. It is a perception that has bled over into “middle” America.

I think He knows this; I think, if He had a good counterargument to offer against what the Congressman has said, someone on His team would’ve offered it by now.

“Newt at his best,” says Weasel Zippers. And I agree, it’s certainly right up there.

This whole thing with The View, it’s quite indefensible. Provided, I mean, one concedes that the presidency has something to do with things above & beyond public relations. That’s what big-eared Nero has been doing, right? Just P.R.

Fundraisers, golf, vacations. Now you could make the case that some of these things are legitimate expenditures of time…not a strong case, but you could make the case. That’s a different thing entirely from saying President Obama is managing His calendar, and the priorities upon it, in any kind of a proper way. Speaker Gingrich is correct, President Obama’s just not being serious.

Frankly, I’d rather have thirty years of presidents like that fool Todd Akin compared to four years of an Obama.

This attitude…this “In what new creative ways can the country worship Barack Obama today?” thing…four years ago it was just annoying. Four years ago it was just a tell-tale sign that our free press had abandoned the critical thinking involved in its obligation to us.

Now, it’s nothing short of dereliction of duty.

It’s a problem many years in the making. It’s been building outside of politics. People say “Omigosh, I’m just SO busy!” and you’ll notice it’s always the same people saying that. And they don’t act like busy people. They don’t have heads crammed chock silly full of the details they’ve managed to cram in, as a first step to getting the things done with what meager amounts of time they’ve managed to scavenge…like genuinely busy people do. There isn’t any great variety in the things they do manage to get done, from one week to the next. None of that desperate, productive-as-can-be-managed juggling you see truly busy people doing. It’s pretty much the same stuff attended, and the same stuff neglected. The months come in, the months go out, it doesn’t change.

What that stupid catchphrase means is “Omigosh, I suck at managing time.”

Screw this glory hound. Once again, I see that if I agreed with President Obama on each issue He has, He would remain among the worst presidents ever. Because He spends too much time screwing around, and He isn’t effective. He just plain sucks.

This one is making the rounds…

Although you can probably ignore the Facebook-page credit on the bottom, the sentiment is much, much broader than that particular website. They never got spanked and got trophies for participating…and they’re in charge. What kind of experience awaits us as a result?

Well the trophy is an unearned reward, and the not-spanking is the suspension of a consequence. I might expect to see the things I’ve become conditioned to do, because I won’t get what I want if I don’t do them — not being reflected in what the leadership does.

It has been my experience that I often encounter these “shift-from-foot-to-foot realities,” these pronunciations of what’s going on and how it all works that are based on objectives. Therefore, the objective is consistently serviced even though fidelity to principles, and reality, is not; the objective is far more important. And so reality yields like warm putty in a firm hand, because it must. Case in point to illustrate what I’m talking about there, the Voter ID law thing…”Should things be proven? Is it good and necessary to prove things…” And the foot-shifty no-spanky automatic-trophy people say Hell Yes! And, No. Yes to the Republicans proving things before they can pass their Voter ID laws (even though the voters want those laws), and no, by nature of the very argument itself, to the idea of people presenting credentials proving their ID when they show up to vote. Yes and no! We know what we know, and we don’t want it. Therefore, you have to prove everything. And these other people don’t have to prove anything.

This is more than lack of discipline; it is also lack of basic set-arithmetic concepts. It’s a surreal experience arguing with these people. They seem to think the super-trustworthy set of person called “voter” doesn’t include any of these scurrilous sneaky set of person called “Republican,” the two classes are unrelated and non-intersecting. Well they don’t say that, but they must think that in order to advance the yes-no prove-and-not-prove assertion…and with such certainty!

ObamaCare is another example. There’s this quote running around lately from Ben Stein, that I haven’t been able to track down or verify: “Many of those who refuse, or are unable, to prove they are citizens will receive free insurance paid for by those who are forced to buy insurance because they are citizens.” Now I’m sure some of the people who defend ObamaCare, out of passion or as part of a profession, who would take issue with that “forced to buy” thing even though (assuming the quote is correct) it’s completely true. But the law is constitutional only because it isn’t “force” — remember that? No no no, it’s a tax that Congress has imposed on a defined class of citizen who is uncovered and hasn’t bought any insurance…a regulation would be unconstitutional, a conditional tax is constitutional. But it’s not a tax, it’s a rule. Which would be unconstitutional, therefore it must be a tax. Shift from foot to foot.

Jon Stewart has been doing The Daily Show for sixteen years now. If he says something outlandish that would get a serious commentator in trouble, it isn’t supposed to count because, joke. Ha ha, get it? Why are you taking the show so seriously, whatsamatter with you? Don’t you know it’s comedy (obligatory sneer)? Oh, but the Daily Show viewers are most knowledgeable while the Fox News viewers “know” the least — read that as, Fox News viewers suck the most at repeating back the talking points to which the survey takers are accustomed. Okay, so the show isn’t supposed to be taken seriously even though, if you watch it, you’ll be among the best informed. Millions and millions of opinionated Americans can’t, or won’t, recognize the contradiction let alone take any steps to work it out. Of course they won’t. Working it out might involve conceding something. It’s quite out of the question.

Based on these observations, I opine that we do not need to be “afraid” of the world run by people who weren’t spanked, and got trophies just for participating.

We’re there.

“There is only one helpful suggestion that I can give you: By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner — check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” — Prof. Hugh Akston speaking, Atlas Shrugged, Part I, Ch. 10, p. 308.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account. I probably should’ve put it here instead, in the first place. It’s too short for a post but too long for a Thing I Know:

If you are to be cursed with abject stupidity in all things save one, and in that one thing you will be compensated with superior wisdom but it can only be one thing, and you get to pick it, you should pick: The ability to tell creative efforts from destructive ones. If you are a wise savant there and an imbecile in all other things, you will be money-ahead.

Not only is that a more important strain of good judgment than all the others, but it is elusive and fleeting. A lot of people are missing it. They see other people building things right in front of their eyes, and they’ll swear that person is a destroyer, but cannot coherently name anything he’s destroying. And they see someone else destroying something, again, right in front of them, and recite some brain-dead litany about the wonderful things that destroyer is “building.” But they can’t name what exactly it is that he’s building.

The loss of the ability to tell building apart from destruction, is the great tragedy of our modern times.

fiat (n.):

1. an authoritative decree, sanction, or order: a royal fiat. Synonyms: authorization, directive, ruling, mandate, diktat, ukase.
2. a fixed form of words containing the word fiat, by which a person in authority gives sanction, or authorization.
3. an arbitrary decree or pronouncement, especially by a person or group of persons having absolute authority to enforce it: The king ruled by fiat.

Every now and then an industry is identified according to some good or service which is, or is seen as, crucial to the continuing survival of the people who live in our or evolving society. A narrative starts up that there is an untenable difficulty involved in acquiring the commodity in question, which endangers peoples’ lives and health, and we need some more rules.

The rules, in turn, introduce greater difficulty involved in acquiring the commodity in question than any difficulty they manage to obliterate or obviate or circumvent and, annoyingly, it seems nobody notices. Quite to the contrary: A new narrative starts up that capitalism has completely bolluxed things up and we need a second wave of rules. And then a third, on and on it goes.

Our smaller regions are divided up into laboratories, and the rules are refined further at that lower level. The laboratories with the more stringent rules suffer from the greatest discomfort with regard to the identified problem. And, annoyingly, again nobody seems to notice.

We’re having a friendly inter-family spat about whether one of our senior members would be well-served by taking an extended holiday from “hate radio.” I should add that I can see the merits in the argument presented by the other side — the senior member offers a lengthy history of distraction, and some failure at modest efforts, which seems to arise from distraction — but I’m seeing the proposal as…oh, let’s see, what was the metaphor one of my old bosses used: “unable to generate the lift to overcome the drag.” Because 1) the senior member is gonna do what he’s gonna do, so who cares what anyone else says, 2) this looks to me like a matter of taste and an exercise in micro-management, and 3) to be forward and frank about it, I have become leery and cynical of the attitude of superiority felt by people who don’t pay attention, over those who do.

Anyway, our e-mail exchanged drifted to some vague generalities about fine, precise details. No details in particular, just a high-level suggestion, unfounded, that some low-altitude navel-gazing and financial planning would change my attitude about government-managed health insurance. I replied:

I’m losing my interest in this specialized knowledge. I’ve come to look at it as a gimmick. I’m more interested in viewing things from a high level. Zooming out. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Imagine a spreadsheet five rows tall, six counting the header. Down the side, label the rows based on industries that have been, to some extent, nationalized. To make sure everybody can have everything they want when they want it. Those evil capitalists have been removed from these markets, or isolated from them. I think of five things: Education; health care; oil/energy; legal services; rents.

Across the top let’s identify some problems. Problem one in col. B: Suppliers cannot reach consumers, and at the same time, consumers cannot reach suppliers.

Problem two in col. C: The commodity price is vastly greater than it was a generation ago. And it can’t be chalked up to inflation.

Problem three in col. D: People don’t really know what it costs to provide the product…they don’t have a clue.

Problem four in col. E: When people do pay for their consumption of the product (or produce some coverage for it)…in actuality, what they’re paying for is somebody else’s consumption of it. And nobody cares. In other words, the market is saturated with freeloaders and we’ve managed to adapt…by not giving a fig about what things really cost.

Problem five in col. F: Nobody wants to start a practice of providing the commodity. If a student is exceptionally talented and can order up his own meal ticket, he probably won’t graduate into this field. In other words, the field no longer attracts the more desirable candidates.

Five rows high, five columns wide. This matrix is COMPLETELY FILLED IN.

Meanwhile, crap I just buy for myself, I know what it costs, I pay what they used to pay plus a reasonable rate of inflation. For that money, I attract the most talented practitioners that can be found. Buying paper clips. Putting new tires on my car. Magic of the free market…but in all these industries the government has “fixed,” all five problems abound…it’s gotten to the point that I should just expect to run into them. All five. That says something.

So, without bothering to read up on the particulars, yes I do consider myself an expert on what has gone wrong. It really doesn’t take much study. Just take in the information, recognize what it means, think on it logically.

I’m pretty sure food is next.

The five have it in common that the profits associated with them, have been identified as some persistent evil that must be banished from our society, and these efforts to so banish have failed. True, we have installed some very complicated machinery. But the profiteers remain. Where people make a profit from health care, legal services, education/tuition, rents/mortgages and oil, the tendency is that they make huge, enormous profits. The only people in these industries who maintain some more rustic standard of living here, are the ones who are positioned closer to the work that actually helps people. The ones who score the fatter paychecks are the ones less dedicated to the industry itself. It seems the biggest names are of the “hatchet men” who drift in to reorganize some agency or company, and wouldn’t know the thing being provided by the company from a hole in the ground. Except for the education/tuition one I suppose…prestige is important in academia. But the people at the top of the rent-control scam are not landlords. The people at the top of the health care food chain are not doctors. The people at the top of the oil monstrosity are bureaucrats and speculators. They may never have seen a drop of oil in their lives.

But my main point is: Access has not been improved by these rules. Quite the opposite. There is a new crisis associated with the access to the product, measurably exacerbated from the situation as it existed before. That is true of all five. Every two, four or six years our politicians run for re-election pledging to “fix” the problems associated with our access to these services. And again. And again.

Meanwhile, if I want a tube of toothpaste I know where I can go to get it, and I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m going to pay for it. If someone tries to charge me double that, or provide an inferior tube of toothpaste, I’ll just go buy the damn thing somewhere else. So they better not screw with me. Coffee, toilet paper, milk, plumbing services…oh, people do need these things, and it’s pretty often you hear about someone paying more for them than they’d like to.

But you’re not going to travel back twenty years in a time machine and tell the people there “I had to pay $3.54 for a gallon of milk” and really make their jaws drop on the floor. What year was that, future-man? Twenty twelve? Yeah, uh huh…that sucks. But whatever. Two-fifty in our time, three-fifty in yours, that’s about right.

But tell ’em what’s going on with any of the big five, and their eyes will get as big as dinner plates.

Our counterproductive habit of fiat-izing and nationalizing the industries upon which we depend the most, has completely filled in my 5×5 matrix, it is twenty-five-for-twenty-five. The bureaucracy is like a lawnmower making tall grass into short grass, in that you can tell where it’s been by way of a simple glance. But it leaves in its wake not short grass, but chaos and wreckage. We don’t seem to notice or care. There is a discernible difference between the experience involved in buying milk, and the experience in buying legal services or gas: People bitch about the price of all these things, but nobody is truly terrified of complete and total financial devastation, arising from the need for milk.

Thing I Know #408. You can’t aspire toward success if you won’t spot the fails.

Oh…my…GOD…

Not wanting to be overly-dramatic here. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at this point. But they’re taking their so-called “comedy” from things that actually took place, and then inventing fiction about who was involved.

Don’t tell me, lemme guess lemme guess: It isn’t fitting for me to call this out because “it’s a joke, get it?”

Yeah, ya know what…I think I get it. I get it just fine.

Steven Goddard explains:

Most lefties suffer from a mental illness where they feel the need to control other people in order to protect themselves from their neurotic fears.

They hate it when people won’t play their games or play by their rules. It makes them feel even more out of control than they usually do.

Ooh, that’s good…very, very good.

The “puppet on a string” arrangement always looks good to the guy who’s going to be holding the strings. Or thinks he’ll have that job.

For all his other faults, Ed’s a classy guy or at least, in certain specific ways, I can appreciate the honest effort he puts into trying to be one…and it’s giving me the giggle-snorts watching the identity crisis that ensues when he finds vulgar-vagina-monologue gutter-trash-talk “comedienne” Sarah Silverman echoing his talking points about voter ID. Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas, that’s what’s going on here. Commentary in the video is extremely not-safe-for-work.

Comment thread explodes, as it tends to when I lower myself into participating in it…although I’m not the only one presenting my point of view, nor am I the first one. He’s getting spanked again. It’s all either silly, or redundant with my sensible comments that sum up the entire situation thusly:

It comes down to one question, Should things be proven? Is it good and necessary to prove things, when the integrity of the voting process is at stake?

Just a little consistency is all that is needed. If it is not necessary to prove things, then people can vote without presenting anything to prove they are who they say they are…until such time as laws are passed saying we don’t do things that way anymore. Because of fraud. Which, ya know, according to the rules, doesn’t have to be proven and your repeated demands for proof are what everyone already knows they are, just a bunch of distracting noise.

If things should be proven, on the other hand, then the Republicans need to prove there’s fraud before they can say there is fraud…until then, there is no fraud because they haven’t proven it. But just in case, to be consistent…people should prove they are who they say they are, when they vote. So pass the voter ID laws already. Without proving anything. And that’s alright. Again, your demands for proof are just so much noise.

If you wish to press the double standard, and say Republicans have to prove there’s fraud before they can do anything about the fraud, but the fraudulent voters don’t need to prove diddly-squat when they cast their fraudulent votes, well then…what that would show is what we’ve all known all along, you can’t make a democrat idea look like a good one without applying a double standard.

Those are the three options, with their logical consequences. There is no fourth one.

After that, all the rest of it is just repetition, partisanship and noise.

…it’s at an all-time high. A clear majority perceives bias.

From the article:

Partisans continue to perceive the media very differently. Seventy-five percent of Republicans and conservatives say the media are too liberal. Democrats and liberals lean more toward saying the media are “just about right,” at 57% and 42%, respectively. Moderates and independents diverge, however, with 50% of independents saying the media are too liberal and 50% of moderates saying they are just about right.

Summarized at CNS News:

Only 8 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal” of trust in the news media, according to a new Gallup poll.

That is down from 11 percent a year ago and is a record low for the 40 years that Gallup has been polling on the question. [emphasis mine]

Hat tip to Boortz, who adds:

Who is the most trusting the ObamaMedia? Democrats. There’s a real shocker. Goes with the territory, I guess.

Democrats are going to trust the ObamaMedia because people tend to gravitate toward news sources that confirm their beliefs. Therefore, their love affair with Barack Obama is simply confirmed by consuming the daily drivel that is passed off as news.

Lots more from here.

Every “good” (sleazy) salesman is taught to tell and not ask. Treat the customer like a child. Too many promising sales fall through because the salesman had the courtesy to seek the customer’s blessing before doing something; if you issue instructions to the customer, rather than requests, you can get things sold that otherwise never would have been.

We’ve seen over the years that this is the way our current President works. He talks a lot about “national dialogue” when it’s a schtik that will get Him out of some kind of trouble, and He’s very fond of playing Himself up as some kind of conduit through which the concerns of the common man can be sent into the beltway so that they, at long last, have an effect on big, important things. But have you ever considered what things would look like if this were really true? Have you ever stopped to consider what it would look like if Obama started a national dialogue every time He wanted something done? As opposed to informing us lowly peons of what He has decided is the right answer? What if Obama was a question-mark — as He ritually presents himself — instead of an exclamation-point?

Would you like your new president to have a special logo? How about an “Office of the President-Elect,” should we have one of those?

Should we implement the DREAM Act?

Do you think, when we spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody?

Would you like your president to bow to foreign dictators?

Trillion dollar budget deficits aren’t something we really care about…right?

How about a half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra, is that a go?

Do you think we should tax capital gains at the same rate as W2-status paychecks, so that Warren Buffett’s secretary never pays a higher rate than he does?

I think it’s time to get rid of manned space flights. What say you?

Should we front-load the taxes on ObamaCare to make it harder to figure out whether the plan pays for itself?

Do you think business owners built the businesses that…uh…y’know, they built?

Do you think we should return the bust of Winston Churchill to the United Kingdom?

Do you think marriage is a union between a man and a woman?

Should Catholic hospitals and charities be forced to provide abortifacients and contraceptives in their health plans, in contravention to their religious principles?

Did the Cambridge Police act stupidly?

Would you like a re-designed American flag?

And my personal favorite: Is the private sector doing fine?

Now with some of these, if you look in some places, you’ll find quite a few of your fellow citizens who will answer “Not only yeah, but hell yeah!” They’re out there. But…not nearly enough to push such a question over the top, were it to be asked in any kind of a respectable nationwide poll.

And here we come to what Barack Obama really is. He is a device. He is a mechanism, to put ideas through that are so bad, that they cannot be “put through” in this way without the benefit of such a magical device. The device He uses is His race. Hillary would have used her sex. John Kerry and Al Gore would have used their ultra-sophisticated ultra-highbrow nuance, their vaunted intellectual ability to “think in shades of gray” as the saying goes. Meaning you’re just a big ol’ slope-foreheaded dummy if you can’t see the wisdom.

Bill Clinton used his charisma. As in: Who gives a flip about the merits of the argument, when this guy walks into a room he lights it up and the ladies just love him, so who cares what you have to say.

Post-Dukakis, the democrat party has been consistently looking for this quality as they choose their champions. Some flavor of false cachet. Some cynical device to make sure arguments are won, always, even when they should not be won. That way, the ideas can mutate and migrate into ever-deepening depths of nuttiness, to such an extent that they make no sense whatsoever, and still have a shot at getting through and hopefully sticking.

Barack Obama is really nothing more than a machine, designed and selected for the purpose of selling ideas that are so bad that a less capable and less sophisticated machine would not be able to get them sold. Merely re-posing these ideas in question form, vividly shows how unsaleable, and how bad, these ideas really are.