Right Sphere:

Team Obama and all the little OFA lemmings are out in full force crying “context! context!” over Obama’s ridiculous comments last Friday. For the sake of sanity, and to provide you with an easy way to combat their latest attempt at damage control, here’s how Obama’s comments were wrong, no matter how you look at it.

First, the comments… in full context.

We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently…We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more …

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Obama’s first mistake was erecting a gigantic strawman to knock down…“Limited government” has never meant, nor does it mean now, “no government.” It’s a ridiculous argument used by those who wish to pretend that conservatives, who favor limited government, are really anarchists, who favor no government.

The second mistake was this notion that business owners (aka “the rich”) aren’t paying their fair share for the stuff tax payers pay for, like roads, bridges, etc…
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The third mistake Obama made was revealing his government-centric view of the world. In his mind, government is the innovator and people simply do what the government instructs them to do. It’s profoundly unamerican. This country is great because of the ideals upon which it was founded: Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of happiness. Obama thinks that is only made possible by government. It’s exactly backwards.

There’s a very cool graphic to go with it, “People in this income group, make this much of the national income, and pay this much in taxes.” I’d embed it, but the exact numbers are likely to change while the overall trend is not so likely to change…

There is a certain symmetry that is lacking here. It has already been asked, repeatedly, who else might have “helped” in the case of businesses that were not so successful; is someone going to help that poor business owner as he deals with the resulting personal and/or business bankruptcy?

Liberals have such a funny idea of numbers. Ed Darrell, for example, is out there trumping up a purely emotion-driven argument in favor of foreign aid. His argument all comes down to, and I quote, “That’s a pittance.” Well, I’m not so much against foreign aid, so I shall not examine the merits of it (since he doesn’t) — I’m more interested in the argument resting entirely on the numbers, the numbers, the numbers, they should be higher, higher, higher. Ever try to corner a progressive on the other end of it, though — how much should the federal government be spending, on everything? Either in a net dollar amount, or per capita. How much is too much?

Quicker than you can say wham, bam, thank you ma’am…the numbers, the numbers, they lose all meaning.

In truth, the numbers never had anything to do with anything in the first place. This “Elizabeth Warren” part of modern liberalism, is just a well-organized and well-funded attack on individual accomplishment. This is why I think Obama’s third mistake was His biggest one; He tipped His hand.

One of my “Hello Kitty of Blogging” friends posted an Atlas Shrugged excerpt that concerns itself with this…oh yeah, probably not paying a decent respect to President Obama’s intended “context”…

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

I think there is a Republican mole in Obama’s inner circle. This is devastating because it fits easily on a bumper sticker: “You Didn’t Build That.” And as an election-year issue, it is viable. Now we can have an election between the “Yes You Built That” people and the “You Didn’t Build That” people.

It’s so sad that, even with the conflict crystallized in those terms, the year-end outcome is still difficult to predict. Of course, there was difficulty involved in predicting 1980, and the difficulty proved to be illusory; perhaps that is the case here. If not, that’s a sign that we’ve lost our bearings. We really have that many voting people who are passionately stirred up against the understanding of human achievement, of identifiable people accomplishing things? That much enthusiasm for burying constructive work beneath a permafrost of anonymity?

Looks like we do have our election-year issue.

So glad right now I don’t have a daughter.

Attention ladies, particularly the young ladies: This…

…looks…bad. Bad with a capital B. That thing with the pockets. If it’s in fashion, it should not be.

I guess I’m just not very well-educated about this stuff. I always figured, these young ladies made themselves some cut-offs for the summer months, failed to calculate the lengths of the pockets, didn’t want to do without ’em and figured they had themselves a garment for hanging around the house casual-style, maybe possibly hauling the trash out to the curb.

Yesterday morning at brunch I saw a youngish type walk into the restaurant with accentuated pocket liners, with glitter. Oh, so that’s intentional now? Turns out, it’s not only a feature and not a bug, but a highly desirable one…so says somebody somewhere.

I struggle to imagine what other things a girl-woman could wear that would look more hooker-ish. And to think, somewhere, there’s a mother allowing her to go out of the house like that.

Update: I spent all that time waiting for the never-ending so-called fashion of “guys pants sagging down around their underwear” and this seems to be just a continuation of it.

We seem to be living, in real life, the imaginary fashion world depicted in this highly forgettable Ryan O’Neal movie. Images associated with the idea that the wearer forgot to clothe him- or her-self somewhere around the pelvic region…suggesting lack of competence in attending to personal tasks dealing with attire, and probably hygiene I suppose, that’s desirable in some way?

Sonic Charmer does his best to help Matt Yglesias understand the ultimate in economic models, which is Model Zero: reality. Yglesias is upset with the final sign-off from “A Short Lesson About the History of US Employment”, which is

Once again, we are not as wealthy as we thought we were. And there really is a significant structural component behind today’s sluggish labor market.

…leading to higher unemployment.

Paraphrasing Yglesias’ response: Yes, it’s all true, we’re not as wealthy as we thought and yes, the labor market is sluggish, but…blah blah blah demand-side blah blah blah reserve wage blah blah blah shouldn’t be happening blah blah blah China.

Imagine a reverse situation. A town full of working-class people sees its unemployment rate suddenly shoot up from 11 percent to 27 percent. Concurrently, it turns out that the town’s residents were much wealthier than they thought they were—each one of them actually had a check for $1 million sitting in their pockets. We might say it’s pretty clear what’s happened here. These folks are wealthier than they thought they were so they raised their reserve wage. But then suppose it turns out the checks were fraudulent and they all bounce. The reserve wage should fall and joblessness should decline. That it seems to me is the supply-side story about the relationship between wealth and employment.

It’s certainly not systematically true that richer countries have low unemployment rates—if that were right the United States would have less unemployment than Germany, and Chinese unemployment would be through the roof.

Giddyap, reality; whoa, reality. You shouldn’t be headed that way, go here instead. Scott Summers agrees with every word, evidently with some enthusiasm…and I’m not sure how, let alone why. It’s like applauding Phlogiston theory, is it not?

It seems there are two things going on here. One, this notion of “sticky” wages, which I understand to mean a negotiated price for labor that is resistant to change, for whatever reason, therefore it can have a disruptive effect on the supply/demand signals communicated within a free market. Seems to me to be a simple concept: The compensation is frozen, or “stuck,” but the commitment is not, thus the entire deal becomes a take-it-or-leave-it. Firm price, no haggling, do you want it or not? So, not. That’s what I’m getting out of Sonic’s ten-step “help” for Mr. Yglesias. And the other thing is: Reality is upsetting the theory, so out comes the blah blah blah, and the reality must yield. Why, how dare it.

It’s a form of Red Dot Science, these left-wing liberal economics. Let’s all just close our eyes and wish with all our might, as hard as we can. We can beat this sluggish employment!

Perhaps the better, more descriptive term is “educated beyond one’s hat size”…

I like to say that people who are, while educated, lacking in real wisdom, are educated beyond their hat size. What I mean is that they do not possess the ability to apply their education to the real world. They are, at times, lacking common sense, and do not, apparently have the capacity to accept simple truths. These people are too enamored with nuance. I have worked with such people. Yes they are intelligent, well educated, but they can never seem to grasp that the solution to a problem, or the answer to a question might be the simplest one available. Maybe to them, simple always equals stupid. Their addiction to over thinking and over analyzing everything prevents them from accepting that some things just are what they are.

This is not to say, of course, that every answer or solution is simple, but often times they are. Our Founders had great wisdom. Yes, they were thinkers, that IS part of being wise. But wisdom also comes from accepting simple truths. Truths that are self-evident. Truths like we are created with certain rights, and simple truths like people are best left to do for themselves in most situations.

The entire science of economics seems to be educated beyond its own hat size, at least the kind practiced by Yglesias & friends. When the people educated in the theory struggle to reconcile it with the reality that has just dealt it a blow, and the people not so versed in the theory (or who don’t give a rip about it) are left on the sidelines, like me, going “Yeah, that’s what I’d expect to see happen, what’s the problem?” then the theory is not only ripe for a re-think, but it’s getting in the way. Yeah, less wealth, lots of people less wealthy, wealth has to do with the ability to afford something — so there’s less affordin’ goin’ on. Uh, like duh…so now, you’ve got some economic theory that says it shouldn’t be happening? Well, go off in your garage and twiddle with that there, Sparky.

It seems there is a blind spot with regard to the “free” in free-market. This is the dangerous thing about red-dot science; this notion of “If I wish for it hard enough, it will happen that way” contaminates not only the unified, big conclusion to be drawn about something, but the finer, more detailed conclusions as well, like transactions within the market. What’s truly worrisome is the realization that the explanation is immediately available to anyone experienced in buying things. What can stop the sale from being made? Lack of money is only the first of many things; once you have the money, or credit, there is a level of need to be evaluated. The proposal may involve an expenditure that is low, and therefore affordable, but if there is some alternative available then there will be a path-of-least-resistance factor. The liquidity of the cash reserves is an asset, just like any other, so that may factor in. And last but not least, there is consumer confidence.

The science of economics being evolved and refined as it is, it takes all this stuff into account. But these fine educated minds drawing their conclusions about will happen, don’t necessarily weigh it all correctly — it is, when all’s said & done, a science dedicated to predicting what total strangers will decide to do. Therefore, there will always be doubt in this particular scientific discipline. It’s not like astronomy, or history, in which there is some precise truth to be measured and the thing being refined is our measurement of it; economic theory either takes all the meaningful variables into account, or else it does not, and if it does not then it’s worth about as much as that wet paper filter I have to go change out of the coffee pot in the kitchen just now, and maybe the used coffee grounds within it.

And when reality steps in to let them know they biffed it, which should mean something…it is reality that must yield, say they.

People educated beyond their hat size scare me, especially when they turn their enthused scrutiny and loud opinion-making toward economic matters. It tends to emerge that they have this weird vision of employment: Good things come after it, but the employment itself, in turn, comes after bad things, so if we want more of this employment we have to make bad things happen, like Godzilla wrecking an entire city or something. The excessive “super-practical” education, if you will, seems to interfere with envisioning employment as what it really is, which is services activity associated with an ownership entity attempting to fulfill some kind of a mission…the mission being either obligatory, as is often the case in the public sector, or creation of wealth (and/or hedging against the loss of said wealth) as is generally the case in the private sector. There’s something in the over-educated mindset, that they just can’t see it that way.

John Hawkins briefly summarizes each of the five, in reverse-order Letterman style, kicking off each tiny essay with a salient quote.

Commenter suz summarizes even more briefly, one line apiece:

5. they’re horny, they know everything and their [sic] going to live forever…so that works out;
4. the inability to see themselves as flawed;
3. lazy and whining snot-nosed punks;
2. their inability to know the difference between having a free mind compared to sound policy — it’s all one and the same to them; and
1. completely void of all moral code.

To which commenter Carlos7 replies…

It all starts with #4.

And, based on my experiences “discussing” things with some of the more intransigent ones, I would have to agree. That isn’t true of your beloved politically-uninvolved politically-unaware “Aunt Mabel” who just wants to do right by the impoverished and disenfranchised, and just hasn’t thought things out. But it’s true of the younger airheads registering for their wedding gifts at Obama’s web site; they, unlike you, were not descended of Adam and Eve who ate of the fruit, therefore they’re not flawed. You’re flawed because you cling to your guns bitterly, and believe in angels and what-not — they’re part of an evolutionary process gliding toward perfection a micron at a time.

The irony is, that while they’re running around being so much more science-y than you are, they’re missing out on a basic key component to evolutionary theory, which is: The progress is achieved solely by means involving birth and death. Each organism, and that means people, has its associated evolutionary stage carved into its DNA, flaws and all, and it carries those flaws from womb to tomb. That necessarily means that, no, sorry, Barack Obama did not become more “evolved” when He made up His mind that gay marriage was alright, and liberals don’t grow bigger brains with extra lobes the day they decide to become liberals, so you can’t transform overnight into the Jetsons, or the X-Men, or those aliens from Star Trek with extra big mushroom-shaped brainy veiney heads.

I think, deep down, they realize this already. That’s the source of the bile, the nastiness; they can’t separate from the riff-raff by means of this overnight-evolution, even though they’d like to, because they’re not happy with themselves the way they are. So snarking at those around them who don’t “believe,” is the next best thing.

Your Aunt Mabel who bakes the yummy sugar cookies, she’s a different story altogether. She doesn’t want this separation, she wants the opposite. But she’s not on topic because the subject is destroying virtue, and bless her heart, she still has tons and tons of it. She just has no idea what she’s talking about, that’s all — no way of knowing what a higher minimum wage or a stricter gun control law really does, and no way of ever finding out.

I thought there was something else special about #4, it’s the most quotable part of Hawkins’ column:

Liberals begin with the proposition that conservatives are unwitting dupes at best and evil at worst while other liberals are on the side of the angels. This leads them to excuse just about any and every behavior from killing cops, to terrorist bombings, to treason as long as the perpetrator has the right beliefs and is useful to the movement. When you think that the only real crime is disagreeing with your ideology, you can make a hero out of a drunken, disreputable coward who left a woman to die in a tidal pool or even come up with justifications for why it’s fine for the Department of Justice to help Mexican cartels get weapons they used to kill more than 300 people as part of some misguided political stunt to encourage gun control.

Precisely.

When a liberal does something wrong, you can probably find lots of other liberals who will say “that was wrong,” but to a man, they’ll all insist on sticking that word “but” after the word “wrong,” followed by some obfuscating and distracting filibuster. That’s a consistent formula: Fellow liberal + “that was wrong” = filibuster. They can’t ever, ever say “that was wrong” and just end the sentence right there: end of sentence, dot, new paragraph, new topic. That’s completely out of the question. Against the rules.

This has been out there awhile, but no I hadn’t seen it before.

Credit goes to Generational Dysfunction, a blog which has since shut down.

Assoc. Press, by way of AJC:

The voter registration form arrived in the mail last month with some key information already filled in: Rosie Charlston’s name was complete, as was her Seattle address.

Problem is, Rosie was a black lab who died in 1998.

A group called the Voter Participation Center has touted the distribution of some 5 million registration forms in recent weeks, targeting Democratic-leaning voting blocs such as unmarried women, blacks, Latinos and young adults.

But residents and election administrators around the country also have reported a series of bizarre and questionable mailings addressed to animals, dead people, noncitizens and people already registered to vote.

Brenda Charlston wasn’t the only person to get documents for her pet: A Virginia man said similar documents arrived for his dead dog, Mozart, while a woman in the state got forms for her cat, Scampers.

“On a serious note, I think it’s tampering with our voting system,” Charlston said. “They’re fishing for votes: That’s how I view it.”
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The group at the root of the questionable mailings — the Voter Participation Center — acknowledges that the databases it uses to contact possible voters are imperfect because they are developed from commercially collected information. The group also says it expects people who receive misdirected mail to simply throw it away.

Several election officials said they believed the voter registration systems were secure enough to catch people who might improperly submit the misdirected documents.

But administrators in New Mexico, a potential swing state in the 2012 presidential race, warned that ineligible voters who complete the documents could make it onto the rolls.

Summing it all up: The whole thing is on the honor system. If you’re not eligible to use these materials, then don’t…wink wink, nod nod.

And then when some effort is made by Republicans or anybody else to get more laws on the books to check the integrity of the election process at voting time, which is when it really counts…democrats and their supporters presume the worst. Without any evidence at all. Honor system, again, but working in the other direction. Honor system all the time. Or more simply: Argument based on emotion and not reason. I can envision the GOP engaging in a premeditated effort to disenfranchise minorities from the voter rolls based on pure racial animosity — that must mean, since I can envision it, that’s what they’re doing.

Well let’s think about this. There’s this theory…or narrative…or perhaps the most accurate term to apply would be “excuse”…the registration form reaches someone who is not eligible to vote. And with this “honor system” in place, the eligible person will say “Hey, this isn’t right! I’m not eligible!” and throw it all away. All of the time. Alright…now, if you think for some reason there might be some holes in that particular part of the process, you don’t need a bigoted racist Republican to push for a voter ID law, it’s actually a sensible conclusion to reach. Don’t our democrat friends say exactly the same thing about arsenic in the water? There’s a standard to be applied, the input falls short of the standard, so the standard has to be reinforced somewhere in the system before we get to the output. Right?

The same is true of any system with an inflow, and and outflow, and a standard. Somewhere the standard has to be applied, or else there isn’t one. This isn’t a left-wing right-wing thing, it’s something that simply is.

So the democrat position, from what I’ve seen around the innerwebz, is that you have to oppose voter ID laws with every fiber of your being or else you’re a racist. Because you don’t have proof of any shenanigans that meet the daunting standards of the democrat who is calling you a racist. How, without some voter ID process in place, would you meet that standard of proof? The mind boggles. I suppose, you’d make a point of catching every hundredth or every tenth or every third voter in a great big net…apologize to them for the inconvenience, take them back to a lab and check their credentials. Short of that, the voters are in & out within five to ten minutes, hopefully they are who they say they are. In my polling place, the only time I talk to anybody is when I say “Yup, that would be me,” and then at the end of it when I get my “I voted” sticker.

And yet, when these registration materials are mailed out to dogs and convicted felons and fictional people and dead people, it’s all on the honor system…so…where…

Eh, well. There I go again, applying a process of reason to an argument that is based on emotion.

Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine:

Yesterday I took a walk down to the oldest part of New York City, where the Dutch landed and planted their flag near the current location of the Staten Island Ferry, where George Washington stood his officers rounds at Fraunces Tavern, now filled with Wall Street types, and where a bunch of smelly hippies stirred by an anti-Semitic Canadian magazine decided to squat a park in order to make a statement about their own need for attention.

Zuccotti Park has returned to its original function as a place where secretaries, construction workers and off-duty cops go to eat quick lunches bought from local fast food places or disease-ridden Halal Mafia food carts. The few plants wave in a breeze that blows between the narrow lanes of the financial district, which has some of the oldest and narrowest streets in the city. An information desk for OWS is the only sign of the occupation, with cardboard signs denouncing the NYPD and sarcastically informing the Indian and Russian tourists taking snapshots of the under-construction Freedom Tower; “And to think these ‘People’ are the ‘Heroes’ of ’911′… Right.”

Occupy Wall Street has gone east, one block east. It no longer occupies Wall Street, instead it has transformed into Occupy Trinity Church. The media, which served as the unofficial PR corps for OWS, is not too enthusiastic about reporting that a movement which they hailed is busy trying to seize land from a historic Episcopalian church that dates back to 1697, in whose cemetery lie several signers of the Declaration of Independence and several delegates to the Continental Congress, not to mention several Revolutionary War generals and a fellow by the name of Alexander Hamilton.

Trinity was also an enthusiastic supporter of Occupy Wall Street, providing them with bathrooms and private conference rooms, but turning over Duarte Square was asking too much. After being evicted from Zuccotti Park, the OWS crowd assumed that they could bully Trinity into giving them the land with the “fact of their occupation.” Instead Duarte Square, named after Juan Pablo Duarte, a founder of the Dominican Republic, has become OWS’s Waterloo.

Despite several attempts to occupy Duarte Square, Trinity Church has held firm. After half a year, OWS has made less impact fighting Trinity than it has fighting Wall Street.

When I passed by, the sad remnant of Occupy Trinity Church was down to three people, one of them sitting with a plastic bucket designated for the “OWS Laundry Fund” and another with a sleeping bag marked “Occupied.” A cardboard sign proclaimed that Trinity Church had stolen Duarte Square from the Indians and should give it back to OWS, as representatives of the native peoples.

One sign accused Trinity Church of greedily sitting on 200 million dollars while refusing the homeless trustafarians of Occupy Wall Street a small measly strip of land for their campsite. On its websites, OWS has blasted Trinity for being aligned with the “1 percent” and spun conspiracy theories about its parish vestry, which they allege holds over 10 billion dollars in real estate assets.

More on the Occupy Trinity Church movement…

Yesterday, demonstrators marched outside Trinity Church with signs reading, “Who would Jesus prosecute?” and “Trinity Church: Real Estate Company or Church?” in reference to the business practices that critics, and exiting board members, say have eclipsed the religious organization’s holy mission. One demonstrator, Jack Boyle, “has been on a hunger strike since May 23 and has denied himself his HIV medication since May 19, trying to appeal to Trinity’s sense of humanity, demanding the charges be dropped,” according to an organizer.

Yes, by all means let’s dismantle our existing economic system and replace it with a new anarchy, in which people demand things and appeal to the “sense of humanity” of others…threatening not to stop hitting themselves in the head with a hammer until they get what they want. Food, shelter, water, gasoline, oh and don’t forget the Starbucks Caramel Macchiatto.

Actually, the analogy doesn’t hold; a guy hitting himself in the head with a hammer doesn’t pose a threat to anybody else, but an HIV patient refusing to take his medication…

Curious posting in the comments —

I totally supported OWS, but if it was my lot I wouldn’t want them there, either.

Um, what?

Actually I think that sums it all up; that’s why the movement is no longer around. We have these people who are not in it, who “totally support” it from without…I’m reading that as, they are part of the middle class, maybe even upper class, people of property who support the effort to dismantle our system of property rights and property exchange. But only for others, not for themselves.

Occupy was not a movement, it was a manifestation. As a “movement” it hasn’t really gone anywhere. It remains among us, in the hearts and minds of those who think it’s possible to find a halfway compromise between order and anarchy. Maybe we can have a quasi-socialist system, kind of a halfway-capitalist utopia.

Their credo, although they will not admit it, is to honor and respect the right to accumulate and own property as long as it’s about me, me, me, me, me…and then, for everybody else, we have to put some system in place inimical to the property-rights thing, that distributes all the goods equally, therefore all the misery. But keep me, me, me out of it because I’ve got mine, mine, mine.

Help those people who don’t have anything…but not with my wallet, just tax those other people over there, and get it done. So I can claim credit for having supported it even though it’s somebody else’s money that was given to those poor people. Oh, and hire some government bureaucrats to do this dirty-work of robbing & giving, so that if it all turns to crap I can claim non-involvement. Decades ago it was joked that a democrat is someone who’s nice enough to give you the shirt off someone else’s back — it never was a joke, and it never changed, it surfaced from a murky ocean, via Occupy like a vile and detestable sea serpent so we could catch a glimpse of how well it does not work.

It is false, cosmetic charity. It is vanity. It is a big fancy bundle of all sorts of strain of human sin. It is modern liberalism. Things will improve when we reject it, society-wide, and continue to deteriorate as long as we tolerate it.

His Most Unifying Holiness wrote to me again, under the subject line of “RE: I will be outspent‏.”

Friend —

We’re getting outraised — a first for a sitting president, if this continues. Not just by the super PACs and outside groups that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into misleading ads, but by our opponent and the Republican Party, which just outraised us for the second month in a row.

We can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more.

So I need your help. If you believe that regular people should decide elections, then please chip in $3 or more today.

This isn’t about me or the outcome of one election.

This election will be a test of the model that got us here. We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.

I believe we can do this. When all of us chip in what we can, when we can, we are the most powerful force in politics.

But today is the day to prove it. Donate now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised

Thank you — for everything you’ve done before and everything you’re doing now. It matters.

Barack

I must say I’m perplexed by the cognitive dissonance: “Barack” is bringing us all together, by declaring some among us deserve to have a voice and others do not. Habitually, I write this off to the two contradictory messages being spaced sufficiently far apart that the average Obama fan’s attention span has been exceeded. But here they both are, big as life, within a relatively brief shakedown letter from the President…”We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.” It seems to be lost on whoever wrote this, that Americans are in control of the democracy through the massive spending.

Michelle Malkin had a gigglesnort moment about this, and she was right to so indulge, for was it not just four years ago we were told what a super-duper mega-awesome champion of these “ordinary Americans” Obama was, because of the historical magnitude of His campaign war chest? Three quarters of a billion dollars or so…now how is that 2008 war chest to have been described, if not with the word “massive”?

Is it only “massive” when it belongs to the bad guys?

Well, not much detail is required where there is not much curiosity applied. And if there is one thing about which the Obama-loving community lacks curiosity, it is about who their enemy is. Is it people in America who can make money? Are they the enemy? That would make sense; the way the economy has been doing lately, it does look like there’s someone in charge, who believes it’s a problem when Americans make money. That would explain quite a few things.

My one-line reply:

“Regular people should decide elections”? I’m confused; who exactly are the non-regular people you have in mind? Aren’t we ALL supposed to have a voice?

Worth posting again, just because.

It’s sad, you know…George Carlin tried so hard to be a proper lefty-nihilistic hippy-dip. For a lifetime. And because of this hard-whiplash eco-friendly leftward-lurch the country’s been doing since the first run of this routine of his, his immortal words come off now like talking points straight out of a GOP convention.

Sounds a lot more Republican, in fact, than the average corporate marketing campaign. Really. “Our peanut butter is friendly to the environment!”

I suspect it’s plenty enough to send the skeleton into a whirling-dervish dance.

Which, incidentally, the planet will survive just fine. Like the man said, the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Burt Folsom:

Earlier this week, President Obama gave listeners a history lesson on why he was running for higher office. “The reason I ran for president,” Mr. Obama said, “the reason I ran the first time for a state senate seat [in 1996] on the south side of Chicago, was because . . . we had gone through a decade where people were working harder and harder but we didn’t see an increase in income. . . . Jobs weren’t growing fast enough. And the cost of everything . . . kept going up faster than people’s income.”

Was high unemployment, high inflation, and low growth what the U.S. was experiencing in 1996, or in the decade before that? No. That describes the 1970s–a decade of big government with price controls, the war in Vietnam, price fixing in oil, and massive inflation of the currency by the Federal Reserve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which topped the 1,000 mark in 1966, was at about 800 fifteen years later. The 1980s, however, began a change. We saw a more stable currency, tax rate cuts, decontrol of oil prices, and relative peace abroad (and the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In 1996, the year President Obama ran for the Illinois state senate, President Clinton downsized government through welfare reform. By cutting welfare benefits, the welfare rolls were cut by almost 50%, and President Clinton had budget surpluses his last two years in office. In 1996, the U.S. saw 2,500,000 new jobs created and only 3% inflation. Americans, contrary to the president’s statement, experienced massive job increases, and they watched their growing incomes outpace inflation. The U.S. economy had strong decades in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, why the pretend history? Because pretend history is the only way to make increases in debt and in the size of government appear to be the correct political move.

Seeing a lot of nitwits out there, as the Bush tax cuts close in on their latest sunset, insisting that we need taxes to go up.

In response to this, wisdom, again, from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

An observation about the debate over taxes:

As is the case with some other issues, it is a more complicated matter than it should be to define the “moderate” position. In fact, this passion for higher taxes is not only out of the mainstream and extreme, but weird, strange and surreal. We don’t see it, because by the time you have taxes you have to have a government demanding it, and of course by the time you have a government you have politics muddying everything up.

But “my taxes are too high” is a natural, heartfelt, honest plea (whether something should be done about that, is the question).

“The taxes are not high enough” is not natural, heartfelt, or honest. It is an insincere protest. It is driven by a desire to please others, to pay someone back for favors received, lust for control over the resulting receipts, old-fashioned jealousy, or some combination among those.

Suppose we were to start all over again, and we had to take stock of what was needed. We would identify food, water, shelter, then hygiene, and then somewhere along the line we would say we need a right to property and a system of laws to maintain it…and we need to make sure everyone has enough to live, if they work for it. But we wouldn’t say “We have to make sure everyone is taxed enough.” You have to endure as a civilization long enough to get sloppy, lazy and silly to identify that “need.” You have to use technology’s gifts to drive a wedge between yourself, and reality. That is what is happening here.

I’m wondering if people understand what it says about them, as thinking people, when they insist tax cuts lead to the dissipation of jobs, and tax increases lead to job growth. “Tax” means to “deplete.” The dictionary defines the word as “a burdensome charge, obligation, duty, or demand.” It is something that, by necessity and often by intent, diminishes the thing upon which it is laid; that is what it does, and that is what it is supposed to do.

A nation having a debate about whether they need to go up, is a nation that is having a dishonest and contaminated debate. That’s us.

I’ve written previously about the meaningful differentiation between efforts involved in building and preserving things, versus the efforts involved in destroying things. There can be some difficulty involved in differentiating this, but it is worth the trouble, because it seems to me we as a species make our greatest and gravest mistakes when we bollux it up. It’s often a murky question. A sniper, for example, destroys something so that something else can be preserved. The terrorist he’s sniping, on the other hand, is trying to preserve something so that something else can be destroyed.

There can be no question that a tax raised to a higher level than what is needed, has a destructive effect; and there can be very little question that this initial destructive effect is a net effect, once the loot flows into the government coffers it is unlikely in the extreme that there will be some creative process to offset the destruction. (If there is one, better-than-even odds it will have something to do with hiring more IRS agents or something of the like.)

Once again, I see our national discourse has become, as I said, contaminated; we have permitted something to become a part of it, that should not have been so allowed in. When a wife says to her husband “I have a problem with that new dishwasher, we did not pay enough for it” that is grounds for divorce, is it not? It is, right? No? Well, I guess maybe I’m in the minority on that one…nevertheless, I’m right. A wife who pushes for a household to spend more money on things, is analogous to your stockbroker pushing for your profits to be lower, or for a general doing what he can to make sure more of his troops are killed.

The same is true for pundits and politicians pushing for taxes to be higher. If your agitation is toward more destruction, why are you part of the process? You don’t belong in here. Debates about taxes are debates about more bang for the buck. We don’t need people to be part of the discussion, who are trying to make things cost more. It’s as simple as that.

Yup, prettymuch.

It’s a good vision to have if “climb that tree” equates to a hard and fundamental skill that has something to do with being productive in society. The problem comes up when the test is applied to other things that aren’t so essential, that are personality-driven and developed (or not) before the school years even start. That’s when it starts to become as absurd as asking a goldfish to climb a tree.

Neal Boortz is working on a Unified Grand Theory on why people vote democrat:

Scientists, for instance, have been looking for a grand theory of the universe; some theory that would completely answer all questions regarding the formation and operation of our universe from day one to the present.

Well I’ve been looking for theory – some grand theory – to explain why people vote Democrat. Why, in this election, would they vote to retain a ruler dedicated to the proposition of “fundamentally transforming” the greatest nation, the greatest system of governance, into a centrally governed behemoth destructive of liberty and everyone’s sense of individualism. Just WHY would people vote for this guy?

Some people will vote Obama because he’s a Democrat and they’ve always voted Democrat and that’s just the way it is. Others will vote for Obama because they’re black, he’s black, and they’re going to vote for the black guy. Period. End of story. Others will vote for him – and this is getting closer to the Unified Theory – because they think he will put more money in their pocket than the other guy. And then there’s just pure mental illness to consider.
:
…I think I’ve found it. Here it is:

People vote for Democrats because they believe that Democrats will give them access to other people’s money.

I’m working on this theory .. ironing out all of the wrinkles. Soon I’ll write my paper and submit it for peer review. I’ll keep you posted.

Hey, he asked for feedback. So Morgan The Lurker signed in, and posted a rebuttal.

It’s true, and you’re on the right track, but it falls short of a Unified Grand Theory because there are some people voting democrat, thoughtlessly as all the rest, who really don’t care about money…If there are many case studies that fall outside your UGT, then it doesn’t work as a UGT.

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

I believe this comes closer to that for which you are seeking. Voting democrat, is all about going through the motions of fixing something, without working with any of the details. You see a lot of this behavior with complex appliances, such as personal computers: “Oh I don’t know what this thing is doing, let’s just get rid of it and go Apple.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed some people take great pride in going the other way, figuring out the motherboard is the problem or the memory is faulty, replacing only the troublesome part and keeping the rest. Well, a lot of other people take pride in the opposite: Replacing the entire thing, “solving” the problem without learning the tiniest detail about what was amiss. Lots of people go through life that way, fixing things without really fixing things.

And, yes, you’re right, a lot of them would like your money, too. But my UGT explains your UGT; that is the evolution of the thought process.

Sadly, Boortz’ website stripped out the <a href=""> HTML tag, so the “Thing I Know” linky goodness didn’t find its way through. Which, in addition to making my comment look a little bit silly, is Boortz’ loss; four hundred things represents a lot of stuff worth knowing.

But the facts back up what I said, I think, and it does fall within the Architects and Medicators split. Some people see a complex system is not functioning as it should, their first impulse is to start testing the simpler components to find a root cause. They’re frustrated if they are prevailed upon, by some higher authority or perhaps by a looming deadline, to throw it all out. See, they’re in the middle of a lifetime process of building a knowledge base about how things break, so they can continually accumulate and refine the skills involved in fixing them. Others are more inclined toward the throw-it-out-start-again approach. It can be a challenge to pick them out when replacement makes sense — sometimes, replacement does not make sense, and you’ll find they’ll still counsel toward it, in fact their speeches and screeds start to grow in length when they have less to say. Ultimately, when they start repeating things they’ve said many times before, it becomes evident they’re just displaying their personality type, grasping for an identity. They want to become “Mister Throw It Out Guy.” Or alternatively, “Captain Change.” Remind you of anyone? It should…

I didn’t know how to title this. It’s just plain good…

From Thoughts and Rantings. Naughty language warning in effect (about eight seconds in).

Here’s some reading that would be helpful for the clue-challenged profanity-in-public-places edgy sunglasses guy…

…bitterly clinging to his non-religion.

From Gerard.

As I said, I think Scott Adams is on to something here. And I’m afraid it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

In the next year or two, we’re going to see a remake of this:

Oh, dear…

The Daily Caller:

Protesters fought with supporters of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during a speech by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Parma, Ohio on Thursday.

Protesters chanted, “Pawlenty go home, Pawlenty go home,” as he took the stage before a 200-person crowd, according to Cleveland.com

A skirmish erupted when Romney supporter Richard Brysac, 77, confronted protester Al Neal, a 25-year-old union worker, by placing a bottle of water in Neal’s mouth.

“He seemed thirsty, so I tried to shove the bottle in his mouth,” Brysac told Cleveland.com. “I thought it was wrong to interfere with [Pawlenty’s] freedom of speech.”

After the bottle failed to silence Neal, Brysac attempted stuffing Neal’s mouth with a handkerchief.

Neal quickly removed the handkerchief and continued to shout until he was removed from the rally — which took place on private property at Kentown Plaza — along with other protesters.

Pawlenty reportedly maintained his composure on stage alongside several local Republican officials and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Speculation persists about whether Pawlenty or Jindal are being considered for Romney’s running mate.

New civility?

Says Ed Darrell, based on this clip:

Hmmm…

Patriotism:

devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.

Liberty:

1. freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
2. freedom from external or foreign rule; independence.
3. freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

This Van Jones character can’t even survive a chance encounter with a freakin’ dictionary. His Orwellian use of words to describe things that are the opposite of what the words are classically intended to describe, becomes crystal-clear with a couple of quick virtual-page-flips.

Much like his former boss, come to think of it:

And how did America’s First Holy Pharoah, He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, come to be Van Jones’ former boss?

It came about as a result of Jones’ own idiotic comments:

White House officials offered tepid support Friday for Van Jones, the administration’s embattled energy efficiency guru, who has issued two public apologies this week, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

He believes in “liberty and justice for all”; apparently that means, making up a bunch of stuff and acting outraged. Go back and watch the clip again, that’s exactly what he does — tell you what the conservatives really mean, just take Van Jones’ word for it, then he acts all Hawkeye-Pierce-NPR-male outraged.

Just like any other penny-ante left-wingers…right before they lose.

So I don’t know. We get to read about Jones because of his connections, not because he actually won an election anywhere. Which is not to say he cannot win one. But let’s see that happen before we hold him aloft as the conservatives’ worst nightmare…on the other hand…if he does win an election, it’s clear to me he would be winning it on the basis of the constituents’ resentments, as opposed to any kind of emboldening and encouraging vision, which is an entirely different thing. He doesn’t seem to have built much of anything based on what I’m reading here. Just some “lawyer-referral service” to make a bunch of legal trouble for cops, that’s the only thing that jumps out…everything else in his entire biography is just making the right friends.

Thanks to America’s First Holy Pharoah, I’ve got a feeling that’s going to go out of style for an extended period of time — politicians elected on the basis of resentments. Vision-free politicians, smooth-talking, using words for the opposite of their intended meaning. Van Jones, running at the ballot box, would be buying a commodity high and setting up to sell it low.

Conservatives fear Van Jones? Please, please, do allow our progressive friends to go on thinking so. Just like libs to bring a knife to a gun fight. Sarah Palin would clean this guy’s clock.

Just a Facebook comment…the GoogleGodz are not smiling upon my effort to locate an original source, or even evidence of replication:

I am reminded of a quad chart I was introduced to a few weeks back, apocryphally from Erwin Rommel, but who knows where it came from:

Imagine two axes, of stupid/smart and motivated/lazy. This gives you 4 quadrants of [personality] types: Smart+Motivated, Smart+Lazy, Stupid+Motivated, and finally Stupid+Lazy.

Of the four, the worst for your organization is the stupid motivated person. Either Smart Lazy or Stupid Lazy people can at least be managed with supervision and the carrot and stick method works nearly as well on them as on anyone else. They still add value. When unsupervised, they tend to do nothing of note.

The Smart Motivated person does what’s right with minimal carrot and stick. They are self-actualized. They do what they do largely because it’s the right thing to do and they get a sense of accomplishment form it.

However, the Stupid Motivated person is too stupid to understand the incentive strutcure and respond to it appropriately. They must be supervised all the time- can’t even neglect them and expect them to stay neutral. They will do something positively stupid when left alone. [They] are the one[s] you need to eliminate from your organization at all cost.

Gee, hope that hasn’t been me.

Update: Come to think on it awhile longer, I think December of ’94 was right around the time I started my ≤40 hours “overtime is bullshit” rule. It’s just a simple, observed fact: If you’re working it when there’s no need, you’re already committing an error in judgment about as basic as any other, which sets up a real possibility that you’re this human-contaminant stupid/motivated guy…and hey, you know when there’s a need, it can almost always be traced to something that was done the wrong way. Which does nothing to address the current crisis, of course. But you can safely bet money that if the wrong-thing-done is accommodated, by way of heading off the impending crisis with this huge and noble investment of human effort and midnight oil, the wrong-thing-done will continue to happen. There aren’t too many exceptions to that, when all’s said & done.

I think we all have what it takes to be this stupid/motivated person, from time to time.

This is Bill Whittle at his best. He explains the problem with the theory, front to back, patiently, for the benefit of people who can’t figure it out right away — but without becoming a condescending twit. Also, his logic is sturdy, straightforward…and unanswerable…which means, it will be dismissed of course.

But it should be circulated anyway. It’s a good day for it.

Maybe we should apply a special tax to anyone who still can’t figure it out…

I suppose I should give my brother credit for providing a link to this stuff. I found this clip which is a perfect summary of ALL the things going wrong lately…(frowny face).

And then it got MUCH WORSE…

And it’s only Tuesday. Poor me, poor me.

Update: The way I see it, our brave state legislators are busy at work tackling the ultimate First World Problem. I’m guessing, from this, that all the bigger problems in our noble state have been resolved since they have time for this.

Uff-da, it’s like a bad opera.

The word “unexpectedly” is in both the headline and in the lead paragraph.

It’s a joke that done run out of steam in the blogger world…but in the “real journalism” world, it seems they haven’t even caught on to it yet.

Unbe-freakin’-lievable.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index fell to 49.7, worse than the most-pessimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, from 53.5 in May, the Tempe, Arizona-based group’s report showed today. Figures less than 50 signal contraction. Measures of orders, production and export demand dropped to three-year lows.

Treasury yields fell on concern Europe’s debt crisis and a slowdown in Asia are taking a bigger toll on the world’s largest economy and hurting manufacturers like DuPont Co. (DD) and Steelcase Inc. (SCS) Assembly lines are at risk of slowing further as consumers temper purchases and companies cut back on investment.

“Manufacturing is gearing down,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research LLC in New York, whose 50.5 forecast was the lowest in the Bloomberg survey. “It’s consistent with the idea that the uncertainty is weighing on businesses. Europe is taking a bite out of the export sector.”

There are some hopeful signs…but none that suggest this is any sort of real recovery.

From Instapundit.

This would be the “I” in the “STACI” quintet of fail-points with progressive ideas…although this isn’t progressive, per se (except for the ObamaCare part), it’s just a fubar’d market built up by an overly intrusive henpecking nanny-state government.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

So I am now in the eighth year of gifting the Internet with my opinions by way of a blog, and I’m thinking to myself…you know, there’s a problem here. I’m way too humble. Sure, I have my opinions, I put them out there, but I keep doing this providing logical justification for what I think, thing…seldom to never is the world ever granted access to my value system. In other words, I haven’t done a good job of saying THIS thing is awesome and wonderful, THAT thing is stupid-terrible-awful and sucks, just because I say so. You know, like the left-wing nitwits over on DailyKOS or something.

It occurred to me that I should do something to remedy this, when I read this thing that was linked over on Linkiest, “12 Unbelievable[y] Sexist Signs.”

I’m just going to go ahead and critique. Because, you know where I’m going with this…for a generation or two now, this inflammatory word “sexist” (adjective) has been defined pretty much unilaterally, by people who — well, let’s call them what they are, insufferable jackasses. Meaning, in Anno Domini Twenty Twelve, we have a pretty solid litmus test in place for the word “sexist” — and it has very, very little to do with reality. We’d be much better off just elevating me to position of “sexist definitions dictator” and letting me have the final word.

On with the show:

Verdict: NOT SEXIST. See, this is the whole problem: Telling a woman she looks good is sexist. No, no, no, fail, fail, fail. I do not want to live in that kind of a world, and neither does any sane straight man…or sane good-looking woman…or, anybody sane, at all. Good looking women are a treasure, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with telling them they look good.

Holy Moly! What got this whole thing started? Talk about a wrong turn!

Next:

Verdict: SEXIST. Yes, you can’t avoid it, that is sexist. Although I hope nobody was actually punished for it, it’s obviously a joke. So, again I have to ask, when did this happen? Sexist as all hell…but…clearly a joke…in a sane world, that is okay. Should be in ours.

SEXIST. And stupid.

But we don’t need fines or extra taxes or whatever…let the customers vote with their feet. Fucking idiot.

SEXIST. But, if it applies, pretty good advice.

SEXIST. And, again, stupid. Some guys are pretty good at kitchen work. Being female has nothing to do with it. Hey, if you don’t think the dude can do the kitchen work just don’t hire him! Why put it on a sign? Morons.

Verdict: Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Just a dumb, stupid idea. You really want all the women to parade through your establishment topless? All? It’s a case of not being careful what ya wish for.

Verdict: SEXIST, immoral, stupid, not funny. Take a dim view of cheating, in either direction.

Verdict: NOT SEXIST. This whole notion that if you make fun of Hillary you’re making fun of women, is wrong-headed, intellectually lazy, intellectually vapid, intellectually childish and intellectually flaccid. Besides of which it’s partisan propaganda. And did I say wrong?

“Hillary” is not “women.” She’s a cynical left-wing hackish glad-handing grand-standing politician. Frankly, she should be ridiculed a whole lot more. And yes, take it from me, not all women like Hillary.

Verdict: NOT SEXIST. It is pretty obvious the butt of the joke here, is the slob who seems to think his mother will be available to pick up after him…and a few moments of serious contemplation will result in the conclusion that he is the sexist here, and not a sympathetic figure by any means.

Verdict: I can see how it might be offensive to some wives who’ve seen their husbands hit the road due to not being “happy,” but ya know what? That, by itself, doesn’t make it sexist. News flash, there are guys out there whose wives have vamoosh’d. They get to hear jokes all the time about cuckolded husbands whose dicks weren’t big enough, and what not…I’m sure they don’t appreciate it, but that’s life. Stuff happens. A joke that doesn’t quite tickle your fancy because of your own personal baggage, is not necessarily sexist.

In fact, this is less sexist than the other Hillary joke, two pictures ago, because it is meaningful political commentary. Think about it: Other than that embarrassing personal business from all those years ago, what are her qualifications? For anything? There aren’t any. Hillary, politics-wise, is the Monica Lewinsky episode. It defines her. She has nothing else to bring. Saying so, is free speech; definitely not sexist.

Verdict: SEXIST.

But kinda funny.

Verdict: Kind of on the line…not sure. Both the figurines are perceptibly female, and perhaps this is unnecessary, but I dunno. What if there was a man in there. Would it make sense still? Not really…let’s face it, who really gives a rat’s ass about running over a man? I’d be inclined to think it was sexist if the message was, look out for those woman-and-girl shoppers, you know you can’t count on them looking where they’re going…that would make the cut. But that’s not fair, that’s embellishing the message in order to change the outcome.

I think you see where I’m going with this. Noticing people happen to be female, is not sexist. Reading something into that could be, depending on the situation.

And noticing that they’re pretty is certainly not sexist.

We have to get rid of that. Soon. Like now.

Toward the end of last year I had noticed, and since then I have made occasional reference to, a perfect quartet of “unavoidable flaws with liberal ideas.” They are derailment points on the railway; the liberal-idea-locomotive encounters one among the four, and chaos ensues. The mishap may be recoverable, but be that the case or be it not, the best-laid plan will come undone; any success realized after that point, will be realized by good fortune as a product of chance. And, interestingly, they make the same mistakes in the service of the interests of their agenda and their party, that they do in service of the interests of the country — which, to me, strongly suggests they are absolutely, genuinely, blind to the problems.

They really don’t understand them. Among the loyalists, I think they could be given a couple hundred years to make the same mistakes thousands and thousands of times…and…they’d just keep making them. That is what happens when you rationalize failure. You obviate the need to learn anything from it. And they are experts rationalizing away failure.

Time. They’re drunk on the elixir of friendly historians scribbling down such nonsense as, Franklin Roosevelt ended the Depression. And so they don’t worry about legacies. They’re very often caught neglecting the refinement of the message that would be handed off to history, opting to focus their attentions on the emotional rapture of the moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its sloppy core message that never did quite gel into any useful form, is a perfect example of this.

Commerce. Considering how much arguing they do about wealth and who has it, it just blows my mind that they demonstrate so anemic a grasp on what it is. They show a complete ignorance of the difference between occupations that create it, and occupations that do not. They seem to think the occupations, themselves, are the wealth, and that when an economy moves it’s just thriving on its own built-up inertia, like some sort of perpetual motion device that doesn’t need any fuel. “Get it going” is all that is needed. When I had my first car, I was responsible for gas and repairs; I suspect most liberals just borrowed their parents’ other car whenever they ran into a problem, and then daddy went & had the repairs done and the tank topped off. They seem intractably dedicated to the notion that any engine not running, including the economic engine, will run just fine if someone just turns a key. They see motion the same way they see life — it’s there just because it’s there, and if you start asking chicken-and-egg questions about it it just means you’re a shallow stupid ol’ teabagger.

Incentives. Conservatives and libertarians have been screaming for generations, “If you want more of something, subsidize it, and if you want less of something, tax it.” Granting the benefit of the doubt that our liberals do really want to make things better, they must not be getting the message. They’re constantly advancing plans to subsidize lifestyles that, if improvement of society is the end goal, nobody would want to see becoming more widely practiced. I haven’t been able to get a liberal to define in clear terms what “prosperity” looks like; haven’t been able to get any one of them to say “more people would be rich”…
:
Abundance, and/or omnipresence. I see them constantly trapped in the thought-whirlpool that the goal must be to make something more highly regarded and highly valued, and the surest way to get there is to make that thing more plentiful, ideally, so that it becomes impossible to ever get away from it. This is a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true.

Just noticed, over at my Hello Kitty of Blogging account, their vision for our society is most gravely in error precisely when & where it comes in closest proximity to almost making sense:

To understand liberals, you have to understand how their social contract makes sense, and it DOES make sense. In certain situations. Like, on a life raft, out in the middle of the ocean, with a dozen or fewer people let’s say. Water water everywhere, not a drop to drink…

In that situation, I agree with the liberals. If I find out one among us as been sitting on a hidden stash of chocolate bars and bottled water, that guy is a dick. And he should be fed to the sharks.

To understand the liberals, all you have to do is realize they live in this world ALL of the time. They lack the intellectual agility required to flex and adapt to different situations. We have legless people running races. Our kids all have cell phones. Our poor people are fat. They aren’t willing to factor these things in, to acknowledge they might have an effect on the social contract…ironic, since they say the Constitution is “living and breathing” but they want the unwritten social contract to be not only written, but carved in stone. They’re constantly accusing people of hoarding the C-rations and the chocolate and the water, when it makes no sense to do so.

So they react to a situation precisely the way a rational person would — but, not in that situation, in a different one. Let us call this one “Survival Staples” or “Starvation Imminent.” Without any supporting evidence at all, and without even any persuasive suggestion, liberals tend to behave as if the commodity-of-the-moment is in such short supply, and is so crucial to the continuing survival of the humans, be they in collectives or be they merely individuals — that an inexhaustible supply of the whatever-it-is becomes a “right.” Once they’re on this pathway, they get lost, instantly, for they adhere to the notion that mere difficulty involved in acquiring it, nevermind outright failure, constitutes an intolerable encroachment upon that right.

Crime…without an actual “bad guy.” So, of course, one has to be invented, that’s the next step.

S)urvival staples,
T)ime,
A)bundance/omnipresence,
C)ommerce and
I)ncentives.

STACI. Your five-part guarantee that liberal ideas, sooner if not later, will always turn out to be the wrong ones. One way or the other.

The Terror of the Tundra, being overly kind.

It occurs to me that we really need a word to describe the very broad range of school-age kids who are not only about to be diagnosed, but could be diagnosed, might be diagnosed, are skating around the periphery of possibly one day being diagnosed, with learning disabilities. I think everyone who’s working with this issue in some way implicitly understands, although no one is really describing it in verbiage or prose (I suppose that’s what I’m doing), that the thing we really need to be studying is that periphery. We as a society are spending a whole lot of time and energy treating it as a boolean thing, an on-off thing, thus we remain fixated on two questions: Does this kid have it, and what do we do about it. Thus, the periphery question — what the heck is it, anyway? — receives scant attention.

We treat it as if everyone has come to some kind of agreement about the boundary line. We question it and argue it the way you might question or argue “is it freezing?” Or, to reflect reality more precisely in the analogy, “are the water pipes under your mobile home frozen?” We act as if: It either is, or it isn’t. As I’ve often observed, though, everyone with a heartbeat could be fairly thought of as LD, in one way or another.

This is a big mistake we’re making. To treat this as an objectively measurable thing, is to give currency to the unjustified notion that all the persons involved, or all of the experts anyway, have achieved agreement on the definitions. If not on definitions of cause, then at the very least, on definitions of symptoms. Well, that is a boolean thing if nothing else is; they have or they haven’t. And, the more I learn about this, the more it comes off as a clear and obvious negatori. No, the “science” is not “settled.” They do not yet clearly know what they’re discovering. They don’t know what it is, let alone what causes it.

To study the “does he have it or does he not” and make these sweeping pronouncements about what the child’s potential might be if he does have it, presumes that this unification of the establishment ideas & methods has been reached, and hardened into a clear workable orthodoxy. To study the periphery cases, acknowledges the possibility that perhaps this is not so, and that our scientific efforts are not quite ready for such a thing.

And there are a lot of periphery cases.

As I’ve often noted, I would have been diagnosed easily, perhaps several times, were the “sciences” that are so trendy today similarly hip & stylish some forty years ago. That much is almost certainly true; what is positive is that I would have been included in the profile of these “is he in or is he out” cases. Therefore, if I was studied, my teachers would have been studied as well.

The method to my madness is: I think we need to start building a profile. We have to build a profile of the parents and educators who push for the diagnosis to be made.

The questionable-LD-child’s profile is started with a gradual realization on his part, that the class (or activity) is a dreadful bore that is not his cup of tea, and he begins to think in un-soldier-like ways, to take little ten-second vacations from reality in order to keep the machinery of his mind moving. These eventually stretch into several-minutes-long vacations from reality, during which he is called upon to do something and fails to leap into action the way the “control” child would. You might say, in the video-game of the classroom, he hasn’t yet figured out where the triangle, circle, square & X buttons are quite yet, and therefore can’t navigate through the “fight sequence.” But that is his perspective. From the teacher’s perspective, he has been “caught daydreaming.”

As anybody understands, if they’ve gone through the experience of learning such a “fight sequence” on a new controller, the solution is as simple as simple can be: Take your licking, figure out the fucking buttons, and play again. The first time you’ll have to do it by rote. “Okay, I’m supposed to press this shape then that shape then that one” and that translates to “the one at three o’clock then the one at high noon then the one at nine o’clock.” It’s the wrong thinking process…but that is okay. The next fight sequence, or perhaps the one after, your brain will be all properly wired and you can understand the story while you’re responding appropriately…a case of machine programming man. That’s how it works.

School should be the same way; start off doing the right thing by way of the wrong thinking process, and the next iteration through, shift to the right thinking process. That used to be exactly how it worked. But, somehow, we’ve gotten it into our heads that boys-caught-daydreaming is an exceptional, out of the ordinary occurrence, which must mean we think of “lifeguard mode” as the ordinary and more commonplace situation.

Know what this tells me?

Our boys are sneaky little shits and they are way smarter than their teachers.

Wait, that’s sexist. The girls are smart and sneaky too.

Just watch kids. Watch them waiting to buy movie tickets; watch them waiting for a subway, or riding on it. These kids can’t wait for a goddamn thing, anywhere, anytime. Out come the cell phones. I’ve said it before once, and again, and I’ll say it again, it’s the “not a single lifeguard worth a damn” generation. They haven’t been taught to passively wait for an event demanding instantaneous action, the necessity has not been created and so the skill has not been developed. But the necessity has been created to pretend…so they’re geniuses about that.

Overall, they are. What we’re dealing with around the periphery, are the kids like me. We’re lacking the talent of “sneak and snap.” We get a little too distracted, a little too lazy, a little too enmeshed in this “other” thought process we have going on, and we get this bulls-eye painted on our backs because the teacher starts to recognize: These kids, over here, are with-it and taking part and those kids, over there, can’t be counted-upon for jack shit. Teachers can’t help it, it’s just the way they think. Always has been.

What has changed, is the job of teaching. Back in my day, the teacher’s job was to gavel the classroom to order just like a judge, and keep it in order. Signals would be sent to the (perceptibly) daydreaming kids that their daydreaming was a bit too thick, their performance was too thin, and they needed to up their game. Know how that was done? Embarrassment. Oh, yes, I could write a whole thesis about my personal experiences with this, but it is a bit off topic; what is germane to the immediate discussion is, that the embarrassment did take place, and trust me on this — it didn’t turn into this crazy endless hamster-on-a-wheel thing where parents and teachers spend years and years arguing and arguing about the same ol’ shit, wondering what to do. The kid fixed the problem. Oh, yes he did!

This is how the “lifeguard” skill is developed: Harsh consequences. Why do we feel compelled to watch a coiled snake, for as long as we have to, when the snake isn’t moving? Let’s face it, it’s because snakes bite and the bite of a snake can really hurt you. Without that, there’d be nothing to watch. And this is why it’s the “not a lifeguard worth a damn” generation. All of the negative consequences, packing any weight at all, have been systematically removed. Embarrassment is a no-can-do. It is grounds for punitive action against the teacher, and it is for the most part against district policy.

I understand this from talking to the teachers. I also understand, further, that the teaching job has been shifted around a bit, and this “maintain order” thing isn’t quite so much a central part of it. The job of teacher has been transformed into something much more equivalent to the job of a university professor: Stay up to date on the academic materials and institutional policy, form the syllabus by whatever means, walk through it and grade the papers. The rest of it is up to the kids, and we’ll remove any ones that aren’t up to the job and put them in a “special” class.

So: The kids are expected to behave as if they have paid tuition in the class, when they haven’t. Much as the residents of public housing are expected to maintain the property and the structure upon it, as if they are engaged in a personal, investment-grounded or fiduciary participation in which they aren’t really engaged. In both scenarios, the outcome is the same. Things turn to shit. And, in both scenarios, the establishment has formed a blind spot with regard to the true epicenter of the problem, therefore the problem goes unsolved.

We are not really seeing a “skyrocketing” diagnosis rate of LDs; what we are seeing is more like a “collapsing” of the rate of mainstream participation. It’s crumbling and dissolving into a dysfunctional gooey mess before our very eyes, because we’re expecting kids not to act like kids. Actually, the adults act very much the same way; business meetings, the PowerPoint presentation is a bit too long and boring, and the presenter himself doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, so up comes the e-mail client.

But, somehow, in the grown-up world, we treat that as a divided responsibility, the way we treat most other things in the grown-up world. The guy IM’-ing during the business meeting might have a shitty work ethic, or be possessed of bad etiquette, or distracted and unaware that he’s much less subtle than he really is — OR — the presenter needs a few tips on how to prepare a better presentation.

With the kids, our approach is far less balanced and we reach for the medication a whole lot quicker. The teacher is somehow infallible, as is the class material. Oh, it would be nice if that was due to a new-found respect for adults and authority; at least, there would be something healthy about that.

But no, this is about the institution being infallible and the individual consistently being at fault, because the individual is smaller than the institution.

That’s not just unhealthy. It is lethal. It is certain to eventually kill off however much of society we have, if we take the passive approach and allow it to continue. For a civilization is nothing, if not a coordination among individuals, and if you don’t respect the individual you cannot expect the civilization to endure.

Teachers need to go back to teaching; the old-fashioned, get-good-at-herding-cats, kid-teaching. If Teacher 1 continues to “find” all these kids in her class with LDs who “need” to be diagnosed, and Teacher 2 isn’t seeing anything similar, and the trend continues year by year, we need to start noticing. We need to profile the teachers whose presentation and drill-sergeant talents are not up to par — so that they can get “the help that they need.” We need to start taking a more balanced approach, the way businesses (sometimes try to) do with their less-than-productive overhead-projector business meetings. The education is communication, communication is a two-way street, both parties involved have responsibilities and therefore both parties labor under a prospect of potentially under-delivering.

That is what we are currently missing. One kid gets that bulls-eye on his back, the fact that some other kid doesn’t have it, is conclusive evidence that “there’s a problem” with the kid. Once we reach that realization we don’t go back & revisit it ever again. That is what we need to start doing, because perhaps it’s a matter of one kid letting us know, sooner than the other one, that the system’s all cocked up and has fallen into a state of disrepair…and of course, if that’s the case, it impacts everyone. Yes, the supposedly-normal, supposedly-successful, supposedly-high-achieving kids as well. They’re being taught to fake it, and when they carry that into “real” life, it won’t be helpful to them or to anyone else.

It is one, isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s even possible to form an argument against that. Not sure if anyone’s tried.

Hat tip to Teri.

From one conservative to other conservatives. Dov Fischer writes in American Thinker:

Chief Justice John Roberts has handed a remarkable victory to American conservatives by threading the judicial needle with perfect precision. The initial disappointment collectively felt by Americans who had hoped for a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Obamacare soon will be replaced, upon further reflection, by the excitement that will come with a fuller appreciation of what the Chief Justice has wrought.

First, almost completely unnoticed, the Chief Justice voted with his four conservative colleagues in drawing an unprecedented red line against Washington wielding the Constitution’s Commerce Clause in the future to justify federal intrusion into the personal lives of Americans. This decision will restrict American Presidents and future Congresses for a generation and more.
:
There is now a formal United States Supreme Court opinion on the books, overdue by nearly a century, holding that the federal government may not wield the Commerce Clause to impose on American citizens the obligation to buy health insurance or anything else we do not want. An American cannot be compelled by federal mandate to eat or even to buy a proverbial stalk of broccoli. As a kosher consumer, the federal government cannot wield that clause to impose on me an obligation to purchase non-kosher food supplements. The rules guiding lower-court wrestling matches over federal power to invade Americans’ private lives now have been reset remarkably by Chief Justice Roberts.
:
Secondly, Chief Justice Roberts has punted the whole ninety yards, so to speak, with the expertise of a professional football kicker whose team has the ball on its own 8-yard-line, then punts ninety yards, pinning the other team on their own two-yard-line. Had Chief Justice Roberts sided completely with his four conservative colleagues, Obamacare now would be off the political table for the November elections. Obama would be campaigning and mobilizing his troops’ passions, arguing an urgent need to reconfigure the Court. Romney, by contrast, would be trying to mobilize passion for a lackluster campaign that is impelled legitimately by one crying urgency: jobs and the economy. However, Romney is not gifted at bringing people to their feet, not for applauding and possibly not for voting. He is competent, perhaps excellent, maybe even extraordinary — but his blandness does not generate passion.
:
Third, the Chief Justice has shifted the spotlight back onto Congress, primarily focusing its glare on the Democrat-run U.S. Senate, only four months before the elections. Republicans rapidly will beat down ObamaCare in the House like a piñata at a children’s party. It is an easy target. It is excessive and intrusive. It is financially devastating, will cause employers to drop health coverage for their employees, and will force millions to lose their preferred doctors and instead to settle on government-supplied alternatives. Seniors will find that $500 million in coverage has been sliced out of their Medicare. Employers will continue resisting expanding their work forces and reviving the flagging labor market while the issue remains in flux, assuring stagnating unemployment numbers through November.

Fourth, the Chief Justice, while permitting the federal government to offer states more money to expand their Medicaid rolls beyond their fiscal capabilities, joined with his four conservative colleagues in banning Washington from penalizing states that turn down the federal inducements to march towards bankruptcy…

Still not sure about all this, myself. But these are persuasive arguments that I am finding to be more and more persuasive as I continue in the dreary task of absorbing what has happened…

There are other conservatives defending the Chief Justice. Eric Erickson has a similar run-down of these and other points, and cutely quips “I guess we can tax the hell out of abortion now.” Heh.

If liberals were capable of imagining the frightening scenario, wherein their newly-discovered newly-forged newly-cast shiny sparkly mega-super Sword of a Thousand Truths falls into the hands of someone else who doesn’t agree with them about everything — they wouldn’t be liberals. That is one of the most important defining distinctions, is it not? If conservatives are in charge of government and government is suddenly empowered to do a whole lot more, first thought in their heads is “Well yeah, but what happens when the other guys take over?” Liberals in charge of government and government can do more, they don’t have so much of as a residual trace of this killjoy thought anywhere in their craniums, not so much as a whiff of it. It’s all sunshine and flowers and parades and high-fives “Yay, we can do stuff, we’re so awesome!”

Time is always frozen, the other guys will never get voted in, ever…all of the foresight and comprehension of time, of a third-grader hearing the final school dismissal bell at the beginning of summer vacation.

So I can definitely buy this much of the argument: The lefties are getting blindsided. Huge. Don’t tell them. This is where they start showing their immaturity and lack of fitness for office, which only helps matters. It helps lay out the case that they don’t belong where they are. Which is true.

Does Will McAvoy think America is okay now?

How about Jeff Daniels and Aaron Sorkin? Are they all cool with America being “great” again? Some mending has taken place? Redemption?

Didn’t think so.