He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Hat tip to Chamblee, who is not, so far as I know, the author of this very bad sentence.

Also, as a runner-up…

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like”Second Tall Man.”

One Lieutenant, one Sergeant, one officer and one reserve officer.

From here.

Yeah, I’d hate to see this kind of thing turn into a partisan my-turn-your-turn tit-for-tat spat. I think this has already happened to the impeachment process…and that isn’t good. But, on the other hand, it certainly can’t be a bad thing to attach some consequence and deeper thought to this “fly off in Air Force One and be seen someplace” thing…

Our First Holy And Gay President, for awhile now, seems to envision this as the solution to every little problem. Re-create the “Xerxes descending from the throne platform” scene in 300…and that’ll do it. Even if “it” is too much carbon in the atmosphere from all these planes flying around, the solution doesn’t change. Fly somewhere and give the most awesome wonderful speech ever.

Mixed feelings about the gleeful attitude. Seems like something we shouldn’t be wanting. But on the other hand, if there is a corrective course that’s possible, that is bound to be the start of it…and, there’s a reason I find it hard not to relish it. I share in the sentiment. Sometimes, the rational, reasoned response does feel kinda good.

In fact I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if the bill went unpaid, and it turned into a big ugly stinky (re-election year) mess.

I don’t like having a Xerxes in charge. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

Again, with no patriarch of the household…must be the anti-Julia. Still, it’s a powerful message.

Hat tip to Bruce Kesler at Maggie’s Farm.

…all in one easy chart. Which is big, so I’ll save it for last…

But this was a good sign-off, I thought:

Congrats to REX NUTTING of MarketWatch for following every one of these rules
http://bit.ly/KpUFug

Like they say: Heh.

Good question.

The mainstream media thought that the membership of Todd Palin, who is not a candidate for any office, in the Alaska Independence Party important enough to report in such outlets as the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, and the New York Times, among others.

So now that Barack Obama’s membership in the far left New Party has been unearthed, will they report his membership in that Socialist organization?

Proof of Obama’s membership in the New Party was discovered by the Politically Drunk On Power blog:

In June sources released information that during his campaign for the State Senate in Illinois, Barack Obama was endorsed by an organization known as the Chicago “New Party”. The ‘New Party’ was a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) to push forth the socialist principles of the DSA by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards. The admittedly Socialist Organization experienced a moderate rise in numbers between 1995 and 1999. By 1999, however, the Socialist ‘New Party’ was essentially defunct after losing a supreme court challenge that ruled the organizations “fusion” reform platform as unconstitutional.

After allegations surfaced in early summer over the ‘New Party’s’ endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and ‘New Party’ then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA’s New Party. [emphasis in original]

So we can call Him a socialist now, right?

Yeah, probably.

A third of all divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” according to Divorce Online. And more than 80 percent of U.S. divorce attorneys say social networking in divorce proceedings is on the rise, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Divorce lawyer Marian Rosen, who practices in Houston, said she’s increasingly seen social media cited in divorce proceedings and child custody battles.

“We’ve had instances where they pull up Facebook in the course of a deposition,” Rosen told ABC News, adding that in addition to proving infidelity, she’s seen cases in which children’s profiles are cited as evidence to suggest bad parenting. “Once it’s out there for the world, it’s very difficult … to erase from the past. There are going to be trails that can be followed.”

Ugh. Poor kids.

The dissenting theory sez, if your spouse’s level of dedication is such that he’s finding the profile of his old sweetie and hooking up the first time it’s convenient, then the problem is there, and Facebook is simply providing the mechanism…which effectively amounts to nothing. There is a lot of truth in this. But it ignores the demography of very weak marriages held together with paper clips and duct tape, out there, which are limping along only because there is no Facebook. Or, the marriages that were so limping-along, before Facebook entered the picture.

I do think there is a problem that predates the social media, certainly. There’s a rather unsettling column in Huffington Post, nine months old now, about thirty percent of marriages being obvious failures — at least from the bride’s point of view — before they ever take place. And this jives with something I’ve been noticing. We do seem to have an issue with people “trying on” marriages, wading in just to see where they go.

So both sides have merit, I think. Social media is a wrecking ball, but there was dry rot in the house before it made contact.

So I was thinking back on this post, which I was actually requested to put together & blog so that a discussion would ensue, about this recent forced cultural disdain against women who happen to have man-appeal. It is clearly a resentment against cosmetics; it has little or nothing to do with substance. But it arouses my ire because, for forty years now, I’ve heard feminists tell me that everyone needs to think and live the way the feminists tell them to, because their way is the right way; over those forty years, they’ve gone from insisting women can have everything and don’t need to choose anything, nor should they have to — to, you can’t be invested with real authority, as a woman, if you happen to look good. So the inconsistency bothers me a lot. But also, it leads to an elite layer of female leaders, one that is somewhat detached from the rest of society and yet, in many cases, making highly influential decisions about how the rest of society should live. The decisions they make, then, are consistently wrong.

And, I’ll just say it, okay? Men can get offended by things too; yeah that’s shocking, to some, I know. And no matter how you cut it, it’s offensive to say there must be something wrong in a candidate for one of these positions of real power, just because you and people of your sex might happen to like her, that all by itself makes her unqualified. We need to keep looking until we find someone you wouldn’t want to be around. Yes, that is offensive, breathtakingly so. Just because nobody strings the words together in sequence, doesn’t mean that isn’t the intent, or that that isn’t the message that comes across.

But my primary objection is to the second of those three; that is where the damage is being done. The women selected are making bad decisions. And I hasten to add, as I always must, that I don’t mean to suggest by this that only beautiful women are capable of making good ones. What I mean to suggest is that when a woman or a man arrives from a culture which displays this hostility toward good-looking women, and they manage to hijack some selection process and steer it toward a homelier candidate…the aftermath is bad. It ends up being just another portal through which real authority can be seized, and wielded, by someone who shouldn’t have it. When a decision process that works by random selection can beat them by several points of probability, time after time, something’s hosed. And that’s what we’ve seen go down. My prior challenge continues to go unmet: Kagan. Sotomayor. Secretary of State Clinton. Name one good decision. Just one.

It occurs to me that phrases like “it’s always the ugly girl’s turn in the limelight” might be good for drawing attention to the matter — and this is overdue — but, apart from the undesirable consequences of alienating a few people who might otherwise by sympathetic to the observation, it misstates the true nature of the problem. The problem doesn’t really have to do with genetic blessings, or lack thereof. Or intellect, or lack thereof. It’s cultural. We have this culture that starts off with a good message: You shouldn’t value a woman’s leadership abilities based on her appearances. And then it imposes this viewpoint, at these crucial junctions where it might matter, in overly simplistic terms. Pretty, bad. Ugly, good.

But the cultural push is not to accept ugly women, or to reject beautiful ones. The desire has to do with intent. The hostility is against women who have made a priority out of their looks. It doesn’t have to do with the achievement, it has to do with the effort; the achievement is just a symptom.

But it’s unhealthy, because say what you want about beautiful women, an achievement is an achievement. Achievements should be rewarded, not punished.

Blogger friend Teri has a post up which links to a report about a study, which in turn reveals more about this than I think might have been intended. The study is not about ugly women, it’s about parental investment, reproductive strategy, and the traits that men might find to be attractive in available women. Thought this was telling:

To figure out which sorts of women might be deemed most receptive to a sexual advance or most vulnerable to male pressure or coercion, they asked a large group of students (103 men and 91 women) to nominate some “specific actions, cues, body postures, attitudes, and personality characteristics” that might indicate receptivity or vulnerability. These could be psychological in nature (e.g., signs of low self-esteem, low intelligence, or recklessness), or they might be more contextual (e.g., fatigue, intoxication, separation from family and friends). A third category includes signs that the woman is physically weak, and thus more easily overpowered by a male (e.g., she’s slow-footed or small in stature). According to the authors, rape constitutes one extreme end of the “exploitation” spectrum—cheesy pickup lines the other.

By asking students for the relevant cues, the experimenters reasoned, they’d keep their own ideas about what makes a woman “exploitable” from coloring their study. When all was said and done, the regular folks in the lab had come up with a list of 88 signs that—in their expert undergraduate opinions—a woman might be an especially good target for a man who wanted to score. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with: “lip lick/bite,” “over-shoulder look,” “sleepy,” “intoxicated,” “tight clothing,” “fat,” “short,” “unintelligent,” “punk,” “attention-seeking,” and “touching breast.” [bold emphasis mine]

The experimenters were concerned about keeping their own ideas from coloring the study…and yet…they had no problem coming up with categories for these cosmetic attributes. Psychological, contextual, and signs that the woman is physically weak.

Hmmm. I don’t know. I have seen the comments from many women, and heard them in face-to-face conversations, that there are a lot of men who crave weakness in their women, including physical weakness. I suppose I shouldn’t judge this perception if I haven’t actually been a woman trying to find a suitable male mate. Many among those complaining, have certainly come out and said so. But then again, it seems to me the people who harbor this preconception don’t spend a lot of time trying to get the male perspective on it. Frankly, it comes off looking like there’s another side to the story that’s being left out. Guys abandoned you because you’re strong? You didn’t, maybe, chase them off?

I’m a guy with some stories to tell about finding the right woman; I’ve talked to other guys who have stories to tell about finding the right woman; weakness, including physical weakness, doesn’t rate very highly on the list of things we started out trying to find, or that we ended up trying to find. As a practical matter, I’m having a tough time trying to think how that could enter into it unless the man plans to force yourself on your companion. And, you know, I’m skeptical on the idea that this would be representative of the typical male.

But I think we’re looking, here, at a post-mortem on the selection of women who don’t look good to men. If I were so privileged as to see a line-up of photographs of these women who made the cut, I could be more sure about it. But the researchers made a list of these 88 signs…taking these steps to keep their own ideas out of it, but you know, I’m gonna take it as a given that there was very little mind-blowing change in direction or perception here. They asked students. Students in colleges…with, probably, a wide assortment of curriculum offerings that end in the word “studies.” They asked a group of 194 students with a very slight male majority, in a college, what a strong, capable woman who can take care of herself, looks like.

I previously had mentioned Megyn Kelly as one of the gorgeous ones, who I think comes off as strong and able to handle things. I’m gonna take it as a given that the strong and capable women-pictures, ultimately selected, didn’t look much like Megyn Kelly.

Oh, well that‘s certainly good to hear.

Actress Ashley Judd had some high praise for President Barack Obama during a recent appearance on NBC’s “Press Pass”, a mid-week online “Meet the Press” segment hosted by David Gregory.
:
“To a certain extent, I was [disappointed] for the first couple of years,” she said. “But I also know that President Obama came in inheriting an extraordinary mess and did his absolute best to do triage. And initially his presidency was about triage, and he started by saving the auto industry and, you know, all the jobs that were associated with that.”

“And now I’m pretty fired up again,” she continued. “And I think that he is a powerful leader. I think he’s a brilliant man. I think that he has an incredible devotion to our constitution, and that he is now able to flower more as the president I knew he could be. And I was extremely proud of his statement about gay marriage, for example, because he didn’t need to do that. He was just displaying his values and his belief in equality. And that moved me to tears.”

Europe makes a lot of mistakes with their government and their economies…but a lot of those countries, you have to give them this much, they can vote no-confidence and call for elections. Not sure how this works out for them, but the concept seems to have a lot to do with what we’re lacking here in the states: A fuse to be tripped. They’ve got this way of saying “We’re not getting a good hit rate with the decisions being made lately, and they seem to be consistently, systematically, bad/corrupt/stupid/wrong decisions. Let’s fix this.”

In the States, we make these two-to-four year commitments to stick with the elected leadership through thick or thin. Such a commitment, bringing nothing to the governed save for the obligation and nothing to the governors save for the benefits, is supposed to be a testament to how well our system works, being a key component to this “bloodless revolution” concept. I like bloodless revolutions; but this part of it needs a re-think. America has no constitutional answer for the situation in which their leaders have “jumped the shark,” as it were. Thrown a rod, slipped a cog — it’s like machinery. Sometimes the gears aren’t meshing, and you can’t just hope things will slip back in place after you’ve had a good night’s sleep and cranked the starter one more time. An overhaul is needed.

This is something I’ve written about many times before: The official, committee or system that turns out good, wise decisions, less often than a system of decision-making that would rely on random chance. This is an extraordinary and profound insult I’m laying down, and unfortunately, I mean it to be. A stupid person would not qualify for such an insult because he would generate decisions that are good decisions, roughly half the time; the people I’m singling out for attack, make the right decisions a great deal less often than this theoretical stupid person.

How did McCarthy put it? “if [Sec. of State George C.] Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.” Say what you want about Sen. McCarthy’s actions, but these are wise, prophetic words. It’s become a national nightmare: The so-called “leader” who morphs into a nearly perfect reverse-compass. It begins to look like a better and better idea, every day, to simply find out what this guy wants to do and do the opposite.

One thing we should think about, though, is that a lot of European states have become socialistic, and it’s easy to see a lot of their socialistic programs start off with these leaders trying to prove what wonderful people they are. This is why Europe is going broke. The pension programs have to keep inflating every year so the leaders can prove their charitable nature. And more and more laws have to be passed to make sure nobody is ever in danger of anything bad happening. Perhaps this all starts with the leaders trying to head off these no-confidence votes. The connection is there. So maybe they have a device in place to prevent this sad situation of a steady, non-stop progression of bad dumb decisions — and the device is not quite working for them.

But our device is not working for us, either. Our Founding Fathers, perhaps anticipating Europe’s problem, did not provide for this no-confidence fuse-tripping…except at regular intervals…and what’ve we got. I see President Obama on the television, speaking, with the sound turned off, and I have the same reaction every time: Oh shit, what’s He doing this time. Find a slobbering Obama fan somewhere…get them drunk…eventually, they’ll admit they’ve got the same reaction. Have a few more drinks together, the alcohol will do its work and the two of you might have the idea you’ve done a better job solving the problem at your drinking table, than our elected leaders. But the tragedy here is, once you’re sober again you’ll still think that’s the case, and you’ll probably be right about this.

This is not good. We should do something to change it, or at least, try to.

Burt Folsom:

Keynesian economist Robert Thomas once said, “Individual entrepreneurs, whether alone or as archetypes, don’t matter!” Thomas elaborated, “And indeed if they don’t matter, the reason, I suggest, is that the supply of entrepreneurs throughout American history, combined with the institutions that permitted–indeed fostered–intense competition, was sufficiently elastic to reduce the importance of any particular individual.”

In other words, if Henry Ford hadn’t come along and popularized the automobile, someone else right behind him would have done so in roughly the same way. Entrepreneurs are not particularly valuable, according to Robert Thomas. Without Ford, another mechanic would have “put a car in every garage.” Ford was merely in the right place at the right time.

If you believe that, then it logically follows that tax rates should be high. Why reward an entrepreneur for doing something now that someone else will do just as well very soon? In this view, government should be actively involved; bureaucrats can easily substitute for entrepreneurs, and the reward will go to the state, which can redistribute it perhaps more equally.

But let’s examine history to tell the real story…

This is an important discussion to have. As Folsom notes, there is a certain crazy but respectable logic bolting it all together; if you believe A, then B is a natural conclusion to draw. If the economy is a zero-sum game, then of course it is in society’s interest to make sure no individual or small consortium can hoard too much of the wealth, and if success is a lottery, then the winners have to put something back. Kinda like a roast beef sandwich, badly made with cheap meat: Take one bite and you’ll find yourself swallowing the whole thing, willingly or otherwise, in one gulp.

Well, I can’t even nibble at the damn thing because I know better. Innovative new things are built by eccentric (and egocentric) individuals, because they can be built by nobody else. It’s just a fact. Now, most innovative new things don’t work. When that happens, the eccentric individual risks ridicule…which won’t be forthcoming, unless people like to ridicule eccentric individuals. Which they do, actually, and not just a little bit. But if the thing works? Then a committee takes it over. Sooner or later.

So, to the untrained eye, to the bystander who’s never been close to any of the real details, it seems like the committee built the thing. That’s a tip-off newbie mistake. Every time I hear someone say “the government built the Internet” I immediately understand I’m hearing from someone who doesn’t know anything about anything. No…I didn’t build the Internet either. But I did make machines talk to each other through software…build packets to hold all the application-relevant data, come up with crude protocols for pings and acks and integrity checks and so forth…modeled it after what I knew about XMODEM at the time. No, a committee is not building something like that. It isn’t the right forum.

If the technology is “bleeding-edge” enough, as we used to call it, you could apply a decent litmus test to that term by first asking if there is some question about whether it will work at all. Yes, that is as good a definition as any. If there isn’t any such question, then you aren’t really innovating. If there is, then an evolutionary loop is going to have to be set up. Methods cobbled together, tried out, discarded like Edison’s light bulb designs, resurrected, refined, tried again. This is an essential element to true innovation. It cannot co-exist with a spirit of consensus. Consensus has to be abandoned, because the lodestar has to be “does it serve the purpose” and this cannot share its authority with any other goal. The innovator cannot serve two masters.

But this is all just obvious to anyone who’s built anything. Why does anyone believe otherwise? And with such zeal, such drive and determination to have the last word. Well, my observations are that they want the last word because they need to have it; their arguments are not convincing otherwise. And they believe committees and governments actually build things that work on new ideas, because they want to — it all has to do with hostility against the individual.

“…sufficiently elastic to reduce the importance of any particular individual.” Mull that one over a few times. Why would anyone say such a thing? Why work so hard to trivialize the good work of a man? You’d never in a million years say, if that firefighter didn’t put out the house fire, some other firefighter surely would’ve, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Why say such a thing with inventing a car?

This is another thing you can pick up only by being close to the action: No, it is not all pre-destined and pre-determined. Any mature and complex software project, for example, has all these modules that “need” to be re-factored. Maybe five percent, and that’s being generous, will eventually be blessed with an effort to so re-factor. And of those, maybe a third or so, and that’s also being generous, will ultimately succeed and not be recalled later as some kind of a boondoggle. “Great concept…nice idea…but, nobody understands it, we gotta meet our deadlines, so…” and then that’s that.

But one percent or so, are indeed refactored with the refactoring being a success. You naturally have to wonder if the refactoring projects were selected right. It’s the height of hubris to suppose the selection process was perfect, and opportunity was not lost somewhere. It’s a crap-shoot.

So no, if this guy wouldn’t have invented this thing, it’s not a fait accompli that the next guy standing behind him would’ve. That has never been assured at all. Invention is a chancy, haphazard thing. It is also a vertical thing, with new things built on top of other new things. Can’t have your Internet or your client-server connection without some way to form, direct, acknowledge and integrity-check the packets; can’t have that if you can’t have voltage differentials, and ways to modulate them and regulate them to transmit digital information; can’t have a system for processing digital information if someone doesn’t invent transistors and come up with several generations of ways to shrink them down. And cool them. And then someone has to buy it. Giant, mind-boggling strides in technology…think about it, I’ve got a cell phone, a money clip and a 250GB external hard drive sitting in front of me, they’re all the same size. When I was born, a system that held five hundredths of a percent of that data, would have filled a room. Leaps of that magnitude, rest on much smaller leaps, that are not nearly so impressive, nor as easily understood, to the layman. Nor, even, to the qualified engineer. Over and over again we see, things that are mind-blowing and easy to explain, rely on other things not so impressive, and nearly as easy to explain. Such smaller building blocks very often look like wastes of time.

So to kick it all off, someone has to risk wasted time. And not have to bother himself with explaining to a committee what he’s doing. Whether you can see it or not, it all starts with some dweeb in an isolated, forgotten room somewhere, playing Doctor Frankenstein. A Nikolai Tesla fiddling around with something in a Wardenclyffe. Wasting his time. That is the egg from which the new, good stuff is hatched.

Why does the contrary vision hold such enduring appeal? Because the forgotten room is isolated, by its very definition; so we never see this stuff actually happen. And, if you accept that Henry Ford could easily have been replaced for the benefit of society, by whoever happened to be standing behind him — it reduces people to mere cattle. And if we’re all cattle, milling about, chewing our grass and cud and every now and then some lucky bull goes through the motions of “inventing” something, well then that would mean…we’re all in desperate need of just a few capable cattlemen. Who are glorious and foreward thinking and wise, but never have to actually prove themselves to be in possession of such glittering qualities — and so opportunities will open to whoever can put on a good show, whoever can do the best job of pretending.

That’s the split, right there. It’s an enduring conflict between those who build amazing things that really work, and those who merely pretend to.

Keynesian theory is simply the detritus, the footprints if you will, left in the dirt by that latter group.

Thanks to Tweedledee, and his magical Facebook-interfacing text-messaging smartphone.

I like this a lot. Not just because it’s a solid shove in a good direction, but it highlights a subtle but meaningful split between the narrow band of elites with the loudest voices and who seem to be perched, everlastingly, on the tallest soapboxes…and…well, y’know, real people.

I’m looking for the split to widen, which I think it will. The loud-chattering-soapbox people will keep on doubling down. Did you pick this up from the linked article?

As for the criticism that the Team Obama’s Bain attack is part of “nauseating” political discourse with which [Cory] Booker has become “very uncomfortable,” [David] Axelrod said, “on this particular instance he was just wrong.”

Axelrod shows what’s wrong with the whole mindset here. Truth and falsehood…and feelings. They’ve all been lazily dumped in the same bin, like refuse that hasn’t been sorted into the right receptacle in some ecology-minded burough. Booker is wrong…to feel nauseated about what’s happening? Oh, so that’s the platform, is it. We’re going to vote for these wise leaders and then their attack dogs are going to tell us how to feel about the things they do. Oh, that’s a winner right there, fer sure.

In addition to which, the whole debacle a sign that the “real” people are finally getting it:

Booker is not the only Democrat to question the aggressive, negative portrayal of Romney’s work in private equity. Former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. said today he agreed with “the substance” of Booker’s comments and “would not have backed out.”

“I agree with him, private equity is not a bad thing. Matter of fact, private equity is a good thing in many, many instances,” the Democrat said in a separate appearance on MSNBC earlier in the day.

Former Obama administration economic adviser Steven Rattner made similar comments last week, calling a new Obama campaign TV ad attacking Romney’s role in the bankruptcy of a Bain-owned steel company “unfair.”

“Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for its investors,” Rattner said. ”‘It did it superbly well, acting within the rules, acting very responsibly. … This is part of capitalism, this is part of life. I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.”

Team Obama looks bad here, because they should. Their message, willingly selected by them, is: “Come on! You don’t want those job-making business people to actually be running anything, do you??”

And I like it because this, above all other things, is what we need our 2012 election to be addressing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Unproductive people giving orders to productive people about how to do their producing. It’s been given a perfectly fair shot here, and it’s a fail.

It is not a partisan position at all, really, or at least it shouldn’t be one; nor is it a model of responsible government. It is simply an ancient hatred against those who create things, nurtured by those who do not and cannot. When you can’t create anything, all there is for you to do, is destroy. Destroy and lie. Get embarrased about your lying, get beaten up about it…and learn nothing from it, just keep right on doing it.

Four years ago, Obama was on His way to being elected President because His campaign successfully pulled off the appearance that His side had all the positive energy and the other side had all the negative energy. “Hope won, fear lost”; remember that? Looks like the shoe’s on the other foot now. But this is a public perception that is going to be very tough to turn around. Hard to correct it, if it’s already true. We’re seeing an election between those who channel creative energies and those who operate off of destructive ones.

A lot can happen, but I’m very pleased with what’s going on so far. Looking like 1980 all over again.

Now after we get this fixed, let’s stop the stupid-go-round and shut down the experiment. That would necessarily mean, educating our youth properly. People who act on destructive impulses, and that includes communists, don’t build things…not after you discount the machinery and the institutions that exist to destroy other things. They don’t eradicate hunger or poverty, they don’t end war, they don’t cure diseases. They’re very charismatic and so forth, they’re good at herding around large crowds of idiots, but that isn’t what it takes to build a well-functioning society.

So stop it already. That’s the message we have to get across. If we could just make our young people as afraid of electing communists as they are of catching AIDS, we could prevent a whole lot of misery.

Hmmm…this is not sounding like any of the classroom conversations we had back in my day.

“As a teacher, I’m not supposed to allow you to disrespect the President.”

This is just one example of a troubling trend: We’ve got a lot of these people running around, offering this argument that someone won an election in 2008 and this somehow means we aren’t allowed to say certain things or think certain things.

They don’t seem to have thought this out very well at all, and their definition of “disrespect” seems to be expanding to include anything not flattering. You know…somehow, I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I’m also rather put off by how these classroom conversations are going nowadays. Teacher wants to make a big show out of things she cannot and will not allow to be said in her classroom — I’m hearing a lot of other things over which such an issue could be made in this recording, that don’t even seem to be registering as blips on the ol’ radar. I’d have gotten detention and my folks would have heard about it, if I called someone a “son-of-a-bitch.” Looks like those rules have fallen by the wayside.

But you can’t talk your smack about Barry O.

“Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of American life.” — Rush Limbaugh, Truth #24 of the 35 Undeniable Truths of Life.

One of the most superficial complaints against Fox News, does find a shred of sympathy with me, if only just a shred: “Real women don’t look like that.” It isn’t true, in the purest technical sense. Women can be occasionally readings-off-the-charts beautiful. But the complaint resonates because it isn’t a complaint only about beauty, and it isn’t only about one or two women. The complaint is that they all look the same and, collectively, this achieves an effect that isn’t natural-looking. Breasts more-or-less the same size, hair all the same color of bleach-blond, glossy glistening lips…it’s an attack of the clones. Just a bit of height variance but not too much.

It makes you wonder who got passed over.

However, even though there’s some merit to this it still ends up being rather silly. The job is to appear on television. Looking good, within this group, should therefore be something like being able to fly when you’re in the Super Friends. Now, there could also be a legitimate charge about sexism, since the men also must meet this requirement of looking good but they all have their identifiable and unique appearances. You aren’t going to mix up Sean Hannity with Bill O’Reilly any time soon…but one can see there is some policy in place, be it soft or hard we do not know, instructing the women to resemble some ideal as closely as possible. Five-foot seven, moist glistening rosy lips, medium-large breasts, nothing at all wrong with a short skirt, turtleneck, and either some sharply spiked heels or dressy knee boots. It does look more incriminating on a whole gaggle of them than on any one of them.

But again…the baseline requirement is to look good. That has a bearing on the situation, because it means something.

With that in mind, then, now consider my complaint about women who have real power — women who can argue with others about what is to happen to my health care, my taxes, and the products I require, from bullet cartridges to light bulbs. It is a close-cousin complaint of “Real women don’t look like that,” with two important differences: One, rather than being beautiful, they’re all ugly. Opposite direction, but equal distance. Even greater distance, really. I can go out on a weekend, shopping, meeting random people — I’m very, very sure I will catch a glimpse of some women who look like Megyn Kelly before I meet even one that looks like Donna Shalala, Janet Reno, Sonia Sotomayor, Geraldine Ferarro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Madeleine Albright.

Second difference: These ugly broads have real power. Gretchen Carlson can’t make me do a damn thing, other than occasionally wish some centerpiece on the coffee table would be moved slightly out of the way. Can’t stop me from doing anything. Can’t make anything I buy any harder to get, or more expensive…she can’t even start to do any of these things.

The similarity between the two complaints? Both have what credibility they have, because of aggregates. It would be just as laughable to point at Elena Kagan and say, “something is wrong with appointing a woman to the bench who looks like that,” as it would be to single out Laurie Dhue and say “news shouldn’t be delivered by someone who looks like that.” The complaints are about long-standing hiring practices. Trends. Probability theory. The lack of exceptions when & where one would & should be able to expect to find some, or one.

My complaint makes more sense than their complaint. Beauty is a good thing. And, let us state it for the third time since it’s important: In the case of ravishing Fox News anchors, it directly pertains to the job. And really, my complaint has much, much more going for it than mere personal appearance — it calls out a larger issue. It isn’t even confined to women. Ever since the baby-boom generation has reached an age which might “fit” the occupations in our business world and our government invested with real power, like say, back in ’92 when Bill Clinton was elected President, our society seems to have become consumed with a passion for pretending mediocre people are excellent in ways that cannot & should not actually be defined. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Joe Biden being an “experienced elder statesman,” although there are several others. That, I suppose, is the real passion behind my complaint. I’m sick to the point of nausea, of this soft cultural expectation that I should be ooh-ing and aah-ing over the wisdom and perspicacity of these lifelong public-trough-gobbling paper-pushing bureaucrats, boasting of entirely lackluster accomplishments, or none at all. Public sector zombies who don’t actually have any good ideas.

This crushing avalanche of butter-faced women being appointed to powerful positions, is simply a vessel through which this sickening product is delivered.

But my quibble is really with the selection process. Discussing the issue over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging, I was challenged repeatedly over this yesterday morning…accused of wanting to lock up the ugly women and keep them out of the way. Interesting, isn’t it? People who object to the pulchritudinous females on Fox News, never seem to be accused of wanting to lock up pretty people and keep them out of the way — even though, in that case, it really is true. But anyway, my opposition and I both came to the agreement that Maggie Thatcher would not have been too likely to win any beauty contests, nor would Jeanne Kirkpatrick. But they do not find disfavor with me by any means, because they’re not part of the complaint. Again, the selection process; in both cases, its purpose was to find someone with specific qualifications. Read that as, rock-hard balls. In both examples, the best man for the job turned out to be a humdrum-looking female. And in both cases the funny-looking female served with distinction. “What’s excellent about Margaret Thatcher?” is a question that can be easily answered. “What’s unique about Jeanne Kirkpatrick?” is also a question that can be answered.

Contrasted with that: Point to one single wise decision made by wise-Latina Sotomayor, or Obamacare Solicitor General Kagan. Just one.

What started it was a fundraising letter sent out by Sarah Jessica Parker, who is hosting an Obama bash at her home. Just like, ah…dimpleface George Clooney. You see the soft sexism at work in this subtle cultural push coming from the left: The men, should they be so genetically blessed, get to be cutie-pies. That’s perfectly alright. Women are required to be bow-wows. And, throughout the years and decades of seeing the Janet Renos and the Donna Shalalas, you and I are required not to say a single word about it. We’re trying to lock up the ugly people and keep ’em out of the way, you know.

Well, maybe good manners would call for keeping my silence about it, but there’s a problem with that: Bad things have been happening from that. I suppose I should repeat the tired, obligatory litany yet again…no, I’m not saying ugly people make dumb decisions or that good looking people make wise ones. It’s the selection process. William F. Buckley famously delivered a line, the exact wording of which it seems no one can definitively pin down, about his preference for being governed by the first thousand names out of the phone book instead of by the Harvard faculty. Well, I’d rather have the decisions that apply to me, decided by a Magic-8 ball than by this menagerie of ugly people appointed by these progressives who seem to think, although they won’t say out loud, that real power should be reserved for women who would be sexually rejected by any straight man with standards. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s obvious they’re trying to send a message about women, beauty and power. In fact, they’re spending a lot of energy on it. Wouldn’t good manners counsel us to try to figure out what that message is, just as much as to keep our silence about it? These are people who make decisions that actually matter. Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out what it is they want to do with our women? It’s clear that “leave them alone” is not the right answer.

Eva Longoria is drop-dead gorgeous. She’s also a silly slobbering Obama-fan airhead. How come, I wanted to know, she isn’t hosting an Obama bash in her home, and sending out a fund-raising letter? Sarah Jessica man-hands Parker? Not wanting to be unkind, but…come on…has she even done anything lately?

After awhile, if the scales haven’t already fallen from your eyes, you gotta let ’em fall. There certainly is a no-pretty-people thing taking place here. It’s being more-or-less ‘fessed up with all the bitching about Fox News.

I’ve written before about how this works, how there is this reverse-sloping effect; Hollywood whores can find favor with the modern left-wing chattering class, so long as they mind their place. If you go along with the idea that Sarah Jessica Parker was selected in some way and Eva Longoria might have been blocked, and this wasn’t all about volunteering, then there must be a hierarchy within even that. Good on you for having the proper lefty opinions, Hollywood whore, now go make your YouTube videos and stay out of the way of our official functions…it’s always the ugly girl’s turn in the limelight because that’s just how we roll.

And then, as you move out of show business and up the power ladder, the requirement is more and more strict. Just grabbing that coffee mug and circling around the table on The View — you don’t have to talk to the progressives too long at all, to find out Elisabeth Hasselbeck is causing offense where her three co-hosts are not, and it isn’t just a problem with opinions, it’s an issue that has something to do with loveliness. Darn that Hasselbeck girl; sane straight men would actually want to sleep with her. How dare she.

And by the time you get to Congress, or the President’s Cabinet, all bets are off. Bow wow.

George W. Bush was going to make an exception to this. Remember that? He looked for a Labor Secretary capable of making good decisions, one who had some balls. He found gorgeous Linda Chavez. The nomination withered and died on the vine, because of something about giving money to an illegal immigrant. You really think it was about that? Really? Timmy Geither is Secretary of the Treasury and he had an embarrassing tax problem resulting from — well, just plain deciding he didn’t want to pay, when you get down to it. No problem there at all. He serves today with the same “distinction” we’ve come to expect from these humdrum mediocre liberals who’ve never actually made any good decisions about anything. So bollucks on the illegal-alien story. Chavez was blocked because she’s beautiful. President Bush somehow, thank goodness, got around this with Condoleeza Rice. How that happened, I don’t know.

We may as well just admit what this is really all about: “Having it all” is dead, done, gone, buried…it may never have been a reality in the first place. Back when I was just beginning to be aware of what was happening, feminism was called “Womens’ Lib,” short for “liberation,” and a key focus of it was that women should be able to make choices, but not sacrifices. The stated goal was to reform society in such a way that if a woman had a family life, and wanted to advance in her career, she should not have to give up the former for the latter, or vice-versa. Nowadays, something’s flipped. Rather drastically. Like a semi-conscious Rip van Winkle, I’m awakening in a new age and I see women are supposed to make such exchanges, almost like a ritual exchange in a marketplace. They should be ready to give up power for beauty, and beauty for power, they should never aspire to acquire, or retain, both; and, most strange of all, the enforcers of this protocol are our women.

Women do not appreciate the idea of other women being both powerful and beautiful.

Famous legal blogger Ann Althouse (who seems to be quite fetching, herself, when she’s facing the camera) highlights a longstanding theme in the so-called “comedy” of loathed unfunny-man Bill Maher: “Our whole society is based on making women nod.” Like many others, I’m repulsed by the very thought of it, but I have to admit he’s right.

We do dumb things to gain female approval, over and over again. It is what makes our society go. And that is to our detriment.

In fact, I pause here to notice something: Women in our society, on average, are not bad at making decisions. I see women making good decisions pretty much every day…or every week, anyhow. We don’t have a lot of women where I work, but I do get to live with one. She’s pretty good at picking things, deciding things. Better than some men, maybe even, on occasion, me. Okay, not that often, but still. Women can make good decisions. So there is something curious afoot when these bonehead decisions are made by others, who are not women, to serve the purpose (and none other) of gaining this female approval. We’re back to Bill Buckley’s phone book again — the institutionalized selection method is compared to a purely-random selection method, and found to be inferior. A pair of dice will come to the right decision more often than one of these pussy beta males trying to Make Women Nod.

Two Supreme Court vacancies have opened up since Barack Obama became President. Both times, the vacancy was filled with an ugly white woman — one not known for making decisions any better than that rolled dice, but whom we’re supposed to perceive, against the evidence, is somehow sagely and wise. Two out of two is outside the probability norm. Simple inductive reasoning suggests, rather forcefully, an affirmative action program for ugly people is in place.

In fact, we’re long past the point at which a reasonable and honest observer can avoid noticing such a thing by one way, and one way only: By consciously deciding not to notice.

So, no. I don’t want the ugly people to be caged up and kept out of the way. Being beautiful has nothing to do with the job…but, because of that very thing, I don’t want the pretty people to be caged up and kept out of the way either. It’s not an either-or situation, that’s my point. Does our ultra-sophisticated, ultra-evolved, ultra-sensible society have the “nuance” to think in these terms? To understand that cosmetic attributes may be entirely unrelated to the desired selection method? Some barnyard animals can do that; can we? These positions of real power don’t have to be reserved for the gorgeous people or for the homelies.

It is possible to simply — ignore the issue of personal appearance altogether, and just pick the right person for the job. Yeah, crazy idea, I know. When you dare to dream, dream big.

Nightfly gives it a good think:

[T]here are so many more approaches to right and wrong. You can be on the right track but not quite there, or wrong on principle, or hopelessly muddled, or etc. etc. You can reach the right conclusion stupidly. You can outsmart yourself and be completely wrong despite years of training and experience. And everyone else around you can be in similar states of approach or withdrawl, their voices can carry more or less weight in the discussion…None of those things is possible in “us vs. them.” There are only three categories, and the only one of them that’s RIGHT is US. If you’re not an us, you are either a them, or raw material. A THEM is always wrong because it’s not US, and the undecideds have to be gathered up into RIGHT/US, quickly, before they are “misled” by THEM.
:
It’s putting “us vs. them” and “right vs. wrong” in front of “good vs. evil” that tends to lead to outrageous abuses and tyrannies in the name of “progress.” That’s the process in use when freedoms are set aside in favor of “it’s for your own good.” It’s how people who forward a critique based on behavior or policy are told that they really only oppose or question things due to personal animosity, or mental impairment, or moral defect. Ultimately, it’s how people themselves become objects. By making all things personal, persons themselves are squeezed out, lose their personality. Mere things are the thing, and no thing is innocent or inoffensive, and no thought or behavior is private.

Eye protection, guy…should use eye protection.

Problem.

Solution.

I don’t think my eyeballs can roll as much as is called for…but…current theory: Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii. But, being a lifelong left-wing hacktivist just like Professor Elizabeth Warren, He’s had a habit of doing the Elizabeth Warren thing which is to boast of diversity credentials He doesn’t really have.

And, if certain college transcripts and other papers were to be made available to the public, we’d see a whole lot of other professors, editors and clerks ‘fessing up to “fact checking error[s] by me.”

We have the “home country” thing…

We have “Kenyan-born Obama all set for US Senate” — and now we have this.

Somewhere around the 2005 to 2007 timeframe, Obama, just like Prof. Warren, stopped checking the box. And that’s where my thinking is: This is a box that should never have been checked. She’s a white girl without a drop of Cherokee blood in her, and He was born in Honolulu.

But they both did check the boxes. In Obama’s case, there’s just a lot more effort involved in hiding the evidence of what He was saying about Himself…no, I don’t think He was born in Kenya. But I’m not going to presume people are crazy for thinking He was, when it looks like He Himself was insisting on exactly that just a few years ago. It isn’t just one thing. It’s now up to three things. And, it looks like it would be up to a whole lot more than that, were Obama’s life not so thoroughly shrouded in secrecy.

And frankly, people who are trying to perpetuate that stigma, whether they’re being compensated for doing so for not, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Who the heck are you to call them these dirty names? Were you there, in Honolulu, back in ’61?

Much of this is damage being done to Obama by Obama Himself. He’s got this habit going — and it’s bigger than a personal habit, it’s like a whole culture that surrounds all of the people, who in turn surround Him: “We’re too good to ever directly answer any questions” I guess you’d call it. Why did it take so long to produce the birth certificate? I’ve heard the various litanies about how nutty it is to be asking for it and He shouldn’t have to show us anything…but the problem is, we get that with every little thing we ask. About anything. Still no bin Laden death photo. And, other than the stonewalling, that’s a completely unrelated subject. But the stonewalling is still there. It’s present with every little thing He does, any question He doesn’t want to answer, you get back some snotty monologue about all the things that are wrong with whoever asked. Just answering the incredibly simple question, or presenting the paperwork that was requested, is ruled out from the get-go.

Dude — that’s weird.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I wanna know what happens when Barack Obama is driving a car, and gets pulled over by a cop. License, registration, insurance. What happens next? I have no idea how that goes down. I’d love to find out.

This is essentially a philosophical issue. We’re dealing with the relativism of our left-wingers, with the pliable notion of “truth” that is the spongy building block of their special stretchy universe, on steroids. Their brand of truth is whatever it takes to move the agenda…what’s the word…forward, and since that changes from one year to the next, truth, also, changes from one year to the next.

So Barack Obama can start being born in Kenya, and then stop again. Just like Elizabeth Warren can start being part Cherokee. And then stop again.

Hillary Clinton has been specializing in this sort of thing for awhile now. Her accent changes to suit the occasion…

…and, now and then, she’s named after the famous mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary. Except when she’s not. She’s been shot at by snipers, except for when she’s not been.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t actually “lying.” When an agenda is present and it is held to a higher level of importance than facts, the facts essentially cease to exist. The agenda becomes the new truth. Try this simple experiment: Find a fact that is objectively measurable and therefore undeniable, one that is unfriendly to the progressive agenda. It’s not hard. There are plenty, if you just look. Odds are, if you’re not a proggie, you have more than a few that are among your favorites. The fact doesn’t have to completely shatter their precious agenda, it just has to make some difficulty for it. A failed global-warming prediction will do nicely. Now find a progressive, and try to get him to acknowledge the undeniable, measurable fact. Try it on a weekend so you can make a day-long project out of it, like building a fence or a birdfeeder, if you have the time. Give it a good honest effort.

Seems like it should be do-able. It’s not. Facts don’t mean the same thing to liberals, as they do to normal people.

See how it works? If Professor Warren feels like she’s part-Indian, she must be. If Obama feels like running for President, then He must have been born in Hawaii. Otherwise, if He’s struggling with His ethnic identity crisis that’s been so thoroughly documented by His ghostwriter…maybe, for today, He was born in Kenya. Feel, feel, feel. That’s the lodestar.

Update: One more video…because Boortz is having some fun:

Every now and then a so-called “moderate,” or alternatively, a hardcore progressive who’s willing to drop the charade and admit to being a proggie, will pose the following (forceful) question: All fine and good that you, you unsophisticated slope-foreheaded right-winger, don’t like what’s being done, but what would you do instead? I’m pretty sure a review of all the times this has been asked, would reveal that it isn’t being asked honestly; or, if it is, the question would show the proggie hasn’t been paying attention. Because their ideas are so bad, that pointing out how bad they are should be enough. You don’t fight a house fire with gasoline, and if you do, and someone walks up to you and says “stop pouring gasoline on that house fire,” you don’t say “well I get how it’s a bad thing I’m doing over here, but what would you suggest as an alternative?” That would be silly. That’s what this question is. Silly.

I suspect this is a coordinated effort. Somewhere in some boiler room, the advice is given…or maybe it’s printed on a newsletter…”demand that they tell you what they’d do instead.” I’ve noticed the people asking these questions don’t pay much attention to the answers, and this says something since they plow more than the average level of effort and adrenaline into asking the questions. They say “I’m wondering what” when they show by their actions they aren’t really wondering much of anything at all.

Burt Prelutsky has been through the same experience and, for what it’s worth, he has answers.

A while back, one of my readers, whom we’ll call Cosmo, sent me an angry challenge. He wrote: “I watch Fox, I listen to Rush and I read you. I do this because I’m trying to understand conservatives. I see them and you bashing liberal policies, but I don’t see any of you coming up with alternative policies.”

To be totally honest, I never really thought it was my mission to come up with alternative policies. I figured it was enough that I pointed out how awful the policies of this current administration are…Still, I am not one to shirk a challenge. So I sent Cosmo the following message: “I can’t speak for Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, but this would be my platform if I were the Republican candidate running against Obama. First off, I would cut spending drastically. That would mean that we all face up to the fact that Social Security and Medicare cannot continue as they are. If that requires raising retirement age or even reducing payments across the board by, say, 5%, so be it. Either we act like mature adults or we slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs.
:
“We quit behaving like America is a third world country where people would starve on the streets if 50 million of them weren’t provided with food stamps and if school kids weren’t given tax-subsidized breakfasts, lunches and dinners. If parents couldn’t provide their kids with three meals a day, they would be charged with child abuse, and the kids would be placed in foster homes or up for adoption.

“Single mothers would have to come up with the name of the sperm donor, who, in turn, would be made responsible for child support. Welfare for unwed mothers would be but a vague and unpleasant memory.

“Abortions would be outlawed. If in 2012, with all the birth control pills and devices available, people are still getting pregnant, it should be a criminal offense. Such people would be better off in jail anyway because they are simply too dumb to be allowed to walk around.
:
We do away with the current system of “higher education.” High school graduates would go to the trade school of their choice, be it for plumbing, car repair, architecture, accounting, law, dentistry, carpentry or nursing. No more of these four year vacationlands that force parents to mortgage their homes and youngsters to mortgage their futures just so bureaucrats will have well-landscaped principalities. Moreover, professors who work 10 hours a week will no longer pull down six-figure salaries, and various football and basketball coaches will no longer pull down seven-figure salaries.

“So now, Cosmo, you not only know my policies, but, aside from my reluctance to move to Washington, D.C., because of the weather and having to spend most of my waking hours with politicians, you know why I have never run for president. In order for my master plan to become a reality, I’d have to be a dictator, and not merely the commander-in-chief. Regards, Burt”

I’m afraid I can’t back the one about people getting pregnant being “simply too dumb to be allowed to walk around.” I would have to assume that applies to the guys who are making the pregnancies happen…der…hey. But we certainly do have an Idiocracy problem with the dummies being the ones who breed the most. With some of these households sweating nickels trying to make ends meet, and others making a constant lifestyle out of being pregnant or making someone pregnant, the gene pool is getting thick, smelly and slimy. We’re already at the point where there’s a distinct inversely-proportional relationship between a household’s productivity and the size of its living room television set. And that’s a problem. Maybe this makes me a hardass, but the dependency class shouldn’t be watching bigger televisions than those watched by the ones who pay for their benefits.

Thing I Know #87. In the past few years I notice the people with the largest television sets are the ones we are supposed to call “poor”.

But all of this is really just talking around the real issue, which is: Are the unproductive to be rewarded with encouragement to continue their ways, and the productive to be shown that what they’re doing is not working — or should we be trying for the reverse of this? And you’ll notice something a little spooky: Very few among us break the many complex issues down to that base essential. But the people who answer a certain way, so reliably, with our domestic policies, answer in exactly the same way with our foreign-relations policies. By which I mean, if they want hard productive work to be punished, and dysfunctional, or even criminal, lifestyles to be rewarded here at home; then, as sure as the thunder following the lightning, they will want our allies to be punished and our enemies to be rewarded in our foreign policy.

This is a very clean break. There isn’t much variance to it, if any at all, on either side. And so this all looks to me like it’s off-topic from the real disagreement or disagreements…nevertheless, it’s useful to see the platform all fleshed out here. It’s useful to see how far our current policies have migrated, from something that might actually have worked.

My answer to “Cosmo” would have been much shorter: First, answer me a question if you could be so kind, what exactly is it we’re trying to do? What’s the goal? You answer that, first, then I’ll tell you what the policies should be. I can’t prove it, but I have a notion that the whole exchange would break down right there. One of the more functional definitions of being a lefty, in this day & age, is that you can’t really say what it is you’re trying to do. You have to keep hiding it.

Just making a note about this:

The president is using his “handy little to-do list” to portray Republicans in Congress as standing in the way of his economic agenda. “Just saying no to ideas that we know will help our economy isn’t an option. There’s too much at stake,” he said. “So even if Republicans are still saying no to some of the bigger proposals… there are some additional ideas that could help people get to work right now and that they haven’t said no to yet. So I’m hoping they say yes.”

Flanked by screens broadcasting an image of his checklist on a Post-it note, the president seemed to mock gridlocked lawmakers. “Every member of Congress should have time to read it and they can glance at it every so often. And hopefully we’ll just be checking off the list, just like when Michelle gives me a list, I check it off,” he said to laughter from the audience. [emphasis mine]

Two theories: One, this whole “Michelle tells Me to jump, and I say ‘how high?'” thing is a response to a sense within the White House, that the whole “sort of God” thing is hurting more than it’s helping, and the henpecked-hubby act is a graceful — and safe — way of winding it down.

Two, if my fuzzy distant memory would be backed up by the record, somewhere in the archives is a challenge against Theory One: I think the “Michelle tells Me what to do, and I do it” thing might have reverberated during the 2008 election campaign; it’s been with us from the very beginning. Which means, Theory Two says that Barack Obama has always put on a show of being ordered around by Michelle. This is part of the “change” that His constituency has always been demanding.

The theories are not necessarily mutually-exclusive, except in the generalized, compete-with-each-other sense of theories about causes of singular effects. Whichever one does apply — I like Theory One much better, but I think Theory Two is more likely — there is something going on out there, and it worries me.

I’ve been noticing for awhile that, every now and then, work & home & other pursuits will throw some time management challenges at me, uncoordinated with each other but all arriving, inconveniently, at the same time. And then I just have to suck it up and make sure the essentials are delivered. This happens to other people as well, and they say something about it…the thing is, and it’s taken me a long time to notice this…the way these other people manage this situation, is very different from the way I manage such a situation.

For one thing, I find I can read about this challenge of theirs, “so many things to do, so little time” — on Facebook. I can see something about “Hubby’s gone for six hours, I don’t have to work, I’m gonna go through this place wish me luck” followed by a six-hour blackout. Or, updating Facebook while something is compiling in the background. But that’s not what’s going on here at all. The uncertainty about being able to get everything done on time, from what I see, must be exaggerated; or else, the importance of getting it done, is over-stated.

But another thing I see happening is the Michelle Obama list-making point-and-click thing. If I’m going through a stretch where lots of things are being demanded out of me and I’m truly unsure about whether I’ll be able to get it all done, certainly I’ll appreciate it if I can delegate some of this. But only if the person to whom I’m delegating it, can do it, reliably enough that I’m not off doing something else worrying my fool head off about it. In which case, I’d say something positive. I wouldn’t talk them down, reduce their dignity by saying things to imply that’s their station in life, to get their lists from me and check them off. I’d be respectful and thankful. I’d act like I owed something to them. Because I would.

But that’s for the vitals. My observation here is, when I’m stressed out about having to do lots of things within timeframes I’m not entirely sure can be managed, it does nothing to reduce my stress to have something fetched for me at McDonalds or Starbucks or what-not. A fancy lunch at a nice restaurant wouldn’t do it for me, either. Maybe after we’re done-done.

My observation boils down to this: We seem to have a lot of our fellow citizens running around, on the loose, placing a very high premium on this ritual of saying what needs to be done and then having someone else do it. And not for sake of getting things done that need to get done, but just as a pleasant diversion, sort of a stress-reliever. Like cat-fishing with a ball of yarn. You can see this when you see the tasks being “delegated” are entirely non-essential tasks, and the person delegating doesn’t take any of the time saved from so delegating to plow into something else; she hovers over the non-essential task, instead, spending just as much time critiquing and supervising as she would just doing it herself.

And from President Obama’s behavior, particularly with this recurring meme of His in which, maybe He’s sort-of-God but Michelle’s back there pulling God’s strings — I’m gathering there is a constituency out there of people who’d like to be able to order other people around and tell them what to do, but they don’t know anybody who’s agreeable to it or can be relied-on to do the more important things…so they vote for someone who will get those results.

And they’re lining up to vote for Michelle Obama.

There’s a history of this in the democrat party. The democrat male politicians who are married, happily or otherwise, seem to delight in reminding their audiences that they’re married; and, their idea of being “married” seems to rely overly much on the ritual of the wife telling the husband what to do, and then the husband going off and doing it. Bill Clinton used to do this a lot. Actually, he still does it. And it’s been deemed impolite to inquire as to whether or not he’s even still married.

Remember when Obama resigned as President and put Bill Clinton back in charge? They exchanged a few words about how awful it would be to keep Michelle waiting. Yeah, yeah…a humorous quip, it’s a joke, it doesn’t count.

Except it does count when you keep seeing it over and over again, even after one presidential administration has gone away and another one has been started in its place. It means something.

I keep hearing about “is America ready for a female president.” If the country is not ready for such a thing, the reason might not have to do so much with a reluctance against female authority; it might have to do with too many among us having accepted the female authority, but in an unorthodox, subtle, surreal way. The vision seems to be, there’s this empty figurehead behind a desk who’s a guy, and then his wife is making the real decisions. For the woman to be the one behind the desk actually signing the papers that matter, says the mindset, would for some reason be uncouth. Women aren’t supposed to sign things; they’re supposed to point and say “I want that.”

Now, I can’t go out and find someone who will ‘fess up to actually believing in that. I certainly don’t believe that. But — this is just like that situation with the tabloids with the gaudy stories about Brad and Angelina splitting up, and Dick Clark’s brave last days, et al…everybody says it must be someone else buying them, because they only look at the covers while they’re waiting in line at the checkstand. If everyone is telling the truth about it, nobody is buying the magazines, but somebody must be buying the magazines because they’re still making them. Well. They’re putting out a lot of effort and energy to appeal to the “wives say what they want and then they get it” vote…the softly sexist mindset that says it’s a woman’s place to point at things and make lists, and a man’s place is to go get things and bring them. Women are in charge, all the time; but their fingernail polish is always wet, so be a dear, and go pick these things up. I’ve made you a little list, sweetie.

I don’t mind seeing it as long as the Commander in Chief of the military has nothing to do with it. Mister “I Won”‘s habit of campaigning on it is having a slow, cumulative effect on me. I’m at the point now where I’m more nauseated by it every time He uses it. Frankly, I liked Him better when He relied more on this pretend-deity thing. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for another act to wear out its welcome even more quickly than that, but the Obama The Henpecked Hubby routine managed to get it done.

He was ninety. She was ninety. They both spent their entire lives in Bellingham, Washington. I don’t know if they met each other, but they both cashed it in last year, 2011. She on February 3rd, he on November 7th. By which time, neither of them had a thing to do with me for some thirty years or more. Neither one of them remembered me. That much, I can pretty much promise.

They are the two lowest points of my K-through-12 educational career. They failed me, but not before I failed them. She was my home-room teacher in sixth grade, and he was my “guidance counselor” or some such, in high school. With noticeably mixed feelings, Dad e-mailed me his obituary. Dad doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead any more than I do.

Truthfully, I don’t know why we have career counselors in high schools. The kids who can really make something of themselves, all have the same thoughts about it: Oh alright, I’m to take career advice from some guy who’s a career counselor in a high school. Eyeball-roll. This one thought I should scrub toilets on an Air Force base somewhere. Oh, okay…thankfully, nobody took that any more seriously than I did. All these years later I have to wonder: What purpose was served by this? I still don’t know.

As for her, I remember her mocking condescension like it was this morning: “Morgan, I’m going to pair you up with Michelle, who I hope has more common sense than you do!” The “hope” syllable could’ve shattered a wine goblet, if it were within earshot. Sixth graders shouldn’t say things like “Lady, you’re a fucking bitch,” but I certainly thought it. And, once a sixth-grader thinks such a thing, thirty-five years later one should expect them to recall such thoughts with some regret. But I have none. I know, it was the seventies and all…very trendy to see lots of potential in the lasses and none at all in the lads…but can you say “out of line”? I don’t recall what I did to disappoint Mrs. R so much. But I knew at age eleven this was uncalled-for, and I still know it.

There is an ugly truth here, one not too often acknowledged. I’ve had other teachers who saw much more potential in me. I should write about them, as well. They certainly deserve it. But, for now, it is an observation worth making:

These two, who were so convinced I’d be good for nothing better than cleaning commodes, inspired me as much as, perhaps more than, their opposites. My twenty-five thousand square foot mansion with its seven buildings and its Batmobile-turntable with the Bugatti Veyron spinning around on it…these things have yet to materialize. But I’m not scrubbing the toilets either. Reality is as distant from one of these visions as it is from the other; so who is to say I am not to attain the other? Vroom vroom.

And I think that’s the take-away. We humans have this tendency to sketch lines in the dirt, for each other; to make these paths, and expect the others not to stray outside of them. But real life is more of a vast expanse of ocean, than a narrow pathway. We should not be hesitating to stray outside of such boundaries, indeed, we should celebrate when we do so. Even if we blunder our way through them by pure accident.

My son came to visit on Spring Break. I’ve been receiving his school reports, and they reminded me of my dysfunctional relationship with Mrs. R. So, in that one week, we had a few conversations about getting into the matronly-females’ “R-Loop.” That means, the loop in which some overly-opinionated female, overly-enamored of her own perceived authority profile, speaks to a younger male round of head and blonde of hair, who might be a trifle difficult to understand — for no purpose but to command him out of the way. Day by day, month by month, she has nothing else to say to him: Stand over here, stay out of the way, let Michelle take care of it. That’s the R-loop. Some marriages are like that. Poor, dumb, pitiful bastards.

Turns out, our conversations about the “R”-loop resonated. I didn’t know it at the time, but after he went back home I was awash in e-mails from his Mother, and his teachers, that things were going much, much better. They didn’t understand it, but he was staying out of their R-loops. They didn’t understand…but I did…and he did. My boy, age fourteen, learned things I had not yet learned at age twenty-five. And he made good use of it. If you want to be capable, you need to communicate to people that this is your vision. They won’t figure it out on their own. And if they don’t figure it out at all, you need to keep that separate from your own vision for yourself. Keep your life on that wide-open sea, and off that narrow road fenced in and paved by others, who don’t understand you and don’t claim to understand you. Stick to your own potential, at its zenith.

No, I don’t have the Bugatti Veyron yet. I may never have it.

But I’m not scrubbing toilets either.

That’s my potential: I’m not likely to end up scrubbing the toilets, I might as well try for the Veyron.

That is the potential we all have.

…unexpectedly!

Just disgusting.

[Gov. Jerry] Brown did not release details of the newly calculated deficit Saturday, but he is expected to lay out a revised spending plan Monday. The new plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 hinges in large part on voters approving higher taxes.

The governor has said those tax increases are needed to help pull the state out of a crippling decade shaped by the collapse of the housing market and recession. Without them, he warned, public schools and colleges, and public safety, will suffer deeper cuts.
:
Under Brown’s tax plan, California would temporarily raise the state’s sales tax by a quarter-cent and increase the income tax on people who make $250,000 or more. Brown is projecting his tax initiative would raise as much as $9 billion, but a review by the nonpartisan analyst’s office estimates revenue of $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2012-13.

This is part of a pattern that doesn’t change much from one story to the next…and it isn’t entirely a California story. Notice at the end of what’s excerpted above, there is this dispute about how much additional revenue can be expected from the tax increase. I don’t know what methodologies were used — I can hazard a guess — but it doesn’t matter, nobody’s got any business projecting or estimating anything. It all ends up being an exercise in predicting who’s going to hang around, bend over and take it up the chute.

That isn’t a predictable thing. Our track record of trying to do so, is pretty lousy.

In the next few minutes, I’m going to go to work and start messing around with code that works with compressed images; the images are conceptually represented by pixels, and each pixel consists of channels. There is a channel for each of the primary colors, and then there is an alpha channel.

I don’t like mixing work with the blog, but I cannot stop thinking about the alpha channel where these liberals are involved. Lately. It’s like they’re missing it. See, what we use it for in computer graphics, is transparency. It represents a fractional number between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being opaqueness and 0.0 being complete transparency, as in, it’s invisible and you can’t see it. You might have noticed the Windows operating systems, post-XP, make a lot of use out of this with window frames and menus and icons and such; things, lately, have transparency. They have cool frosted effects, and if you look closely you’ll see they’ve got this Cheshire Cat fade-out-of-existence thing going on as you trace from the center of an icon out to the edges. Okay, that’s the alpha channel. Each pixel possesses this property of “how much of me is really here.”

If an application converts an image that contains some of this transparency, to a format that doesn’t support it, it’s pretty evident what the desired behavior should be: You prompt the user first, then you save what can be saved. When you go back the other way, of course, the new alpha for each pixel will have to be 1.0; it can’t be anything else. This is a perfect illustration of the way the liberal mind works.

Conservatives, by and large, seem to have the ability to preserve this “how much is really here” attribute with the ideas they carry around in their heads.

And liberals, by & large, don’t. They know exactly what the idea is, just as a color format that supports only red, green and blue knows exactly what each pixel’s red, green and blue are. But with transparency unsupported, every pixel has an alpha of 1.0. Every. Single. One.

As I remarked yesterday at Teach’s blog where he was reporting on the environmentally-friendly candy bar that costs twenty bucks…one of the activists behind it, began to discuss the wind-powered transportation methods which are apparently responsible for this consumer snack costing so much at the point-of-sale. Well, what came out was creepy, creepy, creepy…

The next step is to build a much larger sail-powered cargo ship, a 3,000 tonne EcoLiner equipped for container traffic and fully competitive with the oil guzzling competitors…We want to re-establish sailing ships as a natural alternative to an anti-ecological culture. We want to see a revival of the great age of sail, as a means of Fair transport for cargo around the Atlantic…

“We want to see.” The word “hope” would have carried a tacit acknowledgement that it might not happen, so the word “want” has to be used instead, since everything is absolutely certain, especially where Mother Earth’s future health picture is involved. We saw this in the legendary monster thread, as Severian was very capably summing up in a comment he committed a few minutes ago:

…I find that the most surefire “tell” that you’re dealing with a liberal (apart from the sanctimony, of course) is that they will not admit even the possibility of limits on human knowledge…
:
In fact, I’m trying to recall the last time I’ve heard a liberal say “I don’t know” about any matter of consequence. Ask ’em where the nearest post office is or the price of rice in China, and they’ll happily admit ignorance. But ask them what we should do about genocide in Darfur, or the regulation of the entire world economy, or the navy’s defensive doctrine on the Pacific rim, and all of a sudden they’ve got all the answers….

This is, from my observations, why the monster-thread became a monster-thread. For three weeks or so, as time permitted, some four or five of us took issue with the statements of the hybrid-group-warmist construct known as “Zachriel” — on the alpha channel. That is to say, with a few debatable exceptions, none of us really challenged any of the “primary colors” of the ideas…the red, the green, the blue. The point that came up again and again, was no, you don’t really know that. Through over four hundred comments, the plurality of persons represented under this account never once engaged this challenge directly. Never even demonstrated an understanding of the distinction. He/she/it/they just continued to re-recite the red, the green, the blue…repeating the idea…failing, or perhaps refusing, to even consider the “just how sure are we about this” aspect of it. The limits to human knowledge. The transparency factor.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying “we don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” That is, interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the kind of spirit that is required to make things work. You can’t do it until you develop a practical understanding of how other things work; you can’t do that until you develop some curiosity about it; and you can’t develop any curiosity about it if you think you already know everything.

Liberalism, today, is a 24-bit image format missing its alpha channel. It insists — correctly — that is has computed everything the right way, restoring RGB from a YUV representation, re-computing saturation of each primary color from the shading and tinting effects, used a lossy compression/decompression scheme verified to produce the desired result, used a peer-reviewed encryption algorithm, run a checksum to prove the restored results are good, et cetera, et cetera. But knows nothing about what it doesn’t know, because at the very first step, the alpha channel was stripped out and there’s no transparency, read that as residual uncertainty, information about anything. This is most noticeable when they talk about the environment, and what is about to happen to us. They talk about “science” but all too often have absolutely nothing to say about probability. Every little thing that might happen, is gonna happen.

Of course, if and when it doesn’t happen, in another day or two that will all be forgotten and it will be time for yet another round of predictions…visions…want-to-see-happens…24-bit pixels missing their transparency channels, “known” as absolute certainties.

Well, I know how to get a Tea Party guy to talk exactly the same way: When you stop talking about climate change, and move the discussion to the public debt growing out of control. But since I don’t see anybody else lining up to give the U.S. Treasury any unexpected Christmas presents like the five dollar bill Grandma used to send you…ya know what? That side of it seems fair, to me. Economics, on some level, works that way. Climate doesn’t.

Awhile back we had linked (somewhere) to this “hairpin” page that had compiled an impressive gallery of women eating salad by themselves, laughing their heads off about something.

It’s an interesting meme, in that one doesn’t realize consciously how overused it is until one sees it compiled together like that; one specimen says absolutely nothing, a whole collection makes a point about what’s going on. Although there’s room for debate about what that is. I suppose what we’re seeing is: People like to watch happy women eating healthy things? Grumpy women eating salads, on miserable rainy days, nobody’s got too much interest in that. Or a jolly full-figured type feeding her gaping maw with a dripping greasy trip-tip, wouldn’t go over as well either.

Well I just made a discovery: Google Images is just stuffed full, like twenty pounds of flour in a ten-pound sack, with girl and laptop computer pictures.

Now…what could that mean? Hmmm…not sure. I see we do have some boy laptop, but within that I notice an abundance of 1) comical effect, as in “boy using laptop” is simply a stepping stone on the way toward a punchline, which is more of the main point; 2) confusion and frustration over how to work the darn thing; 3) some combination of 1) and 2); and 4) Mom, or some smarter female instructor type, giving him helpful pointers on how to use it. Hmmm. Might have missed it, but I didn’t notice one single wise benevolent all-knowing patriarch giving the cuties some pointers on how to use their laptops.

Another difference: My girl-query doesn’t contain the world “laugh” or “smile.” Doesn’t have to. Chicks are required to smile in picture-land, pretty much all of the time. Even the one in the dominatrix outfit getting ready to chainsaw her laptop, has a big grin on her face.

This one needs more thought than the salads. I’m really not sure what to make of it…I’ll have to ponder this, solemnly and studiously, frowning at my computer in a very manly way.

From Gerard.

Those who are unfamiliar with this hypothesis and might still be unclear on what’s happening here, can read up over at this page to see how it all works.

It’s terribly unfortunate that, out of an entire four-year cycle of politics, we’ve not seen the national economy recover in any substantial way. That’s a long time for it to be languishing the way it’s been. But it affords us a unique educational opportunity because we’ve been able to watch two presidential administrations — one archetypically liberal, running for re-election, and the other one whatever passes for “conservative” in this day & age, and not — defending their stewardship over economic matters, without being able to bring any record of solid success.

The differences are quite striking. The take-away: Anyone who wants to start understanding the difference between conservatives and liberals, without getting into the nitty-gritty nuts-&-bolts differences in priorities & worldviews, simply has to follow both types around long enough to see their ideas fail and then watch how the idealogues react to the failure of the ideas. President Bush’s sympathizers and apologists brought a lot of different defensive arguments to the table during the meltdown of ’08. There were some lowered-standards, as in, 9/11 changed everything and you had to expect some economic sputtering in the aftermath of a calamity such as that; there were some better-than-it-looks excuses, which carry a bit more weight, since hey, the unemployment rate was quite low and there were other measurements to indicate things weren’t that bad. And there was some finger-pointing at the democrats. Which also carries weight, since the democras took over Congress before things really fell apart. Mixed in with all this, there was some admission that mistakes were made. Stuff was tried that, had the opportunity been presented for a do-over, would not be tried again. And that makes an impression on me because I hear the same thing out of Reagan apologists, answering the charge that the public debt “skyrocketed” during Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Deals were made that were not good deals. Again, with a do-over, things would’ve been done differently.

Now I suppose it isn’t a fair comparison because President Obama is running for re-election, and consequently, we have a lot of people running around coming up with defenses for His failed policies who are paid to come up with those defenses, and this is bound to have an effect on what the defenses are going to be. Nevertheless, I surmise that it is because of the President’s political leanings that we have no, absolutely none, zip, zero, zilch, nada, no-can-do, nothing being said anywhere about what has been done over the last four years that could’ve & would’ve been done differently with the opportunity for said do-over. It’s time to defend the record and I’m seeing nothing out of His team, at all, except craven distractions. Mitt Romney bullied someone in high school and his supporters and campaign contributors are, well, I’m not sure what…poopy-heads or something.

The take-away: Conservatives are capable of admitting mistakes and liberals aren’t. Oh, I can hear the double-whipped mocha lattes spurting through the liberal nostrils at the very suggestion. But it’s true. Conservatives can defend the leadership, as in the character and the decision-making ability of a person or of a team, without standing by each and every little decision they made about everything. They can say “Yeah, that one there, that was a learning experience.” Liberals can’t do that because they’ve got this rule in place…thou shalt not speak ill of anything connected in any way to The Sun King. And by my Louis XIV reference I do not specifically mean to pick on Barack Obama. They’ve got all these demigods who are to be elevated and kept clean and pure in every way. History does not possess the authority needed to indict them of anything; they can’t make mistakes. Good liberals cannot stoop to that low, low level of admitting “Obama probably shouldn’t have said anything about Skip Gates and the Cambridge Police Department.” Can’t form the words. Can’t get the thoughts crystallized. It’s sinful to even be headed in that direction.

This is significant, when you think about it. If we can’t admit mistakes, we can’t learn. We end up about as wise, with our approach to any given problem, as we were when we emerged from the womb.

In addition to the philosophical implications there are the fiduciary ones. Barack Obama’s ideas are generally not inexpensive. He claims credit for thinking big, and he claims this with some legitimacy, for His ideas are indeed grand, big, weighty ideas. But they are grand and big and weighty only because the taxpayers are forced to fund them. The questions about the long-term consequences of these cash outlays are not entirely motivated by partisanship; the government’s solvency has measurably deteriorated throughout this cycle, and there are serious ramifications for the country if the proponents of the big-spending Obama ideas can’t admit that any of them were mistakes, and their unthinking and unreasoned response to every inspection is to double down. I mean that literally. Double down. Some of the most insistent and loud liberals out there, pressed to defend the Reinvestment Act against its clear and obvious failure, will recite the rote litany that it failed because it wasn’t big enough. And they’ll be perfectly straight-faced about it when they say this, seemingly unaware that they’ve become caricatures of those who shouldn’t have anything to say about anything.

This leads off into something else I’ve noticed about the difference between conservatives and liberals. As was pointed out in Sultan Knish (hat tip to Gerard again), what we see playing out before us in this political divide is something that could be called an “efficiency war”:

It’s a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the people or the people will starve the government. Like most political power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people to the government.
:
Despite all the ambitious efforts to reduce everything from skyscraper construction to a human breath to a number and to impose penalties accordingly so as to nudge the offenders away from their carbon crimes, the real criminals fly off someplace warm by the thousands to discuss the need to use less fuel and be more energy efficient. The resort conferences are only a drop in the ocean of government which is swiftly flooding everything in sight.
:
The regulators cannot regulate their own efficiency, yet they insist on regulating ours. They waste by the truckload and while hectoring us ceaselessly about waste. They erect government buildings where the lights burn all night, yet begrudge us an extra kilowatt on the side. They cannot live within their means, yet they insist that we live within theirs. That we not only pay their bills, but that we make do with less for ourselves.

The inefficient cannot create efficiency. The United States and the European Union cannot bring efficiency to their own finances. And part of their waste involves imposing efficiency programs on us. The efficiency programs are themselves waste and worsen the crisis. Garbage in and garbage out defines the process. The government throws money and resources into making the outside world efficient, when the outside world is already more efficient than it is. The sole outcome is to bring down the efficiency of the real world closer to government standards. [bold emphasis mine]

I’ve observed this before, myself, saying (paraphrased) that our national conflict has to do with whether it’s appropriate or called-for, for our most non-productive people to be telling the productive people how to do their producing. Vice President Joe Biden admitted as much, I think, when he said “I never had an interest in being a mayor ’cause that’s a real job. You have to produce. That’s why I was able to be a senator for 36 years.” Maybe he was joking about this, or forgot that he was still speaking on the record. Biden has a history of opening questions like those, and not settling them; he shows no sign of breaking form here. I think we can all agree, intentionally or not, there was some truth uttered here. If so, this partially addresses the dilemma defined above — how do you get anything done when you can’t admit your mistakes, and therefore can’t learn, and you end up dooming yourself to approaching every challenge that comes up with the wisdom you already had the day you were born, and nothing more? Answer: You don’t. Humility, wisdom…efficiency…these are things you need only for “real” jobs.

With these “fake” jobs, you don’t “have to produce” so there’s no need to do any of this learning. Which is important, because when you learn, you almost always have to do this course-correction the conservatives are able to do that the liberals are not able to do; you have to say “given the opportunity to make that decision again amid identical circumstances, I would have chosen this other option.”

For some time now I’ve been fascinated with “real” liberals, meaning, people who struggle in “real” jobs like I do, who are my peers, confronting challenges similar to mine — often even with greater competence than I can show — and then make the mistake of so thoughtlessly voting for liberal politicians. Through the years, I’ve come to the realization that they do not think much of their own everyday struggles. They actually feel some measure of shame about it. It shows up in the tiniest little things. Like, a weekend approaches in a hot summer and they, just like me, look forward to cooling off in a theater with powerful air conditioning where they can watch a movie about someone having an adventure, and pretend to be in a different world for a couple of hours. We have that in common. But it means something entirely different to someone like them, than it does to someone like me. I’m leaving a bunch of drudgery at the entrance to the theater, and they’re leaving genuine shame. Worrying about error handling and texture compression formats and my kid’s doctor bills just causes me a dull headache — offset by the understanding that, ultimately, I’m going to get it all done. They worry about the same things and they seem to be genuinely troubled by their station in life. Like there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with this realization they made, that the entire universe is not their personal property after all.

So their answer is, I think, to live vicariously through someone else who does own the universe. Barack Obama. He never makes a mistake, because if He ever does, the mistake stops being a mistake on the spot and instantly flips, pancake-like, into The Right Thing To Do. Even when He makes a hairpin-turn on some tangential social issue it’s a process of “evolving,” so again, the need to admit that something was done the wrong way, is entirely obviated. That’s when things get rather strange. Barack Obama has always been in favor of same-sex marriage, the chocolate ration has always been 22 grams, and Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.

I’d actually have better confidence in left-wing leadership if they made more — uh — liberal use of the 1984 memory holes. That would at least enable them to change course when they find they’re headed the wrong way. Alas, though, they’re determined to do this very sparingly; it’s only available as an option to extend the political lives of the Obama/Napoleon/Kennedy/Sun King demigods, the monarchs who are incapable of ever making mistakes. The middle-managers who adjudicate each situation out in the real world, make the policies fit the grand vision that was laid out by their betters, are far lacking in the authority required to trip this fuse. They’re obliged to stick to courses that are demonstrated by history and common sense to be wrong. That’s why Sheriff Joe Arpaio got so frustrated, I think, with our Attorney General: “Clean your own house, Eric Holder, before you come trying to clean mine.” It is, once again, a classic conflict between the efficient and the inefficient; between those who have some actual responsibilities, and those who only pretend to have some.

Isn’t that exactly what Sarah Palin said? “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” That’s the fissure right there, the hairline crack widening into a yawning chasm. That’s the split. People who have, and therefore make decisions like someone who has, “actual responsibilities.” They set standards for themselves, and they lack the means to have the last word on how events are interpreted — or don’t pursue this in any way…so, when they fail the standards they set for themselves, a fail is a fail is a fail, and that’s that. Then they’re forced to say “One thing I could’ve done to turn that around, is make a different decision back here…” And they change their behavior. Not because they consciously think that’s glorious. Quite the opposite. They’re simply forced to. They say…I’m trying to get something done here, aren’t I? Well, that thing I did back there, that doesn’t get it done. I shall have to do it differently. The latest demonstration of how mega-awesome I am and people like me are — it doesn’t even enter into it. It’s just an error being corrected, nothing more and nothing less.

The other way to do it is to simply pretend to meet a standard. Then, when you fail it, you do what Obama’s trying to do right now with the economy: Change the standard, by means of making sure you always, always, always have the last word. Obfuscate. Confuse. Distract and deflect. Even lie if you have to.

That is the approach of mental children who never really grew up, who never learned how to do learning. Out here in the real world, conservatives see that and roll their eyes at it. We say to ourselves, there’s a man who isn’t as big as his job. I hope I’m not like that. Because there’s a very sad aspect to it: The iconic demigod and his supporters, keep repeating over and over how uber-wonderful he is, and they are, because there’s a need to. That’s just a terrible way to go through life, and we recoil from the very impression of it. We wince in genuine proxy embarrassment. Liberals, out here with us, toiling with life’s more mundane but real challenges the same way we are, but feeling dirty about it, look at people like Obama and Holder and Biden and say: Wow, how awesome, I wish I could be like that. They can’t answer the obvious question, “like what?” for there is absolutely nothing describably superlative about these people; they’re mediocre in every measurable way. The liberals are living their lives through someone else, whom they only believe to embody excellence because they reject any doubts that they are indeed excellent. So they outwardly crave this lofty height of personal excellence that, at some quiet, deeper level of their consciousness, they understand really isn’t there. They entrust people with a fifteen trillion dollar economy who they wouldn’t trust to walk their own dog…even if they didn’t like the dog.

That’s America’s political divide, right there.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Burt Folsom makes a good point:

During the last week, we have seen the president support three political positions: gay marriage, a raise in the minimum wage, and a cut in the interest rate on loans to college students. These issues have one thing in common: The president’s supporters claim that those who oppose gay marriage, oppose a high minimum wage, and oppose the lowering of interest rates on college student loans must really hate gays, hate the poor, and oppose education. If you don’t favor President Obama’s programs, you hate the groups targeted by the programs. Thus, we have no serious debate on the merits of either side of these issues, and that is unhealthy.
:
Politicians always try to demonize opponents, but until recently it has usually failed because our free press asks presidential candidates the tough questions that force a real debate to take place…With President Obama, however, the mainstream press so far has not asked the president–or his supporters–the tough questions that force a public debate on complicated issues. The November election is very important–let’s hope reporters begin asking both sides the tough questions that yield facts that voters can use to make informed choices. Maybe those who oppose this are the ones who are “anti-education.”

Not sure if this is a coordinated conspiracy, but I do know we’ve got a problem with nobody having anything to lose from the situation — among those who wield influence. President Obama and His supporters, of course, emerge as clear winners if all these discussions boil down to “I’m a much better person than that other guy over there because I’m in favor X.” As far as the press goes, their incentive for keeping this going seems to be nothing more complicated than they’re just plain lazy.

The real problem, however, isn’t that we as a society are ensnared in a potpourri of policy initiatives that are wrong. We are, of course; but the real cost we’re paying for this is that there’s no end to the conflict. Those who support gay marriage or higher minimum wage or discounted loans to college students, solely to prove what wonderful awesome nice kind people they are, are never going to be done proving it. They’re inebriated on, and addicted to, this elixir of “I’m nice and that other guy’s mean.”

So we could give ’em every little thing they want, and they won’t be done.

I’ve also picked up the impression that they, by and large, don’t care too much about these issues. Their motivation seems to be: We’re unhappy that those other mean people, who disagree with us, have any influence on the outcome at all. When they pontificate and proselytize and donate and struggle to win, I think all they really want is some kind of assurance that their influence is unilateral and dictatorial, and the influence of the other people is negligible, insignificant, easily overcome. To the extent that this might be true in some cases, it is not consistently, everlastingly so; when you play, sometimes the other guy’s gonna win. That’s just the way life is.

And so this tyranny-of-nice, until such time as it is confronted directly, will continue. Endlessly. The “real debate” cannot, and will not, happen.

Related: (hat tip to Instapundit) Did the media drive the gay marriage debate?

Burt Prelutsky sounds off:

Quite honestly, the only people I ever hear from who are dopier than liberals are those who identify themselves as conservatives and insist that Republicans and Democrats are identical.

Anyone who would suggest that there is no difference between Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner or Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, is one very dumb bunny. No difference between the likes of Henry Waxman, Al Franken and Charles Rangel and Darrel Issa, Peter King and Paul Ryan? No difference between Joe Biden and Dick Cheney? No difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? You have to wonder what madcap pharmacist is supplying these alleged conservatives with their stupidity pills.

How can anyone who takes the Second Amendment seriously insist there’s no difference between the two parties when gun sales are booming, all thanks to such flame-throwing racists as Eric Holder, Al Sharpton and the Black Panthers? The good news is that income taxes on the gun industry have jumped 66% since Obama’s election, and it’s mainly due to increased sales, not Obama’s counterproductive tax policies. It’s ironic that the man who is most opposed to law-abiding citizens owning weapons not only selected Eric (“Operation Fast & Furious”) Holder to be his attorney general, but has personally done more to hype American gun sales than any prior president.
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For those of you who continue to insist that it makes absolutely no difference if the president is a Democrat or a member of the GOP, please keep in mind that if John Kerry had won the 2004 election, he would not have named John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Instead, he would have seated a couple left-wingers in the mold of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Now, by a show of hands, is there anyone out there who doubts that with six left-wingers on the Court, there would be the slightest chance they’d decide that ObamaCare is unconstitutional?

I would imagine Mr. Prelutsky has been provoked into this latest by the many reactions to Mitt Romney coming closer to securing the Republican nomination. The not-a-dimes-worth-of-difference people do have their reasons for so opining, it should be noted. Romney does have problems with his conservative credentials, and one has cause for concern when one notes the contest has come down to this. The system does have more than a whiff of riggishness about it.

I’m often fond of summarizing these situations with complex and emotionally charged outlooks on the world and life, in terms of very simple math problems. See, Barack Obama and people like Him, are celebrated as special people and have been celebrated as that for so long, that they can’t deal with losing the identity. Oh, you thought I meant black people? No…there are tons and tons of privileged, pampered whites in this crowd I’m describing. They say jump, the crowd says how high…it’s worked this way since third grade, or earlier, and nobody envisions it ever going any other way, because they don’t, and they don’t because nobody else does. So they go through life frustrated because they know there’s something different about them — but that something is never really defined. Something to do with speaking well, being confident, but they’re actually apprehensive deep down inside. They can’t shake the feeling that maybe, whatever is special about them, might be something external to them. And this fills them with fear. Because that would mean everything inside, is just humdrum and ordinary.

So the question comes up: What is one plus one? Barack Obama will immediately rule out “two” as a possible answer because, hey, that’s what an ordinary person would say. Thus we see, with this simple math exercise, someone like President Obama “enjoys” a greater likelihood of getting it wrong, than an answer-producing method that relies purely on random chance. You’re better off rolling the dice to answer the one-plus-one problem than asking President Obama. And, because it works that way with the simple problems, it works that way with the more complicated ones as well. People like Obama have this natural phobia, a natural revulsion, against the common-sense answer. They’re more likely to get it wrong than a decision-making method that works by chance.

The trouble with Mitt Romney is — he will say “two,” but if someone else says “one,” “three” or “five” he’ll reply with “yes, that’s just fine” or “yeah, that’s perfectly alright.” This is why he’s having trouble appealing to conservatives, who understand that we live in a mathematical world…therefore, there is little value in choosing the right answer, if you don’t recognize that all the other answers must therefore be wrong.

So I understand both sides of this.

What I do not understand, are the people who somehow insist that now, these last two or three weeks, as April morphs into May in twenty-twelve — this is the time when Mitt Romney has to be taken down by any means necessary. The opposite is the truth. To the extent that the Romney ascension represents a problem…and I believe that it does…the time to attack that problem is all the other times. For now, if the one-plus-one-is-three guy is to be sent back to Illinois next January, there is going to have to be a coming-together of all the people who recognize that this is what has to happen. There’s going to have to be some emulsification. Can’t build a castle with bone-dry sand.

Weekly Standard investigates, hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.

One aspect of President Obama’s philosophically revealing — and mock-worthy — “Julia” web ad doesn’t seem to have garnered as much attention as one might have expected…When Julia, who never entirely seems to grow out of childhood in her own right, hits the age of 31, we are told that she “decides to have a child.”

This is peculiar phrasing. There’s no mention of Julia having first decided to get married, and no mention of Julia’s husband — or even of her dating anyone — in any of the snippets shown from any of the stages of her life. Perhaps the ad simply doesn’t mention Julia having gotten married because it was one of the few noteworthy events in her life that didn’t involve the active assistance of the federal government.
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Aside from the total lack of romantic spirit on display in this stage of Julia’s life, one wonders what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the longtime Democratic senator from New York, would have thought of this ad. Moynihan famously highlighted the decline of the American family — particular of black Americans’ families. He highlighted that, as of 1963, the out-of-wedlock birthrate had risen to an alarming 24 percent among black Americans (from 17 percent in 1940), compared to 3 percent among white Americans (from 2 percent in 1940). He noted that this “breakdown” in the family structure “led to a startling increase in welfare dependency.”

Yep. Back in those exciting days when Bill Clinton was finishing up his first term, not that long ago by any means…the conservative/liberal conflict was pretty clear-cut. The conservative position represented in the new Gingrich Congress was, our social-services safety net had become something of a vicious cycle, as the largess of the state had created a dependency class, which in turn reproduced without the mainstream concerns about where the college fund comes from, how does Sugarlump get hold of a car & how does he get insured…and then each new generational wave threw itself upon the over-extended safety net. A caused B and B caused A, with no end in sight, so something had to be done. The liberal response was twofold: 1) Nuh-huh, that doesn’t happen, and 2) Well, it does happen and you tighty-righties need to just get used to it, it’s a necessary evil.

Fast-forward to Anno Julia, and the debate has shifted quite aways without our consciously noticing it. And the direction in which it is shifted is not a good one. The debate has not come closer to being resolved, it’s drifted further away, as we now disagree on what the goals are. As anyone who’s watched “Life of Julia” can recognize right away, when President Obama campaigns for re-election this year, He will be doing so on behalf of a constituency that, from His explanation of it, thinks things are supposed to be this way — and who’s to say they are not.

The verb “decides” is a powerful one that also shows a new direction for the national discourse about these social services. Conservatives used to be rightfully piqued about having to subsidize someone else’s lifestyle choices, and classically, the liberal rejoinder has been that these are not lifestyle choices. Again, with the faceless cartoon-figure of Julia, we see President Obama has subtly — or not so subtly? — given up on that. The message that comes across, which is already familiar to us through the many, many other things Obama has had to tell us, is: Yeah, it’s a choice, and what of it? This is the new “greatness” of America, that everybody does whatever they feel like doing, and because we’re going to fleece those selfish rich people, stupid isn’t gonna hurt.

That does seem to be the goal. Hakuna Matada, means no worries for the rest of your days…we’ll just tax the rich people.

The peculiar thing is, the Obama brand of liberal thinks the country has “grown” into this childlike mindset. They think this is the culmination of stage after stage after stage of our national development…or maturity…or evolution. And this is where their viewpoint sputters out and just stops working entirely. How do you aspire toward the next stage of development, when the next stage of development is analogous to one of a helpless newborn infant suckling at a tit? Well, that’s the situation, isn’t it? Gimme, gimme, gimme, if I want it and have to wait for it, I’m gonna cry.

How can anyone of sane mind evaluate this as a way of living, and not come to the conclusion that it’s a process of regression rather than one of maturity? This is the real sea change with the “Life of Julia” slideshow. I can understand some people are just lazy and ignorant, don’t want to spend any time learning about what’s going on, just wanting their stuff…even maybe excuse it. But something new is happening when the President’s slideshow asks us to pretend up is down and in is out.

Come to think of it, “Julia” was the name of the female lead in 1984, wasn’t it?

On another occasion Mother accompanied me to the dentist, where I was to have an aching tooth removed and replaced with a bridge. After my work was accomplished the dentist, a kindly, sensitive man, offered to examine Mother and promptly informed her that she was overdue for dentures. She was not hard to convince, and asked him to proceed at once. using me as interpreter, he explained that five badly infected teeth needed to be extracted at once, and if she was ready he would anesthetize her and proceed. She scoffed at the anesthetic, saying, “I don’t need that.” Thinking that she didn’t understand, the dentist explained that novocaine would lessen the pain, but she waved his explanation aside impatiently. The poor dentist was shaken at the thought of what he was asked to do and looked at me questioningly. Upon receiving my confirming nod, he applied himself to his arduous task. The first tooth had a huge root and required all his strength to extract. Certain that Mother would be unable to bear another such ordeal, he again offered anesthetic, but again she refused. After each extraction he repeated this offer, and each time she refused. When the dreadful job was finished without a word of protest from Mother, the exhausted dentist wiped his brow and turned to me. “Could you have done that?” he asked wonderingly. “I wouldn’t even try,” I assured him.

Mother stayed on with us while her gums healed and her dentures were fitted. She and the dentist became the best of friends. I frequently wonder how often he recounted this story to his colleagues for I doubt he ever had another patient to match her fortitude. (Immigrant Girl: A Memoir, pp. 67-68.)

That was jotted down by Sigfrid Eidsness Ohrt, in the early 1980’s as she approached her ninetieth birthday; it recounts the long hard winter of 1917 in Saskatchewan when her mother, Ragnhild Fjelde Eidsness, showed ’em how it’s done back in the old country. Norwegians don’t need no stinkin’ novocaine.

Her grandson just repeated the exercise an hour or two ago. Last dental exam for me was probably sometime about the time she wrote those words, a little over thirty years ago. Not sure how it compares to having five dead infected teeth pulled. But I, too, took the “Braveheart” approach and hey, I think I outdid you because my teeth are all alive, Granny.

That having been said, I would have to encourage the next generation not to follow my example. I was joking last night that my dentist might not have been born yet the last time I saw a dentist; the hygeinist tonight, at least in her case, confirmed it. That’s probably a good baseline threshold. If the person cleaning your teeth wasn’t born yet the last time you had your teeth cleaned, your maintenance schedule is in need of revising.

Anyway, yeah, the gums need some tender lovin’ care, they’re getting it. The bones are holding up pretty well. Miraculously well, really. I credit my own brushing, the minerals in the water in Arizona, and a good diet. Anyway…I’ve been “invited” back in another four weeks.

Ann Althouse is glad he’s not taking them up on it.

Isn’t it funny, this “treason” incident? Obama supporters everywhere are chastising Romney and holding up McCain as the exemplar of how to respond to overstatements about Obama:

A backer introduced Romney by slamming President Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, comparing Obama to Ronald McDonald. And when a woman said Obama should be tried for treason, Romney didn’t disagree and asked the woman to follow up her question.

Later, when asked by reporters about the treason comment, Romney said he did not believe the president should be tried.

But by then, the moment was already being compared unfavorably to Sen. John McCain’s handling of a similar situation during his 2008 run against Obama.

When a woman said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab,” McCain responded immediately and forcefully: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

That was awfully nice of McCain, but let’s remember he lost. And I think I remember him having a rather exaggerated fear of criticizing Obama. Now, I think McCain had some reason to worry that people in the audience would say something racist or arguably racist or somewhat racial and that anything like that would be exploited by the Obama campaign. But at this point in American history, 4 years later, we are free to criticize Obama. Romney doesn’t need to go all beta when an audience member states her antagonism to Obama in a strong way. He doesn’t need to scold and discipline Obama’s antagonists. Romney’s approach to answering the question asked was just fine, though it perfectly understandable why the Obama campaign would like Romney to get sidetracked into defending Obama.

I wasn’t aware there was anyone still taking the whole “new tone / civil discourse” thing seriously anymore. Only the grossly misinformed, I suppose…maybe the people who read L.A. Times?