It’s making the rounds this morning. Rightly so.

Hat tip to, well, just about everyone on my reading list.

It’s certainly a question worth asking. Because twenty-year-old guys aren’t that worried about evening out an economic playing field, and Das Kapital is boring.

Three fundamental ideas: “The enemy of being is having”; “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need”; “philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.”

Hat tip to David Thompson, by way of Gerard.

I have noticed there is a narrow band of authority altitude that is highly attractive to the Medicator mindset. You could think of it in military terms as Sergeant and Corporal ranks, but not as disciplined. Something high enough that the holder of the office is responsible for seeing what needs to be done, and also high enough that he can order a grunt to do it once he figures out what it is. But low enough that forming the vision to be carried out, is someone else’s job. So someone else higher up figures out, if the mission is to succeed then this thing over here is going to have to be done; then this middle-management layer comes in, takes the order, figures out something incredibly mundane has to happen, and then starts barking orders to the muscle-men who have no discretion and make no meaningful decisions at all.

The appeal seems to be: High enough on the org chart to get some atta-boys, low enough never to be blamed for anything. Apologies to retired Sergeants and Corporals for the comparison, I can’t think of any other way to illustrate it and I know your “real” jobs are much more complicated than this.

Point is, there is a role being sought out, and the role is to boss around others, with or without a real purpose involved. If all commodities achieve value through scarcity, then surely a ticked-off Marxist guy thundering away about how this-shall-not-stand, young or old, is about a dime a dozen. How tiresome the spectacle has become. Yeah yeah, you’re angry and you’re mobilizing, got it. Just order the damn burger and let’s get out of here.

So the appeal of Marxism, apart from getting hold of the fruits of others’ labors without helping to shed the blood sweat & tears, is bossiness. That’s my opinion, anyway. Like Severian (we think it was?) said, somewhere (Update: Nope not him): Modern liberalism amounts to a lifelong struggle to make high school come out right. They are the nerds who were shoved into trash cans by the bullies, who grew up and now want to become the bully.

Longer lecture here:

At 15:33: “Marx was also a master psychologist. He understood there is a class of people in every society who, like himself, are motivated in their day-to-day lives by envy, resentment and hatred. Such people always blame others for their condition and plight. And Marxism speaks directly to such people.”

Related: Because I don’t link to it often enough: Zizzo and Oswald’s money burning experiment.

Yeah, about that…

Red Dot Science (n.)

Broadly, it is the brand of pseudo “science” that is being used any time the outcomes of the underlying experimentation & research are pre-determined. Where real science says whatever it says, without any regard at all for how well-understood or well-communicated it is, red-dot science is all about being communicated in a convincing way. It relies on emotion for this communication, therefore, discussions about it are emotional and not intellectual. Although the people trying to sell the red-dot science try their very best to make it look intellectual.

Real science knows what has been demonstrated after the research is done. Red-dot science knows what has been proven, after, during, and before this research; the research itself is little more than a tangent. Most people with normal working brains, very often have at least the unsettling suspicion they’re looking at such a false brand of science when they read about studies that say, for example, “women suffer more than men do” or “girls are much more advanced in [blank] than boys” or anything of the form “World To End, Women & Minorities Hardest Hit.” Any story about a study that begins “Researchers wondered what would happen if…” inspires thoughts, although it isn’t mentioned much, of wonder about the wondering by the researchers. Wait, what kind of “researchers” would wonder about that? Intellectually-capable, non-agenda-driven people read things like that and think — waitaminnit, was this open to question or was it not? If it was not open to question, why did the money get spent on the study? And if it is indeed questionable and therefore there must be difficulty in measuring it, then how come there never, ever seem to be any “outlier” studies, even ones that are subsequently discredited, that suggest something contrary? Even through error? Like, ever?

If the studies themselves are data…the data suggest that the study findings are written first, or defined first anyway, crystallized more firmly than should be allowed when a useful scientific method is applied. The data do not prove it. But they do suggest it.

Other things suggest this too. There are two definitions for “science” in the House of Eratosthenes Glossary, the more modern of which says:

1) A credentialed collective of academic elites who use democratic, political and coercive techniques to decide amongst themselves what is so. 2) The Dogma embraced by individuals who remain in good standing within this collective. 3) An agenda of Absolutism, toward recruiting more individuals into said dogma. Either way, it is the acquisition of new “psuedo-knowledge” about nature, by means of engaging in a False Unanimity fallacy: X must be so because “all scientists” believe in X, and “all scientists” believe in X because any scientist who doesn’t believe in it does not count. We know he isn’t a real scientist, because he doesn’t believe in X.

So this modern definition of science involves voting on what is and is not so. It embraces a fallacy of circular reasoning, since the voting takes place among elites who are credentialed and therefore qualified; the qualification is linked to the voting, since anyone who dares to fasten his or her name to a dissenting viewpoint is attacked. Therefore, the pie charts and other graphics exploring numbers of scientists with this-or-that opinion, could be better read as pie charts & graphs about how many scientists have balls and will put their careers on the line when science is being abused. Yes, of course it’s a minority. This is always a minority in establishments of credentialed elites, that’s the way establishments of credentialed elites work. No balls.

Red Dot Science, more specifically, is science prepared and presented for the purpose of appealing to emotion. It acts in a squid-like way when challenged, squirting generous amounts of rhetorical ink in order to confuse and deflect. In the many candidates I considered for this name, I tried all sorts of different ways to work “squid” and “cuttlefish” and “sepia” into the final result, and eventually abandoned that.

Red dot science shows other behaviors, when challenged, that real science does not show in the same circumstance.

Since it is an appeal to emotion, it seeks to reinforce itself through simple repetition, just like the kitty saying “I will catch the dot, I will catch the dot.” In real science, of course, the verity of a claim has nothing at all to do with how many times it’s repeated. Real science, in fact, labors — in futility, but nevertheless gives it a good try — to fight the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is the problem that results when the measurement of a thing is affected by the effort to measure it. Real science struggles against this, red dot science embraces it.

Often the repetition is made cosmetically more believable through the exploration of further detail. Consider the following dialogue:

A. The moon is made of cheese.
Q. Whoa…that would require a lot of milk…how do you think it got there?
A. Sixty percent Colby, thirty percent Swiss, five percent Gouda, three percent Cheddar, two percent cottage.
Q. Um, that doesn’t answer my question…
A. What’s your problem? It adds up to a hundred, I’m using science!

Another tell-tale sign of red dot science is that it pushes for things to be “settled.” You can detect this push when you consider elements of the theory that are mostly settled. Real science will push, if anywhere, in the opposite direction and try to call these items along the periphery into further question. Red dot science is like the kid in the back seat of the station wagon asking are-we-there-yet. “Can’t we agree on that so we can go on to the next thing?”

As a result, red dot science treats an opposing viewpoint as something of a contagion, much like the kitty would treat the statement “you can’t catch the red dot,” an undesirable element that thwarts and could reverse the build-up of desired emotional tartar.

As reader Severian was noticing in an offline, red dot science cannot even grant a concession toward the opposing viewpoint theoretically, purely for purposes of argumentation. No can do. That, in itself, is a tip-off that the discussion is an emotional one and not an intellectual one, since a participant in an intellectual disagreement can easily gain credulity by arguing “fine, let’s say things are your way, how then do you explain [etc.]…” Red dot science nurtures an everlasting hostility to any type, kind or form of uncertainty, in any context, just like the hopeful kitty. It even loses track of time itself that way; advocates of red dot science are very frequently heard to wax lyrically about future events, as if they have taken place in the past. “What’s going to have to happen, is reasonable steps will have to be taken to combat climate change, and people are going to have to accept a new form of…”

A strange thing happens when red dot science says if we do this, then that will happen. Example: If we fund a government stimulus program then the economy will turn around. Things do not go the way they were supposed to go, the red-dot-science advocate is made aware of it and asked for his reaction. What happens next is truly surreal. He will recite the way it’s supposed to work, all over again, seemingly oblivious in every possible way to the fact that the experiment has failed. In this context, it shares some traits with mental illnesses. “See, what happens is, the money ends up with the construction workers, and they use it to buy groceries and boots and tools and gas for their trucks, then that goes into the economy…” Yeah, yeah sport. Exactly what we just tried. Where’s your captured red dot?

Another tip-off that red dot science is being used, is that vast verbiage will be used reciting a catechism, with little or nothing said that makes its contents any more probable other than argumentum ad authoritarian static.

Citations offered with no specifics. It’s clear there is an expectation that the works cited are to be consumed, starting on page one, ending whenever the receiving party comes ’round to the red dot way of thinking…at which point, further reading is entirely optional. This is a key functional difference between indoctrinating and educating; the educator is on a mission to expand the student’s mind, the indoctrinator is on a mission to change the student’s mind, at which time any further effort is much better expended on the next “student.” With red dot science, if the other party manages to wade through the citation but hasn’t come around, he is directed to go-back-and-read-it-again. If the other party finds a problem with the reasoning in the citation and stops reading it, he’s accused of “ignoring the evidence” without any hearing given to what problem he found with it, and why it would be a problem.

Intransigence is often used as a substitute for evidence in red dot science. Many of the arguments presented boil down to “you’ll never convince me no matter what, so you might as well come over to my side.” Also, the lecturer’s lack of ability to understand what the other person is saying, is sometimes used as an argument that the lecturer, with his substandard reading comprehension abilities, must have the right idea.

As reader Nightfly noted back at his place,

The whole dizzying affair at Morgan’s barely qualified as a conversation, because it never went anywhere. This fellow (s) Zachriel has, in fact, put himself into my mental dictionary as the picture illustrating GK Chesterton’s chapter on madmen in his tremedous book Orthodoxy. Chesterton observed that a closed circle, such as the mind of a madman, can be said to be infinitely small… a tiny ring constricting tighter and tighter until nothing is left.

Why would he or they or whomever do that? What would be the point of such a long pointless exchange?

I’ve puzzled ’til my puzzler was sore, and only one thing really makes sense: the very pointlessness of it all must be the point to Zachriel. There’s a dull commonality to how he approaches the topic and how he demands that all others approach it. For all the talk about saving the world, it involves no actual volition on the part of those who will actually do the nuts-and-bolts saving on a daily basis – they won’t choose, they’ll be herded.

Summing it up: Red dot science is simply a demand, dressed up in a “science” costume. Its weakness is that a demand to believe in something, no matter how artfully it is demanded, does not make that article of belief any better established. It is precisely as scientific as arriving at the “right” answer by flipping a coin, spinning a roulette wheel, or shaking a Magic-8 ball.

I hear people are contradicting themselves when they say they value life, and want to stop abortions, but then turn around and want murderers executed. Hmmm, it’s an entirely valid critique…until you think about it. The babies being aborted haven’t murdered anyone. If anyone is contradicting themselves, it’s the people who want the executions stopped and the abortions to go ahead. In many cases, the contradictions are quite glaring; some within the anti-capital-punishment crowd say they are speaking up for the voiceless, because our civil liberties and constitutional rights must be applied to the least among us. Eh, voiceless, least among us? Hello?

Come to think of it, these are the people who want a sumtuous gourmet of ever-more-lavish social programs and retirement programs. Isn’t it a real problem when there’s no next generation coming up, to get socked with the bill?

Another thing I’ve been hearing is that Americans have a reputation around the world for being boorish, poorly-mannered, arrogant, intellectually stilted, incurious, et cetera. I’m seeing Americans criticized for reaching middle age without ever having held a passport, meaning they haven’t traveled outside their country’s borders. And it occurs to me: If these are the ones who have not traveled outside the country’s borders, shouldn’t we be looking to the enlightened, sophisticated, well-traveled nuanced-thinking blue-bloods as we try to figure out how we got our reputation? Some of them can act pretty boorish. Why blame the people who haven’t traveled anywhere?

How come democrats want more things in our lives to be run by a government that is run by their enemies six years out of every ten? Are they really so myopic that they think their friends will be calling all the shots, forever and ever? Just wow. Let’s not even discuss the values they have that are different from mine…I don’t want anyone that dense to be in charge of anything, anywhere. For their own good.

I think if I liked Barack Obama’s positions on the issues, and I was excited about His presidency because He has all this gravitas and weight and cred and…well, whatever else you call it when you’re accustomed to getting your way, nobody wants to argue with you about anything, and nobody can explain why…right about now, I’d be wishing for someone else to take charge who had a lot less of this. Think about how it goes with most presidents: The election is coming up in a year or two, so it’s time for the administration to get worried about gas prices, food prices, et al. This one, thanks to all the cred, managed to snooze all the way through about February of this year. Even now it’s a debatable question whether or not He’s on our side on this thing.

That’s another thing: Everything’s open to question. Birth certificate, bin Laden death photo, college transcripts, every little question is answered with “I/We shouldn’t have to produce that and you shouldn’t be asking.” So, again, even if I saw things more President Obama’s way, about now I’d still be wishing for a Republican to be in charge just because that’s the only time it seems we can have a transparent government.

Do Americans want the wealth to be spread around? We certainly do have a stewing, steaming resentment of rich people and there certainly is a feeling that they’re getting away with things…many Americans openly opine that this is how the rich people got rich in the first place. Hmmm, one wonders what it is about the rich that makes them different, if the being rich is not what set them apart, it must have been something else. What was that, then? But when the agenda advances to spreading the wealth around — I do not perceive that there is much passion for this in America. Seems to be an attitude getting forced on us, by the people who are running things.

Does it even work?

As they say in text mesage speak — no other intro will do — “Dude, WTF”:

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech but it cannot insulate folks against the social and cultural repercussions that come from saying something offensive.

I’m pulling that one gem out…some would say, unfairly…from a treatise whose subject and title are “Ted Nugent Should Be In Jail.” I don’t agree with the conclusion, or how he got there, but the author had me accepting his argument as at least a reasonable one right up until I got to that sentence. In fact, if anything, my picking the one sentence out of its context makes it look less glaring, since a casual reader might be forgiven for taking the phrase “social and cultural repercussions” at face value. Which would make it a much more reasonable thing to say. But the idea is JAIL. The whole column is all about how Ted Nugent should be in JAIL.

“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech but you should still be jailed for saying something offensive.” That illustrates the problem; the word “but” is being abused. You don’t get to say “up but down.” But to make the transgression more evident, I had to change it. Did I change it unfairly? Eh…I don’t think so. RTWT, as they say.

If I’ve misunderstood something, then clearly apologies would have to be in order. But if that is the case, it poses a problem: It would illustrate the ease with which things can be misunderstood. In fact, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to suppose that pretty much everything, with a little bit of intellectual torture, can be reinterpreted convincingly as pretty much everything else.

Are you threatening to do something illegal against someone, perhaps plan their murder, when you say “I’ll either be dead or in jail by this time next year”? I can certainly see the thought pattern. If I have a daughter, and I tell you “Marry her and I’ll be dead or in jail by this time next year,” my meaning is pretty clear. It’s not as clear when we’re talking about a sitting President, rumored by His opposition to be aspiring toward becoming the next American Caesar. Among the many legitimate complaints made against His Eminence is the one that, for a professor of constitutional law, He doesn’t seem to know or care much about the Constitution. So, yes, I do think it is appropriate for the Secret Service to check this out, but no, I cannot say a threat against the President’s life is the only reasonable interpretation to be made of Mr. Nugent’s remarks.

Hey, come to think of it, what ever happened to the people who made the move about George W. Bush getting assassinated? You remember, back when Bush was still President. Where’d that go?

You know, it occurs to me: We live in an age where it is becoming increasingly important to tell these two things apart. Which should be easy. But we also live in an age wherein that is becoming increasingly difficult. Partly by accident and partly by design, we’re being offered an awful lot of political propaganda that passes for science.

We need a litmus test. It shouldn’t be hard to arrive at one, since politics is goal-oriented and real science is supposed to be process-oriented.

Perhaps that is the key. With both science, and politics, there is always a sponsor. Every offering has an offerer. Now how would that offerer react to a a second offerer, with a second offering, which drives toward the same conclusion but relies on an analytical process that is clearly flawed. Like: Yes, Earth has gravity that can be measured according to the acceleration of a falling object at sea level, roughly 32 feet per second squared…because there’s a witch who lives in the middle of the planet sucking everything in with her magic potions.

The scientist would recoil from this kooky stuff, but the political propagandist would welcome it into an alliance. Only the propagandists can say: That’s bullshit, but it’s helpful bullshit so we should arrange a partnership to get it spread around. The notion that a bad process happens to arrive at a good conclusion, would be meaningless to a real scientist, since real science is not concerned about arriving at a pre-determined conclusion. That’s not supposed to be the goal.

A lot of what we call “science” is research under government grants, which by their very existence provide pressure to arrive at a particular conclusion. So my litmus test excludes an awful lot. Well, so be it.

I’m looking back over the past week, and it strikes me as a week from which much is to be learned if one studies it the right way, but also as one I would not like to see repeated. About the only good thing I’m seeing happen is that our Ridiculer In Chief had to absorb some ridicule back, and His craven spineless apologists were exposed as craven spineless apologists. What’s that, the “Romney put a dog on the roof of his car” narrative was unfortunately upstaged by the more spectacular “Obama ate dog as a child” narrative, now all of a sudden it’s so important to move on and discuss real issues? You weren’t afraid of this side trail when you thought you were gonna win it, Obama Fans. Either we’re going to talk about mistreating dogs or we’re not. A little consistency.

But the canine controversies mask something else that happened this week. Peggy Noonan, who seems to share my concerns on this one, has a good run-down of examples, although I part company with her on her last one.

People in politics talk about the right track/wrong track numbers as an indicator of public mood. This week Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we’re on the right track as a nation. That’s a historic low. Political professionals tend, understandably, to think it’s all about the economy—unemployment, foreclosures, we’re going in the wrong direction. I’ve long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it’s also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Now I’d go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

I see it as a failure of an experiment, and a spectacular one as failures go. See, we’re supposed to elect Barack Obama, who’s got all this undefinable and unexplainable “cred.” His words carry great weight, although nobody can supply a decent explanation as to why they do. From putting Him in charge, and thinking happy thoughts, and never saying or doing anything that offends anyone (unless they’re the right people to offend) we’re supposed to approach some state of Nirvana and become better people. It’s been given a fair try, and the result of the experiment is indeed a new type of American…a new breed? Let’s call it what it is: A contagion. We’ve become something of a pestilence. Read her examples. A man is beaten in Baltimore and the enlightened denizens of this new Xanadu whip out their cell phones and start filming it.

Low and bad character, is the picture that gels into recognizable form from the examples she has to offer. If we have become an enlightened people from our recent experiment, we’ve got a funny way of showing it.

My own examples mirror this, I’m afraid. There is the extended-family matter into which I’m not inclined to go probing too much, it would betray confidence. Suffice it to say someone is bitterly resentful of our upbringing, and this person has little real cause to be. And although the writer may not recognize it, his wish is for a wallowing; an unproductive, circular conversation about, essentially, nothing. I’ve had one such cyclonic examination this week already and I have no patience for another. But I do take note of a consistency between these two experiences: I have been shown some bit of evidence, or prose, or a political manifesto cloaked as a scientific study — I have read it and it has not produced in me the emotional reaction that was expected/anticipated by someone, who then responds by giving me instructions to go read it again.

Ah, this is fast becoming a pet peeve: The sloganeering didn’t work, so I am to be given a second dose. No, I say. Call it The Godfather rule: Never read something a second time that didn’t make its point the first time around. Why would I do that. Reminds me of the Citizen Kane conversation, in which I made the mistake of asking for specifics about why this would be called The Greatest Film Ever Made. The answer, of course, was that I should go watch it and it would become obvious. Rather useless answer, since I’d already watched it. Years before, a Wesley Clark fan, in response to my questions about Gen. Clark’s position on the issues, very casually directed me to go to his website and all would be made clear. It wasn’t. I’ve seen many Ron Paul fans do the same thing, with the same results.

In hindsight, I realize I should not have been surprised by any of this; lately we, as a society, have developed a fondness for clubbing each other over the head with details, without presenting any details. Part of the Architect/Medicator divide is that medicators want to make everyone else a medicator, and a defining behavior of Medicators is that they react emotionally to things. The logical consequence to all that is, people who react emotionally to things want everyone else to react emotionally to things…which, we see, is true. They forget the “O.J. Simpson Trial” rule: Two people from different walks of life, can see exactly the same thing, and come away with wildly different conclusions about what it means, with neither one of them sustaining the slightest question or doubt about what they’ve concluded.

That’s just the way people are. It’s called “learning”; not a bug, it’s a feature.

The “read it again” and “go to his website” things though — make no mistake about it, those are bugs.

We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around among us who seem to be genuinely incapable of processing & understanding the message: Yes I read the thing you showed me, top to bottom, and no I still don’t agree. They just don’t know what to make of it. “Go read it again!” seems like something into which they’ve at least put some thought. But I don’t think so. I think that’s a reflexive nerve-center reaction, like a dead body twitching.

Peggy Noonan’s complaint, or at least, the worrisome thing to be noticed from all her observations, is that there are things that we have to take somewhat seriously if we’re going to live together in some kind of peace. And these things are not being taken seriously. From my own experiences this week that bother me the most, it seems to come down to: People do appreciate the need for this peace, but they’re making the mistake of defining it as absence of conflict. The mistake is a deadly one, since life itself entails conflict, and a dogmatic regimen of rejecting all conflict will eventually come to the point where it begins to reject life. All those sermons given by Jesus Himself, the parable of the talents, the parable of the magic eyes, the prodigal son, all of that was an attack on this. You can’t be a disciple if you’re only a disciple until such time as there is conflict. The same holds true of being a Christian. No, I do not mean to say a good Christian seeks out conflict and tries to make it happen. But I do mean to say that anti-conflict must be anti-Christian. What point is there to life, if we’re only supposed to live it until there is conflict? There is none.

And this is reflected, I would argue, in the results. When people are bludgeoned into this living-of-life-to-avoid-conflict, sooner or later, you always see someone, somewhere, laboring under a commandment that they need to stop living life, or to live less life. So that someone else isn’t offended. Very often, when the “someone else” doesn’t actually exist, and is thought about only as a hypothetical: “Take that American flag down, someone might find it offensive.”

Sooner or later, intolerance itself is tolerated, and ironically that is the exit point of tolerance from this avoid-all-conflict doctrine.

Peggy Noonan finishes strong:

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this.

Unfortunately, I cannot do the same. I suppose I shouldn’t try; she’s paid to write and I’m not. I will say, though, that all I have learned about people over this past week, makes me more appreciative of dogs. They have the qualities, naturally, that humans are trying to develop; and the more the humans try to approach that goal, it seems, the further away they get from it.

That particular phrase just creeps me out the more I hear it.

Saw someone say over the weekend that this is the only way we can have a good economy, or a comfy economy, or a rosy economy, or something…nothing at all to back it up, no evidence or reasoned thinking whatsoever. Just pure prose.

In a lifetime of listening to this phrase, I’ve not yet been able to wrest a definition straight from the horse’s mouth. I have said before, however, that I’ve been able to glean one: “The class of people who are in approximately the same financial circumstances as the person or people being addressed by that politician in that particular moment.”

Looks like a crab-in-a-bucket mentality, to me. Doesn’t this thing we call an “economy” consistent of, or rely on, advances made by the crabs who occasionally crawl out, and in so doing, cease to be middle class? We can debate about how commonplace that is, but it does happen; isn’t that something we should like to see happen more often?

How come the beltway types never see fit to discuss that? No glowing vaporous rhetoric about the “growing rags-to-riches class” or “growing better-mousetrap class”?

How refreshing that would be.

As I pointed out over on Professor Mondo’s place, I’m having a problem with my observation of the scientific method being applied to the question of an approaching climate-change cataclysm. I characterized my problem as a “Clark Kent and Superman” problem, by which I mean, I’m seeing these two components but never in the same room at the same time. I see people applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s going on with the climate, and I’m seeing prognostications of doom. But the scientific method and the doomsaying are never in the same room at the same time.

Thought I would explore my thinking more exhaustively over here. There exist, within the universe, simple environments which are “primer cap” in nature and other environments which are more like “heavy pendulum.” The former, should it be warmed to some certain level, could be expected to kick off some kind of chain reaction. Things get a little exciting, then they get really exciting. Such an environment has, to coin a phrase, a “tipping point.” A heavy pendulum, on the other hand, tends toward mediocrity. A force may be applied to it so that it shows an abnormally high or low metric, but this will kick off a different cause-and-effect loop…the conclusion of which will be, that the metric is pressured toward the nominal. And if the force is applied in a strategic effort to create as great an abundance or deficiency in that metric as can possibly be managed, as is the case with the heavy pendulum, greater energy (effort) will be required to register only a little bit of ancillary change.

Example of a heavy-pendulum environment: All massive moving objects. Like your car on a freeway entrance ramp. You’ll need to burn up, approximately, four times as much gasoline to reach ninety miles an hour as you need to burn to reach forty-five. If you run out of gas, the car will eventually reach zero miles an hour.

So a question arises. And it’s not a complicated one, nor is it an open one in this “settled” science. Rather, it is an unaddressed one, for if it were to be addressed, some sacred cows would be slaughtered. What kind of environment is the Earth? If it is a “primer cap” environment, then consider that C much carbon in the atmosphere produces M mean temperature, and C+1 carbon yields a mean of M+1. What happens if the carbon content is C+2, what do we get? M+4, M+5, M+6? Oh noes, we’ve crossed the tipping point! We could cut C all the way to absolute zero, and it’ll be too late. We’re ants under the magnifying glass! Tell your kids you love them, and fry eggs on the sidewalk! Aiiieee!

Balderdash, I say. Not because I claim to second-guess the scientists, but because unlike those who crave drama, I remember physics from the tenth grade. Assuming carbon is the most potent of all greenhouse gases and it is a red herring to consider any of the others, or any external forces acting upon this mean temperature — which is not the case — C+2 would yield something like M+1.414. I say “something like” because my comment is limited to what shape of curve we’re talking about here, not where any of the actual points are upon it. Our ecosystem has many natural devices in it which act to regulate the temperature, and other parts of the climate, toward a norm. It’s not much discussed, but you know what, that’s part of the “settled science” as well.

The big factor involved is water. It is an amazing substance. It weighs a lot, absorbs a fair amount of heat, cleanly boils away at a tepid 212 and freezes solid at a balmy 32. Remember what your beleaguered high school physics teacher was trying to show you…evaporation is a cooling process and condensation is a warming process. Self-regulating. In fact, much of this “greenhouse gas effect,” to which we owe our ability to survive for any length of time in relative comfort, is due to water vapor.

Water is so remarkable, that “devices” incorporating it can be astonishingly simple, almost atomically simple, and still successfully implement this property of self-regulation. A saucepan sitting on your stove has it, if it has water. Actually, if the climate-change doomsaying were to be more universally accepted and we were to reach greater consensus that something must be done — and we were to reach such an agreement on a waterless planet — that would be, by far, the most scientifically credible and effective way to put off the apocalypse: Find a way to saturate it with water. About 68 percent of the surface, or so.

Many among those who continue to cling to the climate-cataclysm religion, base it on selected bits and pieces of this “settled science.” They claim — accurately — that carbon is a greenhouse gas and greenhouse gases affect the climate. They fail to take note of the fact, though, that this by itself does not portend doom…and, to a man, they all stop discussing scientific things and scientific processes at this exact point, wandering into a tall grass of unsubstantiated “ifs,” so they can talk about our upcoming last-days and feel smug & superior.

Their scientific sin is to keep in mind directions of cause-and-effect, while they entirely jettison contemplations of proportion. Using their Tinker Toy brand of “science,” you could “prove” that a mouse fart will make a hurricane smell like stale cheese. Yes, the forces are at work and the directions are all correct, but the situation is all askew when one starts to consider proportions, along with the nature of the environment that is being subjected to the influence.

Or vice-versa, maybe…well whatever. Sometimes, when a maelstrom develops at the intersection of two dysfunctional elements, when it all settles down the result is a correct decision.

The California Supreme Court says employers are under no obligation to ensure that workers take legally mandated lunch and rest breaks.

The ruling Thursday comes after worker’s attorneys argued that abuses are routine and widespread when companies aren’t required to issue direct orders to take breaks.

But the high court sided with business when it ruled that requiring companies to order breaks is unmanageable and that those decisions should be left to workers.

“Unmanageable” is an understatement. This is a classic case of one of my most bitter complaints about government, the non-producers telling the producers how to produce. There’s still a widespread lack of understanding about how bad the problem can get, when the non-producers do so after having spent lifetimes not doing anything productive…as is the case here. They start to lose track of where rule-making can & cannot be effective, and drift toward futile things like repealing the law of gravity.

The court, on the other hand, just going by this brief summary has engaged in classic judicial activism. Maybe when time permits I’ll find something in the complete decision that changes my view of that. For now, my sense is they have reached the correct decision by the wrong means.

I’m seeing some things around p. 33 that pose problems for that view, though.

Hohnbaum contends that an employer has one additional obligation: to ensure that employees do no work during meal periods. He places principal reliance on a series of DLSE opinion letters. In 2001, in the course of discussing rest breaks, the DLSE distinguished an employer‟s meal break duties and observed that for meal breaks “an employer has an affirmative obligation to ensure that workers are actually relieved of all duty, not performing any work, and free to leave the worksite . . . .” In 2002, the DLSE reiterated the point:
with regard to meal periods, “an employer has an affirmative obligation to ensure that workers are actually relieved of all duty, not performing any work, and free to leave the worksite…” In 2002, the DLSE reiterated the point: with regard to meal periods, “an employer has an affirmative obligation to ensure that workers are actually relieved of all duty, not performing any work, and…free to leave the employer‟s premises.” …

We are not persuaded. The difficulty with the view that an employer must ensure no work is done—i.e., prohibit work—is that it lacks any textual basis in the wage order or statute. While at one time the IWC‟s wage orders contained language clearly imposing on employers a duty to prevent their employees from working during meal periods, we have found no order in the last half-century continuing that obligation. Indeed, the obligation to ensure employees do no work may in some instances be inconsistent with the fundamental employer obligations associated with a meal break: to relieve the employee of all duty and relinquish any employer control over the employee and how he or she spends the time.

This implies that the phrase “requiring companies to order breaks is unmanageable” may have been in error; the above excerpt is quibbling about what the law does & does not say, which would be a much more proper function. I’ll have to go over it at beer o’clock tonight to see if I approve.

There’s no way I can be unhappy with the result of the decision, though. This is the very worst part of California lawmaking methodology — yes, the rest of the nation is watching us because we’re California, but I cannot help but think the rest of the nation has been laughing at this. How idiotic. How heavy-handed, how Gestapo-ish. And how utterly, utterly, unrealistic; at no point could it ever have been said there were fewer so-called “workers” doing their working six hours without a break, after the rules were put in place (or re-interpreted) than there were before.

A precarious situation has resulted for us — the business climate situation, apart from being generally hostile which is plenty bad enough, has resulted in an over-saturation in our commercial districts of the multi-state operations. By this, I mean brand names that are based in California as well as in other states. (And by “over-saturation” what I really mean is, an under-saturation of all the other kind; they’ve pulled up stakes and moved out because they simply can’t afford the nonsense.) The problem with the tax base relying overly much on these part-in, part-out leviathans is that they don’t need to move out to move out. They simply decide to expand this office & not that one.

One can close one’s eyes and hear the incredulity in their board rooms. “Now, waitaminnit…in our California offices, we have to supervise the employees and make sure…what???”

Maybe the justices of the California State Supreme Court deserve more credit than I gave ’em. We’ll find out when time permits.

Well, this is interesting:

The obesity epidemic may be contributing to the rising number of children diagnosed with autism, according to a study published Monday.

Researchers said mothers who are obese are significantly more likely to have a child with autism or another developmental abnormality. The finding adds to the increasingly complex picture of possible factors that contribute to the disorders.

The obesity epidemic may be contributing to the rising number of children diagnosed with autism.

About half the risk of autism, a condition characterized by poor social skills and repetitive behaviors, is genetic, researchers believe, while the rest stems from factors including older parental age, premature birth or failure to take prenatal vitamins.

The new findings come in the wake of the announcement last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that autism-spectrum disorders, as the range of abnormalities is now called, affect one in 88 U.S. children, up from one in 110 in a 2009 report.

It’s always been interesting to me that the learning disabilities are on the upswing — against even trace amounts of reasonable skepticism, you have these “cheerleaders” who push hard for a positive diagnosis in whichever test subject is under discussion, usually their own children, and they completely foam up at the mouth against the inquiring skepticism. They act like it’s a religion. And they’re so concerned about it…but…the statistics increase dramatically over a relatively narrow period of time, and you’d think they’d be concerned about that, too. I mean, what if it’s tainted drinking water causing it? What if it’s power lines over the house causing it? If you’re so sure Sugarplum has the LD and all these other kids have similar LDs, and just ten years ago there wouldn’t have been that many…shouldn’t there be this surge of adrenaline to try to find the cause, so the yet-to-be-born kids can have a normal life? And yet they don’t even sweat it. Nor will they tolerate any challenges at all to the idea that Precious has a LD.

Well. Mom’s obesity is Factor A, Autism is Factor B. The article doesn’t explore this, but much of Factor B is in the diagnosis process, and the decision to incorporate that reprehensible “spectrum.” But that has nothing to do with Mom being fat. Why the statistically-detectable tie-in?

I vote for a spurious relationship, meaning, there’s a Factor C that causes A and B, creating the correlation.

Some people are extraordinarily cautious about accepting demands on their time, I’ve noticed, even when they’re not doing a lot with said time. You suggest they do something to make something happen — they’ll spin this elaborate yarn about what’s going to go wrong with it when they do it, and finish off with, “and then I will have wasted all that time!” So what’s the point of even trying. So…they don’t. And, if you follow them around, you’ll see they don’t do much of anything. If they find they need to get somewhere five hundred feet away, on a perfectly nice day they’ll reach for the car keys.

And mothers need to work at it in order to relate to their sons. It doesn’t come naturally. I think every man who ever had a mother, will be able to confirm this for you. The mom needs to work at it. Sadly, in far too many cases, this is exactly what a spectrum disorder is; it’s a shortcut for moms that don’t want to work at relating to their sons. We like to think of science as crisp, hard and firm; we like to think of it as an objective, measurable thing, especially when it endeavors to tell us what’s wrong with our brains, and our kids’ brains. Well, the sad fact of it is, people who see empowerment in weaknesses tend to be pushy and loud people. And the science is not that hard. It’s been giving in.

The researchers are very careful to couch this in terms of a more direct, A-causes-B thing, so it can be an unavoidable body-chemistry tragedy in which all players are blameless. Of course they are. It can’t be sold any other way.

The results suggest that obesity and other metabolic conditions are a general risk factor for autism and other developmental disorders, said the researchers from the University of California, Davis and Vanderbilt University.

“The brain is quintessentially susceptible to everything’s that happening in the mother’s body,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, senior author of the study and chief of the division of environmental and occupational health in public health sciences at UC Davis.

But she added that “no one factor is going to be responsible for any one child’s case. This is not a ‘blame the mom’ thing.”

Well, maybe it needs to be. Not in all cases. But definitely in some.

I’ve often observed that we’re looking at a “no lifeguards worth a damn under forty years old” generation. What I mean by this is, today’s kids are sadly lacking in the skill of watching something for an indeterminate period of time, waiting for a state change, at which point they are to complete some task that is time-sensitive. This generation just can’t bring it. Lately, this particular skill hasn’t been getting developed. That’s because it’s not a birth skill. It’s developed, through life-experience and through necessity, and by no other means.

This rule seems to have been put in place, lately, I’m not sure exactly when, that Snowflake can’t ever be bored. It’s become the parents’ job to anticipate that he won’t have anything to do, and so some toy is going to have to be made available so Junior can fiddle with it…and this sacrosanct goal of constant, minute-to-minute entertainment, will be met. Thank goodness! Well okay, we can make a priority out of that, but I hope that in so doing, we can admit that a skyrocketing learning-disability diagnosis statistic will come as no surprise, as something we’ve been asking to have happen, when the time comes. That much is just common sense, isn’t it?

Now, if the parent wants to be the diversion, that would keep it from happening. But that takes physical energy. So there’s your correlation. Kid wants to ride his bike somewhere, if momma is immediately protesting “Oh no, mommy doesn’t do that, bad knees blah blah blah”…that will, over time, shape the kid’s brain. And it will shape the momma’s midsection as well.

But go ahead and look at amino acids and metabolism. I understand you have to, and my theory comes off as harsh, I get it. Science is more than a little bit political lately, and sometimes it has to look for the lost watch where the light is, far away from where it was dropped. Science is pretty expensive lately; wherever the money goes, there are politics. Call it the death of science, call it the terminal illness of science, call it whatever you like. It is what it is.

The one hundred twenty-sixth award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) goes, once again, to Thomas Sowell (hat tip to Neal Boortz).

It’s actually three sentences. Well, we’ll make it fit. This is pretty good.

In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims. Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensation for injustices – leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.

This has a tie-in to the Flukers, Mmes. Fluke and Frank who, it should be noted, are not asking for anything. They and the others in their class are demanding things. That is what is so objectionable about what is taking place; if they were simply charity cases, those who are sympathetic to their plight would pony up (three grand for Fluke’s birth control, 20 to 200 dollars to clear up Ruthelle Frank’s birth certificate problem) and those who are not-so-sympathetic would be left out of it.

That scenario has absolutely nothing to do with what they’re doing.

What they are doing, is introducing a new form of legal tender into the economy. It’s an old story; due to this problem or that problem, or a birth defect or some handicap, so-and-so can’t do such-and-such. And the deficiency hardens into a claim on the time and resources of others, exactly as if it was money. In a way, it does become money. It becomes a new coin of the realm. Helplessness. I’m more important than you are, because I have a need.

In this case, though, the “can’t” has metastasized into a “won’t.” This is a significant change that we are seeing unfold before our eyes. The behavior is easing off on the pathetic, and bearing down on the thuggish.

They feel like they’re victims, I’m sure, since they’re chewing the fat with politicians and lawyers gifted with what Prof. Sowell is talking about up there, the talent of making a parasite feel like it’s been victimized. In reality, it’s the people they’re trying to affect who are victims. Here they are just minding their own business, and here comes a weakling with a story to tell of personal failure, and a big bank of microphones into which the weakling can do her whining…now the rules are going to change. And it’s all according to someone’s preconceived and premeditated plan.

Haven’t put a lot of thought into the cataloguing and ranking of victimology…I wasn’t raised to…but I’m struggling to come up with a way anyone could be “victimized” better than that.

I keep seeing this young lady turning up in ad banners, and I think it’s for this Blackberry device.

The messages ambushing me from all directions about this cute-as-a-button young girl, want to make sure I know that she relies in all kinds of ways on her device. But I still don’t have a good understanding of what exactly it is that she does.

This is not an isolated case, either. I saw something like this on the company portal. Pulchritudinous, energetic, female and young…started her own business…does something vague and undefined with “social networking for societal change” and there are no details about that, but zowee, would her business ever be dead if she didn’t have her laptop.

I’ve met people who are savvy enough to catch a brief overview of what a wonder-gadget can do, and then put in place an effective vision for starting a business. Some of them think I’m in that camp…well…if these ads are aimed at people who possess that unique gift, you know, I think such a competent mind could handle details about what’s being done with the device. I mean, get specific. So I can see what’s superior about this brand versus that brand…why a business, such as this, could never ever rely on Brand X. Shouldn’t the advertisers be in a big hurry to tell us? Isn’t that an essential part of the message?

John Hawkins has really outdone himself this time. Twenty ironies:

3) Only in America could we have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner, the head of the Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who once ran the Ways and Means Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.
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6) Only in America could someone drinking a $5 latte and texting to his friends on an iPhone 4 complain that the government allows some people to make too much money.
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12) Only in America can we have terrorists fly planes into our buildings and have some people’s first thought be “what did we do to make them hate us?”
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19) Only in America could the rich people who pay 86% of all income taxes be accused of not paying their “fair share” by people who don’t pay any income taxes at all.

Our poor people are fat. Perhaps no civilization can have both — the hungry are fed, and people with brains use those brains for their intended purpose. Perhaps there’s a choice to be made.

Hope springs eternal. Give America credit, if there is an experiment to be done to settle the question, it will have to be done here. Where the poor people are fat. Say what you will about it, but there is no getting around the fact that it is an amazing human achievement. Now, if we could just think like grown-ups.

Fluker (n.)

We live in the age of the Fluker. To be a Fluker:

1. You have a problem and want everyone to know about it; it is the very same problem other people have had, and have managed to solve, while keeping it to themselves.
2. This doesn’t bother you in the slightest.
3. The answer you have in mind for your problem involves a change in the rules that would affect EVERYONE.
4. You partner up with special-interest and advocacy groups, politicians, “community organizers” and so forth, and give lots of press conferences and interviews about this problem you’ve got…that thousands, maybe millions, of other people have managed to solve without bugging anyone at all.
5. That doesn’t bother you either.
6. You have your problem in years that are divisible by 4.
7. Inexplicably and strangely, while yammering away about how helpless you are until such time that the rules are changed so that everyone is forced to reckon in some way with your problem, and bitching up a storm about some guy on the radio calling you dirty names, you still want to let everyone know how tough you are and how you don’t back down, that you’ve got a backbone of solid steel, your will be done, you’ll triumph over anything, never get discouraged…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
8. Just like a kid on the playground at recess during third grade, you are entirely unable to distinguish between people who have logical/moral reservations against your idea (which, as noted above, would impact everyone)…and…well, you’ll slander ’em any which way you possibly can, won’t you. Chauvinists, sexist pigs, Nazis, monsters, DirtyRottenCreepyJerks…nobody can be a decent human being unless they back your idea. Because your skin is too thin to handle disagreement, skepticism or legitimate criticism.

After Sandra Fluke, the latest Fluker is Ruthelle Frank, who could march her 84-year-old ass down to the court clerk’s office with $20 and clear up a problem with her birth certificate…but instead…is literally making a federal case out of the new photo ID law in Wisconsin.

And she wants to keep her tough-old-bird cred.

Frank is accustomed to a fight.

“I was born paralyzed on my whole left side, and I came out head first with a big scar at the top of my head,” Frank said.

“My dad pushed me to be what I am,” she added, recalling how her father, Elmer, tied her right hand to her body so that she would learn to use her left hand.
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Her children back her fight.

“She has made all of us tough,” Frank’s daughter said.

Like the birth-control slut, she qualifies on all eight counts as a genuine Fluker.

We’re looking at the real war on women, right here. Flukers tend to be female, and sadly, this causes the new trend to have a polarizing effect on the sexes. Perhaps if a male Fluker were to emerge and start whimpering away about…aw, I dunno. Some days, it seems there aren’t as many beers left in the fridge as there should be, like someone is drinking my suds. Maybe a man could go before Congress and demand a new government program to buy his ale or something.

See, there’s the thing. In the pre-teen years, the dudes have to make a choice. They can grow up to be sissies who are constantly complaining that this-or-that basic challenge in life is tooooooo haaaaaard…can’t handle it by themselves, start hollering for help even where it’s obvious they should be able to succeed by themselves. But you have to give up your big-badass title to do that. You can act like a smug prick if you want, like our current Commander in Chief. You can wrap yourself up in a thick blanket of that “NPR male” not-quite-masculine sissy-rage, like Keith Olbermann or Alan Alda used to do when people were still paying attention to them. But you can’t go strutting around like a modern Conan The Barbarian when you need someone else to twist the top off your soda pop for ya. Can’t be leader of the pack after pulling the “Stop the merry-go-round I wanna climb on” routine. If you insist on having your cake and eating it too, you get your ass kicked. It’s wired into the male DNA. We put up with bossy male progs, expecting that after they’re done strutting around and acting imperious, they’ll go away, or at least get out of the way. To actually take the top-dog spot, for reals, pulling rank after you got done proving you aren’t good for anything — that’s a whole different story. Men don’t tolerate this in other men.

Chicks don’t have that going on, it seems. This is something they need to fix. Somehow, on Planet Woman, you can be a helpless little waif and at the same time you can bellow about what a tough nut you are. In the same breath. Women will rip into other women for wearing the wrong thing at the wrong place, but they vote “present” and call it good when it comes to the “Are you an alpha dog or are you not” thing. They don’t police their ranks for wimps who want to keep the privilege and luxury of wimpiness and still lead the dogsled team.

There is a trifecta in play now. First it was Fluke, next it is Frank. In both cases, the wimp projects this image — maybe it’s compensation? This “don’t screw with me I’m tough as nails” image. In both cases it’s entirely unfitting; we know their names because they are entirely unable to cope with the basics of ordinary life. So if there ever was an outstanding question on whether they’re tough as nails or not, it’s been settled already. Well, I wonder who the third one will be.

Our society is morphing into a rather strange place. This should not be a man/woman issue; there are lots of tough women out there, and there are lots of wimpy guys. Like Hannie Caulder said, there are no hard women there are only soft men. And without regard to gender role assignments, it must be said that our society is not being helped when “tough” is defined as changing the rules so your personal needs can be met…especially when those needs are not very daunting, once your perspective is properly adjusted…and it has to become everybody else’s business because you’re just not sufficiently resourceful to find another way to do it. Sorry, with all due respect to Ruthelle Frank’s daughter, that’s not tough.

We’re now very deep into the Age of the Fluker. I hope it’s a brief blip on the radar of our history. I don’t know if it’s up to the women to stop it, or up to the men to stop it, or to motivate the women to stop it, or if the two sexes need to work together on it somehow. Whatever the case may be, this cannot continue. There are reasons men make other men choose between prestige and the soft blanket of helplessness. No society can survive for long when its rules are created and refined by the wanker set.

It’s a funny thing about logic: The weakest strains of it are the most capable. When you find a brand of logic that can “prove” anything & everything, you know you’re looking at something so weak that it’s borderline useless.

Case in point…

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Likin’ this…

I can never get over it. It’s amazing, how much nothing is packed into one state. If Nevada was something besides a nothing when the white man first discovered it, you’d have to count it among the top human achievements importing all that nothing. Or manufacturing that much nothing. Whatever…it is a truly mind-blowing quantity of nothing out there.

“Kidzmom” tells me it’s up to me to do the driving during the child pick-up or drop-off, and the first thing I do is run down and get a CD audiobook. Amazon used to be the perfect solution, but lately they’ve started taking two weeks to ship what used to take two days. So I’ve had to get creative. When I was contracted to IBM, first time I moved to this area some twenty years ago, there was this awesome truck stop, crammed full of everything a truck driver could ever need or want. It’s still there. I picked up a work of fiction there, which is kind of really creepy, and then my fiancee burned me a copy of Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Requirement met.

I picked up the boy, last weekend, in time for spring break, by myself. This weekend we dropped him off, as a threesome. Me, girlfriend, kid. We stayed in Reno Saturday night, swapped him yesterday at noon in Battle Mountain, and crashed last night in Incline Village. What a blast. Big-ass lobster feast, followed by…well…frankly, Incline Village is afraid of being discovered, so I can’t reveal details. But we limped back home this morning, with a fresh box of beer, I just got done soaking my old ass in a hot bath with a couple bottles of cold suds, during which time I used a brand new Quattro to scrape the March whiskers off my throat. D-i-s-g-u-s-t-i-n-g.

Belly full of beer and shellfish. A newly discovered vacation spot. And my kid knows how to drive a go kart as fast as it can go, fire a .22 rifle, and help his old man with his taxes.

Reminds me of the perfect day.

7:30
Dinner. Lobster appetizers, 1963 Dom Perignon,20oz. New York strip.

9:00
Relax after dinner with 1789 Augler Cognac and Cohiba Cuban cigar.

10:00
Have sex with two
18 year old nymphomaniacs.

11:00
Massage and Jacuzzi.

11:45 Go to bed.

11:46
One last blowjob

11:59
Let loose a 12 second, 4 octave fart. Watch the dog leave the room.

12:00
Laugh yourself to sleep

It was kinda close to that, with some details missing. After we dropped off the kid, that is.

Well, I look at it like — I’d trade it all just to see the kid show some signs of being more manly and capable. And I didn’t have to trade; I got both. A highly successful spring break.

I’m still not sure what to make of the spring break tradition. In my day, this was something you could maybe think about during your senior year of high school. Possibly, maybe, junior. But only if you were one of the “cool” kids with the rich parents. And then something happened. Fast forward to today…from what I know about it, nowadays if you’re fifth grade or higher you get an automatic “spring break.” We-ell — my initial inclination is to disapprove, and my better judgment tells me that’s the right call. But I’ve procreated and failed to make a go of things with the female-incubation unit, who is now with my spawn in another state. So with things the way they are, I’m not sure what we’d do without it.

Is society starting up a whole bunch of new traditions in an attempt to adapt to single-parenthood? Or maybe, just one? I suppose I shall have to leave that to the philosophers.

The dining area was miniscule, with a posted capacity of 49. So we were in close proximity to the couple next to us, the masculine half of which noticed my “One Big Ass Mistake, America” tee shirt after their main course had arrived. It turns out they, too, are from the Golden State, San Luis Obispo area. And they, too, are confronted with an unpleasant reality that the state is headed over a Greek-style financial brink.

They’re probably about fifteen years senior to us, which puts them in early sixties, with a clean-cut “grown-up hippie” look to them both. We talked a bit about some of the more appealing parts of California, where to visit for the summer, and a bit about ObamaCare. The four of us were pleased that the accommodations allowed for fellowship rather than isolation. It would have been more pleasing if we’d been able to discuss current events, rather than liberals ruining everything; but, let’s quit beating around the bush. These days, that is the current event.

And this inspires my “DJEver Notice?” moment…

It isn’t that I object to the specific ideas the left-wingers have. Looking back over all their bills, their executive orders, their speeches, their “occupations,” and the subsequent arguing-over-the-innernets in which I’ve engaged…one big problem I see with the things they want to do, perhaps bigger than all the other problems, is that they don’t have any “specific ideas.” They have lots of general ones: Make it less profitable to be productive in our society, make it more profitable to be unproductive, try to make more abortions happen. Do whatever has to be done to make sure the democrat party wins more battles with its opposition, and that the country loses more battles with her opposition, because the democrat party is good enough for a “scorched earth” policy but America is not.

My DJEver-Notice-moment thought is that: The list of definable ideas ends right about there. Following that point, everything they want to do is not quite so much a what, as a who. “Give a blank check of [power/money] to [blank], who, take our word for it, [has/have] all the right ideas.”

Global warming scientists.

The Congressional Black Caucus.

Labor unions.

The members of Congress who wrote ObamaCare.

This-or-that alphabet-soup government agency that “regulates” this-or-that industry to “keep our water drinkable and our air breathable.”

ACORN.

Pharoah Barack The First.

Planned Parenthood.

The United Nations.

It’s not easy to pick up on this, because if you argue with a lefty for any significant length of time, the conversation will swing over toward “you’re just a bad, bad person” compared to the lefty. Unless, that is, you surrender to their nonsense. But on those rare occasions where the point-of-disagreement is actually defined, overall you’ll notice it comes down to the lefty saying yes, and you saying not-necessarily or I-don’t-think-so, to the proposal of granting unlimited power and deference to some panel of strangers — who will then flesh out the details. Which means you and your leftist antagonist are not arguing about details at all. You’re arguing about generalities, the most significant of which is where to put the power.

They are opposed to transparency in this kind of apparatus, they’re opposed to any kind of sharing of power, and they’re opposed to details. Their appeal, therefore, is toward those who are unaccustomed to thinking in details.

I have the impression that our new friends in the dining hall, perhaps, were once held hostage to this. Although it must be said I ave limited confidence in that impression; they struck me as intellectually capable, curious, and capable of handling details. But they also had a very subtle air about them, which I’ve seen many times before over the last three years, of …”Oops.” It came off looking like a distant regret, not so much Obama-era as Clinton-era. Maybe I imagined all that.

What was not imagined, was their California weariness. Oh, here we go again: Tax the filthy rich bastards and that’ll solve everything. Eyeball roll. They’re facing the same gut-punch reality we are, probably wondering, reluctantly, if the time has come to pack up and watch the wreckage from afar.

There are lemmings who are so sure the other lemmings have the right idea while their paws furiously claw away at the ground underneath, and then there are lemmings who remain sure of it as their furry bodies sail through the open air down toward the sea. I’m not sure if one class is more deserving of contempt than the other, or of pity, but I’m sure that it’s generally better in life to embrace details.

I’m also sure that those who shun details, are going to be forever starting fights with people who do not, and then blaming them for the fights.

Simply disgusting.

The economy is anemic, gas prices are skyrocketing, and it seems that we learn about some new betrayal or failure on the administration’s part every other day. This bad week for President Obama has followed a very bad week for him, as the president was caught promising something on missile defense to the Russians and ObamaCare faced scrutiny in the Supreme Court, and the president followed all of that up with his ill-informed and unwise attack on the Supreme Court. The Tuesday walk back only made the situation worse. A truly adversarial press would have made this story front and center. The Augusta question gave the White House an early lifeline, a chance to bring up its ridiculous “war on women” gambit from another angle and move the women’s conference story, which no one was talking about, into the public conversation ahead of the stories that the nation is talking about, but which don’t favor the president.
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I can’t prove conclusively that Matt Spetalnick’s question about Augusta was a plant, but it was an awfully convenient question for the administration to push an election-year message that has been pushing since January.

Via Instapundit, via Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Also, it’s rather easy to forget now that the whole “requiring coverage for birth control” thing had not yet blown up back in January, when George Stephanopolous steered the Republican primary debate on to the subject of birth control. Of course, Stephanopolous was actually supposed to be a “moderator” and he was, according to your definition, moderating…so if he was ever accused of being a plant, anyone who knows anything about it would be conveniently able to brush that aside with a simple recitation of the relevant “facts.”

Which just goes to show, the definition is not that crisp. Plants don’t necessarily have to be plants. But a pattern emerges nevertheless: The Obama administration, or whoever has taken the stick on coordinating these fortunate public exchanges, would seem to have a cynical view of the attention span of the American female. Someone, somewhere, is of the mind that you just have to shift the conversation to The Pill for a minute or two and all the hysterical airhead American women will turn out in droves to re-elect His Holiness. Well, I know first-hand there must be problems with this — it’s certainly not true across the board. Some of the most intense longing for Him to haul His ass back to Illinois, is felt by the daughters of Eve, and this cheap shallow attempt to manipulate will only make that feeling more intense.

But it is a mixed effect, certainly. So as to whether or not it’s a winning strategy for He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, I suppose we’ll all find out in a few months.

So the kid’s here for spring break, of which today is the last day. The fiancee and I are driving him back to Nevada today so he can resume school. We had a blast with the go-karts and the trip to the shooting range, where I lost my .40 S&W virginity and managed a decently tight grouping in spite of the wicked recoil on the Beretta.

Also upgraded his home-built with a new 2GB video card. No time for blogging lately. But in my early morning ponderings, I did manage to upload some wisdom to the Hello Kitty of blogging…this has been eating at me for awhile…

There are certain “scientific studies” that I notice never seem to do the trick, with such completeness that it would be redundant to release another study saying the same thing, because said further-study is published soon afterward. And again and again and again…polar ice caps are shrinking, conservatives have tinier minds, girls mature faster than boys, et al. Perhaps there is minutiae that needs a further hashing-out and the layman can’t see it. But it’s more likely, I think, that science in these areas is running in circles. I don’t say this because I pretend to understand all that the scientists say; I say that because it is only in a narrow field of subjects wherein I see it happening. It looks like bored, inexperienced, not-yet-established scientists with laptop computers looking for something to do, and that’s probably what it is.

I would like to see a scientific study on this: Some public figure says or does something that generates a bit of heat, and then apologizes for it. What effect does the apology have? Do some experiments, with a control group that doesn’t offer an apology, and find a way to objectively measure the cred, or stature, or job security, that was supposedly lost [and then recovered again]. Also, did the angry people stop being angry when the apology was issued. Put the numbers on a graph, and plot a line.

THAT is a study I would LOVE to see. Once will do it.

Thing I Know #52 sez,

Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

…and that would seem to make such a study redundant already, since apologies certainly fall within the things being demanded by angry people. But Things I Know are nothing more than lifetime experiences — of me — open questions on which the uncertainty seems to have been eliminated…but looks can be deceiving. And, people didn’t just start issuing apologies when I was born, or when I became aware in my observations of such things. The clumsiness and ineffectiveness of apologies does seem to be something of a modern development, or at least, the dazzling phoniness and insincerity of the apologies are modern characteristics.

Do apologies work? There certainly does seem to be a lot riding on the question every year.

Demanding the apologies, that certainly does have an elevating effect on one’s social standing. Kinda reminds me of when Billy Batson said “Shazam!” and was transformed by lightning into Captain Marvel, remember that? That’s what we have had, in recent times, with this other catchphrase, “You know, I find that offensive.” Like, faster than the naked eye can perceive the change, you have acquired superpowers.

But for making the apology, I’m not sure anybody ever recovers a damn thing. I’m not sure why anybody bothers with it. I suppose they want to demonstrate that, at least, they’re not ignoring anybody. But I also see when the time comes to run for a high office, there are a lot of people ready to describe as their qualifications that they do ignore the right people. That, lately, seems to be a backbone to what American politics has become. This candidate, over here…is sensitive to the demands and grievances of that aggrieved victim group, over there…and, if he manages to be elected to the high hallways of power, we will see a gutterballing, a marginalization, of that other antithesis faction of critical people, way over there. *cough* President Barack Obama *cough*. Attorney General Eric Holder upholding the law for “his” people. Equal protection under the law doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything anymore, it’s all about voting in politicians to decide who will gain influence and who will lose it. I suppose that part isn’t really new. What’s changed is the feeling of obligation, the feeling of “These people, who were not really part of the socio-political phenomenon that swept me into office, nevertheless have a legitimate grievance and the Constitution suggests I should take it seriously, through the right it recognizes they have to petition their government.”

I do want to see such a study, though. What necessitates such an apology; why do people clamor for one, what are they looking for in one; what is the effect of issuing it, especially, contrasted with the control group that doesn’t offer one.

I don’t think they do a thing. If they did once, they don’t now. People don’t take them that seriously, and they probably shouldn’t. This is a field ripe for study. It is my impression that this open question affects us in ways it did not, in our recent past. We should get off our duffs and learn what’s going on, and how we’re changing. So much energy, concern, perspiration and drive being plowed into a place that is not providing us with a tangible reward, suggests this might not be a good change.

Sorry if that offends anyone.

It’s floating around the innerwebs since at least February. I can’t find a point of origin to credit properly. Sometimes, things just go that way, other times a helpful bit of evidence will roll in. Anyway — I see the “Re-elect Obama because Romney’s a Mormon” campaign has started in earnest, so this could be helpful.

Quit trashing President Obama’s accomplishments!

An impressive list of accomplishments:

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then
deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has
never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States

First President to violate the War Powers Act. .

First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally
obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

First President to defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease
implementing the Health Care Reform Law.

First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a
third party.

First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs
when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.

First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of
companies to his union supporters.

First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act
through executive fiat.

First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the
deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those
with criminal convictions.

First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of
his political appointees.

First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.

First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law
unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly
spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.

First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state
it is allowed to locate a factory.

First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath
to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been
properly issued years ago.

First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for
catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in
his office. .

First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half
years in office, 90 to date.

First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.

First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

First President to go on multiple global ‘apology tours’.

First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights
and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by
the taxpayer.

First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year
at taxpayer expense.

First President to repeat the Holy Quran tells us the early morning
call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound
on earth.

First President to take a 17 day vacation.

How is this hope and change working out for you?

The perpetual-vacationer speaks:

Michelle Obama, who has quickly become the Obama campaign’s tip of the spear when it comes to fundraising and vote-getting, is now stumping for children to convince their “great-grandparents” to vote for her husband. At an event at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park – for which tickets cost at least $500 – Michelle said:

I mean, I can’t tell you in the last election how many grandparents I ran into who said, I wasn’t going to vote for Barack Obama until my grandson talked to me, until my great-grandson talked to me, and talked about the future he wanted for this country.

You can get out there with your parents. You guys can knock on doors. I had one young lady who brought me a petition — she’s already working. You can convince wrong people. Sometimes we don’t listen to ourselves, but we will listen to our children.

The left seems to have a fascination with this that goes back aways — children being wise sages uniquely qualified to dispense the kind of wisdom that is attained only through experience.

Near as I can figure, it’s part of a much greater and broader perspective in which it’s important to see everything as the opposite of what it really is. We have to spend lots of money to keep from going broke, we show the greatest respect toward women when we systematically eliminate every reason for their existence, we’re “shoring up” capitalism by stealing money from the people who’ve been productive and giving it to people who’ve chosen to live destructive and self-destructive lifestyles…et al.

Children are experienced, knowledgeable, and have unique wisdom to impart. Fits right in. The younger the better, I suppose.

Uh oh…

Mega Millions mania has plunged a Maryland McDonald’s into a bubbling cauldron of controversy hotter than a deep-fried apple pie.

Workers at the fast-food joint who pooled their cash for tickets are furious at a colleague who claims she won with a ticket she bought for herself and has no intention of sharing.

“We had a group plan, but I went and played by myself. [The ‘winning’ ticket] wasn’t on the group plan,” McDonald’s “winner’’ Mirlande Wilson 37, told The Post yesterday, insisting she alone bought one of the three tickets nationwide that will split a record $656 million payout.

“I was in the group, but this was separate. The winning ticket was a separate ticket,” the single mother of seven said as she and her fiancé left her home in the squalid Westport neighborhood to attend church.

The Haitian immigrant refused to show what she said was the winning ticket, claiming she had it hidden in another location and would present it to lottery officials today.

Pressed as the day went on, she became more cagey.

“I don’t know if I won. Some of the numbers were familiar. I recognized some of [them],’’ she said. “I don’t know why’’ people are saying differently. “I’m going to go to the lottery office [today]. I bought some tickets separately.”

With winning tickets also sold in Illinois and Kansas, a single Maryland winner would get an after-tax lump sum of $105 million, or $5.59 million a year for 26 years.

This is why I hate lotteries so much.

Say what you will about people who make their profit by running some kind of business, but at least the profits are realized because, somehow, a product or service was provided to someone else. So if there’s some dispute coming out about where the profits should be going, people end up arguing about the who, what, when, where & why of the product/service coming to be.

These poor miserable wretches are arguing about the five W’s involved with exchanging a dollar for a crummy piece of paper…which piece it is…that determines who gets five million a year for 26 years.

Hard feelings are inevitable. Goodwill and mutual respect are not part of the equation. And in this case, in times recently past, they were — the group bought some tickets together. So something has been destroyed here. And it isn’t an unusual situation with lotteries.

I’ve written elsewhere that you can probably determine, with some good rugged accuracy, which direction our society is headed simply by tuning in to an AM radio station on a daily basis and counting how many times per week you hear an ad that says “find out if you qualify.” The same is true for the level of activity observed, on a weekly or monthly basis, with regard to lotteries. The common thread is: People trying to get hold of free stuff without doing or producing anything that would be valuable to anybody else.

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom (hat tip to blogger friend Terri) snags the 125th award for BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately):

The constant and steady perversion of language and meaning has finally brought us to the surreal endpoint where a president stands before the public and pretends that a Supreme Court ruling is illegitimate if it looks to the Constitution for guidance on checks to federal power.

He is referring to a comment made recently, by America’s First Holy President, He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, that it would be an act of “judicial activism” to strike down the Obamacare law.

“I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected congress,” President Obama said at a White House event in the Rose Garden today.

“I just remind conservative commentators that for years we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step,” Obama said to the White House press.

No distinction made between Supreme Court decisions that invalidate laws because of irreconcilable contradictions against the restrictions in the Constitution…and decisions that invalidate laws because of concerns over “if this, then such-and-such-a-thing might happen.” They’re all just sort of lumped in together and called “judicial activism,” if they go against the grain of what His Holiness wants.

This is supposed to be a Professor of Constitutional Law speaking. We’re told so, anyway.

The e-mails have been busy during my travels on Friday and Saturday, during which time I was at the mercy of the wireless networks in Nevada, a broad flatland in which one must consider himself fortunate to find working indoor plumbing. So this morning at coffee o’clock I have some reading to do. And what do I see in my inbox…vast, great volumes of not-much. Race hustlers trying to make the Trayvon Martin shooting more incendiary, and funny pictures of cats.

And then…

My President had some kind of deadline looming over His head Saturday night, for which He urgently needed me to pony up three dollars. I’m not sure what that was all about. Something to do with the FEC, so from this I infer it would be related to His efforts to win a second term in the upcoming elections.

Ed Darrell & Co. are completely upset with me. There is a picture of our President making the rounds, walking in His dignified way from a plane to a limousine or perhaps vice-versa, carrying a hardcover copy of The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. People think poorly of this, and Mr. Darrell has harsh words for those who think so poorly. His critiism is against poor thinking, but as always seems to be the case with him, one cannot help but suspect he is upset that they’ve reached a conclusion he doesn’t like. One also ends up a little confused about whether his excited and scolding words are for those who send the picture around through the e-mail, or for those who quite reasonably and innocently draw their conclusions from it.

I’m not sure he himself knows.

President Obama has hit me up before for contributions of $2 or $3. Sometimes the e-mails are not from Him, but from people who report to Him or somehow support Him in His efforts. The last one, I think, was from His wife Michelle. There is a lot of language to the effect of how close we are to getting this thing done that we’re trying to do, that is so important. Nothing unusual about any of this, except in this case, I’ve not yet seen a specific statement made about what it is they/we are trying to be doing, which I find a little odd. Isn’t it part of typical deadline management, to keep in mind the horrific consequences to follow of failing to meet the deadline? Granted, that all by itself doesn’t necessitate a repeated chanting over & over again of what the consequences are…but it becomes an expected part of the pitch when the time comes to shake people down for money. What are we trying to do?

Ed’s pals are not happy with me going after just one thing…in which they’re squarely in the wrong. They would like the conversation to be expanded to include other things they think will make them look better. This “James Kessler” person would like to talk about “your [my] side” and/or Republicans, which is unfortunate since that has nothing to do with anything; my point was that Ed Darrell, wrapped up in his hatred and his passions, said something silly and illogical, I’m right and that’s that.

But after all these years of me subscribing to Ed Darrell’s website, and all these years of having been wisely led by President Obama, I notice nothing’s changed — not one single thing. There are these problems existing somewhere; nobody can say, specifically, what those problems are (except schoolteacher Ed is very often upset that the public education system is getting enough money, I guess there’s that, but that particular peeve is not under discussion here). There is not much specific discussion of the problems so it follows that there’s no talk at all about what the solutions are going to be.

But still there is something to inspire all the hot air flowing with such great heat, power and force from the progressives among us. The bulk of it seems to be: These nice people over here do not yet possess a monopoly on free speech — they’re having trouble getting their message out. Those other people, over there, are getting a message out and that’s part of the problem. They need to be shut up.

It is rather remarkable that if I were previously sympathetic to the global desires of Planet Looney Liberal, I’d be forced to seriously reconsider my allegiances right about now. After the last four years of Obama’s presidency and highly successful — and privileged — campaigning, if all the problems in the world that you can see are due to Him not quite being able to get the last word in on enough things…or perhaps not giving enough speeches?…there’s something very, very wrong with your viewpoint. Also, it’s further remarkable that after all the Best! Speech! Evar! going on again and again and again…I still don’t understand what the Obama agenda is. I’ve responded to quite a few of these e-mails asking me for the $3 asking, politely and succinctly, what exactly it is we’re trying to do. I’ve not yet received an answer back.

There is a new video out called The Road We’ve Traveled, narrated by Tom Hanks. Perhaps my question would be answered if the video had a title more like, The Road In Front Of Us or something…okay, so these people who are paid to come up with things that might possibly be credited to President Obama, have found some stuff. Fine, but what choices are we making, when we choose Obama’s leadership? What are the advantages of said leadership, contrasted with that of someone else — who is also capable of making decisions when the time comes, but would & could be expected to make different ones, due to a wholly different outlook on the world and how it works? On this, the seventeen minutes stand functionally mute.

If the video contributes anything at all to the decision to be made about the upcoming election, it is only this: Here, here and here, Barack Obama was confronted with an important decision that could be made by nobody else. And He decided!

Well…with all respect to the office of the Presidency…pffft. You could say exactly the same thing about Obama’s predecessor, couldn’t you? Actually, you could say that about everyone who’s been elected to that office. Except maybe those two guys who died in office without serving very long…I suspect even they would be able to point to something.

After all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and hundreds of speeches given by Him every single year out of the last three or four — I don’t really know what the Obama Doctrine is. About anything. I see He opts for this-or-that when such-and-such a decision comes up…sometimes. It’s much more usual for Him to, as they say, “vote present.” But from whatever definitive decisions actually do manage to be graced with His Holy Imprimatur, I try to reach conclusions about what the Obama philosophy is…and these loudmouths like Ed & Crew scold me about it. If my conclusion is not flattering, that is. And I cannot help but conclude, like I said, that that’s what the scolding is really all about. Meanwhile, the question remains unanswered.

Reasonable persons across the ideological spectrum should be able to agree, that if your argument can only be made to look good by impugning the character of the other guys, to the point where you’re avoiding any discussion of the decisions made & why they’re made, then your argument is probably wrong. According to that, then, they would support whoever is presenting a good plausible plan to get the gas prices back down and get all these capable and able-bodied people working again. I think President Obama should be displaying Himself and His crew as the people who are laboring to implement such a plan.

But from Him, and His supporters, all I’m seeing and hearing is how important it is that they be given more of a chance to get their message out, than those detestable other-people. In fact, it can be truthfully said that — for all I know — that’s the whole point of the seventeen-minute-video linked above: Re-elect Obama, so He can continue to give speeches every day, because who knows, sooner or later one of these days He’ll give the one speech that finally gets the message out. You know, I’m not entirely sure what that has to do with getting the unemployment rate down to five percent, getting gas back down to $2.65 a gallon, and recovering America’s triple-A credit rating.

Steven Hayward posts at PowerLine. He’s recapping the month of March, and this was a source of great enjoyment to me.

First came the Sandra Fluke controversy. What looked like a well-staged triumph for the Left because of a rare overreach by Rush Limbaugh resulted instead in a ferocious blowback against Bill Maher, Louis C.K., and HBO, while Rush’s ratings have spiked and advertisers came groveling back after the anti-Rush boycott was revealed to have been trumped up by Media Matters. Meanwhile, while the media elites identify with Fluke as one of their own, it is less clear that ordinary Americans think the government owes free contraception to 30-year old college students.

Second, Obama is in full retreat and panic mode over gasoline prices, and energy generally….Byron York flatly predicts that Obama will be forced to approve the Keystone pipeline before the election. Obama’s embrace of the GOP slogan of “all-of-the-above” energy means that environmentalists are being largely thrown under the bus.

Then came the Trayvon Martin incident. But what looked like a by-the-numbers drill for the racial grievance industry has started to collapse beneath certain inconvenient facts that don’t fit the narrative such as Zimmerman’s ethnicity and political party registration (Democratic), eyewitness testimony that Martin was assaulting Zimmerman, and Spike Lee advocating vigilantism against Zimmerman, but tweeting an incorrect home address, endangering an innocent elderly couple.
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Then of course we have the Obamacare argument in the Supreme Court this week. Even if the Court ultimately upholds the Affordable Care Act, the course of the argument is extremely damaging to the Left. And if it is struck down, I predict the Left will overreact in ways that will also backfire badly.

Finally, yesterday the House voted down Obama’s proposed budget for next year by a vote of 414 – 0. Not even the most leftist members of Obama’s own party are willing to go on record in support of his unserious and irresponsible budget. Political stunt by the GOP? Sure, but so what?
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None of this should be taken as a sign of a decisive “turning point,” or that our side has won, or even that we’re winning…But it’s been a lousy last month for the Left.

I like the last paragraph the best. After all, it isn’t clear that anything has actually changed here, at all. Odds of the democrats hanging on to the White House and Senate, and taking the House of Representatives — they’re about at the same level now as they were on the last day of February, I think. Obviously that’s always debatable, but that seems to be the case. And yet something did happen.

I think it’s a case not so much of something being altered in form or shape, or in the direction it’s traveling, but rather one of something being revealed. I see a trend permeating through four of the above five events, all of them apart from the budget thing. Fluke, gas and energy, Trayvon, SCOTUS…most especially with the last one. Do you see what I see?

The democrats have a bad habit going on, which they show no signs of arresting or even slowing down, wherein they write the future. That is to say, they start to invent some fiction about what is going to happen. It’s as if they lack the humility needed to acknowledge that we live in a universe filled with unpredictable things. Now in theory, that isn’t really true, because if there is any object in the universe capable of impacting another, then that object must possess sufficient significance for its state to be known and measurable, and if it is in a process of change, then that change must be known and measurable as well…but let’s not drift too far off topic into exploring chaos theory & all that, for it’s all a red herring. To effectively use such a vast repository of knowledge about object states, object metamorphoses, object bearings & vectors of travel, et al, is well outside of the capability of knowledgeable humans. Yoda pegged it: Always in motion, the future is, difficult to see.

But none of this has to do with what democrats do when they boast, with all their fanfare and all their insolent superiority, how they will prevail in this-or-that. They’re great ones for putting on airs and going through the motions like they reached their decisions as the culmination of some rational, scientific, methodical process full of weighing and measuring. Most of the time, though, it’s all posturing. Really, the mask had already slipped when they took this attitude with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Obamacare, the White House was extra, extra, extra, super-duper sure that they’d prevail. Now really. Think it through with all the logic and rationality they pretend to be using. Why would you say that?

You work for the White House and you’re super-duper sure the SCOTUS will vote your way. That would mean, you’re super-duper sure the “liberal wing” will line up…which isn’t enough…and then, I heard some of the law was written with Justice Scalia in mind, maybe your hopes are pinned on him, or you have a lot of confidence Justice Kennedy will see fit to come down on your side. Neither of those prospects seem, to me, to be cause for optimism in the Obama White House. Maybe the combination of both of them, since it only takes one? Seems doubtful.

There was no reason for them to get all cocky about this. It was all a bunch of fakery.

They got their asses kicked, here, because they have this unfortunate tendency to start to believe their own fakery and posturing. We just saw them self-immolate over it, four times in a row. It really isn’t that complicated…see, part of the reason they can act all confident, even when the odds are stacked heavily against them, is that they have this zero-tolerance policy against any doubts in their own ranks. From what I’ve seen, the zero-tolerance policy persists even when they feel safely ensconced on high ground, among their own trusted peers, behind closed doors. I have no way to verify that, of course, it just looks that way to me…I argue with some of them, I come up with things that would make them doubtful, things with which they should have already been preoccupied, if they’re the cautious thinkers they pretend to be, and it’s like…der? They never heard of such a thing before. Have no idea what I’m talking about. So it seems, to me, to work that way. No doubts are allowed. Supremes will side with us, it’s a done deal.

Yes, they end up talking about the future as if it’s something that’s already happened. Pay attention, you’ll see they do that quite a lot.

If there is any cause for actual optimism, here, it is in that they just can’t stop. It is their chosen methodology for fellowship among their own, and the feeling of camaraderie is a vital ingredient to the fuel that drives them. They can’t do without it. They need everyone on the team, to stay on the team, and so many of the people on the team are only there because they want to be on the winning side.

This is the kind of thing a smart general spots in the enemy, right before a battle in which that smart general’s side emerges victorious even against long odds. The enemy, once afflicted with a weakness, is further injured by an inability to address the weakness — because to address it, the weakness would have to be inspected, and this enemy seems to be unable to even acknowledge such weaknesses exist.

How long was the left asked the question: If the government can require us to buy something we don’t want to buy, what can’t it do? And everyone asking, down to a man, was dismissed as a slobbering, slope-foreheaded, teabagger racist. Go away! You don’t count! Let the big boys figure out how this new perfect wonderful society will work, and then when we can’t make it work without your money, we’ll come after you and tell you what to do.

And what question did the Supreme Court ask them, when the time came to defend it in court.

How well-prepared were they, for the very same question they’d heard for two years solid. Uh…not sure how to answer that, derp derp derp.

Reckless optimism is not warranted here. But cautious optimism certainly is. The democrats can be told, point blank, right to their faces, where their weakest flank is…they can be given multiple years, solid, to fix it, said fix being no more complicated than writing up a message, testing it, and getting it disseminated. Which is something they’re pretty capable of doing when they put their minds to it. And in all that time, they won’t put their minds to it.

It happened four times in a row, in the space of a month. If they were tested, similarly, ninety-six more times, things would come out the same way ninety-six more times. We’ve seen the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Their defeat is more likely, if the weaknesses receive due attention, and those weaknesses are not complicated or hard to define.

Update: If the other side feels justified in playing some of this hazardous write the future game, just to see what it’s like…there is a likelihood that Peggy Noonan has isolated the next point of failure.