Let’s start with the first problem: The guy’s a freakin’ broken record…

Another problem, which I posted to my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

What I’m learning from SOTU #8: We’ve got a lot of harebrained politicians out there who think financial solvency can be gauged *solely* by annual income. All throughout the fifty states. This is quite bizarre…we really let these people make decisions about things??

No distinction made between personal income and household income. No distinction made between gross and AGI. And forget all about whether you’re living in an urban mecca, or whether you’re out in the middle of ugly brown hills with dead grass all around with your nearest neighbor a third of a mile away. Barack Obama thinks, if He knows you’re making $200k a year, He knows what your standard of living is…and if He knows you’re making a million, He knows something else about how you live.

Dare I say it — He just isn’t very sophisticated. It’s like He never has had to live in the real world.

Then I noted,

What I’m learning from SOTU #15: Liberals think the most wonderful lesson to be learned from the American experiment, is about working together and laboring toward a common purpose. How sickeningly insulting…

Really, that’s all it was ever about? Patrick Henry said “Give me togetherness or give me death,” is that how that speech went?

After His Holiness relinquished the podium and The House adjourned, with another couple bottles of brew percolating in my system I had another thought…

Sometimes, when you’re exposed to something repeatedly, you notice new things about it even if the repeated-exposure has been going on awhile and the thing you’re being exposed to is very simple.

I noticed something about President Obama’s (>=400 times a year) speeches tonight, and it’s disturbing. This leitmotif of “should” and “should not.” From way early on, we’ve been doing something abysmally stupid, bumbling around like Keystone Cops, until the blessed day that Barack The Magnificent walked into line-of-sight and said “this should not be that way” and now we’re all supposed to look at each other and go duh, hey, He’s right, why are we doing this.

Like it’s really that simple, Pres. Obama? ALL of the time?? There couldn’t possibly have been some rational reason why well-intentioned people have been doing it this way, regardless of how little sense it makes to You? Isn’t this how You got in trouble with that promise to shut down Guantanamo? Isn’t this exactly how You got in trouble with that dumbass remark about the Cambridge police and how they “acted stupidly”?

I’ve personally met people like this, carrying around all the arrogance to think everyone else was being completely nonsensical until they came on the scene, channelling the long-awaited voice of reason. Just very few people like this I’ve met…very, very few. Thank God.

Actually, I had some other thoughts. They mostly dealt with some things noticed by many other people…not a new thing by any means…since this calendar year is divisible by 4, which means it’s an election year, Barack Obama is sliding a lot of sentences past His lips which might as well have found their way into the speeches of a shrill, strident, uncompromising conservative Republican president. Not just the words, but the thoughts as well. What a wonderful place America is, how worthy the country is of an unremitting and terrible defense.

One of my Facebook friends, former work colleague, actually said “…this is a rehash of his campaign promises and he didn’t deliver. I agree there is no money for most of it. I like what he said about offshored jobs though.” This, I think, captures the essence of President Obama’s speeches, as well as the thought process within the audience He is trying to reach: “I know He has no credibility and He doesn’t mean any of it, but I liked His words when He said…”

So there are your three problems.

1. I know everything, so if I see people doing something I don’t understand, it can’t possibly be that they’ve been working in their specialty for awhile and know something I don’t know — they are starved from the benefit of my common sense and I shall distribute it to them…
2. I can promise you someone living on $201k a year in Beverly Hills is livin’ large, swimming in cash, whereas someone living in Eastern Montana on $199k a year doesn’t have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of…
3. I know Barack Obama is writing me rubber checks, but His signature is SOOOOO pretty!

Now solve those three problems, and have the government spend less money every year than it’s taking in — we’ll be on much better footing, and all of our significant problems will become temporary.

Leave them as they are, and we will continue on the course that we’re on. The embedded video up top is testament to that.

“Privatization would’ve been a better route to go…”

There’s a debate we need to have. Tom Daschle said “you can’t professionalize unless you federalize” a decade ago and it would seem, based on all I’ve been able to learn about it, that’s the extent of the serious debate we’ve had here.

We’re supposed to be so concerned about finding that enviable balance between reasonable security and full preservation of our civil liberties. Well, out of ten years, that’s not much serious discussion is it?

From Kini the Aloha Guy.

…and much more patience than I’d be able to show. Good to see.

Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.

From here.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Fading…fading…fading…

Newt’s doing very well. I’m pleased that there’s sand in the gears of the Romney machine and there’s a real chance someone else is going to get the nomination. I’m unhappy that it’s Newt.

But it’s bittersweet all the way. This is poetic justice all around.

I’m delighted to see the anguish and frustration on the part of the faux-intellectual faux-conservatives. You know, the ones like David Frum, for example, endlessly crying in their Pinot Noir about the perceived streak of “anti-intellectualism” in the Republican party. I cannot help but wonder what would happen if Romney bowed out right about now, making a Newt nomination a certainty…and then if Sarah Palin offered to step (back) in, what would they say? I imagine they’d still go for Newt because “we need someone with the intellectual horsepower to defeat The Great Barack Obama” or words to that effect. But more than a few would admit to seeing a certain positive appeal in Alaska’s former Governor that was not evident to them six months ago. Actually, I know this for fact; a few have personally told me so, which could not have been easy for them.

They won’t ‘fess up to learning the life lesson: Be very careful about wishing for a field of options to be narrowed down.

It also pleases me enormously to see the liberal disgust. The feeling of fear is palpable. Anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention, understands that the lefties wanted an Obama/Romney contest, it would have been the next best thing to skipping the elections altogether and swearing in OBumbles as Dictator For Life. Liberals are disgusted with Newt because they know the conservatives are disgusted with Newt — and are willing to rally behind the former House Speaker anyway. They understand this means something. See, like I’ve been saying for awhile, when liberals try to get other liberals elected or re-elected, they act just like conservatives. They understand human incentive and how it connects with free trade…all of a sudden. They’re wondering something like: If the GOP is willing to do that, then what else is it willing to do?

In fundraising, Emperor Barack is 13% of the way toward His original goal, which it seems He’s going to have to abandon right about now. It’s still an impressive amount of money and He’s likely to be out in front this year money-wise, but it must be worrisome that He’s miscalculated the level of His own support so badly.

How to make it a sure thing that we’ll have a different President a year from now? Distill the next three paragraphs down to a bumper sticker slogan, and I think you’ll have this thing nailed shut:

YES Newt Gingrich, with all of his faults, is looking like an okay deal right now to Republicans as well as to the nation as a whole. It is not because the faults are hard to spot. It is a case of beggars-can’t-be-choosers. America is negotiating its own election from a position of weakness.

Across the ideological divide and all our more trivial disagreements, we are still Americans first. We are all unhappy with one thing or another because we do not like to see our country negotiate things from a position of weakness. But to half of us, three years ago it seemed like an okay idea for our country to — call it what you will. Bow a little. Go on an “apology tour.” Listen as its leader droned on endlessly about “for far too long we have [blank]” and “we [the country, not His administration] have not always done what’s right.” In short, look at herself the way any shrewd military commander wants his enemy to look at itself; questioning its own right & privilege to exist and thrive.

It is hypocritical and unworkable to cheer on the journey to the position of weakness, and indulge in shock and dismay as we reach the ultimate destination. In ’08, we planted. Now we’re harvesting.

One fellow Republican I know put it better than anybody else, I think: Obama out now, later on we’ll take out the trash.

The first time I came up with the idea of building a fence to divide the country, at least on these pages, was in February of ’06. It isn’t that I relish the idea, the point is that I think it is unavoidable for many reasons. There are those of us who value opportunity over security and there are those of us who value security over opportunity; nothing wrong with an intermixed people sustaining different systems of personal priority, but it’s a problem because this affects how individuals see their life’s journeys. The opportunity people see the whole point of the exercise as one of learning and becoming more capable, so you can incrementally exchange the security you brought forward from childhood, sacrificing it for greater potential and personal growth. The security people just want to make sure everything is guaranteed, both the needs and the wants, and from what I’ve seen, aren’t too interested in doing more for themselves. In fact, they think that’s a bad thing. They’re frequently heard to say rich people should give back to the community, and so forth…

I have also noticed the opportunity-over-security people tend to think their way through problems logically — how else could it be done? — whereaas, the security-over-opportunity people would rather feel their way through problems, or around them, emotionally. I notice the security/feeler people regularly get me into trouble, because they feel like talking out these differences and they feel I’m receptive and open-minded about the issues, so they feel like a discussion would be a good idea. But then when I ask thinking, logical questions about their priorities, they feel like they’re being attacked…since they aren’t accustomed to it…and then they feel like I’m the one who cornered them, and therefore they feel like I must have started the discussion, and they feel like I’m badgering them and won’t give it up. Since I didn’t end up agreeing with them.

I also notice these thinker/opportunity-over-security types, whom I’ve called the Architects, don’t really give a rip how many other people are also Architects, or how many other people are the other kind, the Medicators….whereas, the Medicators crave much more control. They want everyone else to be a Medicator. We have become increasingly polarized since 9/11, and the Florida election debacle, in the wake of which we’ve seen nobody from either side is willing to compromise. And this is a great pity. For years, I have been re-telling a wonderful analogy somebody made, and I’ve never successfully been able to recover this column, about what would happen if we had a national radio station and, rather than twiddling with a tuning knob in our cars to select our own personal choices, we were to debate whether our monolith national station were to play soft rock, punk, rap, country, blues, classical or jazz. Can you imagine? It would be heated and rancorous, and it would be unnecessary. I have the perception we are becoming torn apart over a matter of personal taste, whose elevation to a national declaration is silly and unnecessary. Naturally, it’s just gettting more and more heated because nobody wants to let go of their personal priority system, and why the heck should they?

The logic to the “Architect” and “Medicator” names is explained here.

We need a wall. Hate to say it, but we need one, all across the country, and it has to be a high one, impassable, with checkpoints. Architects, the opportunity-seekers, do not want to share their toys — because they see life logically, and they know they’ve grown up, these are not toys anymore, they are tools and property they have acquired through wise decision-making, effort and sacrifice. Medicators don’t think anyone really grows up, therefore they want the toys to be shared. They say it’s because that’s what momma always said. But the truth is they want everything shared because they know, contributing as little as they do, they’d come out on top that way.

Now, I do not know if Burt Prelutsky reads my blog. I’ve always taken it as a given that hardly anybody does. But how else do you explain this gem, which appeared on his website sometime late last night…

It only makes sense to divide the United States along political lines. I’m not saying it would be easy, but it’s pretty obvious that the nation is growing increasingly polarized with roughly half the population favoring a huge federal government that oversees everything from smoking to nutrition, while the other half believes that the federal government has gone from being a necessary evil with the emphasis on necessary to one that is increasingly evil.

As I see it, the entire Pacific coast, along with the Northeast, favors Obama and the Democrats. Unfortunately, those two areas are separated by about 2,500 miles. Therefore, I would suggest connecting those two parts of the country with, say, a 30 mile corridor south of the Canadian border that would run through parts of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That America would include California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey. We conservatives would give up Hawaii in exchange for Alaska. You can see where that would make for an odd-looking country, but no odder than the congressional districts that have been gerrymandered by the Democrats here in California.

I’m not being capricious about dividing a nation that has already cost 600,000 American lives lost during the war that was waged to preserve the Union. I simply see no other way to resolve the differences when half the population regards abortion as murder and the other half feels that young girls are entitled to state-funded abortions without parental consent. The same separation exists between those who favor same-sex marriages and those who don’t; those in favor of capital punishment and those who oppose it; those who respect the Second Amendment and those who’d like to abolish it; those who favor class and race warfare and those who believe their America is above such things; those who regard compulsory union membership as a good thing and those who don’t; those who defend public schools but send their own kids to private schools and those who believe in vouchers and home-schooling; those who oppose drilling for oil and digging for coal, and those who realize that alternative sources of energy might be sufficient for a house, but not for an industrial nation; and those who think that the rights of insects trump the rights of human beings and those of us who are sane.

Prelutsky, who writes much better than I do, kicks off the story with an incident about Martha’s Vineyard — you’ve heard of it, right? — being held hostage by a mean turkey. The turkey eventually makes the mistake of attacking the police, at which time the crisis is ended with some gunfire, and the cops end up being the bad guys because hey, it’s Martha’s Vineyard.

The self-defense aspect alone demonstrates that our house united cannot stand. We think of our liberals as being opposed to war, but while the conflict endures, we see what they’re really opposed to is one side enjoying advantages of which the other side is deprived; even across a battlefield, they want things equal-equal-equal. And what better way is there to ensure a war drags on indefinitely?

Can you recall so much as a single incident in which evil was defeated by good, by way of overwhelming, decisive and disproportionate force, and subsequently you could behold that the liberal conscience was soothed? Me neither. To our lefties, that is merely the beginning of the real conflict. And here’s the dirty little secret: Their extremists “wag the dog” of the moderates; the most intractable and militant run the show. Moderate-libs do not agree with extremist-libs that (as I’ve said many a time) when the schoolyard fight is started by one kid and finished by another, the punishment should be rained down upon the stronger boy who acted in self defense and threw the last punch. Moderates side with conservatives in saying the punishment should be for the kid who threw the first one.

But the most rapid and strident libs, who hate any kind of conflict, are never too fond of whoever ends one. And so everyone on their side of the fence, a fence which exists only in thought, becomes duty-bound to jettison common-sense and side with the whack-job lefties and say: No punishment for the kid who threw the first punch, the punishment is for whoever threw the last one. Because there is something nefarious and untrustworthy about possessing strength, even if it is used to end conflict and begin a new period of peace.

No, these two sides cannot be emulsified. Not in their current form.

But I do have a feeling that if the fence were to exist in practice, and the Medicators could go live on the other side and see how well their military-free police-free gun-free share-the-toys opportunity-free society works for a year or two, they might end up looking at life differently. Without the fence, their ideas look appealing because, although few will deign to acknowledge it, their ideas create conflict where conflict did not exist before. It is the conflict that makes it appear promising. The tragedy of these wise liberals being intermixed with these dullard conservatives who are stockpiling money and destroying the environment…that is what makes the liberals look wise. With the separation in place and the conflict removed, there would be a new perspective in place. I think it would be a highly educational one. For everybody.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

It’s important…

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

Yeah, it has something to do with President OBumbles; it is now a regular occurrence for me to hear Him defended with the tired ol’ “doing the best that He can” and “it will take Him awhile to clean up the mess of you-know-who.”

The issue is not that, if this is the best defense available, that as good a guarantee as you’re gonna get that we’re looking at a flop. Although that’s true. The issue is calling out the flop. So no, this is not entirely concerned with our incumbent President; it’s a much, much bigger issue than Him.

It takes balls to call out flops. But the first step toward success is to know what it looks like. To know what a success looks like, you have to call out a fail when it’s staring you right in the face.

Too many among my so-called-countrymen will read that, and reply with something like “That’s right! and…” then they’ll go on to mention some guy who stopped being President three years ago today. Thereby continuing to illustrate exactly what I’m pointing out…as well as the plain and simple fact that they just can’t stop.

That other guy was in for eight years. He ran things for eight years. The average retail gas price (USD/gallon, all brands) for those eight years, assuming I ran my calculator right, was $2.174; that is not the price of a gallon of gas today. The average unemployment rate during those eight years was 5.2625%; that is not the unemployment rate today.

Can’t aspire toward success if you won’t spot the fails.

That’s two in a row. Here’s the one from earlier this week:

Rick Perry, dropping out, endorses Gingrich.

“I believe Newt is a conservative visionary who can transform our country. We’ve had our differences, which campaigns will inevitably have, and Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?” Perry said at a press conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Mittens is about to snag this thing. It’s a very critical time. And once again, Sarah Palin is right:

We need this thing to drag on longer. That may not change how things shake out in terms of who the nominee will be, but it has a big effect on what kind of pressures are brought to bear, and what sort of message that nominee carries into the general election.

And say what you want about Newt, but it’s a good message. There is a consistent theme here of talking back to certain people and forces that haven’t been resisted in any meaningful way up until now, and have long had it coming.

Look who’s been making it into the highest offices. Do we really need a tell-all interview from a previous wife to become part of the process? Last I checked, people on both sides of the partisan divide were still ticked off and annoyed that Bill Clinton’s affair became a matter for an impeachment trial…well…looks to me like people are ticked off and annoyed by that, in the same way that people refuse to read the National Enquirer. As in, if it were true, things wouldn’t be happening that are, in fact, happening.

Thus ends the kingmaker career of Marianne Gingrich. Bet she’s pleased. Well done, Newt.

Over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, I put up this story about the proposed “Reasonable Profits Board…

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to control gas profits.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding “a reasonable profit.” It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms. Unlike other bills setting up advisory boards, the Reasonable Profits Board would not be made up of any nominees from Congress.

…to which, one of my friends over there had this to say: “Jesus Christ. Ayn Rand is a time traveler.”

I want the bumper sticker. It would have to be separated from the reference to my Lord, since aside from being cutely blasphemous, it seems to be making an ironic statement about religion itself by juxtaposing faith itself with a prominent member of the faithless.

But yes, at this point just crediting Alyssa Rosenbaum with the mere gift of prophesy leaves some things unexplained. Time travel seems more like it. The weird name of this board, seems like something straight out of the book, around page 550 or so. It’s Directive 10-289, the Moratorium on Brains! Run for your lives!

No, not quite there yet, though I’m apprehensive about seeing what comes next. We’re still at the early stages, where the unproductive tell the productive how to do their producing, and then when the predictable results are unveiled before us, we lie to ourselves about what it all means.

Terri asks:

How about a “reasonable taxes board? The federal government taxes gas at 18.4 cents a gallon. Is it unreasonable? Theoretically no because it’s going to pay for interstate highways but seriously, if you want to lower the price of gasoline isn’t the one place you actually control the better place to look than setting up an unconstitutional board to force one type of business into a profit model that is designed by people who have no interest in the business other than because they “care” about the poor?

Update: Boortz defines “windfall profit”:

Now as I’ve mentioned, the Democrats have come up with this idea before .. though the idea of this presidential panel is new. But a windfall profit … what is that? I’ve come up with a definition I’d like to share with you, since I’m sure that government schools don’t teach things like this. A windfall profit is money earned by a company that can be readily demagogued by a politician. It is money earned by a company on a commodity that consumers absolutely need but don’t like paying for.

Bulls-eye. They’re supposed to care so much about the middle class and the poor people, but if you hate a certain layer of our economic strata, by which I mean absolutely loathe it and want to see it go away, what better way to make it happen: You identify a product or a service upon which that class relies, the deprivation of which would do the people within the class the greatest damage, and then you make the production of that product or service as miserable, as onerous, and as unprofitable an experience as you possibly can.

Thus has been the case with democrat politicians and: Oil, gasoline, higher education for the next generation, rents, mortgages, health care services, legal assistance and food. In the municipalities which have most consistently elected democrats throughout the decades, those commodities have all been priced into outer space.

As far as domestic issues are concerned, a democrat is a Republican who cares about “the plight of the middle class” and lacks a functional long-term memory.

This year’s example of one, after today, will be such an example no more.

This is why there is this perception that the Republican party is one of white straight males. Because when you filter the search down to “it’s my turn” candidates, you see the democrat party does indeed start to look much more diverse, and the Republican party is full of white males. And among “it’s my turn” candidates, the white male always loses, yet the GOP continues to do this.

A lot of voters are out there ready to vote for “it’s my turn” candidates; that is a plain and simple fact. But white male democrat Ted Kennedy famously flamed out. If you’re going to support someone whose “turn” it is, like you’re little kids playing Yahtzee or Monopoly, why would you support a white male? You wouldn’t. They don’t. Maybe they would if they were given a reason, but by the very definition of the term, the it’s-my-turn candidate is not capable of giving them one.

The results, when the question is actually asked, can be cringe-inducing:

Blah, blah, blah.

If you have a gender or racial or gender-preference claim, there’s no need to get into any of this. It is realistic to predict the question won’t ever be asked. Hillary Clinton, should she decide to run again, will make a spectacular it’s-my-turn candidate. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, to be sure…but you’d better believe there are a lot of people out there who think it’s her turn, and not just because she’s a woman.

As near as I can figure out, the logic works something like this: Her husband cheated on her. She should be President. But don’t ask me to explain it any better than that…

Now that Perry is out, there is still another it’s-my-turn candidate in the running, and I’m afraid this one has a real lock on becoming the Republican nominee: Mittens. It’s his turn. Now, he’s already had to point out what makes him a better candidate, especially compared to the incumbent, and he’s done a satisfactory job of it. I don’t have much confidence in his ability to settle on wise decisions, any more than I’d put on a Magic-8 ball. His visage fairly screams at you “suit-wearing bureaucrat” and his convictions are not reliable.

But if he clinches this, I will support him, because Obama has to go home.

And then he will lose. Because a contest between OBumbles and Mittens is a contest between the devil you know and the devil you don’t.

Got it from one of the guys at work. WAT.

Update 1-19-12: This slide in the lecture being used to illustrate awesomeness, is so awesome in the way it uses awesomeness to metaphorically connect with awesomeness, that I had to capture an awesome .gif of it in such a way that I could give appropriately awesome credit.

WAT.

Plan this stuff ahead…

Hat tip to Miss Cellania, via Gerard.

No. Say what you want about the three marriages and the rest of the baggage, but that is the correct answer.

This blog, which nobody reads anyway, has frequently made the point about GoodPerson Fever; we’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality.

After the process of elimination is complete, they’ve done much worse than eliminate the most beneficial option that could have been chosen — they’ve settled on a single avenue of approach which, on average, stands a much lesser likelihood of servicing the stated objective than an avenue of approach that would’ve been selected by random chance. So you’d be better off asking a Magic 8 ball. Oops, was that racist of me? If you’re pointing it out, you’re an example of exactly what I’m describing.

I know, I know. The fact that the audience is obviously overwhelmingly in favor of the point the former House Speaker is making, means nothing; the minority opinion is very often the right one, and all that. Trouble with that is — as Williams tries to mount another attack and save some face in his follow-up question, he relies on a brand of logic that forgets this. “I’m still right because my Twitter account is overflowing” or something. So, as usual, the politically-correct crowd has to assert their “right-ness” by choosing when majority opinion matters and when it doesn’t. At break-neck speed.

This thing Newt is bringing up, is something that has to be given better respect if we’re going to keep what strength we have as a nation, let alone make an attempt to recover what’s been lost in recent years. We congratulated Newt when he made those original comments; he was right then, he was right now, and it speaks volumes that it’s so rare for anyone to make the obvious point that a work ethic is something learned in early childhood. Nor can I recall anyone saying so, without some ninny jumping in to try to make a racial issue out of it. Well, it isn’t a racial issue when we have kids of all color, sitting around, their brains rotting, making it all the way to adulthood without being challenged on anything. In a way, they’re starving. They can’t enjoy the kind of self-respect one enjoys from working an honest day and receiving an honest paycheck.

I don’t think Newt’s gonna win this thing. But that particular exchange, I hope, lives on in history well beyond this rather underwhelming election cycle.

From here. Hat tip to Linkiest.

“Hates Brooklyn Decker” seems to have something to do with a swimsuit model who was born in 1987, so I’m thinking this is for the younger guys. Which makes sense. We hear much about how our society oppresses women, in fact we’ve been hearing about it for a very long time. But nobody discusses too much what the younger dudes could & should be doing to avoid psycho women.

This guy is making the point I’ve been trying to make: That it’s a mistake to observe so-many people voting as democrats, even registering as democrats, and presuming they all uphold democrat values with every fiber of their being. True, the democrats ask for the abuse themselves; they’re constantly holding themselves aloft as standard bearers of some vague and undetermined brand of morality, and when we see the morality in action, we see it is not morality at all. It’s like they don’t understand how that looks.

But if you apply tests in terms of what liberals are actually expected to believe, you see there really aren’t very many “liberals” around at all.

Here’s a test I invite you to take. Watch C-Span’s morning call-in show and listen to what people who phone in on the “Democrat” or “liberal” line have to say. When is the last time you heard a caller say, “We should all pay higher taxes so that the government can provide us with universal day care”? Or how about, “We should all pay higher taxes so the government can provide us with universal long term care”? I bet you can’t remember ever hearing that.

Here is what I suspect you will hear: Teachers complaining that teachers aren’t paid enough. Union members complaining about competition from workers overseas. Senior citizens whining about the meagerness of Social Security or Medicare benefits. Minority callers advocating more affirmative action. And what is the common denominator of these comments? Self-interest.

Yes, I know. Special interests are in both parties. Why wouldn’t they be? Yet as I wrote in my analysis of “progressivism,” the left in America has elevated special interest privilege to an art form.

Here’s the point: people wanting more, more, more are nothing more than people pursuing their own self interest in politics. They are not in principle different from any other special interest group. Importantly, they have nothing in common with what we normally have in mind by the term “liberalism.”

There is a reason for that. There are very few people around who want to give government more power over their money, their property or their lives.
:
Here is a second test. Keep watching C-Span. After the outside callers are gone, most days you get to watch Congress in action. Have you ever watched a series of speeches on the House floor? Have you ever watched a real Congressional debate? Try it some time. Then ask yourself this question: Do you trust the people you are watching on TV to manage your retirement pension? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or Fidelity or even Merrill Lynch? Do you trust the people on the House floor to manage your health care? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or even UnitedHealthcare or Aetna?

Congress in action most days reminds us of school children insulting and taunting each other. It’s like a group of adolescents desperately in need of adult supervision. It’s the opposite of the civil, rational deliberation that the Founding Fathers must have hoped for.

It takes a very special kind of person to watch lunacy in action and then decide to give the lunatics more control over your life. There are such special people, of course. They are disproportionately congregated in Hollywood, on the campuses of the nation’s colleges and universities and in the elite news media. What are the common characteristics all too many of them share? Arrested development (they never bothered to grow up), aversion to the rest of humanity (they really are elitists), a lack of common sense (they’ve never really managed anything) and a failure to master the syllogism (they approach the world emotionally, not logically).

Here is something you need to understand: liberalism is not an ideology. It’s a sociology. It’s not a way of thinking. It’s a way of responding to the world emotionally.

It all comes down to this: We have these “moderates” running around voting for democrats. They don’t believe in the liberal/democrat outlook on life. Many of them might respond to the world emotionally, because it takes less effort, but they don’t really believe the solution to our problems is to send more money to Washington.

I’ve become fond of an analogy to describe these people: Two kids get in a fight on the schoolyard, and the kid who threw the first punch ended up losing the fight. So you have the kid who started it and the one that finished it. Who gets punished? Part of the liberal ethos is to punish the stronger kid who won the fight. They’re never too excited about correcting the behavior of the person who actually created the problem, they’d much rather punish strength than errant behavior. No sane people agree with this. The moderates side with the conservatives in saying the troublemaker should be sent to detention, or something, and the person who exercised self-defense should walk scott-free, because that just makes sense. If he didn’t start anything, and ends up in trouble, that’s not justice. In fact that could invite a whole different and new kind of bullying.

But such common sense is not to be tolerated in uber-tolerant liberal-loonie land. Real life sides against the troublemaker, and the system will side against him, too? That’s just not how it’s supposed to work! Fight for the underdog! What a great opportunity to show some compassion.

It’s all got to do with incentives. Normal people believe in ’em, and liberals don’t. Well, in order to side with the liberals on that, you somehow need to exclude from the thought process the plain and simple fact that you respond to incentives; either because you haven’t been exposed to enough situations that you’re forced to reckon with this truth, or because you want to argue dishonestly. And both of those last two options describe the true-blue liberal to a tee.

You’ll notice liberal politicians tend to lack “real” experience on their resumes. They’re lawyers, or bureaucrats, or lawyer/bureaucrats. They come from some background in which their job is to ignore incentives, and the statements that would define all the efforts in which they’ve been engaged would all begin with “The rules say.” That’s the world in which they live; there’s some rulebook, and then there is the universe of real life, and then when the two diverge and start moving in different directions, that universe is just gonna have to shape up and get with it.

Whereas, the rest of us say, if it’s a good rule it should reflect real life, and the human characteristic of predictable responses to incentives.

The problem is not that the moderates are in favor of liberal policies. The problem is that the moderates aren’t remembering much. They don’t have bad value systems, they’re just failing to vote for things that would reflect those value systems.

Not sure how I missed this. Better late than never.

I’ve seen these numbers goin’ round on the nets…the same ones, over and over again. I never thought that made the cut, but you know, in video form like this it just completely works.

And I really like the ending.

…because that’s where it gets real. Tragically real.

Our kids are gonna be so pissed.

And this clip from A Bridge Too Far does an exemplary job of explaining the why, as well as the how. If your time is pressed, fast forward to 3:20:

That is exactly what I want done to them. Come on, we have to face facts; we simply can’t let this kind of conduct go. It’s like the Medical Officer said, once you let discipline go you can forget about getting it back again. So the punishment is going to have to be laid down — hard. Just like it was here.

Hey, when I’m right, I’m right.

Potty-mouth language warning in effect, not safe for the workplace or for any mixed audience.

Panetta is a shit-brained ass-infested dickhole.

One of the objectives that it would be nice to see a SECDEF try to achieve, is to retain some semblance of respect from the troops. That is not a vital and minimalist goal, of course…you could say it is one for the Generals but not for the suits that hold civilian command over the armed forces…but it would be good if the working relationship was a good one, or if there was at least some effort expended to make it a good one.

I saw a post up on a milblog somewhere that said something like, you just KNOW the guys at the top are pissed off when they break out the big-words book! (I think the big word under discussion was “reprehensible” or something.) See, that right there is the trouble. The big boss looks not at all like a big boss, he looks like a little puppet dancing to a tune, tossing around big fancy words that he knows, and everybody else knows — and he knows they know — that real people don’t actually use. Well okay, unless maybe if they’re bloggers. The whole exercise looks phony because it is. Imagine what that feels like to you when you’re out on your third deployment, doing the dirty work when it’s 130 degrees in the shade.

I understand this argument about recruited-terrorists, how when these pictures appear it makes it look like the United States is declaring a war on Islam, which is not a perception we can afford to have out there. But there is something about this that I’m having a tough time figuring out: One, this would obviously be a vexing puzzle for us, and a dangerous one, far more important than many of the others. How do we expect to win at it, then, without discussing it more openly? Since 2004 the only rule that’s been in place about it is “just don’t do it” — with a strong undertone of don’t talk about it. Well, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

And two: Has it ever occurred to these geniuses that some may be reacting to situations like this with a quite reasonable attitude of “I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t take yourself seriously”? There’s quite a lot to be said for a response, from the top, of: Look, if you don’t want your dead body defiled, don’t shoot at our guys.

Some people don’t get the irony.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account (I don’t think you can follow those links if you’re not signed up)…

On the Internet, as well as in person occasionally, I have noticed a lot of people imposing the following tests on other people, with great flourish and fanfare:

1. Do you agree with me?
2. Do you know what you’re talking about?
3. Have you managed to remain non-offensive?

They do this over and over again, many times in the space of a minute or two, which permits me to observe the following: Not once do I see the test subject pass one or two of the tests, and fail the remainder — the results are never mixed. All three are passed, or all three are failed. They are shrink-wrapped together and advance or retreat as a set.

I suppose people on both sides of the political spectrum do this, and until you see the pattern maintained for awhile there’s really nothing wrong with it. It only becomes suspicious when it remains consistent throughout a great many examples.

It becomes a callable foul when an ideological zealot hammers his opponents about perceived insults while simultaneously maintaining silence as his cohorts engage in actual ones. But even then, once called on it, the zealot will deny his own double-standard, and his blind spot may be so enlarged and debilitating that he is speaking honestly as he does this.

To really freak yourself out about this, apply the “Peggy Joseph test” as I’ve done a few times. When an Obama fan persists in this pattern, in which everyone who disagrees with him suffers an incurable knowledge deficit, and none of his like-minded comrades do, solicit an opinion about the competence of this colleague in the cause…

And this is where things get to be strange. The best you’ll get back is something like, yes there are some people with unrealistic expectations AndThatIsTrueOfBothSides et cetera. That’s the very best. You won’t get an acknowledgement of the obvious, that there are some absolutely incompetent people backing Obama. The problem is with an inability to say “This person has reached the same conclusion I have even though she’s a moron.” Or, conversely, “This other person has reached a conclusion different from mine, even though he might know a lot about what he’s talking about.”

The meaningful observation to make is one of fear. If you think things out fearlessly, one of the first things to become evident to you is that, although confessions like the two above do not help to get a conclusion sold, certainly, they don’t make that particular conclusion unsalable either. The correlation between knowing what you’re doing, and reaching the right answer all the time, is a rather weak one. Stupid people make the right choice every now & then. Pretty often, really. And you don’t have to wait long for the intellectual giant to make a colossal blunder.

The same goes with being offensive. Offensive people can be, and are much of the time, right. These relationships are non-correlative. Therefore, even if one does seek to argue dishonestly and impose double-standards on the participants to make a particular conclusion more cosmetically appealing, there is no need to shellac these unrelated characteristics together.

It is only an intellectual coward — and therefore, ultimately, an intellectual incompetent — who can’t acknowledge these basic, basic things.

We start at the beginning. In August of last year, billionaire Warren Buffett penned an op-ed in the New York Times complaining that his taxes weren’t high enough.

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
:
Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

President Obama, looking for some justification for a second term, appeared alongside his wealthy friend and pressed the attack against this threat to the American dream, which is…uh…the American dream?

“Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There’s no justification for it,” President Obama insisted while pitching his $4 trillion deficit reduction plan in the Rose Garden on Monday.

And a star was born, albeit, apparently, a reluctant one.

For nearly two decades, Debbie Bosanek has fielded press calls, investor queries, and sundry other requests for her boss, billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Now, she herself is in the middle of a very bright spotlight.

On Monday the White House revealed its debt-reduction package. The most controversial, headline-grabbing portion of the $4.4 trillion plan is what Obama calls the “Buffett rule,” which would ensure that people making more than $1 million a year pay higher rates than middle-income taxpayers. It is named for an often-repeated aphorism of Buffett’s, calling for higher levies on the rich: Buffett says he pays a lower overall tax rate than his hardworking secretary does, and that is wrong.
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“People making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay,” Obama said in announcing his plan. “Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. … It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million.”

Whether Bosanek really does pay a higher tax rate than Buffett, or whether the working class pays a higher tax rate than the gilded super-rich, is hard to say. Bosanek certainly isn’t chiming in.

Reached via telephone at Berkshire Hathaway’s Omaha offices on Tuesday morning, she sighed and politely responded: “I’m sorry, I’m not doing any interviews on that.”

“I understand you must be getting deluged.”

“I’ve got to let you go. Bye-bye.” With that, she hung up.

Her boss says she, or someone in the office, is paying 36 to 41 percent. Taking those words at face-value, I’d say the rest of us are owed at least the minimum information: How are these people getting their taxes done? I have to pay taxes too, and I need to know who & what to avoid.

But Buffett’s tale of tax misery for the lesser mortals, didn’t ring true.

The Buffett secretary comparison has become the go-to talking point for everyone supporting the proposed tax increases. But is it correct?

In order to properly investigate the claim, we contacted accounting professionals in different parts of the country and asked them to “run the numbers” on a secretary making $60,000 a year and a really rich guy.

That analysis becomes quite involved and is not the point of this morning’s coffee-o’clock scribblings. Go RTWT when & if you have the time, it’s quite eye-opening. No, I don’t think Warren Buffett would want you to, but do it anyway.

The long and weird backstory brings us to the events unfolding in the here-and-now:

Warren Buffett is ready to call Republicans’ tax bluff. Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett were feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.” The jab was in response to Buffett’s August 2011 New York Times op-ed, which made hay of the fact that our tax system is so unbalanced, Buffett (worth about $45 billion) pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Senator John Thune promptly introduced the “Buffett Rule Act,” an option on tax forms that would allow the rich to donate more in taxes to help pay down the national debt. It was, as Buffett told me for this week’s TIME cover story, “a tax policy only a Republican could come up with.”

Still, he’s willing to take them up on it. “It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” he says with a chuckle. So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.”

Get it? Warren Buffett wants to make an issue out of Republican hypocrisy.

See the subtle shift taking place: Warren Buffett is taking advantage of a very seldom-discussed privilege available only to a few among us, those who have managed to remain solvent. It may be more precise to define their numbers as: Those who feel comfortable with gambling. He gets to make a grandiose public statement about an example of hypocrisy that has not yet been demonstrated. Obviously he believes in it, and because he has some money to back up what he believes, it could be credibly surmised that his beliefs trump everybody else’s.

But he’s doing this to take a little bit of limelight away from another example of hypocrisy, this one much more credible since it arrives from the past rather than the future: Namely, his own hypocrisy. He’s already been caught red-handed, running to Washington to talk to his buddy Barack Obama, to get the taxes raised on his “mega-rich friends” and himself.

Gee, that Warren Buffett must be a wonderful personal pal. With friends like that…

But you know what? You don’t even need to wait for the Thune Act if you don’t think your taxes are high enough. As Mitch McConnell and others pointed out, you can send it in yourself. We are not to presume Buffett’s too dense & thick to figure this out for himself, are we? He must have recognized the option was available from the very beginning. Which, in my view, makes his whole cause here a little disingenuous to say the least.

But we don’t need to conclude this is incompetence talking, or even necessarily hypocrisy or deceit. I think it is an example of obfuscation…and Buffett, backed into a corner, if you were paying attention you’ll notice he finally dropped the act. To repeat:

“…as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” he says with a chuckle.

That is what this is all about. It doesn’t have anything to do with paying down the public debt or making the government more flush…not for just this year or the year coming-up, anyway. It isn’t about fairness to Buffett’s secretary or calculating a “fair share” for her tax bracket, or his, or any other.

It is about choice. The effort currently underway is to abrogate it. Obama, Buffett, et al, want to get rid of it. They want force. That is central to what this is all about. Everything else under discussion is simply derivative of that.

Senate Minority Leader McConnell, to his credit, made an issue out of that in his office’s response to Buffett’s challenge:

Sen. McConnell says that Washington should be smaller, rather than taxes getting bigger. And since some, like President Obama and Mr. Buffett, want to pay higher taxes, Congress made it possible for them to call their own bluff and send in a check. So I look forward to Mr. Buffett matching a healthy batch of checks from those who actually want to pay higher taxes, including Congressional Democrats, the President and the DNC.

And that would be $6.8 million in fines, to be specific.

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

Hat tip to a wonderful blog we’ve browsed & linked many times before, Small Dead Animals, a Canadian blog. Which offers up the most appropriate Atlas Shrugged quote, and headlines it “America’s EPA Absolutely Out of Control.”

Are you wincing in national shame yet?

This guy said it for me so I don’t have to.

I cannot for the life of me see what is inspiration or fantastic about this story. The main character is horribly self-absorbed, egocentric, narcissistic, and weak. The only thing that matters to her, is her; “what can this holy man do for me?”, “what can this Italian family and way of life do for me?”, “what can these geographical destinations do for me?”, “what can a potential life without the husband, with all his faults and mistakes (none of which could be malicious or evil in any way), who I swore myself to, be like?”

If you’d like to counter with something contextually juvenile like “but happiness is important! we have only one life to live!” or “marriage and commitment only works if both partners are happy!” or “spirituality is real! you must find it or you are incomplete!” or “women deserve to be empowered as well as men!” .. don’t. Spare us, please. You make a commitment, you honor that commitment until all avenues are exhausted.

The character wasn’t right for this journey to self-enlightenment, because the character was self-absorbed. Maybe the producers of the film didn’t see this. To people out here in flyover country — yes, the chicks too — everything was a big fat duh. The protagnoist approaches every country, every street and intersection, every other character with an attitude of what’s in it for me, me, me. She is spiritually unfulfilled. Yeah. Exactly. That’s what happens. You need two hours for that? You could have told it in a minute. You could have made it purely antecedent action, thus cutting it down to zero minutes.

Also, Julia Roberts wasn’t right for the role. At one point, the character is described as “hot.” And the story seems right for a woman about 20 to 25 years of age. Watching a woman in her mid-forties try to figure out what life is all about, just looks dumb and silly. Maybe if she was an empty-nester it would make more sense.

In fact, the only way this works is if you think for some reason the character was developed exactly the way she should have been…as a selfish bitch…and the casting director made some phone calls to find an actress for whom this wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

It’s not going to work for a man who’s been divorced, not even a little bit. And unfortunately, there are a lot of guys in my situation: Started barely-adult life in a starter marriage, the wifey brought nothing but champagne tastes for the beer budget, then after a zillion purchases closed with the sales pitch of “on both our incomes we can afford it” she tired of the materialistic lifestyle and took off. When you’ve been through the financial wreckage of a situation like that, this looks like a story of “what happened to her after you saw her hit the road.” You’re supposed to feel sorry for her because something’s missing from her life and she doesn’t know what. Aw…well…yeah that makes me sad, but not in the way you’re thinking…I was envisioning something involving stake-pegs, honey and an anthill.

I wish I was speaking just for myself and my unique history. Wish I was. You know that’s not the case. Even a lot of women relate to it — yes, every now and then a woman gets the shaft. Women do get married to spendthrift it’ll-all-work-out free spirit guys, who have a change of heart when the bills start rolling in and hit the road. And they can see the deadbeat in Julia Roberts’ character — who, like many fictional constructs in movies, never seems to have to pay for anything.

Conclusion: Only those free spirits will enjoy this movie. It’s made for them and only them. It seems to be a very common occurrence with these life-journey movies: For half the audience, it’s a miserable experience, something of a square-peg-round-hole problem. The movie just doesn’t fit and it just doesn’t work. A shallow selfish person lives an unfulfilling life, we see it and we think: Yeah, so?

We seem to have a lot of these kinds of people watching movies, therefore placing demands on what movies will be made later. It’s becoming a big problem. I saw this happen in the late 1970’s to early 1980’s, a lot…I’ll have to think of some examples later, but it was the same thing. Some superficial jerk would wander around from beginning to end, trying to find a more fulfilling life, and the audience would have to take on the burdensome task of using the two hours to figure out the intimate desires and values of this fictional person they didn’t even like.

After I make the list, I’m sure this will bubble up to the top of it as the most loathsome of the lot. When I saw Julia Roberts riding her bike I wanted a big truck to come along and smack her. When I saw her sailing in a boat I wanted a big shark to come up from the depths and devour it. Not because she’s Julia Roberts (although that certainly helped) but because her character was completely execrable and constantly made bad choices.

I have a Facebook friend who regularly tangles, or is entangled by, some acquaintances of his over in the UK who are fond of what in The States would be considered left-of-center ideas. He regularly invites me into these threads so I can see what’s going on & contribute to the discussion. I’m not sure if the attempt is to help me, him or them. It’s always enlightening but I have to say, with regard to where these discussions go, my curiosity has started to wane because there isn’t too much variance to it.

I’m going to be asked, by the three “blokes,” in a rather pugnacious manner what my feelings are about something that is purely a values determination, like do I support gay marriage, abortion, etc. Or about some discipline that’s trying to be science-ey, like global warming. When I answer in a way the blokes find disagreeable, they’ll gather together and cluck away like chickens in a barnyard that I’m — fill in the adjective — and it’s unworthy of their time to discuss this issue or any other with me.

And then the cycle repeats. But I do learn a tiny bit more every time.

Lately, the most outspoken of these ankle-biters embedded the video you see above, which I find to make some reasonable points about the basics involved in how to think. Interestingly, it points out some things about open-mindedness that often go unnoticed by those who use the term most often.

First time I watched it all the way through, I was convinced — still am — that the bloke who embedded it, never made it to the 8:27 mark. It sounds like the guy who produced the video had been reading his Facebook feed, and said “this bloke is doing all kinds of things wrong, I’m going to put some comments at the end of that video I made so people know they shouldn’t act like him.”

But that point, I thought, would remain a subtle one…until early this morning when I saw this:

I’m surprised the Christian right in the US&A [sic] haven’t made amendments to their Bible like they do to the Constitution so it suits them more. Take out those awkward bits which suggest greed isn’t a good thing, and the bit where Jesus bashes the bankers up. If they did, sheep like Mikey and Morgan will nod in Orwellian fashion, baaaing “Compassion is good, Selfish Greed is Better, Compassion is Good, Selfish Greed is Better”

Oh, my. I’m not even sure what that was. I put in an inquiry. Until I get an answer back that is coherent and makes sense, I’m going to assume it is…

…yet another example of this…

I have noticed something about how some people treat beliefs which are personally important to them. When faced with uncomfortable facts, they do what I call “making up stories.”

I don’t mean they lie. Or rather they do, but they’re lying to themselves, and in a very particular way.

Some examples: About seven years ago, I was taking a course in the Polish city of Wroclaw. While there, I shared an apartment with an Englishman who had a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

This fellow was convinced of every fashionable environmental catastrophe, including, of course, global warming.

I am skeptical about man-caused global warming for reasons not relevant here. In the course of our discussions, I mentioned that when I was working to launch a new college of science in Poland, I had come to know quite a few members of the Polish Academy of Science in the departments of chemistry, physics, paleobiology, etc.

I told him that not one of these world-class scientists believed in man-caused global warming.

He replied, “That’s because their jobs depend on defending the oil companies and denying global warming.”

To begin with, that’s not true. On the contrary, the Polish government at the time had no concerns about global warming. They had too many real problems to deal with. And he was a stranger to Poland who couldn’t have known one way or the other.

From what I have seen around the ‘net, this is a common pattern. The leftist claims, in a variety of ways, to possess a superior attachment to, and command of, reality. I’ve noticed the contemplations about global warming and God are the two triggers most likely to send the discussion off in this direction.

And then that same leftist will start to manufacture this reality which he claims to understand better. Well, I suppose that all makes sense, if you’re the one creating it. Some thought makes you happy, gives you a sense of satisfaction, you get tired of waiting for it to actually happen so you go to Facebook and enter one of your “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened” comments. Uh…alright, I’ll go ahead and state the obvious. It’s fun to think about, for him, because if it happened it would say something that would bolster his argument. Wouldn’t it say so much more to bolster his argument, if he waited for it to happen and then pointed out that it happened?

Things the way they are, he’s just ‘fessed up to, at the very least, a passionate bias at work as he chooses what ideas are worthy of contempt and therefore dismissal, be they based on empirically observed fact or anything else; and what other ideas are worthy of special emphasis and maybe even some embellishment, even if they’re completely manufactured fiction — just because they happen to be fun ideas. To him.

Hardly the stuff that helpfully rivets a concerned thinker to reality.

And this is not an isolated case. It’s become enough of a set pattern that when I see the first event take place, I now expect the second. I’m not making a claim to any powerhouse intellect in noodling this out, I’m just recognizing a pattern, like a dog expecting a meal when he hears a bell ring. Leftists who boast of the most durable and functional recognition of reality, tend to labor with anemic and misguided effort in precisely this area. They make up stories and then they pretend it’s the other guy who’s doing it.