London Daily Mail Online:

Demanding Mekeeda Austin, 13, warned Father Christmas that he will be ‘killed’ if he fails to deliver at least two of her long list of lavish gifts.

She even threatened to ‘hunt down’ Santa’s reindeer and ‘cook them and serve their meat to homeless people on Xmas day’ if she doesn’t get her way.

Her mother Tracey Austin, 40, was dumbstruck when she found the demanding note in her daughter’s school bag.

In the letter Mekeeda, from Brickhill, Bedford, demands a Blackberry, a designer Laura Knitted 33 Jumper, money, Converse trainers and sunglasses.

As well as gifts Mekeeda also demands Father Christmas bring her ‘the real’ Justin Bieber and teenage singer Austin Mahone.

She signs off with the chilling warning: “Remember…two of these, or you die.”

But her mother Tracey, 40, is not punishing her for the letter and has vowed to meet her daughter’s demands…”When I first found the letter I thought it was funny, now I think I better get her what she wants, the last thing I want is for her to kill Santa…I know it sounds like she is spoilt but I like to get my daughter what she wants also you don’t want to get on the wrong side of her.”

Charming.

Update: Via Miss Cellania, by way of Gerard: Wonder if this is the Santa she’s thinking of takin’ out? Wouldn’t mind being there when it all goes down; Mekeeda might’ve bitten off more than she can chew, here. Good luck Mekeeda!

Once again we’re split squarely down the middle: People who believe what they’re told to believe, think the “War on Christmas” is an artificial concoction of fiction being played up by Fox News, and people who pay attention to what’s going on understand there really is one. Examples abound, and have for years, but for purposes of our discussion here we only need one:

Looks like the PC police have threatened members of the House of Representatives against wishing constituents a “Merry Christmas,” if they want to do so in a mailing paid for with tax dollars.

Members who submit official mailings for review by the congressional franking commission that reviews all congressional mail to determine if it can be “franked,” or paid for with tax dollars, are being told that no holiday greetings, including “Merry Christmas,” can be sent in official mail.

“I called the commission to ask for clarification and was told no ‘Merry Christmas.’ Also told cannot say ‘Happy New Year’ but can say ‘have a happy new year’ – referencing the time period of a new year, but not the holiday,” said a Hill staffer who requested anonymity.

Another Hill staffer told The Washington Examiner that “we were given that advice after submitting” a draft mailing.

Notice the following:

One. If a person with common sense happens to agree with this rule (since let’s face it, there is some wisdom and legitimacy to it, just not very much) — such a person would have to concede, without reservation, that if the rule were to be repealed tomorrow morning and then throughout the day, all kinds of things would happen that would’ve flouted the rule…no definable damage would be done. Absolutely none. So you have to be completely lacking in said common sense to try to prop up this notion that the rule has any purpose to it whatsoever. At all. It’s a useless rule, and no reasonable discussion of it can take place among people who do not acknowledge this much.

This is a constant in the War on Christmas. It’s a bunch of “can’t can’t can’t” with no purpose to it at all.

Two. And this is a bit more subtle: The congressmen, who are elected to their positions and are therefore accountable to the will of the electorate, are told what they can & cannot do by people who are not similarly elected, and therefore are not similarly accountable. There isn’t much point to noticing that, except for one thing…

…this, too, is a constant in the War on Christmas. Useless rules, which because of their uselessness are completely arbitrary, since they function as ethereal guardrails marking the edge of a highway that doesn’t have any such edge. And although they are arbitrary, they are enforced, enough though they are cooked up by people who are not guided by anything except for the agreement they will surely receive from other people who have the same biases and are similarly unelected and unaccountable. Such-and-such a judge says yep, something terrible will surely happen if a nativity scene is allowed within line-of-sight from the steps of City Hall, or the courthouse…and he says that, because and only because the next judge will say the same thing. Wow, it sure looks like a sensible interpretation of the Constitution, with all these unelected judges agreeing with each other! Must be one!

Boortz provides an explanation (which I’ve linked somewhere before, too lazy to go searching for that just now):

It’s simple. Just look at the cast of characters. You have government and liberals behind the attacks … almost exclusively. And why? Simple: Because it’s government we’re supposed to worship, not God. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for support in rough times, not our church. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for comfort, not our faith. In fact .. our faith is supposed to be in government, and government doesn’t like competition.

Get it now?

I see by my e-mail from Human Events, that today is the day for #351 on “365 Ways to Drive Liberals Crazy”:

Say grace before meals.
Bringing God into the picture always puts liberals ill at ease, because it reminds them you think there’s a power more important than government.

Not sure what to think of this. My deceased uncle, the Roosevelt democrat, was the one in our family who was most gung-ho about saying grace before meals. And I don’t like the idea of collecting ways to piss people off, even if they are liberals…but it does say something when it takes so little to do it. And this does provide support for what Neal Boortz has been noticing. Government is supposed to be at the tippy-top in all things, there isn’t supposed to be anything higher. And, those who make sure of this, cannot be elected or beholden to the dumb ol’ voters. They have to do this in committee, or from a bench, swinging a gavel.

In Colorado, a District Court judge has handed down an opinion that would appear to provide further evidence:

A case that has been lingering in Colorado courts since 2005 arrived at an important and historic threshold last week when a Denver District court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In her ruling, Denver District Court Judge Sheila Rappaport said that the State funding system of K-12 education is not “thorough and uniform.”

While that seems like a basic judgment, Judge Rappaport went on to frame a much larger ramification in her decision, and delivered the reasons why this case is almost certainly headed to the Colorado Supreme Court.

In her ruling, Judge Rappaport wrote that “there is not one school district that is sufficiently funded.”

She also wrote that, “There is not enough money to permit school districts across the state to properly implement standards-based education and to meet the requirements of state law and regulation.”

In a nutshell, she has ruled that the Colorado State legislature must find a way to fund K-12 education in Colorado at a much higher level, at least a level to meet these standards, but must also do it in a way that is constitutional.

Without stating exactly how much funding would be adequate, Rappaport has asked the legislature to either ask voters to raise taxes, which voters just turned down by nearly a 2 to 1 margin, or find more funding in a state budget for a line item that already eats up more than 40% of the general fund.

While Judge Rappaport may have expected that her ruling would be appealed, if for some reason the State of Colorado decides against the appeal, Rappaport has set an impossible standard without setting any financial guidelines.

Essentially, the legislature is being told to arrive at a magical number that they know is bigger than the one they currently use, but don’t know how high they really need to go.

Hat tip goes to Protein Wisdom, where it is pointed out,

In short, the Judge has now institutionalized the idea that a proper education is tied to how much money is spent on it — this, despite years of evidence showing that per capita spending on education doesn’t correlate to better educational performance.

Many among us have had the experience of arguing with liberals about education, and how it needs to be funded “properly”…and have been confronted with the bedazzling spectacle of our rhetorical antagonist, pondering the quite rational inquiry about how-much-is-enough, doing whatever it takes to avoid providing a practical, usable answer. You know what happens, a lot of bilge comes out, I’m-a-better-person-than-you, a few sound bites they picked up from West Wing, or some homina-homina-homina until a Cheesecake Nazi bursts out of the kitchen, like a clown out of a car, to announce dessert-and-coffee-are-ready-would-everyone-stop-talking-about-politics. But no, you won’t get an answer, you won’t get 5k-per-child-per-year, or 10k, or 15k, nothing like that. Just more.

We’re accustomed to seeing that in our weird liberal friends & relatives during Thanksgiving. It’s strange there. It’s a little more strange seeing it in a court decision.

And here…at long last…I finally come to the point: I don’t think liberals believe government is good. I have long disagreed with Rush Limbaugh about this. Yes, it’s true, they’re constantly demanding more money flow into it, and if anybody dares to disagree with it the liberal will suddenly opine endlessly about what a terrible, awful person that dissenter is, he must be in favor of kids starving and puppies dying and water & air getting polluted et cetera.

Yes, it’s true also, that liberals don’t like western religion because they don’t want anything to be higher than the government. And yes, they probably have this affinity for eastern religions that they don’t have for western religions, because generally the eastern religions can co-exist with an all-powerful, in many cases tyrannical, state government. That does seem to be where they’re going, that government should be supreme and nothing can be above it.

And yes, here and there I see some liberals engaged in the belief, at least superficially, that every human endeavor that results in anything good must have come from government. File this away in your “Ways to drive a lib crazy” file: Let them know it’s absolutely true that Al Gore claimed to have created the Internet. See what kind of discussion ensues. It will almost certainly degenerate into a sermon about how we have the Internet because of the goodness of government…I’m not entirely sure what is being asserted, here, and I’m not entirely sure they know what they’re trying to say either. The OSI model provides seven well-defined layers of technological challenge, and each one of those layers do, indeed, present a fairly formidable challenge (although clearly not an insurmountable one). Particularly the Data Link, Network and Transport layers. Are they saying, a government committee was gaveled to order, and then the committee met to figure out how these packets would be sent from one peer to the next, to make a system that would actually work? They met in that hearing room and figured out what would work and what wouldn’t work? Nobody had to do any actual experimentation? Or are they saying…the experimentation was all done by competent government people while the private-sector businesses just sort of sat around and went “duh”?

It is truly laughable how they think about this stuff. But I can only explore it so far; like I said, I have strong doubts they’ve thought it out too well themselves, and I cannot explore that which does not exist.

It is their motivations that are at issue here. They do not, in spite of all the above, think of government as a wellspring of goodness. Or, at least, not pure goodness. You doubt me, just wait for Barack Obama to get His ass voted out and sent home. Wait for a Reagan-style no-apologies conservative Republican to be inaugurated again, then approach your weird liberal friends-and-relatives about what government can do, or what it’s thinking about doing. You’ll get a whole different song out of them. The best representative case of this might be the San Jose Mercury News story about the CIA selling rock cocaine in inner cities, and all the conspiracy theories that erupted from that whole thing. It fit the narrative: Murder and mayhem being stirred up by all these sinister guys running around, in their nice suits and expensive cars, on the payroll of some shadowy, sinister government agency. Straight out of the Watergate era. It never gets old.

So when the other guy is in charge, our libs are quite capable of believing government might do less-than-wonderful things.

Here we have a dilemma: How, then, can they see the answer to every problem as simple as prying more money out of the taxpayers’ grasp, and turning it over to this sometimes-good sometimes-bad government?

They have no problem believing government does bad stuff when the other guy is in charge. Can the dilemma be explained, as simply as: They don’t think, when their guys are in charge, that the other guys will ever, ever be in charge?

The People will understand, once we see liberal ideas put into action, that they work so well we’ll never want to put anyone else in, ever? Maybe cancel the elections forever or something? How then do they explain fairly recent human history, which saw us getting sick to death of the liberals in 2000, 1980, 1968, 1952, 1920…how do they explain this circular motion. I can tell you from my own experience they have a lot of difficulty with this. Once this is posed, I see a lot of the “homina homina until the Cheesecake Nazi bails me out, or else call the other guy an awful person if she’s nowhere to be seen” tactic. Oh, maybe I really am an awful person…and maybe the Cheesecake Nazi can see that too…but it doesn’t matter, does it, if the question is still out there? The liberal policies are supposed to be so obviously wonderful, and yet the country keeps getting sick of ’em.

This guy has a theory that works. I think he’s nailed it:

Think about the people you know who have low self-esteem. We’ll call that person The Patient. The Patient does not see value in himself. He does not consider himself worthy of advancement, of self-transcendence, or self-actualization. Instead, The Patient believes he is a bad person, undeserving of success, love, wealth, or happiness. He comes to believe, therefore, that any effort he exerts on his own behalf is doomed to fail because he is such a bad person and does not deserve any success.

But there is this tiny little voice — the ego — that just won’t stand for this self-flagellation. So the ego projects The Patient’s self-hate onto The Other as a defense mechanism. They project the self-hate onto the person who is happy, wealthy, successful, and loved. Now, it is The Other who becomes the object of hate. “Why should he have everything? What has he done to deserve all this? I’m not the bad person, he is.” As a friend’s Facebook quote said just today, “Haters don’t really hate you, they hate themselves because you are a reflection of what they wish to be.”

Then, as the pathology deepens, the projection distorts further. Now The Other is actually the cause of The Patient’s unhappiness because The Patient’s ego refuses to accept the truth that The Patient himself is the cause of his own unhappiness. Blame cannot be taken! The Patient becomes The Victim. The Other is demonized — literally transformed into a demon, an evil entity. The Other is called names. The Other is dehumanized. The Patient now self-righteously, and in the name of all that is good and just, actively seeks to destroy The Other. To punish It. To take away what It has by force. Because by destroying The Other, The Patient believes the source of their suffering will be removed.
:
Unhappy people become Liberals. People seek out those that are similar. Birds of a feather flock together. An unhappy person looks around and sees two groups: happy people, and unhappy people. Rather than take a page out of the former group, enter the herd and ask for (and likely receive) help and guidance on how to become happy, the person is more likely to choose the path of least resistance — of instant acceptance. “Come to Mumsy, darling, you’re one of us.” And once in the herd, it becomes very, very difficult to leave it.

The Liberal, of course, will deny this pathology. No, they say, they are only trying to make things fair. Liberals are consumed with fixing the world. By eliminating what is unfair, by eliminating the evil banks and the greedy corporations, all the little people will receive what is rightfully theirs! (Subconsciously, then, nobody will be more successful than they are.) So twisted with hate, and so convinced of their own inefficacy, they cannot even rely on themselves to overthrow The Other. They hand over their own power to a third party — the government — to do their dirty work in the form of the confiscatory process of increased taxation and regulation.

Bulls-eye. The government is a source…not of goodness, but of anonymity. The progressive says, The Internet Is A Government Creation, and the pronouncement is not quite so much an effort to impose the shining light of truth upon the darkness of ignorance, or even to control the outcome, but rather to avoid contending with any of the historical details. It is an exercise in avoidance.

The driving desire is one of denying individual human achievement. Nothing is more frightening to a true progressive than the idea of some guy going into a garage, or abandoned barn, and fiddling around with something that then takes on a life of its own. Whether that something is a steam engine, or an Apple computer, or a light bulb, or a Frankenstein monster, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This idea just scares the hell out of them. If it comes from the labors of an identifiable individual, then it comes from that individual’s brain. That, in turn, means the individual had the potential all by himself…and that, in turn, means we all do.

This is the true reason why they loathe God. The idea of God is an idea of purpose: We are here for some established function. It may very well be that this function is nothing more than an experiment. Maybe God is trying to build His own Internet — or climate model? But even an exploratory function is still a function, and this scares them silly.

They feel useless. So they don’t want anyone else to escape uselessness. Therefore, any decision worth making that has an actual impact on something, has to be made by a committee…a nice, safe, anonymous committee full of people who will never be personally acquainted by the liberal who is so scared of all this. Either a committee, or a super-wonderful demigod like Barack Obama, who, again, will never become a personal acquaintance of the liberal. Oh, maybe the Replacement Jesus will call on them during a town hall meeting to ask a question…or, He’ll have dinner with them to thank them for their five dollar donation…

…but the liberal won’t ever have to be personally associated with a decision about something that has a real lasting impact. Neither will anybody with whom the liberal identifies, on any personal level. We’re all just — here. Doing our thing. Living, eating, fornicating, crapping, dying, like domestic pets.

No real accountability for judgments made. No decisions that really mean anything, coming from any of us.

That’s the real goal. That’s why they like government. All decisions made, are announced in passive voice: “It was the decision that…the feeling was…the consensus was…” Nothing scares them batshit crazy so much as an individual protagonist calling a shot, and sinking the right ball in the right pocket. That would mean anyone else who wants to, could do the same thing. This just rattles them right down to the marrow of their bones. That is what makes them liberals.

And that is why the celebration of Christmas is treated as a toxic thing. If it was about religious freedom, religious diversity, or the respect for people who choose not to be religious, they’d have to acknowledge the obvious: That when an atheist is reminded of the existence of religious people, the atheist is not harmed by this in any way. They have to go much, much further than that, because their driving ambition is to mute out any suggestion from anyone — be it a religious suggestion or not! — that we, as individuals, have the capability of altering the course of events, and maybe it’s a good thing for we as individuals to try to do this. Not by electing super-duper-wonderful people to make those decisions for us. But to do it ourselves. They cannot abide this, even for a stretch of time measured in heartbeats. They cannot…to coin a phrase…”tolerate” it. There is no room for it in their world.

Speculation…

The Obama 2012 campaign will be a profoundly moralistic enterprise. Its practical components have recently been field-tested. The President himself turned up on “60 Minutes” last weekend to unveil the latest updated version of his “Blame Bush” strategy, in which the horrible numbers swirling around his moribund economy are actually the fault of his predecessor, who left him such a mess that we should be congratulating Obama for his incredible skill at making things as good as they are. He even brought back the “jobs created or saved” concept, which should have gotten him laughed off the national stage the first time he tried it.

Meanwhile, on Monday we had DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz​ angrily denying that unemployment has increased under Obama at all. Voters will be hit with a blast of weaponized ignorance in 2012, and told to forget everything that has actually happened since 2008.

But these elements are not the core of the President’s re-election strategy. They’re meant to confuse voters and soften them up for the real sales pitch, which will be entirely moral in character. It doesn’t matter if the things Obama has done didn’t work, or even – as in the case of ObamaCare – achieved exactly the opposite results from what Obama promised. We are morally obliged to follow such policies in the interest of “fairness,” “compassion,” and so forth, even when their failure is obvious.

…but sound speculation nevertheless. We are almost certain to be deluged with such a toxic brew. It’s already started, in fact.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is why you can’t discuss anything with a liberal in polite company and keep the conversation civil. The blame goes to the liberal, if the liberal takes the moral high ground, because it isn’t possible to have a civil conversation with someone taking the position “You are unworthy of society’s privileges and tolerance if you have any opinion on this different from mine.”

Antidote:

The Republican candidate must boldly make the moral case for capitalism, as well as offering a practical critique of the Obama record….Capitalism is the practical expression of liberty. Without private ownership of capital, all other expressions are merely indulgences permitted by the government. We understand instinctively that the suppression of free speech indicates a dangerous lack of respect for individuals by the State, but we have been conditioned to forget that a lack of respect for property is at least as disturbing. Once property is gone, speech is not very difficult for the State to control, or ignore.
:
Independence flourishes only under capitalism! Nothing could be less expressive of individuality that trooping into a voting booth periodically, to vote for or against a handful of people who will be judged according to many different policies, casting your ballot onto a pile of thousands or millions. The more power your “representatives” accumulate, the less accurately their performance can be measured. And if the vote doesn’t go your way, you have very limited options to walk away from the unsatisfactory results. [emphasis in original]

Hat tip to blogger friend Terri.

The part where the innkeeper slams the door in their faces, that just cracks me up.

With a grateful hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Hax:

Dear Carolyn:

My girlfriend broke up with me last Thursday. Essentially she got drunk, and some guy she admits to having a crush on kissed her.

I think the original breakup was an overreaction on her part. She struggles with some self-esteem issues even though she is an amazing person; she constantly tells me she doesn’t deserve to be with me, I treat her too well, etc. She is in therapy and addressing these issues and others.

We’ve been talking a lot the past week — some very painful, tearful conversations — and I think we’re getting back together.

I really, really want to make things work with her, but I’m concerned there are hazards ahead. Is there anything particular we need to watch for?

Hurting but hopeful

I realize this is ridiculously easy for me to say, from out in the ether with no feelings for either of you beyond a we-are-the-world love of humanity, but: It sounds as if she’d be better off navigating through her issues without the added complication of maintaining a relationship.

I agree with Carolyn about what the guy needs to do, and it isn’t necessary to discuss whether I agree on any other point.

“Ladies” like this are not going to get better, ever. That’s because, while they do have self esteem issues, said issues do not exist in the form in which we recognize them. Our mistaken notion is that the victim suffers from low self-esteem and doesn’t consider herself to be worth as much as other people. The truth is more like: She doesn’t know how to live a fulfilling life, only a comfortable one, and in order to reach a comfort zone she needs to diminish the people around her, because that’s their purpose in her eyes. So she’s seen, institutionally, as suffering from a deficit of self-esteem especially in relative terms when she compares herself to others. But it’s more accurate to say she is carrying around a debilitating overabundance of the stuff.

Think about it. Who, in this situation, does she see as more worthy than herself? The guy she kissed? He was just an implement she used in a scheme to get more attention from her real boyfriend; it worked like a charm. The real boyfriend? She manipulates him to get more attention. She cheated on him and she’ll do it again, because that’s the method she’s selected. Won’t use another method until it becomes necessary to do so, and it won’t. The therapist? He or she is there to make her feel good. People like this don’t get better because they fail to learn how to engage life in any setting in which it isn’t all about them, them, them.

They go to therapy, in which, for an hour or so, it’s still all about them-them-them. The bill is paid, somehow, and then they go back to their lives in which it’s still all about them-them-them. They don’t know any other way to do it, and although the therapy industry won’t permit anyone to talk about this openly, they aren’t learning.

I’ve noticed people like this tend to have multiple addictions, of sufficient number and intensity that it’s fair to conclude their personality — which is busted — makes them susceptible to forming addictions. What really defines our blind spot, is this: The addictive personality is not going to struggle with a problem it really wants solved, for years or decades at a time. It is not like the rat in the maze that needs to be led to the cheese. It is the Jurassic Park situation. The way will be found. It wants what it wants when it wants it, and it will get it. If it isn’t getting something, it isn’t getting it because it doesn’t want it.

Now if we’re talking about whether people like this have issues with envisioning themselves independently achieving something useful to others — then this is an entirely different conversation. Yes there is a vision problem there, and the vision problem is atrophy. They haven’t formed that vision because they’re not used to thinking that way. By the time a man is starving, if he uses his wits and other gifts to get himself a plate of food, he has no feeling of accomplishment as he devours the plate of food because the demand nature has placed on him to eat the food obscures that sense of accomplishment. The same is true of a baby who’s found a nipple. In this sense, the “low self esteem” thing is a true statement, because the addictive personality can’t engage this cycle. It simply isn’t constructed that way.

It can barter one good in exchange for another, but it can’t remain in a system that operates by such bartering for any length of time, because sooner or later it will engage this bartering by means of deceit and in so doing, destroy the trust that is the foundation of such a system.

It’s simply un-evolved. Like a beast living in the wild; the time comes to gorge, and it will do whatever it takes, like any properly developed lioness, shark, or other predator. To express a hope that it will learn a different way to interact with its environment, is to express a true ignorance of what’s being observed.

“Predator.” That is the key word. From Kindergarten onward, our society simply will not allow people to view anything feminine in this way, ever, no matter what. We talk about females like this missing their self-esteem, because we’re groping around looking for some alternative way to discuss it. But in truth, the capacity to develop into adulthood poorly, with predatory personality tendencies, is divided about evenly between males and females. We are culturally permitted to recognize it only in the males.

One of the many problems with the protest mentality that’s become popular over the last fifty to eighty years, is the most obvious one, that it creates a toxic and troubling epoxy by mixing raw emotion with inimical sentiment. Raw emotion tends to eclipse rational thought, and when you see a negotiating partner as an enemy it gets much harder to see the situation from his perspective.

And so, for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, we have a handy primer, of sorts, about what it really takes to provide these jobs they’re supposed to be wanting.

You think a job is some sort of entitlement — like it should just be there for you. But you’ve got to realize that a real person has to bust his butt in order to create that job.

When you say, “Dude, where’s my job?” what you’re really saying is, “Dude, put your financial and emotional well-being on the line by quitting your day job and hanging out a shingle. Be smart and diligent enough to come up with a good product, and hope that you can sell enough of that product to have enough revenue to hire and pay me.”

Most people would never in a million years go through all the B.S. involved in starting a business and creating a job.

Liberal blogger Ed Darrell thinks very highly of the late Professor Stephen Schneider, especially of this appearance the Prof. made shortly before his demise before a big roomful of skeptics.

As usual: When I make the most charitable assumptions possible about Darrell’s thinking processes, I’m puzzled as to why he thinks highly of something. I have little idea why he would find Schneider’s comments to be convincing, either to skeptics or to the agreeable. And then when I form the most derogatory expectations I possibly can, all of a sudden everything is crystal clear.

Schneider actually does very little by way of presentation of factual evidence that would persuade a rationally-minded skeptic toward a change of mind. He was annoyingly fond of discussing statistics with approximations, “ten percent” or so, emphasizing on the concepts he was trying to get across. I’m seeing lots of such conceptual explanation here, a lot of made-up numbers to help bolster analogies involving bathtubs and such, and some subtle, cheery condescension. But his arguments are non-arguments: “Oh, then you’re totally wrong.” Yes, I can see why Ed Darrell likes this; Schneider argued things the Darrell way. Don’t read that, read this instead!

Another thing I’m seeing in these four installments is a wonderful overview of the data sets that have come under Schneider’s watchful eye that persuade him. But this says very little when he’s been part of the global warming cult for about as long as it’s been around, and it doesn’t help that he’s indulging in the kind of bureaucratic double-speak that would make a rattlesnake jealous. “I am actually very pleased that you are skeptics. There’s no such thing as a good scientist who’s not a skeptic.” — now, knock it off right now, because I’m here to pound away on this tired trope like it’s a drum, that skepticism on this particular topic is a sign of intellectual weakness.

You think I’m being too cynical? Imagine an astronomer explaining the concept of dark matter. We should see this but instead, what we’re seeing is this.

The cattle rancher lady is doing a much better job, from what I’ve seen, of relying on actual hard, definable numbers. The climate cultists so simplify the arguments of their opposition, that we have a real problem now with them using one-size-fits-all arguments while not an awful lot of additional learning is going on. Like hamsters in little wheels. They run into the dissent, and their first reaction as well as their last one is to just repeat the explanation over again, from the top, about how it’s all supposed to work.

Schneider does very little to improve the situation, frankly. He’s facing fifty or so people who’ve heard it all before. What does he do? He explains how (sing along if you want!) carbon from human activity is trapped in the atmosphere, it acts as a greenhouse gas and this causes global warming, which is going to…do something soon.

If I were a cultist and I really wanted to change some minds, first thing I’d do is what the narrator lady did in the very first installment: Define all these various strands of skepticism. This guy over here doesn’t think there’s warming. That guy over there agrees there is warming, but human activity doesn’t contribute much to it and there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it. Some other guy buys into all of it, but is opposed to the policy changes that have been proposed so far to deal with the problem.

Simply put, global warming scare mongers just don’t have that much respect for their opposition. They can’t follow through on this first simple step, of coming to an understanding of what the opposition has to say. If they were really all about science, rather than taking pains to act scienc-ey, they’d be doing that; you could say something to one of them like “I agree carbon is an insulator and that it tends to accumulate in the atmosphere, but humans don’t contribute much to it” or “I am doubtful of the nightmare scenarios that are supposed to take place if the saturation reaches, say, 550ppm, I think it could get much higher and we wouldn’t be impacted much.” And you’d get back non-preachy, non-sneering, non-chortling answers with non-made-up numbers, rather than a retread of the argument that was already stated. The religious dogma would be left out of it. They wouldn’t be explaining over and over again how it’s supposed to work, when they know you already know. They’d address your specific area of doubt.

Anybody have today’s mean-Earth-temperature handy?

As for myself, I think the concepts are scientifically sound. It’s the doomsday prophecies that are in real trouble here. Where science has made itself robust, from all I’ve read about it, is where the data are gathered from the temperature stations and then plotted. But that is such a huge yawning distance from being able to predict any kind of climate calamity. The correlation between carbon saturation and mean temperature increase, all the desperate post-Climategate-email rhetoric notwithstanding, is fraught with problems. The very phrase “peer review” has been subjected to repeated attempts at institutional re-definition, and that by itself has a very damaging effect on the credibility of the institutions, as it should.

But even where things are going swimmingly, with gathering the data and analyzing it — the experts are doing a very poor job of explaining the nascent state of this particular branch of the science. It’s still at the state where, when they study the data, they’re studying how well their methods are working just as much as they’re studying what the data are supposed to be measuring. What is the list of these weather stations and how is it controlled? Whenever the list changes for whatever reason, are the data sets properly tossed out and started over? It’s a perfectly legitimate question, if you’re sounding a dire doomsday scenario just because when you take an “average” you’re seeing the average change over time. How is the temperature of the oceans factored in? Another perfectly legitimate question, when you consider how much of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and how different the heat density of seawater is compared to the heat density of a land mass. After all, the carbon in the atmosphere is not supposed to be trapping temperature, it is supposed to be trapping heat.

I’ve come to feel very uncomfortable watching these climate change cheerleaders speak in their reverent tones about the departed Professor. Not quite so much because they’re accusing skeptics like me of speaking ill of the dead, although I’m sure that’s the intended undertone. Instead, I’m uneasy because their platitudes are mostly empty. You can’t say “Professor Schneider’s contributions were key to developing the first working…” light bulb, nuclear reactor, something in between. He wrote papers, got his Ph.D., earned honors, appeared in the media, and did a lot of other things that have something to do with what somebody else said or thought.

These are the people who end up with the loudest voices, pretty much everywhere. And that is to our detriment, and our discredit. We tend to place the highest soapboxes under the feet of those who have shown, due to loud voice, lofty stature, or both, that they have no need for a soapbox. I actually feel rather sorry for Dr. Schneider when I hear these sympathetic flailing around for something they can say about his actual contributions. It’s like going to a funeral with very few other attendees, and hearing a couple of eulogies that say things like “He was a wonderful guy in ways I can’t really discuss.”

He deserves props for speaking out against this whole name-calling thing, where climate change deniers are called something “akin to a Holocaust denier” and so forth. I wonder if he was ever conscious of how much people like him contributed to that sort of environment. You go around saying people who don’t agree with you need to read up on the science…and that we’re approaching a tipping point, at which something catastrophic will happen…well okay, the pieces are there. Someone else comes along and arranges them into the proper picture.

And from what I’ve been able to read and watch of his conclusions, there’s just no delicate way to put this: I find his science to be shoddy.

We know that there are probably hundreds of tipping points. We don’t know precisely where they are. Therefore you never know which ones you’re crossing when. All you know is that as you add warming, you cross more and more of them.

Commenter Cassandra King speaks for me:

Huuh? I have heard some ridiculous statements from the AGW industry over the years but this one takes a prize and a rosette.
The statement crosses over into cult belief justification, What are these tipping points and where are they? Its like saying I know angels exist but I have never seen one but they must be all over the place and I might be standing next to one right now.
The utterly foolish anti scientific nature of filling in huge gaps in actual knowledge by inventing unkown and unproven causes/effects reminds me clearly of the phlogiston saga.

Schneider says:

We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of ‘Oh, My God’; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you’re talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times the odds of it happening. That’s an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.

Now how do you square this, with his comment in Part 4 at 4:40: “It is not a scientist’s job to judge whether or not the risks are sufficient to hedge against any of these possibilities, it is only our job to report risk. And that’s why we have so many reviews.” I do find these statements to be reconcilable, but once you stencil things off that way you’re left with a scientist’s “turf” that is focused like a laser-beam. It is not a complicated area of expertise, nothing that hard to understand, it’s something like an insurance or mortgage underwriter.

Well, you know what? That isn’t where the effort has been directed; not what’s come to my attention, anyway. That isn’t what the IPCC assessments have been working on. Crack one open sometime. They have sections on raw data, they have narratives written by committees of scientists and then they have big fat sections all about proposed rules for “developed” nations and “developing” nations…then they drone on about how their committees are made up, with so many representatives from developed nations and so many representatives from developing nations.

Schneider’s “hundreds of tipping points” remain an ethereal, abstract wispy idea.

I cannot help but wonder what Darrell, or any other good progressive, would think of a conservative “proving” Mumia Abu Jamal shot Officer Daniel Faulkner, using exactly the same arguments Schneider used in this forum, with bathtub analogies and so forth.

As I explained on the Hello Kitty of Blogging (I think there’s a registration required to read that)…it’s named after a plot device from the first season of South Park.

Real simple rule. Fifteen items on your Christmas list, that means you want fifteen things that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Not a single item on the list is functionally connected to any other item, in any way whatsoever.

If an item is upgradeable, then that’s great. Start with the basic item. Christmas is for basics.

None of this nonsense about “You bring me a steering column for a Bugatti Veyron, and you bring me a gas pedal for a Bugatti Veyron, and you bring me a glove compartment door for a Bugatti Veyron…” hoping to snap it all together on December 24, when every single retail outlet in the entire Western hemisphere is going to be shut up tight for the next thirty-six hours…and then…if EVERYTHING goes perfectly right, you & everybody else can have a decent, un-ruined Christmas.

And your parents get to struggle with the “Omigosh” stress throughout every single minute of every hour of every day from Thanksgiving forward, struggling to no avail to manage this project as complicated and involved as your average Space Shuttle launch. Does it take a special battery? Does it require a special memory pack? Omigosh!

Fifty things on the wish list, fifty things that have nothing to do with each other. Nice & simple. If you want something that costs fifteen hundred smackers once everything’s all bought up to make it go, grow a pair & write it down that way. As one item.

I’m recording this sensible opinion of mine right here, so it won’t be forgotten in the Christmases yet to come. Baby Jesus wasn’t even able to put together a list. Perspective, people.

Blogging it because it’s chock full of funny-sounding names from foreign countries that are completely news to me.

They left off Jennifer Aniston, though.

His Divine Eminence gave an interview to 60 Minutes:

In the interview, [interviewer Steve] Kroft points out that in his speech in Kansas, [President Obama] mentioned income inequality, a phrase that suggests a need to redistribute wealth. The president quickly responded:

President Obama: Look, everybody’s concerned about inequality. Those folks in there, who were listening to the speech, those are teachers and small-business people, and probably some small-town bankers, who are in there thinking to themselves, “How is it that I– we’re — working so hard, we now have Mom and Dad working hard, maybe if they’re lucky, they might have two jobs to try to pay off their house note, and it just seems like they’re treading water? And meanwhile, they know that corporate profits are at a record level, that a lot of folks are doing very well. What’s happened to the bargain? What’s happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class?

That is not a left or right position. That is an American position. And the question is going to be, in this election, whether or not we are able to reclaim that vital center of American thought and American values that says, “We’re all in this together and, you know, it matters if we are building a broad-based middle class, where everybody is able to do their part and everybody’s able to succeed.

For awhile now, I’ve been noticing four unavoidable flaws with liberal ideas, which is to say that if they manage to get everything they want, and we are to accept the notion that their goal is to improve the situation of something bigger than a left-wing political agenda, their ideas are guaranteed to fail in service of that goal due to one or more of the following reasons:

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

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

Incentives. Conservatives and libertarians have been screaming for generations, “If you want more of something, subsidize it, and if you want less of something, tax it.” Granting the benefit of the doubt that our liberals do really want to make things better, they must not be getting the message. They’re constantly advancing plans to subsidize lifestyles that, if improvement of society is the end goal, nobody would want to see becoming more widely practiced. I haven’t been able to get a liberal to define in clear terms what “prosperity” looks like; haven’t been able to get any one of them to say “more people would be rich.” I think they understand subconsciously that if they were to admit to that obvious truth, they’d admit their policies have something to do with hostility toward people who achieve what we want more people to be achieving…and, therefore, there’s the guaranteed fail.

And the big Kahuna:

Abundance, and/or omnipresence. I see them constantly trapped in the thought-whirlpool that the goal must be to make something more highly regarded and highly valued, and the surest way to get there is to make that thing more plentiful, ideally, so that it becomes impossible to ever get away from it. This is a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true. This is, from what I have seen, the most common failure point of the four.

And that’s what Chairman Zero is doing, near as I can make out.

“And meanwhile, they know that corporate profits are at a record level, that a lot of folks are doing very well. What’s happened to the bargain? What’s happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class?” On the planet on which I live, on which people have red blood and up is up & down is down, that first sentence looks like something is on the right track. I don’t really know what this “bargain” is He’s talking about, nor am I sure of this “American deal.” I don’t know what He means by “building a strong middle class.”

I can hazard a guess. I feel qualified to do so only because, for my entire life, I’ve been hearing this cliché from our liberals. And yet, said guess is all I can hazard, since throughout all that time I’ve not yet heard one say exactly what it is they mean by this…

“Strong,” near as I can figure, has to do with that fourth plank of fail, the abundance. It also has some kind of “don’t fuck with us” property to it. Middle class wants something, someone doesn’t want to give it to them, and they’re forced to give it to them anyway. So the same thing liberals would deny the purveyors of politically incorrect speech, they want to give to the middle class, and then they would like the middle class to be “thriving and robust” which means numerous.

Let’s just cut to the chase. Middle class, if it means anything at all, must mean — enjoying the security that eludes the grasp of the impoverished, yet lacking in the affluence, privileges and options enjoyed by the very rich. “Strong middle class” cannot mean a class of people who can attain this affluence, since that would contradict the very definition.

So “strong” must mean precious and cherished, according to that fourth plank of fail…there are so many middle-class people you can’t ignore their desires, once their desires have achieved consistency and cohesion. Or he means, within our legal or political framework, it’s impossible to ignore what they want because they have some kind of power. Momma Government will see to it that they get the things they want. You know, those two possibilities for what they have in mind, I think lose their contrast with each other; they melt together into one thing, if for no other reason than because the liberals are in charge of the definitions, and I don’t think they’ve put this kind of thought into it. A strong middle class means — you’d better pay attention to them and you’d better give them what they want, because they’ll get it one way or another.

It all comes down to that problem they have with the first plank…time. A proper liberal is living every single day between cradle and coffin, in a strange, surreal remake of “Groundhog Day,” in a perpetual revolution. There’s always this huge constituency that is being denied not only the various free goodies, but the opportunity to get them…and has always been denied this, throughout all the days in history, right up until yesterday. From this point forward we’ll be living in a truly egalitarian society, unicorns will fornicate in the open fields, there will be peace throughout the land, Hatfields and McCoys and Rabbis and Ayatollahs will all get together for a friendly game of kickball and Ewoks and Wookies will play some happy tunes on empty Stormtrooper’s helmets. And then there’s today. Viva la Revolution! But tomorrow will, actually, be just like today. All the tomorrows are just like today. That’s why they like “change” so much; they’re spending their entire lives in it.

“Strong” means — you can get what you want, after the revolution’s over. But you lack the means to acquire it before the revolution because you’re one of the oppressed. That’s what strong really means. It means dependent. It means when an election is coming and liberal politicians start looking for despondent, desperate, dependent people so they can rustle up some votes, you’ll be one of those despondent, desperate, dependent people.

And the President thinks it’s very important that there be a lot of people like that. That’s what a “strong” economy is on Planet Liberal; not too many people enjoying the only sign of wealth that truly matters, independence and self-sufficiency. That, paradoxically, would be a sign of a weak economy, therefore we must avoid that at all costs.

The President’s wrong, by the way. It’s not correct to say “That is not a left or right position, that is an American position.” Or if it is correct to say that, it’s correct only in the sense that some muggers aren’t concerned about left- or right-politics, and some muggers are American.

And no, “everyone” is not concerned about income inequality. Maybe everyone He knows. But that particular statement was just plain dumb. President Obama demonstrated there that He needs to get out more, and contrary to the perception that was being floated to us four years ago, He is not worldly or wise or even sophisticated, and is actually very, very sheltered.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

An oldie but a goodie.

Everyone’s talking about it, I probably don’t even need to link to it, but it’s here.

There’s a reason everybody’s talking about it, of course: It doesn’t make any freakin’ sense. The slightly-good-looking and somewhat-annoying girl-next-door has enjoyed some success improving her appearance in a bikini…and that makes her hottest of all time. Okay, here we go again: It sounds a little bit mean, and I’m sure it’s politically incorrect as just about anything, but if the judgment is to be rendered on who’s a hotter woman than who, then all the straight women and gay men need to recuse themselves. It just isn’t their thing. Some salamanders are born without eyeballs; would you consult one on the best wallpaper for your kids’ bedroom? No, you wouldn’t.

Well, I’m certainly qualified. And so, a short list of women who are hotter than Jennifer Aniston, who somehow didn’t even make the list. Keep in mind, I was asking myself “Are they better-looking than Jennifer Aniston has been known to be on her very best day?” That was my criteria, and I came up with:

Maud Adams
Jenny Agutter
Karen Allen
Nancy Allen
Christina Applegate
Amanda Bearse
Genevieve Bujold
Dyan Canon
Lois Chiles
Corinne Clery
Elisha Cuthbert
Brittany Daniel
Lisa Darr
Zooey Deschanel
Britt Ekland
Angie Everhart
Barbara Feldon
Sherilyn Fenn
Heather Graham
Kate Hudson
Elizabeth Hurley
Amy Irving
Mitzi Kapture
Kloe Kardashian
Cheryl Ladd
Sheryl Lee
Lucy Liu
Shelley Long
Sophia Loren
Rose McGowan
Ali McGraw
Alyssa Milano
Maria Montez
Mary Tyler Moore
Olivia Munn
Tara Reid
Diana Rigg
Tanya Roberts
Keri Russell
Izabella Scorupco
Jaclyn Smith
Jill St. John
Heather Thomas
Jeanne Tripplehorne
Bridgette Wilson
Lana Wood
Natalie Wood

Now, one or two of those might actually have been on the list, and maybe I missed it because I didn’t go looking around for women who are hotter than Jennifer Aniston, until I was all finished leafing through what they put up, page by page. As I took that first step, I put together a roster of their mistakes — women who should’ve placed higher, and someone in charge of this misguided effort deliberately ranked behind Jennifer Aniston. For shame, guys. It comes to 34 names, which is a third of the total.

In the order they appear, on this bottom-to-top list, they are:

100. Catherine Bach
97. Cybill Shepherd
96. Mila Kunis
94. Kathleen Turner
90. Barbara Eden
86. Grace Kelly
84. Loni Anderson
80. Elle MacPherson
77. Kelly LeBrock
76. Anita Ekberg
71. Cheryl Tiegs
64. Kylie Minogue
59. Diane Lane
56. Bo Derek
48. Kathy Ireland
47. Aishwarya Rai
40. Mariah Carey
39. Cindy Crawford
38. Teri Hatcher
37. Claudia Schiffer
33. Beyonce
30. Jayne Mansfield
28. Ann-Margret
29. Kim Kardashian
23. Carmen Electra
20. Heidi Klum
19. Heather Locklear
18. Shakira
16. Christie Brinkley
12. Scarlett Johansson
9. Jane Fonda
7. Bettie Page
3. Marilyn Monroe
2. Raquel Welch

I don’t doubt there are a lot of dull, or joy-killing, women out there who find it reassuring that someone well-known and jilted by Brad Pitt came out on top of something. Unfortunately, this invalidates the entire list. It doesn’t even rate as any kind of a “list” if there isn’t consistency in the criteria as they are being applied, and in this case it seems “hot” means one thing for the bottom-ninety-nine personalities cited, and then for this top contender it simply means “there are some swimsuit pictures floating around of her that look kind of okay.”

Exploring the narcissist. Pure gold.

Definition given:

A friend of mine explained the credo of the narcissist as follows: “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.”

No, she doesn’t mean narcissists think prepositions are perfectly fine things to end sentences with.

Were all the definitions, scientific & otherwise, to be pitched into the abyss and it were up to me to start the field of study all over again, I’d say: You are probably a narcissist if your default perception of others’ opinions is that they are mere obstacles and/or inconveniences, without regard for who possesses logical ownership of the topic. The introductory story, for example (and the title of this post) is about a mother essentially reducing her grown-up daughter to the status of a dress-up doll, and having to contend, with an exasperated sigh and an attitude to match, with the unwelcome epiphany that the daughter has her own ideas about what to wear.

I’ve noticed over the years that narcissists initiate conflict, not when they find indirect evidence that someone disagrees with them about something, but rather when they are placed in proximity to someone who disagrees with them about something. I suppose, in that sense, we’re all narcissists. But therein lies the solution to the problem: Narcissist comes across a rule he doesn’t like, he reacts the way everybody else does, and follows the rule. He sees someone proposing a whole suite of additional stupid rules…if it’s on television or some other non-interactive medium, again he’ll react just like anybody else.

It’s when the people with unwelcome opinions are placed in proximity. When the narcissist perceives he may have influence over the outcome, or events may unfold in such a way that he’s ultimately given this influence, that’s when the trouble starts.

No, I’m not saying lock them up and throw away the key. I’m just pointing out, if that were to happen, it would probably work. These are people who enjoy life the most when they lack influence. At least, that’s when the rest of us enjoy a suspension of the conflict. Then again, the conflict might bring pleasure to some of these more extreme types…but for the rest of them, it’s still an observation worth making, I think.

What does it say for your protest when you need to place a Craig’s List ad to get people to join it?

Well it isn’t quite so much that…it’s for a roommate for one of the tents.

My step father gave me his old tent to use so I can occupy the financial district. I set up a few nights ago but the cops were able to kick me out by using a big german sheapard [sic] to scare me. I want a roommate to help set up a new camp and watch my back in case the NAzis with the GERMAN dog come back to kick me out. I also have a video camera we can share in case they harrass [sic] us.

I am clean and keep a neat tent. I shave and shower every other week, we can alternate so some one is always in the tent. My girlfriend will bring food so we don’t have to leave. $1.00 rent is due upon our agreement and is due on the first of every month. It is not refundable as your dollar symbolizes your dedication to the tent and our cause.

Uh…what’s that again? “Every other week”?

Please tell me anyone who responds to the ad, will at least be making some inquiries about his girlfriend’s cooking. Wonder what life’s like for her? That would be two or three times a day, wouldn’t it, “Oh, gotta go down to the financial district with some food for my stud…”

Parakeets. They’re living just like parakeets. Parakeets in vinyl cages.

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers.

This blog exists for, among other reasons, pointing out what which has not yet been pointed-out. May not seem like that at times, but that is supposed to be one of the things we’re trying to do. And so we try to bestow the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award upon things that have not yet been so honored by anybody else. But this is just too good…even though blogger friend Rick has found reason to single out this wonderful observation from his brother, we’re going to have to go ahead and get in line.

Love those that rail against the corrupt reps. in Government while at the same time advocate raising taxes to send more money to Congress to piss away. Brilliant!

It seems to be the default perspective from which to see things in this era. The crooks who are in charge cannot be trusted, let’s go find them some more money.

That would be a .700 caliber. I’m sure it seems like a silly exercise, until such time as the dinosaur actually comes chasing after you.

The cartridge, named the .700 WTF (“What The F…”) and is made by fire forming a .50 BMG brass case, trimming it to 3″ in length and then sizing it. The round is loaded with a 1132 grain paper patched .700 lead cast bullet.

The rifle, with just a 16.25″ barrel, can push the 1132 grain of lead up to 2300 fps. Thats 13,000 ft/lbs of energy, right up there with the .50 BMG and far exceeding the .700 Nitro Express. The cast lead bullet has enough energy to pass clean through a 1/4″ steel plate.

From our blog-uncle Gerard, again. Yeah, we’re linking to him repeatedly, fracturing an informal policy we’ve had, since the very beginning, in doing so. Got a problem with that? He’s linking just as often to us…and he’s the one who was clinically dead, and he’s more interesting than we are. No, really. He’s taking on some big-game caliber slugs traveling at Mach 2 plus something. We’re just embedding some video clips of foreign-country weather girls with nice lookin’ legs. Which is something, I suppose, but still.

Besides of which, it just so happens we’re breaking in the new .22 targeting rifle tomorrow bright & early. Which is just about perfect for a sheet of heavy card stock with some rings printed on it, whereas the .700 WTF is just about perfect for a fucking T-Rex straight out of Jurassic Park. With lawyer-intestine still dangling off its incisors.

Well, now. That leaves us a mere 48 hundredths of an inch. We’ll just work our way up gradually.

Twenty Novembers have come and gone since my own divorce, and I really should be showing more maturity about this whole thing. But fuck it.

I mean, after all, that’s pretty much what Kevin’s ex said just a couple years ago:

As Kevin Cotter tells the story, when his wife of 12 years moved out of their Tuscon, Ariz. home in 2009, she left behind just one thing: Her old wedding dress, pristinely preserved in his closet.

“What do you expect me to do with it?” he asked.

“Whatever the $%^@# you want,” she replied.

The comment hit a nerve, and a couple of months later Cotter and his family started joking about ways he could repurpose the gown. The frock had cost him nearly a grand anyway and seemed like such a waste just sitting in storage.

AND…a blog is born.

Ah, the deep symbolism. And the contradiction. A wedding dress symbolizes purity…chastity…naïveté…ultimately, dependence on this big tough strong manly male. It is everything that modern feminism is supposed to have risen up to oppose, and yet, after some forty-five years of said feminism, the battle has yet to be engaged.

Perhaps because — among other things, a wedding dress also symbolizes “Today is my fucking day and I get all the attention” — and feminism hasn’t got a whole lot to say against that?

At some point we shall have to ponder the meaning of all these years of this empty sparring. For now, we shall enjoy Kevin Cotter’s 101 uses.

Last year I made the point, and I’d made this same point many times before…and I’ve made it many times since…

When two boys get in a fight on the playground, moderates are united with conservatives in their desire to take a chunk out of the hide of whichever boy threw the first punch. Liberals stand alone in demanding a pound of flesh from whoever threw the last one.

The larger point that this supports is that we are currently living in an era of nonsense. If someone on the boob tube describes a certain other person’s vision or ideology as “extreme,” you automatically know they’re talking about a conservative and not a liberal. Usually, the conservative will want to de-fund a program and that is found to be extreme.

But then if you do your homework, most of the time you’ll find out the reason there is this “extreme” desire to to de-fund the program it’s because the program is a boondoggle. Hence my comment about the era of nonsense. On my planet, if a program is soaking up funds every year and it isn’t doing what it is supposed to do, it’s a sensible and moderate position to take that the program needs to go away, or at least, some probing questions need to be asked about it. On Planet Talking Head, however, the only moderate position you can take is to allow things to continue as they have been.

Extremists are criticizing moderates for being extreme, and taking extremist positions, calling them moderate, and getting away with it.

Back to the schoolyard fight pardigm. I invoked it here and here and here and here…I like it a lot because it is a uniquely American value, a required value for any sensible, stable, self-sustaining civilization. You have the God-given right to defend yourself. People who do the right thing, should finish up ahead of the troublemakers.

Well. Look what Ben Shapiro found.

Last week in Boston, a seven-year-old boy named Mark got into a fight with a bully. The bully put his hands around the boy’s throat and began to squeeze. That’s when Mark fought back; he kicked his aggressor right in the family jewels. In a normal society, we’d celebrate Mark. Throw him a ticker tape parade or something. Bullies need a sharp kick to the testicles. That’s how you convince them that bullying is wrong.

But in Boston, Mark was charged with sexual assault.

Just to get this straight: Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank’s gay lover can run a homosexual prostitution ring from his apartment and Frank will not be prosecuted. But a boy kicks a bully in the berries and he faces expulsion from school.

It’s not the bully who lost his chestnuts. It’s our country.

Once again: The moderates stand with the conservatives. People who don’t give a rip about democrats and Republicans, will say — emphatically — no, you can’t do that. If bullies are picking on kids and they get some blowback from it, leave it alone, the situation handled itself. Save your interference for when the bullies are doing their thing and not suffering natural consequences from it, that’s what discipline is for.

The liberals stand alone in saying: Oh, no. Law and order? Can’t have that. Better to have chaos than law and order, if the law and order arrives by means of vigilantism. Better to let the hooligans win. Better to let Gotham City burn all the way to the ground than to have Batman running around doing his thing.

Liberals stand alone here. And yet, we end up doing things their way, time after time.

And we’re told doing it any other way is extreme.

And we believe it.

After awhile, you know, you can’t blame the liberals anymore. After awhile you have to come to the realization that upholding order over chaos is everybody‘s job. And we’ve been failing it. Shapiro’s right, it isn’t the bully who’s lost his cajones, it’s the country that has that problem.

A Tumblr blog. Might come in handy someday.

Emperor Misha is reading up on history:

His Imperial Majesty is currently going through his copy of the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History that a kind reader sent to us, and it is certainly enlightening…Quotes such as this one from FDR when his brilliant plan to hike prices on food while everybody was starving in his Great Depression was struck down by the Supremes:

“Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?”

Why the HORROR! Individuals owning the land they live on, doing with it what they please and keeping the fruits of their labors?

Sound familiar?

Of course, there is the problem of corporatism; the market is not a perfect thing, the marketplace does make its share of monsters that grow in size and power, and ultimately do harm.

But this open letter from the libertarian right to the moderate left addresses that quite handily (hat tip to blogger friend Gerard):

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
:
You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

I pointed this out years ago: Any good examples you’ll find of capitalism really pissing in its boot, when you look a little closer you’ll find it isn’t really capitalism. Which is to say, it isn’t a completely free market. What you’ll invariably find is, a bunch of big-government crony-capitalist types got some scheme together by which the government would “regulate” an industry, the scheme involved taxpayer money being doled out to their friends in some way, and that’s when the trouble started. As a general rule, this happens with commodities that are most important to us.

The price of a barrel of oil does something within a day or two — “pocket” depressions are created, where all sorts of people who were able to afford to drive to work that Monday, by Thursday, no longer can. The cost involved in having a baby delivered soars by thousands of percentage points within a generation. Tuition. Civil Remedies. Mortgages and rents. Any labor that is unionized — the government gets involved and suddenly we have a new case of “pure and unregulated” capitalism hurting people, except it isn’t pure capitalism.

Ol’ FDR was terrified of the farmer making decisions. There’s the mindset: There’s got to be some system of checks and balances in place, anytime someone decides to do something — unless that someone is me or one of my dear, close friends.

Boortz states the obvious:

Just look at the cast of characters. You have government and liberals behind the attacks…almost exclusively. And why? Simple: Because it’s government we’re supposed to worship, not God. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for support in rough times, not our church. It’s government we’re supposed to look to for comfort, not our faith. In fact, our faith is supposed to be in government, and government doesn’t like competition.

You do have to admit, beltway stimulus spending doesn’t have a lot to do with banning Santa Claus from classrooms, and neither one of those have much to do with telling climate-change skeptics they’re endangering humankind. But our liberals…(insert pinky into corner of mouth, hook lip from inside, and pull).

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account.

After all the long weeks and months of monotony, something’s changing. I know I’m a lot less worried about who ends up being nominated; I’m much more worried about what the primary & general elections will be about.

If it’s a personality contest I’ll save you some time: Romney will flatten Newt, or Newt will trounce Romney. And then Obama will absolutely cream whichever one goes against Him. It’s silly to even wonder about it.

Why Republicans work so hard to wage battles they know they’re going to lose, I’ll never understand. When the elections are about ideas, they win. If this election is about ideas, they’ll win. Clue?

There are a lot of things going on that make me more and more concerned about this. Like this, for example; I struggle to remember any recent statement I’ve heard or read that is more stupid than “This is the biggest alpha dog battle of the campaign so far.” Stupid, that is, if your objective is to get rid of Obama. Not so stupid if you’re trying to get more people to watch the debate, I suppose…and therein lies the problem.

It won’t work on me. Newt will win, or Romney will win. I can learn to live with either one. Either one will win if the general election is about ideas. Either one will lose, hugely, if the general election is about personalities.

Republicans need to be very careful absorbing the learning experience that the country’s had. It certainly has had one. The lesson is that Obama’s ideas stink on ice. And hopefully, we’ll realize that this is generally true of most super-duper-popular-isn’t-He-just-wonderful teleprompter Guy Smiley types. If the idea’s wonderful, you don’t need the world’s most awesome idea-salesman for it, it’ll sell itself.

But there is a mindset out there that the learning experience is something else: Barack Obama just isn’t so charming, and someone with more charisma can be found somewhere else. That’s an illusion, and not even a very good one. It is very dangerous — it is Barack Obama’s best, surest hope for a second term.

I’ve also muttered something to the effect that I’m seriously considering joining the “Write In Sarah Palin” campaign, although I’m still not sure whether this is a reference to the primary or the general election. The people giving me a bunch of flak don’t seem to be sure of this question either, nor do they think it matters much. I’m a moron who’s about to throw away his vote and get Obama re-elected! And I reply…well I’m not sure if we’re talking about primaries here, but anyway, I’m in California. California is going to go for Obama. If I could unilaterally decide that California wants Palin to be the nominee it wouldn’t matter worth a hill o’ beans. And then they throw me some weird argument that seems to attempt to make the popular vote somehow relevant…which it isn’t…and if it was, and so-and-so lost but the margin was smaller because dissidents like me would fall into line and back Mittens or Newteley, that would somehow mean something. Which, of course, it wouldn’t…it’s really something to see, it’s like they’re getting confused by their own words in mid-sentence, and frustrated, so of course they take that out on me. Maybe I deserve it for saying something that got them so upset. But they can’t come up with a scenario that makes it matter.

I tell them, hey — if what you’re trying to say is, if such a campaign gets off the ground then nobody in a swing state like Ohio or Florida should join it — then I agree a hundred percent, yes you’re right. That doesn’t placate them too much.

I’m not sure how many people are thinking this way. I have the impression that it is a very popular way to think: Someone is going to get nominated, and everybody who wants to see Obama out should back that candidate and never mutter a single peep against him. Well, enthusiasm is important. I’ll go so far as to say, it’s more important than usual next year. Turnout is going to be very important. Turnout will probably decide the election.

But enthusiasm only matters so much. It isn’t everything. Even if enthusiasm decides the very last thing, it doesn’t start the first thing — it relies on other things. Look at Newt Gingrich, for example: His popularity surge has been historic, but each and every single time it’s happened, it took place after Newt took to the stage and skillfully and assertively articulated an idea. I don’t perceive any sentiment out there that could be summed up as “Just put Newt in charge of everything, he’s so awesome and his judgment is sound!” People like Newt after Newt makes the case about what he’s going to support, and why. Before he does this, people don’t like him so much.

In a contest against Barack Obama for general-personality-awesomeness, Newt will lose big. So will Romney.

But the ideas to be championed, are good ones. They sell themselves. People are good, people are worthy. If an economy thrives when people prosper, and we want our economy to thrive, we’ll have to make it easier for people to prosper. You should be able to defend your house against an intruder. Racial discrimination is wrong, in either direction. America will suffer an abundance of enemies and a shortage of friends, as long as it’s less hazardous and expensive to be our enemy than to be our friend.

Meanwhile, Obama is much more fun to watch than either one of those pasty white guys. Cuter, too. There’sJustSomethingAboutHimICan’tExplainIt!!!

Like I said: Why Republicans consistently try to engage battles they know they’re going to lose, I just don’t understand.

The perils of personality-politics.

The tide is turning?

Outrage poured across the /internet once reports of a 9-year-old receiving a two-day suspension for calling a teacher “cute” surfaced, but now it appears he’s receiving some justice, WBTV reports.

“We will be sending an official letter of apology to the parents,” Gaston County Schools Spokesperson Bonnie Reidy told the station. “Also the suspension will not count against the child and the child will receive additional instructional assistance to make up for the time out of the classroom.”

Principal Jerry Bostic, who determined the boy’s alleged comment was sexual harassment, has also resigned, according to the report.

Is our society finally coming to its senses? Are we looking at the long-awaited demise of the risible “Could Be Construed As” standard?

Not holding my breath. Standing up for justice for the benefit of a nine-year-old is easy. The last in line for sympathy is the grown-up, 25-to-65-year-old straight white male 72 inches tall and still possessing all 21 digits. Not whining, just stating a simple matter of fact. In the courtroom of public opinion, if someone who’s a member of that group goes up against someone who is not a member of that group, the outcome is pre-determined.

So, no. I’d need to see more. But I’m still holding out hope.

And it’s still a victory for common sense over stupidity, which is always welcome.

Well…I must say, this is a little embarrassing. The anniversary ends with a zero, you would expect an unusually high level of solemnity and punctuality in observing the occasion. As it is, things are so quiet it seems there’s an expectation that the last survivor has expired, and we can move on. As is often the case with unhelpful messages, it isn’t stated syllable-for-syllable or word-for-word, it’s more of a perceptible stench. An absence of something. No movie promos. Hard to see any speeches or ceremonies taking place. Google’s page just has a search box and nothing else.

I can understand the desire to bury the past. There may even be good intentions behind it; Japan is not our enemy. Some people are more dovish than they were ten years ago, they’ve got their reasons and I can respect that.

But it just seems to me, there’s something wrong with your argument if the best shot it has of looking like the right one, arrives as a consequence of people not talking about something.

One of the lessons we have learned from Pearl Harbor, is that when a nation declares war on another, it’s at least possible for it to be unambiguously and incontestably in the right in doing so. If there is a political agenda in motion today that finds this message to be inconvenient, I don’t think it’s asking too much for said agenda to take a break for one day while a grateful nation remembers.

Seems like just yesterday, when not a single week would go by without someone saying Sarah Palin’s “fifteen minutes were up some time ago” and “it’s time for her to go away.” If I had an archive of recordings I could consult, I believe I’d find much of this defeatist muttering was muttered after she’d gone away.

Donald Trump has gone away, too, but now he’s decided he doesn’t like being gone-away. So he’s promoted himself from aspiring conqueror to kingmaker. And yet: Where are the loud, bumptious voices, preaching to the rest of us that Donald Trump Has Exhausted His Fifteenth Minute Of Fame And Must Go Away Now?

Well, I’ll say it. He’s doing incomparable damage.

The truth that no one seems to be willing to audibly point out is, Donald Trump actually shares a lot in common with our current president. Not quite so much the ideology or the positions on the issues, but this vision for proper government. This whole notion that a candidate is elected with a message, the message becomes a mandate…and, at some point, the message is subsumed, overwhelmed by, and ultimately made insignificant in the looming shadow of the messenger. We get this “most important guy” whose opinions are supremely significant, even if those opinions directly contradict the message that got him elected in the first place. And then this scale of significance, in short order, starts to decide everything. Everyone else in the country is inferior to this guy on top. And that’s even if they agree with the top dog; if they disagree, they’re not significant at all, and this top dog guy gets to scheme up some creative new ways to make the dissenters even more insignificant than they already are. The significance becomes a virtue unto itself and the insignificance becomes some kind of a transgression. People start to brag about the correctness of their positions because they’ve got more Twitter followers than whoever else might disagree.

I know Donald Trump subscribes to this whole school of thought, because he relies on it so often. How many times have we heard him defend himself against someone else, because he counts more than they do. In fact, I struggle to recall a single time he’s persisted long in defending an idea, by actually discussing that idea. So Barack Obama and Donald Trump, it seems, agree on how the government should be run. They both agree there needs to be some “soft monarch” up at the top, who dictates what’s right and what’s wrong, one minute to the next. If that guy ever does something wrong, that thing stops being wrong, right there-and-then, just because Mister Wonderful is doing it. They agree on this, they just disagree on who that top guy should be.

This is anti-American. If we are on the brink of realizing some truth that places the country’s continuing survival in real jeopardy, then surely that would be the truth: We lately cannot conduct our elections in such a way that we vote on the acceptance or rejection of ideas, we instead vote on the acceptance or rejection of people, and we’re going to be stuck in this loop for a few more cycles. How many of these four year cycles, I wonder, would it take to make such “stuckage” terminal to America herself, and make the nation’s demise a certain thing?

I submit that to deal a lasting blow to the spirit that makes her great, it takes only one. We just got done demonstrating that much.

This latest stunt has me actually agreeing with Ron Paul, no mean feat that. Newt Gingrich has been called out by Congressman Paul on the mistake he’s making “kissing the ring” of Donald Trump, and Gingrich is doubling down. When you make a mistake and refuse to admit it, you’ve made two mistakes.

Paul’s right.

Gingrich is wrong.

Trump needs to go away. Right now. He never had fifteen minutes here.