…well…if you’ve had this discussion with someone left-of-leaning lately, you’ll know the next thing that happens is as reliable as nightfall. They love their facts and statistics — cling to them like some kind of security blanket. And they seem to understand the concept that statistics, especially statistics that consist of averages, are produced by counting all of something in some consistent way. But they live in this funny half-world in which large pieces of the “all-of-something” disappear, or never existed in the first place. Yes, they shun information and shun facts. Ask a prog about anything that has to do with a non-favored demographic group that is being inconvenienced in some way, or is suffering in some way. Men being hit harder by the current economy, or Christians being forced to close their church services for a re-routed gay pride parade, or the Boy Scouts losing United Way funding…

They don’t want to pay attention to this stuff. Which is their right, of course. But then they have this adorably naive way of carrying-on like when they deliberately ignore half the picture, their statistics somehow still count for something.

It’s just one of the fundamental laws that make up the universe, whether you appreciate that or not: Anything that is an average, is only valid if it is produced from all of whatever the average is supposed to be reflecting. Libs aren’t happy with that. They’d rather consume their half-facts, puff up the adrenaline, and get angry. It’s more fun that way.

But the fact of the matter is…while it’s true the very rich do prosper more than the average during the boom times…they also lose a lot more during the busts. Liberals come to some bizarre conclusions here because — yet again — they’re fond of paying attention to one side of the equation, but not the other:

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CB0) says, “The share of income received by the top 1% grew from about 8% in 1979 to over 17% in 2007.”

This news caused quite a stir, feeding the left’s obsession with inequality. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, said this “jaw-dropping report” shows “why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve.” The New York Times opined that the study is “likely to have a major impact on the debate in Congress over the fairness of federal tax and spending policies.”

But here’s a question: Why did the report stop at 2007? The CBO didn’t say, although its report briefly acknowledged—in a footnote—that “high income taxpayers had especially large declines in adjusted gross income between 2007 and 2009.”

No kidding. Once these two years are brought into the picture, the share of after-tax income of the top 1% by my estimate fell to 11.3% in 2009 from the 17.3% that the CBO reported for 2007.

The larger truth is that recessions always destroy wealth and small business incomes at the top. Perhaps those who obsess over income shares should welcome stock market crashes and deep recessions because such calamities invariably reduce “inequality.” Of course, the same recessions also increase poverty and unemployment.

The latest cyclical destruction of top incomes has been unusually deep and persistent, because fully 43.7% of top earners’ incomes in 2007 were from capital gains, dividends and interest, with another 17.1% from small business. Since 2007, capital gains on stocks and real estate have often turned to losses, dividends on financial stocks were slashed, interest income nearly disappeared, and many small businesses remain unprofitable. [emphasis mine]

Daniel J. Mitchell from the Cato Institute explains the harm that our tax policies really do:

You can see, he’s been running into this too. You say “rich people lose” and there are people out there who immediately stop listening — and they tend to be the loudest ones. But that’s part of the equation. And the loud people will still want to run around pretending to be all scientifical and junk, even though they’re only looking at half the picture.

See, it depends on your purposes. If you’re scavenging for sound bites to try to get people whipped up about an agenda, it’s appropriate to cherry-pick the data and toss out whatever doesn’t suit your needs. If you’re trying to get a reading on the situation and arrive at a rational understanding of what’s going on, and you’re going to rely on statistics and averages to do this, then you want to count everything.

We’re in economic trouble right now, because we’ve spent a lot of years allowing our policies to be written and interpreted and molded and shaped by people who go through the motions of doing the latter when they’re really doing the former.

Now:

Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6% Raising Hopes
Jobless Rate Drop Could Boost Obama
Obama Gets Economic Indicator He Can Crow About
Good News On Job Front For Obama
Jobless Rate Lowest In 2.5 Years

Bush, seeking re-election in ’04:

The President’s Jobless Recovery
Frustrated Job Seekers Cause Jobless Rate To Drop
Economy Adds Few New Jobs
Low Jobless Rate Reflects Lost Hope
US Jobless Rate Drops But For Wrong Reasons

Situation’s pretty much the same…except the unemployment rate being talked about seven years ago was 5.7%. How sweet would that be now.

Nothing further to add.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson

Isn’t there?

If there isn’t such a rule, can’t we make one?

The details aren’t necessary to discuss, but once again we’re contemplating the sad state of health care in this country because, at pharmacy point-of-sale, I made the discovery that my fiance’s health insurance plan is about as useful as a bag without a bottom.

And also, once again: We have to have some sympathy for the people who want to support the latest whiz-bang government-intervention odyssey into the health care market. This is how the ambition starts, isn’t it? “So-and-so needs a pill that costs a quarter of a million dollars, just to live.” It certainly gives one a feeling that Something Must Be Done. And, anybody who stands in the way, or mutters so much as a squeak of resistance, must think of human lives as disposable and must therefore be some kind of a monster.

You know, it occurs to me, maybe that’s where we’re running into trouble. This idea that if a thought is understandable — if a feeling is understandable — then it is wrong to resist it in any way. EVER. The passionate thought has to go to Capitol Hill, it has to get into the books, everyone has to vote for it, it has to become the law of the land and then if it doesn’t net the results we wanted, we have to live with whatever it is forever. And then we have to pass a whole bunch more laws just like it. Where’d we get this, anyway? How and when did it become wrong to say “I understand your agitation, but there are reasons why we can’t do this.” That is precisely what so-called “customer service” people say to us every hour of every day, when our everyday grievances, demands and requests are so much more reasonable than allowing government to take over [blank] yet again. Somehow, that’s the one desire that never seems to run into the boilerplate I-understand-but-proceed-no-further-barrier, even though that’s the one desire that should.

All these horror stories. I asked one of the horror story peddlers a couple years ago: What would happen if you went to the emergency room with this in, let us say, the 1980’s? Would you have been stuck with a $3,000 bill then? Absolutely not. Okay, then…that’s like, the first rule of problem solving, if the problem is a relatively recent problem, review the history. What changed? What’s different? Too many people aren’t doing this. Obama comes up with a plan that has “health” and “care” in the title…anyone following the news, knows how He got it, He just said to Congress “Write something down that has ‘health’ and ‘care’ in the title, and send it to Me.” Wham, bam, thank you ma’am…and we’ve all got to support this because Something Must Be Done.

I just got done writing down something about the insane. Well, the incompetent represent a big problem too.

My confidence in my retirement plans has always been rather fleeting. Like many Americans, I’m worried about outliving my savings. We’re all probably more concerned about this than we ought to be, even though the future may reveal we’ve been less troubled by it than we should be. If all goes well, I expect during my lifetime to see this cycle repeated maybe four more times — politicians put out some new government health care intrusion scheme on display, and every nitwit who ever paid more than he expected for an “inhalator” will yell “Yes, yes, things are terrible, we’ve got to do something!” After four or five of these, what will the state of health care in the United States be? Will life, for an 85-year-old man in 2051, continue to be affordable? I don’t think we can afford this over the long term, right now, with the nitwits running around voting yes on this stuff.

No, a bottle of pills half-full of cotton should not cost a hundred and ten dollars. Yes, there’s a reason that it does…and no, “greed” is not the explanation. The guy selling you a box of paper clips for 89 cents wants to make a profit, too; he’s greedy, too. But you’re only paying 89 cents. Clue?

Go home and do some thinking, you nitwits. Something’s terribly wrong when the rest of us have to choose between becoming a burden on our children and grandchildren, and taking your vote away.

You may want to start with Milton Friedman’s famous quote: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

We make a point of subscribing to liberal blogs, because our curiosity and befuddlement about their ideas is genuine. We really do seek to understand, here. We occasionally will let one of these go when the feed seeks only to aggravate and does nothing to educate; we just dropped The Young Turks off our YouTube channel. But even the ones who are just out there to dispense phony arguments that regular-Joe liberals can use against conservatives in casual settings — the kinds of chestnuts where you dig into them, just a little tiny bit, and you find out you weren’t supposed to do any research on this at all, it was just a cool sound bite to be thrown out at a kegger or over the Thanksgiving dinner table. We still study these, to get a reading on how progressives think.

So we keep subscribing to Ed Darrell, whose computer data has apparently been lost to oblivion or at least placed in jeopardy. Last night he thought he’d announce to the world that he is having trouble signing on to Carbonite because…

So he can continue to slavishly devote himself to his proper progressive ideology, or he can keep things working. Reminds me of the old Vaudeville skit where the mugger pulls a gun on a guy and yells “Your money or your life!” and after a long pause, the mugging victim mutters “I’m thinking, I’m thinking…”

Just about every conservative who has attended and managed to succeed in college — or, pointedly, done the same in Ed Darrell’s class — has learned to do what he can’t bring himself to do here. Actually, every conservative who’s watched teevee long enough to see Our Holy Replacement Jesus Man-God President pop on with some public service announcement…you need to bend and flex, in ways this lefty blogger cannot. It becomes just part of living life. If you have to put up with a smarmy lefty to get something done, then you just do it so the thing gets done; if it’s that unpleasant of an experience, then hurry up let’s get it over with. Progs are not placed in this situation too often, and when they are, we see now how they react. One cannot help but wonder what kind of data is supposed to be protected here. Limbaugh’s smug mug is sufficient to stop the idea in its tracks, that the data might be worth saving?

So yes, this is why we subscribe to liberal blogs. Just like Michael Savage says, it is a mental disorder. Think about what liberal ideas do; they work a lot like Carbonite, except your “on-line service” is the government and you are required to enroll. Much of the time, the government is run by conservatives, and it seems the resulting conundrum is something the liberal just simply ignores and blocks out, from long-term memory, short-term memory and present conscious experience. Very typical behavior for mental disorders.

If it is one, then we all need to be studying it, for it is wrecking our lives, and our childrens’ lives, along with those of the progs. They want to create a perfect world filled with understanding and egalitarianism and compromise, in which everybody’s opinion is important and everybody counts. And then not live in it. Ostracizing everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Reminds me of that weird, goofy dream/nightmare I had in that hot summer night when the last presidential election campaign was in full swing, about the tiny fortress with the strict rules and the high walls. Those who exile end up exiling themselves.

Update: You know, it’s worth pondering here — Darrell did have a legitimate reason for putting up this observation. It is absurd to think he stands alone, among the left-leaning, in nurturing a new reluctance to become a Carbonite client and it is equally absurd to think Carbonite did not anticipate this. Obviously, someone in marketing made a “three steps forward and one step back” decision.

Perhaps what we are seeing here is solid evidence that conservatives and liberals think about data protection in entirely different ways. If I ever lose faith in my own data protection measures, which is doubtful, and an on-line protection plan started to look like a good idea, there is no liberal countenance you could put up on that web site that would slow me down even a little tiny bit. Heck, put Nancy Pelosi up there. I’d just click the button a little faster to get past it.

It’s my [insert your own expletive]-ing data. My data is time. It’s time I spent on the [another expletive] computer, that I could have been spending doing something else. I’m not screwing around here.

Could we conclude that, generally speaking, the most strident liberals haven’t got much use for backups? Hmmmm…there’s a thought. They do seem to be enamored with how ideas resonate, much more than they are with how those ideas are remembered. They don’t seem to care a whole lot that something sounding good today might sound comical tomorrow. “We Are The Change We Have Been Waiting For!” comes to mind as an example, although there are many others.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Sometimes, you can improve the outcome simply by asking the right question(s)…

“…and that’s really scary.” Watch all the way to the end, the argument is made there. And there’s a lot to back this up:

A very rare technology/software-engineering post. Article here deals with the three types of programmers:

We have three primary personas across the developer division: Mort, Elvis and Einstein. Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems. He focuses on productivity and learns as needed. Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learning while working on the solution. Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution.

This interests me, but I’m even more interested in the response from the programming community. One theme that seems to re-emerge over and over again is that people do not like to stereotype or pigeonhole; they seem to be operating from a premise that any lessons learned by indulging in such contraband thinking, must automatically be wrong.

I’m not impressed by that argument at all. There was, however, another one (somewhere) who pointed out it’s credible, in fact likely to be a common occurrence, for a single engineer to display one of these behaviors on one project and a different behavior on some different project. This is something I find to be quite reasonable. Perhaps instead of labeling these things “personas” it would be more appropriate to call them roles.

I notice as I think back over the years, there is a very strong predilection among management, and also among recruiters and contracting agencies as their own role has become more pertinent to the industry, to see all software developers as “Morts” and the software itself as some kind of stuff to be measured in magnitude only. Like asphalt, wallpaper paste or roofing shingles. How many pounds does this Mort spread per hour? Oh, he became a project manager or a principal architect? That must be because he was the quickest. This is an assumption that leads to much trouble for many stakeholders.

Speaking for myself, thinking back on my experiences, and the ones that made me feel most fulfilled and like I had contributed the most to the success of a project, where someone else lacking my experience could not, my roles there could be more realistically likened to the guy hammering the frames and studs together. Or maybe pouring the foundation. It’s the little secrets that lead to success. Pay extra to get the big honkin’ long nails, measure-twice-cut-once, verify everything, and proceed with an attitude of “Whatever I build is gonna stay built for a long time.”

I recognize the hazards and harms of stereotyping. But I do have to say, there certainly is a perceptible difference between the Elvis/Einsteins and the Morts. And I have been very fortunate career-wise, overall. There were a lot of times when it didn’t seem like it, but looking back over the long term I’ve spent a lot less time on the bench than some other people have, many of whom possess talents in great abundance that I’m lacking.

But I must say, I probably could have improved on things for my own benefit, had I been more proactive in taking on the issues raised by this “Mort complex.” Probably, others could have done so as well. Our vocation is grossly misunderstood by the public. I suppose all vocations are, in some way or another. But ours is misunderstood by insiders, who truly believe and act on the assumption that we just slap things together that can be slapped together any ol’ way, and progress-against-time is the only variable that has any lasting impact on anything. Remember making jokes about this? “You guys get started on writing that code, I’ll go upstairs and get some requirements.”

This is our blogger friend Sonic Charmer, CEO, Chief Cook and Bottle Washing of Rhymes With Girls and Cars talking. We subscribe to his RSS feed, and you should too. Not because he’s the guy who came up with a realistic theory about why it’s so hard to burst drinking straws out of their wrappers with one hand lately…although he did do exactly that, and nobody else has. But because he looks at movies in a very intelligent and useful way — which is to say, he looks at them the way I look at them. As a menagerie of over-used, underly-creative tropes.

Like for example: You know that trope where a kinda-sorta-bad-guy, but not completely evil bad guy, a bad guy who shows lots of promise for being redeemed into a good guy, is coerced into holding up a bank or cracking into a safe because a really super-duper-rotten-to-the-core-bad-guy has kidnapped his daughter and is holding her hostage? Well…Sonic has not written too much about that lately, to the best I understand. But he does have something to say about the plot device where a sexpot female has just the bees’ knees excuse for cheating on her husband or boyfriend.

What he’s writing about, specifically, is…

A guy, due to some strange circumstances, is thought to be dead.
His wife starts sleeping with his best friend.
Then he comes back.
At first, he doesn’t know, as she hides it from him.

He came up with:

1. The Walking Dead
2. Homeland

And then I threw in:

3. A Very Brady Sequel
4. The Dead Zone
5. Face/Off
6. Darkman
7. Rob Roy

After which, I thought of

8. Multiplicity

Now, what SC is looking for falls within a tight scope of decent women of healthy conscience who thought their husband or paramour was dead, dead freakin’ dead. Some of these skirt this perimeter and some fall well outside of it. In Rob Roy, Mary has no way of knowing whether her husband Rob is alive or dead, and has no reason at all to suspect he’s on the far side of the sod, in fact she is taken, in a memorably graphic scene, against her will. Andie MacDowell in Multiplicity, likewise, has no reason at all to think her husband is dead; she’s unwittingly seduced by his clones. But they do fall within the definition of what Sonic Charmer is describing, in that these are women who enjoy the benefit of some flimsy excuse, interwoven with the movie’s main plot, for engaging in The Act outside of monogamy.

The trend is perceptible, if not outright-objectionable, because if for no other reason it isn’t reciprocated across gender lines. It is awkward and distracting to cobble together a story about a man being taken against his will…although it’s been done, like here and here.

But Sonic’s query concerns a tighter class as well as a looser one. He is thought to be dead; she is despondent, bereft of solace, finally finding it in the arms of another man, most likely his best friend. Meanwhile, he emerges from oblivion, not dead after all. Has that happened in a gender reversal? I cannot think of a single example. Well..maybe just one, which was a made-for-TV sequel of something that came before.

Commenter Severian came up with some decent observations, I thought.

[O]ne could go so far as to say “woman receives the complete devotion of two hunky men but never really has to choose between them” is the plot driver behind umpteen movies these days, and behind chick lit in general. It’s certainly the case in those awful Twilight movies any male in any kind of relationship in the past five years has had to endure….

I guess it boils down to: a wom[a]n with two or more men on a string is somehow a heroine (and a victim, because they keep trying to force her to choose), whereas a man with multiple women on a string is a player and a jerk. And since women control the bucks, that’s what we see.

Now, here we have a paradox: Women like attention. They crave it. Not all women; but the kind of women being discussed here, the kind who nurture all these unstable emotional demands, who command all the purchasing dollars that mold and shape the movies the rest of us see — they want to be valued. If they must go missing for any length of time, they want to be missed. They want attention, lots and lots of attention.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if they do have a fantasy about someone disappearing, being thought dead, and miraculously reappearing again — it would be about them. But that is not the case. The fantasy has to do with the husband or boyfriend disappearing…the waifish despondent widow finds comfort and solace in the bed of his best friend, and then the dead guy comes back again and now we have a love triangle, oh dear. What to do. But — in real life, if that were ever to happen, the two-timing slut-widow wouldn’t be getting a whole lot of attention. Weeks, months, maybe years after the reappearance, the whole community would be focused on Lazarus. Wow, how awesome that he isn’t dead after all. Too bad his wife is such a tart.

It’s clear to me the entire exercise is all about sympathy. Women in movies can be indecisive about their partners in the mattress-dance, because they can do that and still remain sympathetic. Dudes can’t do anything like that. The cold, hard truth is that nobody’s going to feel sorry for a guy if he loses his woman…his wife, girlfriend, sister, mother, daughter. He’s certainly not going to be given any kind of license to fuck around. That would be violating the memory of whoever. But things work out differently for the honeys; they need someone to keep them warm at night, and they need their bills to be paid. Plus, they’re all sad what with their hubbies being drowned or blown up or whatever. Need a strong shoulder to cry on.

But then again — nearly all of these examples come from the 1990’s.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Roger Gitlin writes in Canada Free Press:

What we are witnessing today as 2011 turns the page, is a slow, agonizing death of the once proud party of the people. In decades past, the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. It was the party that fought to even the playing field with unscrupulous and an all-too greedy American industry. Over time, real progress was made and working folks were paid a decent wage and afforded a lifestyle that many today would envy. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the America of the 1950s and 1960s that molded me into what I am today. In 1968, I was proud to cast my first ballot for Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Things have changed a bit these past 45 years.

Today the Party of the working man has become the Party of the non-working class. The Democrats have devolved to become the Party of moochers, leeches, and victims. And this Party of hope and change has morphed into a Frankenstein that would turn FDR in his grave. The Democratic Party is an abomination that is slowly strangling the greatest country in the world: The United States of America.

He gives lots of reasons not to vote for them…none of which I need. Question is, are they really on a downslide into oblivion? Isn’t that looking through rose-colored glasses?

I’ll permit myself this much optimism: They are not going away, since we have a need for two major parties. One of those parties, or the other, can diminish itself to standing for absolutely nothing, and certainly the democrat party is close to this extreme. But that party will continue to endure, if for no other reason than to accumulate and thereby represent the votes of opposition to the other party, votes which are always going to be there, and will always need a place to go.

But I think in the next couple of decades the Donkey Party will have to reform. Standing for absolutely nothing is a bad plan. History suggests that when it comes to planning battle strategy, democrat strategists are smarter than I am — as I would certainly hope they would be, since this isn’t my day job. But they’re pig-iron stupid when it comes to things they haven’t seen coming. They have a poor track record of “waking up,” becoming aware of things which had previously escaped their awareness. I don’t think they were aware of what follows…

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging page:

It’s interesting. We’ve got all these people who say the two major parties are the same, in some ways…and let’s face it, they have a point.

But it seems when the GOP surges to victory, it’s over some specific issues. Like hey, quit letting these felons out of jail to rape our wives and slaughter our children. Or get rid of that boondoggle ObamaCare. Nuke those terrorists, welfare is temporary assistance not a permanent way of life, build the dang fence.

When the democrat party has a good year, it’s over a bunch of fluff and nonsense. Hooray for us! Help us destroy our opposition. More power and money to our friends in the unions, businesses shouldn’t be profitable, work shouldn’t be rewarding.

These two parties are not the same.

The democrats don’t have a platform. In order to create the perception that they do have one, they have to peddle cliches that don’t really mean anything.

Well, they don’t have much of one. If I were to speak in tones of realism about the platform they really do have, it would be three planks:

One, there are people with racist/sexist/prejudicial thoughts running around, and (somehow) we’ve got to fix this.

Two, there needs to be more power and money going through the federal government. Since it’s we good people who are going to be running it forever and ever and ever, y’know. No bad people are ever on top, from this moment forward, so we have to make it omni-powerful and put it in charge of everything.

Three: Like I said, above, hard work should not pay. People who create products and provide services useful to other people, need to be under the command and management of other people who’ve never done any such thing in their entire lives.

This isn’t a complete list. There’s a line somewhere that separates “what’s wrong with them?” from “what exactly is it they’re trying to do?” The line gets blurry and it gets blurry rather fast…so the ones that look more like criticism than statement of purpose, I’ve left off. Skipped over the ones that would make them look really bad.

No further comment.

…and this is starting to annoy me quite a lot. It’s like getting poked in the ear, with a stick, repeatedly, by an irascible little kid whose parents won’t do anything about it. It goes from “this is weird” to “what the fuck” to “time to lay the smack down,” at warp speed…and the flip-flopper thing has been going on since Kerry was running, some seven years ago.

The act seems to arrive in three parts, kind of an unholy trinity thing:

1. My position has been completely consistent since Day One^TM;
2. You’re an idiot for not seeing it that way;
3. I’m getting really irritated so don’t ever ask that question again.

Perceived front-runner Mittens demonstrates at 4:43…the question is asked at 4:05…through the sixth & seventh minutes things start to get testy. By 7:25 starts walking through the three items listed above and, frankly, acts like a bit of a snot.

He had further words for Bret Baier afterward. I’m not the first to say this and I won’t be the last, but if Romney really hopes to be the nominee he’d better get ready for a lot more grilling than what we saw in the clip. Baier discusses this further with Bill O’Reilly here.

Although Romney did a good job clarifying the immigration question and I find his quibbling somewhat reasonable, I call bullshit for two reasons. They have to do with the phenomenon overall, not quite so much with Romney, although they both apply here:

One. Logically, the argument of “There are subtle differences here that are going over your head because you’re not looking closely enough” — works when you’re arguing two things are different, against an opposition who insists they are the same. It doesn’t work when you go the other way.

Two. If you are indeed unfairly maligned as a flip-flopper because your comments on this earlier occasion, or on this later one, were taken out of context and some false meaning was read into one of them — the rational thing for you to do would have very little to do with dissuading people from looking further. If you’re sincere, you would pick up on where the mistaken perception set in, and then you’d go after it like a pit bull. Which, to be fair, Mitt did. But why then is it on others to bring it up and give you the opportunity to do this clarifying? Mitt should want to do that, and instead, here he is snapping at people.

Let’s walk through the meaning of this very carefully. It’s high time someone did.

People who are CompletelyConsistentAllTheWayBackToDayOne, are going to be somewhat passionate about that position. Indeed, if they’re picking up flak about being a flip-flopper, whether it’s deserved or not, it might very well be because the voters who care about the issue have gotten the gist that their concern isn’t being shared by the candidate. In other words, perceived inconsistency might not have anything to do with it at all. Now if I can figure that much out, rest assured the candidates can and Mitt Romney can. So this tactic of “Let’s move on, and you’re an even bigger idiot if you ever bring it up again” just exacerbates the problem. If the candidate isn’t concerned about that, then he must not be concerned about the issue. He looks guilty. And generally, he probably is. There’s no reason for you to move on unless you just don’t give a damn.

The flip-floppers are proven…or at least, strongly suggested to be…guilty as all holy hell every time they do this, and they’ve been doing it a lot lately. They’ve been doing it because Kerry got away with it. Didn’t win, but you could see this was working well for him and it looks like someone out there took good notes. Now they’re trying to get away with the same shenanigans as the encyclopedia salesmen:

There’s a much broader problem going on here though. I think Romney’s irritation is genuine, as was Kerry’s, and the same goes for the current President when these luminaries are confronted by audiences who aren’t radiating the emotional vibe being sought by the luminary. So this part of the problem doesn’t concern the candidates for the office, or even the current holders of the office, it has to do with the office itself. It is becoming an imperial position. People going after it don’t want to be asked whatever questions, or be confronted by whatever concerns. They want to tell the peasants want to think about things, how to prioritize things, and what emotional reactions they should be having. The candidates are being unfairly inconvenienced by the fact that such matters are under the control of other people.

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.

The Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes to mushroom, commenting at blogger friend Gerard’s place. It’s actually two sentences but we’ll find a way to cope:

True religion — What does the Lord require of you? To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

False religion — What does Gaia require of you? To deceive wickedly, to attack your critics ruthlessly, and to walk in the arrogance of settled science.

The subject is the Bret Stephens column in the Wall Street Journal this morning, The Great Global Warming Fizzle. Which has some pretty good candidates for a BSIHORL as well:

So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

There’s a pretty good chance it’s real, and The Other McCain’s summary is so concise and excellent I want to make sure it’s filed away. No matter where Herman Cain goes, this is going to become relevant later:

Despite all of the obituaries for the Cain campaign, then, what do we know about the three accusers whose names are public?

• Sharon Bialek twice filed for bankruptcy and the suggestion that she was financial stable because she lived with a wealthy fiancé proved false: He’s unemployed and on the verge of bankruptcy himself and — oh, by the way — he’s not actually her fiancé anymore. Also, Bill Kurtis said Bialek had a “history,” whatever that means.
• Karen Kraushaar filed a “frivolous” complaint against her next employer after getting paid “go away” money by the National Restaurant Association.
• Ginger White, an unemployed twice-divorced single mom who is nine months behind on her rent and made libelous accusations of racism and drug abuse against her ex-business partner.

Everybody keeps saying there’s an awful lot of smoke for there to be no fire, but each of these women has something in her background that tends to taint her credibility. A month into this, and we have no actual proof that Cain did anything wrong. [bold emphasis mine]

We’re going to see this again even if Cain is toast. It has not escaped my attention, and I hope it has not escaped yours, that a series of wretchedly inconvenient disasters is systematically falling upon the hapless heads of smaller-government candidates. Bad debate moments, bimbo eruptions, awkward interviews…

No, nobody can control Fred Thompson and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry botching it during debates and interviews, nor is there any evidence, to my knowledge, to suggest someone is behind the scenes coordinating Cain’s gals like little string-puppets. Except Gloria Allred, that is. But the media can control how big of a story each of these debacles can become. And they’ve been making use of that advantage, nonstop, pretty much since the Bush/Gore hoop-de-doo. And before. Well by now, with responsible Americans reading about our mushroom-cloud public debt, passion for fiscal restraint is running high and the countering passion to bloat the government further is running commensurately high.

They’re backed into a corner. What do wild animals and people do when they’re backed into a corner and have one weapon? And so we hear a bunch of fluff about small-government candidates; fluff that has nothing whatsoever to do with how they would govern if they were ever elected. Someone, somewhere, decides the fluff should be repeated over and over again until something happens. Bad on them. The rest of us decide they should get away with it. Bad on us.

Brent Bozell:

Ginger White makes an adultery charge against Cain and she’s on NBC within hours. But when Juanita Broaddick accused Chelsea’s father of raping her in a 1999 Dateline NBC interview, then-anchor Tom Brokaw never allowed one single second of her voice to break into the NBC Nightly News.

So this is really a minor skirmish within a big war about economic systems. Social contracts, as I said before.

Speaking of which — I notice something about this, that nobody anywhere is discussing, which I think is particularly worthy of note. The feminists are conspicuously silent about it. We seem to have an alternate social contract in place, sort of an underworld economy, set up gradually and unconsciously for the use of nominally pulchritudinous, Sigourneylicious females. Serial bankruptcies, serial evictions, “go-away money” and an occasional press conference. Living in the twilight of their years of man-appeal, it seems they start to feel God’s gifts slipping out of their wrinkly but well-manicured fingers, along with their marketability. They begin flailing around for some sort of “retirement” plan.

And so we have our completely bizarre moonlight ritual of sexual harassment litigation. What’s the phrase we wanted to toss into the time capsule? “Non-sexual gesture that made her feel uncomfortable.” There ya go. Somewhere in a Wall Street Journal (may or may not go rummaging in the archives to find it) someone was guessing the break-even point for these things to be around a hundred grand. I’m doubting like the dickens this is an accident. Wherever a community of people rely on a meal ticket, someone in our system of “law” will pop up to inflate that meal ticket by whatever means…and when the break-even point is a hundred large, a “go away” jackpot of fifty is obviously not unreasonable. It becomes a question of simple math.

It’s the paycheck of that alternate, subterranean economy. The commodity of choice. The coin of the underworld. Have some sympathy, it must be a wretched way to live. And this is the world modern feminism has built. Young women who feel reticent about starting families, are discouraged from doing so, and if they’re feeling ambivalent about educating themselves and refining some precious skill in a hard vocation that could make some real money, they’re discouraged from that as well. Just learn Astrology, Buddhism and oppressed-minority-studies and it’ll all work out. Well, all of them cannot become tenured professors in the Oppressed Minority Studies Department. So we have this underworld-economy. An alternate market system for unskilled single ladies past their prime. He looked at me funny, give me some money.

I can recite it with my eyes closed: “It’s very important to note that the intent of the accused is entirely irrelevant, it is the perception of the person who might have been offended that decides everything.” Nobody ever stops to ask “Hey waitaminnit, why is that??” Here we have a bunch of lawyers all of a sudden legislating how humans at work interact with each other. Someone, among them, came up with this rule which clearly has special importance. And is also extraordinarily dangerous. It’s like going into an oil refinery and telling everyone “It’s very important that you be smoking, all of the time.” There’s a rule that would, clearly, be subject to lots of question. But this other one is subjected to none at all. No real chance to avoid the problem of looked-at-me-funny, it’s too late for you, that’s what you get for making the mistake of having a boss who would hire a woman who’s a nutcase. So it’s all on you.

Why does it work this way? Because these subterranean unskilled past-their-prime single females depend on it for their livelihood. They haven’t got anything else.

It’s occasionally said that Jack the Ripper was a force for good in a way, because that string of murders made the public aware of the plight of the indigent in Whitechapel, especially of the “working women” who plied their trade there. This, too, was an alternate underworld market thriving and writhing beneath an opaque surface, serpent-like, out of sight in merry, oblivious Victorian England. Perhaps the derailment of Herman Cain’s candidacy will eventually culminate in a similar, edifying lesson for us all. The situation’s very similar when you think of it: Weird things taking place, because we haven’t been taking care of our gals. Everyone’s raised from childhood to think of females in the here-and-now — carry their luggage, open the doors for them, carry out their vendettas, never ever let them starve. But it’s not so easy to think of their future, and it’s interesting that few people have done them greater long-term harm here than our feminists.

I’m still nursing some regrets about waiting so long to subscribe to Burt Prelutsky. Better late than never.

But in his latest, he’s struggling to figure out how liberalism came about and why it’s sticking with us.

…[H]ow is it that anyone can look at the results of communism and socialism and not see them for the nightmares they are and always have been? After all, the evidence is in plain sight.

For all its claims to idealism, communism has invariably resulted in blood-thirsty regimes, whether in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba or East Germany. For the glories of socialism, you need only look to the riots now taking place in Greece. Tourists who have for years been attracted by the ruins of ancient Athens will now have even more reason to visit, although they will have to watch out for Molotov cocktails and tear gas.

Even here in America, which has generally been heading in the wrong direction ever since FDR adopted Norman Thomas’s socialist platform as his own, we have seen the pathetic results in our own streets. We see young dunderheads demonstrating for the end of capitalism, the destruction of corporations, and the forgiving of student loans, while simultaneously demanding high-paying jobs, free health insurance and the latest products devised by the brain of corporate billionaire Steve Jobs.

His problem, of course, is that he’s thinking too logically. The reference works to consult here can come from Dante, Milton, Pope Gregory I, some old Shazam! comic books…The Seven Deadly Sins. Pride, envy, greed, wrath, selfishness, sloth, injustice. It’s not any organized process of rational thought, it’s just plain sin.

Sin against proper thinking as well as sin against God and man. Liberals do a bang-up job going through the motions of thinking logically: “We tried tax cuts under Reagan and Bush, and they didn’t work!” “We tried [unregulated] capitalism, and it hasn’t worked!” “We TOLD you there were no weapons of mass destruction!” But seriously: When was the last time a liberal had his mind all made up about something, and some evidence came rolling in to give that liberal and his idea a good stiff whack in the nose, and the liberal changed his mind? With sufficient certainty and respect to this new evidence, that he’d take the time and trouble to alert other liberals to it as they entered into their rote monologues, if for no other reason than to save them from making asses out of themselves. Have you ever seen a liberal do that? No, you haven’t and you’re not going to. It isn’t in ’em.

Just ask them sometime. Have you ever been sure of something and then been forced to change your mind because of new evidence. Some might pretend to be former Republicans, and use your query as a launching pad into one of their favorite monologues, so you may have to refine the question — has new evidence ever persuaded you toward a less progressive thought than what you held previously? Over your entire lifetime? This one’s going to be a cul de sac. They’ll change the subject, or some Cheesecake Nazi will change the subject for them, or they’ll accuse you of being a bad person and pull a switcheroo, start waxing lyrically about how they’re better than you are. But you won’t get an answer.

See, this is why good people like Prelutsky end up frustrated. Liberals do not examine evidence, think on what it all means, and reach conclusions like normal people do. They reach the conclusions first. They do their thinking in terms of stories, and they write the stories backwards. The “dunderheads demonstrating for the end of capitalism” are a perfect example — they wrote the final line of their narrative first. Classic Robin Hood stuff, really; the ancient evil regime shall be overthrown, the treasury with all its vast riches will be busted wide open with the treasure spilled out in the streets for the desperate peasants to gather up. Then they’ll storm down the stairs of the dungeon, break down the heavy doors, shatter our chains with their swords and set us free.

But on the way, they’re asked what their protest is all about. Uh, derp derp derp — they have no answer. A few of them have muttered something about how now that they’ve assembled, they need to meet and figure out what the plan is…which makes everyone else go, uh, what?? And then you know what happened next. Someone came up with the idea that the tent cities were emblematic of this model society, this new world they were trying to build, and everyone else was going to see that some other way was possible. Obviously, not too much reasoned, rational thought going into that one. As the autumn gets nippier and wetter and sloppier, we in our comfy apartments and houses are supposed to settle in with our hot toddies and rum, turn on the six o’clock news, and see that camping is possible. That’ll bring capitalism to an end for sure…not exactly the best-thought-out of battle plans. And that’s before the vandalism, robberies and rapes started.

See, they think in narratives and that’s where they get into trouble. All these evil bad people are running things, this “ninety-nine percent” is being oppressed, we’re gonna overthrow this terrible system and put something in that’s equitable. Every time they have to fill in some more plot points beyond just those vitals, it’s like watching a Tyrannosaurus Rex doing push-ups, in that they lack the equipment needed just to get started. I remember awhile ago my son and I rode the light rail, and we ran into a genuine communist. Wanted to tell us all about Michael Moore speaking at some event in San Francisco…we both listened patiently, and I made a point not to ask any questions that wouldn’t be asked by someone truly sympathetic. So I had to ask a question when he got to the part about turning out all those horrible people running things now including President Obama. This was spring of ’09, when His Holy Eminence was still muttering platitudes with every speech about “hope” and “change” and “reversing the failed policies of the last eight years.” I was being sincere, I really thought this Michael Moore thing was a bleed-over from the elections of the previous autumn. And it wasn’t. So your movement doesn’t like Obama? I thought He was the agent of change you were talking about, didn’t you just have your revolution six months ago?

The commie had no idea what to say. I wasn’t being an antagonist who had figured him out; I was being a friendly, or acting like one anyhow, and I’d completely derailed his train of thought by asking a question about time. Our new young friend had become disciplined to think only in terms of snapshots. Narratives, dreams, and the passion of the here-and-now. Nothing else.

So, no. They don’t care how the Soviet Union turned out. That isn’t how they think. They pretend it is, but it isn’t.

Evidently, not enough people have figured out yet the lunacy involved in spending more money on new programs, and then flailing around for more tax revenues to pay for it. So Paul Krugman is intent on showing everybody how crazy it can get. Calling Nurse Ratched:

The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s?

Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.

Noel Sheppard points out the obvious:

As I’ve noted many times in the past, if we had only grown our total expenditures at the rate of inflation since 2007, we would have had a $413 billion deficit in the just-ended fiscal year 2011. This would be even lower in the current year given projections of $2.9 trillion in unified tax receipts.

When you consider that total unified outlays in 2007 – before the Democrats took over Congress! – were $2.7 trillion, and that they rose to a staggering $3.8 trillion in just four years or 41 percent, it’s just absurd to blame our fiscal woes on revenues.

That last paragraph from Sheppard nails down exactly what’s so nutty about all this. If our federal disbursements increased by 41 percent over, let’s say, about 25 years I could then see why so many people might trudge down the Krugman path and demand higher taxes on the very rich. “It must be done,” “The money can’t come from anyplace else,” and all that…I could see it. Wouldn’t agree with it, but I could see it.

We’re talking about an equivalent increase over four years. Fine, one MORE time, here we go again: What do you do with your household budget when you’ve increased your expenses by five-twelfths over four years, and find yourself in financial trouble?

What do you do when you’re running a business, one of your employees does that with his own household budget, and comes barging in one day demanding a raise?

Having a bit of a “Wish I’d Said” moment with regard to some argument I had somewhere with a bunch of liberal twits about the Obama stimulus. Like most of the population of the continental United States, I live within a hop-skipana-jump from the nearest site of Obamastruction. It’s a $22 million project to widen Folsom-Auburn road, of which the Reinvestment Act kicked in just $1 or $2 million, enough to push it over the hump. They just finished it; it did need to be done; if it took a full two years just now, it probably would have taken two years any other time, so what’s my beef with it?

Just that it’s idiotic to be doing this to all the roads in the country at the same time. This is construction that is not in your way, too much, unless you’re going from anywhere near downtown Folsom to anywhere near downtown Auburn. And then you can’t get around it. Anyway, the dialogue looked like:

Morgan: If it’s about economic stimulus, how does it make sense to be doing work on all these roads at the same time?

Liberal dimbulbs: Because, roads have to be maintained from time to time, you idiot. (Nightmarish, Mad Max scenarios involving unmaintained roads…)

Morgan: Uh, you need to go back and read the last four words of my question again.

In Obama-land, “END CONSTRUCTION” might as well mean “CONSTRUCTION AHEAD SOMEWHERE IN THE NEXT THIRTY MILES.” Liberals are trying to convince me it’s a good thing, by showing to me how difficult it is to tell them anything. As for the economy, it’s been sputtering along about as well as you’d expect any economy to do, in a country where it takes 50% longer to deliver something by truck. From anywhere, to anywhere.

Anyway. I was flashing back to that discussion when I read about the British expats having a tough go of it in their adopted country of…Greece:

Last month, I dropped off my two-year-old daughter Nicci Alise at her nursery during a downpour that lasted barely an hour. But this being Athens, that’s all it took for many of the shoddily maintained roads to flood. As I navigated the five-minute drive home, stinking bags of uncollected garbage sailed past in the torrents.

It could have been a scene from Slumdog Millionaire, except that I was driving past multi-million-euro mansions with gilded gates and cascading bougainvillea in one of Athens’s most affluent suburbs. The imagery was potent. Greece 2011: a country that has allowed itself to be capsized by its own accumulated waste.

It’s been barely a fortnight since new prime minister Lucas Papademos was parachuted in, and Greece’s so-called ‘national unity’ government has already devolved into a Mexican stand-off over the crucial signing of the eurozone rescue deal. But regardless of any new political scenario, Greece’s citizens still face years of brutal austerity when, even now, there are so many who haven’t been paid in months.

On that rainy day, the city’s refuse collectors were on strike, as they had been for the past fortnight, along with a good proportion of Greece’s labour force. We were in the grip of a 48-hour general strike. Airports, state schools and banks stopped working. They were joined by bakers, doctors, customs officials, taxi and bus drivers and even judges. Clothes shops and tax offices shut down, but the beggars who clog Athens’s road junctions cleaning windscreens were still hard at it.

Every night, my husband Dimitri and I log on with foreboding to the strike website that has the most reliable information on the next day’s industrial action. That’s right: we have chosen to live in a country where we must consult a website devoted solely to strikes. It is dawning on us that we must be crazy.

The truly dangerous thing about liberalism is its cozy relationship with anybody who can help it with its own P.R. Its representative icon is the freshly-resurfaced road, or the newly-opened bike path, or Thumper and Bambi cavorting away in a protected habitat somewhere. Piles of uncollected garbage would be a more fair and accurate emblem. Tidal waves of red ink. Bloated, exorbitant pension plans, and web sites devoted to strike activity.

This part is a bit weird:

‘The first thing to go was our boat,’ says British expat Tessa, a mother of three from Cheshire whose Greek husband has been forced to leave the family behind and relocate to Dubai after losing his lucrative civil engineering job here. ‘Then the Maserati and then the Volvo. Now I’ve just got the Mazda,’ Tessa laughs, aware of the contrast between her family’s concept of hardship and that of the average Greek.

Liberals ought to be able to agree that if liberalism brings eventual results that are identical to those that arrive from anarchy, or whatever worst-case they imagine to be involved with responsible, minimalist government, then liberalism must be a fail. They won’t agree to that, of course…but they should.

Smartly maintained roads, filled with stinking trash. And big fat bills for the roads that were maintained before, that cannot be paid. In fact, from all I’ve been able to see of it, wherever someone’s made an issue out of health and retirement benefits for “The Workers,” there lies a dangerous sinkhole of insolvency. But hey. I’ve yet to hear of anyone complain of potholes in Greece. Maybe that’s our future. Nobody complains of potholes, nobody knows if the potholes are there, nobody can get their cars down the roads to find out because the trash is piled too high. Maybe the garbage collectors are on strike again, check the website…

I guess, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. With some awesome retirement benefits for the paving-people. After the strikes are over, that is.

Update: Bleaker and bleaker…but the print media manages to get some stories out of it, so it can’t all be a bad thing huh?

Hope it’s some kind of parody…but it looks genuine.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

The “Post-Bush/Gore/Florida/2000” chapter is going to be a very interesting one as future generations study American history. There is much to be learned from this hostile relationship between this era’s political left, and masculinity; the former desires to disenfranchise the latter, the more the better. It is an incremental effort. To destroy masculinity completely, once and for all, is not quite as important as creating as much disruption against it as possible.

Now logically, what does masculinity or femininity have to do with any kind of political goal? Nothing. And yet here we are.

Being angry has a lot to do with being a good leftist. Near as I can figure, that’s because being a good leftist has a lot to do with some bolluxed-up definition of being a good person, and when simpletons see good people come in contact with bad people, they demand that the good person become enraged. Failing that, they might start to re-evaluate who’s good and who’s bad…can’t have that…

…and so we have all these American Castrati running around, doing their very best to act angry while simultaneously doing their very best to act unmanly. It’s always been surreal, after awhile it began to get funny, then it began to get tedious.

Then, they did it a whole bunch more times, for a few more years. Decades. Generations.

And, again, here we are.

Someday I should jot down the few simple reasons how & why liberal plans go gunnybags. One of the derailment points has to do with abundance; liberals continually gum things up for themselves as they embark on a plan dedicated to making us appreciate some certain thing by means of exposing us to more of it. Lots more of it. Across all kinds of issues, they have this tendency to increase popularity of things by means of a deluge. I notice they’re particularly fond of closing off all escape routes so we can’t get away from whatever it is. That’s supposed to increase the acceptance of the thing, offer an incentive to people to view it favorably, so that more people accept it and the people who already were accepting it do so with a fondness that was not in evidence before.

That isn’t how human nature works.

I’m not more eager to see men pretend they’re not men; I never have been; some people might have had an appreciation for this I never had, but I don’t think they’re any more eager to see it either. People don’t like things better when they see them more often. We’re just not wired that way.

Now that Airhead Autumn is thinning out, it’s getting more embarrassing to the far left that it never got much of that oh so coveted diversity going. Stacey Patton of the Washington Post tries to figure out why that is, and does a piss poor job of it. It ends up being not much more than a bunch of rationalization.

Blacks have historically suffered the income inequality and job scarcity that the Wall Street protesters are now railing against. Perhaps black America’s absence is sending a message to the Occupiers: “We told you so! Nothing will change. We’ve been here already. It’s hopeless.”

While the black press and civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the National Urban League were critical to past protest movements, black churches were the organizational force behind the rhetoric. Church leaders mobilized famous names and unsung heroes to end segregation through meetings, marches, demonstrations, boycotts and sit-ins. But where is the church now?

Some argue that the black church is losing its relevance, especially among young people who have been turned off by the religious theater of celebrity preachers. Even after lenders were accused of targeting black churches and communities as fertile markets for subprime mortgages, these churches are not joining Occupy protests en masse.

Fellow Right Wing News contributor William Teach picks it a part, and asks a good question:

After some filler about past inclusion by Blacks in protests, we find out that the Black church leaders are not telling the Blacks to get out there, and that there are just no leaders to tell Blacks to join….hey, isn’t that kinda racist, saying Blacks aren’t smart enough to figure it out themselves as to whether to join the Occupiers or not?
:
My own theory is that Blacks are smart enough to realize that squatting in city parks, sitting in one’s own urine and feces, surrounded by the truly unwashed, being exposed to rape, sexual assault, regular assault, theft, violence, and an absurd amount of “Working Groups” is a Bad Idea.

My theory is mostly the same, although simpler. It’s like saying, how come only-children aren’t as excited about becoming competitive? Answer there, as with here, is: There is no reason to be. Logic is the Great Equalizer with creed and race; group-think is not. Group-think reverberates its messages within social or working groups, and the simple fact is that our social and working groups remain racially polarized. Yes, it is embarrassing to the left, to the protest movements, and to Occupy Wall Street. It puts the big-reveal on the idea that we as a society cannot protest our way toward racial harmony.

The Occupy Wall Street movement simply doesn’t make sense. It’s an “underpants gnome” business plan: Step 1, we protest, Step 2 ????????? Step 3 everything’s fixed.

No wait. Scratch that, the underpants gnomes were a little more specific on Step Three.

If it made sense, you could recruit across communities, racial, gender, sex-preference lines. The irony is that capitalism does this. If something makes sense, people move. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t make sense, and it only appears to make sense when you’re being moved toward it as part of a big flash-mob crowd. Things look different outside of the crowd. Rather like drinking large amounts of alcohol; the drunk thinks all his jokes are funny, and he isn’t quite talking loud enough.

I was thinking back to twenty years ago, when my soon-to-be-ex-wife came by to pick up all her stuff which she decided included the washing machine and dryer. She had decided, when she couldn’t shut off the water outlet after unhooking the washing machine, that this was my problem. It’s difficult for me to dredge up any details from that time, since my brain was in shutdown mode, and the few memories that were being made were not ones I cared to keep. Work sucked and home life sucked. I do, however, recall this theme that was permeating through: Day and night, I was being threatened, because the people with whom I associated at work and at home figured men were beasts of burden, and the way you motivate a beast of burden is to threaten it.

Since then, my life has been in a more-or-less continual state of improvement, and that is undoubtedly because I was determined to apply what I had learned. But because I don’t really have any firm recollections from that time, this is mostly acting on ghostly shadows of what I learned, rather than on actual memories. This has always bothered me. I’m most comfortable acting on hard fact, especially when my efforts have to do with trying to keep my life from sucking. This has been mostly a “gut feel” operation. It’s been a much better success than a gut-feel operation could be expected to be, and for this reason, today I couldn’t be an atheist even if I wanted to be one.

But this leitmotif of motivating men through threats, remains. Tell the man to jump and he’s supposed to ask, “how high?” I was given cause to think on this, again, with that silly Microsoft PowerPoint commercial I put up. Which I saw in my hotel room, while I was picking up my son. Who lives with his Mother. Away from me. Hmmmmm…and lately I got in that argument with the feminists about movie posters, and I was struck by the behavior of one of them who I think might actually be in need of psychiatric help. She made a big show of how she, and the other feminists, did not need my approval and could have any opinions they wanted to have, whether I liked it or not. Oh, okay…as if I had said otherwise. And then, almost in the same breath, walked me through that yellow-light-red-light thing, where I was given so many chances to recant my contraband statements, and having failed at this I would be excoriated or excommunicated or some equivalent thing. What an amazing hairpin turn. You need to meet with our approval; we do not need to meet with your approval. A single paragraph of silliness that pretty much distills the entire feminist message.

As well as — why it just isn’t working. And won’t ever.

Somewhere, I read that when Darth Vader flung the Emperor Palpatine down the Death Star shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi, and became mortally wounded because the Emperor was shooting that fingertip-lightning at him, the certainty of his impending demise had nothing at all to do with the lightning. The idea was that, since Anakin Skywalker had given himself to the Dark Side, and subsequently became dependent on this life support suit for his breathing, lymph functions, kidney functions and so forth — essentially, for the twenty years previous, every breath and heartbeat he had were gifts from the Emperor. So the suit was emblematic of this absolute dependency relationship between Vader’s loyalty and Vader’s life. Vader, therefore, not only served the Empire at the Emperor’s pleasure, he continued to draw breath at the Emperor’s pleasure as well. Must have been a sucky existence. But I think that captures the situation. The dream of feminists, the nightmare of men.

When archeologists dig up the remnants of our civilization and try to figure out where it all went wrong, I think they’ll find that’s it. By then, perhaps, they’ll have some word to describe this practical capability of doing things whether someone likes it, or not. “Authority” doesn’t capture it, “autonomy” doesn’t capture it and “independence” doesn’t capture it. “Freedom” and “liberty” come closest to describing what I have in mind, but they don’t quite get there either. What I have in mind, is what we try to grant “whistleblowers” when we’re afraid they may face reprisal, and battered women who are afraid their abusers may seek them out for revenge; the liberty to act, or not act, completely free of fear of any retaliation.

There must be two strains of this. The assurance that the rules are going to come down on your side, and the assurance that if someone goes outside the rules, they won’t be able to bring harm to your life or property. You have to have both of these, and then you get some kind of power. Passive power, but power real enough to significantly alter your behavior.

The archeologists will discover our civilization was doomed, when it became determined that women should have all of what this word describes, and men should have none of it.

A man doesn’t perform right in his job, you threaten him with the loss of his livelihood.

A man doesn’t perform right at home, you threaten him with the loss of his possessions and family.

Threaten, threaten, threaten-threaten-threaten.

Feminists tune out at this point, since the complaint seems to make men into sympathetic figures, and they’ll tolerate absolutely none of this. But the concern isn’t about men, the concern is about masculinity, and our modern feminists cannot be expected to appreciate the difference between those two things. They think it’s all a bunch of “ick.” The arrangement violates Stein’s Law, which says whatever cannot last forever, won’t. And it trashes masculinity, since it is inherently un-masculine to be put in the Darth Vader situation, acting out of fear and utter dependence. Please don’t do — whatever — to me. Please don’t shut off my — whatever.

A man who wants to live a life of true masculinity, therefore, must become dedicated to two things: Love nobody except those who truly love you back, and make some serious money. Go for what’s called the “fuck you money” — defined as, enough of a stash that you’re never painted into a corner, having to accept arrangements you otherwise wouldn’t because of concerns about your own solvency.

Feminists do a lot of bitching about what our society tells women and girls. But what does society have to say to men and boys who want to love those who would love them back, or are trying to make fuck-you money? Has it offered them any words of encouragement there? I must have missed it.

The irony is that men are most helpful to others when they are most masculine. The masculine man continues to put others before himself. But he internalizes the decision about priorities. Who needs my help? What really needs to be done, here? This is what we’ve been trashing. A man cannot behave that way when he’s teetering on the brink of the oblivion of disapproval, or dismissal, or loss of paychecks or loss of coital privileges. It’s all up to the external authority to make decisions about priorities. Vader does what Palpatine tells him to do. That’s when men have to act like pussies. That’s when the cell phones come out in the grocery aisles. Honey? I think they’re out of white rice, will brown rice do? What’s a “coriander”?

Another irony: Women don’t find that attractive. Stepford Wives, hardcore brittle feminists, every single woman (just about) in between those two extremes. Women hate this not-quite-complete-male behavior. They recoil from it. And yet look how hard we work at bringing it out, in men, by removing all their other options. So, no, the men are not sympathetic figures in this complaint because they do not have to be. This thing we do hurts many more people than just the men.

Someday, we should invent a word to describe this situation where you can act, or not act, without fear of losing these things that are staples in the life you are trying to live. Interestingly, I notice conservative and progressive agendas, alike, are powered by the human drive to acquire the thing this word would describe. The agendas become different when they represent different constituencies, use different tactics, and form different visions about where society is supposed to go. But they’re driven by a common human desire. Meanwhile, the answer upon which we appear to have settled is that all of this thing should go to the women, and none of it should go to the men, since we need the men to do things and there is no other way to motivate a beast of burden.

Stein rule. Things cannot go on this way, indefinitely, and that means they won’t.

Washington:

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions– to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually–to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed–to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord–To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us–and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

Lincoln:

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

Palin:

On Thanksgiving, my family’s traditions will reflect the loyal, active, robust, big family life that shaped me. We’re so fortunate to be together to share the making of another year’s memory. In these late autumn days with temperatures dipping to 20-degrees below zero, we’ll brave Alaska’s biting cold to run and skate and ride – just because we can, and for that I am so thankful. Life in America’s Last Frontier is not an easy living, but it’s a good living. Here in Alaska, where I’m never without inspiration, an optimistic pioneering spirit still permeates, and harsh conditions force us out of self-centeredness and towards community – often in order to survive.

This need for selflessness – and the blessings that come with it – sharpened for me almost four years ago when I was given the gift of broader horizons, clarified priorities, and more commitment to justice and compassion for my fellow man who faces challenges and fears. I was granted this through a gift that arrived in a tiny, six-pound, awe-inspiring bundle. We named him Trig.

I know America’s potential for goodness, thus greatness, because I see it every day through my son. Nothing makes me happier or prouder than to see America’s good heart when someone smiles at my Trig. I notice it happens often in airports. Often a traveler passing by does a double-take when they see him, perhaps curious about the curious look on his face; perhaps my son momentarily exercises an uncontrollable motion that takes the passerby by surprise. Perhaps, as an innocent and candid child announced when she first met Trig, they think “he’s awkward.” But when that traveler pauses to look again and smile, and maybe tells me what a handsome boy I have, I swell with American pride. I am so thankful for their good heart. They represent the best in our country and their kindness shows the real hope we need today.

I am thankful that, as in so many areas of life, the bitter people who say bitter things about someone facing challenges are so outnumbered. There have been stinging criticisms, even from people still screaming that Trig should never have been born, but we know those critics may be the loudest and most malicious, but they’re not the majority.

To me, when individuals reflect the greater societal acceptance of someone facing challenges, they show the best of humanity – even by offering a simple pat on Trig’s head or a knowing smile shot our way. Conversely, when a society works to eliminate the “weakest links” (as some would callously consider the disabled) or “the unproductive” (as some would callously consider the very young and the very old), it eliminates the very best of itself. When a society seeks to destroy them, it also destroys any ability or need for sincere compassion, empathy, improvement, and even goodwill. And those are the very best qualities of humanity! Those are the characteristics of a country that understands and embraces true hope! America can be compassionate and strong enough as a nation to be entrusted with those who some see as an “inconvenience,” but who are really our greatest blessings. Through Trig, I see firsthand that there is man’s standard of perfection, and then there is God’s. Man’s standard is flawed, temporary, and shallow. God’s standard lasts an eternity. At the end of the day, His is what matters.

So, this Thanksgiving my family will bundle Trig up and grin while we watch him through ice-frosted eyelashes as he curiously takes in all that is around him in the crisp open air. I hope your Thanksgiving gives you the opportunity to find that reminder of what really matters, too. For me, my perfect picture of thankfulness is my perfectly awesome son. With him, all is well with my soul and I know I am blessed.

Limbaugh:

Now time for a tradition, an annual tradition, and that is The Real Story of Thanksgiving from my book that I wrote back in the early nineties. I wrote two of them, actually. In one of the books I wrote, The Real Story of Thanksgiving. And reading from it has become something we do every year on the program because it’s still not taught. The myth of Thanksgiving is still what is taught, and that myth is basically that a bunch of thieves from Europe arrived quite by accident at Plymouth Rock, and if it weren’t for the Indians showing them how to grow corn and slaughter turkeys and how to swallow and stuff, that they would have died of starvation and so forth. The Indians were great — and then, in a total show of appreciation, we totally wiped out the Indians!

We took their country from ’em. We started racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia; spread syphilis; and, basically, destroyed the environment. That is the multicultural version of Thanksgiving, and it simply isn’t true. The real version of Thanksgiving is in my second best-seller, 2.5 million copies in hardback: See, I Told You So. “Chapter 6, Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving — The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century … The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.” In England.

So, “A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example.

“And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found — according to Bradford’s detailed journal — a cold, barren, desolate wilderness.” The New York Jets had just lost to the Patriots. “There were no friends to greet them, he wrote.” I just threw that in about the Jets and Patriots. “There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.

“Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of” the Bible, “both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.” Everything belonged to everybody. “They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

“Nobody owned anything.” It was a forerunner of Occupy Wall Street. Seriously. “They just had a share in it,” but nobody owned anything. “It was a commune, folks.” The original pilgrim settlement was a commune. “It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California,” and Occupy Wall Street, “and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.” There’s no question they were organic vegetables. What else could they be? “Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” as they saw fit, and, “thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. That’s right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism.

“And what happened? It didn’t work!” They nearly starved! “It never has worked! What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.” If it were, there wouldn’t be any Occupy Wall Street. There wouldn’t be any romance for it.

“The experience that we had in this common course and condition,'” Bradford wrote. “‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing — as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote.” This was his way of saying, it didn’t work, we thought we were smarter than everybody, everybody was gonna share equally, nobody was gonna have anything more than anything else, it was gonna be hunky-dory, kumbaya. Except it doesn’t work. Because of half of them didn’t work, maybe more. They depended on the others to do all the work. There was no incentive.

“‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,'” without being paid for it, “‘that was thought injustice.'” They figured it out real quick. Half the community is not working — living off the other half, that is. Resentment built. Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? that’s what he was saying. So the Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the under-girding capitalistic principle of private property.

“Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ … Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes,” it did. “Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians.” This is what happened. After everybody had their own plot of land and were allowed to market it and develop it as they saw fit and got to keep what they produced, bounty, plenty resulted.

“And then they set up trading posts, stores. They exchanged goods with and sold the Indians things. Good old-fashioned commerce. They sold stuff. And there were profits because they were screwing the Indians with the price. I’m just throwing that in. No, there were profits, and, “The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.” The Canarsie tribe showed up and they paid double, which is what made the Canarsie tribe screw us in the “Manna-hatin” deal years later. (I just threw that in.) They paid off the merchant sponsors back in London with their profits, they were selling goods and services to the Indians. “[T]he success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans,” what was barren was now productive, “and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’

But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering-in-socialism Pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod. That’s where the original Thanksgiving story stops, and the story basically doesn’t even begin there. The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God,” the pilgrims giving thanks to God, “for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony,” for surviving the trip, for surviving the experience and prospering in it. “The bounty was shared with the Indians.” That’s the story. “They did sit down” and they did have free-range turkey and organic vegetables. There were no trans fats, “but it was not the Indians who saved the day. It was capitalism and Scripture which saved the day,” as acknowledged by George Washington in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, which I also have here.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Kagan’s non-recusal and what it means:

James N. writes:

It is remarkable that Elena Kagan apparently plans to hear and judge the Obamacare lawsuits, although there is a documentary record of her acting as an advocate within the administration for strategies to get the bill through Congress.

Of course, many Republicans are calling for her recusal, which is absolutely required by the appropriate rules for judges.

It’s interesting that no Democrats agree. That they do not agree tells us much about who and what they are.

They don’t agree because they believe it would be wrong of her to follow the rules. They think it would be wrong because, for them, the purpose of Presidential appointment and Senate confirmation is to overthrow the republican system of a government with limited powers.

For the Democrats in Congress, it would make no more sense for Kagan to recuse herself that it would for her to appear in purple underwear and deliver her opinions in Norwegian.

The electoral system only works when both parties are playing the same game. That is, in our country, no longer the case.

LA replies:

Well put. The two parties are not playing the same game. They play different games, under different rules. What are these different rules? The Republicans more or less follow the laws and constitutional procedures, the Democrats deliberately and consciously break them. But the Republicans, while they complain incessantly about the Democrats, never identify this underlying fact. Why? Because that would show that the system is no longer legitimate. And the function of the Republicans, as “patriotic, conservative Americans,” is to uphold the goodness and legitimacy of the system, a legitimacy which rests on the belief that everyone in American politics shares the same basic principles and loyalties. So the Republicans, as defenders of the system and its presumed basic unity, cannot expose what the Democrats are. If they exposed it, politics would be replaced by open war between two radically incompatible parties and America as we know it would come to an end.

I have a long history of objecting to the term “not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” When a cliche is allowed to calcify like that one has, it’s a sign of intellectual laziness and therefore of a process of atrophy. Nobody ever seems to say “no difference,” or “not a nickel’s worth of difference,” it’s always that damn dime. And, too often, people take the statement way too seriously and start to broadly infer that terms like “conservative” and “liberal” must be meaningless, any difference between the two must be an illusion.

I do have trouble criticizing it, though, when its offered as a critique against the Republican party establishment, that it isn’t fighting back hard enough. I notice this is very often true. As far as explanations for the inadequate resistance, this theory of being unable to admit to “different rules” makes good sense to me and explains a lot.

My teachers, and yours too, probably, said Republicans and democrats had the same goals in mind but different ways of getting there. Seen any signs that this is the case? Me neither.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Yeah, that’s weird:

In the thick of the negotiations, [Sen. Majority Leader Harry] Reid, too, recalled the days when deal makers could bridge the partisan divide. He visited Ted Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery with former Sen. Chris Dodd. Dodd poured some whiskey on Kennedy’s grave while Reid recited a prayer, the majority leader told lobbyists at a meeting, according to attendees. He told the group that he missed both men.