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

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

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

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

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

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

AND…a blog is born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well. Look what Ben Shapiro found.

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

But in Boston, Mark was charged with sexual assault.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we believe it.

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

A Tumblr blog. Might come in handy someday.

Emperor Misha is reading up on history:

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boortz states the obvious:

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

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

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perils of personality-politics.

The tide is turning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul’s right.

Gingrich is wrong.

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

…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.