So between twenty and forty years ago we tried out this social protocol that never made any sense; it said, if a female got all pissed off at you in the office, for any reason whatsoever, you were gone. Yeah yeah, supposedly if she was a nutcase and just made up lies about you, the system would offer you some superficial construct of something that resembled due process, and if you were innocent you’d be exonerated. But everyone with a brain knew then, and knows now, that it worked out like that about as often as the cops busted the guy who took the radio out of your car. So when the rubber hit the road, any ol’ psychotic bitch could spin any tale she wanted and it would work. Doubly so if you were highly placed and had real authority over people. The archives are not exactly brimming over with stories of such men successfully finding employment elsewhere, so this had a definite career-limiting effect, on the basis of what in who-knows-how-many cases amounted to nothing at all.

Now we’ve got this tiresome mantra being recited ad nauseum, “stick a fork in him, he’s done!” about a promising presidential candidate, because a bunch of nameless virtually-existent women say that back in the 1990’s he did…well…they don’t say what. One of them has revealed herself, after having been delicately walked to the podium by none other than reptilian litigator Gloria Allred, and now we’re supposed to pretend they’ve all done that. So the people with the loudest voices who hand out these rules by which the rest of us are supposed to be living, seem to think we’re still back in the 1990’s. The whole Anita Hill “Woemyn don’t lie about this stuff” thing.

Margot is all pissed off at me, doesn’t want me commenting at her blog anymore and has probably blocked me. I’m thinking I’ll go ahead and accommodate that. I’m on her side with regard to some things, since we’re both parents who object to the media messages being given to our children. But I’ve been victimizing and oppressing her lately, which is to say I have been disagreeing with her. Chapstick put up an ad prominently displaying a woman from an angle Margot did not appreciate, and she protested this; then, someone promoted a Christmas movie with artwork that did not prominently display a woman and she objected to that. I pointed out the obvious dichotomy and was given just some limited number of chances to reform and recant, either to pretend I was in complete agreement or shut my over-privileged male mouth. Well, I just don’t live in that kind of a world. To me, if you’re protesting one thing, and then two weeks later you’re protesting its opposite, that means the point of your protests is to protest. And if someone points it out and your response is “Hey, don’t point that out,” that just proves it all the more. But either way, this is not constructive. It doesn’t empower women. It doesn’t send the message out “Portray women in a dignified way or else not at all”; it sends out the message “Don’t portray women, in any way, because it just isn’t worth the grief and it isn’t worth the trouble.”

Unstable women filing frivolous complaints against the director of the National Restaurant Association, and being given hush money after proving absolutely nothing, then emerging from the woodwork fourteen years later to alter the outcome of a presidential election even when their stories don’t make any sense — that doesn’t empower women either. It certainly doesn’t make life easier for women who are looking for jobs. The message that says is: Keep the bitches at arms’ length if you can’t afford a big payout. Actually, several big payouts.

Wonder Woman in long pants doesn’t empower women. Arguing about Wonder Woman’s costume, while the movie or other creative effort is in development stages, doesn’t empower women. What that does is make it likely the movie will be canceled. It leads to Green Lantern, Batman, Thor, Iron Man, Superman et al making it to the big screen, raking in the bucks, while the Champion of Themyscira gathers dust and languishes. Which means it leads to feminists complaining about the male superheroes getting more attention. Which makes feminists feel satisfied and happy, maybe even a little bit more churlish and full of themselves than usual, but it does not empower women.

Making a commercial, and adhering to a hard-and-fast rule that the wife has to use the right brand of oven cleaner or pain reliever, and the husband has to use Brand X, does not empower women. Making “family comedy” movies in which the dad is the bad guy, who spends way too much time at the office and is missing out on his kids’ soccer games and school plays, and the happy ending is realized only when dad realizes what a colossal doofus and dolt he’s been and resolves to do better — this does not empower women. It makes the real dad wish the family had gone out to do something else, or picked a different movie, it makes the kids feel smug and smarmy and maybe it has the same effect on some of the moms. It causes an exquisite pain in the wallet, once it’s realized that the household shelled out more than a hundred bucks on a medium of entertainment that lasted less than two hours on a weekend. But it isn’t empowering. For anybody. What it is, is boring. Expensive, unfunny and boring.

California sending a great big termagant delegation of frumpy pantsuit-wearing female senators, congresswomen, et al to Washington, to peel off with silly, irrational paranoid things with their big fat mouths, does not empower women. Rationalizing and legitimizing every single snotty, dismissive insult possible against beautiful women running for office, does not empower women. A late night comedian making jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter getting molested, does not empower women. Denying justice to Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, just because Bill Clinton is influential in keeping abortion legal, does not empower women. Normalizing gay marriage does not empower women.

Marlene yelling “Get It Yourself, Bob!” does not empower women.

Showing men that women can decide things, does not necessarily empower women. Showing us that women can do it unilaterally, and that the man’s opinion is ineffectual and irrelevant, does not empower women. Denying men due process does not empower women, and driving them from promising careers on the basis of hearsay does not empower women.

I’ll make it real simple. If it’s something that would give a reasonable man some incentive to say “Yeah, I can live with this” — then it empowers women. If it’s something that would motivate that same reasonable man to shut his mouth, and quietly daydream about going someplace far, far away…maybe daydream about fly-fishing in a mountain stream a mile above sea level…then it does not empower women. Simple as can be. Sure, it would be politically correct to leave it up to the women to say “Yeah, this is good, someone else can co-exist with us when it works this way” — but that wouldn’t make any sense. Who among us can decide whether others can live with us? If you want to see how the Earth looks from the Moon, you’re in a better position to determine this when you’re on the Moon, right? If there’s an open question on the can-live-with and some testing needs to be done, you leave it up to the ones who have to do that living. Leave it up to the dudes.

You may say, “Freeberg, that makes no sense! Going by your rule, female empowerment depends on whether men and women can live together! You’re allowing female empowerment to be decided by the men!”

Or “Freeberg, that’s just wrong! Your rule would say women are not empowered when they refuse to bring their husband a beer! And are empowered if they go ahead and do that!”

Or “Freeberg, you’re whacked in the head! Your rule would say women are not empowering themselves if they boycott a Hooters restaurant opening in their neighborhood, but are empowering themselves if they let it open!”

Or “Freeberg, you silly goose you! What you’re saying is that women can’t acquire power, until & unless they first give some up!”

Or “Freeberg, you’re not living in the real world! You’re saying women cannot be empowered unless men can exist in proximity to them, and still do the things they want to do!”

And……..yup. Yup and yup and yup and yup. Exactly. Women are empowered in such a way that women and men can co-exist with some reasonable expectation of peace and harmony…or else…they aren’t empowered at all.

And no, I’m not saying men should own women, or treat them like pets or playthings or sex slaves. I said reasonable men.

Women are approachable and therefore empowered, or unapproachable and therefore de-powered. Like I said. Simple. This is a bigger issue than females and feminism. Real power has something to do with the desires of people who are outside of the power-pursuit. Real power involves incentives; positive-enforcement. It involves relationships. You aren’t more powerful, in the position you occupy in any social gathering, if the consensus desire is that you should disappear. You can’t decide for yourself “I am powerful” any more than you can decide for yourself “I make a good friend.”

My fiance brought me a beer without my asking when I was halfway through writing this post. Choke on it.

Thanks to my blogger friend in New Mexico for that cool caveman graphic, although it should be stressed the opinions in this particular post are entirely my own.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

The minute I saw it, I knew I had to share it on my Hello Kitty of Blogging page…where I added my thoughts on where the all-powerful prevailing viewpoint is getting us into trouble:

…that everyone who has balls is missing brains, everyone with brains is missing balls, and the brains are more important if we can’t have both.

I’d like to subject all three of those axioms to some challenge, but they don’t let me decide stuff like that.

Seriously, what is life like if our so-called “leaders” have brains, or what passes for brains during Election Day, and are missing their balls? We don’t really need to ask that question because we’re living in that reality right now. Hoping I don’t need to list what I’m talking about; seems pointless…

And what’s life like if we get someone in charge who is commonly thought to be some kind of a dullard, but needs special briefs to haul those things around? I suppose everyone who’s anyone is going to be thinking back to what’s-his-name…and here and there, you can find some isolated pockets of people who thought that was some kind of misery. Your nearest faculty lounge in a high school or college, a Daily KOS thread, Zucotti Park maybe. Well, Real-America had two chances to vote on it, and history says our “prevailing viewpoint” was pretty damn clear on whether it was okay or not.

I think balls are more important than brains. Brains-without-balls has done absolutely nothing for us; that combination has pretty much broken everything, and fixed nothing. I’d say you have to have balls if you have brains, because without balls, the brains provide nothing but marketing cachet for some nameless-faceless-anonymous-busybody man-behind-the-curtain, who probably doesn’t have America’s interests at heart, because if he did, he wouldn’t be behind a curtain. We’ve learned the lesson and that’s what it teaches, time after time.

But no, I don’t think we have to choose.

Good old Fred. Why didn’t we pick him again? Oh yeah…something to do with debates. You know what? I have a fourth axiom for you. These things we call “debates” are toxic to our republic and we need to get rid of them toot-sweet…or else, completely shake ’em up, stem to stern, make them completely different from what they have been in recent years.

This Washington Examiner editorialist does not want a President Herman Cain, no way, no how. But just the same…

But what I find mind-boggling is the reason Bialek gave for revealing, 14 years after the fact, the details of the alleged “sexual harassment.”

“I actually did it because I wanted to help him,” Bialek said in according to a CBSnews.com story. “I wanted to give him a platform to come clean, to tell the truth.”

On one early morning news show, Bialek presumed to chide Cain: “Admit that you acted inappropriately,” she scolded.

Bialek’s claim that Cain “acted inappropriately” is precisely what makes me skeptical about her story.

If true, what Cain did to Bialek isn’t “sexual harassment” or “acting inappropriately.” What Cain did is called a sexual offense, either second, third or fourth degree sexual assault. It’s a crime, possibly a felony, for heaven’s sake.

Here, in essence, is what Bialek is saying: “Hey, Herman, why don’t you cop to committing this felony?”
:
Why didn’t Bialek report what was clearly a sexual assault when it happened, back in 1997? I’m betting her answer will be something like Cain wasn’t running for president then, and a man of that character shouldn’t be president.

Does that mean if a janitor commits a sexual assault, then it’s OK?

What Bialek is doing exactly what Anita Hill did, and that is why she cannot be believed. Remember Anita Hill? She was put in a “hostile work environment,” to which she reacted by…waiting and waiting and waiting some more, and then after she waited long enough, Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court and then she bravely stepped forward. With some information that the Senate might be interested in hearing. Just as an oh-by-the-way.

It’s really the same problem I have with global warming, when the people telling me to worry about it are driving around in cars two, three or more times as big as my car. If it’s really a problem you want me to take seriously, act like it. Neither one of these broads acted like this is a real problem. They are acting & did act, on the other hand, exactly like cash- and fame-crazed divas. Well yeah, I guess that’s not very tactful of me, but hey it’s true. Their behavior is perfectly consistent with someone who wants money and attention, and not at all consistent with someone who was the victim of an actual crime.

As far as my own feelings about Herman Cain, I just don’t know. It’s probably not accurate to describe myself as a Cain fan, per se…if the primary were to be held today, I certainly would pick him though. But I’m getting there by means of process-of-elimination, as opposed to my process for picking, for example, Fred Thompson or Sarah Palin. I’d much prefer to be choosing a candidate with a spirit of “Yeah! Fist pump! This is exactly what we need!” and there are only trace amounts of that spirit in my consideration of Cain.

But as far as the comments about Bialek, the columnist speaks for me.

Neiwart, you ignorant slut.

DailyKOS folks deserve props for owning-up, and not trying to backpedal or equivocate on it. Okay, that’s a little like handing a big bag of cash to a criminal for not robbing anybody, but still.

I see conservatives are grabbing this one and running with it. There’s sure to be a dust-up coming soon, since you don’t snark at Michelle O and get away with it. The libs will say they’re taking it out of context, and when they do, I’ll be able to see the point…

Michelle Obama told high school students taking part in a mentoring program at Georgetown University on Tuesday that being married to the president can be scary at times, because he makes the family get out of its comfort zone.

The first lady urged students not to let fear guide them after a student asked about being worried about going away to college.

“I mean this is scary,” she said. “Shoot, being married to Barack Obama? He’s got big plans. He’s always pushing us beyond our comfort zones, and I’m dragged along going, `What’s he doing now? No, not this.'”

Sounds like me when I talk to kids. Lazy kids. I think she’s doing the right thing, because nowadays kids have all kinds of incentive to be fat stupid and lazy, and adults don’t correct that behavior now like they used to. She’s still peddling her let’s-move-eat-healthy propaganda campaigns, so this fits in well with that. Chalk it up as penance for those 1500-calorie hamburger meals.

But — only a child, at this point, is going to buy the idea that marriage to Barry figures prominently into the pantheon of scare moments. Get real, Michelle. He opines, opines, and opines some more, then He goes out to the links and plays golf. And let’s face it, it is weird. How many wives-and-mothers would agree that kids need to get used to bigger, scary things? Nearly all of them, probably. How many would offer their own marriages as an example? Uh…just the really bored ones, the ones that have no examples to offer lately and are flailing about, grasping for one. Hmmm…

Unlike most of the other critics, though, I had my attention drawn to something else:

She said she wondered whether she’d be able to compete with classmates who were wealthier and had gone to some of the best schools in the world. But she said she was willing to work hard and found her strengths.

“One of my strengths was that I had a big mouth, and I liked to talk a lot,” she said, adding that she tells her own daughters not to be afraid to speak up.

This part is not so unusual, and I wish it was. I’ve been noticing this about kids lately. Boys, whose voices are naturally annoying, need to learn the “library voice” routine like they always did. At least, after about age five or six…girls, though, are always adorable, always precious and it’s always their turn to talk.

I think this needs scrutiny. We seem to have a lot of bumpkin parents running around, laboring under this misconception that society is suffering from an acute shortage of noisy females, and desperately needs more. Bring ’em on, double-quick, we’re running low.

But that is not reality. Reality is what immediately follows, and it is not “PC”, but here it is: At any age, a female making a whole lot of noise is about as precious as sand in the Sahara. And for the same reason.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t know where this idea came from, that kids of either sex or at any age, need to be told by their parents that they shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. They get that as they pop out of the womb. It’s in their “hardware programming.” Lately it has become awfully fashionable to teach your young girls that they need to be ready, willing and able to speak up about things, and forcefully, especially if they find something disagreeable that’s none of their business. And then talk loudly and forcefully about these efforts you’ve been making to teach your daughters to talk loudly and forcefully about things.

News flash from The Blog That Nobody Reads: This doesn’t empower women. As a general rule, a lady’s behavior does not have an empowering effect on her sex, if it makes the gentlemen want to scram. If it fills the hubby’s head with visions of fishing in a mountain lake, way up high above sea level, with her not around, whatever she’s doing is not striking a blow for women. The Speak-Up-Forcefully schtick falls into this. And I don’t know how this got started. I don’t know who started it and I don’t know what exactly their train of thought was. From all I’ve been able to learn, it seems they, like FLOTUS, are lazily conflating the act of bravely confronting changes and challenges, with the act of talking loudly while female. Well, those two are not the same. They’re different.

There are a lot of parents losing this distinction, and I don’t think future generations will look back favorably on them.

She writes in The Blaze.

In an ironic twist of fate, the owners of pair of San Diego coffee and hot dog carts — who initially provided free food and beverage to Occupy protesters – had to shut down after demonstrators turned violent, splattering their kiosks with blood and urine. CBS reports that Occupiers stole items from the cart in addition to spray-painting them with graffiti.

If that were not enough, the vendors also said they recently received death threats from protesters.

CBS adds:

The coffee and hot dog carts were located in Civic Center Plaza, the same location as the Occupy San Diego protesters.

Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators, but when they stopped, the protesters became violent.

“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio.

Meanwhile, DeMaio said the damages will likely require a complete cleaning if not complete replacement of the food cart covers. And why vendors who showed kindness to Occupiers by providing them with complimentary refreshments would now receive death threats, remains unclear. [bold emphasis mine]

Oh Ms. Gabbay. I know I should not take that final sentence literally, I know you’re just using a little bit of flair. But the whole time I was reading about this event, including your story down to the end, I had this thought just sort of churning away in the back of my noggin, and that sign-off just made it explode. “Unclear” is an anagram of “nuclear,” so now we have a coffee o’clock blog post. Tremble before the enriched plutonium energy of The Blog That Nobody Reads.

What we are seeing with the Occupy Wall Street movement is an alternative social contract. It is not new, it is in fact ancient. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a writhing, slithering scaly deep-sea creature. It lives deep in the darkest depths, dreaming of breaking the surface, enjoying fresh air and sunlight — and overrunning the land as well as the sea, taking things over “up there.” But it can’t breathe air. It dreams the same dream as the dog that yearns to catch the car.

They can’t even put pen to paper and write down their social contract. That’s why they don’t have a unified and coherent statement of their goals, in spite of the fact that many among them have said this is going to be forthcoming soon. They can’t, but I can.

I start with the social contract that is in place now, the one they seek to defeat: If you want something, you work for it. If you want something and you lack the skills to acquire it, you trade for it. If you want something but don’t really need it, then you’ve got a decision to make. If you can bear the consequences, then it’s all on you. You make decisions about sacrificing the things you want to get the things you need — or to give up the things you need in order to get the things you want, in which case you’re about to have a learning experience. Life is full of these. If you get a lesson and you fail to learn from it, life will assign you the same lesson over and over again until you get it learned and then, like magic, it will proceed to the next lesson you haven’t learned yet. If you have a brain in your head, you’re probably going to win at this over the longer term, because your skills will sharpen and you will have more goods and services you can trade to acquire the things you want, and you will make fewer mistakes while you are trading.

The underworld social contract that seeks to supplant this, operates according to revolution. It lusts for a glorious day in which it emerges as the top dog, which is an upcoming revolution, and it does all of its smaller things by means of smaller revolutions. If you want something, you immobilize something else until such time as someone is bludgeoned and browbeaten into giving you what you want. Annoyance is the new coin of the realm. If you want a hot dog, you annoy somebody. If you want a place to put up your tent and crash for the night, you annoy somebody. If you want a job, you annoy somebody. If you want to be heard, you annoy somebody.

And, lately, it seems…if you have the opportunity to be heard and you’re having trouble figuring out what to say…yes, you annoy people until that problem, too, is solved. Just like any other. Any time you find yourself lacking in anything, it must be because someone external to you has not been given the proper motivation, so you find a way to interfere with what they’re trying to do, and then you get what you want.

It’s a whole different way of looking at life.

Ultimately, since the people who live life according to the first social contract end up taking responsibility for what happens to them, and the people who live life according to the second social contract do not, the former end up being Architects and the latter end up being Medicators. Because that’s the definition. Something didn’t go the way the Architect wanted, he must have made a measurement the wrong way, or pursued some option that turned out not to be the right one, just like a real architect ordering steel or cement from the wrong supplier. Architect says — thank goodness I made this mistake while I was constructing a cardboard model instead of the real thing. But sure as I’m standing here right now, we’re going to figure out where things went wrong.

And the people who live life according to the second social contract externalize everything, because they must. That is the mindset: I’m having this problem because someone else didn’t do something they were supposed to do. And now I’m going to get even. So the Architect social contract is about the protagonist learning things, the Medicator social contract is about someone else learning things. I’ll teach them not to screw with me!

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a positive human development. We’re seeing this alternative, subversive social contract break the surface and getting a good look at it. And we’re seeing how much it stinks. We’re seeing, right in front of our eyes, how a miniature “society” of sorts functions as it operates according to this model. We’re seeing how it leads inexorably to chaos, rancor and despair. The subterranean social contract is being given a “job interview” and it is being found to be lacking.

After a time it will submerge again, beneath the depths. Very few who believe in it will abandon it. Medicators medicate; their end goal is not so much to acquire things or to make things work, as to cultivate the proper emotional state. And it’s always more emotionally satisfying to think things are missing from your life because some dirty rotten so-and-so got away with something, and you need to pool your resources with others who’ve been similarly ripped off and hold some epic revolution to get back what was taken from you — plus something extra, to really drive home the message.

But this is not conducive to greatness. It reeks, because over time it does not displace mundane challenges with greater, more worldly challenges as the learner does his learning. Rather, it does the reverse — the challenge remains the same, and a life filled with potential is supplanted by a tinier, more pathetic life shrinking down to become more obsessed with the stationary challenge.

It is the difference between what you think about after you manage to kill the one mosquito in your bedroom as you’re trying to go to sleep, and what you think about when you fail to kill that same mosquito. I cannot predict what thoughts are in your head in the first scenario because, liberated, you can drift off to dreamland with the vast plane of human thought entirely open to you. Who knows. Maybe you’re solving a problem at work. Maybe you’re figuring out what to do that weekend. The sky’s the limit. But in the second scenario, I can guarantee I know what you’re thinking. We replace our challenges, or our challenges replace us.

Regarding Ms. Gabbay’s sign-off: Somewhere, I wrote that the world is divided into people who are nice to people who are nice to them, and mean to people who are mean to them; and, their opposites, who manage to flip this around, rewarding kindness with viciousness and vice-versa. I wrote that these two different kinds of people should not meet. And they shouldn’t, because this is the Architect/Medicator divide. Architects profit from the establishment and maintenance of good relationships. Medicators do not. They cannot. The coin of the realm in which they live their lives, is the act of annoying people to get what they want. So a truly constructive and mutually beneficial relationship is not something they can ever really have, nor do have any need for such a thing.

So — yes. Give them a hot dog, expect to see your hot dog stand wrecked. It’s part of the natural order of things.

Next lesson?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

I have the radio playing in the bathroom. I was out here in the computer room, playing a YouTube clip of the “Justin Bieber paternity” lady’s statement, which I realized I’d already heard…I switched it off and went in to the bathroom to check something and the radio was playing the statement of “Herman Cain’s Fourth Woman.”

It’s exactly the same tone, same dialect, same syllables getting emphasized…

Real people do not talk like this. Actresses on my fiance’s “hot-blooded wise-cracking thirty-somethings carving up room-temperature dead forty-somethings to solve crimes” teevee shows, do not talk like this. The View girls do not talk like this, anchor-ladies on the morning news do not talk like this, Dancing With The Stars dancers do not talk like this.

But “accusers,” to a nose, all talk this way. This lilt, this dialect, this tone. This “Anita Hill” tone. What exactly is it with that tone?

Dude, that’s gross…

A man at his local RBC Bank was told at the drive-thru that the bank didn’t sell money orders. He responded to this inconvenience by doing what any rational and sane person would do: he urinated in the drive-thru’s plastic tube.

Wait, what?

When he was told he couldn’t purchase a money order, the man reportedly became upset, mumbled something “about bad customer service,” and then urinated in the tube.

That’s foul. But it gets worse.

“Another customer pulled into the same drive-through lane shortly after the incident and said the tube had liquid in it that smelled like urine,” reports The St. Augustine Record. “She picked up the tube and urine spilled onto her and her car.”

“Times are hard, people are crazy, anything’s liable to happen.” Oh, dear. And here we have a disagreement about something that one would expect not to inspire any disagreements. As the prison population explodes and people continue to do nutty things, do we just build more prisons? Or do we nod toward the damning statistics, find some reasons to turn people loose, and just expect something now & then?

Me, I don’t think we should be expecting it. And if we have to, then that’s a sign we need to build more prisons. Otherwise, what’s the point of having any laws at all? I think the lady who was next in line and got the golden shower, if she disagreed with that point-of-view before, she probably doesn’t now.

Hard times…blegh. It goes back to my anyone/everyone rule. In this case, if anyone anywhere is capable of getting through tough economic times without piddling on people, that means everyone everywhere is, including this guy. Give him his year, and I hope it’s spent turning big rocks into little rocks. Just disgusting.

I was just reading the Friedman quotes that were memorable enough to be listed on ThinkExist, and it occurred to me that the American People would be much better off if we were all to go the next year hearing about them over and over again.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.

You could stake the Republican party with a short leash, enacting an arbitrary rule that no campaign slogan can ever be used in 2012 that is not a Milton Friedman quote. They’d still take the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate with a commanding dominance, and with almost complete certainty. Occupy Wall Street types and all the various George Soros idea-outlets could come out with their propaganda about womans’ right to choose, Herman Cain is a molester, wealthiest one percent, derp derp derp. And it wouldn’t matter because Friedman’s points about the random havoc wreaked by out-of-control government possess the weightiest attribute of all intellectual arguments: They don’t need to be said. People, from sea to shining sea, can feel it in their bones that the job market should be better than it is. They can feel it that there is something called a business-friendliness climate, and it should be sunnier right now than it is. They can perceive with primal senses, the way you can perceive something is caught in the straw when you’re sucking on a fruit smoothie, that something is getting in the way. And that there is only one thing in all of Creation that has the power to get in the way.

One question I’m fond of asking big-government liberals that they’ve never been able to answer is: If all the smart people in the world intuitively understand that government programs are the key to happiness, and the smaller-government solution is only favored by drooling idiots like myself, and every single small-government Tea Party libertarian loudmouth like me is simply a big-government guy who hasn’t had his moment of edification just yet — what is going on with the American people? What is up with this tick-tock thing we’ve been doing throughout all of the twentieth century? How come we don’t have some moment of national epiphany, be it 1932 or 1964 or 1976 or 1992, and just stick with high taxes and big government forevermore? Is there any way to explain the setbacks at all…other than, there must be some liability involved in a leviathan government, understood by people once they labor under it, left undiscussed in these exchanges. Any other way to explain that at all? What happened in 1952, 1968, 1980 and 2000? Surely you won’t blame all that on tampered Diebold machines!

Haven’t got a straight answer yet.

Funny thing is, my inquiry would be a complete non-starter if progressive plans resembled in substance what is offered in the packaging. Supposedly we have poor, middle-class and rich, and our lefties just want to embiggen the government so that taxes and regulation can be rained down like Napalm upon the heads of those loathed rich. In practice, the barrier between rich and middle-class is mythical; the chestnut that really seals the deal, but is never quite delivered, is “the pain will be reserved for the people who make more than you do, it will never impact you.” I’ve often observed that if there are any numbers that define this “middle-class,” they have to do with the annual income of whatever audience is being addressed by the politician using the term at that moment. So to be realistic about it, there’s really only “rich” and “poor.” People are fooled into swindling from themselves, giving their own money away to people who do not value the sacrifices they’ve made to give themselves & their families better lives, but there’s a certain justice involved in it because they’re reaping the bitter fruit they had planted for someone else. “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” But we’re all the guy behind the tree, we realize, after the lesson has been well and truly learned. That’s my explanation for why America’s experimentation with big-government liberalism has taken a circular rather than linear trajectory; and, as noted above, thus far it is the only answer available.

What’s interesting is that if there were any other explanation, my “Milton Friedman Slogan” campaign would never work. As it is, this would be a sure thing. If there’s one thing on which people of all ideological dispositions can agree in the final weeks of 2011, it is that something was sold to the country three years ago, and the delivery has brought surprise and disappointment, failing to align with the expectations of even those who perspired and hyperventilated under the most exuberant optimism.

Friedman shucked his mortal coil before any of it went down. And yet his earthly quotes, somehow, bulls-eyed the entire sad debacle stem to stern. The unavoidable conclusion is not quite so much that Friedman was a genius, although in my opinion he was one. The point is that we are engaged in a period of learning, the lessons we are in the process of learning are not advanced or impressive. They are rudimentary lessons. They are also painful, and life will most assuredly offer them to us, repeatedly, as long as we demonstrate that we are in need of learning them.

That, and the stuff we are trying now doesn’t work. It relies too much on an axiom that some perfect and infinite wisdom is possessed by people who have been offered no means of achieving it, incentive for having it, nor have they chosen any vocation in the first place that would hold much appeal for those inclined to become wise.

Oh, and Betty Friedan: What a miserable human being. Just horrible. I’d still be thinking that and saying that if I agreed with her on every single issue. Hate to speak ill of the dead, but there’s something about the failure to police one’s own; the act of circling wagons to deny justice to the wronged, to make sure some public-policy question or other political situation comes out the way you want it to.

Thanks to Gerard.

Thinking our blogger friend in New Mexico will get a kick out of this.

The one hundred eighteenth award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes out this morning to Jimmy Kimmel who said, in his comments about the unexpected news of the Kardashian divorce,

Kim has asked that her fans give her a complete lack of privacy during this time.

Whether he realizes it or not, this pinpoints the root cause of just about everything that’s going wrong with civilization lately. Attention is the new coin of the realm. People do what gets them watched.

Now for some Kim Kardashian bikini pics so I can generate more traffic for my blog.

Now that something significant has finally happened with it, I’ll go ahead and say something here.

What has happened that is significant? Rush Limbaugh opined on it, and it’s the first thing I’ve read that makes sense. Video with recording of the broadcast behind the link.

Politico, you failed. You attempted, along with others in the mainstream media, to take the guy out, and you failed. Your influence isn’t what you thought it was. Alana Goodman at Commentary magazine writes, “Basically, the entire Washington media could have collectively called in sick all week, and it wouldn’t have made a difference – at least not for 70 percent of Republicans. The latest Washington Post/ABC poll, one of the first to be taken post-scandal, reports: ‘Seven in 10 Republicans say reports that [Herman] Cain made unwanted advances toward two employees when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s — allegations which have been stiffly rebutted by Cain’s campaign — do not matter when it comes to picking a candidate.'”

Don Surber bottom-lines it:

Politico blew it by not showing any patience on the story. Instead of developing the story, they rushed headlong with basically nothing.

Liberals cannot press the issue. They have no credibility. They blew it by standing by their man in 1998. I knew this day was coming. Surprisingly, I am nether happy nor satisfied. It is what it is.

Karma.

A “scandal” is supposed to be an event, or rather a series of events about an event. Not a procedure. So is it possible to have such a thing as a “botched scandal”?

Yes it is, I say, and yes that’s what we have here. An honest and valuable media tells us about things that happen, a dishonest one makes them happen. An incompetent one tries & fails.

Generations from now, when the history of the twentieth-to-twenty-first century turnover is written, something is going to have to be said about how we learned about things happening as they were happening. It’s obvious, to us, that this has been in a state of change, but I think there won’t be any getting away from it later, when people look back. I think it will be unavoidable. There is too much happening now that can only be explained by: Loudmouths are accustomed to the position of unilaterally dictating what the rest of us will hear about something, and how we will hear it, and they’re slowly losing this status and not adjusting to it too well. There isn’t any other way to sum it up other than to ignore it, and I don’t think our great grandchildren will enjoy the luxury of ignoring it even if they want to.

It’s already started to happen, really. This is one of many reasons why this scandal hasn’t taken off. Think about it; what’s the story? Herman Cain did something that someone back in those days managed, maybe, to make into a big deal. Well even now, people are responding to it with “Uh yeah…people managed to make a big deal out of lots of little deals back then, and it’s good that things aren’t like that anymore because that was wrong. Those were bad things we were doing.”

It’s easy to see that on Main Street. Not so easy in the offices where Politico operates, I think.

It has come to pass. Parker and Stone have finally found the situation to be ridiculous, and therefore worthy of ridicule. Who can ridicule better than they.

From The Daily Caller.

Thomas Sowell, “Democracy and Mob Rule”; were you under the impression that a proper “zing!” could only be laid down over the course of a snappy “zinger” sentence, and couldn’t unfurl over the course of a few paragraphs to unleash its purifying punishment?

The Professor shows how it’s done.

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some “protesters” were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things — and don’t get arrested.

The difference is that I don’t block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money.

Zing.

We seem to be facing some kind of “quickening” here. It’s as if some massive hourglass were up-ended the day they stormed the Bastille, with enfranchised order placed at one end of a spectrum and revolutionary chaos at the other, the two points slowly coming together as the sands ran out of the hourglass. With city governments and retail suppliers of mens’ business attire openly declaring “We Stand With the 99%,” indications are that the two points have met.

I understand that City Hall and retail shops are just trying to appear hip, and plugged in to this newly discovered fountain of youthful energy. But there is danger in this. A line, in geometry, defines things that a point does not define. Enfranchised order carries with it certain powers. The power to subsidize, to tax, therefore to preserve and destroy, the power to create assemblies and break them up. Once we separate the powers again and come up with some “good” laws to thrust upon the enfranchised order with the duty to enforce, they can pick & choose which laws to enforce.

Anarchistic chaos, on the other hand, thinks in terms of us-versus-them. Friends and enemies. Gettin’-even-with-’em-ism. My point is, perhaps it is vital for the continuation of a civilized society, along with the public safety, that these two extremes should not be meeting like this.

I wonder if, to the kids who weren’t alive at the time, these ads look the same way they do to the rest of us. It’s almost elegant the way it seems to come off as something not quite stupid:

Without researching the facts and figures, I can assure you this ad did exactly what it was supposed to do: People talked about the ad with the beer crossing the road. At school, in class, at church, at movies, it was advertising magic.

I just don’t know how you pitch that one in a meeting of ad men. “Hey, I got this idea for a commercial, a bunch of beer cross the road like they’re deer or something.” Were they drinking large amounts of the product? Rainier did not have that kind of intoxicating effect.

But Rainier’s greatest contribution was Marlene:

Daily Caller, via Weasel Zippers:

From the article:

Across countless American living rooms, as Mom and Dad take in the 6 o’clock news with their above-average children playing on the carpet, they wrestle with how to frame the nascent “Occupy” movement to their children. As anchors cut to footage of tear gas scattering masked protesters, parents face the political equivalent of the dreaded birds and the bees talk — about capitalism. And now they have a coloring book to help them.

A new “grown-up coloring book novel” has hit Amazon and Barnes & Noble, chock full of Occupy-related drawings, songs and texts.

They shoulda asked me to design the coloring book. I’d have drawn it up as a description of a mental illness. “Let’s say you run a lemonade stand, your friend runs a lemonade stand, the lemonade at your stand tastes better and so you sell more…and he says that’s not fair, so he stops selling lemonade and occupies your lemonade stand so neither one of you sell any lemonade.”

Charleston Daily Mail, via Surber.

The University of Charleston will slash tuition rates by 22 percent next year in an effort to bolster enrollment.

The tuition decrease is one of several changes that UC President Ed Welch and a committee of stakeholders at the private school have been considering.

In an economic climate that caused public colleges and universities across the state to increase tuition last summer, Welch said he realized that the move to decrease UC’s $25,000 yearly tuition to $19,500 was a bold move.

“It’s a gutsy thing to do, but we know it’s the right thing to do,” Welch said.

While incoming freshmen will pay no more than $19,500 per year, current students still will be charged the $25,000 rate, but with a guaranteed $6,000 in financial aid to lower their cost.

Surber adds:

It may be a local issue. West Virginia’s population flatlined 30 years ago and remains level only because longevity continues to rise. This is a state of old people and the pool of local college material is shrinking.

But I am hoping that it is a sign that colleges nationally will at least halt their rise in tuition. A few brave men question the value of some degrees. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott said: “You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here.”

He later caught flak for it, but he stood by his guns:

Q: Have you heard from any angry anthropologist?

A: Well one of the funniest things, my second daughter, my younger daughter, she’s 26, called me the next day and she said, ‘dad, do you realize that because I got an anthropology undergraduate degree, I was one of the top stories on yahoo?’ She was not very thankful for that.

But I said, well Jordan, what was it like? Did you get a job? ‘Well, no.’

So she got a masters in education after that, and now she’s back getting a masters in business.

Hey, UC has an MBA program. Just saying.

If this is the pop, Prof. Reynolds deserves the credit for endlessly repeatedly reciting Stein rule: Whatever cannot continue forever, won’t.

You’re a triple-a grade asshole, Bruce Crumley.

From Robert at Small Dead Animals…where they have it right: “Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends.”

That’s me. Today. Somewhere there’s an old “Dissolutions Sought Snohomish County” newspaper clipping with my name on it from 11/3/91. I don’t have it and I can’t fill you in on the details. I remember very little from late 1989 to late 1991. I remember work and home life were both filled with an abject hopelessness. I remember the boss very often didn’t meet payroll, or met it late, and when the check came in the wife spent it all. I remember the divorce started to happen when I meandered off that “husband gives paycheck to the wife” plantation. I told her for the next few months, it would probably be good if I handled the bills, and boom. Definitely not the right thing to say. But I was past caring about that; nothing I did or said was the right thing to do or say. The solution to the problems had always been that more control should be given to the wife, and things always came out worse, so I took a different course. Took a few years for that to improve things, but it ultimately turned out to be a smart idea. No, I don’t know where she lives, or if she does.

I do know it doesn’t matter, though. I know now, as I didn’t know as I got married the first time, that there is a vast, subterranean culture of creatures who live in the dark, just like her, people whose misery is always the fault of other people and their solution to it is to hoard more power and control for themselves — which they then wield stupidly, making more problems, blaming these new problems on others…and the cycle continues.

What was it I said a few days ago? Something like: Humanity is divided into two halves, those who make a point of being nice to people who are nice to them, and mean to people who are mean to them — and, those who are nice to people who are mean to them, and mean to people who are nice to them. So those who have it straight, and those who have it backwards. These two halves of humanity should never come into contact with each other.

Well, by this last February I made the decision that the new one and I are good for each other, and I’ve been single long enough. I gave her the ring, we whipped out our phones and updated our relationship statuses. We were going to do something cute with the wedding and make it happen just before today, or just afterward, to make it not-quite or just-over-twenty. But it’s just not working. Things are still going great but we have logistical nightmares with locating relatives to places, and such…there has lately arisen a hubbub about multiple ceremonies.

Just blegh.

Stupid, lazy, self-righteous bitch.

Yeah, I’m talking about toilet-brush-head, from 1:30 forward. The “won’t-do” lady.

She has two kids and can’t/won’t work full time anyway. No mention of the dad. Poor kids. Momma is already making it clear that if you need or want something, you protest for it, and you can’t get a job unless-unless-unless.

A hundred years ago, before people figured out where it would ultimately lead, the Eugenics movement was much more popular than it ever could be today. I have no stomach for it, myself. But there are times when I can at least see how & where some well-intentioned souls might have been led astray: People like parka-lady, who believe in reproducing and don’t believe in work.

Those kids would be better off as Sawney Bean‘s kids. You have a better chance getting hit by lightning, than those kids have of living any kind of normal, independent, capable life.

Memeorandum is silly. There’s this story up about Michael Mann, the scientist who figured out a way to graph the global mean temperature in such a way that some kind of detonation looked imminent. The “hockey stick graph” has become a visual, colorful engine to help drive the effort toward a global command economy. On a sane planet, we’d be debating whether that would change the outcome, or whether some global-climate catastrophe is a possibility with regard to, or regardless of, whatever we do.

On this one, we’re debating whether Mann has to do what you had to do in high school: Show his work.

I say they’re silly because they’re headlining Mann’s victory this way:

Of course, that’s from the ThinkProgress piece itself. But after borrowing that bit of silliness, they then supplement it with another story from Nature News Blog called “Climate scientist wins his day in court – November 01, 2011.”

Cool, so Michael Mann is right and the conservatives are wrong. A court said so. But what happened?

ThinkProgress comes to the point in the second paragraph:

Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann—who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science—triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, and ongoing attempts at scientist-harassment.

More specifically, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch both allowed Mann to join the case that ATI is pursuing against the University of Virginia to get Mann’s emails, and allowed UVA to back out of an agreement with ATI to let it review some of Mann’s emails that the university is nevertheless claiming are exempt from disclosure.

Nature News Blog, to its credit, reveals it in the first:

Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann stepped out of a courthouse in Manassas, Virginia, on Tuesday with a smile on his face. After a surprisingly contentious hearing that lasted most of the day, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch had granted his petition to join his former employer, the University of Virginia, in fighting a lawsuit seeking access to thousands of emails Mann sent as a professor there between 1999 and 2005.

Prof. Mann did indeed win a victory, but it is a victory for opaqueness. Contrary to what a reasonable but casual reader of news might infer from the big-font headlines, it is not the sort of victory that settles science or proves a scientist’s viewpoint on things to have been the right ones, nor does it prove his methods were even sound. Quite to the contrary: It is the sort of victory that would diminish in importance, were the practitioner using such sound methods, laboring under honest motives.

To Mann and his cheerleaders, it is all-important.

Draw your own conclusions. I’ve drawn mine.

American Tradition Institute issues the following press release, which is not linked on Memeorandum:

ATI welcomes Dr. Mann to the case. Now he will have to defend his email content before a neutral court and offer more than slurs and innuendo to support his contention that he can hide his behavior and his emails from the public who paid for them in the first place.

ATI opposed Dr. Mann’s intervention, but not because ATI doesn’t “like” him. Rather, like so many other elements of this case, it gives ATI the opportunity to help the court clarify the law. Although the trial court did not state the interest Mann has in this case, on appeal the court will have to explain what basis exists for a faculty member to intervene in a FOIA case between citizens and a university.

“This is a cloudy area of law and ATI seeks clarity on the matter,” said Dr. David Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “Dr. Mann now must offer to an appellate court citations to cases and statutory law to defend his position.”

So, having heard from both sides we see this has absolutely nothing to do with the science & whether it says the earth is heating up. Not that anybody quoted here, ever said it did. This is a procedural decision, with Mann prevailing in his efforts to maintain secrecy, and his opponents arguing unsuccessfully for transparency.

Hmmm…in global-warming-land, that’s the kind of victory that brings high-fives back-slaps and fist-pumps? Just weird. Progressives seem to be constantly cheering on their own efforts, for the benefit of an audience of dimwits who don’t actually read things. Across the issues, they’ve got all these bumper-sticker-slogans that, when you take the time to read further, you find are supported only in letter but not in spirit. Hey, whatever they gotta do…but Memeorandum does nothing to retain its own credibility, by joining them in the effort, even if they’re doing so only by copying these sneaky, deceptive headlines.

From Ed Morrissey.

Allahpundit sets it up:

This couldn’t be simpler: Jean Quan, the Democratic mayor of a Democratic city, was utterly intimidated by the media backlash after cops followed her orders to clear the plaza in front of city hall and ended up clashing with protesters. So now, to make amends, not only has she given them back the space, she’s giving all city employees the day off tomorrow to join the mass strike against “the establishment” — except of course for the designated scapegoat, the police. If, like the union, you’re wondering whether Quan and those employees aren’t also part of “the establishment” and why she thinks handing out extra sick days for dissent is more important than running the city, clearly you’ve forgotten an important lesson. Namely, any liberal can “speak truth to power” by virtue of being a liberal, no matter how fantastically powerful he or she might be.

This follows a link to, and precedes an excerpt from, a letter to the citizens of the City of Oakland from the Police union:

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

The one hundred seventeenth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award is snagged this morning by Kenneth Anderson at Volokh Conspiracy (hat tip to Professor Mondo). After three paragraphs of observation about modern America’s class struggles, he swivels his spotlight onto the Occupy Wall Street movement to reveal how they tie in…after which come an additional seven paragraphs, at the end of which we stumble across this able and percussive summary:

It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

Smackdown! Not even a comma to break up the rhythm. And it even explains the pricey coffee drinks, crab dinners and fancy laptops.

That rule being, of course: “If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.”

Last week we noted that ReelGirl had launched a failed campaign. There is much to suggest it was in fact a successful one, but it’s all predicated on the notion that feminist campaigns are inherently insincere. If it was about the stationary stanza of feminism — “Oh, look everybody how much I hate this thing over here, come gather around and help me hate it” — it was a wild fantastic success. Margot got lots of traffic and lots of comments on her post. Chapstick stopped running the ad, so there’s a victory there. The ad prominently displays a female’s rear end as she rummages in a couch for her lost Chapstick. But if you believe everything feminists tell you about the protest, it must have been a fail. Womens’ rumps are not banished from advertising, I don’t think. Women do not look stronger. They look weak, delicate, like hysterical creatures that fall to pieces if they see a butt in a magazine. The “don’t screw with the feminist movement” message was communicated loud and clear. But ya know, that just makes them look irrational. If it reinforces some notion that women are powerful, it does so by reminding us that some among them possess a destructive energy. You need not browse too much ancient mythology and literature to realize that this is not a new idea. And, of course, it is antithetical to the notion that a more civilized and better-functioning society awaits us if & when we reward females with greater power & privilege.

Margot’s biggest mistake, however, is to accuse. She accused Chapstick not quite so much of something factual, which would be displaying a female rump — but speculated and imagined, which had something to do with degrading the fairer sex by viewing its bodily appendages through a sensual lens.

And now she has to sound the clarion call, once again, of “How I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” Maybe that’s the whole point.

Now in celebration of their new tag line ‘Never Let Your Lips Go Naked’, Chapstick Australia have signed Australia’s Next Top Model winner Amanda Ware as the face (and body) of their new ad campaign. We say body because Ware will star in a series of cheeky ads wearing nothing but her Chapstick.

Don’t like it when we show a woman’s butt? We’ll show you her whole bod! Take that!

I got a feeling this decision has nothing whatsoever to do with ReelGirl. But I also got a feeling, if Margot permitted herself the luxury of thinking she caused this, it would be a fun idea for her to have. I know we’re getting a kick out of thinking it. I’m all for a grassroots protest that is well-thought-out and has some real nobility to it, aggravated into action by a worthy cause, but when they start to get silly it gives me pleasure to see the big company tell them to stick it. I like it even better when they play rope-a-dope, which seems to be what Chapstick did here, assuming the naked-thing is connected in any way to the couch thing. I like Morgan Rule Number One, I like Australia, and the nice lookin’ naked lady doesn’t hurt matters either.

Lesson: If you’re going to protest everything, the end result is the same as if you protest nothing. Priorities. Restraint. Choices.