I’ve been enjoying the opening & unloading of whoopass on that ignorant slut Elizabeth Warren, and I’m glad to see it’s not over yet. George F. Will weighs in:

Warren is a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.
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Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.

Greg Sargent insists that Will has missed the point here.

What Warren actually said celebrated individual achievement, property and autonomy, while making the completely uncontroversial argument that those things are made possible by a functioning society enabled by a healthy social contract. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive in any way. The argument Warren is making is over how much each of us should sacrifice in order to keep that functioning society healthy. We’re running a deficit; someone has to pay to close it. Warren is simply asking the wealthy to sacrifice a bit more in that direction, because if they don’t, a disporprotionately [sic] heavy burden for fixing it will fall on the rest of us. This is a fair request, Warren says, because the society they’d be helping to keep afloat partly enabled their wealth in the first place — and will enable others to follow in their footsteps. Warren is making thise [sic] case to individuals who will decide whether to elect her to the Senate to advance this view. No tyrannical “collectivity” here.

Will doesn’t even attempt to engage her real argument — he doesn’t tell us why the wealthy shouldn’t be called upon to do a bit more to help close a deficit that conservatives insist is a threat to civilization as we know it.

Okay fine, let’s grant him that. Warren’s main point is still flapping around in the breeze because Will didn’t address it, so I will. This has been bugging me for awhile anyway:

The Elizabeth Warren syllogism I’ve picked up from what she said (for the uninitiated, it is here) — is:

1. Your business concern has been running a profit and the state has been running a deficit;
2. The activities of the state, funded by the rest of us, have been & are critical prerequisites to your business and the profits realized by it;
3. Therefore, since the state’s deficit represents a vital ingredient to your business that has essentially been unfunded, you need to pay more.

Pause here to note that Elizabeth Warren is a walking caricature of the ivy-league loudmouth with too much book smarts & not enough common sense. Of all the scathing criticism that has come her way on this thing, much of it has come from people possessing much greater experience than she can offer in “hard” businesses — businesses that just dangle a product or service out there, something that builds something useful that didn’t exist before, that people can actually use and would be willing to pay money to get. Warren’s background in positions that meet this criteria seems to be limited to writing wills, and oh boy, does it ever show.

A business, in order to realize a profit, relies on all kinds of things — and they’re all vital to the bottom line, or else it wouldn’t be relying on them. All the employees on the payroll, just for starters. The supplies in the supply room. The vendors who put them there. The wireless router and the carrier who supplies an Internet connection to it. The electricity, the physical space, the telephones, the company vehicles, the fuel inside them, the copier machine, the toner inside it, the dude who comes by to fix it, the guy that fixes the company car, the guy that fixes the router and the computers…

I’m not even getting warmed up here. Trust me, I could go at this all day long. There is, of course, a great big bushel of things that are made into these necessities, by design, by the state whose contributions Warren holds aloft. Artificially, the auditor’s efforts are made non-disposable and vital to the business’ “success” by a bunch of pain-in-the-ass rules — which, by the way, a lot of the time are put on the books just to put the business in its “place,” to get the message across to the business that a lot of voters & politicians are pissed off at it. The research eggheads who figure out how much dye & sodium goes into each can of product so the number can be put on a food label, the guys on the payroll whose job it is to work with the auditors and make sure the audit gets done, the second hard drive put in the mainframe to keep this data physically separate from that data, the technician who installed it, the shipper who shipped it.

All of these represent entities that provide products & services to the business so the business can succeed. And they are businesses of their own; each of them has the potential to make money, apply that money to their own expenses — and fall short. Guess what? That’s their problem. Each business has a mission, a way to make money, a big ol’ list of expenses that have to be met in completion of the mission…and some structure of executive responsibility for making sure it runs right. That includes the government.

But in the Warren/Sargent view of things, there is something unique and special about the government — and that is the executive responsibility part of it. For their syllogism to work, they must not see it. And it is the nature of government, at all levels, to remain blind to this as well: It’s never at fault for ending a fiscal period in the red, never, never, not ever. It’s always the fault of the taxpayer for not paying enough. The other providers in that big list I put together, a list I could have made much, much longer…they do not have this luxury. Their executives have actual responsibilities. If they fall short, it’s on them.

You see, these other service- and product-providers are paid according to contract and salary negotiation, not in equity in the business. You take a corporate accounting class, which Warren apparently didn’t do, and they make this distinction crystal-clear: holders of debt, and holders of equity. (Actually I think they defined this in Bookkeeping 101.) The business is indebted to them both but in entirely different ways, and this difference is what makes capitalism actually work. These providers of service or product get their twenty thousand dollars, or their five hundred, or their seventy-five cents — and that’s it. Occasionally, a business that relies on another business, might realize the necessity of offering more money because there’s a symbiotic relationship that’s about to go askew if the provider of some vital service is about to go under. That does happen within capitalism, believe it or not. But that business that receives the service — so long as it has met its obligations in the business community, it retains control. It’s gotta be that way. That’s part of a whole other “social contract” of which Elizabeth Warren, and those of like mind with her, have somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware.

Let me state it much more concisely: You do not get to tell a business “hey, I used a hand truck to haul that copier paper to your office two weeks ago and I can’t pay my cable bill — you need to pay more.” If it worked that way, a) it wouldn’t be capitalism and b) it wouldn’t work for long. So there’s your other social contract, Greg and Elizabeth: Everyone needs to take responsibility in order to participate. Anyone who doesn’t, is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I’m sure Sargent would have something to say in response to that. I hope so. I hope this discussion drags on and on and on. It is helpful and educational…which indicates, to me, that if the conversation does manage to make its way to some statists who are more sympathetic to Warren’s side of things, they’re going to start saying things to dismiss it, like “Oh that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” or maybe fling around a few accusations of racism perhaps. That’s always a good fallback.

So she’s out. This must be an enormous relief for the “moderate” Republicans and others who insisted Obama would flatten and pummel her, more surely than any other challenger: They can go on believing that because this will never be tested now. And this can be a healthy thing. Palin supporters like me, instead of pushing a personality that a lot of people have made up their minds never to accept, can instead push the principles she would have represented.

For our own benefit we’d better define what these are, since we need to select a new favorite. Start with the incumbent, and define the inadequacies with that offering, proceeding to the deficiencies of others. Why can’t we stick with Barack Obama? Is the problem really that He’s a black guy?

In my case, it’s easy to define exactly what I want but it’s hard to articulate it because there isn’t a word to describe it. White skin is not the issue. The phrase “common sense” comes closest. As I said many times before, if I were ever a supporter of Obama, that ship would’ve sailed after I drove through a few highway sections torn apart for months & years at a time by construction projects funded by the Reinvestment Act, which I have nicknamed “Obamastruction.” The stupidity of it is just dazzling. Obama fans, predictably, point out how stupid I am in observing the stupidity. I get back a bunch of snotty lectures about how roads need to be maintained, and what kind of world do I want to live in anyway…one where the roads have completely fallen apart and you can’t even drive a car down them without destroying it, et cetera…

Uh, no. If I wanted to live in a world like that I’d live in Detroit, or some other place democrats have been running for a long time.

Obamastruction fails the test of common sense in so many ways. Let’s dissect it a little. We have high unemployment and we need to get people working…so…we’ll tax and borrow and inject hundreds of billions of dollars which will wholly or partly fund all these construction projects, and when we do that the construction people will have to be hired and they’ll spend money which will lead to more activity…et al…

First problem we have is what Ludwig von Mises pointed out about it:

It is obviously futile to attempt to eliminate unemployment by embarking upon a program of public works that would otherwise not have been undertaken. The necessary resources for such projects must be withdrawn by taxes or loans from the application they would otherwise have found. Unemployment in one industry can, in this way, be mitigated only to the extent that it is increased in another.

Now Obamastruction does have a partial defense against this: In many cases the funds are used cleverly, toward the benefit of the goal as stated. Given President Obama’s track record, this might have been an oversight of some kind, but anyway. the Obamastruction that is the biggest thorn in my side, is a good example, some $1 or $2 million in Reinvestment Act funds to push it “over a hump” and reach a goal of $22 million so the shovel-readiness can be complete.

But there we run into another problem that I don’t see anyone discussing anywhere: The work begins. It begins on this road, and on that road, and that other road over there…throughout the continental United States we have all this Obamastruction going on. And pay attention here you snotty preening condescending Obama fans who want to educate me about how roads need to be maintained: This is all happening at the same time. Earlier, this summer, I drove up the east half of Oregon and Washington State by way of Highway 97. It wouldn’t have been such a dumb move, except for Obamastruction. I was stuck in construction, on and off, for the better half of an entire day. No biggie, right? I was just transporting myself. Well, there’s the rub: There are actually people who live in those places, who need to have supplies shipped to them, which means trucked. If it takes a wheeled vehicle 60% longer to cut through all that, and 60% longer to cut through the mess much closer to my doorstep, and 60% longer to cut through anything & everything in between those points, and all over the place elsewhere…ya know, it starts to not look a whole lot like a program for “economic recovery.”

I worry about the great minds who can’t see that one coming. Do they have drivers’ licenses? Anyone who’s driven for any length of time, knows the last step to dealing with construction is: Heave a sigh of relief, because when you see the “End Construction” sign, you know you’re probably done with it for a few miles. For the last two years or so, thanks to Obama’s brilliance, that has not applied. You drive any stretch of new road anywhere, you expect to see the damn orange cones. And the flagmen. And that silly sign telling you it’s your tax dollars at work. I’m not saying “long stretch,” I’m saying “any stretch.” That doesn’t help with an economic recovery.

Then there’s the matter of what a construction worker buys with the money he or she gets from being employed. Stuff that creates jobs? Really? Raise your hand if you got a job in a small business started by a construction worker who was temporarily employed due to a government program. And then we run into another problem because of that adverb: “temporarily.” At some point, the highway section to be widened, has been widened.

So with Palin out, what we need to be looking for is someone who wouldn’t propose a boondoggle like that.

We should take the emotionalism out of it with an analogy. Say the problem isn’t unemployment or dependence on foreign oil or terrorist buttholes or illegal immigration. Let’s say the problem is we have a golf course and a gopher is tearing it up. Is Obama, then, Bill Murray? No…Obama makes the dynamite look like a good idea. Obama is the guy who comes along and says “Step one, give Me and My friends all the money you can afford, Step three, gopher problem solved.” What’s step two? Dunno. So Obama is more like an underpants gnome sort of character. And this is why He has to become a one-termer. It isn’t that His solutions are overly expensive or that they don’t work…although they are, and they don’t. It’s that getting rid of the goddamn gopher never was the agenda in the first place.

No, Obama is there just to give speeches that make it seem like a swell idea to suck all the money and power away, to confuse lightweight thinkers into thinking this will somehow address whatever problem happens to be under discussion at the moment. But you’ll notice no matter what that problem is, the contorted jumbled-up mess of ObamaLogic keeps leading back to the common central point, of “put lots of money under control of Obama and His friends.”

Other successful politicians seem to approach every problem by defining certain favorite segments of the population as sympathetic, and others as not-sympathetic. So a good solution for the gopher problem would be: Tax the rich, put the money in a new program which will employ some minimal number of fill-in-the-blank…women, ethnic minorities, gay, handicapped…and at some point the gopher drops dead of old age or something.

Sarah Palin would have just shot the fucking gopher. And that would be the fallback plan, I think, after trying to poison it. Point is, the gopher would be dead, and the golf course would be fine.

That’s what we need, I think.

Just before she dropped out, I went on vacation, on bicycle, by myself, through the farmlands around Davis and Dixon, out to the ocean, up the Russian River, and then around & through the county roads around Winters. It took me six days during which I pedaled just shy of 300 miles. By far the deadliest thing I encountered was Obamastruction. But the most inspiring thing I saw? It was the farms. Not the crops, mind you; they make for great pictures, but no I’m talking about the dwelling places where people live and do their operations and planning. Some were prosperous, others not so much. But it made an impression on me that you could see the wisdom going into how a machine should be used, where it should be stored, when it was time to throw it away. How should the house be built. Where should the doors go. Everything was absolutely functional, and in that way, beautiful.

It is a whole different way of living, a whole different way of looking at the world. Anticipation of benefits and consequences. Beginning with the end in mind…if you have not planned for success, you are planning for failure. The whiteboard business-executives like to use phrases like that, but these people who grow our food actually live it. They know how to make it all work. Or else, they’re gone.

They say knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. This is the kind of wisdom of which I speak. Palin, supposedly this stuttering dolt who botched her interview with Katie Couric, was the one — can’t even call her a “candidate,” can I? — whatever-ya-call-it who was running her operations with some wisdom. We could define and detect this wisdom with a criteria of “good fortune that is not accidental.” The Palin haters cannot bring themselves to admit it, but she’s always had this going on; the other contenders, not quite so much. She’s no dummy — or, if she really is one, there must have been someone else calling the shots who knew what to do. It’s always easier to see who has wisdom than it is to figure out what the wisest answer is. It’s even easier to figure out who doesn’t have it, or at least, who’s failing to use it if they’ve got it.

Right now, I think we’re missing the wisdom. Obama’s cabinet is just chock full of knowledge; and His campaign had some wisdom going on. Now that He’s our President, the beneficiary of any wisdom would be the country, rather than the Obama campaign, so suddenly wisdom seems to have taken a holiday. Been on vacation for going on three years, now. (Wonder where in the heck wisdom is riding its bicycle? Is its ass getting as sore as mine was?) So now that I & some others need to go shopping for another candidate, that’s the principle requirement. Wisdom, and the commitment to use it for the benefit of the country. That’s what is missing, and we’ve suffered for it long enough.

This is going to take some disciplined decision-making, based on a responsible review of the evidence. Might take a fair amount of time, too. Hmmm…

Professor Mondo addresses this comparison brewing up lately between the “occupiers” of Wall Street and the Tea Party movement. His words are succinct but powerful:

It’s pretty simple, really. My students want to be able to pull their wagons. The occupants want to ride. [emphasis mine]

But he has to split this prize with — as usual — Ann Coulter:

I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point.

Levin, by way of Surber.

It is what it is.

Props to Althouse for bringing this up, but she’s missing the point in what it all means:

Stimulus programs are always going to be bullshit. They’re always going to net results just like this. It shoulda had a bigger effect, shoulda had a better one, shoulda been longer-lasting, shoulda, shoulda…woulda-coulda-shoulda. This one wasn’t manly enough because it went to schoolteachers first and construction workers second; if it went the other way ’round, it would’ve discriminated against women. If it had somehow managed to balance those out perfectly and duck all criticism there, it wouldn’t have been gay enough. And then it would have discriminated against the handicapped.

Stimulus spending is not about success, it’s about finding excuses for the failure before you even get started. Meanwhile, you know what? A lot of us don’t work in public schools or in construction.

If the money was just left in the free market…the kinda sorta free market…then anybody who wants to complain about where the money’s getting spent, would have to take it up with each of the millions upon millions of people doing the spending. And that is the point to a government stimulus program: To gather the money into one channel, so people can look at how it was spent and then bitch about it. It makes the bitching and blaming and finger-pointing easier. All this talk about how to make the next one work better, is just a crock. This one was as big as we can afford, and it went as well as it’s ever gonna. It was still a complete flop — and that’s what the process looks like. Anyone who needs to run a few more cycles on a merry-go-round so they’ve got time to get that figured out, I think they should go off somewhere and do it in an isolated test environment, with a lot less money. If they find out I’m wrong, let us know…otherwise…don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. As punishment, the god Zeus chained him to a rock and sent a vulture to attack him and eat his gizzard, or appendix, or liver. Every day. By night, the organ would grow back in again, and in the morning the bird would fly on in at its leisure and snack anew. Prometheus was damned to this daily torment for centuries, until Heracles or Pericles came along, slew the bird and shattered the chains.

Room 203 is the jury selection room in downtown Sacramento. Yours Truly was tapped to sit and wait to be selected…during which time they plied us with the following entertainment.

Tooth Fairy
RV
The Game Plan

…all of which I’ve seen before, all of which have something to do with the patriarch of some family unit figuring out his many assorted problems in life are due entirely to his being a shallow self-absorbed jerk. Which, if it were a movie genre not already pounded and re-pounded into oblivion, like a delicate silk handkerchief placed under a thundering jackhammer for a day and a half, would already not be my favorite…but, such as it is…

Well, I’ve blogged this before. Many times. See, I’m a dude…therefore, I’m sympathetic to dudes…but even if I wasn’t, and wasn’t — if I was some bimbo with all kinds of unresolved daddy- and ex-husband-issues, there is still the matter of money changing hands. Still the matter of creativity being bought & paid for. And I want to see some.

This is the part where the nattering nabobs say “well if you hate those movies so much, why don’t ya walk out, HUH??” And that would be a great point under ordinary circumstances. Not here, though. See, I was required to be there…if the judge calls my name, and I don’t show, he can sign a warrant for my arrest. Yeah, in theory. But still.

I could’ve approached the matronly females behind the bullet proof plexi-glass and asked, can you put on a movie that doesn’t make husbands and fathers look like complete jackasses? But what’s the point. It maybe would’ve made for a good story to tell…but probably not…in the end, I figured hell I’ve got work stacking up back at the office, which by now is where I wish I was — someone might as well get something done today. So I let them work. I’ll probably regret that, but I know it was the right thing to do.

There was a moment when the third movie just got started, where I began to think…you know, if I died this morning and didn’t know it, and my earthly existence was found to be displeasing to the deity at hand and I’d been sentenced to eternal torment, this would be it. Wouldn’t it? Stuffy government building just exuding the distinct aroma of thoughtless bureaucracy, a captive audience before an unending string of uncreative, hateful, acrid, toxic, smack-myself-in-forehead-I’m-such-a-thoughtless-jerk doofus dad movies. That’s what my sentence would be — and what’s going on right now? For just a second or two, it kinda creeped me out.

But at twenty minutes to four, we were dismissed. So, inspired by an offline e-mail from blogger friend Phil, I stopped off WalMart on my way home, picked up The Undefeated, then I barricaded myself in my domicile and cracked open a cold one.

And how was your day?

Victor Davis Hanson has put pen to paper, and fleshed out the hopes I’ve been nurturing. But he leads with the dark stuff first:

Stagnant GDP, 9.1 unemployment, another $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion annual deficits, and sky-high fuel and food prices have combined to crush any notion of upward mobility. (If in 2004 5.7% unemployment was supposed to mark a “jobless recovery,” what exactly is 9.1% called? If Bush’s average $500 billion deficits over eight years were abhorrent, what must we say of Obama’s average $1.6 trillion over three? Really bad?)

In response, the Obama administration — let me be candid here — seems clueless, overpopulated as it is by policy nerds, academic overachievers, and tenured functionaries (cf. Larry Summers’ “there is no adult in charge”). They tend to flash Ivy League certificates, but otherwise have little record of achievement in the private sector. Officials seem to think that long ago test scores, a now Neolithic nod from an Ivy League professor, or a past prize translates into knowing what makes America run in places like Idaho and southern Michigan.

Yes, I know that Steven Chu is “brilliant” and a Nobel laureate. But that means no more than suggesting that laureate Paul Krugman was right about adding even more trillions to the debt. My neighbors know enough not to quip, as the know-it-all Chu did, that California farms (the most productive in the U.S.) will dry up and blow away, or gas prices should reach European levels, or Americans can’t be trusted to buy the right light bulbs, or a failed Solyndra just needed millions more of taxpayers’ money.

Solyndra and Van Jones are the metaphors of these times, reminding us of the corruption of the very notion of “green.” In the age of Al Gore, it has eroded from a once noble ideal of conservation to a tawdry profit- and job-scam for assorted hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Without the lofty hype and shake-down, most otherwise would have had to find productive jobs. Tragically, “green” is the new refuge of scoundrels.
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Why, then, do I see blue sky and a break in the present storms? For a variety of very good reasons.
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The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.

The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades.
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The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.

The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades.

In the America that rises like a Phoenix from the ashes, you can’t be elected President just by muttering vague platitudes about “hope” and “change” and being on Oprah Winfrey’s short-list of honored guests. Companies can’t rip off consumers, charging exorbitant prices and fees for providing negligible quantity & quality by way of product & service, and get away with it all by throwing out some bumper-sticker slogan with the word “green” in it.

Who knows? Maybe in the coming bigger-and-better America, we’ll see some movies come out that boast truly original plots, not based on any old comic book or cartoon show from the seventies, and don’t have Shia LaBeouf or Natalie Portman in any major role. Wouldn’t that be great?

And for that, gets suspended from a 20-year gig asking Americans if they’re ready for some Monday night football.

Hank Jr. wasn’t really even comparing President Zero to Hitler; he was only making a point regarding how absurd it is for Republicans to play footsy with radicals bent on destroying America as we know it. But the media establishment’s tolerance for transgression is extremely limited when it isn’t coming from the left.

So there are two issues here. One, it’s pretty obvious that “Obama==Hitler” was not what Williams was trying to get across, so the decision to suspend him was made by someone who didn’t even get the point; or, that is, someone acting on behalf of someone else, real or imagined, who didn’t get the point.

Two, unless ESPN has been sniffing around for reasons to suspend Williams, and just now managed to find one, this wasn’t a well-advised move. Simply ignoring the dumb metaphor would have carried a very high potential for success. So: Williams has been fired for a long time and just didn’t know it; someone bolluxed the cost/benefit part of should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-suspend; or, ESPN figures its bread is buttered by libs. Pick one of the three.

Sadly, Williams’ inept expression of his sentiment has caused said sentiment to be lost in the shuffle: People right now aren’t terribly inspired when they see opposites playing patty-cake with each other. It isn’t encouraging. It has the opposite effect.

James Wilson, who comments often at Daphne‘s & Gerard‘s places, often is seen to write that the result of mixing fine wine together with sewage, is sewage. I think that’s on par with what the country music artist was trying to say…but I don’t know if that would have created any less of a tempest. Like watching your favorite mousing-cat play hopscotch or pinochle with the mice? Oh well. We know a little more about him, and we know a little more about ESPN.

By way of Don Surber.

Wonder what he was going to say?

Found by blogger friend Phil.

Maybe he was talking to the field reporter…advising him against ending his sentences with prepositions?

Found today’s Day By Day cartoon to be particularly on the mark:

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is obsessed with real life, and also with movies, but we like to nurture a gritty and healthy determination to keep those two things separate.

Well part of understanding how things are separate is understanding how and why they overlap. So this entry, linked by venerable blogger friend Gerard, immediately appealed to us:

[An] ending is like a punch line. It is a thing that pulls the story together in such a way as to make the experience satisfying. Usually, an ending is the moment just after the victory when all is concluded. (Unless you’re me, and you write two full chapters of post-victory-missing-father-answers-questions stuff. But I don’t recommend that approach! So, in this case, you might want to do as I say, rather than as I do.) Normally, endings are more like the old romance guidelines which said: end the story the very moment that the couple gets together.

Basically, you write your story. You write your climax. You write what happens next. Then go back and cut everything after whatever the final sum-up moment of the climax was, ending at the very moment when the story is complete.

Again…do as I say, not as I do. Got that? Okay…

Overall, there are three basic endings. Everything turns out the same as the beginning—the sit-com ending used by all non-serial TV shows. Everything turns out worse than it started—a tragedy. Or everything turns out better than when it started—what used to be called a comedy, but now is just called a story.

There is another ending, however, that many of the bestsellers use. It is the unexpected twist ending. In his book Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass describes this kind of ending as: The main character fails to get what he was striving for during the book (sad), but instead he gets something else, which turns out to be good or better (happy or at least kind of happy.)

This kind of ending often has a bittersweet quality, because of the loss of the desired goal brings a note of sadness, even if the unexpected good that comes the character’s way once they see what is left for them after their failure brings some joy with it.

An example of this last ending is Gone With The Wind. Scarlett fails to get Rhett or Ashley, but she does go home to Tara with a hope of starting again. An even better example of this kind of ending is Casablanca. In fact, while whole books could be written on why Casablanca stands out so much among its contemporaries, one of the reasons is the way in which the end so perfectly meets Maass’s criteria.

Gerard asks the provocative question, “How might ‘The Barack Obama Story’ End?” Brett_McS answers:

Barry and Michele hit the media circuit (after a short pause to allow the media to re-write the four year nightmare as the second third coming of Camelot) becoming regular commentators in every venue and on every subject from foreign affairs to healthy eating. They never go away. Ever. For youth is on their side. They will be still preaching to us via our bedside 3D holographic TV as we take our dying breaths and are too weak to change the channel. Light and sound slowly fade. The end.

It occurs to me, there is another type of ending worthy of inclusion in such a list, not satisfactorily captured by any of the other examples: We could call this the “Animated Monster” ending, which makes it clear to the audience that all of the events of the story are merely antecedent to the adventures to come, all distilling into a complex character, and the story itself is simply a unique medium for defining in comprehensive detail all the important attributes of that character. Great works in movies and literature can develop from such an ending, like this one, for example…or just creepy, haunting ones, like this. We may make it all the way to the end, not fully conscious of the fact that all we’re seeing is an “origins” story.

I think the Obama nightmare falls into that. We’re witnessing not a presidency, but a gestation, the culmination of which will be a denizen of the lucrative lecture circuit. An extraordinarily tedious and tiresome one. He’ll hop from podium to podium, talking some smack about the policies of President Palin, just like the classless Carter talked smack about President Bush. He will be nursing an intense but silent seething anger that His entire existence, from the very start, was destined to devolve into nothing more than an endless loop of “Make No Mistake” and “Let Me Be Clear.”

And one day, just like Jesse Jackson, He’ll see Himself displaced by someone younger, hipper, and more fun to watch. Which will pose a problem He’ll seek to solve by exposing Himself more, thus bringing down the market value of His name…and the endless loop will be energized with the frenzied, irrational and escalating drive of the vicious cycle.

Hmmm…maybe “tragedy” does cover it.

An ancient Internet meme that’s been around since before there was an Internet, has been evolving. This version seems to be a 2008 vintage with some parts left in from the 1990’s…

Why DID the Chicken cross the road? Inquiring minds want to know.

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

…than a lot of people do awake.

I’m here, I made it.

The plan to put up a post each day, sort of bit the mat. Just didn’t have that kind of time. Anyway, your closing stats are: Six days, 276.2mi, something most 15-year-olds can’t do. And I’m 45. So nyeah.

Off to the wine & beer bar, for the second of those two items…down by the pool…the Chinese restaurant is delivering War Won Ton and Phad Thai in 30 min. Tomorrow we’ve got a busy day of nuthin’, pure goofing-off. Night all!

Update: Was thinking maybe I should describe the collage above. Clockwise from upper-left: This is one of the picturesque views of downtown Winters, at twilight, facing North on Railroad Ave., the evening arrived as I was going out to get some chow. Next, on the last day, taking advantage of absolutely no traffic on Browns Valley Rd., right before crossing the city limits of Vacaville and completing my loop. Got my second flat tire about a quarter mile later. Next, view from the overpass, I-80 Exit 55, facing East. And the last one is the home stretch, Jameson Canyon Rd, which is Highway 12 heading West…right after it divides from 80. At the end of this is the Marriott…and my fiance…and her car…and Gatorade…and beer.

Received a personal e-mail the other day from President Obama. I notice He consistently applies salutation on His notes and letters the same way: Christian name of the recipient, space, two dashes, new line. An impressive, crisp, efficient flourish with a distinct overtone of “You owe me, I don’t owe you,” the tenor of a Field Marshall summoning the soldiers to arms.

Morgan —

I enjoy talking about fundraising deadlines as much as I imagine you enjoy hearing about them.

But this Friday’s deadline is important.

It’s a chance for us to prove how we’re different from any campaign in politics: We rely on ordinary Americans giving what they can — one grassroots donation at a time.

This is not just a campaign. It’s a chance for each of us as citizens to organize and change the course of history.

And before we close the books this Friday at midnight, I hope you’ll become a part of it.

Please donate $3 or more today.

I’ll be calling some grassroots donors like you by phone this week, so I can say thank you.

And if I don’t call you, there’s a chance I’ll see you at dinner with three other supporters sometime soon.

Even if I don’t get to thank you personally, every single donation counts…

Thanks for doing your part,

Barack

So, noticing something vital seemed to be missing from this polished overture, I replied with an earnest inquiry:

Barack —

Can you please refresh my memory? What exactly is it we’re trying to accomplish here?

Out: 8:47am
In: 4:16pm
Start: Guerneville
End: Calistoga
Distance: 42.9 mi
Trip total: 183.1 mi

Forty miles isn’t much, so I knew I could afford a late start. And it was necessary, since I was at the mercy of the cottage’s continental breakfast, doors unlocking at eight o’clock. No dead animals on the table, so I spent some more minutes loading up on yogurt, a bagel, banana, apple, coffee and orange juice. I’m exerting myself as if two-thirds of my age never happened; I gotta eat that way too.

In what turned out to be a harbinger of the mild inconvenience later in the day, I discovered a couple miles out I needed to firm up the rear tube with my portable pump. Having attended to that, I found Westside Road to be unexpectedly accommodating. This as a route I traced a couple weekends previous in my car, and it looked daunting. It does start out that way; a good distance of granny-gear incline that’ll test your mettle. But the residue from my bad case of the “blahs” had subsided by now, I pushed through and found the worst of it was over in a matter of minutes.

See, it’s all in how you look at it. Just like life! That’s why we do stuff like this, isn’t it?

Simplifying matters further, I found my mileage calculations were bolluxed by about three miles, to my benefit. I ended up making Healdsburg by eleven. Charming place, Healdsburg is. All the tourist-friendly stuff is strategically located on the south end of town, which is hippie’d up…with the more appealing and approachable side of hippie-dom. Think of: interior decorations, new-age music, candles, incense, moon-goddess type stuff.

I wonder if Fairhaven, the setting for my middle-school days, has been engaged in an effort to emulate Healdsburg.

The map says Calistoga is a straight shot down Highway 128 from the point where Alexander Valley Highway ends. This was outside of the route I traced by car; that’s a decision I might have made differently, knowing then what I know now. Challenges await. I had previously forecast my arrival time at 1520, and I ended up gliding in about an hour behind that, almost entirely due to difficulties in the last half-dozen miles.

Good timing, that. Calistoga is something of a bicycle-equipment-shopper’s paradise, and after inspecting and reinspecting my back tire I decided I didn’t want that old tire housing a new tube.

The GPS spot thing is just an expensive flashing light at this point. I put up some notifications on the social media everywhere I could think of it, to the effect that I’m still around and not marooned way back there, as the signal would indicate. After soaking my tired old ass in the jacuzzi for the better part of an hour, I limped off to bed and left the rear-tire repair work for the morning.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Blog That Nobody Reads (that’s this) is not blessed by an especially wise or insightful author, but it has by far the most intelligent readers around. Yeah, I’m going on record: Your blog may be bigger, it may be better, it may be older, but my readers are smarter.

And Professor Mondo is as good a representative as any of the archetype. We have, I dunno, six or eight or ten of these; I’ve lost count quite awhile ago. Professor or other such specialist, working in a higher-education facility somewhere, being conservative of personal ideology, toiling away behind a veneer of anonymity for obvious reasons, be it thick or thin. It is our primary demographic.

But this isn’t about us; it’s about Mondo. So please join me in congratulating one of our favorite readers and fellow bloggers as he celebrates some anniversary of his 29th birthday.

With what must surely rank highly among the raspiest mental-sighs possible, I pull out the file folder marked “technology working against us, giving us more work to do,” and prepare to file the following article therein:

ATTENTION ALL WELL-INTENTIONED ACQUAINTANCES, THE NEW AND THE ANCIENT, THE INTIMATE AND THE CASUAL: MORGAN KARLSSON FREEBERG IS NOT DEAD OR DYING. Not yet. He is nowhere near Bloomfield, California, the location of the last update from his “I work when I damn well want to” newfangled overpriced GPS emergency-signalling device. He has not been bitten by a venomous serpent. He has not been run off the road by an inebriated wine-country-touring hippie piloting some five-ton SUV. He is not lying in a ditch, bleeding out under the moonlight, with a severed artery. He hasn’t been dragged under the wheels of a semi truck and turned into hash. He hasn’t suffered a myocardial infarction and been reduced to a pile of aluminum-human-flesh roadkill in the middle of Highway 1.

Morgan K. Freeberg has not been in Bloomfield for a good thirty hours now; he is a good seventy or eighty miles past that point, with a belly full of red beer and white pork tenderloin. Which would be a reasonable deal if he paid twice for it what he did. Morgan K. Freeberg is in Calistoga, and his biggest worries on earth are that he needs to install a new bike tire (which has been acquired, and is sitting in an armchar in his hotel room), and about 185 miles into his bicycling-vacation, his ass & thighs hurt like a sonofabitch. But he’s buck-ass naked as the day he was born, sitting in a hot tub, with bubbles, remedying that. Drinking more beer. On the other hand, he’s alone…on the other hand, that’s getting fixed too, tomorrow night. So the celibate lifestyle is getting fixed, the super-sore ass is getting fixed…we have laundry facilities tomorrow afternoon too, so that’s also getting fixed. No venom from the wildlife, no injuries, no broken blood vessels. All’s good. Everything’s fine.

I have several hundred dollars sunk into this “GPS spot” device which doesn’t work. Yes, that is a problem. But I think I figured it out: If you put in alkaline batteries, as opposed to lithium, the device will do what it’s supposed to until the charge runs down to 90%, then it will just blink its lights at you. That would explain everything; it would explain why the reviews are so evenly divided between “It does exactly what I wanted!” and “I can’t believe I got taken on this piece of shit.” It isn’t the location, and it isn’t whether you have sweat-soaked bicyclists’ headbands packed on top of the transmitter; it’s the batteries.

Only thing is: I put the batteries in, that arrived with the device.

Whatever. I appreciate everybody’s concerns, but I am not in Bloomfield, I am in Calistoga. I’m sitting in a jacuzzi drinking beer, blogging. I’m just fine. Doing better than you.

Out: 7:32am
In: 5:14pm
Start: Petaluma
End: Guerneville
Distance: 53.5 mi
Trip total: 140.2 mi

I was warned that going up eastward from the mouth of the Russian River would be a draining experience due to the steep inclines. My experience has been the exact opposite. I turned the corner just south of Jenner, around 4 o’clock, top-of-the-hour…and it was as if someone bolted on a motorcycle engine when I wasn’t looking. Going up the seashore highway, right before, is the tough part, Up, down, up, down, high gear, low gear, granny-gear, no shoulder, ten solid miles that seem like forty.

Up the river? Weird. It’s like a fundamental change to the laws of physics that bind the universe. Duh…hey waitaminnit, I’m sustaining a speed of 17mph without even working at it. Uphill, WTH?

I was tempted by a sign at Duncans Mills offering BBQ’s oysters from 1-4 pm. I figured I was just missing the window, but I steered off course because I could hear the live music, and snapped a pic of this impromptu setting. The dancing fella was swinging his gal around like a pro, it was great stuff, wish I had a video of it. And then they settled in for some slow dancing just as I had my camera juiced up…that doesn’t make for a good shot. So as they were slowly spinning around, he saw me and was good enough to oblige with another dip. I kinda sorta caught it, so I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.

I decided to leave the oyster offering for some other time, and push onward.

There are better shots, but they capture the natural beauty of the place, and therefore look like many others I have. This one shows the laid-back fun-loving side of life on the Russian River. We should certainly come back so I can make some efforts to improve on it.

One of my more independent-minded Facebook friends, someone I’ve learned to respect although he’s probably to the political left of me somewhere, took his turn to bash that ignorant slut Elizabeth Warren.

To which I say, Yes. Everybody line up & grab a number.

Good (even great!) arguments for progressive taxation exist. (“We’re broke” is actually an excellent one.) Elizabeth Warren’s relay of tired academic orthodoxy is not such an argument. Though it’s worthwhile to think about the systems that lead us to be able to be able to acquire wealth, and government is part of that, so are free markets, the harnessing of self-interest as a motivational tool that our economy relies on, and the fact that we as a society respect the right of those who earn money to keep it rather than go French-Revolution* on them.

Ah. Well, he’s right about pretty much everything, and I didn’t like jumping down this little rabbit hole, but I had to.

Fantastic post Bob; well said.

I know it’s a parenthetical point, but I have to take issue with the thing about “we’re broke” being an excellent point in favor of progressive taxation. Take it downward in the hierarchy a level or two, to the state and municipal governments; they have the same argument. Now if you start flying around from city to city and buying up local newspapers, reading all these sob stories about local treasuries being broke — after awhile, the message emerges and it is crystal clear: It is the nature of government to entirely avoid accountability for living beyond means. In other words, it is ALWAYS the taxpayer’s fault for not paying enough.

The message becomes even clearer when one starts to review the line item expenses maintained by these governments. Just speaking for myself, I would characterize it as “abuse” if the average age & mileage of the local citizens’ automobiles is measurably greater than the average age & milage of those driven by government officials. Some would disagree with that viewpoint with some legitimacy; but you can just imagine how I feel about $2M spent to study monkey-fornicating habits, or $3M for researchers to play World of Warcraft.

I mean, I think you get the point. “Hey we better not approve this expense because we might not be able to come up with the money for it” — it’s a thought that just doesn’t reverberate. Maybe that can’t be done, but no, “we’re broke” is not an excellent point for progressive taxation. It isn’t even an adequate one.

Bob fessed up that he “went too far,” which is good because we were able to get back to the primary subject, about which he is completely in the right. Incremental improvement.

Since then, I see President Obama is making the news because He’s going to be speaking in Silicon Valley…and I already know what He’s going to say: We have to make the tax system more progressive, because the goverment is in debt up to its ass, and these millionaires-n-billionaires (one word there) are getting away with murder.

It makes me think back to this exchange about the virtue of progressive taxation.

Three things I think all intelligent people paying attention to the issue, realize implicitly, although nobody talks about them out loud. So it falls to The Blog That Nobody Reads to point out the elephant in the room.

One. Conservatives recognize there must be something “okay” with a progressive tax system, and that thing makes any argument about it entirely moot. We are always going to have a progressive tax scheme as long as our government is awash in red ink, and our government is always going to be awash in red ink. The math says so. Imagine what revenues we would have to raise to pay all of one year’s expenses, service the public debt, and avoid running a deficit for that year. Now divide that by the number of people who might conceivably pay taxes…and imagine the least prosperous among those taxpayers sending in that quotient to the IRS. It’s just not going to happen. So there is going to have to be some progressive-curve in what these people & businesses are forking over.

Two. President Obama’s message, “Now that we’re in deep trouble we need to ‘ask’ more of our millionaires-n-billionaires,” creates a self-perpetuating, vicious political circle that is helpful to the liberal cause although it hurts the country. We are in a “hyper-progressive” taxation posture, by which I mean not only are the people at the high end paying more than the people at the low end, but many on the low end are not paying anything at all. So when it’s time to raise the money, many of the voters will back the President in saying yeah, tax that guy over there — what do I care? I’m still paying nothing. That’s the revenue side; when it comes to spending, the electorate will then say hell yes, go ahead and spend the money. Again, what do I care?

Three. Because we’re in this vicious circle, there is an obvious anesthetizing effect coming from the progressive taxation. One thing I like to run past passionate progressives is, let’s just say as a matter of policy proposal, we compromise by remaining progressive but ceasing to be hyper-progressive. We keep the curve, but it reaches all the way over to the left side of the graph; the taxpayer of most humble means is still paying a dollar a year. Everyone has skin in the game. Not a single one of them will agree to that because “I feel that would be greedy,” they say. But maybe that’s the answer, because all the taxpayers who are voting, would have a tactile feel for what’s going on. And it is a good compromise.

From all this, I have lately had a thought. Obama’s message lately — it hasn’t varied even a single bit, for the last few months — relies on a moral premise that a hyper-progressive tax scheme becomes more virtuous as our nation’s financial stature becomes less sturdy, less solvent, more ramshackle. Maybe, instead of flinging insults back and forth, conservatives and liberals should debate that. Specifically, I’d like to see some attention placed on the question: Wouldn’t the President’s implied moral proffering make more sense if it were precisely reversed? In other words, a hyper-progressive taxation curve, in which all the bills are paid by the top 50% and the more you make, the more you pay, makes most sense and is morally defensible when the government is in the black. It spends itself into debt, cannot raise enough to pay its bills, so it starts to tax the bottom half, albeit at a much lower rate. So it has hyper-progressive taxation when it can afford that luxury, and loses it after a time when it can no longer afford it, so that everyone starts to help out. And because everyone helps out, everyone gains this “tactile feel” of the expanding crisis. Many hands make light work.

Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense than what President Obama is proposing, which is the exact opposite?

Out: 6:52am
In: 7:10pm
Start: Dixon
End: Petaluma
Distance: 66.9 mi
Trip total: 87.6 mi

I’d say that’s about two and a half hours late. Not too alarmed about it since this is the second-longest day of the itinerary. Bike seems to be in good working order. But still this is a finish-line time much later than day trips I’ve run covering similar distances.

I chalk it up to:

I’m too much of a sissy-pants to start out at 4:30 or something like that; I showed some crappy-ass time management during my lunch break, like a hundred minutes for it from beginning to end; and the headwinds on Highway 116 were really vicious.

I mean, really, really vicious. I recall thinking sometime mid-afternoon, “I’ve been fighting this shit for five hours straight now.” The construction was a constant thing too. Wonder if I have OBambi to thank for that; there does seem to be something Reinvestment-Act-ish about it all, with all the shoulders unavailable mile after mile after mile. Yeah, that’s really safe. Let’s just say, now I’m past that, I think I have been through the worst of it.

I didn’t have time for my victory beer, or even dinner for that matter. As I type this I’m waiting for Safeway to open so I can rustle up some grub. That is as good a definition as any for a schedule slipping out of control.

It is a mishap I do not care to repeat on this trip. Today’s scheduled stop is a mere fifty miles away, the day after that covers just forty.

Also I got some good pictures out of this run. It’s rather typical to realize a steep time penalty for that, fully understood only at the very end. It’s the price you pay.

Update: Oh, this is kind of cool. Looks like the reports from my GPS tracker device are online.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the inevitability that every language-aware computer tool I use for the near future is going to put a red underline under the words statism and statist. That is something of a pity because they are among the very most important words in these interesting times. To understand what’s going on, you have to understand the pathology of the statists.

concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government often extending to government ownership of industry…

Right now they’re extremely excited, because one among their own said something. Someone else in their camp made a nice image out of it, which is now zipping around the social networking sites like typhoid:

Like all bad ideas, it raises lots of questions when you start to take it seriously. Let’s give it a try, shall we? Elizabeth Warren is right, nobody in this country got rich on his own, nobody. Well — she is right. It’s hard to produce something without relying on somebody else. In years past it was merely difficult, now it is impossible. You grow your own crops, before you can get them to the market you need to transport them on a public road. Then, they’ll have to be inspected. Meanwhile, you’ll be required to carry insurance thanks to ObamaCare…so is Warren criticizing the government because it is legitimizing its own bureaucratic existence, by proliferating all kinds of new rules that don’t really help anyone, but make it an impossibility to get anything constructive done without its participation? Is that what she’s saying? I don’t think so.

But if that’s what she was trying to say, I’d go along with that. Government has eliminated all conscientious objection against it, by making it an impossibility to continue a prosperous life — any life — without its participation.

But the high level of exuberance that swirls around this little observation she has made, creates another question. Like, why? Why the excitement? What makes people so enthused about noticing how hard it is to acquire a little prosperity anymore, without government interference? This doesn’t explain the incredible intensity of anger directed toward those who question why it has to be this way. However, the anger toward the Tea Party movement, along with the thumbs-ups and atta-girls flung toward the sentiment Elizabeth Warren has expressed, does make one thing crystal clear: This is about equity. It’s about, after the product has been delivered and the money has changed hands and the “factory” thrives, a debt has been incurred to this wonderful thing known as government, and it can never be repaid. Rush Limbaugh has been saying for years these people live in a weird little world, one in which government is the source of all that is wonderful — all good things come from the government.

I’ve been maintaining for awhile that Limbaugh is wrong here. He’s thinking too much like a logical person, as he perceives illogical people. Read the quote again: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” There is no presence there, there is only absence; indeed, government itself is not mentioned anywhere. Her point is that you didn’t do it.

This is an important point. The central and primary energy within what Warren is saying, is directed as an assault upon the individual. She isn’t propping government up, she is tearing the individual down, and that is the part that has Facebook statists salivating.

Since she is essentially correct, let’s take a look at what we can conclude from her observation as it is pondered with logic and common sense rather than with statist euphoria. Regardless of whether it ought to be possible to succeed without action from the community as a whole, it isn’t; therefore, presumably, if anyone is thankful for a product, or a job, or a hope, or anything else that emanates from a business tycoon who has done well, that gratitude must be extended toward the community — “you were safe because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” She isn’t mentioning government, she isn’t giving government credit for anything except its service as the pipeline, the conduit through which the wealth is rounded up and directed toward the police and fire forces, et al. So the point she’s making, and the point that finds resonance, is that no one single person can accomplish anything without the participation of everybody else.

Let’s remove the emotionalism from it by removing government from it. We’re all in a community…let’s say it’s a village of some hundred people. And there is this thing in the middle of the village that is the catalyst of all success. It draws energy from the village inhabitants, and then it creates prosperity and happiness. No individuality in this community, it thrives because of the existence of the — I dunno. Kiosk. Talisman. Skull of a pig someone found somewhere. You pray to the wotsit before you go out hunting, and if you have a good day of hunting it must be because of the wotsit. Next day, it’s time for everyone to do their part and prop up the wotsit, so the wotsit is the conduit through which the energies of the community are absorbed and then directed toward the continuing survival of the community. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

You’ve probably picked up that the wotsit has become a sort of a deity, something of a replacement religion. It has, but that is not the point I seek to make here. That’s a good one to discuss another time, though.

No, the point I seek to make is: As the community descends on the wotsit to do whatever it is they do to re-energize it, some community members will give much and other community members will give nothing at all. This is a meaningful sacrifice involving time, blood, effort…something…so it is meaningful that some community members give up more than others.

Therefore, logically, if this survival configuration means we cannot build anything ourselves and say “hey look what I’ve got going on, I must be on the ball because I’ve built this thing” and instead we are to give credit to the pig-skull wotsit…said credit must be directed through the pig-skull-kiosk wotsit, and toward the community members who sacrificed the greatest share to rejuvenate it. As one of my Facebook friends pointed out, Warren has it backwards. The system through which “the rest of us paid for” these things, owes its existence to the “nobodies” who got rich and then paid the lion’s share of the taxes.

Our gratitude, then, would extend toward the, uh…what does Barack Obama call them? The “millionaires and billionaires.”

That, obviously, is not what the statists are all about. Seriously, talk with any one from among them for a few minutes. The M&B have nothing coming their way except derision, name-calling, righteous anger, a bigger tax bill, more regulations and maybe some prison time.

The statists, therefore, stand uncovered, naked, revealed. They are narcissists. And the point of the exercise is not to sustain the community or to make hunting expeditions more bountiful. It is not to pay for fire forces and police forces and sidewalks. The point is obscurity. Government acts, not as a conduit through which these energies are to be drawn from individuals and then directed toward fulfillment of the community’s desires so the individuals can realize success — it acts as a fractal lens, a diffuser of light, a tool of obfuscation. It is there to conceal the fact that some people did something right and other people did something wrong. It is there to make it easier for people to ignore plain truths, if they find it gives them comfort to ignore those truths.

That is what is generating such excitement about Elizabeth Warren’s quote, I think. We’ve got a lot of sad people walking around who like to engage in a belief that individual effort is futile, that individual success is an impossibility and a nullity. They don’t want to face up to the fact that somebody else did something better than they did. They’d rather engage in a systemic belief that there is no prosperity, there is only a state of being “rich” which means you must’ve ripped someone off.

That’s what makes them so incredibly dangerous. They are not trying to foment revolution of any kind. Revolutions can fail. They aren’t in the midst of a revolution, they’re in the midst of a sickness. They’re using narcissism to self-medicate their sickness, reaching for it, just like an alcoholic reaches for the next shot of bourbon.

From here. Oh yes, it’s on, all right. It’s been brought.

Well he can’t fit into the old-fashioned Captain Kirk uniform anymore, but he does have a point. Leia’s metal bikini was way too much build-up for not nearly enough delivery.

But ya gotta admit the lightsabers are cool.

Never negotiate with terrorists.

Thanks to blogger friend Rob Bariton.

…just socialist.

I recognize that [President Obama] gave a speech about how badly he wants there to be more jobs. But in it, and afterwards, you will notice that he has proposed a bunch of bullcrap that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with advancing the economy or increasing employment significantly. Some of the reactions to this have accused him of incompetence, political idiocy, or general stupidity; this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Maybe he’s not incompetent, or stupid, he’s just socialist. He doesn’t want to promote any prosperity if it means strengthening capitalist tendencies – what use is that, if it makes a bunch of people happy with less socialism? Instead he only ‘wants’ to promote jobs via socialist-fantasy methods. Those methods have no chance of working but that’s okay because actually creating jobs isn’t their main goal, their main goal is making him look like he cares and thus (perhaps) keeping him in power four more years to socialize the economy, and meanwhile (to the extent they’re passed) ratcheting up the socialism again.

Most commentary about all this has this blind spot for this man’s ideology. Why is it so hard to admit that he is a true-blue believer in socialism and what that means? This basically gives him a pass because at some point the ‘incompetence’ articles will stop and the ‘he’s learned from his mistakes/comeback kid’ articles will start. But his ideology does not change and has never changed.

One could protest that it doesn’t matter — either way, we’ve seen it in action and The Change Sucks, as they say. But you just know Sonic’s right about the “comeback kid” articles. Sometime after the holidays, when people shopping for Christmas on plastic are getting their first bills, and the cooler temps will help shove The Second Summer Of Jobs further into history. I notice the media tends to think that way: Is three or four months enough to put us into a whole different era of time? Yes if there’s a thirty- or forty-degree swing involved in the seasonal temperatures; no, if not. So sometime after the holidays the question will arise: Geez, this economy stinks on ice, what’s being done about it? Too bad our current President is so incompetent…ah, but He’s been learning from His mistakes! Maybe there’s a ray of hope!

Me, I think President Obama is human just like the rest of us, meaning (lowercase the ‘h’ on purpose here) he operates with competence within a limited and defined scope of concern. The scope of concern, in this case, is P.R., and there is incompetence, by design, addressing anything outside that perimeter. He waits around for something to happen, and when it happens the task to be fulfilled is to dispense narratives. If the thing that happened is a bad thing, the narrative is going to be that it would’ve happened anyway and thank goodness we had the Reinvestment Act to keep it from becoming a total disaster — besides of which, it was the other guy’s bad policies over the last decade that caused it to happen. If it’s a good thing that happened, well then All Hail Caesar. Just like a nightmare boss. Good thing happened, well look at this wonderful thing that happened under my tutelage. Bad thing happens…oh, it’s that klutz [your name here], didn’t implement my policies correctly. Tried to tell ‘im.

As to the central concern of Obama’s socialist ideology: Yes I’ve had this brewing in the back of my head for awhile. It is a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop, is it not? I think the independents side with the conservatives on the desire of what is to happen next: Please let the economy recover without our having to spend any more money since we know there is a consequence to all this. In fact I perceive some of the more reasonable liberals join in that. But will Obama make it happen? Not unless there is something in it for Him; not unless, as the economy is so revived, America fundamentally changes her posturing toward a more socialist bent, like under FDR in the thirties. In left-wing-land, that is how you get into the hall of fame, by creating programs that can never be dismantled, never never not ever, that transfer wealth from people who create it to people who do not — and make it an exercise in futility to work hard. I think Sonic’s right: Any prospect of healing our economy, without getting something like that sold, will be a non-starter with Obama and His administration. Even though that’s exactly what The American People want & need.

Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the example (the post is chock full of good solid ones, read it from top to bottom) about gas prices. Nevermind the democrats’ track record on gas and energy prices; just review the archives of their campaign promises. It becomes clear in short order that anyone who supports democrats in the hopes that gas prices will become affordable, or stay that way, has committed a glaring transgression in forming such a rosy prediction. The transgression is not so much having an opinion different from one of mine; it is having an opinion that is supported entirely by non-existent, made-up things.

Maybe the question should be explored, with at least as much energy as the by now routine exercise of prowling through Sarah Palin’s garbage dumpsters whether she’s running for something or not: How about just ask democrat office-holders and candidates whether they intend to bring gas prices down. Can we start with just that? Hey, maybe we can find a new campaign slogan for democrats next year: “Vote democrat in 2012! Keep gas prices really high!” Or, “Re-elect Obama in 2012! Necessarily bankrupt the coal industry!”

Spotted in Ithaca.

From Prof. Jacobson.