I’m sure that comment was a dig at Rick Perry. But it is useful as a device to get us talking about something not too much discussed; and that, in turn, illustrates rather vividly why Sarah Palin’s fifteenth minute is very far away from being up.

Me, I rather like Rick Perry. If Palin announces she isn’t going to run, Perry would be my pick. All the talk about him being an entrenched power mogul is a little bit overblown & lacking in perspective, in my opinion. He started being Governor of Texas, what, when George W. Bush stepped down to serve as President or something? So, beginning of 2001, ten years ago? Yeah, and? We’ve got people serving in the United States Senate for generations.

But we are overdue for a paradigm shift.

The way I see it, people living in a free society are always going to be predisposed to separate themselves into exactly two important factions; they will unify into one piece only in the presence of a truly grave threat, and then not for any sustained length of time. And if ever they are to fracture into three or more pieces, they’ll place a high priority on healing the smaller cracks and fissures, to overcome those, but also to keep the one yawning chasm in place. So that is the natural juxtaposition of a free people, from what I have seen. One big major split with two large crowds, one on either side of the big split.

Our big split has been rotated. When FDR changed the way we do business in the United States, around that time it became a split of: Management versus labor. The democrats wanted it that way, reasoning that if elections are decided by votes, labor gets more votes so everything is going to be democrat-heavy for a few decades. And that is precisely what happened. After awhile, though, people began to figure out organized labor existed for the purpose of making itself more expensive and we all were paying the price. And so there was a balancing that came about. But the polarization was between labor-sympathetics and management-sympathetics. Or let’s label that last one — people who are capable of looking down the road. People who actually read about what’s going on and put it all together; people who are capable of saying “So we work these generous compensation and vacation packages into the price of things manufactured domestically…we bitch about exports going down, imports going up, ‘jobs being shipped overseas’…and…hello, clue??”

That has been the liberal/conservative divide. At least on domestic issues dealing with regulation of the private sector.

But as far as reality is concerned, there is a different divide being created by a shift in executive power. Our modern loathing of details that make things work, has inclined us to vote in these executives to make decisions based on vague campaign promises, rather than to vote directly on the policies ourselves. Obama is perhaps the very pinnacle of this trend, having campaigned on little more than a bumper sticker slogan of “hope and change.” He was confronted by a tidal wave of criticism over the excessive vagueness of this “plan,” but the tidal wave of criticism was insufficient to stop Him, so we voted in ’08 that bumper sticker slogans were enough. The trend has been building for a very long time, that we don’t want to get into our election season squabbles about policies, we want to get into our election seasons squabbles about…Michelle Obama’s arms, Barack’s dance moves, John McCain can’t send e-mail, Palin doesn’t know the answer to trivial pursuit questions and oh my goodness doesn’t Joe Biden have an impressive wide white straight-toothed smile? Such a nice man.

So we don’t argue too much about “how many jobs are we going to lose to satisfy organized labor’s insatiable demands?” At some point, you’ve shipped all the jobs overseas you can afford to ship overseas, and we’re probably there…next step is the public sector unions getting everything they want, and it seems that particular battle might have been resolved, this time against the unions. So it’s more-or-less settled. In this way, we’ve “grown up” somewhat, probably far too late, and come to realize we’re all in the same boat as far as providing goods and services. Management and labor are seen by the electorate as being more-or-less on the same side. People don’t say so out loud. But M&L are only placed in conflict with each other during some spat about maternity leave or the latest labor demand for better medical benefits or more vacations. Which I think is seen by most nowadays, the way I have always looked at it: as something that is not a public policy issue.

Maybe that’s because in the 21st century labor lacks the ability to get into specifics. They can’t say “Our rights are being oppressed if we don’t get our four weeks vacation, management wants to restrict us to only three!” The average voter would reply with “Uh hey waitaminnit…I only get two where I work.”

The new polarization, I think, is between people who have jobs that actually produce things — or are trying like the dickens to get hold of a job that does that, based on the experience they’ve accumulated to date — and everybody else. The moochers who think work is for suckers, the pencil-neck bureaucrats, the lawyers, the rules & regs people, the politicians, the buyers and sellers of so-called “toxic assets.”

Like Palin said (about 1:40): “We are governed by a permanent political class.” They are completely out of control. Because our major split has been mis-aligned from reality for about, oh, thirty years or more…they have realized a huge benefit from their complete lock on our political and educational institutions, with the other side enjoying no representation at all, or very little. Hence my comments about the polarization being in need of an update.

We have labor and management in the business of building something that other people can actually use, for which customers and clients will willingly pay real money. And then we have labor and management in something that isn’t a business at all. Coming up with new & creative excuses for slapping taxes on things. Regulating, regulating and regulating some more.

We’re running into all kinds of problems when the second of those two groups, makes it their “business” to pretend to know something about how the first of those two groups builds their stuff — when they really don’t know much of anything about anything.

We have a new yawning political chasm between those who run out of money and must take their lumps for having screwed up — on the income, on the expenses, or on the budgeting, one way or another it will be their fault; and, those who run out of money and can simply pass blame on to the taxpayer for not having paid enough. That is our new dividing line.

The labor/management split is out of whack because it’s out of date. The last time it made any sense, the clothes worn by the Monopoly Man were almost still in style.

And so this gels into a perplexing question for those who insist Palin is “doing damage” and her “fifteenth minute is up”: Do you think there might be some validity, any at all, to my observation that we are polarized in a whole new way and that the older labor/management schism no longer reflects reality? And, if you’re willing to concede that, if only partly — who besides Palin is going to carry the interests of the wealth creators…that would be wealth-creation management, as well as wealth-creation labor…to the halls of power where the rules are made? Who else is as likely? Who else is as fit?

Because, you see, this is why there’s this red ink all over the place. The people who build things that actually might command a willingly-paid price, haven’t had a voice in Washington. They haven’t been trudging to the Potomac to make themselves heard. They’ve been too busy; they’ve had work to do. Even now, when they’re participating, it’s only under protest and it’s only with the time they can spare as they try to continue making things that generate real wealth for themselves & others. The rest of the country needs them, more than they need the rest of the country. And so we have been leaving the rule-making to people who don’t know how to build working valuable things, and don’t care to learn how. We have been making rules that destroy wealth, because we have been allowing the rules to be made by those who do not respect the creation of real wealth.

I keep hearing from the Palin-haters “What exactly is Palin’s plan to fix what’s broken?” The question, it seems to me, is what exactly is going to be done by anybody else, to wrest the power out of the grasp of those who consume and destroy, building nothing, and get it into the hands of people who know how to build things? Who else do you Palin-bashers have in mind to get that accomplished?

Update: The complete speech in transcript and video form. Doesn’t settle whether she’s running or not, but it’s enough to change the odds at the betting tables quite a bit.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

George Lucas is still screwin’ around…picking at his lifetime masterpiece like a little boy picking at the crusty scab on his knee.

Screw it, I say. I have a story too, and I’ve been just itching to make that stupid duck into a pelican. Pelicans are just as surreal and exotic and giggle-inspiring as ducks, and they’ve got more business being around the ocean. Probably make better pets too. So if Lucas gets to stir his own pudding then I can do the same. A pelican it is.

Also, I would argue my story has done a much better job of mirroring real life. Still not clear after all these decades why exactly the rebel alliance got started. Slavery? Some fans are under the impression the rebellion represents the Confederate States of America and Emperor Palpatine represents Lincoln…so that doesn’t work. Clear win for my side. Hope the Pelican is dead…History and Logic are in complete agreement, Rhetoric is — well okay. In my story she runs up a huge mound of debt and hits the road, in reality the bitch is still around and we’ve gotta listen to her prattle on some more next week. But it mostly works. Pretty good for two and a half years, if I dare say so myself.

And Han shot first, George.

From here.

Too good not to snag…

Exactly right. From here.

Every time I see this blithe dismissal of the Tea Party — represented aptly by Waters’ “go to hell” comment — I see yet another reminder of what I think people are starting to figure out everywhere:

Modern liberalism is the triggering of some vast, omnipresent plan to affect the human condition. The plan will be enacted far & wide, your involvement in it will be compulsory not voluntary, and there will be no getting out of it once you’re in it. But very few will be privileged to participate in figuring out what the plan will be. Planned by the elites, imposed upon the masses; those are the vital ingredients.

This was a non-story.

As was this. For the record, I’m willing to grant President Obama the benefit of the doubt that the scheduling of the “jobs” speech was a coincidence. Not quite so much because I think it was, but because I see the whole thing as entirely inconsequential.

You can imagine, therefore, how pathetic I think this was. And let’s not even start thinking about this or this. Stories like those only highlight the futility involved in listening to more of Dear Leader’s blah, blah and blah, and that’ll just piss us all off some more when something good on teevee gets pre-empted for it. Like, for instance, I dunno…A Very Special The Kardashians?

I do have to wonder, once again, what’s going to happen when Barack Obama is out of office. All you people on the left and on the right who are so sure He’ll cruise to re-election no matter how bad the economy is — you do realize, even granting for argument’s sake your prediction will come true, it’s still a when and not an if, right? Someday, Obama is going to be a former President.

Should high-ranking officials in Congress resign in disgrace, then, too, for politely suggesting He should pick a different day for His latest styrofoam-packing-peanut speech? Has this been thought out at all?

It’s just another reminder, I think, the latest of many that: Many among Obama’s supporters are not cheering Him on to advance the hopes & dreams of persons-of-color, or to actually get anything done, but just to win arguments. They live in a world of “everything takes a back seat to O.” In left wing politics, this has always been true of the svengali at the top of the power pyramid — a mistake ceases to be a mistake when He is the one who makes it. These poor wretches, somehow, have personally externalized the experience of “being right” and thus have trivialized it. They support King Barry The First, essentially, for no better reason than they just want to win arguments.

Theirs is the story behind the non-story. President Soetoro’s people failed to think something through, He received a polite request as a result and He, with equal politeness, acquiesced. Perhaps because He has what it takes for Him to show true politeness, or perhaps that’s not the case and He just figured out that there was no win for Him here so He’d better save what face He could. I really don’t give a good goddamn about that. It’s really a challenge for me to think of anything less worthy of a good mulling-over. It’s a complete tangent. They ran into a snag and they worked it out…whatever.

But these people are completely beside themselves and no — I don’t think they’re ready for Barack Obama to not be President anymore. They won’t be ready for it in 2013 or 2017 or ever.

If Barry does win a second term, there is going to be a call for a repeal of term limits. I don’t think He will. But if He does, then mark my words on this and you read it here first.

They will want Barry ensconced for life. Because they want to win arguments. Period.

Shelby Steele:

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
:
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There’s a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Hat tip to Professor Mondo.

Randall Hoven, writing at American Thinker, comes up with a list of events & issues about history showing the Tea Party to be on the right side — whether people are paying attention or not. It is an impressive list, longer than I think a lot of people would imagine it to be.

I expect they are going to continue to be right, so long as they keep the platform narrow and reasonable, because the point they’re trying to make is one that human events are always going to support: Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as they say, makes for a sore Peter. It makes for a situation in which Paul must be expected to do a lot more of whatever it is Paul was doing, and Peter will do a lot less of whatever it is Peter was doing. This is the way people are built; we respond to incentive; so this isn’t going to change.

The list is endless. If you were thinking of starting a business or making an investment that might not pay off for five or ten years, would you feel like you know the rules and could depend on them? No, you’d hunker down, which is exactly what everyone with any money left is doing right now.

This jobless recovery is not some mystery. It is very clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats. At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip while healthy and carve up and eat when not.

As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views corporations not yet in Chapter 11.

Nothing Democrats did helped; everything they did hurt. Everything. Min wage. TARP. Stimulus. ObamaCare. The Gulf oil spill. Every budget they ever proposed, written or not. Every little czar they put in place to spend other people’s money and to bully the only productive people still toiling away at the thankless tasks of making stuff and providing jobs.

At every point, the Tea Party and its sympathizers tried to stop these idiocies, only to be called ignorant racists.

But whether or not the Tea Party is right, is only half the issue. The other half, perhaps more important, is how we as a nation are going about conducting the argument.

Everything you can do to botch an experiment, we’re doing. First thing we did was elect minority tokens to represent the way the lefties think our economy should work: Woman as House Speaker and black guy as President. These are improvements, for sure, on some level since it does us no credit to have big long uninterrupted lines of white dudes in these offices going all the way back to the founding of the nation. If that was the only point to it, I’d have no problem — but it isn’t. The tokens were put there to sell things. You can only say nice things about Speaker Pelosi or else you’re a sexist; can’t disagree with President Obama or else you’re a racist. That was the point. President Obama was positioned where He was positioned, and put where He was put, to sell things that otherwise could not be sold. And that’s not just an observation about His skin color, it’s everything about Him. His sex appeal, His speaking style, all the charming superlatives that His admirers will define and a whole lot more that they won’t. Not a single one of these embellishments have anything to do with making anything better, unless you happen to have something to gain by Barack Obama winning an argument. That, as I’ve written many times before, is His only contribution: Selling crap that shouldn’t be sold.

We engage “these idiocies” as Hoven calls them, one after another, each time without waiting to see how any of the previous idiocies have worked out. That thwarts a whole lot more than simply observing that perhaps they’re not a good idea; had any of them worked, but with caveats, there would be opportunities to improve. Can’t do that either. So that’s another thing we did wrong.

The scope is universal. Everything has to be enacted sea to shining sea. Freedom must yield, nobody outside Washington can choose anything. Also, once the idiocy is tried, it has to enjoy the benefit of maximum impact. So everyone has to be affected and nobody can be allowed to get away from it. That’s necessary, of course, because some of the people involved are viewed the same way Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms; so who would participate voluntarily in such a role?

So to me, the insults flung at the Tea Party — by people who plainly aren’t looking at the facts, not monitoring how the evidence is shaping up to appear in columns like Hoven’s — are just icing on the cake, a final layer of national wrongdoing. We’re having a discussion that I think is worthy enough, if we were to have it reasonably: Should the government step in after the free market has determined who-gets-what, and rearrange the results to make them more fair? But “reasonably” is the key word. If we were to have that discussion reasonably it would be a short one. So we break — every — single — rule — we possibly can. Choose minorities to present one school of thought, just so anybody who shows any resistance can be called a racist. Put Washington in charge of everything. Never wait to see how anything works before trying the next thing, just slam ’em in. No test beds allowed, completely out of the question, federalize everything, expand the scope all across the fruited plain, make everything compulsory and don’t allow anything to be voluntary.

That way, there’s no control to the experiment. The results can be as dismal as you can possibly imagine, and at the end of it you get to say “Yeah but who knows what could’ve happened if we didn’t do it. Better agree with me about that or else you’re racist.”

But it only works on people who don’t pay attention. Yes that is a super-majority, to be sure…but as the economy continues to sour, the silver lining in the cloud is that people are given incentive to pay closer attention. That popular yard sign in circulation right now, “If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you’re not a racist, you need to vote for someone else in ’12 to prove you’re not an idiot,” is becoming sadly persuasive. Sixty-five percent of Americans now disapprove of the President’s economic policies; the “do what I say or else you’re a racist” glue is not holding up the wallpaper.

What this all comes down to, is that there is a reason we’re hearing the Tea Party people are crazy: They’ve spoken out about a public issue, which automatically means they have to have enemies. And those enemies have no place else to go other than slander. That’s the bottom of their barrel now, and they’re scraping it. There’s a referendum taking place here and it’s on something much, much bigger than President Obama or His skin. We’re having a referendum on whether the right to private property is higher than political demagoguery, or whether political demagoguery can trump the God-given right to property. Even though the experiment’s been done all wrong, the verdict that is being delivered, unmarred and unsullied — you certainly can’t argue Obama’s way hasn’t been given a fair shake — is that the right to property must win or else civilization cannot endure. You can’t get the bills paid, with your “sore Peters,” that is, if the people paying the bills are to be treated as evil, attacked for doing what they do, discouraged from continuing to do it.

There is a campaign underway to associate the Tea Party with some kind of psychosis, to call the people caught supporting it crazy or nuts. You hear the term “crazy Tea Party rhetoric” often enough that, for me to go inserting links to buttress the observation, would be redundant, pointless, needlessly time-consuming and silly.

As I commented over at the Hello Kitty of blogging (I think you need a Hello-Kitty-of-blogging account to follow that link), I perceive the results of this campaign to be mixed. It is constantly moving along because it is constantly pushed, but it is building up no momentum because in their inner consciousness, I believe Americans hold an unshakable understanding that is contrary to this. There isn’t anything crazy or nuts about insisting your property is your property. It’s not crazy to say, if some jackass who wears a suit well and talks a mile a minute and manages to rake in a thousand more votes than his competition on election day, wants to achieve personal control over some vast mountain of loot, maybe the right thing for him to do is resign from his “public service” position and start a business. This isn’t nuts at all. And if people are constantly told that it is, even every single day, they aren’t going to sign onto that idea unless they wanted to sign on to it in the first place.

Now, this Dr. Helen post has about seven months of dust on it, and I assume by now she must have finished that book which I’m just getting around to ordering. But I’m much more interested in the study that says, when people are presented with an opportunity to destroy the wealth of others, not only are they inclined to go ahead but they are strongly motivated. They’ll pay for the privilege. See, this is why conservatives have a tendency to be religious and liberals are more inclined toward the secular. It all goes back to that damn apple. There is goodness; there are the base impulses that stir within us; these are two different things. Civilization must therefore entail some kind of restraint being placed on instincts from which we cannot separate ourselves, because they are part of us. We fell with Adam. In the world of liberalism, goodness is survival-of-the-fittest and hey, we must have it because we’re here. Every thing on earth your little heart desires is either a “civil right” that’s been legislated as one, or will be legislated as one someday soon. Which means individual effort is useless. It also means, every single act you can perform as an individual has been declared illegal already, or might very well be declared illegal soon. Irony: When every little thing is a “right,” nothing is.

A couple months ago Neal Boortz went to see Green Lantern and the story resonated with him. He likens the democrat party to Parallax, the cosmic being that thrives on yellow, fear-based, energy. Viewed through the lens of the “Tea Party is nuts” campaign, his corollary makes a lot of sense. One thing though: If you go see the movie, you’ll see the green will-based energy came first; there is an errant mindset emerging (spoiler?) that the green power rings are inadequate against the threat, and someone needs to build a yellow power ring and use it to do what the green power rings cannot do.

May I humbly suggest the exact opposite. We have these “un-Green-Lantern” people running around, un-policing the known universe exactly the same way the Green Lantern Corps police the universe. There are thousands of them, some paid by George Soros, others doing it for free, waving around their yellow power rings, getting the word out that it’s crazy and evil to want to hang on to your own property. Using fear to drive home the mantra that we’re all screwed unless we gather our possessions, put it in a great big pot, and let the wise elders exercise the control over it that we’re not good enough to exercise. In our real-life universe, it is the yellow, fear-based power-ring that exists already and is in fact everywhere and we’re seeing it in the mythology about the Tea Party patriots being mentally feeble and crazy.

The momentum is not being built, because green energy is present in all living things. Let’s forge the green power ring, and drive home the contrary message that makes sense:

It is freakin’ batshit-crazy to look at some guy who has a lot of money, and see a walking billfold. Or some kind of task that is left undone which, should that rich guy’s property be distributed — or destroyed! — has now been properly addressed and can be jotted down as a job well done. In brightest day in darkest night…channel the will. The green energy, which calls out crazy as crazy, and recognizes sanity as sanity. The study from ten years ago seems to indicate we all have this craziness. Well, if there’s one lesson to be learned from the Fall of Adam, it is that there is a meaningful difference between the impulses that are inextricably bound to our very being, and the desires that are to be channeled into a civilization destined to endure. Everything we feel, is not necessarily good. There has to be some restraint.

And the recognition of one’s own rights as an individual, is not where the restraint needs to be applied. The civilizing restraint has to be applied against the destructive impulses. That’s what we can learn from the study, that redistribution is really destruction. That is the innate desire. “Fairness” isn’t really the driving force. That’s really nothing more than a catch-phrase. The motivation is to destroy, and to destroy out of pure jealousy. It is crazy, it is nuts, and the time has come to start calling it out.

There’s been a slow, creeping, gradual change in direction here and it isn’t good.

1950: Your honor, the defendant just snapped and killed three people.
2010: Your honor, I’m innocent, I just snapped and killed three people.

Regardless of how you look at the world and the things in it, if your brain is even somewhat properly engaged, this is just blisteringly offensive.

The White House has issued detailed guidelines to government officials on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, with instructions to honor the memory of those who died on American soil but also to recall that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have since carried out attacks elsewhere in the world, from Mumbai to Manila.
:
Copies of the internal documents were provided to The New York Times by officials in several agencies involved in planning the anniversary commemorations. “The important theme is to show the world how much we realize that 9/11 — the attacks themselves and violent extremism writ large — is not ‘just about us,’ ” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal White House planning.

…Obama administration officials caution that public commemorations here should not cast the United States as the sole victim of terrorism, an argument underscored by killings and maimings from extremist attacks overseas.

Some senior administration officials involved in the discussions noted that the tone set on this Sept. 11 should be shaped by a recognition that the outpouring of worldwide support for the United States in the weeks after the attacks turned to anger at some American policies adopted in the name of fighting terror — on detention, on interrogation, and the decision to invade Iraq.

The apology tour…continues…

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers.

William Teach speaks for me:

Who the hell do they think was attacked on September 11th? Yes, there were citizens of other countries killed in the Twin Towers, but the attack was on America. Talk about tone deaf!

On Planet Obama, you’re never tone deaf when you’re in the middle of talking smack about America.

Paul Krugman is digging up an old corpse and making it dance once again.

This was already dealt with, more than a little bit effectively, years and years ago. Not from over here and not by me.

However, we have had a few things to say about it. Here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

So why is Paul making those bones dance in the moonlight? Right now? I think it’s damage control. It is a strange and fascinating thing to observe, when you think about it: People who push what they call “science,” which happens to implore people to live life littler, are never seen to support any kind of “science” that would enable people to live life bigger. Ever. Even though, throughout the centuries, what we have classically called “science” has offered a bounteous cornucopia of gifts — without trying to — that have improved our lives immeasurably.

Once again, I notice, we need to take a much closer and more scrutinizing look at how the word is being used. Real science is apolitical. So what is this word really being used to describe? If you use it to “conclude” something, and then gauge the character of others based entirely on whether or not they believe the same thing — is it right to call that “science”? Really? Because if there’s a proper dictionary definition for “Holy War,” then I think that little ritual would adhere to such a definition right down to the letter.

A sacred-cow theory is questioned, and a loudmouth lays a smack-down:

He’s almost certainly wrong, of course. It’s just been given a fair try, and in my own experience I’ve yet to get a job from an unemployed person or hear of anyone else get a job from an unemployed person. Tattoo parlors don’t usually have employees, no matter how much business they’re doing that they weren’t doing the month before. The same goes for the grocery stores moving the milk, cereal, malt liquor and cat food; if they’re in a depressed area and their cashiers are taking in lots of food stamps and unemployment checks, they’re not to go out and hire a lot of people just because the benefits have been extended.

But of course, none of that is really proof; Carney could still be right. Thing is, it’s when we consider that Carney might be right, right there & then it’s vividly illustrated how badly he’s mishandling this could-be-right theory of his. He swerves off deeply in to Argumentum Ad Plausible territory: “My theory is plausible, or at least it sounds plausible when I describe it, that proves anyone who doesn’t support it is a dumbass.”

It is a Vibranium Adamantium Lightsaber theory that cuts through anything & everything. It is the wildcard in the paper-scissors-rock game, burning through the paper, smelting the scissors and atomizing the rock. Mine beats yours, haha! Proof? Evidence? What are those? You only show your ignorance by asking, mortal!

I’m impressed by the civility of the many liberals with whom I’ve discussed these things — they give me one chance to reform my ways, by walking through the plausible Vibranium theory from beginning to end as if I’ve never heard it before. Unlike the reporter-babe in the video though, often I don’t pose the question as a “how” about the whole thing, my pattern is to ask a “what happens when” about some specific detail within. What happens next is almost cute: They magically zip back up to the thirty-thousand foot level and recite the litany all over again. That’s my one chance. I’m supposed to genuflect on the spot and mend my ways. When, instead, I point out “yeah I’ve heard that a whole lot of times before, we just gave that a shot and it didn’t work” suddenly I’m a moron.

But we did give it a shot. Wasn’t that the complaint about trickle-down? Gave it a shot and it didn’t work?

But the weirdness is how they apparently can’t distinguish between a question about a detail within the plan…and a complete lack of knowledge about the plan itself. The remedy is always the “Our Theory 101” lecture with lots of pontificating and piousness. It reminds me of how they’re always saying we “need to raise awareness about global warming.” Seriously? In 2011, you think there’s someone out there who has yet to hear about it?

I wonder if this clip is what inspired Sonic:

As I alluded to over on this EconLog post, economic discussions often reduce to two camps:

• People who think of the economy in a very simplistic (essent[ia]lly cartoonish) way, abstracting away all details and likening it to a machine you can control and tune – tweaking dials, pulling levers, opening valves, priming pumps.
• People who don’t, and who instead think the economy is pretty complicated, and details matter.

Now, fine. Two approaches, to each his own, right? But here’s what I find astonishing:

The former group thinks they are Smart and they look down with sneering contempt on the intelligence of the latter group.

This is quite inexplicable. I am at a loss to understand it. Trying to explain this curious role-reversal phenomenon almost belongs neither to economics nor even to the study of politics. I am convinced it belongs to the realm of psychology. [emphasis mine]

I’m getting there myself.

I’m a little bit down on the discipline of psychology here. It tends to be a source of confusion, rather than enlightenment, when we get into those fault lines where a mental feebleness lazily & hazily borders on a natural but unfortunate personality attribute. In this case, simply being a dick.

One of the personality attributes of dicks is a complete lack of humility: It’s this way, there can be no doubt about it, because I just said it’s that way. I have my Vibranium Adamantium Lightsaber with me, I’m incapable of making mistakes because if I ever make a mistake it stops being a mistake and becomes the right thing to do, so that settles that.

Okay fine, you’re a dick. But is it too much to ask that dicks be able to complete a thought logically, and figure out what’s going on — sort of bend their preconceived notions to fit reality rather than the other way around? We expect doctors to do that. Anybody who’s spent as much time as I have working with doctors as I have, want to tell me there’s a shortage of dicks in that field? Sure not all doctors are dicks. But they’ve got their rep. There’s something to it, I can tell you that. So yes, you can be a dick and still find out in a reasoned, methodical and scientific way what’s going on. Sort of earn the privilege of your dick-ish-ness, as it were.

These people don’t do that. They don’t so much as make an initial or precursory gesture in that general direction; not even close. They know what they know and anybody who gets in the way must be an ignoramus. And sadly, that includes whatever muse you choose to represent reality itself — reality must bend and yield, and if she does not, then she’s a stupid idiot too.

No — really.

Put this up on the Hello Kitty of Blogging because I was hoping I could do what Armstrong & Getty are doing, on a smaller scale, and find out how much & how often this is going on among my personal acquaintances…

But it occurs to me it’s probably just as good to bounce it off my “blog peeps” as well. It seems to be a national problem. From here in the Golden State, ya know, it’s kind of hard to tell.

It starts with something the radio dudes opened up…quoting from my page (Fb subscription required):

Jack and Joe are taking phone calls right now about school classrooms forcibly redistributing school supplies so one kid doesn’t feel bad about another kid having better stuff. Rather shocking how many teachers & parents are calling in with this blase attitude of “Oh yeah, you can’t have order in the classroom otherwise…” WTF??

Here, let’s list out the problems one by one. One: It’s communism. If you think it isn’t then your definition of communism is too narrow to work because you’re waiting for Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky to come back from the dead before you see any communists.

Two: When I was a kid, if a crayon fell on the floor it didn’t cause commotion. If it did, they removed the kid that caused the commotion and made sure he wouldn’t do it again.

Three: This seems to be going on in quite a few places — I was previously made to understand it hardly goes on anywhere. One caller said it would only take one lawsuit to bring it to a stop, and Jack commented well nobody wants to be that parent. Funny: When the time comes to sue the school for saying “under God” in the pledge, a LOT of parents want to be that parent.

And four: You know what? Real life doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to say “Hey he has something I don’t have, now I feel bad” and hope someone brings it to you. Well…not until a couple years ago…

What everyone seems to be letting go on this thing is: From all I’ve been able to tell about it so far, the one thing all of the reports have in common is that everywhere this is going on, there has been some kind of opaqueness to it. The creepy-crawly slithery-squirmy stuff is proliferating and thriving in the dark. It’s good old “Thou Shalt Not Covet” commandment-breaking jealousy…along with all of the inevitable miseries cropping up around it that must’ve inspired the Commandment in the first place. When the rock is uplifted and the light streams in, the critters scurry. Light, plainly and clearly, is the answer. And yet the push is on to keep the place dark. Don’t tell anyone. Yeah, I’ve been seizing your kids’ stuff, what’s your problem? Pipe down, shut up, go away, we’re doing what we need to do to keep order in the class.

I’m liking Jack Armstrong’s attitude: “You’re not taking my kid’s stuff, not gonna happen, listen to me carefully here: It isn’t going to happen.” That’s the right attitude. We need more of that.

I’ve already done my bit — had the conversation with my kid years ago, last time I heard about it. We’ve not had our experience with it just yet. But that’s us. What’s happening with everybody else?

Why is this such a sad and pathetic empty shell of what it is supposed to be? Not — why do we tolerate it as it is; that’s a different question which I’ll explore some other time. The question that surfaces here is, why do they require the tolerance. What does it take to prattle on for a third of a century about such timeless social problems when you don’t have anything to offer about how to make them better.

A well-thought-out answer arrives from over…here.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, near the end of the Vietnam War, liberalism in America died an intellectual death. Since that time, virtually every new idea — whether good or bad — about how to solve our most important economic problems has come from the right. Virtually nothing has come from the left.

Do you doubt that? Okay, it’s test time. Tell me what the liberal answer is to the problem of our failing public schools. …..tick, tick, tick ….. I’m waiting …. tick, tick, tick …. Give up? What about the liberal solution to the failed War on Poverty? … pause….. pause ….. pause …. No luck there either?

Okay, let’s take what President Obama says is the biggest domestic problem we face. What is the liberal solution to the huge unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare? ….. Can’t think of one? What about solving the problem of unfunded pensions and post-retirement health care benefits for state and local workers? …. Not even a vague suggestion or two? Wow. We seem to be really striking out.

Well, can you tell me what a liberal income tax code would look like? Zip. How about a liberal international economic system? Nada.

Note: I’m not asking if you have a liberal acquaintance who has an opinion or two on these matters. I’m asking if you can produce a solution that would be generally recognized as the liberal solution.

Mr. Goodman finishes strong. Check it out.

It seems to me that without fail, every single time our current President gets away with something that would have been out of the question for His predecessors…or tries to get away with it anyway…

…right then and there, we have to become immediately re-immersed in the you-know-what. The race. Time once again for a national dialogue. Like a defense mechanism. His Divine Eminence tries to get away with some crap, it doesn’t quite go over like He thought it should’ve, and so here we go again on this tangent. Every time He walks out on the ice and it turns out to be thinner than He thought, that’s the rope.

Well, you know what I think about the word “dialogue”.

Good things about the Superman reboot: I like the people who are involved in it, they all have good names with me. Even Costner. That, alone, should ensure a good product in the summer of ’13.

Bad things? I just don’t see the necessity of a reboot. The Singer product was in itself a halfway-reboot. It had some problems but it didn’t have Batman & Robin problems. It was also going somewhere…and pardon me, I had some measure of curiosity about where these things were going. A Kryptonite planet? Son-of-Superman?

Amy Adams is the answer to the problem that Kate Bosworth is an unfit Lois Lane? How? Because she’s older, is that it? And I’m having this beef about pretty much all of the cast-ing. The cast is fine. The roles into which these actors have been placed, raise some questions…pretty much every single role does that. Diane Lane? She’s just slightly older than me, and still a sexpot. Why do we have to have a sex-kitten Martha Kent? It’s possible to be a class act when you have a 64″ waist, you know. How come that’s out of the question in movies nowadays?

I’m afraid at this point, Superman is turning into something of a classic Opera, or Shakespeare play. I mean that in the sense of…I say “Here’s a new Superman movie” and it’s like saying “Here’s a new production of King Lear.” You know each and every single plot point, and in addition, you already have a pretty well crystallized and dead-on idea of what what will be left out. The variety will be in the new faces and the timing and the music, nothing else.

Superman MUST be launched into space as a baby. You MUST show those oh-so-wholesome Kents rescuing the baby and then raising him. He’s GOT to suddenly discover on the farm one day that he can fly. Metropolis…gotta get that reporter job…gotta meet Lois Lane…Fortress of Solitude…Luthor…real estate is the one thing they’re not making anymore…

There’s just too much standard stuff that cannot be moved out of the way. The bitching is supposed to have something to do with Superman not fighting anyone. Well, there isn’t time. So…he won’t…and, at the end of it, there will be disappointment and bunch of loudmouths clamoring for a reboot.

If I wrote it, I’d make it like Lord of the Rings — a trilogy, with each installment released twelve months after the previous. And Clark doesn’t even leave Smallville until Part II. At this point, based on what I’ve seen, that’s the only thing that will dig him out of the rut.

But that sums up the situation as it exists now. It’s not a prediction. The future’s always pliable. His isn’t…that’s the focus of my complaint…but that could change. Let’s see what they do.

The fellow Nobel Laureates and economics professors and students and enthusiasts of Keynesian economics…who just totally get what you’ve been trying to say all these years…

How exactly are those cool people implicitly understanding, within a split second, that this quote was faked? What’s the giveaway, the one part of it that anyone & everyone who knows which way is up, without a trace of doubt or hesitation, would conclude is something you wouldn’t say?

You’ve written all these columns and appeared on all these Sunday morning talk shows, and after that I must ‘fess up I’m a little unclear where the line is drawn. Where’s the definition, the perimeter, the “Oh no, Paul Krugman would never say we need to wreck that” outline?

Something’s going on lately. They’re acting all cornered, wounded, tender, defensive. Since the election of Nancy Pelosi back in ’06 they had been going back to being petty, childish, smug, snooty, “aggressively non-threatening NPR male” Alan-Alda peevish. Now they’re back to the way they were after the Bush v. Gore decision. Us smart and good, you stupid and evil! Grrrr!

Not all twelve of these observations are entirely new. Some of them are things I’ve noticed awhile ago, a few I’ve even written about, but those have become more crystallized with the events of the last two or three months.

1. They want government to manage more and more intimate aspects of our lives, without transparency, oversight or process of appeal, even though six years out of ten they tell us the government is doing bad things because the guy at the top of it is stupid or evil.

2. They’re terribly concerned about the solvency of the government during these debates about taxes, and want the “rich to pay their fair share” so the government doesn’t run out of money and go into debt. But then when it comes time to discuss the continuation of a program, or possibly starting up a whole new program, suddenly their concern about government solvency flies out the window.

3. They seem genuinely agitated about the length and the emptiness of the yawning chasm between the rich and the poor, and rail against the social problems attendant to the preservation of an aristocracy entrenched in privilege which is perpetually renewed without merit. But the very first thing that happens when they’re in charge, is their election of some charismatic individual who is to be entrenched in sustained and unearned perpetual privilege. All of their domestic agenda items have something to do with just a narrow and elite few unilaterally dictating the benefits and burdens to be applied to the many. Everyone is to be impacted by what is done; it cannot be set up in a test bed to see how well it works, it must be deployed for the very first time right on the production floor, and there can’t be any getting away from it. And yet any discussions about how it will work, have to take place behind closed doors, and not everyone can take part.

4. You ask them to point out when & where higher taxes did something good for an economy, and without fail they point to FDR’s New Deal which, along with the opening of World War II, lifted us from the Great Depression. Okay…so your policies, plus the LARGEST MILITARY CONFLICT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, will measurably improve an economy?

5. They don’t even seem to have an internal understanding of what an “economy” is. It seems like their point-of-view is that the government is part of the economy, but I don’t hear them actually say this, nor do I hear them dispute the point that the government is outside of what is commonly referred to as the “free market.” It’s like this is a question on which they haven’t coordinated yet; is “the economy” a different, larger thing apart from the “free market”? Or are these two terms used to describe the same thing, the government is outside of the economy — which must mean they think “the economy” is something helped when wealth is removed from it, so that their prescription becomes indistinguishable from the notorious bedside bloodletting of the middle ages.

6. According to them, America has cherished modern liberal values from the very beginning and it is the conservatives who are usurping the constitutional values of the republic by demanding the republic be governed according to the Constitution. The American Revolution, therefore, was a victory of liberalism over conservatism, which was represented by King George III and Great Britain. Yet, also according to them, there is something about America that makes the poor get poorer, allows businesses to run roughshod over “working families”…it’s just a terrible place and we need someone strong to fix everything. Take it all seriously, and it points to an inescapable conclusion that liberalism is destined to fail. And that’s according to the liberals.

7. They say one of the many things wrong with Christians is that the Christians insist their faith is the only path to salvation, therefore there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t follow it. They then proceed to vilify Ayn Rand as a terrible person…and then throw out the zinger that oh, by the way, didn’t you know she was an atheist? Which seems to have some significance for them. But, according to their own argument, such a thing cannot have any significance in any way whatsoever. Judging from their own conduct, it obviously does.

8. They certainly are fond of diatribes about their ideological opponents being evil or stupid. Produce some evidence unfriendly to their position, ask them for something similar to support what they’re trying to say, and if they don’t have it ready — here comes the snark. It will be bitter, it will be pointed, it will be focused, it will be personal. Above all, it will be a sure thing, like tomorrow’s sunrise. But according to their constant complaints, it’s the other side doing that. Classic psychological projection. Evil, stupid, stupid, evil…with a great flourish, they go through the motions of applying some intelligence test, or “goodness” test, and finding their opponent wanting. But what they’re really applying is a loyalty test.

9. The evil/stupid thing has some complexity to it that’s a little tough to figure out, for those on the outside. Liberals seem united on the idea that George W. Bush is stupid and Dick Cheney is evil. Circulate a questionnaire among a thousand liberals, and all thousand will mark the boxes that say Bush=Stupid and Cheney=Evil. That seems to be the orientation; now and then someone will occasionally pronounce Bush to be Evil, but I’ve yet to hear a single one say Cheney is Stupid. I haven’t heard anybody say Sarah Palin is Evil, either. Did they all meet somewhere and decide Dick Cheney is some kind of rocket scientist genius and Sarah Palin is an okay person, therefore the dogs of Cheney=Stupid and Palin=Evil just aren’t gonna hunt, so don’t even try it? If that’s what they think, they’re doing a great job of hiding it.

10. If they have a plan for improving the economy, and after it’s implemented the economy improves, this is proof that their plan must have worked. If, after the plan is implemented, the economy suffers — this, also, is proof that their plan is the right way to go, we’re just not doing enough of it.

11. I notice when our country is in some conflict with another country, their recipe is for a diplomatic solution. Very often I hear the phrase “sit down and talk out our differences.” They don’t discuss much what exactly is going to be said in these sit-downs, but after you listen to them awhile it’s clear they want America to be making most or all of the concessions while the other country makes none. Another thing I hear from them often is that we are “seen” as arrogant, lacking in humility, and we need to work harder to clean up our rep. Now, when their partisan faction enters into conflict with somebody else, they work this very differently — in that situation, it is the other side that needs to be making more concessions to them, even if they’re the ones who just lost an election. Their party does not have a problem with “humility.” I suppose that reads like I’m saying they’re safeguarding liberals’ interests in a way different from how they’re safeguarding the country’s interests…well, hey. Gotta call it like I see it.

12. They must understand that if we have a pressing and urgent problem with the atmosphere filling up with carbon & the earth heating up as a result, and we also have a pressing and urgent concern with our government running out of money, an individual’s effort to curtail his own carbon emissions isn’t going to make any difference at all with the environmental problem, whereas a few people contributing voluntarily to the Treasury just might change the outcome for the better. And yet, liberal individuals do not brag about donating excess money to the Treasury; they brag about drinking out of eco-cups and driving hybrids. That is supposed to show they’re the ones more concerned about things like “reality” and “science.”

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

They’re out again. I’m not sure what it is; Obama’s failed economic policies, I guess. Maybe His speeches are more boring than usual. Maybe someone actually started snoring audibly a few minutes in.

But it seems whenever His Eminence is trotting around giving wonderful speeches, a meme resurrects itself like it’s some dark, unholy anti-Easter…rolls the great rock away from its tomb…and emerges to proclaim the gospel that Jesus Christ was a socialist and all those who are not socialists better make right with The Lord for the end of the world is nigh.

It fails the first test of soundness in an idea, failing to retain its shape and composition when placed under the simple pressure of being taken seriously. Ponder it without ridicule for awhile and it collapses under its own weight. There is therefore a certain loss of dignity involved in even indulging it.

But the challenge has been answered, and it’s a decent job. At least good enough for the archives.

This theological assertion — a reading of Scripture that has completely escaped theologians for two millennia — rests on the story of Ananias and Saphhira, who were struck dead after they “lied to the Holy Spirit.” They had sold land, given part to the Apostles but claimed that they had given all. Here are the Apostle Peter’s words to Ananias:

Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.

Catch that? The very passage which Mr. Paul believes clinches his argument that the Bible endorses “terror-enforced-communism” actually reaffirms private property rights. The land belonged to Ananias, and after he sold it, the money was “at [his] disposal.” (Indeed, Jesus Himself declared that “the worker deserves his wages.”) His crime wasn’t withholding money; his crime was lying.

While the Bible is hardly an economics text, some economic and social themes do endure, and they are incompatible not just with socialism but also many aspects of the modern welfare state.

While the Bible calls us to help the poor, it is also clear that the poor must help themselves to the extent they are able. In 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul warns against idleness and says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” In 1 Timothy 5, Paul also declares, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” Even inclusion on the widows’ “list” (which entitled widows to receive aid from the church) was conditioned upon age and good conduct.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades, by way of Linkiest.

Susanne Eman wants to become the most obese human being ever and she’s halfway there.

It’s certainly obvious she doesn’t want to become the world’s fattest sack of goo in secret, this is all about achieving fame. So I’m going to do my best to help her.

The unemployed mother – who cannot work because of her weight – claims she stays active by doing simple exercises and having regular health checks.

‘I go for a waddle and do stretches and exercises every day,’ she said. ‘My muscles need to hold up to my weight, so I have to stay strong.
:
Despite warnings from her doctor that her bizarre experiment could kill her, Susanne insists she wants to break the record.

Dr Patrick Flite said: ‘She’s really playing Russian roulette with her life with this goal. There are well-documented complications that come with morbid obesity.

‘I would never encourage anyone to be doing what Susanne is doing.’

Dr Flite said Susanne’s medical checks showed no current problems, adding: ‘She’s capable of making her own decisions. I don’t see any psychiatric problems or anything else wrong.’

I do. If you click through to the article, you’ll see she has that smug smirk on every single picture. (Warning: She’s wearing shorts in one.) The woman is a nut, and if current mental health science cannot identify a psychiatric deficiency then that means it hasn’t looked hard enough. I’m not a psychologist and I do not play one on teevee, but I think my initial impression is the right one: In a welfare state in which there is no place for individual exceptionalism, this is where the natural instinct to achieve it is siphoned off. Yes, this is lunacy, and it’s man-made.

Thanks, Cas.

The other obvious problem is, if she should ever reach her goal, with the elapse of a little more additional time someone else is going to pass it, and then where will she be? Well, practically speaking, under the ground and that’s another problem. Doesn’t that sum it up? When Al Bundy waxes lyrically about scoring two touchdowns in a single game at Polk High School…that’s as pathetic as Susanne Eman will become if she lives, which isn’t gonna happen. So she’s one notch beneath Al Bundy. One notch and six feet.

Ed Darrell thinks it’s time for Americans to dream, and we realize our biggest dreams through government spending. Jabba The Eman of Arizona, at “52 stone” (that’s over 700 lb.) and still packing it on, proves he has a point.

The White House won’t think outside the box on this one, so Victor Davis Hanson does it for them.

If the president thought that a campaign bus tour would rescue his numbers, he was mistaken — it seems to have had the opposite effect, perhaps because it seemed staged, almost like what a wealthy person would do if he wanted to act “real” for a bit.

But if President Obama has already purchased the new bus, why not use it Winnebago-style to see America with his family for a week, visiting a national park, a closed-down plant — or a real vineyard?

Two possibilities:

One, it’s a “Jar Jar Binks” decision, meaning the Guy At The Top came up with it, and the leadership dynamic is such that nobody in earshot would point out the obvious deficiencies in the plan, so it went forward.

Two, we’re suffering from a misunderstanding of the whole point of Obama’s “vacation.” It’s a listening tour, sure, a “get the word out that I am one of you” road trip. But Obama has no reason to show He’s one of the hoi polloi; He wants to show He’s one of the New Englanders. It’s about donations and not votes.

According to Two, which I’m thinking is a bit more likely but not by much: Obama is not going to pick up a single vote because of any whistle-stop vacation. If the economy continues to suck and He manages to win re-election anyway, He’ll have to win back some votes He lost when the economy started sucking…and He’s going to do that by buying them back with the money He’s going to start raising right now. He could very well be on to something here.

Sure is a weird transformation of our nation’s political cycle, though.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I don’t watch these things because it seems absurd to me to provide air time to people who are selected based on the fact that, whether it’s in print or electronic form, they enjoy excessive opportunities to blather away already. And I’m not seeing any reason to revisit that particular question here. But I do see some value in checking the lunacy level. Bearing in mind, these are the people who wield influence in the status quo. These are the heavy hitters, the ones whose ideas gain traction and currency…solely because those ideas came from them, not because the ideas show promise.

I think most people don’t understand how bad the problem really is.

This is the spirit of what they’re all saying; the wording changes somewhat from one walk-through to the next, but it all boils down to this.

“Okay what we have to do is raise taxes on the rich. And then we keep doing it, over and over again, until there aren’t any rich people anymore. Now, after we’ve gotten rid of all the rich people, we, uh…that is, the next step is, er…um…gah! This is no fun! When do I get to say some bad things about conservatives and Republicans??”

From here, by way of blogger friend Phil.

Hat tip to blogger friend Buck.

Niiiiiicccceeeeee……………………………..

Reason, via Althouse.

Way, way off to the left…

I am not morganovich, but s/he speaks for me…

…interesting to see that the left takes in 76% of the top 20’s money, then spend their time vilifying the re[p]ublicans for selling out to ” large special interests”.

[T]hat’s pretty astounding hypocrisy.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Ethan Cordray at On the Square, at First Things:

There’s no denying the popularity of zombies—by which I mean the modern brain-hungry, shambling, disgusting, undead-or-plague-infected monsters, not the traditional figures from voodoo culture. The modern craze started in the late 1960s and 1970s with George Romero and John A. Russo’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and the movie franchises that followed it. But recently the popularity of zombies seems to have grown dramatically. Movies like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead seem to come out every year; books like Max Brooks’s World War Z and the young adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth climb the bestseller lists; and video games like Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead sell millions of copies.
:
But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation. Though they still move and act, they are not really alive. They hunger and are never filled. And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control.

In Pauline terms, they are the sarx in its purest form. Without a soul to control it, the flesh is a slave to its own desires. The rise in popularity of zombies, then, may reflect a rise in anxiety over the elevation of appetite in modern life, a popular recognition that appetite has gotten out of control, and that unchecked, unreflective, and immoderate appetite is a form of death.

Hat tip to Anchoress.

It’s definitely a Thing That Makes You Go Hmmmm…especially for me. Many’s the time I’ve driven through the mean streets of Folsom, where the story is always the same: Dickhead in the car in front of you has all the time in the world, dickhead in the car behind you is in some big ol’ hurry — until he passes you and gets his butt in your face, then all of a sudden he has all the time in the world. What a bunch of dickheads. Move it, dickhead!

And then I stop and think…my God, this is why they behave like this; they’re doing it to each other. They just did it to me, and I’m becoming one of them! It’s like zombies! And I’ve been bitten!

So why now? I think Cordray is on to something. People “work” by sitting in cubicles five feet wide and seven feet deep, and doing something that justifies a status report or a time sheet. That’s their “work.” If they’re exceptionally lucky, they’ll be among the very few who actually build something and then they’ll be able to say, look, I pulled in a paycheck by building something. But most people don’t build something…so they perform something…then they get the paycheck and spend it, or give it to somebody else to go spend. Then they consume, sleep, and it’s time to go do it again and again. Perform and consume. Occasionally some unsettling piece of evidence will arrive to suggest nobody’s placing any real value on the performing, that the remuneration of the paycheck is simply part of someone else’s performance. And so people, quite logically, start to feel like zombies; just drifting through a so-called “life” with an appetite.

Why now? Because we’re bored, that’s why. We are overly-urbanized. The problems we manage to identify in hopes of a constructive solution, we look to others to solve — without faith.

Update: Neal Boortz has a video clip up that seems apropos. “Flash Mob Loots 7-11”:

An amazing and riveting story, via Instapundit, by way of blogger friend Rick.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein’s note. He puzzled over the baby.

Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.

Weinstein was beside himself.

What if the Gestapo took her from the police?

What if they decided that she was a Jew?

Pat Condell tells it as he sees it. Potty-mouth language warning is in effect…but it makes much better sense than any other description you’ve heard, do’nit?

Hat tip to Gerard.