Many analysts — including yours truly — have made the mistake of arguing that the Obama administration has no energy policy. But the evidence increasingly reveals that the administration does indeed have an energy policy, one that is designed to reduce access to fossil fuels by raising their price, thereby making “alternate” or “green” energy sources more attractive.
The administration’s approach is constantly on display: Use government policy to raise oil and gas prices, subsidize alternative energy sources, then mandate the use of the latter. The EPA, far from being a rogue agency, remains an important tool for implementing this policy.
Well hey, that was the idea right? The song doesn’t go “Obama’s gonna do what we want Him to do”…that would probably be racist. No, it goes like…
He’s gonna lead us, guide us, make us do the right things, capiche? That’s the vision, we all just stand around in the soup lines waiting to be told what to do. Then we find out, and we go do it. Yes we can!
So how’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?
One of my most original thoughts is something I desperately wish was not such an original thought: Some of the luminaries among us who are to be worshiped just because everyone else worth worshiping seems to be worshiping them, I think are nuts. What they’ve got, in my opinion, is far more worthy of being diagnosed as a mental disorder, maybe even a mental illness, than a lot of other things that really are diagnosed as said disorders.
So it brought me great pleasure to see, if I ever could put a patent on this idea, that opportunity has closed now. The idea’s been stolen, and the occasion merits. Paul Krugman, with his unwise deeds and his unwise words, brought it on himself.
And so we have a round-table discussion on what’s wrong upstairs with Paulie. It’s about goddamn time.
One of my favorite coffee o’clock sites for figuring out what happened the day before, is Memeorandum. It is a non-partisan news feed that groups the stories into a nice hierarchy, by topic…with one big drawback…if this whack-job Paul Krugman writes something, somehow that automatically ratchets upward to the tippy-top of the page in the biggest font they’ve got. You can’t always figure out what’s going on with the Memeorandum stories without actually clicking through & reading the original piece, and many’s the time I’ve flailed around trying to figure out what the heck happened here, only to emerge with nothing more than: Paul Krugman had a brain fart. It’s annoying.
Wonder if that will keep happening after this. Someone at Meme has liked Krugmeister a whole lot up to this point, that’s for sure. I have no idea why.
We sure are doing a great job in this day and age at dismissing people as whack-jobs who ought not be dismissed as whack-jobs, and failing to dismiss as whack-jobs people whose surreal babblings never should have been seriously considered in the first place…
Bearded bitter buffoon? That’s an insult to buffoons. How about overrated, acrid, toxic, grandstanding ass-munch?
Testosterone is responsible for everything from facial hair and Adam’s apples to a deepened voice, muscle development and a strong libido in men. Apparently men don’t need the hormone so much after becoming parents, though! Researchers at Northwestern University have found that levels of testosterone drop significantly after men become fathers.
As reported in the UK’s Daily Mail, those with newborns and those who spend more time doing child care had the biggest drops in testosterone levels:
For those with a child under one month old, the decline was around 50 per cent, but it remained consistently lower than their childless counterparts ‘until their offspring is at least a year or two old’.
The men who reported caring for their child for between one and three hours per day saw the greatest decline, which the authors said was not accounted for by stress or sleep deprivation.
While this might sound like bad news, the researchers think it’s a good sign. In an interview with Time, the study’s lead author, biological anthropologist Lee Gettler said, “… it means that men are apparently hard-wired to respond biologically to fatherhood. It’s a fresh perspective, given that the conventional wisdom describes traditional societies as those in which men are hunter-gatherers, while women on the home front forage for berries and care for kids … Humans wouldn’t have been as successful if fathers weren’t helping.”
Way to go, dads!
They missed the point. Didn’t even follow the evidence. Didn’t even implement sound logic.
How does it necessarily follow that, if a man should maintain his level of testosterone after becoming a father, he has to be a bad father? And the “traditional” and “conventional” wisdom, how did that come about? Did we make up all the stories about men being hunters & gatherers? What about the fathers back in the agrarian era, having kids…and then having a bunch more? Evidence of testosterone post-fatherhood. What happened?
My answer: It’s cultural. Culture impacts the mind, and the mind impacts the body. In the twenty-first century, there is very little cultural acceptance of real man-hood, especially post-fatherhood. Having a child nowadays means immersing oneself in a whole different world, chock full of preening snotty lectures about learning disabilities, colorful plastic toys jammed up your ass when you sit on the couch, a whole bunch of movies every single year all about what clumsy idiots the small-dee dad is and how we all need to help mom work him over so he doesn’t go to the office and do any of that work stuff. Dads are supposed to “be there” for their kids…which lately, is morphing into a weird definition of spending all their waking hours being around their kids. Go to the park, as if you’re a grandpa instead of a dad. Buy ice cream. And never, ever, ever allow your voice to descend in pitch below 440 Mhz. Not when there are kids around. Speaking anywhere below alto is worse than using the fuck-word.
Not sure who made that rule, but a rule it is. Walk around Folsom with me on a Saturday morning. Watch these grown men moan & whine non-threateningly at their kids.
Yes I think there’s something to the research. I assume they actually measured the hormones, and if they did and it produced the results they’re talking about, I’m not one bit surprised.
I just think the research is worthless if they didn’t take history into account — it didn’t begin yesterday morning. Things are different. And it’s an indictment…this is not good…because, news flash, there are other ways to stop a man from screwing around on his wife other than turning him into a woman. Appeal to basic human decency comes to mind, y’know? Once he’s made kids with her, a real man shouldn’t want to.
In fact I would go further: The lesson to be gleaned from this study is that human are unique, after all. We possess the intelligence necessary to use free will to decide if we want to accept humanity. Birds and beasts are “wired” to mate for life, or to scatter their seed around with wild abandon. It is, mostly, decided by their species. They have “wiring.” Humans don’t. We can breed with one partner throughout our entire lives, or we can breed like cattle. Or fruit flies. We ate of the apple and lost our innocence, so it’s all up to us, and the decisions we make speak to our character or lack thereof. That is our unique covenant.
We can debate whether or not it’s “scientific” to go cheering on such a trend in one direction or another. But I would hope we all agree that a researcher who says, it’s a good thing when a member of any species stops trying to be what it naturally is, shouldn’t be in research. This team has crossed that line, and is no longer “researching” into what is happening to hormonal levels after parenthood. They aren’t even researchers, they’re advocates.
That thing Tom Friedman does at around 0:47 to 0:50 — you aren’t supposed to be able to do it through text on an Internet thread, but I’ve seen lots of liberals do it in exactly that forum. I expect Friedman would bristle at being called a “liberal” and that isn’t descriptive of my meaning here, so let’s use a different term. “Vapid thinkers” maybe.
What Friedman attempts to do, is prove Social Security is not a “Ponzi scheme” by showcasing the formidable level of difficulty to be involved in ever convincing Friedman that it might be one. He’s being a Thing I Know #402 guy:
We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around who can’t seem to tell the difference between supporting evidence and their own intransigence. It’s as if they’re saying, “I am inflexible and therefore correct, I know everything because I don’t let anybody tell me anything”; and I’m expected to say, in reply, “I can see your mind will never be changed even if it is proven to you that you’re wrong…so I might as well change my mind and agree with you.” Did they meet with someone else, perhaps, who intentionally or otherwise accustomed them to such deference?
What Tom Friedman is showcasing, in fact, is something completely different: That he comes from a world in which people are intellectually flaccid, to such an extent they can be persuaded to decide crucial and complex issues with a “pfffft” or a “pfshaw.”
In the world from which I come, this clip shows up under a different perspective. I see one guy has presented a logical argument and another guy has not.
I have an effective way of dealing with Thing I Know #402 people. It goes like this: “Let the record show Rick Santelli has advanced a reasonable argument that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and Tom Friedman has failed to present a reasonable argument that Social Security might not be one.” Just that. Let the record show — Friedman brought absolutely nothing to this little exchange but some dismissive noises and an eyeball roll, and a few moments of quality rational thought seem to naturally bring on an inference that he’s wrong. No, it’s not “effective” at changing the other person’s mind. But you can’t compress a fluid; and it helps to remind all present that there’s a big world out there, and Thing I Know #402 is for weenies who lack the maturity required to live in it.
So Mr. Friedman puts out a regular column of some kind, that people read? My goodness, that is worrisome.
…says the Speaker of the House. I guess the skillful politician drops seeds of hope wherever he walks, even onto a cement floor.
The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration. We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well…
It’s my hope that we can work together to end the uncertainty facing families and small businesses and create a better environment for long-term economic growth and private-sector job creation…
The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcome — will change their minds any time soon.
That sentiment was echoed across numerous industries by executives in companies big and small on Friday, underscoring the challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to encourage hiring and perk up the moribund economy.
The plan failed to generate any optimism on Wall Street as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average each fell about 2.7 percent.
At this point, if you’re still seeing Barack Obama as a healer of our nation’s financial woes, you’re either being paid to see Him that way or you’re one of a slender and dwindling minority of cheerleaders who are gushing about it for free. There are many things a person can do to earn respect and esteem when commenting on economic matters, but doing the exact same thing for free that others are being paid handsomely to do, is not one of those things.
There’s enormous coverage, but no news. None of this is news, it is drama, portraits of courage and sadness. Last phone calls between loved ones, “the last time I saw him was when…”, “when I saw the first Tower fall I…”
And firefighters. Lots of firefighters. America wants its real life heroes unarmed and unthreatening.
Lots of sadness, but no anger. No one on TV is angry? The Towers didn’t fall, they were kicked in the face. How many politicians do I have to watch cry on TV? STOP CRYING. I already know it’s sad. Don’t tell me we are resilient, don’t tell me we’ll go on, are there people worried they won’t go on? Show me the country has some men in it, show me that we aren’t five year olds.
:
Observe that the media has unilaterally decided that no American will ever again see the images of the planes being slammed into the Towers. “Come on, you’ve seen it enough times, nothing to be gained from that. Here’s a firefighter.”
I’m told anger serves no useful purpose. But sadness isn’t going to prevent this from happening again, sadness isn’t going to restructure the planet so that people don’t want to do these things. You might say anger won’t either, but I’ll take my chances.
No, anger doesn’t prevent things from happening. But anger is not the issue. Think on this — imagine yourself tasked to cut a lawn. You had other things planned for this block of time and you’re irritable and peeved; you want the lawn as thoroughly cut as you can possibly manage, and you want to spend the absolute minimum in terms of time, energy and effort to get it done. You want to mow that lawn the way a man buys a pair of socks at the mall. In & out in record time.
Now if it’s up to you to determine the mental positioning and emotional profile of each blade of grass, how would you condition them? And I say the answer is: Precisely the way our media and our so-called “leaders” have been conditioning us. Sad and not angry. Every single swath you mow down, the yet-to-be-cut blades on the next swath over say to themselves….aw, how sad. Where were you when that happened? Conforming with each other barely enough to lean in the same direction, so you can take care of ’em when you come around again.
You would push for a complete extirpation from this particular lawn, of any sense that a blade of grass is worth something. You’d want the blades of grass to get mopey, depressed, but not outraged in the slightest. Your goal would be to make them suicidal without being aware that they’re suicidal. Lining up like lambs for slaughter. Then you can get it all done, dump out the clippings and still make your tee time.
The issue is not anger; the issue is a sense of the value of human life. We’re losing track of what is really important. Losing track of this simple and easily-grasped idea that, the twenty-five-year-old firefighter who responded to the crash of Flight 11, and was ripped away from us forever by the crash of Flight 175, should today be thirty-five…and isn’t. There should still be another fifty years ahead of that fine man. And there aren’t. He’s forever 25. It’s true of him and the thousands of others — that is what we have lost. That is the mindset, stolen from us, but only passively, relieved from our possession after we willingly gave it up. By the chattering-class over here, not by terrorists. The terrorists took the lives, the media took the sense & sensibility that those lives were worth something.
We’ve become like the lawn, waiting to be mowed. At least, that is the picture that emerges from the boob tube. Vast barrels and bushels of mopey sadness, not so much as a dollop of natural anger. Our media remembers that something was removed from us, but they appear to have forgotten that a hostile act was involved. It is a blight against all of us that so much footage can be watched, and there won’t be any mention that this was an unnatural act, committed deliberately by hostiles.
Update: Mark Steyn, writing on exactly the same theme, is taking note of what does & doesn’t make it on to the peace quilt.
How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.
What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.
No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.
In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”
Might have posted this before, but it’s worth doing again…
I’d say right about now, we’re somewhere around the 8:30 mark…where they’re pouring the elixir on the ground and the charlatan salesman is yelling “Now now gentlemen, no need for violence.”
You need to be very careful when a desire to hang on to freedom is characterized as somehow weird, anti-social, intransigent, dangerous or nutty.
On the anniversary, Sonic Charmer is inclined to leave it alone. I’m leaning somewhat toward his side of things. Advice Goddess Amy Alkon is having trouble with the F-word, as am I…ultimately, I decided to go the same route as Don Surber.
Caught a couple of fresh-grilled hamburgers at the company pool party yesterday, somewhere around three in the afternoon. They were a little on the rare side, and I rode my bike home some seven miles, getting a flat on the way…lots of dehydration, more sunburn than was planned, some indigestion from the raw meat, which means Friday evening was spent in a nap. And all this culminates in the conclusion that as of this morning I was starving. So I rode my bike to a local sandwich shop. It’s a “Hof Brau” imitation thing where they carve up the meat right in front of you. Right next door to where they had a mail stop for my Netflix drop-off, so that was pretty cool.
So in line in front of me, is a momma and her whelps. She’s about a decade younger than me…I have no idea where the dad is…there are a couple of male ten-year-old tow-heads in Judo outfits, and a pair of teenage trollops decked out in the “cootchie cutter” super-tight jean shorts I wish the ladies would be wearing in their mid-to-late twenties or so. So we’ve got two ten-year-olds and two sixteen-year-olds. And I was struck by the “mother ship” configuration going on here…Mom was just barking out order after order after order, command after command after command. Really something to watch. You go here, you go there. The tow-headed kids are having salads — wonder how that came about. So the guy behind the counter is asking the little guy what kind of cheese he wants on top and the Mom is interrupting her own commandment-dishing-out exercise long enough to yell over “He probably wants blue cheese”…and then an issue is somehow made of the idea that salad consumed by a person wearing a Gi, is likely to become salad worn on the sleeve of the Gi. So she instructs the little cretins to roll up their sleeves. Oh no she doesn’t; she has one hold his arms out, and she rolls up the sleeves for him while she continues to belt out Great Santini commands in all directions.
What struck me was the reaction of the four kids. The two jean-short-sluts, of course, immersed themselves deeply in “Best Friends Forever” hobnobbing, jibber-jabbering to each other a mile a minute while all the people and furnishings and air space around them disappeared. The two tow-heads did what boys will do, taking a more individualized approach, daydreaming about Pokemon or Fred Flintstone or something. Mom continued to belt out orders as if she was the center of attention…and nuclear powered.
Mercifully, I was allowed to line-jump. I got my grub. They got theirs. I got a pub table, teen trollops got another pub table and Momma and Judo artists got a booth across from the trollops. When Momma had to excuse herself to go resolve biological issues, things got real interesting. Wonder sluts began assaulting the martial artists…something to do with wiping salad dressing on the Judo outfits or something. Martial artists are not just sitting there & taking it, they’re dishing it back out. It was pure chaos. And, on some level, rather healthy and therefore appealing; a wholesome chaos. Mom’s gone, let’s act like people again.
Momma emerged and there was a predictable smackdown as she busied herself with restoring order. Each of the four combatants was entirely innocent — you could just see the golden halos over their heads. Momma barked out some more orders, replied with a wordless upraised hand to this-or-that protest, and made some superficial motion toward actually consuming food.
Anyway. It’s just interesting, to me, that nobody has any interest or ability to socially interact as normal people until the momma bear is gone. And that only has to happen for about five seconds or so.
Let’s just cut to the chase here: Kids do not take care of what they see someone else is already managing…or trying to manage. They will not join in any team effort with Mom, to “help” get their own food ordered. Frankly, I wouldn’t either. If Mom takes over the whole show, they quietly fantasize about the ground swallowing them up…and yeah…that’s what I would be doing, too, if I were them.
Learning disabilities? Social immaturity? Let me just state the obvious — that which everybody knows to be true, but everyone’s too smart to say out loud except me. Kids do what they can see needs to be done. They are not going to participate socially until such time as an avenging angel descends on us, spreads pixie dust around all the Moms, and silences them. Is that not sexist enough yet? Shut UP, moms. Let the kid order his own salad.
Or else…I don’t want to hear a single word about ADHD. So long as I see the adults show the behavior I saw today, I will expect to see the kids showing the behavior I saw out of them. The operative formula here is something like: Social competence in the kids, plus words-per-minute out of the Mom, equals C, a constant. So zip it. Let’s see what your kids really have going on.
I imagine a hundred out of a hundred mothers will reply that this advice, for this reason or that one, somehow doesn’t apply to them. How I wish that were truly the case.
Update 9/11/11: You know, it occurs to me — over the last twenty years, what is the caricature of the parent that has been most stigmatized other than the deadbeat dad…it is the overly-involved dad, sitting in the front row at the soccer match, yelling at the whelp to do everything that’s needed to score the goal. Win! Beat! Get! Grrrr! From the beginning, I’ve been a little confused and disoriented as to which entity I found less sympathetic; the Great Santini dad who’s ruining what should be a pleasurable outing for everybody, or his critics. Who are these people who are signing their curtain-climbers up for soccer and then working so hard to make it into a non-competitive sport? And since when is it the worst thing a dad can do, to want his kid to do something well — how’s that even make the list? What happened to burnings & beatings and sending ten-year-olds out on liquor runs?
But this thing with the moms who won’t shut up, it’s exactly the same thing. It has the same effect. The only difference is, the pushy moms are interfering to stop their kids from living life, and the pushy dads are interfering to stop their kids from losing a game. If you accept the premise that both are doing damage, the dads at least stop doing the damage when the game is over and the van doors slide shut.
Here we are all puzzled about why learning disabilities are skyrocketing; I’ll bet if you round up lots of SLD kids, you’re not going to find too many with dads berating their game performance on the soccer field. But I’m pretty sure you’ll find they all have pushy moms. I’m really not sure how & why the moms are getting away with this behavior that does this kind of damage to our society. Is it just because they’re girls?
Just run the words through your head a few times: The President is going to give a speech to address the jobs crisis. Think about our brief and flirtatious history with President Obama; how many speeches does He give in a year? How many speeches has He already given about the economy? Run the words through your noggin yet again. The President is going to give a speech about jobs. This date, this time! Be sure and tune in!
I’ve been working in technology for twenty-three years now. That’s counting just the time I’ve been thrown in with a bunch of other tech geeks in that “Lord of the Flies” situation that seems to follow us around throughout our entire careers. So believe me, I have met my share of big egos. But from all I’ve seen and heard, it seems there is this threshold of ego that can be defined in this way: If a problem emerges that is new in nature or vague in definition, the subject will confront the problem by giving a speech.
I think, at that threshold, we fulfill a meaningful litmus test of a true mental disorder.
And it would not surprise me to learn that the dozen or so words I asked you to reiterate to yourself, to cast a renewed spotlight on the plain observation that they are nonsensical, led directly to the Republicans’ decision that no rebuttal would be made — that they decided right there & then that none was necessary. Just sort of says it all, ya know? President Obama has figured out the job crisis is sufficiently serious that He must do something to provide a remedy, and right now…so…He’s going to give a speech. Now who, exactly, is hearing about that and thinking “All RIGHT! Things are sure to get better now!” Anybody? Anywhere?
Yes, it’s a mental disorder. It’s a learning disability, too, since you can’t take in any new information while your lips are moving.
We shouldn’t become enamored of our own pessimism…there is no constructive observation to be made there…but we can’t improve the situation as it really exists, if we don’t recognize how bad the problem is. And it seems to me that within government and academia, as well as with some businesses, most or all of the executives who hold real power and decide real things with real authority, are afflicted with this mental deficiency. A problem comes up, and Step One is to give a speech. Is that all that’s needed to address the problem? A lot of them seem to think so.
And really, where I start to become alarmed is where I prognosticate about what would happen in an advanced civilization in which everybody who was a power-broker of any kind, was mentally feeble in this way. I imagine no new things would get built that do anything useful; or, very few would do that. I imagine the things that used to work years ago, would start to crumble and fall apart. And, uh, well? Isn’t that exactly what’s happening?
Armed gunmen have taken over Nakatomi Plaza! All right, it’s time for some decisive action…so everyone gather around! I have something to say to you!
Captain, we’ve hit an iceberg and the ship is expected to sink within the hour! Okay, get all the passengers up on deck right now. But there aren’t enough lifeboats! No, we’re not bringing them up to put them in the lifeboats; I’m going to give a speech to address this crisis.
Sir! The Huns are at the gate! They carry torches and they are setting fire to our city! Right, now get all the residents into the village square pronto…is this microphone working?
I think it starts in childhood. I think what happens is, Junior speaks to a large crowd — some people are just built to — and earns some accolades from parents and teachers because the speech-job is better than average. The thing of it is, if you watch the parents and teachers congratulate students for doing a better-than-average job in a spectator environment, you’ll notice nobody ever does it halfway. Nobody ever says “you didn’t suck as bad as usual” or anything like that…no muted-tone “nice job.” Isn’t that funny? Grown-ups seem to have this fake exuberance that is directly proportional to the number of people who watched the performance. “Nice job” is for the budding artist who grinds out his handiwork when nobody is watching. That poor kid will never be carried around through a crowd on his buddies’ shoulders. But the aspiring gymnast or football player or speechmaker pulls in the can’t-find-a-way-to-express-it-adequately applause and accolades and high-five — that’s where the real atta-boy is. When the talent & strength is observed by a large number of spectators, simultaneously. Then, it seems this unwritten rule emerges that if a positive thing might possibly be said about what was accomplished, then that thing has to get said, and emphasized in every possible way.
Could this alter the course of a child’s natural development? It is manifestly absurd to try to deny it. That’s why it’s done. But the alteration is not completely positive…
So I guess these people, in childhood, are overly-indulged. And from this they form the impression that their speeches can solve everything. Bring the unemployment rate down, heal the sick, save the planet, turn water into wine, drive off an alien invasion, cure AIDS and Cancer, make a perfect sandwich, land a man on the moon a few years afterward…
People tend to lose sight of the self-evident fact that speeches don’t do these things.
And they go crazy. Yes, crazy. Don’t forget, Barack Obama gave the Queen of England an iPod — loaded up with His speeches. To this day, no evidence has emerged that the President has ever understood what might be wrong or inappropriate about that. It pretty much underscores exactly what I’m talking about here, doesn’t it? So I would like to see an ICD-9 number assigned to this; it would be a reasonable move. Sort of an offshoot of NPD (301.81), but not quite the same thing. Much, much more dangerous.
I mean seriously: How big of a threat can a mental disorder become? Let’s say, if a walking textbook incarnation of the disorder becomes President of the United States, and as a direct result of that, a whole bunch of national problems get worse and none of ’em get any better. So I ask again: What exactly is it we’re seeing right now? If this doesn’t make it sufficiently important for us to start recognizing this hitherto-unrecognized mental disability, then what does?
Maybe I should revise my opinion about these shout-fests where the two sides talk over each other. Up until now I’ve regarded it as a non-edifying, even stultifying, forum because it simply isn’t possible for any new information or revelations to come out amid all the flotsam and jetsam.
Apparently, not only might I have been wrong about this, but my perception may have been the exact opposite of the truth.
I very often hear of our progressives comparing the national economy to a gas engine. Their point, as I understand it, is that all the ingredients can be there for high performance — valves closing as they should, spark, fuel, aspiration and so forth — and the net output might be zero simply because the machinery hasn’t been started. So lack of motion equals lack of motion. Prime the pump. Close the switch. Spin the crankshaft and off we go.
It leads to a mistaken conclusion because the economy is much more like a pair of wild animals. If the species are compatible and the attraction is there, nature will take its course, and if it doesn’t then something’s wrong. Or…if it really is a gas engine, the “starter” theory is mythical. An economy with all the working parts in place & in good order, will take off with no starting necessary. If it isn’t running, that’s your reading on how good the parts are & how well they’re fitting together.
If we are to fit the liberal message and strategy into the gas engine analogy, the plan is to siphon the gas out of the tank while the engine is running, until such time as the engine quits. When it quits, indulge in your “starter” theory, charging the taxpayers somewhere between half a trillion and a full trillion per yank…a service the liberal will have to provide, since everyone else is too stupid.
And don’t anybody even think of putting more gas in the tank because that would be greedy.
Mr. President, we all remember your eloquence in Arizona last January, when you declared that irresponsible rhetoric had no place in public discourse. You said,
“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
So, did you mean that? Because it seems like if you meant that, you would have been mortified to follow Hoffa’s incendiary rhetoric, and you would have found a way — with smart diplomacy — to have corrected him; you’d have been horrified to know your Vice-President was calling his fellow countrymen “barbarians” and you’d have suggested that maybe “Joe was just a little excited, but I’ve talked to him.”
Instead. Silence.
My father always told me that “silence implies consent.”
It is the tragic nature of demagoguery that it can be effectively practiced in a passive style as well as in an active one, in fact it adds an appealing attribute of plausible deniability when it is practiced passively. A “wing man” or a “pit bull” can lunge in for the attack while the leader of the movement stands back and observes. The incriminating association is made only by the few in the minority who practice their talents at noticing what is done, not merely by what is said; some among those who remain will insist that all in attendance must indulge a game of pretend, recognizing a separating partition that isn’t there.
Just a meaningful repudiation, is all the Anchoress requests of her President. And her humble request is left unfulfilled.
A couple of hours after talking to an ABC correspondent about the woeful job numbers and what might be done to improve them, I was in the Bloomberg TV studios debating a guy from Heritage. He went on for several minutes about the damage being done by high taxes, excess regulation, business “uncertainty” about future tax hikes and regulatory burdens. I asked Bloomberg’s host whether he was aware that corporate profits relative to national income had just hit a 60-year peak? He had heard rumors to that effect. Was he aware that taxes on corporate earnings were at a 60-year low? The Heritage guy had heard that might be the case.
Then why was uncertainty about taxes and the future burden of the Affordable Care Act holding back business investment and hiring right now? If managers thought taxes or regulatory costs might go up in the future, wouldn’t it make sense to take advantage of today’s low taxes and lower burdens to invest and hire today? According to the “uncertainty” argument, businesses are fearful they might face high taxes and extra health costs in 2016 or 2018. Shouldn’t they expand hiring right now and scale back employment when they actually face higher costs (if they ever do)?
Nevermind the ramshackle structure of the flawed argument, just look at the point that is being made: “Darn that reality, it refuses to comport with my theories, how shall we punish it?” It is a classic example of Thing I Know #400.
Lately I’m noticing a prevalent and widespread sickness in which opinionated people conflate or confuse their preferences with regard to what should happen, with what might make sense. In other words, they cannot understand “surprise” events, or events contrary to their vision. They are often heard to protest that such a contraband event is senseless. They say this when in fact it is perfectly reasonable given the antecedent events related to it — what is senseless, is the failure to anticipate that it would happen.
Particularly applicable to the field of economics, which must be a study in the approximate prediction of human behavior — for, if it cannot be practiced to facilitate that, then it has no purpose whatsoever. So yeah, what are you guys studying, exactly? What are you smoking?
No, I don’t have an economics degree and I’m asking the question anyway. Find a way to deal.
As far as the argument itself, Sonic has already dissected it thereby dirtying his hands. No point to me jumping in & doing the same.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The trouble with women is that women are people, and people are flawed. So this isn’t really a woman thing. I notice when people get into a group setting, especially online with that semi-safe semi-anonymity, and say “Is it okay if I…” there are two things that are going on. One, the right answer is no and they damn well know it; two, they’re hoping to make it into a yes. Psychologists have a specific term to describe this: Validation.
In my book, that’s a betrayal of wedding vows already. The husband didn’t marry hundreds and hundreds of future best-friends-forever who have yet to be met and maybe, in some cases, have yet to even be born. He didn’t marry a bunch of semi-anonymous female busybodies on the Internet. Why should his married life be affected, in any way, by the opinions spouting forth from such outsiders? He married a woman…one woman…one mature and capable woman, which means that woman is duty-bound to come up with her own ways of handling things.
This is an equal-opportunity complaint. Lately I’m just completely bowled over by the number of ways some people conjure up, to demonstrate they never were ready for marriage — without coming out & saying it or even admitting it to themselves. It’s not a country club membership or a fun hobby to try out for a little while.
I’m only 23 and it’s been barely over a year since I graduated from university. Yet already the work environment and the consequences of the “real world” have warped and degraded me. All I have are feelings of disillusionment and betrayal. If I were a mood ring, the color would translate to somewhere between quite desperation and self-loathing. I work full-time at a temp position that under-utilizes me. I make sure not to finish work to quickly, for fear it doing so will only shorten my employment. Before that I worked in retail. Before long, I may end up back there.
Compared with other children with absentee dads, kids whose fathers were active parents in early and middle childhood had fewer behaviour problems and higher intellectual abilities as they grew older — even among socio-economically at-risk families.
Somewhere, the shrill and dying voices of barren, bitter feminists is rising to some crescent moon, uncomforted by their futile attempts to alter reality, which has so disappointed them. They have found out what the Weather Worshipers have found out: That Nature doesn’t really need them as protectors. Reality always finds a way.
So the focus of MM’s complaint is a video clip in which Fox seems to have skipped forward to the good part with the sons-of-bitches…leaving out the bit about voting. From reviewing the second clip, it seems this is a valid complaint but it’s also a trivial one. How many times a week have we been admonished to treat the office of the President of the United States with respect — by people who can’t tell the difference between respect and reverence? And then go on to make introductory speeches for the President with language like “take these sons of bitches out,” or defend people who make speeches like that. Respect for the office of President? We need someone to pick & choose when that is due, and when it is not, I guess.
The weasel who comes on to defend Hoffa, says it strikes him as “disingenuous” to complain about Hoffa when you have these Tea Party people “roaring” and “foaming at the mouth.” Nothing provided to back up that story; guess we’re not supposed to ask for it. Okay so the defense is now complete. Everybody does it, and Hoffa didn’t.
Progressives just love to talk about “the video takes his remarks out of context” and they just love talking about what the other guy did. Both tactics divert the argument into thicket patches of details, and it takes time for fair-minded people to sift through the details. How much time do you have every day for watching YouTube clips?
Meanwhile, the whole “context” thing is a complete bunny trail. Go round up a hundred people who think it’s inappropriate for Hoffa to make these remarks. How many, do you think, believe he was actually threatening physical violence?
Most of them, I think, will see it the way I do: It manifests a mindset, an us-versus-them mindset. These are the people who are not supposed to have that mindset. They want to bring the whole world together, supposedly. Overcome differences, world without borders, we’re all in this together, blah blah blah et cetera.
Megyn Kelly notes that everyone on the left seems to be getting a pass for putting this nastier “get the sunsa bitches” sentiment to voice — everyone seems to be getting excused by their colleagues, very few on the progressive side are trying to police their own. I think they’re playing a game of “let’s see where the boundaries are.” Ever have a relative who made it into adulthood without ever having been meaningfully disciplined? Every now and then they’ll make some slight against somebody, and better-than-even-odds they’ll do it without being aware of it, and get called on the carpet for it. The response? Anger. Theatrical, audible anger…and it’s anger because of what happens next. What happens next is a change of subject. Now just a minute, are you accusing Bubbins of something? How dare you. Oh yes, let’s all have a long, drawn-out circular conversation about whether it was fair to expect Bubbins to have known he shouldn’t do that…were his words taken out of context…Officer Krupke, I have a social disease but deep down inside me there is good. Bubbins will get an apology out of the person from whom the conflict emerged — or, he will get a proxy apology, a consensus decision that Bubbins was the victim here. Either way, Bubbins wins.
So give it a try, Bubbins! “HOW DARE YOU PUT WORDS IN MY MOUTH!”
They’re in a game of throw crap at the wall, see if it sticks. Like the dysfunctional and over-indulged brother or cousin…the one who is constantly blowing up in some kind of rage, without appearing genuinely angry about anything, usually right after having stepped in something and getting caught. The one who, typically, is never given any meaningful responsibilities.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think, at that threshold, we fulfill a meaningful litmus test of a true mental disorder.
It leads to a mistaken conclusion because the economy is much more like a pair of wild animals. If the species are compatible and the attraction is there, nature will take its course, and if it doesn’t then something’s wrong. Or…if it really is a gas engine, the “starter” theory is mythical. An economy with all the working parts in place & in good order, will take off with no starting necessary. If it isn’t running, that’s your reading on how good the parts are & how well they’re fitting together.
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.
