Holy Moley.

DC Comics officially announced Tuesday that the company will reset the numbers of all its comic titles back to #1 later this summer.

All 52 titles under the publisher will be affected, including Action Comics, which is up to issue 902 – numbering that began with the first appearance of Superman in 1938.

“DC Comics will be making history this September,” said co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee in a statement. “We’ll be renumbering the entire DC Universe line of comic books with 52 first issues.

“Not only will this initiative be compelling for existing readers, it’ll give new readers a precise entry point into our titles.”

The move is meant to give new fans intimidated by the long continuity of many characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash easier access into comic books, but also will include new writer-artist teams for about three-quarters of the books.

Rebooting individual titles has been done many times in the industry over the years, but this is the first time a publisher’s entire line of books has undergone that kind of massive change.

This could be very good news. We’ll have to keep an eye out & see what develops.

Eric Allie at Townhall, by way of blogger friend Buck.

Now we’re up to fifty new words I’ve made up.

Why do I do this? Because language is culture. You show me a society, with all the concepts that society has deemed to be worth describing with words; and the concepts that society has chosen to ignore, by refusing or failing to come up with words to describe them. You show me that, and I’ll show you the fiber that makes up that society. I’ll show you its passions and its collective apathy.

We have a lot of problems we’re leaving unaddressed, because we haven’t come up with words to describe certain things. So I just make up new words.

It should be noted that I don’t pretend to have any talent at this. But some of these concepts are pretty important, and I figure it’s better to deploy a sucky-ass word to describe whatever it is, than to flail around without the benefit of any word at all.

The latest:

Ji•no (n.)

1. The act of pretending something was intended to provoke a jocular response, when it wasn’t, as a defense mechanism when called out for saying or doing something thoughtless and unacceptable.
2. The act of repackaging something as a “joke” only for the purpose of pretending false things are true, true things are false, right things are wrong and/or wrong things are right.
3. Anything played off as a joke that, on careful inspection, is found to be entirely lacking in mirth.
4. A joke that one must find funny, or else there’s something wrong with that person; a reprimand is sure to arrive after the joke, “You take everything way too seriously, can’cha take a joke.”

Joke
In
Name
Only

I see Congressman Anthony Weiner, during his infamous press conference today, employed (in part) the “joke” defense, much as Sen. John Kerry did seven years ago.

There seems, to me, to be a sharp uptick in this over the last few years. It’s like the accuse-the-accuser method on steroids. I accuse you of slander, you accuse me of not being able to take a joke; the real damage is done by the implication that my inability to take a joke is some kind of a crime, or transgression.

This is extraordinarily dangerous, because there is difficulty involved in distinguishing it from the reasonable. For example, I’d be the first in line to protest if someone were to lodge a complaint against an off-color bit of humor from the South Park cartoon, especially if they were complaining about their young children bearing witness to it. Sit down and shut up!, I and persons like me would say. Change the damn channel if you can’t take a joke! What’s your precious babums doing up after ten o’clock at night anyway.

But you see, there is the difference. South Park jokes are actually funny. They are supposed to be non-family-friendly, but funny. Genuinely jocular. And not thoughtless by any stretch.

Contrast that with some of the JINOs told by repeat-offender Bill Maher:

It’s that fearlessness — he acknowledged that some people would probably be uncomfortable with some of his remarks about religion, not to mention calling Sarah Palin a “cunt” (“there’s just no other word for her”) — that makes Maher the most dangerous person in comedy. He’s painfully well-informed, which means he takes no bullshit from anyone. President Barack Obama took it on the chin almost as much as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. How dare the President say he would not settle for America being No. 2 — America is already out of the top 10 in most international lifestyle and human rights categories (health care, education, social mobility, women in high political positions). “I’d be thrilled if we were No. 2,” he ranted, noting it’s nice to be behind Bosnia in life expectancy (where the chief cause of death is wolfman attacks, he joked).

It seems like a legit defense as long as you don’t take it too seriously. To take it seriously though, you have to walk a mile in Bill Maher’s shoes…let’s say you hate Sarah Palin and the United States of America, as well. Now try it on for size: Are these remarks honestly hilarious knee-slappers? Or is it more fair to characterize it all as a nervous giggle? Calling a woman you don’t like, a cunt? That’s “humor” right off the elementary school playground.

There’s an awful lot of stuff being presented over the last, let’s say, ten years give-or-take that just isn’t funny. Maybe you think I’m speaking out of my own unique perspective on things, bringing my biases into it. I admit that’s a possibility, but not an altogether imposing one; it’s dealt-with pretty easily. Just take the identities out of it, and with those identities, the objects of loathing, hatred or affection. Pretend Bill Maher referred to some generic, faceless, nameless woman as a cunt. Is it still gut-bustingly funny? If not, then how come it’s that way when you re-insert Palin’s identity? There’s only one answer possible: Audience & comedian are sharing a moment, not of jocularity, but of camaraderie. And only weak camaraderie at that — the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” type.

And so they jiggle their voice boxes to show their unity…and if any outsiders should call out that this says derogatory things about their character, huddling together in agreement that an object of mutual loathing is a cunt, out comes the “can’t ya take a joke” defense. Read that as: We’re good, you’re the problem.

But then, in that situation, this isn’t really a joke. If I have to disclaim everything under the sun as being unworthy of serious thought, in order to find a joke funny, then the joke isn’t funny. If in only inspires laughter in people who feel some strange surreal urge to laugh at everything, then it isn’t funny.

One final point worth mentioning: Some people, and not just a few, manage to straddle the chasm. That is to say, some people have been known to lodge verbal or written complaints of the sort “I do not find that funny in fact I find it offensive” — even on behalf of third parties, who exist in no way except as hypotheticals, as in “someone somewhere might find that joke offensive.” And then, go on to tell JINOs. As if to say: I get to blow the whistle on your jokes, but your complaints about my jokes are meaningless even when my jokes aren’t even supposed to be funny.

See, this is a situation that remains unclear only when we refuse to come up with the words to properly describe it. These nattering nabobs are not declaring this thing or that thing to be funny or unfunny; they’re passion judgment on who matters. The stand they are taking, is one of defining strangers into insignificance and irrelevance, by saying: “Yes, I know this is offensive to you and that is the point. Nothing will come of that. You just need to learn to take a joke.”

Ed Morrissey wonders,

What makes free men [in] landing craft in rough seas jump out to face this?

Continuing…

Think of that picture above and the courage it took to take that first step. Many of the men who saw this vista died without ever getting past the shore. What made them take that step? Certainly discipline strengthened them, but these men knew that they faced one of the most evil regimes the world had ever known — and that the Nazis wouldn’t stop with Europe. Evil could not be contained, nor appeased; it had to be fought and destroyed, and that it would take a tremendous sacrifice to end it. They went forth to battle evil, and even if they as individuals fell, these men knew that liberty and justice would defeat evil, and that their sacrifice would make that victory possible.

What compelled free men do such a thing sixty-seven years ago? Probably the fact that eighty-seven years ago, that thing little kids do with with the “Why do I have to do it? It’s his/her tuuuuuuurn…” was thought of as a little-kid thing. By the time a child reached majority age, he was expected to say something more like “If it’s gotta be done, then who better to do it than me?” You know, the kind of guy you’d like to be the closest neighbor if your house caught fire.

The good news is, that if such a mission were ever made necessary again, God forbid, we have the young men & women who would and could do it. The outcome of the war would not be won so decisively, I’m afraid…in American history, it hasn’t happened very often since WWII that a foe was well and truly vanquished.

But with liberal degenerates taking over everything, it’s still possible to bring out the best in people. The military is in good hands.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t learn a lot from such historical examples. There is a world of difference between a free man seeing what needs to be done & doing it, and a communist slave-in-all-but-name just plodding along at something to the detriment of his own interests, for the “greater good.”

Sonic Charmer wants to know why they change size. Or, not so much wants to know, but is having trouble getting past the dimension shift.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the increased mass. Although there is an explanation:

Charles Q. Choi from LiveScience.com further explains that unlike the Hulk, gamma rays are not green; existing as they do beyond the visible spectrum, gamma rays have no color at all that we can describe. He also explains that gamma rays are so powerful (the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation and 10,000 times more powerful than visible light) that they can even create matter from energy – a possible explanation for the increased mass that Bruce Banner takes on during transformations. “Just as the Incredible Hulk ‘is the strongest one there is,’ as he says himself, so too are gamma ray bursts the most powerful explosions known.”

Sonic takes particular umbrage with the increased size of the teeth. His real beef is with the CGI…he’s watching the most recent version of Hulk. And he’s right, Hulk’s teeth are like the size of cereal boxes. It just doesn’t work…

But I disagree about this being in a completely different league from Superman zipping through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, and then landing just as clean as when he took off. I rode my bike twenty miles just today, and I’m covered with scum and dust and dead insects…even pebbles. Of course, Superman doesn’t have to wear sunscreen, but still.

Yeah, that bothers me just as much as Hulk’s teeth. Superman’s speed is measured in miles per second…speeds like this can melt the wings off aircraft…but when he lands, every hair is in place.

That’s just as bad, I say.

And while we’re at it, how come seagulls always seem to be immaculately groomed? I mean, in real life. They’re wild animals, aren’t they?

Hat tip to Gerard.

I have this weird opinion floating around in my head, that as one surveys the fruited plain — or the junkyard full of wreckage — of American cinema, one can glean from all the items strewn hither & yon all the strengths and weaknesses of our dominant culture. In other words, my nutty opinion is that if you can show me what we’ve been watching to distract ourselves from the pain of life, I can show you our thinking as we’ve been going through that life.

Maybe I can even show you some of what brought about the pain. Oh, but that’s getting a little deep for this particular post…

…the point of which is, it seems to me that Sonic Charmer shares my nutty opinion about movies. Or, just pieces of it anyway. Our thinking is more eccentric than we as a society are willing to admit, and this shows up in our cinema:

Being a teenager is like being royalty. You have no responsibilities and virtually all your mental energy is focused on your personal entertainment and relative social status. This royalty is also perpetually declining, however; by definition and construction it has a finite shelf life: the royal status ends more or less when high school does, or at least college. And teens are painfully conscious of this expiration date, even if not explicitly in these terms.

This is why so many teen movies are tinged with nostalgia, sadness, and angst. In any event it should be possible to identify strong parallels between stories of ‘declining royalty’ and stories of ‘teen angst’. Are they really the same story? Crossover movies like Cruel Intentions made the link explicit. But the sense of a sadness for a lost royal age, and desperation to salvage something before the peasants storm the castle, is there in most teen movies, from explicitly nostalgic ones like American Graffiti to modern ones like Can’t Hardly Wait.
:
If this is even partially right, society seems to have made something of a macro error in creating the life stage we call ‘teenager’, which is a relatively new phenomenon. Consciously it is a well-intentioned effort to shield young people from realities while they have a chance at an extended childhood and to complete their development, but in practice it seems to be a recipe for unhappiness while it lasts and regret/nostalgia once it’s over. To treat people like royalty only to set them up for an ouster from the royal house is not an unalloyed kindness. Worse, we seem to be going in the wrong direction; according to conventional wisdom, an ever-increasing percentage of young people are supposed to continue with more and more years of ‘school’ after age 18 – and the more schooling the better. This is a doomed attempt to extend the unsustainable stage of royalty beyond economic realities.

I’m having a difference of opinion with a certain family member concerning the leisure activities of a mutual relative who is junior to us. The discourse is a meeting of the minds between two worlds…one world in which the “down time” of lazy children is somehow sacred and sacrosanct — for reasons never clearly stated — and the other world, in which…well, kids get a “vacation” when their parents get vacations, not before. And that’s if they’re good.

I think, if memory serves, the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie starred Heather Langenkamp as the “smart girl who lives until closing credits” girl, and the killer robot from Six Million Dollar Man co-starred as her dopey ol’ small-dee dad who was the police chief or something…that fits the mold beautifully, maybe even defines it. The authority figures — parents & police — are entirely ineffectual in their attempts to deal with the supernatural threat. It’s all up to the kids.

Now interestingly, you go back before this “relatively new phenomenon” of the royal figure who is the teenager…and you enter an earlier time in which it really is all up to the kids. This twenty-year-old and that nineteen-year-old are going to strap themselves into a bomber, fly over Hitler’s troops together and let the bombs fly. Just like facing off against Freddy Kreuger, some come back and some don’t. Except, this was for real.

And teenagers weren’t royalty. Teenagers did what they were told…and later, they did what had to be done. Perhaps the latter would not have been possible were it not for the former.

I’m revising my position. After reading this well-thought-out article linked by our blogger friend in New Mexico, I have experienced a spiritual awakening, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I can see Sarah Palin is a thoroughly inadequate candidate. We’ve got to do something to make this woman go away before she scuttles our chances in 2012, and Barack Obama coasts to an easy second term…which I don’t think this country can survive.

This is the passage that really turned me around:

The years since 2008 were Mrs. Palin’s opportunity to redefine herself, to shake off the McCain tinge, to shatter the press stereotypes of her as a right-wing zealot. This was certainly within her ability. After all, prior to getting tapped in 2008, Mrs. Palin’s reputation was as a clear-eyed, inclusive reformer—one with soaring bipartisan approval ratings.

Instead, Mrs. Palin has chosen to cater mostly to her loyalist base. She’s purposely chosen to insert herself into nearly every national controversy—all but forcing voters to be for her or against her. Far from being reassured, many independents have felt confirmed in their fears about her temperament. She remains radioactive among a majority of voters, and she has even polarized Republicans. A March poll showed that 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view her unfavorably, a number that far outpaced that of any other potential GOP candidate.

The stakes in 2012 are high. Mr. Obama is a sitting president. It will take a mighty GOP nominee (not to mention a lot of luck) to knock him off. Mrs. Palin would come into this race with little or no infrastructure, a near complete lack of a policy agenda, and eye-popping unfavorables. Nothing is impossible in politics, but her start is not encouraging.

Yes, now that I’m looking in on this “other” world from the outside, and making my first moves toward joining it, I can understand the appeal.

Making decisions a certain way, because & only because nameless, faceless strangers, whom you don’t know and never will meet, made the same choices. Choices you embrace fully, but the logic to which you will not, and cannot, explain.

It’s like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. No responsibility. Don’t ask me why this is the right choice, I only know that it is! Look at all those other people! Whoops, sorry, you can’t see them and neither can I. Oh well, they’re out there. Somewhere. Other nameless, faceless no-account busybodies keep telling me about ’em…and they wouldn’t lie. Why would they? They have no preconceived agenda at all! I think.

Anyway, I can certainly see the appeal. “Everybody knows it’s true because everybody knows that everybody knows.” No one taking individual responsibility for figuring out what the facts are, or what they might mean. Proxy fact-gathering, proxy-inference-forming, proxy-freakin’-everything. It’s like going back to high school or something.

Well, here’s one nagging problem with my conversion: If Palin is not the good candidate, then who is? So far, in spite of my asking this question of the rightward-leaning libertarian-spirit Palinophobes…I haven’t got back a single cogent, coherent response. Not one. Not a single time.

I haven’t even got the beginnings of a list of requirements to be applied, to figure out who such a candidate must be.

So I figured I’d do this legwork for them. Heck, if they were ever going to do it themselves, let’s face facts, they’d have done it by now. And they won’t put together such a list, so it falls to me.

They’ve been unified, and enthused, about why they disapprove of Palin so much. So the way I figure it, this is just building on top of the foundation they’ve already laid. So onward with Step 2 — your “Good Candidate” requirements document…

1. Male, or ugly woman; either way, never wears a skirt or dress
2. Went to Yale or Harvard, or a school with the right “prestige”
3. There is nothing novel about the state of origin, which rules out not only Alaska but probably a dozen others
4. Enlisted, saw combat, but not in any war or engagement that was particularly controversial
5. Meticulously puts “g” on the ends of all words
6. No pregnant daughters, no family members with mental disabilities
7. Children all have common names
8. Never participated in any gross or disgusting work that might show up on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs
9. The usual with kids’ education; candidate is an advocate for public schools, but kids all go to Sidwell
10. Takes “moderate” positions on global warming, which I guess means we need new taxes to fix it all
11. “Moderate” on the economy, which I take to mean we need more regulation like what caused the mess in the first place
12. “Moderate” on stimulus spending, means we need to keep trying it again and again until it magically works
13. “Moderate” on drilling, which means don’t
14. “Moderate” on education, and that would have to mean don’t make any waves with the teachers’ unions
15. Wears all kinds of expensive clothes, but for unexplained reasons the media will never question it
16. Knows that Gaborone is the capitol of Botswana and that it has a population of 192,000…or isn’t asked about any such thing
17. Refuses to talk about Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright
18. Despises waterboarding
19. On record as thinking Dick Cheney is pure evil
20. Friend to Oprah
21. Gets along great with Joy Behar
22. Bill Maher thinks he’s a swell guy
23. David Brooks likes him
24. Plays a musical instrument while guesting on Letterman
25. Laughs good-naturedly at jokes at his expense, even if he’s called a baby killer or a war criminal

And after all that, don’t tell me let me guess…everyone to the political left of Orin Hatch is going to stay home, or vote to re-elect Obama anyway. Because He’s cuter. Sounds like a plan!

Hmmm…you know, after looking this plan over, along with what details I can cobble together and the likely outcome of it all…I dunno. It’s like I have a feeling of deja vu. Like I’ve already been through this a couple years ago…plus six months and twenty-nine days. Just a feeling I can’t shake. Am I imagining it?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Why go into the details. Sarah Palin recited an historical event that “obviously” was supposed to go in a certain direction, and she took it in a direction different from that and this is ipso facto proof that the woman is a complete ditz who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Aaron Worthing, guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications, has an excellent roundup of the explosion that ensued…and, the salient linkage that shows Palin was not so wrong after all.

Isn’t it obvious what’s going on? Palin is doing what this guy is doing:

Whitney Pitcher has more to say about the details of Paul Revere’s ride, but that isn’t what I wish to inspect at this time.

Now that we’ve been through enough turns on this merry-go-round, I wish to take a look at the people who continuously pipe up, sneering at Sarah Palin that she needs to study a history or just crack open a book…without first studying history or cracking open a book.

I made the link to Stockholm Syndrome because some of the people I know who are doing this are, in fact, sympathetic with Governor Palin’s point of view that the country is going in the wrong direction. These people are not pussy liberals; in fact, the picture that emerges is one of a freedom-loving, rightward-leaning libertarian type. They agree the Second Amendment is the only gun permit anyone should ever need, and that the best cure for an ailing economy is to simply allow the lowly citizenry to make money. They pay their taxes on time, and they take notice when the people helped by those tax dollars, have much bigger teevee sets than they have. They know global warming is a scam, and they fight the scam. They’re good Americans. They know things are cocked up, and as long as the matter under discussion is non-Palin-related, they can be counted-on to do the right thing. They’ll fight the madness with the resolve of Sisyphus.

But when the Barracuda pops up, this all changes.

These are the very same people who really go apeshit when Palin warbles her way through another “Kyle Steals a Ride” fake-out. They tap into a great wellspring of adrenaline, which our left-wing friends don’t seem to have, I see; beating the Wasilla Wonder upside her pretty head, transforming themselves into frenzied perpetual-motion machines of spite, ridicule and snark, while the lefties quickly tire of the game and move on. These are the people who seem to learn absolutely nothing from the last go-’round.

Yesterday morning, having no idea what was about to take place with the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, I updated the list of Things I Know with the stuff that had been stewing in my smartphone for a few weeks, and it just so happened this item came in through that batch:

396. Once disaster is perceived as inevitable, people will resist any efforts to thwart it.

The captive will begin to sympathize with her captors, and not only defend them but resist the efforts of rescue. It’s like, they’re dangling off the edge of a cliff, desperately clinging to some sagebrush or whatever…Sarah Palin extends a dainty and well-manicured, but strong, hand in their direction…and no thankyew. Palin’s voice is annoying, or she must be an airhead because perception is reality, right? Or her legs are too shapely. There must be someone else up there who can yank us up — we’ll hold out.

Just ridiculous. But that’s where we are, I’m afraid.

And it would be an object of merely intense quizzical study and maybe some measure of pity. But the captive is the United States of America. Obama’s got the country hostage, and is forcing it at knifepoint to withdraw from its own ATM, repeatedly. His handling of the employment situation is a complete boot-pissing exercise, an absolute albatross.

And He may get another four years to do His damage, just because of the repeated fracturing of the eleventh commandment. Nope, it hasn’t gone out of style yet. The Gingrich hoop-de-doo, evidently, didn’t teach anybody anything.

Commenter Peter probably said it better than anybody this morning:

Keep devouring your own dear pseudo-conservatives. You will ensure that Obungler gets reelected.

Yup, there it is. If you allow your skills to atrophy, and de-value your powers of reasoning, you eventually lose out and it doesn’t matter how many or what kind of services you receive. If you can’t do, you can’t get.

A society filled with such people cannot survive for long.

It starts with the little things.

Hat tip to Boortz.

Gallup:

Americans break into two roughly evenly matched camps on the question of whether the government should enact heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in the U.S. Forty-seven percent believe the government should redistribute wealth in this way, while 49% disagree, similar to views Gallup found four years ago.

Notice the question that accompanies the graph: “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich?” The sway that is involved is actually very slight, but since the ramifications involved are so significant I wish there was a better idea of how many people are deciding this based on economic climate of the moment. In other words, how many say “No it should not, as a matter of principle” versus how many say “Ordinarily it might be a swell idea, this just isn’t a good time for that.”

Maybe they should conduct another poll in which they ask “Do you think it’s any of the government’s [expletive deleted] business?” In our modern culture, I notice people are rather slow to say “I have a right to my property” but they’re great for saying “it’s nobody else’s [expletive deleted] business.” Privacy over property; take my spare change but leave me my weed.

Well anyway, it’s good to see the right side is winning out. If it can happen with gas approaching five dollars a gallon, it can happen anytime. Question for the “Yes, should” types: You do realize this country doesn’t have a wealth tax, right?

Hat tip to Ed Morrissey, who adds:

Redistributionist policies will always appeal to those who see themselves as outsiders to economic success. One might expect that the terrible economy of the last three years would have boosted the popularity of Barack Obama’s populist agenda, but it seems the opposite has occurred. Americans know that job creation comes from private investors taking risks with their wealth in order to create even more wealth, and not from government confiscation of wealth to create new bureaucracies that create nothing but red tape. We have spent the last two years watching what happens when government takes wealth out of the economy, and the results — chronically high unemployment, bad housing markets, and a falling dollar that brings high fuel and food prices — are no longer dim reminders of the 1970s, but our current environment.

RealClearPolitics:

As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

“New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed,” reported cnbc.com May 25.

“Personal consumption fell,” Business Insider reported the same day, “when it was expected to rise.”

“Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month,” Reuters reported May 25, “worse than economists’ expectations.”

“Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall,” headlined Bloomberg News May 19.

“U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April,” wrote The Wall Street Journal May 18.

Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.

The first question that naturally emerges is, how much do you really know about what’s going on if every little thing that happens comes as some sort of surprise to you?

The second question is: In what way is an Obama administration good for the economy? What Obama policy is likely to make sales & purchases & profits take off and go through the roof. Any Obama policy…anywhere. Any industry, any year. Where could we expect such an effect to happen, or to have happened?

There’s Cash For Clunkers, which “unexpectedly” didn’t pan out. So that’s toast. What else is there?

Time to face facts: Obama is a democrat. The policy proposals of democrats, make commodities more expensive. All of them, across the board. Unless you count what is to be provided for “free,” at taxpayer expense.

But with a democrat in charge, those who have the means to pay for the things they consume, will have to pay more. The labor costs more, the transportation costs more and the taxes cost more. This is true of all commodities, all issues, stem to stern.

So can someone please explain to me how it’s “unexpected” that the economy will stall? When you put some quality thought into it, it really can’t go any other way…can it?

On Memorial Day, I started out inventing another new word and ended up penning an essay about Give-A-Damn, and the comical and tragic situation into which we’ve placed ourselves by not…well…giving a damn about it. I proclaimed Memorial Day to be Give-A-Damn day. Events since then, have unfolded in such a way that the essay puts them in a new light.

Nothing with regard to that particular piece — this is The Blog That Nobody Reads, after all. But Blogsister Cassy is on the warpath against Hallmark Greeting Cards, and their fictional cranky Madam Maxine. We’re squarely in her corner on this. Although, for reasons that will be explained, we’ve had far less charitable feelings toward this cartoon than she’s had…

On 5-30, for those customers who feel so inclined to send cards on Memorial Day, this panel appeared:

This is where Maxine cartoons start to lose me, on any day. A lot of the time she acts as an emulsifying bonding agent among people who’ve found it somehow virtuous to — well, here we are right back at square one all over again — not Give A Damn about anything.

Here’s the problem: However these lazy apathetics may protest to the contrary, they don’t find a lack of Give A Damn a virtuous thing straight out of the chute; they have to do their fellowshipping with one another about it, in order to maintain this illusion, and I get the feeling that’s where Maxine comes in. Look how hip the old battleaxe is, she doesn’t give a damn about anything. Supposedly there’s something admirable about that. If we gave a damn, we’d tell you what it is.

She’s like a seventy-five-year-old goth chick. No, I don’t think we have a shortage of such an attitude.

But as Hallmark is finding out, it becomes an especially aggravating problem on Memorial Day. In my family, the service members who saw combat all lived through it, thank God, and have since retired naturally from their mortal coils. Now they’re gone. Cassy, meanwhile, has a husband who’s been through multiple deployments just lately, and has survived one roadside bomb. So Memorial Day has special meaning for her family, and for many other families as well for the same reason. So Hallmark, which makes its very living off of the feelings people have when they lay their eyes on the company’s products, has engaged in something wretchedly insensitive here. Plus, they’ve made an idiotic business decision because these are the very people who would feel so inclined to exchange mementos on Memorial Day…who, typically, might consider purchasing Hallmark products for that purpose.

But here’s where it gets weird. I made the comment up above that, when people who find it virtuous to lack any Give A Damn about anything display said virtue by showing off that they don’t have any Give A Damn, they need to fellowship & bond with each other before they find it virtuous. From what I’ve read, out on Maxine’s Facebook page, several offended persons made their feelings known politely and respectfully — and here came the guff. Not “I disagree the cartoon is not offensive,” but rather all kinds of smear and slime and snot and flamewar nonsense. Personal insults aplenty.

Cassy’s treatise on it is here, Susan Katz Keating has examples of the snide snippets over here and BlackFive has a very decent and thoughtful write-up here.

Cassy’s message to Hallmark is here, which I’ll quote in part:

I am writing to inform you that you have lost a Hallmark customer. On Memorial Day, you published an offensive cartoon from your character, Maxine. The text was as follows:

“Lots of people don’t have to work today. Which is why my motto is “Live every day like it’s Memorial Day!”

This was offensive to many people, including myself and some Gold Star families. I know many of the people who commented on Maxine’s Facebook page to express their disappointment. All of them are supportive of the military beyond just complaining on a Facebook page, as your fans would have you believe. It’s bad enough that most Americans view Memorial Day as a day only for a three-day weekend and barbecues. It’s even worse that Hallmark would further this idea.

After many of us posted that the cartoon offended us, Maxine fans responded extremely crudely. They attacked us, including a Gold Star mother. The page moderator did nothing. We were insulted, told to shut up and go away, and still the moderator did nothing. After a while, Hallmark issued a rather weak apology. However, they still took a stand against the military. Comments from military families who were offended were deleted. Comments from fans attacking military families, though, were let stand. Some of these included being called “inbred hicks”, “retards”, and much more. Why were comments from military families — respectful comments — deleted while vile, crude insulting comments directed at said military comments let stand? Clearly, the company apology was not sincere. Actions speak louder than words, and your actions clearly show that not only does Hallmark NOT support our troops and respect the sacrifices of the fallen, they actively side with those who disrespect and insult our troops and their families. This situation could have been handled differently, but Hallmark made a choice and took a stand. You chose which comments to delete and which comments to keep, and the comments you chose were vile, rabid, insulting, and disrespectful. Apparently those are the customers you value — not our troops and their families who are sacrificing for your fans to have the right to insult us.

I visited the page to try to find comments about this, and most of what I found was more polite than “inbred hick” stuff (although I did see that). However, even the polite counterprotests from the “pure” Maxine fans crossed a line, although I don’t think the authors of those comments realized it…because they all had it in common that they presumed the offense taken by the others, was due to some kind of personal problem.

And this is why I’ve never been particularly fond of Maxine. We’re finding something out about human nature here, and what we’re finding out is not pretty: To be dysfunctional is to be a controlling ass. There is no such thing as a lovable, not-give-a-damn type of curmudgeon. If you make a decision not to pick up litter, and then someone picks it up, you look like a jerk. So it’s going to be a natural thing, if you don’t make the world a better place you aren’t going to want anybody else to do it either. If you don’t have the balls to intervene and keep someone from being beaten up, you aren’t going to want anyone else to do it either.

And if you think it’s just great that Maxine, and all the “taker” type people she represents regard Memorial Day as just a day to sit on the ol’ ass and not give a rip about anything…then you’ll be offended when someone else is offended…and you’ll feel inclined to lash out, to lay down these snide insults, as if the offended persons had something “wrong” with them that made them offended, and therefore, should just shut up and go away.

Well yeah, they do have something “wrong” with just them that doesn’t have a bearing on everybody else. Except it isn’t “wrong,” it’s more like special and exclusive, and that’s exactly the problem. The problem is that they, and their family members, and their families themselves, have made meaningful, often life-changing, debilitating sacrifices, sometimes mortal sacrifices, and they’re getting the feeling the rest of the country could care less. You know what really bottom-lines it? There are times when Maxine-style apathy just isn’t funny.

Actually now that I think on it, this nails it even better:

…I hear Marines say over and over again that the Marine Corps is at war while America is at the mall. You people are a shining example of that.

Well hey. They’re Maxine fans. There is bound to be a huge chunk of this crowd, made up by worthless buttholes who think if you give-a-damn about anything, there must be something wrong with you.

This is a bigger problem than just Maxine. All too often, our culture tends to place value on things without first asking salient, sensible questions about things that are supposed to be precious: Is it useful? Is it rare? This “don’t give a damn” is neither one of those. It is, in fact, prevalent and to the best I can discern, it is the source of absolutely nothing that’s any good.

I do admit though I’m wondering what Maxine does for Veteran’s Day to get the crowd giggling. Does she walk up to the vet handing out flowers & pins at the entrance to her corner grocery store, and kick him in the shins or something?

Lesson to take away? Everybody can’t Give A Damn about everything…but its polar opposite, the not-give-a-damn, is not a fashion statement. Or it shouldn’t be one anyway. It’s rather toxic and it isn’t really funny. There does exist a need to find it funny, but that by itself doesn’t make something funny.

In my opinion, and this is not exactly going out on a limb, the need-to-find-not-give-a-damn-funny, is related and connected to the need-to-beat-up-on-people-who-give-a-damn, and the friends and family members who are offended on their behalf. So maybe, before people make a decision to go through life not-giving-a-damn about things, they would do well to look down the road, to think through ahead of time, how they would feel about it if someone else came along who gave a damn. Would that make you look foolish? Would that make you look lazy? Would it make you look like an asshole, a jerk, a dickwad, a horrible human being, or maybe just a waste of skin and vital organs that would do more good in someone else’s body?

If so, then maybe you need to think twice before constructing an entire identity around this goth-hipster “I’m cool because I don’t give a damn about anything” thing. Because if you do, someday it’s gonna happen — someone will bring a good outcome, when you’re too cool to think about doing it yourself, and you’re gong to look like the jackass you are…and then you’ll want to lash out. Best case scenario will be you’ll stay silent and be thought of as a dick; worst case, you’ll speak up like these Maxine fans and remove all doubt.

So your one-liner is: Only way to win at this game is not to play. Better to just Give A Damn. Ironically, that just might end up being less work!

Update: You know, thinking on this some more: While the statement,

Everybody can’t Give A Damn about everything…but…

may or may not be true. Let’s assume for sake of argument this is true and it’s impossible as a human endeavor to go through life giving a damn about everything. How should we then live? If we can’t give a damn about everything, the next best thing would be to place value on people who give a damn. Which means, to appreciate people who give a damn, more than people who don’t give a damn.

That ultimately means looking down on people.

So the inference I’d draw is, this cultural movement we had throughout the final third of the twentieth century, or so…that nobody should ever look down on anybody. I see a linear path of parentage there. We, as people living in a sophisticated society that is trying to right the wrongs of the past, are forbidden by taboo from seeing any other people as better or worse than any other people no matter what. We are required, therefore, to see all people as equal.

But humans cannot see other humans that way.

So…we do whatever takes the least amount of effort, and some diseased minds in our midst have taken to seeing the apathetics as better people. This hyper-enthusiastic drive toward not-giving-a-damn about anything, and finding Maxine cartoons to be “funny,” is like a bastard love-child of this other hyper-enthused drive for a perfect society so strictly egalitarian as to remain entirely fictional.

If you’re wondering where this is coming from, my suggestion is to hop on over to the Maxine page on Facebook, and see how risible and rancorous some of those “nothing to see here” comments can be. It’s really shocking and really deplorable.

Obviously, not-giving-a-damn means never having to be ashamed of your own conduct.

I’m on the Dad’s side on this one, I think. He’s not ignoring the ball for yet-more-clingy with the daughter…he decides to try to catch the ball instead. And he gets a lecture from security?

Hat tip to Jawa, who seems to have a different take on things.

There is a parent-code solidifying before my eyes here; maybe it hasn’t taken on the form & shape it seems to have taken on, to me, since I live in Folsom and I may be getting an unnatural perspective. But I don’t like what I’m seeing.

If you are a man, you cannot use your voice to address your children in a pitch lower than a woman’s voice…even though you’re not a woman. Hugs & kisses all of the time, and never, ever tell them they did anything wrong. The adorable moppet knocked a hole in the wall and then smeared feces all over it? Just adorable!

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But answer me this: If the guy ignored the ball to do some more huggy bonding with the kid, how safe would the kid be then? Right…if it were not a baseball, if it was some other projectile with no glory attached to it, only danger, then the loving protective Dad would have done exactly what this guy did. And come out of the situation a hero. But since it’s a baseball, the community needs to rise up against this creep and maybe put the kid in protective custody.

Well, it is a different situation, I’m sure the Dad thought of the baseball as a glory souvenir and not a deadly missile. But it isn’t diffferent, meaningfully so. It’s essentially the same thing happening. My point is, sometimes the community needs to just jam its hands in its pockets, turn around and mind its own business. The kid’s obviously fine. Dad needs to work on his baseball skills a little, maybe the girl can help out with that. But the nattering nabobs can chill out a little here. Ease off.

Legs in the news…albeit photoshopped…

From here, which is linked over here, which we found out about by way of FARK.

The problem is not with the cheerleaders, or with the sixteen-year-old (girl) student who put the insulting article in, but in grown-up-land. Some grown-ups think the yearbook is an exercise in free speech, is therefore sacred…in fact there is a Supreme Court decision, or law, or something saying the administrators have to let the students have the final word. Other grown-ups think the cheerleaders enjoy some equally sacrosanct right to flip open the yearbook and not be offended by anything they find in there. Many grown-ups, I’m gathering, believe both things and glide on through life blissfully unaware of the contradiction.

But there’s a contradiction. You can’t have both of those. It’s one or the other.

Me? I’m one of the rotten stinkers who doesn’t believe in either one. I think the admins have a right and an obligation to interfere if the content flouts some standard or other — and, when you open the yearbook you might find something that might not necessarily appeal to you, and that’s okay. Both these ideas of mine, I hasten to point out, reflect the world in which grown-ups live after they’ve grown up. So why we’re trying to impress on children that it’s not really that way, is something I’d need to have someone explain to me…doesn’t seem to me like anything that will help them down the road.

I’ll go along with this, though. It’s rotten to put in something insulting about identified individuals right before graduation — no rebuttal possible, no recourse available if the writer & editor happen to be seniors. Maybe that’s the best way to handle it: The yearbook content, cover to cover or most of it, is decided by graduating freshmen. So the image-conscious sophomores and juniors have an incentive not to be complete dicks to the freshmen, and the freshmen have an incentive to save that “done with school, answer to no one, rebel without a clue” nonsense for three years down the road.

Granted, that does not address the problem here quite so much…but, like I sad, that’s alright. I’m not sure it has to be addressed. Imagine such a snotty article is written about you and your fellow cheerleaders, now add ten or twenty years. Is it a problem? Really? No, it’s funny. Admit it, it’s a minor footnote at best.

This one needs an attitude adjustment:

“Ugh! I was really mad. I was shaking,” said cheerleader Breannah Gully after picking up her yearbook. “And I started reading, and everyone had to tell me to calm down and I was just angry at the words, and I called my mom and I was crying.”

So that’s another litmus test I have: If you describe the problem to me, and I end up more worried about your upbringing than about the problem itself, then that’s a fail. This girl seems to think performing before an audience has something to do with controlling the reaction the audience is supposed to have, right down to each individual within…and that’s a much bigger problem than the yearbook.

One-line summary: A good supply of car explosions, if cars getting wrecked by a giant robot count as car explosions; but no tits. So it barely nets a 50% score on the tits-and-car-explosions test.

A solidly put-together entertainment product. My quibbles are with the content, not the execution. Think I got fooled into watching a chick flick. One guy went shirtless, and then there were no females to watch at all, except a warrior princess and a couple of hipster chicks, all fully clothed.

The special effects were great, the story was on the weak side. The conflict between Richard the Lionheart and King John from any old Robin Hood story, was mashed together with Transformers II and The Good Son, threw in La Femme Nikita for good measure, then they mounted it on the ledge from Tron: Legacy, laced it with some monsters from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and let it fly.

Something should be said about the sets. I want a dining hall in my dream house like what they had. A throne room like Odin’s wouldn’t hurt either.

Ever notice, lately, in these movies that star the puppy-face actors who were born sometime in the 1980’s — the men are all exotic European/Australian types, but the women are super-duper-Yankee-Americanized urban yuppie chicks? That certain voice inflection is really starting to wear on me, I must say. Julia Roberts, Monica Potter, Natalie Portman, Katie Holmes, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley…they all have it. Just a little too polished and a little too flat. It’s got that “never stepped foot out of an urban metropolis with at least five million people living in it” sound to it.

It’s easy to see what is going on here: The women are hyper-normalized — unremarkable — because that’s what attracts women. “You, too, can lock lips with a hunky long-haired Viking God,” that’s the message.

Well, Anthony Hopkins managed to save it. I suppose I could even recommend it for a theatrical viewing…only because it’s in 3D, and it looks good enough to justify it. The story is weaker than Avatar, which is really saying something…were it not for the stunning visuals, I’d say wait for home rental.

Said stunning visuals, be forewarned, do not include anything having to do with the female form, at all. Except for the warrior chick. She was easy on the eyes. But there’s nothing to see there except a pretty face. We can’t even have any fun debates about “real or silicon,” not that much to see. The visual treats are all for the ladies.

Best comic book adaptation so far? No, I won’t sign up to that. Lately? No, I won’t sign up to that either. This is a solid medium, nothing more. A solid C+.

One of Hawkins‘ finest:

Anyone who follows politics knows that the mainstream media has two sets of rules: one set for conservatives and another set for liberals. Conservatives spend most of their time correcting smears and trying to explain to the public what they really believe. Liberals, on the other hand, can count on the press to hide their unpopular beliefs and put the best spin possible on everything they do. This is why you often hear Republicans say, “Imagine what they’d say if a Democrat had said that,” while you almost never hear Democrats say, “Imagine what they’d say if a Republican had said that.”

Those two separate sets of rules shape how politicians behave, how they’re perceived, and the issues that they spend most of their time talking about. In Barack Obama’s case, the media would be focusing on an entirely different set of issues if he were a Republican.

Of course it’s all speculation, but not very far-fetched as far as speculation goes. See if you don’t agree. The six items:

1) This guy is way too stupid to be President of the United States!
2) Obama’s an amateurish cowboy who’s wrecking our image around the world!
3) Obama’s going to bankrupt the country by giving our money to his corporate cronies!
4) He’s the job-killing, gas-price-raising, economy-wrecking President!
5) Obama’s not an authentic black man.
6) He’s an arrogant jerk who cares about no one but himself!

John Hawkins did forget about one, though: It’s going to take the next President all sorts of time and effort just to clean up all of the messes this one is making.

Hat tip to Terri.

Surber:

Canada’s economy grows, while America’s sputters.

The difference?

Drill, baby, drill.

From the Wall Street Journal:

OTTAWA—Canada’s economy expanded at a 3.9% annualized pace in January through March, the fastest clip in a year and more than double the rate in the U.S., as businesses replenished inventories and boosted investment spending and exports rose while consumer and government spending stalled, Statistics Canada said Monday.

Gross domestic product growth was marginally below the consensus call of 4%, and also undershot the Bank of Canada’s 4.2% forecast.

GDP growth accelerated from a downwardly revised 3.1% in the fourth quarter, which was originally reported at 3.3%. The economic performance was the reverse of the U.S. where growth decelerated to 1.8% in the first quarter from 3.1% previously.

From Bloomberg News:

Canada’s current account deficit (on a seasonally adjusted basis) with the rest of the world declined for the second consecutive quarter to reach $8.9 billion in the first quarter, led by a larger goods surplus. The $1.4 billion decline in the current account deficit was largely attributable to strong export volumes of energy products.

In the capital and financial account (unadjusted for seasonal variation), the purchase of Canadian securities by foreign investors slowed in the quarter, but continued to account for most of the inflows to Canada. These purchases, almost equally split between Canadian bonds and stocks, were the lowest recorded in a year.

The overall surplus on the trade in goods widened in the first quarter to $1.7 billion, up $1.3 billion from the previous quarter. Trade with the US accounted for all of the gains, as the goods deficit with other countries increased in the quarter. The goods surplus with the US expanded to its highest level since the third quarter of 2008, notably on much higher exports of energy products.

Canada drills for more oil than it needs, the United States does not drill for enough oil to meet its name.

A world power does not remain a world power long under those conditions.

Much has been said about how this-or-that candidate for the Republican nomination would be a substandard contender because President Barack Obama, with all His debating skill, would mop the floor with ’em.

But has anyone given any thought to what He Who Walks On Water would actually say? How many issues are there? Every single molehill that was made into a mountain over the last three years…the “Beer Summit,” oil-in-the-gulf, Libya, Egypt, taking a zillion weeks to decide what to do in Afghanistan…and then the stupid issues like gay marriage and legalizing pot. Iran and North Korea, and then you have things like this drill-or-don’t-drill that cut right to the heart of the matter of whether Americans are good enough to have claim to the things we need. Whether we count, whether we matter, whether we should apologize to the rest of the world wherever we go…

What would the transcript to a debate look like, between Obama and X? Correct me if I’m wrong, we’ve not seen Him participate in an old-fashioned, off-the-cuff Reagan/Carter debate have we? I saw him participate in one of those “joint press conferences that are called debates” once three years ago.

Does Obama have the talent to think up, on the spot, an answer to pointed criticism about His own record after He’s been managing something?

And won’t it be tedious listening to ninety solid minutes of “I’m still working on cleaning up George Bush’s mess”…especially in regard to situations, like this one, where that obviously is not true?

This has to be the dumbest story I’ve ever seen…I’ve been ignoring it because I really don’t care. I haven’t seen the picture, I don’t want to, I don’t care what it looks like, don’t care if it’s real, don’t care if it’s fake, and I really don’t care whether it makes the Congressman look…uh…I’m observing the “eyes up front at the urinal” rule.

I know he’s a die-hard lefty and also an asshole on top of it, and this makes him look silly. I still just wish the story would go away, it’s just dumb.

But Iowahawk gave it a treatment that’s got me in stiches, several times per paragraph. I can’t help it.

Meanwhile, there’s a generous award available to whoever brings the Weiner-Whacker to justice.

Update 5/31/11: Althouse has more thoughts, about what parts of Weiner’s version of events don’t add up, and the glaring double standard at work.

I’m listening to the morning radio as I type this up. All Weiner, all the time…

Christine Miserandino explains what it is like to live with a debilitating disease:

I asked her to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never-ending supply of “spoons”. But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting. She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn’t even started yet. I’ve wanted more “spoons” for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? I also told her to always be conscious of how many she had, and not to drop them because she can never forget she has Lupus.

I asked her to list off the tasks of her day, including the most simple. As, she rattled off daily chores, or just fun things to do; I explained how each one would cost her a spoon. When she jumped right into getting ready for work as her first task of the morning, I cut her off and took away a spoon. I practically jumped down her throat. I said ” No! You don’t just get up. You have to crack open your eyes, and then realize you are late. You didn’t sleep well the night before. You have to crawl out of bed, and then you have to make your self something to eat before you can do anything else, because if you don’t, you can’t take your medicine, and if you don’t take your medicine you might as well give up all your spoons for today and tomorrow too.” I quickly took away a spoon and she realized she hasn’t even gotten dressed yet. Showering cost her spoon, just for washing her hair and shaving her legs. Reaching high and low that early in the morning could actually cost more than one spoon, but I figured I would give her a break; I didn’t want to scare her right away. Getting dressed was worth another spoon. I stopped her and broke down every task to show her how every little detail needs to be thought about. You cannot simply just throw clothes on when you are sick. I explained that I have to see what clothes I can physically put on, if my hands hurt that day buttons are out of the question. If I have bruises that day, I need to wear long sleeves, and if I have a fever I need a sweater to stay warm and so on. If my hair is falling out I need to spend more time to look presentable, and then you need to factor in another 5 minutes for feeling badly that it took you 2 hours to do all this.

Give•A•Damn (intang. n.)

1. Effort applied to a task that goes well above-and-beyond the level of merely plodding along. Like you give a damn.
2. Evidence of this.
3. Benefits of the successfully completed task that go beyond the initially stated objective, which could not have been delivered if it weren’t for some Give-A-Damn in the effort applied.

Note that these three definitions overlap somewhat.

In business, parenthood and house-shopping I’ve been throwing this word into conversation when it seems there is no other phrase that describes this important concept, and it occurs to me this is one of many places where we hurt ourselves with our choices about what words need inventing and what words don’t. We need to start giving a damn about Give-A-Damn.

I realized I was derelict in my failure to add this to my “make new word” list, when I stumbled across this risible Memorial Day slideshow of “Best and Worst War Movies” over on NY Daily News. I haven’t much of a quibble with the “best” ones, but the “worst” end of the list is…here, I’ll bottom-line it: Pearl Harbor is a “worst” movie, and so is A Bridge Too Far, along with Patton.

Those last two are on our movie shelf because they’re packed chock-full-silly with Give-A-Damn. The Michael Bay monstrosity, not so much…I will never see that one again, much less own it. I know of no effort to describe saliently why it is, exactly, that Pearl Harbor sucks. But I can bottom-line it for you: Aside from the marvelous footage of the bomb dropping on the deck, it’s completely lacking in Give-A-Damn. It doesn’t belong on any list alongside Bridge Too Far or Patton. It isn’t even in the same universe.

As I pointed out on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, the problem with the list is that it was compiled (anonymously) by a damn hipster. I can’t prove it, but I think that’s the issue: Some under-thirty-five hipster, an American Castrati, who understands Give-A-Damn about as well as Mark Twain’s metaphorical pig understands the day of the week. That is my primary complaint against the hipster culture, why we will never have a need for it that will match any trace portion of its vast abundance: The hipster lifestyle does not understand, much less appreciate, Give-A-Damn.

The rest of us are going to have to compensate for their apathy and ignorance. Memorial Day is a great day to take notice of this. It’s Act-Like-You-Give-A-Damn day.

ThatIsAll.

Have a happy one, and spare a thought for those who have sacrificed, and those who still serve.

Update: Cartoon of the day: via Don Surber.

The Hill reports on Mac’s remarks, without comment, to get their lefty commenters all riled up and it works beautifully.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said he thinks Sarah Palin could defeat President Obama in next year’s presidential election, but he’s far from certain that she will actually jump into the race.

The GOP’s standard-bearer in 2008 also shrugged off his former running mate’s poor standing in many polls, saying she would have the opportunity to turn that around if she did make a bid for the White House.

“That’s what campaigns are all about,” McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I’ve never seen anyone as mercilessly and relentlessly attacked as I have seen Sarah Palin in the last couple of years,” the Arizona senator added. “But she also inspires great passion, particularly among the Republican faithful.”

I find this to be the most agreeable statement coming out of John McCain’s mouth in quite some time.

Can Palin beat Obama? That’s an easy question; the much harder one is will she. It’s up to her to jump in, and then it’s up to Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida to figure out whether they like her better than His Wonderfulness. If it comes down to that, and that’s a big “if,” her odds are much better than average.

Like all other big decisions, the Presidential Election of 2012 can be decided the way Architects decide things or it can be decided the way Medicators decide things. If the voters in the Penn/Ohio/Fla triumvirate think like Architects, she will win, and if they think like Medicators then He will win. And in any free society, that’s going to be a tough call. There are forces at work that naturally position the “front” in such a battle close to the fifty-yard line; that is to say, when either side dominates it labors under a heavy burden of disadvantage.

It’s very similar to the way an old metal alarm bell works. The clapper comes in contact with the bell, a circuit is closed which trips a relay, activating a magnet that pulls the clapper away from the bell. The circuit is then broken, the relay shuts off the magnet and the return spring moves the clapper in contact with the bell again. Think I got that right…some of the details might be flipped around. But the point is, the machinery operates in a perpetual cycle. That’s exactly the way Architect/Medicator conflicts work.

The Architects — those who think their way through life’s problems rather than feeling their way around them, the ones who couldn’t care less what popular consensus is because it has no bearing on what the correct answer is, the Henry Reardens of the world if you will — become dominant when the outlook is bleak. People see their own livelihoods attenuate, and figure out they just can’t afford any more cockeyed decisions. So they delegate the decisions to someone who thinks things through sensibly, who offers solutions based on if-this, then-that. Once the Architects dominate for awhile, things get better because the decision-making process has a natural tendency to evolve intelligently. Whatever is tried, and fails, is pitched overboard because that is what thinking people do. Thinking people also put more stock in decisions that have been shown to be successful.

And so things improve…problems get solved…and, after awhile, the clapper moves away from the bell. People get it in their heads that there are no problems that need to be solved, therefore the point to life, if there is one at all, is to be entertained and happy. And so they start to turn on the Architects and put more faith in the Medicators. Interestingly, they manage to do this without ever acknowledging any problems ever got solved, that anything ever got better. That’s exactly where we were two years ago; we needed Barack Obama to solve “all these problems” that George W. Bush created for us. But the unemployment rate was just beginning to snake upward from the 5.5 percent where it had been for awhile, nosing up through the sevens. That would be a pretty sweet deal now, wouldn’t it? How about gas at a buck sixty-one, any takers?

But we have “all these problems”; nobody can describe them in any great detail, but they’re not too bothered by that because they’re thinking like Medicators. Not too keen on details at the present time. And so you get this happy talky laughey jokey fun-to-watch guy who speaks in vague bromides and looks good in a suit. Makes people feel so good. He must have the answer to “all these problems”! It really doesn’t make much sense when you think about it. But it isn’t being thought about, it’s being felt about.

So we put the laughy-talky-Guy-Smiley in charge of things…and…the relay is tripped. We get a bunch of silly decisions made. But deep down, people feel — feel — like that must be okay. They won’t admit it out loud, but their feeling is that they can afford some foolish decisions now & then. But then, of course, you get to a point where it’s been a very long time since anyone can remember a decision made by the looks-good-in-suit guy, that wasn’t foolish. And that’s where we are now.

What’s the last thing Obama handled sensibly? Alright, let’s go ahead and count the shoot-bin-Laden thing…that decision made lots of sense. Anything else? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

Aw that’s okay. Obama looks good in a suit. And THERE’SJUSTSOMETHINGABOUTHIMICAN’TEXPLAINIT!!!

But you know what? The “details will work themselves out because Obama’s awesome” thing is on a steep decline. It’s gotta be that way. People are suffering, they’re having trouble buying enough gas to get to work to earn the paychecks that buy the gas.

Nobody really knows what Obama’s going to decide to do next. His decisions aren’t all completely bad, but it may as well be a random decision-making process. It’s racist if I compare Him to a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard, and it’s racist if I compare Him to a Magic-8 ball. The point is, it’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get…uh oh, maybe that’s racist of me too…

But when you’re having trouble getting gas so you can go to work, this “that’s racist” stuff isn’t gonna cut it. The situation becomes one adroitly summed up by my Facebook friend Mike Simone,

If you voted for Obama in ‘08 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll need to vote for someone else in ‘12 to prove you’re not an idiot.

Clang! We’re having trouble buying gas and food. We can’t do anymore experimenting with these randomly-deciding, feel-good Medicators. It becomes a natural event in the course of the human experiment, that the Medicators are told to take their beer summits and stick ’em. Just can’t afford the silliness anymore.

Now the people who might be compelled, every now & then, to vote for an Obama will never admit this: But the clapper will meet the bell, it is quite unavoidable. Feeling your way around life’s challenges, as opposed to thinking them through, falls out of fashion. It has to. At a certain point, when things continue to go wrong because there’s too much feeling & not enough thinking, eventually it doesn’t feel good anymore to make these feel-good decisions. And when feel-good decisions don’t feel good, then what’s the point?

Palin-haters sound very silly when they try to deny this. They sound like this guy:

That woman is not going to run for President. She’s just doing her bus tour and movie to raise money to pay for her house in Arizona. I’ll say it again: she’s not running for President. If she was, Faux News would’ve fired her just like the did the other Faux News contributors who were thinking of running for President. She’s an idiot. I can’t say it enough.

“She’s an idiot I can’t say it enough”…reworded only just slightly, and I suspect this re-wording is much closer to the truth…becomes an abject exercise in the purest cognitive dissonance: “Everybody needs to stop mentioning her name I can’t say it enough.” Now, whether you have your biases toward the Architect way of managing things or whether you like the Medicator way of managing things, it’s a cinch that if you’re starting to worry about the refrigerator being bare and the gas tank being empty, you’re probably not going to be all that pleased with the biggest decisions in your economy made by the representative of lunatics like this guy, who thinks with all the clarity of a dog chasing its own tail. Does he even know that “Faux” rhymes with “Dough” and not with “Fox”?

As I’ve said many times before, this is going to be an interesting election, whether Palin jumps in or not. We’re voting on common sense itself. Can life’s most vexing and challenging problems be solved with yet another bacchanal, festooned with phony Greek columns? Or as the situation continues to deteriorate and the price of gas soars past five, six, seven dollars a gallon, does the time come where you have to start thinking like a grown-up?

McCain’s right. She absolutely does have a chance. I’m not pleased at all that it is improved when our country’s buying power and start of living continue to diminish; that is a real tragedy. But it is what it is.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

So says Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel. The full excerpt is:

Intel is on pace for what Otellini predicts could be the company’s best year ever but said other businesses are not so lucky. “A lot of companies are sitting on the sidelines right now,” he said, due mainly to a lack of clarity about taxes and regulation.

“Take the uncertainly out. Businesses can’t invest until they have fewer variables and right now there are just too many variables,” he said. [emphasis in original]

Or, as a tire company executive put it some three quarters of a century ago, during a dress rehearsal of what would later become Obamanomics: “[The investor] will not risk financing new ventures if the government take is greater than that of the average gambling house.”

In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I’m an Intel employee.

There is so much good meat in this article that brings us the two quotes above, it’s like a half-year-early serving of TurBaconDuckEn and I don’t know where to start with it. Although BlogUncle Gerard knew exactly what to do. He went after the tastiest morsel on the lovely, juicy, glistening, baconey-goodness salty carcass.

What would happen, if, heaven forfend, Obama actually went into business himself?

Oh my, he had fun lifting & linking that one. Yes, the High Prince of Hope and Change, Birther Zero, Mister Let Me Be Clear, founder of the “Office of the President-Elect.” The Teleprompter King. The very archetype of the non-productive telling the productive what to do, and feeling perfectly entitled to do so…not because He was sworn in on January 20, 2009…but simply because, since childhood, nobody has ever told Him “no.”

What if He was part of an effort to — not sell some stinky piece of legislation that is so pus-filled and rancid that everybody and his dog needs some kind of “waiver” from it — but create a product, bring it to market, and move it along to the consumers who can use it? And at a profit? Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last six years, you know He has some considerable skills. But are they applicable to useful pursuits? In any way? Any at all? Any mission that has something to do with helping people…in ways other than forcibly taking money from one class of person and giving it to another?

The anecdote about George McGovern suggests the intensity and magnitude of surprise that awaits “Professor” Obama in the Driscoll hypothetical.

But there is more yummy goodness here. Obama manifests great talent at non-productive things, and doesn’t manage to suggest any talent at all in things that would actually create other things. But that, by itself, offers no evidence of any contempt toward the private sector. Notice I said “by itself.” Just because you have a lack of aptitude for tending to a discipline, doesn’t mean you harbor actual disdain against that discipline.

The wifey, Mrs. O, took care of that part:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do…Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

But the real problem — what is asphyxiating our economy in the here and now — is perhaps best summarized by another anecdote near the very beginning:

Adolf Berle, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state, sounded for all the world like Hank Paulson or Timothy Geithner when he argued in the late 1930s for a “modern financial tool kit.” Tool kit means “let me fiddle around” and not “let us agree together on rules and abide by them, together.” [emphasis Driscoll’s]

It’s a quote from Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man.

What we are to learn from all this, is that investors are people. That sounds like I’m pleading for some kind of sympathy for their benefit, which is where the progressives tune out. That’s the world in which they live — light on the “if this is done, that happens” and extremely heavy on the “it’s so-and-so’s turn to get all the attention, advantages, pity and praise.” But this isn’t about pity or praise, it’s about the other; the if-this-then-that.

Because they are people, and thinking people, they go through a process before they shake loose of the bucks. As Chairman Otellini points out, uncertainty about the outcome, and the variables that contribute to the outcome, affect the decision to shake loose; they’re less willing to do it. That’s just the way sane, reasonable people can be expected to behave.

As I thought some more about the Theron Trimble interview, my mind did this sort of a flip-floppy thing like a fish on the bottom of a rowboat right after you caught it — it tends to do that. And I managed to dredge up this quote from H.L. Mencken:

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.

In the years of my youth, when leftists were still in the process of taking over academia, and the grade schools, and the newspapers and the alphabet-soup television networks and anything else that had to do with communicating…this had slowly morphed into something like “conservatism is the nagging fear that someone somewhere is having a good time.”

Post-Reagan, this morphed-Mencken idea might be ripe for another re-think. When it comes to after-tax money kept in a personal wallet or purse, it is consistently our left-leaning friends who are consumed with a quaking, shivering, pulsating, apprehensive fear that someone, somewhere might have cash to spend on having a good time.

No, no, no, they say. Give back to the community. Go ahead and have a good time, as long as it doesn’t involve money that could be going back to Uncle Sam…unless, that is, you’re one of these special people. Anyone with the last name of “Obama,” “Kennedy” or “Clinton” can go ahead and be rich. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and George Soros can have lots of mney, as long as they say or do things every now & then to help advance leftist causes. Deny global warming, and all bets are off — fork it over.

But I heard that undertone from Theron Trimble yesterday. Florida taxes gently, Florida doesn’t have an income tax…Neal Boortz says “yeah, why do you think I’m here?” And Trimble, very clearly, disapproves…and not just a little bit.

The fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time — with their money. And doesn’t owe anybody anything, nor is looking to anybody to protect them from any imminent, looming threat. Looking forward to making more loot tomorrow, living a happy, independent and secure life.

That is their ultimate nightmare scenario. They have a genuine phobia about it.

Wisdom, from me, over at Rhymes With Girls and Cars.

I recall seeing somewhere someone made the point this is an aspect of modern leftism: An inordinate fascination with linguistics. Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics. To a liberal, if you find ten different ways to say the same thing, you and those around you become ten times more worldly. Naturally, expending the same magnitude of energy pondering ten different things with a single language, would make you an unsophisticated dullard.

Or, thinking about only one thing with one language, with ten times the diligence…maybe succeeding in anticipating some important facet, preventing a disaster.

We’re trying to figure out where this thing came from, where the word basura is used to describe trash. Sonic Charmer says it must be people who think Spanish-speakers are complete idiots. I agree with the logic in his theory, I can’t sign on to the theory itself just because I know better. It’s the danger inherent to all generalizations. My boss, the dead one, started the thing back in the old job of writing “basura” on the cardboard boxes to be discarded, and I know he was just being considerate. Efficient, too, probably. You put some big bulky box where you think it will get pitched, come back in Monday to find it still there, that’s annoying & counterproductive in an office environment.

But no, he didn’t have a condescending or mean bone in his whole body. Unless he thought all kinds of people were idiots and was just really good at hiding it…mmm, hey, waitaminnit…

But I do have to say, Sonic is right. You would have to be a complete imbecile if you spoke Spanish, and you saw something marked “trash” instead of “basura” and didn’t know what it was. I would think, if you’re in another country you should be ready to see some signs put down in a language that is not yours, and also be ready to figure out the easy ones & respond to them.

It raises a distinct possibility that some of our Spanish speakers are guests, are not supposed to be on this side of the border for some reason, and don’t think of themselves as being in another country. Now, that’s a problem. That pushes somewhat out of the field of illegal immigration, and into what could be called an actual invasion. Sort of a lazy, meandering “I don’t think of it as an invasion” invasion.

So no, I don’t agree because I can’t…but I definitely see where he’s going with this. It goes right along with having to Press One For English. We’re having a cold, soft civil war right now, trying to figure out if the United States is an English-speaking country or a multi-language country. It is a muted argument, because when people think of conservative-versus-liberal disagreements they tend to think of abortion and taxes. But this is just as important: Once you teach a child how to count to ten, should the next lesson be about how to add? Or should you go on to counting to ten in Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Swahili…

From The Other McCain.

It’s amazing all the freedoms the rest of us get to enjoy, that Governor Palin apparently isn’t supposed to. Existing, breathing oxygen, riding on a bus, making money…

McCain — er, that would be the one whose writing we enjoy, “The Other,” Robert Stacey — goes on to find out about something else that has not vanished: Decent writing at Wonkette. Really! Flawed (two “for” instances in the first sentence), but poignant and flows nicely.

We don’t like Meghan McCain because she is a multi-millionaire and gets writing jobs for which she is utterly unqualified for, not because of her breast size or her butt, neither of which concerns us at all. When you make her “a victim of the Internet” because she posts pictures of her big boobs, which for most women are considered an asset, then you let her off the hook for being an ultra-rich Republican who is taking writing jobs away from talented non-rich people. Even clicking the NYT link is probably forwarding her “writing career,” which exists solely because her dad is a failed presidential candidate from four years ago. Thank you for your co-operation. [New York Times]

Ironically, Meghan McCain is the one writing “Wonkette” style:

I love skulls. I have 10 of them. I love the way they look in my place. I have one on my night stand; one on my desk; crystal ones in my kitchen; one that’s filled with vodka; some with diamond eyes.

Semicolons instead of bangs, but still. Like it’s chopped! Into little pieces! Like sushi!

I wish Wonkette learned to like Ms. McCain…not pleased seeing rancor come out of that corner of the universe. Wonkette, Meghan, they’re like two sides of the same coin. Like the hero & the villain out of a comic book, or pulpy old action movie, “We Are Not So Different, You And I.”

The Meghan/Wonkette duo seems, or seem, to be laboring under a delusion that the continuing existence of the universe depends entirely on some designated object of loathing not getting any attention. Meghan is concerned that there isn’t a news blackout on Palin, and Wonkette is concerned that the same isn’t happening with Meghan. Normal rational people, meanwhile — myself, Robert McCain, Sarah Palin — don’t give a rip, and I notice we are very seldom the ones to bring up these contraband subjects. Meghan McCain talks about Sarah Palin much more often than Sarah talks about Meghan. Meghan talks about Sarah much more often than Sarah talks about Sarah.

What is it like to live like this, with all this concern about what total strangers, whom you have no way of meeting and thus will always be strangers, might be talking about & thinking about? Good heavens. Even real writers manage to dredge up concern only about something vaguely resembling this: Will they think about my latest piece long enough to put some money down on it? And then they move on. The Meghan/Wonkette crowd on the other hand, has made it their own personal migraine to fret away about where the attention of complete strangers should not be going.

Meh. That’s just strange. But no more so than blaming your lack of dating on a former state Governor who currently holds no public position.

Hey, is that why a completely unskilled and unqualified junior Senator got elected to the White House? So the whole country would stop paying any attention to Sarah Palin? Just another promise on which He’s failed to deliver? Come to think of it, has Meghan ever gone on record to say she voted for her Dad? Hmmmmmm……..

Well, I’m not going to be thinking too much of Meghan McCain — but as far as I’m concerned, anybody else can watch or pay attention to whatever they want. The only thing I want to know about Ms. McCain is the one thing she doesn’t seem to want to describe about herself: What is it about the Republican party that makes her want to be in it? Some Republican position on some issue, somewhere? Any at all?

But don’t worry about it, because kids’ punishments are confidential.

KION 46, via Treacher, via Instapundit.