Time Out: 5:08
Time In: 18:11
Distance: 71.67
Scariest wild animal encountered: If bovine creatures count, a herd of cows I seem to have sent into a stampede. On one of those “okay if I do this again I don’t think I’m coming this way” shortcuts, it became a doubtful proposition as to whether I was still on a public road…this situation arises frequently out there. Never saw any barriers. I pushed on through and made my egress. But the cows didn’t appreciate it.

Didn’t break the distance record, but that was not the intent anyway. It was quite by accident that I came as close as I did.

I’ll put a map together when the opportunity presents itself…

Just dang, people.

After 5,852 posts and six and a half years, I misspelled a word. Okay?

And I’m actually seeing a spike in traffic as a result. How pathetic is that?

…to arrive at tax freedom day (article is now one year old).

Tax Freedom Day — the date on which Americans have earned enough to pay this year’s tax obligations at the federal, state and local levels — falls today, April 27th, for residents of Connecticut, giving them the latest Tax Freedom Day in the nation. This is 18 days after national Tax Freedom Day (April 9).

Rhode Island reached Tax Freedom Day on April 12th, Massachusetts on the 14th, and New York on the 23rd.

And why is tax freedom day important?

…Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined.

But it’s taken from the rich and then redistributed to “working families” so that makes it all okay, right?

You can tell there’s something fundamentally dishonest about it, because when the time comes to defend it, the defenders just want to talk about police, firemen, sidewalks and park benches.

Go Connecticut.

Liberals tend to fall for the false consensus effect, and conservatives tend to fall for something that could be thought of as its opposite.

This is an important observation, I think, so indulge me a few paragraphs to explain it. We have people who do real work, and people who don’t. Overall, you’ll find people who do work have a tendency to — as they said when we were growing up — “see what needs doing and get it done.” People who don’t work tend to bitch about what someone should do, wait until someone gets it done, and then contribute a bunch of “ideas” in some big gab-fest about where the product of the work should go. That’s what post-industrial-revolution liberalism is: Non-producers making rules about what should be done with the items of value produced by producers.

Where we’re at, now in the age of the Tea Party, is the producers have again been reminded that they can’t tune out of the political process and busy themselves with producing. So the producers, the conservatives, feel this conflict that is not felt by the non-producing liberals. Our inclination is to say “fuck this shit, I’ve got work to do”; kiss the wife & kids, go off to work, toil away, come home, pop open a beer, do our projects or watch teevee or whatever & go to bed. We put together our software or our bales of hay or our car parts or our pottery and figure that justifies our existence. But then the non-producing liberals come along and make their rules about what should be done with what we built. Or what should be done with the wealth generated by what we built. And so after we’ve built our things, or before we’ve built our things, or during, or wherever we can somehow manage to find the time — we must participate in this gab-fest about redistribution, and if we can’t manage to do that, the result is the same as if we never bothered to build anything.

Because that’s what really motivates our liberals. When you live out a non-productive life not actually creating anything of value, you don’t want anybody else to do that either.

Where the false consensus comes in, is: Our liberals are stronger when they make this common mistake — they congregate together and come to an understanding that “everybody” thinks the way they do. You hear this when a liberal politician makes a speech about American values. You know this part, you’ve heard it before, it’s where they start pulling things out of their butts and show us they have no clue what the Constitution actually says. They start off with this bastardized and corrupted reading of the fifth and sixth amendments…not about the speedy trial so much, but “innocent until proven guilty,” and then of course we’re going to make it harder every damn year to “prove” guilt, until the streets are crawling with violent criminals again. Then they meander from that to all the nonsense. Diversity. Yeah, it was Ben Franklin who thought to toss that one in, either him or James Madison. Open borders, lots of social programs, the rich should pay their fair share. Classically American values!

See, that’s false consensus at work. “Everybody in line-of-sight in this room agrees with me on this one thing; therefore, everybody with a pulse must agree with me on all other things.”

This opposite of false-consensus that hobbles the conservative mind, has to do with conjuring up a villain on some issues where, maybe there really isn’t one. And this is an important point, I think. We’re directing this energy toward the gab-fest on Facebook and on the blogs. We have all these other things we do where we’d rather be directing the energy, but experience has taught us we can’t do that and neglect the gab-fest because the end result of the gab-fest determines — dictates, unilaterally, I’d say — what will become of the fruits of our other labors. And it’s not too hard to pick up on the resentment we have over this conflict. We’re being painted into a corner, here, and dammit we don’t like that.

And so, I think, it’s important to develop a sense of looking at all the people who disagree with us, and figuring out who’s real and who is just an illusion. Our tendency has been…and this is the opposite of false consensus…to hear of some voice of someone who disagrees with us, and leap to the assumption “that is a real person speaking sincerely of his opinion and he represents God only knows how many millions of other dickheads.” We need to be leery of this. There are too many talking points out there being regurgitated.

Yes, I’m speaking of Astroturfing. To read the Wikipedia article on Astroturfing and skim the Recent Examples (political) section, you’d think the progressive side never does it, ever. This has been a very silly situation with that page that has been going on for quite awhile. Read up on the “Ellie Light” situation. Wikipedia editors and admins are well-intentioned, honest folks — except when they’re not.

Heck, just listen to what some of the supposedly real people have to say. The woman who interrupted Lou Barletta’s town hall meeting for example —

While he was going through a slide projector presentation about the Medicare changes proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), a woman raised her hand.

“Excuse me, I’d like to get something off my chest,” she said, standing. “You seem to think that because I’m not effected [sic] I won’t care if my niece, my grandson, my child is affected. I do care. What you’re doing with this Ryan budget is you’re taking Medicare and changing it from a guaranteed health care system to one that is a voucher system where you throw seniors on the mercy of for-profit insurance companies.”

“You said nothing in the campaign about I’m going to change Medicare, now you voted for a plan that will destroy Medicare,” Linda Christman, 64, said. Christman is president of the Carbon County Democrats for Change, according to Barletta’s office.

A concerned citizen who happens to be a democrat activist? Or a democrat activist who happened to have some time to turn the town hall into a circus? You be the judge of that…but these cliches are dishonest. “Throw seniors on the mercy of for-profit insurance companies.” That might get a “real” citizen excited, but it’s not an honest expression of real-citizen concerns. Real citizens are concerned that their nieces (that’s the next generation), children (next generation) and grandchildren (two generations forward) won’t enjoy some absolute, unconditional guarantee from the government that we can’t afford as of right now anyway?

That’s bullshit. Plants and puppets. Puppets and plants.

One of my favorite examples of this, lately, is all this polling that says the public supports public sector unions over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. You know the drill…

As labor battles erupt in state capitals around the nation, a majority of Americans say they oppose efforts to weaken the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions and are also against cutting the pay or benefits of public workers to reduce state budget deficits, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
:
Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.

Riiiiight. Because if there’s one classically American value that really counts for something, it is that nobody who is a member of a union should ever feel the effects of a recession, ever. They shouldn’t have to wait for their raises even when the economy sucks, they shouldn’t ever have to worry about layoffs. Such indignities are for the rest of us. And after governments take some money away from us in the form of taxes so they can function as efficiently as possible, we need to have some other part of government, also funded with our tax dollars, to “negotiate” with…uh, somebody…so it all ends up being a jobs program that costs as much as it possibly can. Yeah, nobody has a peep of protest to offer against that except a bare majority of those extremist Republicans.

My other example is this drive to teach gay history in the public schools —

Over forty years ago, African Americans demanded public school districts and other educational institutions to reform their curriculum in order to reflect the experiences and histories of folks other than white men…in the years that followed, other ethnic groups and women would follow suit and push schools to revise their curriculum to be more reflective of United States history.
:
These battles over what and whom should be included in public school curricula are far from over; e.g., Texas State Board of Education approves revising textbooks to eliminate the civil rights movement, and Mississippi becomes the first state to implement a civil rights curriculum for grades K through 12. But it appears that public school curricula may undergo an entirely new makeover with the recent news that the state of California is close to becoming the first state to require the teaching of gay history.

According to the Associated Press, the California Senate approved the landmark measure a week ago, but it still needs to get a seal of approval from the Democratic-controlled Assembly and Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. If the legislation is a success, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people will be added to the lengthy list of social and ethnic groups that schools must include in social studies lessons. As early as the 2013-2014 school year, the California Board of Education and local school districts would be required to adopt textbooks and other teaching materials that would cover the contributions of LGBTs throughout history.

It is, of course, a stupid idea because the parallel does not exist. You conduct a class and say “Here’s Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb” and you’re not going to get too far before everyone can see this is a white guy. And so if we grant the black-history argument every conceivable advantage, then we eventually acknowledge, alright if you’re a black kid you might feel a sense of estrangement that doesn’t apply to the white kids.

But you’re probably not going to cover the fact that Thomas Edison was straight. I mean, he was, wasn’t he? Gee, I don’t even know that for sure. In all my learning about Edison, the subject simply never came up which is exactly my point.

But my other point on top of that point, is even more important: I don’t think there’s anybody I need to convince of that. Who’s really for LGBT history month? Who’s pushing this? A bunch of well-intentioned but mistaken liberal dipshits who could be my co-worker or my neighbor? Doubt it. Yes, it passed the Senate. Gov. Brown would sign it if it landed on his desk; of that I have no doubt. So yeah it could become law.

But I don’t think anybody’s being fooled by this turkey, anywhere. You have some “citizens” who are for it, but again, they aren’t uninvolved citizens. They’re egghead quacky docs and education professionals who stand to make money off the new curriculum.

This is a hazard that applies to conservatism that doesn’t apply to liberalism, since conservatism makes sense. All ideas, whether they make sense or not, must eventually find some opposition somewhere. And nothing really makes more sense than “it should be more lucrative to be a producer than a non-producer, not the other way around” — and — “if you subsidize something you’ll get more of it, if you tax something you’ll get less of it.” Those ideas make so much sense that nobody should be disagreeing with them. But, since they are ideas, someone, somewhere, will.

But that doesn’t mean those are real people. They’re plants. We’re living in the age of the plant. The whore who is paid money, or recruited as a volunteer, to pratfall and faint when Barack Obama makes a speech. It is a reaction, I think an expected one, to this recent development of blogs and social media and the Tea Party. Since the liberals have monopolized the previously-mentioned gab-fest about where the fruits of labor should be directed, and the producers have understood they need to mount a resistance at that gab-fest, a fierce battle now takes place on that hilltop. Both sides perceive that this tiny plot of land holds premium strategic value, and both sides are correct about this. They’re trying to get the first word and the last word.

Liberal non-producers are engaged in this battle because of their natural instincts, whereas conservative producers are engaged under protest. We are very much like the founding fathers rushing off to the battlefield, or off to the halls of Congress, wondering if the wife & kids can look after the farm in our absence. We’re conflicted by that, and furthermore, we don’t like to think some of our friends & neighbors are liberal jackasses. We mind our affairs with some degree of foresightedness, we make decisions deliberately, and that includes decisions about which friends to have. It bothers us to think some of our close friends can be so mistaken about things. It doesn’t seem to bother liberals to think derogatory thoughts about their conservative “friends”; they just write ’em off as gun-and-Bible-clinging assholes, and go about the day.

And so, I think, it might be productive to keep in mind which liberals are real people and which ones are phantoms and plants. Keep the bullshit detector on high alert. The New York Times won’t fess up about the deceptive and leading questions being asked in their polls, Wikipedia won’t be honest about what astroturfing really is or where it’s really being used. We really don’t have the time or energy to be participating in this too much. They do.

In fact, I’m seeing an up-surge lately in the left-wing cliches being flooded into the social media, since the unemployment rate found its new Obama-era home between nine and ten percentage points. Maybe they’re being paid to do it and maybe they’re not; does it really matter? These are still phony positions that, by being offered audibly, sometimes create phony controversies. The California legislature obviously needs an overhaul in its priorities — whether that is possible or whether it isn’t, and I’m inclined toward the negative on that one, the first step is going to have to be the public leads it by example. So many other things are much more worthy of discussion. Like, for example, the high volume of red ink on the balance sheet of our federal government, and on our state governments and local governments. I’d say that’s Issue #1.

So leave the farm to the wife and kids and approach the battlefield. Make it a good fight and a decisive victory; a complete rout, everywhere you carry the banner. But then choose those battlefields very carefully, that’s my take-away from all that. This is an enemy that is fighting us on all fronts, and one of those fronts is information warfare. They’re coming at us with fake attacks as well as real ones.

I cannot help but wonder how much of this effort, which seems to resemble real combat in more ways than one, is being supported with our tax dollars. Directly or indirectly. That, too, fits the Revolutionary-War analogy. Colonials fought British soldiers who were furnished with shot, swords, rifles, horses, and red coats — all funded with taxes paid by the blue coats. They, like we, were placed in the sadly laughable position of paying for their own hanging.

So you see me walking up to some guy, and I tell the guy “Eat poo! Because then I’ll be your friend and stuff. And it’s tasty! And if you don’t, I’ll be all, like, whatsa matta with you, you too good to eat some poo?”

And you come running up and advance the quite sensible argument of “Dude…no. No! That’s just wrong! You’ll get e coli and ptomaine and God only knows what else. Case of bad breath at the very least. Don’t eat poo.”

And then I come back with: “Hey, hold on there now. You have to eat something. You can’t go just eating nothing. You’ll starve to death. That guy over there wants people to starve to death. He’s bad! He doesn’t want anybody to eat anything.”

That third thing there is like what I’m hearing from the President lately, and a lot of His admirers. “I think America wants smart government (dramatic pause)…it wants a lean government (pause) …it wants a[n] accountable government (pause)…but we don’t want no government.” (0:47 to 1:03, here (hat tip to Hot Air).) Okay, now. Who, lately, have you heard seriously advocating an overthrow and complete dismantling of the government?

Far be it from me to speak for every citizen from sea to shining sea who feels some sympathy for the tea party movement. But I think it would be more accurate to paraphrase the platform as one of: Stop spending more than you’re taking in, because we are not going to be distracted from the red ink on the nation’s balance sheet by a bunch of gimmicks. Or: When a trillion dollars in outlays was unthinkable just a generation ago, and two trillion was unthinkable just a decade ago, boosting the spending level by a whole trillion dollars in one year is probably not a great idea. Especially if, while you’re doing that, you’re looking for whole new ways to spend even more.

See, this arguing style has a way of flipping things upside-down — it turns the moderate side of the argument into the extreme side, and thus the extreme side into the moderate side. To rationally thinking people, “eat poo” is an extremist position. My ludicrous and silly example at the beginning of the post inverts the equation, and makes the poo-eating proposition look moderate and any attack upon it look extreme (assuming you’re dim enough to buy into it). Well, that is what the President is doing.

The situation with our nation’s finances is such that “Whoa, slow the fuck down!” is just the reasonable position for any thinking man or woman to take. And I’m afraid that is considerably understating the matter. We have only the barest, slimmest chance of avoiding the fate of Greece, and that’s relying on the premise that Barack Obama is made into the one-term President that He richly deserves to become.

“Pay no attention to those teabagging rubes in the back” is a position that can only be taken by a charlatan…or one who is convinced he will somehow escape any personal responsibility in our nation’s resulting financial mess…or one who is both of those. “And come, gather ’round, let’s find new creative ways to spend even more” is pure insanity.

Uncle Kenny dealt with it this way.

We should all be writing letters that make Uncle Kenny look like a lovable teddy bear. Letters to senators, letters to congressmen, letters to state legislators, letters to the editor (if your local paper still has some circulation), blog posts, and keep fighting those liberal jackasses on Facebook.

They think we don’t give a shit about debt. It’s an old, moldering rotten corpse of an antiquated idea from the New Deal era. God willing, we’re seeing the final internment of that festering carcass. But I suppose there will always be some petty jealous jackals that can’t stand to see willingly unproductive people treated to their just desserts. They’d rather play their game of make-believe, that people who actually generate wealth must have stolen it from someone else, and people who’ve done not a single worthy thing their entire lives and have no talent at anything other than wearing a suit nicely and speaking into a microphone eloquently, are somehow responsible for every good thing that ever happened to anybody.

And they have all this contempt for the rest of us, for getting in the way of this childish fantasy. Well, pardon us all to holy hell.

Sorry. People who don’t produce, don’t get to lead. And insisting that a government live within limits just like the people it taxes, is not the same as insisting that it go away. It isn’t the same as anarchy.

For no particular reason. Call my complaint department if you’ve a mind to.

I see in some parts it looks like they hired the cameraman from Quantum of Solace. “Yo dude…shaky cameraman with a bad case of DT…pretty girl. Over there. Point the camera at the pretty girl. Over there, please.” But you know, I’ll find a way to deal.

Hat tip: Viral Footage, via Linkiest.

Megan McArdle explains the problems involved in trying to make up for the profligate spending of an out-of-control government by simply hiking taxes on the filthy, hated rich. Of course, anybody in California who’s actually been paying attention, will find it to be old news. But it still has to be said:

Without arguing about whether our tax system is fair or not, the fact is that the federal income tax is the most variable part of the code, and the federal income tax is now very progressive; it collects most of its revenue from people at the top. (Whether it should collect even more is an argument for another day.) Because it collects most of its income from people at the top, and because the incomes of the wealthy are more variable than the incomes of the poor and middle class (Warren Buffett’s income can drop by $300,000; mine can’t), we’re going to get deep troughs in recessions, and high peaks in boom times. We will get particularly high peaks when the booms are delivering huge chunks of income to a handful of people in a very short timeframe. According to the CBO, capital gains receipts alone, which more than doubled in Clinton’s second term, accounted for more than 30% of the increase in income tax receipts above the rate of GDP growth. Obviously the ancillary ordinary income, like banking fees, also contributed substantially. Between 1996 and 2000, payroll taxes increased a tidy 30%. But income taxes increased by 55%. In 1996, social insurance receipts were about $500 billion, while income tax receipts were $650 billion. By 2000, payroll tax receipts had grown to $656 billion–but the income tax was collecting over a trillion. Today they’re roughly at par again (though that won’t last–social insurance contributions will drop as the worker to population ratio declines.)

A progressive tax revenue system is necessarily “top-heavy”; and top-heavy things are inherently unstable. Note that this argument doesn’t even venture into the human-behavior aspect of this — when the financial consequences of a decision are changed, do people still decide that thing the same way? If that were true, there’d be no “economy” for us to argue about. And since it isn’t, the change in behavior that is to follow a “tax the rich” scheme is easy to predict: Less profit involved in capitalistic ventures, means fewer capitalistic ventures.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Noonan:

In this week’s polls: An Ipsos survey says 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, up five points since March. Zogby has only 38% of national respondents saying Mr. Obama deserves re-election, with 55% wanting someone new. Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania in 2008 by double digits; a poll there this week shows only 42% approving of his leadership, with 52% disapproving. Gallup had the president’s support slipping among blacks and Hispanics, with the latter’s numbers dramatic: 73% supported him when he was inaugurated, 54% do now. Support among whites on Inauguration Day was 60%. Now it is 39%.

We’re all so used to reporting the general trend of these polls that we fail to see their significance: The more that people experience his leadership, the less they like his leadership. There’s no real reason to think upticks in this direction or that will seriously change this. Another way to say it is that there have been upticks that might have benefited the president, and so far they haven’t.

No further comment needed here, I think.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

So sez Kate at Small Dead Animals…as she links to this.

It’s been this way for awhile, you know.

…[T]axpayers with the highest 400 AGIs (who made on average $345 million in 2007, the majority of which came from capital gains which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15%) were taxed at an average federal income tax rate of 16.62 percent, with effective tax rates within this group ranging from 0% to 35%.

These statistics signal a tax system that is not only progressive, but one that is convoluted and unfair.

I remember my liberal social studies teacher making the case for a progressive tax system. We had a conservative one and a liberal one, and they were fast friends with each other. This was some thirty years ago, you see. Different era. Anyway, the argument had something to do with a “waitress.” She needed every nickel to stay alive or something.

When I was in tenth grade, that did make some measure of sense to me. It still does. But there are prob-a-luhms you know…like…with all the social programs for which one becomes eligible when one earns only the bare minimum required to survive, can it truly be said that the bare minimum can be defined so starkly and so clearly? The necessities required for survival, after all, have much to do with what is offered to the eligible.

In fact, is anybody in America in danger of starving to death because their salaries & wages are too much on the skimpy side? Any kids with swollen bellies in American cities, desperately trying to catch rats & pigeons so their starving bodies can get some protein?

I shouldn’t be able to find any poor people with big teevee sets, right? Certainly, no poor people with teevee sets bigger than those owned by some of the “wealthy” taxpayers who subsidize them? Does my social studies teacher’s argument still hold water if the waitress’ kid wears $300 sneakers to school? What if the waitress has a $500 tattoo?

No, my point is not that everyone in the bottom 45% is able to afford such luxuries.

My point is that when some of them are…and that is undoubtedly the case…we are no longer talking about money required for survival. The necessities of survival have, in one way or another, been provided, thus freeing up the cash for these non-staple items. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that either. Other than this: Don’t characterize it as a discussion about what’s needed to survive, when that is not what we’re really talking about.

Also, 45% is awfully close to 50%. If half of us are not paying any income tax at all, and the matter being referred to the electorate is “should we provide more alms,” then the “we” in that question has lost all practical meaning. If it’s a minority among the electorate doing the providing the question becomes more like one of “should we make those guys over there give us more stuff?”

And we’re way too close to that situation in 2011.

Grappling Hook Head

One who begins with the end in mind, such that his vision of the end result is strong, steely and unshakable, like a metal hook sunk deep into a granite wall; while any the variables involved in getting there are outside of his concern. These people can be hazardous to the success of a project if they know barely enough about the details to monopolize the political power. The tendency is for them to envision the completion of some “favorite” minor task, as the end delivery product, so their “grappling hook” vision concerns the completion of some relatively minor task rather than the completion of the overall project itself. Their knowledge is deep but narrow.

The thinking of a grappling-hook-head, and the impracticality of it, can be summed up in a single statement: “In the course of running this touchdown, when I reach the twenty-yard line my right foot is going to be on this spot.”

In technological pursuits, the grappling-hook-head becomes quickly enamored of the use of a particular tool. A purebred bureaucrat is notorious for inculcating a “Not Invented Here” environment. The grappling-hook-head fosters an environment of “Nothing Invented Here Except This One Thing.”

In their exuberance about all the details involved in achieving one particular task, and from the frequent regurgitation of well-thought-out implementation considerations involved in that one task, the grappling-hook-head very often ends up taking over much more complex and involved projects that contain many elements unfamiliar to them. This is often not a result of their own instigation, but rather of the perception that the individual has achieved a “perfect blend” of political mastery and technological know-how. This is a disaster, because when the grappling-hook-head encounters something unfamiliar, his favorite response is to double down and re-immerse himself in the workings of his favorite tool, and how it will bring about the optimal results in his favorite miniscule task. The project then proceeds without any top-level design existing anywhere, on paper or in somebody’s head, nowhere at all — noodling out how things are going to get done stem to stern. Middle management has no incentive to put one together, and senior management doesn’t know enough to force them to.

The one situation for which a grappling-hook-head is least prepared, is the one in which the favorite-miniscule-task is successfully realized by some alternative means. Once the grappling-hook-head ensconces himself into a position of political or organizational power, a perfect storm ensues when such an alternative emerges, especially when new evidence arrives suggesting the favorite-tool brings the inferior results, and the alternative method brings better ones.

The resources of the project are then spent on some heated duel between these two methods, only one of which may be implemented to achieve this relatively meaningless task. In this situation, there isn’t too much else that rises to the grappling-hook-head’s attention, and delegation of responsibility is very low. To the extent it exists at all, it is in a state of decline.

If the favorite tool is in fact discovered to bring inferior results, a great tragedy arises: the grappling-hook-head sets out trying to be an Ayn Rand hero, and metastasizes into the perfect Ayn Rand villain. He uses his “phantom” but superficial knowledge of technological workings, charisma, charm, force, “strong personality,” et al, to take over the project assuming he hasn’t taken it over already, and forces all things to be done his way. The results that arrive afterward are substandard, or maybe even disastrous. His solution to this is to insist, in an even more shrill tone, and with even more zeal than last time, that more things be done his way. (After all, there’s only one explanation to be considered about why the problem wasn’t solved by now; somebody must have done something wrong.) Thus, the crisis that developed from their last big screw-up, provides the urgency which is channeled into the impetus for their next incremental seizure of power. And so a vicious cycle develops.

I’m drawing on more personal observations than I can count as I write this up. So if you’re reading this, and you and I worked on something together, rest assured this isn’t about you. If you really think it is, I can guarantee it isn’t just about you. It’s about, oh…five, six, seven or so experiences I’ve had over the years, that I can think of right off the bat. I have to try pretty hard, myself, not to become like this. It’s part of being human. And I have to be humble; I like to think that by simply paying attention to this, I’m successful all the time, but of course life doesn’t work that way.

You really don’t need to wait too long to see this happen, because humans aren’t wired to receive that most unpalatable of thoughts: “My wonderful idea has been given a fair try here, and it just isn’t good.” Cutting our losses doesn’t come easy for us. We can learn how, but we just aren’t wired for it.

Ken Blackwell:

[W]e’ve become a culture where earning money doesn’t entitle you to it; but wanting it does…

Or, as Charles Payne put it:

* The harder I work the more I owe society.
* The less I work the more society owes me.

How did we get here? By the efforts of people who feel an intense terror down to the marrow of their bones at the slightest suggestion of the formula all thinking men and women know to be unalterably true:

Every significant enterprise we’ve seen from this government since January 20, 2009 has been an exercise in willful avoidance of this.

What motivates people to avoid it? Pain. Hard work to be expended tomorrow is easy; hard work to be expended today is a terrible prospect. Hard work that was avoided yesterday is a profound regret. Too many of us have pasts filled with three, four, five-hour blocks spent watching the idjit-box…knowing, deep down inside, that this expenditure of time, now lost forever, might have been spent creating wealth. They don’t need anyone to tell them. They know.

So they lash out at whoever didn’t do it that way. “Rich get richer, poor get poorer.” “Took advantage of a tax loophole.” “Not contributing their/his/her fair share.”

But aw gee…something about circumstances. Opportunities. Didn’t go to college, couldn’t graduate from high school, blah blah blah.

That’s my own tune, actually. I’m a high school grad myself, come from the wrong side of the tracks. It isn’t that my sympathy for this is low; it’s more like in a state of decline. And you know what? It damn well should be.

We’re not Oliver Twist. This isn’t London in the 1840’s. You can grab a nice laptop for $300, and software that will make it useful for something for another $100. Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, anything else you want is just a mouse-click away, and free.

That’s not to say getting a job is easy in Obama’s America. It isn’t. But getting the skills? You just have to want to, and that’s as good-as-done. Oh yes, I agree you could call that something of a trite and ignorant statement in times past. But it’s certainly true now. Work and wait, work and wait, make some good decisions, and you’ve got a valuable and salable skill.

You doubt me? Resurrect some guy from 200 years ago who had to grow his own vegetables to stay alive; bounce the idea off him, after you’ve disclosed what exactly this “Internet” is. Then try whining at him about how tough you’ve got it.

This one statement is just a little bit more awesome than the rest of it:

The Greens are trying to frame this election as an epic battle between them as the cosmopolitan and enlightened forces of light versus those dumb and uneducated reactionaries who are trying to bitterly cling to an idealized past. I mean, that is pretty damn rich coming from the party whose every social, cultural and economic goal can essentially be summed up as return to the small tribal societies of the Pleistocene.

And I’m liking the title, too.

In a flash of brilliance, I just coined that term.

Somewhere in the archives, and I’m too lazy to try to figure out which archives I’m talking about let alone go digging through them, I came up with some other name for the theory that goes with this. Or maybe I just took note that the theory needed a name, since it doesn’t have one, and it’s important. The theory is that if you line up the potential nominees of the party not in power and sequence them according to their approval ratings in the polls, you are looking at the sequence of their likelihood for beating the incumbent. In this case, Barack Obama. If the polls say the sequence is Romney, Huckabee, Trump, Palin, Paul then the likelihood of sending Obama packing is Romney, Huckabee, Trump, Palin and Paul.

I think the theory needs a name because, just to be clear, I think it deserves a beatdown it’s only going to get if it has a name. I don’t believe in this theory and I think the wrong people believing in it at the wrong time has done our nation incalculable damage.

The most successful conservative Presidents — there haven’t been many — were not nominees of least resistance. They were, overall, nominees of greatest resistance, in other words, whose nomination was prologue and/or epilogue to a contentious fight. Actually, I think that might be true of both parties. If you’re a liberal democrat, and your loyalty is to the liberal agenda rather than to your country, you’d have to look at Barack Obama as quite a decent President. He’s getting a lot of things done for the party, isn’t He? And His nomination, lest it be forgotten, came at the conclusion of a bruiser of a fight. If our media were more inclined to discuss things unflattering to the liberal establishment, it might even have been an embarrassment.

The conservative movement, on the other hand, has no need for a nominee of least resistance. In fact, its need for rejecting such candidates has never been greater.

Update: Another thought. This is much bigger than politics, by which I mean bigger than Republican/democrat electoral politics. It pertains to business as well; anything with an organization.

To actually nominate a nominee-of-least-resistance, is to say nothing. That is the primary asset and that is the primary liability. There are some situations and issues, to be clear, where this might be a smart way to go. Sometimes you want to obfuscate. I might buy that this is always sneaky and a bit underhanded, but I can’t buy that it’s always dumb.

The Presidential election of 2012 is not one of these situations. The message that resonates once the nominee is nominated, needs to be crystal clear, reverberating, penetrating, even shattering.

We tried it the other way two and a half years ago. Can’t afford anymore of this.

Update: In any medium in which every position conceivable is guaranteed to meet with its opposite somewhere, clarity guarantees a fight, and lack of clarity provides strong assurance of avoiding a fight. I think most people get this — to such an extent that clear people, just by being clear, are seen as spoiling for a fight even if all they’re trying to do is be clear.

And unclear people are seen as trying to avoid a fight…which is very often the case. But then, this opacity is seen as synonymous with maturity. Big, big mistake; huge mistake. Because now you’re providing an incentive for people to be unclear, and the surest career path for people who are practiced at being unclear. Now, who’s that going to be? You think that’ll be someone you’d like watching your house while you go on vacation?

This whole situation is so well defined, you can express it as a mathematical equation.

Yup. I’m reasonably sure the twits who argue with me on the innernets are college kids. I do hesitate somewhat since these munchkins are polite, and not in a fake sell-you-something way, but in what looks like a healthy, wholesome way. Then again — there is a camera rolling.

I’m just watching in a state of awe over the vast magnitudes of energy being churned into this exercise of not-going-there. And you know what “there” I’m talking about: Redistributing a GPA is different from redistributing money, because I have a GPA worth redistributing but I do not have money worth redistributing — they’re different because you’re talking about me in one of those and you’re not talking about me in the other one of those.

This is the trouble with problem-solving with feelings. It isn’t a problem with bad arguments being accepted, quite so much as with decent propositions being rejected. In just the last few years, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick on this while arguing with dweebs on the innertubez. Which is certainly not scientific, but still. It bothers me seeing the acceleration of this: I reject such-and-such…but…I have nothing to offer about why it should be rejected. If someone hits me with it again, I’ll be in “got nuthin'” mode, but this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I’ll not lose a wink of sleep over it tonight.

This is not good. This is a very bad thing. If the opportunity is presented to fight it, we should.

I’m old enough to remember when it was not that way. When, if someone hit you with an equivalency argument you didn’t like, and you couldn’t handle it, you’d be at least disturbed about it and you’d walk away mumbling to yourself, trying to figure out if there was a meaningful difference you’d overlooked. Or, if maybe you just got schooled because you needed to be, and had to re-think something.

It’s like our young currently-in-college set, the leaders of tomorrow, have discovered that weird super-power. You know, where you make unappealing thoughts and facts vanish instantly simply by laughing at them. Have to give props to blogger friend Phil if that’s the case — he’s on to something there.

Thing I Know #183. When an education has given you the ability to dismiss ideas more quickly, it’s not really an education.

Hat tip to Kaye Dowdell Taylor.

Philip Greenspun has an explanation:

If we divide everything by 100 million, the numbers begin to make more sense.

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

But it’s so much better now, isn’t it, now that our First Holy President just gave us His latest “best speech evar!” and injected us with all kinds of feel good hope and change and junk…plus bashed the Republicans, which as any fool knows is the key to all problem-solving and happiness.

Well, I didn’t watch the speech. But if there was something substantial in it, I think I’d have heard of it by now. Nobody seems to have a kind word to say about it anywhere except Paul Krugman, who must know something since he won a Nobel Prize in economics. But Krugman’s treatise on the good things about the speech, amount to matters of taste and nothing more. “I like this, I like that, I can live with this other thing.” And this is the only sentient living being I can find who seems to have liked it. I can summarize it in one sentence: “Cut military spending increase everything else, me likey that it happies me.” Yeah, the Nobel Laureate makes about as much sense as your average LOLcat.

Well, Lee Doren also watched the speech. And unlike your average Nobel Prize recipient, Doren actually makes sense.

Remember: We had to borrow $16.5k. Now, with the $38.5 billion “savings,” assuming you take every nickel seriously in that, we need to borrow $16,120.

And President It’s-All-About-Me fought kicking and screaming against that. Birther Zero wanted to keep the premium cable subscription.

This needs to be made a centerpiece of the 2012 election: The democrat party has enjoyed an opportunity for — by then — six years, to show us what they’re all about, and the rest of us have enjoyed an opportunity to observe and learn. For four years, we have seen what they have in mind when they sell us a leader for the very highest executive office in our nation’s government.

The part about how they can’t do math, is a pretty good reason not to leave them in charge of anything ever again.

But when we see what they have in mind for a “leader” — watch Doren’s video all the way through — it shows how urgent the need is to get them booted out. See, Barack Obama has no leadership skills because He was not selected for any leadership skills. Go on, point to a single situation where you can say “this is much better because Barack Obama decided X and not Y.” Something besides getting Obama, or an Obama crony, elected or appointed to something. Name just one. There isn’t anything.

Obama is a political weapon. He gets up, He makes a “best speech evar!”, and when He sits down again He and His friends have more power than they had a few minutes earlier, and His enemies have less. That is His occupation; His primary skill set; His only skill set. It is what He does, His life calling. “Community organizer,” remember?

He needs to go, because this has nothing to do with actually solving a problem.

And His political party needs to go, because in their mind, these two things are synonymous — crush our enemies and all the details will work themselves out.

David Burge, whom you may know as Iowahawk, had something interesting to post at the Hello Kitty of Blogging which you may know as Facebook.

Those who may have been distracted by tax day & all the associated festivities, may have lost track of the other meaningful bits of this particular time of year. It’s mid-spring now, which means people who recoil in horror, for some reason, at the sight of a nice-looking girl in a swimsuit, have now had about six months of bliss. They haven’t had to experience the agony of seeing that anywhere, for all this time, and they’ve now gotten it in their heads that not seeing nice looking girls in bikinis is some kind of a “universal human right” or something. This has become a seasonal thing over the past few years, I see. Some nice looking girl has a picture taken of herself in a bikini right about this time, and finds herself in a mess of trouble over it which nobody — and I do mean nobody, and that includes the troublemakers — can coherently explain.

The University of Waterloo in Canada has suspended a team of students who built a racecar after a female member was photographed posing next to the car in a bikini and high heels.

University spokesman Michael Strickland said the temporary suspension is in response to an “inappropriate and denigrating” photograph that appeared online, as well as in Tuesday’s edition of the Waterloo Region Record.

“The decision also considered the guidelines in place to ensure the safety of students,” Strickland wrote in an email to FoxNews.com. “The university’s engineering design centre, where the photo was taken, has rules covering the type of equipment that can be brought in as well as the manner in which it can be used.”

Mmmm, hmmm, “safety.” Yeah. Lady in a swimsuit might get someone hurt. Can’t have that!

I hit the “like” button next to Joe Clark‘s comment:

Bet if it was a male student, and they took the car into the local gay pride parade and did obscene things with it, the university would hail the display as a shining example of the university’s values.

Further evidence there is a schism taking place between two kinds of people who simply can’t live together, and that a really tall fence needs to be built or else someone — one side or the other — has to get banished to an island.

I’m rapidly approaching the point where if the island option is chosen, I don’t care that much which side is subject to the banishing. I’ll miss Trader Joe’s, but let’s face it, even within three miles of the closest one I don’t go there that often. Of course I don’t go to Hooters that often either. Both of them cost like crazy.

But when the gender-benders and the goths and the hippies and the gay-pride-paraders start scraping the bottom of the barrel like this, it just becomes obvious they’re in sterilization mode. They’re running out of things to get rid of. “Pussying ourselves, pussying ourselves, pussying ourselves some more…let’s see…what else…I know! Girls in bikinis! Straight men with hairy chests just might like that, we better get rid of it. It’s for ‘safety’!”

Just build the damn fence and be done with it. Yeah, I find chaw tobacco as disgusting as anybody else, but I can live with people who chew it. I can’t live so easily around people who have problems with pretty ladies. Especially if they are so used to saying nonsensical things that they start to wax lyrically about the safety hazards involved with bathing suits…that’s pretty far afield of the reality I know & understand.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and Right Wing News.

Re-discovered blogger friend Terri takes the one hundred and eleventh Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. On the subject of “civil disobedience on a paper plate” (you have to skim through this New York Times article about San Francisco “food raves” to see what’s going on), she observes:

Ahh the odd belief system of the left. “We can tax as needed to afford our progressive state and then revenue will just magically rise. But when there seems to be a correlation between high taxes and free enterprise (the good kind) we’ll work around it because we’re revolutionaries! Viva Che!!”

Okay, that’s more than one sentence. It isn’t the first waiver we’ve granted and it won’t be the last.

This points up a unique trait of our modern left, one that in a sane universe would bar them from having any influence on anything, anywhere. They aren’t “left” at all; they aren’t anything. People who live on the left-to-right spectrum, anywhere, have to follow their own rules. These advocates we call “The Left” exist, not on a classic French Napoleonic/royalty spectrum of left-to-right, but on that other spectrum, authoritarianism to “libertarianism to point of anarchy.” And they occupy the two extreme ends.

Straddling this impossible divide offers them an ideological nimbleness denied to other movements, and which anyone on the outside of the leftist movement, over the longer term, cannot afford. They say, “we need a rule…” and then they say it again and again and again. Once met with the natural consequences of living in such a rigid, overly-regulated “perfect” society of their own making, they simply sidestep it all. Like Terri said above: “Because we’re revolutionaries!”

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and Right Wing News.

Daily Caller, by way of Instapundit.

Yup, I resemble that parenting style.

Credit to one of my friends over on the Hello Kitty of blogging.

Jay Cost is engaged in the usual criticism but with a unique twist: President Obama is out of His element in His new job, because He is the product of our nomination process for that job. Therefore, His inadequacy is a much bigger problem for us that is not limited to just Him. Cost makes an interesting case.

Unfortunately, since George McGovern ruined the presidential nominating system in 1971, there has been a new potential item for the presidential CV: navigating the byzantine process of primaries and caucuses better than any competitor.
:
Unfortunately, gaming the nomination process plus having no significant experience in government turns out to be a grossly insufficient combination for presidential leadership. Day by day, week by week, we are becoming more aware that, when it comes to the political dance in Washington, [President Barack] Obama is foxtrotting with two left feet.
:
[a bunch of examples]
:
When you get right down to it, Obama hit his high point at Iowa’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner in November, 2007. It’s been downhill ever since – with one verbal gaffe or policy misstep after another.

Of course, the media overlooking all this stuff does not make the problem go away. And the proof is in the pudding: the right can’t stand him, the middle has abandoned him, and now even the left is criticizing him out in the open.

Let’s face it: this president is just plain bad at politics.

To me, the power of such an argument comes not so much from the examples, but from what one can reliably anticipate in terms of rebuttal. We need not speculate idly about this; the rebuttal would have to concern itself with the history Obama made. The hope, the change, the smiles and the tears of election night ’08, the enthusiasm at the inauguration…all that great stuff. Surely, whoever brought that kind of excitement must have the talent to back it up somewhere. Surely this must be someone who is unique in some way, right?

Something like that.

Trouble is, we’re all unique. Here lies the hazard of avoiding details; one tends to trap oneself in a fantasy world, in which anything said anywhere about anything, must necessarily be missing the details. It’s just like seeing yourself on HDTV without the proper makeup — once someone adds the details back in, the picture that results is not so flattering.

What’s the trouble with our nominating process? It isn’t the integrity. That part of it worked just fine. The champion deserved to be the champion; Barack Obama is the best of the best of the best. At what, though — there is the problem.

I, among others, tried to point out that this was not a successful producer of positive results who was being built up by our strange, surreal, emotion-driven nomination and electoral process. For this, myself and others were called rigid, inflexible, conservative Republicans, and then tea party bigots, and then just plain bigots. Nothing like a good session of name-calling to sweep aside whatever points and counterpoints happen to be unpalatable in the moment, huh. But the substance of an argument is not so easily swept aside. It manifested then, and manifests now, a problem that is with us and growing. And that problem is this: We have yet to have installed an executive to deal with the nation’s many problems. The number of people who want to believe we have, is irrelevant. The passion with which they believe this, is also irrelevant.

It seems every other month or so, I hear from somewhere “Obama really hit one out of the park!” But with the passage of a little more time, the ugly truth emerges: It was just a speech. Some of the people who agree with Obama really liked it, because it made them feel better than their enemies, whom Obama successfully smeared, or marginalized. But if the speech contained any policy points, they were not policy points assured of making the situation any better. And that’s assuming there would be action taking place consistent with the speech — another question altogether.

Obama is not as big as the issues He was elected to confront. And that is not even because the issues are big, or because He is small. The issue of fiscal discipline is actually pretty mundane. But it takes an effective executive to truly conquer it.

And Obama is just…Obama. Not big, not small, just average. A mediocre politician selected by a process built to seek out and reward mediocrity. He sounds kind of sophisticated when He says the word “uh,” and that’s about all He has going for Him. Or for the rest of us.

Update: Until I actually watch the President’s much-talked-about speech from yesterday, front to back, consider this to be my comment upon it. I’m confining my commentary to things that I know, and as safe as I may find it to be to presume things about that speech, I don’t know it so I shall remain mostly silent on it.

But I do have to say, given the track record I’ve been watching unfold, and the other commentary I’m hearing about it, things like this do not surprise me.

…Obama offered little of substance other than rhetorical bombs aimed at Paul Ryan, accusing him of trying to kill an entire generation of retirees while offering nothing specific to oppose it…

Uh huh. Fits right in with the theme. The President is a superior fit for the nomination process but the nomination process is wholly inadequate for the job at hand, and therefore, so is He. Unless the job at hand is to belittle the other side. Some of our liberals, and let’s be fair some of the conservatives as well, seem to think that is exactly the case. A little ridicule, some mocking, diminish the other side and the job is done. Everything else will work out.

They’re wrong. And because they’re wrong, Obama is just a bad fit for the job. Not up to it.

I was just noticing this myself:

In light of the recent budget debate and the unveiling of Obama’s long-term deficit plan .. the liberal wealth envy crowd has come out in full force to make sure that their ideas be heard. What are their ideas? Well there is really only one idea and that is: Increase taxes. Why? For the purposes of redistributing the wealth.

A narrative has emerged on the left side that President Wonderful must not have the chops for negotiating because the Republicans took Him to the cleaners. This in the wake of the much-publicized eleventh-hour “keep the government running” agreement last week to “slash” $38.5 billion. Saturday Night Live had a monologue parody in which Obama talks up what a wonderful negotiation process it was since everyone went away from it unhappy. There’s a lot of truth in that. A lot of Republicans are unhappy because the target amount was 100 billion, and of course 38.5 is not 100. Well, the democrats are unhappy too.

Here’s my question: Why, exactly? I mean, you take out all the “don’t cut my pet project” people, and out of the ones that are left — there are still quite a few, from what I see — there remains unhappiness. That’s where I am curious. What’s the problem?

And no, don’t go digging into the budget line items trying to find a problem. You’re already pissed that any cutting took place at all. I would like to know what the beef is.

Because spending simply cannot stay where it is…it is out of the question for it to go up…sure anything is possible over the short term, but my point is the situation is unsustainable. If we have people involved in this process who are always going to be pissed when there’s any cutting at all, nevermind where it is, then this whole “negotiation” ritual is a rather empty one isn’t it? That is, unless a real leader emerges who has the stones to tell one side — preferably, the spend-more crowd — “nope, not gonna work that way, and if you wanna get mad then you just go ahead and get as mad as you want.”

And I think these “don’t cut anything,” advocates of generally higher spending, are out there. I think they have overlap with the inner circle of key players. I think an important part of liberalism right now, is to say “Yes. More spending. Higher taxes. We want taxes to go up, and spending to go up — and we don’t care what the spending is — until such a time as it is utterly futile to try to provide for your own interests through your own efforts in this country.” In fact, I expect to come under the quite righteous and accurate critique that this is just pointing out the obvious…

Well, if that’s your position you’ve a right to it. You even have the right to try to seek some influence — and, unfortunately, to achieve that influence if you can.

But I think if such a movement exists, it should be fully exposed. Seeing as how its continued existence is fundamentally incompatible with the country’s.

Too much to ask maybe?

Carrie Lukas writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women’s Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.

In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
:
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

These are generalizations, and of course generalizations are always problematic. You don’t have to check them against reality for too long before you run into the inevitable exception. And, of course, one decent exception reduces the generalization into a rough-thumbnail law-of-averages, nothing more.

But there’s the thing. Rough-thumbnail is plenty good enough, because law-of-averages is what it’s all about. That was, after all, the original complaint: Average woman earning such-and-such a percentage of the average man.

Nice scam while it lasted.

Spearhead, via Captain Capitalism, via Small Dead Animals.

I had made a passing reference somewhere to “The Three Things Morgan Hasn’t Got the Balls to Blog” and someone was wondering what those three things were. Well…this article does borrow some things from Thing #3.

The researchers placed nearly 700 people into groups of between two and five, then gave them problems to solve, such as visual puzzles, games, negotiations, and logical analysis. Here’s what they found:

Individual smarts doesn’t affect performance. The average intelligence of team members wasn’t related to team performance. So if you’ve got a team that’s struggling, putting a couple of really smart people on it isn’t going to help.

EQ–emotional intelligence– is more important than IQ. Good communication and good coordination make teams function well. To get that, you need people who are good at reading and responding to other peoples’ emotions. Teams that included even one person with superior skills in this regard had better performance.

A ’strong’ personality hurts performance. Groups where one person dominated the conversation or the decision-making, or where people didn’t do as well taking turns, had worse performance. This correlates well with other research that shows ’stronger’ leaders are often less effective than those who perceive themselves to be less powerful.
:
The researchers found one fairly simple answer: Add women. [that last emphasis mine]

Yes, that has been my experience. There really aren’t too many things on Creation less productive than a group of men.

But of course, that isn’t the least little bit politically-incorrect for me to be pointing it out. Why then would I not have the balls to blog it? Because this is part of a graph. Picture the X axis as being gender saturation; on the left, 0.0, the group is all females and on the right, 1.0, it’s all males. The Y axis is productivity and it enters a steep nosedive on the right side, approaching 1.0. In fact, on the square to its immediate left, 0.95, where you have a large group of one men with a single reasonably-intelligent reasonably-assertive woman at its nexus, productivity is at its zenith. Pull the female out, round up to 1.0, and with the men no longer having to prove anything or maintain some modicum of civility, it’s crash-and-burn time.

Why would I be afraid to blog that? Because of the stuff that goes on to the left of the 0.95; and that’s all I’m sayin’ about that.

People just aren’t very productive when they’re in their comfort zones. They’re not very smart in that state, either. That goes for both sexes.

The article starts to get new-age touchy-feelie toward the end, and dissolves into a puddle of Age of Aquarius silliness:

…Heidi Grant Halvorson suggests a number of ways any team can become more socially aware, and therefore, higher performing:

Create opportunities for team members to express their feelings, and for others to respond to them. Encourage face-time whenever possible. Cultivating a work environment where team members experiences are acknowledged and understood will create teams that are smarter, happier, and far more successful.

I don’t know how the ‘express your feelings’ bit would have gone over at some of the places I’ve worked–although if “creating opportunities to express feelings’ means just putting an end to some of the macho teasing I’ve seen, I’m all for it. But as the researchers found, you don’t have to break out the hankies to get reap the benefits of social sensitivity. Just try taking turns.

I recall one place I worked in particular became enamored of the “strong personality.” I didn’t fare too well under this management style; I must have one of the weaker ones. But I got the distinct impression everyone else in the room was as frustrated as I was with missing out on an hour or two out of the day, toward no higher purpose than to round out an audience of “Oh let us all admire what a strong personality [Mr. X] has.”

I really despise watching people show off like that — dictating what product should be bought, what feature is important, what button should be pushed what and lever should be pulled. Drives me right up a tree. Fills me with an acute sense of dread. I mean — here, I’ll just abandon all the suspense & come out & say what everyone with a brain is thinking already — if they really knew that much about it, wouldn’t they be in a back room somewhere, completely out of sight, earshot or mind of anyone, busying themselves with pushing the damn button or pulling the damn lever?

Had some thoughts continuing from the post previous. That’s okay, isn’t it? “The same subject, continued” appears I-don’t-know-how-many times in the titles of the Federalist Papers; that “Publius” dude had no problem continuing his thoughts from earlier. So it must not be a sign of arrogance, or if it is, that Publius guy must not have been too terribly humble. Anyway. I have some thoughts on the same subject, continued.

I’ve been wondering for awhile about the different definitions conservatives & liberals seem to have in mind when they speak of “The Economy.” In fact, I wonder about this pretty much every time I read a Paul Krugman column. I’ve tried to resolve it by looking it up in various dictionaries, and I’ve come to learn this intangible noun is so utterly lacking definitions-wise we may as well not have the word at all. Now conservatives tend to be supply-siders, meaning they believe in “trickle-down.” Liberals laugh at this…which seems to be the liberal solution to every single credible idea that poses a serious danger to liberal worldview.

But if you take supply-side-trickle-down seriously for a minute or two, you see it shores up the conservative view of “The Economy” rather neatly. When the economy is robust, the wealthy — those with investment capital to spare — can see entrepreneurial opportunities. A robust economy does not entail zero risk. But a relatively healthy economy would involve relatively diminished risk in the entrepreneurial endeavors, or at least, manageable risk. In this way, the wealth is spread around, since in order to realize the endeavor, the entrepreneur needs to add staff, or acquire goods & services. We then have movement in our “economy.” The economy itself, therefore, could be thought of as the actual movement. According to the conservative worldview.

The liberal worldview is simpler, and yet I have a tougher time figuring it out. I don’t need to observe too much to figure out what arouses liberal concern when “the economy” has beached itself like a sick whale: Poor people have it tough. Their beloved social programs are running out of cash, the class sizes in the public schools are swelling, the buses are stopping every twenty minutes instead of every ten, and as we just saw we have our “looming government shutdowns.” Of course, some of these “poor” people have bigger teevee sets than some of the not-poor-people…and have generally more comfortable lifestyles…in some cases, even higher incomes! You have to be very careful when you use the word, or perceive the word, “poor” around liberals. For that reason, liberals often like to use the term “working families” to describe these people. But that breaks more linguistic things than it fixes, for very often “working families” do not consist of families at all, and much of the time nobody in these “families” is even working.

So it’s best to think of “poor people” and “working families” as liberal special-interest groups, and beneficiaries of those groups. People our liberals happen to like; people that liberals don’t think should be sharing in any pain, for any reason.

Therefore, to the best I can make out, to a liberal the word “economy” refers to the absence of discomfort or concern among these not-poor not-working not-family beneficiaries of liberal social movements. The standard of living enjoyed, or not enjoyed, by these elites determines how well “our economy” is doing. And — this next part is key — to hell with everybody else. That does pretty much frame it properly, does it not? Find any one of these people the liberals consider to be non-persons…the “bitter clingers” out there, who actually stand a chance of one day being profiled on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs show. Describe some of the problems these folks might be having, to one of our modern-day liberals, and you’ll get nothing back in return save for a derisive sneer, a dismissive chuckle, and maybe a suggestion that the dumb schmuck should trade in his car. That goes double if the schmuck does something failing to meet with progressive approval. If, for example, said car sports a “McCain/Palin ’08” sticker. Or if the schmuck smokes tobacco, home-schools his kids, et cetera.

Now, here’s the problem. If the liberal definition of a “robust economy” or a “vibrant economy” is zero discomfort or worry among the not-poor not-working not-family people that our liberals call “poor working families,” how then do we know, according to the liberal worldview, that our economy is doing well? I presume we should be sending some of our ace reporters — you know, from those old-fashioned twentieth-century real-paper “newspapers” — out to gather some tearjerker sob stories to put on Page B1 of the local edition, otherwise known as the “whine about some lauded social program running out of money” page. And then, they would fail to find such a person because all the not-poor not-working not-family poor-working-family people are doing alright.

Problem One: That isn’t going to happen.

Problem Two: If ever it did happen, the old-fashioned twentieth-century birdcage-liner newspaper would run out of things to put on Page B1. Which means the newspaper would lose the commodity it has been selling. Which means circulation would start to take a tumble. And, since that is exactly what has already been happening…we need not speculate recklessly to figure out what happens next. The tumbling circulation becomes its own sob story. So the economy remains threadbare, slipshod, catawampus and gunnybags.

It’s kind of like a case of boy-who-cried-wolf. You can’t sound an alarm that something is in bad shape, if you aren’t capable of ever acknowledging it’s in good shape — no matter what.

Suppose I wanted to just get past that problem, but still perceive of “the economy” the way our liberals do, as a measure of standard-of-living among our “poor” people. In other words, take a look at whether they’re doing alright or not, and evaluate it in such a way that I’m able to acknowledge a good, fair or poor measurement of how well it’s doing. Well, that’s quite a contortion. But if I persist in it, guess what? Our “economy” is doing okay and has been for a very long time.

Among the ranks of our “poor” people, are people living in homes. Poor people wearing shoes that cost much more than my Nike Air Monarch III’s. Poor people who have very large teevees, and some games to hook up to those teevees. Not the old-fashioned ugly gray Xbox I have, that has all my software-engineer co-workers snickering at me when they see it. But the 360 models.

The five-word House of Eratosthenes Salute to the United States of America seems apropos here: Our poor people are fat. It was true the first time I said it, and it’s still true today. What an awesome, kick-ass country. How many thousands of years of various civilizations has this planet seen, whose jaws would drop in flabbergasted envy at such opulence they’d barely be able to comprehend it. Fat poor people!

But there is an equal & opposite, five-word curse to go with it, now: Our companies are not hiring. But you know, only our conservatives care about that. According to the liberal worldview, “the economy” is doing alright. The only reason our liberals can’t see it is, they are not wired to appreciate success even when it is realized according to the terms they themselves have codified. They are, by nature, high drama. Everything’s a crisis, all the time.

I really don’t understand how people can live like this. Perhaps that is my own unique weakness. But if it was, I would think our twentieth-century real-paper fish-wrap “newspapers” would be doing better. As it is, I expect to have to tell my grandchildren about them, maybe catch a glimpse of a Page B1 on the other side of a glass, in a museum. In other words, I expect those newspapers to become history before I do. And I’m no spring chicken.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Story here. Paul Krugman speaks on behalf of the liberals.

Kind of interesting. From what I can make out, you have something called the “economy” and then you have government spending. Krugman is afraid the economy is too weak to withstand this hiccup in government spending. Now, conservatives are afraid the economy is too weak to withstand the withering effects of higher taxes. Princeton Professor Krugman, to the contrary, thinks higher taxes are just the ticket because in addition to the “economy” being in danger from the government-not-spending-money, the government is in danger of running out of this money.

So we have the economy, we have the government spending money, we have the money the government has to spend…we have higher taxes on the rich. Conservatives think the taxes on the rich need to come down, in order to help the economy. Liberals think the government has to spend money in order to help the economy. I’m entertaining the notion that maybe we’re quibbling about different definitions of an “economy” here without realizing it. I’m not too sure about that — but here’s one thing I am sure of. If I’m one of those rich guys, I’m going to change my investment strategies if taxes go up on the profits I make from my more successful investments. And that just might have an impact on the economy, I think…and on the tax revenues too. Because hey, if I just convert it all into gold ingots and lock it in a vault, there isn’t much tax revenue involved in that, right?

In fact, I would argue we’re already seeing the effects of this in terms of labor, payrolls, unemployment…and stuff…we have businesses doing their darndest to figure out how to keep functioning without hiring anybody. Why, because they’re evil? Probably not that; if you think businesses are evil, it follows that they always have been that way, whereas this higher unemployment rate is kind of an Obama-era thing.

But Krugman is right about the government running out of money. We just had a piece of shutdown drama, and we’ll probably have another one later this year. That must mean it’s a problem.

So in view of the fact that there’s so little time between the shutdown drama, and the U.S. income tax filing deadline, I figure there is only one thing to do. The Blog That Nobody Reads hereby issues a challenge to all progressives who agree with Paul Krugman, to waive their refunds this tax year. So the government doesn’t run out of money, and it can spend more, thereby saving this nebulous conceptual thing you progressives are trying to describe by using this word “economy.”

I don’t think it’s what everybody else is trying to describe with that word. But whatever it is, it must be something really important to you. So show us how important it really is. A little money where the ol’ mouth is.

Ya gotta admit, it’s a little awkward for you to be talking the same way Professor Krugman is, and then just a few short days later, claiming a refund from exactly the same treasury you’re afraid is going to run out of money. I mean, why would you do that? “Because it’s mine”? or “Because they owe it to me”? Property rights for thee but not for anybody else, eh? Stick to your own knitting; just waive the damn refund. You’ll be able to save enough dimes and nickels to watch Fahrenheit 911 or The Color Purple one more time, plenty soon enough.

Update: Ready for another video about whether we have a revenue problem or a spending problem? Once again, it’s not looking good for the “revenue problem” folks.

From Reason TV, by way of Ed Morrissey.

Once again: That web site for voluntary contributions to help reduce the public debt, is right here. Click it now, click it often, send it off to your wealthy left-wing friends who are losing sleep at night from not getting taxed enough. Since “everybody agrees” with this, there must be a lot of people in that camp.

Jazz Shaw has some thoughts on it over at HotAir. Included is this chestnut I recall from many decades past:

[Leftists] will frequently make the case that one of the defining characteristics of all strains of conservatism is “a deep, abiding fear that somebody, somewhere may be having a good time.”

Mmmm, hmmm. That one has aged rather poorly. It was certainly showing some haggard lines and other signs of wear & tear by the time President Barack “can’t turn our thermostats to 72 degrees” Obama was sworn in to office.

In fact, I would say over the decades, it has flipped around to something resembling the following: The defining characteristic of all strains of liberalism is that somewhere, the wrong people might be having a good time. Boy Scouts, stay-at-home Moms, gun owners, whites, males, straights, Jesus-worshipers, oil company executives, health care company executives, bank executives. These people are not feeling enough pain.

Jazz continues:

[T]imes have changed since I was a young man. Back then, men in their early twenties frequently were already busy with a job, mowing the lawn and working on getting a wife if they had not done so already. Going to college was more the exception than the rule, and young men graduating high school frequently went straight into the job market. We married younger, started families sooner, and generally expected to be somewhat “established” in life by the time we reached our early thirties.

Society has undergone a dramatic shift. Life in general is more expensive, particularly since we all have to have so many things which our parents never thought of. You’ve got to have a cell phone, a laptop, a high speed internet connection and 327 channels of cable television. (312 of which you will never watch.) It takes longer to save up the money to position yourself for marriage and two incomes are often required to maintain a modern lifestyle, so children are often put off until later in life.

How does this all translate into happiness, and its role in distinguishing conservatives from liberals?

It’s rather lost on me, since I don’t necessarily buy into the notion that the purpose of life is to be happy. I have often said here & there (too lazy, once again, to go digging into the archives) that conservatism in our modern, contemporary age could be best characterized as the possession, ownership and use of a long-term memory. The readiness, willingness and ability to say “We’ve tried that before; so unless there’s some meaningful difference between this time & last time, kindly keep it out of my way.” Liberalism is more like a circular trip on an amusement park silly-go-’round. History always began yesterday morning. So we haven’t tried this before. And if we did, and it failed, it must have been because…of something. Didn’t spend enough money on it. Wrong people were in charge. This time, it’s sure to work.

But happiness itself? It seems to me that both sides are in favor of happiness. They just define it differently. With conservatism it has more to do with a sustainable society. If I’m in a lousy rotten mood with a dour expression on my face, but my kid is assured of having all the options I’ve had plus something, then I’m “happy.” That remains the case even if he is going to spend a lifetime in a lousy rotten mood. If he’s on track to do more with his life than I ever could’ve with mine, then I’m “happy”; if his ever achieving as much as I did, starts to slip into the ether of lost dreams, then that makes me unhappy. The XBox 360 or whatever doesn’t figure into it.

With liberalism, “happiness” seems to have something to do with your state of mind when you’re inclined to re-elect and re-elect your (democrat) representative generation after generation after generation, until he’s in his nineties. Which usually translates to you enjoying access to something of value that you did not earn.

Even if that situation — as we have been reminded this past week with the “looming government shutdown — is demonstrably unsustainable. If Rome is burning or the barbarians are at the gate, but you’re still getting your lucre, then you’re “happy.”

It’s midnight EDT, and Politico has something.

After a long day of trading offers, the White House and House Republicans reached agreement Friday night on a budget framework that would cap 2011 appropriations near or below $1.050 trillion while cutting domestic and foreign aid by more than $40 billion from the rate of spending at the beginning of this Congress.

Behind the closed doors of special meeting of the Republican Conference, Speaker John Boehner presented the package to his party as at least an agreement in principle and said at one point: “We have a deal.” The Senate should now feel confident enough to move ahead with a stop gap spending bill to avert—or at least shorten—any shutdown beginning at midnight.

I’d sure like to know the mentality at work with people who think this is an okay way for our country to function. I know they must be lacking in any useful long-term memory since, as I’ve written before, the newspaper headlines never really seem to change. “[Program/agency] in trouble! Budget shortfall! Wah!” And then there’s a tearjerker story of some sad sack who’s utterly, completely dependent on the government program who just doesn’t know what he or she is gonna do. Crack that paper open again a couple months later, or a couple years later, and it hasn’t changed any. The program is different, the agency is different, but the rest of it is the same. Budget shortfall! What’re we gonna do??

See, this has always intrigued and befuddled me. Clearly, what separates them from everyone else is the fact that they don’t value independence…I mean, personal independence. Wouldn’t this kind of experience sort of, y’know, motivate them to value it more highly?

It’s here. Perhaps this will remain the definitive one, perhaps there will be others.

I knew it could not be long in coming. The way it was described in that press conference, did not make a whole lot of sense to me. I have the impression this system is sort of a jerry-rig approach, full of cotter pins, duct tape and band aids, and that such an oopsie was inevitable.

In fact, in all my years with supporting computer applications, this is the primary source of oopsies. It isn’t that such systems take their first breaths of life on somebody’s desktop machine with Microsoft Office products that are designed for — let’s face it — some guy to keep track of his seashell collection or what-not. That is, after all, the most effective way of figuring out what you want the application to actually do. It’s that they stay there. The plant becomes too big for the pot.

At some point, there is a “database migration project” to a client-server platform, or three-tier platform, which costs engineering resources and project management resources and design resources and software licensing dollars and down-time. More often than not, it doesn’t happen. That seems to be what happened here, and it’s got me wondering where else it isn’t happening and what other mistakes are being made.

What’s the result? Situation: Very much like parking a fine vintage Packard in a garage made out of Lincoln Logs. Inappropriate for the magnitude of data, inappropriate for the importance of the mission and worst of all, loaded up with the potential for human error. Outcome: Exquisite embarrassment. Yet another vote-counting scandal. An obvious lack of confidence.

And a bunch of crazed left-wingers forced to choke on their words. Well, that part I like. And a whole lot.

But it still isn’t a good thing.