People tell me there is something wrong with my blog, because this post or that post has too many commas in it, or has unclean pronoun reference. Or, this group of sentences here toward the end of a paragraph, don’t really add anything.

You know what? I agree with all of them.

But I still tell them to stick it. When I write these things, more often than not I’m dealing with all kinds of distractions…people asking me “does this dress make me look fat”…what was the name of that movie we saw back in whenever…what should I do when I get this error message. It isn’t a structured editing process by any means. You know what my editing process looks like? I get done with fighting the editor, I hit “publish,” I get the little WordPress spinning wheel thing. And after about five seconds I say out loud “well go fuck yourself, I’m going to get another cup of coffee.” Then I get myself another cup of coffee, by which time it’s usually finished and I view the home page and scan it for some obvious, reprehensible, offensive to God and Creation itself errors of all kinds.

Then I say, enough-is-enough-is-enough and I shower up and go to work.

Point is, if I held off on publishing anything that had yet to run through a proper editing cycle, I’d never write anything.

On more than one occasion, I have gotten the distinct impression that is the point. I get the feeling there is this sentiment out there: “I have thoughts I have not been allowed to express, or have been unable to express, or have been too lazy to express…and if I can’t express anything, nobody else should be able to either.”

Also, on more than one occasion, I have noticed the people who provide the distractions to me while I’m trying to write something, are the same people who provide these “helpful” criticisms once it’s put together so they can see it.

You know, I can tolerate criticism all day and night. It’s jealousy I can’t stand.

This one has been all over the innertubz, the radio, the teevee…and the Associated Press, from what I understand, has been trying to sanitize it. Apparently in vain. It’s Barack Obama’s “Marie Antoinette” moment:

Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”

What a dick. Just no other way to say it.

Afterward, the 8-mpg-figure was dancing around in my brain and it gave me cause to recall something. Remember when His Holiness was first inaugurated as our first demigod President? He got a special chariot out of the deal, something the Secret Service referred to as “The Beast.” Remember how many miles a gallon it got?

Barack. Obama. Mmmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm!

Or, as they say over at Gerard’s place: “Oh, we are thinking about a trade-in, schmuck!”

Quote from one Alfred E. N. Gray, by way of Boortz:

“The secret of success of every person who has ever been successful lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.”

I’m thinking I like this husband. I acknowledge the multitude of exceptions to my observation, but I have found it to be a (yet another) fair generalization to make:

Reality teevee shows take as long as they do, because for every minute of something happening there are nine additional minutes of “When [blank] did or said [blank] it made me feel [blank].” To say I find this annoying would be an understatement, so potty-mouth and I are on the same page.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Since sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, we have had this rule in place that is unwritten and yet rigidly enforced. If someone were to take the time to string it into actual words, it would read something like “Any observation about people with exceptions to it, along with any observation that may have an exception to it is to be blocked, on penalty of ostracism.” Sometimes in grade school it is crystallized into the form of “It is wrong to generalize.”

Nowadays, it seems the perimeter has shrunk although at the same time, hardened. “All things noticed about a class of people, particularly a class of people represented by any organized victims-advocacy groups, are to be discarded before anyone acknowledges the thing noticed, such that it may as well not have been noticed.” So the enforcement is no longer against certain ways of thinking, it has subtly changed into a pit bull safeguarding the interests of political advocacy groups. For example — in 2011, I can say “it seems I am much less safe on the highways when the driver of the next car has a very low head, rising not too far above the steering wheel.” It is a generalization; certainly, still not looked upon too favorably. But it no longer draws any genuine offense because it doesn’t specifically target any one particular group. There is a “Could Be Construed As” standard that still has some teeth, and this could be construed as an attack upon Asians, or old people, or vertically challenged.

But it is not considered “super duper wrong” like it would have been before. In other words, we have very subtly done away with our deploring of certain ways of thinking, with the “enter every single new experience with people with zero baggage, and a brand new blank slate” thing. In times past, generalization itself was thought to be always unfair; making use of a long term memory was absurdly equivalent to denying someone, somewhere, opportunities and therefore “rights.” Well, unless it was a generalization the communists might like. “Business executives are cold-blooded reptiles” has never been politically incorrect, or discouraged in any way.

Well, like Baxter Black said: I acknowledge the multitude of exceptions to my observation. When you start out with that; and acknowledge the plain truth of the matter, that greater proportions of one declared class engage in a certain behavior than of some other declared class; and, consider the action of voting to re-elect President Obama — it is interesting what remains on the table.

Neal Boortz proceeds to catalog it thusly. And it’s a fair question for these fair generalizations. Who, after all, could have been paying attention over the last three years, and come to any conclusion available, other than that we’re looking at a failed experiment?

As I’ve said before, I take issue with the thing about women being wired for security while men are wired for opportunity. In times past, I say, it might very well have been true; but it’s time for a re-think. Are men, nowadays, wired for opportunity? Pfeh. If that’s the case, let them prove it, better than I’ve seen them prove it up ’til now. And I’ll be generous about it — dudes, if you’re going out to cut your own wood, change your own oil, fix your own machinery, plumbing, wiring, heating/AC ductwork, then I award you points. If you have opted for a job that pays on commission, or some kind of a bounty, has no flat salary, you get points too. Who’s left standing around with no points? A bunch of dames? A bunch of skirts? Their mothers, sisters, wives and girlfriends…nobody else? I’m thinking not. I’m seeing a lot of men who can’t make rational decisions about their own lives, unless & until everything is completely safe…at least in appearance. Men who can’t tell their next pink slip apart from an order of execution — who lack the ability to envision what is to become of their lives, the day after the current full-time job comes to an end.

Another disagreement: I must side with the commenters who have pointed out to Boortz that he has erred in skipping over the very young people. They are significant. Obama can count on them, and I think He is. You know what they say; you can’t have a heart if you vote Republican at twenty-five, and you can’t have a brain if you still vote democrat at thirty-five. As Rush Limbaugh said in his book, “that statement is at least half true.” But I find it a fair generalization to make that voters, up until about age thirty, don’t really give a rip. Oh, they’ll vote to “be a part of this thing” and so forth, but they won’t take the time to learn the details about what they’re doing.

I think in 2012, Barack Obama can count on young voters, feeling the pressure to participate…but, not taking the time to answer critical questions that pertain to Obama’s administration. Like, for example, “how exactly does a drilling moratorium help the situation with the oil seeping into the gulf?” Or, to cite another example, “what exactly is ObamaCare supposed to do, to bring medical costs down and make better care available to a greater number of people?”

If you had to contend with some kind of knowledge obstacle, to demonstrate some capacity of understanding for our policies and the effects they have before you could cast a vote…Obama would be a dead duck, with His amazing talents for speechmaking and crowd-pleasing rendered a mere nullity and nothing more. Might as well call up the moving truck right now.

There’s only one fair generalization needed, really: Barack Obama is depending on voters accustomed to feeling their way around problems, rather than thinking their way through them. Voters who have been conditioned to think they are assured of an acceptable outcome of each new situation, if only their emotions are in a good state, and kept that way until some concluding event.

Mental children, in other words.

And why not? It’s brought us such wonderful things, like…uh…hold on, I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Well it’s not over yet.

Am I hearing this right? Are these multiple generations of male hippies apologizing for rape? Sounds like a confession to me.

Give ’em a fair trial, lop off what they seem not to value anyway and toss their ponytailed carcasses in the clink.

To engage in further dark fantasy would be to embark upon a road I fear does not end…but it would also be to join them, on some level, so I shall concentrate on other things.

Rather surprised this has not already become a “Everyone Else is Blogging It, I Might as Well Do It Too” thing. I imagine it will be going viral soon.

Thanks to Rob, sending around the good stuff by way of e-mail, again.

Thanks to blogger friends Phil and Buck for confirming it isn’t just my imagination. Of course, the occasional HTTP 500 errors confirm that, but we needed confirmation the problem is getting worse.

It seems to happen between 9 and 10 PDT on weekdays. My domain provider has confirmed it’s a “roommate” problem of sorts, I’m sharing a physical bank of machines with other clients and one of them has been sucking the cycles away. They’re going to investigate the problem over a few days, read some logs, etc., possibly move things around if necessary.

So it’s not just your imagination, either. We’ll be following up in a couple days to make sure there’s real progress.

Daphne is letting loose once again, and making it look easy.

A silent tide is sweeping across the country among family men of a certain age. Men who’ve decided that they are done living on the government’s terms, shrugging off the tight-fitting version of suburban success with an ease they never thought possible. They’re walking off the reservation on their own terms, without anyone taking slightest bit of notice.

These men don’t show up at Tea Party rallies, march on Washington or join militias. They go to work, love their wives, pay their never-ending taxes, fees, surcharges and diligently raise the next responsible generation. Most people would call these solid men our nation’s backbone.

Many have served our country, in war zones, with distinguished honor. They gladly earn their bread while supporting complete strangers who don’t, can’t or won’t work. They span the spectrum from blue collar workers to successful entrepreneurs. A number of these good men have been sniffing the wind for the past two years and they’re calling it a day. Bolt holes are being created, money is being transferred out of the market and into solid commodities, debt load is being reduced with an eye towards further economic collapse. Politics have become meaningless to this breed, they’re done, disgusted, fed up with whole cesspool. These men are looking at American life in a whole new way.
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Flying under the radar, getting out from under the yoke, becoming free men, rather than shackled dogs or besuited grey ghosts, is the juice fueling their passion. These men don’t want to argue politics and they have no interest in fighting, not anymore.

These men have decided that what they want most of all, is to finally start living.

It is, perhaps, impossible to definitively determine how many societies have crumbled this way. Someone gets the bright idea to improve things and make them kinder and more compassionate, by making them kinder and more compassionate. As in, force some class of schmucks to do something they otherwise would not do. And then they do it again and do it again…after awhile, nobody bothers to even begin to explain how this next incremental erosion of freedom is supposed to solve the stated problem. We just do it a few more times. And then, finally, lo and behold we do build a super advanced society that works for “everyone.” But by this time we become well-practiced in re-defining “everyone” to mean something besides “everyone.” We re-define it to cover non-productive people, who don’t have jobs, don’t want jobs, or have jobs that cannot and do not produce anything of value to anybody. We create a society that works for them, and to hell with those other people, the people who keep it all running.

So our super-magical perfect society leaves them…before they leave it.

It isn’t the first time we’ve been down this road. Far from it.

Atlas Shrugged is opening on April 15. Have you demanded that it be shown in your zip code yet?

I’ve been conducting guided tours through California with extended family, and I’ve seen the question emerge as I execute my assigned captain-of-vessel duties from behind the steering wheel, many times in a variety of different phrasings, “What is California?”

The comment has arisen that lane-splitting is hairbrained and stupid. I am inclined to agree. Lane-splitting, for the uninitiated, refers to the practice of going between cars when you’re on a motorcycle. It is legal here in California, and in not too many other places.

I must admit that if I was on a motorcycle I’d probably not exploit this. But I also must admit that I hope California keeps this allowance in place, for one reason and one reason alone: This state is completely pussy-whipped in all other respects. In all other scenarios, all other situations, all other institutions, in all other walks of life. In fact, I shouldn’t compare it to female anatomy or female appendages or female characteristics because it isn’t fair to females. I do find this to be anti-male, but anti-male is not the same as female.

In all other matters, “One Regulation Away From Complete Bliss” is the order of the day.

California is, in its own way, rather disgusting. It is egregious. It is extremist. It is…dare I string the words together in this sequence…brutally secure. Yes, that does capture it, I think.

Everybody has to be healthy and safe. Siskiyous to Rio Grande, Sierra Nevada to the surf of the Pacific, every single square inch. Everyone must have an absolute guarantee that they will stay that way — healthy, safe, cancer free, organic, sterilized, non-radioactive…happy and content. And everyone has to have the feeling that they are absolutely safe. All the time.

This objective is not possible in this universe of reality, and so: It is always the right time to make another law. So yes, I do agree the lane-splitting is potentially hazardous — I don’t see any reason to keep it legal, at all, save one — if it is outlawed, our pussification is complete. While this stupid suicidal practice remains legal, there is a layer of insulation separating California from the brink. It is the one way you can use your resourcefulness, and your drive, and your rugged individualism to get ahead of the crowd. It’s dangerous. California allows it and not too many other states do. We need more things like that, not fewer.

We were heading toward one of our favorite places in the National Forest, and Dad was noting how attractive the wilderness was. And it is. Well cared-for, has that looked-after feel to it. And these aren’t acres and acres we’re talking about; it’s square miles and square miles.

But we weren’t in the National Forest yet.

And herein lies my observation. Not quite so much a liberal/conservative thing; more of a statist/libertarian thing. What is it we keep hearing about national forests? “Protect it! Make this parcel of lands hands-off to developers! Make it so it can’t be developed!”

Here I’ll just come out and say it. I don’t think those people bother to come out to where we were. I don’t think they go to national forests. I don’t think they enter the periphery near the forests, where we were. Because what we were looking at destroyed the entire paradigm. “Make this a national forest so it is protected from development” assumes, implicitly, that anything outside the borders of a national forest is going to get developed. Or at least un-maintained. Un-looked-after. That obviously is not true, so the entire argument crumbles under the weight of its own inherent silliness.

The same is true of any government entitlement program. When you say we need to raise taxes so the government can make ends meet, and then we need that government to provide a program so the beneficiaries of the program can do…whatever…what you need to presume, for that idea to find support, is that a dollar left untaxed is a dollar that won’t be used to help anybody. Well, people use their after-tax dollars to contribute to charities. So there goes that.

Education, too. How many times do we hear, lately, that we need to route more of these dollars to “education.” Implicit in that is — well, it’s the same. We’ve built this leviathan construct bureaucracy to educate people. Therefore, there must not be any way to get educated outside of this bureaucracy. Now if you presume that and refrain from challenging it in any way, or tolerating any challenges to it in any way, it makes sense. But if you tolerate challenges to it, once again the whole argument crumbles. And why would you refuse to tolerate any challenges to it? On a word-for-word basis, nobody even has the balls to advance this supposition anyway.

I don’t mean to flesh this list out to the point where it becomes exhaustive. But there are more examples, of course. ObamaCare. People going uncovered, dying, diseased, medical costs through the roof, blah blah blah — because there is freedom. Because there is choice. Like Venus arising from the ocean waves, this idea springs forward from nothing that all these problems will simply go away if people are forced to do something. Forced into the “public option.” Forced to buy insurance. Same thing as what you saw with the national forests. Stopped. Hindered. Obstructed. Made to do. Forced. Must. Should. Can’t.

How have these acts of force solved our problems? How will they? How can they? I say, go ahead and ask the questions; you’ll probably notice what I’m noticing. The answer never seems to come. It’s like the sacrifice of some barnyard beast to some primitive deity. Do it, and the rains come and we have crops…unless they don’t, and we don’t, in which case, well, heck. We must not have done it right. Do it again.

Is the global warming scare still on? I’m not even sure anymore. Let’s consider adding that to the list. Let’s see if I can describe this crisis accurately: Something called the “mean earth temperature” has gone up by a degree or so over the last hundred years or so. Solution: “cap and trade” scheme of some kind, and maybe a tax. There it is again. Force. Make. Bludgeon, beat-down, coerce, penalize, regulate, legislate, enforce, fine, imprison.

May I proceed to point out the obvious? Here, I’ll state it word for word and ruin the suspense: We are surrounded by fellow citizens who think of force as an adequate substitute for logical thought. If they were to enjoy some mystical immediate translation of their every thought into action, the problem would remain unsolved. Or, let’s state it properly: We find ourselves wholly missing any logical substantiation for the idea that the stated problem might be solved.

The involvement of force, is the only ingredient in the proposed solution that might incline a person to think the situation would be improved. But since when has that really solved anything?

Gun control. Prohibition against trans fats and salts in restaurants. Don’t invade Iraq unless the U.N. says it’s okay. No “gaming” unless you’re in a licensed casino. No home-schooling. Can’t turn your thermostat to seventy-two degrees.

When there’s another “crisis” with an oil leak in the gulf, the answer is a drilling moratorium. What is a moratorium? It is the word “can’t.” So there it is yet again. Can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t.

I say: Fine, give it a try. Forbid people from doing things, to your heart’s content. But hey, I’m a moderate. I say…do it, and at the same time, remain open to the possibility that it isn’t working. That last half of it is not being done.

I see it as something like an involuntary facial tic. Or a hand-washing compulsion. Some challenge arises and the resolution to the challenge is not immediately obvious. So these people, who lack basic talents involving maturity and resourcefulness, immediately just scurry to their corner of protection and comfort and say — forbid X from doing Y and that will make everything come out all fine.

And don’t ask me how. “I don’t care, Obama is awesome!” and let’s move on to the next topic.

But these are the fellow citizens who are supposed to be our deep, talented, nuanced thinkers. Yeah, uh huh. You figure that one out, you drop me a line okay?

Update: It seems this particular brand of insanity does not sleep, or even rest. Hat tip to Instapundit.

Can someone come up with some kind of special treatment, or program of confinement, or drug, to get these poor wretches the help that they need?

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

William Jacobson, among others, is having a chuckle over this. Looks like someone at the Los Angeles Times had the wrong link copied into the clipboard whilst engaging in an attempt to direct readers to Obama’s re-election website, and pasted in the Times’ site address instead.

I just got done trying to find my way around President Obama’s website. I was trying to drop a brief reply, asking the President specifically what He plans to do in His second term that He can’t quite seem to get accomplished in His first. It’s a fair question, isn’t it? Whatever it is, it seems to be important enough to drive this historical, billion dollar campaign fund-raising effort.

Even knowing we’re talking about Barack Obama here, the “excitement,” contrasted against the absolutely complete lack of substance about goals & processes for reaching the goals…is nothing short of stunning. It’s worse than 2008. Without the ritual bellyaching about George W. Bush, there isn’t enough structure to get the excitement generated — not enough to even get started on that.

Just a lot of “okay, it’s time, let’s get started.” Like an elementary school teacher leading kids off a bus onto a field trip…but not to the petting zoo or fire hall or something cool & fun…more like, to some museum everyone’s already seen.

I was trying to ask pal Barry what’s up, and what I thought might get me to an e-mail reply page, got me this instead.

I don’t know about you, but I found “Ed” to be particularly pathetic. Toxic, even. The video would have been better if he’d been entirely removed. In the middle of a video that’s supposed to get me all excited and jazzed, but is completely lacking in “President Obama is for [blank] and to get that done He intends to do [blank],” here’s Ed to counsel and preach to me that he doesn’t agree with Obama on everything, but he respects Him. Hmmmmm…yes, that is very inspiring. Gas prices have doubled, unemployment seems to have found a natural new home at around nine percent, and the top dog is doing things we disagree with. But He’s respectable, “we” respect Him.

Maybe there’s a way for the bar to be lower than that. Having trouble thinking of one at the moment…

Still, there’s a real chance this might actually work. It’s going to be an interesting race. Sort of like a literal race, from one end of a barnyard to the other, among two animals, chickens or goats maybe, neither one of them feeling too much oomph about it or offering much clarity of thought about space, geography, where the finish line is…maybe a couple of feral creatures inebriated on liquor. To build up such an analogy any further is to drift into the realm of award-winning bad metaphors and I’m probably there already.

Point is, I expect each side to be excited and motivated solely by the weaknesses hobbling the other. Not entirely sure about the Republican challenger, since I don’t know who that is yet. But President Obama certainly does have that problem — His billion dollar fundraising campaign shows none of the excitement He seems to think He can bring to it. And if it does ever come to find this excitement, it will be agitated into effect only by the weakness on the other side.

So I’m not altogether sure why He has seen fit to deliver this to us now. Maybe someone, somewhere, has done a calculation and figured out it’ll cost a billion dollars to get His sorry ass re-elected.

Good for Him that the LA Times is helping Him out where it can.

I’m divided about Charlie Sheen, although not by any means unresolved or uncertain. As a matter of fact, there are many things in life about which I think it would do me good to learn a bit more, but there are very few subjects on which I have less curiosity than Charlie Sheen. Among the things about which I am ambivalent, I think it is fair to say Charlie Sheen represents the one item on that list about which I possess the lowest level of curiosity, the one item on which I have the least to learn.

Do I need to elaborate upon the reasons for which I feel ambivalent? I have some sympathy for when he’s asked why he likes hot looking women…as if it’s some kind of mental illness…and he replies, “duh.” Not only am I on Charlie Sheen’s side in that exchange — I am deeply, deeply suspicious of the man who is not. Charlie Sheen ranks much higher on my scale of acceptability, than some virtual gelding who goes through the motions of pretending “proper” men should not find attractive women to be attractive. I think those lightweights are selling out their own sex, but I also think they are much worse than that. I see them as liars, who are complicit in an effort to ruin the lives of others who speak truth.

From what I have read, Charlie Sheen is a working man. He shows up for the job on time, and he delivers. He seems to be a pain in the ass to any kind of employee, boss or co-worker…but not because anything that has to do with getting the job done. I think he’s a dick, but I think the guy who fires him because of some personal friction, is a bigger dick. In short: I have contributed productively to successful projects, working shoulder-to-shoulder with people who disagreed with me about things. I have little interest in forcing everybody else to do likewise. But I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who fail at this. I figure if I can do it everybody else can too. I think the “team player” thing has been vastly, vastly overdone, in all walks of life. I think we have neglected the getting-done of the job at hand, even if it’s a silly job like show business, to this “lesson” more properly relegated to the second-grade classroom of “learning to work together.” I think Charlie Sheen fails at this, is proud to have failed at this, but the goal is substandard, nonsensical, useless and childish in the first place. I think it needs more resistance. When Sheen/Estevez puts up his resistance against it, I am in his ball park and I am on his side.

Next item of Sheen-mania: “Winning…”? I’m ambivalent about this more than anything else. Yes, it sounds pretty stupid and yes it probably should. It’s also a falsehood in my opinion. I have a few people in mind who I think are “winning” or have been “winning.” Charlie Sheen has not been on that list. He is certainly not on that list now!

But why do I not like Charlie Sheen? Not because of any one thing he’s uttered in particular; he’s going through the motions of being this rugged-individualist guy who doesn’t care what anybody thinks. And it is the polar opposite of the truth.

Charlie Sheen is trying to get attention. I cannot respect people who try to get attention. They keep saying all kinds of stupid bullshit things.

Like for example…this.

9:18 – “Nothing terrifies a troll more than its own reflection,” Sheen continues, before shifting gears into politics. “In a recent poll, they told me I’d bring down that whore [Sarah] Palin. I don’t have time for that nonsense.”

9:20 — People start booing Sheen. Not playing around, but actually booing him. Sheen yells, “I already got your money, dude!”

We here happen to like Sarah Palin, but let’s leave that alone. We happen to be friends with lots of people who don’t like Sarah Palin, if Charlie has something insulting to say that by itself doesn’t make him a bad person.

And it’s not necessarily the word that brings it to my attention.

It’s the entire family of words. Trollop, whore, cunt, twat, plate-of-warm-meat, jezebel, tramp, bimbo, gang bang party favor, tootsie, hoe-bag, strumpet, tart.

Nouns that indirectly refer to the organ that is between a woman’s legs, for the purpose of implying that the target of the insult has sexual intercourse with an inordinately large number of men, or has a great number of sexual adventures of a casual nature across a relatively brief expanse of time.

Calling all people who do not like Sarah Palin — and let us say, for the purpose of argument, that I am also a person who does not like Sarah Palin.

Why would you go calling her a whore? It just makes us look like dumbasses.

Now let’s re-emerge back in reality, and acknowledge that I do, in fact, like Sarah Palin: I already know these Palin haters are dumbasses and don’t need to see anything by way of ancillary proof. But it does prove what I already know. They’re dumbasses.

Why do you go calling her a whore? Can you think of any way in which she is qualified to be on the receiving end of such an insult, even remotely? No, you can’t. I say this makes Charlie Sheen, and all the other Palin haters, look like exactly what they are. People stranded in “opposite land.”

I would rather have Palin watch my house while I was on vacation, than Charlie Sheen. And I think most of the Palin haters would rather have Sarah and Todd watching their houses than Charlie Sheen, while they were on vacation. I think they know what I know. I think this is why they hate her so much. It’s like Stockholm syndrome; they have this inexplicable fascination with, and attraction toward, flaky unreliable scumbag ditzy slutty people. And so they project these slutty attributes upon clear-thinking reliable people who are not sluts, that they know are not sluts.

They try to make an issue out of Sarah Palin, and “tea party people,” being well-read or not well-read. But it’s all nothing but a big smoke screen, a big red herring. Being erudite or worldly or having a passport has nothing to do with it.

She possesses good judgment and is wholesome, and they hate her for it.

But why call her a slut or a cunt or a hoe-bag or a twat, or any of these derogatory words for women who have indiscriminate, frequent or vast magnitudes of sex? Why do that?

After years and years of moving in next door to her to spy on her, and comb through her trash, there was not a single sexually titillating thing discovered about her except — correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is an exhaustive list:

– Her daughter got knocked up
– She showed her legs, wearing running shorts, with awesome looking legs sticking out of them, on the cover of a magazine, and it was a damn good-looking cover since Sarah Palin’s legs are so good-looking…
– Some bikini picture had to be photoshopped. That means it wasn’t real. Which means, they couldn’t find a real picture. Which means, you know what her legs look like but you don’t know what her stomach looks like.

That’s a whore? You can’t even find an old boyfriend pre-Todd? Just one? Someone who will spill some secrets? Just one? After all this energy spent looking…it would not be an overstatement to say an entire industry has been built on this effort, between August of 2008 and the moment in which I’m writing this…still, there is nothing. That’s a whore, huh?

Sorry Charlie. You’re a falling star, burning out. But I think you know that already.

Title of this post taken from the comment made by cruzin77.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

His weekly column is here.

He is even enviable in the way he chooses to word things. During the audio book on the way back from Nevada, I was particularly impressed with the phrase, “I acknowledge the multitude of exceptions to my observation.” The occasion was a comment made about the difference between girls and boys as they interact with horses. Gender differences, in other words. We sometimes talk about gender differences here; it sort of teeters on the brink of the precipice of “Three Things Morgan Doesn’t Have the Balls to Blog.”

So I think I’ll borrow the phrase, when it is needed, going forward. “I acknowledge the multitude of exceptions to my observation.”

…in everything he says, about anything. I mean the dude does talk about capitalism and money an awful lot. He must know something about it, since he’s a great big fat rich capitalist guy & all.

I just hope it doesn’t get me into any kind of (logical) trouble. Like so —

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Of course we do.

To me, it has the approximate tenor, lilt and rhythm of a Libya debate. Although it could be ObamaCare, I suppose…

Hat tip to Gerard.

Cool bracelet.

It seems the opinions are divided on whether these scenes are any good or not. They don’t quite match the vision I had as I was reading the pages…not precisely. But that’s not a fair measurement at all, is it? You wouldn’t rate an Ebenezer Scrooge movie this way would you? Well than why use that yardstick here.

I say, let’s be fair. Did this capture the essentials? Yes, absolutely.

Oh and there is one perfect match: Lillian. It’s as if they captured a recording from my mind’s-eye, as I worked my way through the pages, and incarnated it.

I don’t care if her husband is the only man on the planet she’s ever seen naked. This is a wicked vampish slut and a waste of vital organs. Leader of the moochers, Lillian Rearden. They fleshed her out beautifully. Like an immaculately carved Grecian statue of some goddess of pure toxic bile.

Hat tip to Boortz.

We have to come up with a word to describe this.

Yeah, I say that a lot. But this time, there really is a meaningful, pertinent concept out there with no name, and we need to come up with a name.

Measured in growth, the American economy has outperformed those of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — every Group of 7 developed nation except Canada, according to The Associated Press’ new Global Economy Tracker, a quarterly analysis of 22 countries representing more than 80 percent of global output.

Yet the U.S. job market remains the group’s weakest. U.S. employment bottomed and started growing again a year ago, but there are still 5.4 percent fewer American jobs than in December 2007. That’s a much sharper drop than in any other G-7 country. The U.S. had the G-7’s highest unemployment rate as of December.

I’m not talking about America having a high unemployment rate compared to other countries. I’m talking about this so-called “research” people do, in which they find there is some significant difference between life in the U.S. and life abroad…they flesh it out, to such an extent that you’re pressed to come to a conclusion that there must be something different about the people who live here.

And then — they stop. They don’t define the difference. They don’t even offer a possibility. They just sort of drop it out there, like a stink bomb.

I remember Bowling for Columbine which did some of this. United States has this awful murder rate, because we’ve got “all these guns lying around.” But what makes us this way? Michael Moore spent the entire movie building up this question, and from what I recall, never provided an answer.

Just used it to ambush Charlton Heston at the end, that’s all.

And what makes the American corporate executives such awful, terrible people that they lay people off, and refuse to hire them back, when their counterparts overseas are engaged in different behavior? Again…no answer is proposed. They gather all the statistics necessary to form the differential, they say “look how awful America is” and then that’s as far as they go. To the intellectually honest, the “why?” question gels naturally assuming the data are found to be accurate, and sound. But these are not intellectually honest people; they aren’t trying to reach an audience of intellectually honest people.

So the stink bomb sits.

Canada and Germany have actually added jobs since the recession ended in June 2009.

U.S. companies aren’t acting the way economists had expected them to.
:
In the past, when the U.S. economy fell into recession, companies typically cut jobs but often kept more than they needed. Some might have felt protective of their staffs. Or they didn’t want to risk losing skilled employees they’d need once business rebounded.
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The result is that productivity — output per workers — has typically decelerated or even dropped as the economy has weakened.

Japan and Europe have been following that script. At the depth of the recession in 2009, productivity shrank 3.7 percent in Japan and 2.2 percent in Europe.

The United States has proved the exception. U.S. productivity growth doubled from 2008 to 2009, then doubled again in 2010, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

At least, it remains an open question until paragraph…I don’t even know what. Four fifths of the way down the page.

Japanese, European and Canadian companies are less inclined to purge employees. Their customs, labor regulations and unions discourage aggressive layoffs. [emphasis mine]

Oh-KAY…so now it comes out. The laws are different. Other countries have laws on the books that “discourage aggressive layoffs”.

Now, laws do not “discourage” things, as anybody who’s ever lived under a law can tell you. A law is a law is a law — it says you can’t do something. If the law prohibits you from doing something you wouldn’t be doing anyway, then the law is entirely irrelevant. It only comes into play when it proscribes against something you would otherwise do…or compels you to do something you otherwise would not do.

So these other countries — according to the article — have all these onerous, labor-friendly laws that tell their businesses to do things the businesses would not otherwise do. Which puts the kibosh on the idea anyone might have formed that foreign company executives might be more inherently compassionate than American company executives…or, at least, that said compassion differential explains the unemployment problem in the U.S.

Oh and what’s that other thing? The foreign businesses, according to the article, are less productive. So these other countries are struggling under the bulwark of a bunch of looney liberal labor laws, and as a direct result of this their businesses are less productive. According to the article.

Is that the point you were trying to make, Paul Wiseman of MSNBC? Because whether that is or is not the case — that’s what your article says.

But there are other things the article does not cover. Like, for example: When those foreign businesses do manage to make some money so they can keep “workers” on the payroll sweeping the floor or painting the walls; how do they make that money? From where does it come?

A variety of places, of course — not the least of which is exports to the United States. It just seems to me that might be a good thing to point out. Because, someone just might read Mr. Wiseman’s article and get it in their head that what we need to do, is make the United States more like the other countries. Whether that’s part of what Wiseman intended or not (haha!).

Just raising the possibility that, as one learns a few more facts about the situation, it just might emerge that this isn’t such a hot idea after all, when all’s said & done.

But I’m so glad we have a democrat President, so we can read this stuff-that-has-no-name about “What’s the deal with America that makes it such a toxic cesspool of human sin?” Rather than a bunch of that other stuff that has no name…about that Republican President meanie-cow and his buddies in the oil business, and how they’re jointly and singularly responsible for every single rejection letter flying through the mail right now. It’s just amazing how the blame shifts when there’s another party in charge, isn’t it?

I have a rule that I don’t talk about…you know. “Ew, I’m so sorry I haven’t been blogging lately life has gotten SO hectic and I’m SO busy…” Let’s face it, you don’t really care. Besides, it seems kind of Valley-Girl-ish. Also it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. “Too busy to do X” means you’re just not giving X priority and you fully intend to keep right on doing it that way. Why apologize?

I’m on vacation next week. Which is not a promise of more updating, quite to the contrary I’m on vacation with family & stuff. This week I’m trying to tie stuff up. Now, I have another (informal) rule of not talking about work too much…but…let’s just say I’m a software guy who works for a hardware company. My job deals with validating prototypes of products that are going to hit the market some number of years in the future, like two or three years — can’t say any more than that. Except to say we’re getting completely slammed.

I’m still clocking out after eight hours. Or…ten, maybe. We’re leaving the hundred-hour-weeks behind, in my young-adulthood, twenty years ago. Where they belong. But, then I watch stupid movies about stupid whores in summer camp getting hacked to ribbons by deranged maniacs swinging machetes around…after muttering hackneyed phrases like “Brandon, is that you? C’mon, guys, quit joking around, it’s not funny anymore!”

Still with the computer on my lap. But only to make inquiries to IMDB to figure out “is that [so-and-so], what other movies has she been in?”

I’m turning forty-five soon. Still not wearing glasses, knock on wood. But the computer screens are starting to hammer away on those little muscles that move the eyeballs around. In the evenings, watching stupid slasher flicks is about all I can manage.

My fiance is still stuck on medical-examiner-shows. I’m still putting up with them, because I still like her. But at this point I have begun walking off into the bedroom to read a book when “Bones” is on. X-Files and Bones, I’m at Popeye stage: I’ve had alls I can stands and I can’t stands no more. Sorry, there is mildly repetitious and then there is a mobius-fucking-strip of a television show. They WILL solve the crime! They will NOT sleep together! I have no curiosity about this…not willing to part with the sixty minutes I’ll never get back again.

Columbo is do-able though. I can watch Columbo. “Oh, and eh…one more little thing.” Hehe, makes me chuckle.

Well, I’m going to go inside and help her watch that. In forty-five minutes I have to hop on a teleconference with the Bangalore folks. Working a project with some people thirteen time zones away…oh well, whaddya gonna do. Hope my Thursday doesn’t get rearranged too drastically.

And so it goes. Life keeps churning along.

SNUL.

Sowell:

The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.

When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.

Whites are also fleeing the big northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in the midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Although California has long been a prime destination of Asian immigrants and the homes of their descendants, the 2010 census shows a striking increase in the Asian American population of Nevada, more so than any other state. Nevada is adjacent to California but has no income tax nor the hostile climate for business that California maintains.

The movement of the black population– especially educated young blacks– is the most striking of all.

In the past, the massive movements of millions of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was one of the epic migrations of a people– comparable in size with the millions of the Irish who fled the famine in Ireland in the 1840s or the millions of Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In more recent decades, blacks have been moving back to the South, however. While the overall black population of the northeastern and midwestern states has not declined in the past ten years, except in Michigan and Illinois, the net increase of the black population nationwide has increasingly been in the South. About half of the national growth of the black population took place in the South in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the past 10 years.

Well, to me the racial disparities are just blips on a radar. We’re all humans, are we not? And it’s starkly clear what the humans are doing.

Some of us think about things in a certain way, which is necessary when you build things. By building things we have managed to achieve a great increase in comfort, in speed, in standard-of-living…

…and then, because of what is made possible by those innovations, some other people who think in drastically different ways manage to seize control over everybody else. And then they make things a certain way.

And then everybody else yells “Hello no!”

But then they keep right on doing it. Operating under the presumption that this is what the continuing evolution & civilization are all about.

With nothing whatsoever to back that up.

Note — I am typing this in Northern California. I know of what I speak.

Someone needs to get these people the help that they need. Really, these are not mentally healthy people. It should be classified as some weird obsessive-compulsive disorder because that’s exactly what it is.

Let’s take a look at what we know happened here. Someone saw a picture of Wonder Woman in the Lynda Carter costume…which is nearly identical to all of the Silver Age costumes of the Champion of Themiscyra, going back to the very beginning. They looked at that costume with the bustier that conceals Wonder Woman’s tits. The bustier that is propped up by whatever structural stiffness it has, and absolutely nothing else. The bustier that fights not only gravity, but also whatever shifts and pulls and wrenches and tears and body blows come about while she is wrestling with giant gorillas or killer robots or superhuman Nazi clones. The bustier magically conceals the Wonder titties…and these sick asses looked at that and said, “I know what’s wrong with that! Wonder Woman is wearing shorts! Let’s fix that!”

Yes, Wonder Woman wears shorts. Male superheroes cover their legs up, superheroines show theirs. That’s the way it is because that is the way it’s supposed to be. Have you seen an average man showing his legs lately?

You want to re-vamp the costume, give Wonder Woman a collar so she’s got kind of a “Slave Leia” thing working for her. Or, just hook something on to the bustier, wind it around the back of her neck, and then hook it on to the other side so it’s got kind of a halter thing going on. Something that makes it believable the goddamn thing stays up while she’s a stowaway on the outside of a rocket, or a jet plane, or an alien spaceship, or whatever. Then people will sing your praises. They’ll say “Hey, there goes [blank], who made sure Wonder Woman’s tits finally remained properly concealed!”

Because let’s face it.

Nobody, but NOBODY…not Ted Nugent, not Patricia Ireland, not John Kerry, not Rush Limbaugh, nobody but nobody but nobody…is ever going to say “thank goodness the Good Lord saw fit to breathe life into the body of [your name here] who put Wonder Woman into a pair of pants.” Nobody wants to see that.

Here, I will explain it one MORE time:

Wonder Woman wearing a pair of little tiny shorts is not a symbol of female oppression. It wasn’t in the 1940’s and it isn’t now. You know what that symbolizes? The Olympic games. That’s what it is all about. Have you read the origin of Wonder Woman? She is, first and foremost, a champion. She was selected as the best of the best…and right after champion, she becomes a diplomat. She is an emissary sent from one world to another. She is an ambassador. The so-called “skimpy” costume is an emblem to be worn, to reflect the demanding physical nature of the contest by which she became a champion. It really isn’t clothing at all; if anything, it is a fabric mural telling a story of how she secured her position. It isn’t intended to be pin-up attire, it is intended to be competitive, athletic attire. Kind of a hodge-podge between a track running suit, and combat armor. To sum it up, she is a female Hercules.

And by the way, where she comes from everybody prances around buck-ass naked all day all year. It’s a story of perspectives, and from her perspective the classic Lynda Carter costume is…well…something like a burkha.

Yeah, it looks a little peculiar when she wears it into outer space with a plastic globe around her head. Whatever. She’s Wonder Woman. Deal with it.

Frankly, what we’re looking at here is the reason there will never be a female-action-star movie that makes real money. Never, never, not ever. It isn’t going to happen, because when you’re a female movie star, everything you do arouses controversy, and every controversy has to be resolved by means of the answer that is most assured of avoiding passion…and therefore, being boring. This counts double when the subject turns to the exposure of lovely female skin.

Tomb Raider: Wore shorts for the promotional shots, ran around fully clothed for the rest of the movie. Generated a decent revenue stream for opening weekend, got crappy reviews. Cradle of Life: No shorts outfit at all, one bikini scene, completely stupid plot, slightly better reviews though decidedly lukewarm, financial failure. Aeon Flux: Cartoon character who runs around showing everything, brought to life with a supermodel who’d look completely awesome naked — again, running around fully covered from head to foot the entire movie. Critics hated it. Audience hated it. Creator Peter Chung felt completely embarrassed and humiliated. Fiscal meltdown.

James Bond slaps on a pair of swim trunks and nothing else…ladies go “ooh!”…but the movie continues to be about whatever the movie is about. Bad guy’s laser cannon or nuclear sabotage or whatever. Colorful characters, goofy double-agents, gadgets, codes, decoder machines, betrayals…James Bond showing skin, does not become some controversial thing that takes over the entire production. You doubt me? Let’s say your wife coos at you to put in the Bond movie where Daniel Craig wears swimming trunks…or Pierce Brosnan…or Sean Connery. Do you know we’re talking Casino Royale, Goldeneye and Goldfinger? No, you don’t. Because those movies are about many, many other things. Result? Double-Oh-Seven continues to pull in a goddamn fucking fortune, every single time. Even the bad ones make money. There is effort put into the actual story, and the method in which it is told…there is “give a damn” in the movie. That’s what everyone wants, right?

Indiana Jones? I don’t even care. I’m a straight dude and I don’t swing that way. But if I have to attend to some tedious household chore for two hours, I can promise you Raiders of the Lost Ark has a whole lot more potential for being tossed into my Blu-Ray player, than any Tomb Raider movie, or Aeon Flux. It’s got heads melting and exploding — what do you think I’m going to do? Hell, I’d rather watch that second one with the slave kids and the screaming blond and the railroad cars, than Aeon Flux. The difference isn’t the action hero. The difference is the story. And the story got some attention because they didn’t use up all their bandwidth quibbling about forcing pulchritudinous females into long pants.

You read it here first, folks. The new Wonder Woman movie is going to be a financial Japanese-Tsunami-Reactor. And it’s not because Wonder Woman is covering up her legs; it’s because, since she is, we know the makers of the movie have all their priorities cockeyed. They’re focused on the wrong things. They won’t work hard to entertain the audience. They’d rather be politically correct than deliver the entertainment value to the audience, that the audience was promised.

What’s the problem with female legs, anyway? Where’d this come from? We’re a year and a half away from electing a female President with an awesome looking pair of legs. Isn’t it time we got past this?

Bare female legs…they’re like puppies, or kittens. Good enough to turn your bad day around and make it into a good one, even if you’re a straight female. C’mon, I’m only saying what everybody’s thinking already. Seriously, if you can lay eyes on a Wonder Woman costume and your first instinct is “those two need to get covered up”…and you’re not talking about the breasts…you are way, way off base and there is something wrong with you.

Some people just haven’t been around ladies’ gams long enough, and don’t know what they’re missing. They’ve become incrementally disconnected from their own humanity, and need to be brought back in touch with it.

Which I suppose is fine, all by itself. But how come they’re in charge of making all our movies nowadays?

We’re so obsessed with being properly entertained lately. It seems everything that reaches multiple people, has to be entertaining. Even the domestic & foreign policy of our government…we judge it according to whether it is entertaining or not, not by whether it is likely to achieve the results we say we want.

How come we allow our entertainment to become so incredibly boring? Radiant, ravishing, gorgeous, beautiful females, running around in long pants. They tell us we should clamor for more of this although the ticket sales clearly prove we don’t want it. Why do we tolerate this?

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

We seem to have a lot of people walking around laboring under the impression that a bad idea, coupled up with some meaningless device, makes a good idea. And so therefore we have all these weightless ornaments that somehow have a King Midas effect on bad ideas:

– A democrat President
– A smile
– A nod
– A gesture
– A witty punchline
– The color of said President’s skin
– A thoughtful, sonorous sounding “uh” or two
– Make no mistake
– Let me be clear
– At this particular point in time, with the economy the way it is, etc.

These things do not change the fundamentals of a problem, just as the right answer doesn’t change just because the name of the country in question is “Libya” as opposed to “Iraq.”

Children should have this figured out by the time they graduate from about the fourth grade. Problems have correct and wrong answers; a lot of problems have a singular correct answer and an infinite selection of wrong answers; and most of the variables involved in the asking/answering of the question, are meaningless. You stand in front of the class and say what five and five add up to; then walk to the back of the class, do it again, the answer doesn’t change.

Now, there are some differences between Iraq/03 and Libya/11 that are in fact meaningful. Who it is who happens to be President, is not one of those; His speaking still is not meaningful. Most of the meaningful differences, actually, tend to define action as the better idea with regard to Iraq/03 and not as good an idea with regard to Libya/11.

This is Obama’s Waterloo because what has become obvious and undeniable about Him, is the very worst aspect of having Him in charge: His talent is to convincingly sell ideas that are bad. To impose Himself into the equation, as a variable that meaningfully changes the answer for the weak-minded, nevermind the plain fact that as a variable His identity does nothing to alter the correct answer. We therefore find ourselves far more likely, under His tutelage, to pursue policies that are mistaken and wrong.

I’m still maintaining my silence on whether this is one of them. We have enough examples of this, accumulated over the last two years, without Libya.

We just got this phrase from our realty agent, whom we like. I’m not going to allow the relationship to sour over a single casually-selected phrase; not easily, anyway.

My mother, who is the embodiment of perfection in every way and cannot be criticized — since she’s dead — had a Circle of Trust very much like Robert de Niro’s, and she spoke often of her proclivity for drumming people out of it on hearing the phrase “at this [particular] point in time.” At the time, I could see where she was going with this but I thought her reaction was a little on the extreme side. Even at the tender age of seventeen, with all I had to learn still ahead of me, I had the maturity to recognize business relationships were more complicated than this. Five little words change everything? Really?

And the girls half your age at the credit union who call you by your first name. Get with it Mom, that’s just how they do it in the 1980’s. You’re going to complain to management over that? Yes, as I embarked on the world of adulthood, I had the worldly wisdom necessary to see the world is more nuanced than that.

Well, one hitch in the giddy-up there. The years that have come & gone in the interim have taught me nothing about this, save for introducing the distinct possibility that Mom was on to something. And I think “possibility” is understating it. Phrases reveal things, and therefore they are important. From how many business disasters have I suffered, in all those years? Not too many, I suppose, given how much of a stretch of time we’re talking about; I’ve been fortunate. And how many could have been avoided if I just pulled an emergency cord when I heard a phrase? Uh…pretty much every single one, with no exceptions? Hmm. So there’s food for thought here. It could be twenty-twenty-hindsight, I guess. But do trustworthy people need catchphrases? No. They don’t. So I’ve had something of a slow paradigm shift here.

Well, I always knew there was something to this. I’ve never really trusted anyone who says “at this point in time.” But my own favorite is “together we can do this.” And I’ve also tacked on “in times like these” and “with the economy the way it is.”

But the more I turn it over in my head, it seems to me “not sure where you got your information” is a worthy entrant. Why would you say that to somebody? I suppose if you have conflicting information, and you can source it but you’re not sure the other person can, it might seem like a natural utterance. And I want to be fair here; if it’s the other person with all the skin in the game, and I’m just a researcher doing my job, I could see myself saying that.

Except I’ve been in that position. I didn’t use this phrase. I think that’s because I’m not a salesman; your ass is on the line, mine isn’t, in my world that means you get to do whatever you want. It isn’t that I don’t care. It’s an issue of deference to proper ownership.

And this says nothing, unlike the others, about a person’s character. It is an intrinsic attribute of that ages-old exercise in what is called “dickering.” Ever since the peasants sidestepped horse shit in the market square to quibble about bolts of silk, or ounces of spice. “Not sure where you got your info” has been part of it the entire time, I’m sure.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t expendable. It’s just poor form. I mean, if I know something I know it, right? No use trying to convince me I didn’t see what I saw.

How about “here’s my info.” Or, “can you forward me what you have, so I can make sure we’re talking about apples-and-apples here.” If you’re on my side, give me some damn help assembling together a complete picture. But I don’t much appreciate the kindly suggestions about what I’m supposed to be forgetting, in order to come to the conclusion you want me to come to.

So is it fair to add this to the list? I’m thinking maybe there need to be two lists. One, a list of phrases you shouldn’t want to use if we’re going to form the realtor/buyer relationship I think we should be forming here; the other, a list of phrases that immediately put you out of the circle.

With all due respect to our current President, “let me be clear” and “make no mistake” go on that second list. And I think that one about “together we can do this” is the finalist; that’s the one that compels me to slam the door harder & faster than all the rest of them. This does not make me as excited as it might make other people. Well, not in the same way, anyhow.

From t-shirt doctor.

We were getting ready to check out of a hotel yesterday morning and there was some kind of zit ointment commercial on the teevee. I was intrigued by the expensive-looking computer graphic that showed the goop working its way into the facial pores and cleaning the crap out of it, sending the detritus up to the surface so it could be washed away. And then it used the remaining fifteen seconds for some gorgeous female to croon away about its wonderful glittering attributes. First adjective she used was “creamy”; this is what piqued my interest.

I was not quite so much intrigued by the lack of coordination. Although there was that, obviously; creamy things can’t be counted on to sink into the pores of your face. It was the mindlessness. Obviously, I would have to blog this phenomenon of universal, glittering generalities that are used to sell things.

– Creamy
– Toll free phone numbers repeated three or four times in rapid succession
– 4g
– Green
– Personal advisor/counselor/trainer/representative/tutor just for you!!!

These are just some of the verbals. Year by year, they change somewhat. The visuals are more entrenched and stabilized: Young, healthy, young, good-looking, young, attractive, young, full of pep, young, perky, and young. Did I say young? Also, women winning arguments with their stubborn, stupid, clumsy and insensitive but well-intentioned husbands & boyfriends. That is how you sell your crap. Young beautiful people, man uses brand X, woman tells him how to do it right, green, good for the environment, creamy and personal trainer devoted just to you.

First question I have is: How do I blog this without picking on the girls? Clearly, men don’t give a flying fig about creamy, and any fool can plainly see a man is not made more receptive to the prospect of buying something by the idea that his wife or girlfriend is going to humiliate him in public yet another time. The tutor who burns up all this time on one thing and on absolutely nothing else is obviously cobbled together to churn up some female appeal. Rare is the man who will stoop to being shown how to do something; and, I daresay, the one who is excited about such a thing has yet to be born. The 4g network does have some appeal for us, we pine for lost youth just like our female counterparts, albeit not in the same way perhaps. Just as many men are snobbish about the environment and want to be “green” so they can say they’re better than the next guy, more worthy of continuing to live here.

But by and large, I said, commercials are not made for men, they’re made for women. Nobody’s going out of business any time soon for having failed to attract enough male clientele, not as far as teevee advertising is concerned.

My fiance offered up the situation with pickup truck commercials. I had to give her that one. This truck is tough! Grrrr! But then again…after we checked out and mingled with the traffic, there were a lot of Big! Tough! Grrrr! trucks out there, not being used to pull tree stumps or transport cords of wood, just tootling down the road. Sitting way up high. Being safe. Feeling invulnerable…and driving in such a manner as to reflect that, should a collision occur, Number One would come out of it just fine. The other driver would be screwed. But the pilot of the larger vessel would likely not even know anything happened. Like a nine hundred foot long cruise ship running over an otter or something.

And that fantasy, ladies and gentlemen, is a chick thing. Oooo…safety safety safety, I feel so safe. Point is, maybe even the “Truck! Big! Tough! Grrrr!” message has some gender-neutral appeal, even some feminine appeal.

But I don’t care. The “arms race” with larger and larger vehicles is certainly not a good thing, but to me this is a secondary matter. The thing that really makes me think modern civilization is boned is — no, not “creamy” — it is the special-tutor-just-for-you thing.

This just might not help, in some situations.

And it might hurt.

There is a skill we are talking about here, that is important but doesn’t get a lot of attention because it doesn’t have a name. It is roughly analogous to the skill involved in climbing on to a merry-go-round without anyone stopping it for you. Let the world function in whatever way it will; learn all you can about it anyway.

I’m not even that worried that the skill is in a state of steep decline. If it were just a decline, we’d bottom out with it at some point. The marketplace of ideas would take care of it. Someone would say “nobody seems to be doing this, perhaps if I refine a skill here, this is how I can make my way in the world.” My concern is that the skill is not valued. My concern is that, parents are seeing their children are incapable of learning anything until there’s a “special instructor just for him!” — and that’s quite alright. Sign up that tutor. Get the medication prescription filled. Who cares about such a crippling dependency when the wonderful services are there to take care of it all…it’s like a does-the-tree-make-a-noise thing.

And I really don’t like seeing all these bushels of crap getting sold with this “special [blank] just for you who doesn’t attend to anything else in any way” deal. That looks, to me, like…I feel special with all these resources consumed just for me, me, me. It’s the polar opposite of the environmentally-conscious thing, is it not? Leave a tiny footprint over there, and a big one over here. I count, because this person’s (or these people’s) time got all burned up on me and my problems, and absolutely nothing else.

Looks like a cognitive dissonance taking place. People want to be a certain thing, but they don’t want to admit, even to themselves, that this is what they want to be.

Go get ’em Professor McKitrick. “I refuse to accept that civilization is something to be ashamed of.” So do I. So do many.

Earth Hour: A Dissent. Hat tip to Gerard.

In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.

Here is my response.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
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Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
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I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics
University of Guelph

Civilization is at an impasse. Up until, I think, somewhere around the mid-1950’s technology had the capability to sprint or walk or hop or skip or mosey or whatever it wanted to do, onward, forward into the future. As fast or as slow as it cared to. If people hated it, they could go ahead and hate just as much as they wanted to. But you can only keep Rearden Metal off the market so long. If the laws of physics made it possible for something to happen, and someone figured out how to do it, but our busybody bureaucrats had a bee up their butts about it…it would happen.

I think the time has come to recognize those days are in twilight, and have been for quite some time. Where human achievement is in conflict with human rules, the rules will yield for a little while…until such time as they have had time to organize. And then achievement must give way. Unless — and this is key — it has taken the initiative to organize itself into a political movement. To become as firm and as unrelenting as the destructive forces that are about to assail it.

If it persists in flickering away like a candle flame just because it can…ignoring all of the human reactions to it…it will not be flickering long. Someone will come along and blow it out. They’ll blow harder and harder, until the flame flickers no more. Unless the flame fights back somehow.

I know something personally about this. Frankly, I have learned something personally about this, far more times than I care to have learned it…I know more about it than I care to. We’ll discuss the particulars of that some other time.

But I’ve not yet seen this fail. When human resourcefulness triumphs over the laws of physics and the forces that bind the known universe, that is an action. You know what they say about actions…equals & opposites & all that. We may not like to admit it, but that is part of the human condition as well. Until the final beat of the last surviving human heart, as long as there are people building things there will be people laboring to destroy those things. Even the new things. Especially the new things. If all you know how to do is destroy, you don’t want to see anybody else building anything.

Blogger friend Phil has snagged the one hundred and tenth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. The subject is gay marriage and the potential it may possess for opening the door to polygamy…a subject that does very little to arouse our passion.

But we knew we had to snag this beauty before it drifted on by into oblivion:

The ole “I laugh, so it is defacto untrue” argument.

Mmmmmmmm…nine words that perfectly capture how the Jon Stewart brand of punditry works. And completely. Well — not really. The cowardliness of this, the part where you get nailed by an exaggeration and take the “can’t ya take a joke” easy-out, the nine words don’t capture that. But they capture all the rest of it. A snarky remark and a deferential chuckle, and an inconvenient truth is brushed aside as if it never existed.

How many times have you seen this in the last ten years? One hell of a lot more than you saw it in the previous ten, I’ll wager. It is a wave of cultural evolution. Not a good one; not at all.

I shamelessly lifted it as I flushed the buffer of “penciled-in, unnumbered Things I Know,” which I noticed was up to an accumulation of ten items over three months. So now the thought bears a serial number — and due credit is owed, as I proceed to point out the obvious:

Thing I Know #393. We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around in possession of some magical power that has no name and that is difficult to describe. It is probably most accurate to call this magical power “If I laugh at something it becomes untrue.” They have this magical power…or, at least, they seem to think that they do.

This would be about the fourth-grade level of that halcyon era known as “it’s still alright to see positive things about a straight white guy who hasn’t contributed to a freakish lefty political agenda”…it was wounded in the seventies, limped onward during the eighties, rallied a little bit with the first Die Hard movie and was smothered in its sleep with the election of Bill Clinton.

It’s always a little deflating to watch what was cool & awesome back in 1975 and see how stupid it looks now. Thus far, I’ve not found any scene from Happy Days that fails to affect me in this way. But, in some ways we were all healthier. There’s absolutely nothing offensive about this scene, and yet, it would be completely unthinkable to put it on the air now for all kinds of reasons.

There’s a strong central hero, with nothing to “legitimize” this role for him. He’s not ethnically diverse — Italian does not count — not a homosexual, not a woman, not handicapped in any way, not eleven years old, so there’s no ironic twist. Whaddya think you’re doing making him look like he knows what he’s doing?

The Evil HR Lady explains, in clear and concise terms, why another nanny-rule isn’t such a good thing. It’s nothing that comes as any sort of news to my fine self, but the way she makes her point is constructive and worthy of emulation, in my opinion. It makes the point more likely to sink in, for those who need to understand it. Maybe.

Anti bullying legislation has been under consideration in several states since California first introduced a proposal in 2003. None has passed such legislation, but, the Los Angeles Times reports, New York is likely to make bullying illegal this year. Maryland is holding hearings and other states are considering proposals.

This is all noble and good and completely the wrong thing to do. Here are 5 reasons why.

1. It will be even harder to find new jobs…

2. Legislation will not solve the problem…

3. Bullying is impossible to define clearly…

4. Managers need to manage…

5. Protection against bullying also protects the bully…

I find this to be a rather eclectic mix of wants and needs, which is somewhat nonsensical because it doesn’t live up to the panic generated by the headline.

Maybe you think you’ll stop eating out so much, and cook at home more, now that you have time. Be warned that if you’re the type who likes to cook, when you have a lot of time on your hands, you’ll probably be most interested in trying new (aka expensive) things that require spices and equipment you don’t have–not in pouring Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom over some defrosted chicken breasts.

Yeah fine. But that’s not a make-or-break between a comfortable retirement and an uncomfortable one. In other words, if that special terror of the prospect of outliving my savings should befall me, fancy spices are probably not going to enter the picture at all.

But it does make some good points. Our tried-and-true rules of thumb about funding retirement, of necessity, must be re-thought.

Your health expenses will go up, and contrary to what you may have been imagining, Medicare does not cover everything–Medigap insurance is costly, and may still leave you with considerable out-of-pocket expenses. There are associated costs, too, with getting older–you frequently have to pay people to do things that you no longer have the energy or physical ability to do yourself. Assisted living isn’t covered by any of the major programs, and it’s quite costly.

Somehow, the subject came up in the office about laws being passed to make Pi a certain number. One of our contractors forwarded me this thing from the Huffington Post later in the day.

Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3.
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“That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better,” said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama’s second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius, a mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter “π,” with a value of approximately 3.14159. HR 205 does not change the root definition, per se. The bill simply, and legally, declares pi to be exactly 3.
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“For decades, we’ve all been learning that pi is this crazy ‘irrational’ number. And any number with no end is, not, well, it makes it really hard,” Roby said. “We talked about making pi 3-and-a-third, but that wouldn’t really help, because you’re still then stuck with endless threes.”

Okay, so that’s the left-wing fantasy “Palin says she can see Russia from her house” version, meaning it makes them feel good to think it really happened. But what are the facts? Twenty years ago, Straight Dope dug into it and here’s what they found.

It happened in Indiana. Although the attempt to legislate pi was ultimately unsuccessful, it did come pretty close. In 1897 Representative T.I. Record of Posen county introduced House Bill #246 in the Indiana House of Representatives. The bill, based on the work of a physician and amateur mathematician named Edward J. Goodwin (Edwin in some accounts), suggests not one but three numbers for pi, among them 3.2…

Now I know what you’re thinking: If this T.I. Record was a democrat, then that will round this whole thing out as just yet another example of democrats doing something silly, bigoted and irrational and then, recalling it much later through those thick mists of “makes me feel good to think such-and-such,” projecting the behavior on to their enemies the Republicans.

Not that it really says a whole lot, having happened in 1897 and all. But it certainly would have to be added to such a list.

Well…okay. Go ahead and tack that puppy on to the list. They can’t seem to stop, huh?

RECORD (RECORDS), Taylor I. HOUSE, 1897 (POSEY). Born October 12, 1846, Greene County, Indiana. Attended common schools. Married Sallie A. Cox, 1867 (4 children) – died 1882; married Mary Yeager, 1883 (1 child). Farmer; timber and lumber merchant. Democrat. Died November 20, 1912, Lynn Township, Posey County, Indiana. [emphasis mine]

Why did I suspect it was the democrats who had actually started this? Easy. I have found it to be a fair generalization that, if some supposition goes against the plain truth — but it might be acceptable to those among us who have never built anything, and never will have to build anything, that stays built — the democrats are almost always the ones promoting it. And you can’t build a grain silo, or a gun barrel, if you think Pi is 16/5.

I saw that, to someone charged with the responsibility of designing or creating something that had to actually work, it would be unacceptable to pretend Pi is something different from what it really is. For everyone else, it just might be okay. And that nailed it shut for me…must be democrats. I was right.