“I’ve noticed the more questions I ask, the worse your ideas get.”

Byron York in the Washington Examiner, hat tip to Hot Air, via blogger friend Terri.

In the last few days, Obama administration officials have frequently faced the question: Is the fighting in Libya a war? From military officers to White House spokesmen up to the president himself, the answer is no. But that leaves the question: What is it?

In a briefing on board Air Force One Wednesday, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes took a crack at an answer. “I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” Rhodes said. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.”

Rhodes’ words echoed a description by national security adviser Tom Donilon in a briefing with reporters two weeks ago as the administration contemplated action in Libya. “Military steps — and they can be kinetic and non-kinetic, obviously the full range — are not the only method by which we and the international community are pressuring Gadhafi,” Donilon said.

Rhodes and Donilon are by no means alone. “Kinetic” is heard in a lot of descriptions of what’s going on in Libya. “As we are successful in suppressing the [Libyan] air defenses, the level of kinetic activity should decline,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a meeting with reporters in Moscow Tuesday. In a briefing with reporters the same day from on board the USS Mount Whitney, Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn, said, “The coalition brings together a wide array of capabilities that allow us to minimize the collateral damage when we have to take kinetic operations.” On Monday, General Carter Ham, head of U.S. Africa Command, said of the coalition forces, “We possess certainly a very significant kinetic capability.” And unnamed sources use it too. “In terms of the heavy kinetic portion of this military action, the president envisions it as lasting days, not weeks,” an unnamed senior official told CNN Saturday.

Like I was just telling you: The election of 2008 went exactly the way it was supposed to go. We got together and chose the candidate with the greatest salesmanship ability, hoping that this would reflect the very best the nation would have to offer — and it worked. We’ve got a “leader” who can sell anything to anybody.

That’s the problem.

His policies are absolutely wretched, since there’s no need for them to to be well-thought-out, good, quality policies. There would be effort involved in that. If it was a requirement, which it isn’t. Forget about selling ice to Eskimos. Forget about selling that ice to living snowmen. This guy could sell them hairdryers.

Awesome salesman == reprehensible policies. Not a new formula by any means.

I still can’t get used to the idea of a presidential election campaign in one year, running through its various stages in earlier years. The campaign of 2012 has been going on since the first time our current President’s approval rating hit its history-making down-slide, sometime during the spring of ’09. Perhaps persons like myself are to blame for this, for our actions that I, for one, would cheerfully do all over again.

But since the campaign season of 2012 has been underway for two years now, I see it has now entered the “What Do You Think Of” stage. Friends and acquaintances ask me what I think of some new or aspiring candidate. They’re all female, and the spirit in which they ask the question reflects that. Which is to say they’ve already made up their minds what my answer is supposed to be and I’m not altogether sure why they’re bothering to ask me. I give them my answer, and then they ask a different question — or maybe the same one again — consistently demonstrating that they didn’t pay attention to what I just got done telling them. Kind of a “this dress or this dress?” thing.

But the ladies maintain no monopoly on what follows. This next piece of turf they must share with the gentlemen: We seem to have a lot of people out there who, blisteringly disappointed with the way the popularity contest of 2008 turned out, are eagerly anticipating the next one. The problem with this is, as I continue to explain, in vain, over and over…

If it is indeed a popularity contest, you may as well cancel the whole thing right now.

Barack Obama is The Man, you see what I’m saying? He was, in November 2008, and remains today, the pot of gold at the end of the “charming personality” rainbow. Once you buy into the notion that the Oval Office is the repository in which we ensconce the nation’s premiere salesman, there is no need to have another election. Barack Obama can sell anything to anybody. That’s the problem.

The 2012 election is a coming-of-age for a whole lot of American adults. Somehow, for whatever reason, it has become appealing to them in a natural way to make decisions about things like this toward producing a desirable outcome not in terms of the state of objects involved, but in terms of the state of their own emotions. In other words, they feel their way around perplexing problems, rather than think their way through them. That is not to say these are stupid people. It says, rather, that they have yet to mature in certain key, critical ways. It’s an easy thing to do with elections. You don’t get to see the immediate effect of the decisions made by these office-holders after they win their elections, so it’s easy to start thinking about it like a child — “I feel good about the decision I made therefore it must have been the right one.”

The point being missed is that if that’s your process, Barack Obama doesn’t represent any flaw that came afterward. He is the best-case scenario of where this can go. These people, for the most part, don’t want to accept this because if you accept it, there’s no escaping the logical conclusion that if Obama represents an unacceptable problem then so does the process itself!

And you know what the O-man said about change; it can be scary. He’s got that one right. These people need to change the way they make these decisions. They know this, but they don’t want to know this. They need to grow up in a big hurry and start voting like grown-ups, by November next.

Or else let’s just cancel the election. Seriously, save the money, save the carbon pollution offset vouchers or whatever, save the gas. You seriously think we’ll have a personality contest between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, and Trump will lock that thing up?

No, you make it about policies and issues, “If our officials do X, Y is the likely result” — or else don’t bother. And repeal term limits while you’re at it. Obama isn’t Bill Clinton; we are never, in the next twenty years or so, going to find as charming a huckster as Barack Hussein Obama. Might as well make Him our Emperor For Life. We cannot financially afford what He does, but that’s irrelevant. He belongs exactly where He is, and for the indeterminate future, nobody else ever will.

If, that is, certain people can’t grow up in certain ways.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

It’s here. Pull up a chair and read with me, will you…let’s see if we can find what people are missing.

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

Yikes! That’s pretty bad. Better keep reading…even though some of these words are a tad bit big, and stuff.

Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they’ve been lamenting the philistinism of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman’s day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to “slightly under 1 percent.”

Thus ends paragraph two. Paragraphs three and four follow…

But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.

To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.

Paragraph five has some of them underline things in them called “links.” You know how they works. You clicks on ’em and they take you places, which makes it tougher to concentrate on the big words.

Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U.S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to “share power with a lot of subnational governments,” notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics. In contrast, we’re saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). “Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote,” says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. “You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.”

Hmmm…yes, here at the end of paragraph five, I think we’ve got a good point. I live in California, which does something a little bit strange that might come as news to you. Anytime our state legislators sit down to decide an issue that seems to be slightly contentious — and that’s an expansive reading there, you’d be surprised how many things fall into this category — it ends up on the ballot as a referendum. They’re usually called “propositions” and in a typical election year we’ll see between ten and twenty of the goddamn things, sometimes more than that, about such things as issuing water bonds or imposing new requirements that a given revenue stream can only be spent on certain things. From the home and office note-comparing sessions during the first couple of days of November in even numbered years, it has become clear to me that even our best-informed voters have entirely given up on trying to follow this. It has dissolved into a puddle of crapshoot lunacy, a very long time long ago.

I see California as a rather extreme example of what this Schudson guy is talking about. Staying involved and fleshing out the details is a rather simple order if there aren’t too many details, especially when everybody’s talking about them all the time. Once you have to do some research, into things nobody’s talking about anywhere, the interest tapers off. Doesn’t matter if it’s going to be on the ballot or not.

Now paragraph six. This is the mind-blower…or the eyeball-roller.

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe. [emphasis mine]

Maybe, since you’re probably an American with your limited attention span and so forth, you should go back and read that bolded sentence one more time.

Beginning to get an idea why I don’t subscribe to Newsweek? We just finished half a dozen paragraphs. And only now do we find out, the entire point of the article, the entire premise that has sent it ricocheting around cyberspace like a jitterbug in a jar…there’s nothing to it. America is made up of capable people who are more-or-less the same as their European counterparts — on top of which, they are remaining equivalently knowledgeable about a vastly more complex system — augmented by this influx of immigrants, of which there are a great many who are not learning the native language and not trying to assimilate. But they get to participate in this survey anyway, bringing down the net score of the country so the smug Europeans can chuckle at us.

There are some countries in the European community which also have issues with immigrants who refuse to assimilate. But I wonder if those immigrants managed to participate in the survey. Or if they cared to.

Well, I’m glad someone is going through the trouble of making sure Europe can feel good about itself.

Did you ever notice that whenever there’s a broad, intense effort to make a certain person or entity feel good about itself, most of the time that person or entity is someone/something that already feels mighty good about itself? I wonder what drives this. Did someone, somewhere, decide there was a shortage of smug Europeans that had to be immediately addressed? Not enough people running around making snide, self-satisfied comments about stupid Americans yet?

Why do we work so hard to create greater abundances of things that are already abundant? This is where the angels and demons look at us, and have trouble comprehending what it is they are seeing.

Update: Neal Boortz has some interesting observations to make about how the numbers break down.

That’s the first of Seven Questions for Liberals About Obama’s Libyan War, from blogger friend John Hawkins.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.

…and leave my family alone, says Michelle Malkin.

Here’s a transcript and here’s the audio:

CARL KASELL, host:

From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT…DON’T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I’m Carl Kasell. We’re playing this week with Amy Dickinson, Maz Jobrani and Paula Poundstone. And here again is your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, host:

Thank you, Carl.

(Soundbite of applause)*

*[MM NOTE: THE SHOW IS TAPED BEFORE A LIVE STUDIO AUDIENCE, BUT THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

SAGAL: Thank you everybody. Right now it’s time for the WAIT WAIT…DON’T TELL ME! Bluff the Listener game. Call 1-888-Wait-Wait to play our game on the air. Hi, you’re on WAIT WAIT…DON’T TELL ME!

PATRICK: Hi, this is Patrick from Suffolk, Virginia.

SAGAL: Hey Patrick, how are things in Suffolk?

…[Lame chatter edited out for space]…

…SAGAL: I agree with you. Well welcome to the show, Patrick. You’re going to play the game in which you must try to tell truth from fiction. Carl, what is Patrick’s topic?

KASELL: Finally, I know who I really am.

SAGAL: Everyone has faced that moment of existential doubt and asked: who am I? Where do I come from? Well, this week, we read about someone who sought answers to those questions and was shocked at what they found. Our panelists are going to tell you three stories about people uncovering a secret about their identity, only one of which was in this week’s news. Choose that true story; you’ll win Carl’s voice on your home answering machine or voicemail. Ready to play?

PATRICK: I am.

SAGAL: First, let’s hear from Maz Jobrani.

Mr. MAZ JOBRANI (Founder, Axis of Evil Comedy Tour): Conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin has expressed her fear that there are Muslims amongst us who are hiding their true identity. The most prominent, she claims, being Barack Obama. However, when she set out to find proof of these undercover Muslims, she found more than she bargained for.

It turns out that there are, indeed, some Muslims hiding their identity to fly under the radar. The most pertinent one for Malkin being her own grandfather.

(Soundbite of laughter)*

*[MM NOTE: THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

Mr. JOBRANI: Yes, Grandpa Malkin, who is from the Philippines but lives with Michelle’s parents, had not told the family about his religion for fear of being ostracized and thrown out. “Do you know how hard it is to pray five times a day when your family doesn’t know?”

(Soundbite of laughter)*

*[MM NOTE: THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

Mr. JOBRANI: “I had to excuse myself to the bathroom every time I wanted to pray.”

(Soundbite of laughter)*

*[MM NOTE: THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

Mr. JOBRANI: “And the ham dinners, don’t get me started on the ham dinners.”

(Soundbite of laughter)*

**[MM NOTE: THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

Mr. JOBRANI: Malkin was in shock when her grandfather revealed his true identity to her. He explained that he had been closeted Muslim for too long and it was time for him to live his life and be happy with himself. Malkin used the revelation to confirm her argument that Muslims are taking over. First they wanted the youth, and now they’re going after my grandfather? My 90-year-old grandfather? This is sick.

(Soundbite of laughter)*

**[MM NOTE: THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CANNED LAUGH TRACK]

(Soundbite of applause)

SAGAL: Conservative activist Michelle Malkin finds a Muslim in her very home.

Fired NPR journalist Juan Williams says: Defund. Excuse me, I seem to have lost track: What is the opposing argument? Michelle Malkin’s cousin has gone missing from the University district in Seattle since early this month, so I find the timing of this “humor” to be monstrously insensitive and incompetent…at best. In view of that, the tried-and-true “Aw c’mon, it isn’t that much loot” just doesn’t do it for me.

Watch this spindly, craven comedian’s gestures and expressions right after he drops the “twat-bomb” at 0:34. Spins around with fake surprise, as if he’s saying: “Yes, I actually said it! Now give me some attention! Yipee!”

I’m with Blogger Friend Rick. How much would you pay to watch this craven fucking coward with his sickening, pleading puppy face and his scrawny little arms, personally meet up with a guy who finished 400 miles of dogsled race with a broken arm (Going Rogue: An American Life, pp. 188-189) whose wife he just called a “twat.”

I’d lay out some big bucks to see that. Certainly a lot more than I’d ever pay to see some lame Bill Maher so-called “comedy” monologue.

And whether they want to admit it or not, so would any Bill Maher fan who absolutely loathes the Palins. Even among that community, the cage match would fetch a premium price, more than the very best of Maher’s material, whatever that is. It’d would be a “National Enquirer” situation, nobody admitting to paying for it, but the bottom-line numbers belying the truth.

Am I wrong?

If not, then what’s that say.

Maher is just the sorriest sight I can imagine. Well, maybe I can imagine something else, but I’d have to do a whole lot of thinking to do it, and it just isn’t worth it to me. How much of a sad sack piece of shit is he? Bill Maher might very well have woken up one morning, maybe a week and a half after Sarah Palin became John McCain’s running mate…or maybe a week and a half into Obama’s term…and figured out that not only is Palin qualified to be President, but she’d be more qualified for that office than anyone since Lincoln.

No, it isn’t terribly likely.

Point is, if he did, we wouldn’t know. His schtick is chiseled in granite — it is defined — he cannot drop it and move on to something else. This is his career. It is his life. He needs to keep spewing this crap whether he wants to or not.

He is as pathetic as a fifty year old hooker with seventy year old tits, who never learned to cook and isn’t enough of a looker to wait on tables. Yeah, he’s got people sitting in front of him laughing at his jokes. Who among them is saying “I want my kid to turn out just like Bill Maher”?

Oh but we haven’t even gotten to the really pitiful part, which is this: Once again, something ugly has been dredged up for people to say about Sarah Palin. And once again, it’s something completely made-up…which says something. It says something about her, and it says something about the people who want to criticize her. They don’t live in reality. And they make poor decisions.

Yeah yeah I know what comes next…”C’mon Freeberg, get with it and don’t take things so seriously, it was a joke.” Right. Like I said. Not living in reality. Making decisions, on purpose, based on made-up things that are not true.

Losers. Every last one of them. If they’re allowed to dress themselves in the morning and walk around, they’ve been entrusted with too much responsibility.

As for you Mr. Maher, the classic redneck bumper sticker says it all. Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.

I’m seeing quite a few posts in blogs like mine to the effect of “I think I might have pissed off this liberal friend of mine on Facebook and here’s how.” This has been on a hockey-stick upswing now that President Obama, showing an apparent fondness for the idea of getting re-elected, has thrown His entire platform of “end war forever by unilaterally deciding not to participate in it” under the bus by taking action on Libya. The lefties are ending friendships, or threatening to. They’re feeling like they’ve been painted into a corner; they feel that way because that’s exactly what has happened.

Well, my lefty friend wasn’t ending a friendship, but he was making it known that something stung and I had brought the friendly and jocular tone of the discourse to an end, or at least endangered it. How did I do that? I called him out. He’d offered these rejoinders to me of the form “you misunderstand, I am not saying A, I am saying B.” Then he did it again and again and again…each time, I took it seriously, resolving to sharpen my pencil of discussion and place a greater effort on the task of staying within the lines, to understand the other side. But after awhile it stopped making sense. In truth, it had been quite awhile since I began to suspect this was either some tactic being lifted out of a written-or-unwritten Alinsky playbook, or was simply a nervous tic. Either way, I wasn’t taking it as seriously as I did before. How could I?

I should note that he isn’t a lefty, he’s anti-war and anti-Bush. But, you see, there we go again. Quite easy to take at face value if that’s the first protest to arrive fitting this template; when it’s the latest of many, you have to look at it differently.

Sometimes, even if it might be entirely sincere it’s altogether unreasonable. When you deal with real life, there are consequences. You can’t say “No no, I’m not saying I want to get into an accident, I’m just saying why can’t we go 70 miles an hour even though it’s a windy backroad and it’s icy.” You can’t say “I’m not saying I like the idea of losing a finger or that’s what I want to do, I’m just saying why do we have to power off the electric knife before we pick things out of the blades.” Sometimes you have to avoid A to avoid B. Which means — this “I’m not saying this, I’m saying that” can be effectively used, even without the knowledge of the person using it, to avoid reality.

Nor is it lost on me that there’s a soft, subtle dig being tossed out to the other party. Ah, look at this dimwit; he misunderstood what I said here, too! He keeps misunderstanding me! Fits right in to that narrative about only stupid people vote for, or support, candidates or office-holders who happen to be stupid. I should hasten to add this might not be the case with my former work colleague; he’s tossed out lots of flattering bromides about my brainpower, et al. But you see, this is how it’s gotten awkward. There’s really nothing else being said. You’re so smart Morgan, no no, you keep misunderstanding me, I’m not saying this I’m saying that. Well, we agree on the awesomeness of vintage teevee shows, maybe that’s what we should be talking about.

Now, this other guy who was talking to me about it back in ’04, when it was a much more exciting thing: This was the first time I had ever heard of anyone say “No no, I’m not saying Saddam Hussein wasn’t a problem, I am in fact agreeing to the idea that he was quite dangerous, all I’m saying is we had no right to go in and do something about it.” That creeped me out. It creeps me out to this very day. Because I know why that guy said it; this was a chameleon, someone who acted on each new situation for the sole purpose of making his popularity greater than it was before. I worked with him for five years and never saw him once go against the perceived majority, nor do I expect I ever would’ve if I’d worked with him for another twenty.

I think these two agents — lust for positioning oneself with the popular frame of mind, and denial of the consequences of reality vis a vis “I’m not saying A, what I’m saying is B” — combined together, present a danger much greater than the sum of the parts. I think what we’re looking at here is the Epoxy of Doom. Don’t we then act out the mythos of the lemmings, rushing together as a crowd up to, and over, the brink of a cliff? Have we not then eliminated any factor that might stop us from doing such a thing? Avoidance of reality provides the lack of direction and ignorance, and then peer pressure provides the drive. “No no, I’m not saying I want that bad thing to happen, what I’m saying is…whatever all these other people around me are saying.” Okay then, we’re big and we’re moving. Momentum by definition. But who’s driving this bus?

Right versus wrong is measured according to whether lots of “cool” people are doing the same thing. Any logical pondering about actions versus consequences is brushed aside with “I’m not saying that I’m saying this.” And wherever the mob goes, it goes. We then become just a tumbleweed in the windstorm of random chance, do we not? What, then, anchors us or directs us? Have we not then abjured anything that would?

Interesting. I knew what it meant, since I’m over twenty-five and I listened to the O.J. Simpson trial just like everyone else…

But the time line involved is a bit of a surprise to me. It’s got a bit of a “hockey stick graph” thing going, does it not? I wonder how many other words do.

I can’t take issue with Freud for this observation of his about men being hysterical — even though he screwed up a perfectly good word. But there’s something not right about a word meaning the same thing for over two millennia, and then some egghead comes along and says “Nope it doesn’t mean that any more it means some other thing, I said so.” How does a modernized society retain its frame of reference with that going on? Answer: It doesn’t.

In fact, is this a sexist term anymore? It either applies to women exclusively or it doesn’t; and if Freud has made it more generalized to apply to the gentlemen as well, how does it remain sexist? Can’t have it both ways.

Schwagnificaence (n.):

A portmanteau of schwag, swagger, significance and magnificence.

(I tried to work in momentum and inertia as well but I ran out of syllables.)

The rights and privileges a sentient organism retains under some interpretation of Natural Law, to take up space and consume resources toward fulfillment of that organism’s own needs, desires or goals.

The act of doing this, without any express or implied apology. Pride in one’s own existence. Confidence that this existence is a net gain, or at least a break-even, for others and therefore nobody else has the authority or obligation to interfere. Schwagnificaence is not necessarily hard-nosed libertarianism; it may involve a requirement that others defer or genuflect.

“Interpretation of Natural Law” is key; the interpretation is culturally driven. In some cultures, certain classes of people have this automatically. Protocols can confer schwagnificaence on certain people if there is an expectation that others should pay heed, or give way. A lady possesses schwagnificaence when a gentleman is expected to surrender his bus seat to her or to open doors for her. When he actually does it, this is confirmed. Schwagnificaence can be, therefore, a differential in a culturally understood but unwritten ranking system.

Why am I inventing this new word? It’s needed. This is what the arguing is all about — people want schwagnificaence, or they want others to have it, or they want to deny it to others, and they’re trying to cudgel and coerce strangers into confirming it. Great magnitudes of energy, therefore, are diverted into the effort to mold and shape an evolving cultural protocol.

– Feminism is a demand that one class increases in schwagnificaence, and it must decrease for another class
– Affirmative action is a legislated requirement to this effect; one class is to gain at the expense of another
– Hating George W. Bush because he smirks and swaggers, once announced, becomes an effort to deplete schwagnificaence
– Protesting foreign aid to Israel is not a protest about dollars, but about schwagnificaence
– Global warming is all about schwagnificaence — it is an effort to make people apologize for continuing to exist
– Can’t turn our thermostats to 72 degrees and expect Europe to say that’s alright
– Can’t drill for oil
– Congressional hearings on Muslim men being recruited to Jihad; when we argue about this, we’re arguing about schwagnificaence
– Everybody who dares to question the policies of Our First Holy President must be a racist; since He possesses, in the minds of some, infinite schwagnificaence
– The Wisconsin riots are all about schwagnificaence
– “Won’t Sarah Palin go away already her 15 minutes are SO up” implores that Palin should lose whatever schwagnificaence she has.

Schwagnificaence can not be measured in absolute terms; it can only be compared, and even then the differential is subjective. It is a matter of opinion. Schwagnificaence is firmer when the opinions come together and form a numerically solid consensus, that some designated individual possesses a vast abundance of schwagnificaence, or suffers from a crippling deficit of schwagnificaence. However, a firm measurement of schwagnificaence is by no means a high reading, or vice-versa. Schwagnificaence, therefore, is measured on two dimensions; it can be firm or soft (a perceived majority agrees on the reading), high or low (the individual has much or the individual has very little).

Schwagnificaence is absolutely not self esteem. If a man possesses extraordinarily high levels of self esteem, he is almost certainly a sociopath. Such an person cannot live peacefully among others, and if he does so, society is weakened. However, a man who is confident and secure in evaluating his own worthiness, irrespective of the derogatory comments of antagonists, strangers and other outsiders, is the strong flexible stuff from which a robust, functional society is made. He does not scramble for a higher or firmer footing on some social ladder, therefore he does not betray friendships to please or appease newer acquaintances he thinks might be in a position to help him.

You might say self esteem is the license a man feels he has to live at the expense of others, and schwagnificaence is his drive and determination to stop others from living at his expense.

But the point is — an individual’s measurement of his own schwagnificaence, is conflated, by design, with the reading made by those who spend time around him. If an individual is subschwagnificaent, meaning his own reading is far beneath the reading made of him by his peers, with the passage of time his reading will ascend to match theirs; if he is supraschwagnificaent, meaning he fancies himself to be more worthy than they do, then ultimately his reading will usually diminish to match theirs. Only individuals who accord themselves great, vast reserves of schwagnificaence will show themselves capable of maintaining this, across time, throughout a sustained onslaught of protests from peers that the reading should be dropped.

My recommendation for a new, civil tone in our discourse? Let’s narrow the arguing about schwagnificaence down to just a very few things. And of those arguments about schwagnificaence that must remain, let’s admit that’s what they’re about. If we can do that much, I maintain the “civil tone” thing will pretty much work itself out. If we can’t, then it won’t.

I’m seeing an awful lot of arguments lately that look like this:

Assertion: It might in fact be quite reasonable.

Evidence: It might in fact be quite sturdy and convincing. But, annoyingly, it leaves some wiggle room for a responsible and curious mind to entertain some skepticism, if only as a formality.

Boogeyman: We’re being overrun by teeming hordes of crackpots, idiots, psychotics, sociopaths, schizoids, dirtbags, jerks, lunatics, luddites, et al who I hate so much because their minds are not conclusively made up by the evidence I have presented. I have given them their instructions about what they’re supposed to think, and goldang it I know I was clear about it, but they’re not obeying.

Indictment and Abdication: And here is what I’m calling out. Ready? Here it comes, drum roll please…I am all done discussing this because those dirtbags listed in the paragraph above will never be convinced, ever, by anything. You are hereby instructed to regard these people you have never met, who might for all you know not even exist, with the same visceral level of sneering contempt I have just shared with you.

I’m seeing this arguing style in a lot of places and I don’t think I ever saw it before just a few years ago.

Obama was born in Hawaii.

The “global climate” is warming and we’ve got to do something about it.

Evolution explains every little characteristic about every species and disproves the existence of God.

There are more examples to add to this list, but at the moment I cannot see the point of adding them. But my problem with the argument is actually two problems: One, the certainty with which an assertion has been “proven,” is not affected by quantity or quality of people who accept it, reject it, question it…nor by any of their characteristics…whether those people are real or imaginary.

And two — it is a mighty tall order to “prove” something, to such an extent of certainty that one embarrasses oneself simply by continuing to question the conclusion after reviewing the supposedly unquestionable evidence. That is a mighty tall order. This is the age of Photoshop. It’s also the age of the Dan Rather memos. Anything can be falsified, and the incentive is clearly there.

I just think when we toss around that word “science” so freely, “skeptic” shouldn’t be a dirty word. If it is, you’re probably applying that other word “science” to something that isn’t using the scientific method and therefore isn’t really science.

The one hundred ninth award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to Andrew Breitbart, who has been offered a forum for presenting his side of the story by — surprise! — GQ of all places (hat tip to blogger friend Rob Bariton). As the subject turns to Hollywood, he lets fly this piece of bumper sticker goodness worthy of an embiggened font:

Hollywood has traded in the casting couch for the political fundraiser.

The interview continues:

The first thing that a young lady who gets off the Greyhound Bus learns is to see and be seen at liberal-based fundraisers.

You really think that’s the first thing they learn?

One hundred percent.
:
How are you going after Planned Parenthood? In what way?

They’re a corrupt organization!

How so?

These people are the best service industry professionals in the history of the world. They have a dark soul. But let me just say something about Planned Parenthood: I’m pro-life, but it’s because I’m selfish and adopted. It’s not because of some grand theological overview. Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an abortion van driving along at a conservative convention showing aborted fetuses. I think that’s the wrong aesthetic. Randall Terry shoving fetuses in people’s faces is wrong.

Do you think Planned Parenthood is going to be your next ACORN?

It’s not my ACORN. But yeah, I do.

Why do liberals have such boring radio shows?

I wish I could give you a more clever answer, but it’s because they exist in an environment in which they don’t have to ever argue their points. Conservatives know what liberals think because we have to swim in their waters.

Pretty interesting stuff. On the thing about Hollywood driving some crusade for ideological purity, it’s hard to deny it when you watch the Oscars. And it becomes even harder when you take note of that last part, about liberals never having to argue their points…and then you look at what gets pumped out. Follow the plot, follow the moral of the story at the end, closely inspect what the film is trying to say. Freakin’ boring.

I identify with what he’s jotting down here because I once made the mistake of entering management, and I co-mingled with some folks who had this attitude; “let’s make the entire world just like us, starting right here.” I’d seen this before, many years further in the past…previously it was bible-thumpers, this time it was Kerry/Obama-worshiping lefties. Should’ve seen it coming, but in fairness to myself, my role in this was passive rather than active. I didn’t choose to co-mingle. I got co-mingled. I’m guessing that’s how it works. Anyway, it started out promising…and stayed that way…as long as getting things accomplished was more important than showing my team-player-ish-ness, “no mavericks here.” Somewhere along the way, the job came to be about everyone on the team looking at the world exactly the same way to show what a great team we were, and not about getting anything done. No, really: If there was a deliverable and it was missed, but all characteristics that made us unique were completely undetectable, that was a success. On the other hand, if the deadlines got met with everyone tackling their own workload in their own unique way, that was a fail. I think that’s the definition — that’s when the trolley has come off the tracks. At that point, I got drummed out and I probably should’ve been. Now I’m an engineer again; I see it as a win, and a lesson. You want to see how management works, the same way you want to learn how sausage is made.

This is not a unique story in the technical professions, by any means. The paragraph above could have been jotted down by any one of, I dunno, maybe millions of people. Apart from whatever might be unique about my writing style, you’d never know who wrote it. It’s a fairly common story.

And the moral is that creativity is the first casualty when the managers-of-managers put some effort in to what I suppose is a natural, primitive desire, this crusade toward sameness. When they get it in their heads to say “Hey you know what would make our team really great? If everyone on it was exactly the same.” I guess we’re all a little bit like this. You see it in the way principals and teachers run elementary schools. It’s easier to manage a hundred ball bearings of equal size than a hundred objects of assorted shapes, sizes, textures, masses; gives you a lot more latitude to define the word “manage.” Lowers the effort. This, I think, is the root cause of reader Severian‘s rule (paraphrased): “All institutions not specifically chartered to lean right, end up leaning left.”

The casting couch for the political fund-raiser — that just captures it. If we were to napalm Hollywood out of existence completely, and start a new one, when all’s said & done it wouldn’t be appreciably different from what we have right now. That new one would also trade the casting couch for the political fund-raiser, and it would lean left. All institutions do this. They start out with an attitude of, let’s refine our capabilities so we can deal with whatever problem comes up. Which demands thinking like a righty: liberty; freedom; reward for hard work; try and try again, and all that stuff.

Then someone gets the thought going — this team will be greater than the sum of its parts, if we can get it working according to standards. It works, at first. And then there are more standards, then more, then more…then it becomes a clean-up operation when someone notices “I see if I give a job to this guy it will get done this way, but if I give it to that guy it will get done some other way.” Followed immediately by “there must be one best way to do any job, so let’s force everyone to do everything the same way after we figure out what the best way is.” That’s a problem.

You’re not going to see the good, rugged, quality thinking you’d expect, going in to figuring out what that best way is. You’d think the first realization would be “Wow, this will affect every little thing we do, we’d better be sure and get it really, really right.” You’d be reasonable to think so, but you’d be wrong. “How every job, big and small, is going to get done” is destined to be the most casual, breeziest, quickest decision your management team has ever made before, or will ever make again.

The method selected will generally be the method that offers the greatest sense of comfort — “awesome, that’s the way I was already doing it anyway!” — to the people who do the most talking. To the political-animals. Political, small-p, as in office-politics. The ones who can be counted on for very little, apart from getting the last word about every little thing. The people whose single favorite computer application is the e-mail client. At that point, you’re a bureaucracy. People don’t say it out loud because they like earning a paycheck, but deep down everybody knows it is true.

And your organization is no longer capable of doing what it could once do before. Ability comes from resourcefulness; resourcefulness relies on creativity; creativity cannot exist without individual autonomy and freedom. That is why the Oscars are lame, and that is why you aren’t watching as many movies from beginning to end anymore. Your attention span isn’t dwindling. The movies are more boring. Hollywood is practicing that “hey, let’s make the entire world exactly the same, starting right here” thing. They’re sacrificing ability & creativity for something else.

Can’t believe I haven’t seen anybody else do this. That’s probably because most bloggers are way classier than I am.

Well, maybe I should be the bigger man here. I’m just not up to it though. This asshole managed to become a multi-millionaire because of our capitalist system…and he hasn’t got a single good word to say about any of it. Well, that and the extraordinarily short attention span of some of the people who live here. So screw him.

Here I am lowering myself. I’ll write myself a note to lose a few winks of sleep tonight because of my shame. Might even remember to read it.

Pics captured from here and here.

We here at The Blog That Nobody Reads are fans of Sarah Palin, and yet we’ve been on a Palin moratorium since long before a Palin moratorium was cool. November of last year, to be precise.

Terms are as follows:

…[W]hen she points out something meaningful, or is imploded by the major scandal that has been so breathlessly anticipated by her enemies for over two years straight now. Or, when she turns out to be right about something and the O-Man turns out to be wrong…which is the trigger most likely to get tripped first.

But some whiny pussykins writing a meandering screed — thereby proving she’s relevant AND electable — is not going to get any notice from us for the foreseeable future. This is just stupid. Someone wants attention so they write “Palin Go Away!” and they just…get it? Enough is enough.

So if Palin announces she’s running, we’ll pay attention. If she announces she’s not, we’ll pay attention. She wins the lottery, sprains her ankle, Heavy forbid she or one of her family is hurt or killed or kidnapped, we’ll talk about it. She turns out to be right and her enemies turn out to be wrong, we’ll talk about it.

“Hey, look at my elegant essay about how tired people are of her!” we’re ignoring. “Hey, look at this push-poll we did saying it’s time for her to go away!” — ditto. And, true to our prediction four months ago, the one single Palin-related thing worth talking about that has happened most often, is she’s made a point that turned out to be absolutely correct that few, or no, other people wanted to make even though everyone with a brain knows it’s right. It happened just in the last couple days actually.

Well, this moratorium has hit Public Policy Polling disproportionately hard. They’re supposed to be polling the public on a variety of issues — maybe they are. But whenever I hear out of them it’s exactly the kind of push-poll or whiny sniveling treatise I was talking about earlier.

So I imagine I should apologize to them. If the world really ended and women and minorities were hardest-hit, as the joke goes, we’d feel particularly bad for the women and minorities right? Well, I’ve not heard hide nor hair of PPP — ever — apart from their latest poll instructing us to think the snowbilly has overstayed her welcome and needs to go away. Lather, rinse, repeat. So because of the terms of our moratorium, what we end up practicing is a “don’t link or excerpt anything from those left-wingers pretending to be independent over at Public Policy Polling.”

It’s so unfair. Think I’ll cry about it. Or write myself a reminder note to do so, anyway.

Once you tune out the droning buzz of “Oh God please nominate her because I’m a slobbering faithful democrat and Obama will crush her like a bug!,” one salient thought comes to the forefront and it isn’t that Holy Man will crush her like a bug. No, the thought is…Jesus fucking Christ they are so scared of her. Which is not to deny Obama will crush her like an insect or anything. Obama’s Obama. If it does indeed come to be a popularity contest, He will win no matter who’s challenging Him, because let’s face it, He does have the most charming personality.

But popularity contests are for little kids. We think like little kids when we feel like we can afford to do so. Thanks to the ravaging effect of Birther Zero’s policies, a lot of us don’t feel like we can afford to think like little kids anymore…and we’re right.

The left’s fear of her has reached thermonuclear levels of heat, pressure and intensity. As the above graph shows, they think they’ve got some smooth sailing ahead if only they can get rid of her. That’s why you don’t hear “I don’t like Sarah Palin” or “I disagree with Sarah Palin’s position on this that or the other.” You very rarely hear that. It’s “She is so unqualified.” They don’t want her in the running. They want her gutterballed, the sooner the better.

Know what?

You don’t react that way to someone you think you can beat. It’s just a fact. If you really think you can take ’em down, you get into the cage match with ’em and you do it. “Unqualified”? That’s what pussies say.

Speaking of pussies. It’s time to address the “moderate” “Republicans.” But I can’t say anything that will compare with the rhetorical napalm drop of veteran Bob Zee:

She is fighting multibillion dollar left wing media companies and two hack political parties every fucking day of her life, and we cannot even muster a defense with the exception of a few websites and the OCCASIONAL defense on talk radio.

PATHETIC.

I served in Korea and Vietnam in combat. When I say combat, I mean COMBAT. After that, I worked for the government “unofficially” (use your imagination.)

I killed with my bare hands for this country and it makes me sick that even most of my fellow conservatives will not lift a finger to help her. If I was younger and still serving I would be honored to have her as my commander in chief.

You can keep the phony tough guy men that get trotted out as candidates. I saw REAL leadership up close and I know what it looks like. Sarah Palin has “IT.”

I saw men blown to pieces and other men who still ran forward with the entrails of their best friends still on them. My oh my, how far we have fallen. Those boys had integrity and valor. Today’s conservative movement by and large is not fit to shine their fucking shoes.

The state of our conservative movement today sickens me.

It is full of frauds and cowards. We cower in fear because the media is too mean and unfair to Sarah Palin, so we should just throw her over the fucking side because ITS TOO HARD to fight back.

AWWWW, poor babies.

Exactly. Ever see High Noon? It’s completely awesome. Gary Cooper gets himself a nice shave, then he dresses up to meet the bad guys who are coming in by train to take him down, then he swallows these magic pills that make him bulletproof, then he grabs the bad guy by his boots and throws him over a grain silo, and grows thirty feet, and tramples the buildings they’re hiding in with his boots, and then travels back in time and…

No, none of that happens. High Noon is a great movie because it doesn’t say too much about Marshal Will Kane’s character. The story isn’t really about him. Not really. High Noon is about the citizens of Hadleyville. The people who hid behind the closed shutters.

I suppose it’s really about both. It’s about the contrast between ordinary people who see what needs to be done and get it done, and gutless fucking cowards.

I can appreciate this, so Zee’s words really speak to me. We’re not living in a story about Palin. She might not run…probably won’t run…and who in the world can blame her at this point?

It’s a story about the rest of us. Or her ankle-biting critics anyway. Just sitting behind the shutters and the blinds…doing nothing…knowing full well that O-Bummer is ballooning our national debt way out of control, bowing to our enemies, selling us down the river just like Frank Miller is arriving on the train. Doing nothing about any of it. Saying whatever they think they need to say to elevate themselves a notch or two in their perceived social structure. Like wild dogs fighting over a soup bone. Completely pathetic.

And here’s Palin. What is she? I can tell you what she isn’t: Running for President. Not yet. A housewife scribbling stuff down on her Facebook page.

This is their target.

They think it makes them big somehow. Oh my…I struggle, in futility, trying to think of an example of someone being more mistaken. Eighth-graders trying to look cool smoking cigarettes, maybe?

Cower away, Hadleyville citizens. Show us what you do best. Show us all what you’re good for. The one & only thing.

And Public Policy Polling, I’m looking forward to your next poll. Going to give it all the attention it deserves. Promise.

Caught your leprechaun yet?

It’s time to regroup, rethink, re-assess. Not that it’ll happen in this case…

The previous post examined the unfortunate dilemma that rears its ugly head whenever our liberals want to produce more of something: They, in their state of enlightenment, can see the thing that is to be produced is A Good Thing. The logic seems to be that if there is more of it, more people will be convinced of its goodness. Of course, Economics 101 says it cannot work that way.

This one deals with what happens when conservatives want more of something to be produced. The trend we see, overall, is that this makes much more sense because the plan has something to do with affordability. The price is supposed to go down if there is more of the whatever-it-is available. We are not inspecting the phenomenon very closely at all, yet — we have yet to even select which commodity it is we’re talking about — but already we can see the conservative viewpoint makes much more sense. It isn’t even alienating the “working families” of limited means, which we’re continually told conservatives deplore and despise. When your means are limited, affordability is a good thing, right?

But my point breaks down here: It isn’t all conservatives. Our former chief executive, the one who associated with Oval Office with Oral, had some words to say:

I think I’m beginning to really miss The Big Me:

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are “ridiculous” at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference.

Clinton spoke on a panel with former President George W. Bush that was closed to the media. Video of their moderated talk with IHS CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin was also prohibited. …

Clinton said there are “ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn’t need it,” according to Noe and others.

Our next President wrote about this in some length. And eloquently too:

Taken altogether, it’s hard to deny that the Obama Administration is anti-drilling. The President may try to suggest that the rise in oil prices has nothing to do with him, but the American people won’t be fooled. Before we saw any protests in the Middle East, increased global demand led to a significant rise in oil prices; but the White House stood idly by watching the prices go up and allowing America to remain increasingly dependent on imports from foreign regimes in dangerously unstable parts of the world.

This was no accident. Through a process of what candidate Obama once called “gradual adjustment,” American consumers have seen prices at the pump rise 67 percent since he took office. Let’s not forget that in September 2008, candidate Obama’s Energy Secretary in-waiting said: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” That’s one campaign promise they’re working hard to fulfill! Last week, the British Telegraph reported that the price of petrol in the UK hit £6 a gallon – which comes to about $9.70. If you think $4 a gallon is bad now, just wait till the next crisis causes oil prices to “necessarily” skyrocket. Meanwhile, the vast undeveloped reserves that could help to keep prices at the pump affordable remain locked up because of President Obama’s deliberate unwillingness to drill here and drill now.

For about a year and a half now, the polls have consistently said people continue to like President Obama for His personality, but find His policies to be absolutely wretched. There seems to be no drive or ambition, none whatsoever, to turn that unfortunate last part around.

Let’s review: Lots and lots and lots of college graduates; that’s the “number one priority” or something? And each graduate will find out, upon graduation, that 1) there are lots and lots of other graduates, 2) gas is up to six to eight dollars a gallon, and 3) his or her share of the public debt is $200k or more. Sweet! Future’s lookin’ so bright, ya gotta wear shades…

And, step by step, the current administration is making it happen.

Question for the American electorate: Are our elections still all about choosing the most popular, charming guy? That’s what it was all about clear back in high school, I remember…you know what they said about change, it can be scary but sometimes ya gotta embrace it? Are we ready to vote on policies yet, like the grown-ups are supposed to do?

Because if not…if it really is about personality…give Obama His due. We’ve already got the right guy. Might as well repeal term limits, cancel all the elections, and just put up with the deplorable policies. Expensive oil, cheap college graduates, and if you don’t think that’s wonderful then you must be the problem. If you do think that’s wonderful, you must know something that has escaped both Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton.

At no time is it more evident to us how much the modern progressive has to learn about economics, than when said modern progressive seizes upon the Magical, Wonderful Commodity. His treatment of it is always the same:

Commodity good. Make lots and lots of it because it is good. When there is lots of it, it will become even more precious than it is right now.

No they don’t say that word for word. If they did, everyone who’s been taught the essentials in seventh or eighth grade would say “Uh, wait a minute…that doesn’t add up.” But their policies are based on this. Commodity good, make more of it, commodity become even better. “The middle class” — I’m still waiting for a solid justification from the left, why it is that these people are somehow being oppressed when the membership size of their class is diminished. Ethanol. Carbon offset credit vouchers. Hemp shirts. Hybrid cars. High speed trains. Handicapped parking spaces. Union members — the argument is that the power of collective bargaining increases when more people are in the union. (That’s not quite how it works: Collective bargaining increases because, if the union’s demands are not met, there’s nobody left to do the actual work. Slightly different thing.) Rent-controlled housing. ObamaCare “rights,” ObamaCare entitlements, ObamaCare services…ObamaCare waivers.

In fact, this is a commonality in the phenomenon of liberal plans running into their “crash & burn” moment: The public becomes disenchanted with something that was provided in great abundance, for “free,” because it’s such a wonderful thing. Reality reliably disengages & deviates from the liberal’s plan, because right about this time the public was supposed to be in some state of euphoria, and instead the public is saying something like “Oh damn, it’s another gawforsaken [fill in the blank].”

Well, we have a new magical commodity that is supposed to increase in value as we are provided with more of it. College graduates.

“The best economic policy is one that produces more college graduates,” President Obama said in a speech today on education. “I’m confident these reforms will help us meet the goal that I set when I took office -– which is, by the end of the decade we will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. We’ll be number one again. That’s my priority. ”

Nothing against college graduates — I am one myself — but it seems to have escaped the president’s notice that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern America, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Jack Taylor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell computer’s Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson — are not college graduates.

It seems to me that president is wrong, and that the best economic policy is not one that “produces more college graduates,” but one that produces more entrepreneurs. If producing a high proportion of college graduates were the secret to economic success, Belgium would be the world’s economic powerhouse. Making college completion rates a priority does funnel taxpayer money to college professors, a reliable Democratic constituency. But as economic policy, it strikes me as at best questionable.

I agree with Ira Stoll, the author of this column. Why? Because when you clamor for “more entrepreneurs” you’re clamoring for more effort to be made at doing a certain thing — entrepreneur-ing. Kind of gets back to my treatise on What’s Wrong With The World? Too much attention put on people being something, not enough attention put on people doing something.

Those who clamor for more college graduates, won’t be able to put to a unified voice any ideas on what exactly it is they want done. We’re just back to that lesson from which liberals can never, ever learn: When you provide a great abundance of something, it doesn’t become precious just because there is more of it. Things, in general, do not become valuable or more highly regarded when they can be found everywhere.

Liberals can’t learn that simple truth — or, they’re refining their words and their arguments for other people who can’t learn it. Or won’t learn it. I’ve yet to discern which of those it is, but does it really matter?

New readers to this blog, which nobody reads anyway, will note that its author possesses very little talent by way of making things pithy or concise. (If he does possess any such talent he deploys it sparingly.) Well, commenter Mark nailed this one better than I ever could’ve:

To simply supply something that is not in demand is economically stupid

The best economic policy is not one that produces more college graduates, but one that creates a demand for college graduates. To simply supply something that is not in demand is economically stupid. But that’s not surprising coming from this administration.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Ed Carson, Investor’s Business Daily:

Unfortunately, the AWOL Wisconsin Democrats are not an aberration. Indiana Democrats are playing the same game. More broadly, the political left has a modern history of accepting elections only when they win.

During the long, grueling push to approve ObamaCare, the legislation was clearly unpopular. But Democrats had the votes in Congress.

Then came Scott Brown’s remarkable January 2010 victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election. It was a stunning repudiation of ObamaCare in an ultra-blue state. It also meant Democrats did not have the necessary 60 Senate votes for final passage. Certainly the health bill was dead after that.

No way. Nancy Pelosi twisted the rules to ram the legislation through reconciliation, bypassing the need for the Senate to approve the final bill with a filibuster-proof majority.

Ignoring an unsatisfactory election result is a global phenomenon for the left. Over in Europe, ignoring voters is practically Eurocrats’ prime directive. When voters in a country ratify a treaty giving more power to Brussels, that’s the final word, end of story, for all time. Those voters can never change their mind.

But when the people vote no, Europe’s wise men huff and puff and keep holding elections until voters get it “right.” Or, the Eurocrats rework the treaty just enough to rationalize that voters don’t get to have a say again.

The left also ignores voters even at the most local level.

Back when I attended the University of Oregon in the early ’90s, students voted on whether to raise their own fees to provide $100,000 for a new multicultural center. UO is a very liberal campus on par with UC Berkeley or the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The few students who actually vote in campus elections tend to be extremely left wing, with the various ethnic student unions making up a big share of that. Despite all those advantages, the multicultural center measure lost.

Within a few weeks, the student body president-elect asked the outgoing fees committee to approve some $50,000 for a multicultural center. Dismissing my objections — I was on the fees panel — that voters had just rejected the MCC concept, the committee OK’d the funding in a matter of minutes. The center exists to this day.

The left believes that political rules and ethics don’t apply to them, because they are on the side of good. The ends justify the means, always.

America has what it takes to repudiate things. We repudiated slavery, and the racism that goes along with it. It was long slow and tortured, but the process of stigmatization made world history.

Nowhere is it written that this only has to be done with one thing. If you’re a left-winger and your friendship with the ballot-box process is only a fair-weather one, you should be subjected to the same process of ostracism.

Something was in our midst, entire industries were built up around it, and later on that same institution is no longer accepted. Nobody recollects it fondly and no one is going to be stupid enough to ask that it be reinstated. We won’t tolerate anyone who even comes close. A Senate Majority Leader lost his post over that very thing.

A fair-weather friendship to the electoral process ought to be tolerated just as much as a fondness for white supremacy. Or antisemitism or sexism or any one of our various other isms. By which I mean, any man who tolerates it, even by degrees of removal, will find his reputation soiled. And he should.

Actually, you know what fits it even better? Gambling, and not paying up when you lose. Or protesting that the cards must be marked or the die must be loaded…when you lose. Or, it is discovered that you planned only to win, and therefore don’t have the money — when you lose. That fits. And even when we were still tolerating slavery in this country, as I understand it, people got shot for that.

No, no violent rhetoric here. Just calling for some good ol’ American-as-apple-pie, healthy-as-you-can-get, cleansing ostracism. Liberals have been in favor of ostracism just as much as anybody else. Oh, don’t tell me they have a fair-weather friendship with this too? That would be sad.

We should all agree on this point. It’s not right-wing or left-wing; Carson has summed it up neatly for us.

1. Elections have consequences — even if your side loses.

2. If your side loses, there’s always another election. This is what democracy looks like.

3. Free speech is a constitutional right — even if you disagree with the speech.

And anyone who fails to agree, unconditionally, can’t play.

Gamblers manage to get that enforced one way or the other. Even now when nobody’s shooting anybody; can’t play if you aren’t ready to lose.

We should be able to enforce those same rules, too, as they apply to our elections.

Because they do.

International:

We’ll approach each negotiation with lots of concessions offered toward the other side, expecting nothing in return, and lots of apology for whatever. The other side will surely reciprocate, and if they don’t…we’ll, uh, make it up as we go along or something.

Domestic/economic:

You can’t make a profit. Well okay, if Barack Obama has something to gain from you making a profit, then you can. But otherwise, no. If you make a profit and help people, we’ll pretend you’re hurting people, and if you hurt people but don’t make a profit at it we’ll pretend you’re helping people. Profit is the problem. Now then, how come the businesses aren’t hiring? I’m open to suggestions.

Energy:

Don’t forget to check the air in your tires.

Gee, when you just spell it out with actual written-words like that…it loses a lot of appeal. But at the same time, things become much more clear. Maybe we should kick off campaign seasons with the candidates writing things down this way.

By the way, if anyone can come up with a flaw in my summations, maybe something I’ve gelled out unfairly, or something I’ve left off…I’m all ears. Seems like a reasonably complete and accurate picture to me.

William Tucker walks through it meticulously, detail by technical detail. At the end of it, no we don’t have three-eyed fish in the Pacific and we don’t have nuclear cores melting down to the center of the Earth making our beloved planet blow up into a million pieces like Krypton.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., writes in the Huffington Post. Yes I know it’s a liberal snotrag of a soapbox and she’s using it to indulge in a bunch of classic-feminist “Wah, wah, The Man is keeping us down”…but give the lady credit: She doesn’t have a hyphenated last name. And a few paragraphs in, she manages to re-secure her tetherings back on planet earth.

…[S]mart and talented women rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they’ll have to overcome to be successful lies within. Compared with our male colleagues, we judge our own abilities not only more harshly but fundamentally differently. Understanding why we do it is the first step to righting a terrible wrong. And to do that, we need to take a step back in time.

Chances are good that if you are a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth grade girl. My graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck (author of “Mindset”) conducted a series of studies in the 1980s, looking at how Bright Girls and boys in the fifth grade handled new, difficult and confusing material.

She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls’ IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty — what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

Researchers have uncovered the reason for this difference in how difficulty is interpreted, and it is simply this: More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

That’s a fine piece of research, Dr. Halvorson and Dr. Dweck. You’ve done the female race proud; now get your asses into the kitchen and make me a pie!

Seriously though? I think it’s a mistake figuring gender too prominently into this. I know lots of ladies who rise to the occasion when a new challenge presents itself, and lots of gentlemen who do not.

But, I should qualify that carefully. I work in a highly technical field, so when I say “lots of ladies” I’m not really talking lots. Just enough to define a profile, really. Maybe four or five I guess, evenly distributed throughout a career that now spans a quarter century and counting. They each carved out their own role, and the role they carved out was eerily similar from woman to woman. And…the politically incorrect truth of it is, although each woman took command of a technically involved role, these were not roles that would have been filled by men. It isn’t that the men wouldn’t have been able; they would not have been willing.

Chicks are motivated by different things.

But let’s leave that thought alone. I wish to concentrate on this other differential, the one that less clearly marked along gender lines; the Architect versus Medicator divide, the opportunity-versus-security divide.

I would argue — although some might reasonably disagree — that this is what Kimberly Weisul was writing about in BNET a little while ago: “This is Why Innovation is Rare in US Companies.”

In a survey of 1,500 CEOs by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, creativity was viewed as the single most important attribute needed to lead a large corporation. So companies are aware that, at least hypothetically, they need leaders who are creative. But how do people react when faced with someone who actually expresses creative ideas?

Not well, it turns out. Jennifer Mueller, a professor at Wharton, Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell, and Dishan Kamdar of the Indian School of Business conducted a series of experiments to find out how creative people were viewed by their colleagues. Individuals who expressed creative ideas were viewed as having less leadership potential than individuals whose ideas were less creative. “It is not easy to select creative leaders,” says Mueller. “It takes more time and effort…than we might previously have thought.”

Yes, this takes some special intellectual effort…discipline…which large groups of people are not capable of putting out. And the large groups of people ultimately are the deciders, usually, when we decide what we want to see in our leaders. With no thinking discipline being practiced effectively, the tendency is to say “this is what I expect to see, therefore it is leadership and it is innovative.” You see the twist — innovation is something you expect to see?

This, also, reminds me of a conversation I’ve had a few times over my career, usually with the most experienced colleagues. Everything, of course, cannot be innovated. In fact, the most successful projects to which I’ve contributed have generally consisted of just a small sliver of innovation, plated upon a structure of something non-innovative. A structure with a legacy to it would provide the confidence, and then the confidence would be built-upon, and the contribution would be made. Think of, pudding-that-is-not-skin, and skin on top. Or, house-that-is-not-paint, and then paint. We want to deliver something new, but before we get to the thing that is new we want to re-use what was built before. It cuts down on the integration testing when you use what was used already.

But I’ve often run into the brilliant engineer who is tempted to toss out the pudding-skin. The standards mentality should completely dominate the project and no part of it should be new. And you get into this James Taggart mentality of “Rearden Metal cannot be good because nobody’s ever used it before.” And I have to point out, waitaminnit what are we doing? We’re not drywall installers or wallpaper hangers; we’re software engineers. If it’s worth coding in software at all, is the damn thing going to do something nothing else is doing? If it won’t then why are we here? We are we investing our time? There’s lots of other professions whose goals can be described as “make this thing over here look exactly like that thing over there” — ours is not one of them.

It comes back to the Morgan maxim: Technology is the opposite of doing what lots of other people are already doing. It seems so simple, but how easy it is to forget. It would be much easier to remember if good software engineering had something to do with building every little thing in a different way than every other little thing. But, of course, that would be a nightmare. Good engineering, in any discipline, is a mix. On a leading-edge new aircraft prototype, there will be tens of thousands of rivets — that all look the same, and are the same. The rivet design will be generations old. It’s what they come together, to form in the final product, that is new. Pudding and skin. House and paint.

But the Architects and Medicators paradigm says Medicators will always want to take everything over, and they like to…well, you know, medicate. Just bathe & stew in something they’ve found to be familiar, never separating themselves from whatever substance it is lest they suffer from withdrawal symptoms. And here is irony for you: Didn’t someone recently campaign for the highest office in our government on a platform of “change can be scary but you have to learn to embrace it if you want to move forward” or some such? Who did that? Who said it?

That would be Master Medicator Numero Uno, Barack Hussein “Barry Soetoro” Obama, our current President. Mmmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm!

John Hinderaker at Powerline hits on something I’ve been saying for quite some time about the man in the White House:

Last night Col. Ralph Peters was on Bill O’Reilly’s show, talking about Libya. Peters thinks we should act on behalf of the rebels there, but he expressed skepticism that President Obama will ever do anything. “Obama loves the idea of being President,” Peters said, “but he can’t make a decision.”

I think there is a lot of truth to that, even in domestic policy, where Obama has passively deferred to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on all legislative matters. One can debate whether action is appropriate in Libya or not, but Peters is certainly right when it comes to foreign policy–it is a safe bet that Obama will do nothing, because doing something would require a decision.

Now it just so happens that I think we ought to stay out of Libya, so this is a stopped clock moment for me. I essentially agree with Obama’s non-decision.

However, to the larger point. I agree with Peters completely when he says “Obama loves the idea of President, but he can’t make a decision”. I might have said it a little differently. Obama loves the idea of being President and the trappings and perks. What he doesn’t like is the job.

I think that should be abundantly clear to anyone who has closely observed the man and taken a look at his background. I always remember the words of the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review who said that Obama loved the title of Editor of the Law Review, but he didn’t want to do the work. The managing editor said he rarely saw him except when it was to glad hand or take credit (and praise) for what was being done. Additionally, Obama never wrote a thing for the review during his tenure, something almost unheard of.

In all cases, his problems are leadership problems. He’s simply not a leader. He has no idea how to be a leader. But that doesn’t keep him from wanting leadership roles that offer him prestige, perks and pleasure derived from simply from being in the position.

The reason Obama can’t make a decision is he can’t reason like a leader must. He has no experience. And he doesn’t understand the decision making process as practiced by a leader. He’s never really had to make leadership decisions. So he simply tries to avoid making them. One way he does it is to ignore the problem. Another way he does this is to appoint commissions and panels concerning problems the country faces in order to defer the problem (and decision). He also like to defer to the “international community” on foreign policy or the Democratic leadership in the legislature on domestic things. Again, the avoidance of decision making.

One aspect of the Medicator I’ve never been able to understand is this: They are in constant search of some medicinal balm, some soothing agent. This is why Obama doesn’t want to decide anything, why He wants to “defer to the international community” and so forth. The medicinal balm; the international community decided it, so it must be good. Who needs a recognizable individual to decide anything? Names? Accountability? Who cares. The nameless-faceless-unaccountable iCommunity handed down the decision — there is comfort in that. Head-On, apply directly to the forehead.

The enigma is, why don’t Medicators ever want to be the balm? It isn’t going too far out to say in 2008, when He was campaigning for the office, there was a widespread and popular perception that Barack Obama’s team was building a brand, with a name, and they were doing an exceptional job at this. We were going to get a fantastic leader, a decider, like a miracle ointment. Or a King Midas who would just bring all the right results out of everything He touched. We’d end up with someone like FDR — the only American President ever to be elected to four terms, and there was a reason for this. Obama was supposed to be like FDR. Republicans and democrats alike would reckon with some new vexing problem, and say to themselves “well let’s just apply an Obama solution to that and it will all be okay.” Just like our grandparents might have said “well let’s let FDR handle it and everything will turn out fine.” That’s what gets you four terms in office. Be Blistex. Rub a little of this stuff on that new irritation over there, it’ll probably be good as new.

Does anyone in his right mind, right now, want to subject some exotic, unfamiliar new problem to an Obama fix and hope for the best? Erm…not quite so much. We, as a nation, have become disenchanted. We just got done watching Our First Holy President deal with the oil-in-the-gulf thing. Who’s chomping at the bit to see Him lay His Holy Hands upon the melty Japanese reactors and get it all fixed? Nobody. We’re not going to get anything from that direction, just a bunch of sniveling excuses. Maybe a “you should be grateful” thrown in. People get tired of it.

So the tube of ointment will sit in the medicine cabinet untouched.

Why’s it like this? Why does it always seem to go in this direction? Medicators have such a craving for approval, such a desire to be associated with fun and excitement. Obama certainly does. Do they really suck this badly at thinking ahead? I suppose that’s part of taking a fix; you’re just living for the moment.

Many times I have had to wonder, what would our lives be like if it were natural for the innovative types to seek out ways to exert control over the non-innovative types, rather than the other way around. But, for practical reasons, it must always work the other way around. When you innovate successfully and come up with something new, you don’t have time to think about what the other guy is doing. (And when you’re not successful, you try to figure out why — and so then, too, you don’t have time to monitor other people.) But people who cannot or do not think for themselves, develop this natural jealousy against people who can and do. They start to blockade, hinder, obstruct. It turns into this weird “If I can’t figure out what to do next, I don’t want you to figure it out either” thing.

Speaking of which, you might have missed this thing George Will put together about trains. It’s priceless — I’ll excerpt just a tiny piece of it:

High Speed to Insolvency
Why liberals love trains.
:
[W]hy is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

And there is your picture of humanity, not only for 2011 Anno Domini, but in eons past and forevermore foward: One guy fixated on systems of ever-increasing complexity that work when assembled properly, and another guy fixated on the comforts of the moment. A man at a drafting table designing something, and another leaning on a plushy cushion smoking opiates. Architect, Medicator. One looks to the future and the other does not, because it’s hard to think about the future when your attention is all on your level of comfort, or lack thereof…today. Right here & now. The designer does not try to control the junkie, because the designer is worried about other things. But the junkie tries to control the designer, because when you’ve dedicated your life to being unable to do something you don’t want to see someone else getting it done.

And because there are other junkies, the junkie will succeed in controlling the designer. Innovation will be arrested, hobbled, chained down. Eventually, snuffed out altogether. That’s what being a junkie is all about. If you manage to get something, in a few minutes you’re going to want more of it, and then you’ll want more and more and more.

So they have the White House, and of course early in 2009 it was obvious that was not enough because they still had cravings. Now we have problems, but their Top Guy isn’t going to make any decisions. But let’s build some trains.

Update: I see over on Memeorandum — it’s like they said to themselves, “Look at that nonsense Morgan K. Freeberg jotted down that doesn’t make any sense. We’d better put up some links, so that what he said makes more sense.” Japanese Nuclear Power Plants’ Operator Scrambles to Avert Meltdowns — and — Obama Scores Laughs at Gridiron Dinner.

Just what I was talking about. No decisions made, no details engaged, the gray matter inside The First Skull isn’t that kind of stuff. But an impressive emotional vibe-connection taking place. Just like last month and the month before that, the year before that…thus it will be, into the indeterminate future. We’ve got a Court Jester sitting on the Emperor’s throne.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Up to a certain age it is normal and expected for your offspring to fail to distinguish between minor irritants, perceived slights, dull discomforts, petty jealousies, cranky moods, and emergencies. Where your child is at now, everything is an emergency, and the only way to address any such emergency is to annoy you.

This is all obvious to anyone who’s been a parent, in fact it’s the story of your life right now. But let’s have a refresher course about that last word shall we? You. Parents & maybe the big siblings. Family. For the rest of us, it isn’t as cute as you seem to think it is.

But that that’s not as important as what follows, nor is there as much breathtaking ignorance about it as there is about what follows.

Doing whatever it is you have to do to get the “BLLLAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!” to stop is not your top priority. Shaking the favorite doll and making a funny face, giving the child whatever it is that it wants, murmuring “Shshshshsh,” offering it your soothing voice, saying its name, singing a song — this is not Job One. No, Job One is to express your disapproval.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Because I’m a middle aged fat man with a sedentary lifestyle, I spent the first half of today on my mountain bike. But I don’t do forty or fifty or sixty miles in one stretch. I take prolonged rest stops in populated retail places, catching up on various projects on my laptop, and maybe that’s a mistake since I don’t have the right temperament for the strangers who surround me. But it’s becoming an all too common sight to see parents shushing their noisy demanding young children through various means without taking any effort whatsoever to work on Job One. Some of them are actually sensitive to the pressing demand of Job Two which is to spare the nearby strangers a migraine by bringing the cacaphony to an end. Without killing the child. And don’t get me wrong, that is appreciated. But how in the world do you think kids grow out of this?

Everywhere I look where there is a child that is young, it always seems to be happening like this. The parents do the whatever, but it’s never made clear to the child that there is a societal/cultural expectation that this protocol should eventually change. Not a single indication of it; not so much as a trace, not a syllable, not a peep. The child is, in effect, held to the same profile of acceptable behavior that applies to a newborn when the child is no longer a newborn. By the time the signature noise becomes a weary but piercing squawk, the signs are there that the child is picking up the idea that this is normal behavior. That, and that it is always, always, always the child’s turn to make the noise. Nobody within earshot has anything else demanding their attention, at least nothing worthy of it. Simple formula preserved from baby-hood: I want something, minus having it, equals an emergency. Emergency equals yelling, and what good is yelling if it doesn’t reverberate off the farthest wall?

People who are older than me, make it abundantly clear that this is not the way it worked when they were kids. When I was a kid, there was something of a schism going on; some parents thought it was the job of the rest of the world do things for their kids, and other parents thought it was the job of their kids to do something for the world. Now it seems this conflict has reached a conclusion. It seems all the kids are being raised the same way and I’m not sure I like it, nor am I pondering where it all leads with too much satisfaction.

Try “no.” It’s a single syllable, for a reason. Your child is ready for this broadening of the horizons much, much earlier than you think. Yeah yeah, I know, “self esteem” and what not. Did it ever occur to you that self worth might be different from a feeling of self worth? Or, that an occasional rejection maybe, just maybe, might not inflict lifetime damage upon either one of those?

Maybe, by hovering around the retail environments, I’m only seeing a piece of society. A random sampling that isn’t that random. Maybe it’s like the cop who goes out to too many domestic disputes and becomes convinced the world’s going to pot, because he’s seen an average that isn’t an average. Maybe the “Always Junior’s Turn to Talk & Squawk” fad is merely an aberration.

Even though I’m seeing it everywhere I look. Maybe the generation that is coming up, is considerably different from what I am seeing.

Hope so.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

This is actually serious stuff. The Wisconsin union thing is important too, but the way we’re really losing our freedoms fast is through the “death by thousand paper cuts”…through the pain-in-the-ass laws…through the little laws.

Go get ’em, Rand.

I’m sick of being told to get with it. Sick of being told “you can’t buy that anymore.” Sick of being told about this year’s standards…partnerships…green…blah blah blah. Sick. To. Death. Of. It.

If you want the power to tell a complete stranger what kind of toilet he has to install, to me, it’s an indication that you probably don’t really have the sense of judgment to bring about a good outcome there. Or to do much of anything for that matter. Based on what I’ve seen, when people have what it takes to make good decisions that produce a good outcome, as a general rule they start to lose interest in that kind of micro-management. They get too busy. And so the people who retain some kind of an interest in this — guess what? Yeah, I see them as the no-talent types. They might be able to present well and talk well, but overall they tend to make poor decisions. You can tell because they’re not too interested in the ones they have to make for themselves, they continue to be distracted by the decisions they can make on behalf of others.

Summarizing more briefly: Go get ’em, Rand. Go for blood. Sick ’em.

Thanks to my Facebook friend Kayla.

It’s that time again.

Me, I’m pretty cold and heartless about it. It’s not a matter of iron will power — that much you can tell by my physique, or lack thereof. But I live in a surburbia, and statistics & sensibilities would confirm it to be one of the more affluent ones. Just barely rustic enough for openness; it is fairly overrun with, well, panhandlers. That’s what they are, isn’t it? Please sign this petition, help this cause, that cause, take this pamphlet. Either they don’t ask the store manager’s permission, or there’s something in the air that keeps the store managers from telling them “no.”

So I tell the girls I don’t have any cash for their cookies, whether that’s true or not. I don’t need ’em anyway. But then again, they don’t look like the graphic to the right.

It’s not the same way with Gerard.

I’ve tried to escape their clutches, but it’s no good. Today, desperate to kick after discovering last night that I could hear a box of Thin Mints calling to me through a closed door, I even invented a granddaughter.

The MILF saw my glance at their cookie table and smiled. I said, having bought no less than three boxes of their krispy krack over the last week, “I’m sorry, but my granddaughter has made me swear to buy cookies only from her troop.” (I have no granddaughter, but I was in despair.)

One of her henchgirls shrugged and did a cartwheel while the other two looked disappointed in that trademark Girl Scout disappointed look that I’m sure they give a patch for.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said the MILF. “We’ll never tell. Right girls?”

“We’ll never-ever tell,” said all three virtually in unison as if they’d practiced it throughout all of February at their Girl Scout/MILF coven meetings.

It was all over for me. All I could say was,

“Samoas.”

There is another ritual started up about this time of year: The bitching about how Boy Scouts get to go out on hikes and learn how to tie knots & start fires & build campsites & what-not…and the Girls Scouts crochet & sell cookies.

I know of a certain indignant mother who has sufficiently piqued by the lack of local scouting resources for girls, that she’s about to start her own Girl Scout troop. But someone else will have to do the hiking & camping with the young charges. She’s found plenty of other mothers enthused about the setting things right, the rallying, the organizing, the getting it all started, but so far the enthusiasm wanes when it comes to the outdoor stuff.

Does she think the man has been born who’s stupid enough to take a bunch of girls out in the woods by himself? No, she doesn’t. But the mommas are all waiting for some other momma to do this part. Within the community of females, this particular task has deteriorated into yet another thing “somebody should” come along and do, like a Pokemon creature or Rumpelstiltskin perhaps…someday.

Meanwhile, the men & boys trek out there, tie their knots, cook their s’mores and have a blast. Somewhere there’s a Dad or two who managed to find the time. The girls sell cookies. Can’t you just hear the grievance engine revving up for the next blast? Three guesses where the blame is going to land, and the first two don’t count…

Well you know — I think it all evens out. I’m one of the very, very few who manage to invent excuses successfully, and charge past, leaving the neat stacks of cookie boxes untouched and uninspected. The girls pile back in to the Navigator and head to from whence they came, with far fewer cookie boxes than they brought. I’m sure they’re hauling in a whole lot more cash than the boys, who are still limping along on the donations from the Christmas tree pick-up.

Thus it is in the “real,” grown-up, world. They say the world is run by men in neckties and black socks. But to whatever extent that may be true, it isn’t a complete power monopoly is it? Not when people tend to want to give cash to cute girls and women. Who wants to hand money over to a dude? There’s something in us that makes it seem natural to give money to chicks. I pay my car insurance by handing a check to a lovely looking lady sitting at a reception desk. Ditto for the car payment…the phone bill I pay by computer when their system is working, if it isn’t, I pay it by phone. The person who forces the computer to take my money is always female. Power company: Computer. Rent: Gorgeous females. Gas: Computer, and I think it was a disembodied female voice who took my money when the computer was down that one time…

When I have the oil changed in the car, a guy does the labor…or two guys, or who knows maybe ten or twenty. Probably just one or two. But not a skirt in sight. Once the chariot is all put back together again, I amble over to the front counter and give the money to a female at a computer before driving off. I don’t know if the guys ever see the money.

Child support. We don’t even need to go there.

When I have my hair cut, there’s a possibility that it’ll be a guy engaging in the un-guy-ish occupation of doing the cutting. It’s not that remote, either; about one in five. Funny thing is, if it’s a lady wielding the scissors, I’ve noticed about half the time she’ll walk over to the cash register with me, ring up the sale, and thank me for the tip. If it’s a guy who does the cutting, he’ll wish me a nice day and grab a broom to sweep up. Then I go to the cash register by myself. To hand the money to a cute girl who thanks me for the tip.

I haven’t forked over money to a dude, since the last time a pizza was delivered to my door. Actually that’s the only time I can remember ever giving a man money: pizza deliveries. We, as humans, just are not wired to hand money to the guys. It’s not in our DNA. We are conditioned and trained and evolved to give money to females & computers…or computers & females. The computer thing is, obviously, an efficiency/quantity kind of thing, and it’s a modern, recent thing. It can’t have anything to do with evolution…although at times it certainly does look that way. The females? That is in our genetic set-up. Releasing things of value into the possession of females. We’re built to do it. They’re cute. Their eyelashes are longer.

So yes, boys sleep under the stars and, consequently, learn to do some cool stuff. But it’s a little tough to get worked up about males running the world when the handling of the money that makes the world go, is about as dominated by females as, uh…well, lately we’re becoming extra civilized and gender-bendy, aren’t we, and I’m having trouble thinking of anything else besides money-handling that hasn’t gone all coed-diverse. Not nursing or secretary-ing or airplane-stewardess-ing. Childbirth maybe?

So I think this is healthy, all-in-all, in that it reflects the world into which the girls & boys in scouting now, will eventually grow as they become adults. Might as well teach ’em now: Girls take money. Ergo, girls sell things. Boys can certainly try. I sold newspaper or magazine subscriptions or something when I was a boy scout. Didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Maybe I should have tried a cartwheel or two.

New York Post:

Let’s call this what it is: a campaign to nullify the 2010 election, by a sore-loser party that doesn’t like the results.

The Democrats are trying to cast themselves as the heroes — noble prisoners of conscience engaged in an act of civil disobedience by denying Walker a quorum so the vote can be held. But, like the sheriff played by Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles,” the gun at their heads is being held in their own hands.

We’ve seen this act before, and from the same political party. Eight years ago, Democratic state legislators in Texas vamoosed twice, to Oklahoma and later to New Mexico, to avoid voting on a redistricting plan they didn’t like. In the end, one returned, the quorum was established, the vote was held and they lost.

This time, however, the stakes are higher: Whatever happens in Wisconsin will set a precedent for the rest of the nation, which is why Madison has become a critical battleground in a fight that neither side can afford to lose.

In a bid to protect one of its core constituencies — public-sector unions — the left has thrown a prime temper tantrum within and without the marble halls of the state capitol, trotting out its ’60-era playbook of chants, signs and sickouts to create a media narrative that the cruel and heartless governor is trying to “destroy the unions.”

But this fight is no longer simply about Walker’s attempt to balance Wisconsin’s wobbly budget, or even about whether public-employee unions ought to have the right to collective bargaining — they shouldn’t, and in fact they shouldn’t even exist, as FDR himself warned.

It’s now about whether we are to have an orderly democracy or legislative and executive anarchy, whether elections can be delegitimized and even overturned by the daily plebiscites of the polls, by the flouting of sacred oaths of office and by the trampling on the laws of the state.

It must stop.

Qui-Gon Jinn had it right: When you gamble, you must be prepared to lose. Elections fall under that rule.

It seems every now and then we have electoral chaos — and it happens whenever the elections present the left with a threat to their continuing survival. And so they fight back like a cornered rat…to ensure their continuing, political, survival.

It would be nice if, while they’re in power, they were to fight that way for the continuing survival of the nation when that is threatened. But I suppose that’s another issue altogether.

Sowell:

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
:
The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether they are businesses or the taxpayers.
:
At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. Not any more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.
:
While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.

That is why government unions continue to thrive while private-sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.

The creation of wealth, or lack thereof, and the ramifications involved — it’s fascinating how so many of our progressive friends remain ignorant of these crucial concepts. Many of them boast impressive educational credentials, and you’d better believe that means something, because if you ever forget they’ll remind you. But if you just listen to them distinguish “private sector” and “public sector” a little while, it becomes apparent they haven’t a clue.

The most usual pattern is that they’ll happen upon some talking point about what wonderful programs some government agency is enforcing and what disenfranchised oppressed minority is being helped — that makes the agency wonderful, therefore all the people working within it are wonderful. I often wonder if any of these people have visited a government agency to see all the billowy passion that radiates down to the lowliest copy-making worker bee and positively electrifies the entire setting so you can feel the excitement cackling in the air…as some gender-ambiguous version of Ferris Bueller’s math teacher drones away on the loudspeaker “now serving…A-119…window…fifteen…”

Meanwhile, you just know the businesses are evil because they work for — (one eye starts to twitch uncontrollably) — PRRROOOFFFFFFFFFIIIIIITTTTTT!!!

As far as the real difference, the creation of wealth. Even our highly intelligent left-wingers, and yes there are some. The worldly, the well-traveled, the well-read, the erudite. Not. A. Single. Fucking. Clue. Just talk to them a little while about it. Focus on that one point, and see what they know. Or not.

Just amazing.

They’ll just go through the usual ritual, paint themselves into a corner and start looking for an out. So get ready to be called a racist teabagger.

It doesn’t mean anything.

The hell it doesn’t, it means everything.

My question is, which argument do you think was made in a more compelling way, suitable for a persuasive presentation to an audience not initially receptive to it?

For anyone who’s argued with liberals sometime since the Bush v. Gore debacle a decade ago, this is NOT news. They’ve been going at this pretty hard: Things are getting derailed/chaotic/frightening/disorganized, whatever, because too many Americans (sneer) are uneducated. They lack the sophistication, the nuance, the juno se qua to make truly innovative and insightful observations like…[insert hackneyed cliche here]. “Gun toting”…scary…scary…scary.

Let it go on long enough, and this hatred of Jews eventually comes spilling out.

I suppose I should be offended by this coastal white guy bitching up a storm about midwestern white guys. And the Jewish thing. And the “we can do without funding oh no we can’t all these stations would go dark” double-talk. Even though I’m a coastal white guy myself (from the other coast), protestant…but what gets under my skin is this talk about educated.

This now-former NPR stooge, like a lot of liberals, is not ready for any so-called educated people to come up with anything new. There is a real cost being paid by the rest of us here, and it has nothing to do with NPR funding. “Educated” is a word that is being used, more and more, to describe a personal quality that would be more fairly and accurately called “predictable.” Listen carefully to how it is used; that’s what they mean. You can be as stupid and uneducated as you want, but if you say all the right things and have all the right opinions you’re “educated.”

One of my favorite challenges has been to ask if Peggy Joseph, the woman who thought Obama was going to pay her mortgage and put gas in her car, is smarter than Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams — since she has the right opinions, and they don’t. Is she better educated. I haven’t gotten a straight answer back on that yet.

It’s not too hard to figure out the agenda here. Our modern liberals are servicing an agenda, which can take a back seat to none other. And they’re calling people names in order to get it fulfilled. Using taxpayer dollars to do it.

Update: Schiller has resigned. No not that one, the other one.

What’s that? You thought politicians were there for you or something? Or, if they’re not working hard enough for you, they must be in the pocket of “big business” or some such?

Close, but no cigar…

From here. Where the following is added…

The video above shows a representative of the United Healthcare Workers from a budget hearing in California in 2009. She makes it clear that the union got ‘democrats’ elected and that they [the union] ‘have long memories’ should the members deign to not support the union demands. If the officials support needed measures to cut spending, the representative will unleash her members to campaign against their reelection. And her threats are all legally sanctioned. And they are paid for by us.

This is the central problem with public sector unions. They get to use taxpayer money to elect their bosses and they get to use taxpayer money to convince their bosses to give them more taxpayer money. [emphasis mine]

Update: Blog-uncle Gerard’s summation is too good to pass up:

Most Americans can’t imagine that they are ruled by overweight, pasty, transgendered union thugs with bad hairstyles. But they are.

Wall Street Journal:

No one has done more to revive the reputation of Bush-era antiterror policies than the Obama Administration…On a conference call yesterday, senior Administration officials tried to sell their military commissions process as more “credible” than Mr. Bush’s, but their policy changes are de minimis. In 2009, Congress made technical reforms for handling testimony and classified information. By executive order, a new panel will now also conduct a “periodic review” of detentions. But the bipartisan Military Commissions Act of 2006, or MCA, had already included “administrative review boards” dedicated to the same goal.
:
In an August 2007 speech that his advisers touted at the time, Mr. Obama promised to repeal this “legal framework that does not work.” He even claimed that Bush policies undermined “our Constitution and our freedom” and that the Bush Administration had pressed a “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand,” a line he recycled in his Inaugural Address. He went out of his way to vote against the Military Commissions Act.

So much for all that. Yesterday the senior Administration officials even praised the “bipartisan effort” that produced that law. They’re right. The MCA was a serious and painstaking compromise under the constitutional guidance of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, but the anti-antiterror lobby—including candidate Obama—maintained it was an affront to American values. The real test of Mr. Obama’s new maturity will be if he puts the guts back into the tribunal process, restoring the funding and talent necessary to handle complex prosecutions that have been lost over the years amid the assault on Gitmo.

Dog that caught the car. Now that the chase is over, what to do?

Actually, President Obama is not so confused. To use another animal metaphor, the seagull manager is never, ever confused. There really aren’t any perplexing decisions to be made about flying in, crapping all over everything, squawking & flying away. It is the leftist revolutionary tsunami that is confused. Moping around and chanting slogans about the RichBadWhiteMenInPower is easy enough. But how do you run things when you’re in charge?

If the answer is “pretty much the same way the last guy did,” isn’t there some “Viva la Revolution” card you’re obliged to turn back in?

Yup, dog that caught the car. What a monumental waste of energy.