Beth Shaw thought The One was unelectable, which was a big mistake. But she thought it for a good reason. She noticed it:

I have finally been able to put my finger on what it is that the democrats have been trying to keep the public from knowing. Barack Obama is boring. This is a secret. Its a super secret. Please don’t tell the democrats that we are on to this fact because they still have time to change their minds and put Hillary at the top of the ticket and get her 18 million voters back. Remember, she didn’t END her campaign, she just suspended it.

A campaign against Hillary would be fun too, but that’s a whole other story.

The man LOVES the sound of his own voice. He goes on and on and on and on. If you pay attention during his speeches – not to him but to the audience – you’ll notice that their eyes start glassing over. Then all of the sudden he’ll say ‘HOPE’ and they’ll all rouse up and start applauding and jumping up and down. When they settle down he starts talking again. Their eyes start glassing over and he goes on and on and on…

Michael Wolff noticed it in President Soetoro’s first year:

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn.

You can see the fundamental mistake he’s making. Having been so successfully elected, he’s acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He’s the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he’s just talking—and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you’re telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain’t doing.

He’s cold; he’s prickly; he’s uncomfortable; he’s not funny; and he’s getting awfully tedious. He thinks it’s all about him…

Robert Morrison notices it, and notices something else too:

Two million people gathered two years ago on the Mall to hear President Obama take the Oath of Office. It was assuredly an historic moment. But now, barely 25 months later, can anyone-supporter or opponent-recall a single memorable line from Inaugural Address? “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” He said that?

Mr. Obama has also suffered from the 24/7 news cycle. Franklin Roosevelt “Fireside Chats” were offered sparingly. FDR knew the presidency was a precious national resource and he did not squander it. His major speeches were carefully crafted for maximum effect.

Compare Mr. Obama at Normandy with President Ronald Reagan at the same location twenty-five years earlier. Reagan spoke movingly of “the Boys of Pointe du Hoc”-our heroic Rangers-in cadences that gave echoes of Henry V and Gettysburg.

Mr. Obama was said by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas to hover over the nations at Normandy “like a god.” Awesome, but what did he say there? [emphasis mine]

President Barack Obama is, in fact, known for just a few identifiable, glowing snippets and there are people who can recite them instantaneously. The problem is, those are people like me who disapprove of Him. We use the glittering verbal trinkets to make our Obama Speech Bingo cards, because they don’t actually mean anything. “Let Me be clear,” “Make no mistake,” “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” et al.

Where’s the counterpart to “One Man Makes a Majority” or “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself”? What can a slobbering Obama fan print up onto a tee shirt, or glaze onto a coffee mug, that won’t look silly?

It’s not too tall an order, is it? Shoot, I’m a blogger, widely ridiculed for my inability to say something in less than several thousand words…and after six years in “office” even I have just a few snippets some readers have found worthy of quotation. Doesn’t happen very often at all, mind you. But it seems to me, if I can pull it off and I don’t have any magazine editors babbling any glowing nonsense about my godlike superpowers, surely Birther Zero over there in the White House can say something that is both memorable and actually means something? Both at the same time?

Because to many among His supporters, that’s the one thing we were supposed to get out of this deal. The “ZOMG THERE’S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT HIM I CAN’T EXPLAIN IT!!!” voting bloc. C’mon, Barack…give ’em something. You’ve paid back everybody else, right? Where’s that super duper excitement and charisma-or-whatever so repetitively extolled two years ago?

Hand our leader a foreign crisis — like Libya. What does the president have to say about that? “This violence is unacceptable.” We don’t need a $400,000-a-year Commander-in-Chief and his $172,000-a-year speechwriter to tell us that.

Exactly.

He’s still a tough contender for His re-election bid, which suggests maybe none of this matters very much. But that contest is still in a state of uncertainty. And this is shaping up to be yet another argument, and by no means the first one, that perhaps this is a person who is good for a job different from the one He has, and that the job He has, requires a person whose talents are far different from His.

Hat tip to Boortz.

I know I’ve been linking to Kate at Small Dead Animals a lot, there’s a reason for that. You really should make it a regular stop if you aren’t doing so already.

Some of the things you’ll not find elsewhere — this bit of cognitive dissonance.

An online petition declaring this week “Ignore Sarah Palin Week” …. has attracted more than 32,000 signatures.

Nothing to add.

Via Michelle Malkin:

She adds…

AFSCME, UCFW, SEIU: Does this behavior make all our children proud and improve the national tone, like President Obama asked us all to do post-Tucson?

I wonder what Mahatma Ghandi would think of this…

The “peaceful protest” at the end — really, really creepy. “Cameras are rolling, guys!” at 7:00 — ditto.

I’ve said before that left-wing politics seem to have a goal of transforming people into barnyard animals. Usually, what I have in mind with regard to that statement is cattle…as in, overly-modernized family law that estranges the father, diminishes his role into one of sperm donor who leaves his contribution and then moves on, just like a bull. Or halfway-domesticated sheep, milling about, waiting to be told where to go & what to do…or hogs at the trough…

The union-politicking turns them into geese. Angry geese. The “moderates” who are fooled into supporting this stuff, I wonder if they realize how bad it gets sometimes.

George Lakoff:

—Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.
Budget deficits are a ruse, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.

Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the President has discussed. But deficits are not what really matters to conservatives.

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: Empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility — acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions and empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one’s fellow citizens.

The conservative worldview rejects all of that.

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have over 800** military bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, “Let the market decide” assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that. Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks, and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don’t deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life, a civilized society, and as necessary for business to prosper.

I found the “empathy” thing snort-worthy. It certainly isn’t true that conservatives “reject all that,” it isn’t even true that conservatives are any less accepting of it than our modern liberals. My dictionary says empathy is:

the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

And looking high & low for some stellar example of a failure of empathy, I guess I would need to inpsect…uh…oh, how about a George Lakoff editorial. Where he starts chastising democrats for helping those evil awful conservatives too much:

Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific “cuts” is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American — the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.

Plenty of money up there at the top. So just go get it. Nevermind the message this sends to people starting businesses, or thinking about starting businesses, or thinking about expanding them. Good luck, suckers, if you do manage to make a buck at it you won’t be able to hang on to it for long. George Lakoff sees your money!

How un-empathic.

The thing about equality draws a sad sort of chortle out of me as well. Equality? Good heavens, Lakoff’s little masterpiece here is loaded up, from top to bottom, with good guys and bad guys. He doesn’t see people as equally virtuous, and certainly, he doesn’t see it as a noble goal that they should all participate in a democracy with an equal vote. This isn’t the work of someone who sees people as “equal”; not even close. Does he seriously think he sees people this way? If so, he’s insane.

There’s a long diatribe about midpoint about a patriarchal household or some such, with a benevolent patriarch instilling discipline in the lesser house-members by telling them what’s what & what for. Not to belabor the obvious, but…well, I’ll go ahead and belabor it. This is pure projection. Who do you see in this equation being authoritarian…knowing best…stating unequivocally who’s supposed to make the rules, who’s supposed to snap-to attention and do what they’re told without giving any lip?

In my recent memory, that would be George Lakoff. Obama and the liberal politicians will tell the businesses and the “rich” what they’re supposed to pay, and those awful rich people will just pony it up. Through some kind of system of checks & balances? Lakoff doesn’t say; it comes off looking like every tax increase is just supposed to be an itch between a pair of ears somewhere, followed by a scrawling of a pen, and it’s done-and-done. Is that what he means? If so, what could be more “strict father”-ish than that?

I wonder how many conservatives George Lakoff knows. He’s telling us what it is they want, so it’s not an entirely irrelevant question.

A grateful hat tip to my old blogger friend JoAnn (sorry if I botched your name).

Yecchh…

San Francisco’s big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite – better known as bleach – to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city’s treated water before it’s dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

The perils that are visited upon us when we never, never, ever tell the tree-hugging hippies “no.” Now, we have to provide our proper stewardship to the planet, the only one we have, Mother Earth, by pouring bleach into the system.

Something’s not quite getting thunk out all the way here, fellas.

Another hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

That dinner coming up where we were going to invite Barbara Walters and blogger friend Joan of Argghh!….and seat them next to each other. You know what, I think we might be putting that one off a little while.

Courtesy of Judicial Watch, via Doug Ross’ Journal, we see a fine example of what it means to discern the times you live in, and to judge a man by his actions. You weren’t crazy, you were right all along. In this instance, two men and one now-grandmotherly woman all chummy with the political pervert’s plans to undermine our country:

Furthermore, Kennedy approached the Soviets with an offer to help undermine Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential reelection campaign. Kennedy proposed a public relations blitz and mentioned his friends — Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters, by name — as willing to assist in the propaganda effort.

Read Doug’s post first. There are no civil words for media and political figures like these. So, fuck Water Cronkite, fuck the Kennedys, and fuck Barbara Walters.

Every now and then, someone will scold me for taking the trouble to link to a blog. Read the mainstream news intead, they tell me. And I usually come back with something about evolving to address the realities of a changing world; using one’s intellect to recognize truths, and adapt to them. I try to remind them that it is a world of selection. We don’t subscribe to one of two major local newspapers or tune in to one of three alphabet-soup networks at six o’clock to find out what someone wants us to think. That’s a very 1960 way of taking in your information; a teevee-tray-and-rickety-folding-table way of doing it. The cliche I use most often is something like “The era of Walter Cronkite is over.”

I have no regrets about presenting it that way. None at all. Relying on a single-source for your understanding of what’s going on in the world, should be recognized as a bad move even by the most casual observer. Because people want power. It’s human nature to try to figure out how to have a bigger effect on things.

So millions upon millions of people saw Cronkite as the kindly old trusted uncle we could all rely on to tell us the news. Well, bully for those millions. Cronkite obviously didn’t see himself that way, and that’s what really counts.

Viewing the world through Walter Cronkite’s presentation of it, is going to be recognized by history on par with treating a case of tuberculosis with burning incense and magic spells. Whether it was a ritual engaged day after day by millions and millions, doesn’t matter one bit. It’s a ritual that is aging very poorly, and time is only just beginning to leave its harshest marks upon it.

Time to admit it. We were hoodwinked.

Technology Review:

Any droplet that hits the ground at an angle leaves an elliptical mark. It’s straightforward to measure the shape of these ellipses and then extrapolate along their semimajor axes to see where they cross. This gives you the location of the vertical axis of the source.

But try determining the height of the source and you’ll soon run into trouble. The eccentricity of the ellipse tells the angle of impact but trace this back to the vertical axis and you’ll find that there can usually be more than one possible source height.

Forensic scientists have always had to rely on other clues to help them work out what the true height must have been.

Now Christopher Varney and Fred Gittes at Washington State University have found a way to solve this problem using elementary trigonometry. First, they derived a simple expression that links the launch height and angle of the droplet with its horizontal flight distance and angle of impact.

They then realised that although the launch height of a single droplet cannot be uniquely determined, it ought to be possible with data from many droplets released with the same launch angle and height but different velocities. In that case plotting a certain relationship between the angle of impacts and horizontal flight distances of all the droplets should produce a straight line.

But here’s the clever part. The technique only works if the droplets all have the same launch angle. If they have different launch angles it fails. But in this case, the plot produces a scatter rather than a straight line and so can be picked out as a null result rather than giving an erroneous measure of height.

That’s important in forensics. A “fail safe” technique is crucial for evidence that can be used to obtain a conviction.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation.

Specifically, the education or lack thereof with regard to Texas children:

Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.

But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Oops, though:

Slight problem here, namely, the cause and effect relationship that Krugman implies. If low state spending leads to high state dropout rates, as Krugman suggests, then riddle me this: Why does California spend more per pupil, yet have a higher dropout rate? And why does New York spend even more per pupil than California and Texas, and also have a higher drop-out rate? And why does the District of Columbia spend almost twice as much money per pupil as Texas, and yet have a much higher dropout rate than Texas?

Don’t take my word for it: Here’s a chart showing the state dropout rates, and here’s a chart showing state spending per pupil. They’re not for the same year, but the trends are fairly consistent year to year. More government spending does not necessarily lead to higher graduation rates. It’s not that simple, especially in states where the requirement to educate the children of illegal aliens grows year by year.

I’m seeing Colorado is the next notch up from Texas in terms of spending per student, with a dropout rate of 6.9 to Texas’ 4.0. My native Washington State would be the next one up, and it is also burdened by a dropout rate greater than Texas’. Overall, the relationship these two metrics seem to have, assuming they have one at all, is rather tenuous. There seems to be more going on. I’m pretty sure a X-Y scatter diagram would bear that out. Like Tatler said, it’s just not as simple as spend-money-help-kids.

It very seldom is, with anything.

Tatler goes on to look into the lavishly paid administrators — not teachers. And of course there are two sides to this coin…the administrators seem to think they’re being compensated fairly. We all think we’re being compensated fairly, or are underpaid. But it all comes down to this final finish:

I find it pretty hard to justify making local public school bureaucrats rich, especially when taxpayers are hurting and the states are going broke. Perhaps Krugman doesn’t agree, and thinks we should just keep spending more without looking at where the money is going, or the impact it has when it is taken from the taxpayer. If that’s his position, he should make that argument.

It’s a transaction within a free economy, or quasi-free economy, just like any other — we are engaged in a process of finding the midpoint. We look for clues that we’re not spending enough on public school education, and we look for clues that maybe we’re spending too much. Right now, the evidence says the next move is a cut.

Now, to go leaping in there with guns blazing with your “Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Children?!?” does not impress me as intelligent, preventative, let’s-stop-a-disaster medicine. It is a thwarting of the signaling network that makes a quasi-free economy work. It is deliberate sabotage; it is a blocking out, a strident rule that says “no matter what happens, this number can never go down.” It is childlike thinking, falling far short of what I would expect from a Nobel Prize winner in economics.

Gerard:

Whenever the objection is made that LeftLibProgism has failed everywhere it has been tried, the response is always that it just wasn’t tried on a large enough scale. This is the argument that the cure for bad pop music is to just make it louder. The implied endgame is that only when the entire world is remade in the LeftLibProg model, “world without end always,” will the promised utopia arrive. Hence the wrecking ball of LeftLibProg economics must be swung against the pillars of civilization until the whole structure comes tumbling in upon itself. With help from the scions of greed at the far end of maxi-capitalism this vision currently has a whisper of a hope of actually happening.

Commenter elaine adds:

The thing that made America different was the idea (reality?) that class isn’t fixed; that we can move up or down the economic ladder. This isn’t true in other countries. Even now, if you make money in most of the world, you still can’t live down your humble roots. You see some of that snobbery in America today, and it seems most often to be espoused by LeftLibProgs. Oh, they usually couch it in more clever or subtle terms, but that’s what it really boils down to.

Michelle Obama’s childhood obesity initiative — that obesity is a national security issue if all those poor and middle class males are too fat to be soldiers — smacks of this attitude, that the poor and middle class white males aren’t fit for anything better than to be used as cannon fodder for the whos of this nation. They don’t have the right to open their own businesses and be their own men, if they were born into families of humble means…

It’s fast becoming clear to me that many of the LeftLibProgs in high places see the rest of us as pawns they play with on a chess board. Serfs who make the goods and pay the taxes to support their lavish lifestyles. They don’t care about us, though they’re adequate at pretending to. (Clinton’s “I feel your pain” comes to mind as an example.)

For too long, we’ve bought it. Every time they’ve framed the debate in more winning terms, the rubes have fallen for it. “It’s for the children” — say that, and you’ve won the argument. So the teachers in Madison have called in sick and deprived their students of their lessons, but those teachers are selflessly striking “for the children”…

It would be laughable, if the underlying problem weren’t so serious.

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers, via Boortz.

The man who needs no introduction. Washington Post:

Frank W. Buckles died early Sunday, sadly yet not unexpectedly at age 110, having achieved a singular feat of longevity that left him proud and a bit bemused.

In 1917 and 1918, close to 5 million Americans served in World War I, and Mr. Buckles, a cordial fellow of gentle humor, was the last known survivor. “I knew there’d be only one someday,” he said a few years back. “I didn’t think it would be me.”

His daughter, Susannah Buckles Flanagan, said Mr. Buckles, a widower, died of natural causes on his West Virginia farm, where she had been caring for him.

Buckles’ distant generation was the first to witness the awful toll of modern, mechanized warfare. As time thinned the ranks of those long-ago U.S. veterans, the nation hardly noticed them vanishing, until the roster dwindled to one ex-soldier, embraced in his final years by an appreciative public.
:
Mr. Buckles, who was born by lantern light in a Missouri farmhouse, quit school at 16 and bluffed his way into the Army. As the nation flexed its full military might overseas for the first time, he joined 4.7 million Americans in uniform and was among 2 million U.S. troops shipped to France to vanquish the German kaiser.

Ninety years later, with available records showing that former corporal Buckles, serial No. 15577, had outlived all of his compatriots from World War I, the Department of Veterans Affairs declared him the last doughboy standing.

Here’s a theory. Suppose the day the Empire of Japan surrendered thereby bringing World War II to an end, you were given a thousand dollars to invest. Every year since then, you form your investment plan according to the Oscars.

I think you’d be very, very far ahead if you were to buy securities in the years in which the Oscar-winning movies had lots of tits & car explosions. And if you were to roll it all over into cash, in the years in which the Oscar-winning movies were highly deficient in tits & car explosions, again, you’d be very far ahead.

Bullitt got an Oscar. The Godfather got three Oscars. Lots of tits & car explosions.

Raiders of the Lost Ark did even better, with 4 Oscars. Reagan was in his first year, so if you invested in our economy in that year you would have done very well. Especially if your investment was Microsoft. Of course, being built for little kids, Raiders didn’t have any actual tits. But it did have an exploding truck, and lots of other yummy violence. It was good clean fun built for rug rats who would later grow up into hairy-chested, beer-swilling, meat-eating men like me.

Tonight, I don’t think anything that wins is going to have any tits or car explosions whatsoever. I’m hoping True Grit manages to nab something, and it doesn’t have either one. And in 2011, what’s the sensible investor doing? Heh heh heh…think of greenbacks stuck under mattresses where they’ll never be found.

Long term, we don’t have anything to worry about. When we’re making movies with tits & car explosions again, the economy will come around.

Update: For other reasons, Facebook friend Melissa Clouthier opines that the festivities suck. From what I saw, I would guess that “The Kings Speech” deserved a lot of the gold that it got…I’m not similarly convinced on “The Social Network,” that looks like a name-recognition thing to me. Both of these are guarded opinions as I’ve not yet seen either film. I did see True Grit, and I’m surprised it got frozen out. Also saw Inception, which I’ll rate as a “meh.” Maybe good enough to buy, but not at full price, I’ll wait until it’s down in the ten dollar range. Which could take quite awhile.

I have yet to glean so much as a shred of evidence that there are any tits or car explosions in any one of those four. Which, all by itself, suggests we are in a cultural abyss. And, that we aren’t willing to do what it takes for the economy to do better.

It’s just like the hemline theory involving short skirts and the stock market. How does the rule go about correlation and causation…let’s see if I can do it from memory…

If A correlates with B, then
1. A causes B;
2. B causes A;
3. There is an unseen C which causes both A and B;
4. Or, it could be just coinkeedink.

If the truth lies behind option #1, then we can lessen the pain considerably by shortening those skirts, and awarding more Oscars to movies with tits & car explosions in them. If the truth is behind #2 #3 or #4, then we can find out more about my theory by gathering some more data…which means it’s to our advantage to do these things anyway.

Personally, I think it’s #3. There is an unseen C, which is our readiness and willingness to do things that are fun. How much do we want to live our lives, without guilt. We live in guilty times right now, we manage lives that are ruled by the manufactured single word “s’poseda.” Or, to be more precise about it, that other manufactured single word “not’s’poseda.” Men are not’s’poseda appreciate nice looking women…at least not too much. Movies are not supposed to have loud explosions in them that gratify grown men, no, they’re supposed to have loud explosions in them that gratify children below the age of fifteen. Which are different explosions. Oh yes, they are.

We’re not making any money, because we’re not’s’poseda. The very gas we expel from our lungs several times a minute in order to stay alive, is supposed to be toxic to the planet. Our very existence is damaging, so goes the prevailing know-how, and we’re not doing anything to redeem ourselves of this, nor can we. So we live life like guilty thieves. Like craven rats, scavenging what we can to stay alive. We may ensconce ourselves into a lofty standard of living by doing so, but if we don’t feel good about doing it, we’re not going to create and maintain a vibrant economy.

And our movies, by and large, are going to suck. Along with our award ceremonies.

We need more movies with tits & car explosions. Stat.

Dr. Helen, who is Mrs. Instapundit, makes an interesting point about incentives with regard to that Kay Hymowitz book everyone’s been talking about lately:

What would happen if a regular Joe, not an alpha male, came into class and gave his true opinion about the topics at hand, say in a psychology or sociology class? What if that opinion was non-PC, such as: “I think that men should not have to pay child support if women can have abortions,” etc.? How far would that man get in school? Would he graduate? Would he even pass the class? Even if men won’t admit it to themselves and women like Hymowitz overlook the problem, it exists.

After 45 years of being told they are pigs, sexist, and good for nothing, men have quit trying to please others, so they slap on a baseball cap and don’t talk much. And with good reason.

According to Hymowitz, these child-men are all used to a freewheeling life of going from girl to girl and video game to video game. Hymowitz mistakenly believes that men are suffering from the limits of American individualism.

Though she reluctantly admits that the “materials available to young men are meager, and what is available contradicts itself,” she comes up with this ridiculous conclusion: “At bottom, they are too free, a fact epitomized by their undefined, open-ended, and profoundly autonomous pre-adulthood.” She ends the book suggesting that young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies (Huh?) and young men need to man up.

My question to her: Why should they?

What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?

A is to B as C is to D, Reagan is to the democrat party as men are to society. We haven’t abandoned it; it abandoned us.

The male brain is a beautifully designed thing for processing unlimited varieties and permutations of motivated behavior, and only a finite selection of unmotivated, protocol-driven behavior. In other words, two or three hundred things you need to do to keep your arm from getting caught in a corn harvester, or to keep a boar hog from trampling you when you’re hunting it, the male consciousness can handle just fine. That other stuff you do just because, because you’re “s’posda,” because of tradition, because someone said so…we can follow about maybe half a dozen of those. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Open the door and let her go first. Take your damn hat off.

Dr. Helen’s complaint comes from something ugly feminism did in the last half century. The activist movement realized that we men, quite different from being the oppressors they were painting us as, actually behaved deferentially to our mothers and wives because of a short list of “no-nos” that had been passed down from father to son. And so they took the easy way out, returning some of that imagined oppression by adding some items to the list.

At first this seemed reasonable. Don’t smack a female co-worker in the ass. And then it got less reasonable…don’t treat her as just one of the guys unless she gives her consent to being treated like one of the guys. And less reasonable…once she says she wants to be treated like one of the guys, you’d better do it, or we’ll end your career. And less reasonable…don’t put a calendar on the wall of your cubicle with women in swimsuits that look better than her, although she can put up whatever she wants.

And less reasonable than that: Don’t say or do anything that might make her feel uncomfortable. And she is the ultimate authority on whether you have succeeded at this. Even though she might be a nut.

Until it came down to the ultimate: The intent of the offender does not matter legally! The perception of the person offended decides everything! These rules are put in place to help ensure a comfortable, safe and non-threatening work environment for everyone! All in the same breath, unbelievably enough.

I live in California where we have “Furlough Fridays,” meaning every so many weeks it’s been pre-determined there isn’t enough money in the kitty to keep our state workers employed. Campgrounds up in the foothills have become much, much harder to reserve since this came about. I get to watch it happen; from my balcony, I have a splendid view of the ribbon of Highway 50 as it winds up a hill, from downtown Sacramento up into the El Dorado National Forest. It’s the only way to get there.

I know exactly what a Friday night used to look like. And I can assure you, that this is what a Thursday night looks like in more recent years. Tail lights upon tail lights upon tail lights. State “workers,” voting with their feet, showing us exactly how anxious and eager they are to live in this world they have helped to create for the rest of us with all of its modern rules. I wonder how many of them are male state workers. Doesn’t this speak volumes? Well, I’ve got about as much of that fat state paycheck as I’m gonna get, might as well start the weekend early…and so what do they do? They get the hell out. The people who live closest to the heart of our “evolving” civilization want no part of it, once Thursday afternoon comes and they’re given a choice.

Doesn’t that make sense given the rules in place? “We’re going to make this workplace environment extra extra safe for everyone. And so we’re going to put you in a cubicle next to someone who could be borderline insane. If you say something this person doesn’t like it will end your career. If you do something this person doesn’t like it will end your career. If you don’t say or do anything, and she finds it creepy, it could end your career. Those are the rules, to keep this envi– uh, hey, wait, where are you goin’?”

Captain Capitalism (hat tip again to Kate) adds:

The “man world” is DIRECTLY related to the economic crisis we face today AND IS ALSO THE SOLE SOLUTION to our economic problems today. It is the forefront of the battlefield and is precisely where all economic analysis should be focused (that is assuming we care to solve our little economic problems we face today). You want the recession to end? You want unemployment back to 4%? You want oil back below $2 a gallon? You want the US back on the road to supreme economic and military dominance and security? You want a world where your precious little children actually have a future? Put men back in charge (of course, what is funny, is if things keep going the way they are, men will inevitably end up in charge again, but it won’t be the nice ones who appreciate democracy and the sanctity of women).
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In the meantime you will forgive us if we just plain opt not to marry, breed, or just in general, participate in society. Because, well frankly, what’s the upshot?

In the meantime, enjoy the decline!

And a decline is what it is. The more machinery we get installed into this ever-self-civilizing civilization, the quicker people — men — want to get the hell away from it once they’re given the option.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

It is a mark of maturity — and, sadly, in our modern age a rare one that is diminishing into nothingness before our eyes — to visualize a possible improvement to a situation, and yet simultaneously concede that there’s no great transgression being committed while we’re waiting for the improvement to come about; no gross violation of human rights if the improvement somehow fails to materialize. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? “I think it should work such-and-such a way; but if someone disagrees with me, or presents an obstacle, I’ll just deal with it like I would deal with any other dissenting opinion. I won’t carry on with maximum drama like justice and human dignity themselves depend completely on my whiz-bang idea.”

Victor Davis Hanson bemoans this loss of situational perspective:

We live in a therapeutic age, one in which the old tragic view of our ancestors has been replaced by prolonged adolescence. Adolescents hold adult notions of consumption: they understand the comfort of a pricey car; they appreciate the status conveyed by a particular sort of handbag or sunglasses; they sense how outward consumption and refined tastes can translate into popularity and envy; and they appreciate how a slogan or world view can win acceptance among peers without worry over its validity. But they have no adult sense of acquisition, themselves not paying taxes, balancing the family budget, or worrying about household insurance, maintenance, or debt. Theirs is a world view of today or tomorrow, not of next year — or even of next week.

So adolescents throw fits when denied a hip sweater or a trip to Disneyland, concluding that it is somehow “unfair” or “mean,” without concern about the funds available to grant their agendas. We see now just that adolescent mind in Wisconsin. “They” surely can come up with the money from someone (“the rich”) somehow to pay teachers and public servants what they deserve. And what they deserve is determined not by comparable rates in private enterprise, or by market value (if the DMV clerk loses a job, does another public bureau or private company inevitably seize the opportunity to hire such a valuable worker at comparable or improved wages?), or by results produced (improved test scores, more applicants processed in an office, overhead reduced, etc.), or by what the strapped state is able to provide, but by what is deemed to be necessary to ensure an upper-middle class lifestyle. That is altogether understandable and decent, but it is entirely adolescent in a globalized economy.

Why so? In a word, the United States is not producing enough real wealth to justify a particular standard of living among its public workforce far superior to counterparts in the private sector. We are borrowing massively abroad for redistributive entitlements. We fight wars with credit cards. We talk of cap-and-trade and “climate change” without prior worry about how to fuel the United States, as we sink in perpetual debt to import well over half our oil. We have open borders and pat ourselves on our backs for the ensuing “diversity,” without worry that illegality and lack of reverence for federal laws, absence of English, no diplomas, multiculturalism instead of the melting pot, the cynicism and chauvinism of Mexico, and recessionary times are a perfect storm for a dependent, and eventually resentful, underclass extending well into a second generation, one that fumes over why things outside are not equal rather than looking within to ensure that they could be.

Who would not wish pristine 19th-century rivers to run all year long? But that same utopian rarely thinks like an adult: “I want water releases into the San Joaquin River all year long and am willing to pay more money at Whole Earth for my produce to subsidize such diversion of irrigation water; I do not wish any more derricks off Santa Barbara, so I choose to drive a Smart car rather than my Lexus SUV. And I want teachers to be able to strike, and receive $100,000 in compensation and benefits, and therefore am willing to close down a rural hospital in Wisconsin or tax the wealthy with full knowledge that many will leave the state. I insist on amnesty and open borders, and will put my children in schools where 50% do not speak English, and live in the barrios to lend my talents where needed to ensure parity for new arrivals. I want cap-and-trade and so believe that the lower middle classes should pay “skyrocketing” energy bills to subsidize such legislation.” And so on.

Finally, the adolescent thinks in a rigid, fossilized fashion in explicating the “unfairness” of it all, unable yet to process new data and adjust conclusions accordingly. So we now hear that the evil corporate/Wall Street nexus is turning us into a Republican-driven Third World — apparently unwilling to see that among the largest contributors of campaign cash were unions, and both Wall Street and international corporations favored Barack Obama in the last election, the first presidential candidate in the history of campaign financing legislation to opt out of the program in order to raise even more “fat cat” money. Just because one is a former Chicago organizer does not mean he cannot be the largest recipient of Goldman Sachs or BP donations in history. Railing against Las Vegas jet-setters does not mean that one cannot prefer Martha’s Vineyard, Vail, or Costa del Sol to Camp David.

But I think this snippet really says it all:

There are lots of issues involved in Wisconsin, in the impending financial and fuel crises, and in the sense of American impotency abroad. Yet a common denominator is a national adolescence, in which we want what we have not earned. We demand the world be the way that it cannot; and we don’t wish to hear “unfair” arguments from “bad” and “mean” people.

Hat tip once again to Gerard.

It would be almost the textbook illustration of intellectual recklessness itself to, when an undesirable but possibly meritorious idea is seen ambling into the discourse, simply shunt it aside, effectively stick one’s fingers into one’s ears and yell “la la la la.” The sin we see committed lately goes somewhat beyond that I’m afraid — we marry up the unpalatable idea with the identity of the person or group presenting it, and then effectively exile that entity from the discussion and all subsequent discussions.

If I can take yet another swipe at those emblems of ultimate intellectual flaccidity, the Palin haters, to me the sentiment seems to work like this: “Oh, her again, won’t she shut up and go away once and for all? Let’s talk about how much we hate her, constantly, unceasingly, and with great passion, until she is no longer mentioned.”

But on the subject of the adolescent mind. Yes, there is a fundamental requirement to adult thinking that is missing here. Read that as, thinking in such a way that all of the ramifications of a decision, positive & negative alike, are anticipated, offset, prevented, paid in full, amortized…somehow dealt with. And no, I’m not talking about predicting how many fives, tens, ones, quarters and nickels will be in your pants pocket on Tuesday, January 28, 2025. See, that’s how it starts — I’ve lived with this attitude, and I understand it. Wondering naturally, in an adult way, “how are we going to pay for this” is seen not quite so much as gloomy, but obsessive. That’s the mental illness. The patient has been disciplined to separate the dance to the tune from the paying of the piper, and to think of this exercise as one of planning carefully around “what really matters.” The dancing, the eating and drinking and fun stuff, is envisioned as a functional, workable, thirty-thousand-foot view. All that dour sad stuff like “this is out of line with what we can afford” is seen as a detail. Therefore, if thinking about it does have some bearing on the final decision, then whoever paid attention to it is guilty of losing themselves in the details.

Just stick to the important stuff! Our kids need this! It’s for the kids, what about that is so hard for you to understand you old fuddy-duddy?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Caroline Baum finishes strong and I supposed I shouldn’t excerpt that part of it, but hey. It’s a wonderful column that just might save your weekend, that happens to have been put together upside-down. The final note is a perfect summary for all that came before.

For every number homegrown America-haters spit out to show our best days are behind us, there’s an offsetting statistic that points to our underlying strength. The solution isn’t a war of words or statistics. It’s the recognition that many of the characteristics that made the U.S. the envy of the world are still intact or begging to be resuscitated.

The naysayers don’t appreciate American exceptionalism and never will.

I was particularly surprised by the GDP per capita statistic, and even moreso when it was broken down further into GDP per employed person.

You know, it’s awfully funny how we think about this stuff. I doubt you’ll have any trouble at all finding an agreement across party/ideology lines that our country’s employment picture, in the near future as well as the distant one, is going to be affected in large part not only by how many of our children are educated, but by the depth and content of that education. Can they translate a hexadecimal number, can they refute from memory a quote Alexander Pope didn’t really say, can they name the thirteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This concern is supposed to be driving a number of sympathies with the public school teachers’ unions, the skirmish currently taking place in Wisconsin being a case in point.

But nobody ever seems to stop and ask what our teachers are doing about this. There are a lot of pieces that have to be present and working in a child’s education before said child is given any kind of a boost in his potential to contribute to the country’s GDP. “Yay, he got a passing grade” or “Yay, he passed the state competency exam” isn’t going to get it done. I think, deep down, we all realize this…

So where are the follow-up questions? Especially from those who sympathize with the teachers. They, after all, are generally the ones quickest to spout off with the doom-and-gloom statistics Caroline Baum is offsetting here.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

GBIL (girlfriend’s brother-in-law) is broadening my horizons again, through the e-mails, in unhealthy ways.

Years ago my Dad came up with a good one and I still don’t know where he got it. He said life is like a roll of toilet paper. Seems like it’s gonna last forever when you first get it started, and as you get closer to the end that goddamn thing starts spinning faster.

You know what the problem is with liberal activists and liberal politicians talking about that word “civility”?

What you and I call civility, in that weird other-dimension inhabited by our liberals, is adequately substituted with a little bit of solidarity. And they still get to call it civility, when it has nothing to do, whatsoever, with what you and I use that word to describe. To them, if you show solidarity it’s perfectly fair to call it civility.

Explains a lot, don’t it?

See, it’s all about words and what they mean. They have different meanings in mind for just a few of the words we use…unfortunately, those are the words that are most important to the task of figuring out what it is they’re trying to say.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Respected commenter at The Blog That Nobody Reads Severian speaks. If you’re reading these pages looking for wisdom, I hope you’re here for him:

It’s the one true sign you’re dealing with a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist. Corporations are “capitalist;” therefore they, like all other capitalists, are out to screw “the workers;” and they’re all on one big e-mail list and have a Facebook page and all the CEOs go out for drinks together every Friday night.

They actually seem to believe this. It’s like they were kinda sorta paying attention in history class the day that one professor with the greasy ponytail and the ripped jeans said something about the Standard Oil Trust, and now they’re utterly convinced this is how “big business” really works.

And the died-in-the-wool marxists must have come across that somehow…and said to themselves something like: “Look what this guy said over on this Blog That Nobody Reads. He says we think businesses collude with each other this way. That’s a pretty nutty thing he said, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. We’d better pipe up with something to help prove him right, so that what he said makes better sense.”

And they searched from within their own ranks and produced one perfesser Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University…director of something called the Earth Institute. Called up MSNBC and told them they wanted to put the Earth Director on the air.

To help prove Severian right. And prove it the Earth Dude did…

It’s classic paranoia. “Everyone who has a vision different from mine, is after whatever I say they’re after, they’ll never stop until they go all the way and they’re all conspiring with each other.”

Now, how do you prove Prof. Sachs right in what he was saying? Not only is there precious little fact in there, but there is precious little that is fact-based in there. It isn’t even opinionated. It’s just a whole lot of unhinged fantasy.

What these billionaires have been doing is buying the whole Congress, now buying out the governors, to make sure they never have to pay taxes again. And then we have these huge budget deficits because they don’t pay taxes any more, and what do they want to do? Cut the benefits for the poor.

Hat tip to Boortz, who points out the following:

This academic hack talks about these “billionaires…buying the whole congress.” You do know who’s trying to buy the congress, don’t you? Government sector unions, that’s who. How much did they contribute in the last election cycle? Try over $400 million dollars. Now…get out there and add up the campaign contributions from billionaires and see if you reach that figure.

Perhaps this is a good time to point out that the ICD-9 code of paranoid schizophrenia is 295.3, and its definitions include:

* psychotic behavior accompanied simultaneously by persecutory or grandiose delusions (paranoia) and hallucinations (schizophrenia); delusional jealousy may be present.
* Type of schizophrenia characterized by grandiosity, suspiciousness, and delusions of persecution, often with hallucinations.

An awful lot of this weeping and wailing about “the middle class getting crushed” is looking like Earth Dude stuff…ICD 295.3 stuff. They’re all conspiring with each other to get me/us! MSNBC seems to think their mad ravings offer a great way for the rest of the public to catch up on what’s going on.

You know, they might think that…but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

And when you’re sympathetic to the public sector unions and you’ve spent a lot of years watching their asses getting kissed, and imagining by proxy that it’s your ass getting kissed…I imagine, when the day comes that it stops, it might feel like you’re being persecuted and everyone’s out to get you. But that doesn’t mean that’s true.

What is it our President kept telling us about change? How it’s a good thing even though sometimes it might be scary? Looks like we get some schizophrenics who are afraid of change out there.

No occasion. I just think it makes the point extremely well.

Speaking of which, “The Blog That Nobody Reads” — you know, I worked so hard to get that title…

Oh, my. What a deeply satisfying story this is, for anyone who’s ever been given it good & hard by a bank.

About two years ago, after Wells Fargo stopped responding to his letters requesting more information, Patrick boned up and learned about a law called the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). The law was enacted to safeguard homebuyers from anti-competitive and collusive behavior among the companies and agents involved with buying and selling real estate. One of the protections involves the “Qualified Written Request,” or QWR.
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“Do your research,” says Patrick. When drafting it, besides getting tips on writing one from various consumer sites, he also went to banking sites and saw how bankers were talking about ways they had rejected various QWRs. He made sure to craft his so it couldn’t get disqualified. “Use the internet as your law library,” says Patrick. With a little Googling, he was quickly about to find official resources and templates that guided him, step by step.
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Within 20 days, the company must say they got the QWR, and they have 60 to take action on it. That action must be to either correct the problem or to respond back with why they think they’re right. They must also give a name and phone number for the borrower to contact with questions about their account.

Wells Fargo did none of these, says Patrick. So he moved on to the next step provided by RESPA: statutory damages, aka, cash money.
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At trial, Wells Fargo didn’t send anyone to represent themselves, so Patrick got a default judgment against them for $1,173. They eventually sent him the amount, but they had still had not responded to his letters or agreed to fix his premiums, as required by law. So he filed for a sheriff’s levy. This directs the sheriff to seize and sell the debtor’s property to pay up. In this case, it was the local branch office of Wells Fargo mortgage, the ones who had been ignoring him all these years.

And it just gets better and better.

It should be mentioned that I have a loan account with Wells Fargo and it’s mostly been okay…no serious beef with them. The other bank which I’ll leave unmentioned, is no longer in existence anyway. I wish I was the one that did that to ’em. Bastards. I see similarities in the shenanigans, and this story just warms the cockles of my heart.

Gateway Pundit, via Instapundit:

In Last 24 Hours Dem Protesters Have Assaulted a Young Woman, Tortured a Camel, Called Opponents “Bad Jews” & Attacked Gay Black Tea Partier…They Must Be Very Proud

With a video clip behind each one.

dwd comments:

They’ve pretty much offended every group out there…where are the animal rights groups denouncing this? How about the women’s rights groups? Gay rights groups? The NAACP / Jesse Jackson / Al Sharpton? Religious figures? How about environmentalists outraged by all the trash and signs just dumped on the ground when the union members left the protests?

Anyone? Anyone?

Crickets…

because these flagrant offenses don’t fit the leftist narrative[.]

My dictionary defines “civility” as “a. civilized conduct…b. a polite act or expression.” To have it when two sides disagree about something, both sides need to agree to the simple code of “I recognize the other person or party has a different take on things and that’s just fine.” “That’s just fine” meaning, not quite so much that there’s nothing worth doing; since of course both sides are going to have some demonstrations, and participate in exchanges of ideas, in order to change some minds. But it is not recognized as an urgent problem in desperate need of fixing, that the other side has influence. There is no recognized imperative to neutralize.

This would contradict the very foundation of modern leftist thought. Look around — every single thing they want is a “basic human right.” Even if it only became a basic human right minutes ago, when they decided it was one. Not because a Higher Power gave it to us, or because we need that right in order to enjoy some other right. No, it’s a “basic human right” because, and only because, this enables them to say there must be something wrong with you if you don’t go along.

Every single leftist recognition that a certain thing ought to be a certain way, is paired up with another leftist recognition that all “good” people agree with this, and therefore, if you’re not agreeing you must be “bad.” If you don’t agree, and you still have some ability to convince others to also disagree, then that has to be fixed. It’s time to go “activist,” to “get a little bloody” as they say.

They want society to be perfect. But at the same time — and this is the dirty little secret — they’re anarchists.

Until leftists who influence other leftists can say “I think X, but I can see how a reasonable person might think not-X,” you cannot involve leftists and have a civil discourse. About anything. And they can’t say that. They don’t believe it.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Newsbusters:

Loud protests by Wisconsin public employee unions against a budget reform proposal from new Governor Scott Walker have drawn considerable national network news attention since Thursday, the day Democratic state senators fled the state in a last-ditch gambit to prevent the bill from becoming law. A story-by-story analysis by the Media Research Center shows the Wisconsin protests are a perfect case study in the media’s longstanding double standard favoring left-wing causes while demonstrating much more hostility to the Tea Party and conservative protest.

Last March, as thousands protested on Capitol Hill in the days before the passage of ObamaCare, CBS’s Nancy Cordes slammed it as “a weekend filled with incivility,” while World News anchor Diane Sawyer painted the Tea Party as a violent gang, with “protesters roaming Washington, some of them increasingly emotional, yelling slurs and epithets.” In August 2009, ABC anchor Charles Gibson complained how “protesters brought pictures of President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache to a town hall meeting,” failing to mention that the signs were produced by Lyndon LaRouche’s wacky fringe movement, not the Tea Party or conservatives.

You know what James Taranto said yesterday about this?

It’s quite striking the way almost every lie the left ever told about the Tea Party has turned out to be true of the government unionists in Wisconsin and their supporters…

He went on to provide examples:

• Extreme rhetoric. The Wisconsin Republican Party has produced what Mediaite.org calls an “incredibly effective” video juxtaposing liberal complaints about allegedly extremist Tea Party rhetoric with unionist signs likening Gov. Walker to Hitler and other dictators. Left-wing journalists are making similar invidious comparisons: “Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, but Might Be Silenced in Wisconsin” read the headline of a Washington Post column by Harold Meyerson last week. The other day on CNN we saw scenes of a Madison crowd chanting, “Kill the bill”–which was said to be violent and invidious a year ago, when “the bill” was ObamaCare.

• Violence. Blogress Ann Althouse, a state employee based in Madison, posted a video of municipal salt trucks blowing their horns in support of the unionists. A YouTube commenter responded (quoting verbatim), “whoever video taped this has no life and should be shot in the head.” Unlike Frances Fox Piven, Althouse has never advocated violence, but don’t expect the Times to give this the kind of coverage it gave Piven’s claims that she had received threatening emails.

• Partisan AstroTurf. That’s the Beltway term referring to a fake grassroots movement. Politico reported last week that “the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm–the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign–is playing an active role in organizing protests.” A blogger at the OFA website, BarackObama.com, writes: “To our allies in the labor movement, to our brothers and sisters in public work, we stand with you, and we stand strong.” We’ve also received emails from MoveOn.org, which says it’s holding a pro-unionist rally outside our offices later this afternoon. Sorry, MOO, we’re working at home today.

• Refusal to accept election results. Although Republicans have a majority in the Wisconsin Senate, Democrats have fled the state, taking advantage of the body’s rules to deny the majority a quorum. The Indianapolis Star reports that Democrats from the Indiana House are employing the same tactic. Even Barack Obama, when he was an Illinois senator, usually voted “present.”

• Stupidity. Remember “Teabonics,” a photo album of misspelled Tea Party signs? The unionists can’t spell any better–and some of them are teachers! Althouse got one photo of what we think is a woman holding a sign that reads ” ‘Open for business’ = Closed for Negotiatins [sic].” Also, some of the teachers’ tactics–in particular, fraudulently calling in sick and exploiting other people’s children by enlisting them as protesters–seem not only unethical but calculated to repel the public. One blessing of low standards for public school teachers is that it ensures many of them are not bright enough to stage an effective protest.

The one exception: So far we haven’t seen any evidence of racism by the Wisconsin unionists. But we’re watching for it.

Is there anyone, anywhere, who’s still engaged in the fantasy that mainstream news is providing to us a straight picture of what’s going on?

The progressive mind can find racism anywhere.

Michael Moore is revealing something else about the mind of the loyal leftist when he uses that worn-out phrase, “vast majority.” He does not mean greater-than-fifty-percent, or greater-than-something-else-that-is-greater-than-fifty-percent. That is not what he means; he is deliberately reducing a plurality to a singularity. He is generalizing. Think about it: What does “majority” mean when you say the majority of guns are owned by people in safe areas where there are no murders? Are you saying nobody owns a gun in an unsafe area — that nobody who owns a gun actually needs one? That isn’t your point? Well if that isn’t your point, then you have no point to make, STFU.

Unless — what you mean to say is that there is a statistical slope indicating that there aren’t too many violent crimes taking place where someone owns a gun. Is that what he means to say? Because that would tend to indicate the guns are effective in discouraging what they are supposed to be discouraging; they are effective in their selected purpose. Yay, guns! Let’s hear it for guns. Keeping homes safe and doing a great job at it, according to that noted wild-eyed gun zealot Michael Moore.

As for the racism angle, it just doesn’t hold up. Most of the people I know who keep guns in the house because they don’t want to confront a burglar with their kids’ toy plastic baseball bat, are prepared to decide and act without regard to the burglar’s skin color. Their training is skin-color-neutral, their planning is skin-color-neutral. They’re not cool with having someone come waltzing in & relieving them of their stuff, just because that someone happens to be white.

So dream on, libs.

Hat tip to Robert S. McCain.

Dr. Thomas Sowell writes in RealClearPolitics:

Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of “high-speed rail.” The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think.

High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher than in the United States. But, without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the high cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.

Building a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco may sound great to people who don’t give it any serious thought. But we are a more spread-out country than England, France or Japan. The distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is greater than the distance from London to Paris– by more than 100 miles.

In Japan, the distance between Tokyo and Osaka is comparable to the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the population of Osaka alone is larger than the combined populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco– and Tokyo has millions more people than Osaka. That is why it can make sense to have a “bullet train” running between Osaka and Tokyo, but makes no sense to build one between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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Make no mistake about it, spending wins votes, and votes are the ultimate bottom line for politicians. If fancy words and lofty visions are enough to get the voters to go along with more spending, then expect to hear a lot of fancy words and lofty visions.

One of the most successful political ploys is to promise people things without having the money to pay for them. Then, when others want to cut back on the things that have been promised, blame them for lacking the compassion of those who wrote the checks without enough money in the bank to cover them.

This is precisely why that overpass crumbled in Minnesota. Government money tends to go where politicians tell it to go, and politicians have a tendency to direct that money toward new, exciting, sexy things. Maintaining what’s already there is so boring. Holding the new projects up, like a private company would, to make sure they can pay for themselves over the long term — that’s boring too.

And so the incentive remains, to eat dessert first and think about veggies later.

A thoughtful essay from Sonic Charmer that I think deserves all of the attention it could get:

One principled argument [in favor of unions] is that the “right” to unionize is something that flows from free speech, or assembly, or something – something like an obvious emergent right that builds off basic, individual, inalienable rights.

This justification breaks down upon even the most superficial inspection. If all unions were about was speech and assembly, there would be nothing controversial about them. Yes of course, people have the right to form ‘clubs’ of whatever sort with each other, go to meetings, give part of their paycheck to other people, to complain about things, and if they are really unhappy with their working conditions, not go to work and say they’ll only come back if they get more pay. But that is not actually what unions do – none of that is where the rubber meets the road, because it fails to incorporate the key points about modern unions: 1. being able to force people to join them, i.e. monopolize labor, 2. being able to force a company to negotiate with certain dudes that have been anointed the union leaders, and 3. the company is not allowed to fire people when they don’t come to work (which is ridiculous!).

Points 1-3 form the actual teeth of unions. Without them, unions would be superfluous and pointless. With them, unions are what they are. But none of 1-3 flow from the right to free speech, or free assembly, or any other individual right of any kind.
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[T]he argument is that, as constructed, the system of corporations becomes too powerful and if given no counterbalance this would lead to a bad situation for employees. Hence, let’s empower unions too, by whatever right and authority we used to empower corporations.

This argument, I must say, has some merit. It can’t be easily dismissed; there could be something to it. At the very least, even the most instinctively anti-union person (such as myself) must recognize that there could be sectors or industries in which the (government-created, after all) corporate structure leads to a warped situation, and against which unions are a reasonable and feasible solution.

But this argument ONLY WORKS IF WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE PRIVATE SECTOR.

James Taranto (inadvertently) continues this train of thought in today’s Best of the Web:

There is a fundamental difference between private- and public-sector workers. A private-sector labor dispute is a clear clash of competing interests, with management representing shareholders and unions representing workers. In the public sector, as George Will notes, taxpayers–whose position is analogous to that of shareholders–are usually denied a seat at the table:

Such unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway – grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members’ employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees’ salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy “negotiations” with unions.

Collective bargaining in the public sector thus is less a negotiation than a conspiracy to steal money from taxpayers.

And one other point of Taranto’s. It doesn’t fit in anywhere, but it’s too good to leave unmentioned so I’ll simply tack it on to the end:

Here is the contradiction of progressivism. Progressives tell us they want the government to do more. But they can’t win elections without public-sector unions. Because they are beholden to those unions, their main priority when in power is to increase the cost, not the scope, of government. Because resources are finite, the result is the worst of both worlds: a government that taxes more without doing more. This is unsustainable economically. Fortunately, as Wisconsin voters showed last November, it’s unsustainable politically as well.

City Journal:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.

As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.

“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.

“And you’re majoring in . . .”

“English?”

All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that “like” was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching (“What I said was, I said . . .”) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (“So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

Hat tip to Wheat & Weeds.

Can’t just leave this up without saying a word about Gerard Van der Leun, and how he pegged this a few years back with his observations about the American Castrati, which I snapped up just as fast as I could.

If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the “service” sector — be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It’s a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.
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You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

As far as I’m concerned, people can talk in whatever way they like. My objection begins when it starts to affect how they think. This, too, I’d allow to pass without too much critique, if only the flaccid thinking could be somehow walled off, incapable of having too much of an effect on myself or on others. Which seems to be the intention anyway, isn’t it? Isn’t that the motivation? Fear of declaring anything too conclusively, and of having any kind of irreversible effect on anything? Like…y’know…and stuff?

Rasmussen:

A sizable number of voters are following new Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s showdown with unionized public employees in his state, and nearly half side with the governor.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters agree more with the Republican governor in his dispute with union workers. Thirty-eight percent (38%) agree more with the unionized public employees, while 14% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

In an effort to close the state’s sizable budget deficit, Walker is proposing to eliminate collective bargaining for public employees including teachers on everything but wage issues. He is excluding public safety workers such as policemen and firemen from his plan.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters think teachers, firemen and policemen should be allowed to go on strike, but 49% disagree and believe they should not have that right. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure.

Not only is this all I need when a film comes out, but if I was a film critic this is pretty much all I’d provide. Guess I better keep the day job…

Yeah, the casting, who got an award for what, who’s directing, who’s hoping this is their big comeback vehicle — just kindly skip it all. Fill in the appropriate check marks, below, and that’s good enough for me. That’s more than good enough for me.

Kay S. Hymowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“We are sick of hooking up with guys,” writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, “I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated.” What Ms. Klausner means by “guys” is males who are not boys or men but something in between. “Guys talk about ‘Star Wars’ like it’s not a movie made for people half their age; a guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends…. They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.” One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner’s book wrote, “I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?”

I remember from years and years ago, “most” people would ask me things like “why are you so hung up on politics?” and my answer would be something variation of, “because that’s my money they’re spending…money that belongs to my kids who aren’t born yet…this stuff has a real impact.” And then “everyone” would ask me “why aren’t you interested in sports when everyone else is?” and I’d come back with “because…that stuff does not have a real impact.”

Now I’m not so engaged in self-worship as to say this is any kind of special ability of mine. It’s just a difference in concerns. Some of us make a special point of being concerned about things that matter, and some of us make a special point of being concerned with things that don’t matter.

Aw wait, that still came out wrong…

There is a possibility here that I’m not in any kind of minority; with the Tea Party and all, maybe I’m actually in the majority and it is only a perceived majority, and a factual minority, that goes the other way.

I dunno.

I do know this though: If you really do want to be all hung up on fluff, things that don’t matter, the “circuses” part of the bread-and-circuses…you can only be so engaged with it to the extent that your circumstances permit. Which team is going to win the Super Bowl — when the cupboards are full and the bills are all paid, that might seem a reasonable question to ask. And, let’s be fair about it, “Now that they’ve rebooted Star Trek, is Jean-Luc Picard still going to exist?” falls into the same category.

If your circumstances are such that even potable water is a matter subjected to some question, you probably won’t be asking about this stuff…

And this is where the ladies of marriageable age become frustrated. It’s the same thing we’ve discussed in these parts many times before. Modern life is too comfortable. We’re getting all fixated on a bunch of crap.

People tap into their Wells Fargo bank accounts through a Bank of America machine, or vice versa, and get socked a buck twenty-five for the “privilege” of accessing their own dough. They feel like their human rights have been violated. Time to riot in the streets. Grrrr!

And then they go pick up their morning frothy foo-foo drink at Starbucks for $4.50 and don’t so much as bat an eyelash.

What’s happening to young men? The same thing that’s happening to everybody else; the same thing that is happening to people in general. We’re losing our bearings. We are losing the ability to prioritize, because there’s no reason to.

We know the sun is going to come up tomorrow no matter what, and until it sets again, & beyond, we’ll still have enough to eat. There is no decision we can make that will put that in jeopardy, or if it is in jeopardy, will pull it out again.

We’re bored.