Jessica Valenti, angry creator of the celebrated flog, which is here…is moving on. Cassy Fiano gives us a run-down of what we’ll be missing.

[W]hile Valenti said she would still be involved in an advisory capacity, her departure caused much sadness and sorrow among lefty feminists in the blogosphere. Here at NewsReal, though, we thought: what better time than to honor Jessica Valenti’s femisogynist legacy at Feministing?

Like most blogs being written by femisogynists, you can find the typical subjects at Feministing. They write about the glories of abortion, bash conservative women, reinforce feminist myths, and defend sluthood culture. But this post isn’t about the typical Feministing posts. This is about the ones that went above and beyond, the ones that took ridiculousness and idiocy to a whole new level.
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10. Hating photo models.

Meet Daniella Sarahyba, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. A few years back, she committed the unthinkable sin of partnering with Taco Bell for a promotion allowing customers to direct her in an online interactive photo shoot. Feministing was, predictably, outrageously outraged!

One of our readers sent us an email recently, rightfully confused as to why Taco Bell’s hot sauce packets are now printed with a website that leads you to perhaps the creepiest ad campaign ever. “Direct Daniella” has the user follow around a swimsuit model, taking pictures of her in a weird stalkerish webcam way.

Reader Karlen wrote, “What this has to do with lousy ‘Mexican’ fast food is beyond me.” Indeed. So I did a little digging. Turns out, Taco Bell has joined up with Sports Illustrated to promote the magazine’s swimsuit issue.

Exotic, huh? It’s like a big ole chalupa of sexism and grossness wrapped in some fetishization of women of color. De-licious.

Right. A supermodel willingly participating in a promotion where men get to — gasp!! — photograph her is disgusting and sexist. Of course, one could argue that the entire point of modeling is to be photographed.

Hopefully, the younger crowd will find a way to keep turning out those big burritos of anger and hate. If you check out Cassy’s article you’ll see this is #10 for a reason…there are much spicier samples of feminist resentment and vitriol.

We just chose to spotlight this one because of the good-lookin’ girl. Ooh, that’ll get ’em all frothed up all over again.

Isn’t there a quote floating around by Abraham Lincoln about people being generally about as happy as they’ve made up their minds to be? I’ve found that is true with regard to more things besides happiness…particularly with regard to the emotion of anger. Mostly with anger. Especially with floggers and ultra-feminists. They’re generally about as angry as they’ve made up their minds to be.

Speaking of GBIL, the boy is on a roll…

Barbara Walters, of 20/20, did a story on gender roles in Kabul , Afghanistan , several years before the Afghan conflict.

She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands.. Despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime,the women now seem to, and are happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked, ‘Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?’

The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation said, “Land Mines.”

We just did a post about this particular appendage, and here it is again. What’s going on? Don’t ask me…ask GBIL (girlfriend’s brother-in-law). He e-mailed it in and it was too funny to, ah, er, let go.

The Super Bowl commercial that didn’t quite make it.

From the Battle of Tours in 732, when their champion stopped the Muslim horde that was sweeping over the entire known world.

To…

French police said Thursday they arrested a 63-year-old woman who was leading her 40-year-old companion along a busy shopping street by a leash attached to his exposed penis.

The couple were detained Wednesday afternoon in the southwestern city of Carcassonne and were due to appear in court in April on charges of public indecency.

The couple admitted to being sex addicts and said they were in the middle of a game when arrested, police said.

*sigh*

Sacré bleu. It is a figure of speech no more.

Daily Mail:

A killer dentist would inject his lover with drugs to knock her out while they had sex, a double murder trial heard yesterday.

Colin Howell and Hazel Stewart were both cheating on their spouses and the mother of two wanted to be unconscious so she would not experience any Christian guilt, the court was told.

Howell once feared he had overdone the dose and that she wouldn’t come round, it was claimed.

Stewart, 47, denies murdering her husband Trevor Buchanan, 32, and Howell’s 31-year-old wife Lesley, whose bodies were found in a fume-filled car in 1991.

Howell was jailed last year for at least 21 years after admitting poisoning them both and making it look like a suicide pact.

Wow. Messed up.

I’ve known people like this who have found some method of coping with guilt…whether it’s religion or music or booze or whatever. All this emphasis on feel feel feel — after all the chips have landed on the ground and then the elixir of choice has been imbibed, how do they feel. Not, what is the situation.

I’ve never quite gotten past the initial impression, that the really big guilt-trigger is the one they leave unmentioned.

KTAR/AZ:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has announced the state will sue the federal government for its failure to secure the border and enforce immigration laws.

Brewer and Attorney General Tom Horne held a news conference Thursday to announce their fight in the face of a federal judge’s ruling that parts of SB1070, the state’s controversial immigration law, are unconstitutional.

The announcement came four days after Brewer signed into law a bill that would let legislative leaders participate in efforts to defend the enforcement law against court challenges.

Victor Davis Hanson:

What factors decide wars? Luck? Fervent ideology? Preponderance of material resources? Or is advantage achieved by superior manpower and morale? In modern times, is victory found largely in lethal cutting-edge technology?

All these factors in varying degrees have in the past explained military success. Hernan Cortés’ destruction of the Aztec Empire (1521) was predicated on the vastly outnumbered, but well-led Spanish conquistadors alone possessing harquebuses, artillery, steel swords, metal breastplates and helmets, horses, and crossbows. That monopoly allowed a few hundred mounted knights to end an empire of millions in roughly two years.

The industrial might of the United States often ensured that American forces in the distant Pacific during the Second World War simply had far more food, weapons, medical care, and military infrastructure than did the imperial Japanese in their own environs. Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht was often outnumbered through much of 1939–41; nevertheless, in those three years, it managed to maintain greater fervor, morale, and conviction of purpose than did its surprised French, Soviet and disorganized British opponents.

Yet sometimes generals and the leadership that single individuals instill matter as much as all these seemingly larger inanimate factors. Often the fates of millions, both on the battlefield and to the rear, hinge on the abilities of just a few rare commanders of genius. They are perhaps the military equivalent of civilian airline pilots, whose skill or ineptness can determine whether hundreds of passengers live or die, regardless of the weather or the condition or model of the aircraft or the nature of the passengers on board.

I’m so late to the party on this there’s no point offering a hat tip to anyone; it has truly become an “everybody else is blogging it, I might as well do it too” situation.

And rightly so.

Of course the New York Times explaining to Republicans what their options are is a little bit like the spider giving the fly navigational instructions.

If you just can’t get enough of C-Span’s daytime programming and are inclined to watch all of the speechifying at the annual gathering of conservative activists here this week, then keep in mind that these potential Republican presidential candidates face a choice in the earliest months of this nascent campaign.

They can either tell the rebellious, angry base of their party exactly what it craves to hear, or they can tell the base what they think it needs to hear in order to win. Down one path lies affection and applause. Down the other, just maybe, lies the presidency.

Why does this interest anyone? Well, I know why it interests me: It’s a window into a newsroom…or conference room…or around a water cooler…crammed full of silly liberals. It is a recording of the silly thoughts that find natural resonance there.

There’s nothing extreme or angry about saying, hey there are a lot of states going broke and our federal government’s deficit is becoming manageable assuming it hasn’t already been unmanageable for several years now — maybe more government spending is not the solution to every li’l problem after all.

If you read this piece, you find it goes on to compare this simple philosophy to Howard Dean’s “Yeeeaaaarrrrrggghhhh!!!” moment. Seriously.

Why am I even linking it. Well, I think it’s important that people understand this; they don’t realize how incredibly out of touch the Manhattan ink-and-electron purple-necktie media really is. The only explanation I can see for this batch of codswallop finding its way under my nose, is that these clowns really do live, literally and figuratively, on an island. Outside of that island they only acknowledge Washington, DC, and that place only grudgingly. They figure out what is going to happen based almost entirely on what it is they’d like to see happen. And then, when what happens is completely different, they forget all about it. When they’re forced to recollect it, they engage in a little bit of creative rewriting of history to blend what really happened with what they wanted to see happen…and then they erase everything that is not exactly like the blend.

They do not sanity-check each other, any more than one of George Lucas’ minions sanity-checked him about Jar Jar Binks. If there was some kind of “peer review,” formal or informal, someone somewhere would’ve said those magic words: “Dude…you just compared more freedom & lower taxes to Howard Fucking Dean.”

I really don’t understand why anybody pays good money for this.

Part One is cool enough, but it isn’t going to include this exchange which is really a perfect fit for 2011:

“If a drunken lout could find the power to express himself on paper,” said Dr. Stadler, “if he could give voice to his essence — the eternal savage, leering his hatred of the mind — this is the sort of book I would expect him to write. But to see it come from a scientist, under the imprint of this institute!”

“But, Dr. Stadler, this book was not intended to be read by scientists. It was written for that drunken lout.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the general public.”

“But, good God! The feeblest imbecile should be able to see the glaring contradictions in every one of your statements.”

“Let us put it this way, Dr. Stadler. The man who doesn’t see that, deserves to believe all my statements.”

There’s a reason why college kids were forced to read it all the way through — besides its length. The story was expanded to cover the basics of how commerce works. All of its fundamental components. And the point is that there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Lend money to starting businesses, run a “state science institute,” lay railroad track, run the locomotives that move about on it, make sandwiches, even to philosophize and compose music.

Nearly every character is an archetype; a walking, talking incarnation of a simple concept, that character’s job being to execute a certain function the right way or the wrong way. Nearly all are like this — save one: The good-looking blond chick with big blue eyes who would look awesome naked, running around fully clothed following the trail of clues.

The story does have one glaring flaw, which is connected to its atheism: You can’t go opining about how society should work, when your models of both failed & successful societies are crammed full of childless people who are between 37 and 44 years old.

Laffer weighs in.

What the Reagan Revolution did was to move America toward lower, flatter tax rates, sound money, freer trade and less regulation. The key to Reaganomics was to change people’s behavior with respect to working, investing and producing. To do this, personal income tax rates not only decreased significantly, but they were also indexed for inflation in 1985. The highest tax rate on “unearned” (i.e., non-wage) income dropped to 28% from 70%. The corporate tax rate also fell to 34% from 46%. And tax brackets were pushed out, so that taxpayers wouldn’t cross the threshold until their incomes were far higher.

Changing tax rates changed behavior, and changed behavior affected tax revenues. Reagan understood that lowering tax rates led to static revenue losses. But he also understood that lowering tax rates also increased taxable income, whether by increasing output or by causing less use of tax shelters and less tax cheating.

Moreover, Reagan knew from personal experience in making movies that once he was in the highest tax bracket, he’d stop making movies for the rest of the year. In other words, a lower tax rate could increase revenues. And so it was with his tax cuts. The highest 1% of income earners paid more in taxes as a share of GDP in 1988 at lower tax rates than they had in 1980 at higher tax rates. To Reagan, what’s been called the “Laffer Curve” (a concept that originated centuries ago and which I had been using without the name in my classes at the University of Chicago) was pure common sense.
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The true lesson to be learned from the Reagan presidency is that good economics isn’t Republican or Democrat, right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative. It’s simply good economics. President Barack Obama should take heed and not limit his vision while seeking a workable solution to America’s tragically high unemployment rate.

There has been an effort this month to compare Obama to Reagan. After this week, though, due to events on the foreign policy front Obama is looking much more like Carter. What concerns me is, He might actually have a shot at that second term if the moderates start to say to themselves, “Conservatives compare Him to Carter and liberals compare Him to Reagan…He must be right in between those two and with all the arguing going on lately, maybe that’s exactly what we need.”

They wouldn’t, would they? Yes they would. Moderates get to be moderates through a desire to have an influence on things that outpaces their desire to learn.

The message that needs to get out, I think, is that you’re not going to have a Reagan-like period of economic growth under the policies of a liberal because it simply isn’t possible. Liberal define success as failure. If you’re rich this year but you were poor last year, the conservative will take your story as proof that the policies are working as intended. Recall Laffer’s sign-off, that good economics are just plain good economics. The liberal, meanwhile, will call you a “special interest” who needs to give back something to “the community” so we can use it to help “working families.”

More wisdom from Yours Truly over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging…although in this case perhaps it is more precise to call it “clarity” than wisdom.

It comes down to cost/benefit. What’s the cost of being our friend, what’s the cost of being our enemy, what’s the benefit of being our friend and what’s the benefit of being our enemy. The four ingredients of great foreign policy. There isn’t a fifth one…those four are the only things that matter.

Meaning, those are the four things that affect the behavior of those whose decisions impact the United States. Having passed the mathematical midpoint between cradle and coffin, looking back on all that is behind me, I can’t think of a single example of any such influence-wielder being affected by any fifth thing. Those four, nothing more.

The occasion was my stumbling across this clip:

Our common error here has to do with recognizing a decision is “big,” as in, too big for us normal-folk. You’ll notice people start to make a lot of mistakes when they confront situations like this. We tend to say something like “well, whatever this guy over here says, he seems pretty sharp…” and then just sort of tune out. So you get decisions made that, when they’re distilled down into a video like this, you find they can be portrayed as shall we say nonsensical. But — if you were to try to make a video portraying the decision as more sensible, you wouldn’t be able to make one.

It’s the logic used in making the decision. You wouldn’t use this kind of logic in the decisions that are small enough for you, so why would the logic make sense in a bigger decision?

What if your kids started giving money away to their friends so they could become more popular in school? “Here’s some money! Do ya like me now?” “If I say no, will you give me more money tomorrow?” “Sure!” “Then no.” “Wha-a-a-a? Uh…Mom! Dad! Can I have some money???”

No, no parent would go for that…or very few. But then again, I suppose being a liberal means these situations are handled entirely differently, based on the level at which they are handled. Some different form of relationship physics has to come into play.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

PJ Tatler:

The silence of liberals is sometimes just as revealing as what they say. What would be the reaction if protesters at a Tea Party rally were heard saying the following about Attorney General Eric Holder?

• He should be impeached and “put… back in the fields.”

• We should “cut off his toes one-by-one and feed them to him.”

• “I’m all about peace… but I would say torture” him.

• “String him up… and his wife, too.”

• “Hang him.”

Of course, none of these vile, racist and violent things were said about Eric Holder at a conservative political rally. But they were said at a liberal protest affiliated with a Common Cause-sponsored conference on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on January 30 in Rancho Mirage, California.
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…I won’t hold my breath waiting for liberal websites to cover this or for organizations like the NAACP to denounce it, given the double standards they have long exhibited in their unfair and degrading criticisms of principled black conservatives like Justice Clarence Thomas.

My blogger friend over on the Hello Kitty of blogging absolutely nails it:

Civility, as it turns out, is only a word used to criticize conservatives. In the name of equality, therefore, I decline to bother with it.

The trouble isn’t that liberals are mean; some of them are quite nice. But they can’t bring themselves to say “our agenda has waited since 1932, it can wait a few more minutes today while we stand up for something more immediately important.” They’re extremists by nature and their army has to be advancing, Patton style, holding nothing, never retreating, never standing still, always going forward, brooking no delays.

If you’re a liberal in good standing, and you say hey hold up, let’s stand up for what’s right even if it’s at a (negligible) cost to our incremental progress…guess what? You’re no longer a liberal in good standing. To even acknowledge a priority conflict exists, is to make yourself into a pariah.

How often do I hear conservatives say “this fight is important to me, and this guy over here I agree with on most things…but we cannot tolerate things like what he just said.” Mmmm…I think it’s fair to say, just about as often as the matter arises. Right?

I’m confused yet again. Who are the moderates and who are the extremists?

…at his place. Christina Aguilera’s warbling has not earned her any kind remarks from any direction whatsoever, so far as I can tell, and she cannot look to Phil for any sympathy.

Just an unfortunate decision all-around. And screwing up the lyrics, of course, didn’t help much.

I’m cautiously optimistic: We may have just witnessed the final chapter on the “diva-warbling.”

On the subject of my parking oopsie which, uh, my girlfriend might’ve just found out about…<grin>

No, it seems she just so happened to receive this from one of her Facebook friends. So it’s someone else’s story that inspired this, not mine. I guess we’re all getting to that age aren’t we?

I was going to put it up yesterday.

But I forgot.

GBIL continues with his Saturday evening mass-e-mail-virtual-blogging. That’s two that make the cut, in the space of a few minutes; well done, GBIL.

Thanks to an e-mail tip-off from GBIL (girlfriend’s brother-in-law).

Much of our behavior is cyclical because we simply don’t know what we want.

1. Decisiveness

Once upon a time, I was single and unattached. Aw, quit laughin’. Anyway, back in my younger years I had made a mistake of thinking I could become appealing to women if I worked harder at becoming appealing to most women. It’s a common mistake among young adult men. My other mistake was to define what most women wanted, according to what I had heard most women say they wanted. Young men tend to think young women see things & go through life the way young men do, which isn’t even close to being correct…

To my credit, I outgrew this after I had heard one particular phrase a bit too often: “Confident but not cocky.” This sounds like two things that are different, with a meaningful difference that will emerge and self-clarify if only you study it hard enough. But why do you need to study it? Logically, if both aspects of this desire are of paramount importance, it should similarly be of paramount importance to define the dividing line between confident & cocky and spend a few words explaining what this is. Nobody ever did, so I gradually came to the realization these were dumb, fickle women who were being asked their opinions…and throwing out incomprehensible, self-contradictory gibberish.

They were expressing a craving for exactly the same thing for which they were simultaneously expressing a revulsion. There was, and is, no dividing line. They wanted a man who knew what he wanted in any given situation…until such time as this quality might become inconvenient…and then they wanted this very quality to be deactivated, instantly, on command, like flicking a switch. These dumb women didn’t want a living, thinking mate, they wanted a stuffed animal.

In the years that came afterward, I discovered this was a very common problem. Dim women, thinking they were emotionally available for emotional involvement with a man on equal footing, but who really wanted a stuffed animal. The rest of us, much of the time, are like this too. We go through the motions of wanting to interact with each other, of wanting certain things out of life. But we don’t really want these things. Until we’re missing them, and then we want them again.

2. Waffling

Waffling is, of course, the opposite of decisiveness, and we all know we hate waffling. Everybody loathes the boss or the politician who puts up a good show of having made some decision, when all he did was wet his finger and stick it up in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing. We all detest that guy. We say, “just do what you think is right, even if I disagree with it; I’ll at least respect you for it.”

And then we got George W. Bush as our President. He did a lot of things a lot of people thought were wrong, but at least he got their respect for doing what he thought was right. Right? Heheheh. No, not even. If he stayed in office twenty more years, he would have been less popular each year than he had been the year before.

See, we get exactly what we asked for, and once we get it we’re unhappy with it.

3. Individual recognition

The other morning I woke up to the brain-cell-killing morning news channel talking about a couple of high school soccer players who would be hosting…something. It became very clear that the girls were celebrities, and a lot of people within & outside of the student body found it personally satisfying that these two individuals received an unnatural magnitude of attention, over and over again. In fact, this particular news story was paying attention to them for no reason other than the fact that the story was about them getting attention somewhere.

I went to high school myself, awhile back, and I remember how this works. In my day it was male football players. All the cool kids would learn to rattle off their full names, Christian-then-surname, as if it was all one single syllable. Which meant everybody else ran around working those names into conversation as well. If so-and-so busted his ankle skiing, it would make it into the school newspaper. There was one time I tried to get interested in the whole thing, maybe go to a Friday night football game just to see what the fuss was all about. It didn’t work because those people were not my friends, and furthermore, I just didn’t care. I tried this only once.

Many years into adulthood I realized: There is a reason kids have a craving for celebrity worship: They toil away in an environment of enforced sameness. The grown-ups do too…but, to make the economy go, we need to give the grown-ups some latitude to earn special privileges which we then say are, by their very existence, evil. But we do not need to permit our children this latitude.

So when you’re in school, you’re in the land of “if I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand,” and, “because of the poor behavior of one person, we are all going to have to do without.” Everyone is on an unnaturally smooth, unnaturally polished, unnaturally even playing field. A playing field where no grass can grow — a dead thing. More like a stainless steel plate, upon which a ball bearing will not roll.

People get tired of it. They want someone elevated to a pedestal, so they can live vicariously through that person. And so X becomes worthy of special attention…and then X is recognized again…and again and again and again. But only X, because there is effort involved in learning about a new celebrity, so it tends to remain the same person or persons across a great expanse of time. For someone who is not X to achieve a minute in the limelight, remains resolutely unthinkable.

4. Masculinity

I mentioned the dumb girls who say they want a guy “confident, but not cocky” when what they really mean is they want male confidence they can turn on and off like a light switch. Somewhere I have a post with embedded video — I’m way too lazy to go searching for it — of a protester being shown his way out of a college bookstore by campus police. The protester is the one shooting the video, and he’s an absolute douche bag, playing out his Mahatma-Ghandi-civil-disobedience thing, but very badly. He keeps calling for some kind of sit-down to talk out the differences, over and over again…doing all of the talking…but sounding exasperatingly wimpy. Blah blah blah blah blah…and he’s got this nasal resonance thing going on that makes you just want to punch him.

His co-hort is taking a different route, spoiling for a fight the whole time, and one quickly estimates that his mouth is writing checks his body can’t cash. The interesting thing is these two people are hanging out together: Alan Alda and Mike Tyson.

It’s pretty obvious what is going on. Just as, when you form a social protocol that one person cannot be any more important than any other, people start to crave that very thing, the same holds true for masculinity. When it’s All Ghandi All The Time, people crave brashness, pugnaciousness, arrogant-bastard-ness. They want to see it and they want to become it. Boys who show too much of it at the wrong time and get in trouble with the law, disproportionately come from single-parent households and they live out their lives with a day-to-day deficiency in masculine role models. Protester #1 was avoiding masculinity because he’d been taught it’s a bad thing, and Protester #2 was compensating for something. No, not for that — for hanging around Protester #1.

5. Opportunities to become obscenely wealthy

Of all the leftist politicians and political figures out there who complain “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” have you ever stopped to notice how many of them are breathtakingly wealthy?

That goes for the people on the left who have no prayer of ever getting that far, as well. Once you eliminate any possibility whatsoever of getting out of the vicious paycheck cycle, and life has nothing more to offer that’s more lavish than next year’s vacation and that’s only if everything goes right, life becomes dull. People tend to underestimate how dull it can get, or to even notice there’s something missing when they can no longer strive for anything, reach for anything.

They start to crave the opportunity to acquire something out of the ordinary. They become easy marks for slick salesmen who sell houses, cars, timeshares that the prospect cannot realistically afford. They start to fall for the “you’ve arrived” method of salesmanship. This is very much like shopping for groceries without a list when you’re starving. But, imagine what would happen if you went shopping while you were starving but did not consciously realize you were starving. That’s where these poor wretches are. They’ve gotten rid of the opportunity to do something material and special, and they want it back again. They end up with a primal impulse, a sense of something missing, that is much keener and more urgent than it naturally should be.

6. Social unrest

How many times have we heard about CALWWNTY, “We’ve Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet”? How many times do we fail to ask the tough but obvious question: “Wait a minute, if we’ve come along way, and several decades ago we were getting told we came along way, we’ve been coming a long way every single year since then, would you care to explain why we’re not there yet?”

There’s a simple reason why these things drag on through the generations and nobody ever gets “there yet.” They become addicted to the conflict. They form their personalities, their identities, around this perceived truth that one segment of society is keeping another segment down.

And so you often see people lapsing back into it. How else do you explain the fact that America, a country with a black guy as President, needs affirmative action? The people who continue to complain about this, they become living solutions in search of problems. It’s very sad. These are entire lives wasted on a big nothing, by choice.

The dog chasing the car, may be as confused as all get-out, but he at least stops running when the car stops. The racial huckster in search of social-justice or social-equilibrium, is more confused than the dog. He never stops.

7. Aristocracy, titles, castes, inequality of privilege

Why do we have “ObamaCare waivers”? Seriously, why.

I’ll tell you why. We do not elect wonderful people full of charisma and charm to make us all the same. We elect them to tell us who all must be the same as who else, and who is allowed to be different.

Listen to these politicians give their speeches sometime. Just pick some speeches at random. They identify these problems with “some” people unable to acquire access to health care services…it’s always some people underprivileged. We need to make a new world in which everybody has whatever-it-is. It’s not good enough if the service is easy for some to acquire and possible for others to acquire. We need enforced same-ness.

But if you listen to the speech a little while longer, it becomes quickly apparent that these politicians would not be able to handle a new social order that works this way, in which everybody can do everything with equal ease. The minute they identify a problem, they have identified someone responsible for creating it and keeping it around, making the problem bigger. In other words, villains.

This is different from high school student bodies singling out individuals from among them to worship as celebrities. That has to do with manufacturing an identity. This has to do with stratification, building classes as opposed to building individuals. Also, it has to do with real power. Those soccer players mentioned earlier, their classmates want them to get attention, but there’s no special need for them to make real, powerful, influential decisions. We want people we know, to achieve fame; we want people we don’t know, to achieve power. We want strangers who are nearly guaranteed to remain lifetime strangers, to make the big decisions that impact us personally. And, deep down, we want them to make secret deals with each other they would not make with us.

And we want those super-people to have super-powers of some kind, to be able to do things any ol’ schmuck would not be able to do.

Like everything else on this list, the minute we get rid of it, it seems there are many among us who want it back again. And, among the people who want it back again, very many of them took point on the project to dispose of it in the first place.

People who hate each other can find ways to work together if they share a more intense hatred of some third party.

And, as I pointed out over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, we tend to dismiss certain things as crazy-conspiracy-theories, just because someone wants us to dismiss them, even when we know as an absolute fact that they’re true.

Another observation: People who have some axe to grind, for whatever reason, against freedom…are given perhaps too much of an opportunity to influence or unilaterally dictate how certain situations are going to come out — when they make a point of displaying their hatred for the people who are in favor of freedom, rather than their hatred of freedom itself. I would characterize this lack of scrutiny on the part of the rest of us as perhaps the biggest mistake we’re making right now, at least among the ones that go un-corrected.

Hat tip to Althouse by way of Instapundit.

Gallup:

President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings were even more polarized during his second year in office than during his first, when he registered the most polarized ratings for a first-year president. An average of 81% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans approved of the job Obama was doing as president during his second year. That 68-point gap in party ratings is up from 65 points in his first year and is easily the most polarized second year for a president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Yeah, I know, more polling data. Yawn.

But give this one another look. George W. Bush was a polarizing figure and Barack Obama, as of January of ’09 when The God President was “ready to rule,” The Anointed One was going to fix this. Remember that? Fix the economic mess, make us more respected around the world and heal our divisions.

We are seeing the effects of the holy healing. Barack Obama’s ratings are polarized, because Barack Obama has a polarizing effect. Which is not to say it’s all His fault, and it’s certainly not to say President Bush wasn’t polarizing…the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that both presidents are & were polarizing.

Or maybe it’s us. We’re ready to be polarized. The Lewinsky matter, the debacle in Florida, maybe those are the events that put something unhealthy in motion.

In fact, I see a pattern.

Slick Willy wanted a knob job in the big chair; he lied about it, and when he got caught the democrats decided to circle the wagons and make it look like it was the other guys who had a problem. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do. They got what they wanted, but their cherished radical-left feminist movement has never been taken seriously since then, and it polarized the country. They blame conservatives and Republicans.

When Al Gore lost Florida and thus the presidency, democrats decided to fly all kinds of high-priced lawyers in to argue that Florida’s vote should be decided by means of cherry-picking the most liberal counties and extrapolating the results across the state. This time they didn’t get what they wanted. It was the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country. They blame conservatives and Republicans.

When Sen. Paul Wellstone died the democrats transformed his funeral into a pep rally with a perceptible overtone of “aren’t we so awesome we’re going to kick those other guys’ asses.” It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country. It doesn’t seem to me that they seek to blame conservatives and Republicans for this, but they’d much rather the whole thing never get brought up again. And if they could find a way to blame conservatives and Republicans, they would.

When it was time to confront Saddam Hussein about something, they decided to play it off like it was President Bush trying to avenge his daddy’s assassination attempt…conveniently forgetting it’s been time to confront Saddam Hussein about something, oh, every three or four years since 1991. This time, the intel said Hussein had to be dealt with for good, and they decided to make this look like a “lie.” It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it really, really polarized the country. A lot. You know who they’d like to blame for this.

When Republicans tried to make an issue about the developing financial problems with Fannie and Freddie, the democrats stuck their fingers in their ears and yelled “I can’t hear you la la la.” That turned out to be the wrong thing to do. It didn’t polarize the country because it was a bunch of boring financial stuff…but it did break the country.

When New Orleans was flooded they blamed the President. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do and it polarized the country.

When they won the House of Representatives and the Senate they put Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge. That was wrong, and it polarized the country.

When it turned out democrat voters were evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they spent all summer of ’08 trying to decide the matter through their “super-delegates,” none of whom wanted to be on record going on either direction on this. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do. It didn’t polarize the country but it certainly polarized the democrats.

And then there’s Barack Obama. In my living memory, I struggle to remember the last time a presidential candidate trashed the incumbent so thoroughly, in such bad taste, with such a consistency that, before every speech, you knew with absolute certainty what was going to be discussed ad nauseum. “FaPoBuAd” became our token word of choice to abbreviate the “failed policies of the Bush administration,” which quickly found a permanent home on the Obama Speech Bingo card. Well, at the beginning of 2011 it has become painfully clear that our country’s problems were not due to the FaPoBuAd. Inventing this boogeyman was the wrong thing to do. It was a big mistake; not so much from the perspective of the interests of the Obama campaign, but for the continuing survival and welfare of the country.

It polarized us, big time.

Am I reciting the history of the last decade or so unfairly? Making something up that didn’t happen? Leaving something out that might change things? Forming the wrong take on any of it?

Let me know.

In the meantime, these assclowns should never be given credit for healing any divisions about anything ever again. Not until such time as they really do.

Somebody please let the Nobel Prize Committee know…

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Lee Doren’s mad. We all should be.

Margot McGowan at ReelGirl sets me straight:

Morgan,

Men are not more visual!!! That is a total myth! Men are allowed to be visual in our culture. Men watch and women watch themselves being watched.

Women are attracted to half naked guys. Not only that, women are attracted to completely naked guys.

Our disagreement is with regard to the statement “5x more skin shown by women than men from G to R rated films,” to which I say, damn straight. Women have better looking skin. We like looking at what they got, more than they like looking at what we got. It’s all about selling the movie tickets, so whaddya expect?

But Margot disagrees emphatically. That’s an awful lot of exclamation marks, I’d better re-think this.

I do agree with Margot on the “women watch themselves being watched.” That part is absolutely true. Female superheroes in comic books — they either show copious amounts of skin, or they wear a tight rubber/latex/spandex suit that shows every curve. The boys like seeing that, and the girls, well, this attire might very well be there to attract the girls in the first place more than the boys. Let’s think on this — what could a female superhero wear, that wasn’t either skimpy or skin-tight, that would attract the female readers? A Hillary-Clinton-pantsuit? No. The bod needs to be shown, because a superhero has to do something to exude confidence.

But Margot’s argument, which I see as one of “don’t you dare think men and women are any different” straight out of the 1970’s, falls apart right here. Should Batman exude confidence, fighting Gotham’s crime in a loincloth? No…he already exudes confidence fighting the crime. Us guys have the long end of the stick here. And it wouldn’t work. Nobody, of either sex or any persuasion, wants to see a guy’s butt cheeks sticking out of something.

Exhibit B would be my video game shelf which is crammed full of James Bond and Tomb Raider. Now, one of those franchises has a feature that allows the player to place all kinds of different skimpy outfits on the protagonist as he beats levels and earns “rewards.” It is not the 007 franchise. Once again: Nobody, anywhere, wants to see a guy’s hind end. We don’t even want to pay that much attention to his clothes at all, really. He should look alright…but his clothes? That’s just a way to get him looking alright, nothing more.

Exhibit C is my own flabby middle-aged man-bod. This time of year, with the beer-blogging really showing up and my gut dangling down by my kneecaps, I’m not going to go popping down by the pool and see a bevy of college-age vixens suddenly decide “Oh, hello handsome, I guess it isn’t that nippy after all I want to get an eyeful!” Not happening. Nobody wants to see me in the buff except my girlfriend, and that’s just because she’s a good liar. But let’s say I’m in better shape; let’s imagine I look like…oh, what are they drooling over now. That werewolf kid in the “Twilight” saga I suppose. Here, I can see Margot’s point. The women who crowd into the theaters over this “girl porn” certainly do seem just as stupid and empty-headed as any over-sexed male…

…but I doubt they could be sold anything stupid. See, that’s my definition. I think Margot has underestimated just how badly our judgment can be impaired by our hormones. That’s really where it counts, is in the making of decisions. Of course women like looking at half-naked men now and then…one would hope…but it doesn’t have the same effect. And the half-naked thing isn’t quite as central to the visual experience. A man who wants to wear something selected for the purpose of selling stupid things that the (female) buyer would not otherwise buy, is just as well-off going for a look that is something else. “Professional” seems to be dominant theme. A tailored suit. Get in shape first, take care of the skin around the face, tweeze the eyebrows, pull the hair out of the ears, then spend real money on the haircut and the suit.

Girls have it all over us here. If they want to sell us something we shouldn’t be buying, they just do the primping they’d be doing anyway and then show their legs. We don’t even stop to look at what they’re selling. We will buy up the whole inventory and we won’t look back.

So I think she missed the point, and maybe I should have explained it a little more specifically…but then again, I’m not a brain surgeon. The two sexes are not the same. If a woman does happen to enjoy looking at a half-naked guy somewhere…it stops there. It’s a visual experience and nothing more. No decisions are going to get changed, no purchasing behavior is going to be affected, or very little. James Bond might wear a speedo in one scene — which will make it to the trailer, so that the Lord & Lady of the Manor will agree “yeah we need to go see that.” But that’s it. Star Trek uniforms are always going to be different, with the gentlemen officers consuming more of the starship laundry resources covering up what nobody wants to see anyway. Lara Croft is always going to be doing fashion shows with skimpy swimsuits, for as long as she’s around…and Indiana Jones, and James Bond, will not.

Women just have nicer looking limbs all-around. They’re built to be seen. Even when women look at other women — if the woman who is a spectacle is some icon of fantasy or some other kind of fiction, the woman who’s doing the looking is going to want to see evidence of her fantastic-al-ness. That doesn’t end up being a sexual thing, but it ends up in exactly the same destination: display some evidence that you think highly of yourself. So no, you don’t wear long trousers, a rumpled up shirt and a heavy leather jacket with a bullwhip & a hat. Anything the lady-hero would wear in a crowd, that would get her lost in the crowd, is out of the question. That — near as I can figure, anyway — is the girl-on-girl rule.

Being a female is tough when you get to the costuming-department-of-life. The opportunities are all different, the stigma are different, the expectations are different and the reactions are different. I, for one, wouldn’t survive; I’m more of a “got my tee shirt, got my jeans, I’m all set” kinda guy. But hey, the super heroines who show the skin have it easy when it comes time to buy laundry detergent.

Update: Related: A new feminist movement to make us re-think the pink. Oh my, the more you pay attention to this stuff, the more complicated it becomes…

I’m surprised an eagle-eyed editor didn’t pick up on this. But with so much “opinion” being churned out by means of the tried-and-true method of “I simply pulled it out of my butt,” it makes me wonder if an editor was on the job at all. Just make sure the words are spelled right, put the punctuation in the right places, and let the presses roll huh?

The TEA Party is an interesting phenomenon that has to implode under the rules of logic and contradictions soon. The party that proclaims to be all about the US Constitution wants to be rid of the 14th Amendment, and the 17th.

They are afraid of classes that promote the overthrow of the government, yet turn a blind eye to groups such as the NSM, the neo-Nazis, and other right-wing Christian militia groups that actively are working towards this.
:
The first way to notice a bigot is by how much they mention the Tenth Amendment.

Now, to be clear, it’s not the love of the Tenth Amendment that makes one a bigot, but rather it tends to be a great indicator of those supporters of bigotry since the 10th Amendment was the tool used to allow things such as slavery, segregation, and now anti-immigration policies.

A simple look at history shows that those rallying for “states rights” were usually racist whites and they are rallying for some form of racism.

The TEA Party has to implode under logic contradictions soon, because it has an idea of what parts of the Constitution it would like to lop off…but…you can tell a bigot, because the bigot will show some decent respect to other parts of the Constitution the author of this editorial would just as soon like to see ignored altogether. That’s good…

It does my heart good to see some people getting eaten alive in their own comment sections.

This article should be a case study in liberal debate. First, misrepresent your opponents[‘] position. “Now the TEA Party in Arizona is so American that they no longer want to be ruled by America’s government. American rules should not apply to Arizona.” No, what they TEA party wants is for the Federal government to act within the bounds of the constitution, to stick to its enumerated powers and stop expanding those powers to encompass every aspect of American’s daily lives. And what they are trying to do in Arizona is say to the Federal Government, “you enact a law that the constitution does not authorize you to enact, according to the 10th amendment, we don’t have to follow it”. That IS following the constitution. Despite what you liberals would have people believe, the constitution is a LIMIT on the powers of the Federal Government, not a blank check for them do to anything they want. Ok, so now on to step two in liberal debate. You have misrepresented your opponents[‘] point of view and since debating their true position might lead to someone actually finding out what their true position is, just attack them. They are bigots, they are racist, they want to re-implement slavery, and so, therefore, they are wrong. Look, look at the “code words” they use to try to hide their true agenda, they must be stopped. No facts, no counter-arguments, just personal attacks.

FrankJ is trying to figure out why the left thinks so many things are “far right.” Concluding that it’s all relative, but not really, he came up with a nifty chart that is spooky accurate:

On the Hello Kitty of Blogging, I had some harsh words about “moderates” that fall roughly into line with this:

The trouble with “moderates” is they don’t know what is moderate…

Now most moderates turn to the nearest leftist for instructions about what they are to think is moderate and what they are to think is extreme. It reminds me of Homer Simpson getting ahold of $15,000 and asking the nearest car dealer, “does this car cost fifteen thousand dollars?” and the car dealer says, “it does now!”

If you’re faced with an issue and you want to figure out which position is extreme, and you just pick the one that cannot be expressed without using the words “always” or “never,” you’ll be right about eight times out of ten. If you decide it by asking the nearest moderate, you’ll be right only about two or three times out of ten because the moderate is going to ask the nearest liberal what he should think.

If you pick whichever position is more conservative, you’ll be right only one time out of ten. Seriously, think of an example. “I’m a conservative and I want a law against anyone having sex in this position” — that would be extreme. Okay, there’s one…but how often does that happen? What if it’s “I’m a liberal and I don’t think any executives in a company should make more than such-and-such a salary or bonus.” That’s extreme, but nearly all moderates will tell you that’s moderate. And right! But they are so, so wrong…moderates very often are seduced into being anti-freedom. You can’t call them useful-idiots, because moderates who do this aren’t quite so useful.

Now, if you want to be right only one time out of a hundred — ask a GROUP of moderates what is moderate, and allow them to discuss it among themselves before they get back to you. Then they’ll start trying to impress each other. In all likelihood you wont get a coherent answer back, they’ll just come to a consensus that Sarah Palin is a moron, we need to stop hearing about her, and let’s keep talking about her constantly until we’re not hearing about her anymore.

When do the moderates feel that they are most powerful? When there is a perceptible fatigue with “all of the fighting”; that the “two sides need to get along, and work together to get things done.” When do the liberals feel powerful? In exactly the same situation. They feel that all of the arguing has been done, and they are right to feel this way; they’ll simply package the liberal solution up, as the definitive answer to “all the fighting,” the moderates will believe it uncritically and thus be taught to parrot the liberal line. As if it were their own.

And presto change-o! The “moderate” solution to our health care crisis is socialized medicine, and the “moderate” solution to an oil leak in the gulf is a drilling moratorium. On and on down the line, we pick the solution that makes liberals happy. The moderates are satisfied and even feeling a little bit smug. Liberals stay grouchy. Nobody notices that, and since the solution doesn’t work there will be another “crisis” in a few years so we can go back Jack and do it again.

But meanwhile, deep down where the personal values are, moderates are actually conservative. They’re just conservatives who have more passion about making everybody agree to the same thing, than they do about seeing to it their personal values — or somebody’s personal values — have some bearing on the final outcome. Moderates, as I have said before, agree with conservatives that after a fight breaks out on the school playground, the punishment needs to be rained down upon the kid who threw the first punch and not the kid who threw the last punch. It is the liberals who live in their own little world, values-wise; they think all strength needs to be punished, unless it is strength that advances their statist agenda. This has been consistent: If it has something to do with capability, and they cannot control it, then it must be destroyed.

Most of us, including the moderates, are not willing to sign up to that. Only the moderates can be fooled into supporting this goal, provided it is packaged as something else.

Louis E. Lataif writes in Forbes:

Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges.

Like many situations too good to be true–like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.

Just 10 years ago the cost of a four-year public college education amounted to 18% of the annual income of middle-income families. Ten years later, it amounted to 25% of that family’s average annual income. The cost of attending a private university is about double the cost of public universities. Think of higher education as the proverbial frog in boiling water. It feels very warm and comfy but soon will be cooked.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I see it as a smaller thing that is unsustainable within a larger thing that is unsustainable: We are evolving out of a place where, if you don’t produce something, you don’t eat. I suppose that is a good thing, at least at first, but we’re evolving in a constant direction a bit too far. With no signs of slowing down. We’re coming up with more and more ways for more and more people to create livelihoods for themselves without producing anything…you’ve heard the old adage “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” Perhaps private higher-level education is becoming more expensive, not quite so much because those who toil away therein are demanding more lavish lifestyles, but because there are more of them.

The whole thing strikes me as a misdirection. If we’re laboring away to create an advanced society in which everyone has a livelihood, and therefore no one needs to worry about whether they can get ahold of one — how come we have more and more people who make such a livelihood out of dictating who does & who does not deserve to have a livelihood? Should that not be an occupation in recession? In fact, it strikes me as an altogether unintended consequence. If your livelihood consists of handing down decisions on who else is entitled to a livelihood, well obviously that just beats the snot out of a livelihood that is made by working. So the lazy people are going to want the livelihood that consists of dictating who else can have a livelihood, since it doesn’t involve any actual work. This may not be a problem if the lazy people are in the minority. But when the option to be lazy has been around for a little while…lazy people always, and I do mean always, achieve majority status.

Glenn Reynolds says often that this is a “bubble” that is due to burst; whatever cannot continue indefinitely, won’t. To his credit, I have yet to see him declare anyone should seek any measure of comfort from this. They shouldn’t because the bursting of the bubble is going to be ugly. Don’t forget, as higher-level education becomes more and more difficult to acquire, the “hard” qualifications to be acquired from it are on a downslide, which means the qualifications to be expected from those who have not acquired one, are similarly on a downslide.

To put it in simpler terms, if the bubble doesn’t pop soon you’re going to need a Master’s degree to shovel shit out of a stable.

So. You can’t have a livelihood of any kind until someone says you’re entitled to have a livelihood, and for them to even consider saying it you need to attend some semesters and pay a rapidly inflating rate for the privilege. Just to be considered. This is the culmination of our efforts to build a super-sophisticated society in which nobody needs to worry about acquiring a livelihood.

Einstein is reputed to have said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. I think that is applicable here.

On Groundhog Day I woke up like I always do, engaged in some carnal delight like I usually do, made the coffee like I always do, took my shower, got dressed, logged on to tweak the brittle liberals like I always do…heh heh. Gathered my gear, kissed my sweetie goodbye and walked over to the garage like I always do. Then I pushed the button on my keychain like I always do and the garage door slid up like it always does.

Something just shy of eight inches. Woops.

I tried it again, with the same results. Eh…this needs some addressing. There’s no other way to get in. After fiddling around for the better part of a minute I saw the problem: The metal door was catching on the bottom of the license plate frame. Did I really park the car that way? Is my memory going?

It turned out, yeah, maybe it is, just not in the way I thought. On Groundhog-Day-Eve, I forgot to set the damn parking brake…

Uff da. If your grandfather lived with you and he pulled these shenanigans, you’d start up with that speech about surrendering the license, right? I think most of us would at least give it some thought. What are the rules for this when you’re forty-four instead of eighty-eight? I think, at my tender age, it’s reasonable to have a one-time pass. Get some yuks in, make sure it doesn’t happen again or else the “it’s time, Grandpa” speechifying will begin in earnest.

Maybe I’m biased, but that seems reasonable. Okay then. How in blazes do I get to work, short of crawling around on the dusty floor like a little kid or something? It’s a li’l four-banger, and about eighty pounds of force disengages the car from the door. But I found it somehow impossible to maintain this while avoiding the beam that disengages the motor; there’s a gentle slope to the cement floor, so the vessel rolls back in place when I stop shoving; and as slow as it’s rolling, it’s so much quicker than the door mechanism. Just a two-by-four to block the tires, and this would be so much easier. But there is none.

I ended up sticking my foot in there to jam the Leatherman tool I carry on my belt, under the tire. And, mercifully, the first Groundhog Day misadventure was at an end. Yet another triumph for American ingenuity. Just imagine calling a tow truck over something like this…yikes…forget about drivers’ licenses, let’s talk about Man Cards. What does a tow truck driver’s hysterical laughter sound like? I’m happy to plead an honest ignorance on this point, like any proper red-blooded meat-eating beer-drinking Leatherman-carrying American man.

But clearly I’m fallible, and you have some idea of just how fallible I can be at times…

And so it arrives as something of a shock when I see things like this:

One of my favorite bloggers is Morgan Freeberg a.k.a. House of Eratosthenes. He is able to explain things clearly, although not always concisely. Simple ideas or complex ideas, when Morgan gets a hold of it, he can boil it down to something that is understandable. I urge you to make him a daily stop.

But I was a little dismayed when he rather off-handedly remarked that he didn’t like fisking, musing that doing so usually didn’t add anything to a discussion.

Of course, I’ve been doing a weekly (more-or-less) fisking of a liberal columnist for several years now. I don’t think Morgan’s comment was directed at me, because those fiskings are on a more obscure website that is more of a diary than a blog, but I did take it as whispered advice from an older brother. I hold Morgan’s advice in high regard, so whenever he expresses an opinion, I weight it a bit more than other people’s words. So I quit doing fiskings and figured that I would never do them again.

Until now.

Oh, dear. Maybe the blogs are enhancing our ability to communicate a little bit too well; we have some ditz who can’t even park his car & set the brake, making an off-hand comment about not liking the fisking, and because of that one thing we have some potentially wonderful writing dribbling off into oblivion.

I am not inclined to refudiate the remark about fisking; as a general rule, I still don’t like it. It encourages an intellectual vigor that is broad but not deep. The message behind it is one of “look how gloriously flawed my target must be, for behold the vast quantity of flaws I have uncovered in his work.” But what does that say, really, when you waded into the exercise with that very preconceived notion. And so you began with the intent of finding a bunch of flaws…you found them…this usually says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking. And when it says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking, and the goal was to say something about the thing you’re fisking, then what we have created is an abomination in that it appears to have met a goal when it really fell short.

That is my objection — it does not apply to what Captain Kardde jotted down after the “until now.” You do need to go read that, it is really something. The target of the fisking has it comin’. When I read things like this (comments by Bob Scott, target-of-fisking, in italics):

Even though I am not willing to conclude that the hatred spouted by conservatives like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (Fox News) is responsible for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the distinguished chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, along with five other Americans,

That’s mighty white of you, Bob. Seeing as how that’s what the evidence has proven.

…it is time for conservatives to examine that possibility.

Oh. I see. So, conservatives and the “hatred” that we have “spouted” are not responsible for the shooting, but we need to examine the “possibility” that we are.

It all makes perfect sense!

Aw fuck it, fisk away. What an insufferable jackass.

Anyway, in the evening I came home to an empty house because the girlfriend is taking evening classes. I’d much rather come home to find her, but in her place I found the two dozen St. Pauli’s I’d stocked in the outdoor (daddy) fridge the night before, a package from older relative containing a book called “The No-Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t“; and, Season One of the Six Million Dollar Man, produced for the first time on DVD Region 1 — yes! Plus a bowl of shake-n-bake chicken drumsticks in the (momma) fridge.

The slow motion, I have to say, has not aged well. In fact, the timing of the story in these episodes is much more tedious and plodding than how I remember. Maybe that’s because when I was seven I was just waiting for Steve Austin to jump over a wall or hit somebody. Another thing that I find interesting is that the influence of James Bond was much more perceptible than the way I remember it. Col. Austin is not just bionic, he’s a man’s man, capable of seducing any woman, relocating an engine from a pickup truck into an airplane, designing some super-world-saving-ramshackle device on the spot, apparently has an IQ of over 200 or so. Since he’s fighting bad guys who really have to be stopped, it goes without saying that he must work for some super-secret government agency. It’s an interesting comment on the times in which we lived back then; I wonder if it would have been possible to make this a couple years later, with Watergate & all. In fact, I’d wager not. Knight Rider did exactly the same thing, but he worked for “The Foundation.”

But still. In that subsequent era, with our confidence completely blown, when you went to the boob tube the real shadowy guys who were up to no good never worked for the government. Sure, you could tell they were bad because they wore nice suits…all the time…even in the middle of the night. Good guys wore plaid shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, and jeans that were skin tight up top around the derrier, flowing like draperies down by the ankles. Suit == bad. But the bad guys weren’t government agency employees, they were super rich megalomaniacs running large corporations. See the little twist? Government screws up…and in our national consciousness, this means free enterprise cannot be trusted.

Another thing that has not aged well from this show, and it is more central to the costuming issue: Steve’s clothes. I can see exactly what they’re getting across — here the scientists and generals and Oscar are briefing Steve on his next mission, and if you’re seeing this for the first time you can tell this guy in the middle of the room is the cool one because he’s a fashion plate. That’s how it looks in 1973. Nowadays, you look at it and go, why is that man wearing a carpet for a suit?

To the asshole book: Wish it arrived twenty years earlier, I could’ve used something like that. By sheer coincidence, Severian posted a comment, also on Groundhog Day, that said

This is why the left almost always wins. Bureaucracies only work when workplaces are harmonious, and so they create elaborate structures to enforce harmony. Since leftists are offended by almost everything, those enforcement structures err on the side of caution and begin enforcing mandatory leftism. And on and on the vicious circle spins…

And here we come to another elaborate thought about workplaces. Chapter four, “How To Stop Your Inner Jerk From Getting Out,” concentrates on avoiding the zombie characteristic of asshole-mania, how to keep from becoming one after you have been bitten. Perhaps this is where the relative wants me to concentrate my energies, I don’t know. It’s chock full of advice and has a self-assessment.

I’m pleased and proud to report that, of all the people who shared a difficult workplace with me and nurtured or became inextricably devoted to the thought that I’m an asshole, their thinking went something like this: Morgan isn’t doing every little thing, large & small, exactly the way I’d be doing it if I were Morgan, that makes him an asshole. And you know what, I’ll take that. I think something needs to be faced here, the word “asshole” is not so much a word that serves to insult, as a word that serves to dismiss. Once you go through life saying “I seek to dismiss any & all persons who do not do things exactly the same way I would do them,” then I submit you do not need to take an asshole self-assessment quiz, we already know the answer…such a being is lower than anybody who ever fisked somebody, or anybody who ever got fisked even if they had it coming.

And this ties in to Severian’s comment. If you have a workplace that is harmonious only because some busybody is “enforcing harmony”…and that busybody, or someone who shares a factional agenda with the busybody, is “offended by almost everything” — how harmonious is that workplace going to be? To paraphrase Stalin, it doesn’t matter who is the asshole, it matters who counts the assholes and therefore defines the assholes.

More than once I have wondered, how do we explain this to future generations? We are going to make our workplaces harmonious, by deferring to the opinions of self-appointed dictators in determining what is “offensive”…oh, and the dictators will generally be self-appointed on the basis of being super-sensitive to perceived slights. That is what makes our workplaces so flexible, so friendly, so welcoming. Above all, non-threatening. That is the paramount goal, so since that goal is higher than any other, we will achieve it by making sure your minute-to-minute behavior, actual & perceived, is adjudicated by some frenzied neurotic you’ve never met, who never had to convince anybody that he or she can be fair or impartial…someone who might very well be nuts. We will end your career over this. We’ll send you to special classes to make sure you understand these are the rules, so you know ahead of time that you are toiling eight hours a day under the Sword of Damocles.

That this creates a non-threatening business environment, is something that will be much more difficult to explain to future generations than — well, The Six Million Dollar Man’s leisure suit.

So there you have a day in the life. Groundhog Day. It covers a lot of subjects, and perhaps in the elaborate treatise above I have managed to tie all of them neatly together. Except for Steve Austin who’s just sort of sticking out there. But he’s cool like that. Nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga….

Rudy Barnett and Elizabeth Foley, WSJ:

For months, progressives smugly labeled the legal challenges to ObamaCare as “silly” or even “frivolous.” Today their confidence must be severely shaken.

Late Monday afternoon in Pensacola, Fla., U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson delivered the second major judgment that the centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—the “individual mandate” that forces Americans to buy health insurance whether or not they want it—is unconstitutional.
:
Consider the problems posed by the insurance mandate. The Obama administration argued that it was supported by the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. True enough, insurance is commerce, but not buying insurance is the antithesis of commerce. Commerce has always been understood as requiring economic activity. This was the rationale Judge Hudson adopted in striking down the individual mandate in the Virginia case.

Since this weekend, just before the ruling, I was treated to a dedicated lefty on the Hello-Kitty-of-Blogging who beat me upside the head (since I was the only one foolish enough to actually debate him on this) that this ruling is inconsequential because it WILL be overturned. Not quite so much that the ruling is wrong, that we need ObamaCare, millions and millions cannot get any access to health care blah blah blah…although there were some trace amounts of that. But it WILL be overturned, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, I’ve proven my intellectual feebleness by expressing any sort of belief that the ruling means anything at all.

And oh by the way, my argument has been judged by these authoritative yet virtually anonymous busybodies on social media and found wanting.

But, back to the argument that it doesn’t matter what’s right or wrong, what the Constitution says, this WILL be overturned. Reminds me of the argument that it doesn’t matter if the Victory Mosque should or shouldn’t be built, it WILL be…hey, how’d that turn out. But the decision WILL be overturned. Wow, someone somewhere must have a sweetheart deal for Justice Kennedy.

I irritated the busybody and his sidekick with a hypothetical about a future America vigorously shoving a nascent socialized-medicine system through its early evolutionary stages…and running headlong into an “emergency” kidney shortage. If the government can do anything it wants, since it is “judicial activism” to merely declare anything at all unconstitutional…can the government order me to surrender one of my healthy kidneys? This met with two responses, both peppered with insults, each starkly contradictory to the other: Your hypothetical is unlikely, fantastic and stupid — and, who in pity fuck’s sake ever said your kidneys weren’t up for grabs from the very beginning?

All of which demonstrates two things.

One, those who have no love at all of liberty, principles of self-governance, self-direction, self-ownership and freedom…are viscerally resentful and angry toward those who do. It has been ever thus.

And two: Our lefties are experiencing a difficult time right now. Please be more considerate and gentle than I am.

Look what Cassy posted on her Facebook wall:

Men should concentrate on playing with their children and leave the care to women

Fathers should stick to just playing with their children as their efforts to look after them just end in arguments with their wives, a study claims.

I defer to my own wisdom on this…

It’s very simple; up until 1960, the world was run by white men in black socks. Since 1970, it’s run by women who like to complain about things. So of course we need to get ready for next year’s study that says men aren’t helping out enough…

As you read through about the study, one thing jumps out. Yep, you guessed it…one researcher, who seems to be functioning in a dictatorial capacity in reporting the findings and likely in conducting the study itself, a female with a hyphenated name. No reassurance whatsoever that the conclusions of the study were based in any way on the data the study found…just a belief arranged by legacy protocol, nothing more than that.

In fact, toward the end of the article, a confession of sorts:

The results fit into her other work, which has found that mothers can act as “gatekeepers” to their children, either fostering or restricting how much fathers are involved in caring.

I sense that lately the eggheads are getting more brazen about this thing…this, pop in with an agenda, figure out what you want the study to say, go through the motions of a “study,” come to the conclusion you wanted to come to from the very beginning, work the agenda forward. They seem to be putting less effort into hiding it. In years past, a passage like “The findings in the study remained the same even when the researchers compared dual and single-income families, and when they took into account a wide variety of other demographic factors…” would have been implicitly interpreted as: The findings in the study would remain the same even if other research teams were measuring them.

Nowadays, maybe I’m imagining this, but there seems to be an unwritten undertone permeating throughout that says: “The findings in the study remained the same and they always will remain the same, because we’re the ones doing it.” As in…who cares if we’re measuring it in an objective, reproducible way or not? It’s a study, we’ve got it, and we’ve got our diplomas too. Like it or not, you’ll be living your life the way we want you to inside of five years, ten tops.

In this case, with mothers as the active parent, and fathers as the passive one. Like cattle, in other words. Nice.

How come it is that academics and the left…but I repeat myself…seem so everlastingly intent on bullying people to live like some kind of animal species that is not people?

…say the seven out of ten.

Seven in 10 Americans would like to see Republican leaders in Congress consider the tea party movement’s ideas as they confront the country’s challenges, a new poll has found.

In a Gallup/USA Today polling released Monday, 71 percent of those surveyed said they want to see GOP leaders look to tea party positions when developing policy. Forty-two percent said that listening to tea party ideas was “very important,” while another 29 percent said it was “somewhat important.”

Support for congressional GOPers to adopt tea party positions was strongest among Republicans, with 88 percent saying it was important for party leadership to take tea party ideas into account. Fifty-three percent said it was very important and 35 percent said it was somewhat important.

The remaining three in ten thought it was tragic when Keith Olbermann’s show ended, and also agreed that President Bush caused 9/11. Probably eat their own dung, too.

No, I’m making all that stuff up…because I kind of have to. I don’t know who those people are, I don’t know where I’d be able to find them if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. You can see from reading further in the article this has nothing to do with whether the respondent personally approves of the GOP, or of the TP. The question is — should the former listen to the latter.

Maybe, I suppose…if they’re decent people…but have been living under a rock. An enormous rock. Short of that, and wanting the Republicans to remain a minority party forever, why would you say no? What would be the rationale? The letter “R” is just groovier than the letter “D” or something? I don’t get it.

…anytime they find out my DVR is taping Sarah Palin’s show.