The one hundred and eighth award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to commenter “edwoof”, who says underneath “The Dangerous Lure of the Research-University Model” by Kevin Carey, via Professor Mondo:

We have gone from the university-as-knowledge-provider model to the university as a seller of an educational experience and we are fast approaching a place where the university becomes a purveyor of an educational fantasy.

It’s always a treacherous business to try to find an explanation for things you can’t see changing first-hand, even if you’re spending years & decades feeling the shock waves of them. But the question compels, and so flailing around looking for an explanation, I’m having a flashback to November of last year, when Blogsister Cassy managed to lay her mitts on this:

This nourishes a theory germinating in my head, a theory as sturdy and functional as any other. I’m a “follow the money” kinda guy; the money that comes to continuing/higher education, as I understand it, is tuition that is provided mostly by parents. If a transformation is taking place with chubby sixth graders, it’s silly to think the same transformation would not be taking place with freshmen and sophomores…and this would ultimately have the effect described, right? “So how are things going in college, sport? Are you having a good time there?” I can’t prove it since what takes place over a Thanksgiving table while “sport” is home on break, is none of my business.

But my intuition tells me there is a diminishing supply of the classic home-for-the-holidays conversation…”now that you’re a big college man, you think you can solve this page of problems they gave me back in the day, sport?” The pattern fits right in with what I see in other places. More concern about experiences, emotions that result from the experiences, how does it make you feel. Less emphasis on individual capability, conceptual understanding, good old-fashioned know-how.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

“What are these people paid to do?” I love it. This is exactly the question I was asking myself. I know it’s silly to expect that people can foretell the future in the State Department, regardless of which regime is in there…I get that. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people’s predictions be somewhat attached to reality. Don’t be hauling your oh-so-impressive credentials in there and pontificating about what will & won’t happen and then…Omigaw! They did? He did? It didn’t? Zowee, didn’t see that coming! I was too busy blowing smoke…

More of my wisdom from the comment thread underneath:

I notice every single positive assessment of Obama’s handling of some situation is non-falsifiable the same way the Egypt thing is, “Gee, that turned out relatively well when all’s said & done, didn’t it?” There is ALWAYS a worse scenario. So there’s no connection existing, or mentioned, or established, between shrewd Obama planning/acting and these beneficent results…just…well, it could’ve been much worse, and it turned out okay under His watch…

Drives me crazy. There’s no standard for performance there! None! “Birther Zero” could go golfing morning noon & night throughout the entire thing, and when it’s done, no matter the outcome you could plausibly argue it could’ve gone worse.

So glad this ditzy co-anchor got Niall-nailed to the wall here. She deserved it.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a post about “propeller beanie eggheads discover the sexes are different” — so let’s get in some trouble again. Science Daily:

A study by the University of the Basque Country has carried out the first Spanish study into the emotional differences between the sexes and generations in terms of forgiveness. According to the study, parents forgive more than children, while women are better at forgiving than men.

“This study has great application for teaching values, because it shows us what reasons people have for forgiving men and women, and the popular conception of forgiveness,” says Maite Garaigordobil, co-author of the study and a senior professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV.

This study, which has been published in the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología, is the first to have been carried out in Spain. It shows that parents find it easier to forgive than their children, and that women are better at forgiving than men.

“A decisive factor in the capacity to forgive is empathy, and women have a greater empathetic capacity than males,” says Carmen Maganto, co-author of the study and a tenured professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV.

And I’m sure any man who’s been with a woman for any length of time, is having the same thought about this that I’m having: Forgiving is not the same as forgetting.

I find in general, whenever someone is stymied by the way the two sexes behave differently or respond to shared experiences in different ways, it comes down to this: Men, over a prolonged period of time, become disenchanted and bored with a certain outcome whereas women do not. Think about the strange, inexplicable things a woman does, things she herself cannot explain, when she chooses one suitor over another. It’s all about the certain outcome. Even when she chooses the bad boy who bloodies her nose and blackens her eyes, over the nice nerd-boy who brings her flowers — what she is engaging in is a taming. She’s like the cowboy breaking the unbreakable mare. She doesn’t lust after her next bloody lip, she’s lusting after the ruffian’s power. She wants it harnessed, to be put under her control.

This creates an alluring potential that the nerd-boy cannot match. It’s really all about power. Things that have to do with sex, for the most part, have to do with power.

Forgiveness can be very powerful. Forgiveness, compared to the alternative, carries a great potential in the endeavor to arrive at a certain outcome.

Men are bored to tears with things on the teevee that women will watch and watch and watch, and then rewind, and watch some more. Part of the appeal — and this is where we men become profoundly confused — is in a ritual of pretending something is going to happen that we know darn good and well is not going to happen. Booth and Bones might sleep together, or Scully and Mulder might sleep together, or we’ll finally learn what the shadowy government agencies are up to, or we’ll snap up some meaningful clue as far as how the Heroes are going to save the world. Watching these shows means pretending these things might happen. And the chicks just love ’em even though it’s a certainty that these things will not be happening.

Remember when the Star Wars prequels came out? Massive disappointment…which was explained, easily, by the fact that Jar Jar Binks was ridiculous, the dialogue was bad and the storylines illogical and incomprehensible. But lost in all the other complaints was a subtle, masculine complaint against the very concept of the “prequel.” Obi-Wan fights Darth Maul, and we’re supposed to wonder who’s going to win…but when we look at the situation logically, we don’t really need to wonder and that sucks away a lot of the suspense. My point is, men experience an agitation here that is not experienced by the women. We feel like, on some level, we’re wasting our time.

There was a popular joke going around about Titanic, too — “didn’t see it, I already know how it ends.” Of course that’s silly, that movie was about so much more than the ship sinking…but that does sum it up. When the outcome is a certainty, women are capable of enjoying the journey to it. Men are too, but to a far, far lesser extent. And when the outcome is less certain, it is the women who start to feel things are out-of-kilter and out-of-sorts, in a way the men cannot fully appreciate. How does a man relax? Surf the Internet…watch a game…play poker with friends…things with uncertain outcomes. And the women? Converse among themselves — with expectations about the behavior of the other, where the conversation is going to go. Read things, and watch things, which have it in common that they progress toward a singularity. A man might see how such works of fiction conclude and mutter something like “I’m so shocked she went back to him!” with an earnest eyeball-roll. See, it carries an attraction for her, whereas for him it’s sheer boredom.

Women appreciate sweet, nice guys when they can drive a certain outcome. And they appreciate powerful, bad guys when they drive a certain outcome.

Demi Moore had a line in A Few Good Men that I think just cuts to the heart of all this: Asked “why do you like them [the U.S. Marines]” she replies, “Because they stand upon a wall and say, ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch.'” There you have it. It isn’t quite so much weakness or a need to be protected all the time. It’s the attraction felt to the concept of a guarantee.

So yes. Women are more forgiving than men. They feel a different set of incentives during a conflict.

As is usually the case with these articles about white-coat-wearing clip-board-carrying propeller-beanie-eggheads with their phony studies, and it is with great fascination I note this…my summary and explanation of the findings, is values-neutral, whereas theirs is not. In what could only be reasonably regarded as something that is polar opposite from what science is supposed to be, the researchers once again seem to have figured out at Stage One which side is supposed to be “good” and which side is supposed to be “bad,” and every little nugget they have gleaned out of this exercise is carefully fit into that simple narrative.

Ed Driscoll (hat tip to Mark) notes that he saw this before in Blazing Saddles: “Just obey our hostage demands, and we’ll let ourselves go.”

I cannot help but notice, the place in which these liberal democrats have ensconced themselves to get away from everybody else, looks an awful lot like a place in which I’d ensconce myself to get away from them: Hot meat, cold beer, and lots of great-looking “objectified” women.

What in the world is up with that? I thought left-wingers in good standing held some measure of contempt for such things. Bitterly clung to it, as it were.

Are they growing up now? Could it be a case of “this is the last place they’d ever look for us”? Or do they just want to hoard all the good stuff for themselves?

New York Times:

As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.

They are part of a small faction on the right: conservatives with no use for religion. Since 2008, they have been contributors to the blog Secular Right, where they argue that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them.

And they serve as public proof that an irreligious conservative can exist.

“A lot of religious conservatives say, ‘You can’t be conservative because you don’t believe in God,’ ” said Mr. Khan, 34, who was raised in New York and Oregon but whose grandfather was an imam in Bangladesh. “They say I am logically impossible, and I say, ‘Well I am possible because I am.’

“They assert your nonexistence, and you have to assert your existence.”

Neither Mr. Khan nor Ms. Mac Donald gainsays the historical connection between conservatism and religiosity. Influential conservatives, like the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, have been sympathetic toward religion in part because it endures.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, noted that conservatives throughout history have esteemed “mediating institutions” like schools and churches, sources of authority other than the state. “If that’s the way you’re thinking, concern for the strength of organized religion follows pretty naturally,” Mr. Ponnuru said.

Aw darn, I got a reminder tonight from reading blogger friend Phil’s page. I just about missed it.

From two years ago…

…and the Tea Party was born.

Where do we go from here? It’s an uncomfortable question. This country does have a history of trying to find mid-point compromises where they do not exist and cannot exist; and then trying and trying throughout decade after decade until the whole thing erupts into a bloody civil war. Okay, it’s only gone that far once. But the fact remains that the search for a halfway compromise is a fool’s errand. You achieve a claim over money by earning it, or by lusting after it after someone else has earned it. One or the other of those two things, not both.

I don’t know if a secession or split is coming, or if it will actually lead to a violent conflagration. But I do know this stink is going to keep hovering over our heads until the day we make a unified, conscious, unapologetic decision to embrace socialism wholeheartedly, or reject it just as emphatically.

The fable of the evil sticky black stuff makes it perfectly clear: It doesn’t really matter what we decide to do, quite so much as how we go about deciding to do it. Free will or coercion? Reasoned debate involving an exchange of rational ideas, or one side telling the other “You have to do it our way because we have the magical elixir”?

John Fund takes a look at what’s really happening in Wisconsin:

This week President Obama was roundly criticized, even by many of his allies, for submitting a federal budget that actually increases our already crushing deficit. But that didn’t stop him Thursday from jumping into Wisconsin’s titanic budget battle. He accused the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, of launching an “assault” on unions with his emergency legislation aimed at cutting the state budget.

The real assault this week was led by Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.

Mr. Walker’s proposals are hardly revolutionary. Facing a $137 million budget deficit, he has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. That’s roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules—something that 24 states already limit or ban.

The governor’s move is in reaction to a 2009 law implemented by the then-Democratic legislature that expanded public unions’ collective-bargaining rights and lifted existing limits on teacher raises.

Democratic reactions to these proposals have been over the top. In addition to the thousands of protesters who descended on the Capitol building on Thursday to intimidate legislators, so many teachers called in sick on Friday that school districts in Milwaukee, Madison and Janesville had to close.
:
Why are national liberal groups treating Wisconsin as if it were their last stand? Partly for reasons of symbolism. Historically, Wisconsin “embraced the organized labor movement more heartily than any other [state],” notes liberal activist Abe Sauer.
:
Labor historian Fred Siegel offers further reasons why unions are manning the barricades. Mr. Walker would require that public-employee unions be recertified annually by a majority vote of all their members, not merely by a majority of those that choose to cast ballots. In addition, he would end the government’s practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For Wisconsin teachers, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year.

“Ending dues deductions breaks the political cycle in which government collects dues, gives them to the unions, who then use the dues to back their favorite candidates and also lobby for bigger government and more pay and benefits,” Mr. Siegel told me. After New York City’s Transport Workers Union lost the right to automatic dues collection in 2007 following an illegal strike, its income fell by more than 35% as many members stopped ponying up. New York City ended the dues collection ban after 18 months.
:
Mr. Walker’s argument—that public workers shouldn’t be living high off the hog at the expense of taxpayers—is being made in other states facing budget crises. But the left observed the impact of the tea party last year and seems determined to unleash a more aggressive version of its own by teaming up with union allies. Organizing for America is already coordinating protests against proposed reforms in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri.

Anytime a labor union is involved in a struggle it seems you can always count on two things: One, once you’ve found out what’s really going on it turns out the union is just as motivated by profit as any business; and two, it isn’t acting to promote the interests of people who produce goods and services other people can actually use.

Gerard found a comment from Richard Fernandez that, unfortunately, captures the situation reasonably well.

This is all elementary game theory; and tried, true and hoary deterrence theory. Be strong and you won’t need to use nukes. Be weak and you’ll use them for sure.

The problem of radical Islam is the problem of Western weakness. That is the problem to which the policy nuking Muslims is an impertinent answer. Who’s going to do it? Obama? And yet if Obama lost the next election in favor of someone who might actually resist, then the probability of having to pre-empt declines dramatically.

The logical problem is that any strategy which requires pre-emptively nuking the Islamic world implies a President who is too weak to do it anyway. But that doesn’t mean it might not happen. As I’ve argued ad nauseam, the biggest danger to nuclear use, in both the Israeli and general Western case, is via the act in desperation.

As long as Israel’s strategic position is strong, it will not unleash the nukes. But only in its dying gasp will that be certain. So what do the geniuses at State do? Bring Israel to the point of strategic death.

Matt Welch, writing in Reason:

Just think–there once was a time (for more than a century, actually), when the president of the United States thought it too imperious to deliver the State of the Union via a speech to a joint session of Congress, since that would smack of telling a co-equal branch of government what to do. Now we have a president not just taking rhetorical sides in a state issue, but actively mobilizing his political organization to affect the outcome(s), even though (to my knowledge) nothing that Gov. Walker or any other belated statehouse cost-cutter is doing has a damned thing to do with federal law.
:
The president’s heavy-handed involvement, along with House Republicans’ refusal to sign off on any new bailout of the states, means that this may very well be America’s biggest and most widespread political fight in 2011. It’s a cage match to determine first dibs on a shrinking pie. A clarifying moment.

This has really become a piece of “everyone’s blogging it by now, I might as well do it too,” but a hat tip is in order to Professor Mondo.

The danger involved in cage matches deterministic of diminishing rewards, of course, is the same prospect you have when you sew two felines into a burlap bag with each other and throw it in the river. In both scenarios, whoever is longing for a more “civil tone” is apt to be disappointed. Among others, Stanley Kurtz can see this is going to become much worse before it gets any better:

We are destined for still more polarization. Neither side can pull back, because the financial crunch is going to have to be resolved one way or another. We either scale back government and the power of public employee unions, or we move toward a structurally higher tax burden and a permanently enlarged welfare state. The very nature of the American system is now at stake. The emerging populist movements on both the right and left recognize this, and so cannot turn back from further confrontation.

But, as we all know by now, being a lefty means you get to invent your own reality:

It is a stunning propaganda victory when you think about it. A political movement…where its foundation is buried into the ground, full of incendiary rage and nothing else. Do it our way, or else! Nobody fucks with the union! BusHitler!

And that same movement…way up above, where its bastions and parapets pierce the clouds, we see its leaders engaging in the classic kindergarten teacher finger-waggling against its opponents. Now now…simmer down, behave. What we really need is less fighting, more peace, and for that to happen what you all need to do is obey me, me, me!

Of course, the finger-waggling isn’t really aimed at the opponents. It isn’t really intended to lecture anybody. It’s show-boating, playing to an audience of moderates.

Could they fall for it? On this question, all depends. And the likely answer, I’m afraid…and I’m reminded of this, after viewing this clip blogger friend Buck forwarded in an offline, after receiving it from Rob…is in the affirmative.

Moderate: A person who appreciates right-wing values but consistently falls for left-wing manipulation tactics.

And this is what the cage match is really all about. The Left will continue to make their pitch to people who, otherwise, would never accept their policies in a million years — but can be duped into thinking the tone will become more civil, if and only if we head left. “Duped” is the operative word. It’s a fool’s errand, because when it’s a cage match and the pie is shrinking, a civil tone is nowhere to be found in the near future, nor is any amicable mid-point compromise. You can’t find a middle ground between these two positions.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

The running joke is, we’re going to wait until twenty years after my divorce. That way, if things don’t work out, I can at least say I wasn’t an easy mark.

No, seriously it takes a very special woman to thaw out a heart frozen that solid. But this one went and did it, so we’re planning for something around Christmas. It’s all driven by when the boy can be here, and that’s the long pole in the tent as they say. He goes to school while living under the roof of his mother, some 400 miles from here. So we’ll do the dirty deed on his break. If Nevada turns out to be frozen up so badly that boy-extraction is impossible, then it could be put off ’til the spring…but that’s not likely to happen. Christmas it is.

That’ll carry us across that fateful anniversary, coming up November 3rd.

Quoting commenter Jason,

Hey Morgan, can we get a thread somewhere’s where we can offer congratulations and make empty promises of rounds of beer?

Knock yerselves out, fellas.

You pick up on what I noticed? Although the three charts (click on each for source) are compiled to make different points…they all end up saying exactly the same thing. We are headed into uncharted territory as far as the sheer magnitude of the money we’re spending that we don’t have. Over the longer term, this impacts things. Government is a debtor, just like any other; the market of loaned money is a market just like any other; its commodity can become scarce, and thus more expensive, just like any other. It’s called the interest rate, and when it ticks upward just a little bit, pain ensues.

Wild times ahead. Have a great day.

Betcha can’t watch it with a straight face all the way through.

The subtitle is “the snake that threatens to choke the economy.” The post wound down with this chestnut, which was somewhat new to me:

Wasn’t income inequality one of the key causes of the Great Depression?

So I took the time to research this casually, which I’ll freely admit means next to nothing…I submitted a Google search and skimmed through what came up. Everything was conjecture, in the sense that everything about economic cause-and-effect is conjecture. But this was particularly flimsy. No evidence that anyone, anywhere, did some actual digging except for the hardcore progressive cases with an agenda to push, like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney for example. And Ezra Klein seems to think there’s something to this, if his name is still credible with you.

So I got sucked in again. I wanted to see just how hard this evidence would get. The answer is not very. And, predictably, although it was the other fellow who posited something, it soon became my job to prove everything. That’s one of the fundamental definitions of how Darrellogic works.

One of the points I made was that a low Gini coefficient does not seem to be helpful to a nation’s economy, in fact, it seems the more productive nations overall have a higher Gini. These international plot-jobs on income distribution within the nations seem to more or less agree with each other, and the “equal” countries overall contribute less to world commerce than the “unequal” ones. Now this is all very casual, not scientific in any way, we’re not looking up national exports divided by population & cross referencing or anything like that…more a test of, “can I think of anything Canada produces that I want or need to buy, or that is used to assemble/produce/grow something I want or need to buy?” I also linked Professor Laffer’s editorial, or at least my own post that linked it anyway…

Frankly, I think this was all way above-and-beyond the call. If the other side is speculating about something it’s up to the other side to prove it. Ed Darrell has a track record of “winning” these things, in his own mind, the way most liberals “win” which is by making the other side prove everything while he doesn’t even bother to substantiate. That’s why I’ve added “Darrellogic” to the dictionary. In Darrellogic, there are different thresholds of proof required to prove different things; whatever tenet fails to produce the proof commensurate with its threshold, is ipso facto falsified; and these different thresholds are decided, from the best I can tell, by nothing more complicated than whether Ed Darrell happens to like them.

But we’re still having our nice little chat here. Until, because of some gremlin residing on his server or WordPress installation, my comment is no longer being accepted. Hmmm…maybe there’s an income inequality snake choking off the comments on Ed’s blog.

So my witty rejoinder will have to go here instead.

To prove the Laffer Curve, you would have to create two universes going through two time lines, with all other economic factors meticulously replicated between the two time lines. This is why the discipline of economics exists in the first place; we can’t do that kind of experimentation. The same applies to your position “I could concede to you the validity of the Laffer curve, but point out that we’re far on the left side, where increasing tax rates increases government income in greater proportion…” What can you offer to prove this might I ask? Can’t I say that’s refuted the first time we use simple multiplication to predict how much additional revenue a tax increase will create — and then it falls short?

No of course I can’t. In the same sense you can’t really produce economic data to “prove” or refute anything. In the field of economics, every single experiment in the real world is conducted in a test environment that is as polluted and dirty as it can possibly be. We don’t know Reagan’s tax cuts helped the budget picture because spending went up, we don’t know Clinton stimulated the economy because those dot-com technologies were taking off, we don’t know the real impact of the Bush tax cuts because of 9/11. There’s always a contagion somewhere, and since the test bed doesn’t have a perimeter, the primary contagion is usually an enormous one.

But in fact, on a macro level the Laffer Curve is easily provable and you don’t need to jot down a single paragraph or produce a single table, you can rely entirely on the nature of human incentive. If tax rates are zero, you have zero revenue — that’s simple math; if tax rates are 1, so that the minute you make any money you’re obliged to hand it in, the government’s revenue would be negligible at best. Somewhere in between, there is revenue at a level greater than what you find on the extreme ends (every time a tax is levied and revenue comes in, there’s your proof for the last of these three). Now, if those three offerings are accepted then the curve is “proven.” So which one of the three are you going to debate? If you think it isn’t your job to say which, but insist the debate still must rage onward, then it’s time for the universe-splitting experiment. So, yes, it is laughable and that’s probably why you didn’t see the paper. Laffer was probably laughing right back at you, and he’d have been right to.

But you still haven’t explained why the Gini coefficient is irrelevant to a discussion about “income inequality: the snake that threatens to choke the economy.” What exactly is the meaningful difference between the discussion you are seeking to have here, and what the Gini is intended to measure?

To me, this stuff doesn’t even get into the conservative/liberal aspect of it; it’s much simpler than that. If there’s a requirement that your feet can never be more than a few inches apart from each other, you can’t walk. This progressive vision of super-duper-sameness ultimately has to rely on: We’re going to pass some new tax policies that ream you right up the butt when you produce, and you’re just going to keep on producing.

I personally know this is not true. In my early twenties, my distaste for the process of exchanging technical information with people became so palpable and so intense that I made a conscious decision to type for a living just so people would leave me alone. I made minimum wage and I was content to make minimum wage. That didn’t last long; financial obligations crept up, and eventually I decided the proper outlook would be to save first and anticipate whatever might go wrong later. I grew up.

That’s what work is. We put up with things that might occasionally be a pain in the ass, to make money. If at the end of it all we don’t get to keep the money, we don’t do it. Ask a waitress next time you go to a diner.

But of course “tax the rich” is not about taxing waitresses. It’s about people who make a real do-I-really-want-to-do-this decision every single time they go to work at their “jobs”…who, if they decide to go ahead, typically spend money as a first step. So their question is a little bit different: Do I want to lay out this cash. And, unlike the waitress, they can say no and not suffer too much as a result. Not suffer at all, really.

People are not automatons. They are sentient, rational, intelligent beings who observe ramifications, anticipate rewards & consequences, and make decisions about what to do that are predicated on these things. Their behavior changes with costs & benefits.

It’s just a dumb policy. That’s why those who defend it keep insisting the other side is the one that has to prove everything…so that, before it’s done, you’re on the hot seat “proving” things so self-evidently true as things like, People Like Money. And you’ll probably fail to achieve the threshold even “proving” that much. The tax-the-rich folks can’t make their plan look good by discussing it under any other protocol.

Dr. Murray sums up the Old Testament, and the New one, in just a dozen words.

Rambling recollections from Yours Truly, in an e-mail to my father just a few minutes ago, aided by some doses out of Valle de Tulum, Bodegas Callia, 2010.

Back in ’83, you’ll recall, as [brother] was closing in on the final days before his first marriage, it was all-drama-all-the-time, and he was chasing off in an endless pursuit of wise advice that he wasn’t really ready to absorb. For reasons I cannot recall, I was “in tow” at one of these unproductive match-ups, in front of Dr. Murray; [brother] asked him if he had any advice. [Sister-in-law] looked down at the ground, and beamed, which was customary for her. Dr. Murray rambled onward about some obscure point, and [brother] felt the necessity of finishing his sentence for him “it’ll all work out?”

Keith radiated across the room a smile that would have embarrassed a crocodile…and just maybe might have swallowed one. “I think you’ll find that ‘it’ has a habit of doing just that!”

You know, it’s awfully strange. In those three decades, with people getting brain tumors and dying, with divorces, accidental pregnancies, cars blowing out their head gaskets, kids being “diagnosed” with Autism, or ADD, or bipolar, I see this wisdom from Keith Murray is the one little snippet that has come out right. I mean, against reality…if you take the time and trouble to absorb it over the longer term.

Dr. Keith Murray was one of my mother’s instructors from her college days. But he was a great deal more than that. You don’t get to be an adviser to my mother’s sons, on the eve before his marriage, just because you’re one of her old professors. No, Dr. Murray was a respected family friend, not for his intellect, or for his values, but because of an irreplaceable amalgamation of those two things.

Optimism is cheap. Reality…not quite so cheap, it can have its redeeming value, I suppose. Optimism that naturally gels with reality — that’s priceless, and I’m not talking about something that fits into a MasterCard commercial.

What I’m talking about is: We make our wonderful plans, the rigid plans, the brittle plans, the plans that get all the angels laughing. All of our weaknesses factor into these plans, and none of our strengths do…

…but, by the time the toast falls all the way down to the carpet, it is still butter-side-up. And why? How? Because of our wisdom? Oh…don’t get those angels laughing yet one more time, please. Even Heaven’s Host can get a case of acute hernia…

No, it distills down into a simple mathematical equation. You have the outcome. Contrasted with that, you have the challenge that we meet, added to the resourcefulness we show when we meet it — multiplied by the wisdom we have with regard to with is truly going on…

Once you factor all that in, you have no choice but to go insane, or to logically conclude there is a superior force watching over us.

Dr. Murray nailed it. To the wall, in a way Jedi Master Yoda never did. “I think you’ll find ‘it’ has a way of doing exactly that.” [Working itself out]

My mother chose her mentors exceptionally well. It looked like a pure accident, to me; that’s because she left when I was twenty-six.

Twenty-six feels like adulthood, when you’re there. This year, if I make it that far, I’ll be forty-five. I see wisdom where I did not see it before. Things do not look the same.

This means, in a cruel twist of fate, that as one Winter Solstice rolls on by after another…it becomes acutely perceptible that my mother might as well have passed on to the next world while I was 3 or 4. And her memory continues to fade, and fade, and fade some more… but, every now and then I become aware of those who became her heroes. Her mentors. And I am reminded that this is a woman who showed great wisdom, well beyond her years, about who was deserving of her respect. Keith Murray absolutely, without a doubt, goes into the “win” column. And this pithy phrase of his, in my mind if if in no other, is one of his keystones.

It survives him, makes him immortal — because it is, when all’s said & done, what life is really all about. We were put here. Therefore, we must have been put here by someone who knows better…and for a reason.

For all of our everyday worries, and they certainly can be overwhelming at times I know…we really don’t need to worry about anything outside of that, do we?

It will all work out. ‘It’ has a habit of doing that…and you will find that out.

FrankJ takes the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award…

So conservatives are stuck in the past, but the big progressive solution to the economy right now is to build trains?

Nothing to add here.

Superbooyah presents a gallery of stills like this one:

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.”