They are the two lowest points of my K-through-12 educational career. They failed me, but not before I failed them. She was my home-room teacher in sixth grade, and he was my “guidance counselor” or some such, in high school. With noticeably mixed feelings, Dad e-mailed me his obituary. Dad doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead any more than I do.

Truthfully, I don’t know why we have career counselors in high schools. The kids who can really make something of themselves, all have the same thoughts about it: Oh alright, I’m to take career advice from some guy who’s a career counselor in a high school. Eyeball-roll. This one thought I should scrub toilets on an Air Force base somewhere. Oh, okay…thankfully, nobody took that any more seriously than I did. All these years later I have to wonder: What purpose was served by this? I still don’t know.

As for her, I remember her mocking condescension like it was this morning: “Morgan, I’m going to pair you up with Michelle, who I hope has more common sense than you do!” The “hope” syllable could’ve shattered a wine goblet, if it were within earshot. Sixth graders shouldn’t say things like “Lady, you’re a fucking bitch,” but I certainly thought it. And, once a sixth-grader thinks such a thing, thirty-five years later one should expect them to recall such thoughts with some regret. But I have none. I know, it was the seventies and all…very trendy to see lots of potential in the lasses and none at all in the lads…but can you say “out of line”? I don’t recall what I did to disappoint Mrs. R so much. But I knew at age eleven this was uncalled-for, and I still know it.

There is an ugly truth here, one not too often acknowledged. I’ve had other teachers who saw much more potential in me. I should write about them, as well. They certainly deserve it. But, for now, it is an observation worth making:

These two, who were so convinced I’d be good for nothing better than cleaning commodes, inspired me as much as, perhaps more than, their opposites. My twenty-five thousand square foot mansion with its seven buildings and its Batmobile-turntable with the Bugatti Veyron spinning around on it…these things have yet to materialize. But I’m not scrubbing the toilets either. Reality is as distant from one of these visions as it is from the other; so who is to say I am not to attain the other? Vroom vroom.

And I think that’s the take-away. We humans have this tendency to sketch lines in the dirt, for each other; to make these paths, and expect the others not to stray outside of them. But real life is more of a vast expanse of ocean, than a narrow pathway. We should not be hesitating to stray outside of such boundaries, indeed, we should celebrate when we do so. Even if we blunder our way through them by pure accident.

My son came to visit on Spring Break. I’ve been receiving his school reports, and they reminded me of my dysfunctional relationship with Mrs. R. So, in that one week, we had a few conversations about getting into the matronly-females’ “R-Loop.” That means, the loop in which some overly-opinionated female, overly-enamored of her own perceived authority profile, speaks to a younger male round of head and blonde of hair, who might be a trifle difficult to understand — for no purpose but to command him out of the way. Day by day, month by month, she has nothing else to say to him: Stand over here, stay out of the way, let Michelle take care of it. That’s the R-loop. Some marriages are like that. Poor, dumb, pitiful bastards.

Turns out, our conversations about the “R”-loop resonated. I didn’t know it at the time, but after he went back home I was awash in e-mails from his Mother, and his teachers, that things were going much, much better. They didn’t understand it, but he was staying out of their R-loops. They didn’t understand…but I did…and he did. My boy, age fourteen, learned things I had not yet learned at age twenty-five. And he made good use of it. If you want to be capable, you need to communicate to people that this is your vision. They won’t figure it out on their own. And if they don’t figure it out at all, you need to keep that separate from your own vision for yourself. Keep your life on that wide-open sea, and off that narrow road fenced in and paved by others, who don’t understand you and don’t claim to understand you. Stick to your own potential, at its zenith.

No, I don’t have the Bugatti Veyron yet. I may never have it.

But I’m not scrubbing toilets either.

That’s my potential: I’m not likely to end up scrubbing the toilets, I might as well try for the Veyron.

That is the potential we all have.

Just disgusting.

[Gov. Jerry] Brown did not release details of the newly calculated deficit Saturday, but he is expected to lay out a revised spending plan Monday. The new plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 hinges in large part on voters approving higher taxes.

The governor has said those tax increases are needed to help pull the state out of a crippling decade shaped by the collapse of the housing market and recession. Without them, he warned, public schools and colleges, and public safety, will suffer deeper cuts.
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Under Brown’s tax plan, California would temporarily raise the state’s sales tax by a quarter-cent and increase the income tax on people who make $250,000 or more. Brown is projecting his tax initiative would raise as much as $9 billion, but a review by the nonpartisan analyst’s office estimates revenue of $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2012-13.

This is part of a pattern that doesn’t change much from one story to the next…and it isn’t entirely a California story. Notice at the end of what’s excerpted above, there is this dispute about how much additional revenue can be expected from the tax increase. I don’t know what methodologies were used — I can hazard a guess — but it doesn’t matter, nobody’s got any business projecting or estimating anything. It all ends up being an exercise in predicting who’s going to hang around, bend over and take it up the chute.

That isn’t a predictable thing. Our track record of trying to do so, is pretty lousy.

I don’t like mixing work with the blog, but I cannot stop thinking about the alpha channel where these liberals are involved. Lately. It’s like they’re missing it. See, what we use it for in computer graphics, is transparency. It represents a fractional number between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being opaqueness and 0.0 being complete transparency, as in, it’s invisible and you can’t see it. You might have noticed the Windows operating systems, post-XP, make a lot of use out of this with window frames and menus and icons and such; things, lately, have transparency. They have cool frosted effects, and if you look closely you’ll see they’ve got this Cheshire Cat fade-out-of-existence thing going on as you trace from the center of an icon out to the edges. Okay, that’s the alpha channel. Each pixel possesses this property of “how much of me is really here.”

If an application converts an image that contains some of this transparency, to a format that doesn’t support it, it’s pretty evident what the desired behavior should be: You prompt the user first, then you save what can be saved. When you go back the other way, of course, the new alpha for each pixel will have to be 1.0; it can’t be anything else. This is a perfect illustration of the way the liberal mind works.

Conservatives, by and large, seem to have the ability to preserve this “how much is really here” attribute with the ideas they carry around in their heads.

And liberals, by & large, don’t. They know exactly what the idea is, just as a color format that supports only red, green and blue knows exactly what each pixel’s red, green and blue are. But with transparency unsupported, every pixel has an alpha of 1.0. Every. Single. One.

As I remarked yesterday at Teach’s blog where he was reporting on the environmentally-friendly candy bar that costs twenty bucks…one of the activists behind it, began to discuss the wind-powered transportation methods which are apparently responsible for this consumer snack costing so much at the point-of-sale. Well, what came out was creepy, creepy, creepy…

The next step is to build a much larger sail-powered cargo ship, a 3,000 tonne EcoLiner equipped for container traffic and fully competitive with the oil guzzling competitors…We want to re-establish sailing ships as a natural alternative to an anti-ecological culture. We want to see a revival of the great age of sail, as a means of Fair transport for cargo around the Atlantic…

“We want to see.” The word “hope” would have carried a tacit acknowledgement that it might not happen, so the word “want” has to be used instead, since everything is absolutely certain, especially where Mother Earth’s future health picture is involved. We saw this in the legendary monster thread, as Severian was very capably summing up in a comment he committed a few minutes ago:

…I find that the most surefire “tell” that you’re dealing with a liberal (apart from the sanctimony, of course) is that they will not admit even the possibility of limits on human knowledge…
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In fact, I’m trying to recall the last time I’ve heard a liberal say “I don’t know” about any matter of consequence. Ask ‘em where the nearest post office is or the price of rice in China, and they’ll happily admit ignorance. But ask them what we should do about genocide in Darfur, or the regulation of the entire world economy, or the navy’s defensive doctrine on the Pacific rim, and all of a sudden they’ve got all the answers….

This is, from my observations, why the monster-thread became a monster-thread. For three weeks or so, as time permitted, some four or five of us took issue with the statements of the hybrid-group-warmist construct known as “Zachriel” — on the alpha channel. That is to say, with a few debatable exceptions, none of us really challenged any of the “primary colors” of the ideas…the red, the green, the blue. The point that came up again and again, was no, you don’t really know that. Through over four hundred comments, the plurality of persons represented under this account never once engaged this challenge directly. Never even demonstrated an understanding of the distinction. He/she/it/they just continued to re-recite the red, the green, the blue…repeating the idea…failing, or perhaps refusing, to even consider the “just how sure are we about this” aspect of it. The limits to human knowledge. The transparency factor.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying “we don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” That is, interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the kind of spirit that is required to make things work. You can’t do it until you develop a practical understanding of how other things work; you can’t do that until you develop some curiosity about it; and you can’t develop any curiosity about it if you think you already know everything.

Liberalism, today, is a 24-bit image format missing its alpha channel. It insists — correctly — that is has computed everything the right way, restoring RGB from a YUV representation, re-computing saturation of each primary color from the shading and tinting effects, used a lossy compression/decompression scheme verified to produce the desired result, used a peer-reviewed encryption algorithm, run a checksum to prove the restored results are good, et cetera, et cetera. But knows nothing about what it doesn’t know, because at the very first step, the alpha channel was stripped out and there’s no transparency, read that as residual uncertainty, information about anything. This is most noticeable when they talk about the environment, and what is about to happen to us. They talk about “science” but all too often have absolutely nothing to say about probability. Every little thing that might happen, is gonna happen.

Of course, if and when it doesn’t happen, in another day or two that will all be forgotten and it will be time for yet another round of predictions…visions…want-to-see-happens…24-bit pixels missing their transparency channels, “known” as absolute certainties.

Well, I know how to get a Tea Party guy to talk exactly the same way: When you stop talking about climate change, and move the discussion to the public debt growing out of control. But since I don’t see anybody else lining up to give the U.S. Treasury any unexpected Christmas presents like the five dollar bill Grandma used to send you…ya know what? That side of it seems fair, to me. Economics, on some level, works that way. Climate doesn’t.

It’s an interesting meme, in that one doesn’t realize consciously how overused it is until one sees it compiled together like that; one specimen says absolutely nothing, a whole collection makes a point about what’s going on. Although there’s room for debate about what that is. I suppose what we’re seeing is: People like to watch happy women eating healthy things? Grumpy women eating salads, on miserable rainy days, nobody’s got too much interest in that. Or a jolly full-figured type feeding her gaping maw with a dripping greasy trip-tip, wouldn’t go over as well either.

Well I just made a discovery: Google Images is just stuffed full, like twenty pounds of flour in a ten-pound sack, with girl and laptop computer pictures.

Now…what could that mean? Hmmm…not sure. I see we do have some boy laptop, but within that I notice an abundance of 1) comical effect, as in “boy using laptop” is simply a stepping stone on the way toward a punchline, which is more of the main point; 2) confusion and frustration over how to work the darn thing; 3) some combination of 1) and 2); and 4) Mom, or some smarter female instructor type, giving him helpful pointers on how to use it. Hmmm. Might have missed it, but I didn’t notice one single wise benevolent all-knowing patriarch giving the cuties some pointers on how to use their laptops.

Another difference: My girl-query doesn’t contain the world “laugh” or “smile.” Doesn’t have to. Chicks are required to smile in picture-land, pretty much all of the time. Even the one in the dominatrix outfit getting ready to chainsaw her laptop, has a big grin on her face.

This one needs more thought than the salads. I’m really not sure what to make of it…I’ll have to ponder this, solemnly and studiously, frowning at my computer in a very manly way.

From Gerard.

Those who are unfamiliar with this hypothesis and might still be unclear on what’s happening here, can read up over at this page to see how it all works.

The differences are quite striking. The take-away: Anyone who wants to start understanding the difference between conservatives and liberals, without getting into the nitty-gritty nuts-&-bolts differences in priorities & worldviews, simply has to follow both types around long enough to see their ideas fail and then watch how the idealogues react to the failure of the ideas. President Bush’s sympathizers and apologists brought a lot of different defensive arguments to the table during the meltdown of ‘08. There were some lowered-standards, as in, 9/11 changed everything and you had to expect some economic sputtering in the aftermath of a calamity such as that; there were some better-than-it-looks excuses, which carry a bit more weight, since hey, the unemployment rate was quite low and there were other measurements to indicate things weren’t that bad. And there was some finger-pointing at the democrats. Which also carries weight, since the democras took over Congress before things really fell apart. Mixed in with all this, there was some admission that mistakes were made. Stuff was tried that, had the opportunity been presented for a do-over, would not be tried again. And that makes an impression on me because I hear the same thing out of Reagan apologists, answering the charge that the public debt “skyrocketed” during Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Deals were made that were not good deals. Again, with a do-over, things would’ve been done differently.

Now I suppose it isn’t a fair comparison because President Obama is running for re-election, and consequently, we have a lot of people running around coming up with defenses for His failed policies who are paid to come up with those defenses, and this is bound to have an effect on what the defenses are going to be. Nevertheless, I surmise that it is because of the President’s political leanings that we have no, absolutely none, zip, zero, zilch, nada, no-can-do, nothing being said anywhere about what has been done over the last four years that could’ve & would’ve been done differently with the opportunity for said do-over. It’s time to defend the record and I’m seeing nothing out of His team, at all, except craven distractions. Mitt Romney bullied someone in high school and his supporters and campaign contributors are, well, I’m not sure what…poopy-heads or something.

The take-away: Conservatives are capable of admitting mistakes and liberals aren’t. Oh, I can hear the double-whipped mocha lattes spurting through the liberal nostrils at the very suggestion. But it’s true. Conservatives can defend the leadership, as in the character and the decision-making ability of a person or of a team, without standing by each and every little decision they made about everything. They can say “Yeah, that one there, that was a learning experience.” Liberals can’t do that because they’ve got this rule in place…thou shalt not speak ill of anything connected in any way to The Sun King. And by my Louis XIV reference I do not specifically mean to pick on Barack Obama. They’ve got all these demigods who are to be elevated and kept clean and pure in every way. History does not possess the authority needed to indict them of anything; they can’t make mistakes. Good liberals cannot stoop to that low, low level of admitting “Obama probably shouldn’t have said anything about Skip Gates and the Cambridge Police Department.” Can’t form the words. Can’t get the thoughts crystallized. It’s sinful to even be headed in that direction.

This is significant, when you think about it. If we can’t admit mistakes, we can’t learn. We end up about as wise, with our approach to any given problem, as we were when we emerged from the womb.

In addition to the philosophical implications there are the fiduciary ones. Barack Obama’s ideas are generally not inexpensive. He claims credit for thinking big, and he claims this with some legitimacy, for His ideas are indeed grand, big, weighty ideas. But they are grand and big and weighty only because the taxpayers are forced to fund them. The questions about the long-term consequences of these cash outlays are not entirely motivated by partisanship; the government’s solvency has measurably deteriorated throughout this cycle, and there are serious ramifications for the country if the proponents of the big-spending Obama ideas can’t admit that any of them were mistakes, and their unthinking and unreasoned response to every inspection is to double down. I mean that literally. Double down. Some of the most insistent and loud liberals out there, pressed to defend the Reinvestment Act against its clear and obvious failure, will recite the rote litany that it failed because it wasn’t big enough. And they’ll be perfectly straight-faced about it when they say this, seemingly unaware that they’ve become caricatures of those who shouldn’t have anything to say about anything.

This leads off into something else I’ve noticed about the difference between conservatives and liberals. As was pointed out in Sultan Knish (hat tip to Gerard again), what we see playing out before us in this political divide is something that could be called an “efficiency war”:

It’s a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the people or the people will starve the government. Like most political power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people to the government.
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Despite all the ambitious efforts to reduce everything from skyscraper construction to a human breath to a number and to impose penalties accordingly so as to nudge the offenders away from their carbon crimes, the real criminals fly off someplace warm by the thousands to discuss the need to use less fuel and be more energy efficient. The resort conferences are only a drop in the ocean of government which is swiftly flooding everything in sight.
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The regulators cannot regulate their own efficiency, yet they insist on regulating ours. They waste by the truckload and while hectoring us ceaselessly about waste. They erect government buildings where the lights burn all night, yet begrudge us an extra kilowatt on the side. They cannot live within their means, yet they insist that we live within theirs. That we not only pay their bills, but that we make do with less for ourselves.

The inefficient cannot create efficiency. The United States and the European Union cannot bring efficiency to their own finances. And part of their waste involves imposing efficiency programs on us. The efficiency programs are themselves waste and worsen the crisis. Garbage in and garbage out defines the process. The government throws money and resources into making the outside world efficient, when the outside world is already more efficient than it is. The sole outcome is to bring down the efficiency of the real world closer to government standards. [bold emphasis mine]

I’ve observed this before, myself, saying (paraphrased) that our national conflict has to do with whether it’s appropriate or called-for, for our most non-productive people to be telling the productive people how to do their producing. Vice President Joe Biden admitted as much, I think, when he said “I never had an interest in being a mayor ’cause that’s a real job. You have to produce. That’s why I was able to be a senator for 36 years.” Maybe he was joking about this, or forgot that he was still speaking on the record. Biden has a history of opening questions like those, and not settling them; he shows no sign of breaking form here. I think we can all agree, intentionally or not, there was some truth uttered here. If so, this partially addresses the dilemma defined above — how do you get anything done when you can’t admit your mistakes, and therefore can’t learn, and you end up dooming yourself to approaching every challenge that comes up with the wisdom you already had the day you were born, and nothing more? Answer: You don’t. Humility, wisdom…efficiency…these are things you need only for “real” jobs.

With these “fake” jobs, you don’t “have to produce” so there’s no need to do any of this learning. Which is important, because when you learn, you almost always have to do this course-correction the conservatives are able to do that the liberals are not able to do; you have to say “given the opportunity to make that decision again amid identical circumstances, I would have chosen this other option.”

For some time now I’ve been fascinated with “real” liberals, meaning, people who struggle in “real” jobs like I do, who are my peers, confronting challenges similar to mine — often even with greater competence than I can show — and then make the mistake of so thoughtlessly voting for liberal politicians. Through the years, I’ve come to the realization that they do not think much of their own everyday struggles. They actually feel some measure of shame about it. It shows up in the tiniest little things. Like, a weekend approaches in a hot summer and they, just like me, look forward to cooling off in a theater with powerful air conditioning where they can watch a movie about someone having an adventure, and pretend to be in a different world for a couple of hours. We have that in common. But it means something entirely different to someone like them, than it does to someone like me. I’m leaving a bunch of drudgery at the entrance to the theater, and they’re leaving genuine shame. Worrying about error handling and texture compression formats and my kid’s doctor bills just causes me a dull headache — offset by the understanding that, ultimately, I’m going to get it all done. They worry about the same things and they seem to be genuinely troubled by their station in life. Like there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with this realization they made, that the entire universe is not their personal property after all.

So their answer is, I think, to live vicariously through someone else who does own the universe. Barack Obama. He never makes a mistake, because if He ever does, the mistake stops being a mistake on the spot and instantly flips, pancake-like, into The Right Thing To Do. Even when He makes a hairpin-turn on some tangential social issue it’s a process of “evolving,” so again, the need to admit that something was done the wrong way, is entirely obviated. That’s when things get rather strange. Barack Obama has always been in favor of same-sex marriage, the chocolate ration has always been 22 grams, and Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.

I’d actually have better confidence in left-wing leadership if they made more — uh — liberal use of the 1984 memory holes. That would at least enable them to change course when they find they’re headed the wrong way. Alas, though, they’re determined to do this very sparingly; it’s only available as an option to extend the political lives of the Obama/Napoleon/Kennedy/Sun King demigods, the monarchs who are incapable of ever making mistakes. The middle-managers who adjudicate each situation out in the real world, make the policies fit the grand vision that was laid out by their betters, are far lacking in the authority required to trip this fuse. They’re obliged to stick to courses that are demonstrated by history and common sense to be wrong. That’s why Sheriff Joe Arpaio got so frustrated, I think, with our Attorney General: “Clean your own house, Eric Holder, before you come trying to clean mine.” It is, once again, a classic conflict between the efficient and the inefficient; between those who have some actual responsibilities, and those who only pretend to have some.

Isn’t that exactly what Sarah Palin said? “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” That’s the fissure right there, the hairline crack widening into a yawning chasm. That’s the split. People who have, and therefore make decisions like someone who has, “actual responsibilities.” They set standards for themselves, and they lack the means to have the last word on how events are interpreted — or don’t pursue this in any way…so, when they fail the standards they set for themselves, a fail is a fail is a fail, and that’s that. Then they’re forced to say “One thing I could’ve done to turn that around, is make a different decision back here…” And they change their behavior. Not because they consciously think that’s glorious. Quite the opposite. They’re simply forced to. They say…I’m trying to get something done here, aren’t I? Well, that thing I did back there, that doesn’t get it done. I shall have to do it differently. The latest demonstration of how mega-awesome I am and people like me are — it doesn’t even enter into it. It’s just an error being corrected, nothing more and nothing less.

The other way to do it is to simply pretend to meet a standard. Then, when you fail it, you do what Obama’s trying to do right now with the economy: Change the standard, by means of making sure you always, always, always have the last word. Obfuscate. Confuse. Distract and deflect. Even lie if you have to.

That is the approach of mental children who never really grew up, who never learned how to do learning. Out here in the real world, conservatives see that and roll their eyes at it. We say to ourselves, there’s a man who isn’t as big as his job. I hope I’m not like that. Because there’s a very sad aspect to it: The iconic demigod and his supporters, keep repeating over and over how uber-wonderful he is, and they are, because there’s a need to. That’s just a terrible way to go through life, and we recoil from the very impression of it. We wince in genuine proxy embarrassment. Liberals, out here with us, toiling with life’s more mundane but real challenges the same way we are, but feeling dirty about it, look at people like Obama and Holder and Biden and say: Wow, how awesome, I wish I could be like that. They can’t answer the obvious question, “like what?” for there is absolutely nothing describably superlative about these people; they’re mediocre in every measurable way. The liberals are living their lives through someone else, whom they only believe to embody excellence because they reject any doubts that they are indeed excellent. So they outwardly crave this lofty height of personal excellence that, at some quiet, deeper level of their consciousness, they understand really isn’t there. They entrust people with a fifteen trillion dollar economy who they wouldn’t trust to walk their own dog…even if they didn’t like the dog.

That’s America’s political divide, right there.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

During the last week, we have seen the president support three political positions: gay marriage, a raise in the minimum wage, and a cut in the interest rate on loans to college students. These issues have one thing in common: The president’s supporters claim that those who oppose gay marriage, oppose a high minimum wage, and oppose the lowering of interest rates on college student loans must really hate gays, hate the poor, and oppose education. If you don’t favor President Obama’s programs, you hate the groups targeted by the programs. Thus, we have no serious debate on the merits of either side of these issues, and that is unhealthy.
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Politicians always try to demonize opponents, but until recently it has usually failed because our free press asks presidential candidates the tough questions that force a real debate to take place…With President Obama, however, the mainstream press so far has not asked the president–or his supporters–the tough questions that force a public debate on complicated issues. The November election is very important–let’s hope reporters begin asking both sides the tough questions that yield facts that voters can use to make informed choices. Maybe those who oppose this are the ones who are “anti-education.”

Not sure if this is a coordinated conspiracy, but I do know we’ve got a problem with nobody having anything to lose from the situation — among those who wield influence. President Obama and His supporters, of course, emerge as clear winners if all these discussions boil down to “I’m a much better person than that other guy over there because I’m in favor X.” As far as the press goes, their incentive for keeping this going seems to be nothing more complicated than they’re just plain lazy.

The real problem, however, isn’t that we as a society are ensnared in a potpourri of policy initiatives that are wrong. We are, of course; but the real cost we’re paying for this is that there’s no end to the conflict. Those who support gay marriage or higher minimum wage or discounted loans to college students, solely to prove what wonderful awesome nice kind people they are, are never going to be done proving it. They’re inebriated on, and addicted to, this elixir of “I’m nice and that other guy’s mean.”

So we could give ‘em every little thing they want, and they won’t be done.

I’ve also picked up the impression that they, by and large, don’t care too much about these issues. Their motivation seems to be: We’re unhappy that those other mean people, who disagree with us, have any influence on the outcome at all. When they pontificate and proselytize and donate and struggle to win, I think all they really want is some kind of assurance that their influence is unilateral and dictatorial, and the influence of the other people is negligible, insignificant, easily overcome. To the extent that this might be true in some cases, it is not consistently, everlastingly so; when you play, sometimes the other guy’s gonna win. That’s just the way life is.

And so this tyranny-of-nice, until such time as it is confronted directly, will continue. Endlessly. The “real debate” cannot, and will not, happen.

Related: (hat tip to Instapundit) Did the media drive the gay marriage debate?

Quite honestly, the only people I ever hear from who are dopier than liberals are those who identify themselves as conservatives and insist that Republicans and Democrats are identical.

Anyone who would suggest that there is no difference between Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner or Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, is one very dumb bunny. No difference between the likes of Henry Waxman, Al Franken and Charles Rangel and Darrel Issa, Peter King and Paul Ryan? No difference between Joe Biden and Dick Cheney? No difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? You have to wonder what madcap pharmacist is supplying these alleged conservatives with their stupidity pills.

How can anyone who takes the Second Amendment seriously insist there’s no difference between the two parties when gun sales are booming, all thanks to such flame-throwing racists as Eric Holder, Al Sharpton and the Black Panthers? The good news is that income taxes on the gun industry have jumped 66% since Obama’s election, and it’s mainly due to increased sales, not Obama’s counterproductive tax policies. It’s ironic that the man who is most opposed to law-abiding citizens owning weapons not only selected Eric (“Operation Fast & Furious”) Holder to be his attorney general, but has personally done more to hype American gun sales than any prior president.
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For those of you who continue to insist that it makes absolutely no difference if the president is a Democrat or a member of the GOP, please keep in mind that if John Kerry had won the 2004 election, he would not have named John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Instead, he would have seated a couple left-wingers in the mold of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Now, by a show of hands, is there anyone out there who doubts that with six left-wingers on the Court, there would be the slightest chance they’d decide that ObamaCare is unconstitutional?

I would imagine Mr. Prelutsky has been provoked into this latest by the many reactions to Mitt Romney coming closer to securing the Republican nomination. The not-a-dimes-worth-of-difference people do have their reasons for so opining, it should be noted. Romney does have problems with his conservative credentials, and one has cause for concern when one notes the contest has come down to this. The system does have more than a whiff of riggishness about it.

I’m often fond of summarizing these situations with complex and emotionally charged outlooks on the world and life, in terms of very simple math problems. See, Barack Obama and people like Him, are celebrated as special people and have been celebrated as that for so long, that they can’t deal with losing the identity. Oh, you thought I meant black people? No…there are tons and tons of privileged, pampered whites in this crowd I’m describing. They say jump, the crowd says how high…it’s worked this way since third grade, or earlier, and nobody envisions it ever going any other way, because they don’t, and they don’t because nobody else does. So they go through life frustrated because they know there’s something different about them — but that something is never really defined. Something to do with speaking well, being confident, but they’re actually apprehensive deep down inside. They can’t shake the feeling that maybe, whatever is special about them, might be something external to them. And this fills them with fear. Because that would mean everything inside, is just humdrum and ordinary.

So the question comes up: What is one plus one? Barack Obama will immediately rule out “two” as a possible answer because, hey, that’s what an ordinary person would say. Thus we see, with this simple math exercise, someone like President Obama “enjoys” a greater likelihood of getting it wrong, than an answer-producing method that relies purely on random chance. You’re better off rolling the dice to answer the one-plus-one problem than asking President Obama. And, because it works that way with the simple problems, it works that way with the more complicated ones as well. People like Obama have this natural phobia, a natural revulsion, against the common-sense answer. They’re more likely to get it wrong than a decision-making method that works by chance.

The trouble with Mitt Romney is — he will say “two,” but if someone else says “one,” “three” or “five” he’ll reply with “yes, that’s just fine” or “yeah, that’s perfectly alright.” This is why he’s having trouble appealing to conservatives, who understand that we live in a mathematical world…therefore, there is little value in choosing the right answer, if you don’t recognize that all the other answers must therefore be wrong.

So I understand both sides of this.

What I do not understand, are the people who somehow insist that now, these last two or three weeks, as April morphs into May in twenty-twelve — this is the time when Mitt Romney has to be taken down by any means necessary. The opposite is the truth. To the extent that the Romney ascension represents a problem…and I believe that it does…the time to attack that problem is all the other times. For now, if the one-plus-one-is-three guy is to be sent back to Illinois next January, there is going to have to be a coming-together of all the people who recognize that this is what has to happen. There’s going to have to be some emulsification. Can’t build a castle with bone-dry sand.

One aspect of President Obama’s philosophically revealing — and mock-worthy — “Julia” web ad doesn’t seem to have garnered as much attention as one might have expected…When Julia, who never entirely seems to grow out of childhood in her own right, hits the age of 31, we are told that she “decides to have a child.”

This is peculiar phrasing. There’s no mention of Julia having first decided to get married, and no mention of Julia’s husband — or even of her dating anyone — in any of the snippets shown from any of the stages of her life. Perhaps the ad simply doesn’t mention Julia having gotten married because it was one of the few noteworthy events in her life that didn’t involve the active assistance of the federal government.
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Aside from the total lack of romantic spirit on display in this stage of Julia’s life, one wonders what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the longtime Democratic senator from New York, would have thought of this ad. Moynihan famously highlighted the decline of the American family — particular of black Americans’ families. He highlighted that, as of 1963, the out-of-wedlock birthrate had risen to an alarming 24 percent among black Americans (from 17 percent in 1940), compared to 3 percent among white Americans (from 2 percent in 1940). He noted that this “breakdown” in the family structure “led to a startling increase in welfare dependency.”

Yep. Back in those exciting days when Bill Clinton was finishing up his first term, not that long ago by any means…the conservative/liberal conflict was pretty clear-cut. The conservative position represented in the new Gingrich Congress was, our social-services safety net had become something of a vicious cycle, as the largess of the state had created a dependency class, which in turn reproduced without the mainstream concerns about where the college fund comes from, how does Sugarlump get hold of a car & how does he get insured…and then each new generational wave threw itself upon the over-extended safety net. A caused B and B caused A, with no end in sight, so something had to be done. The liberal response was twofold: 1) Nuh-huh, that doesn’t happen, and 2) Well, it does happen and you tighty-righties need to just get used to it, it’s a necessary evil.

Fast-forward to Anno Julia, and the debate has shifted quite aways without our consciously noticing it. And the direction in which it is shifted is not a good one. The debate has not come closer to being resolved, it’s drifted further away, as we now disagree on what the goals are. As anyone who’s watched “Life of Julia” can recognize right away, when President Obama campaigns for re-election this year, He will be doing so on behalf of a constituency that, from His explanation of it, thinks things are supposed to be this way — and who’s to say they are not.

The verb “decides” is a powerful one that also shows a new direction for the national discourse about these social services. Conservatives used to be rightfully piqued about having to subsidize someone else’s lifestyle choices, and classically, the liberal rejoinder has been that these are not lifestyle choices. Again, with the faceless cartoon-figure of Julia, we see President Obama has subtly — or not so subtly? — given up on that. The message that comes across, which is already familiar to us through the many, many other things Obama has had to tell us, is: Yeah, it’s a choice, and what of it? This is the new “greatness” of America, that everybody does whatever they feel like doing, and because we’re going to fleece those selfish rich people, stupid isn’t gonna hurt.

That does seem to be the goal. Hakuna Matada, means no worries for the rest of your days…we’ll just tax the rich people.

The peculiar thing is, the Obama brand of liberal thinks the country has “grown” into this childlike mindset. They think this is the culmination of stage after stage after stage of our national development…or maturity…or evolution. And this is where their viewpoint sputters out and just stops working entirely. How do you aspire toward the next stage of development, when the next stage of development is analogous to one of a helpless newborn infant suckling at a tit? Well, that’s the situation, isn’t it? Gimme, gimme, gimme, if I want it and have to wait for it, I’m gonna cry.

How can anyone of sane mind evaluate this as a way of living, and not come to the conclusion that it’s a process of regression rather than one of maturity? This is the real sea change with the “Life of Julia” slideshow. I can understand some people are just lazy and ignorant, don’t want to spend any time learning about what’s going on, just wanting their stuff…even maybe excuse it. But something new is happening when the President’s slideshow asks us to pretend up is down and in is out.

Come to think of it, “Julia” was the name of the female lead in 1984, wasn’t it?

On another occasion Mother accompanied me to the dentist, where I was to have an aching tooth removed and replaced with a bridge. After my work was accomplished the dentist, a kindly, sensitive man, offered to examine Mother and promptly informed her that she was overdue for dentures. She was not hard to convince, and asked him to proceed at once. using me as interpreter, he explained that five badly infected teeth needed to be extracted at once, and if she was ready he would anesthetize her and proceed. She scoffed at the anesthetic, saying, “I don’t need that.” Thinking that she didn’t understand, the dentist explained that novocaine would lessen the pain, but she waved his explanation aside impatiently. The poor dentist was shaken at the thought of what he was asked to do and looked at me questioningly. Upon receiving my confirming nod, he applied himself to his arduous task. The first tooth had a huge root and required all his strength to extract. Certain that Mother would be unable to bear another such ordeal, he again offered anesthetic, but again she refused. After each extraction he repeated this offer, and each time she refused. When the dreadful job was finished without a word of protest from Mother, the exhausted dentist wiped his brow and turned to me. “Could you have done that?” he asked wonderingly. “I wouldn’t even try,” I assured him.

Mother stayed on with us while her gums healed and her dentures were fitted. She and the dentist became the best of friends. I frequently wonder how often he recounted this story to his colleagues for I doubt he ever had another patient to match her fortitude. (Immigrant Girl: A Memoir, pp. 67-68.)

That was jotted down by Sigfrid Eidsness Ohrt, in the early 1980’s as she approached her ninetieth birthday; it recounts the long hard winter of 1917 in Saskatchewan when her mother, Ragnhild Fjelde Eidsness, showed ‘em how it’s done back in the old country. Norwegians don’t need no stinkin’ novocaine.

Her grandson just repeated the exercise an hour or two ago. Last dental exam for me was probably sometime about the time she wrote those words, a little over thirty years ago. Not sure how it compares to having five dead infected teeth pulled. But I, too, took the “Braveheart” approach and hey, I think I outdid you because my teeth are all alive, Granny.

That having been said, I would have to encourage the next generation not to follow my example. I was joking last night that my dentist might not have been born yet the last time I saw a dentist; the hygeinist tonight, at least in her case, confirmed it. That’s probably a good baseline threshold. If the person cleaning your teeth wasn’t born yet the last time you had your teeth cleaned, your maintenance schedule is in need of revising.

Anyway, yeah, the gums need some tender lovin’ care, they’re getting it. The bones are holding up pretty well. Miraculously well, really. I credit my own brushing, the minerals in the water in Arizona, and a good diet. Anyway…I’ve been “invited” back in another four weeks.