NARAL Communications Director STWF’d

There appears to be a subtle difference between the FOX News story on the sudden departure of NARAL Communications Directory David Seldin, Friday, and the follow-up in the Washington Post that appeared Sunday. The FOX News article leaves ample room for doubt, with no spin in one direction or the other, as to whether NARAL was getting rid of Seldin or Seldin was getting rid of NARAL. The Post story gives us a good shove in the direction of presuming the latter.

Some Democrats said their side should be tougher, and one of them is David E. Seldin, who as NARAL’s communications director had defended the ad’s linking of Roberts to violent abortion opponents as “100 percent accurate.” A day after Thursday night’s announcement that the ad was being yanked, Seldin sent an e-mail to friends saying that he was leaving his job immediately.

In one job I had, it became key to the success of our enterprises to try to anticipate what was going to happen with other teams. Sometimes, someone outside would leave. Sometimes, someone on the inside would leave. Or we’d get worried someone somewhere was about to leave. Maybe someone in a key position was about to not be there anymore, or word was just getting out that someone already wasn’t there anymore.

Seasoned readers of corporate spin, which showered us with buzzwords designed to confuse whenever high-ranking executives were shown the door, we used to say “I got a feeling so-and-so is about to Spend More Time With His Family.”

So it’s kind of amusing to me, with that background in the rear-view mirror, that the following paragraph is shared between the Fox story and the Post story:

Seldin, who had held the job for just over two years, wrote in the Friday afternoon e-mail: “I’ve been thinking for a while that I would most likely leave after the Supreme Court nomination fight was over, and by leaving now I can spend the next two weeks in Cape Cod with my family relaxing, instead of trying to find a place with good cell phone reception.”

This is really encouraging. Not because I’ve got a big hard-on to outlaw abortion whenever & wherever I can, which I don’t. It’s encouraging because the ad, which is really at the heart of the matter no matter which side you believe, is a lie.

An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers �supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber� and of having an ideology that �leads him to excuse violence against other Americans� It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

The ad is false.

And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn’t deal with bombing at all.

Awhile back I had written about how incredibly, and tragically, rare it was nowadays to tell a provable falsehood and then not only get caught for it, but suffer some kind of consequence for spreading it around as well.

Twice in the last two weeks liars are suffering consequences for their lies. And both times, there is actually some coverage of the consequences in the media. This time, it is the communications director of a powerful political advocacy group. Fired, asked to resign, or resigning in disgust after being caught in a known lie.

This is real progress, in an age when we tend to show much more enthusiasm for believing known lies, than we do for debunking them or listening to somebody else debunk them.

This is the kind of thing that could eventually save our society. IF we keep it up. But that is a big “if”.

Dear Ms. Sheehan

…and hopefully, this is the second-to-last thing I’ll ever have to say about this.

Normally, I get uncontrollably cheesed-off when people tell me things they know to not be true, and after I do my research I find they’re either ignorant, or must have been hoping I wouldn’t look into the facts behind what they said. When Cindy Sheehan does this, she doesn’t make me angry, she just makes me cringe. I fear for the reputation she has on the national stage, upon which she obviously depends so much for whatever’s left of her emotional health, every time she opens her mouth. Every syllable she utters, every far-leftist cause she allows to hop into bed with her, is another opportunity for her to embarrass herself. She’s playing Russian Roulette, by herself, with three cartridges in the cylinder.

Cindy Sheehan has said one of the reasons she separated with her husband, is that he dealt with his grief by avoiding things that would remind him of Casey’s death, including moving his son’s property into the garage, while she herself has dealt with it by immersion. If that is the case, her bandwagon is a key piece to her emotional solace, and I fear it will come as another bitter blow when that bandwagon goes sailing off a cliff. We live in an age where this happens to people with some regularity…but I don’t think it was as devastating to Dan Rather, when he got STWF’d, as it will someday be to Sheehan after she is knocked off her soapbox for good.

She’s misguided, not evil. Let’s hope she burns out quietly, instead of going supernova the way the Dan-Man did.

Dear Ms. Sheehan,

During our annual August News Drought, a nation beholds your heavily-reported anticipation of a (second) meeting with President Bush, whether we want to or not. You say you have one or several questions to ask of him. Some of us are aware you met with the President and had an opportunity to ask him such questions last year. Many others are not. While it is wrong to publicize the idea that you’re waiting for this meeting, without disclosing the fact that you’ve already had a previous meeting, I see you as playing-along with this falsehood engineered by others rather than engineering it yourself.

We have not yet reached universal agreement that the purpose of your (second) visit is to embarrass President Bush, as opposed to communicating with him in some way, but we have reached the point where nobody paying attention would doubt it. With that in mind, I thought I should mention to you some ways the President could embarrass you, with or without intent, although I’m certain he doesn’t want to. At the very least, he may raise issues you haven’t considered before. Although we’re told the man is an idiot, for an idiot he has an impressive history of doing exactly that.

With all due respect, in the things you’ve written that I’ve read, you haven’t done this. You’re also a media darling. It is difficult to anticipate things when one is imbibing the elixir of media worship, or drowning in grief. You appear to be doing both, so this should be of some use to you. Ponder them in advance of your upcoming (second) hearing, so that you’re not caught considering them for the first time before the cameras that will almost certainly be there. The fame that has clearly become personally important to you, will never become greater than it would be in that instant, nor will it extend much beyond that instant. Don’t blow it. I suggest you review the following line by line. Coming up with compelling answers would be ideal; having simply given them thought, would be almost as good. Being surprised by them would be…awful. We who are opposed to your cause, don’t want to see it die THAT way.

– Your son believed in the cause for which he was fighting. It’s impossible to believe he didn’t since he willingly re-enlisted.
– You don’t speak for all bereaved parents. Proving this is easy.
– In regard to the above, it’s possible another bereaved parent will be there with views different from your own. Other than the President’s demonstrably innate good nature and reluctance to exploit people, there’s no reason to doubt this to be the case. THEY may have questions for YOU.
– Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq. The fallacy that none were, has been preserved through the technique of re-defining what a WMD is, as each WMD was in fact found.
– Saddam Hussein’s regime was linked to Al-Qaeda, and through them, indirectly to the attacks of September 11, 2001 as well.
– The United States of America has a pressing national interest in stabilizing Iraq, which necessarily included a regime change.
– Regime change in Iraq has been the official United States policy since 1998. That policy, therefore, precedes this administration.
– Some of our national interest has to do with the market for petroleum, which is being consumed by your friends as they put you on film, broadcast you, blog about you, fly in to talk to you, rent cars, crank up the air conditioning when they’re with you, order supplies that have to be trucked around, bring you bottled water, film themselves bringing you bottled water, bottle the water, package up the bottles of water, and put the bottled water in electrical refrigerators to keep it cool.
– Presidents are not on “vacation” no matter where they are. Ever.
– If President Bush has told any “lies” to start this war, in spite of repeated requests from myself & others, nobody’s called out what the lie is. On the other hand, the legend being disseminated that you want to see him simply to ask a question, hardly has the ring of truth to it.
– The vast majority of us don’t think the President lied. He won the last election by a significant margin, which is thought to be a large margin by people like me, albeit perhaps a narrow one by people like you. But it’s proven that he received more votes than his opponent. A lot of people voted against him even though they thought he told the truth about Iraq — but nobody’s ready to insinuate anyone voted for him, believing he lied. We’ve had a national referendum on President Bush lying, and this country has resoundingly rejected this.
– People who want to pressure the President to meet with you (for a second time), knowing that you would rather embarrass him than truly discuss anything with him or ask any genuine questions of him, scare the rest of us. We know those people have excited themselves about their various causes, to the extent where they no longer question the moral implications of what they do.
– The idea that this President is afraid to meet with the parents of our war dead, or is afraid to appear before them without the benefit of a scripted meeting, is unsupported by the facts. It’s possible, in fact likely, that the President is refusing to meet with you to spare YOU from embarrassment.
– As the Commander in Chief, this President knows things about ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda that you don’t know. This is important to you, because frankly you haven’t demonstrated the quality of staying silent on things you don’t know.
– The President won re-election. If you think he lied or he is an illegitimate President, back this up somehow. Remember that someone cast all those votes. If all you’re going to do is repeat the opinions you think the rest of us ought to have, your final public comments will fall on deaf ears.

I know you will never be shaken from the things you believe about this war. That is not my intent. But in one month, you will be deprived of both your child, and your celebratory status. Many other grieving parents have similarly lost the former but never had the chance to enjoy the latter. I hope wherever the next phase of your life takes you, should it involve your outspokenness or not, it gives you fulfillment, some measure of happiness, and peace.

Thank you for raising Casey, who had the courage and sense of duty to enlist twice. Millions of people like me, who do not share your beliefs, are immeasurably grateful for his sacrifice, to you & the rest of his family, as well as to his memory.

Best Wishes.

Baby Step in the Right Direction

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin for this story in the Washington Post. Air Marshalls are no longer being required to dress as, you know, um, Air Marshalls.

People who called this the “Kill Me First” policy are gleefully cheering that “Kill Me First is dead,” as Malkin headlined the story. People who didn’t call it that, i.e., public relations folks, say the reversal simply “broadens the scope” of the dress code.

The issue of what the marshals wear when flying on jetliners put a wrinkle in the public relations image of the Department of Homeland Security last year.

The 24,000-member Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association protested that the dress code could blow the cover of air marshals, making it easier for terrorists to identify them. Department officials said the concerns were overblown.

Accounts vary on what the air marshals were ordered to wear, but the department apparently wanted them to project a professional image, and some agents believed they were being forced into suit coats, ties and dress shoes. Officials said the policy did not require coats and ties.

A sense of perspective is needed on this. With my limited knowledge as a civie, I see no reason to regard the enemy with which we are engaged, as anything but extraordinarily cunning and resourceful. Sure they screw up. Their bombs go off twelve hours late because they set them to p.m. instead of a.m. They put insufficient postage on their bomb parcels and blow themselves up, almost like Yosemite Sam, when the packages come back. But they also do smart things; and they get lucky.

I don’t give a rat’s rear end what we were requiring the Air Marshalls to wear. If it was a government dress code, if I’m a terrorist and I get a year or two to sync up to what’s going on, I’ll be able to pick ’em out and train low-ranking people to do the same.

Thus, I didn’t like Kill Me First because it wasn’t consistent with a Homeland Security department that really meant business. The symptom has now been mitigated; is the underlying sickness really gone?

Time will tell.

I’m At A Loss

I’m a staunch supporter of the death penalty. In fact I’m vigorously opposed to any attempts, with very few exceptions, to make the justice system more lenient in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of serious violent crimes. And when I say “very few exceptions” I’m referring to the processes that deal with forensics, admission and conviction…not with sentencing.

From what I’ve observed, the watering-down of our justice system is an experiment that was already tried, between the mid ’60s to the early ’70s. The results were so disastrous, so crystal-clear, and ran so contrary to the will of the well-intentioned — so incredibly simple — that further experimentation is unwarranted and unnecessary.

To bottom-line it: More innocent people got killed and we got sick of it. Duh.

One of the most persuasive arguments the anti-death-penalty people use, and it even has a compelling effect on people like me, is that the death penalty is an unjust investment of power into the government. In other words, the taking of human life is a power that a government of free men ought not have.

That makes perfect sense. By itself. But I’m at a loss to explain the following.

There are several countries sprinkled around the globe that measure the extent to which they have become “civilized,” by their readiness, willingness, ability and eagerness to create new regulation. These countries are not known for a careful balance between social good versus individual liberties — the latter of the two, is something that is simply in the way. A ban on drinking, even in the privacy of people’s homes, to curb violence and disorderly conduct? “Something must be done!” A ban on guns, including the forcible confiscation of private property? “It’s for the children!” A requirement to put health-warning bumper stickers on SUVs? “They kill!”

With increasing regularity, I see these countries indulging in risk-mitigation, perhaps up to & beyond a point of diminishing return. They regulate until threat-to-self has been lowered about as much as it practically can be, then they keep regulating. Taking away freedom, offering no benefit in return. Goo-Gooders. Guardian Angel Governments (GAG). Nanny-states.

Let ’em do it. As a yankee, I have no right to impose my will on such an enlightened society that is so eager to steamroll over the individual rights of its citizens.

Which brings me to the thing I don’t understand.

The list of countries that have abolished the death penalty unconditionally, supposedly because government ought-not-have-that-right, has an incredibly high overlap with the nanny-state countries. It seems all the nanny-states have outlawed the death penalty, and all the anti-death-penalty states are nanny-states.

They are not known for curtailing government excesses in too many other areas, any areas at all, besides taking the life of the provably homicidal. In these countries, you have the right to be alive, even if you kill people, and even if you swear that if you make it outside again you’ll kill again. But once you are kept alive, you don’t have the right to do an awful lot with that life. Everything that isn’t confiscated, is pasturized, regulated, subsidized, underwritten. And then a warning label is put on it.

This is a long list. Canada. Spain. France. Germany. Sweden. Norway. Denmark. Belgium. On and on and on.

They all supposedly respect an individual’s right to life more than the USA does — because if you kill somebody, you have an absolute guarantee, you will live. Nevermind that your victim had no such guarantee.

Now, we live in a universe that does have some contradictions — they may not be genuine contradictions, but illusory or not the contradictions are there. But this one is more troubling than most, because the resulting message is truly paradoxical. The government will champion your right to stay alive even if you kill; but if someone else kills you, the government will make sure that person cannot be executed for the crime of killing you. If someone else kills him then that person, too, will be spared execution. You are all protected by a law that outlaws killing, but that law really has no teeth.

And until all of you get killed, you have to stay within the lines. You can’t smoke. When you kill each other you must use knives because you can’t have guns. If you work and earn money, you owe whatever portion of it to the state, that the state says you owe — all of it, if the state has the desire to say so. Logically, that would have to mean whatever you’re allowed to keep, you get to keep because the state decided to let you, not because it’s your “right”.

It’s so bizarre. The state cannot take your whole life but it can take chunks of it, large & small. On a whim, basically. You have an absolute, sacrosanct right to listen to your heartbeat; anything else you do is up for challenge. Pour milk on top of your cake? Swallow watermelon seeds? Read a newspaper while having breakfast with your wife? If 49 say you can and 51 say you can’t, then forget it.

I would call this a coincidence if it was a couple countries. Maybe three or four. But like I said, we’re talking like, I don’t know, something approaching twenty or so here.

Is there a nanny-state that allows its government to regulate reflexively, excessively, redundantly, on a whim, and — for sake of consistency — also allows it to impose the death penalty? With considerable deterioration to the spirit of its Constitution over the years, the United States somewhat qualifies for this. In practice; not in intent. I can’t think of another one.

Is there a state that curtails its government from executing the guilty, and also — for the sake of consistency — restricts its government from doing a lot of other things? I can’t think of one.

This means something. I’m not sure what.

A Nation Of Pussies

If this is what Title IX is all about, we have to do something about it. Kill the beast. Or starve it. Or simply clip its nails. But for God’s sakes, let us do something.

Bullies called this kid gay. I doubt like hell they said “hey, you are a gay person.” The bullies probably called him a pansy, or a pole-smoker, or a fag.

The family of Dylan Theno, 18, filed the lawsuit in May 2004 against the Tonganoxie School District. The suit claimed Theno had suffered years of brutal bullying, and that school officials didn’t attempt to stop the harassment.

He got a quarter mil. From the school. For the treatment he received at the hands of bullies who, so far as the article mentions, did not work for the school. So now I have a crystal ball showing me a place that is Our Future, where people confront any & all problems with a lawsuit. We have no hope.

When I was a kid, I got picked on by bullies a lot…although I haven’t completely forgotten, that stuff mostly took place between fifth and seventh grades, not during my junior year of high school. I haven’t been sued by anyone under Title IX lately. So based on my personal experience, I have a lot of incentive to say bullies represent a big problem, and kids like Dylan Theno, and his lawyers, do not. But I’m not going to say that. Theno is a much bigger problem for our society than his tormentors.

Why do I say so? Because bullies are part of life. Life is bullies. Life is pretty much one solid, non-stop parade of figurative “bullies,” like reverse-fairy-godmothers, waving their magic wands over you. You wake up, get dressed, run downstairs and some days you’ll find yourself blessed by the fairy-godmother-bully of dead car batteries. Or maybe the fairy-godmother-bully of being-out-of-coffee will brighten your day. Or maybe you’ll get some pixie dust sprinkled on your head by the fairy-godmother-bully of “I’m the boss and I just had a fight with my wife and I’m going to take it out on you.”

I think by now every grown man who has any character at all, can see where I’m going with this. Life is a series of challenges. And looking back on it with the wisdom and lack-of-sympathy of a 39-year-old, reviewing the days I lived a full quarter century ago, I see that besides a few cold mornings on the paper route, and some lukewarm grades I earned myself by not doing the homework I was supposed to be doing, I really didn’t have any problems in life besides bullies. Life did get rough soon after that, but the point is that Dylan Theno took the one real exigency in life we can expect during those years…the only one…and played ostrich with it.

Manhood has given me many blessings over the years, things I wouldn’t trade for the three brand new Dodge Vipers Mr. Theno can now buy any time he chooses. Not just “I have a penis” manhood, but being a real man who knows how to take a lemon and use that internal resourcefulness to turn it into lemonade. Manhood hasn’t made me any money…not that I’m aware of. People who lack my manliness don’t look at me wistfully and say “Gosh, I wish I could be a real man like that Freeberg guy,” and because I’m a real man, it wouldn’t mean a whole lot to me if they did. But my manhood is priceless.

It has solved, by itself, every single problem that it ever made for me and a whole fistful of problems that it didn’t.

Nearly everything I have that’s good, I owe to my manhood, and conversely, I only owe my manhood to a tiny handful of various things. I owe it to other manly men I had the common sense to sit back & watch & observe, at an age where I didn’t have the common sense to do too much else. And I owe it to Boy Scouts. And a good chunk of what’s left over — I owe to bullies.

Bullies are therefore, to me and a whole bunch of other real men, emblematic of what it takes for our society to survive, insofar as our society needs real men to survive. Which it undoubtedly does. You see, you’re reading this blog entry on a computer invented by a real man, running software written by a real man, downloading my remarks through transmission protocols written, tested, refined and documented by real men.

The gavel that the judge brought down when Dylan Theno was handed his 250 large was invented by a real man.

“That’s five years of my life that I had to live — just depressed, angry, scared. I can never get that back,” Theno told KMBC-TV. “I was just miserable, you know. You wake up every morning, begging my parents not to make me go to school. It was just, I didn’t want to be there; I didn’t want to walk down those halls anymore.”

I know the feeling, kiddo. It’s part of life. And the grown-ups are pretty much unsympathetic, apparently, because they don’t have to go through it everyday like you do. And that’s true — kind of like your dad only had so much sympathy for you when you got circumcised, because it wasn’t being done to him.

And that’s kind of “wrong,” so what, now all circumcised men can go back and sue over that too?

This is crap. And you know what else is crap? Take a look at this…

Mr. Theno says he was “just miserable, you know…didn’t want to be there; I didn’t want to walk down those halls anymore.” Because the bullies were offering their opinion that he was a homosexual.

Not that I’m advocating you should let bullies determine your fashion sense.

But a man’s earrings are, so far as I understand them, a known “calling card.” If you put any weight behind my personal opinion, anyway, they definitely are. Earrings are for women and mature little girls — the message they send out from masculine earlobes ranges somewhere between “confused,” “androgenous,” “weird” and — well, let’s face it — “gay.” Having it all to do over again Mr. Theno, would it not have been a tad less drastic to simply remove that metal from your earlobes, as opposed to dropping out, getting your G.E.D., and turning our tort system upside-down?

I know it would be awfully tough for me to hear a question like that while I was cashing a check for 250 grand. But the rest of us may want to take note, there’s a sensible way & a nonsensical way to address just about anything.

Update: No new news, I was just doing some more thinking about this.

The reporter-in-the-field, on the video, makes reference to vulgar slang and I believe he used the word “epithets”. Although the exact epithets used, must be in the public record somewhere, my capability of finding them falls short of what is needed.

Why would they be relevant? Well you run through the list of them in your mind, which is what I’ve been doing, and you come to realize something. Pussy. A vagina, a feline, a homosexual male, a male exhibiting traits of a homosexual, or a male lacking masculine qualities. Sissy. A homosexual male, or a male who is not manly. Fag. A small piece of wood to be used for fuel, a matchstick, a homosexual male, or a male who is thought to not be very cool. Homo. A homosexual, or a guy that other guys just wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with. Pansy or Pansie. A homosexual male, or a male who, if you go out to do some fun stuff with this guy, will put the kibosh on it — either by not being tough enough to do it, or by threatening to snitch.

My point is — and this is based on what I know, which is not comprehensive — it’s not only within the realm of consideration, but likely, that the bullies had the intent of calling Theno something besides a homosexual. I say likely because based on what I now know about Mr. Theno, the subordinate definitions of these words apply to him, either in fact or in appearance.

In fact, I honestly can’t think of a single word you can apply to a homosexual, besides “homosexual,” that would not also be used to describe an adolescent male showing desultory development of the desirable adult male attributes.

I have an abundance of reasons to believe that this applies to Dylan Theno, or did apply to him during high school. I have no reason to doubt this. As a matter of law, I would expect this would become relevant if Theno’s standing to sue is founded on the Title IX anti-discrimination legislation. I’m not a lawyer, but if I was inclined to bet on the school’s appeal, this would have an effect on the amount I was wagering.

None of which will probably arouse much interest from anybody at all. Except for Dylan Theno himself, the school district, and Dodge Viper dealers. All you Viper dealers, if you see Mr. Theno on your lots, maybe you should make an appointment for him to come back in a few months after the appeals have been exhausted. You might be glad later.

Informing Us NOT

I was listening to the Rush Replay like any good American, and at the top of the hour the station put out one of those news-bumpers by Reuters or AP or something…think it was AP. Not sure. Can’t find a link for this.

The big news event that inspired the news bumper was that crude oil hit $67 a barrel. That’s just a simple fact, but one of the tangents that the news-bite-writer thought was really important was that “Regular Unleaded” was now demanding as much as “three dollars a gallon in some cities.”

I live in Sack-O-Tomatoes. Capital of California. Home of spoiled-brat yuppies with hummers that get three miles a gallon, pretending they’re living in Mayberry USA when they’re really living in the middle of a rocky desert. We never saw a regulation we didn’t like, so with the difficulties of trucking any product around this state, whatever gas costs anywhere, it probably costs that much here. I’m forking out $2.60 to $2.70 for premium…I’m thinking if I had to fill up this morning, it would probably run me about $2.75 or so. That is 92 octane. The anchor babe gave me the impression she was talking about 87.

Last night, the spike in crude oil inspired the posting of an apparently-unsourced “Chart of the Day” on one of my favorite stomping grounds, FARK. It’s hard to glean much useful information out of the chart, although it appears the left side of it squares with my memory: Carter messed up the market big time, Reagan fixed it again. (Hey as an aside, why is that?) Adjust for inflation, and the curve of the graph by the late-seventies-early-eighties leaps upward toward three 2003 dollars per gallon.

The thread underneath this graph is pretty informative. Some guy in Houston, TX says he paid .90 back in ’95. A young lady in Virginia says she was paying .55 to .60 in ’97. Probably the best piece of information was the inclusion of this link to all kinds of gas-price graphs, up to the beginning of August, all kinds of regions and all kinds of grades.

But the point of my complaint, is this:

How exactly am I supposed to use, in my everday life, this news tidbit of “three dollars in some cities.” If I hop in my car and drive a couple hours, I can reach the ocean. There are gas pumps out there, some of them with miles and miles and miles of empty road ahead of them, with no other gas pumps out there, anywhere. Perhaps if I take the time to head out that way today, I will find a pump that demands three dollars a gallon. I’m not willing to bet much that it would fall short of that.

So top-of-hour News Lady, is this your “some cities”? Yes? It is? Well then report THAT. Not so much because it would be truth-in-advertising — although it would, because it would disclose that the problem isn’t as bad as you’re trying to make it sound. But maybe I am heading that way today, and if that’s the case, this would be news I could use.

This kind of irritates me, because the news agencies are supposed to be servicing US. I base that on the fact that without people listening to them, they have nothing to do. But they don’t exist to provide services to “real people”, they provide services to power-brokers and movers-and-shakers who want us panicked at certain times and all-calmed-down at certain times.

Meanwhile, since “some cities” sounds like where I live…since it’s a big city, with lots of people who have reason to be here, but charges up the yin-yang for gas…I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a local signpost that says three dollars a gallon. I’ll bet the zenith is going to be $2.789 premium.

Update: I was off by a dime. Premium unleaded is $2.899, Plus is $2.799 and Regular is $2.699.

Top-Of-News-Hour-Lady says it is $3.00 “in some cities” which is thirty cents a gallon higher. So the question remains…where is this? And…why, assuming I care, is it up to me ask the question to find out when I’m supposed to have been informed?

To Be Explained

Intelligent Design is scientifically untestable. You can, however, make a lot of progress toward debunking it, at least in my eyes, if you can find explanations for the following:

• “Evolution” appears to have given me the ability to use microscopic muscles to hoist the fur on my arms, neck, back and legs when my skin gets cold or when I become apprehensive about something, thus giving me “goosebumps”. What evolutionary purpose is there for this, and more importantly, how did evolution accomplish this?
• My ‘nards dangle down toward my knees on a hot day but if I go swimming in a cold pool they get yanked into my pelvis and my scrotum gets thick and hard. I can see the evolutionary purpose for this, since without a climate-regulating device I’m less likely to reproduce. How did this come to be through the evolutionary process? “Natural selection,” as I understand it, dictates there was an ancient race of humans who lacked the testicle-shrinking function and they eventually died off — without intelligence at work, how do you develop a feature like this?
• My eyes have lashes that deflect contaminants from my eyeballs. This is most desirable for my comfort but doesn’t appear to be necessary for my survival or for my ability to reproduce. How and why did evolution develop this?
• Thousands of years ago when life expectancy was much lower, how much would it have been lowered if our glands were too stupid to secrete thicker mucus when we got sick? How does natural selection go about determining my snot is thick green when I have a cold, but globby & transparent if I’m only suffering from allergies?
• Why does my hair grow the most thickly where my brain is? Was there an ancient race of bald humans who died off from brain-freeze as natural selection worked its course?
• If my feet were not smart enough to develop callouses when I spend several days walking barefoot over rough dirt, it occurs to me that I’d be able to survive just fine and reproduce just fine. How did natural selection come to develop that feature?
• My brain has the ability to isolate fairly complicated thought processes, to the extent that my “fingers” appear to “know” how to press these keys without my looking at them or consciously thinking about them. It should be noted that knowing how to type, appears to have very little to do with being attractive to potential mates — so what has this to do with survival of the species? How did natural selection develop this?
• How did natural selection give my lips the ability to chap on a really cold day?
• If our sex drives existed solely as evolutionary mechanisms to ensure that our species can continue, rather than as a gift from a Higher Power, would we not be drawn to each other only because of fertility or tell-tale clues for same? Why do “hot” women with “moves,” big hair and large gold earrings, look so much more appealing to me than fertile-Myrtles? Why do men who “shake it up” look better to women, than men who are simply virile?
• Speaking of sex, wouldn’t we propagate just fine, in any era, if we had the same drive to copulate as we do to wipe our noses? Scratch our asses? Urinate and defecate? Do that nose-pinching thing we do when we’re really tired? Yawn? Sneeze? Let out a really good-sized fart? It’s not like we don’t do those things often enough, cradle-to-grave, to get our seed scattered, considering the hypothetical that this was what it took to do it. Why does sex have to be so much fun? Seems like a gift, you know.
• There are some species of snake that eat their young. If we can develop such amazing features only to ensure continuing survival of our species, can’t the snakes develop the “feature” of not eating their children? If that would cause an imbalance, why can’t they develop the “feature” of not laying so many eggs at once?
• Why is it that no species of animal with a natural predator, ever seems to evolve to the point that it has all the features needed to make itself “un-huntable” and remove itself from the food chain? If a fish can evolve to grow a luminous appendage out of its forehead to attract other fish, can’t the other fish evolve to the extent that they swim away from it instead of toward it?
• Why do little boys think farts are funny?
• How come little girls don’t?
• If humans are simply ancillary denizens of a massive ecosystem filled with doe-eyed otters being munched by killer whales, doe-eyed seagulls being munched by ospreys, doe-eyed bunny-rabbits being munched by foxes, doe-eyed gazelles being munched by cheetahs, doe-eyed fish being munched by bears, doe-eyed krill being munched by right whales, doe-eyed goats being munched by pit bulls, doe-eyed rats being munched by snakes, doe-eyed snakes being munched by mongooses, doe-eyed pizza parlor customers being blown up by terrorists and doe-eyed terrorists being blown up by stinger missiles — with no Higher Power at work, therefore, no will of that Higher Power to be respected — just how outraged can I possibly get that some people are voluntarily working for six dollars an hour instead of seven?

Things I Know

My mind’s made up that these things are so, although why they are, is something of which I’m not always entirely certain.

1. Very few people who have four-wheel drive have any reason to expect they’ll need it. Ever.
2. For every man who maintains his opinion because of preponderance of evidence, nine more maintain theirs simply because they’re already on record and want to stay consistent.
3. Mercy is the opposite of justice.
4. Most of us want to be capitalists on payday, and Marxists on the day before.
5. It takes a lot of maturity to keep your silence on an important decision, simply because you recognize it belongs to someone else.
6. Initiating or maintaining a verbal conversation across a parking lot is a sign of diminished intelligence.
7. A lot of what passes for bad news in a technological society, wouldn’t be discussed in an agricultural one because it would be a waste of time.
8. It is hard to get people to argue about private matters, but easy if you can somehow turn them into public matters.
9. International disputes, like any other problem, can be postponed indefinitely and this always seems to make them bigger.
10. Men can’t see dirt and women don’t know how to work one of those itty-bitty cheap can openers.
11. I can no more trust the man who tells me a thing is so, but not what I should think about it, than I can trust the man who tells me what I should think, and can’t explain why.
12. The word “should” rolls off our tongues easily when we talk about another man’s purse.
13. When a man says childbirth can’t possibly hurt that much, childless women are quick to anger while mothers laugh with him.
14. The brain is not the only part of you that has a tough time absorbing arguments you don’t like. When you read such things the words seem blurry. When you hear them the syllables run together.
15. It’s hard to be truthful to others that you’re worried about something. Often, it’s hard to be truthful to yourself that you’re not.
16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.
17. A man may not kill a fly for a cause he believes is right; but he might do terrible things for a cause he believes is righteous.
18. A pretty woman notices men noticing her long before the men notice themselves noticing her, even if the men honestly don’t know if she noticed them noticing her.
19. Beware the Government-Entertainment Complex, for the power to surround a weak-minded man with the same message in several directions, is the power to tell him what to think.
20. An effort to silence an idea doesn’t make an idea wrong, but it doesn’t make it right either. When people tell you to shut up they may be afraid of the truth you speak, but it’s also likely you’re making an ass out of yourself.
21. Caution is fitting for the poor man who relies on an argument that would crumble if he were wealthy; and it’s good for the wealthy man who convinces himself with an rationale that would dissipate if he were poor. If you take your life in your hands by the things you notice and the way you think, you’re probably doing it right. If not, then maybe you’re not.
22. Leadership is the presentation of answers before your following has fully absorbed the questions. Time is of the essence, for decisions are deeply offensive to the indecisive.
23. A man might be willing to bet a nickel on his opinion, but you can often quickly increase this to ten dollars simply by arguing with him.
24. A dog can pick out a master and follow him; a lemming can detect a consensus and go along with it; a monkey is capable of showing compassion to the weak; but only a human can honor a pledge.
25. A lot of tempting things get repulsive when you get too much of them. These include: conversation; beef jerky; travel; ice cream; opera; and being attractive to the opposite sex.

How To Defeat a Dowd

I have a tough time remembering the name of the publication for which columnist Maureen Dowd works — my memory key is that it is the paper known for hiring Jayson Blair to make stuff up and report it is “news”. Once again donning her robes of the High Priestess of Correct Opinions, Dowd preaches to us and instructs us on what we’re supposed to think about Cindy Sheehan, mother of Iraq casualty Casey Sheehan, and the meeting desired by the bereaved mother with President Bush.

I don’t blame people for reading Dowd, but it surprises me that anyone can read her columns ostensibly for the purpose of becoming more informed about a given situation, forming a more definite opinion based on things they have learned be true, or gathering a helpful tidbit or two they can pass on to someone else. She has the same problem as that old fossil Krugmasaurus, who works at some paper that…oh, my mistake, it’s the same one. Hmmm.

There are facts, there are opinions based on those facts, there are value-judgments, logical inferences, calls for action, calls for inaction. There is humor. Which is which? Maureen Dowd, herself, appears not to know. If she doesn’t understand the purpose of a given paragraph or sentence, why should her readers? And if we don’t know & can’t find out, why are we reading?

It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. He’s a populist who never meets people – an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to.

It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. These two sentences appear to be describing hard fact. So what exactly is it: Something known to be true, or a theory concocted to explain something previously observed? Does Maureen Dowd follow President Bush around all day, and monitor anyone & everyone with whom he comes in contact? Or does she know someone who does this? It seems unlikely. So if it isn’t the recitation of a fact, could it be…humor? How am I supposed to be using this, Ms. Dowd? It’s part of your product; if I don’t know the answer, you certainly should. If you know, please tell me, or at least give me a clue.

He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. Half of this sentence is the recitation of a fact, or the recitation of a supposed fact, which again seems difficult to assert; the other half is a statement of logical progression that seems at least somewhat reasonable. Trouble is, the U.S. Constitution requires the President to defend himself to Congress during a whole variety of events, so at least a part of this is provably false. If you really want to force the President to defend himself, you elect a hostile Congress; our electorate didn’t feel like doing that, so perhaps by doing the next-best-thing — writing about it, when you can’t get your agenda passed at the ballot box — what Dowd is doing here is telling us once again what a bunch of stupid dolts we are.

He’s a populist who never meets people – an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to. Okay, now this must be a joke. Jokes are fine, but again, how much of this column is a joke? Just this sentence, or the entire thing? How am I supposed to be using your product Maureen?

You know, if I didn’t know better I’d swear this was just an exercise in literary masturbation; pointless, feel-good stuff designed to make me feel satisfied if I shared the same prejudices as Maureen Dowd, which unfortunately, I don’t. That’s a little disturbing, because if the facts were on the side of your prejudices, you wouldn’t need to stroke-off your audience to keep them agreeing with you. You could simply let them go about their lives, offering concrete, provable facts, and the opinions based on reasonable inferences derived from those facts. Completely and deliberately losing track of the barrier between those inferences, and humor, would be an unnecessary exercise.

The Bush team tried to discredit “Mom” by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W.

It’s kind of sad in a telling way, that for those who wish to defeat Maureen Dowd intellectually can do so most effectively by simply researching what she reports. It turns out if you take the time to find out what she’s talking about, not only is Dowd’s point discredited, but Cindy Sheehan’s campaign doesn’t look too hot either. Furthermore, it doesn’t appear “The Bush team” had much to do with reporting this unless you count Drudge as being part of the Bush team.

It’s looking kind of bad. Cindy Sheehan has already met with George W. Bush. I’m taking it as a given that some people have lost children in Iraq, perhaps more than one, and have yet to meet with the President once. So that poses a problem; there are many things to suggest that the purpose of this second meeting is to make the President look bad, and that’s a second problem.

The third problem? Well Ms. Sheehan’s inconsistencies are just downright disturbing. Here’s what she said following the meeting last year, in the third month after her son unfortunately became a casualty.

“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis…I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.”

For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.”

It’s kind of bad when the flavor of a story as reported by an editorialist, goes a hundred-and-eighty degrees against the flavor the story has when you just look into things yourself and find out what’s really going on. Maureen Dowd doesn’t want to tell us what’s going on, she just wants to tell us what to think.

It gets worse. Second-to-last paragraph, Dowd dutifully advises us that

Selectively humane, Bush justified his Iraq war by stressing the 9/11 losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire freedom when his weapons of mass destruction rationale vaporized.

And that’s provably false. Links to Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations Security Council before the invasion of Iraq, are vanishing from the Internet like milk duds before Rosie O’Donnell. But the State Department has kept a copy online, in which the rationale is concluded with the following:

And, friends, this has been a long and a detailed presentation and I thank you for your patience, but there is one more subject that I would like to touch on briefly, and it should be a subject of deep and continuing concern to this Council: Saddam Hussein’s violations of human rights.

Underlying all that I have said, underlying all the facts and the patterns of behavior that I have identified, is Saddam Hussein’s contempt for the will of this Council, his contempt for the truth, and, most damning of all, his utter contempt for human life. Saddam Hussein’s use of mustard and nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988 was one of the 20th century’s most horrible atrocities. Five thousand men, women and children died. His campaign against the Kurds from 1987 to ’89 included mass summary executions, disappearances, arbitrary jailing and ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of some 2,000 villages.

He has also conducted ethnic cleansing against the Shia Iraqis and the Marsh Arabs whose culture has flourished for more than a millennium. Saddam Hussein’s police state ruthlessly eliminates anyone who dares to dissent. Iraq has more forced disappearance cases than any other country — tens of thousands of people reported missing in the past decade.

Nothing points more clearly to Saddam Hussein’s dangerous intentions and the threat he poses to all of us than his calculated cruelty to his own citizens and to his neighbors. Clearly, Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him.

So whoops, we did it again. You go check out the material upon which the Dowd opinion is based, and you find the Dowd opinion is utterly unsustainable. Dowd is either ignorant, or else instructing us on what to think with the express wish that we should not take the time to find out what she’s talking about. Either way, it’s difficult to use the product she’s provided in a progressive way; the facts upon which it is based, are provably false. In this case, nobody invented an ulterior motive of human rights when the WMD justification “vaporized,” the humanitarian intentions were there from Day One. That’s just the way it is.

I find it interesting that Colin Powell, and the Bush Administration, have been subsequently embarrassed by this testimony. They were put in that position because Secretary Powell structured his presentation soundly: Things we know, things we conclude from what we know, things we think we must do based on the things we have concluded. Each and every little statement falls neatly within one category — not two or more — and there is no subject change via the insertion of inappropriate jocularity.

Because of that, Secretary Powell’s logic was crystal clear to anyone who bothered to pay attention, and thus left open to assault. Ultimately, the court of public opinion held the administration accountable. That, it would appear, is a little bit too much heat for the Dowd kitchen. She can’t tell me, or won’t tell me, why she thinks my President talks to brush all day.

I’m glad that our elected representatives were held to account for the things they thought they knew but didn’t really quite know. But does this do us any good, if the journalists who work for our nation’s supposed “Paper of Record” are not held to the same standard?

Intelligent Design

I notice that the hot new Talking Point from the Democrats is that Intelligent Design (ID) should not be taught in our classrooms because it is “scientifically untestable”. I do not know if it is a focus-group tested phrase or not, but I’ve been picking up on it for awhile when I argue with liberals about it in the chat rooms, and I see lately it has apparently begun to trickle-up to the liberal-leaning Peter Schagg of the Sacramento Bee (link requires registration).

The argument that evolution should be taught in classrooms but ID shouldn’t because the latter is “scientifically untestable” is one that has sufficient merit to be discussed somewhat, although it doesn’t convince me. However, it hasn’t escaped my notice that there is a fundamental shift taking place in scientific thought & methodology here. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, the way liberals would like our classrooms to work, is fundamentally different from the way they worked when I had to attend them. Their monkey-ladder claim that “this is the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t square with my recollection at all.

I recall my science teacher(s) instructing us on how to differentiate fact from theory, how to prove something, and how to refute something. They were very specific about it, and none of them said anything to the effect of “you shouldn’t argue one way or another on a theory if it is ‘untestable’.” The reason should be obvious. What makes a theory untestable? Is it untestable by abstract concept, in which case it is guaranteed to be forever untestable? Or is it simply the limits of current technology? Should you decide one way or the other, how do you prove that?

No, the only rule that was ever handed to me about this was quite different. It was iron-clad, self-proving, and it was a singular rule, with a great reason for not being included with a bunch of other rules: You shouldn’t dismiss a theory until it has been definitively refuted. The reason for this, too, should be obvious. Dismissing theories that haven’t been proven to be false, contaminates your pursuit of the truth. It leaves you in a position where subsequently, you’ll be unable to distinguish between a bad data, and an enigma.

Let’s take the case of the geocentric universe. In centuries past, this could have been held to be proven, and was, because the notion of a heliocentric universe was “scientifically untestable”. Liberals today, then, by implication applaud this conclusion. Upon the invention of a suitably powerful telescope, you would then have to reconcile the apparent “zig zag” motion of the planets relative to each other throughout the year, with this other thing you “know”: They are moving around the earth, and thus around our vantage point. Planets like to dance the hokey pokey? And then there is parallax. Celestial Body A is fourteen angular seconds away from Celestial Body B in March, but eight seconds from it in October; since we “know” we live in a geocentric universe, why is this?

You would then be left to scramble around in search of some universal calendar which acts on all heavenly bodies depending on the seasons which are based on the earth. Furthermore, you’d be going down this bunny-trail until it was somehow proven that extraterrestrial bodies are insulated from & acting completely independently from earth-based seasons. Onward you would stumble, until ultimately forced to re-think this geocentric concept that you had previously “proven” to be true.

But to be consistent, you have to refute what was previously proven, while continuing to discard everything else that’s “untestable.” How long is that going to take?

So this new rule our liberals are trying to make for “science,” doesn’t quite work for me.

There is also the matter of consistency. Man-made global warming (MMGW), contrary to the rumors being promulgated through the editorial columns, currently qualifies in every sense I’m aware of as “scientifically untestable”. If MMGW doesn’t qualify for this, the idea that it can do our climate significant harm over the next several centuries, certainly does.

In fact, based on how I have seen the MMGW theory evolve just over the last couple of decades, I have the impression that it is defined and periodically re-defined based on what cannot be scientifically tested. Are the leftists willing to apply this new rule for science across the board, then? Because I would personally look forward to them leaving me alone for awhile on MMGW, and I expect some of the most powerful Democrats to soon offer President Bush their congratulations for refusing to approve the Kyoto Protocol. All in the spirit of disregarding whatever is scientifically untestable, after all.

Um no, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to do this.

This new dictum not only flies in the face of good science, it also contradicts basic common sense that us commoners use in our everyday lives. Why, anyone who’s sat down to play a game of poker, Mastermind or Clue understands it is far more important to separate what is proven from what is not, than it is to separate what’s “testable” from what is not. It reminds me of a timeless parable about a man leaving a bar late at night and encountering another man who was desperately looking in a ditch for something; it turned out the unfortunate soul had lost his watch, so the first man decided to help him.

After awhile of fruitless searching, the first man asked the second man where he was standing when he noticed his watch was gone — imagine his surprise when the second man pointed clear across the street! The first man was incredulous; “Why in the world are we looking here then?” The second man said “the light is much better over here than it is over there.”

Good science defines what is known & unknown based on what is learned, not based on what can be done by the tools at hand.

You Missed A Spot, Bitch

Apologies to Michael Savage, I’m going to rip off something he said that I thought was funny as hell when he said it. He really did appear to be completely freakin’ oblivious to what a great line he thought up off the top of his head, though. The line for which I’m going to give him credit was being applied to, I think, Tereeeeza Heinz Kerry. Anyway, I know exactly where I want to direct this. Stand by. Ready? Here goes.

Jennifer Wilbanks, a.k.a. the “Runaway Bride,” may have engaged in some poor judgment and she probably did inconvenience people, and while we all agree she has some mental problems to sort out, if you just take the time to probe beneath the confusing, unstable, and downright nutty exterior…hard as it may be to believe, underneath, you’re going to find an evil horrible witch.

There, I think that just about sums it up.

Jennifer Wilbanks has been sentenced to 120 hours of community service, and has already fulfilled 16 hours of it by mowing lawns around government buildings. This is good news. Walk out on a huge wedding and lie to the cops…spend three weeks cutting grass. We should really be thankful that lying can have an actual consequences such as this nowadays. In fact, ten years from now if it works some other way, we shouldn’t be surprised. I see a future where it just doesn’t matter worth a damn. In the future, it will be protected by the First Amendment, after all, isn’t false speech, speech? We have thousands of lawyers ready to file an Amicus Curiae to exactly that effect. But that’s down the road. This is now.

Let us not forget, the lies Jennifer Wilbanks told were not harmless lies. They hurt people, and they had the potential — still have the potential today — to cause much worse harm. If you’re a cop, how do you later-on conduct an energetic, diligent search for the next missing woman with Wilbanks’ little stunt in your rear view mirror?

Word has reached me that there are a lot of people questioning why this story is still being followed. Apparently, it’s in their way when they’re looking for something else. Ahh…hear ya go.

You people suck. You hear me? Your attitude is kind of like watching a fully-restored vintage Ford Model A tootling along in the right lane beside you, and muttering “those damn things are in the way everyplace I look.”

Get a sense of perspective. This is a story about malicious lies being uncovered, and the people who tell them having to bear the consequences. I really hate to sound like an old fart here…knocking on the door of actually becoming one, and all…but it needs to be said. You don’t see that everyday now. Odds are better-than-average, the day’s going to come when it’ll be a “remember when” thing. Can’t make those liars feel bad by insinuating they have any less virtue than people who chronically tell the truth, I mean hey, it’s just a lifestyle choice right?

But I understand some of you might still wish the story went away, and/or, have sympathy for the rich bitch who still has to mow lawns for another 104 hours. Okay then. Before putting the story down to get back to your American Idol whatever-it-is, you might want to click this link to refresh your memory about what kind of lies Jennifer told. The real damage starts being done toward the bottom of page 2:

While jogging, she was grabbed by two individuals, a “Hispanic male” and a “White female,” in a van and thrown in the back of it. Her hands were then tied with rope. The individuals placed her on the right side on the floor of the van and made her face the back door. The male then began driving while the female stayed in the back of the van with Jennifer. After approximately thirty minutes, the male pulled the van off to the side of the road and shut the vehicle off. The female took off her pants and underwear but left her shirt on. The female then pulled down Jennifer’s pants and underwear, performed oral sex on her, and digitally penetrated her vagina. The female then moved over Jennifer’s head and told her to perform oral sex on her. At the same time, the male had gone to the back of the van. He then removed his pants and placed his penis into Jennifer’s vagina. According to Jennifer, she performed oral sex on the female until she “had an orgasm.” The male pulled his penis from Jennifer’s vagina once the female had an orgasm. Jennifer was not sure if the male ejaculated. The female and male then dressed themselves and pulled up Jennifer’s underwear and pants. The male then moved to the front of the vehicle, and began to drive again.

Just remember: She is not damaged goods, although it would serve her right if she was. She’ll get herself that Prince Charming, and it’s likely to be the poor slob she ditched three months ago, the one everybody thought was a murderer.

I don’t understand why so much of our news is important, until we find out it has something to do with a lie, then we want to go onto the next thing. Liars hurt us, over and over again. I would venture to say most of the serious problems we have in the world, have to do with people telling lies to fatten their wallets or save their own asses. Lies about what they did. Lies about what happened to them. Lies about what they intend to do.

Screw you, you “I’m so tired of this story” types. Go click on something else. I wanna make sure she pays her due, and that the world knows she had to. This is the kind of thing that makes a persuasive argument for bringing back stocks in the public square.

Hotel to Open Women Only Section

A new section of the five-star Grange City Hotel in central London will be opened with a strict no-men-allowed policy, in an effort to appeal to a market of travelling women who are afraid of men, suspicious of men, tired of men hitting on them, find men to be exhausting, want to be able to tell their insecure husbands that they can’t see any men, or for whatever reason just plain don’t want to be around men.

Even room service staff will be female in the seven-storey building that will open at the end of August.

The Grange Hotel Group offered the service after research showed half its customers were women, many of whom felt vulnerable when travelling alone.

While civil libertarians on both sides of “The Pond” have instructed us to show increased concern & get generally uppity over Tony Blair’s new policy of deporting clerics & other loudmouths who deliberately incite others to violence, said civil libertarians have been generally silent, calm and pliable on this assault on the concept of equal-protection and anti-discrimination. Scientists are at a complete loss as to explain why, although more grant money might help.

Okay, those last two sentences I may have made up.

As a man, I don’t see anything wrong with it at all. We all know men get a charge of out of hitting on travelling women, especially when you think you have a chance, but we all know if the woman’s not interested it’s no picnic for her, and who the hell wants to hit on a travelling woman who would rather not be around any men at all, let alone you. Besides, you don’t have a civil liberty to hit on women who don’t want you around.

I say, let’em go ahead with the pink hotel, with an eye toward bringing the practice over here. If us yanks build entire women-only hotel wings, maybe we’ll be one step closer to that gentleman’s-club with the plush leather recliners, glasses of warm brandy, cigars, fireplaces, spitoons and dancing girls. Maybe we could even have a gentleman’s-club in Sacramento.

Um, like, yeah.

I did manage to get this photograph of the parking garage behind the women’s-only wing of the Grange City Hotel:

I Can’t Find Them

I’m going to need some help from my readers on this one. Both of them. Heh.

I’m including this week’s Townhall article from Mike S. Adams in it’s entirety, because I can’t find a way to take meaningful excerpts from it and, well, what can I say it’s just delicious. He’s picking on feminists again, specifically the Appalachian State University Women’s Center.

Dear ASU Women�s Center (womenscenter@appstate.edu):

Hello ladies. I am writing to initiate negotiations for a legal settlement that I think will be in the best interests of ASU feminists. When I saw your website, I felt immediately sexually harassed as I read the following quotes:

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” – Gloria Steinem

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” – Charlotte Whitton

“Sure God created man before woman. But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.” – Anonymous

“If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?” – Gloria Steinem

“Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women.” – Nicole Hollander

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. A woman must do what he can’t.” – Rhonda Hansoms

“Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.” -Maryon Pearson

According to the examples of sexual harassment listed on the ASU website, you have clearly sexually harassed me and, in fact, every other man who has logged on to the Women�s Center website. For example, ASU claims that �telling racist, sexist, homophobic jokes that demean people because of their protected class membership� is sexual harassment.

The only way that your website�s feminist quotes cannot be considered harassment is by excluding men as a �protected class.� However, the ASU website also says that sexual harassment can take the form of simply �stating that people of one sex are inferior to people of the other sex or can�t perform their jobs as well as a result of their sex; labeling people and jobs due to sex or other protected class membership.� The word �or� may be your biggest problem.

As you can clearly see, this is an open and shut case. You are all – according to your own examples � guilty of sexual harassment. And I am obviously a victim. Of course, I now want what all victims want. In other words, I want a lot of your money.

So, please, make sure that you send a check to the mailing address posted at the bottom of my website (www.DrAdams.org). And make sure that the amount is at least six digits. Otherwise, we may have to go to court and risk a lot of nasty media exposure.

While you are deciding on the amount of money to send, let me also give you a few questions to ponder:

1. Did it ever occur to you that your website is supported with North Carolina tax dollars? In other words, did it occur to you that the state is paying you to sexually harass men?

2. Does your use of the concept of a �protected class� discriminate against men by seeking to protect only women?

3. Or does your double standard in the application of harassment policies really reflect a form of sexism against women? Perhaps you are really suggesting that women are emotionally inferior to men and, thus, need special protection from things that might upset them. Wouldn�t such a view contradict the quotes listed on your website?

I look forward to your answers to these questions. But, to be honest, I�m really looking forward to getting that check. My Ann Coulter Action Figure really needs some new cloths and I haven�t bought a gun in weeks.

Mike S. Adams is presently recovering from his ordeal by watching the new Jessica Simpson video and eating chocolate ice cream. He plans to resume work soon.

Now I understand the Internet is not a static thing, but for cryin’ out loud this is today’s column. Today’s. I figured if I could click my mousey fast enough, I could zip on over to the website myself and see what the hubbub was about. Alas, in the clearly called-out “Quotes” section, there is a ‘fessing-up that “this page has been updated in an effort to stay consistent with our mission, which is ‘to enhance awareness of the challenges facing women on this campus and in this society, and to promote, support, and celebrate the diverse Appalachian State University women’s community.'”. Dr. Adams, to the best I can see, is given no credit for the cited epiphany. Perhaps it is unrelated to his recent letter, but the update must have been subsequent to it, for all I can find are the following:

“Well-behaved women rarely make history.” – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“I think the key is for women not to set any limits.” – Martina Navratilova

“Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“My advice to the women’s clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.” – William Allen White

“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.” – Mary Wollstonecraft

“Become the change you want to see.” – Oprah Winfrey

“You can’t wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.” – Pat Schroeder

“It’s gonna be a long hard drag, but we’ll make it.” – Janis Joplin

“Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut her up with cookies.” – Anonymous

Not a word about men. Just nine quotes about women; two about higher goals, two about optimism, three about being obnoxious, one about being stubborn and one about being fat. Hey yeah, every woman I’ve ever met wants to be known for these things. She wants everyone she’s ever met, to get together and remark “that is one goal-setting, optimistic, poorly-behaved, hell-raising, chubby pastry-sucking battleaxe.” There is perhaps room for improvement in incorporating these quotes with a productive vision, but they don’t invite a lawsuit as far as I can tell.

I’d say any of you male chauvinist pigs out there who think women don’t know their way around the innernets, had better re-think a thing or two. When litigation’s in the air, looks like the college-educated ones can strip things off a web server pretty quick.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm… II

As the New York Times has begun sniffing around in sealed adoption records in an effort to dig up dirt on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and the whole sorry spectacle dances around in front of my sites yelling “blog me, please blog me!” I have steadfastly refused. Why? Because the story is not that editors at the Times, and the leftists they represent, are sinking to lower and lower depths in an effort to derail the nomination, for that is old news. The story is in the depths to which the sinking sinks. It’s like Old Rose in that reprehensible Titanic movie tossing the fabled Hope Diamond into the Atlantic — we know the bauble is in the water, what could be news, would be that it has reached a hundred fathoms…two hundred…four hundred.

When we wake up in the morning and find it a mile beneath the waves, when the previous night it was submerged only half that, I see that as back-of-the-paper kind of news, not front-page-above-the-fold news. The damn thing can’t float after all, and it can’t stay still, so there’s only one other direction. The Left will remain in free-fall until something stops them. Point is, their rate of descent is rapid; I can’t get in front of this and I don’t wish to try. I’m a spectator like anyone else. “Tracking” the depth at which we can find it at any given moment, is a job best left to other more talented commentators.

As a spectator though, I have noticed a thing or two. By themselves they’re pretty mundane; tied together they make for something that could be of interest. I should hasten to add this involves a fair amount of reading and won’t be interesting to just anybody — in fact there is one associate justice on the Supreme Court who cannot find it newsworthy in any way, shape or form.

Item!

I have the luxury of being 39 now, which means I can have some experience watching this. Not a lot. A little tiny bit. But if I seek to submerge to some level beneath where the bauble has sunk at this precise instant, my experience does afford me one vantage point to which it has not yet sunk.

“Clarence Thomas” article at Wikipedia:

His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance. In 1975, when Thomas read Race and Economics by economist Thomas Sowell, he found an intellectual foundation for this philosophy. The book criticized social reforms by government and instead argued for individual action to overcome circumstances and adversity. Thomas later said that the book changed his life.

Raised Roman Catholic (he later attended an Episcopal church with his wife, but returned to the Catholic Church in the late 1990s), Thomas considered entering the priesthood, and briefly attended Immaculate Conception Seminary, a Catholic seminary in Missouri, where he encountered some racism. Thomas later attended College of the Holy Cross, where he co-founded the school’s Black Student Union and received an A.B., cum laude.

Thomas explored his political identity as he was growing up. He flirted with being a leftist in college, but he was subsequently influenced by the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Later, he gravitated towards conservative viewpoints.

Clarence Thomas was influenced by the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he may or may not have (but probably) picked up from the writings of Dr. Sowell.

Item!

Excerpt from Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged:

Facing the platform, his voice inflectionless and peculiarly clear, Hank Rearden answered:

“I have no defence.”

“Do you –” The judge stumbled; he had not expected it to be that easy. “Do you throw yourself upon the mercy of this court?”

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“What?”

“I do not recognise this court’s right to try me.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, this is the legally appointed court to try this particular category of crime.”

“I do not recognise my action as a crime.”

“But you have admitted that you have broken our regulations controlling the sale of your Metal.”

“I do not recognise your right to control the sale of my Metal.”

“Is it necessary for me to point out that your recognition was not required?”

“No. I am fully aware of it and I am acting accordingly.”

He noted the stillness of the room. By the rules of the complicated pretence which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.

“Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?” asked the judge.

“No. I am complying with the law – to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defence is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself.”

“A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognised by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it.”

“Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle – the principle of the public good.”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to e their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

A group of seats at the side of the courtroom was reserved for the prominent visitors who had come from New York to witness the trial. Dagny sat motionless and her face showed nothing but a solemn attention, the attention of listening with the knowledge that the flow of his words would determine the course of her life. Eddie Willers sat beside her. James Taggart had not come. Paul Larkin sat hunched forward, his face thrust out, pointed like an animal’s muzzle, sharpened by a look of fear now turning into malicious hatred. Mr. Mowen, who sat beside him, was a man of greater innocence and smaller understanding; his fear was of a simpler nature; he listened in bewildered indignation and he whispered to Larkin, “Good God, now he’s done it! Now he’ll convince the whole country that all businessmen are enemies of the public good!”

“Are we to understand,” asked the judge, “that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?”

“I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

“What … do you mean?”

“I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.”

“Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognise its right to do so?”

“Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes – by refusing to buy my product.”

“We are speaking of … other methods.”

“Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters – and I recognise it as such.”

“Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself.”

“I said that I would not defend myself.”

“But this is unheard of! Do you realise the gravity of the charge against you?”

“I do not care to consider it.”

“Do you realise the possible consequences of your stand?”

“Fully.”

“It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Impose it.”

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. “This is unprecedented,” he said.

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no … yes … that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a –” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defence!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen,” said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

For the uninitiated, look at this carefully. Ayn Rand wrote a great novel with a huge following. People like me, who like Ayn Rand, do not like the way she writes dialog. We finish fifty pages of this stuff and we think “man, my ass hurts!” and we’re peeved that we spent half an hour reading something that should have been over & done in about five minutes.

She was terrible. George Lucas has more business writing dialog than Ayn Rand ever did. Seriously.

But unlike Lucas, Rand had a style that remains worth inspecting because she uses the style of speaking to differentiate — in a juvenile way, I grant you — heroes from villains. Such an awkward machinery is what we should expect when we read novels written by those who think themselves philosophers first & novelists second. Skim through the excerpt. See all those sentences in quotes with exclamation marks at the end? Those are spoken by villains. Ayn Rand heroes don’t yell. They don’t pause. They don’t have bangs on the ends of their sentences or …ellipses in the middle. They know everything, too. When Ayn Rand heroes ask a question, it is rhetorical. Rand villains exist in a state of perpetual confusion. They never know what to say next. An intellectual argument from a Rand villain is usually nothing more than a European-style “must ought should must gotta should” demand, heavily seasoned with a lot of gulping and gasping. Rand villains are about as stupid as…well, about as stupid as Dukes of Hazzard villains.

So look that over. Not every single word, but just note the flow of the conversation. Got it? Good.

Item!

Senate hearing on confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Friday, October 11, 1991:

SEN. HEFLIN:
Now, you, I suppose, have heard Ms. — Professor Hill’s — Ms. Hill — Anita F. Hill testify today.

JUDGE THOMAS:
No, I haven’t.

SEN. HEFLIN:
You didn’t listen?

JUDGE THOMAS:
No, I didn’t. I’ve heard enough lies.

SEN. HEFLIN:
You didn’t listen to her testimony at all?

JUDGE THOMAS:
No, I didn’t.

SEN. HEFLIN:
On television?

JUDGE THOMAS:
No, I didn’t. I’ve heard enough lies. Today is not a day that in my opinion is high among the days in our country. This is a travesty. You spent the entire day destroying what it has taken me 43 years to build, and providing a forum for that.

SEN. HEFLIN:
Well, Judge Thomas, you know, we have a responsibility, too. And as far as I’m involved, I had nothing to do with Anita Hill coming here and testifying. We’re trying to get to the bottom of this, and if she is lying, then I think you can help us prove that she was lying.

JUDGE THOMAS:
Senator, I am incapable of proving the negative. It did not occur.

SEN. HEFLIN:
Well, if it did not occur, I think you are in a position, certainly your ability to testify to in effect to try to eliminate it from people’s minds.

JUDGE THOMAS:
Senator, I didn’t create it in people’s minds. This matter was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a confidential way. It was then leaked last weekend to the media. I did not do that. And how many members of this committee would like to have the same scurrilous, uncorroborated allegations made about him, and then leaked to national newspapers, and then be drawn and dragged before a national forum of this nature to discuss those allegations that should have been resolved in a confidential way.

SEN. HEFLIN:
Well I certainly appreciate your attitude toward leaks. I happen to serve on the Senate Ethics Committee, and it’s been a sieve.

JUDGE THOMAS:
Well, but it didn’t leak on me. This leaked on me and it is drowning my life, my career and my integrity and you can’t give it back to me and this committee can’t give it back to me and this Senate can’t give it back to me. You have robbed me of something that can never be restored.

SEN. (unknown):
I know exactly how you feel.

SEN. HEFLIN:
Judge Thomas, one of the aspects of this is that she could be living in a fantasy world. I don’t know. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of all of these facts. But if you didn’t listen and didn’t see her testify, I think you put yourself in an unusual position. You in effect are defending yourself and basically some of us want to be fair to you, fair to her, but if you didn’t listen to what she said today, then that puts it somewhat in a more difficult task to find out what the actual facts are relative to this matter.

JUDGE THOMAS:
The facts keep changing, Senator. When the FBI visited me, the statements to this committee and the questions were one thing. The FBI’s subsequent questions were another thing, and the statements today as I received summaries of them were another thing. It is not my fault that the facts changed. What I have said to you is categorical; that any allegations that I engaged in any conduct involving sexual activity, pornographic movies, attempted to date her, any allegations, I deny. It is not true. So, the facts can change, but my denial does not. Ms. Hill was treated in a way that all my special assistants were treated: cordial, professional, respectful.

SEN. HEFLIN:
Judge, if you are on the bench and you approach a case where you appear to have a closed mind and that you are only right, doesn’t it raise issues of judicial temperament?

JUDGE THOMAS:
Senator, Senator, there is a big difference between approaching a case objectively and watching yourself being lynched. There is no comparison whatsoever.

I just think the parallel conversation flow is interesting. Whether Ayn Rand changed Justice Thomas’ life completely around, or just had a marginally seasoning influence on the way he thinks, his concurring and disseting opinions are brilliant. They are absolute masterpieces. He is a credit to the Supreme Court, and anybody who chooses to preserve the Senate’s reputation as the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” would do well to shield their eyes from what’s transcribed above, in fact, from the whole sorry episode.

However, any other bell-divers who would like to descend, like me, to the depths to which the sinking bauble is headed at breakneck speed but thus far has not yet reached, may want to look over the Thomas Hearing transcripts in their entirety.

I cannot begin to describe to those too young to have been paying attention to this at the time, the alarming level of apathy I had toward politics when these hearings started fourteen years ago. As our legislators and our media poked & prodded the Anita Hill scab into a putrid, infected boil in the coming days, I gradually developed an interest around this particular event. I made a point of listening more and more often; by the time the actual vote was held I was not only titillated, but sickened. I couldn’t believe what we had allowed our elected representatives to do to this country. I still needed Bill Clinton to come along to really show me how bad it was getting, but these hearings, on top of the House Bank Scandal, greatly impressed on me that change was needed. I was not alone. “The Year of the Woman,” 1992, could be more accurately termed “The Year of Throwing the Dirty Bastards Out.” House Bank in the lower chamber, and Thomas Hearings in the upper, undoubtedly were causative factors for this, and of course we all know by now that incumbents were no safer in the 1994 midterm elections than they were two years previous.

Our republic had become heavily diseased, and various techniques of improved mass communication were just beginning to show us what a bunch of weird old men we had put under the dome. To this day I’m convinced that the cancer is so bad that it can never be fully driven from the host, no matter what — we can only hope for some days a tiny bit less pessimistic than others, as a home-hospice patient with bone cancer can hope for a few days with a little less pain.

I want to be wrong. And who knows? Maybe the Hope Diamond will be stopped before it reaches the floor of the Atlantic, and the Roberts hearings will never get this bad. It should be noted that they’re headed in the “right” direction, though. Tomorrow, I’m sure, we will wake up to discover something even more hideous, mean-spirited and patently irrelevant had been done to keep John Roberts off the Supreme Court. The jewel is sinking, and sinking, and sinking…

Benefit of Hindsight

The following movie review for 12 Angry Men (1957) was posted today at the Internet Movie Database:

(Spoilers) I really liked the message of the movie: A lot of times things that look crystal clear at first glance, upon deeper inspection, aren’t so clear. The acting was top-notch all-around, especially with Juror #9. The product ends up being not very preachy, which is a considerable achievement given that it’s built entirely around a simple parable.

With the benefit of hindsight, though, one can see a few things about this that I personally find really disturbing.

The question that drives the movie is whether the jurors have properly awarded the defendant the benefit of any reasonable doubt, and as the climax approaches, the attention given to this reaches a fevered pitch. Left behind in the dust, is the equally critical question of whether the defendant is really guilty. There’s a scene early on when Jack Warden, the juror who just wants to get the voting over with so he can watch a ball game, meets Henry Fonda in the washroom. The last two lines in that scene discuss the possibility that the boy may be acquitted, even though he is guilty. Fonda says something to the effect of “that very well may be” or some such, and to my recollection this is the last time this possibility is even considered.

The jury may have released a murderer onto the streets. You can make the argument that with the presence of reasonable doubt, this was their job. I agree. But as Henry Fonda walks down the courthouse steps to resume his everyday life as an architect, would it really then be fitting to have the happy “a wrong has been righted” swelling-orchestra music, as our hero walks proudly among his fellow citizens with his head held high? Doubt or no, conviction or no, this kind of peace-of-mind is not lying in wait for you after your last day on a real jury. There are jurors who want it anyway, and because of that, will not convict anyone. They have seen this movie, and want to be Henry Fonda. I’ve served with them. It’s a pretty serious problem.

There is a short speech given by Fonda shortly after he is revealed to be the one juror who wants to acquit. Several times in the speech he makes the point that the defendant is poor, has had a rough background, and has been beaten up a lot. It is not entirely clear where he is going with this, since the movie is supposed to be about what is reasonable doubt, and how the doubt applies regardless of economic class. There is at least one other juror who wants to convict because the defendant is poor; does Fonda mean to say with a defendant who was wealthier, he himself would have voted to convict? That doesn’t seem likely at all. But then why bring it up? It means something to other jurors, but it isn’t supposed to mean anything to Fonda. The only way it could support any of Fonda’s arguments, is if he was making decisions based on the way those decisions made him feel about himself, rather than based on the evidence. This is something jurors aren’t supposed to do.

Four years after this movie was made, the Supreme Court defined the Exclusionary Rule in Mapp v. Ohio. So by this time, you weren’t supposed to convict anyone unless you knew they were guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, and in addition to that, if you knew too much, then you still couldn’t convict. During the sixties, conviction became such an unlikely goal even when the evidence seemed compelling, that a lot of District Attorneys refused to make arrests even though they knew a suspect posed a significant danger to society.

By the seventies, Americans were so fed-up with the “justice system failing us” that they began turning politicians out of office in bulk, hoping against hope they could fix what was broken before their own children were murdered or their wives were raped. Between Vietnam and Watergate, this was a third salvo against our fragile faith in government, and it was an erosion of our trust that we don’t talk about too much today.

What really concerns me is that a little while after this film was made, with the poorest Americans being forced to live among violent people and thus becoming increasingly interested in vigilantism, suddenly we had a huge surge in movies about “Taking the law into your own hands.” Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and countless made-for-TV projects. In summary, the pendulum swung in one direction, then a few years later, the other. Hollywood got to make money both times.

I have trouble getting completely behind this film because it’s a concentrated effort, ultimately a successful one, to get that pendulum swinging wildly. If we spent that relatively short amount of time, just fifteen years or so, leaving “revolution” out of it and reforming our justice system in baby steps, the mistakes of the past could have been avoided. I do not know if it was possible to fix what was broken back then, by doing this — convictions weren’t always carefully considered back in the 1950’s & earlier. But a lot of innocent people would be alive today if all those violent felons, in subsequent years, were arrested like they should have been.

I would say, if you’re going to serve on a jury, by all means rent this because it’s a very meticulous and passionate reminder of your civil duty, it makes some great points, and everything in this movie is highest-quality. But also on your required-viewing list would be Primal Fear, the Richard Gere movie. Better yet, watch that one last, so the final scene really sticks in your mind.

Nobody should be serving on a jury, if they can’t seriously consider the consequences of releasing people who are really guilty of violent crimes.

I Do, Until I Don’t

What in the HELL is this thing. Oh God, I hope there is no truth to it, for if there is then our species has approached the level of abject stupidity where we should just pray for some horrible nuclear or biological or astronomical accident that will just end all the misery.

AMERICAN brides are rejecting the vow to love “till death do us part” in favour of more cautious promises such as staying together “for as long as our marriage shall serve the common good”.

Hey that’s just brilliant! If you’re going to piss away someone else’s life on a sham arrangement in which you fully intend to reap all the benefits while laboring under NONE of the obligations — and hey, female-genius, who’s to say he doesn’t as well, and isn’t THAT a recipe for matrimonial success — just be up-front about it!

I gotta admit, it beats the hell out of years and years of “we gotta buy this, we gotta buy that, my credit is shit so we’ll have to do it in your name, don’t worry, with both our incomes we can barely afford the payments” followed by a smashing uppercut of “I woke up this morning and realized I’m not happy so I’m outta here, have fun paying for all this stuff, you’ll hear from my lawyer soon.” There’s something to be said for honesty.

Traditionalists say increasingly popular phrases such as “I promise to be loyal as long as love lasts” are undermining the lifelong commitment that has been at the heart of marriage since St Paul told the Corinthians a man and wife are bound together “unto the grave”.

Oh, this is just a real innovation. Being loyal. As in, not screwing anybody else. Look, when you’re re-writing your wedding vows so that you have no real commitment to each other, everybody with an ounce of intelligence knows it’s all about lying and having affairs without feeling any pang of conscience — it’s not necessary to come out & say so.

Hey…on a completely unrelated subject, what’s this?

The institution of marriage may be under stress, but the presence of gay or lesbian couples has nothing to do with it. The major source of stress on marriage and prospective married couples is an economic one. This is because while marriage has economic benefits, it also has economic costs that fewer people appear to be able or willing to accept.

Americans’ age at the time of their first marriage, for example, is at an all-time high as most people now wait until they are in their late 20s to tie the knot.

Let me translate that for you: Most men now wait until they are in their late 20s to tie the knot.

“Why Men Won’t Commit: Exploring Young Men’s Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage” is a 2002 report from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Ph.D., and David Popenoe, Ph.D., Professor of Social Sciences at Rutgers. The report can be read here, and it shows that most of the pressure to marry later in life is being placed on the man. Well, not really. It would appear more accurate to summarize the report as: Marriages are taking place less often and it’s the man’s fault for not sacrificing himself as eagerly, with cutesy spin-words like “commitment-phobic” and spin-phrases like “it is men more often than women who are accused of being ‘commitment phobic’ and dragging their feet about marriage”. Interestingly, the report echoes the “most people now wait unti they are in their late 20s to tie the not,” above, with some reputable data reporting “The median age of first marriage for men has reached 27, the oldest age in the nation�s history.”

Gee…I wonder why? Sounds like a great deal all-around, fellas. You make all the financial commitments which are enforceable in court in any state, and really last until death do you part even though the marriage probably will not; your lovely bride promises to…uh, let me get back to you on that. What a great deal!

I’m not exactly filled with confidence by Drs. Whitehead and Popenoe here. I get the impression they have a limitless drive to identify the problem, but can’t or won’t identify what could be done about it. They seem to be falling short of acknowledging what a raw deal marriage has turned into from the male point of view, instead choosing to focus on the reaction shown by the males to what has happened to marriage over time. Let’s take their executive summary apart bullet by bullet:

The ten reasons why men won�t commit are:

1. They can get sex without marriage more easily than in times past

I never understood this. Step into the bride’s shoes for just a second. Ooh, it’s the Celibacy Fairy! She has waved her magic wand and now we live in a magical society where it’s impossible for a man to get laid until he gets married! Now we can use mens’ sex-drives to pressure them to get married sooner, because without that, nothing’s happening. So I don’t have to wait as long to get me a groom!

What an unflattering motivation. Who wants to be around a guy like that for a minute or two, let alone spend years with him? Seriously.

2. They can enjoy the benefits of having a wife by cohabiting rather than marrying

Redundant with #1.

3. They want to avoid divorce and its financial risks

No shit, Sherlock. Wow, what is wrong with men today? What chicken-shits they are, they don’t want to be guaranteed broke for the rest of their lives!

You know what? I could get my butt shipped off to Iraq so I can see people blown up every hour on the hour, bullets whizzing everywhere, my socks are rotten, there’s no deoderant, towelettes are gone, water’s gone, sand everywhere, hotter than hell, I don’t know what’s around that corner and it could very well be a terrorist who wants me dead. Worst place you can be, right? With a wife and children, I’ve still got better-than-even odds that they’re taken care of. With a divorce, your financial wherewithal to do anything, including being a materially decent father, is stripped off you like a peel from a banana. With the police power of the state. All fifty states. Guaranteed.

4. They want to wait until they are older to have children

Wow, yeah, like that’s a big disaster in the making.

5. They fear that marriage will require too many changes and compromises

Taking on a partnership that entails new obligations is a huge pain in the ass. Taking on a partnership where you’re the only one with new obligations, is a terrible, lonely feeling, and it’s not the way things are supposed to be at all. There’s no upside to this.

6. They are waiting for the perfect soul mate and she hasn�t yet appeared

See #3. When a single guy meets a lady and starts to think seriously about marrying her, if he’s got a brain he’s going to think “could she possibly fleece me…could she possibly fleece me…could she possibly fleece me.” Marriage-minded men do this all the time, they just don’t say so.

Yeah, go ahead and call it “soul mate” if it makes you feel better.

7. They face few social pressures to marry

Whoops! Topic drift. You are two Ph.D.’s putting together a report. When we’ve elected you to dictators-for-life, we’ll give you a call and then you can start ruling us with an iron fist and enacting new “social pressures” to put together your utopian society.

Maybe I’ve got a personal bias here, but I don’t see much potential for fixing problems by exerting pressure on people so you can force them to commit financial suicide.

8. They are reluctant to marry a woman who already has children

Why is there any pressing need for them to? Why is it that nowadays you can’t swing a dead cat around without smacking the face of a single woman who already has children? Where did all the dads go? Did they get sucked into some parallel universe chock full of missing socks and old-fashioned diskette sleeves?

Oh wait, I forgot I should have known. She married a guy and pledged to be his wife for “as long as love lasts” or “as long as the common social good is served” or some such bullshit, and woke up one day and decided the contract was fulfilled. That’s when she became a single mom. Hey, what lucky guy wouldn’t want a prize like that?

Step right up, stud. Be the next duck in the shooting gallery.

9. They want to own a house before they get a wife

Makes sense to me. Hey, I can’t guarantee that this means he’ll keep the house if there’s a divorce…but I can practically guarantee there’ll be a divorce. Why not give it a shot?

10. They want to enjoy single life as long as they can

I love the single life I had before I got married the first time. It’s been sixteen years since the day I said good-bye to it, and not a day goes by where I don’t wonder what the hell I was thinking. If a never-before-married single guy asks me about it, you think I’m not going to tell him that? What do you think the other divorced guys are saying and doing? You think we’re keeping our mouths shut? Or lying? Or the never-before-married guys aren’t asking us?

I got a clue for you: Nobody asks more questions than an about-to-be-married, never-before-married single guy. It’s only their whole freakin’ LIFE, you know, can’t blame them for being a little inquisitive.

I’m not sure what it is about being a Ph.D. When you go to Ph.D. school they must herd you into a huge auditorium and subject you to a seminar where you are stripped of any respect at all whatsoever for male intellect. What is this expectation of self-sacrifice — self destruction — on the part of men? I can see respecting it if there’s some noble goal involved, like, a man taking a bullet for one of his own children or grandchildren. But to demand that a man trash his own life? Everything fun about that life, in addition to his financial health, his ability to accomplish material things large & small? So that some bitch with a princess-complex can get spoiled?

When did we decide that good husbands spend cash, rather than hanging onto it, to damage their own households? Cars with wipers on the headlights traded in every year or two because “it’s time”? Wedding dresses that will never be worn again? The two-month-salary rule for a wedding ring? Weekly therapy sessions where she gets her head filled with pro-divorce anti-male bullshit?

There is something sacred, when all’s said & done, about money, and something noble about keeping it in the bank. Have we forgotten? There are things you can do in life that demand money, and there are things you can do in life that do not. Raising those kids and giving them a decent start in life, falls into…and I’m not sure why, when or how we forgot this…the first of those two. Maybe we’ve reached the point where being a decent father, and being a decent husband, have begun to share a painful mutual-exclusivity. Spend wisely to accomplish the former, spend lavishly to achieve the latter.

MEMORANDUM TO ACADEMICS:

Mark my words carefully. This social trend of skyrocketing divorces will continue as long as you use the word “phobic.” Which will thrill you endlessly because you’ll have a social problem to study, and I’m sure you’re smart enough to see that aren’t you. If your cable company told you “hey we’re going to keep billing you every month for the rest of your life but we can cancel your service at our discretion any time we’re not happy with you” would you still want a cable subscription? What if your car insurance company promised to keep billing your credit card every month for the rest of your life but declared that continuing converage was contingent on its own “happiness”?

Would you still want cable TV? Would you still want car insurance? No? Would you then call yourselves cable-phobic? Insurance-phobic? Cut the crap, eggheads. When you see common sense and self-preservation at work and call it a phobia, you don’t look like educated academic-types, you look like dipshits.

MEMORANDUM TO SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES:

You’re right, the institution of marriage is dying. But lay off the gays for a little while, just to shake things up. The problem with marriage is not scope; the problem with marriage is purpose. As long as people are getting married for the express purpose of being “happy” every single day, when anyone with any maturity at all knows that this is not what life is really all about and it’s not what life can be all about, nothing will ever get better. You may be knights in shining armor, but the anti-marriage dragon is munching away on the King’s Castle and by attacking gay marriages, you’re spending your time and resources jousting with…a little lavender bunny rabbit.

You want to stop someone from marrying? Stop fatass television-watching Marxist parasites from marrying. A real marriage is all about sharing, not taking. If the marriages we recognize start to conform with that, then perhaps the institution will recover. If they don’t, it won’t.

MEMORANDUM TO BRIDES CHANGING THEIR VOWS LIKE THE ABOVE:

I’m Michael Corleone. You’re Fredo. You go somewhere I might be, let me know a day in advance so I won’t be there. I’d tell you why you’re messed up, but you wouldn’t understand because you’re retards. You suck. Go out in the rowboat and say a Hail Mary.

It disgusts me to know that in order to get married and change your vows this way, you have to have a working pancreas, spleen, lungs, heart, corneas, limbs and a vagina. Those parts could be plugged into a more worthwhile human being. Can I really say the same about your intended groom, and a brain? I dunno. You deserve each other.

Hooters in Germany

Sacramento has been passed over YET AGAIN, apparently, as a location for a new branch of Hooter’s. I don’t know that to be true, and it contradicts some “scuttlebutt” that I’ve actually picked up from Hooter’s waitresses. But as far as what I can find out, as Germany gets ready for its first Hooter’s restaurant, Sacramento maintains its reputation as a shimmering oasis of “something wrong with letting men have too much fun” in a continent-wide cold-beer hot-wing big-cleavage desert of “when men are happy, everybody else is happy.”

I’m so grateful to our local brittle feminist activists for keeping my virginal Sacramento eyeballs pure and free of the vision of any nice-looking young girls in trademark orange short-shorts. Thanks a lot, you smelly Big Berthas. I’m sure your husbands will stay at home and hand-wash the dishes while you watch Wheel of Fortune, now that there’s noplace else for them to be. Except for the strip clubs and nudie bars. Hey here’s a thought: I wonder how many dancers work at the sleazy juice bars, dancing on poles, who would much rather be in a wholesome family environment like Hooter’s, but can’t do it because you’re keeping the establishment out of the River City. Way to go. Way to champion womens’ rights, there.

But a heartfelt congratulations to Germany, and the men and women of Ramstein Air Base.

SAARBR�CKEN, Germany � Good news: The first Hooters restaurant in Germany is set to open in mid-October.

Sort of bad news: The well-known American sports bar/restaurant won�t open in Ramstein, as previously reported, but rather in Neunkirchen.

The location change isn�t devastating news, considering that Hooters and all the perks that come with it will be within a 30-minute drive for the nearly 54,000 Americans that live in the Kaiserslautern area. As an added bonus, Hooters officials are exploring the possibility of having weekend buses run from Ramstein Air Base to the Neunkirchen Hooters.

They even get a bus! I wouldn’t mind having a bus take me to Hooter’s, not at all. That’s enough to get me whining and snivelling in quiet jealousy.

Soon after I discovered how good Hooter’s was for business travel, including the infliction of extremely gentle debits from my expense account, I noticed something about Hooter’s. There are women in there. Lots of them! Women who work there, women who don’t, women who are on the payroll but not on shift. Women having fun. Women who clock out, drive home, change into something else that’s incredibly hot, and have their lunky boyfriends drive them straight back to Hooter’s. Old women, young women, fat women, skinny women.

And they all have great attitudes. You hold the door open for them and they say “thank you!” and really mean it. They don’t give you this West Coast icy stare as if to say “I could have gotten that myself, thank you very much…you dick.”

Man-bashing feminists just don’t have a home at Hooter’s. Which means…if a man goes there, he can get the hell away from them for an hour or two. That’s a little bit too much free will for the People’s Republic of Northern California I’m afraid. I’ll believe Sacramento is getting a Hooter’s, when I’m sitting in it, munching on a hot wing.

For more of my tedious bitching, pissing and moaning about no Hooter’s in Sacramento, you can skim over this post from last year. I note, with some measure of interest, that nothing’s changed since then.

I wonder if the waitresses would look different in a Hooter’s in Germany? My grandfather used to say — he was dead when I was born, so I heard this second-hand — that German women were kept on rigid diets of kraut and kielbasa because it made them rubenesque. That’s not really what he was quoted as saying…what he was quoted as saying was something like “A German man likes to slap his wife in the ass before he goes to work, and come home to find her still jiggling.”

I’m not entirely sure I would be okay with a waitress capable of jiggling her flesh for an entire day, taking my orders for BBQ sandwiches and hot wings in a pair of skimpy shorts. But years ago, I came to realize it was purely a matter of interpretation that Grandpa was talking about body styles. With a growing sense of the world around me, I realized it was quite possible he was commenting on the length of a German workday.

You’re Goddamn Right We Do

Scientists have discovered men have a tough time hearing the sound of a woman’s voice. I’ve been saying this for years. Maybe I should become a scientist.

Men who are accused of never listening by women now have an excuse — women’s voices are more difficult for men to listen to than other men’s, a report said.

The Daily Mail, quoting findings published in the specialist magazine NeuroImage, said researchers at Sheffield university in northern England discovered startling differences in the way the brain responds to male and female sounds.

A few ancillary thoughts if I may:

• “Researchers at Sheffield university in northern England” sounds like something out of the public sector, so I’ll take it as a given the Krugmasaurus will look kindly upon me if I pay attention to the findings.
• There seems to be a slight discrepancy between what the article summarizes, and what is noted by the content. I don’t get the impression that the purpose of the research was to find out why men have a tough time listening to women.
• There are many other things to explain why men don’t listen to women. One thing is content. Men tend to tell other men “let’s go knock back a couple if you got time,” whereas women tend to tell men there is work to be done. Or that the man promised to do something. Or that it’s her turn to pick out the movie and she wants to watch something with Meg Ryan in it. Or that he bought two cans of tomato paste instead of four like she asked.
• You could purge these disparities in a laboratory, but not effectively because the social conditioning has already set in.
• As a man, I cannot remember the last time I was surfing the net or writing something and having to go “mmm, yeah, mmm, mm-hmm” in response to a man prattling away about something. A man sees a web browser window, with the back of another man’s head in front of it, and he understands he does not have the floor.
• My initial inclination is to doubt the actual content of the study. When my e-mail notify sound effect is set to spoken words, I set it to female spoken words. Whether I’m routing the syllables through different cortexes or not, the feminine mystique gets my attention. When I’m waiting in line at the bank with a large deposit, and the female teller is tied up with some windbag and the male teller calls me over to his window, I’m a little disappointed. And I can’t help but feel a premonition of dread that something’s going to get messed up.
• Men tune out the female voice because of two things: Content and timing. What are you saying to us, ladies? And when are you saying it? Wait until we’re bored and looking for something to do — then — ask us down to the sports bar to split a pitcher. Try this just once, and you’ll be amazed at how good we are at listening, no matter what your voice sounds like.

Krugmasaurus

Paul Krugman is a dinosaur. Get a load of his latest (link requires registration). Go on, try to find me one single well-reasoned argument in the entire piece. Just one. Underlying, undisputed, concrete fact…sound opinion based on one or several plausible inferences derived from those facts. Is there anything like that in there, anything at all?

I’m afraid the highest-profile editorialist at the nation’s most prestigious newspaper, has a style of writing quite out of place in our current age, in which we differentiate between facts and opinions. In the Jurassic period of editorialism from which Krugman comes, facts are invisible accessories within large packages of opinion given to us unwashed masses by the elites. Facts are like computer chips inside a highly modernized automobile — take it in for servicing by a qualified mechanic, this part is not built to be serviced by the customer. Think this; don’t think that. Trust these scientists but not those. What is the theme of his column today?

Corporations [subsidized]…think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of “scholars” whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

Krugman is instructing us that we should disregard an entire universe of research, any research that can be tied to the private sector. It’s not peer-reviewed after all. I suppose if a scientist’s pants were on fire and I said “Hey, your pants are on fire” but my thesis on his pants had no peer review, the guy’s pants wouldn’t be on fire. One wonders what a fire drill at the New York times must be like. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Poor Paul, he just doesn’t get it. If you “peer-review” research that says, to take his example, there is such a thing as global warming and it is caused by human activity, what in the hell does that tell me? That it’s proven? No, it tells me you found some peers who agree with the conclusion, and if they were diligent, they found the report carried no facts that were provably false, and there were no outright lies. But Paul wants to strip the research clean of any infestation from that awful, evil private sector. So his kind of peer review tells me a bunch of government & academic types were found who happen to agree with each other about something.

Now, I wasn’t alive when Krugman’s contemporaries roamed the earth, before their bones were smashed underneath tons of sand and silt to form the fossils we can excavate today. But I understand how this used to work. Facts were hard to come by, and we relied on professionals to not only glean the facts, but to digest them as well. Consequently, it was quite acceptable for Joe Six-Pack to clone between his own two ears, as an example, Walter Cronkite’s opinion that the war in Vietnam wasn’t going so hot, or the progressive intelligentsia’s verdict that Joe McCarthy was doing more harm than good, or that Watergate was a lot worse than Whitewatergate. Upon which facts did these opinions depend? Well that was the wonderful thing about professionals; who in the world cared? The professionals spouted off to us opinions that were good. If the opinions weren’t good, then the spouters wouldn’t be professionals, would they?

As I have said before, this is the Age of Google. We don’t have any requirement for this service anymore, although Krugman desperately wants to be in that line of work. I can sit down in front of a search engine — for free! — and watch the pro-global-warming camp inflict their intellectual assaults on the evidence presented by the anti-global-warming camp, and vice-versa.

In the twenty-first century, we not only have the capability of doing this, we also have a need. One scientist might report that the ocean temperatures have gone up 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1961. Another scientist might say, hey, those measurements weren’t taken the same way in 1961 as they are today and this taints the evidence. Now the first scientist might say excuse me, the second scientist is not addressing the data that went into my report…that would be a reasonable counterargument. Or the first scientist might say hey, if you believe everything the second scientist says, the global warming is worse than I stated. That would be reasonable too.

But Paul would rather say “ignore that second scientist, his work is not peer reviewed.” What the hell is that?

I’ll tell you what it is; it is Petitio Qu�siti. Krugman carefully recuses himself from telling us why a certain statement is true, only that — trust him — it is. Seeking foundation for global warming, he lays the foundation in an informal vote, purportedly a unanimous one, among the scientists he likes. His argument is: Everyone agrees that that global warming is real. Except when I say “everyone” I’m disregarding everything in the private sector, which is what you should be doing too. Therefore, we may have a situation where every single scientist who doesn’t depend on a government teat, agrees global warming is not real, but within my little jurassic world I’d still be on good foundation to say “everyone agrees that that global warming is real.” It’s a unanimous decision…among the people that I, Krugmasaurus, have decreed you should be paying attention to.

I’m nominally familiar with Paul Krugman’s work. Now and then a liberal will demand that I take a look at this Krugman piece or that Krugman piece, and tell me how I can maintain my opinions about this-or-that in the face of such clear-cut and irresistible offense. Very seldom can I form an adequate response. What evidence is Krugman presenting to me, what is he telling me I should conclude from it? I need to know the answer to those two questions, in order to divine the answer to a third: How solidly do Krugman facts support Krugman opinions? But with Krugmasaurus, these things are never clear. Fact and opinion are poured into the same blender like water and oil, and the motor is turned on high so they’re all churned together. Perhaps if I set the resulting mixture aside and let it separate, we could see how the argument was formed, but the Krugman blades churn on relentlessly.

Based on what I have observed of Krugman, he doesn’t understand any more about the difference between fact & opinion, than a cold-blooded reptile understands how to sweat. Pontificators that belong to his species have no reason to understand this. They come from an ancient steaming jungle where this isn’t required; there is only a vast, vertical hierarchy of thinkers, each level telling the level beneath it what to think, just like the “food chain” of the carnivores and herbivores. He is simply playing his part in this hierarchy.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn’t have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

Ouch! There is a lot of flesh missing from that self-inflicted dripping wound belonging to Krugman. Read that last sentence one more time…”That…may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.” What reason have you to think this, Krugmasaurus Rex? It just sounds really ominous and spooky to say so, and therefore, it’s a fitting climax to your self-gratifying treatise?

It would appear “banishing Darwin from the classroom” is a dire enough consequence, that in Krugman’s mind no hard evidence or solid reasoning should be needed in order to sound the alarm. If that’s the case, is it not reasonable to posit that this is what’s supporting the whole global warming theory to begin with? That the consequences are grave enough that no threshold of proof should be imposed?

I expect this would probably stand up to what Krugman calls “peer review.”

Sorry, but as a warm-blooded homo sapiens, I find it difficult to accept that I’d be forming more responsible opinions by simply dismissing any & all scientists in the parallel universe. Why should I? If the parallel universe comes up with something that can be proven wrong…just prove it wrong. Come up with something that reasonably points out the mistakes. Your public-sector scientists have the same access to mass communication as everybody else, Paul.

Just have them make sure the rebuttal is peer reviewed first.

We Get Another Chance

I’m going to leave it as an “Article of Faith” that after both of George W. Bush’s election victories, lots and lots of folks announced to anyone paying attention that they were moving to Canada. Not that I can’t find links to support that, but if I started to collect them such an effort would undoubtedly lead to scope creep. Do I want to pick on the Hollywood celebrities, or the commoners? How far should I look into that proven/unproven claim that Alec Baldwin never took the pledge, and it was his wife at the time who misinterpreted him? What exactly did these people want out of a Gore or Kerry victory? On and on it would go. I just don’t want to get into it. I think we can all agree there were a lot of people, they were making a lot of noise, and in theory we were ready for a mass exodus of disaffected Americans who were ready to beat feet out of here.

Canada has apparently been looking forward to an influx of well-to-do, professional yankees with eager sympathy for gun control laws and nanny-state government. Alas, bobbing up in the Soup of Reality is a Dead Fly of Disappointment:

In the days after President Bush won a second term, the number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada’s main immigration Web site shot up sixfold, prompting speculation that unhappy Democrats would flock north.

But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election.
:
Data from the main Canadian processing center in Buffalo, NY shows that in the six months up to the U.S. election there were 16,266 applications from people seeking to live in Canada, a figure that fell to 14,666 for the half year after the vote.

I’m really confused now. It’s long been one of the Talking Points of the left that the Bush-voting “Red States” are the irresponsible people, which are leeching off the “Blue States” through pork barrel spending and farm subsidies. Red States are also supposed to have lower I.Q.s on average. The target of the acrimony, President Bush, spends money like a horse going through water, which further implies fiscal irresponsibility involved in the states that support him. So these disaffected Democrats must be like really intelligent, mature, articulate and responsible blue-bloods who are tired of living with the riff-raff I suppose…

…why then are they acting just like the little kid who decides to give his parents one more chance, after threatening to move out because he gets dishwasher duty once or twice a week?

Canada has been let down. We have got to find a way to blame this on Bush!

Which Is Worse?

At the bottom of this posting is a picture. By giving that image a brief once-over, you can tell that I’m a cheapskate who doesn’t use Photoshop, but the point of it is to address something I’ve been noticing for the last few years. Since the September 11 attacks, Democrats have been circulating two different Talking Points, each of which is somewhat out of harmony with the other, and I’ve got a little bit of a burr in my saddle that they never seem to get called on it. I figured if the job fell to me to call them on it, one picture is worth a thousand words.

On April 6 of last year, as the elections were gathering steam Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the floor of the United States Senate and referred to the Iraq situation as “George Bush’s Vietnam”. Soon after that, Muqtada Al-Sadr made a similar analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. Al-Sadr, as in, the Enemy. Is it a logical leap to infer that Al-Sadr took note of, and made his own material from, Sen. Kennedy’s comments? What does our Vietnam experience mean, exactly, to a camel-fornicating weird-beard greaseball warlord in the Middle East? I honestly don’t know, but I would expect in world of homicidal Islamic extremism the Vietnam War is about as relevant as the Marshall Plan, the Tamany Hall scandal, and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

Al-Sadr, I suspect, would have needed a model, and Kennedy gave it to him.

It’s not my intent to use this space to argue that Sen. Kennedy committed treason by providing “aid and comfort to an enemy,” only to provide background as to why some Americans had the opinion then, and have it now, that he certainly did. But by this time, Democrats had circulated the Talking Point that it was an unfair tactic to question the patriotism of loyal dissent. Apparently, they had done some research and found when people heard someone’s patriotism had been questioned, seldom if ever did the test subjects bother to verify the questioning took place, or to ascertain what had been done to provoke the questioning. Sympathy was instant, long-lasting once developed, and nearly guaranteed.

I can’t explain this. Apparently, you say “the Government blew up the World Trade Center and blamed it on terrorists” and I say “that’s a stupid, silly wild-ass theory”. Then you say “I’ve had my patriotism questioned for saying so” and now I say “Oh, well I guess there’s something to it then.” Makes no sense, but the tactic would appear to work somewhere. So the call went out to win arguments by lashing out angrily at Republicans for “questioning patriotism.”

The record would appear to suggest that calmly, harmoniously and boringly murmuring something about “Oh, by the way, so-and-so just called my patriotism into question” didn’t get the job done. To implement the Talking Point, you were supposed to get huffy-puffy. You were supposed to act like a cat suddenly dropped in a bathtub. Like having your patriotism questioned, was akin to being poked in the ribs with a pool cue in the same spot every time, and you were getting mighty sore. Hillary Clinton managed to model the proper mode of outrage a year earlier, during a speech at a Democratic fundraiser in Connecticut. You can view a humorous mock-up of her outburst here (hat tip to James Taranto, Best of the Web); the sound is genuine, the visual is not.

Now in the days between then and now, we’ve been buried in an avalanche of liberals angrily snarking around that their patriotism has been called into question (Google hits on “question patriotism” as of this writing: about 1,250,000). It’s been my general experience that these outbursts often bear little or no relevance to the dialog that took place beforehand; and where patriotism actually got questioned, more often than not there are facts that explain, reasonably, why the questioning took place. To take Sen. Kennedy’s case as an example, not everyone would agree that he’s unpatriotic, or that the episode above proves that he is. But a reasonable person would understand why someone else might consider the possibility, having reviewed the facts.

Democrats circulated another Talking Point, and this one has a much longer history. This Talking Point goes like this: Anybody who doesn’t agree with us Democrats, is a moron. Call them that. It would appear they have been experimenting with the moderate folks, and found they could get a lot of people to agree with the Democratic viewpoint, simply through bullying and coercion. If the test subject leans toward accepting a conservative viewpoint, or shows reluctance to accept a liberal one, blast’em. Call’em an idiot — it can’t hurt, and it might help. Kind of like using electrical shock on a lab rat.

Now, I can say stupid things just as noticeably and just as frequently as the next guy, so even though I’ve encountered my share of being-called-an-idiot I suppose there’s a chance that some of it is sincere. But when I see the treatment given to third parties, more often than not there is something terribly wrong: The insult is premature. As an observer, I don’t know why someone is being called an idiot. An insult isn’t effective unless the reason for the insult is crystal-clear.

If you call me an idiot, you may be commenting on my ability to gather facts. I say “Abraham Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence” and you say “Lincoln wasn’t even alive at the time, you idiot.” Or you might be commenting on my ability to form reasoned conclusions from the facts once I’ve gathered the facts. I say “the weatherman is a liar” and you say “weather is not an exact science, you idiot.” Or you can question my ability to formulate sound tactics in response to a situation. I say “The freeway is backed up for miles so I’m going to take the backroads” and you say “If you do that you’re going to hit every red light, you idiot.” My point is, why are you calling someone an idiot? The conversation ought to have developed to the extent that there’s a clear answer to that question — it should have progressed to the point that the disagreement has been defined. Otherwise, the insult is just a way of avoiding discussion and that, in turn, raises a red flag that perhaps the facts are not on your side.

So we’ve had these liberals and Democrats running around for the last several years, burping out “questioning my patriotism” like clucking chickens, while on the other hand they call people stupid idiot morons anytime they encounter disagreement.

This is a blatant contradiction. One of these Talking Points is a complaint about people avoiding discussion, the other one is an avoidance of discussion in & of itself. Disregarding for the moment that as thinking individuals, we all have a sacred, unassailable right to form our own opinions about who’s patriotic and who is not — it’s hypocritical to imply legitimacy in questioning people’s intellect, but illegitimacy in questioning patriotism. To my way of thinking, it’s OK to do both, or else, not OK to do either one. To have one without the other is not only disingenuous; it adds a lot of confusion to the message.

All the Treachery on One Side

I’ve said for a long time now that when justices are nominated to the Supreme Court and subsequently confirmed, then turn out to be traitors to the cause under which they were nominated, the treachery has a strong historical pattern of only going in one direction. They are nominated under the cause of conservatism, and they turn out to be liberals — seldom if ever does it work the other way around. That’s a real shame, because on courts when we say “conservatism” we refer to judges acting within the limits of their authority, and when we say “liberalism” we mean judges…well, not acting within any limit at all. And that’s always struck me as odd, since when they don the robe they make a pledge to do one and not the other. Rather than “conservatism/activism” or “originalism/activism” or “textualism/progressivism,” would it not be more accurate to refer to this spectrum as “oath-keeping/oath-violating”?

I can’t explain very confidently why it is that Supreme Court justices are nominated as conservatives and, over time, become activists, with some regularity; whereas almost never can a justice be said to receive a nomination as a liberal and then betray his cause by becoming a conservative. Studying the particulars of history, and knowing what I do about institutions that wield power, the best I can say is that it’s human nature to make your job more important tomorrow than what it is today. If our justices are little kids with homework, being a “conservative” is like actually doing the homework, and being an “activist” is like having a pillow fight, eating candy and playing games. Except little kids are usually supervised. Being on the Supreme Court means you have no supervision from anywhere at all.

Ann Coulter is now in her third straight week of trying to convince people that John Roberts, the latest nominee to the Supreme Court, is just more of the same of conservative-to-liberal backstabbing; the knife is there, it just has yet to come out. She has yet to convince me. She seems to be looking for a nominee who will promise during the confirmation hearings, “Yup, I’m going to overturn Roe v. Wade. Can’t wait to do it. Get five of me in there, and that bubble’s gonna burst.”

Annie, it ain’t gonna happen. I think somewhere between overturning an opinion you don’t like, and another traitor like Souter, there is probably a middle ground.

But I would encourage interested readers to go over her arguments carefully. The points she has gleaned out of her research, are interesting ones. Assuming they all check out factually, it’s a fascinating mosaic of deceipt not only by justice Souter, but plenty of justices like him — regardless of whether such examples ever had willful intent to deceive or not.

Read my lips: No new liberals, August 4
Fool me 8 times, shame on me, July 28
Souter in Roberts’ clothing, July 21

Toxic Goo

This late in the game, it’s abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that the people we call “conservatives” understand more about the thought process of those we call “liberals” than the other way around. There is a marginal possibility, a HUGE logical leap, that a sincere effort exists on the left to understand opposing viewpoints, and it’s only the achievement that is lacking. If that’s the case, I guess my viewpoints really are stupid, because every time a liberal has insisted on an explanation from me about “why do you think x” the conversation always arrives at some variant of that tried-and-true intellectual riposte from six-year-olds, “YOU’RE STOOOPIDDD!!1!”

Well, that’s the trouble with calling people stupid isn’t it. Not only is it unlikely to persuade the target of your assault, and not only does it make you feel good about your own viewpoint even if you’ve proven absolutely nothing, but it places you in a position of knowing less about how your opposition thinks. Today, we have a major political party that is built on a half-century or more of calling the other side stupid. The ideology behind this party understands so little about the thought process of anyone who doesn’t drink the kool-aid, that in spite of the white-hot angry fidelity it enjoys among the True Believers, its continuing ability to lose elections is all but assured.

I’ve decided to help the Democrats and liberals out; 2006 is coming fast, after all.

Now that the war in Iraq is enjoying probably the lowest approval rating now that it ever has, we perceive a “bedrock” of people who remain convinced that it’s a good idea. That would be okay with the liberals, except the bedrock is close to 50% or so. What the liberals would like to do, although they are loathe to admit it, is find a way to dig into that bedrock. Calling us “stupid” doesn’t seem to be doing much, but anyone caught going out of their way trying to actually understand how we think, is likely to lose their Good Lefty Club membership card. So I’ll take the first step.

It all comes down to this, liberals. Terrorists, to me, resemble — actually, to me they are exactly like — toxic goo.

Deadly, carcinogenic, toxic goo.

Deadly carcinogenic toxic goo, capable of killing on contact with humans and cuddly pets, discharged by an irresponsible, megalithic, greedy capitalist corporation, with malice.

Toxic goo discharged by a corporation that makes obscene profits and cheats on its taxes.

That should explain everything done & said by people like me, in ways people like you can understand it. The September Eleven attacks, to me, compared to a disastrous event involving the deaths of three thousand innocent men, women and children, who were exposed to toxic goo. That event was not a wake-up call about “Al Qaeda” or “Osama bin Laden”; it was a wake-up call that we had been ignoring the Weird Beards, and in so doing, we and our government had been negligent. It was time to get “eco-friendly” and get that sludge cleaned up wherever we possibly could. We all became, in that sense, a bunch of tree-hugging liberals ready to bash an industry without mercy…a certain kind of industry.

So you see, your problem with convincing us isn’t in the lack of veracity to your arguments, quite so much as a lack of relevance.

To build an argument that my President is telling me lies about the war, is about as relevant as saying “sure that guy is cleaning up toxic goo, but he’s a liar who is cleaning up the toxic goo and he’s cleaning up the toxic goo under false pretenses.” See how irrelevant that becomes?

To tell me Iraq doesn’t have anything to do with Al Qaeda or doesn’t have anything to do with September 11, 2001 — by the way, you’ve done an abysmal job of organizing and disseminating that particular Talking Point, I mean, which is it? — is like saying “this puddle of toxic goo is not connected to the puddle of toxic goo that killed that three thousand people and there’s no evidence they were ever connected”. See how irrelevant that becomes?

To tell me Saddam Hussein has never murdered any Americans is like saying “that particular puddle of toxic goo you are cleaning up never killed anyone”. See how irrelevant that becomes?

To tell me there are no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (which is a problematic claim in & of itself) is akin to saying “no carcinogens have actually been detected in that puddle of toxic goo”. See how irrelevant that becomes?

Nor do I care whether “it’s about oil”. That’s like telling me as the toxic goo is being cleaned up, it’s being converted to petroleum and someone’s making a profit from it. See how irrelevant that becomes?

I don’t care if the goo is mad, and by extension, I don’t care what makes it so. Angry, vengeful, screaming goo is no more deadly than happy goo. Make it dopey, grumpy, bashful, sneezy, sleepy goo. It all goes.

To tell me terrorists have rights we are denying them, is like telling me the toxic goo has rights being denied it. No, really. I have absolute respect for the natural rights of others, particularly the rights of others to have the individual opinions they want to have — but to state that my respect is absolute is diffferent from saying it’s unlimited. It’s not that; it exists within a boundary. People who want to kill folks like me, with impunity and apathy, exist outside of that boundary. Actually, anyone who fails to recognize the sanctity of human life exists outside that boundary. On this point, you’ve got the bedrock figured out. We don’t think people like that have rights. You have to adhere to the obligations of a social contract before you enjoy the benefits of it, and that’s one obligation.

If you don’t subscribe to that, what could your vision possibly be? That we live in a state of nirvana with people who don’t want to kill us because we are behaving in a way they find palatable; who, otherwise, would want to kill us, but because we adhering to the unwritten rules, don’t worry about it? C’mon, guys, take a couple steps backward and look at this again. That’s not gonna work.

We don’t think the terrorists, or their sympathizers, are sentient beings, in the sense they enjoy these basic rights. And we think they’re interconnected by default; they are connected virtually, even if & when you prove they are separate physically. A danger posed by one, is a danger posed by them all. Just like provably isolated, but equally lethal, puddles of toxic goo. You wouldn’t quibble about which corporation dumped it or where it was dumped, would you?

As an aside, I guaran-damn-tee this analogy won’t penetrate the thick skull of a single True Believing anti-war liberal.

But it all fits.

Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit V

You know, it’s an entirely different thing when the parking lot is completely empty versus when the parking lot is completely full. When it’s full, you’re tying up two parking spaces to park one car.

Why, oh why, do people do this? Why?

Hee Hee!

This is W

Hat tip to James Taranto and his Best of the Web column at the Wall Street Journal opinion section. There’s no news here, just a breakdown of what we call “blogs” which I found to be insightful and more than a little bit useful. The source is an April, 2002 post about Internet traffic from one “USS Clueless“.

Blogs are as different as the people who write them, but you’ll find two fundamental themes, with each blog being somewhere on the axis of how much of each appears. For lack of better terms, I suppose you could refer to them as “editors” and “writers”.

One form of blog is the “informal portal”. The general idea is to find cool stuff, link to it, and perhaps add a few words describing it. The link is the point; the words are there to encapsulate and sell the link. These people are organizers, searchers, they’re the web’s editors. They become popular to the extent that their readers like their judgment.

The other theme is writing. The idea is to actually create something new and add it to the collective data stream. There may be a link involved or may not be, but it’s the writing which is the point. The subject matter may be critical or trivial; it may be driven by current events or by private experience or by the whim of the blogger. Sometimes a link is relevant; sometimes it inspires the writing. Sometimes no link is needed at all.

Down at the bottom there is a small-print update about an interested reader suggesting the synonyms “linkers and thinkers”. I think that’s pretty clever.

So what is my blog…well, let’s look it over. Editing, or writing? Yeah, this is probably a “writing” blog. Something happens, which justifies one link, maybe a couple more at the most…and gets me ALL pissed off, which culminates in the generation of a thousand words or more. Blah, blah, blah.

Must Be Nice

Now get a load of this. The President has just had his routine annual physical, which noted that he has deliberately lost eight pounds and is exceptionally healthy. On the planet from which I come, you have a few choices about how to respond to this: You can go “gee whiz” and move on; you can just move on; or you can take yet another crack at losing eight pounds yourself, taking note that it’s apparently possible. And then move on. That’s it. Those are your options.

Out on Planet Democrat, though, this is an occasion for an exceptionally weak segue into the difference between the President’s policies, and what they would like to do if they were in charge — playing up the former of those two as something apocalyptic, in a fact sheet released on Tuesday.

BUSH IN SUPERIOR HEALTH, BUT AMERICA’S YOUTH NOT

Doctors gave President Bush a clean bill of health in his annual checkup this weekend and White House spokesperson Dana Perino proclaimed him to be “in superior health.” However, America’s youth are not so lucky. While obesity has been declared an epidemic in this country, Bush’s education policy is putting children at risk with cuts in physical education and school athletic programs.

Putting children at risk! Gosh!

The release goes on to note the cut in Bush’s proposal is 25%, some $18.4 million. Back in April, Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe reported the cut to teachers and equipment was from $74 to $55 million.

Ask the people who put Bush in power, who won that last election by a handy margin: If President Bush could run for a third term, what could another candidate do to convince you to get rid of him? Ask a hundred of those voters, and at least ninety will say: The opposing candidate could offer better policies about protecting the border, he could allow racial profiling at the airports, and he could do a better job of cutting the budget.

President Bush is the spending-est President of all time.

This press release is apparently aimed at people who don’t know that. Because taking that into account, most reasonable people would ask for a plan of action: All right, let’s restore the 18 million, but where do we get them from? Or even better yet: Hey, aren’t you the guys who were criticizing the President for the budget deficit? Isn’t this where budget deficits come from, a whole bunch of angst stirred up in these hysterical press releases any time some deeply-buried budget item gets nicked a little bit?

Hmmm…my kid has an XBOX. What about the parents who are so agitated by this budget cut putting children at risk? Do their kids have video games? I monitor how much time my child spends playing his, do they monitor how often their kids play theirs? My son and I go roller skating, we go bicycle riding. What about the concerned parents, do they take their kids out to do physical things?

As long as we’re making this awkward segue from President Bush’s physical, into his federal budget proposal for physical fitness, how much out of that line item did the President spend on his own physical upkeep? How many middle-school teachers had to teach him how to ride a bike? How many federally-subsidized teachers had to teach me?

I guess my question really comes down to, why are federal funds needed for this?

It must be nice to use press releases to grumble about how things are being done differently than the way you would do them, right after you got your butt-cheeks handed to you in an election. Just a lot of complaining, not a single word about where you would get the eighteen million, and because you don’t have to define that, not a single harsh word against you from the interest groups who would be irritated as a consequence of cutting into their pet line items, so you can fortify yours. Oh, that must be so nice.

Even nicer still, to transition the topic from something completely unrelated, the President’s own physical exam, into the line item on the budget proposal that you think might stir the most puddin’.

Next time someone says Republicans should reach out across the aisle to mollify tax-and-spend Democrats, I hope it is remembered what kind of reaching-out the Democrats do back. Democrats are supposed to be in recovery mode; they’re supposed to be patching up the roof after a major hurricane. This is not the time most political parties start playing to their bases, but that’s exactly what this is. How many Republicans and conservatives and libertarians are there, who are oh-so-concerned President Bush isn’t spending quite enough money on something?