Archive for the ‘About Me and My Blog’ Category

Morgan’s Purse-Dog

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Webutante was wondering over at Gerard’s place what we look like, so we went looking through our own pages for something old in which our Buddha-sized gut didn’t show. We finally settled on this one which is slightly modified…

I did that one a very long time ago, and if I recall correctly I zoomed way in and sucked in the stomach by about three or four pixels. Digital liposuction; wouldn’t help nowadays. Everything else is genuine though. If memory serves.

Gerard wasn’t satisfied though, and thought it might be realistic to add something back in.

Mmm, yeah. Don’t think that’s gonna happen.

F*ck You, Scott Adams

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Thanks a lot, pal. Now, everyplace I’ve ever worked…minus the places where they can’t remember me and don’t care about me (which is probably most of ’em), will be clipping this out and sticking it on the wall. Thanks huge.

Well, there’s a lesson here. Obviously there’s something about that first name. I can tell you it’s not an ordinary experience going through life with it. Beyond that, I can’t say much. Except to promise nobody, anywhere, is ever gonna say “Naw that doesn’t fit the Morgan I know at all…he’s always had great communication skills!” That’s not going to get said.

One thing does jump out at me though. I’ve had my share of dust-ups with people through the years. But the overall pattern for such conflict, especially the conflict that is rooted in differences in communication styles — which is most of them, I think — has been that I’m the guy in glasses. As in, “Waitaminnit, am I really the only one in this room who sees ambiguity here?” Situations such as this, provide the inspiration for Thing I Know #291: Some folks see ambiguity where there is none. These seem to be the same people who don’t see it when it’s there.

I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective. And, I suppose further, I should be pleased to see that surreal Christian name of mine used as a predominantly masculine handle. Four decades of showing the world what it’s all about, maybe they’re finally catching on.

Scott Adams, thanks again. I gotcher communication skills, right here.

Update 1/1/10: Here are the strips from 12/28, 12/29 and 1/1.

Dilbert.com

Dilbert.com

Dilbert.com

That jackass he’s talking to today, I wonder if that’s still “Morgan”? Haircut seems different, and the tie is different. Same loathing of specifics though. Hey, Scott Adams, I am confused by the ambiguity in your comic strip. Your communication skills are being found wanting. And unlike me, you actually do this for a living, so stick that one where the sun don’t shine.

I’m impressed by this observation of his, that details are avoided by people who have “no communication skills.” As I indicated up above, my experience has been precisely the flip-side of this; people with “excellent communication skills,” I call them “Guy Smileys,” always at the ready with the newest hot business cliche from a trade magazine, never show a shred of talent for making something actually work — and they know all the tricks to keep the decision-makers from noticing that.

And because they’re never under any actual, personal burden to make something work, they take in the entire world in terms of an emotional vibe. Because they can afford to. They are the first to form an opinion, and to voice it most forcefully, without any hint of hesitation or doubt…because they can afford to. And because this forms their entire working methodology, they react to specifics the way a vampire reacts to a cross. And when they take on something that absolutely, positively has to work — and break it — they get all pissed off at the next guy for fixing it.

Mr. Adams and I are having an Inigo Montoya moment with that phrase “communication skills.” I do not think it means what he thinks it means. In my world, it is “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance baffle ’em with bullshit,” and this Morgan is pleased and proud not to have them.

How to Cover Obama’s Double-Homicide

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

John Hawkins printed up a list of the Top 40 Quotes From 2009, and we got a trackback out of it because we came up with #11. For grins, we decided to skim through it top to bottom, and we realized we completely missed out on this eight-month-old Onion article.

Sadly, it remains just as relevant today as it was then.

Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle On Obama’s Double-Homicide

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.

“I know there’s a story in there somewhere,” said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama’s home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. “Right now though, it’s probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation.”

Added Meacham, “It’s not so cut and dried.”

Since the killings took place, reporters across the country have struggled to come up with an appropriate take on the ruthless crime, with some wondering whether it warrants front-page coverage, and others questioning its relevance in a fast-changing media landscape.

“What exactly is the news hook here?” asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a ‘day in the life’ of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama’s unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?”

“Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now,” Kaplan continued. “I don’t know. There are a million different angles on this one.”

So far, the president’s double-homicide has not been covered by any major news outlets. The only two mentions of the heinous tragedy have been a 100-word blurb on the Associated Press wire and an obituary on page E7 of this week’s edition of the Lake County Examiner.

Since this one was printed up, the Obama administration has specifically fingered Fox News as “not a real news organization.” The Onion piece reports — prophesies — why this might be. Some bit of fact emerges that is unflattering to the administration, and Fox News comes out and actually reports it. I mean, hey, what in the world is up with that? What responsible news organization would do such a thing?

Once More Into the Breach My Friends

Friday, November 27th, 2009

So last weekend I dropped the kid off with his mother.

Today I zip on over there and pick him up.

Up until Reno/Sparks, things are a little on the scary side and there’s too much going on. Especially on Black Friday. After that, the problem is the opposite. The struggle is to stay awake. Coffee, soda, audio books, hamburgers and piss breaks.

Like I’ve said before. If Nevada was provided by the Good Lord with something, and the nothing had to be manufactured or grown or trucked in…it would be a technological achievement nothing short of breathtaking.

Clicky pic to embiggen.

Thanksgiving Morning 2009

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

You have to de-bone the turkey if you want to do Turbaconducken. My girlfriend took care of de-boning the chicken and the duck, but the turkey was up to me. The hitch in the giddy-up was that as of this morning I had not yet shed my turkey-deboning-virginity. It’s pretty damn dismal when you’re asking Google how to do it. What can I say. Mom always crammed the turkey full of traditional stuffing, so there was no de-boning…or maybe there was…but her two sons weren’t involved in that process. How the turkey was to be stuffed, was never anything that was put up for debate. There was no call for it, none whatsoever, believe me. Turkey stuffing. One of Mom’s culinary victories.

Well, I’d say the turkey was 60 or 70 percent de-boned. Packing the bacon-wrapped meat into it was considerably quicker and more fun. Now it’s cooking away, and it smells awesome.

On this morning, sitting side-by-side with the wonderful woman who was allowed to sleep in because of my masculine (which means awkward) struggles — and Lord knows she’s earned it — watching some airheaded chick-flick drivel on cable…I am…

1. Thankful for family.
2. Thankful for friends.
3. Thankful to be alive in interesting times. Yes I know it’s a Chinese curse. But when you’re on your deathbed, really, who wants to look back on having lived in uneventful times?
4. Thankful for California’s climate. Yes that new blog makes the brilliant, accurate and irritating point that this is the only reason people don’t leave in droves, and he could be right. But what the hell. It is what it is. We’ve got our seasons, or lack thereof.
5. Thankful that Folsom, California, although imbued with a with an unmistakable social undertone of “I’m never in the way and you always are,” and people drive their cars like complete assholes, at least isn’t another liberal shithole just yet.
6. Thankful for President Obama’s election. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that we have to see what this looks like every now and then. We will always make the mistake of electing it if we haven’t lately seen what it looks like. And I’m thankful He’s doing such a splendid job of feeding all the passion that will yank us out of this part of the cycle, like a golf ball out of a sand trap, the sooner the better.
7. Thankful for Russian computer hackers. They just might have saved the world as we know it. They certainly stand a chance of having saved us trillions and trillions of dollars, and probably millions of lives.
8. Thankful for our fighting men and women, their readiness for their missions, their willingess to volunteer, and their ability to kill people and blow things up. I’m thankful for the ones that come back whole, and I’m thankful when the ones that don’t come back at all, are respectfully remembered as the heroes they are. And for the ones who make it back and leave something behind, I’m thankful we have foundations like Wounded Warrior and Soldier’s Angels so we can show them we appreciate their service, in a way that will really help them.
9. Thankful for Palin. Hope she saves us from all the nonsense.
10. Thankful for Beck.
11. Thankful for Limbaugh.
12. Thankful for that “great American” Hannity.
13. Thankful for Coulter.
14. Thankful for all the other wonderful columnists that people don’t hear about, because it would be far more difficult to “tar & feather” them as teabaggers, homophobes, racists or sexists…Krauthammer, Hayes, Tyrrell, Simon, Blackwell, Sowell, York, Milloy, Hanson, Chavez, Elder, Saunders, Williams, Stossel, West, Barone, Monckton, Meister.
Thanksgiving15. Thankful for my blog and all the nobodies who don’t stop by to read it. Which, by extension, means when I’m told “everybody agrees” on something, when the rubber hits the road it seems there are always lots of exceptions to “everybody.” Also thankful for all my blogger-friends; Rick, Gerard, Cassy, Buck (from whom I shamelessly copped the image), Neo-Nocon, Phil, Andy, Daphne, Melissa Clouthier, Sister Toldjah, Old Iron and KC. Especially the ones like Cassy, and John Hawkins, who continually approach me for “guest-blogging” stints so I can gum up their sites with my loquacious bloviating. Hey now that I think about it, I’m thankful for words like “loquacious” and “bloviating.”
16. Thankful there are still some women in the world who don’t lie awake at night thinking up ways to denigrate, abuse, neglect, short-change, snark at, scold, nag, and generally disrespect men. Sweetie pies. Women who pride themselves in how happy they make him. A- and B-Girls. And that, actually, their numbers seem to be increasing and they’re beginning to outnumber, or have outnumbered for quite some time now, their unfriendly, brittle, shrewish, churlish, griping, high-drama, sour, dour, vituperative, vengeful, perpetually jealous, perpetually unhappy, perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually complaining sisters. The ones that have long ago doomed themselves to a lonely death in a house full of cats.
17. Thankful to have been born here, so I can torture myself wondering what small part I can play in keeping the country great, rather than torturing myself about why some mysterious cosmic plan stuck me in just another filthy socialist mudpuddle.
18. Thankful for my wonderful girlfriend who cooks my dinner, puts up with my weird-ass kid, covers up my Turbaconducken experiment with foil properly so the bacon grease doesn’t all evaporate, her heart of gold, her (mysterious) willingness to work such long hours for so little pay, and those quick phone calls I get asking me if we need more beer so she can bring home a box or two.
19. Thankful my son brings me a bottle of it when I yell for him to do so.
20. Thankful his mother isn’t one of those ball-busting termagants and doesn’t get in the way of me raising him like a real man should.
21. Thankful for health; thankful I’ve gone ten years without barfing, that I’m well over forty and my eyes work more-or-less perfectly, that I almost never seem to get sick, that I’ve never had any cavities, that in spite of all my physical adventures I’ve never broken a bone, that in spite of all the time I spend sitting on my fat ass I actually have some physical endurance, that I don’t have a tumor wrapped around my caratid artery, a brain aneurysm, a conjoined twin, that I’m not allergic to peanuts, that I don’t have plantar fasciitis, haven’t lost any limbs or digits, haven’t had to have any intestines removed, or…you know what, let’s just bring this list to an end right here and now.
22. Thankful that the institution of marriage is slowly but surely pulling out of its half-century side-trip metamorphosis into an institution of legalized theft. Maybe once it’s returned to its roots, it’ll work for me again, who knows.
23. Thankful the society in which we live is decorated with all these amazing resources that are necessary to fulling this vital task of spoiling ourselves so superlatively rotten. That a grown, slaughtered, cleaned, sterilized, sanitary, skinned, filleted, inspected, certified and competitively plump cut of chicken is one swipe of the debit card away. Just think about it. When this country got started, if you were a lawyer you did your lawyer-ing after putting in fifteen hours growing your food. Now we swipe a card. How fucking anesthetized and stultified can we possibly get.
24. That I have all the fruit, soda and coffee I can possibly consume at work, free of charge. Because let’s face it, I’d be quite the asshole if I didn’t include that on this list.
25. That my commute is 3.1 miles, from key-on to key-off.
26. That nobody is trying to bring me down, to the best of my knowledge, like at the last job…therefore I don’t have to ask myself that ageless question “does it make me paranoid to think so, when it’s demonstrably true?”
27. That my mini-notebook doesn’t overheat, take ten minutes to boot up, shed plastic key caps like a sheepdog in molting season, suck up viruses off the Internet wherever it can find them, or sit there giving me dumb looks when I’m expecting it to do something.
28. Thankful that people are inherently greedy. Whenever some communist or religious-leftist tries to monopolize a dinner table conversation and insist everyone should take a vow of poverty, it seems all I have to do is murmur something to the effect that that guy should go first, and before you know it someone’s changed the topic in a great big hurry. Which means I won and he lost. Because in a society where everyone really believed it was virtuous to starve one’s own family to death, it wouldn’t be so easy to make that point. In this one, all I have to endure is people putting their voices behind a bunch of bullshit they don’t really believe anyway.
29. Thankful my kid’s school does not seem to be one of those that are indoctrinating the students to worship President Sort-of-God.
Casual30. Thankful for the DVR and all the crap I can put onto it. Saturday Night Live (although I erase the episode right after the opening monologue), Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Dark Side, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, South Park, Old Star Trek. And I’m very thankful for the people Mike goes out to interview in his respectful way, that they’re out there doing what they do, being so deserving of this overdue respect. We need them more than they need us.
31. Thankful for Netflix.
32. Thankful we don’t have any pets and I’m not being ambushed with that insipid conversation every goddamn day.
33. Thankful I can wear jeans and a tee shirt to work.
34. Thankful we live in a society in which someone, somewhere, needs to figure out how to make things work…and that it is therefore possible to earn a handsome living doing this…however much energy we may expend pretending this is not the case and that charisma will getcha everything you or anyone else could possibly need or want.
35. Thankful I spent the time and effort learning how to type, because life would be really awkward otherwise.
36. Thankful for Context, TreePAD, Subversion, WordPress, Google Docs and that I can still buy Microsoft Excel from way back in the olden “97” days before they screwed it all up.
37. Thankful the ocean is two hours away. Thirty minutes would be a lot better, but I’ll take two hours.
38. Thankful Lake Tahoe is also two hours away.
39. Thankful for my good fortune with cars that do what they’re supposed to do. Of course I deserve a lot of credit for that. But hey, if the car’s a piece of shit, you can drive it and maintain it as wonderfully as you want and it’ll still be a piece of shit and a money hole.
40. Thankful that cop didn’t show up. It was only a two hundred dollar ticket, but I wouldn’t have been suprised to see that whole thing get out of control because I was really, really aggravated…and I don’t have that much self-control. Not for situations like that one, I don’t. Scandinavians can have temper tantrums too, ya sure yoobetcha we do.

I’m also thankful there’s a little bit more coffee left, and now I’m going to go fix that.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXVII

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

This blog over here is called Bombs and Dollars: America’s Top Exports, and it seems to be almost an online periodical. I like the title and I like the content. But I particularly like this page because we’re on it: “Top 133 Conservative Blogs.” The Blog That Nobody Reads is in slot #118.

In truth, we don’t feel worthy. There’s a whole lot of stuff well worth checking out, in the form of all the other names sharing that list with us. So we’re linking it with the plan of checking back on it, again and again. When time permits.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXVI

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Right Wing News, where we are an occasional contributing editor on the weekends, has gone back over the week just past and lifted some of the best quotes. From the news, from the teevee, from the blogs, from the op-ed pieces. It is by no means a short list, but it is put together from some quality material. And we are flattered to see we have made the cut.

Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous.

That is intended as a lamentation, let’s be clear about that. And lately it seems to work both ways. If you think carbon is dangerous (more on this later) but there’s no cause for concern over giving Kalid Shiekh Mohammed a civilian trial, you must possess some keen insight, perhaps some X-ray vision, that gives you wisdom beyond the three dimensions and the earthly domain.

If, on the other hand, you just call things as they are — taxes hurt the economy, if you execute the bad guy he won’t kill any more little kids, cities with magnanimous social programs have teeming masses of homeless because if I was homeless I’d head down there too, maybe kids have attention deficit problems because they aren’t getting their asses whipped anymore — then you’re more mundane. You have demonstrated no irony, therefore you haven’t demonstrated this keen extra-dimensional insight. Therefore you must not have it, therefore you must be something of a dimwit. And far more horrifyingly still, you’re a little bit on the boring side.

You may be missing Trivial Pursuit questions that any average fourth grader would be able to ace easily, but express one thought contrary to common sense and you have a free ride to genius-land. Over time the favorite among these has become “perhaps they are sending their children into restaurants with dynamite belts because they have no other way to fight back.” On the flip-side, you may have been publishing important scientific works for decades, curing diseases, re-designing bridges so they can carry more weight…but utter one single thing that fits in too well with reality, like “If I wanted to burglarize people, I’d skip all the houses that I thought had guns in ’em” — and you’re an instant dumbass.

It’s not a drive toward left-wing politics; if it was, it would be far less dangerous because it would capture the fascination only of those who are enamored of left-wing politics. This phenomenon has a deep impact on people who don’t give a rat’s ass about politics. It’s a mistaken realization of what intellectual wherewithal really is. It is an excessive fascination with where above-average intelligence might take a thought, with an inadequate understanding of how exactly that works.

And it pushes us toward choosing the more exotic and more contrarian epiphanies and solutions — in response to problems that, when all’s said & done, at the end of the day are really quite mundane.

And those solutions are wrong, more often than not.

Happy Birthday to Us, 2009

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

House of Eratosthenes. The blog that nobody reads. WordPress on a Linux server leased from GoDaddy. Subjects: Meat, beer, tasty barbeque sauce, bread, wine, guns, really big engines, good lookin’ women in skimpy clothes, stupid crook stories, people being strange & weird, honoring our vets, the War on Terror, technology, project management, and how much liberalism sucks. First post: November 12, 2004.

Total posts: This makes 4,159. Comments: 6,686. Categories: 129. Tags: 24. Registered users: 362.

Began using Sitemeter in April of 2006. Recorded visits: 264,450. Page views: 448,362. Maximum hits in a single day: 14,6 hundred something something, which we got from an Instalanche on our Venn Diagram. Average hits per day: Hovering around 360 right about now.

What’s up with that funny name? It’s explained here.

Best Sentence LXXIII

Friday, November 6th, 2009

The seventy-third award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes into oblivion. It is chasing after the thing that it is trying to honor, because that’s where today’s BSIHORL champion lives. It was jotted down, edited to perfection, and then deleted. The body of text in which it lived for just a version or two, made it to where it was headed — but after it was cleaned up.

Like all wonderful nuggets that meet such a fate, it would have gotten the point across but it would have caused enough trouble to create questions of cost/benefit. Life’s just too short. Author is me.

We seem to have entered an infinite loop of sorts because the answer to the question you’ve put to me, is dependent on an answer to the question which I’ve put to you. I didn’t make it that way; that’s just the way it is. We all find satisfaction in achieving a dictatorial reign over all information related to one matter or another while simultaneously seeing to it that those around us are kept mired in a stultifying vacuum of same, and are able to learn absolutely nothing — but there comes a point where a mid-point compromise is politely requested by nothing less than the laws of the universe itself.

Heh. Heheh. Heheheheh. I used to be a project manager, dealing with a rather dazzling array of personality types…and if you’ve ever been put in a similar situation, you know exactly what kind of person I’m talking about.

Quote Plaque

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’m not a perfect man, although I’m humble enough to admit it. Sometimes I lack the insight required to recognize, on the spot or even much later, that I have said something exceedingly wise and it is worthy of special recognition.

Just an unworthy sinner trying to improve himself. Thanks Rogue, for helping to keep my ego in check.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXIV

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Last week Rogue Thinker found a favorite quote, one jotted down by a very smart guy. Rogue puts roman numerals at the ends of his post titles. What a screwball, huh?

Best Quote XIX

Some of us are willing to tolerate any sort of personal ridicule in order to avoid supporting the wrong decisions;

The rest of us are willing to support all kinds of wrong decisions, in order to escape any sort of ridicule.

Morgan Freeberg

An insightful comment on the difference between liberals and not-liberals. Freeberg calls it Yin and Yang, where Yin are the people who go out and build things, and Yang are the people who socialize and network.

The Yin theory is actually a very accurate description of my life. I’m a builder by nature; I spent my entire childhood playing with LEGOs or K’Nex. Yes, there was running around outside with the standard compliment of boy’s toys (GI Joes, Nerf guns, bat and ball), but I spent an equal amount of time making things. I didn’t bother developing social skills until I got to high school, and was well in to college before they were sufficiently advanced that I could deal with people normally.

What is critical to Freeberg’s theory is that for a Yin to make something, he has to understand how things actually work. If his knowledge of reality is wrong, what he makes won’t work. And he is forced by his experiences to modify his knowledge of reality. See engineers for further details.

The Yang, however, want to show that they have the right social connections. They have to show they are connected to the right people, and distinguish themselves from those who are not. But fashion and popularity aren’t really constrained by physics, so they can go in any bizarre direction.

Which brings us back to the quote at the top. Some people want the right answer, and some people want to belong. Very often we have to pick one or the other.

I’d rather be right than popular.

If documenting this theory means I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and the world will be left with a clear statement of what I mean, I’ve probably done a pretty lousy job of it. I don’t know for sure, of course; it depends on what people have managed to pick up. But I’d say this fellow’s pretty much got it.

I do think it’s important to note that liberals can be Yin and conservatives can be Yang. It can happen…although overall the conservative/liberal Yin/Yang correlation remains somewhat strong. What is important here though, is not the statistical outcome, but the concepts.

Conservative/liberal, of course, has to do with the opinions we form. Yin/Yang has to do with how we form them. Obviously, the latter is causative of the former.

One example of the upsetting of the clean pattern is the Palin Phenomenon. Sarah Palin herself might very well be a Yang; one indicator I’ve noticed of unusually high intellect, is that it becomes difficult to tell. Some of Palin’s followers, and I’ve noticed this because I’ve been among them, are hardcore Yang. They end up agreeing with me, but by means of a process I cannot understand. Some of them sound just like Obama people. You know…we’ve got to get ‘er in there, she’s the most charismatic person the world has ever known.

The Bastidge says I’m using the wrong terms with Yin and Yang, that these words have an ancient meaning — by using them with a mixture of correctness and incorrectness, I’m producing unhelpful noise. Well, he’s right. But the words come from an ancient world, one that predates the industrial revolution as well as feminism. If one side applies to males and is accustomed to giving orders, and the other side is female and accustomed to being meek and submissive…then, obviously, something is going to have to morph somewhere if the nomenclature is not to be retired altogether.

I’ve heard people object to these terms being used before, with the same sense of — how do I say it, what do I call it. It’s not anger and it’s not apprehension. But there’s something adrenalized about Bastidge’s objections, and I’ve seen it before. People who object in this way, with these points, tend to be Yang. And they call themselves that. I think what’s happened, is they’ve spent a great deal of passion being as male as possible…as outgoing and boisterous and jolly as possible…identifying themselves this way. And here comes my theory pointing out that Yang is chirpy and outgoing, true enough, but also in its own way rather disorganized and logically sloppy — and insecure. Can’t be! The Yin is supposed to be insecure. The Yang is supposed to be secure. And so they rankle at this because it is a challenge not to their worldview, but to their ego.

I’m not going to say this applies to Bastidge. That would be dolphin-logic. You know…”All fish swim in the sea, dolphins swim in the sea, therefore dolphins are fish.” Can’t make the call. I don’t know the man.

But he came up with a great alternative suggestion. It’s a Thomas Sowell product that somehow flew under my radar. Cranky Conservative quoted from it a year ago:

Peter Robinson discusses his interview with Thomas Sowell, where Sowell elaborates on his 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions. Robinson sums up the book’s major thesis:

:
Sowell calls one worldview the “constrained vision.” It sees human nature as flawed or fallen, seeking to make the best of the possibilities that exist within that constraint. The competing worldview, which Sowell terms the “unconstrained vision,” instead sees human nature as capable of continual improvement.

You can trace the constrained vision back to Aristotle; the unconstrained vision to Plato. But the neatest illustration of the two visions occurred during the great upheavals of the 18th century, the American and French revolutions.

The American Revolution embodied the constrained vision. “In the United States,” Sowell says, “it was assumed from the outset that what you needed to do above all was minimize [the damage that could be done by] the flaws in human nature.” The founders did so by composing a constitution of checks and balances. More than two centuries later, their work remains in place.

The French Revolution, by contrast, embodied the unconstrained vision. “In France,” Sowell says, “the idea was that if you put the right people in charge–if you had a political Messiah–then problems would just go away.” The result? The Terror, Napoleon and so many decades of instability that France finally sorted itself out only when Charles de Gaulle declared the Fifth Republic.

“If you had a political Messiah.” Hmmmm………..There’s a defining characteristic. Barack Obama doesn’t actually have superpowers. Nobody really thinks he’s better than anyone else; not really, not down deep inside.

I think what happens is this vibe, this “buzz” of “He Is The One,” becomes an overarching theme, one that is easily defined. As has been the case for the Yang all the way back to the elementary school playground, once you can fall in line behind something that has captured the passion and allegiance of some critical mass of your peers, the necessity of recognizing cause-and-effect just falls away. You don’t need to worry about how much current goes through this circuit with this much voltage and that much resistance. Similarly, you don’t need to worry about what happens to the unemployment rate if the minimum wage is raised by a buck fifty. You are now in a separate universe…on in which things…do not happen because of other things. Events just plain — happen. And their relevance is that they inspire you to “come together” in some forum in which “everybody” knows that this-or-that other thing is the next “Thing We Have To Do.”

Of course, people do not make all their decisions this way. Right now, people feel very much different from how they felt a year ago. That’s the conservative/liberal part of it. When conservatives win, it gives people a powerful incentive to start voting liberal — and vice-versa.

But the comfort zone remains static. People who are accustomed to Yang thinking, then forced to think according to hard logic like the Yin, can be prevailed upon to do that…but they feel mighty uncomfortable about it. Like they don’t know what they’re doing. Of course, when Yang decide things the Yang way they still don’t know what they’re doing. That’s part of the definition, you “feel” your way through a decision rather than think your way through it. So knowing what you’re doing is not related to comfort with the decision, or lack thereof.

It’s all got to do with the methods involved in getting the decision made. That’s the difference. The Yin has figured out the Thing To Do, Pillar III, based on the Opinions/Inferences he has formed, which are Pillar II. These are objects instantiated from defined classes, and he can sit down and draw circles and lines, connecting one to the other, effortlessly, because that is how they are stored in his mind.

The Opinions, Pillar II, in turn are similarly derived from the Facts, Pillar I. So the Yin knows what to do based on what he thinks he knows about what’s going on; and he thinks he knows what’s going on, based on what he has observed. These objects are derived from each other, methodically.

The Yang have formed, from early childhood, a way of neatly sidestepping that. But their method depends on other people being around. People who want to impress them, and who are willing to be impressed by them.

Four Thousand

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Memo For File XCVII

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Just got done sending Blogsister Daphne an offline which contains a redacted version of the complaint letter that arises from the situation over here. It’s the same ol’ Morgan that got picked-on by bullies in the sixth grade: He’ll take it and take it and take it, but man, don’t back that fucker up into a corner. Must be my Viking bloodline.

And I’ve suddenly realized something about my business correspondence about such touchy subjects. I have been privileged to see all kinds of such works written by, and addressed to, other people. For a high school graduate with a 2.65 gradepoint, I have rubbed shoulders with so many millionaires. I suppose I’ve always been shell-shocked at how incredibly lucky I’ve been, in this way. All these years later I still don’t believe it. I’ve been close to captains of industry, and I didn’t get to watch them just ask their Girl Fridays to get them cups of coffee…oh, no. I watched them get sued. I watched them get audited. I watched them get blackmailed.

Maybe I’m just a jinx.

Anyway, I digress. I blame my upbringing. When you’ve been fortunate, in whatever way, you should stop to acknowledge it even if there’s no one around to thank. And this is a piece of fortune I’ve never stopped to acknowledge. My eyeballs are now 43 years old and require no visual aid whatsoever; before them has been paraded a dizzying panoply of spicy business correspondence. That’s two huge blessings. If I had to give up one of them, and keep the other, I’d absolutely be wearing glasses. I’ve learned that much from the correspondence I’ve seen. That oh so spicy business correspondence.

What I’ve realized about the correspondence I put out, is this:

I model it based on what I have seen, as any intelligent creative energy will do. But although I try to coral it all in, when dollars are on the line, the eighty-twenty rule rears its ugly head. In fact, far from drawing on twenty percent of what I’ve seen, most of the time I end up making use of only three artifacts:

There are various tidbits I picked up by reading the works of, and having conversations with, my late Uncle Wally.

When I think professionalism is the order of the day, and it is necessary to conceal my wrath beneath a thick “nuclear reactor wall” veneer of diplomacy so it requires some cleverness on the part of the reader just to figure out how peeved I am, I think of this letter from a dying Ulysses Grant to his biographer, Adam Badeau. President Grant is, in my opinion, highly underrated as our 18th President, and even more highly underrated as a writer. Consider this to be advice: Just pick up some of his stuff. At random. This is art, of a grade you don’t often see.

And when I think I’ve been pussy-footing around too much and some asshole is getting away without his just desserts — I draw on an e-mail I was forwarded from this guy, way back in the olden days when he was my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss or some damn thing. He was the President of the whole freakin’ company and he walked through the lobby of the corporate headquarters one day to catch the guard playing Solitair on the computer. Poor guard. Stupid sonofabitch. The order came down from on high to strip Solitair out of all the company computers…on Windows 95…order arriving complete with a word-for-word reproduction of the top-dog’s summation of what needed to be done — and oh, my. What fine incendiary business prose. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it. So who is to do what needs to be done? Yep. Lucky me, I’m the poor stupid bastard…not that it was that technically demanding; it ended up being my job because I was the one who had the balls. I’m glad my immediate-boss at the time had some balls too. We did what had to be done, verified what had to be verified, verified it a few more times, and then sent off what had to be sent off. Years later it’s nothing but a good story to tell.

But the point is, I draw on those three. The wise; the cool; and the napalm.

Without those three, I’d still know how to write stuff. But not nearly as well, I think; and certainly not nearly as confidently. I think I’ll be recalling all three of them on my deathbed, in the final hours. I really do.

“In Times Like These…”

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

I might have complained about those four words before. It’s almost certain that I did, because I was impressed that about half the lines spoken by the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged begin with those four words — and the message is crystal clear. Apart from this other message that socialism tends to feed off the misery that it creates, we see there is this tendency we have to justify shitty decisions with some variant of that old cliche. What I mean by “shitty” is indefensible; ideas that have to have some glittery decoration to distract from the fact that they’re just plain stupid.

And usually it’s socialism. You might say “In times like these, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing a service so essential to the rest of us.” You would not say “Because it’s Tuesday and my butt itches, we have to pull together and nobody can make a profit providing this service.” With the latter, even a flaccid mind would immediately recognize — duh, hey wait a minute…if the service is so essential, how do we make sure it continues to be provided if nobody can make a profit providing it? But “In times like these” goes over like Free Ice Cream night in Hell. Why yes! That makes perfect sense!

But it isn’t confined to socialism. All stupid ideas benefit from the “Times Like These” cliche. It’s like covering a turd in a chocolate-crusty coating.

I went in to a certain financial institution to discuss an interesting letter I’d received from them. The letter pretended to be sent from a collection agency…which I thought was interesting, because my payment record is perfect. First thing the bank guy said was “Well to get a letter like this, you have to be way behind on something…like three months or something.” This I found to be reasonable, and it was my first impression. But the payment record is there. The phone calls are coming in from their account manager to please take out this-or-that credit card and go further in debt, because someone in there has figured out it’s profitable to be doing business with me. I’m invoiced on this every thirty days, and there are no past-due amounts, no late charges, nothing of the kind. So he got on the phone to figure out what’s going on…

What followed was an extended conversation between him and the voice on the other end, as he apparently got an education about the new process. Then he got that look on his face, like he had to explain something exquisitely embarrassing. And explain he did.

“With the economy the way it is now,” he started out…and I realized what was coming next was going to be boneheaded. “What they’ve started to do a few months ago is send out these letters as soon as a payment is two days past its due date.” Apparently this was earlier in the year, and I hadn’t realized it because my payments were on time, like they’re supposed to be. “The idea is…and the lady I’ve been talking to, she wouldn’t want me to use the word ‘scare,’ but that’s pretty much what it is, the letters are supposed to scare people into bringing those payments in because the home office is starting to get worried when payments are late even by a day or two.”

“I have a suggestion for your home office,” I said, and the banker smiled and winced a little, knowing full well what was coming. “Confine this unorthodox and surreal debt management practice to those accounts that have payment records suggesting such a thing might be necessary.” Unless, of course, those customers with perfect payment histories among the ones scaring that poor little home office and making it so upset…suggesting, in my mind, that someone is in a business that they shouldn’t be in.

I’m looking for a way to roll this thing over and give the business to another lender. I have a special dislike for being treated like a crappy customer when I’ve been a good one. Especially when it comes to debt. I look at it like…when you’re a good customer and you’re being treated like a bad customer, what that really means is that the lender in question will not be treating anyone like a good customer. Which means they’re a bottom-feeder. That means if you have the means to deal with someone else, you really should, just because life’s too short. And it will bite you in the ass. Soon. It’s kind of like parking a nice new BMW convertible overnight at Broadway and Stockton Boulevard.

I got a feeling I’m going to get these folks paid off right quick, one way or t’other. This business relationship needs to get canceled somehow. When a wife wants to be single and doesn’t know it, you give her what she wants. When you have someone working for you who would rather be unemployed and they don’t know it, you give him what he wants. The same goes for a bank that doesn’t really want anyone to be in debt to it. They just don’t want to be in business, and they don’t know it.

But the pattern continues. Whatever comes after “In Times Like These” is a staggeringly stupid idea, one that could be justified, even cosmetically, in no other way. If it made sense nobody would be prefacing it with those words.

And with the economy the way it is, in times like these, I’m hearing that phrase more and more lately. There’s a stupid idea behind each use of it. We’re being buried in an avalanche of candy-coated turds.

Peter and Chris Eat Oreos

Monday, September 21st, 2009

The minute this came on, I hollered at the kid to come out and watch the eight seconds with me. He said he already saw it but didn’t mind seeing it again…which is a little odd since it’s obvious what kind of fun I’m having at his expense.

Not that the little shit doesn’t deserve it.

“Is Morgan Freeberg Slipping?”

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Some folks stopping by to read The Blog That Nobody Reads, might be toying with starting one of their own, and are now engaged in that frenzied gathering of bits of evidence of the benefits & liabilities of doing so.

If in doubt, I think you should proceed…but if you are feeling queasy about the liabilities and feeling less than confident about your comprehension of what they are, I suppose you could take note of things like this —

And as much of a tragedy as I think it might be when someone decides to bite down on a thought that (agree or disagree) is well-thought-out and worthy of being expressed, I would have to agree: If you’re not prepared for the experience of seeing your name up in lights like that, you probably shouldn’t get started.

Smitty’s gripes — make what sense out of them as you can — are linked behind the pic. And I must ‘fess up: I’ll be needing to hear from you about it, if you can spare a moment or two. I’m not sure I see what the beef is…

Sitting on a couch in your undies typing shit about stuff through the innerw Blogging. It ain’t for the timid.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXIII

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

We’ve decided to try an experiment. Advertising, at Cassy’s spot. We’re pretty pleased with the friends we made when we guest-blogged for her a year back, and can’t help but wonder what other ones we might pull in from thereabouts.

Also, Smitty over at The Other McCain is making up new words to try to be cool like us.

Phil is making up some new words, too.

These are some pretty damned useful words. Nowadays. I’m afraid.

And on that note, Gerard thinks our latest bitch-pitch and occasional embrace of pessimism, goes pretty well with a music video of good-lookin’ girls in skimpy clothes. We agree.

Update: Recent events have left sensible individuals with a healthy thirst for some good old-fashioned optimism. The above-mentioned Smitty has found some, and its name is Senator Tom Coburn.

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXII

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

I’ve been cross-posting on the weekends at Right Wing News for a little over a year now. One thing that takes place over at RWN that doesn’t take place over here, is that readers can click “up” or “down” on a post to rate how well they liked it. Which, to the folks who pump out material for The Blog That Nobody Reads, doesn’t mean very much. Part of putting an honest effort into figuring out what’s really going on, is showing a little bit of a rugged apathy toward who does & doesn’t like what’s being said.

Now partly because of that…this…which is in regard to this post…has never before happened anywhere

Worthy of notice, I suppose. It seems a certain recently-departed and supposedly venerable member of our nation’s upper legislative chamber, rubbed quite a few folks the wrong way.

O’Reilly Flips Out

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

We’ve all heard it, or most of us have heard it…over, and over, and over, and over and over again. This is, I believe, an enormous mistake on the part of those who are trying to impress us with the audio. There is so much taken away with discarding the visual.

For one thing, it’s a whole new level of funny. I laughed my ass off. And the other thing, perhaps closely related to the first thing, is…I’m somewhat inclined to see things Bill’s way here. The older I get, the more of a visceral reaction I have to the unclear instruction. You know how “unclear” is an anagram of “nuclear”? That’s because of me. Good instructions, most folks can follow — that’s why they’re good instructions. Shitty instructions take a special skill, and I don’t gots it. The more life challenges me to produce this talent I don’t gots, that I never once in my life implied to a single soul I gots, the more aggravated I gets. Big time. It’s like a one-legged man being challenged to kick butts. The five hundredth time, you’re ready to stand up on something, break something, and yell “I get it I get it I get it I get it, everyone can do it I can’t! Now stop it already!” I can feel the blood getting hotter as it is piped up into my head through my jugular. Maybe there’s more Irish in me than I thought.

Earlier this week I was in traffic court being led down this line and that line like a head of stupid livestock…and yet, even though I was livestock, I was still being called upon to make decisions. Nobody there understood these decisions. Rampant confusion. The impulse was damn near irresistible to jump up on the nearest table and yell at the top of my lungs, “Mutherfuckers, if it came naturally to us to follow shitty instructions we wouldn’t be here in the first place!”

But ya know, maybe that wouldn’t have gone over so well.

Bill O’Reilly shows wisdom (well…limited…this is the age of the YouTubes) in knowing where he can throw a temper tantrum. But he’s no more sanitized than I in his use of the King’s English, so watch your volume level and share the experience with some mature hardy souls who might appreciate it.

“Conclusion First, Back Story Later”

Monday, August 17th, 2009

That’s what I said this morning, but it is not to be. I believed the appear-in-court date on my traffic citation would be my drop-dead date for arguing my case, but that’s not the way it works; your first appearance in court is to be herded around like a head of stupid cattle, being shuffled from window to window, telling His Honor that you plead not guilty, and…that’s it. The date is set for your real trial, and after pissing away an entire morning on nothing, away you go.

SomeBad Sign folks have speculated this has to do with a gun permit. Not quite. It’s a u-turn sign; I haven’t blogged about this, but since the twentieth of June I have been obsessed with u-turn signs. That’s the day I got busted for disregarding one.

I have footage. Footage. Yep, that’s a little obsessed I’ll admit; but can you blame me? This cop…who wasn’t even born when I started driving…hands me this pink slip with a notice to appear on it, and I go back to the scene of the crime to see — a cigarette-carton-sized “sign” I missed, along with thirty people per hour, on average, disregarding it exactly the way I did. Maybe they can see it just fine, and they’re just a bunch of law-breaking assholes. I dunno. I can tell you if I saw the sign, I’d have followed it. But I didn’t see it. And I didn’t see it because it’s not a legal sign.

A “no-parking-sized” sign, which means, I dunno…nine inches by twelve inches? Mounted on a median. A no-parking-sized, regulatory sign on a median. Have you ever seen such a thing? I’ve driven one end of this great nation to the other, and this is a new one on me. Anyway, my “layman’s” reading of the law strongly indicates that it is on my side. The minimum dimensions are right in there, I have the citations and page numbers ready to show the Judge, and there’s no authorization for a no-parking-sized sign on a median anywhere. Not for a “no u-turn” sign.

My poor girlfriend. “Ring Ring.” “Hi!” “Where are you?” “Where do you think?” “Oh my God…you’re videotaping that stupid sign again?” “Yer goddamn right I am. What time are you home?”

I live in a state that is deeply, deeply in the red. And you can see it in the “cattle drive” sessions at traffic court. Everyone has a tale of woe to tell about an evil auto-camera capturing their license plate numbers and mailing them traffic citations for four hundred bucks or more. Freeberg’s traffic citation formula: Penalty imposed, minus enhancement to the public safety, equals loss of freedom. We’re losing just bagfuls and bagfuls of freedom at the traffic court, and we’re probably not pulling our impoverished state out of debt for all the effort…but by God, they’re gonna give it a good try.

They’re not going to succeed with my wallet, I’ll tell you that right now. I’ve got twelve pages of PowerPoint, plus a three-minute video, to make sure of it.

There. I said this morning “irresistible force meeting an immovable object” and now you know exactly what that’s all about. Tune in September 21 to find out what comes of this.

My Day in Court

Monday, August 17th, 2009

How Will It Go?Well, the big day is here. Win or lose, I don’t expect this hearing will last more than a couple minutes; I’m just not that important. But everyone who knows me well enough to be forced to reckon with my day-to-day life-happenings is expressing more than a casual interest in how this thing is going to turn out; truly a case of an irresistible force meeting up with an immovable object.

You’ll get the conclusion first, back-story later.

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Yes, from here on you can click the title and be taken to the front-page. Just like any normal blog. Yup, you click it, and away you go…we’re not going to be special anymore.

Thanks to Daphne for screeching at me until I came to my senses.

Morgan and Mahatma

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Mahatma Ghandi

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the resolve with which it ensures that good guys win and bad guys lose.”

— Morgan K. Freeberg

Niner Fiver Six Three Zip

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

I’ve seen both Stepford Wives movies, and I’ve never understood either one of them. They seem to define a tragic situation from what I consider to be a happy one, and vice versa. Gorgeous, graceful, devoted and docile wives — a sign of trouble? Men happily sipping from brandy snifters, smoking cigars, farting into luxurious leather chairs while their happy, agreeable wives bring them plates of sandwiches…that’s an ominous harbinger of doom? Argumentative, buzz-cut harpies arguing with their henpecked husbands just for the sheer hell of it — that’s the way things are supposed to be? The Katherine Ross version came out a third of a century ago. In all that time, I’ve managed to remain entirely clueless. I just don’t get it. I don’t show signs of getting it anytime soon.

But I get the opposite. Folsom, California 95630 absolutely, positively has a “Stepford Husbands” problem.

How do I know this? The parking lots. The parking lots with great big SUVs parked in them. SUVs that no true man would ever buy. With loud, obnoxious, mouse-like dogs barking their fool heads off in the front seats. Dogs no self-respecting man would own.

In the twinkling of an eye, anyone with a head that’s worth more than a hat-hanger knows exactly what has taken place here. She (and maybe the kids) came home with an adorable puppy dog that he did not pick out, nor did he assist in picking out…and in response…he said “oh, alright.” Folks, I’m here to tell you right now, no man from the planet I call “Earth” would react that way. Nobody with red blood would react that way. Normal people raise it as an issue — um, would you care to discuss this with me before you consign me to indentured servitude living adjacent to this annoying little yip-dog? What in the hell is the matter with you, woman?

Beast from HellYes, I mean it. It’s not a “man of the house” thing; it has nothing to do with dominating your wife. It’s basic self-respect.

Not so with the Folsom husbands. They just say “oh, alright” and that’s the way life is from that day forward. I speculate recklessly? How else did that damn dog get in there? It was his? Hah. Tell me another. It’s a rapidly spreading sickness. An epidemic. How do I know this? Because the next car over is also a halftrack-sized leviathan gleaming-metal-skinned creature…with an annoying little yip-dog barking his head off in the front seat. And the next car over from that. And the next car. And the next car. You think Folsom is like any other place in the union? You think wrong.

These Stepford Husbands who do the unthinkable so regularly…behold such an evil canine/rodent creature taking over their home and acquiescing to the invasion in such an unmanly, French way…they don’t live in my world. But they live in Folsom, that’s for sure.

Folsom — land of the tank-sized vehicles people drive to work, while they worry incessantly about global warming.

Folsom — urban mecca of the enormous SUVs with irritating little marsupial-rodent dogs, bred to be carried around in purses, barking, barking, barking some more, with high, glass-cutting animal sounds you’d expect out of a birdcage.

Folsom — where men talk to their very own kids as if they aren’t really men. Children go through their entire childhoods, never seeing anything good coming out of masculinity. Folsom, which is slightly conservative-leaning…for now. Nobody with a brain expects it to say that way. How can it?

Why do we live here? Because until people start forcing each other to raise their kids the same way, it’s still a good place to raise kids. And you can unpack groceries from your car, forget to lock up your car…in fact, leave the trunk yawning wide open…and come back the next morning to a concerned neighbor (walking his wife’s annoying little yip dog) pointing out “Hey dude, you left your trunk open and I closed it for ya.” This offsets my concerns about what’s happening to the culture. We don’t have manliness, but for now we do have some order. We still have the “good guys should win bad guys should lose” spirit. It may be the next casualty, but it’s still around for now.

I’m reminded of a protocol that is supposed to be effective within the United States Marine Corps: Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one. This is a good distinction to keep in mind, I think, and it would benefit the average Folsom family man enormously to learn it. It would be good for his family, too. It’s never, ever a good thing for kids, to have a “friend” instead of a father…or a mother. And I think that’s the problem. I see kids playing with toys, obstructing heavy pedestrian traffic. The proper response from the parent is to move the child out of the way and then provide admonishment, commensurate with the age of the child who doesn’t know his place, that he shouldn’t be getting in the way. This doesn’t happen often in Folsom; seems lately like I’m the only one who bothers.

Gum on the sidewalk. Let’s be fair about it, Folsom is not a “gum on your shoe” capital of the world by any means. If I want to get gum stuck on my shoes, I’ll head to midtown. But nevertheless — why does it ever happen at all? My own kid isn’t even allowed to chew gum outside. He hasn’t expressed an interest in it. If he did, he would be properly schooled in how to dispose of the gum when he’s done chewing it. Kids leaving gum where it can get stuck to your shoes, reflect poorly on their parenting. They should’ve been taught things. They show, yet again, their parents were in too big of a hurry to be buddies rather than parents.

Bubble Wrap Society

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Me, in the e-mails, elaborating on the brilliance I showed yesterday morning:

Bubble WrapIf, when we as individuals make dumbass decisions, we can expect to deal a severe injury to ourselves but to none of our neighbors — then we have the makings of a free society. If, on the other hand, our reprehensibly bad judgment poses a danger to others whenever it poses a danger to us, then our freedom is already gone. All the intermediate steps that ensue…the statist politician or advocate making his way to the microphone, imploring us to accept the next nanny-state law, the strategically-worded polls that draw pre-calculated answers saying people are oh so worried, all the canned speeches about the status quo being unacceptable, the committee votes, the floor votes, et cetera…these are nothing but inevitable and meaningless milestones, hash marks along the swing path of the wrecking ball. Once the foolishness of one can be expected to impact the welfare of the many, we aren’t free anymore, it’s all over but the shouting and the weeping.

To distill all of the above to its essentials: Our freedom isn’t measured in our freedom to be smart. It’s measured in our freedom to be jackasses. Jackasses, suffering self-inflicted wounds, but one jackass at a time. We’re losing that fast…

A great example of this is motorcycle helmet laws. This is a rarity among issues, because when most people think on it awhile, they end up agreeing with me.

Which means they think: If in our modern age it was possible to go riding without a motorcycle helmet, crash, get yourself completely messed up, and end up in horrible trouble but by engaging in such foolishness dealing no harm to anybody else…then yes, motorcycle helmet laws would be a horrible thing and we shouldn’t have ’em. Now that that ship has sailed, though, the “public” has a vested interest in your well-being whether you like it or not, and the helmet law becomes a symptom, not a cause, of what’s gone wrong with us. We are, indeed, all connected. We have, indeed, lost the modularity of our bubble-wrapping. We are just one big bubble. We’ve lost that quality where one bubble can be popped, and all adjacent bubbles remain intact. Since we’re all one bubble, yes you are going to wear your goddamn helmet. That’s a shame, but it’s gotta be that way.

It’s a shame because everything has to work that way now. Can’t use charcoal, you grill with propane or electric or don’t grill at all. No guns in your house. Drive a smaller car. Unplug your cell phone when it’s done charging. Buy your “carbon credit vouchers.” Teach your kids to share, and keep them in the public school system (unless you’re a democrat politician who makes it harder for people to take their own kids out of the public school system…then you can do whatever you want). Every little choice we can possibly make — except for a woman deciding to end her pregnancy — is considered for the harm it might bring to “The People,” just like we’re living in Stalinist Russia.

Do you realize what we have now abandoned? In those dirty little socialist mudpuddle countries in which people all live as part of one big bubble and they’re proud of living out their lives that way, like amoebas or ants or The Borg…isolated cases of individuals or subclasses can, and are, indeed “popped” in instances of contained destruction. In his book 1984, George Orwell referred to it as “vaporizing.” They come for you in the middle of the night, no publicity, no trials, and nobody ever hears from you again. And then the Ministry of Truth wipes out your past as well.

That’s actually happened in real life. It happens in nations in which everybody is “united,” where one man lives, works, breathes, breeds, eats and sleeps for the benefit of all the others. Because that’s the kind of government action that can only be justified as “doing the work of The People.”

All of the weaknesses of a bubble-wrap society, with none of the strengths.

A true bubble-wrap society though, enjoys all of the strengths of a socialist regime but is burdened by none of the weaknesses. Back in the nineteenth century, out in the midwest where a living was a hard thing to earn and a tough thing to keep, we had a true bubble wrap society. Your closest neighbor might have been a half a mile away, maybe more. And your bubble might be popped. Bad harvest. Your cows get sick. Your kids get the flu. Your husband goes off to war and doesn’t come back.

But people pulled together and helped each other out. Laws did not compel them to do that; a community sense of decency did that. It was voluntary, but only barely, since anyone who did not partake would become a social pariah. A pariah, not a criminal. There’s an enormous difference.

Because people helped each other, out of a sense of civil decency but not a sense of civil obedience, it was infeasible for a political figure to mount a soapbox and raffle off some sales pitch for a new social program. That’s because we still had our bubble wrapping. The widow’s oldest son was dead, and he was the one who did the heavy lifting; of course you would help her out, but this didn’t have a depressing effect on your net worth because so many others would be helping too. A social program to prevent all this from happening? What’s the point. People understood back then that life was hard. If it wasn’t one thing, it would be some other thing.

But now, we are bound not by a sense of cultural decency, but by the law. So a minor disaster is thought to be an actual expense to “The People” — even to those who make too little money to have a tax liability! The politician mounts the soapbox to tell us how we need his new disaster-preventing social program, and his argument is like an acetylene torch cutting through a snowman. The deliberation is over before it’s even begun. Of course the politician is right! This other social program the politician’s dad put together…this shell game that involves some kind of “fund”…it is “stressed.” It is “at the breaking point.” Something must be done! And so now we have to be regulated. Guns. Jeeps. Meat. Fat in our food. Sodium. These choices don’t really belong to us anymore, it’s all in the interest of “The People.” And so you might be against what’s going on…but what’s the point of opposing it?

In three or four generations — one thing used to be completely pointless, now the opposite thing is what’s completely pointless. Are you beginning to comprehend the depth of this tragedy? It’s a tough thing to take in all at once, and impossible to overstate.

The most precious things you can order online, the highest value things, the fanciest hard drives and other electronic components…when they’re carried off that brown truck of happiness, you open the box and you see they are cushioned with bubble wrap. That’s because they are cushioned with something the manufacturer and seller really, really wanted to work. Bubble wrap works, because when one bubble is popped the adjacent bubbles are not.

Your freedom arrives in bubble wrap.

No bubble wrap…no freedom. Like I said, it’s already gone and you just don’t know it yet. Without the bubble wrap, it’s all over except the shouting and the weeping.

That’s what socialized medicine is really all about. That’s what all these nanny-state programs are really all about. They’re there to put us “all in the same boat,” under enforcement by the police powers of the state, so that all our residual freedoms can be easily taken away. You can’t argue with anyone where the welfare of The People is at stake, can you?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

How to Make a Car Last Three Hundred Thousand Miles

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

I’m timid when I barely know the subject matter, or don’t know it at all. But when it comes to making cars last a long time, I’ve achieved more than most have, and I’ve adjusted my humility to reflect that.

Who knows? Maybe this’ll help some folks out. If not, then at least it’s a chance for me to vent. Some of you folks who have been entrusted with a good chunk of the household finances, present & future, through the hunk of gleaming metal you get to command on the public roads…you haven’t quite earned this sense of trust. You need to brush up. So read on.

1. No automatic transmissions.

If your car is an automatic transmission, you have no business trying to follow this list; not unless you’re prepared to replace the automatic transmission, which is going to cost more than you think and will mostly invalidate what we’re doing here. Get another car that has an old-fashioned gearbox. Automatic transmissions are done at 100k, maybe 150k. No, I don’t care how good the modern technology is. Making a car last means spending some effort. Learn to work a clutch, get really good at it so you can start from a dead stop without knocking an egg off the dashboard.

2. No jackrabbit starts.

If you want to prove me wrong about what I just said with regard to automatics, don’t peel out. Just because you want to go sixty miles an hour, doesn’t mean you have to jump there. If you are feeling some “G” forces you’re doing it wrong.

3. Do everything as if your car weighs ten tons.

That means going and stopping. Drive like you’re in command of a logging truck, with tons of timber and really loose chains holding it all down. Your automatic transmission will thank you for that. In fact, this is all good advice for everyone whether they’re driving a real car or not. Think like a freight train. Or a barge on a river. Take about thirty seconds after the light turns green to get up to speed. If this annoys the fellow in back of you, let him pass.

4. Show some empathy.

Know those old westerns where the cowboy vaults into the saddle from the second floor of a saloon or a brothel? Yes, no man is ready, willing or able to do that in real life. But if your relationship to your car is something like that — “I got places to go, giddyap!” — you need to change that relationship. This is a two-way street, and your car needs things from you, too.

This goes double for the ladies. Just because it’s politically incorrect doesn’t mean it’s incorrect all-around: Most women, when they operate machinery in general, conduct themselves in a way that the only adjective truly fit to describe it is “peevish.” They act like a wife being forced to share the kitchen with her husband’s concubine. That probably captures the reason why just as well as it captures the phenomenon itself: Jealousy. Women also do the most bitching about car repair bills, speculating with some justification that they’re being given inflated quotes because of their sex.

Your suspicion may not be misplaced, but your jealousy is. You are not competing with this car for anything. The car is not taking anything from you. The car is your friend. If you need to remind yourself of that on a regular basis, then do so. And then, who knows, perhaps owning a car will be as economical for you as it is for most of the gentlemen. C’mon, admit it, you know it’s true. Men don’t use cars the same way you do. And we don’t hear the “time to go car shopping” speech quite as often from our mechanics. There is a connection. If nobody’s told you that yet, it’s time you found it out from somewhere.

5. Fluids. Check ’em.

Fluids and belts. Gas, oil, coolant, PS, windshield washer, air in the tires.

6. Spend some real money on your fluids.

This is a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later thing. Don’t go looking for reasons to throw money away, for there will always be someone willing to take it.

But if you only buy the finest name-brand medicine for your kids when they’re sick, and only the finest dog food for your puppy, but the cheapest utilitarian crap for your designated chariot, you just might be repaid for this stingy habit in a manner not convenient to you.

Mortality7. Choose your motor oil wisely.

Thicker oil in the summer, thinner oil in the winter. Natural/synthetic blend is best. Use high mileage formulas over 200k.

When I first bought Bessie, these were left to consumer discretion. Now they make all the choices for you at the station, and of course you’re forced to go there because there are dainty disposal requirements involved for the used oil. The pussification of America, whaddya gonna do.

You can still bring up the subject with your mechanic. Ask what’s going into the crankcase. Believe me, it has a far bigger effect on your day-to-day life, than the mechanic’s.

8. Premium gasoline, all the time, and I don’t care what anyone says.

I’m open to a reasonable discussion here. But if you haven’t gotten 340 thousand miles on one car out of your cheapass gasoline, then know your place.

9. As with a person’s health, the key is getting past life’s grander misadventures.

You want to pilot an old car, start thinking like an old person: Once you’ve celebrated your ninetieth, you know that when the end finally comes it will most likely be coming in the middle of some kind of event. Day-to-day, you’ll be just as vibrant as you were four decades previous; but someday you’ll check into the hospital for something trivial, something that would’ve been shrugged off those four decades ago, but this time you won’t check out again. Barring a terrorist attack, that’s how it ends for you after ninety. That’s what is slated for your wheels after nineteen. An event. So you’ll get warnings. But the upkeep required will increase exponentially whereas your attendance to the requirement will not. That’s the exit cue.

Learn enough about what makes your car go that when the time comes it’s not running quite right, you possess some knowledge for figuring out what’s amiss and the consequences involved in this deficiency.

You should know enough that, once you understand what isn’t working right, you can categorize this into one of the two: “limp along” or “power down.” A window that won’t roll up is “limp along.” A quart of oil disappearing every 3,000 miles is “limp along.” A major oil leak or a cracked radiator, is “power down.” It is your responsibility to know which is which.

If you don’t know, err on the side of caution, park safely, shut things off, call the tow truck.

10. Any little problem that has to do with cooling goes in the “power down” column.

Machines don’t react to heat the way people do, and all damage caused by heat is not immediately visible. Just remember, as the odometer rolls over and over again, that when this thing eventually goes the final blow will almost certainly be directly related to heat.

So if you’re in it to win it, and you’re not absolutely sure the oil is going where it needs to go, and the coolant is going where it needs to go…key OFF.

Thatisall.

Twits and Bookies, Bookies and Twits

Friday, July 17th, 2009

So sometime a few months ago, I caved in and set up a Twitter account just to see what all the fuss is about. Like many others out there…I’m still waiting to find out. I think.

Some of my blogger friends seem to have gotten a lot of meaning out of this thing that I can’t quite see, and some of them have even taking to blogger-bitching that I’m not using Twitter properly. I concede this point by default. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing it right. I’m a bad twit.

So I hole up in my little cave and continue to do my blogger thing, and meanwhile the Facebook invitations are piling up and piling up. My girlfriend was getting into Facebook pretty heavy, getting into some kind of cartoon farm planting contest with some other bookies. I don’t know what this thing’s called or where it is, I just know it has this annoying virtual cow.

One night I figured it out: It’s the chat. “My God!” I said to her one night, while she chatted away with her sister-in-law…or girlfriend from New York…or whatever. “Is that what the fuss is about? You people are discovering chat?” And she nodded. “Do you realize I’ve been arguing with liberals over chat since 1986? You non-computer-people are just learning about chat now that it’s called ‘Facebook’?”

“Pretty much,” she said. My gal. She has such inventive ways of saying “stick a cork in it, putz.”

Then my kid got into it. I got an e-mail earlier this week from his mother saying he was chatting with his cousin and grandfather (on my side of the family). So I sent back this bit of snark:

Wow, so my entire extended family is filled with Facebook bloggers. You computer people, drifting around in cyberspace with all your puffed-up opinions…

I’m as obnoxious as I can possibly get where Facebook is concerned — or at least, I was. It was my way to stop people from inviting me. It didn’t work. And then when your kid sends you an invite, of course you have to accept. So now I’m on it.

I have not been an overwhelmingly successful twit, and I have strong doubts against the supposition that I’ll be a super-cool bookie. On both sites I’m just kinda…there.

It came up in the staff meeting this morning, this phenomenon called Facebook. There were a bunch of knowing nods around the table among the older set, as I explained that you have to join when your kid invites you. But in this “live” round of “social networking,” I came to learn about something else going on: As the gray-beards (me) slowly come trickling into the Facebook pool, the younger crowd is making a mass exodus out of apparent revulsion toward the invading Metamucil set.

I guess it’s part & parcel of being forty-three. I have my first set of liver spots, and the minute I do what everyone else has decided is “cool,” by definition it ceases to be cool. Still waiting for the eyeballs to turn to mush like all the older folks keep telling me should’ve already happened by now. Friends and family insist my hair is thinning more than I’m willing to admit though…so it looks like the next stop is senior discounts at Denny’s.

Working on Plans for the Next Forty-Three

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Well, we’re a workin’ blogger, so we have to get off our fat ass and get our day started here. There is so much more to be said about our wonderful blogger friends all around the innerwebs…a few days ago I awarded a “first place” ribbon to one of them for updating her link to us after we moved our site, and we were going to get a sequenced list going of all the other early-birds.

Blogsister Daphne's Birthday CardIt seemed fair. It’s OUR move; we decided to do it, and how obnoxious would it be if every time someone moved a blog and his buddies didn’t update their links to him that day, he started sending out snotty notes to them to the effect of “Hey goddammit! Update your links!” I’d be all, like screw you pal. So sticks are inappropriate here. Carrots over sticks.

Well it didn’t happen, because the next time I checked everyone apparently had updated their links to this spot, www.peekinthewell.net/blog. It really is true: You can’t fool bloggers.

So with the gracious accommodations to the blog-move, and the birthday wishes, we have so many shout-outs for so many wonderful folks. We just don’t have time for it all at the moment. We’ll have to remedy that one soon.

But I do have to get by with just one…this virtual birthday card from Blogsister Daphne. What is it about Texas women that makes them so classy and precious? I can hear you all virtually yelling at me “Don’t say it!”…

…that’s one birthday wish I can get behind. Badump Bup Psshhh!! Tip your waiters. Try the veal. I’m here all week.

Gotta go, it’s getting late. After showering and dressing, I still have all those boxes of beer to lug up the stairs…ten of ’em. This weekend we’re going to go out and catch a movie, and then another couple weeks I’ll be making the trip to go pick up my twelve-year-old so he can get ready to start the school year. And then I won’t even have to go out to the balcony to get the next bottle of beer, I’ll have someone I can send. Free labor.

Life is good.

Moving Day

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

We-ell…if Sarah Palin has the decency and candor to come clean and let the people of Alaska know that they need a change if they’re going to get their money’s worth…I think the nobodies who never make time to not stop by and not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, are deserving of the same decency. I think we could handle this behind the scenes, make it invisible, take the veil-over-the-statue approach, but what’s the point. I don’t see the upside. Might as well spill the beans now.

We’re moving.

For the last three years, we’ve been squatting on Terry “Trip” Trippany’s domain, which he runs as one of his many pursuits. You may know him from his Newsbusters column. Back in the summer of ’06, he approached us about the idea of converting to WordPress, which we’d already been thinking about for quite some time because we were on Blogger. As an added bonus, he offered to do the hosting duties as well, which is more than what it sounds like. He does a very able job of not only keeping things going, but enabling countermeasures against the sampbots, the beasties, the hackers, the vandals…et cetera. We’ve been thrilled to benefit from such a capable hand in this. Plus, in response to those who come asking, we’ve been able to say we get our hosting services from a real fan. He approached us because he liked our stuff. We like the shop he runs. It’s been a good match.

Well, there’s some money involved in this, which has been coming out of his wallet instead of ours. That never was fair, and with the economy the way it is, it’s no longer workable. It’s not like we’re being kicked out, the fact of the matter is Trip is spread thin.

MugWe already have another domain. Had it for a few years now. The bottleneck here, has been — nothing but — our huge fat ass and the attendant laziness associated therein. So now we got a deadline.

Knowing how well I work under pressure, along with how the inertia in my ass works, my crystal ball says…and this is just a best-guess…we’ll probably have a practice run this weekend, followed by an actual cutover the weekend after that, worst-case scenario. That’s my rough-ball-park timeline. I think. I know, you’re just in awe at my sense of certainty. I are an experienced projek manager, don’t forget.

Anyway, now you know what we know. We’ll try to make it as smooth a shift as possible. But one other thing that’s gonna be absolutely certain…the URL is going to change. Sorry ’bout that. But it’s okay…there’s only one coffee mug that has ever been manufactured with this old link, which is at work as I write this (pictured, to the right). That’ll be my private collector’s item.

Wish us luck. And let us know if you have any extra cardboard boxes.

Daphne’s Disgusted

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Unlike the rest of that unending parade of snarky females slapping us bumbling men upside the head claiming to want us to smarten up and do better, this one means it. She’s Blogsister Daphne, a woman of wit, class and substance, who claims to like men because she really does; and she’s upset with our obsession with Flo.

If obsession is the offense, I would point out we didn’t bring up the subject in the first place. But something tells me this is one of those things where “discussion” only exists as an idea…train has left the station…woman-talk-man-listen territory from here on out. We’ve all been there.

Lara CroftAnd we know the protocol. Wait for her to get done…try like the dickens to avoid doing anything to piss her off any further…stay quiet and out of sight…do something harmless. Like playing Tomb Raider.

For those who can’t bear to stay quiet — Buck represented us reasonably well, I thought. But hey, maybe you think he left something unsaid. I’m staying out of this one. Things reach a fevered pitch, and then they crescendo further to a point where even I start to have some common sense. Best to just stay out of (further) trouble.

Besides, have you noticed what they’ve done with Lara’s rack in the last two games? Great googly moogly.