Michelle's pride
Yesterday's Official Standard Talking Point for the 'R' branch of the McCainstream Media was Michelle Obama's comment: she's proud to be an American for the first time.

All the brand-R talking pointheads spent all three hours yesterday repeating over and over and over and over the Official Talking Point that we are all required to be Proud Of Being A Great American Citizen Of The Greatest Country On God's Green Earth At All Times, and that anyone who fails to be Proud Of Being A Great American Citizen Of The Greatest Country On God's Green Earth At All Times is shameful, distasteful, and a huge huge Lib, huuuuuge huuuuuuuuuuuge huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge Lib.

Amazingly enough, despite all this gaudy parrot-squawk, the Talking Pointheads missed one angle.

Michelle Obama benefitted from affirmative action: she came from a working-class background and was able to attend Princeton. Clarence Thomas also benefitted from affirmative action: he came from a working-class background and was able to attend Yale. White youngsters of the same generation and background did not have the same chance.

Our Communist masters have been instructing us daily for the last 16 years that Clarence Thomas is unqualified to criticize affirmative action because he experienced affirmative action.

So why aren't they calling Michelle Obama unqualified to criticize her privileged life? She had the same 'benefit'.

Behind all this mess of hypocrisy stands one plain fact. Affirmative action is not really a benefit to anyone. It creates convoluted feelings of resentment, guilt, and shame on both sides: those who gain position and those who lose.

This is exactly why our founders decided to set up a system without official privilege, because they had felt these resentments in the English class system.

Thanks to Comrades LBJ and Nixon, we've long since abandoned the dream of the founders and resumed a hereditary class system. We are now reaping the rotten harvest, but because our communist masters instruct us that the purpose of this class system is to get rid of classes, we aren't able to deal with it honestly.

"The class system is a temporary necessity to help us reach the classless utopia."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Ordinary Russians understood this Marxian scam only too well. We don't.



Either we're dumber than Russians, or our Politburo does a better job of internal propaganda. I truly don't know which is the case.
  ¶ 11:54 PM

  Bush in Benin
As much as I've come to disrespect Bush for his incompetent leadership of this country, I have to sympathize with the guy. His current situation can't be any fun.



By contrast, he obviously likes these people, and they obviously like him.

Absolutely classic photograph, with all those hands competing for territory! I see two stories in the photo. First, those African kids have a fine unjaded sense of respect. They all want a tactile memory of their meeting with an important man, and they want the important man to know that he is loved and respected. Second, the Secret Service would never allow this to happen in America.

Hmm. What does that say about the relative level of civilization in the two countries?

And it must be a tremendous joy for a tired politician to encounter this expression of respect:


when he's been getting the opposite at home.

These Africans have a good reason for liking him. His AIDS program has already saved many lives. I wouldn't blame him for moving to Tanzania or Benin when his term is over, perhaps to manage a foundation of some sort. Bush is a kind-hearted compassionate man, the right man for such a foundation. He's not the right man for a wartime presidency.

Combine this with the likely election of Obama, who is a genuine African-American in the proper and strict sense of the word, and we may end up with something close to the situation Polistra dreamed about last year.  ¶ 8:40 PM

  Plagiarism
The Clinton machine is using a "charge" of plagiarism against Obama, and is getting the desired results. All of the McCainstream Media, both left and right, are helping to carry the charge.

It's really an irrelevant charge within the world of politics, because nearly all politicians grab good lines from other politicians. Original writing is simply not part of the job description for a good leader; you're more likely to inspire people with well-tested lines. Only a few pols (Disraeli, Churchill, Jefferson, Lincoln) are fully original writers. All the rest are happy copiers, and the [living] sources don't seem to object.

But plagiarism does matter within two other professions: Academia and journalism. Doing your own research, and attributing sources accurately, are definitely part of the job description for professors and reporters. Even within those worlds the charge is only used in exceptional cases, though .... both academia and journalism have tight fraternities with strong leftist tendencies, and both have audiences which don't share the leftist tendencies. Now and then a prof or a reporter will crank out propaganda so crude or heavy-handed that the audience (college alumni or newspaper readers) will start withdrawing their support for the institution. In those cases, plagiarism gives the management a functional method to fire the heavy-handed propagandist. If they fired her honestly, the fraternity would rock the institution with shouts of McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism! McCarthyism!

So they use plagiarism as the stated reason, because it's a meaningful offense to the fraternity members, who are serious professionals as well as serious Communists.

The Clinton machine is following the same gambit. They know that the two Leninist fraternities ... who naturally prefer Obama as the more orthodox leftist ... will carry the charge against Obama, and may even lose some of their love for him in the process.

The voters don't give a rip either way.
  ¶ 6:36 PM

  Real ID
Polistra returns to the subject of Intelligent Design because of a new development. Peculiarly enough, the science-ists have actually decided to engage in real science in order to defend their claims against the ID'ers.

The whole dispute started when Darwin, himself a firm Christian, wrote: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous ... small modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case."

Since then, the argument has been refined to include purpose or usefulness as well as complexity; generally the ID folks cite complex organs that would be useless consumers of energy and growth during the "numerous small modifications", and which could only help the organism in their final or current form. Survival of the fittest would generally eliminate organisms that carried such intermediate stages, because they were wasting energy on structures that served no purpose.

My own favorite example is the cochlea, an exquisitely complex and tiny mechanism that serves no purpose until it is connected to an eardrum for input, and connected to a fantastically complex set of processing "software" in the brain for output. The origin of the mechanical part of the system can be traced easily enough: the three little bones that couple the eardrum to the cochlea have undoubtedly evolved from the multi-jointed jawbone of frogs and snakes. The intermediate stages have been demonstrated. But why would a device that helps a python swallow a pig, develop into tiny specialized levers that transform acoustic impedance between the air and the fluids in the cochlea?

Most importantly, the cochlea itself would simply have no purpose unless it was between the eardrum and the processing "software".








Consider this snail-shaped object containing three chambers, each with its own custom-made fluid of just the right viscosity, lined with nerve cells that are triggered by movement of tiny hairs embedded in the ceiling membrane. The combination of viscosity, shape and mass of membranes, leads each frequency of the incoming sound to strike the membrane at a different place, thus giving each nerve cell its own frequency response. It works beautifully to process exactly the range of sounds that a human [in pre-urban society] needs for communication and safety.




There are simpler cochleas in some mammals, more complex in others. Obviously adaptation and mutation are responsible for the varied types of cochleas; and obviously we haven't adapted yet to urban situations, because the cochlea is highly susceptible to damage from frequencies and intensities often found in automobiles and factories. Evolution on those levels is visible and understandable. But that doesn't take us from the earless fish to the wildly complicated mammalian auditory system.


Another example is the flagellum, found in bacteria and in many of our component cells. Flagella serve as "oars" to propel the bacterium through the water as it seeks food or light. Until rather recently, the flagellum was thought to be a whip that moved back and forth, perhaps driven by filling and emptying nearby membranes.






A whip would be interesting, but it turns out the flagellum is vastly more complicated and ingenious. It is an electrostatic motor, with a free-floating shaft held in alignment by the bearing between the outer and inner membranes of the cell. The shaft is turned by charging and discharging the Stator bodies in a circular pattern, thus attracting the Rotor bodies successively in each step of the circle.




(This motor was re-invented 2 billion years later by Tesla, using magnetic fields instead of electrostatic fields.)

Intelligent Design advocates love the flagellum because it's very hard to imagine an intermediate or "prototype" form. Remove any of the parts or arrange them differently, and you get a motionless hair or a circular set of thingies that serve no purpose. And the flagellum is a significant part of the size and weight of the cell, so it's not a minor burden.

The science-ists had always answered this objection by saying "The flagellum evolved." Hmm. Sounds a lot like "Darwin said it, I believe it, that settles it."

"Modern biology, of course, has no need for omniscient designers. Evolution is all that is needed to explain the origin of complexity in nature. Even so, [the ID'ers] continue to search for evidence of design in the living world. The bacterial flagellum has become their cause celebre - and a focal point in science's ongoing struggle against unreason."

Struggle against unreason. Rhymes with jihad against infidels, doesn't it?






Lately, feeling the pressure, a few microbiologists finally decided to look at the question scientifically. What a novel idea!!!! They examined the various bits and pieces, and found that several of them existed in other tissues or cells. From this they concluded: "This abundance of homology provides incontrovertible evidence that bacterial flagella are cobbled together from recycled components of other systems, through gene duplication and diversification. In other words, they evolved."

= = = = =

Polistra finds this idea to be a wondrous epiphany, and is now exploring various structures found in Nature to celebrate their incontrovertible randomness.



This structure, discovered in a valley in Pennsylvania, appears to have an "abundance of homology." In fact, within the formal study of homes, this structure is generally considered to be a prime example. (Sorry, lame pun, couldn't resist.)

It is evidently "cobbled together from recycled components of other systems", such as small rocks, metal bars, and melted sand. Thus we can decisively conclude that it was not designed by any sort of intelligence; it must have evolved randomly.




Or how about this system? Cobbled together from components found in deciduous trees, elephant dentition, and igneous rocks. Clearly random. What's more, its internal structure is remarkably parallel to the cochlea, with a sequence of precisely tuned resonators. Since we already know the cochlea is random, we can impute this one to a mere toss of the dice as well, by homology.



And this system was found on top of the previous one. It appears to be cobbled together from a series of flat slabs of crushed tree material, coated in places with a mixture of carbon and glue. Polistra is examining a segment of the carbon and glue layers which form the following visible pattern:

"AND THE GLORY OF THE LORD SHALL BE REVEALED."

This sequence must be random, produced by the proverbial thousand monkeys at typewriters, because the accompanying musical pitches were recycled from the third movement of a harpsichord concerto. Clearly random, clearly the blind product of evolution.

Yes, the science-ists have finally won. This argument is unanswerable.

Or perhaps it's just unfathomable.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 12:44 PM

  Rush is seriously missing the point on this one...
As he does on so many things.

Just finished listening to the call from 33-yr-old Jared here in Spokane. Jared was voicing a fairly common idea: Since the R side won't give us any substantial candidates, he's voting for Obama because Obama is inspirational.

First, Rush and most of the punditry are still not getting the basic problem.

Americans have become so totally cynical, so totally fed up with the bizarre corruption, wild incompetence and shameless disloyalty of the Federal level, that a revolution is brewing.

"Futility is the nemesis of democracy" like it says up there.

FDR faced a similar situation in 1932. Hoover had done such an abysmal job of handling the Depression, had spent so much time claiming the economy was still strong (though at least he didn't use the word Robust!) that the people had lost faith in the entire system. Father Coughlin was gathering voters for outright Fascism, and various Communist candidates were gaining strength.

Roosevelt's substantial solutions were no better than Hoover's at first ... in fact FDR simply implemented Hoover's ideas. But he was able to avoid revolution from either side because he gave the people something to hang onto. After that, he had more freedom to experiment with unconventional solutions.

It's a plain fact that most people need to trust their leaders in times of stress.

This isn't true for the Rush class, because (as Polistra has said many times) the Rush class doesn't even need a country. They have their private transportation systems, private armies, private economies. But for the rest of us, a major crisis will turn us into starving mobs ripe for revolution, unless we feel some degree of reassurance that the leaders are ... that the leaders are not mentally defective, to put it plainly.

I understand how the emphasis on ideology came to be supreme: in several recent elections we had no particular crisis, and in the last two elections we had candidates who could only be separated by (essentially false) advertising of ideology. Bush and Gore are both mentally defective rich white guys from Yale. Bush and Kerry are both mentally defective rich white guys from Yale. Bush, Gore, and Kerry believe most of the same things. In order to make those elections seem like contests, the parties had to create something to advertise.

This time is different. We have both foreign and domestic crises. We did have some potentially available candidates with both substance and inspiring leadership. Well, we had one. Dana Rohrabacher, the nearest thing to Churchill in our government. But he didn't run. Duncan Hunter had the substance but not the inspiration, and he dropped out. I've been supporting Huck because he has the inspiration if not the substance, but now that he's practically out, I just might go to Obama.

Yes, I understand what Jared is saying, and I'll bet many others do also.

Rush ended up with a stupid and contemptuous insult: Assuming Jared was a seminar caller, a plant, because nobody of that age could possibly have been conscious of Reagan in high school - especially in a liberal state like Washington. That's lame, Rush. Not just lame but ignorant. Washington is not the same kind of liberal as Massachusetts. Perot did very well here. Spokane is distinctly Republican; tradition holds sway here, and the public schools here are not badly infected by Communism.
  ¶ 9:48 AM

  By and by, part II
I've been arguing with (or more precisely arguing at) Lawrence Krauss for a while without naming him; he has been writing some truly obnoxious opinion pieces in New Scientist, and I've been responding indirectly.

My quote on the right-hand side in this post was from Krauss.

Right now Krauss is giving a speech at AEI, broadcast on C-Span, in which he makes the same terrible points. Luckily, some questions are allowed, and luckily the questioners are excellent. It would have been better to format the whole presentation as a debate, with questions after each point, so that Krauss's illogical arguments weren't allowed to stick in the audience's minds.

Krauss (to his credit) backed off in some places, but he stuck to a couple of silly and dangerous arguments, which nobody questioned in the time available.

Krauss began by associating ignorance with totalitarianism. He gave the example of the Taliban destroying important parts of world culture (the ancient Buddhist statues) "because of ignorance", and proceeded from there to state that Americans must understand the BASICS of evolution as taught by the current consensus, in order to avoid totalitarianism.

This is worse than nonsense.

First, the most effective totalitarians were very smart. Hitler and Stalin poured huge amounts of money and emphasis into research and education. German and Russian math and science teaching was -- probably still is -- vastly superior to ours. Modern Russians know more about nearly everything than modern Americans.

Our entire space program depended on scientists educated under Hitler, not on scientists educated in America. Hitler's problem was emphatically not ignorance.

Second, Krauss seems to think that American science and math education is bad because we hesitate to tell students that evolution is an axiom.

It's exactly the other way around.

Our science and math education is awful BECAUSE WE HAVE FOLLOWED the Krauss model: start with a few axioms, build theories, consider the theories to be settled. Ever since the Scopes trial, we have IN FACT been telling students that evolution is the only possible theory, and this hasn't made a damn bit of difference.

Science and math education -- for that matter, science and math in general -- work best when you start with experimentation. Students learn best when they know first why each fact or theory is important. Why did I slip and fall on the ice this morning? Why did the fried egg stick to the pan? Why did the snow hit Spokane instead of Pullman? Why did this resistor burn, while that one over there is nicely cool? How do I know which part of the computer needs to be replaced?

After the students have their motivation, after they feel the frustration and puzzlement of the question, after they know that the answer will help them to live better or earn more money, THEN you can go into the lab and check out the details. And after the details have been discussed and settled, preferably with some (carefully contained) failures to show what doesn't work, THEN you can show the math and theoretical background.

This is how the Russians did it, with great results; yet despite a few good local programs, we still don't teach this way in most schools.

The Taliban way of thinking is destructive because it starts with definite knowledge and proceeds to immediate action. Allahu akbar, therefore we must destroy all evidence of other gods.

Krauss's own mindset is much closer to the Taliban than to science or Christianity. He takes evolution and global warming as unquestioned axioms, from which we must proceed to immediate action.

A good Christian, or a good scientist, is far more humble. "We'll understand it all by and by" is a Christian attitude and a scientific attitude.

= = = = =

Update: It appears that NBC Nightly News will be doing a feature on math teaching, called "Math Wars", Mon 2/18. Dispute is an encouraging sign ... but it would be more encouraging if the CORRECT method, the EXPERIMENTAL method, had been chosen 100 years ago when it was already obvious.

In a backward sort of way, the Kraussites are right about one thing. Good teaching is actually opposed by conservative and religious factions, but this is totally unrelated to Darwin. Every respected "conservative" is required to rant for "sticking to the basics" and rant against "progressive" education. Unfortunately "sticking to the basics" always means teaching by memorization of verbal facts, while "progressive" education includes the Montessori methods that work, PLUS a batch of egalitarian ratshit about eliminating competition and eliminating grades.

The correct solution, the Russian solution, is not "the basics", but Montessori PLUS competition and evaluation. Since the correct solution lies outside the rigid chalk lines of each team, it will never be adopted. The "conservatives" will never allow experiential education because it has been dirtied by association with the Left; and the Left will never allow competition because insane egalitarianism is an absolute core belief of the Left, second only to the sacrament of Abortion. I conclude that the teams have drawn the lines this way intentionally, since the one thing our political teams WILL NEVER ALLOW UNDER ANY CONDITIONS IS A CORRECT SOLUTION TO ANY PROBLEM. We must, must, must, must, must, must, continue our pointless repetition of opposing meaningless mantras, while the ship continues to sink with nobody at the helm.

Labels: Krauss

  ¶ 4:24 PM

  Lordy, lordy, lordy!
This morning I was googling to find a non-modern recording of 'Farther Along', to decorate this entry. I found it, and therewith found also an immense cornucopia of real raw unfiltered Appalachian music. Been exploring it since then!

The source is the Digital Library of Appalachia. Contains not only music but oral history and texts.

The Messenger Quartet, who sing 'Farther Along', have about 40 other songs in the archive.

Best I've found so far is the Emmanuel Quartet, consisting of "Mr. and Mrs. Arvil Hanks, with their daughter on piano, and an unidentified man." The singers are below average, but the "daughter on piano" is pure heaven. I do believe she was playing straight to Jesus.

Imagine what she could have done with a piano that had been tuned once in its life....... or accompanying singers who had been tuned once in their lives.

Hint: These recordings are scratchy and rumbly. Set your equalizer like this



for best results.
  ¶ 9:35 PM

  This is how corruption works.
The McCainstream Media are all reporting as a solid fact that Comrade McCain won the Washington state caucuses.

This is a FIX, not a FACT.

Why? Because the state Republican Party STOPPED COUNTING AT 87% OF THE BALLOTS.

At that point, the totals for Comrade McCain and Huck were 25.5% and 23.7% respectively. If these numbers came after counting all the votes reliably, they would indeed represent a narrow victory for Comrade McCain. But when you've stopped counting at 87%, this separation is simply meaningless. Could go either way easily.

I conclude that the state Republican establishment must have seen the remaining votes trending toward Huckabee, and decided to stop while their Comrade was ahead.

The Huckabee campaign is actively working on this fraud.

= = = = =

Thirty minutes later: Amazingly, Fox News just picked up this fact, through their embedded reporter. I figured they would maintain silence, because up till now they have tried hard to delete Huck from their coverage. Credit where credit is due!

= = = = =

Later: Fox is all over it. Good stuff!

This particular fraud is especially galling ... The gov election of 2004 was essentially a tie, with a highly dubious recount in Seattle that threw the tie to the Dems. The Rep Party then spent all of its resources for a year in trying to fight that result, long after the fight was pointless. Ultimately the Seattle county official responsible for the fraud was fired (or rather resigned to spend more time with his Life Partner). In other words, the State Rep Party had nothing to offer but honesty, because they used up all their ammo shooting at the Dem fraud when they should have been fighting legislation. Now the very same R party commits an even more egregious and obvious fraud, totally negating the one and only thing they stood for.


  ¶ 12:35 PM

  By and by
The high priests of Gaia have been shouting loudly of late. They shriek that Christians such as Huckabee should not be allowed anywhere near the government, because Christians are closed-minded and incapable of comprehending data. They bellow that politicians who refuse to march in line with the diktats of Gaia should be jailed.

Okay, let's compare a typical "emanation" from fundamentalist Christianity with a typical "emanation" from the Gaia priesthood.




[The Christian text is by J.R. Baxter, the Gaian by Lawrence Krauss.]

Now let's ask a basic question.

How is science supposed to proceed?

The textbook answer: With humility, through an incremental process of adversarial argument, always open to contrary alternatives, willing to suspend judgment until more data is available.

Which of these two "emanations" comes closer to the proper attitude of science?

Got it?

= = = = =

PS: Here is an especially fine rendition of the left-side emanation above. Click on "Access this Item" near the top of the page to play the recording. A bit of explanation is needed for modern listeners who may find this rendition difficult to comprehend: The four voices in this recording are emitting different pitches at the same time. You will observe that the different pitches sometimes agree and sometimes disagree. This was an archaic technique known as harmony, no longer implemented by modern enlightened performers. One very loud note is all you need when you're an enlightened follower of Lenin. Or Allah. Or Gaia.

Labels: Krauss

  ¶ 9:23 AM

  The bell of Atri

At Atri in Abruzzo, a small town
Of ancient Roman date, but scant renown,
One of those little places that have run
Half up the hill, beneath a blazing sun,
And then sat down to rest, as if to say,
"I climb no farther upward, come what may,"--
The King Giovanni, now unknown to fame,
So many monarchs since have borne the name,
Had a great bell hung in the market-place
Beneath a roof, projecting some small space,
By way of shelter from the sun and rain.
Then rode he through the streets with all his train,
And, with the blast of trumpets loud and long,
Made proclamation, that whenever wrong
Was done to any man, he should but ring
The great bell in the square, and he, the King,
Would cause the Syndic to decide thereon.
Such was the proclamation of King John.

How swift the happy days in Atri sped,
What wrongs were righted, need not here be said.
Suffice it that, as all things must decay,
The hempen rope at length was worn away,
Unravelled at the end, and, strand by strand,
Loosened and wasted in the ringer's hand,
Till one, who noted this in passing by,
Mended the rope with braids of briony,
So that the leaves and tendrils of the vine
Hung like a votive garland at a shrine.

By chance it happened that in Atri dwelt
A knight, with spur on heel and sword in belt,
Who loved to hunt the wild-boar in the woods,
Who loved his falcons with their crimson hoods,
Who loved his hounds and horses, and all sports
And prodigalities of camps and courts;--
Loved, or had loved them; for at last, grown old,
His only passion was the love of gold.

He sold his horses, sold his hawks and hounds,
Rented his vineyards and his garden-grounds,
Kept but one steed, his favorite steed of all,
To starve and shiver in a naked stall,
And day by day sat brooding in his chair,
Devising plans how best to hoard and spare.

At length he said: "What is the use or need
To keep at my own cost this lazy steed,
Eating his head off in my stables here,
When rents are low and provender is dear?
Let him go feed upon the public ways;
I want him only for the holidays."
So the old steed was turned into the heat
Of the long, lonely, silent, shadeless street;
And wandered in suburban lanes forlorn,
Barked at by dogs, and torn by brier and thorn.

One afternoon, as in that sultry clime
It is the custom in the summer time,
With bolted doors and window-shutters closed,
The inhabitants of Atri slept or dozed;
When suddenly upon their senses fell
The loud alarum of the accusing bell!
The Syndic started from his deep repose,
Turned on his couch, and listened, and then rose
And donned his robes, and with reluctant pace
Went panting forth into the market-place,
Where the great bell upon its cross-beam swung
Reiterating with persistent tongue,
In half-articulate jargon, the old song:
"Some one hath done a wrong, hath done a wrong!"

But ere he reached the belfry's light arcade
He saw, or thought he saw, beneath its shade,
No shape of human form of woman born,
But a poor steed dejected and forlorn,
Who with uplifted head and eager eye
Was tugging at the vines of briony.
"Domeneddio!" cried the Syndic straight,
"This is the Knight of Atri's steed of state!
He calls for justice, being sore distressed,
And pleads his cause as loudly as the best."

Meanwhile from street and lane a noisy crowd
Had rolled together like a summer cloud,
And told the story of the wretched beast
In five-and-twenty different ways at least,
With much gesticulation and appeal
To heathen gods, in their excessive zeal.
The Knight was called and questioned; in reply
Did not confess the fact, did not deny;
Treated the matter as a pleasant jest,
And set at naught the Syndic and the rest,
Maintaining, in an angry undertone,
That he should do what pleased him with his own.

And thereupon the Syndic gravely read
The proclamation of the King; then said:
"Pride goeth forth on horseback grand and gay,
But cometh back on foot, and begs its way;
Fame is the fragrance of heroic deeds,
Of flowers of chivalry and not of weeds!
These are familiar proverbs; but I fear
They never yet have reached your knightly ear.
What fair renown, what honor, what repute
Can come to you from starving this poor brute?
He who serves well and speaks not, merits more
Than they who clamor loudest at the door.
Therefore the law decrees that as this steed
Served you in youth, henceforth you shall take heed
To comfort his old age, and to provide
Shelter in stall and food and field beside."

The Knight withdrew abashed; the people all
Led home the steed in triumph to his stall.
The King heard and approved, and laughed in glee
And cried aloud: "Right well it pleaseth me!
Church-bells at best but ring us to the door;
But go not in to mass; my bell doth more:
It cometh into court and pleads the cause
Of creatures dumb and unknown to the laws;
And this shall make, in every Christian clime,
The Bell of Atri famous for all time."

.... Longfellow



  ¶ 10:01 AM

  Madame Polisztra sees ........
China is suffering the worst cold and snow in 50 years. Thousands of roofs have collapsed, unknown numbers of people are dead, the power system is badly damaged.

Note the 50 years. This means that China had similar climate conditions half a century before. In simpler words, THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. It's a La Niña cycle, the same pattern that is pouring heavy snow on Spokane and heavy rain on California.



Madame Polisztra can see two things coming, and she is not happy.

First: The high priests and prophets of Earth Goddess Gaia will manage to reverse their field. As temperatures continue dropping steeply, which is exactly what any rational creature would expect after the peak of a wave, "Global Warming" will be magically repurposed to "Climate Change", and the chilling will be OUR FAULT just as the warming was OUR FAULT. The chilling will require Western Civilization to surrender to China and Arabia, just as the warming required Western Civilization to surrender to China and Arabia.

Second: Behind and beneath all the propaganda, CHINA IS A NORMAL AND RATIONAL NATION. Its first priority is the success and advancement of China. Unlike chickenshit America, China will not be afraid to try various forms of weather control. Unlike coward-ass America, China will find a way to steer the jet stream when it suits China's purposes. If the steering happens to make things worse on this side of the Pacific, well, c'est la guerre, eh? Meanwhile, we have been hypnotized and paralyzed by Dear Leader George the Micro-wit. His appointed and anointed successor, Dear Leader McCain the Senile, who has declared full-throated and absolute fealty to Gaia, will advance our hypnosis and paralysis. America will continue to be an insane nation, devoted solely to its OWN DESTRUCTION.
  ¶ 9:31 AM

  One word
Spokane is digging out pretty well. The public school system took an entire Snow Week ... highly unusual, since the last time they took even one Snow Day was after a huge ice-storm in 1996. Only the seniors would even remember the previous Snow Day.

The school in my neighborhood has a bulletin board out front, normally bearing such dull but necessary notations as PTA 7PM MON or PRE-REGISTER AUG 9.

Today, on the first day back in session, the bulletin board says simply

SHEESH

  ¶ 9:52 PM

  The real Maverick
Comrade McCain is often called a "maverick". I suppose the term is partly appropriate, in that he doesn't follow either the brand-D or the brand-R leadership consistently; instead, he follows the money.

The original political Maverick was Mayor Maury Maverick of San Antonio.



Mayor Maury is in the middle here, with his son on the left and his father on the right; his grandfather, the eponymous Maverick and source of the metaphor, is in the picture on the wall.


= = = = =

In this segment of the wonderful quiz show Information Please, from July of 1939, Maury Maverick explains the source of the metaphorical term: Listen.

And in this segment, the Mayor answers a question about the Constitution: Listen.

Transcription of the Constitutional question for non-listeners.

Note that the host (Clifton Fadiman, book reviewer for the New Yorker) didn't try to drown out or censor Maverick's correct but unfashionable answer; note that the quiz show's editors also understood the point and didn't try to "re-educate" the submitted question.

Imagine a similar question on Jeopardy or Millionaire. The show's writers would require the modern incorrect answer. An unfortunate contestant who gave Maverick's correct answer would have been declared absolutely wrong, would get yanked out of his seat, tasered by Network Security, and sent instantly to Colorado Supermax as an "anti-government militiaman".

Well then, was Mayor Maverick considered a raging right-winger in 1939? Not hardly. He was an active New Dealer, a close associate of FDR, and an enthusiastic initiator of WPA projects to serve San Antonio.

According to this personal account by his secretary, he was generally considered to be a radical, even a Communist.

What did Mayor Maverick actually believe? Read "In Blood and Ink", his own beautifully written booklet on the Constitution. He emphasizes territory and property as the source of rights and prosperity. Defending your own land, your own house, your own family, your own country, is the crux of the matter.

This, then, is the correct definition of the word maverick.

= = = = =

Clarification after re-reading: I wasn't trying to say that Maury Maverick was a 'conservative' in modern terms; he was most certainly a Populist in the original sense, or more precisely an Agrarian. He wasn't cheering for state's rights; he was saying that state's rights needed to be decreased. The difference I'm trying to emphasize is not in ideology, but rather in the understanding of what a Constitution means. Maverick and Fadiman both understood in 1939 that the document is meaningless if the personal feelings of judges are allowed to rule the country. Maverick wanted to see the document changed in the direction of more central planning, but he wanted the change to be done properly, through the process of amendment, so that it could be undone later if it turned out to be wrong. When we allow the menopausal hormone surges of Lesbian Leninist black-robed saboteurs to serve as perpetual precedent (stare decisis) we lose the ability to undo an obsolete or bad policy.
  ¶ 8:30 PM

  Snowed in
The Spokane area is basically out of commission this week because of heavy snow. Not up to Buffalo standards, but still tiresome. We normally get about 50 inches of snow in a winter, but it's normally spaced out evenly, two or three inches per week. Gives time to melt and shovel easily. This time we got a couple of big storms in a row, and the infrastructure isn't coping well.

Wash governor Christine Gregoire flew over the mountains to check things and plan a state-level emergency response. I must say, she is extremely good at this sort of thing. In other areas of governance she's competent enough: frugal, responsive to needs, no big ideas. But she truly knows how to handle an emergency. Knows how to avoid panic, how to explain things honestly and directly. One interesting thing she mentioned just now ... the Feds are entirely out of money for emergencies, told her the state was on its own. This isn't nationally known.

Gregoire would be a good choice for FEMA director under Hillary.
  ¶ 3:48 PM

  War is about three things ... (continued)
David Warren's latest column points out that our enemy understands the basic purpose of war perfectly. The Army of Allah, basically Arab and originally Egyptian, is using the Palestinians of Gaza to take over the vaguely pro-Western and definitely prosperous government of Egypt. Their steady goal is to gain territory for Allah, and we're doing very little to stop them. Instead, we "advise" Israel to give up more territory each day, which is like advising an anorexic fashion model to lose 10 pounds each day.
  ¶ 10:00 AM

  War is about three things.....


Professor Polistra briefly returns to this decade bearing the gift of clarity.

All of our elites believe --- or claim to believe --- in the image of America as the selfless altruistic bringer of liberty.

Miss Romney is especially annoying in her constant emphasis on this point. "Isn't this country just wonderful as the dickens?", she chirps. "America always fights wars for the freedom of others and never takes anything."

Well, Miss, it's not wonderful. It's suicidal.

And we didn't always do it this way, either.

For the first half of our life as a nation, we fought wars in the normal human way: to gain or regain territory. And when we gained, we used the territory to advantage: mined its resources, farmed its land, built forts to defend it. Wars were fought for a net profit, even if not always calculable in strict monetary terms. The investment in money and blood was meant to be repaid.

Sometimes we were able to buy territory from faded empires, as when we bought the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, or Alaska from Russia in 1867; but mostly we fought wars to gain or keep.

Lincoln's war was all about regaining the territory of the South, and his successors behaved normally after winning that war. The Union milked the South for everything it could grab. (See 'Carpetbagger'.) In 1940 we still understood the situation accurately, but since then we've rewritten the whole mess as a pure angelic impulse to free the slaves.

Our largest warlike expansion was between 1870 and 1910, when we fought aggressively against Spain to claim the Phillipines and Cuba, and fought Mexico to gain the present Arizona and New Mexico. In that same period we also turned most of Central America into "commercial colonies", essentially plantations managed by the United Fruit Company.

The first exception to the rule was Wilson's entry into WW1. We had no immediate territorial stake, though Germany was trying to muscle in on our Central American quasi-colonies. When WW1 was done, we claimed no spoils. Instead Wilson claimed the right to spread Democracy. The result was WW2, which should have taught us something.

What brought us into WW2 was a threat to our colonies, not a threat to our national homeland. Radio news bulletins on 12/7/41 treated Jap attacks on the Phillipines and Hawaii as parallel, and FDR's 'day of infamy' speech also refers to Manila and Honolulu equally. In our modern non-colonial fantasy, we've rewritten the event as a pure threat on our national territory (because Hawaii became a state 18 years later), and we've forgotten Manila.

Professor Polistra thinks the non-colonial fantasy was imposed on us by the Soviets in a clever bank-shot gambit.

In the '50s, France and Britain were exhausted and devastated from WW2, and couldn't spare the energy and personnel to manage their African and Asian colonies. Russia was even more devastated, but Stalin was more concerned with gaining territory and resources than with rebuilding the homeland. Stalin manipulated our Wilsonian delusion of self-determination to grab much of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean under the guise of independence from colonial masters.

Because the Wilsonian delusion was ours -- and because much of our bureaucracy was loyal to Russia -- we couldn't and wouldn't deal with Africa honestly. We couldn't speak the plain truth: those African and Caribbean colonies were not qualified for self-rule. We had to support the notion of independence, which meant ceding much of the world to the Soviet Empire. (A few people did speak the truth, but they were ruthlessly condemned and silenced by our Sovietized elite media.)

JFK tried to turn the tide and got himself killed. Reagan tried again, and Russia tried again to kill him, but didn't send a sufficiently competent assassin. When Reagan and the Pope survived their parallel assassins, they worked together to collapse the Soviet Empire. Since the victory happened slightly after Reagan's last term, it's not clear how he would have clinched it, but in any case the presidents since Reagan have returned to serving Lenin, even as the center of the ideology moved from Russia to China.

The current occupant of the Oval Office, Putin's dear soulmate, has followed the Wilson delusion more feverishly than Wilson himself. He spends thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to "bring Democracy" to the Middle East, and in the process he makes resources even harder to reach. He won't even claim our OWN offshore territory for oil extraction; he defines allies as enemies and enemies as allies; he kisses the ring of our Saudi attackers when he should have depopulated their country and claimed its oil as American property.

None of the current candidates will question the Wilsonian delusion; all of them take the bizarre position that Putin's soulmate is fighting this war with maximum strength and loyalty. Some promise to stay on the current path until we are totally bankrupt and exhausted (though they don't say the last part of the sentence) and some promise to surrender quickly and cleanly. Since those are the only available choices, quick and clean surrender is preferable. At least we will know where we stand, and we will not be spending the next 100 years in a long terminal illness.
  ¶ 10:36 AM

  If only......
The idiots and traitors in DC are planning to spend about $150 billion for 'stimulus', most of which will end up in China. No surprise.

This is what you'd expect from a government that has sold its soul to China.

But what could a loyal American government do for us with $150 billion?

We could build at least TWENTY nuclear power plants, maybe thirty or forty.

From an article on the French EDF plants:

EDF has put the cost of the Civaux units at $4.1 billion.

Once operating, the plants should outperform conventional thermal units. EDF has stated Chooz B1's operating costs are 2 cents per kWh, compared to its estimates of gas-fired operating costs of 2.9 cents per kWh and coal-fired costs of 2.5 cents per kWh.

Think about that. Four billion for construction of one plant. French labor and material costs are in the same ballpark as American, so the basic figure would be the same here, if we could skip the uncertainty and delays from litigation and regulation. A President who served America instead of China could accomplish this by executive order. We could build the plants on existing power plant compounds and idle military bases, thus avoiding NIMBY and land-acquisition costs.

Even allowing twice that amount for site preparation and other stuff, we could still have twenty new nuclear plants within a few years. Those plants would make new natural-gas and coal plants unnecessary.

Polistra imagines an ideal Christmas:




  ¶ 10:18 AM

  Tonight's MSNBC debate .... notes.......
Huck has picked up the Hunter agenda (resist China, expand our production) along with the Hunter endorsement.

Since this is exactly what I hoped for, I'm thoroughly happy.

Huck on the stimulus:

Most of this stimulus will go to China.

Says: As governor, I built new highways that did more to stimulate my state's economy than any sort of giveaway.

Suggests that improving our interstates, using "American labor, American steel, American concrete", would do a lot more for our country in a permanent way.

Properly reminds us that he saw the economic disaster afflicting most of America before these other Wall Street and Beltway candidates did.

On the question "should we have gone into Iraq", he explains the good reasons for that war much better than Bush ever did. If a Huckabee-quality communicator had been President in 2002, we wouldn't have many of our current problems.

Romney picks up Huckabee's China point, gives him credit, asks Rudy how we should handle China. Rudy goes flatly wrong: takes the time-worn American optimism toward China ("how can we ignore a billion customers?") which has been proved wrong over and over, as this commentary from 1944 demonstrates. In previous years, this dumb optimism only led to repeated disappointment (China wasn't a good export market), but in today's conditions it's suicidal.

McCain asks Huck about the effect of the national sales tax on the poor. It's an obvious softball, and Huck knocked it out of the park ... wonder why McCain asked it? Russert follows up with a tougher question about the numbers; why wouldn't it cause poor folks to pay more? Huck answers with numbers. Not fully convincing, but solid.

Huck asks Romney about 2nd Amendment and assault weapons. Not well asked; doesn't get into the facts about effectiveness of self-defense, which really needed to be mentioned in such a question. Romney gives his universal answer to every question: I'll consult my lawyers.

Later: Rudy pushes hard for nuclear power. Good, even if he's doing it in the context of a full-throated "Credo in unum Gaia."

McCain swears his allegiance to the Goddess [pbuh] in even more detail, and supports High Priest Algore's cap and trade system, which is purely a gift to China. Does his Pascal Wager thing again.


McCain: "...because they know that I'll put my country above my party every single time."

No, sir. Dead wrong. You, Comrade McCain, have stated openly, consistenly and repeatedly that you will put your own personal scruples above the safety of the country; that you will not allow interrogators to stop a pending attack. You have stated that you will allow millions of Americans to die rather than offend your own precious feelings. You have sworn an OATH OF DISLOYALTY to this country, Comrade McCain.

Ron Paul hits the false calibration problem: We really have 10 to 12% inflation, but the fraudulent 'Core Inflation' used for government benefits gives them only a 2% increase.

Russert asks Huck about the solution to Social Security. Huck pulls a cute joke to Romney, then gets specific. Says his national sales tax gives a more reliable funding stream for SS ... Russert scoffs, Huck does the Hunter thing again. Bringing back our industries and productivity is the best way to bring back our economy. Good point in itself, but the question about SS and sales tax never got specifically answered.

[I need to look at the 'Fair Tax' info to see if the numbers really do work out!]

Overall, good questions by Russert, fair treatment of all candidates including Paul.
  ¶ 7:39 PM

  Satan Edwards, this blood is on your hands.
Story from NWCN.COM:

PORTLAND - Oregon Health & Science University plans to cut at least 200 jobs and raise tuition by at least 10 percent to free the money needed for higher insurance costs following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling.

The December ruling cleared the way for the family of a brain-damaged child to pursue malpractice damages from the university. It effectively eliminated a liability cap of $200,000 designed to protect state agencies from major damage awards.

Besides trimming jobs and hiking tuition, OHSU expects to restructure or close clinical, research and education programs, and scale back construction on Portland's South Waterfront.

OHSU said the court ruling will add $30 million a year in insurance and administrative expenses. Though that's only 2 percent of OHSU's annual operating budget of about $1.5 billion, it amounts to more than 60 percent of its annual support from the state's general fund.

OHSU is a major teaching hospital for Portland, running a number of clinics serving low-income neighborhoods. These clinics will be closed. It's also a major medical research institution. Many sick people in the "Second America" will now die, and many diseases will now remain uncured, all because Satan Edwards and his vicious genocidal buddies have conspired with a cell of black-robed saboteurs to fill their bloody pockets with even more bloody money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.


The terms Ruthless Desire and Reckless Greed, which I've been [over]using lately, are woefully insufficient.

= = = = =

(And as always, I must apologize to Satan for comparing him to John Edwards.)

  ¶ 9:49 AM

  Closed-caption humor
I like to keep the TV picture on with closed-captioning, while I listen to old-time radio on CD. Wasteful, but satisfies a need to be informed in case something really important happens. The closed captioning also provides some interesting evidence of bias. For instance, during one minute of primary coverage last night, the Fox News CC referred to Huckabee as 'UCK BEE' and 'MUCK BEE', which corresponds nicely with the Brand-R establishment's attitude toward Huck. Later, while showing a clip from Huck's stump speech, the captioning went like this:

AN OLD LADY APPROACHED ME AND ASKED IF I WAS AN ORDAINED MINISTER. I SAID CORRECT, IM A BAATHIST.
  ¶ 9:23 AM

  McCain and Pascal
McCain's stump speech contains a couple of interesting points, but neither one works well.

First, he states accurately that he was pushing for 'The Surge' long before Bush did it. This is supposed to reassure hawks, but it doesn't reassure me. Many of us in the blogworld were advocating a normal pattern to the Iraq war: keep going until you win. In the modern political world this apparently seems weird and radical, but in the longer run of history it was so trivially obvious that it didn't even need to be discussed. Kudos to McCain for being the only major power player to understand the insanity of the Bush approach. (Start a war with great enthusiasm, then stop halfway to smell the roses while the enemy kills our soldiers.)

Problem with this: McCain is a power player, not a blogger. He's been in the Senate long enough to have plenty of seniority, and his party had the majority from '02 through '06. He may have been advocating a normal war strategy, but he didn't say it audibly at the time, and he apparently went along with Bush's abnormal and insane strategy. Bush didn't switch to normal conduct ('The Surge') until the other party took over Congress, which tells us which side he respects. So McCain is not entitled to claim this as a reason to vote for him; in fact, it's evidence that he lacks leadership ability.

Second, he's making a Pascal's Wager on the subject of the all-encompassing and genocidal fraud of 'global warming'. McCain says that he tends to believe in the Earth Goddess Gaia [pbuh] but even if you don't believe, we'll be better off if we follow the orders of Gaia's High Priest Albert Gore.

This is logically and factually wrong. Pascal was dealing with a purely indeterminate question - the existence of a god and the presence of an afterlife - so there was no data to weigh on one side or the other. He was free to bet on pure possibility. On the question of anthropogenic global warming, we have data, and the data indicates that we've already passed the peak of this particular hump in the temperature cycle. The data also indicates that CO2 increases after the earth's surface warms, so it can't be the primary causative factor. Thus anything we do to decrease the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is absurdly useless ... sort of like pushing your car's speedometer needle down instead of hitting the brake pedal.

And most of the steps recommended by High Priest Gore will not even decrease CO2; they will just drain trillions of dollars from the Western economy and leave more room for China to generate more CO2. Which was the whole point all along, since Maurice Strong, the First Prophet of Gaia, has always been an agent of the Chinese Government.
  ¶ 6:59 AM

  Update on the Maldives Boy Scout....
Turns out that the assassin - stopped by the heroic Boy Scout - was indeed a full-fledged Jihadi, not a 'lone knifeman'.

Ibrahim said he had no doubt the attacker was a militant or inspired by an extremist vision of the world, a view seconded by people who know the suspect.

"He had a long beard; he shouted 'Allahu akbar' when he took out his knife. He kept shouting it," Ibrahim said from the hospital in Male where he is recovering from wounds to his left hand sustained in the attack.

The assassin [according to his mother] had long been pious and often listened to Islamic CDs. Another person who knew the assassin — a former teacher who asked not to be further identified for fear of attracting attention — told the AP he had in recent years become more interested in the more extreme elements of Islam and frequently watched videos made by militants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full story here.
  ¶ 8:24 PM

  Romney ramblings again......
Listening to a Romney speech on C-Span. He's talking at length about a '62 Rambler that he bought as a gift recently; telling how his grandkids instinctively grabbed for the seatbelt but didn't find one, and telling how the defroster made lots of noise but didn't work as well as modern defrosters. His point is partly valid (competition causes improvement) but it's oddly out of place when discussing Nash products.

Nash introduced optional seat belts in 1950, long before other American cars, and long before the Feds required them. It wasn't competition that put seatbelts on all cars, it was regulation.

And Nash introduced the first really good heater and defroster in 1938, leading the market by several years.



The Nash heater actually included a cleanable dust filter, visible here ... a feature that was unfortunately abandoned by Nash later, and wasn't picked up by other carmakers until the 1990s.



This picture shows the heater in place, at lower right under the unique dash-centered shift lever. You can also see the theft-proof ignition-and-steering lock, which was more effective and harder to break than the post-1970 Federal requirement. [Must admit, I included this picture mainly because of the pleasant lady driver!]

Moral: Competition is good, but it's irrelevant to the features Mitt mentions. In both cases his father's company was ahead of the competition and ahead of the regulation. And such innovative leadership is exactly what we need right now. Mitt has every right to emphasize his innovative genes, but it doesn't occur to him for some reason. His mindset is stuck in the purely quantitative bean-counting model of life and business.

= = = = =

Bit later, after more pondering: What really bothers me is not Mitt's political mindset. What really bothers me is that I, a mere dilettante and shade-tree mechanic, am more willing to defend and extol the qualities of Nash. While Mitt talks often about his father's job, he doesn't seem to understand his father's vocation, for lack of a better word.
  ¶ 7:12 PM

  Speedboats and RDF


A random thought about the Persian speedboat cat-n-mouse game. Surely our Navy ships have directional antennas on their receivers? They did in WW2. With directional antennas on two ships, you can locate a transmission quite accurately. And if the transmission is coming from a speedboat zipping back and forth, you should be able to distinguish such an extreme side-to-side movement even without triangulation.

Thus the Navy's seeming uncertainty about the source of the Darth Vader voice is puzzling. Has George W. Gandhi ordered the Navy to abandon radio direction finding because it gave us an unfair advantage? Or is the whole thing a fraud?
  ¶ 8:13 AM

  Landsburg on Huckabee
The economist Steven Landsburg, who often cuts through nonsense to reach good empirical conclusions, has written an article praising Huckabee's national sales tax. Landsburg is missing the basic point, though. He focuses strictly on the mathematical difference between paying tax immediately on income versus paying it later when you consume, and makes the completely nonsensical assumption that everyone always spends everything they earn. He thus considers the national sales tax to be equivalent to "unlimited IRAs", and says that we could accomplish the same purpose by simply allowing unlimited IRAs.

Landsburg is missing a couple of vital points.

1. When consumption is the target of tax, people will not only save more, they will borrow less. This will take the air out of our constant bubbles (stocks bought on margin, real estate bought on no-principal loans) which will dramatically improve the soundness of our economy, but will knock most of our bubble-boosting elites out of their jobs. Undoubtedly the elites understand this point even if they're not telling the proletariat about it, which accounts for their hissing anger and contempt.

2. Shifting tax to point-of-sale means that the pre-tax prices of products made in America will be lower, because the personal and corporate income tax will be factored out of the price. Huckabee has pointed this out, but I don't think he's mentioned the best consequence of this change. Products from other countries will not have a reduced pre-tax price. So the 'fair tax' will effectively impose a 20% tariff on products from China, which will also dramatically improve the soundness of our economy. Retailers will start to look for locally made products instead of instantly looking to China, which will return some types of manufacturing to America. Again our elites (including Romney and Giuliani) are more loyal to China than to America, so they understand and hate this consequence.
  ¶ 7:49 AM

  Batch of idiots, with one exception
In the Fox "forum" just now, Brit asked Huckabee about his record as governor:

Brit stated that Huck had raised taxes and increased the size of government, and asked if he would do the same thing as President.

Huck finally gave a halfway decent answer. Governors have to do something that Senators don't have to do: We have to take the situation as it stands, including Federal mandates, and make it work.

But there was a perfectly conservative, perfectly Constitutional, and powerfully Reaganite answer to the question, which Huckabee either doesn't understand or isn't willing to give.

This answer would be:

"Yes, I made tremendous improvements in Arkansas [give details] and this did require an increase in taxes and an increase in the size of the STATE government. And this is exactly how our federal system is supposed to work. The Tenth Amendment says that all powers not explicitly given to the Federal level shall be exercised at the State level.

By improving my own state instead of sitting back and letting the Feds do it all, as my Democrat predecessors had done, I was following the will of the Founders."

= = = = = = = =

Overall, I found myself thinking for the first time that Ron Paul makes sense. All the other candidates spent the entire debate getting tangled up in a total contradiction. All the other candidates were trying to convey two simultaneous and insanely incompatible messages:

Message 1. I pledge to continue the policies of George W. Bush totally, completely and utterly, in all things. Our government under George W. Bush is totally, completely and utterly perfect, the most wonderful of all possible worlds, Nirvana and Heaven rolled into one.

Message 2. I will change everything for the better, but I won't tell you how.

Only Dr. Paul states clearly the obvious truth: the current situation is disastrous.

Most of his diagnosis is wrong, which means most of his prescription is also wrong, but he's the only candidate who states the patient's condition accurately, and the only candidate who gives the correct PROGNOSIS if the patient continues its present lifestyle without treatment.
  ¶ 7:25 PM

  "Be prepared"
While we're all jabbering and yammering about Dixville Notch, playing all the usual Gotcha and How Dare You Say Gotcha and How Dare You Criticize Me For Saying How Dare You and It's Obscene That You Dare To Say How Dare You Criticize Me For Saying How Dare You .....

In a far corner of the world, a dramatic little event shows that humanity still has a chance, even among Mohammedans.

The Maldive Islands, a long chain of little islands near India, with roughly the same ethnic and religious makeup as Pakistan, just gave us a lesson.

An assassin came after the Maldives President with a knife; the president's bodyguards were slow to react, but a Boy Scout named Mohammed Jaisham Ibrahim got there first. He grabbed the blade and saved the president's life.

The bodyguards then arrested the assassin. At this point it's not clear whether the assassin was acting for Jihad [because the Maldives president is relatively pro-Western] or just some kind of local rebellion.

Moral of the story: As we focus ever more strongly on de-preparing and idiotizing the people; as we let the 'professionals' do all the jobs; as we allow lawyers to sue ordinary people and Boy Scouts into submission; we forget that problems are usually solved by a prepared (and armed) citizen. Or as George W. Gore would call him, a "vigilante".

Story here.  ¶ 2:41 PM

  I knew the Rambler, and Mr Romney, you're no Rambler.
A year ago when Romney first started campaigning, Polistra liked him and wrote at some length about Romney's father and his beloved Rambler.

Mitt has recently started to tell this story, but after a longer exposure to Mitt we can see that the analogy doesn't work.

George Romney took over Nash in 1954, at a time when the Establishment (Ford and GM) were running strong, exhibiting all the worst qualities of Ruthless Desire and Reckless Greed. GM and Ford were pushing Numerical Superiority in every possible way: more length, more flash, more horsepower, more advertising, more gas usage. Worst of all, GM and Ford conspired to lower prices below cost in '54, for the specific purpose of knocking out the competition.

Romney Senior knew that Nash couldn't run the same race. He chose instead to emphasize quality over quantity, value over price. The Rambler was just large enough to hold a family comfortably; had just enough power to drive safely; had no flash whatsoever, but had a sense of firmness and solidity, combined with proven durability. These qualities kept Nash alive when the other small companies failed, and later took Rambler up to third place in the market, ahead of Plymouth in 1960-61.

Romney Junior has failed to learn the lesson, or perhaps his 'product' just isn't up to Rambler standards. In fact he's following the GM model, not the Nash model. What does he offer? Not something different, but a continuation of the same old Bush brand. He's had plenty of chances to separate himself from the Bush record, and every time he refuses. Instead, he concentrates on maximum flash, maximum advertising, maximum expenditure, and price cuts (i.e. Zero Zip Nada Taxes).

He's running on quantity, not quality.
  ¶ 2:37 PM

  "People are more important than the purse."
Polistra has heard about Huckabee's splendid victory, and since (unlike the author) she never had any doubts, she returns briefly from her vacation in 1940 to celebrate.

Obviously she didn't have time to re-dress for the current era of ruthless desire and reckless greed.....




Polistra believes that Huckabee carries the same quality of leadership that we experienced in the '30s and '40s, and she brings an example of the earlier form to remind us of how it worked.

This is Secretary of War Stimson talking to the nation on Christmas 1943.

Listen.

Can we have leadership like this again? We damn sure need it.
  ¶ 7:45 PM

  Word of the year
Since Professor Polistra isn't around to do her annual Words of the Year properly, I'll just quote from Chosunilbo in South Korea.

The Professors' Times on Sunday reported it has chosen the four-letter Chinese phrase "jagigiin (自欺欺人)" to describe the nation's economic, political and social situation in 2007. It means "deceiving yourself and others." Prof. Ahn Dae-hoe of Sungkyunkwan University, who nominated the phrase, said it "can be used to refer to actions resulting from ruthless desire. All the scandals that shook the social foundation of the country this year resulted from reckless greed." His comments aimed at scandals surrounding the disgraced curator Shin Jeong-ah's faking of her degrees, former Korea University president Lee Pil-sang's plagiarism, and corporate scandals like that surrounding the Samsung Group. The word emerged the winner in a survey conducted by the publication of 340 professors, including leaders of the national and private university professor councils, from Dec. 15 to 20.

Deceiving yourself and others. Ruthless desire. Reckless greed.

Fake news, fake economics, fake inflation index, fake war, fake politics.

And above all, the all-consuming all-corrupting genocidal false religion of "global warming".

Yes, the term applies equally well here, I think.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 8:02 PM

  Got it.....
Comparing Huckabee and Romney reminded me of something that I couldn't quite pin down.....



Finally got it.

Huck is Sheriff Andy and Mitt is Deputy Barney.

Sheriff Andy knew human nature, and Deputy Barney knew all the rules.

= = = = =

12/31: Well, poop.

I've been defending Huck on grounds of basic leadership abilities, but this latest mess with planning a negative ad, then deciding not to run it, is a deal-breaker. In the Mayberry metaphor, it makes Huck look more like the town drunk Otis.

Two possibilities:

1. He simply can't manage his staff. If you can't manage a dozen people, you're not qualified to manage millions.

2. There's an opposition mole on the staff, a David Brock type. If you can't detect and eject a mole, you're not paranoid enough to be President.



  ¶ 8:32 PM

  Experience
Polistra is still enjoying her vacation in a better time; no reports from her yet.

Meanwhile, our precious Elites are peddling a magnificent piece of illogic. All the Top Experts agree that the assassination of Bhutto means we need to keep Experienced People in office. The experts also agree that Pakistan needs more democracy, because Democracies Don't War.

Do these people THINK at all????

The assassination happened WHILE the Experienced people were in office, and it happened partly BECAUSE Bush/Wilson has been pushing Musharraf to take more steps toward the Holy Grail of Democracy. If we had been pushing him to wipe out al-Qaeda instead of pushing him to admit Bhutto as an opposition candidate, this specific event would NOT have occurred.

A logical mind will conclude from this event that the current path, the Experienced path, is NOT WORKING. This doesn't tell us which alternate path would be better, but it emphatically and easily tells us that the current type of Experience is making things worse.
  ¶ 1:10 PM

  Where's Polistra?


Despairing of today's intolerable idiocy, Polistra wandered into another time and place, when life was somewhat harder but common sense still survived.

An account of her travels will be coming through the ether in a couple of days.....


Meanwhile, Martha Mears sings for Christmas.

  ¶ 9:22 PM

  Oath of disloyalty
Listening to George W. Gore's press conference. Mostly the usual futile attempts at cleverness by a man who is incapable of cleverness.

One astonishingly honest revelation: "Dow Jones Man" asked George if he was concerned about the increasing number of large financial institutions being bought by foreign and unfriendly governments. George W. Gore said "No, I'm happy to have the money coming back. I'm not troubled at all."

It's not often you hear a Federal employee state so baldly and openly that he is fully loyal to Arabia and China.

Will anyone do anything about it? No, of course not.

J. Edgar is spinning so fast that pieces of his ghost are flying off into distant parts of the universe.


= = = = =

Less sardonically: This is what happens when you follow purely numerical economics, what is sometimes called 'autistic economics'. When the only thing that matters is increasing the flow of monetary units, you can't even imagine the real troubles or benefits that may be caused by one specific transaction between two specific countries or companies. Money moves, so everything is wonderful in this most wonderful of all worlds. Bah.
  ¶ 7:48 AM

  Sarko takes over Korea
Well, not exactly. But in fact South Korea has just elected a new president who sounds like a cross between Rudy and Sarko.

Via Chosunilbo:

Five major employers organizations on Wednesday expressed hope that president-elect Lee Myung-bak will revive the economy and create a business-friendly environment. .... "Voters in effect gave him their overwhelming support despite various lingering suspicions and negative factors emerging during campaign because they expect him to revive the economy. We hope that he will turn his campaign promise -- achieving 7 percent growth and increasing per capita income to $40,000 -- into reality, using his experience as a corporate CEO who led the country's development and as mayor of Seoul who implemented massive projects."

Yoo Chang-moo, vice chairman of the Korea International Trade Association, asked the president-elect to build a society where law and principles are respected and create an atmosphere where business is valued. "We want to see our president aggressively engage in sales diplomacy and resource diplomacy, just like French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he flew to Libya to sell Airbus aircraft," he said.

Military leaders asked the president-elect to restore the identity and pride of the military. They called for national division and military confrontation to be seen not from an ideological perspective but from a realistic viewpoint. An Army colonel said, "The first and foremost raison d'etre of the military is to protect the people from the enemy. In the current circumstances, it's hard to teach the soldiers who the main enemy is. It's high time politicians and those in power stopped rocking the foundation of the military and sapping soldiers' morale."

So, while we are mired in total corruption and foolishness, our genuine allies are picking up the torch of civilization and carrying it for us.

God protects drunks and idiots.
  ¶ 6:51 PM

  Oh, I see 3
Listening to a local talk show host who is (for some unknown reason) rehashing all the basic arguments for and against the war in Iraq.

I've covered this ground before, best here. At that time I wrote, among other things:

Bush says: "If we fail over there, the turrists will follow us home."

Think about this for a minute. Exactly how is this going to happen? Several thousand Sunni and Shiite warriors will not be able to infiltrate easily into American life. These guys are not the elite Westernized types that performed 9/11. If they do attack en masse by some method, it means we are not doing the basic job of controlling our ports and borders.

I realized just now that there's an even simpler argument against the "turrists follow us home" idiocy.

Bush says that the enemy wants to fight us where our army is.

Okay....

If you were Osama, where would you want to fight America? Where the US Army is, or where it isn't?

The truly odd thing is that the Left doesn't use any of these clear logical counter-arguments. Bush's claims are astonishingly easy to break, but our Left is even more thoroughly idiotized by decades of forced contradictions and weird alliances, by mixing Marx, Marcuse and Mohammed. Our Left can't even make arguments that would serve its own side. It just screams tourettishly about Halliburton, Habeas Corpus and Hitler.

Maybe God does protect drunks and idiots after all.
  ¶ 4:53 PM

  Harris gets it
Lee Harris, one of the better commentators, sees the Huckabee phenomenon correctly. It's not really about religion, it's about culture.

Harris says:

I have also been sampling some of the anti-Huckabee literature, which is becoming increasingly shrill and mean-spirited. As I read some of these comments I found something quite strange going on inside of me. I felt offended, in a personal way, as when someone attacks not you, but your family, or your people. In short, I felt angry, righteously angry.

Harris goes on to describe his Baptist upbringing, and the role played by unspoken cultural habits. And then the key:

Much of this attack takes the odious form of snobbery. It is true that the Southern Baptist church has seldom been the home of the elite, social or intellectual. On the contrary, it began as the religion of the poor and the uneducated, those who farmed their own land and made things with their own hands.

Hands. The real difference between those "economic conservatives" who control most of the "conservative" commentary, versus plain old Americans. The "economic conservatives" don't need a country or a place; they can exist on a purely virtual and numerical plane because they have the power to escape to Dubai or Shanghai after they have succeeded in selling off America's physical production capacity. As long as their fraudulent Core Inflation remains low, as long as they have Zip Zero Nada Taxes and Zip Zero Nada Interest Rates, their gambling addiction can run wild, scouring the American landscape of mere physical objects like factories, mines, and oil refineries. Meanwhile, those of us who grew up in a hand-based culture, who come from lines of farmers, mechanics and cooks, are struggling to exist. Huckabee seems to understand this difference, though he hasn't yet offered satisfying specifics. Maybe he will listen to Hunter on this point.

Harris again:

Nobody told the Southern Baptists what they could and couldn't think—not even each other, which is why they kept dividing off into new congregations so frequently. You still can't tell them what to think, which is perhaps why the intellectual elite distrusts them — they stubbornly refuse to take the word of those who are so clearly their cerebral superiors.

I'm not sure about the last point. It's not so much that the elite distrusts us, more that they see us as utterly irrelevant and incapable of thought because we don't have Harvard degrees and we don't share their bizarre addiction to maximal status and power expressed in numerical form and measured by transparently false instruments.

Polistra has felt the same not-quite-logical loyalty to Huckabee, beginning a month ago. Huck strikes a deep chord in a native of the Protestant Midwest. He is the natural chief or delegate of our tribe, the leader of the farmers and mechanics. He insists on judging by merit rather than numbers.

Incidentally, this precise distinction probably accounts for the elite's wild hissing at his Foreign Affairs article: he is judging Persia and Pakistan by their essential human qualities and intentions, not by their weapon stockpiles as measured by transparently fraudulent CIA reports. Similarly with Huckabee's record of pardons and paroles: he trusted his judgment of character more than Due Process or Minimum Sentence Guidelines.

If the "conservative" elite could stop hissing like cats in heat and start thinking, they would realize that judging on merit is supposed to be a basic axiom of conservatism. The old American setup gave room for personal morality on both sides. Public opinion and juries were meant to examine the character and intentions of offenders; and would-be offenders were slowed down by the prospect of facing a public that had no fear of discrimination lawsuits. When the elites squawk about Huckabee's insistence on using his own morality to examine the morality of the criminal, they are following Lenin's road: they are replacing natural judgment by "objective" formulas. It's true that natural judgment makes errors at times, but when you banish morality from your brain and use stiff binary rules instead, you have laid yourself wide open to a complete systematic error.

If you measure your enemy solely by his centrifuge count, the CIA can lead you into truly stupid mistakes. Contrarily, when you use your own mature and practiced moral judgment to measure the enemy's moral nature, you won't be fooled by Joe Wilson's thumb on the scale.

= = = = =

Semi-relevantly, here's my great-great-grandfather, a Baptist preacher and carpenter. He wanted a church to preach in, so he built this one in 1880, and proceeded to build much of the surrounding town. I don't know if the church still stands ... looked solid enough when this photo was taken in 1956.




Note the work gloves, even when posing for a rare photograph. Hands.
  ¶ 7:16 AM

  Huck's article



Polistra's Seventh Law: When the elites say X is unthinkable, it's time to think X.

The commentariat has been focusing today on Huckabee's long article in Foreign Affairs. The brand-R and brand-D teams are both using the article's summary (probably written by an editor) to dismiss Huck as unthinkable.

I took the trouble to read the whole article. Huckabee makes three main points in various ways:

1. We need to understand our enemy coldly and completely. This requires better intelligence and stronger diplomatic connections.

2. Persia is basically a rational country. It won't be our friend, but it will be neutral if we handle it right.

3. Pakistan is basically an irrational country. It is our enemy, and we should handle it as such.

Polistra has been making these points for a long time ... except for the bit about stronger diplomatic connections, but Huck's argument there is persuasive. His main error is to focus too much on the Mohammedan element of the enemy, not enough on the Arab tribal element.
  ¶ 2:31 PM

  McCotter's Manifesto
Thaddeus McCotter, rep from Michigan, made a dramatic speech in the House Special Orders last night. It is a full-blown manifesto for a new approach to politics. If we are going to have a non-Communist party in the America of the future, it will have to follow McCotter's basic principles.

McCotter's high-falutin verbosity makes his speeches hard to follow orally, so I started looking for a transcript. Unsurprisingly, none of the brand-R blogs paid any attention to the speech, because it's WAY out of the standard playing field. For the two standard teams, the only permissible political dialogue is 10,000 repetitions of "Bush is God and Hillary is Satan", or 10,000 repetitions of "Hillary is God and Bush is Satan", respectively. Since McCotter's speech does not repeat either form of the rosary even once, it will be completely ignored by our two political brands.

Perhaps oddly, perhaps meaningfully, the first place I found a transcript is a pro-Obama blog, and I give credit and thanks to Arnold Sherr for locating and publishing the transcript.

I've reformatted the transcript for readability, and stored the result here.

Some key points.

Introduction:

... Republicans must accurately assess our party’s past and present failings; and its future prospects of again providing Americans a meaningful choice between the major parties. This remains, after all, a party’s duty to the citizenry. For my GOP to fulfill it, first we must bury our ideological dead. ... Such was the Republican bathos: a transformational majority sinned and slipped into a transactional “Cashocracy” – promises, policies, principles, all bartered, even honor. The majority now is of the ages, may it rest in peace ... And be redeemed.

His short list of basic principles:

1. Our liberty is granted not by the pen of a government bureaucrat, but is authored by the hand of almighty God.

2. Our sovereignty rests not in our soil, but in our souls.

3. Our security is guaranteed not by the thin hopes of appeasement, but by the moral and physical courage of our troops defending us in hours of maximum danger.

4. Our prosperity is produced not by the tax hikes and spending sprees of politicians, but by the innovation and perspiration of free people engaged in free enterprise.

5. Our cherished truths and communal virtues are preserved and observed not by a coerced political correctness, but by our reverent citizenry’s voluntary celebration of the culture of life.

And the strongest bit of his conclusion:

In this Age of Globalization, however, while Americans are vexed by their seeming inability to influence the potent economic, social and political forces radically reshaping their lives, American corporations are busy decentralizing into 'virtual corporations' reliant upon the outsourcing of jobs to other nations to obtain lower labor costs and evade cumbersome domestic laws and regulations. Such 'rootless capital' being sent around the world in a keystroke to more 'competitive markets' has cost Americans their livelihoods; reduced their wages and employer-provided benefits; diminished their unions' memberships; eclipsed their optimism regarding our economy’s continued vitality; and, in cases of extreme economic distress and angst, destroyed their marriages and dreams for their children.


The failure to realize the seismic ramifications to normal Americans of this tectonic economic shift was a primary cause of the Cashocracy's collapse. As rising corporate profits and Wall Street bull markets became increasingly divorced from working Americans' prosperity, the Cashocrats clung ever more tightly to their corporate benefactors without grasping that Americans had concluded what is 'good for GM' is no longer necessarily good for them.

The advent of virtual corporations and transient international capital has ended the old industrial-welfare state model of governance, wherein solutions to Americans' economic and social anxieties were the shared burdens of centralized corporations and government. The stark choice is now between increasing the centralized power of the federal government or decentralizing power into the hands of individuals, families and communities.

  ¶ 9:59 AM

  Whole lotta diagnosin goin on, but no prescribin.
In today's Iowa "debate", the questioner lady gave plenty of opportunities to state specific actions, but got no meaningful response. Lots of "I will use the bully pulpit" and "I will encourage" and "I will raise the level of dialogue", for Christ's sake. But I didn't hear any promises to take specific actions.

On education, Thompson finally diagnosed the core problem: the NEA. But he didn't say that he would eliminate the NEA by executive order.

In 1957 Eisenhower used force to insure that black kids got an equal
education. When Ark gov Orval Faubus "stood in the schoolhouse door", Ike called out the National Guard.

At this point we need a similarly forceful action to insure that all kids get a decent education. Charter and voucher systems must be established nationally; no state shall be permitted to have a monopolistic public school system, and the NEA and AFT must be eliminated entirely.

Generally (as always) Hunter stated the priorities and problems best, but even he was woefully short on solutions.

Worst thing of all: Even though the little rebellion against "handshowing" was fun, every single one of the candidates allowed the criminal fraud of Global Warming to stand without question. Several swore full allegiance to Gaia, others said that it didn't matter whether the fraud was a fraud or not.

Unforgivable.
  ¶ 12:27 PM

  Time capsule: Anonymous heaven
Still in the hidden-gem mode:

In the late '40s the Aunt Jemima pancake flour company ran a brief daily music show, something like an infomercial. Aunt Jemima and an announcer bantered for a minute, then abruptly cut to a piece of music, then bantered again, then a second piece of music. The banter was below even the usual standard of daytime commercials, but the music was above anything else heard on radio. A small chorus sang a mix of Old Favorites, gospel numbers, and a few newer songs.

I'm purely guessing the "Jemima chorus" was actually a set of records made by a college glee-club ... because of the classical flavor, somewhere between barber-shop and madrigal. [College a-cappella choirs and madrigal choirs were a semi-pro phenomenon in the 1930s; many of them toured nationally and made records.]

Heavenly music rammed up against crass commercialism produced an immiscible incongruity that beggars description, but I'll try anyway. Just imagine The Gabrieli and Tammy Faye Show, or J.S. "Buddy" Bach and the Oak Ridge Boys.

Here are several of the best pieces, carefully clipped away from the stupidity so that these anonymous musical angels can finally be appreciated.

= = = = =

Note: Originally these clips weren't available anywhere else online, so I had a few good selections on my own website. They are now (late 2011) available free at archive.org, here.

= = = = =
  ¶ 3:38 PM

  The Commie that didn't bark
Hugo Chavez held an election last week, and the voters turned down his proposal for lifetime rule. Holding such an election is not unusual: Commie leaders have often taken power through elections. What's deeply strange, even unique in history, is that Chavez allowed the election result to go against him, and that he hasn't [yet!] dissolved the Parliament and grabbed total power anyway. Thus violating Manweller's Rule, the deepest law of human political nature.

Most American commentators are (quite properly) cheering the result, but they seem to take it for granted that election results are automatically valid and automatically followed. This is obvious nonsense, even in the US. Plenty of elections, from county-seat choices to Presidential votes, have been 'thrown out' by all sorts of methods.

We should be both puzzled and happy that Chavez has followed the will of the people. Maybe he isn't such a dumb thug after all? Or maybe his real power was never as great as he wanted it to appear.
  ¶ 11:52 AM

  Cherokee leprechauns
I find the WPA Guides make good bedtime reading. Always well-written and objective, and they occasionally yield a surprising little gem of knowledge. This is from the Oklahoma guide:

Some three miles south of Salina a small creek flows from the east into the Grand River at the foot of a range of rocky bluffs. High on the cliffs is the spot which Cherokee Indian legends say is the home of the "Little People" who have been a part of Cherokee traditional lore since ancient times. When the tribe lived in the East, they believed in the "Little People", who were supposed to be no more than knee-high, but well formed, handsome and exceedingly clever. They lived far back in the mountains and were never seen except at dusk or by solitary individuals.

Some Cherokees, at the time of the Removal, still believed in the legendary figures and moved their "Little People" to the new nation and to this site. Tribal members would stop fishing at a certain spot on the Grand River if stones happened to roll down the bluffs into the water, usually with the remark "Let's move downstream, I see the Little People live here and want the fish for their own use."

These legends are so widespread and so similar that I sometimes wonder if there's an underlying reality. A human subspecies that coexisted with Sapiens for a while? Extraterrestrials? A gate to a parallel universe?
  ¶ 9:48 AM

  Subliminal Mitt
Listening to his "I am not Brigham Young" speech this morning, without looking at the TV screen.

He's a great writer but a totally uncomfortable speaker. Somewhat overmodulated, too much aspirate on the consonants. The voice tone belongs to a teenager trying to explain plausibly why Dad's car has a dented fender this morning. It doesn't belong to a grown man describing his deep faith. In the last debate, when he got into a tiff with Rudy over illegal immigrant gardeners, the adolescent tone came out even more strongly.
  ¶ 1:49 PM

  Tired.
Still working on the spreadsheet job, generally tired, still too disgusted with political matters to think much about them.

One exception. Anti-Huckabee callers to talking-point shows are repeating the idiotic argument that we must not switch to a national sales tax ('fair tax') until the 16th Amendment is repealed so the income tax can't be restored. This is a fantastically stupid excuse, and it's based on insufficient paranoia. There is simply no point in even thinking about the text of the Constitution now, because:


  ¶ 8:28 PM