Technopoly

I found this little book by Neil Postman hugely thought provoking and important on many fronts, even though I work in the heart of "technopoly". Unlike many skeptics with a bit of luddite orientation, Postman is way less arrogant. He freely admits that he has no real solution to the problem, although my view is that he bypasses the obvious solution and focuses on a less desirable solution as an atheist.

The subtitle is "The Surrender of Culture to Technology" and opens with a story from Plato's Phaedrus about Thamus, a great Egyptian king. Thamus entertained the god Theuth, who was the inventor of many things; numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy and writing. Thamus finds each of the inventions lacking, and has this to say of writing:

"Theuth , my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you who are the father of writing , have out of the fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to excercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their rememberence by externeal signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupoils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society".

Thamus is wrong in missing the fact that writing DOES provide value. Where is very right however is in realizing that no technology has only a single side. When one picks up a technology, both you and the world are changed, and it seems that it is typically an irrevocable change.

"A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe."

All technology contains an "ideology". In the case of the printing press, that ideology was mainly "power to the people", which many in modern society tend to agree with, BUT it was a major factor in huge changes (the reformation, rise of a better educated common man, democracy, etc)

One of his least favorite technologies is the technology of the IQ score. It has created the idea that something that we can't even define adequately at all (human intelligence) can be expressed by a simple integer that is explanatory of a host of things. He argues convincingly (as have others) that the idea is pure fantasy. Mooses are all in agreement on this priniciple, since we tend to not do well on IQ tests and would much rather they were invalid.

Postman argues that in the 19th century we had a "technocracy":

"The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clang to the philosophies of their fathers".

(He did not specify if their clinging was "bitter" ;-) ) He argues that the Sopes Monkey Trial was the point at which we shifted to "technopoly":

"Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy."

It is at this point that I largely part company with his conclusions. He seems to have made the "guns kill people" error here. There is MORE than "technology" going on here, for "something" HAS made prayer in schools, teaching of creation in schools already illegal, and that "something" may be well on it's way to attempting to make religion itself illegal. I'd name that "something" liberal facism, but whatever it is, it isn't "technology". While there are aspects of truth in Postmans attempts to paint technology as the "bogeyman", primarily, "technology is a tool". As he has obviously made his peace with writing, like all tools, it can be used to write great books like his (and I DO think this is a worthy and useful book), or skinhead pamphlets. The choice isn't implicit in the technology, only the option.

He makes a good argument that in a technopoly, the "information immune system is inoperable. Technology is a form of culutural AIDs, which I use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome". We used to have a lot of "gatekeepers". He does a good job of talking about how curriculum in schooling is still a valid gatekeeper and how the "rules of evidence" that declare broad swaths of information "inadmissible" are the only way that the institution of our courts can operate. "...in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves."

He doesn't say "why" there can be no transcendent purpose. Certainly there are many million Christians in the US (which he believes is the only Technopoly so far) that would disagree with him that there CAN be no transcendence. My fundamental split is that I disagree with him on that point. The choice of transcendence MUST be a human choice. It can be inhibited by technology (constant diversion for example), but I see the choice as clearly remaining.

"..cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself. It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional tecture through a clusxter of symbols that cal for respect and allegiance, even devotion."

At this point he touches on religion and rejects it as a way out and then touches on Allan Boom's "Great Books", espoused in "The Closing of the American Mind" and rejects that as well. His solution is based on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", which I haven't read, but can't quite imagine if thousands of years of religion and culture are not sufficient to the task at hand, how one book is going to be. I'll have to put it on my list.

Very much a highly regarded book. Well written and well reasoned. Oh yes, I almost forgot. He really hates polling and goes through many problems with it, but the one I'll likely remember. Two priests wrote to the Pope asking for guidance on smoking and prayer. One phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" to which the reply was that it was not because prayer ought take ones full attention. The other phrased the question: "Is it permissible to pray while smoking?" Which received the answer that it was, because we are to pray without ceasing. Any further questions as to why polling is an inherently ridiculous technology?

Wines Of (cheap) Distinction

One of the side aspects of our firepit has become the chance for my wife and I to sit down and have a bottle of wine as we discuss whatever is happening with kids, the world, church, our plans, and way too often, work. "Sometime" I'm going to get a MUCH better ordered wine list than this, but having a bottle of wine that we really enjoyed last night led me to the idea that a blog post that I linked and updated from time to time was "a way":

• Smoking Loon Merlot, 2005, Firepit 5-25, purchased at RCLS Auction. Very low tannin, smooth. Looks like it only got an 81 from Wine Spectator, 2003 got 85, 2004 84, so they may be worth looking for. Looks like it can be had for <$10 a bottle.
• Little Penguin Cabernet Savignon, 2005, 2006. The Spector gave the '05 an 88 and the '06 an 85. We haven't had a bottle we didn't like, but we may need to do more research to see if we can find some '05 around. This can be had for < $6 a bottle.
• Apothic Red ... we call it "Apathetic" ;-) $7 a bottle, blend, we love it. 
• 
  

A Little Luck

I got a Gander Mountain "Scratch Off" offer in the mail that said you needed to go into the store to have it scratched off to be valid, and only after you scratched it off would you know how much you would save. Sort of a cute little idea to get folks into the store, but it let you believe that not very many would have the "30% off maximum" since they used their little device to lure you into the store.

I have no idea what % they did of 30%, but I was lucky and have been looking to get a gun safe for quite a while, so I'm now the proud owner of a "Franklin Series 35 cubic foot" that is rated for an hour at 1200. It is going in a corner of the basement, so I'm thinking that should be more than sufficient, "just in case". I'm also planning on running a LAN cable into it and putting my main backup disk server in there so that family pictures, iTunes and digital records will be pretty secure.

The piano moves are contacted, so hopefully it will be moving from the store into the house next week and I will likely throw some pictures out here somewhere.

Gouging on Oil?

Power Line: Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless

The one little tidbit in this excellent coverage that is especially apt is the following:

Another theme of the day's testimony was that, if anyone is "gouging"
consumers through the high price of gasoline, it is federal and state
governments, not American oil companies. On the average, 15% percent of
the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4%
represents oil company profits. These figures were repeated several
times, but, strangely, not a single Democratic Senator proposed
relieving consumers' anxieties about gas prices by reducing taxes.

How Democrats look at the world is pretty amazing. Profits = Bad, Taxes = Good. We hear endlessly about the size of oil company profits and are constantly told how "they are the problem". The MSM virtually NEVER reports that simple number that taxes average 15% of the cost of fuel, and the profits are only 4%. Even more strange, the idea that a "tax moratorium" is a stupid idea is claimed to be foolish (I guess because BO doesn't like it), where we CONSTANTLY hear that oil company profits are "way too high". How can that be? 15% off would be completely worthless to consumers, but 4% off would be a huge help?

The fact is that Democrats don't like business, executives, and especially not the oil industry. They have been working to restrict them for 50+ years, and it is pretty obvious they have been very successful. Our oil industry is anemic by world standards ... accounting for single digit percentages of reserves and refining capacity. Largely due to government decisions that we have made to restrict exploration, drilling and refineries, we have arrived where Europe arrived decades ago as likely going to always be a high cost oil market. Congratulations Democrats and MSM! You have successfully put the US in a hole that hurts the lowest income people the worst and is likely to be a drag on the economy for decades to come.

Will US Business and Technology find some innovative way to dig us out? Hydrogen, better electric cars, fusion, solar, coal gassification, or some way that I have no clue about? I sure hope so. No doubt BO will do all he can do to make that less likely by restricting capital flows through higher taxes, but the innovation momentum kicked off by Reagan won't wind down immediately (well, unless BO takes even worse actions than I expect to stop it). I like to think there is always hope. Investors, innovators and producers always fight against long odds, it is just that at some points they get a lot longer.

Kennedy Cancer

The deification of Teddy from the press has arrived. Like a lot of things, if that cut both ways for Democrats and Republicans it would actually be fine with me. When Reagan got Alzheimer's we had to have a lot of time spent in the press basically saying "that explains a lot of what he did in office", and an awful lot of the farther left press saying essentially "he deserved it".

There is an odd connection in the Reagan / Kennedy comparison, because Kennedy essentially traded his very real shot at the Presidency for a night out with a young secretary that ended in her death. If Chappaquiddick doesn't happen, then I wonder if Carter to Reagan ever happens? We will never know, but given the Kennedy mystique, I think anything short of the death of the young lady under suspicious circumstances, and Teddy makes it to President. Teddy made his choice and this history happened. It is heartwarming to hear the press talk about him "surviving a car accident"--in fact, so well that by his official story he could swim to the mainland and call the authorities in the AM.

I'm a Christian, so I certainly hope I don't get what I deserve, and I hope Teddy doesn't either. We all die; cancer, Alzheimer's, accidents, heart attack-the list is long and nothing all that fun to dwell on. We all die of something--we don't get to pick, no matter our power attained in life, we find that some things are beyond our control. Some level of "remembering the good times" is to be expected from the MSM, but the press certainly didn't avoid "the rough spots" for Reagan at the time of the Alzheimer's announcement. Iran Contra, deficits, etc. I'm not saying that they should have ignored the rough spots. Reagan was flesh and blood, just like Kennedy, but I don't recall Reagan ever saying anything like this, as Kennedy did on Robert Bork:

"The President, should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision on the Supreme Court.

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."

Aside from the well known boozing, womanizing and death of Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy has always played hard-ball politics. AT LEAST as hardball as anyone on the right. Again, I don't have a problem with that, it is just a fact. He managed to have Robert Bork defeated, he worked very hard to have Clarence Thomas defeated with every technique he could come up with, reasonable and over the top. He played very hard, and his hardness has often been returned in kind. That fact ought to be included in the stories along with his kindness. I assume he has been kind, at the very least to those he liked, and no doubt, in some cases to others. It is also clear from the record that this man is not one that has failed to "give punches".

So far I haven't heard any nut job from the right talk about "he deserves a painful death" as MANY from the left have for Reagan, Bush, Cheney and others. I suppose someone will do that, since there are certainly right-wing nut jobs as well as left wing ones, but I hope they are very few and far between. We all get to face the grim reaper in one form or another, the long lists of folks from the left that like to heap painful death wishes on Republicans is something that I find reflects especially badly on those of that stripe. Disease and death happen and only the most ultimate of fascists try to make them ideological issues (as in the left with AIDS/Reagan).

One of the VERY common things that the press loves to do is to try to arouse people's emotions against Republicans. "If it was HIS son or daughter killed in Iraq, THEN how much would he support the war"? Somehow one never reads in the MSM how the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne might feel about a sitting US Senator that left their daughter in a car under water, where all the evidence we have says that she died over hours, breathing her last in an air bubble while that US Senator tried to come up with the right lie to keep his career alive. The feelings of of her parents are forfeit by the MSM for what they see as the greater cause of liberalism. It is also basically top secret that John McCain's son is in Iraq -- and he supports the war.

The other common emotion is "how would they feel if THEY didn't have health insurance, maybe they wouldn't be so greedy and vote against national health insurance THEN!". Guess what, in England there would be no treatment for Kennedy under their plan. It would be hospice time. Will the MSM be looking into that very much? If Kennedy was forced to live under the health system that he supports, he would not be treated. Emotions might be quite different--and maybe even more removed from the picture since people might realize that National Health is just a "trade off", not some huge "sure win for all".

How do I feel about Kennedy now that I know he is dying? It doesn't make much of a difference to me, since I know I am dying and I knew he was dying as well all along-- neither one of us knows when. This information likely increases my chances of outliving him, but there are no guarantees. I wish him peace with God, as much remaining time as can have reasonable quality for him and as pain free a death as possible. Finding out that we liked the same Scotch wouldn't even make me agree with him politically, a reminder that we are both going to die is even less likely to so so.

Success! (So Far)

This is from Taranto, "Best of the Web" at WSJ and is right in line with what I have been noticing. From the sounds of this, apparently even the NYT agrees that Iraq being "out of the news" means that there is solid progress there again. Could there EVER be a time when the MSM and the Democrats would say something like; "We were premature when we said that Iraq had descended into civil war and the situation was not recoverable. It IS being recovered and we applaud the success of the US and Iraqi troops and will do what we can to help it continue".

Is that possible? Nope, I don't think it is. The Democrats and the MSM have declared Iraq "the worst decision ever", "a lost cause", "civil war", "a tradegdy", "a waste", just too many times to be willing to acknowledge success there. It is a matter of ideology, not reality.

Mission Accomplished?
Yesterday New York Post columnist Ralph Peters issued a dare to the New York Times:

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times.

Today, the Times took him up on the dare:

Iraqi forces rolled unopposed through the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Tuesday, a dramatic turnaround from the bitter fighting that has plagued the Baghdad neighborhood for two months, and a qualified success for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

As it did in the southern city of Basra last month, the Iraqi government advanced its goal of establishing sovereignty and curtailing the powers of the militias.

This was a hopeful accomplishment, but one that came with caveats: In both cities, the militias eventually melted away in the face of Iraqi troops backed by American firepower. Thus nobody can say just where the militias might re-emerge or when Iraqi and American forces might need to fight them again.

The Times put the caveat right in the headline--"Operation in Sadr City Is an Iraqi Success, So Far"--and we do not seem to remember the paper being so careful to hedge its bets when reporting on setbacks for America's side. Still, it's nice to see our colleague at the Post get results.

Are We Still in Iraq?

Power Line: Success that probably only the Democrats can reverse

I just did a quick scan of the headlines today, not one mention of anything from Iraq. Last month there was a brief flurry of news as the Iraqi army ran some operations in Basra and Sadir City flared causing some loss of American life. Naturally, the media and the Democrats indicated that "defeat is proven yet again, it will only get worse". Nancy Pelosi was over there recently, but since even HER reports were upbeat, they have received virtually no coverage. (she must have missed the news from Harry Reid that Iraq was a "lost cause".) For all practical purposes, Iraq is out of the news. I wonder what that means? Do you think things are going well, or badly? Which would play more to the Democrat hands, and thus be more likely to reported?

We are talking about a party here that having a lot of trouble picking one from a field of two. Their strongest suit is always pointing out everything in the world that they find to be "hopeless", "unfair", "a lost cause", etc. Their weakest suit is always actually getting anything productive done on any front.

Imagine

Michelle Malkin: Obamanation, NRO

I was looking for another post by Michelle on BO gaffes and ran into this. Apparently from over a year ago. I always love Democrats who claim that the lives of soldiers that died in the service of their country were "wasted". On one hand, I do admire their honesty, because that is what most of them believe. I think John Lennon had the liberal view pretty close with "Imagine":

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today


Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace


You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one


Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world


You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

It fits in so many ways. Here we have a guy that was worth at least 100's of millions of dollars with homes around the world singing about "no possessions". Beyond that, someone who thought that if there were "no countries" there would be nothing to "kill or die for" gets killed by someone basically just because he was famous. There would seem to be a message in there somewhere and it is doubtful that John understood it.

No God, No Country, No Possessions. Just the self lost in a meaningless cosmos. Given that, what would "wasted" be? Dying for something other than personal pleasure?

Here are the words of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, who died in a 2005
firefight in Ramadi:

“Obviously if you are reading this then I have
died in Iraq . . . I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to
do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why
we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that
they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or
vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is
why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.”

John Lennon, BO, or 90%+ of Democrats can have nothing but contempt for such words and when they are honest believe that Jeffrey Starr "wasted his life".

Imagine

Climate Conditions Above Normal Hurricane Season

NOAA predicts above-normal '08 hurricane season - CNN.com

Early in the article we read; "The approaching 2008 Atlantic hurricane season is likely to be above
normal, with up to 16 named storms and up to five major hurricanes, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday, citing
climate conditions."

If you read to the bottom of this article you see " The predictions came after calmer-than-normal seasons of 2006 and 2007." and " The 2007 season was the weakest in five years, ...".

I know in 2006 the predications were for a very active season. I don't recall last years prediction headlines. Supposedly, Science either has to make correct predictions, or the basic assumptions have to be questioned - in this case that climate change is causing more hurricanes.

Come November we will see how correct they were this time.

Inequality Has Two Sides?

Shattering the Conventional Wisdom on Growing Inequality - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Levitt is considered one of the smartest young enconomists, his book "Freakonomics" was interesting in that it was willing to be "politically incorrect" on the abortion issue, among other things.

His core assertion here is so simple that it would be common sense if we didn't live in a world of extreme bias where the MSM keeps the sheep only looking left. "Inequality that matters" is defined by BOTH the income and what you do with it. (Duh). Unsurprisingly, WalMart and other discount outlets continue to drop prices on a lot of the stuff that low income folks buy, but at the higher end of the market, there isn't as much competition for lower prices, so while the rich make a lot more, they also end up paying a lot more.

While the INCOME side of the gap seems most interesting-since it is simple and looks bigger. Most people aren't really greedy misers just looking at how much money they can get there hands on, most want to DO SOMETHING with that money, and when that is part of the equation, any realistic gap analysis has to take the SPENDING side into consideration.

This quote from the article sums it up pretty well:

When people talk about inequality, they tend to focus exclusively on the income part of the equation. According to all our measures, the gap in income between the rich and the poor has been growing. What Broda and Romalis quite convincingly demonstrate, however, is that the prices of goods that poor people tend to consume have fallen sharply relative to the prices of goods that rich people consume. Consequently, when you measure the true buying power of the rich and the poor, inequality grew only one-third as fast as economists previously thought it did — or maybe didn’t grow at all.

Why did the prices of the things poor people buy fall relative to the stuff rich people buy? Lefties aren’t going to like the answers one bit: globalization and Wal-Mart!

The Messiah Makes Mistakes?

Michelle Malkin on Barack Obama on National Review Online

I have no problem with BO making mistakes. He is a human just like the rest of us and no doubt he has some glaring weaknesses, since he seems to have excellent communication skills in both speaking and writing. It appears that numbers may be a large problem for him. A year ago he confidently talked about "Ten thousand killed in a tornado in Kansas".

Most people that have a standard grasp of numbers would immediately sense that was a VERY wrong number, especially when the real number as TWELVE. BO didn't. As I said then, that doesn't really mean anything, it just means he is human and since he is a Democrat, we all just go on without him being called stupid because of it.

There are a number of gaffes where he seems to not really have a solid grasp on how many states are in the US. The one Michelle quotes is pretty cute, I'm sure he FEELS that he has covered 57 states with 1 to go.

Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”

Again, the primary problem here is that media bias prevents us from getting the full benefit of the humor of having a young guy with no leadership experience and a wife that is obviously pretty bitter about a lot of stuff run for President. There is no reason that it can't be even a bigger hoot than W mangling his prose with regularity. The Presidency is a job that no human being ever has or ever will handle with anything like perfection. The media loves to make a joke of Republican Presidents and if they get any chance they make them into a strange comedy of evil and incompetence that would seem to be metaphysically impossible in the real world.

Their love of Democrats drive them to work very hard to push all flaws and controversy aside as "unimportant", "politically motivated", etc. Sometimes, like with a Carter, the feet of clay just get so obvious that they can no longer keep up the fiction, but sometimes, with someone like Clinton they are able to "stand by their man" no matter how clear it becomes that even the clay is more like regular old dirt ... shit even. I Slick had been an R, his memory would be something like this in the minds of every American.

It is going to take a lot for BO to lose the MSM, and I suspect that "Bush Blame Syndrome" will hold him in good stead for one term no matter how bad things go. Republicans always have one weakness, we still love the country no matter how bad the odds against her may look, maybe especially when it looks dark. My prayer at this point is that BO will be about 100x as lucky as Reagan was, from the way he looks so far, he will need that and more.

Newsweek's Decline

America’s Decline Is Largely Self-Inflicted | Newsweek Voices - Michael Hirsh | Newsweek.com

I'm always heartened to read such a cold and level headed assessment of the Bush Presidency. One can tell that News Speak is a bastion of lack of bias and realistic appraisals of world affairs. Oh, the heaven that Bush was handed in 2001 -- a nation 10 months out of a major stock market crash, already in recession, so on top of the terrorist problem that the USS Cole had just been attacked and we were less than 8 months away from 9-11. Talk about a country in GREAT SHAPE!!!

I think the following shows how realistic this guy is about the position of the US (or any country in the world):

What an exercise in the judicious use of our great power that would have been, and what a trophy to place on the shelf after Germany and Japan following World War II! America would have been widely admired.

He is talking about "fixing Afghanistan" as the "use of our great power". I wonder how Germany and Japan feel about being "trophies on the shelf"? No "imperialist pretensions" on the left are there? The guy looks like he HAD to be alive in the 80's, maybe he was just on drugs or something. I read a WHOLE bunch of books that seemed to indicate that at least our Japanese "trophy" was very far from inert and was supposed to be eating our lunch.

I'd have no problem with the DNC printing this, it sounds exactly like the kind of propaganda that they BETTER believe if they think that you can hand the keys to the worlds only Superpower to a freshman Senator with no executive experience and have success. But a magazine that people are supposed to buy as "objective"? Wow.

Unacceptable Wife?

ABC News: Spare My Wife, Please: Can Chivalry Exist on the Campaign Trail?

Gee, BO thinks it is "unacceptable" for his wife to be brought into the campaign. I'll give ABC credit, they point out in the article that Democrats are already targeting Cindy McCain in a number of ways. Heck, during the campaign of 2004 Kitty Kelley came out with a book asserting that Laura Bush was a big drug user, potentially even a dealer during college. She got coverage on the Today Show and other MSM outlets. Oh, and the MSM and the Democrats ALWAYS kept Nancy Reagan out of it! Never heard stories on dresses, White House china, astrology, potential affairs with Frank Sinatra, etc, etc. Those Democrats are always big on "practice what they preach". I'd argue that Laura, Nancy, and at least so far Cindy McCain have kept themselves FAR more out of the media spotlight than old "I'm not proud" Mrs BO. No matter, if you have an "R" next to your name, you ARE "fair game" no matter what.

So what does BO mean by: ""If they think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in
this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable," ?? Does he mean that he will "negotiate" then? Would there be "conditions" to THOSE talks, or is it just "sit down and talk anytime"? I have no doubt that would be a real threat, since I'm convinced he could talk anyone to death.

It reminds me of the Billy C finger wag. Potentially old Billy and BO can work on their statements without the Secret Service guys around? It seems to me that it is much more "manly" to give your big "unacceptable" talk and bluster when you don't have top notch guys with guns arrayed around you and trained to give their lives for you. Those agents would even give their lives protecting a woman that isn't even proud of the country that they serve. What a world.

Hopefully Hamas, Iran and Al Qaeda will be a lot more impressed with BOs "unacceptable" than I find it to be.

Buffalo Theory of Drinking

It doesn't get much clearer than this! ;-)

The Buffalo Theory

In one episode of 'Cheers', Cliff is seated at the bar describing the Buffalo Theory to his buddy, Norm. I don't think I've ever heard the concept explained any better than this:

'Well you see, Norm, it's like this . . . A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the lowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.'

The Fall of Conservatism

The Political Scene: The Fall of Conservatism: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

I thought this New Yorker Article was well on the longish side, but had some points worth looking at. The following is something that I think bears comment:

In its final year, the Bush Administration is seen by many conservatives (along with seventy per cent of Americans) to be a failure. Among true believers, there are two explanations of why this happened and what it portends. One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account—shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress—has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles. Buchanan said, “The conservatives need to, in Maoist terms, go back to Yenan.”

The second version—call it reformist—is more painful, because it’s based on the recognition that, though Bush’s fatal incompetence and Rove’s shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement’s demise, they didn’t cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems. Instead of heading back to Yenan to regroup, conservatives will have to spend some years or even decades wandering across a bleak political landscape of losing campaigns and rebranding efforts and earnest policy retreats, much as liberals did after 1968, before they can hope to reëstablish dominance.

My fundamental analysis is that "Conservatives became too purist". The Buchanans and Wills just think that things will be OK if the Republicans "get back to the basics". The problems I see with that are:

1. Republicans never successfully REALLY sold smaller government. They sold the IDEA, but when they actually cut the RATE OF GROWTH in programs, they paid dearly for it and Clinton took the credit for the resulting budget surplus. This hurt them in MANY ways. Politically, it was expensive and simply ended up handing a feather to Clinton, and internally, it made Republicans feel that cutting spending wasn't worth it.
   
2. Tax cutting has pretty much OVER run it's course. The fact that people below say $50K pay so little tax today is dangerous. Much as a tithe to the church isn't about helping God, it is about helping YOU (because you see that this is a universe of plenty and gratitude for that is critical to your well being), paying some taxes on your income isn't only about "government revenue", it is about all Americans feeling that they are "paying their fair share". When folks decide that "taxes are for people that make more money than me to pay", we have a big problem, and I think we have it.
   
3. Republicans QUICKLY forgot how painful it is to be in the wilderness. They only controlled all three branches from 2002-2006, 4 short years out of the last 50+. When handed the keys to actual governance without the excuse of "the other party", the coalition promptly decided "this better be perfect or we are going to pout". Without a recession, with only the smallest of military difficulty relative to history (see WWII, Vietnam, Korea, etc), and a natural "disaster" that hardly even qualifies as such (try <2k>

This quote is unfortunately exactly where I think we are at. The remaining issue now is "how long will Republicans be in the wilderness"? Unfortunately, I have to HOPE that it will be a long time, because I think it is going to take a national disaster of something greater than the late 1970s but hopefully not as bad as the depression.

Sam Tanenhaus summed up the 2008 race with a simple formula: Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama. From the ruins of Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, conservatives began the march that brought them fully to power sixteen years later. If Obama wins in November, it will have taken liberals thirty-six years.