House of Eratosthenes

Gov. Sarah Palin parachuted into a phone interview on the Laura Ingraham show in the last minutes of the program today at about ten minutes to Noon eastern. She urged citizens (and by extension, the media) to demand answers from Barack Obama and Joe Biden about Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Obama’s record of voting against protections for infants born alive after an unsuccessful abortion.

“I don’t see the other ticket being asked to be truthful and give details,” she said. She added that Obama’s positions are “so far left,” but they’re being “packaged up to look pretty and mainstream, and they are not.”
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On Ayers, Palin said Obama hasn’t told the “total truth” about his long-time association with an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” On ACORN, she said they are pushing voter fraud. “Doesn’t anybody have a conscience any more?” She urged, America to “wake up and ask thse questions.”

Based on some experience watching some talking points blossom and others die on the vine, it seems to me our problem is with these “soft referendums” that pass unanimously without being put to a vote. Like for example: What’s mean? We’ve somehow decided what’s mean and what isn’t, to the complete advantage of liberal democrats, without any meaningful dissents, and without actually casting ballots.

Sen. McCain points at Sen. Obama during a townhall debate and uses the words “that one.” That’s mean. Obama’s official campaign makes fun of Sen. McCain because his wartime injuries leave him unable to use a computer keyboard…that isn’t mean.

What’s bipartisanship? That’s another one. John McCain has made a big show out of being able to work with Barack Obama and other liberal democrats. I haven’t heard of Sen. Obama making any similar and opposite declarations about his readiness, willingness, or ability to work with Republicans. All I’ve seen him do is blame Bush for any little fly in the ointment…often changing the subject, to the point of offense, to do so.

And yet among those who think the answer to our problems is to “rise above partisanship and do what’s best for the country” — the overwhelming consensus is to flock to The Chosen One, whom any honest analysis would declare has very, very little to do with rising above partisanship. How does this dovetail with their decree that partisanship caused our problems and bipartisanship will end them? What’s that got to do with an Obama administration? Again: It’s a soft referendum. It was put to “The People,” supposedly, but decided, unanimously, without voting.

People like to run around babbling a bunch of stuff and nonsense about what independent thinkers they are. It just ain’t so.

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Illegal Aliens with Illegal Mortgages
Friday, October 10th, 2008

Newsbusters…

A single report by KFYI radio of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.

There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.

KFYI reports that these fraudulent straw purchases of mortgages by illegal aliens has affected every state in the union.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

Lax immigration laws have also helped make this crime easy to perpetrate.

In 1965 a Democrat Controlled Congress under President Lyndon Johnson passed the concept of “chain” immigration into law. A later commission named the Hesburgh Commission convened during Ronald Reagan’s first term, found that this concept statistically allowed each single immigrant to bring into this country 84 of his family members. Of course, all these people have to live somewhere making such fraudulent mortgages quite attractive.

But go on. Vote for the fellow with the most charismatic personality for your hopey changey goodness, and blame any hitches in the giddy-up on “eight years of Bush Cheney.”

Real life just isn’t that simple, m’friends.

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Best Sentence XLIII
Friday, October 10th, 2008

John Stossel snags the forty-third award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL):

Everybody talked about the “freeze” in the credit markets, but why, I wonder, were the cable news programs that repeated the credit-freeze mantra pausing for commercials from companies trying to lend me money?

He goes on…

Ditech and LendingTree still hawk mortgages at under 6 percent. Some credit freeze.

Economist Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute looked at the credit numbers kept by the Federal Reserve. He writes: “Although certain financial institutions are undeniably in deep trouble — difficulties of their own making … — credit markets in general have not ceased to operate. Moreover, lenders are extending credit in historically great amounts“.

Maybe this is why CNN business reporter Ali Velshi broke ranks when reporting on “dried up” credit and said, “When I say ‘dried up,’ I don’t mean there’s no money. But you’d better have good collateral and good credit.”

What’s wrong with that?

You really should go read the whole thing. It’ll change your perspective…especially if you think the 1929 crash was some harbinger of doom regarding what’s about to happen to us next.

It’s the technology. Not what it used to be. Seventy-nine years is a long, long time.

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“With a Little Luck, They May Soon Be Orthodoxies”
Friday, October 10th, 2008

So writes Chatterbox, whom you may know as Timothy Noah, of Slate Magazine (H/T: Boortz). He’s referring to a little list he cooked up of things you can say, now, if you are a left-wing kook. His point is that with McCain’s defeat now an inevitability, these items might soon be embraced by the mainstream; you won’t have to be safely insulated from major political campaigns to say them out loud.

It still isn’t wise for Obama to say them, but maybe the New Complacency will loosen other tongues within the political mainstream. Even if it doesn’t, it’s fun to think about what those utterances might be. What follows is a list, compiled with help from my fellow Slate staffers. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of the contributors—one of whom is a conservative Republican—or even me. But they sure are a refreshing change from what we’ve been hearing since 1981. With a little luck, they may soon be orthodoxies.

I think Karl Marx had some valuable insights into capitalist economies!

I think abortion should be safe and legal. Rare is fine, too, but the way to achieve that is contraception, baby!

I think Mormons are kooks!

The Second Amendment does too allow government to ban handguns!

Let’s standardize the federal age of consent at 16!

Promiscuity between consenting adults is good exercise!

Wheeeee! Isn’t this fun?

Health care is a service, not a business!

Pot is no more dangerous than vodka. Legalize it!

I don’t support the troops. I support some troops, depending on whether or not they’ve committed war crimes!

No more wars without United Nations or at least NATO support!

Saving the boulder darter was worth a few thousand jobs!

If Eastern Europeans think NATO will go to war to defend them against Russia, they’re out of their minds!

Ditto if Taiwan thinks the United States will go to war to defend it against China!

Let’s teach evolution in Sunday school!

The military-industrial complex is a greater menace than most foreign nations!

If Israel isn’t out of the occupied territories in six months, we’ll cut off all aid.

I think Chatterbox deserves a profound thank you from the electorate for revealing what we are really debating here with this election. Karl Marx had valuable insight into capitalist economies, huh? Government should dictate that evolution is taught in Sunday school? I thought the left-wingers were all about separation of church and state?

Now this all sounds quite out-there and absurd…but you know, he’s right. Among Obama supporters, none of these ideas are out of their localized “mainstream,” so can it really be said such tidbits won’t find greater acceptance in the new Age of Obama, or perhaps codified into public policy.

Some, among his supporters, think they’re good ideas. If I understand his context right, it looks like I have written proof.

Can we please re-schedule and re-do that ridiculous “townhall” debate? Call me nuts if you want, but I think the public has a right to know what exactly we’ve been arguing about.

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Why Do I Have the Feeling…
Thursday, October 9th, 2008

…that Republicans won’t ever be innocent of these charges of “mudslinging,” until they actively campaign for democrats?

It’s disheartening to see the 2008 presidential campaign sink into smear tactics. This raises ugly echoes of the false Swift Boat accusations of 2004 and the racist Willie Horton ads of 1988.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin stooped to mud-slinging by saying Democrat Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists” because he served on boards with Dr. William Ayers, a 60-year-old University of Illinois distinguished professor who was a youthful leader of the radical Weather Underground one-third of a century ago, opposing the Vietnam War in the 1970s when Obama was a tot.

The McCain-Palin ticket should beware of such hatchet jobs, because both GOP nominees are vulnerable to counterattacks.

McCain betrayed his crippled first wife and lived with beer heiress Cindy Hensley, whose father had been convicted of mob bootlegging charges. McCain used Hensley money and connections to succeed in Arizona politics. He nearly sank politically because he pulled Washington strings to help crooked financier Charles Keating, who went to prison after his savings-and-loan chain cost U.S. taxpayers billions.

Palin is vulnerable because she has spent her life in Pentecostal churches where members speak in tongues, cast out demons, await the Rapture, practice faith healing and try to ward off witches. So far, the Obama-Biden campaign has declined to question her fitness in this regard.

Really, they have? They have so declined? The “in this regard” must be the magic loophole here. “Ah yes, we’ve questioned Sarah Palin’s fitness in the regard of being pro-life, of having five kids, of having not gone to Wellesly or Yale, of wearing porn-star hooker glasses, of buying a tanning bed, of being Governor only as long as our Messiah has been a Senator, of leaving herself vulnerable to her personal e-mail being illegally hacked, of her husband getting a DUI twenty-two years ago…but not specifically in the regard of speaking in tongues and handling snakes!”

Millions upon millions of voters this year are voting not quite so much for McCain, but against Barack Obama. Depending on your personal issue priorities, that’s quite a legitimate position to take — just as it’s quite a legitimate position to vote for Obama because you want the war to end (just, in my humble opinion, misguided…nevertheless, legitimate). If it’s legitimate for people to vote for McCain for this reason, that his opponent is unacceptable, it is quite legitimate for McCain to remind them of this, and to go after converts under the same rationale.

The editorial goes on to state…

After eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, America faces a nightmare. The national debt has leaped past $10 trillion, with no stabilizing in sight. Three-quarters of a million U.S. jobs have been lost so far this year, including 159,000 last month. The stock market plunge has wiped out trillions in personal savings. The unnecessary Iraq war has killed more than 4,000 young Americans.

McCain is tied tightly to the Bush-Cheney agenda because he supported invading Iraq, supported deregulation that brought the Wall Street financial meltdown, and supported trillion-dollar tax giveaways to the wealthy that wrought monster deficits and the soaring national debt.

These are the overriding concerns of the 2008 presidential campaign. They mustn’t be camouflaged by petty mudslinging attacks.

Which raises my question — what is there for the McCain campaign to do, exactly? What if the McCain campaign woke up one morning and decided “Hey, let’s not do anything the esteemed editors of the Charleston Gazette don’t want us to do”? What then? Would the esteemed editors remain unsatisfied in their thirst for a civil tone, until the McCain headquarters started handing out Obama/Biden buttons?

From where I sit, that’s very likely to be the case. It’s like the joke of the corrupt defense attorney saying “I object, Your Honor, when the prosecution says he intends to prove my client’s guilt! It prejudices the jury for him to prove my client’s guilt!”

I jest, but only slightly. Insignificantly, in fact. We seem to have truly arrived at that moment in history at which Republicans are thought to engage in “smear tactics,” simply by pointing out the reasons why voters should choose them as opposed to the other guy.

Meanwhile, you ask Barack Obama what kind of syrup he wants to put on his waffles on any given morning, he can’t answer your question without going into some meaningless litany about how Bush has screwed something up. You know, in my world, if that’s not connected in some way to the question you were asking him…that adequately qualifies as “mud-slinging.” So from where I sit, he’s been doing that, and very little else, all year. Am I figuring that wrong? If so, where? And if not, when do we start going after the Obama/Biden ticket to start engaging a more civil tone and start answering our damn questions?

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Around the World: A Private Jet Expedition
Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Via Steven Milloy’s Junk Science website, we learn of a very special WWF junket to go see lemurs. On other continents. On a private jet. Spewing tons and tons of carbon.

Meanwhile, you little people better switch to flourescent bulbs.

“Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by luxury private jet,” invites the WWF in a brochure for its voyage to “some of the most astonishing places on the planet to see top wildlife, including gorillas, orangutans, rhinos, lemurs and toucans.”

For a price tag that starts at $64,950 per person, travelers will meet at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Fla. on April 6, 2009 and then fly to “remote corners” of the world on a “specially outfitted jet that carries just 88 passengers in business-class comfort.” “World class experts — including WWF’s director of species conservation — will provide lectures en route, and a professional staff will be devoted to making your global adventure seamless and memorable.” Travelers will visit the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil, Easter Island, Samoa, Borneo, Laos, Nepal, Madagascar, Namibia, Uganda or Rwanda, and finish up at the luxury Dorchester Hotel in London.

This is the very same WWF that says “the current growth in [carbon dioxide] emissions must be stopped as soon as possible” and that blames Americans for emitting 21 percent of global CO2 emissions even though the U.S. accounts for only 5 percent of the global population. In December 2007, the WWF launched its “Earth Hour” campaign, a global initiative in which cities and communities simultaneously turn out their lights for one hour “to symbolize their leadership and commitment to finding solutions for climate change.”

Oh, okay. So they’re not touting their luxurious private-jet world tour in the same breath as saying the CO₂ emissions must be stopped as soon as possible.

For a second there, I was worried. Because that, of course, would be silly.

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Men and Women - The Differences
Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Old. But a great find.

Call me a mushy sentimentalist, but I liked the ending the best.

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Valenti Backpedals
Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Jessica Valenti says I can’t give her book a fair hearing unless I buy a copy of it and read it for myself. Sounds reasonable. It also sounds suspiciously convenient.

Anti-feminists tell me what my book is about: Turning teens into sluts!

I figured that my new book would get some negative attention from conservative blogs, but I kinda thought that would happen once the book was, you know…published.

But it seems that there’s no reason to wait for pesky things like the actual content of the book to start blogging about what The Purity Myth is all about. So apparently, the purpose of my book is to “turn America’s teenagers into raging whores.” Woo hoo!
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House of Eratosthenes: “Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one.”

But Cassy Fiano’s post was my fave, “Putting out is SO much better for girls than abstinence.” (And it’s not just because her blog design uses a rose/gun combo that speaks volumes.)

Fiano writes that I have an “obsession with sluttiness.”

Why is it so many feminists are so obsessed with turning teenage girls into raging whores? How is that something you tell girls they should aspire to?

…I honestly think that what most of this is about when it comes to feminists like Jessica is self-loathing… you know, misery loves company and all. I can’t help but see someone extremely misguided, bitter, and angry in Jessica and the feminists like her. What’s truly pathetic is that they aren’t content with screwing up their own lives. No… they’ve got to ruin the lives of American teenage girls as well.

What I find most interesting about Fiano and the other posts is that they’re the ones who are talking about ’sluts’, ‘whores’ and women being promiscuous. (In fact, one of Fiano’s classy commenters suggests that I’m promiscuous and that’s why I wrote the book.) The book cover says nothing about sex, promiscuity or the like - they make that jump. Why? Because for conservatives and purity pushers, the only alternative to being a virgin is being [a] whore. There’s no in-between for them, there’s no complexity or nuance when it comes to sexuality. And that’s why I wanted to write this book. Seriously, these bloggers are making my point for me!

Another thing I found amusing about these responses was that almost all of them took the subtitle to mean that I think virginity is hurting young women, when what when I actually wrote is that “America’s obsession with virginity” is what’s damaging.

So for the record: I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don’t really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that’s the point. I believe that a young woman’s sexual choices - no matter what they be - shouldn’t have a bearing on how they’re seen as moral actors. I also believe that slut-shaming and fetishizing virginity is not just about only valuing women for their sexuality (or lack thereof), but that it’s also part of a larger agenda that seeks to regress women’s rights and return to traditional gender roles. But if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read the book.

Oh, I see, so it’s not virginity that is damaging, it is the obsession with virginity. Feminists aren’t about young girls having as much sex as possible, they’re about people minding their own business. It all seems so clear now!

Except…it doesn’t. As Yoda said, “This one, a long time have I watched.” We are frequent visitors to Feministing. It’s one of the most entertaining sites on the net. Back in July, the site chose to attack Brad Henning, who gives abstinence-only presentations at schools. Now, I don’t have much of an opinion about Mr. Henning one way or another, and I don’t know how you feel about abstinence-only presentations.

But I was fascinated at Feministing’s choice of spokesperson against Mr. Henning. It was a girl who used to sit through Henning’s lectures, grown up into an older girl who’d lost her virginity, grown up still further into a married lady living in an open marriage, screwing another eight guys since tying the knot. She didn’t make much of a point with her letter, other than that she didn’t believe in abstinance-only education…a point lots of others could make. But good heavens, all the pats on the back she got from screwing lots of other guys, with her hubby’s consent, and with that background daring to boldly confront that awful Brad Henning!

As a point of interest, our marriage is open. My husband was the seventh man I slept with, and now that number has almost doubled to 15. Our marriage is more happy and healthy since we’ve opened it than it was before. This is because it is not sex which binds us together, but our commitment to each other. We are not wearing sex blinders. The key to a good marriage is trust and communication, two things that HAD to grow exponentially when our marriage opened up. If you wish to prepare students for solid marriages, then exercises in building trust and communication skills will take you much farther than telling the kids to just wait to have sex until they’re married.

Huh. I know quite a few married couples. I haven’t made the acquaintance of any open-relationship folks, since my days in Seattle…some twenty years ago. Wouldn’t it have been easier to find someone in a normal, monogamous union to offer this kind of personal testimony? Wouldn’t that message then be much clearer? I’d say if Feministing is concerned about confusion between its attacks on virginity, and obsessions with virginity — it’s only concerned about this to a certain extent. Not exactly losing sleep over it.

I don’t think there’s been any such confusion at all. This is pure backpedaling.

It’s not really about minding your own business; it’s about anybody who can be a slut, being one. Feminists may want others to mind their own business with respect to whether a young lady is keeping herself intact or not. But that doesn’t mean they themselves intend to mind their beeswax with regard to same. And yes, we have more than adequate reason to believe third-wave feminists in general, and Ms. Valenti & fellow modmins in particular, are infatuated with the idea of nubile young ladies ridin’ the baloney pony. The more the better. Cassy’s words ring true, and I’ll stand behind my own as well.

They aren’t hostile to the idea of chastity? I’ll take on that debate. But only with people who are familiar with the Feministing website. In the world of Feministing, parents must take absolute zero interest in whether their children are coming to sexual maturity in a responsible way. If they pay any attention to this at all, it is called “fetishizing.”

I nearly lost my mind when I read this gushing piece from Time Magazine about purity balls.

What was amazing to me about the reporting of this article was despite hearing all of these creepy anecdotes - and admitting that girls as young as four are participating in a ceremony about their virginity - writer Nancy Gibbs still managed to be smitten over the whole shebang.

But first…a creepy anecdote.

Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She’ll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today’s world,” she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet–a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. “On my wedding day, he’ll give it to my husband,” she explains. “It’s a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I’m supposed to be loved.”

Paging Dr. Freud! But Gibbs is loving it.

Leave aside for a moment the critics who recoil at the symbols, the patriarchy, the very use of the term purity, with its shadow of stains and stigma. Whatever guests came looking for, they are likely to come away with something unexpected. The goal seems less about making judgments than about making memories.

And making sure young women think their worth is dependent on whether or not they’re sexual. So, no Ms. Gibbs, I think I won’t “leave aside” that very real and very dangerous message. Thanks anyway!

Gibbs continues to totally miss the point:

Purity is certainly a loaded word–but is there anyone who thinks it’s a good idea for 12-year-olds to have sex? Or a bad idea for fathers to be engaged in the lives of their daughters and promise to practice what they preach? Parents won’t necessarily say this out loud, but isn’t it better to set the bar high and miss than not even try?

Are families who don’t expect their daughters to promise their virginity to their dads promoting sex for 12 year-olds? Can’t dads be engaged in the lives of their daughters without worrying about the state of their hymen? And is telling women that their moral compass lays in between their legs really setting the bar high?

Flowery language and valorizing these days doesn’t change what purity balls are about: the ownership and fetishizing of young girls’ sexuality.

Funny. If you open up the Time Magazine article and read it for yourself, what you find doesn’t have an awful lot to do with four-year-old girls being told their “worth” is measured by whether they have sex or not. You don’t even read anything, contrary to what you might expect, about contingencies laid down upon a young lady’s worth as a person. Quite to the contrary, what you read about is such pre-conditions being removed…as in…the girls are made to understand they don’t have to hook up with a guy in order to be worth something. I guess Valenti didn’t want you to read that part for yourself.

Kylie talks with an unblinking confidence about a promise that she says is spiritual, mental and physical. “It’s something I’m very proud of. I plan to keep pure until marriage. It’s a promise I made to myself–not pressure from my parents,” she says. She speaks plainly about what she wants in her life, what she thinks she has the power to control and what she doesn’t. “I’m very much at peace about this,” she says, and looks out across the twirling room. “I don’t feel like I need to seek a man. I will be found.”

Irony. This used to be what feminism was all about. Jessica Valenti says it’s creepy. What she means by “fetishization,” I don’t know for sure, and I’m not sure shelling out a bunch of greenbacks for her latest book will clear it up for me.

I do know one thing for absolute sure.

The brand of feminism practiced at Feministing, has very little, or nothing, to do with minding your own business. Feminists there regularly get involved, get their cackles up, write their letters, when old magazines are dug out of dusty archives that they find displeasing; or when advertisements for household cleaning products are aimed at women; or when private citizens choose to form their own opinions about Sarah Palin being a liberated woman (since she is one); or when said private citizens form other disturbing opinions, such as marriage being between a man and a woman.

Nope. Feministing’s brand of feminism has nothing to do with minding your own business.

Not unless the Feministing-feminists can keep an exemption from such a rule, for themselves.

About everything.

Having said that — glad they think us worthy of mention over there. Now we know we’ve arrived. Maybe by the end of next week we’ll be Keith Olberman’s Worst Person in the World.

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Pretentious Snobbery Versus Common Sense
Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Dr. Melissa Clouthier dares — dares! — to make a distinction between the two.

Sarah Palin inspires vitriol for many reasons among the smug knobby-headed class. The latest unguarded moment came courtesy David Brooks who called Sarah Palin a “cancer on the party” to a group of writers from The Atlantic. (As AllahPundit points out, this outburst is a lot like Peggy Noonan’s opinion, also caught in an unguarded moment. And, of course, it differs little from Barack Obama’s “gun clinging” comment.)

Why do they dislike her so?

1. Her state school education and path to power devalues the elite’s Harvard training.
2. She’s homespun. Intellectuals despise homespun. They prefer the calculated indifference they’ve worked so hard to master over the years.
3. Sarah doesn’t seem to care what they think. Perhaps her most grievous error is that she just doesn’t give a moose turd what David Brooks thinks. Everyone should care what David Brooks thinks. And Peggy Noonan. And the rest of the obnoxious snobs.

Here’s the thing, for those in the elite class, who go to parties and hang in social circles, they spend their time telling themselves a story: the story is that middle America is consumed with the provincial and that the provincial is horrible. It doesn’t occur to them that middle Americans have the same concerns and often discuss some of the same things as the elites, but that middle Americans have what is called a life which gives them a context in which to put these fancy-pants ideals. Many theories sound good in theory, but the small business people, and white and blue collar blokes have to actually live with the consequences of these theories know how they affect life practically.

What she’s talking about is What Is A Liberal? Part One. It’s Yin and Yang stuff. Before I connect that all together, take a look at what Melissa has to say a bit further down…

When a person has spent his whole life living theoretically, a person who lives real makes him feel insecure. The DC elites are no different than the actors in Hollywood. No wonder they all pal around together. At a certain point, their lack of concrete contributions and endless pontifications sounds hollow and empty. They want their lives to have meaning so they inflate their contributions in their own minds. No one dissuades them of the notion because they hang around people just like them.

Here’s a great example.

The oil companies are gouging us. You can tell they’re gouging us because these two gas stations representing two completely different companies are across the street from each other; the same night one of them raises the price from 3.929 premium to 4.199 premium, the other one raises it from 3.939 to 4.189. The same amount, more-or-less, to the same new price, more-or-less, within the same hour, more-or-less. Obviously there’s a conspiracy at work.

So let’s raise their taxes through the freakin’ roof.

If you live in the real world, you live in a world of cause-and-effect. A world of “butterfly effects.” And so, as ticked off as you may be at the oil companies, and as much as you believe in that kind of conspiracy, you still can’t get behind this because it’s ridiculous to think we’ll make it artificially expensive to peddle some product, and as a result, the price of that product will come DOWN.

So if you’re Yin, you may feel anger like anybody else, but you get over it. You live in a world of IF…THEN. The Yang live in a world of protocol. “S’poseda.” You’re s’poseda cut your carbon emissions. You’re s’poseda behave humbly so the rest of the world likes us more.

The decision-making is always externalized to someone else. And that “someone else” is always some vague, non-corporeal, undefinable entity. “Them.” “The People.” “Everybody.” “Us.” “Out There.” You dare to make this distinction, after awhile you see this everywhere. I see it in this Charles Gibson interview with The Messiah — Gibson explicitly asks him “what will you do different from what the current administration is doing now” (or some such)…and here comes the reply. The People have lost confidence. It’s always someone else making the decision that matters.

People who populate this whole other world, have good reason to be jealous. Once they own a task, a task that depends on real decisions being made by an individual who’s directly responsible for how things turn out — they’re lost. And they know it. They’ve spent too much of their lives living theoretically…spooning out the right answers to please others. Ignoring cause and effect.

There are some social skills involved in this. It is a certain brand of “smarts.” In a way. But it’s not the right kind of smarts to build anything; at least, not anything new. It certainly isn’t the kind of smarts compatible with “Change We Can Believe In.”

I remember one of my less-inspiring old bosses who was opposed to my retaining the title of “Senior Network Systems Engineer.” His argument was that the title of “engineer” was something like the title of “doctor.” You should have a certificate from somewhere, with a serial number on it, and a licensing board ready to pull it if you screw something up.

I can certainly see the logic involved in that. But I see a problem with it as well, because this isn’t something that’s based on the IF…THEN that engineering is all about. Such a rule is based on convention and protocol. Technology, people forget often, is the direct opposite of protocol. It is directly antithetical to doing things the way you’re “s’poseda” do them. Because if you’re always doing something the way someone else has decided you’re supposed to do them, how are you ever going to build anything new?

And yeah, that’s why we have this rage at Sarah Palin. It isn’t the traipsing around out there hunting moose and field-dressing the carcass. It’s knowing how to do it — and to find your way back, using only a compass. Melissa hit the nail right on the head. These people have lived their entire lives “living theoretically.” S’poseda, s’poseda, s’poseda. Deep down, they know this is not how things are built. This isn’t how anything was invented or discovered or provided, that we have today, that we use. It’s how you go about copying something somebody else has said or done.

They understand this difference deep down, themselves, without anyone else pointing it out. And so they find Sarah Palin threatening. But Barack Obama doesn’t threaten them one little bit. He’s plugged into the same collective power-structure, so he’s guaranteed to never show that anything is flawed, wrong or weak about it.

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