Tinkering to fix a bad design, 2: the stupidity of nibbling around the edges of Obamacare. #hcr #teaparty #tcot

Nibbling around the edges is the surest way for Obamacare to become ingrained in the federal administrative machine. Once the hordes of medical clerks in insurance companies and hospitals become versed in the unconstitutional law's provisions, there will be great inertia to retain it. Better the abominable hydra we know, you might say.



And if you take away the 1099 requirement, soften the mandates, and provide waivers and workarounds, it becomes a pill people can swallow.



If the government were to control every aspect of the medical insurance industry, and mandate that everyone have medical insurance, then the government would control, on a basic level, everyone in the country. Not only is the very thought of that repulsive, but the danger of abuse, by local functionaries and federal power brokers, is real.



Tinkering only adds to uncertainty. If one onerous provision is axed, will the others be? The quest will then be to lobby the government for the best position.



Because apart from personal indignities and the threat of corrupt leverage of medical information and access to health care by those government, the effect on business is at least as bad. Rather than businesses making decisions based on their attempts to please their customers, all business interests would be subordinated to the attempt to ameliorate the effects of a bad health insurance situation. In the alternative, Obamacare amounts to an ever-increasing fee put upon American businesses who elect not to pay their employees via a health insurance plan.



And the tinkering we're seeing the Republicans take part in now is just the start.

Amplify’d from www.redstate.com

How The Stupid Party Gets Its Name

Senator Dick Durbin hinted two days ago that the Senate Democrats would be unified in their opposition to repeal Obamacare except for one or two. In other words, the GOP had the opportunity to get Democrats to jump ship.

But Democrats have signaled that they want to “fix” Obamacare, not repeal it. So the GOP gladly obliged. Without any obstruction, the GOP went along with the Democrats’ changes to the onerous 1099 provision.

No Democrat had to vote for repeal because they knew they’d get a chance to say they were “fixing” Obamacare. And the headline will now be that the GOP and Democrats in the Senate are cooperating on a “fix” instead of repeal.

On top of that, however, is the stupidity — sheer stupidity — of certain Republicans now trying to undermine the litigation against Obamacare. I’m looking at you Senators Lindsey Graham and John Barasso.

Tinkering with Obamacare undermines both the lawsuit against Obamacare and the effort for full repeal. It doesn’t take a genius to know that, but it does take the stupid party to ignore it. Read more at www.redstate.com

 

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hZpN6h

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Tinkering to fix a bad design: the stupidity of nibbling around the edges of Obamacare. #hcr #teaparty #tcot

Nibbling around the edges is the surest way for Obamacare to become ingrained in the federal administrative machine. Once the hordes of medical clerks in insurance companies and hospitals become versed in the unconstitutional law's provisions,



And if you take away the 1099 requirement, soften the mandates, and provide waivers and workarounds, it becomes a pill people can swallow.



Tinkering only adds to uncertainty. If one onerous provision is axed, will the others be? The quest will then be to lobby the government for the best position.



If the government were to control every aspect of the medical insurance industry, and mandate that everyone have medical insurance, then the government would control, on a basic level, everyone in the country. Not only is the very thought of that repulsive, but the danger of abuse, by local functionaries and federal power brokers, is real.



Apart from personal indignities and the threat of corrupt leverage of medical information and access to health care by those government, the effect on business is at least as bad. Rather than businesses making decisions based on their attempts to please their customers, all business interests would be subordinated to the attempt to ameliorate the effects of a bad health insurance situation. In the alternative, Obamacare amounts to an ever-increasing fee put upon American businesses who elect not to pay their employees via a health insurance plan.



And the tinkering we're seeing the Republicans take part in now is just the start.

Amplify’d from www.redstate.com

How The Stupid Party Gets Its Name

Senator Dick Durbin hinted two days ago that the Senate Democrats would be unified in their opposition to repeal Obamacare except for one or two. In other words, the GOP had the opportunity to get Democrats to jump ship.

But Democrats have signaled that they want to “fix” Obamacare, not repeal it. So the GOP gladly obliged. Without any obstruction, the GOP went along with the Democrats’ changes to the onerous 1099 provision.

No Democrat had to vote for repeal because they knew they’d get a chance to say they were “fixing” Obamacare. And the headline will now be that the GOP and Democrats in the Senate are cooperating on a “fix” instead of repeal.

On top of that, however, is the stupidity — sheer stupidity — of certain Republicans now trying to undermine the litigation against Obamacare. I’m looking at you Senators Lindsey Graham and John Barasso.

Tinkering with Obamacare undermines both the lawsuit against Obamacare and the effort for full repeal. It doesn’t take a genius to know that, but it does take the stupid party to ignore it. Read more at www.redstate.com

 

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/dS9R0C

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Governor Blagojevice Has No Reason To Resign

What will resigning now get him?

If he's not found guilty of Federal corruption charges, he can still have a career in politics, on some level.

If he's found guilty, he can resign in protest, or simply wait to be impeached.

If he's impeached and tried, he can resign at any time during the process.

As Dave at Political Machine puts it:

It's quite apparent that no one has anything on Blago or is willing to offer him anything to resign. Quite the reverse. Blago probably knows where enough bodies are buried to make taking him out a risky project, and he has nothing to lose by staying where he is until he gets the right offer. The most valuable thing he now owns is the ability to resign. He's not going to give that away for bleeping nothing right?

I disagree with Dave on one thing: Blago has more leverage than just the ability to resign. If he's impeached and goes on trial, he can take a whole bunch of people down with him, probably to include a former Senator or two.

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Government is the Devil's Evil Twin

Over at Power and Control, Simon says:

The government IS the Devil. Not metaphorically. Really.

Everything you get from government will have a price much larger than the value of the object gained. Some times the price will not be extracted from you. Sometimes it will be from your children, your grand children, or ten generations hence. But the full price the government wants will be extracted at compound interest.

We are still paying the price for trying to be a free people while holding slaves. My great great grand parents lived on another continent when all that went on. And yet the price is being extracted from me.

I think I blogged a generalization of this a while back, but maybe I just thought of it and never did. Ah, found it, in that link.

Government creeps. Given power in one area, it will keep that power as leverage to extend its reach into another.

You cannot deficit spend without an eventual tax increase -- or the lack of an otherwise obvious decrease.

You cannot say that drunk driving (without actually harming anyone or breaking any traffic laws) is illegal without eventually losing the right to take any other risky action.

You cannot have Roe v Wade and not later get Kelo.

And you cannot grow a bureaucracy big enough to manage the health care system without surrendering your right to criticize the government. You watch.

At least the devil lets you enjoy the crap you sold your soul for. Government doesn't even give you that.

Government is not the Devil -- it's the Devil's evil twin.

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House Votes Greater Dependence on OPEC

oh no, i am not making this stuff up

According to shortnews.com (which links to a Reuters story at yahoo):

The U.S. House of Representatives passed in a landslide legislation that would allow the Justice Department to sue OPEC for cooperating to set high oil prices and limiting supply, but President Bush said he will veto the bill.

The bill would attempt to subject OPEC to U.S. antitrust laws and would include Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. The vote margin, 324-84, is large enough to override a presidential veto, which was threatened in fear of retaliation by OPEC.

This attempt by Congress to extend our antitrust laws to cover an organization made up of other sovereign nations is wrong-headed for several reasons, some obvious and some not.

OPEC, as known to everyone not a member of the House of Representatives, stands for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. These countries, not being part of the United States, are not required to recognize our laws or courts.

However, the bill would leverage regulation of foreign-owned oil refinery and transport properties in the U.S to get cooperation from the individual OPEC nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela.

The entire stated purpose of OPEC is to cooperate to set high oil prices and limit supply. Congress may as well say that the United States has authority over the treaties other nations may make with one another, or over the legal systems of any country doing business in the United States.

And their price-fixing scheme is not totally effective. The price of oil is set by the international oil market: sellers try to find the buyer willing to pay the highest price, and buyers try to find the cheapest source. OPEC is simply one group of sellers in the international oil market. The way to get them to lower their price is to buy from a less expensive source.

Another group of sellers is U.S. domestic oil producers. If Congress wishes to increase supply, it can allow domestic producers to drill for oil in places which are already known to have oil, such as the continental shelf off our own coasts and in Alaska.

But rather than stand up to the environmental lobby, Congressional Democrats would encourage OPEC to increase its supply, thereby increasing our dependence on foreign oil.

There is no rule or law that says an OPEC country must produce a single drop of oil. The only thing keeping them producing oil is the international market price. You can't sue someone into selling you something at your price.

What's next: legislating that pi henceforth will be equal to 3.0? Perhaps instead the Congress would like to ensure that the oil fields in Saudia Arabia meet OSHA requirements, or those in Kenya aren't harming the sensitive East African environment.

And if OPEC decides to retaliate against Congressional arrogance, they can turn off the spigot, or merely lower their output even further. That would be a minor inconvenience for them, and the consequences for us would be disastrous.

But perhaps the Democrats in Congress know that already, and believe they can blame President Bush for the economic depression that would follow their attempt to extend our laws to the whole world.

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Saying No to the Banker

Obama was asked about boycotting the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing. Earlier he'd called for the President to boycott the ceremonies, but now he hedges his bets, since he learned that Chicago was trying to host and upcoming Games. After a circuitous discourse about who knows what, he said:

We have to take a stronger stance. We have to take a stronger stance and it's got to be more consistent over time. Let me make one last point about China: It's very hard to tell your banker that he's wrong, all right? And if we are running huge deficits and big national debts and we're borrowing money constantly from China, that gives us less leverage. It give us less leverage to talk about human rights, it also is giving us less leverage to talk about the uneven trading relationship that we have with China.

Shorter: "No". While saying it was important to take a stand, he refused to even take a symbolic one.

So Obama will not ruffle Chinese feathers by personally boycotting Olympics. What does that say, by extension, about his ability to stand up to those people who have endorsed his campaign or bankrolled it? And even if those who have donated to it could be characterized as "the little guys", which they cannot, how can he ever do anything that is unpopular, as a leader often, or even usually, must?
[tiny edits]

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Lunactivists Take Part in Easter Mass

From Moe Lane of Redstate and the Gateway Pundit comes this poor use of of leverage: six adult brats disrupt a Catholic Mass in Chicago on Easter Sunday. I don't care why, and hesitate even to say "Iraq war", because they don't deserve it. The important part to me is that they were there to compain about something the Church and probably the congregation is against, to gain for themselves some measure of attention.

This has all of the elements of lunactivism, all rolled into a nice little package.

They call it "raising awareness", but it's an attention-getting device no different than a toddler's temper tantrum.

The setting chosen for the idiocy ensured the brats' phyical safety.

They wasted leverage. Catholic Mass, like almost all church services, is open to everyone, and a disruption like theirs was sure to result in blog stories like this one. I feel dirty and ill-used even giving them the attention they were after, but I feel compelled to note the absurdity of it all.

The lunactivism is shown most clearly because they were preaching to the choir: most of the cathedral goers are probably against the war, but the act of lunacy drives a wedge between the activists and their audience. All of the worshippers were aware of the war. were The only awareness they raised was a negative perception about those opposing it.

And guess what: despit the best efforts of anti-war leftists in Congress and nursery schools, Iraq is becoming a country again: it's own country, not ruled by a thug and not run by our enemies. In time, we will leave there, too. But for now, our armed forces are giving terrorism a bad name in Iraq.

And so there is this from Michael J. Totten:


Meanwhile, "Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War" and the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice are giving anti-war activism a bad name in America.

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Speak not of a victim

The status of Victimhood is very important to the liberal culture. In many ways it is central to the liberal coalition, a requisite tag on the ear those wishing a place at the trough.

Says Drezner:

This leads to a central irony about this campaign. I don't doubt that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have suffered a multitude of small slights in their professional and personal lives because of their gender or race. However, if you think about this as a contest to see who has suffered the greatest because of their identity, it's not even close.

The candidate who has suffered the most in his lifetime is.... John McCain. As an individual, he has paid a much higher price for his identity as an officer in the United States military than Obama or Cinton has individually paid for their race or gender. And there's simply no way to spin it otherwise.

(w/t: Adam C at Redstate)
As individuals, the case is clear: McCain had it far worse and for a far greater cause than either of his opponents.

But to the Inclusive Victims Movement the election particularly this year is about symbolism, not substance. The amount and depth of trial each candidate has faced is not the issue. Hillary and Obama are running as proxies for all women and all blacks, respectively. That neither one of them has done any personal suffering beyond the normal trials we all face is irrelevant, because voters who identify with one or the other of them will impute their own ear tag.

But we are not, or should not be, electing an entire gender or a race to work in the Oval Office. We are electing an individual, a single person on whose life experience we must rely. The symbolism of putting a woman or a black man in the big chair is of no consequence to the world leaders with whom he or she will have to deal.

But life experience has led John McCain to a position of leadership in the Senate, while Hillary merely occupied an office and Obama has yet to do so.

McCain can leverage the progress in Iraq because the surge is a reflection of his stance all along. He knew that in attempting not to look mean and imperial we were trying to pacify a country with far too light a force. Because of that strategic mistake, we allowed Al Qaeda to gain a foothold in Iraq, which they have now all but lost. But that victory has come at great cost, a cost that a President McCain would have understood, a President Hillary Clinton would have run from, and one that a President Obama would have ducked like the other hard questions he never answers.

Because John McCain doesn't see himself as a victim.

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Anthropocentric Global Alarmism, Part II

Archimedes ^† said, "Give me a lever long enough and a proper fulcrum, and I shall move the Earth." Liberals today see world government as the leverage to institute their ill-considered policies. They have found their fulcrum in the issue of Global Warming.

By asserting that mankind is endangering the climate, liberals are using time-worn techniques of psychological manipulation in an attempt to gain control over economics, institute a measure of world government, and show a triumph of science over theology. Blaming capitalism for all the world's ills as they do, in Global Warming they see a chance to lay at its feet the price, and exact tribute for their cause. They insist that the cures for Global Warming require subverting both the nation and prosperity before the needs of "the planet". And since traditional religions did not predict climate changes, and don't offer solace for this problem, Global Warming is an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of the atheistic world view.

Whether we call it Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW), Anthropocentric Climate Change, or whatever (ACCOW), or something else, the concept is both simple, and bizarre. The path by which the idea of AGW has arrived at mainstream acceptance is the usual one: a weird theory is proposed, which masks incredible complexity with apparent simplicity, along with the alleged potential for disaster.

So by repeatedly having a cow over having ACCOW, liberals are using the technique of the Big Lie: repeated assertions take on the aura of truth.

In Part I of this series, I touched on the resistance to change as it relates to having ACCOW.
But the ACCOW controversy is really dominated by the fear of looking stupid. Not wanting to be wrong, scientists in government and academia would follow the consensus opinion off a cliff, and figuratively speaking, many have. Having done so, it now will be very difficult psychologically for them to reject the "consensus" opinion.

Another aspect of ACCOW which ropes people in is the principle that

Experts in the psychology of human error have long been aware that even highly trained experts are easily misled when they rely on personal experience and informal decision rules to infer the causes of complex events.

Humans tend to think that what they themselves personally experience generalizes to all people, all places, and for all time. While often accurate, hasty generalizations can lead to ruinous results.

Liberals tend to be more urban, and in cities every passing vehicle and belching smokestack shows to the city-dweller a clear link between heat and pollution. This makes them more willing to accept the notion that CO2, which makes up a tiny fraction of greenhouse gases and an even tinier proportion of the atmosphere, can have anything like the massive effect that proponents of having ACCOW suggest.

This all follows a pattern, that of the boy crying wolf. Since the 1970s, there has been a procession of looming disasters about to doom the planet. Liberals now talk about climate change, and condemn as in denial anyone who is less than apoplectic about having ACCOW.

Liberals are understandably excited about the opportunity to change society, and at the prospect that in Global Warming we can seem man despoiling the commons. It's the perfect chance to do what the threat of the previous looming disasters about to doom the planet could not. Each of the following was to be the beginning of the end of mankind, and possibly all life on Earth:

• Overpopulation
  It is odd that the Earth has managed to support its burgeoning population, given the hysteria that led to the attempted extermination of the 'lower races', and the current worldwide practice of prenatal infanticide. But perhaps these outcomes have done their grisly job.
  
  
• Pesticides
  Let's sing it, shall we?
  

  Hey farmer, farmer
  Put away that DDT now
  Give me spots on my apples
  But LEAVE me the birds and the bees
  Please!

  It is a terrible irony that the pesticides needed to replace DDT have done more damage to the birds and the bees than DDT would have, while also allowing millions of deaths due to malaria that DDT use may well have prevented. While resistance, effectiveness, and side effects have to be weighed, the hype surrounding DDT's alleged dangers artificially increased the number of people who died from malaria, as well as needlessly complicating agricultural production.
  
  
• Nuclear Winter
  I must have missed it. Of course, now that only Israel is being threatened, liberals seem unconcerned by nuclear war.
  
  
• Ozone depletion
  There's a hole, there's not a hole. Go figure.
  
  
• Deforestation
  Goodness me, people figured out that if they want to chop down their trees, they'd better get busy growing them. And when the 'old growth' trees are all gone, we'll just have to wait for more, or learn to to do without. Hardly seems worth it to do without now so we don't have to do without later.
  

But those problems either didn't materialize or weren't anything like the disaster we were told they would be. It seems likely that, while there will doubtless be changes coming if the Earth gets warmer, it's hardly worth having ACCOW over it.

---

 ^† This is in paraphrase of Archimedes, who actually spoke Greek, not English. At least, that's what I'm told; I wasn't there.

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The Mass Hysteria of Convenient Targets

Mankind has a certain way of finding scapegoats, a method which seems to assign blame for causes on a scale inversely proportional with the ability of the scapegoat to defend itself against the charge.

Why do we insist on assigning guilt for all troubles great and small to the bogeyman of the day? While Satan, demons, pixies, elves, gremlins, and other such creatures have often received more blame than is their due, there can be little doubt that they are involved in some of our many troubles. But we don't stop there; we take actual things and people we see in the world and assign other-worldly power to them.

• Witches
  From as early as we can tell, witches enjoyed a special reputation for casting ruinous spells and unprovoked magicks on their hapless neighbors.
  
  These witches were so powerful as to control the climate, the economy, disease or war. That they chose in their omnipotence to live in a hut on the outskirts of some dirty little village ought to have given a thinking peasant reason to pause with his pitchfork. History being so woefully incomplete, we may never know whether the Cotton Mathers of the world gave that consideration.
  
  
• Jews
  Like witches, the Jews represented a convenient target. A small minority, with "odd" ways, the Jews were also quite a bit smarter on average. But beginning with the Black Plague in the 14^th century, Jews were blamed for various events which, with the benefit of hindsight, they probably wish they had not brought about.
  
  
• Corporations
  At the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th, a populist movement began to vilify the Trusts as controlling all economic activity and exerting undue influence on government. This fell short of attributing weather patterns to corporate greed, but not too far short of it.
  
  
• Drugs
  At about the same time, Prohibition Fever caught hold of Americans, especially activist Christians. Opiates, marijuana, and alcohol were each vilified as ruinous to good living, and banned. This was at about the same time that self-propelled vehicles became common, allowing unprecedented leverage. Prior to this time, what a person drank or smoked was a matter of taste, with social benefits and consequences, but no concern of the government. With modern machinery came modern restrictions on freedom.
  
  Today the hysteria continues in certain circles, but it must be noted that drug use has not tapered off, despite laws to the contrary.
  
  
• Jews again
  The Nazis incorporated antisemitic hysteria into their governing philosophy.
  
  
• Commies
  In the United States at the height of the Cold War, the Red Menace was thought capable of any evil imaginable, and so communists were held responsible for even the evil they didn't do.
  
  
• Jews again
  What a surprise it is that the Islamofascists blame the Jews for their troubles. And what a shame that some Western dhimmis agree.
  
  
• Corporations
  Those evil corporations are said to be keeping a lid on 200-mpg cars, electric cars, a cancer cure, an AIDS cure, and the like.
  
  
• Global Warming
  But perhaps the all-time winner in the Mass Hysteria Sweepstakes, or at least giving antisemitism a runner up, is the Global Warming hysteria. Perpetuated by science worship and a willing media, the global warming myth plays on the fallacy that if something happens, there must be a human cause.
  

So if you start to think the Witches have unleashed the Jews on us with their Evil Corporations peddling Drugs and leading to Global Warming, just relax. It's really George Bush's fault.

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War and Peace

The history of mankind is the history of war and waiting for war. Peacetime is a kind of stalemate, in which the cost of war is judged by all sides to be greater than the fruits of victory, or at least, greater than the cost of peace.

The search for new weapons and destructive power in warfare is the search for leverage. Leverage is the ability to exert a small amount of effort to command a large amount of force. The history of war is the history of learning to use leverage.

In The Balance Sheet, we saw a hierarchy of values, ranging from our ideals at the top, then our civilian lives and on down to enemy military lives and enemy ideals at the bottom. Depending on the situation, we might spend or compromise massive amounts of items lower on the list to preserve or obtain things at the top.

In case it isn't clear, the notion that we can't put a value on human life holds true only because we value the things ranked below it so much less than we value it. We can, however, engage in cold calculation when we weigh the cost in lives of our decisions against the return in lives saved, or ideals defended, or the return of something of greater value to us than the lives we anticipate losing.

The calculus of war is a kind of vector equation, in which that range of values interacts with a set of risks. In a given situation, we calculate the risk that we will be forced to lose too much of a higher-value item than we will likely gain in other items. More generally, we have

War =

(Risk to ideals)*(Value of ideals)*(Quantity of ideals) +
(Risk of civilian loss)*(Value of a civilian loss)*(Quantity of civilian losses) +
Risk*Value*Quantity{Our Territory
Ally Ideals
Ally Civilian Lives
Ally Territory
Neutral Civilian Lives
Enemy Territory
Ally Military Lives
Enemy Civilian Lives
Our Military Lives
Neutral Territory
Our Money
Our Resources
Ally Money
Ally Resources
Neutral Ideals
Neutral Military Lives
Neutral Money
Neutral Resources
Enemy Resources
Enemy Money} +
(Risk of killing enemy)*(Value of enemy soldier)*(Quantity of enemy losses) +
(Risk of civilian loss)*(Value of enemy ideal losses)*(Quantity of enemy ideals)

While many military thinkers have considered the goal of war to be ending the enemy's ability to enforce his will, that maxim has shown weakness as the cost to acquire leverage has fallen. In particular, the cost of leverage has gotten so low that we now face an enemy whose values place all of the terms in the above equation except his own values at zero. When we can't convince the enemy that his cost for imposing his will is too high, our end goal must be to utterly discredit the enemy's ideals that conflict with our own.

When a new technology comes on the scene, people are quick to exploit it for military advantage. A tiny change in weaponry, or a change in the availability of weaponry or training in the use of weaponry, can have a large impact on the conduct of war.

The tactics and armor needed to fight an enemy armed only with swords, spears, and bows are dramatically different than those needed against one armed with crossbows. The canon reduced mighty castles and fortresses to so much rubble. The musket altered tactics again, as did in turn the rifle, the repeating rifle, and barbed wire. But each of these technologies depended on advances in manufacturing technique and technology for non-military purposes.

Technology changes the calculus of war by changing the relative risks. When access to information is as easy as it is today, coordination of resistance and the ability to impose some amount of will is in reach of very small operators. Leverage is higher than ever before, and increasing with no end in sight.

History happens

Technology is not the only reason war becomes an option. Governments grow and change, tyrants come and go, reformers reform and burn out, and the people endure it all. Sometimes the government of some state or another will decide it needs to grow more than its territory will allow. When the desire for territory exceeds the value of the costs associated with taking it, we have war.

Sometimes a government will become so corrupt or incompetent that it fails. The resultant 'power vacuum' makes the decision to attack that territory easier, because it lowers the risk involved.

History waits for a technology, people, resources and tactics to come together. When the dreaded combination presents a lower risk to achieve a goal by military force, peace is soon only a sweet memory.

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The Liberal Error

I've noticed a tendency, a pattern of sorts, among modern American liberals. They seem most often to conflate side effects and cause.

Self Esteem

Liberals love to talk about self esteem, as though low self esteem were its own cause and not simply the mental health equivalent of scurvy. Without achievement, we lack the self esteem to stay away from suicide, drug abuse, and undesirable sexual activity. But just a little self esteem is enough to ward off these potholes of life. Too much self esteem leads to arrogance and sociopathy.

Low self esteem is undesirable, but high self esteem is just as bad. Furthermore, you can't supply the self esteem innoculation with unmerited praise, and the reward of doing a good job is often enough without any praise at all. As Dr. Sanity says,

Our cultural focus on enhancing "self-esteem" has resulted in the near-worship of emotions and feelings at the expense of reason and thought; on emphasizing "root causes" and victimhood, instead of demanding that behavior be civilized and that individuals exert self-discipline and self-control--no matter what they are "feeling".

Healthy, well-adjusted people have moderate self-esteem, but that cannot be given -- it must be earned.

Diversity

Diversity is not a source of strength in human societies, it is a symptom of it. Unity gives strength, .and people are different enough without foolishly trying to make them more different. A people who are unified is a stronger people. But to be strong, a people must have freedom;. A free people develop diversity. Mere enforced superficial (e.g., racial) diversity does not enhance strength in any way. This topic deserves more treatment, and will be the topic of a future post.

Guns and Violence

Just days before the Virginia Tech massacre, my son's high school English class viewed two videos about the Columbine school schooting. One delved into the actual motivations of the kids who committed the acts of murderous rage, and the other was Michael Moore's Waiting for Columbine. My son identified with the first documentary, saying (and I'm of course translating here from the original teenagerese) that he understood the pain of peer rejection. We agreed that was hardly an excuse to go killing people, but he pointed out that if someone were intent on killing, there's not much that can be done about it. Anyone with a library card can learn how to destroy.

Michael Moore's shlockumentary, on the other hand, he found ludicrous. He took Moore's point to be that if K-Mart had not sold the bullets the Columbine killers had used, they would not have been able to kill. Getting the bullets taken off the shelves would solve the whole problem, he thought Moore to be saying. Knowing as he did the amount of time and thought the Columbine killers put into their rampage, not having those bullets would not have held them back. Guns were their plan B. Plan A was homemade explosives, which failed. Without the bullets, even assuming they couldn't find any anywhere beside K-Mart, they would have come up with some other plan B.

The Columbine rampage didn't happen because bullets were available. It happened because humans ostracize those who are different, and we live in the time of leverage from which there is no return. The bullets were available because we live in a dangerous world, not the other way around.

Now gun control advocates are playing this VaTech massacre for all it's worth, saying that it was caused by the availability of guns. No, it was caused by a lack of guns in the hands of the victims.

Massacres are a result of gun control, not a reason for more of it.

I could go on listing examples in which liberals conflate cause and side effect, such as Global Warming (is the world getting warmer because of the CO2 in the air, or is there more CO2 in the air because the world is getting warmer?), or social justice (to a liberal, life is only fair if the outcome is fair; the conditions are judged by the outcome). However, I'm not really happy with this post, and though I am fairly happy with all of the points made, am not sure I've made my overall case.

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The Police Cannot Protect You

We live in a world of leverage, in which a small amount of human effort and knowledge can control vast amounts of energy. That energy can be used for good, and almost all of the time, it is. Cranes, jackhammers, SUVs, guns, airplanes -- all of these things have tremendous destructive power. When used appropriately, as they almost always are, they make our lives much better. When used poorly, they give us the power to destroy.

Laws cannot protect you.

There are laws against killing people, laws against stealing, and laws against just about everything someone doesn't like. In places where its illegal to have guns, people still have guns, and people still die. People still kill people, and they always will. Our society works on the premise that people will behave themselves. If they will not, then the American Experiment will be shown a failure.

"You cannot legislate morality" means exactly that: laws change only the law-abiding, and a certain number will always ignore the law when you least expect it.

The police cannot protect you.

There is no guarantee of police protection. There is no service level agreement, nor even an agreement that one neighborhood will be served by police as well as the next one. Police cannot be everywhere. If a person is willing to give up his life, there is nothing the police can do to stop him or her from committing any number of violent acts.

Make no mistake: the police were not responsible for the shootings at Virginia Tech, Columbine, or those by the DC Snipers.

Being a good person cannot protect you.

Evil people bent on killing others make no distinction between who gave the most to charity or who volunteered at the homeless shelter. The level of kindness, integrity, and generosity with which you live your life may not make it into that final conversation -- and there may not be a final conversation. But if there is, there is no reason to believe that anyone already set to kill will be dissuaded by a history of goodness.

Even God cannot (or will not) protect you.

We are all going to die some day. God allows wickedness in the world, including the level of wickedness needed to look into the eyes of and kill, one by one, a group of thirty people.

Only you can protect you.


Only you will be there when your life, or your family's life, is on the line. Only you will be there to see the murderer coming down the hall. Only you will be there. The question is: will you be there, standing in the moment, or will you hide your face and wish it all away?

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Leverage

The media dustup over Dr. James Dobson's interest in Fred Thompson's faith made me think about Dr. Dobson. I used to be a devoted follower, back when I was a single dad trying to figure out kids. This isn't about him at all, though.

A few years ago, Focus on the Family interviewed Dr. Richard Swenson on his book Margin. I haven't read it, but that interview stuck with me ¹.

Since the invention of writing a few thousand years ago, technology has been able to increase at an exponential rate. I use "exponential" advisedly. Prior to writing, Man possessed only the amount of knowledge that a group could memorize and pass on to its next generation orally. After writing, information could be recorded in much more detail, allowing an individual to acquire or recaquire the details of an area of knowledge as needed.

A quantity increases exponentially when the amount of its increase is a function of how much of it there is. That's not a rigorous definition, but it will do.

Writing allowed information to spread, even being carried by people who could not read it. Once written down, it could last as long as its medium. The more people there were who could read, the more information there was to store and disseminate.

The Internet has greatly expanded our power to communicate. We can form cliques with people whose interests we share, even though we have never met them and couldn't pick them out of a crowd.

Likewise, the technology of war has come a long way, from spears and slings to firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and supersonic fighters whose targets never see or hear them. Many of these weapsons require only one person to operate, and greatly magnify a single human's power.

Dr Swenson was writing before 9/11, but he foresaw the leverage acquired when a handful of people with simple knives can control the destructive power of a jumbo jet, or derail a train, or poison a city. Blogs and online communication allow us to control of vast amounts of power with the flick of a switch or the click of a mouse. Well, "us" may be a bit of an overreach.

I really should read that book.

¹ Or maybe I've got it confused with some other book. It's been several years.

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Meanwhile, from the echo chamber

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos) has a certain perspective that I seem to lack. Living in an echo chamber can do that to a guy.

Speaking of Tuesday night primary winners and losers, he goes through a long list you can read about at his site if (if you promise to wash before returning). Then he says this:

Losers

Republicans. They're going to do some silly press conference on Wednesday claiming the Democratic Party is held in thrall by craaaazy people who agree with, um, 2/3rds of the American people on Iraq. If they want to make a big deal and remind people they have no exit strategy for Iraq, then by all means, therein lies the path to bizarro 1994.

If they really thought Lieberman losing was such a bad thing for the Democratic Party they wouldn't have gone out of their way to prop him up. Instead, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, the wingnutosphere, several Republican congresscritters, and the GOP's Big Money all rallied around their man. This is not a happy day for them.

Winners

Democrats. Did you see Rahm out of the gate tonight?

"This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush and being his love child means," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the leader of the Democratic House Congressional campaign. "This is not about the war. It's blind loyalty to Bush."

This is a party with purpose. United on the war (under the call for withdrawal from Iraq), fueled by record fundraising and shockingly good poll numbers, and operating in the best political climate for the opposition since 1994, Dems are poised to make killer gains this fall. And without Lieberman in the caucus to undermine it from within, unity and commonality of purpose is now on the table.

One more point, and an important one to close with --

Tonight's race was watched from every corner of this country. There wasn't a city I hit during my book tour (and I hit over 40 of them) in which someone didn't ask about this race, where people didn't cheer when I mentioned Lamont's name.

Ignore for a moment that the leader of the Congressional Democrats called Senator Joseph Lieberman George Bush's "love child".

Kos thinks we "backed" Lieberman. He's sure that we aren't happy to see a three-way race in Connecticut, in which the huge war chest of Lieberman and the hordes of the nutosphere will do battle over one Senate seat in a Blue State, a seat that was so solidly theirs that it wasn't even on the radar.

So instead of getting behind their party chairbat, they'll be stuck in CT. Instead of taking advantage of the Internet's leverage to bring together local supporters with non-local ones across the country, as Republicans are doing, they will be stuck in the Purple Northeast, doing their best to beat Lieberman again.

Happy? You bet we are.

Ok, so what is this about an echo chamber?

Kos went on a book tour, out among the people of this great land. How many Conservatives showed up? Uh, I would say approximately none. The only voice he heard on his nationwide book tour and Venus natal declension party was the same one he hears every day on his blog, and every year at their little love fest. More moonbats.

So no wonder he thinks he's winning. Get someone in office first, n'kay?

The leader of the Congressional Democrats called Senator Joseph Lieberman George Bush's "love child". I wonder where Joe will caucus when he wins in November: with his knuckledragging neocon worshippers in the Republican Party, or with someone who dishes out personal insults?

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