I went into Sunday evening with the thought that, despite my apprehension about the Madonna halftime show at the Super Bowl, I would not be writing about said show as my column for this week. After all, I wrote about the same subject a mere two years back, when they dug up The Who to underwhelm us. I hate to repeat myself, but it is occasionally unavoidable. This is one of those times. What a total crapfest.

I am really curious to know who makes the decision as to who will perform each year. I am also curious as to how that person keeps his or her job. I know that the Super Bowl is an event that transcends football, and that the audience is far more varied than it would be for any other game. Even so, did someone really think Madonna would hit the sweet spot here? Apparently, women over 35 and gay men comprise far more of the viewership than I would have expected. It seems unlikely to me that anyone else would have enjoyed that embarrassing display of awkwardness. I will grant you that I have never been a fan of Madonna, even when she was the biggest act on earth. She had a song or two that I liked, but for the most part, I was always pretty allergic to anything she did. This time, on the biggest stage of her career, she lip-synced her way through a bunch of songs, surrounded by gladiators, cheerleaders, and a neck-less Cee-Lo Green. Madonna attempted to dance in high-heeled boots and did not do it well. She stumbled more than once, and at one point, I thought she might fall off the back of the stage. The entire thing seemed awkward and poorly done. I am a fan of live music, and really dislike lip-syncing. In this case, it did not even sound like she had made new recordings of the vocals or anything. Instead, it sounded like original recordings, some from more than two decades ago. So she didn’t sing, and she danced poorly. What a treat.

I don’t know who would be a good choice for the halftime show, but I know that most of the recent ones have been awful. I understand why most of the recent choices have been closer to retirement than to the beginning of their careers, as I would expect that the lion’s share of people watching are adults, and acts like The Who, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Prince are comfort food to many people my age. Age-wise, Madonna fits into that group. Fanbase-wise, though, she sticks out like a sore thumb. Combine that with a hideous performance like that one, and it really is a stunning miscalculation. Even my wife, who was always a huge Madonna fan, was unimpressed. They tried to appeal to a younger audience by including some current acts like Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., LMFAO (I wonder if the NFL bigwigs know what that stands for), and Cee-Lo Green, but that simply added to the mess that was the halftime festivities. My Twitter and Facebook feeds supported my opinion, as there were far more negative comments than there were positive, and most of the positive ones were to the effect of “it wasn’t that bad.”

So thanks, NFL, for giving me column fodder, if nothing else. They also helped all of the channels putting on counter-programming during halftime, as I imagine many channels were changed around that time. Next year, maybe they can get that Man Vs. Food guy to sit on stage and eat a 10-pound hamburger or something. I would find that far more entertaining.

Bad sports, continued:

2) I thought this was worth its own entry. During the god-awful cheerleader portion of the Madonna fiasco, British singer and rapper M.I.A., who was flanking Madonna along with Nicki Minaj, took a brief turn at the lead vocals. When she reached a part of the song “Give Me All Your Luvin’” where she would normally say a scatological profanity, she skipped the word but instead decided to flip the bird to the 105 million people said to be watching. I am sure that was not quite what the NFL and NBC had in mind when they booked this act in this post-wardrobe-malfunction world.

3) In one of the worst examples of violence I have ever seen connected to sports, 79 people were killed and hundreds were wounded when violence flared at the end of a soccer match between two Egyptian clubs in Port Said, Egypt. The violence appears to have been politically motivated.

4) Legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, best known for training Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, died on Wednesday at the age of 90.

5) Roger Lewis, a high school football star in Ohio who was expected to sign with Ohio State on Wednesday, was arrested and charged with rape this week.

6) A bizarre battle is raging between the Utah Jazz and the greatest player in the team’s history, Karl Malone, who retired back in 2004. Malone has been outspoken about the team’s treatment of former star DeRon Williams, who was traded to the New Jersey Nets last year. Malone and team owner Greg Miller have been taking shots at each other on Twitter.

7) One day before his team was going to play in the Super Bowl, Tiquan Underwood, a reserve wide receiver, was cut by the New England Patriots. The team decided it needed a better special teams player for the game, so they cut Underwood in favor of Alex Silvestro, who was on the team’s practice squad. I think they should have cut him for that hairdo.

8) Cassanova McKinzy, a high school football player who was deciding between Clemson and Auburn this week, chose Auburn because he was concerned about the lack of a Chik-Fil-A on campus at Clemson. Yes, he actually said that. Awesome. Even better, Clemson actually does have the restaurant on campus. I guess McKinzy failed to do his research. He seemed like such a smart kid, too.

Good sports:

1) After the embarrassment that was the NFL Pro Bowl last week, league commissioner Roger Goodell said this week that he would actually consider eliminating the Pro Bowl entirely if they can’t come up with a way to make it better. Considering how bad the game has gotten, nixing it sounds like a great idea. Newly minted league MVP Aaron Rodgers, earlier in the week, was complaining about the play of his fellow players during the exhibition, which managed to make preseason games look competitive.

2) Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, considered by many to be the greatest cyclist of all time, was cleared of all doping charges by federal prosecutors this week. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has yet to make its ruling, but I would expect the same conclusion.

Bad sports, good sports appears every Monday

10. The television screen was so small, you had to take turns watching

9. Every five minutes, some old guy was yelling, “Where’s Knute Rockne?”

8. You missed most of the first half so the host could tell you all about Scientology

7. Somebody had already licked all the orange dust off the Cheetos

6. No New York Giants fans, no New England Patriots fans, just Beyoncé fans

5. There’s a big screen TV, but it’s stuck on a station showing “Matlock” reruns

4. The guacamole was moving

3. It was held on Saturday so no one would miss church

2. When the host ran out of beer, he started serving NyQuil

1. The only snacks were what you could find under the couch cushions
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

An alarming thing has happened and the most alarming bit is that no one is alarmed. Things seem to be proceeding apace in Egypt and the intellectuals are salivating at the prospect of a new Egyptian constitution, to be drafted by around June. That doesn’t leave much time so they are soliciting advice from foreign corners and from one corner was dislodged sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg who used the occasion to suggest that under no circumstances should the Egyptian reformers consider the US Constitution as any sort of guide. It is, after all, laughably aged and enfeebled. Much better ore is to be had in the post-War world. Look right at 10:00 to see where she swallows the Constitution she has sworn to defend in one gulp. Most emphatically does she advise the Egyptians NOT to look at this document for guidance even as she describes the ordinary Rights of public participation and arrest that have been made real in the world, in large part, because of the attention given them in our Constitution and the spread of these, through means fair and foul, to every aspiring society.  How the Egyptian fellow did not show shock or even surprise is a bit mysterious but a larger puzzler is how this could have been on youtube for a week and only now drawing attention. Hopefully this was a clever bit of disinformation. The dimmest Cairo cabbie could not fail  to realize, Ginsburg is a Jew. Perhaps the State Department and the Justice came up with a plot of reverse-psychology. “Ruthie,” Hillary might have told her. “You go in and you tell ‘em, don’t you look at our Constitution. There is NOTHING in there for you, and they will tear into it like Bill through a Ladies’ Auxiliary!” But no, with the specifics and enthusiasm it is plain, this is Ginsburg Unplugged.

Her condemnation of our Constitution is sotto voce. She seems to only complain of its age. Glass houses, Madame Justice. Glass houses. I’m sure her objections are fleshed out in her writings from her lengthy career as head of the ACLU. What we have from this interview, however, what she has boiled down to an essential essence that might aid the new leaders of a turbulent desert nation, is a chirpy, if vapid, endorsement of the South African constitution. Certainly it exceeds our Constitution on grounds of freshness; if it were an American citizen it would just now be able to drive. But it is a prodigy, leaping past the old tatters of  parchment. The SA constitution, in contrast to our own, “was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights… ” As a Supreme Court Justice, she must indeed know her stuff.

We know what Ginsburg is on about. She mentions a couple other documents but all attempt to secure the rights in our Bill of Rights (except, always, the Second Amendment) and mostly do so in language aping the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. So that cannot be Ginsburg’s indictment. Plainly what she desires although even she knows enough to speak only vaguely, is to have Constitutional mandates in the US promising healthcare, housing, education, food, water and “social security”, a term obviously ripped from the American fabric though not our Constitution. Who can doubt that this is also what Obama has in mind when he complains that the US Constitution is flawed and encumbering? So what lucky city is going to reap the hotel taxes and bar tabs generated by a New Constitutional Convention? Sadly there will be no such boon. Obama and his Progressives do not seek to add the South African provisions under public scrutiny. Rather they will redefine federal food aid as an Establishment of Justice, federal housing subsidies as Ensuring Domestic Tranquility. Pay-offs will Provide for the Common Defense. Tuition grants Promote the General Welfare. Government doctoring is a  Blessing of Liberty secured to Ourselves and our Posterity. These are the building blocks of A More Perfect Union. So says Obama. So says Ginsburg and Kagan; Sotomayor, Breyer and Kennedy but also Alito, Roberts, Scalia and to the least extent, Thomas. Also Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and yes, even the adamant Ron Paul. Rush Limbaugh is on board as well, as is Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, George Will, Charles Krauthammer or anyone else on the so-called Right. And quite probably YOU and everyone you know. How do we know this? Actions speak louder than words but we have BOTH and perhaps the most revealing of all are not actions but in-actions; not the words spoken or written but those unspoken. The most revealing of all are those words forbidden to speak. What is the Cow Most Sacred that to even mention her name in any but adulatory terms is to be torn out of the American ledger? You know and I know, it is that term adopted so fully and respectfully from America to South Africa. Social Security.

The professional talkers who reap bags of cash and decibels of applause for their embittered pronouncements and have no elections to lose will defend Social Security in terms both strident and dogmatic. Even the secular-saint Reagan is found to be a New Dealer at heart. All the Constitutional gyrations that are rightly denounced as subterfuge as regards Obamacare or other new iterations of wealth redistribution are swallowed whole cloth as regards Social Security. Limbaugh is as willing to explain as Hillary that, Social Security is not “socialism” in any sense and by the way, the OTHER guys are out to destroy it! The protege of Ed Meese, Levin, will calmly explain that the Commerce Clause is the foundation for Social Security and Medicare as well. This while he draws the line acerbically at the diktats of Obamacare and Romneycare that say, you will not pay us for your medicine but rather we will tell you whom to pay, how much and what you will get for it. Paul Ryan stands no further than Howard Dean from the justifying principles of these programs; he just aspires to make them actuarially sound. Ron Paul? Yes, he does denounce them in Constitutional terms but what is his solution? To continue them except with an opt-out for the young.

Both the Paul and the Ryan plans have one thing in common with ALL the other solutions out in the public realm, that is they DO NOT TOUCH current beneficiaries or those with about ten years until eligibility. This is mathematically impossible. You can’t just sever those paying in from those receiving the payments even if they stay flat (which they will not). Where do the truly mammoth amounts to make up the difference come from? Only from taxes, borrowing and printing. So just as the youthful opt-out is working in his first office job, he is neither paying into nor drawing from Social Security but somewhere, if he is not taxed into poverty, there is either an auctioneer or a high-speed press operating at high speed in his name. And in the meantime when he DOES save for his own infirmity, he has no guarantee of returns. He has no guarantee of his principle. These are the inevitable burdens you lay on a prostate America when you press your claims.

Who? Me? I’m not “pressing” any claims. I’m filing for my entitlements. And hey, didn’t I pay for ‘em?

This is the fatal rub; the deadly misconstruction and it is what separates the ten Articles in the American Bill of Rights and rights delineated under Chapter 2 of the SA constitution. The Rights in the Bill of Rights don’t require anyone to do anything for you to enjoy them. Rather the Bill of Rights is a menu of restrictions laid on the federal government and its subsidiaries. Citizens “shall not be denied due process of law…” not provided with anything except the restraint of the authorities. “…shall not be infringed.” That is plain and definitive language and as adamant as law can be. The equivalent South African codice has thirty-two sections, each with sub-sections and indexed paragraphs. Our Bill of Rights can be plainly seen in the first half though it is watered down like a cheap cocktail. It bargains away the clarity of our First Amendment for a slew of claims now dressed up as Rights. It seems the citizen is wildly empowered; he has a claim against the state for his subsistence. In South Africa this was expressly meant to atone for Apartheid. You will find the same arguments in America claiming reparations for slavery (but improperly). So there is a powerful pseudo-moral case for the claims as just compensation. Its morality is false however since government has nothing to give unless it is taken first from The People; so the claimant, if he considers himself a free, equal, sovereign citizen; one among many, holds nothing but a chit from himself which he honors with taxes (whether those levies are called “taxes” or not). This only applies while we recognize One class or sort of citizen. Once you assert that say, white people owe me. Or rich people owe me, and you write that class out of protections you reserve to yourself, we say good-bye to Equal Protection. No one has Rights but everyone will have claims, to some extent, of being ill-used. So their claims then become sacred rights while all an unconsensual debt can ever be is a license to enslave which was the problem in the first place.

Even if one still asserts a theoretical superiority for a system of common holdings based on “just” claims, it must be admitted that it does not work. Even for the Soviets there was a practical limit to printing roubles; phony money to pay any claim. If all claims, legitimate or not are honored then in short order no claims, legitimate or not, can be paid. It can’t work. It is a math based on the infinite of human wants converted to claims against human industry but painted as Civil Rights. There are only two ways out once embarked down this road; one is for large numbers of citizens to forgo their claims, just or not. Unlikely.The other is for everyone to press their claims to the maximum until the pot is drained and smashed to bits. The State based on claims will die and the claims with it. Rough freedoms will return because no one will be paid to stop them. Trade and thievery, enterprise and loot will thrive. Then by necessity genuine charity will replace the system of claims, now defunct. This happy time will persist so long as the new State is restrained, which is the function of the Constitution. One would think a Supreme Court Justice, or at least SOMEONE would know it.

When you’re working in a group, it’s hard to know what you truly think. We’re such social animals that we instinctively mimic others’ opinions, often without realizing we’re doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the “pain of independence.”

Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

This is not to say that we should abolish groupwork. But we should use it a lot more judiciously than we do today.

Author Susan Cain interview with Gareth Cook, Scientific American Jan 24, 2012

A while back, I did a post on politics over at the Defeatists (In full disclosure, I post my stuff several places at a time if it fits, and that’s my primary place. It’s also the easiest to throw in videos and such…so if you think there may have been tune-age that you missed, check it out.) One of my frustrations with blogging and one reason that I have cut back is the lack of feedback, by the way. Comments are welcome, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, most of the comments over there seem to come from people who are trying to sell something like Gucci handbags but have been fascinated by some brilliant thing one of us said, either recently or a couple of years ago. We’re about due for the annual “How dare you say anything bad about boy bands, you misogynist bastards, especially you, Commandante!” which has some interesting semiotic undertext in it. However, this one was from a real human being who was interested in what I said and conflicted…I might be right, but what the hell…

Here’s the conversation. Any emphasis is mine…

Good post, good post…but what if the “middle” is, objectively moronic and absolutely wrong? The middle says:

“We need to invade Iraq and kill or displace a million people and turn the country over to the Shiite theocrats, but we will do so with properly audited spending and well-trained troops who will follow the letter of the rules”

The middle says: “Medical care funding in this country is broken so let’s require people to buy overpriced private insurance with their minimum wage jobs”.

Sometimes, to parpaphrase Jim Hightower, “the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines or dead armadillos”

And…do you really see any Democratic Party politicians with any position or any influence in the party (which means…Jesse Jackson does not really count) as being anywhere near as crazy as the current GOP? Really? Which ones? I can’t think of any…I’m a little younger than you but I remember Jimmy Carter and Dukakis and their ilk…and they are NOT Santorum or Gingrich, let alone Bachmann.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:48 AM

The middle is also gung ho about the upcoming hot war with Iran…either run driectly by the United States or by our good buddies in Israel. (Another nuclear power. Hmmmm….why is Israel “allowed” to have nuclear weapons?”

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:59 AM

Not sure where the middle is…you see it further off to the right than I do. Oddly, we could take either Eisenhower or Nixon and their social policies as a starting point for the middle, and we’d look pretty leftist today. Imagine the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the Great Society in swing today…but, of course, what we got is what we got and determines what we’re gonna get near term and possibly long term. What that doesn’t do is allow us to just give up. I remain convinced that the lesser of two evils is the better choice. By having Bush beat Gore, how did Nader make things better? Devolve for 8 years and here we go again? (Nader is not to blame completely for Bush — lots of things conspired to make things this bad.) However, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush can be summed up with two names — Samuel Alito and John Roberts as well as one Supreme Court Decision — Citizens United. A Democrat wins in 2000 or in 2004, even an uninspiring Democrat like Kerry, and money doesn’t equal speech. However, it’s probably time for my periodic Yeats post…

Posted by: Crusader AXE | 31 January 2012 at 11:47 AM

I guess I am gloomier than you.

I wished I believed things could be “reformed”. I think Chalmers Johnston nailed it. Even as things devolve and crash and burn, the people that benefit from the system still have plentiful opportunities for looting and rent seeking. And, the system promotes sociopaths (no…I am not saying everyone in government is a sociopath…but still, there are a lot of ‘em).

People like Obama merely provide a cover, a gloss, for the ongoing predation. Arguably, Obama has made things worse in that the “anti-war left” (a feeble force given America’s history as a violent culture based on conquest)) was lulled to sleep and ineffectiveness.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 02:04 PM

From a guy who calls himself “The High Arka”

You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them. Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder “fewer” innocent people. The crucial difference between voting for Obama in the real world, and choosing to allow him to murder only 3 preschoolers in the example above, is that the example above describes a terrible choice being made one time only. The presidential farce is recurring. Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. Times ten or fifty or a hundred. Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children–your choice. At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along and say, “Enough”? At some point, it must become apparent to you that the game is never going to end.

The children are going to keep dying–there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders. Choose your “party.” How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and “choose” which rich, powerful national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. The fucking crusades, or the genocide of the neanderthals. Count the bodies. Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, “Enough”?

Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there. When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only the deaths they cause, but their entire horrific game? It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as “a little less murder than we could otherwise commit,” it will never end. When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first, who refuse to compromise by saying, “I guess it’s fine if Obama kills people, because he’ll kill fewer than Gingrich will.” (This is, essentially, what that haughty piece of shit George Clooney is saying as the televised 2012 contest approaches) A few crazies, and maybe someday, more. It’s as daunting a task as any, but it has to happen for the killing to stop: human individuals–without an automatic, reassuring group consensus–refusing to support killing any longer.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 04:31 PM

I’m guessing Brian isn’t the High Arka, but HA is definitely invited to the conversation…

This bothered me, and I was blogging about it. However, I was composing on Typepad, which my Defeatist brothers continually caution me against because a couple of times a year the Google or the Typepad Hobbits decide to fuck me over and eat everything I had written. I learn for a while, and then revert to form…so, I have brief moments of sanity, interspersing the Einsteinian standard insanity of doing something again and again and being surprised when it goes wrong. Terribly wrong. So, I dropped it for a while.

However, it’s still bugging me. I’m a lifelong Democrat who thinks that Jefferson, Jackson, both Roosevelts and Truman were among the great presidents, but the greatest was Lincoln. Lincoln would have serious problems in today’s Republican party of course. In fact, he’d probably either be a Democrat or possibly something further left. It’s fun to imagine him with David Boies, arguing Citizen’s United against some Koch brothers mercenary. Of course, as Jesus wouldn’t be allowed to preach in modern Christianity, Lincoln could never be admitted to the bar. Paul Tillich, the Existentialist Christian theologian and philosopher wrote in the introductory remarks to his most approachable work, The Dynamics of Faith, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the 50s that “Today, faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender…”

One reason that I admire Lincoln is simple – he personifies human compassion. Lincoln wasn’t overtly religious publicly, but he was a man of deep spirituality and concern. Tillich contends that “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The dymanics of faith are the dynamics of ultimate concern…” Lincoln’s ultimate concern was justice which he saw as fairness, compassion, compromise and the acceptance of the other side’s humanity. He was generally disappointed, but he strove to achieve that world by doing what he could to maintain the union based on that idea of justice – not because the Union was itself just, but because he saw the potential for justice as lying in the Union, depending on it, deriving it’s future from it. And, in order to preserve it as source of ultimate good, he was willing to risk everything, including his soul and sanity and sense of self to preserve it. Had the South been victorious, would he have been treated like a hero by the North? He’d have been hung…he was risking his life, and the irony of his assassination lies in the reality that Wilkes egotistical madness created.

Today’s political world is based largely on something that goes back to the beginning – between those who are ALWAYS RIGHT and those who suspect quietly that they could have made a mistake. I don’t think Lincoln ever signed an execution order easily or without struggle; we know that George W. Bush had no such concerns, and that Rick Perry was almost gleeful about it at times. And, we know that the people who go to Republican debates cheer executions. Where would Lincoln have been on that? I suspect he’d have vomited…

I’ve been doing some reading about Afghanistan and our continued adventures there. Now, I have colleagues who are 9/11 Truthers, which I am not. I have colleagues who think Osama bin Laden was killed years ago and then dumped in the Ocean for a propaganda victory; I have colleagues that believe that Israel and the Mossad did 9/11 and got us into the various mid-eastern debacles. Well, if I were Israel I would probably have reacted to the news of 9/11 attacks with some restrained glee especially if I was concerned about the US cutting a separate deal that would be to Israel’s disadvantage. Churchill confessed to a feeling of relief and happiness when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Do we really think Churchill planned Pearl Harbor? I know that the Israelis and their various lobbies in this country really want Iran to go away – and, they’d like us to do it. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued on Hardball on Friday we’re facing a reality. There is nothing that makes sense about backing an attack on Iran for us; lots to make it a really bad idea; and, exactly what does Israel get out of the attack? NBC’s chief “go get shot at” correspondent Richard Engle was in the same segment, and he indicated that the political leadership in Israel might be really excited by the possibility of an attack on Iran, but the actual soldiers and covert operators think it would be stupid, that their focus needs to be on Egypt and Jordan. Brzezinski argued that Iran may be crazy, but that particular empire in various incarnations has been around for 0ver 3000 years, and do we really think they’re suicidal? He also points out to those who say “Israel can’t live under the threat of nuclear attack” the degree of fatuous reasoning. We did it for over 40 years as did the Soviets and Western Europe. If Iran gets a bomb and uses it, do they expect to survive? Everybody in the neighborhood who counts, including Israel, has a credible nuclear deterrent, as well as delivery systems. The Iranians are depending in so far as they are on anything, on North Korean technology…what the hell. Let them spend themselves into oblivion, which was Reagan’s strategy in the 80s. It works…unless you screw up and spend yourself into oblivion.

This is relevant to Afghanistan for a number of reasons. I know that the administration has agreed to stop combat operations sooner than later, but I’m really wondering why not now! It really helps to have some historical awareness, and the only tactic that has worked with Afghanistan is the punitive raid. Get in, fuck up the bad guys and anybody in the vicinity, threaten worse if they do it again, unass the AO. Invade and try to make it better, and you’ll just make it a helluva lot worse, and you’ll suffer for it. By April of 2002, the Taliban is gone from power although still there; al Queida was severely damaged there; Pakistan is/was/will be totally fucked up; and we’re there because…we’re going to turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy? As soon as the Taliban was defeated and Osama bin Laden et al were in Tora Bora, we should have declared victory, given them a check, possibly re-established the monarchy and gotten out. The Afghan people don’t want western culture; they don’t want women to have any rights; they don’t want to not kill each other. It’s that simple – we’re trying to impose an improvement on people who see no reason to change and regard the “improvements” as evil. NATO and the US would be further ahead to fund emigration to some reasonable location – Barstow, California for example – for those who want to live under something other than Sharia law. That’ll assuage some consciences. But whether we leave now or in five years or in ten years, it will be the same…only worse.

The piece from Susan Cain is very relevant here. We got into Iraq due to a rush to judgment and the influence of Ike’s military industrial complex combined with green, hubris and myopia. It’s interesting in comparing our Iraq-Afghanistan experience to the Soviet experience. Unlike the Soviets, we did have a reason for attacking within Afghanistan – they were harboring a threat, and we had a just reason for wanting to eliminate that threat. The Soviets had been dithering around with the Afghans for years and chose to invade because of the Brezhnev doctrine that once a Red Block Country always a Red Block combined with the belief that they could control matters. They sold themselves a bill of goods. The Soviet experience looks a lot like US experience in Vietnam – lots of people with good intentions and an absolute inability to see the consequences of their actions. I’ve been reading former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 with a degree of déjà vu combined with a strong sense of WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? Working from Russian sources and interviews, Braithwaite has a history of a cosmic comedy of errors that looks and smells a lot like Vietnam. Lousy policy, self-delusion, group-think run amuck, combined with inefficient tactics, lousy planning, and dumbfounding mismatches between outcomes, methods and resources. The good news for the Soviets was that Spetznaz was really well honed in Afghanistan. The bad news is that they failed to achieve any of their goals while turning the Red Block essentially into Cuba and North Korea. We achieved our initial goals, dithered and screwed around for the next 10 years and are still looking for a goal that we can achieve. Somebody in power needs to stop talking, listen to the record and the history and start focusing on ultimate concerns, desired outcomes – I define a desired outcome as something that can be achieved within the reasonable constraints of blood, time, treasure and lost opportunity. The most desirable outcome today is not to listen to the congressional storm or the media tumult but to listen to the inner voice of reason and make the sort of courageous decision that Lincoln made routinely. And, don’t wait for elections or consensus. Do what’s right, now…for Lincoln’s sake.

Braithwaite begins the third portion of his book, the Long Goodbye with a poem by one the Russian Afghan veterans, Igor Morozov. It reads, in part –

Down from the heights we once commanded/ with burning feet we descend to the ground/ bombarded with calumny, slander and lies/ we’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

Farewell you mountains you know best/ what prices paid while we were here/what foes unconquered still survive/what friends we had to leave behind…

I generally find Russian poems and song lyrics somewhat of a blend of overly didactic and overly romantic…peasant and soldier poetry. The Soviet Army and its soldiers deserved a better use; so did the British with Lord Elphinstone in 1820. The Soviets in many ways repeated the British experience. We repeat the Soviety experience…if history repeats itself with the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, what exactly is our experience going to be? Tragical farce? We deserve better, and if someone listens not to the crowd but to the inner voices or reason, creativity and common sense, we may get it. I remain pessimistically hopeful…

From the cage beneath the cellar, a random spattering of hyperlinks.

Inside New York's abandoned leper colony

• Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a great profile of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady here.

• Do Republicans orgasm more than Democrats?

• Freeman Dyson‘s brain.

• Ice hockey in Turkey; skiing in Iran.

• Liz Hazelton takes readers to “the island that New York forgot.”

• Peter Singer: “The U.S. Navy has trained dolphins to detect mines. Now, they might be used in the conflict with Iran over its nuclear policies.” (Related: CETACEAN NATION!)

• Portland author Scott Farris: “Democracy is a fragile thing. The winners only govern with the losers’ consent. It would only take one candidate to say ‘I reject the results’ to plunge things into chaos.”

• “Seeing a human wrapped in cellophane with blood smeared around, it makes people think.”

• Soothing image of holstein being brushed.

• The Antiplanner reviews Margin Call.

• The Mother of All Saxophones.

• The Washington Post: 10 Reasons the U.S. is No Longer the Land of the Free.

And from my Favorite Links of All-Time pile: “A cat is gorgeous and wild Leopard which disguises itself! Dress a cat only with shawl. Shawl achieves the duty of a foppish muffler. Back cloth is a tartan check handle and a hat and shawl look dear.”

If ever I run this town, even before I take revenge on my enemies I will have a statue commissioned. A bronzed Anne Cox-Chambers already man’s the traffic island outside my front door, permanently enjoying a newspaper as only an owner of one could do. Around Underground there are life-size bronzes from the ’30s and 1890s. Naturally we have a smattering of Civil War heroes (or villains), some artsy friezes and a Phoenix both in abstract and figure. There is at least one missing. The subject has not been gone long enough to become historic but I remember and will see her commemorated. She was always in the company of statues when I saw her, usually Herman Talmadge. She stood quite nearly as a statue; an elderly woman, clearly a nifty number from the Mad Men era would stand unmoving in a parka and gloves in the winter, in a sundress with a wet hanky on her head in summer, holding a stack of leaflets in each arm. She didn’t hand them out. She couldn’t have since both hands were full, the half-reams perfectly her cubit. Sometimes they were single sheets and sometimes it would be a stapled pair. Did I mention the rocks? She also had a rock on each pile to act as a paperweight. Around her neck hung a small sandwich board explaining in meticulous print how the private ownership of land was the source of near all of man’s troubles.

It took about three years of seeing this woman at her post to gingerly take one of her pamphlets. She looked at me not at all, you could think she was blind, but when I took the pages and left the rock in its spot like a cheap magic trick she chirped up, “Thank you.” I never saw anyone else ever take one. As I recall the argument was pretty solidly formed as you will often find eccentrics’ rants to be. Who could argue that territorialism is not at the root and branch of nearly every struggle? As usual the easy utopianism doesn’t pass any serious muster. While the indictments of real estate as a concept were just about on target, the solution was a nightmare proposition. Basically the idea was a public trust, perhaps like the National Parks. Owners would get long term leases at sweetheart rates but there could be no inheritance. The use of the land would be tightly controlled, more tightly even than now, we presume. The whole thing would be administered by the county with an elected board. As Cox’s interests made the newspaper so enchanting, I think only someone who had suffered quite badly under the current system could really trust anything so daft. And that is the same aspiration of the branch office of Occupy Atlanta just opened two miles east of the main campus, in the yard of a yellow brick house.

It shows all the hallmarks of The Occupation. Bicycles worth a couple thousand bucks are leaned up against a short, sad, chainlink fence. A dozen or more patchworked signs create a screen behind which a few fuzzy fellows are enjoying a smoke to such a degree that I at first thought they were cooking out. No banks. No landlords. Give BACK the DEED! No chains for gains…. The house in question is nearing foreclosure. It seems to have been halted for PR reasons, which is fine; congratulations to the bank for being accommodating and to the Occupiers for forcing the accommodation but, as with that Dixie Belle’s proposition, it is all for show. Are the Occupiers paying rent? That seems unlikely and even if they were, and at a rate that could cover the house note, how long could that go on? Especially since the “protest” violates residency laws that are enforced pretty vigorously on everyone else. It is likewise with the Occupiers in the park. They sit in violation of a law that is enforced against men down on their luck and trying to grab some sleep in relative shelter. They have no message, like the Occupiers but unlike the Occupiers they do not pretend to. These fellows are told to move along, move along. Head down to Pine Street, the warehouse-size flop which is also where the Occupiers flee on the odd days the cops look cross at them. When they go they are given the top floor and do not mix with the general bum population as the last time they did, a nasty TB outbreak struck the tramps! Oddly, these spokesdudes for la vida en fera natura prove a territorial bunch themselves.

The very concept of real estate is under assault where it has not been abandoned to squatters and easements. It is the eternal struggle between those with land and those without. This, our statue-model and the Occupiers would do away with. All will be held in common and all will be disbursed by common rules. That is genius. Why didn’t anyone ever think of that before? The contact-high from believing such a presumption or being around it when it is being believed is a powerful narcotic. The simple fact is that no, this is NOT an original idea. In fact wherever there are property rights of the meagerest sort there is a constant pressure upon them. These are the Have-Nots, or Not-Enoughs. They Want.

Well, get in line, pal. We ALL Want and Adam Smith would tell you that Human Want is infinite. But nothing else is and whatever the moral superiority the commons system might enjoy, it doesn’t create any more territory and if it did, that territory would likewise be the object of dispute. Real estate, the private ownership of land is a slowly constructed layer of debts, laws and customs evolved to mitigate the monkey-grabbing and head-cracking that obtains in nature. The holdings in common are the quickest and surest way to return to that state as with common holdings there is no claim legally held above another so those most able to press their claims through strength, guile, deception or luck find themselves masters of all they can hold. It is a classic of human tragedy, The Tragedy of the Commons.  It repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats simply because the ignorant can recycle it to the credulous as a new idea.

It is the personal ownership of land that is the true innovation over the laws of the jungle which are not too far removed from the law of the commons or the law of the lord. For us it was practically born among the age of Lords and Ladies. Rome had melted from Britain and lawlessness poured in. Arthur’s father, Uther fought off other, less able warlords until he had the largest patch and called himself a King. He claimed all the land he could set foot on, as King’s are wont to do, but some of these holdouts were stubborn and threatened to make the fight cost more than the land was worth. He would leave them, as lesser Kings, so long as they paid up and knelt down. Once there were six or eight of these lesser Kings; palaver being more lucrative than battle, they would band together when one was threatened, understanding that their “rights” began and ended with their ability to assert them. Don’t think this had anything to do with a Common Man. Such a man, if he were not pressed into a private army, would be fortunate to live as a pig and could own only what was not taken from him. But slowly as peace made itself more attractive than strife, this curious notion of title and deed was extended to lesser and lesser Kings until A man’s home is his Castle applied even to the Common Man. Behold the foundation on which all the modern world has been built. This is the only way anyone can accumulate anything one could call a fortune or an estate. Any amount of gold or silver or weapons or clothing, commodities, furniture, victuals or livestock was chattel. Only the land was real estate.

To own land in this sense is to have a right to stand on a cone that extends from the center of the earth through the shape of your property lines and out into infinite space. No one owns property in this sense anymore. No, you do not own your airspace. You cannot forbid a plane or satellite nor charge them for passage. Likewise you probably cannot start drilling for oil in your backyard and if you did bring in a gusher you might well be arrested for stealing the crude someone else has claim to. We’ve surrendered much of the reality in our real estate. These, unlike the rights in the Declaration of Independence, did prove alienable. They have been sold away or abandoned to scavengers with gavels and pricey suits. And that is fine. Having a mineshaft in your garage could impact the other fellows property values, after all, but we must keep the kernel of it. Someone’s real estate gives them rights and privileges unknown elsewhere, however curtailed they have become but if there is no limit to that curtailment, always presented in millimeter-thin slices, then there are no rights nor privileges but a continued tax burden that somehow never stumbles.

When I bought my place, or pledged to buy it with borrowed money, I surrendered a princely sum it will take thirty years to pay, if I ever do. Condos, especially high-rise and exotic, are far more volatile than free-standing homes held outright. Our estate is a bit less real than the next fellows, being subject to a variety of covenants and practical restrictions reflected in the current predicament where units are selling at around half of what they were, and then not briskly. I claim no airspace or mineral rights if only because I would have to bore through someone else’s front-room to get to them and the neighbor’s drain may well back up into mine. But what I do hold, so long as common law real estate exists, is a line to withdraw behind, a platform to stand on that no one can legally remove. That is not to say that they cannot remove it, just that it will be a crime…. for whatever that is worth. What the Holdings in Common people want is to replace this wobbling, uncertain conception with a great simplicity: all will have a landlord and the government shall be he. Whatever good is inherent in real property as a concept will be preserved by electing folks with the proper mindset, most likely our noble selves! The responsibilities and benefits of ownership will be replaced with appeals to political institutions. Real property as a store of wealth? That will be a quaint anachronism but not for long. Those who can, will leverage their claims until property is again owned in all but name by a few influential individuals. They will extract more and more from their unfortunate tenants until they must revolt or die. Warlord will fight warlord until one has a patch large enough to call himself King. Or we could pay our notes to the best of our ability and take our foreclosures if we must. Perhaps then I could have my statues without a ruination of the landscape but either way works for me.

Following the recent street protests in Russia, international attention has been focused on the country’s political scene. A young person tuning in to the news coverage might be confused by all the long names ending with –ov and –sky, and the series of heads that resemble slabs of meat, lumpy potatoes or some other comestible. Too much of the commentary is targeted at initiates; beginners need a jumping on point. After all, today’s 20 year olds were barely crawling the last time Vladimir Zhirinovsky scored serious headlines in the West. So strap on your shapka and let’s go!

Part I:   THE ESTABLISHMENT

VLADIMIR PUTIN: In 1999, when V.V. Putin was appointed prime minister by the celebrated disco dancer Borya Yeltsin, many articles appeared in the press noting that all he had to show for a long stint as a KGB agent in the 70s and 80s was a bronze medal from the Stasi- the implication being that he was a lightweight, a gray mediocrity, etc. Nobody remembers that stuff now. He is a master of political chess, and- whether you like him or not- compares favorably with most (perhaps all) Russian leaders of the past 100 years.

DMITRI MEDVEDEV: An elusive, mystical figure who has shown world-historic levels of personal restraint since winning the presidency in 2008. Indeed, he is very possibly the first man in history to rise to supreme office and then volunteer to return power to his predecessor. Historians shall ponder his enigma for centuries to come.

That’s all you need to know about the establishment. Now let’s get down to the parties of disgruntlement.

Part II: THE UPRISING

THE PROTESTORS: Russia has experienced anti-Putin protests for years, but until 2011 the crowds consisted of marginal types such as communist pensioners, rabid nationalists and international chess grandmasters. This changed in the aftermath of last year’s Duma elections which were widely viewed as rigged. There is nothing new in that criticism, but- perhaps inspired by events in the Middle East- individuals who look surprisingly middle class have started to object. Alas for them, the opposition is completely useless.

Part III: THE OPPOSITION

GENNADY ZYUGANOV: In all the breathless Western media coverage of Russia’s street protests what most journalists have neglected to mention is that the largest and best-organized opposition force in Russia is… THE COMMUNIST PARTY. That’s right, the party of Stalin and Brezhnev, which has a long tradition of tyranny and disastrous economic policies! Gennady Zyuganov has run the show since 1993, when everybody with talent and ambition abandoned the party to make $$$$. His is the saggy-jowled face of stagnation, the root vegetable-shaped head of hopelessness.

VLADIMIR ZHIRINOVSKY: A professional clown from Kazakhstan famous for his long-running performance as a radical nationalist. Not to be confused with an actual idiot, Zhirinovsky studied Turkish at Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Countries, then law (also at MSU) and finally landed himself a PhD in philosophy (also at MSU, although he attained that last qualification in the 90s when standards had slipped). Impressively, he has never once broken character in twenty years of playing “Zhirik”, the burly, brawling politician-buffoon. Slyly subverts the very concept of “opposition” by endorsing everything Putin stands for whenever called upon to vote in the Duma.

MIKHAIL PROKHOROV: Russia’s third-richest man- worth $18 billion according to Forbes- and yet he has never shared any of his coin with me, the swine. Owner of SNOB, the magazine of Russian bourgeois self-satisfaction, and the New Jersey Nets basketball team. When he declared his candidacy I assumed he was a Kremlin double agent, however the numerous sympathetic articles about disgraced 90s billionaires that have appeared in SNOB lead me to suspect he is sincere in his opposition to Putin. Apparently not joking when he floated the idea of making the loathed ex- billionaire and current convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky his prime minister, this goes some way to explaining the 3% support he currently enjoys in the polls.

SERGEI MIRONOV: Some dude with a beard who, last time he ran for president, said he would vote for Putin rather than himself. Now supposedly an actual gen-u-wine enemy of the establishment, he poses absolutely no threat whatsoever.

BONUS MENTION:

GRIGORY YAVLINSKY: When he was disqualified from running for president following the discovery of thousands of forged signatures on his application, this was reported around the world as something significant, possibly an act of skullduggery on the part of the establishment. In fact, Yavlinsky is a has-been with miniscule support among Russians, even if he means well. Fun fact: in 1990, while still a member of the Communist Party, he co-authored a surrealist manifesto masquerading as a serious proposal to transform the USSR into a market economy in 500 days!

CONCLUSION:

Of course, many blame Putin for preventing a viable opposition from emerging on Russia’s political scene over the last twelve years. If that is true, he has been highly successful- I mean, presented with that selection of candidates, who would you vote for? Be honest, now.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

Do you remember back when that jury full of carefully selected idiots let Casey Anthony stroll her baby-murdering caboose out of court, free as a bird last year?  Come on, you remember her, right?  The 20 something tart that had either murdered her own two year old daughter, or helped someone else hide the body after they murdered her, and then went on a 31 day party binge, boozing it up and getting new tats before she was arrested, which caused her to immediately began creating lie after lie in an attempt to avoid paying the penalty for slaughtering her kid so she wouldn’t have to deal with the responsibilities of being a parent?

Immediately after the trial, she dyed her hair, let it down out of that ponytail, changed her name, and is now living wild and free, unrecognizable as the baby killing liar we all saw on TV, and the public’s outrage exploded.  The jury hastily ran to the cameras, gibbering about how “Oh, I didn’t say she was innocent, just that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her in the 400 items introduced by the prosecution during the trial!” in an effort to stop the harassment emanating from even their friends and family.  Do you remember what the public was told, over and over again, in an attempt to calm everyone down?

“Our justice system is designed to let 1,000 guilty people go free to avoid punishing 1 innocent person!”

Oh, really?

I was thinking about that yesterday as I was turned away from a Wal-Mart pharmacy.  By the time I reached my car in the parking lot, I was pretty steamed.  I, a college educated individual with a good job working as a researcher for a Division 1 University, a nice home, a nice car, custody of my kid, no criminal record (not even a speeding ticket), health insurance, a model citizen, so to speak, had been looked at and talked down to as if I were Casey Anthony for the singular offense of asking some Wal-Mart cashier if I could buy a box of Advil Cold and Sinus!

I’d done up an’ got in-censed, lehmuh tell ya…

See, it’s spring time here where I live.  I know, I know, it’s just the start of February, but we’ve been having mid 50s and 60s for the high temps for the last two or three weeks this year, plenty of sunshine, and the state has even had tornadoes already.  In my book:  Spring has arrived.  Happy days, chirping birds, all that good stuff.  But unfortunately, I was cursed at birth with a sinus cavity which refuses to tolerate a changing season with all the stubbornness of an irate mule, and invariably I wind up with a cold which spawns a week long battle with a clogged head, cough, and sore throat.  It’s hereditary, and it happens every year, afflicting half of my entire family.

So after trying for a couple of days to combat this monstrosity with Musinex and DayQuil, I got tired of being unable to find relief for my worst symptoms with the standard OTC bullcrap I had in my medicine cabinet at home, and I decided it was time to head to the pharmacy to get a box of the good stuff.  I’ve been taking Sudafed or Advil Cold and Sinus since I was a wee tyke, and it has never, not once in 20 plus years of extensive trials, failed to fix me up ASAP.  I pop two of them, and the aches and pains go away due to the ibuprofen, and it’s like there’s a tiny little Moses leading an Exodus inside my head the way the sea of mucus parts and dries up, thanks to the pseudoephedrine.

So after picking the kid up from after school care, we swung in to grab some groceries at Wally World, and I walked over to the pharmacy counter.  See, this box of medicine which I used to be able to select off the shelf is now stored behind the counter, by Federal Law, specifically The Combat Methamphetamine Act of 2005.

Ok, a bit of an inconvenience, sure.  But I could live with it.  See, where I live, meth is apparently the drug of choice.  Arkansas is one of the hottest states for meth use and manufacture, consistently one of the worst in the nation.  When you are walking around inside of our Wal-Mart, you’ll see that we have four races of people represented here in my town: Asiatic, Black, Caucasian, and Hispanic.  But the longer you walk the aisles, you’ll come to realize that there are so many meth addicts that it’s like there’s a 5th race of people living here.  They’re all over the place (and not just because of the spastic twitching), picking at sores and scaring children with their broken, nasty smiles.

The local radio stations (well, station, since the same company runs all three of our local channels from the same building) all play a local news segment every day at noon and three, and in this little broadcast they describe up coming events, special interest stories, and the notable crimes in the region from the day before.  Given that this is a small community without an awful lot going on, the number of crimes committed by meth addicts typically overwhelms all of the other news items combined (which doesn’t take much, maybe three or four items), but so common is the occurrence that the local populace lovingly dubs the segment “The Crackhead Report”.

So, beyond the Federal law, the State of Arkansas goes even further.  Joining several other states, Arkansas now requires a prescription for the purchase of Sudafed, or any other medication containing pseudoephedrine, one of the key ingredients in the manufacture of methamphetamine, as I was so curtly informed yesterday.  I was standing there in line with the kid, and there were three men in front of us.  One of the guys was dressed in a suit, the two between him and me looked as if they’d just got done working a normal blue collar job, and I was dressed in my standard button up and khakis.  Just a group of four normal, everyday Joes.  The first guy walked up and asked the lady for some Sudafed, and she said “I’m going to need a prescription from a doctor.” loudly enough that the rest of us could hear it.  The other three of us immediately stepped up and asked about our alternatives.

“Can I get a box of Advil Cold and Sinus?”, “What about Sudafed PM?”, all of us were told immediately rebuffed in the cold manner which I alluded to earlier, as if we were all some vast criminal conspiracy, out to purchase a heap of drugs so we could make untold millions by illicitly producing home wrecking narcotics…  But the pharmacist would gladly point out some alternatives over on the counters for us(!), as if the four grown men standing in front of her were physically and mentally incapable of finding something else on their own.

I managed to tortuously scratch out as much.  “Ma’am, those placebos are over there for anyone to grab and use specifically because they don’t work.  You’ve got the stuff which does work locked back there, and all four of us know it.  If the Musinex was going to ease my symptoms, it would’ve done so already.”

Damn.  I spun our cart around, and as I was headed toward the grocery section, one of the blue collar guys turned to me and gargled “That’s a real sunovabitch.” through the phlegm in his throat.  “No kidding, amigo.  Now you’ve gotta miss work, and pay for a co-pay on top of the price of the Sudafed.”, I bubbled back to him before he stuck his hands in his pockets, dropped his head and moved off in the general direction of the exit.

You know, I’m a staunch Libertarian.  Compared to me, Ayn Rand was an over-zealous Soviet commissar.  The freedom loving, to-hell-with-the-negative-consequence side of me really, really, really loathes the War on Drugs.  Government exists to protect us from external threat, and to enforce contract law within its borders, not to try to “save” citizens from themselves by preventing them from pursuing too much happiness.  But at the same time, I rarely decry the War on Drugs because another Libertarian virtue is a high respect for the law and the belief that people should be free to benefit or suffer from the consequences of their actions, whatever they may be.  While I do not agree with our existing legislation and judicial stance on drugs, and I deplore the money spent on weaponizing the police state to combat this logically unsupportable “war” on the free market, I have no sympathy for the people who knowingly committed a crime and got caught.  They deserve what’s coming to them.

But this is not a case of the government stepping in between a drug addict and their fix.  Sure, banning one of the key ingredients in its manufacture works, and meth lab busts have fallen, but people are still using meth, so someone is making it somewhere.  Furthermore, if you’re going to start banning the legal stuff which is involved in the manufacture of an illegal product, buildings have been used in the manufacture of meth as well.  Why not ban buildings, or dark places out in the woods where someone MIGHT hide and make their dope? 

I’m not a meth addict, nor have I ever engaged in its manufacture.  This is a case of four working taxpayers being prohibited by the Government from finding relief that was available to them just a few short years ago with no regulation, and when I was denied the ability to purchase Advil Cold and Sinus, there wasn’t a meth user involved in the discussion at all.  All four of us knew what worked, and it wasn’t the garbage the drug companies are putting out on the shelves now.  If that stuff was so great, it’d have bumped pseudoephedrine off the shelves without the regulations.

So as I sit here, sniffling and hacking in agony while I write this missive, I again reflect on the obvious hypocrisy being exhibited by our justice system.  While claiming that it’s better for a child murderer and compulsive liar be allowed to walk the streets without punishment than for a single innocent person to suffer, it’s simultaneously claiming that it’s better that millions of sick, law abiding citizens be denied easy access to relief from the common cold than a small handful of miscreants be given the opportunity to purchase something which might, possibly, may be used to manufacture an illegal drug.  Man, stay out Lady Justice’s way!  That woman is blindfolded and waving a damned sword!

It’s just a snapshot of a larger problem in our country at the start of 2012.  The Government won’t let you buy Sudafed, has banned (but to the best of my knowledge defunded enforcement of said ban) the all American light bulb, is flushing billions down the Green Energy Toilet while trying to make you feel like the Spawn of Satan everytime you pull up to a gas pump or turn on something using coal-generated electricity in your kitchen.  Heck, you can’t take a dump without the Government passing three or four taxes and a hundred regulations governing it, from stress testing on your toilet bowl to regulations on the water pressure required to flush the damned thing.  You know, at some point, someone is going to have to take a real stand.  I’m not talking about winning one simple court case, because the Government is displaying daily it’s belief that the law doesn’t govern the Government and would just ignore rulings against it in a court.

But where is this person going to come from?  Where is my generation’s Edward R. Murrow to our McCarthy/Government analogy, or our Martin Luther King Jr. to our current version of Jim Crow?  I thought the TEA Party was really going to make a difference, but as time moves forward, I’m not so confident that our problems are going to be resolved so easily.  There will eventually have to be a leader.  But who could, or would, make such a stand these days?

I despair, at times.  And cough.  Actually, I’m coughing more than I’m despairing.  This sucks.  Wish I had some Sudafed.

“The kids today can’t write, you’ve surely heard it said, and new technologies are to blame.” So writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick at cnn.com, but she doesn’t agree that texting and other electronic media are making students less literate. Whatever your view of the influence of e-communication on writing skills, read the insightful comments below the article.

Fitzpatrick is attacked for writing, “I’ve got nearly 20 years of experience in the classroom[...]” Commenter Keith writes:

“I’ve got nearly 20 years of experience in the classroom…”

I’ve got – if it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny.

Commenter deaneasy writes:

You’re opinion died at “got”. Sorry.

He recognizes his error and then posts:

And mine died at “you’re”.

At least he has got a sense of humor. I also like that tomj writes:

This “writer” has proven the theory against which she argues. Her misuse of sentence structure, and it’s importance in comunication of written ideas, shows a fundamental lack of knowledge about her subject.

First, there’s the sarcastic “writer.” Is Fitzpatrick not writing? Then there’s the incorrect “it’s” as a possessive in a sentence accusing someone else of not knowing how to write. I wish I could make this stuff up.

Commenter Uthor disagrees with those critical of “I’ve got.”

You shouldn’t be so hard on people who say or write “I’ve got.” Many speakers of English say this very often. That makes the construction a solid part of the English language. Usage is law.

It’s petty and disingenuous to sigh and toss your flighty little head over such things. There are rules of Latin that some school-marmish stuffed shirts stand up for (don’t end a sentence with a preposition, don’t start a sentence with “and or “but”).

They are wrong–and more clownish than those who they self-righteously scold. English is a Germanic language. There are plenty of Latinate words because of court languages (French, after the Normans conquered England), but the heart of the language is Germanic. The core language is good and short and to the point.

God save us from English Nazis.

(Using “Nazi” to mean “strict” is one of my pet peeves. Nazis killed millions of people. I object to diluting the word’s meaning by applying it to people who are strict about grammar or the way customers order soup.)

Commenter JS writes:

The use of “I’ve got” is a colloquialism appropriate to the chatty tone of an internet opinion post. Writers often intentionally use grammatically incorrect constructions for the sake of humour or to convey a conversational or informal tone. I doubt this writer would use “I’ve got” in a scholarly article or even a business letter.

Score one for those of us teaching writing students to consider their audience, purpose, and genre. But not everyone thinks that all writing is writing. Ken from FL, an alleged college instructor, refers to Fitzpatrick when he writes:

Please keep this person away from our children. Blogging, etc, is not writing.

Blogging isn’t writing, folks. Ken from FL has so decreed. I’d keep typing (not “writing”), but I don’t have time — I’ve got to go tell all the writers I know to stop blogging, lest they lose their writing licenses.

(Cross-posted at DPG Online)