Leany on Life -- November 2009

Building on the popularity of government-controlled health care, Obama is expanding the concept to baseball . . .

Continued below
(Best viewed with a mind not clouded by the Kool-Aid)

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The John Galt Society

It can be discouraging to look around at who's running the show these days and wonder "Where have all the grown-ups gone?"

Take heart. There are still some people who are not drinking the Kool-aid. Here's where to find them.

Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin is a feisty conservative bastion. You loved her book "Unhinged" and you can read her columns here.
Ann Coulter
Ann posts her new column every Thursday, or you can browse her past columns.
George Will
What can you say? It's George Will. Read it.
Charles Krauthammer posts every Friday. Just a good, smart conservative columnist.
If you want someone who gets it just as right, but is easier to read, try Thomas Sowell, who just posts at random times.
Jonah Goldbert seldom disappoints.
David Limbaugh carries on the family tradition.

Jewish World Review has all these guys plus lots more good stuff.

Or you can go to radio show sites like
 Laura Ingraham's or Glenn Beck's or Rush Limbaugh's..

If you'd like you can study The Constitution while you wait.

Then there's always World Net Daily, NewsMax.com, The Drudge Report, FreeRepublic.com, News Busters, or National Review Online.

For the Lighter Appetite

If you have to read the news, I recommend The Nose on Your Face, news so fake you'd swear it came from the Mainstream Media. HT to Sid for the link.
Or there's always The Onion. (For the benefit of you Obama Supporters, it's a spoof.)

Dilbert.
Dave Barry's Column
Daryl Cagle's Index of Political Cartoons
About half of these cartoonists are liberal (Latin for wrong) but the art is usually good. (Fantastic, if you're used to the quality of art on this site.)

Or just follow the links above and to the right of this section (you can't have read all my archived articles already). If you have read all my articles (you need to get out more) go to my I'm Not Falling For It section.

Above all, try to stay calm. Eventually I may post something again.

A Good Idea Expanded
11/20/09

Building on the popularity of government-controlled health care, Obama is expanding the concept to baseball, as outlined in this column. Some excerpts below:

President Obama today announced his plan to add "choice and competition" to the World Series of Major League Baseball by adding a 'public team' to the traditional end-of-season championship duel.

Players on the public team must meet a stringent set of regulations, outlined in a 2,700-page codebook, that ensures the public will get the highest quality of baseball available within the limited resources of the federal government.

And my favorite part of the plan:

If ticket sales should drop off, Obama said, it would trigger a "mandatory attendance provision" which would impose fines on local employers who fail to buy tickets for their employees.

When I get home at night I park my car in the carport and go in the house. When I go out in the morning it's right where I parked it.

Now the logical assumption is that the car, and all of its components, were in that spot all night long while I wasn't watching. But last week I encountered some evidence that made me think that's not true.

My passenger side door sneaks out at night and sleeps with a co-worker's wife.

No, you read that right. I know, I know, I don't understand all the logistical details of accomplishing such a task either, but that's the only explanation that makes sense. Sleeping with a guy's wife would explain the abuse that co-worker inflicted on my passenger door.

I got called over to the other shop. When I finished what I needed to do Co-worker A said he needed to stay a while longer and could I give Co-worker B a ride back to the main plant. I said "sure." What was I going to say? I couldn't have known at that point the offenses that my car door had committed against Co-worker B.

But the enmity between this guy and my car door soon became clear. This wasn't a "your car looks like a pile of junk, I need to slam the door hard enough to break the window because I'm afraid it won't latch and I'll fall to my death" kind of abuse. This was a "grit your teeth, wind up, fling with all your might, then lean back panting to catch your breath from the exertion" kind of abuse.

Well, if my car door can still sleep with his wife after that beating it has my admiration. It can only do it if that task is easier than safely latching with a reasonable force, which my poor car door is no longer capable of doing.

Now it's time for that weekly feature that's become so popular here at Leany on Life: Stale Events that You No Longer Care About.

On today's SETYNLCA we have the Fort Hood shooting by the Muslim terrorist. Bob Lonsberry explains the obvious in this column: He did it because he's Muslim.

That reminded me of another good column he wrote quite a while back called Gatorade is not the problem.

See, if this were a real blog I'd include little excerpts here to whet your appetite and induce you to click the link. But you know what? I don't give a crap if you read them or not. Your mother and I work our fingers to the bone providing links for you and this is how you show your gratitude? Don't click on the link, see if I care, you ingrate. Someday you'll have blog readers just like yourself, then you'll understand. Just you wait.

The Gatorade article was particularly relevant to me because the Muslim terrorist attacked Fort Hood while I was out of the country on a business trip. So I was watching it on the news sandwiched between two trips through airport security, one of which involved a TSA guy chastising me because my 3 oz. containers of toiletries safely locked in a one quart Ziploc bag were not taken out of my bag.

Like I told my travelling companions--you could eliminate all of this nonsense if you just didn't allow anyone on an airplane who wasn't willing to eat a slice of bacon or kiss the star of David before boarding.

The last time I heard the Rosetta Stone ad on the radio I finally decided to call for my free demo CD. I almost hung up as I became subjected to the standard salesman approach. "Could I get your first name?" Sure, no harm in that. "And what's your ZIP code?" Well, of course, they need that to ship me the CD. But then he asked me for my last name—reasonable request, if he'd asked with my first name as part of the address to ship the free demo CD to. But the way he asked it was like he was sneaking it into the conversation, extracting some information out of me that I wouldn't normally give him, a tactic you'd expect from the wastes of skin at Legasleaze Mazda or something.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is what he did next. "What Rosetta Stone is going to do for you is . . . "

Not "The way Rosetta Stone works . . . " or anything like that. It was the "when" not "if" way they approached it. He kept using that phrasing.

I'm betting he thought I wasn't picking up on that.

A few years ago I was selling a piece of property. Some developers came over and we walked around the property. If they had handed me asking price in cash plus my closing costs right on the spot I wouldn't have sold it to them. The main guy was in full-on active campaign mode for @**hole of the Year Award. I was thinking a lot of things, but I didn't ever say anything.

AOTY was using the same technique the Rosetta Stone guy used. He was saying "Right here we are going to put . . ." and "What we'll do with this piece is . . . " and "We're going to come in here with some fill dirt . . ."

You know the story. These developers and the RS guy all sat in a sales training seminar learning these "secret" technique. You can hear the presenter explaining it. "It's very subliminal. You just have to get in the habit of phrasing things in a way that suggests it's a done deal." All the seminar goers are frantically scribbling notes, thinking 'Oooh, isn't that cool? Wow, what a great trick, the company's really getting its money out of these secrets I'm learning.' The presenter is talking about how the person you're using this psychology on will find himself being persuaded without even being aware that he is being played by your highly trained sales mind.

In real life it has the opposite effect. You distrust the person who thinks you're stupid enough to fall for his silly attempt at Jedi mind control.

I've been turning this concept over in my mind a lot lately: How you come across compared to how you think you come across. I call it the "Burt Reynolds Effect."You may not have the same features and facial muscles as Burt Reynolds. When you deliver his lines they may not have the same effect as when he did it.

As I observe people in meetings and on business trips I try to compare how I perceive the person compared to what he thinks he is projecting. Everyone in the room is thinking "This guy has no clue what he's talking about," while Clueless is thinking "Nobody's objecting to what I'm saying, so they're buying the whole thing." Reading what someone thinks of what you're saying is not an easy thing.

But this morning it occurred to me: Being funny is the one thing you can get immediate readable feedback from. That's why being the comic in the room is so rewarding. You know right away whether your line worked.

Do you ever give much thought to Booger, that slob character on Revenge of the Nerds? You know the one I mean. The unkempt, lazy, horny, underachiever who wanted to smoke pot all the time.

Is that really what you think of when you think "nerd?" Of course not. He was the polar opposite of a nerd. In fact, out of that whole group there were only four people that you could stretch the word "nerd" around. The others were just misfits because they were ugly or couldn't speak English or wore makeup and gave you the heebie jeebies. They weren't nerds at all.

But you can't make a movie about a fraternity that only has four guys in it.

Welcome to the democrat party.

The democrat party has no core. You can't get elected by the votes of any of the special interest groups they cater to. You have to bundle them all together. So you end up with a motley collection of union thugs, abortionists, radical business and industry haters, Marxists and communists who never gave their sandals to the thrift store after college, and assorted other whack jobs who have nothing in common with anybody else in the party. The democrat party has no core principle, other than "Whatever the Republicans believe we oppose."

But here's the deal. If you're a true liberal, where do you go? If you are a sensitive, compassionate person—an English major who writes and thinks and feels—where is your party?

The demorats have deceived a lot of those people into thinking they have a home there. Green? Oh, sure, yep, that's us. We care about the environment . . . as long as we can cash in on it. Compassion? Sure, we're all about compassion. Give us all your money so we can fund all our expensive programs to combat those greedy capitalists who hate the poor. And tolerance, too. That's our middle name. Not like those awful sub-human conservatives who should die of kidney failure and be put to death by Muslims and not allowed to express their views.

True liberals—those who care about Mother Earth and feel pain at the suffering of others—are the abused wives of the political system. No matter how shabbily the democrat party treats them they will fight anyone who breathes a word against it. "He may not be perfect, but he loves me."

Yeah. That'll make a good epitaph.

So I go and post that whole big thing about atheism and "what you saw was bunk but it was not religion" and forget to make the whole point.

The point was The Boy That Cried Wolf. Just like you see so many counterfeits of true religion and get jaded on the whole idea, you see so many whacked out conspiracy theories that you dismiss the whole idea that evil men would like to take away your freedoms. So many of the conspiracies are implausible and convoluted, just like the doctrine of a lot of churches.

That's a great culture to have in place if you decide you're going to dismantle America. "Did you hear that Obama is planning to . . ." Zip it, Skippy, I've heard them all and they're all bunk. "But, but . . . " Yeah, I know. This time it's different, just like every other time since you've been feeding me those nut job stories.

It's like I keep saying, how do you accurately describe what Obama and his allies ares doing without sounding like a total conspiracy nut?

Okay, so another Muslim terrorist kills Americans and the guy on CNN was talking about—and in my own defense I have to clarify, I was in an airport, so I couldn't control the channel—how the Army was trying to ". . . calm the fears of Muslims who believe we're are at war with them."

Oh, how silly of them. How could anybody think we have any problems with Muslims? We're still trying to track down the Christians, Buddhists and Hindus who attacked us on 9/11.

And just in case you're curious, screaming at a TV screen in an airport waiting lounge is a good way to get a lot of funny looks.

The other thing the morons on CNN were saying is "You know, it's becoming quite clear that the Army had many, many signs this was coming. What's their culpability in not picking up on those obvious red flags and preventing this?"

My response was, "Yeah, and you think you're having a heyday with this story . . ."

No, seriously. Can you imagine the crap the military would have taken if they had done something to a Muslim before he actually killed anyone? I mean, killing someone, yeah, that's pretty bad, but persecuting Muslims? That's unforgivable.

Don't believe me?

None other than General George Casey confirmed what I said when he said "And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

Just so we all understand, not having our enemies in our military is worse than the murder of 13 people by a Muslim terrorist.

How do you fight an enemy that you're not even allowed to identify? It's bizarre, the amount of energy being spent trying to convince us that the people trying to kill us are not our enemy.

It's scary how many stupid, stupid spineless people are running the show.

It has been reported that Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be President.

Hey, that is absolutely true. That statement, saying that a lie has been reported, is absolutely true.

Why doesn't it work for us? I can't understand why it works for the enemy but it doesn't work for us.

It has been reported that Obama was sexually abused by an adult mentor. It has been reported that he's a Muslim and has an agenda to institute shariah law in the United States. It has been reported that he said he never met Rod Blagojevich even though pictures abound showing them together. It has been reported that Obama is plotting to suspend the Constitution . . . I can do this all day.

Not so fun when we do it to you, is it?

So I'm standing in the video store minding my own business and I see the DVDs for "24." I figure "Why not? Let's see what all the fuss is about."

So Saturday, October 31, 2009, I resigned my status as the last person on the planet who had never seen an episode of 24.

So Senator Palmer (Obama) finds out his kid was involved in the death of someone who really, really had it coming. He's talking to his Axelrod and the question of resigning from the presidential primaries comes up. Axelrod tells Senator Palmer that this isn't going to hurt him. First, the voters are very forgiving. But more than that, he is their chance to be part of history. No way are they going to let anything get in the way of that.

I'm going to figure out how to do this. I'm going to figure out how Rush, Ayn Rand and the writers of 24 can observe what is happening, what has happened, and then project the equation into what's going to happen.

That is why the "It has been reported" trick doesn't for us. The Obama supporters are so breathless about their little role in history, they won't let anything take that away. Not anything.

Dismantle America? Sure, whatever, but hey, remember--I'm cosmopolitan. I voted for a black guy.

It all started when I flipped to KNRS on the way to work and they were in the middle of the Dr. Laura Moment. It might be here somewhere. I got into the conversation at some guy asking " . . . so how do you stand up for what's right without being rude . . . ?" and Dr. Laura interrupted with "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa—whoa!" She explained that no matter what you do, they're going to say you are being rude just to try to shut you up. You have to stand up for principle.

Then the news came on and they lead with a story about protests in Kabul, or some place in Trashcanistan, where people were rioting, saying that a Khoran got urinated on or something. You know that no such thing happened. It's as if they were coordinating with the Dr. Laura Moment. "Okay, here's the lead story, do we have a DLM that ties into that?" No matter how careful we are in treating these savages they are going to call us insensitive.

Then I pull up the latest articles on JWR and Civility and Jonah Goldberg is talking about civility and George Will is talking about Michelle Bachmann standing up for what she believes in.

Those guys probably explain it better than I can. I'll never get this nailed down. But that won't stop me from talking about it. I know, I know, if you cared you would have already explored it yourself, if you don't . . .

ADD moment.

You get it. In college you figured out that half of the battle was conquering the vocabulary. That's because vocabulary encapsulates concepts—sometimes very large concepts—into words. So instead of saying "That hidden tax deal where people who want to pollute just pay money to some arbitrarily Friend of the Party who is designated as the non-polluter" you simply say "Cap and Trade."

So I'm assigning some vocabulary. I think I first saw this concept in words discussing an old saying that for a woman an education was either unnecessary or inadequate; if she were capable of netting a husband she didn't need it, and if she wasn't it wouldn't help her to that end.

So I'm going to call it the UOI (unnecessary or inadequate) effect . . . at least until I come up with a decent name for it.

I get it. You have to maintain your credibility to stay in the game. You can't come off as radical. But you have to stand up for what you believe, and the enemy will paint you as racist or radical no matter how polite you are. In fact, being polite makes them think you're weak.

But back on the other hand, I also understand that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I love Ann Coulter (don't tell her or my wife that) because she tells it straight. But a lot of the criticism she gets is from the right because she's too abrasive and people think she's damaging our cause.

There's no answer.

You try to be reasonable, you try to play the game, you try to get everyone to act like grownups. I can understand how the colonists felt. Appeal to their reason, appeal to their pride, appeal to their honor, then appeal to their hide.

You can understand how at some point they just decided to start shooting.

Speaking of no answers, here's a question. Have we ever seen an atom. When I was a kid that was a big question in my mind. Could we ever get a microscope powerful enough to see an atom.

Answer: No.

But wait a minute. You've seen photographs of a single atom. So we can see an atom.

No, we can't. An atom is smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so you can't see an atom. Period. You can't see something smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

What we can do is shoot electrons at atoms, 'cause electrons are much smaller than an atom. We record what comes back and we're seeing an image of an atom. But we have to use something different than lenses and light.

Laura Ingraham had Christopher Hitchins on the other day. He's very intelligent, well-spoken and seems like an all right guy. But he's as wrong as he can be.

See, God doesn't live in our little 4-dimensional time-space continuum. No matter how smart you are, you're not going to find him there.

Your mind--your consciousness, doesn't fully live here either. You have your body, which includes your brain, you have your intellect--both of which are quantifiable to some extent. Then you have something else. Let's call it "spirit," as in mind, body, and spirit. How much do you love your family? Is that your intellect that loves? No, it's something else.

Laura asked him, so what happens when you die? He said "That's it. I'm sorry, but that's it. You cease to exist."

Get past your mind for a second and consult with your consciousness. Does that make any sense to you? Are you a collection of electronic impulses in an organ in your head? What are you? Are you your body? Are you your mind? What constitutes you?

I'm not going to try to prove to you there's a God. You know how I carefully I avoid talking about religion or politics. But if you try that little exercise you'll find that the concept of "you" being your body makes no sense at all.

Anyway . . .

I was disappointed to find out that Martin Gardner was an atheist, but then I thought about it. Sure--what's worse, believing that God doesn't exist, or believing in a God that doesn't exist. A lot of the religions today have fabricated a God that doesn't exist--a being so confusing that thinking individuals have to conclude that there is not God, 'cause the God they've been presented with is absurd.

Presented only with the religion that Gardner saw I likely would have chosen atheism as the most reasonable option as well.

Malachy McCourt grew up with a worthless drunk of a dad. His dad was less than useless, but he pushed his brand of Catholicism on his family. He forced his interpretation of religion on them while living a life as far removed from Christ as you could get.

Malachy McCourt said "I've seen religion, and it is bunk."

No. What you saw was bunk, but it certainly wasn't religion.