Does He Even Listen To Himself?

From the mouth of Vice President Joe Biden:

They [Republicans] still believe … that we’re a bunch of socialists – all these things you hear. I think the healthcare debate put a big stake in the heart of that argument.

No, Joe, the healthcare debate confirmed the argument that the Democrats are a bunch of socialists. Sheesh. What is ObamaCare if it’s not socialism?

A New Light

Professor Jacobson over at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion quoted Michelle Obama from a couple of years ago:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

I read these words today in a new light.

She’s right, but not in the way she meant.

None of us will ever go back to our lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

My Wishlist

If I were President (heck, if Barry proves anything, it’s that the old promise that “anyone can become president” is actually true):

1. Withdraw from the United Nations; kick the United Nations out of New York City and make them hold their meetings somewhere else.
2. Overturn all court decisions based on international law rather than on the Constitution of the United States; protect America’s sacred sovereignty.
3. Recognize the rights of the unborn to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There may be more to come; this is just what came to me on the spur of the moment.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

I finally realized today another, more devious reason, besides wanting to hide the costs, that the benefits in ObamaCare do not start until 2014.

It’s so that Obama can insist that he has to get reelected or the benefits will never kick in—that if he’s defeated the bill will be overturned. And he’s right.

O Fortuna, from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana

Having a classical tune in my head, and being able to tap out a tune by ear on the piano, I did a Google search for something that would allow me to search for a song by doing just that.

Having then found Musipedia, I tapped out what turned out to be O Fortuna, from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. It took just a bit more poking around on Wikipedia, though, because what Musipedia was able to find for me, while consisting of the right notes, was not the right tempo and was definitely not the right orchestration—at least Musipedia found something from the larger Carmina Burana, anyway, which was enough.

Seriously, what did people do before ubiquitous access to the World Wide Web?

Perpetuating an Entitlement Mentality

I received a letter in the mail today from the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau telling me that my response to the census will “help [my] community get its fair share of government funds”, which is to say “its fair share of” the money the government confiscates from me anyway.

I thought the point of the census was to be able to determine representation, both at the State and Federal level, to ensure that my interests were adequately protected. I didn’t know it was so that the redistribution of tax dollars could be “fair”.

 Is it “fair” to distribute the money to all communities equally based on population percentages? Is it “fair” to distribute the money based on relative income levels, so that communities with higher income levels get less (or more?) government funds?

What’s “fair”, anyway, and who determines what’s “fair”?

“Those are my government funds and I’m entitled to get them.” Yeah, right. How about, “Those are my tax dollars and I’m entitled to keep them.”

Obama, the Late-Night Talk-Show Host

What, did Obama have a laugh track and applause lights during today's speech? He must think he's a late-night talk-show host. Listen to this video, at about 2:10. I wonder if it was all just nervous laughter.

A Letter to the Program Director of My Local Radio Station

Dear [Program Director],

I find it ironic that, between segments of conservative talk radio from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, your radio station would air Democrat talking points passing as legitimate news updates. I refer specifically to today’s stories about Senator Bunning’s refusal to go along with unanimous support for cutting off debate on a spending bill that does not meet the Democrats’ own pay-as-you-go standard—stories that do not even mention the pay-as-you-go standard.

If I wanted stories like that, I’d watch MSNBC.

I wonder if your station couldn’t find a different source for its news updates—something a little more fair and balanced, perhaps.

Sincerely,
DavidD

P.s. For more on this subject, see this fine post from theblogprof:
http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2010/03/liberal-msm-no-checks-for-jobless.html

Insulation From Feedback

Here’s a three-page passage from Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, pp. 247 ff., that sums up the whole book:

Insulation From Feedback

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? In everything from avant-garde art, music, and drama to exotic animals and “radical chic” activities, the stress is on their own differentness, their specialness. A chorus of public outcry against what they are doing or advocating is not a reason to reconsider but music to their ears. To disdain “public clamor,” as it is called when court decisions are protested, is a badge of distinction. All this, of course, contributes to the sealing off of the vision of the anointed from feedback from reality.

Consistent with this pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all cost has been the adoption of a variety of anti-social individuals and groups as special objects of solicitude—which is to say, special examples of the wider and loftier vision of the anointed. From multiple murderers to smelly vagrants, these anti-social elements have been adopted as mascots, much like exotic animals. The stigmas put on these mascots by the rest of society merely provide yet another occasion for the anointed to blame society itself for failing to “solve” these people’s “problems.” Again, having committed themselves to this disdainful view of the benighted masses, the anointed have cut off their own path of retreat when evidence begins to pile up that their mascots have both richly deserved the stigmas they have received and are unlikely to be magically transformed by any of the innumerable programs and projects that the anointed have created for their benefit. Another avenue to reality is sealed off.

One symptom of divorce from the constraints of reality is the tendency to treat numbers as if they had a life of their own—for example, to make extrapolations from statistics without any serious analysis of the actual processes from which these numbers were generated. This has been common, not only in “overpopulation” projections and exhaustion-of-resources projections, but even in the claim that it is wrong to criticize the courts for the soaring crime rates that followed the criminal law revolutions of the 1960s because of “the abnormally low base from which the crime of the 1960s and early ’70s began.” In other words, these numbers were apparently due to go up anyway—not for any specific, discernible reason, anchored in reality, but simpley because they were “abnormally low.”

One could just have easily have said that the crime rate was abnormally high when the country was expanding, with a lawless frontier still being settled, and when its cities had an unprecedented growth of a crowded, polyglot population of immigrants—and that when these and other adverse influences faded over time, crime rates likewise subsided. But to say this would be to say that the numbers did not have a life of their own, but reflected actual social processes—and that in turn would suggest that the soaring crime rates which followed the judicial revolution in the criminal justice system were also a result of actual facts in the real world. but the reluctance to say that people are responsible for the consequences of their action—even in a causal sense, much less in a moral sense—is here extended to judges.

Such an approach is part of a more general pattern among those with the vision of the anointed, a pattern exemplified by the use of the word “epidemic” to describe chosen behavior, including drug use and such consequences of sexual behavior as pregnancy and AIDS. Without a sense of the tragedy of the human condition, and of the painful trade-offs implied by inherent constraints, the anointed are free to believe that the unhappiness they observe and the anomalies they encounter are due to the public’s not being as wise or as virtuous as themselves. Both their conceptions of social issues and the vocabulary in which they discuss them are pervaded by notions of “protecting” this group and “liberating” that one—in both cases, obviously from the benighted or malign actions of other people. It is a world of victims, villains, and rescuers, with the anointed cast in the last and most heroic of these roles. Thus, in this vision, the Third World is poor because the more prosperous nations have made them so, and problems within the black community are caused by the white community, women are less represented in given occupations because men keep them out—and so on and on. Alternative explanations of all these phenomena are neither lacking nor without evidence, but alternatives to the vision of the anointed are sweepingly and sneeringly dismissed.

Those with the vision of the anointed are especially reluctant to see human nature as a source of the evils they wish to eradicate. Instead, they seek special causes of particular evils. Nothing so exemplifies this approach as the perennial attempts to get at the causes—the “root causes,” as it is phrased—of crime. There seems to be no awareness that people commit crimes because they are human beings. That is, that people’s natural impulses are to favor themselves over others and to disregard the harm they create in trying to satisfy their own desires in the easiest way. If most people do not behave this way with complete shamelessness in most things, it is because they have been through a long process of becoming civilized—and because this process is buttressed by law enforcement. Civilization has been aptly called, “a thin crust over a volcano.” The anointed are constantly picking at that crust.

The dangers in a vision come not simply from the answers it gives, but from the very way it frames the questions. The concept of “income distribution,” for example, causes statistics to be looked at with certain preconceptions, so that the transient positions of individuals are seen as the enduring relationships between classes. The habit of looking at policy issues in terms of the goals they proclaim and the values they represent, not to mention the unconstrained options they assume, leads in a wholly different direction from an analysis of the incentives being created, within the constraints that exist, and the probable outcome of such incentives and constraints.

It is the intertwining of the intellect and the ego which is so dangerous in making the vision highly resistant to any facts that threaten the existing framework of beliefs and assumptions. Cultural wars are so desperate because they are not simply about the merits or demerits of particular policies. They are about the anointed’s whole conception of themselves—about whether they are in the heady role of a vanguard or in the pathetic role of pretentious and self-infatuated people.