Meet the New Year

…same as the old year.

In his remarks Tuesday, Obama issued a stern forewarning on the upcoming debates, and reiterated that he will not negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

“As I’ve demonstrated throughout the past several weeks, I am very open to compromise,” he said. “But we cannot simply cut our way to prosperity.”

“While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills they have already racked up,” Obama said. “We cannot not pay bills that we have already incurred.”

So… yeah.  Three points:

1. When your guy refuses to have a discussion, it’s “principle.”  When the other guy refuses, it’s “obstruction.”  He may as well stick to saying “DO IT MY WAY.”

2. Why can’t you cut your way to prosperity? If I save $2000 a year, does it matter if I’ve made $30K or $50K?  I’m still $2000 to the good in case of an emergency.

2½. OK, that $2000 won’t make me wealthy, but it will keep me solvent… and you have to be solvent before you can prosper.  So what’s wrong with a little solvency?  Can’t we just start there, and then see if we can take the step to prosperity when we’re sure we’re not just going bust?

3. :::facepalm:::

Not to troll or anything, but sometimes you just have to shout: WE KNOW YOU HAVE TO PAY YOUR BILLS – THAT’S WHY WE DIDN’T WANT YOU TO SPEND SO DAMNED MUCH IN THE FIRST PLACE.

You see, Obama is, as far as it goes, a child.  I don’t mean in the Gospel “lighthearted, trusting, teachable, open to joy” sense, either, but in the Epistolary “thinks like a child and acts like a child” sense.  He’s not a child at heart, but at mind.  An adult would realize the all-cap bolded part beforehand, and thus avoid racking up trillions in unpaid debts in four years. An adult would say, as Obama himself said in the presser, “The fact is, the deficit is still too high,” and then go on to consider any possible way to avoid incurring another one.  An adult would admit, at bare minimum to himself, that what has gone on when he was in charge of things was at least partly his fault, and he’s learned his lesson.  And above all, an adult would actually learn the lesson.

Obama, mentally, is not that adult.  When I hear what comes from his mouth, I can close my eyes and hear the same form of argument coming from a child trying to lie his way out of being caught raiding the cookie jar.

We gotta pay our bills… but we wanted it NOW.

The deficit is too high… but I won’t spend less to reduce it.

Yeah, well, see… it was Congress’ fault!

This last, in fact, is somewhat true, which is the mark of a skillful liar.  Toss in a true statement, and then cry foul when it is dismissed as either irrelevant to what’s under discussion or put into its real context.  This is especially effective for squeezing free a few drops of sympathy: But it IS true, you’re not fair! followed by some well-meaning dolt saying, “Aw, the poor kid, cut him a break.”

Congress HAS spent far too much.  But how?  Primarily by refusing to pass a budget of any kind for three years… and that failure originated in the Senate, controlled by Obama’s party, and not in the House, controlled by the GOP.  And why?  Whose vision were they seeing?  Whose policy were they enacting?  Whose example were they following?  Same answer each time: Obama.  He was the “Bush’s deficits are terrible” guy who promptly doubled and tripled them; the “shovel-ready projects” guy who found only after spending $800 billion or so that there weren’t any such projects; the guy whose party was actually in charge of the House for the first two years and the Senate the entire four.  Most importantly, he’s the guy who could have been saying “How about a balanced budget?” during this entire time – instead he was the guys whose budget proposals were so much worse than the stuff he’s complaining about that they couldn’t garner a single vote of support in either chamber of Congress for an entire term.

This isn’t a grown-up discussion – it’s a child who is running roughshod over his (at best) tween babysitter (namely, the Congress).  Gimme, the Kid President says, and the Congress says no – that’s what any babysitter is primarily paid to do, after all – and the Kid promptly goes off on a snit and threatens to tell his folks (us).  The sitter wavers, then caves… and then the Kid reports back that it wasn’t his fault, the sitter let him do it!*

A good parent would fire the sitter and punish the child.  The result ought to be a better and more reliable sitter in charge of a better-behaved kid.  We have just proven ourselves to be little better than reality-show parents, however, absently mumbling “You knock that off” and threatening dire conquences that never happen.  Obama’s contempt for the voting public and their livelihoods and freedoms ought to have been met with a resounding initial defeat in 2006, when he was first elected to the Senate – far less two Presidential terms.  At this point, I’m beginning to think that the Kid, irresponsible liar that he is, has a shrewd grasp of things from his own limited point of view: we deserve the contempt.  By our actions we’ve proven that we’re more than willing to give in to the Kid just to have a little peace and quiet to ourselves, instead of buckling down to our work.  So why should the Kid, or the sitters, bother with their own work?

The result is a spoiled Kid.  A child often innocently hurts his parents as a toddler, not understanding the connection between his tiny fists and nails and the adult’s pain.  It’s just fun.  But as anyone who’s seen a brat knows, once the connection is made, the toddler will often keep doing it, all with that giggly imp’s smile.  They quickly learn the fun of wrecking things and getting away with it.  (Heck, most modern revenge-fantasy movies and TV shows are just this impulse writ large.)  It has to be stopped at once or the child becomes a bully who comes to enjoy causing harm, and possibly ending up as someone who can’t enjoy anything else BUT others’ pain.

* Adding to this problem is the snot-nosed crowd that the Kid hangs with, whom we call The Media.  We like to think that they’re a terrible influence on him, when in he’s really the ringleader and they’re the toadies; and their terrible influence is over US.

(tip of the wings to Ace.)

I like your eyes… I like him too

Godspeed, Mr. Brubeck.

He passed just short of 92, much as my Uncle Guy did about 18 months ago.  I mentioned him then, briefly, among other well-known folks that had enriched my life growing up.  It wasn’t very much of a tribute, but in the end, all the amazing music he wrote and performed, and the legacy of his children, are the greatest tribute.  I offer the following in that spirit.

There is something ineffably wonderful about watching these guys play; they were the heppest cats, but they looked as if they would spill a slide rule and graph paper out of their briefcase if it tipped.  Brubeck himself, in the interview segments, looks both enduringly goofy and impeccably professional.  His business was grooving out, and he was CEO… but he shows an unquenchable love and enthusiasm for music, for taking it in different directions and seeing what’s out there.  His piano was the bridge of the starship taking jazz fans to the final frontier, to boldly play what no one had heard before.

There is more on his own website, davebrubeck.com.  The site will autoplay… but for once I don’t think anyone will actually mind.

You can’t take it with you

RT @dawgmark35: Wasn’t Alec Baldwin going to leave the country one election?–Yes, but he didn’t say he was taking it with him.

— Brent Spiner (@BrentSpiner) November 15, 2012

Brent Spiner gets a lot of respect here in the Supersonic Rocket Ship.  It’s not just geek cred for having been Data, either… it’s also for being a clever, good-humored guy (his Twitter feed is a fun follow); for his varied acting gifts – comic, dramatic, and musical; and for generally leaving off the tired sermonizing that too many other entertainers indulge in.

The above is actually a fine example.  Wherever you stand on the recent elections, or the rumbles of secession/nullity, et als, this is the sort of quip that will probably make you chuckle.  It’s reasonably plain where Mr. Spiner stands, in both senses of the phrase – it’s plain, and it’s reasonable.  That’s how you handle a subject that risks alienating a goodly part of your fan base.  Love it.

In any case, you tend to hear these rumbles from one or the other far side, as dawgmark35* points out here.  When it was W’s turn in office, we would regularly hear of some cheesed off lefty celebrity** threatening to abscond to some European clime.  When the Left seems most ascendant, it’s the reverse, and Texas is going to rise again or some such.

* There are 34 other dawgmarks?

** Celeftrity? No, that’s a coinage too far. I feel like there should be something there, but it would be a shame to force it.

I don’t take either thing very seriously, because it’s not at all likely to happen.  But there’s a distinction that I think that dawgmark and Spiner don’t mention here.  It’s most obvious to me in both cases, that of the Baldwinites and E Unumis Plurae,† that each group isn’t trying to take a country with them, but feeling that the country has already left them behind, and it’s time to decamp.

† I know my declension is off. It’s been a long while since my only Latin class.

Neither side makes a secret of this feeling, though I notice that the Left conveniently forgets this feeling when they retake authority.  Troubles and scandals that storm around the Right are somehow far less troubling to them when it’s one of their own in the center.  As CS Lewis observed, they have an engine called the press whereby the public is deceived.  They use this tool much like a high school might use a bonfire at a prep rally: whip up the observers and immolate (at least by proxy) the opponents.

But there’s one more difference, and this one runs right down the middle of the Left/Right divide.  To wit: the Left’s solution involves enforced conformity, and the Right’s does not.

What a lot of people are talking about with this succession business is actually more like Federalism – let the individual state come up with local-level solutions to problems where the Constitution gives the Congress no authority.  This arrangement has the dual advantage of making policy easier to implement AND easier to undo.  After all, if all of Wisconsin or Kansas wants something, why should they be outvoted by a cabal of Californians?  And if it turns out to be a disaster, why should people with no say in the matter be able to block your wishes?

Second, if you don’t like what your state has done, you can head to one more to your liking… without sacrificing your American citizenship or losing your voice in the affairs of your home country.

Now, the Left’s solution is essentially to tell everyone to lump it because they’re in charge.  When they’re not, they threaten to leave the process entirely.  It’s like some tiresome party-goer who insists that everyone will just LOVE their chosen activity, and runs about enforcing the gaiety (and policing the conversation) by a variety of means.  They naturally consider those who stop attending to be tiresome and dull people, and conclude that these wallflowers need livening up – something is obviously the matter with THEM.  They never get to see the parties that these “wallflowers” throw among themselves, with a variety of games, conversations, and even people quietly sitting in ones or twos when they please.  They imagine, if they get wind of such parties, that they’ve been snubbed and take offense… perhaps they never even faintly dream that they would be invited if only they wouldn’t try to carry out a coup d’fete every time.  They can gladly have their fun, so long as they don’t inflict that fun on all present.

Texas and New Mexico can coexist doing different things with abortion, health insurance, and whatever social issues present themselves.  They can’t coexist if one insists on making the other follow all the same policies.  The Big Ticket items that make us an Unum are outlined in the Constitution; that same marvelous document insists that where such items are not specified, the means to deal with them are vested in the Pluribus and the populace.  This would lead to more variety, more opportunity, more choices… horrors, we might run the risk of becoming a more understanding society!  We might have to learn to appreciate how another approach works for a different group of people, and not just reflexively condemn someone who thinks and acts otherwise.  We might just stumble into the shocking realization that it’s possible to disagree without being odious, and realize that it doesn’t make someone an -IST or a  -PHOBE for going their own way.

Rush was right.  No, not that one – the guys who sang “Subdivisions.”

Processed thought-like substance

You’re no doubt familiar with the wonders of those little plastic cheese slices.

Nowadays, people tend to just buy actual cheese.  In my childhood, my parents bought those plastic-wrapped singles.  If we were really splurging maybe there would be Velveeta – same company, differently-wrapped slightly-different-flavored product.  But it was what I thought of as “cheese” because if there was cheese in my sandwhich at lunch, this crayon-orange stuff was it.

Years later, having assumed control over my own cheese procurement and consumption, I noticed of course that this was “processed cheese food.”  It was not cheese as commonly understood by humans, but was close enough in taste and texture to be permitted a label that called it a food resembling cheese.

In a similar fashion, many of us grow up being taught something that’s called thinking, but isn’t.  And for a child, well, that’s good enough.  Who wants to blow nine bucks for a pound of the really good stuff when you can drop $1.79 on sixteen slices of “cheese food” and the kid’s none the wiser?  Likewise, children need to be able to get up to speed quickly on all sorts of topics as they begin their school years, and it’s a lot faster to give them the basics without bogging their brains down in the process of acquiring and testing information.  They’re beginners, so we streamline it for them.

The problem is that too many of them stroll about all day long getting by on that old, streamlined process.  They test what they know by seeing if it satisfies an emotional need or confirms what they already concluded.  Instead of going out and learning, they accept what they’re told from certain pre-approved sources.  When difficulties arrive, they frequently assume that it’s someone else’s doing, and blame the person who points out the problem as if that person caused it, rather than just noticed it.

It’s a poor way to live, of course.  If I screw up and give up a bad goal in one of my games, it is superficially correct, for example, to blame the shooter – if he didn’t shoot, or if he had missed the net, I wouldn’t have looked like a terrible goalie!  But you’ll notice that this approach doesn’t make me a better goalie.  And the ones who pay the price are my put-upon teammates, forever working half the game to scrape out a goal, only to see it given back in fifteen seconds.

The irony is – and for all their love of irony, the standard-issue unthinking hipster misses this constantly – is that they notice this instantly in everyone else.  To take the example I started with, if they went into a bistro and were served a sandwich with locally-sourced field greens on artisan bread, topped with a gooey slice of Kraft, they would flip their organic gourds over it.  And imagine what they would do to their fellow who sheepishly admitted that he actually preferred the chemical approximation to actual cheddar!

They wouldn’t be caught dead doing that in every unimportant pursuit of life, but the important stuff, requiring actual thinking instead of processed, thought-like substance?  Hm.  There’s a quandry.  Just where quality would last forever, they get a false sense of economy.  Case in point, uncovered by the good Professor, after the jump…

Shut up, they explained – it’s for your own good

So, it’s law.

The local paper ran a two-color headline: YES IT’S CONSTITUTIONAL.  I wouldn’t go quite that far.  “Yes, It Stands,” maybe, or “Sure, Why the Hell Not?” or “Yes, It’s As Bad As You Feared and If You Don’t Like It, Scrap It Yourselves.”  But constitutional?  Even though the Supreme Court refused to strike down the ACA, I think that I’d stop short of saying that they gave it the Constitutional imprimatur.

For one thing, the decision basically outlines every last way in which this statute is bad law, and Constitutionally sketchy… which seems quite odd in an affirmation.  For another, it’s quite possible for a very smart person to make mistakes that no average or middling intellect could ever.   Justice Roberts’ reasoning in this decision is nearly a textbook example thereof.  It’s almost as if he were searching frantically for a legal reason to avoid scrapping this monstrosity.

As a result, there are a number of thoughts within his reasoning that make sense in isolation.  For example, there’s the statement that a bad policy isn’t de facto unconstitutional; also, the thought that the Courts don’t exist to spare us the consequences of sending morons to Congress to write dumb laws.  Both eminently true.  Alas, neither of these is the point at hand.  The point at hand is, does Congress have the authority to force us to do what this bill requires?  And a very simple reading of the list contained in the US Constitution of things Congress can do reveals that, No, they really can’t, not no way, not no how.

But they ARE allowed to tax us, right?  OK, so fine, this is a tax and they’re allowed to do it!  Splitting the judicial baby, as it were.  Poor kid, he never stood a chance.

There’s a huge flaw in that thinking.  I’m sure a cleverer mind than mine could paper over it, explain it away, much as today there are many clever minds explaining all the silver linings in this cloud that’s currently set to deluge us in another layer of unbearable government busybodery.  In this case, let’s just look at the cloud, OK?  Sure, the Congress can levy taxes – but why are they taxing us this time?  That’s exactly what the decision refuses to examine, with a firmness and determination that I wish had been applied towards actually deciding the issue instead of punting it. 

The Ministry of News Reporting

Via MSNBC.com:

A Kuwaiti man was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.

Sometimes we in the U.S. seem shrill about our own problems, such as the people getting spamblocked on Twitter, Obama’s infamous “truth teams,” and the conformist mentality threatening many of our institutions.  And there’s an important distinction between those things and what has happened to Hamad al-Naqi with this ruling: as horrible as those three above examples are, they are still (for now) the free actions of free people.  It’s not welcome for them to merely shout down others, but in itself it’s not the same thing as active State interference in our ideas and opinions.

The problem is that it never just stops at that.  If it did, it would be inconvenient to the one side, but eventually futile for the other.  Those who have been “twitmo’d” have their accounts restored; “truth teams” meet with the approbation and scorn they deserve; the conformists eventually get out into a real world that they have yet to succeed in silencing.  Ultimately those things hurt professional lives and reputations, but in the States, at least, you don’t yet go to the pokey for merely insulting someone.

But it’s worth saying that all those things lie on the same continuum that gets us to the criminalization of thought.  Those who are comfortable with those acts are usually also comfortable with the next step – from insult, to dirty tricks, to getting people in actual trouble with authority for daring to say such things.  In Canada and England people have gone to jail for expressing unapproved opinions, under their hate-speech legislations.  Mark Steyn was called onto the carpet by Canada’s Orwellian Human Rights commissions for article he wrote that appeared in Maclean’s, and he’s only the most prominent example.  (You’ll all have seen the clip of the unhinged high school teacher insisting that her student can be jailed for speaking out against the President’s policies and qualifications.)  Most recently, Robert Stacy McCain was forced to relocate his entire family because of the “lawfare” tricks of Brett Kimberlin, while Aaron Worthing has actually been jailed (hopefully temporarily) through Kimberlin’s legal bombardment – more a wearying of opponents rather than carrying the day with actual proof of tangible harm.

These are dangerous precedents, and not to be encouraged.  There’s no guarantee that Western governments won’t simply ignore the Constitution and rule rather than serve.  We could fall into the worst trap of all – so thoroughly internalizing such onerous rules that we become our own thought police, denouncing ourselves to our betters, or not speaking when challenged.  Every time someone says something that “requires’ one of those “public apology” statements, a part of me sickens worse.  Often, the opinion itself is misquoted or not all that objectionable; even if offensive, well, again, there’s no law against that.  But even if it’s appropriate to apologize, shouldn’t that be something the person does unprompted?  By forcing the apology, we tend to rob all such statements, however heartfelt, of sincerity.  “Oh, he did that for the PR,” we say, because half of the time it was just for the PR, just to fulfill that part of the cycle of theater that passes for too much public discourse.

Imagine a world where those momentary affronts stood.  Wouldn’t that be a world in which we could judge for ourselves if an apology was genuine, rather than assume it was a sham?  For that matter, wouldn’t it also be a world in which we could judge for ourselves if the affront was actually all that offensive?  Could we not, in this world, pick and choose our protests, and have the other party pick and choose what they are and aren’t sorry for? I think I find even the possibility preferable to the endless parade of off-the-cuff comments leading to ginned-up “controversy” followed by routine “outrage” and automatic statements from “representatives.”  Hell, we might just run the risk of not being so darned thin-skinned all day long, thinking a little before reacting, and maybe getting along better in the long run.

A world where everything triggers a quick, automatic (and completely predictable) reply is not a world where people are really thinking and interacting.  It’s replacing the effort of human relationship with the simple stimulus-response of animals or machines.  It can’t be healthy.  We’re not to the point, quite, where we do risk a jail cell for protesting our leaders, or our religious figures.  However, I don’t want to risk getting there.  I also want you to actually read the article and note three things:

1. This was a Kuwaiti man jailed, in part, for protesting OTHER governments, not his own.
2. al-Nagi’s defense was that his account was hacked, not that the statements weren’t made.
3. We’re told he insulted Mohammed, but the Reuters reporter does not repeat what was actually said.

This last is key.  We are not Kuwaiti; why can’t we read for ourselves and make up our own mind about the statements?  They wouldn’t warrant a prison term in any case, but really, what was written?  Why did Reuters neuter its own report and deny us a key piece of information in the story?  The piece had an author, two additional reporters, and two editors, and none of them felt it was worth the trouble of repeating the statements.  It’s entirely likely they were expunged to “avoid offense” to anyone’s delicate ears.

“This verdict is a deterrent to those who insult the Prophet Mohammad, his companions and the mothers of the believers,” civil plaintiff Dowaem al-Mowazry said in a text message.

It worked on Reuters, anyway, and I’m not OK with that.  We have every good reason to resist any hint of such a thing happening where we live.  On with the truth, and up with the volume.

Doubling down on petty tyranny

update, 6/3 – they start early, don’t they? (thx to Stoaty via Twitter)

(Plenty of play on the blogosphere and Twitter on this subject: the Swillers, Morgan Freeberg, and IMAO for starters.  Good.  I hope Bloomberg is driven from the field in shame.  It’s high time we let these bossy busybodies know who’s boss in the citizen-politician relationship.)

The more I hear about this seemingly-inconsequential Beverage Mandate, the more it irritates me.  I’ve seen a clip of a flack on TV (I think it was an “obesity expert” or some such from a university) say that obesity began to spike in the early 80′s with the introduction of the two-liter soda bottle.

Horseradish.  I can remember Hoffman’s Beverages on Long Island offering racks of twelve single-quart (glass) bottles.  After we emptied it, we brought the rack back and got twelve new ones, with the old bottles sent to the company for cleaning and refilling… or we could just take the nickel deposits and be done.  Soda has always been around.  Sugary drinks have always been around.  Gigantic calorie-stuffed, creme-filled snack food has always been around.

What we have now that we didn’t then is the Atari 2600 and its successors.  We have an Internet that is so easily reachable that even when kids are turned out of doors, they spend their time huddled over miniature screens instead of running and laughing.  Are we going to ban video game consoles and smartphones next?

We also have such an over-layered, smothering approach to exercise that it’s no wonder that ever-more people are inflating at a rapid rate.  Unstructured play?  What’s that?  Sure, it keeps you healthy, you have fun, you learn to mediate your own disputes, you have opportunity to develop good sportsmanship, coordination, skill, and friendships – but what if you get hurt??!?!eleventy!!?

To top all that, we lack essential counter-influences to these tugs on our daily habits.  We fetishize self-esteem to such an extent that any experience that affronts or worries is considered a borderline assault.  Well, playing a game of pickup basketball offers ample chance to be affronted or worried.  Am I good enough?  Will I be teased for running slow or looking awkward?  Will nobody want me on their team because I’m terrible?

We also lack parental authority.  Not coincidentally, this is directly tied to the ever-intrusive State: they have whittled and undermined the traditional societal units of influence in order to gin up a desire for those necessary functions to be filled by elected officials.  “Government must step in” is the mantra of the newly-infantilized adult, raised for 30-50 solid years in a world in which parents’ and church’s accustomed say in kids’ lives were systematically ridiculed, marginalized, and ultimately ignored.  Pick a topic.  Education?  Teachers know so much more!  A kid ought to feel good about the educational process and be an equal partner in it.  Morality?  Passé!  It’s all situational ethics now, with no timeless absolutes by which to judge the momentary situation.  Relationships?  We’ll teach sex ed.  All that situational ethics and self-esteem we taught earlier will ensure that kids will have no basis for decision other than their in-the-moment, hormone-addled emotions, and no way to be told that the decision may have lasting consequences without being horribly offended.  If it doesn’t work, it’s not their fault – society has failed them.  But government will never fail them!  They pinky-swear!

Eat, drink, and be wary

The latest in Mother Henmanship from Mike Bloomberg in New York City: banning any sugary bevarage of more than 16 ounces.

This pferdkaese reminds me a lot about the whinnying over tobacco use.  Seriously, if soda or cigs are that bad for you?  Ban them outright.  Otherwise it really isn’t anything to do with “safety” or “public health” or any such fig leaf; it’s about control.  And that all of this is coming from the man who shoved through a revocation of the term limits on his office so he could rule a third time.

Sure, he says it was only because of an “extraordinary one-time thing.”  But it wasn’t.  There’s always some financial crisis looming.  This isn’t the first time even in my lifetime that the national or world economy has tanked.  You know what was an extraordinary one-time thing?  Foreign agents driving airliners into skyscrapers, that’s what – and Rudy Guiliani didn’t serve a third damned term.  He talked about it but it wasn’t a good idea even then; he gave way to this tinpot potentate – one who now hypocritically says that he supports changing it back so no mere human peasant can have the opportunity.  None are as enlightened as he, and thus shan’t be trusted with such awesome power!  And I’m not fond of hearing, “Oh, but it was legally done!”  Are you fighting Big Beverage “legally,” Mayor Ninnyhammer, or are you just ruling by fiat without any input from the City Council?  The answer is B, isn’t it?

Again – it’s about control.  The mandatory posting of nutritional information and calorie contents was supposed to be enough.  Apparently not, so now it’s going to be blunt force.  I’m fond of joking that parody is a dying art because it’s so hard to stay ahead of the idiot curve, but this is nearly beyond a joke, now.  On Futurama, Leela once said something like: ”This is Fry’s decision to make… and he made it wrong, so now we’re going to butt in and do it for him.”  Oh, Mayor?  THIS WAS NOT MEANT AS ADVICE.  Stop it.

Sometimes, debate and argument don’t really work, because a person isn’t really being reasonable at all.  That’s when you resort to ridicule.  If you make the dumb idea seem dumb even to the person promoting it, you might stay their meddling, restless hand when ironclad logic fails.  The Twitter hashtag #BloombergMovieTitles sprang up and a good many people spent hours savaging Bloomberg’s pompous overreach.  You can click the tag to see the top lines… some of my contributions are below.  (Hard to come up with ones others didn’t, so I hope I didn’t rip anyone off.  I mean, The Good The Bad and The “X” is just a slam-dunk.)

• Heavy-Handed Luke
• Lord of the Servings
• Smokey and the Big Gulp
• Ten Things I Hate About Yoo-Hoo
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Eat, Drink, or Smoke, but Weren’t Allowed To
• Bloomberg Almighty
• Birth of a Ration
• The Incredible Rightness of Being Mayor
• The Sensible Breakfast Club
• Silence of the Gourmands
• The Good, the Bad, and the Salty
• Transfatting
• Steamed Green Tomatoes
• Logan’s Beer Run
• The Towering Cappucino
• Blazing Griddles

A season for all men

Margaret: Father, have him arrested!

More: On what charge?

Margaret: He’s a bad man.

More: There’s no law against that.

Margaret: Yes there is – God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.  … He shall go free, were he the Devil himself, unless he broke the law.

Roper: So now you would give the Devil the shelter of the law?

More: And what would you do, Roper? Cut a great road through the law to reach him? … And when he turned on you, Roper, where would you hide, now that the law’s flat?  The country’s planted thick with laws, Roper – man’s laws, not God’s.  If you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, could you stand upright in the winds that would then blow?  I give the Devil the safety of the law, for my own safety’s sake.

That is from the magnificent movie (and play before that) A Man for All Seasons.  You’ll forgive the paraphrase, I hope, as my copy of neither source is nearby.  It’s somewhat a long lead into the topic, too, and I’ll hope you find it worth it, because this is a very big topic.    It’s been building for a long time, too.

You’ll have noticed that one of the most popular TV shows today is “Person of Interest,” J.J. Abrams’ general apology to the world for the Star Trek reboot and “Lost” finale.  It’s really a great show, too, almost in spite of itself: the premise of an all-seeing surveillance network quietly ferreting out terrorist plots and other impending crimes is enormously troublesome, and under poor stewardship, could easily devolve into a too-blunt critique of society, both badly-aimed and badly-executed.

As it is, they ask some fantastic questions, and all from the perspective of the characters, arising naturally from their interactions.  It’s masterful work, actually, and any aspiring storyteller would be well-advised to observe and emulate the approach.  That’s reason enough for it to become a popular program, but I think there’s more.  Plenty of well-crafted shows die on the vine because they can’t find an audience.  ”Person of Interest” got through, because in its way it deals with exactly what Sir Thomas More was talking about 450 years ago.  The more things change…

For the children?

I was thinking about something that I heard on the radio (heheheh) while driving to work yesterday – a news item about lawmakers from New Jersey wanting to change the regulations regarding tanning beds.  They want to raise the minimum age from 14 to 18.

It didn’t seem like much of anything to write a post about, until I saw this online today, via Ace:

Federal agencies should step in if industries that promote high-calorie foods to children do not implement common nutrition standards within two years, the influential Institute of Medicine (IOM) said Tuesday.

Now, “exercise more and eat healthier” hardly requires 478 pages to say; no doubt the rest of the IOM’s report has to do with exactly what these agencies ought to be doing to whomever gives a kid a slice of cake.  And for once, I’m not going to track down that report and go over the highlights, like I did with the Act in Multiple Acts from last week.  Frankly, there’s no need.  If you’ve stuffed 478 pages full of “guidelines” and “interventions”, then doing even 5% of it will be a huge intrusion on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

But even that isn’t actually the point here.  Ace makes that point much better than I can, anyway, and I see the Masters are on board with a fine take as well.  The long and short of it is that the proposal here and in re: tanning beds in Jersey are both categorically dumb, in the same category.  To wit, they aren’t going to do a blessed thing to fix the problem that was allegedly the whole reason for getting together and blathering on for 478 pages.