FunctionalAmbivalent

Better Buy More Christmas Cards

In two days, I have gone from having 1 Facebook friend to having 12 Facebook friends. At this rate, I will have more than 3 million Facebook friends by the first of December.

OK, Let's Just Admit It and Call It a Week

I've been traveling and working and traveling and working, and I've neglected you and I feel bad about that. So today I'm not going to be traveling, but the work thing is still there and it's cold out and all I want to do is build a fire in the fireplace and scrunch down under a blanket and grumble. So, to celebrate my irresponsibility of the last few days, I'm taking today off. Or maybe not. Who knows? Maybe I'll get on a roll and post a bunch of stuff.

But right now, my toes are so cold I'm thinking of having them amputated.

I'll write a present for you this weekend.

Lose An Election, Lose Perspective

Katherine-Jean Lopez at NRO thinks Sarah Palin should be Time magazine's Person of the Year. She suspects that liberal media bias is what's going to keep Time from doing that. If the media weren't biased, Time would have chosen Palin, losing Vice Presidential candidate, over Barack Obama, winning Presidential candidate.

Because there's nothing noteworthy in the election of the first African-Americna President.

Harry Reid, Thy Name Is Wimp

I'd have killed Joe Lieberman with a dull knife in a public forum. I'd have left his head on pike for all to see, and contemplate the meaning of duplicity.

Senate Democrats, on the other hand, forgive and forget. Lieberman will remain chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

While Lieberman's entitled to believe whatever he wants, he's not entitled to speak at the other party's convention, campaign for the other party's candidate, insinuate terrible things about the candidate of his own party, and keep his stature within the party.

President-elect Obama shouldn't have been reasonable and Majority Leader Harry Reid should have told Lieberman to pack up his committee chair gavel and find someplace new to sit. I'd have done it even if it meant losing a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority, because no party comfortable with the exercise of power should be able to tolerate the kind of disloyalty Lieberman displayed. This is a craven act of cowardice designed entirely to preserve comity that doesn't exist and hoard power that Democrats have demonstrated themselves to be unworthy of wielding.

Reid's lack of leadership showed when he allowed Republicans to filibuster legislation without actually having to stage a filibuster. Now he's exacting no vengeance on Lieberman, who has worked to protect the Republican Administration from accountability while campaigning to destroy the Democratic candidate for the Presidency.

Uneasy rests the head who wears the crown. If I were an ambitious Senator, I'd start plotting Reid's overthrow. After all, he's demonstrated that he's a man of no hard feelings, even when a coup fails.

What I'm Doing Today When I Should Be Working

I now have one Facebook friend. Also, I have one contact on Linked-In, who I have never met or heard of before. I think it was some kind of technical glitch.

UPDATE: New favorite Facebook group: "I'm Sexually Inappropriate With My Friends, But I'm Not Actually a Lesbian."

Good For Your Schwing

The Four Seasons in Scottsdale, Arizona, introduces the golf ball massage: an attractive masseuse rubs you down with golf balls after a hard day on the course. Good for your muscles, sure, but what about your putts? Do I have to carry my own bag?

Further Evidence, If Any Were Necessary, That Conservatives Believe Things That Aren't True

Fox News President Roger Ailes:

I remember when Bill Clinton took over and within a very short time he had to get rid of a couple of appointees," he says, referring to Zoë Baird and Lani Guinier. "And then he got into gays in the military, and suddenly issues became critical and our ratings started to climb back up. I expect a dip over the next couple of months and then a big return to our numbers in late January, early February."

That was late January, early February 1993. Fox News premiered in 1996.

Creative Destruction

I've rewritten this sentence six times because anything that  sounds like "we live in times of massive change" sounds like it's belaboring the obvious. And it is, except that the reason for that is not, I think, that we've all embraced the inevitability of change but because we've devalued the world "massive." We've used too many of our big words to describe small things, and at this moment that leaves me without the worlds to express what now feels like.

It feels like we're crossing some threshold of history over which we can never return. It feels like that moment when an avalanche breaks loose, when the cracks appear but movement hasn't quite started. It feels like 10 years from now, the world is going to be a very, very different place.

Think of the scale of the change that took place between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, as Europe shed its structure of principalities and kingdoms for the nations of the modern world. Think of the change wrought in the few years it took to construct the transcontinental railroad, when travel from one coast to the other went from being a life-threatening three month journey to a few days on a train. Think of Columbus, starting the biggest land-run in the history of mankind.

Obama ran on a platform of change, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about something that comes out of Congress or the White House. I'm talking about deep, fundamental economic and technological and cultural change. I can't put my finger on it, exactly. If I were smarter I'd be able to look out over the horizon and see what it's going to be. Instead, I'm able to detect it's coming by implication, by looking around at all the unsustainable structures we have in place and marveling at how they all seem to be teetering at once.

The consumer culture as we've known it -- the culture of value-defined-by-consumption -- is over. Easy debt is over; anyone can see that. A look at California's massive budget deficits suggests that big, expensive government is over, too. Oil is going to go back through the roof soon enough, environmental concerns are going to grow more pressing, and our whole world of energy is going to change to something substantially different. Our medical system isn't sustainable; one of the reasons American car companies are in such trouble is that they're the only car companies in the world that are expected to pay for their workers' and retirees' medical care. Big media are collapsing; daily newspapers are only a few years from stopping the presses in favor of no-one-knows-quite-what. And government -- poor, pathetic, helpless government: we're watching a run on the government bank right now, and bank runs never end well. Government, as it's been conceived for nearly 100 years, feels like it's about to be over, too.

We're all talking about recession, but it feels bigger to me than that. It feels like a giant cultural shift, a change in not just economics but psychology.

I'm excited by it, though I can't say exactly why. I'm pretty comfortable in today's world; the odds that my life will improve a lot in a new world aren't high. But still...

I was talking with my nephew over the weekend, a recent graduate of an Ivy League school now working as a Congressional aide and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He thinks the place to be is energy, that Wall Street is done, that show business is done, that real estate and manufacturing and politics are done. He and his cohort are walking into energy companies on the cutting edge and asking for a job, any job, just to be where the action is.

And then this:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The game-changer, the paradigm shift: it's out there somewhere close. We're going to read about it one morning in the newspaper, if there are still newspapers.

The stuff we're messing with now...doesn't it all feel like those Internet start-ups who were going to make money by sending people email? You know, back when email was new and getting a message was exciting, there were venture capital start-ups whose business plan was to send out little fun facts about gardening and sports and movie trivia because people weren't getting enough email. It was the brave new medium! Think about that today when you open Outlook and come face-to-face with a whole bunch of crap you'd rather not deal with, that has nothing to do with you, that is waiting for your input entirely because somebody invented the "Reply to All" button. Think about what it must have been like back in the days when people didn't get enough email.

Every time anyone talks about ethanol or offshore drilling, it feels the same to me as when people used to talk about subscription email services. "Enjoy your moment," I find myself thinking, because that's what it is, a moment that will be gone before we know it. And we don't know what's coming to replace it.

Energy is just one example, an easy example. Everywhere I look I see the same things, the same symptoms of impending doom, at least for the established order. The principle of creative destruction, of course, is the same as the principle of the forest floor. That is, the death of one set of organisms creates the environment necessary for the rise of the next set of organisms. Look up into the canopy and notice that the biggest trees are all heavy with dead limbs, that one good gust of wind could bring everything down. The change is going to be -- here's that inadequate word again -- massive. When I was a kid we had an ice storm, and I remember laying in my bed listening to the limbs crack and the trees falling in the woods out back. When we walked out the next day it was as if a bomb had gone off, but I remember the next spring being the greenest ever, with new growth soaking up the sunlight the old trees had been monopolizing.

A dozen years from now we're going to be living in an entirely different world, a world built on the broken limbs of the world we live in right now. I'm convinced of that, and I'm excited.

As If It Were Even Remotely Possible

MSNBC runs an article that includes the sentence:

Avoid weaponizing your penis.

You know you want to read it.

You Could Take That a Couple of Ways

The Secret Service code name for Todd Palin was "Driller."

The Art of the Screed

P.J. O'Rourke demonstrates in a piece called We Blew It:

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Here In Crazytown, We Believe Anything Anyone Tells Us

Excerpts from the Barack Obama entry in Conservapedia:

Obama will likely be the first Muslim President...Doctors from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons have stated that Obama uses techniques of mind control in his speeches and campaign symbols...Obama has espoused the socialist idea of "spreading the wealth" in other words raising the tax rates on business and the wealthy to a burdensome level in order to redistribute their income to low income individuals, many of whom don't currently pay taxes...The October 2008 crimes against Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson's family highlight Obama's record against law and order...Obama is the first person having ties to a known former terrorist to gain control over America's nuclear weapons...Author and blogger Jack Cashill compared the writing style of Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, with Barack Obama's earlier 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, and came to the conclusion that Ayres had ghostwritten Dreams...Obama has consistently shown himself to be an elitist who looks down on "ordinary" Americans...Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation. Presumably it would have hurt him with anti-military campaign donors.

And so on.

I Need a Little Help Here, Tracking Down Those Vile Liberals

Respected -- for now -- political analyst Michael Barone says this:

The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.

I've heard other conservatives say the same thing.

Now, I spend four or five hours a day reading the web and watching news shows on TV, and I haven't seen or heard a single significant liberal say anything like that. In conversations with liberal friends and activist Democrats, all I've heard is admiration for the Palin's decision to care for their Down's Syndrome child.

So, perhaps someone out there could direct me to a single liberal pundit or commentator or politician or anyone of significance and influence who did anything like ridiculing Sarah Palin for choosing to carry her child to term. (Crackpot bloggers don't count.) Because I've looked, and I can't find a single member of the "liberal media" who said anything of the sort.

I think this is one of those imagined affronts that -- like Al Gore claiming to have invented the Internet -- is going to enter our political lore and become common knowledge despite the fact that it's not true.

I Know the Rule Is That All Economic News Has To Be Bad, But Aren't We Missing Something Here?

Americans plan to spend less at Christmas this year:

U.S. holiday retail sales will fall 1 percent this year, according to America's Research Group, marking the first time the research firm has forecast a decline in almost a quarter century of surveys.

"This year looks so bad that even normally good signs for retail sales, such as more Americans staying home this Christmas, can't save the season for retailers," said C. Britt Beemer, CEO and founder of the research group, in a news release.

The reason we're spending less: we're saving more and borrowing less. Which, if you'll pardon my being a stodgy old fart for a minute, is exactly what we want people to do, right? I mean, isn't the appalling, debt-financed consumption of the last ten years exactly the thing that people like me have been whining about? Isn't the national savings rate a moral scandal of the first order?

So OK: we're spending less. Halla-freakin'-leuja. Maybe Christmas this year won't feature as many disturbing images of people humiliating themselves to buy crap.

On the other hand, maybe they'll just buy crap for less. The projected 1% decrease in consumer spending is translating into much larger cuts in prices as retailers decide it's better to make a little bit of money than no money at all. I wandered into a shopping mall last week to buy a white dress shirt and everything was on sale. They would have sold me an escalator if I could have hauled it away. Two weeks before the biggest shopping day of the year, the stores stuffed with brand-new Winter inventory, and I'm looking at 35% off of everything, as far as the eye can see. It was like the day after Christmas except they had everything in all sizes and colors.

The discounts are certainly bad news for someone -- I wouldn't, personally, do any short-term investing in retail stocks -- but most of us are buying rather than selling so it's good news for us.

The same goes for the stock market itself. The conventional wisdom is that the falling market is a disaster. Yesterday I had to listen politely to a 30-year old financial analyst (who should have known better) bitching about the hit his retirement accounts have taken. Here's a kid with 30 years to recover and he's seriously considering giving up equity investing until the market goes back up. I was seriously considering knocking him on the head and asking him what it is that qualifies him to be a financial analyst, since he seemed to be advocating selling low and buying high.

I guess if you're a retiree living on capital gains and you haven't diversified into less volatile investments, the current bear market is a disaster. But for the rest of us, contributing through automatic payroll deductions to our 401(k) accounts, socking money away in mutual funds, and dabbling in a little day-trading on the side, the current slide in stock prices is a godsend. Think about it: stock prices are coming down just when we're in the market to buy. What could be better than that?

I know: it's an economic disaster. I get that. I'll be more understanding of financial dread in a few weeks when I, personally, am out of work. But it seems to me that an awfully lot of us are missing a hell of an opportunity here.

White House Tour

What with the new folks moving into the old Bush place, I figured it might be nice to pick up a little real estate intel. You know: grab one of those brochures out of the box in front of the house that just went on the market, see what they've got and what they're asking, maybe get a clue about what our place is worth.

All I can say is: Cool pad.