By the way, “their theory” — if I can trust McArdle — is that “people are naturally polyamorous.” The dispute continues with McArdle and the author (Christopher Ryan) throwing shit at each other in a fight about whether people are like bonobos. I’m just saying “throwing shit at each other” because that’s how bonobos fight, and people are like bonobos, right? Not right? Advantage McArdle!!!!!

Just to watch her die.

For those who had fretted that the Republican Party had lost its soul, nothing could be more heartening than watching Lisa Murkowski go down to a Tea Partier. She was being groomed: She was appointed by her own father to fill the senate seat he vacated when he was elected governor; In her first term she was already on the Appropriations Committee, barreling pork like few others; She was going to be the next Ted Stevens, spending 40 years in the Senate serving no particular principle other than being a reliable vote for the party leadership and sending oodles of other people’s goodies to the folks back home.

This year’s Republican primaries have produced quite a crop of genuine right-wingers: Miller in Alaska, Lee in Utah, Buck in Colorado, Angle in Nevada, Toomey in Pennsylvania, Rubio in Florida. I’ll even toss in Paul in Kentucky, who will also stand athwart the budget voting “No.” Every one of those candidates is favored to win. Perhaps not every one will, but I’m proud to belong to the party that nominated them.

Combine those guys with Coburn, DeMint, and Vitter, and by God if we don’t have ourselves a strong core of real, principled conservatives in the Senate, the likes of which we have not had for too long now.

Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.

Ships these day are made of steel. The hull, the decks, the walls separating interior compartments, the propeller and engine – more or less the only essential part of the ship not made of steel is the wiring. Every thing that isn’t steel in a ship – furnishings, insulation, the crew – is not normally considered when one thinks of what is the essence of a “ship.” Is the president saying that our troops are the essence of the country, and everyone else is some variety of unnecessary creature comfort? Our country is made of troops, and the rest of us are just deck chairs and decorative windows?

But there were ships before steel. For thousands of years, wooden ships sailed through rough waters and many stormy nights on the ocean, venturing to every corner of the globe. Wooden ships crossed every ocean, explored both the Arctic and Antarctic, and in the overwhelmingly vast majority of times were perfectly safe. Making a ship out of steel is a neat luxury of the modern age, but it’s not essential to making a ship. Many ships made out of steel sink (paging DiCaprio, L.) and many ships made out of wood float (paging Columbus, C.).

So if our soldiers are the steel of our ship of state, are they just a luxury? We could have a wooden ship of state that, so long as we didn’t ram against people who had steel ships of state, would be perfectly fine. Indeed, in this age of steel ships many people look back on wooden ships with nostalgia. Perhaps the world would be better if every ship of state was wood, instead of expending the needless resources making them out of steel, which is only necessary in the case of conflict with other ships of state.

And since when does steel give sailors confidence that their “course is true”? Experienced sailors can navigate by the heavens; if a captain knows where he’s going and how to use an astrolabe, a steel compass is just a luxury. Moreover, there’s no reason why a compass needs to be made of steel. Inferior quality iron will work just fine for a compass needle. Is the president saying that we could do with lesser quality soldiers? Eliminating all but our National Guard would leave us, perhaps, with an iron compass, but an iron compass works just as well as a steel compass for determining if the course is true.

Finally, and most nonsensically, steel has absolutely nothing to do with “giv[ing] us confidence . . .  that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.” Sometimes, even if your ship is made of steel, there are no better days ahead. Unless you’re coliding with a steel ship, actually, I’d say that whether your ship is made of steel is more or less irrelevent to whether there are better days ahead. The word he’s looking for isn’t “steel,” it’s “optimism,” but I wouldn’t try to sail across a swimming pool in a ship made of optimism.

If George Bush had used that metaphor, we’d have been lectured on how stupid he was. Since it’s Barry, though, we’re probably just too dumb to understand.

As Moe Lane points out, I think it’s fairly obvious that Sebelius isn’t being threatening when she uses that word, she’s being “inarticulate and stupidly insensitive.” Perhaps she needs to be reeducated regarding leftist totalitarianisms of the 20th Century?

Lane, on the real importance of the word: “Use of a term like ‘reeducation’ indicates that the user of it has decided that there’s nothing wrong with his or her argument; the flaw lies in whoever is not being persuaded by it.  So there’s no need to fix the argument itself, obviously.”

I think the non-partisan lesson that should be emerging from Obamacare is the danger of passing big (i.e. physically large) bills without bipartisan support. I agree that there’s tons of misinformation out there, and it comes from all sides. I don’t have a clue what the law does to me, and I challenge anybody to produce a comprehensive list of what the law does to them. That’s what happens when you pass a two-thousand page bill: absolutely nobody knows what it really means.

If I could make one reform in the rules of Congress, it would be this: any law longer than 50 pages must pass with 60% of each house. If a matter is controversial, good republicanism demands that the voters at least be able to understand it and act accordingly in the next election. The Obama administration’s “people’d-love-it-if-they-only-understood-it” defense is lame beyond belief – we’ve gone from “Change You Can Believe In” to “Change You’re Too Dumb To Understand” – and, when examined in the light of how they handled the legislative process, is in fact no defense at all.

After taking care of the requisite smog check (sigh) I drove over to the DMV to see if I could just wait in line. Upon arriving the line was wrapped around the building. Twice. It was 4 hours long. Sigh.

I drove back to work fearing I would have to wait until September 13th. Upon arriving I told my tale of woe to a coworker who informed me that AAA takes care of 90% of DMV related tasks. Eureka.

I drove to the nearest AAA where they scanned my card and gave me a seat in nice plush chairs in their air-conditioned office. 5 minutes later I was called by name. 5 minutes after that I was out the door with my new tags. All this was done for free with my membership.

I’ve been a AAA member for 4 years now. I have not once used their roadside assistance services. This one trip has convinced me that my $45 a year was worth every penny.

Mr. Carter is right to be upset at Eminem and Rihanna’s song, but is disturbed for the wrong reasons:

Many listeners assume that the song must be against domestic abuse. Why else would Rhianna agree to sing on the track? But no amount of creative eisegesis can read into the lyrics what isn’t there. The song is an unapologetic glamorization of lethal violence against women.

Lest anyone be confused about this, the video—which has already been viewed 24 million times—sends an even stronger message that being smacked around is sexy. Although it includes Eminem—wearing, naturally, a “wife-beater” t-shirt—they couldn’t show him striking a black woman—our society isn’t quite that post-racial yet—so the main characters are portrayed by actors Dominic Monaghan (Merry in The Lord of the Rings) and Megan Fox (the love interest in Transformers).

The sepia tones and lens flares put a sheen on both the abuse and the post-pummeling make-up sessions. The pushing, pulling, and punching are merely passionate foreplay, the pain before the pleasure. At the end of the video, the lovers lie spent and sleeping, curled up together peacefully on the their bed. The immolation in the lyrics apparently just a part of the sadomasochistic fantasy. . . . [emphasis added]

Other country songs by female artists, like Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks and Independence Day by Martina McBride, have dealt with the topic of domestic abuse in the same way. Hit a woman in a country song and you’re not likely to be alive when by the last note.

Kill-the-abuser songs, while not praiseworthy, certainly reveal the moral perspective of country fans: You don’t turn a blind eye to a woman’s bruised cheek. While rap and rock lyrics often declare what their audiences should find acceptable, country musicians are expected to conform their lyrics to the worldview of their fans. [emphasis added]

Thoughts and observations:

• Has Mr. Carter polled listeners of this song to find out if they think the song is against domestic abuse?  He might be giving their intelligence too little credit and their morals too much.  We cannot find out what Eminem’s fans think of his music from this post, but it seems as though Mr. Carter thinks the fans blindly follow what rappers do.  There is a serious problem here, but perhaps not the “sadomasochistic fantasy” Mr. Carter thinks. (Hold this thought, we’ll return to it.)

• Why would Rihanna necessarily be against domestic violence?  After Chris Brown beat her bloody, she went back to him.  Further, Eminem has made a fortune exploiting his repulsive personal life.

• The women-killing-men songs that he extols reveal a different unpleasant truth: Gloria Steinem has taken over country music.  Dr. Helen has long railed against women abusing men, and there should be one standard: attacking someone with intent to harm is wrong.  Weapons allow women to be as depraved as men.  The anti-woman rap songs and the anti-man country songs appeal to different demographics, but both groups of fans have an unhealthy attitude towards violence.

• One thing that Mr. Carter is absolutely right on is that Eminem and Rihanna chickened out in not acting the roles themselves.  Using the actors Dominic Monaghan and Megan Fox instead allowed them to avoid racial overtones, but neither actor (so far as can be ascertained through the always reliable wikipedia) has a history of domestic violence; Eminem and Rihanna do.

The Last Psychiatrist (whose whole post should be read, although his description softens the violence of the video) has a significantly different take on this hideous art:

Asking them to stop battling each other is to ask them to fast, what should they do when they get hungry?  They both feel no one will ever love them as much, and dopamine or whatever is going on in their brain confirms it.  While you’re yelling from the outside “get away from him!” from the inside they try to deflect with high emotion substitutes: drugs, pregnancy, cheating.  After a while, your life is that cycle.  You can break up, sure, but each of you will probably repeat that pattern elsewhere, because the problem isn’t the specific partner in front of you but the way you sustain your relationships.  When you’re hungry, you gotta eat, and you may have heard of hunting and cooking and peeling garlic but Spam is SO EASY and you know EXACTLY how to get it. It comes with Stoli.

The only solution I have ever seen work is that one of the people has to change the way they respond to the other.  You hate me when I bring up certain topics, so I’ll give you a parable; one thing I’ve noticed about the mutually abusive is their clinging to spirituality because when you live by no rules the psyche demands you to impose them from without:

And when the toddler comes ferociously upon you and yells, “I AM TWO AND I AM UNCONTAINED!” do you beat him like a dog?  Teach him that the rest of your life will have to wait while you unleash your anger on him– so central is his existence?  Or rather, do you calmly show restraint, neither do you reward his mania with your emotion?   They are filled by your love, but they will settle for your attention.  He who feeds a Chaos will raise a Demon.

I’ll let you work out the details for adults.

TLP also gets into the minds of the fans of the video better than Mr. Carter:

Here is the primary difference between The Atlantic’s [and Joe Carter's] perspective and Eminem’s audience’s perspective of the video: to the former, the video is a discussion of an issue; to the latter, it is CCTV of their lives.  And probably a routine Thursday at the Inem house.  It is too real and too usual for them to describe it as an “awful domestic violence incident,” any more than they would describe their dinner as “a reliable spaghetti scenario.”

This is what’s wrong with Mr. Carter referring to the video as “sadomasochistic fantasy”:  Eminem and Rihanna are describing the reality of messed up relationship. To millions of people, the abuse is life.  The real scandal, which Mr. Carter seems to have misunderstood, is that Eminem and Rihanna are conforming to the worldview of their fans.

The English major’s three part test

First, what is the artist trying to do?  If Eminem and Rihanna were trying to make a public service announcement about domestic violence, they failed.  But they were trying to make a song and video that would make them money.  To do this, they had to appeal to a large audience.  A good way to do this is to tell people stories about themselves, stories they can identify with.  So we get a glamorized story of violence that ends the way it begins, setting the cycle up again.

Second, how well has the artist done what he set out to do? Millions of hits on youtube and downloads on iTunes later, the gruesome twosome have done quite well for themselves.  They could only have done so if their ugly story resonated with many people who saw it as an accurate reflection of their own lives.

Third, was this worth doing? Well, to the artists, it was certainly worth doing.  They’ve made quite a bit of money.  The rest of us have just gotten a glimpse into the evil that pervades some people’s lives.  That they made the video tells us little we didn’t already know from the tabloids; that millions of people liked the video tells us that our society is sick.

What a wondrous age we live in.

When the marines went to investigate, they were met with a hail of gunfire from cartel gunmen holed up at the ranch, which sits 90 miles from the U.S. border. One marine and three alleged gunmen died during a two-hour battle, which ended when the gunmen fled in a fleet of SUVs, leaving behind a cache of weapons.

My emphasis there, obviously. Or should I say, allegedly. Because if the people killed during a two-hour firefight that occurred when the military (!) went to investigate the scene of a 72-victim massacre are only “alleged gunmen,” I – that is, the person allegedly known as me – am not sure that anything can be described without throwing in the word “alleged.” Why wasn’t the one marine killed an “alleged marine”? Does the alleged WSJ journalist know he was a marine with any more certainty than the journalist knew the “alleged gunman” was a gunman? I mean, there are a great deal of facts reported in this alleged article that, in fact, are based on the journalist’s supposition and third-hand information he got from others.

Allow me to rewrite, just so we don’t have alleged readers jumping to unfounded conclusions:

When the alleged marines allegedly went to investigate, they were allegedly met with an alleged hail of alleged gunfire from alleged cartel gunmen allegedly holed up at the alleged ranch, which, allegedly, sits 90 so-called “miles” from the alleged U.S. border. One alleged marine and three alleged gunmen allegedly died during an allegedly two-hour alleged battle, which allegedly ended when the alleged gunmen allegedly fled in an alleged fleet of alleged SUVS, allegedly leaving behind an alleged cache of alleged weapons.

I hope that clarified things.

“According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, four in 10 Americans mistakenly believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [I believe that's the secret code name for Obamacare--ed] creates a panel that makes decisions about end-of-life care.”

Is it really dumb that Americans don’t know what was and wasn’t in Obamacare? We spent months debating various proposals for what should be in there, with the president’s budget adviser recommending panels to determine when people were no longer worth saving (aka “death panels”). I think, thanks to the much derided Mrs. Palin, those didn’t make it into the final bill, but I honestly don’t know. There were so many proposals, spread out over so many months, with different drafts of the bill popping up in different committees in different houses, and then one version got scrapped after Scott Brown’s election, and then something passed and got signed. But, speaking as someone who paid a moderate amount of attention last year, I’m not positive what that something was.

We’re talking about a complex bill containing thousands of pages of statutory writing, that delegated hundreds of decisions to administrative agencies. Not even the sponsor of the bill read the damned thing. The snoots at Newsweak can call it dumb for Americans to believe the law contained death panels, but whose fault is that? When you make an unpopular law so long that normal people will never read the damned thing and so complicated that only a small handful of experts would actually grasp the full import if they did read it, people will tend to believe inaccurate things about it. To me, that’s an argument in favor a different style of law-making: smaller, simpler bills that do things that are easily explained. To Newsweak, it’s a reason to make fun of people as believing “dumb” things. If Mr. Harmon intends to make his $1 back, I suggest he get writers more interested in explaining thing than in looking down their noses.

P.S. Want to talk about people believing “dumb” things? A majority of both houses of Congress and the president believed that their 2,000 page administrative monstrosity would reduce healthcare costs. When all the administrative agencies get done with their rulemakings, there may well be something like death panels. But there’s no possible scenario where this is going to reduce costs. Now that was a dumb belief.

I’d hate to think that I’m one of those crotchety old people who frets at what kids do these days, but reality doesn’t really care what I think. The fact is that I’m disturbed by that level of texting. Not because it’s a “drug” or whatever the people in that story are saying, but because I can’t think of anyone I know who has 100 thoughts worth sharing in a day. I don’t think I know anyone who has 10. Personally, I may have 1 or 2, but that’d be on a very good day.  And I’m much more interesting than the average teenager, who probably doesn’t have an interesting thought most months of the year.

If I had one message I could convey to my fellow citizens, it would be the following: “You’re not that interesting. I’m not that interesting. Your friends aren’t that interesting.” The talking on the phone while driving, texting while driving, texting while walking, obnoxious cell phone use in public spaces – it’s all premised on the belief that there are interesting things to be said. But that belief, by and large, is just wrong.

I’ve got enough faith in people to believe that in a few years we’ll adapt to our new ability to communicate instantly via multiple mediums and stop saying so much. There has to be a point past which even people as daft as teenagers will get bored.

P.S. Please don’t point out that the existence of this post contradicts the point of this post. I’ve managed to overcome the contradictions; I’m an Übermensch that way.

P.P.S. In the introduction to Everyday Drinking, Christopher Hitchens notes of alcohol: “The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.” Perhaps text messaging is more interesting when drunk? I’ll find a teenager to ask.