A Bit Further.....

A headline from The Onion? Oh, I wish:

Cystic Fibrosis Too White for Ottawa Fundraiser

Yep, it's real. Best comments I've read so far:

1. "That'll mean they won't do any fundraisers for sickle cell now."

2. "Unified thought leads to stupidity like this. That's a problem. People who have a vested financial interest in unified thought are a bigger problem. They take advantage of it.
The problem isn't liberalism or conservatism. The problem is that an idea (in this case, political correctness) is accepted by a group of people, without question or critical thought, and over time becomes distorted into something so radical that nobody outside that group could possibly be deluded enough to support it."

This is confined to some subpar Canadian university (Carleton), you say?

From the National Post of Toronto:

Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., has hired six students whose jobs as "dialogue facilitators" will involve intervening in conversations among students in dining halls and common rooms to encourage discussion of such social justice issues as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability and social class.

"Yes, there's nothing today's coeds look forward to more than the creepy 46-year-old Divinity student who is paid to chat them up about white privilege!"

All New, All The Time

Some cable channel (which, I am not sure, and don't wish to be) gushing this morning over the nominee for Attorney General, naturally the emphasis being on the "first ever {insert minority here} in the cabinet." I guess Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as Secretaries of State don't count. And to these people, I think they don't.

Wordy

The online comic xkcd.com, which rocks -some of the time- has a great one here:

"A Bunch of Rocks"

I found the strip verbose, however. Richard Brautigan, a deservedly third-rate writer*, summed up this particular suspension of the laws of space-time better, in perhaps the best line he managed:

"You should have ridden with Jesse James, for all the time you stole from me."

Yeah, we stole your time. And we used ours to give something back....if you were listening.

*No. No. He's a third-rate writer. Lots of writers are, just keep repeating that until you believe it.

"But maaaan, he wrote Trout Fishing in America, maaaan, it's such a cool title maaaan."

....and did you ever read it? Even in Cliff's Notes? Do you think the criterion for awarding Nobel Prizes in literature should be scribbling anarchic crap attacking Western Civilization? Oh, wait.......

A Sigh of Relief

The CNN news streamer this morning featured the following sentences, in sequence:

"Elderly men in Mexico to receive free Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra."

and

"Mexican government states 'Everyone has the right to be happy.'"

Sidestepping the obvious, that the Mexican government statement is mistaken, even with the worst translation in the world (although I suppose they can't say "Everyone has the right to an erection," when half the populace is left out), I found reading this strangely liberating.

I finally decided I felt more at peace with my own country after that, having just survived the brutal, frantic idiocy that was the presidential campaign by sedulously ignoring it as much as possible. It's just good to be reminded that any other government can be just as removed from reality, and as disposed to make policy that completely misallocates resources.

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

- Friederich Nietzsche

Keeping Pace With Morons

A fragment of paraphrased conversation on Fox News Channel between Bill Kristol and Steve Doocy:

Kristol: "If the stock market rises again and the economy comes back by 2011 or 1012, the Obama administration could be sitting pretty."

Doocy: "You mean I have to wait until then for the recession to be over?"

I will give Doocy something of the benefit of the doubt, given the "Chief Fox News On-Air Dipshit" schtick he plays, but there are hordes of my fellow citizens who would say this, and in dead earnest......

Should Have Seen This Coming

We already have a Foaming Free Speech brouhaha in MS, brought about by administrators deciding all discussion of the president-elect should be banned from the classrom or the halls.

I don't claim for a moment that the administrative ban on discussing this person (or any person) isn't stupid and abysmally ill-advised. All it's likely to do is have exactly opposite the desired effect, while whipping up emotion on every side. From three decades of experience, best that it be left up to the individual classroom teacher to control. The method? Let the kids talk it out. Given the attention spans and stamina for any topic of high schoolers.....about 20 minutes. But, after all, we are talking about school administrators, so this whole tempest in a teapot may (literally) become a federal case.

That Didn't Take Long

And so it begins. Daniel Schorr concludes that since President-Elect Obama is black, he must make Darfur a priority, a syllogism without parallel. The laundry list of things Obama's supposed to do for Illinois is growing, too. I suppose this putative largesse stems from the fact that he's a senator from Illinois.....but I don't think the reasons matter. Rumor has the New York Times is already pleading that folks need to go easy on the new president. This should be a full-blown farce by this time next year.

Post-Election Post

Couldn't think of anything particularly trenchant to say about the national election; as far as I could tell, the results pretty much reflected the polls. Therefore, I'll just link an earlier post of mine that has become more poignant in the months leading up to the election of Obama.

On a more encouraging note, most of the things I was really concerned about in this election went OK. The Illinois Constitutional Convention referendum went down in flames, and the Champaign County sales tax increase was narrowly defeated. Unfortunately, our township referenda to ban industrial development were approved by fairly narrow margins, but the good news is that they're advisory only.

Assault on Precinct #1

I wouldn't be posting again today if it hadn't been for the extraordinary turnout at our polling place.....and at just 0605, barely time to open the doors. To set the stage, this is a small precinct in a rural township in a small, mostly rural county in downstate Illinois. The total numbers of registered voters I estimate at 5-600, no higher. In the 20 years we've voted there, I've never been at the polls with more than 3 or 4 other voters in attendance, and most of the time I vote at about the same hour- just after opening. Today there were 25-30 people ahead of us, took us about 15 minutes to get a ballot, and by that time the line snaked out of the building and down the sidewalk. Remarkable, considering the only critters likely to swell the ranks of voters in this area might be rabbits or whitetail deer.

Significance? Probably none.....

Election Day '08

Not much to say, since everything that's really important about today lies in a ritual that has been performed one hundred ten times since the inception of the Republic. In thinking about what might be most apt to say about this particular election, a quote comes to mind:

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."

--Spock in 'Amok Time', Star Trek TOS

A Sentiment for Election Eve

Since I already have something in mind to post tomorrow, today I thought it would be appropriate to juxtapose a comment to the frantic exhortations of the last days prior to the election. "There is no party that is suited to govern except- US." "There are all the incipient disasters you can think of in voting for anybody except- US." "Grass will grow in the streets of thousands of cities and towns in the United States* unless you vote for- US." And so forth.

The truth, for my money:

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

-Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone, 1881

The Constitution of the United States was designed -and by very intelligent men- to accomplish several goals, among them that of denying to any party, group, sect or interest the ability to seize power in this country. So far, it works......so what's the concern? Why not just stay home?

Perhaps it lies simply in the decision to vote, to assume that particular responsibility. Self-government means just that. It means to take responsibility for one's own affairs, to do one's own business.

Perhaps it lies in the fact that constitutions are not the last word. Ultimately, people have the last word. No one destroyed the Roman Empire. As far as anyone can tell, basically people just got tired of it and.....walked away. In our own time, perhaps the most trenchant comment on this view was made by Judge Learned Hand:

“I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

*Warning of what would happen if FDR was elected in 1932.