obama
Among the key documents that continue to be shielded from the public by Obama:
This is a site to save info that I want to savor and to just dink around with.
"[a]ny man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." (Well, maybe 35; certainly 70.) So do the math and you'll guess my politics."( I am over 70!)
(Click on any picture to enlarge and make clearer, TRY THAT ON THE PICTURE OF THE BACK OF MY HEAD TO SEE MY TATTOO!)
Among the key documents that continue to be shielded from the public by Obama:
1. The Law of Common Sense
Never accept a drink from a urologist.
2. The Law of Reality
Never get into fights with ugly people, they have nothing to lose.
3. The Law of Self Sacrifice
When you starve with a tiger, the tiger starves last.
4. The Law of Volunteering
If you dance with a grizzly bear, you had better let him lead.
5. The Law of Avoiding Oversell
When putting cheese in a mousetrap, always leave room for the mouse.
6. The Law of Motivation
Creativity is great, but plagiarism is faster.
7. Boob’s Law
You always find something in the last place you look.
8. Wailer’s Law
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.
9. Law of Probable Dispersal
Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
10. Law of Volunteer Labor
People are always available for work in the past tense.
11. Conway’s Law
In any organization there is one person who knows what is going on. That person must be fired.
12. Iron Law of Distribution
Them that has, gets.
13. Law of Cybernetic Entomology
There is always one more bug.
14. Law of Drunkenness
You can’t fall off the floor.
15. Heeler’s Law
The first myth of management is that it exists.
16. Osborne’s Law
Variables won’t; constants aren’t.
17. Main’s Law
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
18. Weinberg’s Second Law
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilization.
19. Cole’s Law
Thinly chopped cabbage.
As required by Congress since 1995, salaries paid to staffers employed in the West Wing of the White House must be publicly reported. Most of you won’t be pleased to learn that your tax dollars are paying $1,448,500 annually to provide the First Lady, Michelle Obama, with the staff she feels she needs to execute her duties as FLOTUS.
For purposes of comparison, please consult Dan Froomkin’s 2004 White House Staff List-By Salary published in the Washington Post on June 13, 2004. Tallying Laura Bush’s staff from the list provided by Froomkin totals $561,325 in annual salaries for the former First Lady’s staff.
This number does not include White House maintenance or kitchen staff or the occasional pizza night with Barack and Michelle flying in the chef from a St. Louis restaurant to kick back and share some deep dish with 140 of their close personal friends. Nor does it include date nights in Chicago.
And it certainly doesn’t include Michelle’s European vacation with her daughters. In fact, CNS reports that
“the White House will not reveal the cost to taxpayers of the European vacation that first lady Michelle Obama and the president’s two daughters, Malia and Sasha, took last month.”
That’s your substandard writing that’ll put you to sleep; now wake up, we’re returning to the subject at hand. Get ready for some far superior written stuff. Daphne’s comments:
Sarah Palin is not of their tribe, culturally or ideologically. She hasn’t played by their rules or bought into their code of narrowly defined group conduct. She’s a renegade anomaly, wielding all the power and benefit of every last feminist tenet without ever stepping foot on that particular reservation. She proves the current batch of young feminists wrong and obsolete, pulling the curtain back to reveal their lack of substance and relevance in the current game of sexual politics. Women have immense power. All the power they want is sitting in the palm of their hand, Sarah knows this fact and lives her life accordingly. She’s no victim of the patriarchy, she’s her own glorious force of life, putting to lie the vaunted despised vagina status many feminists preach all women are cursed with at birth as some delusional high truth of basic female existence.
Tribes get off on viral hate fests against the others, it’s massively fun stuff. Tapping into that primal vein creates unity, crafts a little momentum and fans the flames to chase down and roast rogue elements threatening the group’s comfortable mindset and debatable version of truth. The hate fueled hunt is a bacchanal most humans never pass up given the right conditions – we like a little slaughter with our communal feasts, women particularly enjoy delivering the verbal coup de grace over wine and cheese. We’re well skilled in that form of pack warfare, ripping an objectionable bitch to pieces is one of our ancient talents. Palin’s found herself on the wrong side of some fierce bitches and they’re having a damn fine time flaying the skin off her hide one strip at a time. I see no mystery to these hypocritical feminist attacks, the young ladies are just hewing to their basic natures and having themselves some good old fashioned, primal fun.
Had I been Sarah’s speechwriter last week, I would have offered her the following text for consideration.
“I am resigning as Governor of Alaska because the well-being of Alaskans and the needs of my family will always come first. There are two main reasons for my resignation:
First, the endless stream of frivolous “ethics” complaints that have been filed against me by my enemies is costing the state of Alaska hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal and administrative expenses, and prevents me from giving the job of governing my complete attention. Ever since I accepted my party’s Vice Presidential nomination last year, these complaints have continued to multiply. I expected them to subside after the presidential election, but they have not. It’s just not fair to ask you, the citizens and taxpayers of Alaska, to keep funding these investigations, with no end in sight, while I am more and more distracted from my real job because of them.
Second, I am resigning because the vicious and nasty attacks on my family, particularly my children, cause me great concern for their well-being. First and foremost, I am a parent and a mother. I cannot, and I will not, ask or expect my children to endure the degree of public hatred and ridicule that I, myself, as a veteran public official would shrug off as a “part of the job.” My husband Todd and I have always known that a certain amount of “family scrutiny” comes with the territory of being an elected official, but we never dreamed that the focus on our children would reach this level of sustained, targeted assault by the mass media and my political enemies. I will not sacrifice my children’s dignity for anything.
Now, let me clarify why I am NOT resigning. I am NOT a quitter. If I could give the people of Alaska 150 percent of my effort without the daily distraction of frivolous legal claims, if I could serve the people of Alaska without sacrificing my children to the cause of perverse comic relief, I would absolutely LOVE to keep being your dedicated Governor. YOU gave me the privilege of leading Alaska, and I have never taken that privilege for granted. There is nothing I would rather do than finish my term. But I cannot focus on that job, and because of these distractions, I must let someone who IS capable of giving you 150 percent take over.
I am NOT resigning to pursue other political ambitions, although I predict that my critics will accuse me of such selfish motives. That’s okay, let them speculate, I can’t stop them. But I want you to know that my professional plans for the future are undefined and unknown. Yes, I hope to help the Republican party in any capacity possible. Above all else, I believe in the good will and patriotism of Americans, and wherever I am, whatever I am doing — I will be working in my own way to protect, preserve, and defend core American values.
Again, I must thank you, the people of Alaska, for entrusting me with the job of leading this great and beautiful state, and for giving me the opportunity to serve you. It has been the greatest honor of my life, aside from being a mother. My heart and my home will always be with you, here in Alaska.
God Bless Alaska, and God Bless America.”
Today, however, the concept of quantum weirdness seems also to apply to politics in America.
Clearly, we are no longer living in a world of normal reality. For the first time in US history, we have a president who hates his own country. A president who is on the side of America's enemies, not on the side of America.
(The latest example, explained this week by Jack Kelly, regards Honduras.)
We have a media who reveres and worships as a demi-god a president who hates his, and their, country.
We have a government spending trillions of dollars it does not have in a seemingly determined effort to destroy everyone's life savings via inflation.
We have a Congress that passes the largest tax increase in the history of the world (literally) via a 1,300 page Climate Bill that no one has read and based on utterly fraudulent science.
We have a governor who goes so around the bend that he trashes his wife, four children, his career and life for some broad in Argentina.
We have a people who go completely bananas with grief over the suicide of a washed-up pedophilic fruitcake ex-rock star.
This is societal quantum weirdness, a dissociation from normal reality, of which additional examples could be endlessly provided. Yet extreme, unhinged, over-the-top weirdness is normally what you get when you get close to a tipping point, close to the bursting of a bubble.
Madnesses of crowds are most often economic, such as the dotcom craze or the housing bubble. A lot of folks lose a lot of money, and that's it. But when such a madness pervades an entire society, the consequences can be far more dramatic. Such a madness is often the runup to a revolution.
Revolutions are chaotic, dangerous things. We were blessed-by-Providence lucky in our first one in 1776. We got freedom and George Washington, while the French with theirs in 1789 got the guillotine and Napoleon. Which will we get in the coming Second American Revolution?
The pervasive quantum weirdness we are experiencing is clearly pointing towards mass societal breakdown. We will emerge out the other side of it with either more freedom or more fascism. You can bet it will be the latter unless there is a planned, concerted, purposeful, and organized effort to secure the former.
The focus of such an effort should be clear: constitutional government. Advocates of freedom in America have an extraordinary advantage over the advocates of fascism: the legal foundation of the country, the Constitution. But will they take that advantage?
There is no constitutional basis whatever, for example, no enumerated power for a single page of the 1,300 pages Climate Bill. None for 90% of the laws, regulations, programs, and agencies of the federal government.
Yet if there is not a Movement to Restore the Constitution that takes hold of the Republican Party - the only political entity that can realistically stop the Democrat drive towards fascism - then the end result of our quantum madness will be Darkness at Noon.
The July 4th Tea Parties - now registered to take place in 1,347 cities - could be the start of such a constitutional movement. If they remain an amorphous unfocused complaint against "too much" government regulation and taxes, then the tea party movement will fizzle.
Only with a clearly understandable and positive focus on what it wants to achieve, not just what it opposes, can it reach a threshold capable of driving the direction of coming chaos towards freedom and away from fascism.
So if you are participating in a tea party this Saturday the 4th, consider doing what you can for it to have a constitutional focus.
We're all in this together. It's up to all of us individually to help enable our country to escape from quantum weirdness, to become normal and sane once again.
[Note: for a well-thought discussion of how quantum weirdness is no stranger than "Newtonian weirdness" - to this day, science really doesn't understand gravity - see this essay by physicist Paul Quincey.]
There is an eMail I recently received from a friend. It contained a link to the Babalublog about someone who was waxing philosophic about the greatness that is the worker's paradise known as Cuba. I had something to say right away, but I held off for a few dasy in order to take care of some other things, and get a few minutes set aside to write about Cuba.
First, unlike about 99.99% of the population in America, I have actually been to Cuba. I didn't go there as part of some bullshit potemkin village tour, or to betray the US by deliberately badmouthing these United States like Noam Chomsky.
No, I was there for other reasons. I was a sentry on the fenceline which seperates the US Naval Base at Guantanamo bay from Communist Cuba. I loved the character of Col. Nathan Jessup in "A few good men," btw.
Now, I am a medical student, and I worked for a while as an EMT on an ambulance. One question I get sometimes from those who do not work in medicine is the dreaded "So, what's the worst thing you have ever seen?"
btw, We generally hate that question. The bad stuff we have seen has broken our hearts, and asking us about it is like asking us about an ex-girlfriend who ripped our heart out and did a Mexican hat dance on it. It's something we would prefer not to remember, but we cannot forget.
Anyway, they ask me what the worst thing I have ever seen is. I have a fair selection to choose from. I have seen soccer moms torn apart in MVAs. I have seen children who had fallen out the window of a moving vehicle. I have seen 15 year old girls in labor. I have seen the second of premature twins desperately trying to live against all odds gasping for air like a golddfish out of water, while his dead brother is beside him. I have seen a lot of stuff which I really could have lived for the rest of my life without seeing, and I wouldn't miss it.
But the worst thing I ever saw was in Cuba.
There was, at the time of this, the policy of the Clinton administration to deny access to the US Naval base by refugees. One day, while I was serving as part of a reactionary force, a group of refugees were spotted heading towards the base. As the reactionary force, it was our duty to react to whatever came up. We did so in this case as well.
UPDATE: There seems to be some confusion. Since the transpiration of these events over a decade ago, I am of the understanding that US policy towards Cuban refugees has changed.
We deployed in the vicinity of the fenceline. We met the refugees as they approached, and with weapns in hand, denied them entry to the base. They had managed to traverse a kilometer deep minefield covered by towers with machine guns to get to this point. They had left everything they had ever known in order to get out of there. And we stopped them. We had orders. We had our orders, so we followed them. After enough shouting and threatening, the refugees eventualy gave up and headed back. Back into Cuba. While I was sweating my balls off under the hot sun, these refugees made a mistake. They had gotten through the minefield the first time, but they had not followed in their own footsteps going back. While I was thinking to myself how I wish these people would hurry up and go back so that I could head back to someplace with air-conditioning, one of them stepped on a landmine.
That explosion touched my world.
Then, I witnessed the worst thing I ever saw in my life.
As the dust cloud wafted away from those refugees, nobody ran. Nobody screamed. Nobody said anything.
They just laid down to die in the middle of a minefield that was the sun's anvil.
Think of how badly you would not want to die like that. Think about that real hard. Think about slowly dying of exposure in a minefield. Think about what would make you risk such an outcome. Think about it real hard, and then remember that as bad as that was, it was better than going back.
Despair was once described to me by a college english professor as "the death throes of hope." That day in the minefield was despair incarnate, and it was the worst thing I have ever seen with mine own eyes.
Make a fucking documentary of that.
One good thing that has come from Gov. Palin’s resignation, is I’ve been able to beef up my inventory of opinions it seems find support from a clear majority, even though they’re just plain dumbass opinions. They come to be because a lot of everyday folks feel socially obliged to feel opinionated about things, but haven’t had the time, energy, inclination or incentive to form opinions the way we all know opinions should be formed. So a lot of them take the easy-out. They say whatever sounds good, and from then on they get an ego-investment in this arbitrarily-selected opinion, that ends up being a dumbass opinion much more often than not.
It is how we use the democratic process to make our worst decisions.
It is the best evidence we have that we need to make the voting process more difficult, and not easier.
These are opinions that derogate the person who gives them ink, a voice, or an otherwise good name. There is a lot more going on with these opinions than just me disagreeing with them. For example — I don’t think we should legalize prostitution or drugs; I don’t think we should even be seriously discussing it. But I understand why well-informed, intelligent, good people think we should. I understand why people think women should be allowed to abort, and even have their abortions publicly funded, although I disagree with that too. These opinions go well beyond those. These opinions, and their popularity, are ugly remnants of this mindset we’ve been nurturing that all passionate things must be respected. It isn’t so. If you hold these opinions, you are a problem. You are uninformed. They are cries for help. They are shorthand notation for “I desperately require some way of forming an inflamed opinion but I don’t know how to get ahold of the information I need to form it responsibly.”
They are the opinion equivalent of driving several miles down the highway with your blinker on.
30. Together, we can take on global warming and we can win. Save the planet. Together we can do this.
29. We’ve got to get some more money into the education system, because our children are worth it.
28. Seventy languages in use in a school district is a sign that it is a rich tapestry of diversity, and that is good for everybody.
27. Any statement that qualifies “tax cuts” as an expenditure, such as comparing the “Bush tax cuts” with real spending plans.
26. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus.
25. The trouble with our justice system is that the people who decide the cases don’t have enough empathy.
24. We’ve got to do something to help the unemployed, like taxing the snot out of the businesses that just might hire them.
23. It’s going to take Barack Obama a long, long time to fix all this stuff, and He is trying His best.
22. If women were in charge of the world there wouldn’t be any wars.
21. FOX News tells lots of lies, but I can’t come up with any examples.
20. You know what we really need to change? If a guy has lots of sex he’s a stud, if a woman does the same thing she’s a slut. SO unfair!
19. Everything that needs inventing has been invented. Men, drop out of school, learn to rap and do your crunches.
18. We’ve got to change our policies because our (unnamed) allies in Europe don’t like us.
17. I can’t approve of Barack Obama’s policies. But I still like Him personally, and that’s what really matters.
16. We must all be forced to call gay people “married.” It’s a civil rights issue. For them. Not for anyone else. Just for them.
15. We have to raise the tax rate on the rich, because that makes us all a better people.
14. The Earth is sure to be doomed if I use traditional sandwich baggies. But it’s got a fighting chance if I use these ones that are 25% lighter.
13. Sarah Palin isn’t a real woman; she’s a Republican.
12. I know exactly what my thousand dollar car needs: Three thousand dollar rims.
11. If we drill, we won’t see a single drop of oil for x years. Besides, adorable polar bears, penguins, pristine environment blah blah blah.
10. We should not have attacked Iraq because Iraq didn’t attack us.
9. I wanna watch American Idol!
8. Hooters? Isn’t that a strip bar or something?
7. The second amendment is out of date because all them founders couldn’t have envisioned nukular weapons and what-not
6. Those illegal aliens are just trying to make a better life for their kids so we should coddle them all and make them citizens.
5. Vote for Obama! Hope! Change!
4. If your kid doesn’t feel like paying attention it’s a learning disability. Medicate him.
3. No one’s going to be safe until we get rid of all these guns we have lying around.
2. Culottes and clamdiggers. That’s what hip fashionable hot looking women should wear this summer. Who wants to see a gorgeous woman’s bare thigh anyway.
1. Palin quit because of a scandal. Yup. After all that digging, months and months, the entire Fourth Estate…they left one hidden. Boy, do they feel foolish.
Misogyny has very little to do with why Sarah Palin continues to be attacked by the Left. This has become a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The hatred for Sarah Palin is because she is absolute poison to the American communist movement. Call them Democrats if you wish, but I prefer to call them what they are. They are no longer my father’s Democrats.
Palin represents God, family and country (in that order). These themes are anathema to communists and Palin’s personal popularity must be scaring them to death. In their view she must be destroyed by any means necessary. If you think she’s being attacked simply because she’s female you’re really missing the point.
She’s being destroyed because her convictions are a direct threat to the Left’s “progressive” march toward communism. Not socialism… communism. Nikita Khrushchev warned us 50 years ago that we would be defeated from within. Its here. Call it what you want, but its here in the person of The One.
Communism requires the removal of God, religion and the resulting moral authority from society. Moral authority is whatever the state says it is. Believers are to be exterminated or driven undergound. Tolerance has become simple intolerance of religious morality’s influence on society. Palin is a direct threat to their ability to further degrade morality.
Communism benefits from the breakdown of the nuclear family. For decades we’ve been sold on the idea that “family” should be defined in any one of a million different ways. Palin is the personification of the traditional family. Again, Sarah Palin is a threat.
Some of Sarah Palin’s most vicious critics have been women. Women whose interests are not of God, family and country. They don’t detest Palin because she is a woman. They hate her because of the TYPE of woman she is. They hate that she has religious convictions. They hate that she has a traditional family. They hate that she loves her country.
Sarah is old school. Pay close attention and you’ll notice that ANYBODY of prominence who is old school is meeting the same fate as Sarah. Misogyny has little to do with it, but if you continue to take the bait I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to keep setting the hook for you.
Jim Geraghty had the best explanation for this extravagant, unprecedented hatred directed against Palin:
Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: “She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Down’s, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands . . . That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it’s not just enough to say, ‘I disagree with you,’; she has to be repudiated and crushed.”
And now, I would submit a slight refining of that idea, that the seeming happiness of Palin’s life is a 24-7 irritant because it challenges the way some liberals see the world.
Liberals believe that their ideas, philosophy, worldview, and policies liberate believers, and that the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves as rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders, and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren’t as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural superegos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they can’t always do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.
Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn’t satisfy you, burden you with children you don’t want, repress your passions, and trap you in a empty, boring, and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.
I am heartbroken.
Only this morning, as a comment to this post at GM's Place about the ongoing campaign to destroy Sarah Palin, I had this to say:
Hatred can have many geneses. Palin-hatred might partake of several.First, there's Governor Palin's exceedingly "conventional" home life, in which she's happy and stable. Quite a lot of people will never know such a life. They envy it in the Ayn Rand sense: "hatred of the good for being the good." The syndrome afflicts left-liberals disproportionately.
Then there's Palin's extraordinary beauty and grace. It's been said, with some justice, that politics is celebrity for ugly people; there's certainly quite a lot of ugliness on the Left. It's also been said, by P. J. O'Rourke and Ann Coulter among others, that the beautiful women are the most reliable indicators of political trends -- and the beautiful women are trending to the Right. That has to sting the vitriolic harpies on the Left.
Then there's Palin's political success. She busted every barrier the Alaskan Establishment set before her, pretty much without outside assistance. This is a "twofer:" first, because her political success owes nothing to the feminist movement, and second, because she's a conservative Republican. That puts a spear into the Left's notions that conservatives can't abide a strong woman.
Then there's Palin's sincerity about her convictions. She walks it like she talks it: devoutly Christian; pro-life even at her own expense; utterly faithful to her husband despite their frequent protracted absences from one another; loving and supportive of all her children, including her soldier son and her unwed mother daughter; and incorruptible in the performance of her duties, where so many other pols would be setting themselves up to cash in after their time in office has ended (at least). Name a left-liberal pol who left office poorer than he went in; some of them even refrigerate their bribes.
Finally, but by no means least, she wears figure-flattering clothes, grooms herself beautifully, and walks gracefully and confidently in high heels. Most women on the Left resent having to shave their legs -- some don't bother -- wear clothing that would look well on an alley-dwelling wino, and think high heels are a Republican plot.
A teenaged character in Jack Vance's novel Araminta Station asks his father why a woman hates him and Dad so. Part of the answer is that "You are everything that her son is not." I'd say that applies to Palin-hatred, as well.
Just a few minutes ago, Sarah Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin shocked the political word Friday by announcing that she will step down at the end of the month and transfer power to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.Palin made the announcement from her home in Wasilla, flanked by her husband, Todd, and family and state commissioners....
Palin, who defeated incumbent Gov. Murkowski in a primary in 2006,.gained national prominence when GOP presidential candidate John McCain picked her as his running mate last year. But her approval ratings in the state have skidded in recent months.
Palin has been dogged in recent months by ethics inquiries. Her office last month announced the 15th dismissal of an ethics complaint against her or one of her staff.
The campaign to bring down the best conservative officeholder in the country has succeeded...by wearing away Governor Palin's patience. Not one accusation ever stuck. Every complaint brought against her was dismissed. But each one taxed her time, her zeal, and her bank account. It took a million mosquito bites to bring down this elephant, but when substance is lacking, numbers will sometimes suffice.
It's time for freedom lovers to take a no-prisoners / no-mercy attitude toward the Democrats, the Left, the Mainstream Media, and the Republican Party establishment. All of these have contributed to Palin's departure. It is vital that none of them ever know another restful night. Dog their private lives. Dog their finances. Dog their associations. Pepper them with hostile questions and accusations at every imaginable turn.
Take vengeance for Sarah Palin.DENVER, Feb. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ )
Says the flibbertigibbet, I screwed around on my husband, so I guess marriage can’t work out for anyone…plus, I get to write a column!
On marriage: Let’s call the whole thing off
Author Sandra Tsing Loh is ending her marriage. Is it time you did, too?
By Sandra Tsing Loh
updated 6:27 a.m. PT, Mon., June 22, 2009Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we bewailed the fate of our children.
And yet at the end of the day — literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks — when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized…no. Heart-shattering as this moment was — a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history — I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in “Against Love,” and as everyone knows, good relationships take work.
Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I — like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers — have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half — sometimes more — of the money…I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.
Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother — which is to say, my failure as a wife — I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
:
Imagine driving with me now to Rachel’s house for our new 40-something social hobby — the Girls’ Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realize — given my confessed extramarital affair, avowed childhood desire to see my father explode into flames, and carpet of tattered Happy Meal wrappers — I may not strike you as the most reliable explicator of modern marriage. Still, we forge on, and what I’d like to do now is recant for a moment and not be quite so hard on marriage, which I think is a very good fit for some people.
:
[Helen] Fisher, a women’s cult figure and an anthropologist, has long argued that falling in love — and falling out of love — is part of our evolutionary biology and that humans are programmed not for lifelong monogamy, but for serial monogamy.“Why Him? Why Her?” explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:
The Explorer — the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.
The Builder — the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.
The Director — the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.
The Negotiator — the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.
Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.
Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!”
The nitwit. Guess Fisher forgot about that fifth one there. Poor schmucks that are married to these nitwits; they’re about to lose half their stuff because they made the awful mistake of allowing their nitwit wives to read books.
Yup, it’s really as bad as people think it is. Middle-aged married women with a Cinderella complex, angry that life isn’t perfect and stress free, get all sauced up and talk each other into divorces. Then they bury their gross wrinkly noses in hateful chick-books carefully designed to expunge any doubts about it that might remain, download some hunky stud off the innerwebs, and the poor schlub who was stupid enough to marry them loses half his stuff.
And then they become authorities on marriage, graciously counseling women who are more mature and mentally balanced than they are. Making craploads of money, if they get lucky…and still pulling in that alimony check. So that girls’-night-out wine-buying slush fund stays all slushy.
This is the kind of thing that makes me think our whole society needs a reboot. In a number of our most treasured institutions, the rules are made by whoever among us have proven themselves to be, without any doubt, the most dysfunctional.
Many of my readers sent me this. It's sumpin' for all the liberals who have been lambasting Chimpy McHalliburton Bushitler during the past eight years.
What If George W. Bush had ...made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the Fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had misspelled the word advice would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potato as “proof” of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on “Earth Day”, would you have concluded he’s a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually “get” what happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how he is inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?
So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 10 weeks -- so you'll have three years and nine-and-a-half months to come up with an answer.
I meant to get to this from last week — but given that its a 140 year chart, I guess one week won’t matter much (via Ron Griess of The Chart Store):




Michael Jackson embodied diversity. He *was* diversity, all in one body. Witness:
He was born a black boy from Gary Indiana.
He died a white man from Hollywood.
He loved men, women, and children. Literally, evidently.
There wasn’t a religion he didn’t call his own.
He’d breathe oxygen, sometimes with nitrogen and sometimes without.
He had a large nose.
He had a small nose.
He had no nose.
He had a cleft chin.
He had no cleft chin.
He had no chin.
He had frizzy hair.
He had wavy hair.
He had straight hair.
He had burning hair.
He’d wear two gloves. He’d wear one glove. He’d wear no gloves.
He’d wear gold lame’ jock straps OUTSIDE of his clothes and, we must presume, inside as well.
Yes, truly, Michael Jackson was all things to all people.

Thanks to new drilling technologies that are unlocking substantial amounts of natural gas from shale rocks, the nation’s estimated gas reserves have surged by 35 percent, according to a study due for release on Thursday.
Estimated natural gas reserves rose to 2,074 trillion cubic feet in 2008, from 1,532 trillion cubic feet in 2006, when the last report was issued. This includes the proven reserves compiled by the Energy Department of 237 trillion cubic feet, as well as the sum of the nation’s probable, possible and speculative reserves.
The new estimates show “an exceptionally strong and optimistic gas supply picture for the nation,” according to a summary of the report, which is issued every two years by a group of academics and industry experts that is supported by the Colorado School of Mines.
The amount of natural gas available for production in the United States has soared 58% in the past four years, driven by a drilling boom and the discovery of huge new gas fields in Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, a new study says.
...the Potential Gas Committee's study was prepared by industry geologists who analyzed individual gas fields using seismic imagery and production data provided by gas producers. The surge in gas resources is the result of a five-year-long drilling boom spurred by high natural-gas prices, easy credit and new technologies that allowed companies to produce gas from a dense kind of rock known as shale. The first big shale formation to be discovered, the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, Texas, is now the country's top-producing gas field, and companies have made other huge discoveries in Arkansas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Together, the shale fields account for roughly a third of U.S. gas resources, according to the Potential Gas Committee.
Today’s report substantiates what I’ve been saying for years: there’s plenty of natural gas in the U.S. I launched the Pickens Plan a year ago to help reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and using our abundant supply of natural gas as a transition fuel for fleet vehicles and heavy-duty trucks is a key element of that plan. On the same day this report is going out, diesel prices are again on the rise, squeezing the trucking industry. Now more than ever we need to take action to enact energy reform that will immediately reduce oil imports.
The 2,074 trillion cubic feet of domestic natural gas reserves cited in the study is the equivalent of nearly 350 billion barrels of oil, about the same as Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves.