Not really much of a match. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (254)
Post contains 12 words, total size 1 kb.

This question perplexes some men.

The Savvy Man looks upon it not as a trap but something close to a gift.

Alternate Gambit: Offer up very vague statements that sound like criticisms, but are so without meaning that no one can pin you down on quite what you mean.

Example One: Well, she's got a bit of wallaby sort of look to her, doesn't she?

Example Two: She's a bit diagonal for my tastes.

Another Savvy Man Answer: RW wrote:

My wife once asked me "is it true that all men really think about having a threesome? If so, who do you think about?"

Answer: "Yes. And, two of you."

Outstanding.

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (288)
Post contains 141 words, total size 1 kb.

I have two stories about Piers Morgan and am trying to connect them up.

First up, "Piers Morgan demonstrates how emotion triumphs over reason on cable news." After noting how Piers Morgan and his designated Victim Prop resorted again and again to cheap emotionalism in an alleged debate on gay marriage...

Again, in this authorÂ’s opinion, the intellectual underpinnings of [the] argument against gay marriage are especially frail. Morgan probably could, if he chose, dissect and dismantle [that] argument with facts of his own. Orman most certainly could have. Neither chose to, however, because they were content to express their feelings on the matter, and the audience ate it up. Why would either rely on a dispassionate argument in favor of gay marriage when the audience rewards them so for merely expressing their feelings?

There is a deeply fulfilling and powerful intellectual debate ongoing in the print and online community about gay marriage today, just as there is regarding nearly every contentious issue of the day. Readers of this post are probably aware of that, and are likely to be voracious consumers of that debate. The viewers of programs like MorganÂ’s are, sadly, cheated out of that experience. One would hope that Morgan thinks highly enough of his own audience to treat them to an educated discussion on the issues at hand, rather than to rely solely on the self-evident high regard he has for his opinion.

I linked this recently, but Sacred Honor compels me to link it again: Adam Carolla goes off on Piers Morgan's remorseless narcissism. Note particularly Carolla acknowledges we all have this beast of narcissism inside us (or, rather, we who seek public attention all do), but that there used to be a decorum about it, a Social Contract about how much you were permitted to blatantly talk about yourself in any five minute period. Say, about for about one minute in five, so long as you could gin up a plausible pretext to return to every narcissist's favorite subject, the Almighty Me. You couldn't just talk about yourself for five minutes straight, without even pretending to have anything else in mind but a celebration of the Almighty Me.

But that decorum is largely gone. Those who breach it pay no social penalty for doing so -- indeed, as Carolla notes, they're actually socially rewarded now.

Linking these two ideas about Piers Morgan: It occurs to me that while there is a selfish, ego-centric aspect to ideas -- we are, after all, proud of the ideas we hold, in perhaps a way we shouldn't be -- emotion, on the other hand, is entirely about the Self.

Ideas -- even if we are egotistically invested in them -- remain, fundamentally, external to us. What we call "abstract." They are Specters that reside in a Plane of Ideas outside of us. We champion one Specter over another, and surely there is an element of self-justification in our choices, but, at the end of the day, Ideas are owned by no man. They are owned, briefly, by their first creator, but after that briefest period of intellectual ownership, they have no owner and are simply commonly-held good which any man can utilize. They are outside of us. Ideas shape us but they are not us.

Emotion, on the other hand, is purely and entirely about the self. Emotions do not exist or have importance outside the self that feels them.

While the ego may be protective of the Ideas it chooses, the ego is not merely protective of emotions; emotions are the ego, and the ego is emotion.

I note this because every statement of emotion is unavoidably a statement about the Self. This is the Narcissists's Playground. At last, an opportunity to talk endlessly about oneself! Ideas, quotations, and lines of argument must be frequently cited to external sources. Credit must be given to others. What a hateful thought to the Narcissist.

But Emotion? O Joyous Thing, Emotion! We are all the authors and owners of our own Emotions, and undeniable experts on ourselves and our feelings! We need not share credit with anyone! For our emotions are Us and when we speak of our emotions we Sing a Joyous Song of Ourselves!

It takes hard work and talent to craft and argument -- but, actually, anyone can do that, can't he? So long he has something on the ball.

But only Piers Morgan can tell you what Piers Morgan is feeling. That is specific to he himself; that Glory is his alone.

I think this is what I find so bothersome about Meghan McCain's constant use of the words "young people" in justifying herself. She's not talking about external ideas that could be of interest to young people; primarily she is just asserting that her personal status as (sort of) young should make she herself compelling to young people. Rather than advertising her ideas (should she stumble upon one some day) she relentlessly and remorselessly advertises herself (but always with the unmet promise that one day she will offer an idea external to herself that Young People might think is just swell).

And make no mistake, when she says things like "Young people need a young spokesperson" or the like, what she really means, barely disguised at all, barely comporting with the decorum Carolla mentions, is that "Young people need the Almighty Me."

I think Carolla is right; at some point we stopped telling the Narcissists that they were boors, and stopped imposing the social penalty of Shunning on them, and instead started pouring gasoline of attention on the already-blazing fire of self-regard.

We should probably stop that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:08 AM | Comments (371)
Post contains 948 words, total size 6 kb.

Usual rules.....first correct answer gets a Platinum Membership with the optional ampersand utility.

Extra year of membership for:
a)correct engine or
b) Moron who owns it.

The rule committee has agreed to a special prize for most elegant answer that may or may not be correct: One Get-Out-of-Barrel-Free card.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:55 AM | Comments (184)
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

Pretty good!

And welcome back, commenters! After the comments were down for two hours, I started to wig out -- without interaction, this site is pretty dead. Plus, as I was the only one talking (well, and Drew and Maetenloch), I became suddenly aware of the silence and realized, "Shit, I have to work. I have to post stuff."

Also a big welcome back to Albie Damned, who I'm told is out of surgery and now able to play in the comments again! more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (369)
Post contains 93 words, total size 1 kb.

Of course. From the IBT.

Royal Mayo, a lifelong resident of the Ohio city that gained national infamy following the rape of the girl by two Steubenville High School football players, says that attention should be focused on the role of the young woman, whom he calls the “alleged victim,” saying she was drunk and wanted to go out with one of the football players. He also claims that other teens involved in the incident were let off easy, because they were “well-connected.”

...

In a phone interview with the International Business Times, Mayo described the 16-year-old girl as the “alleged victim” and said she might have been having consensual sex. “She said her mother brought her to the party, at 3 o’clock, with a bottle of vodka,” Mayo said. “Where did you get it, young lady? You brought it from home? Where’d you get it? You came to the party with your mother.”

Mayo added that she might have been a willing participant, apparently unfazed by the inflammatory nature of such statements. “They’re alleging she got raped; she’s acknowledging that she wanted to leave with Trent. Her friends say she pushed them away as she went and got into the car, twice telling them, ‘I know what I’m doing; I’m going with Trent,’” Mayo said.

The Media will not report this, of course, because it tends to discredit the Democratic coalition, by association.

Wouldn't this demand some coverage, given that Todd Akin's remarks had flooded the airwaves during campaign season? But that would assume the media decides which stories to run based on news-worthiness or neutral standards, an entirely false assumption.

The media picks which ancillary political stories to champion based solely on one criterion: Whether they discredit, indirectly, the conservative cause.

The Media's game is despicable. Their "ethic" of pretend objectivity means that they do not address issues head-on, honestly. If they were to honestly object to, and argue against, Republican/conservative positions, two good results would flow:

1, they'd be outing themselves as far as political bias, which would be honest, and informative for their viewers.

2, the argument being honestly joined, with the positions of the various partisans (including those of the press) plainly identified, a rational conversation could be had.

But they don't do this. Which leads to the Worst of All Possible Bias Reporting -- rather than honestly attack Republican positions through argument, they instead seek to discredit them by a welter of negative reporting on the various sins and gaffes of Republican personalities. They do not join the argument honestly, but dishonestly, and not frontally, but from the side, by feigning neutrality on the position under discussion but making sure that every wart on every Republican face is magnified 100x.

Todd Akin's rape comment is worthy of endless repetition, and not just in Missouri, where it was relevant, but across the nation, to discredit each and every other Republican running in each and every other race, including the Presidential one. The endless repetition was intended to, and did in fact manage to, discredit all other Republican office-seekers. Note well: It did not refute their positions, but it discredited them personally.

Imagine an alternative world where the media was still biased, but honest: In such a world, the media could, rather than running this game in which they endlessly regurgitate negative reporting on Republican gaffes and scandals (both real and contrived), they could simply take ten minutes at the end of every news-hour to offer their opinions and beliefs candidly, and make honest arguments about the issues they care about. 50 minutes of straight reporting, unbiased; and then ten minutes of honest, out-in-the-open partisan agitation.

Because their "ethics" supposedly prevent them from openly taking a side, however, they instead inject their opinions into all 60 minutes of every hour. Todd Akin's views on rape are endlessly reported to discredit his entire party; this NAACP president's odd views on rape are never spoken of, not even a single time, by the liberal establishment media. (IBD, which reported this, is not liberal establishment media.)

In law this technique is called "collateral attack" -- you're not challenging the actual issue head-on, because you can't (for example, because you have forfeit your right to challenge it by missing a filing date) but instead mount a logically unrelated attack on your opponent, hoping to achieve the same goal as a frontal attack would have. Different tactic, different argument, separate logic -- but mounted for the same goal.

The media is nothing but collateral attacks all the live-long day, because "ethics" supposedly compel them not to make any frontal ones. (And this "ethic" incidentally is a corporate code created to maximize profits by withholding the organization's actual partisan bias from the public and thus permitting it, in theory, to appeal to every possible partisan in the entire universe of potential news viewers. It does not exist to better inform the public; it exists precisely to keep them less informed. It does not exist to keep reportage free of bias; it exists to keep reportage full of stealth, unacknowledged bias, a much more potent method of propaganda than straight-ahead argumentation would ever be.)

It's dishonest and cowardly and shameful.

You cannot trust someone whose first words to you are a blatant lie. And the media's first, second, and last words to you are lies.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (346)
Post contains 934 words, total size 6 kb.

So says Meghan McCain.

I couldn't disagree more:

You know, Footloose was about a town where they didn't let young people have news. And look what happened there.

"No news is good news." — The Bible

Posted by: Ace at 07:17 AM | Comments (404)
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.

• Dems Are Happy Judd Didn't Run Because They Have A Deep Bench Or Something
  
• Alabama Pols, Frothing Racist Democrat An Embarrassment To The State
  
• Cory Booker May Mandate Armed Guards And Curfews For Newark Businesses After Wave Of Violence
  
• China Is Currently Attacking The US Computer System
  
• Little Hope Seen For Millions Priced Out Of Health Overhaul
  
• US Sends Stealth Bombers To Korea
  
• Surging Student Loan Debt Is Crushing The System
  
• The Story Behind Walmart's Bare Shelves
  
• Cyprus Banks Re-Open With Armed Guards
  
• BRICs Now The New Imperialists In Africa
  
• Don't Draw A Penis On Your Sleeping Roommates Face
  
• A Blow To Teachers Unions In Indiana
  
• A Bipartisan Abdication
  
• 110,197,000 People With STDs In The US. Yay Feminism!
  
• Faber, Not Even Gold Will Save You From What's Coming
  
• Reason To Homeschool Your Kid Pat 1,234
  
• Two Year Old Picks Lock To Sister's Room In Order To Get A Stuffed Animal He Wants
  
• Man Rammed By Bison And Survives
  
• PA Unions Fighting In Pennsylvania To Maintain State Control Of Alcohol
  
• Penguins Trade For Jarome Iginla
  

Follow me on twitter

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:07 AM | Comments (532)
Post contains 186 words, total size 3 kb.

Happy Thursday.

Slow start around here today. Hopefully Vic has the goods.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (397)
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, the cat is out of the bag now.

The U.S. Department of Education said 6.8 million federal student loan borrowers are now in default, representing $85 billion in debt. [$85B? The sequester was how big?] And the department's systems for collecting the bad loans are struggling to keep up.

The Department's Office of Inspector General found in December that more than $1.1 billion in defaulted student loans were stuck in a sort of computer limbo.

"The Department is not pursuing collection remedies and borrowers are unable to take steps to remove their loans from default status," wrote Assistant Inspector General for Audit Patrick Howard in the December 13 report, which blames a system installed in 2011 by Xerox that is supposed to transfer defaulted loan accounts from servicing companies to private collection agencies. Those collection firms have considerable power, including the ability to garnish up to 15 percent of a borrower's wages. But none of that can happen until the accounts are transferred.

This looks like a pretty expensive glitch now that its been going on for a couple of years, but I'm sure Xerox is darkening the skies and clogging airports with consultants, TOP MEN, EXPERTS, the freaking PROS FROM DOVER and it'll all be sorted out in a jiffy(*).

(*) In government parlance, a jiffy is roughly about 20 years +/-5yr

Comments seem to be hosed again...NOW you can panic

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:55 PM | Comments (84)
Post contains 270 words, total size 2 kb.