Election Regret

It's hard to admit when you were wrong. Or so I've heard. (That's a joke, son.)

Grant Stinchfield regrets voting for Donald Trump, and in this article he details in a pretty comprehensive way the reasons he voted for him, and he demonstrates how to express your failings with humility. Excerpt:

I fell victim to my own hatred. Donald Trump offered me a vehicle to stick it to the bloviating bureaucrats I despise. I dedicated my life to exposing self-promoting career politicians and their love of big government programs. Trump was the guy who was going to scare the hell out of the “establishment,” the guy who was going to turn Washington on its head. So I voted with anger in my heart. I gave my vote to Trump with expectation he would find his way by putting smart constitutional conservatives by his side. Trump didn’t find his way; he got lost.

Sadly, I did exactly what my mother always warned me not to do. I made an important decision while in an emotionally fragile state of anger and despair. My vote for Trump amounted to a vendetta against the ruling class of DC career politicians. I made a mistake.

It’s why I am publicly apologizing to governors Rick Perry and Scott Walker. I abandoned them way too early. I now realize their level-headed grasp on conservative values and principles would have made them the perfect candidates to carry a torch of limited government straight into the White House.

Hatred, anger, despair.... These things characterize every Trump voter I know personally. This is a brief, honest article by someone who came to their senses although too late. They "gave in to the dark side." Where's Yoda when you need him?

Stinchfield ends by acknowledging that he will vote for whoever gets the GOP nomination in the general election, including Trump. I will do the same. It's just a shame to be forced to vote for someone so woefully unprepared for running in a general Presidential election, let alone actually being President. But we will never have to suffer through that tragedy. He will never win.

Happy Birthday, Chuck!

I LOVE this video. If I had a lot of time today I would kick off a discussion with my commentary, but maybe Pik, K and BtEG can do so in the comment section.

"The slurs start right here."

"You want to get it right... let's get it right."

LOL

They could have just called one of us...

...and we would have told them. But instead, a study was conducted that found that "Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments" or as it is put in the connecting link on MSNBC (hat tip goes to reader Diane for emailing this to me) "organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

I guess this makes it official. But to me it goes in the "no duh" category with established phenomena like divorce rates being higher among Hollywood stars and kids being more likely to drop out of high schools in the inner city.

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

"There's something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves," says Eskine. "And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess."

A little bit? You guess?? Come on. These people will bring their own snacks to your party and put them front and center, and then they go around telling everyone to eat their stuff because its organic. No lie.

Oh, I loved the concluding quip:

"At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling," says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. "So I'll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up."

Woman after my own heart.

Wendell Berry's Imagined World

Here are some of my favorite paragraphs in the very good article by James Schall on Wendell Berry.

The stark localism of Berry is very attractive in many ways. He wants to get us out of the cities and back to the land, to know our neighbor. He wants us to preserve the land and in the process of preserving ourselves and our planet. It is a majestic vision, no doubt. Yet, man is a city living being. The exodus from the land was not merely a plot against mankind but rather a fulfillment of man and the city in which the higher things could take place. It is not that great and human things do not take place in the economic order, but that they are not enough, do not speak what man is. Berry himself, after all, is also a college professor. Scenes of him with his horses and plough are striking, but so are those of his being given a medal by the president. Without the city, he could not speak.

Yes: were the guys who invented your microphone and started your publishing company "boomers" or "stickers"?

The Jefferson lecture has many moving passages. But it somehow struck me as a kind of ecological utopianism. It promotes a world of villages. Berry wants to put us all to work. He seems to reverse Pieper’s notion that we work in order to have leisure. The lives of his characters are honorable and deeply sensitive, no doubt of it. His grandfather, he tells us, took but one trip in his life, to Tennessee, and didn’t see much there that would want to make him leave again. Ever since I read William Cobbett, I have realized that we can achieve our salvation even if we never leave home. If Berry does anything, he makes us nostalgic for our homes. To what extent we are also “restless” at home is not always clear. The Jefferson Lecture re-domesticates us. Still, it does not seem like a lasting city, let alone a lasting farm, even when we live there all our lives and care for the land and animals.

You thought the story of the city mouse and the country mouse was basically a parable about how there is no lasting city on earth, and although where you live may be bad, there are many other worse places. But you have no idea how fascistic a country mouse could be before you listen to Wendell Berry. In Berry's parable, the country mouse returns home, repents of his trip, then scolds the city mouse for preferring his urban residence.

“And so I am nominating economy for an equal sanding among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth.” Berry, I am sure, would not disagree with the famous phrase, “We have here no lasting city.” But the Jefferson Lecture does leave me perplexed about the admonition “Increase, multiply, and subdue the earth.” I had always supposed that this passage encouraged us to use our minds and hands so that we could accomplish these purposes. The Jefferson Lecture seems to oppose our minds to our affections, the city to the economy. One suspects that we would be better off if we could harmonize the two instead of pitting them against each other.

Emphasis mine. The imagined world of Wendell Berry is no less silly than the one "imagined" by John Lennon, it just has more tillable land, furry animals, and maybe a few Indian tribes running around killing each other. Berry is a user of the land and a user of resources just like everybody else he criticizes. The fact that he may use a little bit less than others is ultimately a matter of taste and not morality. I don't care what he does with his life, but he seems to care a lot what others do with theirs and has developed his own Sharia-like law based on his preferences. Continuing to pay serious attention to him as a thinker because a few of his quips are quotable and insightful is a dubious practice which can be applied to moral idiots such as Mao Tse-Tung, Muhammad Ali and the aforementioned Mr. Lennon, although I am reminded that the line "I believe in yesterday" was penned solely by Mr. McCartney.

Obama's Intellectual Stammer

This is such a slam, and so on the money. Meghan Daum opens up some serious ass-whoop, though perhaps inadvertently. My fave paragraphs:

But consider this: It's not that Obama can't speak clearly. It's that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you're a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president's stammer doesn't bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch whisky and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).

And here's the money shot:

Obama's problem is not that he's an intellectual (for the sake of argument let's define it as someone who is scholarly, broadly informed and distinguished as a thinker). It's that he sounds like an intellectual. Unlike other presumed political brainiacs — Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, for example — he isn't able to bury his ideas behind a folksy regional accent or good-old-boy affectations when he wants to. Nor is he effective at "keeping it real" when he falls into traditionally African-American cadences that he clearly never used when he was growing up.

By speaking as though he hails from everywhere, he ends up being from nowhere. The result is that people look at him and see not a Hawaiian or a Chicagoan or even a black man, but a university man.

"University man." [he shivers.]

"You can live some sort of life..."

Just found this quote from Richard Dawkins on this site about evolution:

Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of 'design' that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study. — Richard Dawkins

I guess I am living "some sort of life" with a darkened intellect and a total lack of understanding of how I evolved from a Drosophilia. But I am laughing my ass off dancing on Lord Darwin's grave, and I'm ready for another beer.

Clouds in my coffee

I have often balked at focusing on the personal faults and failings of President Obama. After all, nobody's perfect, and it can take time away from concentrating on the horrible damage that the man's policies are causing.

Having said that, I think that Jonathan Last's "American Narcissus" article is a must-read. It illustrates the real consequences of Barack Obama's arrogance and vanity, like his absolute lack of bi-partisanship and his "in-house retirement" service in the Senate during which the American taxpayers paid him to write his second book. Furthermore, the article shows the amazing extent to which the man relates everything to his own persona and achievements, like when he gave the Queen of England an iPod pre-loaded with his famous speeches and pictures of him. Here's an excerpt his pathetic response to the fall of the Berlin Wall anniversary:

On November 9, 2009, Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was kind of a big deal. They may not mention the Cold War in schools much these days, but it pitted the Western liberal order against a totalitarian ideology in a global struggle. In this the United States was the guarantor of liberty and peace for the West; had we faltered, no corner of the world would have been safe from Soviet domination.

President Obama has a somewhat different reading. He explains: “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.” Pretty magnanimous of the Soviets to let the long twilight struggle end peacefully like that, especially after all we did to provoke them.

So Obama doesn’t know much about the Cold War. Which is probably why he didn’t think the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was all that important. When the leaders of Europe got together to commemorate it, he decided not to go to that, either. But he did find time to record a video message, which he graciously allowed the Europeans to air during the ceremony.

In his video, Obama ruminated for a few minutes on the grand events of the 20th century, the Cold War itself, and the great lesson we all should take from this historic passing: “Few would have foreseen .  .  . that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the freedom of all humanity—it’s great stuff. Right up there with the election of Barack Obama.

Wow... The "punchline" caught me by surprise. I hadn't heard that speech. I guess "Obamanometer" for pretentiousness wasn't too far off the mark.

This also goes quite a ways toward explaining why people are starting to get annoyed with him internationally, and his magic is fading.