SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: There's this guy who wants to cure millions of Americans of depression, chronic pain, and sleep disorders. This is exactly what I was warning against in my book Liberal Fascism.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? A PEEK IN AT ACE O. SPADES. It's like blogger drunkdialing! Hadn't paid attention to the site in months, so I looked today and saw some guy posting a map of the places where English is the official language, then commenting:

So when you're choosing your apocalypse bolt-hole, you might want to consider which lingua the locals sprechen. And yes that little blue speck in Central America is Belize which speaks English thanks to its history as a British colony. Here's some info on fleeing retiring to Belize as an American. Of course there's also Guyana to the south, but it seems a little far from the US and a little too close to Venezuela. Next best options would probably be some of the Caribbean islands.

Belize. The guy thinks he's going to Belize. I doubt that Delta allows customers to pay for their flights with Cheetos proofs of purchase.

Ace really hasn't been the same since he went softcore.

DON'T CHANGE JIM JOYCE'S CALL. Apparently the Commissioner is considering changing the umpire's call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game.

No. Human umpires are part of baseball, and if you're going to have them, you're going to have blown calls. And human though they are, their rulings have to stand. Why? Because to challenge their authority is to throw the whole premise of baseball into chaos.

Baseball is not supposed to be a quasi-mechanical Thunderdome affair like football, with everything from the players' muscle mass to the video review delegated to state-of-the-art science. It is, as George Carlin memorably observed, a game played in a park. The vagaries, oddities, and lapses in judgement -- and there are plenty in a 162-game season -- are part of the pleasure. I once saw Benny Agbayani take a fly ball he'd caught and toss it into the stands, thinking he had made the third out; he had in fact made the second, and the ground-rule double cost the Mets the game. That sucked, but nobody thought the result should be reversed because that wasn't what he should have done.

Umpires fuck up too, yet we've decided to treat them like God: Their word rules even if everyone in the park disputes it. And only the ump himself can reverse the call. Maybe you would prefer that there should be Baseball Courts of Appeal or The Guardians of the Universe or some shit, but them's the rules, and games without rules are only fun for people who've taken too much acid.

If you want to put in video review -- an abomination, I still believe -- then you can avoid these kinds of problems in future games of the thing you will call baseball and I will call bullshit. But only then.

UPDATE. Let me add something else: A ballgame is not a court of law. Our judicial system is convoluted because human lives are at stake. In Major League Baseball, the only thing at stake is some millionaires' future trade value.

I think Billy Martin said it best.

UPDATE 2. And if me and Billy haven't convinced you, be aware that one of National Review's biggest idiots -- John J. Miller, sort of Jonah Goldberg on training wheels -- wants the call overturned.

Speaking of National Review idiots, Daniel Foster:

In a weird way, it is like the BP spill. Those of us who oppose instant replay in baseball, like those of us who support domestic drilling, correctly (I think) point out that catastrophic failures of the status quo are so unlikely that worries about them shouldn't guide our policy thinking. But then Deepwater Horizon blew up and Jim Joyce blew a perfect game.

I've never seen Foster so maybe he really is 10 years old and a lot of things in life that we adults take for granted are brand new to him.

THEY DON'T MAKE CAPITALISTS LIKE THEY USED TO.The Anchoress interrupts a rant about Obama Hitler socialism for a personal complaint, which she believes is relevant to her point:

I feel like my relationship to my son’s college is a microcosm of our relationship to the government. Every year tuition goes up appreciably, even though our salaries have gone stagnant. There are union workers on campus, you see, and they must get their raises, even if services to the students must be cut to ensure them. So, it’s cut services or bleed the students, and either way the cafeteria has too many carbs. The scholarships don’t go up, but the tuition does. We’re trying to keep his student loan debt down to about $30,000, so our contribution, year after year, just gets bigger and bigger.

I think I see the relevance: A degree from the college of her choosing is something The Anchoress believes she should have, and if the price goes up to what its administrators think the Free Market will bear, this is not capitalism in action, as it might seem to the uninitiated, but socialism, because all the money over and above what The Anchoress wishes to pay for this sheepskin will be going to communist union janitors; she just knows it.

If only she could strike a bargain with the professors -- have them come over to the house and teach Buster, free from the constraints of the unions! She could in recompense bake them a pie. They could call it Galt's Gulch Community College!

It's astonishing that these people achieved adulthood without ever realizing that the Invisible Hand is not Casper the Friendly Ghost.

UPDATE. The Anchoress amplifies in comments that her husband (who already has a profitable engineering degree) and her sons agree that university educations are worthless, which makes it even harder for me to understand why she hasn't taken the kids out of school yet and used the savings to buy gold, shotguns, and a generator in preparation for the End Times, and maybe some church raffle tickets. Also, why in the first place is she exposing these innocent young minds to the evil liberal professors who, her commenters assure her, will just try to convert them to Marxism? They'll be safe from that kind of brainwashing at barber college.

Using the kind of fantasy problem-solving she also exhibits in her subsequent, why-isn't-Obama-doing-this-thing-I-heard-about-in-the-Gulf post ("Is this something that is possible? I have no idea, but let’s find out! Seems like something the government ought to already be aware of"), The Anchoress dreams up (via the medium of one of her children) an alternative educational regime -- sort of a rightwing Montessori:

My Elder Son has made a very strong case for the de-emphasizing of degrees in favor of true competency certification (based not on education credits but true proficiency) for educators, the social sciences and business degrees, and artists--whether in fine arts or music--should be able to study as apprentices, journeymen, etc.

These certificates, which I'm sure would be covered with gold stars, would also no doubt be accepted in lieu of diplomas from accredited colleges by the Bigbrain Randian Wealth Producers who have Gone Galt. And aren't they the only sort of people by whom Buster and Boomer or whatever his name is would consent to be employed? Don't dream it, The Anchoress, be it! Let your Galt schools be the monasteries of the new Dark Ages!

SHORTER ABIGAIL THERNSTROM: Why did Artur Davis lose in Alabama? Because he defied Obama. Or because he's good friends with Obama. Something to do with Obama, anyway. But whatever it was, it certainly had nothing to do with race.

JONAH GOLDBERG, HARD ON THE JOB, LATEST IN A SERIES*. 9:21 am: Look, funny video!

9:40 am: This flotilla thing -- anybody know anything about it? Cuz you can't trust the lamestream media, y'know. They hate Jews.

5:31 pm: W00t, wingnut welfare gravy train now boarding! Come on, it'll be fun, like college.

5:36 pm: More video!

5:40 pm: I got to judge a conservative beauty contest! Fart. I mean, "Fart."

7:55 am: Ooooh, I got in trouble lookin at the purty girls. Fart. Speaking of which, wingnut welfare!

8:00 am: That big hole in Guatawhatchamacallit sure is big. Like something out of a scary movie! Haw! This is almost as good as Hurricane Katrina.

Etc. * Compiled by Instaputz and Tbogg, among others.

HOW YOU GET A BP. What I and perhaps many of you have been grumbling under our breaths for years, Nancy Nall eloquently lays out in complete sentences, in the course of a lengthy gripe about her shitty bank:

Oh, why bother with this? You all have your own tales of pain and woe, if not with banks, then with health insur­ance com­pa­nies, mort­gage hold­ers or whomever. Here’s what amuses me most about them — how, in our allegedly per­fect market-based sys­tem, our cus­tomer expe­ri­ence should be improv­ing year to year. In some ways, it has, although I credit tech­nol­ogy (the ATM) more than man­age­ment. But mostly, bank­ing — and many other allegedly service-based busi­nesses — has only become more Soviet with time, more mono­lithic, less sen­si­tive to cus­tomer com­plaint, more frus­trat­ing to deal with. Yes, I enjoy check­ing my bal­ance online or over the phone. No, I don’t like being nickel-and-dimed — or ten-dollared and thirty-dollared — to death over every lit­tle thing.

I still hope to get past the muttering stage on this important topic someday, but Nance has it good and broken down already.

I will add this: Any of us, if we think about it for more than a few minutes, can see that our largest and most powerful institutions are increasing treating us, their customers, like sub-humans.

They do it in Washington, with monstrosities like the nightmarish 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, and they do it in the day-to-day, by socking us with every hidden fee, added surcharge, delayed payment, automatic renewal, and designed-to-discourage phone tree they can dream up to separate us from more of our money.

I don't suggest there was ever a golden age when businesses didn't try to get more of our money, but I've been walking around this civilization for quite a healthy span of years, and I've never spent as much time as I do now fighting with corporations to keep or get back my money. I don't recall, in the allegedly less enlightened past, a bank insisting that I still had a credit card with them years after I paid off the balance and told them repeatedly to close my account. I don't recall being told that it didn't matter when I sent in my payment, it only mattered when the bank decided to accept it, and if it wound up being late they could raise my rate and fuck up my credit. (BTW thank the Democrats for fixing at least some of this shit.)

It's true that in the old days, I didn't have internet, and I often had to physically approach a service desk to get satisfaction. But those desks were clearly marked and manned. If they were run like the byzantine "support" features at many company websites now, they would be available only by rope ladder at the bottom a 30-foot shaft, and their agents would fend me off with pikestaffs.

Yet as plain as this is to us normal people, conservatives and libertarians (but I repeat myself) are insensible to the situation. They generally tell you, hey look, you got iPods and diet pet food, you never had it so good. And if you're suffering, it's your own damn fault for being a littlebrain. If you go through, say, a typical Megan McArdle post about bank shenanigans, you'll find the comments filled with the counsel of Randian supermen who have never had any troubles getting loans themselves, and don't understand how any decent person would ("When it comes down to it, if a person lives responsibly, chances are they won't have to worry").

And there's always someone like Cassy Fiano to blubber that the banks are the ones getting screwed by their customers and how dare they etc.

Which brings us to the depraved indifference shown by those BP ratfucks toward actually cleaning up (as opposed to covering up) their disastrous pollution of the Gulf of Mexico. For a while I was actually in sympathy with them -- when you fuck up that bad, you might be forgiven for using a psychological strategy to distance yourself from the enormity of your guilt, if only just so you can function. But after watching them at work awhile, I have decided that they are incorrigible. To put it politely.

And why shouldn't they be? See it their way: In this country, in this time, if you want the big money you don't give the suckers an even break. You brass it out. Fuck the regulators, fuck the press, and fuck the paupers who think they have some say in what washes up on their beaches -- we got people, we got money. And most of all, we got the right of way. Because for decades now, wherever some herkimer-jerkimer objected that our business was coming on a little too strong for their precious "community," we had the answer that never failed: Step aside, buddy, you're standing in the way of the Free Market.

It never failed before. Why should it fail them now?

IT WON'T FLOAT. As an old-fashioned Democrat who would really like to support the Israeli government, I remain open to any good justification for boarding an aid flotilla (even an embargoed one of suspicious political provenance) in international waters [!] and killing and kidnapping several of its passengers. So far I haven't heard any -- only shrill blood-libel crap like Jennifer Rubin's.

Anytime you find yourself writing something like this --

When the Israeli commandos were set upon as they were lowered from a helicopter, they acted to defend themselves.

-- and it isn't meant as satire, you should know that you aren't making your case, and in fact are strongly giving the impression that you don't have one.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reviews of Sex and The City 2, and how they've changed their minds about the franchise since they found the new film talks smack about Arabs. It also contains what may be my favorite Rod Dreher quote of all time.

A NEW LOW. Big Hollywood is your one-stop shopping place for the conservatism of petty personal grievances, with its constant surveillance of movies, TV shows, and Some Silly Liberal Who Was Mean to Me for evidence of wrongthink. They're so good at it that I long ago stopped trying to think of ways to top them. After they attacked Sesame Street for failing to make up affectionate nicknames for Fox News reporters, I knew no one could embarrass them better than they regularly embarrassed themselves.

And here's proof: In a million years, could you have come up with a parody Big Hollywood headline to rival this one?

Elayne Boosler ‘Unfriended’ Me on Facebook for Being Conservative.

Yes, the guy's actually complaining about this, though he adds, "You want to be narrow minded and intellectually lazy so you don’t have to defend your opinions, that is your right as an American." Generous of him! Next he'll grudgingly defend your right to shoo him off your porch when he shows up singing "The Ballad of the Green Berets."

Eventually he cites Some Silly Liberal Who Was Mean to Him, and then gets to the inevitable veiled accusations of Hollywood McCarthyism. "I look at folks like Dennis Miller, a guy who I have admired for years, and Drew Carey," he says, "and wonder what their brash conservatism has cost them." Gee, I don't know -- maybe the lead in Cast Away?

A few months back I suspected one of the BH guys of being a ringer. Now I'm starting to think they're all putting it on.

UPDATE. Typo fixed, thanks Nance. Any others? My MBP is at the shop and I'm using Mary's PC, which makes me clunky on the keys.

A CRAZE, IN A SENSE. That Go Galt thing lives on -- in rightwing campfire stories! Today's is from Dan Kennedy at Townhall:

During a conference at which I just spoke, the owner of several companies showed me a pair of cufflinks he’d just had custom-made, engraved with the words “Who Is John Galt?”

Not just a president, mind you, but the president of several companies! He probably owns a mansion and a yacht.

This business owner said the cuff-links were the last item other than absolute necessities that he would buy until Obama was an ex-president. He said he was sending out a letter to the restaurants and shops he patronized, his dry cleaners, the service companies that tended his lawns at his homes – over 200 different business owners – letting them know that President Obama had determined he was making too much money and was too rich for reason. Therefore, he was going to cut sales and production at his companies by half, himself work but one day a week, cut business spending to the bone and personally buy nothing – other than vacations out of the country – until the president exits.

Apparently Elmer J. Fudd also rules a feudal community, where the dry-cleaning vassals rely upon his custom to feed their children.

Each man to his own kinky fantasy, I say, but I wonder what the thrill is here. Do they imagine the underlings will say, "Wow, that rich guy means business -- I better vote Republican but pronto"? Or -- as the old "No tipping, we're Galt" routine suggests -- do they just like the idea of stiffing service employees and blaming it on politics?

Or maybe they're trying to sell the punters these. Only $50, yet just like what the Lord of Several Companies wears! Now there's capitalism I can understand -- the sort that never gives a sucker an even break.

GENIUS, I TELL YOU. Kaus has this thing sewn up. My only question: Is that Ann Althouse in the front row?

(From the Stephen Kaus Weblog; h/t Farley at Lawyers Guns & Money)

SPIN-OFF. I don't know if you've noticed but I have a link on the sidebar for my tumblr page.

I took it up last year, didn't know what to do with it, and let it lay. But a couple of weeks ago I started using it for the sort of cultural stuff with which I used to irregularly seed alicublog. Fond as I am of themed tumblr pages, I haven't come up with a Big Idea for one of my own yet. But it seems a nice format for quick shots on neat stuff.

I think I'll keep that going a while, so stop by if that sort of thing interests you.

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. Regular readers may already know about Dave Weigel's problems with Palin fans who are enraged by his perfectly sane observations on the former Alaska governor's latest public complaints.

The sad thing is, in a different context we might be able to rationally discuss Joe McGinniss' decision to get a home near that of a former politician/current TV celebrity on whom he is writing a book. Is it more invasive and less ethical than the near-constant presence of reporters outside the less bucolic homes of other public figures?

But Palin is reliably full of shit and a professional victim, so as with the idiotic David Letterman fuss she stirred up last year -- claiming against common sense that Letterman was intentionally attacking her underage daughter -- Palin has ended all chance of rational debate by accusing McGinniss of looking at her tits and suggesting that he might want to ogle her 9-year-old.

Weigel squawked, and here's a sampler of what ensued:



But what else can we expect? Rush Limbaugh's black fill-in Walter Williams is advocating secession from the perspective of the Confederacy. I like to think I'm pretty creative, but I don't think I could have made that one up, though maybe Sam Fuller already did:



This country has already gone nuts. Now it's all about waiting to see what entertaining means the patient will use to do harm to herself.

MAYBE I'M GETTING OLD. but the whole time I was watching this video preview (warning: incredibly NSFW), two questions kept crossing my mind: 1.) Who is Kendra Wilkinson? and 2.) Please, God, can you make Kathryn J. Lopez and Maggie Gallagher write about it?

UPDATE. In comments Leonard Pierce explains: "Kendra Wilkinson is one of Hugh Hefner's exes, which makes her appearance in a porn video about as shocking a headline as 'GOLDBERG DICKS AROUND IN OFFICE, POSTPONES WORK.'"

SHORTER WEASEL ZIPPERS: Sputter sputter, I hate fags.

SHORTER TIGERHAWK: Remember, if you do anything to punish BP, their employees will suffer. Think of them as moral hostages of the Free Market!

JONAH GOLDBERG, HARD ON THE JOB, LATEST IN A SERIES*. "The reason I have not commented on the series finales of Lost and 24 is that I have not been able to watch either yet. I will not read or respond to email on these subjects either until I've had a chance to catch-up. I know this reflects a shameful lapse on my part."

Christ Jesus, Goldberg is now too lazy to watch TV.

Also: "What's David Brooks Trying To Say?" in which Goldberg suggests Brooks is making a couple of connections not supported by the actual Brooks column (including one to himself), then concludes, "I have to assume that's the case, but Brooks just doesn't make it clear." One of the non-legacy-pledges at NR picks up his slack.

Goldberg also prints a bunch of reader letters, and has enough energy left over to link to BP propaganda.

* Compiled by Instaputz and Tbogg, among others.

SARAH PALIN ACCUSES AUTHOR OF LOOKING AT HER TITS. As R. Crumb once drew himself thinking in a comic jam about the apocalypse, I always hoped I wouldn't be alive for this.

THE BITTEREST PILL (THEY EVER HAD TO SWALLOW). A week ago at National Review, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of The Pill, Kathryn Jean Lopez came waving a celebrity news hook:

If you need a quick primer on the birds and the bees, on how a culture has been misled, and on why Carrie and her friends from yet another Sex and the City movie have had miserable, not-so-pretty lives...

(Yeah, that "conservative cause celebre" thing is really gonna happen.)

...the woman once declared “Most Desired Woman” by Playboy can help you out.

Surprise, it's Raquel Welch! Bless her, Rocky has a book out and says she's seen how contraception "has altered American society for better or worse" -- while it "made it easier for a woman to choose to delay having children until after she established herself in a career," it also made people less likely to get married, presumably by obviating the time-honored tradition of the shotgun wedding.

Though Welch is four times married and obviously didn't let child-rearing slow down her own career, K-Lo swooned. "What she writes knocks the glimmer off the rose of so-called 'sexual freedom,'" wrote Lopez. Also, "Raquel Welch echoes another pope when she talks about sexual explicitness in the culture." The crime of the Pill, in K-Lo's view, was that it turned women away from something they really wanted: "Motherhood is at the heart of what it means to be a woman, and, for decades now, the pill has been trying to deny that reality."

Later Lopez claimed her column "seemed to strike a nerve." But she only cited in evidence a couple of Catholic blogs, and there is no sign that in the wide world women started burning their Ortho Tri-Cyclen in response.

So Maggie Gallagher dropped by to both raise the stakes and change the subject: The Pill wasn't bad because it worked, but because it sometimes didn't:

If we had truly separated sex from reproduction, why would we need abortion?

It was the failure of the Pill to reliably separate sex and reproduction that led quickly to Roe v. Wade.

"The problem is not the Pill," Gallagher added later. "The problem is the idea, which promoters of the pill introduced and promoted with great fanfare, that we have separated sex from reproduction." Because we haven't -- "If you spend ten years being unmarried and sexually active, the odds you will get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, are quite substantial."

Apparently Lopez had been too idealistic: The kids weren't going to stop using birth control because it was morally wrong -- they could only be scared out of it. Pregnancy was not to be used to lure them to virtue, but to terrorize them out of having sex.

K-Lo agreed as much as pride would allow: "That pill alone was not the poison that made a mess between men and women, but it sure was a contributing factor."

And so it goes: Tactical debates among cultural warriors whose cause is long, long lost. They might as well be arguing about why the invention of washing machines turned the innocent women of their great-grandmothers' time into flappers, and what can be done about it today.

But keep pitching guys! Maybe the environmental angle will "strike a nerve" somewhere.

UPDATE: In comments, good point, PGE: "Wait a minute... It doesn't work, plus women don't REALLY want it. How has it survived the miracle of the free market?"