Tasty Tidbits 8/5/11

1. Man tries to hurl himself over the White House fence.
2. Something’s not right ….
3. Tu quoque.
4. Did anyone warn the legislature?
5. The elephant in the budget room.
6. Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry.
7. E-Trade Baby loses his … diaper region.

1

There was drama at the White House this week when a man tried to hurl himself over the fence. But the Secret Service intervened and talked the president into going back inside and finishing his term.

Quoting this Conan O’Brien gag, Peggy Noonan opens her column “The Power of Bad Ideas.” “Don’t call my bluff; I’m taking it to the people” got a collosal yawn from those who watched the whole tedious exercise of “taking it to the people” later on.

Obama is in trouble, and I don’t think the Republicans are so clever that they’ve single-handedly put him there, however high a priority they’ve put on his defeat in 2012.

2

You could do a lot worse things with a few hours than reading (or re-reading) C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Which reminds me of a Podcast I listened to where the speaker said that the central religious insight, across a broad swath of religions, is that “something’s not right about me.”

3

Michael Shermer has published a “skeptical” book, “The Believing Brain,” reviewed in Reason:

The Believing Brain perhaps inevitably turns to religion, but a sign of Mr. Shermer’s all-purpose skepticism is his consigning of the chapter “Belief in God,” along with “Belief in Aliens,” to a section called “Belief in Things Unseen.” He doesn’t take religious faith seriously except as an object for explanatory debunking—God is simply the human explanation for pattern-making and agency on an epic scale.

I do not claim to have read the book, nor does what follows mean that the book isn’t worth reading, but one of the fairly safe things to say, if this review paragraph is accurate, is that Shermer is one of the folks who make a career of the conceit that “I have real reasons, while you have only [random cerebral molecular movements/biases/a pattern-making brain/etc.].

One can only hope that Mr. Shermer will some day turn his skeptical eye onto his own “believing is seeing” filter. If you “see through” everything, you actually “see” nothing, and many the entertaining reductionist has been blissfully unaware of how his skeptical sword cuts both ways. Shermer might want to start with that central religious insight I mentioned.

4

It seems that Washington State, perceiving a broad problem, cyberstalking, addressed it with a very broad brush. And a prosecutor with no sense whatever is using the law to criminally charge an anonymous online cartoonist for committing what, outside of Renton County, Washington, would be recognized in an instant by any first year law student (who in this case would be right) as constitutionally protected political satire. Is It a Crime to Publish Parody Videos That Use “Lewd … Language” Meant to “Embarrass and Emotionally Torment” Police Officers?

Zounds! Is it too late to give the Prosecutor a failing grade on his Bar Exam?!

5

Michael Gerson at the Washington Post meanders around vaguely Churchy-Statey issues before getting to the salient point, which needs to be repeated often to people who think denial is dat river in Egypt:

Public spending on poverty and global health programs is a sliver of discretionary spending and essentially irrelevant to America’s long-term debt. A political argument giving equal weight to cuts in poverty programs and reductions in entitlement spending is uninformed about the nature of the budget crisis, which is largely a health-entitlement crisis. A simplistic philosophy of “shared sacrifice,” focused mainly on cuts in discretionary spending, requires disproportionate sacrifices of the most vulnerable.

6

It’s Wendell Berry’s birthday. There’s too few of those left.

7

Nothing funny about market dropping 500 points, but …

Bon appetit!