The Liberal Canon

All cultures are equal. One culture is less equal than others.

Members of a minority are never responsible for their failures. Members of the majority are never responsible for their successes.

Only the Liberal elite and certain select villains on the Right have free will.

Capitalism is bad because it requires empathy. Socialism is good because it requires only sympathy.

No statement is ever true or false except this one.

Cultural Relativism is a fact. Temporal Relativism is not.

A woman has a right to her body, but no responsibility for it.

Everyone is a hypocrite.

Words speak louder than actions.

Submission in the name of tolerance is not the same as cowardice.

The truth of one's argument can be enhanced by dressing up in a funny costume.

Police States aren't. Non-Police States are.

No one should be judged on the content of his character.

To explain why other cultures hate the West, one may go as far back into history as one wishes.

There is no such thing as “Good” except the “Common Good”.

Results don't count. Only intentions matter.

The truth value of any data depends entirely on who funded the research.

Anything your elected President says is false. Anything an unelected dictator from another country says is true.

Two legs good. Four legs better.

You can't tell us what drugs we can't use, be we can tell you what foods you can't eat.

An unpleasant fact can be dealt with by changing the words used to describe it.

A criminal is never responsible for his actions, but law-abiding citizens are responsible for the actions of their ancestors unto the 70 and 7^th generation.

Fighting in a battle for the sake of your country doesn't require bravery. Holding up a sign during a protest march does.

To be a truly authentic individual, you need to have the same tattoos and to dress exactly like all the other authentic individuals.

If you are a minority, you should be proud of genetic traits over which you had absolutely no control.

Having a bumper sticker that says “Free Tibet” or “Save Darfur” is morally equivalent to actually freeing Tibet or saving Darfur.

If you don't believe what we do it is because you are stupid or evil.

The worst thing that anyone can do is to “act white”.

The seven deadly sins are:

Greed

Intolerance

Absolutism

Patriotism

Christianity

Violence

Inequality

The seven holy virtues are:

Envy

Tolerance

Relativism

Internationalism

Mysticism

Non-Violence

Equality of results

Laughing at liberals
My first reaction upon seeing this was probably not unlike yours: shock, disgust and anger. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that was exactly the response these children were seeking. And the more I studied it, the mock seriousness, the mise en scene, the faux courage (note that they have their faces covered just in case a real soldier walks by and decides to vent his anger) the more I found the whole thing to be hysterically funny.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the entirely loony left simply should not be taken seriously.

How about Al Gore. Imagine a seminar like the following:

"You should trust me on global warming because I invented the Internet!" (Sniggers from the audience).

"You should cut your carbon consumption like I do." (Outright laughter).

"If you prefer, you can always send me a check to buy carbon offsets which I will invest in the largest bank in Switzerland." (People literally rolling on the floor in the aisles, clutching their sides.)

Sure Mr. Bore. Right after I send my bank account information to that nice gentleman in Nigeria who is trying to get his dead uncle's money out of the country.

But seriously. Here's a man who uses more energy than the entire country of Lesotho, a man whose carbon footprint is bigger than Godzilla's. And he wants us to cut back? Stop it. You're killing me!

It's like Larry, Curly and Moe all rolled into one and poking himself in the eyes!

Or how about Mother Moonbat herself: Cindy Sheehan. "I felt so bad about the death of my son Casey that I had to hug Hugo Chavez." OK, my sides are hurting now.

Or John "Unfit for Command" Kerry telling the Democrat National Convention that he was "reporting for duty!" Can't.take.any.more!

It takes a village idiot
Back in the day, each village had its idiot who was the subject of scorn, ridicule, derision and laughter. Our standards of decency have evolved to the point where we no longer laugh at someone who, through an accident of birth and no fault of his own, displays sub-standard intelligence. But surely we can still scorn, ridicule, deride and laugh at those who choose to display sub-standard intelligence? Today, there are villages with nothing but idiots.

When Rosie O'Donnell states in all seriousness that on 9/11, for the first time in history, "fire melted steel" shouldn't we all just burst out laughing? Or at the very least the sort of muffled sniggering that occurs when someone has just made a complete fool of herself or farted in public?

How much better off would we be if Don Imus had had the courage to go on Al Sharpton's show and say "Me? Apologize? Sure, right after you apologize to the Duke LAX players and those accused by Tawana Brawley!" and then smiled condescendingly?

If my hypothosis that hard-core leftists suffer from Narcisstic Personality Disorder is correct, then the last thing we should do is to take them seriously. Seriously. It is simply wrong to believe that Narcissists are selfish. You have to have a self before you can be selfish. The Narcissist's real self is so wrapped up in the persona he/she needs to present outwardly that it might as well not exist. He needs to be surrounded by people who take his made-up persona seriously. People who give him the serious attention that his persona craves. And like the emotional six-year-old that he is inside, any attention is good. Even if it is bad. The one thing that he can't stand is to be laughed at. To be ridiculed.

So the next time some trans-gender freak in a pink dress states that "we support the troops by making their sacrifices worthless", or some San Francisco feminist dons a hajib to kow-tow to a Muslim dictator, laugh. Go on, you know you want to.

Do yourself a favor. Do America a favor. Laugh at a liberal today.

Social Conservatism for Libertarians
As a long-time libertarian, one-time pot-smoking, shroom-dropping, coke-snorting, head banger, and short time Thomas Aquinas College student I have seen the divide between "social conservatives" and "libertarians" and today would like to address certain social conservative positions and why libertarians would do well to support them. These arguments would, obviously, work for liberals as well, but since liberals are immune to reasoned argument I will ignore them in what follows. Certain social conservatives would also do well to heed these arguments since arguments relying strictly on the Bible are not likely to sway either libertarians OR liberals.

Axioms of libertarianism
While libertarians may disagree on certain things, what makes them libertarians is their belief in the following two axioms:

1) The fundamental (and maybe ONLY) purpose of a state is to protect its citizens - this may or may not include a provision for the enforcement of contracts.

2) An individual's freedom to act is absolute up until the point where it infringes on the freedoms of another.

Would it be possible to derive socially conservative positions from these two axioms, rationally and empirically? That is our task today in what follows.

Abortion
While libertarians are divided on this issue, they should not be. Social conservatives believe that human life begins at conception. If this is the case, then by Axiom 1, it is the fundamental role of the state to protect this citizen from the point of conception.

If it is not the case, then it is incumbent upon libertarians to come up with a definition of when state protection of the individual should commence. The problem here is that it will always be possible to come up with an example using this definition that would allow the state to kill an adult in the same circumstances.

For example: "Life begins only when the foetus is self-sustaining." By this reasoning, would it be permissible to abort Stephen Hawking who is only kept alive by a bevy of nurses?

"Life begins when the foetus becomes "conscious". Would it then be permissible to abort adults who are unconscious?

"It is permissible to abort a foetus up until the point where it begins to feel pain." Is it then permissible to abort adults who don't feel pain?

Further examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

Gay Marriage
The issue here is the perversion of language perpetrated by collectivists and which concerns libertarians as much as it does social conservatives. Liberals are masters at redefining terms and then claiming them for their own uses. Liberals wish to redefine the word "marriage" as something like "a long term love affair between two consenting adults." This completely ignores the social and political history of the term which relates generally to the establishment of a family and the rearing of children.

Private right vs. Public sanction
While libertarians couldn't care less what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes, they should beware of any and all attempts to increase the sphere of public sanction. Public sanction of marriages (marriage licenses issued by the state) has historical roots and libertarians should be concentrating on reducing this state power (by trying to abolish state licensing of marriage altogether) rather than on increasing it by redefining the word "marriage" to include people who were heretofore not included.

Drugs and Prostitution
I'll admit that this subject is slightly more difficult, but that the second axiom comes into play. Libertarians argue that the nefarious side effects of these activities are due to the fact that the state has made them illegal.

If the sale and possession of drugs was not illegal, libertarians argue, they would be cheaper and addicts would not need to rob and steal in order to feed their habits. Drug cartels would not have the money to subvert entire countries.

If prostitution were legal, it would not need to hide itself in the seemier parts of the city, creating no-go wastelands.

Two points:

One, these questions can be placed in an empirical context by asking whether or not in those communities where these activities are legal there is actually less infringement on the liberty of others. Amsterdam is a good example, and while the evidence is not strong, it does appear that libertarians are wrong. Amsterdam neighborhoods with high rates of drug use and prostitution, though legal, are not particularly safe for the general public.

Two, there is a broader question involving the public space. By acting to reduce the public space (by privatizing much of it), libertarians can drive these activities into private where they belong. The case of prostitution in Nevada is instructive. By limiting prostitution to private brothels, the general public is not confronted with the seemier side of it unless they choose to be.

Libertarian goals and Social Conservatism
Many of the goals of Social Conservatism fall out of the equation when the goals of libertarianism are considered:

Prayer in school? Liberal indocrination of children? Get the government out of the school business.

Religious symbols on public property? Reduce the amount of public property and increase the amount of private property.

Welfare dependency? Get rid of redistibutionist taxation.

Abortion? Define citizenship as beginning at the moment of conception.

Gay Marriage? Take the issuance of marriage licenses out of the hands of the state.

For further discussion of some of these issues, check out my multiple-utopias.org website and join in the debate.

As always, please feel free to revise and extend these remarks.

The Ultimate Anti-Global Warming Argument

Now that the Enviro-Nazis have come out and clearly stated that anyone who denies global warming will be tried for "crimes against humanity", I want to clearly state for the future record that I'm not a "global warming denier." I love trees. And your little dog too. The globe will warm. The heavens will rend. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Against all physical laws, gigantic ice-wielding hurricanes will devour Manhatten. In short, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Now that I have saved myself from future prosecution, I still want to ask "So what? What are we supposed to do about it?" I would like to present for your intellectual pleasure, the ultimate anti-global warming argument. The advantage to this argument is that all it requires is a pen, a cocktail napkin and a Earth First knot-hole surfer to act as foil. What is truly great about the argument is that your tree-hugging friend will agree with everything you say right up until you reach the conclusion, at which point he will begin to do the flopping flounder - mouth opening and closing with no sound coming out as he attempts to refute it. Trust me, it's more fun than a barrel full of crystal rubbers or pyramid wearers!

STEP 1
Grab your pen and a cocktail napkin and draw a simple graph: The X axis represents the temperature rise, and the Y axis represents time.

STEP 2
Ask the granola-muncher what the temperature will be in 100 years if nothing is done (GMs like to think in terms of centures, most likely because they know they won't be around to take the heat if their predictions turn out wrong). It doesn't matter what temperature they give (it only changes the scale). Drop a line to the Y axis at the 100 year point. Then draw a dotted line from the temperature they have given. Finally, draw the diagonal from the origin to the point where the temperature line meets the 100 year line. Since GMs are usually not very good at math, you may have to explain to them that you have simplified the temperature rise curve: it may not be exactly a straight line increase, but it's close enough for our purposes.



Step 3

Ask your pet GM if he believes that ALL global warming is attributable to man or whether there is a natural component to it. After all, the Earth has had ice ages, and therefore must have had whatever is the opposite of an ice age. Even hard core global warming whackos will admit that yes, there is a natural component. Global warming climatologists, if they agree on anything, agree that this natural component accounts for roughly 50% of the observed effect. So draw a diagonal roughly half way between the Y axis and the original diagonal that you drew:

Label the bottom triangle "E" representing the Earth's contribution to global warming, and the top triangle "M" to represent man's contribution.

Step 4

Tell the GM "Fine. We'll reduce the rise in man-made global warming gases by 10% over the next 100 years." Explain to him that economists have estimated that implementing such a decrease would cost the world economy some $5 trillion dollars over that period. The GM will probably go off on a tirade ("PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS! IF IT SAVES JUST ONE HUMAN LIFE! BLOATED PLUTOCRATS. CAPITALIST PIG-DOGS! *choke*, *gasp*, *hack*, *furball*) but that's OK because we are about to spring the trap. Draw another diagonal from the origin to the 100 year line to represent the 10% reduction in the rise of global warming gases:

Step 5
Now the fun begins. Extend the Y axis (the time line). Extend the dotted line representing the initial temperature that the GM gave you. Then extend the diagonal representing the 10% reduction until it hits the temperature line. Then drop a perpendicular down to the timeline:


Bingo!
Depending on the scale of your graph, you have just demonstrated that for a cost of $5 trillion we have managed to postpone the arrival of the dreaded temperature by... 10 years. The GM will do the flopping flounder ("wuah wuah wuah"). Just for fun, you can propose that we kill off all humans to save the planet. Then just extend the "E" line until it hits the temperature line and drop another perpendicular. We won't reach the dreaded temperature for two hundred years. But of course there won't be anyone around to record the temperature at that point.

Enjoy, and good hunting!

Liberalism and NPD: Part II
Why Liberals Hate Capitalism

In my previous post, I attempted to show how the actions and beliefs of liberals fit the diagnostic mould of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In today's post, I would like to explore how various NPD diagnostic criteria might explain one liberal constant: their utter contempt and hatred for capitalism. The fact that liberals will side with anyone, from communist thug dictators to Islamofascists as long as they are anti or non capitalist is proof enough of their hatred.

You will recall from the previous post that in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM IV-R), psychiatry's bible for the diagnosis of mental illness, the emphasis for a diagnosis of NPD shifted from grandiosity to lack of empathy.

DSM IV-R, criterion 7 puts it this way: (7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others. While clinicians are divided as to whether or not this lack of empathy is volitional (in other words, whether the NPD actually lacks the mental faculty of empathy or whether he simply refuses to use it) for our purposes, the difference is unimportant. What is important for our purposes is that if liberals really are unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, then they are completely unsuited for life in a capitalist system.

In the political sphere, we vote for our elected leaders every two years. In the economic sphere, we vote for our capitalist leaders every single day, with every single dollar that we spend. More importantly, we vote for our capitalist leaders using a strict criterion: which leader is going to provide us with the greatest marginal utility for our dollars. A successful capitalist is a person who provides not what people say they want, but what they actually want and are willing to pay for. This in turn requires that they recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, in other words that they have empathy.

Imagine if you will what it must be like to live in a system that rewards people for having a mental faculty that you utterly lack or are unwilling to use. Even worse (in a hall of mirrors sort of way), if you lack empathy, than you lack even the slightest basis for believing that empathy exists! But if empathy doesn't exist, if there can be no exchange on the basis of understanding the needs of others, then there is only force, compulsion and coercion. Listen closely to liberals when they talk about capitalism and you will hear those notes repeatedly, from poverty forcing someone to take a low paying job to advertising coercing people into buying things they don't want. If you lack empathy, no other explanation of capitalism is possible.

Further, if you lack empathy, then everyone is just like you and should want precisely what you want. If they don't actually want precisely what you want it must be because a) they are stoopid, b) they have been brainwashed, c) they are being willfully evil.

Against big business

While liberals hate capitalism in general, they reserve a special hatred for big business. Part of this, I believe, can be explained by reference to the third NPD diagnostic criterion: (3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

The textbook case of liberal hatred of big business is Wal-Mart. While liberals claim that their dislike stems from Wal-Mart's lack of unions, low wages or lack of health care, I believe the real reason is that Wal-Mart offends their sense of specialness. Wal-Mart is very successful at providing the masses with what they actually want rather than what liberals believe they should want. The key here is the masses: I, being unique and special, am by definition, not part of the masses and won't associate with them by shopping at the same stores.

Perhaps an even more cogent example is Starbucks. As long as Starbucks was new and trendy, liberals loved them. Now that they have become big business, liberals loathe them. In my own backyard laboratory of NPD behavior, otherwise known as San Francisco, the city has refused permits for any more Starbucks within city limits. One city proposal even went so far as to ban any national chain from setting up new shops within the city. Why? Well because citizens might accidentally choose to become part of the masses by trafficking with a mass retailer. And then where would San Francisco's unique specialness be?

So what kind of economic system would an NPD set up if he could? Obviously, it would be one which rewards not the ability to provide people with what they actually want, but one which rewards the ability to provide people with what they should want. It should be a system that rewards people for their unique specialness rather than their ability to bring people together.
It would be a system that allots rewards not on the basis of understanding what makes people tick, but only what ticks them off.

Now such a system actually exists in America: it's called the university tenure system. Let's think about this for a second. American academia rewards people for their unique specialness regardless of the actual added value of the contribution. You will note that the admonition is publish or perish, and NOT publish, AND BE READ, or perish. It allows people to associate only with others who are special like them. It is said that in the arcane English department world of "critical theory" 3000 people write books that are only read by other members of the same group. Academia rewards people not for providing what people actually want, it rewards them on the simple basis of longevity. And lastly, it rewards Narcissists by re-enforcing their sense of self-importance by giving them a new crop naive students to manipulate each semester.

I hope that I have been able to shed some light not only on why Liberals hate capitalism, but why academia attracts so many of them.

Please feel free to revise and extend these remarks.

Liberalism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Despite the fact that I live in the Bay Area, I've never been a big fan of Michael Savage. However, I have increasingly become convinced that his conclusion that "liberalism is a mental disease" is correct. In what follows, I go one step further and attempt to show specifically WHICH mental disease it is.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth Edition (henceforth "DSM-IV") describes the clinical criteria necessary for a diagnosis of "Narcissistic Personality Disorder". In what follows, the clinical diagnostic criteria of DSM-IV are given in bold with my comments following in plain text:

Diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

How often have we seen this, not only among liberal politicians (Ted Kennedy is an NPD poster boi) but among FR trolls: the idea that since they have gone to college everyone should take their word as Gospel. And has anyone exaggerated their achievements and talents more than John Kerry and Joseph Wilson?

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Nothing turns me off faster than some petty little liberal who believes that he holds the future of the Earth in his hand because he doesn't eat animals, or recycles his cans, or bikes to work. Liberals (to quote my best friend) want to "carve their initials in the universe".

(3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
Examples are left as an exercise for the reader...

(4) requires excessive admiration
Yes. Requires that one admire his politically correct stance on issues regardless of the actual concrete results of following his prescriptions...

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
Like Nietzsche, I think I have the ability to smell whiners. And no one whines more than a liberal. They all whine about how the world doesn't take them seriously and how they should have a higher place in the world than the one they actually occupy.

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
There is perhaps nothing that separates liberals from conservatives more than this: that conservatives will weigh the means to achieving an end and reject certain of them on the basis of "fair play" (despite the fact that the end might not be achieved) whereas for liberals it is the end that counts and any means are acceptable (including lying, exaggerating, eco-terrorism, or REAL terrorism for that matter...)

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

Whereas the DSM-III put the clinical emphasis for NPD on the idea of "grandiosity", the "DSM-IV Revised" rightly places the emphasis here. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is the ability to see or perceive that others are different. Others have different life experiences and different goals. That liberals literally can't understand this leads to two typical liberal responses:

For those who really are different (Islamofascists, neo-communists, dictators), the idea that "They really are just like us! If only we could get Osama and Kim Jung-Il over for a game of pool and a coupla beers, we could work this whole thing out!"

And for those who should be like us (ie the "red states"): That we are being willfully ignorant or evil. After all, the truth is self evident (and I am the judge). So if another American disagrees with me it MUST be because he hasn't been enlightened (most likely because the capitalist media has brainwashed him) or because he willfully ignores the truth to pursue his own evil agenda (nothing is more fun that watching liberals swim back and forth between the idea that Bush is an ignorant chimp and that he is the master of a global cabal to rule the world!)

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
No comment necessary.

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
None here neither.

Donut Truths


With the recent revelations of media manipulation, staging and out-right fraud in the Qana Affair (soon to be a major motion picture starring Omar Sharif as "Green Helmet Guy", Suri Holmes-Cruise as dead baby with blue pacifier, and produced by Barbara Brocolli (look it up...)), trust in the major media has dropped plus bas q'un serpent qui chie as an old colleague of mine used to say of morale at our common workplace and which I render in the original froggish so as not to offend the sensibilities of my more delicate readers and their firewall settings.

There is a reason that Hezbollah chose to show pictures of dead children rather than dead journalists which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Do you know the difference between a journalist and a dead skunk in the middle of the road? Neither to do I.

[Somewhat abrupt segue here as the scene shifts to Cannes, France. Perhaps a soft dissolve, or maybe one of those 1930's maps with a cardboard plane traveling from Beirut to Nice Airport - quick cut to an interior shot of little cardboard passengers with their non-gel-containing, transparent plastic carry-on bags. Music shifts from heavy, slow violins to recognizably froggish tho not identifiable accordion...]

Cannes, France, where Dan and Nicole Diver played out their pathetic little lives, where, legend has it, Ernest rebuffed the late-night, private boys' boarding school type drunken advances of F. Scott, and whence entire generations of American college students were infected by post-WW I European ennui via some sort of sympathetic hypochondria.

For the record, Cannes is pronounced can as in "can-do" (or, this being frogland, "can't-do") and not kahn is in "the wrath of". In fact nothing gives me an inner smile faster than hearing some poseur artiste pronounce it kahn. Ask any frog for directions to kahn and you will probably get a look of dis-belief and a rush of incomprehensible froggish, tho you might get lucky and find one that actually, after 6 years of obligatory English lessons in school, understands your simple request. At which point you will be directed to a horribly ugly town of concrete public housing apartments near the Normandy coast by the name of Caen.

The reason that Caen is full of concrete public housing apartments is that the original city was reduced to its elementary building materials by concentrated Allied bombing just prior to D-Day. Had our valiant bomber pilots known about the frogs then what we know about them today, they would have gladly done to Paris what they did to Caen, or at least would have done what they did to Caen with gladness in their hearts.

Cannes, as every poseur artiste knows, is today the home of the Cannes Film Festival where self-inflicted ennui sufferers from around the world (or at least those non-Talibanic parts of the world where one is allowed to make films) get together for some mutually self-congratulatory, mutual self-abuse.

You have seen the red carpet and the movie stars climbing the stairs to a showing of some obscure Bulgarian oeuvre deemed "poignant" or "touching" by this or that self-proclaimed arbiter of filmic taste. You have seen the crowds of adoring fans packed in tight around the red carpet with their Instamatics at the ready to try to get a candid shot of Tom, or Sylvester, or Sean, or Brigitte or Nicole to show Aunt Edna back home.

But what you haven't seen, unless, like Yer Humble Narrator, you have at least briefly possessed that golden "get into jail free" card known as a press pass, is the cavernous basement of the Palais des Festivals which, during the festival, becomes a week-long international film market where people from third-world countries known only to their neighbors and the UN set up in small booths with large banners containing vaguely annoying diacritical marks over a really annoying string of consecutive consonants and attempt to attract the attention of film buyers from other indistinguishable third-world countries.

The real fun is in the back of the cavern, way back, segregated by a sort of metaphorical brown-paper wrapping, in the "adult" film section. [Note from YHN - this all took place in roughly the year 4 BI (or, for my more fastidious and secular readers, 4 Before the Internet Era)] This was back in the day when one had to "buy" or "rent" one's porn rather than having complete access to it for the price of broadband access (or banned-broad access depending on your firewall settings - sorry, couldn't resist).

It was a veritable pornucopia of "adult" entertainment, running the gamut from A to, oh say, B, hustled by surgically-enhanced starlet wannabees rented for the day and lacking in any sort of diacritical faculties whatsoever. The "press conferences" for these adult film companies were even occasionally held outside on the imported sands of the Cannes beaches where the "stars" of a latest release would re-enact, live, certain scenes from their most recent oeuvre right there in the open surrounded by a horde of press photogs who seemed frankly relieved not to be cooped up in the theater deciphering Bulgarian sub-titles. These scenes often included certain manual manipulations which, at least according to YHN, were much more deserving of the coveted Palme d'Or than anything showing upstairs (sorry, couldn't resist that one either).

"So, what's your point?", you're saying to yourself about now. Well to make a long story somewhat longerish, the point is that the readers of the magazine for which YHN then worked never learned about the sordid subterranean depths of the Cannes Film Festival from his keyboard. Returning to his tiny office, YHN dutifully wrote a story keeping both target audience and demographic in mind, a demographic of blue-haired Brit and American ex-pats who somehow managed to miss the opportunity of standing in the 95 degree heat outside the Palais with their Instamatics at the ready. YHN dutifully wrote about how splendid Tom and Sylvester and Sean, and Brigitte and Nicole looked as they walked up the red carpet, how "poignant" and "touching" were the tractor scenes in that Bulgarian film, how the champagne flowed at the after-hours parties on this or that producer's yacht.

Why? Why? Why would someone who has been politically incorrect for most of his adult life stoop to such a thing? I'll give you the answer: power. We're talking cut-to-the-front-of-the-line, touch the Stars and make them squirm, drink free champagne and eat caviar with billionaires power. We're talking about power that even American presidents and CEOs don't have what with their checks-and-balances and Sarbanes-Oxley and consumer demand to constrain them. We're talking about the power to smirk, from the air-conditioned press room, at the hordes of outsiders, outside, sweltering in the heat. To make the Toms and Nicoles and Seans dance to the tune of your questions. To have multi-millionaire producers grovel at your feet for a few column inches.

But perhaps an even greater feeling of power comes from the journalist's right, nay professional obligation, to be objective.

Do you understand what that means? Do you?

It means that journalists can, with a completely clear conscience, allow little Hadji to starve to death. [5 PI points to the first commenter to correctly identify that allusion]

It means that a journalist can, with a completely clear conscience, stand outside the Superdome and report what he sees, with no obligation to speculate on what he can't.

It means that journalists can, nay are obliged to, by the principle of objectivity, ignore the whole philosophically charged question of context. Of meaning. Not their job.

Example: The powers-that-be in the newsroom have determined that Senator Blowhard is inherently newsworthy. By the commutative principle of newsworthiness, the utterances of Senator Blowhard are also newsworthy. Leading to such journalistic gems as "Senator Blowhard today said that x." Job done. Microphone packed. Back to the watering hole to discuss Senator Blowhard's sexual peccadilloes with other journalists. It is not the journalist's job, or even the news editor's job to determine or opine whether or not x is true. To determine whether or not x contradicts Senator Blowhard's statements of yesterday. That job, if it gets done at all, is relegated to the punditocracy on the second-to-last two pages of section A.

The principle of objectivity allows journalists to see and experience and live the entire spectacle of human drama as beneath them. Just more grist for the mill. Emotions too, since emotion requires a point of view, is subjective rather than objective. Which is why journalists can, with a completely clear conscience, ask of Mrs. Jane Doe who just lost her husband and five children: "How does it feel?" The principle of objectivity allows journalists to concentrate on getting the money shot (to tie two somewhat distant themes together in today's blog).

And once you have seen the sausage being made, once you have seen the man behind the curtain pulling the levers and have even pulled the levers yourself once or twice, you can't but help feeling contempt for those outside who see only the great and powerful Oz.

This power, the power to be on the inside and the power to be objective, are extremely potent and intoxicating drugs. And once they've had a taste of this power, the only thing that journalists fear is that it be taken away. In the case of the Cannes Film Festival and its hyper-sensitive press accreditation girls, your press pass would get yanked faster than a Torah in Tikrit if you even hinted that all was not golden in Festival Palace. And so you write what you have to to keep the power, all the while exchanging knowing looks with other journalists about what is really happening. The same, I imagine, in Qana.

Which is why, more than anything else, today's mainstream news is filled with what Vladimir Nabokov once called "donut truths": The truth, the whole truth, with a hole in the truth.

Stoopid People

Those who know me, and their aren't many, know that I have a real problem with stoopid people. And you know who they are. They're the one's who wear their baseball caps on sideways and their pants down around their thighs.

Check in a mirror.

If you are wearing a baseball cap and it is on sideways, this blog is not for you.

Now this here is a true story...

A coupla weeks ago, I was in my once favorite (though no longer) watering hole late one week-end and a young man walks in to the watering hole with his best girl by his side.

The young man was wearing an authentic San Francisco Giants (this blog takes place in the Bay Area for reasons which will become apparent to you later tho incomprehensible to me now)...

Where were we? Oh yeah.

The young man was wearing an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap on sideways.

He had on a camouflage-colored shirt on underneath his authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball jacket.

He had a pair of camouflage pants down around his thighs showing off a pair of camouflage-colored boxers.

I couldn't tell whether he was wearing camouflage-colored socks because of his pants being so low, but I could tell that he had on a pair of camouflage colored shoes.

So he comes in and sits down.

His girlfriend sits down next to him.

And he starts looking around the bar, basking in the glow of all the envious looks he is getting from the other bar patrons.

Now something you gotta understand about stoopid people: you know that look you get on your face when you are just about to burst out laughing but you stop yourself because you know that to laugh out loud would be to commit a social faux pas? Well stoopid people think that look is the look of envy, of jealousy.

So the young man is basking in the glory of all the envious looks he is getting. His girlfriend is basking in the reflected glow of all the envious looks her boyfriend is getting.

Now just about this time, another young man and his girlfriend walk in to the bar.

The second young man is wearing an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap on sideways.

He has on a camouflage-colored shirt on underneath his authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball jacket.

He has a pair of camouflage pants down around his thighs showing off a pair of camouflage-colored boxers.

I can't tell whether he is wearing camouflage-colored socks because of his pants being so low, but I can see that he has on a pair of camouflage colored shoes.

And he sits down at the bar.

And his girlfriend sits down next to him.

And he starts to bask in the glow of what had become some seriously envious looks from the other bar patrons.

And his girlfriend starts to bask in the reflected glow of all that envy directed at her boyfriend.

Then he sees the first young man.

Then he looks around at all the other bar patrons.

Then he looks back at the first young man.

Then he looks back at the other bar patrons who, by this time, are radiating some real rolling on the floor, clutching their sides looks of envy.

Then his girlfriend sees the first young man.

And the first girlfriend sees the second young man.

And they both start getting envious looks on their faces 'cause they both simultaneously come to the realization that all you gotta do to be the snazziest dresser in the neighborhood is to have about five-hunnert dollars and a double digit IQ...

But the story doesn't end there.

I went outside to be politically incorrect which is what you gotta do if you live in California and want to exercise yer God-given right to fill yer lungs with the smoke of burning sot-weed (look it up...) and what do I see but a young woman walking out of the mall next door with the price tag dangling off a pair of brand new shoes. Now bein' the nice guy that I am, I was gonna go over and discreetly alert the young lady to the social faux pas she was committing. But being the socially inept guy that I am, I didn't. And good thing too.

'Cause as I walk back into the watering hole, I begin to notice that all sorts of people (well, OK, only one type of people, but there were lots of them) had price tags sticking out o' their brand new clothing.

And a look of envy began to come over my face as I came to the realization that these people had deliberately, and with malice aforethought, left those price tags on their clothes. 'Cause there's not much point in payin' a hunnert dollars for an authentic, camouflage-colored San Francisco Giants baseball cap if other people don't know just how authentically expensive it is.

And not much point in payin' two-hunnert dollars for a pair o' jeans if people don't realize you got that much money to spend.

And no point in dropping two-hunnert-and-fitty dollars on a pair of sneakers and then literally walking all over it if it ain't gonna make people jealous.

I must admit, I like this new system 'cause it allows me to calculate, at a glance, down to the penny, just how stoopid people can be.

And just for more proof in case you needed it: Stoopid People Laws.