"(Two hundred years ago) the only thing being emitted (in London) were horse toots."

Prager can't know much about history. The Industrial Revolution was well under way, there were factories in London, and every home, if it was warmed at all, was heated by coal-burning stoves, fireplaces, or the like. Cooking was over dirty stoves. Livestock lived in the city when the owners could afford it. Horses poooped, they didn't just pass gas. The city had a sewage system, I believe, but many people did continue throwing stuff into the street. Many factories used steam power, heated with coal ... the list goes on and on and on. I've never been surprised to hear that the air back then was putrid and thick enough to cut with a knife. I don't know why you don't know stuff like this. Maybe you should read a book or three by Dickens. Vanity Fair might give you some info. Jane Austen might give you a few pointers on how houses were managed. Probably the Bronte sisters will have some info, ya think? Fielding? Try it, you'll learn something.

"forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one"

Barack Obama has put himself in the position of "forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one."

So says Shelby Steele, one of my favorite authors. Need I say more?

"In the final analysis, what's it (life) all about?"

Prager has settled on "doing good for others."

I can't think of a better goal. One of my religious friends once told me something he had heard in a class on his religion: "God put us here on Earth so that we could let him walk on Earth."

Or, in his words, God could walk this earth without a creature here who appreciated him, but what would be the point? We're here to do God's work and to demonstrate His love to one another and to do the work he would ask us to do. We are meant to act as His hands and feet. I would add that failing to do so is abandoning God.

Remarkably successful propaganda campaign

"You don't have to think to vote for the Left, all you have to know is that you oppose Nazis."

This is the crux of the whole issue. Many people are too lazy to think. Others aren't particularly lazy, and in fact they care about the issue, but nothing they have ever run into in public school teaches them how to approach anything with logic or with a critical approach. It is the triumph of our liberal educators that they have bought so many votes for the left wing, that for the last hundred years they have deprived succeeding generations more and more of their right to be taught good thinking.

My generation, the generation of hippies, didn't start this. But they sure did exploit it. "School shouldn't teach you WHAT to think," ranted the laziest bunch of people ever to land on planet earth, "but HOW to think!" They pounded the table demanding the schools eliminate every minute of "teaching facts to the kids" that could possibly be eliminated. As for the "how to think" part of the curriculum, they replaced that with iconoclasm. It sufficed for them to tell one another (and their elders) that every generation that had come before theirs was stupid, ignorant, didn't know what Life was, didn't appreciate the virtues of hedonism, and insisted there was no such thing as truth (is that true?) and that therefore there was no way to find truth or help anyone else to find truth. Then they threw out all the books that could possibly teach anything and replaced them with Rousseau's child-centered curriculum, where suburban kids should read about suburban experiences, because that's all that they'd be interested in, and inner-city minority kids were fed garbage about drug dealers and prostitutes, appropriately outraging the mothers of these children, whom the hippies subsequently patronized to death.

"These applauses are, i'm finding, more depressing than..."

...the fools who make the statements."

Well, our Left are, among all the things Prager points out, essentially bullies.

A bully only functions well when he has an unresisting victim, and he brings with him a posse of bully wanna-be's who form a backdrop of support for the bully.

In echoing or mirroring what the bully does, the posse gain a large degree of status as they borrow his importance and power. They are only too happy to join in on the game of ridiculing or belittling the target and watching him helplessly cry, run away, or grow to an outraged anger.

Maher's audience are "sharers in the indignation" and they need to promote Reiner's belittling and ridicule so they can bask in it all the more themselves. It's a rare person who steps back from the party and looks at himself and what he's getting out of the bully event, and then says no to it.

"There are people who take care of an infirmed person"

It's "infirm", Prager.

You love to say, "I'm extremely precise in my language."

Yes, you TRY to be, but you make many flubs, and some of them are big flubs. The flubs add up; there are many, many of them. It is to your credit that you work at it and you even take input from people who want to correct you. Except for me. I spend time reading books on English for pleasure. When I was a teenager I sat with my mother's Random House Unabridged Dictionary (copyright date was about 1963, when they were still a prescriptive dictionary, unlike today when they have turned into a descriptive dictionary) in my lap while reading literature and made vocabulary lists from words I needed to learn. I also studied several languages as I grew up, and expanded my vocabulary that way. I loved grammar as a hobby, and had a blast diagramming sentences for fun. All I'm missing is the proper terms for various grammatica. For instance, my elementary and beginning high school grammar texts referred to such verbs as "to be" as "linking verbs." The proper term is "copulative verb", but maybe in the Sixties that term was too risué for public school use.

Back to my point. You're just a wee tad short of the "extremely precise" area and must drop down into the "I TRY to be extremely precise" area. But since you try to be extremely precise, you'd want to use that wording anyway, right?

"So sad, the guy's an anti-semite..."

Prager had a caller who complained that Jews occupied a disproportionate number of seats (almost all of the seats) in the New York State Assembly. He may or may not have been correct, I don't think it matters much toward his argument. Prager wanted to know why this mattered to him?

"Because it's not fair! It's not fair that your people, who make up one or two percent of the population in your state, occupy all the seats..." I'm paraphrasing. Prager was already trying to interrupt this guy, obviously a liberal as revealed in his debating tactic, which conservatives almost never use: the Steam Roller Method. It consists in having a huge speech prepared ahead of time and delivered without taking a breat, and keeps the other person from getting a word in edgewise. It is a common practice among immature debaters to keep the other side from getting its points out. That way, among the immature and untrained (mainly, largely uneducated) among the populace, the steamroller gets only his point of view represented, and since the opposition appears to have no arguments to contribute, the innocent, naive, and uninformed have no reason to change their minds.

But that's not my point. "It's not fair," cries the caller, then adds, via my paraphrase, "You have more legislators than you have constituents. Pragers immediate question should have been, "If there were more than 12% blacks, should we fire them? Should we cap the number of women in the assembly at 50% The Latinos at 22% The African Americans at 12.8%?"

He's asking those questions now, I'm glad to say.

The poor caller has had his mind numbed by decades of howling from the democrat party. He doesn't know that he doesn't want the number of women capped at 50%. He has only thought about how "only" 18% of the members of congress were women (back in the Seventies) and that the appropriate action should be to elect more women to make the numbers "fair". Of course this should mean, to a thinking person, that "fair" numbers means limits as well.

Sorry, they just can't think clearly, they've had that process of thinking squashed by propaganda.

If your marriage is not particularly good, can you name one thing that would turn it around?

1-8Prager-776

That's double seven six, Prager. You said triple.

The question is: can you name one thing your spouse could do that would make the marriage better? Is there an, "If only [Steve] would..." ?

I can think of a number of things that he should have done. "Listen more" was Prager's first example; it was mine too.

When a man hears he doesn't listen enough, he doesn't know what to do with that. We men are spectacular at listening enough; we are spectacular at reading manuals, or getting instructions. If the wife said, "Honey, I was 22.5 minutes of listening time at 6:30 p.m." he would reply "fantastic!"

Here's the female response, and Prager believe it's a problem: "Well, he should know." I think it's a horrible problem, too. There's also "If you loved me you would know" or "would think it out." And women wonder why men are baffled by us.

She should say, "Here's how I know you're listening." There are books on active listening, how to reflect back what she just said (by phrasing it in his own words) and show he's listening. Assertiveness training often covers this stuff.

Dennis is on vacation again

I don't know how long he's been playing "bests of" but I'm disappointed that when I finally get to log in after several days of not listening, I get a "best of". Hope it's not one that I've heard before so I can hear something new.

George Gilder: "Something happened in the twentieth century when the Jews became a dominant intellectual force..."

Sorry, Gilder, but the Jews were a dominant intellectual force in the Nineteenth Century, too.

Since the first time I heard Gilder's thesis that men were evolutionarily driven to rape, I knew he was intellectually vapid. He has never thought through the consequences of this idea.

Sure, a man who raped twenty women would have dispersed his seed among them, maybe five times as much as a man who remains monogamous. Of course, not every rape results in a pregnancy, and the rapist would have to rape a hundred women to conceive even a few babies. Meanwhile, the brothers, husbands, or fathers of the raped women will undoubtedly take action against the rapist. He likely ends up dead before he even spawns three babies.

Okay, so that's two babies produced that wouldn't have been born otherwise. A success? Remember, ancient man killed unwanted babies. Most likely prehistoric man also killed such infants. But what if they didn't, and allowed the un-partnered mother to raise the baby alone? Well, we know that in the hunter-gatherer society, a single woman would hardly succeed to gather enough to keep a baby alive long enough to grow up. End of the rapist's seed, end of the genetic imperative to rape.

Evolutionary psychology is a very discredited field. Gilder should have shut up long ago. There was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal several months ago; I'm astonished Prager didn't read it. When all the factors are taken into account, the numbers show that rape is a very unfavorable way for a strand of DNA to carry on, at least among the human species. But, because Prager loves it as an explanation for his own wandering eye, he continues espousing it twenty years after it was shown to be a fatally flawed theory.

Read and learn, Prager. It's dead.

"If they reallly hate fossil fuel, why don't they support nuclear power?"

Because they're not logical. You can love and hate at the same time. You can be happy and sad over the same issue. True, you're looking at two different aspect of an issue when you're happy and then sad and then both. But they don't think that way, that's too much intelelctual precision for leftists to comprehend. So is some baptist minister reading off a list of OTHER kinds of banned marriages that have nothing else to do with one another, and always in the leftist "brain", that means he's comparing the banned forms of marriage to one another, when the truth is, he's merely listed several kinds of banned marriages in preparation to asking, "From this list, you might pick some and I might pick others, why do you get your way and I'm not supposed to have a place at the table?"

That's too subtle for them.

When liberals took over schools, the schools went down the toilet

I wish I had the time to blow on a blog that no one reads, to expound on this. It is so true, all the "innovations" in education that started a hundred years ago.

Go read Anne of Green Gables, and see what NORMAL, AVERAGE children were expected to do at age ten and eleven and thirteen and fifteen. They were doing every bit as much in Paraguay in the 1970's. Probably we sent some stupid liberals over there and their education system has been destroyed--it matches ours today, no doubt.

Read "Marva Collins' Way" and see what supposedly retarded little black kids were capable of in the 1970's as well--after their school-of-ed teachers wrote them off as incapable of doing anything.

Oh, well, I'm not going on. Children used to learn to read thousands of words in first grade. Then the progressives decided that was too horrible a punishment, implemented the whole word look-see method and ruined the teaching of reading, and fifty years later book publishers were bragging how little they could teach kids in first grade. I'm referring to their bragging in published statements that they only taught the children fewer than 300 words. This was a great accomplishment, allowing the children not to feel threatened by the act of learning.

If you're not vomiting yet, you probably went to a school of education yourself.

France is a good measure of our Left

...because their Left is clear about what they believe.

First, though, you have to get them to agree to the label "Left". They fight it like anything.

We on the right are frequently labeled by the left. It makes the left happy to throw ANY label at anyone. They call us rightwing and though we don't exactly like that label (since the word "wing" is pretty negative), we don't argue about it. A label is just a label, and we also think there is a left wing who ought to be wearing that label. But just try saying someone is "leftwing" or refer to the "left wing" of the democrat party and you're likely in for a fight. Labeling leftists as leftist, or communists as communists (even when they've got the card right there in their wallets) or socialists as socialists--use any word but "progressive" and you have spoken evil. Of course, you know, that means war.

But the left is always at war. I think they're mostly a bunch of unhappy, even miserable, people who blame everything outside themselves for the unhappiness they feel. Their solution is to try desperately to remodel the world by changing everyone else, another cause for the rage they express when you confront them with contrary arguments. "Well," you say, "if we just do suchandso, where will the money come from to pay for it?"

They don't know the answer. They have never thought it through, but they see that you want to stop them. But this has to translate into "you hate", so in retaliation they hate you.

Of course she won the long drive competition, she's a man.

Prager then mentioned he didn't think it would be fair to let "former" men participate in women's sports. That was my first reaction, too. You've had "gender reassignment" surgery but you've still got the same chromosomes you had before. You can claim all day long that you're not a man, you're a woman now, but your chromosomes know better. Your former testes may have stopped flooding your body with testosterone and your current prescription may be flooding your body with estrogen, but the rest of your body is all male.

You're taller, your bones are bigger, your skeleton is broader and larger and there is a lot more room for it to have larger muscles attached. If the LPGA had a special category for "gigantic women and former men" to compete with one another, it would be fair, but failing that, competition should be limited to XY's.

A man who doesn't lust after women whom he's not married to! Prager discovery!

Prager today has discovered "the only man in the world" who doesn't have lustful feelings for women other than his wife. He's baffled, I believe, and is telling this man that he needs to be studied because he's the only such man in the world.

Then for several minutes, he asserts his credentials that give him the right to insist that his "every man" over-generalization is still dead-on correct: he has had couples approach him and tell him he saved their marriage. Goody for you, Prager.

Prager looks at himself, and he looks at a million honest men who admit they wish they had more variety in their women. And because Prager wishes to screw around promiscuously (though of course he reins himself in), he projects to every other man on the planet. He finds a book (George Guilder, discredited evolutionary psychologist) that supports him and for twenty years quotes Guilder's phony arm-chair theorizing as support for his own Prager-centric theorizing.

Another caller, another monogamist, and Prager tells THIS one to get examined as well. Then, I'm not sure, I thought I heard him muttering about lying to oneself. I'm way behind, time-wise, so I can't be sure I heard that or just imagined it.

But what is this, other than narcissism? I feel this, therefore everyone feels this. I can do it, therefore anyone should be able to do it. I respond in such a way, therefore everyone should be able to respond in such a way.

"The average liberal cannot enunciate what they believe in..."

They can't, and that's why they are so vicious in their attacks against the opposition. They try to clarify their positions and support their reasons for holding them, but when they actually look for the language that would explain it, they only come up with, "This is right because I believe it, I believe it because I'm good, I believe it because it's good, therefore it's right, I'm right, my beliefs are right, my beliefs are good, believing good beliefs is good, and you're a genocidal, racist, sexist, xenophobic Nazi."

A better way to TRY talking to them is to ask them for their second-degree thinking, which will be utterly new to them. Don't give them a lecture, just use Thomas Sowell's phrase, "And then what will happen?"

I offer an example. My father quoted me this from a conversation with his (college age) stepdaughter about welfare and her ideas about how many people should be on it. She stated that it wouldn't bother her if half the population lived on welfare. A few deft qustions from my dad told him she had never thought through where those welfare dollars came from. She "knew" that taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor was a good thing, and that doing so was going to allow a hundred million people not to have to work.

She had never thought about how the government mistreats the dollars it seizes, passing it though the hands of unproductive offices, bureaus, and government workers who only shuffle papers around for their living, until that one hundred cents has turned into twenty-eight cents. She had never seen how the pittance that is paid to welfare recipients is so puny that people cannot prosper because of it and are essentially forced either to stay in a world of poverty or are forced to get off the roles and get a job. In spite of this, she "knew" that efforts under Reagan to push people off welfare were evil.

She had never once thought about productivity, and how America's being the most productive country in the world was what made us the country with the higher standard of living in the world, and how if the average amount of productivity were cut almost in half, that our standard of living would crash through the floor, and take these welfare recipients along with it.

And because she has never thought about any of these things, she is a liberal, and "knows" only that taking from the evil rich and giving to the pathetic, helpless, pitiful, incompetent poor is a good thing.

People like this need to learn to think. I'm not worried about their learning to think well; for now, they just need to think at all.

"If they were religious enough their cancer would be cured"

That makes God look disgusting.

Well, it doesn't make God look like anything he isn't. It makes the speaker look bad, though; he appears to think that he has God on puppet strings whereby he is bound by a promise he never made, to give us everything we request.

God is not our cosmic puppet. He doesn't pop out of a tardis (ex machina) to make our lives good in whatever way we have specified. Snap my fingers, you do my bidding, O God, because you promised.

You're right, God often answers, "No". He told Paul no when the latter had appealed to him to cure his pain. After three such requests, God said "no" and Paul submitted to his will. Unlike the name-it-and-claim-it boobies who think God owes them a cure.

"My wife is the only woman in the world who is turned on by discussions of tax policy."

It is just wonderful that your wife is logical. About ten percent of women will tell you they are run by their reason rather than by their feelings; the others will say they want to be honored for their feelings more than for their thoughts, according to Barbara DeAngelis, author of Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know. Many of us who do run on reason are very proud of our condition and consider ourselves not just exceptional but special. When you claim your wife is the ONLY woman on the planet who thinks logically, you're not just insulting us all, but I believe you're stating a lie.

We thinking-over-feelings women are not devoid of feelings. In occasionally we respond similarly to the feelings-over-thinking. You can hurt us, even if we do rationalize our way out of it.

Similarly, I used to have a game partner (sort of like a tennis partner, though we had to text everything to one another instead of talking) who seemed to consider my being rational as an excuse for him to become abusive about once a week. He would send me a long list of criticisms--most of them very unkindly expressed, or simply not true or--that cut to the core, and then denied me any right to respond to the attack by stating that none of this was "personal", he was just stating the facts. I learned a few years later in The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense that this was a tactic for severely abusing someone, and she labeled it something like "analytical mode", one of many modes in which attackers gave themselves license to put someone else down. Watch out for that.

Like Prager, I like to analyze everything. The day he said, "If I had been on the Titanic I would have drowned trying to find what caused it instead of trying to find a life jacket," I recognized myself. Thank you, Prager; you gave me a way to explain to other people why I'm so curious and why I ask so many questions, or why sometimes I want to continue discussing a subject more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, too many people treat me as a common, feelings-based woman and misinterpret my curiosity or my wish to reason things out as something bad. It's a hard life.

The left of the "art" world crap on institutions that won't hurt them

Amen to that, Prager. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christians nor with Christian churches nor for that matter with the thing known as "organized religion." But they have done everything they could think of so far (they will think of more as time goes on) to demonize all religious people and religious institutions.

The ugliest tactic is taking our extremists, religious redneck believers, and pretending "this is what christianity will do to you" and overgeneralizing to all of us. The next one is labeling all of us "stupid", as if they weren't themselves devoid of logic or reason.

Al Franken won his race by 375 votes

Actually, Al Franken lost his race narrowly, only a few hundred votes behind. But in the recount he and his cronies threw in hundreds of phony votes. "Oh, my," says a democratic poll worker, "look at this! I forgot and left a hundred votes in my trunk! And isn't this amazing, all hundred of them happen to be for Franken! Gosh, aren't we blessed!"

As Hugh Hewitt says, they can't cheat if it isn't close.

The bigger problem is the news item that appeared last week, telling how a voter registration drive run by people from SEIU turned in well over 23,000 phony registrations in Texas. Imagine how many Franken votes were also phony.