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We were a little busy playing Doctor Kervorkian on the market, among other things. Got to make hay while the sun is shining, don’t you know. Can’t BELIEVE we forgot to nail CSCO yesterday. Bloody bloody bloody bloody heck! Oh well, can’t win them all.

I love the smell of a 200 percent short in the morning. And the Vorpal Blade went snicker-snack….

One of the most difficult myths to shake in dealing with people is the idea that people are rational. No matter how many times we see people behaving in a manner that is obviously contrary to their self-interest, we find it difficult to imagine that anyone would knowingly do so. And yet, they do, again and again.

I’m working on a project right now, and I decided that from the start, I wouldn’t worry about whether it made sense to anyone. I tried to do the same thing six years ago and was tremendously frustrated when people simply would not see or accept the obvious. Now that I’ve learned to expect irrational behavior, I’ve taken precisely the identical product but have designed an approach to appeal to the customer’s instincts instead of his reason.

Needless to say, the level of interest is now off the charts. I was badly misled by my father, I think, who was always telling me that I needed to be less contemptous of people. In day-to-day relations, I now accept that is true, but it is precisely the opposite in business. In business, no matter how low your opinion of the average individual, you will usually be surprised by the blind greed, incompetence, inability to project the future and total incapacity for logical thinking with which you must deal.

Think about it for a second. If people were rational creatures, how many would purchase Microsoft Office, considering the alternative? And yet Microsoft Office XP Pro ranks #390 on Amazon. It retails for $499, but you can find copies of it for about $140. Its functional equivalent, OpenOffice, which is 95 percent equivalent to Office – in the sense that only 5 percent of Office users need features that are not in OpenOffice – is infinitely cheaper. Seriously, it’s free, you only have to go to openoffice.org and download it. If you install Linux, you don’t even have to do that.

And yet every single person that I’ve ever spoken with about this specific issue, who did not need any of those Office-specific features, has gone out and bought MS Office anyhow. This isn’t reason, this is herd mentality. So, the trick to convincing an individual of something is to make sure that the solution you are offering him lies in the direction that his herd mentality is already driving him. This isn’t a new concept, but it’s harder to force yourself to think this way than you’d imagine. I’m constantly wrestling with the urge to make a rational case, but in truth, logic often only gets in the way. People will almost always do what they want in the end.

Once you learn to put forth your ideas and proposals in a manner which deals with people as they are instead of how you think they should be, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to deal with them.

President Bush said on Tuesday that abolishing the U.S. income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax was an idea worth considering. “It’s an interesting idea,” Bush told an “Ask President Bush” campaign forum here. “You know, I’m not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it’s the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously.”

Yes, he sounds completely committed to tax reform, doesn’t he? Isn’t “interesting” the sort of thing you say when you think something is outrageously stupid, but don’t want to say so in public? I suspect the five or six people who are still very excited about the possibility of George Bush making the abolition of the income tax the priority of his super-secret second-term agenda are going to be sadly disappointed.

Dark Window sets aside the mushrooms long enough to hit it out of the park with a much-needed smackdown of the latest neoconservative insanity:

Here is the proposed Lucom Plan to End Terrorism (subject to modification):

That “subject to modification” means he’ll change it a little and write another column about it next month. Here are a couple of his latest ideas:

1. All terrorists are declared criminals, subject to arrest on sight for the act of being terrorists. Due process, of course, must be observed.

Hmmmm…Something sounds fishy here…The “act” of “being.” Well, anyway, as long as it’s “on sight” I think we’ll be okay. Too bad Annie Jacobson didn’t have the Lucom Plan on her Terroristic Flight of Doom.

3. A $250,000 reward is payable by the State Department for information leading to the arrest and conviction of individual terrorists, in accordance with its reward program, to assist in preventing acts of national and international terrorism and other related criminal acts. A $1 billion reward is posted for the capture of Osama bin Laden.

That really big reward is the hallmark of the Lucom plan. It has graced every iteration I’ve read so far.

4. Any nation willfully and deliberately violating this United Nations resolution will be fined $5 billion for each violation. The U.N. or U.S. armed forces will enter the non-cooperating country to eliminate the terrorists and any terrorist training camps. Nuclear weapons can be used if considered necessary to save the lives of U.N. or U.S. troops, as President Truman used nuclear weapons in Japan. (This point expressly subject to modification.)

You know, on the off chance that people might actually object to having their country nuked.

This is so profoundly stupid that it practically strikes one dumb with awe at the sight of its towering idiocy. How is a terrorist defined, the same way that the FBI defined the 19 9/11 hijackers, seven of whom are still living after supposedly having crashed a 757 into the WTC? Isn’t there already a plethora of fines being offered for various undesirables? Note the now-obligatory neoconservative Republican kowtowing to the UN, as Wilson advocates nuclear attack in defense of UN resolutions. And on what basis is the UN fining these nations? Who collects and receives the fines… the same entity that hands them out? Hmmm, I wonder how that will work out.

I recently wrote that if you scare a woman enough, she’ll embrace death camps. Scare a crazy man and he’ll embrace indiscriminate nuclear attacks. When I read this sort of lunacy, I begin to understand the global elitist’s burden.

I have nothing against Rebecca Hagelin, who is almost certainly a very nice woman, except for the fact that she titles her column “Heartbeat”, which with its cloying suggestion of just how much she cares about life, the universe and everything makes me want to set her hair on fire. But the notion that this woman should be discussing “what constitutes cool”, in any context, is as fundamentally wrong as your average liberal journalist even mentioning the word “economics”.

I am, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of ten coolest nationally syndicated columnists at this particular juncture in the space-time continuum.* This isn’t saying much – just look at the Creators lineup; ye cats! – and I take no pride in this, it is simply the inevitable result of my encyclopedic knowledge of Public Enemy, post-cyberpunk fiction and techno-industrial music. And, of course, I ride the tank, which counts for something in shadowy, but significant circles. But the concept of cool morphs so quickly that I would not even think to pontificate on the matter, as the notion of paying any attention whatsoever to what is current among the latest angst-laden posings of over-fed, hormone-enslaved adolescents appalls me.

Look to Rebecca, then, all you who would be cool! Thus spake Vox.

*I haven’t actually considered a top ten list of cool columnists. Maybe we should do that. I’ll have to give the matter some thought. Goldberg’s got to be on the list, he’s got class clown all wrapped up. Coulter too, just because she’ll bring the smokes. Derbyshire? Definitely.

If Bill Clinton is, as once said of him, an unusually good liar, John Kerry is an unusually bad one. Everything about him speaks of his being full to the rim with the rich smell of fecal matter. I’ve considered him to be a quasi-psychotic piece of work ever since first hearing of his “Band of Brothers” which, in its overt attempt to draw attention to itself, rang false in light of the experience I’ve had in close relationships with three generations of warriors.

Veterans with real experience of war, real military heroes, don’t talk about it in public at the drop of a hat. Everyone with a grandfather who fought in WWII or a father who fought in Vietnam knows that it’s like pulling teeth to get them to talk about it, even in private. It’s only those who never served and what the front-line fighters call REMFs who boast about their bold and fearless exploits.

This is why Kerry was considered sketchy from the start by so many who otherwise mindlessly laud anyone who ever served in the military. Now that facts of his pathetic four-month service are coming out – like the patently false claims to have spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 that he has repeatedly and publicly made – these suspicions are being shown to have had strong foundation.

It still amazes me that the Democrats nominated this utter charlatan. Senators have a horrible Presidential track record, and Massachusetts liberals haven’t exactly distinguished themselves either. The Democrats would surely have avoided this debacle if they’d only had a few people familiar with the military – besides political officers like Wes Clark – in a position to influence the decision-making back when the DNC leadership decided to trash Howard Dean in favor of Kerry. But then, I suppose it’s hard to identify one specific stink when you’re wallowing in sewage.

I noticed this in Joani’s missive:

Some men can’t stand when a woman wants to better herself, improve her education, fulfill her purposes in life other than domestic duties.

I daresay that there’s not a single man on the planet who cares at all if she does this, as long as she doesn’t do it after telling him that she wants bear his children and stay home and take care of them. There are few things more obnoxious than the individual who suddenly changes his or her mind after someone else has made a commitment to them based on all the available information. This holds true for both sexes.

But I marvel at the women who seem to think that education and fulfillment can only come outside the house. The former is especially ridiculous in the age of the Internet. Domestic work is easy, if time-consuming, and perhaps if a woman did not sit down in front of the television for the 4.5 hours that are the reported daily average, she’d have more than enough time to educate herself. I found it interesting that one study reported that men have 30 more minutes of free time a day than women, which, strangely enough, corresponded rather closely with the 30 minutes less daily television watching reported by the first study. (Four hours a day is still ridiculous, by the way. Go read a book or something. Learn your culture. You’re blind from the facts on who ya are cos you’re watching that garbage.)

Of course, this requires personal discipline, something that is in obviously short supply among men and women today, who can’t even control what they put in their mouths, let alone their minds.

Rod Dreher patiently explains:

My editorial board colleague Ruben Navarrette, who is Latino, returned from the UNITY conference of minority journalists appalled by the naked partisanship his 5,000 fellow minority journalists displayed in the way they treated John Kerry, versus the way they treated President Bush. And he wrote a staff editorial about it. Here’s the first sentence: “Anyone who has ever harbored suspicions that there’s such a thing as a liberal media need only to have been in Washington last week to observe how thousands of minority journalists treated the two headliners to their conference: President George Bush and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.”

What’s ironic is that these idiot journalists seriously believe the President is conservative. People don’t realize that most journalists aren’t very smart or well-educated, and the affirmative action babies are sub the low par. They’re ignorant too – I once spoke with an editor at a major newspaper, who is responsible for covering tax-related issues, and he had no idea that the state’s revenue court judges were employees of the state’s revenue agency despite the fact that they had been so for more than 25 years.

39% – (R) George Bush (183 votes)

5% – (D) John Kerry (22 votes)

39% – (L) Michael Badnarik (184 votes)

18% – (C) Michael Peroutka (86 votes)

The extremely close results would cause me to conclude that two of you were clicking on (L) and (R) in an attempt to one-up each other, except that the number of votes is about what I would expect given the traffic. So… I just don’t know. Blog traffic today was a little higher than normal, but that may have simply been the excitement caused by the discussion of a cuddle party. MOOOOOOO!

Anyhow, it’s nice to see that Dark Window and a few of his friends stopped by, and I’m a little surprised that Peroutka wasn’t closer to Badnarik. Still, a pretty solid showing for the Constitution Party here in this little corner of the extreme right wing. Interesting, too, that George Bush has solid electoral support even if he doesn’t have a lot of vocal defenders posting here on the blog.

And yet I doubt that the November elections will look anything like this, unless those Swift boat vets really manage to tattoo their version of events on the nation’s consciousness.

“It started out as a joke,” said Baczynski. “Now we talk about cuddling all the time. It’s just been amazing.”

MOOOOO!

Curiosity is a big driver for people who attend cuddle parties, and it is a better way to meet people than going to a bar, getting drunk and spending the night with someone just because of the need for some affection, she said. A cuddle party is really about communication and not therapy, say the organizers.

Before any touching begins, participants gather in a circle to hear the rules and voice any questions or concerns. The first rule is that the event is not clothing optional, pajamas must stay on and sex is not permitted. Participants team up into pairs and to ensure the boundaries of what is permissible are clear, they practice saying “no” to the question, “May I kiss you?” An introduction to cuddling ensues, first by hugging three people. People then get in a circle on their hands and knees, rub shoulders and moo like cows. After a bit of swaying, everyone falls to their side, which puts them into an easy cuddling position.

Cuddle parties are intended for people who are emotionally sound.

Emotionally sound? Sounds like that’s water under the bridge, about three states up. This has to be a con. Please, tell me someone was just messing with the reporter.