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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Jesse Jackson Jr. demands Obama hire 15 million unemployed Americans

By David McElroy · October 17, 2011

Many of us have breathed a sigh of relief that Congress hasn’t been foolish enough to pass Barack Obama’s jobs bill. However, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) says Congress’ failure to pass the legislation is an act of rebellion — and that Obama should declare a “state of emergency” and simply give government jobs to 15 million unemployed Americans.

It’s always seemed that logic was purely optional in the Jackson family, and it seems that Jesse Jr. hasn’t turned out any better than his crazy father. The scary part is that the younger Jackson is actually a member of Congress, not just a publicity-seeking gadfly the way his father’s always been.

To make sure you see that his words aren’t being taken out of context, watch the video here. Jackson compares Congress not passing Obama’s jobs legislation to the Confederate states seceding from the Union. Jackson said Obama simply needs to act on his own, in the way he imagines Abraham Lincoln might have in the face of rebellious states. In addition to employing 15 million Americans for five years — at an average salary of $40,000 a year — Jackson says Obama should also unilaterally spend hundreds of billions of dollars more to bail out all cities and states across the country. He says the total cost of the plan would be $804 billion.

“President Obama tends to idealize — and rightfully so  — Abraham Lincoln, who looked at states in rebellion and he made a judgment that the government of the United States, while the states are in rebellion, still had an obligation to function. …On several occasions now, we’ve seen … the Congress is in rebellion, determined, as Abraham Lincoln said, to wreck or ruin at all costs. I believe … in the direct hiring of 15 million unemployed Americans at $40,000 a head, some more than $40,000, some less than $40,000 — that’s a $600 billion stimulus. It could be a five-year program. For another $104 billion, we bail out all of the states … for another $100 billion, we bail out all of the cities.”

If you wonder about Jackson’s economic literacy, well, wonder no more. This is the same economic illiterate who earlier this year blamed the iPad for killing thousands of jobs in the United States, which makes nearly as much sense as blaming the advent of CDs for mostly putting vinyl-pressing plants out of business for the past few decades or for blaming the development of automobiles for killing off buggy whip makers. (Of course, Obama himself recently sounded a bit ignorant of economics when he claimed in an interview that one problem with the economy is that businesses are learning to be more efficient. He cited the example of banks’ increasing use of ATMs instead of human tellers as a problem.)

Jackson and people of his ilk care only about one thing. They care about getting the money and power to do what they want to do. They don’t care about legalities. They don’t care about the Constitution, which you’re supposed to care about if you’re a member of Congress and supporting the whole state system. To be fair, there are people on the other side of the aisle who would be just as happy to unilaterally seize power, but that’s the real point: This isn’t an ideological issue. It’s an issue about the kind of power-hungry people who just want their way and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

The coercive state is dangerous to all of us even when it obeys its own rules in how it decides what we have to do. It veers way off the path into serious tyranny when loose cannons such as Jackson become taken seriously. At this point, I see no evidence that anyone is going to take him seriously, but the very fact that a demagogue such as him can be elected to Congress should be all the evidence you need of the kind of results a majoritarian system is going to give us as things get worse in the future.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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