Join me Tuesday for some live radio — if you can stomach an hour of me

By David McElroy · March 13, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook once again…

I talked to a local elected official Monday night who told me that interest in the primary election today in Alabama is so low that they’re expecting only about 15 percent turnout among Democrats and 45 percent turnout among Republicans. I don’t sense any enthusiasm from voters about any race around here, from presidential on down to family court judge or constable or whatever. I mostly sense apathy.

Up until Monday, I hadn’t even seen a single sign for a presidential candidate around here other than the one Ron Paul sign at the other end of the street where I live. And you know how well Paul is going to do in a state with such a strong social conservative streak. (A poll released on primary day shows this for Alabama: Romney 28 percent, Gingrich 27 percent, Santorum 22 percent and Paul just 4 percent.)

I’ll be a guest Tuesday on a live radio show called “Independent Thinking with Steve Gelder.” Click the link and then click on “Listen live” to join us at noon central time — 10 a.m. on the west coast and 1 p.m. on the east coast. (If you’re in the rest of the world, you’re on your own with the time conversion.)

Steve is a bright and funny guy who’s a Los Angeles-based comedian, actor and filmmaker. We come from completely different places politically, but he’s smart, fair and genuinely interested in other points of view, so it ought to be a lot of fun. I’ve been fighting a cold for nearly a week, so the biggest fun for the audience might be counting the number of times I cough or snort before I can mute myself. If you miss the live show, you can hear it later when the episode is archived.

If a German government proposal is implemented, the Germans might come looking for me to pay someone each time I link to an article somewhere. The German government is trying to figure out ways to get online giants such as Google to pay money to help out with the European financial crisis, but the list of priorities also includes trying to get money from sites that aggregate news links. If this thing passes, I have news for them. The monkeys aren’t paying. All they have in life are their bananas — and the Germans are just going to have to find their own.

All my life, I’ve heard the expression, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but I didn’t know where it came from and I had no idea of the context. (I also had no idea that the commonly used version isn’t quite correct.) When I was listening to this week’s EconTalk podcast Monday — which you should listen to each week if you don’t already — host Russ Roberts quoted the line from Alexander Pope in its context — and it took on new meaning for me:

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain;
And drinking largely sobers us again.

How many times have you known someone who’s learned just a little bit about something, but just enough to make him assume he’s an expert? Pope is saying that learning just a little bit about something makes us feel as though we’re brilliant, but if we dig a little deeper, we’ll realize just how little we understand.

Most people today are painfully shallow in their intellectual pursuits. I have to confess that I’ve been guilty at times of learning just enough to talk about something, but not enough to really question the glib insights that I’ve casually picked up. Haven’t all of us done that? I just found myself thinking that when I study something new, if I immediately think I’ve mastered the subject, I probably haven’t gone deep enough to figure out how little I know.

There are times when men get unfairly characterized as being jerks who just want to use women, but there are some guys for whom the stereotype truly applies. A female friend of mine recently met a guy who acted very interested in her and pursued as though he was crazy about her. They had dinner for the first time and that went well. A week later, they had dinner at her house. Afterwards, he was all hands and lips. There was quite a bit of kissing and everything seemed to be going well.

All of a sudden, though, he realized that she didn’t have any intention of sleeping with him. He suddenly looked at the clock and said that it was late and he needed to go. That was days ago and she still hasn’t heard from him. Is there any question about what he was after?

Fella, it’s people like you who give all of us a bad name.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts