Positive Sum, Zero Sum, Dumb Sum

Jonah Goldberg writes an article deploring the perceived necessity to submit all of our social conflicts to the stricture of law - it's worth reading here.  Of course he's talking about the latest gay marriage kerfuffle which played out in Arizona this week.  It turns out that the LGBT side of the debate (or is that LGBTQ? sexual categories keep metastasizing on me) has persuaded legislatures to pass laws criminalizing 'discrimination' against the differently sexual.  In defense, the differently believing asked the legislature to pass legal provisions protecting the differently believing from the protections given to the differently sexual upon which the differently sexual demonstrated their apparent and newfound superior air power to pound the differently believing into the ground for a clear win by the differently sexual.  Thus the differently believing lose a slight bit of the rights they had to act on some of their beliefs while the differently sexual gain the right to act with slightly more freedom on theirs.  What a wonderful zero sum achievement.

Yet the diffsex didn't really gain anything because none of them really want to pay money to people they know disapprove of them if only on prudential (nasty flavored cakes, shitty photos) not to  mention principled grounds.  And the 'losers' haven't really lost anything other than their pride and the possible occasional humiliation when a diffsex wants so bad to humiliate a diffbelief that they will tolerate bad, resentful service just to prove that they've got power.  Thus the only thing this 'liberation' has done is poisoned our social discourse just a little bit more.  Now each of us can hate the 'other' with just a little sharper edge, a bit more contempt.  Which as Goldberg points out is what happens when you subject informal social arrangements to the strictures and inevitable brutality of the law.

Social and economic relations should be a positive sum game - and as a libertarian conservative, I believe in general they are - when we come together to do things we do so because both of us benefit - either economically, socially or some cases, both ways.  In my opinion, using the law to govern private social relations takes a positive sum game and turns it into a zero sum or even negative sum game - just like it does for economic relations.  The left believes in a zero sum world where we use politics to create laws to take from the 'unworthy' and give to the 'worthy'.  It's called 'social' justice as opposed to just 'justice'.  But what 'social' justice is is merely politics.  The powerful impose on the weak.  Right now that means that the diffsexes can pone the diffbeliefs.  Someday the worm will inevitably turn and the diffbeliefs will pone the diffsexes.

As Goldberg points out:

In 2000, Jonathan Rauch, a (gay) brilliant intellectual and champion of gay marriage, wrote a wonderful essay on “hidden law,” which he defined as “the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts.” Basically, hidden law is the unwritten legal and ethical code of civil society. Abortion, assisted suicide, and numerous other hot-button issues were once settled by people doing right as they saw it without seeking permission from the government.

“Hidden law is exceptionally resilient,” Rauch observed, “until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers.” That crowd believes all good things must be protected by law and all bad things must be outlawed.

As society has grown more diverse (a good thing) and social trust has eroded (a bad thing), the authority of hidden law has atrophied. Once it was understood that a kid’s unlicensed lemonade stand, while technically “illegal,” was just fine. Now kids are increasingly asked, “Do you have a permit for this?”

Inevitably the erosion of hidden law by the 'majesty' of the law that has guns, shackles and steel boxes leads to a coarsening and brutalizing of our society.  We turn positive sum interactions into negative sum ones:  you win, I lose, the lawyers get paid.   And a negative sum world is truly a dumb sum world.  Because it leads to more cruelty, more anger, more hatred.  And at the end of the day those in the minority - which ultimately must include the diffsex suffer mightily by the example that in this case they have so expertly given.  Shylock was right:  it is human nature for those on bottom to when they get on top to revenge themselves on their 'oppressors'.  The problem is that who's on bottom in a pluralistic society will keep flipping and flopping and the revenging and counter-revenging never stop.

It all makes for an ugly country to live in.

Erm, doesn't a 40% decline in obesity among children tell you other things than just yay?

The rate of obesity in preschool-age children in the U.S. dropped about 40% over the past decade, according to data from a comprehensive federal survey published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association—the latest sign that attempts to help parents improve children's diets and exercise habits might be starting to have an effect.

Great news!  State manipulation of human behavior finally shown to have real effects that are the same as intended!  Yay!  Woo hooo!  Right?   Except, except:  Anytime you see a major demographic statistic move so fast you wonder WTF?  It's not normal and certainly not for behavioral interventions, and I would suspect not for child rearing.  So my first reaction is either the original or new data are crap or the analytics are or there is something else going on.

But let's say its true.  Great news:  we should see significant improvements in health and mortality among this cohort because the reason we were doing this was for health reasons right?  Not aesthetic or left-puritanical reasons, right?  There was a true public benefit to all this fol de rol right?  So c'mon gang, let's see it!  Whip it out.  I await the shocking truth with bated breath.

Bank Corporatism is the best corporatism

The Obami notoriously dislike dealing with the little platoons of American life.  Like corporatists everywhere they want to dragoon everyone into big corporations, unions, groups, guilds, mobs, crowds and banks to make it easier for them to stitch up all the rackets.  Because it's the Rackets that the Obami and the rest of the Chicago pols are interested in.  Veronique De Rugy has a piece on the ongoing 'stitching up' of the bnking sector.  Hat tip  http://commonsensewonder.blogspot.com/

What if "I knew you were gay marrying so I baked a (crappy) cake"?

Could you sue me for not trying hard enough?  Could you have me jailed for 'cake quality discrimination'?  If you coerce my participation in your ceremony that I believe is wrong, haven't you enslaved me?

I note with cynicism the hysteria that exploded when Arizona tried to clarify their Religious Freedom Act - the same one that the US has at the Federal level. I had to sift through the first 80 Google listings before I found the first one that would actually explain what the law was - the first 79 were hateful gay rants against those who disagree with them on this issue, none of whom it seemed had bothered to read the language of the law.  Of course it was nothing particularly earth shattering.  It was simply an attempt to clarify the AZ RFRA to protect against abuses like that which happened recently in Colorado and New Mexico. It seems that in Colorado if you decline to photograph (which means participate in) a Gay Marriage on religious grounds you are now guilty of 'discrimination' and subject to a year in the State Prison.  Of course if you're a Gay Married Photographer and you decline to photograph a religious event that includes a sermon opposing gay marriage you would not be guilty of anything.  This is what passes for equality under the law in Colorado.  Perhaps it's all the drugs they're doing these days.

Of course there is no way that the religious would ask you to photograph an event that was diametrically opposed to your beliefs - at a minimum, they'd be afraid that you'd do a poor job.  Which begs the question:  why would the gay marrying couple want, indeed ask someone who disagreed with their choice to photograph their 'blessed day'. Sadly, we know the reason:  to rub their noses in it.  To humiliate them and if they refuse prosecute and sue for damages.  The KKK used to hold parties where they would force local blacks to serve.  Not because they wanted their service or trusted them, but because they wanted to humiliate them.

Shylock in the Merchant of Venice explained this vengeful motivation hundreds of years ago: 

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.

So Gays, having (in their view) been mistreated on the marriage issue are determined to punish those that disagree with them for the crime of disagreement.  I think Shylock would have been astonished at such vindictive pettiness.

And once again we've pushed law into places where it ought not go, criminalizing differences in belief and embittering the social landscape.  By this anti-republican arrogance we once again tear at the social bonds which hold our republic together.  If the religious are now subject to legal persecution and coerced service by the irreligious or gay religious for the purpose of humiliating them then why should the religious sustain the state?

This is how a powerful minority hijacks a republic

Through persuading a small elite of jurists and their social confreres that it is no longer 'acceptable' for them to tolerate the choices of the 'little ones' they supposedly serve.  I have no beef with Gay Marriage, Gay Sex or the Gay Divorcee for that matter.  I do have a problem that a small and unaccountable elite that we have endowed with great power abuses that power and undermines the foundations of our constitutional republic.  They've screwed the pooch with abortion and now we have more hatred, vituperation and incivility on that issue than ever before because of arrogant old lawyers in black Mummus.  The more the black clad ones wade into social issues and substitute their cocktail party chatter for the People's judgement, the uglier, crueler and less stable our republic will be.  From NRO:

Texas became the fifth state in two months to see a judge strike down its law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. On Thursday, San Antonio–based U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled that Texas’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as well as its refusal to recognize same-sex marriages outside the state violated the U.S. Constitution, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The ruling will not take effect right away as Garcia issued a stay in expectation that the decision would be appealed. Texas attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott issued a statement saying he plans to appeal. Abbott argues the ruling defies the people of Texas, who voted in 2003 to codify the traditional definition of marriage in their constitution.

Since December, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Virginia have all seen similar laws struck down in court.

Republics only work when the elites that hold power demonstrate appropriate republican reserve in the use of their powers.  When they abuse them no matter how good the reason, they rip at the sinews that support and stabilize the Republic.  They really are the most destructive force in the nation short of civil war.  An event (via Dred Scott) that they have already provoked once.

Your Ancestors, Your Fate? The surprising immobility of the rate of social mobility in history.

Good NYT piece on research that finds that social mobility in a wide range of cultures over many hundreds of years is slow and the rate of change hasn't budged even for communist revolutions or socialist egalitarianism.  Apparently the damned little DNA wrigglies really are dispositive.  Maybe we should ban them.

It has an awesome chart on the difference in the number of physicians per 1000 adults with different family names in the US.  Really fascinating and deflating of our  pretensions to 'save', 'rescue', 'elevate' the poor or to 'fold', 'shred' and 'spindle' the affluent.

Of course it's generally been members of the affluent class who made the class warfare promises in return for getting the weak and the poor's political support.  The fact that their promises may be scientific and moral crap - well that's just another piece of evidence of the persistence of social status - the smart cats screwing the weak ones whether up front via capitalism our out back via socialism.

Reality turns out  to truly be a first class Bitch, doesn't she?

Is income inequality a result of diversity?

I have long suspected that income inequality is less about market 'failures' in the private economy than a simple reflection of how diverse a country is.  The more diverse, the more unequal because groups who are very different or live in very different places confront different opportunities and issues which must ultimately be reflected in their economic outcomes.  So I decided to investigate the relationship between ethnic homogeneity - the proportion of the population that is part of the dominant race and culture and income inequality as measured by pretax, pretransfer Gini. I plotted each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.  I also plotted the five 'Nordic' countries that have a sterling reputation for income equality:  Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark.  And here's what I found:

Source:  US Census Bureau, Wikipedia Gini Tables.

As you can see, there is a significant negative relationship between ethnic and racial homogeneity (in percent on the X axis) and income inequality (gini scores on the Y axis) - the US State Correlation Coefficient is -.60 which is moderately strong. When I add the five nordic countries (in red) and rerun the analysis they plot very consistently with US states and the correlation coefficient including them rises to -.63 which suggests that almost 40% of the variation in inequality can be explained by the level of racial homogeneity.   Finland, at the high edge of the dispersion is nordic but not ethnically scandanavian while Iceland at the very bottom is perhaps more homogenous than any other country in the world.  All of them perform similarly to their American peers.  I say peers because these countries have smallish populations and are far more akin to a mid-sized state like Missouri or Minnesota (or Wyoming if you're Iceland) than the USA.

It turns out that the various US states and nordic countries' economies deliver similar levels of income inequality depending upon the level of  'diversity' that they have.  The smaller the 'dominant' race is (and in all cases except Hawaii, that race is 'White, European') the greater inequality is.  So economy-wise the Nordics aren't naturally 'fairer' than their North American cousins. 

You may also notice that every single US state has a lower level of income inequality than the United States as a whole - the exception is District of Columbia. This makes sense because the entire US is much more diverse than any single state, just like it is much more diverse than a nordic country.  This is the reason why it makes no sense to compare these types of statistical analyses between countries with very different circumstances.  This type of league table jockeying inevitably creates more heat than light.

Now the clever chaps in the booming academic field of Envy Studies will point out that the Nordics intervene in their economies significantly more than the US does to equalize outcomes and it results in much lower inequality.  And that is a Good Thing.  So I plotted post tax post transfer Gini.  Note:  there is evidently no post tax/transfer data at the state level.  I made a macro adjustment for all 51 data points, using the US nationwide reduction in Gini from government intervention which was .11: from .49 to .38 and plotted the nordic numbers.

Source:  US Census Bureau, Wikipedia Gini Tables.

Unsurprisingly four of the nordic countries redistribute more income and reduce their (comparable) pre tax ginis substantially more: ranging from .16 (Norway) to .21 (Finland) points.  Iceland does not, only moving .08 points which I suspect is because Iceland is small and already so homogenous that elaborate redistribution just doesn't matter as much. No doubt if US states had the same control over their taxing and social welfare policies that the Nordics have we'd see some states intervening substantially more to redistribute income. However, the US has a national redistribution policy that is driven by a very complex and diverse electorate and consistent with public choice theory, such a conglomeration is less willing to accept redistribution and collective solutions than the homogeneous nordics.  (Incidentally, public choice Theory also predicts that as homogeneous countries become more diverse, redistribution and acquisition of public goods will fall which is precisely what has happened to the most 'diverse' nordic:  Sweden who has seen its welfare state trimmed and top marginal tax rates fall as it added more immigrants)

But Gini says nothing about well being.  Because there are real trade offs between more government intervention to ensure equal outcomes and other metrics like productivity, output per person, disposable income not to mention liberty and autonomy.  The nordics are more equal which requires them to be more coercive which contributes to them being poorer for both mean and median household disposable income.  And nordic citizens have many choices made for them that for better or worse Americans are trusted to choose for themselves.

Source:  OECD Better Life Index               

So what do I think I know now?   First, US income inequality when looked at at a relevant state level is what you would expect it to be given our levels of racial and ethnic diversity.  The 'best', most 'equal' countries don't do any better relative to their racial and ethnic diversity.  Second, I have only looked at one component of diversity:  racial diversity and it explains about 40% of the inequality variation.  Other differences such as geography, climate, religion, economics and form of government also drive inequality up and I believe would explain substantially more of the variation.  Third, given our national diversity we don't do as much redistribution as homogeneous Nordics do which is what you would expect and probably won't change for Public Choice reasons.  Fourth, if you want income equality it's best to make sure everyone looks and thinks like you.  It turns out that diversity is hell on equality.  Which makes sense:  the more I differ from you in heritage, religion, ethnicity, race, geography, weather the more my economic results are going to differ.  Fifth, the more you intervene to level incomes the poorer your country will be - there is dead weight cost to an economy of coercive income redistribution.  It discourages work and productivity both at the top and the bottom of the distribution. Something that apparently doesn't happen with voluntary redistribution:  Utah in real terms is among the richest of states despite having far higher levels of charitable giving which is just another word for income redistribution that doesn't include guns and handcuffs. Sixth,  perhaps the only way that US proponents of a 'fairer' or more accurately flatter income redistribution regime will be successful (with 'successful' meaning more redistribution without nasty social and economic repercussions) is if taxing and spending policies are set at the state level rather than dictated nationally as they are now.  There are many states with the homogeneity of  nordics and a similar culture who might end up at the same place as a Sweden, or at least closer.

But when one looks at inequality at a reasonable level - meaning the state level, the US  does fine.  It simply has made the choice to intervene less and thereby trade the abstract concept of 'fairness' for the real dollars and cents of wealth, innovation and productivity.  There's nothing particularly immoral or shameful about not aping the snow elves choices.  It's just that we value liberty, autonomy and wealth more and sameness less. Which is probably one reason why the Norwegian and Swedish American's ancestors moved here in the first place.

Worrying about the least and lightest

The minwage and Obamacare wage increases on those at the bottom will are estimated to be between 39 and 70% - these are massively destructive changes.  Which is why the Obami have postponed the employer mandate again and again and are phasing in the minwage hike.  But the really problem is the differential impact:  Obami 'social' policy is likely to hit the San Joaquin and Rio Grande Valleys, the Mississippi Delta, parts of New Mexico and Florida and small towns everywhere hard, very hard. You know, overwhelmingly black and brown places and/or where people have few options.

Won't make a tinker's damn worth of difference for SFO or MA or Manhattan or DC or upscale suburbs everywhere.

Kevin Williamson made a really trenchant point about the Minwage and Obamacare issues: this is less about 'helping' the poor and weak than about demonstrating who's boss: The Obami are the intellectual, scribbling left and they've been frustrated that no one listens to them at least since Johnson drawled off the stage. These laws don't follow logic, they're demonstrations of power. A last great Whitmanesque Yawp of the intelligensia on its political death ride.

And if millions of poor, weak people suffer for their self indulgent howls, well that's what welfare is for isn't it?

Which of these economic indicator charts is not like the others?

I've been perusing Zero Hedge, which is always dangerous because it mixes astute analysis with some of the most gap jawed drivel I've ever seen.  Must be Tyler Durden's fight club brain damage. But its chartwork is awesome.  I put together my latest pessimist scenario from them.  So thanks Mr. Crazy, keep bangin' your head against the rocks.

As the Fed has threatened us with taperism, there's been a flight from emerging markets to 'quality'. Unfortunately, the "quality" is deteriorating steadily.

You can really see the flight to quality it in this chart.

And in this chart - investors are increasingly frightened of risk.  But in ZIRP there's negative returns on risk free or low risk assets so stock market speculation based upon free debt has become the answer.  And the debt is free until you can't make the margin call.

Yet while the markets are rockin' and rolling in a credit fueled speculative bubble, the nation is slipping deeper and deeper into a funk.  People are losing  hope which is surprising given all this change.  And the warm, suffocating arms of the welfare plantation have never been more inviting.  Go ahead, walk into the 'light'

Things could be worse.  We could be China.  But of course we have to live with what happens to the Mao Dynasty. And dynasties come and go.

And the wheels are about to pop off of the Great Proletarian Economic Revolution.

Unless you think that China isn't subject to the laws of nature, because its rotting credit boom is directly tied to the Feds QEaserama.

All the charts above explain what is happening.  Only one explains who it's for.  It's not for working Americans, it's not for the poor, it's for the investor class and their institutions.  And without inflationary finance the stock market crashes.  With inflationary finance the stock market will crash. 

 I used to hold to the view that the Great Recession was the wages of decades of sinfully papering over economic contractions with easy money, saving up the pain for later.  I now believe that the Great Recession was just the last moderately sized myocardial infarction before the Big One.  Reality's warning sign.  But now we're even fatter, more sedentary, smoking more and our heroin habit has popped up again.

Income Inequality and All that Jazz
Incidentally, if there is any substance to the income inequality issue it has to do not with earned income but with state rent seeking.  Specifically, the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses in the financial markets.  The QE and previous loose money periods designed to goose the financial markets and avoid the inevitabe structural adjustment have delivered great low risk wealth to the investor class but the crash when it comes will be paid for by everyone.  Particularly the working and lower middle class jobless.

Taxing current income more or increasing the minwage or layering a seventh regulatory body on the Finance industry that increases opacity and unpredictability is not going to get the Ginis out of the bottle, much less contribute to human flourishing.  The best thing that we could do to reduce inequality would be to eliminate the economic rents that the state delivers to the affluent, starting with the moral hazard of "to big to fail".  But this administration yells about inequality while entrenching TBTF and socialization of losses.  It also chose the 'super-dove' as Fed Chair.  Which means more private 'gains' to inevitably be converted into social losses.

So who really gives a damn about the little guy?

Someday I'm going to figure out how to use this in a post

Until then, I'll just use it in a post.

Stupid police tricks in chock full 'o sensitivity Austin

Policing attracts people that didn't get much respect or notice in school.  They believe that by getting a gun and a badge they can force people to respect them.  When people still don't notice them it enrages them.  Unfortunately, now they have a gun and a badge.  Sigh.

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW: Austin Police Arrest Jogger Because She Couldn’t Hear Them.

Walmart is not a minimum wage employer

I knew this but it's amazing how many people don't.

Wal-Mart has 1.3 million U.S. employees, and about 4,000 of them currently make either a state or federal minimum wage, Tovar said.

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.RaxKEjeB.dpuf

Can you accelerate science with more money?

Chip makers typically know what technologies they are going to use to develop the next two generations of chips.  So why don't they skip the intermediate generation and go to the second one - it would save time and money.  They don't because the technos to create a chip is more than the science - many of the things that you need to know to produce the second generation are learned by producing the intermediate one.  So a doubling of Research or Development spending wouldn't appreciably change Moore's law.

I wonder how far this notion extends because people are always arguing for 'more' research money to 'accelerate' progress.  But often progress can't be achieved in one area until certain things are solved elsewhere.  For example, in AD 1500 you could have put 1000 boffins full time on figuring out Celestial Mechanics and Gravity.  It wouldn't have helped because the tool you needed to figure it out:  the calculus wasn't invented until later, unsurprisingly by the same guy that came up with Classical Mechanics (Newton). (Leibniz invented calculus independently as well).

So when people make this argument, take it with a grain of salt.

With loss at VW, where it had management's active support, the UAW enters the ranks of the terminal

Just keep the patient worm and sedated.  He'll slip off to oblivion one of these years.

Mandated wage increases on tap to be greatest percent increase ever

When you take the $10+ new minimum wage plus add employer fines for those typically low wage employers that don't offer health insurance, you get a massive increase in the hourly cost of labor.  One that is going to lead to dislocation and lots of poor brown and black unemployment.  The scope of the stress placed upon low wage employers will be unprecedented. And if you claim your goal is to reduce income inequality, you'd never do it.  Why, Lord, why?

We have two conceptions of the state that are in conflict and both cannot reign:

1. The notion of legal supremacy, law trumps everything, tradition, institutions, everything. Law is even used to eradicate traditions and institutions that the powerful deem wrong. And ferocious penalties are attached to infractions.

2. The notion of the therapeutic state - GWB said it worst: "When people are hurting, government has to move".

If there are no limits to the state's ambit and the law is supreme and ferocious, then effectively prosecutors and judges become dictators. Incoherent and erratic dictators, like a hive mind Muommar Quadafi. And lawyers a privileged priestly caste. Because if the law trumps everything and there is law everywhere....






We either need to start nullifying lots of law through civil disobedience or legislation or get rid of the law as we now conceive it. Because we can no longer live with it.

Elite Universities are among the most 'progressive' and 'egalitarian' institutions in the land

And they promote ignorance and intellectual conservatism.  Attaboy progs.  HT Instapundit.com

A SYSTEM WHERE WHAT’S RATIONAL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL IS BAD FOR SOCIETY IS A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM:

The other day, after one of my talks, a 10th-grade girl came up and shyly asked if I had a minute. I always have a minute to talk to shy high school sophomores, having been one myself.
And this is what she asked me:
“I understand what you’re saying about trying new things, and hard things, but I’m in an International Baccalaureate program and only about five percent of us will get 4.0, so how can I try a subject where I might not get an A?”
I was floored. All I could think as I talked to this poor girl is “America, you’re doing it wrong.”
I was 15 in 10th grade. If you can’t try something new in 10th grade, when can you? If you can’t afford to risk anything less than perfection at the age of 15, then for heaven’s sake, when is going to be the right time? When you’re ready to splash out on an edgy assisted-living facility?
Now is when this kid should be learning to dream big dreams and dare greatly. Now is when she should be making mistakes and figuring out how to recover from them. Instead, we’re telling one of our best and brightest to focus all her talent on coloring within the lines. This is not the first time I’ve heard this from kids and teachers and parents. But I’ve never heard it phrased quite so starkly.

Our educational system, like our political system, is structured to reward behavior that is bad for society at large. You get more of what you reward. Incentives, even perverse incentives, matter.

95

Stupidity, thy name is elite University

Jonah Goldberg notices that elite Universities tend to breed intolerance.  I am shocked, shocked.  Read the whole thing.  Unless you believe in 'diversity'.

Which brings us back to the sages of Swarthmore and Harvard. They at least understand that ideological diversity is actually, like, you know, a thing. They just think it’s a bad thing.

More pernicious, however, is that they believe the question of justice is a settled matter. We know what justice is, so why let serious people debate it anymore? The millennia-old dialogue between Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Rawls, Rorty, Hayek et al.? Shut it down, people. Or at least if the conversation heads in a direction where the Korns, Chings, and Streisands smell “oppression” — as defined solely by the Left — then it must not be “put up with.” Diversity demands that diversity of opinion not be tolerated anymore. 

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/21/attacking_diversity_of_thought_121667.html#ixzz2tzjdQXbI
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter

Saw, saw, saw went the Prog-ooooos!

Indeed.  The only problem is the 'fallen and can't climb up ones should all be black or brown and young.  But that would harsh the narrative, wouldn't it?

Was Barbara Eden from Eden? And if so, why won't she take her clothes off? A short disquisition on Adam, Eve and The Fall - Part 2: Eden Red in Tooth and Claw

This is Part 2, Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.  But you really should think about whether you really want to read this dreck. Part four is here - didn't want to but, sigh.

When last we stopped by Eden your intrepid reporter was ranting at the snake wranglers for buying into a Fall narrative that was less believable than an early Harry Potter storyline.  And I was all ready to commit premeditated apostasy or at least agnosticism in the second degree when you guys calmed me down and persuaded me to consult with the ivy covered denizens of bien pensant opinion.  But pensant or pissant I am really concerned that this fruit/fall fol-de-rol is getting too weird even for me.

So anyway, I went over and dickered with the plum suckers of Princeton Theological and here's what they had to say.*

Eden Red in Tooth and Claw

So God picks out the first two monkeys to bang the rocks together the right way and calls them Adam and Eve.  Great.  So we have two Chimps.

So I guess I need to deal with the inevitable plummy complaint that our upjumped forefathers were technically Hominids, not Chimps.  And while you're suing me why don't you rustle up some Austroplethici so that we can observe just how sweet they were to their mommas.  What?  Don't have any Hominids in the closet?  None wandering around the herbaceous borders?  The closest I've got to us today that I can observe and be horrified by is Chimps so unless you've got your very own Paleolithic Lab and Fun Park, I'm sticking with the old Daktari standby - the standard garden variety Chimpanzee.  Besides, Chimps really don't behave that much differently than my cousins in Sallisaw, I mean they'll beat up anybody that wanders over from Talequah and the girls, well, their chimp like behavior is why their brothers beat up anybody that wanders into town.

So as I said before: So we have two Chimps who are now the first humans, representatives of the Triune God to the Universe.  Chimps.  Have you ever been around Chimps? I mean really hung around them? First of all female Chimps are sluts - they screw every male in range and if the guy isn't in the mood they make him anyway.  Imagine how that will go over in Women's Ministries. But don't blame the simian ladies of the night for their promiscuity because Mr. Chimps so to speak will kill any kid that he doesn't have some probability of being dad of, hence the frenzied fucking - they're just trying to keep their kids alive.

Now calm down, Grandad

And this is the evolutionary neighborhood that God sampled from to staff his Primate Officer Corps?  Now you redheads will argue that you came from Orangutans, not baby killers but I bet you wouldn't make that claim if you knew what I knew about what they do.

So the Old Princetonians say that we're all descended from upjumped simians who ate babies that weren't theirs.  Oh joy.  But my question is how did they get the promotion?  I mean how did anyone get close enough to these utterly nasty creatures to slip them the Neshamah suppository or injection or whatever without getting either mated on or killed?  Oh well, since we're here I presume God found a way.

So exactly what happened when the suppositories took? Did Bonzo and Bonzette go from babykilling sluts to Sunday School leaders overnight?  Did they suddenly develop a sunny, unsimian outlook on life?  Were they now filled with joy and love for their brothers and sisters who were trying to kill them 24/7? Or did Bonzette still put out for the boys in the band?  And what happened to Bonzo's inconvenient appetite for baby flesh - did he really go cold turkey because cold turkey tastes nothing like warm baby chimp.  Or did he wean himself off of the unweaned slowly, with furtive detours into the occasional Chimpanzee Bar and Baby Grill for a 'nip' of the hair of the chimp that he bit?  Hmm.

I'm the McTavish and
O'Reilly's Grandad!

It seems to me that we have the mirror image of the problem that we had with the snake wrangler's Naif Duo: if they lived in an all white world then the Bonzos came from an all red one.  Red sky, red trees, bloody red baby chimps, red chimp jaws dripping red chimp blood, red, red, red.  It's almost as if our simian seekers had never experienced an unforced, non evolutionary good deed in their evolutionary lines.  They were nasty all the way down.  All sin all the time.  So how do you clean up rotters like this so that they can be candy cane nice enough to get to the point to commit the original 'sin'.  I mean the level of sin remediation required of these premier class primates just to become garden variety 'nice guys' is huge.

Or perhaps 'original sin' didn't happen the way that we think it did?  Because if we listen to the tweedier anthropologists and archaeologists they tell us that of the first truly human remains that they can find bits and pieces of 30% show evidence of violent death.  And given that in Chimpland the proportion murdered or if not murdered, then eaten by relatives after they died was probably even higher, it would seem that the best explanation was that the 'sin' slope was downward not to zero and then back up but just a gentle downward slope.  Perhaps this original sin thing is more metaphorical?

"Frat" Monkeys?

Maybe they were Blood Oranges?

Now this is not what the tweeded plummers think, this is simply my surmise borne of the surprise I felt at finding so many Chimps in the attic.  What if God's Eden is more like a very exclusive club than a place for the 'perfect'?  Or in other words, God, needing some way to separate the sheep from the goats or more to the point the enlisted Chimps from the officer Humans came up with the sorts of things that Frat boys did in a later Epoch:  secret signs and handshakes and sayings and initiations and so on?  And God in his infinite wisdom used these 'signs and wonders' to assemble his holy Eden Corps from all the Chimps he upjumped with his Neshamah juice? In this reading of scripture Adam and Eve were the first two initiates who got into the "Frat" and boy was it a great place:  awesome house, beautiful grounds, the lions weren't trying to eat you and the rest of the homicidal band that you came from is jumping up and down outside the gates guarded by these bitchin' flaming swords.  Eve (nee Bonzette) only has one (humanized) Chimp that she has to 'do' so she's pretty happy but I imagine Adam is feeling a bit of withdrawal.  I'm sure God provided some sort of substitute for Chimp baby - Chimp methadone if you will but it probably was made of tofu and didn't really satisfy. So I figure this is where the original sin came from:  during the initiation rites when the initiates were doing their 'yes sir may I have anothers' (or more accurately: ooh ooh ooh gooo, ay ay grawf, do ooher!) they probably swore that they wouldn't eat anything from the Tree of Good and Evil.  And I'll bet Good 'nEvil fruit smelled and tasted just like....fresh baby Chimp.

OK, here's part three.  Yum, yum, yum!

*Full disclosure:  I haven't dickered with anyone from Princeton Theological Seminary since my undergrad roomie went there in my long past youth and back then we usually dickered over what kind of weed he was putting in his pipe.  This entire section is a summary of what I think guys who think like those guys thinks about this think piece.  I think.  Anyway it is what it is and what it ain't is a scholarly journal article whether refereed or broken up by the police.

I'm sorry Bethany, but our innocence was lost the moment Eve realized that her ass looked big in....nothing.

Contra this, Bill Clinton didn't steal our innocence, we gave it away fair and square a long, long time ago.  Don't believe me?  Ask Bill Clinton, he'll show ya.

IRS is at a Tipping Point or Melting Point or Crapping out point or some point that sounds pretty good

I say Tip their canoe and their IT too!

BLOWBACK: The IRS Is at a Tipping Point: Under Attack, Distrusted, and Underfunded. All of these things are because they betrayed their trust.

You didn't hear it from me, but the country's on 'Double Secret Probation'

When Dean Vermer invented the term in the movie Animal House it was a joke.  But with our 'fearless protectors' in the FBI, NSA, DEA and other agencies dedicated to destroying our freedoms and advancing their crappy bureaucratic careers double secret probation is a swell idea that they have implemented with typical bureaucratic verve.

Our enemies are increasingly from within.  Fear the bebadged gun totin' thugs.  They're not on your side, they're on their side.

It turns out a lot of cops hate the truth. Wonder why?

ANNALS OF POLICE MISCONDUCT: Woman who recorded traffic stop spends night in jail. I think I’ll start an insurance company — if you’re arrested for something like this, my company will send mimes to follow the cop around, on and off-duty, and mock them. If they arrest the mimes, I send . . . even more mimes. No one can withstand even more mimes, especially if arresting those mimes produces even more mimes than that! Downside: Full employment for mimes.

HT instapundit.com

Left handed science is no science at all.

Science isn't worth anything if it simply seeks to confirm the establishment theory.  By that standard AGW research is worse than useless.  Christy in the WSJ:

We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

Me? I think he's the bogey-man.

I And in Santa Monica no less.

Here's the One in the crapper.   Where you will find his poll numbers.

For the record: Anyone who has worked for the DOJ since 1980 should not be allowed to vote.

Fucking state fascist felons.

FELONS AND VOTING: So Attorney General Eric Holder, perhaps reflecting that most felons tend to vote Democratic, thinks that felons should be allowed to vote. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey thinks that felons shouldn’t vote.
Let me suggest that the real problem is that we have too many felons, because too many crimes have been designated as felonies. Traditionally, felonies were very serious crimes, for which the death penalty was common. The justification for loss of civil rights, like voting, was that though you were being allowed to live, your crime — rape, murder, etc. — was sufficiently serious that it separated you from civil society. That can’t be maintained where today’s rather promiscuous designation of felonies is concerned. Personally, I think there should be — and, in fact, are, though not presently recognized by the courts — limitations on what can be designated a felony under the Due Process Clause. I may write something on this someday, but in the meantime I would refer readers to the discussion of malum in se vs. malum prohibitum in my Ham Sandwich Nation piece as a starting point.

YMCA Vs Library smackdown

In Webster Groves the library and Y are across the street from each other.  The Y is not for profit private and the Library is NFP but run by the city with tax dollars.  The Y is open about twice as much and has half the staff of the library.  Funny that.

Imagine just how much wealth we could create if we could shift all the state functions to NFP but privates.  Not a single 'greedhead' anywhere, just better incentives and almost no unions.

Again, funny.  That.

I love the people who say you could never deport all the illegals, but who think you could lock up all the gun owners.

I just thought that was a cool thing to say.

Babawawa talking about her masturbation tech

Oh how the pathetic have fallen.  rub hard Baba!

THINGS YOU MISS BY NOT WATCHING THE VIEW: Barbara Walters Talking About Her Vibrators. So, are there any TV shows where the male hosts all chortle about their masturbation methods?

Sitting Politicians hate criticism

So they instruct their government minions to 'shut them up' forgetting that 'them' includes their friends.  From James Taranto at the WSJ:

The Internal Revenue Service responded to the scandal over its targeting of conservative groups in 2011-12 by putting forth new rules that would suppress even more political speech. "The proposed changes, which were unveiled in late November, would classify much of the day-to-day activity of 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups, including voter education and registration, as political, thereby endangering their tax-exempt status," writes National Review's Eliana Johnson.

"They would also prohibit public communication 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary election that identifies a political candidate," seemingly in direct defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) that such prohibitions are, in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, "classic examples of censorship."

Johnson writes that "sources and analysts" think the proposed rules "appear unlikely to be implemented in current form." One possible reason is that although censorship of political speech has long been a left-liberal cause, the IRS's proposals are drawing considerable opposition from the left. Johnson notes three examples:

The American Civil Liberties Union, itself a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, submitted a 29-page comment to the IRS "slamming the proposed regulations," in Johnson's words. "Social welfare organizations praise or criticize candidates for public office on the issues and they should be able to do so freely, without fear of losing or being denied tax-exempt status, even if doing so could influence a citizen's vote," the memo argued.

Nan Aron, who heads a left-liberal 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Alliance for Justice, inveighed against the new rules in a piece for the website of The Nation: "The new regs will do almost nothing to fix the things you think are broken and may, in fact, do some real damage to the ability of everyday Americans to have an impact on the political process."

Enlarge Image

Exercising his constitutional rights. Getty Images

Most interestingly, according to Johnson, "the proposed regulations have a host of left-leaning groups worried that the 501(c)(4) rules could serve as a template for regulations governing 501(c)(5) nonprofits (unions) and 501(c)(6) groups (trade associations)." She quotes John Sullivan, general counsel to the Service Employees International Union (many of whose members work in the public sector) as telling the Washington Post that "the rule is so broadly phrased and so categorical," if applied to unions, "it would seriously affect their ability to function as membership organizations."

So if the entire nonprofit world opposes these rules, who supports them? "The move to rewrite the 501(c)(4) guidelines, which have remained unchanged since 1959, appears to have come at the behest of Democratic senators," Johnson reports. As early as 2010, Montana's Max Baucus, then chairman of the Finance Committee, was urging the IRS to apply greater scrutiny to nonprofits. (Baucus left the Senate this month to become ambassador to Beijing.) Michigan's Carl Levin was "complaining bitterly" about insufficient scrutiny, a former IRS commissioner told congressional investigators.

More recently, Sen. Chuck Schumer last month "proposed using the Internal Revenue Service to curtail Tea Party group funding during a speech on how to 'exploit' and 'weaken' the movement," as the Washington Free Beacon's Alana Goodman reported.

The Rube Goldberg Democrats

Henninger coins a phrase.  I think Rube Goldberg is caused by too much lawyering.  Lawyers have a touching faith in the efficacy of special runes written on magic hard drives.  Saying it is so doesn't make it so.  Good thing to remember for all of us.

Why does every program our President supports seem to cost jobs?

Is the President opposed to employment?  Does he hate the poor and young so much? Or does power justify hurting the least and lightest among us?  Who cares for the losers when the New Jesus doesn't?

CBO estimated that President Obama's latest proposal—$10.10 by 2016 from $7.25 today—could cost half a million Americans their jobs as "some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly."

God help us every one.

HT WSJ

Was Barbara Eden from Eden? And if so, why won't she take her clothes off? A short disquisition on Adam, Eve and The Fall

This is part one of a multi part tale.  Part two is here. There are four parts so are you sure you want to wade into this swamp?

I have to admit I haven't spent much time reflecting on The Fall.  I capitalize it to differentiate it from all of the other trips, stumbles, pratfalls and belly flops that characterize the world that we live in.  It seems that we're always bounding down steps or flipping over obstacles.  And every stinking mother tumble of them is due to the first fall:  The Big One:  Adam's Fall.

Whoops!

About the only time that The Fall really ever pierced my consciousness was as a child when the notion of Eve waltzing around Eden in her altogether captured my imagination in that sniggering way only available to boys who have yet to be impaired by testosterone.  Admittedly, I didn't know about the Song of Solomon and had I it is quite unlikely that I would have found it taught in the First Baptist Churches' Children's Sunday School program.  Besides, I would have had no idea why ripe melons got the author so worked up.  I mean I liked a good cantaloupe as much as the next kid.  But I had yet to develop the mammary vocabulary that would reflect my steady and irreversible poisoning by Mr. T ("I pity the man who ain't hairy and don't smell").  And so lacking, I had no language to feast on the lush, lyrical poetry of Solomon. Incidentally, everyone says that S.O.S. was written as an allegory of God's love for us as well as a love poem for one of Solomon's favorite wives but I think Solomon actually hired a bronze age Barbara Cartland to gin up the rather ripeish verse as a way to get the girls going so that he could complete the Solomon 500 before hell froze over.  I mean he didn't have a lot of time to whisper sweet nothings much less give each wife a slap and a tickle - he had to be on the job from the get-go so the poetry subbed for foreplay.  Never has anyone been more single mindedly dedicated to the severe, ascetic art of the forward thrust.  Except perhaps Mohammed and Bill Clinton - but certainly no one else.

So where was I.  Oh, yeah, creation and Eve:  sweet naked Eve.  I have to admit that I have never had use for naked Adam, the dumb cluck just clutters up the frame.  I mean, what is the point of naked men?  The Greeks liked them but take it from the Romans:  the Greeks were all a bit nuts - speaking of nuts can you imagine what would happen to yours if you ran a Marathon sans culottes?  No wonder the Greek world almost died out.

But what I really wanted to talk about was Adam and Eve and what it must have been like for them to experience the fall.  And given that by screwing up they screwed it up for the rest of us I wanted to imagine what their state of mind must have been and how they processed an experience which to that point in time had never been experienced.  I want to get inside their heads, live in their skins, particularly Adam's when he was near sweet, naked Eve.

Perhaps the most trenchant and sophisticated critique of the theology of the fall was written by a famed English mystic who served in a secret sect of English monks called the "Beeb"  Brother Douglas Adams wrote several volumes of his Summa Magnificat:  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where he reflected on the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" - he was an ambitious little prat, wasn't he?  Adams said of Adam's Fall:

“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'
'Why not?'
'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.” 

I think we can all agree that Brother Adam's critique of The Fall is deep and profound in its import. As a matter of fact why don't we pause for a moment of silence to reflect on its profundity.

Okay, let's not get carried away, Dougie was just a smart alec who tried to be funny but the question is: was he right? Was Eden a set up job? Was the Fall just a practical joke by God that had to happen eventually? Or are we all stuck here just because Eve was a world class nagger?   Does God feel sorry for us? Is he mad at us? Or are we simply a channel on heavenly cable, just before the Folgangchan people of Setraginus V and after the Lesser Dorkling of Alpha Proxima? And if you press SAP will we all start thinking in Spanish? And are we funny? I mean really funny, Emmy quality funny?

Ribs 'n Bibs or Monkey's Uncles?

From flinging poo....

..to doot doot doo doot doo.

There are two theories (okay there are tons, there are two that I understand enough to write about) that have been proposed for the creation of Adam and Eve:  one, favored by tweedy types with plummy accents, tenure at Princeton Theological and the ability to make an awesome sacramental martini is evolution: God created creation which after a lot of dithering and screwing around produced monkeys of a caliber that they could be anointed as human beings. God called the first two to bang the rocks together the right way Adam and Eve.  In this reading of scripture, the part where Eve gets made out of Adam's rib was actually put in there by Moses to get back at his wife who had been busting his chops for spending so much time screwing around on mountain tops.  The Jewish describe the process of converting simple animals (apes, monkeys, baboons, whatever my brother was) into God breathed humans as the gifting of the Neshamah or human soul to complement the Nefesh or animal soul.  Regardless, as the story goes (or is made up if you're on the other side), once the monkeys got their Neshamah, they became aware of God and entered into a relationship with Him.  I sort of imagine this being the climax of a Busby Berkeley number "I gotta be me! With the Great Big He!" as the monkeys stop ooh ooh oohing and begin a sophisticated song and dance routine complete with dancing seraphim and cherubim.

Oooh look:  cocktails.

The other explanation is what I would call Bible Classic - no not the comic books, but they're good aren't they? Bible Classic is favored by more denimy types with persimmon accents who make a mean rattlesnake venom cocktail and have full time employment at Bud's Tire Barn.  This theory of Creation posits that God made Adam and Eve from scratch right after he made all the other animals so he was able to integrate the learnings he got from them (shorter necks than giraffes, less hair than Chimps and so on).  In this interpretation Moses didn't make up the rib thing, instead the rib was literally the biological basis for cloning Adam without a y chromosome, hence Eve.  Given that bone marrow stem cells can be reversed into a pluripotent state for the cloning of organs it is amazing how much sense that Bible Story makes biology-wise.

Regardless of which creation story or myth or yarn or tale or documented National Enquirer True Story you believe the story line around the Fall just doesn't add up. It seems like somehow Moses or whomever transcribed this part of scripture dropped some pages or perhaps they were stone tablets that broke. Because I honestly can't see how either scenario could have led to a credible "First Sin" outcome.

Candy Cane Chaos
Let me explain what I mean by going through the two scenarios in more detail and I'll start with Bible classic version this time.  So Bible classic Adam and Eve showed up naked as the day they were - well that was the day they were born in a place called the Garden of Eden which to hear tell of it was a rather weird locale.  It was 'perfect' if by perfect you mean perfectly weird - the lions didn't just lie down with the lambs, they were in the same handball (paw, hoof?) league and whatever kept the mosquitoes going bzzzz, it wasn't blood because Adam and Eve lived a 'perfect' (there's that word again) life. Which I guess meant no pain, no sorrow, no being picked last, no mockery, whooping cough, rashes, sprains, disappointments, betrayals, flayings, murders, irrational orders, bad oysters, diarrhea, monomania, kleptomania, hypertrophy or hypo adenoidism.  It sounds like absolutely nothing ever went on - the Naif Duo wandered from friendly Dingo to kindly Tyrannosaurus accompanied by the Army Ants who hummed 'Whistle While You Work' even though nobody did in a fog of goodwill, peace on earth, joy and utter ignorance.

Ignorance of evil, that is.  They had good down to a science - when cats stop and compliment you on your good looks you know that you are in a terminally good place.  So good that your teeth rot from the sickening sweetness of it.  It's like a bloody Mary Poppins singalong with Dick Van Dyke pretending to be some stupid penguin with his pants around his knees.  For us hardened veterans of what we assume is the 'real' world, the candy cane houses and gumdrop dreams of Classic Adam and Eve are pretty hard to take.  And into this sappy, saccharine sunburst of niceness God slips the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Let's think about this Good'nEvil Tree for a moment, shall we?  The naifs are experts on good, they know good so good that it's great.  But Evil? They haven't got a clue.  They don't know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like or is like.  It's like they live in a pure white world with white trees, white clouds, white sunshine, white sky, white people, white black people, white, white, white.  And if you live in an all white world you don't know what black is.  They were clueless about Evil.  They were as clueless about evil, as able to make a reasoned judgement about the consequences of disobeying God and eating from the tree as my three year old was.  No, that's not true because my three year old had experienced the pain of teething and gas, he had sinned and even gotten a few smacks from yours truly.  He understood disappointment and frustration and it pissed him off.   Compared to Adam and Eve, he was a battle hardened sinner of the old school - the Sergeant Rock of Sin.

But we are supposed to believe that God let these candy cane kooks, these marshmallow morons make the call for all of humankind for all time on whether we would sin or not?  These clueless koo koos who didn't know their pooer from a pez dispenser were given the proxy for 60 billion souls and counting?  They had signing authority for an entire fucking planet for all eternity?  These yahoos, these created clowns that people who drink snake spit believe in?  Excuse me?

It's like letting my three year old decide whether or not we're going to Nuke Iran.  "Okay junior, is'ms gonna kill those nasty ayatollahs with the big bad thermonuclear MIRVed missile?  Or do those naughty Russians need to be fried today?"  Yeah right - a God who would let a toddler decide the fate of the world would be like some guy who let a poisonous serpent go talk to his children.  Oops.

Yumm-eeeee

So Satan is a nasty serpent - I imagine he's a Komodo dragon with a potty mouth filled with bacteria and lies and he goes strolling up to Mrs. Klueless and lies through his fangs to a woman who's never heard a lie before.  Ooh, this is going to end well.  So she buys his line of hooey tucks into a red ripe one and bam! Reality hits her straight in the kisser.  All of a sudden she realizes that her ass looks rather big in this....nothing and what's more this pervert snake is looking straight at her nothingness and - well the first thing she thinks to do is begin nagging Adam.  Because nagging your husband is really the Ur-Sin - the first one, the one that leads to all the other ones. So she yells "yoo hoo, Adam" and lays into the old boy good and hard because he really doesn't want to disobey God but that lying snake Satan backs his suddenly termagant wife who for some strange reason keeps covering up her boobs and crotch and so he says "what the hey" and bam!  All of a sudden...well you know the rest.

And then God has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, the holy cojones to waltz in to a situation that is as set up as a Lego town and go all Claude Rains:  "shocked, shocked at the sin going on here".  The guy who made Satan a four star devil and bunged him into the Garden knowing full well what he would do is trying to pin the dirty deed not only on Eve and Adam but on their kids and ultimately me? Really God?  No offense but I think You've just committed the sin of first class Bullshit!

OK, calm down Bill, take a deep breath because this is just scenario number one.  It probably didn't happen the way the snake wranglers say.  Let's go over and talk to the tweedy plum suckers and get their version of events.  After all they're educated so they're bound to know something.

Come on, go for part two,  you know want it!