How else to explain a woman study­ing women for 5 years who can’t graduate?

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San­ity! It’s so invig­o­rat­ing!

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Back in the 80’s when I read about a Lights Out assem­bly plant in Japan, so-called because it was entirely robotic and so didn’t need lights except when the care and feed­ing of the machin­ery was nec­es­sary, I won­dered what, some decades hence, the peo­ple, who would oth­er­wise have been employed in the man­u­fac­ture of goods and the sup­port ser­vices nec­es­sary to run a man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tion, do?

I have long sus­pected that not-for-profit groups were a big part of the answer. Every time I’d read a news­pa­per story about THIS or about THAT the reporter would invari­ably include a quote from Ms. Mar­jorie Puffen­bloe, Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Care­ful Crin­kling of Taffeta, about THIS, or from Herb Lyke­sis­beer, the CEO of The Mar­su­pial Pocket-Protector Advo­cacy League, about THAT and I would think,

Aha! So long as there are peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions with a suit to press or an ax to grind or a cause to pro­mote or an idea to sup­press these peo­ple will now be busily occu­pied in think­ing, writ­ing, tes­ti­fy­ing, lob­by­ing, study­ing, and argu­ing about THIS and about THAT and procur­ing, col­lat­ing, dis­tort­ing and ana­lyz­ing facts –and other things which can be dressed up as facts — either in sup­port or rebut­tal of their par­tic­u­lar hobby horse from which they derive a busily pros­per­ous existence.

In one post from Karl at Hot Air we get sev­eral sight­ings of this new ver­sion of knight-errantry. Knight-Errantry 2.0. We see the first one here

Indeed, the biggest pro­po­nent of this unproven the­ory is Sean Kane, pres­i­dent of Massachusetts-based Safety Research & Strate­gies Inc., who will be testifying

and get another glimpse here

Kane got his start with the Naderite Cen­ter for Auto Safety. That group’s cur­rent exec­u­tive direc­tor, Clarence Dit­low, is also sched­uled to testify:

He pop­u­lar­ized the story about “explod­ing” Gen­eral Motors pickup trucks, which NBC sub­se­quently had to retract. In 1993 Mr. Dit­low accused a GM …

Another wit­ness will be Joan Clay­brook, of the Naderite Pub­lic Cit­i­zen, which — among other things — cam­paigns against “astro­turf” lob­by­ing, though it refuses to dis­close how many mil­lions from plain­tiffs’ attor­neys fund its operations.

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It is kind of sad, but it is instruc­tive.  If you have a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail.

Even if it is help­ing “his peo­ple” (which peo­ple he remem­bers when it suits him and assumes are , to coin a phrase, shift­less and lazy) he can’t help him­self.  It’s auto­matic.  It’s like the infant’s mouth seek­ing the nip­ple.  Here he is, rag­ing!

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