One of your humble Blog Goliard’s personal categories that helps him make sense of the world is: “things that are very good, yet still wildly overrated”.

It can be a tricky category to maintain and explain. When we try to argue that something is wildly overrated, people can automatically presume that we’re saying they’re mediocre or bad. But even excellent things can be overrated and overpraised, and it can skew our perception. Absolutely anything human, from the greatest to the humblest, can be overhyped.

As a big college football fan, my current Exhibit A in this category should come as no surprise. It is none other than Florida’s Tim Tebow.

Your humble Blog Goliard has had the privilege of spending multiple hours on multiple computers this week, fighting with one of the gazillion Windows XP updates that were recently pushed out. The security update for .NET Framework 1.1 would not install properly; and it was loads of fun ripping out .NET and reinstalling it to fix this problem.

If, perchance, anyone who stumbles across this page finds him or herself in the same situation, here is what worked for my machines, along with links to the tools used.

Step 1: Open up the Add or Remove Programs Control Panel. Remove all instances of Microsoft .NET Framework (all versions). There appears to be a certain order in which it prefers to work, but I never seemed to hit upon the exact right one, so I can’t give detailed advice there; just keep whacking at it until they’re all gone.

Step 2: Download the .NET Framework Cleanup Tool from this site and run it to remove any stray bits of .NET Framework that may remain.

Step 3: Download All in One Runtimes from this site. After rebooting, run this tool with the boxes under “Microsoft .NET Framework checked” and other boxes unchecked, and it will automatically reinstall .NET Framework versions 1.1 through 3.5, with service packs.

Step 4: Reboot again, then run Microsoft Update. Any remaining updates not already rolled into All in One Runtimes should now install.

Good luck!

Dormant blogs exist in a vicious cycle of not-happeningness. Nobody comes around because there’s not much new content and the blogger isn’t doing much to promote the site. Less gets written and less promoting occurs because nobody’s coming around. And so on.

So your humble Blog Goliard—when he’s got the time and energy, which seem harder to come by all the time—has been doing more writing these days in the form of comments on other, more-travelled sites. Bigger audience and more chance of instant gratification. He should really do more with this site too, though, so that those who wander by here because they like what he has to say in com-boxes (maybe that describes you right now, dear reader) find more timely goodness here and bookmark it.

Surely he will. Surely he will also find a way to fix what the newer versions of Internet Destroyer borkened in the blog template. But he’s busy and distracted a lot these days, so hard to tell when that will be exactly.

Good luck to the brave and long-suffering Iranian people, as many of them fully recognize, recollect, and confront the true nature of the regime run by their vile overlords.

May God help them use this crisis to make their country a better place, and preserve them from the violence, disorder, privations, and bitter disappointment that are the far-too-common fruit of even the most justified and best-intentioned revolutions in our world.

And may Khameni and Ahmadinejad either repent and find sanity in this world, or receive their just rewards in the next.

Here are some notes from an immigration discussion your humble Blog Goliard got into in the comment boxes of another website (yes, yes, he knows…but these were fairly sane and low-traffic com-boxes).

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There’s plenty of Republicans as well as Democrats who believe that Americans have no right to preserve the country they grew up in and hand down something recognizably similar to their children. Sadly, this is an utterly bipartisan (and generally, elite) position.

If, however, millions of Germans suddenly turned up uninvited in Peru, taking jobs from locals and threatening to overwhelm traditional Andean cultures, you can bet the same bien-pensants would change their tune—lecturing not the Peruvians for trying to kick them out, but the Germans for respecting neither the laws of other nations nor the preciousness of the unique character of other peoples’ homelands.

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Plenty of immigration fairy tales being peddled here. As with any issue, misinformation can be too useful to not propagate, and so we all come to “know” things that aren’t so. Here’s two.

* The fairy tale of the good, family-values, Catholic Hispanics:

Heather MacDonald is one scholar who has been on the case here. See, for instance, “The Hispanic Family: The Case for National Action” and “Honesty from the Left on Hispanic Immigration”.

* The fairy tale of a vast legal guest-worker system as a solution:

1) Ask, say, the Germans and the Dutch how that’s been working out for them.

2) If we’re so short on labor, then: a) I’m sure that will be a great comfort to those now looking for work, who surely even in this crisis should have been able to find something by now…if not, obviously they are just doing it wrong; b) the only real long-term solution, of course, is to start having a healthily above-replacement-rate number of babies again; else no matter what we do the country will not long endure.

3) This is supposed to solve the problems of inequality and people having second-class status in America how exactly?

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Other comments:

* Deportation does not equal “demonization” (which is mostly a straw-man anyhow). And anyway, I read the above comments of Archbishop Chaput as criticism of both.

* Scott overstates the degree to which illegal immigration has been officially overlooked (the fact that these people needed to get fraudulent Social Security numbers to do any number of things should have been their first clue that what they were doing was still unlawful).

Also he fails to recognize that prosecutorial discretion cuts both ways–the prosecutor always has the choice to start aggressively enforcing the rules on the books again, just as he had the choice to give them a low priority before. Given fair notice (which we’ve already had; witness the number of immigrants who have voluntarily returned home in the past year or two), this is not a problem at all, especially legally.

Were the above not true, the successful “broken windows” law-and-order initiative under Mayor Giuliani would hardly have gotten off the ground.

* “Sacrificing for others” is not a reason for us to accept gravely damaging one of the minority of countries in the world that does work. Indeed, that starts to look more like a failure of stewardship. Charity has its place, but you cannot raise one nation up by dragging another down…nor have governments succeeded in raising other nations up by even the most lavish aid efforts, except in the rarest of occasions.

The best way to help the largest number of Mexicans over the long term is to encourage things to get sorted out in Mexico. Closing the border would be the most efficient way to do that, as it would cut off the main safety valve that the Mexican government uses to export and ameliorate its racial and poverty problems without solving them, and that the Mexican people use individually to escape those and all the other problems of their country without solving them.

Your humble Blog Goliard loves Inauguration Day. It is a day of hope and goodwill and unity. Of democratic pomp, of solemn civic liturgy. Of marveling at the regularly-occurring miracle of an outgoing President peacefully departing amid smiles and embraces, and his successor promising continuity with America’s greatest traditions and dearest principles.

God bless President Barack Obama. May his administration keep us safe and renew our prosperity. May those of us who spent Election Night on the brink of apoplexy be serene and of good cheer; and may the next four years give us plenty of sound reasons to admire the man.

And God bless America. May none of us fail to appreciate our outrageous luck to be able to live in this land…or the incalculable efforts and sacrifices that were required to make it the envy of the world.

Your humble Blog Goliard may not be a Brit, but in a pinch he can play one on TV. Or at least, he follows Anglosphere politics avidly enough to now and then roam about, playing at being Mark Steyn (with much the same beard, but vastly inferior knowledge of Broadway tunes).

This morning, it was a post on ConservativeHome that got the commenting juices flowing. The full article is short enough to read, but the gist is that some geniuses across the pond put together a report entitled “Future of Politics”, which dispenses advice on how politicos can “keep up with a new generation of ‘digital natives’”—largely by doing more stuff on the Internet, whether or not there is any real benefit in doing so.

And of course, it simply must be two-way, “interactive”, Web 2.0, [insert additional buzzwords here], because plain old websites have of course become completely passé and useless. So says everyone…particularly those folks over there, whom you may recognize from about fifteen minutes ago, when they were grabbing you by the lapels to tell you that you needed to hire them to make a Web 1.0 website for you right now, because that was the Future. (It appears that the Future has become even less durable than Aldous Huxley feared.)

Anyhow, the ConservativeHome blogger reported on the new document with some thoughtful criticism, but not nearly enough to suit this reader…or to ward off some silly follow-on comments welcoming the coming age of interactive Prime Minister’s Questions and Internet-based plebiscitary democracy. So yours truly chimed in to say:

What a damn fool bit of starry-eyed technobabble.

There’s almost too many points to be made here for one to sort out.

1) That graphic tells you more than it means to. It portrays technology being used, not to bring the House information necessary for informed debate, but rather the 24-hour news channel simulacrum of “information”. To wit: shallow visual flash. Fancy graphics, b-roll video, a mugshot of a person, outline maps…all of which are designed not to convey information, but to give ADD television viewers sufficient visual stimulus to prevent them changing the channel.

2) The digerati may think they have invented two-way conversations, but Alexander Graham Bell might have disagreed…as might anyone else who has ever engaged in that hopelessly outmoded exercise that involves standing in close proximity to another person and alternating between exercising one’s vocal cords and employing one’s ears.

And anyhow, meaningful two-way communication between MPs and the public will always be rare, whatever technology is employed, so long as: a) there are millions, not dozens, of Britons who would like to have their concerns heard and their questions answered…and only so many hours in a day; and b) one end of the conversation involves a politician who endeavours to say as little as possible while talking, whilst working in as many focus-grouped PR phrases as possible.

3) Even to the extent that a more involved and connected public is possible, that would first require an informed public capable of rational deliberation on the public good. How many of the people texting in their queries to be put to the Prime Minister will meet this requirement…especially if they are all ‘digital natives’?

Mitchell and Webb really deserve the last word here (the full skit can be found here):

What possible reason could there be for you to not email us? Certainly ignorance shouldn’t be a bar. You might not know anything about the issue, but I bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon? Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uniformed, ad hoc reckon by going to bbc.co.uk/meandmyimportantthoughts (all one word), clicking on ‘What I Reckon’ and simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head.

One of the most important things Republicans will have to do, as they rebuild, is to explain why the last 20 years are not proof positive that Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican ones.

It will not do to simply count on the Obama years failing to bring recovery. It’s always a bad thing, on many levels, to find oneself rooting for bad news for political purposes; and also recall that, however bad things got after 1932, the Democrats successfully blamed Hoover for, what, 20? 30? 40 years?

The Carter vs. Reagan example won’t be much help, no matter how large it still looms in many of our minds. For the great mass of voters, that’s simply too far in the past to be part of the picture now.

Explaining that control of Congress is an important part of the picture, and getting into any number of other non-White House-centric macroeconomic arguments, will also be tough sells. Your humble Blog Goliard has long argued that as far as mid- to low-information voters (who are the overwhelming majority of swing voters) are concerned, our economic situation depends on who is President, pure and simple.

You’ll notice that Sen. Obama never had to offer much detail when he railed against the “failed Bush economic policies”. Swing voters didn’t need to know what policies those might be and why they were wrong. All they needed to know was: we have an economic crisis, and George W. Bush is President. So obviously, the former is caused by the latter doing it wrong. QED.

As mentioned in the post below, it’s almost as if they imagine there’s a master control panel in the White House, resembling the cockpit of a 747. If the President spends enough time at the controls, and operates all the buttons and dials and switches correctly, we have good economic times; if not, we risk recession. It all boils down to his dedication and skill at “running the economy”.

With persuadable voters bringing this half-formed mental picture to the table, all Democrats have to do is point to two President Bushes (three terms, three recessions, big deficits) and contrast to one President Clinton (two terms, no recessions, explosive stock market growth, budget brought under control). And poof there goes Republican standing on economic matters.

Unless Republicans can figure out how to put together an equally compelling counter-narrative, it’s going to be a long eight to twelve years. Because, again, hard times under Obama can’t be counted on to help. Messiah excesses notwithstanding, most Obama voters are already on board with the idea that that idiot-chimp-devil Bush—the worstest President ever!!!—did it so wrong that it may well take more than one term for even The One to get us out of the deep hole his predecessor dug.

So it’s time for the coaching carousel to crank up to full speed, as the silly season in college football—full of BCS arguments and regime-change agitation—gets underway.

As the old proverb goes, “A change in rulers is the joy of fools.” Silly season never fails to provide such joy.

Some of the latest rumors surround Tommy Tuberville at Auburn, whose ten-year tenure has seen five SEC West titles; and, from his second year forward, an average of nine wins a season. That’s nothing to sniff at. Yet this season was bad, so some Auburn folks are already in search of greener pastures.

How anyone can be confident that the team would fare better than that with a new coach, however, is beyond me. Especially when no one really knows whether your new hire would be the next Saban or the next Willingham. Heck, it’s hard enough sometimes to figure out how to gauge the guy who’s already in charge of your team.

Consider, Aubies: Not long ago, you were so desperate to keep Coach Tuberville you threw a huge buyout his way; now you’re desperate enough to consider paying it. Did he change that much between then and now? Or, perhaps, have you not seen him clearly on either occasion?

And how well equipped are any of us, really, to evaluate the job that a head coach is doing? It’s not like he’s the one on the field making the plays…or, in many cases, even calling the plays.

Your humble Blog Goliard had hoped that coacholatry was due to fade, but the roaring success so far of the Saban hire in Tuscaloosa has nixed that return to sanity. We’re right back to crediting or blaming everything on the head coach, seeing him as having the power to win national championships or utterly ruin a football program, all on his lonesome.

It’s as naïve as placing the entire credit or blame for the economy on the White House, as if there were a master control panel resembling a 747 right off the Oval Office.

No wonder monarchy seemed the natural and inevitable human condition for so many centuries.

ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie has written a sensible piece with many good points; your humble Blog Goliard must admit that there may be some lessons to learn from Britain’s Tories after all, comments in the post immediately below notwithstanding. But I still bristle at two aspects of the Cameron leadership.

1) “Modernization”. Many of those who call for conservatism to “modernize” don’t go very far in defining that term. They’ll sometimes go on about 20th-century-this versus 21st-century-that, but that’s meaningless blather—the fact that the giant odometer rolled over recently isn’t an argument for or against anything.

Once again, the sense I get is that this “modernization” mainly consists of asking “what is the modern thing to do?” and then declaring “let’s do that!” But if conservatism means anything, surely it’s standing against the clueless chasing after what is trendy and new, and all other manifestations of presentism.

2) Public Relations. I’m still convinced that hiring a PR person as national leader holds every promise of being an even worse choice than hiring an MBA (W.) or an engineer (Hoover, Carter). The profile of that job’s professional strengths and occupational hazards may match up well with the business of campaigning…but with wise, effective, and far-seeing governance? Color me dubious.