"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."- Thomas Jefferson
Analog World
Click to enlarge
In a land where neuters, unicorn riders, and moonwalking molesters are deified and canonized, we can forget that there are real men still walking the American earth. Here's one. Do you think she was glad to see him?
"A construction worker, suspended from a crane, rescued a woman who fell into the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines Tuesday. A man who also fell into the water died." -- Photo Journal
And then, for the man reaching out his hand, Jason Oglesbee, and the others involved in the rescue, it was back to work on Wednesday, "We have a bridge to build here," the supervisor said as his men went about their business. -- Des Moines Register
***
Rush Limbaugh: "This represents a successful assault on prosperity."
U.S. job losses spike in June, dampen recovery hopes WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut far more jobs than expected last month and the unemployment rate hit a nearly 26-year high of 9.5 percent, underscoring the likelihood of a long and slow recovery from recession.
BREAKING! The White House today announced that Sir Paul McCartney will open for President Obama's "Happy Days Are Here Again" tour.
American Studies
No, not "blind dating" where the danger is in the dated one, but "bungee dating" where the danger lurks in the date itself. "Bungee dating" because one finds oneself jumping into a situation that is 100 feet deep with a bungee cord that extends to 101 feet.
Thus it was with this sorry pilgrim, this old and true friend, who called my West Coast retreat from New York this morning, tattered and battered from his bungee date of the previous evening, telling his tale of testosterone-powered urban woe.
He will be distressed that I have related it here, but it is for the greater good I do so. Men, take heed. Ladies are advised to avert their delicate eyes.
So I'm having this telephone relationship with her, see? You know, the kind of relationship where you're doing this long dance to the tune of "Getting to Know You," and its going pretty well.
I mean, I like it the way it is. We don't see each other a lot because of jobs, errands, New York yadda-yadda, and all that sort of thing. But also its neat, unusual, to spend hours on the telephone just sort of chatting away.
I *never* talk on the phone this long with anyone, but she's clever with questions and sort of keeps me blathering away. I don't feel weird about it until after when I notice that she's winkled all this information about me out of me, but I still don't know a lot about her.
She's a reporter type. I keep feeling I'm getting my notes taken, you know. But still I like it. I mean, hey, it's all about me so who wouldn't?
Still, we are really not having enough face time. She's getting all these weird ideas about me -- which just aren't true. Or maybe they are and I don't like being in such total disclosure with a telephone relationship.
Anyway, she's been under a lot of stress -- job, sick loved ones, hangovers, insecurity, the whole mini-catastrophe. She's sounding fried on the phone and I'm getting the 'let me help you' impulse big time. So when she mentions how uptight her body is, I say, utterly innocently, "I know just how you feel. We need a spa night with major shiatsu massages. That'll tune us up."
The next thing that should have gone through my mind was a dum-dum bullet, but sadly that did not happen.
American Studies
Across the street they've nailed the curtains.
They're getting ready for the feast.
The Phantom of the Opera,
A perfect image of a priest.
They're spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured.
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence,
After poisoning him with words,
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls,
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"
-- Bob Dylan
The Mark Sanford Media Fornication Festival currently climaxing in day-by-day updates, when not interrupted by ignoring where Michael Jackson parked his detachable penis for decades, instructs us yet again in what our media expects of Republican politicians: pseudo-moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave. Democrats, conversely, are expected and required to use their sex organs in ways that emulate and celebrate either Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, or Barney Frank.
It is of passing interest that the "profession" of "Journalism" itself requires no moral celibacy on the part of scribes ( pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, avarice, and gluttony being required activities for advancement -- Current Champions: Perez Hilton and his life partner Arianna Huffington.) The position of the media/entertainment industry en masse is that none of the seven deadly sins are allowed to be present in a Republican. Conversely, all seven deadly sins must not only be present but be celebrated in a Democrat. But since all this is well known and daily shown, we will let this interest in the media's position pass for the moment. Besides, it is futile since long and continuing research into the activities of our media today has shown, again and again, that you cannot insult whores.
Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?"
American Studies
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
-- Eliot
He's one hundred years old and his long hands, once strong, are growing translucent. He does not so much sit in his wheelchair as he is held upright and aslant by straps. Even awake his eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the florescent lights in the roof of the home. His meals of pureed food are spoon fed to him by attendants who speak to him in the tones he once used, long ago, on his infant children. When the drapes in his room are partially opened they reveal a view of a gravel roof, exhaust fans, and the brick facade of the opposite wing of the home. It's not a view but he doesn't mind. His eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the present, and he's gone off on a fishing trip in the summer of 1949 where "Jesus, the fish are thick on the ground." Don't make the mistake of thinking he's not in the here and now, because he'll surprise you now and then. He'll come out for a bit if it is worth it, but it seldom is. And then only for a moment.
He's my mother's brother, my uncle, and his life has now spanned a century. In the year of his birth, 1909, the NAACP was founded as was Tel Aviv while the keel of what was to become the Titanic was laid in Belfast. Taft took over the Presidency from Roosevelt (Theodore) and "Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the first woman to drive across the United States." Airplanes were only six years old but the Germans were already working on the anti-aircraft gun. Wisely so since the United States Army Signal Corp Division purchased the world's first military airplane from the Wright brothers in that same year. Not to be outdone, the US Navy decided it needed a central base in the Pacific and thought Pearl Harbor made strategic sense.
In the year of his birth Geronimo died, Barry Goldwater was born, and Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of radio. There's a radio in his room next to his bed but it's never turned on. Neither is the television that hangs from the ceiling and if the phone rings, it's a mistake. But in his mind, there are signals still coming in from elsewhere, from elsewhen, from out there, and if you sit with him quietly, without trying to engage him and without expectation; if you sit with him "where here and now cease to matter" you can sometimes sense where he lives in this his hundredth year.
C. S. Lewis observed “You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” Live long enough and your body slowly betrays you and sometimes takes your mind and soul with it. Many of my uncle's relatives seem to think that's what has happened to him. And perhaps they are correct. Alzheimer's, senile dementia, and other associated afflictions are the terror of the elderly and their families. Indeed, they are the things we fear most about growing old next to unremitting pain from a degenerating disease. As one of my cousins said, "It's about 'quality of life.'
Dementia might well be the overriding problem that afflicts my uncle as he waits in his room with his name on a card in a slotted holder next to the door. It certainly is what we all assume when the elderly become less and less present to us as we perform our dutiful visits. We reintroduce ourselves and then carefully monitor how long they can hold who we are (son, daughter, sister, brother, friend) and measure that against how long they held that knowledge the year before. It is almost always for a shorter time and that calculation distresses us. We call for more care, for more or different drugs. After all, their care is expensive and we need to get the value for money of our aged relatives knowing, at least, who we are for more than five minutes. Their forgetfulness distresses us because it cuts us off from them just when our need to remind them of our love is greatest, and because it is a portent of what waits for us when it is our name on the card in the slotted holder next to the door. Dementia.
Maybe. Maybe not.
I'd escorted my 94-year-old mother from her home in California to her childhood home in Fargo for my uncle's 100th birthday. My mother is still active and present and, all those who know her agree, inspiring. But her knees have betrayed her recently and long flights that change planes in Denver are something that can no longer be done without a dutiful son whose firm motto is: "There will be no falls on my watch."
In the same home, just down the hall from my 100 year old uncle, is my mother's other brother who is 96. He sleeps a lot but still reads, or seems to read, the daily paper. She'd spend time with him too. During those moments I'd sit with my uncle aslant in his wheel chair with his eyes shut against the glare of the lights and the blur of the common room. It was mostly a quiet time but, now and then, he'd speak to the air. He'd say things like, "Well, Barbara, what are we going to do about the tree this year?" and, after a minute or so, "Biggest damn Walleye I ever saw." Fragments and scraps of thoughts. As the poet says, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
It came to me that perhaps we sometimes mistake senile dementia for sanity in the elderly; that we are so impressed with our slivers and crumbs of knowledge about the workings of the human mind we mistake them for insights into the terra incognita of the human soul. It seemed to me, as I sat with my uncle, that maybe what I was hearing from him was a sane man's sane reaction to his circumstances.
If you knew that everyday for the rest of your life, you'd be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick walled room what would you do? If you knew that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do? If, opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do? If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do? If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?
I don't know about you, but I would figure a way out and if that way out was only deeper in, that's where I'd go. I'd go deep into my palace of memories and I'd use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I'd lived.
I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating, finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and, finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery complete.
More than anything else, I would not be in that room any more than I absolutely had to.
I like to think that is what is going on in the soul of my uncle. It's not only "pretty to think so," but it has the added advantage of possibly being true. Because he is not always "away" but will come out if the moment is right.
When my mother came in to see him the first time and said, "Mac, it's your sister, Lois," he said, without a pause, "Oh, my irritating little sister. How are you doing?" What followed was a pretty lively back and forth until he tired and left again before being wheeled downstairs for his lunch purees.
Then, a few days later, at the hundredth birthday part his family had arranged, the special presentation involved about thirty Barbershop Quartet singers. Both he and my uncle had been half of a barbershop quartet for decades and every Barbershopper for miles around showed up to honor both of them who sat in the front and listened to a cascade of songs. At the end, of course, the singers launched into "Happy Birthday" which was taken up by the 150 other friends and family at the party. The last extended "Youuuuu..." faded and in the moment of silence that came after, my uncle opened his eyes and in a clear strong voice sang, on key, "Thank you all from the bottom of my heart." And then he closed his eyes and left again taking with him, I hope, one last room to add to his palace of memory.
PictureThis
Last Saturday, the denizens of the self-named "Peoples Republic of Fremont" in Seattle celebrated their state religion, paganism, by worshiping the Summer Solstice with a parade. But since, in Fremont, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, they held a parade before the parade. This "opening" parade is officially known as "The Solstice Cyclist Parade." Unofficially it is known at "The Big Bunch of Buck Naked Bozos on Bikes Parade."
Being alerted to this annual "running of the butts" ritual, I thought it my moral duty to attend and document this pre-rutting ritual. At great personal risk, I placed myself in the street in front of this barrage of bikers and bravely clicked away. The results can be seen after the jump.
Warning: If you are offended by several tons of T&A on bike seats, you are the kind of person who would never, EVER, click the continue link. Some of these pictures are NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Still others are NOT SAFE FOR YOUR EYES.
You, yes you, have been warned.
Click to continue...iWar
A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009. (AP Photo) - via The Big Picture - Boston.com
Out of the tsunami of images, videos, rumors and reports that wash over the web during these days of Iranian resistance, this single image of a fleeting moment arrested my attention. Clicking on it will make it larger and allow you to see the expressions of the women closing in on the ayatollah's thugs. And in that flickering instant you will see what all injustice and repression fears from the people it oppresses, the emergence of The Furies.
Always female and dating back to the Age of Myth, the Furies were the agents of Nemesis:
The [Furies] Erinyes often stood for the rightness of things within the standard order.... Predominantly, they were understood as the persecutors of mortal men and women who broke natural laws. In particular, those who broke ties of kinship through murdering a mother (matricide), murdering a father (patricide), murdering a brother (fratricide), or other such familial killings brought special attention from the Furies.Here three goons beat a man on the ground with long truncheons. A fourth man turns from the beating as he hears the shrieks close on him from the hijab-draped women. We don't know what is being said, but we can infer from the expressions and the gestures that these women have determined not to let this particular fratricide go forward.
The woman directly confronting the turning thug is especially revealing. She wears glasses and is certainly not the sort that one would think capable of bravery or violence. And yet she raises a bare hand high as if to strike this man who outweighs her and is certainly schooled in torture and murder by the regime. Behind this courageous woman come others also determined, also outraged, also, in a word, furious.
What happened after this moment? We cannot know unless the rooftop photographer can be found and we can see the other frames that came after. The goons could have turned on the women and beaten them. The goons, seeing themselves outnumbered and others arriving in the background, could have retreated to beat and kill another days. All we have now is this instant and the history that will ripple outward from it, for better or worse, in Iran over the coming days and months.
What we do know is that once you can see, in an image such as this, the emergence of The Furies in the Mesopotamian realm that gave them birth in the Age of Myth, their harsh mistress Nemesis hovers above them. And while The Furies are vengeful, Nemesis is remorseless.
All Islamic tyrannies fear their women. Here you can see the reason why.
Myths & Texts
Tehran
Year upon year in this world's dark woods,
Heaped at the foot of the trees,
The tangles and bundles of dead brush increase
Which sunlight shall never seize.
The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.
The ash that descends in the clearest of skies?
The leapers that swam down the stones?
Best answered by bombs from mid-heaven at prayer
With the fire which hollows the bones.
The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.
If their gods decree war, God's war shall prevail.
His lessons are seared in the stone.
No dreams shall defer, nor wishes erase,
The hate that is burned in the bone.
The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.
Only by fire is fascism finished.
This sin is demanded that your line may live.
Only through fire is freedom reborn.
Each generation pulls the sword from the stone.
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
As the fascist government of Iran begins the massacreof its unarmed citizens today, the world slowly, fitfully wakes to the reality of what it means to have a weakling in Washington.
This report from Britain's Telegraph sounds the first note (The Iranian election: Barack Obama’s cowardly silence :: Nile Gardiner) but it will be far from the last:
The Obama administration's response to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent election victory is cowardly, lily-livered and wrong. The White House's refusal to officially question the result or even condemn the brutal suppression of opposition protestors, is undermining America's standing as a global power, and is little more than a face-saving, cynical exercise in appeasement that will all end in tears.
I'm wrong on so many things so often that I usually take extreme pleasure in being right on the few things I do forecast. But I take no pleasure in this observation from last October:
Click to continue...Grace Notes
"When I was a boy I had a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye"
-- Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb
The inscape of our world is always with us, omnipresent; a third that walks beside us. We are the ones who shut it out, who lose the thread when tangled in the web of daily events, who forever forget that we can always remember.
To live always in the light, in the presence of the now is something that is perhaps only possible for saints, as it is, for brief moments, available to poets. The power and
Click to continue...American Studies
During my years in the cities, returning to New York by air at night mezmerized me during the long approach. Sliding down over the Alleghenies from the west, curving in over the Atlantic from the South, or throttling back and easing off the Great Circle Route from Europe, the emergence of the vast sprawl of lights that defined the Hive always enraptured me. On moonless nights, after the humming hours held in that aluminum cylinder hoisted into mid-heaven, you saw the long continents of dark water or land dissolve into shimmering white-gold strands connecting to clusters of earth-anchored constellations that merged to expanding galaxies of towns, suburbs,
Enemies, Foreign & Domestic
[Note: If I ran the zoo, this would be the outline of my foreign policy. From June, 2008.]
Greetings Earthlings!
It has come to our attention that we haven't really been at the top of your Christmas list for some time now. Like some spouse that has become too used to having her good life paid for by a husband's work and sweat, you've decided you "need your space."
And we are here to give it to you. Politely if possible, but with both barrels if necessary. So pay attention....
Click to continue...American Studies
Previously Published Sunday Reading from the Archives
ABSENT BEING IN A COMA IN A CAVE somewhere on a high mountain in the middle of a cypress swamp, you cannot escape "The Runaway Bride." She is the plat du jour of our blighted age and the story of the decade so far this week. Now that she's back she'll be parsed and probed, drawn, quartered and eviscerated by the rapacious media until she's little more than a damp spot on some surgical sponge.
I hated The Runaway Bride from the first moment it was revealed she was safe and had simply freaked out and taken the geographic cure by getting gone to Vegas. Sane
Click to continue...Grace Notes
Today your job is straightforward. First you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net of rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the steel boat shouting and urging you to hurry up.
Once in the boat you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are, from time to time, hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. The smell of men fouling themselves near you
Click to continue...Analog World
....Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
--- Shakespeare -- Sonnet 116.
THE FIRST TIME I WAS MARRIED I was married to over 200 naked people. We weren't quite buck naked. The men had crudely made laurel wreathes on their heads, sometimes just a wad of weeds, while the women had wreathes of flowers around their brows and, for those old enough to have any, small bouquets of blossoms lodged in their pubic hair. All the men had large clubs and all the women large breasts. It was the butt end of the 60s and people in my set tended to have that kind of equipment. What children there were tended to be either infants or toddlers, all still nursing at will.
The men and the women had separated an hour or so before the wedding and, at dusk, the two groups came together from opposite directions.
Click to continue...***
Buh-bye: In 'survival mode,' newspapers slashing jobs -Washington Times
"In Sir Henry Wotton's jocular definition, 'An ambassador is said to be a man of virtue sent abroad to tell lies for the advantage of his country ; a news-writer is a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit.'"
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. -- Samuel Johnson, The Idler, #30, 1758
One of my odd hobbies is to read authors so ancient that they are only seldom taught and even less read in our post-post-modern world. Currently these authors are Montaigne and
Click to continue...Grace Notes
The Spark Gap
I've long had a theory about why prayers are answered, but answered rarely. I think that God, for all his omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience is pretty much nailed to the present as far as humans go.
Yes, I know all the arguments for predestination and preordination but those strike me as a one-way street to Dullsville even for God. If, as God, You let Yourself know everything that was going to happen everywhere for all time (Not that You couldn't if You wanted to.), what's the entertainment value in that proposition? Slim to none, if you ask me.
***
One of the many blights on classic American culture that the cult of "brand extension" hath wrought.
A friend that edits a magazine writes, to his personal email list of cranks, loonies, and general malcontents:
To all: For an upcoming article celebrating curmudgeons, we're planning a list of "50 things that aren't as good as they used to be" and we invite your contributions. Thanks a bunch. Creativity counts. Crankiness too. Here are two, to give you an idea: Not as good as they used to be: TV News Anchors -- Buncha movie star pretty boys. Chet Huntley had a dog face, but you could trust him. Traveling Carnivals: They've shut down the freak shows and moved them to FOX.My just-off-the-top-of-my-head response reads as follows.
OREOS -- This was, without a doubt, America's greatest store bought cookie ever. And it dominated the market. But was that good enough for the sleazoid 90s "marketing" department? No. They wanted more and even more. As a result they have 'New-Coked' this cookie into oblivion with endless variations on the theme. The heresy began with "Double Stuffed" Oreos. This simple-minded d-oh moment came when somebody thought, hey, let's double the stuffing! It did not matter to them that the perfect proportion of white cream stuffing had already been achieved. Nope, this
Click to continue...American Studies
In the account books of friendship, a balance can never be struck. Favors are always owing. True, there's some sort of record and you can, if you really push it, get overdrawn, but the Bank of the Friend is very forgiving of minor transgressions and small inconveniences. You can be lounging about on a weekend morning with no intention of dressing and driving out into the cold, but the call comes in and you saddle up.
Ringtone: "Hello."
"I need help with my equipment I used in the sermon."
"I thought that was just going to be one telephone."
"It got more elaborate."
("Elaborate" is a word he uses when he let his imagination get the better of his judgement. In general, he believes in simple things: zen gardens, books of quotations or jokes, a single perfect leaf next to a perfect rock, wood floors instead of shag rugs. Over the years his friends have learned to fear "elaborate.")
"More 'elaborate' huh?"
"Well, I wanted it to be a memorable sermon."
(This was in response to an invitation to give a speech at a certain Seattle church's 50th Anniversary.)
"And?"
"It started when I decided to give the sermon in the chicken suit."
(He owns three full-body yellow-feathered chicken suits -- with heads. There are full-body bunny suits as well and there was once, briefly, a full-body pink gorilla suit, but that's two other stories.)
"But they've already seen the chicken suit."
"That's exactly what I thought so I decided to dress it up."
"And?"
"So I went down to The Love Connection by Lake Union."
Click to continue...American Studies
“I’m no yenta, but I think this is going to work." - Jim Rogers
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments..."
Submitted for your consideration an item most notable for its soothing palliative tone in which the unusual is normalized. As the age's intellectual insanity assumes the proportions of a plague, the experience of reading the herald of these plague years, the New York Times, becomes more and more like reading dispatches from the alternate universe of "hoping these changes stick." That the changes can only stick if the core of the more normative America holds both economically and militarily (even as the 'changy' culture struggles to destroy it) is where the hoping enters in.
American Studies
"Ye Olde Walk-In Seattle"
Where Lake Washington meets the ship canal at Union Bay, that's where Seattle has tucked in its slight, but somewhat interesting, Museum of Science and Industry. I'd been putting off going there since I seldom hear of anything interesting that the museum is exhibiting. It's a bit like the city thought it needed such a museum in order to qualify as a first-rate city. There's a lot of that kind of stuff in this town. It usually disappoints. However, having little to do other than avoid the rain last week -- and being in the general area -- I pulled into the road to the parking lot.
I had to stop and wait while a bus from a local old-folks home slowly unloaded its compliment of day-tripping seniors. You've seen these groups. They're the people that we usually store out of sight in one of God's proliferating waiting rooms. You know those places too. Somewhere ahead there's one of them with your name printed on a temporary tag and slipped into a bracket next to the door.
5-Minute Arguments
Text via anonymous email this AM. First two already checked off. More to come. Keep track. There will be a test.
(X) -- Government takes control of the banks
(X) -- Government takes control of the car companies
SideLights
LinkApparently, Hitler could not avoid the fact that he believed what he was doing was for the great benefit of Germany. The winner of an election cannot be dissuaded from that belief until he is deposed. Hitler himself is not so interesting as is the ways in which he represents the ambitions of the 20th century. I wonder how different he is from any other such leader, and how different the German people are from us. Yeah, now I do actually wonder. Like most other folks who have studied Hitler's Germany, I scratch my head wondering how London, Washington, Paris and Moscow could have been so blind.
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and â at first â even the paperâs own reporters and editors. The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its health care reporting and editorial staff." -- Washington Post sells access, $25,000Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course...
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
The 87,492 page bill -- official designated as the American Patriotic Renewal Act of 2009 for Carbon Reduction, Energy Independence, Heathy Climate, Sustainable Job Growth, Adorable Puppies, and Earthly Paradise -- is a keystone in President Obama's first year legislative agenda, and was originally anticipated to get swift congressional passage. Instead, it faced a unexpectedly tough vote in the House last week after coal state Democrats complained it would place an unfair economic burden on their home districts. "I am as interested in reversing global climate change as anyone, but I fail to see how increasing taxes and random machete attacks on Ohio coal producers alone will solve the problem," said Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). "Come on people, there are plenty of other industries who deserve machete attacks too."
At over 2,280 meters above sea level (nearly 7,480 feet), the capital city of Chaghcharan has no factories, few cars or motorbikes, and air that is fresh and dry (and thin). Yet these are the lowlands. For about six months out of the year, the mountains around us could just as well be blanketed under a hundred miles of snow. When the snows arrive in about November, the place is socked in. The nearest paved road is about 380km (236 miles) away at Herat. Tens of thousands of people in the surrounding mountains and in this lowland are cut off from the world. There is nowhere to go but here. None of the Afghans have internet access, but there are cell phones. Even the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), run by the Lithuanians, becomes isolated other than by virtue of the gravel airstrip. They sometimes go several weeks without a flight. The place might as well be a spaceship, isolated first by the snows, then by the floods from the melting. This is a common story in Afghanistan. -- Lithuanians on the Moon
It is easy enough to see why progressive doctrine should be attractive to our masters. Tyrannical ambition is nothing new, and throughout human history it has nearly always presented itself to men in the guise of idealism. We are all inclined to meddle in other people's business; we are all inclined to think that we know better; and higher education tends to inflate our vanity and to make us more inclined to lord it over those who are less well-instructed. Never for a moment does a Barack Obama stop to ask whether depriving us of responsibility for our own well-being is demeaning. He and his supporters know that they know better, and their putative wisdom in this regard constitutes for them an absolute claim to rule. The logic unfolding within the progressive impulse requires that there be a class of Guardians empowered to supervise our lives in every particular, and to an ever-increasing degree this is the reality with which we live. -- Paul Rahe: Obama's tyrannical ambition
Fruit, I now understand, causes within people a diabolical disorientation, and that disorientation spreads into every aspect of humanity. Fruit captivates the attention and leads to painful mishaps. Fruit causes aggression, which leads to war. It inspires prostration and adoration, which leads to idolatry and misplaced allegiances. Fruit flummoxes a man’s ability to reason, impacting his marriage and his daughter’s self-esteem and future lumbar health. Fruit maketh a woman into a blithe-and-brainless spirit, content to bounce from car-to-car like a well-flicked pinball. These people go out into the world. They write books. They teach. They govern nations. They program network television. -- The Anchoress — A First Things Blog
Presto-the beleaguered, more moral liberal must be given greater leeway, employ sometimes questionable means, since his ends are the more exalted. Yes, Al Gore gets to fly private, and have a few extra rooms in his mansion, but he is sacrificing on the planetâs behalf, and needs a more ample footprint than the rest of us to save us from ourselves. Who cares if George Bushâs Texas ranch house has a lighter footprint than Goreâs mansion, given that Bush thwarted Kyoto and Gore promoted it? Yes, Timothy Geithner skipped a few thousands in taxes, but who wouldnât if you were trying to reformulate an entire tax code to level the playing field? Yes, Bill slipped up with Monica, but Monicas come and go-a womanâs right to chose simply cannot. Yes, Eliot Spitzer had a bothersome desire for young prostitutes, but he was a crusader against Wall Street greed. And yes, the previously mentioned John Edwards was campaigning to the left of Clinton and Obama, and thus his âproblemsâ deserved some sort gestation, given his voice on the behalf of the poor.
The Bad Moose crowd at night is prone to motorcycles and tattoos. There are very few drinks with umbrellas in them in evidence. There is a contingent of very large males enamored of high-fives and bottled beer, and some women who might have danced around a pole previously. The bartender works alone, whirling like a dervish, is dressed like a vampire, has some metal in the face and tattoos on the skin, and could probably clear the room in 15 seconds flat. And she's a girl. -- Sippican Cottage: Money (Still) Changes Everything
The calculus of political correctness is like roshambo, the "rock-paper-scissors" game. Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.
Don't ask why. It just is.But who then makes The Rules?, asks the Belmont Club in Carnival of grotesques:
If Poets were the unacknowledged legislators of Shelley's world, then who are unacknowledged legislators of ours? If Shelley's commentary remains valid then the true authors of Breitbart's Laws are the Carnival of Grotesques collectively referred to as popular culture. They make the rules to which we subconsciously conform. Its members are household names. And the measure of its quality can be deduced from the fact that Lavandeira occupies an honored position in this assembly. And that's why Andrew Breitbart can write seriously about this creature, and the reason why anyone, in spite of himself should read it. Perez Hilton is about us. He is a measure of the circumference to which our outlook has shrunk.
Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing. -- Michael Kinsley
The flight down to Florida was an eternity. We cruised at 250 knots indicated, giving us about 315 knots of ground speed at 15,000'. The miles didn't click by like I am use to them clicking by in a fighter at MACH .94. We were burning fuel at a rate of 40,000 pounds per hour or 130 pounds per mile, or one gallon every length of the fuselage! The vibration in the cockpit was mild, compared to down below and to the rear of the fuselage where it reminded me of that football game I had as a child where you turned it on and the players vibrated around the board. -- Alva Review/Courier HT Rick @ Brutally Honest
Another day, another day of internecine Muslim slaughter in Iraq. To put things in perspective, if a proportionate mass killing had occurred in the US, it would equal 2000 American dead. Pundits and academics and scribblers of every kind will write millions of words trying to explain these killings. Some will blame Iran. Some will blame Al-Qaeda. Some will blame Bush. Yet such things happen regularly in Iraq and in almost every nation where Mohammed hangs his ragged turban. Muslim killing Muslim began when Islam began. It will end when the last two Muslims strangle each other with their own intestines.
If any man in Guantanamo Bay prison had been found in [Michael Jackson's] condition there would be cries for a war crimes prosecution. But since Jackson succumbed to that most socially acceptable and lucrative of ends, death by celebrity, the real question is whether anyone — anyone at all, bar some fall guy — will be found guilty of anything....
One might be forgiven for imagining that the elite media system actually works quite well: that it can keep a secret when it wants to; that secrets only leak when it is convenient. When massive liquidity problems impend, when tax bills disguised as climate change fixes are introduced in the dead of the night, when totally incompetent people are foisted on an unsuspecting public, it can hide the information quite effectively. If these horrible autopsy results are real then I hope it starts a fire that doesn't stop until everyone associated with this incident burns down. Here's one slogan from the sixties that hasn't gone out of date. Burn, baby, burn. It isn't that I like Michael Jackson particularly, but no human being should be beset by bloodsuckers this bad. -- Belmont Club Night of the living dead
I don't know how, but I am now in my sixties. I keep telling myself not to feel so much sorrow for what is happening now, since I have the easy way out. Every time I almost let go, the figurehead utters something about being a nation of laws or international law and I'm sucked right back in. I read this yesterday morning, it helped yesterday -- "For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace."-Romans. Hmmm, it just helped again. Nonetheless, I'll do all in my power to stand against America's enemies, domestic and foreign.
In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the "politically correct" ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny -- of the Nanny State and all its trappings -- has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation. -- David Warren
The card table bohemian Marxists loomed large now on the radar screen. I saw them watching the bum they had hired directly across the street, and eying me. And here I was, right in front of them; I was the person they were touting on all those flyers. I was the worker who they would emancipate. I've been a body shop mechanic, and a janitor, and a housepainter, and a welder, and a factory hand, and a starving artist, and a laborer, and every other damn thing. If I sneeze at the wrong time I could still lose a finger or two at work.... They sized me up, and pulled their hands back in, and let me pass by without saying anything. -- Sippican Cottage: Gimme Some (More) Of That Old Time Religion
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
The rise to power and fame of the real lowbrows explains a lot. It even points to an answer of sorts. Because we've all been intimidated by the Cult of Nice not to contradict anybody who comes out with a really stupid, destructive idea. We can no longer call a really stupid idea what it is. I know that I censor myself all the time. We have been taught to keep our mouths shut when a word in time might make a real difference. We have allowed the national conversation to be dumbed down.
Here's my resolution for July Fourth: From now on I'm going to call idiocy idiotic. Not nastily, but as clearly as I can. It is high time for normal, intelligent common sense to become acceptable again. I'm happy to have a respectful argument with anyone who disagrees with me. But I'm going to start saying the magic words:
That's really dumb! That's really ignorant! You haven't thought about that much, have you? Have you ever considered another side of that batty idea?
The process through which a principal is captured by his servants is familiar to students of bureaucracy and even business. Once capture is consummated, the master and servant exchange places. The enterprise is run thereafter not for the benefit of the principal, but for those of the agents, such as when a country is run for the benefit of a government, or when a government is run for the benefit of its officials. In the case of Jackson, he may have been working -- and made to keep working -- for the benefit of the vast swarm of creditors, suppliers and hangers-on who attached themselves like parasites to failing host.
But how many people, reflecting on the King of Pop’s fantasies, will ask themselves whether subprime mortgages, unfunded social security or borrowing our way out of debt makes any more sense than that last shot of Demerol? On a day when the House has passed the climate change bill, wouldn’t it be good to ask how much of what the public is being made spend is for the public’s own benefit, and how much for the continued livelihood of the armies of special pleaders who surround society with their policy pills and needles? Good, but unlikely. It is far easier to believe in promises and rely feel-good nostrums than it is to look in the mirror, even though we know what it will show. Jackson’s death when it came, wasn’t a surprise; probably not even to him. And the crash of public policy fantasy, when it arrives, will not be wholly unexpected.
Obama Foodorama The Obama Foodorama: Everything From Arugula To Waffles. An archive of Obama Food Art, White House recipes, White House Kitchen Garden info, Ag Policy Commentary & Food Politics, and an exploration of the Folk Foodways of the Obama White House. Scroll the sidebar for clickable stories. No public comments....HT: neo-neocon Obama Foodorama: gag me with a spoon
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