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April 22, 2009 - April 15, 2009

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

PSOMETHINGS.44. Yes, it's true. Here's the bitter bad news:

Woods said on his Web site that he will have surgery on his anterior cruciate ligament. He also wrote that he needs time to rehabilitate a double stress fracture of his left tibia, which he said was discovered just before the Memorial Tournament in late May.

And he revealed that he originally ruptured the ACL in 2007 while running at his home in Orlando after the British Open. He said he decided not to have surgery at that point, and he went on to win five of the next six events he entered (through his Target World Challenge in December).

Woods said no date has been determined for the surgery, which will be the third in five years on Woods' left knee.

Woods said doctors have assured him the outlook is positive. Doctors have told him that the stress fractures will heal with time.

Of course, the PGA is gamely trying to cope. Regularly scheduled tournaments will be played as exhibitions for the rest of the year since the results obviously won't count. There's no guarantee, however, that any of the events will be televised; the networks are businesses, not charities for sports without viewers. Otherwise, we'd see a lot more coverage of curling.

Sorry. Best wishes to Tiger. Hope you get well soon.

...OR NUTHIN. When guns are outlawed, onlyoutlaws will have gunsforgo the hassle of finding illegal guns and just use knives instead:


Too many stabbings. That's a drag. My heart would, er, bleed for them if I didn't delight in the chance to see that famed Brit intellect go to work solving this problem. "Can't stab if you've got no knife, can you, bloke?" some Great Expectations-looking twit thinks. "Get rid of all them knives, then. Righto!"


Uh, shouldn't that be "the perils of not carrying a knife"? It's not as if each knife is some kind of unstoppable projectile, flying like Robin Hood's arrow toward a young hooligan hundreds of yards away carrying another knife. Unless they're referring to the risk of puncturing your scrotum with a knife in your pocket, like Mr. Bean with a Sheffield steel fountain pen.

Youth summit. They didn't make any actual young people attend, did they? Now I'm feeling pangs of sympathy.

The name sounds lofty, doesn't it? Summit. The handful of kids in the nation who don't carry knives are led to expect an event that's part think-tank, part Woodstock. What they get is closer to a goddamn DMV seminar, where the pressure on everyone to pretend they're having a good time and saving the world kills their youthful enthusiasm stone-dead. Like a load of buckshot to the face.

I'm irritated. Let's skip to the punchline:


That's some mighty big stupid, doctor. Leaving aside the idiocy of "only the point can kill" for the moment...


...can you see the implications of this "logic"? If not, come with me into the terrifying mind of Lord Bottingham, future Minister of Public Safety. Watch how his deformed, anemic morality cuts the rights of man to ribbons, like Helen Keller pushing a lawnmower through a rose garden while wearing one of those electric dog-shocking collars.

"Murder is dreadful. Simply unspeakable. Guns are used to kill. Outlaw guns. Problem solved! No further thinking required! Time for a snort at Boodles!

"Wait. Now kids [the most prominent group of murderers, evidently] are using knives instead of guns. Outlaw knives-- at least the keen ones. They don't need to be quite so keen, after all. Set a legal cap on how sharp a knife may be. Require all knife sharpeners to be rigged so they hone a knife only to an edge that can slaughter butter...

"What's this? Kids are using rope to strangle each other now? Guess we have to get rid of rope, too. II know, I know. I don't like the idea either, but we have to protect the beastly little bastardskids, don't we? From the other ghastly, common larvaekids, all of whom want to kill each other so frantically that inventiveness in homicide is the only sort of creativity they express anymore. The only way to stop them is to inhibit them, to render them physically unable to enact their fervent bloodlust. So rope's right out of the picture. Bungie cords too. You'll have to use something else, mate. But nothing that can ever harm a human being in any way. That's why we replaced all the real motorcars with dodgy electrified golf carts a few years back. Getting out and walking across every road with a greater than one-degree incline is a small price to pay for keeping the repellent low-bred spawn of cockney verminkids safe. Isn't it? Brilliant.


"Bollocks! Now the monstrous semi-human hooliganskids are using cricket bats, paperweights, and grandmama's objets d'art to bludgeon random passers-by to death. We've got to ban EVERY OBJECT WEIGHING MORE THAN A KILOGRAM! Excluding, of course, nature and whatnot. (After all, igneous rocks have more right to this planet than we do, being way more natural. By far.) We'll have to put spool after spool of razor wire around each tree-- to protect them, as well as us. From their heavy limbs and pokey branches. And it's high time to finally take down all those public sculptures of the "heroes"-- Ha!-- of Brit military imperialism...

"Bugger! Now every bloody bastardchild under 18, without exception, is pushing his closest relatives into the razor wire! Bugger our war-mongering, imperialist heritage! We've got to cork all the razor wire... except we can't make corks anymore, because most of the equipment is illegal and our cork colony is right down the drains. Bugger the universe's random, cruel wit! Bloody hell.

"But... WHAT WHAT! We can still make Nerf. The Nerf works converted to all-Nerf production some time ago.

"We could Nerf everything! Nerf police boxes, Nerf carriageways, Nerf pencils and office cubicles, even Nerf kitchen bits!

"And everything we can't make out of Nerf will have Nerf padding, applied with super glue, so it can never be removed, for any reason! Brilliant!

"Finally, a consequence-free Britain! Utopia! An orange-coloured paradise! Island Nerf!"

Bloody brilliant. Brits...

Of course, it can't happen here.

P.S. Hey, Mal: There's a sliver of hope. You know the great thing about people with no stomach whatsoever for a fight? They have no stomach whatsoever for a fight. Thank GodAllah.

G-R-R-REAT. Something important has gotten lost in the American experiment. Something we used to know deep down but seem committed to forgetting. What triggered my own memory was Mark Steyn's last post before he went on hiatus to mount a new offensive against the forces which no longer believe in freedom of speech. He wrote this about Obama and McCain:


Uh, yeah. Obama's a great talker. McCain's a great self-promoter. But is either of them great in the sense of the word that we all know underlies its constant overuse? No. They're not great. They're politicians. Both of them. Which is mutually exclusive with the real meaning of the word 'great.'

That's what Steyn is reminding us about. He explains in a later paragraph:


What is American exceptionalism? The notion, the conviction, that we're different from every other nation in history. On what was this conviction founded? In terms of politics, it was founded on the brand new idea that a nation's political leaders were not to be blindly followed but continuously suspected. Indeed, our best presidents have been those who were self-consciously plain, keenly aware that their power was largely an accident of timing and circumstance, that they themselves were merely reflections of a national mood that could have been exemplified by many others. They did not see themselves as messiahs. And if they suspected other people did, they worked to disabuse the majority of that impression. Washington set the precedent of retiring after two terms in office, after having turned down a proffered crown. Jefferson was too shy to play a charismatic executive. Jackson was too human, too flawed to play at being a savior. Lincoln probably came the closest to being truly great, but his press -- the world over -- was every bit as bad as Bush's, and he never knew he was being groomed for sainthood. And the record of the "phantom amendment" proves that the Great Emancipator was also a sly and potentially unscrupulous politician.

It's only since the advent of mass media that we have begun to see presidents as mythological figures -- Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Obama -- as larger than life figures, larger even than ourselves. It's all hogwash. The partisan critics of these icons have all been right to some degree. TR was a cartoonish personality, a blustering braggart making up for a sickly youth with oceans of overbearing bravado. FDR was an arrogant, ignorant snob, dumb as a brick about economics and blind to the sedition and treason in his own inner circle. He never did directly what he could do by stealth and sneaky tactics. Truman was a lifetime politician who lucked into the biggest political deal ever. JFK was a sex- and drug-addicted Irish mobster, heir of a ruthless clan that accumulated power with no thought about the values of democracy. Reagan was an actor who found a different way to be the star his talent couldn't achieve in Hollywood.

I've been thinking about such not just because I'm concerned about the cult of Obama. I've been watching the new attacks on Winston Churchill by Pat Buchanan and others, for example, which was at first surprising because I grew up in the generation which deemed Churchill the "Man of the Century," and then not so surprising as I remembered that Churchill was a politician, meaning that at least part of him was low, mean, unscrupulous, and self-obsessed.

It is an American act to challenge the putative greatness of the so-called great, especially when they're politicians. That's how we've avoided monarchy and aristocracy for close to a quarter of a millennium. It got me thinking. About greatness. Nobody who aspires to so much power and control can ever be truly great as a person. How do I know that? Because I've had the privilege of knowing -- in my entire lifetime -- two truly great human beings. I've known many more good human beings, but greatness is its own category. It's the kind of human quality you find yourself measuring yourself against, even when it doesn't seem relevant, and the measurement always makes you feel inferior. You know what I'm talking about. None of the excuses work when you're talking about real greatness.

So I've known two. My paternal grandfather. And my wife. Which makes me blessed among men. I've had the honor of knowing two people who were always who they were, without doubt or apology, and whose singular goodness survived every temptation and became, instead, an example of how one should respond to life's trials. Interestingly, the quest for power and authority never figured into their life plans. Instead, they managed somehow to do things for others, serve as un-self-conscious examples of virtue in its purest form, and enjoy the simple pleasures of a life that could not be summarized in a bumper sticker. I've known good men who were good executives, but greatness is always an impossibility. They make choices the great ones would never make. Because when it comes down to it, the career matters more than, well, other things. I'm not accusing. I've been there. But I don't like to think I could go there again. When life gives you a second opportunity to learn, you're worse than a fool if you don't try to take in the lesson.

If you want Obama or McCain, cast your votes accordingly. But please do it the American Way. Knowing that they're both damned dirty politicians who can't be trusted any farther than we can throw them.

I'd say the same thing if Abraham Lincoln were running again. So help me.

FAREWELL. She was the best. Ever. Now she's gone. But you can read about her here.

But this is all you need. There was a time when young women were sexy.


Long gone.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Grave Questions:

THE TIGER GALLERY. As a resident of the Philadelphia area, I'm pretty much stuck with the lame-brain sports analysis of Howard Eskin and SportsTalk Radio at WIP. I can't tell you how many times I've been masochistic enough to listen to dumb-jock deejays opining about how race car drivers and golfers aren't really athletes. They devote hours and hours of their call-in shows to it, and their experts are usually ex-NFL players who are certain that bloated offensive linemen are athletes while wiry Grand Prix drivers aren't.

I'm pretty much sick of it. I won't name names. Uh, come to think of it, I will. Ex-Eagle Hugh Douglas is willing to stipulate that Tiger Woods is an an athlete, but no other professional golfer is, unless Hugh knows for a fact that he works out. You see, what they do is not athletic. They're not in shape the way the NFL and NBA define it. According to Hugh and the other armchair jocks of WIP radio, golfers are merely privileged gameplayers. Hugh's sidekicks are eager to chime in with the opinion that race car drivers may have a certain knack but aren't athletes, either.




I'm calling foul on all of them. Athletes are people who make a living with their bodies, what their bodies can do, and what their bodies can withstand. Their 'shape' is what it has to be for them to excel at what they do. It may not conform to standard ideals of beauty or athleticism. Sumo wrestlers don't look like male models. Neither do most shot-putters, marksmen, or dressage champions. Race-car drivers and golfers are athletes. Perhaps the best of them all. Because they can only win by using their minds as well as they use their bodies.

Race car drivers bet that their reflexes and physical endurance are sufficient to keep them alive and competitive in situations where you or I or talk radio hosts would fail from fatigue or loss of focus or lack of skill. The penalty for failure is death, much more so than in any other sport. No 'athletic' sport has a list of players "killed in action" with talents of the caliber of Wolfgang von Trips, Graham Hill, Mark Donohue, or Dale Earnhardt.

Golfers play the greatest and oldest sport of all -- its players are always alone, challenged to keep striking the smallest target in any sport the longest distance with the greatest accuracy over the longest period of time -- one against hundreds for days rather than hours.

Occasionally we get a glimpse of the fact that it is an athletic event, in the starkest terms. Like today, with Tiger Woods. Golf is a game? Nothing more? Chess players don't wince or double-up when they make a move on the board. They don't have to fight to the finish against fifty opponents and a wall of pain.


Tiger Woods proved the idiots of SportsTalk wrong this week. Playing golf and winning at it does does involve physical commitment and all kinds of suffering. Knees, shoulders, backs, necks, hands -- the same list you'll find in every other sport.

And, Hugh, Tiger wasn't the first to battle agony for a victory in golf. Before him were other greats. Ken Venturi. Ben Hogan. Bobby Jones. Look them up. They were the most poignant of many.

I'm tired of your whole prejudiced act.

Go, Tiger. Win or lose, we're with you.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

PSAYINGS.5Q.46. The founder of The Weather Channel has delivered the most stinging condemnation of the Global Warming frenzy ever reported in the media. Here is a link to the text of a speech by John Coleman to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. I'm providing a few teaser excerpts below, but that's no substitute for reading the whole thing. I urge every reader of this site to email the link to 10 other people and urge them to do the same thing. Because the impossible has happened. Our present economy and our future as a civilization are being seriously sabotaged by a con job. This state of affairs can't be permitted to stand.


Now get busy with those emails.

Friday, June 13, 2008

THERE IS NO GOD. The argument for why atheism is an absurd philosophical position is simple in its basics. Most of the complications that arise in the debates between atheists and non-atheists are due to assumptions made by atheists. How many of them begin making their case, for example, by attacking the Bible and the supernatural beliefs of Christianity? The decisions people make to accept individual religions are, indeed, matters of faith and largely irrelevant to the principal question. But religious faith is not the sole alternative to atheism. There are at least two more alternatives that allow the subject to be framed more precisely.

The agnostic position is an acknowledgment of not knowing. There might be a supreme power of some kind, and there might not be. The agnostic accepts that he doesn't have enough evidence to be certain one way or the other.

The second alternative is what I will call the deist position, which I know has various connotations of its own, so I will define my use of it as precisely as I can: The deist is one who subscribes to no particular religion or specific incarnation of divinity, but he rejects the premise that something can come from nothing and that a universe governed by myriad natural laws could exist at all without some precipitating higher intelligence, even if that intelligence is intrinsic to every particle (or string) of the universe.

And to restate the obvious: The true atheist is certain that there is no supreme intelligence present in or behind the creation of the universe. All that is simply is.

To be fair, there are also what I call pragmatic atheists. Their position is more lawyerly than philosophical (and there are more of them than admit to it). They believe that even entertaining the question philosophically is an irrelevant distraction, because the answer can't possibly matter in the here and now. Therefore, atheism is for them simply a working assumption that enables them, they think, to keep a clearer, more objective mind in matters of real life than those afflicted with speculative fancies about life, the universe, and everything. Importantly, these are not true atheists. They are merely the incurably incurious left-brained know-it-alls who have always been impatient with matters of deep philosophy. It's conceivable that their approach is an efficient one, but it is entirely disconnected from the subject of truth and meaning, about which they are obsessively scornful and dismissive without ever being responsive. Interestingly, they also tend to be the population of self-styled atheists who are the quickest to attack when atheism is questioned as a position. Because they don't ever ponder the underlying philosophical issues, they are the most outraged when someone points out just how thoughtless and mundane their mental processes are.

Doesn't this simplify the legitimate scope of disagreement? Now, the atheists love to take the position that any perspective but their own is the one that bears the burden of proof. Prove to me that there is a God. If you can't, I win.

What should be obvious to fair-minded rationalists is that the most defensible, if least risky, position is that of the agnostics. I don't know. The question is a lot bigger than I am. This is the only person in the debate who has a right to demand proof without accepting a reciprocal demand for same. When an atheist demands proof that there is a God, he does so secure in the knowledge that the agnostics are right about the difficulty of doing so. But he almost universally rejects the notion that he has an equal obligation to prove there is no god. Because contrary to popular belief, it is possible, under certain conditions, to prove a negative. The problem is that atheists are not operating under those conditions. The field of potential sources of refutation is not the finite box of intellectual experiments; it comprises everthing that ever was, is, and will be. So when they attempt the feat of proving their position, they almost invariably engage in the same kind of argument by anecdote they decry in the foolish sectarian religionists who sally out to do battle with them. Their arguments are generally preoccupied with a false premise -- that to prove individual instances of so-called miracles natural instead of supernatural, they have stripped the universe of divinity. What they disregard is that the natural universe and its workings are, ipso facto, the best possible rebuttal of their position, not an endorsement.

Even if one could prove to a certainty that there is not, and has never been, an interventionist divinity at work in human affairs, it would not prove the absence of divinity from the workings of any part of the universe, including human affairs. Scientific deists may take comfort in positing a supreme intelligence capable of devising laws of physics and a field of mathematics that set the universe in motion like some clinical experiment never to be interfered with until it winds down of its own accord, but they have no solid philosophical basis for doing so. They have simply chosen, like the ancient Israelites, to cast god in their own image, as a remote and superior observer behind the screen. There is nothing -- no principle of science whatever -- to rule out the possibility that an intelligence capable of generating the universe, from string or quark to multi-galactic infinity, would not also be capable of observing or participating in everything, in perpetuity, without ever violating the laws of his own creation and yet accomplishing his will in everything. It's not that the scientific archetype of divinity is impossible; it's just that it's typically anthropomorphic and lacking in any kind of evidence.

Now if we posit the agnostic sitting on the judicial bench between the two sides who might reasonably be asked to produce proof of their positions, we can begin to assess the scale and quality of the arguments that might be made on each side. It is here that the relative frailty of the atheist position versus the deist position begins to be obvious.

1. First Causes. The atheist is constantly bedeviled by the question of "before"? If he subscribes to the Big Bang Theory, that the universe begins with a tiny speck and explodes into the reality which has obtained ever since and whose laws and effects we study, he has not answered the question of the beginning. What put the speck there? A black hole from yet another universe? Perhaps. But that only puts the question of origins at one more remove. It does not resolve it. If he accepts the laws of physics he uses to understand the function of the universe, he is also accepting that energy is neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form. Here's the ugly paradox. The atheist has a greater responsibility to account for the origin of the energy that makes and drives the universe than the deists do. The deists accept at some level that the energy which has continually changed form since the beginning of our universe arose, much like the probabilistic multi-states quantum mechanics describes for electrons, from a kind of unreal potentiality we might describe as the energy of intention. The history of quantum mechanics is rife with the unsolved ramifications of the apparent role of consciousness in the behavior of electrons. It is the atheists who have to explain all this away in other terms. They have to accept a universe that has no beginning -- an eternal law-driven universe with no originating or architectural intelligence of any kind (uh, a philosophical paradox), or they have to posit a universe which violates a fundamental law of physics, i.e., that a universe-sized field of energy can spontaneously arise from nothing at all (an, uh, scientific paradox). In comparison, the deist position is common-sensical, even a demonstration of Occam's Razor. Before there was matter, there was an intelligence which imagined matter and the laws governing it; then there was intention; and then there was a manifestation in reality. Which is not a paradox. It's a process seen many many times in our own experience. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. Except that the atheists have to reject that easily verifiable truism as well.

2. Mathematics. This is its own universe. It overlaps our physical universe very substantially but is not identical with it. One could, I suppose, belittle the aspects that don't overlap (i.e., unreal numbers, which have no counterpart in the reality we can apprehend through the senses), but since they have proven vital to innumerable technological breakthroughs which demonstrate their utility and consistency with the rest of the universe of mathematics, Occam's Razor would again suggest that mathematics is its own universe, a conceptual one that straddles the worlds of physicality and intellect, suggesting that the universe itself is at least part intellect. For the atheists this is another fatal paradox. They must postulate the existence of algorithm and principle without originating intelligence. When I see a house, I am also seeing evidence of an architect. And here, the existence of math prodigies is also valid evidence. Pascal's tutor gave his young student the first postulate of Euclid. That same day, Pascal recreated the rest of Euclidian geometry. There is an order and consistency in math which betrays the deep order of the universe, and because it is not purely physical, it entirely refutes the phantasm of a brain-dead, designerless universe.

3. Human Intelligence. We are all stuff of the universe, created from the same particles and atoms and laws as every other part of the universe, and thus we are part of an entity which is capable of asking questions about itself. What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What does it all mean? The atheist position -- that we are a pointless emergent property of a soulless, mechanical universe -- is still another hopeless paradox that defies the observations of science and even the theory of evolution upon which so many atheists depend for their foundation, like Atlas standing on the free-floating tortoise of Greek mythology. How much of their scientific certainty rests on their belief in the prescriptive power of DNA, that what we are is what the process has made us? How diligently have they sought to demonstrate that what we are is an adaptation of what we have been before, that hands come from fins and abstract thinking from synergies of reptilian, avian, and mammalian brains? But where lies the precedent for any of this in the geology of stars and planets? The brute fact is that higher intelligence, as we conceive of it in ourselves, does exist. On what basis do we rule it out as one of the principal properties of the universe in which we live? Whence the observed phenomenon that matter inevitably complicates and complexifies itself until it is capable of asking philosophical questions? So that a handful of arrogant Philistines can declare themselves superior to the universe itself, which as we must remember in the atheist model, is undesigned, unintelligent, directionless, purposeless, and amoral.

Here's what the true atheist is declaring to the rest of us. He is superior to the entire universe, explored and unexplored. Because there is no intelligence involved in its cause, design, development, and current incarnation. Which makes him, who has not yet penetrated that universe's most arcane secrets of physics and biology, capable of declaring that universe a meaningless but wholly unexplained accident of an existence he does not yet possess the vocabulary to define in terms of a beginning, an end, a scale, or an outcome.

QED. Atheism as a philosophical position is a rank absurdity. An act of extraordinarily conceited and conveniently narcissistic faith. Agnostics are philosophical cowards who probably haven't looked at the facts much more than "pragmatic atheists." Deists are like non-practicing Vegas card-counters; they know the math but don't have the guts to take a risk. And the faithful are the army of gamblers at every game in the casino. They know the odds are hopelessly against them, but they have learned that the reward is in the playing, not in the cold-blooded automatons who deal the cards and handle security.

I haven't looked at comments from the last post since the first one or two. I don't think I will (although I might). Fact is, I'm still laughing at atheists assaulting Rachel and then taking my bait. You're all tools.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

N IS FOR NOW. The MSM isn't much for remembering its own recent past, but here and there one can find contrarians who look backward at times for a better view of today. Here are some examples of relevant journalistic archeology, all of them worth reading in full despite their length. I'm giving you teasers only. What you do with them would be up to you.

Neal Boortz occasionally turns up a nugget of gold among the dross. This 1993 article from the New York Times is one of those. But those of us who continue to maintain that climate is more complex than computer models indicate are the ones supposed to be in denial.


The Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is back in the news, with John McCain reiterating his absurd comparison of that off-the-edge-of-the-world locale with the Grand Canyon. Helpfully, one of the editors at the National Review decided to dig up Jonah Goldberg's account of his visit there in 2001. The whole piece is long but engagingly written and chock full of details about all the key variables, from the oil fields and their crews to the lives of the caribou herds the armchair environmentalists think they are saving with their oil-drilling ban.


Has the riddle of Barack Obama's 20 year association with Reverend Wright and the Trinity United Church been resolved to everybody's satisfaction? Well, maybe you missed this essay by the National Review's Stanley Kurtz, which dared to dig through the archives of Chicago journalism for a profile of Obama written in 1995. There's more evidence of what's going on in Obama's mind here than in the sum total of the reportage you've received from the MSM during the campaign.


Finally, and just for fun, Mark Steyn is so good at what he does that he regularly reposts old op-ed pieces of his, as requested by readers of his blog. This one dates from the end of the Clinton Administration, when he summarized that epoch for us in a useful A to Z format.


Okay. That's a lot of reading I've given you. But I guarantee you it will be more illuminating than anything you find today at the Drudge Report or RealClearPolitics. Because sometimes old news is, if not good news, at least more informative than sensational.

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