Archive Listing
January 14, 2011 - January 7, 2011

Friday, March 26, 2010

OBAHMUD? I'm not assuming you're unaware of the big headlines, but I know people are withdrawing somewhat from the news world in the wake of the healthcare law and the ugly mix of Democrat gloating and racial smears against the law's opponents that are dominating MSM journalism. So I'm just making sure you concentrate for a moment on this important and disturbing story:


I know there are many different and complex conceivable explanations for such a direct diplomatic snub. Obama is sending a message to Israel that the current regime must be replaced before meaningful negotiations can resume. Alternatively, he is creating U.S. deniability -- and provocation -- for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities that is nevertheless "a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Still. It's impossible not to consider this in the context of Hillary Clinton's pollyana descriptions of the benefits of "smart power" in foreign diplomacy.


Is this really how "smart power" treats a nation that has lived under a constant existential threat from both war and terrorism since its founding 60 years ago?

It's also impossible not to think anew about the -- to many Americans nauseating -- 'Apology Tour' of Obama's first year in office, the largely unrequited cordiality of his outreach to the most criminal despots in the world, and the borderline rudeness of his relations with allies like the U.K., France, and Germany.

And it's hard not to allow as a distinct possibility that our president is fundamentally anti-Israel if not anti-Jew. Are we really supposed to forget that Barack Obama sat in the pew of Jeremiah Wright's church during outbursts such as this?


Well, I can't forget. I'd welcome any guidance on how I can and why I should.

We're constantly assured (er, scorned and ridiculed for not quite believing) that Obama is neither a muslim nor a muslim sympathizer. How does that argument go again exactly?

PATERNALISTIC OLD WHITE MEN. I don't usually take suggestions about posts. This time is the exception that proves the rule. Eduardo wanted me to see the Marxists among us and so he offered this link with the proviso that the comments were the only interesting part. He's right. Marxists all. Nothing to say about it, really. Except read them and weep. (Yawn.)

But then he provided this additional link about The Great Turning, which is far more interesting. Why? It's facinating, to me at least, because it's actually written. You know. Sentences. Paragraphs, Spelling and punctuation. Far better than the standard at a score of righty websites, including Ace of Spades, InstaPundit, Hugh Hewitt, Boortz, Hotair (with the sole exception of DocZero), PowerLine, and all the Breitbart sites (sadly). Useful. How? Because regardless of the close relationship that usually exists between them, writing and thinking aren't the same thing. It's possible to be a competent writer and a wildly, utterly incompetent thinker. (Thus explaining Norman Mailer, for example.) Anyway. Here's a sample paragraph:


I love this (Thank you, Eduardo.) It's a perfect archetype of literate writing and, well, nonexistent thinking. Which makes it perfectly post-modern too. Consider that the first sentence of the second paragraph would make exactly as much sense if it had been written thus: "Whether they come through Lady Gaga, carburetor technology, flatulence jokes, or through G-spot theory, itinerant Gypsy fortunetellers, or Beyonce, such insights and experiences are absolutely necessary to free us from the grip of the Cleveland City Council..." There are virtually no commonalities among the strands of thought being so specifically referenced. Gaia theory is a pseudo-mythology imposed on the past, systems theory and chaos theory are legitimate branches of science and math, and everything else in the citation is post-modern, victim-centric bullshit. But it sure sounds scholarly, don't it?

AGAIN my thanks to Eduardo. Rare, really, to get such a distilled example of what people are exposed to every day in the mainstream media. That WTF feeling you get when you read a NYT editorial or hear a sententious commentary from some third-generation successor to Eric Severaid at CBS News is a result of exactly this kind of fakery, which can be given many names: pseudo-intellectualism, faux learning, narcissistic preening, ignorant elitist bombast, jargonized superiority, academically abstruse obtuseness, or what Lewis Carroll aptly named Jabberwocky.

But Lewis Carroll defined it only by example. Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, defined it in (gasp) precise dictionary terms (h/t to commenter Michael Murry at Sic Semper Tyrannis for the exact quote I remembered).


That's what we're up against with the left. They tend to write better than their counterparts on the right. (That's what the Ivy League does after all... provide a vocabulary of disdain unaffiliated with actual experience.) But they have no idea what they're really talking about. It's just a pile of plausible phrases they've learned how to string together in a way that can be diagrammed as grammatically faultless and therefore superficially beyond reproach. Could you write a more literate paragraph?

This is a syndrome that reaches very high into the realm of the intellectually elite. It explains the opening paragraph of this post, for example. But there's nothing in their educations or predilections that makes them students of systems theory, chaos theory, shamanism, or mythology -- let alone economics, complexity theory, information theory, quantum physics, theology, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and cosmology -- to the degree that a functioning human being who is grappling with the meaning of life in an oppressively secular age is inclined to do.

What's the biggest single cultural influence in the western world? The Bible. Ask the next intellectuals who patronize you whether they've ever read it. Be alert for deceitful answers because they haven't. From Judges to Proverbs to Isaiah to Romans, it's all Greek to them. (And believe me, they've never studied Greek either.) Everything they tell you about your supposed religious delusions is misdirection. Everything they condescend to share about their superior take on religion, philosophy, science, or politics is "the purely prudential use of language." In other words, intellectual mush.

We're governed these days by an elite class of emperors. All of whom have no clothes. Don't be afraid to jeer at their nakedness. Yes, they're articulate, assertive, arrogant, and if need be, assaultive. But they don't know shit. They're simply the brightest smears we've trained ourselves to track on the Internet. By bright I don't mean intelligent. I mean, rather, the strobing egos of those who know so little of their own paucity that they lack the humility to regard the spotlight as something other than a friend.

LESSON: If they give you a podium to preach from, be very afraid. If you're not afraid, there's a near 100 percent probability that you're a fool. If you take a podium no one gave you, be very very careful. You're probably a fool too. Those are the inevitable odds.

Unless you're InstaPunk. Because we're never ever ever wrong. Except when we're completely full of shit. [Which might have happened once or twice in the last seven years, Maybe.]

Here endeth the lesson.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

STAVING OFF DESPAIR. Is there any? Not really. Well, some. Around the edges. But we take what we can get. Like this takedown of David Frum.


And this takedown of James Cameron (w/no help btw from Fox News.)


And a Global Warming defeat in France.


And a post by the most glamorously named economist ever (see video above).


And a lefty WAPO media columnist disses the Iranian Quisling Christiane Amanpour:


And a lefty takedown of Michael Moore:


And ACORN is folding (but beware the sequel...)


And polls are only, well, polls:


And no more free speech in Canada. Hurrah! Or is that 'eh'? (Don't be looking to NRO for updates on this one...)

And OOPS! The immediate benefits Fox & Friends have been promoting (promoting, promoting, promoting...) aren't actually there yet.

So the wheels keep grinding. Will they 'grind exceeding small'? We'll see.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

MR. STEYN. The National Review famously fired Ann Coulter for being impolitic about muslims in the wake of the 9/11 attack. Amusingly, they're now struggling with a story that should be red meat for them. Here's the newest slab of rare Coulter filet mignon:


Cool. But so far, NRO hasn't even acknowledged this part of the story. Daniel Foster reported briefly on her speech:


And Mark Steyn, who has waged a huge battle against Canadian hate speech charges leveled at one of his books, has had only this to say about the matter:


You can search all seven years of Instapunk archives and never find one negative comment about Mark Steyn. Here's the first. Get the stick out of your ass, Mark. And National Review too. Coulter's funny and most of her jokes aren't "bum jokes;" they tend to be both smart and pertinent to the reality of our political environment.

I'm very fond of The Corner, especially Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg, but I have to say I've grown weary of NRO's reluctance to cast Kathleen Parker into the outer darkness she deserves for month upon month of Obama apologias and Palin bashing. And I could grow even wearier within hours if NRO continues to treat Coulter like some sort of Orwellian nonperson.

Her counterattack against the Canadian Human Rights Commissions is inspired, and it should be right up NRO's alley. But no. The ghost of WFB would sniff his disapproval. Or would he?

Don't disappoint us, Mr. Steyn. You know she's a national treasure. Man up.

UNREDEEMED. We're all grieving now. I'll give you one anecdote to show you I'm there too. I talked to a friend last night, a big wheel in the mainstream media. He was contemptuous of our objections to the health care bill. Almost spittingly so. I was so shocked I demeaned his Columbia journalism degree: "Did you go to business school?" I asked. "I did. Did you ever take a course in economics?" And I love this guy. He's a friend of 40 years. But our country is dying and he -- with two Ivy League degrees -- doesn't have a f___ng clue. I get it. It's a pain in the soul. I understand the heartbreaking exchange between JS and Lake that anyone can read in our Comments section.

What can I do? Not much. (We're waiting for Eduardo's Ayn Rand post, but then we'll have to thump him about that too. So it goes...) How about some distractions, some substitute pains? Moovies. Not happy feelgood shows but something that accords with your mood and twists it into something else -- a thing at one remove from your real despair. Best I can do.

Three movies. One cheapo horror flick. One self-important indie. And one big-budget entry you might have missed if you're like me, because why would anyone watch it?

Horror flick. It's called Population 436. Not a slasher movie. It stars Jeremy Sisto of Six Feet Under fame. And a very lovely girl, one of those corn-fed brunettes for a change. Here's the trailer:


It gets to you somehow. Well, it got to me anyway. Horror taking the form of framed encomiums to a doctor.

The indie flick is Passengers. About a plane crash and its traumatized survivors. I won't show you the trailer because I don't want you to watch it. Good acting performances by Anne Hathaway, Andre Braugher, and a guy named Patrick Wilson. Don't look it up on Rotten Tomatoes, either. Just watch it. Trust me.

The big budget flick is Blood Diamond. There's lots wrong with it. It's preachy, Leonardo di Caprio can't do a South African or Rhodesian accent to save his life, and it's very long. However. It got me. It also got my wife, who shed tears at the end, even though she'd missed nearly half the action. There's an actor named Djimon Hounsou, who will shock you and move you, regardless of any cynicism you rightfully have about sub-Saharan Africa. Here's the trailer.


And, finally, just for JS and Lake. Not a movie but a song. This was a huge hit when I was in college about a hundred years ago. Here's the original:


And here's a diferent version which somehow completes the circle.


Take it as I offer it, JS. The problem is still bad ideas, not soulless Americans. The problem isn't even Harvard. Go here and click on the Chesnokov piece in the top box, then tell me we're all automatically doomed. When I saw it live at Princeton University with my stepdaughter Monica, I looked at her and saw she was weeping. I've never been prouder of her. I believed at that moment in the salvation of all of us.

Or am I just ducking my own particular flavor of guilt?

Monday, March 22, 2010

THE RESISTANCE. How about it? A president who isn't a messiah but a citizen executive. The awful, the truly terrible irony, is that without Reagan there would have been no Obama. A president who is truly larger than life is a rare, rare thing. A man of far-seeing vision, personal charisma, and policies that proved to be right for the long-term health of the republic. The United States has had exactly three of these in 220 years: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. There have been some who possessed two but not all three of these attributes. Jefferson lacked personal charisma, but it didn't matter as much in his day. Jackson lacked vision, as his intimates and duelling partners would have attested. FDR had vision and charisma, but his vision was wrong and became a festering wound in the heart of the nation. The same was true of FDR's elder cousin Theodore. Because it's not true that people who consider themselves smarter than the rest of us are. A vision of government as the father and mother of a child citizenry is more a function of ego than insight. And electing men who simply look good in suits and deliver affecting speeches can make us think we're connected to someone larger than life, but that's perhaps the worst folly of all.

But after Reagan, the Democrats wanted one of their own. The Reagan funeral -- all that love expressed by citizens of every color and class -- tipped them into desperation. The Republicans have Reagan, who won the Cold War and rescued America's economic and foreign policy primacy, and who do we have? Carter, the smallest, meanest, most uncharismatic leftover of the twentieth century. Clinton, the charismatic scumbag who at every turn traded vision for expediency and everything else for survival in office. To this day, Democrats rummage the gutters for some, any evidence that Ronald Reagan was ever mean, hypocritical, or consumed with blind ego and partisanship. Not finding such evidence, they paint him as an idiot, a figurehead, a photogenic performer. Even to the point of ascribing all his accomplishments in foreign policy to Mikhail Gorbachev and all his accomplishments in economic prosperity to, uh, sheer luck. And they have actually celebrated and joked about his tragic succumbing to Alzheimer's.

Which tells us a lot about the attributes they were looking for in their own version of Reagan. He would have to look good, sound good, and seem good in terms of his marriage and personal morals. It would be great if his national political career was precipitated by a single memorable speech. He should be iconic in some elementally American way. He should campaign in a perpetually positive, speak-no-evil sort of way, as if the very robustness of his own belief in people and America could somehow overcome mere policy differences with the opposition. "We can be better than all this partisan ugliness."

But you can never conjure up a Reagan just because you want one. Truth is, there's only ever been one Reagan. Even Washington and Lincoln didn't quite have what Reagan did. Lincoln had a high voice and suffered from chronic depression. Washington had no teeth, and he was nevertheless so vain it took a constitutional crisis before he could bring himself to wear spectacles in public. Yes, Lincoln was a more gifted writer than Reagan (but not by as much as is popularly believed) and Washington had a better biography (unless we're talking exemplary American biographies), but Reagan was really a 'perfect storm' of presidential attributes, which is why my Irish wife remains so scornful of him to this day -- noting that he was Irish, charming, and regardless of everything, a politician -- which to her means that there must, positively has to have been, something deeply dark and therefore forgivably Irish about him she can't find, no matter how hard she looks. Which makes him, in Irish logic, a fake of some sort who can't be forgiven for having been pretty much what he seemed to be. It actually makes her suspicious that Reagan took a bullet and didn't die while he joked his way through the crisis, because she knows that the celebrated "luck of the Irish" is all bad luck and all real Irish stories end badly.

Except in America. Where we're all presently grappling with -- given the current president's disavowal of it -- the concept of American exceptionalism.

Ah. Yes. Back to the Democrats' Reagan. So they found one and they elected him and a huge majority in congress and the senate, and how can you argue the luck of how the Dems acquired their filibuster-proof majority in the senate -- Arlen Specter turning tail at the tag end of his life and Al Franken chiselling his way past a meek Republican governor to the final stolen seat? How could this not be a sign of Reagan-like luck?

There's only one problem. Obama is not a Reagan. He's a guy who looks good in a suit and delivers a speech that inspires people who have never read speeches much. He's not even FDR or JFK. He's full of platitudes, not eloquence, and there's neither a TR nor a PT-109 in his background. His beautiful suits -- I'll stipulate the best ever -- are all empty.

A long way round, I suppose, to a point that's already been made here. Our next president isn't going to be charismatic, beautiful, beautifully dressed, or situationally eloquent. He'll be what most of the presidents we've gotten when we needed them were: ordinary Americans who know that's what they are. We don't need that extra dimension of "larger than life" right now. What we need is "real life."

The American presidency isn't about fatherhood or motherhood. It's about serving the voters, being a scrupulous steward of our future. Protecting and defending us as a nation. Guarding the budget and its bottom line. Letting us ordinary citizens provide all the pyrotechnics, prosperity, and potency of the American Dream.

Best ideal of an American president in the Obama age? A respectful clerk executing our agenda, with balls the size of Mount Rushmore and principles more granite than the Ten Commandments.

Additional candidates? Mike Pence. Gray but not fun.


I'm even thinking about this guy. So what if he doesn't understand the uncoolness of a spray-on tan. For my money, he's fought like a Trojan and spoken direct declarative sentences I haven't heard since Barry Goldwater -- or Ronald Reagan.


btw, we'll get back to you when what we really need is another Ronald Reagan. Or when we spot one.

Friday, March 19, 2010

HAMMER TIME. You know it's bad when even David Brooks of the New York Times is foaming at the mouth:


But people are talking about it with a straight face. There's some tutting and clucking to be sure, but mostly it's all about handicapping a horse race, not defending the liberty and solvency of the republic. Last night Bill O'Reilly, the guy who's "looking out for the folks," did as good a job of the CBO Straddle as anybody (or should I say everybody) else, simultaneously expressing doubt about the absurd budget-impact estimates the Democrats have extorted from this supposedly neutral bureaucracy and adopting a moderate wait-and-see approach about the real economic impact of the bill. Yes, somehow, it's all really about politics and competing partisan claims, and it will all come out in the wash eventually. That's how the professional pundits are playing it for the most part. (Yesterday, Mark McKinnon, one of GWB's former political advisers, actually penned a column explaining that Obama's at his low point now and should rally in time to win reelection in 2012. So why is the Republican establishment actually opposed to the healthcare bill if it'll be irrelevant in a year or so? Just playing the game?...)

O'Reilly topped off his brilliant talking points with a smirk-and-grin inquiry of Glenn Beck about whether he was going to leave the country if the bill passed. Soooo funny.

Truth. There's nowhere to go if the congress destroys the American healthcare system. We have been the last best hope of the world for a very long time now, and destroying that identity -- our identity -- appears to be the real mission of this insane administration. There's no one like us out there to take up the slack.

And if we're the only ones who are goggling at the utter corrupt madness of what's going on, guess what? We're the ones who will be judged insane. Maybe we should organize our own asylum.

THE JESUS FACTOR. Just to refresh your memories, I'll quote a relevant chunk from the last post that wasn't about healthcare and the death of the United States. (btw, saying I'm ready to die right now isn't a suicide threat; it's a way of saying the stakes are now life and death in a way they haven't been for generations, and being ready to die for those stakes is a necessary price of admission to the discussion. "Ready" and "anxious" aren't synonyms in my lexicon.) Ahem. The chunk:


Several of you say you do. I'm only going to outline the basic ideas here. Your discussions and questions can be the means of fleshing out the depths and additional dimensions inherent in the outline. The most important concepts are historical stratifications of authority, mass media, post-modernism, traditional assumptions about organizations versus individuals, consciousness, and the Internet.

Historical Stratifications

All societies to this point in time have been organized around caste systems. The ancients had mostly layers of hierarchy, gods, royals, priests, soldiers, craftsmen, and peasants, with little freedom of movement between layers. This state persisted into the middle ages, where some of the layers became social segments not quite as precisely arranged in a hierarchy. Thanks to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, artists and intellectuals -- and later, scientists -- acquired an authority that could sometimes successfully contend with the hierarchy, which remained absolute in a social sense but not necessarily in all other respects. Still, the craft (trade) and peasant classes were subordinate to all others. The rise of capitalism changed the equation again because money could buy power, however low its origins, although the social castes remained. An aristocrat was always automatically superior to a peasant, and highly educated intellectuals were always superior to those of more humble schooling. This state of affairs survived even the American Revolution and the cultural exceptionalism and the social mobility it enabled. Even the low-bred barons of industry acquired social status only through the increasing educational credentials of their children.

The important thing to understand about this is that social mobility (and consequent influence) was a function of moving from one segment of an increasingly complex and staggered hierarchy to another. It was a movement among categories -- say, from aristocrat to scientist/artist/intellectual, from nouveau riche to old money, from peasantry to economic power, from middle class tradesman to intellectually credentialed, or to any number of permutations of these. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were always socially superior to Benjamin Franklin. But Franklin moved into a segment that was approximately equivalent if not entirely equal. In every case, however, the movement was from insignificant to powerful, connected, and therefore famous and influential. Versus not.

Mass Media

The ascendancy of these -- from books to newspapers to magazines to advertising to movies to records to radio to television -- have increased mobility to some extent but have also ossified the oldest slots and boxes while adding a few more categories to the mix: journalist, movie star, musician, cultural icon. The mass media also made it possible for politicians and political movements to become influential despite lack of social credentials: organized labor, oppressed ethnic and racial minorities, the female sex. All of which led to a certain process of cross-pollination; it became possible to belong to more than one authoritative segment: female intellectual, ethnic artist, labor leader, peasant movie star, intellectual journalist. Etc. The proliferation of such cross-pollinations multiplied the number of definable segments and created a vigorous and confused amalgam of authorities that seemed very much like a democratic mingling, a marketplace of ideas.

Post Modernism

But it wasn't really. In important ways, all the new competing and overlapping segments were mere camouflage. Underneath, the old hierarchies flourished and reasserted themselves in the dark. There were the people who had money and power and breeding and a natural authority nothing could undo. And there were, in the post-Enlightenment era, people whose educational credentials meant that they knew something, as opposed to all the people who didn't. Know anything, that is. And because what they shared was power and influence, they began to grow together, to complement one another, based on their conviction that collectively they were the right people to tell everyone else what to do, meaning all the dumb people who didn't have breeding and power and influence and education and ideas and the means to drive their ideas into the population as a whole. Which is when they began abandoning ideas altogether in favor of concentrating their power over the dumbshits who annoyed them so much. That's when they decided -- given that the only truth they could agree on was the importance of power -- that ideas and even truth didn't exist. What existed was the infinite ability of those in the right positions to remake truth on the fly based on their superior capacity to wield facts like weapons and distort anything and everything for their own purposes. Religion, literature, art, science, philosophy -- all of it meant nothing. It could all be whatever they needed it to mean at the moment, which was proof positive of their superiority over the worthless commoners. Every idiocy people could be made to believe was only reinforcement of their own natural right to reinvent the truth on a day-to-day basis. And so they did. They used an imagination no longer geared toward creation to transform black to white, good to evil (and vice versa), justice to injustice, virtue to vice, and most importantly, native common sense (which they never had) into demonstration of ignorance and folly.

Traditional Assumptions about Organizations Versus Individuals

Meanwhile, the increasing proliferation of segments and sub-segments had led to the creation of all kinds of organizations. The celebration of individuals and individual mobility which had accompanied the American Experiment and its proliferation of confusing cross-pollinations was becoming a hindrance to the atavistic preference for the simpler hierarchy of the high and the low all power-seekers rediscover in their experience of making up truth for their inferiors. Which caused them to forget some things. Like the fact that almost all important breakthroughs are not the function of commissions, congresses, corporations, colleges, committees, and political alliances, but of one guy with a better idea: Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Nicola Tesla, William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, James Madison, etc. You see, the community of the superior rarely consists of the actually superior. It consists of the self-anointed ones, the superiorly disposed. Who rely on the group to affirm their omniscience and right to lead. The story of corporations is almost always a story of decline from the brilliance of the founder to the embarrassments of bankruptcy. The story of governments is even more pitiful. From false humility to fatal hubris and shocking irresponsibility leading to utter ruin. Thus is the tale of human civilizations written across the pages of history.

Consciousness

What human civilization still has going for it. Your consciousness. Mine. The consciousness of people who don't necessarily accept the laws laid down repeatedly for them by those who deem themselves smarter and more aware. But what is consciousness? It's the ability to make decisions for yourself about what is, what has been, and what will be. What is fact. What is truth. And what constitutes the difference between them.

The Internet

What is it? It's nothing less than the collective consciousness of the entire human race. It's the biggest breakthrough in the history of humankind. Why? Because it records everything. It bashes all the distinctions between layers and segments to nothing, which is what they always were. There are no layers. No segments. There are only the regions of the whole each individual person impinges on or is defined by. We all now have the power to Google a person, a belief, an organization, a set of relationships, a pattern of ideas. There is no more pyramid. There are only smears of links upon links that create tiny percentile regions of the whole representing the reach of single persons, ranging from the official bios that used to intimidate us to the silliest, most parochial things they have ever done. Joe Biden is no longer just his carefully constructed senate cv; he is also his YouTube gaffes, the senate gossip, his hair plugs, the blogs of friends, family, and acquaintances, the indiscreet twitters of his intimates. He is a fallible and limited man, not the falsely grand persona of his NYT defenders.

The same is true of absolutely everything in the world. Global Warming may be a science. It's also a scandal, a religion, a financial scam, a political conspiracy, a cultural byproduct of the baby boomer revolutionaries, etc. Is there one truth of the matter? Probably not. But paradoxically, this "fact" doesn't mean the post-modernists are right. It means they're wrong. It means, rather, that values are more important than facts, since we have seen that facts -- and all the people who believe they are in possession of the truth because they possess more facts -- are not necessarily right. We can see, and even prove to ourselves, that where they begin affects where they end up, no matter how much they claim to be pure intellectuals.

Which is where the Reconceptualization figures in. The overwhelming tidal wave of information on the Internet suggests that truth outweighs facts, because facts can be and generally are twisted in service to a pre-existing notion of truth. In other words, we are all capable of recreating the universe in terms of the truths we believe and the questions we ask, whether we're Oxford PhDs or curious amateurs, with no better chance of being absolutely right because of PhDs or native intuition.

Which suggests... a lot of things. Not that we should ignore facts. But that we should trust our individual experience, use it to discern between pontification and modest inference. We need to abandon our corporate, committee, and other organizational training in favor of what the earliest scientists would have considered empirical experience. What happens when you skip a pebble across a river? What does that say about Global Warming, universal healthcare, the existence of Bigfoot, time travel, the age of the universe, and race relations in the United States of America?

The vast glut of the Internet is driving us relentlessly back to ourselves, to the ideal of humanity as a sliver of divinity represented by Christianity, and to the simplicity of thought and analysis we find in our own minds as the basis for all aspiration and decision making.

The Internet should not intimidate us. It should empower us. It reaffirms that the smartest can be the dumbest, and the simplest can be the smartest. It does not argue against the acquisition of new knowledge. It commands us to confront facts with the bedrock of our own experience.

Many mansions. There can be more than one truth. Perhaps there can be many. Yours is one of them. It only becomes a white elephant when the answers get too easy. And my guess is that when there's more than one truth, they'll be strangely consistent with one another, which would militate against outright religious war. If your own mansion isn't conceived as a fortress besieged.

APOLOGIES. Have to admit, the yard is a mess and I'm not feeling good about the future. Feeling old, in fact. So here's the Johnny of Cash. Just a reminder of the wishing well where the pennies don't always add up to salvation. Wish I hadn't done so much killing. Wish I didn't still look so good in my ankle-length leather coat. Oh well, we all take redemption where we find it.


I'd do more Iggy, but I can't find it. Ain't that the way? So I'll do Bowie instead. (uh, here's the real clip they won't let us use...)


I watch "Criminal Minds." In their argot, I'm devolving. Returning to my sixties "kill all the bastards" roots. That's where I am. I believe in Christ and redemption and forgiveness. Just not for the clowns who have killed my country... For them I have only punk anthems.


And a final cut about Nancy Pelosi (unless this is):


To hell with everybody.


And a general lament:


Sorry.

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