Archive Listing
March 3, 2013 - February 24, 2013

Friday, March 30, 2012

HOME. I've been thinking about the Jersey map below because it seems oddly relevant in the latest round of liberal attempts to divide Americans in every way possible. New Jersey routinely gets treated to the same kind of contempt the intelligentsia visit on the part of the country between the coasts, say 98 percent, because they don't know much about it. I've travelled a lot, like many Jersey folk, and what I've discovered is that wherever I go in the U.S., we have some of everything I find right here in my home state. We're a microcosm, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, and unique, just like the United States as a whole. Yet we do contrive to live together and for the most part get along. I once urged Barack Obama to take a tour of the country he knows so little about, but now I'd settle for him touring the Garden State. We have it all, north, south, factories, fishermen, farms, rustic hamlets, cities, mountains, wilderness, beaches, lakes, rivers, history, casinos and Chris Crafts, landfills and lavish horse breeding estates, movie stars and mobsters and motorheads, vast riches and terrifying poverty of both the urban and rural kinds, and hundreds of solid old middle class neighborhoods featuring ethnic combinations galore.

I was going to sit on this perception for a while, but then I happened on Anthony Bourdain's wry return to his place of origin, and I took it as a sign. Thanks, Tony.

Here's Jersey:


In case you're wondering, I'm from the part labelled "Pretty Much Alabama." But I've been to all the other parts too. They're at most an hour and a half away via the Turnpike. Which I live below the bottom of. In the deep south of what everyone assumes is a blue state. It's every state, all wrapped up in one. Why so many of the Jersey born flee and then ultimately return.

The way, I'm sure, many are presently locked into a love-hate relationship with the whole country. It's awful. It's unbearable. It's too deep in our souls to root out. And it's home.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

LET US PRAY. Well... none of them. I wish I could. It feels like weakness that I can't.

I don't hate. I despise and loathe and contemn. I want them to have that piercing moment when they realize how utterly wrong they've always been about everything. I want to be there when the truth sinks in. Is that even meaner than wanting to see them dead? So be it.

Here's my list. I'm not doing links today. But you can find them easily enough for yourselves. Go to Youtube. Where were we? My list:


I changed my mind. I want them all to die. Of cancer. Horribly. Screaming. Half as much as they want Cheney to die screaming. Not really. You know. I want them to wake up. Impossible as that is for pea-brained, soul-shrunken fools. But I can dream, can't I?

P.S. Like many others, apparently, I have been concerned about the state of Shepard Smith's health. I discovered a comment thread at the Free Republic, whose denizens decidedly don't like Mr. Smith. But I was struck by the fact that they all wished him a return to health rather than death. Compare this to lib reactions to the life-and-death situations of Cheney, Ingraham, Snow, and Breitbart.

CLASS. This is dumb, I admit it. When you do all the look-ups you just shake your head and tell yourself, "I know, I know, I know, why am I wasting valuable time on this?" But then you realize nobody else has put all this together in one place before, and so maybe there's some value in seeing the whole empty bag in its awesome emptiness.

Herewith, the academic qualifications of celebrities who have declared George Bush, Sarah Palin, and all the current Republican candidates for president too stupid to merit any respect whatever. Celebrities who think we should listen to their views on politics because they have views on politics. According to Wikipedia:


I'm really not trying to play a snob game here. But think about it. The MSM journalists are happy to interview them as if their political views are important. Journalists. Meaning people who ask questions of those who are more influential and probably more knowing than they are. With all due deference.

The ones cited here are advocates for Obama. We, and the MSM, should take them seriously WHY?

Yes, they've become financial successes. Particular manifestations of the American Dream.  But who are they to tell us about politics? People who spend their lives pretending they're heroes, symbols of humanity, and others of a stature they imitate in manufactured sets or in front of blue screens without ever experiencing the lives they read from lines written by another (or making up same). And there are always stunt people to handle the heavy lifting. But there are no stunt thinkers alas.

Poseurs and fakers all of them in terms of real world issues. The very definition of their trade. They're A-List celebrities who own mansions and servants galore. What does anything in their lives have to do with anything in ours?

Two points I'd like to make.

Note how many of the stars on the list are second generation actors or the progeny of Hollywood families -- Sean Penn, George Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Charlie Sheen, Jane Fonda. Not one of these silver spoon kids has a college degree. Not one. All that money and they couldn't muster the grit to learn some history, science, math, and economics and pass tests on these basics of western civilization like everyone else. No. They were above all that from the git-go.

Second point. Yes, it's possible to be a gifted dropout. Orson Welles dropped out of Harvard before his first class. And I would never derogate the achievements or capacity for learning of people who worked their way up without formal education. But is that really what we're looking at here?

No. These are mostly people who have entries at the Smoking Gun for the exorbitant demands they make on tour or on set. They're not sitting around reading books and soaking up culture because they so love learning. They're playing the part of "being important" because their educational credentials demonstrate they aren't intellectual heavyweights, and it just kills them to be so much smaller than their public image suggests they ought to be.

They want to be John Lennon, iconic like him but not killed like him.

And they'll contribute millions of dollars and even the last half of the careers they might have had to get there. Pitiful.

But not as pitiful as Meryl Streep. Who never had a self to begin with and is hunting, hunting, hunting some long gone male's approval. Shudder.

There's another celebrity category exemplified by the truly well educated who have a real hard-on against America for other reasons. Samuel Jackson and Spike Lee, for example, are graduates of Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King and, it must be said, Herman Cain. I take them more seriously than the list above, but narcissism is no respecter of race anymore than it's a respecter of couch-casted starlets. Stupid is as stupid does.

And the question remains: Why should any of us take seriously anything these spoiled millionaires have to say about how we should live our lives? They're entitled, as we all are, to personal opinions, but I've worked directly with corporate CEOs without ever once being tempted to ask them for advice about how to vote in the next election. I trust myself to answer those questions for myself. Is that such a strange conviction for an American?

AMAZING. No, I haven't joined the Doomsday Preppers. The exact opposite, in fact. My wonderful wife gave me an early Easter present in the form of an iPad. Wow. (I gave her a 1930s drawing of a Scottish deerhound. Maybe I'm not keeping up as well with the march of time as I thought. But she told me it's the thought that counts. I'm going with that.)


The only way to learn a new high-tech device is to play with it. The only way to stop learning it is to get smacked in the head with a skillet in Hour 72 or thereabouts. So I'm posting again now that the aspirin has kicked in.

I had no idea. The two new posts below this one were both done on the iPad's virtual keyboard, which I can actually type on. Not only that, it gives you the illusion that you're handwriting your copy on a legal pad. I haven't done that for real in more than 30 years.


My only point being, I'm not sulking. I'm, what's the word?, ebullient. In fact, I'm feeling so good I'm going to a buy a ticket for the Mega-Millions Lottery. Like many of you, probably, I got discouraged about my chances when the statisticians started comparing the odds of winning to getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a great white shark. But this little story turned my head right around:


What are the odds of that, you statisticians?

I'm getting a ticket and I'm going to WIN. Some of us never learn. Which might be a good thing.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

ZUT ALORS. To be honest, I started out today looking for some graphic, hopefully an old painting, of Napoleon sitting on his famous log at Waterloo, paralyzed and nearly catatonic while the battle slipped from his grasp. Sometimes it's all too much to deal with, even for us know-it-alls.

There's no shortage of news and all of it is of a piece, frightening outrages being reconfigured on the fly by an utterly corrupt mass media establishment in hopes that none of the rest of us, the real 99 percent, will notice how much is at stake and how thoroughly amoral the 24/7 media game has become.

The current health care debate before the Supreme Court is literally about whether the constitution lives or dies. If the federal government can require us to enter into a business contract because we are alive, there are no more limitations on what the federal government can do to rule our lives. It's that simple. Yet the reporting on it isn't about the critical philosophical conflict but more like ESPN coverage of, say, an NCAA basketball tournament -- who's up, who's down, whose bracket is still looking good. Judge Anthony Kennedy is suddenly the SCOTUS version of Brittney Griner, the mysterious hybrid who will single-handedly decide the whole outcome without any larger questions being asked. Because that would be impolite or incorrect. All that matters is the question, "What will he do in the big game?"

The president whispers of a deal hinting at concessions on a vital matter of U.S. national security to the figurehead president of a hostile foreign power, and there's nothing to see here according to the MSM. Move along. Soaring gas prices? Which were used to tattoo George W. Bush as part of the oilman conspiracy theory of righty politics? Forget all that. The new truth: there's nothing a president can do about gas prices. Move along.

Just a couple weeks after the entire liberal establishment assaulted Rush Limbaugh for using the word slut and embarked on attempts to dismantle the first amendment for so-called "hate" speech from the right, that same liberal establishment blithely becomes a lynch mob inciting vigilante violence against a private citizen -- an Hispanic, no less, suddenly deemed "white" by selfsame media -- who has not yet been convicted let alone charged with any crime. But all sides praise the president for interjecting his private emotional affiliation into what could become a legal case requiring a trial by unbiased (?) jury? Go figure. A Hollywood star publishes the home address of what he believes (erroneously) to be the killer's house, just as some years ago tolerant liberals published satellite photos of Michelle Malkin's house, wanting their working class factotums to pay her a rapacious visit. In between hysterical imprecations about white hate, we are also treated to the usual disgusting responses to news of a conservative with a health problem. This time it's Dick Cheney who should die rather than receive a heart transplant, just as it was once Laura Ingraham who should die from her cancer, and Tony Snow who was delightfully dead of his cancer. But hate is purely the province of the right. Right.

The unifying thread here is that the news is only supposed to be what we are told it is. What's stupefyingly impossible to comprehend is why people who are supposed to be so smart think they can get away with such leviathan hypocrisies, cover-ups, and flat-out lies.

Where does such arrogant complacency originate and how is it sustained even in the face of what to any intelligent person has to be interpreted as a sense of superiority totally at odds with the national tradition of equality they claim to represent?

I'm thinking the answer isn't strictly intellectual, social, or philosophical. It's physical. A deeply engrained sense impression so powerful it underlies the conscious mind like Freud's concept of the id. And is therefore invulnerable to self examination. It's just the basal topology of the soul, the unknown source of all metaphor and the physics of personal reality.

Overwhelmingly, the media in all its forms -- books, magazines, newspapers of national scope, television networks and their news organizations, advertising, sports journalism, the theater, radio, and even a significant chunk of the business end of Hollywood -- is headquartered in New York City.

New York City. Land of skyscrapers. I've spent a fair amount of time in New York on business. It's easy to see why simplistic notions such as Jon Edwards's Two Americas are so easily accepted there. There's the world of the street, with its small retail establishments, restaurants there to serve, loutish cabdrivers, foul-mouthed beat cops, and the constant horde of jostling others one encounters as soon as one departs the sanctums of office buildings, grand hotels, and luxurious apartment complexes.

The cognoscenti speak of "the herd" as if it were a rural reference. But there is no more evocative sense of the term to be experienced than in New York City at lunchtime. Everyone in Manhattan has exactly the same lunch hour, from noon to one pm. Suddenly everyone is on the sidewalk hurrying toward satisfying the most basic of appetites.

The escape from this herd is return to the skyscraper, through its doormen, brass revolving doors and marble launching pads for the elevators that climb to the sky. From the office, from the penthouse, from the carpeted realms of the affluent, the herd in the street is reduced to ants, inconsequential, muffled, as conceptually insignificant as they are tiny to the naked eye.

The superiority of such elites is about physical altitude. They are literally above the fray, in domains where the commoners are either barred or know their place. This isn't a function of capitalism; it's a function of relative location and perspective.

What matters is what happens in the sky. Everything else is smell, vulgarity, noise, ugliness, and a kind of roiling futility not unlike human hamsters endlessly running in their wheels, all headed nowhere unless the sky people deign to bestow their doublethink compassion.

The worst part of the delusion is that because they daily encounter the lunchtime herd, they think they know everything important about the herd. They think they are plugged in to the great human reality of New York and the country at large. Which is a lie and a joke. They think there is some kind of divorcement between their own meaningful lives and the hamsters in the herd. At some primeval level, they have forgotten or never learned that they need the herd more than the herd needs them. And that their own self-proclaimed wisdom, whatever intrinsic merits it might possess, would be helpless and doomed without the hamsters who build the skyscrapers, keep them running, fix the elevators, carpet their palatial digs, answer their phones, make them coffee, fix the toilets, and buy (or don't) the mostly sky-minded products they sell.

Which brings me to the graphic above. A perfect illustration of the hubris and vulnerability of the skyscraper people. Note the date: October 26, 1929. Two days after Black Tuesday, the day of the great crash. The New Yorker had already been put to bed before the stock market fell. Thus, we have a snapshot of how the elites regarded themselves in relation to their city on the very brink of disaster.

How easy it is to understand that they would regard themselves as the answer to the calamity that had occurred. That they would see it as an opportunity to grab more power for themselves through the New Deal and its many naked assaults on the constitution, because the herd was stampeding and only the sky people could see, from their lofty pinnacles, what needed to be done, regardless of any archaic promises that had been made by the founders to "we the people." Exactly where we are today. "Sure, the economy sucks. But the president cares. Listen to his fireside chats. He's on our side against the evil others."

The laughable irony of the phony Occupy Wall Street shenanigans. It's all misdirection, carefully orchestrated by the elites in another part of town. And that's their 2012 campaign strategy by the way. Convince the herd that there's a skyscraper problem here and not anywhere else.

Maybe the tea parties should steal a page from this carefully written script, rename themselves "Occupy the Skyscrapers" (and the Ivory Towers, and the Federal Palaces, and the PC Police Fortresses... all pretty much the same thing, a matter of distance, ID cards, and well trained gatekeepers). Bring the sky people back down to earth and separate them, once and for all, from their delusions of grandeur.