Eternity Road -- Hors d'Oeuvres

Some Lottery Ideas For Long Island

2007-04-03T17:11:00.000-04:00

Liz at Half-Baked Sourdough tells of Alaska's contribution to modern lottery culture:

We have plenty of ice up here this winter. Don't let anybody in the South 48 tell you any different. We have so much, we are tired to death of it. If you need some, feel free to bring your own big trucks and come help yourselves. By now, though, what's left is nasty beyond words. It's yucky, dirty, and shredded. We call it "rotten" when it reaches this stage. Ugh. And a lot of it is plastered over every vehicle in the area. Man, when I get rich, I'm going to build a bunch of car-wash places in Wasilla. Talk about money machines...

In the meantime, we will do what we have always done: We'll use it for FUN. One of the oldest ways for this is the Nenana Ice Classic, a good, old-fashioned baseball-pool of a guessing game. Fairbanks, being in the really COLD part of Alaska (as compared to the just plain "COLD," or the average "cold"), has a unique way to capitalize on all their ice and get some publicity at the same time. They all get together and bet on when the ice on the Tanana River breaks up and moves. The jackpots are usually pretty good, depending, of course, on how many people buy a guess.

Hm! Well, there are people who'll bet on anything. Which got your Curmudgeon to thinking about lotteries that would be uniquely suited to Long Island:

The Long Island Expressway Lottery: Players would bet on the next date and time at which traffic on the Expressway is entirely unobstructed by traffic jams, construction, or accident delays. This lottery would require a lot of patience.
The Property Tax Lottery: Players would bet on which Long Island school district would experience the highest percentage increase in property taxes. This annual lottery might provide some compensation to the residents of the most vulpine districts.
The Indictment Lottery: Players would bet on which elected official would be next to be the subject of a felony indictment. This lottery would also offer "place" and "show" prizes, the former for those who named officials indicted for misdemeanors, and the latter for those who predicted officials that were investigated but not charged. (No points for predicting party affiliations; only Republicans are ever indicted on Long Island.)
The LIPA Lottery: Since it absorbed LILCO a few years back, the Long Island Power Authority, formed ostensibly to combat expensive electrical power, has steadily raised the price of electricity to its captive market. But surely at some point the price per kilowatt must go down, if only by a fraction of a penny! Can you predict when?
The Pine Barrens Lottery: The Brookhaven Pine Barrens, a large tract of utterly useless land covered by "trees" that do nothing but drink our groundwater, has been barred to development of any sort for decades. Now and then hunters sally bravely into it in search of one of its few remaining deer. But environmentalists and anti-gun activists have campaigned to put an end to all hunting in the Barrens. Hazard a dollar and guess when even this pastime will be forbidden!

Got any ideas of your own?

Requiem

2007-03-17T09:38:00.000-04:00

"Know how to make God laugh?"
"How?"
"You tell Him your plans."
(From Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear)

About ten years ago, the #1 pastime of teens in my area was mailbox demolition. No, that wasn't solely my opinion. The Fortress of Crankitude went through several mailboxes of increasing sturdiness before I reached for the nukes.

Magda the Ultimate Mailbox arrived, fortuitously, on a Saturday morning. She was tough. She was strong. She was hardy. She was $169.95 before taxes and shipping. And she took me an entire day to install, what with the post-hole digging, and the concrete mixing, and the careful emplacement of the newel post, and time for the concrete to set, and the secure bolting of Magda to that brawny spar. Literally an entire day; I began at about 8:30 AM, and finished well after dark. The C.S.O. and I looked upon the completed assembly by flashlight -- didn't want to build a bonfire on the front lawn -- and saw that it was good.

Magda served us through many a vicissitude. She survived two hurricanes and uncounted nor'easters. Yes, the local teens did stage a couple of attempts on her life, but she proved more than equal to her own defense. Our worst problem was keeping the address numbers securely glued on; her super-slick anti-terrorism coating, no doubt intended to thwart limpet mines, made that a bit of a hassle. But the numbers on the front porch are visible from the street, and anyway, our carrier Lenny is 3,972 years old and has been with the Postal Service for 3,950 of them. It's rumored that he, not Moses, brought the Ten Commandments down the mountain. (There used to be fifteen, but Lenny dropped one of the tablets.) He has all the addresses on this street memorized already.

But all things must pass, and yesterday was Magda's turn. She met her demise in the huge ice storm that battered Long Island. Fortunately, she snapped off above the top of her mounting strut, so I won't have to dig 200 lb of concrete out of the ground when I replace her. But we're sad, nevertheless; she was a worthy 'box, plain in appearance but unflinching before the depredations of both Man and Nature.

Rest in peace, Magda. Flights of USPS trucks convey thee to thy rest, Express Mail. For those of you who'd like to attend, the funeral mass is tomorrow at 9 AM.

Poetry

2007-03-10T08:19:00.000-05:00

Howard at Oraculations has just expressed his admiration for the "poetry" of the late Charles Bukowski. Now it is widely believed, albeit incorrectly, that beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. And it has been said, and truly, that there's no accounting for tastes. BUT...

If that is
Poetry
Then
So is this --
For both are
     ...without rhyme or meter...
     ...badly formatted...
     ...eccentrically punctuated...
     ...and leadenly sententious.

Dear Lord,
For Your humble servant's next birthday,
Would You please
Give us a rebirth of Kipling, Tennyson, and Coleridge,
And perhaps
(If Your schedule will permit)
Do something about the poseurs
Who
In their endless quest for a claim to "creativity"
Have drained
ALL meaning
From the noble word
Poetry?

Thank You, Lord.

Yours truly,
Francis W. Porretto

One Of THOSE Days...

2007-03-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

A software engineer has had "one of those days" when the incomprehensible problem he's pursuing turns out to be a hardware fault. Granted, it doesn't happen often. But when it does, the agony is both poignant and severe.

I spent about two hours today trying to "debug" such a fault -- by phone. Few frustrations can compare with not being able to see your own program's behavior, using a distant collaborator as a waldo, and having absolutely no idea why what works in your own lab has failed catastrophically when installed afar.

The key question turned out to be: "Is it plugged in?"

Time to get drunk, I think.

Horizontal Snow!

2007-03-05T16:57:00.000-05:00

That's what the emcees on WCBS-AM were raving about as I drove home. And indeed, the snow, though light, was blowing directly across the Long Island Expressway, roughly parallel to the ground.

So when do the earthquakes and tidal waves arrive?

(With apologies to Andersen Windows.)

Ironies Abounding

2007-03-04T06:13:00.000-05:00

James Wolcott displays his characteristic inability to detect true irony:

"I believe it was Ann Coulter who said, after observing that liberals' whole public-relations strategy was to call conservatives names, that conservatives don't bother to call liberals names [my emph] because they have actual points to make and would rather spend their time making them."

--Francis W. Poretto, whose blog can be read if not fully comprehended here

Well, thanks for the citation, James, but as a devotee of accuracy and a fan of Miss Coulter's, I must point out:

The entire Right side of the Blogosphere has severely chided Miss Coulter for her crudity -- something the Left side has failed to notice.
When someone on the Left commits a comparable crudity -- for example, something like this:

Ann Coulter may be a travesty of humanity, as unacceptable a hank of flesh draped on a hanger ever to be foisted upon an ignorant populace hungry for more ignorance. Her racism, her character slurs, her whirlwind talent for rewriting history, her ability to leave a glossy coat of slime on any issue she discusses (when she licks a stamp, it curls up and dies), these are condemnable.

But credit where credit is due. The skank can shift ass on a dime.

...or this:

Nov. 2: I am preparing myself for either outcome today. Should Kerry win, I will post an important statement called “A Time for Healing,” or something equally noble-sounding. Should Bush win, I shall post a statement of philosophical resignation tentatively titled “Good, Go Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die.” The latter will probably require a little more tweaking.

...all his Leftist colleagues applaud and egg him on.
Miss Coulter still writes more incisively and entertainingly than you do.
My last name is spelled Porretto.
I aim the material at Eternity Road at an intelligent and well-educated readership; if you can't comprehend it, all I can offer is my sympathies.
Your obsession with me won't get you much traffic, as I'm a relatively low-status figure in Blogdom.

Just thought you'd like to know.

A New Threat To The Body Politic

2007-03-04T06:06:00.000-05:00

The forces of the Left are frequently rather kooky -- we all know they believe words and opinions create reality rather than articulate or reflect it -- but their educational establishments are raising the insanity bar as we speak: Now they're accusing an association of Christian students of "harassment" simply for existing:

Today the National Litigation Foundation and the Alliance Defense Fund (representing a Christian student group called "Commissioned II Love") filed a lawsuit against Savannah State University in Georgia after the university expelled the group from campus. In one of the more bizarre cases of viewpoint discrimination that I've seen, the university first punished the group for "hazing" after the university discovered that group members voluntarily engaged in the ancient Christian practice of "foot washing." The practice sounds strange to some, but it is taken directly from one of Jesus' most famous acts and involves, well, literally washing (with soap and water) the feet of another member of the group as a symbolic act of humility, love, and service. The university construed this action as endangering the "physical health" of their students.

After suspending the group for "hazing" and "harassment" (yes, in the eyes of the university, students sharing their faith constitutes "harassment"), the university imposed the ultimate punishment — expulsion — when the group members had the audacity to go to an off-campus, weekend event together (a Christian music concert). In other words, the very act of collectively hanging out off campus was enough to impose the ultimate penalty on the group.

Well, in a university context, perhaps expulsion is the "ultimate penalty," but can anyone doubt that were stronger measures available, Savannah State would have imposed them? I mean, Christianity! That simply has to go, doesn't it?

Peeve Alert

2007-03-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

I have a particular fascination with inconsiderate and discourteous drivers. They come in a number of flavors. Today's Special is the guy who, coming down the road in the opposite direction, sees that you're positioned to make a left turn, and:

Speeds up to prevent you from experiencing a gap in the traffic;
Slows down to prevent you from experiencing a gap in the traffic;
Conceals his intentions so as to freeze you in place until the light has turned against you.

I am convinced that there's a special circle in Hell for persons who behave thus. A traffic circle, of course. One where demon-piloted SUVs with massive V8 engines dart in and out so erratically that a mere human driver in a four-cylinder econobox never dares to exit.

Massively Tiring

2007-03-03T06:13:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, I know we've entered the era of the "permanent campaign," but in God's name, can't we have at least a little respite from the parade of politicos? By this time next year, the country will be so fatigued from all this self-promotion and jockeying for position that we'll probably elect Kim Jong-Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president just to be rid of our domestic clown troupe.

And people think the Anna Nicole / Britney / Lindsay news is tedious! I mean, Obama, Clinton, Romney and McCain don't even appear in public without underwear!

Hmmm, maybe we should be grateful for small favors.

Homely Wisdom With A Killer Right Hook

2004-08-22T04:23:00.000-04:00

I just found this statement at The Brothers Judd. It strikes me as about as perceptive an analysis of contemporary international conflict as I've ever heard:

Alright. Here's how it works. It order to be rich enough to dream of fighting the United States, you have to become the United States. Of course, by that time you won't want to fight the United States. You don't want to become the United States? Not to worry: plenty of room on the ash-heap of history.

-- Lou Gots

Pass it around.

Biter Bit

2004-08-21T16:41:00.000-04:00

You guys bring new meaning to "move on." When one charge doesn't pan out, you're on to the next one.

That's from commenter "Kyle" in a thread at the fine Just One Minute blog. The meat of the thread is a comparison between Kerry's self-exaltation as a Vietnam veteran and his statements in 1971 to the Senate during the Winter Soldier hearings.

It's ironic precisely because that's how the Kerry campaign has handled every allegation laid at its candidate's door. They denounce the people making the charge in the most strident imaginable terms, wait for the furor to die down, and refrain from replying to any of the substance.

Not one charge made against Kerry's claims has yet been refuted. Remember that.

WHOA!!

2004-08-21T14:52:00.000-04:00

DO NOT MISS this absolutely unsparing, wickedly funny column by Doug Giles, in which he administers a high colonic to the Democratic Party for its apotheosis of Senator John Kerry!

A Three Front War

2004-08-21T06:05:00.000-04:00

While the Kerry For President campaign struggles to suppress Regnery Publishing's explosive bestseller Unfit For Command, and Media Matters strives to intimidate booksellers out of carrying it, Kerry's boosters are beginning to try to shift the focus of his campaign away from his Vietnam tour. They're simultaneously trying to refocus attention on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

(In her book Slander, Ann Coulter writes:

Finally, the self-appointed champions of free speech come to the realization that hectoring alone will not shut down the Samizdat press. It must be regulated. The First Amendment protects taxpayer-funded photos of bullwhips up men's anuses. It says nothing about Matt Drudge. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argues in his book Republic.com that by allowing people to choose "what they want to read, see, and hear," the Internet is a threat to "a well-functioning system of democratic deliberation." It's never Debbie Does Dallas or the publication of classified Pentagon documents that provoke such urgent re-examinations of the First Amendment. When liberals warn that free speech imperils "the capacity of citizens to govern themselves," you know conservatives must be opening their yaps again.

Need we ask why Miss Coulter is the Left's most hated columnist?)

The jury has returned:

Kerry is stupid.
His major promoters, such as David Brock and the crew at Media Matters, are at least as stupid.
His more active boosters are growing really desperate.

#1 is true because attempting to suppress political speech, whether by legal means or by intimidation tactics, always gives the message a jet-propelled boost. #2 is true because Media Matters, which has repeatedly trumpeted its non-alignment, has now openly signed on to the Kerry For President campaign and can no longer deny it. #3 is true because there's been no attempt to defend Kerry's many misstatements and exaggerations by recourse to the facts -- nor has anyone publicly aligned with Kerry called for him to execute SF 180, the form that would authorize a complete release of his military records.

We knew Kerry was exceedingly vain. We knew David Brock would say or do anything to cozy up to his new masters on the Left. But there are nonetheless some new and important discoveries here. If President Bush's campaign strategists can find a way to exploit Kerry's inability to see the traps laid before him, the junior senator from Massachusetts will be lucky to get 100 electoral votes.

Desperation And The Acts Of A Desperate Man

2004-08-20T17:16:00.000-04:00

The Internet is pulsing over the attempts by the Kerry for President campaign to suppress Unfit For Command, by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, or failing that, to link the book to President Bush. Granted that the book is a devastating critique of Kerry's war record and subsequent paradings before Congress; one would think that even the maximally vain, minimally tuned-in Senator Kerry would know better than to try to suppress a book in these United States. The very attempt is pure rocket fuel for the book's sales, and for his adversaries' contentions.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are dismantling Kerry's one and only claim to public esteem with that most merciless of all tools: facts related by the witnesses to them. Apparently, Kerry cannot answer them, and is unwilling to execute an SF 180 authorizing the full release of his military records. That leaves the Democrats with nothing in their quiver except an attempt at censorship by intimidation.

They tried attacking President Bush as the spurious winner of a fraudulent election. It didn't work.
They tried attacking President Bush on his anti-terror campaign. It didn't work.
They tried attacking him on his National Guard service. It didn't work.
They tried attacking Dubya on his tax cuts and economic record. It didn't work.
They tried attacking his oil connections, his articulation, his Christianity, his willingness to act alone, his disdain for the racialists at the NAACP, his loyalty to Dick Cheney, his "sixteen words," his commitment to the sovereignty handover in Iraq, even the way he walks. None of it worked.

They picked a presidential candidate who'd been passing himself off as a war hero for more than three decades, after slandering his fellow soldiers and sailors as war criminals for political visibility. His tissue of fictions is being teased apart by his contemporaneous veterans -- and so thoroughly that should he lose in November, he might not retain his Senate seat two years hence. It has to be Bush's doing!

I love the smell of desperation come election time. Smells like...defeat.

What Matters

2004-08-19T07:33:00.000-04:00

At National Review Online, Walter Weber gives an impressive list of the subjects that would be affected by a Kerry-reengineered Supreme Court. All the matters Weber lists are of some importance, but I find myself most concerned about this one:

Unlimited federal-government power: A slim 5-4 majority in a string of cases has enforced some modest limits on federal power under the Commerce Clause, the Tenth Amendment, and the Eleventh Amendment. Even those few limits would evaporate under a Kerry-picked Court.

I consider this the heart of all federal matters. Law is supposed to be made by Congress and enforced by the Executive Branch, with specific accusations of offenses against the law to be tried by the courts. But altogether too much federal law is either plainly contrary to the Constitution, or emerges as an Executive Order, which is contemplated nowhere in that document. Worse, most federal law is now made by unelected regulators, who determine offenses against it, and the penalties for them, all by themselves.

That whirring sound you hear is the Framers rotating in their graves.

Perhaps President Bush won't be able to get the judicial nominees he wants through the Senate, even after the election. But would anyone doubt that a President (shudder) Kerry would get his nominees approved -- or that they'd be so far to the anti-Constitutional, judicial-activist left that they'd fall off the ADA's evaluation scale?

Bush in 2004, damn it!

Stick To What You Know

2004-08-19T07:18:00.000-04:00

It's a fine principle, and one I heartily commend to business affairs commentator Bruce Bartlett:

One of the great strengths of the Electoral College is that it tends to magnify presidential victories. For example, although Bill Clinton never got a majority of the popular vote in either 1992 or 1996, he won comfortably in the Electoral College, which gave him a mandate to govern even though he lacked majority support among voters.

The reason for this is that almost all states have a winner-take-all system for awarding electoral votes. Whoever wins the popular vote gets all the state's electoral votes -- even if he wins by a single vote. A state's electoral votes equal the total of its congressional seats plus two votes for its senators. (Washington, D.C., gets three votes -- what it would have if it were a state.) Thus there are 438 total electoral votes, and a candidate must get an absolute majority to become president.

Can you count the number of mistakes in that passage? If you haven't worn out your calculator, add the following:

The faithless elector problem is also easily solved. States can require that their electors vote the way they are pledged, which is already the case in 26 states and the District of Columbia. In some cases, it is even a felony for an elector to vote for a different candidate than he is pledged to. A better solution would be to adopt the law adopted by Michigan and North Carolina, which simply cancels that elector's vote and provides for his replacement.

I've seldom seen an intelligent columnist go so badly wrong.

The electoral college was not created to magnify presidential victories, nor would the Framers approve of its doing so. It was created to place a level of indirection between the state legislatures and the selection of the president.
As the president has a veto power over legislation, his role in the federal system has a large negative characteristic. This makes him particularly important to low-population states, which are favored with slightly disproportionate influence over presidential elections by the electoral college -- another of the reasons for its design.
"Faithless electors" are not a problem, but a designed-in feature of the system. The whole idea was that the state legislatures would, by whatever means best appealed to it, choose electors who would then exercise their independent judgment about who should become president. To the extent that state legislatures have attempted to "lock in" an elector's vote by law, they have contravened the logic at the base of the electoral college system.
The electoral college cannot of itself confer a "mandate to govern." Many were the cries in 1968, after Richard Nixon's victory over Hubert Humphrey, that Nixon had no mandate to govern, despite his substantial margin in the electoral college -- because of the slenderness of Nixon's margin in the popular balloting.
There are 538 electoral collegians chosen in each presidential election, not 438.

Perhaps Mr. Bartlett should return to writing about business and finance.

Qualifications

2004-08-18T06:59:00.000-04:00

As amusing as it is, the recent gaffe by Senator John Kerry's campaign staff, which claimed that their candidate served as Vice-Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when in point of fact the post was held by former Senator Bob Kerrey, is an indicator of more than campaign slovenliness.

The President of the United States is an executive. He doesn't personally fight wars, enforce the laws, or negotiate with other countries...well, mostly he doesn't. He supervises a rather large staff -- many thousands of people -- who do those things at his direction and subject to his review.

Senator Kerry has spent twenty years as a legislator. A legislator has no independent responsibilities. His sole job function is to vote his convictions on the issues put before his legislative body. As an individual, he possesses practically no importance.

Senator Kerry, who hasn't even shown up for most of the Senate votes or Intelligence Committee meetings during his tenure of office, wants to be president -- an executive, not a legislator. But ought we to grant that position to a man who doesn't even supervise his own campaign staff sufficiently well to prevent them from appropriating another senator's resume?

Ignore the Vietnam stuff for a moment. Has Kerry demonstrated any qualifications for executive office?

McGreevey Periphery

2004-08-18T06:41:00.000-04:00

The post-dated resignation of New Jersey Governor James McGreevey must be seen in the light of the above-linked article on the downfall of Charles Kushner, who was his top campaign contributor and who brought Golan Cipel to the United States.

Kushner's plea agreements apparently exempt him from having to testify about McGreevey in any way. Meanwhile Cipel, having filed a $50 million defamation suit against the soon-to-be-ex-governor, has fled to Israel, where he is said to be in seclusion with his family. It would be very difficult, though not impossible, to compel him to return to the United States for a trial of corruption charges against McGreevey.

The McGreevey affair, if you'll allow me, has become such a stink in the nostrils of the electorate that even most Democrats want to see his departure expedited. McGreevey's tactic of:

Announcing his resignation as corruption accusations against him were massing to a head, but before indictments could be handed down;
Using his sexuality as a shield against the accusations;
Deferring his actual exit from office until after the statutory time when a by-election could be held;

...is so transparent that even Democrats are unwilling to defend it.

Perhaps this is the linchpin event that will restore a sense of shame -- and honor -- to the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

The Climax Approaches

2004-08-17T08:45:00.000-04:00

The election seems near certain to return President Bush to the White House for a second term. What's less certain is whether the candidate it has chosen will be the final catastrophe for the Democratic Party.

Senator John Kerry has tried to take both sides of every substantive issue. On the matter of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he's claimed to be both for it and against it; most recently, he's for it, but claims he "would have done it better." On most other matters, he's tailored his statements to the audience he was addressing at the moment -- even if it meant contradicting what he'd said to a different audience in an earlier forum.

The press has -- reluctantly -- captured several examples of Kerry's vanity and arrogance. Probably the best known are his explosions at those who've dared to "question my patriotism" and the famous "I don't fall down. That son of a bitch knocked me over" snowboarding incident. Pictures show him mishandling a firearm in an unsafe manner and shoving past an elderly woman to get to a microphone.

The Vietnam story has become a particular embarrassment. The overwhelming majority of the swift boat veterans of Kerry's cohort have signed onto the statements of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to the effect that Kerry is unfit to command. The Unfit For Command book by O'Neill and Corsi is #1 on Amazon's sales charts. Kerry has also been caught in lies about a fictitious Cambodia mission, about the times and dates of various actions, and about the circumstances under which he was awarded two of his Purple Hearts -- the decorations that truncated his tour of duty in Vietnam.

The Old Media are firmly on Kerry's side. The left wing of the Democratic Party will support him fervently; indeed, they'd support Satan himself if His Infernal Majesty had a decent chance to unseat George W. Bush. Several foreign influences are also weighing in for Kerry, as they'd like nothing better than to weaken American resolve under our current conditions of world crisis. But Bush's approval ratings are more than adequate, and the general public appears to be alive to Kerry's inadequacies of character, despite the Old Media's attempts to ignore them into oblivion.

If Kerry wins, he's unlikely to use power wisely. Unless Congress restrains him, he could fatally undo the American military and the American economy in just one term. But if Kerry loses, which I consider far more likely, the Democratic Party will be under tremendous post-election stress. It could be enough to trigger a fission between the Clinton-McAuliffe pragmatists and the Kennedy liberals who've been duking it out for control of the party these past four years.

Democrats who'd like to save their party from being reduced to a rump by such a fission had better start thinking about what they'll do after November 2, in the event that their party's nominee goes down to an inglorious, Walter Mondale-like defeat.

Speaking Truth To The Systematically Pandered-To And Deceived

2004-08-16T07:32:00.000-04:00

Dr. Alan Keyes, now running as the Republican candidate for United States Senator from Illinois, continues to hold my highest esteem for his political courage:

Alan Keyes said Friday he would like to end the system under which the people elect U.S. senators and return to pre-1913 practice in which senators were chosen by state legislatures.

The Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, asked about past comments on the election process, said the constitutional amendment that provided for popular election of senators upset the balance between the people and the states.

"The balance is utterly destroyed when the senators are directly elected because the state government as such no longer plays any role in the deliberations at the federal level," Keyes said at a taping of WBBM Newsradio's "At Issue" program.

He said it was one of the reasons "there has been a steady deleterious erosion of the sovereign role of the states."

And he's absolutely right. The popular election of Senators and Presidents was what gave free rein to political factions and the undue influence of the mass media on political currents. The indirection provided by state legislatures' authority to choose federal Senators and electors, and electors' authority to choose Presidents, dampened wild currents in popular sentiment and made it possible for at least some federal officers to work without worrying about having to please the masses.

But how many people would be likely to understand this today? And how many candidates for high office would be willing even to discuss it in public?

Bravo, Dr. Keyes.

Mimics

2004-08-16T07:16:00.000-04:00

Hearken to Lawrence Auster, in today's Front Page Magazine:

When trying to explain the Islamists' global campaign of mass murder, both liberals and conservatives, despite their fierce mutual disagreements, make the same underlying mistake. People on the anti-war left believe that Al Qaeda attacked us because we're imperialist, or because we're racist, or because we don't do enough for Third-World hunger (yes, there are people who actually believe the hunger argument; most of them are Episcopalians). By contrast, many people on the pro-war right, especially President Bush, believe that the Islamists hate us for our freedoms, opportunities, and overall success as a society. In other words, the left believes that the Islamists hate us for our sins, and the right believes that they hate us for our virtues. Both sides commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.

Wrong, says Auster: it's just what Muslims are supposed to do:

Using Muhammed as their model, the jihadis live and think and act within paradigms provided by the stages of Muhammed’s political and military career. According to Habeck, this internally driven logic of Islam, and not any particular provocation, real or imagined, by some outside power, is the key to understanding why the jihadis do what they do.

This is almost comprehensible, given that the ethos of Islam puts each Muslim's standing with God at the mercy of those around him. A Muslim can lose his place in Paradise merely for having been touched by pig offal, even involuntarily. He is under Divine command to spread Islam by force. "Conversions of the mouth," wherein the converted one professes Islam solely because the alternative is death, are regarded as just as valid as the voluntary acceptance of the creed.

Rational creeds such as Christianity put the believer's salvation entirely in his own hands; he will be judged by how well they conform to the dictates of the natural law, not by the actions or reactions of those around him.

I cannot help but repeat: the mean IQ of the Muslim Middle East is about 85.

I Find Myself Wondering...

2004-08-15T19:34:00.000-04:00

...just how much it will take to embarrass the Democrats?

They've produced all of the most laughable presidents and presidential candidates of the past half-century.
Their greatest political achievement since FDR was an eight year presidency by a terminally henpecked multiple adulterer, whose wife snatched control of domestic policy out of his hands as her price for not divorcing him, and who couldn't tell the truth about anything for fear his tongue would snap off.
Their senior statesman is another multiple adulterer, also an alcoholic, who coincidentally happens to have committed negligent homicide, which he got away with by using family connections.
Right behind that gentleman is a Senator who admits to having been a KKK member, and who slaps his name onto every chunk of concrete or asphalt in his state.
Their congressional caucus has included:
- Ron Dellums, a Castro worshipper;
- Bernard Sanders, an avowed socialist;
- Jim McDermott and David Bonior, who puckered up for Saddam Hussein;
- Cynthia McKinney, a rabid anti-Semite;
- Barney Frank, whose lover ran a house of prostitution out of Frank's apartment.
They've welcomed rabid race-hustlers and blackmailers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to the lectern at their national conventions.
Out of their fury at losing the 2000 presidential campaign, they were willing to risk the destruction of the national electoral system by dragging the affair out for 35 days with one anti-Constitutional tactic after another, and didn't concede until the United States Supreme Court slapped them down with one of the most strongly worded decisions in judicial history.
Their 2004 presidential candidate is a man:
- whose highest achievement is that he married two very rich women;
- who's sleepwalked through a four term Senate career, and has no legislative accomplishments to show for it;
- and whose principal qualification for high office is a four month tour of duty in Vietnam, about which he's told nothing but lies.

If the Democratic Party isn't having agonies of regret about it all, it's run by total lunatics with no sense of shame. Granted, the Republican Party blotted its copybook with the Watergate affair, and I'm sure they'd like to forget Bob Packwood, but...how can anyone with any self-regard willingly admit to being a Democrat?

The Old Greats

2004-08-15T07:36:00.000-04:00

Charles Hill of Dustbury, one of my mandatory daily stops, has a brief but piercing article up on the false aura of greatness attached to many "classics" in popular music. He's got a point. Perhaps a point-and-a-half.

I'm rather an old fart -- 52 as of this writing -- and I grew up with a major wave in popular music: the British Invasion, which segued into the San Francisco uprising and the general Sixties milieu. Yes, we were very excited about the music of that time, and some of it was genuinely innovative and fine. But much of the glamor associated with it in our memories stems from its provenance. It was music made by the very young, to appeal to the very young: to us.

I say this ruefully. I've been sweeping up all sorts of "classic" rock and roll lately, from, ah, a variety of sources. Seldom has the experience of hearing it again today matched the thrill I got from hearing it thirty years ago.

In one sense, this is only natural. We do edit our memories of things without realizing that we've done so. Our tendency is to hype the extremes and efface the routine and the mediocre. In another, it might be just a tad unfair. Musicians of today, like Isaac Newton, stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, and ought logically to be expected to see farther and do better.

Incidentally, we get a similar effect from glamor-clouded reminiscences about sporting greats who've left the field. Today's athletes are substantially better in every way than previous generations; competition and the advancing sciences of sports conditioning and medicine guarantee it. But you'll seldom get a nod to that from a veteran baseball fan as he compares Barry Bonds to Babe Ruth, or Randy Johnson to Walter Johnson.

Cute Person Of The Month!

2004-08-14T09:16:00.000-04:00

Ladies, gentlemen, assorted nonhumans! I have just become the first winner of The Running Conservative's "Cute Person Of The Month" Award!!

Truly, words cannot express. But hey, what can I say? When ya got it, ya got it, and Kate, cutie that she is, ought to know it when she sees it.

Apparently, what put me over the top against the unbelievably ferocious competition was this photo:

I should have shaved. Yeah, I know I won anyway, but I still should have shaved.

"We Want Information."

2004-08-14T07:05:00.000-04:00

From the esteemed Robert Novak:

Republican National Committee sources say operatives in Washington are not happy about "Unfit for Command," the book that attacks John Kerry's record as both a combatant in Vietnam and as an anti-war protester.

These critics fear the attack on the Democratic presidential candidate will backfire and be regarded by voters as dirty politics. They also are apprehensive that the examination of Kerry's Vietnam record will renew charges that George W. Bush did not fulfill his obligations as an Air National Guardsman during the Vietnam War.

To which your humble Curmudgeon deposeth and sayeth:

BALDERDASH!

The public wants as much information as it can gather about the heretofore almost unknown Senator John F. Kerry. This is a man whose life has been near to insignificant since the "Winter Soldier" incidents, despite his occupancy of a seat in the United States Senate. He has no significant record of public achievement. His principal distinction is having married into wealth -- twice. Yet he's a candidate for the highest office in America, with the backing of a major political party.

Whatever the Republican leaders fear, the public wants to know more. As the information being presented to us appears to be heavily unfavorable to Senator Kerry, and the ad hominem attacks the Kerry campaign has issued in response have rebounded against it, whence cometh the fear? Why not sit back and enjoy the ride?

I don't think it has anything to do with Bush's TANG records, which have already been completely disclosed, as Kerry's military records have not. I think it's a more formless thing: the Democrats have always been the more ruthless and rhetorically vicious of the two major parties, and the Republicans hate to have to face such talk whether it has substance behind it or not. It simply offends and disconcerts them.

Sorry, boys, but there's an election on. Haven't you heard?

You Knew This Was Coming

2004-08-13T07:34:00.000-04:00

Senator John Kerry has found a policy he definitely likes and unambiguously endorses: the graduated income tax. In an appearance at California State University, he characterized Bush's comment endorsing the Dennis Hastert proposal to replace the income tax with a sales tax or VAT as "is an insult to financially struggling voters and would amount to "one of the largest tax increases on the middle class in American history."

This is no surprise. The Democrats are utterly dependent on the graduated income tax -- indeed, on the principle of unequal taxation. It's what makes it possible for them to buy the allegiance of interest groups. Uniform taxation which is visible at all times, such as a retail sales tax, destroys the rob-Peter-to-bribe-Paul special-interest dynamic and is a powerful inducement to low taxation as well.

As for tax increases, when an interviewer recently asked Senator Kerry about whether he would raise taxes, his response was that he would never raise them above the levels of the Clinton years -- levels that already seem unconscionable and extortionate.

So much for Monsieur Kerry, who's so eager to pose as a tax cutter while he jams his hand ever deeper into our pockets.

For Posterity

2004-08-13T07:16:00.000-04:00

I don't normally remember my dreams. Either they're not sufficiently vivid, or they're too jumbled to make into a story line that my conscious mind can retain. However, last night's was a doozy. The C.S.O. has told me that I simply must record it somewhere, so you, gentle readers, will be the, ah, beneficiaries.

It was a fine summer evening in Brooklyn. I and a number of others were standing outside Peter Luger's Steak House. We wanted to enter and have dinner, but we were reluctant, because there was nowhere to secure our lawn mowers. Eventually, we decided that they'd be safe on the sidewalk -- who'd steal a lawn mower in Brooklyn, after all? -- so we left them there and went inside.

The restaurant was enormous and very dark. There was only one diner present: my father, who was hunched over an enormous steak with every conceivable side dish and garnish. Not having seen Dad since he died twenty years ago, I sat with him and made small talk about the changes since then, until the waiter arrived with the menu.

The menu was organized like a multiple-choice test, but one's "answers" had to be written in longhand into very small spaces thereupon, with a dry-erase marker. I did my best to be neat, but when I turned it over to the waiter, he shook his head, said "You flunk," and told me I could only have a roll with butter, which he thereupon brought. Dad clucked at me without sympathy and gave his full attention to his steak.

When I went back outside, my lawn mower was missing.

Say...

2004-08-12T19:14:00.000-04:00

...does anyone else think it's a mighty coincidental coincidence that James McGreevey resigned his governorship and the California Supreme Court invalidated 4000 gay marriages while Andrew Sullivan was on vacation?

"I Am A Gay American."

2004-08-12T17:25:00.000-04:00

Is that a new racial subgroup? Where's the hyphen?

In all seriousness, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey is resigning because of a homosexual affair. What I'd like to know is: why is he resigning?

Democrats don't put much stock in marital fidelity (cf. John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Gary Hart and Donna Rice, Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, Hillary Clinton & Vince Foster, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam), nor do they see anything wrong with homosexuality (cf. Barney Frank). So why is McGreevey resigning? Is the combination somehow worse than the parts?

Be certain of this: You will not hear McGreevey criticized by Democratic Party partisans. Nor will you hear him criticized by anyone from the GOP, at least not for his sexual peccadilloes. This will shortly become a non-story to rival (most liberal) Senator John Kerry's Cambodian adventure.

On Giving Yourself A Break

2004-08-11T08:10:00.000-04:00

I've been slowing down these past few years, though it might not be evident from this dive or the Palace. Now and then I ponder what it is that causes us to slow down -- i.e., to become less productive; to take more time over a given task -- as we age. When it comes to intellectual undertakings such as writing or political analysis, the matter is cloudy: these things don't require the full intellectual powers of an Einstein at his prime, nor do aching joints appear to affect them.

When I was about forty, I was considered the best man in my field. Today, I'm still very good, but my reputation, which is based on earlier achievements, exceeds my current abilities. I've begun to think that it's the cushion provided by those earlier achievements -- "Hey, don't crowd him. Do you know what he's done?" -- that opens the way for the intellectual deceleration of age. It makes it possible to "give yourself a break."

When you start to coast in any way, getting back up to maximum velocity becomes harder than it was originally. There are immediate rewards in coasting, and we all develop more ramified and demanding agendas as we age. In consequence, once a man develops a bulgy reputation that makes it possible for him to take it a little easier by traveling on his earlier achievements, should he begin to slacken, the odds are heavy that he'll never return to peak form.

Is this a suggestion that you should never give yourself a break? What's the superlative of "Hell, no!" -- ? Gerontological research and its possibilities to one side, what's the point of striving hard for twenty or thirty years if you never allow yourself to reap and enjoy the fruits?

"Work is good, but it's not everything. After a while, you realize it's time to relax and enjoy your lingerie." -- from a dear, departed friend.

The Constraints Of Freedom

2004-08-11T07:42:00.000-04:00

The Internet is often spoken of as a liberating technology, and there's much truth to the claim. But its homogenizing tendencies, all too often overlooked, deserve a bit of attention too.

English became the commercial language of the world because of a small group of enterprises: aviation, finance, and data processing. To be capable of participating in these things, one must have a command of the English language. Yet no one would condemn any of those enterprises as coercive; they just come equipped with powerful incentives toward linguistic conformity.

Similarly, the Internet, particularly in its manifestation as the World Wide Web, is nudging its user community -- an appreciable fraction of the world and a majority of the United States -- toward several different uniformities. It's doing this through enticement, rather than any sort of inherent constraint.

An example: Time was, there were several popular word processors, including AMIPro, MicroPro WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word. Eight to ten years ago, MS Word and WordPerfect commanded about equal degrees of allegiance. Today, only Microsoft Word commands a non-negligible market share.

Why? Because these programs use widely different file formats. If you have to exchange word processing files with others over the Internet, conversion between formats becomes a matter of importance: annoying at best, catastrophic at worst. Given that incentive toward uniformity, Microsoft Word's minor advantage from being integrated with a set of other common applications was enough to make it absolutely dominant. The same phenomenon could be noted about the spreadsheets. Microsoft Excel now dominates absolutely, despite its late arrival in the spreadsheet wars and its early technical lag behind Lotus 1-2-3. The need for uniformity in an Internet-oriented world made the minor Excel advantage of being integrated with Word and Access a killing advantage.

American English is receiving a boost as the world language from the Internet. So is the dominance of the "American time zone": GMT minus 5 (Eastern US) through GMT minus 8 (Pacific coast states).

As the Army likes to remind us, freedom isn't free. One of the prices we pay is this sort of tendency toward uniformity. Perhaps it's nothing to worry about...but God help us all if someone finds a way to hunt down and destroy Word documents or Excel spreadsheets via a hard-to-detect virus.

Unease Rampant

2004-08-10T07:21:00.000-04:00

The unhealed wound we call the Vietnam War continues to fester, thirty-one years after our official separation from that unhappy land. The most immediate facet of the thing is the unease many feel over criticizing a veteran of that war, however justified the criticism might be.

Senator John Kerry, a person of no principles whatsoever, who appears to have lied about his Vietnam experiences for political advantage (to say nothing of the "Winter Soldier" and medal-throwing incidents), is now coming under sustained fire for those lies from groups such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. However, a large number of people who dislike Kerry intensely, and who've derided him for making his four-month Vietnam tour the center of his presidential campaign, nonetheless do not want to see his Vietnam service attacked.

This is a mark of our ambivalence about the War. It's unclear whether America ought to have entered that conflict in the first place. Many Americans died in it. Many more served honorably and well, despite appalling political betrayals and a set of constraints on their action that guaranteed an unsatisfactory result. A horrifying number of Vietnam vets faced incomprehensibly brutal treatment by War opponents when they returned to these shores -- treatment that broke many who'd stood up to the War's cruelties and horrors unflinchingly, even heroically.

The supporters of John Kerry, whose deceits and treasons helped to fuel that barbarity toward American soldier-returnees, nevertheless claim that his honor and patriotism ought to be above all question -- and many who oppose him are agreeing.

They sense that the War ought to have ended.
They sense that the War has taken enough out of us.
They sense that the War has violated our national psyche, and ought to be extracted from it before it can do any more harm.

"I think we all died a little in that damn' war." -- Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales

It's Getting Interesting Already

2004-08-10T07:02:00.000-04:00

Alan Keyes has hit the ground running in his Senate race against Democratic Party "rising star" Barack Obama. Here's Dr. Keyes's excoriation of Obama's vote against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act:

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence," Keyes said. He said Obama "has broken and rejected those principles -- he has taken the slaveholder's position."

Obama, who has been basking in national celebrity since delivering the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, suggested Keyes is outside the moderate mainstream of state Republicans.

Asked specifically about the phrase "slaveholder's position," Obama said Keyes "should look to members of his own party to see if that's appropriate if he's going to use that kind of language."

Keyes delivered a haymaker. It very nearly floored the hapless Obama, whose response, a model of puerility and ineffectiveness, indicates how far below his opponent's weight class he is. Keyes should look to members of his own party? Very well:

Secretary of State Colin Powell: black.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: black.
Secretary of Education Rod Paige: black.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas: black.

The four blacks who hold the highest federal offices ever occupied by blacks were all appointed by Republicans.

Republicans don't patronize blacks. They hold them to the same standards as whites or Orientals -- in contrast to the Democrats, to whom the color of a man's skin is so much more important than his ability, achievements, or character than they insist on federally enforced skin-color quotas in both private enterprise and public life. Which should tell you something about the heavily hyped assets of Barack Obama.

To All Who Wrote:

2004-08-09T20:28:00.000-04:00

Thank you, everyone, for your good wishes and prayers. It appears that "Alice" will be okay. Unfortunately, other matters have come unglued. The C.S.O. is very upset about the whole incident, with good reason. I have to admit that I'm rather unhappy with the young lady myself. Had she suffered worse than she did, she would have been entirely to blame. Yet she doesn't appear to appreciate the gravity of the chance she took.

This post is so that you, my dear and gentle readers, can cease to worry about us. Our destinies are in our own hands now. Thanks again for caring.

Shopping For Trouble

2004-08-09T06:48:00.000-04:00

I've been accused of doing that. This morning, the accusations appear to contain a grain of truth.

If you've read the third section of this post at the Palace, you already know about "Alice," whom the C.S.O. and I have taken in while she gets on her feet after some medical misadventures and several years of parental maltreatment. Well, it appears that the adventures are not over.

"Alice" is rather down on herself and life for various reasons. As with most young depressives, most of her reasons are specious: routine disappointments culled from the interstices among "I need," "I want," and "I can afford." A couple of them have some substance, as they pertain to the aforementioned cruelties of her parents. As a result, she's persuaded a doctor to prescribe fairly potent antidepressants and mood elevators for her. They're marked "to be used as necessary" -- and she takes them all too frequently.

These are not drugs that ought ever to be mixed with alcohol, or taken during social interactions with persons of subnormal sensitivity.

"Alice" is in the hospital this morning. We're in a uniquely painful situation here: because we're not related to her in any way other than affection, the hospital won't tell us her condition. We have to wait for Alice to tell us. At the moment, we're not allowed to see her, which suggests that her condition is serious.

I haven't slept in a while.

Please, if you have the inclination and the opportunity, pray for us.

Never Send To Know For Whom The Poll Tolls

2004-08-08T07:44:00.000-04:00

Jayson at PoliPundit has posted a nice roundup that illustrates the perennial inaccuracy of political polls. It's worth reviewing at times like these, when every poll the Old Media presents to us seems to indicate that, despite the infinite gulf between the characters, achievements, and positions of President George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry, Kerry maintains a thin lead over Dubya among registered voters.

Polls are often wrong. Some of the reasons are obvious. For example, the Literary Digest conducted an extensive poll in 1936 whose results suggested that Governor Alf Landon of Kansas would unseat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November, by a large margin. The results, as we know, were quite the reverse. This was a case of sampling error: Literary Digest's poll had been:

Entirely of its own subscribers,
Conducted during the Great Depression,
Conducted by telephone.

Now, during the Depression, just what sort of person was most likely to have a telephone and a subscription to the Literary Digest?

Sometimes the problems are subtler. For example, few people appreciate the psychological difference between answering a pollster's question and flipping a lever in the privacy of the voting booth. Still others fail to grasp the many factors that can affect whether a registered voter will be an actual voter on Election Day. And then, there's pollster's bias, which is particularly important when the poll is financed by someone with a stake in the outcome of the election. Yes, Virginia, there really are people who will pay others to tell them what they want to believe.

Form your decision to vote on the basis of your convictions and what you think of the candidates. Don't be swayed by polls. Anyway, it's not a horse race: you don't have to put money down to vote, and you get nothing for "betting" on the winner.

Real Work, Real Pain

2004-08-08T07:31:00.000-04:00

Apologies for yesterday's hiatus. I spent the morning swinging a hedge clipper and a chain saw, and after that there was nothing left in me with which to write.

The manual on the hedge clipper says it weighs about six pounds. The chain saw weighs about ten. But I'm here to tell you, friends: those are not trivial amounts to dangle from your arms at full extension, perched precariously on a roofer's ladder, as you strain to evade a multitude of things that ardently desire your death, disfigurement, or at least your deep and lasting abrasion.

Programming computers, managing other programmers, and writing for the Palace and Eternity Road are nothing compared to any sort of yard work. The rich are different from you and me: they can hire someone else to do this crap and suffer through the consequences.

I was ready to quit after fifteen minutes, but I'd promised myself that on the first day where the temperature and humidity were less than hellish I'd do this to the Blue Spruce (62 feet tall) and that to the Scotch Pine (now over 90 feet tall -- one of the finest trees on Long Island) and clean up the BLEEPing chain link fence, two hundred feet of which were heavily overgrown by my retired neighbor's bushes. And I kept at it until I'd finished, even though it damn near finished me.

It's amazing what even a self-imposed schedule can do to you. Knowing full well that there's no enforcement authority to penalize you for slacking off, you push yourself anyway, and achieve despite all disinclinations and obstacles.

I wish I'd known the power of this technique when I was younger. I might have accomplished something. Ah, well. "The Road goes ever on and on..."

Raw Sociopolitical Brilliance From...Whom?

2004-08-06T09:58:00.000-04:00

Every now and again, I'll hear something so piercing, so insightful, from an unexpected source that my reaction will be, "Who are you really?"

Consider the following, a brief yet powerful argument that the disease of Arab/Muslim culture, that keeps them from advancing as others have, is pyromania:

Pyromania may be the yet unexamined, underlying motivation behind the willingness to self-combust that is so prevalent among, and peculiar to, the Palestinian population. After all, if one looks at the far more desperate situations of people living in many African countries as well as in Cuba, Cambodia and Thailand, to name a few --which do not have a neighboring Israel providing jobs, running water and electricity -- no one there is causing explosions or burning buildings.

It is said the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity -- such as that presented by the Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza, which has elicited havoc instead of hope. But the kind of society that the opportunities bring takes years to implement. Why wait a decade to witness the results of one’s efforts to build a livable society when it’s so much easier to just set off an explosion and become a local legend?

With the new fence obstructing access for carrying out pyromaniac missions against Israelis -- and therefore bringing less and less uplifting news of successfully carried-out explosions -- the immediate gratification is gone. Now that it’s more complicated to blow up Israelis, the torching syndrome has turned inward, as militants burn down PA offices, police stations and cars in Gaza, as well as government buildings in the West Bank.

It’s not just the Palestinians, of course: Chechens, Saudis and even Iraqis have an affinity for the blaze. During fighting in Iraq between American-led forces and Baathist holdouts, whenever something exploded -- regardless on which side -- local people stopped what they were doing to yell and jump around whatever was burning. Whether these people are like firecracker-obsessed children or more like tribal sorts who dance around fire, it’s a culture of pyromaniacs. You can put them in suits and invite them to the negotiating table, but pray that no one lights a cigarette.

Witness all the energy and excitement even at funeral processions for fallen Hamas leaders. There is excitement because an assassinated Hamas leader means that somewhere there was an explosion that caused it, and there will be future explosions to avenge it.

The much debated Palestinian national identity is one of maintaining a perpetual state of need and suffering. That’s why, when this people gets what it agitates for -- as it did with the unexpectedly generous Barak-Clinton offer and now again with the Gaza withdrawal plan -- it only agitates them more. Because if the day ever arrives that there is nothing to explode or set afire, there will be no reason to get up in the morning.

Gentle reader, it doesn't get any better than this. The author of this analysis? New York comic and op-ed writer Julia Gorin.

Some wag once said that the country's problems could be traced to the fact that the people with the answers were all busy driving taxicabs. Maybe he should have had a look at the comedians.

2004-08-06T08:19:00.000-04:00

In response to this emission, Connie Du Toit added:

I think the bigger point is that the first thing the Left had to do was breakdown education--they had to get the great Tombs of the Great/Good books off the shelves. Once they'd successfully accomplished that and removed the great buffer of the wisdom of the past, the rest was easy.

Too true. There are three legs to the tripod of a free society: education, communications, and weaponry. Once all of these have been sawn through, the people are helpless before their oppressors.

We know what's happened to the right to keep and bear arms. Education is at least as badly threatened. Now there are some 38 left-wing Congressmen trying to intimidate Fox News, the only major news service that doesn't lean left, with unspecific threats of legislative action unless Fox ceases to present the news with its preferred center-right slant.

God help us all if they manage to get their hands around the throat of the Internet.

Not "Yesterday's News"

2004-08-05T07:44:00.000-04:00

The above-linked article makes reference to a number of scandalous attempts by government-school "educators," college professors and administrators to curb or punish opinions that differ from theirs -- theirs being uniformly Leftist and anti-American.

We've heard a lot about this, these past few years. Perhaps the earliest and most compendious treatment was Dinesh D'Souza's book Illiberal Education, though Roger Kimball's fine Tenured Radicals must not be neglected. The point for today is that this is not a dead-letter phenomenon. It's intensifying as we speak, along with all the other stridencies and power-grabs of the Left. It's only reasonable that it should be thus: the Left is growing quite desperate.

The tactic must not be allowed to succeed. If you can help the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or the Institute for Justice, which also pursues this sort of villainy, please do so. After all, as the Left knows full well, "the children are our future."

Run, Alan, Run!

2004-08-05T07:34:00.000-04:00

Alan Keyes is said to be seriously considering running for United States Senator from Illinois against Democratic "rising star" Barack Obama. The proposition troubles him for reasons of federalism...well, to be candid, it troubles me, too, on the same grounds...but he appears to be leaning toward the necessity of it.

Keyes has been one of my heroes ever since I first read one of his columns. He's passionate about freedom, highly articulate, possesses a well-defined and wholseome morality, and can trade punches with the toughest political combatants currently loose. I'd like to see him do this.

Carpetbagging? Yes, somewhat. But perhaps this was inevitable. Robert Kennedy did it. Hillary! [Rodham] [Clinton] did it. The Right didn't set the rules. All we can do is play by them as they stand. Should we once more command the heights with an adequate degree of philosophical unity, we ought to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and put an end to this nonsense.

But until then...!

Strawman Sighted; Burned Same.

2004-08-04T13:32:00.000-04:00

Concerning the biggest news of the hour, Mark Alger reminds us that:

Much will be made of the "fact" that any tax other than the current one (which, of course, since Republicans wish to alter it, must be good and even perfect) will fall heavily on "the poor." This is true, because all taxes fall most heavily on those least able to pay. This is not a license to "soak the rich," but rather a mandate to be certain that all taxes rest lightly on all -- using the ability of the least [able] to pay to set the bar.

Time was, Americans would not have needed to be told this. The American Revolution was a revolution against unjust taxation -- taxation levied primarily for the benefit of English manufacturers and landlords who saw the American colonies as a captive market, and used their influence over Parliament and the Crown to secure taxes they hoped would prevent the emergence of competitive American industries.

Were taxes collected solely for the maintenance of national defense and the justice system, they wouldn't lie heavily on anyone who earned his own way. In any event, the fair tax plan includes provisions for a cost-of-living rebate, so the objection is specious from the start.

Blackout!

2004-08-04T07:07:00.000-04:00

It's been three days since Dennis Hastert proclaimed that repealing the income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax or Value-Added Tax (VAT) would be a priority goal for the second Bush Administration. The entire Internet Commentariat is buzzing over the news. Yet not one major Old Media outlet has seen fit to mention it.

Don't take my word for it. Go to Google News and do a search on:

Hastert "income tax" "national sales tax"

I got six hits -- and the only prominent Old Media site among them was that of the Washington Times.

If you wanted hard evidence that the Old Media are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, you have it right there.

"When all the errors are in the bank's favor, you can be forgiven for thinking there's more than sloppy arithmentic at work." -- Me.

The Call To The Colors

2004-08-03T08:13:00.000-04:00

The Hastert proposal to end the income tax and abolish the IRS, news of which has been carefully ignored by the Old Media but which has thundered from one end of the Internet to the other, is the best possible reason to get behind every GOP Congressional or Senatorial candidate within reach and push them all into office.

Consider: the Democrats have filibustered federal district court appointments and deputy undersecretaries of the Cabinet. There's no slightest chance they'd refrain from filibustering this. If pressed, they might even do it the hard way, occupying the Senate microphone continuously until the Republicans throw their hands up in surrender.

There's only one way to prevent a filibuster in the Senate: cloture. It takes a 60-vote majority.

Find the GOP's federal legislative candidates in your area, and contact their campaign organizations. Get those candidates to promise in public that they'll support the Hastert / Bush proposal. Assure them that if they do, you'll back them to the hilt.

Perhaps we can get Kate involved with this. Cuteness like hers should be good for three or four Senate seats all by itself, wouldn't you say?

A Genius Is Among Us

2004-08-02T08:02:00.000-04:00

First he gave us a story of spiritual affliction, a dark urban fantasy whose protagonists appeared to be doomed, until trust and resolve brought a brilliant light out of their despair.

Then he gave us a tale of yearning and madness, in which two deeply troubled men with complementary gifts found their purposes in living.

Then he gave us a story of a vocation lost to tragedy, by a man whose faith was renewed through great trial, endurance and the loving bonds of family.

Today he gives us a disturbing tableau, a hazily Utopian idyll from the days when men sought to perfect themselves in isolation from other men, and succumbed to their own hidden savagery more often than not.

His name is M. Night Shyamalan, and we are supremely fortunate to be alive in the days of his artifice.

Go see The Village. Don't read the reviews; every one of them is wrong from the first word to the last. Don't ask others who've already seen it "what it's about." I won't tell you any more about it here; to give you substantive information about it could not help but spoil one of more of its many pleasures.

Go and puzzle over the questionable sociopolitical premises, the delicate involutions of the script, and the ambiguities of setting and motif. Go and enjoy the fine performances by Cherry Jones, Sigourney Weaver, and Joaquin Phoenix. Go and thrill to the Oscar-caliber depictions by the great William Hurt, and by newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard as his blind but fiercely courageous daughter.

Go, and ponder, and give thanks for the genius of M. Night Shyamalan.

Overload In Progress

2004-08-01T08:39:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been taking on commitments the way a holed ship takes on water, with about the same result: I'm foundering. To those who've been waiting for a reply to an E-mail, my apologies; I do try to answer most of them, but these days my free time is nonexistent, and the wait can be protracted. To those who've been wondering about a promised article at the Palace, hang in there. I'll almost certainly get to it, given time.

Time is something one cannot make, store up, rewind nor recycle. Often I've wished that I had back some of the time I wasted as a young man. No dice.

Is there something you've been putting off "until I get around to it"? Is it on the back burner because it's genuinely of low priority, or because you're reluctant to face its challenges and exertions?

Attend to your family's needs, however unpleasant or strenuous the task might be. The real needs, that bear on security, responsibility, and moral development. Not the whinings for a pair of designer sneakers, a new car, or a vacation in Aruba.
Deal with your personal shortcomings, particularly your failures of initiative or character. Don't leave the apologies and forgivenesses for your deathbed -- or your will.
Think through the problems that you've tried to suppress. You know which ones those are. Some of them are wounds you can't afford to let fester. They're the ones a mental mumble rises to occlude, the moment you try to address them. They're the ones where you think, "Damn! I haven't vacuumed out the basement in five years! I'd better get to it right away," in preference to confronting them. Which is stronger: you or your weaknesses?
Learn what you need to learn. Everyone has something in that bin. What's in yours?
Get right with God.

You know not the day nor the hour.

And The Chorus Sings

2004-08-01T08:20:00.000-04:00

In last week's Sunday New York Times, public editor Daniel Okrent did something that astonished the paper's readers: he admitted that the Times has a liberal-left bias. I wrote a bit about it here.

Clearly, Okrent's statement was the sort that would evoke feedback from the Times's readership. I've been curious to see what slice of that feedback the Times would choose to print. Well, it's arrived, and it's 100% liberal.

Read 'em yourself. The letters that don't denigrate conservatives' moral standing denigrate our intelligence. According to the letter writers, either we accept political dogmas passively from our pastors and cleave to them under pain of eternal damnation, or we just picked them up somewhere because they sounded good, confirmed our prejudices, and we're too stupid to understand the "evidence" against them. Given such reactions, liberals should express no further surprise when a conservative candidate beats a liberal one even though "nobody I know voted for him."

The overall thrust of the letters printed, that the Times should be a liberal-left publication, begs an important question: Are these letters representative of the letters received? If they are, then conservatives have already tuned out the Times's sentiments; the Times can no longer influence the way we think. If they're not, then the Times has once again decided to suppress criticism of its journalistic policies for the sake of a happy face.

Let us mourn the death of a once-great newspaper.

A Platinum Member?

2004-07-31T10:13:00.000-04:00

How on Earth did the Republican Party know that about me? I'd thought that only a select few were privy to my most intimate secret: that I have a...

Oops, wait. Wrong predicate.

The letter I've just received from the Republican Party is addressed to "Dear Fellow Republican," and this plastic card, which looks very much like a credit card, entitles the holder to...well...not a lot:

This Platinum Card has been issued to the bearer by the Republican National Committee in recognition of an extraordinary level of commitment to the Republican ideals and values that are the foundation of our Party and our country.

The bearer of this card should be given special consideration by all Republican leaders as one who has provided the lifeblood of our Party over many years.

If this Platinum Card is lost, please contact the Republican National Committee and provide the Member Number shown on the front, so we may arrange its prompt return to the owner.

And of course, there's a space for my Authorized Signature.

Does the RNC know that I'm a registered Democrat -- don't faint; it's so I can louse up their primaries by voting to nominate the biggest idiots -- and was a high official in the Libertarian Party for several years, but have never been a member of any Republican organization?

Of course, the Card is accompanied by a solicitation for funds:

So please: when you return your Platinum Card Receipt Confirmation, include your gift of at least $25 to join the RNC. President Bush has never needed your leadership more -- and never has the value to our nation of your extraordinary patriotism been so evident.

It's clever, I'll give them that. A lot of folks will cruise past the "Dear Fellow Republican" part and infer that this really is some sort of individual recognition. Considering how clever it is, I might send them a few bob.

But seriously, "fellow Republicans," I'm considerably more "republican" than the majority of you are; I don't know if I want to lower my standards by subordinating my convictions to the desires of your vote-maximizing club. And does President Bush really need my leadership? I'd have thought he saw things the other way around. But if it's really the way you say, just give Dubya the Palace's URL and tell him to do exactly what it says there. (No, the bit about paying me a very large salary to be his chief advisor and sole speechwriter is not optional.)

Encouragement

2004-07-31T09:09:00.000-04:00

Sarah of Trying To Grok complains of an ailment much like one that has afflicted me. However, she winds up with an exhortation to stay strong.

I don't know if Sarah's a Palace reader, but from the sound of her plaint, she's weary of exactly what's enervated me. Still, if she can soldier on, I suppose I can, too.

Someday, this war will be over, or I'll be safely and cozily dead. And frankly, I'll settle for whichever of those arrives first.

Marketing Toward The Future

2004-07-31T06:26:00.000-04:00

Some years ago, a major computer equipment firm decided that, to improve its future market, it would heavily discount its equipment to institutions of higher education. It hoped thereby to predispose college students toward thinking of it first when, later in life, they became involved in the acquisition of computers.

Excuse me! Did I say a computer equipment firm? So sorry. It's been done several times, by several different firms. The first instance I know of was by IBM, but Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems have all adopted comparable policies.

There's nothing dishonorable about this tactic, and it does help university computing departments stretch their budgets. However, I'm not sure how well it works. With computers, at least. After all, the damned things are forever changing. Even for those of us whose lives are completely wrapped around them, keeping abreast of developments is very difficult.

Speaking of "keeping a breast," I note that a rather well known maker of, ah, "softwear" has decided that it's time to sow a few seeds in the college field. Yes, you guessed it! Victoria's Secret is going after the college gals.

I don't know if this application of the tactic will be any more effective than its uses by computer makers -- after all, fashion changes at least as swiftly as computers do -- but I certainly hope it is! As blogcolleague Mark Alger likes to say, "Screw feminism: Celebrate your babe-ness!"

Hey, does anyone have the phone number of the marketing director at Manolo Blahnik?

HUH??

2004-07-31T06:03:00.000-04:00

A commenter has posted this link at Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs:

President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger -- who'd been accused of stealing classified material from the National Archives -- has been cleared of all wrongdoing.

The National Archives and the Justice Department have concluded nothing is missing and nothing in the Clinton administration's record was withheld from the 9-11 Commission.

The Wall Street Journal reports archives staff have accounted for all classified documents Berger looked at.

Late last year they asked investigators to see if the former national security adviser removed materials during his visits.

Berger's lawyers said his client had inadvertently removed several photocopies of reports, but later returned them.

I, a Googlemaster of some renown, am unable to find any reference to this "story" on any other news site. Does anyone have any additional information?

The House That Ruth Will Not Have Built

2004-07-30T07:49:00.000-04:00

From the above-linked article, it appears that the YankeeNets corporation has decided to build a new Yankee Stadium, across the street from the old one in the Bronx.

The total cost of the project has been estimated at $750 million. However, the Yankees are asking the City for $450 million in "public infrastructure investment."

There is no more fanatical Yankee fan than I, but the idea that a sports franchise -- especially the Yankees, the most financially successful franchise in sports history -- could receive close to half a billion dollars in public subsidy so that it can improve its owners' profits is simply obscene.

Any New Yorkers who are reading this should write their councilmen, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki about this proposal today -- in the negative.

Faith In What?

2004-07-29T07:14:00.000-04:00

I find it amusing that the Democrats are only now becoming concerned about their huge deficit among religious Americans -- and more than amusing that they should be trying to fan-dance their social-welfare statism as compatible with the dictates of the faiths most Americans profess.

Are the following Democratic or Republican positions?

Preferential treatment for homosexuals and legal penalties for organizations that exclude or otherwise disapprove of homosexuals.
Abortion on demand, at any stage of gestation, at taxpayer expense.
Abortion on demand for minors, without a requirement that their parents be consulted.
Aggressive sex education throughout grammar and high school.
Promotion of homosexuality, bestiality, S&M, and other deviances as "equally valid lifestyles."
Expulsion of all manifestations of religion from the public square (and especially the public schools), even when conducted entirely by private parties at their own expense.
Taxpayer funding for the support of illegitimate children, lives of indolence and intoxication, and the production and display of obscene art.
Forcible interference in parental decisions about child rearing and child care by "Child Welfare Services" bureaucrats and "Family Courts."
Opposition to the involvement of religious organizations in charity.
Opposition to school choice programs that would include religious schools.
Coercion of religious employers into providing employee "benefits" (e.g., "medical insurance" that would pay for contraceptives, abortions, or sex changes) that clash with the doctrines of the employer's religion.

...and are they positions that ought to sit well with religious Americans, 74% of whom self-identify as Christians?

The Hits Just Keep On Coming

2004-07-29T06:58:00.000-04:00

The suicide bombing in Iraq on Tuesday killed 68 people, almost all of them Iraqis. Is there anyone out there who still thinks this is about the American intervention?

Iraq is looking at two divergent paths into its future. In one, it surrenders to the terror campaign and becomes another Iran-style theocracy that enforces shari'a, permits no dissent, and executes women for learning how to read. In the other, its people assert some willpower, fortify their borders, and cleanse their country of the terrorists who would force them back into the seventh century on a cascade of blood.

America can still help, but the main effort must come from the Iraqis themselves. In this connection, to import "soldiers" or "police" from other Middle Eastern Islamic countries would be a huge mistake, as none of those countries favor the emergence of a free, strong, prosperous, pro-American Iraq. They'd be "soldiers" and "police" only in name; most of their efforts would go toward undermining the infant Iraqi republic.

We must watch closely.

"Hey, man, I'm a panda!"

2004-07-29T06:47:00.000-04:00

Long, long ago, I discovered the storytelling powers -- and quite extraordinary gift of humor -- of W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham was among the master narrators of his time, and could teach our own a thing or two as well. His short stories are gemlike examples of how to conceive of an effect and bring it off without affect, in part because he wrote consciously, using all the tools at his disposal, and in part because he wrote un-self-consciously, never refraining from a technique because "the critics" might disapprove.

One of Maugham's very best, The Achilles Statue, tells the sad tale of Mrs. Albert Forrester, a high-flown novelist whose books don't sell, despite her exalted status in literary and critical circles. When Mrs. Forrester's husband Albert, who has supported her faithfully for thirty-five years, decides to leave her (after she cuts him cruelly at a meeting of her little salon), she must find a way to support herself for the first time in her life...but I'll leave the rest for you to enjoy on your own.

I mention The Achilles Statue because of one of Maugham's master-strokes in giving us the essence of Mrs. Forrester. He makes a great deal out of her literary gift of humor, such that the reader can hardly imagine why this woman's books don't sell like Beatles concert tickets...and then blindsides us with the revelation that Mrs. Forrester's humor is "a humor of punctuation." Her specialty is the semicolon. As one of her salon guests says, no one can milk all the good clean fun out of a semicolon the way she can.

Which brings me to today's Recommendation. If you have any interest in the technical aspects of the English language, you've probably at least considered buying Lynne Truss's bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Hesitate no longer. For it's no dry exposition over the rules of puncutation, but a hysterical howling delight. It will leave you gasping for breath so often that your Significant Other will dither between calling your doctor and calling the local loony bin.

To judge by this book alone, Miss Truss is one of the most gifted essayists to come out of the Sceptered Isle. Apparently she's making a mark here in America, too. Let her make a mark on you. It'll probably be an apostrophe, but what the hell.

The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds?

2004-07-27T07:24:00.000-04:00

Teresa Heinz Kerry and her "Shove it" remark to a reporter who pursued her about having called her husband's critics "un-American" made a brief starburst on the Net, but, so far, have hardly disturbed the Old Media's somnolence.

It puzzles me that Mrs. Kerry, who controls a large business concern, should be so clueless about the importance of standing behind her own words -- words uttered mere moments before. But then I remember the habitual vacillations and vermiculations of the man she married, who tries his best to stand on both sides of every fence, and it seems more...no, "consistent" is not the right word.

Cognitive Dissonance 101

2004-07-27T07:07:00.000-04:00

The fuel for Democratic Party activism these past two years has been hatred of President Bush. Liberal critics have called Dubya "everything but white," as a friend of mine likes to put it. Despite his Yale degrees, his intelligence is constantly denigrated, yet the same critics imply that he's an evil genius in their next breath. The Clinton-Gore Administration mailed voter identification cards to hundreds of thousands of non-citizen immigrants in 2000, but it's Bush who "stole the election." His tax cuts gave the largest percentage reductions to the lowest income brackets, and resulted in millions of working poor being completely exempt from income tax, but they were "for the rich." Supposedly, he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom for oil, for revenge for his father, at the behest of Dick Cheney, out of a desire to Christianize the Middle East, and because he's a cowboy who likes to play soldier. Despite having appointed Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Rod Paige to the highest federal positions ever occupied by black Americans, he's a savage, Confederacy-venerating racist.

But here's the ultimate condemnation of the president, from the mouth of Jimmy Carter, that fabulously successful former president: Dubya is divisive.

Huh? Say that again.

Broken Promises

2004-07-26T18:06:00.000-04:00

You must be careful about the promises you make.

Engineers largely hate to write English prose. Code, fine. Schematics, okay. But English? That parses? Surely you jest, Fran! (Yes, yes, I'm an obvious exception.)

Unfortunately, there are times when it's necessary. My little group, for example, has to define its own requirements in print before it's allowed to develop what it's been asked for. So I have to flog my engineers into gathering up the appropriate inputs from our customer community -- other engineers -- and then assemble them into comprehensible documents. It's not easy. I've tried everything from candy bars to red-hot pokers, and I've only got about a 50% success rate. The other 50% of the requirements documents, I have to produce myself.

My most recent inducement has been to "think of the possibilities! You're defining your own criteria for success! You can get away with anything!"

It had some effect, until today. Today, one of our customer groups, who signed off on the requirements we presented them four months ago, grabbed a vice-president and thrashed us with him until we agreed to give him something totally different from what they'd originally said they'd wanted and approved after several group reviews. Call it eight man-months of work down the drain.

As we left the fatal meeting, the youngest of my folks, who was principally responsible for the original requirements, said under his breath, "So that's what it feels like."

To which I replied, "Hm? What what feels like?"

He said, "Getting gang-raped in public. But you must be used to it by now. You didn't even twitch."

He's more right than otherwise.

No One Can Sit Between Two Stools

2004-07-26T09:53:00.000-04:00

John Kerry has a tightrope to walk. He should know: he braided it himself, with his ultra-liberal record as a senator.

Rich Lowry, in his column today at National Review Online, opines that Kerry will try to avert the liberal label and maneuver within the "Clinton tradition" of rhetorical pragmatism and moderation. If Lowry is correct, that would put Kerry at odds with his principal backers -- the Kennedy clan -- while unlikely to win the support of independents and moderate Democrats.

That is, he'll be unlikely to win the support of independents and moderate Democrats if conservatives do their job right.

The job is to keep Kerry's record as a sitting senator, including his many very leftist statements on such issues as military procurement, taxation, gun control and abortion, in the public eye and mind continuously from now to November 2. A sustained campaign of simple dissemination of easily verified facts will keep Kerry off-balance on his tightrope. Given his poor speaking skills and tendency toward public gaffes ("I voted for his $87 billion before voting against it"), we shouldn't need to nudge him much to get him to fall.

We know the Old Media won't do it. It's up to the New Media. It's up to us.

May The Best Wife Win

2004-07-25T12:31:00.000-04:00

Could there be a greater contrast between Teresa Heinz Kerry and Laura Bush?

To me, it speaks volumes that John Kerry has bound himself to a woman as vain, obnoxious, and boring as Teresa, while Dubya won the heart of gracious, self-effacing, well-spoken Laura. Of course, being a rather traditional wife, Mrs. Bush wouldn't appeal to the Democratic Party's feminist auxiliary. They'd insist on a First Lady who'd cut her own channel in the world, who'd built up her own fortune and reputation, who'd been a force for virtue and justice, who...wait a minute, Teresa Heinz hasn't done any of those things, has she?

More should be made of the sort of character each of these very different women preferred for her husband.

A Lance Through The Heart

2004-07-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

I never took much interest in competitive cycling. Even so, Lance Armstrong's superb performance at this year's Tour De France has me unreasonably charged up. I can't wait to hear that he's won his sixth consecutive Tour, and I'll be dejected if I hear otherwise.

The reports of spectator abuse being showered on Armstrong are incredibly infuriating...but given France, highly predictable, indeed, completely in character.

The French have come to hate America and all things American with a ferocity that approaches madness. That an American -- worse, a Texan -- should have mastered this sport, so closely identified with Europe, in which all the past greats have been Europeans and a Frenchman, Jacques Anquetil, is co-holder of the record that American is poised to break, is more than their flaccid souls can endure. It's brought the less-well-hinged among them to the ragged edge of violence.

Woodrow Wilson allowed Georges Clemenceau to dictate the partition of Germany at the Versailles peace treaty talks after World War I. Dwight Eisenhower arranged for De Gaulle's Free French Army to be the first into Paris after the D-Day invasion. Later, he committed the United States to the support of the re-establishment of France's colonial position in Indochina. But then we went and destroyed the Soviet Union and liberated Eastern Europe and invaded Iraq without their approval! How can we be so cruel to the nation that gave us the Terror, the guillotine, Maximilien Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Dreyfus scandal, the Vichy Republic, Eurocommunism, dirigisme, the Vietnam War, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre? Why can't we leave them a little something?

Well, their wines are still pretty good. The kind you drink, I mean.

One Coin, Two Sides

2004-07-25T11:24:00.000-04:00

These past couple of days, Connie Du Toit has published My Business, and Can And Should, whose central thesis was the old truism that not everything we can do is therefore something we should do. Today, Steven Den Beste reverses the mirror: he writes about how not everything we'd like to do is something we can do.

Read them all. Weeping is optional.

Hidden Treasures

2004-07-25T07:22:00.000-04:00

Glass Hammer's Shadowlands has been out for a few months now, and in my hands for just about as long, and I've listened to it a huge number of times. Though the entire disc is superb, I keep returning to one track with a sort of bemused wonder: their prog-rock cover of Dan Fogelberg's love ballad, "Longer." (Apparently I'm not the only one; since the Shadowlands release, several progressive-music radio stations have reported receiving more requests to play that track than any other.)

If you haven't heard this piece, you'll have a hard time understanding what I'm about to say, so there's no time to lose! Run, do not walk, to the Glass Hammer Website and order Shadowlands. Wait at the mailbox until it arrives. Play it for yourself once all the way through, then play "Longer" about a dozen times. Then ask yourself these two questions:

Why did Glass Hammer choose this piece, which on its face seems so distant from their usual material, to cover in their unique symphonic-progressive style?
How did they make it work so well?

The Dan Fogelberg original is beautiful, but it's also very much in the tradition of the acoustic love ballad: apparently simple, meant to be sung and played at a low volume, without much elaboration or development. The lyric carries the song; the accompaniment is just that. The Glass Hammer cover is a much different thing. For one thing, it's more than twice as long, and more instrumental than vocal. It develops in movements, each with a dominant melody, and progresses to a unified final presentation. There are distinct intermezzos in the piece where keyboard wizard Fred Schendel and guitarist Walter Moore elaborate on its themes with brilliant instrumental work. Though it's filled with energy throughout, it rises in intensity as it goes, concluding at a peak of exuberance so compelling that even your humble commentator, whose voice sounds like a orangutan in heat screeching through a rusty bullhorn, has to sing along.

Two quite different songs...yet it's the same song.

I'm no musician, and no composer, so the following should be taken as an enthusiast's guess and nothing more. Still, it strikes me that there's something important to be pondered here.

As with all other human action, when a musician decides to do a cover, he has a reason for it. Maybe the song is especially popular and he just wants to get on the gravy train. Or maybe it's uniquely well matched to his vocal and instrumental assets. Maybe he just loves the song for itself and the way it speaks to him. Or maybe he sees more deeply into the song than even its composer did.

I can imagine Fred Schendel listening to the Fogelberg original and saying to himself, "Man! Listen to all those subsidiary melodies! Gorgeous! Did he do that on purpose? If so, why didn't he pull them forward a lot more?" I can imagine him sitting at his bank of keyboards and elaborating variations and progressions on each of the sub-vocal melodies, musing over further instrumental and choral enhancement, a key or meter transition here or there, and coming up with a plan. I can imagine him pulling bassist Steve Babb, guitarist Walter Moore, and drummer Matt Mendians into the studio by their shirtsleeves, all but jumping up and down as he exhorts them to "Listen to this! Just listen a minute!"

And of course, Schendel being the genius he is, he'd infect his fellow geniuses, and they'd live in the studio, subsisting on pizza and soda, until they'd laid down the track just so, in Glass Hammer's symphonic-progressive style.

It works as well as it does because the hidden treasures of melody and possible variations thereof that Fogelberg declined to exploit are precisely the sort of thing with which the Glass Hammer style works best. For Fogelberg, they were grace notes; for Glass Hammer, they were the heart of the matter.

Nor did the transmogrification destroy or diminish the piece. The love ballad is still there, but now, instead of being simply a gentle, dreamy statement of devotion, it's a shout of joy that rings from the heavens. It's all that it was, and more.

Two quite different songs...yet it's the same song.

Treasures are hidden all around us, within everything we see, hear, or touch. Treasures are hidden within each of us as well. To some they're finished products, to be taken as and for what they are. But to others, they're ingredients, or perhaps departure points, from which to create still greater beauties, higher achievements, finer pleasures, more worshipful worship and more joyous joy.

Honor them.

Why "Eternity Road"?

2004-07-24T06:48:00.000-04:00

It has nothing to do with the Jack McDevitt novel, which I haven't read, and only a little to do with the old Moody Blues song from To Our Children's Children's Children. It's more a recognition of the path we all share.

Every step brings us closer to eternity. None can be retraced. At the end, when your last step has been taken, your story will be complete. Those you leave behind will remember such portions of it as they, not you, choose to recall.

Therefore, make each step a good one: purposeful, well considered, and of wholesome intent. Do nothing out of pique over trivia or disdain for the moment and its setting. Even if, upon the instant of your passing, you're entirely forgotten by the world of men, there's still your pride to consider.

God is watching, too. Don't make Him chide you for wasting His gifts. You wouldn't like it.

They Say That I Am Mad, But I Am Not Mad

2004-07-24T06:37:00.000-04:00

The brain is a very flexible instrument, especially on short sleep rations.

Our morning routine includes feeding and watering three dogs, five cats, and a nice new holly hedge. The cats share a single large, very heavy water bowl, one of the more awkward of the necessities our brood has imposed on us, since for no clear reason April Come She Will gets a charge out of turning a water bowl over and playing in what follows. (We're not sure April is really a cat.)

So, this morning after I'd fed and watered the dogs, I asked the C.S.O., "Anything left undone?"

Her reply: "Only the big cat water."

Upon which I immediately began to spin out a tourism pitch for Big Cat Water, Wyoming, where the famed herding cats of the Old West were bred and the Siamota Indians still perform their quaint propitiatory rituals to Bubastis the Goddess of cats twice daily (Adults $3.50, children under 14 not admitted). Come see the lovely mass burial pits and our brand new ultra-modern casino! Ample parking and lots of guided tours.

Why yes, I am allowed to run around loose. Why do you ask?

Don't Try This At Home

2004-07-24T06:35:00.000-04:00

Among the reasons to -- or not to -- get up when I do is the "segue" between the dream world and that of reality. Just this morning, when I arose, the C.S.O. asked why I was spouting a line of gibberish, which made me start listening to myself. What was emanating from my mouth was gibberish -- literal nonsense syllables -- so why was I spouting it?

I free-associated for a minute -- an effective technique for recalling dreams -- and remembered the one I'd been having as I awoke. I was on line outside a recording studio. Inside was a band the assembled crowd wanted to meet -- but for the privilege, each of us had to prove to the gatekeeper that he could "sing scat."

I can't remember what band it was, though, or whether I got in. Sigh.

None So Blind Dept., Part Two

2004-07-23T07:18:00.000-04:00

One of the facts of software development most resistant to improvement is the ratio between the design-and-code phase and the debug-and-test phase. Over the entire history of software engineering, this ratio has never dipped below 2 hours debug-and-test for every 1 hour of design-and-code. On projects of high complexity, it can exceed 3 and threaten 4.

There are many reasons for this, and all of them are highly intractable. In light of the history, you'd think managements would proportion their schedules and make their commitments of resources accordingly, wouldn't you?

Well, you'd be wrong.

My shop has just demonstrated yet again that Scott Adams's "Dilbert Principle" is truly a law of nature. For a project which will require 35 software engineers and is planned to extend over six years, there will be exactly one laboratory in which those 35 engineers can debug and test their programs.

The reason? The principal component required by the laboratory costs $150,000, quantity one. So the powers that be are only buying one. They've responded to the anguished cries from below by telling us to "manage it well."

Did I mention what we're being paid for this product? It's a little over $500,000,000. And don't ask about the penalties for late completion.

Who Needs The French?

2004-07-23T07:02:00.000-04:00

Most Americans are unaware that winemaking is an industry pursued in all fifty states.

I live in New York, the #2 producer of American wines. Some of our stuff is splendid, and some of it is vinegar. However, one of the nicest things about this state is that one can go on any of several wine-oriented vacations, according to which part of the state one favors.

Long Island's North Fork has several fine wineries. Much of the summer traffic these past few years has been in the form of tasting tours among those establishments. Though Long Island wines tend to be rather drier than I like, I can commend the experience to anyone who enjoys wine and the relaxed beauties of Long Island's "other" tourist area.

My favorite winy destination, though, is the Seneca Wine Trail. This extraordinary strip of continental New York, concentrated along the western shore of Seneca Lake, boasts 22 different wineries, every one of them with multiple awards to its credit. Several companies have packaged holiday-themed bus tours of the wineries, with accommodations included, at reasonable cost.

My personal favorite: The Earle Estates Meadery on Route 14 in Himrod, NY. If you haven't had their dessert wines, many of which are made from variant fruits such as blueberries and cherries, you haven't lived.

Why is wine on my mind at this early hour? Ah, but is it early, or very, very late?

None So Blind Dept.

2004-07-23T06:45:00.001-04:00

The Du Toits are in their best form in dissecting two rampant idiocies from recent news.

In her opus Wrong Way: DO NOT ENTER, Connie Du Toit casts a harsh and entirely accurate light on the fatuity of erecting a new level of bureaucracy in the intelligence services -- services already hamstrung by stifling levels of bureaucratic regulation, supervision, infighting, and general organizational naughtiness. Having been on the front lines in the "structure wars" during the 1970s and 1980s, I'm here to tell you: the lady knows whereof she speaks.

Kim, meanwhile, administers a thorough whipping to Brazil, for making private citizens' carriage of weapons in public, whether overt or concealed, a crime nationwide: ( http://www.kimdutoit.com/dr/weblog.php?id=P3333 ) The Latin countries have always had proportionately higher homicide rates than the Anglo-Saxon ones -- theories, anyone? -- and there's no evidence to the effect that citizens' guns have anything to do with it. Kim predicts an explosion of violent crime over this enactment, comparable to what Britain has seen, as Brazil's predators capitalize on this new citizen disarmament measure.

The Du Toits are the Blogosphere's gold standard for hard sense. Now, if Kim would just add some punch to his prose by cussing a little...

Juvenilia

2004-07-22T08:34:00.000-04:00

May we please have an end to bad jokes based on Sandy Berger's last name? Granted that the man is a deceitful faex (plural: faeces), every conceivable bad pun and reference to "frying" or "grilling" based on his name has already been made uncountable times. The humor has bled out of the lot of them...if, indeed, there ever is any humor in wisecracks about a man's name.

I will grant a single exemption: to the judge who eventually sentences the former National Security Advisor for his crimes. So if you simply can't help yourself, make haste to get onto the federal bench.

Second Impressions

2004-07-22T07:06:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the rumor campaign -- started and conducted by Democrats and their affiliates -- that Dick Cheney would be dropped from the GOP's 2004 Presidential ticket, one of the most vilified of all Right commentators, Ann Coulter, is looking ever more like a seeress.

In her book Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right, she made a powerful case that the Left-affiliated Old Media deliberately embrace "moderate" Republicans whom they know to be losers. And indeed, this has been the pattern at least since the 1976 nomination contest between Ronald Reagan and President Gerald Ford.

Dick Cheney has done what few other Vice-Presidents have done: he's made the office into a powerful positive contributor to the executive branch. Moreover, he's done so in the face of a determined campaign to bring him down with unfounded accusations of venality and manipulation of President Bush. He could probably out-debate John Edwards even if he were in an induced coma. Of course the Democrats want him off the ticket!

Coulter returns to her thesis from Slander, with a few punchy reminders, in her column of today. Pay close attention. The lady knows her stuff.

Fair And Balanced?

2004-07-21T06:58:00.000-04:00

Don't miss today's column from Brent Bozell at Townhall.com: an evisceration of Robert Greenwald's pseudo-documentary "Outfoxed," in which the filmmaker attempts to pose a case that Fox News is a danger to the body politic.

The most disturbing bit: Greenwald's film climaxes with John Nichols of The Nation stating that Fox must be stopped because it "limits" and "narrows political discourse."

Don't believe the Left's hype about "free speech." The Left has never had a problem with censorship, as long as it gets to do the censoring. Herbert Marcuse was busily advancing a pro-censorship thesis in 1965 in his seminal essay "Repressive Tolerance," which would become gospel to the American Left. Little has changed.

Perhaps Parent Licensure Is A Good Idea

2004-07-21T06:52:00.000-04:00

According to a celebrity-gossip magazine, Michael Jackson is expecting soon to be presented with quadruplets by a contracted host mother. Jackson himself has denied it, and well he should. He'll shortly be tried on ten counts of child molestation and conspiracy to kidnap a child.

I can't decide whether this story or the Amy Richards "selective reduction" story (see below) is the more vomitous. Moving to a fortified mountaintop is looking better and better.

The Fence

2004-07-21T06:42:00.000-04:00

Essentially as expected, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (150 - 6) to condemn the Israeli security fence and demand that it be dismantled.

The UN had no stomach for dealing with the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. It can't quite bring itself to acknowledge the genocide in Sudan, or the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, both of which have obvious intended targets. But a fence? That, though not yet complete, has prevented perhaps a hundred terror bombings in the past year? This must be stopped at once!

Forgive them not, O Lord. They know exactly what they do, and they do it anyway.

Euro-Hissy Fit

2004-07-20T10:24:00.000-04:00

As the above-linked article indicates, Jacques Chirac, premier of France, has announced that Ariel Sharon, premier of Israel, is no longer welcome in France. Why? Because Sharon urged French Jews, who are under a mounting threat from anti-Semitizm propelled in large part by France's swelling Muslim population, to emigrate to Israel for their own safety.

Chirac is probably more accommodating to Yasser Arafat, the mass-murdering head of the Palestinian Authority, than any other statesman alive today. He's famously friendly toward the heads of several Muslim satrapies in which anti-Semitic sentiment runs riot, and has aligned his government with a number of anti-Israel initiatives within the European Union and the United Nations.

Which begs the question: Why does Chirac think Sharon would want to go to France? Does anyone think France is on Sharon's list of preferred destinations?

Another Waste Of Pubic Funds

2004-07-20T06:30:00.000-04:00

A carefully designed, meticulously administered survey of over 330,000 women has produced the conclusion that a woman's sexual pleasure is unrelated to the size of her partner's genital organ. Rather, it depends directly on the degree of engorgement he can achieve and how long he can sustain it.

In other words, just as we've always known, it's not the meat, it's the tumidity.

I Am Gratified...

2004-07-19T18:01:00.000-04:00

...by the explosion of outrage over Amy Richards's story of double infanticide in yesterday's New York Times Sunday Magazine. Today it's the hottest topic on the World Wide Web.

Perhaps we still have consciences after all. Some of us.

Ideas Have Consequences

2004-07-18T19:50:00.000-04:00

Indeed they do.

A young woman by the name of Amy Richards told this shocker to a New York Times reporter. It appeared this morning in the Magazine.

Michelle Malkin has covered it, and Gerard Van der Leun has covered it. Now I have covered it.

That a young woman could be so completely devoid of a sense of responsibility for her actions, and numb to the arbitrariness of her decision, speaks grotesquely of those who will follow us on Earth. We have produced a generation of vipers.

Yet, is it not the case that my generation -- the Boomers -- and that of our parents laid the foundation for Miss Richards' acts of infanticide? Was it not we who glorified sexual pleasure, called it a right, and railed at any imposition of responsibility for the consequences for our indulgences?

All we can do in expiation is to try to counter the ideas that made it thinkable for this morally numb woman to murder two of the three babies she allowed her boyfriend to plant in her womb. The available tools are example, disapproval, and ostracism. It has become obligatory that we use them.

God grant that her surviving child never learns of the fates of his siblings.

Not To Be Missed

2004-07-18T17:33:00.000-04:00

I've just listened to Glass Hammer's Live At NEARfest CD for the third time. It's the sort of experience that makes you feel privileged to be alive, with functioning ears and a soul that can respond to beauty.

The program is almost the same as on their Lex Live DVD, so if you have the one, you might not feel compelled to get the other. But if you love music, by all means add at least one of these extraordinary recordings to your library.

Of course, having music of such power playing does make it just a trifle more difficult to write fiction than it would otherwise be. But hey, all things have their prices.

Strength In Numbers

2004-07-18T13:10:00.000-04:00

Ever get the feeling that, if it weren't for the swaddling "strength in numbers" effect so many interest groups get out of their alignment with the political Left, they'd have no reason to be there?

Why, for example, are most homosexuals Left-aligned? What would protect homosexuals against the violence and indignities they fear better than the right to carry a gun? Which of the two major camps in American politics is more serious about that right?

Why are most conservationists Left-aligned? The free market has done an incomparably better job of preserving woodlands and waterways than government regulation has. The largest polluters in all of history have always been governments.

Why are most black education activists Left-aligned? Leftist policies on education have wrought immense harm on black children, while fattening the treasuries of teachers' unions and insulating "educators" near-perfectly from responsibility for results. You'd think the school choice movement would be immensely attractive to black parents who want a bright future for their kids.

Or...dare I suggest it?...is it that the majorities within these interest groups really are Right-aligned, but it's not in the interests of the Old Media to say so?

How would we find out?

Sometimes It All Works Out

2004-07-18T13:05:00.000-04:00

The above-linked item is courtesy of the wonderful Juliette.

Acquired Tastes

2004-07-18T08:22:00.000-04:00

It's been said of many things -- varieties of food, music, art, humor, entertainment, and other indulgences -- that they're "acquired tastes." That is, you have to accustom yourself to their characteristics by repeated exposure before you actually get to like them.

Which begs the question: What made you want to acquire them in the first place?

I've been puzzling over that one for a long time. I have no blanket answer, except to say that peer pressure appears to play a significant part. But the other side of the coin deserves some attention as well: What of lost tastes, things we once enjoyed but inexplicably ceased to take pleasure in?

Back in college, I was present at one such occasion. A friend named Cris, who'd displayed a long and ardent love for salami, was gnawing on a roll of Hebrew National's best while we played chess when, without warning, he slid back from the board and regarded his salami with something between puzzlement and horror.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

Cris's fixed stare on the object of his former affections did not waver. "I just realized something," he said. "This stuff sucks!"

And for the remainder of our time together in college, I never saw him eat salami again.

To the best of my knowledge, no one is born liking salami. So Cris had both acquired and lost that taste within his young lifetime.

I just had a similar moment, though how long its effects will last remains to be seen. The object? Coffee.

No one's born liking coffee, either. If you enjoy coffee, do you remember how you came to feel that way? If you once enjoyed coffee but no longer do, can you capture the moment in which your tastes flipped over to their present state?

Wait a minute. Sunday mornings without coffee? Gahh.

As Matt Drudge would say: DEVELOPING...

Early Morning Thoughts

2004-07-18T06:52:00.000-04:00

I "have my moments," as the phrase runs, when I'm not a particularly nice person.

I put a lot of time, money, and effort into the Palace. I have a small following there, about two thousand readers who seem to enjoy the result. For me, it's a labor of love. For them, it's "free ice cream," without reciprocal obligation. All that is fine; we're both getting what we want at an acceptable cost.

But I've made it clear on several occasions that there are certain things I won't tolerate. One of those is an attack on me personally by a commenter. I ban such persons immediately, usually to the accompaniment of a verbal backhanding.

Just this morning, I found the following comment attached to a relatively recent essay on the limits of originality in fiction:

Disregard the 'you go, boy!' comments.You decided to quit publishing fiction on your site. You also decided to quit writing it. (I'm not an uninformed respondant, here.)

You can either agonize over the past, or you can get your s**t together and play the game of 'fiction' again. Period....

But don't play the self-pity game. I've done it as well, and all it does is stifle your muse.

The commenter is a person with whom I'd had some enjoyable interchange over the past three years. He'd sold me some good short stories, back when the Palace was publishing fiction. We'd exchanged comments on one another's fiction as mutual friendly critics as well. In fact, he'd made my Christmas list -- and it's not a long list.

He appears to feel that that licenses him to psychologize me in the Comments section at the Palace.

Wrong, Mikal. Not there, and not here. I regard that as a violation of what privacy I retain, to say nothing of the arrogance of offering such an intimate assessment without having been asked. If you simply had to say those things, why didn't you E-mail them to my private address?

Someone who exposes a part of his thinking for the amusement and edification of others ought still to be able to expect some courtesies and a modicum of respect for his privacy. That he should have to say so is a sad comment on our time. That the prod to his saying so arrived from someone he considered a friend makes it an order of magnitude worse.

One of my not-particularly-nice features is that I don't forgive easily. At least, in the opinion of those I haven't yet forgiven.

What "They" Want

2004-07-17T06:48:00.000-04:00

Despite being "off the market" now, I have an enduring interest in the Great American Mating Dance. It's the engineer in me; I can't look at a problem like that without at least trying to solve it, even when I know that no uniform solution can possibly exist. But hey, Turing-undecidability and Schrodinger's Cat have never stopped me either...though I must admit, I do discourage my cats from jumping into opaque boxes with locking lids and electron-width slits in the sides.

The above-linked article on what "singles" are looking for contains several built-in biases, and so should not be considered definitive. However, perhaps because of those biases, it also contains an important truth.

Men do the chasing; women do the choosing.

Too obvious, right? But the Latin roots of "obvious" mean "overlooked."

A young man eager for the affections of a young woman must strive to offer her what she wants. In the large, women's desires are fairly uniform: security, companionship, affection, children, a place of honor in the community. Those are sine qua nons; answering them must be any suitor's first priority. But he must go beyond these things; he must get to know his target lady and speak to her more individual desires. The better he does this, the better is his chance of winning her heart.

Chance only! For she will do the choosing. If she's a woman of quality, the competition will be stiff. All he can do is aver his willingness to cater to her desires, and his ability to fulfill them. If she plucks another suitor from the display case, he has no recourse but to try again.

The linked article's recommendations about humor, etc. are pertinent to how the man ought to present himself, not to a woman's complementary need. I would go further: a woman who feels that she has to improve her fishing technique has got hold of the wrong end of the pole, and is likely to wind up with a loser, or a succession of them.

Yeah, I know. I'm an unreformed male chauvinist pig. So sue me.

Late Evening Thoughts

2004-07-16T22:02:00.000-04:00

It's a few minutes to ten PM, which is rather late by Fortress standards. The C.S.O. is already asleep, but I made the mistake of napping a little earlier, and will have a while to go before I can join her.

The Space Shuttles, designed in the 1970s, are the most complicated machines ever designed and built. Each one contains hundreds of thousands of identifiable parts, of which far too many are moving parts, the engineer's bane. As everyone knows, we've lost two of them, and fourteen of the brave folks who flew in them, to catastrophic failures. I count those two incidents as among the greatest peacetime tragedies I know.

But there's something else about both the Challenger and the Columbia disasters that will forever stick in my mind: In the aftermath of both events, there was furious discussion of what the crews could have done to avert the calamity.

What the crews could have done...!

Yet it's not an entirely fatuous thing to consider. Any individual human being is six or seven orders of magnitude more complex than a Shuttle. A man has billions of available states and an inconceivable number of possible transitions among them. By the Law of Requisite Variety, that makes him far and away the dominant element in any network to which he's connected.

And there's this, too: Thirteen of the fourteen of them were Americans.

One of the signal differences between the American space program and that of the defunct Soviet Union was our divergent attitudes toward what could be expected from our spacefarers. The Soviets gave their cosmonauts very little latitude of action; their flights were heavily controlled from the ground. NASA has always trusted its astronauts with far more control over their vehicles and their missions, even though they're rigorously trained in procedures for responding to foreseeable developments.

NASA's astronauts have always been America's best military aviators. We expect our best men to rise to the occasion, with little consideration for how bad "the occasion" might prove to be. But then, Americans have always expected that of themselves in general.

That says an awful lot about us. It says just as much, of a less complimentary nature, about the peoples of Old Europe, who hate to have to deal with an unpleasant necessity. I'd imagine that our habit of charging into the breach, and our incredulity at their flaccidity in the face of a crisis, is a large part of why they've come resent us.

Generosity

2004-07-16T14:10:00.000-04:00

After this past week's experiences, I suppose I should mention a couple of instances of notable generosity that ought not to fly under the radar.

Since Eternity Road first appeared on Blogspot, I've received three separate offers to re-host it on a more capable platform. I won't mention names here, since the offerers might be swarmed under with requests for free assistance by persons less courteous than myself, but the three of you know who you are, and you have my thanks.

My neighbor to the south, who's twenty years my senior, heard that I was looking into the purchase of a snowblower, and counseled me against it. Actually, what he said was that he'd be perfectly happy to clear my driveway with his snowblower when necesary. What could I say?

Then there's my landscaper again. He cast a gimlet eye upon the dimple his crew had to make in the line of my new hedge (to miss burying my water meter), and volunteered to build a decorative stone well around it -- at no charge to me.

It can be awfully hard to stay properly cynical under a barrage like that.

Anarchism

2004-07-15T07:25:00.000-04:00

Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority has been conducting an exchange with several other persons about the comparative merits of anarchism and constitutional republicanism (note the small 'r'). It's a fascinating topic, about which I expect I'll be writing a screed quite soon.

One thing about the subject that's stuck with me is the importance of the observer's perspective. We who are embedded -- I forbear to say "stuck" -- in a governmental order take many things about it for granted, most notably the legitimacy of government's unique privilege of coercing us. Would an Aldebaranian see things the same way? Or would he regard the State as one more player on an essentially anarchic field, which has succeeded in gaining a privilege from the consensus that the consensus denies to other actors (e.g., "private" criminals)?

For additional confusion, note that all States, large or small, young or old, powerful or weak, are in a condition of anarchy with respect to one another. None of them concedes the inherent legitimacy of any other's coercive privileges. Their relations are based on the more pragmatic concession of not invading just yet.

Funny, isn't it? Anarchy, supposed by many to lead inevitably to unacceptable violence and disharmony, appears unavoidable at the inter-State level. But we accept that tacitly, because up to this point, all the alternatives proposed or attempted have been far worse. Will that ever change -- or should we pray that it won't?

You've Been Wondering...

2004-07-15T07:06:00.000-04:00

...how I do all this?

1) I get up at 4 AM. Yes, weekends too.
2) I don't watch broadcast television, except for the occasional sporting event.
3) When I'm not reading, nor working for pay, nor tending to my home and family, I'm writing.
4) I exploit random bizarrenesses that intrude upon my thoughts. Many of them become either the subjects of essays, or bad jokes used to punctuate the sonority thereof.
5) No manatees were harmed in the making of this post.
6) I have a large staff of ghostwriters. My favorite is named Casper.
7) Too many people know too much. I might just be one of them, so don't tell!
8) Is that your black helicopter double-parked over there?
9) Reusing one's best ideas is permissible over a sufficiently long period of time, as most readers have short memories and won't notice.
10) When all else fails, I just call someone names. It works for the Democrats, doesn't it?

Intellectual Property

2004-07-15T06:56:00.000-04:00

Mark Alger has been commenting on Intellectual Property issues. It's a fascinating topic, on which I too have written a tract. If you have an interest, stop by Mark's place and toss your two cents into the kitty. The stakes are high.

WHAT??

2004-07-14T11:55:00.000-04:00

There's one phrase I never want to hear from a so-called conservative: "his 'fair share' of taxes." Donald Luskin committed that gaffe today at National Review Online, in discussing the finances of Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Frankly, I think well of, and wish well to, those who manage to minimize their tax burdens, no matter what means they use. If Mrs. Kerry had managed to pay zero in taxes, I'd think even better of her. About 80 cents out of every dollar spent by the federal government today is spent on unConstitutional activities. The only way to put a stop to that is to choke off the revenue stream. If that has the incidental consequence of enriching a few folks, I have no problem with it -- especially if one of them is me.

Food Fight!

2004-07-14T11:54:00.000-04:00

It's time to Blog It Forward a bit.

If you don't know of Live From The Guillotine, run by Lana, repent your sins and get over there at once. Lana doesn't post a lot, but her stuff is quirky and interesting, especially her comments about family life. And she has this huge collection of shoes, too.

Wince And Nod -- "Uncomfortable truths, gently expressed" -- is a fine bit of work that deserves wider readership. "Wince" prefers to remain unidentified -- "a mystery wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside an enigma" -- but his interests range widely. He provides many links to interesting stories and opinion pieces by others. Recently his wife has begun to contribute, as well.

Finally, one of my newer addictions is The Running Conservative, a.k.a. Kate. It's unfair that a fifteen-year-old should already be this good a writer and thinker. And she's cute, too. Make sure you stop by and tell her so.

Come On In, The Water's Fine!

2004-07-14T11:53:00.000-04:00

Joe Lemyre of Cold Fury recently left a humorous comment at the Palace to the effect that my "prodigious output" was making the rest of the Internet Commentariat look bad. I got quite a giggle out of that, as I usually have much more to say than I allow myself, owing to time pressures.

But Joe might want to talk to Thomas Sowell, too. Dr. Sowell, one of the titans of libertarian-conservative thought, has been producing four, five, or six columns every week for the past several months. All of them are replete with his usual penetration, insight, and understanding.

Any interest in starting a blog, Dr. Sowell? I know this guy...

Words To Live By

2004-07-14T11:52:00.000-04:00

Joe Scarborough, formerly a Congressman from Florida, has an excellent, angry article at Jewish World Review today about his "issues." Mr. Scarborough is offended at the hypocrisy of the media, the Democratic Party's national candidates, their backers and their propagandists, a court or two, and a few other things. Read and enjoy.

Our society is developing a split personality over anger. Some folks believe that outward expressions of anger are never justified. Others feel they're always justified. The former group tends to be conservative, and the latter group tends to be insane.

Anger, like force, has its proper targets. As Sherlock Holmes (portrayed by the brilliant Christopher Plummer) said to the prime minister of England (portrayed by the immortal Sir John Gielgud) at the climax of the magnificent movie Murder By Decree, "If I am offensive, you may take it that I am offended!"

Comments Are Now Wide Open

2004-07-13T18:08:00.000-04:00

There's no longer a need to register with Blogger if you'd like to comment. MEMO TO ME: Check all the settings tabs when you make a change!

Talent Is Where You Find It

2004-07-13T12:09:00.000-04:00

I am repeatedly amazed by the quality of the young men and women mustering out of America's armed forces.

A young man who's just joined my development team -- let's call him John -- had just mustered out of the Marines, where he'd spent eight years and earned a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. Under normal circumstances, someone in John's position would be expected to spend between three and six months absorbing enough of the huge knowledge domain required by avionic software before he could become productive. But as of today, on his sixth day of work, John is already a positive contributor.

Where do America's armed services find young people of this caliber? They don't. Young people of this caliber find them.

Don't Kid Yourself

2004-07-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

In today's National Review Online, Canadian analyst Dan Dunsky opines that the Conservative movement in Canada is partly propelled by immigration:

Furthermore, while immigrants to Canada have tended in the past to vote Liberal, immigration now primarily comes from socially conservative countries. Though evidence is scarce, this at least suggests a possible openness to conservative ideas.

There's conservatism and conservatism, Dan. Ask Grover Norquist.

If It Isn't Obvious By Now...

2004-07-13T05:07:00.000-04:00

I am dichromatic. In more common parlance, color-blind.

There have been times when this was a considerable nuisance, but I never expected it to affect my writing. And I thought a nice patriotic red / white / blue palette would be safe!

To those Palace devotees who've written to criticize the color scheme there: Suggestions are always appreciated. But please remember that I have to muddle along alone here. I'm my own Webmaster, and have no one to vet your recommendations. So please be nice.

Even Smart People Can Stop Thinking Now And Then

2004-07-12T18:32:00.000-04:00

Professor Glenn Reynolds, the illustrious InstaPundit, opines that the current push for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman and nothing else is:

a pointless exercise driven by social conservatives to fire up their base

Why? Mightn't the opponents of same-sex marriage sincerely believe it to be the death knell for the functional and meaningful institution of marriage, that's underpinned all of human society for all of recorded history? Or does he have some reason to believe that the backers of the Federal Marriage Amendment can't possibly be sincere?

Would Professor Reynolds think me insincere for opposing State-recognized same-sex marriage? If not, how do I differ from the backers of the FMA?

The Head & Shoulders Principle

2004-07-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, a long-time colleague of mine brought a newer colleague to my lair, thinking I would want to meet him. The newer colleague, whom we shall call Smith, has some experience in my specialty. Moreover, he insisted that I hear all about it, right then and there. Within a couple of minutes, and with absolutely no knowledge of the project I'm working on or the nature of my customer community, Smith was telling me that what I'd been trying to do wasn't what I really wanted to do.

This is not how one makes a good first impression on others. Nor am I likely to forget it any time soon. It was a good reminder of just how repellent arrogance of any kind can be.

First Steps

2004-07-12T17:11:00.000-04:00

Connie Du Toit and others have urged me to get a "regular" blog. Okay, here we go.

I'm unsure how this will enhance the experience of my readers, but I'll try anything once.

Watch this space.

All my best,
Francis W. Porretto,
Designated Trash Picker
Eternity Road
(Coming soon to a spiral galaxy near you!)