The Whip Of The Week

"Kucinich is a gagging little congenital bellhop and that "Reasonable Profits Board" is right out of Atlas Shrugged. The name was changed to avoid violating her copyright."

(Martin McPhillips -- Facebook)

"The Sword That Heals"

"There were no more powerful moments in the Birmingham episode than during the closing days of the campaign, when Negro youngsters ran after white policemen, asking to be locked up. There was an element of unmalicious mischief in this. The Negro youngsters, although perfectly willing to submit to imprisonment, knew that we had already filled up the jails, and that the police had no place left to take them.

When, for decades, you have been able to make a man compromise his manhood by threatening him with a cruel and unjust punishment, and when suddenly he turns upon you and says: 'Punish me. I do not deserve it. But because I do not deserve it, I will accept it so that the world will know that I am right and you are wrong,' you hardly know what to do. You feel defeated and secretly ashamed. You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force."

(Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Why We Can't Wait", 1964, chapter 2, "The Sword That Heals", p. 30)

The Whip Of The Week

"The Rhino Republicrats don't know they have a rock star in their stable; or more likely they just want to keep selling Disco..."

(Jeff Zienty -- Facebook)

A Specter Is Haunting This Election

Word on the midnight wires has it that Kathryn Jean Lopez and Ann Coulter whirled the night away on the painted ponies of a carousel in Mt. Carmel, California, on the news out of Dixville Notch. Spleen futures are exploding in morning trading.

Spleen Shares Roundup

"Just one of a million points of light in our market outlook!"

(Splice Ripman -- Spleenco Vice-President for Biocommerce Operations)

"In Terms Of Centuries"

"And that you see no solution other than ruin."

No, sir. That's quite incomplete. When we talk about "solution", it has to imply the effection of things that would actually make better human life practically possible. In politics, freedom is the whole answer, but politics is not the whole of culture. Now, within the constraint of politics, the theory and practice are actually quite simple: anything that is not freedom must be reversed. (Because of the state of philosophy now, there very probably must be a discussion of what freedom actually is, which will, at least as probably, devolve to metaphysics and the whole question of existence and identity. It should be short and to the point, however, with all bullshitter clowns relegated to the kids' playroom while the adults figure it out. Do you hear me in your grave Richard Rorty, you stoopid prancing piece of shit?)

Here is a very serious concern, to me: if all of American politics were sorted-out to my liking, instantly, I am not at all certain that there would actually be enough Americans who could live it. That once required a certain and historically unique grasp of values, which is quite -- quite -- beyond the competence of whole multitudes in my daily observation, now.

It's a very open question whether it's too late to save any of this. We'll be lucky if a small torch of American ethical theory burns anywhere through what might very well be coming: a Dark Age to revive the name -- and concept -- from recent revisions which attempt to deny that the last one ever really existed.

I'm not kidding when I scale this matter in terms of centuries. And that is part of why I view presidential elections as less than a drip off the end of my dick.

(Facebook note)

The Danger You're In

Do you understand that no culture can survive this?

The Apparatchik Outlook

"You know we pride ourselves on being above the law and anytime you see somebody engage in this type of conduct it's bad, but when it's a law enforcement officer I think it makes it that much worse."

What the fuck did he say?

Jefferson County (Oklahoma) District Attorney Jason Hicks.

"Now Hear This..."

"When the water reaches the gunwales, follow the rats."

(H. L. Mencken)

"What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447"

"Endarkenment" is a very broad and deep concept. I am not kidding when I say that human thought is coming to a halt.

It was always horrifying enough, to me, to picture that airplane flat-plating down like that with full aft-stick input. See, I've done that in my own flying, in order to understand what happens. All airplane types behave from slightly to fairly drastically differently in those conditions, but one thing is common to all of them: air moving over the wing (Angle-of-Attack, kids: read your Langewiesche!) is all the difference between an airplane and a brick, no matter the differences in how they look. Pointing the nose down must -- early in any flight training -- become virtually instinctive. It must be the first idea to be considered in any attitude-recovery crisis, and will almost always be the solution. It has to crawl up the pilot's spine like the instinct of a dirt-track racer to kick the ass of the car out into the turn with even thinking about it.

I fully understand that these guys got themselves in a box with queer flight data flashing at them. That pitot system on those airplanes has been a gold-plated clusterfuck all the way along. This, to me, would almost beg the question of what they were doing there in the first place, but everybody's gotta eat and some people fly in order to do that, so off they went, in an airplane system that was doing a great deal of their thinking for them.

It's astounding that they fell for miles with the stick full-aft, which is horrifying enough for me to picture. They just never figured it out. Then; I have to read about an airplane system in which two pilots can hold opposite pitch inputs and not know what each other are doing.

That just about tears it.

The Only Hitch In The Whole Plan

Using the word with great care and consideration, I say that on the day he died, Christopher Hitchens was the strongest intellect in this country.

We'll miss him, but we still have everything he wrote, and that's as good as it ever gets.

Well done, Hitch. Thank you, sir.

Later --

Martin McPhillips wrote at Facebook:

"In the postmodern hell of flat and amputated intellect, where wisecracks are worshipped as deep insights, Hitchens was a hurricane against that superficiality."

You know, that was probably the biggest part of his attraction for me. We live in a nerveless time, full of sneering little animals in the dark and afraid of the light. That man stood up on a human spine, and he was all the more spectacular for the time in which he did that.

La Dolce Vita

Spleenco intelligence operatives report that Thomas Friedman is holed-up in Thailand with a six-pack of twelve year-olds, a deck of heroin and a live seagull.

Discuss

In the spirit of Russian response to a pretender to the Imperial crown, I propose that Eric Holder be strangled, burned, his ashes loaded into cannon and fired across the Rio Grande into Mexico.

It Always Seeps — It Never Stops

Referring to this article on an "energy bonanza", a poster sardonicized,

"OK yeah, think WE will see any savings? Wait, I know you know the answer...!!"

I'd rung-in to point out that competition actually works in these affairs, and the Mulberry Bush Perimeter was wearily trampled again. ("I don't want fracking in my backyard, that's all I know.") It all came down to the Weary Sigh of the American Voter:

"Everything is backwards."

And so, another chance to ruin my reputation:

No. In the case of energy, what's "backwards" is that producers await permission from commissars. This is not how the original energy revolution took place, and there will not be another one as long as that is the political state of affairs.

What's also backwards are public estimations of internal combustion vs. all other energies: there is still nothing available that even approaches the energy-density per-pound of gasoline. This is a fact (you know: physics & stuff), and it has enormous implications for an economy on the scale of ours: one that delivers what ours does. I keep asking people to look around the rooms they're sitting in right now, and realize that almost nothing in them arrives without petro-fuels or petro-chemicals in one way or another. I keep waiting for the light to go on, when they understand that we simply cannot live anything like 21st-century lives without these materials, and that to condemn them in all the terms which are popular now goes quite beyond senseless: it's madness.

New technologies and material discoveries (as well as discovery methods) have made all "resource conservation" arguments completely impertinent and irrelevant. We can burn oil for a long, long time, and one very important implication of this is that we have time for authentic geniuses to invent and refine new energies, instead of being force-driven in blind panics by politicians playing the future to pressure-group herds for peanuts.

What's "backwards" is the belief that government has anything to do with production. It's perfectly atavistic: it comes from a time before America demonstrated the actual material value of freedom for the first time in human history.

Keep begging for the whip.

Your children will curse you in the freezing darkness.

David Brooks Is A Disgusting Creature

"It does not strike me as odd that a Times man would not be able to process the moral order or the facts. This is, after all, the 'conservative' who fell in love with Obama over the crease in his pants."

(Martin McPhillips -- Facebook)

Brooks should speak for himself, but he aspires to a lot worse than that.