The Whip Of The Week

"Is Vietnam a swing-state? Kerry keeps talking about it..."

(someone in the Command Post 'debate' chat)

When They're Not Outright Lying, They're Just Lame

Reynolds points out linx on the latest CBS News fraud. Along the trail, INDC Journal gets you to Rathergate.com, where you'll discover the reprobates cleaning up after themselves without alerting the reader to the fact that the original story was bullshit deluxe. (IOW: "There's nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.")

Know what? Through all the lies and bloody nonsense on this front over the past two weeks or more, it had completely slipped my mind that I'd seen poor CBS News, uhm, "get scammed" before, right at the start of the the Iraqi war. Here is my item at The Command Post. (If your browser doesn't land you directly on the permalink, then word-search the page for the word "Skepticism", which was the title of my post.) In that post, you'll find a link to the image at issue. Of course, that's my screen cap of the thing in the pop-up at the CBS website, which fairly promptly disappeared -- without a word -- shortly after we started taking it apart at the CP. That means, of course, that there is no chance on earth that you could see it with their name on it outside my screen-cap. And that means that it wouldn't surprise me for one second if someone accused me of faking it. Anyone who wanted to try that, however, would have to deal with the people at the CP who saw it at the CBS site (read through the comments to that post), as well as people at rec.aviation.military who saw it when I asked about it there.

Look at the screen-cap. "Photo:CBS". They claimed it. Then, it went down the memory hole, and they got away with it, without a single word.

Here's what we'll never know: just how long (decades?) they've been broadcasting utter fraudulence.

Strutting Frauds

This is utterly disgusting. Read the post and the comments. You'll see a whole crowd of imperious poseurs sitting around attempting to determine how others should be forced to live their lives by government diktat.

"What's so unusual about that?" you ask. Well, right off the bat, the head fool in charge of the goddamned thing calls herself a "libertarian".

With "allies" like that, I just might as well go vote this November.

(link -- TLJ)

No Way Around It

John Lopez cites Claire Wolfe.

It is most certainly a necessary thing to kill the bad guys, who are trying to kill us. However, the vicious murderer Lon Horiuchi still walks the land, living on stolen money, with the full sanction of this monstrous ostensible agency of justice seated in Washington.

I don't know about any of you, but I, for one, am never going to forgive or forget that.

High Frivolity

CNN was the only network to catch it, and that's only because Burt Rutan was sitting right there talking them through it, but I understood it as it happened:

Spaceshipone Pilot Mike Melvill couldn't resist one controlled victory-roll during his approach to landing after making his qualifying altitude in the first of the two X-Prize flights, which was pretty exciting in the launch phase. That included at least thirty un-commanded rolls as the thing kept blasting along to altitude.

Those damned test pilots: it seems like they can never behave themselves.

Good job by the whole team.

Goddamned Good Question

"Maybe it's just been particularly bad this week, but watching parts of nine or ten games I saw a number of occasions where the ball and the baserunner were converging and the guy was called out even though he seemed to have avoided the tag altogether. It's almost like the fielder just has to wave at the oncoming runner now. Hi! You're out! One pair of broadcasters even noted the phenomenon, soberly and acceptingly: 'Well, of course, if the ball beats the runner, the umpire is usually going to call him out.' Pardon me? When did this concept come in???"

(Colby Cosh)

I lay the thing at the feet of Charles Sanders Pierce, at the beginning of a long trail that runs down to us through The Vienna Circle, people like A. J. Ayer, various French lunatics, and various American crackpots like Richard "There Ain't No Reality 'Out There'" Rorty and Peter L. Berger -- to not even scratch the surface of the matter.

It ain't what it is, Cosh. Nothing ever is, and it couldn't be proved even it if it was. Especially in the last hundred twenty-five years or so. Just stop whining and play ball.

Working

This is to say that I see every e-mail in my box. I am not ignoring you people. (Greg F. -- I see you. I understand. Thank you for writing, and I'll see if I can bash off a note for you.)

I've spent my whole day fighting with a particularly recalcitrant dishwasher installation, and I've had it. I might blog something this evening (I'll definitely take an AxeBites tour to see what's in the market this evening), but I'm about ready for a long hot shower and a book in bed, and it's only eight o'clock.

Done, I think.

That's About The Size Of It

Yes: you must go look at the cartoon at the top of this page right now.

(linkage: Greg Ransom)

Welcome Aboard, Newbies

Who did not know this?

I saw the Dallas Morning News story in 1999.

Of course, to be as fair as possible about it: I never heard it from Dan Rather, and I'd bet the farm that nobody else ever did, either.

Commies In The House

Here's an idea for aspiring screenwriters out there:

Work up the life of a young man bouncing through the streets of Vienna in the mid-20's in care-free pursuit of his career as an artist: a portrait of exclusive dedication to an age-old romantic ideal. Sure; it doesn't have any car chases in it or stuff like that, but we're talking about an "art film" aimed at the very best festivals of sophisticated taste.

Go see if you could convince Robert Redford to produce a film about the pre-Nazi life of Adolf Hitler. Go ahead. I dare you.

Paul Berman puts his finger on something disgusting and sick.

I Just Have To Ask

Is it a threat, then?

Watch This On HBO

"And the Yankees, whether they could accept this or not -- through humility or whatever -- really had the city on their shoulders."

(Rudy Giuliani commenting on games four and five of the 2001 World Series)

This is HBO's "Nine Innings From Ground Zero". I don't know if one need necessarily be a baseball fan in order to get the hang of this. I know it took me three attempts to get through the whole thing in one sitting, and I had no hope of doing it without tears.

Watch for it, and see how you do. Emphatically recommended.

Mary?

Why on earth did CBS News political operative Mary Mapes agree to act as a secret courier for a white supremacist, Secret Service snitch, secret cross-dresser, convicted bank robber, and a person resembling a person who was seen driving a Ryder truck in Oklahoma City on the day of the bombing, and whose residence at the time of Mapes' agreement was a federal prison cell in Colorado?

Hit the first link above and scroll down to the linked PDF 2001 letter to Mapes from the Bureau of Prisons.

What could she possibly have been up to?

(linked outta COTB)

Fun With Ignitables

I have now decided to build the largest bonfire that I've ever managed by myself.

This is a consequence of my now ex-friend Mark and one of his skilled mates felling the maple tree in the front yard while I was away last week. I very much appreciated that. However, I've been waiting for the rotten bastards to come back and clean up the huge pile of branches -- not to mention the cuttings from the mutant lilac bush -- standing four feet high in the front yard, with no sign of them. Dammit.

With the tractor this afternoon, I dragged the whole wad back by the creek, where I'll set fire to it. This will take time and careful effort, in order to heap everything up for prompt and proper combustion. Perhaps it will take until November 2nd, in order to bring a proper thematic thrill to the occasion. I'll dedicate the thing to Dad, who would have enjoyed the ritual national disaster that month (he always rejected voting, but the sport of the thing fascinated him), and he always loved a good fire.

Maybe I'll invite Mark and tell him, "See what you made me do?"

He Said "Mythodrama" And "Pseudographies"

Victor Davis Hanson.

Hah. Update the lexicon, instanter.

ATTN: "Moby"

My Dear Sniveling Imbecile,

If you know where a person could buy fully automatic AK-47's over the internet, "legally", as you assert in the 9/14/2004 entry of your ridiculous "Journal", then I would appreciate it if you would forward links at your earliest convenience in order to check my advancing conviction that you are in fact a chimpanzee in a bald-head costume, which fact would, of course, constitutionally prohibit your participation in this November's Great Conspiracy of the Cannibal Pot.

Lookin' forward to it, cash in hand, I remain, etc., etc.

AxeBites

I like the length of the AxeBites column as it stands. I'm not sure how many people are actually interested in it, but it doesn't matter to me: I am.

It sometimes happens that sellers remove photographs after auctions close, but before any featured guitar moves off the column. One example is the 1962 Les Paul Custom with the question about its pickups. Those photographs are gone now, so you cannot see what I was talking about when I called it a "splendid example", and that's too bad, especially if you missed it. It really was sensational.

Still, it surprised me to observe that it finally closed out after thirty-six bids, at $23,211.00. (Attn. Gary Cruse: I wonder where yours is now. Don't you?) Man, those things are standing up proud these days.

Another New Record

Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket?

Uh-huh.

Didja ever go one hundred forty miles an hour over the highway speed limit?

When I lived in Atlanta, there was a guy killed about 300 yards up Jimmy Carter Blvd. from my place. In the middle of the night, with a green light at the intersection, he went blowing up the road at about 160mph on his bike. Less than a quarter-mile past the intersection, some old guy was pulling out of the Waffle House at, like, 2:00am. He was in that biker's lane before either one of 'em could say, "Holy shit!", and the guy on the bike got launched after impact.

The whole reason for this is that comparatively very few people have ever seen anything doing 160mph on land right in front of their eyes. They have no earthly idea what that looks like, and the upshot is that even if they look for you before they pull out of that parking lot into your lane, they're not going to see you.

These people are crazy. They're just begging to get killed.

Euphemasia

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic[s], with their particular measurements omitted.

Do you understand? Think about this. For instance, consider that final clause: "with their particular measurements omitted". You can handle the concept of a "chair" without specifying its color, or even how many legs it has.

Or, you can handle the concept of a "terrorist" without knowing where he is, or even who he is.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the fag in charge of Reuters.

(e-mailed link by Usenet Old Fighter Alan Furman)

Chris Matthews Is Functionally Insane

"He won't even give people the out to vote against this president."

(The notorious imbecile, Chris Matthews, just now, gibbering about how John McCain is hedging this election.)

Waitaminnit, let's set the Wayback Machine the enormous distance of twenty-four hours earlier in time:

MATTHEWS: How do you register your disapproval as an American of American policy toward Iraq? How do you register it?

MCCAIN: I think you vote against the president.

The sheer strut of these worthless assholes is just wearing me out.

Honest to god. I've never seen anything quite like it.

I Just Hate It When This Happens

"A philosopher should be able to make a case for any proposition."

(Keith Burgess-Jackson)

Whenever I see something like that -- and I see it just about all the bloody time -- I always wonder whether the person who wrote it actually knew what they were writing, and was actually serious about it.

I could sit here all day long and list propositions that would sorely test that proposition. I'm not going to do that, however.

Instead, I'm just going to point out that philosophers have been doing just exactly what Burgess-Jackson suggests, for long enough that any person of ordinary sense could fucking look around and see the results right up in their face at every hour of the day.

Movin' On

Life's full of mysteries.

One of 'em is what the hell was Dad's plan for the stairset on the back porch. I have no earthly idea, but it's my problem now. Since pulling in from Connecticut yesterday, I've been puttering around the place, to include hitting a 9-iron up & down the north lawn for a while with an eye on completing that project before the snow flies. I don't get it. The Old Man did a splendid job with concrete-block and decking, and there are pencil marks where the stairs will go, which means he had a plan in mind, but they're inscrutible, incomplete or otherwise beyond my reach. It's a wonder: I look at it and marvel on the fact of what's missing now, and how it always will be.

Same Ol' Song And Dance

Checking in from the connection in Jid-san's hotel room, I sees this over at Radley Balko's. Prohibition follies, with the 18/21 twist. Nothing you've not seen before but it's all true, age-old, and should have been learned by now.

Rolling Off

Okay; I'm off to Connecticut, through next weekend. There is some kind of a chance that I'll be able to blog while I'm out, but if you don't see anything here in an inordinate length of time, then I wasn't able to make it happen and I'll be back next week.

JFK: ring me at the hotel, Tuesday evening.

See ya.

Infogenre & Blogspecie

Greg Swann:

"I had thought, when the weblog wave hit, that, although HTML is prettier, the web is not nearly as convenient or efficient as Usenet, where Billy, Ernest and I, and many other webloggers, cut our teeth. But by being prettier and much more user-friendly, the weblogs have brought people into the game in vast abundance. Even if they serve only as audience, the Usenet effects--broadcasting, vetting, reputation-based hierarchies-of-expertise, rapid error correction, etc.--have been massively amplified."

Greg hits on one of my original reservations about blogs, which after a long time with Usenet, felt something like, "This seems like a lot of trouble to distribute and gather this sort of data, and it doesn't move nearly as fast through, say, twelve to twenty-four hour cycles."

Take a look at "comment" threads at peoples' blogs. That's just Usenet all over again, where the bloggers are the news servers. So, what's happened is that people have actually gone to all the trouble to set up personalized publishing and then pay for people who don't do that, to hang around and enjoy the party. It beats me why anyone would do that, but it works for some people, and I see now & then where commenters make fairly important contributions. (I could be linking all this stuff up for you, but if you're watching the 'sphere, you don't need my help.)

Ten years ago, though, most people would not have known what "dial up" meant, and couldn't do it in any case. Today, it all floats through the very air. The hardware and everything about it makes sense to constant data, all the time.

Read that sentence again.

"Everything about it" includes any number of individual reasoning minds connecting information to reality, all the time. Nobody gets to get away clean with the reverse, because everybody knows. It's been "massively amplified". Of course, this effect doesn't completely banish delusion, and nothing ever will. However...

"Dan Rather is a dinosaur, surely. But what's worse is that he does not even know it."

I don't know if that's worse. I am deeply sick with glee at the prospect of watching that unspeakable person teeter over into years of fulminant senility. This could be rich. He might creep away and spend years at grinding out some bilious knob of a memoir, sticking out the neck of broadcasting history after this sudden cropping.

Could you imagine the marginalia?

No, man; what's worse is the wide implications of the thing: what's gone by in history under utter pimps like this. Listen, I have watched The CBS Evening Puppet Show nearly every night that I could for fifteen years, anyway. I've been watching Himself forever. Like; JFK, forever. ("Present At The Creation", one might say.) Over the years, I've pointed out the disgusting FEE episode: I posted that within minutes of its airing. I've been horribly fascinated with watching all the twitches and hangs of the bloody performance and how they waft through the consciousness of idle consumers all over the country. This outrageous hooter has been sitting up on his Right Honorable Bench and caressing horseshit into ordinary peoples' faces for whole generations, and he's not the only one.

It is not one moment too soon that their day is done. More and more, information now means evidence, not mere presense. (Not to say "pretense".) The broad intellectual outlook (there: I dared a hope) is less and less in a state similar to late-17th century urban sanitation, where masses of rot lay as it falls from these clods. It's being washed away as fast as real people can scrub to the facts, and it's instructive to note just how many of them are interested to do that, now.

Me? I'd like to see Dan Rather towed to the middle of the North Atlantic on a beer keg. I've no idea how it'll really play -- how's he going to slide this the least his way on the way out? -- but there is no question in my mind but that he's just sunk the cornerstone of his tomb in history: that he went to this length in the year of this presidential campaign.

Woo-hoo. Way to go, Dan.

I'd Rather Not

Everyone's all agog over this Dan Rather thing. Typin' superscripts in his name on their blogs & shit.

I wasn't going to have anything to say about it until Ernest Brown had to go poking his nose innit and busted me, although this and this are certainly more to the point of that crummy fraud Rather.

Ernie Ball

First, I mention guitar stringer Ernie Ball, then comes the sad report of his death at age seventy-four. He was the man who revolutionized guitar string marketing and manufacture when nobody else saw it.

Good job, Ernie.

Personal To An Attitude

TO: Vidal S. Lim -- United Airlines ticket agent, Philadelphia International Airport
SUBJECT:

Yo, Lim: I wonder if you know that little rat-eyed creep who works at your counter in the evenings. He likes to run up & down the counters hollering "I'M BAGGAGE-TRAINED!" I saw him the other night bouncing off the America West counter while they were trying to hook me the last shot to Salt Lake City. Short guy. Glasses. Dark hair, middle-aged. (Whaddya want? I wouldn't have gotten away with a photograph.)

Listen, if you see that guy, just tell him that I know that you, and he, and your whole ridiculous act, had my checked bag, and that it went to Salt Lake. You know: it went that night when that creep was telling me over & over that you guys didn't have my bag. That would be the bag without which America West wouldn't let me on their flight, for security reasons. This, of couse, in spite of the fact that nobody on earth could find that bag for the three and a half hours available to get me out on the last flight to Salt Lake City that night, but let's not worry about someone weird getting their hands on it and doing something bad with it, because you guys are professionals, right? "Baggage-trained!"

Of course, I know this because you're the one who told me where the bag went. Remember? You told me the next morning, right after you tore up my boarding passes and told me that you'd just taken me off the flight. And you really thought I was going to stand there and shit my pants because you thought you could afford to be a straight-up snot. You and your petit-bourgeois-wannabe proletarian graspings while you've got the angle for a second. It didn't work out that way, though, did it? Remember me: riding up the escalator with boarding passes and smiling and waving at you, you miserable hind?

I just want to tell everybody what I told you to your face, just before you thought you'd had me thrown off the flight:

I have never seen such dedication to failure, succeeding so brilliantly. I cannot wait until it's announced that United Airlines has gone out of business. I will mark that day as an anniversary to be celebrated for the rest of my life. And every year on that day, I'm going to be just thrilled to think about you: out of a job, your pension crashed-out at nothing on the dollar, and you, just wailing. I will probably like to think about you living under a bridge.

Crashdown

NASA recovery teams have been practicing for five years to snag the Genesis solar probe in mid-air with helicopters on its re-entry to earth's atmosphere. They wanted to do this because of very delicate instrumentation aboard the probe, which they were afraid might not survive an ordinary landing. MSNBC just now ran impressive viddie of the helicopter formation trolling around and waiting for Genesis to appear. Then, we had a great shot of the silly thing tumbling like a blob through the blue sky, with no real clue to its altitude...

...until it crashed into the desert floor at terminal velocity. No 'chute deployment.

Well done.

Off to Salt Lake City. I'll see ya late Friday evening.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Okay.

I'd like to see someone explain this to me.

It would be terrific if you could do it before I have to go deal with those goddamned TSA frauds on my way to Salt Lake City tomorrow. (Well... later today, in fact...)

The Endarkened

Since I've already uttered Her Dread Name once today, I have no compunction at relating this:

Dr. Ferris smiled. "Don't you suppose we knew it?" he said, his tone suggesting that he was letting his patent-leather hair down to impress a fellow criminal in a display of superior cunning. "We've waited a long time to get something on you. You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later - and this is just what we wanted."

"You seem to be pleased about it."

"Don't I have good reason to be?"

"But, after all, I broke one of your laws."

"Well, what do you think they're for?"

Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see. Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was intent upon delivering the last blows to an animal caught in a trap.

"Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed?" asked Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can't be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

Watching Dr. Ferris watch him, Rearden saw the sudden twitch of anxiety, the look that precedes panic, as if a clean card had fallen on the table from a deck that Dr. Ferris had never seen before.

What Dr. Ferris was seeing in Rearden's face was the look of luminous serenity that comes from the sudden answer to an old, dark problem, a look of relaxation and eagerness together; there was a youthful clarity in Rearden's eyes and the faintest touch of contempt in the line of his mouth. Whatever this meant - and Dr. Ferris could not decipher it - he was certain of one thing: the face held no sign of guilt.

("Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand, 1957. Emphases original.)

Take a good long look at this.

There is not one single party to that whole discussion who understands what this is really about.

Figure It Out

Jeff Soyer asks, "How to respond?"

Me? I like 7.62mm semi-auto fire in the back yard.

In fact, I'm going to go take a break right now.

The Tempo Of The Times

(My remarks on this post.)

Stand back, for I am about to quote the unspeakable:

The Russian Rage (Ayn Rand) once wrote about America:

Only one thing is certain: dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled -- but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be "pushed around." Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say "Yes, sir" to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.

She wrote that thirty-three years ago. ("Don't Let It Go", from the essay anthology, "Philosophy: Who Needs It" -- and everyone within eye-shot of these words should drop everything and go read it, right this instant.)

The question of the day is whether that nation exists, now. I say that, if it does, then it exists only as one party to an irreconcilable division between individualists and collectivists. Try to understand that this is a metaphysical antagonism: there is nothing to "compromise" because the antagonism is bound up with two completely different assertions of the nature of reality, raised to the domain of politics over the matter of what human beings are.

Now, I hate it, and I have for a long time, but I see no way on earth around the conclusion of Ironbear's post. I've been saying it for at least twenty-five years: "The pace of this thing is picking up." That's one reason why I hold nothing but searing contempt for conservative waterheads who like to come around with their insipid smiley-faces, telling me about how "good" life is in my homeland. I travel the world. I don't need these idiots telling me what it's like to step off an airplane at JFK or LAX after visiting anywhere else on earth. Their rationales essentially boil down to something like, "Well, at least it's not Albania, here. Don't worry. Be happy." They are rife throughout the 'sphere, and my response goes like this:

"Fuck you."

How bloody close to something like that does it have to get before they realize what's being lost? I have no patient regard for them and I do not apologize for my fury.

I'll close this with another section of Rand, from the same essay:

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections -- it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future.

For example: consider the statist trend in this country. The doctrine of collectivism has never been submitted explicitly to the American voters; if it had been, it would have sustained a landslide defeat (as the various socialist parties have demonstrated). But the welfare state was put over on Americans piecemeal, by degrees, under cover of some undefined "Americanism" -- culminating in the absurdity of a President's declaration that America owes its greatness to "the willingness for self-sacrifice." People sense that something has gone wrong; they cannot grasp what or when.

The ways in which this state of affairs is completely unreasonable are myriad. Understand that word "unreasonable": it means that there can be no "compromise" over the diametrically opposed premises at work in America now, because neither side has anything of value to offer the other in exchange. And when reason is impotent, the only alternatives are surrender or conquest.

Now, that's where this is going. I don't like it, but I am not one to evade reality.

Only fools do that.

Pretenses

I don't "root for hurricanes" like some skeevy twits enbosomed in the original American Capital of Ostentatious Consumption. Hurricanes are bad things, and "Gaia" is among the most ridiculous of all delusions.

All the same, I do wonder how many of these disasters in a single season it would take before someone seriously questioned the moral probity of rewarding with stolen money the people who insist on living in the way of these things, after every one of them marches through their "communities", time after time. When I think about people in Oregon or upstate New York who get soaked -- at gunpoint, mind you -- to pay for this blinding foolishness, you could not possibly imagine how very little I give a shit about people stumbling around in knee-deep water and watching their boats smashed to toothpicks on sea-walls.

Here's the sick irony of the thing: have a look at this. Not intimately familiar with the whole bag of characters in those links, I nonetheless believe they are all "conservatives". But I dare you: go ahead and press them on the matter that I'm talking about. I would go 10-1 that every single one of them would start moaning, "But there are some people who really need government help!!" In other, briefer, words: in this, you would not find a principle among them at odds with the object of their scorn. They would be just like him. They might not like hurricanes, but they'd be willing to force you to pay for them.

Of Course I Was Right

"Mr Two--Four, 'The Theory Of The Leisure Class', 1899, Thorstein Veblen? --- wow --- you're smart. Say have you ever read, "The World is Flat!!"? I can't remember the author, but it's really old, really out-dated and really silly too --- kinda like your rayon tropical shirt and gold chains. Nice facial expression too. good luck with that set-up, just ribbin, i like our friend over at u.s.s clueless"

That is a direct cut & paste from yet another Steven Den Beste fan's e-mail, this morning.

Yes, this is still going on, and it's all quite remarkable. I am only going to say that nothing has convinced me that I was right so much as having these people in my e-mail.

And I have never, ever in my life, worn gold.

This Afternoon

The Pits

I've only gotten less than two paragraphs through this from Mark Steyn before he cites "The Guardian's Isabel Hilton":

"Today's hostage-taking is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines."

I'm only going to point out that words mean things, and that children in no way constitute "powerful military machines", and that children is what this "small, weak and irregular force" was pitted against. When the Big Kids came out to play, this "small, weak and irregular force" started gunning the little ones in the back, and tried to sneak out of the scene and run away.

So, Hilton, if you want to run your yap about the pits, you should probably crawl your ass up out of them in order to see clearly what you're talking about.

Who Does Bainbridge Think He's Kidding?

This, from a person who only one month ago called for the impounding of "all" SUV's.

Ladies and Gentlemen: it occasionally reaches my ear that some of you are mystified by my attitude -- you complain about me being "nasty", etc., ad barfium.

I am not going to explain to you why a slug like Bainbridge would be well-served with a two-by-four laid directly across the bridge of his spectacles with enough force to rivet his attention on his rotten hypocrisy. He's gonna make all this pious noise about an "ownership society" after calling for the summary theft of peoples' automobiles?

Just shut up and get the fuck outta here, already.

(Link: The Libertarian Jackass)

Scorecards, Get'cher Scorecards

Keith Burgess-Jackson points out a fairly nifty breakdown of the great national conspiracy.

It's Goin' Around

Look out. Everybody's doing The Lynndie.

Check six.

(link: Wendy)

More -- Listen, don't miss the Bad Gas virtual tour of London's famous East End. I'm not kidding: I had tears in my eyes and I laughed until I hurt.

Also: please attend smartly the Bad Language page. [solemn nod] Yes, yes, lawd. I would see grisly murder to be done upon these crummy assholes, and all like them. Get out the sledge hammers, and start working on 'em at the ankles. >whack< "An apostrophe does not mean..." >smash< "...'Look out! There's'..." >pound< "...'an S coming'." >bash<

Slammed

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FACSIST 2 DA CORE

LIVE SHORT & POORLY IMPORTANT HEARTLESS 1"

Could someone just outright give me a shotgun shell?

I mean, I wouldn't be able to give it back after I shot myself.

String Blither, With Digressions

If I'd had my camera with me, I'd be posting bitchin' guitar pictures today.

Here's a funny thing: Ithaca, New York is in many ways a lot more active town than Cortland, about thirty-five miles away over Rt. 13. There was always a bit of an "industrial base" in Cortland, what with Smith-Corona and Brockway Trucks manufacturing going on there, but, to my eye, the thing was always more important as the county seat of surrounding agriculture. These are country people, really. Ithaca is a great deal more "sophisticated", of course, beginning with Cornell University, and the East Coast Set playground of Ithaca College. Through the late 1970's and early 80's, I directly experienced the music culture of Ithaca, which was simply fabulous. It seemed like every other person you met on the street was in at least one band, and just about everybody was jamming with everybody on nights off. Of course, what eventually happened was that the legislature hiked the drinking age from 18 to 21 ('83, I think), and nearly the whole market for working musicians just dried up and blew away, about as "overnight" as you could imagine.

Through it all, however, and to this day, Cortland was always the center of a musical history that held its own against the market down the road. There's players over there. There always has been. All over the surrounding area, people have always danced to various cowboy bands full of people who addressed their music with the same attention that they would lavish on their farm equipment. They knew their gear, and the thing I'm pointing out is that the per capita of players serious about the hardware was higher around Cortland than in Ithaca. You might find an Ivy League professor or staffer who could handle a fine guitar, but there was always going to be several more farmers or hands who did, too, and in ways that seemed a lot more real to me.

One damned good reason for this, for a long time, was Al Falso. Al was a sawed-off little white-haired Italian guy who owned a music store over on Port Watson Street in Cortland. I don't know how or when he got started. However, by the time my family arrived in the area in 1974, Al was an established patron of the scene. Make no mistake: he ran a tough business. At first glance, a person would think it crazy to try to operate a music store in a place like this. But Al managed to find the seam between peoples' work and play, and he made it flourish. If you were a player in those years, you knew "Al The Pal". He dealt with whole generations of starving freaks and country people on budgets. Personally, I bought my early Les Paul Deluxe from Al. I think I gave him fifty dollars down on a $350 deal, and then I would go see him every week and drop whatever I could on the thing, all while it was living in my bedroom. Al was all about good faith. As long as he knew you had not forgotten him, he was happy to see you. There is no telling how many deals like that he had going at any given moment, but it was obviously enough to keep him in business.

A good Al Falso story: Very near the end of his life, he'd decided to close up the store and retire. Well, my father had always preferred a very specific sort of guitar pick: a large triangle made by Gibson, the thin ones. He'd buy the things in batches of three for a quarter. Near the end of Falso's Music, Dad dropped in for picks. That's all he ever bought in Al's shop, along with strings. There was never a chance in life that Dad was going to buy another guitar. The ES-355 was his lifelong treasure when it came to that, and everybody -- including Al -- knew it. But my Old Man was nevertheless a somebody to Al, whenever he walked in. So, he bought these three measley picks for a quarter one day. Al, knowing Dad's preference for many years, pointed out that he was closing the shop, and he probably wouldn't sell all the thin Gibson triangles he had left, so Dad should just take some. Dad was naturally parsimonious about things like this, so he fished three more out of the jar. Al got exasperated and, shaking his head and saying, "I said you should take some," pulled out a little brown paper bag and stuffed it with these things.

To this day, I still have an old macadamia nut can with maybe a hundred of them left. They're hard to find in America. I bought a bunch more, the last time I was in Japan.

That's the kind of guy Al was, and he definitely left a mark on the local culture. There are people who grew up around Al's shop who know how to look back, and know the value of doing so.

So, today, I was at Ultimate Music over there. Needing strings, I'd also taken the 355 with me. The last time I was there, one of the guys working there had told me about his 1962 ES-345. It's the same year as my 355 and we wanted to compare them. It's a beautiful guitar. We stood around talking axes for a while, including the real oddball that one of his mates has in the shop: a 1979 ES-335 in the Walnut finish, with small-block fret markers and crown inlay on the head, and the coil-tap switch, like an ES-347. I couldn't believe it. The damned sticker in the F-hole says "ES-335TD", plain as day, but there's that factory-installed switch on the upper treble bout. Never, ever seen that before.

Anyway, this guy was telling me about his 345, and how he got it from Al. He said the silly thing had been hanging on the wall for at least five years in Al's shop. (In those years, I must've walked past it hundreds of times.) It had had a price-tag saying "$1200" forever. This guy walked in one day with eight hundred dollars in his pocket and offered it to Al. It's a mystery why it hung there that long, and the only thing we can think is that Al was sick of looking at it, and the deal was done. Mel took it home and cracked the pickups out of it, only to discover PAF's. So, there you go: about twenty years ago, Mel hit the lottery. Al had never bothered to look into the thing, and Mel made off with a treasure. Of course, twenty years ago, PAF's weren't bringing anything like the price they are today, and it's not like Mel is going to part out his 345, which he always wanted. But that guitar is just splendid, and it just naturally does bring a certain satisfaction to know that the pickups alone are worth one hell of a lot more than he paid for the whole guitar.

He also told me about his early-60's Gibson Melody Maker. This poor thing blew in the door of the shop where he was working one day in the hands of someone who didn't care about it. It had been re-finished in some kinda mop-brushed white, and routed for Humbucker pickups. The pickup switch had actually been moved down to the edge of the guitar, which is just inexplicable. It was on offer for sale to the store, but the owner took one look at it and wasn't interested. So, Mel offered the guy all the money in his pocket, which amounted to twenty-five dollars. He took it home and started taking it apart, and discovered two real PAF Humbucker pickups. It's the damndest thing: here's a guitar that's been mutilated -- to put Humbuckers in a Melody Maker is no small structural feat -- and whoever did it had stuffed it with with pickups worth at least two to three thousand dollars on today's market, and sold the whole mess for a quarter.

Life's a funny thing. Mel's real, real happy with his bought-for-a-song Melody Maker, not least because it sounds like a millon bucks. He's not about to part that one out. It's a worker.


The new cheap-ass Mexican Fender Stratocaster arrived yesterday. At this point, I'm just going to tell you right now: the Mexican Strats are about the best deal in electric guitars going, today. And that would go with double emphasis for beginners. Reviewing my current quiver:

*** The 1995 SG Special, factory white, with ebony fretboard.

*** The 1977 Les Paul Custom.

*** The 1962 ES-355.

I'm a die-hard Gibson fan. Raised on 'em, loved 'em all my life. And that's a modestly cool little pile of Gibson hardware, right there. Most people could be happy with that for all their lives.

There really is a place in the world for a Fender, though. The main thing I want to point out is that, certainly to my fingers and ears, it's not necessary to spend a hell of a lot of money on a Fender. They are fundamentally different guitars. And, in the end, they're so simple that something like the Mexican Strats, getting comparatively little respect in the market, are just the thing: they do a great job for the money.

Anyway, this thing dropped on my doorstep yesterday. I broke it out and noticed right away that it was strung with .009's.

A word about string gauges: that number refers to the high E-string, with the diameter measured in decimal fractions of an inch. The rest of the strings in the set are larger as they descend to the bass side of the neck, with the proportions set out as necessary to make up a guitar set, but guitarists ordinarily refer to the set gauge by the top E-string's number. (A bit of history: sometime in the mid-60's, some guitarists began making up their own custom sets, buying individual strings instead of the packaged sets on offer from manufacturers in those days. I believe it was Ernie Ball who began offering packaged "custom" sets in lighter gauges, also including sets with heavier bottoms. These days, the string market is quite florid.)

I've never played on .009's in my whole life. They're far too light for me, and it's hard to describe what this feels like. I've been playing .011's for a long time -- upwards of twenty years -- and when I attempt to bend a note on .009's, it always goes far, far too sharp (higher in pitch than the target note) because the lighter ones are always easier to stretch. The difference between .009's and .011's is pretty minor in mathematical terms, but it's pretty drastic when you're fingering it. The Strat, with a full set of .009's, feels like a handful of rubber bands at half tension.

I didn't take 'em right off, though, because I found the exercise of a far lighter touch very interesting in a very short time. It's necessarily way more delicate, and my attention was brought to very intimate physical mechanics of the touch in a way that was much more consciously deliberate than I've thought about in some time.

The upshot is that I'm now mixing my string gauges across different guitars. I'll keep stringing the SG and Les Paul with .011's. A great deal of this has to do with the way I've got them set up, with the top-wrap over the tailpiece on the SG and the elevated TP-6 on the Les Paul. The most important result of this is that the string gauge never feels quite as heavy as it really is. All the tone of a heavier set is still present, and they're easier to play than a set that heavy would otherwise be. The Strat doesn't permit that sort of adjustment, with its categorically different construction. The 355 has that Bigsby tailpiece, the elevation of which does not change, so it cannot be adjusted that way, either. So, I'm going to lighten it up to .010's, which I'm also putting on the Strat.

I could manage those two guitars with .011's -- I've been playing the 355 with them since Dad died -- but I'm going to lighten their strings one gauge deliberately in order to keep getting my explicit conscious attention as I change between them all: the touch of the strings is going to make me pay attention to what I'm telling my fingers to do, in a way that's sort of been taken for granted for a long time. This happens, sometimes: losing that sense of difference between a rut and a groove. And it's the tiny details that sometimes make the issue a lot more clear.

Come On, Man

Ken Layne drank the Associated Press kool-aid.

I'd heard about The Lying Bastard's pump problem as it began to supercede the Russian hostage story as the latter began to wind down, yesterday. In the mid-afternoon, I was driving into town to the music store for Strat-bits and heard Bush's announcement on the radio, and the very thing that I listened for was the thing that the AP story lied about, except that I didn't know they were already lying about it. I heard it, however, and, to tell the truth, I was impressed that that crowd had not reacted the way AP lied about them. Of course, the implication is that I'd about halfway expected them to do just that. The fact, however, is that they didn't.

Yo, Ken: why'd you buy it in advance of the facts?

Ditz Deluxe

How in the name of flamin' Jesus does a person who actually writes "disorientating" get to be the editor of NRO?

If you pay attention to The Corner for about ninety minutes at a stretch, you can plainly see that Kathryn Jean Lopez is about as dizzy as they come.

Wow.

Bits & Shreds

I spent the afternoon grooming a little pine grove near the house, and mowing nearly five acres of lawn. I went and consulted my friend Mark, a former logger, about cutting down a maple tree too near the house, which should have been done long ago. We'll bag that thing next week. Then, I went and helped babysit The Terrible Monsters: my nephew Mitchell, two years, and his baby sister Dana, seven months. Mitchell spent most of the time driving around the house on his little electric John Deere tractor, not quite crashing into everything in the joint, but almost everything. Dana is astonishing. She started crawling about a week ago, and look out, because that kid is on the move. And fearless. She's standing up next to anything to which she can hold on, completely without concern for falling over, which means that someone has to stay within close arm's reach at every moment in order to catch her and stand her back up. Everything she sees, she wants in her hands. Everything anyone is doing, she wants in on the action. And she thinks her big brother is the funniest thing in the world. She just looks at him and explodes in laughter, which is something quite enthralling to watch in a seven month-old.

The upshot is that there are several things on my mind to write about:

*** Eric Florack has demanding remarks on the subject of authority here and here, intersecting John Venlet here.

*** Richard Nikoley has two interesting posts at the top of his blog, the second of which is by far the most important.

*** Reader R. Caley rings in from Toronto to ask about my characterization of Zell Miller as "the very picture of a Southerner not about to stand for bullshit." That's a very interesting question.

*** I see a lot of people complaining about "anger" in Zell Miller's speech last night. To my mind, that is an utterly ridiculous thing to moan about, but it doesn't surprise me because I live in an utterly ridiculous political culture, full of nerveless, bloodless, smiley-faced buffoons, sublimating the very idea of passion to a place where it emerges as threadbare lies, like the one you hear every time some asshole in the Congress calls someone else his "good friend". That's a subject that could bear a whole book. I oughta kick out a couple of thousand words, but I don't know when.

*** I've been thinking about Trey Givens -- linked below -- for several different reasons and topics, not the least of which is his remark about "how small it is". I need to find time to explain to him how actually big is the thing he's talking about.

Tonight, however, I'm gonna watch The Pack of Lies in New York.

Make no mistake. That's what it is.

I might have a couple of scribbles on the damned thing.

Tomorrow, my new (to me) Fender Stratocaster gets delivered. (It replaces the one that I gave to my nephew, Ethan.) That means: take it all apart, set it up, put it back together, and start listening to it.

I might be kinda busy tomorrow. We'll see.

Onward.

If You Get Nothing Else, Get this

TO: Trey Givens

1) -- There are lots of people whose positions on various issues of the day are very different from mine, who I nonetheless respect. The central thing upon which I insist is at least a rudimentary awareness of logical integrity beginning with endorsement of reality and reaching high-level implication, eventually aimed at grasping the crucial connection of ethics to politics. I understand that this is a lengthy and arduous project, for which very, very few experience anything remotely like training or conditioning. When I see it happening, however, I can cultivate it with the best of 'em. People like that don't "cross" me.

2) -- You can read Roy Childs' Open Letter To Ayn Rand (1969) here.

Memo To Media Producers

Yesterday, I heard the madman Don King on some talk radio show while I was clearing brush with a chainsaw out in the north meadow. I'd pulled my Explorer up to the site and turned up the radio, and there he was, just blaring like... well, Don King. I'm not kidding: I'd be wailing along with the chainsaw, and I could hear that nutter over the noise.

I just now watched him on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, waving two little American flags on sticks, with glitter stars all over his denim jacket and that hair lookin' like a bomb-blast from the cartoons before people got up on their hind-legs about The Roadrunner.

Here's the thing with Don: when the segment ends, the thing to do is for the interviewer to tag it out, and then the Technical Director should just call the switch, as if Don wasn't even there anymore. That's because he's never going to shut up. It's simply a given. Let him roll.

That guy's a riot.

Zell Beats Matthews' Ass

Holy shit.

As I write this, Zell Miller is just stomping Chris Matthews' guts out. This is just sensational. If you're not watching MSNBC, then you have to sit up late and watch the re-run. Line after line out of Miller's mouth is landing like mortar-fire right on Matthews' fat head, faster and harder almost than I can register them.

I believe I heard Miller state his regret that he could not challenge Matthews to a duel. And then, he would have done it again, in defense of Michelle Malkin.

I've been waiting for someone to slap that impudent bastard in the head, for years.

More -- Jonah Goldberg is as dim as usual. Miller was the very picture of a Southerner not about to stand for bullshit. I'd bet the farm that this is something that Goldberg has absolutely no knowledge of or experience with, but I know it when I see it. That comes from my mother's side of the family. The first really explosive round fired by Miller followed Matthews' typical exposition of a conceptual-range about >< that wide (his bullshit little snark on the MX missile vis-a-vis John Kerry's voting record), whereupon Miller tore his head off and jumped down his neck with two pages of evidence like that and put it to Matthews that he'd come prepared for Matthews' crap.

It was glorious.

Politicians almost never impress me. But Zell Miller just about won my heart tonight, just for the way he kicked that punk's ass. Watch the re-run. don't miss it.

Audacity

Forget about John Kerry for a minute. His mendacity is simply a given; like the wind.

One thing that's fascinated me in fits & starts over the past week or so is the outlandish audacity of Douglas Brinkley. To begin with, it's amazing to me that this rotten motherfucker still appears on my TEEVEE screen about every two hours on average, remarking on the horseshit in New York. It's just astounding. If I attended my work with the straight-up incompetence evident in his work, I would be righteously committed to the ranks of bridge-dwellers in extremely short order. Of at least equal curiosity to me is the fact of his stark ignorance of the time in which he lies: the fact that he has no earthly idea that he cannot get away with his ridiculous crummy pose, now. He thinks it's still 1960, and nobody is able to point out, at large, what a fraud he really is.

It's not tar, feathers, and a rail to the edge of town, but it'll do, over the long run.

Wow -- reader Jon thoughtfully wrote to ask whether I'd really had "David Brinkley" in mind when I wrote that post, on the very reasonable ground that I'd originally written "David". It's fixed now, and I had always had in mind the alleged "historian" instead of the splendid news broadcaster, whose last gig was occupied by that slithering creep of a refugee from The Ozark Long March.

Wow.

They's Marchin' In The Digital Streets

Selections from Den Bestebles in the morning e-mail:

Michael Bolduc complains --

"Your petty insults would be interesting if you had anything to offer logically or informationally, but you don't."

Uh-huh. Not like this, or this. (And don't miss the "expoundation".) This includes an intimation of the fact that I know exactly what I'm doing, and I don't bloody care what anyone thinks about it.

Of course, I was necessarily charmed with Alferd Packer --

"Your photo on your page looks like you are dieing of AIDS. I really hope this is the case."

Well, Alferd, I appreciate the sentiment, but it's really quite vain, although I do believe I'll spark another cigarette in your name. Have an ice day, on me.

Turning Worms

Greg Swann applauds Shawn Macomber in yesterday's American Spectator.

Then; Colby Cosh points to an item about Macomber and fucking idiot NYC cops.

Recall the adage about a liberal who's never been mugged. Well, here's a case of a conservative who's been mugged by Law & Order. I have often said that it is impossible to completely understand American politics without having spent at least one night in jail. We'll see what Macomber has to say for himself when he's finally sprung. I say a plunger-full of copy up someone's ass is in high order, here.