Wipe Out

Just finished reviewing two hours of viddie of my band at today's cancer benefit gig. Wow; I'm so tired, you wouldn't bleeve it. We had a great time, though, and did a goodly amount of cash business for this deal. Good. That was the point.

Havin' a piece of pie, and it won't be long before I'm bound for bed with Durant.

Seeyalaterville.

We Know This Isn't True

Reynolds: "Lying to a grand jury is serious, if true."

What the hell, man? A sitting president can do it and skate like a purse-snatcher in a crowd.

How serious could it possibly be?

Endarkenment

Referring to this, this person says, "Besides, every generation, feels like the 'wheels are coming off' in some sense."

Yup. But you know what?

Every now and then, they're right about it.

I'm off to bed.

Sweet dreams, kids.

"First Thing: Let's Surrender"

Neal Boortz sez: "We'd better give them money, because if we don't, then they'll start acting like commissars."

Way to go, Neal. There's nothin' like rolling tits-up in front of an implied threat.

Punk.

Nothing Happening

(The following went out in e-mail, responding to one enthusiastic commentor, and cc'd to another, which accounts for the reference to "the three of us". I have emphasized the central premise that I have in mind.)

"Heh. I've gotten over the last few months where Two-four is the first site I hit when I start to read in the mornings."

Naturally, it's good to hear that, and I'm glad if it's working for you. I have serious reservations, because of the fact that I'm simply not producing, lately. Certainly: I'm not living up to the potential that my record illustrates. (I think you missed my real hey-day. It happened in Usenet, which posts of mine some people insist should be assembled in a book.)

Here's the thing: there is nothing really important happening in American politics right now.

That might seem strange, but the sensation is unmistakable and overwhelming to me. Yes, there are some rather large and superficially notable things happening. The split in the conservatives over the Miers nomination is one example. However, they're not that "large" in the whole context -- the general direction -- of American politics.

We are riding along a sort of dynamic plateau of events all headed in the direction that the three of us understand. Everything happening right now is easily contained in the concept of emerging Amsoc. (Did you read "1984"? "Amsoc" is a yank on Orwell's "Ingsoc" -- "English Socialism" -- and I wish I could claim it, but it was my old Usenet pal Rob Robertson who first put that together within my eyesight.) Even what might be called anomalies, like Reynolds & Co.'s "Porkbusters" horseshit or my loved and wandering friend Bruce McQuain's "Neolibertarianism", remain squarely within the axis of advance. (At the bottom end, no matter what: they're all still playing to the basic premises that they ostensibly reject.)

One reason for this "plateau" dynamic is that the realization of pressure-group politics is more complete than ever before. And an implication of this is that events and "movements" that, in the past, when (this is important) the shocks of such things were far more easily absorbed, would have been distinctive in their scale (say; the environmental movement by the late-60's/early-70's, or the Watts riots) are now subsumed by a far greater number of similarly-scaled events and movements: more big things and ideas happening all the time, in a political climate becoming more volatile all the time, so that the import of events and movements themselves is not so great as the fact of the intensity of the action. This action -- all this playing along the axis -- is nowhere to be, and that's what causes me to say that "there is nothing really important happening in American politics right now".

You see?

That's the sort of thing that I'm not writing about.

There's really nothing happening.

I bite off notes on the day-to-day. It's a long-term project.

"The Judicial Monastery"

The subject header is a phrase that I just now heard some TEEVEE talking-head utter while I was in the kitchen carving off a chunk of The Best Apple Pie In The World (which comes from Hollenbeck's over in Virgil, and which makes you sorry bastards all the poorer because you don't live close enough to the joint to stand in line for one when they come out of the oven).

And this morning's news on the Miers nomination marks a good time to quote Martin McPhillips, from discussion that we conducted several days ago:

"As far as I'm concerned, I don't want another bigtime legal blowhard on the Court. I don't think that beyond some hard but reachable rigor Constitutional law is any big mystery. I think that conservatives have been led down a garden path by Bork and his legal positivism, which I reject, and I don't buy any of this 'labored in the judicial vineyards for thirty years' nonsense."

This point was the only one on which I was tempted by Miers -- as much as I could be "tempted" by anything involving the Supreme Court.

I completely agree with him.

"As If"

"I've said for years now that we need to take an analogy to David Ben Gurion's position on WWII as our motto. His position was: fight the war against the Nazis as if there was no White Paper (British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine) and fight the White Paper as if there no war against the Nazis. We need to fight the Islamo-Fascists as if there were no State (or any more than a minarchist state), and fight the State as if there were no Islamo-Fascists."

(That's Tim Starr -- the link goes to his Yahoo group -- commenting on my remarks for Jeff Baxter, yesterday. He's exactly right.)

Wake Up And Smell The Goddamned Coffee Beans, Fool

Q: " How do they live with themselves?"

A: They can do it because "representation" is a lie (graduated now to that status from the hopeful delusion of yore), and you don't count.

Dumbass.

What The Hell Did He Think Was Going On?

If this person really was watching Usenet and listservs, c. 1998, then I sure can't figure out why he's apprehensive about the Web, now. If blogs were going to happen, then it was fore-ordained that everything he saw in the "niche[s]" would explode into what the Web has become with the advent of blogs. There could be no other way about it, because those niches were leading the way, certainly in terms of outlining political contentions in this country.

He hits me a bit like Dan Rather: someone who had no idea what's been going on. For someone who was active online before blogs, that's quite remarkable.

"The Politics Of The War"

Douglas at D-STPFW includes a line attributed to George Packer, on last Sunday's Meet The Press:

"[t]he politics of the war were taken more seriously by this administration than the war itself."

I see no way around the truth of that.

It's exactly why the Bush administration deserves just about all the gas they're taking over the whole WMD thing. A principled leader would have understood that it was never necessary to go there (and it was a lot less than unnecessary to go the goddammned United Nations). Neither of the two attacks on the World Trade Center (to take a couple at random) involved what are generally understood as "weapons of mass destruction", but they were adequate moral reason to start killing people interested in that sort of thing. There was always sufficient moral imperative in that, without saying word-one about WMD's.

But we're talking about fools, at least.

Two Distinct Concepts

Well, now. I wonder who this is:

"Doubtless, those I consider superior minds (Beck comes to mind immediately), are so blinded by war that their anarchist roots begin to shrivel from lack of nutrition. I am constantly both amused and dismayed by those who regularly ridicule government, then take some supposed 'long view' of history to justify war, which is merely the ace card of government's stranglehold upon citizens. Whenever a philosophy of war is advanced to defend government, there I distrust that philosophy most of all. Of all online, Beck is easily the individual who thinks most thoroughly, save for war. Then, he experiences an inexplicable disconnect. I have never really understood why he trusts government to go to war, over against those who distrust our government--as much as does he. We do not need 'terrorists' to take us out, so to speak. Our government is doing a far better job."

Ah. I see that it's Jeff Baxter.

I think about remarks like that, and I get split up. I think that I'm responsible for part of it; extending a doubt that I've made myself clear on the matter. On the other hand, I see no warrant for the presumption of something like the third-to-last sentence.

"Trust" has nothing to do with any of it. I wouldn't "trust" these motherfuckers -- not one of them -- with a sack of garbage on its way to the end of my driveway on any given Wednesday morning.

Look: there will be people reading this who will -- and do -- understand a great deal of the scope and nature of issues involved here. There will also be people reading this who could not assemble all of it in one mental bag with all the intellectual devotion of their entire lives. Each set of people implies reasons why comprehensive explication here (like; right this instant) should not be entirely necessary.

Given that, I can broad-stroke the thing like this:

At root, there is a crucial difference between the bloody fools running this war and the mindless dipshits who stand against war -- any war, in general principle -- with their strictly amoral demands for peace and no regard at all for the prospect that there really is a right and wrong which must sometimes be resolved by main force. And there should be no mistake that that difference is where this thing fundamentally turns. This is not to say that certain higher-level considerations must not be accounted. For example: a great deal of opposition to this military episode is founded in the outrage on the left borne of the simple fact that the White House is not occupied by someone commie enough to suit the tastes of creatures like Katrina vanden Heuvel and Michael Moore. Anyone who thinks that these people are really screaming about the war is deluded.

(Just this instant, I'm listening to Maureen Dowd on the Imus show. She just called the war a "scam": attacking Iraq, "instead of going after Osama". That woman is completely insufferable -- as bloody stoopid as the day is long -- and there is nothing unrepresentative about her: she is an instantly handy typicality. I will return to her statement here, shortly.)

Let's think about "trust" for a moment. Does this look like "trust" to anyone here? I can understand some peoples' confusion, but I don't need lectures on what's happening to my country. I've said it before and I could say it all day long, for all the difference it would make: this administration is leading the way into the future, and any sensible person should be horrified by the elegance of that statement of fact.

But that's only one of two subjects that Baxter has conflated upon taking my name in vain. The matter of the state security apparat is fundamentally separate from the imperative to kill the bad guys. Read that again, and understand the thirst for blood. I'm talking rationally applied savagery here, kids, and I don't apologize for it: the thing to do is to summarily destroy those who have set out to destroy us, with all the world-original American aptitude for going to the extremity of the thing. Nobody who cannot or will not grasp this imperative is fit for the discussion, because they're simply not coming to terms with reality, and I don't attempt to discuss anything with insane people. There's just no percentage in it.

None of this implies endorsement of this government. You bet: every time I hear of a dead fourteenth-century throwback, shot down in the streets of some shitty little pest-hole where actual and actualizing human beings would not live beyond the length of a desperation that would drive them out to something better, I cheer. "Fuck 'em." That's my motto on the thing. If they would attend their primitive dirt-scratching in peace, then my attitude would be exactly opposite -- as it is the opposite in the individual cases of people who are not interested to blow me to pieces in order to get their ticket punched into Paradise. And in a free country, I would hire people -- superbly trained killers, you bet -- to get there first with the most and just smash 'em on the spot, like bugs. I would hire them to do it in the same way that I hire General Motors to build cars, along with everyone else who hires them (unless they're hiring, say, Ford, to do the same thing).

It is regrettable if some people cannot or will not draw these categorical distinctions, but I don't have that debility.

Look at Dowd, the rotten creep. Attacking Iraq "instead of going after Osama" (those were her exact words) was a "scam" (her exact word). Honestly, already: why on earth should anyone have to point out the obvious fact that this thing would not be done -- not by a long shot -- if George W. Bush were able to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue this very afternoon, dragging bin Laden's body behind a chariot like Caesar returning from Gaul? What causes her kind of childishness?

[shrug] Who really cares? The point is that she simply has no idea what's going on beyond the fact that she doesn't like Bush.

Well. I don't like him, either. When the 2000 election was decided, I wrote that he would be "spectacularly rotten" -- I didn't see anyone with a brain in their head say anything like that before I did -- and I have every confidence that I will be vindicated before history. Domestic affairs in America alone will see to that, but there will be more. This whole "democracy" thing in Iraq is going to be one long bitter horse-laugh before it's done. Everyone who understands "democracy" beyond the shimmer of dull platitude will understand the object-lesson just getting underway over there.

Look: find me a way to fire this government. (Anyone who's paid attention to me knows that I know a way, but not having gained popular approval, I'm open to sensible suggestion.) Nothing would thrill me more than to see George W. Bush and his whole cohort headed across the Fourteenth Street Bridge and out of Washington D.C. with their shit strapped to the roofs of mini-vans like a bunch of political hillbillies, as long as -- and this is crucial -- it would be the last time such a mess would have to be handled in such a way.

Nobody gets to question my anarcho-cred. I'm as heavy as anyone in the world, and way heavier than most.

But don't mistake this: just because I hate this government, it doesn't mean that I am not interested in the war.

They are two categorically distinct concepts, and anyone interested to address the matter would do well to handle them competently.

Weathermark

It's bloody snowing in Daisy Hollow.

Only just now -- like; ten seconds ago -- I looked out the window, and there is snow falling in large heavy flakes. (The sort that doesn't last very long, depending on how it piles up.)

Almost a week before Halloween.

(9:30pm -- I just drove back down the hill behind the first snowplow of the year. He was throwing an impressive rooster-tail, and there is an inch and a half of very heavy new snow laying where he hasn't run yet. It's still snowing quite merrily.)

The Gas Before Your Eyes

In the long trail of the destruction of language and concepts, it would be fairly difficult to come up with something more pernicious than the example of the word, "inflation". Going through my daily life and listening to all the senseless jabber shot through this culture now, I never -- ever -- hear anyone using that word to refer to its proper conceptual referent. They all talk like children playing at adult things. Every talking head on the TEEVEE, every brain-fart popper on the radio, every chimpanzee seated at a dead-tree word-processor: not a single one of them has a clue in the world to what "inflation" is all about. (ed. -- hmm... seems maybe Boortz has been straight on the thing a time or two, but I can't cite it.)

It has taken ninety-two years to beat this country this senseless. Do the math and then consult history for the turning point.

It now seems that the space aliens are about to return their abductee (Alan Greenspan) to earth. But their spaceship sails on: fuming clouds of gas upon the eyes of hundreds of millions, who, in turn, venerate the gas in lieu of reality.

Meanwhile: the totality of the theft over nearly a century will never be known.

How long, oh lord? How long?

(That's another Ransomlink)

(Ps. -- it's everywhere. Very few understand it. See what I mean?)

How?

According to the claims of morons everywhere and of every stripe, you now owe the United States government nearly twenty-seven thousand dollars.

What you wanted to do with what you would produce doesn't count. Look into your future and say good-bye to twenty-seven grand's worth of it, before you ever laid your hand on it.

[shrug]

I said good-bye to all of my future a long time ago. I don't work for thieves.

How do you people live with this?

(link: Greg Ransom)

"Try To Imagine"

"Finally, there is Hitler’s place in history. I agree that Hitler was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Hitler’s legacy is not all bad."

(Comment, here)

Go right ahead: just try to imagine those lines in The New York Times.

"outrage -> disgust -> resignation"

Everybody should watch out for the transcript of Howard Dean's appearance on ABC's This Week, and pay attention to his remarks on things like "altruists".

It should not take a Derbyshire to point out that the very idea that something like Howard Dean might be taken seriously in American politics by the turn of the twenty-first century should be utterly scandalous.

I'm going over to the 'ville to turn up my guitar really loud.

The subject header is quoted from an e-mail from a friend while we were talking about what I called the "routine disaster in the history of the Court" in my expectations of Miers, should she get through.

It's really no big deal, folx. There really is not anything to see in this stuff, and everybody should just move along. Keep moving along.

Petitioning History

For the two hundredth anniversary of Trafalgar, Tom Utley argues that the Brits need another Lord Nelson.

Makes good sense to me.

(link: Samizdata)

I Guess It Didn't Work Out

Yesterday, this post quoted this post, saying that "This could be a defining moment for America." Today, Reynolds' post doesn't say that.

Maybe that's because he doesn't like the definition.

Bookmark Hayek

Matt McIntosh posts a link to F.A. Hayek's 1949 essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism", which I've never read.

"Special Interests"

"The problem is not that the democratic system is somehow broken, or that the right people have yet to step up and demand change and/or be elected to public office."

Freeman remarks on this article by Anthony Gregory at LRC, although I would have wrapped the thing a bit more neatly, I think, after his opening clause, above: "The problem is not that the democratic system is somehow broken. It is actually refining itself toward peak performance. The democratic system is working very well."

The obvious facts that make the point are argument enough for me, by now, but these two people are interested to expound, and do it fairly well.

Gregory opens his article with remarks on "private interests". The general ethical point that he makes is important. However, the FNORD that routinely catches in my eye and ear is "special interests". (Word-search those pages.) In current tactical rhetoric, the thing almost always turns up as an implicit assertion that "special interests" are a pernicious anomaly somewhere in the political machinery, which can be rooted out with refined application of certain principles. This is nearly delusional. Pernicious they most usually are, but certainly not anomalous. Democracy is a positive demand for "special interests" because of its political attempt to normalize values: "interests" necessarily become "special" in order as they vie for mass necessary to political success or even survival.

Elements Of Scenic Design

In retrospect, Ms. Kosinski said, “I wish that I had done things differently. I wish I had said right off the bat, just so it was totally clear, ‘Katie, Matt, we’re in a foot of water here, but out further it’s waist-deep and the current is strong.’”

(Michelle, culping to The New York Observer)

I don't know quite how to make this clear, dahlink, but it is perfectly obvious that, had you done that, you would not have needed the bleeding canoe.

Hello?

Dog Bites Man

No big deal, right?

Well, this one is special.

It would be tempting to say that this Schwartz goof should be spiked on his own legislation: brought up on felony charges. The irony here is extremely rich. In the end, however, I would have to settle for seeing the guy get up on TEEVEE and letting everyone who voted for him know that he's been an asshole (in the legislature -- how he handles his dog is his own private affair), he's sorry for foisting his assholery on the public at large, and that it's time for him to recede into a life of not grubbing his nonsense all over other peoples' lives.

Fat chance, eh wot?

"World War II as an online Real Time Strategy Game"

"deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*"

This is only the funniest thing I've read this month.

Rickets

Now, see, if you tried to run your affairs like this, you'd be broke, too. Twenty years paying people to sit around and not produce will tend to do that to you.

There is no conscionable rationale for this sort of thing, naturally, and it should be recalled as a big part of the action as the cards begin to un-stack.

Spleen Shares Roundup

SpleenCo shares soared on news of better than expected growth in the assisted-ducting sector, today. Glands in general responded juicily, but small ductless outfits were positively awash in product for the curb & driveway markets. "We're looking forward to greater partnership in the rear end, with excellent prospects for deeper integration of spleen-based metastructure, right down to your old La-Z-Boy!" moaned SpleenCo Research Cooddinator Jax Fex. "We are the right move for the savvy investor today."

Dead Ducks On The Danube

In today's cheery news of the morning, the damned bird flu is on The Continent now. Dead ducks in Romania, on one of the major European flyways. I naturally suppose that there is all kinds of potential for enormous disaster in this, but the issue turns on whether Continental politics is confronted with responsibility for the lives of large numbers of persons in a particular crisis, in which case only the worst can be expected.

Place your bets.

(Don't Look Now, Or Anything ...but it's getting deeper.)

OWH

I'd sent Cosh a note on his bite on Oliver Wendell Holmes (look down -- it's the little one, underneath), endorsing Louis Menand's 2001 effort "The Metaphysical Club -- A Story of Ideas in America", and I was ready to let it go at that. But then, McIntosh piled-on with his wisecracks and all that appalling distolerationism of The Great Man. Not to mention...

"The weak spot in his reasoning, if I may presume to suggest such a thing, was his tacit assumption that the voice of the legislature was the voice of the people. There is, in fact, no reason for confusing the people and the legislature: the two, in these later years, are quite distinct. The legislature, like the executive, has ceased, save indirectly, to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature, in the main, of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle- a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism."

...the link to a spot-on Mencken.

Small Writs

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

(Original unlinked text from Theodore Dalrymple, via Diana -- links added on the fly)

Administrivia

Administrivia -- don't bother.

Well, I Must Say...

...that was rather disgusting. For a minute there, some mad person actually logged a bleedin' comment here. Jeezis. The whole damned database had disassappeared and there were just this little hokey "This is a pMachine message!" or something, with damned user logins and comments and you name it. Wow. Mortifying.

This is why we backup databases, innit?

I must now housekeep and press on with the damned blog upgrade.

--> Good deal. That's done. Pretty painlessly once I paid proper attention.

Stop The Labels

At this writing, there were thirty-six comments logged after this post at Samizdata.

In passing, remarks by "srs" are notable for their sketchy concordance with Ayn Rand's Mind/Body Dichotomy analysis, where conservatives (tend to, although less and less lately) material freedom (principally; economic affairs) but restrict spiritual-intellectual matters, and so-called "liberals" grant freedoms in spritual/intellectual matters while they want to control material affairs ("means of production", etc.). See "Philosophy: Who Needs It" (Signet 1984), pp. 186-187.

Kieran Barry first approached my approach to the problem at hand, with his call to "represent more information" than normally comprises "short-hand representation of political positions". However, he proposes to "extend the shorthand", and falls short, I think, with a cartographic metaphor.

Someone called "pommygranate" suggests finding a new word for one's beliefs.

In all the comments so far, I didn't see the suggestion that I'd hoped for, which is to "represent more information" by way of asserting and controverting specific issues and their underlying principles, instead of dealing in any of the "shorthand" at all. Cease all this talk in labels, and get to the real things that they contrive to represent. Those interested in electoral politics will find this sort of thing un-handy for its increasing the difficulty of assembling... what? masses? gangs?... whaddam I s'posed to call em? This at least one good reason why serious individualists should take this humble advice, ya morons, and one good way by which to practice individualism at little cost. Dodging the herd is almost always the best thing, and there are all kinds of benefits open to dealing in applications of principles to concrete circumstances of the day. Clarity of thought, f'rinstance. Focal mobility over events. That sort of thing.

Say what you think without abetting others' indiscriminate grab-bags.

The Cosh

Some people might wonder every now & then what's with my interest in Colby Cosh. That's the first place I hit on my morning rounds every day. Certainly, his evident politics is nothing as drastical as my tastes normally run, although I would be seriously interested to sit around and toss drinks with him, and we'd see which way the sparks would fly.

But look here: tell me how you can't love a guy who turns a phrase like "customer support imagineered by Lavrenti Beria".

A Reading In Time

"I know that your bedside is beleaguered by doctors, and naturally this fills me with fear. Their opinions are always conflicting, and he who has nothing new to say suffers the shame of limping behind the others. As Pliny said, in order to make a name for themselves through some novelty, they traffic in our lives. With them -- not as with other trades -- it is sufficient to be called a physician to be believed to the last word, and yet a physician's lie harbors more danger than any other. Only sweet hope causes us not to think of the situation. They learn their art at our expense, and even our death brings them experience; the physician alone has the right to kill with impunity. Oh, Most Gentle Father, look upon their band as an army of enemies. Remember the warning epitaph which an unfortunate man had inscribed on his tombstone: 'I died of too many physicians.'"

(Petrarch, to Pope Clement VI, 1352, quoted in Durant's "Story of Civilization", vol. V, "The Renaissance", p. 531)

This is for Rob.

What's All The Bloody Flap?

(laff, laff, laff)

I see people with their hair on fire over a stolen jet that turned up at Gwinnett County, Georgia.

Here's a bet for you: none of these people know anything about general aviation, and they're certainly not pilots.

I trained at Briscoe Field. It's where I met Mohamed Atta: standing at the desk at Advanced Aviation for several minutes.

When I was flying there, Briscoe was the third-busiest airport in Georgia, only after Hartsfield International and Peachtree-DeKalb (another metro-ATL airport, just a bit north of the city). It's a single six-thousand foot runway, with traffic ranging from military jets (I've seen transient F/A-18's in there, which was curious because NAS Dobbins is only a short hop over to the northwest), to multi-recips (I was once #2 for takeoff behind a C-47), to homebuilts, to biz-jets (a passel of 'em came flooding in during my initial solo, which was a riot), to all kinds of G.A. That place jumps, all day long.

What this all means is that there is nothing notably unusual about a Cessna Citation parking on the ramp and nobody knowing anything about it for a period of less than twelve hours (the "mighty big window of time" that "B Relevant" asserts). The tower at Briscoe is not manned 24/7. When you fly in at night (which I have), you punch your radio PTT ("push-to-talk") button in order to light up the runway. (This is not an unusual procedure across the U.S.) Personally, I usually flew a low centerline pass in order to scare the coyotes off the runway before going around for landing. And when I parked the airplane, I would tie it down, jump in my car and drive away, most often without seeing a single soul. It gets quiet there at night.

Somebody could drop in there in a Citation and drive away without making a ripple. That's how nobody can yet nail the time when that jet landed. It's really not unusual.

It is a bit unusual to make that flight without a flight plan, but VFR and un-filed (flight-plan) night-flight is certainly legal, even in a jet.

Let's pay attention, but calm down.

Studio Hours

It's just that I have this AutoCAD project dealing with boats, you see.

Boats, even.

Like; even though I'd much rather be beating out copy on this howling laugh of a Supreme Court folly.

(cackle)

"I See Dumb People"

Some poor dope writes to Reynolds:

"The many responses you have detailed from Congress to constituents are a graphic exposition of the distance between voters and their representatives. Our representatives have no interest in actually responding to voters' specific concerns. They have even less interest in controlling federal spending or cutting back on that oh so delicious pork.

What can be done to restore fiscal responsibility in this country? I wish I had that answer."

To which I say: Bullshit. That person is not interested in anything like "fiscal responsibility". And if you don't believe me, then do whatever it takes to get in touch with him, and then ask him to list the things for which he endorses government theft in order to secure them. Should you ever get a straight answer, then you can take that list of things and throw it right in his face with the fact that everyone else's demands are exactly as morally and politically valid as his. His "fiscal responsibility" is someone else's "safety net".

The fight's on.

And this is never going to stop until some considerable number of Americans stand up on the principle of private property and say, "No. This is mine: I produced it, and you cannot have it for any reason."

This government will keep spending what you produce as long as they are able to lay their hands on it. It's just that simple, and it will never stop until enough people get themselves face to face with the facts.

"Porkbusters", my aching ass. You goddamned fools.

FZ Collection

"I had searched for that album for over a year, and now... disaster. I told the guy I only had $3.80. He scratched his neck. 'We use that record to demonstrate the hi-fi's with, but nobody ever buys one when we use it... you can have it for $3.80 if you want it that bad.'

I couldn't imagine what he meant by 'demonstrating hi-fi's with it.' I'd never heard a hi-fi. I only knew that old people bought them. I had a genuine lo-fi... it was a little box about 4 inches deep with imitation wrought-iron legs at each corner (sort of brass-plated) which elevated it from the table top because the speaker was in the bottom. My mother kept it near the ironing board. She used to listen to a 78 of The Little Shoemaker on it. I took off the 78 of The Little Shoemaker and, carefully moving the speed lever to 33 1/3 (it had never been there before), turned the volume all the way up and placed the all-purpose Osmium-tip needle in the lead-in spiral to Ionization. I have a nice Catholic mother who likes Roller Derby. Edgard Varese does not get her off, even to this very day. I was forbidden to play that record in the living room ever again.

In order to listen to The Album, I had to stay in my room. I would sit there every night and play it two or three times and read the liner notes over and over. I didn't understand them at all. I didn't know what timbre was. I never heard of polyphony. I just liked the music because it sounded good to me. I would force anybody who came over to listen to it. (I had heard someplace that in radio stations the guys would make chalk marks on records so they could find an exact spot, so I did the same thing to EMS 401... marked all the hot items so my friends wouldn't get bored in the quiet parts.)"

...

"On my fifteenth birthday my mother said she'd give me $5. I told her I would rather make a long-distance phone call. I figured Mr. Varese lived in New York because the record was made in New York (and because he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone book."

(FZ, on discovering Edgar Varese -- Stereo Review, June 1971)

Here is a pretty damned good collection of articles about and interviews with Frank Zappa, running from 1966 to 1995.

Coast-to-Coast Kitsch

So that's where they came from.

You know, I'd seen the damned bloody things all over everywhere -- damned Harrisburg had 'em all over the place when I was there last -- and I was definitely wondering what was up with all the brat-painted animals standin' around.

Jeezis.

(Balko)

(Ps. -- this deserves its own item, but what the hell; don't miss Balko's note on Der Field Marshal Rodham's prospects. Ain't that the livin' end? Sure; there's Three More Years for bailing the Bush ship, but they's a boat-load of water running through them holes. Hmm. Who's gonna get killed in the '06 gladiations? How much of the Republican congress could wash out to sea? No tellin', but it'll be an interesting watch on the tides.)

False Presumptions

Jason Kuznicki.

He found a bike. It was discarded, and he asked if he could have it. He's antsy about the way he got it, but I see no obviously serious problem with it.

It does not, however, comport with Washington D.C. bicycle regulations.

("Washington D.C. bicycle regulations." The phrase fairly rumbles with the sensations of Christmas Eve on the Delaware River, doesn't it? Anyway...)

Of course, it's no great big-ass deal, from what I can make of it. Jason is picking a scab with this stuff; I guess nobody in D.C. registers a bicycle. That doesn't stop the cops from stealing them, but that's only a detail. The real thing here is the flashlight on one of the myriad corners of life -- the interstices of human action -- where the state, despite its general presumptions, cannot go before it suffocates the life out of its object.

"The bike registration policy is one of those arbitrary regulations that sublimates my inner rule-following instinct into my outer libertarian ideology. The root problem with the law is that it tackles the (real) problem of bike theft by falsely presuming the guilt of all those who do not comply with a regulation that could never be enforced except arbitrarily."

In the end, the political always becomes personal. And these days, it leaves less and less room for those who know what they're doing and are doing the right thing.

Slag The French

What can one say about a people whose founding political event was a crushing defeat? (Alesia -- 52 BC)

Anything one wants.

Fambly Tradition

Q: What's the difference between George W. Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush?

A: The kid waited until his second term to go tits-up.

Greg Ransom does not appreciate it.

"Castle Coalition"

Anyone keeping up with the Kelo eminent domain hematoma might find this joint handy now & then.

(link: Samizdata)

Discognition

"The widespread opposition to the integration of knowledge in philosophy over the past century or so has substantially affected the standard practices of other disciplines. By routinely engaging in hyper-specialized nit-picking irrelevant to life, philosophers largely removed themselves from that central location in the nexus of human knowledge. Since they defended intellectual disintegration on philosophic grounds, they also encouraged scholars in other disciplines to engage in their own form of compartmentalization. That they did, apparently while also turning to the crazed continental philosophers for the required philosophic foundation to varying degrees. The current fractured state of academia is the end result of that process. It won't change until philosophers seriously commit themselves -- in both theory and practice -- to cognitive integration."

Diana Mertz Hsieh puts up a good brief on the state of acanemia.

The only point she doesn't make is that disintegration has made its way all the way down to the street, and this is why "principle" has become a four-letter word in political discourse, everywhere one looks. For only one glaring example: it explains the oft-stated aversion to "litmus tests" in the examination of Supreme Court candidates. It is anathema now to state one's principles explicitly, because the very idea of principles has no value anymore.

All bets are off.

"Good To Go"

I have no regard for the Supreme Court. Nobody has ever been able to seriously address my perennial question: "Why do you think they call 'em 'opinions', dummy?"

When it comes to this Miers person, Jonah Goldberg is about as quotable as it gets, for me.

Stop Me Before I Shop Again

Well, I couldn't resist it. Dammit.

I'd seen it the other day, on a top shelf at Vlad's place while trying to get away with a history of the House of Morgan (modern American finance), a very good looking history of the Middle Ages, and Vol. II of Durant's history of civilization ("The Life Of Greece"). The place is a pile, and one must pay close attention to every corner and cranny in order to see what's there, and I'd inadvertantly taken a glance that comprehended the thing that's been on my mind for the past two days, up there on this top shelf. I tried to blow it off, thinking that I would just piece the thing together one bit at a time, seeing as how I already had two pieces of it in hand.

And I was driving home from the 'ville just now and just stopped and turned around in Bambi Edmonds' driveway (over on the Virgil road) and headed back past TC3 and the vegetable stand-corner, saying, "To hell with it. Let's go get that." I wasn't sure if Vlad would still be there, but he was, all alone in that barn, doing paperwork.

"Hey, You. Listen, I seem to have stacked up somewhat rather more cash than I expected at this point, so I'll take that collection of Durant."

So he bagged it up for me while I asked him if The Vampire State was making him bite me for it. (I'd never noticed, you see.) "Yeah, I have to do that."

"Hmm. Well, dammit, I can't do it in that case," showing him a hundred fifty-two dollars: all I had in my pocket after I'd just dropped forty bucks in my gas tank. He reached up and adjusted his glasses with a sudden smile and said, "That's okay, you can owe me."

"Done," I said. "You'll see me within a day or two."

So I walked out with a very nice...

...edition of Will Durant's eleven volume "The Story of Civilization".

And I owe Vlad a tenner.

Onward

The blog was down all day because of a server matter. All's well, now.

Busy-ness Of Late

Yes, of course: I know I've been neglecting the joint lately. It's mostly been about maintenance items around the place, swinging towards winter. Some minor roof repairs, a new stack for the coal stove, and lots of other bits and pieces. Got the band together last Sunday, and didn't today, but this needs a push because a friend has put the arm on me to play a benefit for a cancer case on the 30th (which news will be surprising to Garry if he reads this -- G; I'll call and 'splain).

I was working in the garage yesterday and came across something very interesting to me.

I needed a drill-bit, so I went sorting through the collection that Dad left. I found the size that I needed, but on closer examination, I observed that the tip of the bit was broken, although it had been filed back toward something like its original shape. The next place to go looking was in an old wooden cabinet with small drawers, which had always stood in my grandfather's cellar, next to the Craftsman drill-press which now stands in my father's garage, and which has been in service since 1938. This cabinet always contained all kinds of accessories and stuff for the drill-press. In a drawer full of bits, I found a small box full of the smaller-sized bits in the range that I needed. Looking through that little box, I began to see that they were all broken, and filed in the same way.

And it dawned on me: "I am looking at the consequences of the Great Depression."

This box was filled with drill-bits that looked like they'd come straight out of a Soviet memoir, and they had been put there by a man so terrorized by the experience of his youth that he could not -- ever -- bring himself to throw away a drill-bit and buy a new one.

That was my grandfather.

It was remarkable thing to realize, looking at it seven decades after the fact.