It's Too Bad That It's So Difficult

You know, I just Googled around trying to find out when, or whether, HBO's "Rome" would be available on DVD. I found this discussion rather depressing.

It would seem to me that the thing ought to be produced for sale right away. Season one is in the bag, and what I see is that its market is being chipped away underground. I'm not going to even think about downloading it anywhere, but that's just me. I don't know what's to be done about anyone else, but I would buy it right instantly now, and I cannot imagine that I'm the only one.

[shrug]

I've had myself a day and I'm too tired to think about it much.

Extremely Dangerous Presumptions

"No one is talking about tapping run-of-the-mill phone conversations."

I have a question for Jonah Goldberg:

How the hell do you know that?

Morons Deluxe

"My question: Why is the TSA only starting this program now?!"

Okay: this is the part where I make myself ever more unpopular around the 'sphere because I have a bad attitude and an un-civil tongue:

Michelle Malkin is a goddamned dope, and so is anyone and everyone who thinks the TSA scheme to turn airport czaristas into instant shrinks is a good idea.

Let me tell you something: you haven't plumbed the depths of these peoples' puffery until you've watched some dumpy broad with a gun and a uniform shooing-away a van unloading passengers and baggage at the aiport at Dayton, Ohio on the premise that...well, it's such a juicy target for exploding-van terrorism that it needs a single dumpy-ass broad with a gun glaring her resentments over a shitty job to save the country from a family trying to get grandma and grandpop on the plane to Memphis.

But you will. Just wait'll you get a load of these slugs playing psycho-ologist if you can't manage to fit your eyes exactly between the lines on the early morning flight or you happen to be travelling with your mates and they realize that you're not the only one who went through the same twenty-hour run home from the Far East with all attendant dizziness adding up -- about which these hinds and crumbs don't know fuck all -- by the time the bunch of you ended up in their protecting clutches.

Now, I hold no brief for the ACLU. The thing they're concerned with in all this is the premise that everybody but white people will be insulted. They're dismissed.

The banality of evil is such a fine thing, ladies and gentlemen, that you have to be right there on the spot to catch the second-to-second fleet of its flash down the sinews of some punk who's been handed a power that he can in no way rationally manage precisely because he's a punk.

Consider this: what TSA is implementing is something that every person with a brain and eyes ought to be able to manage as a simple matter of adult work in the world. But these people must now be instructed. In less than a week.

Believe me: they'll be very good at it. Right away.

And it's going to kick your ever-lovin' ass when you go through it, in ways so fine that you'll find yourself all alone in a country that should know better -- and once could have -- with no resort but utter rage burning through nothing but the solitary cage of your own mind. You'll know better, but it won't matter.

What My Baby Sister's Birthplace Has Come To

Michael J. Totten samples Tripoli, Libya again.

Even at six thousand words, it must necessarily be only a snapshot, but I can see it.

I can remember the place happily from the view of a small child in a pre-industrial jewel on the Mediterranean with semi-rational hopes for the future, before the whole thing was pressed through the molds of Soviet ideology and a madman's delusions. Really: they were sweet people, and it saddens me a lot to consider what's happened to them.

Renovative Destruction

Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, yes.

I just had the most sublime explosion of ill-temper. Really: it was just beautiful.

You see, my desk is a three by five-foot tilting electric-lift drafting table. I don't know who made it. I'm pretty sure there's a data plate on the bottom of the damned thing, but it weighs about a hundred seventy-five pounds and I'm not about to look. It's very cool, and I just love it. I bought it for a hundred bucks at a second-hand office furniture joint on Mountain Industrial Boulevard down in Atlanta about ten years ago, and have just loved every minute of it, except for one thing:

For all these years, it's had this dopey sheet of linoleum tacked down on its top with some kind of double-sided adhesive tape around the entire perimeter. I suppose it was put there by whoever owned it before me as a sort of replacable top surface. Well: it has had these low bubbles and wrinkles in it, surrounding an area about two-thirds the size of what I need for optimum mousing around a computer display. It's been driving me nuts for a long time, although I only just now figured out that that's what it was. I had to play with the mouse a long time and study the matter closely in order to get it. Once I did, however...

Shit flew.

Twenty-inch monitor. Keyboard. Acoustic Research Active Partners (my desktop speakers). All the audio-mixing gear in the up-left corner. Two cell-hones. The Beretta 92FS. Three small enameled dishes filled with everything from guitar picks and pre-1965 silver coins to stray 7.62mm rounds and a collection of silver bracelets. Small screwdrivers and 35mm Kodachrome slides. CD's. Photographic prints, my flight logbook, a mini-Maglite, a small antique copper oil-can from my grandfather's basement shop, a pile of audio connectors, a lanyard with my whole collection of tour laminates; you fuckin' name it. The whole thing went up in a cloud while I cleared this deck like a Marine D.I. Fuckin' outta here. Then, I tore that shitty piece of linoleum off the top of the desk in one move, ran it down the stairs, out the back door, and you had to see it sailing out into the black of the back yard.

Oh, yes, lawdy-lawd.

Now, these fifteen square feet are the lovely flat mint-green surface of the original table, and the world is a far, far better place.

I will sit here watching episodes of HBO's "Rome", delighted to gather up all this stuff to put it back where it belongs.

I do love a proper, righteous, temper-fit.

Insufferable Brats

I just cruised through the living room, where the television was tuned to the Kennedy Center Honors. One of the recipients this year is Tina Turner. And up on the stage was Beyonce Knowles: doing a straight cop of Tina's "Proud Mary".

I had to wonder where that child found the bloody nerve to do that right there in front of the woman who conquered the world with it.

Truly: many things go right past my comprehension.

Liars For The Cause

Of course, everyone who's paid attention knows the story of the utterly despicable Walter Duranty and his bloody lies in service of Josef Stalin, institutionalized with a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times. Let's put the thing this way: every single time some lefty utters the fuzz-word, "legacy", one of the towering hypocrisies of the twentieth century is being shoveled toward the dust-bin in hope that reality can be defrauded forever.

Did you ever know that Paul Robeson only told the truth out of sheer soul-eating guilt at the end of his life about the murder of his "friend" Itsik Fefer during Stalin's purge of Soviet Jews that began in 1948? That rotten bastard lied when he came home from a trip to the USSR, during which he met Fefer for the last time and Fefer had told him, "They're going to kill us." You could catch the sketch of the thing in "Radical Son", by David Horowitz (1997, pp. 73-74). And if you're the sort of dipshit who cannot sort substance from style, then see "Stalin's Secret Pogrom -- The Postwar Inquisition Of The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee" (2001, pp. 48-49), part of the Yale University "Annals Of Communism" series.

"Robeson justified his silence on the grounds that any public criticism of the USSR would reinforce the authority of America's right wing, which, he believed, wanted to see a preeemptive war against the Soviet Union."

"No enemies on the Left." That was the deal. And there was no price too high for others to pay while these moral monsters were held out as courageous crusaders for the noble experiment of socialism. Robeson held his awful secrets for nearly thirty years as his "friend" mouldered in the grave.

Now, we learn of another paragon of commie virtue who wrote a whole book of lies for "the greater good":

"The story was 'Boston,' Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.

Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.

Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for 'Boston,' Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore 'sent me into a panic,' Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.

'Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,' Sinclair wrote. '… He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.'"

The Los Angeles Times.

Sinclair carried his lies for more than forty years, to his grave.

Understand this, kids:

"... no price too high for others to pay..."

This necessarily includes the delusions that millions of simpletons carried through their own little lives across decades and generations, which were bred and cultivated by such leaders of public opinion who lied to them with deliberate ethical calculation:

"'I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point,' he wrote to his attorney. 'I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case.'

Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.

'My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book,' Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927."

Now.

Wake up, pay attention, and then ask yourself just how comprehensive has been the scale of the lying throughout all your life.

(link: Tim Starr)

Taking Care At Shipping What One Doesn't Want

In 1987, along with my brother Michael and two good friends, I led a team of independent steel-climbers and riggers at work on setting and striking the stadium productions of Pink Floyd's "Delicate Sound of Thunder" tour in America. This work (scroll down for a couple of pix) would usually see us on site for about five days per show: three in and two out. We kept hotel rooms, but this was more like industrial camping: we actually lived on site nearly all the time. There came a moment when, striking the rig out of Kansas City (I believe), there was found an entire Domino's large pepperoni pizza lying on a large wooden hardware box right at the upstage edge. Now, there were actually up to three sets of hardware on the tour at any given moment being shuttled between sites in various degrees of set or strike: there were hardware bits that moved between sites faster than crews and the greatest mass of 'A', 'B', or 'C' rigs. This stuff wasn't being leapfrogged to every other gig; it went directly from one gig to the next. This upstage hardware box was part of that. So, when that box got packed in Kansas City, that pizza got dropped into it, and off it went to the next site, where it was found in the box by a crew who had no idea what it meant. They carefully set that pizza aside, unpacked that box and set the show. The pizza languished for nearly a week until that hardware box got packed during the strike, at which point, the pizza was carefully placed on top of the load, and off it went to the next city. The last I knew of it, the pizza's box was carefully patched with duct-tape to ensure its integrity for another trip, and it had been on the tour for six weeks, bouncing back & forth between crews taking every possible care to maintain its all-access upstage status.

That was the best story of bouncing un-wanted goods back & forth I ever knew, until I saw this at Eric's place. These guys have it beaten by a mile.

Pretty funny.

Done

If anyone is going to give an odder Christmas present than me, this year, I'd like to know what it is.

After detailed study and long thought, I decided that my two year-old neice, Dana, is going to get nuts and bolts.

This child loves to take things apart and put them back together again. She does this with fierce intensity: one does not get away with interrupting her when she's busy at figuring out something remotely mechanical. So, I bought a bunch of hardware and a nifty box to keep it all in. She's got wingnuts and stove-bolts and U-bolts and thimbles & clips and snap-hooks and quick-links and eye-bolts, all in different sizes.

I'm tellin' ya: this is going to be a hit. This is who this child is. She has her dollies, but they always sit next to her quietly when she's at work.


Okay, fine then. I'm all shopped. I hope you are, too, and I hope you all have the best holidays ever. All of youse. All your way.

Stay warm out there. I'm going to go over to my friend Mark's to crack a primo bottle of Haitian rum in an egg nog.

Dec. 25 update -- I note that Bill St. Clair appreciated the idea but holds concerns. This is obviously a serious matter. He's right, and it's not something that did not occur to me. "Detailed study and long thought," however. I discussed this with my sister, Dana's mother, who thought it was a splendid idea all 'round, and reinforced it every time I thought twice about it. One point that she made emphatically is that Dana has never put things in her mouth the way her (now) three year-old brother did, and I have never seen him do it. Which is to say: he did it only very rarely, and Dana even less.

These children are uncanny. It is something of a mystery in the family how Agnes got away with two beautiful, wonderfully sweet-tempered, and intelligent children when her first pregnancy occurred in her fortieth year. The joke is that she didn't deserve this. But everyone is far too charmed to play it on her, because the facts of the case are so blinding.

All of my brothers' and sister's children are marvelous, but this kid is a real case. She has been using the word "no" for nearly a year, now. She won't be two years old until next month. Here's the thing: she isn't arbitrary about the exercise of power -- the discovery of personal autonomy -- with that word, as nearly all children are. Even if one doesn't agree with it, one can just about always see something that looks almost like a reason behind it when she says it, and you wouldn't believe the conviction in the rendering. There are very rarely two-year-old histrionics behind the thing: ordinarily, it's just a quiet and flat statement of her position, presented to the court. It's really remarkable. And the flip side is a blessing: when she is agreeable -- which is often -- she just glows with an angelic smile and the sweetest voice; she'll say "'kay" in assent, she goes to bed without a fight and she wakes up with a smile and a greeting by name to whoever she sees.

I could go on for a long time. This is a remarkable kid. Did I mention that her father is a mechanical engineer?

She is far past putting small metal bits in her mouth. We don't quite know how she got there, but she's there.

We don't let her play with electricity yet.

The Amoral Ignoring The Hopeless

Gary Cruse points to Radley Balko's links to Cory Maye trial transcripts. He encourages more linkage and he's right, of course. I suppose. I don't know whether I'm doing any worse than anyone else at this, although I surely don't suspect that I'm doing any better. Certainly not better than Balko, whose devotion to the thing ought to gather scads of "awards" every time someone takes it in mind to congratulate blogs for any of the myriad reasons that people do such things.

Gary says:

"The life of a man wrongfully on Mississippi death row depends on the blogosphere getting this story into a MSM that was all over Tookie Williams but seemingly uninterested in a wrongful conviction and execution."

This is completely disgraceful, of course, but nothing about it surprises me. The Maye travesty is obvious -- it doesn't fit the maimstreamers' sense of "nuance", don'tcha know? You simply cannot go near this case without realizing an injustice so general that it does not admit the sort of hermeneutic posturing central to their self-congratulations of "objectivity". This is a real live barrel of snakes (not like a "can of worms"), and the big-timers would rather eat a fresh hot bowl of dryer-lint before they kick it open.

It will be an authentically astounding day, should any of them touch it with the least fingertip, and it would be foolish to hope that they might do it justice.

The best way around disappointment is mortal fear for Cory Maye. I would like to be wrong, but my money runs the other way.

Resounding Ingrates

If you didn't see it (like I hadn't), here is a cached copy of 733 comments left at the TWU Local 100 blog, before they all got disappeared.

It seems that hordes of proles are not thrilled with the valiant struggle.

What a pathetic episode. If any union in America has engineered a worse public relations disaster in recent memory, I'd like to know what it might be.

(link: HoT)

Fifty Years Of Bloody Horseshit

Reason lauds Milton Friedman for a half-century of advocating the gift-wrapping of stolen money.

"Free To Choose" my ass.

To hell with him.

The Rocket-Sled To Hell

"Anyone else sickened by this thought?"

"Sickened" is not the word.

There are no words.

Only grim resignation.

(this link has been fixed, now, thanks to the alert by Mike Schneider)

Administrivia

I will be changing ISP's today. At this moment, I don't know all of the implications for daily action around here. At some point, e-mails to my current address will begin to bounce. (Here's a big Drop Dead to the spammers.) The new address, once I have it, will be found in the left-column link here (just above the calendar).

We'll see how this goes.

What Does It Have To Come To?

If you hadn't heard of the Edmonton, Alberta, butt-bus flap, let me only point out that Cosh is recommending alligator clips to the testicles.

We'll see if it gets to that, but I would hold no hope for reason prevailing in the thing.

Bovard Up

If you haven't heard yet, let me point out that James Bovard is blogging now.

Adjust your bookmarks.

Idiots On Parade

"The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay.

'It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour,' Dr Schneider confidently asserted."

Guess what.

(link: Stanley Kurtz)

N142PA

Here is a nice photograph of Grumman G-73T One Four Two Papa Alpha in happier days.

This is the airplane that splashed off Miami Beach this afternoon.

Sorry to hear it.

Changing Subjects

"...many people think the Constitution provides far more protection for privacy in communications than it actually does under existing caselaw."

(Glenn Reynolds)

This might seem like a stupid question, but I don't think so at all:

If we're going to talk about "the Constitution", then why are we talking about "caselaw"?

Do you see the difference?

Today In History

The terrorists went wild.

Two hundred thirty-two years ago.

May the memory resound forever.

A Useless Dream

Myrhal cites remarks on racism by Morgan Freeman.

"The actor says he believes the labels 'black' and 'white' are an obstacle to beating racism.

'I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man,' Freeman says."

I completely understand this impulse, and admire it. I know where it's headed and it makes good sense to a great degree, but not completely.

Look: sometimes, it's simply necessary to refer to a person's skin color as a matter of identification. It's handy. Item: many years ago, I'd run into my old mate Dwight "Popcorn" Miller somewhere along the way. I told him that I knew of a monitor engineer in Atlanta who was looking for work, and mentioned the man's name. Dwight was pensive for a long moment, trying to dig the name out of his memory. Stroking his chin, he finally looked at me and said, "He's a black man, right?" "Yup," I said, "That's him." Dwight had connected the name -- very vaguely familiar to him -- with the guy's skin color and figured it out. That was a characteristic that helped him narrow the list of possibilities.

Here's another: I once sat at a table in the bar of a hotel in New Orleans with a friend of mine. He's in his 30's: a professional guitarist, and a black man, for sure. We were having a drink, when a middle-aged lady attending The Bayou Classic football game saw us sitting there. Like almost all the 100,000-odd people in town specially for the game and auxillary fesitivities, she was black, too. So, there we sat, the black guy and the white boy. She saw him, recognized him, and came over to say 'hi'.

She was tentative about it, because he's something of a star to people paying attention. We invited her to sit with us, anxious to make her comfortable. My friend introduced me as a member of the crew, and she looked at me with sudden recognition: she had seen me on the hotel elevator earlier in the afternoon, with my mate Jid O'Brien. "Oh, yes, I saw you today with another..."

...and she couldn't say it. The poor thing just couldn't get the words out of her mouth.

Of course, I understood it immediately. She comes from a time when even the most benign possible allusion to race was an extremely painful thing, and she simply didn't know how to deal with the manifest fact.

My pal Derek looked at me, looked at her, and with an innocently bemused smile, completed the sentence for her:

"...white guy?"

Even then, even though she hadn't had to say it, she could hardly bear it.

We told her gently, "That's what he is. There's nothing to it."

Now: is this "racism"? [shrug] You tell me, because I just about don't know what anyone is talking about anymore, mainly because they just make it up as they go along. And a great deal of what they make up is just bloody nonsense. In any case, there is no good to be done at willfully ignoring facts of reality, and more: sometimes, reference to certain facts is manifestly necessary as a guide to reality. Like; in the two cases I cite above.

I've never forgotten the t-shirt that Tina Dumey wore in rehearsal on the En Vogue tour: "Racism without prejudice never hurt anybody." This is a call for full fidelity to reality. And what has to happen is that references to race must be stripped of the ignorance of prejudice.

That should be the point.

Morning Bits

Two similes that rang favorably on my ear in the past couple of days --

*** My brother Michael is writing for a touring production magazine, and complained in e-mail: "I am under deadlines on the January issue that that make me yearn for the days of the Jews having to make bricks without straw." (My solicitous rejoinder: "[cackle] You idiot. You thought it was going to be a glamorous profession. Good damned luck, already. Try not to say anything dumb right out loud, which usually happens to everyone working on a deadline, sooner or later." I am nothing if not concerned and helpful.)

*** Colby Cosh, in remarks on his sea voyage: "I'm the kind of guy who is basically pursuing diabetes the way Buddhist monks chase enlightenment..." (You have to love a guy who knows what he's doing.)

Note on the weather: it's quite remarkable how adaptable one can be in dropping temperatures. Barely more than a month ago, it would have been a full-dress bundle of layers deal to go outside at about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Today, it's about a sweatshirt over a t-shirt if I'm in the garage up to an hour or so. Stepping outside to the coal bins at four degrees Fahrenheit (like the night before last) tends to shift one's considerations of the matter.

Five inches of new snow last night. I'm going to make my blog rounds, and then go out and play with the plow in the driveway for a while.

Lexicon

[cackle]

Eric said "sudafedayeen".

I wish I'd thought of that.

Immaculate Reception

I haven't seen it online anywhere, although it's been on MSNBC all day long:

If you can find it, don't miss the viddie of the guy catching the infant thrown out of a third floor window of a burning building in the Bronx.

Every once in a while, it's a good day.

God bless 'em, all 'round. Well done.

No Violins Here

"'My client is emotionally shattered from what is an extremely disturbing ordeal,' said Jordan Koko, her attorney."

Oh. The one that she's responsible for, on her own.

Tough shit. Shut the fuck up, fool.

(link: Blowhards)

The Banality Of Evil

Joseph Goebbels was a devoted family man.

That doesn't matter.

Do you understand?

Daniel Ho

Daniel Ho is a road compadre: he plays keyboards (and, lately, guitar) for Peabo Bryson, and we bounce around the world together. (Scroll down the page here for a cool photograph of The White Boys -- and Toni -- that he took in an alley in Seattle.) Honest to god: I don't know if I ever met anyone more constantly cheerful than Danny -- a fact which, I must say, makes me wonder about the boy sometimes. In any case, he really is a joy to work with and I'm glad to know him.

Comes word, now, that his album "Masters of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar, volume 1" has been nominated for a Grammy.

Good for you, Danny. You go, boy.

Word

"We don't need a revolution, we need millions of them."

Kyle Bennett posts on Mafiosi, Claire Wolfe, and individualist ontology.

I am reminded of the story of an American banker -- which exists somewhere in my library -- who once said that he never ever had to give any man "credit".

"It was something already in his possession when he stepped into my office."

Just about everywhere I look, today, with very, very few exceptions, I see yawning deficits. Kyle is pointing out the dogs chasing the bus: they won't know what to do with it if they actually catch it.

The whole thing reminds me of Ayn Rand's observation that "it's sooner than you think."

(ed. -- nooo... the quote is, "It's earlier than you think." See the late unfortunately deceased Steven Malcom Anderson in this comment.)

Putting Them In Their Place

Natalie points to this post by someone roughly characterized as a lefty, who just puts the shits to the very idea of European moral superiority. The instant matter before the court is the execution of that "Tookie" Williams person.

I stand against "the death penalty". I put the thing in quotes because the phrase refers very specifically to the action of the state. This is quite politically distinct from the general matter of taking the life of a murderer. I completely realize that this is far too fine a distinction for a planet full of goddamned morons to grasp, but their conceptual debilities are not mine. My objection goes against the state in arbitrarily claiming everyone ("The People vs. ...") within its presumption of authority in the matter. (And one necessary implication of this is that I reject the authority of the state in dictating punishments for any crime.) No criminal ever owes anything at all to "society". Society simply does not exist in this context: the matter is exclusively between any given criminal and his victim[s]. Until I count in that number, no crime anywhere is any of my direct business, and nobody has any business putting my name on the indictment, explicitly or implicitly ("The People vs. ...").

With all that in the record, however, it is undeniable that the Williams affair sharply illuminates what Greenwald points out as "the true character of the European left". Damned good post, with rollicking comments. Have a look.

Maye Updates

Radley Balko is doing God's work (you might excuse the precise expression and indulge me the widest possible connotation of the good) on the Cory Maye case. If this poor man's life is saved, then I believe sensible people will have to look back and credit Balko with the play.

This thing is cranking up. The link above goes to Balko's current state-of-the-case update, "that aims to keep everyone on the same page." He's working out on all kinds of details. I've done some bits in court on my own, and I understand how this goes. Here in my own space, however, I say that the general principles of the thing dictate that Cory Maye must be freed. He is an innocent man. Commutation of the death sentence will not do.

Less Euphemasia

Excuse me, but I must put right a line from Claire Wolf's post on the Cory Maye outrage.

"Soldiers are smashing down doors in the middle of the night solely to gather evidence of possible drug activity." (Word changed and emphasis added.)

Let's get real about this and figure it out: the age-old American abhorence of a standing army is an obvious dead letter, as evidenced by both their words and their deeds. And they're standing on us.

Day By Day

Like an old bulb on a Christmas tree, something winked out, and Natalie Solent noticed the light going away.

Memo To A Fucking Asshole

Scott Scheule, you insipid punk, let me tell you something:

You should live long enough to look back on what you wrote, observe that you were a profoundly foolish young man infatuated with a fashionable language, and be deeply ashamed of that fact.

And that goes for the rest of you over there, as well as that goddamned idiot Henke, over at QandO, who I simply told that he was a fucking idiot without explaining why, although it was about this very issue. You people are not smart, clever, or anything else but deplorable. You're useless dinks, who I believe will be put to great good use by this culture in the future.

I don't know how to damn you any worse than that.

There Are No "Better-Trained Police"

"South Padre Island needs to have better-trained police..."

Stopping right then and there along the way of this statement by one Ellen Sovkoplas, I am compelled to point out that the police of South Padre Island are at least as well trained as any in the country.

After all: her husband was bagged and they got his money.

That's the whole point.

To Mrs. Sovkoplas: stop it with these ridiculous delusions about freedom, my dear. Your husband made a dreadful mistake, and I am not talking about falling asleep on the beach.

How Things Work

Believe it or not, the very first time I ever heard the word "demonize", it was being explained to me by Dan Rather on his CBS Evening News broadcast. Early 90's. I would give a lot for a video tape of that. It's an amazing thing to look back on: a new anti-concept emerging into the culture right there on a network newscast. It was replete with some university professor explaining "our image of 'the other'," and how we need to make some things evil in order to validate ourselves.

Even as it was happening, I knew that I was hearing another load of gravel being dropped in the hole where ethics was being buried. It was obvious to me that this complaint of "demonization" would be the defense of every truly evil person facing utter fools.

Let me tell you something, kids: before evil ever sets foot upon the earth, it is first given a home in language.

This dictum brought to you by Cliff May's snipe at the detestable Ramsey Clark and that hideous porridge-brained animatron, Katie Couric.

Spleen Shares Roundup

Spleenco rolled out a new market integration campaign today on the opening of the Ductless Specialties unit. "A spleen in need is a friend indeed." Splenetic consultation looks for a bright future, and the wise investor knows where the action is.

[wink]

Partly Cloudy

Blowing through the morning horrors, MSNBC keeps reminding me that Eugene McCarthy died yesterday. I never thought about that guy but the word "McCarthyism" jumped up in my brain with a picket sign in the hands of some dizzy fool who later became Marty McFly's parents at the end of the movie, irresponsible to all the horseshit that he kicked up back in the day, far too much of which is venerated to this day.

Mr. Pryor. My god, how he made me laugh. Item: my father had broken his jaw in a construction accident. (A horrible thing, which I witnessed.) Two days into the ordeal, Dad was just about getting the hang of having his mouth wired shut -- like; keeping the wire cutters handy and stuff, and dealing with the dope -- and he watched Pryor's "Live on the Sunset Strip" on HBO. I have never seen anyone hurt so bad at laughing so hard. That's way up there with the funniest things I ever saw. Well done, Richard.

Mark Steyn riffs on Sinatra. (Ransomlink) His first three song picks include two that go way back in my guitar experience: "Paper Doll" -- I was raised on The Mills Brothers recording and played that rhythm track with Dad for over thirty years; and "Always", which I'd thought was the older of the two. My grandfather played that with us, as he'd played it in his band in the late 20's. He played mandolin and guitar parts. (I have a photograph of that band someplace and I'll have to post that.) Steyn is great at this stuff.

In Tim Starr's Yahoo group I sees Stephen Schwartz's article on Soviet Holocaust deniers. Has this -- "Soviet Holocaust denial" -- yet clearly emerged as a distinct and identified pathology? (Had it already and I missed it?) Isn't that -- or something like it -- how the Jewish Holocaust blank-outers are handled? Aren't they just nuts and that's it? Is there a small moment turning here on which people who keep ignoring these facts will be understood to be practically insane, so that people aspiring to reason might get down to work on what the facts mean?

Hmm?

Schwartz cites Robert Conquest's Wall Street Journal article, "Stalinophilia", which actually turns up here. (Also linked from Tim's group.)'So, contrary to all civilized expectation, the lessons of the past three generations are rejected. Those of us who thought they had been learnt must, once again, face the non-facts."That second sentence is, to me, one of the great dry cracks -- the very word picture of a barely perceptible sideways little grin -- of all time. Somebody's heads is getting beat into the walls, ladies and gennelmens. Over and over, for generations. Who's is it?

The other night, Michael Schneider sent me this. People in Norway are all nonplussed about how to teach history without reference to all the key events of the twentieth century.

Who's responsible for this sort of thing? Why do they keep trying to put the lights out?

"Angle" This

"Unlike those other cases, this seems like one without a political angle."

That's Glenn Reynolds, at the bottom of a post about Radley Balko's post about a guy who's currently booked to get killed. Like; not in the bits & pieces nickel & dime every day kind of way -- the State of Mississippi says they're going to kill Cory Maye.

Now, you should go read it all and make up your own mind. But I say that the "political angle" in a case like this is about preserving unto itself and excluding from without the state's power to have its way in its dominion and no individually self-reliant observation of facts and their implications having anything to say or do about it.

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; -- but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"

William Pitt (The Elder) need only have concerned himself with kings. He didn't have to face dealing with bunches of razor-headed snipes brought up to believe that cops are at war with everybody else, and who get to play with soldier costumes and carabiners in their web-gear replete with banana magazines and lasers while they're smashing up peoples' lives, not to mention all the head-patted blessings of a political culture that bred them. In which tender clutches, after all, Mr. Maye has ended up.

There are enormous and enormously bent political angles all over this. To not see it and say so is ridiculous.

The Damned Lost Line

(So, I sez to my friend Toby, upon his realizing way too late that Tony Levin was playing in Ithaca last night...)

> ...FUCK!!! ... GODDAMMIT.

Tell me about it:

I'm sitting here going through the daily disasters in all the damned blogs this morning, with my SG in my lap. So; I starts out playing Alan Bradley's "Lovin' By The Hour", not even thinking about it while I'm reading damned Rich Nikoley, because I've been playing it for so long. And I gets to the damned bottom riff -- just before the Dsus-D bounce back to the lyric line -- and I plays it with perfect technical clarity, but something sounds weird about it, so I goes through it again and I realize that I'm playing what I'd been playing before Garry corrected the first part of my line a coupla years ago, already. It was a simple correction, which nonetheless owned the virtue of being correct. I've been playing it the right way ever since, except for damned this morning. Dammit.

So, I thinks, "Okay, I'll just not pay attention this time and do it again, and the right line will float up on time."

Does that ever happen to you guys? It does to me. It's a little odd and it doesn't always work, but it does often enough to keep it around like some weird bubble-packed discount gag in your toolbox.

It's coming up while I'm playing it and I can't wait to hear this simple correct little change, but it doesn't happen. My left hand plays the old wrong line that I'd thought I'd recalled Bradley playing, about fifteen years after I'd last heard him play it. Which is what I'm now stuck with like a bleedin' Monkees hook bangin' around in me brain all damned day.

Shit. Now it's going to bug me until I can get G. to damned correct me again.

> ...FUCK!!! ... GODDAMMIT.

I know shit damned hell piss, dammit.

[...drum roll...]

The International Wog of the Year -- winner of the Edward Said Trophy -- has been announced.

Good show.

"Bonus Hassling"

Robert Higgs writes:

"Strange as it might seem, most people get used to being treated as criminals or inmates in a concentration camp. Americans are no exception."

His next sentence begins, "Keep beating them down, and eventually you will produce a thoroughly cowed and compliant herd, a mass of pliant raw material in the hands of their political masters,..." and the fact is that there is no happy answer to the final question of his essay. It's true that the beat-downs result in "pliant material", but this is a condition that winds up in someone's hands after long conditioning, and that's "what's going on". I remember when one could get on an airplane without submitting der paperz, and so should Higgs. He knows that was the machine long before "the Police State that the Bush administration has been building relentlessly" -- which is true enough, too. But my point is that everything happens before the music finally stops, happens over a time-line that precludes betting on who'll get the driver's seat in the end. The Bush administration is getting away with what it can get away with in the face of not much but the inertia of really American ideals, straining against things like a larger population than ever before who don't know, for instance, an America where people could get on airplanes without der paperz, nevermind getting felt up.

Now; of course we're at war and all that, but it shouldn't take Higgs' "criminal mind" to understand how contemptible is the whole airport security scheme, as he does. He's right about all that and more. These are facts, easily observable and occasionally observed here and there. I see them -- the actual facts in action -- all the time. What they mean is that there is no serious connection between the contemptible charade of "security" and the value for which it all ostensibly acts: security, meaning; some kind of ability to detect, in order to prevent or retribute, attacks on massed civilians. (If that's not what it is, then someone tell me what it should be.) This is exactly what makes it all contemptible: this mass subversion of American character for nothing.

To ask, as Higgs finally does, who'll benefit from it all is to cast the "benefit" to tyrants of course and this must logically follow. Someone will be in the driver's seat when the music stops. The thing is; it'll be hard to say when it stopped, exactly. A lot of peoples' ears will hear it differently as it fades (as it is, now), so it's anyone's argument to make; who's the tyrant to whom the benefit has fallen. There are all kinds of screaming about Bush, but my outlook is: "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Taking On Liars

"As is now widely acknowledged by scholars of the period—and as American intelligence officials knew at the time—the American Communist party was used by the Soviets as an intelligence apparatus through which, starting in the early 30’s, Soviet spies successfully infiltrated the U.S. government. Yet with the exception of one glancing, carefully unspecific reference to Alger Hiss, the script of Good Night, and Good Luck takes no notice whatsoever of this well-known fact. Rather, we are invited to suppose that the activities of Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and other Soviet agents were nothing more than a paranoid fantasy on the part of McCarthy and his supporters.

We know better, but, damningly for Clooney’s project, Murrow himself did not. He had been, for example, one of the most vocal defenders of Laurence Duggan, a State Department official who committed suicide in 1948 after the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that Whittaker Chambers, the Soviet agent who was Hiss’s controller, had identified him as another agent. Decoded Soviet cables made public years later proved that Chambers was telling the truth, just as he had told the truth about Hiss.

Needless to say, Duggan goes unmentioned in Good Night, and Good Luck."

(Terry Teachout, contrasting and comparing Clooney's rot with "Capote")

"Mission Creep"

Balko points out links about Militarizing Mayberry, which always brings to mind an old bit from one of my favorite commies. He did a Part Two, six years later.

It's About The Machine

Coyote Blog hits on the power of principles --

"...the technocrats that built our regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created."

Warren Meyer goes on to point out the bloody travails on the left because the schools are out of order. He spends a moment with the niceties of FDA.

The whole thing brang me to these old bits in Usenet. RTWT; my first post there, and understand the thing about schools. This stuff is from 1998, in discussion with Martin McPhillips and Bruce McQuain. Pay attention to Bruce.

Morning Hits

Quickly, before I blow out of here:

Drizz does a once-over of Sharp-Objects nonsense.

Derbyshire is "Reading pieces like this from all over the advanced world lately."

Just bookmark this place and hit it regularly.

Okay, fine then: I'm off to Houston and I'll be home Saturday.