Nefarious Narratives

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I’m still struggling with the notion that freedom from the archaisms of religion allows for a more objective and rationally enlightened consensus of morality. The argument is generally couched in terms of an increase in individual freedom by both secularist liberals and libertarians, both of which trade on their appropriations of the word liberty.

But this argument fails in a number of ways. Most importantly because it is spectacularly untrue and self-contradictory. Neither liberals nor libertarians are honest. Both are expressly Utopian, meaning they claim that there is a set of rationally determined circumstances that can achieve the ideal of human equality and individual empowerment, regardless of divisive pre-existing social, educational, cultural, ethnic, racial, economic, and (of course) religious factors. Which is nonsense. It’s not what they really believe.

Libertarians are essentially Randian. (Why did Ron Paul name his son Rand?) Their position is that I should be able to do what I want to do, and you should trust that I’m not actually inimical to the well being of others, even though my core postulate is the supremacy of my own self-interest. It is superficially attractive to many who should know better because it is not intelligent human philosophy but rather an obvious rhetorical opposition to statist control of human actions. In real terms, of course, it is a prescription for state control. When religion, the meta-human anchor that keeps people rooted in enduring values, is done in for its fancied crimes, the rational deciders of objective morality are, by default, human beings. What is the remaining attractor for those rationalists who know better than everyone else? It’s government. Where they get to rewrite all the values as they see fit.

It has become fashionable to deride “reactionaries” who pose the specter of slippery slopes. These don’t really exist, we are told, except as last-ditch arguments made by those who have already lost the debate on the merits. Except that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a stunning avalanche of slippery slopes that have consumed entire peoples, nations, and, yes, the oh-so-prized individual as well.

Libertarians are perhaps uniquely lunkheaded in their subjective assessments of the consequences of secular hijacking of the social contract. Motivations and effects of secularists whose views do not accord with their own can be safely ruled irrelevant. Atheist Nazis were irrational in their beliefs and therefore immaterial. Communism in the Soviet Union and China was rationalism deluded by a false economic premise; they failed to understand the libertarian gospel of the Chicago school of economics. Big mistake. Therefore not germane.

What the Randians stubbornly refuse to realize is that for all her later pretensions, Ayn Rand was not writing philosophy in Atlas Shrugged; she was writing a parable. She was reacting against a youth lived in the iron oppression of the Soviet Union, which was bent on exterminating individual identity to replace it with automatons of the state. Which is, in fact, rational, but anti-human. Her book Anthem is the clearest statement of her emotional inspiration. The protagonist learns to replace the statist “we” with the human “I.” When all societal forces are trying to annul your basic human identity, the response is to mount an equally monolithic defense. I matter more than the whole state. Otherwise, I am wholly lost. But her claims to an objective truth that refutes the Soviet truth are rootless. Without God, there is no basis for declaring one right and the other wrong.

Indeed, the Soviet truth makes more sense in a godless universe, especially if all the religions of the world are superstitious malarkey. Without the residue of that superstition in your head, why would you flinch at the sight of a man in uniform shooting a mother and her children in the head? Is the gun aimed at you? No. And which is the more rational response to being concerned that the gun might one day be aimed at you? Fighting for a spurious notion of universal justice, or becoming yourself the man with the gun and the uniform that makes it right?

So the libertarians are lying to themselves in a deep way. Oddly, for example, their positions on abortion, same sex marriage, drugs, and disengagement from the world tend to mirror the positions of liberals with expressly statist goals, and they do not comprehend the contradiction.

Liberals, on the other hand, are fooling themselves in an even sillier way. They talk about equality and social justice and retribution for ancient wrongs, on behalf of all the people who are mired in misery, and not for one moment do they realize that they are themselves disciples of Ayn Rand.

Yes, that’s what I said. From first to last they and their feudal subjects are motivated by pure objectivist self-interest. Despite the gloss of Atlas Shrugged with all its creative entrepreneurs, there is nothing commanding self-interest to be consciously or even neutrally virtuous. Protestations to the contrary are mere pretension or, more bluntly, self-serving PR. Revenge is just as meritorious an aspiration as creativity. How is greed by the talentless subordinate to ambition by the able? It isn’t. We all get only one shot at it. Who cares what happens to the generations after I’m gone?

We’ve had a century to observe FDR liberals and his heirs in action. In all that time, they have never cared about the results of their “reform” efforts or the consequences to the victims, er, beneficiaries of their lordly largesse. The only striking record of accomplishment they have recorded is the continual growth of government, the increase in power located in Washington, DC, the conquest of formerly liberal institutions of higher learning by post-modern nihilism, and the slow deterioration of the journalism profession to concubine of the political left.

It’s no coincidence that the two longest periods of economic depression since 1929 are the FDR administration and the Obama administration. But they’re not failures in liberal minds because both men got reelected. They take credit for JFK even though in today’s terms he would have been a right wing conservative, militant about national defense and devoted to tax cuts as economic stimulus. They don’t care. He’s cover for the whole party because he favored the civil rights movement, which conceals the fact that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Republicans in congress, not Democrats. LBJ vowed to end poverty. His urban renewal program knocked down black neighborhoods and began fifty years of government-sponsored Jim Crow legislation, which directly subsidized the destruction of black families, the annihilation of the public school system, and the creation of a permanent underclass of, well, urban sharecroppers, whose only crop is illegal drugs. Sixties liberals still preen over their successful opposition to the war in Vietnam and fail to accept any responsibility for the mult-million murders in Vietnam and Cambodia caused by their humanitarian delusions.

It simply can’t be the case that smart, rich politicians believe any of this crap has worked. Except in the sense that it has kept them rich, powerful, and in office.

But the slippery slopes are everywhere, and they have turned into a federal infrastructure of chutes to ruination and progressively more impossibly steep ladders to individual success.

Rational? Surely they would tell you so. Even as they continue and amplify their efforts to rout God and Christianity from all corners of the nation but the real estate on which churches sit. And contrary to the complaining of our “free press,” they are succeeding spectacularly. 75 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, and lesser but equally frightening percentages are true of other demographics as well, while the studies demonstrate that children of young single mothers are many times more likely to get involved with drugs, gangs, prison, and violent death.

Amazingly, not even the Gollum press, whose Precious plays golf and jets sybaritically around the world while the country disintegrates, retains any capability to see that propaganda about gun control — inspired by the deaths of suburban white children — constitutes any kind of fundamental and anti-moral hypocrisy. It still makes more sense to them that big signs advertising schools as gun-free zones tempt maniacs to invade schools with guns. Meanwhile, gang culture in Detroit and Chicago is killing hundreds of nonwhite children with admittedly illegal guns — which doesn’t occur in the public mind because the press doesn’t report on it.

You see. Liberals care. Ask the New York Times. Ask Harvard professors. Ask Hollywood stars. Ask every comfortable liberal who spews unspeakable hate against all who dare to oppose their fraudulent causes.

Did I forget same-sex marriage? No. Another crock. Professional politicans falling like dominoes to proclaim their support for a reform most have been conspicuously opposed to for ostensibly moral reasons.

How we know that God has been successfully evicted from the machinery of state. The MSM fails to cover the case of two men, legally married to one another, who adopted nine boys and proceeded to molest two or more of them. Trial underway as we speak. Have you heard of it? No. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

Right now, an appalling trial is underway in Pennsylvania in which an abortionist is charged with killing seven but perhaps many hundreds of babies who survived botched abortions by snipping their spinal cords. At the same time, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood in Florida testifies to the state legislature that such decisions belong entirely to the mothers and doctors involved. First, abortion was a right covered by the privacy of a woman’s uterus. But guess what? They never cared about the uterus. Babies who somehow manage to escape the uterus are also subject to termination. Post-Christian rational morality has now accomplished the great leap forward of reverting to the bowels of ancient Roman bathhouses where pagan mothers entombed their smothered unwelcome babies. It’s called progress. Or social justice. Or liberty. Because we’re, you know, so liberal.

Rationalists. What do they do? They argue for an inch and take a mile. The goalposts keep moving, more all the time. How the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into the Gulag Archipelago. That’s no accident. It’s the inevitable product of human hubris by rationalists convinced that they are smarter than multiple millennia of cultural and moral consensus. Some animals are more equal than others. Anybody think Rand wouldn’t agree with that basic proposition?

What makes it so dire and probably fatal is that the media are Randians too. It’s not a good career move to deviate from the approved narrative.

What God used to be for. Something bigger than my career, no matter what it costs me. Yes, there used to be journalistic ethics. But what underpinned those ethics is gone. By post-modern, arrogant consent.

 

Watching the Boss

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I’ve got my eye on the Boss today as he works through some issues with the plastic kibble that he continually chews with his hands.

raebertSunglasses

Keeping a close eye. Because he’s still upset.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe this video of a friend will cheer him up.

Another Ending

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We’ve been standing for a while now at the precipice of a dizzying decline from the world we were born into. Today, Margaret Thatcher died. She is, thanks to the speed of media (is ‘speedia’ a new meme?), already a yellowed and despised artifact of a time we have collectively decided to misremember. Contemporary Brits mock her, if they remember her at all, as our own ‘liberals’ continue to mock Reagan. Even though the two of them, with the help of John Paul II, managed to end one of the most oppressive and murderous regimes in the history of mankind, which also happened to be the greatest military force for the subjugation of humanity yet seen on earth. Rivals to that deadly regime are already preparing their own offensives, one religious and one atheist, and the only nation with the power to stand against them is sunk in indecisive lethargy.

Why? Because the people who are supposed to be the smartest among us are committed to our defeat and destruction.

There will be time later on to explore their motives in greater detail, but the purpose of mentioning this crisis is to explain the existence of this new blog. I spent much of the last decade fighting in the sphere of politics, believing — against the odds — that Americans would vote for their own freedom rather than those who nakedly seek to control every aspect of their lives.

I was fixated on the political threat from the left. In so doing I missed the equally dangerous threat from the right, those who cast themselves as political libertarians in the mold of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy.

My blindness to the real issues underneath the politics caused me to make significant errors. With my political hat on, I was motivated to understate the extremity of the religious and philosophical divide that has empowered the totalitarians. I failed to apprehend that Randian libertarians are also totalitarians, but either naively or ignorantly unaware of it.

When I encountered a full-on attack from that quarter, I failed to take it seriously. I was dismissive, arrogant, and inattentive. I didn’t even read the posts all the way through. I was wrong in that. More specifically, I was wrong to prefer keeping religion out of the political discussion. I thought it a needless distraction. I was disastrously wrong about that.

Then I got forcibly silenced for a week that seemed like it could be permanent.There were clues I take seriously that I was being told to wake up and smell the coffee.

I have done so. Here are my new premises:

– Almost everything we think of as progress in modern history is a direct function of Christianity.

– Christianity, and its Jewish precursor, is under global attack, from within and without.

– Moral relativism based on identity politics and supposed post-Christian sophistication is nihilist, masochistic, incoherent, and poisonous to freedom.

– The line of defense against a new Dark Age is not defense of all religions, but one religion in particular, Christianity.

– It’s too late for politics to save us. At this moment before we plunge into an epoch of darkness, it’s crucial to remember what made us and what will enable us to survive as individual human beings through the crucible that awaits.

I say this as one whose Christian faith has always been subject to doubt. What I missed in my own internal debates was the strength of an argument I have made repeatedly over the years. Nothing else quite works. It was always a backward proof. Now I’m committed to exploring more positive proofs. Because the extent to which everything else doesn’t work is becoming more dire and horrifying by the day.

That said, this won’t be a blog full of sermons and sententious Bible quotations. That’s not my way. I just want to look at everything from a different, less political and more philosophical perspective. Why are we here and what should we be doing? Does the universe offer any clues? Is science really the enemy of faith? Are physics, mathematics, and poetry merely discrepant absurdist tricks? Or is there a whole we can perhaps (pun intended) divine from our own experience?

I promise not to do any of this without a sense of humor. That particular tone I leave entirely to the atheists, who have proven their humorlessness beyond possibility of any rival.

Woo Woo.

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Raebert1

I‘m three. Or so they told me when they gave me the hamburger last time from the white bag with the yellow legs on it. Which is supposed to make me dumb I guess. But my kind aren’t dumb except for the dumb ones. What we are is ancient instead. I have an old guy who thinks he’s the boss and a mommy who thinks she is too but I know my history whether they recognize it or not. I know every one who has lived in this place because I can smell them. All I need. There was one like me before and the boss and mommy thought I would be just like him.

I am but I’m not too and I know this because I am a sight hound and we are special because we can see mice running in the grass a hundred yards away and all the way through eyes into what bosses and mommies are thinking right now. Not all of us but me anyway. Why I worry about the boss because we have the same blood and there is sadness that runs through our heads the same way we run through fields.

The boss is sad because he used to run his mind through the plastic kibble he never ate but always chewed with his paws in front of the box of pictures he couldn’t take his eyes away from. He has become a sad boss and I have all I can do to take care of him. He needs to go to bed at the right time, which is seven lie downs after my dinner and out, but he never does. He watches the box of colors without his plastic kibble and he doesn’t run in his head the way he did.

His head only works like mine does in dreams. He sees things happening there and the things happening there are terrible. I know the best way out of those dreams is Cheezits and Cheetos. He has these but they don’t please him and I keep trying to make him see that I see what he sees and it is not so bad because there are Cheezits and Cheetos and that is enough.

Eyes are enough. My kind doesn’t need plastic kibble to speak. We just look what we want to say. What I am doing now and you hear what I look don’t you?

I am looking this thing because I want my boss to smile and he does not know how anymore. I am looking harder than I need to look because I need to find how to give him the look he needs to be better. I am seeing names of things he sees and I am working to run through them like he should. Like the worst out there is only one more deer to be run down.

Raebert

So. I’m suddenly a retired blogger. The webmaster who was posting my work suddenly stopped. That’s okay, actually. I probably said what I had to say several times over. What’s not okay is the feeling that your fingers should still be lodged in the dike, preventing the imminent catastrophe.

It’s probably ego that’s holding you against the wall that is the failing dike. You don’t want to admit you never made a difference, ten fingers or none.

Ego fades with age. But habit holds time hostage. I’ve noticed the phenomenon that stars of long-lived TV series look the same year after year. Then, when the show is cancelled and they appear on a new series, they’re suddenly much older. Less makeup, fewer kind cameras? Maybe they just quit clenching their youth.

How I feel. I fought so hard for so long, maintained the same grim convictions at all costs, and now, cancelled, I feel, well, different.

Not better. It’s like the end of a losing war. Defeat was not real as long as you kept fighting, no matter what casualties you saw on the battlefield. But when you lay down your arms at last, there IS a lassitude that sets in. I know it has set in on me. Even the cats and dogs are staring at me strangely.

But every end, even disastrous ones, portend a new start. That’s what this is. My heart still beats, I will still write, and –I know my own DNA by this time — I will never ever give up on what I believe in.

I know that wasn’t exactly a ringing invitation to join me here, but do accept the invitation. When you’re not always in combat, you can be in better tune with yourself and others. You can laugh more easily. Even on the gallows.

I intend for us to have some fun here. And there are donuts in the lobby.

Robert

Three Greatest Sporting Events of My Life

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Interesting. All from the 1970s. Before we got so politically correct. No politics involved in these choices, at least no politics imputed by me.

Frank Klammer’s Gold Medal downhill from the’76 Olympics. At the end of the day, on a beat-up course, as the favorite who was no longer favored.

Muhammad Ali in his amazing conquest of the fearsome puncher George Foreman. 1974. The boxer poet who became the fighter-chessmaster-killer. Too many other videos would be required. I remember this one as a social event. We cheered our asses off.

Secretariat. 1973. I just keep hearing the announcer giving up the ghost: “like a tremendous machine.”

No other horse was even in the picture. Only one other thing since the Seventies. The 1980 Phillies. But that would make this seem parochial. Which it isn’t. It’s universal.

Those preciosos ojos marrones of a girl named Maria

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Cómo pintar retratos de fotografías: un tutorial de pintura de aceite paso a paso

Yo solía ser intimidado por la pintura de retratos. Nunca pude conseguir los colores correcto y siempre me sentí como terminé dibujo con mi pintura en vez de pintar.

Me decidí a hacer frente a la pintura retrato de cabeza, y después de un montón de práctica, ahora me siento muy cómodo pintando retratos. Aquí están los pasos que he desarrollado para pintar un retrato exitoso de una foto. 

Por supuesto que soy un completo imbécil.

***************
A Man Who Finally Turned to Finer Things

George Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IV
He used to be sort of famous for having a dad who was Presdent, also named Bush, and for owning a big league baseball team in Texus. He could party with the best of them.

via GIPHY

 

Then he settled down, got married to a nice girl, and discovered he was wanted in the family business. Which, to be blunt, did not come easily to him. He had to be groomed in small venues before he could run for a training-wheels type office in Texus.

Initially he was a complete bust at public speaking. He would stand in front of the microphone, turn bright red, try to crack an off-color joke, and then forget the punchline. Salvation came in the form of a course of instruction in speechwriting and mucho practice at speech delivery reading from his own scripts. The first one was a store opening in Lubbock, where he brought down the house and acquired a measure of confidence.

Next came…

And then…

The children laughed and laughed. He was ready for a shot at a local no-brainer office, Governor of Texus, and not only got elected but re-elected with 70 percent of the vote. It was obviously time to follow his dad’s path to the White House, especially since Bush The Elder had been unceremoniously turned out of office after only one term by a hard-partying southern philanderer and perjurer named Bill Clitton, whose Veep, Al Bore, was confident of succeeding him in office after two popular terms. Bore had a book out, “Loving Ameria,” and so the Bush braintrust decided W needed a book too. (People had been calling him ‘W’ since first grade when his attempts to print his numeral, ‘IV,’ looked a lot like W’s.) With typical impish humor, W decided to call his own book, “Loving Ameria 2.”

Actually all the speech excerpts above are in the book, so you can pretty much go with that as a taste of the overall content.

So far, W is making steady headway in his presidential run, mostly by letting people go on thinking he’s his dad. He does this by not saying much. Which pretty much brings us up to date.

EXCEPT…

The Punk Writer Time Machine

Meaning we have more about George Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush, IV, for a bunch of years in the future. Cool.

Let’s see. He was (will be) elected presdent over Al Bore in 2000.

The vote count was very close, so close that the Democrats never accepted him as presdent for all 8 years in office. Yes, he got re-elected too. He was even a hero for a while because of a giant 911 call the whole country got in his first year in office. He did some wars, won some battles, and was hated by everybody but some very quiet Republicans. His incredibly huge number of enemies said he was stupid, uneducated, a drunk, and a completely illegitimate mistake. His inner circle of staffers thought the best way to handle the constant abuse and slander was to say nothing, do nothing, and then resign at the first opportunity and write a book while he was still lameducking it in his second term.

So Bush decided to set the record straight with a book of his own, as reported by our friends at the XOFF News Channel:

W. Races His Book to Market
Buoyed by the news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has published a book about herself in the teeth of congressional approval ratings that are even lower than his own, the President of the United States has announced that a book he has dictated about what it’s like to be him will be hitting the back storage rooms of bookstores all over the nation within the next few weeks.

“They will have to ask for the book by name,” Press Secretary Dana Perrino conceded. “The remarkably superior high school graduates who actually shelve books at the nation’s two bookstores — Borders and Barnes & Noble — are unlikely to carry a book by the President of the United States from the back of the store to anywhere that it might actually be seen or bought. But customers who ask for it are certain to be charmed by an account of the Bush administration from an utterly unexpected source — that of the chief executive from whom everyone else in his administration has made a fortune by libelling him to an unprecedented degree.”

President Bush is also planning, Perrino announced, to spend the rest of his second term on a book tour promoting the work. “I might as well,” she quoted the president as saying, “now that we have an ‘acting president’ so charismatic that the people of Germany are willing to follow him to the very end. Who could compete with that?”

Multiple stops on the president’s literary tour have already been booked, including a county fair in Wyoming, a cable access channel in Cowlick, West Virginia, and a college radio station in Gawdhelpus, Alabama. “We will announce other dates as they are confirmed,” Perrino said.

Some reporters at the press conference questioned the “as told to” attribution of some writing credit to former press secretary Scott McClellan, who has recently become a critic of the Bush administration. Perrino denied that McClellan’s involvement was any cause for concern. “This manuscript was completed well before Scott became a brilliant moral philosopher and political hero,” she said. “In fact, while he was actually taking dictation on the manuscript, he was still somewhere between a talentless Texas toady and an embarrassingly inept impediment to any sort of clear communication between the White House and the press. His new-found greatness as a progressive patriot was simply not a factor in this book, although his involvement did require more than the usual complement of spell-checks, and his foreword underwent multiple surgeries for the removal of metastasizing obsequies.”

The publisher — “You Got the Buck, We Got the Printing Press & Sons — has also released a few text excerpts. Among them:
“Dick Cheney never told me what to do. I brought a cattle prod with me from texas. The old bastard knew I’d stop his pacemaker in a second if he gave me any grief. And I would have, too.”

“I know. They say I’m dumb. I just have one question for them: Do you have any idea how hard it is to cheat your way through Andover, Yale, and the Harvard Business School? It’s damn near impossible. It takes organization, people skills, ruthless determination, and even an occasional lucky guess. I’m nowhere near as dumb as they’d like to think.”

“Drink? You better believe it. Who wouldn’t have after 9/11? Where do you think the term “shock and awe” came from? I gave the GO order in Iraq after I downed one bottle of scotch, one bottle of bourbon, and one 40-ounce bottle of Iron City beer. That’s when the damn generals knew I was serious. That’s my biggest doubt about Obama. World leaders have to be men of the world. FDR never made a decision in WWII without inhaling half a dozen martinis first. Churchill was blasted on brandy from day one of his prime ministership to VE-Day. Lyndon Johnson… well, whew, the stories I could tell from Herr Grandpa Prescott’s diary. And JFK had injections most of us would kill for. Yet, to this day, I’ve never even seen Obama sip a beer. That’s sick. And un-American.””

“I’m more like JFK than my ‘critics’ acknowledge. I went into politics for the same reason he did. Chicks. You get one kind of chick if you own a baseball team. You get a whole different kind of chick if you run the most powerful country on the planet. Enough said. If you want details, talk to Bill. Why do you think he and I hit it off so well?”

“Dan Rather. Geez. I thought he had me. Those memos. Word for word what I remember. What I couldn’t believe was how his snitch remembered them word for word too. If he’d had the actual documents instead of retyped copies, I’d have been a goner. Of course, the much bigger relief was that no one ever found out I didn’t know how to fly a plane. That would have been a political problem.”

“You want to know about Colin Pow? I’ll tell you about Colin Pow. One word. Dork. Never knew a black man who was more concerned about how his tie looked than the lies he was telling the U.N. He can go suck eggs.”

“Well, I actually like Laura. I really do. She’s been a good mother to those kids of ours — daughters, I’m pretty sure. And she stays out of my way. What else can you ask of a wife? I mean, really?”

“People get upset about all those death penalty cases in Texas. Why? Do you want those people running loose in your neighborhood? No. Of course you don’t. Dead is what some people really ought to be. It’s a lot easier to be from Massachusetts or California and act all outraged about the vicious killers we’re executing in Texas than it is to look at your next-door neighbor who got a kid murdered by some psycho and then argue that he should have cable TV, a kitty-cat, and free room and board for the rest of his natural days. Every time I signed a death warrant in Austin, I hung up that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner I’ve gotten so much grief about. Where do you think we got it in the first place?”

“Yeah, there are always crap-weasels. George Tennent. Richard Clarke. Joe Wilson and that dumb whore wife of his. It goes with the territory. I don’t pay them no mind. When all is said and done, I’m the president. That’s what it’ll say in the history books. Does anybody bother Truman with the crap he pulled on Tokyo Rose? No. The crap-weasels are always footnotes.”

“I get tired of hearing that I’m soft on immigration. Of course I am. Never said I wasn’t. I ran on it back in 2000. How do you think I overcame all that New England constipation? And a mother who looked exactly like John Madden? Her name was Maria. She took care of me when my parents were at Kennebunkport. She taught me Spanish. And she also showed me her breasts. That’s why I’m so bilingual to this day. Quien bustamos las brassieros la takeitoffo nowomos. You see? I just wish that Laura wouldn’t keep stalking out of the room every time ‘West Side Story’ is on and Barney and I start singing ‘Maria’ and toasting each other with Margaritas and like that. It’s a lot more healthily than what we did at Skull & Bones, I can tell you.”

Then he went back to Texus and became an artist. Even had an exhibition at the Metropolis Museum of Art in Newyork City, hosted by his good buddies Bill and Hillery Clitton. Not much about politics anymore. Until That Man came along.

Not all of the Bush brushwork is on display in a museum, though. His ‘masterpiece’ is tucked privately away at home.

This the now the centerpiece of W’s ‘Man Cave,’ a kind of members-only establishment in the basement of the ranch.

Don’t tell anybody, but there’s a DVD out too.

We’re told it was a very intense recording session.

Better to leave it there, on a sort of high note.

Remember, you heard it all here first.

Tobago’s Triumphant Tradition

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The National Dance, and the cultural heart, of tiny Tobago is the giant phenomenon known as the limbo. Much of the world regards it as a contest, but its pioneers and evangelists regard it as more than that, an exacting displace for body, mind, and spirit.

This the height, or impossibly low bar, a world class limbo champion can achieve. Breathtaking.

And here’s what it looks like when a big fat westerner does it an Obese Man Competition.

Did we say obese? What? It appears my notes were wrong. This post was supposed to be about a completely different fat man, Mr. Zeus’s Limbo and his obese new bestseller:

…and Joseph McCarthy was about to screw up the secret war against communism. But on the plus side, Mrs. Limbo was carrying a baby of such impressive cerebral development that she looked like her pregnancy was pregnant… Hey, I like that! For the truth was… I’m already a few words in and I haven’t used the word ‘truth’ yet, so I better do this… the truth was that if I weren’t such a decent, virtuous, happily married man, I’d compare her appearance to that of a woman with a third breast, because that’s how far out the baby’s cranium protruded from the otherwise perfectly round shape of her belly… uh, let’s see. WHERE IS THAT DAMN SNAFFLE? AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT GET ME ANOTHER CIGAR. THAT LETTUCE I’VE BEEN EATING FOR THE LAST YEAR-AND-A-HALF TASTES LIKE CRAP, YOU KNOW IT?!

Where was I? Uh, that’s right. I don’t want to overdo the round belly thing. Everybody that only sees me on the radio thinks I’m still fat. Well, she was carrying big, and although she didn’t look like she had a third breast because that might offend some of the female bitto-heads, it did look somewhat as if her pregnancy was pregnant. Fix that all up, and show it to me when it’s typed, and I’ll jazz up that best of times, worst of times thing. Who did that originally? I think it must have been Buckley. Well, Bill and I are good friends, and he’ll know I mean it as a respectful homage.

Uh, best of times….? uh, make a note. Find out who was winning the National League that year. Was it the Gashouse Gang? I’m not sure I like that one. Anyway, look it up. Maybe it’ll work for some kind of sports metaphor with my life. It’s got to be good, because I want this book to be really literary sounding. It’s nice to sell a billion copies or so, but just once I’d like to see a nice review in the Times.

Anyway… best of times, worst times opening, then, uh, something humorous. It should be witty, like that stuff they write for my show, but it’s got to be… uh… OOPS! Time for golf. I’ll be back on this tomorrow.

Uh, it’s tomorrow, I mean, it’s the next day. Where was I? Why I’m Right by Russ Limbo. Chapter One. Did you get that? And don’t forget the O-N-E. Good. Now then… I was doing something about the best of times and the worst of times. It was really good, really intelligent, and what I was going to say next was arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

It won’t be that long till Russ Limbo celebrates a big anniversary too. In honor of that, here’s a link to what might be said on that occasion;

A 20th Year of Broadcasting for the Number One Talk Radio Guy

 

Friday, July 25, 1997 – Whose Fog?

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Think they’re still using the same thermometer in exactly the same location as 1895? If you do, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Awakening once again to NPR, I heard crime news – the serial killer believed dead in Florida and some new development in the Ira Einhorn case, possibly an extradition fight. Science was making news this morning, too. Evolutionary biologists have come up with a neat new explanation of the Cambrian explosion, which has been a thorn in their side forever. Apparently, the whole earth flopped over on its side 500 million years ago and somehow made random genetic mutations at the cellular level happen faster(?) Funny we hadn’t heard about this before. You’d think an earth flop-over would have been discovered by the guys who know so much about tectonic plates. I also heard an extended NPR segment on the Greenhouse Effect – a.k.a. Global Warming – which has made the usual invisible transition from hypothesis to scientific fact. As a result, the president has decided we all need to worry about this. It sounded like a remedial seminar on the subject had been conducted at the White House, with the Pres taking on the role of simple-minded questioner while various scientists played the role of patronizing know-it-all. I got the impression we’re all supposed to be feeling guilty because we still get in our cars and drive to work.

There must be some evidence in support Global Warming, but the only one the mass media like to cite is far from convincing to me. This has to do with a reported rise in average temperatures of one degree (Fahrenheit, I think) during the last hundred years. No expert in climate, I’m willing to concede their argument that one degree has pretty serious implications. It’s how they get to the one degree that leaves me a little skeptical.

Let’s think about this for a minute. What is the ‘average’ temperature on earth right now? Yes, I mean at this very moment. One hundred two degrees, as the thermometers in Arizona might report? Fifty below, as the ones in Antarctica would claim? Neither, obviously.

It’s not as if there’s one definitely correct number that represents the answer to this question. The word ‘average’ always means that we’re going to perform some calculation. To begin with, the discipline of mathematics gives us at least three different definitions of what an ‘average’ is. The ‘mean’ is the arithmetic average, which we calculate by adding up all individual instances of something and then dividing that total by the number of instances. The ‘median’ is a function of counting – we take all individual instances of something, then count up from the bottom until we reach the halfway point. The ‘mode’ is the most common number found in all individual instances – we gather together all the instances of something and see which value occurs most often.
I apologize. I know this is boring, but it’s got to be important. The scientists are talking about the melting of glaciers, the flooding of thousands of miles of coastline, the forced migration of major populations, the devastation of our agricultural equilibrium, and dozens of other effects of their one degree ‘average increase.’ So there’s a quite valid reason for asking whether they’re as certain as they sound.

Back to the math. All the definitions of ‘average’ assume that that there is some finite number of instances to be used as the basis for calculation. In the case of temperature on earth, this is not strictly true. The atmosphere is made of gases, not subject to counting like dollars or stones. It must be that we can artificially create enough instances by the act of measuring to eliminate the difference between gases and stones. How do we do that? Is it sufficient to record the airport temperature of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, add those temperatures together and divide by three? Probably not. Maybe we need to add Paris, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney, and Little America in the Antarctic. Would that do? Again, probably not. That leaves out a lot of places, and measurements in the city are tricky anyway, because artificial structures like asphalt paving have a tendency to soak up additional heat. So we’d better add in a bunch of pure countryside and farmland – put some of our thermometers in fields, forests, mountains, ocean-top oil rigs, deserts, prairies, and plateaus. Still, this doesn’t tell us much about how to weight the number of instances we measure, so that we balance arctic and Antarctic cold properly against tropical and temperate zones. And even then, we’re taking a lot for granted – having read Admiral Byrd’s Alone, I’ve learned that temperatures vary pretty considerably only a hundred or so miles apart in the Antarctic.

I suppose we’re going to have to concede that whatever number of instances we record, the ‘average’ number we arrive at is not necessarily going to be objectively ‘right.’ Because no matter how many thermometers you have out there, say one hundred thousand, you’d get more accurate data if you put another million in the spaces in between the hundred thousand, and more accurate data still if you put another hundred million in between those. It doesn’t take a weather wizard to know that the temperature can be at least a little bit different one hundred yards from where you’re standing now. Which would be the right number for the location listed under the name of your home town? Is that in the shade? In the sun? Or somewhere in between. You decide.

Considering all this, it looks as if we’re computing some theoretical average which we must assume bears some definite relationship to the objectively ‘right’ number we can’t measure. Which is another way of saying we’re sure the amount of our unmeasurable and uncorrectable error will never change. Everyone happy so far?

But the Global Warming hypothesis depends on far more than our theoretically correct though ‘not right’ average temperature on earth at this moment. The one degree change we’re looking for has occurred over one hundred years. This must mean that our theoretically correct number is actually determined by the number of instances – and the standard of measurement precision – that was already established in the year 1897.
Eighteen hundred and ninety seven. William McKinley was President of the United States. The automobile was a curiosity that frightened the horses. The continents of the world were connected by steamship travel and the telegraph. Charles Lindbergh hadn’t been born. There weren’t any airports anywhere. The North and South Poles hadn’t been discovered yet. But the worldwide temperature recording system was already in place.

This means, for example, that the New York City measurement has to be coming, year after year, not from the state-of-the-art instruments at LaGuardia, but from a thermometer that’s been religiously maintained on the lefthand tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. I hope nobody accidentally broke and replaced that thermometer at any point during the last hundred years, or moved it to the righthand tower, or forgot to record the readings while they were away on vacation for a month, or ever made up any readings because they got behind or just didn’t care enough during that ugly divorce in nineteen- ought-seven. Because the one degree change we’re after is less than two percent of the theoretical average, which is already just a bit flimsy as a computation strategy. Bad data would ruin everything. Equipment changes, human carelessness, or changes in measurement location might invalidate the numbers completely, and that would never do because we’re talking semi-apocalypse here.

You have to admire the discipline of science. To think that they were able to assemble all the thermometer readers all over the world in 1897 and train them to be unfailingly accurate and reliable is pretty impressive. To think that over the whole hundred years, no Tibetan shepherd ever said, ‘oh, about thirty-two degrees,’ when – thanks to his untreated nearsightedness – he was inclined to guesstimate a likely reading for those pesky western meteorologists. Amazing.

But the most astounding thing of all is that this degree of accuracy has been achieved in a field whose practitioners claim is not an exact science. Meteorologists who can’t tell us for sure if the tornado they’ve sighted is going to mow down my hometown or the City of South Bend, Indiana, are certain they know what the average temperature on earth will be forty years from now. This is made all the more miraculous by the statistical concept of standard deviation – meaning the amount of normal built-in variability – which is pretty high when it comes to temperature. That’s why we continue to set record highs and lows in temperature on individual days in every single year. Christmas in New York can be as warm as sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit or as cold as ten below zero. It’s this kind of variability that makes it difficult even to compare seasonal averages. Was last summer five percent cooler than this summer? In my neck of the woods we had more cool days last year but hotter hot spells. How should I compare this year to last year in terms of average. Who the hell knows for sure?

All we do know for sure is that it’s one degree hotter in summer, on average, last summer aside, than summer was, in general, a hundred years ago. Or is it winter that’s getting warmer instead? Like the one a few years back when the northeastern U.S. got raked by five ice storms of a severity not seen since they began taking weather measurements. Which reminds me – how long has that been? Of course. About a hundred years. The temperatures on earth have been pertinent to the Global Warming question since the end of the last ice age about ten thousand years ago. This means we’re depending on data from one percent of the relevant time period to calculate the standard deviation. And the standard deviation we come up with has to be so dead-reliable that it can be used to verify a less-than-two percent change in ‘average’ temperature.

Scientists like thought experiments. I have one I’d like to try on them. Ask a friend to record the mileage of all (or most) trips he takes in his automobile during the last week in December. Then calculate the percentage change in length of trip, up or down, from the beginning of the week to the end of the week, and use this number to project the average length of an automobile trip on January second. Now: would you bet your life that this prediction will be accurate within one mile? Really?

There’s always the possibility, I guess, that scientists are citing the temperature change ‘evidence’ to us because we’re too stupid to understand the real evidence. I know they’ve been busy calculating the number of tons of carbon dioxide in the air, and they’ve got their chemistry down cold – except, of course, when the number of variables gets too large. Which is the only reason their projections about how much impact atmospheric events like volcanic eruptions have on the earth get a little overstated at times. Or am I wrong about that? Was I mistaken when I heard the dire prediction that the area surrounding Mount St. Helen would be a wasteland for decades? But maybe what I’m wrong about is the extent to which the area has already recovered from the devastation of the eruption.

You see, not being a scientist, I can’t prove anything. My duty is therefore to shut up and nod vigorously when the scientists talk. And then to feel ashamed and fearful because I’m not doing anything to prevent the environmental catastrophe I’m causing by driving to work, buying a Christmas tree once a year, and exhaling carbon dioxide every day. I know I should prefer the worldwide depression that would follow the prudent shutting down of the entire fossil fuel industry and all the markets and products and jobs that flow from it. I know I should.

One of the scientists at the President’s Global Warming Nursery School said that those of us who don’t care about the Greenhouse Effect are like passengers on a bus bound for disaster: we think there’s nothing to be afraid of as long as the bus is surrounded by fog. Whose fog, buster? Ours or yours? And does the bus driver have the foggiest idea where he’s taking us? Sorry for asking.

Saturday, June 21, 1997 — Your Body is a Federal Asset

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Another day at the Pet Palace. A rumor that the vicious German shepherd is being peddled to the county prison. Let him do his berserk act on any criminals who get loose in the yard. How appropriate.

Dinner at Patrick’s house. We discussed the tobacco deal, $360 billion over 25 years to keep the states from filing lawsuits for the purpose of recovering the costs of medical care for smokers.

‘What about all those excise taxes?’ Patrick asked. ‘What were they for?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘they weren’t for anything. They were discouragement from smoking. Sin taxes aren’t about money; they’re a sign of government disapproval of naughty behavior.’

‘You’re saying they just spent it.’

‘Of course.’

Patrick laughed. ‘God. The states have to have made more money from cigarettes than the tobacco companies have. A company makes money on its own products. The state gets to profit from all of them. And now they want another $360 billion. It’s amazing.’
‘And they’re sanctimonious about it to boot. It’s ‘for the kids’.’

‘Right.’

‘The excise taxes are going up again too. A lot.’

‘Man,’ said Patrick. ‘The tobacco lobby is the most powerful of all. They’ve got money, lawyers – ‘

‘ – and politicians,’ I interjected.

‘Bunches of them, ‘ Patrick agreed. ‘So if they have to take this deal, then there’s nobody who can stand up to government extortion. I mean, that’s what it is, just a giant holdup.’

‘What I can’t figure, ‘ I said, ‘is why nobody seems concerned about the implications. This isn’t just about cigarettes.’

‘It’s about cigars, too,’ said Elizabeth, pointing at the one Patrick was smoking.

‘And what about the day when your medical insurance goes up because you bought a pound of bacon at the supermarket?’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, ‘we can hit up the red meat pushers for a few hundred billion, I’ll bet. All that colon cancer. Somebody has to pay.’

‘Who would ever have thought that the government’s desire to help people with their medical bills would lead to state ownership of your body? Because that’s the truth of it. The motorcyclists who oppose helmet laws can’t use the argument that it’s their own business whether they get a head injury or not. Not anymore. Now it’s ‘the people’s’ business because it’s ‘the people’ who are paying the hospital bill. And they’ve been making the same kind of argument about smokers, suggesting that anyone who smokes shouldn’t get insurance coverage for smoking-related diseases. Think about that. The government takes over the health care business. Then they set about denying coverage to everyone for exactly the ailments they’re most prone to get. So maybe fat people won’t get coverage for heart disease. Drinkers can’t be allowed coverage for liver disease. Women who won’t drink their milk can’t be covered for osteoporosis. They have the right to tell you how to live.’

‘Your body is a federal asset,’ Patrick said. ‘It has to be maintained so that it can keep working, which is to say generating the tax revenues that are needed to pay off that $15 trillion national debt. If you get sick and die of something like lung cancer, you’ve cheated them out of their money. What chance does the Fourth Amendment have when the government’s got to come up with $15 trillion? Sorry, we own your lungs just like we own your house and your children.’

‘So the only part of the human body anyone owns anymore is the uterus, which just happens to be the only part on which somebody else might have a legitimate claim.’
Patrick laughed. ‘Right. The last and only corner of the world still protected by the Fourth Amendment.’
We discussed the irony, as we had before, but I have been developing for some time a perspective that might explain or even eliminate the irony. I didn’t get into it tonight, though, because it’s a big subject and will take hours, maybe days, to explore.