bullshit

Something to think about...

hunter thompson

I've more or less come to the conclusion that Thompson probably knew exactly what he was doing when he put a .45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw part of an interview with him from about five years ago, in which he mumbled incomprehensibly a great deal, but I clearly heard him say he believed when he died he'd exist in some form or other and maybe come back as a three-legged dog in Bangaladesh. (When he said this, he smiled and shook his head and mumbled something that made me think Thompson felt reasonably sure he'd come back as a human being, and hopefully a more advanced one in his next incarnation).

So, in the middle of a phone call with his wife, she heard him put down the phone as if he was going over to the fridge to get ice cubes. At this point Thompson evidently sat down in his big chair with a nice crackling fire going, cocked his weapon, and moved himself forward along the karmic wheel with as much grace as possible considering that he was blowing his brains all over the kitchen floor.

I feel better about it after hearing this reaction from his wife.

poetry friday

This poem has many excellent qualities, but what I really like about it is that it's fun to read the first time through, and subsequent re-readings reveal many surprises, especially in the rhythms of the lines and the subtle turns of colloquial speech.

The Cyclop's name was Polyphemus.


Song of the Cyclops

I’m tired. Why sing when there’s no one
To sing to? Everyone knows me; I’m "famous".
No one wants to listen though. Why is that?
So I got "one round eye." So I never cut my hair.

I used to sing. Played music too. Especially
When I was in love with that sea nymph Galatea.
She toyed with me, led me on. She was cruel.
“You can’t play me like a pipe, wretched woman!”

That’s what I said when I saw her make out
with that guy Acis, right in front of my bases.
Someone stole my pain for his own damn gain.
So I picked up a boulder and smashed his head.

Then I returned to my flock. Yes, I’m a Shepard.
No, I never made any iron tool for the gods. No
Thunderbolts for Zeus. Those were my grandfather’s
Grandfather, or something. I don’t care.

Story goes, this heartbreak of mine made me a mean
Monster who loved to eat people. That’s bullshit.
Yes, I eat people. I like people. They’re tasty.
You never took a bite of beef, fish, chicken? It’s all meat, man.

One night I came home to find a pile of people
Resting in my cave. Enough to feed me for a week.
I ate two for dinner, two for breakfast. I came home
And ate two more again. Then they got me drunk.

Wine makes me weak. “What’s your name?”
I asked the leader. “No one” he said, trying to trick me.
It worked. I was dozing off when I felt a hot poker driving
Through my eye. The bonehead blinded me.

Man, I screamed so loud my friends came running, asking,
“Who hurt you?” All I could say was “no one.” So they walked
away. Then the men escaped by hiding under my sheep.
I prayed Poseidon would take revenge. I hear he took it.

Eyeless. That’s when I became really, too damn tired.

-- Josh Gray

requiem for harvard

I just heard the most astonishing “debate” on the radio between Sean Hannity and some 21 year old Harvard student named Amy about the Larry Summers imbroglio. Now, admittedly, Sean isn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver, but he tried earnestly and patiently to get Amy to answer one simple question: Are there any inherent, innate differences between men and women? Instead of answering with a simple Yes or No and using that answer as a starting point to discuss the subject, Amy would go off on a rant about how Summers needed to be fired because he wasn’t doing enough to promote and protect the women teachers and students at Harvard.

Sean: That’s not what I asked, Amy. I’m sure that’s an interesting subject, but it’s not why Mr. Summers has come under fire. He’s come under fire because he speculated that there might be biological reasons that women are under-represented in math and the sciences. So I repeat: are there any innate differences between boys and girls, men and women?

Amy: Yes. Men have more power than women in this society, blah blah blah.

Sean: But that’s not an innate difference. Are there any innate, biological differences between men and women? Any at all.

Amy: Evolutionary biologists have long ago established that biological changes must be seen in context, Sean, and you’re asking me to take them out of context, which is that at Harvard as in most of corporate America, men have all the power and women blah blah blah.

Sean: This isn’t a tough question, Amy. Biological differences. Between men and women. For instance, are men generally stronger than women? Taller than women?

Amy: That’s completely irrelevant. You’re asking me to give you an answer out of context. What’s relevant is that the white male power structure, blah blah blah.

What struck me about Amy’s “answers” in this “debate” is how terrified she must be at some deep and inaccessible level of her “mind” not to be able to mouth the phrase, Yes of course there are differences. I have no doubt that if Sean had asked her if men, in general, have penises, and women, in general, have vaginas, she’d have figured out a way to avoid saying a simple Yes.

Amy couldn’t admit the obvious because it was the Slippery Slope.

If you can admit that men, on average, are taller than women, or stronger, then it’s only a matter of time before you might have to admit men have more testosterone, that little boys like to play with guns and swords more than little girls, that they’re more fascinated with the inner workings of machines than little girls are, and that these obvious differences may have something to do with the way little boys and little girls are wired, and that the way they are wired may have something to do with the fact that boys tend to do better in math and girls tend to have larger vocabularies and better language skills.

Hard-wired differences between men and women?! Surely not!

Amy doesn't realize it, but this is a matter of faith for her. The actual inconvenient facts, available to any parent with a set of eyes, don't matter.

Amy is no different than the strict Creationist who won’t admit that men and women walked the earth 40,000 years ago because the Bible, inconveniently, puts the date of creation at 4004 B.C.
Carbon dating? What's that?

And what’s Larry Summers apologizing to these people for?

Listen to this from Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader who's never been a friend of the U.S. about what's happening in his country and the Middle East generally:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

more...

I just happened to catch most of a Frontline show about a U.S. company stationed in Baghdad, called A Company of Soldiers.

My guess is it was made by someone who went to Iraq doubting the wisdom of the war but came away impressed by the soldiers he met there. And it's pretty compelling stuff just watching these soldiers going through their day(s).

There's a nice scene of a colonel telling a local sheik he better start identifying the bad guys in his town or there'll be hell to pay, and a heartwrenching sequence of soldiers profoundly grieving for one of their own killed in an ambush. It may have been intended to remind viewers that we're paying a heavy price for Bush's War, but it just made me proud that this country can produce such brave and decent men.

If you want to see blogging at its best, and its worst, go here, and just read the comments and follow the links. General subject: Iraq, terror, the left, psychological blindness.

Here's a taste:

"The Left will wake up one day, on the morning it is led down a dark corridor to a cell floored with rubber mats, sloping curiously down to a corner where a single drain waits to carry fluid away. The walls will be bare but for a banner with the words 'Allah is Great' opposite a video camera whose tripod legs are protected with a drop cloth. On a table will be a single knife. And then they will know. Then they will see."

And another:

"The "Left's inability to see" -- is the product of their unshakeable belief in the immutability of their world whose safety is guaranteed by the very system they hate the most. In that make-believe garden, academic tenure, human-rights lawyers, newspaper articles and political correctness will always protect them. They are dimly aware of, but do not really believe in the existence an outside world governed by what Tom Friedman called Hama Rules."

feelings

Ever wondered how and where leftists get their moral compass to figure out what's right and what's wrong? (Make that "right" and "wrong.")

The answer is, of course, feelings. Feelings of love. Feelings of compassion. Feelings of horror and despair that come when you can put yourself in the other guy's shoes.

"Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war -- from slavery in America to the Holocaust in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in Europe."

Read the rest. Please.

A nice article by British historian Paul Johnson, talking about how very thin the veneer of democracy is in Europe, where

"Power is distributed among masterful bureaucrats and permanent political elites. The resulting lack of freedom for individuals and businesses means that economic growth is almost nil and the future is bleak. As for European intellectuals, who command so much power in the media, universities and opinion-forming circles, they have done everything they possibly could to abuse America's initiative in Iraq and to prevent the installation of freedom. Some make it clear that they would much prefer Iraq to be run by men like Saddam than by American-backed democrats. Of course, intellectuals pay lip service to free elections but in practice have a profound (if secret) hatred of democracy. They cannot believe that their votes should count for no more than the votes of "uneducated" people who run small businesses, work on farms and in factories and have never read Proust."

Read the rest.

Devotees of "24" (like me) should check this out. It just makes you want to cry.

If you still believe Social Security and Medicare are in okay shape, they aren't.

Really.

Unless something is done now, or pretty soon, some future Congress is going to have to tell old people there's no more money in the kitty.

Those future old people are in their mid to late 30's now, and like the rest of us, they won't be dying when they're supposed to.

"Things were cheap when Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in pushing the Social Security plan through Congress in 1935. The maximum tax was 2 percent on a worker's first $3,000, or $5 per month. Benefits didn't commence until age 65, and life expectancy at birth was 58 for men and 62 for women."

Read the whole thing.

Unfortunately, the Bush numbers don't seem to add up either.

gonzo goodbye

So Hunter Thompson shot himself to death. The news said he'd been sick and in a wheelchair.

''I wasn't surprised,'' said George Stranahan, a former owner of the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson's favorite hangouts. ''I never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him.''

I guess I get it. Something tells me suicide is going to be the way out for a lot of people as the boomers start getting sick and deciding that death is okay but dying in a slow ungainly way, a snip at a time, isn't.

Appreciations of a truly great American writer, here, and here.