Fearless Dream

Losing Václav Havel

2011-12-21T12:00:00.001-08:00

This week saw the loss of two of humankind’s best, followed by the departure of one of the world’s worst villains. I’ve written a brief reflection regarding Václav Havel below, and will try to get to commenting on Christopher Hitchens’ and Kim Jong-Il’s passing when I can manage to seize a bit more time. (Joshua Treviño probably framed the odd trio of passings best: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.”)

Václav Havel, Czech playwright and dissident who inspired millions with the courage of his convictions and went on to lead a liberated Czech Republic after the 1989 fall of Communism across Eastern Europe, succumbed to a long respiratory illness and passed away last Sunday. As one who loves and celebrates liberty, and whose mother’s parents were Czechs who emigrated to France in the 1920s, I feel a strong appreciation of Havel’s acts of steadfast courage in the face of gloomy odds. The Czech story in the 20th century was an especially sad one: Just as Czechs began to loosen the shackles of over two decades of self-inflicted communism during the Prague Spring of 1968, Soviet forces invaded and imposed a stricter communist regime that halted the liberalization. This, in a once free and democratic nation.

I will always remember a several days’ visit with my parents and sister to what was still “Czechoslovakia” in 1985, during which we managed to see Prague and a bit of Plzeň, and visit some extended family. The Prague of the time was the gloomiest place I had ever been, gray and desolate with the scaffolding and rubble of languishing construction projects, and their accompanying “5 year plan” signage, everywhere. Restaurants were nearly empty, and it seemed as if people rarely left their homes. One cousin, who worked for a television station, was afraid to be seen meeting with Americans. Years later, we heard of his disappearance; the family suspected he had been taken to a labor camp, as commonly happened to political dissidents during that time. Everywhere along the roads, propaganda billboards proclaimed the virtues of Communism, or the vices of Capitalism, in their characteristic style, yet the world around them seemed still, unmoving, almost abandoned. (I recall feeling my stomach sink years later, on seeing a familiar Czech anti-capitalist poster in the home of a left-leaning work colleague — another of the many signs I’ve seen, of the Western left’s misguided admiration for the malignant ideology of communism.) I recall the generous and unreserved hospitality of cousins who welcomed us into their homes, and one cousin’s fascination with the under-the-hood workings of what we thought of as our very simple, run-of-the-mill rental car — a Ford sedan with a modest 4-cylinder engine. It was a fascinating marvel to him, like nothing that the state auto manufacturer, Škoda, produced. And perhaps most of all, I remembered the presence of armed soldiers throughout the country, and in particular guarding the borders, where they searched the trunks of cars not only entering but leaving the country. My teenage angst was put into its proper perspective by contact with people who did not enjoy the freedoms and standard of living that I foolishly took for granted. I remember thinking, if one was ever to feel so gloomy about the world as to think life was not worth living, it would be a far better thing to risk one’s life helping people who wished to to escape a place like this. Within years, that kind of action became unnecessary. The collapse of Soviet communism gave Czechs and Slovaks another chance at freedom, and they seized it as well they should. I had the opportunity to return to Prague in 2005, for a few days after Christmas, and it gave me great joy to see the city revitalized, alive, thriving, and free. For leadership that helped make that dream a reality, and courageous persistence that kept a candle of hope lit through the many dark years before it could be realized, today’s free Czechs will forever be in Havel’s debt. The world has too few who share his deep devotion to freedom and commensurate dedication to advancing it, and he will be greatly missed.

Two noteworthy Havel quotes from my Quotes page:

On economics:

Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy… This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself.

On grappling with evil:

Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.

Rob Long on the Decline of Print Media

2011-12-20T08:13:00.001-08:00

A great 98th podcast episode featuring Insta-guest Glenn Reynolds (whose delightful and informative blog I love every bit as much as our Ricochet hosts do) ends with some particularly insightful comments by Rob Long. Starting around 59 and a half minutes:

I think what hurt these magazines [(Time and Newsweek)] is Reagan. Because when Reagan was elected and did well, all of these journalists went nuts. Now Hugh Sidey used to write a very pro-Reagan column for Time. … And the idea that you would have a thoughtful, kind of middle-of-the-road wise man journalist writing a column for any one of these magazines that was not knee-jerk partisanship is … literally inconceivable. They all decided with Reagan that they needed, now … their job was to try to reform the electorate. And you could see it. You could see it in the collapse of the big media titles when they tried to reform the electorate, to try to teach you a lesson: You voted wrong. That … the electorate just kind of turned them off and people stopped reading. They stopped reading those magazines. They stopped reading the newspaper when the newspaper became homework … for your soul … instead of: telling me what happened in my neighborhood today.

On journalism then vs. now:

These were Ivy League weeklies … Newsweek and Time are staffed entirely by Harvard and Yale students. But they didn’t have the sense of trying to tell you … why you were wrong, and why you were stupid … the advocacy journalism which came up … really, began in the 70s, but I think really hit its stride in the 80s under Reagan. This idea that you need to be corrected. And the people reading this thought, “Well, I don’t really need to be corrected.” And then you saw the magazines as they desperately tried to come up with something else — was it more show business, more lifestyle stuff, more trend pieces. They tried to do everything they could, because they couldn’t report the news, because it was too obvious what they were trying to do. You look at a paper like the L.A. Times — the L.A. Times is … the dead twin of the New York Times. The New York Times succeeds because it has fantastic feature sections, right? The New York Times succeeds because on Thursdays about style, Wednesdays about food … and Fridays about escapes. It has these great sections that people want to read, despite the front section. And they’ve done that very successfully. But everyone else … they forget the Hugh Sidey model, which is just … everything doesn’t have to be corrective of Conservatives.

…

The mainstream just wants to know what’s going on in the world, and doesn’t need to be told, over and over again, that Conservatives are bad, and that Liberals are good. They just … they don’t believe it, so it seems like a comic book to them.

As Glenn would rightly advise: Listen to the whole thing!

I’m reminded of an older man I once met, whose eyes beamed with pride on relating to me that his son had gone into journalism “to change the world”. I smiled and said nothing, not wanting to rob this nice fellow I barely knew of a notion that was clearly a source of great happiness to him, but in my head I had to wonder: Did his son choose the right career for that? And: what are the implications of conflating the business of reporting facts with the pursuit of advocacy journalism?

Bill Whittle's Voter's Guide to the Republican Party

2011-12-20T07:00:00.001-08:00

Not to be missed: Bill Whittle’s latest and greatest Firewall. Everything you wanted to know about those mean, nasty, evil, really not very nice Republikkkans, but were afraid to ask:

(via Phineas at Public Secrets, care of @sistertoldjah)

V.I. Day 2011

2011-11-22T06:44:00.001-08:00

In 2008, blogger “Zombie” published a thoughtful, well-reasoned post discussing the conditions for victory in Iraq, and calling for November 22nd to be observed as “Victory in Iraq Day”. Continued progress and relative stability over the three years since seems to me to have vindicated that judgment, and in line with what I wrote on the occasion that year, I think we ought to carry on the tradition. The U.S. and her allies achieved what many vehemently declared was impossible, ousting one of the world’s worst dictators, liberating the Iraqi people, and planting the seeds of freedom and representative democracy in what has been one of the most politically troubled and volatile regions of the globe. Today’s Iraq has its challenges and problems, to be sure, but it is a place far more full of genuine hope than it had been under two decades of Saddam’s brutal dictatorship, and stands as a stark and unflattering counterexample to the remaining dictatorships that surround it, have acted to undermine it, and feel their grip on power threatened by its very existence. Those are all things to be grateful for and to celebrate.

Even President Obama, who as a senator vigorously opposed what he declared to be an ill-motivated, ill-conceived, and unwinnable Iraq war, and as a candidate opportunistically vilified the war and the Bush administration, promising an immediate withdrawal of our troops if elected, no matter the consequences, has had to quietly concede that the U.S. won the very war he campaigned against. Once in office, and I suspect apprised of facts and perspective that only presidents and their military advisors have access to, he scrapped his promises of immediate and unconditional retreat and defeat to embrace the same overall policies and drawdown plan of the Bush administration that he previously demonized.

The Bush administration didn’t take it upon itself to declare victory, and it was clear that neither candidate Obama nor the press were about to do any such thing. It was up to others to do so, and I’m grateful to Zombie and the participants in 2008’s V-I Day for leading the way.

I’m not one to focus on the negative, but there is something I hope will not be forgotten about this war, that I fear history books will not amply record: the way that victory was achieved despite the most intense vilification of American conduct and motives that I have seen in my lifetime. The opposition brought their biggest rhetorical guns to bear, some among them stopping at nothing and accusing us of the most vile, malevolent intentions. We were charged by some with going to Iraq to steal their oil, to claim the land as a permanent colony of our vast, overbearing Empire, or simply for the implicit joy of killing dark-skinned people. There are people for whom it is a foregone conclusion that such actions are clearly and exactly what the United States is all about, for whom we are the exact polar opposite of all that we claim to stand for, because in order for those people to win hearts and minds it must be made to be so. The record of our actual conduct proved otherwise, casting our soldiers’ actions in start contrast with the brutality of foreign fighters who committed themselves to the failure of the Iraqi project at all costs, deliberately inflicting the kind of mass civilian casualties that the United States takes greater pains than any combatant in history to avoid. Sadly, history’s record will not prevent the same accusations from being endlessly recycled. We will fight identical smears again in future conflicts — I feel sure of it — and we had therefore best learn from this experience and be mentally prepared to battle the same calumnies again.

As I wrote on my recently added “Welcome” page, and meant it: I feel deeply, humbly grateful and indebted beyond capacity for adequate repayment to the men and women of the United States armed forces, and equally so to our truest friends in this world, the soldiers of our stalwart allied nations, who daily risk everything they have in this brief life for the liberty and safety of others, setting aside even their own. Let there be no doubt: I want them to have the full support that their risk and sacrifice merits, and I want them to be given every chance to succeed that they ask of us — precious little to expect, I think, in return. They have my sincerest admiration, and with remarkably few exceptions that serve to prove the rule, I am deeply, deeply proud of their demonstrated ethics, courage, fairness, generosity, resourcefulness, and professional conduct as our emissaries in hostile lands. The precious, fragile free society that we so often take for granted is the very thing they are risking all to preserve and defend, and they should have our heartfelt gratitude.

To those who risked all to make Iraq’s liberation possible, and to those who lost all making it happen, may you forever have the gratitude of the freer world you left behind. You are the best of us, in my book, and we are lucky to count you as our fellow citizens.

For additional perspective, see Bill Whittle’s September 2011 “What We Did Right,” which, among its survey of the decade since the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks, examines the results of our intervention in Iraq.

Progress!

2011-11-14T08:58:00.001-08:00

The three weeks since Launch Day have been incredibly fun and exhilarating. I’ve been so deeply immersed, making satisfying, design-validating progress on my first project, that you’ve scarcely heard a peep from me here. OK, my solo time hasn’t quite been the blogging Renaissance I had planned for, but it’s exactly what I need to be doing, and I don’t want to risk breaking the fantastic momentum I’ve got going. It’s been delightful, amazingly productive, and an absolute rush.

At this stage, I can only reveal that I’m designing and implementing what I believe will be some truly neat and groundbreaking software for Mac OS X. Believe me, I can’t wait to be able to announce more than that — I’ll announce it with great enthusiasm, when the time is right. Meanwhile, I thought I might mention a bit about why I’m having such fun working on this.

A big part of what makes the development process so rewarding, and makes what I’m attempting even possible for a lone developer to achieve, is the superb set of system capabilities and developer technologies that are available to leverage on the Mac platform, which fall under the broad marketing-label umbrella of the “Cocoa Frameworks”. As I mentioned in a comment on Ricochet, these technologies have quietly revolutionized the economics of software development, breaking down barriers and former notions of what a single engineer or small team could aspire to accomplish. I’ve been working with these technologies for about fifteen years now, enjoyed the privilege of working on them for the past nine and a half, and now am applying and synthesizing everything I’ve learned into some great new stuff that I believe will empower users in very exciting ways. With due acknowledgment of what a thrill it was hacking Apple ][s and PCs at the assembly-language level back in the 80s, working with this stuff is probably the most fun I have ever had programming.

The best thing of all about working with the Objective-C language and Cocoa Frameworks at their full potential, is that it isn’t just cheap rapid prototyping that leaves you with a long way to go to a robust, production-quality end result. You can achieve all the benefits of quick development without having to write a lot of temporary code that you’ll just end up discarding later — analogous, perhaps, to the temporary support scaffolding that a carpenter or stone mason might have to build to get a job done. If you stick to the right path (which isn’t too hard to do), you can begin to realize a design with quick-turnaround results, while faithfully modeling the things you’re working with in uncompromising full generality, or a subset thereof driven by immediate needs, that can be readily extended to full generality without having to discard progress and backtrack. All the while you’re making progress that counts. That in itself is an exhilarating feeling.

I don’t know whether the foregoing communicates much to those who haven’t written software before. Some may be relieved to hear that it’s as technical as I’m likely to get on this blog. I just wanted to try to convey some sense of how fun and exciting this endeavor is to me — in part because this is the “distraction” that’s going to keep me off the radar for spans of time, though I will do my best to set aside some time for blogging when I reasonably can.

I leave you with an entrepreneurial song of the day: “Prime Mover” from Rush’s 1987 Hold Your Fire. I discovered this one around the time my son was born a couple years ago, and also think of it as a hard-to-beat optimistic anthem for a new life. A definite favorite of mine. Enjoy!

Prime Mover

Basic elemental instinct to survive
Stirs the higher passions
Thrill to be alive

Alternating currents in a tidewater surge
Rational resistance to an unwise urge

Anything can happen…

From the point of conception
To the moment of truth
At the point of surrender
To the burden of proof

From the point of ignition
To the final drive
The point of the journey is not to arrive

Anything can happen…

Basic temperamental filters on our eyes
Alter our perceptions
Lenses polarize

Alternating currents force a show of hands
Rational responses force a change of plans

Anything can happen…

From a point on the compass
To magnetic north
The point of the needle moving back and forth

From the point of entry
Until the candle is burned
The point of departure is not to return

Anything can happen…

I set the wheels in motion
Turn up all the machines
Activate the programs
And run behind the scene

I set the clouds in motion
Turn up light and sound
Activate the window
And watch the world go ‘round

From the point of conception
To the moment of truth
At the point of surrender
To the burden of proof

From the point of ignition
To the final drive
The point of a journey
Is not to arrive

Anything can happen…

Just Being Myself

2011-10-28T13:57:00.001-07:00

A minor announcement: After six years of blogging as “an unrepentant kulak”, I’ve switched to publishing under my real name.

It’s bothered me for a while now that others have taken far greater risks to secure the freedom and the thriving free society that I enjoy, and also has felt odd to me to “hide” behind a pseudonym to advocate for what are, or ought to be, fairly non-controversial, mainstream, foundational American principles. Now that I’ve gone solo in my work, and no longer have an employer to protect, I also feel a bit freer to drop the pseudonym, and I think with age I’ve also become more comfortable with being liked or disliked (or loved or reviled!) for who I am, and I’ve seen the need to do what we can for what matters most to us, in the time we have.

Not much more to say about it beyond that. As I wrote when I started this blog, I’ve endeavored to keep the discussion reasonable and refrain from writing anything that I didn’t feel comfortable standing by. Looking back on six years of work, I think I’ve lived up to that promise, and I intend to continue striving for the same goal.

I’ve written a bit about my former nom de plume, which people have occasionally asked about, at the bottom of my new Welcome page. In the accompanying site reorg., I also moved my blogroll and other sidebar links to their own page, which I expect will make them a lot easier to keep up to date. I hope visitors will take a look there now and again; there are some truly great blogs, sites, and podcasts listed. I’ve updated my Twitter and Ricochet profiles too.

That’s it for now.

Nothing more to see here.

To my online friends of many years: Nice to meet you. Again!

(Footnote: Because of the way I set up my blog template, all previous posts have been retroactively tagged with my new byline. Just FYI.)

Launch Day

2011-10-24T13:26:00.001-07:00

I have eagerly awaited this day for a very long time now. Today, for the first time in years, I own my own time again, and I’m officially embarking on the adventure of starting my own software development company.

I have a million and one things on my mind to do with this precious first day, let me tell you, so allow me to defer to my original announcement of this endeavor, which I think already captured the event’s significance to me pretty darn well:

I’ve had the entrepreneurial bug for a while now, and a new job for my wife that requires us to move cross-country has had the welcome effect of forcing/facilitating Decision Time. We’ve put our house on the market, and later this month will be moving to lovely Packanack Lake, New Jersey. I’ll have a couple months of working remotely for my previous employer ahead, to tie up loose ends and leave my areas of responsibility in the best shape I can, but come October 1st [OK, I ended up sticking around for a bit more loose-end tying than I originally planned on!] I’ll be striking off in pursuit of my own American Dream — which, to me, means taking a chance on myself and my ideas and aspirations, embracing risk and challenge, and developing my talents to their fullest, with the hope of producing things that other people find useful, and in the process making the work I love my living. I’m grateful to have enjoyed something close to that in my current job, but this is an opportunity to own the entire creative process from end to end, to challenge and take chances on my own design sense, and to pursue areas of application that serve other markets.

I’m tremendously excited, and am positively chomping at the bit to get started. There are plenty of logistics to take care of between here and Day One, but I feel lighter with the knowledge that I’ve committed to this new course, and that I’m giving myself permission to do the very things I yearn to. I also hope this change will enable me to do more writing here, and I mean to include among that writing the story of my startup venture as it unfolds.

As I set my sights on this Big Dream (and, when I think those words, Bill Whittle’s “Trinity” (part 2 here) is on my mind as having so brilliantly put into words what I feel about it), in the forefront of my thoughts is a deep and abiding appreciation for a culture that, in its very bones, cherishes, celebrates, and strives to exhort exactly this kind of big dreaming. What I’m setting out to achieve is exactly what a culture founded on the individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness designed itself for. My gratitude for this opportunity is immense, and I mean to make use of it to achieve great things, while always remembering my debt to those who took tremendous risks before me to make it all possible.

As I later wrote, “Day One sitting at my desk in my newly appointed home office, ready to create wonderful things, seems a long way off now, but I’m so charged with excitement about it that it’s getting me through the day-to-day tasks necessary to reach my goal — and that kind of focus is exactly what I need.” Well, it worked, and I made it through, and I’m here and ready and eager to go, and part of me can only just barely believe it. This first day will necessarily consist of some basic logistical stuff — such as getting my workspace cleared and transformed into a de-cluttered environment where I can think — but damn if even that isn’t an exciting and fun task taken in context. This baby is mine. I’m creating the environment I want, the technology I want, the culture and vision of the future I want. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Music has always been a huge motivator and connection to Important Stuff for me, and over the years I’ve accumulated a playlist of favorite entrepreneurial or otherwise inspiring songs that get me in the desired frame of mind to achieve. I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll make a habit of posting about one of them every once in a while.

There’s a lot of good stuff on the list, such that choosing a single Launch Day song to rule them all is no easy task, but when I think about it there’s a natural choice for me: I’m going with the Live in Paris version of Joe Satriani’s “Time Machine”, which I must apologize to my neighbors for cranking earlier today. Not particularly entrepreneurial — purely instrumental, in fact — but this one holds a deep connection for me, one that reaches back nearly two decades to some of my first serious thinking about my life, tugging at threads that have run through my life since, and striking those Mystic Chords of Memory that Bill Whittle has written so eloquently about. Turn it up and I’m back circa 1994, cruising up California’s Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to Malibu to clear my head and think, with the album version (a worthy listen) driving my speakers for all they’ve got. I made Big Plans then, let me tell you, and now, today, I’m keeping promises made to myself long ago, and embarking full-throttle on fulfilling them. The feeling of elation is beyond my meager ability to describe. This is exactly where I need to be.

More to come soon!

Getting Closer

2011-09-30T14:48:00.001-07:00

It’s getting close enough that I can see it approaching, and awareness of that has buoyed my spirits tremendously. Following three more short weeks of working for my current employer, I’ll be heading off to forge my own path as an independent software developer. As of Monday, October 24th, I’ll be free to devote my full efforts to the development and realization of my own ideas, pursuing directions whose results I can’t wait to see myself.

I couldn’t be more excited to be embarking on this new challenge and adventure. Everything about it — responsibility for success or failure — is going to be in my own hands, and up to my own abilities, judgment, awareness of my own shortcomings, and my drive to learn, adapt, surmount obstacles, and work with determined, tireless commitment toward the goals I’m setting out to achieve — the marriage of powerful capabilities with fun and elegant design.

I plan to start writing more about this new venture of mine when its long-awaited-by-me launch date arrives. I’ll keep the posts on topic for this blog, and will probably spin off a new blog for any related technical discussion I want to get into. I expect there’s a lot on the subject of entrepreneurship, risk, optimism, and the freedom to try that will be relevant and worth exploring here as the mood strikes. This will be such a central part of my life and direction from here on out, it would be hard to avoid mention of it.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned, if you will. I think it’s going to be a fun ride.

Pilot Bill Whittle on the Reno Air Race Crash

2011-09-30T09:54:00.001-07:00

This week’s Afterburner: “Live Free or Die”, on PJTV (Warning: contains video of the crash):

What We Can Learn From the Gratitude of Immigrants

2011-09-28T06:04:00.001-07:00

Anecdotes such as this should put our domestic self-criticism in perspective, and remind us how very much we have to be grateful for. These are the people who flock to frontiers without hesitation, and build prosperity out of little more than freedom, opportunity, determination, and irrepressible optimism. May we always welcome such appreciative new citizens:

On Constitution Day in Philadelphia, 48 new Americans were naturalized, representing 18 countries from Argentina to Vietnam. The citizenship candidates and their families filled a small auditorium, they sat through welcoming speeches, including one from retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. They understood that it was a big deal.

They were an appreciative, demonstrative audience, if not Emma Lazarus’ “wretched refuse” of a teeming shore. Many are educated, with their eyes fixed on a shiny future as Americans. They might not all succeed, but they know they are free to try, so they are not complaining.

For the small number of you who think that America is bad, or mean, or evil, come convince our new Americans. You’ll die trying.

They don’t measure America by a dreamy, utopian ideal, they judge America against realities of the world in which they had lived. Despite wars and recession, they cast their lot with us because they know that in the totality of liberty, opportunity and equality — even the freedom to fail and try again — America is matchless.

To some of you, this is flag-waving fiction. To our newest Americans, who have lived here for years while qualifying for citizenship, it is fact.

Whittle: What We Did Right

2011-09-16T07:00:00.001-07:00

“What We Did Right” in the decade since 9/11: Another great Afterburner, thanks to Bill Whittle’s aptitude for placing events in Big Picture perspective:

at PJTV and on YouTube

American Islamic Group Supports Sharia Law Ban

2011-09-13T11:00:00.001-07:00

There are non-trivial legal and freedom issues involved in considering such a measure, of course, but the fact that there are Muslims in the United States advocating for a ban on the implementation of Sharia law here, as described in this article on The Blaze, gives me hope. From the “American Islamic Leadership Coalition“‘s website:

As American Muslims, we believe that the law should treat people of all faiths equally, while protecting Muslims and non-Muslims alike from extremist attempts to use the legal instrument of shari‘ah (also known as Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh) to incubate, within the West, a highly politicized and dangerous understanding of Islam that is generally known as “Islamism,” or “radical Islam.”

…

As American Muslims we are conscious of the fact that Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups and other Islamists and their surrogates in the U.S. are trying their best to portray any opposition to manifestations of shari‘ah law as “racism” and “discrimination against Muslims.” However, as a coalition of traditional, liberal and secular Muslim Americans, we denounce this fear-mongering and playing of the race card, which only serves to mask the Islamists’ highly politicized agenda.

…

“Many of us fled the Muslim world to escape Shariah law… We do not wish these laws to follow us here.”

Dennis Prager: Lessons from 9/11? What Lessons?

2011-09-13T10:57:00.001-07:00

At Prager’s site (via @inhuggermugger)

After 9/11, the normal and decent question that normal and decent people — people who fully and happily recognize the existence of vast numbers of normal and decent Muslims in the world — would have posed is this: What has happened in the Arab world and parts of the Muslim world?

But as this, the most obvious question that 9/11 prompted, has not been allowed to be asked, what lessons can possibly be learned?

The answer is, of course, none.

Ten Years Later: 9/11 Links

2011-09-11T11:11:00.001-07:00

I’ve posted my own 9/11 reflections here.

Following are links to some of the most stirring writing I’ve seen today. I’ll continue adding to this list as I go.

Never forget. Never submit.

This YouTube video should make every decent person sick: Counter-demonstrators forced to disperse, while Islamic Supremacists holding signs that call for “Jihad” and declaring “Islam Will Dominate the World” freely spew their rage and burn our flag outside the U.S. embassy in London on 9/11/2011:

James Delingpole commented on this at Ricochet, in: “Western Civilization to barbarians: ‘Please. Come right in. The gates are wide open…’

9/11 is now “National Grandparents Day”! No, really.

Dana Loesch: “My 9/11 Awakening”

Sundries Shack: “9/11, The New Tet”

Ezra Dulis: “9/11: The Hijackers Were Soldiers, The Speech Police Are Terrorists”

@bapartofmylife: “9/11 is a Day of Mourning”

Perfection Under a Red Umbrella: “10 Years Later, Ground Zero & The Pentagon, Hallowed Ground of Flight 93”

GayPatriot: “In Memoriam - James Joe Ferguson Lost Ten Years Ago Today”

All I could remember was how happy Joe always was and how that cheer was infectious to all of his friends and colleagues. I would miss that cheerful influence on me. Joe had made the choice to live life to the fullest extent possible. He was the model of the optimistic American who knows no frontiers and no bounds. He was doing more than his fair share of contributing to a better society.

Mark Steyn: From “Let’s Roll” to “Let’s Roll Over”

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day.

Larry O’Connor: “9/11 Was Declaration of War”

Ed Ross: “The Legacy of 9/11 is about much more than terrorism”

Andrew Klavan: “When Hollywood Hit Rock Bottom”

John Nolte at Big Hollywood: “September 11th: My Thanks to Joel Surnow and His Fellow Hollywood Subversives”

James Lileks: The Lake and the Sky

A Plea, Ten Years After: Please, Open Your Eyes

2011-09-10T21:09:00.001-07:00

In past years, I’ve written about where I was on 9/11, posted quotes, written about songs, tweeted the names of victims, and recommended blog posts, articles, and videos. But on nearly every anniversary of the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks since I started blogging, the unifying issue on my mind has been nearly the same: To assess where we are and how we are faring some years after.

Reviewing what I’ve written in years past, I find that my answer to that question has changed very little, and the farther we get from that awful day the more that fact worries me, for despite having successfully thwarted at least 19 subsequent would-be attacks, I don’t think we’re faring very well as a culture, in crucial ways that for me raise serious questions about what our long-term future will hold.

I try not to let the gloom envelop me. In so many ways, I am an optimist in my heart of hearts. I have tremendous confidence in our culture and way of life, in our resilience and adaptability, and in all that we can achieve with our ingenuity and dedication and mutual goodwill. Yet it kills me to see that same culture mired in and hobbled by an unwarranted mentality of self-recrimination and self-doubt, and simultaneously unwilling to candidly examine and confront an ideological movement that is actively, deeply, vocally, immutably, and demonstratedly hostile to its foundational principles and continued existence.

What does it mean to live in a culture that is only just barely willing to stand up and fight for itself in the wake of a horrific act of war such as the 9/11 attacks? I would not have thought our present-day frame of mind possible to sustain after such an event, but the cultural and political divisions that predated 9/11 have proven far more resilient than I would ever have expected. We didn’t wake from our slumber of infighting to pursue, united and with doggedly committed determination, the defense and preservation our nation and way of life; rather, we retrenched and resumed fighting each other, our cultural fault lines painfully underscored in the process. As Michele Catalano wrote three years ago,

In so many ways, 9/11 ended up furthering any divisions we had instead of closing them. We chose up sides and backed away from each other as if we were our own enemies —- as if the enemies we had, those who steered planes into buildings, weren’t enough.

This realization, and the seeming impossibility of bridging the chasm, has been a knife in my heart ever since. It kills me. But I don’t see any way around it.

So many aspects of our cultural condition have caused me grief over the past ten years. I feel crestfallen that it is taking us as long as it has to rebuild at the World Trade Center site. I’ve felt deeply betrayed by a Hollywood that now routinely denigrates and vilifies the country whose values and achievements it once celebrated and defended, a Hollywood that I loved in my youth but have now all but written off and given up on. I have been deeply disappointed in a supposedly mainstream American press that seems to have seen it as its sworn duty to demoralize us and convince us of inevitable defeat and dishonor in the wars we’ve prosecuted, in a way that’s been shown to be transparently contingent on the political party of the President in the White House. I’m troubled that over the past three years, we’ve largely acted in ways that can only serve to embolden our enemies, while giving our friends and allies and those we should at least be lending moral support in their fight for freedom and against totalitarianism (c.f. Iran’s democracy activists, and other participants in the recent “Arab Spring” uprisings) scant reason to hope for the backing of a country that has for so long been thought of as a beacon of hope and the moral “leader of the free world”. It makes my heart sink that too many of our own citizens seem to believe that America is the problem in some form or other.

All of these cultural factors pain me and deeply trouble me, but on this 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I’m willing to largely put them aside in the interest of getting just one, crucial point across regarding the single most dangerous problem we face: the inability or unwillingness to name, frankly discuss, and squarely face our ideological enemy. More than anything else, it is a commitment to reckoning with this circumstance that needs to cross the perhaps otherwise impassable ideological chasm that separates the American Right and Left.

We can and will continue to differ with our countrymen regarding specific policy prescriptions, including matters of war. I could perhaps accept that, in a world where I felt we had all made a candid and fully informed assessment of the adversary we are up against. But there are still many among us who don’t seem to want to look Islamic Supremacism in the face, or even acknowledge its existence, either because the prospect is too frightening, or because the acknowledgment would violate long-practiced “PC” rules of cultural conduct that are so deeply ingrained in us, we fear we wouldn’t know how to function without blindly deferring to them. If I could make one plea to my fellow countrymen, Left, Right, and Center, it would be this: Please, please look with open eyes at what we are up against. Even if you must conclude that Islamic Supremacism is a fringe ideology with no real possibility of gaining dominance or causing substantial long-term harm to the free world (I truly wish I could believe it was so), do so with a full understanding and awareness of what the Jihadists intend for us, far-fetched or not, as detailed in their own words and actions: the return of a 7th century Caliphate that is fundamentally incompatible with and hostile to secular and pluralistic free societies, with all the attendant implications for women, homosexuals, infidels and religious and ethnic minorities. These Jihadists have told us their intentions time and time again, but we somehow refuse to believe them.

We are so conditioned to reflexively genuflect to any and every other culture as a show of goodwill, that both our critical thinking faculties, and our courage to overcome fear of social reprisals and voice our honest concerns, seem to have become disengaged or defunct. If every culture and religion in this world was as benign in its intentions toward us as most are, this willful blindness wouldn’t be a big problem. We could all live together in happy harmony and the “coexistence” that so many understandably wish for. But the fact that most others have relatively benign intentions has disarmed us to the crucial few that do not. Our cultural defenses are down — way down — and even being caught off our guard ten years ago with horrific consequences doesn’t seem to have changed that sufficiently. Informing and educating ourselves about what we’re up against is crucial, for we cannot expect to remain both ignorant and free.

Is this state of denial (or leaning strongly toward diplomatic use of language, if you prefer) causing any real problems? It certainly seems to be. How else could a man like Nidal Malik Hasan remain in active service in the United States Army, after repeatedly making statements against the United States and in sympathy with our Jihadist enemies? There are compelling and deeply troubling indications that not only our armed forces, but our broader defense and law enforcement agencies are compromised in their ability and sworn duty to protect this country and its citizens by pressure to whitewash reality, sanitize the use of language that could be perceived as hurtful or offensive, and shrink from confronting reality. We are letting organizations such as CAIR — a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose charter calls for a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions” — advise our FBI on how to combat violent Islamic radicalism.

Bill Whittle’s April 7, 2010 PJTV piece “The Censorship Agenda” revealed in worrisome detail the sanitizing of our foundational national security documents that has taken place since the original, bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report. (As Bill himself suggests, contrary to the provocative subtitle “Obama Bans ‘Islam’”, the culture of self-censorship and willful blindness that produced these results may very well be indicative of a long-extant problem that predates the Obama administration.)

Think about the implications of Bill’s findings: in stark contrast with the comparatively frank and sober assessment of the 9/11 Commission Report (whose use of key terms is tabulated in the leftmost column, below), the FBI’s 2008 Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon (next column), our 2009 National Intelligence Strategy report (next column), and the Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood report on the shooting rampage by Nidal Malik Hasan (rightmost column), use the terms “Islam”, “Muslim”, and “Jihad” a total of zero times.

Zero.

The National Intelligence Strategy report doesn’t even reference “al Qaeda” or use the word “enemy” (employing, instead, the term “violent extremist”, a total of 29 times). The DoD’s Fort Hood report, amazingly, makes no reference whatsoever to “violent extremism”, “Islam”, “Muslim”, “Jihad”, or even to Hasan’s name.

Think about this. Disregard, for the moment, our popular culture and variously informed conversation among Joes like you and me. How is it possible that the very institutions we charge with our defense — whose analyses one would expect, of necessity, to be unflinchingly sober and frank — have become this willfully blind?

I can only shake my head in near-despair at the self-sabotaging ridiculousness of it. It might be funny if the consequences weren’t so dire for all of us. (Bill, however, has a more upbeat outlook than I do this year.)

Forget about applying the non-lethal (but awfully emotionally insensitive) tool of humor by mocking our enemies, which appears to be completely out of the question save for a few valiant out-of-the-mainstream efforts such as Shire Network News and Sands of Passion. In most cases, we can’t even bring ourselves to precisely and candidly refer to them. If our thinking and definitions are clear, there should be no reason not to do so, given all that is at stake.

This man has the right idea (emphasis mine):

There is nothing insulting to decent, good members of the Muslim religion when I say “Islamic extremist terrorist”, any more than it is insulting to the Italian-American community (when I was a prosecutor) to say the word “Mafia”. Or that it would be insulting to decent Germans to say the word “Nazi”.

One mistake to avoid is political correctness. You can’t fight crime, and you can’t deter terrorism, if you are hobbled by political correctness. I believe that Major [Nidal] Hasan is an example of that. There is no way that Major Hasan should have been a major in the United States Army, after several years of spewing forth hatred for the United States of America… I would consider Major Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood an Islamic extremist terrorist attack. I have a hard time understanding why the government doesn’t see it that way, since he was yelling “Allahu Akbar” when he started killing people. …

… We cannot use this as an opportunity to say, “let’s put this behind us”, because if we we do that, we will repeat the mistake that we made before September 11th, which is not evaluating correctly the scope and the danger of Islamic extremist terrorism. Notice I use those words and I use them often. I do because I have a simple belief: If you can’t face your enemy, you can’t defeat your enemy. If you can’t honestly describe your enemy, there are distortions in your policy decisions as a result of that.

Re-read that last part, and internalize the essential lesson: If we refuse the accurate use of words, we are sabotaging ourselves.

Since accusations of “Islamophobia”, etc. are now flung automatically against any who express concern about Islam’s militant political arm as exemplified by the likes of al Qaeda and Hamas, let me be as clear as it’s possible to be, knowing full well that “it is impossible to speak in such a way that one cannot be misunderstood” (or willfully misinterpreted): I really don’t want to spend my time writing and thinking about this stuff. I have no intrinsic need to gratify myself or feel superior by grinding ideological axes against either an external enemy culture or my own countrymen. I’d much rather invest my time and energy inventing, innovating, creating, raising my son, spending time with my wife, living and working and striving to do better among peers whose origins span the globe, but who share a necessary basic dedication to the essential principles of a free society. I would love nothing more than to be decisively proven wrong about all of this, and get back to my life. I think and write about this kind of stuff because, as far as I can tell, there is no avoiding it. The very culture that furnishes and protects my ability and yours to live our lives as we do and freely engage in such humanity-advancing work, is under attack by another that demands our submission to a suffocating, stifling, totalitarian ideology. If we cannot name, discuss, and confront that ideology, we might as well surrender to it.

My “endgame” — the long-term future I hope for — is not a perpetual state of war (who would wish for that?), but a true coexistence of stable peace and security that can only exist after the Islamic Supremacist threat has been acknowledged and somehow neutralized. That is to say, I seek a peace worth having. To whatever extent we can accomplish that without resorting to the use of force and violence, wonderful — you have me on your side. I want and hope for a future where I can freely live, work, and prosper alongside all others who share my commitment to upholding the essential principles of our free society, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, regardless of where on the globe they hail from, without any of us having to fear violence from totalitarian nutjobs. There is too much to do and achieve for us to waste our time, capabilities, and resources on war where we have a reasonable alternative. But to shrink from the last-resort necessity of war when it is upon us seems to me no less a betrayal of the society we rightly cherish, for if left undefended that society will crumble.

I speak “peace”, when peace is spoken.

Even when we are not in our worst moments of genuflecting self-censorship, our choice of terminology has been clumsy, muddled, and unhelpful from the start — and, make no mistake, these poor choices of terminology sink us. Case in point: A “War on Terror” is no more meaningful than a “War on Blitzkrieg”, or a “War on Kamikaze strikes. Terror is a tactic, not an identification of the ideology that motivates its perpetrators. The ideology we’re up against is is most accurately described as “Islamic Supremacism” — a militant, political branch of Islam that sees as its imperative the subjugation under strict Islamic law (Sharia) of all non-Muslims and any who wish to live in free and pluralistic societies. To attempt to broaden our response to al Qaeda’s brand of violent Islamic Supremacism into a “War on Terror” is to dilute our sense of purpose, and pretend against evidence that there are just as many terrorists motivated by various other ideologies who pose an imminent threat. This awkwardly vague and clumsy choice of words was, I think, both an attempt to avoid any reference to or indictment of any sect of “Islam”, and a well-intentioned overture of comradeship to other nations who had suffered terrorist scourges of other origins, but in the end I believe it’s been an ill-advised one. Since we’re not supposed to draw any connection between acts of terrorism and even a small, extreme, ostensibly non-representative minority fringe of Islam, we try to make do with the unhelpfully vague “War on Terror”, and it’s a wonder if we don’t forget what, in fact, we are fighting against.

I’m out of words, but I hope I’ve made my point clearly.

Please, my friends. Before you decide this is not your fight, read, research, learn. Our shared future is at stake.

Recommended Watching

I’ve watched this memorial slideshow every year. It unfailingly moves me to tears. Never forget that day, nor misremember. Never forget those we lost, the heroes who ran unbidden toward danger and lost their lives saving others, the heroes aboard Flight 93 who lost theirs preventing another attack that would likely have killed scores more of their fellow citizens…

Inside 9/11: an in-depth accounting of the 9/11 attacks and the events that led up to them

102 Minutes that Changed America: a uniquely composed account of the attack on New York, seen through raw footage from a variety of sources, combined with emergency calls and radio communications

My Previous Years’ Posts

2009: Tomorrow is 9/11 ~ My Experience of September 11, 2001 ~ 9/11 Quotes

2008: 9/11, Seven Years On ~ 9/11, Seven Years On, Part 2 ~ 102 Minutes that Changed America

2007: 9/11, Six Years On

2006: Soon, Time Again to Reflect ~ 9/11 Observances ~ 9/11 Observances, Part 2

2005: I Remember

2004: Remembering and Rebuilding (Yes, that’s me, in a post at my old blog. I’ll be transitioning to blogging openly under my own name here shortly. It’s about time.)

The Deal

2011-08-22T11:54:00.001-07:00

Who else but Bill Whittle can so adeptly weave together the early history of commercial aviation, this month’s deadly Chinook crash involving members of SEAL Team Six, the end of the Space Shuttle program, the private space race, the November 2001 crash of American Airlines flight 587 in Queens, and the needless, gut-wrenching destruction of the recent London riots.

Don’t miss “The Deal”, Bill’s latest Afterburner, on PJTV:

I would add one minor adjustment, that I doubt Bill would quibble with: To me, it’s being willing to risk dying for something that’s the key. Excepting one who chooses to embrace certain death as the last and only possible way to save others (as a soldier diving on a grenade, using his body to prevent the deadly spray of shrapnel from killing his comrades-in-arms), in a culture that rightly celebrates and cherishes life, we achieve our ends by embracing risk and seeking to live through danger, not by dying. Dying is just what happens the one time the gamble doesn’t pay off, despite our best reasonable efforts to prevent it short of playing life safe and never daring to venture anything at all (which is an end far worse than dying in the pursuit of a meaningful goal).

Amazon has Ernest Gann’s “Fate is the Hunter” in paperback.

Rich Man, Poor Man

2011-08-10T09:49:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner, “Rich Man, Poor Man”, is one of his finest. Watch it at Public Secrets:

In the grand scheme of things, we should indeed be celebrating this precious Civilization of ours, and its demonstrated, unrivaled ability to elevate everyone’s standard of living by liberating creative people to do what they do best — invent, innovate, and serve the wants and needs of others. It has taken a campaign of perspective-distorting envy and bitterness and cynicism sustained over decades to bring large numbers of us to believe otherwise, against all evidence.

Arrival

2011-08-09T10:43:00.001-07:00

There’s always the last, lingering bit of unpacking to do, but we’ve arrived in Packanack Lake, New Jersey, and were settled enough in the new house yesterday for me to start full-time work again.

I have two months of working remotely for my present Silicon Valley employer ahead before I strike off on my own to pursue “The Venture”, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to tie up loose ends and help gradually transition ownership of my areas of responsibility to other engineers.

Meanwhile, I’ve mostly set up my new home office, and am really looking forward to all that lies ahead.

Here’s the lake, by the way — just a few blocks away and what I expect will be a good “take a walk to clear my head” destination when needed:

More to come as time allows.

Getting There

2011-07-05T21:44:00.001-07:00

In light of the big changes underway, my wife and I have been pretty fully occupied lately dealing with all of the logistics necessary to make it all reality — getting our house fixed up, inspected, “staged”, and on the market, getting rid of Stuff We Don’t Need that isn’t worth moving, etc. Our “To Do” list has seemed endless, and yet I know it’s ultimately finite, and we’ve managed to keep checking things off, day by day, so I feel certain we’re getting closer, right?

To keep myself amply motivated through it all, I turn my mind to the tremendous possibilities this necessary effort is opening up. Day One sitting at my desk in my newly appointed home office, ready to create wonderful things, seems a long way off now, but I’m so charged with excitement about it that it’s getting me through the day-to-day tasks necessary to reach my goal — and that kind of focus is exactly what I need.

I’ve added a new tag, “The Venture”, for posts related to this enterprise of mine. I hope to keep them frequent, concise, and interesting, while also resuming posting on my usual range of topics when time allows again (most likely about a month from now). Stay tuned!

Declaring My Independence

2011-07-03T23:57:00.001-07:00

I’m about to make some big changes in my life, and it’s hard to imagine a better occasion to announce them.

After nine challenging, rewarding, and at times arduous years working at a Silicon Valley company that was once a garage startup itself, I’m amicably parting ways with my employer to pursue my own projects as an independent software developer.

I’ve had the entrepreneurial bug for a while now, and a new job for my wife that requires us to move cross-country has had the welcome effect of forcing/facilitating Decision Time. We’ve put our house on the market, and later this month will be moving to lovely Packanack Lake, New Jersey. I’ll have a couple months of working remotely for my previous employer ahead, to tie up loose ends and leave my areas of responsibility in the best shape I can, but come October 1st I’ll be striking off in pursuit of my own American Dream — which, to me, means taking a chance on myself and my ideas and aspirations, embracing risk and challenge, and developing my talents to their fullest, with the hope of producing things that other people find useful, and in the process making the work I love my living. I’m grateful to have enjoyed something close to that in my current job, but this is an opportunity to own the entire creative process from end to end, to challenge and take chances on my own design sense, and to pursue areas of application that serve other markets.

I’m tremendously excited, and am positively chomping at the bit to get started. There are plenty of logistics to take care of between here and Day One, but I feel lighter with the knowledge that I’ve committed to this new course, and that I’m giving myself permission to do the very things I yearn to. I also hope this change will enable me to do more writing here, and I mean to include among that writing the story of my startup venture as it unfolds.

As I set my sights on this Big Dream (and, when I think those words, Bill Whittle’s “Trinity” (part 2 here) is on my mind as having so brilliantly put into words what I feel about it), in the forefront of my thoughts is a deep and abiding appreciation for a culture that, in its very bones, cherishes, celebrates, and strives to exhort exactly this kind of big dreaming. What I’m setting out to achieve is exactly what a culture founded on the individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness designed itself for. My gratitude for this opportunity is immense, and I mean to make use of it to achieve great things, while always remembering my debt to those who took tremendous risks before me to make it all possible.

More to come later, but I wanted to share the exciting news. I can’t wait to write more about this new adventure.

Wishing my American friends a very joyous and grateful Independence Day!

At Long Last!

2011-05-02T22:10:00.001-07:00

Hats Off to the "Dudettes"

2011-04-16T15:41:00.001-07:00

I’d probably have missed this if not for a post on Ricochet:

Hats off to the flying “Dudettes”, and Godspeed to all our troops and airmen, male and female alike, in harm’s way. I’ll just bet our guys on the ground calling in for air support are just a little extra happy to hear their voices. I love how they appreciate the positive effect that has on morale, while at the same time just doing their job the same as other airmen. My kind of feminism. Rock on.

The Free Frontier: How Private Enterprise Is Winning the Space Race

2011-02-15T14:47:00.001-08:00

Bill Whittle, doing what he does best. Does this inspire you like it does me?

The Free Frontier

Followed up by a great discussion on Trifecta:

Capitalism in Space: Private Enterprise Is Winning the Space Race

The People Are Revolting

2011-01-29T14:20:00.001-08:00

Beautifully put:

If the scholarship you most value and reward is that which is intended to shock the bourgeoisie, don’t be shocked when the bourgeoisie decides that they don’t feel like paying for it.

From a very worthwhile post at Instapundit.

(And for those it may amuse: my title reference.)

Will Hollywood change its tune?

2010-11-24T15:20:00.001-08:00

Will Hollywood change the political overtones of its creative products, in response to the 2010 Midterm Election results? Another very interesting and relevant Poliwood conversation with Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on PJTV (9 min. video):

My prediction: Not a chance; the bulk of Hollywood’s creative and producer class seems too deeply entrenched and calcified to temper its sneering condescension toward Middle America (a.k.a. “Flyover Country”). Which should make the future very interesting, as alternative production companies like Declaration Entertainment potentially seize the opportunity to serve pent-up popular demand for America-positive content that formerly mainstream Hollywood seems content to leave unrequited.

Then again… Every time I feel I’m about to completely give up on Hollywood’s relationship with America, I seem to be greeted with one last glimmer of hope. Re-watching the spectacularly well done Iron Man followed by Iron Man 2 recently, I was delighted all over again by Robert Downey Jr.’s pitch-perfect portrayal of an unapologetic American inventor-entrepreneur-capitalist-hero-patriot. You see something beautiful, inspiring, and celebratory like that and can’t help but wonder, “Why not more like this?” But there it is nonetheless, even if it stands comparatively alone among recent movies, reminding us that there are still at least a few people in Hollywood who really get it about who we are and why many of us are so rightly proud of it.

Perhaps, as Simon and Chetwynd seem to conclude, the book isn’t closed on Hollywood just yet. It will be interesting indeed to see what comes out of Hollywood over the next few years, as ideas entering the production pipeline now start to reach audiences.

To Be Continued … ?

UPDATE 2010-11-25 (Happy Thanksgiving!): An interesting related article on the Washington Times website: “Hollywood Ending not in script for ‘Elites’”

Poliwood: Cultural Suicide Watch: Will Hollywood Embrace Islam?

2010-10-23T21:48:00.001-07:00

I always enjoy Lionel Chetwynd & Roger Simon’s exchanges regarding moviemaking and Hollywood’s political culture. This episode is especially important:

Nose Back to Grindstone on the Flying Thing

2010-10-18T09:54:00.001-07:00

There is so much more that I want to do and write about, and even as parenthood places tighter constraints on my time and energy than I have ever before experienced, I’m feeling renewed optimism and determination to do whatever I have to do to make the things I want most come to pass.

In the wake of recent inspiration that’s included reading about last month’s Reno Air Races, discovering some great aviation podcasts, and hearing about Scaled Composites’ latest achievement, I’ve put my nose back to the grindstone and started reading the FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook (via the Kindle app on my iPad). I started reading Eichenberger’s “Your Pilot’s License” a while ago, but found it frustratingly light on technical details. I know there’s a lot of highly technical stuff I’m going to need to learn and master, about piloting, radio protocol, aerodynamics, navigation, maintenance, etc. I engineer complex software for a living, and studied physics up through some early graduate-level quantum mechanics as an undergrad. I’m not afraid of hard-core math and science — in fact, I hunger for the stuff — by all means, please throw it at me! The FAA handbook might not be quite that, but it certainly seems like a step in the desired direction so far.

If anyone reading this is a pilot and there are other great introductory books you’d recommend, I’d love to hear about them! (Thank you!)

Flight Aboard a KC-135R Stratotanker

2010-10-18T09:51:00.001-07:00

A rare and unique treat, thanks to Steve Tupper and the “Airspeed” podcast that I mentioned recently: Experience a training ride aboard a USAF KC-135R Stratotanker: 16min video

Awesomeness, all around.

SpaceShipTwo Hits Solo Glide Flight Milestone

2010-10-11T10:13:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to visionary pioneers Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and team, on SpaceShipTwo’s latest milestone — a smooth and successful 11-minute solo glide flight yesterday, after being dropped from mothership Eve at 45,000 ft. Story here, and by all means watch the video highlights here.

Their achievement marks a significant step on the road to developing Rutan’s history-making SpaceShipOne prototype into a viable commercial space tourism platform.

I think Johan Norberg is right: Entrepreneurs are the heroes of the world. Space is opening up for broader access, and it’s the efforts of can-do problem solvers like Rutan and Branson who will drive innovation and lead the way. My admiration for them, and gratitude that the human race can produce such people, is tremendous.

To any who missed the making of history the first time around, when in 2004 Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize for manned commercial space flight, I heartily recommend the Discovery Channel’s superbly done “Black Sky: ‘The Race for Space’ and ‘Winning the X Prize’” documentary. If it doesn’t get you all fired up about the future of space travel, nothing will. As Rutan said of a milestone on the road to that earlier achievement:

This is the first time that a small company, without being supported by the government, has developed and flown a supersonic airplane. Now you would think that the first private supersonic airplane would just barely go supersonic in level flight. This morning we went supersonic going almost straight up. [laughs] That was cool!

…

Clearly there is an enormous pent-up hunger to fly in space, and not just dream about it. We do want our children to go to the planets. We are willing to seek breakthroughs by taking risks. And if the business-as-usual space developers continue their decades-long pace, they will be gazing from the slow lane as we speed into the new space age.

Thanks to dreamers and doers like Rutan and Branson, the pace of development is accelerating, we are on our way to a promising and exciting future in space.

UPDATE 2010-10-13: Fixed the “Black Sky” documentary link and enclosing paragraph. (It’s easy to overlook a missing closing quote in a Markdown link title, but the result should have been more apparent to me in proofreading — text gobbled up until the next quote!)

Great Aviation Podcasts Newly Discovered

2010-10-08T10:25:00.001-07:00

Having long hungered to learn to fly, I’m surprised I waited until now to go hunting for aviation-enthusiast podcasts. I don’t think the thought even occurred to me that something in that genre might exist — which, in hindsight, was completely silly.

I don’t remember what prompted me to look yesterday, but the iTunes search I did immediately turned up three absolute gems that I have to recommend to anyone interested in this stuff:

First, check out this 14-minute Airspeed video episode, shot from 3 angles, of pilot Steve Tupper practicing recovery from stalls and spins with instructor Barry Sutton providing guidance from the back seat. It’s educational, inspiring, and made of awesome. As I tweeted this morning: Why waste time watching TV when I can sit in the cockpit with a pilot practicing stalls & spins?

Next, I had the great pleasure of listening to Steve’s 2007 “Why I Fly” episode, which is beautiful, inspired, true to everything I’ve felt compels me to seek to become a pilot, and something I’m sure Bill Whittle would delight in too. (For me it’s reminiscent of — and, impressively, on par with — Bill’s great & inspired writing on the subject. — See, for example, Bill’s unmissable 2003 essay “Courage”.)

Finally, I wrapped up last night’s bout of insomnia with an Uncontrolled Airspace interview, in which pilot and instructor Amy Laboda recounted the 2001 experience of having to ditch her Cessna 210, following total engine failure in a turn at 1500 ft., in the water off Key West. Again, amazing and deeply educational, and an invaluable opportunity to learn from another pilot’s experience and wisdom.

After being rewarded with such great content on my first foray into aviation podcasts, I’m sure to continue listening and looking for more podcasts to try. And I’m feeling newly inspired to pick up the books and do all the learning I can in the moments I can make for it. I’ve more or less put the dream on hold since becoming a parent a year and a half ago, but I’m determined I’m going to get there someday. I will not give up!

Americans: A Thought for the Day

2010-10-02T09:42:00.001-07:00

Don’t want this to just disappear into my tweet stream:

Americans head West in search of Wide Open Spaces, Risk, Opportunity, and Freedom; not Left in search of Safety and Dependency.

That one manages to sum up a lot of what matters for me.

9/11: Two Songs

2010-09-10T08:13:00.001-07:00

I have loved and enjoyed music all my life, but have never before or since experienced anything like the two weeks or so after 9/11, when, for the first time, I found it impossible to listen to any music at all. Music I had treasured all my life, with which I had felt a deep emotional connection, and in which I had sought refuge through many crises, fell flat on my ears, and seemed a distant artifact of another life that I could never return to.

I don’t remember any particular moment when I was first able to break out of that isolated silence. I think it was a gradual and tentative process. Thankfully, the human mind has a remarkable ability to adapt and recover, to put tragedy and horror behind and get on with the necessities of day-to-day life in the present. Eventually my ability to enjoy music somehow found a way to coexist with the gloom in the back of my mind, with daily thoughts of that terrible day and its consequences, of the fight we’re now in and how ill-equipped we seem to be as a culture to prevail.

It took years for our creative culture to begin to make sense of 9/11 and its world-changing aftermath, and for songwriters to grapple successfully with this extraordinarily difficult subject. The two superb songs that are especially on my mind this year are relatively recent.

Tuesday

John Ondrasik, who records and tours under the the band name “Five for Fighting”, wrote a remarkably stirring song about 9/11 and its psychological aftermath called “Tuesday”. Released on the 2009 album “Slice” (Amazon, iTunes), and given a fitting intro by John on his “Live in Boston” album (iTunes, “Tuesday” reflects on the ordinary day that became anything but, on the helpless sense of loss, of uncertainty whether further attacks would come, and our inexorable tendency to gradually forget, as even the most awful of memories slowly recede into our increasingly foggy recollections of the past.

John spoke briefly about “Tuesday” in this Big Hollywood interview, and was kind enough to confirm the lyrics for this post. I can’t do this deeply moving song justice in prose. — Go and have a listen…

Tuesday

One year like any old other year
in a week like any week
Monday lying down,
half asleep
People doing what people do,
loving, working and getting through
No portraits on the walls
of Seventh Avenue

Then Tuesday came and went
like a helicopter overhead
The letter that she left,
cold addressed in red
Tuesday came and went
one, one September when
Will she come again?

The thing about memories
they’re sure and bound to fade
Except for the stolen souls
left upon her blade
Is Monday coming back?
Well, that’s what Mondays do
They turn and turn around
afraid to see it through

Tuesday came and went
like a helicopter overhead
The letter that she left
cold addressed in red
Tuesday came and went
one, one September when
Will she come again?

Tuesday came and went
one, one September when
Cold and dressed in red, how could I forget? Tuesday came and went
like a helicopter overhead
Will she come again?

Remember (9-12)

I found Jeremy Hoop’s “Remember (9-12)” just a couple of weeks ago, and it has replayed in my head ever since. More directly than any other song I’ve heard about 9/11, it addresses the West’s willful blindness and perilously persistent state of denial regarding what we’re up against.

“Peace, prosperity, pride. Our wizards said there’d be no ebb to this tide,” the song begins, conjuring the Fukuyama-esque belief that seemed to prevail through the 1990s — the belief that we had reached an “end of history”, that the future from there on held not the familiar historic cycles of conflict and the periodic return of tragedy, but an unprecedented deviation from all human history to date, in which liberty’s light would expand inexorably to illuminate the world and raise up all of humanity. To be sure, we had willfully shut our eyes to the threat of Jihadist warfare that had clearly announced its intentions (c.f. Osama Bin Laden’s 1988 declaration of holy war against the United States, and the subsequent bombings of the USS Cole, US embassies, and, in 1993, the World Trade Center). Together with their nearly 3,000 victims, the 9/11 Jihadist attacks on the United States irrevocably killed this naïve delusion that we had somehow escaped history’s grasp.

“And the sages did not see the spaces to hide, or the cracks in the footings, termites inside…” A dual reference, perhaps — to the 19 al Qaeda “termites” who had concealed themselves in plain sight among us, training for their horrible task in our flight schools, and living in our neighborhoods — and also to the damage of our own doing that had crept into our culture’s foundations, leaving us vulnerable to such an attack and only weakly able to respond to it. The lyric instantly brought to mind the opening of Bill Whittle’s superb 2005 essay “Sanctuary”, which I’ve quoted before:

What’s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundation’s rotten with decades of termite damage?

NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundation’s rotten with decades of termite damage.

(Sadly “Sanctuary” is no longer online, but it can be found in print as part of Bill’s “Silent America” essay collection. I’ll keep an eye out for its return, and update the link in my Bill Whittle essay index when it surfaces.)

Jeremy goes on with uncommon songwriting grace, recalling our brief unity (or perception thereof?) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, our determination to remember that day and understand its implications, and our subsequent withdrawal into an even more willful blindness, an insistence on doing the impossible, on retreating to the “9/10” mindset that had allowed the attacks to happen. “Just seven short years, oops! we’ve blown it again. The bubbles this time around are bigger times ten” We stand on the precipice overlooking an abyss, it seems — one that threatens to swallow us as surely as other civilizations before that have abandoned their own defense. If 9/11 wasn’t enough to wake us up, to snap us out of our willful denial, what will it take? Is there any hope that we, as a civilization, will avoid passively free-falling to our demise? Some of us still struggle to sound the alarm loudly and clearly enough so that our countrymen will hear and take heed, but it often seems a futile endeavor … as if no one is listening.

Can we put them back, pull the slack, right the track
But it’s business as usual, we’re playing the fool
Though no bodies falling to the ground, no smell of jet fuel
The carnage lying round the bend’s as real and as cruel

Much like the equally absurd notion of airliners full of passengers and fuel being turned into weapons and flown into buildings full of people, the idea of a devastating biological attack, or of a radioactive crater where a major city once stood, will continue to be nothing but a figment of far-fetched, scare-mongering fiction. Until it isn’t.

Many realms gone before have marched to their December
While the crowds cried “all is well!”
That fate will be ours if we don’t remember
Those days after, days after
The towers fell
… Remember, Remember, Remember…

Jeremy Hoop can be found on Twitter as @jeremyhoop.

Remember (9-12)

Peace, prosperity, pride
Our wizards said there’d be no ebb to this tide
And the sages did not see the spaces to hide
Or the cracks in the footings, the termites inside

Then darkness broke through that clear morn in September
When our land saw the blackest hell
I swore what I’d be, and I would remember
Those days after…

When what to my wondering worry worn eyes
Mere strangers at once turn near kindred with binding ties
City to city to wide open country skies
No left or right, black or white, hands on hearts, all please arise!

The light that shone through those dark days like an ember
Lit the fires of the citadel
And we swore what we’d be, we would remember
Those days after the towers fell

Short memories, of braveries, of slaveries,
Prone to retreat
And walk through the door, like Rome before, forevermore
Known in defeat
The remedy, no mystery: know history
Or be doomed to repeat it.

Just seven short years, oops! we’ve blown it again
The bubbles this time around are bigger times ten
The Animal spirits broke loose from the pen
Can we put them back, pull the slack, right the track
But it’s business as usual, we’re playing the fool
Though no bodies falling to the ground, no smell of jet fuel
The carnage lying round the bend’s as real and as cruel

Many realms gone before have marched to their December
While the crowds cried “all is well!”
That fate will be ours if we don’t remember
Those days after, days after
The towers fell

Remember the days after
Remember the day after
Remember the day after
Remember, Remember, Remember

Independence Day 2010

2010-07-04T00:12:00.001-07:00

In last year’s Independence Day post, I offered a playlist of my favorite Liberty-themed songs. This year, it’s going to be a brief, issue-focused post for me, as what I want most is to direct readers’ attention to a very important but uncertain new initiative:

Bill Whittle, PJTV commentator who first gained admiration and notoriety for his brilliant and eminently worthwhile “Silent America” Essays, has chosen July 4th, 2010 to launch “Declaration Entertainment”. By all means, watch this 4½-minute welcome video that explains what it’s all about:

See Bill’s 3-minute “Pioneers” video for more.

Pipe dream? Perhaps. Can it work? I honestly don’t know. But Bill has a plan, and he’s doing something, and while I hold out great hope that his idea will succeed tremendously, I greatly admire his initiative independent of the result. Because to me, this really matters.

Many of us have watched with increasing despair over the years, as the Hollywood we thought we knew growing up — one whose craft once promoted and unabashedly celebrated classically American values such as optimism, confidence, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and heroism (including the heroism of American soldiers who risked everything fighting for the freedom of others) — has gradually transformed into the preeminent domestic broadcaster of anti-Americanism, social criticism, ambivalence, nihilism, and ennui. From the content it now produces to the invective its glitterati deliver from the pulpits of self-congratulatory awards ceremonies, Hollywood has mainstreamed the culture of shame, cynicism, social criticism, and self-loathing that was once largely the preoccupation of a small, bitter niche of radical-left academia.

Those of us who’ve felt this despair have realized that today’s Hollywood does not speak for us, our values, or our outlook. We’ve felt helpless to do anything but stop buying a product that routinely insults and vilifies us. Yet, for reasons that Declaration Entertainment’s introductory video explains, this strategy of passive withdrawal exerts no significant economic influence on the content that a now internationally-funded Hollywood produces, for what has become first and foremost a worldwide audience. I believe we’ll learn that it’s not enough to economically reject repellent content and its Hollywood creators. We ultimately need to find other ways of getting our own movies made, of producing and promoting alternative content that positively reflects our values and confidence in our culture.

Remember when School House Rock distilled the essence of the American Idea into educational and genuinely celebratory Saturday morning shorts such as “No More Kings”, “The Shot Heard Round the World”, “Elbow Room”, “The Preamble”, “Sufferin’ ‘til Suffrage”, and “Fireworks”? Watch them again (or most anything else of that era), with the eyes of 2010, and think long and hard about the tremendous change that’s occurred in our popular culture. Can you imagine educational shorts like these being produced and broadcast today? Why not? Would you ever, back in those days, have predicted such a transformation of attitudes?

It’s not supposed to be like this.

We have a choice.

If we care enough, we can usher in a new Renaissance of the American Idea.

Bill’s ambitious plan for “Declaration Entertainment” could, I sincerely hope, be the start of that.

Remember when we believed in us:

ps - Now that I’ve thoroughly depressed you: Go enjoy some uplifting music!

Memorial Day 2010

2010-05-30T21:07:00.001-07:00

Last Year, I posted a collection of quotes and musical selections. I still treasure these as among the most fitting and moving I have encountered, so I’ve copied them again below.

My new discovery for this year: The Arlington Ladies. Never heard of them? I hadn’t either. You can, and by all means should, read all about them here. (Thanks to Twitter friends Allahpundit and Cubanita for pointing out this story.) May the moving example of the Arlington Ladies’ respect and devotion stir each of us to do what we can.

I live each day in the humbling knowledge that I am made and kept free by the exertions of better men and women than myself, a debt I will never be able to fully repay. Let us give due regard this Memorial Day to those who gave the last full measure of devotion, that we might live the lives of the free.

Listening:

from Oscar Peterson, Night Train: “Hymn to Freedom”

from Dave Brubeck, Private Brubeck Remembers: “Don’t Worry ‘bout Me”, “We Crossed the Rhine”, “For All We Know”

from Five for Fighting, Two Lights: “Two Lights”

Quotes:

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” — General George S. Patton, Jr.

“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” — Sir Winston Churchill / George Orwell †

“We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.” — Bill Whittle, “History”

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” — George Washington

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” — John Stuart Mill

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” — John F. Kennedy

“We can’t share the earth with pure evil anymore than we can share the earth with smallpox.” — David Gelernter

“Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.” — Vaclav Havel

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

“The front line now, at this critical time, is in the hearts and minds of our own people. That’s where the real battle is now. That is our weakest point, our breach, our point of failure. We have not made the case to enough people and time is running out.

So maybe now, at this absurd point in this new kind of war, we’re the crack troops, we old and useless pajama patriots reduced to printing up pamphlets to sell war bonds to the weary, to make the case for holding on to an unglamorous, uninspiring, relentless grind because that — not Normandy and Midway — is the face of war in this gilded age of luxury and safety and plenty.” — Bill Whittle, “Deterrence”

“We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.” — Sir Winston Churchill

† The “rough men stand ready” quote is frequently attributed to both Winston Churchill and George Orwell in various forms. It is a beautifully focused statement, whatever its true origin.

Index of Bill Whittle's "Silent America" Essays

2010-03-24T00:00:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle’s incisive “Afterburner” PJTV editorials have brought his sharp thinking to a whole new audience, but it was Bill’s brilliant and uplifting writing on the history, character, and spirit of America that I and many others first encountered. Bill’s superb essays — which he published first online at ejectejecteject.com, and later in print under the title “Silent America” — lifted me up when I needed it most, and are far and away some of the very best writing about this precious American civilization of ours that I have had the good fortune of encountering.

Since I often find myself recommending Bill’s “Silent America” essays, and since attempts to do so are bedeviled by the fact that many did not survive Bill’s move from ejectejecteject.com to pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject intact, I’ve compiled a list of them, with links to the ones that made it over. Thankfully, Bill has begun republishing them one by one at his new Pajamas Media address, and I’ve linked to the newly published copies where available. The “Silent America” essays are, in order:

Honor - December 22, 2002
Freedom - December 22, 2002
Empire - December 27, 2002
War - January 26, 2003
Courage - February 15, 2003
Confidence - February 23, 2003
History (broken) - March 29, 2003
Victory (broken) - April 27, 2003
Magic (broken) - June 7, 2003
Trinity, Part 1 and Part 2 - July 4, 2003
Responsibility (broken) - August 20, 2003
Strength, Part 1 (broken) and Part 2 (broken) - May 22, 2004
Deterrence, Part 1(broken) and Part 2 (broken) - October 6, 2004
Sanctuary (part of second edition only), Part 1 (broken) and Part 2 (broken) - May 18, 2005
Tribes (part of second edition only) - September 5, 2005
Power (broken) - October 1, 2003

Unfortunately “(broken)” means there’s almost nothing there to read. Most of these essays are truncated after the first few sentences or words. I’ll come back and update these links as each essay is, hopefully, republished. Meanwhile, the previous, “(broken)” links are just for reference.

There is, however, hope! You can buy the complete set of essays in book form on Amazon, which I can almost guarantee you’ll want to do after sampling Bill’s unparalleled wares.

Bill, by the way, can be found on Twitter as @BillWhittle.

Also, here’s a link to all the blog posts where I’ve quoted or mentioned Bill’s writing.

Enjoy!

UPDATE 2010-09-06: I’m delighted to report that one of Bill’s very finest essays, “Trinity”, is now back online. Don’t miss it. Thanks to reader David B. for sending the updated links!

UPDATE 2010-09-09: Freedom is back up too! (Thanks again to David B.!)

UPDATE 2011-04-30: Sadly, pajampajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject started returning blank pages recently. I have an email inquiry out to the site admins about whether the Eject! Eject! Eject! archives can be brought back. Meanwhile, all of the following links are currently non-functional. I’ll try to keep on top of the situation and update this post when it hopefully improves. Thanks for visiting!

UPDATE 2011-08-13: I just noticed pajampajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject is back online, and the above Silent America essay links appear to be working again!

Published a New "Quotes" Page

2010-02-07T11:08:00.001-08:00

I’ve made a habit, for some years now, of collecting quotes that strike me as profoundly insightful or interesting, probably for all the same reasons that others do — for the keenly focused insight and concise expression of ideas they offer, as well as the inspiration and distilled wisdom they can call to mind on a moment’s notice.

Having recently sifted through the assortment of text files where I’ve been gradually stashing these hand-selected quotes away, I’ve assembled the best of them into a new “Quotes” page that I invite you all to visit.

The topics include Liberty & Economics, Cultural Confidence, War, and keeping Perspective. I hope my readers will draw as much enjoyment from them as I have.

UPDATE 2010-02-08: I’ve added several more selected gems, dug out of a handwritten journal I’ve kept off and on since September 2002. Enjoy!

Tyrants Heart Our Useful Idiots

2010-02-04T08:22:00.001-08:00

Foreign enemy sworn to our total destruction, or unhinged domestic-Left social critic inveighing that we deserve the same? Who can tell any difference in the rhetoric these days?

At Digital Journal, via Instapundit:

In Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent televised speech on Iran State TV, the Iranian President upped the ante on his promised February 11 “telling blow against global arrogance” with his prediction of the “end of American civilization.”

“This means the end of a civilization, the end of a thought, and the end of a system.” That is how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad qualified his statement regarding the “end of American civilization” that he referred to in his most recent televised speech in homage to the ‘Ten Day Dawn’ anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Events will culminate on February 11th with “a telling blow against global arrogance,” according to the Iranian President’s previous speech marking the opening of ceremonies for the anniversary. During this most recent speech, Ahmadinejad claimed that the West, the United States in particular, had been the biggest historical impediment to the worldwide Islamic Revolution:

“The arrogant and hegemonic powers, which mankind experienced in the past 300 years – and past 60 years in particular – have been the biggest historical impediment in the face of fulfillment of this goal (worldwide Islamic revolution),” he said, according to the BBC.

Ahmadinejad went on to declare that the “materialistic and hegemonic (American) system” was dead, and that slogans about freedom, human rights and democracy had misled the world, further declaring that America “has no thoughts or means other than the use of arms to prove themselves.” As with his cryptic allusion to the ‘telling blow’ on February 11, the Iranian president provided no specifics on what would bring about America’s end and focused more on polemics, perhaps to rally his domestic Islamist audience. Calls of “Death to America” and the burning of US flags have been political staples in Iran for thirty years.

If that whole “wiping Israel off the map” and installing a global caliphate thing doesn’t work out, I’m sure Ahmadinejad could easily land an honored position lecturing at an American university. No doubt he’d delight faculty lounge and commencement audiences alike with his incisive takedowns of Western decadence, “arrogance”, and “imperialism”.

A man of his stature and worldly experience (facing down those mythical Western “imperialists”) would probably be spared the tedium of having to teach the pedestrian “Why America Is Uniquely Evil 101” intro course, proceeding directly to coaching graduate students in their independent investigations into Western sins. Granted, he’s not a Marxist (totalitarians of competing stripes are never too keen on shared world domination, but can make cozy if strange bedfellows in the short term) — but I think A-jad will fit in just fine.

Does it ever dawn on our culture’s self-appointed domestic critics, when they witness the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez parroting their indictments of America and the West and playing to their credulous sympathies with great virtuosity, that they’ve been handing ideological ammo to implacable enemies who want them dead or subservient too? Or that our enemies hear, and will gleefully repeat to their rhetorical advantage, every self-recrimination we speak in our public squares? No, they probably take it as independent validation and pat themselves on the back. “Great minds think alike.”

Useful idiots all the way.

The phrase “aid and comfort” comes to mind…

Chavez holding Chomsky aloft while delivering his own anti-U.S. invective at the U.N. in September 2006. (He wouldn’t hesitate a moment, of course, to imprison an anti-Chavez Venezuelan “Chomsky”.)

One Year Gone: Reflections on the Bush Years

2010-01-22T22:37:00.001-08:00

Following are links to several worthwhile articles on the first anniversary of George W. Bush’s departure from office — most of which appeared as part of a “One Year Gone” collection at Big Hollywood. I’m in agreement regarding the unhinged viciousness with which President Bush was vilified, as well as his accomplishments and faults. Do read at least the first few — they’re well worth it.

“Hope and Change – Miss Bush Yet?” by Pam Meister (especially excellent!)

“America Betrayed President Bush” by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro

“President George W. Bush Answered the Calling of Our Time” by Adam Baldwin

“Welcome to the Obama Era of Awesomeness” by Kurt Schlichter (hilarious!)

“George W. Bush…Idiot.” by Leigh Scott

“The Death of Class” by Gary Graham

“The George W. Bush Era In Movies” by Ben Shapiro

More to Come Here

2010-01-20T22:49:00.001-08:00

I’m no big fan of meta-posts, so I promise not to make a habit of this. Just feeling the need to affirm that this project is far from over, and despite my apparent shift over to Twitter I intend to post more in-depth writing here as soon as I can find a way to do so.

Blogging has been a hard project to make time for (given my apparently inadequate time-management skills, at least), and becoming a Dad nearly a year ago has ratcheted the difficulty level up another major notch. By the time my wife and I get home from our jobs at the end of a half-hour commute, do the evening dinner, bath time & bedtime routine with our “little guy”, get the kitchen back under control, deal with mail and bills, etc., it’s usually around 9pm and we’re good for little more than collapsing in a heap for an hour or so before bed. Repeat 5x and add 2 days of full-time parenting and it’s a typical week. My best bet seems to be squeezing a bit of writing in before bedtime when possible (like I’m doing now), or during occasional bouts of insomnia, but that approach hardly seems likely to produce my best work. I’m in awe of others, parents among them, who manage to make time to blog with any frequency, let alone on topics that require substantial research and thought. I really have no idea how they do it (but I’m eager to learn!).

In short: It may take a while longer for me to work the logistics out. But the passage of time has only strengthened my conviction that writing here is an important project that I need to make time for somehow. I will trust, as I have many times before in my life, that where there’s a will there’s a way, necessity is the mother of invention, and all that good stuff, and hope that through persistence I can eventually find a way to translate constantly thinking about things into action on writing about them.

Hope there’ll be more to see here soon. ‘Til then…

Haiti: Where to Give

2010-01-16T11:48:00.001-08:00

The situation for survivors of Haiti’s horrific earthquake is desperate, and getting worse. Please give what you can.

Here’s a list of organizations that are providing aid. I gave to the American Red Cross. You can too.

More Renovations Afoot

2009-10-29T05:14:00.001-07:00

No need to watch your step, folks … the surface changes are minor and shouldn’t cause any big trouble … but I’ve done a bit of remodeling behind the scenes here to better serve you, our valued patrons.

Specifically, I’ve finally finished porting my heavily customized blog template to Blogger’s newer “Layouts” format. The process was about as fun as it sounds, but part of the payoff is that I can now classify my posts using “labels” (a.k.a. “tags”) for your surfing and post-discovery convenience.

This of course means I have a new job to do (isn’t it neat how that works?) — choosing appropriate tag set, and going back and tagging all of my old posts. I’m only partway through that, with most of 2007 through 2009 left to go, so the categories aren’t yet complete (though “9/11” is mostly there already), but note that you can now discover posts on related topics using the “Labels” links that appear at the end of each post and under the “About Me” box in the right sidebar. (You may now welcome me to the early 21st century. Thank you.)

I’ll of course be tagging new posts as I go from now on, and I hope to finish tagging the rest of the old ones soon.

That’s it. Please let me know if you run into any problems during the bringup, including posts that seem misclassified. — Thanks!

The Management

Anita Dunn, Maoist in the White House

2009-10-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

What possible place could there be for an ardent admirer of Mao Zedong in the United States government? White House Communications Director, apparently. Madness.

At Say Anything, via Instapundit:

How can any high-level American political official seriously cite Mao as a favorite political philosopher and not be driven from office immediate with jeers and derision?

Mao was a mass murder. A tyrant and a dictator whose teachings amount to a cruel ideology that murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more.

Obama needs to explain to us why someone like Dunn is serving in his administration.

Nick Gillespie at Reason (also via Instapundit):

I admit it. I want my reality back. I don’t know when it went missing. But I want it back.

Victor Davis Hanson (thanks again, Glenn):

I am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a “political philosopher” is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto.

Mao killed anywhere from 50 million to 70 million innocents in the initial cleansing of Nationalists, the scouring of the countryside, the failed Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Tibet, and the internal Chinese gulag. Dunn’s praise of a genocidal monster was no inadvertent slip: She was reading from a written text and went into great detail to give the full context of the remark. Moreover, her comments were not some student outburst from 30 years ago; they were delivered on June 5, 2009. Her praise of Mao’s insight and courage in defeating the Nationalists was offered long after the full extent of Mao’s mass-murdering had been well documented. Mao killed more people than any other single mass killer in the history of civilization.

So where do all these people, so intimate with our president (Dunn is the wife of his personal lawyer), come from? A right-wing attack machine could not make up such statements as those tossed off by a Dunn or a Van Jones. There seems to be neither a moral compass nor even a casual knowledge of history in this administration. And now we have the avatars of the “new politics” claiming it’s okay to praise Mao’s political and philosophical insight and his supposed determination (“You fight your war, and I’ll fight mine”) because Lee Atwater supposedly once evoked Mao too.

Ms. Dunn should simply duck out of her D.C. suburb and ask any Tibetan or Chinese immigrant in his 70s and 80s what life was really like in Mao’s China.

Ironic Surrealism, via @velvethammer, has video of Anita Dunn describing the Obama campaign’s press strategy:

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.

“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.

“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.

Continued Dunn: “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was. … Making the press cover what we were saying.”

UPDATE:

At The Atlantic: Megan McArdle: “Radical Chic”:

I thought that this must be some kind of grotesque conservative exaggeration, but no, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn really did tell a graduating high school class to emulate Mao Tse-Tung’s bold and imaginative attitude during his takeover of China. Most of us look at the tens of millions who died and maybe think twice about trying to imitate the late Chairman, but hey, think different!

Glenn Reynolds adds::

The White House has long since outrun conservatives’ powers of exaggeration.

I’ll say.

9/11 Quotes

2009-09-11T17:36:00.001-07:00

Following are quotes from some of the best writing I have seen over the past eight years, on the subject of the 9/11 attacks and their legacy. (I’ve also posted my own 9/11 recollections this year — my first time telling this story.)

Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of American Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, cautioned us last year not to “misremember”

There is a disturbing phenomenon creeping into the public debate about all things 9/11. Increasingly, Sept. 11 is compared to hurricanes, bridge collapses and other mechanical disasters or criminal acts that result in loss of life, with “body count” being the primary factor that keeps it in the top spot of “worst in the nation’s history.”

Misremembering is as dangerous as forgetting. If we must know one thing, it is that the Sept. 11 attacks were neither a natural disaster, nor the unfortunate result of human error. 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophic equivalent of a 3,000-car pileup.

The attacks were not a random act of violence or insanity. They were a deliberate and brutal act of war committed by religious fanatics engaged in Islamic jihad against the United States, all non-Muslim people and any Muslim who wishes to live in a secular society. Worse, the people who perpetrated the attacks have explicitly told us that they are not done.

Commenting on this year’s designation of September 11th as a “National Day of Service and Remembrance”, Debra responded (hat tip: neo-neocon):

When I first heard about it, I was concerned. I fear, I greatly fear, at some point we’ll transition to turning it into Earth Day where we go and plant trees and the remembrance part will become smaller and smaller and smaller.

Robert Spencer wrote at at Jihad Watch in 2008:

[T]here has still never been a full and comprehensive discussion of the jihad threat in the American public square.

So seven years after the Towers went down and the Pentagon was wounded, the jihadists have every reason to smell victory — not in Iraq, where they are indeed on the run, but in their efforts to cow and intimidate the West into giving up all resistance to Islamization. It’s happening, but no one notices or cares, because it is happening in small steps.

Neo-neocon re-posted an apropos piece from 2006 last year — one that touches, among other matters, on the foresight we wish we’d had in anticipating and guarding against the attacks:

But the clearest foreshadowing of the event that would henceforth be known only by those numbers, “9/11” — as though words were somehow inadequate to describe it — was its most direct predecessor, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That earlier attack distinguished itself in audaciousness by being the only large-scale Islamist totalitarian terrorist attack within the boundaries of the United States prior to 9/11.

And it was every bit as serious in intent. The only reason it wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been was the seemingly Keystone Cops-like incompetence of its perpetrators. They would learn from their errors, and quickly. It would take us longer to learn what we needed to know.

Meghan Cox Gurdon:

The cruelty and implacability of the Islamic terrorists has made ordinary life seem fragile not in such a way that you appreciate each passing golden moment, but in a way that jolts you awake at night with strangled thoughts of whether everything you know and love will be taken away. But worse is finding that in this situation where, like our grandparents, we do face an obvious, common, and determined enemy, there is such self-loathing amongst our countrymen. When I hear people phoning C-SPAN to explain that 9/11 was an “inside job” by the Bush administration, or that the United States is to blame for “stirring up a hornet’s nest,” when the swarm was already upon us, it seems to me that national unity is impossible. Of all September 11th’s grim legacies, this seems to me the saddest.

Mark Steyn:

In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant.

James Lileks, in 2006:

If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.

This year’s follow-up:

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn’t diminished a joule. This doesn’t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo’d, and the day is bright and real and true again.

Or not. It’s all so far in the past, isn’t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired — seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they’re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn’t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We’re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won’t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven’t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in the pictures — shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.

Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.

~(Update)~

Some additional quotes that have struck me as relevant (many of them repeated from my Memorial Day 2009 post):

“When I see the city … I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.” — Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead”

“Our responsibility is to continue the search for beauty and humanity. That is what survives.” — violinist Isaac Stern, shortly after 9/11

“We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.” — Sir Winston Churchill

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” — John F. Kennedy

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” — General George S. Patton, Jr.

“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” — Sir Winston Churchill / George Orwell †

“We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.” — Bill Whittle, “History”

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

“We can’t share the earth with pure evil anymore than we can share the earth with smallpox.” — David Gelernter

“Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.” — Vaclav Havel

“The front line now, at this critical time, is in the hearts and minds of our own people. That’s where the real battle is now. That is our weakest point, our breach, our point of failure. We have not made the case to enough people and time is running out.

So maybe now, at this absurd point in this new kind of war, we’re the crack troops, we old and useless pajama patriots reduced to printing up pamphlets to sell war bonds to the weary, to make the case for holding on to an unglamorous, uninspiring, relentless grind because that — not Normandy and Midway — is the face of war in this gilded age of luxury and safety and plenty.” — Bill Whittle, “Deterrence”

† The “rough men stand ready” quote is frequently attributed to both Winston Churchill and George Orwell in various forms. It is a beautifully focused statement, whatever its true origin.

Previous post: My Experience of September 11, 2001

My Experience of September 11, 2001

2009-09-11T00:00:00.001-07:00

In September 2001, I was living in Upstate New York (meaning, as the obligatory joke roughly goes, somewhere north of 186th Street). A little over a year earlier, I had heeded the call of wanderlust and left my rewarding but insufficiently purposeful and fulfilling videogame programming job in San Francisco to pursue my own entrepreneurial endeavor — the realization of ideas that had been gnawing at my restless mind for some time. The largely solitary research I then pursued being eminently portable, I was in the perfect position to relocate when my then-girlfriend, now wife decided to return to school for a graduate degree. New York state turned out to be the place, and the dramatically lower cost of living in the small town by the Hudson that we were headed for suited my purposes just fine. Lower expenses vs. living in Bay Area California meant a slower burn rate for the hard-earned, socked-away cash and investments I would be using to self-finance my project, and that was a very good thing — for what I needed most was time to think. We sold our furniture and non-essentials, and hit the road East for a new adventure. That was the summer of 2000.

Our first year of adapting to this transition went well, considering what a change it was transplanting ourselves to a quiet small town and the even smaller, more isolated community of the graduate art program. We had rented the upstairs of an old but satisfactory white clapboard house, for a price that would be unheard of back in California. We learned about heating oil and boilers and changing tires for the winter. We crossed a bridge over the magnificent Hudson River to do our weekly shopping. We visited historic sites that had been beyond the easy reach of our mostly car-less Connecticut college experience. We sledded.

I pursued my research, at the college’s libraries or at home, and strove daily to keep focus in my imperfect and occasionally uncertain, wandering mind. I had been on my own like this before (I will likely write about that at another time), knew that it would take all the self-discipline I could muster, knew also that if I didn’t persevere and give it my best shot I’d be driven mad by the road not taken, by ideas that would not leave me alone.

That year was also an eye-opening continuation of my first encounters with the Contemporary (as distinct from Modern) art world and the cultural attitudes and ideologies that have tended to dominate it, and a foreshadowing of many such encounters that would continue to this day (another subject I hope to write about at greater length another time). I had then only the first and faintest inkling of the bleak perspectives and frequent obsession with cynical cultural criticism that I would often encounter in the work of contemporary artists.

As summer 2001 rolled around, it became clear that our remaining assets weren’t going to last us comfortably another year at our current rate. Our investments weren’t doing as well, and I had underestimated some of our expenditures. I did some job-hunting, seeking to put my software engineering skills to use to generate some income for us. The suitable opportunities in that part of the country were few, and the prospects I did find would have required me to move on my own to Boston or Albany or New York City — incurring among other more practical inconveniences an emotional cost of separation that we did not want to bear.

In anticipation of my need to depart, my girlfriend had made arrangements to share an apartment with two of her female classmates who we had begun to get to know during the program’s first year. When August arrived and it became clear that I would not settle my job hunt before the time came to move, I was graciously invited to be a fourth roommate on a temporary basis. It seemed like a good arrangement, and it was at the time. None of us could have forseen the world-upending historic event that silently approached, or what it would mean for us.

On the morning of September 11th, my girlfriend and I were awakened from an otherwise ordinary night’s sleep by the alarmed shouts of one of our roommates outside our door. My girlfriend’s parents had called from their home in Europe, and our roommate had answered the phone and was relaying the news to us as she received it herself. I don’t know whether she was repeating exactly what was said to her, but I will never forget the sound of her increasingly alarmed words as she exclaimed through the door, phone in hand: “There are bombs all over New York!”

After hearing something so unthinkable we got up with a sudden start of course, and, like so many others that morning, headed to the TV with a great sense of urgency to find out what was happening. As the picture tube warmed up, in faded the scroll-by newsbytes, the solemn news anchor (I don’t remember which), and the terrible, haunting image of the North Tower of the World Trade Center bleeding a long, slowly rising plume of dark smoke. Reports were that a plane had hit the tower. Nobody knew why. Could it have been a terrible, terrible accident? How could such a thing have possibly happened?

We sat stunned and spellbound, anxiously awaiting each fragment of new information — even just new speculation — as the news coverage repeated and ad libbed in that early time before anyone had the remotest idea what had just happened, much less grasped its immense historic significance — that this was the sudden and irrevocable end of one era and the beginning of another. Hauntingly, the then-unexplained southward turn of American Airlines Flight 11, which was soon identified as the plane that had hit the WTC, had brought its flight path through skies fairly close to where we lived. I got a terrible chill thinking of its passengers’ last minutes alive, soaring past us down along the Hudson on that perfectly beautiful, crisp, clear day — surely, I supposed, not knowing the terrible end that awaited them in Lower Manhattan.

Then something still more unthinkable happened that, impossibly enough, shocked us out of the shock we were already in, and into a daze of complete disbelief and confusion — killing instantly any hope that this had been some awful accident. Before our very eyes, United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower.

As the impossible reality of the day’s events sank in, it gradually became clear to me: Our country and its people had been attacked. And in the slow dawning of that terrible realization through the coming hours — hours that brought with them the crashing of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 and its heroic passengers in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and complete uncertainty about what else might still be in store — both a terrible fury and a somber determination welled up in me. Things were going to be different now. They had to be. I was sure that we would snap out of our useless, toxic gloom of cultural self-doubt, drop our idle infighting over comparatively trivial disagreements, identify those who sought to cause us all such terrible harm, and go after them with swift and united resolve — unequivocally removing their capacity to mount further attacks, and never again allowing such a thing to happen.

The terrible events of September 11th changed me, and seemed to mark what I was sure would be a watershed, a tectonic shift for our entire country, and for the world. I assumed 9/11 had had a similar effect on everyone I knew. I was soon to find out just how mistaken I was in that assumption.

It wasn’t long before the self-recrimination began to flow from those around me, first in a trickle, then more and more freely as the days went by. Didn’t you know, we had it coming? Probably deserved it, even. Of course, we’re going to jump the gun and blame The Arabs, while those responsible were probably homegrown fanatics of our own making. (Oklahoma City was still fairly fresh in everyone’s mind then.) People who looked Middle-Eastern were of course going to be targets of random mob violence on a massive scale, and/or rounded up and put in internment camps, because — don’t you know? — that’s just the kind of unsophisticated, “jingoistic”, racist simpleton bumpkins we Americans are.

“I can’t believe what I am hearing in this house,” I finally declared after perhaps two or three days of this. How could anyone begin to rationalize and justify such malicious horror — the deliberate, premeditated flying of aircraft full of people into buildings full of people — the vicious mass murder of so many?

At this, our roommate who had answered the phone on the morning of 9/11 shot back unhesitatingly in a dead-serious fury: “America mass-murders every day!”

I’m quite certain that my jaw dropped in dumbfounded astonishment. I was stunned — flummoxed beyond any ability to comprehend and respond to the concentrated vitriol that had just reached my ears, particularly in light of all that had just happened. The cognitive dissonance left me frozen in my tracks, speechless. I held no pretension that our nation’s history was flawless and unmarred, but surely this degree of venomous contempt was not deserved. (During my visit for the program’s graduation the following Spring, the same roommate quite casually announced — in much the same way that one might express delight in the discovery of a new favorite ice cream flavor — “I think I’m a Marxist.” Well, there you go. At least she’s not affiliating herself with mass murderers.)

I might have been able to dismiss such occurrences had they remained confined to our household. I soon learned, however, that the decay afflicting our culture’s self-image was (and still is) much more extensive and persistent than I had realized. All around me in this academic setting, the primary concern seemed to be not how we were going to win this one or what despicable monsters the attackers were, but what unjustifiably terrible things the United States was now likely to do. Mass e-mails expressing American resolve to stand up and fight back, of the kind that commonly circulated back then, were derided. The then-ubiquitous U.S. flags that flew from car antennas and windows were greeted with a disapproving roll of the eyes. The increasing prevalence of the same flags on commercial products was derided too, consistent with a worldview that holds commerce to be something outside of us that manipulates us, rather than an expression of and by us, an integral and vital part of our own culture that was simply reflecting the defiant, heartfelt pride and determination to go on that many authentically felt. In response to my despairing expression of incomprehension at such horrific and vicious attacks, another of my girlfriend’s classmates referred me to a website that he gently assured me explained it all. And that it did — through the grim and twisted lens of Chomsky-ite faith in America the Ugly and Brutal, and her innumerable (or perhaps enumerable) sins that made us deserving of the world’s contempt and such a hateful, murderous surprise attack.

This kind of thing continued in various other forms, until I gradually got the message that I was very, very alone in my thoughts and views. Even my girlfriend didn’t know what to make of my behavior, and was disturbed by my words and my anger, and the uncomfortable living situation they created for us. As the gloom of that realization and of that climate of cultural self-recrimination encircled me, I withdrew, holed up, and learned to keep my thoughts largely to myself. I had not at that point gotten wind of the budding “blogosphere”, much less managed to find solace in writers who felt as I did. I felt utterly and completely alone. I had to save myself, I concluded — to get out of an environment where I felt trapped and poisoned — but my remaining resources were by then very limited, and I had made the mistake of letting myself become financially dependent on what had become a very deeply psychologically bad situation for me. Gathering my last reserves of embattled optimism, I redoubled my job-hunting efforts. An attractive offer came in from my previous employer in February. I came very close to taking it, but my own need for self-rescue was not the only factor in play. My girlfriend was paddling hard against the proverbial current to finish her graduate degree, and needed me there for moral support. I stayed a while longer, keeping my feelers out for other, possibly more local job opportunities. Eventually another offer came from California, and with our savings dwindling and only a little over a month now left to go in the graduate program, I took it.

The fresh start did me good — being wanted, needed enough to be moved across the country by my new employer certainly helped to pick up my spirits. But I was still under the weight of a terrible gloom, still reeling from what I had been through and could not stop thinking about. I have an indelible image in my mind of sitting outside at lunch, looking up at a company building against a clear blue California sky — feeling simultaneously grateful to have a handle on my life and surroundings again, and somber with the weight of memories and thoughts I couldn’t shake.

At the program’s graduation ceremony in May of 2002, which I returned to attend, the college’s president followed his expression of sympathy for the 9/11 victims and their families with an expression of his profound shame at being an American in these times — for which, to my astonishment and disgust, he was roundly applauded and cheered. It took all my self control and decorum not to hiss and boo at this display of insular, ungrateful, self-righteous pontification.

Those who’ve kept track of the post-9/11 timeline will recall: Our nation’s response was still confined to the war in Afghanistan, back then.

I held my tongue. This day belonged to the hard-fought achievements of those who were being awarded their degrees, my girlfriend among them, and I did not want my own self-indulgence to detract from that. If only the college president had felt the same. Apparently, either no one objected, or they were just as silent about it as I was.

Prior to the events of September 11th, 2001, I had developed an awareness of our gloomy climate of cultural self-doubt, idle self-recrimination, and intellectually fashionable college campus radicalism — first with startled dismay, then with grim resignation — and naïvely supposed that the appearance of some new, bona fide external threat would eventually wake us out of our idle funk. In hindsight, I could not have been more mistaken. The roots of our cultural self-distrust run far, far deeper than I had ever dared suppose, casting our future as a country, culture, and civilization into serious doubt. To this day, I find myself deeply troubled by the question of what, if anything, we can do to recover from the sad state we seem to be stuck in, and for all my usual optimism I find it hard to imagine a day when I won’t have cause for such worry.

Previous post: Tomorrow is 9/11
Next post: 9/11 Quotes

Tomorrow is 9/11

2009-09-10T21:04:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States. I’ve finished writing a couple of posts detailing my own recollections of 9/11 — a project I’ve been meaning to get to for a while, and got a start on last year without quite finishing — and I’ll be publishing them later tonight or early tomorrow. After that, I’ll be keeping an eye out for new and noteworthy posts from blogs and sites that I follow (see the sidebar at right for links to many of my favorites), and posting links and quotes here and on Twitter (speaking of which, this will be my first year observing 9/11 in the virtual company of Twitter friends, which should make for an interesting supplement to my usual blog- and news-reading routine).

Meanwhile, following are links to my previous years’ 9/11 posts, going back to 2005, the year I started this blog. With the exception of my second 2006 post, which maybe sums up my own thoughts the best to date, most consist of links to and excerpts from superb articles by others that touch close to my thinking, and in most if not all cases express what I only wish I had the skill to say. Highly recommend reading.

September 11, 2001
I will never forget.

2005
2006: 1, 2, 3
2007
2008: 1, 2, 3, 4

My thoughts will be with those who lost their lives and loved ones on that terrible, hauntingly clear-skied day, and on the challenges facing us as we still struggle feebly as a civilization — some eight years later — to come to terms with the implications of 9/11’s horrific, era-defining events.

Next post: My Experience of September 11, 2001

Hot Air: The Death of the Individual

2009-09-02T04:27:00.001-07:00

Not to be missed: The Death of the Individual — an excellent short piece by Hot Air blogger “Doctor Zero”, on individual liberty vs. collectivism, in the context of recent journalistic attempts ascribe political value to Mary Jo Kopechne’s life and death:

The meme floated by the Left over the past few days, that Kopechne’s death was a reasonable price to pay for Ted Kennedy’s wonderful political career, is a brutally candid expression of the principle that even an individual’s right to live is negotiable — a commodity to be measured against the “needs of the many,” which the Left believes were far better served by Kennedy’s politics than Kopechne’s insignificant little life.

Read the whole, concise thing.

Victor Davis Hanson's "Thoughts of Our European Future to Come"

2009-08-18T07:18:00.001-07:00

This is so important — a true must-read, from a man who has produced a great deal of deeply insightful writing. “On Becoming Europe” is among Victor Davis Hanson’s best, and its message is acutely and urgently relevant:

After concluding another 16 days in Europe. I am again reminded how different their form of socialism is, and yet how closely it resembles the model that Obama seeks for America. The vast majority of citizens lives in apartments, even in smaller towns and villages. Cars are tiny. Prices are higher than in the states; income is lower (The government taxes you to pay for things like “free” college, so you won’t have much to spend on antisocial things like your Wal-Mart plastic Christmas Tree or your second K-Mart plasma TV.)

Mass transit is frequent and cheap, but often crowded and occasionally unpleasant. The stifled desire to acquire something — large house, car, deposit account — is of course not quite destroyed by socialism, but rather is channeled into a sort of cynicism and anger, often leading to a hedonism of few children, late and long meals, and disco hours until the early morning. The number of Gucci like stores selling overpriced label junk like 200 Euro eye-glass frames and 1000 Euro leather bags to socialists is quite amazing.

…

My point? The more Europe professes to be egalitarian, the more cynical and conniving the people have become — almost as if the human craving for one’s own property and to make one one’s destiny cannot be denied by the state, but by needs will be channeled into what the state mandates as anti-social for most, but quietly a perk for a few.

Read the whole, very worthwhile 2-pager. There’s too much good insight in it to quote. Think deeply about it until the lessons sink in. This is our future-to-be, America, if we keep to our present course.

Fare Well, Sarah. I mean that.

2009-07-29T22:17:00.001-07:00

As I tweeted earlier today, you don’t have to believe Sarah Palin is “God’s gift” to conservatism to appreciate the content and spirit of her farewell speech as Governor of Alaska — a speech in which, it seems to me, she demonstrates a deep and heartfelt understanding of what it means to be independent and truly free.

Our Frontier spirit is still alive and well in a few places — thank the Founders. As long as there are states whose people understand and value Liberty and are willing to fight for it, there is authentic Hope for the rest of us.

Part 1:

Part 2:

UPDATE: Bill Whittle nails it as usual, with “The Destruction of Sarah Palin”:

Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama. He is urban; she is rural. He preaches dependency on the government and she leads a life of independence. He consistently apologizes for the sins of the country he was elected to lead, and she is unabashedly proud of it. He opposes the war in Iraq; she has skin in the game. And on and on.

And that is why she had to be destroyed, by the Democratic Party, by the New York media elites, and by many of the inside-the-beltway voices of various and sundry GOP “strategists.”

She needs to be destroyed because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is this: you cannot have a voice in this political debate. You know who I mean. You rubes, you hicks out there in flyover country. Your job is pay taxes, vote for who they have decided over cocktails makes them feel better about themselves, and occasionally provide your inbred idiot sons and daughters for the army or police force or whatever you people without Ivy League educations do with your tawdry little lives.

Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated elitist geniuses will run the country according to their infinitely brighter intellectual and moral lights.

And whatever happens, do not be distracted by inconvenient facts that you might stumble upon as you listen to Faux News, or your hate-filled talk radio, or right-wing nutjob blogs. Pay no attention to the fact that small banks, run by hayseeds like yourselves, were in no financial troubles at all lending money and writing mortgages to people who could afford to pay it back, but who are now are being forced to pay for the failure of genius-level Harvard Business School ideas like Collateralized Debt Obligations which essentially brought down the greatest economy the world has ever seen.

And remember, it’s just a coincidence that Harvard grads John F. Kennedy and Robert S McNamara not only got us into the Vietnam war, they also determined the genius-level rules of engagement that caused inbound Naval aviators to look down at, but not attack, the surface-to-air missiles being unloaded at Haiphong Harbor. They’d see those same missiles again in a few weeks when they were shot down and killed by them.

That’s genius-level, Harvard-quality thinking. Not like that simpering idiot, that commonplace dolt Ronald Reagan. I mean, the man went to Eureka College, for God’s sake! Who’s even heard of Eureka College? The fact that he defied forty years of Harvard-educated State Department officials and defeated the Soviet Union with plain speaking and common sense and some antiquated, embarrassing and– one might say tacky – belief in his country and its people… well, that’s surely coincidence as well.

Read the whole blessed thing at PJM.

Independence Day 2009

2009-07-04T07:27:00.001-07:00

With the signing of America’s Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the bravest members of our founding generation pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor”, assuming tremendous personal risk so that an independent nation of free people, the like of which the world had never seen, might have its chance at an anything-but-certain beginning. Today — two hundred and thirty-three years later — we are still free because of their vision, courage, and sacrifice.

I’ll be out celebrating today with my wife, her mother, and our four-month-old son, starting with a neighborhood parade in the morning (we’ve got our son’s stroller all decorated!), then on to enjoy other parades and festivities in Foster City and maybe Redwood City, wrapping up with watching fireworks (of course!) that I hope our little guy is still awake to see.

In celebration of the occasion, I offer a playlist of some of my favorite liberty-themed songs, along with this concluding passage quoted from Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1941 radio script “Listen to the People”, which I’ve mentioned before and highly recommend reading in its entirety. Its words ring as true today as ever.

Find it and keep it and hold on to it,
For there’s a buried thing in all of us,
Deeper than all the noise of the parade,
The thing the haters never understand
And never will, the habit of the free.
Out of the flesh, out of the minds and hearts
Of thousand upon thousand common men,
Cranks, martyrs, starry-eyed enthusiasts,
Slow-spoken neighbors, hard to push around,
Women whose hands were gentle with their kids
And men with a cold passion for mere justice.
We made this thing, this dream.
This land unsatisfied by little ways,
Open to every man who brought good will,
This peaceless vision, groping for the stars,
Not as a huge devouring machine
Rolling and clanking with remorseless force
Over submitted bodies and the dead
But as live earth where anything could grow,
Your crankiness, my notions and his dream,
Grow and be looked at, grow and live or die.
But get their chance of growing and the sun.
We made it and we make it and it’s ours.
We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained.

Following are some favorites new and old from my music library, with iTunes and Amazon links provided for your convenience. The songs span a range of styles/genres, such that I’m not sure this holds together incredibly well as a mix album, but on the upside there should be a little something in here for everybody (and I love ‘em all).

Steve Vai, “Liberty” (iTunes, Amazon)
Jon David, “American Heart” (iTunes, Amazon)
Aretha Franklin, “Think” (iTunes, Amazon)
The Cult, “Wake Up Time For Freedom” (iTunes, Amazon)
Harold Faltermeyer & Steve Stevens, “Top Gun Anthem”
(iTunes, Amazon)
Stuck Mojo, “I’m American” (iTunes, Amazon, blog)
Rush, “Freewill” (iTunes, Amazon
Ella Fitzgerald, “Don’t Fence Me In” (iTunes, Amazon)
Five for Fighting, “Freedom Never Cries” (iTunes, Amazon)
Five for Fighting, “Johnny America” (iTunes, Amazon)
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, “American Girl” (iTunes, Amazon)
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, “Into the Great Wide Open”
(iTunes, Amazon)
Madeleine Peyroux, “This is Heaven to Me” (iTunes, Amazon, blog)
Oscar Peterson Trio, “Hymn to Freedom” (iTunes, Amazon)

Steve Vai’s glorious 1990 guitar anthem “Liberty” spills over with soaring celebratory joy, and is about as natural a first track for a playlist as they come. Jon David’s “American Heart” is a brand new favorite I just discovered two days ago, thanks to a recommendation from my good Twitter friend, songwriter @ConservativeLA. With its timely message, it won me over instantly. “Go on, raise the flag / I’ve got stars in my eyes / I’m in love with her / and I won’t apologize.”

Some of my selections aren’t specifically patriotic songs, but fit the broader theme of freedom in some way. I put Aretha Franklin’s “Think” next because I just love, love, love it when she busts out with gospel verve singing “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”. After having that bit stuck in my head for ages, I finally identified the song it was from this year. Love it.

The Cult’s “Wake Up Time For Freedom” is next. I just couldn’t resist. (The entire “Sonic Temple” album rocks mightily, by the way, and is a must-have.)

Next up, another great guitar anthem, the end title theme from “Top Gun”. This soars with so much of Eddie Van Halen’s phrasing style that I’ve always mistakenly attributed it to him. A great, soaring track that ages well in my book.

I wrote about Stuck Mojo’s “I’m American” last month — another much enjoyed new discovery this year, also thanks to @ConservativeLA. “Hate me, blame me / You can’t shame me / Come and stand with me / I’m American.” Rock. On.

Then it’s “Freewill” by Canadian prog-rock power trio Rush, as great a celebration of freedom in music as I’ve heard. The live version I linked to is from the same, excellent “Exit…Stage Left” album whose “Red Barchetta” inspired the title of my blog.

As with many a Cole Porter song, Ella Fitzgerald sings “Don’t Fence Me In” like no one else can. A truly great and fun song and a timeless classic beautifully done; one of my wife’s favorites too.

John Ondrasik writes and sings some truly great original songs under the hockey-inspired band name Five for Fighting, and has been a loyal supporter of America’s deployed fighting men and women. “Freedom Never Cries” is a timely meditation on taking our freedom for granted, and the way events can wake us up to a renewed appreciation of its preciousness. “I took a flag to a pawnshop / for a broken guitar / I took a flag to a pawnshop / How much is that guitar? / What’s a flag in a pawnshop to me?” The next track I’ve included, “Johnny America”, picks up the mood with an unsurpassed expression of American optimism against all odds. “Here comes Johnny America / Riding hard up Mission Hill / Some say he’ll make it to the top today / Some say he never will / Though he’s just a child at heart / he’s old enough to fall / Nobody in a hundred years / can touch him, faults and all”

Tom Petty’s “American Girl” is just plain fun, and “Into the Great Wide Open” is to me a classic expression of the American Dream.

I put Madeleine Peyroux’s rendition of “This Is Heaven To Me” (a great song whose history I’m very interested in but haven’t managed to track down yet) next to last, because I just can’t manage to listen to it without getting all choked up with tears in my eyes. If there is a more perfect expression of what freedom means, sung with more beautiful grace, I haven’t heard it yet.

When I hear them say, there’s better livin’
Let them go their way, to that new livin’
I won’t ever stray
‘Cause this is Heaven, to me

‘Long as freedom grows, I want to seek it
If it’s “Yes” or “No”, it’s me who’ll speak it
‘Cause the Lord, he knows
That this is Heaven, to me

If you’ve got your hands, and got your feet
to sing your song all through the street
You’ll raise your head when the day is done,
shout your thanks up to the Sun

So when I hear them say there’s better livin’
Let them go their way, to that new livin’
I won’t ever stray, ‘cause this is Heaven, to me
‘Cause this is Heaven, to me…

I close the playlist out with a piano instrumental: Oscar Peterson’s by turns reverential, playful, and celebratory “Hymn to Freedom”. A true gem.

Hope you all find something new to enjoy in here. Wishing you a very happy Independence Day!

Frontiers

2009-06-19T17:05:00.001-07:00

One nagging thought that’s troubled me for several years now has concerned the nature of “frontiers” — the character of those who strike out to populate them, what happens as the populace of a former frontier changes over time, and what to do when we run out of new frontiers to settle.

The United States began life as a frontier of far-flung colonies — colonies that came to be populated by people who were brave, bold, and/or desperate enough to give up every semblance of stability in their former lives and risk everything on the possibility of a new and, they hoped, better future on the other side of a formidable ocean — a future they knew full well they would have to fashion by their own exertions, at considerable risk, in a land of many unknowns.

Over the few centuries since, the US has become a new home to immigrants with similar circumstances, motivations, dreams, courage, and drive hailing from every reach of the planet. Many more who might have wished to begin new lives here, but were fearful of the risks this life entails, did not come, and in this way our melting-pot population became a self-selecting group largely characterized by a measure of boldness, guts, and — I dare say — genuine, honest-to-gosh audacity.

At the same time, of course, we’ve also set about increasing our ranks the old fashioned way. Those born here sometimes successfully absorb the spirit of the place, and grow up to share such courage, determination, independence, work ethic, and mettle as their immigrant ancestors bore. Others somehow don’t acquire these traits, and seeing as they’re already here, don’t have to get here, and typically stay, they end up edging our average bearings as a population a bit farther away from that rugged pioneer spirit.

Roughly speaking, then, relative rates of immigration and birth, coupled with our rate of success or failure at instilling a love of sweet Freedom in our newly minted Americans, combine to determine the vitality of the American Spirit. (I leave out emigration as a relatively insignificant contributing factor because — funny thing — that just doesn’t happen much here.)

This all leads me to a question that, to my scientifically-trained mind, is reminiscent of the grand cosmological question of whether we live in an “open” universe (one that will continue to expand without limit) or a “closed” universe (whose expansion will eventually be slowed and then reversed by mutual gravity, leading it to recollapse):

Does a frontier inevitably move?

Maybe the answer should be intuitively obvious. A frontier doesn’t stay a frontier forever. New places are discovered, and become the new frontiers, while the old, now-familiar places accumulate a sort of inertia and become stable.

Only, what happens when we run out of new places? What happens when the old, former frontiers become gradually less friendly to those who dare to dream the really big dreams, who aspire to wide-open unencumbered FREEDOM as far as the eye can see, but there’s nowhere else left for them to go?

Barring the discovery of an unforseen loophole in the laws of physics as we’ve thus far distilled them, we are prisoners of our own solar system, whose eight — er, strike that — seven other planets aren’t particularly hospitable to human habitation. At great cost and with enough of the hardy pioneer determination that birthed this nation it could be done, perhaps, but there is no other home remotely as cordial as this precious blue-green marble we inhabit within our grasp. Firefly fantasies aside, enterprising interplanetary homesteaders don’t have a whole lot of choices — or, really, any — right now.

This fact has been keenly on my mind as we watch our beloved United States of America become seemingly less and less recognizable to those of us who prize untrammeled individual freedom as the Founders did. As our population gradually loses that once-indomitable frontier spirit, and in the place of cherishing Sweet Liberty increasingly demands the safety, security, and closing of material equality gaps that are promised by a culture of regulation, entitlement, and coerced redistribution, so our dear country begins to seem less and less the kind of place for an intrepid frontiersman or frontierswoman to hitch their wagon to.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all about this “Europeanization” of America is the insistence on implementing such ideas here, despite the litany of nations in which they are already practiced (a fact it seems we’re incessantly reminded of by domestic critics of the classically American Way of life — you know, the ones who insist that Swedes, Venezuelans, and Cubans are somehow “freer than we are”). “Diversity” is not so much to be sought and celebrated, it seems, when it comes to socioeconomic policy — at least when doing so favors the continued existence of classically liberal (economically permissive rather than socially engineered) societies. Oddly, though the United States places no restrictions on emigration, proponents of Europeanization rarely seem to choose that route to obtaining the lifestyle they favor. There is something about this drive that seeks to transcend personal choice and impose that choice on others (ostensibly for their own good, of course).

Maybe the subduing of America is a “Holy Grail” of sorts for those who aspire to bring the benefits of benevolent statism to the whole world. Transnationalism has been a key aspect of Marxism from the get-go, and some ideas die hard. Today’s transnational progressivism, with its contempt for and active attempts to undermine international tax and regulatory competition, seems little different in this respect. Transnationalism seeks to seal off all avenues of escape for those who crave and seek greater economic freedom and commensurate responsibility for assuming risk. There would be no way out in a future world that agrees on and enforces the same set of laws, taxes and restrictions everywhere. The message from control-hungry transnationalists is clear: Tough luck, buddy. One Vorld Government vill be gut, und you vill like it.

If even the fiery, fiercely independent souls who inhabit the United States can be berated into giving up Liberty for safety, superficial equality, “fairness”, “niceness”, or just to be like everyone else, then there is truly no limit to statism’s ability to dominate a willing, submissive, or even just indifferent humankind. If we choose — on a personal, individual and not just national level — to continually seek the approval of others in an exceedingly self-conscious high-schoolish popularity contest, in the place of cherishing our right to scandalize the neighbors, then we are as good as done, and the American Idea is dead — much to the delight of its very vocal detractors.

Take a good look at the following piece of contemporary art, which I took notice of among the 2008 “Zero1” exhibits in San Jose. Study it until you see the message behind the message.

In the final year of the Bush administration, this was shown as mockery and criticism of America’s conduct in waging the Global War on Terror, from the perspective of the sort of person who thinks we ought to be ashamed of ourselves rather than fiercely proud and doggedly committed to our nation’s defense in the wake of the 9/11 Jihadist attacks on US soil. The longer I studied this image, the more the eagle’s tear rang hollow. Is the artist’s intent really to express regret at the decline in opinions of America that he or she obviously feels is justified?

I think there’s a clear second meaning here, that’s picked up by those who go in for such stuff, and it is one of triumphant celebration. There are people — the artist included, I strongly suspect — who could not be more pleased by this development, who don’t merely feel ashamed of what they think we’ve become, but cannot stand even what we once were and have long stood for, and who cannot wait for the American Idea itself — the notion of your life on your terms — to fall in the world’s esteem, lose its luster and appeal, and fade away as an object of aspiration for millions upon millions the world over. They want mindshare for governing ideas of their own, and those ideas have little to do with freedom I’m afraid.

Friends, it’s no accident that the tongue-in-cheek “fire sale” that this exhibit advertised accepts “Euros or Mao Bucks”:

Why is it that we keep seeing these folks among the ranks of anti-war activists? It’s hard to avoid supposing that they are more accurately pro-war, but on the other side.

Look at the image again.

It is not a lament, but a victory banner. Those it speaks for feign disappointment, but in truth couldn’t be more pleased. America and what she represents falling in the world’s esteem. Mission Accomplished.

These fellow citizens and others like them aim to demoralize us with their moralizing — to tame, subdue, and crush the defiantly independent frontier spirit that makes us us — and I fear they may be succeeding.

How we got to this point from our ruggedly independent, defiantly freedom-loving, living-my-own-way who-cares-what-others-think frontier roots is a very long story. But the net change in our national character could hardly be more pronounced.

Living in the far-West former frontier “Gold Rush” state of California as I do, I feel acutely aware of the especially radical transformation my state has undergone since its settlement — crossing the full spectrum from initially wild and lawless open country to one of the most social-engineering-heavy and burdensomely taxed and regulated (or, if you prefer, most “progressive”) states in the Union. To some, this is desirable progress. To me, it is the slow, tragic dying of a cherished dream and ideal.

When I contemplate the Frontier, the “Invocation” of Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem “Western Star”, which I first mentioned a few years ago, always comes to mind. I’ve read this passage at home in far-West California; I’ve read it on vacation on a horse ranch in Wyoming, a state whose wide-open vistas preserve some of the last remaining fragments of the old frontier spirit. And it gives me a deep shiver. Every time.

Not for the great, not for the marvelous,
Not for the barren husbands of the gold;
Not for the arrowmakers of the soul,
Wasted with truth, the star-regarding wise;
Not even for the few
Who would not be the hunter nor the prey,
Who stood between the eater and the meat,
The wilderness saints, the guiltless, the absolved,
Born out of Time, the seekers of the balm
Where the green grass grows from the broken heart;
But for all these, the nameless, numberless
Seed of the field, the mortal wood and earth
Hewn for the clearing, trampled for the floor,
Uprooted and cast out upon the stone
From Jamestown to Benicia.
This is their song, this is their testament,
Carved to their likeness, speaking in their tongue
And branded with the iron of their star.
I say you shall remember them. I say
When the night has fallen on your loneliness
And the deep wood beyond the ruined wall
Seems to step forward swiftly with the dusk,
You shall remember them. You shall not see
Water or wheat or axe-mark on the tree
And not remember them.
You shall not win without remembering them,
For they won every shadow of the moon,
All the vast shadows, and you shall not lose
Without a dark remembrance of their loss
For they lost all and none remembered them.

Hear the wind
Blow through the buffalo-grass
Blow over wild-grape and brier.
This was frontier, and this,
And this, your house, was frontier.
There were footprints upon the hill
And men lie buried under,
Tamers of earth and rivers.
They died at the end of labor,
Forgotten is the name.

Now, in full summer, by the Eastern shore,
Between the seamark and the roads going West,
I call two oceans to remember them.
I fill the hollow darkness with their names.

Is it possible to read the above and not feel it in your bones?

All this has been on my mind for a seemingly very long time now, but it took this superb blog post by “VodkaPundit” Stephen Green to prompt me to finally compose my thoughts.

American freedom was a huge, sprawling, messy, brawling thing. It consumed everything and anything, and spewed out an unimaginable bounty. For some, the freedom was about growing their business and making money. For others, it was about growing their hair and making love. But it was always here, for anyone willing to risk the journey and leave behind the Old World and its old ways.

But now that we have this wonderful place, this precious idea — what are we doing with it?

Already, the government runs our children’s education and our parents’ retirement. Now we’re allowing it to usurp our banks and nationalize what remains of our auto industries. Within weeks, Washington promises a plan to dictate our health care. To do all this, we’ve let Washington run up enough red ink to impoverish our grandchildren. As if all that weren’t enough, the president still found the time to kick our friends in London and Tel Aviv while courting a genocidal, election-stealing maniac in Tehran. He even gave a speech in Cairo — that oppressed, impoverished Old World megalopolis — in which he assured the world that America really is no better than anywhere else.

Well, once upon a time, we were.

Absent a warp drive, a wormhole, or some other science fiction escape to an uninhabited Earth-like planet, it’s impossible to recreate the conditions which allowed the creation of these United States. It can’t be done; there aren’t any New Worlds left to discover. Our maps are all filled in.

If the Old World comes here, where does the New World have left to go?

When the Puritans were persecuted in England, they risked everything to come to America. When young Germans faced the Prussian army’s grip, they gave up their ancient towns to come here. When Jews faced the Czar’s pogroms, they gave up their bucolic steppes for the slums of New York. Rather than accept stagnant lives in their own countries, Latin Americans risked uncertain lives in America. Rather than accept far milder impositions than our own, America’s Founding Fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor just to sign their names on parchment.

Anyone with nothing to lose and everything to gain — and bearing wits and character enough to risk it all — came here. They ventured here. To America.

Whatever liberty we have right here, right now, in America … well, for all practical purposes, that’s all that’s left anywhere. If France had our freedoms, there would be no French here. If China had it, there would be no Chinese here. If it existed in Latin America, there would be no Spanish spoken here. And so it goes.

And so if we, here in America, throw it all away in a fit of panic or pique, then what we once called “America” will become as false as a fairy tale.

By all means, read the whole, brilliantly worded thing.

One more thought in closing:

Remember the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, when many on the left threatened to “seek asylum” in Canada if Bush or McCain won?

Those of us who cherish the classically American commitment to individual Freedom have no Canada. America is our last, best hope. Our opponents know it. And if we lose this ground for good, it seems to me we will have lost everything that matters.

For the sake of all we hold dear in this life, we mustn’t let that happen.

Bill Whittle: The Dowd Conundrum

2009-06-08T10:41:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle has outdone himself again, boldly going where no news commentator has gone before: The Dowd Conundrum: Why Vulcans and Other Intellectuals Don’t Belong in the Big Chair A must-watch episode of Afterburner, on PJTV!

Phyllis Chesler: Obama Throws Muslim Women Under the Bus

2009-06-08T10:30:00.001-07:00

Did President Obama sacrifice the interests of Muslim women in his Cairo speech? Phyllis Chesler thinks so, and says as much in a characteristically well-articulated piece at PJM:

It is a Catholic woman’s right to become a nun and shave or cover her hair; it is an Orthodox or Hasidic Jewish woman’s right to shave or cover her hair; and it is a Muslim woman’s right to cover her hair and her face–as long as those women who refuse to do so are not browbeaten, beaten, ostracized, stalked, stoned to death or honor-murdered. I have written about just such cases in the West right here, at this blog, cases in which young American- and Canadian-Muslim girls were tormented, then killed because they refused to wear hijab.

In Europe, where there are many more Muslims, there is a veritable epidemic of such exceedingly dishonorable and incredibly gruesome “honor” murders.

But there’s something more. Let’s face it: The Islamic face-veil and headscarf have become symbols of “jihad” and Islamic religious apartheid or intolerance in the West. And, it is spooky, even frightening to see women, (or are they men?), face-veiled or wearing full-body shrouds. Masked people, hooded people, have cut themselves off from human contact; they can see you, but you can’t see them. You cannot see their expressions in response to what you are saying. I would not want to appear before a masked judge, study with a masked teacher, hire a masked lawyer, etc. Would you?

Whether I approve of their clothing choices or not, Hasidic (ultra-orthodox or anti-modern) Jews and Catholics are not threatening western civilization and are not out there be-heading those who leave Judaism or Catholicism. Nor are they force-converting Muslims and Hindus. Muslims are doing just that at this very moment in history when America’s President has reached out to the entire Islamic world.

What’s more, Jews and Catholics are not honor-murdering their daughters and wives because they refuse to veil their faces, their hair, or their bodies. Mainly Muslims do that.

See the full article for more good argument, and quotes from a worrisome exchange between President Obama and French President Sarkozy on the subject of women’s rights and headscarves.

4th Bloggiversary!

2009-06-05T15:08:00.001-07:00

I just now realized, while looking back through my archives for something, that yesterday was the 4th anniversary of my first post here.

I’m finding it hard to believe that so much time has gone by, and I feel there’s a great deal more writing that I’d have hoped to find time do by this point, but at the same time I’m glad to have started the project and kept it going at least somewhat steadily, if slowly. I still remember sitting in the back of a conference hall taking advantage of some downtime to draft and publish my first post. The feeling of casting out a proverbial sort of “message in a bottle” was a real lift to my spirits, and I suspect is much the same high that so many other bloggers have said helps keep them writing and publishing.

My biggest regret so far is not having continued the project of recounting key parts of my own life, and exploring the ways they have influenced my worldview, that I set out to begin. I wrote a first [awkwardly self-conscious and not highly recommended] post in the intended series in September 2005, and didn’t get any farther than that. I still have hope of picking that project up again and making something interesting of it, if I can make the time. Soon, I hope (eternal optimist that I am)!

There are also many thoughts in the realm of economics, entrepreneurship, cultural self-perception and self-doubt/confidence that have struck me over the years and continue to nip at my mind, waiting impatiently to be written down and developed, and I’m hanging onto the mental, electronic, and paper notes where I’ve jotted bits down, hoping to get to those someday too.

Meanwhile, I have greatly enjoyed the past six months (amazed that it’s been that long already!) of meeting and conversing with so many amazing, interesting, insightful and devoted fellow freedom-lovers and America-lovers on Twitter. I highly recommend giving Twitter a try, to those who may feel as ideologically isolated as I do. I find the Twitter experience has been a great complement to blogging, rather than a replacement for it — a suitable place for fragments of thought that don’t require lengthier exposition, or that I haven’t yet found the time to develop into something in-depth enough to be worthy of a blog post. The blog, meanwhile, has served me well as a more permanent-feeling structure of sorts, on which to hang my expression of love for the American Idea and way of life. I aim to convey in these pages, not just concerns and gloom that have tended to occupy my thoughts at times, but also a sense of celebration of who we are and the way we live. I hope that comes across in the design as well as in the content.

My sincere thanks to any and all who have popped in now and then to read the pages here. Please do stop by again; I intend to keep this project going and have more to offer in the future!

Charles Murray: Europe Syndrome

2009-06-05T15:04:00.001-07:00

This Wall Street Journal piece by Charles Murray went by a few months ago, but is such an excellent bit of writing that I’m belatedly posting about it as I meant to back then. “Europe Syndrome” is well worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a highlight.

I, for one, am an American Exceptionalist at heart — so grateful to have had the good luck to be born right where I belong. I often fear we are a dying breed. We must figure out how to keep the shining beacon, the defiantly individualistic spirit of American Liberty aglow.

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.

Underlying these symptoms of American exceptionalism are the underlying exceptional dynamics of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a famous book describing the nature of that more fundamental exceptionalism back in the 1830s. He found American life characterized by two apparently conflicting themes. The first was the passion with which Americans pursued their individual interests, and made no bones about it — that’s what America was all about, they kept telling Tocqueville. But at the same time, Tocqueville kept coming up against this phenomenal American passion for forming associations to deal with every conceivable problem, voluntarily taking up public affairs, and tending to the needs of their communities. How could this be? Because, Americans told Tocqueville, there’s no conflict. “In the United States,” Tocqueville writes, “hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue… . They do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous.” And then he concludes, “I shall not here enter into the reasons they allege… . Suffice it to say, they have convinced their fellow countrymen.”

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn’t something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.

…

The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening. It won’t happen by appealing to people on the basis of lower marginal tax rates or keeping a health care system that lets them choose their own doctor. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.

Memorial Day 2009

2009-05-25T08:10:00.001-07:00

A collection of musical selections and quotes in honor of Memorial Day. I also highly recommend reading or re-reading Bill Whittle’s “Honor”, the first of his superb “Silent America” essays, as I just did. (Also recommended: a moving address by Donald Sensing that I linked last year.)

I am moved and humbled beyond words by the actions of men and women throughout our storied history, who have risked and sacrificed their very lives to secure our safety and liberty. What more profound love there could be for a nation, an idea, and one’s fellow man, I can’t imagine. May they have our undying gratitude and commitment to ensuring that their sacrifices will not have been in vain.

Listening:

from Oscar Peterson, Night Train: “Hymn to Freedom”

from Dave Brubeck, Private Brubeck Remembers: “Don’t Worry ‘bout Me”, “We Crossed the Rhine”, “For All We Know”

from Five for Fighting, Two Lights: “Two Lights”

Quotes:

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” — General George S. Patton, Jr.

“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” — Sir Winston Churchill / George Orwell †

“We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.” — Bill Whittle, “History”

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” — George Washington

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” — John Stuart Mill

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” — John F. Kennedy

“We can’t share the earth with pure evil anymore than we can share the earth with smallpox.” — David Gelernter

“Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.” — Vaclav Havel

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

“The front line now, at this critical time, is in the hearts and minds of our own people. That’s where the real battle is now. That is our weakest point, our breach, our point of failure. We have not made the case to enough people and time is running out.

So maybe now, at this absurd point in this new kind of war, we’re the crack troops, we old and useless pajama patriots reduced to printing up pamphlets to sell war bonds to the weary, to make the case for holding on to an unglamorous, uninspiring, relentless grind because that — not Normandy and Midway — is the face of war in this gilded age of luxury and safety and plenty.” — Bill Whittle, “Deterrence”

“We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.” — Sir Winston Churchill

† The “rough men stand ready” quote is frequently attributed to both Winston Churchill and George Orwell in various forms. It is a beautifully focused statement, whatever its true origin.

Stuck Mojo, "I'm American"

2009-05-13T14:04:00.001-07:00

Mentioned at the end of my previous post and well worth attention of its own: a beautifully worded and spirited anthem in praise of the good ol’ U.S. of A. — “I’m American”.

If we ever did retire the beloved Star-Spangled Banner in favor of a new national anthem, “I’m American” would be seriously in the running for my vote.

Lyrics, and an Independence Day dedication by Stuck Mojo lead singer Lord Nelson, below:

I’m an American related to all colors of brethren
Priests and Pastors and Prophets and Reverends
Divided we fall, united we stand — together, man
In this cultural melting pot there’s nothing better than
this land of the free and the home of the brave
populated by ancestors, immigrants and slaves
who met early graves, so we could see brighter days
and we could proudly praise and raise
the stars and stripes as Americans

Hate me, blame me
You can’t shame me
Come and stand with me
I’m American

I’m an American born in these states united
where racial discrimination keeps us so divided
Well we’ve got free speech, so I won’t be quiet
We’ve got a lot of problems here, man, I won’t deny it
But ain’t another place that I’d rather be
than in this land of great opportunity
where we can be anything that we want to be
so until the day I D-I-E
I stand tall as an American

Hate me, blame me
You can’t shame me
Come and stand with me
I’m American

Lord Nelson’s dedication:

On July 4, 1776 America adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring independence from Great Britain. We have celebrated this historical event every year since that day. Today we live in an America that is a diverse melting pot of cultures, a place where so many races and faces of different color call home. Every July 4th, we celebrate freedom. We celebrate our strong and prideful disposition and unwavering love for country. Oh, what a feeling when we’re at an event and we see the red, white and blue flying. Americans engulfed in patriotism and love for fellow man.

From the fireworks to the barbecues, baseball games to swimming pools. We congregate and enjoy each others company like one big family. On this day we share a common thought of prosperity and family values. What it really means to be American. All having that desire to achieve the American dream.

The very reason that millions around the globe long to be a part of this great society. From the smallest towns to the largest cities, we all stand tall and proudly say “I’m American!” On this July 4, 2007, The Stuck Mojo Family would like to salute those troops who continue to fight for our freedom and way of life, and we would also like to praise and remember those who have fought and died for our beautiful country and for the principles that it stands for.

United we stand. Divided we fall. God bless America.

Amen!

Anti-Jihad Done Right: Stuck Mojo, "Open Season"

2009-04-20T00:31:00.001-07:00

At long last, musicians with the perspective and cojones to call out and confront the hostile homicidal intent and raw evil of Islamic Jihad, straight up. This music video by Stuck Mojo is a must-see. If only our leaders exhibited such boldly defiant convictions.

(Warning: contains some fittingly disturbing images and, er, “unsavory” language)

Lyrics below and on the band’s website. A deeply indebted tip of the hat to my good Twitter buddy @ConservativeLA for pointing these guys out. For me, finally seeing something like this makes conspicuous the huge gaping hole and dearth of similar material in the music (and, more broadly, arts/creative) world, where those who’ve taken it upon themselves to express opinions have most often demonized the United States and the Global War on Terror while ignoring the very real — and perhaps too frightening for them to contemplate — Jihadist enemy that we face.

I speak peace
when peace is spoken
But I speak war
when your hate is provoking
The season is open
twenty-four seven, three-sixty-five
Man up — yo, time to ride

No need to hide behind slogans of deceit
Claiming that you’re a religion of peace
We just don’t believe you
We can clearly see through
The madness that you’re feeding your people — Ji-had!

The cry of your unholy war
Using the willing, the weak and poor
From birth drowning in propaganda,
rhetoric and slander
All we can say is damn ya

My forefathers fought and died for this here
I’m stronger than your war of fear
Are we clear?
If you step in my ‘hood,
It’s understood — ha ha!
It’s open season

I don’t need a faith that’s blind
Where death and hate
bring me peace of mind
With views that are stuck deep in the seventh century
With so much sand in your eyes, too blind to see

The venom that you leaders preach
Is the path to your own destruction
Your own demise
You might say that I don’t understand
but your disgust for me is what I realize

Surprise!
Your homicidal ways
has got the whole world watching,
Whole world scoping,
So if you bring it to my home base,
Best believe it
The season’s open

My forefathers fought and died for this here
I’m stronger than your war of fear
Are we clear?
If you step in my ‘hood,
It’s understood — ha!
It’s open season

I see you
Hell yeah, I see you
Motherfucker, naw, I don’t wanna be you!
If you come to my place, I’ll drop more than just some bass
Yo you’ll get a taste of a
Sick motherfucker from the Dirty
I ain’t worrying not a fucking bit
I’m telescoping like Hubble
Yo, you in trouble
Yo, on the double

I’m wild with mine
Bring that style with mine
Fuck with my family I’ll end your line
Just the way it is, Just the way it be
Do you understand?

No matter if you’re woman or man, or child
My profile is crazy
That shit you do doesn’t amaze me
I’m ready to blaze thee

I don’t give a damn what god you claim
I’ve seen the innocent that you’ve slain
On my streets you’re just fair game
Like a pig walk to your slaughter
The heat here is so much hotter
And my views
won’t teeter totter or fluctuate
Step to me you just met your fate, and I’ll annihilate
With the skill of a Shogun assassin
Slicing and dicing precise with a passion
In any shape form or fashion
Bring it to my home,
Welcome to the danger zone
Cause your attitude’s the reason
The triggers keep squeezing
The hunt is on,
and it’s open season
It’s open season

My forefathers fought and died for this here
I’m stronger than your war of fear
Are we clear?
If you step in my ‘hood,
It’s understood — ha!
It’s open season

Another great Stuck Mojo video from the same album: “I’m American”

The album, Southern Born Killers, is available on the iTunes store.

Those whose musical tastes may run more along the lines of Pink Floyd’s The Wall should also check out Imagine Jihad by Weapon of Musical Defense — another very admirable musical effort to shine some daylight on an insufficiently widely understood ideology of hatred, domination, repression, and general 7th-century backwardness. Not as directly hard-hitting as “Open Season”, perhaps, but lyrically more in-depth.

"A Universal Doctrine of Women's Rights"

2009-03-25T06:18:00.001-07:00

Excellent article by Phyllis Chesler and Marcia Pappas at PJM:

It is time for feminists, both women and men, of all faiths, and of no faith, to stand together for a woman’s right not to be murdered in the name of family honor. Indeed, we welcome men and women of all faiths, including Islam, to stand with us against female genital mutilation/castration, forced veiling, child marriage, arranged marriage, polygamy, and “honorcide,” and in favor of a woman’s right to live as a westerner in the West without being threatened and beaten for refusing to wear hijab, wanting to have non-Muslim friends, wear makeup, attend college, drive her own car, or end an abusive marriage. Muslim and Sikh women have been honor murdered in North America for all these alleged crimes against their religion and their culture.

Read the whole thing.

"The Lost Generation"

2009-03-18T08:17:00.001-07:00

I have a bad habit of responding to e-mails that I should probably just let slide, as I did again yesterday when this YouTube video was enthusiastically recommended by a relative as “brilliant”. Below is my [diplomatic but fairly direct] reply. Is it just me, or does the tone of this thing bother anyone else?

Thought-provoking video!

I like the clever trick of reversing the words, but it’s hard for me to know what to make of the content, since it seems deeply cynical about the way things are now, and the priorities it appears to disparage are in many ways my own. Both work, as a means of achieving and striving to advance one’s art, and family life are important to me, in balance. Do I have to choose only one? (Interesting that the narrator’s voice sounds female; I wonder, would some object to the seeming implication that she should choose family life over work as the approved-of right thing?) Further, does choosing to focus my considerable efforts on my own life’s aspirations and my family’s well-being and happiness, instead of in some public sector endeavor (is that the implication of “changing the world”?), really make me “apathetic” and “lethargic”? I do not feel “lost” at all, but very much in my element doing exactly what I want and need to be doing, and what is also most likely to contribute something useful to the world.

Money isn’t the most important thing, but it’s a useful means of exchange, and a seemingly indispensible means to an end of achieving the life one wants. Maybe put differently, it certainly isn’t the most important thing … until one doesn’t have enough of it — then it can of course become painfully important. Family comes before money for money’s sake, to be sure, but it would hard to raise a family and realize one’s hopes for them without some measure of it.

I also think we can become better caretakers of the planet without having to beat ourselves up excessively over the things we do and the resources we use to do them. (Seems almost like the ideas of original sin, guilt, and the need to atone for our perceived offenses are deeply embedded in the human mind, even when not expressed in a religious context?) I like the aspiration to do things better and more wisely and efficiently, but that kind of gloomy approach always bothers me.

I do generally agree, and have said so before myself, that many of the essential ingredients of true happiness come from within. Maybe that is the key take-home point that I’m missing in getting hung up on all the rest leading up to it? If nothing else, hearing another’s perspective articulated can help to clarify things one takes for granted about one’s own. Thanks for the interesting video!

I think there’s more troublesome stuff in this that I missed commenting on too. The implication of “work”, for example, seems to be of something that takes unreasonably from one without giving back, rather than being an opportunity to pursue genuinely worthwhile goals and ambitions that produce reward (monetary, spiritual, and in my field technological) for yourself and others.

Guess I’m just glad I’m nowhere near that cynical?

Update: I just noticed that the creator of this clip is apparently still in college, so presumably hasn’t experienced having a career of any kind yet, let alone a fulfilling one. Maybe that explains the focus on money issues instead of achievement and fulfillment?

Jonah Goldberg: Obama's Fear Mongering

2009-03-11T00:08:00.001-07:00

Jonah Goldberg on NRO:

“Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times right after the election. “They are opportunities to do big things.” Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience at the European Parliament, “Never waste a good crisis.” Then President Obama explained in his Saturday radio and Internet address that there is “great opportunity in the midst of” the “great crisis” befalling America.

…

…now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting — boasting! — that they want to exploit a national emergency to further their preexisting agenda, and there’s no scandal. No one even calls it a gaffe. No, they call it leadership.

It’s not leadership. It’s fear mongering.

Franklin Roosevelt said that all we have to fear is fear itself. Now, Barack Obama tacitly admits that all he has to fear is the loss of fear itself.

In other realms of life, exploiting a crisis for your own purposes is an outrage. If a business uses a hurricane warning to price-gouge on vital supplies, it is a crime. When a liberal administration does it, it’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity.

Read the whole, brief article.

Hat tip: txdubp

It's Official: I'm a Dad!

2009-03-10T23:21:00.001-07:00

A bit of very important good news to impart, for anyone reading my blog who hasn’t also been following me on Twitter: I recently became a father!

Two weeks ago, my wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Mom and son are both doing very well, and we are delighting in the incredible and wonderful experience of becoming parents to an adorable tiny new person. There have been plenty of half-sleepless nights of crying and comforting and feeding and diaper-changing since, but just being in the company of the amazing little guy has made it all worthwhile.

Posting here is likely to be less frequent than usual for a while, due to my newfound and greatly enjoyed duties of fatherhood taking precedence, but I fully intend to continue this project when I find time. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to post daily on Twitter, where I can always be found. (If you haven’t tried Twitter yet, I highly recommend giving it a whirl — I’ve been greatly enjoying both the medium and the great many new and interesting friends I’ve made there!)

Sincere thanks for the many kind wishes people have sent via Twitter and e-mail! I greatly appreciate the thoughtful notes, and am very happy to be able to share the joy of becoming a new parent!

Phyllis Chesler: President Obama Believes He Can Charm the Barbarians

2009-02-12T23:23:00.001-08:00

Another great Chesler article at PJM:

Western liberals — and in the past I have been a very good one — still refuse to describe any culture other than their own as “barbaric” lest they be maligned as “racists.” Now, America’s first (half) African-American president, whose first order of business was to reach out to the Muslim world on Al-Arabiya, has said he will actively negotiate with the Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Saudis.

I wish him well. But I also fear for him and hope he reads what I have to say.

He must understand that he will be dealing with barbarians. Like all good liberals, he may not understand what that means. But what word other than “barbaric” describes the systematic incitement to violence that takes place in mosques and on television and which has led to mob rampages and episodes of “wilding” against Muslim girls and women who are group-groped, gang raped, kidnapped into sexual slavery, set on fire, buried alive, blinded by acid for daring to go to school, work as a newscaster, a hairdresser, or for a foreign company, refuse to wear a shroud, or choose to marry someone of their own choice. Few Muslim clerics and even fewer fabled Muslim “moderates” have loudly and perilously condemned such behavior towards their sisters–or towards Christians, Jews, and other infidels who routinely fall prey to such mobs.

President Obama is in favor of women’s rights as is his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. How in God’s name do they think they can persuade barbarians who behave in such ways to change their behaviors?

…

The western liberal media is not so much reluctant as it is terrified to further offend the rampaging Muslims whose religion is, presumably, one of peace. But not telling the truth, keeping one’s head deep in the sand, does not abolish the barbarism. It only makes it more difficult for us to name it and to defend ourselves against it.

…

“Barbarism” is not only a mob or youth-gang phenomena. It defines the very nature of Muslim religious law.

For example, on February 11, 2009, a Saudi judge ordered that a young woman who was gang raped and impregnated be imprisoned for one year. He also ordered that she be given 100 lashes after she gives birth, (which is often a death sentence), because she talked with and followed a man who was not her relative and who turned out to have planned the attack.

Read the whole thing.

Former Liberal Eli Bernstein Says Goodbye to President Bush

2009-02-02T20:19:00.001-08:00

At PJM: Former Liberal Eli Bernstein says goodbye to President Bush. A short but great article, well worth reading in full.

I didn’t always like George.

There was a time I thought of him as a stupid stooge, a man undeserving of power. There was a time I thought he had shattered America’s greatest asset — its democracy.

I had followed every twist and turn in that infamous ballot count, read all the relevant legal proceedings, and felt personally wronged when on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the man I voted for. I was so incensed by what I saw as an appointment against the will of the people that I inquired about rescinding my U.S. citizenship. Thankfully, I never followed through.

It was nine months later that I felt American again, and a proud one at that.

As I watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center, I realized the world had changed forever; that a dark new reality has set in; that the world my children will grow up in will not be the world of my childhood.

I understood this in seconds and so did George, my old foe. Some have still to grasp this.

On that day, George grew into his role as leader of the free world. Hanging chads no longer mattered when smoke filled the skies of Manhattan. A man not known for his words was saying exactly what I needed to hear. He spoke on that fateful day:

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.

…

As a former liberal, I had to get used to living with George’s moral clarity, a world of black and white, good and evil, Cowboys and Indians. But then I realized, even black and white has its place on a full color spectrum. There is a time and place for monochrome. I also realized that the alternate view, proposed by the liberal camp, was even more limiting in its spectrum. Unlike George, their world was painted a single shade of murky grey, a world where perpetrator and victim were morally equaled. This alternate view suggested that America had brought September 11 upon itself and should see itself as its own aggressor and its aggressor as its victim. In this topsy-turvy weltanschauung, old allies and long held values should be abandoned for the sake of expediency. It is the same logic that blames the rape victim for her ordeal: she should have never worn that mini skirt in the first place.

George recognized that the problem was more fundamental than America’s mini skirt; that Osama and the 9/11 crew had little grievance about U.S. policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict but were rather fiercely opposed to the spread of secular thought in the Middle East; that the best way of beating them was to do just that, spread democracy in the region, by whatever means necessary. A government by the people and for the people has no interest in perpetuating ongoing conflict. …

…

The Iraqi elections proved that the unspoken notion of non-interventionalists that Arabs are (a) incapable or (b) undeserving of democracy was indeed a fallacy. It took a man of black and white to rid the world of this grey notion. The premise of basic human rights is set on universal principles that apply to all people at all times at all places — an absolutist notion. The relativist approach that opposes the imposition of democracy has pushed human rights championship away from their camp to the political right.

…

As George said back in March 2005, “the trend is clear. In the Middle East and throughout the world, freedom is on the march.” His ally John Howard backed this view up when he stated that “these things wouldn’t have been thought remotely possible a year ago and I have no doubt that … one of the reasons … was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.” Even old foes like Walid Jumblatt, the leftist Lebanese Druze leader, shared the view:

I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.

The Berlin Wall has fallen once again while your news reporters were looking the other way, counting body bags in Iraq and actively embroiling themselves in partisan politics.

And so I bid farewell to the man who sacrificed his legacy to protect America’s greatest asset, freedom and democracy. Ironically, he had become the defender of the asset I had once accused him of robbing.

Rush: Something for Nothing

2009-01-28T23:43:00.001-08:00

This is the final post in a series of six, in which I’m lyricblogging the 1976 Rush album 2112. To start at the beginning, see the post that started it all here.

“Something for Nothing” is the gem and culmination of 2112, the part I’ve been most eager to get to — a song I can listen to again and again, and a parting bit of imparted wisdom that sticks deep in your mind where it belongs.

Neil Peart (Rush’s peerless drummer and primary lyricist) is well known for having drawn inspiration from Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” philosophy, and he has surely produced no more direct expression of that influence than in “Something for Nothing”, which is both a wake-up call to the dreamer who has yet to back his plans up with committed and decisive action, and a fierce defense of the individual’s right to take pride in and enjoy profit from his own hard-won achievements.

“Something for Nothing” is a worthy anthem to rouse you to action when you crawl reluctantly out of bed in the morning, or to keep in your head through late night entrepreneurial labors of love when exhaustion might drive others to their comfortable beds. Its bold, ringing declaration has surely changed my life for the better, and I hope it will do the same for others.

Something for Nothing

Waiting for the winds of change
To sweep the clouds away
Waiting for the rainbow’s end
To cast its gold your way
Countless ways
You pass the days

Waiting for someone to call
And turn your world around
Looking for an answer to
The question you have found
Looking for
An open door

You don’t get something for nothing
You can’t have freedom for free
You won’t get wise with the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dream might be

What you own is your own kingdom
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power
What you live is your own story
In your head is the answer
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor
And the beat of your own song

You don’t get something for nothing
You can’t have freedom for free
You won’t get wise with the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dream might be

Previous: Tears

2112 — The Complete Album

Rush: Tears

2009-01-28T23:06:00.001-08:00

This is the fifth post in a series of six, in which I’m lyricblogging the 1976 Rush album 2112. To start at the beginning, see the post that started it all here.

“Tears” is where the album gets philosophically interesting to me again, as its longing, reflective lyrics seem to pose a profound question about the value of compassion and its limits.

“What would touch me deeper?”, the song asks, “Tears that fall from eyes that only cry?” Tears draw our natural sympathy, but their meaning is diluted when coming from someone for whom we know they flow frequently and freely.

“Would it touch you deeper, than tears that fall from eyes that know why?” Whose tears carry the greater sorrow, or should be ascribed the greater gravity? Those of the ignorant and consequently helpless, or the more reservedly given tears of one who sees and understands the world through the lens of reason, and is moved by a deeper understanding of its workings and flaws?

Tears

All of the seasons and all of the days
All of the reasons why I’ve felt this way
So long…
So long

Then lost in that feeling I looked in your eyes
I noticed emotion and that you had cried
For me,
I can see

What would touch me deeper…
Tears that fall from eyes that only cry?
Would it touch you deeper
Than tears that fall from eyes that know why?

A lifetime of questions, tears on your cheek
I tasted the answers and my body was weak
For you,
The truth.

What would touch me deeper…
Tears that fall from eyes that only cry?
Would it touch you deeper
Than tears that fall from eyes that know why?

Previous: Lessons | Next: Something for Nothing

2112 — The Complete Album

Rush: Lessons

2009-01-28T22:43:00.001-08:00

This is the fourth post in a series of six, in which I’m lyricblogging the 1976 Rush album 2112. To start at the beginning, see the post that started it all here.

“Lessons” picks up the mood with an upbeat, rambling riff and largely optimistic lyrics to match. The impression I get is of a joyous homecoming, as might be experienced by the guitar-discovering protagonist of 2112 in encountering the world he had only dreamt of, or perhaps by members of the Elder Race, as they returned to reclaim their home planet. The choruses in between the upbeat bits evoke the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, protesting that their demands of conformity to The Plan have gone unheeded. Their reprimands appear to be in vain, as the song ends on an upswing, fading off merrily over the horizon.

Lessons

Sweet memories
Flashing very quickly by
Reminding me
And giving me a reason why
I know that
My goal is more than a thought
I’ll be there
When I teach
What I’ve been taught
And I’ve been taught…

You know we’ve told you before
But you didn’t hear us then
So you still question why
No! You didn’t listen again!

You didn’t listen again!

Sweet memories
I never thought it would be like this
Reminding me
Just how close I came to missing
I know that
This is the way for me to go
You’ll be there
When you know what I know
And I know…

You know we’ve told you before
But you didn’t hear us then
So you still question why
No! You didn’t listen again!

You didn’t listen again!

Previous: The Twilight Zone | Next: Tears

2112 — The Complete Album

Rush: The Twilight Zone

2009-01-28T22:16:00.001-08:00

This is the third post in a series of six, in which I’m lyricblogging the 1976 Rush album 2112. To start at the beginning, see the post that started it all here.

As with “A Passage to Bangkok” I’m letting the lyrics to this moody intermediate track stand on their own. The most interesting stuff to analyze will be coming up shortly, as we get to the last few tracks on the album.

The Twilight Zone

A pleasant faced man steps up to greet you
He smiles and says he’s pleased to meet you
Beneath his hat the strangeness lies
Take it off, he’s got three eyes
Truth is false and logic lost
Now the fourth dimension is crossed

You have entered the twilight zone
Beyond this world strange things are known
Use the key, unlock the door
See what your fate might have in store
Come explore your dreams’ creation
Enter this world of imagination

You wake up lost in an empty town
Wondering why no one else is around
Look up to see a giant boy
You’ve just become his brand new toy
No escape, no place to hide
Here where time and space collide

You have entered the twilight zone
Beyond this world strange things are known
Use the key, unlock the door
See what your fate might have in store
Come explore your dreams’ creation
Enter this world of imagination

Previous: A Passage to Bangkok | Next: Lessons

2112 — The Complete Album

Geert Wilders to be Prosecuted for Fitna

2009-01-22T11:34:00.001-08:00

When telling unpleasant truths is “inciting hatred”: Dutch politician Geert Wilders is set to be prosecuted for comments made in speeches and in his anti-Islam film “Fitna”

The charges stem partly from a 15-minute film Wilders released online last March, “Fitna,” which features disturbing images of terrorist acts superimposed over verses from the Quran to paint Islam as a threat to Western society.

The movie drew complaints from the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as concern from the United States, which warned it could spark riots.

The film opens with a controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, followed by translated portions of Islam’s holy book, the Quran. The passages are interspersed with graphic images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States juxtaposed with audio from 9-1-1 calls made by the victims trapped inside the World Trade Center in New York.

The video includes images of other terror attacks; bloodied victims; beheadings of hostages; executions of women in hijab, the traditional full-body covering; and footage, with subtitles, of Islamic leaders preaching inflammatory sermons against Jews and Christians.

The film concludes with scrolling messages reading in part: “The government insists that you respect Islam, but Islam has no respect for you” and “In 1945, Nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989, communism was defeated in Europe. Now the Islamic ideology has to be defeated.”

Wilders has been outspoken in his criticism of Islam and called the religion a threat to the world.

“It’s not a provocation, but the harsh reality and a political conclusion,” Wilders said of the film when it was released last year.

Wilders’ 16-minute film “Fitna” can be viewed on Google Video, and is also posted on Hot Air. Have a look and see for yourself. And think about it in the context of the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh over “Submission”, a film criticizing Islam’s treatment of women. Van Gogh’s associate Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had to take refuge in the United States following threats on her own life.

Should the kind of speech contained in “Fitna”, which largely presents the West’s Jihadist enemies in their own words and actions, really be repressed because it might upset some people? If so, why the apparent double standard when it comes to insistence on expressive freedom in the Western art world, which has been unrelenting in its criticism of Western and particularly U.S. actions, yet from which we’ve heard nary a peep regarding radical Islam’s deeply anti-liberal, anti-feminist, anti-semitic, anti-civilizational bent? (As Glenn Reynolds aptly put it: “They do this because they know we won’t behead them. Such is the bravery of artists.”)

Eugene Volokh posted a brief review of “Fitna” when the film first appeared last March (hat tip: Instapundit):

This is of course a rhetorical work, not an academic inquiry, and it’s trying to stir people emotionally. But I didn’t see much of hyperbole or gratuitious insults. Wilders is arguing against an important and dangerous ideological movement; my sense is that his approach is well within bounds of legitimate criticism.

So I think this is a significant contribution to the ideological debate, and it seems to me that we — and especially Wilders’ fellow Dutch, to whom he is speaking most specifically — should take it seriously, naturally together with whatever responses might come out.

Fore more background on Wilders, see this fine WSJ article.

More posts about “Fitna” from last March:

Dr. Sanity: A Sobering Reality
Instapundit: LESSON: If you don’t like a film, threaten violence.
Eugene Volokh: LiveLeak Brings Back Fitna
Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch: All right, where is the worldwide Muslim indignation over this film?

Update: Robert Spencer has a post about Wilders’ prosecution at JihadWatch.

Rush: A Passage to Bangkok

2009-01-20T20:28:00.001-08:00

This is the second post in a series of six, in which I’m lyricblogging the 1976 Rush album 2112. To start at the beginning, see the post that started it all yesterday here.

I had a lot to write about the album’s title track, “2112”, which is quite long and dense with interesting material, and seemed in need of detailed description/explanation. For this second track, “A Passage to Bangkok” (which, it may relieve you to learn, is only three and a half minutes long) and some others, I’ll largely just post the lyrics — in no small part because the song’s role in the overall story is still a bit of an enigma to me.

My best guess so far is that it describes the return to Earth of the “Elder Race of Man” mentioned in the title track — which, interestingly, would seem to imply that the ominous chant of “We have assumed control” that’s repeated at the end of the previous track is not a malevolent declaration by the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, but a proclamation by the Elder Race that they’ve arrived “to (re)claim the home where they belong”. Having returned home after a long exile, they travel the planet to survey all the old familiar places.

That’s just a guess though. This stuff is pretty out there. Rarely can Rush be accused of unimaginative lyrics…

A Passage to Bangkok

Our first stop is in Bogota
To check Columbian fields
The natives smile and pass along
A sample of their yield
Sweet Jamaican pipe dreams
Golden Acapulco nights
Then Morocco, and the East,
Fly by morning light

We’re on the train to Bangkok
Aboard the Thailand Express
We’ll hit the stops along the way
We only stop for the best

Wreathed in smoke in Lebanon
We burn the midnight oil
The fragrance of Afghanistan
Rewards a long day’s toil
Pulling into Katmandu
Smoke rings fill the air
Perfumed by a Nepal night
The Express gets you there

We’re on the train to Bangkok
Aboard the Thailand Express
We’ll hit the stops along the way
We only stop for the best

More to come…

Previous: 2112 | Next: The Twilight Zone

2112 — The Complete Album

Andy Levy's "To Don't" List for the Right

2009-01-20T20:25:00.001-08:00

Another excellent article at Big Hollywood. Good and timely advice.

Rush: 2112

2009-01-20T01:00:00.001-08:00

An unusual sort of offering, perhaps — presented for your consideration in observance of Inauguration 2009:

This is the first post in a series, in which I’m planning to lyricblog the six tracks of the extraordinary 1976 Rush album 2112, one post per song. Writing about some of the music and song lyrics that have greatly affected my life and thinking is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while (I also have Rush’s excellent “A Farewell to Kings” and “Hemispheres” in my sights as future projects), and with the Changes that are imminent here in the U.S. I find the themes embodied in 2112 are especially on my mind. Rockstars who lay claim to defiant rebellion are legion, but to me, there is nothing more authentically rock ‘n roll than rebelling against statism in the way that this album succeeds in doing.

I’m hoping the results may be as interesting to others as the idea of the project has felt to me. If the amateur commentary I’ve presented here looks insufferably long and boring, however, please feel free to skip this series and just take it as an enthusiastic recommendation to have a listen to 2112 yourself. Among other places (without endorsing any particular vendor; just providing the links as a convenience), the album can be purchased on iTunes, as well as on Amazon as either an MP3 download or a physical CD (remember those?).

The published lyrics for 2112 include some backstory narrative that isn’t spoken or sung in the recording. I’ve decided to omit that text here and focus on the album as you’ll actually hear it. A search for Rush+2112+lyrics will turn up numerous sites that have the full published lyrics with the narrative text included.

I’ve given the album a lot of thought since first discovering it sometime around 2003, but my interpretation is certainly not the only one, or even necessarily consistent with the band’s intent. (I’m a fan as a listener, but haven’t read up on what the band or others had to say about 2112’s theme and meaning.) Have a listen and see what you think. Rush are in general known for song themes inspired by Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” philosophy, and 2112 is certainly a prime example of that.

OK, enough introductory rambling. With that, I invite you to brace for the ride and queue up the album’s title track: “2112”. At 20 minutes, this is a long one, but I promise it’s well worth the journey.

I. Overture

0:00 Ear-assailing yet delightfully campy electronic sounds (this is indeed the finest in 1970s progressive rock!) whirl in — oscillating, screeching, conjuring a sci-fi UFO landing. Perfectly synchronized drums, bass, and power chords pop in at 0:46, Rush’s trademark use of precise stops and starts, tempo changes, and free time already making their appearance. (By the way: Best. Drummer. Ever.)

Around 1:30 the band picks up into a galloping riff that brings to mind a charge of horses. Distant voices swirl in the background, then around 1:58 we get triumphant, anthemic guitar work over sustained chords. 2:30 brings the Temples of Syrinx theme, then at 3:04 a wailing, troubled guitar solo, chock full o’ feeling. At 3:33 a switch to yet another whole new riff. (Rush packs more good hooks into this one song than many bands do into an entire album.) Then at 4:07 a reference to the famous finale melody of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

At 4:16, crashes of synchronized drums, bass, and guitar over explosions, fading away as if we were at 2112’s own finale already … but then at 4:25 come the first of the lyrics (yes, believe it or not there really are lyrics to this song!) — a gentle, phased-guitar-accompanied:

And the meek shall inherit the earth…

II. Temples of Syrinx

4:34 The tempo picks up to a trot again, and we’re greeted by the shrill chorus of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx: ostensibly benevolent engineers of the future utopia of 2112 — omnipotent keepers of the culture and its art — shrieking the justification for their all-encompassing rule:

We’ve taken care of everything
The words you hear, the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes.
It’s one for all and all for one
We work together, common sons
Never need to wonder how or why.

We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls.

Look around at this world we’ve made
Equality our stock in trade
Come and join the Brotherhood of Man
Oh, what a nice, contented world
Let the banners be unfurled
Hold the Red Star proudly high at hand.

We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls.

6:35 Tight guitar+bass+drum strikes punctuate this declaration, then a bit of classical guitar fades the song out.

III. Discovery

6:46 The trickle of a waterfall fades in, mingling with the sound of a guitar being tuned. Not the usual polished stuff of a studio album, to be sure, but there’s a protagonist being introduced and a story being told here. A resident of the futureworld of Syrinx has found a dusty guitar behind a waterfall in a cave — an object that to him is completely foreign and mysterious in its purpose. As our hero handles the strange object, he discovers that it can be made to produce sounds, even music. (“How different it could be from the music of the Temples!” he proclaims in the liner notes. “I can’t wait to tell the priests about it!” — presaging a song passage soon to come.)

8:00 The tentative exploration gives way to melody, harmonics, chords as our friend learns to play (pretty quickly I might add, but we have to listen so who’s complaining). Then strumming and the beginnings of a contemplative song as our protagonist seems to start getting the hang of it:

What can this strange device be?
When I touch it, it gives forth a sound
It’s got wires that vibrate and give music
What can this thing be that I found?

8:49 The strumming picks up into a bright, upbeat riff that dances about with the joy of discovery, then slows reflectively again as he sings:

See how it sings like a sad heart
And joyously screams out its pain
Sounds that build high like a mountain
Or notes that fall gently like rain.

9:46 A hopeful new chord progression evolves, and with it a determination to tell others of his discovery:

I can’t wait to share this new wonder
The people will all see its light
Let them all make their own music!
The Priests praise my name on this night!

IV. Presentation

10:14 Heart wide open, expecting to be greeted by nothing but enthusiasm for his miraculous new find, the unsuspecting hero of our story makes his presentation before the Priests:

I know it’s most unusual
To come before you so
But I’ve found an ancient miracle
I thought that you should know
Listen to my music
And hear what it can do
There’s something here as strong as life
I know that it will reach you.

11:10 The Priests interrupt. Instead of showing interest, they dismiss his find outright in implacable unison:

Yes, we know, it’s nothing new
It’s just a waste of time
We have no need for ancient ways
Our world is doing fine
Another toy will help destroy
The elder race of Man
Forget about your silly whim
It doesn’t fit the plan.

11:47 Incredulous, our protagonist implores the Priests to reconsider:

I can’t believe you’re saying
These things just can’t be true
Our world could use this beauty
Just think what we might do.
Listen to my music
And hear what it can do
There’s something here as strong as life
I know that it will reach you.

12:23 His pleas are again rebuffed:

Don’t annoy us further!
We have our work to do.
Just think about the average
What use have they for you?
Another toy will help destroy
The elder race of Man
Forget about your silly whim
It doesn’t fit the Plan!

And with that, the Priests’ theme picks up into a wailing guitar solo over rapid bass and drum work. It’s clear that it’s pretty much Game Over for our friend’s helpful suggestion as far as the Priests are concerned.

V. Oracle: The Dream

13:57 Dreamy far-off phased guitar strums in, as our crestfallen young man reflects on this unexpected defeat:

I wandered home though the silent streets
And fell into a fitful sleep
Escape to realms beyond the night
Dream can’t you show me the light?

14:47 Cue more far out 70s prog.-rock synth work! Then triumphant chords as the wished-for dream arrives and changes everything, conjuring hope from despair:

I stand atop a spiral stair
An oracle confirms me there
He leads me on, light years away
Through astral nights, galactic days
I see the works of gifted hands
That grace this strange and wondrous land
I see the hand of man arise
With hungry mind and open eyes

They left our planets long ago
The elder race still learn and grow
Their power grows with purpose strong
To claim the home where they belong
Home to tear the Temples down…
Home to change!

VI. Soliloquy

16:00 This has got to be one of my favorite moments on the album. Our protagonist awakens from his dream, and seems to realize with both faint hope and resigned despair that the world he lives in is not the world he was meant for, the world that could be. The “sleep is still in my eyes” meme also lays the groundwork for the album’s finale and possible moral, in the final track “Something For Nothing” (which I’ll get to in a future post).

The sleep is still in my eyes
The dream is still in my head
I heave a sigh and sadly smile
And lie a while in bed
I wish that it might come to pass
Not fade like all my dreams…

Just think of what my life might be
In a world like I have seen!
I don’t think I can carry on
Carry on this cold and empty life

My spirits are low in the depths of despair
My lifeblood…
…spills over…

VII. The Grand Finale

18:19 Even in this moment of narrative despair, the band can’t seem to resist picking it up with more rockin’ riffs. Transitioning into the a struggling, neurotic, ultimately spiraling all-out cavalry charge, they end with a climax of climbing anthemic chords, feedback-charged soloing, and explosive noise as a malevolent-sounding voice rings out as if from the sky:

Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.

Indeed.

There is plenty that can be gleaned from or said about this unusual bit of epic rock-opera. Listening it today has left me with this thought:

The United States of America is Liberty’s natural and rightful home, friends. It’s time to make our own music, in preference to accepting the vision that is being handed to us in the name of our own good. We need to start planning and preparing for the day when we can leave our state of ideological exile, and return to claim the home where we belong.

Next: A Passage to Bangkok

2112 — The Complete Album

Andrew Breitbart's Pledge to Hollywood's Sunshine Patriots

2009-01-19T23:00:00.001-08:00

At Big Hollywood: Andrew Breitbart pledges to ridicule celebrities who refuse to recognize we are at war with people who want to kill them, too:

Many of the celebrities that were central to demonizing and making life impossible for President Bush for eight loathsome years NOW want to help with the heavy lifting of bringing America back together under President Barack Obama.

Witness Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s cavalcade of shiny, happy situational patriots appearing in a derivative public servitude video campaign: A “Presidential Pledge” to President Barack Obama.

…

Missing are pledges not to kiss the ring of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and other pledged enemies of America. Nor are there pledges not to make movies that glorify these tyrants. Nor are there pledges to take seriously that we are at war, will continue to be at war under President Obama and that our precious and under-appreciated military is fighting an avowed and evil enemy — so that, among other things, Hollywood can continue to make decadent crap that actually motivates our enemy to fight us harder!

…

God bless, President Obama. Even though I didn’t vote for him, and disagree with much of his agenda, he has my best wishes and all of my best efforts.

But that doesn’t mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism, petty complaining and conspiracy theory peddling from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. [See “Hollywood, Interrupted” — my book co-written with Mark Ebner — which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren’t found. The public behavior from Hollywood even then was almost uniformly deplorable.]

Conspiracy theories of America’s complicity in 9/11 dominated cocktail party discussions for eight tedious years. They couldn’t simply disagree with Bush. They had to ascribe evil to his motivations and make sure the whole world agreed on that flawed premise.

Yet, hating the president doesn’t mean one can’t still help out the country in a great time of need. But many went to foreign countries and demeaned it instead. Called those that disagreed with them rubes and hicks. The elitism of the celebrities against flyover country America could not have been more pronounced. They made a boat-load of movies that affirmed this narrow and patronizing world view.

And now they want us back.

We’re all Americans — NOW.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

And, while you’re visiting Big Hollywood, don’t miss this phenomenal article by TV writer and journalist Charles Winecoff, in which he recounts the trials of coming out of the Hollywood closet twice: first as a gay man in 1977, then again as a 9/11 Republican. It’s truly one of the best pieces I have read in a while, not to be missed. (Big thanks to Erick Brockway for pointing it out!)

Video: How Obama Got Elected...Interviews With Obama Voters

2009-01-17T06:34:00.001-08:00

Unbelievable … painful to watch … and frankly infuriating given the serious consequences for our country. A must-see video from www.HowObamaGotElected.com:

Obama's Likeness Burned in Tehran

2009-01-13T20:26:00.001-08:00

Thanks to @scooplarue at Conservative Exile for this story, which as I re-tweeted earlier today illuminates something that is vitally important for us to understand and internalize:

The Jihadists who harbor virulent hatred of the United States will continue to hate us so long as we exist, regardless of who we elect to the presidency.

Images of President-Elect Barack Obama — who has not yet taken office, and who ran for election on a platform as lacking in hostility to the interests of the Islamic world as I can imagine — are already being burned in Tehran.

See the article for the Reuters photo, and this brilliantly apropos observation:

I remember a great quote from a conservative thinker to leftist groups in the United States about the issue of Muslim rage:

“The reasons they hate your country have nothing to do with the reasons you hate your country.”

We need to understand this loud and clear, folks, or we are sunk. Despite what many continue to contend (owing to no small amount of projection, I’m sure), radical Islamists are not merely at war with the persona and policies of George W. Bush. Their fight is against the very existence and cultural values of Western Civilization, and no matter who we elect or how we modify our behavior short of completely abandoning this project in Liberty, they will not relent until the West is either destroyed or brought into Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission.

If you harbor any doubt about this, I highly recommend a perusal of JihadWatch.org, where Robert Spencer has over the years done a tremendous job of illuminating the motives and objectives of Jihadist radicals, which are very often clearly stated in their own words. (For another excellent site, see TheReligionOfPeace.com.)

My dear country, I implore you: Please wake up!

UPDATE 1/13: More pictures at the E3 Gazette.

Bill Whittle: "The Workshops of Identity"

2009-01-09T00:14:00.001-08:00

Breitbart’s new “Big Hollywood” site appears to be off to a strong start. — I’m still trying to catch up with the initial flood of interesting articles there!

I was positively delighted to see today that Bill Whittle has joined in the action and done what he does best: written another knock-it-out-of-the-park essay that focuses the mind, stirs the soul, and pins the tail on the proverbial donkey. Remixing some elements from his brilliant Silent America essays, Bill lays bare the great peril that I believe we now face as a civilization comprised of free men and women — in this, our darkest hour of cultural self-loathing. The piece is titled “The Workshops of Identity”. By all means go read it now.

Placing our own situation in the context of the many civilizations that have risen and fallen before, Bill gets quickly to distilling the essential lesson:

One thing in common these patterns bear: the rise slow, the fall seemingly precipitous, and in every case we find the loss of nerve and strength and will comes not from the bottom, not from the common people at all, but from the rulers, the philosophers, the most affluent and educated who, in their comfort and Narcissism, abandon duty for self-absorption and self-gratification and who in boredom or self-loathing decide to fling open the gates of the city to the barbarians beyond, while the common man still stands at the walls prepared to die for the people in his charge.

And that gem of expression, my friends, is as usual just the beginning for Bill.

If you like what you see, and haven’t had the pleasure of reading Bill’s prior essays, I can’t possibly recommend them highly enough. They’re available free on his site, Eject! Eject! Eject!, as well as in print. You might start with one of my personal favorites, “Trinity”. I guarantee Bill will not disappoint. (His web server, on the other hand, has a very bad habit with reporting text encodings. If you see junk characters where punctuation should be, switch your browser’s text encoding (“View” > “Text Encoding” in Safari) over to “Western (ISO Latin 1)”, and all should be legible.)

A sampling of the many occasions on which I’ve cited Bill’s excellent work in the past (far more than I had realized until I paused to compile this list):

Update 1/15: Thanks to Scoop LaRue for the link back from Conservative Exile!

"Big Hollywood" To Launch Tomorrow

2009-01-05T20:31:00.001-08:00

Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com is about to launch “Big Hollywood”, a website by, for, and about Hollywood’s politically conservative/libertarian minority.

FoxNews has the story (hat tip: chasrmartin and doctorlinguist): Hollywood Conservatives Encouraged to Come Out of the Closet:

A once-timid group of social outcasts is emerging from the shadows in Hollywood. If the past year is any indication, Tinseltown may have to get accustomed to the loud presence of a growing minority.

After years of silence, conservatives are coming out of the closet.

Andrew Breitbart, the conservative founder of Breitbart.com and author of “Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon,” is launching a Web site he hopes will help challenge the status quo in what he believes has been a one-party, left-tilting town. Set to debut on Jan. 6, “Big Hollywood” will be a place where center, right and libertarian-leaning celebrities and industry-insiders can weigh in on Hollywood politics, offer film, television and movie reviews, and have an open forum for political discussion.

“Our goal,” says Breitbart, who lives in Los Angeles, “is to create an atmosphere of tolerance — something that does not exist in this town.”

"Go back to the ovens", "We'll get you", "Nuke Israel"

2009-01-01T11:22:00.001-08:00

The protesters in their own words (hat tip: republicangal):

Notice that some of the protesters’ signs have been furnished by A.N.S.W.E.R. We’ve seen these folks before. They are not so much anti-war, as pro-war and on the side of anyone who opposes the U.S. and her allies.

In other news: Hamas legalizes crucifixion.

Obama: Building a Religion

2008-12-30T09:57:00.001-08:00

This is brilliantly done and disturbing all at once. Brought to you by cakesecret, who is requesting help persuading YouTube to remove the “may not be suitable for minors” flag from it.

Three Weeks of Being a Twit

2008-12-29T11:41:00.001-08:00

Hard to believe it’s been nearly three weeks already since I started using Twitter (my first Twitter post is here)! I think I was pretty well hooked by Day 2, and now I don’t care to imagine life without Twitter.

Being able to read and post tweets on the go from my iPhone is what has really made it work, as life offers plenty of opportunities for a quick, 120-character-or-less note that aren’t conducive time-wise to writing substantial blog posts (which the entry method on the iPhone isn’t really well suited for anyway). I definitely engage with the “Twittersphere” much more via iPhone than via a web browser on the desktop/laptop. So far I’ve been using “Twitterific”, and it’s been great, though I’ve noticed there are a few other highly-rated iPhone Twitter clients that are probably worth a look. Twitterific’s ability to post pictures, current location coordinates (approximate in my case, since I have a first-gen iPhone), and URLs from Safari are very nifty, and have been lots of fun to use so far.

In terms of the Twitter community/experience, it’s been very interesting to see the variety of ways in which others use Twitter, and to start to figure out how I want to use it. The founding idea of posting occasional quick notes about “what you’re doing now” is appealing, and to some limited extent I’ve been sticking to that so far. Others have taken their use beyond that starting point, using Twitter more to chat with other users (or “Twits”, if you prefer), or as a short-form blog of sorts. Some individuals’ feeds consist mainly of links to news articles, and there are also news organizations such as the WSJ, CNN, and BBC that offer their headlines and story links in Twitter form. I followed Instapundit via Twitter for a short while, but found that my previous habit of reading RSS/Atom feeds via NetNewsWire works much better for keeping up with Glenn’s stream and other blogs/news feeds. There have been other Twitter-isms to discover such as “#tcot”, the search hashtag for Top Conservatives on Twitter. I haven’t yet figured out whether or how deeply I want to participate in that, but the #tcot list has already helped me find a number of interesting users to follow. So far, I’ve mainly been inclined to follow people with similar interests who post more everyday “what I’m up to” tweets, or a combination of that and pointers to interesting news and such. I get a good dose of news and editorials already via the blogs and sites I follow, and find what I really enjoy in Twitter is the opportunity to see what others like me do or find interesting in their day-to-day lives. There are plenty of other potential uses inherent in the Twitter format though, and maybe I will find myself making more use of them as time goes by.

Meanwhile: You can continue to find me here at fearlessdream.blogspot.com, as well as on Twitter at twitter.com/kulak76 See you all out there!

The Dilemmas of a Day Off

2008-12-29T09:53:00.001-08:00

It’s the start of a wide-open day off where I have nothing previously planned, and as usual my mind is racing a bit with a completely infeasible number of ideas for things I might do. Picture the bits of debris whirling around in the Wizard of Oz twister; it feels a bit like that.

You might think a bit of simple rest and relaxation would be high on the list, and in a very real sense it is (I might even get myself to sit long enough to watch a movie), but in general I need something for my noggin to engage with. Creative projects of various kinds, and even simple “getting my life un-cluttered so I can feel relaxed and focus the next time I sit down to a creative project” projects are things I always wish I had more time for, and they come to mind on those rare occasions when the time actually becomes available.

The danger with a day like today is always that I’ll try to do a bit of several things here and there, and then wonder in the end, as I usually end up doing, what I actually did or where the day went. So today I’m thinking I’ll try to avoid the possibly inevitable, and start the day by prioritizing and choosing one or maybe a very few things to try to do or accomplish.

This would be the time when I fire up Things on my Mac or iPhone, and try to skim the cream off my To Do list. (Brief product endorsement here: I love Things, and rely on it as the place where I dump all the miscellaneous “I should maybe…” thoughts that would otherwise clutter and worry my overactive mind. I’ve become a big fan of “ubiquitous capture”, for the stuff that’s worth capturing at least.)

Thoughts for today: catch up on my blog/news reading (I’m days behind, and I miss it!), do some of the blog writing I’ve been wanting to get to (lots of ideas saved up, but never the time), go through our pictures from this weekend’s Big Sur / Pacific Grove / Monterey trip and post some, work on finishing one of the 2-3 books I tend to be in the middle of reading at any given time (right now it’s “An Innocent at Polebrook” and “Atlas Shrugged”, and I’m looking to start a book on getting a pilot’s license that I got for Christmas), organize the virtual mess of project files on the home computer that I never tend to since I spend my days in front of the work computer, do the same for my paper files (not so much the boring bills-and-receipts stuff, but the project folders where I’ve collected ideas and notes over the years), work on the office redecorating project we started a couple months ago (the walls are bare, and pictures need hanging), get a voltmeter so I can figure out whether the cordless drill needs a new battery or a new charger, and then get what the drill needs so I can run the wires for the surround speakers under the house to the back of the living room, fire up GarageBand for a little guitar or keyboard practice, etc. And those are just the things I’d like to do for fun. I’ve also got our baby shower to help plan, and probably a variety of other things that need doing around the house.

Of course, all this “meta” stuff of taking the time to blog about what I might do is taking time away from, well, what I might do… The hope is that sitting and taking a moment to reflect on the possibilities before launching right into anything might help me to make better decisions about how I’ll spend my day. Whether this pans out remains to be seen, but I’m feeling good about it so far. Pause to take a look around from 30,000 ft. before committing to a destination — yeah, that’s it. If nothing else, I will have written at least one blog post today, and even if it’s devoid of interesting content that somehow still feels good.

Happy vacation, to those who are on one! — May you have a much easier time simply enjoying it than I do!

Tied Up Like a Christmas Present

2008-12-16T23:43:00.001-08:00

Between pre-holiday work deadlines and the characteristic frenzy of activities (some authentically delightful, others perhaps less so) that makes the holidays so great, it’s likely to continue to be quiet here for at least another week. I very much look forward to posting more when I can; there’s a lot that I still want to get around to writing about. Meanwhile, you can find me on Twitter, where I hope to continue to manage at least a few potentially interesting thoughts a day.

Happy Holidays, all, and thanks for stopping by!

On Twitter as "kulak76"

2008-12-11T21:39:00.001-08:00

A bit late to the party, perhaps, but I’ve created a Twitter account. My feed, for any who may be interested in taking a peek or following it, is at http://twitter.com/kulak76

I’m thinking I’ll give Twitter a serious try for at least a good month or so — posting at least one “tweet” a day (if not a few more) about what I’m up to or what’s on my mind as I go about the business of life. I’ll continue blogging here as usual when I find the time and inclination to point out interesting articles, or to write more substantive stuff, but I’m intrigued by the idea of supplementing blogging with a more immediate way to toss out casual thoughts, and maybe even (with any luck?) connect more effectively with others who have similar interests.

My blog-reading habit, together with the occasional posting I do here, has provided a priceless gateway to deeper thinking about issues that weigh on my mind, as well as a certain much-appreciated sense of loose-knit community and just plain “not-alone-ness”, in discovering that there are others who share similar feelings and concerns. I’d hate to have to life life without a place to write about such things, or without my periodic visits to the neighborhoods of the blogosphere that I frequent. But even during times when I’m keeping up relatively well with all of that, I feel a remaining distance at the end of the day between me and others of my kind. Can tweeting help close that gap a bit? It will be interesting to see. I imagine much will depend on finding some intersection between the Twitter-sphere and people I’ve started to get to know in glorious Blog-ville (since blithering alone into a vacuum can only hold its interest for so long — even for me), and/or discovering other interesting feeds to follow.

One intriguing aspect of the Twitter format is that gathering together a group of people who follow one another’s Twitter feeds is a bit like creating a long-lived, slow-motion/casual-turnaround chatroom of sorts. The participants don’t all have to be online at the same time, which could otherwise present a problem for those in different time zones (the reason I’ve been such a stranger at The Chase Lounge, though I don’t mean to be). You can show up now and again, catch up on what others are up to, post, and either stay logged in for a bit of back-and-forth if others are online at the same time, or come back later without missing the conversation.

Anyhow … all the above is probably way too much thinking for something meant to be fun and casual. Consider this an invitation to follow my Twitter feed if the fancy strikes you.

Don’t have a Twitter account? Create one; they’re free! (No, I don’t work for Twitter, and I have no part whatsoever in the Vast Twitter Conspiracy, no matter what anyone tells you to the contrary. I have merely drunk the Kool Aid flavor of the month and found it satisfactory.)

Incidentally, I’ve been using the Iconfactory’s excellent “Twitterific” app on my iPhone to read and post, and am liking it greatly so far.

The free version does just about everything that the ad-free, theme-enhanced $9.99 version does, but I expect I’ll soon move up to being a paying customer if I continue to find Twitterific useful. One of its nifty features is a Javascript bookmarklet that sends the URL of any page you’re looking at in Safari to Twitterific for inclusion in a tweet. (Twitter then replaces it with a space-saving TinyURL.) Posting pictures is fully supported too (from your existing photo library, or taken on-the-fly). I’ve taken much advantage of both of these features already.

OK … ‘Nuff said. Everybody in the pool! (What’s that? I’m the last one to find the pool? Heh.)

Robert Spencer at His Best, on David Horowitz TV

2008-12-09T20:34:00.001-08:00

More first-rate stuff on the “David Horowitz TV” video podcast: Robert Spencer, thoughtful expositor of radical Islamist ideology and chief poster at Jihad Watch, gives an excellent talk on the machinations of “stealth Jihad”. Don’t miss Spencer’s additional insightful remarks in the Q&A video that follows.

View the talk here, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes to get this and other episodes in the series.

Especially if you haven’t had the opportunity to see Robert Spencer in action before, this is an excellent introduction to his style, his perspective, and what he does.

Another Call for World Government

2008-12-09T07:02:00.001-08:00

Via Drudge: Gideon Rachman in the London Financial Times (emphasis mine):

Even in the EU – the heartland of law-based international government – the idea remains unpopular. The EU has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for “ever closer union” have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic.

And yet, the author seems nonetheless to favor the idea, both throughout the article and in his closing:

The world’s most pressing political problems may indeed be international in nature, but the average citizen’s political identity remains stubbornly local. Until somebody cracks this problem, that plan for world government may have to stay locked away in a safe at the UN.

Pesky, provincial voters! Where is their vision? Clearly there’s a need for someone to “crack this problem”. The will of the unwashed masses can’t possibly be allowed to stand in the way of global progress.

The most frightening thing about the idea of a single world government is precisely what gives it such appeal to those who would see themselves in positions of power within it: There is no escape (short of a rocket ride to an as-yet-nonexistent off-Earth colony, and who knows even then what the governing arrangement with the mother planet will be?). Don’t like the regulatory climate, taxation scheme, or laws abridging free speech or free exercise of religion where you are? Tough. That’s the way it will be, everywhere.

More Brilliance from Victor Davis Hanson

2008-11-28T13:47:00.001-08:00

On the David Horowitz TV video podcast: Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 presidential election, challenges facing the Obama administration, and history’s lessons.

Hanson’s “Restoration Weekend” lunch keynote, and the Q&A session that followed, are both packed with good discussion and well worth watching. Both videos can be viewed online here. Or, do what I did and get the latest episodes via the iTunes podcast feed.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

2008-11-28T13:20:00.001-08:00

…of others — still just as relevant the day after:

Victor Davis Hanson: “Some Random Politically-incorrect Reasons to Be Optimistic on Thanksgiving Day”. (Appreciation of dedicated pilots and the wonder of air travel hardly seems “un-PC”, but I suppose his other points qualify.)

Bill Whittle celebrates the life of a friend recently lost.

Neo recalls a Thanksgiving spent alone, in “Thanks for the burger, but no thanks”. (I’ve been there!)

Terror Attacks in Mumbai

2008-11-27T13:01:00.001-08:00

A horrific night/day in India’s financial capital, and it’s apparently still ongoing. Most reports thus far estimate between 100 and 125 killed, and approximately 300 wounded, after gunmen opened fire and lobbed grenades at six or seven sites around the city. Responsibility for the attacks has yet to be clearly established, though some say this attack on soft targets has the hallmarks of an al Qaeda operation. Reports claim that in addition to the 14 police officers and 80 Indian nationals killed, the gunmen were questioning people and targeting holders of British and American passports. Hostages were taken; some released or escaped, some may still be held. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel is ablaze and under seige.

A selection of current reports via Drudge:

BBC: Indian PM vows action on attacks

Breitbart: 14TH LD: 125 dead, more than 300 wounded in Mumbai terror attacks

Times Online: Foreigners targeted in co-ordinated Bombay attacks

Sky News: Mumbai Hotel Terror Attacks: Scores Killed In Violence Against Foreigners By Islamist Militants

Via Instapundit: a roundup at Barcepundit, and comments from Ann Althouse.

When giving becomes a crime

2008-11-26T09:26:00.001-08:00

Roger Kimball on a ridicule-worthy legal absurdity in Strasburg, Illinois:

On one side you have these preposterous petty tyrants (in the case of IDOL, they’re called “conciliators”–how George Orwell would have like that!) armed with the power of the state, on the other side you have individuals and local communities endeavoring to stand on their own two feet and live their lives without “bailouts” and unmolested by state interference.

But such autonomy is the one thing these miniature despots can’t abide. They don’t want people to be independent. They don’t want local communities to take care of their own needs. They want to meddle. They want to be the sole source of sustenance and labor–and they want to do it, of course, on their own terms, enforcing their own requirements for who gets to work, when, under what conditions, and how much they are paid. This, as Friedrich Hayek observed, is the road to serfdom.

"Party of Privilege"

2008-11-25T20:53:00.001-08:00

John Agresto at NRO, courtesy of Ed Driscoll:

This, by the way, is why Sarah Palin was so refreshing and, to be clear, so exotic to all the elites: a woman who could raise herself up by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice to be a wife, mother, mayor, and governor. She didn’t do it by set-asides, by birth, by quotas, or by handouts. She did it as a woman and she did it by her efforts. She exemplified what we all once saw as America—a land of opportunity, where you could be anything you set your mind to be so long as you worked for it. She showed us something about both her character and ours, our old-fashioned American character. For all this, she had to be ridiculed—she represented a kind of American virtue that shames the privileged, whether they be rich or poor.

But maybe we as a party have boxed ourselves in. We believe that prosperity will trickle down from the success of the prosperous and we believe (or have been shamed into believing) in the superior moral status of those whose only job is always to ask for more. But the shiftless have no greater moral claim than others, and prosperity doesn’t always trickle down from the top. It wells up from the efforts of the working classes, the middle classes, the builders, doers, and makers of America. And it’s not just small-business owners who are the backbone of America but the clerks and sales people and night watchmen in those businesses.

The poor knew Obama was on their side, and the liberal rich were always in his camp. (If it’s simply “the economy, stupid,” and not culture and values, then why does Connecticut always vote Democratic and West Virginia not?) No, the strange thing was that the party of self-reliance, of initiative, of productivity and hard work, the party of cops and soldiers, firemen and farmers, hunters and ranchers—the party of ordinary American virtue, not privilege—allowed itself to look like the party of big oil and bailouts. How bizarre it was to see a plumber trying to come to our rescue and tell us what to say; but it was already too late.

"Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts"

2008-11-25T07:54:00.001-08:00

Ample material for ten insightful articles, condensed into one. Don’t miss Victor Davis Hanson’s latest: “Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts”.

Fearless Dream

Losing Václav Havel

Rob Long on the Decline of Print Media

Bill Whittle's Voter's Guide to the Republican Party

V.I. Day 2011

Progress!

Just Being Myself

Launch Day

Getting Closer

Pilot Bill Whittle on the Reno Air Race Crash

What We Can Learn From the Gratitude of Immigrants

Whittle: What We Did Right

American Islamic Group Supports Sharia Law Ban

Dennis Prager: Lessons from 9/11? What Lessons?

Ten Years Later: 9/11 Links

A Plea, Ten Years After: Please, Open Your Eyes

Recommended Watching

Recommended Reading

My Previous Years’ Posts

The Deal

Rich Man, Poor Man

Arrival

Getting There

Declaring My Independence

At Long Last!

Hats Off to the "Dudettes"

The Free Frontier: How Private Enterprise Is Winning the Space Race

The People Are Revolting

Will Hollywood change its tune?

Poliwood: Cultural Suicide Watch: Will Hollywood Embrace Islam?

Nose Back to Grindstone on the Flying Thing

Flight Aboard a KC-135R Stratotanker

SpaceShipTwo Hits Solo Glide Flight Milestone

Great Aviation Podcasts Newly Discovered

Americans: A Thought for the Day

9/11: Two Songs

Tuesday

Remember (9-12)

Independence Day 2010

Memorial Day 2010

Index of Bill Whittle's "Silent America" Essays

Published a New "Quotes" Page

Tyrants Heart Our Useful Idiots

One Year Gone: Reflections on the Bush Years

More to Come Here

Haiti: Where to Give

More Renovations Afoot

Anita Dunn, Maoist in the White House

9/11 Quotes

My Experience of September 11, 2001

Tomorrow is 9/11

Hot Air: The Death of the Individual

Victor Davis Hanson's "Thoughts of Our European Future to Come"

Fare Well, Sarah. I mean that.

Independence Day 2009

Frontiers

Bill Whittle: The Dowd Conundrum

Phyllis Chesler: Obama Throws Muslim Women Under the Bus

4th Bloggiversary!

Charles Murray: Europe Syndrome

Memorial Day 2009

Stuck Mojo, "I'm American"

Anti-Jihad Done Right: Stuck Mojo, "Open Season"

"A Universal Doctrine of Women's Rights"

"The Lost Generation"

Jonah Goldberg: Obama's Fear Mongering

It's Official: I'm a Dad!

Phyllis Chesler: President Obama Believes He Can Charm the Barbarians

Former Liberal Eli Bernstein Says Goodbye to President Bush

Rush: Something for Nothing

Rush: Tears

Rush: Lessons

Rush: The Twilight Zone

Geert Wilders to be Prosecuted for Fitna

Rush: A Passage to Bangkok

Andy Levy's "To Don't" List for the Right

Rush: 2112

Andrew Breitbart's Pledge to Hollywood's Sunshine Patriots

Video: How Obama Got Elected...Interviews With Obama Voters

Obama's Likeness Burned in Tehran