Keeper
Michael Crichton has made a speech (found through Colby Cosh, my favorite Alberta-blogger) to the Commonwealth Society in which he says almost everything I've ever said about the environmental movement in a few paragraphs. The point:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

The only part he leaves out is about the ozone hole - oh, and acid rain. But the idea of the "Eden Myth" I've been ranting about for decades is there in the most articulate form I can conceive of. He is, after all, a professional. And the speech confirms the context of Jurassic Park that was left out of the movie - the incomprehensible complexity of life, which Man can never control or destroy no matter what he does. Read it.

Hard day - night!
I've had a long day firing my AK-47 into the air around Tallahassee and handing out candy to the local ragamuffins and partaking liberally of non-Islamic libations to celebrate the political demise of one of history's worst tyrants. So I go to bed much more optimistic about the future course of events in the Middle East. And in the War on Terror. Think bin Laden is digging his hidey-hole a little deeper? Assuming he wasn't buried deep within a mountain months ago, which is likely.

Here's the Iranian take. The mullahs are cynical old beards, aren't they? I wonder what "Hoseyn" may have to say about them and their terroristic activities? I suppose eventually Saddam, instead of getting "the chair" will get a chair in intenational politics at some Old European university, if we make the mistake of letting him be tried by the World Court or some other such contradiction in terms. Maybe that will be his price for not telling all about Chira(q) and Schroeder and all the other appeasers. So let the Iraqis deal with him. Maybe they'll freeze him and put his body behind glass in a memorial to his victims.

Fin de parcours!
End of the road, Baby! Even LeMonde is forced to admit that the great ami of Chira(q) is done for. No more weapon sales, sales de cochons! No more twitting the US about how unrealistic and naive it is to think that Arabs can actually govern themselves in a democracy. Of course the Froggies, from whom I have liberated a car, do have to put in "soutenu d'abord par l'Occident avant d'etre diabolise" as a descriptor of Saddam. Sorry, I'm not going to go get accent marks for Frogs' sakes. And I mean. "Made into a devil"?? Maybe, just maybe some of his own actions, like KILLING MILLIONS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE may have effectively diabolized him, or made his evil clear. And another thing "Axe du Mal" doesn't quite convey the meaning of Axis of Evil. He's not just "bad". He's EVIL, darn it! Say, you don't think they're still mad about that "Axis of Weasels" thing, do you? Aww.. I'm so sympathetic.

Got him!

Even Drudge doesn't have this yet. Nor Instapundit. Saddam has been captured!! Alive, with NO resistance. The old murderer didn't even have the guts to go down fighting like his sons. He's been hiding in a hole clutching money for months, apparently. Please God let there be a public execution. Oh, after a trial, of course. The course of history has just changed. What are the Dems going to say now? Time to celebrate!!

Non-Brights
I went to this Bright site from James Randi's www.randi.org. Then I started thinking, "Hey, how's this any different from good old-fashioned revivalist Objectivism?" Then I started thinking some more, "Hey, these guys think they're so "bright", how do they explain the absence from their ranks of some darn "bright" people?" And also, I mean, how dare they say they know what "Bright" is? And they pretend that they don't mean by "Bright" what we peons call "smart". Right. This is just Mensa lite or "brite"! I thought their hero Stephen Jay Gould demolished the concept of intelligence in "The Mismeasure of Man". But OK. How tiring. I guess I actually have to read some of their stuff, maybe even an article in the Jayson Blair Times, to figure out what they mean by "Bright". Like it's worth it. The prospect's almost as enticing as reading Andrew Sullivan's books to find out how he reconciles homosexuality with a Catholicism that has been burning faggots for millennia. Like I really want to wade through hours of poufter self-deception.

But I may do that. Right now, off the top of my head, I can name Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Voltaire, Darwin, Faraday, Plato, Kant, Socrates, Aristotle and Augustine among those whose "worldview" was not "free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities". I guess they just weren't "Bright" enough to realize that the question of the existence and efficacy of forces unknown to Man had been settled once and for all. But as I say, I haven't read Brightthought. I'll check it out.

Hitchens the iconoclast


Frontpage has an interesting if frustrating interview with Christopher Hitchens, mostly about leftists and the War on Terror. Predictably, however, Hitchens is not predictable or ordinary. Sometimes it's hard to imagine what might be going on in his head. But the spectacle is entertaining.

Patriotism and America
I've been thinking about this for a long time. Patriotism is usually defined as a deep emotional loyalty to the land where one - or one's fathers (patri) - were born. Not very many Americans go back very far in America, compared to the rest of the world. My father was born in England. But I feel a deep sense of what seems like patriotism for America. I always felt somewhat guilty about this, growing up in liberal America and spending a good deal of childhood time in liberal Europe. The Europeans especially are eager to point out the irrationality of patriotism based solely on birth. Germans died by the millions for Hitler and Russians for Stalin because of a patriotism with little justifiable ideological basis. Their sacrifices arguably led to worse results for their homelands, not better. Even the "democracies" sacrificed generations of their young men just to see empires wither away and national glory decline. So how can an American feel patriotism? Isn't it just for suckers?

Once you remove the patriotism stemming from birth, the feeling for a patch of ground where your mother and sisters and children huddle together, counting on you in the front lines to protect them from a murderous enemy, a man can only feel patriotism that stems from a superior ideology. The only possible justification for fighting and dying for your country would be if that country's ideology would make mankind in general happier and safer and more prosperous. Certainly many young men died in the Spanish Civil War and in the Cold War for that sort of ideology. I don't doubt that the feeling that led Orwell and the other Republicans to risk their lives in Catalonia in 1936 and, as it turned out, futilely, was quite different from the patriotism of a Chinese villager fighting invading Japanese in the thirties and forties of the last century. But now their collectivism has been exposed as a fraud and sham, at the cost of millions of families starved and shot and transported and worked to death with nothing to show for their lives. So how can one possibly say that the American ideology is worth dying for. Every one of those soldiers in Iraq who dies from a cowardly roadside bomb or an RPG or a fanatic suicide bomber must have been motivated to risk his life by some ideology. Perhaps most of them went just because of old-fashioned patriotism, to protect Americans from another 9-11-01, perhaps some to gain glory, to test themselves as men in the ultimate video game.

But many Americans feel a different kind of patriotism, based on the conviction that limited constitutional government really IS superior to all other forms yet tried. This ideology specifically is not based on race or religion or language. It's based on hope. Optimism is the great gift that America has for the world. Oh, I don't think most soldiers think of things in technical political terms. They just have a sense of freedom, of what economic opportunity means to people. And when they get off the plane in the Middle East and hear the all-suffocating wail of the muezzin five times a day throughout every little hamlet and big city, see peasants plowing fields behind water buffalo and living in mud houses, barely able to feed their children, they inevitably compare their own childhoods, with universal education and food and hygiene and luxuries the average Iraqi could not dream of. And they must think, yes, it's true. Freedom is better.

Aleatory automobile
The Peugeot 505 I bought for $1950 is a true adventure I felt a bit bad about buying anything French, but then I figured I was simply liberating the car from the clutches of the America-haters. Like a French woman, though, the Peugeot presents a different personality every day. Some days everything works, she smiles and hums and pleases me without my having to ask. Other days the turn signals don't work, the ABS light comes on, the cooling system overheats and the transmission seems on the verge of dropping out of the car every other second. But exerting my male mastery has so far kept her obedient, even submissive. I've learned a lot about her moods. I bring her presents, like octane booster, a tire gauge, a funnel for filling fluids. I'm sure she's going to dump me in the middle of nowhere some day, but it's been worth it so far, for those glorious sunny days when fourth gear kicks in and she zooms past everything on the highway, smooth and cool as a summer breeze. Not bad for an old gal. I wonder if it's true that French women get better as they get older. I'll have to find out! I actually found some Peugeot sites on the web, like this mailing list directory and this list of links. Could this be the start of a harem of seductive beauties from many different lands? I'm still on the lookout for an early '70s MG Midget. And I'd love an Alfa, a Lancia, an old three-cylinder Saab. Ah, so many cars, so little time and money!

More fiction
Browsing through Lou Salome's "Nietzsche", (University of Illinois Press, 1988) what should I find but ten aphorisms for writers:

Toward the Teaching of Style
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely, "what-and-what do I wish to say and present," before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker's means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation; of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything - the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments - like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one's readers of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one's reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

That old Friedrich Wilhelm! He sure does set the mind a-thinking. Numbers 8 and 9 are beautifully clear and compelling, but insanely difficult to practice.

Governmentium
Just in case anyone missed Frontpagemag.com today, it has a link to a religious site that, nonetheless, offers this. As a government worker, I can testify to the scientific truth of the author's observation of governmentium, proven through many controlled experiments, all too easily reproduced in any environment on God's green earth.

Soldier of the Legion

Marshall S. Thomas has written a spectacular story which I bought and read. It's impossible not to get caught up in the action. At the end he keeps the reader in delicious suspense, agog for the sequel, which I am assured by the author is written and ready to be sent to the publisher. I can give no higher recommendation than to say that I haven't read science fiction for decades, weary of pedestrian plots and outlandish characters meant to shock as much as entertain. Legion is different. Read it.

I woke up this morning and I had myself a blog
Oh, yeah, I woke up this morning and I had myself a blo-og
The future's uncertain and the end is always - Pog??

OK so there's no good rhyme. As the proud owner of a 1987 Peugeot 505 STX, though, I think I'm justified in saying that this life takes you places you never thought you'd go. I was going to buy a brand new Kia, for the warranty. But I didn't see chaining myself to a six-year payment plan to pay ten thousand dollars for a chintzy Korean car that will be worth three thousand dollars in four years, when I'll still have six thousand dollars to pay on it. SO I went for the six-cylinder, automatic transmission, power sunroof, air-conditioned rugged if irredeemably Frankish Peugeot. Drives like a dream, it does, although those suspicious "clunks" coming from the automatic transmission should have given a wise man pause. But wise men tell no tales. No, that's dead men. Well, actually, that could apply to both, one by definition, one by prudence. Time for more coffee...

Michael Jackson and Gay Marriage

As the case against Michael Jackson gets more and more watertight, his defenders are backed into a corner. If all they had against them was a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with preteen boys unrelated to him, they would still be in serious trouble. Who else, famous or not, could survive such confessed behavior? What other sane man, in this day and age, would do such a thing without thinking, "Hey, wait a minute, this could get me into real trouble"? Aren't we forced to think perhaps there was a little arrogance behind it, not just innocence? Isn't it highly probable Jackson was not thinking, "Isn't this beautiful and aren't I innocent and harmless and childlike", but "Hey, this would get most men my age in trouble, but I'm Michael Jackson. They can't touch me!" Since now letters have come out with damaging details about what was really going on in that bed, aren't his defenders now forced back into the "what's wrong with it, it's all done in the name of love?" defense? And screaming "racism!!" of course, which has already started. And which is palpably absurd when you realize that MJ has spent his whole life fleeing from blackness as he has from adulthood. The MJ Trial which looms ahead of us could have as many resonances as the OJ Trial did in the Nineties. One hopes the justice system comes off looking better. If the defense does try to defend Jackson's conduct on the grounds that even though it is illegal, it shouldn't be, we may be in for a wild ride. If homosexual conduct can go from being a ticket to jail to being a requirement for a marriage license, though, who knows what a California jury might come up with in the the way of "empathetic nullification"? The case for gay marriage stresses that homosexual attraction is love, a love just as real and just as worthy of protection by the state as heterosexual attraction. Well, then, why not the love of a 45-year old billionaire for a 12-year-old dying of cancer? Drawing the line at a particular age, as the state does with statutory rape laws, would have to be exposed as prejudiced, rigid and harsh. After all, don't laws allow underage heterosexuals to get married, with parental consent? Well, didn't MJ's kiddy victims have their parents' approval, for whatever reasons? I smell quagmire.

Gee, maybe there really are some actual men left in Britain!

From the Guardian:

Dear Mr President,

Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.

You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.

I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.

It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.

Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist

America as Israel

Natan Sharansky has connected Zionism and America-bashing in a particularly convincing column in Commentary (via RealClearPolitics).

No candy today, kids

Gee, what do you know? Al Qaeda attacks Arabs too! But the secretary of the "Organization of the Islamic Conference" said the attacks in Riyadh on the living quarters of foreign workers from Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan and other Arab countries "harmed the image of Muslims and Islam. " Right. Image for whom? The American Street? You guys blew that so long ago it isn't funny. So for whom are these apologists for murderers performing now? Better get those Bush t-shirts while you can!!

Good one
Never thought I'd say this in my days of fanatic military-hating during Vietnam, but I now do understand and appreciate everything the US soldiers are doing over there in Iraq. As usual, Mark Steyn says it best:

In our time, mass slaughter occurs only in places where the West refuses to act - in the Sudan or North Korea - or acts only under the contemptible and corrupting rules of UN "peacekeeping", as at Srebrenica. In Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, technological advantage changes the moral calculus: it makes war the least worst option, the moral choice. At the 11th hour of the 11th day, we should remember those who died in the Great War, but recognise that it could never be "the war to end all wars" and never should.

Huh?
Here it is 12:30 in the morning Wednesday after the polls have closed in Kentucky and Mississippi - OK, they're on Central Time and Tallahassee's on Eastern Time - and I can't get anyone to admit that Haley Barbour has actually won the MS governor's race. Not CNN, not ABC, not even Fox, which isn't as conservative as it's portrayed. It's weird. It's like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hey, you don't think he's hiding out in the PBS studio in Tallahassee, do you?? Nah. The Dems gave up on KY pretty early, and they were ecstatic about the black beating the Jew in Philly, but do you think they had any idea that George W and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz might have helped Haley Barbour become Governor of Mississippi? When neither Clinton nor McAuliffe nor Dean nor, God help us, Kucinich, can go south of the Mason-Dixon line at the risk of their political lives and those that they're trying to help? The Dems better consider if they can win the 2004 presidential race with Philadelphia and Vermont. 'Cause that's all they've got.

Gasp!
Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle actually has a (gulp!) conservative writing for it! This guy Adam Sparks actually quotes Rush - in a Frisco paper!! Gee, maybe the Bay Area does like to be on the cutting edge! His take on the apparent shift to Republicanism in California could have come right out of the pages of the National Review. Or maybe Reason. It's becoming clear to me that Arnold is not just any old Republican. He may steal all the lifestyle issues from the Dems, leaving them with hardscrabble Hillary- and Nader-style neo-Puritanism. That doesn't win elections. The true right wing - from Buchanan to Pat Robertson - won't like it one bit, but that's also OK with me. Welcome to the rational world of Adam Sparks, Frisco!

Laser hellos
Looks like laser weapons are going to happen, and not that far in the future. Now if they can get them to the point where they can stop an RPG in mid-flight, before the soldier even knows one's been fired, and he can wear it on his helmet without knowing it's there, we've got something.