Finito

From now until the cataclysm I hereby declare this blog completed.  I need to move to a concept less somber and more personal.  I'm developing that concept, so from now until doom I'll post only at Of Mouse Matters .  --On this-&-that, occasionally.

This Baby Got Legs

Think I'll try a post, since I seem to have abandoned my other blog.

That excursion into the personal was oddly satisfying, but it seems to have served it's purpose.  I'll probably go back to it.  I think much of it was not so much the discussion of the personal as it was of the private, by which I mean the emotions everybody has but which are of relationships, and so limited in public scope; but it's the stuff we each live by so it's of exceptional value; it is the stuff of the novelist.  I will go back to it.  --In this blog, in fact, even though I expect to discuss the public, I may try to create the tone of the personal.  I'm not sure just what that means, but I think if I can create a personality observing events, rather than just be a mind stating a view, I might  be doing something with more emotional meat-on-the-bones than has been the case before.   --I'm not sure what I mean, I do have a sense of what I mean.

I think I'll discuss the Tea Party, a movement as exciting as any I've ever seen.  Basically it's simply a movement against over-reach.

Generally, most people have a private life and it's that life which is life, everything else is peripheral.  They might have knowledge of a corrupt class but if that class is distant it's merely offensive, it doesn't impinge on the private.  America certainly has a corrupt class, which I would define presently as just about anybody who has power, and that class is no longer content simply with graft and splendor within their own set, they want control; and there are so many now, and they are so insistent, that they have pervasively penetrated to the private, and that's their over-reach.  And so there is a rebellion, they're "mess'n with people".

I've been offended with people "mess'n" with me my entire life, from the first day I attended school and found I had a teacher who insisted I should stop playing with some really neat big green blocks I found and instead sit around in a circle and listen while she read "See Spot run".  I couldn't believe anybody could do that to me and I've never liked any group since.  I'm extreme, but everybody has this sense, just with different periphery; but everybody in the "ruling class" has the opposite sense, they will make you sit in a circle, and they will shove their crap down your throat.

This impulse to control I find a matter for analysis.  I innately understand the impulse to independence, I innately understand the impulse to self-aggrandizement, what I find puzzling is the impulse to control when it simply isn't necessary in terms of acquiring personal wealth,  and really isn't necessary either in terms of acquiring power --that is, if the purpose of power is to contend with another power; instead it seems simply the impulse to control the citizenry, for no real purpose other than to control the citizenry.

Why?  I think it's the impulse of hollow men to define themselves as having substance: if you can control, you're superior; if superior, of substance.  I believe this is the whole soul of the present ruling class, of the modern intellectual class.  There's nothing there, not of capacity, understanding, belief, or achievement.  Nothing.  But there is control, and if there are enough, and enough of the same mindset, with virtually no opposition, they can control; and in the mind of a man of nothing something is a lot.  It is substance, it's as much as he'll ever have, as much as he can ever feel.

I see the whole impulse of the nanny state, and of modern Academe, as a drive to establish self conception.  This self-conception, of course is splendiferous, and in practice a conception, a "substance" gained, not by achieving excellence (difficult, no modern writer is Dostoevsky), but by changing nature.  In politics it's the servant nature of the ruling class to the democratic populace that's changed; in everything else nature is changed simply by definition; excellence is defined as excrescence and (their own) excrescence defined as excellence.  And you gotta swallow it.  --If there are enough of them, at the very least they can shove it in your face ("Piss Christ").

--And so this is what the Tea Party is against.  They know how inferior these empty men are, and so they rise up unafraid.  And the empty men?  They can't possibly understand a populace that does have values, that can recognize excellence, that can properly place themselves within that hierarchy of the excellent.  Empty men can't possibly understand the motivation of people of spiritual substance, they can't possibly fathom the contempt they engender.  And so they can respond only in the same way they have always: more control, and more contempt for those they can't comprehend.  This is adding fuel to the rebellion.  People who don't like people doubly don't like people when the feeling is returned.  But there are more in the Tea Party than the elite, and as long as there is still a vote, there is simply no way the Tea Party won't win.  I can't see any possibility that the movement can lose force before there's been an upset in power.  Contempt is a mighty force.  For the elites, once they've earned contempt, especially an activist contempt, they'll never again earn respect.  No member of the Tea Party movement will ever again placidly accept authority from those they now oppose.  This baby got legs.

(Argument a bit scattered, concentration horse shit, but in just one or two posts more I should be back in rhythm.) (The edit lost the bottom two paragraphs.  May make them the next post.)

Refudiate

Last post July 14. I see I am establishing a torrid pace. My need to change the world is great.

From my notebook:

8:33 PM. Rainbow out. At 7:47 it was like night looking out my bay window. Sunset is 8:46. I thought I would drive out to the woods and try to get in my walk before the rain came. Made it three quarters of a mile from the truck before the downpour. Downpour Nature sucks. I made it back to my truck sopped (but did keep my pipe lit). Driving back I watched the rainbow. --The great thing about outdoors just before a storm is the light. It's unworldly, often an eerie green, touches of brilliant yellow-white. It does express the wild, and that right here inside the city. On either side of these woods I go to there are miles and miles of houses.

So, Refudiate.

I copy the original tweet as it's printed in an opinion piece by Bill Kristol:

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it
does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate."

Originally I heard that the nutroots were going wild over new evidence that Palin was a moron: "She can't spell." So I went to the tweet and read it three or four time. I can't spell either, I know that, I couldn't post without spell-check, but as I read through that tweet I couldn't spot the misspelling. So I went to some actual nutroots commentary and I found the misspelling was "refudiate". I never noticed. The word was perfect.

And the Kristol piece makes the same argument:

Just before noon on Sunday, July 18, 2010, Sarah Palin enriched the English language. Referring to the planned Islamic center near the 9/11 site in New York, she tweeted: “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.”
Presumably, Palin was wavering between “refute” and “repudiate,” and, in the heat of the tweeting moment, typed or BlackBerried or iPhoned or texted the new amalgam, “refudiate.” Pedants in the blogosphere got all huffy. Palin decided to double down. A few hours later, she follow-up-tweeted: “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

Perfect. This is a mind that creates, and does it subconsciously, as do all the best verbal artist. And the nutroots? well, they of course don't create, can't think, and can't recognize excellence. I suppose that's why they find their nitch is being left, where "excellence" is whatever they define as excellent, and always in opposition to what has historically, over millenia, been considered excellent. That's generally the way of the present intelligentsia: So inferior to the past, so inflamed in their self-assessment, the only way they can achieve stature is to define the inferior as superior, crap as excellence. For them it's a very useful orientation, they're very good at crap.

The core of Kristol's argument is this:

Not that there’s anything wrong with “refute.” It means, according to Webster’s Third, “to overthrow by argument, evidence, or proof; prove to be false or erroneous.” Nor is there anything wrong with “repudiate,” meaning “to cast off .  .  . to refuse to accept as having rightful authority .  .  . to refuse approval or belief to.” And they’re distinct. To refute is primarily an intellectual act; a thinker refutes a claim or an argument. To repudiate is a practical or political act; a political party repudiates a sect that holds a discredited (and perhaps refuted) argument. A refutation that isn’t followed by a repudiation is just talk. A repudiation that doesn’t include a refutation is just arbitrary action.

The case for linguistic innovation is this: We need a word that captures and conjoins the meanings of refutation and repudiation. And we need it now. To save the country from the ravages of contemporary liberalism, we have to refute liberal arguments and see liberal politicians repudiated at the polls. So the conservative agenda is, in a word, refudiation. Indeed, given the dramatic moment at which we have arrived, one might say that we now have the prospect of a grand refudiation of liberalism.

This is good stuff. One other fellow (unfortunately I can't find the article now and so can't link) noted that in the middle of refudiate is the solid separate sound "feud", and no politician more than Palin is in a feud with the present powers and conformist thought of American leaders.
--And this fellow also thought there might fairly be read an historical allusion, to the Refuseniks of the Soviet era, those who resisted the tyranny of their time.

So in one word: Refute, Repudiate, Feud, Refuse. Pretty darn impressive. And it's a political mind that does that kind of thing effortlessly.

Last note. This is something I may expand on later because it's so much fun. Why did Sarah go through seven colleges before she got her degree? That's considered a negative. It's actually a splendid fidelity and a consideration on her part, and anybody who can't instantly recognize it as that is really dumb. The components are these: Her beauty, and her first love, Todd Palin. --Man, I'm in love with Sarah.

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Just a bit on the oil spill. This from the NYT:

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.
Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.

And from an email I wrote April 4, though I could have written it just a few days after the spill began:

A little on the oil spill. Will there be environmental damage? Probably not that much, the media and enviro-wackos like to hype these things. There are many factors but the primary protection is just the distance from shore. That gives the oil time to separate into different components, and gives the really volatile stuff--the stuff that does the greatest damage to living cells-- time to evaporate. By the time it gets to land it will primarily be just gunk. Gunk is hard on feathers and fur, but that's about it. (Some of this separation happens just rising up through one mile of water.)

This is pretty obvious stuff, both as to what would happen with the oil, and what would happen with the media. The MSM thought process is always correct.

To Begin Again?

May Start posting again. Wow, a whole year-and-a-half, no posts. I must have been undergoing a great sorrow or something, couldn't be that I just slobbed-out.

I have discovered I have a secrete admire... Not a female unfortunately, but a reader, and if somebody reads what I write I guess that's all the admiration I really need, or am going to get. The lonely life. --This post is just to see if the blog still posts.

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Ha! Worked! And Three Day Post comes up too. So now all I've got to do is find brain and I can change the world.

Who Needs Numbers?

Didn't go for my walk today --snowstorm-- so made a note in my notebook instead and am going to now type it out:

The state of the nation? Right now I'm more concerned with the state of my mental state. Things are very odd, and it's hard to get a grip on what has happened. All this spending, and no sense that it's money...?

Things are different. The left, as expressed by the media, has collectively gone stir crazy nuts. Nancy and Harry are nuts, most Democrats follow as if nuts themselves (and probably are) and our new President is a loon. But what I always go back to is the media, because it's their propaganda that makes it all possible.

During Clinton's time they just covered for him. His "indiscretions" were charming, his policies either just fine or at least not attacked, and if ever he was attacked, the attackers were destroyed. Sort of typical partisanship.

With Bush things changed. They made things up. Gitmo and Abu Grabid as torture? Repeated and repeated it becomes fact. And Bush a liar? A man honest to the core of his bone marrow? Well of course. Repeated and repeated it becomes fact, no matter the consequences to the nation as the effectiveness of his presidency was destroyed.

Bush destroyed and gone, they now have their own fantasy creation, Barack, and he, as they, is rather attracted to the idea that government can do everything... Of course, it doesn't really matter if it can or not, what they really mean is: Government can control every thing. In this we know they're right. Fidel, Mao, Stalin, they all proved that true, and that in fact is all the left really wants: control. With control Happy Days Are Here Again... because they're on top, never mind the nation.

This is the program for the next many months:

Domestically we're piling up debt that's functionally useless and that can't possibly be repaid. More significantly, within the legislation, regulatory structures are being recast such that, without debate, more power is being given to the government.

Over seas we're offending out friends and giving comfort to our enemies. The friend of my enemy is not my friend. Europe may soon see that, and turn against us. Oddly, that would be good.

Afghanistan? Lost. Without Musharaf it would be a hard fight anyway, but without Bush there's no hope at all. I think the military has to recognize they're slated for defeat. Somehow they have to make this war as quiet as possible. If they don't get headlines, and there aren't too many dead bodies, they'll still get money, simply because Democrats don't want the embarrassment of a visible defeat. Yet. But the jihad's want that defeat, now! Afghanistan is the new flypaper, but instead of Al Qaeda being drawn to the slaughter, it will eventually be the Americans who are... withdrawn... sometime after some Concord of Understanding is signed with somebody wearing a rag on their head.

Russia? They get Georgia and Ukraine.

Israel? They get the shaft. Fortunately they now have Bibi, and Bibi served during Carter. He'll know what it means to go it alone, and will do as well as any leader could. Note: This is interesting. Though Hillary is no friend of Israel, she's far more an enemy of Barack. And they understand each other. Barack is trying to tie her down with people like Samantha Powers and Susan Rice and Charles Freeman. Hill can't possibly out-Hamas those guys. So she might switch. She might go pro Jew. If she does that she'll have a power base here at home. A lot of people support Israel. She could announce "agreements". What's Barry going to do, fire her?

So everywhere there's a mess. --I wonder if Europe, on it's own now, will develop a backbone? --And here on the soil of the States of America we have insanity, as the left runs through the candy store.

How long is this going to last? It's two years before congress can be changed, up until then we've got nothing but public opinion.

There could be some change among the rational left. There are some. There are some who don't want to see things go topsy-turvy. There are some who, though they did their good deed by voting for a black guy, don't really want their good nature to be taken advantage of. They gave him his presidency, that's enough. He should be pleased and not screw around like he actually is a President. A black guy in the White House --Oh, heart be still! --but that's enough, that's all the change they want. If they get more change than that that's ingratitude, and they're going to become very annoyed.

I think many are already annoyed, but it's not an annoyance easily expressed. They can't attack him. Among other, obvious, reasons, that would reflect poorly on their judgment and their vote; so they have to attack something else. That will be "Those around him", and of course the poor policies undertaken because of poor advice --whatever. It will be largely criticism within a created "construct of the proper". The construct (to be worked out) will be fake, but within it, the expression of angers will be acceptable. And once the construct is established, there will be a lot of anger. --I see the possibility of his approval ratings remaining high, at the same time as a lot of people are totally sick of him. People will ba able to say "he's popular", but everybody will know he's not.

But my God, we're only five weeks into the next four years! A lot is going to happen. I think I'm going to take a real big deep breath, and try to make it through one more week.

Ice Is Out

Cold on my walk, about 20, with a wind. All the ice out, except on both shores, where it clings yet as a white beach to ten or fifteen feet out. Three days ago there was just a little water-breach along the East bank, like a meandering stream. The next day, over night, 3/4 of the ice was gone, and over last night, the rest. Strange to see the wide river as open water in the middle of the winter.

The beavers seem not present. I checked where I thought their burrow might be. There are three large trees that yet hold that bank from collapsing. Their roots are undercut, leaving a tangle extending for or five feet up from the gravel of the river bed, which in low water now extends out several feet as a flat margin of narrow shore.

I walked on that margin, peering in through the roots. The three trees are separated each by about twenty feet. It does appear that within those roots there has been a warren of activity. I couldn't establish pathways, but there was something through that tangle that seemed somewhat the arch of hallways, and under the southern most tangle, high up, there appeared a hole disappearing into the bank. I couldn't get my face close enough to peer into it, so can't for certain say that it extended deeply, and it did seem to constrict to only eight inches in diameter, which seems very small for animals so large. Still, if there is a burrow, that's where it's at.

I know the beavers hadn't been there because there were no tracks in the light snow that fell early last evening. Tomorrow perhaps I'll take a flash light and see if I can make better judgments.

Note: Though it was cold, and I'd carelessly dressed one layer shy of warmth, I still was happier with the weather than yesterday when it was so spring-like. Today was winter weather. It's winter. I seem to prefer that the weather be appropriate to the season.

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On the present state of our Republic. It's my idea that the most important part of the Presidency is keeping the other party from having it. Except in foreign policy, the President doesn't really have to do much. If one party has both the Executive branch and the Legislative, the Congress can do all the stuff that's important and the President can just sit there, or maybe give a speech now and then, or shoot some hoops. That may be the Democrat/Obama model. Obama will be media, Nancy and Harry will run the country. That could work. --If it come to be accepted by the country that Obama is just royalty, with no real function, he may very well remain popular, because who's going to bother to dislike a guy who in fact doesn't do anything? Could happen. Change.

It is intriguing that so many people have a need to believe in this guy. I don't understand it. It is going to be interesting to see how Obama plays his role, how the press plays that role playing... --I just have no idea who's making decisions, except that it's perhaps anybody who can.

Perhaps the Stimulus

Ha! I just looked up from my computer and walked to the window and it's begun to snow; --7:26PM. Everything from brown this afternoon to white. --7:28, first car, first tire tracks, so it hasn't been snowing long. Coming down heavy.

Interesting. On my walk earlier, so mild, most of the snow gone, most of the river ice broken open just over night, I felt a little sad. So like Spring, but not Spring; four weeks of winter yet, maybe six. Spring is joyous. Warm weather? a thaw? not so much... It's not actually clear to me why I felt that slight sadness. But it's snowing now, the night is downy, everything is pleasant............