An Implication Of Concepts

Michele is not amused with bloggers posting and linking to photographs of Paul Johnson's murder. Nor am I. At her blog, I quote Solzhenitsyn: "To taste the ocean needs only a single drop." Whether you know it or not, he's talking about the power of concepts. Let me illustrate the thing with a concrete example:

Most children, before they reach adolescence, and one way or another, become familiar in some degree with the concept of beheading. I know I did. We look back in horror at medieval atrocities like burning at the stake. Everyone I know is utterly horrified at the concept, but I have never met a single person who has seen a photograph of a person being burned at the stake. The concept is enough, to a thinking person.

And you might consider that whenever you hear a dipshit like Michael Savage or Sean Hannity telling you that you need to see these images in order to understand what we're up against.

Now, go look at them if you want to. All I'm saying is that the argument outlined by the hysterical dipshits is false. Think about what Solzhenitsyn said. Think about it honestly, and see if you can refute it.

As for bloggers: yes, a good many of them are unconscionable leeches when it comes to this sort of thing. They do this over long periods of time because it sucks in page-views from dolts.

They ought to be ashamed fo themselves.

Something Mysterious

Well. Comes today the grim news about Paul Johnson's murder in Saudi Arabia. Everybody is saying everything about it, but I have in mind something that I have never seen anyone else address.

To begin with, I dismiss all protestations of "retaliation" and everything remotely like it as so much lying bullshit. I have no doubt at all that they would do exactly the same thing to me if they could get their hands on me. They would chop up every boneheaded Peace At Any Cost, Rachel Corrie dingbat on the scene.

An important question remains, however.

Why aren't they doing this here?

It is an abiding mystery, to me, why we haven't gotten hit again in America, if not on the same scale of something like 9/11, then surely on a smaller scale in numbers sufficient to make it hurt like hell, at least in the psyches of fretters and moaners over "why they hate us". And one damned good way to do it would be to start running around America with a video camera, snatching soccer-moms at gas-pumps in little one-horse towns, bleeding 'em out, and dropping tape cassettes in the mail to Live At 5 stations from coast to coast.

If I were one of these animals, I would have this country shitting in its pants 24/7.

I don't understand this.

I might have more thoughts on implications, later.

More: "When Al Qaeda kills Americans in Saudi Arabia, it's not as good for them as killing Americans on American soil. It may show some operational frustration in them..."

Cliff May just said that on CNN's Crossfire. The larger subject of his remarks is about the "Frankenstein problem" that Saudi Arabia has with Wahhabism. However, the matter of "operational frustration" is an important implication of what I have in mind.

Basically, I conclude that the US response to Al Qaeda -- to include the Iraqi operation -- is nowhere nearly precisely geared to the theat. I never thought it would be. (Hint: "The generals are always planning to fight the last war.")

For all their beastly savagery, these people are punks. There is a premise of air combat that talks about "honoring the threat". It was never in my mind a proper thing to honor the threat of Al Qaeda with corps and army-level action. It wasn't even proper for us to honor the threat of Saddam Hussein on that level. One hundred hours of ground action in 1991, and the utterly craven performance of the Iraqi army last year only solidified this conviction in my mind. The Iraqi state under Saddam had to be destroyed -- and anybody who wants to dispute this can go drop dead. They're disqualified from discussion on grounds of aggravated stupidity.

But there is a "center of mass" (Clausewitz’s concept) aspect to all of this that haunts me, and always has. We're swinging an enormous mass at an enemy essentially without a mass, and the implications should be obvious.

This afternoon, I was over in the 'ville. I stopped at a convenience store where I go all the time.

There is a girl behind the counter, there. She's about twenty years old or so. Very pleasant, all the time, with a quick smile and pretty good at her job.

She asked how I was doing, the way she always does. I told her that I was just watching the rotten news. She barely glanced at me and kept doing her thing in the cash register. I told her about the news of Paul Johnson. She never stopped. She looked at me perfectly blankly as she counted out my change. "You know; the guy they captured. They killed him."

Nothing. Not the least bat of an eye.

"They cut his head off."

Not one blink, not one hitch in her motion. Nothing.

She didn't know. She had absolutely no earthly idea what I was talking about.

Here's what I see: whether she knows it or not, that girl has implicitly delegated the responsibility for dealing with these monsters to an organization that simply cannot possibly do so.

And that organization will never be able to move as nimbly as the murderers of Paul Johnson, should they take it in mind to move with real efficacy, like: snatching some soccer-mom from that little girl's gas-pump, not fifty feet away.

I'm barely scratching the surface of my thinking on these matters, but the biggest mystery remains:

Why aren't they doing that?

Not Me

This, just out to Bob Hunt's Individual-Sovereignty group:

> From: Mike Schneider
> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 5:31 AM
> Subject: [I-S] Billy on a Banjo

> There's still time to, oh I dunno, buy a smallish
> apartment building in some Asian tiger with
> relatively loose social customs,...

I'm now having the same problem with you that I'm having with Kennedy, after his recent taking of my name in vain. It goes roughly like this:

"I don't know how many times I'm going to have to tell you."

I am an American, Michael. Try to understand. I've been around the world enough to know -- mind, body, heart and soul -- that there is no place else for me to be. There is no other political ideal worth fighting for than that which was born -- for the first time in human history -- right here on this continent, and which is, to me, inextricably connected to this land.

In his "November 1916" installment of the "Red Wheel" series of novels, Solzhenitsyn brought me to tears with his story of Colonel Vorotyntsev taking leave from the front, experiencing the compulsion to get down on his knees and kiss the stones of the square at the Kremlin, all because of how the history of his homeland moved his heart. I understood that completely.

I don't know how to impart that, but it is as real in me as I am, in myself.

I've told you before and I'll tell you again right now: I would happily die in an American prison before I ever ran away from this place.

This is it: this fight, in this place. When this light goes out, it could be a thousand years before it fires again, if ever.

I'm not going anywhere.

"Recommended Books"

Observe the menu of links to the left. The "Recommended Books" item points to my post here of May 26 of this year, in which I listed "important books" in my collection.

I will update this list occasionally, as I get around to it. If you've not seen it, then you might have a look. If you did see it, it contains nothing new at the moment. When it does, the additions will appear at the bottom.

Movin' Up

I was standing in the room at Endicott, New York, in 1984 (I believe), with two presidents. One was Ronald Reagan. The other was the president of IBM, and I don't remember his name. However, he was announcing IBM's prototype of the first processor that packed one million transistors aboard a single chip. He told us that this device would bring the computing power of mainframes of the time to our desktops.

"Cool!" I thought. "I'll be looking forward to that." At the time, I was writing BASIC on my little brother's Timex Sinclair TS2068 with its Z80 processor, and I was mere weeks away from buying my Atari 800XL with the M6502C. I had enough to keep me amused, and I was definitely looking forward.

A decade later, I was about to retire my first Intel 486 machine, which was a fairly close cousin to the device that I saw IBM reveal that day.

Here is an interesting story about what to look forward to a decade from now.

I've seen it happen this way, and I have no reason to doubt.

(linked from John Venlet)

Busted

Patterico puts a shot-on-goal at the Los Angeles Times.

To be sure, this sort of outrageous crap happens all the time, so there is really no news here. It's just another datapoint along the long-march arc of cultural corruption, but it's worth a look.

The thing that makes me reach for my pistol is the appalling lies at the root of it. These disgusting creeps hold up their pious protestations of "impartiality" and "objectivity", all while a normal person of common sense could throw a blindfold dart at the corpus and hit something like this squarely between the lines, every single time. And to have them sit up on their moral pygmy-ponies lecturing us about their probity warrants swift, summary, kicks right in the balls until they just bleed out every pore, all day long.

They're worse than worthless, and that would be bad enough.

Jerome Lee Barber

The first band I ever worked for was comprised of my best friends. For three and a half years, I just coasted along in that bubble, working hard, to be sure, but not really thinking about some larger implications, of which I was actually unaware.

When that band broke up, I was out of a job. >boom< That fast. You know what? I've always laughed when I hear people moaning about "job security". I have never seen anything remotely like it a day in my life since 1977.

I had no idea what I was going to do. And then the phone rang.

It was a guy named Jerry Barber, who I knew from another little bar band over in Ithaca. Jerry spoke to me in extremely respectful tones, making clear that he admired and valued my work with lights on a stage, and he offered me a job. I knew and liked his band, and said yes, instantly, and then the light went on in my brain: "Oh. I get it. You just go find another gig." A career was born.

Jerry was terrific to work with. He was a splendid singer, but I always thought he should have gone to work in touring audio. He was a major gear-head, fascinated with the technique of rock shows. He could solder with the best of them, and he could do it in a dark corner on the floor of a club if he had to, which he sometimes did. He had a fine ear, and that made him a valuable twisty ("sound guy", who turns knobs and mixes live audio). He later found local work in Ithaca doing that.

I went a hell of a lot further around the world than Jerry did. So did my brother, Bryan, who followed me into the business and who also worked for Jerry's band later, for a couple of years. Last year, we sat around drinks talking about the journey, and Jerry was as happy and proud as he could be to see two of his crew guys "went further than everybody else in the band!" He had a sweetly enthusiastic glow in his eyes, which, if one knew him, one also knew was completely authentic. He really thought it was cool that we'd made it.

By the time of that get-together, Jerry's diagnosis of throat cancer was about eighteen months in the bag. I marveled at watching him, because Jerry had grown into a philosopher. It was the damndest thing: I'd never figured him for that. You see, he was great on deck, he always loved his work, but he never really seemed -- to me, at least -- to think about what that meant. He was too busy living as hard as he could. For instance, he ate women up with a spoon. All the time. By last summer, when someone asked how he was doing, he would invariably answer, "I'm still here." He would say it with a shrug and a deep smile, which anyone who knew him saw as a revelation.

I once spent some time at his house with him. When I dropped in, the living room was littered with power-tools, chopped up plywood and sawdust. He was building a sensational model railroad layout in the place. He told me, "I always thought that I would play with my trains in my retirement, and since this could be it, I need to get to work on it." We talked about life and death and everybody's prospects, which nobody really ever knows. "You just have to live, man," he said. "You have to keep livin'." As far as I know, he faced it like a man, and I was deeply impressed. I'd never really doubted Jerry's strength, but I hadn't really seen it like I did while he was going through this.

This morning, I got the rotten e-mail from my mate Toby. We lost Jerry yesterday. He was an unforgettable character; a natural-born sweetheart and a good friend. I was always happy and proud to know him.

Jerry Barber was forty-five years old, when he died in Ithaca, New York.

A Late Birthday Notice

I'd just like to point out something that slipped my attention in all the noise last week:

On June 9, Les Paul turned eighty-nine years old.

Happy birthday, Les. God bless you. You go, man.

100% Moron

TO: Mary Ellen Burris -- Senior Vice President of Consumer Affairs, Wegmans supermarkets
SUBJECT: You're Fired

On the announcement of your 100% Morons Program, I write in order to let you know that I will never, ever in my life step foot in one of your stores again. This is because I do not deal with abject vegetables.

Have an ice day, you ridiculous hind.

Contemptible

Look at this survey. Look at those bloggers.

Not one single word for Ragnar Danneskjold.

Speechless.

Owl-Eyed Beanie-Heads

Stuart Buck fingers the 'work' of acanemics too goddamned stupid to realize how goddamned stupid they are.

Disgusting But Natural Decadence

"So his central message in this run for the state House will be about holding the line on taxes and teaching the state to live within a budget. Further he'll talk about how the state can deliver more and better services more efficiently."

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Libertarian Party has come to.

(link: Strike The Root)

Absolutely No Way. <-- Period

Fuggetaboudit. I'll keep my cowboy boots. (My favorite pair is elephant skin.)

You would not catch me dead in a pair of sandals. Ever. At least one good reason is that I walk the earth in confidence that I'm never going to have half my foot smashed off or shredded in an accident (say, with a door that I did not know someone would suddenly open from the other side) because I did not have sense enough to protect one of the most delicate but necessarily contact-active parts of my body.

(link: The Corner)

"It's All Her Fault That We're Idiots"

"She had an intellectual side that was fairly well hidden from us because we were all looking at what kind of clothes she was wearing."

(Evan Thomas of Newsweek, just now on Imus In The Morning -- speaking of Nancy Reagan and the press)

Thomas said that after several minutes of explaining that he had expected Nancy to "go shop" after her husband's term as president, but that he'd been wrong, and surprised when she attended Ronnie as closely as she did.

Someone remind me why people like this have jobs.

Precious Delusia

For the first five hundred thirty-five words of this article, I had no earthly idea what the author was talking about.

There is a very good reason for that.

(link: Mike Schneider)