Vox Popoli

LW has a few thoughts:

You really are on a roll. Though we often differ, I cannot argue with your train of thought lately. So much so that I have abandoned the Republican party, or more to the point, have realized that train never was headed for, never will arrive at, and does not even have tracks laid; to the train station I’ve been calling it from. Ok, so you were more correct than I had thought about Bush. Still, voting Democrat, Libertarian, or Constitutional party would have been no better and potentially worse. Anyway, I have left that train station and now wander the political wastelands of America.

You ask a lot of interesting questions in your recent articles. If you are anything like me, you have probably answers to those questions. Those answers are just too ugly to look at, do dangerous to publicly state. For example, why use the new expanded federal powers on US citizens while having open borders? Well, that is simple if perhaps cynical; it’s a government power grab based on a set of events that will only strengthen based on future and similar events. The powers are the
pry bar that will open the US vault of personal and state powers that had been locked away. Once opened, the precious commodities are slowly removed, more quickly if another attack occurs. Leaving the borders open ensures that the vault will remain unsealed and that the valuables may be looted more swiftly….

Anyway, perhaps I am wrong and you have no such scenario’s worked up in your mind. Perhaps I am delusional, hysterical, or at odds with what is happening so much so that I am blind to reality, but then if I am even near the answer we are in trouble.

If nothing else, you seem to see that last quite plainly. Out of curiosity, what practical solutions do you see? The only one I see would be a massive ground swell of Libertarian or Constitutional Party membership. Alas, I do not see that occurring. Then again, in some ways we all seem to be slightly blind to the overall picture of what is really happening. The internet and blogs only seem to offer more
questions than answers and the news is either blatantly pro or con.

Well, I am sure you are too busy to respond to a typical conservative email. I’ll continue to follow your articles, the news, and whatnot. More out of curiosity than anything now. Is there a pool for when the US becomes a totally socialist nation? If so, I want in.

I do, indeed, have many theories about various aspects of the current situation that I do not choose to share. Not because they are dangerous – I harbor no illusions about my own importance in a media pond that lends great credence to what passes for the thinking of Rich, Dowd, Malkin and so forth – but because they are only half-formed, at times contradictory and lack sufficient foundations in irrefutable proof.

Also, I prefer to ask questions because I’ve found, as have many individuals since Socrates, that asking the sort of questions that cause others to think is far more productive than telling them what to think. I believe the ability to doubt and think for yourself is far more useful than the simple transference of blind faith from one authority to another.

It is obvious, of course, that the behavior of the current administration, and of the governments of Europe, defy logic, if not belief. The US government is at war with the hitherto unalienable rights of its citizens at and peace with a “religion of peace” while the UK government has responded to eight Muslim bomb attacks by investigating anti-Islamic English football hooligans and murdering a Brazilian.

Where are we headed? Not towards a purely socialist construction, which, by most economic measures has already largely been installed. In my opinion, George Orwell appears to have understood the ultimate direction better than most, and not only in the metaphorical sense that most people read his work. Perhaps Nate is correct about the insidious evils of soccer.

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons. The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

“I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet,” said Taylor.

Microsoft SOP:

1. Discover something computer-related, usually several years late
2. Copy it.
3. Claim you invented and use lawyers to prevent others from using what you ripped off.

I was pleased to note that more than 50 percent of you are now using non-Microsoft browsers. Let’s get that up to 100 percent! If you’re still using Explorer – and I don’t know how you can stand it – I encourage you to switch to Opera or Firefox.

Microsoft isn’t a capitalist organization, it is a socialist-led technobureaucracy wrapped in a capitalist shroud. Corporations are not capitalism.

Nancy writes:

Perhaps it’d be best for all you Monday morning quarterbacks if the police or (bobbies), just said “ok, Fine, we resign! and we will let you fin for yourselves, if you get bombed on the train to grandmas house or to work or to take your kids to school, or while on vacation in Egypt, well then that is just all on you.
No more will we put our lives on the line and as a matter of fact maybe soldiers should do the same.

You want to call the police incompetent and rash, blah blah blah, after what they’ve been dealing with to try and keep you safe? Live Free and Die, you ungrateful, whining, liberal wretches!”

Hmmm, that’s true, because without the police, innocent people might have died in 9/11, the OK City bombing, the Madrid bombings or the London subway bombings.

Ahem, wait a minute….

The police are there to pick up the pieces, and to arrest the perpetrator if he chooses to turn himself in or if someone close to him tells them who did it. They are not there to defend anyone. They are not there to protect anyone or prevent anything. This is not up for debate, it is a matter of settled case law.

Live Free or Die is not exactly a left/liberal philosophy.

Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers chased and shot to death at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here. Senior investigators and officials of the Metropolitan Police said the man was believed to be South American; it was not known whether he was Muslim. No explosives or weapons were found on the man’s body after the shooting, police officials said.

It’s important to remember that the police are government employees. This does not meant that they will always foul things up, only that they can be reliably depended upon to do so.

So, while Scotland Yard may not have any idea where those responsible for the bombings are, at least they managed to kill one innocent man. And, as usual, they’ll be doing their best to cover their respective asses.

“After the shooting, Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said, “The information I have available is that this shooting is directly linked to the ongoing and expanding anti-terrorist operation.”

Or not….

From the Evening Standard:

Eyewitnesses described mayhem at Stockwell Tube station today after a suspected suicide bomber was shot dead fleeing from armed police. One said the man was shot five times as he ran on to a Northern line train soon after 10am. Scotland Yard have confirmed they shot a man and he was pronounced dead at the scene….

“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified. He sort of tripped but they were hotly pursuing him and couldn’t have been more than two or three feet behind him at this time. He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor. The policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand, he held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him.

“He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket. Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don’t know. But it looked out of place in the weather we’ve been having.”

I don’t know what the correct way to handle a suicide bomber is, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion on this. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies, but it seems to me that if the guy was wearing a bomb vest, simply shooting him would run the risk of triggering a dead-man switch.

And if it turns out he wasn’t concealing a bomb, this would be truly appalling news.

The Sports Guy’s intern passes on a link:

According to researchers, celebrities are four times as likely to commit suicide as noncelebrities and live, on average, thirteen years less than Joe and Jane Sixpack. Celebrities may receive substandard treatment at hospitals, victims of deferred medical tests or competition between surgeons for the honor of operating on a celebrity. Celebrities may experience more insomnia, migraines, and irritable-bowel syndrome. Celebrities are twice as likely to develop a serious alcohol problem….

Are the crazy drawn to Fame, or does Fame make them crazy? ASN claims the latter. To a celebrity, narcissism is a rational response to a world that functions as a mirror, amplifying one’s positive self-image, the sense that one is in the absolute center. It arrives later than classical narcissism—which sets in between the ages of 3 and 5, once a realistic view of the world begins to develop—but the disorders are indistinguishable, with patients exhibiting the same grandiose fantasies, excessive need for approval, lack of empathy, anger, and depression (how fabulous). Fearful of exposing the real them, narcissists project a glorified self that becomes so ingrained it becomes impossible to tell what’s real and what’s made up. This is the self they start talking about in the third person. Everyone must love this self or it risks dissolution. There must be Omnipresent Love. Speech becomes impressionistic and lacking in detail—a symptom celebrity profilers well recognize….

Celebrity, as John Updike wrote, is the mask that eats into the face. A study has shown that pop stars use personal pronouns in their songwriting three times more once they become famous; another study claims that the more famous one gets, the more one checks oneself in the mirror, and the more one’s self-concept becomes self-conscious. It’s a problem, to be both self-involved and self-conscious.

My personal suspicion is that it is the crazy who are drawn to fame. Even in the less-famous world of celebrity punditry, you have only to witness the delusional opinion-spinning of a Sean Hannity, an Al Franken or a Michelle Malkin to wonder if these people have it all together. The fascinating thing about Ann Coulter’s pundithood, what sets her apart, is that she gives off a powerful sense of not giving a damn where she is or with whom she is speaking, as opposed to the desperate If-I-am-not-on-Fox-I-do-not-exist brand marketing of so many other chattercrats.

While fame opens doors and makes many desirable things more accessible, it is a curse in its own right. I have known very few famous people that I considered to be sane who enjoyed the celebrity aspect of their fame for very long. And those I’ve known who consciously sought, and failed, to find success in those industries that lead to celebrity were, almost without fail, more than a little off their rocker.

ihatedashrub writes:

I’ll type real slow because I know you have trouble with comprehension…

Where does human talent originate? From whence does it come? What is the birth place of human creativity?

I even asked three different ways. I’m going to pen a new book…Cedarford: The Myopia of Me, an unauthorized autobiography.

I think my favorite thing about this blog is that I regularly lose track of who is on whose side on any given issue, as teams seem to shift unpredictably depending on the issue. For some inexplicable reason, this little post threw me for a loop, forcing me to step back and remind myself of the most basic foundations on which this quasi-community rests.

1. Nate aka The Gargler vs the Civil War aka The War of Northern Aggression
2. Bane aka The Weeper vs insufficiently attractive women, Muslims, fat people, etc
3. Crystal vs killing babies
4. Dread vs Area 51
5. Shrubbery aka ihatedashrub vs the President of the United States of America
6. Desert Cat vs the Drug War
7. Gregg vs the English language
8. Cedarford vs the insufficiently human
9. The Lizard Queen vs Mighty Cthulhu

Okay, now I think I’ve got it again.

Regarding the knowability of the supernatural:

Note that the sciences are incapable of recognizing such phenomena. For the sake of discussion, let us suppose that some unscientific event actually occurred—say, that the shade of Elvis in fact appeared in my living room one night, sang Blue Moon Over Kentucky, and then vanished. Would science, or any scientist, be able to know it?

I could tell a physicist that I had seen Elvis, of course. He would assume that I was joking, lying, or deluded. I could report that the neighbors had heard Blue Moon, but the physicist would say that I had played the song on my stereo. I might show him video that I had shot of the appearance, but he would say that I had hired an Elvis impersonator, or that I had faked the footage with video-editing software.

In sum, even though it had really happened, he could never know that it had.

The difficulty is that the sciences can apprehend only the repeatable. If I could summon Elvis at will, again and again in an instrumented laboratory, physicists would eventually have to concede that something was happening, whatever it might be. While scientists defend their paradigms as fiercely as Marxists or Moslems, they can, after sufficient demonstration, be swayed by evidence. But without repeatability, they see no evidence.

Not uncommonly, those in the sciences say that they “do not accept supernatural explanations.” One might observe that the world remains the same, no matter what they accept. I might choose not to accept the existence of gravity, but could nonetheless fall over a cliff.

Yet those who do not accept the supernatural never say just what they mean by “supernatural.” By “nature,” do we not simply mean, “that which is”? If for example genuine premonitions exist (which I do not know), how can they be supernatural, as distinct from poorly understood?

I think that by supernatural scientists mean “not deducible from physics.” But of course a great many things are not so deducible—thought, consciousness, free will if any, sorrow, beauty. Scientists do not accept things which seem to have no physical cause, and of course as scientists should not accept them. If a comet were suddenly to change course, it would hardly be useful if an astronomer said that it just happened, or that a herd of invisible unicorns had pushed it off course. He, properly, would want to find a gravitational influence.

Trouble comes when the sciences overstep their bounds. It is one thing to study physical phenomena, another to say that only physical phenomena exist. Here science blurs into ideology, an ideology being a systematic and emotionally held way of misunderstanding the world. A science is open and descriptive, an ideology closed and prescriptive. A scientists says, in principle at least, “Give me the facts and I will endeavor to derive a theory that describes them.” The ideologist says, “I have the theory, and nothing that does not fit it can be a fact.” Having chosen his rut, he never sees beyond it. This has not been the way of the greats of science, but of the middle ranks, adequate to swell a progress or work in a laboratory.

I have written on this phenomenon before myself. Does it trouble no one that many of the greatest scientists in history believed in things supernatural? That nearly every physics supremacist’s pet theories have eventually been proven to be wrong by their fellows?

Science, as a tool and a method of increasing knowledge, is invaluable. Science as a substitute faith for materialist idealogues is a sham. Despite the vast difference between “we know” and “as far as we can tell at this point in time”, second-rate minds arrogantly continue to confuse the two, often, ironically, when they are deviating wildly from the strictures of logic.

Jon Podhoretz writes on NRO:

Neil Livingstone, one of those “terrorism experts” who seems to be one only because he has declared himself one, just said on the CBS Morning Show that this was the first time there had been follow-up attacks after a major terrorist assault. Hello? Neil? Anthrax? Ever heard of anthrax?

I don’t recall any major anthrax assaults. I don’t recall stock markets and currencies plunging because of dozens of anthrax victims. It all depends upon the meaning of the word “major”, I suppose. The silliness of the hurry with which pundits leap into these petty frays has become seriously annoying.

And anyone who still says “hello” as a poor excuse for a witty wake-up call deserves to be forced to watch the entire Michael J. Fox ouvre, without commercial breaks. It was already old when it was still the Eighties.

From Soccernet:

England have been overtaken by the United States in the FIFA Coca-Cola world rankings after dropping one place to eighth. The USA, still managed by Bruce Arena who guided his country to the quarter-finals of the 2002 World Cup, have reached their highest ever placing with a rise to sixth.

Heh heh heh….