Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Sand Flea’s Plea

Or, rather, the Psammead’s wish
 
1908.  A quote from the world’s only recorded encounter with a Psammead (sand fairy), asking a supplicant for one wish of its own: to be forever unmentioned,
 
‘Why, don’t you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They’d get hold of me, and they wouldn’t wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they’d ask for a graduated income-tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.’
 

Sadly, it seems that someone found the Psammead, or one of his nearly-extinct brethren and wreaked the very havoc he feared. “…graduated income tax… old-age pensions… manhood suffrage… free secondary education…”  ::shudder::  It’s all come to pass.  And on your dime.
 
The National Day of Mourning is soon upon us…
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The problem with so-called “liberals”

as if there were only one :heh:
 
When you couple ideals that are unconnected to reality with the silly notion that “practice makes perfect” you end up with the current crop of so-called liberals. Think about it.  Every single “liberal” (or as so-called liberals now prefer, “progressive”) idea in social engineering, education, government and academics that I can recall from the past thirty-five years (and know of from the past century or so) has proven to be harmful to society. While some may have seemed to have temporary beneficial effects, the law of unintended consequences caught up with every darned one of even the truly well-intentioned “liberal” ideas.
 
That’s what happens when people who refuse to test their ideas against verifiable facts continue to insist that “practice makes perfect.”  Anyone who has listened to a beginning music student play the wrong note over and over and over again can tell you that practice does NOT “make perfect”—only perfect practice makes perfect.  And only the practice of good ideas, proven by testing them against their real world results, can produce good policies and practices.
 
But current “liberals” have no need to test their ideas against reality, you see, because they just know by faith that reality will change to conform to what they think should be.
 
And folk such as that are a prescription for creating hell in utopia.
 
Back to regular programming.
 
(BTW, I usually put “liberal” and “liberals” in quotation marks when referring to the current crop of folk who espouse so-called [heh] progressive ideas, because almost without exception they are not liberal in the classic sense of seeking to expand freedoms and liberties… unless it is for folks who agree with them to be free to say and do what this current crop of “liberals” want.  “Everything not forbidden (by them) is compulsoty” so to speak… Their idea of justice and equal treatment under the law, for example, is to create priviledged classes who recieve benefits because of ethnic or racial backgrounds.  Orwellian indeed… And decidedly UNliberal.)
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Ready for “The National Day of Mourning”?

Ambivalence: April 15 approaches
 
Years ago, I designated April 15 as The National Day of Mourning, for obvious reasons.  While the meme has not yet spread far (enough), my close associates expect that every April 15 they will see me beardless, as a sign of my mourning for liberty wasted. Yes: wasted. If ownership of the fruits of one’s labors is, as Madison asserted** in the Federalist papers, indicative of a free or slave state (the slave owing the fruits of his labors to another), then April 15 is perhaps the best day of the year to symbolize the economic slavery of Americans, for it highlights the fact that the fruits of your labors are only as much yours as your political masters say they are.
 
You do not own your home as long as some government entity can claim it under “eminent domain” and give it to someone else in order to generate more tax income for the slavemasters than you pay on the same property (more and more private property is being seized and turned over to big businesses “for the good of the community”).
 
You do not “own” your income, as long as some political animal can tax it from you any darned time they want and give it to someone else.
 
And make no mistake: what you pay in hidden taxes is much, much more than you see when you pay the butcher’s bill on April 15.  Think anout it for a minute.  How many businesses pay taxes?  Answer: not one single one.  Not one.  Sure, the governments collect taxes from businesses, but those taxes are simply passed on to the purchasers of those businesses’ goods and services… all the way down the line.
 
So, when you buy a $10.00 item at your local grocery, think how many different businesses’ taxes you must pay to purchase that item.  The local store remits various taxes and licensing to various governments, and it MUST include those taxes as a part of its cost of doing business… in the cost of the goods it sells you.  Then there’s the distributor who delivered the goods.  The (various and sundry) manufacturer(s) of the item.  The shipper of the raw materials to the manufacturer and the suppliers of the raw materials themselves. In this simple (overly  simplified) model, in order to purchase your $10.00 item, yoju have to pay the taxes that are hidden from you of at least five other entities.
 
And those hidden taxes are just the beginning of how government alone saps your economic freedoms. Consider the enormous burdens of all the various regulatory agencies on each of those businesses. Not a small burden at all. Consider the circumstances Jay Lancaster, a small business owner speaking before the U.S. House Small Business Committee, faces:
 
“My small eight-person business is regulated by over eight federal agencies. Those eight regulatory agencies are just the tip of the iceberg because we also have to comply with state and local regulations. The amount of paperwork associated with these regulations is staggering and is certainly not something that one person alone can handle. I don’t have compliance officers, accountants and lawyers on staff to handle regulatory compliance. My wife acts as our ‘compliance officer’ and my daughter, much to her dismay, is forced to spend countless hours a month just on compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration….   As a businessman, I do not measure the cost of regulation solely in money spent on outside contractors but I also calculate it in the time my employees and I have to spend on the regulation itself. I think this is the worst cost of all, because every minute I spend on regulation takes me away from growing my business or, better yet, playing with my grandchildren. Every dollar I spend on an accountant is a dollar I cannot reinvest in my business, which is my family’s future.”  
 
Every dime businessmen like Lancaster must spend to comply with the gargantuan regulatory burden must be shared with the consumer, or Lancaster and his like will simply have to close their doors.
 
Another piece of change from your pockets to prop up government meddling.
 
But of course economic slavery isn’t solely due to abuse of taxation and other governmental abuses; it is also the result of another weakness of the sheep who submit to such abuses: excessive debt resultant from, well, laziness and greed.
 
Yep.  The same laziness and greed that produces a “grab the other guy’s money and give it to me” attitude toward governmental theft also convinces people that placing their lives in hock to bankers is a good idea, and so millions of us are in debt up to our eyeballs and paying more in interest to creditors than we are gaining in interest from savings.
 
So, April 15 stands in my mind as a day of mourning for the death of that myth of American independence and self-reliance, of freedom and liberty, as long as our taxes go largely to pay bureaucrats to abuse us whenever the whim hits them (see: TSA, the fear most Americans have of the IRS, the tyranny of the EPA and so many of the other alphabet soup agencies *sigh*) and Americans are willing to, for the most part, place their lives in hock to creditors.
 
And yet… ambivalence.  While I might prefer that the billions spent liberating Iraq were spent in prize monies for development and implementation of energy independence from outside sources, I recognize that as long as the military is serving in a manner specifically designed to protect American citizens from foreign attacks, then that money is at least being spent in a Constitutionally legitimate fashion for one of the very, very few Constitutionally legitimate functions of our national government.  And so, I waffle a little in my mourning this year, as I have for the past two years.
 
A little.  I’ll leave the moustache when I shave.
 
 
**Madison’s explaination of the apportionment of representation, addressing the slavery issue and arguing the Southern/slaveholding states’ position:
 
“In being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of
another… ” [shades of Martha Stewart and the TSA haunt the final clauses of that comment… ]
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Sugar gives me a headache!

(What is the answer to “One lump or two?”)
 
See the Blogwriter mess below? <sigh> Yeh, it’s an unclosed link tag. But the html is such a mess (typical bloated and messy Blogwriter code, from what I’ve viewed of its efforts to do wysiwyg so far) that rather than take my lumps, I’ll just let it stand as an object lesson: TANSTAFL.
 
See, what I tried was implementing Zoundry’s affiliate linking.  Signed up for an affiliate account (it’s in beta: you have to request an invitation) and inserted an affiliate link to the book I mentioned, cos I actually like the thing.  Such a messy result… *sigh*
 
Still, it is a good read. Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit.
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It’s the little things

One of the best things about the internet +
Nice touch, Smallville=
2 lil joys
 
On the phone last night, my daughter mentioned one of the five books she’s currently reading for pleasure. A juvie written in 1908.  Sooooo… since it was likely PD, I searched and found scads of places I could get ebook/etext versions.  Fun book:  Five Children and It  by Edith Nesbit. A tad didactic, but pleasantly told.  Much better, IMO, than the Series of Unfortunate Events tales, which palled after only a few pages.  And now I see that it’s a film (upcoming release) featuring Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard, Freddie Highmore, and Zoe Wannamaker.
 
One to watch for.
 
[UPDATE: I’ve seen a trailer for the flick.  It departs from the book on several rather major points, introduces characters and situations not in the book, etc. Nevertheless, it may still be worth a viewing. I’ll probably finish the book this evening, between other more pressing tasks.]
 
The other lil joy: Orson Scott Card, a writer who knows how to craft good stories—sound plotting, credible characters, pace, etc.—wrote a paean extolling Smallville, so I dutifully began watching it when I had a chance.  Saw the latest tonight and it was… passable.  More teenaged sturm und drang filtered through a touchy-feely soap opera-ish hammishness than I like, but not all that bad.  The lil joy was after the show was over, the very last of the credits.  An ink bottle, apparently filled with red ink, labeled Miller Cough Ink is smashed and… a brief lil motif from Mahler’s Symphony #1 tinkled past my ears!  Brought the whole darned first movement singing through my head! What a nice touch, Smallville!  Thanks!
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Why I like living in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢ Part III

Secession is still an option

Well-established rumor has it that America's Third World Countyâ„¢ came within an ace of seceding all on its lonesome back in the middle years of the 20th Century (not during the Great Unitarian-Baptist Shootout of the 19th Century).  The feeling is still rather strong in these parts that, though sparsely-populated, America's Third World Countyâ„¢ is still heavily-armed enough to guard its own borders, should it ever come to such a pass…

Which is reason number 3 for appreciating this part of the world. See a prediction of where the rest of the country is going here.  Have your speakers on and remove breakables from easy reach. It's a brave new world (and no, I'll not say that with apologies to Aldous Huxley).  Coming to a pizza joint near you Real Soon Now if the socialists (of both major political parties) have their way.

They wish

h/t "Guitar Man" at Jerry Pournelle's Current Mail page.

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Does Blogger work, now?

No

Minimally glad that Blogwriter does, though. Except, of course, that I have other stuff to do, and also have lots to bloviate about… decisions, decisions… how to prioritize? That which I ought to do, shall I do it not?

Not.

So, refining the nomenclature re: subclasses of dumbasses will just have to wait for later…

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True Serenity

The Serenity Prayer—real world version
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill, because they REALLY chapped my gizzard!
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tis a poor thing…

…but my own
One of the things that prisons for kids (also called “public schools”) has done that is beyond monstrous is that it has endeavored to drive a stake through the very heart of that which educrats view as a vampire that will suck their very lives: minds of imagination and memory and appreciation of Beauty. What is worse is that it has mostly achieved this goal.
OK, here’s an example… a poor thing, but my own. I had said in the previous post that I was about to fire up some good music and read a good book as an anodyne to the pain of contemplating contemporary “culture”… but… phone call, hour late, WonderWoman in bed. Listening to music on headphones is just… not right, somehow. So.
Even with tiredness enveloping me, turning up the volume on my tinitus, I can “listen” to Copland’s “Fanfare…” by remembering it. By reading it. Whichever and/or both. And still read such as,
“The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing… “
…from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (a citation from the introduction I ought to have woven into the text of my previous post).
I’ve learned not to speak of such things in “normal” company, though. Most people look at me like a calf at a new gate if I mention “listening to music” in my head or quote a piece of Kipling, Shakespeare or Stephenson. But I can recall my grandfather quoting chapters of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Scott’s Ivanhoe or Lady of the Lake or any one of many poets he had read in his youth… and memorized extensively, so I do not feel any great accomplishment in the few snatches of the “good stuff” I recall.
But… these poor things that have become my own in memory, these things I can hear and taste and see no matter where I am or in what circumstances I find myself, these are denied (by whatever mechanism—natural or, more often, inculcated stupidity, for the most part) to too many in our land today.
*sigh*
Back to Chesterton and… I think one of the Bs this time. (I never get enough of Ludwig’s an freude, let alone everything that builds up to it… I know, I know, musical snobs say it’s performed too much, but what do they know?)
Good night, Gracie.
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America and “the arts”–the long goodbye

Well, no duh
 
I’m not sure where in the blizzard of quick skimming I’ve done in the last hour or so that this turned up (though it’s almost certainly at Jerry Pournelle’s site, probably in Current Mail), but it points out the excruciatingly obvious “dog bites man” story about most young Americans and anything that comprises real music, graphic art or literature.  A sample of “Why Literature Matters”:
 
“According to the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a population study designed and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts (and executed by the US Bureau of the Census), arts participation by Americans has declined for eight of the nine major forms that are measured. (Only jazz has shown a tiny increase — thank you, Ken Burns.) The declines have been most severe among younger adults (ages 18-24). The most worrisome finding in the 2002 study, however, is the declining percentage of Americans, especially young adults, reading literature.”
Of course, the problem is many-faceted.  On the one hand, there was little of artistic merit that was both produced during the latter part of the 20th century (or is being produced today) and accepted as “art” by the tasteless drones of academia or their sycophants in the media “critics” (which is where art “certification” is “done”).  Nah.  Most “serious” music, graphic, dramatic or literary “art” of the latter part of the 20th century was as crappy (if not more so) than popular “art.”
 
That’s one problem: when “art” is crap, why bother to partake of such snobbery when equally crappy fare is available in pop “culture”?
 
Another is that academia (and especially that portion devoted to the study of education and the training of teachers) has been focusing ever more carefully on producing stupid students.  When stupid people (whether it is their natural state or a state inculcated via the artifice of educrats) are presented with beauty, they tend to, at best, use it to wipe excrement from their nether regions. If they have the sensibilities to do even that.
 
Aw, shucky darns, heck and rot. And all that sort of weak [expletive deleted].  *sigh* Again, Holly Lisle pretty well describes why people ought not to read that which critics and academia proclaim as “literature”—at least, 20th century “literature”—in “How to Write Suckitudinous Fiction” (I keep telling you to GO READ IT. I’ll wait.  Go.  Come back later for the rest of this rant.)
 
…..

…..

…..

…..
Back now? OK.  Her exposition of the problem of “Suckitudinous Fiction” also applies to “Suckitudinous” graphic, musical and any other art.  I’d say it has more to do with a loss of appreciation for beauty—no, make that Beauty—than anything else.  “Expression” is now a substitute for speech, art, music—a whole range of once very human things now made the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces at each other.
 
But when our schools turn out products that are the moral equivalent of monkeys (a less charitable person would probably argue that monkeys are the moral superiors of most “public school” products) in that each is just about equivalent in their ability to percieve and appreciate Beauty, Meaning, Love—all those silly passé values our parents once understood as eternal.
 
*profound sigh*
 
The subject matter of “Why Literature Matters”  is not news.  It’s just sad. (And besides, the author misses the most important reasons why literature—or any art—matters.  Of course.)
 
I think I’m going to listen to some music, now.  Copland*, I think.  Maybe one of the Bs.  Nothing written or performed in “serious” or popular music in the last 25 years, though.  And while I’m listening, maybe I’ll get a little deeper into Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I missed it when I was younger and just recently found a copy.  Maybe some good music and well-written prose can wash the taste of the 21st century out of my mouth for a little while.
 
Maybe.
 
(*Yeh.  It’s not a sound clip.  It’s a manuscript page. read it and weep. heh)