Month: July 2012

Existence and an ‘Open Question’ Consideration

G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good?  The point, I take it, is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good.  To appreciate the contrast between open and closed questions, consider Tom the bachelor.  Given that Tom is  a bachelor, it is not an open question whether Tom is an unmarried adult male.  This is because the sense of 'bachelor' does not allow us reasonably to resist the identification of bachelors with adult unmarried males.    It is built into the very sense of 'bachelor' that a bachelor is an adult unmarried male.  But it is not built into the very sense of 'good' that the good is pleasure.

It occurred to me while cavorting in the swimming pool the other  morning that a similar Open Question gambit can be deployed against the thin theorist.

Suppose a thin theorist maintains  the following.  To say that Quine exists is to say that Quine is identical to something.  No doubt, but does the something exist?  The question remains open.  Just as 'good' does not mean 'pleasurable,' 'something' does not mean 'something that exists.'  Otherwise,  'Something that does not exist'  would be a contradiction in terms.  But it is not.  Consider

1. A matter transmitter is something that does not exist.

It follows from (1) that

2. Something does not exist.

I am not claiming that (2) is true.  I hold that everything exists!  My claim is that (2) is neither a formal-logical contradiction, nor is it semantically contradictory, i.e., contradictory in virtue of the senses of the constituent terms.  Here is an example of a formal-logical contradiction:

3. Something  that does not exist exists.

Here is an example of a sentence that, while not self-contradictory by the lights of formal logic, is semantically contradictory:

4. There are bachelors that are not unmarried adult males.

'Some cat is fat' and 'A fat cat exists' are logically equivalent.  But do they have exactly the same meaning (sense)?  This is an open question.  And precisely because it is an open question, the two sentencces do not have the same meaning, pace London Ed, van Inwagen and the rest of the thin boys.  For there is nothing in the very sense of 'Some cat is fat' to require that a fact cat exist.  Compare 'Some unicorn is angry.'  Does that require by its very sense that an angry unicorn exists?

Am I getting close to the point where I can justifiably diagnose van Inwagen and the boys with that dreaded cognitive aberration, existence-blindness? Or is it rather the case that I suffer from double-vision? 

Death, Where is Thy Sting?

We are concerned that life is short and that its end approaches.  But there is consolation in the contrary thought that we are getting through this life, that a time will come when we can lay down its burdens of pain, disappointment, ignorance, and moral failure.  The end is the end of the goods of this life but also the end of its evils.  And this whether the end is final or a new beginning.

So death, where is thy sting?  If this world is but a shadow-play of phenomena, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; if all the world's a stage in the theater of the absurd, then to be quit of it is no great loss.  But if it  is prelude, then new adventures await and you can look forward to them. To live well one must hope, both in this life and beyond it.

But suppose you believe that this world is ultimately real, and that life in it is unqualifiedly good.  Then you have a problem.  For then death is a great calamity: it deprives you irrevocably of the ultimate in reality and value.

The solution to the problem is to abandon the twin presupposition that this world is the ne plus ultra of being and value and that life in it is unqualifiedly good.  There are fairly weighty reasons for both abandonments.

What I don't understand is the attitude of Philip Larkin on Death.  He seems in the grip of the twin presupposition.

Government Did Not Build Your Business

A very good Reason magazine article.  The author, Ronald Bailey, explains a distinction between tangible and intangible wealth.  Human, social, and institutional capital are forms of intangible wealth. 

And while you are at Reason.com, read Sheldon Richman's article on the right to self-defense.  It makes a number of obvious points that liberals seem incapable of understanding.  Part of the problem, of course, is that liberals live in enclaves in which the truths Richman enunciates are simply not heard.  Liberals hang too much with their own ilk.  They need to get out more and 'expand their horizons.'

Conservatives are not 'sheltered' in the same way.  There is no way a conservative or a libertarian can avoid liberals.  Liberals dominate the mainstream media, the universities, the courts, the other branches of government,  the entertainment industry, and many mainstream churches.  Conservatives and libertarians cannot help but confront liberal ideas.

But what happens when conservative and libertarian ideas are presented to the public via an outlet such as Fox News Network? Liberals  scream their pointy heads off in protest.  That is clear proof that they are not 'liberal' in any classical  sense.  They would be better described as left-wing fascists.

How can anybody object to a John Stossel simply presenting his ideas and his arguments?  Most of what he says makes good sense.  I disagree with his open borders policy and his ideas about drug legalization.  He and libertarians generally are dead wrong on those two points.  But I don't want to shut him down — or up.  I want to hear his point of view.

One night Stossel hosted a discussion between Pat Buchanan and Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie. Paleo-conservatism met  libertarianism. Great discussion.  Are you going to find something like that on MSNBC?  They dumped Buchanan.  Leftist scumbaggery!

A Second Van Inwagen Argument for the Univocity of ‘Exists’

I discussed one of the Peter van Inwagen's arguments here and found it wanting.  He has a second argument:  ". . . 'exists' is univocal owing to the interdefinability of 'there exists'  and the obviously univocal 'all.'  But this is a powerful argument, for, surely, 'all' means the same in 'All natural numbers have a successor' and 'All Greeks are mortal'?" (484).  The argument could be put as follows:

'Every' is univocal.

'Exist(s)' and 'every' are interdefinable:  'Fs exist' is equivalent to 'It is not the case that everything is not an F.'

Therefore

'Exist(s)' is univocal.

I accept this crisp little argument — but with a restriction: 'exist(s)' is univocal across all affirmative and negative general existential sentences.  But what about a singular existential such as 'Peter exists'?  Does 'exist' in the latter have the same sense that it has in 'Rabbits exist'?  I say it doesn't:  'exist(s)' is not univocal across all existence sentences, general and singular.

To warm up, what are we saying when we say that rabbits exist? On Frege's approach, we are saying that the concept rabbit is instantiated.  So 'exist(s)' in general existentials means 'is instantiated.'  But 'Peter exists' does not say that Peter is instantiated.  So is it not spectacularly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal across singular and general existentials? 

But we needn't follow Frege is holding that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate.  And van Inwagen does not follow him in this.  Perhaps it would not be unfair to characterize van Inwagen as a half-way Fregean: he likes the notion that "existence is allied to number" but he does not take that characteristic Fregean thesis to entail that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, i.e., a predicate of concepts, not objects.  Van Inwagen could and would say something along these lines:

1. Rabbits exist:  It is not the case that everything is not a rabbit.  ~(x)~Rx.

2. Peter exists:  It is not the case that everything is not identical to Peter.  ~(x)~(x = Peter)

I will now try to show that, even on van Inwagen's preferred translations, there is still equivocity as between general and singular existentials. (1) and (2) are equivalent to

1*. Rabbits exist: Something is a rabbit. (Ex)Rx.

and

2*. Peter exists:  Something is (identically) Peter. (Ex)(x = Peter).

Now it seems to me that we are still stuck with equivocation.  The predicate in (1*) is 'something is (predicatively) ___.'   The predicate in (2*) is 'something is (identically) ___.'  Now the 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity.  So the equivocation on 'exist(s)' remains in the form of an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity.

The equivocation ought to be obvious from the notation alone.  The immediate juxtaposition of 'R' and 'x' in '(Ex)Rx' signifies that x is (predicatively) R.  But in '(Ex)(x = Peter)' we find no such juxtaposition but a new sign, '=.'  

My thesis, then, is that while 'exist(s)' is univocal across all general existentials, it is not univocal across all existentials.  This reflects that fact that — to switch over to material mode — existence cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of any thin logical notion or combination of such notions.

Gun Laws and the Supposed ‘Politicization’ of the Aurora Massacre

Last year, when Republicans were being accused of 'politicizing' the national debt crisis I made the point that one cannot politicize that which is inherently political:

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis.  But how can you politicize what is  inherently political?  The debt in question is the debt of the federal government.  Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions.  As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political.  Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

Then I was criticizing Democrats and liberals.  But now I find that some Republicans and conservatives are making the same mistake.  They are accusing liberals of politicizing the Aurora massacre.  Example here.

But as I said, you cannot politicize what is already political.  Now guns are not political entities, but gun laws are, whether federal, state, or local.  Whether there should be gun laws at all, and what their content should be are political questions.

Now we all agree that we have to have laws regulating the manufacture, sale,  transporting, and use of firearms.  So we all agree that we have to have 'gun control.'  Gun control is not what I display or fail to display at the shooting range, but is a phrase that refers to gun control laws.  Since we all want gun control, we all want (enforceable and enforced)  gun control laws, even the dreaded NRA.

It is a liberal lie to say that conservatives are against gun control.  It is similar to the liberal lie that conservatives are anti-government.  If I am for limited government, then I am for government, whence it follows that I am not against government.    (Anarchists are anti-government, but no conservative, and few libertarians, are against government.)  Likewise, if I am for laws that prevent the sale of guns to felons, and for other such laws, then I am not against gun control. 

By the way, the preternaturally obtuse Bill Moyers got a nice and well-deserved slap-down from Bill O'Reilly the other night for his idiotic remarks about the NRA.  Bill Moyers is a one-man argument for the federal defunding of PBS and its affiliates such as NPR. (See National Public Radio Needs Your Support!)  Listen to the whole of O'Reilly's speech.  He is a moderate on gun control, too moderate perhaps.  He is moderate on many issues.   Is that why the Left can't stand him?

But I digress.  We  all agree that we need enforceable and enforced gun control laws.  But we don't all agree about the content of these laws.  Now that is a political question the answering of which presupposes a political theory, a theory of man in his relation to the state. The gun debate is political from the ground up.  It is silly so speak of 'politicizing' it.

Here is what I say.  I have a right to life, a right to defend my life, and a right to appropriate means of self-defense.  No government has the right to interfere with these rights.  This is nonnegotiable.  If you disagree, I have to put you down as morally and intellecually obtuse, as beyond the pale of rational debate.  I will do my best to make sure that you and your ilk are defeated politically.

What's an appropriate means of self-defense?  The tactical shotgun is the most effective  tool of home defense.  Holmes, the Aurora shooter, had one of those.  It looked like a Remington 1070.  He misused it for evil ends.  That is chargeable to his moral and legal account, not to the gun's.  Guns lack such 'accounts.'  No gun is a free agent.  No gun ever lilled anybody.  Killing is an action (action-type); actions are actions of agents.  Pay attention, liberals.

There will always be massacres and murders regardless of the stringency of gun laws.  Norway.

Can anything be done?  Yes.  Enforce existing gun laws.  Execute miscreants such as Holmes, after a fair trial, in a speedy manner.  There could a be a judicial fast-track to expedite the execution of such people within a year, at most.  Put limits on the quantities and types of vile and soul-destroying rubbish that HollyWeird liberals dish out.  Stop attacking religion, that most excellent vehicle for the delivery of moral teachings.  If Holmes had internalized the Ten Commandments as a boy, could he have done what he did?  Do you think he would have been less likely to do what he did?

But liberals are morally and intellectually obtuse.  So they will fight against all reasonable proposals.  A liberal would far rather violate the rights of decent citizens than mete out justice to vicious criminals. 

The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

Nausea

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen — the head honcho of the thin theorists — want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  — but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Who Built the Internet? Obama’s Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" — really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about — you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

There is Beauty in the World

I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise.  There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it.  There is also beauty and nobility in human nature.  It peeps out now and again.  A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.

It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy.  But avoid it we must.  The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free.  Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?

The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth and Old Age

Let's get off to a rousing start with The Who's famous generational anthem, aptly entitled My Generation.  "Things they say seem so cold, I hope I die before I get old."  Rather on the sweeter side, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys wonder what it'll be like when I Grow Up to be a Man.  The same wonderful harmonies are also in evidence in this great Beach Boys cover of  I'm So Young. 

Ricky Nelson, Young World.  Sonny James, Young Love.  Lovin Spoonful, Younger Girl.  Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Young Girl.  Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Little Children.  Janis Ian, Society's Child.  Social commentary from a precocious 16 year old in '67.  Joan Baez sings Bob Dylan's, Forever Young.

But the young become old . . .

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. "Call me a relic, call me what you will/Say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill/Today's music ain't got the same soul/ I like that that old time Rock and Roll." Neil Young, Old Man.  Howlin' Wolf, Goin' Down Slow.  "I've had my fun, if I don't get well no more."  Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet (but it's gettin' there). George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean.

R.I.P. Kitty Wells (1919-2012), Making Believe (1955). Heartaches by the Number.

The Three Greatest Scams of Our Time

Here.  Excerpt:

These three chimeras [the Palestinian faux “narrative,” the environmental craze, and the Obama myth] generally manifest the morbid sense of victimhood and hatred of the modern West that is the most contemptible and dangerous feature of our contemporary world. Israel is a tiny outpost of enlightened modernity that the world wants to see snuffed out and replaced by medieval barbarism and tribal fanaticism; the global warming hoaxers want to roll back technological progress to a condition like that well before the industrial revolution, even before the rise of agrarian societies; and Barack Obama is the first president of the United States who actually despises—and has stated overtly his desire to “fundamentally transform”—the founding principles and way of life of the freest and most dynamic society ever known.

What sustains these programs of dissolution is not truth but a semblance of truth rooted in fantasy, misrepresentation, invention, and dinning repetition. Serious critique and sincere skepticism are dismissed as mere conspiracy, as disrupting the recitals we have come dotingly to believe in. Myth is received as reality and “narrative” euchres objective analysis and the pursuit of fact. In our fable-ready time, the real story is the story itself. This is where we are today. Where we will be tomorrow does not inspire confidence.