Ronettes, Be My Baby (opening sequence).
Rolling Stones, Tell Me (Keitel's entrance).
Rolling Stones, Jumpin' Jack Flash (De Niro's entrance).
Smokey Robinson, Mickey's Monkey
Derek and the Dominoes, I looked Away
Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman
Little Caesar and the Romans, Those Oldies but Goodies
Johnny Ace, Pledging My Love
Paragons, Florence
What follows is a reposting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 19 July 2010. The reposting is prompted by the following surprising statement by Joe Nocera: "But it is equally true that anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill." (Emphasis added.) Well, maybe it isn't so surprising given that Mr. Nocera is a NYT op-ed writer. Surprising or not, Nocera's claim is not only false, but illustrative of complete confusion about the meaning of 'by definition.'
Suppose a Palestinian Arab terrorist enters a yeshiva with a semi-automatic rifle and kills 20 children and six adults. May you validly infer that the terrorist is mentally ill? Of course not. He may or may not be. Were the 9/11 hijackers mentally ill? No. They collectively committed an unspeakably evil act. But only a liberal would confuse an evil act with an insane act. Suppose a young SS soldier is ordered to shoot a group of 26 defenceless Jews, toppling them into a mass grave they were forced to dig. He does so, acting sanely and rationally, knowing that if he does not commit mass murder he himself will be shot to death.
Conceptual confusion and emotive uses of language are trademarks of liberal feel-good 'thinking.' To give one more example from Nocera's piece, he refers to semi-automatics as "killing machines." Question: would a semi-auto pistol or rifle be a "killing machine" if it were used purely defensively or to stop a would-be mass murderer? Is an 'assault weapon' an assault weapon when used for defense? Is a liberal a liberal on the rare occasions when he talks sense?
…………………
What is wrong with the following sentence: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"? It is from a speech by Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.
I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional. Argue away, and
good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illict importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X. But that is exactly what Berwick is doing. Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional. Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic. It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.
This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff. In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.
This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.
One more example. Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is. The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional. Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth. Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government. One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via
taxation. But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.
Leftists are typically intellectual cheaters. They will try to bamboozle you. Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.' Don't let yourself be fooled.
"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?" I don't know and it doesn''t matter. The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.
Jonah Goldberg:
"One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work harder to persuade ideological friends and foes alike that the way to reduce partisanship and maximize happiness in America is to embrace federalism — the view that we should push as many decisions as possible to the lowest local level feasible."
Me too:
Voluntary Balkanization: Good or Bad?
Social Justice or Subsidiarity?
If it is a mere absence of sound, why is it so delicious? Turn off some noisemaker and the silence is there, palpably. It is supereminently there if you succeed in turning off that most noisy and hard-to-turn-off noisemaker, your own mind.
Max Picard proved unhelpful. His effusions are vaguely suggestive but neither fish nor fowl, neither philosophy nor poetry. More help is to be had from the Beatles: "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying . . . ."
How close dreams are to waking reality is shown by the need we sometimes have to remind ourselves that something seemingly remembered was merely dreamt. I wake up from a dream in which an enemy has acted in a friendly and conciliatory manner. I remind myself that the conciliatory behavior was merely my dreaming mind's invention.
As privacy dies our mailboxes fill — with privacy policies.
It can depress one's mood to realize how one's mood is depressed by the gloom and brevity of December days. Mortal man, who would soar so high, like Icarus toward the sun, is brought down to ground by the thought that his sunny mood is affected by — the sun.
Isn't this a delightful topic? But it is important that you inform yourself and do your level best to form correct opinions about these matters.
Liberals routinely pose the rhetorical question, Why would anyone need a semi-automatic rifle? You need to have an answer at the ready. When 'Assault Weapons' Saved Koreatown
William Spengler, the miscreant who ambushed NY firefighters, killing two of them, was a convicted felon out on parole. In 1981 he was convicted of killing his grandmother with a hammer. Two points. First, if he hadn't been let out he couldn't have committed arson and murder, outside the prison, leastways. This supports my claim that it is liberal culture, not gun culture, that is the real problem. Liberals have a casual attitude toward criminal behavior. Second, as a convicted felon, Spengler illegally possessed the guns he used in his rampage. Liberals need to reflect on the fact that criminals, by definition, do not respect laws or the rule of law.
Liberals shirk the hard task of demanding strict enforcement of existing laws while opting for the easy feel-good call for new laws. They go hard on the weapon, soft on the wielder. That piece of stupidity is fallout from their worldview, one that denies free agency and individual responsibility.
Dianne Feinstein of San Bancisco is calling for a ban on the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of, among other things, "semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can accept a detachable magazine and have one military characteristic." (emphasis added) Well, the 1911 model semi-auto .45 caliber pistol has a detachable magazine and has arguably one military characteristic: " The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, recoil-operated handgun chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge,[1] which served as the standard-issue side arm for the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1985. It was widely used in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War." (See here.) So is the 1911 model pistol going to be banned?
Gun bans have worked really well in the U.K. : "Gun crime has almost doubled since Labour came to power as a culture of extreme gang violence has taken hold. The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year - a rise of 89 per cent."
Once again I am proven right: when you go hard on the weapon but soft on the wielder, at the same time stripping decent citizens of their right to the tools of self-defense, then you get more crime.
Finally this, from "a leftist who loves guns."
More tomorrow. Oh boy!
. . . then heaven is a joke, and so is this life, and there is no ultimate justice, hence no God.
Mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. has died in prison. Good riddance. I read the book by his son, Frank Jr. and came away impressed by him for courageously 'ratting out' his father: family loyalty is a value, but there are higher loyalties.
Unfortunately:
Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Sun-Times on Wednesday that that violent history made his father's death especially emotional.
"I believe he was taken on Christmas Day for a reason," he said. "I hope he made peace. I hope he's up above looking down on us. … He's not suffering anymore. The people on the street aren't suffering anymore."
With all due respect to Frank Jr., this is just morally obtuse. For it implies that how we live here below makes no difference to the ultimate outcome. It makes no difference whether one lives the life of a brutal murderer or the life of an Edith Stein or a Simone Weil. But then there is no justice, and this life is even more absurd than it would be were there no God or afterlife at all. The reality of the moral point of view cannot have the divine underpinning it needs unless God is the guarantor of justice. The following exchange between Drury and Wittgenstein is apropos:
DRURY: I had been reading Origen before. Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things. That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory. This was a conception that appealed to me — but it was at once condemned as heretical.
WITTGENSTEIN: Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.
(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)
What I like about Wittgenstein is that he was one serious man.
Well, you might be a rancher on the southern border whose property is routinely overrun by drug smugglers armed with AK-47s. Actual examples here.
Surely a man has the right to defend his life, his family, his property, and his livelihood from domestic and international criminals. Having that right, he has the right to appropriate means for conducting that defense. If you disagree then you are morally obtuse. If you say that the Federal government provides adequate control of the border, then you are badly misinformed — or lying.
Not only do the Feds not control the border adequately, the Obama administration had the chutzpah to sue Arizona over S. B. 1070.
The second rancher to be interviewed in the above linked article tells of an incident when his child was taking a shower. An illegal alien reached through the window and grabbed the kid, who for months thereafter refused to take showers! What really got me, though, was that the rancher referred to the alien as a 'gentleman.'
The Buddhist cure is radical all right: it goes right to the root, radix, of the matter: desire. But eschewing a salutary horticulture, it e-rad-icates the root. That is like curing a disease by snuffing out the life of the diseased. The problem is not desire, but misdirected desire. The solution is not the uprooting of desire, but its proper direction.
I almost entitled this post, "Jack Klugman Enters the Twilight Zone," except that this is the vale of twilight. Be that as it may, Jack Klugman, who died yesterday, starred in four Twilight Zone episodes. The news accounts mention that fact but don't say which. "A Passage for Trumpet," "In Praise of Pip," "A Game of Pool," and "Death Ship." Twilight Zone marathon coming up on New Year's Eve. Check it out to see what TV can be.
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert:
Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21)
Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from Latin lambere, to lick.)
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it, phenomenologically, is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung, which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light.
Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light." He continues:
It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light of the same kind
. . . Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)
'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics, which is but a theoretical posit. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.
One could characterize a materialist as one who is blind to the light, except in the first of the four senses lately mentioned.
Ed Farrell sent me the above. Here is more of his spectacular photography. The New Testament verse he chose is one of the most beautiful in the whole Bible. One of the gifts of the Father of lights is the Range of Light, as she is called since John Muir so named her, the Sierra Nevada of California. Ed's Sierra Nevada Gallery does justice to this, one of the great mountain ranges of the world.
Companion post: The Range of Light
