Chesterton on all-encompassing theology and philosophy

"Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters; they alone lie open to all attacks.

"There is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology."

'C. F. Watts.'

Apparently this should be GF Watts, a Victorian painter and sculptor, about whom GKC wrote a book published in 1904. This Telegraph piece describes Watts' works as "beautiful paintings that exposed brutal truths about Victorian society". Chesterton certainly wasn't someone with a dewey-eyed view of his era.

A few thoughts on Charlie Rose

You know, you can't really accuse people like Charlie Rose of hypocrisy. Yes, he mouthed the "pro-woman" platitudes of the Left. But as a progressive he doesn't really believe anything. A thoroughly secularized progressivism inevitably reduces everything to, "Whose opinion is fashionable right now"? . The debased sexual culture Bill Clinton and such helped create was fashionable for a while. Unfortunately for Rose, it's somewhat less so at the moment.

Of course, people need to believe something, so everybody grasps at some motivator, even if it's just empty money- and power- seeking. It's all "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die".

So you can't accuse the Left of hypocrisy. They do stick to their script. A plush Manhattan high-rise is a pretty obvious token of success, whatever the price might've been to get it.


But progressives can, with justification, accuse conservatives of instances of hypocrisy, since we claim loyalty to the eternal verities liberals laugh at. The violations are often glaring.

In any case, I always thought Rose was a pretty engaging guy, though he was an obvious partisan-only conservatives got tough questions. But Charlie wasn't quite as engaging as he thought young women found him.

So-men with power often exploit women. Should they then be deprived of power, or is The Pence Rule a good idea?

Just a blog I like, and some thoughts on Trump

Miriam Sawyer has been blogging for many years. She's one of those very talented people that few have heard of, but whom no one would've heard of before the Internet, and blogging. So that counts for something.

She's written some very engaging stories about her crazy Jewish relatives, is a fine artist, and now offers up trenchant views on a stratified US. Here she noted that favorite hobby of rich lefties-virtue-signaling via Trump-bashing.

My own view on Trump is, I hope, a nuanced one. I take a (or "an", if you're hopelessly pedantic) historical view: Kennedy was a philanderer. LBJ was corrupt to an almost laughable degree. Obama sicced the IRS on his political opponents. Nixon was none too stable mentally. And so on.

Our presidents haven't exactly been a rogues' gallery, but they haven't all been Lincoln, either.

Trump fits right in.

Chesterton on not taking yourself too seriously

SERIOUSNESS is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.


From "Orthodoxy".


As an aside I used to read Punch, the great British humor magazine which expired a few years ago, when I was in high school. I already loved British sports cars, and was coming to love British writing. Later I got into GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, CS Lewis, and PG Wodehouse. Thus an Irish Catholic became an Anglophile.

Roy Halladay, 1977-2017

A few thoughts on the career of Roy Halladay, who died piloting his plane yesterday. (Halladay had just taken delivery of the ICON A5 amphibious plane a month ago. It is the second fatal crash for the "sports car with wings" this year).


First I wanted to note that Halladay had a well-deserved reputation as a good guy. He was heavily involved in charitable work in both his Blue Jays and Phillies years. He was a multiple finalist for the Roberto Clemente Award, given to players with exemplary records for humanitarianism.


As a pitcher, Roy had few equals in his era. He won 203 games, threw a no-hitter for the Phillies in the 2010 playoffs, and is rated the 42nd best starting pitcher of all-time by the JAWS metric.


The most similar pitcher to Roy by Similarity Score is Zach Greinke of Arizona, another pitcher who will likely end up in the Hall of Fame. (Interestingly enough, the most similar pitcher to Greinke is Roy Oswalt, who with Halladay, Cole Hamels, and Cliff Lee formed the historic "Four Aces" rotation of the 2011 Phillies, who won 102 games).


Halladay never won a World Series, having arrived in both Toronto and Philadelphia a little too late for either team's championship years. But in 38 innings of excellent post-season work, he bettered his regular season ERA by a full run.


RIP to a good man and a fine athlete.

What remains

Some thoughts for All Saints Day, from our old friend GK Chesterton:


"You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in Ireland or in Italy there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well; now take the other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. The English gentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still in this meadow and be an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? Have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon.


"And so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire a London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you the Catholic saint will remain."


'The Ball and the Cross.'

The case against football

I don't mean to sound like a sports prude, if there is such a thing, but if you're an NFL fan, these guys are suffering catastrophic brain injuries so you can be entertained. How can you be okay with that?


On various other blogs I've issued screeds about football-why the teams aren't really trying to win (they make money regardless), with the result that the sport is basically just a hugely successful TV show. Or about how the sixteen game season's small sample size makes it all kind of pointless anyway. Not to mention the degree to which the game's success is linked to all the free publicity it gets in the media, or how the hype to thrills ratio is pretty skewed given that there may be five or six exciting plays (lots of "three yards and a cloud of dust" skirmishes) in a dreary three hour TV show.


But those are simply matters of taste. Much more important is that we now know much more about how risky the game is, which may be why kids' participation in the sport is declining-America's parents have the good sense to protect their kids.


Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering research into football's dangers was actively resisted by the league, says kids under eighteen shouldn't play football at all. He has the same opinion, it should be added, about other contact sports-they are simply too risky for the developing brain.


For the NFL'ers themselves, Omalu says no equipment can prevent the injuries caused by huge guys moving at great speeds. Far too may become suicidal, or zombies.

Of course there are other arguments against the game-the current kneeling idiocy, the fact that so many of the players are, well, thugs.


But the safety issue is the big one.

Trump approval-down 5.9%

That is, Trump's current approval rating with registered/likely voters of 40.2%, according to the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, represents a 5.9% drop from his election popular vote percentage.


That 40.2% compares unfavorably with his 42% figure the last time I checked this on September 21. Will a stronger economy and a grownup foreign policy push these numbers higher, or will Trump's hyper-ventilated reactions to all criticism continue to blot out his considerable achievements to date? I have no idea.

Category error

Pandora thinks ultra high energy jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and pop trumpeter Herb Alpert are "similar artists". I have a certain not entirely rational affection for The Tijuana Brass, but that's like calling Charlie Parker and Kenny G "similar artists" because both are saxophonists.

By the numbers

We are knee-deep in the baseball playoffs, which look to be yielding a potentially classic Yankees/Dodgers World Series. The games have been good, if rather long-averaging about half an hour longer than the regular season...in fact no game has been less than three hours (ALCS game two was exactly three hours).

Here, though, I wanted to talk about some regular season questions. We baseball fans like numbers. We argue about which ones matter, when if ever they should take second place to intangibles like the evergreen notion of the "veteran clubhouse presence", and whether "statheads" are universally guys who couldn't play (in my case, yes).

I just wanted to take a quick look at a few correlations between wins (ranging from the Dodgers' 104 to the Giants' and Tigers' 64), and factors like payroll, batter age, pitchers' strikeouts, etc. Nothing too sophisticated here. And yes, correlation is not causation. This is quick and dirty stuff. Anyway...


The highest positive correlation I found was between wins and pitcher strikeouts per nine innings: 0.76. Think teams like Cleveland, the Dodgers, Houston. Baseball is more and more about power arms, and numbers like this one will only encourage the trend.


The highest negative one was between wins and runs against per game, not surprisingly, at -0.86. The correlation for runs scored per game was 0.72.


There is a decent sized positive correlation for pitcher age, at 0.32, and a tiny negative one for batter age. The former figure would seem to contradict the number above on the value of young flamethrowers.


And with modest-payroll teams like the Astros and Diamondbacks making the playoffs, it's not a shock that while payroll is an important factor in success, it isn't necessarily central-the positive correlation here is 0.37

Hitler or Hefner

This quote from Malcolm Muggeridge seems apt:

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner".

RIP Hugh Hefner.

Chet

Below is a poem I wrote a while ago about the great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker-


Found his way to Birdland,

Valhalla of the jazzmen.

Played his horn like an angel whispering,

Not a warrior bearing his weapon.


All the beauty was on the stand,

Darkness all else.

But if your darkness be light,

O, how great the light!


Sought by Hollywood in his youth,

James Dean's worthy heir.

Killed himself more slowly,

But we were no less fascinated.


The standard songs with the standard changes,

Conventional to the last:

His 50's gospel, the sated man of alley and bandstand,

The perfect fix, the perfect note.


"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy":

A better tale than a triumph,

In a world that lives out its woes,

One song at a time.

The bizarre ritual (anti-ritual?) of anthem protests

The phrase has a strange ring to it-"anthem protests". Who would protest the playing of their own national anthem? The anthem, after all, and the displaying of the flag, and any other civic ritual you could name, aren't some sort of declaration that a nation is flawless.

We celebrate America, or at least acknowledge its worth, as a sort of truism of shared values-that a people, with a given set of civic beliefs, have created and sustained a nation in line with those values. But what happens when those values are no longer widely shared?

I don't intend to wade into all the political controversies that have me convinced we're a nation in name only. I'll just mention that we have a founding document that establishes the rules of the civic game. Increasingly that document, and the laws that operate under it, are seen as just so many words on paper, when one side is unhappy with the results. When such a point is reached, where the consequences of a long-established democratic process are "illegitimate" because the wrong party wins or the wrong policy is instituted, we are in the process of rejecting what made America succeed. The entire system is based on the idea that the results of our political process are by definition legitimate.

The essential orientation of America-as a nation organized towards the promotion of freedom and prosperity-is now rejected by half the nation. Freedom is dicey because people can use it for purposes not tending towards "social justice". Prosperity-the creation of new wealth, with the ultimate purpose of starting and maintaining families-is irrelevant. Redistribution of existing wealth (with the exception of Silicon Valley's vast hordes of same) is paramount. The fact that greater redistribution doesn't yield greater economic equality is irrelevant.


So we have one side wishing to maintain the old order, and another rejecting it entirely. What the latter would establish may still maintain some of the forms of democracy, but they will be toothless relics. Whatever means necessary to get to nirvana will be acceptable.


UPDATE: Miriam has some interesting thoughts on what was intended to be a cost-free exercise in virtue-signalling.

FURTHER UPDATE: A further reason not to watch the NFL-an appalling percentage of these guys are thugs. Here are detailed NFL arrest records. 

ONE MORE UPDATE: "The brontosaurus in the room": Roger L. Simon on the lie behind the protests-the notion that cops are what's wrong with the black community.


AND FINALLY: No matter how you play with the numbers, it is black men who are doing most of the killing of black men.

I haven't read what you wrote, but I know you're an idiot

The New Atheists aren't, shall we say, a group of intellectual heavyweights.

Edward Feser is, by any reckoning, a heavyweight, and here he decries the NA's who assail his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God without, of course, having read it.

Good God.

In denial?

Those of us who, as either scientists or laymen, believe that we cannot know, now, or possibly ever, what the climate will be like in fifty or a hundred years, let alone whether changes will have disastrous effects-we are called denialists. We get this fun epithet largely because it is alleged we deny that climate is changing, not just that long-term predictions are a fool's errand.

For the record-we deny nothing....at least regarding the idea that the climate can ever be ENTIRELY stable, one way or the other.


The Earth's temperature, as best we can tell, is today 0.5 degrees C above its 1979-2000 base. 


But those predictions are fact dicey propositions. As this piece argues, while the climate is a "non-linear chaotic system", it in fact is prone to long periods of relative stability-it has been quite stable over the last ten thousand years (post the last Ice Age).

The shoe seems to be on the other foot, so to speak-the alarmists need to make a case that small changes in carbon dioxide (relative to those seen in geological history) will have effects that override this stability, and that, given that predictions of chaotic systems call for full knowledge of small-scale conditions ("The Butterfly Effect"), that they know conditions well enough to make such calls.

I deny this possibility.

Links-mostly controversial

It looks like Obama spied on Trump and his campaign, as he also apparently did on reporters like Sharyl Attkisson. There should be outrage from all sides on this, but we're past the point where anything but results matters to the Left.

A fun little plaything-CodePen chord progression arpeggio generator. I've wasted hours with this.

Ray Fair, an economist famous for his election models, shows you here how fast you'll decline in chess and sports as you age. It's not pretty.


Buying the iPhone X-an exercise in irrationality. 

Want to know exactly what Bob Dylan played on his XM Satellite and Sirius XM radio shows? Now you can, or at least "the Best of".


Cardinal Dolan wants liberals to like him a little too much. Bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded label of "Islamophobia" doesn't show much spiritual leadership, but then again most of our American bishops act more like administrators than spiritual leaders.

Trump tracking-down 4.1%

In the Real Clear Politics average of RV/LV, Trump stands at 42% approval.

This is down 4.1% from his election popular vote percentage, but up from 40% last time I checked this on September 13.


I track this not only because because I'm interested in this figure, but because I track all sorts of stuff-health numbers like blood pressure and resting pulse, twitter tweets per follower, a wide variety of baseball stats, etc. I do love numbers.

Built on a lie

It is always best, when possible, to seek simplicity rather than complexity. Complexity is often used to obscure, simplicity to illuminate.

One uncomplicated truth we might ponder-Life is better than death. When thinking about abortion, we hear it said that this is a nuanced issue, one whose many circumstances and intricacies must be dealt with before taking a position, on the issue in general, or any particular choice to sustain or destroy life.


But there is another uncomplicated truth here-abortion always ends an innocent human life. There are no exceptions. The victim is never a deserving one, regardless of the circumstances of conception.

The allegedly pro-choice position argues that the creation and sustenance of life are equally valid choices. It isn't hard to see that this is a barbaric position. Unless, of course, we prefer to believe a lie.

And it isn't hard to see that the main pro-abortion argument-it is a woman's "right to choose" (note the avoidance of the word "mother" in this context), because the decision affects her, and only her-is simply not true. Abortion affects the baby, the father, the grandparents, all other relatives, friends, the community, the nation, the world. All are wounded by this choice.

Lies must be challenged with truth, even when, as in this case, the truth is already known by all, in their hearts. Everyone knows what abortion is, and what it does. But it will never be time to stop uttering these truths, not until this practice is gone from the world.

Beautiful women and mountaintops-the uses and abuses of technology

Here is a nice picture. We see a beautiful woman sitting on a mountaintop, enjoying a magnificent view. She's reveling in the splendors of nature in all their glory. A true, ahem, mountaintop moment.

One problem, though-she isn't enjoying the scene at all. It might be hard to see in the image as uploaded, but her eyes are closed. She's having a wonderful time, but it's due to the music she's listening to, music she could just as easily listen to at home.


This is an ad for headphones, as you may have suspected. The evident message from our corporate overlords benefactors is that we now need headphones, smart phones, devices, everywhere and anywhere. All situations call for the injection of at least a little virtual reality, lest the real thing bore us, trouble us, or fail to entertain us adequately, as in the case of this woman and her mountaintop view.

You half-expect to hear of people watching their devices while having sex. As a means of enhancing the experience, you watch OTHER people having sex!

Technology can be used, has been used, to improve people's lives, but are we past that stage now?

The power of positive salesmanship, bigotry, and Sen. Feinstein

I ridiculed the Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking" way of thinking in my recent post on the value of "negative" emotions. Peale more than deserved deserved it-not only is it a silly worldview, if you could call it that, he was rather an anti-Catholic bigot, as evidenced by his comments in the 1960 election campaign.

But having mentioned Peale, Amazon's marketing bot keeps putting that book, which apparently is still a big-seller, in the ads you see here. I have no control over that, of course.


Peale's comments put me in mind of the recent controversy started by CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, who bashed Federal court nominee Amy Barrett for her unconcealed Catholicism. Peale and Feinstein would likely agree on little, but both seem to think a good Catholic is one who should, well, shut up in public if he is serious about his faith. Peale would censor Catholics; Feinstein both Catholics and Peale.

The Left now endorses a narrow "freedom of  worship", rather than our long-established "freedom of religion", in which you may attend any religious service you like, but had better not bring those views to the public square.

Feinstein and many of her Democratic colleagues advocate the notion that secular politics is "neutral" politics, that early 21st century deism is the default, unbiased view of thinking folks. But, to state the glaringly obvious, it is not a neutral view, any more than a Catholic, evangelical, Muslin, or any other more explicitly worldview would be.


It is not, to be sure, really a secular view. It is more of a seemingly unreflected-upon Moral Therapeutic Deism-it doesn't exactly deny God, since few Americans are atheists. Rather, MTD reduces Him to a figure on the periphery, a vaguely benevolent figure who wants us to be happy but is little involved in human affairs, and certainly not politics.

Trump tracking-down 6.1%

Trump's average approval among registered/likely voters (RCP) is 40%. He got 46.1% of the vote last year.

I've been tracking this and will update it on occasion.


By the way, the full breakdown of the vote totals by David Wasserman is fascinating, at least to politics junkies like myself.

September 11

On the "first" September 11, I was living in North Carolina. Somebody called and said, "Turn on the TV", and it was done. We witnessed the events. The day is otherwise a blur to me. I didn't watch the videos of the planes crashing into the buildings for many years. They still have an unreal quality to me, like a scene from a bad movie.
It is no good to pretend that in our modern world we have no enemies, that human nature has changed for the better, or that "the arc of history bends towards justice".
History, and the events of a mere sixteen years ago, teach us otherwise.

Emotions, good and "bad"

We tend to think of certain emotions-fear, anger, sadness-as bad. We are told to "think positive", or "Don't be so negative!". One particular quasi-religious empire was built around "positive thinking". Another, more contemporary one, tells us that a different sort of positive thinking combined with meditation will "attract" wonderful things to us, somewhere from the deep recesses of a universe that somehow is both personal and impersonal at the same time.

In any case, the so-called negative emotions are so described because they are unpleasant. No one likes to feel them, unless, I suppose, you're a pain glutton, patterning yourself on Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors, but as an emotional, rather than physical, pain junkie.


For the rest of us, though, emotions act as signals. And so they cannot be bad in themselves. They tell us, remind us, to "Avoid this", or that "I'm sorry I lost this". We could no more lose our unpleasant emotions and be fully functioning humans than we could do the same if we lost our pleasant ones, or our reason.

But when we experience that signal, that pain, we want to turn away. We want to shut it down, now. Often this is a perfectly reasonable. So much of what we see on the Internet is designed to work us up to a strong emotional reaction, get a click, drive numbers.


But much of the time, in "real life", that strong reaction indicates there's something here that we need to think about. This is especially true if the reaction is particularly powerful. If someone says something I react to strongly, I must ask myself why this is. Am I really inconsiderate, or too slow to ponder why a given viewpoint angers me? What am I walling myself off from?

In a age of using electronic devices to, in effect, alienate ourselves from what we truly feel and think, it strikes me that these are worthwhile questions.

Lesley Garrett, "Jerusalem"

"Jerusalem" is from a poem by William Blake that references a mythical visit by Jesus to England. He re-sets the myth in Industrial Age England, hoping that Christ might come among the "dark Satanic mills" and establish The New Jerusalem, the heavenly city of history's climax. Music is by Sir Hubert Parry.

It is exquisitely beautiful.


UPDATE: If you'd like to know why Christianity is all but dead in Europe, a vicar has banned this gorgeous hymn for being excessively nationalistic.


FURTHER UPDATE: this reminds me a of a quote by CS Lewis, another UK'er, on the Second Coming, Progress, and what Barack Obama inaccurately calls "the arc of history that inevitably bends towards justice":

"The doctrine of the Second Coming is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought. We have been taught to think of the world as something that slowly moves towards perfection....Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell a gradual decay....[I]t foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without....a curtain rung down on the play-'Halt!'". The World's Last Night, 1952.


YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is the text of Blake's poem-

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear! Oh, clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land!

The Search

Nothing beautiful can be fully understood. Our hearts crave mysterious Truth. So much of the beauty is in the mystery, itself. And so the search continues.

Walker Percy, a member of that interesting category, the Southern Catholic writer, often wrote of the search. Percy is the only author I've ever read who prompted the thought, "This guy thinks like me". I'm not sure if that says much for Percy, in itself, but he was certainly one of the 20th century's finest novelists.

Will Barrett, the protagonist of The Second Coming, is a widower who has reached a point in his depression where he essentially dares God to kill him. God doesn't. Will ends up meeting Allison, a zany mental hospital escapee living in a greenhouse, whose love redeems him. Almost sounds trite to describe, but Percy uses a light touch to show how gratitude can lead to faith.


Percy's books are all about the alienation of modern man, who struggles with, as Arnold Stocker (the Catholic Romanian psychoanalyst) put it, "A false suggestion and a true intuition". The false suggestion, to put it simply, is that what we strive for-career, relationships, wealth, power-are all we need. The world tells modern man this, and in his secularized understanding of his meaning and purpose, he "accepts" it.

The true intuition is the sense that we need more, that the "sensus divinitatis" that Calvin spoke of. It is the instinctive sense each of us has that God is real and our lives are not our own. As CS Lewis wrote,  we desire things, and God provides them-food, sex. Similarly God plants in each of us a desire for Himself, that only He can fulfill.


Our alienation, our anger, comes from the usually unconscious recognition that our strivings, even when achieved, do not really satisfy. How many Hollywood types do we see who have, most improbably, gotten all their wished for-fame and money and power and creative success-who still are miserable?

This world cannot satisfy us.


Much of the above comes from ideas drawn from Swiss physician Paul Tournier's work, such as The Whole Person in a Broken World.  

Trump steals black baby as trophy of TX trip, plans to make her White House mascot

As often as Trump says or does something beyond ridiculous, our "dispassionate" media will always out-Trump him. The two sides-the media, and Trump the media manipulator-truly deserve each other. They're basically Mo and Larry of the Three Stooges, poking each other in the eye on a daily basis. Enjoy the next three and a half years!

In any case, the above headline is a fake-I think. The difference between the National Enquirer and the New York Times is now more what schools the reporters went to than content.


We got Trump for a lot of nasty reasons, all of which are too unpleasant to detail, and he is no real antidote to any of that, but yes, Hillary would've been worse. That's what we're reduced to.

I didn't vote for him. I voted for Evan McMullin. The Mormon Roundhead.

Embarrassing.

Walter Becker, RIP

Just heard of the death of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker. Here's one of my SD favorites. Great opening guitar solo by Larry Carlton. This song may or not be based on the Texas tower shooter case from 1966. 

I once inserted the Becker-Fagen line about "luckless pedestrians" from this song in an Economics paper in college, as in, "A high unemployment rate will further damage America's luckless pedestrians". The professor was not amused.

Links-controversial and otherwise

Democrats' smears of GOP as racists, misogynists long predate Trump.

In fact, the Left's inability to make an argument for their position instead of libeling their opponents along these lines goes all the way back to Harry Truman.


Many people, Right and Left, now decry "mass incarceration". But unpleasant though it is, it means less crime. 

The New Atheists made the mistake of slamming Islam as well as Christianity, and have been bodily removed from the lefty funhouse. 


A "map of the soul": Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurological Surgery at Stony Brook University, says neuroscience confirms Aquinas' notion of will and intellect as immaterial things. 

List of the oldest living people. Violet Brown of Jamaica is the winner, at 117 years, 177 days. My Grandmother on my mother's side, who lived to 102, was a piker compared to these women (not many men in the bunch).

Miriam on the perils of the art business. 


Whose voices are you listening to? The search for worthy role models. I note, in pondering the conclusion reached here, that GK Chesterton was quite hefty.


Several of the links above come from this article by philosopher Edward Feser.

Far out

Voyagers 1 and 2 are way out there. From Astronomy POTD: "Launched in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets of the Solar System, Voyager 1 and 2 have become the longest operating and most distant spacecraft from Earth. Nearly 16 light-hours from the Sun, Voyager 2 has reached the edge of the heliosphere, the realm defined by the influence of the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field. Now humanity's first ambassador to the Milky Way, Voyager 1 is over 19 light-hours away, beyond the heliosphere in interstellar space. Celebrate the Voyagers' 40 year journey toward the stars with NASA on September 5."

On this date in Phillies' history

They lost.

Pictured: Hugh "Losing Pitcher" Mulcahy.

A noble putdown

"[thou] shalt stand in fire up to the navel and in ice up to th' heart, and there the offending part burns and the deceiving part freezes."

The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare knew how to insult people.

No politics, for a day

Over on twitter, my meager musical contribution to a politics-free Friday.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

The Eternal Soundtrack

God knows how many tracks there-500?.  But they're all, in my biased opinion, worth listening to-the youtube playlist I've been accumulating for several years. It might take several years to listen to all of them. Basically it's jazz, the better rock stuff, sophisticated pop like Sinatra, classical brass pieces, French Impressionists, clips from old TV shows like What's My Line-you know, the usual pretentious crapola.

People like me who have widely diverging tastes in music like to think that shows how smart we are. It actually shows that we have wisely diverging tastes in music.

I still feel weird about youtube, I have to admit. Yes, I own maybe 150 CD's. But I could still try to buy all of these tracks. I doubt I will.

Tear 'em down?

There is, you may noticed, some controversy over the Confederate statues that are found all over the South (having lived there, I can tell you every town has one), and even the US Capitol.

I'm 57 and do not recall any uproar over the statues until quite recently. So-have we suddenly come to some profound new understanding of what the statues' continued existence means? Or, do the statues, which denote an unavoidable fact of history that has had an enormous impact on life both North and South, lack in themselves any particular moral meaning or message as regards the justness of the Confederate cause as such?

As you may have guessed by the way I have framed the question, I am not persuaded that removing the statues amounts to anything more than virtue-signaling. The monuments may have been erected to, in various cases, celebrate slavery, honor the "valiant" fight against Northern oppression, or even (most likely I imagine) to merely commemorate the dead and wounded of virtually every Southern town.

I think the most important question, though, is-what do the statues mean NOW? Are they treated as shrines to The Lost Cause? Do people gather around them to ponder the halcyon days of the antebellum South? No-the memorials just note that the War we read about in books and on Wikipedia really did happen, and that it had a real effect on the towns and cities they're found in.

Ultimately, I ask: Why didn't we hang Jefferson Davis? We didn't hang him because you allow the defeated some measure of dignity, and allow history, rather than brute force, to settle issues where possible.

We all know the Confederate cause was a stupid one, in that it was both economically backwards and required the continuation of an evil institution. The point hardly needs to be reinforced.

Healing vs. Recovery

Distinctions are sometimes made in the field of mental health between "recovery" and "healing". I have tended to think of the former as simply representing the cessation of the more unpleasant symptoms of mental illness, and as a mere "way station" to true healing.

I am persuaded now, though, that healing is better described as completed recovery. Recovery calls for good coping methods to deal with the effects of the trauma that induced the "illness" in the first place. Once such methods are in place (therapy, exercise, proper nutrition, prayer/contemplation, etc), and have become habitual, then we can begin to heal-or rather, continue to heal. Note that medication should be used only as a last resort, and patients should be weaned off all psychotropic drugs as soon as possible. Medication can do no more than mask symptoms-it can never promote growth.


What is healing, then? It is the casting off of all false selves. It is becoming truly what we are, with no accommodations to the trauma that caused the false selves to arise, or to social norms. Does that mean we become moral free agents? No, it means that our truest selves are driven by love for others, and ourselves. Evil is "unreal"-it exists, to be sure, but only as a manifestation of unpursued goodness.

The truth is, we tend to either follow social cues, and pursue a path of mindless conformity, or go our own way for its own sake, casting ourselves as contrarians, as relentless pursuers of Truth, when in fact we may just be snobs. (I tend to be guilty of the latter). Neither is healthy.

It may sound solipsistic, and excessively in tune with the mindless slogans of our warped culture, but in fact we only need to be ourselves. The best, truest version of ourselves. This is wholeness. This is the healed human.

In a strange land

I called this blog "I'm Just a Visitor Here" because I've always felt I was looking at people from a distance, like someone dropped on the wrong planet early in life who's then been compelled to spend his time trying to figure out his strange new neighbors. As a child I was told by "helpful" siblings I'd been purchased at the supermarket (and so I imagined babies of various hues lined up along the back wall at the A & P, available that week only for just $2.99 a pound), but I was never told where I'd been shipped from.

Not that I really believed the supermarket story, but I might as well have-I've always felt like I didn't really belong "here".  


That lack of a sense of "connectedness", of community-I guess I'm not so dissimilar to the masses now. People who ponder why depression is in epidemic mode in the US point to that loss of associations as a big reason why. It's just as true for other sorts of mental illness, most likely. Every ad for cell phones talks about "staying connected", and we seem desperate to avoid losing those few associations modern society affords us.

We have slice and dice marketing for products, and for votes. Seemingly nothing is offered to all. Everybody's assumed to have differing opinions and values. Elections no longer count because "the wrong person" won.


But of course, it really is true that we no longer have the same values. There is Christian America, in decline here as elsewhere in the West, and there is post-Christian America, eager to eliminate all vestiges of the old order. Not to be melodramatic, but our very own Cultural Revolution puts all at risk, for the sake of a "more just" society.

Lincoln spoke of both North and South reading the same Bible. Now, our two warring nations have radically different understandings of, well, everything. We cannot hold together like this. I am frightened.

Anti-social media

I haven't posted on twitter in months. Most of what I post on facebook is just youtube music clips, though I do occasionally annoy people there with my right wing views. I also vex people with comments on the Phillies, in various places, such as here. 

I have at times had semi-popular blogs that people with discriminating taste read ignored. I have no real desire to chase that dragon once again, but I would like to keep this blog updated once in a while. There might be someone out there who would like to read it and say, "Damn, this dude's more f-ed up than I am." That's the kind of service to mankind I'd like to provide.


Really, I can never can decide what to with my writing. I've written poetry, stories, lyrics to songs (including the only really funny song ever written about Prozac), blogs, and once had a fairly substantial number of jokes written for a comedy act I was working on. The character was to be a total loser-i.e., strictly autobiographical. You see, I'm the kind of guy who can calculate the most arcane baseball statistics in his head, but can't figure out a restaurant tip, because I can't get a girl to go to a restaurant with me. The main idea was, Here is a comedian you can't heckle, because I'm up here HECKLING MYSELF. "Is this thing off? Good."

The total loser part turned out to be all too accurate, when I lost the ability to access the tablet the jokes were in due to a dead battery that proved impossible to recharge. WTF? Who does that happen to? I guess I could've gotten a new battery, but only about half of the jokes were good.


So I guess I'll write some more self-deprecating material. Which raises an interesting question....is that an indication of really lousy self-esteem, or really good self-esteem? If Bob Uecker says, for example, "You know, people had divided opinions on my career in baseball-half thought I was awful, the other half thought I was a disgrace to the uniform"-is he saner than the rest of us? Or closer to the edge?

We slouch, exhausted but unified

Yes, Americans are in agreement about something, amazingly enough in these ultra-polarized times. Everybody but everybody agrees that 2016 was a cosmically awful year, the sort of year that must be punishment for something. Scandals, terrorism, ugly elections, foreign intrigues....God really piled it on in 2016, didn't He? We get it, Lord, we get it.

Or do we? I won't even speculate what the ill-treatment might be a result of. We all have our favorite pop culture or political targets, and most of them deserve all the scorn that can be thrown at them. But a loving God doesn't allow the unworthy success of a talent-free rapper or blowhard politician to be cause for an unrelieved twelve months of misery.


No, it must've been big this time. God really doesn't want to get into the backseat where the kids are, like a Cosmic Father pushed too far, but He will do it when it's called for. But we weren't just spilling soda back there or playing that damned awful music too loud.

I don't really have any answers, other than that our slide into post-Christian anything goes continued at its usual hurried pace this past year. But, nostalgia aside, that's nothing new. People have been bitching about the secularization of Christmas, say, since the first one, when I understand the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce hit on the idea of having guided tours of the stable where Christ was born for a mere five shekels a pop.

Nope, it's nothing new. But maybe we've reached a tipping point. I don't know how you'd know such a point has been reached, and I'm more than aware that talk like this always spawns the "everything's cyclical, everything can't go downhill at once" response. Maybe.


The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.