Love, Liberty, and the Stupefying Odor of Bullshit in Politics and the Human Condition

Imagine

2011-10-10T18:50:00.014-05:00

Amazing how simple and profound, and eminently, without a shred of doubt most important it is, to just be a solid and loving human being.

Incredible how simple most of the world's problems are. And how simply they are resolved. Once the heart and mind become clearer about just how crazy our basest impulses make us. And how crazy and a mess, as a consequence, the world becomes. How simple and profound love and integrity make us genuinely stronger in almost every way conceivable. All of the ways that it does so. And just what exactly that simple purpose in our lives has to offer us.

Unfathomably and so simply remarkable how easy it is to make this world better. For ourselves as much as anyone else. Once we get clear about what impulses have undoubtedly made it worse. On all of our parts. And how the confusion about that can be easily dispelled. With just a little clarity about what strength the best that our hearts and minds have to offer. And what strength really looks like. For those who are afraid that they are otherwise. All of us, that is. Until the more serious and real strength that love and integrity have to offer become a seemless expression of our lives.

Once we get clear about all of that. Imagine the possibilties.

Just who on earth could it be?

2011-09-01T19:31:00.001-05:00

Adults are a funny lot.

Much of the time. For the long train of humanity's history. Most of us, when we're honest, are like children. In much bigger and more stationary packages. Creating endless confusion and mayhem for young people and old people alike. With all our limitless nonsense and outrageous bullshit.

And we are notorious for more than bullshit, I'll have you know. Often it is our life commitments, by God. With ourselves and with one another.

And, far too often, we take too little, if any, responsibility for the lot of it. Regularly. As a matter of common course.

And then we pose, so often. Persistently. So tough, so brave, so very, very, very infallibly good. For all the same folks. Our parents. Our friends. Our children, most of all.

And impersonate people that are all that we are not. And pretend that it was someone else who created all that confusion and mess. And misled that fearful and hardluck world in the process.

I am most certainly guilty. More guilty than most, very likely. Because I am so very good, I will have you know. Just ask those who really know me.

And then, all the while, at a fever pitch, we wonder, in all sincerety, why the world is such a persistent, unremitting mess.

And marvel, aghast and dumbstruck, out loud and often, "Who on earth could it be, I wonder, who made the world as it is?"

Blessed

2011-08-11T07:29:00.000-05:00

Our first day back at Capital City, yesterday. I am so unspeakably blessed to work with this crew. Easily, some of the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure of spending any time with, at all, my entire life. These people inspire the shit out of me. And I love them all so thoroughly.

Sometimes our lives are so blessed and we don't even know it.

Love y'all.

Truth or Dare

2011-06-19T21:32:00.001-05:00

If truth is stranger than fiction, then people are stranger than fiction lets on.

The beaten path

2011-06-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

In all its economic, technological, and cultural abundance, humanity has a million and one opportunities to screw itself out of life being more decent, and happy, and peaceful.

And if there's one thing about humanity you can count on: it never wants to waste an opportunity.

The human tragedy

2011-06-16T02:55:00.001-05:00

The single most tragic and frustrating of human experiences, for those who might like to correct it, is that, tomorrow, all forms of genocide, oppression, serious violence and intentional harm to our fellow man could end in a moment. All that awaits is for us to choose to do so. It can without a shred of doubt be chosen otherwise. But, persistently, we choose our meaner, more demonizing, more aggressive, more predatory, more destructive impulses. Because we are convinced, at long last, that they, finally, will save us from all that. When it is, generally, our meaner, more demonizing, more aggressive, more predatory, more destructive impulses that we need to be saved from. What is tragic is that it is all avoidable. Every single bit of it. But we refuse to avoid it. For fear that doing so means that we will be subject to its self-destruction.

Evolution. She's a bitch. But maybe she's not done with us yet.

What bin Laden has wrought

2011-05-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

A very nice description of America since 9/11.

The long road home

And a moment to pause and reflect on the changes that day has wrought.

Food for thought

2011-05-04T14:23:00.000-05:00

What we look like to the outside world.

Food for thought. If there's still room for that in America, these days.

All praise to the Gods

2011-05-04T07:29:00.002-05:00

Ownership of TV sets falls in U.S.

It's beginning to sink in, for me, that much of what constitutes politics is animated by people with strong opinions, about something, and approaching deadlines. And a need for an audience. In the press. In academia. In Washington.

And all with a desperate desire to be important. Whether they do any good or not.

And when you watch them all working in a frenzy to no clear and apparent end, it all becomes all that more ridiculous. And far too often tragic.

Self-importance. New religion in these parts.

All praise to the Gods.

Revenge

2011-05-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

"But several Muslim authorities said today that the sea burial in fact violated Muslim tradition--and warned that it could help trigger calls for revenge from militant Muslims...

..."And Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, who preaches at Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque declared: 'It is not acceptable, and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea,' adding that the action 'might provoke some Muslims.'"

Be careful what world you wish for. You just might get it.

Adventures in liberal democracy

2011-05-02T15:15:00.007-05:00

As someone who grew up a peace activist and otherwise leftist, I have relunctantly and slowly come to agree with many of the fairly insightful observations in this column by Alastair Crooke, British diplomat and former MI6 officer in the Middle East.

Why the demise of the Middle East 'peace process' may be a good thing

It is pretty clear, today, that Islamists, of different stripes, and Hamas and Fatah, in Palestine, have been playing a very different game of international politics than the West with often very different aims. And, too often, these days, sadly, they have been learning that game from us. Just with far more brutal commitments. All with the very same and foolish insecurity underneath it all. Just one that liberal democracies should know better, about, today, given their vastly and unquestionably more serious success in the world, on almost every single important front. The fear that freedom and compassion and all of the highest of humanities values make them weak. And that only the persistent and unrelenting use and projection of force will cure that fear. When it is very clear, from the long length of history, that that perscription has never and will never do anything of the sort. And the long road of progress in liberal democracies and human civilization and cultural evolution has been as a matter of the most serious commitments of liberal values and common purpose, when reasonable and made possible, among humanity's various cultures, nations, governments, and people. Today is no different, in that respect. What is at stake is how long we will take the opposite conclusion seriously when it has clearly undermined almost all of our various important independent and common objectives.

What I like about Crooke's analysis is that he is clearly still committed to some kind of peace between Israel and Palestine, which, I agree, is the only long term, sustainable commitment that will not mean security threats for either Israel or Palestinians in perpetuity and some kind of just end to 100 years of warfare between these parties.

It also may very likely signal the future shape of a liberal democratic order, whose main threat, today, is Islamism, Islamic terrorism, and autocratic power players who both resist and are hostile to liberal democratic values and culture and manipulate and pose serious threats to important liberal democratic institutions, like the United Nations and the liberal democratic press. Physically, that is liberal demcracy's most serious threat. But, perhaps more pressing a threat than that, is a liberal democratic culture that seems all too convinced that perhaps all those liberal commitments have betrayed them and that their more illiberal brethren in the Islamic, Communist, and other worlds have had it right, all along, that liberty is their greatest threat and force their greatest friend. Even when it clearly undermines them. That foolish and cowardly insecurity is perhaps more of a threat to liberal democracies, today. Because it feeds all of the rationalizations that make the terrorism and dictatorship and threats from all of its real and autocratic enemies, today, possible at all. And that fact is perhaps the most tragic fact of all in the early 21st century. Liberal democracies triumphing as the one most serious commitment of humanity's future and brightest light. Only to be dimmed by their own insecurity that they were perhaps wrong about all that made them great.

This particular commitment of my youth - to a peaceful liberal order - was borne out of both the peace commitments of my youth and the post-Soviet euphoria that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled, and rightfully so, a final vindication of a peaceful, liberal democratic world order.

9/11 was, indeed, as many conservatives argued, at the time, a wake up call that history was not finished. And that peace and liberal democracy were hardly its unquestionable victors, as a matter of its ongoing commitments, even as it was undoubtedly the most ingenious, strongest, most abundant, and contributing model of society and governance devised. Even, in other words, as liberal democracies were still clearly its strongest and most contributing participants. Irony has abounded in 21st century liberal democracy. And acknowledging that irony is, perhaps, the clearest road forward for liberal democracies stuck in their own fears of what they are and what they are best.

Crooke, in this article, tries to forge an outlook for how peace in the Middle East might still arise out of the ashes of a process that has seriously stalled, at this point, absent some real commitment by combatants to peaceful coexistence.

The alternative has been a destructive and irrational game of power politics, particularly by Palestinian terrorist groups and their political representatives, by my lights, and by Israeli and Palestinian partisans who opt for power politics over more genuine cooperation and collaboration, and any and all parties who have sworn off each and every opportunity for a peace agreement that would end the occupation of Palestine and end the killing of innocent Palestinians and Israelis at every turn.

And as someone who recognizes that one of the chief purposes of democracy is to provide peaceful alternatives to violence to resolve political conflicts, I have very little patience and no truck at all with the use of violence to manipulate peaceful or more democratic negotiations.

The Israelis leadership opted for stalling for better negotiating position, it appears, in the last round of talks. And Palestinians leaders, it appears, think that they can do an end run around reasonable negotiations with Israelis through the United Nations. A notion that is as ridiculous as it is counterproductive to a workable settlement.

And, at the end of the day, the intransigence of those not genuinely committed to peace is responsible for the deaths of so many innocent Palestinians and Israelis.

The general failure of Muslim cultures to respect the commitments to peaceful engagement and respect for differences inherent in liberal democratic values and institutions is one of the more serious problems that liberal democratic cultures face as a fact of national and international security commitments, today. But the failure of liberal democratic cultures to respect those same values and commitments, their own values and commitments, ironically, is their much more serious and self-governing responsibility which gives cover for the lack of respect for those same values among illiberal cultures and governments.

I do not care how many apologists for violent manipulation of those processes that Palestinians and Muslims have in the West. And I don't care how many apologists there are for the less violent and but still destuctive and counterproductive manipulation of liberal democratic discussions and processes with power and pressure politics in liberal democracies that feed the rationalizations for these violent thugs. At a certain point, when you rationalize the deaths of your own people or your own allies in the name of abstractions of politics or value, it becomes hard to tell if you are friend or foe, frankly. And, at a certain point, when illiberal impulses, as much as illiberal values or commitments or institutions, have so undermined societies' capacities for maintaining any real peace, security, economic strength, cultural contributions, and all of the other purposes that our illiberal impulses have undermined, free and unfree peoples need to rethink that path of destruction and self-destruction.

And that is the challenge the West faces, today. How do we deal with countries and groups who still pose threats who may or may not learn to respect liberal democratic values, but who are more than willing to manipulate those same liberal democratic values and institutions? And how do we learn to live up to our own values and end the legacy of manipulating those same values, commitments, and institutions in our own societies which lend rationalization to their manipulation in illiberal cultures and societies and make far harder our ability to build a peaceful and secure liberal democratic order that can successfully bring more peoples, cultures, government, and various people into its fold. To grow stronger, not weaker, ironically. And to do so by embracing its most serious strengths. It's commitment to freedom and compassion and common purpose in humanity, and all of its highest values that humanity's most base impulses often mistake for weakness in their perpetual insecurity and their failures of liberal democratic maturity.

That is the question we face, today. Let's see if we can find workable answers.

Osama Bin Laden out of the picture is not a bad start towards that end. But looking to our own honest commitments and failures is the most serious road forward.

Or just how noble we've become

2011-05-02T11:04:00.001-05:00

When Bad Things Happen to Do-Good People

"If Mr. Mortenson’s apparent fall from grace stems from a failure of character, it also has the ancillary benefit of showing us that the world is indeed a good deal more complicated than merely taking tea with our enemies. That global realities of entrenched money and power, diametrically opposed ideologies, religious conflict and centuries-long geopolitical animosities can render change nigh on impossible, so why try? It confirms the good judgment inherent in our own inaction. It certainly allows me to live another day without getting off the couch.

They say that schoolyard tune of 'Nya nya nya nya nya!' is universal; the same melody and intonation the world over. One likes to think that as one gets older, the impulse to stand over another and sing it while pointing like some scornful and victorious Marvelette diminishes. Maybe we just find other ways to do so."

Such a noble species, ain't we?

Megan McCain speaks some gentle truth

2011-04-28T16:18:00.005-05:00

I have to say. I do not usually take Meghan McCain seriously on political matters.

But on this matter, I think she's right. And has some personal experience to validate it that I think should be taken seriously by a media that, I agree, is seriously out of control, right now.

Why should Meghan or anyone have to defend that they are not mean enough to be a journalist? When did mean become the standard against we judged quality journalism?

And what does that say about our culture and its direction if that is the standard?

It is true that as a culture we can be too nice about all sorts of matters. That we can be naive about the state of the world. About human nature. About all sorts of things. I'm certainly guilty. Everyone is, at some point in their life (and all points of their life, if they were honest with themselves about real and possible limits of understanding about the world).

But when did empathy somehow become to source of all of our misunderstanding, is my question? Rather than the source of the largest bulk of our understanding about people other than ourselves?

It's like saying our brains are the source of most of our mistakes. Which, of course, they are. Since that is the part of the human anatomy responsible for decision-making. But they are also responsible for all of our honest and constructive understanding of the world, as well. Since they are responsible for the same. And losing ourselves in some notion of our brains as the source of our weakness because it is responsible for most of our mistakes as a species, is about the dumbest form of a dog chasing its tail to catch its backside of any notion that this damn fool species might just settle upon.

Obviously, there are a lot of directions this conversation can take us in that point us to the limits of empathy in understanding the world and others around us and in acting consistent with a wiser understanding of the world. As there are with the limits of almost any means of understanding or organizing the world. Including the rule of law. The limits of which, as much as anything else, have been a serious and important part of the development of liberal democracies and liberal values over time.

What I know, at this moment, is that I agree with Meghan that the national media in the United States is both seriously out of control in its treatment of all of its subjects. Self-congratulatory, generally, about its own behavior. And, simultaneously, discordant on so many issues of national import that is makes it extremely difficult to either get anything done on matters of common purpose or to develop consensus and common purpose and common standards of conduct that so many in the media or so bound and determined to undermine and bully and abandon in favor of whatever trends seem to suit their fancy. All while they bemoan those same lack of standards or the absence of this or that law that they favor.

It's more than a bit bizarre to watch, frankly, after some time.

If there is one reason for why Americans have expressed so little confidence in their national political institutions it is both the behavior of those institutions that does not seem to resolve important issues of national significance, and, much more importantly, the unwillingness of members of the media to ever allow or actively work to identify consensus and common purpose to tackle and resolve such problems.

And then, out of the obsession with the power vaccuum that behavior creates, more aggressive, mean-spirited posturing looks to be the only real option.

Even when the world watches that option playing itself out and so many people ask, legitimately:

"How, exactly, has this made things better?"

It hasn't, is the truth, I'm pretty clear. And Fox News and Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are as guilty as Bill Maher or Rachel Maddow or CNBC. And I don't care how much they try to weasel their way out of this one by blaming the other guy, it has turned our national conversation into some ugly, distorted version of something more decent and honest and worthy of American democracy and our liberal values and heritage. What we've adopted, as of late, is something more worthy of Weimar Germany, before the Nazis. It's not the same thing. But neither should we be strutting with pride in that direction, either.

It's been worse, to be sure. Can't get much worse than a Civil War. But neither does that make it ok. Civil war is not ok, either, except when unavoidable, as it likely was in our own history. And politics as culture war is neither unavoidable or an honest or decent or worthy way of conducting a democracy. Especially the birthplace of modern liberal democracy.

And whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we are responsible for the sorry mess of things, today. And Americans will have to say different if they want something more worthy.

Perhaps they don't. And perhaps I'm wrong. In which case, I, for one, at least, will be joining the masses of apathetic Americans who have thrown in the towel on this politics and just grateful that I have sufficient freedom to do so in this great country.

But it seems a damned shameful way to conduct things, in the meantime.

My experience is that those who approach the world as one long fight interpret that world and others around them very differently than a world where less aggression predominates and those who seek to build that peace. Interpretations of foreign policy before and after World War demonstrate this propensity to see threat and danger and fear in every direction in ways that create the same. Fear of a world that is unsafe made unsafe by that same fear. And it is the most repeated and unfailing folly of the species homo sapiens in their long, predatory, and all-too-aggressive history.

Perhaps we have evolved beyond our sense of something more genuinely decent. Perhaps aggressive and mean-spirited is the wave of the future.

All I know is that every single group or ideology who has taken that direction, rather than giving some honest parameters to liberal democracy, has taken those same democracies and cultures in some fairly ugly directions, generally. And they, too, thought they were doing what was best, often, as well as what was in their self-interest.

Only to discover that they had hurt a lot of people along the way. And leave history teachers, like myself, to get all that sorted out for the world.

Be nice to get some of that sorted out ahead of time, perhaps. Avoid the unnecessary harm to ourselves and one another. For all of our sakes.

What would George Washington do?

2011-04-22T09:51:00.001-05:00

The kids and I are studying party politics for our district document based assessment. And George Washington came up.

Washington is a President whose reputation, with me, up till this point, was not as an intellectual. Washington was the good guy. The guy who gave up power voluntarily after successfully leading the Americans in battle.The guy more concerned about getting the country off on the right foot than with his own personal ambitions.

But then I happened on Washington's Farewell Address while trying to find documents for the kids. And this is what George Washington had to say about party politics:

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is the truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural and party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindle the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent it from bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."

It's easy for people to lose themselves in party passions and prides of all various sorts. It's also often destructive for no particular purpose, at all. Other than the one conjured in the moment.

It seems to me, at least, given how ugly and irrational our debates have gotten, that this is one of those moments.

Not the first time. Won't be the last. Not good for any of us, either.

Perhaps we have all outthunk one another.

Perhaps we have outthunk ourselves.

Perhaps we have outthunk noone but ourselves.

Perhaps all that is a tad more foolish than we might want to admit.

And perhaps, deep down, those are the real stakes involved today.

What would George Washington do?

Not this, I'm pretty sure. Not this.

You know who I'm voting for?

2011-04-07T16:28:00.003-05:00

You know who I'm voting for?

No clue. We'll see who can rise above the bullshit.

You know who I'm voting against?

Dicks. Like this one.

Trump brings media blitz to NBC, 'steamrolls' Meredith Vieria on birther issue

And the dicks who blamed Meredith for this guy being a dick.

And every dick who blames compassionate folks for all the dicks in the world, like themselves, being dicks.

And like Bowles and Simpson said. I'll be voting against dicks in both parties. Believe that.

Fuck off, dicks. I don't care what direction you come from.

You've fucked up my country.

I want nothing to do with you assholes. Right or left.

Fuck off.

And go learn something real in the world, you prick.

Fuck you and your cause.

For real, dicks.

I don't want anything to do with the lot of you.

For reals, homey.

What to do with Libya, the Middle East, and whole damn world

2011-04-01T18:07:00.002-05:00

By far, the strongest thoughts I've seen on the situation in Libya and liberal interventionism, more broadly.

By merely bolstering the weaker side, we are prolonging Libya's civil war

He's definitely right, by the way, about the failures and limitations of liberal interventionism. This is where, for all his faults, President Bush was far stronger than his successor. And what will likely lead me to vote Republican and for whatever candidate can promise to be more thoughtful about such situations and fully committed when they engage in warfare, of any kind, when they do.

Liberal democracies need to keep all options open when dealing with the baddest of bad actors. A muscular unilateralism or multi-multilateralism. A U.N. sanctioned liberal interventionism. Bilateral or multilateral diplomacy. Whatever commits the world to liberal values, defends liberal democracies, removes bad actors, when possible, and otherwise makes the world a freer, more peaceful, more prosperous, better place to live.

The only real questions at this point, are:

1) Does this situation in Lybia warrant any intervention (I still lean in favor, though I am persuaded that many people likely understand this situation and region far better than me and many of those voices oppose this intervention, perhaps for good reason; thank God for thoughtful liberal debate and discussion and people far smarter than me about such matters, that's all I gotta say).

2) If we are engaged in such interventions, are we going to fight to win or put our men and women in uniform in harm's way without any real guarantee of victory, even when we have the real capacity to guarantee just that?

There's probably more that I just don't understand well enough. That's most questions of import, I'm convinced, at this point, as far as I'm concerned.

But one thing I do know, at this point, is that if liberal democracies do not make clear that they are the dominant force in the world, someone else will. And they won't be our friends. That doesn't justify any and every intervention. And my advocacy for this intervention could very likely turn out to be wrong.

But there does, I believe, need to be a more serious, mature, thoughtful, open, engaged, reliable and credible debate and discussion about such matters in government, by major media outlets, in universities, and in all places where genuinely thoughtful and serious folks have such discussions, or should be having those discussions, even when they opt for politics, in its lowest and least trustworthy forms, instead.

There needs to be, I believe, some kind of consensus that begins to evolve out of this conflict, between liberal and conservatives that can have the American and liberal democratic peoples fully on board when we do commit to such actions so our brave men and women in uniform do not give their lives in vain.

And some sense of gravity and seriousness that matters of life and death, for everyone, and particularly for those in the armed forces, are, without even a hint of question, more important than our petty debates about who is going to get more money for themselves or whichever purposes that happen to suit their fancy.

Our debates in politics need to reflect the seriousness of the matters that they entail. And if all Americans are not going to give them that kind of seriousness, then those who are supposed to be the grown-ups in such debates need to start acting like them.

Simon Jenkins does a nice job of doing just that in this piece.

The question is (for all of us, myself especially):

Can the rest of us?

Searching for some good faith (and Bobby Fisher, but he's since ate it)

2011-03-24T15:57:00.002-05:00

It's so funny. In an age obsessed with proving just how badass and unforgiving it is, you have two parties and their ideological brethren who have, as R. Emmett Terrell alludes to, here, likely unintentionally, bumbled through America's unipolar moment. Both of whom and their Presidents have needed much room for failure and forgiveness.

And I'm pretty sure they are both in solid good faith.

Obama's Crazy War

If this were late 1940's Europe, we would just begin the process of giving up imperialism as a rationalization of endless warfare and conquest and power and move on to something more democratic.

The problem we face, today, however is quite significantly different. How do you simultaneously provide for national and collective security, commit the world to a liberal order, be able to affect change, especially with the baddest of bad actors, without powers capable and willing to exercise the power to do so? Or populations that will back them?

Good question, is the answer to that one. And two Presidents doing their best to offer answers. Internationally sanctioned multilateralism, in the case of the current President (even, as Terrell points out, if he skips his own Congress and Constitution). Or multi-multilateralism, using NATO and other willing partners - coalitions of the willing, someone once called them - when the U.N. or other bodies become ineffectual.

If there's one thing I've learned, in this time. There is no one group that's got anything figured out for good. So if you think you're one of them, think again. The thinker thinks to himself. And so goes the lot of us.

Attention: Team America

2011-03-18T10:45:00.013-05:00

Secretary Clinton, Victor Davis Hanson, and everybody else for that matter.

As per Libya, the Arab Spring, and all the rest:

Obama: No U.S. Ground Troops Will Be Deployed To Libya

As much as possible, the President's best case scenario should be our policy. And while the President's caution is understandable, given the propensity for worse case scenarios, all options, including the use of overwhelming force, should be on the table.

Enough petty bickering.

Time to start acting like a team, Team America.

The world needs leadership.

Let's show them some.

Before it is too late

2011-03-16T12:20:00.002-05:00

Gwynne Dyer, one of the strongest international security columnists I have ever encountered, has an excellent suggestion for making sure that Mohammar Gadhafi does not defeat Lybia's rebels and crush democratic hopes in Lybia.

The Libyan Revolution's Best Hope: Egypt?

"The Libyan revolution is losing the battle. Col. Moammar Gadhafi's army does not have much logistical capability, but it can get enough fuel and ammunition east along the coast road to attack Benghazi, Libya's second city, at some point in the next week or so. His army is not well trained and a lot of his troops are foreign mercenaries, but the lightly armed rebels cannot hold out long against tanks, artillery and air strikes.

Even sooner, Gadhafi's forces will attack Misrata, Libya's third city and the last opposition stronghold in the western half of the country. It will probably fall after some days of bitter fighting, as Zawiya eventually fell. And if Zawiya's brave and stubborn resistance is repeated in the two larger cities then they will both suffer very large casualties, including many noncombatants, in the fighting.

What happens to the rebels and their families after active resistance is crushed will be much worse. When political prisoners in Abu Salim prison staged a protest at jail conditions in 1996, Gadhafi had 1,200 of them massacred. All the people now fighting him, or helping the Libyan National Council that organizes resistance in the east, or just demonstrating against him, will be tracked down by his secret police. They and their families are doomed.

The collapse of the democratic revolution in Libya will also gravely damage the prospects of the "Arab spring" elsewhere. Rulers in other Arab countries where the army is also largely made up of foreign mercenaries (Bahrain and several other Gulf states, for example), will conclude that they can safely kill enough of their own protesters to 'restore order.'...

...U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was not being entirely honest when he said that a no-fly zone could not be imposed without the prior destruction of all Libya's surface-to-air defenses, which would require a lot of bombing. It would be perfectly possible to enforce the no-fly ban from the air, and only attack Gadhafi's ground-based defense systems if and when their targeting radars locked onto the enforcing aircraft.

Nevertheless, Gates is right to reject the no-fly solution, for two reasons. First, it wouldn't stop Gadhafi's advance. Second, if it were done by American and European air forces, it would undermine the Arab sense of ownership of this extraordinary revolt against tyranny. It would be pure gesture politics, to make the onlookers to the tragedy feel better about themselves.

What is actually needed is active military intervention on the ground and in the air by disciplined, well-trained Arab forces, sent by a revolutionary Arab government that is in sympathy with the Libyan rebels. So where is the Egyptian army when the Libyans need it?

Egypt has an open border with the rebel-controlled east of Libya, and just one brigade of the Egyptian Army would be enough to stop Gadhafi's ground forces in their tracks. The Egyptian air force could easily shoot down any of Gadhafi's aircraft that dared to take off, especially if it had early warning from European or American AWACS aircraft.

The Egyptian Army would probably not need to go all the way to Tripoli, although it could easily do so if necessary. Just the fact of Egyptian military intervention would probably convince most of the Libyan troops still supporting Gadhafi that it is time to change sides.

Arab League support for the intervention would not be hard to get, and the Libyan rebels are now desperate enough that they would quickly overcome their natural distrust of their giant neighbor. As for internal Egyptian politics, what better way for the Egyptian Army to establish its revolutionary credentials and protect its privileged position in the state than by saving the revolution next door?

It is very much in the interest of the Egyptian revolution that Gadhafi does not triumph in Libya, and even more that the forces of reaction do not win in the broader Arab world. For the first time since Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s, the giant of the Arab world would also be its moral leader.

It would be nice if the Tunisian Army could intervene from the west at the same time as the Egyptian Army went into Libya from the east, but it is a far weaker force belonging to a far smaller country: Tunisia only has twice Libya's population, whereas Egypt has 12 times as many people. No matter. Egypt would be enough on its own.

Only do it fast. A week from now will probably be too late."

They need to act quickly.

If they do not, many, many brave Lybians will be sent to slaughter. While those with the means to help them stand paralyzed on the sidelines.

If noone helps these rebels, the tragedy will be more serious than any 24 hour cable news celebrity will ever be able to explain away.

Some masterful chillaxin'

2011-03-11T14:58:00.001-06:00

For all the right reasons and their close associates, I am taking a much needed break from the world of politics and all other all-too-serious things in the world for a some much deserved time for chilling out and wooing women. I might return if I have something useful to say. Not likely for awhile, in other words.

In the meantime, enjoy the masterful chillaxin' from the master of chillaxing.

You will be missed, David Broder

2011-03-09T18:09:00.003-06:00

The Broder We Knew

In an era that soberly addresses very little other than its own ego, David Broder made public service in journalism a serious endeavor.

Rest in peace, David. You will be missed.

Someone had to say it

2011-03-09T16:44:00.006-06:00

The most honest and credible description I've heard about Paul Krugman in the short and unfortunate time I've known of that man.

Take it away, Alan. Someone had to say it.

How about that for a little honesty?

2011-03-09T16:29:00.001-06:00

Alan Simpson makes awesome feel humble.

How refreshing to have anyone in Washington talk about sacrafice. And to get honest about how our self-centeredness will be our downfall - in our government, as much as in our personal lives - if we can't get ourselves cleaned up.

How refreshing to have someone call us out - all of us - on our bullshit.

Screw your political gamesmanship. Get straight about doing what needs to be done do long before it advances your career ambitions.

And those who play otherwise have no business leading everyone else around by the nose.

So says Alan Simpson. A rare breed in Washington D.C. and in the popular culture of any variety, these days.

A grown up. And proud of it.

There's hope for us yet.

Who can you trust in politics?

2011-03-08T15:42:00.003-06:00

Finally. People I can trust in politics.

What a rare and welcome treat.

It has nothing to do with party.

It has to do with who is serious and honest.

How refreshing that some people still believe that means something.

Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all folks

2011-03-07T17:44:00.007-06:00

After another weekend with The Blindside and a long enough and often too-thoughtfully-involved career, at this point, helping kids get their lives turned around, I have made a decision about the world and about my life.

I think, largely, that the world is a good and decent place. I think, at least. I've had much reason to doubt that, these days. But I still think that to be so.

I've spent a good portion of my adult life studying all the places - in America and around the world - where the world does not seem to be and often very much is not a very good or decent place. Or at least a much scarier, more brutal, more manipulative and self-centered, and otherwise unfriendly place than I believed it to be, as a kid. So I know plenty of that exists in the world. I'm not naive about that big, bad world. Or, at least, I'm less naive, today, for better or for worse. I wish I was more naive about the world, anymore, these days, is the truth. But I suppose I'll have to settle for just focussing my life on the good stuff in life and leave it at that.

I just genuinely believe, generally, that the world and people are better, more decent and all the rest than we give them credit. And I think, generally, the world is a decent enough place to be when you do what you're supposed to do (whatever that might be, I suppose) and when you go out to do some good in the world and, generally, do something worthwhile with your life.

I've spent enough time, at this point, seeing all the places where that's not true. Where people get sometimes some very short ends of sticks. Where life can be tragic. Where it's not fair. Where it's not happy. Where bad guys get the girl and nice guys finish last. And all that.

That world's plenty out there, that's for sure.

I just don't want to live that life, is the truth. I find it all kinda self-centered and self-involved and just not at all the kinda life I wanna live or the people I wanna be around, is the truth. They aren't the kinda people I like to be around, today, nevertheless as a matter of life.

And I guess I've just decided I've done all that plenty, at this point in my life. You could spend you're whole life with your focus, there, I suppose. With an eye to the cynical and disappointing facts of life.

But, why, really? Has it ever once made me feel better, I ask myself? Or has my life ever really gotten substantially better, meaning in my overall feeling about life, from having my focus there? Has anyone's, really?

No, is the answer to all of those questions. At least not in my experience.

And I guess I'm just at a point where I'm tired of questioning all of that. Or contemplating it all. Except as a matter of limited and not-terribly-serious focus in my life.

Having a nice life isn't all that tough. It's just about doing it. And spent a good, long enough time with the alternatives - namely, thinking about all the shit in the world that isn't so nice - to know that that kind of focus in life is just kinda miserable, is the truth. Especially when many of the people who make it so just don't seem so interested in it being any different. Because they create much of that misery, is the truth. And why that misery needs to be my problem, with so little I can do about it, I have no clue, at this point.

There's something about spending your life helping people, especially people who either want or don't want the help, and plenty of people don't want the help, at least not right now, and maybe ever, for some folks, that I realize that I don't have to worry about stuff I can't control, anyway, if I don't wanna. And I don't wanna, anymore. Except as a passing fancy, I suppose. But nothing to get my panties in a wad about.

Anyway. I watch the Blindside and I look at that lovely family and I think to myself, "That kinda life is just good enough for me. And more than any other way I look at the world, that kinda people is who I identify with, more than anything else, at this point."

And it's not about politics. And it's not about money. And it's not about anything really except good people who don't mind doing some good and just having that be that. And not losing their heads in a world that could drag them in one direction or another at any moment they might let them.

I'm done with all that. I want a life where I do good. Period. And perhaps do some other things along the way.

Anyway. For some reason I felt like saying it out loud. If only just to remind myself of the one lesson that has really sunk in from all this work, at this point. That being happy doesn't really have to be so complicated, is the truth. It's just up to us.

And as Porky Pig once wisely opined, Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all folks.

No, really. Honestly. Thats all there is to it.

Thanks, Porky.

I gotta life to go spend some time with.

A modest question for the times

2011-03-06T17:34:00.006-06:00

One question, it was occurring to me, today, that everyone might ask themselves - no matter what side of what lines they identify with - these days, is:

How do I look to someone who is not me? Often, it is not flattering. Just ask me. I have a lifetime enough to share, on that front.

The film, The Blindside, I think, offers the most convincing and realistic idea, I've seen, of bridging worlds that might otherwise resist bridges. In America, at least.

The book is excellent, as well, by the way. But the movie captures the real story in that story:

How do we bridge worlds that often feel, and often are, so far apart, in America, today?

Lots of folks resisting bridges these days. Often this just impacts our money. For those in the political world, that seems to be the real priority, these days. Perhaps the only one, from the looks of it, sometimes.

But, too often, in the world, today - Israel and Palestine come to mind, as do violent political and criminal matters in any number of countries in the world, today - this impacts life and death for many, many people.

Not all people will accept bridges. In which case, when life and death are at stake, we will have to settle for guns, instead, sadly.

But in those places where bridges can be built, in America and in the world, fewer guns are needed and fewer people die.

So while we're all pulling out our weapons and setting our sites on the other guy, we might ask ourselves, for a moment, that question:

How do I look to someone who is not me? And what has that done to make things better in the world or make them worse?

Something to think about.

If anything, just to have something to do while we tear each other apart.

Perhaps we all might build ourselves up a little bit better, this time around.

But what happens when there's no magic?

2011-03-04T12:57:00.002-06:00

The American Thinker has a fascinating column on how things have changed from 1900. And whether they have, in fact, changed for the better.

"Federal spending. In 1900 federal spending was $0.5B. In 2000 it was $1,789B . Those amounts translated to 2.5% of GDP in 1900 and 21% in 2000. Government spending at all levels in the U.S. was 36.5% of GDP in 2006. That 2.5% of GDP that could sustain the entire federal government in 1900 is not even enough to cover the Medicare program today.

The Medicare program, by the way, did not exist in 1900; it was established in 1965.

Federal taxes. A federal income tax did not exist in 1900; it was unconstitutional, and would remain that way until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. The first 1040 form included one page of instructions, and appeared to apply to both individuals and businesses. Today's 1040 instructions for individuals runs 155 pages, with no guarantee that you won't have to fill out other forms and consult other instructions.

Federal regulation. There were few enough federal regulations in 1900 that the government did not do anything special to keep track of them. That changed in the middle of the New Deal. The Federal Register, the master list of federal regulations, came into existence in 1936. In that year it had 2,620 pages of regulations. The next year it had 3,450. In the year 2000, it had 83,294 pages.

Cabinet Departments. There were seven cabinet level departments in 1900: State, Treasury, War, Navy, Justice, Interior and Agriculture. All but Interior (1849) and Agriculture (1889) were established prior to 1790.

In 2000 there were 14 cabinet departments, including 9 created after 1900: State, Treasury, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce (1903), Labor (1913), Defense (1947), Health & Human Services (1953), Housing and Urban Development (1965), Transportation (1966), Energy (1977), Education (1979), and Veterans Affairs (1988).

In 2002 the Department of Homeland Security was established, making the current total 15 departments. If the "cabinet level" positions are included (excluding the Vice President), the total is 20. The cabinet level positions (excluding VP) are White House Chief of Staff, Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Trade Representative, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Constitutional Amendments. The first 10 Amendments (the Bill of Rights) and the 11th were passed prior to 1800. The 12th was passed in 1804. In the next 109 years, only three more Amendments were added to the Constitution; all three were passed in the five years between 1865 and 1870 and related to ending slavery and establishing the rights of ex-slaves. The last 12 Amendments were all passed between 1913 and 1992. There are now 27 Amendments.

Federal Bureaucracy. The following sampling of government agencies did not exist in 1900. (The years given are when the agency was established. When a range is given, it includes the related pre-cursor agencies.)

FDA, Food and Drug Administration (1906-1930)
FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1908-1935)
Federal Reserve (1913)
IRS, Internal Revenue Service (1913)
FTC, Federal Trade Commission (1914)
BATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (1920-1972)
FCC, Federal Communications Commission (1934)
SEC, Security and Exchange Commission (1934)
Social Security (1935)
Medicare and Medicaid (1965)
EPA, Environmental Protection Agency (1970)
OSHA, Occupational, Safety and Health Administration (1971)
DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration (1973)
FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Administration (1979)

Crime and Punishment. In 1900 there were no Federal laws against drugs. None. In fact, you didn't even need a prescription for medicine. Now, of course, the Federal government outlaws marijuana even where a state government has made it legal (over the dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas, by the way), and has the FDA, DEA and other departments of armed men ready to enforce those laws and regulations. More generally, the federal departments we normally associate with law enforcement, the FBI and BATF for examples, did not exist at all in 1900.

In 1900 there were about 100,000 people (1 in 760) in U.S. prisons. In 2000 there were about 2 million (1 in 140). The incarceration rate increased over 400%.

In 1900 there were 1.2 murder victims for every 100,000 people. The rate has been over 10 per 100,000, and in 2000 it was 6.1 per 100,000, an increase of over 400% compared to 1900.

Generally, the federal government has stepped into law enforcement in a big way since 1900. Unfortunately, we did not become safer, either from criminals or from zealous prosecutors and lawmen. More of us get locked up. More of us get murdered. Four hundred percent more of us."

It's a fascinating read. And a welcome question mark for those convinced that the world changing means a world getting better.

Perhaps the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Perhaps the world just changes. For better and for worse.

Hard to know, ain't it?

So why are partisans so convinced that they made the magic happen?

Because when there's no magic, there's no reason to celebrate those who didn't make the magic happen.

And in the history of the world, that has meant celebrating those who have often made much tragedy happen in its stead.

And perhaps we have something a little better to offer than all that.

Check, please

2011-03-03T17:22:00.008-06:00

Caroline Baum provides dead on analysis of the current economic debate. And the crossroads that has been, literally, forced upon the liberal democratic world, at this point, by the unbending, manipulative propaganda and pressure politics - and the utter lack of concern with the consequences of either - of the various partisans.

Macroeconomics Stuck in the Dark Ages

"Economists have been debating the pros and cons of fiscal stimulus since the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes diagnosed the problem as one of inadequate private investment and prescribed public spending, financed by borrowing, as the cure.

The discussion hasn’t advanced very much in eight decades. Sure, economists have devised elegant mathematical models that purport to show that $1 of government purchases translates into -- take your pick -- no increase in gross domestic product (the multiplier is zero, according to Harvard’s Robert Barro) or $1.50 of GDP (a multiplier of 1.5, according to Berkeley’s Christina Romer, who was chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers when the $814 billion stimulus was crafted in 2009). They haven’t really proven anything.

Keynesian economics went into hibernation in the latter part of the 20th century following an array of stimulus failures on the part of both Democratic and Republican administrations in the 1970s. The only thing the spending stimulated was stagflation.

In the 1980s, inflation came down, the Berlin Wall came down, economists thought the volatility of the business cycle had come down, and the notion of government as the solution went out of vogue.

Keynesians All

All it took was a good financial crisis for the Keynesians to come out of the woodwork.

The debate over fiscal stimulus went viral last week (at least in the geek world) with an economic forecast from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), a counter from Stanford University economist John Taylor (he of the Taylor rule), and an addenda from Goldman yesterday.

The Goldman gang projected an economic drag (that would be the opposite of stimulus) on GDP growth of 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters if House-passed budget cuts of $61 billion for the remainder of fiscal 2011 become the law of the land.

Asked about the Goldman forecast Tuesday following testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke demurred.

“Our analysis doesn’t get a number quite like that,” he said. “Two percent is an enormous effect.”

He could have added: “especially when the rest of government is growing.”

Wrong on Everything

“Total government spending is up 6.7 percent in 2011 from 2010,” Taylor told me in a telephone interview.

Defense spending is rising, as are non-discretionary outlays for programs such as Medicare and Social Security that are on automatic pilot.

The proposed cuts would reduce non-defense non-security discretionary spending, a teensy share of the federal budget, back to 2008 levels.

In a Feb. 28 blog post, Taylor said Goldman’s analysis was “wrong.” He criticized it for failing to consider the beneficial effects that expectations of lower future deficits and smaller tax increases would have on the economy. He criticized the methodology for relying on the same “large multiplier theory” used to justify the 2009 stimulus. And he criticized the assumption that proposed spending equates with actual spending, which trickles out over time.

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, the Goldman analysis was spot on.

‘Alchemists and Quacks’

This fundamental disagreement among professional economists about whether government spending helps or hurts represents the state of the art, or science, today. In what other science do practitioners design a treatment plan based on inconclusive proof that the medicine does any good?

There are no control studies in economics, no way to hold everything else constant to determine the impact of one variable, no way to falsify conclusions that models spit out. Financial Times columnist John Kay, writing yesterday about risk modelers, referred to them as “alchemists and quacks.”

A bit harsh, perhaps, but he’d probably hold macroeconomic models in the same high regard.

Whenever oil prices spike, modelers instantly project how much the increase will subtract from GDP growth. No mention of why prices are rising. Is it the result of a supply shock, which results in higher prices and reduced quantity demanded, or an outward shift in the demand curve, which equates with higher price and quantity demanded? There is a difference.

Known Knowns

In microeconomics, which is the study of how individuals and firms interact in specific markets, certain truths are self- evident. Which doesn’t mean economic planners can see them. Governments across Asia right now are using subsidies and price controls to ease the pain of higher oil and food prices even though their actions will exacerbate the crisis.

Goldman countered Taylor’s critique with a clarification. The projected 1.5 to 2 percentage point hit to GDP was to the quarterly annualized growth rate, not to the level. Thanks for that.

As I said before, we entered the 21st century with macroeconomics still looking for an Age of Enlightenment.

Five thousand years ago in ancient Egypt, medics used leeches to suck the blood of ill patients, believing the practice could cure everything from fevers to food poisoning.

Today’s physicians have largely forsaken bloodsuckers for modern medicine. It’s about time macroeconomics emerged from the Dark Ages as well."

The caveat, here, is that many partisans are just fine to argue that the economics debate is cover for partisanship that they have no intention of resolving. Scientifically or otherwise. In which case, Caroline's allusion that, if partisans are going to resign us to such a fate, the notion that economics, as a matter of objective scientific pursuit, must be abandoned, is the only honest conclusion.

Postmodernists on the left have argued the same for years. But the troubling part of that argument is that the only logical alternative is that more naked, or even more covert, power politics is substituted for honest science or debate or discussion. Not the most promising future for democratic discussion. But one that many on the left would characterize as progress. Because they say so. And with very little appeal to something more objective or for which broad consensus of any kind can be achieved.

Hence the current political period.

It is true, from what I've seen, that unemployment rates did seem to drop after Franklin Roosevelt took office. Very, very slowly. And with a long period of double-digit unemployment well into New Deal policies. Validating elements of the New Deal legacy. I've long believed that the strongest feature of that legacy was a commitment to temporary and as limited as possible government intervention in the face of true economic emergencies, like the 25% unemployment that Franklin Roosevelt faced upon taking office.

But the experience of America, at least, in the latter half of the 20th century, and really the experience of Europe, Japan, and most liberal democratic economies, is that Keynsian and neo-Keysnian policy has not fared well for economic growth, at least. Even if it provided cover for more wealth redistribution, which many Keynsians and leftists may support, it has not, and cannot possibly be, a substitute nor is it any kind of rational priority over economic growth, since growth is what creates the wealth that might otherwise be distributed. Killing the goose for the golden egg, as conservatives would argue. And which the current economic malaise seems to bear out. For someone who is honestly open-minded about what policies make for better economic results.

The truth is, I believe, that most Keynsians are committed leftists. And will be so despite the consequences. A problem that the right shares as well, to be sure. But one for which there is no other possible honest solution outside of naked power politics with no honest engagement - of the sort that has become commonplace in America today - absent a more objective policy discussion.

What I know is that this direction looks neither enlightened, as Caroline makes reference, nor like progress of any substantive sort that looks recognizable to me.

It certainly has not hastened progress in this economy, at this point, to anyone with eyes.

Perhaps progress is just a matter of who has the best narrative to justify their naked power politics, as leftists argue. No matter what happens to the world, in consequence.

In which case, as someone who was a committed liberal for most of my life, this direction looks like no kind of honest progress at all.

I most certainly have my doubts about the certainty that too many religious conservatives, in particular, bring to their politics, as well.

But it does seem to me to be a fairly serious hijacking of a democratic process for the priorities of the fringe to drive out a consensus of the more genuinely moderate and independent, thoughtful, and open-minded of the culture. The very same hijacking that characterized Weimar Germany, similary by both the right and the left, out of the same fear that liberal values had made Germany weak, in the lead up to Nazi rule.

It very much seems like a culture that has turned itself on its head. And that eats itself alive, simultaneously, with its own self-certainty and self-doubt.

Something needs to give, is the bottom line. And an objective and honest discussion of policies and their consequences seems like as good as any to find resolution of our perennial political battles. Outside of naked power politics.

A path forward that does not feel very much forward-moving at all.

Perhaps permanent and unbending mutual hostility and opposition is the future of democratic politics. Perhaps the future is blind assertion of power and not any kind of honest democratic discussion and debate in an honestly committed marketplace of ideas.

In which case, I'm with the folks voting against the assholes of the bunch.

All of them.

Until bullshit is not the only plate on the menu.

No rest for the ruthless

2011-03-02T14:30:00.002-06:00

Someone needs to read some Montesquieu.

The Most Ruthless Usually Triumph

"Yet here we come up against a hard fact of life, beyond individuals; one which we must try to understand when looking forward - not only in Libya, but perhaps throughout the realm of Islam. Ruthlessness works. And in almost every revolution in history, the most ruthless faction eventually triumphed.

Chance, or what looks like chance, can also come into this. In their several ways, Robespierre of France, Hitler of Germany, and Pol Pot of Cambodia, overplayed their hands. Lenin, Stalin and Mao did not: each bequeathed a regime of monstrous tyranny to his successors.

While it is impossible to predict the course of history in narrative detail, that is not what 'learning from history' is about. History seldom repeats itself, in any melodic sense, but repeats itself constantly in rhythm and themes. We should grasp, for instance, that the American Revolution was almost unique in history, for ending so well. We should also grasp why. It was, from beginning to end, under the leadership of highly civilized men, governed by a conception of liberty that was restrained and mature."

Apparently David Warren has not figured out that the point of liberal democracy is not to beknight such facts of history. It is to challenge them in every way possible. Including as a matter of historical record.

That was the point of Montesquieu's and Madison's commitment to checks and balances. It also happens to have been the point of the 20th century. And the entirety of liberal democratic history. When we stop acting like it wasn't.

And the historical record, at this point, is that the most decent and humane countries are the most powerful countries. And that is the way it will remain. As long as we let those who would rationalize ruthlessness say what they like, but don't pretend that they have more to say than they do.

And make sure the truly ruthless have no opportunity, at all, to do anything of the sort.

Getting it right

2011-03-01T15:09:00.000-06:00

The direction of more honest progress.

Enterprise, Not Greed, Creates a Better World

It involves getting this question right.

To be better

2011-03-01T15:00:00.000-06:00

Finally got around to seeing this, last night.

The single most inspiring story I've seen for the work we do.

Thank you for your example, Leigh Anne Tuohy.

You inspire me to be better.

One worthy of your heart

2011-02-24T09:13:00.005-06:00

If there is anything that teaching and studying people has taught me, it is that, for all the complexities that naturally arise out of life, having a nice, decent, successful life is actually much easier and more common sense than so many of us make it. Myself included.

And, ultimately, we either choose to have that life or not.

A nice life is the life I've chosen, at this point. And I'll let others choose their own path.

Everything else is beside the point, as far as I'm concerned.

Home is where the heart is, as they say.

And the question I ask myself, these days, is what kind of home have I made myself?

One worthy of my heart, I hope.

Nice to be home.

Choose wisely. And, if not, as is generally the case. For everyone. Choose again.

2011-02-19T11:05:00.002-06:00

Life is full of clusterfucks, is the truth. Plenty of unfairness in the world. Plenty of unnecessary tragedy. Plenty of bad breaks and failures and life that just doesn't go quite right, is the truth.

And in the face of that, you can either work to make the world, and especially your little place in it, a little better, more genuinely decent and good, more beautiful, whatnot.

Or you can resign yourself or perpetuate the clusterfucks in life.

It's up to you.

And all us get to live with those choices.

Choose wisely.

And, if not. As is generally the case. For everyone. Choose again.

Rules is rules (good intentions, roads to hell, and all the rest)

2011-02-16T20:14:00.007-06:00

Just had yet one more meeting centering around the ratcheting up of enforcement and compliance on any number of ridiculous paperwork requirements for our IEP work.

I was just sharing with another teacher in the building, a teacher I really respect for her ability to reach and touch kids, while we talked about ways to improve classes, that what drives me crazy about all this bullshit is that there is limited time we have in a week to do all the things that might make a difference in kids' lives.

But that time is persistently eaten up and the enthusiasm and enjoyment and commitment to the work persistently undermined by the ever increasing levels of ridiculousness around paperwork and the rules meant to leverage what, for real, outside of improving the egos of those doing the leveraging, I will never, ever in my life really know.

And I'm quite sure, given the circularity of answers always given - which always boil down to, "Because I said so"; no matter the unintended consequences, apparently - I will likely never hear an answer meant to make any real sense beyond defending itself.

Because those doing the work every day know that the ever increasing paperwork and emphasis on compliance, generally, does not one real lick of good. And does much bad, creating much aggravation and cutting into time to do those things that might do real good on the job. And, ironically, is the very thing that most of our kids are trying to desperately get out from under.

It's all very Alice in Wonderland, is what it is. Life in America is more than a tad Orwellian, these days, as everyone disregards any honest discussion about anything these days in lieu of very confidently asserted ideological certainty. It's kinda bizarre watching it, honestly, when you are just as confident that the assholes doing it are, generally, more strange and foolish for doing it and disregarding anything that might contradict their Very Confident Understandings of Everything Ever Known.

It's very much like studying or watching the warfare and political intrigue between Protestants and Catholics, or Sunni and Shia, or Christians and Muslims, or whatever many variations of ego pretending to be something better than it is to strut its way through human history, as if strutting really made it more true or good or whatever bullshit people have conjured for themselves, these days. And all days.

It's kinda funny and strange to watch an Administration that does not dare speak the namesake for American independence - for fear that the world will just go to pot and a hell of a lot worse than the fine, upstanding one all the leverage and power-mongering has so thoroughly created - pressure an Egyptian government to embrace freedom. Or else. It's all a little loony, after awhile, is what it is.

Where I come from, we just say it just don't make any damned sense, is the truth.

But like the Administration before it, this one cynically calculates that if they just do whatever they damn well please with their leverage and blame the other guy for anything that goes wrong, in lieu of something more decent and humble and respectful and honest, then everything will be hunky dorey. What must be avoided at all costs is something that might involve them learning something from the folks they so loathe just is not humanly possible that they could learn anything at all, apparently.

One does not learn from the De-veel and his terribly sexy, but power-hungry minions, after all. Meaning all of us. Yeah, you heard me. I just called you sexy.

It's just a little insane, really, all the bullshit. All the self-righteous assertions of power. Because I said so.

And not a goddamn bit o' good to show for it.

Except for the ones that I can just repeatedly assert. Against any contrary claims. Because I'll just ignore all the claims to the contrary. As my little sister once wisely opined, "Na-na-na-na-na."

It's all so grown up, I can hardly stand it.

What I know is that it is that the bullshit is thick, these days, in every quarters.

And it makes life wearisome for everyone else who has to live with it.

Because the overweaning egos of so many who clamor for power for any number of purposes just cannot to bring themselves to consider admitting that they might be wrong. About any goddamn thing. Which, of course, is what makes them so right. Because they have so thoroughly banished from their consciousness anything that might resemble anything even in leagues with wrong.

It's all so damn noble, is what strikes me. I just can't fathom how much more noble a species could get, frankly. What without patting itself on their-all-too-humble backs. What's a species so awesomely humble supposed to do, you know?

Rules is rules, I suppose. No matter how much we fuck shit up in the name of them. And our right to use them for whatever purpose our noble little hearts desire.

Sounds like an Egyptian regime I know of.

Perhaps those folks in Egypt are onto something.

A more genuine and humble path forward

2011-02-14T16:59:00.007-06:00

Janet Daley, one of the stronger political columnists on the international scene I have encountered, of late, has an excellent articulation of what the future of a more humble vision of liberal democratic government and its role in our lives might begin to look like.

The Big Society starts with our wedding vows

"I can recall a time when the Big Society meant something more than spending cuts. It was a positive thing: an argument that seemed to grow naturally out of the original analysis of British society as being “broken” (remember that?). It was tied inextricably to a particular view of the relationship between personal and social responsibility. It was about families and parents and neighbourhoods, and the extent to which private choices impacted on communities. It was part of a moral vision – or, to put it in the language of political manipulators, of a compelling “narrative” that was persuasive enough to be worth developing...

...The Prime Minister is planning to redress that this week. He wants to reassert (we won’t call it a 'relaunch') the moral tenets of the Big Society in order to make it clear that this is not just austerity with a human face, or a fancy name for taking power from local government by handing over its functions to outside agencies. It is still a moral vision of a country in which ordinary people accept that responsibility for each other and for society at large is a significant part of their everyday lives.

All of which is perfectly fine. If ever there was a moment to reiterate the more profound intention of creating a different approach to governing, and to link it definitively with a morally conscientious purpose, this is it.

But I think there may be a gap in the logical chain which David Cameron will find it hard to fill. The most obviously sincere commitment that he made during his period as Leader of the Opposition was to his support for marriage and the family. His insistence that marriage needed to be recognised in the tax system because it was of irreplaceable value seemed to ring true to his personal experience. It also seemed courageous precisely because it was contentious and defiant of media fashion. (Indeed, he defied quite a few media inquisitors to stand by it.) In itself, these statements were a testament to his character, but they could have an even greater significance for the Big Society prospectus, because marriage is the quintessential example of that 'moral vision' which Mr Cameron is hoping to reinvigorate.

There is dissension over this matter within the Coalition, both from Nick Clegg, who doesn’t think government should talk about personal relationships at all, and from George Osborne, who has a real problem with the idea of marriage being recognised in the tax system – even though it will not constitute a financial advantage for the married but only a removal of the present disadvantage.

So the message has been muted. Marriage may be talked about in terms of its usefulness as a successful child-rearing operation: the evidence is now overwhelming that the children of married parents have better outcomes in virtually every category of life experience. But it is not presented as the linchpin that might help to make sense of this mysterious thing that Mr Cameron is trying to offer: a national life in which responsibility for the general good is accepted by individuals who see themselves as part of something larger than themselves.

And yet that it precisely what marriage is: a public declaration that you are prepared to undertake a commitment not just to each other but to the wider community. By its very official, legally accountable nature, it is the perfect model of the intersection between private and public responsibility...

...Marriage is not just a sexual relationship between two people: it is the joining of two families. (An affirmation, as Ruth says to her mother-in-law in the Hebrew Bible, that 'your people shall be my people'.) It is a commitment of continuity with the past generations in the presence of whom you make that declaration, and to the future generations that your union may produce. And that network of conjoined families – of the extended circles attaching to the couples who have pronounced that their relationship extends beyond their own interests – is the beginning of community.

This is where private life, and the responsibility that it entails, meets the wider life of the society. It is not an intrusion into personal relations for a government to acknowledge the importance of marriage: it is a refusal to accept the breakdown of social life into fragmented, disconnected atoms with no obligation to any larger entity outside themselves. If Mr Cameron really wants to restore the moral foundations of the Big Society, he should summon up his nerve and repeat the bravest thing he ever said."

As someone who has incomparably and gratefully benefited from the intersection of many families and the remarkable life lessons and examples, good and bad, and all the love that each has had to offer, this conception of community and the more humble role that government might play in our lives rings far truer a conception than any I have heard, on the left or right, as of late.

May something so humble, and thus so powerful, offer us a more genuine path forward. For all of our sakes.

What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

2011-02-09T20:26:00.010-06:00

Darkening gloom

"Moderates and liberals in Pakistan are still reeling from the assassination of a liberal politician, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab Province, by one of his own bodyguards. Mr Taseer was murdered, shot in a hail of bullets at a posh shopping centre in Islamabad, apparently because he dared to speak out against a repressive anti-blasphemy law which is used to intimidate the weak—mostly fellow Muslims, but also religious minorities, including Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman whom he had defended.

More disturbing than Mr Taseer’s death, however, was the deafening silence from the powerful in its aftermath. Lawyers showered his traitorous bodyguard with rose petals. The killer has become a hero. It has been almost impossible to find a judge who will dare take on the case. In parliament no senator would lead a prayer to commemorate the slain politician. Almost none of Pakistan’s articulate and educated liberal voices have dared speak out in his defence. Even Mr Taseer’s allies mostly stayed away from his funeral. By contrast, in Lahore on Sunday, I was caught up in a huge crowd of Islamists celebrating noisily the death of the hated liberal. A burst of anti-American sentiment following the arrest of a mysterious gunman in Lahore has somehow merged with this further rejection of secular values.

Now comes another reason to be gloomy. After Mr Taseer, it has widely been reported that Sherry Rehman, a Karachi-based female politician who has talked of reforming the blasphemy law, would be next on the religious thugs’ list. Ms Rehman has since locked herself away. On February 3rd Pakistani newspapers reported that she had been persuaded to withdraw any plans she might have had to table a bill for the law’s reform.

The same day, just as miserably, newspapers reported that a 17-year-old schoolboy, also in Karachi, had been arrested and charged with blasphemy. His sin? Apparently he had written something objectionable while doing an exam, although nobody can be told what it was he wrote (lest they be charged with committing blasphemy-by-repetition). The invigilator felt obliged to report it. The school authorities did so too. The police got involved. This is insane. To any reasonable observer, it is deeply troubling when state authorities decide to arrest a child for something written, however bad the taste, in an exam paper. The boy apologised. But, according to Pakistan’s law, as a blasphemer he could now be executed.

For moderate Pakistanis, proud of living in a country that has defied military rule, ensured the return of democracy and promoted the interests of its people against meddling outsiders, it is troubling to see thuggish radicalism spreading in such a fashion. Hateful and intolerant ideas are being spread by madrassas and by excitable news organisations. Increasingly, many Pakistani women feel compelled to cover their faces or to stay at home. Those who should be speaking out in defence of liberal, progressive ideas are becoming too frightened to defy the men with guns—or to break the terrifying silence of their fellow citizens."

Hmm. Sounds like a few other countries I know of, these days.

Not to worry. You're bullying is way different than their bullying.

Your bullying is good. Their bullying is very, very bad.

Or is it the other way around?

Hard to keep track, these days.

It's all for good reason. Or for bad reason. Or for some reason.

Whatever reason.

Gets me what I want, now doesn't it?

And makes the world a better place.

That's what we call this world where everyone gets their way. With just enough fear.

Progress.

And if we call it progress, it just must be.

I mean. After all.

What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

Kids in cowboy hats

2011-02-09T19:16:00.005-06:00

This man of few words - but what he does with those few - even makes the boys from Liverpool go down smoother.

But you gotta admit. Tykes in cowboy hats make everything go better.

Sing it, kids.

Irony and the language of mad gods

2011-02-09T17:57:00.004-06:00

U.S. terror threat at highest since 9/11: Napolitano

"Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who is U.S. citizen but left the country in 2001 and joined al Qaeda in Yemen, has been tied to plots against the United States over the last two years.

The group has claimed responsibility for the 2009 Christmas Day thwarted attack aboard a U.S. airliner and a more recent attempt to blow up two U.S.-bound cargo planes with toner cartridges packed with explosives.

Al-Awlaki also communicated with a U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan who in November 2009 allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 and wounded 32. Leiter said that it appeared to be more 'inspiration rather than direction.'"

Irony, apparently, is the language of mad gods inspiring truth far stranger than the pale imitation of fiction.

Why kids still believe

2011-02-01T11:36:00.006-06:00

You know why kids still believe, more than adults, so often, that life and the world can be better than it is, I think?

Because when kids are bullied or bully one another, they know that it's wrong.

But when adults bully one another, they call it whatever they please.

What Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and all the rest of us are deciding, right now, is:

"Is that really how we want it to be?"

Perhaps we can do a bit better

2011-02-01T09:15:00.007-06:00

It's so funny watching this stupid, petty, godforesaken mess of humanity, these days. How much they try to get their hands on power and take credit for progress that generally happens despite them, more often than not, sadly. Stupidly. But sadly, still.

It's so funny to watch all the ego masquerading as something better than itself. All so it doesn't have to face it's own shittiness.

My own, too, of course. I've been guilty more times than I can count, honestly. Everyone has, is the truth. When we're not bullshitting. It's those who can't face that truth that you really need to be concerned about, honestly. Fred Phelps comes to mind. So does Kim Jong Il. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And that Chinese government. And the broadest swath of American politicians, these days. And most days, is the truth.

There are signs of hope. A Tunisian public that knows real oppression well enough to know that freedom isn't a four letter word. And Egyptians and Yemenis and Jordanians who know better than to wait on petty, sniping Americans to come save them. Even as Iraqis and Afghanis benefit from the half-ass bumbling of an American government and public too stupid and scared to just embrace the very cause they lost lives for in those conflicts. Many American soldiers, I've noticed, are not so stupid and scared, to embrace the freedom they fight for. A lot of teachers and firefighters and other such folk, too, I've noticed. A lot of cops seem to prefer more freedom for people, is my experience. But so few of us, today, seem willing to say so out loud.

For fear that the world will go to shit, if we do. I mean, far more shitty than we've already made it, of course. The fear that always rationalizes our worst instincts. Because we are far too shitty to ever stop imagining just how much far more shitty we could possibly be.

How stupid and mean and self-centered are we, you wonder? As stupid and mean and self-centered as we wanna be, is the truth. And, from there, springs all our problems, of course.

I guess I've decided that a humanity that behaves that way deserves its own misery, is the truth. Until they can face up to what jackasses they are. That's the only way I've ever learned, at least.

Perhaps we are more enamoured of our pride. But pride has consequences. Enjoy them, I suppose.

If humanity can't embrace it's better angels because it's too afraid of its own demons, it deserves the hell on earth it creates, I suppose.

Until it has the courage to embrace something better.

And no matter how many ways you talk your way around that one, that is the only courage that has ever been worthy of the name. Everything else, no matter how we talk ourselves around it, is the consequence of the alternative.

And everything else is what we get until we find that courage.

The only way around it is to put down the threats and the will to overpower and to be decent to one another.

But that will only happen when we find the courage to do just that.

Hitler and Stalin, as it turns out, were not so different from us as we flatter ourselves to believe, is the truth. They just were more committed to the logical endpoint of this very same reasoning.

They went to greater extremes, you might say. They were more radical. They were more consistent in their principles, as modern day would-be Stalins and Hitlers, on the right and the left, might say.

And that makes us so much better, let me tell ya.

Or perhaps it makes us not quite as shitty.

Either way, the way forward should clearly be in the other direction. When we aren't rationalizing our inner Hitlers and Stalins.

Humanity sets up the impossible task that all its members must be Jesus for them to stop falling short of Hitler and Stalin. And then spends the rest of its existence justifying why they just can't be that dude in their own lifetimes.

And makes a mess of itself in the meantime.

What a stupid way to run a species, don't you think?

Perhaps its the only way to run a species.

Or perhaps that's just one more line of bullshit in a long succession of bullshit.

Perhaps the reason we don't do better is because we're afraid of ourselves. And one another.

Perhaps we can do a bit better than that.

What do you do for a species too stubborn to listen?

2011-02-01T07:47:00.002-06:00

Sometimes, all you can do for humanity is just let them all fall on their own swords.

If we'd stop being such dicks, that is

2011-01-30T18:22:00.002-06:00

What do you do with a world, I've been asking myself, lately, where people have decided to perpetually act like dicks and ignore all the consequences from what perpetually acting like dicks results in in the world?

Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting

Been thinking a lot, lately, about how it's acting like dicks, and the constant and ever-creative-and-sophisticated-sounding justifications for acting like dicks, that is so clearly responsible for most of the world's avoidable misery, when you step back from it and aren't busy making ever-creative-and-sophisticated sounding justifications for doing so.

But in a world where people keep going down that path and can just pretend that they aren't responsible for any of the bullshit it creates, what do you do?

If everyone is doing it and they know that they just don't have to take responsibility for it if they don't wanna, and that they have some lame ass justification for it laying around here, somewhere, what the hell do you do with such lame asses, I've wondered.

If shaming, and jailing, and pressuring, and what-not not only does not keep them from being such pricks, until they're willing to give it up, but it makes us all into a bunch of callous pricks in the process - and a political and popular culture that reflects what shitheads we've all become - and always has, what can you do with all that prickishness, you have to wonder?

Talk about it honestly, is about the only thing I can think of. Write about it. Joke about it. And laugh about it. And what remarkable dumbasses we look like for doing it. How miserably it's failed to make things better.

And how it has so often - the economy comes to mind, right now, but really just about any issue you can name, right now - made everything we said we wanted to be better far worse in the process.

And, more importantly, makes us all far worse, in the process.

And do what you can to stay away from the dicks. And then let all those dicks fall on those swords they've been living by.

And spend time and stop taking for granted all the folks who love you, for real, no matter what.

Anyway, that's about all I can come up with, at this point.

Now I remember why I valued loving people, so much, as a kid. Because they're nicer people to be around, is the truth. Generally. When they're not being dicks, too, that is. Yeah, I know. Me, too. Thanks for reminding me, asshole.

It's really not all that complicated, when you get down to it. Dicks are shitty people to be around, is the truth. And they fuck up most of what is fucked up and could be otherwise in the world.

And if it weren't the entirety of the goddamn species, you'd give up on the whole lot of them. But since it is, until it isn't, what the fuck you gonna do, you know?

Hope that they don't blow themselves up, I suppose. And remind them that when the world gets shittier, it just might be the human species that's responsible. No matter where their stubby little fingers are pointed.

And maybe offer them a vision of the future that is a bit less shitty. And maybe even a pretty decent future. If we'd stop being such dicks, that is.

Real progress doesn't need permission

2011-01-28T09:44:00.003-06:00

The scent of jasmine spreads

Tunisia protests: 'The fear has gone...I've been waiting 20 years for this day'

Egypt scene of chaos as protests escalate

Thousands in Yemen Protest Against the Government

Because real progress means less fear and repression. Not more.

And no amount of bullshit will ever make that go away.

Your heart and the most essential truth, so says this heart

2011-01-27T10:03:00.003-06:00

The most important wrestling we do in our life, I'm convinced, at this point, is the wrestling we do with ourselves. With our conscience. With our dreams. With our fears and insecurities. With our hearts. With our minds.

And at the end of all of that, if we're wise, I think, is making what can be better - in our lives and in the lives of other around us - better. For real.

And out of that wrestling is our best. Each of us. The best we have to offer. For ourselves and for everyone else.

The rest - the fighting, the threatening, the hurt imposed, the will to overpower, the self-centered efforts to get our way at the expense of others, the use of fear and force, except when real danger is present (and distinguishing between what is real and what is not is the essence of the strongest efforts to wrestle with one's conscience) - these are all both fruitless and self-involved.

And like all fruitless and self-involved things in the world, they make our lives worse rather than better.

We are welcome to them. And we are welcome to their consequences. And whether we take responsibility for the consequences or not, we are responsible for them.

But the real and wonderful opportunities in life, for ourselves and for others, come from wrestling with oneself and one's own thinking and acting in the world.

And once you've done that, the world is really not all that difficult to navigate, at all. It is just a matter of to thy own heart being true, as the English poet would say.

And no other greater wisdom could be truer. Until it proves itself otherwise to that same heart. As a matter of fact. And as a matter of fact of how the world should be.

And that is the most essential truth of any life. So says this heart.

A question for our cynicism

2011-01-21T11:39:00.007-06:00

If we are so cynical that we do not care or pretend not to care about the consequences of our behavior on other human beings and the world outside of ourselves, does that, in fact, mean that our behavior has no consequences?

And do those consequences care that we do not care?

Do we?

Do I?

The better I understand, the more I care.

And the more I care, the better I understand.

And so goes the virtuous circle of life.

One life at a time.

The space between our ears

2011-01-19T07:59:00.002-06:00

Some egos are so enormous, I'm learning, that very little decency or honest sense could possibly fit in the vast space within the ears or hearts they occupy.

'If maybe that fellow who was shooting everybody — if he had had some friends and family around him, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.'

2011-01-17T12:44:00.002-06:00

I am in awe of the inspiring courage and grace of John Green, the father of 9-year-old Christina Green, who died in last week's tragedy in Tuscon, AZ.

As Jeff Jacoby eloquently writes:

"In the eight days since the deadly shootings in Arizona, the nation has been engulfed by a tidal wave of rhetoric and reaction, much of it unnecessary, ungracious, or unfortunate. But amid the flood of words, two voices have spoken with an uplifting decency and grace that should make them memorable long after the hue and cry of the past week has ended.

One of those voices was that of President Obama, whose remarks at the memorial service in Tucson Wednesday night were humane and eloquent, unmarred by the acrimony that has ricocheted back and forth in the political echo chamber. The president spoke movingly about each of the victims whose lives were cut short. He gratefully hailed by name those whose heroism and quick thinking prevented even more lives from being lost. And with no hint of self-interest or rationalization, he urged all Americans not to 'use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.’

Not even the president, however, could match the goodness, dignity, and large-heartedness of John Green, whose 9-year-old daughter, Christina, was the youngest victim of suspect Jared Loughner’s rampage.

Speaking through tears as he was interviewed on NBC’s 'Today' show and on the Fox News Channel, Christina’s father refused to pin his daughter’s murder on the 'climate of hate' and 'vitriolic rhetoric' so many others were eager to indict. Unlike the local sheriff who seized the moment to smear Arizona as 'a mecca for prejudice and bigotry,' John Green said the killings were 'such a rare thing to happen in Tucson, Arizona, which is a wonderful city — and the northwest side is a wonderful community.'

The chattering class spent much of the past week calling for new laws and tighter regulations. There were proposals for (among other things) a ban on carrying guns within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress, resurrecting the long-discredited broadcast Fairness Doctrine, funding more outpatient clinics to treat the mentally ill, and prohibiting ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. John Green endorsed none of them. 'We don’t need any more restrictions on our society,’ he said. 'New laws and limitations cannot prevent every horror, and if we want to live in a country like the United States, where we are more free than anywhere else, we are subject to things like this happening.’

No one would have faulted Green if, in his heartbreak, he had raged against the monster who shot Christina. Instead he expressed gratitude for 'the friends and family we have surrounded ourselves with,’ and added, with almost incomprehensible generosity: 'If maybe that fellow who was shooting everybody — if he had had some friends and family around him, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.'

Americans talk too much and think too little, especially when it comes to the sins and sorrows of others. There is 'a time to keep silence and a time to speak,' Ecclesiastes teaches. When a tragedy like the one in Tucson strikes, most of us would do well to keep silence, and leave the speaking for those with the humanity and wisdom to say something meaningful."

In honor of Christina and John Green.

When we look for what's best

2011-01-10T14:43:00.001-06:00

A reminder of what we can accomplish when we look for what is best in ourselves and each other.

All dark paths lie elsewhere.

Time to use our freedom for something worthwhile.

No more No more Mr. Nice Guy

2011-01-10T13:55:00.002-06:00

World's awash in assholes. Time for something better in this world. For all our sakes.

Something beautiful

2011-01-10T08:28:00.007-06:00

It's been beyond time, for a long time, that we took responsibility for the ugly direction our country and world has taken. Turn things around. Make the world genuinely better.

As I watch the blame game in full swing, might I suggest that in lieu of left or right, on this matter, that we consider the example of someone like Jack Johnson. Or Stephen Covey. Or their example, perhaps. Someone like Jesus of Nazareth.

And focus on the beams in our own eyes.

I'm as guilty as anyone else. I aspire for love and understanding. And I've fallen, too often, into anger and impatience. My whole purpose, at this point, is to help us all see how there is much to discover and understand from one another. And I've fallen short of that too often to count.

Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed in a similarly scared, aggressive and hateful period.

Gabrielle Giffords avoided that fate, thankfully. Six others, including a 9-year-old girl, did not, sadly.

It is time we take responsibility for the ugliness. To give it up. And make the world something more beautiful. For real.

It is possible. It's just about us getting honest with ourselves about us.

And isn't that the most important truth of all.

Sing it, Jack.

On forgiveness

2011-01-08T13:27:00.005-06:00

There is nothing more satisfying for the soul than facing someone who insults your dignity openly to your face, kicking the shit out of them several times over in your mind, and then forgiving them and yourself nonetheless.

Or perhaps there is nothing more satisfying for the soul than forgiving others and yourself.

Or so say those with satisfied souls.

High tide or low tide

2011-01-05T16:59:00.009-06:00

Notice the low tides, here.

111th Congress Averaged 25% Approval, Among the Recent Lowest

111th Congress - Nancy Pelosi 23%
110th Congress - Nancy Pelosi 25%
103rd Congress - Tom Foley 25%
102nd Congress - Tom Foley 27%
109th Congress - Dennis Hastert 30%

Meaning, Democratic, up front, on the top 4. And with the 5th, those who most favored increased government intervention and power in the lives of Americans.

I would bet you'd find a similar trend among Presidential approval ratings.

Meaning, either Democrats and the 109th Republican Congress are right that really what America needs more of is more government control and intervention in their lives, no matter what Americans have to say about the matter. Or that what they need is more Democratic control and intervention and not Republican control and intervention, an interpretation many lefists champion. Or that they need more Republican control and intervention, an interpretation that many right-wing folks favor.

Or that the American peoples' sense that Congresses that have increased government control and intervention in their lives - right and left - are moving in the wrong direction and that what they need is less government control and intervention in their lives is the best interpretation of events.

And I have to say that though I do not romanticize Americans and their politics, I do think that last interpretation is the strongest one.

And the one that will win the day, regardless, no matter how much we try to spin or leverage it otherwise.

Your teachers were right. There really are realities that exist quite independent of our opinions about them. And this is one of them.

And thank God, or whatever might tickle your fancy, we live in a relatively free country where we can voice those opinions as openly and freely, as possible.

So that something more genuine might win the day. And our hearts.

Win or lose, Nancy, Tom, and Denny, I'll still be with you, at least. No joke, homefries.

Sometimes, though, poorer ideas need to lose favor.

And stronger ideas, and the people who need them as much as those who offer them, need to thrive. So we can better look after everyone. For real.

Especially for those looking out for everyone.

Speaking of which. Lay it down, Jack.

The proof, and getting about the business of making better pudding

2011-01-05T14:34:00.002-06:00

Tony Blankley has a poignant observation about the temper of the times that is the temper of every era where those who would entertain their baser impulse to overpower in lieu of honest engagement has taken hold.

A Public Voice for Private Virtue

"In that context, I was struck this weekend by the words of the great Christian theorist and historian of the last century Hilaire Belloc that I read in his book 'The Elements of the Great War, The Second Phase' (written in 1916.)

He observed that when the most profound issue may face a nation, there is the danger that 'the lesser should conquer the greater, the viler the more noble, the more changeable the more steadfast, the baser the more noble ... We know, upon the analogy of all historical things, small and great, that the less creative, the dullest and the worst elements may destroy, and has frequently attempted to destroy, the vital, the more creative and the best."

The proof is in the pudding, is the bottom line. And the pudding of this era of our romance with power is looking pretty curdled, at this point.

Perhaps better thought about such proof and getting about the business of making better pudding might be in order.

Our story

2011-01-04T18:09:00.001-06:00

This is a story of needless tragedy. And what can be done to end it. It is a human story. As old as homo sapiens have been telling stories. And as long as they have been ignoring their own wisdom.

All matters are matters of the heart

2010-12-27T16:29:00.002-06:00

"Most mistakes with our children, with our spouses, with all family members are not the result of bad intent. It's just that we really don't understand. We don't see clearly enough into one another's hearts.

If we did - if an entire family could develop the kind of openness we're talking about - over 90% of the difficulties and problems could be solved."

- Stephen Covey, speaking of humankind, not just the humankind we are related to

Please, Santa, bring someone who genuinely cares

2010-12-20T14:47:00.001-06:00

It's so refreshing and beautiful to have someone write about politics like people really matter to them.

A Christmas wish

"My sister’s rental place was littered with signs of a more complicated truth than the one obscured by the easy headline. She had 24-hour Alcoholics Anonymous coins lying all over her house, on tables and in dishes. These coins are given out at meetings to mark a day of sobriety, and she attended meetings all the time. She had weights in the living room for her workouts. She always wanted to stay in shape. Religious, spiritual, and poetry books were scattered about with freshly underlined passages on faith, hope, and love. The food in the refrigerator was still fresh, and notes were posted on the door to remind her of the things she needed to do, amid pictures her kids had drawn for her. The movie The Bucket List was near her DVD player. She had either just watched it or was about to. It’s a wonderful film about preparing for death and enjoying life in the meantime.

And, of course, the Christmas list in her pocket. A piece of paper that reflected her love of her kids and the hope and joy that comes with giving.

No, President Obama isn’t a socialist. He isn’t trying to ruin the country, and he doesn’t hate America. Sarah Palin isn’t a dimwit without anything valuable to say or contribute to the country. Republicans aren’t all greedy and corporate stooges. Democrats aren’t all Big Government liberals and against capitalism. The news media (generally) aren’t a tool of the Left or the Right. And my sister wasn’t an uncaring addict who overdosed on a cold day in Michigan.

As we walk through life and deal with one another, we need to keep in mind that truth is not in the headline or the pithy sound bite but deeper in the hearts and souls of each of us—and in the good intentions that most of us carry with us every day, whether we’re bagging groceries, cleaning offices, defending our country, or negotiating a tax compromise.

Diving down to those depths, rather than just snorkeling in the shallows, might give us the bends. But it also might tell us a little more about each other and ourselves.

And maybe it would be good to consider the possibility that each of us, even on our bad days, is walking around with a Christmas list in our pocket."

Perhaps this should be the only way to write about anything that really matters.

Just how great?

2010-12-16T18:27:00.007-06:00

Studying politics, like working with the meanest kids, has a tendency to sit heavy on the heart.

They're both similar activities. Both celebrating their meaner instincts. Politics, especially, in the last 10 years. Both pretending like their meaner instincts are their better instincts. Because it's easier than facing shortcomings, in both cases. And listening. And being decent. And having faith in people. And being better, generally.

All of the things we take for granted with nicer people. Loving people. The same people that the meanspirited scapegoat for the failures of their meaner impulses.

Because it's easier than having the courage to take responsibility for them, is the truth.

All of this has made the the world an enormous mess in the last 10 years.

And all of it weighs on the heart. Which is exactly what meaner folks count on to get their way when they want to do that. So it's not terribly surprising.

And the saddest consequence of all this for me and for the country, right now, I was realizing, tonight, is just how much it underestimates just how great each of us and all of us can be.

Given the one thing people have been desperately trying to avoid and more explicitly undermine than I have ever seen.

Our sense of common and higher purpose.

It's been a strange odyssey to watch a country and a world give up on its sense of common purpose. And to pretend like its baser impulses can somehow compensate for more genuine higher purpose.

And the saddest fact of all, in all of this, is how much this fails to appreciate just how great each of us and all of us can be. Given a commitment towards that end.

We may choose not to be great. Not to be good and decent to one another. Not to be generous and decent. To be courageous and humble. To be compassionate and thoughtful. To be forgiving and trustworthy. To be all of the values that we know, deep in our hearts, are humanity's and America's strongest legacy.

We can choose that.

And we can live with its fruits.

And we are, currently, living with those fruits.

And the craziness of it all is that it really does not have to be that way.

Because we can also support one another to aspire for our own greatness. And for greatness as a nation. And greatness in our commitment to the purposes of all humanity.

People really can be better. To let those who refuse to do so refuse. And to lead them in better directions. And to let those those take up the mantle of greatness lead us. And to aspire in the direction of greatness. Because it serves us better. Even when we fall short.

The rub is that it means humbling ourselves. And facing how we fall short. To take up greatness in whatever pursuit once again.

Especially in the pursuit of being a great human being. Great children and parents. Great spouses and loved ones. Great people making great contributions to our families and communities and world and the lives of others.

If there is anything I regret at this point in my life it is losing track of this commitment in my own life, too often. And losing track of my commitment and need to aspire in this direction no matter what anyone else is doing. To let them lead their lives as they see fit. For good and for bad.

To take greatness seriously in my own life. To see greatness in others. To encourage them and myself in more loving and constructive directions.And to let people choose otherwise if they so choose. Except when they are dangerous to others.

Because the truth is that greatness is within our reach. Mine. Yours. All of us. One day at a time. One choice at a time. One moment at a time.

And the rest of my life is committed to seeing and encouraging that in myself and others. To knowing the limits of doing so for anyone other than myself. And to love and appreciate deeply people in my life no matter how this pans out for any of us.

Just how great can we be?

As great as we can imagine. And make real what it conceivable and able to be actualized.

That is just how great I aspire to be.

And doing so does not need me to bemoan the ways that the world falls short somewhat and perhaps substantially less than I am encouraging myself and the world in the direction of its biggest, greatest horizons.

Many will choose to forgo those horizons.

Until their pride gives way to a humble appreciation for what is possible.

For me. For others. For the world.

And that is the only way forward that really offers anything real to satisfy the deepest sense of purpose and satisfaction in life, I am convinced.

Just how great can I be?

Just how great can you be?

Now's as good as time as any to enlighten the rest of us.

Leadership is building commitment to doing the right thing

2010-12-16T09:44:00.132-06:00

Poll: Support Drops for Afghanistan War

Something is amiss, these days, in America and the world.

And America's discussion about the war in Afghanistan should be the big red flag for everyone that this is so.

The Afghanistan war, for those who were never fully convinced - I include myself, here, when the war was initially declared - really was and is the war of self-defense. This is in contrast to the Iraq war, which was a worthy war of choice, I believe, with a far-less-than-worthy effort to persuade others of that fact.

After Al Queda attacked on September 11th, the means of capturing or killing remaining fighters, likely to strike again if not contained or killed, was limited by the their ability to find save haven. They had one in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan (and western Pakistan) with no recourse to capture or kill them given a Taliban government that was sympathetic to the cause of Al Queda and not likely willing, in any uncertain terms, to cooperate with the United States.

Absent a U.S. invasion, Afghanistan not only had one of the more brutal and oppressive regimes, over its own people whom had no say over the matter, and towards Muslim people, for those concerned about the fate of Islam under liberal or illiberal governents, in the world. More immediately threatening to U.S. interests, it was a safe haven for Al Queda fighters operating and planning future attacks on the United States and other targets with impunity.

In other words, without invading Afghanistan, the likelihood of Al Queda remaining on the offensive and attacking the United States again was very high. By invading, Al Queda played mouse to our cat and laid low in hiding (and we had a better chance of capturing Bin Laden and the lot) and a terribly ugly and brutal regime gets taken out, in the process, and Afghanis could elect a government of their choosing democratically. Just as we take for granted in the good ol' U.S. of A. as we debate the very issue.

Now, that is the argument that should have been made and debated in 2001, and was, in part, when America first invaded Afghanistan.

And the fact that we didn't discuss and debate this invasion or the invasion in Iraq nearly thoroughly, respectfully, open-heartedly, and open-mindedly enough - and with more focus on doing good than looking good - has everything to do with why the domestic politics is such a mess, on both this war and the war in Iraq and most issues America faces, right now.

So lots of fucking up in this war, the war in Iraq, and all around. And mostly, contrary to popular opinion, not around the military strategy - where America has always had overwhelming force - but around the political matters - in how we understand and engage the people issues, more honestly - and our failure to have an honest and respectful enough discussion and debate about all the people matters that matter.

And in a way where everyone did exactly what everyone is so loathe to do today.

To admit the only and most important honest thing they could possibly admit about anything of any import.

That they may not have all the answers. That they could be wrong. And that, thus, there was plenty to explore, with a genuinely open mind and heart, to arrive at better decisions.

All of this is true. And all of this has created an enormous clusterfuck in Afghanistan. And Iraq. And on most issues that America faces right now. Largely because we've all be acting like assholes and acting like acting like assholes has no consequences when it so clearly has.

So, now, that's where we're at, today.

Now, 9 years later, with nearly 10 years of emotional and upsetting debates about both these wars and any number of issues that matter to people, and with a long war with lots of Americans dying, people have grown war weary.

Understandable. Especially when a lot of folks are not completely clear on the stakes in this war. And many of them may just disagree with me, no matter how clear I am that the stakes are too high to just pull out and supposedly cut our losses.

What's not understandable is all of that meaning that America pulls out of the one situation where self-defense was and still is (as far as I know, Osama Bin Laden is still at large) the real legitimate reason to go to war. And to do so knowing that doing so will leave Afghanis to the devices of those brutal thugs who used to rule their country, in league with the very brutal thugs who killed our people and were the reason for us being there, in the first place, and will do so, again, as soon as they have the inkling they can get away with it.

What's not understandable, in other words, is quitting. Because it's hard.

All the while, pretending what tough little badasses we are to the rest of the world.

It's fuckin' weak, is what it is.

It's fuckin' pathetic.

And it is exactly what America has become in the early 21st century the more we march down this dark path we've been on.

America wants to prove how tough she is.

Stick it out and do the right thing.

And stop making excuses for why we don't wanna.

Or why the fact that we don't wanna somehow means that the people who do want to stick it out need to follow suit. All to suit your ego. And pride. And whatever damn fool impulse drives you, these days.

In other words, perhaps Afghanistan can be a genuine restart.

An opportunity for America to do what she has been failing to do for the last 10 years.

To lead.

And leadership meaning building commitment to doing the right thing.

Patiently. Honestly. The way real, sustainable commitment of any kind is built.

Even when all the popular winds point otherwise.

I don't care how weary we feel.

We went here for the right reasons. And we're fighting there, now, for the right reasons.

And if we leave, Afghanis go back to a brutal, barbaric existence.

All so we could pretend how tough we were.

But not really be tough when it counted.

Meaning, resigning ourselves to being a nation of whining little pussies.

All the while crowing about how fuckin' tough we are.

And then bailing, when the going gets tough.

Leadership is calling out that bullshit for what it is.

And building commitment to something genuinely better.

And we are all welcome to follow anything else that we please.

But pretending like doing so is really our best, or toughest, or most thoughtful selves is really just bullshit. No matter how you try to spin that one.

And if America leaves Afghanistan. They deserve to be known for the fuckin' whiny, tough-talkin' little pussies they turned out to be.

And no amount of talking our way out of that one will make anything different from what it really is.

America is not a country of whiny, tough-talkin' little pussies.

Not for long, that is.

Because we have what it takes to be better than all that bullshit.

And we're gonna stick it out in Afghanistan and demonstrate that's true. And not just talk it.

Doubt that? Watch, motherfucker.

And you know why, captain?

Because nothing else would be worthy of the name American.

And, in my book, at least. That still means something.

Politics and progress (and opinions and assholes, it's all the same thing, after all)

2010-12-14T15:20:00.008-06:00

I am convinced, at this point, the more I watch politics, and the utter failure of any political partisan to ever acknowledge any real failure, at all, that most progress in politics happens largely despite ourselves.

Despite our egos. And our stupid pride. And our failure to ever admit failure. Because we think by doing so we make it go away. Or, at least, not our problem.

Which explains most of the problems of liberal democratic politics, right now.

And, for that, we have only ourselves to blame.

What I know today that I did not realize more than 20 years ago, when I first started following American and international politics, is that political leaders are often the farthest thing from an example or role model for life that one could want. For one's children. And for anyone, for that matter.

Because political leaders so consistently fail to do the one thing that anyone would want out of a role model.

To admit their mistakes.

To themselves, at the very least. And to others, when they feel comfortable. A fact we make far less likely by making anyone, nevertheless those in politics, afraid of doing, for fear of the repercussions, even though it is the surest route to facilitating willingness to giving our mistakes up. So that we can move on and stop making them. The failure to do so being about the most damn fool way to live life possible. Because failing to admit your mistakes, of course, by any objective criteria of judgment, does not, in fact, mean that you are not making them. It just means you are repeating them. For as long as it takes for you to admit them.

Says the man to his mistakes.

There is no one in politics, these days - no one, not even one - person I look up to for this purpose. Which is how it should be, I suppose. Since the man I should be looking to for that purpose is myself, of course.

And if there is anything I have learned from politics in 20 years it is that there is so much to be learned, of any substance, from those in politics is of the variety of negative example. Sadly. And, these days, that is a more serious problem than I have ever witnessed it in my lifetime.

If you are looking for anyone to save you, outside of yourself, you are damned fool, is the bottom line, if you look to these people. They can barely take care of themselves, nevertheless you or your loved ones. And, after a time, if you are still looking to them to be a better judge of your life and what is best for you more than for yourself, you not only are a fool - because they can't do so, no matter how much you might wish differently, and, typically, are barely able to sufficiently do so in their own lives - but you really have no one else to blame but yourself for that foolishness.

Because there is no politician who is ever going to come down from on high and tell you:

"Most of the time, we're just doing our best to think of something and get elected. The truth is, we haven't thought nearly enough about this stuff, either. We have strong opinions. Just like so many of you. But just like so many of you, that really doesn't mean jack shit, in the real world, is the truth. Opinions are like assholes. And there's an awful lot of those, too, doing their damage in this tiny little world, now aren't there?"

It's the most profound thing I have to say on the matter, these days. Because I am so fully convinced that these idiots will never say so themselves. So someone has to say it.

The most important thing I have for my kids, for any kids, and for anyone in life, at this point, I'm convinced, is my example.

And the most important example I have to offer, right now, I'm convinced, is that if you want to be an idiot in life, it is all yours. Enjoy it. Because it's going to hard to enjoy anything else, given the mess you're likely to make of your life.

Says the man to his mess.

But I don't want to make a mess of life. And I know, without reservation, at this point, that the surest way to a tidier, self-respecting life I might love is to be the best man I know how to be. The best father. And husband. And son and brother. The best man I know. And to let the idiots have their idiocy. And to live a life I'm genuinely proud of.

Like opinions, anybody can be an asshole. Doesn't take much, frankly.

And anybody can have the damn fool life that comes with it.

I'll take something with more real love, myself.

And I just won't be settling for anything else, at this point.

No matter what gets laid on the table.

And that's the only kind of progress that could ever be worth anything even approaching anything real in my too short a lifetime.

In any lifetime, for that matter.

The lie that power sows

2010-12-14T09:58:00.002-06:00

I'm weary of the lie.

The lie that my lying and cynicism is exactly what make me worthy of overpowering you.

Obama's Cynical Maneuvering on the Health-Care Mandate

"On page 25 of his decision, Judge Hudson writes, “Despite pre-enactment representations to the contrary by the Executive and Legislative branches, the Secretary now argues that the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is, in essence, a ‘tax penalty.’

That’s a polite way of saying that the Obama administration willfully misled the public during the health-care debate. In fact, President Obama repeatedly denied that the mandate was a tax — but now, in order to pass constitutional muster, his administration is insisting it is. I urge you to watch the president’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to see just how emphatic Obama was. When Stephanopoulos says that the mandate is a tax increase, Obama scolds Stephanopoulos. “That’s not true, George,” the president says. '[It] is absolutely not a tax increase.'

Now the president and his administration are arguing exactly the opposite."

Why would anyone look to such people and think to themselves:

Trustworthy.

Not me. Not anymore.

I'm tired of the lie.

The lie that the lying and the armtwisting is the wave of the future.

The same lie that has plagued humanity since the beginning of humanity.

I'm tired of the lie.

The lie that the armtwisting makes us better. Makes others better. Makes any of us better.

And that the best of us, the best in us, is that which overpowers.

And the worst of us, the worst in us, thus, is that which treat others, more genuinely, the way we'd want to be treated.

I've grown weary of this lie.

And all the weary harvest it has reaped.

Time for something else. For me, at least.

Even if it means I take my own road. And let everyone else find their own path.

My life is not up for negotiation.

No matter how much anyone offers.

Thanks for everything

2010-12-13T16:44:00.000-06:00

If you slow down, enough, to hear it, as I've been, here, recently.

This guy is unbelievable.

Who I'd want my daughter to marry, at least.

Thanks, Jack. Thanks for everything

A song for the genuinely curious

2010-12-12T15:40:00.012-06:00

At some point, in every person's life, we are faced with the choice.

Am I going to follow that herd? Even when they have stampeded down that dark path.

Or am I going to have courage to croon that ballad I sing quietly in my own soul?

The road less taken, says Frost.

To your own heart be true, sings the Bard.

And Jack. He thinks the answers could be found. We could learn from digging down. But no one ever seems to be digging.

And you. I'm curious. What verse might you have to share with the heartfelt world?

What secrets are whispered in your tell-tale heart.

What dreams hunger expression.

What love needs your heart to breathe.

Now that's a tune, if you ask nicely, I just might just be willing to give a listen. Or two, if you listen to the sad, lonely melody in mine.

What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

2010-12-11T13:27:00.025-06:00

How awesome is it to basically tell everyone else in your business:

I am the smartest, sweetest, most beautiful motherfucker up in this joint.

What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

Jack Johnson. Loving the fuck out of everyone. And that means you, too, bitch.

Food for thought

2010-12-11T13:03:00.002-06:00

If we opt for life to become like prison - where the most aggressive can bully to get what they want - are we willing to live with prison conditions?

Where everyone becomes more and more aggressive to ward off potential retaliation and where aggression and retaliation make everyone feel unsafe, and too insecure to give it all up?

Or, to put it a bit more simply:

Do you really want life to be like prison?

Or should we save prison for the truly dangerous?

And the rest of us just learn to behave better? And stop acting like prisonyard bullies?

Something to chew on.

Outside the gruel they serve around here.

It's been that kinda day

2010-12-10T15:05:00.004-06:00

Maybe the world really doesn't have anything better to offer.

Maybe tragedy is the only language we will ever speak.

Or maybe.

ZenHabits - What's Wrong With the World? Not a Damn Thing.

This is your moment of Zen.

The stakes in this discussion

2010-12-09T11:59:00.013-06:00

Nobel head: Liu's prize based on universal values

"The Nobel Peace Prize panel on Thursday defended its award to jailed dissident Liu Xiabaobo as based on 'universal values,' rejecting Beijing's accusation that it is trying force Western ideas on China.

China maintained its combative tone on the eve of the prize ceremony in Oslo, and announced the award of its own 'Confucius Peace Prize' to former Taiwan vice-president Lien Chan, though his office said he was unaware of the award.

China jailed Liu last Christmas Day for 11 years for subversion of state power and for being the lead author of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for democratic reform in the one-party state.

Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told a news conference the award of the prize to Liu was not a protest.

'It is a signal to China that it would be very important for China's future to combine economic development with political reforms and support for those in China fighting for basic human rights,' he said.

'This prize conveys the understanding that these are universal rights and universal values, they are not Western standards,' he added.

His comments were unlikely to placate Beijing, where Communist Party ideologists consider 'universal values' to be codewords for Western liberalization...

...Chinese state-run media accused the West of 'launching a new round of China-bashing.'

A number of countries and international human rights organizations have criticized Beijing for its sweeping crackdown on dissent ahead of the Oslo ceremony, preventing Liu's friends and family from attending.

'The Chinese government should be celebrating this global recognition of a Chinese writer and activist,' said Salil Shetty, secretary general of rights group Amnesty International.

'Instead, the government's very public tantrum has generated even more critical attention inside and outside China -- and, ironically, emphasized the significance of Liu Xiaobo's message of respect for human rights,' Shetty said.

Beijing has briefly blacked out BBC and CNN reports on Liu and his supporters over the past few days, though foreign news channels are generally only available in upmarket hotels and apartment buildings mostly inhabited by foreigners."

Do you let bullies off the hook because it stings their thin little skins?

Or do you call them out for their bullying?

Do we get honest about the bullying? And about our own bullying?

Or do we resign ourselves to it? And the long and tragic history that it has had for humanity. And reverse every single sign of real progress that human history has ever known.

And, in doing so, reinforce the repressive instincts of every authoritarian government and culture around the globe.

Or do we get honest that our most recent path reverses that more real progress that comes with freedom, democracy, liberalization and liberal democratic values?

Those are the stakes here.

Choose wisely.

Lot of peoples' lives and freedoms on the line.

Dear American partisans: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart

2010-12-08T16:15:00.016-06:00

Dear American partisans (Left and Right, and whichever rock you hide under),

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

For shitting all over my country.

Thank you for what an insane mess you've made of America.

Though how terribly strange and sad and small of you that you behave like this and call it anything even resembling good or decent or honest or anything of the sort.

How thoroughly mindless and weaselly that you shut down all reasonable discussion and understanding, and lately, our short term economic fortunes, and take no responsibility for the consequences of any of it. All while you destroy others for their own failures. And for your own purposes.

Whether you admit it or not, Mr. and Mrs. Left or Right Wingnut, you are responsible for the mess this country is in.

And no one cares what your excuses are anymore.

I certainly don't.

The Wiemar Republic quickly became the Third Reich when left-wing and right-wing partisans did the same to the German government and economy in the 1930's.

Thankfully, in America, we take our right to think and speak for ourselves more seriously than all that bullshit.

But thank you, just the same, for fucking up my country and acting like no big whoop.

And thank you for continuing the legacy that has killed, oppressed, and made miserable the lives of more human beings than any other legacy that our species has to offer.

And telling the world, "What the fuck are you gonna do about it?" while you shit all over it.

In other words:

Fuck you. You mindless bullies.

And get used to that refrain. That will be my response to anything you ask for. At all. Ever. Anymore. For as long as we know one another.

You don't like that. Humble thyself.

If not, enjoy the consequences.

I don't care about your causes, anymore. Not until you stop being shitheads.

My patience is finally worn.

Sincerely,

You Know Who

Doesn't progress mean things get better?

2010-12-07T10:41:00.004-06:00

Quick question.

Doesn't progress mean things get better?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Making peace (when nothing else will do)

2010-12-06T14:12:00.011-06:00

After a weekend of some honest reflection on my life, I'm wanting to take a slightly different turn with my life, from here on out, I think.

I've been too angry for too long with a world too stubborn and foolish to give up the unnecessary tragedy. A world of homo sapiens, especially, who bully and kill and oppress and hurt one another for no real useful purpose. A species that, too the contrary, creates most of its own tragedy. And gives ammunition to the excuses of all its friends and especially its enemies. All in the name of avoiding that same tragedy. Or so it says.

I'm tired of the theatrics and tired drama of the Hominidae. The liberal and the illiberal variations. Their politics and their money. Their violence and their power envy. Their popular and their higher culture. Or so they say. And all the rest of the world that all the rest of the world is focussed on.

I want to make a difference, is the truth. I want to contribute what might make the world a better place to live.

Some honest and loving understanding on all of it might offer something along those lines, I hope. Can't do worse than all the alternatives, I reckon.

I just appreciate this sort of contribution better, is the truth. Jack's quiet reflections on life. On a world consumed with itself, to be sure. A world consumed with one another. A world consumed and consumed with consuming.

And a life reflecting on life, with my own heart, with friends and family, with a wife and kids, with everyone we love, without the theatrics and tired drama we so often choose. In lieu of something more loving and understanding. A little life more full of love and understanding.

Be a damn shame, wouldn't it?

A world more loving and understanding. Lives more thoughtful and full of love. Respecting each others' limits and learning and consciences.

Be a goddamn shame, wouldn't it?

Not possible, say cynics. Because of cynics like us, say the same. Or at least those other cynics on the other side of this godforsaken garden.

Maybe not tomorrow, says yours truly. But maybe not impossible, either, says the same. If we stop making all the excuses, that is. For us. And our failures. And all the rest.

For my children's sakes. And for their children. And for their children. And all the rest.

For all the children that are bigger than us and our opinions. About ourselves and one another. Even if we won't be.

For my children, in the meantime. And for all the rest, while I'm at it.

America: As lame as we wanna be

2010-12-03T15:33:00.005-06:00

The one thing that the left and right agree on, these days.

Whether it's business, government, the press, or whomever gettin' their macho on, these days.

They sure as hell aren't responsible for any of the messes America finds itself in, today.

America: As lame as we wanna be. As long as someone else is doing the real heavy lifting.

Liberal democracy and Barbara Streissand make me a tiny bit fahklumpt and little meschuge in the keppie

2010-12-03T09:38:00.012-06:00

A kind-hearted yiddish response to Charles Krauthammer's sweet-natured musings.

From our own Linda Richmond:

Da Wikileaps dumps, like leaks to mainstream media, aw good fah freedom and demaw-cracy. And America. Talk amongst ya-selves.

Freedom and democracy: It's like da bread and da butta.

Happy Hanukah, bubbellahs.

What it means to be a grown-up

2010-12-02T15:38:00.001-06:00

A serious sign of just how bad things have gotten in America. This guy, I mean.

When an FCC commissioner starts talking about regulating the content of news and journalism, you know respect for the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment face serious threats.

Liberal my ass, Michael. You need to spend some more time figuring out what that word means, Commissioner.

In the meantime, go fuck yourself, Mr. FCC.

The grownups in this country will sort this out just fine without your oversight.

Exactly what it means to be a grownup in the free world.

Expecting better

2010-12-01T16:18:00.007-06:00

Thomas P. Barnett has the strongest reflections on the WikiLeaks mess and the lessons it offers for American foreign policy that I've seen.

Wikileaks and Obama's False Utopia

"So the Obama administration says America's relations with our allies around the world can survive the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, and I'm inclined to agree. Truth is, the whole thing reads like a booze-addled Thanksgiving argument spun out of control, and nothing more. So the Middle East's corrupt autocrats hate each other and constantly goad the White House into taking out their garbage — big deal! God only knows the same good ol' boys will be the first to condemn us once things get tough and we choose to act. (To say nothing of Julian Assange's impending lawsuit.) In the meantime, sell the bad guys a few anti-missile defense systems and tell 'em to shut the hell up, because President Obama has one helluva lot more on his plate right now than just Iran, or North Korea, or Pakistan, or... you get the point.

But here's the bigger point: What really screams out from all these very much undiplomatic cables is how little Obama ever really broke from the Bush doctrine. I mean, in a certain way, he never really broke from it at all. Yes, there's been a laudable break from Cheney's Toughonics in terms of rhetoric, but in spirit, Obama still hasn't gotten realistic with his foreign-policy ambitions all that much. The president is constantly lecturing us about how America can't do it all, and yet consider how many plates he's trying to spin around the world. He keeps talking about how we need to accept this new world and how we can't solve any big problems on our own, but he hasn't acted like that's the case — not enough, anyway. And, quite frankly, Obama's lack of adjustment to his own articulation of a global future is starting to make America look weaker than we really are.

If I might be so bold as to warn of a strategic trilemma here: America can't simultaneously be about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and promoting democratic regime change and unwinding our wars in a responsible fashion. Something's got to give, on multiple fronts...

...It's high time, then, for Obama to put his Nobel in the closet, get his inner Nixon on, and get to work in the one arena where John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don't share his bed. If we really want to move the ball forward instead of just keeping a bunch in the air, compromise had better start sooner than the hunt for some Australian "journalist" with a fancy Web site."

I highly recommend reading his entire thought process.

He's right.

The weakness of the Administration is not that it is too soft. Or compassionate. Or any other damn fool notion of weakness.

It is too much hubris. And ambition. As with his domestic policy. And American policy, domestic and international, writ large.

The weakness of American international and domestic policy is not too little muscle.

It is too little humility.

What weakness looks like in any serious human endeavor. For those for whom strength has meaning beyond their own egos.

And ignoring that fact just entails more failure.

Have at it, boys. I say. I'm sure it will make all that failure go away.

Just like North Korea. Or Iran. Or Cuba. Or Zimbabwe.

Or any government organized primarily around power rather than around freedom.

Failure is nothing new to the cynics who manipulate for power.

What is new is the notion that no one should be listening to their excuses.

No how matter how many ways they spin it. Or try to talk their way around the failure.

Strength is humility in the face of failure.

And a commitment to real success. When making excuses is easier.

Says the man to his excuses.

Perhaps something stronger is in order.

Love thy neighbor would be a good start. To understand him or her.

Respect for freedom of conscience would help us learn and comprehend the world better.

And the liberty and democratic self-determination that flow from those principles, for peoples as much as for individuals, would center all of our efforts more effectively.

And the proof is in the rotten pudding made of its alternatives.

Enjoy that pudding, folks

Myself. I'll just be expecting something better.

Where our hearts are centered

2010-11-29T11:55:00.004-06:00

A reminder of where my heart is centered.

In a world with too many, too often, hostile to any center at all.

Pity the poor asshole

2010-11-22T15:43:00.001-06:00

Miley. Forgive Andrew for being such an asshole. Someone has to.

Else the world will be full of assholes like Andrew.

And what a fucked up world that would be.

Because dicks say so

2010-11-22T09:08:00.004-06:00

I just won't do what dicks say so just because they say so, anymore. No matter who they are. I'm sorry if that disappoints dicks who would prefer otherwise. I don't feel beholden to their inclinations any longer.

Waitin' for a Superman

2010-11-20T13:06:00.006-06:00

And then the heavy passes.

Homo sapien, from the Latin "lovable, to be sure, but a damn stubborn fool"

2010-11-19T18:36:00.012-06:00

Homo sapien. Latin translation for "wise man". "Clever man". "All-too-clever man." And the most ridiculous mess of stubborn foolishness that humankind, so called, has ever known.

Quick question: If you bully Galileo into recanting a heliocentric solar system, or any other fact of the known or unknown universe, does that, in fact, mean that the known universe revolves around the earth? Or the pope? Or your bank account? Or your powerful perch? Or whatever selfish impulse suits you, that afternoon?

If homo sapiens bully those other homo sapiens who tell you that bullying homo sapiens to solve their problems, generally, makes those problems and those homo sapiens worse, does that, in fact, make those homo sapiens and those problems and the state of the species better? If you bully those who tell you that bullying, punishing, and otherwise aggressively leveraging problems from our midst does not, in fact, resolve them, often makes them more difficult and painful, and often makes life quite needlessly destructive and tragic, does that, in fact, resolve those problems by pretending them from their midst?

If you are a member of the only remaining species from the animal family Hominidae, circa its entire known existence, perhaps you might be so foolish to pay cash money for that bullshit.

Homo sapiens sapiens. The only species on earth that can contemplate the depth of such questions of their existence and, simultaneously, dramatically and destructively, fail such questions and all the real and meaningful matters they touch by failing to seriously contemplate them at all.

Until the rest of the human species figures out what just how stupid and stubborn the rest of the human species really is.

Doublespeak, 21st Century Gangster-Style

2010-11-18T17:54:00.002-06:00

The best guarantor of a free press is a government that shuts it the fuck down.

Progress is killing this little bitch called freedom once and for all.

New discoveries for our own personal star maps

2010-11-15T20:11:00.040-06:00

There are days when something so simple makes all the difference. And makes you remember why you teach. This was one of those days.

I've been feeling seriously burned out on the job, frankly. All the various legal requirements and outside bureaucracy that persistently get in the way of me - and most of my colleagues, honestly, if you ask them and, perhaps, care or give some thought what they might think on the matter - bringing a commitment of excellence in education and not just the mandated "free and adequate public education" that so often encourages and enforces diminishing expectations in public education - "a rising tide of mediocrity," as one man spoke of it - in my field have really been weighing heavy on me, this semester.

So much time that could be spent preparing really meaningful lessons eaten up by requirements, many of which are dedicated to explaining away failure with kids who have failed far more than most, rather than committing ourselves to their success. And the ways it distorts more honest understandings of what is going on with kids and adults and schools and ways to create the best opportunities for all of them.

A class I have at the local university, in particular, has been eating at me, given the professor's more conventional commitment to making excuses for failure rather than facing it honestly, learning about its honest sources and committing kids and adults to success and more meaningful understandings of the world around them.

The strongest liberal education, in other words. The kind that matters. To those who believe that it matters. People like me, at least.

The prospect of resigning myself to this nonsense and all of the ways that its mandated variations are out of my control was getting too much, as of late. Given opportunities to leave the field and mark a path for greatness, or at least an independent working existence, elsewhere.

And, last night, in my mental and emotional exhaustion and my lack of inspiration for original lesson ideas for the week, I decided to do something very simple that made all the difference, today.

I decided to have a conversation with the kids.

The question that got the ball rolling was very straightforward and at the heart of all of my anguishing about the distance between why I became a teacher and what education had devolved into, in an age when government fiat too often trumps the commitment of liberal education to develop conscience, freely and honestly. What that liberal in "liberal education" stands for. Liberty, namely. And the commitment to the development of a free and independent conscience that it implies.

The question I asked the kids was, "Does it matter to learn something, to know something, about this world?"

Outside of the assessments - the DBQ's, or Document-Based Questions, as the kids, with half-hearted inspiration and dread, simultaneously, know them - outside of the requirement to take history classes, outside even of the legal compulsion to be at school. Outside of parents and teachers and other adults and all the people who tell them that they should get an education and that education is their future and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And out of that question, the kids and I had really remarkably profound conversations, today. About the nature of learning and knowing and education. Every class had lively and, at times, passionate opinions on the matter (except for a few in 2nd hour, where a couple of kids opted for napping, all efforts to engage them to the contrary). Even the one girl who argued in 6th hour that education did not matter did so thoughtfully and thoroughly immersed in the discussion (the most involved in that class, ironically).

So many interesting directions with this conversation. The nature of success and education's role in that journey and destination. The nature of education and learning and all those places it shows up. The relationship between street smarts and book smarts and which mattered most in life. Whether learning mattered independent of whether it advances our ambitions or wealth or opportunities.

And my favorite insight from Noah in 4th hour. That so much of school and life gets bogged down in ways peoples' various insecurities - smart people and not-so-smart people, good folks and not-so-good folks, good-looking and the not-terribly-pretty, the more and less talented, the petty-minded and the bigger-minded folks of the world, and down the line - how all of this is constantly getting in the way of people being able to keep focus on this much more fundamental question.

Does it matter to learn, to grow, to develop, to mature, for it's own sake? No matter from where in life we come from. And no matter what stations in life we aspire to.

It was really extraordinary, actually. A bunch of fairly terribly behaved teenage kids, almost all of whom have been in more serious trouble with the law or with school, in one form or another. Many of whose ability to read and reason have been, otherwise, cast in more serious doubt. Many of whom adults have variously given up on. All having a very serious and well-reasoned and, often enough, passionate conversation about whether education matters for its own sake. Completely independent of what it does for each of us tangibly.

It was really insightful for me because it got me much more square with my own insecurities. The same insecurities I work with the kids on. Whether I'm smart enough. Or good enough. Or successful enough. Or whatever enough to warrant peoples' love and respect. And the ways that my own insecurities play out in the classroom, as much as my relationships, or my life, or anywhere else.

We talked about Jack Johnson, of course. Since he's my musical hero, and all.

What was so profound about it, for me, was that in a world that is consumed in those insecurities - in its politics, in the world of high finance and average everyday work-a-day business, in its sports and entertainment industries, especially the world of popular music, and most certainly in its press and media and in its universities and think tanks, in almost every facet of life in America and in the world - these kids, generally thought of as intellectually incapable, even by many of their own teachers, and often thought beyond the pale, even by many of their own parents and family members, were getting underneath some of the more profound truths of human nature and life on this third planet from the sun. And I was learning with them, too. About the world and people. About myself, as much as anything else.

And, to boot, they were enjoying it. I don't know if I had ever seen them appreciate a abstract classroom conversation nearly as well before. And I don't know if I've ever learned so much from kids in one day, from the whole experience. I don't know if I've learned so much from anyone in one day, nevertheless these kids.

It was all really pretty profound for me. A fundamental conversation about the nature of education. And a reminder of why I got into this work, in the first place.

The only and best therapy for my eduction blues.

If this becomes a regular feature of my life as a teacher, I don't know how I can quit, is the truth. It almost felt like I was getting through, today. I'm sure that will fade, tomorrow. But, maybe, like the tide, it will return and perhaps, with it, bring the promise of something else over that moonlit horizon.

I don't want kids who will settle for good or smart after being thought delinquent or retarded and otherwise incapable.

I expect greatness. And genius.

And today we got a little closer to constellations never conceived before on these kids' sky maps.

And that, if you're wondering, is why I do this work.

What a real man sounds like

2010-11-15T18:01:00.003-06:00

For those who do not yet know better.

Real progress leads by example

2010-11-13T11:51:00.001-06:00

Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi released

And waits patiently for the world to catch up.

Hot cocoa for the frostbitten heart

2010-11-12T17:16:00.014-06:00

All you ever needed to know about the cold, cold world.

Warm words for the bitter chill that chafes at a broken heart.

The light over that dark horizon

2010-11-09T09:52:00.016-06:00

In a world that celebrates its cowardice and pettiness and dark impulses, say those who carry candlesticks, we can either offer our own portion, or we can envision a brighter horizon. Dark can give way to light. If we take time to notice just how dark it has gotten.

Perhaps ugly is not the only impulse that can find a home in our hearts. Perhaps there is no home, at all, in our hearts, as long as it does.

Amidst the celebration - mine, yours, all of us, when we are honest - of the small and base in our natures, perhaps we might consider what kind of world we have made for ourselves and our children in consequence.

And, then, perhaps, there might be hope for something more beautiful for the ones we love, after all.

Physician, heal thyself

2010-11-05T09:45:00.005-05:00

The Democrats hold on the House didn't last. Their landmark legislation will.

Hubris, the Greeks whisper.

Instant karma's gonna getcha, says the Brit.

Humble self-discipline beats bitter medicine.

And stinky tofu make for stinky adventure.

Ancient Chi-nese se-cret.

Do we really have any doubt...

2010-11-04T14:35:00.010-05:00

Where this is all going?

I definitely do. More often than I let on, honestly. More often than not, these days, really. I preach love and patience. And I practice, far too much, anger and despair. Lack of faith, I suppose. A lack I experience so often, I can't keep up with it. I don't know why, really. Other than everyone - family, friends, students, everyone I know and all the rest I do not know - trying to impress upon me that assholes finish first and that nice guys - my kind of people, meaning - finish last. Nice to know you're loved, huh?

It's a more than a little overwhelming for the heart, truth be told. No matter how strong we think we are.

But then I read exchanges like this. And I'm reminded why humanity just has a way of working these things out.

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: Is there — you’ve been asked questions about the vagueness of this and the problem for the seller to know what’s good and what’s bad. California — does California have any kind of an advisory opinion, an office that will view these videos and say, yes, this belongs in this, what did you call it, deviant violence, and this one is just violent but not deviant? Is there — is there any kind of opinion that the — that the seller can get to know which games can be sold to minors and which ones can’t?

MR. MORAZZINI: Not that I’m aware of, Justice Ginsburg.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You should consider creating such a one. You might call it the California office of censorship. It would judge each of these videos one by one. That would be very nice."

Honestly, do we really have any doubt where we are headed, long term?

More or less freedom? More or less love? Honest progress or not?

We shouldn't, I don't think. We doubt, I think, because doing the right thing does not always bring instant gratification. And doing the wrong thing often does.

But we also do really know how these things work out in the end. When we're not deceiving ourselves.

Doubt is among the choices while building faith, I suppose. And faith is a function of our efforts. Our successes and our failures.

I'm tired and feeling a bit cynical today. A function of bad choices, I assume. And a heavy and weary heart, these days.

Perhaps wiser heads should speak on this matter, today.

Perhaps one day I might be more like one of them.

This is not a Sandwich, this is Progress.

2010-11-04T12:11:00.006-05:00

Happy Meals banned in San Fransisco

Progress. Means never having to admit that you're wrong.

And no Happy Meals, to boot.

Unhappy meal. Happy, happy day.

This is not a Sandwich. This is Progress.

Je ne comprend pas Francais. Je suis désolé. Mais je voudrais vous aimer.

2010-11-03T11:03:00.001-05:00

I do not understand French. I am sorry. But I want to love you.
- Jack Johnson

What touches the heart is the only honest truth that really matters

2010-11-02T10:25:00.006-05:00

And the say of those who say different generally does not. Not really. When all is said and done.

The final word on politics

2010-11-02T08:27:00.007-05:00

You know it's true.

My daughters should expect no less

2010-10-30T17:15:00.013-05:00

There's good reason the masses are revolting

It is so funny and sad watching politics, this season. Every season. This season. Every season.

What none of the largely good faith and still too often bad faith major players in this tired, tragic great game of power can quite fathom, the American President included, almost identical to his predecessor, is that a politics that beats the life out of each another encourages all sorts of self-and-that-other-guy-deception. And ignores the bountiful unintended consequences of serious policy decisions. It is the very thing that Democrats and the American left keep engaging in up to the bitter end, and the very thing that lost their right-wing predecessors the U.S. Presidency and both houses of Congress, and is exactly what independents and citizens in my fair country, more broadly, are voting at odds with.

It is the most seriously disheartening fact of 21st century humankind. The most seriously disheartening fact of every century humankind. The will to overpower. The endless feuding. The impulse to dominance. The fear of a world without such obsession. The pride that animates it all. And the imitation it inspires among more repressive members of the species. And the countless dead and oppressed and too-terribly-frightened it leaves in its wake.

The great irony of the viciously partisan, and hence much more seriously self-enamoured and self-deluding, political and media wars of the early 21st century liberal democracies (not to mention the regularly pious political, cultural, and media manipulations of the illiberal world) is that it is average folks, or at least independents, in America, at least, who are deciding elections, these days, by and large, who have the least distorted outlook on questions of governance, in my all-too-distorted estimation, and the all-too-learned-and-self-important political intelligencia who are feverishly defending their very serious mistakes of policy, to anyone not defending them and their mistakes.

And the saddest fact of all, right now, is that various partisans, left and right and of every flavor and variety, have become so self-consumed that they would rather the other guy fail and their side and its policy positions be defended, right or wrong, without serious reservation - that they would rather watch American governance fail, in the broadest strokes - than to humble themselves and get honest about their failures.

All the while strong-arming the rest of us to become more responsible for the world.

It's all kind of mind-numbingly, still yet forgivably, and terribly, abundantly self-centered, after awhile.

And there is no amount of words that will ever talk us out of the wreckage.

The very impulse that drives partisanship - a failure to seriously consider that you and your side just might be wrong about any serious policy matter - is exactly what is sinking both American political parties, their ideological wings, and all-around confidence in government and the culture of politics as professional wrestling, at this moment. And for good reason. And will the next round. And the round after that. And the round after that. And the round after that. And the round after that, too.

The British Empire, similarly thought, after World War I, that it could coax and bully its way out of disgruntlement with the grabbing of British spoils following the First Great War.

They, too, thought that might would make right indefinitely. They, too, believed, cynically, that no new ideas about the world - self-determination and liberal democracy and freedom, more broadly, namely - could trump the force of military arms.

And they, too, were terribly, pitifully, tragically wrong. And failed miserably to maintain their overwhelming might. And much of the politics of the world, today, is a function of that very cynicism both during the height of empire and its various democratic corollaries, internationally and domestically, that were practiced following World War I and World War II.

And those democratic fellow-travelling power calculations are now falling apart, as well. And people begin to see the lie for what it is. And grow disillusioned with the ugly consequences.

Lord Acton knew what he was talking about. Power corrupts. And it does not matter if it is your side and you are convinced of the rightness of your cause. You are not original, in that thought. That thought has animated power and its wielding since the dawn of homo sapien as a social, political animal. And, by and large, though intentions have often been good, in limited ways, they have also been bad, in vastly more corrupting ways, long term.

Hence the skepticism of power in modern liberal democratic societies. The strongest societies in the world and the history of the world, in case you are keeping score. For good reason. Because power is used, more often, to hinder progress than to encourage it. So says honest observation.

And the early 21st century is but one additional iteration of that foolish, failed, perpetually self-unraveling notion.

It does not matter how much governments fight this reality. The impulse and need for freedom and self-determination for people to self-govern their lives is more basic and fundamental than any government could ever be. All governments can ever do is frustrate this need. They can never meet it. And hence why people perpetually find ways around masters and governments that frustrate their own real learning, growth, and development.

The Chinese government must liberalize, as the only means to face a failed and stagnating economy. There is no doubt that it was the freedom of the Chinese people, granted a bit more daylight when a Chinese government begrudgingly lifted its repression, that ultimately grew the Chinese economy and lifted 500 million people out of poverty. Mao's government had killed between 40 and 70 million people to establish its power and, in consequence, stagnate Chinese political, economic, and cultural development. Just as it is the repression of the North Korean communist government that is responsible for the starvation of its people. And the power machinations of the theocratic Iranian regime that has strangled its economy and halted its serious cultural development. And the opportunistic dictatorships in Zimbabwe and Myanmar that shut its people away from the light of the free world. It is liberalization, not Chinese totalitarianism, that created the strong growth we see in China, today. And it is liberalization that will be the genuine march of progress in China, North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and in America, the land of the free, from here until the end of human history.

Because liberalization is the only and single possible direction for honest progress. Nothing else actually produces or leads to real progress. And every ounce of evidence in free and unfree countries points in this direction.

It is not the evidence that is the problem. The evidence is in exponential abundance. It is the agendas of those who seek to defend their favored policies and ideological commitments, left and right and otherwise, that is the most serious obstacle to real progress in America, in China, in North Korea, in Iran, in Zimbabwe, in Myanmar, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, in North and South America, and in the rest of the known world.

Thankfully, our progress does not depend on any person in power, no matter how educated or not. Our progress has always and always will depend on our own self-determined efforts. No matter what anyone who happens to be in charge of the government at any particular moment has to say about the matter.

That has always been the case in America and the world.

That is just on stark and fast-forward display right now.

And no amount of talk will make it go away.

And thanks go to the Americans and people all around the world who are making that fact plain enough to their governments and governors, today.

No matter how much they might deceive themselves otherwise.

This is the most fundamental strength of liberal democracy.

What we are witnessing, right now - a country turning over its government as many times as necessary and as it takes to get us in the direction of more honest and liberalizing progress - is what living in a free country is all about.

You might thank Baron de Montesquieu and James Madison for that, when you get a chance. They are quite dead. But they still deserve your thanks.

Real progress does not need permission. What it needs is freedom. And and love for one's neighbor. And a more honest appreciation for the fact that the one goes quite naturally with the other.

If you are still not quite sure of that notion, you might take a moment to consider something. You might consider your daughter, for a moment. And just how, exactly, you want her to be treated. By the man, or any man, she falls in love with.

You might ask yourself. Do you want that man to be one who will bully and control and attempt to scare her into submission? Do you want a man who will intimidate and hurt and cower her in fear? Or do you want a man who treats her with love and respect for her, her life, her choices, and her heart.

Because if its good enough for your daughters, then, perhaps, you might consider that it might be good enough for the rest of us, too.

And if you are the type of parent or man who would bully or control or cower your wife or children into fearful submission, perhaps they should be doing exactly what they, generally, will end up doing, most of the time, anyway, regrettably. Sometimes not-so-regrettably.

Looking for someone else to love them. As soon as the opportunity arises.

What each and every single one of us should be doing in all of our relationships in life, if we cannot find the courage to turn back from that dark path.

Matters of power and governing being just one more minor variation on that eternal and eternally human theme.

I am looking for someone who loves and respects and cares about me, my life, my choices and my heart. I'll be looking for the same for my daughters, one day, I hope. And I just as surely will be looking for the same from my government. And choosing as many times as necessary until I find one that will.

That sort of choosing is what real progress looks like.

My daughters, I will hope, should expect no less.

Perhaps

2010-10-29T13:11:00.004-05:00

There really is literally no end to this circus.

4-Year-Old Can Be Sued, Judge Rules in Bike Case

Presidents are not responsible for their policy failures. Ever. In any administration.

But 4-year-olds are perfectly and legally culpable.

How in the world could young people come to the conclusion that they cannot trust their elders, I wonder?

Perhaps because they can't.

And perhaps we have no plans to ever earn back that trust.

Perhaps.

Pride. It's a helluva drug.

2010-10-27T20:34:00.007-05:00

I think, at this point, watching the stupidity of aggression and arm-twisting, how it inevitably fucks things up, and how little anyone takes any responsibility for it.

Perhaps this really is the world we want.

We seem dissatisfied. But when you talk to anyone about how it got this fucked up, they all defend all the bullshit that got us here. Against everyone else, of course. They hate how their own arms get twisted. But they love twisting someone else's arm.

Perhaps our entire lives are just one long unhappy marriage. And if we all pretend like this is the way things are supposed to be, we can all, maybe, pretend, as well, just how happy we are with life as it is.

Perhaps a world that is fucked up and unhappy and with no potential for anything better, as long as we continue down this same road, is just too comfortable to ever give up.

All I know is that all this pride costs us something.

A life we love, namely. And one that's safer, freer, more decent, more full of opportunities, and where more people more genuinely get their needs taken care of.

That's the choice, I suppose. The same unhappy mess. Or something better.

Difficult choice, I know.

And it's not a political party that offers us a path out.

It's not anything that any politician can offer us at all (other than getting out of our way).

It is whether we are going to give up the pride that if I could only step on the neck of that other motherfucker, then and only then, the world will finally be made right.

The long, dark nightmare that is human history, that is.

Perhaps one day we might wake up from that grim reality.

For now, it is our own little plot of mutually assured misery.

Yay us.

Pride. It's a helluva drug.

A bit of sanity never hurt

2010-10-27T16:53:00.005-05:00

As I read the coverage of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive, I am reminded of a deeper truth of people and politics and all the rest, today.

'Rally to Restore Sanity' Unite to Offer Pretensious Whining

I find the criticisms of these rallies as whiny and self-involved and disingenuously serious as I did the criticisms of Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance for Congress on matters of immigration.

The truth is these assholes hate the fact that these guys are clowning them. And, worse. That they are dead on in much of their satire. It bothers them that John and Stephen have their number. And even when I disagree with these guys, which is often enough, they get taken more seriously exactly because they don't take themselves so seriously. And bring some needed humility to political discussions, right now.

I love these guys. I disagree with them often. But I love the much needed humbling and levity that they bring to a political world all-too-seriously-committed to its various worldviews and policy positions.

What I love about Stewart and Colbert - Stephen a bit more, just for the record, because he's goddamn brilliant as all shit and has some of the more thoughtful conversations taking place anywhere that anyone else can see, right now - is exactly that they do not take themselves so seriously.

This world would be a far better place if more people - Jesus and Buddha and Mill and Twain and King and Ghandi and all the rest included - did not take themselves and their random opinions so goddamn seriously. It is mindboggling, sometimes, just how ugly and foolish we all behave, this strange, self-involved, solipsistic species, in the name of our all-too-certain opinions about this and that and whatever tickles our momentary fancy.

The goddamn tragedy of the world is that people are so unrepentantly and self-centeredly serious about All Matters That Make Them Look More Important Than They Or Anyone Deserves.

And that so many people are killed or imprisoned or variously bullied and treated in ugly fashion because of this perpetually irrational attachment that the whole goddamn species has to its various thought processes.

It's a goddamn tragedy. And you can either cry about it. On end.

Or you can laugh. Big and hearty, if you can.

At what a sad, stupid, lame, oft-self-centered and mean-spirited, always bumbling and foolish, species we so often choose to be.

All in the name of pretending to be smarter and better and whatever else that any of us could possibly ever be.

All of which only further demonstrates just how stupid and petty and small-minded and everything else that we all really are.

And, the sad, comic irony of the whole thing is that it's still all OK. We just have to pick up from there.

Because what the fuck else are any of us going to do, for God's sakes?

Other than maintain this mindless, mean, damn fool mess of an existence.

An existence that would be far better, for everyone involved, tragically and ironically, the more love and freedom - the very virtues that our fears persistently betray - we make available in the world.

About goddamn time we finally faced up to that little tidbit of life as we know it.

A little sanity never hurt anyone.

Least of all any of us.

A little love for my homies

2010-10-26T18:14:00.003-05:00

Democrats are the unbeloved, if pitiful, heroes of their own Greek tragedy, this year.

And David Brooks knows hubris is just another way of saying:

"Noone likes me because I am so much undoubtedly better and smarter than you."

No Second Thoughts

"When times get tough, it’s really important to believe in yourself. This is something the Democrats have done splendidly this year. The polls have been terrible, and the party may be heading for a historic defeat, but Democrats have done a magnificent job of maintaining their own self-esteem. This is vital, because even if the public doesn’t approve of you, it is important to approve of yourself...

Democrats are lagging this year because the country appears incapable of appreciating the grandeur of their accomplishments. That’s because, as several commentators have argued over the past few weeks, many Americans are nearsighted and ill-informed. Or, as President Obama himself noted last week, they get scared, and when Americans get scared they stop listening to facts and reason. They get all these crazy ideas in their heads, like not wanting to re-elect Blanche Lincoln.

The Democrats’ problem, as some senior officials have mentioned, is that they are so darn captivated by substance, it never occurs to them to look out for their own political self-interest. By they way, here’s a fun party game: Get a bottle of vodka and read Peter Baker’s article 'The Education of President Obama' from The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. Take a shot every time a White House official is quoted blaming Republicans for the Democrats’ political plight. You’ll be unconscious by page three...

As Nancy Pelosi put it at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser, 'Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in.'

Even allowing the menace of secret money, embracing this Paradise Lost epic means obscuring a few inconvenient facts: that Democrats were happy to benefit from millions of anonymous dollars in 2006, 2008 and today; that the spending by Rove’s group amounts to less than 1 percent of the total money spent on campaigns this year; that Democrats retain an overall spending advantage.

But legend rises above mere facticity, and this Lancelots-of-the-Left tale underlines a self-affirming message — that Democrats are engaged in a righteous crusade against the dark villain who tricked Americans into voting against John Kerry.

In short, it’s hard not to be impressed by the spirit of self-approval that Democrats have managed to maintain this election. I say that knowing it may end as soon as next Wednesday, when, as is their wont, Democrats will flip from complete self-worship to complete self-laceration in the blink of an eye."

Poor pitiable progressives. Does no one in America realize that all of this is for them?

Such an ungrateful lot, these American suckers. We offer up our best sales pitch. And all they can bitch about is how everything has gone to hell.

How can they know how much smarter we are when noone will listen anymore to just how much smarter we are?

It's enough to make a grown man cry.

Perhaps a little love is in order, even for the loveless, after all.

The salvation of the humble

2010-10-24T21:07:00.000-05:00

The salvation of the humble is that hubris knows no limits.

Washington referees face ban for charity pink whistles

Bring the pink.

God, give me strength

2010-10-24T19:43:00.003-05:00

For every last unrepentant cheerleader of might begetting right:

Do you really wonder how this thing ends?

The suspense is killing me.

And, Tom Friedman.

You cross my path and rationalize these mass murderering thugs to my face, pray I have strength that chance encounter.

Because, in the dark corners of my heart, I furiously want you to witness what real weakness looks like.

Something honest in an all-too-jaded world

2010-10-24T17:01:00.003-05:00

This is the song that plays over and over again in my CD player and my heart, these days. I asked myself, reminded by a friend, today, why I like this guy's music so much.

And I guess what I like it about it, I suppose, is that in a world - and, in this song's case, a music world - that seems so driven by so many cynical calculations, Jack offers hope of something better.

Jack's music is heart balm for a world obsessed with jading itself and one another. And pretending that it has no consequence, outside of our various petty and self-centered agendas. He keeps my heart in the game. When most everyone else would kick it in the aortal teeth. He offers hope that the last say on the world is not what shitheads we can be in the name of our various causes and agendas. That maybe someone is making an effort to keep hearts and minds open. In a world full of efforts to twist and manipulate and otherwise wear down the heart.

All in the name of justifying the jaded hearts of cynics.

Something honest. In a world of ever self-justifying ego. Perhaps there just might be more to this world than meets the eye.

Learning the honest lesson

2010-10-23T12:12:00.003-05:00

This is the bottom line for the left (and right), at this point.

NPR's Schiller Says Juan Williams Was Fired Because of Ethics Guidelines

Are we all going to keep following shitheads like Vivian Schiller (and Roger Ailes, for that matter) - I was always ambivalent about defunding NPR in the past; I am no longer ambivalent, in my personal funds or in Federal funds, at this point - who think enforcing leftist newspeak and bullying decent people like Nina Totenberg from saying what they really think about this firing - or are we going to get honest about what thuggishness dominates the left and right, these days, and do better?

I have never in my life been so fucking embarrassed to have been associated with such self-centered slimeballs like Ms. Schiller for the largest bulk of my life. If you are honest, you know this shit is wrong. And if you don't, what comes around, goes around. At least until you can face up.

The left has some cumuppance coming it's way. Let's hope they learn the honest lesson.

Conscience is for pussies (and other things that Hitler said before he ate it)

2010-10-22T14:34:00.007-05:00

The embodiment of Democratic conceit and that of the established political universe, left and right, right now.

Reid: But for Me, We'd Be in a Worldwide Depression

Every interpretation around the stimulus and the economy center around Mr. Reid's self-centered interpretation, here.

It's never quite occurred to a lot of folks that maybe, as a matter of fact - not as a matter of partisanship, not as a matter of politics, not as a matter of expression of faction in any remote sense - Mr. Reid and this interpretation just might happen to be wrong. The fear being that to say it is wrong is to rethink the entire New Deal legacy. That, just perhaps, Franklin Roosevelt's greatest legacy as it concerns the economy was offering temporary help when our fear had resulted in genuinely desperate times - versus the "I have to move out of my house and stay with family or move into an apartment" variety of today - not rationalizing desperation and fear of hard times as the centerpiece of thinking about the economy and government and humanity from now into eternity.

Rethinking, though, is for the other guy. Because to say otherwise is to assume that I might, Heaven's to Betsy, be wrong about any one thing that has ever passed through my otherwise infallible frontal cortex.

The sin qua non of this political period is that anything that comes to mind and perhaps out of my mouth or my keyboard must, in fact, be true. Because otherwise it would mean that I might be wrong. And wrong is for that other shithead. Not for me. Because anything else would leave me feeling like a damned fool. And it is everyone else who is the fool. Worthy of firing or criminal sanction, no less. Because that'll finally teach those weaselly bastards who have the gall to think that I might be wrong.

Right.

Perhaps Harry Reid, like Newt Gingrich, like every person who has ever held power are all right about one thing.

Perhaps it is power and not genuinely caring about people, engaging thoughtfully, and acting in accordance with one's conscience that really matters in this world. Perhaps the future is getting our way. And blaming the other guy when it doesn't turn out well.

Because how on earth, you ask, could anyone possibly argue with that kind of logic?

Not this goddamned fool, no doubt. Far, far too clever for me. Far, far too clever for this world of fools, I'm sure.