Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
The tyranny of the people...

Drudge has been chortling for days over dumb jokes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made at Harvard, but the most intersting thing the man had to say has gone unreported. This is from the Harvard Crimson:

In one of the more bizarre moments of the evening, Scalia mentioned--in passing--that he thought the 17th Amendment was "a bad idea."

The 17th Amendment provides for the direct election of senators.

I love that characterization of the idea as "bizarre." Only at Harvard could it be considered bizarre to return to state legislatures the power to rein in the rapacious federal government. Civic minded types, from the president down to the schoolmarm, natter on about checks and balances, but no one mourns the loss of one of the most important checks built into the 1789 consititution. The coalition behind the coup de etat behind that consititution was held together by the idea that the federal government would be a creation of and a servant to the states. The people, through the House of Representatives, might propose, but it was left to the Senators, each appointed at the pleasure of his home state's legislature, to dispose. Prior to the 17th amendment, the Senate was the most important check on federal power. The outrageous growth of the leviathan is a direct consequence of its passage.

I wrote about this a long time ago. Nothing has changed, of course, but I felt better. In any case, Scalia's off-hand remark is another good reason to hope that Dubya can pull this off: We need Scalia (or Thomas) as Chief Justice.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:51 AM

 
'One of these days the Left is going to dig up somebody competant to forge their documents'

Wizbang exposes more falsified "evidence." The 'th' is decisvie, but look also at the counter on the "e".
posted by Greg Swann at 6:01 PM

 
Hanging with the wrong crowd...

Billy Beck cites this as an egregious example of a pretend libertarian proposing to use coercion to force everyone else to live her way. What jumped out at me was this:

If I had to design my perfect place to live, it would be a townhouse, on a square of similar townhouses that opened up onto a large communal yard where children and dogs could romp. A train station would be no more than a few blocks away, as would shops, schools, and other accoutrements of refined living.

This already exists. It's Salem Commons, of course. In Salem, Massachusetts. Where they hung the "witches." I love that word "communal." The Tragedy of the Commons isn't really the sorry condition of the lawn, as you've read. It's the communally-owned gulag and gas chamber, just a stone's throw from the communal gallows.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:59 AM

 
Hitchens:

Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"--which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates--but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.

The unfortunately necessary corollary of this--that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry--is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?

posted by Greg Swann at 6:37 AM

 
Bruce Springsteen, Unglued

It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending
A rich man in a poor man's shirt

posted by Greg Swann at 10:30 PM

 
Dylan speaks...

From the Victoria Herald Sun, summarizing an article to appear in Newsweek:

[Bob Dylan] blames his anointment as 'the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent' largely on the press who labelled him as the spokesman for a generation.

'The big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs.

'I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.'

He acknowledges that his lyrics 'struck nerves that had never been struck before', but says he grated at the way his songs' 'meanings (were) subverted into polemics'.

This will come as a huge surprise to everyone who wasn't paying attention. Dylan is never completely honest, so he won't come right out and say that he pandered to the doe-eyed left part-time in the early 60s in order to draw attention to himself, then summarily dumped them when he had enough pop draw to get along without them. But the song quoted below, the very first track on the Band's Music From Big Pink,* is Dylan's succint eulogy for everything the 60s had become.

Tears of Rage

by Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day
And now you'd throw us all aside
And put us all away
Oh, what dear daughter 'neath the sun
Could treat a father so?
To wait upon him hand and foot
Yet always tell him "No"

Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we're so alone
And life is brief

It was all so very painless
When you ran out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?

Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we're so alone
And life is brief

We pointed you the way to go
And scratched your name in sand
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand
I want you to know that while we watched you
Discover no one would be true
That I myself was among the ones who thought
It was just a childish thing to do

Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we're so alone
And life is brief

As with everything Dylan, it's possible to read to much into this, but this was written in 1967. While the rest of the world was going crazy, Dylan and the Band were woodshedding in the basement of a big pink house in West Saugerties, NY. The Band played at Woodstock, but Dylan demurred. But those six men worked at music like a day job and reinvented rock 'n' roll as a much more conservative force--not politcally conservative, but conserving traditional American values of faith and family.



*Band CD caveat: Avoid the remastered rereleases of classic Band albums. They are classics because of the music they contained, but also because of the music they omitted. To amend original song lists with out-takes or alternate-takes is to destroy the purity and perfection of the original recordings. The first three Band albums are unamendably perfect. Experience them unruined.
posted by Greg Swann at 11:01 PM

SplendorQuests