Starting My First Novel

From, like, 6 years ago -- just cuz it's so good:

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It was a dark and stormy night.

[No.]

The night was dark, so very dark, and quite stormy. ... It -- by which is meant the night -- was stormy and dark. ... The darkness of the night was so dark, and the storminess made the darkness seem that much darker and more nightlike.

[Yikes. It's just getting worse.]

Dark and stormy, the night screamed like a ravished virgin. ... The dark, stormy night ranted madly in a barometric tantrum.

[Ugh.]

It was an ebonic nocturnal tempest. ... The stygian typhoon of eventide...

[No, no, no.] 

Prosopopeic fuliginous Nyx, enceinte as it were with lachrymal lamia farouche as Hecate, disbosomed upon her terrene demiorb an empyreal borasque.

[Huh?]

Dark storm roiled through the night, stirring up ghosts untroubled since pagan times.

[Pagans?! At least it isn't pirates.]

Dark the night was, and stormy -- aye.

[Dang.]

O Thou, Night of Dark Storm, whither goest? -- whence cometh thine exudations of witching Strife?

[Unbe-freakin-lievable.]

It all started on a dark night that was stormy.

[Um ... no.]

I never would, or could, have dreamed, or believed, that anything like it could ever have had happened, to somebody, anybody at all, really, such as myself, but, man, oh, man, believe you me, it really, truly, did happen, and not too very long ago, either, and, not only that, but, also, what’s more, it happened to me, too, one dark, and stormy, night!

[Ack!!]

"Take me! Take me now, you big man!" moaned Stormie Knight darkly as she threw herself panting and naked onto the hot wet sand.

[Hmm. I'll deal with this later.]

The night swayed into my office on dark clouds like your mother never wanted you to see. A lacy froth of storm just barely held back the thrusting silky light of the soft, full moon. Brother, could I feel the wind rising, and how.

[How ... noir.]

Dark, stormy night rolled madding over the wuthering moor, heedless of the heather blooms.

[Yeah, great -- and here’s Heathcliff wending soulfully through the tuffets.]

Darkness muffled the stormy night, damping dreams as well as earth.

[...and breeding lilacs out of the dead land.]

It was the best of dark and stormy nights, it was the worst of dark and stormy nights.

Once upon a dark and stormy night dreary, while I pondered weak...

To be a dark and stormy night, or not to be a dark...

Let us go then, you and I, when the dark and stormy night is spread out against the sky... 

Call me a dark and stormy night.

Mother died today, or maybe last dark and stormy night -- I can't be sure. 

These are the dark and stormy nights that try men’s souls. 

In the beginning, it was a dark and stormy night.

~~~~~

It hadn’t rained for months, and the hard bright sunlight streaming all day through the window was harsh enough finally to kill the fat angry fly that clattered around in the dry air like a broken shopping cart. But now the sun had fallen, and night with it. Somewhere out of the Pacific, storm clouds crept through the darkness and laid hold of the sky. 

Rain was falling. 

It was almost comical, slopping down in a deliberate drench. I could picture the dark fairies hidden just above the backdrop of the clouds, giggling and snorting to each other, gleeful with malice, scooping out great wooden bucketfulls from the waters of the firmament. You just don’t expect government workers to try so hard. A light mist, a drizzle, maybe even a few scattered showers. The minimum, just to meet the quota. Certainly nothing as exuberant as this. 

I smiled. Odd, how we smile outloud. Even when a man's so sick of himself he can barely breathe, he still acts out his little pantomimes. No one’s there, no one watching, no audience. Yet he talks to himself, smiles when he's alone. His inner life spills out, overflows, too much to be contained. Witness me, O Creation! I’m so interesting! 

No one’s watching. No flies, no peeping toms, no fairies or angels or demons or ghosts. I didn’t see any. Well, maybe ghosts. 

And still the rain falls. 

I was in my office. I’d just wrapped up the Svenson case, and for the past few days I found myself with nothing to do. I was out of whiskey. I lit another cigarette. It was a dark and stormy night. 

A knock sounded at the door. Goodness, who can it be at this late hour? ...



J

Gilead

I hate God the way I hate my father. Their failings stem from different strictures in their natures, but the damage they have done is analogous. Words are insufficient of course to communicate my meaning. God, and father, are easy, but hate is a tough word. Hate the sin not the sinner. But the agent of failure is accountable. Can we judge God, then? Language is insufficient.  We can't even argue with him.  Because he doesn't argue back.

God cares about only one thing. Righteousness. That’s the only thing God cares about. Nothing else. Only that. Love, and mercy, and justice, and grace -- it all falls under this broadest description. His character. Of righteousness. The world stands or falls on that. Well, it falls. And then, because of his righteousness, he provides a way of grace. And to demonstrate his holiness he puts himself, as his son, through infinite torment. There is no consideration that will cause me to believe that if he will do that to himself, to his son, he would hesitate for an infinitesimal moment to judge and condemn us. There’s a way out -- take it or don’t, and be damned. Does he suffer in his heart because of this? Sure he does. But more important to him than even his own suffering, is his righteousness.

Thus, there is no forgiveness, for the unrepentant. Didn’t take your chance? Too bad for you. There is no deal, no bargain, we can make with God. I’m sure he doesn’t laugh at us, in his heart or before his assembled angels at our rabbinical attempts to pursued him. We do not mock our children. But whereas no human father is righteous, God is, and he cannot compromise, when it comes to the greater good. What after all do we have to bargain with? I’ll be good from now on if you give me such and such? No, be good for the sake of righteousness. I’ll put away this sin, that vice, for a time or forever, if you give me some particular blessing? Thus was Sodom destroyed. The meteors were already blazing towards a set intercept point, latitude and longitude, minute and second. It was foreordained that there should be a Dead Sea. We converse with God, in our prayers. But prayer is where we listen, and God does not. He knows what he wants, and he cannot deviate from righteousness.

God cannot conceive that he might need to be forgiven. He is so very righteous after all. Part of it is that we have only language, human language, and God isn’t human.  Human speech is not his native tongue. He needs a mediator.  So when we formulate our anguish and dismay and despair into words, something is lost in the interpretation, and in any case words are mere approximations. We can’t out-argue him, and we can’t articulate our emotions, and we just have to depend on his seeing our hearts, brokenness and pain. Well, yes, he sees. But what can he do? Only what righteousness allows.

So we suffer in a fallen world, for our sins, for the sins of others, for happenstance, for reasons and for no reason at all. And God watches, utterly, completely, unyieldingly implacable. Does he wish to comfort us? How? Through the beauty of the world? Grief robs the world of its beauty. Through the revelation of scripture? Words are what we use to tell lies with -- at best they are reflections, and too often ambiguous, confusing, comforting only in the way that soothing noises to a child might be. Where else are we do find comfort? Sympathetic humans -- family, friend, community, fellowship -- surely here, but this is to say nothing at all, given that sometimes our hearts are too broken even to allow eye contact. There is no comfort where there is no trust.

So yes, I trust God. I trust him to do as he pleases. I trust him to send even more pain, even more harsh and bitter lessons, to hector and beat and pound at us until we are ground to dust, nothing left of our will save that which conforms to his. Well, it’s a good thing to agree with truth. And it is good that all necessary energy should be expended, to teach lessons that must be learned. If I am stiff-necked, as I am, it is only fitting that I should have my neck broken. This is the chastening that a father reserves for his son.

We are commanded to love God. I do not. I hate him. I would rather never have been conceived, than live in this world. I hate this world. I know I’m doing it wrong, the way I live my life. I know I’m trapped. I know there is a madness in my soul that poisons every moment of self-reflection. I know that when I say hate, I mean resentment and unforgiveness and unrepentance and dishonesty and self-righteousness. I realize that I am withholding my trust as a bargaining tactic, and I know that when I surrender everything I have, that will have to include everything that I want. I want to be happy. I want to feel well. I want to be loved. It may be, that when I finally succumb to the pain and give in to God’s demands, it will be at the final moment of my life, and I will have lived a meaningless life, utterly solitary, needlessly defiant, futile and a waste. As one through fire.

Before that, then, I would hope, if hope can mean something other than trust, that God takes pity on me, and places his hand on my shoulder, and draws me to his breast, and consoles my broken spirit. Because I’m too unsociable for human company, and the revelation of nature and of scripture seem to be insufficient. It’s just a little fantasy I have, though. God appears only to prophets.


J

Etc

I went on and on just now, the way I do, about pain and unforgiveness and injustice. And the need for eternal torture and the inadequate performance of God, and the impossibility for me of peace. There were some good lines and some gripping images, and it was touching in the revelation of my deeply flawed humanity. But it’s been said before, and goes nowhere.

 I have however come up hard against something that seems worth saying. I do want comfort, you know, I want to be soothed, strengthened. Because my soul has been poisoned by resentment, and my body, which had always been reliable, now pains me. It’s not a betrayal; it is a wounded animal, and I mourn for its distress. Point is, where shall I find encouragement?

 There is that part of us, the small child, that wants to be rescued, picked up in our tears and held and reassured that we are loved -- which is the true cure for that sort of childish pain. That sort of rough-and-tumble fall-down pain is never the real problem; it’s the idea that we suffer alone, in the presence of indifference. A child who bumps himself while actually alone doesn’t cry. That says it all.

 There’s that part of me that wants God to just intervene, have mercy or compassion on me, manifest his angel as a solid presence of healing. Indeed, there is that desire in me. So I asked myself, why doesn’t God just do that? He does it for some people. Why not me? And the answer, as happens, really, always, when I ask this sort of question, comes with the clarity of a voice from across a table. God is holy, and he is disinclined to manifest himself within a heart filled with rage.

 We say God. Jesus, Holy Spirit -- it’s this last who does most or all of the comforting. I just don’t think the Holy Spirit dives headlong into a cesspool. That’s not very holy. Holy means separated apart, reserved for cleanliness and respect -- the idea of sacred. There has to be a clean spot, for God to slip through. I think of the way a cat picks its way through mud.

 One has to make room, for God. Clear a space, a little altar in your heart, where madness and filth don’t quite reach. Seems like a small enough thing to ask.

 For all I know, my life as an athletic person is ending. Maybe this affliction will pass. If not, what will I have left? Rage and pain fill me. There’s only one domain left, my intellect. Will this be attacked too? Body, soul and mind? I did not fully appreciate my health, although I protected it. And I did nothing to clarify my soul, filling it instead with resentment and other low things. And my intelligence is no small thing, but it is almost totally wasted, or completely, given the insignificance of this blog and of the few other interactions I have whereby I share ideas. Transient, superficial, insignificant. The fact that you, you might find some amusement in what I do -- it’s nice, to amuse for a moment. It hardly leaves a mark, a pebble into the water. The meaning of life must surely be more than to make remarks that are forgotten.

 I had some blood tests done, just standard stuff, inflammation (which I can spy with my little eye) and bloodwork, whatever that is -- but it’s phone tag with the doctor. So now I have the luxury of imagining something fatal has been found, and there is a thrill in the idea, like I can finally give up and just be done with this, and it won’t be my fault, I can’t be blamed. A little self-dramatizing, comforting. I can’t be blamed. Well, yes, I could be, as has happened in the past, falsely, but there I am, dead, and finally I’ll get justice from God. He can apologize to me, and reward me for my patience, self-restraint and excellence.

 Yeah.


J

OFTEN

     
Someday you will leave.
I’m sure that in this
it will not be your purpose
to cause pain.

     And here I’ll say something philosophical
     about the nature of change
     and the wisdom of letting go.
     Then a rhythmic image of nature,
     naked branches, twigs
     scraping at a window.
     Then I allude to something visceral
     and violent, like dripping blood,
     drip drip, but not so obvious--
     thrumming in your ears.
     Then something innocuous again,
     like a breeze and slow breathing,
     then I close with--
     either ‘And’ or ‘But’--

often I discover my left index finger
tapping, fast as if with anxiety.


J

TG

If anyone deserved good health, it was me. You deserve what you earn. Then again, you own only what you can keep. It is self evident that God acts upon humanity only in a general way. There simply are no specific miracles. Oh, sure, of course there are, but so rarely, profoundly exotic, sui generis. Two-headed calves are not miracles. Spontaneous remission is not a miracle. The midnight reprieve of the condemned is not a miracle. These are just things that happen.

 Prayer does not move God. So very rarely does he, as it were, repent himself. Shadows moving backward on the sundial; human depravity that brings forth a Flood. Offhand I can’t think of any other example. Earthquakes and brimstone from the skies – these are phenomena of nature, acts of God, as we say, but traceable to the current nature, rather than any initial created perfect condition, of the universe. Prayer, then, is what we do when we want to change our own minds.

Rarely do we get special warnings. Usually it is conscience that warns us: gee, maybe that wouldn't be such a good thing to do?  But if the thing seems to be mere change, a left turn instead of a right? -- well, you should have driven more carefully, slowly, looked both ways, been more mindful of intersections and headlong traffic. Or you eat out, give yourself a special treat or just pick up a bite, and a bacteria colony comes along with it. What warning was there? Prepare your own food? -- meditate before every meal and await a highsign? If there were such a thing as the urim and thummim any longer, I doubt if it would function. God acts in the universe only upon quarks and upon conscience. He sustains the universe, and he seeks for our salvation. All the rest of it is happenstance.

The wicked prosper, the virtuous suffer, and justice might as well be counted as a miracle, more rare than two-headed serpents. What then is the purpose? Here it is, Thanksgiving. Indeed, we must be thankful. It can always get worse. You had better cling with utmost desperation to what you have, cherish and treasure and spray out thanks like a pulsar pervading infinite space. God has demanded of us a thankful spirit, and commanded us to rejoice, always. Through suffering? Oh, sweet child, to think you know anything of suffering. Whatever we are put through could be so very much worse. The burn victim must be thankful that he can walk; the paralytic must be grateful that he can speak. And at the end of an ungrateful life is an eternity of pain. Indeed, it can be so much infinitely worse. Thanksgiving, then.

The meaning of life is the curse and necessity of free will, and what we do with it. Should I have said blessing, as well? Find them where you may. We stand on the shore of a vast cesspool of cruelty and indifference. We stand on a small floating island in that pool. Most of humanity is nearly submerged, deprived of the blessing even of a place to stand.

 For my part, I have poisoned my spirit with unforgiveness, virtually mad by now with the need to avoid those persons and situations that have given me, well, past anguish. How is this wrong? When we reach an intersection we must remember the rules of the road, look both ways and avoid catastrophe. The people in our lives who have ignored the rules of, well, humanity -- aren’t there rules that must guide us? No. Apparently there are not. We must forgive. Forgive the oncoming truck.  Which seems so stupid and insane a thing to do that I cannot. Christ can be Christlike. It seems a contradiction that we must be, also. It isn’t, of course -- forgiveness doesn’t mean trust. My problem, one of them, is that I’d like to see justice. All I can do, to approximate that, is hold a grudge. Poor substitute.

 We learn our first lessons about God through the character of our fathers. Very very grim. Very bad plan, God. You fucked up. That must be the first step on election: God puts us in a toxic crippling family and then lets us fend for ourselves -- those who are elected will thrive, find support and stability and sanity where we may. It can happen. And late late later, maybe we get some friends, or find a mate, or carve out a place for ourselves in the world. We find meaning. And perhaps the wasted years that have been consumed as by locusts are returned to us and we achieve or approach our potential. Perhaps it is this way. The meaning of hope is that tomorrow might be better than today. Perhaps our pain will be less. Perhaps our solitude will be broken. Perhaps our spirit will lay down its burden, seen to be so completely unnecessary. Perhaps God will smile on us, and we feel that smile as peace and love and fellowship.

 I have been silent in these pages for some weeks now. Sometimes I write, but I don’t think of myself as a complainer, so I keep it to myself. These pages are for saying what I feel like saying, but not everything is fit for print. I have friends, but there’s no one I would lay my burdens on. Seems discourteous, that level of intimacy, when I’m so superficial a persona. I know I’m wrong in this. Count it as another of my sins.

 I will isolate myself for Thanksgiving, and Friday, emerge briefly on Saturday and disappear again on Sunday. The world, and moving through it, is painful. I should have been more grateful, when I felt well. As it is, I will be thankful that I am not paralyzed, physically.


 J

Wave

It is self evident that I am brilliant, but I’m unaccomplished and undisciplined. So my philosophical speculations are likely to be astute, and accurate as far as I have my facts straight, and original in that I came up with them -- which is not to say they are original. Perhaps my new ideas are clichés, to initiates of the arcana.

I was thinking about light, photons, having wavelike properties. Then I thought about what a wave actually is. It is the transfer of energy, momentum, through a medium, from one molecule to another, in a bumping sort of movement. Water molecule A pushes against water molecule B, losing energy as it transmits it. Water rises outward in wave formation as energy moves out, losing it in the trough, transferring it to the crest. Same with sound: air molecules push against molecules further out. Or a guitar string, or a whip, or the ground during an earthquake. It requires the outward transfer of energy.

 Given this concrete definition, how can light be a wave? Is a photon pushing against another, which in turn pushes against another? No -- no more than a bullet pushes against another bullet, and so on. So I thought, the term wave must be an analogy, and I wonder if this thought has been thought before. We get caught up in the word wavelike, which leads us down false paths.

 Then I thought about how a photon is timeless, eternal. An object traveling at the speed of light would be frozen in time -- an astronaut traveling for 20 years at light speed would return to earth after 20 years, virtually no time having passes for him. And an object going faster than light would move backwards in time -- impossible of course, but that’s what would happen if it could. So what is the universe like, to a photon? Frozen, the way a reel of film is frozen (without a projector’s movement and light to give it life). All laid out, contiguous but static. The astronaut would observe 20 years of an earthling’s life as if it were a person-shaped line of extruded toothpaste -- not a point moving through time but a completed line. That’s why they say things stretch at near light speed … perhaps it’s not so much a stretch as an infinitude of multiplicities -- every moment abutting the next as a physical object. Thus would an object gain infinite mass. Yet, again, the universe would not be so much frozen as imperceptible -- moving faster and faster, to the vanishing point; even the most distant stars would move their given distance, instantly, which is to say, undetected. To a photon, the universe is black and empty.

 Then I thought about what a photon is like to itself. It is a line, a streak, originating at the source whence it emanates, ending at an eyeball or a black surface or whatnot. It is not a particle or a wave, to itself. It is a string, timeless. And that gave me the idea about how it can be a wave. A photon manifests, intrudes, in time, the universe, as the movement of a single oscillation along its length. If it travels/extends 186,000 times 10 miles -- so it lasts 10 seconds -- the wave along its length shows up as a photon each second every 186.000 miles (and all the relevant fractions). A photon experiences the universe the way a monkey slides down a vine; the vine is always there, and there is no jungle. That’s how a particle can be a wave: the same way a vibration moves along a violin string. You may very well call a piece of a vibration, a particle. It’s not a bullet traveling down a barrel, it’s a shotgun load.

 Then I thought about how everything is in motion at 186,000 miles per second. For us, as objects at “rest”, almost all of that motion is spent moving through time; for an object moving through space at near light speed, there is hardly any motion left for movement through time, so time slows for it. Something is going to be slower, the object or its time. It’s an inverse function, always ends up as 1. Movement through time and movement through space sum up to lightspeed. This is basic relativity

 But what I was really thinking was, that explains, oh, say, angels. Our mundane world, plodding innert materialism, is almost all time and almost no speed. Matter is slow, racing through time; light is fast, and massless and timeless. What of consciousness that was all speed and no time? -- like light? Innately massless, that is, nonmaterial, immaterial, incorporeal -- but if it does slow down, entering time, it gains mass, becomes physical (as an object which increases in speed gains mass) (“objects” then of both types, material and, um, radiant, gain mass when they change speed to a relativistic degree). It is a different set of laws that must govern such a plane. The idea that we express as 186,000 “miles” per “second” (space and time) must find its expression some other way.

Ours is a universe of (slow) mass-particles racing through time. Another would be of timeless massless-particles, its entities comprised of such “molecules” and aware in time at the wave-point, pervading the entire universe, as a mass-particle would take on the mass of the universe if it could attain light-speed.  And I’m just ignoring gravity.  But

I could drive myself to distraction, following up the implications.

 I have no desire to start a cult, however, and I’m too bad at selling things to write a book about it. I’m like the Unibomber -- alone in his shack, spewing out ideas, with no reality check, no other strong intellect to challenge or correct or encourage. I don’t get a lot of feedback. Mostly I’m not understood. I may be wrong, but I’m not crazy-wrong. And even with old, simple and obvious ideas, it’s hard to be understood.

 Pain, pain, go away. Come again some other day. I got old suddenly, and too soon.  A certain symptom has manifested, that informs me that my now long-term issue is not bursitis or what have you.  Unsettling.  But depression is close enough to despair that I have cause to fear for my life, if my life is imperiled.  I'm sure I'll go to a doctor, though.  After all, it would be crazy not to.  And what an artist the world would lose, in me.


 J

Slight Fellow

Looks like Obama's taking his cues from Putin -- they know who their enemy is.  Republicans routed, chickens without heads.  Please, boys, chose your battles?  You're not hired to take a stand.  Your hired to further the agenda.

One thing the Boboma Debacle perfectly illustrates is that it's better to have a fat president than a skinny one.

Hold on, son, the wind is picking up.  A man should be big enough for his clothes.  Doesn't this guy have a tailor?  He just keeps getting smaller, per speech -- blow out some more hot air, get smaller.  Soon he'll be shopping in the Lil' Mister department at Nordstroms. Not that he ever was big, or that he's losing size quickly.  He must have been very very full indeed though, because he surely does love to speechify.  

Yes, ad hominim.  It's my civic duty.  People who set themselves up as puppetkings of the world need to be attacked.  And since he is the leader of the Fraud World, it is only appropriate that I follow his lead.  Attack the man.  He's evil.  Grrr.

Speaking of death, I give you: America.  This is a dead parrot.  Sucked dry by a vampire.  Started probably with Social Secuity, and sunk its teeth to the bone with income tax.  Yes, I understand the chronological order is reversed.  But the universally instituted system of government supporting its citizens is antiamerican.  And it is impossible to work in this country without a government issued license, the SS#.  And the IRS has a SWAT team -- well, so does the Dept of Agriculture.  Automatic withholding -- so you don't even realize how much they're taking from you.  Yes, they.  Congressional redistricting makes office a sinecure.  Gay marriage is a fait accompli, soon to be universal.  I don't care about gay, or marriage, but for judges to drag us through the lookinglass is, well, a governmental encroachment upon conscience.   No, this is not America.  

I'm sure the government algorithms have flagged my little blog.  I'm harmless.  What else could a man without a country be?  

J

In Which I Correct Newton and Mach

Newton arrived eventually at the idea of Absolute Space, the idea that space was a thing independent of matter. It was a needful idea in order to explain why, say, a bucket full of water, suspended from a rope and set to spinning, would transfer the spin from rope to bucket to water – yet when the bucket stopped spinning in one direction (the rope having rewound itself taut to the other extreme), the water would continue its whirlpool spin even as the bucket moved in the opposite direction. Trust me, it’s a problem, answered by Newton: motion must be relative to some greater context, and by extension, to the universe itself.

Leibnitz had argued that there was no space without matter, any more than there can be no alphabet without letters – it must be occupied to exist at all; an empty set is not a set at all: a null set is a mathematical conceit, having no actual reality. The spinning bucket with its concave water befuddles this conception. Ernst Mach came along two and a half centuries later and said that spin, which is what the discussion is all about, is dependent on how much matter there is in the universe. If you spin like an ice-skater you feel your arms pulled outward – not as a function of vision or of balance, but as a centrifugal quality inherent in matter. Mach said that if there were less matter in the universe, your arms would be flung out less. If there were no other matter in the universe, a “null” set universe, your arms would not move out at all.

I’m simplifying, of course.

 Well. We know this spin is not a function of local gravity, because whether as an ice-skater on earth or as an astronaut in zero gravity, if you are set to spinning, your arms are flung out. Centrifugal force manifests universally -- or at least under all testable circumstances.  Mach’s idea would have it that an astronaut set to spinning in our universe would have more centrifugal force than a similar astronaut in a universe in which there was only a single star. Which is to say, the mass of the universe, the amount of overall (not merely local) gravity, determines the perception or manifestation of spin. I see this as wrong on the face of it -- how much mass there is in the universe should have no bearing on the result from how much energy is put into a system to make it spin. X amount of energy would manifest as X amount of centrifugal response. No? I’m no mathematician, but this reasoning seems more to do with logic. Confounded of course by the fact that we are dealing with impossibilities -- there is no universe with only one star, so how can we decide upon an equivalence of X input energies? Would Joules or ergs be absolute, or proportional, relative to another cosmos? Maybe it’s an imponderable, or maybe there’s the math for it. I don’t know. But such maths would be based on suppositions. So I believe.

Newton said that even in an empty universe of absolute space, there would be a distinction between you stationary and you spinning. Mach said there would be no difference. This is all very fine and well. Where I must interject, object & correct is here: in an empty universe containing only you, how could you start spinning in the first place? From a static state, some other agent is required to provide the acceleration force – whether a passing alien or a springboard rock or a handheld rocket gun.

The term spin never got defined up front. Putting aside all considerations of torque and angular momentum and relative motion, spin requires the input and transfer of energy. Newton wound up the rope, which spun the bucket, which got the water moving. Spin requires a relationship between, uh, entities … energy, matter, space, what you will. Since matter and energy are equivalents, we should be able to say that matter requires other matter/energy in order to start spinning. As for what the ultimate reference point of spin would be, well, gravity is a universal field, as is the virtual foam of quantum mechanics. There is no need of an empty absolute space, because there is no such thing as emptiness. Newton of course anticipated Einstein, re relativity.

Of course all these thoughts have been thought before, and questions answered.  I'm surely traveling old ground. But discovery is relative.  Delight, Dear Reader, in my joy.


J

Insane Hell Roll

It would have been around 1975 that I read Harlen Ellison’s Deathbird Stories. Is his name an anagram? (Hellion learns. Hell's neon liar.  On leaner hills.)  I’ve remembered the book all these years, as superb. Some time ago I got a copy, and I’ve been reading it again. It’s not that I’m disappointed. But I can see Ellison in the writing, I can see the writing, and it is distracting. Like a brilliant adolescent wrote it. Which worked brilliantly, when I was an adolescent. The man is in love with words. Images, impression, impact. He knows his craft. He wrote some of the best original Star Trek episodes. I don’t know what it is, what’s lacking. I can’t say there’s a monotony of tone, but it has something to do with depth. He digs only in one direction?

 Modern Family, the sitcom, is in reruns. I’d never seen it. It had been mentioned as something like Arrested Development, which is stellar. But MF is second rate. I used that term a while back in a text. I think it comes off as harsher than I mean. First rate is, oh, say, Shakespeare, and Chandler, and Arrested Development. Second rate is skilled, and professional, but not worth looking at a second time. There are after all five ratings, so second rate is a B. Pretty good. The MF writing is funny. Rigidly formulaic but I laugh a few times in each of the episodes I’ve seen. That’s rare. And I suppose I have to admit that Ed O’Neil redeems himself with this -- I hadn’t thought it possible, given MWC -- I will not even say the name. The hot Columbian wife is really gifted -- it would be so easy to get that part wrong. The fat son is pretty awful -- good for the Disney Channel, but he telegraphs and uses his hands amateurishly and isn’t smart enough to play the smart kid he’s playing. It’s distracting. The kids are just stickfigures, manufactured by the “created by” guys -- a dim-bulb slut, a wisecracking egghead, and a crazy and formless little brother -- we’ve seen them in a hundred previous iterations. The gays are not bad, but watered down for middle America -- no hint at all of sex, between them.  The parents have lots of sex.  The gays have a few pecking kisses of vanilla affection. FYI: gays like sodomy and sucking each other’s dicks. Now, the dick-sucking I can understand, although it is an idea that takes some getting used to. That’s the point though, of the MF gays. Get us used to it. But without any gay sex at all, it’s just a sell-out. Superficial. The universe is full of wormholes; until you look closely, a thing can seem first-rate.

I have discussions every now and again about writing. I’m always urging for authenticity -- how people really talk. Obviously there is art involved, we eliminate the ums and ahs, and try to be worth hearing, but fake is not funny.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to Tolstoy -- the difference between their genius is demonstrated by the fact that Shaw needs to be identified the more completely -- in which he says, “To me God does not yet exist…” and he blathers on about how Evolution is trying to create such a thing. “The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself when He might just as easily have created something equally perfect. That is a horrible belief...” Indeed. It’s also a fictitious belief. At no time has this been “the current theory.” God cannot create himself. No serious theologian of a Western faith has proposed such a thing. How could Shaw be so wrong? Because he got caught up in his own ideas and words, and because he was so used to impressing people and being complimented that he failed to develop a capacity for self-examination. It’s a form of insanity. Self confidence is better than self doubt, when it comes to producing commercial entertainments. But comedians should stick to trying to be funny.

 For almost a year now I’ve had constant pain. Sometimes literally crippling. It’s not a disc, and certainly not plantar fasciitis. Not sports medicine, not a general practitioner, not a chiropractor. It’s a disease -- debilitating pain at but not in various joints. Not arthritis or the like -- tendons or bursa or something. I’ve taken excellent care of myself, my whole life, for exactly this reason. I’ve always known that if I ever got a big problem, I wouldn’t be responsible about it. It really digs deeply into my crazy place. I could very well just give up. So I’m worried about myself. I am profoundly self destructive.

It's irksome.  So many bad choices, and their accrued consequences.  I needed a wife, to ground and motive and encourage me.  Instead I read.  What a waste.


J

Pop

Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus boils down to the idea that it’s not the experience, with its inevitable suffering and apparent lack of meaning -- the futility -- but rather the fact of existence that makes it worthwhile, or, bearable. Simply being, an agent of free will, is meaning enough. The logic is flawed of course, as any philosophical paradigm must be, by the need for axioms. As with Descartes, I think therefore I am: why thinking? -- why not feeling? -- or some other arbitrary basepoint? I am, therefore I will endure.

 It isn’t a matter of whether or not I am. Clearly I exist, as Dr. Johnson so succinctly demonstrated by proving the reality of a rock by kicking it: so much for Berkeley. Demonstrable truths hardly need to be demonstrated … ah, the convolutions glib minds require for themselves. Convulsions, really.

 Sisyphus, then, eternally pushing at the rock, undone daily. It compels our attention. Futility. Meaning. Meaninglessness. The problem, as with all paradoxes, is that it starts with an incorrect axiom. Here’s my point: as much to complain about suffering, as about the fact that we live in an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen. Yes, we do -- now get on with life. Press your cheek and your shoulder against the rough cold or hot boulder and push, and live your life. It’s not about pushing a rock. It’s about waking up every morning alive.

 On a whim I’m reading again about cosmology and quantum mechanics -- favorite subjects, but hard to read because it gets my mind racing and it’s frustrating not having a meaningful way or reason to express myself. So I was thinking about Time’s Arrow, how it’s supposed to be a puzzlement that time runs only one way. And then I thought about how we think of time and space as separate things, as we must, but there’s a flaw in it. We think of space as three dimensions, and of time as one. We could say time was three, past and present and future, but in this there’s no real analogy with depth and breadth and height.  Time after all is really just a point, with an irrecoverable past and an unpromised future. We can conceptualize it, as a salient stone in a tumbling stream, or as the burning spark of a long fuse, or as the tip of a scalpel slicing through flesh.  Who knows where it will cut? -- but we can see the wound.

 Then I thought, that’s what space is, as well -- not really three dimensions, but just one, a point, as time’s present is a point, but which is perceived as having three axial dimensions. Then I thought that space, as a point, as our experience of time is a point, must then have two other aspects, analogues of past and future. So the mystery isn’t Time’s Arrow, but rather, what is the nature of the unperceived and unconceived aspects -- we can hardly call them dimensions -- of space. Well, perhaps we have names for them -- heaven and hell: kaballistically speaking, qliphoth and whatnot, but that analogy doesn’t really correspond.

 Then I thought about how we pay so much attention to time and to space in our lives, and rightly so, but how gravity is a third partner, and more than an equal.  I’ve always seen the need for aether -- and quantum foam, and gravity, and “dark energy” seem to address that need. But that brings us back to the idea that space is a single point, as is time. We never got out of the singularity of the big bang. The universe is a pebble in God’s pocket.

 Well. The idea of a universe is absurd on the face of it. An expanding universe? Into what is it expanding? The laws of physics do not apply to metaphysics; time and space do not exist outside the universe -- thus, time must be separated from consciousness; and the very idea of “outside” is nonsensical, if there is no space. An exploding singularity? Obviously wrong -- the correct analogy would be of an egg -- all the transformations occur within the shell -- there is no expanding -- it doesn’t explode itself into a chicken -- in the end it is a chicken, a chick, inside the shell. That’s what the universe is, a becoming, a chick even, but not yet what it will be. (And so we’ve answered that puzzle: the egg came first; there is no chicken.) But, again, this is not a new idea -- consult the book of Revelation -- wherein we read of the sky rolled back, of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Mysterious terms, like a need to think of space as just a point on a line.

 You see what I’m reduced to. I have to talk to myself.


J

* Bozorg

YT

A little more drama in the news this week, about some shopping center in some African country.  Details hardly matter.  More crap.  Islamist terrorists ... but I repeat myself ... took over a Macy's or something.  Let the moslems go, kept and killed a bunch of Westerners or whatever.  Hardly matters.  Wasn't there something like that here, the week before?  Someone with a gun?  I don't remember.  Probably.  And Obama made it political at a funeral or something.  Of course he did.  What he doesn't understand, it's not guns that kill, it's bullets.  Or do I mean gunpowder.  Well, not guns, anyway.  Insufficiently bulletproof skin kills people.

Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Just the human comedy.

But wait.  No, it seems I'm wrong.  Something unusual did indeed happen.  During that African time of evil and dull terror, one of the monsters shot a woman, English woman.  In front of the eyes of her six year old daughter, and four year old son.  Well, that's nothing unusual.  What's unusual is what followed.  The little boy stepped in front of his fallen mother and his sister, and faced the gun-toting islamist terrorist, and said, “You’re a bad man! Let us leave!”

This, in itself, makes my heart swell with pain and with love.  And the moslem islamist terrorist must have seen the child before him for a moment.  The terrorist follower of Mohammad then said to the little English boy, “Please forgive me.  We are not monsters.”  It follows that the islamist terrorist gave the child a Mars bar, and allowed the family, wounded mother too, to get away from their hostage-taking terrorist murdering moslem captors.  The moslem terrorist instructed the mother that she must convert to Islam, said by the American media to be the religion of peace.

What lessons shall we learn, from this.  Well, there seems to be no human heart so totally depraved that it cannot respond humanly to a child's purity.  I expect it hardly ever happens, that monsters act human -- it is permissible and therefore common in the moslem east to sodomize children, per the islamist Ayatollah Khomeini.  But it happened here, a faint stirring of humanity in the corrupt heart of a moslem monster.

We must be deeply thankful for such a thing.  It is so rich in meaning.

Here's a picture of the little boy, and his sister, and

the Mars bar, I think.

Yes, Mars bar.  Two, in fact.  Windfall.  One for the sister?  How thoughtful.

I wonder if they will ever be eaten.  Sell them on Ebay?  Give them to the Smithsonian, or the UN?  Probably eaten, kids being kids.  I wonder if a Mars bar has enough tensile strength to pull an islamist moslem terrorist out of the Lake of Fire in hell. The media did not report that it was two, TWO Mars bars. This is an FP exclusive!  Typical Western Anti-islam bias at work, no doubt.  Oh, I'm forgetting, how careless of me, that anonymous dead body in the center of the frame, perhaps, what, 5 feet away from the children?  My bad.  Is that blood on the little boy's shirt?  I love New York too.

The Ayatollah famously said the United States was Shaytân-e Bozorg, the Great Satan.  Israel was the Little.  Huh.  It is not Satans, big nor small, that we have to concern ourselves with. It's not guns either.  It's individual people -- nowadays, disproportionately, moslem islamist terrorists.  People, I say, because the only monsters that there are, are people.

There's a lot of talk that these islamist moslem monsters are Americans. Somali-Minnesotans,  American born, teenagers, radicalized somehow and given airfare.  Maybe they saved up, from their paper route money, or their drug-dealer money, or by selling their food stamps for under the counter cash.  Who can say.  I have to wonder if anyone who needs to think of themselves as Hyphenated-American is any kind of American at all.  Here's a new thing for you to admire from me: Constitutional-American.  You may quote me.  As contrasted to the Satan-American teens who've been acting out in African malls, shoplifting Mars bars and littering and whatnot.

It's all too stupid for words.  We're in a concentration camp.  We find a daisy in a dunghill, and find the hope to continue on for a while longer. For a moment, a monster was not a monster.  Shall we think of it as Evolution?  What about the moments that follow?  Life is not a daisy chain.  No one can say what life is.  It's too stupid for words.

Yesterday I thought I was healed.  Today I feel bad.  I have a disease.  I'll just waste my time until I die.  Then I'll see what happens next.


J

*Book of Job, Chapter Nine

YT

I’m reading Job again. Intently. There are parts where my heart quickens. Was it David who was a man after God’s own heart? David does not speak to me. It was not a king, as Saul, who afflicted Job -- it was Satan, and it was God. Seems like a bigger deal. Perhaps there was some drama in the heavenlies of which we are not informed, where David too is handed over to Satan. Well, we know God plays favorites. For all that Job was, eventually, blessed, David was chosen.

 The book isn’t easy to follow, all the arguments and poetry. It would have been written long after the events, with much license. Job’s friends, his comforters, are bores, and boring. Job is riveting. “What is man, that You should magnify him, set Your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment? How long? Will You not look away from me and let me alone till I swallow my saliva? Have I sinned? What have I done to You, O Watcher of Men? Why have You set me as Your target, so that I am a burden to myself? Why then do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I will lie down in the dust, and You will seek me diligently, but I will no longer be.” 

 It is enough. Too much. Job is doubled over on his knees, soundless, strings of drool undoing a lifetime of dignity. Promises that we are not given burdens greater than we can bear do not ring true. Promises that God will comfort us sound like noises from the other side of a door. There’s something inconsistent, about being both a savior and a judge. “Though I were righteous, I could not answer God. If I called and He answered me I would not believe that He was listening to my voice -- for He crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds, without cause. He will not allow me to catch my breath.” Job’s children were crushed in a tempest; Job’s body was infected with wounds; of course he can’t breathe.

 There’s righteous and there’s righteous. We try, and that has to be enough. That’s the deal. We try, and fail, and get forgiven -- then through the Law, now through the Cross. Always, through blood. But there is too much evidence to the contrary, to suppose we’re not pieces on a game board. God may at any time chose to turn our lives into object lessons.

 “God destroys the blameless, and the wicked. If the scourge slays suddenly, God laughs at the plight of the innocent. The earth is given into the hands of the wicked. God covers the faces of its righteous judges. If it is not God, who else could it be?” 

 We were told right up front that God gave permission, for some untold reason, to Satan, to torment Job. If it’s not God’s doing, whose? It must be that suffering doesn’t really matter. Sure feels like hell though, don’t it? But we’re also given the answer, pretty clearly. “God is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him and go to court together. Nor is there any Mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both.” Mediator, Reconciler, Councilor. God without Jesus might as well be Satan. A Judge who can only condemn doesn’t need an Accuser.

 If it is not God, who else could it be? It’s a complex situation. God uses the wicked as well as the good, and both the weak and the strong. God optimizes, and everyone suffers, and evil doers have happiness perhaps as much as the righteous, right up to the end. Clearly our understanding of justice cannot be accommodating all the variables. It’s nuanced. God cannot tolerate imperfection, yet we’re counted as good enough. That’s why quantum mechanics is necessary -- because particles are waves.

 Job, blameless Job in the bitterness of his pain said true things that are not true. God laughs at our pain. But it’s not so much laughter as a chuckle with a shake of the head, as at a crying child who is overly distressed by some small thing. Small, and not small.

 The pain of life is like fetish pornography. It’s not at all interesting, unless that’s your thing. Otherwise you have to just shake your head, and chuckle, if it’s not too gross. Poor, foolish, wretched creatures. Just get on with what’s important. 


J

Microstick

If the President stands before the assembled Press and reports to them the very most important, sensitive, vital secrets, the revelation of which places the nation in dire peril, the Press has a duty,  a deepest, most sacred duty to NOT report that news.  Of course there will be traitors in the press to match the treachery of the politician.  But what does one man's betrayal have to do with another's patriotism?

We live in a culture where someone's profession is more important than his country.  Or, in the case of the Occupant, where his vanity is more important.  I cannot be bothered to inform myself of the specifics, but it seems the entire former plan to punish Assad has been leaked.  Didn't Chelsea Manning go to jail for less than this?

We cannot speak plainly.  It would be too painful to hear.  To be bloody, bold and resolute, to understand and embrace the fact that the nature of things is red in tooth and claw -- we must be both prudent and honest about reality.  The monstrous dictator?  Kill him.  If he hides behind his children, nevertheless, kill him.  If he hides behind the innocent, delay until he can be more prudently killed.  We, as moral beings, concern ourselves with the innocent.  We need not take care of the children of monsters.  That is the job of the monster.

Is what I'm saying inhuman?  It is pragmatic.  Reality and the natural order of things matter.  Life is not a zero-sum game, for all that the innocent will suffer.  Our Constitution does not allow for the corruption of blood -- but nature does: children suffer for the incompetence of their parents.  Too bad.  What we do not do is tell the monster the duration and intensity of our attack against him.

We have a most deeply incompetent Occupant of the White House.  We have a degenerating culture and the well-earned contempt of emboldened enemies.  They are energized by our decadence -- abortion and gay marriage and sexualized children (it's all  about sex, isn't it) -- and they will deserve the success of their conquest.  Success is earned, after all.  Nature is not moral, it is mechanistic; cause and effect.

The conscience of a weakling is worse than useless, as a moral guide.  It is questionable if such a thing even exists.  There currently occupies the Oval Office an occupant who feels his gravitas is magnified when he utters the phrase, "...and I mean it!"  He thinks he'll be taken more seriously, or seriously, when he chillingly warns, "...and I don't bluff!"  Generally?  Here.  Specifically, at second 21.  Brr.  One's blood runs cold.  This is a man who will, no lie, knock your mailbox over.

I have an occasional correspondence with a young former reader -- who now, it is clear, occasionally skims FP.  He has evolved over the years, and seems currently to be leaning a bit more left than right.  Never met him, don't know him, but I respect his sincerity.  It should be met with tenderness. He wondered how gay marriage affected me, that I should have such a clear and negative opinion on the subject.  I responded that the rightness of a thing does not depend on how it affects me. Because he was raised right, he understood the validity of that.

But he also observed that he'd never known anyone who talks as much as I do, about how big my dick is.  This is why I say he skims, rather than reads.  This misunderstanding, through his carelessness -- I won't say it disturbs me, not troubles, not disappoints or saddens -- it gives me an unease.

I am certain I've never explored the matter.  My actual dick is nobody's business; more importantly, I don't think dick-size is in itself funny. I think the mentality that thinks about dick-size is funny.  I know I've bragged about how much weight my dick can deadlift, and I may have mentioned my gigantic scrotum, and I've talked about my huge pubic bone.  I recall I've mentioned hardness, tumescence, semi's, and the like, but this is common to almost all men, regardless of what some are pleased to call "endowment." 

I appear to be obsessed with my abs and my blondness and all such callow vanities -- but, really, please.  You have no business not being in on the joke. I certainly over-reference my intelligence, with allusions to my high IQ.  But this is obvious, where, although I am tall, there's no necessary inference re my dick size.   Specifics, re mine?  Never.  Maybe with the adjective enormous, from the very on-the-nose parodic performance-art character, a monster of ego and delusion, that I sometimes allow to perform in these pages.  

Likewise he said I talk about how small Obama's dick is, and I'm equally sure I've never said it was small -- I said his IQ was bright average, and I suggested at a later date we'd delve into his dick-size.  My point?  Obama's dick is whatever it is, unremarkable, long and thin or fat, short and fat or thin, exotically curved, purple and piebald  -- it's a matter of indifference.

Obama speaks loudly, however, and carries, publicly, a very small stick -- which he has made our business, and which is worse than embarrassing.  While Obama was hastily backing away from some "red line" people kept inconveniently talking about, he tripped himself into a whip-it-out contest with Putin.  Because O is what he is, it is America that must lose.  Obama's tiny little microstick is just a pathetic double-take point-and-laugh shame.

No.  Wait.  I'm sorry.  I'm talking about balls.


J

Red Stain

What should we do?  Be heroes?  This is The Non-Heroic Age.  What else could a war possibly be, where there are "no American boots on the ground".  Where there is no danger, there is no virtue.  It's not a good thing, in itself, to risk life and limb.  But it is necessary, for heroism.  What a bother.  Fine.  We don't need no heroes.  In the safe nannycam world currently being constructed for us, we need only consume, be silent and die.  No, wait, that's a cynical lefty observation upon 1970s Corporate America.  Needs to be amended.  Recycle, conform, and be a hypocrite.  Mankind without chests.  Bosoms only, here, please, male and female, if I may indulge in such archaic vernacular.

Let us concern ourselves with dictators and their anarchy.  Before we turn to the odd-man-out Assyrian of the Sarin gas (supplied complements of the former Saddam Hussain), might we call to mind the fact of chattel slavery, throughout Africa and the Arab world?  Where Christian women, and children, herd goats from dawn to dusk, hunger and thirst and sweat and flies, and then get to be beaten, and raped as often as the Moslim master and his favorites can manage to achieve an erection.  So what.  It's not in the news, before our eyes, occupying for the nonce our minute attention spans.  Ethnic little girl slaves raped daily in the Arab desert?  Ho hum.  A dictator used poison gas!  Now that's news!

Nations should act in their national interest.  Governments are not benevolent associations.  We've covered this ground already, in our American slippers.  So what is it to us if The Assyrian gases HIS OWN PEOPLE?  (Don't you just love how that's always emphasized?  I just don't see how that makes it worse.  Governments have the power and right to apply a police action, as much as to defend or extend their borders.  Duh.  Easy cheesy.)  The US has no pressing national interest in the internal affairs of Syria. I won't defend the statement -- I expect you to see the point.  Sadly, there is another necessity that demands our action.

The Idiot drew a line in the sand -- "Um, I'm warning you, uh, I, er, you'd better not cross th-this um line, and I uh mean it!"  And The Dicpotato crossed the line.  The Idiot said, "Er, uh, you'd better not knock uh this uh chip uh off my sh-shoulder, or else!"  And The Dicpotato knocked the chip off The Idiot's shoulder.  And The Idiot said, "Ooo, uh, now there is definitely going to be a very uh limited uh narrow uh action of some various uh sort, that I have the right to do, but only if the uh bad Republicans let me, but I will anyway, uh but not over the holiday weekend, uh."

It's not The Idiot who is a laughing stock.  It's the Presidency, and America, and the stupid stupid stupid American public.  America deserves the judgment that is coming upon it.  The cup of God's wrath is full, as proven by our abandonment of sanity, and his abandonment of us.  Whatever great archangel it was, who presided over and battled in the heavenlies for the United States, as Michael did or does for Israel, its energy and vitality is expended, now as vitiated as our own spirit.  Indignant protestations as to the remaining vigor and potential of this land to the contrary, there are spiritual laws, as there are laws of physics:  the trajectory of a missile can be calculated as far as the variables are known.  There is a hand at work, determining our direction, and the will behind it is malevolent.  

How dire.  Are you praying, for a Great Awakening? -- for a Revival? -- a rebirth and renewal and revolution and return to self control and independence and personal responsibility?  Maybe God listens, still.  We're told of his hardened heart, and of his awakened compassion.  I see it as arbitrary, so outside of our understanding it is.

Put not your faith in America.  America has a tramp stamp and a piercing in her labia.   America gave herself ducklips so she can give blowjobs to strangers and post the video anonymously on social media.  Yes.  America has made a sex tape.  You betraying bitch.

We have to act in Syria, then, not because poison gas has been used.  Poison gas is always being used, and we do nothing.  We have to act not because hundreds upon hundreds of children have been casually slain.  The math is too hard for me right now, but how many abortions are enjoyed every minute, in America?  Assad is a saint, if we look at the matter statistically, as a ratio of killed children, America:Syria.  We have to act because The Idiot said we would, and we are liars, but we must not be seen to be liars, and we are hypocrites, but we must not be seen to be hypocrites, and we are cowards, and betrayers, and just plain stupid, but we must not be seen to be so.

The counterpart of a vagina is not a penis.  The counterpart of a vagina is an empty scrotum.


J

Red Line

"...we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." --Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940

"...uh. This kind of attack is a challenge to THE WORLD, uh ....uh, so uh I have SAID BEFORE, uh and I MEANT what I SAID, that, uh, TH-THE WORLD has an obligation to make sure that WE maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons.  Now, I have NOT made a final decision, uh, about, uh, various actions that MIGHT be taken to HELP enforce that norm, uh, but uh as I’ve ALREADY SAID, uh I have had MY military uh ... look at a wide range of options.  ...uh in NO event are we considering uh ANY kind of military ACTION that would involve BOOTS ON THE GROUND, uh that would involve a long-term campaign, uh but we are looking at the POSSIBILITY of a LIMITED, uh NARROW uh ACT....  Uh, buh AGAIN, I REPEAT, uh we’re NOT considering ANY open-ended uh COMMITMENT, we’re NOT considering ANY boots-on-the-ground approach, uh what we will do is CONSIDER uh options that uh meet the NARROW concern around chemical weapons, uh understanding that there's NOT going to be uh a solely MILITARY solution...." --Barack Obama, August 30, 2013

-----

...until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.  It's not that we owe them.  To owe is an element of a contract, where there is mutual benefit and obligation.  We receive from them not even a vague hint of present or future respect or loyalty.  They understand that the purpose of a family or a State or a culture is to promote its own best self-interest.  Governments are not benevolent associations.  They exist as competitive organizations, to advance their own goals over those of some other.  Alliances and loyalties can be a good and noble part of this.  Self-sacrifice is not an element in the calculus of nations.

We do not owe them.  We owe ourselves.  What do we owe to the ingrate?  Only what we actually owe.  Gratitude is insubstantial and not a fungible commodity.  As an element of honor and integrity, it carries profound weight.  But we're talking realpolitik here.  And that's a good thing.  God may, and does, note the falling of sparrows, but he doesn't as a rule keep them from falling.  God cares, but he does not act.  He's acted already, on a Cross.  Job done.  Now it's on us.  That's religious, which is in the same category as gratitude.  Insubstantials.

But because we owe ourselves, to be faithful to our better angels and loyal to our best principals, we must be worthy of our power and might.  Because we must be honorable, we must be generous -- an impractical and costly thing, and very often fruitless and indeed foolish.  It's not that we must be foolish; it's that wisdom is far more complex than a glib mind can see, and its benefit can developed so far into the future that cause and effect cannot be discerned.

The frankly inevitable outcome of Obama's Libyan leading from behind "leadership" can be found in the massacre and murders in Libyan Benghazi.  The Incompetent-in-Chief doesn't even know what the term "shot across the bow" means.  It would be better if the ship of state had no hand at the wheel, rather than the direction our re-elected "captain" (what a joke) is taking us.  It's not that our course is random, but that we are adrift and guided not by stars but by winds, not principles but emotions.

Churchill looked to the United States for salvation, and his faith and hope were not disappointed.  That was another age, and a different New World, peopled here not by the Greatest Generation, but by the last decent generation.  What can we expect from the drug abuser who currently occupies the Oval Office?  The very minimum it will take for him to save face.  Tough talk like 'red line' re the use of Syrian chemical weapons ... well, what are words for?  Manipulating people into having a nice opinion of you?  Dictators may be cowards, may be fools, certainly are "bullies" (murdering monsters), but they are very good at recognizing empty-suit weakling lying pols, and will be excellent at noting the frequency that warnings are not acted on.  You know, Obama's foreign "policy."

Where the innocent cry out for rescue, oh God let us be men.

What should we do, re Syria?  We should identify our own best self-interest, and act on that, with fierce resolve.  I find that I am, still, after all these years, a fool.  We must do what is right.  We must find monsters and slay them.  I wish I were smarter, more prudent, wiser.  But murderous injustice is intolerable.  We can wait forever for God to rain down fire from the sky.  If we want fire from the sky, we have to do the job ourselves.  Kill the Syrian hierarchy.  Target their palaces and their families.  Pick the winners, and back them.

There is no best outcome.  There is only being true to your nature.

J

First Horseman

At first glance it doesn't work, this being the time of the First, of Four, Horsemen.  But the first is Conquest, and we are indeed being conquered.  After all, the necessary counterpart of conquest is capitulation.  And we have capitulated.  War, Famine, and Death, in their turn.

Bradley E Manning, heroic patriot whistleblower, announced Tues that he is now Chelsey E Manning.  Whether or not the E still stands for Edward is unreported.  He is now by self-declaration a female, and per his statement wishes that "you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility)."

Oh, when I said he was "patriotic" I must have meant to the world, rather than to such an outmoded paternalistic idea as a nation.  So I must have meant he was matriotic.  And when I said "heroic", it would have been one of those different strokes things, what's right for some may not be right for others.  And when I said whistleblower I would not have been referring to penises or oral sex.  And when he says "confinement facility", he means prison.  And when you say she, you mean he.

Wikipedia now redirects "Bradley Manning" to "Chelsey Manning".  The change was made within a few hours of the press release.  Thus,  opening sentence: "Chelsea E. Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, 17 December 1987)..."  Was there a legal name change?  Well, hasn't Manning demonstrated that there is no need of law?

Here Chelsey is when she was a little boy.

Mmm.  Hot!  I mean, don't get me wrong, she's too young of course, but if she were an adult I'd do her in a heartbeat.

OH! Woo hoo! Happy day!!  I dig a woman with a 5 inch clitoris.

The Wikipedia article has already shifted all the HEs to SHEs.  That was fast.  SLATE knows a dame when it sees one; there, properly, Manning is Womanning.  NPR  avoids pronouns, calling Manning Manning throughout their reportage.  Very cowardly and insensitive of them.  Fascists. They should be killed.

You can change your mind, you can change your name.  You can change your underwear, for panties.  You can't change your sex.

But.  I apologize.  Especially about that clitoris thing.  I should strive to repel rather than embrace vulgarity and the delusion and wantonness around me.  I should resist rather than comply with the abandonment of all former standards of sanity.  But I am unhinged.  We have lost.  I think it's over.  Obama, in his sermons about what America is, making sure to always include in his formula, "no matter the color of our skin, or [insert verbiage] ... or who we love..."  The Wikipresident.  QED.

So, in Oklahoma, two black teens and a white boy shot a jogger in the back.  Death to tourists!

James Francis Edwards, age 15 (second from left), one of the bored boys ... teens, recently tweeted: "90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM." Another reads, "Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!:)"  Per the Urban Dictionary, "woods" is "a  derogatory term used to portray dumb white boys."  Good to know.  I wish there were some term appropriate to portray murderous racist teens.  And thank you, Media, for making our teens so civic minded, what with their following important current event stories the way this boy must have done, re Zimmerman. "Nigga of chief keef don't drop almighty SOSA or something by #Monday I'ma put hands on every wood I see until they drop lol."  Now, I confess I don't understand the specific meaning intended here (SOSA is perhaps "cocaine that is meant to be snorted from a stripper's buttcrack.").  Just the general tone.

 Go Army.  James also tweeted: "I see death around the Coner".  Well, teens can be a bit macabre.  It's a maturity thing.  Same thing: "Some say ima be dead or in jail by the time I'm 18. But the only problem there is...#i shoot first,and I got bond money!: so sorry to burst your bubble."  A sense of destiny and invulnerability.  I was the same way.  On Aug 13 -- why that's only 3 days before his little outing with his little friends! -- James tweeted: "With my niggas when it's time to start taken life's"  I like to tweet my location too! "In Starbucks sucking a rad joe!"

 James is the one who was dancing and laughing as he was being booked.  So he's got talent and a sense of humor, too. I trust it will serve him well in his confinement facility.  It's not all fun and games, though.  He's broken the heart of Rachel Padilla, his sister (from uhnothuh mothuh?): 

Think, son ... think!  But at least his moms, Brenda M, is a happy person.

The notable and noble thing about women like this (as I have intimate cause to know) is that they balance out their having abortions with having babies ... they are fruitful and multiply!  Drugs and crime and having babies ... how well I remember her.  Brenda should have gone into the Army.  Makes a woman out of you!  

What did Fairness & Justice spokesperson The Reverend Al Sharpton opine on this issue? Quote: *crickets*

Above, among the mug shots, the man on the left -- practically anonymous thrill-kill victim Christopher Lane -- was not available for comment.

 Death is not soon enough for this world.  We just have to plod through War and Famine.  Hasten the way.


J

Epic Fail

The Discerning Reader of These Pages will have noticed that it has not yet been the policy of FP to reference the current Occupier of the White House in the lower case.  Such has been the practice with clinton, and with carter -- clinton for the disgrace he brought to the office while in power, and carter for his shoddy emeritus conduct.  Obama is too small for the office, and wrong on every issue of importance, but he is not yet a fornicator or a traitor.

Obama: a man of surpassingly minor accomplishments prior to the gifting of his current station.  Fate must always have conspired to ensure that he was the glibbest man in the small room.  Or perhaps he so engineered the situation.  In any case, out of unchallenging circumstances he constructed for himself a prodigious self-regard.  The greatest of his many many failures of judgment, values and perception -- "gay" "marriage", Obama-"Care", "Global" "Warming", etc -- is his high opinion of his own abilities.  It may be that he is as smart as he thinks he is.  Objective evidence to the contrary not withstanding.  His virtue falls short of his ambition.

It is not reasonable that I actually am as smart as I think I am.  I'm smarter than Lisa Simpson, per her published IQ (a lot smarter). But my meager life accomplishments mitigate against the Great State of California's testing of my intelligence, way back in the day when it was legal and mandatory for states to take such measurements.  You know, before we found out that it was racist to measure for differences. Now we measure only for similarities.  You know, to firmly establish equality and fairness.

This pretty interesting blog post uses what objective measurements there are to yield an IQ for Obama of not over 116.  That is perfectly respectable.  "Bright normal".  Obama is bright.  No one would argue that he is not bright.  He's bright.  That means there are likely to be realized talents, perhaps even optimized.  The careful composition of several poetical speeches, and their delivery in sonorous, yea, mellifluous tones.  I'd give him an A minus.  But as with elite marathon running, sometimes there is only one or two truly great performances in a man. Obama shot his wad in his 2004  DNC speech, and in his "Si se pueda" candidate poem. Since then, on occasion he has been bright normal.  Mostly, though, not that bright.

It's not that Icarus flew too close to the sun.  It's that Icarus did not fly at all -- it's just a made-up story, about an impossibility.  Man-sized wings made out of sticks and wax and feathers are not functionally operative in the real world.  How nice it would be, if fantasy could be made real.  But dreams aren't real.  Realistic goals and effective training create excellence.  There are natural prodigies, who excel with little real exhaustion  or development of character.  Just so are there snakes hatched with two heads.  Prodigies, that did not earn their uniqueness.  They were noticed by the gods, and bear the mark.  There is no blessing in having two heads.  Better to diligently develop the intelligence contained within one's own, single head -- the intelligence, and the character.  Rather than getting by with the dog and one-trick pony show -- glib speaking skills honed between tokes during all-night sophomore rap sessions.

My expectation is that Obama labored over his several speeches, in their composition and delivery.  It need not be so, that he sold his soul for them.  Maybe he earned them.  Even a socialist must have some small grasp of the concept of earning what you attain.  But the presidency of the United States should not have been purchased for so cheap a price.  Something about a mess of pottage.

Obama's great failing -- aside from how poorly he has served the best interests of America -- is that he judged himself sufficient to the job.  At some point the possibility arose, to run, and after some thought -- for what man is so trifling that he would not at least pause -- Obama said, Yes, I am the man for this job.  I'm the best man in the field.  No one could do this job better than I.  To so underestimate the task, and overestimate his abilities -- well, you kids nowadays use the word "epic" a fair bit.  Here we have it.  Epic fail.

Were my arrogance altered in such a way as to make me crave a literal spotlight, and I conceived the idea that I had great leadership skills, and party apparatchiks observed my excellence and manipulated the media to present me as a golden boy ... well, even under such a circumstance I might very well demur, knowing myself as I do.  I am amazing, but I'm not up to the presidency.  Under those same circumstances, Obama thrust himself forward.  Fail, re self-evaluation.  Sadly, history will be the judge.  If only Obama had adequately judged himself.  He would have remained a perfectly sufficient Chicago ward politician, sidelining as an associate professor and part-time community organizer.  He would have made some sociology grad student a very nice obscure subject for a research paper -- "An Analysis of 'Present' Voting Patterns in the 2002-2003 Illinois State Assymbly".  Grad student, Pass.  Obama, Epic fail.

Next time, estimates about the size of Obama's dick.


J

More Terror

One of the countless reasons everyone admires me so much is that I never have to compromise, because I am so obviously and always right.  If there were every any doubt about this fact, I might have to explain my conclusions to someone, because they were initially incapable of apprehending the inevitable virtue of my clarity.  Since I am the most patient man in the world, of necessity, I would and do not mind or resent such intellectual incompetence, for all that it technically wastes my most-valuable-of-all time.

Anyone else who never has to compromise would be an extremist.  They must get their own way, impose it, by violence if need be, and regardless of cost or the damage it does to others. Compromise is the opposite of fanaticism and extremism.  Thus, the Obaministration, which rephrases "islamist terrorism" as "violent extremism."  This observation, from Krauthammer.  "The word 'extremism' is meaningless. People don’t devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content."

Obama most recently asserts that he will not compromise on the upcoming next-in-line fiscal crisis.  Cuz, like, planning a budget that doesn't always spend disproportionately more is, like, undemocratic.  So, no compromising, like some not-American car company motto.  Dictators do not compromise.  Anyone involved in politics must.  Why must it be, that I and I alone am the only person who has ever pointed this fact out?

Well.  I've said it before.  Admitted it.  Observed, discovered it.  I hold a grudge.  This has come as a big surprise to me.  I had not been aware of that quality in my character.  But I am a hard man, reaping where I did not sow.  It seems that the pattern is, screw me once, well, you may not have meant it.  Do it again and it's malice.  So with the plumber, who turned the neighbor's water off, and mine as well, without warning.  For a couple of days.  Hmm.  Well, you'd think a professional would have noticed that the lines were connected, but never mind.  Then the next week he did it again -- said the water would be off for three hours, and left it off all weekend. I'm easy, I'm polite and accommodating, the first time. The second time, it is an assault on my human worth. He had the phone number, but it didn't occur to him to make the call.  And now again, today, he's effing around with the neighbor's issue and interfering here for incomprehensible and inadequate reasons.  I am immobilized with disgust.  I know it's not reasonable of me.  Roll with the punches.  But I spent my childhood being the victim of scum.  Apparently I don't like it.  I have a spiritual disorder.

The heel pain must be a spur.  I have a podiatrist appointment -- finally got to it.  I've been massaging it etc, to no real effect, and that's supposed to be the fix.  Why doesn't anything ever get better?

I just told a child to run with scissors.

Well, it seems my animadversion of the use of "garnish", as of wages, has been misapplied -- it is not an illiterate usage, in place of "garnishee."  It rings clangorously in my ears, garnish used this way, calling up images of parsley, but it is not only correct but can lay strong claim to being preferred.  Go figure.  It appears that I, even I must very slightly moderate an opinion once in a very great while.  I have betrayed myself.


J

Zoom

The Idiot swept by in his motorcade yesterday, to do Leno.  Someone I know got a knock on her door, and a looming giant instructed her to take her trash cans in off the street.  Secret Service -- or, in this case, considering at whose pleasure he serves, SS.  The woman twittered some joke to her significant other, denigratory of the Kenyan, and I told her she was now on a Homeland Security list.

I'm sure that the NSA or Homeland Security or some other Agency  or all of them and certainly the IRS have computer algorithms searching out  phone and web and text disloyalty against Zero, and one of the flagged phrases must be "The Idiot."

In his declamation to Camp Pendleton Marines yesterday, The Idiot joked that "The United States is never going to retreat from the world.  We don't get terrorized."  What?  Huh?  You say he wasn't joking?  Oh.  Well ... um, well, I hardly know what to say then.  We don't get terrorized, cuz 9-11 never happened.  It was a bad acid trip, dude.  Gnarly.  It was not Al Qaeda, but an incredible simulation.  CGI.  Hollywood Lefties did it to show how stupid Bush was.  And now that you mention it I'm sure that I never did see Americans fleeing in terror from the billowing dust clouds sweeping down the canyoned boulevards of NYC.   This, although it will go unnoticed, was an even more inept verbal formulation than Doubleyou's "Bring it on." Bring it on means "try it again".  We don't get terrorized means "do even worse".

Obama's patriotism extends so far that he takes the bother to say "The United States" rather than just "America."  Such dignity and reverence.

 I mean, look at the size of that flag!

Of course, it's the wrong flag.

Ah, that's better.  The Ol' Zeros and Strips.


J

Sty

I come, belatedly, to Charles Krauthammer's simple and eloquent words.  Belatedly, of course.  My destiny has outpaced me, and I am left floundering.  Simple and eloquent, of course.  More frequently than not, they are paired.  Complexity can be eloquent, and simplicity can be coarse.  But: "The Father of Waters again rolls unvexed to the sea."

Krauthammer is always simple, clear, direct, the most logical of the opinion-writers.  For Zimmerman, justice? -- punishment?  "All we have is the human kind whose only standard in a civilized society is this: A jury has spoken."

You will know by now my opinion.  There is no justice.  Punishment, certainly.  Redress, occasionally ... perhaps half the time?  Injustice, well, always.  Because there is no justice.  That's logic.  I no longer consider myself wise -- it was a long fall with a hard landing.  But I suppose that wisdom is finding, crafting, extracting somehow a sense of joy even in such a world as this.  The most and best that we can expect from life is embedded, like a beetle in amber, within the judgment of others.  The jury continues to speak, dictating our circumstances -- wisdom abides in the choosing of our response.

So Obama got himself reelected.  Some French philosopher said, "Every nation has the government it deserves."  Sounds pretty smart.  And it's right, mostly.  Tweak it a little and it is right: Every nation deserves the government it affirms.  The Cambodians did not deserve the Khmer Rouge.  People don't deserve that.  Nations, perhaps, do.  Why was Cambodia so Third World, that such a thing could happen?  Why did they not have their own wise leader or traditions to establish strong and sane institutions?  Ach.  There it is.  Justice, and no justice.  Failure brings disproportionate punishment.

As for Obamerica, I now think of it not as the Prodigal Son, who left the dignity of his father's household to be a wastrel and then live with pigs.  I think of America as the pigs.  The pig returneth to its vomit.  Perhaps once the Lord was our Shepherd.  Now we have a swineherd.

I didn't eat this week.  A juice fast, kale and chard and dandelion leaf and suchlike.  Blech.  Five days.  Does not seem to have helped.  But I will persevere.  I don't have any extra weight to lose, so I don't want to lose weight.  Haven't been this, um, lean since distant days when I was in deep grief.  Meantime there are bad days, and days that are not quite so bad.  What's that you say?  I should go to the doctor?  But ... I don't know any doctors.  And, uh, I don't want to be spending my very limited resources on inevitable expensive tests that are inevitably unhelpful.  For example, I still do not have AIDS or syphilis or chlamydia, etc.  Not helpful information.  I knew that already.  And, um, I am mentally and spiritually ill, and there's something in me that wants to degrade and destroy myself, and embraces constant pain as a deserved punishment.

Out of such contradictions were the worlds created.

July 3 my son was born.  August 3 I asked my wife to marry me.  September 3 I became Christian.  October 3 I got my divorce decree.  November 3 my son was conceived.  We strive to find order in chaos, and purpose in what is random.  We impose it.  (Pardon my sententiousness.  It's what I do.  But I can't resist: "We impose it.")  Like God imposes life upon ourselves, impresses it into the clay of our nature.  Impressive, such an imposition.

Thank you.  Thank you very much.


J