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January 31, 2005

Best Sci-Fi in Any Form

n my humble opinion, the greatest science fiction in any form is the television series Babylon 5.

Better than Star Trek, better than the Foundation trilogy, better than Stranger in a Strange Land, better than...well, you get the message. The creator of Babylon 5 is J. Michael Straczynski.

Here's my favorite picture of J. Michael Straczynski:

If you have not taken the time to get to know this television series, let me try to persuade you to rent or buy the DVDs.

The series was conceived as a 5-year saga, a novel painted on a grand tapestry of time and space. Thus, unlike Star Trek (and don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Star Trek), major characters can undergo profound shifts of character and tragically die.

The pilot, The Gathering, and the first season are a bit rocky on the story/acting side of things. Like so many new shows, it takes a while for it to get its sea legs. But the investment is more than worth it.

I tried once to create a set of B5 tapes of season one that eliminated weak episodes that would not be crucial to the underlying arc of the show (and believe me there is one helluva arc, more than one, in fact). But I couldn't do it. Every episode contained a piece that was needed to appreciate a future episode.

And that's the first thing about B5: You must see it from the beginning, in order. Otherwise, it's like jumping into the middle of a novel. The stories/episodes build on each other so that by the time you get to the first season finale, you begin to get a glimpse of the larger universe being fashioned.

I was one of those who checked in on it when it first ran and blew it off as just another Star Trek rip off.


Big mistake!

Years later I caught it from the beginning on the FX channel, after hearing how great it was from friends. What a ride! (I envy those who are about to have their first experience with it.)

The second season really begins to build, in character, story, acting, and arc. The season finale is a revelation.

Season three, however, is when all cylinders fire and, about halfway into the season, you are taken for the ride of your life. By the time you hit the third season cliffhanger, you're stunned, shaken, and amazed.

Season four manages to pack more action into it than the first three seasons combined, and season five cruises like the Space Shuttle coming in for a landing until you hit the final episode of the series, which will move you to tears.

Some things to keep in mind when first watching:

Enjoy!

*** If you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die. Kosh

Update: A Warning! Do not watch the 2-hour movie In the Beginning until AFTER season 4. It will give away several surprises.

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Posted by witnit at 8:06 AM

January 30, 2005

Perfect, Horrible Feel-Bad Movies

ere is a list of movies that don't end well, some of which I am embarassed to admit that I like because of the high artistic quality, fine acting, blah blah blah.

David Cronenberg has weird dreams in some lower astral hell that he somehow turns into movies. How does he get the financing? Because he takes us to places we wouldn't even think of visiting, except via film, which seems safer. I'm not always so sure.

Here's my favorite picture of David Cronenberg's mind:

If you've never seen a Cronenberg film and are easily disturbed, skip 'em. They make Scream look like a day at Disneyland.

Here is another list of more terrestrial, perfect feel-bad films:

I'd also have to add Quentin Tarentino's film's, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. (I'd add the Kill Bill films but they actually end well...for Uma.)

*** I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film. David Cronenberg

(Did you catch the Easter Egg?)

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January 29, 2005

John McWhorter, Articulator

ohn McWhorter, a writer and thinker I admire greatly, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an associate professor of linguistics at U.C. Berkeley.

His books include Authentically Black, The Power of Babel, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.

Here is my favorite picture of John McWhorter:

You can get a flavor of his thinking with this Op-Ed piece, Why I'm Black, Not African American.

His latest book is Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. Is that, like, a great title or what?

If you've never read this man, ARE YOU, LIKE, INSANE? Here's the introduction to his new book. Now go forth and put money into Mr. McWhorter's pockets. Keep this man in leisure to write more books and talk more on television and radio. Hugh Hewitt take note!

*** Appreciate me now and avoid the rush! Ashleigh Brilliant

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January 28, 2005

Random Morsels

his month's Penguin Dope Slap goes to Univ. of Colorado poorfessor Ward Churchill, who says things like "On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center."

Now he plans on appearing at Hamilton College in NY, and people are pissed. Thanks to Little Green Footballs for holding the line against ivory tower idiocy.

Take that, Poorfessor Churchill:

If you want to read this fool's paper, ""Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," go here. (I say fool because he is not stupid. Many people with intelligence are fools. And fools can mouth idiocy. I've done it myself, but usually I correct myself when discovered.)

I've decided to move Random Morsels to Fridays. Makes more sense news-wise.

*** Victory goes to whoever makes the second-to-last mistake.

Update: More Churchill information.

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The God Game, Part 2

his post continues thoughts started in The God Game, Part 1.

I used to subscribe to Skeptic magazine. I love science. I enjoyed reading the likes of Martin Gardner, the former Mathematical Games colunmist of Scientific American.

Martin was then replaced by Douglas Hofstadter who is even more brilliant. (His books are powerful play for mathematical/musical/linguistic minds, especially the original Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

I also enjoyed James Randi, Isaac Asimov, and Michael Shermer.

Yet none of them believe in the Soul or in God. They can look at a little girl holding a doll, and feel nothing odd or irrational in pointing at the doll and saying, "That has obviously been designed by a creative mind" and then point at the girl and declare, "That is not the result of a design by a creative mind."

(Update: As the comments below point out, I am wrong about Michael Shermer and Martin Gardner. I made the kind of mistake one makes when applying to all contributors the beliefs held by the loudest voices. I apologize for the error. I should have used the names of the more popular radical defenders of evolution. Not that I discount evolution. Please keep in mind that the writing that follows speaks only to that domain of staunch rationalist skeptics who start from the position that they believe there is no God until there is scientific evidence to prove such existence.)

I finally had to end my subscription to Skeptic. Why? I simply got tired of the rather sloppy, hypocritical, unscientific attacks on believers in Soul or God.

Specifically, I got tired of rationalists who could attack the leap of faith (and anecdotal experiences) of many Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others, when these same rationalists failed to recognize their own leap of faith denying the existence of Soul or God.

I can understand if they say there is no scientific proof, and that they simply do not know. But they abdicate their right to claim to be scientific when they declare that there is no Soul or God.

The Micro-Scientific Method

Many authorities, particularly rationalists, insist that reality is best explained consistently through the Scientific Method of experimentation. Anecdotal evidence is always suspect, so consistent results of experiments conducted by a variety of researchers offer better evidence for the truth of a proposition. Never mind that science is essentially a series of anecdotal experiences.

(Really, when was the last time you had direct, first-hand experience with anything "scientifically proven"? Almost all that you believe to be scientifically proven is really based on the authority of anecdotal stories. How often have you opened the newspaper only to discover that the latest studies show that all previous studies are wrong? How often have you believed the new anecdotal scientific story has proven that the previous anecdotal scientific story is wrong? Is your belief "scientific"?)

I call this the Macro-Scientific Method. It's the staple of our media diet of statistics and research and studies. It carves out a very particular, very narrow domain of experience and declares that to be truth. Don't get me wrong. The Macro-Scientific method goes far in the "hard sciences" in revealing material truths.

But there is also a Micro-Scientific Method, which carves out a far larger domain of experience and truth. This Method centers on one's own personal experience rather than on authoritative studies.

I know what thoughts I had 10 minutes ago. What those thoughts are can only be known by me. I cannot scientifically prove them to anyone. If I tell anyone, that's declared to be anecdotal. But they're still true.

The hubris of the rationalists at Skeptic magazine is that they can selectively negate all that is provable through the Micro-Scientific Method, through direct, personal knowing. To negate Soul and God and everything else outside the scientific domain, all that they have to do is start from the position that nothing is true except what is scientifically provable. It's a perfect gotcha.


Why not start from the position that everything is possible, and only negate what is scientifically proven not to be so?

Oops. Sorry. That would allow too much possibility.

The Two Traditions

We dwell in the western tradition that goes back to the Greeks. We center ourselves in the philosophical tradition that starts with Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and goes through Augustine, Erasmus, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Mill, Darwin, Marx, Freud, James, Wittgenstein, and Turing. (Nope. Won't link 'em. Go to The Philosophy Pages, if you want.)

The philosophical tradition is primarily one of interpreting reality with the mind.

The other tradition is the initiatory tradition. This is the tradition of enlightenment, conversion, direct knowing, revelation, learning from the feet of an inspired master, or directly from Spirit of God or something.

The initiatory tradition bypasses the mind and supplies knowing directly, through some kind of direct experience, often inexplicable, beyond language, and sometimes sending someone into such a state that rationalists want to lock them away. It's very unscientific because it's exceedingly personal and unprovable to others.

The initiatory tradition interprets truth outside the mind. Perhaps directly by this thing called Soul.

Of course many people combine both traditions into any number of combinations.


Prelude to the God Game

People, especially rationalists, look at this world and the so-called problem of evil (most often encapsulated in the statement, How can a God allow children to suffer?) and declare that there can be no God. There is no way to reconcile a loving God with the nature of this world.

Maybe not. But let's try an experiment.

Forget all that you know. Forget all that you believe regarding science and religion and philosophy. Detach yourself from your cherished anchor points. Try this thought experiment:

Suppose you were an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being. Suppose you had the impulse to create. The question that begins The God Game is simple.

What would you create?

Think about that. I'll give you my answer in The God Game, Part 3.

*** There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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January 27, 2005

Why a Limited Federal Government?

lease note: As strident as my writing sometimes seems, and as passionate as I am about my opinions, I'm not so attached to them that I'm not open to countering arguments and evidence. Short essays are not the best for arguing positions adequately. But they can be sharp and fun.

Government by nature is about coercion. What distinguishes governments of any stripe from business or any other entity is that government is empowered to use force: Forcing people to follow law, forcing people to pay it money, forcing people to use its services, forcing people to support others. Government exists with the constant implicit threat that you will be jailed or killed if you do not submit to its coercion.

Many people in government are good people. They take their job seriously, and they actually accomplish good things. Still, much of the good that government is supposed to accomplish actually accomplishes the opposite. But to stay in the midst of political power, politicians and bureaucrats strive to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. As their ideals fade, they become "practical," and "realistic."

Here's my favorite picture of a politician:

That is why you constantly see politicians change once they are in office for an extended period of time. You see, many professional politicians and bureaucrats have had to compromise their principles to get something done, or they have indulged in some abuse of power and have come to believe that that is just how things are supposed to be. Therefore, when a newcomer politician or bureaucrat arrives with "stars in their eyes" and lofty principles, the professionals actively try to co-opt the newcomer. Teach them a lesson about politics.

How many times have you seen a principled member of Congress eventually forced to smile and mouth a position that you know they don't believe in, just to get the support of their political party?

All governments to some extent are tyrannies and embody the constant probability of abuse.

That is why America was founded upon principles of a limited government. The Founders clearly understood that by creating a Federal government, they were creating an entity that was potentially as tyrannical as the one they were throwing off. Thus they created The U.S. Constitution, which was designed to limit the powers of the Federal government that they were creating.

The U.S. Constitution does not grant rights. This fact is now mostly lost in the public consciousness, which believes that the Constitution is a government document that grants rights to people.

No. Every word of it is about defining the explicit powers of the Federal government. Everything not explicitly defined is not granted to it. Therefore, the Federal government has no business engaging in most of the activities it currently engages in. It is supposedly limited to what is explicitly granted in the Constitution.

The Constitution functioned as it was supposed to up until the early part of the 20th century, when the current Federal government was finally and effectively unhinged from the Constitution's limiting capacity. The Federal government has since taken on a range of coercive powers to force people to work for it and its social and political goals. We now live under an increasingly socialist government, where more than half of our labor goes to support the government through explicit and implicit taxation (the income tax being one of the most pernicious).

The Constitution, in its original 18th century capacity, allowed U.S. citizens a life mostly free from government coercion. By the middle of the 20th century, that changed to where U.S. citizens increasingly were subject to government controls and intrusions, in the name of freedom and security.

We are oftened warned of the dangers of socialism; that is, government coercively and selectively taking money (and therefore labor, in most cases) from some to selectively support others. Nothing in the Constitution was designed to allow for this, for the simple reason that a government that can selectively take and give is a tyranny. It becomes ridden with sycophants and manipulators and grand strategies for trying to get something through favors rather than personal merit.

Both businesses and special interests are only able to get something out of the government to the extent that government has the power to selectively give through favor what it selectively takes. Right now, both political parties engage in socialism and government by favor, although the Democratic party by far carries the banner of government socialism.

Unfortunately, many Americans have bought into emotional socialistic thinking that persuades them that it is the government's job to shape the social landscape. Increasing tyranny and slavery is the result. Forcing people to support others in their leisure is slavery, whether the leisure class is aristrocrats, slave owners, or the needy.

(Progressives looked to the Graduated Income Tax as the answer to the imbalance of income between the upper and lower classes. Little did they realize that this tax would insidiously open the door to all kinds of special interests who desire to influence and manipulate government. The U.S. Constitution allowed only those taxes that could be equally applied. Remember: The power to tax is the power to destroy. Raise your hand if you are afraid of the IRS?)

There are fundamental principles of liberty: Do all you agree to do and do not encroach on other people or their property.


All the rationalizations for supporting an increasingly socialist government are simply social consciousness blindness. In the mid-1960s, about 25% of black children were born into poverty. 40 years after The Great Society attempts through increase taxation and profligate spending that has increased almost every year, after billions spent, now almost 70% ofblack children are born into poverty. (Source: Thomas Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race and Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?)

Hello. Is anyone paying attention?

Government socialism enslaves, even while it deludes itself into believing that it is freeing. The answer worldwide is always less government. Government action has enslaved and murdered more in the 20th century than religion did for the last 2000 years. (And the religions that did this functioned as governments because of their coercive exercise of power.)

(Some want to point to European models of socialism that worked. They don't, or at least, people don't take into account that these countries have, for the most part, been relieved of the burden of financially supporting their own militaries and defense by the huge support coming from the United States for NATO.)

As an individual, I resist all attempts for any government expansion. I believe the Federal government is Consitutionally powered to do only one-tenth of what it does.

Perhaps that explains more clearly why, even though I voted for him, I am only on board with about 30% of what President Bush stands for.

*** The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. Winston Churchill


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January 26, 2005

Random Morsels

his month's Penguin Dope Slap goes to Johnny Carson, for dying way too young, and leaving the planet absent one of its greatest comedic geniuses. We'll miss him. So will his writers. And commedians.

Four Questions to Ask before You Get Married: For Paula, and anyone thinking about getting married. If you can answer Yes to all four questions, you may have found your partner for life.

1. If this person were to stay just the way they are now for the rest of their lives, would that be okay with you? 2. Would you like to become more like this person? 3. If you were to have a child, would you want to have a child with this person? 4. Would you want the child to grow up to be exactly like this person?

*** The next time travel class will be held two weeks ago.

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January 25, 2005

Perfect, Funny Feel-Good Films

am not a professional film buff. I am not a film critic. I cannot explain the merits of Jean Cocteau, the subtlety of John Cassavetes, or the existentialism of Ingmar Bergman.

I know what I like, and maybe I can recommend to you some funny feel-good films on DVD that I regard as perfect (able to be seen again and again with greater appreciation) that you have not seen or heard about. (Later I may post some perfect feel-bad films.)

*** Our comedies are not to be laughed at. Samuel Goldwyn

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January 24, 2005

Evil Dictionaries and Money, Part 1

he genuine purpose of a dictionary is to preserve distinctions despite public misuse.

A good dictionary functions as a ruler, as a constant unit of measurement for meanings to help people acquire a flexibility and subtlety of language and thought, for deeper and common communications and expressions.

A good dictionary warns against such misuse.

An evil dictionary, on the other hand, will descend to popular misusages, even to the point of deleting the original, correct usages. By evil, I mean that which breaks down structures and hierarchies that lead to greater freedom of thought, expression, and awareness.

Which word is correct usage for the following sentence? "We expect his continual/continuous presence in class this month."

"Continual" means repeated at intervals while "continuous" means non-stop. Therefore, continuous presence would mean he never goes home, night or day. This is a distinction worth preserving, but evil dictionaries will blur the distinction, calling them synonyms.

Evil dictionaries allow misusages to flourish and blur distinctions that are freeing. We live in an age that throws out hierarchies just for being hierarchies. Thus, many liberating structures are being reduced to rubble.

Manipulators of power want to blur the language, to keep people from using language specifically, clearly, and effectively because such people are easy to control. Clear and distinct definitions clarify reality, while unclear and ambiguous usage and misusage blur reality and keep people from seeing what is really going on. ("It depends on what the meaning of is is.")

In other words, if I can get a blurred meaning into your imagination, you will not see past that implanted meaning. I can then get away with misdirection in reality, while you are blinded by the implant.

Let me give a politically manipulative example that you can use to immediately classify your dictionary. Look up the word inflation in its economic sense. If the definition given is only that inflation is "a general rise in prices," then you have an evil dictionary. If your dictionary defines inflation as "an increase in the supply of currency that causes prices to rise", then you have a good dictionary.

If your dictionary supplies both without warning you that the first usage is a popular misuse, then you have a partially evil dictionary.You see, there is a profound difference between the two definitions. Inflation is not "rising prices." Inflation causes prices to rise.

There are people who want you to believe that inflation is merely rising prices in order to disguise the fact that it is the government or its appointed designees who "inflate the currency supply" (i.e., inject more money into the economy making the value of all money to go down and thus prices to rise).

If you never knew that governments cause rising prices by printing up more money (to finance wars, foreign aid, parties), then congratulations. You have been taken in by a con game that has been going on as long as there have been governments.

Study Roman history to see how the Caesars did it. Have you ever wondered why so many old coins have holes in them? Once the treasury got low with all the big parties, Caligula, say, would require that the money (gold and silver coins) have their centers punched out so that the metal could be melted down and more coins could be made. And a law would be passed requiring citizens to use the holed coins as if they still contained the full value of silver or gold of those without holes.

Of course, such laws failed, since the holed coins would immediately be devalued by merchants who raised their prices to account for the difference. One of the reasons why Greek and Roman history and the Greek and Latin languages are being removed from high school and college curriculums is that fewer students will stumble upon such truths. A deep study of Greek and Roman history and politics reveals starkly uncomfortable truths.

Of course, a good dictionary should supply the technical definitions as well as the popular reductions or alterations, but it should also make clear when there is a possible problem or potential confusion. That's one reason I like the Oxford English Dictionary (which gives the complete history of usage) and the Oxford Amercian Dictionary (which for example warns one not to confuse Continual with Continuous). (Of course, as you have seen with the link above, you can't trust AskOxford.Com, a terrible irony.)

But the main point I am making is that a dictionary's primary purpose should be to preserve real distinctions so that everyone has access to those distinctions. As you know, any elite group wishing to alienate the majority and consolidate power construct a technical language that allows them to talk above the heads of the majority.

In essence, good dictionaries do not become tools of such groups to offer only popular definitions while allowing the finer distinctions to slip away. Stay tuned. In Evil Dictionaries and Money, Part 2, I will get into stuff so serious, you can only laugh.

Here are some interesting dictionaries for something to do during your dotage:

*** MAGNET, n. Something acted upon by magnetism.

MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet.
The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge. The Devil's Dictionary


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Posted by witnit at 7:16 AM

January 23, 2005

Armor Geddon

here's nothing quite like reading first-hand accounts written by American soldiers in Iraq. Spend time with Armor Geddon. Neil Prakash and friends are quite fascinating. Neil has just been awarded the Silver Star.

Check out Murphys Laws of Combat Operations.

And these military photos from Iraq (like the one above) at Militaryphotos.net.

*** From a Soviet Junior Lt's Notebook: "One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine."

Update: Our boy Hugh Hewitt, the blogfather, is giving the L.A. Times hell over their reporting on Iraq.

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January 22, 2005

Why I Am an Oxfordian

xfordian: One who believes that Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford is the true author of the Shakepeare poems and plays.

I was a graduate student in my early 30s when I came upon Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare. Hardly an impressionable age. In fact, given the events that followed, it is remarkable how unimpressed I was by my peers.

Let me explain. First, my parents never finished high school. I put myself through college over a 10-year period by managing a 7-11 store. Hardly a background that would make me a snob, in Stratfordian parlance. Actually, I should be quite sympathetic to the "by-his-own-bootstraps" model of Shakspere.

When I came upon Ogburn, I had already been tested by fire by my favorite professor. He was a classic 18th-century literature dinosaur who still believed in the old standards of reading literature first, criticism second and rarely, and of grading papers in terms of mastery, not mere competence.

In his lower division Brit Lit survey course, I received my first "C" ever on a paper. I was stunned. At that time I had yet to understand the impact of public education, especially so-called "honors" courses that allowed us to be "creative" rather than to study such old-fashioned things as grammar.

In any event, that C grade set me on a journey of discovery. I respected him, admired him, and recognized by his written comments that I was still a writing and thinking fool. I set out to do whatever was necessary to get an A from this man on one of my papers. By the time I took his upper division John Milton course, I had at least begun to develop the ability to argue a thesis fairly well, but it was in his graduate seminars that the real testing ground awaited me. Each seminar was graded based on one paper and one final exam, a three-hour monster, often with only a single question that opened up a chasm that seemed impossible to bridge. (Occasionally, a student got up at the beginning of his final exam saying "I can't do this" and walked out.) I grew to love those finals, because of the incredible original creative compression that I was forced to confront. They were exhilarating.

In his "Austen and Bronte" seminar I found the appalling flabby areas in my reading comprehension. (Paper B+, Course B+) In his "Classical Rhetoric" seminar I was properly introduced to Plato and Aristotle. (Paper B+, Course A-) In "Richardson and Fielding" I was confronted with the novel and the moral dimensions of the novel. (Paper A-, Course A-).

And finally there was "The Age of Johnson": The reading list alone was awesome. Boswell's complete Biography and the London Journal (recommended completion date: the summer before the course). Most of Johnson's Rambler and Idler essays, Rasselas, poems, prefaces. Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Pope's Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and The Dunciad. Hume's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France…All in a single course…

I'm sure I left out some. People refused to sign up just based on the reading alone. It was a fabulous course. My paper was on Burke's Imagery and was due the last day of class before the Final. I began writing that morning at 6 am and finished by 3 pm, one hour before the deadline. (Paper A, Course A)

After three years, four undergraduate courses and four graduate seminars, I got that A, and I knew I had earned it.

My best friend Scott, a brilliant man who now teaches in a Catholic college in Texas, was also in those courses. We were Teaching Assistants. We spoke a common language, drawing on Richard Weaver's and Edward Corbett's texts for teaching real rhetoric, not the fancy usurped watered-down version then promulgated by the Composition Director and the rather sheepish TAs who followed blindly the multi-cultural, let-the-students-evaluate-each-other approach that merely perpetuated the damage initiated by the public schools.

So…

I read Ogburn, I'm interested in its argument, I approach my professor with a copy I bought for him because I wanted someone I respected to examine the argument and to discuss its merits with me. He dismissed it without examination, a response contrary to all that was implied in his teaching. I left the book with him anyway, somewhat baffled. I approached my best friend. He would not look at the argument either. I was astonished. Two brilliant, thinking minds who would not even examine the argument, who simply dismissed it out of hand. Later, I discovered my professor had given the book to another graduate student, a protιgι. When I finally asked her about what she thought of the argument, she would only say that the Stratfordian professors cited were obvious idiots, but Ogburn's rhetorical stance was faulty in places, and besides he disses Philip Sidney and she loved Philip Sidney, her Master's Thesis was on Philip Sidney, so Ogburn's argument had to be untenable.

Yes, once again I was baffled.

What was it about this topic that so provoked such bizarre responses? If I had been a "good" graduate student, a properly "impressionable" graduate student, then I would have dropped Ogburn and gone along with the prevailing view.

But I knew enough that, whatever it's faults, Ogburn's argument merited a hearing and that what I saw among my peers was something of a psychologically disturbed nature, and absolutely anathema to true scholarship.

Thus began my two-year in-the-library checking sources approach to sorting out Ogburn's argument, and my slow and steady conversion from Stratfordianism to Oxfordianism.

Ogburn did not persuade me right away because I had to research the other side more thoroughly, but with new eyes. I would sit in the library with his book and grab books and volumes and check sources, compare arguments, find out what Ogburn had not addressed, how he was refuted, how orthodox scholars handled dissent.

What first got to me was the extent of scholarly fraud...How much students believe and take for granted, how much professors spread conjecture as truth, theories as fact, fabrications as dogma. It took me six months just to fully grasp how scholars, documentary evidence, arguments, and the tradition of commentary and interpretation symbiotically interact in the arena of Shakespeare.

It made me ill.

Once I came to terms with my own regard for the role of art and the nature of the great artist, I realized more clearly where the real line was truly drawn, and how impossible it would be to really "prove" which side of the line was the "truth." Stratfordians tend (not universally) to accept what I call the "material/academic" Shakespeare. The reductionist "scientific" view. In effect, "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare until you can prove with actual documentary evidence that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare." Anti-Stratfordians tend (not universally) to accept the "spiritual/artist" Shakespeare. "The great artist forges in the smithy of his soul his consciousness and cannot help leave a mark of his life and experience on that." That is not exactly the "biographical" approach that Stratfordians want to lay on us. But there is probably no use arguing that.

The differences boil down to a fundamental perception on the nature of the artist, and all disconnects among Stratfordians and Anti-Stratfordians ultimately, I believe, arise from that distinction.

When I read the poems and plays through the lens of Stratford, I get much insight and greatness ... but only from the plays themselves. Shakspere the man leaves no mark on the plays as far as I can access. This violates my experience of almost every other great artist I know of.

When I read the poems and plays through the lens of Oxford, the experience is powerful and transformative and true to the experience I have had with other artists.

That is not proof for anyone else but me.

My wife is an executive producer with her own event and video production company. She helps launch software start-up companies, product launches (Apple, Oracle, and others), and even produces commercials for broadcast. She works with Directors of Photography (DPs) all the time. Most DPs love film cameras and merely like video cameras. The main difference is in the "aspect" capabilities of a film camera: A film camera can focus one aspect of a "shot" and allow others aspects to blur. This feature opens the door to certain creative uses of film. Video cameras, particularly, the new digital cameras, resolve everything in a shot. (This fact accounts for the very real difference you notice on TV between that which is filmed and that which is videoed.)

So, a DP with a film camera can focus on the foreground "elements" and allow the background elements to blur; or the DP can focus on the background elements and allow the foreground elements to blur.

Both "models" of a scene are neutral. Where one becomes more "appropriate" than the other depends upon the particular application. Of course, the appropriateness of the application is up to the DP or some other creative controlling authority.

My approach to the Stratfordian and Oxfordian models are very much like a DP's approach to film and the foreground and background elements.

I liken the Stratfordian model to a focus on the foreground elements that leave the background elements blurred. The Oxfordian model is similar to a focus on the background elements that leave the foreground blurred. (I could extend this analogy with more detail, but I leave it to the reader. There are many remarkable correspondences.)

This modeling very much touches on the fundamental anchor points that we hold regarding human nature, the nature of the artist, and political and cultural assumptions. For these reasons, this clash of models resembles a clash of religious interpretive models and provokes similar heat.

I am not one who favors squashing the Stratfordian model and replacing it with the Oxfordian one. I do not think either model capable of being the only one. I do object to Stratfordian attempts to squash the Oxfordian model, to keep it forever barred from academic investigation and support, just as a DP who favors a background focus would object to the DP Committee establishing foreground-only rules and dissing background-focused looks in film.

My view of "models", then, recognizes that the "elements" (the evidence, the people involved, the society, the poetics, etc.) can be focused in more than one manner. In this view of models, then, one can (at least initially) objectively look through both "lenses" (the Stratfordian and the Oxfordian) and see how the elements come into focus.

During those two years in the library, I had to give up the "distorted" Statfordian lens that I had (the Folger Library/Chute edition) and discover a *clearer* Stratfordian lens to view the elements before I could even properly compare it with the Oxfordian lens. For a time I did not know what to think…I was more or less in a "decomposed" anchorless objective state, which is the proper place to be when looking through competing lenses.

I had to come to terms "consciously" with my own fundamental values and beliefs regarding the nature of art and the artist (poetics), human nature, political and social history, and even certain spiritual matters.

What I saw through the Stratfordian lens defied my arrangement of these values and beliefs. I knew enough of argument even then to be disgusted with the "Satan Manuever" argument of Shakspere's supposed "genius-that-explains-everything" that seemed to be the cornerstone of every Stratfordian argument in response to "real" difficulties in explaining the evidence or lack of evidence.

The Satan Manuever is what I call the introduction of any "argument" that immediately destroys a forum based upon arguing from evidence and reason. The name arises from an occasion where an evangelical Christian, when asked how he accounted for the fossils that scientists use to demonstrate that the earth is far older than 6000 years, responded, "Satan put them there." Such an argument when introduced clearly destroys the possibility for any opposing argument based on evidence and reason. The Satan Manuever has many manifestations in every discipline. In Shakespeariana, it arrives with the introduction of the mystical, inexplicable "genius" of Shakespeare. Consequently, I regard every scholar who introduces this form of the Satan Manuever with disdain, for poisoning the atmosphere of discussion based on evidence and reason. Responsible scholars, it seems to me, must develop an interpretive model that does not rely on such poisonous introductions.

However, despite its obvious and sometimes even severe problems, I found that the way the elements "focused" when I looked through the Oxfordian lens (the "organizing pattern") made much more sense, held much more consistency and connection with my fundamental values and beliefs, and actually "generated" a host of new and interesting information patterns.

I should note that anyone can "discover" patterns when one goes looking for them. Such is the fate of the Baconians who put so much reliance on coding and cryptograms (take those away and how compelling is the Baconian lens?).

So how do you know when you have discovered a genuine, innate pattern? When the pattern organizes the elements in such a way that new information is effortlessly generated that actually enhances the "focus" in completely unexpected yet integrated ways, AND naturally begins explaining other mysteries and problems in the focus of the elements when viewed through other lenses.

The Oxfordian lens does that for me, in revelatory and delightful ways that in no way subtract from the works themselves.


*** Me... a skeptic? I trust you have proof...



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January 21, 2005

Speech, Speech

must admit that I agree with only 30% of what President Bush stands for, and that I don't think he is fully qualified to be President. (I think a President should be reasonably articulate so that he doesn't inadvertantly make diplomatic gafs. Consciously intended gafs are fine, like the ones Reagan would make. Also, I think a President should be well-traveled, with a healthy sense of the world stage.)

In addition, I must admit that I agree with only 30% of what John Kerry stands for, and that I think he is even less qualified than George Bush to be President. (Despite media spin, a close and dispassionate examination of the Swift Boat Veterans arguments reveals that they have a strong case against Kerry.)

One day, historians will record that President Bush's speechwriter is among the best in United States history. His speeches read much better than Bush delivers them. (He is not Winston Churchill, or Tony Blair, both of whom wrote their own speeches.)

Read the text of Bush's Second Inaugural Speech. It is historic and breathtaking, both in content and rhetoric. This line is particularly good: "Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country."

I believe that only the ideologically committed against Bush will fail to be moved by this amazing speech. Go ahead. Take the time to read the whole thing.

*** To whom much is given, much shall be required...

Update: Check out the latest JibJab movie/song of Bush's second term.


Update: This column by Peggy Noonan offers fascinating criticism of the speech. Never take Peggy lightly.


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January 20, 2005

The Curriculum from Hell

reader has reminded us of this classic from Richard Mitchell, which I reproduce in its entirety. Take your time with it. Savor.

NOTE: The author has given his permission to copy and distribute this, and all other essays from The Underground Grammarian, freely and without regard to copyright.

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The Curriculum from Hell

"For we have reached the place of which I spoke,
where you will see the miserable people,

those who have lost the good of intellect."

Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.

Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
accents of anger, words of suffering,
and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands,

all went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.

EDWARD T. HOLLANDER is called the Chancellor of Higher Education in New Jersey. It is his job to see to it that the state mental institutions become, and remain, politically and ideologically correct. It's not easy, but he's amiable, he has the vocabulary down pat, and the times are on his side.

He now proposes the "affirmative action curriculum," against which, who can be? What else is there, after all, but the negative action curriculum? It's the same sort of elementary mind trick by which all ideologues sneak up to the high ground, favoring the really good stuff--life, maybe, or peace, or even more puzzling imponderables, like fitness. So Hollander, in this high cause, wants the various trainers and keepers in the state mental institutions to "rethink what they teach, and ... seek ways of bridging the gap between their areas of expertise and the diverse student populations in New Jersey colleges and universities."

Although we take no clear idea at all from the metaphor of a bridge over a gap between an area and a population, we are not unaccustomed to this style of discourse, and we think we know what he means--not, to be sure, because we can decipher his metaphor, but because we have heard it all a million times. And so have you. It's the same old "relevance" stuff, which has now become the "race, class, and gender" stuff.

By now, we all know the argument. Surely you can't suppose, can you, that a girl from the barrio can take any profit from studying the thought of a man from a villa, who happens also to be rotten in the earth for five hundred years? And so forth, mutatis mutandis. Since principles are few, and particulars beyond counting, such cases can be made without end, and the "argument," by force of numbers, easily persuades the shallow mind. Furthermore, in these days, everybody likes to feel like a victim, and by virtue of victimhood to claim not only the sympathy but some portion of the fortune of everybody else. You will have little trouble convincing the girl from the barrio that the man from the villa has done her some damage and injustice, and that he could not possibly know anything about her experience, and that he was a member of an oppressive and elitist clique of which we have already had quite enough, thank you. Then you can require her to study instead that exciting new "area of expertise," Literature as Revenge--the lyrics of pop singers, the sullen remonstrations of other victims, and the Look How Deeply I Feel And Have Suffered free verse of the wandering, poetry reading minstrels of the wretched of the earth, to all of which she can relate. She will like you, and that will be nice. And you, at least, if not your entire institution, will be politically correct.

Well, why not? It is, after all, the real and not unreasonable intent of the state mental institutions to bring their wards into what can in fact be called a version of mental health, and, even without irony, right thinking and adjustment, into harmony with the world as it is, and even with the world as it is just now, for it is just now, and only just now, that they can live. And with that in mind, we would like to take the good part of Hollander's advice, the part where he says that teachers should rethink what they teach. So they should. And more important, not only what they teach, which may find some justification in substance, but what they preach, which seldom will. And that goes for Hollander too. But he is a busy man.

So we rethink. The epigraph above is from Hell, the first book of Dante's long and elaborate poem, The Divine Comedy, in the old sense of "comedy." If it is read anywhere, it is probably in a school. It is neither easy nor popular, and its usefulness in such matters as the plight of the homeless and competing with the Japanese is hard to see.

(Unlike us, all Dante knew of homelessness was a term of exile; he found "eating another's bread" a "sorrow.")

Now, for the purposes of excluding him from an affirmative action curriculum, we can say many things about Dante. He was a Roman Catholic, and a serious one. Not even the Roman Catholics are Roman Catholic any more. He lived in an age that was not only pre-scientific, but pre-sociological as well. He thought the existence of social classes a good thing. He was a monarchist. He believed that there could be such a thing as a wise and virtuous ruler, who ought therefore to be accorded perfect and complete obedience, although he could clearly see that such were thin on the ground. He believed in nobles, that is, he believed that some people, by birth, were at least capable of being better and worthier people than others. He was not at all democratic. He was not a woman, but a man, and he thought to see in Beatrice not a good mind and the potential for effective achievement, but only the good, the true, and the beautiful. Only the light.

His book, also, is hard to commend to the affirmative action curriculum. It is long, not in word count, of course, but surely in reading time. Even the most modern translations require more vocabulary than our schools provide. His poem is dense; it never vamps or coasts. His images and metaphors seem often obscure, and sometimes, impenetrable. And his allusions are mostly, to say the least, provincial, so that, among them, his references to the Guelfs and the Ghibellines are likely to be the least arcane, since those folk do occasionally crop up in history books. In general, he refers to countless people and events of which no student has ever heard, either in the barrio or in Beverly Hills. And all those people are dead and gone, and all those issues of no moment at all. To read even Hell, which is the easiest of the books, requires as many footnotes as some imaginable definitive edition of the complete comedies of Aristophanes.

What purpose could there be in the study of Hell? If it is intended as a social adornment or a refresher for the quizzes of the cultural literacy mavens, then it should be expelled not only from the affirmative action curriculum but from all others as well. And so too, if it is to be read as an illustrated guide to the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, which, if it still exists, can be left to use it as it will. As an adjunct to the study of the history of the Renaissance (which is itself a poor candidate for the AAC,) it is of little use. It isn't even very useful for the student of Italian (another course of study that lies ill in the AAC); its Italian is antiquated and, especially for the student in school, inordinately difficult. Although it has its share of nastiness and violence and even obscenity, very few readers will find it entertaining. Nor do many find it heart-warming or conducive to self-esteem. Its only commendation is, in these times, a condemnation: it is included in the canon of classics as devised by the once dominant class of white, upper class men. That alone is enough to prove it irrelevant to the life of the girl from the barrio and thousands and thousands of others.

In short, as a candidate for exclusion from the list of socially desirable and with-it readings, it's a sure winner, and will probably soon be gone from state mental institutions in New Jersey. And it will, of course, not travel alone, for all of the same things, with changes only in detail, could be said of books without number from the Iliad to Moby Dick and well beyond.

Nevertheless, those who have read Hell will see that in all of these objections--and they are not faked--there is an amazing inappropriateness, and will be brought to wonder how anybody could possibly imagine that such considerations were, well, relevant to the book, even if true. And among those that stand amazed at such irrelevance will be the girl from the barrio who has read Hell. It never fails. And with her there will stand atheists and suburbanites and vegetarians, and even those who think of themselves as Roman Catholics.

How can this be?

Go back now and read again the epigraph. Carefully. Notice, for instance, that we are among those who have lost not intellect, which readily lends itself to anything we want to do, but the good of intellect, which must be something else. Wonder what that something else might be. Ask: is there some special Roman Catholic notion hidden here, some at least religious notion, some notion that would be foreign and abhorrent to the Chinese perhaps, or the Martians, or some notion suitable to men only?

Ask yourself this: where could you go, today, to find yourself surrounded by strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, and accents of anger, all making an endless, gritty tumult, like whirling sand in the turbid air? If you are at a loss to answer, watch the news tonight.

Herein lies the power of Dante's Hell, where also lies the power of any number of works against which charges of irrelevance are so easily brought. It just happens to be true, and accurate as well. But its truth is in principle, not in particulars, which change so universally and rapidly as to seem, in any serious consideration of the business of human life, the truly irrelevant details.

There is a wonderful clue to the reading of Hell in a little essay by Borges. It can be found in Seven Nights, a book that you should read. Borges quotes from a supposed letter of Dante's son, who is explaining, in effect, that his father was not, as some still imagine, a mystic or a religious nut. (Yes, they had them then too.) He did not pretend to portray the Afterworld, but rather to show how we do live here and now. All of us. Hell is a picture of how the sinful live. Purgatory and Paradise show, respectively, how the repentant and the saved do live, here and now. The concepts may be foreign to us, but we don't need them. We do not have to think greed a sin in order to see a truthful picture of how greedy people do in fact live. We know people whose lives are given always to pushing around and around a great stone that they love. When Thoreau shows us a similar truth in the form of a young man pushing before him, down the road of life, house and barn and land and wife and child and beasts, we would be fools to discount what he says because hardly anybody has a barn these days. But when Dante, in the passage above, shows us the plight of Jews and Arabs, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, and indeed of all factionalists of any persuasion, we would like to dismiss him because he is male, and religious, and white, and dead.

But those who would dismiss him have even more serious deficits than those in mind. Dante is indeed a member of an elite company, but it is a company neither usefully nor sufficiently defined by the discriminatory epithets now happily adopted by the opponents of discrimination. It is the company of those writers whose work is given to the exploration of the inner life, rather than to the exposition of the outer life. Imagine some list of works to be prized in the affirmative action curriculum, and, in another column, works like Hell, which are not "correct." In the correct works there is an implicit message: Look away! Look at the world out there. Account for yourself, if you must, by all that is not in you. For your miseries and your misdeeds, hold the world to blame. In the incorrect works, the message is this: Look within. See what you are. And, in Hell specifically but not uniquely: See how your miseries and your misdeeds fondle and kiss each other.

Be practical. Consider what is called "sex education." It is, like all the pretend educations, moved by the spirit of column A. It is a how to do in the world workshop. Now consider another study, a thorough reading of the fifth canto of Hell, where the weightless lustful, in perpetual free fall, are blown about by hellish winds. They have no rest; they go where the wind goes. They remind us that levity is the loss of gravity. And the endless flight of the flighty is not some punishment visited upon them by dour and puritanical authority; it is what they chose. Now they have it. To share their fate, you do not have to be dead. And, excepting only the very young, there is no living human being who will not understand what Dante is talking about, understand and nod. And sigh.

The wind is like the rain; it blows on all alike. When it blows, who will stand, and who will fly away? What makes the difference? Where does the power to stand come from; can it be cultivated? Should it be cultivated? Are there other winds that blow? Which is freedom, the power to stand, or the intoxication of flying with the wind?

These are interesting questions, and parents not depraved or moronic would, given the choice, want their children to consider them rather than to live in ignorance of them. The lifelong consideration of such questions is the substance of true education, as opposed to all the other stuff. But the socializing educationists, for some surely fascinating but unknown reason, hate such questions, and would, without reading the book, expel Dante from the sex education program not only for all the reasons that we have already given, but also because he is obviously ignorant of the moral revolution, and never even mentions the threat of AIDS and the importance of clean condoms. To that sort of thing, which can be sufficiently disposed of in ten minutes in a pamphlet, they will allot long and costly seasons of "study." To the other study, which fosters meditation rather than rapping, and consulting with the self rather than with a peer group, they dare not give ten minutes?

Why? Hollander, although he surely didn't mean to, provides an answer. "We must do," he says, "what is both morally right and educationally sound to ensure that our students are intellectually and culturally equipped to function and live in a global and highly diverse society." Diversity is big these days. There is money to be made in it, grants to be granted, programs to be funded, facilitators to be hired. And there is merit to be earned. The praise of diversity brings out the vote; it pays off a supposed debt to the diverse, who, it must be presumed, have always been slighted and offended by the undiverse. And a Hollander, who is decidedly undiverse, can make big points by spreading a table before the diverse in the presence of their enemies, and generously bidding them, well, not exactly to his banqueting table, but to their own barbecue, where he will let them eat whatever they like. And if on that menu they should find, and why not, their Dante, will he not, by the very powers that make him their Dante, will he not suddenly come to be numbered among the undiverse, and stricken from the menu?

For, by clear and simple logic, if there is a Dante, and there either is or will be a Dante, in the literature of the third world or among the women, that Dante will provoke similar questions, and raise, among the educationists, the same objections. Suddenly, the color or culture or gender of that Dante will not be a ticket of admission to a new canon, and that Dante, too, will have to go.

The reason is clear. That Dante will be that Dante because, like this Dante, he or she will be no respecter of diversity. The diversities among people are, in fact, superficial and trivial. To imagine that they are important, and that they go to mold nature and character, is exactly the root of the mental disorders that we call the -isms. To imagine, for instance, that black people are so constituted that they are more easily blown away than white people, and that that's OK, and that the meaning of the Second Circle has nothing to do with them, a Dante will not allow. Will a Hollander? For a Dante, the person is the vessel of meaning; it is for the racist that the black person is the vessel of meaning, or the white. It is not to white people, or to religious people, or to Italian people, or to left-handed people, but to people that Dante can reveal the mysteries of self-searching and self-knowing, which is why a Dante has little interest in diversity. His interest is rather in what, how strange to notice, must be the true opposite of diversity. University.

And that's what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth.

And it is a place for the testing of wisdom too. Schools should follow the example of THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN and present their students with readings that make no use of the names of the writers, as we do in our Great Booklets. We do not want our readers to say, Oh, this was written by that Jew, or by that communist. We want them to attend only to what is said, and to weigh that rather than some diversity of the author. We wonder what Hollander would say to this. Does he want the students to read Baldwin or Beauvoir that they may weigh and consider what is said, and perhaps even find fault with it, or does he, like the man who is willing to be virtuous so long as he is known to be virtuous, want the curriculum to show the names of Baldwin and Beauvoir, so that the diverse will be appeased? If the former, then let Beauvoir and Baldwin, who should be read in any case, stand anonymously on the same corner with Sophocles and Tolstoi, casting what light, and winning what approval they can. If the latter, which seems to be the case, then Sophocles and Tolstoi will have to retire, and Beauvoir and Baldwin will have to wear their name cards. Which will not please them.

Be of good cheer. The University is long, and the Hollanders are very short. There is quite enough contention, and ambition, in the University to provide a testing and weighing of them all. Some will flare for a space and sputter out, and some will get the Mene, mene right away. Some will fall, only to rise again in another age. And some will move at once, and have already moved, into that canon, which really is exclusive, as it should be, but whose rules are not what our Hollanders think them.

And now we must leave off, to go back and ponder what Dante might have meant by the good of intellect. We have, at least, a clue. We know lots of Hollanders, and they are not short of intellect. And right there we must begin.

*** It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move into an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks... Gustave Flaubert

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January 19, 2005

Random Morsels

h my gawd! This man was invited to speak by the principal of a middle school within 10 minutes of where I live! That principal wins this week's Penguin Dope Slap.

*** Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

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January 18, 2005

Is Teaching English-Only Classes Racist?

eed Hastings may lose his seat on the California state Board of Education for supporting English-only classooms for immigrant students in some California schools. Even Susan Estrich is defending him.

Here's my favorite picture of Susan Estrich:

It all bounces around like BB's on a stainless-steel counter, but it all comes together so be patient.


Okay. Here's the bottom line. I think that one of the most manipulative, controlling, disempowering, and indeed racist things you can do to immigrants to the United States is to put into place measures that keep them from learning English. Why on earth would anyone support an education for immigrants in this country without doing everything possible to help them learn English? Why do lawyers and priests and politicians create a special language?

In a word, dependency.

It's that simple. If I am an Hispanic leader who needs a following, and if I want to make sure that my people have to work through me to get information and help, I will not be all that excited about empowering them to get that information and help directly.

If they want to know whom to vote for, what the political issues are, what the president is saying (or what I want them to believe the president is saying), I will make sure that in the interests of "multicultural" education, they stay with their own language. That they do not assimilate into the American culture by learning English.

That they are dependent on me.

Most importantly, a person who speaks English might discover that what I am saying to my people may not quite match what that person may now discover independently.

Everyone who argues that English-only is racist has it backwards. English-only is empowering, inclusive, community building, connecting, supportive, and pluralistic. It opens doors. It gives individuals power to be free, to access information directly, to make up their own minds.

And that's what the whole thing is about, isn't it? Who controls their minds? Do we help them learn English, so that they can control their own minds? Or do we deny English to them so that we can control their minds?

*** Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education. The Graves of Academe

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January 17, 2005

Websites for Mystery Fans

f you love reading mystery novels, you might want to check out these websites:

*** I became a police officer because I wanted to be in a business where the customer is always wrong.

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January 16, 2005

Digital Identity

ne commenter supplied a link to Digital Identity, a rather fascinating website. Here's a link to Predictions for Digital ID in 2005.

1. Federated Policy will become a buzz-word.
2. Little real progress will be made in 2005 to fight phishing.
3. Web Services will Change Identity Management.
4. Someone will wake up in 2005 and realize that the U.S. legislated a de facto national ID with the intelligence bill.
5. RFID will look like it's in trouble, but quietly start working.
6. Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" conversation will begin affecting products.
7. The Cry for Strong Auth will grow.
8. VCs will start to cash out with identity investments.
9. Federated Identity and Policy in Web Services become real.
10. There will be almost no security problem left that isn't seen as really being an identity problem.

Check it out.

*** Confusion over identity causes many of the ills that plague our planet. First Post


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What to Do till the Undertaker Comes

HAVE just had some exciting news about Boating Education. There are some people somewhere who believe that Boating Education should be just as regular an enterprise in the schools as Driver Education, Television Education, and Brothering and Sistering Education, all of which have won themselves places in schools all over the land.

The proponents of Boating Education make a strong case. What is the good, they ask, of teaching reading and writing, or even physics and calculus, if the young people thus laboriously instructed are only going to tip over their canoes and drown, or decapitate themselves by running motorboats at full throttle under docks and bridges?

A good question. And its logical implications are even more compelling than the question itself, which, unfortunately, suggests facetious analogies. We might with the same justification require that our schools provide their students with Rock Climbing Education and Burglar Alarm Education. We might even conclude, since death is even more certain than a diploma to put an end to all learning, that we ought to abandon the whole business of education, and, while waiting for death, pursue only those "studies" that might help us to live as long and as well as possible in the meantime.

The Boating Education enthusiasts may seem silly and all too obviously self-serving (people actually do make livings from such notions), but, given the meaning of "education" in these times, they are logically consistent and impeccably orthodox. It is our fashion, not only in our notions of education but apparently in all others, not only to consider the meaning (if there be any) of human deeds as a function of time and place, but also to reject as sentimental, and maybe superstitious, the belief, the suspicion, the fear, that human deeds have some meaning not dependent on time and place. It is an unspoken presumption of the practice of our schools that "education" is for a purpose, and that the purpose is to live in one style rather than another until we die. Whatever is conducive to the socially approved style of living is, therefore, the legitimate substance of "education"; whatever is not patently thus conducive is, at best, a harmless and perhaps even an "enriching" diversion, and, at worst, an elitist display of conspicuous consumption and leisure, and a dangerous impediment to the cultivation of socially approved, "useful" styles of living.

I do not mean to suggest that our version of education is hedonistic, although it is often cynically described as "fun and games," and even though Boating Education might come to be "taught" up a lazy river by the old mill run. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of hedonism, and characterized not by abandoned merriment but by a sanctimonious search for a place in life. That place, furthermore, exists only because the social order needs it, and is seen not only as an accepted way to make a living, but, at the same time, to serve some supposed needs of the social arrangement that provides us the opportunity to live. In this respect, modern educational systems do seem to vary, but only in this: while we are all expected to "serve" in some way the system that teaches us how to serve, some systems permit some of us more choice as to how we will serve, and how much pleasure and profit we may take from that service.

This is the final meaning of "life-adjustment," a term intended both to describe and to justify that presumed education to which we are committed: it is designed to adjust us to life as it now must be lived, in this time and in this place, and with due regard to the collective needs of the society that is said to harbor and nourish us. Thus it is that what we call "education," once thought a condition, even a virtue, not subject to passing fashions, has come to be thought a filling of some cavity in the mind, a neutral void to be stuffed with this or that, or whatever else the ephemeral "needs" of the society may dictate. And that is why the practice of the schools must change with every real or imagined change in the texture and style of life.

Such a view of education can seem attractively reasonable. After all, we do have to live here and now. That is our most immediately obvious need, and the schooling that will fit us to do it indubitably "meets a need," a phrase much used by those calling themselves "educators." And what could be more reasonable and salutary than an education that meets not just one but two urgent needs: the need of the individual to live this life, and the need of this life to be served? Why, when a turn of the wheel brings us a need of navigators, or silversmiths, or computer programmers, should we not "adjust" education itself accordingly? What else is there to live but life?

Why, then, are many of us troubled by what seem, well, at least failures, and sometimes no less than evil fruits, of our system of education? I think it is because we do remember some of our history. We must at least pause to reflect on the troubling fact that education, in its beginnings, and for a long time thereafter, was not in any sense an "adjustment" to the obvious needs of getting and spending, but rather a development of the powers by which we might best endure those needs. It was not a preparation for the world, but a preparation against the world, which will inevitably bring us pain and sorrow. And death.

The ancient Greeks, to whom we owe the very idea of education, saw no important difference between the educated person and the philosopher. To be the one was to be the other. Nor did they equate the trained practitioner of any craft or art, however great his skill or difficult his calling, with the educated man. They would not have said, as we do, that the physician, for instance, has been educated in his art, but that he has rather been trained into it. He might, of course, also have been educated, as might the cobbler or the wheelwright, but not so that he could make a living.

The Greeks did not see education as a process that might culminate in the practice of a profession, or in anything else, for that matter. They saw it as an endless exploration, not a way of making a living, but a way of trying--only trying, no more--to live wisely. It is a measure of our values that we deem any powers other than those by which we make our livings either harmless diversions or elitist luxuries. For the Greeks, education was simply a necessity, not a necessity for life--all creatures have that--or for the happy life--nothing can assure that--but for the virtuous life, whose principles can be discovered, and whose attributes do not change with the turnings of the wheels of fashion and fortune.

Just at the end of The Republic, Socrates tells the mystifying little story of Er, who was mistakenly left for dead and taken, like an ancient Dante, on a tour of the Afterworld. Whether it is as a true believer or merely as one who would teach by parable that Socrates tells the tale, I can not guess, but its power as a parable is quite enough for his purposes. Er beholds the souls of the dead as they are shown new lives from which to choose, lives of every sort, humble or exalted, long or short, pleasant or nasty, rich or poor, brave or craven, even the lives of plants and animals. The souls, whose presence at the choosing is testimony to a desire for virtue, are free to choose, but must bear whatever destinies their choices bring. The good choice has nothing to do with the aims of our kind of education, promotion and pay, and what pleasures they may provide. The good choice is "good" in what has become a "special" sense of the word: it is the choice of a life in which the choosing soul can best seek virtue.

"And, here, my dear Glaucon," says Socrates, "is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life."

That severe and unfashionable idea of education must seem at the least idealistic and impractical to us, for the bread, after all, must be buttered. We can hardly afford to "leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only." Socrates seems, furthermore, to command something foreign and incomprehensible to us, an education not for living, but for being. We do believe that we live, but we do not take any clear meaning from the distinction between living and being. Partly for that reason, and partly because of its obvious impracticality, the education urged by Socrates just wouldn't do in our schools, and I am not about to suggest its adoption. But I do wonder: Why is it that so many people, when brought to consider such an impractical and esoteric education, can not suppress a feeling of longing and loss, and must even think it, however irrelevant to what they suppose to be their "needs," worthy, estimable, and somehow better than what we have?

But, of course, preposterous. What fools and dreamers we would seem if we said to our children, and to each other: Drop everything else and seek only to learn how to tell what is evil from what is good. Even the teachers, perhaps especially the teachers, would laugh at such an unprofessional notion of education. So we don't say that. We say instead: Study Boating Education so that you won't drown and thus fail to live comfortably while also serving the needs of the society that provides you with practical skills like Boating Education. And that, of course, is not thought preposterous.

I will not recite here yet another list of the many, and always multiplying, preposterous things that we do in the name of education. Any reader can, if only from sad experience, make such a list. I will only suggest that they all may be expressions of one pervasive ideology, all variations on an unstated theme. The Boating Education enthusiasts and their ilk bob up and down on the tide of that theme. What good is anything, they ask, except what we can do while we live? All our "needs," they say, can be defined by what lies outside of us, the world and its ways, to which we must be fitted. The aim of education, therefore, is to fashion us into components compatible with the great system into which we must be plugged, where we "may operate" as effectively as possible until we wear out, when we can easily be replaced by other, and even better, "state of the art" components. And even those few remaining elements of our "education" that do not contribute directly to our componentship, now collected in the disorderly jumble called "general" education, are justified only because they might "enrich" our leisure, and make us feel better, and so contribute to better "performance" as well as satisfaction and self-esteem. It is an education pro tem, an education that sees no destiny but death, an education in which all human understandings once thought incorruptible have put on the corruption of change and decay.

The education that Socrates commended to Glaucon was not, in any modern sense of the word, "religious," and certainly not churchly, for Socrates knew nothing of what we call "church." In fact, the inquiry that he urges, the lifelong questioning of good and evil, is not the chosen task of churches, any one of which can easily recite numerous and invariable rules that will put an end to all questioning of good and evil. In that respect, the church is not different from the school; in the one, questions about good and evil, and in the other, questions about relevance and irrelevance, are routinely settled by "information." We must not imagine that what some churches now propose in their squabble with the schools would be a remedy. Should they have their way, we would have what we have now, except that some unquestioned presuppositions would change. It is important to keep that in mind, for I now have to say something about education according to Socrates that makes it sound "religious": That education was neither the learning of skills nor the acquiring of knowledge, however worthy and necessary those things surely were, but the process of growth in the soul. Our educational devisers have concluded that there is no such thing as a soul.

This is what makes it so difficult--probably impossible--ever to win any battles with the educationists. If we oppose them in detail, they can always retreat, if they have to, into tinkering and adjustment through "innovative thrusts," which always thrust us away from education. If we oppose them in principle, we have to sound like zany metaphysicians ranting against an age of scientific "certainties," and speaking in categories about which professional educationists have generated no findings, not even a parameter. Having proved myself an amateur by speaking of good and evil, I now do worse and speak of the soul. Absurd. Can I really be that far behind the times? Have I never heard of Planck's constant, or of behavior modification? Do I also believe in phrenology and flying saucers? Can I really propose that education, a vast, collective, bureaucratic agency, take cognizance of the soul, instead of things that we know to exist, things like intelligence, and existentiality, and reading readiness, and self-esteem, all of which we can and do weigh and measure through whole batteries of standardized assessment instruments of proven effectiveness, complete with established norms for age, and place of origin, and ethnic background, as well as socio-economic? Preposterous!

Well, maybe. And yet, I am not at all convinced that the exploration of the "affective domain," always pursued with startling incongruity through a statistical method applied to hearsay evidence from witnesses whose self-interest is inevitable and whose self-knowledge is dubitable, is somehow less preposterous than a consideration of the soul. And, while in considering the "affective domain" I must mingle with glib, self-satisfied functionaries, in considering the soul, I find myself in excellent company. I would rather sit with Emerson and Dostoyevski than with concocters of self-worth enhancement assessment instruments. If they see no point in sitting in such excellent company, that fact alone could be sufficient comment on education in our time. And that fact suggests the beginning of a prescription for education: Search out diligently the best, wondering minds, and go and sit with them. And remember as you do that, that our children sit with facilitators.

When we do sit among those best minds, we find that people we know to be "dead," no longer "meeting current needs," are, strangely, not dead at all. They speak to us with far greater power and effect than we can expect from most of the "living," whatever that might mean. And it is to us that they speak; we do not merely overhear them "meeting the needs" of their time and place and forming components compatible with their systems. They had us in mind, but not in our roles as temporary life-forms subject to the necessities of time and place. It is as though, out of something that is not bound by time and place, they spoke to the same something in us, knowing it would be there. And it is. I do not think it preposterous to say that they spoke as souls to souls. I don't know a better word.

Furthermore, if we have from time to time sat with the best, something in us is vexed and saddened by anything less. That is how we know that it is in some deep principle and not just in a multitude of silly particulars that the way we "educate" our children is wrong. Except for brief meetings with the best, almost always happy accidents and seldom a provision of the "guidelines," most of schooling is remembered as a wasteland, where there was neither power, nor passion, nor nourishment, but only, if we were lucky, skills development. Education seems a process through which we must pass, not a condition into which we may grow. We are usually glad to be done with it, so that we can begin to live the life to which schooling is a long, dull overture.

What is it in us that is thus vexed and offended? Does it not also tell us (unless that "education" has overcome us utterly) that the getting and spending, the meeting of needs and having needs met, are not enough, are not the nourishment for the need? Does it not trouble us, hinting that there is more, and better, than job security and comfortable retirement? Does it not hint that there is something degrading in being adjusted to a system, and something vile and tyrannical in a system that admits, no, affirms, that it is not likely to survive unless most of us are adjusted to it?

To talk of the soul is doubly embarrassing. Not only does it invite the charge of silliness, but it requires me to make, on the soul's behalf, some demands that can never be met by a bureaucratic agency of government. The soul seeks not information, but truth; not cultural enrichment, but beauty; not citizenship education, but goodness. These things are not, and should not be, provided for in the official guidelines of a government agency. It is, therefore, by its nature, and not only by its choice, that a system of schooling can not educate.

It is, however, somewhat more by choice than by nature that it makes it difficult for education to erupt, even by accident, within its precincts. The teachers are not expected to have any special propensity for sitting among the best, wondering minds; and the "books" in the schools are ordinarily collective concoctions whose aim is to serve some social cause. Even more significantly, the best minds are very rarely invited to talk to the students, who are seldom at an appropriate level of "reading ability" anyway. Furthermore, the school people make no secret of their opinion that going to sit among the irrelevant ancients is an empty ritual, which opinion they have easily engendered in their students. They cannot imagine that it might be otherwise, that we might go to listen with love and respect to our elders, who speak the inquiries of their minds and the meditations of their hearts from beyond the boundaries of time and place.

The churchly challengers of education have at least found the right word for it: secular. They misconstrue the word, however, in supposing that it distinguishes schools from churches. Churches are just as secular as schools; both are agencies with agendas, hard at work not only in this time and place but on them. Both are adjusters of persons according to the guidelines. Those who resort to the churches will find there what children find in their schools: smooth counsellors reciting glib answers to great questions. And the best, wondering minds, for whom such questions are wellsprings of contemplation, seldom speak.

Our "education" is, therefore, dying. That is not a prophetic utterance, but only another way of describing it as secular. All institutions are dying. The time will come, if we can survive as a species, when no one will remember, or care, what we did in schools or even whether we had such things. Who, a thousand years from now, will know or care what energy and wealth we spent in moving from the self-contained classroom into the open classroom and back? How many would now remember Socrates, had he held off questioning his listeners until he could generate some findings about their comprehension levels, and their cognitive styles, learning disabilities, and occupational aptitudes? Our very science, which we love, and our soft pseudo-science, which we worship, will pass away or be changed beyond anything we can imagine, if not in a thousand years, then two. Or ten. It doesn't matter. Only what souls have spoken to souls will endure as long as humanity lives. Unless, of course, our schools and their brand of "education" should triumph utterly.

Be of good cheer. That won't happen. Any soul is stronger than a whole Department of Education. Schools do what they do with Death always in mind, under the rubric of What to Do till the Undertaker Comes. Souls, even the most ruthlessly adjusted, have Life in mind, and they know it when they see it. I have been there--so have we all--when some soul, oppressed by experiential self-awareness continua, or Boating Education, finds itself spoken to, person-to-person, by one of those best, wondering minds. It knows, in that moment, not the knack of competence, minimum or maximum, not the vainglory of induced self-esteem, but joy. Such a soul does, at least for a little while, and who can hope for more in our times, "leave every other kind of knowledge and follow one thing only." It finds a purity of heart and mind never achieved in Boating Education, or even in interpersonal relating enhancement role-playing.

There is no counting the sad things we do in the name of education, nor would the counting be sufficient indictment. They are, after all, mostly trivial nuisances committed by little people who do mean well but don't know what "well" means. It's almost as though a curse were laid upon the whole enterprise of schooling. Twist and dodge as it will, it never comes up with anything but new nuisances. But a curse is even harder to believe in than the soul; a more reasonable explanation might be sin. Our education commits us utterly to this world until we die and lose our entitlements. We quest not after virtue, but after maximized potentials and safe boating. We have accepted death and fallen into despair. And despair, some say, is the unforgivable sin, since it precludes even the hope of learning "to discern between good and evil." And if that is so, then our "education" will not only die, but will be damned as well. And to that, amen.

A supplement to The Underground Grammarian by Richard Mitchell.



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Beijing-ed - China, Part 2

showed pictures of Shanghai in Shanghaied, China Part 1 but I did not have a camera for Beijing. We stayed at the Grand Hyatt, a huge luxury hotel, with a remarkable swimming pool three floors below the main floor. The city was mostly foggy/smoggy. There were even more high-rise cranes scattered across the horizon than in Shanghai (for those 600 hotels they need to build).

We took a 5-hour tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Our Chinese tour guide showed us a huge countdown clock above the Square that counted down the days, hours, and minutes to the 2008 Olympics to be hosted in Beijing. Our guide said that before this it counted down to when China got Hong Kong back, and next it will count down to when China gets Taiwan back. We didn't know if he was kidding and nobody laughed!


In the Forbidden City, you can go through the gates and look into the buildings, but you are still forbidden from entering the buildings. It was fascinating, while also looking run down and uncomfortable. You would need lots of fancy robes to enjoy sitting in those square, upright wooden chairs.

On other days, we visited the Summer Palace, which was magnificent, my favorite spot. I wish we would have had all day to spend there. There is a long gallery that goes on for over a quarter of a mile, with over 8000 painted scenes in the ceiling.

We also did the obligatory Great Wall. Hard to imagine that we saw only a tiny portion, the Badaling section. It was cold and I had to buy a sweatshirt that said 100% cotton but was obviously polyester. Truth in labeling laws don't seem to be a concern.

I will be traveling to China again this year. I hope to get to Suzhou, an hour outside of Shanghai, a city of water and gardens.

*** A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. Lao Tzu

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January 15, 2005

Contemporary Art

o you have $20,000 for unique interior design? This is what art has come to: Snot as art.

*** If you make one or two ridiculous assumptions, you'll find everything I say or do totally justified. Ashleigh Brilliant


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Men and Women

oy, just when you think Men are getting civilized!

But then, Women aren't much better!

*** There better be a next life, if I am to have any hope of understanding this one. Ashleigh Brilliant

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Long Notes on World War IV

ommentary magazine has published a couple of indepth articles by Norman Podhoretz articulating the position that we are in World War IV. Here's my favorite picture of Norman:

I do not completely agree with all of his arguments, but I think he makes a mostly fascinating case.

If you take the time (and you will have to patiently read the first document in its entirety to grasp the argument), I think you will at least begin to understand what many in the Bush Adminstration believes to be true. This is the best explanation I have read to account for all of the Bush administration's actions. Not the wacky conspiracy theories of the Michael Moore / MoveOn.Org crowd.

One important distinction seems to be ignored by people who argue for "fair trials" and "constitutional rights" for enemy combatants during a war: Law Enforcement only comes into play under the U.S. Constitution in peace time. Warfare by definition is resorted to when law enforcement fails, when law enforcement is not enough to protect a society against extraordinary criminal activity.

Under the U.S. Constitution and law enforcement, you cannot legally execute someone without going through a proper political and legal process.

In warfare, you can legally execute someone based on the military uniform they are wearing, or the fact that they are trying to kill you, whether or not they are wearing a uniform. (The U.S. Military does have Rules of War, which trigger military law enforcement. That is entirely different from the law enforcement I am speaking of here. You've heard of Martial Law, right?)

For these reasons, warfare must be looked on as something rarely engaged in, and only in cases where law enforcement cannot stop large-scale criminal activity, especially activity that endangers the foundations and institutions of a society.

The point is, these are distinct areas that should not be mixed. That is, when talking about warfare, it's inappropriate to talk law enforcement. When people mix these two, you can bet they are either unclear in their thinking, or being politically manipulative.

Law enforcement comes back into play once war has ended.

The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, the U.N., and the European countries spent the 1980s and 90s applying law enforcement tactics against suicidal jihadists. It did not work. It encouraged the jihadists, who state clearly that they thought the West was weak, a paper tiger, easily brought to its knees, just like the Soviet Union was when it lost the war in Afghanistan.

The current Bush administration has recognized the failure of law enforcement and has moved into warfare. Right or wrong, that is the decision. We have moved beyond fair trials, and constitutional rights, except to the extent the Bush administration chooses to apply it in selective situations.

*** Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. Mark Twain

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January 14, 2005

My Name is Sue

e might as well have signs everywhere that say "Warning: Life Causes Death." Here are some real warning labels from the Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch website:

Also check out their Whiplash Awards for frivolous lawsuits, and their Looney Lawsuits. Here are some headlines:

Here's some more wacky warning labels:

*** TWO THERAPISTS GET UGLY: "I'd like to empower you to get out of my face." "Oh yeah? You and what co-facilitators?

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January 13, 2005

Top Ten Laws I'd Like to See


  1. he top salary for every public school administrator shall be no greater than the lowest salary for a teacher.
  2. For every law passed, two laws must be rescinded.
  3. Since politicians and lawyers will abuse "one-law, two-removed," for every word in a new law, two words must be removed.
  4. Movie and television actors are forbidden to speak publicly on political issues for 5 years after their last TV or movie appearance.
  5. The term of office for President is 7 years. Limited to one term.
  6. The term of office for Senators is 5 years. Limited to one term.
  7. The term of office for House members is 4 years. Limited to two terms.
  8. The term of office for Supreme Court Justice is for life, up to 80 years old.
  9. Lawyers are forbidden from accepting any portion of damage awards.
  10. Lawyers who bring lawsuits and lose must pay the legal fees of those they file against.

Update: The more I think about election logistics, the more I think I should modify the election terms:

  1. The term of office for President is 7 years. Limited to one term.
  2. The term of office for Senators is 9 years. Limited to one term.
  3. The term of office for House members is 3 years. Limited to three terms.

This way more often than not, Presedential elections would not be hampered with Senate and House elections.

*** How many lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb? One: the lawyer holds it while the rest of the world revolves around him.

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January 12, 2005

"My name is Rather. And I'm a dick."

augh out loud to excerpts from the new Inspector Dan Rather mystery.

Juicy quote: "It was a quiet cold Monday at Black Rock. Too quiet, I thought, slowly polishing the lens on my trusty Sony VC6809. New York is not the kind of town that likes to keep secrets, and my tingling senses told me that somewhere in Gotham somebody was spilling some beans. And in my line of work, you get to know deep down in your gut those beans have a habit of being silent - but deadly. "

*** Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.


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Random Morsels

his week's Penguin Dope Slap goes to Dan Rather for going beyond being a mere idiot and becoming an idiot savant. In the CBS Report, on page 208: "Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true because 'the facts are right on the money,' and that no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic." Enough of this idiot! Take that:

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." Jonathan Swift


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January 11, 2005

Shanghaied - China, Part 1

ast September my company sent me to China to help with training engineers. It was my first trip to Asia, and we stayed a week in Shanghai and then several days in Beijing. It was an amazing trip. And I saw first-hand that communism is a real, uh, interesting idea (more on that in a minute).

Shanghai is a city of 20 million people. Think about that. Over twice as many people as in New York City. There are skyscrapers as far as the eye can see in all directions!

At night, the structures look like The Jetsons meet Godzilla.



It's as if the Chinese brought in every French avant garde architect to create buildings topped by spheres and rings and points and neon lights. The Chinese definitely love color. The skyline looks like neon fireworks. Everywhere you go at night, the buildings are lit up. I was walking the Bund area when I saw a huge building lit up in gold light. It was grand in architecture and presence. Was it a museum? Was it the opera house? No! It was the Shanghai Customs House!

We had dinner in the second sphere of the Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower. The restuarant revolves 360 degrees in exactly one hour.

Everywhere you go in Shanghai, and especially in Beijing, you see high-rise cranes. The steel consumption is incredible. (In Beijing they are building over 600 hotels to accommodate the 2008 Olympics. They work 24 hours. All night you can see welding torches in the distance.

Here is a picture of Shanghai taken from the Oriental Pearl restaurant.




When we went shopping in Shanghai, whatever price you're quoted, you know you can haggle down to one-third. The merchandise is very cheap, and truth in labeling is not enforced. Silk and cashmere are not silk and cashmere.

After a couple of days I noticed that all of the shops contained pretty much the same merchandise in the same packaging. I suddenly got visions of factories churning out tourist trinkets and began to see that it all was kind of a front for the Communist Party. It had all the appearance of capitalism, but it wasn't.

Here's a picture of me with friends in a famous restaurant in Yu Gardens (they have a big picture of Bill and Hillary Clinton on the wall).

More later.

*** All I want is a warm bed, a kind word, and ultimate power. Ashleigh Brilliant


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January 10, 2005

The Washington State Fix Is In

ooks like the governor's race was fixed in favor of the Democratic incumbant, according to John Fund. The incumbant has declared victory with a 129-vote lead after the recount, but:

Juicy Quote: "At least 1,200 more votes were counted in Seattle's King County than the number of individual voters who can be accounted for. Other counties saw similar, albeit smaller, excess vote totals. More than 300 military personnel who were sent their absentee ballots too late to return them have signed affidavits saying they intended to vote for Mr. Rossi. Some 1 out of 20 ballots in King County that officials felt were marked unclearly were 'enhanced' with Wite-Out or pens so that some had their original markings obliterated. Most disturbing is the revelation last week by King County officials that at least 348 unverified provisional ballots were fed directly into vote-counting machines. 'Did it happen? Yes. Unfortunately, that's part of the process in King County,' elections superintendent Bill Huennekens told the Seattle Times. 'It's a very human process, and in some cases that did happen.'"

So where are the calls for a stolen election? I guess it depends on whose ox appears to be getting AlGored.

*** Truth is beautiful, of course; but so are lies. Ralph Waldo Emerson



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January 9, 2005

Anna Gets What She Wants

nna in Cairo asks for the next chapter following the one in my First Post, and I believe in giving the audience, even an audience of one, what she wants. Here you go, Anna:

****Chapter 9 ****

The students couldn't get out of that room fast enough. I joined them and waited outside the door. Bendbridge came out and gave me a grim look.

"You must be the man my daughter told me about."

I caught a slight whiff of whiskey. "Mackenzie's my name, Professor. Can we speak in your office?"

I didn't offer to shake hands. He grimaced and gestured for me to follow. He walked like a man soon in need of a walker. Bent forward, somewhat lurching. We made our way to another building, passing Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, six life-size reproductions reflecting the soon-to-be-programmed aspirations of many new students.

He opened a ground-floor door into a stuffy, cramped office, overloaded with books and papers and other strange piles on his enormous desk that barely left room for a pair of wood chairs, his on rollers, the other without. One small window with slitted blinds allowed in slivers of sunlight. A petite, pudgy woman sat in a chair. She turned as the door opened. Black-dyed hair with stylish silver streaks on the sides, olive-wrinkled skin, no makeup around brown eyes. Her eyes were moist and red from crying, though her cheeks were dry.

"Tom, I...."

"I have a guest at the moment," he said, stepping aside to reveal me standing in the doorway. "I'll come to your office when we're done." He spoke sharply, impatiently.

She rose with her head down and stepped past me without looking up. Short and plump. Pale, translucent skin from spending too much time indoors.

I sat in the chair she vacated. Stepping around the desk, he sat in his chair, staring at me, waiting for some justification for my taking his time to view me through the folds of his slitted lizard eyes. Age makes time more precious.

"My daughter said she wanted to hire a private detective," he said. He said it with about the same respect I received from many members of law enforcement. "You don't look like one. They normally have enough sense to wear a suit and tie. But then, you're my first and all I have to go on is Bogart. Perhaps you can apply your ratiocinative skills and tell me what you thought of the short lesson I just gave to one of my students."

I guessed him to be in his late-fifties, not all that old, but his attitude added ten years of ugly. I liked him. His wall was one that required burrowing from the inside. I was good at that. It was a risk. But I suspected he had little tolerance for indirectness and sweet-talk.

"The stereotype is one of relying as much on fists as on brains." I smiled the smile of a military nurse readying an enema bag. "I understand. I'd be happy to tell you what I thought of your nuanced performance, Poorfessor. I enjoyed your brief exordium on vocabulary framed in the Socratic Method. But I must qualify my enjoyment by pointing out that you did what Socrates would never do. You turned his method away from a mutual exploration of truth and into a bludgeon of ridicule. While I would tend to agree with your implied assessment that the girl has been taken in by a rather jingoistic superficiality, how many young people her age have escaped that? I would presume, Poorfessor, that you subscribe to the classic definition of a liberal education, the education of a free citizen. That education leads one out of the slavery of ignorance into the freedom of knowledge. And that your job, Poorfessor, is to aid the ignorant, like that young woman, in a manner that enhances her self-examination, increases her desire to expand her scope, and puts her feet solidly on a path that leads out of mere ignorance and acquired superficialities."

I paused long enough to emit a short barking sigh.

"But I am afraid, Poorfessor, that today you have failed. Instead of opening a door, you may well have welded it shut. Through your ridicule, Poorfessor, you have provided her with an excuse, not only to dismiss you, an obviously insecure ethnocentric white male only interested in keeping women on eggshells, especially of the Black-Hispanic-lesbian variety, but also to dismiss Shakespeare as well. In my view, Poorfessor, you have committed an intellectual crime. Rather than lead her out of her ignorance, you have confirmed her in it. Unless she's made of sterner stuff than most freshmen living away from home for the first time. And because you ridiculed her publicly, you have effectively shut down the entire class. Who would dare put a thoughtful question to you now, after you have revealed yourself to be a rhetorical rocket launcher?"

* * *

His face grew red, his eyes slitted even more. I had achieved one mission objective.

"I know I don't look like a much of a sophisticated rocket launcher myself, Poorfessor. But I'm curious; how does it feel?" I gave him my patented sardonic smile.

He didn't answer. Several more creases appeared on his forehead. He stood up and walked over to the window, looking blasted. Good.

"But there is a way out," I said, transitioning to my second mission objective. "You could devote your next class to self-humiliation. Blow up your own authority. Allow them time to have at you with their explosives, which they will likely use, but more gently, after you have used your own on yourself more ruthlessly. Devastate yourself. You could then use the rest of your class to rebuild your ethos into one of openness and humility. You might actually get through to some of them. You can even rotate that diamond of Shakespeare to reveal the facets of humiliation and draw out some examples, since we already know that nobody has explored the variety of emotional states associated with humiliation and their consequent value in improving character with the exquisite precision of Shakespeare. Too bad the spring quarter is about over."

I waited. After a minute of silence, he looked at me with a raised bushy eyebrow. I'd won the first round.

"Where did you receive your education?"

"Redding, California."

"There is no university in such a place."

I shrugged. "When I was eight years old, my parents bought me an old set of Britannica's The Great Books of the Western World. You know, that 54-volume set you see in finer used books stores? The one that looks nice in the home but nobody ever reads? The first volume outlines a ten-year study plan. I'm the only person I know who has ever actually put himself through it. At first my mother tried to keep up with me. Later my father took over. I finished it by the time I was eighteen. You can imagine how out of place I felt in the small public schools in Redding. The local community college was no better. I tried Chico State University for a couple of semesters and then left for love and marriage. After a year of that, I joined the U.S. Army. I learned how to use my brains and my fists. I now have enough of an education to teach myself. I still read a great deal. And I pay attention."

He gave me an odd look. He didn't crack. He held on to his anger. I didn't tell him about my Master's at George Washington University. Security Policy Studies. It always led to questions that I refused to answer.

"You don't look military."

"I get that a lot." Members of my particular branch of the military preferred being underestimated. That perception has helped us achieve more mission objectives, often without our targets knowing who did what, or how.

"Let's get on with this," he said, abruptly sitting down. "What do you want to know?"

"Tell me why your daughter is concerned about you."

"Undoubtedly she has told you that. Why should I...? Oh, I see. Multiply your sources to crosscheck information. Fine. Keli is concerned that I am participating in a marginal group of zealots who see conspiracy everywhere. She thinks I have been sold a bill of goods and that they are taking advantage of my reputation in the academic community to make unwarranted inroads into the hearts and minds of gullible students. So I assume your job is to investigate me and them for signs of idiocy and senility and the kinds of mold that can grow in an intellectually insular environment. The fact is, Mr....?"

I handed him my card.

He read it and then eyed me in a way I'd seen countless times. "Mercedes Macintyre Mackenzie?"

"A literary collision," I said. "One survivor. Most people call me Mac."

He didn't laugh. "The fact is, Mr. Mackenzie, my daughter is partially correct in her assessment. I leave it to you to determine if she is completely correct."

Ugly but sensible. "She wants me to investigate this organization. What do you call it?"

"The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship," he said. "SOF for short."

I made a note of the name. "She also wants me to investigate Shakespeare. Ferret out the truth."

He actually attempted to construct a smile, but the architecture collapsed. "She believes that a private detective can determine the truth about who wrote the plays?" he said. "Amusing. I suppose you would like my help?"

"I'm sure you can recommend the most persuasive books to read. People to talk to. I'd also be interested in any critiques of your Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship."

"Your timing is impeccable, Mr. Mackenzie. There is an SOF conference this weekend in Carmel at the White Sands Hotel. I will be delivering a paper that will rock the Shakespeare establishment, and I will be engaging in a debate with Professor Raven Teagis of Harvard. He's out here doing research at Berkeley. Calling it a debate is rather misleading. He does not debate. He merely ridicules. Like all Stratfordians. That is what they have been reduced to."

I wrote as he talked. "Stratfordians?"

"Those who believe in the myth that Shakespeare," he pronounced it Shaksper, "of Stratford, that illiterate country boy, was the author of these magnificent plays. I number among the Oxfordians, who have demonstrated that only an educated Englishman of the nobility could have written those plays. Our man is Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the first earl of the realm under Elizabeth." He had turned on his oration voice. Louder, deeper. He sounded snobbishly oracular.

"Elizabeth Tudor."

"That's right."

I decided against pulling out the paper at this time.

"She knew Oxford was Shakespeare?"

He gave me a Mona Lisa smile. "Oh, I would say Elizabeth knew more than history has chosen to record."

"Such as?"

"Let's just say that there is plenty of explosive material that would shock, not only your average Englishman, but also the English government. They would not be happy with that material becoming public."

I waited.

"Mr. Mackenzie, I realize you want to put me in the conspiracy nut box. But before I condemn myself in your eyes by explaining prematurely what I have discovered, perhaps you ought to do a little background reading first."

"Okay. If I were to read, say, two or three books on the subject, which do you think would be most helpful?" I asked.

He got up and pulled a book from a bookshelf. "I will presume that you return books that are loaned to you, Mr. Mackenzie. For background, you should first read Thomas Looney's Shakespeare 'Identified'." He pronounced it Loney.

The book was old and thick. I checked the date. 1920. "This seems a bit old. Has there been nothing more recently published?"

"Anything recent will be available at the conference. You're holding the true foundation of this movement. That will give you enough to chew on."

"Thank you, professor. I was wondering. What real difference does it make? I mean, we have the plays. If you are right, they've survived hundreds of years without the world knowing the true author. Does it really matter who wrote the plays?"

Bendbridge stood with his hands on his desk and took a deep breath.

* * *

"Does it really matter who you are, Mr. Mackenzie? Does it matter at all that others are able to attach your actions to you? I think it does. Identity clarifies reality. Confusion over identity causes many of the ills that plague our planet. Those who identify themselves and others primarily with skin color or ethnicity, or some other superficial characteristic that supplants their essential humanity, have caused horrible strife. People who have their identities captured with programmatic ideologies have voluntarily participated in mass slaughter. Millions of school children have been led to believe that their education, their life, and their experience make no difference when it comes to writing great poetry or great literature. In some areas, it is true that extraordinary things can be achieved without training. We have idiot savants who are math geniuses. However, no idiot savant has even written great literature. No one without extraordinary access to learning has written, not just one work, but a whole series, a whole lifetime of works that marks an experienced genius. To believe in the Stratford myth is to believe in a kind of divine grace that simply has no example in any other life lived in this world."

He straightened up and crinkled his face at me as if I were a student in his class.

"Great poets, great writers experience the life reflected in their works. Their works represent a kind of unconscious psychobiography. They have lived their ideas and the passions. And Shakespeare above all other writers has the ideas and the passions. His life must necessarily have been one of leisure, one that allowed him the time, the learning, the experience, to live the life we see reflected in the plays. To believe otherwise is to denigrate learning, to marginalize experience, to sideline the necessary ore mined for a great life lived. A life worth reworking into fiction. Look at all the great authors, Dante, Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce. Their works speak of their lives, reveal intimate glimpses into their experiences, expose the state of their being. A great author lives the life that in one way or the other is revealed in great works. Not literal autobiography, perhaps. Rather an autobiography of mind, experience, and learning. But if you listen to Stratfordians, Shakespeare is the one great exception. A man of no significant experience, no significant learning. In fact in all documented biographical details, he is an insignificant man, his an insignificant life. All I have to say to that, Mr. Mackenzie, is horseshit. Pure unadulterated horseshit."

Thus endeth the lesson.

"I see," I said. "Thank you. Your daughter tells me that you were converted to this new author within the last couple of years. Care to tell me specifically what made you change?"

"Do you like a good mystery, Mr. Mackenzie?"

"I'm a private detective, Professor."

"Then you should be able to appreciate this. Who wrote the works of Shakespeare is the greatest of all literary mysteries. He is acknowledged as the greatest writer in the English language, perhaps in any language. You will find him quoted more often than the Bible. He has influenced every art. And his plays are still performed everywhere in the world today, 400 years after they were written. And yet, many intelligent scholars still ask one simple question: Who was he?"

"That's interesting, Professor, but that doesn't tell me what made you change."

He sighed as he reseated himself. "Young man, I don't have the time right now to give you what has taken others years to deduce. If you are as intelligent as you seem to think you are, then after reading those books and listening carefully this weekend, you should be able to figure it out. Let's just say that I don't give a damn about academic reputations, mine or anyone else's. And perhaps because of that, I can see where other orthodox scholars are blind. Now run along and do your studies. We can talk in a week or two, after you have digested the basics."

I changed my mind. I pulled out the ripped note, unfolded it, and placed it on his desk. He stared at it before picking it up and putting it away in his drawer.

"I see my daughter has become a snoop." He looked up at me. "There are always cranks, Mr. Mackenzie. Cranks who refuse to let go of their cherished fixations. If you want to understand what this...disturbed person is concerned about, come to my lecture Friday. I assure you that there is nothing sinister here. I am in no danger."

"I'll do that. One last question, Professor." I pretended to look at my notes. "Would you say you have a drinking problem?"

He jerked out of his chair, uglier, redder, angrier. "That's none of your damn business. Now I have an appointment to keep. Get out."

Class dismissed.


*** Are we having a relationship, or just doing research on each other? Ashleigh Brilliant


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A Shakespeare Heretic

t's true. I'm a Shakespeare heretic. Here's a painting of the real author, Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Shakespeare 'Identified' is a real book and available free online at The Shakespeare Fellowship. (Not to be confused with the novel's Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.)

If you are interested in exploring the Shakespeare Authorship question, and if you are using at least Internet Explorer 5.0, you can check out a PowerPoint presentation I created for the web called Shakespeare and Oxford: 25 Curious Connections.

And here's A Beginner's Guide. My website: SourceText.Com.

Also, Roland Emmerich is directing a $35 million film called Soul of the Age based on De Vere's life.

And Jeremy Irons recently announced on The Charlie Rose Show that he too is an Oxfordian.

*** Gentles, do not reprehend
If you pardon, we will mend.


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Posted by witnit at 6:00 AM

January 8, 2005

Urban Legends


y the way, if you don't know about Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference website, get on board.

*** It's not what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. Will Rogers

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Speaking of Merry Christmas...

or the friends who read this blog, and you voyeurs, here's me with my cute wife Bree for Christmas. (And no she is not a Desperate Housewife.)



*** One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.


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January 7, 2005

Short Notes on World War IV

*** Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact. Richard Mitchell

UPDATE: Power Line has a post about the Gonzales hearings.


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The God Game, Part 1

bishop, a priest, and a peasant were in a great European cathedral. The bishop approached the alter rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing. I am nothing." Then the priest approached the alter rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing. I am nothing." The humble peasant was moved to imitate the bishop and the priest, so he approached the alter rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing. I am nothing."

The priest turned furiously and hissed into the priest's ear, "Who the hell does he think he is?"

It's good to recall that it's not necessary to believe in God in order to be a fundamentalist.

I think all too many Americans have forgotten just what was and is the purpose of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights: To define the limits of the Federal government and to protect citizens from its coercive power.

That's what distinguishes government from business: A business persuades us to use its goods and services, while a government coerces us to use its goods and services.

So when the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" the purpose is clearly to protect us from government's coercive power to restrict religious freedom or force a particular religion upon citizens.

Which leads us to the present conundrum: Is the forceable amputation of religious icons and discussions from government institutions, including public schools, a restriction of religious freedom and in effect a form of coercing an atheistic religion upon citizens?

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Muslim. Nor Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Frisbeetarian (one who believes that when you die, your Soul flies up to the roof and rests there for eternity.)

In general, I favor open public references to a "non-partisan" deity and discussion of God and religions in public schools. The spiritual life and the tradition of spiritual principles are a legitimate topic for public discussion. Indeed, I think that, whether a particular religion has the whole truth or not, a person who believes they are held divinely accountable for their actions in this life is more likely to restrain their baser impulses than a person who believes there is no such accountability, that Darwinian struggle is the norm.

So when the mere presence of the word "God" in public life becomes something to amputate (recall the Sacramento, California, man suing over the use of "under God" in the Pledge of Alliegiance or the Cupertino, California, school district bans the Declaration of Independence from classrooms for containing the word God), Housten, we have a problem.

Think about how widely the 1st Amendement freedom of speech is protected, how it insinuates itself into public and private life. Religious expression seems to be equally protected by the same Amendment. Yet that passage is increasingly interpreted as a reason to restrict religious expression to dark places and behind closed doors.

I don't want either the whacko right or the whacko left dictating what everyone should believe, whether it's one God or no God at all. Just shut up and let us say Merry Christmas, even if we're not Christians. And let us talk about religion and God in the schools without being coerced into a particular belief. Or non-belief.


*** I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant. H. L. Mencken

Go on to The God Game, Part 2.


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January 6, 2005

Iraqis Must Liberate Themselves

inally, someone who says it succinctly. Tom Friedman of the New York Times:

"We cannot liberate Iraq, and never could. Only Iraqis can liberate themselves, by first forging a social contract for sharing power and then having the will to go out and defend that compact against the minorities who will try to resist it. Elections are necessary for that process to unfold, but not sufficient. There has to be the will - among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds - to forge that equitable social contract and then fight for it."

*** May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans? I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant. Mr. Spock

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Self-Referential Sentences

Thanks to Douglas Hofstadter and his Godel, Escher, Back: an Etermal Golden Braid for launching the Self-Referential Sentence movement.

Also a nod to Dave Barry's Self-Referential Item of the Day.

*** Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum. P.G. Wodehouse

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January 5, 2005

ConsLibModism

hen I see politicians on television, invariably I want to do this:

By now you're probably trying to put me in a liberal/conservative Democrat/Republican box. Let me help you out with some facts about me:

In short, I have an oddly wide range of interests and tolerance. The political party I would belong to probably died with Benjamin Franklin.

There. I think I just lost 60% of my readers. But as Bill Cosby once said, "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

*** It is all very simple, or it is all very complex, or it is neither, or both. Ashleigh Brilliant

UPDATE

I must admit I love this Open Letter to Europe by Herbert E. Meyer for The American Thinker. Somehow I missed it the first time around.

Juicy quote: "But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars – may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?"

***It's not what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. Will Rogers

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January 4, 2005

Up With Which

efinition 4 of "WitNit" (in the About section to the right) is a transparent play on a possibly apocryphal statement by Winston Churchill. According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, Winston Churchill was chided by an editor for ending a sentence in a preposition, to which he replied, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

I love ending sentences in prepositions. We have to. That's what communication's about. (I also love self-referential sentences like, "This sentence is a !!!! premature punctuator" But that topic is saved for a future post.)

Churchill is well worth investing time studying. For people who want to glimpse parallels between the Chamberlains of yesterday and today, I always recommend the first volume of his six-book history of The Second World War, The Gathering Storm. Amazon.com sells a paperback version.

Juicy quote: "When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong, these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history." Winston S. Churchill, House of Commons, 12 April 1935

Regarding great speeches, check out the American Rhetoric website. Over 5,000 audio and video speeches are available. You can listen to the top 100 speeches, including the entire Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" speech. They also have a section on the Rhetoric of 9-11.

*** You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war. Winston Churchill's remark after Neville Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler.


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January 3, 2005

Why Johnny Can't Think Politically

'm an admirer of the late Walter Karp's political writings (although I disagree with some of his positions). His articles in Harper's Magazine should not be forgotten. Here's one I recommend: Textbook America.


Juicy quote: "Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers. As Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.' Since there was no way to stop 'the masses' from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there."

If you like that, you will also like, Why Johnny Can't Think.

Juicy quote: "When 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third party in America, we are dealing not with a sad educational failure but with a remarkably subtle success."

These essays and others can be found in Walter Karp's Buried Alive: Essays on Our Endagered Republic.

*** The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. Mark Twain


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January 2, 2005

Warning! Rape of the Mother Tongue Will Be Punished!

ou would think that a bunch of physics student bloggers at the University of Texas would know better, but no. The Einsteins at The String Coffee Table, a group blog on physics, don't know the difference between "lose" and "loose." If you Google "to loose" with the quotes, you'll think that the confusion exists primarily with writers who want to advise you on how "to loose" weight. (Let's not imagine what that might literally mean.)

I know that English is challenging, especially considering that words like cough, rough, bough, though, and through are all pronounced differently. But for God's sake, these are physics students at a university!


I know I'm setting myself up for witnitters who will point out my errors in grammar and usage. Fine. That's to be expected. But please note that not one student responding in the blog above seems to have noticed the problem.

By the way, the title of this post is taken from Richard Mitchell, famous for The Underground Grammarian, a funny, cranky newsletter, all of which I have transcribed for the web. He used the statement in his first newsletter.

Juicy quote: "The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English."

A good place to start with Richard Mitchell is the text of a speech he gave called Why Good Grammar? or his book Less Than Words Can Say. You can read the Foreword.


*** You reached me just in time; I was beginning to feel confident again. Ashleigh Brilliant

Update: January 5, 9:06 pm

It's been properly pointed out to me that the student posting at the website above is from Germany and not a U of T student. And that his English is probably much better than my German. Most Germans I know have much better English than most Americans. I'm sure this is merely the first of my public humiliations. The air gets awfully thin on that high horse.

*** I am sorry, but what you have mistaken for malicious intent is nothing more than sheer incompetance! Mark Alexander


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