Archive Listing
March 24, 2013 - March 17, 2013

Saturday, February 25, 2012

WINE. ETC. The editorial staff of Instapunk.com has always displayed an interest in "fringe science." As it happens, I've been dabbling in some fringe science lately, so when IP invited me to write some guest posts, I knew right away where to start.

Perhaps you have, like venerable Harry, enjoyed wine from time to time. Perhaps, like him, you've even enjoyed enough at one sitting to experience an intoxicating effect. But let's not dwell on such excesses. For this journey of imagination, let's merely stipulate that you enjoy one single, modest serving of wine every evening while you curl up in your Snuggie in your favorite cozy chair, savoring the latest drollery of Maureen Dowd or James Wolcott. A comforting, yet intellectually stimulating, routine.

But one night, a friend stops by and insists, quite insistently, that you read a book. A book he claims may -- no, will -- change your whole life for the better. A book that, if you chose to believe it, would mean giving up wine for life... or at least indulging in it only on the very most special occasions. Certainly not on a nightly or near-nightly basis.

The author is a doctor who has seen thousands of patients. His years of experience have convinced him that the wine sold in stores today bears little resemblance to the wine that people have been drinking since before the dawn of writing. Yes, its flavor is similar or even better; but the twentieth century introduced innovations in winemaking that not only reduced wine's nutritional value, but made it actively harmful to humans. So harmful, in fact, that "Frankenwine" by itself may account for a good portion of America's increases in health problems over the last few decades.

He has spent considerable time and effort searching the corpus of scientific knowledge for relevant information. He has found much that he believes supports his theory, and includes citations for all of it.

The author claims that if you are willing to undertake the experiment of going without your daily glass of wine for one month, you will notice significant positive benefits. Your mood will improve, possibly within days. Your energy will increase. Your excess weight will begin to melt away. Your skin will clear up. Your chronic aches and pains, particularly those related to inflammation, will diminish or vanish entirely. And so will your cravings for wine.

All you have to do is go without wine! -- Though you do have to be scrupulous about it. Drinking one glass of wine may be enough to halt your progress for three days. You also have to keep an eye out for wine lurking where it isn't advertised; for example, in your Chicken Marsala, or in your Mimosa. Sorry, champagne counts as wine.

The author also maintains a web site. It is usually updated daily, and many people visit it. Oftentimes the comments on a given blog entry will include posts from people who just stopped by to thank the author for changing their lives. Some even write impassioned personal histories, or lament that the knowledge came too late to save a relative who died of a wine-related illness.

You take the time to determine whether this author has detractors, and of course, he does. But you notice a curious consistency among them. They don't seem to disprove the author's arguments. Some point out that wine has been around for a long time. Some say wine allergy is a well-known problem among a small percentage of the population, and the book has no broader application. Others refute assertions the author never made. Still others complain that the author failed to include wine-free recipes.

In the meantime, while you contemplate the book and the words its detractors have written, you grow ever more fat, tired, and depressed, and you need to buy a bigger Snuggie.

So. Are you ready to give up wine?

You may have guessed the scenario isn't hypothetical. But before you make up your mind, I should mention there's one detail I changed. The substance in question is actually wheat, not wine.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

HOW DARE ANYONE QUESTION OBAMA'S THEOLOGY?  Everything you need to know about the history of 20th/21st century leftism is contained in the clip above. I know Santorum has been criticized for his use of the word theology in opposing Obama's policies, and it's unfortunate that he is, like most conservatives, fumbling inarticulately toward a truth he senses without wholly understanding. But we all know what he is talking about. What so-called liberals term secular humanism is a synonym for rational atheistic totalitarianism. Its overwhelmingly most important objective is to amputate God from the social equation. It's vital that there be no divine justice, which implies supra-human absoluteness that transcends secular authority, but only a relative, frequently vengeful and vindictive impostor hinted at in the qualifying term 'social justice.'
     
Supposedly, they're the ones who care equally about everyone, and all the rest of us care unequally about everyone, fatally compromised by free opinions embodying biases no one should have. These cause us to discriminate -- i.e., make decisions and judgments based on differences between our nonsensically absolute ideals and the behaviors of individuals and groups of peoples. Which are always wrong. Because only the secular humanists are objective enough to know that secular humanist decisions and judgments are objective and everyone else's decisions and judgments are irrationally racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, selfish, ignorant, and wrong. Not to mention anthropocentric. As if the history of human life conferred some right to feel superior to other forms of life randomly generated by evolution.

Whereupon we fall immediately into their trap. We laugh at secular humanist legislation aimed at killing family farms and housing developments for the sake of saving snail darters and the last two surviving yellow-lashed dung finches. Who's exhibiting the more divine concern for "every sparrow that falls" than they? We're the small-minded ones. They're the Big Picture grandees, the ones who care about "The Planet" more than a cracker kid's desire to manifest his adolescent testosterone by showing off at junior bull-riding in the local rodeo. Hell, their kids aren't even allowed to play with toy guns. Who's more humanly virtuous here?

uh, WE are. Discrimination is not a crime. It's a fundamental component of human survival. Throughout all of human history, we have discriminated to protect our families and communities -- between friend and foe, strong and weak, health and disease, moral strength and moral weakness, fidelity and betrayal, hard-working and lazy, fruitful and barren, brave and cowardly, valorous and merely violent, creative and parasitic, determined and equivocal, reliable and not worth a damn. These are all value judgments. Why the human race has advanced to a degree that Agent Smith regards as akin to a virus. While the mammals he regards as archetypes of mammalian "equilibrium," many now threatened by their inability to think and adapt (evolution, anyone?) are declining toward extinction, we are here in greater numbers than any other large mammal. Virus? Really? A mammal anomaly? Really? Has Agent Smith ever heard of rats? But rats didn't build the Sistine Chapel, and rats don't create a virulent philosophical anti-rat offshoot that hates rats as a threat to the fucking Planet.

Agent Smith should have ensconced himself in Washington, DC. He'd be almost at home there. He hates the ordinary human form he's been required to adopt. Like all the brilliant overeducated supermen who pass laws they never have to comply with themselves. Pelosi's a Catholic who can tell the Pope what's what about about contraception and abortion. Harry Reid's a Mormon who can defy his avowed beliefs just as expediently. Obama is a professed Christian who lives like a married Pope and gets to be infallible about everything, because if he isn't, you're a racist. If there's a unifying theology here, it's pretty clear God has nothing to do with it. At all. Which, I'm thinking, is the whole point. The only god on the scene is the superior person or persons in charge. Why they continue to sympathize with Castro, Ahmadinejad, and the Taliban. The powerful are more united by their contempt for their subjects than by faith or ideas. All that really matters is what you can get away with. Why Agent Smith's peroration is corrupt before he even begins it.

But I'm willing to accept one of Agent Smith's metaphors. The left has become a disease akin to a virus. Its purpose is to invade healthy cells and destroy the immune system, generate cancer, and cause normal healthy functioning to turn against itself and mutate into self-destroying pathology.

This is one of those posts where you can cite a hundred topical links or none. I'll cite one here. Now I'll move on.

Here's the thing. The left now owns the intelligentsia. The press, the universities, the entertainment media, the assholes who think union loyalty is more important than patriotism, the hyphenated millions who look to government to make America more responsive to their own personal needs than the long-term health of the nation, the same ones who adore JFK for his rhetoric about "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country," when all they're thinking about every single moment of every single damn day is "what can my country do for me," the ones who are so content with a new definition of the presidency as Excuse-Maker-in-Chief that they're not even slightly irked by Michelle's 16th glamour vacation in three years.... Why? Well, she's a celebrity. And we're just... uh... what?

Right. We're the consumers of internet alternative media. We can console ourselves with this, this, this, this (if you were only registered), and other stuff like this. Or closer to home, this.

Problem? The radical new left of the sixties was famous for declaring that "everything is politics." They may not have been right then, but they're right now. Facts and truth don't matter anymore. Everything you read, including me, is now less important for its content than its category. If you draw your facts and commentary and hope from the rightish blogosphere, rest assured that it's completely refuted by bland or strident (as needed) assertions to the contrary by CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the LA Times, the Providence Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The View, SNL, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Glee, Fashion Police, and every single sitcom on the air in America.

Not to mention every poll created as an artificial news story by some combination of the alphabet broadcasters (including Fox News, which is as anxious as every ugly girl to have a fairer friend to go out with, sorry to say), and every survey released from institutions like Harvard, the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and, of course, Harvard. If you get your news or motivation from somewhere else, well, everyone who matters can smell your, uh, "stink." If you get your news and arguments from the Drudge Report, Breitbart sites, Hotair, the Daily Caller, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, or (shudder) Worldnet News Daily, your stink is off the charts. You're pure Neanderthal, the virus Agent Smith was speaking of. They're poised and well able to destroy us in the upcoming election, despite the fact that Obama is the worst president by far in American history.

I'd counsel despair and acceptance of defeat -- but for one thing. The secular humanists are not saviors waiting in the wings. They've already had their chance. They did their own first version of the Matrix that was supposed to make everyone happy. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Catastrophic failures both. With casualties in the hundreds of millions. Killing individual aspiration for a better life in favor of government godhood seems to be the stupidest revolution of all. And we have the best record possible of both their vision and their legacy. The truest fossils of philosophy and its consequences are the architecture their sponsoring visions produce. On the one hand, we have the history of an architecture inspired by belief in the divine. On the other, we have the record of the architecture produced by the only rational atheist governments who ever ruled on our, uh, "planet." One Nazi, one Soviet. (Mao's secular dreams never actually resulted in what we'd call architecture. Just tens of millions of unmarked graves. The new stuff is, uh, capitalist, in a rather older architectural tradition.)

Compare. What inspires you? What depresses you? Take a look at the brief architectural glimpses we see in Agent Smith's tirade. What do they remind you of? Do you want to live? Or do you want to die? The choice facing Americans right now.

Architecture is the concretization of ideas about the meaning of life. Buildings either celebrate individuality and faith or they reduce humanity to slots and boxes. Follow the links. You think free peoples are immune? I'll close with a link to the architecture of contemporary London, the most surveilled city in the supposedly free west. Take note of the geometry -- boxes, squares, units, sameness, warehouse regularity. This is where we should desire to be headed? The new rational utopia? Lock and load, my friends. Atheism is the most anti-human force on earth.

Final note. Architecture is also the memorial of who we were. A cultural tombstone if nothing else. How do you want yours to read? We ran away when the tank was bearing down on us? Or we stood fast and got run over? There's been a lot of talk about a brokered convention. Mostly, conservatives seem to be opposed. A pragmatic reminder: if there is a brokered convention, the only possible candidate is Palin. Nobody else has been vetted (er, already raped and ransacked and eviscerated) by the national press. If you don't want Palin, don't hope for a brokered convention.

Final final note. If gas goes to $4.50 a gallon, it doesn't matter who runs against Obama. In that case, we win. Which means, I guess, that old notions of "electability" no longer apply.

In short, we're screwed. But maybe not. As I've said before, "the wheel spins round and round..."


...And maybe this time it spins for us.

Back to Archive Index