Bill's Notes

He's 21 now. I've been able to beat him until this year. But alas, he's gotten better with time and I've lost more than a few steps. Such is the march of time.

One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit.
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
....
That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.

and I have driven away all but the most committed readers.

Seriously. Almost everyone has left. I can't blame them. They kept checking and I kept not writing.

I'm sorry to my readers. My commitment to this blog has waned, I admit.

Still, I'm going to keep plugging along. Even if I'm the last one still reading ...

And if you keep checking in and are not a spambot, I appreciate it. Thanks.

I bought Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

I'm a fan of Jonah's National Review columns and expected to agree with his thesis. But I didn't like this book as much as I thought. I found that the trouble defining fascism put the whole thing in a gray area ... like many intellectual pursuits, your conclusions would follow from the definitions. But the definitions are very gray.

I didn't have a problem with that. Heck, I like gray. Gray is the new black. I like to know things are more complicated than they appear. But then there was a fatal problem: I got the sense from the writing that Jonah simply hadn't mastered the material. He didn't seem in control of it. It felt less like a book than a pretty-good term paper. So I bailed just before 100 pages.

Michael Ledeen explains the troubles with the book here.

My two conclusions from the book and related commentary:

1. Liberals should definitely stop calling conservatives fascists.

2. And, considering how complex the subject matter is concerning fascism, vice versa.

How about a group hug now that we've learned that none of us, all of us, or some of us are fascists, sometimes?

But I'm leaving it up there.

Keep making those babies.

Fun to make. Fun to keep. What's not to like?

Memo to France, Germany and Japan: Better start getting busy.

And in the "Where we would be without experts?" category, there's this:

Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty.

Golly. So people have babies because they're stupid, can't find the condoms and it's more difficult to kill them now? Whew!

You know, there could've been another reason ... that people wanted children, and that they were more than just horny, stupid and drunk. Naah ... couldn't be that.

I don't blog about work, but let's just say it's been a heck of fortnight. 'Nuf said.