Bill's Notes

Can't help it. Guy was a great artist, then sold out, then turned it around — sorta. Still, Every Picture Tells a Story is one of the great albums of the 70s. But that's not where I'm going now. This was the only decent song (and it's barely decent) that he did after he sold out and before ... well, we're getting to that. By the way, the video excludes the final, Baise-moi. Which is not a nice thing to say on AM radio. Anyway, Tonight's the Night in all Rod's mid-70s tarted-up-ness:



So Mr. Stewart was totally sold out for years, and let's skip that unpleasantness, shall we? But then in the early 80s he teamed up with Jeff Beck to cover Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready. Overplayed on the radio, but still a great song. I mean, Rod Stewart singing about faith!

Faith is the key
Open the doors and board them
There's hope for all ...



Then he sorta became middlebrow, and had a bunch of non-obnoxious hits. Then he had the guts to cover this Van Morrison song (this is the Unplugged version), which again talks of faith. I'm sorry he's dressed like an overstuffed partridge. But he does the job.

And at the end of the day
We should give thanks and praise to the One.



Speaking of Van Morrison, here's a terrific version of Tupelo Honey:



I'll be here all weekend. Don't forget to tip your bartenders and remember, designated drivers drink free.

Sail Away from David Gray:



Pretty cool video to go with it. Really captures those strange characters, smoke-filled haunts and non-sequiturs pretty well. (See this post.) Plus, I totally dig minor chords, and David Gray is all minor chords. As Bob Dylan said, minor chords hint at the supernatural.

Plenty of minors in This Year's Love:



And again here:



Of course, too many minor chords loses the mysticism and you end up in a self-absorbed languor, or even depression. So we'll perk it up.

And here's Shine:



So that's David Gray.

Every once in a while Mark hits one out of the park. Here he does a terrific job of explaining one of the most common misconceptions about how the Church works. And I find myself slipping into the legalistic thinking all the time. (I'd added some paragraphing to ease reading.)

What is absent from all this is any concept of life in Christ as *relationship*. All you get are rules, written on a card and magnetized to the refrigerator. Break rules on card A and the Divine Administrator puts in the record that you are slated for Hell. Break rules on Card B and the Divine Administrator marks you down. Earn enough infractions and the Sin Monitor Task Force transfers your name to the Go to Hell file.

However, if you do the theological equivalent of filling out a waiver by going to confession, the Divine Adminstrator will, for inscrutable reasons, round file your sin folder and let you start over. The goal of the Christian life, therefore is to die with your sin folder empty. Then God has to let you into heaven, which is this beautiful place that has nothing to do with Him really. It's just a really pretty park where your favorite people have been standing around waiting for you to arrive.

The notion that a life of virtue spent trying to cultivate a *relationship* with God never enters into the picture. It's just a question of keeping and breaking rules. And nobody really knows why one rule is more important than another. Indeed, some of the rules appear (to us moderns) to have nothing whatever do with anything. A mortal sin to miss Mass? Why? That one must have been stuck in by the Church to try to control people. Hey! Everybody lusts. Downgrade that one to venial. And if we are going to have rule to control people, why not putt something in there about SUVs. Destroying the earth is more serious than missing Mass!

In the same way, hell seems to have nothing to do with *relationship* in the modern mind. I constantly meet people who seem to think of Hell as an absurdly sadistic overreaction by a touchy God who get irrationally angry when people don't keep his arbitrary rules. Or else its something that falls on the head of innocent people like a safe, destroying them for no reason.

The notion that Hell has everything to do with *relationship*: that it is the "definitive self-exclusion" of a soul from the society of God never seems to occur to anybody. Having lived through the 20th Century, having seen a soul like Hitler's look around at a world he destroyed and declare that it was everybody else's fault but his, postmoderns can still somehow take seriously the notion that the human heart is incapable of walling itself off from relationship with God and man in pride.

In short, people don't seem to grasp that Heaven is simply the fruit of a life that pursues relationship with God on His terms and Hell is simply the fruit of a life that pursues its own course on our terms. Mortal and venial sins are useful distinctions, to be sure. But if you turn them into another way of trying to be saved by law, you are stone deaf to the most elementary teaching of the gospel: that only Christ, not law, can save us.

A reminder more for myself than anything.

So I'm stressing and stressing over my deadline. It looks like I'm gonna miss it. So I call the printer to humbly tell her the pub won't be coming this afternoon, but tomorrow morning. And she says, "Well, that's fine. We're not expecting it until next Thursday." Woo-hoo!

Fortunately, Alan Dershowitz explains the situation for us slower types.

In this case, they wiretapped 5,000 phone conversations, intercepted 6,000 emails, used surveillance and undercover tactics that are more appropriate for trapping terrorists than entrapping johns. Unlike terrorism and other predatory crimes, prostitution is legal in many parts of the world and in some parts of the U.S. Even in places like New York, where it is technically illegal, johns are rarely prosecuted. Prostitution rings operate openly, advertising "massage" and "escort" services in the back pages of glossy magazines, local newspapers and television sex channels.

If the federal government really wanted to shut down these operations, they could easily do it without a single wiretap or email intercept. All they would have to do is get an undercover agent to answer the ads, arrange for the "escort" to go from New York to New Jersey and be arrested. But many in law enforcement would much rather reserve these statutes for selective use against predetermined targets.

In this case, if the serendipitous bank audit really led federal agents to Mr. Spitzer, and Mr. Spitzer led them to the Emperor's Club, and federal prosecutors really wanted to get the Club, they could easily have sent an undercover cop to pose as a john, instead of tapping phones and reading emails — tactics designed to catch and embarrass Mr. Spitzer with his own recorded words, which could be, and were, leaked to the media. As this newspaper has reported: "It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . ."

Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin's KGB, once quipped to his boss, "show me the man and I will find the crime." The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad.

Both Democrats and Republicans have targeted political adversaries over the years. The weapons of choice are almost always elastic criminal laws. And few laws are more elastic, and susceptible to abuse, than federal laws on money laundering and sex crimes. For the sake of all Americans, these laws should be narrowed and limited to predatory crimes with real victims.

I have to admit that I was worn out by this stuff like this going back to the 80s. Whether RICO, asset-forfeiture laws that allow law enforcement to "arrest money" and keep it, and widespread wiretapping — all of it has been so far over the line, for so long, that I got tired of complaining about it.

That's one reason I haven't joined the chorus of those who complain about Dubya's wiretapping changes ... I'm like, that ship sailed a long time ago.

Granted, Spitzer made his name by abusing his prosecutorial discretion along the lines Dershowitz describes. So it's ironic that he got caught in the same web. Still, an appreciation for irony doesn't change the fundamental way Spitzer's privacy was violated, and two wrongs don't make a right.

Note: NOT Republicans. Conservatives.

First George McGovern last weeks a spirited defense of libertarianism. (I always knew George would come around.)

Now David Mamet.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Read the whole thing. It's an excellent exposition of the two world views at stake, and how we sorta work it out, anyway.

Comes from CK, so sent me one line: "So, I take it that you just discovered YouTube for the first time [...] ?
;-)"

The answer is, sorta. My new home computer has sound, and my work computer doesn't. I recognize that my exact format for these entries needs a little tweaking. Right now, they likely read like you've wandered into someone's basement with a guy who keeps playing his records and telling you personal stories about each song. As a writing challenge, that's pretty difficult to pull off. I don't think I'm doing it, so I'll have to revisit the play format here.

Probably need to pick fewer songs, be less discursive, focus on one story with a point, and don't bore the read with extraneous detail. Ah heck, if I'm gonna do all that thinking, I might as well call it work! Heigh-ho.

Roger Kimball weighs in on hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is one word that really demonstrates the cultural divide. For those conservatively inclined, hypocrisy is "the tribute vice pays to virtue," and a sign of fallen man failing to live up to his aspirations. For those of a liberal bent, hypocrisy is among the greatest of sins, and most often a charge thrown at conservatives and other public moralizers.

What I find ironic is that liberals say conservatives are hypocrites, and conservatives largely agree.

The fundamental question is: What do we do about man's inability to live up to his highest aspirations. For some, the answer is to continue to try and be charitable about those who fail. For others, the answer is to define those aspirations down so that values and behavior meet.

BTW, I do think the definition of hypocrisy is often misused. A true hypocrite, as one commenter in the link above, is really a "rules are for other people" type of person. They believe in a morality that they have no intention of personally meeting. No, that's wrong. Hypocrisy doesn't refer as much to intention as belief. You publicly state a morality that you don't really believe in. You don't think it applies to you. And there's also an element that you are publicly benefiting from your stand, while privately benefitting from the broken value.

I wish this had been more clear. Maybe I'll take a rewrite later.

Bottom line: The wrong attitude about hypocrisy can cause you to attack the very idea of morals, or make you think you must water down your morals to match private behavior you engage in out of weakness or folly that you still believe is wrong.

BTW, hypocrisy and tolerance are flip sides of the same thought distortion. As Chesterton said, tolerance is a virtue for people who don't believe in anything.

Look at this bill from embattled NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's administration, complete with the euphemistic and deceptive name, the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act. Just lovely.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Quote:

Albany, Feb 20, 2008 / 10:35 pm (CNA).- A New York state bill that would declare abortion a fundamental human right for women faces opposition from Catholics who believe the bill will leave Catholic hospitals and social agencies vulnerable to lawsuits and state sanctions, the New York Sun reports.

Some opponents argue that the bill privileges abortion rights even more than the right to free exercise of religion.

A video produced by the New York Catholic Conference suggests the bill could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortion procedures and could compel insurance companies and employers to cover abortion procedures in health plans.

Abortion a fundamental human right. Well, if you're killed before your born, you don't have any rights. So I'd suggest the right to life is a little more fundamental than the right to kill.

OK, it's safe to say we're probably going to get economically hammered. The U.S. economy has proven itself incredibly resilient to the shocks it has faced in the past eight years. It survived:

* the Dot-Com bust
* the Y2K and tech-related busts, which caused a serious recession
* a series of horrific corporate-governance and securities-related scandals
* the 9-11 terrorist attacks
* the over-reaction of Sarbanes-Oxley, which was extremely costly to U.S. businesses
* record-deficit spending
* losing one U.S. city to a massive hurricane-related flood
* gas prices that tripled and simply remained high
* a housing boom-and-bust
* an unpopular, expensive war, and
* a credit crunch.

We've taken a hell of a lot of hits, though many of these wounds were self-inflicted. Still, we've absorbed huge losses and kept going. It appears, however, that we're starting to show signs of weakening. The U.S. dollar is falling, we're seeing inflation, and the economy is sliding into recession. We still face an ongoing, expensive war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we've got dark clouds on the horizon in both Iran and Pakistan.

That's what the next president faces. Simultaneous trouble at home and abroad. High oil prices. Remember also that in 2010, the Bush tax cuts sunset, and we will face the largest tax increase in U.S. history. A big tax increase during stagflation or even just a recession is usually a bad idea.

And none of the leading political candidates seems to be talking about what we need to do. Domestically, the good news is we've been here before. We've been plenty better buggered than this. Unfortunately, the solution is painful.

1. Created a tighter monetary policy to contain inflation. (Unhappily, this will cause a nasty recession, but it will lift and we'll be on solid footing.)
2. Tax cuts to encourage investment and spending.
3. And this is crucial — rein in government spending. Everyone talks about this as if it's complicated, but it's politically complicated. Truth is, there are only four big spending items, and everything else is cheap. They are military spending, welfare entitlements, interest on the debt, and Social Security. The cuts have to come there, or they will come from nowhere. Better, a balanced budget will calm the markets.

Next, we need to do something about oil prices. This solution is fairly simple, but not without pain:

1. Energy independence. This needs to be our top priority — it's the reason we're involved in the War on Terror (along with our support of Israel), and it's the reason our economy is under such attack right now.

2. Support investment in alternative technologies by offering to protect U.S. investments. The problem with investing in non-oil technologies is OPEC can just drop the price to $10 a barrel one day and then all the investment is lost. This happened in the early 80s and people who were investing got hammered — severely. People are skittish to do it again. We need to eliminate this risk by, essentially, protecting those industries with a tariff. I know tariff is a scary word. But say we say, OK, imported oil is never again going to be cheaper than $50 a barrel in this country. That gives companies a benchmark — at $49 a barrel, our new technology is cheaper than imported oil.

Next, we need to do something about the Middle East. I can't see anything politically feasible at this time short of inoculating our population against a bioweapon and threatening to release it if we keep getting pestered.

And if that doesn't work, we can always pull back all our troops from overseas, put them on the Mexican border, cancel our foreign debt and renege on our foreign obligations, and ride out the ensuing worldwide terror and economic shitstorm as New Switzerland.