Donald Trump Vs. Mother Theresa

The Donald Trumps of this world are not the Mother Theresas.

Many people think this is a great shame. But which group are really more valuable?

It is the Donald Trumps that provide the tax receipts on which universities survive.

Some think we should seize the assets of the Donald Trumps and let the Mother Theresas redistribute them. But if this were done there would shortly be nothing left to redistribute. North Korea, for instance, has nothing left to redistribute. Meanwhile, the redistributors are rarely Mother Theresas even when there is something to redistribute.

The best possible economic situation is to encourage the Donald Trumps of this world to do the best they can. We need a roaring capitalism if the rest of us are to survive off its tax receipts.

Community Organizers!

I don't have any real problem with "community organizers." Communities need organizations, and families need to be organized. I don't have any problems with organizations or organization. But what kind of organizations, what kind of organization?

Organized crime families are also community organizers. Nazis try to organize communities.

Some Christian groups are community organizers. Some only allow men to preach, some of these are rather disorganized and have allowed child rapists to preach.

Jesus was a community organizer, as was St. Paul, as was Martin Luther. Andy Warhol was a community organizer, as was Allen Ginsberg, as was Mother Theresa, and Malcolm X, ACORN was a community organizer, as is NPR, and every government agency is a community organizer.

One has to worry about too much red tape. One has to worry about wolves in sheeps' clothing.

Every government sponsors community organization, but some do it so as to better fleece the flock. Myanmar, North Korea, Red China, Cuba all organize the community so that they can't think for themselves. Universities that exist in such countries exist in order to indoctrinate the students. Some of our faculty at universities (Duke 88) follow suit.

Luther organized educational institutions with the "freedom of inquiry" in mind.

Some say this led to a breakup of church hegemony and to the rise of science, and to the disintegration of moral values, and the rise of atheism.

Nice job, Luther!

We are, according to scientists, a form of monkey, and except for orangutangs, most monkeys are social. We live in groups and bands and organizations. But how are they to be organized? Most biologists see dominance in any monkey outfit as the ultimate aim of the organizers.

What will be the ruling principles around which dominance is organized in a community? Is it to be competence? Is it to be party affiliation? Is it to be race, gender and class (or their opposite, which is the same)? Is it to be based on helping the neediest so that charity toward the lazy is the name of the game?

What kind of community, what kind of organization? Which organizations preach in the name of peace, and deliver us on the road to Serfdom? Friedrich Hayek argued that Marxists brought on the Nazis, and said they were the same as the Stalinists, in terms of their structure.

Freedom for competent capitalism, he argued, is the best organization, as it yields free societies without too much red tape. He did allow for some government oversight, but wasn't very specific about it. A little leeway to give the poorest of the poor some help. But how was this to be organized? What communities needed it? As soon as it's allowed in, highways to hell can be built with federal dollars.

I'm On Another Kant Kick

I'm on another lil' Kant kick, so I was reviewing what I've written about Kant over the years on the blague. There are many posts. Maybe twenty or thirty.

This seemed especially relevant to what I'm going to do with today's post:

KANT AVEC SADE

Increasingly the right reminds me of Kant
The categorical imperative & the need to do one's duty
The left sees its duty as to liberate all desire
And this on the other side reminds me of Sade
Together, the two remind me of Lacan's essay
Kant Avec Sade
In which Lacan argues that desire and duty
Become a Moebius strip
& that's how I see the American electorate
Driven by desire for duty or dutiful desire
In the way that Creon & Antigone
Are opposite sides of the same hard-headed koinonia
So the left & right, the red & the blue
Are two sides of our community
The red & the blue as aspects of the flag
Interspersed with stars and stripes of white
Representing peace
Peace as the deep background of America
& red & blue as the part of the story
That makes good TV.

November 19, 2004

This is from my first year of the blague. What is stunning about it at first is my sanguine assessment that red and blue will be able to get together in the white space of peace represented by the stars in the blue field of our flag, as well as in the alternation with red stripes in the larger field. To some extent I believe that red and blue are aspects of any culture, as there is always a Falstaff and there is always a Henry V. But at the end of the Part II, they separate, and Henry V says to Falstaff that unless he adopts different moral maxims, they can no longer know one another.

Their cultural fields were quite different, and counter-cultures may simply be unable to live together in the same house. As Lincoln put it, "A House Divided Cannot Stand."

Or as I might put it, it's hard to stand being in the same house with someone who has a completely different set of axioms from the ones from which you have built your house. In Kant's day, everyone believed more or less the same thing. Diversity, as we know, is almost never intellectual diversity. It may be color of skin, it may be gender, but unless we believe more or less the same things, it may ultimately be impossible for us to stand one another. Personally, most people drive me out of my mind, but I rarely show it. I couldn't for instance JOIN a St. Patrick's Day Parade, but I am outwardly tolerant of it. I just wouldn't want to jump up and down over the color green, and the cultural field that it represents (beer and potatoes). I don't think it's terrible that there are those who get off on this, but I am not sure I could live with people in the same house who lived for the color green and for potatoes and beer.

On a less trivial level, I am not sure that I can really stand people who live for sexual kicks, either. When I was younger, I used to think, I will just submerge my differences, and try not to care. But ultimately, I just thought: these people are insane to live on a phrase like, "If it feels good, do it." The notion is terrible to me, and has no place in my moral universe. I feel that we have a duty to the Law (Ten Commandments) but can never fully embody the Law (self-righteous people drive me out of my mind, as does the whole notion of sainthood). I can stand Abraham Lincoln, in other words, but not John Wilkes Booth.

Kant says that our communities are made from phrases. There are people who live by the phrase, "Work first, and then play." I like that group, although I don't really belong in it. I try to turn all work into play, and have turned play into work as a result. But I respect work, and those who do their duty. What I don't really like are those who merely shake their booty. Kant argues that our basic verbal axioms determine in which community we live.

3 Phrases from Immanuel Kant

1.
Selling one's hair is not altogether free from blame.

2.
A man may be an atheist in theory and not in practice.

3.
Argument is a kind of entertainment that outlasts jesting.

To some extent I agree with each of these phrases. I'm not sure if you time-warped me back to Konigsberg that Kant and I would be the best of friends. But I love him on paper. He clarifies my thought.

"We call a man evil, however, not because he performs actions that are evil (contrary to law) but because these actions are of such a nature that we may infer from them the presence in him of evil maxims" ("Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone," p. 370, in Basic Writings of Kant, Modern Library, 2001). If we have freedom, we have the freedom to choose our maxims.

"Treat others as an end in themselves and not merely a means."

Anyone going against this is evil. Thus, promiscuous sex is by nature EVIL (which is why I am against the phrase, "If it feels good, do it.")

For the longest time I tried to get along with the left because I was assured that the right was even more evil, since their phrase seemed to be, "It's all about money," which I thought was even more atrocious. I am no longer certain that it is more atrocious, especially since the children that often result, or are killed by the spendthrifts and mayhem types in the act of abortion, are costing the nation not only its moral character, but billions of dollars, and whole lost generations.

The rule of maxims (for me, The Ten Commandments, and NOT the Sermon on the Mount, which I hold to be for the next Kingdom and not binding in this one) is important, and so it is apparent that in choosing our maxims we also choose not only the nature of our lives, but the nature of our community with which we surround ourselves, and the kind of thing we can stand in one another.

The red and the blue are separated by their phrasings, and shall never again come together. If we are to be united, it must be on basic phrases that render us mutually comprehensible. At present, I think these are more and more different, as the left gets their phrasing from Marx and Foucault (they are largely unaware of this as their party has been hijacked from within during the Long March that was instigated by the left in 1968), and the right from the Bible and from Locke.

The wild lawlessness in relation to others that I perceived in the Beats (especially in Burroughs and Ginsberg who openly joined NAMBLA) could be contrasted with the demure careful qualities of a poet like Marianne Moore. Both were writers, and to that extent they were the same, but their phrasing was different. They were writing DIFFERENT THINGS. Marianne Moore and Allen Ginsberg simply could not have spent a weekend together: because the phrasing by which they lived were so impossibly different. Moore was a Republican, and Ginsberg to the left of the Democratic party of his day. The propensity to accept a maxim like "If it feels good do it," is indicative of an evil heart, Kant says, while the propensity to accept a phrase like, "Do unto others," is indicative of a good heart. Imagine Marianne Moore and Allen Ginsberg sharing an apartment together.

We may disagree on many things as long as we don't really know one another. Argument is as fun as jesting, Kant also says. We are not animals. We can choose our phrases, judiciously, but on important matters there can be a parting of the ways, creating a rift as deep as the opening of the Red Sea.

Where differences are slight, humor can reign. Where they are major, there can be no true discussion, and no humor, as there, a certain seriousness reigns. One cannot laugh at the altar. There can be such a thing as one "who despite a corrupted heart yet possesses a good will, there remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed" (394). When there is a presupposition that another has at the very least a good heart, then we can continue to argue in jest.

What worries me is that if the phrases are totally separate, as they increasingly seem to be with red and blue, we may also think of the other as irredeemably separate, and as possessing a corrupted heart. Where this is the case all discourse must cease, and the silence of the white stripes can mean a boundary more firm than the one we have with Mexico, more firm even than the military boundaries of WWI with barbed wire and trench warfare, more firm than those which we use to wall in maximum security prisoners.

What Is Energy?

Energy is eternal delight, said the mystic William Blake.

E = MC squared, said Einstein.

On a more pragmatic basis, energy could be based on steam-driven turbines. This form of energy heats water until it expands into steam, and then that drives the pistons.

Car pistons drive on burning gasoline.

When something is transformed into another, it produces energy.

I don't know much about how uranium produces energy, but it apparently is a volatile substance. When it's done producing energy, the spent fuel rods remain radioactive. This is poisonous even in small quantities to humans.

Steam can create steam burns, but steam is more visible, and not as dangerous. But it is also not as productive of energy as uranium.

Whatever's been going on in Japan this week with the tsunami after the earthquake it has to do with energy, and massive amounts of it. Earthquakes can produce massive energy but since this energy is unpredictable it's difficult to harness. Volcanoes and tornadoes also produce massive energy, but it's tough to harness it.

How many of the elements produce energy? Are there any of them that are yet untapped that can produce energy in a more stable way than uranium, and yet that produce more energy and in a recyclable way than water or gasoline?

Obama's energy czar hasn't done much. She seems to lack energy. (Actually, she resigned a couple of months ago, and I don't think there's been a replacement.) We need a more energetic search for reliable means of producing energy that do not in turn produce toxic waste. Solar power seems easy to harness, but apparently you can't get enough of it to run a car. You can run a pocket calculator on it, but not a car. Wind power creates blight on the landscape during the construction and leaves ugliness on the tops of mountains in the form of gigantic windmills which kill birds (cats kill a lot more birds every year, but cats are cute).

We need to find an energy source that is eternal and is always a delight.

AARON BELZ

Poetry is about the tiniest of the arts and within it is the poetry reading, generally a draggy affair that is about as interesting as a gum spot on the floor of a movie theatre.

What to do about it?

You could show a silent movie, so people could watch that, while you mumble along.

You could say you are dying, so people don't mind looking at your last few moments.

You could be beautiful, or at least wear a colorful hat.

You could be brief.

When my friend Aaron Belz sent me his video of his latest reading I was not delighted. I haven't been to any successful poetry readings in my life. Maybe the best was Corso, because he was so drunk he just yelled at the audience for thirty minutes. It wasn't elegant, but I was awake.

So I was surprised to enjoy the video. At first I was angry. I just thought, fine, go ahead and ruin my day with your video, Belz. But I did listen. After about a minute, I thought: this is like stand-up comedy (which I adore). And it's like good stand-up comedy. But it's also like good poetry. It's somewhere in between. For many years I wondered if anybody could pull together these two genres. Belz has finally done it.

I like Belz. We've known one another for years and years and have read together on one occasion in St. Louis at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He's a Presbyterian, and is far right. So of course we get along in terms of our politics. And in art, he's all over the place, like me. He is very interested in comedy and wrote a very good dissertation on comedy. I also have written a book on comedy. So we have a lot in common.

He's not as cantankerous as I am on the page, but I am not at all cantankerous in person (unless you know me really really well, I will never show any cantankerousness in person).

He has size 13 shoes, if I recall correctly. Mine are only sevens, but they are extra wide. He is capable of acting nicely. He has this humble thing he does, but I think it's actually sincere. He teaches at a Christian university in Los Angeles. I don't know how to link the video directly (I spent all of ten seconds trying) but here's the link if anybody wants to brave boredom for a delicious ten minute bit (ok, I actually figured it out, just press the red hyperlink bar):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjK4NY-Y1Sg

Glory! (Ode to Bachofen)

Glory!

The sun over the hill comes
The mist rises from the Delaware River
The WatchTower men stroll in the neighborhood
They still wear hats and suits in 2004
My baby is asleep & I'm writing a poem
On TV, news of our far-flung wars
The abuse and mistreatment of women has caused it
We confront Afghan warlords with tanks
& insist on the right of 19-year-old women to vote
We are less than delighted with Hussein's use of women
Electric cattleprod as standard equipment
OBL promises 72 virgins to every exploded terrorist
OBL as pimp
Against this use of women
Stands Odysseus & the marriage bed of Penelope
An idea slowly dawns in the west
The glory of women, their estates held in God's hands

Glory be to marriage -- a crucible of love
Yes to brides and no to harlots
Yes to love and no to use value
Yes to women. Yes! Yes!
Jesus announces and Paul confirms it
Now all of history can be seen according to JJ Bachofen
As the slow rise of the patriarchal principle of justice
The marriage bed's purity is a symbol of a society's level
(Clinton's soiled bed)
One to one marriage as the symbol of a risen society
72 virgins per terrorist as a symbol of haetarism
Where there are whores one can smell the sulphur
Where there are brides there are bridges between man & heaven

Oct. 28, 2004

THE HOUSE JUST VOTED TO DEFUND NPR

The House just voted to entirely defund NPR:

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll192.xml

It was 229-196, or something like that.

Probably the senate will never allow it to come to a vote, and if it does, the president will veto the bill.

The secular humanists and Marxists love a biased archipelago of stations reporting the news entirely their way from coast to coast. Who wouldn't? So of course they voted to keep NPR en masse.

I rather like NPR when I get to listen to it, except when they report politics. Then it's like the Marxist hooligans have censored every truth, and replaced it with what Orwell called The Ministry of Truth. Last night I listened to a program about some Maoist group in India which had taken up an armed struggle with the Indian government. For a half hour this program went on without even once consulting the Indian government. I was somewhat shocked at the bias, to say the least. This is virtually the only news station to go this far to the left, and yet they have government funding, which Obama and the Democrats completely endorse.

NPR gets away with murder in terms of unfair and unbalanced representation. They did try to have a few moderate voices on, but then when they defenestrated Juan Williams, you had to wonder if these shenanigans would continue. Williams was one of their only "people of color" and also their only independent. Williams is a weird egg: he likes Obama, but sometimes argues with his decisions. He has his own mind. That simply won't do at NPR. Williams' big crime was to say that he was afraid on airplanes when he saw turbans or other Arab garb getting on. Under PC, you have to go bravely to your death, loving and supporting all the wonderful peoples around the world who hate our guts and want us to die. Because of course you can dialogue with OBL and his ilk! Just ask Daniel Pearl! Just ask the women of Afghanistan who lived there under the Taliban!

We'll see what happens with NPR. Obama would veto anything that threatened his base. NPR is solidly in his corner. He tried to save ACORN, but couldn't. Now another of his props is in danger. I assume he will fight even harder to save NPR.

What worries me is that the universities will be next: Obama's last prop. For decades they've slid further and further left, and now even to be a classical liberal is to be hated. You have to be a Marxist sociopath to get a position in any of the larger colleges or universities. You have to want to silence the other, in the name of diversity. Having a total monopoly on all thought IS the new diversity, just as under the communism regimes the first thing they did was to rename exile. Reeducation meant electric shock for days before being disappeared to Siberia.

Is it wrong to do this with federally funded institutions? Uh, yes.

All it's going to take is a Republican president, and the legislature back in the hands of the Republicans (Trump just threw his hat in the ring) and the whole house of cards supporting the Marxist jokers is coming down: all funding for the leftists will be gone. This means the universities and PBS and NPR will have to make their own funding. Plus, they will be paying taxes, in addition to no longer having funding. Is there still time to turn this around?

I have felt it coming for decades, but since the left has committed intellectual genocide against political diversity on campuses as well as public TV, the same thing is likely to happen there as has happened at NPR. Why should centrists and conservatives pay the tax bill to support 600,000 Ward Churchills who are seemingly hell-bent on America's destruction, with "a thousand Mogadishus" as their mantra? Why should we let our lacrosse players be lynched by Marxist professors who assume guilt on the part of their students without even the benefit of a trial?

My own representative, Chris Gibson, was one of nine Repubs who voted to maintain NPR funding. I am not sure why he did this. He's a good egg, I think. NPR does have value. The universities do have value. We're not all weirdos. Some of us are trying to present a balanced perspective, and still hold to classical liberal values as presented by F. Hayek, Locke, and Smith (throw out the Keynes).

This country needs all the news it can get, but it needs it from more diverse sources. We don't need groupthink. We need conversations between groups, not just horrific propaganda from Maoist jungle guerillas operating in the mountains of India, or psychobabble from NPR execs following stinging dismissals of centrists and independents, (the defenestration of centrists like Juan Williams, who was one of the only sane voices at NPR).

Let us have the perspectives of all Americans, including those good people of the Tea Party (economic conservatives, not racists!). If NPR is truly a NATIONAL and PUBLIC radio, then let it represent the NATION, and the entire PUBLIC. Let's listen fairly to one another, and listen with our hearts, and not be so sickeningly one-sided.

Otherwise, propagandize with your own dime on your own time.

Software Design for Aesthetic Appreciation?

Often when I'm typing the print will turn blue, green, or red, designating a spelling or grammatical error, a run-on sentence, or some other mechanical problem.

I appreciate this.

What a computer can't do is grasp the meaning of my work, and tell me whether or not it's "good." Or whether it's "great." The criteria by which we decide "memorability" has SOMETHING to do with it being sui generis, and therefore there is no one pattern that the computer is looking for.

Gregory Bateson tells an anecdote in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind about a dolphin researcher who began rewarding dolphins not for any specific move, but rather for a move he'd never seen before. The dolphins had to grasp the idea of "innovation," in order to get a free fish.

Creativity is not quite just something heretofore unseen (computers could easily register such a phenomenon if they had a list of all the heretofore seen moves in any given sphere). While novelty is an aspect of aesthetics and is necessary, it is not sufficient. Aesthetics must also embrace morality (moral ugliness can negate a poem or novel). A good poem or novel must create a new step in moral terms and in aesthetic terms, a kind of two-step. It must therefore understand the history of its genre, and create a meaningful new addition to a tradition.

So far, it has only been human critics who are steeped in a tradition and yet open to innovation who have been able to herald this, and to tap a new poet or a new novelist, as significant. They've sometimes made mistakes. Critics lambasted Whitman, and some others, when they initially appeared. Andy Warhol was controversial. There was not even unanimity on Melville or on Shakespeare.

Our understanding of aesthetics is slippery, and we do not have a formula for new work that matters. For a while it looked like Lang-Po would triumph in poetry. Now this seems increasingly tenuous. Black Mountain Poets are also losing their stock rating.

Novelty often creates a first sound appreciation, but then we want the human to wish to return to a poem or novel and live in it. This means it must offer a satisfying moral and aesthetic world, an alternative world that clarifies this one. No computer needs to make meaning of the world, so I don't think this is something they will ever be able to achieve. It's something that we struggle with, making many mistakes along the way. There was a time when I was about 17 when I thought EE Cummings was important. It's not mere fashion that dictates aesthetic importance, although that's of course part of it. Pound said it was "news that stays news." That's about as good a definition as we have.

A computer can't light up when I'm writing something good and say, "Keep going, Buster!" "You're on to something!"

Nor can it say, "Drop this line of inquiry. It's stupid, and Soren Kierkegaard has already done it to death."

In the realm of literary aesthetics, we're on our own. I rather like this.

Computers can look toward the past, and tell us how we are not in accord with a given spelling, or a given grammatical rule that has been set in stone. A computer cannot look ahead. Literature however must continue to speak to us, and therefore its writer must have been ahead of us, and remain ahead of us, in order to continue to matter.

Homer still has something to say to us. The Bible still speaks to us. Shakespeare still is ahead of us. Marxists for a time seemed ahead of us, and now it is increasingly clear that they are a bridge to nowhere, one that only a fool would follow. There are a great number of bridges to nowhere, and French post-structuralism, based largely as it was on Marx, is now an increasingly tenuous bridge. Studying it appears to have been a waste of time. The guru movement of the 1970s with Maharajahs dancing around appears, likewise, to have been a waste of time.

The ideas of rgc as they are enshrined in the new left, seems increasingly to have been a waste of time.

To be conservative means to dive deep for what's still meaningful: Jane Austen, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, are still way ahead of epigones of PC like Toni Morrison and Barack Obama, Chairman Mao and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrea Dworkin and Julia Kristeva.

103-yr. old Jacques Barzun Writes Article for WSJ

Last night I was reading the WSJ as is my wont when I saw an article penned by Jacques Barzun. About ten years ago I read a book by him on prosody. At the time he was in his nineties, and I was surprised he had written such a good book. He wrote another one about ten years ago on the history of the last 500 years.

I googled last night, and Barzun was born in 1907. I don't know if there are many writers who live to be 103. I can't think of any others. Wodehouse died at 96. Philippe Soupault died at 93. Sophocles apparently wrote Oedipus at Colonnus in his nineties. His sons said he was senile and so they should be able to take his land. Sophocles showed the jury Oedipus at Colonnus and they said he was of sound mind (not so sure about Oedipus himself). I think Barzun's survival is a wondrous thing.

At any rate, Barzun's article was about how the ancient Greeks valued scholar-soldiers, and how we should, too. Barzun taught at Columbia for decades. In 1968, Columbia outlawed the ROTC from appearing on campus. But they said if the military got rid of DADT, they would allow them on campus. Now the military has done just that, and Columbia has reneged and said we don't want a bunch of uniformed people on campus making us into a militaristic campus. They took back their word. Barzun said that Harvard meanwhile has allowed the military back on campus, as have many other campuses. I wrote to Stuart Kurtz about this and he came down on the side of the ROTC. I'll let Stu speak for himself:

"Our military can either fulfill its role as one of the great supporters of our democracy, or it can become democracy's greatest enemy, as has happened with some frequency in Latin America (c.f., Argentina, Chile for relatively recent and notorious examples). If it is to continue to serve in the former supportive role, it is essential that a certain fraction of our best and brightest choose the services as their career.

Now, I've been at schools with active and visible ROTC programs (Michigan State, Illinois). The notion that these schools became militarized through their ROTC programs is laughable. On the other hand, it seems to me that Columbia's position, if taken broadly, will tend to intellectually impoverish the military, and with it, to weaken its (small d) democratic commitment.

Historically, the military has sometimes been ahead of the country socially (e.g., during the Civil War, when the Union Army used African American units to good effect, and during the Eisenhower administration when the services were integrated), and sometimes behind (e.g., during WW II, when African Americans were generally used as servants or laborers, and only infrequently as actual combatants, a reflection of the Jim Crow south rather than of the nation as a whole). Recently, they've been a bit behind on homosexuality, and a bit ahead in terms of race. I think there was merit to drawing a line on homosexuality, as Harvard did. Their policy is that campus based organizations could not discriminate, and the services did. Hence, no ROTC. Now that DADT is dead, the objection no longer holds. Hence, ROTC is welcome back at Harvard. Columbia's position, though, of erecting a new barrier immediately smacks of bad faith."

Meanwhile, another Democratic stalwart, my friend Hazard Adams, also disagrees with Columbia's position, and says, "they should get over it."

As much as we can disagree here, those who stick around (and aren't ejected) still have some things in common. We agree that there is something to be said for truth and honesty, and that if our word is given, it's our word. Plus, (Stu said this), most of us agree that truth can be found in Scripture, and we accept it as a common source of appeal.

At any rate, Hallelujah for Jacques Barzun! He gives us all hope.

HAMSTER MURDERED IN BROOKLYN

I was shocked by the comments at Ann Althouse's blog over the hamster case in Brooklyn. A woman named Monique Smith, 19, took her brother's pet hamster and slammed it to the ground, then punched it in the guts, and then proceeded to rip out its whiskers one by one. The hamster died from blunt force trauma, and damage to the liver, a necropsy showed.

The woman (Monique Smith) now faces a two-year sentence and a $5000 fine.

She apparently bludgeoned the pet in retaliation for her brother kicking a soccer ball in which her own hamster resided. This killed her pet, so she wanted an eye for an eye, or a hamster for a hamster.

Whether or not the brother deliberately intended to kill his sister's hamster is in question:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2011/03/09/2011-03-09_pet_hamster_beaten_killed_by_19yearold_brooklyn
_woman_monique_smith_suspect_arre.html

Part of the family said no, he didn't mean it, and some said yes, he did. The hamster has driven a wedge into the family.

ANIMAL PLANET has a show called ANIMAL COPS. It makes me sick to see what people do to animals. People neglect horses, and let them go without food for months on end, or throw a cat into barbed wire because the cat woke the person up. Do what you like with a cockroach, a worm, or any kind of bug. But if the animal is furry and has a cute face, hold it right there, Buster Brown. I think it's normal for humans to love our mammalian friends and to regard them as our neighbors. Do they have souls? Perhaps they do. They have some kind of sense of the world at least. They can respond to affection. Cats purr, dogs like to be petted. They can recognize their masters. If our souls are not equal, then God at least made them, too. If our souls are worthy of a rating of 1, then theirs are at least .001 of a soul. Some soul is still something valuable, right? souls have no weight, but they might have extension in terms of ability to feel, ability to remember, ability to love.

Most of the commenters at Althouse's blog laughed at the hamster proceedings, and thought that the hamster didn't matter. It only weighed four ounces. Some said they planned to purchase hamsters and launch them over the parking lot this weekend in solidarity with the arch-criminal Monique Smith. I find this flying arc of a mammal to be a criminal act and hope the animal police will keep their searchlight out this weekend for aerial hamsters.

I love hamsters.

We need to be more aware of our furry friends, and to accord them certain rights.

(I understand that we have to trap mice, because they spread diseases, and I know that rats and some other varmints shouldn't be allowed to drip in from the sewer to watch TV without a scrub-down.)

If humans were made by God, then all animals, all things, were made by God. If we alone are enabled to partake in the UNDERSTANDING of God's wonder, then we are like the princes of creation, whereas He is the King. But all of God's little vassals deserve to be accorded some love, and some good treatment, just as the working class should have some rights, and not all rights belong to the aristocracy alone. Even if we alone can pray and commune with Him, this doesn't mean that we alone are worthy in His sight. The whale, the cat, the hamster, also adorn God's creation, and are no mean part of it that we can afford to kick around with impunity. People who deliberately batter a hamster are also assaulting God. This should be a CRIME, and IS A CRIME, and let's not forget it, as Monique Smith did.

WHAT LOVELY WEATHER WE'RE HAVING (NOT) Contest

This contest will be weather poems. Just write weather type poems, complaining or not about the late winter weather. Contest ends on 11:59 pm first day of Spring, March 20th, 2011. Poems up to 31 lines in length accepted. Voting will occur on March 21st, 2011, each entrant getting one vote. Here's my first entry (you can have multiple entries):

Shoveling

Cracking the ice with a shovel
I compare it to great campaigns
Hannibal v. Rome
Stalin v. Hitler
Lincoln v. Lee
From the air it's a tiny driveway
In a small village
In the Catskill mountain range
But to me it's an epic in history
The Battle of the Marne
Antietam
Gettysburg
Stalingrad

Are Wisconsin Democratic Senators Committing a Crime?

It's baffling to me that the 14 Democratic senators could simply disappear from Wisconsin so that the business of the state could not continue. Most of us have to appear at our jobs every day. Why don't they? Why don't they lose their jobs?

They should either lose their jobs, or have to pay an enormous fine for every day they don't work, or else they should be rounded up and imprisoned.

They can't simply abscond. They should at least have their salaries and benefits taken away, and their offices closed, with all those they have hired put out of work.

If they don't return, they should be replaced by the governor with appointees.

The Democrats feel that they can Thoreau the law and legislature itself under the bus whenever the bus isn't going in their direction. There ought to be a penalty. This is ridiculous. They should at least be fired and barred from ever holding public office again; maybe their assets should be seized, too, and they should face prison time. Not sure if there are laws for this. There has to at least be the ability to fire them for not showing their faces.