Speaking Goof to Power

That Mark Steyn. He's got a million of 'em.

But as Bookworm points out, with an assist from Jennifer Rubin, indecision has consequences.

Reassessing Reformation approaches

Peter Sean Bradley makes the connection between Hallowe'en and Reformation Day, and then adds a few nuggets from the fascinating reading he has been doing about the Apostle Paul, via Stanley Hauerwas and (as excerpted here) Thomas Aquinas:

"Our view of the stark dichotomy of Law v. Grace comes from Luther, not Paul, who would have seen grace in the law, which incidentally St. Thomas Aquinas taught in his Commentary on Romans:

For even in the Old Law faith was necessary, just as it is in the New: “You who fear the Lord believe him” (Sir 2:8); “I believed; therefore I have spoken” (Ps l16:l0). And indeed, works are required in the New Law, namely, the works of certain sacraments, as commanded in Luke 22(:19), “Do this in memory of me” and of moral observances: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22)."

Bradley also cites essays by Paula Frederiksen and Pamela Eisenbaum. His conclusion? "It is interesting how a Jewish re-assessment of Reformation approaches to Paul and Augustine may further intra-Christian dialogue." Indeed!

See also: The Anchoress on "who needs the saints?"

Gruntled or disgruntled

Christopher Johnson lends formidable wit to anything theological or pastoral. He's not Catholic, but he's keeping a friendly eye on Catholicism, and very few people provide covering fire for Pope Benedict as effectively as Chris does.

Mr. Johnson smoked the ignorant atheist Richard Dawkins. He had already TKO'd James Carroll in an undercard bout where Carroll had no chance.

Among the recent hits:

The Roman Catholic Church making it easier for Anglicans to join will destroy the world? Wow. For the love of God, get a freaking grip, Carroll.

Well played, sir. Well played!

Two musical thoughts

WRVA drive time disc jockey Kitty Kinnin is a person who I've mentioned before. We've never met, but she struck me when I first heard her as a gracefully-aging hippie with suspect politics, a big heart, newfound respect for her alarm clock, and an ear tuned to that subset of rock that I grew up with.

I caught what must have been the "rock anthem" portion of her show yesterday.

I liked this sequence: "Sympathy for the Deveil" (Rolling Stones), "Burning for You (Blue Oyster Cult), "Summer of '69" (Bryan Adams). Sequeing to a commercial after the cut from Adams, Kinnin quipped "Let me see if I can remember the summer of '69. Hmmm....Nope, I can't do it."

Like the joke says, that means she was there. The quip made me smile.

On a more dispreputable plane, mad props to friend Bookworm for highlighting this inspired takedown of John Lennon's insipid "Imagine." (The first lines are: “Imagine there’s no heaven/it’s easy if you try.” No, it isn’t, because if there’s no heaven then there’s no hell, and we know that there’s a hell because when this song is playing we’re in it.)

Still not sure it's the worst song of all time (worse than "In the Year 2525"?), but it's in the bottom five.

Paging the Ministry of Truth

Over at Protein Wisdom, they've noticed the way Democrats try to rewrite their own party history:

Jane Hamsher and Rachel Maddow - historical revisionists [Darleen Click]

Posted using ShareThis

UPDATE: Senator John Kerry wants in on the same rewrite gig. Maybe Bill Ayers can help?

Will not be sacrificed to global warmist fearmongers

Would somebody please tell Al Gore and his ilk that they've already had their fifteen minutes of fame?

Sophia and her siblings are not harms to the environment in any meaningful sense.

The climate change crowd is not just anti-man, it's also anti-man's best friend.

Apologies to rocker Tom Petty, but "anthropogenic global warming" (note how it's now called "climate change" to accommodate that embarrassing cooling they didn't see coming) looks more and more like a disgruntled loser, "eating pills like candy, and chasing them with tears" between bouts of "singing to a juke box in some all-night beanery."

In his own words

Doug Hoffman (yes, that Doug Hoffman) writes a manifesto.

An Afghan trifecta

RAF police on the Helmand beat.

"One Tribe at a Time."

And Andrew Klavan on how the commander-in-chief got trapped by his own rhetoric, and why that matters.

Now we have consensus

I once heard a librarian make the same point that John C. Wright does here: "Being a pirate is passing brave, to be sure, but being a Space Pirate is the ne plus ultra of human ambition. It is like being a pirate, but with rayguns."

And speaking of consensus, Mike Flynn -- officially in danger of being added to my blogroll -- has this to say about "warmist" science.

UPDATE: There's always at least one nonconformist: Kathy Shaidle is no fan of consensus. She doesn't like Amnesty International or the United Nations, either. But I like her and think she's funny.

Also, it's still okay to skip reading Maureen Dowd.

John Zmirak on Ayn Rand

Even the comments are interesting. Rand comes off poorly.

Three cheers for the Little Flower

St. Therese of Lisieux (Therese of the Child Jesus) probably had a lot to do with what Pope Benedict did recently to formalize a Catholic welcome for disaffected Anglicans.

Her relics were in York Minster October 1 and 2. York Minster, a cathedral of the Church of England, is, per its web site, "the only non-Roman Catholic venue in the programme of visits" arranged for her reliquary, which just finished a tour of England and Wales, and was earlier this year displayed in Ireland.

As a commentator over at MCJ put it, the moral of the story (if there is one), might be "don't mess with the Little Flower." She died at age 24, but had said that she hoped to "spend heaven doing good on earth."

Things to sing about

Kudos to the S.P.E.B.Q.S.A., but I'm going to bracket "Lida Rose" and the typical barbershop standards, because here's something else to sing about, in the "How Can I Keep From Singing?" and "Band of Angels" sense:

Think back to "I am the vine; you are the branches," as Andrew Murray (1828-1917) does in his great devotional book, Abide in Christ:

"When a graft is united with the stock on which it is to grow, we know that it must be kept fixed, it must abide in the place where the stock has been cut, been wounded, to make an opening to receive the graft. No graft without wounding -- the laying bare and opening up of the inner life of the tree to receive the stranger branch. It is only through such wounding that access can be obtained to the fellowship of the sap and the growth and the life of the stronger stem. Even so with Jesus and the sinner. Only when we are planted into the likeness of His death shall we also be in the likeness of His resurrection, partakers of the life and the power there are in Him. In the death of the Cross, Christ was wounded, and in His opened wounds a place prepared where we might be grafted in."

I like this, too.

On the special Catholic provision for Anglicans

By Web standards, what the Vatican announced earlier this week is old news now, but it's good stuff. Almost everything Pope Benedict XVI does vindicates my early prediction that he would not justly be pigeonholed as an "interim" pope between the long-serving John Paul II and whoever comes next.

Benedict is old, but he's also smart, and more compassionate than the people who used to think of him as the "PanzerKardinal" or "God's rottweiler" will ever give him credit for.

The go-to blogs on matters Catholic and Anglican have all the details. If you're as interested in this stuff as I am, you'll already have seen the first wave of commentary.

Here are my favorite reactions:

Damian Thompson: "This is a decision of supreme boldness and generosity by Pope Benedict XVI, comparable to his liberation of the Traditional Latin Mass. The implications of this announcement will take a long time to sink in, but I suspect that this will be a day of rejoicing for conservative Anglo-Catholics and their Roman Catholic friends all over the world. " Also this: "The professional ecumenists on both sides had decades to get this right. They screwed it up. So now Pope Benedict has opened up another route to unity: a high-speed bypass."

Thompson even goes back to John Henry Newman for historical perspective. I love that.

Christopher Johnson (in my paraphrase): "Good for Pope Benedict. In a metaphorical sense that Peter himself would have understood, he's busy catching fish. I'm busy frying 'em."

In Johnson's own words: "Odd, isn’t it, how the hidebound, reactionary church was the one that took the revolutionary step?"

UPDATE, October 26: Ross Douthat of the New York Times weighs in with a persuasive argument that Pope Benedict is also thinking about Islam.

Christopher Johnson at MCJ has continuing coverage.

Foolish games

I may have to bring Jewel back in another YouTube embed to reprise that hit song of hers, because it makes a fine summation of what Congresscritters in the majority party keep trying to do so that Obamacare sounds a tad more affordable than it really is.

Recall the quip about "lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- that probably fits, too (update: even after you're dead). And I don't pretend to have a firm grasp on the billions of dollars involved. But Ace says the fate of $247 billion was enough to rile the American Medical Association, and I believe him. Meanwhile, Philip Klein looks at the spending projections from the Congressional Budget Office, and says "you ain't seen nothing yet." I believe him, too (like the dollar isn't already in trouble).

Add numbers like those to the myth of the stimulus multiplier and the idea that the White House is trying to cow the media into silence (Contrary to the crackpot theories of NYT scold Paul Krugman, presidential consiglieres like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel probably figure that there is very little downside to annoying even the mildly conservative, as Tom Maguire points out. Fortunately, some people refuse to be silenced).

The whole imbroglio is enough to make me reach for ibuprofen. Hmmm...I don't know the man, but Justice Alito probably keeps some ibuprofen on hand.

A different way to study Latin

Jane asked me to wake her up early this morning because she wanted to cram for a Latin test. I reviewed the two dozen or so vocabulary words with her while doing a few other chores, and I saw her looking at the vocabulary list on the kitchen counter afterward, but it's a good thing she had already memorized most of it, because she kept singing these lines at the same time:

I've paid my duuuues
Time after tiiiime;
I served my sentence,
But committed no criiiime!

Thomas came downstairs, heard that singing, and immediately went for parody, changing the first line to "I blew up my houuuuse..."

Fish in a barrel

Hat tip to Mark Shea for citing a wonderfully entertaining evisceration of atheist bias against the so-called Dark Ages. Mike Flynn absolutely takes a "freethinker" to school in his compelling and sometimes hilarious rebuttal.

Here's a taste: The militant atheist had written with wholly unwarranted confidence that "when Christianity took over Europe, scientitific and engineering advancement virtually stopped."

My first thought on reading that whopper was that the atheist had never seen a Gothic cathedral.

Flynn's answer is more entertaining, though. He brought the whole arsenal, and created the rhetorical equivalent of the great scene in the horror comedy Tremors where Reba McIntyre and Michael Gross open up with automatic weapons because giant carnivorous worms that have been tunneling through a small town in the high desert "broke into the wrong rec room" (theirs).

Here's Flynn:

"In no particular order: watermills, windmills, camshafts, toothed wheels, transmission shafts, mechanical clocks, pendant clocks, eye glasses, four-wheeled wagons, wheeled moldboard plows with shares and coulters, three-field crop rotation, blast furnaces, laws of magnetism, steam blowers, treadles, stirrups, armored cavalry, the elliptical arch, the fraction and arithmetic of fractions, the plus sign, preservation of antiquity, “Gresham’s” law, the mean speed theorem, “Newton’s” first law, distilled liquor, use of letters to indicate quantities in al jabr, discovery of the Canary Islands, the Vivaldi expedition, cranks, overhead springs, latitudo et longitudo, coiled springs, laws of war and non-combatants, modal logic, capital letters and punctuation marks, hydraulic hammers, definition of uniform motion, of uniformly accelerated motion, of instantaneous motion, explanation of the rainbow, counterpoint and harmony, screw-jacks, screw-presses, horse collars, gunpowder and pots de fer, that there may be a vacuum, that there may be other Worlds, that the earth may turn in a diurnal motion, that to overthrow a tyrant is the right of the multitude, the two-masted cog, infinitesimals, open and closed sets, verge-and-foliot escapements, magnetic compasses, portolan charts, the true keel, natural law, human rights, international law, universities, corporations, freedom of inquiry, separation of church and state, “Smith’s” law of marketplaces, fossilization, geological erosion and uplift, anaerobic salting of fatty fish (“pickled herring”), double entry bookkeeping, and... the printing press. (Yeah, some of the innovations are political and economic.)"

American exceptionalism as a Mickey Mouse idea

Some things I thought about at Disneyland and while traveling earlier this month, now at American Spectator Online. The work of scriptwriter William Goldman has a cameo in the same essay.

Because words mean things

Karl Keating explains the important difference between "infallible" and "inerrant."

"Abide" is another word that tends to be used more by theologians than by politicians, but lately it's been rode hard and put away wet, as Quin Hillyer observes.

Standing right in front of me

Speaking words of wisdom...

(let it be)

Odd headline for a great rebuttal

Doctor Zero defends Rush Limbaugh. Here's a taste:

"Only the most gullible dupes, and people who rely on CNN for “news”, seriously think Rush Limbaugh is a racist. The dishonesty and cynicism behind dimwitted assertions that he wanted to buy an NFL team to role-play the life of a plantation owner is breathtaking. His accusers don’t really think he harbors some elusive racist demon, which he suppresses just long enough to become friends with Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and Tony Dungy. The people who read this crap should be at least as angry over the insult to their intelligence as Limbaugh is about the insult to his honor. This kind of weapons-grade stupidity is one of the things America can no longer afford.

Limbaugh’s accusers want him burned at the stake for the crime of effective conservatism, not the racism they were so eager to lie about last week. The American public should think long and hard about which side of this ideological struggle should be on trial. "

A case against blogging?

Stefan McDaniel has a heartfelt blog post at First Things arguing that blogs are not doing people who love language any favors. Riffing on what Neil Postman wrote two generations ago about television (the book was Amusing Ourselves to Death), McDaniel worries about what blogging has done to our attention spans. That literature is worth saving, he takes as a given, and good for him. Although he doesn't put it quite this way, his misgivings stem from the fact that literature is built for comfort, not for speed. His argument is that the proliferation of blogs now makes it more difficult for people to read or write a sustained argument (or any narrative, really) than it used to be.

I think I agree with everything McDaniel wrote. My only quibble with his manifesto is that it is not long enough. While he alludes to incivility in blogging, and tackles the difference between thoughtfulness and cleverness head-on, McDaniel never gets around to discussing the defensive measures that bloggers like me take to ensure that blogging rhythms are trained enough to sit, stay, or heel on command.

This blog, for example, will never become a parade of squibs. Instapundit long ago cornered the market on that approach. I'm not above one-liners, and I really like being able to cite good work elsewhere, but (per the deliberately chosen metaphor in my blog title) I also strive to develop original content that is sturdy enough to take root in the gardens of allies and sometimes even antagonists. Some of those "think pieces" get posted here. Some are accepted for publication by American Spectator Online. Astute readers will have noticed my pattern -- if there are no paragraphs planted here for two or three days, I'm either preoccupied with family activity or doing the spade work necessary to put a longer essay together.

Another thing I do is track my own interests, often at the expense of generating buzzworthy content that could make this site more popular. Theology and history are niche disciplines, after all. My musical taste is wide-ranging but idiosyncratic, and almost never influenced by the artists topping sales charts in any given week (Michael Jackson's passing meant less to me than Billy Powell's or Brad Delp's, for example).

Conservative politics can also be found here, but I don't feel compelled to comment on everything in the polis (Isn't that what Michelle Malkin already pays people over at HotAir to do?). You'll never find a news crawl on the Paragraph Farm.

I applaud McDaniel's "young fogey" defense of wordsmithery and recognize more than a few of my own concerns in it. But I also urge Mr. McDaniel to take heart-- there are bloggers around who love language (Cassandra, Amanda, and Neo-Neocon come immediately to mind). Moreover, as McDaniel well knows, we none of us have to look like Marina Orlova to be "hot for words."

A blog is only one blade in the Swiss Army knife that every writer should carry. It is not a vocation. But it can be part of one. (Late-breaking validation of that insight comes from the sidebar of Fr. Dwight Longenecker's Standing on My Head: "I consider the time spent on my blog as part of my ministry.")

What humility

Toby Harnden reads the recent press releases from the White House, and finds the Nobel Peace Prize shoehorned into most of them.

When John Fogarty looks out his back door?

Maybe "anthropogenic global warming" is playing on the lawn together with those elephants Forgarty sings about.

The high temperature at Raleigh-Durham airport (RDU) yesterday was 55 degrees, and that was the lowest high on record for October 15.

Rory knows how to bring it

All but miraculous

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf on the comically agnostic explanations for the "miracle of the sun" that took place in Fatima, Portugal on October 13th, 1917.

If dancing in the sky seems implausible, that's because it is. You could start with landing safely on a river and work your way up.

More perspective on the Peace Prize and other events

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal thanks the late, great Orianna Fallaci for coining the label, "goodists," and hails President Obama as a worthy representative of that class.

On the same subject, Jill Stanek points out in a WorldNet Daily column today that Irena Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but lost to Al Gore.

(I don't normally link to WorldNet Daily because the site has an awful interface and too many lunatic columnists -- but Stanek is reliable. If, like me, you'd never heard of Irena Sendler, the "female Oskar Schindler" is well worth getting to know posthumously. She'd have been a far better choice than Al Gore was).

As to the prize announced last Friday, Lars Walker has the most interesting take I've read.

Gateway Pundit offers perspective of a different sort, as does Neo-Neocon ("Re-ratting?" I love that!)

And I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, but there's no doubt he's being unjustly villified by the usual suspects.

Bumper stickerism

The dark side of "think globally; act locally"

Learning from ancient Rome

J.R. Dunn takes a sobering look back at the reign of Lucius Aurelius Commodus. The parallels to our own day are inexact but instructive.

The Anchoress also looks back, just not as far. And her look is inspired by current conditions in Africa.

Peace Prize in a Crackerjack box?

Ross Douthat on the mistake made by five smitten Norwegians and one American president:

"People have argued that you can’t turn down a Nobel. Please. Of course you can. Obama is a gifted rhetorician with world-class speechwriters. All he would have needed was a simple, graceful statement emphasizing the impossibility of accepting such an honor during his first year in office, with America’s armed forces still deep in two unfinished wars.

Would the world have been offended? Well, to start with, the prize isn’t given out by an imaginary “world community.” It’s voted on and handed out by a committee of five obscure Norwegians. So turning it down would have been a slap in the face, yes, to Thorbjorn Jagland, Kaci Kullmann Five, Sissel Marie Ronbeck, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn and Agot Valle. But it wouldn’t have been a slap in the face to the Europeans or the Africans, to Moscow or Beijing, or to any other population or great power that an American president should fret about offending."

UPDATE: Eugene Robinson argues for the other side. The heart of his argument:

"Obama has shifted U.S. foreign policy away from George W. Bush's cowboy ethos toward a multilateral approach. He envisions, and has begun to implement, a different kind of U.S. leadership that I believe is more likely to succeed in an interconnected, multipolar world. That this shift is being noticed and recognized is to Obama's credit -- and to our country's."

Note that Robinson's argument depends on making the following assumptions, all of which are questionable: 1. That George W. Bush had a "cowboy ethos" 2. That a "cowboy ethos" is bad 3. That unalloyed multilateralism is good 4. That all it takes to "shift" U.S. foreign policy is a mistranslated reset button and some speechifying.

I think Douthat makes a better case than Robinson. Besides which, it's time to do laundry.

Drafting Roy Orbison

How and why it's a mistake to count the rockabilly legend out if you have four intemperate criticisms for Sarah Palin in front of me.

Saving the appearances

Maybe David Axelrod and Barack Obama are students of Ptolemy. One wonders, though, what theory they're trying to defend. It's not geocentrism or American exceptionalism -- we know at least that much.

UPDATE: This report on Senator Jim DeMint's trip to Honduras touches on the same themes, as does this advice for the president to stay home from Stephanie Gutmann, which I found through Nice Deb. Also, per Cassandra, don't miss this context for any water cooler conversation about American strategy in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, North Carolina hosted what I think I'll call the administration's "conscience clause collapse," much to the consternation of the good folks at Belmont Abbey College.

Only Patty Griffin has more range

Three cheers for the self-taught guitarist and pride of Homer, Alaska:

Truth in a book review

Ross Douthat reads and corrects Karen Armstrong in the course of reviewing The Case for God (thanks to Mark Shea for the find):

"This is an eloquent case for the ancient roots of the liberal approach to faith, and my summary does not do justice to its subtleties. But it deserves to be heavily qualified. Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs."

Read the whole review. It's relatively short, and Douthat's conclusion (not excerpted here) is masterful.

Recognizing Father Damien

From the Maui News:

Dozens of Maui Catholics have begun the half-way-around-the-world journey to Rome to see Father Damien de Veuster canonized as Hawaii's first saint.

[...]

Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Blessed Damien with four other saints during a ceremony set for 10 a.m. Oct. 11 (10 p.m. Saturday HST) at St. Peter's Square in Rome.

Father Damien, who was christened Joseph de Veuster in Tremelo, Belgium, is known to much of the world as Damien the Leper. In June 1995, he was declared by the late Pope John Paul II as "Blessed Damien, servant of God, servant of humanity."

Damien ministered to people afflicted with Hansen's disease for 16 years on Molokai, where he died at the age of 49 from the same disease.

In December 1999, the Vatican approved May 10, the day Father Damien arrived on Molokai, as his feast day. Last year in July, Pope Benedict signed a decree accepting the unexplained cancer cure of retired Hawaii schoolteacher Audrey Toguchi as the miracle required for Blessed Damien's canonization.

The moment of canonization is now less than a week away.

The newspaper doesn't say so, but Father Damien is in august company.

Lessons from the movies

Sammy Benoit, writing at American Thinker:

There is a great movie scene from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross that most people involved in sales can recite verbatim. In the movie, Jack Lemmon is salesman, who gets up to get a cup of coffee during a sales meeting. The new Sales Manager (Alec Baldwin), screams at him "Put That Coffee Down!" Lemmon looks at him quizzically. Baldwin screams at him again, "Put That Coffee Down! ---Coffee is For Closers." Even more than coffee, foreign policy is for closers, and unfortunately for the future of the United States, the man running our foreign policy is not a closer.

Mick Lasalle, reviewing It Might Get Loud for the San Francisco Chronicle (he's much crankier than he needs to be, and I still want to see the film, but his point about the oddity of flattening the hierarchy is a good one):

Imagine a documentary about Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Benjamin Harrison. Lincoln? Can't get enough of the guy. Ike? Sure, that could be interesting. But Harrison? Actually, Harrison did some good things, and considered alone, he might be worth hearing about. But only the most artificial of structures could grant equal screen time to Harrison as Eisenhower, much less Lincoln. In the end, they have nothing in common, except that they were president.

Likewise, Page, the Edge and White have nothing in common except that they're guitarists. That would be fine if "It Might Get Loud" were truly a movie about guitarists and guitar playing. Then lumping them together would be justified. But, in effect, it's really about three disparate careers, and so the question becomes why these careers, and why does Benjamin Harrison -- or rather, Jack White -- get equal time?

Wrestling with big thoughts on culture

Something's percolating over at friend Bookworm's rooms, and while it's not yet done, the house smells good, and even the kitchen conversation about it is fascinating.

I think Mark Steyn's most recent insight (against phoney "transcendence" of the moral order) would be welcome in the discussion:

"Earlier bad boys – Lord Byron, say – were obliged to operate as "transgressive" artists within a broader moral order. Now we are told that a man such as Polanski cannot be subject to anything so footling as morality: He cannot "transgress" it because, by definition, he transcends it. Yet all truly great art is made in the tension between freedom and constraint. In demanding that an artist be placed above the laws of man, Harvey Weinstein & Co. are also putting him beyond the possibility of art."

A followup thought: The writers' block that Bookworm laments is, I think, a good sign. It's the kind of thing that happens when you're hiking in the metaphorical wilderness (whether you know it or not).

I've been there. I tend to over-think the experience every time, and then puree random impressions with a song lyric or two in the blender of my mind. Cassandra at Villainous Company has also been there. She typically uses her "wilderness time" more skillfully than I do. Occasional dry spells seem to have made her more incisive as an analyst and even funnier (Hard to believe, but true. Moreover, given the writing talent that Cassandra first walked into the wilderness with, that's a thought to frighten nincompoops everywhere. It beats Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Robert Pirsig's Zen-infused motorcycle maintenance all to hell).

Friend Bookworm has a topographical map and a functioning compass, so I'm confident she'll find her way out with words that the rest of us are going to want to read.

If you stay long enough in the desert without losing faith, God sends manna.

There is another, lesser cause of writer's block peculiar to those of us who care about politics, and that mosquito-like secondary irritant -- the "permanent campaign" -- aggravates the difficulty of looking for the mouth of a river in territory not often walked by other people.

Calling out the American left

When it comes to defending Obamacare, the name-calling left assumes only it can be Boss. I do not beg to differ. Not anymore. I just do differ. For details, see The American Spectator.

Postscript: Victor Davis Hanson also has a few lucid thoughts on the same subject. And Anne has a great quote of the day to add to the lineup.

What I read in September

September turned out to be a month for nonfiction.

• Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention (May to September 1787), by Catherine Drinker Bowen
• Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions, by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber

I'd recommend both books.

So far this year: 27 books

Postscript: Hunter Baker's The End of Secularism looks like a book to keep an eye out for. Heather King's Redeemed also looks great.

Back to the future with the Commodores

What the First Lady needs to listen to is Elton John (..."it's no sacrfice, no sacrifi-i-ice, no sacrifice at all..."), but I like the Commodores better. Enjoy: