Your 13:29 of Zen

Watch right about 7:20.  Yikes!  Oh, and my strong suggestion is to crank up the definition as high as your connection will allow and watch it full-screen.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v2L2UGZJAM?rel=0]

Quote of the Day – David Mamet Edition

David Mamet, playwright and recent convert to the right has written an op-ed on gun control for Newsweak. Today’s QotD is excerpted from its opening:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

FrackNation

I watched the documentary FrackNation that I helped fund last night when it aired on AXS.  It is a takedown of the previous crockumentary Gasland, and the opposition to fracking both here and around the world using, you know, facts.

The central focus of the film is the town of Dimock, PA and the people there who have been fighting against the anti-fracking forces, and one thing that struck me in particular was a montage of residents decrying the incredibly slanted media coverage of the topic without, as one person put it, any attempt at balance at all.

I was reminded of The Narrative – an excerpt from a Stephen Hunter novel I posted here a while back:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.

And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….

And the media knows that fracking is a horrible thing that destroys ground water and air quality and must be stopped at all costs because it will contribute to Global Warming.

Are You Going to the NRA Convention?

This year it’s in Houston, May 3-5.  I’ve missed the last two three, but Houston is close enough to drive to.  (15 hours from Tucson, just like Reno.)  So, if you’re going, where will you be staying?  I’d like to be in the same hotel with as many other bloggers as I can.  Please let me know in comments or by email.  Thanks.

UPDATE:  I’m staying at the Hampton Inn by the Galleria. I’ll at least get to meet up with JayG!

Now I just have to get my media credentials.

Quote of the Day

From Robert Avrech:

Yes, we eager students studied history, literature and art. But soon enough it became clear to me that a massive amount of time was spent on Marxist theory, a material view of the world. Still observant, still wearing a yarmulke, I would ask about religion, about the spirit. With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people.

I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.