Bent Notes

Finally got the high-speed Internet I’d been assuming I was on the road to.  With the exception of the NYC trip, the last two weeks have been a nightmare.  I do believe it is behind me now.

It all got started because Mrs. BN and I decided to join the 21st century and get cell phones.  I met with a Verizon rep over coffee one morning and told her that if we were givign up our land line, I’d like to go ahead and be done with the company that had been providing our phone service altogether.  That company had been providing us with DSL Internet access as well.  She said, “No problem.  We’ll fix you up with wireless access that you get with an air card that you stick into your USB port.”

Seemed simple enough.  Alas, I spent hours in tech support hell, usually winding up the interlude with the tech support person saying, “Hmmm, I can’t tell you what’s going on.  You probably should call the tech support department at the manufacturer of your computer.”  (More than once, it involved said person saying, “Mr. Quick, please stop yelling.”)  This, after I’d made it clear I had two computers, a desktop and a laptop, both of which were accessing the Net at a crawl.

This morning, I finally busted a move.  Took the air card and installation disc back to the Verizon store and said, “We dig the phones, but the Net access ain’t making it.”  Then I went to our Comcast office, with which we already deal for our cable TV, and said “Sign me up for the high-speed stuff.”  The front-counter gal was nice, but she just basically handed me an installation kit.  I explained that I had two computers and she said I’d need to go to Circuit City and buy a router.  Did that, came home and started in.  The Comcast manual said that I’d need to get a screwdriver and take the cover off my desktop and do something with something called DCI slots or something like that.

I called a buddy of mine who is an IT whiz for a big multinational company and he came by after work.  He got it all figured out and I’m doing fine now.

But the whole computer / software industry is in need of massive streamlining.  I have to believe that there are a whole herd of folks like me who feel like they’ve been dumped by the raodside in the middle of the desert with a barely readable map and no compass. 

 I know a lot of bloggers have a lot of skills in that whole area; Little Green Footballs comes to mind as one blog that routinely makes improvements in technical things and explains what has been done for readers.

Me, I’d rather have a syringe full of kerosene injected into my left testicle than deal with that stuff.

Anyway, I have my writing deadlines met for the month, I have good Net access again, I have three gigs this weekend and I’m able to see the possibility of sanity again.

A lot of good it did for Rev. Wright to retire.

He Who Maybe Doesn’t Walk On Water After All gave his once-and-for-all-head-on-addressing of the Rev. Wright issue in Philadelphia this morning.  Some initial thoughts:

- It was, as one would expect, structurally well-crafted.  Still, his attempt at tiptoeing along the fencerow - not “disowning” Rev. Wright, but using what he thought was strong language to repudiate “some of” Rev. Wright’s “political views” - falls short of what most Americans know is needed: the calling out of Rev. Wright as a venom-spewing vessel of hate.

- Of course, Obama can’t do that.  Those shouting, clapping throngs in the pews at Trinity Church and in other such sanctuaries where “liberation theology” and “social justice” are preached are the most important part of his base.

- The talk-show hosts and political commentators he called out as blurring some supposed line between bogus racism and some kind of real and still-prevalent racism are surely going to be all over him demanding that he give concrete evidence of this supposed real racism they have supposedly blurred.

- It’s not surprising that he wound the whole thing up with a call for Americans to unify to tackle what he says are the pressing issues before us, which would be, of course, such hard-left boilerplate as “climate change’ and “income inequality.”

- It was well-crafted enough that it will probably stem the bit of political hemorraging he experienced this past week.

- That, in turn, is going to make the smoke coming out of the H-Word Creature’s  nostrils all the more hot-coal flashing red.  Another way of putting that is to say that superdelegates just went up yet another notch in importance.  It’s going to be a bloodbath in Denver this summer.

Some rather pungent quotes from the Obamas’ pastor.

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/13/video-obamas-pastor-takes-highly-nuanced-approach-to-racial-divisiveness/

If Western civilization survives another five years, it will be because of the likes of Debbie Lee.

I expected this treatment of the Marines out of Berkeley, one of the world’s premier sewers of freedom-hatred, but Toledo, Ohio?

A commenter thought he was really sticking one down my throat with a link to a news story about the two foundations that reported on the “Many lies the Bush administration told” about Iraq.

I hadn’t anticipated needing to even deal with it, but here’s the refutation:

At Big Lizards, you’ll find the omissions from what the reports had to say.

At Law Hawk, you’ll find references to all the Democrats who were concerned about Saddam’s intentions.

At Hot Air, you’ll find documentation showing that the two foundations spewing this dog vomit are Greorge Soros front groups.

I’ve recently backed off using the term “Stalinists” when referring to the Freedom-Haters.  I wanted to not be over-the-top in my characterization of those whose ideology and methods greatly concern me.  Here at BN and generally in my life as a citizen, I strive for a constructive level of discourse and even heated polemical exchange.

But this  - well, what can you call it besides Stalinist tactics?  Representative Waxman wants to use your tax dollars to look at the work of radio talk show hosts who are earning a living on privately owned radio networks and are not only protected by the first amendment but take careful measures to make sure that they are well-informed and cultivating an elevated level of discourse.

And it all got started with a lie.  The “phony soldiers” remark Rush made in reference to Jesse MacBeth and others who have done what he did has morphed into a witch hunt.

These people are sinister.  And they’re poised to take the White House and retain both chambers of Congress if this country doesn’t get a clue real fast.

The word “disconnect” looms large in my thoughts when I come upon news items about popular culture. Has the chasm ever been wider between the sewer that it’s become and the still-vital proclivity of most Americans for the decent, noble, true, delightful and sensible?

Exhibit A is the release of albums by two rock icons who are sixty-ish and don’t have the clout they did in their heyday, but still wield industry power, are able to negotiate contracts most of us musicians can only fantasize about, and garner headlines when they come out with new product.  Joni Mitchell’s Shine, an album-long rant against the Catholic church, consumerism and what she perceives as environmental harm, and Bruce Springsteen’s Magic, which paints a bleak present and future for his country, are perfect examples of the hollowness of the whole countercultural fantasy.  From its beginnings in the 50s with the New Left, beatniks and coffeehouses, through the pop explosions of the 1960s and on into the rock sensibility’s institutionalization as the lingua franca of Western culture in ensuing decades, it was sold to us as a luminous possble future we could step into if we would but cast off the oppressive mindset of the previous five thousand years.  Instead, it has come to this - vile and dark pedantry by overpaid guitar twangers without a clue as to the human nature, the nature of God, economics, science, or much of anything else.

One skirts the issue if one says, “It’s a free country.  You don’t like that stuff?  Don’t put it on your ipod.”  That’s a lame attempt to dismiss the ubiquity that these records enjoy.  Mitchell’s album is on the Starbucks label.  Anybody sidling up to the counter to pay for his or her latte will have to take note of it in the point-of-purchase display.  Springsteen is doing the Today Show and 60 Minutes, where he gets to mouth lies about “illegal wiretapping,” “voter suppression,” “no habeus corpus,” “neglect of New Orleans” and the Iraqi situation with nary a dispute from interviewers.  Yes, I know we live in an age where young people - the primary consumers of music, as study after study shows - cultivate their music tastes based on word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, and they are increasingly interested in indie acts and “non-corporate” output.  Still, they know from the media attention, and all too often from the fare listened to by their counterculture-saturated parents, that performers such as Mitchell and Springsteen are venerated icons.  To the younger music consumers, these dispensers of vitriol have joined the great American pantheon alongside Sinatra and Louis Armstrong (if they even know who they are).

Or let’s take Exhibit B, a couple of recent installments of daytime girly-girl chatfests, namely, The View and Oprah.  The episode of The View in question devolved into a blather by Whoopi Goldberg aboout being willing to engage in a three-way tryst with husband-and-wife actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.  The other panelists thought this was quite a hoot.  Then there’s Oprah’s recent focus on how to have a more fulfilling sex life, complete with guests who advocate open marriages.

Again, it’s pointless to say “Just turn it off.”  You’ll see this garbage somewhere - on the treadmills at the gym, in a waiting room of some sort, at someone else’s home.

These are but the latest examples of the enormity of the task before those of us professionally involved in trying to restore some sparkle and humanity - to say nothing of truth and good sense - to our shared public life.  Is it discouraging?  Sometimes momentarily.  That’s when one has to get back to work.  More sandbags are needed to hold back the flood.

The NYT did indeed give MoveOn.org a half-off discount for its full-page act of treason.

On the overriding issue of our time, Senator Lieberman has his head on very straight, as evidenced by his candor about Chuck Schumer’s treasonous spouting-off.

Now, here’s an interesting situation.  What is going on when, in the kind of  hostage situation where we can often realistically believe that the captive is being forced to spout the radical Islamist line, we have the history of this guy.   How are we to digest his rantings if they’re a lot like what he was spewing forth under the guise of objective journalism for the BBC?

Iowahawk and Jim Treacher engage in a most imaginative back-and-forth about how to make The View watchable, and on daytime TV in general.

I get little glimpses of this sludge when I’m on the treadmill at the gym, and I’d sure welcome any of the ideas they put forth on their discussion thread.

When I put up the link to that great Johnny Otis footage, I didn’t know my next post was going to be a link to a bunch of vile hip-hop videos.  My intention with the Johnny Otis post was for us here at BN to take a break from World War III and the erosion of our economic liberties and even pervasive cultural rot and have some fun, have a dance party.  Now it feels like Mims and R. Kelly have spoiled my party.  (I realize Michelle Malkin put those videos up on her site to make a point regarding the Don Imus matter.   I’ll let her point about it, as well as what the always spot-on Teri O’Brien has to say, speak for me on the I-man’s situation.)

That’s one of the larger cultural points I’m striving to make here at BN.  Our modern culture spoils the party so much of the time.  Is there anything fun about Britney Spears, who is ostensibly a prominent figure because she sings pop music, or Rosie O’Donnell, who is ostensibly a talk-show co-host, or, for that matter, Don Imus, who is ostensibly a radio guy?  No, and it’s because these people have chosen to morph into purveyors of ugliness, which is the main thing they are all known for now.  That’s a much faster route to fame these days than having a particular skill set in some branch of the media or entertainment.

Then there’s the matter of their overblown stature.  Such clowns occupy the public’s attention at a time when Iran announces the firing up of 3,000 centrifuges (and one government official brags that it’s just the latest milestone on the way to 50,000) and North Korea is once again found to be in non-compliance with yet another deal the objective of which is to get it to give up its nukes.

And to think we’re back to all this stuff so quickly when I though maybe we could take off our shoes and do a little hand-jivin’.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of coverage of the Afghan suicide bombing, including some of the disgusting comments from Huffington Post and Democratic Underground about Vice President Cheney’s having survived.  How do people become so poisoned that they develop this kind of hate for someone who has embodied character, vision, and humanity as much as anyone who has ever served in American public life?