Good-D'Harma By: Mark W Adams

Ed Hornbeck inspires. Give him some love over at DocuHarma.

Do you want them to have that victory?

I say never. "Live Free or Die."

The Media is going to be the slowest of institutions to change. They're the very ground we're fighting on, the embodiment of late 20th Century corporate power. Here on the tubz we fight free. As in cheap. As in 41 cents for a Benjamin Franklin letter, he of deserving neither security or liberty fame.

The limit of this tool is the limit of your imagination, just as for any artist. There is what is and then there is what you wish to see.

If the line does not look like a tree, change it until it does.

(And FWIW, my daughter is doing that Novel in a Month thing too.)

The question of course is: If a line becomes a tree, and no one sees it, will it upset David Broder? (In which I ponder whether it would be worth it to drop my support of Edwards and get on the Hillary bandwagon just to see Broder's head explode. Nyaah. Maybe later, after she's finished buying the nomination, but not while a real progressive still has a shot.)

The Zen Master of the Intertubez notes, not for the first time, that reality has an anti-conservative bias. Must be that internal inconsistency thingy -- better known as abject hypocrisy.

Untrammeled individual rights for me; a rigid moral code for everyone else.

See, being full of shit is a feature, not a bug of the modern conservative movement. 40 years of dealing with these idiots in a nutshell. I wish Paul Rosenberg had just come out and said that instead of make us wade through all that psycho-babble. Ayn Rand's progeny are still a bunch of selfish children and they better grow up or be faced with indefinite time-out status.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Rosenberg's psycho-babble, but I'm not exactly "normal" in my literary tastes. (I read the Complete Works of Shakespeare just for fun, then immediately re-read the entire Dune series. Who does that?) And I felt compelled to share the bloggy goodness as I tried to grok it all. But, it would have been all the more soothing to my karmic energies if he had just said this from the start:

But the basic premise that conservatism used to be such a wonderful, respectable tradition is nothing but a borrowing from conservatism itself, whose basic narrative is that everything has gone to hell in a handbasket since the good old days.

To the contrary, as some lost Greek once said, "The good old days, they were never good."

The only thing different about conservatives today, is that they've had untrammelled power for the first time since the 1920s, at which time they brought us the Great Depression.

Like the man said, "The good old days, they were never good."

See, wasn't that easy -- and a whole lot quicker.