Election

Romney and then Ryan will give us a nine member reactionary Supreme Court. I think I know that after 25 or 30 years the baleful effect of Ronald Ragan and Margaret Thatcher dwindled and then we had Clinton and that George W. Bush making conservatism look like sheer crap but Medicare will be trashed maybe even Social Security, retirement will be moved up to 77, or something like that. These are horrible people these Republicans. There suppressing the vote, they obstructed civil rights, Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and they have the south which is proslavery for God sakes. The majority of Southerners would make intermarriage illegal again. And Republicans want those kinds of states to have rights.

Welfare and automation

Here's the deal on the 47%. It's true. 47% of our people don't like their job and would love to win the lottery and quit. 53% of people are at work that gives them more than the paycheck, it gives them leadership and creativity and the opportunity to be somebody, to make something of themselves. They are comfortable and happy in their workplace to a large degree. This narrow majority and it's a dwindling majority, has the work ethic and has the values, and also has the temperament the stamina and the intellect to do well at work and to move forward and be promoted. To repeat myself they enjoy their work. Those of us who don't enjoy our work want the welfare state. I can understand that. Maybe you can't. It's too bad. For many of us, every day in the workplace is an ordeal. The commute, the short lunch break, co- workers who are indifferent or worse toward us and vice versa, the commute back and coming home to a wife who worked all day. They would quit their jobs if they won the lottery. The American dream is liking your job.

Debate

Uncaring, lazy, disrespectful, unprepared. To go into a debate watched by 60 million people with NO memorized talking points is the height of disrespectful arrogance.

Debate

Uncaring, lazy, disrespectful, unprepared. To go into a debate watched by 60 million people with NO memorized talking points is the height of

DEBATE

Romney denied the seven trillion argument. One of them is lying.  You know, five trillion in lost tax revenue. Need I explain? Right at the start of the debate.  A total factual opposition.  Obama let it slide.   And of course, the  issue that Obamacare was premature ill timed during this recession. That one is an Achilles' heel. But the five trillion, that should have been vetted then and there!  Mr. Romney says Mr. Obama doubled the deficit. That is not true. When Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office had already projected that the deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30 of that year, would be $1.2 trillion. (It ended up as $1.4 trillion.) For the just-finished fiscal year 2012, which ended last week, the deficit is expected to be $1.1 trillion — just under the level in the year he was inaugurated. Measured as a share of the economy, as economists prefer, the deficit has declined more significantly — from 10.1 percent of the economy’s total output in 2009 to 7.3 percent for 2012. Obama simply hasn’t pressed any points where Romney said things that were demonstrably false. A bit on his tax cut plan, but not much. And there is no explanation. Obama should have called him a liar, Romney called him a liar, compared obama to one of his boys.  Remember that part?  I'm sure he wasn't calling Obama a boy, but it was a rude comparison. Definitely calling us liars. And Obama didn't seem to notice.  He was very sleepy.  I've always worried that Obama is intermittent, unreliable, occasionally tongue tied. I never bought him as any silver tongued wordsmith. Neither of these men meet my expectations. I just vote party. Union.  Against the party of voter suppression, and all their past misdeeds, civil rights, Medicare, national health, social security, and the horrible southern constituency.   But how does it play over the next week? Romney’s been holding back all the details on his plans, basically refusing to talk about him. He’s put a lot on the table here, made a lot of claims which simply don’t add up.  Obama didn't  press the falsehoods or math that doesn’t make sense.  NO HE DIDN'T, AND IT  WAS HORRIBLE TO WATCH.  Does the press do it tomorrow? How well do these claims wear? That’s how we’ll know how each did. Along those lines, here's a highlight from Wonkblog's live fact-check of the debate:  PRE EXISTING CONDITIONS LIE.  Romney said his web site has a “lengthy description” of his health-care plan. In fact, it’s only 369 words. He also said it covers preexisting conditions. It doesn’t. Romney wouldn’t cover preexisting conditions for Americans who fall uninsured for periods of time, which happened to 89 million Americans between 2004 and 2007.  Jackie Calmes also catches Romney bending the truth: AND MEDICARE LIE. ROMNEY WILL GUT IT.  Or not.  Another factual opposition that should have  been settled then and there.  Ambinder's take on why Obama underperformed: Why didn't Obama do better? Here's some speculation: He is not as good at these formats like Romney is. He was too cautious ... even about appearing too flip and arrogant, which might have itself come off as arrogant; he didn't clip his answers; he didn't remember to say what he intended to say; he spent the day dealing with Turkey and Syria; he let his disdain for Romney show. I think all of those contributed to some degree. But fundamentally, when it comes to domestic policy, Obama just doesn't have a very good affirmative argument to make.  Yes he does. Should ask how Romney's vision is any different from bush.   That's a consequence of being a crisis president of a country where, as some are now saying, the old dismal is the new normal. 

Econ

I am not an economist. If I were I would be in one camp or another. A Keynesian or anti Keynesian. Believing FDR solved the depression or didn't. Believing tax and spend is or isn't tax and invest. Questioning trickle down or believing in it. Believing Reagan did a better job with his recession than we did, or that Obama's recession was incomparably worse. Here's what this is all about.  I am not an economist so I don't claim a position. That may sound like some kind of cop out, and it is, but it is a truthful one. I really cannot vouch for Robert reich or Paul Krugman. Or Paul Ryan or Ayn Rand, or Bill Clinton or FDR or Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or Chris Christie or Carl Rove. I couldn't argue with any of these people, or my fucking Aunt Tillie for that matter, or my brilliant lying bullying step son Josef for that matter. I couldn't argue arithmetic with that motherfucking bastard.  So I vote union and tax the rich, (they won't feel it). I vote against the party that opposed civil rights, Medicare, national health care and social security. Against the party that opposed stem cell research. And I vote agains the party of our sick South. Drunk Rick Perry, stupid Herman Caine who said, and believes "if you aren't rich or employed its your fault". Chris Christie. And weirdos like Dennis Prager who believes if you're poor its largely because of your values. A patently ignorant absurdity. Who believes that liberals and secularists have no valid ideas. None. What a crock of shit. How could he say such a thing. Or this. : "No one has the self esteem of a liberal. No one". See, that's just fucking NUTS.  The party that spawned a man who could say that half the nation are moochers that he couldn't "convince to take responsibility for themselves". "To CARE for themselves." He said that and he meant it. It is ignorant and hateful.  That's a sick mother fucking plutocrat hater of the common man. That was not a gaffe. It is how he thinks about us. It was completely in context.  And again, I wouldn't bother to risk my self confidence by entering into a "discussion" with any of the geniuses above. On ether side.  At the usual risk of repeating myself, which ought to be an acronym, I cannot vote the only issue, economic philosophy. I cannot take a position, and apparently, neither can anyone. Nobel Prize winners in economics disagree with astonishing clarity. In other words, THEY DON'T KNOW. NOBODY KNOWS!  So I'll vote republican for abortion restraint, and religious freedom. Or democratic, because every time I hear Michael Medved say "democrat party" I cringe. and because we don't have a Rush Limbaugh in our stable. What a terrible and frightening man. Sent from my iPad

Economics

I am not an economist. If I were I would be in one camp or another. A Keynesian or anti Keynesian. Believing FDR solved the depression or didn't. Believing tax and spend is or isn't tax and invest. Questioning trickle down or believing in it. Believing Reagan did a better job with his recession than we did, or that Obama's recession was incomparably worse. Here's what this is all about.  I am not an economist so I don't claim a position. That may sound like some kind of cop out, and it is, but it is a truthful one. I really cannot vouch for Robert reich or Paul Krugman. Or Paul Ryan or Ayn Rand, or Bill Clinton or FDR or Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or Chris Christie or Carl Rove. I couldn't argue with any of these people, or my fucking Aunt Tillie for that matter, or my brilliant lying bullying step son Josef for that matter. I couldn't argue arithmetic with that motherfucking bastard.  So I vote union and tax the rich, (they won't feel it). I vote against the party that opposed civil rights, Medicare, national health care and social security. Against the party that opposed stem cell research. And I vote agains the party of our sick South. Drunk Rick Perry, stupid Herman Caine who said, and believes "if you aren't rich or employed its your fault". Chris Christie. And weirdos like Dennis Prager who believes if you're poor its largely because of your values. A patently ignorant absurdity. Who believes that liberals and secularists have no valid ideas. None. What a crock of shit. How could he say such a thing. Or this. : "No one has the self esteem of a liberal. No one". See, that's just fucking NUTS.  The party that spawned a man who could say that half the nation are moochers that he couldn't "convince to take responsibility for themselves". "To CARE for themselves." He said that and he meant it. It is ignorant and hateful.  That's a sick mother fucking plutocrat hater of the common man. That was not a gaffe. It is how he thinks about us. It was completely in context.  And again, I wouldn't bother to risk my self confidence by entering into a "discussion" with any of the geniuses above. On ether side.  At the usual risk of repeating myself, which ought to be an acronym, I cannot vote the only issue, economic philosophy. I cannot take a position, and apparently, neither can anyone. Nobel Prize winners in economics disagree with astonishing clarity. In other words, THEY DON'T KNOW. NOBODY KNOWS!  So I'll vote republican for abortion restraint, and religious freedom. Or democratic, because every time I hear Michael Medved say "democrat party" I cringe. and because we don't have a Rush Limbaugh in our stable. What a terrible and frightening man.

Mimi's. Hamburger hamlet. Cheesecake factory. And Shulamit and I have gone
To every conceivable restaurant.  And there are restaurants located everywhere. 




On Sep 11, 2012, at 4:40 PM, Cerebi wrote:

Hi Dan,

We differ on your characterization of Souplantation, but, here's the deal:

- The restaurant must have a broad enough selection to accomodate Shulamit's keeping Kosher (which she does), and my Nutritarian eating style (essentially semi-hardcore vegetarian).  Burger joints, Pizzerias, Delicatessens, etc., will not do that.  Nor will Chinese/Italian places.  

- The restaurant must also have sufficiently 'normal' food that will accommodate the bulk of the other people in the group.  Souplantation has that:  soups, various kinds of chicken that can be *added* to whatever one gets, pasta, bread, pizza, fruit, ice-cream, it's all there.  

- Finally, there's the question of what restaurants am I familiar with, that I know will accommodate everyone, and that are centrally located enough for most of the people in the group (as opposed to driving out to the boonies).

As you see, it's not as easy or as straightforward as you first thought.  While I don't want anyone to sit it out because they don't like this or that element, there probably is no perfect solution (in the sense of fully satisfying everyone).  I do think that the priority should go to those whose birthdays we are celebrating.  In light of that, it'd be pretty lame to go to a more 'conventional' restaurant and force Shulamit to eat a small side salad (being unable to order other things on the menu), when hers is one of the birthdays being celebrated.  Shulamit has been very, very good to me and to the group over the years; I'm inclined to help her out, to the extent that I can.

Best,

Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan
To: Cerebi
Sent: Tue, Sep 11, 2012 10:09 am
Subject: More restaurant choices

Dear Larry,


Any chance of a different restaurant? Soup plantation isn't everyone's
favorite. Very limited fare, no sandwiches, no half chicken, no French fries,
no burgers, no steak, or steak sandwiches, very little of the favorite foods,
and there's nice big Chinese restaurants or italian. A whole bunch of
restaurants, why the SP again? Variety is the spice of life.

We went to soup plantation last time and had to stand on line, and I went home
hungry. Just nothing particularly caught my fancy. And the seating was
uncomfortable.

Think about it. SP is an acquired taste. Most restaurants offer a much wider
appeal, that's a fact. So think it over. Change your mind. People don't always
speak their mind, but cafeteria service and limited fare is a concern.

How about hamburger hamlet. Now that's nice and varied food. Roast salmon.
Braised sirloin steak. Buffalo wings. Or cheese cake factory. If those are
too expensive, there are other choices with the variety of food I'm talking
about with lower prices. How about Mimi's. Crazy decor, forties music, good
varied food. Great blueberry muffins. Yum. Glorious burritos. Soups, pasta,
sandwiches, what a GLORIOUS menu. Irresistible.

Just a suggestion. In your heart you know I'm right.


Sincerely,

Dan Ziferstein

Mimi's. Hamburger hamlet. Cheesecake factory. And Shulamit and I have gone
To every conceivable restaurant.  And there are restaurants located everywhere. 




On Sep 11, 2012, at 4:40 PM, Cerebi wrote:

Hi Dan,

We differ on your characterization of Souplantation, but, here's the deal:

- The restaurant must have a broad enough selection to accomodate Shulamit's keeping Kosher (which she does), and my Nutritarian eating style (essentially semi-hardcore vegetarian).  Burger joints, Pizzerias, Delicatessens, etc., will not do that.  Nor will Chinese/Italian places.  

- The restaurant must also have sufficiently 'normal' food that will accommodate the bulk of the other people in the group.  Souplantation has that:  soups, various kinds of chicken that can be *added* to whatever one gets, pasta, bread, pizza, fruit, ice-cream, it's all there.  

- Finally, there's the question of what restaurants am I familiar with, that I know will accommodate everyone, and that are centrally located enough for most of the people in the group (as opposed to driving out to the boonies).

As you see, it's not as easy or as straightforward as you first thought.  While I don't want anyone to sit it out because they don't like this or that element, there probably is no perfect solution (in the sense of fully satisfying everyone).  I do think that the priority should go to those whose birthdays we are celebrating.  In light of that, it'd be pretty lame to go to a more 'conventional' restaurant and force Shulamit to eat a small side salad (being unable to order other things on the menu), when hers is one of the birthdays being celebrated.  Shulamit has been very, very good to me and to the group over the years; I'm inclined to help her out, to the extent that I can.

Best,

Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan
To: Cerebi
Sent: Tue, Sep 11, 2012 10:09 am
Subject: More restaurant choices

Dear Larry,


Any chance of a different restaurant? Soup plantation isn't everyone's
favorite. Very limited fare, no sandwiches, no half chicken, no French fries,
no burgers, no steak, or steak sandwiches, very little of the favorite foods,
and there's nice big Chinese restaurants or italian. A whole bunch of
restaurants, why the SP again? Variety is the spice of life.

We went to soup plantation last time and had to stand on line, and I went home
hungry. Just nothing particularly caught my fancy. And the seating was
uncomfortable.

Think about it. SP is an acquired taste. Most restaurants offer a much wider
appeal, that's a fact. So think it over. Change your mind. People don't always
speak their mind, but cafeteria service and limited fare is a concern.

How about hamburger hamlet. Now that's nice and varied food. Roast salmon.
Braised sirloin steak. Buffalo wings. Or cheese cake factory. If those are
too expensive, there are other choices with the variety of food I'm talking
about with lower prices. How about Mimi's. Crazy decor, forties music, good
varied food. Great blueberry muffins. Yum. Glorious burritos. Soups, pasta,
sandwiches, what a GLORIOUS menu. Irresistible.

Just a suggestion. In your heart you know I'm right.


Sincerely,

Dan Ziferstein

Free will

In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about. 
Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I’m afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won’t do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well. At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line. None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren’t born a psychopath.
Of course, I’m not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration? And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious. Where is the freedom in this?

I'll open the discussion with this excerpt by Sam Harris on the subject:

Life Without Free Will

One of the most common objections to my position on free will is that accepting it could have terrible consequences, psychologically or socially. This is a strange rejoinder, analogous to what many religious people allege against atheism: Without a belief in God, human beings will cease to be good to one another. Both responses abandon any pretense of caring about what is true and merely change the subject. But that does not mean we should never worry about the practical effects of holding specific beliefs.
I can well imagine that some people might use the nonexistence of free will as a pretext for doing whatever they want, assuming that it’s pointless to resist temptation or that there’s no difference between good and evil. This is a misunderstanding of the situation, but, I admit, a possible one. There is also the question of how we should raise children in light of what science tells us about the nature of the human mind. It seems doubtful that a lecture on the illusoriness of free will should be part of an elementary school curriculum.
In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about.
Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I’m afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won’t do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well. At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line. None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren’t born a psychopath.
Of course, I’m not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration? And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious. Where is the freedom in this?
If we cannot assign blame to the workings of the universe, how can evil people be held responsible for their actions? In the deepest sense, it seems, they can’t be. But in a practical sense, they must be. I see no contradiction in this. In fact, I think that keeping the deep causes of human behavior in view would only improve our practical response to evil. The feeling that people are deeply responsible for who they are does nothing but produce moral illusions and psychological suffering.
Imagine that you are enjoying your last nap of the summer, perhaps outside in a hammock somewhere, and are awakened by an unfamiliar sound. You open your eyes to the sight of a large bear charging at you across the lawn. It should be easy enough to understand that you have a problem. If we swap this bear for a large man holding a butcher knife, the problem changes in a few interesting ways, but the sudden appearance of free will in the brain of your attacker is not among them.
Should you survive this ordeal, your subsequent experience is liable to depend—far too much, in my view—on the species of your attacker. Imagine the difference between seeing the man who almost killed you on the witness stand and seeing the bear romping at the zoo. If you are like many victims, you might be overcome in the first instance by feelings of rage and hatred so intense as to constitute a further trauma. You might spend years fantasizing about the man’s death. But it seems certain that your experience at the zoo would be altogether different. You might even bring friends and family just for the fun of it: “That’s the beast that almost killed me!” Which state of mind would you prefer—seething hatred or triumphant feelings of good luck and amazement? The conviction that a human assailant could have done otherwise, while a bear could not, would seem to account for much of the difference.
A person’s conscious thoughts, intentions, and efforts at every moment are preceded by causes of which he is unaware. What is more, they are preceded by deep causes—genes, childhood experience, etc.—for which no one, however evil, can be held responsible. Our ignorance of both sets of facts gives rise to moral illusions. And yet many people worry that it is necessary to believe in free will, especially in the process of raising children.
This strikes me as a legitimate concern, though I would point out that the question of which truths to tell children (or childlike adults) haunts every room in the mansion of our understanding. For instance, my wife and I recently took our three-year-old daughter on an airplane for the first time. She loves to fly! As it happens, her joy was made possible in part because we neglected to tell her that airplanes occasionally malfunction and fall out of the sky, killing everyone on board. I don’t believe I’m the first person to observe that certain truths are best left unspoken, especially in the presence of young children. And I would no more think of telling my daughter at this age that free will is an illusion than I would teach her to drive a car or load a pistol.
Which is to say that there is a time and a place for everything—unless, of course, there isn’t. We all find ourselves in the position of a child from time to time, when specific information, however valid or necessary it may be in other contexts, will only produce confusion, despondency, or terror in the context of our life. It can be perfectly rational to avoid certain facts. For instance, if you must undergo a medical procedure for which there is no reasonable alternative, I recommend that you not conduct an Internet search designed to uncover all its possible complications. Similarly, if you are prone to nightmares or otherwise destabilized by contemplating human evil, I recommend that you not read Machete Season. Some forms of knowledge are not for everyone.
Generally speaking, however, I don’t think that the illusoriness of free will is an ugly truth. Nor is it one that must remain a philosophical abstraction. In fact, as I write this, it is absolutely clear to me that I do not have free will. This knowledge doesn’t seem to prevent me from getting things done. Recognizing that my conscious mind is always downstream from the underlying causes of my thoughts, intentions, and actions does not change the fact that thoughts, intentions, and actions of all kinds are necessary for living a happy life—or an unhappy one, for that matter.
I haven’t been noticeably harmed, and I believe I have benefited, from knowing that the next thought that unfurls in my mind will arise and become effective (or not) due to conditions that I cannot know and did not bring into being. The negative effects that people worry about—a lack of motivation, a plunge into nihilism—are simply not evident in my life. And the positive effects have been obvious. Seeing through the illusion of free will has lessened my feelings of hatred for bad people. I’m still capable of feeling hatred, of course, but when I think about the actual causes of a person’s behavior, the feeling falls away. It is a relief to put down this burden, and I think nothing would be lost if we all put it down together. On the contrary, much would be gained. We could forget about retribution and concentrate entirely on mitigating harm. (And if punishing people proved important for either deterrence or rehabilitation, we could make prison as unpleasant as required.)
Understanding the true causes of human behavior does not leave any room for the traditional notion of free will. But this shouldn’t depress us, or tempt us to go off our diets. Diligence and wisdom still yield better results than sloth and stupidity. And, in psychologically healthy adults, understanding the illusoriness of free will should make divisive feelings such as pride and hatred a little less compelling. While it’s conceivable that someone, somewhere, might be made worse off by dispensing with the illusion of free will, I think that on balance, it could only produce a more compassionate, equitable, and sane society.

WHAT WOULD THE FOUNDING FATHERS DO.

It’s a question Thomas Jefferson found ridiculous. In 1816, when he was seventy-three and many of his revolutionary generation had already died, he offered this answer: “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The Founders believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed was to become a slave to the tyranny of the past. Jefferson put it this way: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human

In the U.S. people who say they are "religious" dropped from 73 percent to 60 percent. So 40 percent of Americans don't believe in god. And that includes the South. Among under 40, college educated good earners in blue states, that could be double.



WHAT WOULD THE FOUNDING FATHERS DO.

It’s a question Thomas Jefferson found ridiculous. In 1816, when he was seventy-three and many of his revolutionary generation had already died, he offered this answer: “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The Founders believed that to defer witho...See More
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Inequality, Eugenics, and Envy
by Thomas Sowell
With all the talk about “disparities” in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention — disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.

In a market economy, people pay us for benefiting them in some way — whether we are sweeping their floors, selling them diamonds or anything in between. Disparities in our ability to create benefits for which others will pay us are huge, and the skills required can develop early — or sometimes not at all.

A recent national competition among high school students who create their own technological advances turned up an especially high share of such students winning recognition in the San Francisco Bay Area. A closer look showed that the great majority of these Bay Area students had Asian names.

Asian Americans are a substantial presence in this region but they are by no means a majority, much less such an overwhelming majority as they are among those winning high tech awards.

This pattern of disproportionate representation of particular groups among those with special skills and achievements is not confined to Asian Americans or even to the United States.

It is a phenomenon among particular racial, ethnic or other groups in countries around the world — the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Tamils in Sri Lanka. The list goes on and on.

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

Nor is this simply an opinion. Businesses have been sued by the government when the representation of different groups among their employees differs substantially from their proportions in the population at large. But, no matter how the human race is broken down into its components — whether by race, sex, geographic region or whatever — glaring disparities in achievements have been the rule, not the exception.

Anyone who watches professional basketball games knows that the star players are by no means a representative sample of the population at large. The book “Human Accomplishment” by Charles Murray is a huge compendium of the top achievements around the world in the arts and sciences, as well as in sports and other fields.

Nowhere have these achievements been random or representative of the demographic proportions of the population of a country or of the world. Nor have they been the same from one century to the next. China was once far more advanced technologically than any country in Europe, but then it fell behind and more recently is gaining ground.

Most professional golfers who participate in PGA tournaments have never won a single tournament, but Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have each won dozens of tournaments.

Yet these and numerous other disparities in achievement are resolutely ignored by those whose shrill voices denounce disparities in rewards, as if these disparities are somehow suspicious at best and sinister at worst.

Higher achieving groups — whether classes, races or whatever — are often blamed for the failure of other groups to achieve. Politicians and intellectuals, especially, tend to conceive of social questions in terms that allow them to take on the role of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

This can be a huge disservice to those individuals and groups who are lagging behind, for it leads them to focus on a sense of grievance and victimhood, rather than on how they can lift themselves up instead of trying to pull other people down.

Again, this is a worldwide phenomenon — a sad commentary on the down side of the brotherhood of man.

One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it.

This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.

When institutions of higher learning turn out highly qualified doctors, scientists, engineers and others with skills that can raise the standard of living of a whole society and make possible a better and longer life, the benefits are obvious.

What is not so obvious, but is painfully true nonetheless, is that colleges and universities can also turn out vast numbers of people with credentials, but with no marketable skills with which to fulfill their expectations. There is nothing magic about simply being in ivy-covered buildings for four years.

Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges — and lemons.

A decade after graduation, people whose degrees were in a hard field like engineering earned twice as much as people whose degrees were in the ultimate soft field, education. Nor is a degree from a prestigious institution a guarantee of a big pay-off, especially not for those who failed to specialize in subjects that would give them skills valued in the real world.

But that is not even half the story. In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war.

People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences.

These include what a noted historian called the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity politics in the 19th century, which led ultimately to historic tragedies for both Czechs and Germans in 20th century Czechoslovakia. It was much the same story of soft-subject “educated” but unsuccessful young men who promoted pro-fascist and anti-Semitic movements in Romania in the 1930s.

The targets have been different in different countries but the basic story has been much the same. Those who cannot compete in the marketplace, despite their degrees, not only resent those who have succeeded where they have failed, but push demands for preferential treatment, in order to negate the “unfair” advantages that others have.

Similar attempts to substitute political favoritism for developing one’s own skills and achievements have been common as well in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka and throughout Central Europe and Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.

Such political movements cannot promote their agendas without demonizing others, thereby polarizing whole societies. Time and again, their targets have been those who have the skills and achievements that they lack. When they achieve their ultimate success, forcing such people out of the country, as in Uganda in the 1970s or Zimbabwe more recently, the whole economy can collapse.

Against this international background, the current class warfare rhetoric in American politics and ethnic grievance ideology in our schools and colleges, can be seen as the dangerous things they are. Those who are pushing such things may be seeking nothing more than votes for themselves or some unearned group benefits at other people’s expense. But they are playing with dynamite.

The semi-literate sloganizing of our own Occupy Wall Street mobs recalls the distinction that Milton Friedman often made between those who are educated and those who have simply been in schools. Generating more such people, in the name of expanding education, may serve the interests of the Obama administration but hardly the interests of America.

Anyone who has ever been in a Third World country, or even in a slum neighborhood at home, is likely to wonder why there can be such dire poverty among some people, while others are prospering.

Both politicians and intellectuals have tended to have simple answers to that question, even if these simple answers have been different in different eras.

A hundred years ago, the prevailing answer was that some people are innately and genetically inferior. Not only was this answer thundered from political platforms in redneck dialect by politicians in the Jim Crow South, the same message was delivered in cultured and lofty tones from academic podiums in the most prestigious colleges and universities across the country.

Nor was this unique to the United States. In Britain, a study of high-achieving families by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, concluded that the reason for their achievements was genetic superiority. From there it was a short step to seeing various races as genetically superior and inferior.

More ominously, Galton saw those who were inferior as a drag on society who should be eliminated. As often happens when a big idea seizes the imagination of the intelligentsia, their strongest argument is that there is no argument — that “science” has already proved what they believe.

As Sir Francis Galton put it: “there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”

The idea that those with different views had only “sentiment” on their side, while he had science, was common among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eugenics — a term Galton coined — became a crusading creed, and eugenics societies were set up by such stellar intellectuals as John Maynard Keynes, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw in England. In the United States there were 376 college courses devoted to eugenics in American colleges and universities in 1928.

By the end of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Now differences in achievements among classes, races or the sexes were seen as being a result of discriminatory treatment. And, again, as with the intelligentsia of the Progressive era, those with different views were dismissed with a word — often “racist” now, as compared to “sentimental” in the earlier period. But in neither era were views different from the crusading creed of the day seriously engaged.

In our supposedly more enlightened time, it became dangerous even to express differing views on the subject on leading college and university campuses.

A very fundamental question was seldom asked, in either the earlier or the later period: Was there ever any realistic reason to expect the same achievements among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species?

Could we really have expected Eskimos to have the same ability to grow pineapples as the people of Hawaii had? Could the Bedouins of the Sahara really know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific? Could the people of the Himalayas have the same seafaring skills as people living in ports around the Mediterranean?

On a more general level, could people living in isolated mountain valleys realistically be expected to develop their own intellectual potential as fully as people living in cities that were international crossroads of commerce, cultures and ideas from around the world?

When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level. Isolation and backwardness have gone together in many parts of the world, regardless of the race of the people involved.

Historical happenstances — the fact that the Romans invaded Western Europe but not Eastern Europe, for example — left a legacy of written languages in Western Europe that people in Eastern Europe did not have until centuries later.

But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.

Different histories, geography, demography and cultures have left various groups, races, nations and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

In centuries past, the majority population of various cities in Eastern Europe consisted of people from Western Europe — Germans, Jews and others — while the vast majority of the population in the surrounding countrysides were Slavs or other indigenous peoples of the region.

Just as Western Europe was — and is — more prosperous than Eastern Europe, so Western Europeans living in Eastern European cities in centuries past were more prosperous than the Slavs and others living in the countrysides, or even in the same cities.

One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that it was conquered by the Romans in ancient times — a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.

Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages’ centuries earlier head start.

Even the educated elites of Eastern Europe were often educated in Western European languages. None of this was due to the faults of one or the merits of the other. It is just the way that history went down.

But such mundane explanations of gross disparities are seldom emotionally satisfying — least of all to those on the short end of these disparities. With the rise over time of an indigenous intelligentsia in Eastern Europe and the growing influence of mass politics, more emotionally satisfying explanations emerged, such as oppression, exploitation and the like.

Since human beings have seldom been saints, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, there were no doubt many individual flaws and shortcomings among the non-indigenous elites to complain of. But those shortcomings were not the fundamental reason for the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans. More important, seeing those Western European elites in Eastern Europe as the cause of the economic disparities led many Eastern Europeans into the blind alley of ethnic identity politics, including hostility to Germans, Jews and others — and a romanticizing of their own cultural patterns that were holding them back.

What happened in Eastern Europe, including many tragedies that grew out of the polarization of groups in the region, has implications that reach far beyond Europe, and in fact reach all around the world, where similar events have produced similar polarizations and similar historic tragedies.

Today, in America, many denounce the black-white gap in economic and other achievements, which they attribute to the same kinds of causes as those to which the lags of Eastern Europeans have been attributed. Moreover, the persistence of these gaps, years after the civil rights laws were expected to close them, is regarded as something strange and even sinister.

Yet the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans remains to this day greater than the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America — and the gap in Europe has lasted for centuries.

Focusing attention and attacks on people who have greater wealth-generating capacity — whether races, classes or whatever — has had counterproductive consequences, including tragedies written in the blood of millions. Whole totalitarian governments have risen to dictatorial power on the wings of envy and resentment ideologies.

Intellectuals have all too often promoted these envy and resentment ideologies. There are both psychic and material rewards for the intelligentsia in doing so, even when the supposed beneficiaries of these ideologies end up worse off. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

First things first. mikeroweWORKS grew out of a TV show called Dirty Jobs. If by some chance you are not glued to The Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 10pm, allow me to visually introduce myself. That’s me on the right, preparing to do something dirty. 
When Dirty Jobs premiered back in 2003, critics called the show “a calamity of exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.” They weren’t exactly wrong. But mostly, Dirty Jobs was an unscripted celebration of hard work and skilled labor. It still is. Every week, we highlight regular people who do the kind of jobs most people go out of their way to avoid. My role on the show is that of a “perpetual apprentice.” In that capacity I have completed over three hundred different jobs, visited all fifty states, and worked in every major industry.
Though schizophrenic and void of any actual qualifications, my resume looks pretty impressive, and when our economy officially crapped the bed in 2008, I was perfectly positioned to weigh in on a variety of serious topics. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called to ask what I thought about the “counter-intuitive correlation between rising unemployment and the growing shortage of skilled labor.” CNBC wanted my take on outsourcing. Fox News wanted my opinions on manufacturing and infrastructure. And CNN wanted to chat about currency valuations, free trade, and just about every other work-related problem under the sun.
In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce.  We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.
Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)
Which brings me to my purpose in writing. On Labor Day of 2008, the fans of Dirty Jobs helped me launch this website. mikeroweWORKS.com began as a Trade Resource Center designed to connect kids with careers in the skilled trades. It has since evolved into a non-profit foundation – a kind of PR Campaign for hard work and skilled labor. Thanks to a number of strategic partnerships, I have been able to promote a dialogue around these issues with a bit more credibility than my previous resume allowed. I’ve spoken to Congress (twice) about the need to confront the underlying stigmas and stereotypes that surround these kinds of jobs. Alabama and Georgia have both used mikeroweWORKS to launch their own statewide technical recruitment campaigns, and I’m proud to be the spokesman for both initiatives. I also work closely with Caterpillar, Ford, Kimberly-Clark, and Master Lock, as well as The Boy Scouts of America and The Future Farmers of America. To date, the mikeroweWORKS Foundation has raised over a million dollars for trade scholarships. It’s modest by many standards, but I think we’re making a difference.
Certainly, we need more jobs, and you were clear about that in Tampa. But the Skills Gap proves that we need something else too.  We need people who see opportunity where opportunity exists. We need enthusiasm for careers that have been overlooked and underappreciated by society at large. We need to have a really big national conversation about what we value in the workforce, and if I can be of help to you in that regard, I am at your service – assuming of course, you find yourself in a new address early next year.
To be clear, mikeroweWORKS has no political agenda. I am not an apologist for Organized Labor or for Management. mikeroweWORKS is concerned only with encouraging a larger appreciation for skilled labor, and supporting those kids who are willing to learn a skill.
Good luck in November. And thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Mike Rowe
PS. In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I wrote a similar letter to President Obama. Of course, that was four years ago, and since I never heard back, I believe proper etiquette allows me to extend the same offer to you now. I figure if I post it here, the odds are better that someone you know might send it along to your attention.

The Nastiness of Dennis Prager

"There is no wisdom in the atheistic and secular world. None. "



 "No one has the self esteem of a liberal. No one."

 

 "In America, differences in income exist largely because of the values of those who make more money."

Larry, can you comment on these statements by Dennis. They are disturbing to say the least.  I wonder if his mind is wandering. It seems so careless.


There is no wisdom in the atheistic and secular world. None. 

--- 

 No one has the self esteem of a liberal. No one.
 

 In America, differences in income exist largely because of the values of those who make more money.

---- 












;


Larry

According to Einstein, volition or free will, initiative and effort had NOTHING to do with his rise to great fame and fortune and everything that goes with it.  And I'm sure he considered his philosophy just fine for everyone.   He didn't build it. It was all luck and DNA and the usual effort and hard work that just being a person entails.  Very believable, but most people aren't ready for it. 

Here's the Protestant Calvinist version of free will.  There isn't any. If god chooses you for earthly riches and admiration and success and happiness,  you are elected .  You don't earn it. Hell,  you don't even deserve it.    it's called election.  Google Charles Portis and election for more on this subject.  Some great quotes from True Grit.

Also google Sam Harris and free will.  You might change your mind. I didn't have to.  I discovered John Calvin and Albert Einstein's philosophy against free will at about fourteen years old.  Life is unfair.  Also google JFK and life is unfair for another solid doubter of free choice

I have always been weary of the whine regarding the purported “liberal media”; having won 60% of presidential elections over the last 40 years, near-complete dominance of the radio airwaves, and a cable news behemoth with ratings greater than the aggregate of both its nearest competitors, conservatives are hardly the most suppressed segment of our society. Yet even for a skeptic like me, MSNBC’s coverage of the Iowa caucuses was truly a sight to behold.

For starters, once it became apparent in recent days that Mitt Romney was at least charted for the top three—a squeaker of a victory or a third place finish in a closely bunched spread—”Hardball” host Chris Matthews began rallying to the defense of the bombarded Newt Gingrich. Matthews upbraided the insidious Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future at the close of his Monday broadcast, trumpeting the end of democracy as we know it with Newt Gingrich as the first slain giant.

Like Gingrich himself, he made no assertion that the content of anti-Gingrich advertisements was false. Nor did he document what, exactly, was “nasty” about the PAC advertisements. Matthews’ qualms were couched entirely in the advertisements’ funding apparatus (undercutting his very own argument by identifying Romney as the attributable candidate Restore Our Future supports). Were any viewers unaware that Restore Our Future is a pro-Romney Super PAC? If they were, Matthews certainly took care to remove all premise of anonymity. Problem solved.

But Matthews’ duty was not yet done. Once it became clear that the anti-Newt barrage was doing nothing to diminish Romney’s support in Iowa on Tuesday, Matthews took up the cause of giving a Gingrich attack line free air-time—quite a favor given Gingrich’s inability to afford a riposte on his own behalf. In Matthews’ hypothesis of the nominating contest going forward, he began echoing Gingrich’s recent charge that the Massachusetts state health law signed by Romney had provisions for state-funded abortion. No less than four times over the course of Tuesday’s broadcast, Matthews repeated various iterations of how an ennervated Gingrich would now fly to New Hampshire and South Carolina to warn them that Romney funded abortion at the state level as governor, energizing “the Pat Buchanan crowd” in the former and the southern evangelicals in the latter. Howard Fineman, nodding sagely in agreement, couldn’t help but concur, confirming the real threat now posed to Romney’s candidacy by the emergent Rick Santorum—just as he had done previously regarding Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and most recently, Gingrich himself.

There was another instance of strange bedfellows made Tuesday night: Ed Schultz waxed poetic about Santorum’s closing speech, praising it as a refreshing ode to the American working class before declaring Santorum’s retail politicking to be superior to that of President Obama. Meanwhile, Al Sharpton’s contribution to the evening consisted of declaring that every development somehow redounded to the president’s benefit, at one point declaring how worried the Romney camp should be given “the clear lack of enthusiasm among Iowans to remove the incumbent”. By the evening’s conclusion, the MSNBC narrative was clear: Romney was an insidious corporate toady whose chance at the nomination was quickly fading; Gingrich the beleaguered victim of the cruel underbelly of modern campaign finance, ready to expose the liberal governor’s pro-choice record; Santorum the only hope for a Republican Party looking to reconnect with Reagan Democrats; and the coming war involving the three would only help President Obama.

One can be forgiven for suspecting that the MSNBC crowd would prefer that President Obama not face the candidate universally considered to be the toughest challenge to his reelection. Could it be that the channel’s talent has decided to do its part to stop Romney at the gate? With an apparent move underway by movement conservatives to do the same, the thought isn’t entirely out of the question. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Here's the Einstein opinion on free will and effort and success and responsibility and praise and blame.  This old school philosopher believed in a very new set of ideas, nearly a hundred years ago, in the famous 1920's.  The time of Jung and Freud and J.P. Morgan and Einstein and Henry Ford. 

I just finished a gigantic novel on the period, Doctorow's Ragtime, and feel like a just returned time traveller.  I know what Einstein was thinking.  The future lay ahead, beyond anyone's imagination. (a quote from  George Harrison, in another world changing era.) 


                      FREE WILL


"In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. 

EINSTEIN DOESN'T BELIEVE IN HUMAN FREEDOM OF CHOICE.  REAL CHOICES ARW THRUST UPON US AND DEPEND NEARLY ENTIRELY ON factors over which we have no control.  We choose a career because we find ourselves possessing certain traits and skills that lead us there. In Einstein's sense of reality, that's not a real choice. It's a phantom, a notion of control. 

Einstein chose academia, the study of mathematics and found himself preeminent in it. He did not choose to be preeminent. 

Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. 

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. 

This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.



What that means is Einstein believed he didn't build his own success or career,  his natural talents carried him into the easy academic life, and then his extremely rare version of mathematical skill lead him to discoveries that hundreds of his peers were looking for.  He found relativity.  It was not his doing. He worked no harder than the man in the next cubicle. 

The intensity of effort in the mathematics  and physics community at the turn of the last century was at a fever pitch.   So Einstein acknowledges his success was not due to greater effort.  He doesn't even take pride in it.  He's glad, pleased, but it happened to him.  HAPPENED.  It was external to his own volition.  

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. 

According to Einstein, volition or free will, initiative and effort had NOTHING to do with his rise to great fame and fortune and everything that goes with it.  And I'm sure he considered his philosophy just fine for everyone.   He didn't build it. It was all luck and DNA and the usual effort and hard work that just being a person entails.  Very believable, but most people aren't ready for it. 

Here's the Protestant Calvinist version of free will.  There isn't any. If god chooses you for earthly riches and admiration and success and happiness,  you are elected .  You don't earn it. Hell,  you don't even deserve it.    it's called election.  Google Charles Portis and election for more on this subject.  Some great quotes from True Grit.

Also google Sam Harris and free will.  You might change your mind. I didn't have to.  I discovered John Calvin and Albert Einstein's philosophy against free will at about fourteen years old.  Life is unfair.  Also google JFK and life is unfair for another solid doubter of free choice

Einstein

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this.

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.

Clinton speech

11.18 pm. Republicanism today is failed arithmetic. Clinton is really bringing this home - intellectually. It is not a series of platitudes; it is a series of arguments rebutting last week's entire convention arguments. It has far more policy substance than Romney's or Ryan's speeches. And it has the added benefit of being true.

11.15 pm. Clinton is now equating Obama's plan with Bowles-Simpson. And when you spell out the Romney plan as it exists, it does not add up. And it's perverse. Cutting revenues as a way to cut debt when revenues are at 50 year lows is not a policy. It's madness.

11.11 pm. Now the important passage on Romney's massive welfare lie. The requirement was for more work, not less. Bill Clinton is the perfect man to rebut this lie. I wonder if it will have some serious blowback for Romney. A former president has called him out on a clear lie.

11.10 pm. Now he's telling seniors that slashing Medicaid means slashing home-care for the elderly.

11.07 pm. "It takes some brass to attack a man for doing what you did." He's on fire. Now: welfare? Please: welfare.

11.04 pm. What's great about Clinton's speech: he has taken on the opposing argument directly. We are better off than four years ago. And the healthcare reform is already slowing healthcare costs. Now he's tackling the "robbing Medicare to pay for Obamacare" deception. He's a lawyer slowly moving the jury to a judgment.

10.57 pm. Now he's telling people exactly how the GOP tried to kill the recovery after 2010 by blocking a second stimulus and slashing budgets at the state level. Now touting the auto workers. And the new mileage standards. And a domestic energy boom. And better student loans. He's making it real. Have you lost count of the number of times he said, "Now, listen ..." We are. He's telling a story that Obama has so far failed to tell effectively.

10.51 pm. Clinton's summary of Republican malfeasance these past four years is simply liberating. Liberating because it is true: their moral and intellectual and political degeneracy is our biggest challenge. And he is directly comparing his re-election to Obama's. And he's being as honest as he can: no one could have repaired the full damage of the 2008 crash in four years - but the green shoots are there.

10.49 pm. Genius: "We left him a total mess and he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough so we should get back into power".

10.45 pm. This is a brilliant and core point: the difference between Obama and the GOP is that Obama can compromise and the Republicans will not. If this election is about who can best compromise, it's over. Obama has tried to bring people together - including his former rivals. And the GOP has from the very beginning refused to do anything with this president but plan to defeat him. For Bill Clinton to use the example of Hillary to illustrate Obama's capacity for magnanimity and compromise is a very Bill Clinton coup de grace.

10.41 pm. Clinton is now telling Americans he has worked with Republicans in the past and liked them. He is telling the independents that the current Republicans are different - they are hateful, angry, and partisan all the way down. For a man impeached by Republicans to say they hate Obama even more than they hated him is quite something.

10.36 pm. He's on. I'm gonna sit back for a bit to absorb it better.

10.34 pm. And now the likable rogue. Man did he love that walk onto the stage. And he took his sweet time. Now: for the second most critical speech of the convention.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

---- Albert Einstein

Early in life, Einstein developed a combination of awe and rebellion. Those two traits combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith. The rebellion part comes early in his life when he rejected the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intervenes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his fifties when he settled into a deism based on what he called "the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a God who "reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists."
Einstein retained, from his childhood religious phase, a profound faith in and reverence for the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws.

According to Prince Hubertus, Einstein said, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

That's what someone said he said,  here's what he actually did say. 

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

---- Albert Einstein

Lick and success

If  you succeed, don't break you arm patting yourself on the back. It was luck, and a host of god given gifts, looks, health, intelligence, good home, supportive economy, etc. You didn't build it. 

This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. 



don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with  luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

Paul Ryan

Take a close look at that. Ryan wants to cut Medicaid and children's health care by half. These are not especially generous programs in the first place, but in his long-term vision he wants them cut in half.

But it gets worse: He wants to cut all other spending—aside from Social Security and Medicare—by 70 percent. And even that understates things. He's made it plain that he doesn't want to see substantial cuts in the defense budget, which means that the domestic budget would probably have to go down to something like 1.5 percent of GDP. That's a cut of 80 percent or so and it affects everything. It affects prisons, food assistance, education, the FBI, assistance to the needy, courts, child nutrition, drug abuse counseling, FEMA, rape prevention, autism programs, housing, border control, student loans, roads and bridges, Head Start, college scholarships, unemployment insurance, and job training. Everything. Most of these programs would simply disappear, and the ones that remained would be shriveled and nearly useless.

Nor is that all. Despite his professed concern over the deficit, Ryan also want to cut taxes on America's richest families. The Joint Economic Committee took a look at Ryan's tax plan and concluded that it would most likely raise taxes on the poor and the middle classes and cut taxes on the wealthy.

Let this sink in. This is Paul Ryan's vision for America. This is what Ryan means by "protecting the weak." This is the core of Ryan's tough choices: He wants to cut taxes on the wealthy and cut spending on the poor.

In fact, for all practical purposes he'd like to see most spending on the poor go away completely. But how do you get that across? It sounds so shrill, so hackish. And Paul Ryan seems like such a nice, earnest young man. Surely this isn't what he really proposes?

But it is. There's nothing shrill here, just the plain facts of Ryan's plan. This is Paul Ryan's vision for America.

I am, of course, unconvinced by your response. But this can hardly disappoint you, as it was not intended to convince me. You simply wrote to inform me that you have never doubted God's existence, cannot account for how you came to believe in Him, and are well aware that these facts will not (and should not) persuade me of the legitimacy of your religious beliefs. I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket.

You have simply declared your faith to be immune to rational challenge. As you didn't come to believe in God by taking any state of the world into account, no possible state of the world could put His existence in doubt. This is the very soul of dogmatism. But to call it such in this context will seem callous, as you have emphasized how your faith has survived-and perhaps helped you to survive-many harrowing experiences. Such testimonials about the strength and utility of faith mark off territory that most atheists have learned never to trespass. This reminds me of the wonderful quotation from Mencken: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." The truth is, no one wants to be in the business of arguing that another person's principal sources of comfort and gratification are not as he thinks them to be. But we are now in this up to our eyebrows, so permit me to just blurt out what I'm thinking and to tell you why I believe that your nonjustification-justification of faith should not satisfy you (or anyone else).

If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to Heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.

It is not my intention to go on at tiresome length, but your last post has opened so many doors to the winds of unreason that I can't resist running from room to room trying to settle things down. You seem to have taken particular offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn't actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be rigorously honest on any other subject, in this instance she doesn't want to distinguish between what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) and 1) what she wants to be true, or 2) what will keep her children from grieving too much in Granny's absence. She is lying--either to herself or to her children--but we've all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than teach our children to grieve, we teach them to lie to themselves.

You can call me "intolerant" all you want, but that won't make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won't differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won't constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write.




As someone who is simply making his best effort to be a rational human being, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. The truth is, I experience what I would call the "selflessness of consciousness" rather often, wherever I happen to meditate-be it in a Buddhist monastery, a Hindu temple, or while having my teeth cleaned. Consequently, the fact that I also had this experience at a Christian holy site does not lend an ounce of credibility to the doctrine of Christianity.
You are, of course, right to say that there are many different contexts in which a statement about the world can be deemed "true" (or likely to be true) and not all of these are empirical or scientific, narrowly defined. Some are even fictional. It is, for instance, true to say that "Hamlet was the prince of Denmark." But admitting the role of context does not render all truth-claims equally legitimate. As you point out, history is not an exact science, but it isn't exactly in conflict with science either. Permit me to quote from another of my essays, as it addresses precisely this point:
It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: Either people have good reasons for what they believe, or they do not. When they have good reasons, their beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" sciences here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines, like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely on "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque-that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to Heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.
So, while I admit that there are many different contexts in which our beliefs may be justified, and many different modes of justification, there is still an important difference between justified and unjustified belief. My previous remarks-about not knowing what happens after death, about the gaps in science, about the potential validity of contemplative experience, etc.-do nothing to change this picture. And it is the manifest failure of most religious people to observe the distinction between justified and unjustified belief (generally calling their non-observance "faith") that leaves me convinced that they are generally misled in their search for truth.

"‎"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.


 You may call me an agnostic, because I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist ..."

----- Albert Einstein"




"Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.
---- Barack Obama"

"Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.
---- Barack Obama"

The centerpiece of the presidents entire reelection campaign is attacking success.

--- Mitt Romney

It was a little after dawn on the twenty-first of March 1981 when Randall Pritchard torqued his Triumph Bonneville off the 101 interchange southeast of Silverlake. The seventeen-year-old girl behind him gave a terrified howl as she flew off the back of the motorcycle, cartwheeled twice, and slammed facedown on the pavement, breaking both wrists and four front teeth and going mercifully unconscious. Randall never made a sound. He simply followed the bike's trajectory, over the railing toward the sunrise, his long hair shining in the pink-gold glow and his arms outstretched to meet the rusty spokes of the construction barrier at the base of the concrete pilings. A skinny, pockmarked teenager from Inglewood was crouched nearby, rummaging through a stolen backpack. He saw Randall hit the barrier, the dust and rock that rose in a cloud, the blood that soaked Randall's blue cotton shirt.

"'Delia,'" the boy told reporters later. "The man just whispered 'Delia' and died."

Delia Byrd had been up for an hour, walking back and forth in the tiny garden behind the house in Venice Beach, thinking about the local convenience store, where the liquor was overpriced but accessible twenty-four hours a day. Eyes on the sunrise, fists curled up to her midriff, she was singing to herself, stringing one lyric to another, pulling choruses from songs she had not sung onstage in five years and segueing into garbled versions of rock and roll and folk. She told her friend Rosemary that there was real magic in some of those old melodies, especially the lesser successes of groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. Rosemary laughed at the notion of a mantra in the mundane, but Delia found that after a few dozen repetitions of "The MTA" she could unfocus her eyes and laugh at the desire to drink.

"Oh, he never returned," Delia was singing softly as Randall's head dropped forward and the dark blood gushed one last time. She stopped then. Something may have passed her in the cool morning air, but Delia did not feel it. Focused on the muscles in her neck and upper back, the ones that ached all the time, she wrapped her arms around herself, gripped her shoulders so tightly she started to shake with the effort, and then let go abruptly. The release was luxurious and welcome. A little of the weight lifted, the weight of more than two solid years of trying not to do what she still wanted desperately to do, to sip whiskey until the world turned golden and quiet and safe, until Dede and Amanda Louise, the daughters she had left behind, ceased whispering and whimpering from behind her left ear. She hadn't had a drink since November, and the strain showed.

I'm tired, Delia thought the moment Randall died. A garbage truck rumbled up the narrow alley behind the cottage. A shabby gray cat jumped the fence with a yowl. Delia's neck pulled tight again as a shaft of sunlight cut through the tattered palm fronds by the fence. "I want to go home," she said out loud, and the two girls in her memory lifted their shadowy heads and turned hot eyes in her direction.

Behind Delia, in the little house, ten-year-old Cissy stirred in her sleep and burrowed deeper into the sheets. Her daddy was riding his motorcycle into a red-gold circle of flame. He was laughing and extending his arms high into the bright burning light. He looked so happy that Cissy almost woke up. He hadn't looked happy in so long a time. "Daddy," Cissy whispered, then slipped sideways into a dream of the ocean, the water sweet as the rum and Coke Delia let her sip when she was too drunk to say no.

* * *
Rosemary called at nine with the news, but Delia had already heard on the little radio she kept set low in the kitchen that opened onto the garden. Within minutes of the report, she had pulled down all the shades and barricaded the front door with a mound of dead plants and old newspapers, hoping the mess would make the house look empty.

When Cissy got up, Delia gave her daughter a bowl of strawberries and a toasted muffin, watched her eat, and then sat down to tell her girl that Randall was dead.

Cissy laid down her spoon and looked at Delia. "I don't believe you," she said. "You're lying. You'd say anything to keep my daddy away from me."

"Oh, baby, you know that's not true," Delia said.

"No!" Cissy threw off Delia's arm and pushed her away. "It's your fault!" she screamed. "It's your fault! He should have been with us. I hate you!"

Delia said nothing. She had lost count of how many times Cissy had said those words in the last two years, ever since Delia had moved them out of Randall's house. Keeping still and letting Cissy shout had become second nature to her.

Cissy pushed herself back from the table. "You killed him," she said. "You killed my daddy."

"Cissy, please," Delia said. "We're going to need each other now." Delia was still struggling for control. She crossed her arms over her breasts. "And that's no way to talk to me," she told Cissy.

"How am I supposed to talk?" Cissy's tone was sharp and wheedling. "Please, Mama, don't fall down drunk on the floor. Please, Mama, don't pass out at the breakfast table. Or please, Mama, don't forget what day it is and send me to school when nobody's there."

Delia flinched as though she had been struck.

Cissy glared at Delia's pink face. "I hate you," she said. "I hate you more than Satan and all the devils." She turned away to hide the tears she couldn't keep back any longer.

Delia forced herself to look at her daughter. The shape of Cissy's profile seemed to alter as she watched. "You don't even believe in the devil," she said softly.

"Oh yes I do," Cissy sobbed. "I believe in the devil. He's the one made you."

Delia felt the bones in her neck turning to concrete. She wanted to weep at what she saw, the child's face lengthening and closing against her. The left eyelid drooped a little as it had since the accident, but Cissy's eyes were Amanda Louise's eyes, her mouth the exact shape of lost baby Dede's.

Slowly Cissy, the daughter Delia had always sworn was pure Randall and none of her, had grown more and more like the babies Delia had left behind. With every day Delia was sober, Cissy became more pale and cold, more angry and hurt. In Delia's dreams her girls became one creature, one keening source of anguish, one child monster damning her name.

"I hate you," Cissy said, and it was as if Delia's three girls spoke in one voice. "I hate you" became the chorus that slowed Delia's pulse until she felt as if she were swimming a mud ride, the thick scum of her guilt clogging the chambers of her heart. For two solid years, Delia had scoured her own insides trying not to be what she knew she was--hated and deserving hatred in full measure. She had abandoned her babies and spent most of a decade drunk on her butt. Even the daughter she had tried to protect despised her.

Every time she went back to the bottle, Delia sang the same song. She called it the hatred song, the I-deserve-to-die song. It had no words but Cissy's curse, no melody but Delia's own pulse. Sunrise-sunset-goddamn-me-to-hell song. Delia sang it the way she had sung for Mud Dog, with her whole soul and every ounce of her blood. People said that hearing Delia Byrd sing in concert was like hearing heartbreak in a whole new key. Her voice could make you sweat, make you move, make you want to lift your hands and pull justice out of the air. But the song Delia sang inside herself was meaner than anything anyone ever heard onstage. It was almost meaner than she could stand.

* * *
When Rosemary came over that afternoon, Delia was sitting on the hassock near the big leather couch, turning over the same six photographs and humming "Puff the Magic Dragon." Three of the pictures were in color. One showed Delia leaning back against a lazy-eyed Randall, the infant Cissy cradled in her arms. Another showed Cissy at five, riding Randall's neck with a big smile and bigger eyes. The third, dated two years later, captured them in the same pose, but Randall was noticeably thinner, his face gray and lined, and Cissy wore an awkward bandage over her left eye.

The other three photographs were black-and-white snapshots with cracked edges. Delia fingered them tenderly. In the top one she was holding a baby exactly as she held Cissy in the color photo. A solemn-faced toddler was beside her, and leaning in over her shoulder was a man with washed-out features and stunned, angry eyes. Delia put her thumb over his face and stopped singing. "Damn you," she said, and looked up to find Rosemary watching her.

Without a word Rosemary picked up the two remaining photos. That man--Clint Windsor--lifting the toddler, Amanda, in front of a small frame house with a bare dirt yard and a porch half shaded by an awkwardly hung madras bedspread; and then baby Amanda, with her wispy blond hair pulled staight up into a knot at the top of her head, and baby Dede, hair just as blond and fine barely visible in the faded photograph, the two bracketing a dark-haired older woman whose hands were linked into a clumsy praying fist. The woman's eyes were on her hands, but the girls were looking straight out at the camera, eyes enormous and fixed.

"What are you going to do now, honey?" Rosemary asked, handing Delia the photos.

"Go home," Delia told her. "I'm going home to get my babies." From the back of the house came the sound of Cissy's heartbroken weeping.

"Oh, Delia." Rosemary shook her head. "Lord, girl, you do not want to do that. Those children are half grown now. They an't seen you in more than ten years. Nobody there is going to welcome you, honey."

"You don't know that. I got people there. I got friends." Delia rose suddenly, nearly overturning the hassock. "And they're my girls. I'm their mother. That don't go away. They'll be mad at me, yeah. But I can handle that. I been handling it here."

"But you got Cissy to think about, Delia." Rosemary looked toward the back of the house. "Listen to her. She's just lost her daddy, and you know how she is about Randall. Child thinks everything that happened is her fault, that he never done nothing wrong in his life. Take some time, Delia. Take some time and let yourself think about what you're going to do."

"I am thinking about Cissy. I'm thinking about all my girls." Delia's shoulders were shaking. The pictures in her hand crumpled as she tugged her elbows in tight to her abdomen.

"Rosemary, this is what I'm meant to do," Delia said. "It's what I should have done years ago. I don't belong here. I never have. Whatever I loved in the music an't got nothing to do with living here. I hate Los Angeles. It's the outer goddamn circle of hell."

Rosemary bit her lip. Delia's face was red and sweaty, but she did not smell of drink. She smelled of fever and grief and salty outrage.

"Honey," Rosemary said, and put her hand on Delia's wire-taut shoulder. "All I'm saying is you don't have to rush things. Just give Cissy a chance to absorb what's happened." But Delia was not listening. She's going to leave, Rosemary thought. She's going to go back to Cayro and fight those crazy people for her daughters. Her hand on Delia's shoulder reluctantly stroked and soothed. She looked down at the creased pictures in Delia's hand, the two girls' faces as bleak as her friend's.

"Oh, Delia," Rosemary said one more time. "Please, just take a little while to think."

The funeral made all the papers. All and all, it was a decorous affair. The Columbia Records executive who called about sending a car for Delia was astonished when she told him she was not going. "I'm not about to let you see me crying," she said. "Let them take pictures of that girl Randall nearly killed, get a shot of her without her teeth." But in the end, though she told Rosemary she would rather have chewed dirt than put on that black dress and drive over to the church in Glendale, Delia could not refuse the grieving Cissy. A plot at Forest Lawn had been donated, but no one could swear that Randall would wind up there. Booger, solidly sober and twice the size he was when he had been with the band, drove down from Oregon to handle the arrangements for the burial and he was stubbornly closemouthed about what exactly would happen to Randall's body. "Leave that to me," he said. "Just leave it to me."

"Bet he's going to haul Randall's corpse out to the Mojave Desert and cremate him over brittlebush and dried yucca," Rosemary told Delia.

"That'd be about right," Delia said, but kept her voice low so Cissy wouldn't hear.

Cissy cried all through Booger's mumbled eulogy and the unfamiliar service. Delia sat dry-eyed and silent. Some of the band members stood up to speak, but they kept it brief. Delia kept expecting someone to say what they were all thinking--that Randall's death was as close to suicide as made no difference, that half of them had not spoken to him in the last year and the other half only when they needed money, but all the speakers looked over at Randall's sobbing child and visibly rethought their remarks. There was more "God bless" than "goddamn," and people joined in on the gospel songs with real emotion. It was as close to a Pentecostal service as could be managed in an L.A. Episcopal church.

"Wasn't too bad," Delia told Booger on the steps after, and he nodded in agreement. They both knew Rosemary and a few of the band members from the early days had chosen the music, mostly blues, and the flowers--great stands of gladiolas and ridiculously cheerful giant sunflowers imported from Brazil. "One last thing we can charge to the record company," Rosemary said with a big grin. They had also managed to block the sermon the minister was determined to deliver.

"Randall weren't exactly religious," one of the brass players told the minister, prompting boisterous laughter from the other band members.

Standing on the steps, everyone said the same thing. "Wasn't too bad."

"Not at all."

The wake was something else again. Rosemary described it to Delia contemptuously as a goddamned carnival. "Rock and roll is dead" was the refrain, and the catering was done by a discount liquor mart. Most of those who came were already drunk or stoned when they arrived, their faces slack and eyes sheathed protectively in black shades. It was a mistake, one of the Columbia guys said, holding the event at Randall's place. Rosemary agreed. All of the old band members left in the first few hours. The open house drew the new crowd, the roadies and session players, the dealers and users who had been Randall's constant companions, and all those women who had trooped in and out of the house since Delia moved out.

"Rock and Roll is DEAD!" the crowd shouted repeatedly all evening. The drunks got angrier by the hour. People wandered through the house, picking up mementos and just as often setting them down. Around midnight someone dropped the crystal guitar Randall had been given after Mud Dog passed the half-million mark with Diamonds and Dust. The accident sparked a general melee, people smashing things just for the satisfaction of watching glass fly.

"Where's Delia?" one of the drunks demanded.

"Oh, she's pretty broke up," he was told.

"Well, goddamn it, so am I!"

Ignoring the weeping girls and cursing men, Rosemary went upstairs to look through Randall's closets. The seventeen-year-old who had been on the back of the bike swore at her awkwardly with her broken mouth but could do nothing with her pitiful hands encased in casts. Rosemary went about collecting what she had come for: all the pictures of Delia and Cissy, and a few pieces of jewelry from the big teak box on the burl table where Randall had always thrown his things.

Downstairs, a late-news repeat of a Reagan speech came on the television after the videotape of the funeral coverage clicked off. Those thin lips moved soundlessly while the roadies roared obscenities and poured beer into the back of the big-screen television set. When it finally blew up, everyone laughed helplessly as sparks sprayed the rug. Rosemary skirted the smoldering carpet as she left. The fire that flared up just before dawn probably started in that rug, abetted by the thirty or forty candles set up all over the living room with its gossamer curtains. The revelers swore the fire was Randall's creation, the flames trailing behind the ghost they saw walking the rooms in that dawn hour.

"He took his house," a roadie told the reporter from Rolling Stone. "He took it right down to hell."

Already Randall was becoming a legend, magnified Into what he had never been, the Doomed Prince of Rock and Roll. Snakeskin boots and suede jacket, dark glasses and flashing teeth--the ghost of Randall Pritchard took the house down, his last act leading that crippled girl onto the lawn before he sparked out in the smoke and stink of the morning. The record company knew what it had. They quickly issued a memorial edition of Diamonds and Dust that sold far more than the first printing. The new cover was all Randall, snakeskin and teeth and night. Delia and the band were cropped and gone.

"Randall would have loved it," Delia said when Rosemary finished her account of the wake. She was sorting Cissy's clothes and drinking black coffee, her face puffy from tears and pale from lack of sleep. Since Randall's death, her talisman songs had sunk to wordless hums and whispers, snatches of folk and Laura Nyro and Spanish lullabies Randall had taught her when Cissy was born. She still hadn't had a drink, but there was no sense of accomplishment in the act. It felt to Delia that if she did not get on the road, the beast would reclaim her and she would go down to the beach with a bottle. Going home was the answer. Making amends, getting her girls, that was the answer. It was all she could think about, all she would let herself think about.

"Cayro," she told Rosemary. "When I get to Cayro, I'll be all right."

Rosemary nodded, knowing better than to argue with a desperate woman. Somewhere in Delia, grief was waiting, and when it hit, she would wilt like all those flowers in the heat of the church. Then she would need someone to prop her up, and who was there in Cayro to take that on? Rosemary shuddered. No, not even for Delia would she move to Georgia. Whatever was going to happen would just have to happen.

"Hell, girl," Rosemary drawled in a deliberately exaggerated Valley accent, "you and I both know Randall would have preferred that all of Venice Beach go up." She gestured at the Times, where a news photo showed the blackened frame of Randall's house. "Man always did have a taste for that scorched-earth scenario. If the Columbia building burned down, he'd probably come back to piss on the pyre."

Delia laughed, then shot a guilty look at Cissy, who was sitting on the couch in a daze, sucking on a strand of her dirty red hair and hugging a silver-framed photo of her daddy that Rosemary had brought her. She had sworn she would not cry anymore, though that was all she wanted to do. She had also decided to ignore Delia, but that was proving harder still. Her mother had been packing like a madwoman, stripping the books off the shelves and the prints off the wall, giving everything that would not fit in the car to Rosemary. She talked continually about going home, as if Cissy was supposed to be happy at the idea. Now she came over to the couch and began her litany again.

"Don't worry, baby. It will all be different in Cayro," Delia said. "It an't like here. People are different there. They care about each other, take time to talk to each other. They don't lie or cheat or mess with each other all the time. They're not scared, not having to be so careful all the time. They know who they are, what is important. And you'll be with your sisters. You won't be alone, honey. Not being alone in the world, that's something you've never had. That's something I can give you."

"I won't go," Cissy said, the same futile words she had hurled at Delia when they moved to Venice Beach.

"You'll be happier there." Delia's eyes glittered like the rocks near the ocean. "It will be like I always wanted it to be. You and me, Amanda and Dede, all of us together. Your only living kin in the world are in Cayro, yours and mine, your sisters, your granddaddy."

Cissy hugged Randall's photograph tighter and looked at Rosemary like a cornered animal.

"Your sisters," Delia said fiercely. "Your sisters are going to be amazed how much you look like them. You won't believe it yourself." A tear glistened at the edge of her left eye, hovered briefly, and slipped down her cheek.

Cissy kept her focus on that wet streak. Her sisters. Amanda and Dede. Dede and Amanda. There had never been a time when Cissy did not know their names, how terribly Delia grieved for them. The lost girls, the precious ones. Delia was always saying that Cissy's hazel eyes were the mirror of Amanda's, her red-blond hair the exact shade of Dede's when she was an infant. Birthday presents, Christmas presents, Easter baskets, back-to-school packages, all testified to the same legend: "From your sisters." "From Amanda." "From Dede." "Until we see you." "See you soon."

What was Cissy to believe? That the sisters she had never met of her, wrapped those presents, and signed those cards? No. The same packages and tokens were sent in her name, and Cissy knew how little she cared. She signed at Delia's direction, printing out the message Delia dictated in careful block letters, impersonal and precise. The tears, the passion were all Delia's. She never seemed to notice how Cissy turned her face away at the mention of Amanda and Dede.

"Oh, Cissy." Delia's voice was thick and husky. "It is going to be so good to get home. You'll see. You'll see."

Cissy put her lips to the metal edge of the picture frame, tasting the sweet alloy with the tip of her tongue. She had loved to climb up Randall's back and press her face into his neck. Her daddy had always tasted smoky and sweet, like no one else in the world. When Delia had hugged her tight at the funeral, her neck tasted like flat beer. She could stay sober forever and it wouldn't matter. Bitter and mean, that was how Delia tasted. Cissy looked over at her mother and sucked harder at the metal against her tongue.

"When we get to Cayro, I'll call you from Granddaddy Byrd's," Delia was saying to Rosemary, who was looking at Cissy's blank face, as empty as the wall behind her.

Cissy knew about Cayro. Cayro was where her crazy mother was born, the back end of the earth. Cayro was the last place Randall Pritchard's daughter ever wanted to be.

"I won't go," Cissy murmured again.

Delia put her arms around Rosemary's neck. "Oh God," she said. "This time I'm going to make it right."

Rock and roll, in Delia's opinion, might as well have died back in 1976, when Mud Dog stopped touring. That was the year Randall trashed his agent's office and spent a couple of weeks drying out at a sanitarium in Palm Springs. By 1978, the year the Rolling Stones cut a disco track, Randall had gone off whiskey and settled into what he called his Keith Richards solution, boosting his heroin with just enough speed to keep himself mobile and charming. Columbia was coaxed into putting Delia back on contract and financing another studio rental, but that spring Randall flipped the T-bird in Topanga Canyon, nearly blinded Cissy, and broke the last of Delia's love for him.

When she decided to leave Randall, Delia told him to his face. She thought of writing him a letter, but what she wanted to say would sound absurd on a page. Dear Randall, you almost killed us. Dear Randall, you're on your own. Dear Randall, you've broken my heart. Instead she tracked him down at the studio annex, where he had one of his girls with him, a child not even twenty and stoned out of her mind.

"You got a name?" Delia said when she came to the door.

The girl just blinked.

"Go get Randall," Delia told her.

A few minutes later Randall came out, his pupils huge and glassy. He stood in the sunlight and gave her that grin of his.

"What's up, sweet thing?"

"I'm moving out."

"Moving?"

"We can't live with you no more."

"Damn, Delia." He squirmed inside his loose denim jacket. "Don't I take care of you? Don't I treat you and Cissy right?"

Delia looked at him until he blushed, but his smile never faded.

"There's that house in Venice Beach," he said finally. "That one Booger and me bought. It's pretty messy, but it's empty. Booger didn't like the neighborhood. We could clean it up. You could go there."

Delia hesitated and looked away. The girl was watching them from the annex. "All right," Delia said, "all right."

"Do you need anything?" Randall asked, one hand pulling money out of a pocket.

She shook her head.

"Ah, Delia." Her name was thick in his mouth. "Honey," he said, slurring even that.

For a moment Delia hated him. She wasn't just another girl he'd picked up on the street. She was the mother of his child, the woman who had thrown everything away for him. He had no right speaking her name with that sleepy smile. She stood there and let him see the contempt on her face.

Randall held out the bills. Delia slapped him hard, then bent forward to kiss his cheek. The smell of his skin startled her.

"I'm sorry," he said.

The whole time she was packing, Cissy sobbing in her bedroom, Delia kept wiping her face and remembering how Randall smelled that day, the tang of him. What surprised her was how little pain his death caused her. He had been dead to her so long that it was hard to mourn all over again, hard to keep in mind that all the time when they had so rarely seen him he had been going on with his dying. Somehow, in the middle of everyone else's living, Randall had given up on his own life and started dying. That he had nearly taken Delia and Cissy with him was what stayed with Delia, the memory of shattered glass burning her skin, and the smell of the man she loved turning bitter. He had never expected her to get sober or leave him. He had never expected anything to change.

Delia taped a box shut and kicked it hard. She had loved Randall from the first time she saw that angel smile bright under the spotlights. It had seemed a miracle when he pulled her up into his tour bus, the blood from her abraded palms black on his cream shirt.

"Girl," he had said. "Lord, darling, look at you."

Delia's memories of that moment were as golden and smoky as two inches of whiskey in a thick tumbler. Jim Beam in a bar glass, a mound of crushed ice in a hand towel, the pervasive aroma of marijuana and patchouli oil. From the instant Randall helped her into the bus, Delia felt numbed and fragile. The whiskey he gave her warmed her belly, while the icy glass soothed her bruised temple. But it was Randall's soft embrace that made the difference, the open, easy way he wrapped her around. She shouldn't have trusted him, shouldn't have been willing to let him touch her with the mark of Clint's rage darkening steadily along the line of her face and neck. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the bus wheels spinning clean and sure, taking her away from the nightmare behind her. Maybe it was that she had been wanting to run away for so long. But maybe it was just Randall and the way he had about him.

Delia wanted to scream at the figure in her memory, at Randall's body so long gone, so much of him wasted even when he was alive. He had been so beautiful when he took her in his arms, so strong and tender when she was so hurt. He had felt like the one man on earth she could hang on to and be safe with. How could she not have loved him? She loved him more than her life.

After the accident in Topanga Canyon, trying repeatedly to get sober, Delia stopped going over to Randall's place at all. Even when she slipped back into drinking, she wouldn't let herself be cajoled into climbing into one of the limos sent around by record companies hoping to sign her to sing on her own. She didn't like the parties anymore, and she'd never enjoyed talking business. Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

Once they moved to Venice Beach, Delia tried to behave as if it were just another small town too, a place like Cayro. It did not matter that behind her house loomed thousands of others, postage-stamp boxes layered across Los Angeles County up from Santa Monica or south to Long Beach and all the little suburbs that trailed down to San Diego. Delia rarely went outside her neighborhood, and as long as she stayed off the highways, she could pretend they were cut off from the world. When she took Cissy over to Randall's place in West Hollywood or went to the studio annex in Santa Monica, the sight of greater Los Angeles stunned her. The glass structures along Wilshire, the grotesque mansions in Beverly Hills, the interlaced freeways that Randall prowled, none of that was Delia's world. Her world was the cottage and its tiny garden, the convenience store a few blocks west, and Cissy's school two blocks past that, with the occasional trip down to Rosemary's in Marina Del Rey.

"It's strange. Every time I take a drink, I go back in time," Delia told Rosemary not long after she left Randall. "I imagine I am back on the bus, going nowhere in particular, just cruising with the band."

"Uh-huh." Rosemary blew smoke out her nose. "Cruising back to the toilet to puke your guts out and curse Randall with every heave of your stomach? I remember you pregnant and sick as a dog. I remember those bus trips."

Delia pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and shrugged. "In my imagination," she said, "it's always 1971 and we are all young and happy. It's like a dream, a good dream."

Rosemary shook her head. "Nothing like the dream life, huh?"

Delia was the only member of Mud Dog who had loved the road. While everyone else grew pale and exhausted, she blossomed, catching naps during the day and sleeping easily backstage. She drank a lot but ate little, mostly fruit and rice, and avoided the pills and powders that kept half the band wired and sleepless and sick as dogs. In the midst of the tour chaos, Delia was serene. She would drift up the middle of the overloaded bus with a smile and a bottle in her hand, trailing her long fingers over the greasy Formica storage cabinets as if they were flowers and sweet-smelling vines. Sometimes she just stood there, steadying herself with one hand, eyes almost closed. To her it seemed like dancing, balancing there while the bus swayed and rolled along. She would laugh at the thought of herself almost motionless yet hurtling forward.

What Delia did not love were the motels and the parties, the obsequious roadies dealing drugs behind the luggage vans, the hysterical fans who pounced on her before she could get away. There were always people coming up on her from behind, wanting to talk or to touch her, following her every move so closely she would start to shy away even from Randall or Rosemary or Booger, or Little Jimmy the drummer with his shy nudge. Her skin seemed to wear thin, to the point where she hesitated sometimes before following the band out onstage. After a while the road wore you down until you lost the satisfaction of the music everyone came to hear, and Delia knew that the only thing she loved without reservation was the music in her head. The road itself, the two-lane blacktop and the six-lane freeways, the truck stops where the only things you could be sure of were the eggs and the bottled beer, that was not something you loved. The road was something that took you over unawares--the unexpected poetry of road signs and the reassuring glint of reflective markers counting off miles, the backbeat of the wheels whooshing along the asphalt and the song it awakened in the back of Delia's head. She got drunk on the road the same way she did on whiskey, a gentle drunk, an easy binge, smiling and loose and careless as death on two legs.

Delia dreamed on the bus like nowhere else, humming with the wheels, drifting, her eyelids open just enough to catch the shine of the road lights. In that condition, neither asleep nor awake, Delia dreamed of home, of Cayro and Amanda and Dede. Sometimes she dreamed of them in their bodies, the babies growing into girls while she watched and cared for them. When she dreamed that dream, she would weep with relief as everything that had happened after Dede's birth erased itself. In that dream there was no band, no house in Venice Beach, no Cissy, no third girl child with Randall's lazy mouth and her own dark red hair. In that dream Delia was the good mother kneeling on the clay path near her old house in Cayro, her fingers cupping Dede's baby face and her tears burning her own cheeks.

Sometimes the dream would play out the years differently, Delia sweeping in like an angel the week after she climbed into Randall's bus and ran away. In that dream she snatched up her babies, pulling them to her throat as their arms reached to embrace her, her shoulders sprouting wings that carried them all high and far, like the Santa Ana winds over Southern California.

"Mama," the dream girls would say in one voice, "Mama," and Delia's heart would lurch in her breast. The dream children cried her name and held on to her: "Mama. We knew you would come." Their cheeks were hot and flushed, their hair smelling earthy and sweet, the way Delia's palms smelled when she worked in the garden. She breathed them in and felt her insides tremble as the scent filled her. But the arms that reached out to Delia were phantom arms. The dream daughters were ghost girls, imaginary creatures. The road that went everywhere never went to Cayro. As the scent faded, Delia would jerk awake, her face streaked with tears and her muscles straining to hold what was not there.

Sober and fully conscious, Delia knew these dreams for what they were, a comforting lie. If her daughters dreamed of her, they would not be loving dreams. Raging, angry nightmares, that's what her girls would dream of Delia. But in the weeks after Randall's death, she dreamed again her road dreams, Dede and Amanda Louise dreams, Mama dreams, guilt and hope dreams.

Emptying the closets of the little cottage, Delia picked at the raw sore of her conscience. It had been ten years. Dede and Amanda were not babies. They were eleven and thirteen, nearly grown, but what if they didn't hate her? What if her girls hoped for her as much as she hoped for them? From "what if" she fell to maybe, then to might be, could be, oh God! surely so. It was the way Delia thought when she was drinking, as detached from the real as anything could be. It was the voice in the back brain, the voice that swore one drink would not kill her and another was all right too. The devil or desperation, that voice whispered steadily and drew her on. Delia swore she would never drink again, but her girls were not liquor. Her girls were real. Cayro was real. Cayro was home. Maybe no one could earn forgiveness, but listening to that whisper, Delia Byrd packed everything she owned and decided to try.

(C) 1998 Dorothy Allison All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-525-94167-3