I haven't read Glenn Reynold's "Army of Davids", in part because--well frankly I could have written the book. That being said, I could never have gotten it published, lacking Reynold's celebrity. But Both professionally and otherwise, I am one of the David's--have wireless connection, will travel.

For this reason, I found myself--well not exactly annoyed, but nevertheless shaking my head at a review in the Weekly Standard by Andrew Keen, who I also thought was off-the-mark with a previous column on Web 2.0.

Both articles reflect a penchant for citing obscure French intellectuals and Hobbesian (obscure English intellectual?) dread of the modern empowerment of the individual. Chaos will ensure and anarchy will be the order of the day without the order imposed by the Leviathan.

In Web 2.0, Keen poses that notorious Luddite (obscure English paleoconservatives?) query on technology--yes we can, but should we? Keen wants us to consider the ethical implications of enabling technologies that thrust a lecturn, a canvas, a broadsheet, a camera or a microphone into the hands of any who wish to avail themselves.

Of course, what he is really saying is that we should consider the ethical implications of the Marxist, flower-child future he draws for us. A future where the artistic and cultural acheivements of the masters are lost or fall on the deaf ears of narcissistic cultural morons.

Total unmitigated crap.

I really should be more sympathetic to the argument as someone with an appreciation for the value of tradition and the continuity provided by society's institutions, but this isn't a cheer for the barbarians to conquer Rome. Its the simple recognition that Keen doesn't know what he is talking about.

To put it succinctly, the new enabling technologies aren't about pulling down the exceptional until its all just one uniform landscape of mediocrity--its about news ways to discover excellence.

Its not about Marxism, its about Americanism, about the possibility for self-realization by the individual without the limiting factors of class. In fact, every single on of the thinkers Keen cites came from a culture that more fully exploited the human resources at their disposal than any other of their day. I submit that Lenardo da Vinci wasn't the creation of renaissance Italy, but that renaissance Italy was the creation of da Vinci and thousands and hundreds of thousands of exceptional people like him.

Unfortunately, as the exceptional becomes institutionalized, it inevitably calcifies and unable to avail itself of the very genius that gave it birth, slips beneath the waves of time.

This process is writ large all over the world's history. At the beginning of the 19th century, sailing ship technology reigned supreme, and so did the companies the had mastered it. Yet by the end of the century, all those companies had disappeared, replaced by new companies featuring steam-drive technology. The real question isn't why those steamship entrepreneurs had no respect for their betters, but why sail ship companies, flush with capital, sittiing astride the traderoutes of the world--failed to make the transition to steam power.

Society progresses in direct relationship to how well it exploits its human resources and the significance of the new enabling technologies is the unprecedented granularity with which it extends opportunity to virtually all members of the society. In essence, its the logical end-point of the American experiment: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But what of excellence?

In oh so many ways, this is the most bizarre of Keen's worries:

THE REVOLUTION, Glenn Reynolds promises in An Army of Davids might well be inevitable. Even shunting aside notions of exceptionalism and cultural excellence, the idea of personal empowerment wrapped up in Reynolds's man-without-walls worldview is certainly seductive. But it would do readers well to remember that revolutions have consequences.

Egads! The stunning cluelessness of his remark.

There are 30 million blogs according to Technorati's most recent count. 99.999% are never seen or read by anyone outside the author's immediate circle of friends. Those that are read are exceptional by virtue of market acceptance. No academic committee, no editorial board or any other political construct--just people voting with their eyeballs.

The simple reality of empowerment technologies is that they bypass the gatekeepers to allow the market to judge the product directly. Its not perfect, but even I am surprised at how well it actually does work. I strongly suspect that the new artistic, literary and cinematic elite will come from Web 2.0--it is in fact already happening.

Bloggers are all over cable news these days, and even this humble blog has been featured on three broadcasts that I know of (and I never even saw one of them myself...). Authors, both of fiction and non-fiction are also coming out of the blogging world. Increasingly, publishers are looking to promote candidates who already have proven themselves in the market and developed a following. Its a risk-management no-brainer.

Excellence was never in any danger--what is at peril are the power structures that used to arbitrarily dictate taste and popularity. I think we are through with designer pop stars, pointless remakes of King Kong and the Poseidon Adventure, Star Trek and Star Wars serialized novels (and movies)--we will simply regard the garden of a million flowers and pick the most breath-taking examples. Excellence will abound.

Conservative opinion leaders? Really.

Per Ambinder.

I would grant some leadership to Bill Kristol, but David Brooks? Conservative? Maybe to NY Times readers...and Barack Obama.

As the WSJ said when it wrote of Sen. McCain in the primaries--at least you know in what way he will betray you.

That said, we will take it for what it's worth. Something. Not nothing.

Bill Ayers was invited to speak at Florida State University by the Institute for Liberal Studies. Protesters gathered outside, but were moved by police to a designated free speech zone:

FSU senior and member of College Republicans Ashley Schow, bearing a sign reading “Ayers lied, people died,” took issue with the confinement of their protest.

The free speech zones on campus are designated by the Board of Trustees. While recognizing that events such as this may stir strong feelings, FSUPD spokesperson Major Jim Russell said his primary concern is maintaining order. “It can’t be an out-of-control type situation,” Russell said. “There are classes going on, there are people that are going about their business. You’ve got to make sure it’s a safe event.”

The subject? School reform.

--crossposted at BackyardConservative

Sadly, the choice of Rick Warren to give the inauguration invocation has drawn controversy from some intolerant quarters of the country who merely pay lip service to freedom of speech and respect for diversity. Apparently diversity of ideas doesn't count. But this is not news to conservatives, or to conservative Catholics like me, or Mormons. Please, let us give evangelical Christians their due:

For starters, evangelical church leaders believe instinctively in localism: the church, not the state, is the most effective institution to deliver meaningful help to those in need. So, for example, Saddleback's church network has sent over 2,600 small groups to "adopt" poor villages in Rwanda. For all his talk of social justice, Warren emphasizes the immediate human dimension to social problems--the need for strong families and moral communities that offer both assistance and accountability. Unlike his liberal counterparts, Warren's ministry enlists churches, not political action committees, as the catalyst for social change. [snip]

No minister can claim immunity from the temptations of political power. Nevertheless, Warren was right to accept Obama's invitation to offer a benediction. He will do so, as he has said, as a believing Christian. That will disappoint many Obama supporters, who reflexively associate conservative religion with social repression. They will be reminded, to their discomfort, that Christians who believe firmly in the need for spiritual redemption can also be crusaders for the poor and marginalized.

An evangelical prayer on Inauguration Day also seems fitting, given Obama's historic election as America's first African-American president. It was, after all, an earlier generation of evangelicals--believers with the same reformist zeal as Rick Warren--who gave birth to the abolition party, the party of Lincoln, the president who freed America's slaves. Henry Ward Beecher, a Republican who campaigned for Lincoln in 1860, warned his Brooklyn congregation against a political compromise that would allow slavery to spread. "If we go on to purchase peace on these terms, we become partners in slavery, and consent, for the sake of peace, to ratify this gigantic evil," he said. "We cannot wink at it."

Rick Warren is a good and serious man, and whether you believe in God or not, there is a place for the power of prayer on the day.

I knew about the exclusive HBO deal, but not this. (I didn't watch.) Mark Hemingway, NRO:

What few people seemed to have picked up on, however, was that when Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger — the lefty folksinger icon who just recently got around to apologizing for his support of Joseph Stalin — led a massive singalong of "This Land is Your Land," it included the oft-omitted "controversial" verse:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

Pete Seeger--phony, commie-conventional, ticky-tacky as ever. And in case you missed it, Matt Bai's piece in the NY Times magazine.

As we think of the first African-American president in history, our minds drift to one class of Americans who will never be allowed to become president—the 45 million lives aborted in the womb since 1972.

Has it touched the heart of our first African-American president that the largest single number of the aborted are black children in the womb—13 million of them? These are children who will never be allowed to achieve the dreams they would have developed.

And the struggle for America's soul. Princeton professor Robert George:

We must, with God’s help, persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence by bringing the unborn fully within the protection of our laws.

On this score, we have a marvelous model in the great anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce. When he began his work against the monstrous evil of chattel slavery, the odds appeared to be long against abolition. He was attacked by partisans of the slave power as a zealot, a religious fanatic, and, most perversely, an enemy of freedom. He was, they said, imposing his religious values on others. If he didn’t like slavery, well, no one was forcing him to own slaves. He should mind his own business and stay out of other people’s affairs. Less vitriolic critics said that he was unrealistic. He was a dreamer. He was making impossible demands.

Mark writes: Here's one who made it.

but more is less:

Michelle Obama is not PC enough for some. She's got to have design by quota. Politico:

FLOTUS's inaugural outfits sent designers to their drafting tables to design knockoffs and droves went to J.Crew to get those snazzy leather green gloves. But not everyone is happy with her choices. The Black Artists Association is chiding FLOTUS for not choosing any African-American designers.

They will send a letter to FLOTUS's office and appeal to her to include items from black designers in her wardrobe. BAA Cofounder Amnau Eele, who was a former runway model told Women's Wear Daily:

"It's fine and good if you want to be all 'Kumbaya' and 'We Are the World' by representing all different countries. But if you are going to have Isabel Toledo do the inauguration dress, and Jason Wu do the evening gown, why not have Kevan Hall, B Michael, Stephen Burrows or any of the other black designers do something too?"

It's kind of a straight-jacket on your personal choice, isn't it?

It's got that color block look. Kind of bland though. Welcome to PC chic.

P.S. In trouble already and she hasn't even said anything.

Barack and Michelle expose their daughters to some schlocky TV tabloid interview on Malia's birthday, trotting them out like cute little dolls. Their father writes them an open letter in the newspaper--can't he just talk to them like other fathers?

Now Michelle objects to a toy company making actual dolls of the two. I sympathize, but her outrage is apparently selective. Reason's Hit and Run.

P.S. Ruth Marcus, WaPo on the upside of the dolls.

Things have deteriorated badly in the People's Republic of Evanston, IL. Being neighborly apparently hasn't been mandated yet by the PC police, so one victim of uncharitable behavior took matters into his own hands. Sun Times:

A man walking in the North Shore suburb slipped on the ice and fell. A group of people huddled together across the street laughed at his misfortune.

Then the man pulled a gun -- and started shooting.

"He obviously got ticked off,'' said Evanston Police Commander Tom Guenther.

The man fired six shots in all as the group of friends fled, but one of them was struck in the ankle, Guenther said. That 20-year-old victim was treated and released from a local hospital early Saturday morning.

The friends told police they did not know the gunman.

Not aging hippies but aging lesbians. Somehow I think of aging hippies congregating in San Francisco, or in the hills of Vermont, but these women have chosen to retire in the usual spot--somewhere warm. First in Florida, now Alabama, living in pastoral seclusion. It reminds me of a Shaker colony--doomed to extinction.

The sad part is that their community seems to be founded on fear, but they're kind of endearing:

BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”

This last election there was talk of the urban-rural divide, the liberal-conservative gap, with the exurbs in the middle. The swing voters live there, the question is are they more rural or urban? In 2004 they went Bush. In 2008 they flipped to The One.

So we are left with the question--is this still a center-right country with the Go West Young Man American Dream? It remains to be seen, but David Brooks, recently fallen out of love with The One, gives us some stats.

It's still a machine and a garden. And give me a view.

Chicago Tea Party... Join Us!
Welcome! This is NOT the "official" website for all Nationwide Chicago Tea Party activity. This IS the official planning group for the DontGo Movement's involvement.

The "Nationwide Chicago TeaParty" sponsored by the #DONTGO movement, Smart Girl Politics (#SGP), Americans for Tax Reform, Heartland Institute, Top Conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT), and the American Spectator will be February 27 at Noon EST.

Are gentlemen an endangered species? I think not, but I think gentlemen should be appreciated and respected. Conservatives have always valued gentlemanly behavior--post Sept. 11th it became more openly appreciated in the culture, and this includes Americans' high respect for the military.

Interestingly, there is a counterculture on college campuses that is pushing back against the feminazi vagina monologues bunch. They call themselves the Network of enlightened Women (NeW) (Video by the ladies at ASU). More power to them.

This is part of the right-direction, wrong-direction debate on America. As Matt Continetti points out in his TWS column, it's not a political problem (as the new administration thinks it is), it's a cultural one, and it's systemic.

This is part of the solution.

Unlike the President's tax cheating cabinent picks, I pay my taxes without the threat of Senate hearings. This tax day, however, after completing my patriotic duty the Feds will hear from me. I'm heading down to the Tea Party being held at the Salt Lake City Federal Building. Look for me under the banner "Term Limits for Congress" or "Term limits = Sane Spending" (yes Orrin "Tim Geithner's too important" Hatch - you're one of my inspirations).

Are we going to have much of an impact other than to blow off steam? I dunno, but it is amusing to see two Congressmen and Utah's Attorney General are planning to crash the party as well.

If you are in Utah, join us:

April 15, 2009 Noon-2PM
Federal Building, 125 S State St., Salt Lake City

There will be a second protest from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm for those of you still intent on making more taxible income that day.

Other Tax Day Utah Tea Party Protests:

Provo
5-7 pm
US Post Office Provo (East Bay), 210 East 900 South

St George
5-7 pm
Vernon Worthen Park Gazebo (300 S 300 E, St. George)

Cache Valley
4-6 pm
Free Speech Zone
Approximately 241 North Main, directly south of City Hall/Logan Library (Grassy Area to the West of the Sidewalk).

Vernal
5-7 pm
Courthouse lawn at 150 E. Main St

Remember the Democrat carping about the "rise of anti-Americanism" due to Bush policies?

Well, Canadians still distrust Americans at the same rate they did when Bush was in the White House.

"There really does appear to be a hardy strain of anti-Americanism in Canada," Cohen said. "Almost half of us don't believe America is a force for good in the world, even with Obama as president."

They like Obama better than Bush, but that's probably because Obama's urbane manner reminds them of Pierre Trudeau. There are after all, no French-Canadian cowboys.

The reasons for Canadian anti-Americanism are not all that different from English, French or German anti-Americanism, and its rooted in American economic, military and diplomatic supremacy that has nothing to do with the current or erstwhile occupant of the White House.

Ironically, no one even polls Americans on their attitudes about Canadians, because Canada does not matter enough for individual Americans to have an opinion. That my friends is what really drives Canadians crazy--being ignored.

Make Canadians feel better--hate one today.

1. I was sent this Newt Gingrich quote today:

I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials.

2. From the Telegraph blogsite a comment from 'sunnysocal':

Wow, you guys are my new favorite News website. I haven’t heard or read a thing about this Manhattan Declaration. I was also reading the posts by James Delingpole regarding global warming. Time and time again I have to read the English news websites for information regarding things that the MSM in the US don’t want us to know about.

Your tax dollars at work on NPR:

It's good that Obama is president. Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline. The growth of giant government has been sapping the West all my lifetime. Maybe Obama is the culmination of the sickness which provokes America's immune system, ie its culture and Constitution, to kick in hard and inoculate the body politic against socialism.

For the time being it's good that the right has no leader; better that the true character of the country should emerge spontaneously. A leader like Gingrich of old or Palin of the future would be a target to distract the aim of the Democrat circular firing squad. For the time being the hobgoblins are mumbling 'Bush did it' and 'teabaggers' as tho obscenity were argument, which I suppose it is in their circles.

I foresee that blacks who presently vote as a bloc of serfs will move away from mono-politics as they see that Obamanism is a dead-end. Plenty of decent blacks get it that abortion and absent fathers are their modern holocaust not racism. Maybe someone like Allen West will show the way.

As the whiskey kicked in I orated that the NJ Governor needs a vision beyond a tax freeze. NJ is almost the worst state in the Union to do business in thanks to the cancer of big government and big tax, but its natural setting is top-notch; great beaches, 4 seasons, lots of open space, NYC, strong communities outside the statist dependency hatcheries, hours from Britain and Europe, major international airport, entrepot potential thanks to the deeper, wider Panama Canal....
The vision should be a special economic zone something like Shenzen next door to Hong Kong or Eire minus the Euro. The emphasis should be on tax incentives for foreign capital and when I say 'foreign' I mean flight capital from California especially. Cutting tax collects more tax; cutting government cuts corruption. Anyway Nj should be thinking like a young ambitious far eastern mercenary state not like a Californian government apparatchik or a tenured academic. Go East, young man, they'll say in Silicon Valley.

The cherry on the top of last week was a climate change for Anthropogenic Global Scamming. There were grotesque exposés of the shoddiness and bias of the IPCC UN report to the point where there's talk of taking back its Nobel Prize. Glancing at the comments threads of Warmist organs like the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that hardly anyone defends Warmism any more. Instead of priests intoning 'settled science', 'overwhelming consensus' and 'peer review' there's an overwhelming consensus that climate scientists and climate journalists were driven by:

• Peer pressure


• Fear of ostracism


• Politics


• Groupthink


• Biased models


• Selective data


• Superstition


• Religious impulse


• Scientism


• Misanthrope


• Refusal to admit error


• It's where the money is


• Disinterested enquiry, not so much.

Public libraries were central to my developement. I'd go down every single shelf, picking out books to skim for utterly subjective reasons. The green and red Loeb Classics for example will be in my heavenly library, just because of the Greek or Latin text directly opposite the translation. Anyway it's been decades since I've been in a UK pubic library, so I sidled warily into John Harvard Library (Harvard's founder grew up in Southwark) with a bookish and be-scootered young lady from New Jersey. A few impressions:

1. Staff were helpful, smiley, bright and willing.
2. Enrolment was a doddle.
3. 15 books per member! No call to liberate any folio'd friends.
4. Computerised self-withdrawal system was almost excellent. Just a couple of glitches for 'differently' catalogued items.
5. It was child-friendly up the wazoo! loads of noise, relaxed atmosphere, bright light. That's at odds with my idea of a library as a place of study, but has its plusses.
6. There just aren't that many books.
7. The children's section is passable.
8. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender section is in the Adult section for now and apparently exists due to public demand (I enquired). The demand must be superb since LGBT shelf space = the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
9. The public demand for Black History must be even more superb, since that subject's shelf space is 2x the size of the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
10. The public demand for Social Science must be superbly superb, since that subject's shelf space is 5x the size of the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
11. I couldn't find the Loeb Classics.

I guess I just wasn't made for these times, but a black sense of humour does help along with whisky and Frank Zappa to which and to whom I reach for consolation. I suspect John Harvard would feel the same.

Mick intones: I live about twenty minutes from one of the top ten libraries in the United States (Ranked #1 in 2004, #4 in 2007 by Princeton Review...). I visit regularly and am struck by how much of what the library does contain is obsolete and often irrelevant.

Truly current and relevant information is held in the minds of leading-edge professionals and secondarily on web pages. By the time it gets to a library shelf, its essentially historical.

Its not apparent yet, although I know from personal conversations with people in the loop, that universities, public schools and libraries are an endangered species much in the same way dead-tree newspapers and network television is. The only thing a university can offer you that you can't get yourself for free, is a certification. That's not much of a foundation for the future.

The left's ability to promulgate their silly, yet harmful propaganda is at severe risk and the only thing that stands in the way are teacher's unions and other recalcitrant institutions determined to protect their sinecures. There are in fact on-line elementary, middle and public schools right now who are serving hundreds of thousands of students in those states where the legislatures haven't been bought an paid for.

The real worry?

Google's very close relationship with the Democrat party.

From his denunciations of Wall Street greed to his critiques of the auto manufacturers, Obama and his team have done little to disguise their mistrust of big business -- except when it comes to one very large, very influential technology company.

Read the whole thing.

The wingnuts are essentially stupid people, but those that throw around the levers of power understand how the internet is going to disrupt their stranglehold and they know they have to coopt the infrastructure in order to control the content.

Google may or may not be evil yet, but they will be. Its inevitable.