One Man's Trial, and Gratitude for Life

Rich Brodsky is Atomic Skunk. He's a musician whom I met via social networking. He writes cool ambient music. He also had brain surgery earlier this week. Second time in ten years, to address a slowly growing tumor. His remarkable blog post, written quickly after his experience, "Mr. Skunk's Wild Ride," is surely worth reading.

I wish the Skunk well in his recovery.

A Week to Use in Weeks Ahead

A strange week, this one.

It seems the older I get the more life oscillates rapidly between light and darkness. I don't mean that it all happens to me, or that it all occurs in the same degree, but rather I simply observe, and hear about, and am provoked by so much more.

On my birthday,  friends leave kind wishes with charitable hopes, at the same time that I am of necessity doing some of the most backbreaking and psychologically challenging work I have ever done -- in intense heat.

A successful musician I admire and correspond with socially undergoes brain surgery, calling forth images of my own late mother's similar procedure, while the same day a good friend endorses me most generously to his former employer; veritable gold in a time of some scarcity of opportunity.

The week overall brings reports from friends of great successes, and also revelations of deep cynicism. At home my family receive regularly sequenced acts of generosity from siblings, aunts, uncles and in-laws, and serendipitous kindness from strangers. Sometimes these displace moments of self-doubt. Sometimes they evoke new ones.

My children bring joy, and contemplation of their development and their natural beauty.

But also there is weariness, and sadness. Weltschmertz even.

One day this week I sat on a dock in Lloyd Harbor, overlooking a magnificently beautiful vista of rippling waters and anchored sailboats. Based on all past experience I should have enjoyed it deeply. But, beaten down by fatigue, no matter which way I looked on that water, all I could feel was what I was missing. There was no consolation or contemplation. I simply hoped to cool off my body a bit before stumbling back up the hill to work for several more hours in the heat. Feeling more than my age and more than a little off course from the destiny that seemed so clearly plotted in my youth. "Where is that benevolent, guiding force?" I wondered. Is it more subtle and sublime than I can imagine? Was it ever there?

Yet as all the impressions of these moments drift into the past and settle down in the memory, with the passage of time, they are refined into the raw material of "experience." To fuel the soul through another day, or week, or year to follow.

With hope, those will be better ones. But hopes like these have been had before.

Reason Video Nails Problems of FCC Regulating Internet

When I grow up, I want to be as cool as Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie. In the video below he gives succinct summaries of the problems of this most recent and allegedly "light-touch" power grab by the Federal Communications Commission.

(By the way, all meaningless metaphors used by government officials such as the current FCC chairman are unenforceable for future generations of officials.)


Which is why Reason's third "reason" here, "Mission Creep" as a danger to FCC regulation of the Internet is a huge problem, and something the public rarely understands about government: its growth is almost inevitable.

I admire the pluckiness of libertarians in fighting the growth of the state, but in recent years I have become more dour about the prospects for our government and society to avoid decline. Despite even the empowering magic of things like the Internet.


Bureaucrats, however well intentioned, believe they can "help" with almost anything and relentlessly seek to insert themselves into private decisions. Those less well intentioned also see numerous opportunities to expand their power.

One reason the public doesn't understand this is because in essence the problem is highly philosophical. More specifically, epistemological. Government officials trying to help in a way allegedly free from self-interest (not true) concentrate more power in the hands of those with less knowledge than the entirety of the marketplace.

Freedom is a way of crowd-sourcing our problems; with more individuals handling smaller pieces of the logistics of delivering products and services.  In a bureaucrat's way of seeing things, that means they have a less "comprehensive" view of the market, which requires a handful of nobles to facilitate (to their own benefit) greater "global coordination" and other such nonsense.

Political Over-promising and Under-delivering?

Very good article today by the Washington Examiner on the continuation of the "blame game" campaign by President Obama regarding the Gulf Oil spill, and the backlash it's causing him politically. Basically, after years of "blaming Bush" the expectations of the executive have been raised so high, they are sure to disappoint when the increasingly human Barack Obama flails about.

Which raises a larger point. Remember the old adage: "Under-promise and over-deliver?" Doesn't that kind of sum up the entire political problem of modern liberalism (other than it's squishy "third-way" variant)? It's all over-promise and under-deliver.

Did we end the War on Poverty? Or create a Great Society? Did liberalism really bring about a New Deal where the so-called "little guy" was liberated from the corruption of government power by the very industries it claimed it would control? (Or, to put it in today's lingo "asses it would kick?")

The answer is No.  Today we see the Obama presidency is rife with corporatism (BP, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, etc.)

So much of modern liberalism is grandiose and utopian, so full of over-promising. How can it lead to anything but disappointment? And yet, the faith lives on . . .

Sex Ed Movie Has Me Thinking (About Thinking)

My ten-year-old son and I finally watched "the movie" this week at school about changes in the body. Fostering talks between us.

Since, as he learned this week, hormones play such a role in emotional and psychological changes, it seems that when he observes adult psychology at work and comments to me on it, we end up having similar discussions.

This week, for example, after discussing cigarette smoking, we have talked more than once about how adults deal with psychological and emotional stress, quite often resorting to some kind of drug or other addictive/compulsive behavior.

The curious thing for me is how much this little movie provoked my own thinking about adult problems. I find myself in many of these discussions feeling some pity for adults, whose minds seem both heightened and benighted by their hormones.

On the downside resulting not just in addictions, but sometimes even more serious pathologies.

Indeed, from what little I know about those suffering from mental illness, very bright minds that began at birth often face great challenges to their proper functioning when a mixture of traumatic childhood recollections meet with the earliest flood of procreational hormones.

(It makes me seriously wonder what Schopenhauer would say about his and others' adolescence. Is it the "Will's" nightmarish wake-up call?)

I don't have a remedy -- beyond the belief that warm embraces, kisses and saying "I love you" to children are forms of fighting mental illness. Only a certain melancholic puzzlement.

Article on The Higher Education Bubble

As an adjunct professor, I have long thought the educational system is seriously dysfunctional. Students have little incentive to perform because they are insulated by the true cost of their education by their parents, the government and the taxpayers.

I say as much to the students, a number of whom are doing "do-overs" of their failed (drunken) first try at college some years ago.

The unintended consequence of all this helping in cheap credit and "free financial aid" by the government is out of control tuition inflation. Yet another distortion of the market in the name of creating opportunity.

Glenn Reynolds makes the case more eloquently than I could hope to in this piece today about the effects of cheap credit and mounting educational debt.

Problems of Belief

1) The Problem of Evil

2) The Mushrooming of Belief Propositions (Or, the Zeno's Paradox of Belief) - To evangelize the faith means to take responsibility for a collection of propositions. But those are not a closed set, Through all of history. Leading to interminable debate for those who choose to participate.

3) Inability to find a "core" set of beliefs free from the centuries of accretions.