The Right Coast

Nobody said TEOTWAWKI would be easy Tom Smith

Oh that's just great.  When we're reconstituting the Republic after defeating the invasion of the crazed narco-zombies, we will have these nuts to deal with.

Church no longer a knee-jerk supporter of unions Tom Smith

Interesting.

Learning to love an ugly liturgy Tom Smith

Hmm. I don't know.  I'm one of those odd ducks who would go to Mass more often if it were in Latin.  We recently switched parishes from one with that incredibly rare thing, a modern church that was actually architecturally tasteful, filled with art, some of it quite beautiful, but (of course) a knuckleheaded, clueless, irritatingly irreverent pastor, who is busy destroying what his predecessor built up over decades, to an older, more working class parish so ugly inside, anyway, it could only have been built in the 1950s, as it was.  But, the pastor is a sound man.  Maybe the Church should allow hostile takeovers, which would allow parish 2 to takeover parish 1, and to replace management. 

Are you sure it's not just the drugs, Glenn? Tom Smith

Heh.  Just kidding, really.

Those darn communists Tom Smith

You want to read this.  

It is a deeply puzzling thing.  The grip, that is, of Marxism on the minds of so many evidently intelligent people.  I think I understand the appeal of Marxism on the brain of the early twenty something, having suffered through it, not to mention my poor father, myself.  (That is, he suffered through my infatuation with Marxism.)  But it goes way beyond that. You have to think that if our planet were ever to be discovered by some moderately ethical star faring race, and they were able to appreciate along with everything else the history of communism and all its acolytes, the case against just sterilizing the muddy ball on which we live would be made considerably weaker.  What an appalling, nasty, weak-minded and heartless batch of insects it makes us look. And even that's unfair to insects -- ant colonies work well at least.  They don't set up little ant gulags.  If the aliens arrive, somebody will have to make sure Hobsbawm STFU.  He merits the dubious distinction of having made scholarship a crime against humanity.

And yet it remains true that your chances of getting hired as an historian by the University of California and most US universities of stature would have to be greater if you were known to believe that Stalin was at bottom engaged in a noble experiment and deserved our qualified admiration, than if you were known to think that Jesus had had a grip on an ethical insight that rose to the supernatural, or even just was really swell.  It baffles one still and among other reactions, how can one not feel, as a human and Californian or whatever, ashamed?  If this is enlightenment, I would hate to see the dark void ruled by lies, hatred, ignorance and lust for power.  

But on the bright side, we did win the Cold War, which was just the long, drawn out end to beating that other and closely related Evil of Hitlerism and its various horrific mutations.  We can whine about how comfortably the Marxists have burrowed into the academy but I doubt we would get much sympathy from, say, the Poles, or the Cambodians, Cubans, Koreans, Chinese, and one could go on.  At least it gives us something to do, being undertakers for history's unmarked grave of forgotten lies.  Just now a ways to go before the lies are forgotten, or so at least one hopes that is all is going on.

"Former showgirl and dental hygienist turned politician" Tom Smith

The Italians may be even better than the French when it comes to sex scandals.

Psychoanalyze tweeters Tom Smith

This is interesting.  Plug in a person's twitter handle and get a report on their psychological profile based on a statistical analysis of the words they use.  I ran Glenn Beck and he came back angry and worried off the charts, which seems about right.  Probably more toy than science but still cool.  Law professors (not naming anybody) seem to come out as pretty arrogant.  Could that be?

Brooks and Shields on unions etc. Tom Smith

Political math of Wisconsin Tom Smith

Yup.

This might explain why I'm on the right Tom Smith

Science in action.