Thoughts of the day

This is my 3rd thoughts of the day this month. That's a record. I don't have bright-line black-letter criteria for what gets thrown in with a thoughts of the day ensemble and what gets featured in its own post or when a thought grows into its own post. Some of the thoughts are at least as developed and interesting as many of the posts, while some posts are no more than bookmarks. I just go by a sense of it; my blog is ruled by my whims.

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"Now Homer, don't you eat this pie."

"That's what I'm looking for, my old friend, Sphagnum Moss."

If I move forward from tinkering within the body on Blogger's HTML editor and try building an HTML webpage from scratch, I'll need to familiarize with editing the head with CSS, or ^{Cascading Style Sheets}, which is used on _{HTML pages} for formatting the content.

1. Hello! How are you? I am fine. Good-bye!
2. Endnote: For a beginner learning the language, this HTML5 and CSS3 upgrade business is a bit unsettling.

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I prefer the distinctly evocative over the drily descriptive when choosing a name or symbol, although I recognize a descriptive name is sometimes more suitable for the mission at hand. The symbolism and history of the "LOVE CHERISH DEFEND IT" plaque spoke to me and served as my inspiration for the original MilVets logo design. When a later generation of MilVets leaders replaced my logo with a 'professional' emblem by the guy who designs stuff for GS, I was disappointed the new logo was merely a flat description. My logo evoked meaning that was personalized to Columbia military heritage and Columbia student-veterans. If I ever get to design another Columbia military symbol, I would use the plaque rendered in its original shining bronze, perhaps combined with a bronze Athena (Alma Mater) helm.

One of my favorite things about being MI was our evocative and pretty darn cool branch insignia. Check out the 3D renderings of the MI insignia from this site.

In her TED talk, Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert spoke on the familiar subject of the erratic, unpredictable, and channeled nature of artistic inspiration. She suggests that the notion that something as temperamental as artistic inspiration is a creative ability internal to artists is the cause of the endemic mental breakdowns of artists since the Renaissance. Artists understand they are actually craftsmen who can only do their best to capture inspiration and give it an adequate expression. Gilbert proposes instead a return to the Greek and Roman notion that artistic inspiration is externally sourced from an invisible genius (Roman) or daemon (Greek). I'm familiar with the burgeoning urge of artistic inspiration from my student activism. I imagined and conceived the beginning of the Columbia civil-military movement mostly in spurts of inspiration that mostly came to me during long walks down from Columbia through Central Park. Once inspired, I scrambled urgently to catch the thread of the inspiration and bring it to life before it escaped, just like how Gilbert described the creative process of the poet in her story.

A full posting of 1982 movie Paradise is on youtube. Paradise is similar to 1980 movie Blue Lagoon starring Brooke Shields. It features, exploits really, a young Phoebe Cates in her first starring role. The male lead is Willie Aames, the goofy sidekick in Charles in Charge. Did I say that Phoebe Cates is a babe? Yes, I did. These days, she owns a boutique in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood.

Any cartoon that features H. Jon Benjamin's voice is halfway to being a hit with that alone.

In a February 26 Grantland piece, Rockets GM Daryl Morey is quoted, "We probably got the hardest part done, but now we have to get a second star to go with James." Before the Harden trade, Jeremy Lin was the star. Then he was the 2nd star. His status seems to have been downgraded further by Rockets management since then. The Rockets are still a good situation for Lin to establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG, which is an improvement from earlier in the season. While playing for Woodson and the Knicks would have helped Lin become a more well-rounded PG with more responsibility, the go-go offense that the Rockets have developed suits Lin's strengths similar to the way that the Mavs' go-go offense helped Steve Nash establish his bonafides as a starting NBA PG. However, Nash grew into an NBA star only when he became the Suns' featured player, and he was at least the featured ball handler on the Mavs. As long as Lin shares the backcourt with Harden, there appears to be a limit on the height that Lin's star can reach with the Rockets. That's a concern looking ahead to years 2 and 3 on his contract, though, not a problem this season.

Bannock idea: Leave out the salt. Ray Mears's basic recipe for bannock calls for flour, baking soda, salt, and water. The problem is the baking soda, used for leavening, causes a bitter salty flavor, which is why many people substitute baking powder for baking soda in their bannock. I still use baking soda in my bannock due to its dual-use as my hair soap. There isn't much I can do about the bitter flavor except adding an acid like vinegar to counteract the alkaline from the baking soda, but I don't want to bother calculating and measuring out a balanced ratio. I can help the salty issue simply by not adding salt. There's enough sodium in sodium bicarbonate that sodium chloride isn't needed for flavor.

Don't cook jelly on pizza bannock. Melted jelly turns into melted sugar. Add it after cooking.

For a willing scavenger like me, a benefit of apartment-living is the garbage. Apartments have limited storage space so most residents will discard their replaced housewares and furnishings rather than store them. Apartment size also tends to be as needed, so as apartment dwellers transition from a single's studio to a couple's 1 bedroom, then to a family 2+ bedroom or house, they move. When they move, they throw things out. It's not uncommon to find housewares, furnishings, and sometimes more interesting things, in serviceable condition in the common bulk-item garbage area. Of course, my apartment has limited storage space, too, so I take only what's useful. A bonus of scavenging is the peace of mind that someone thought enough of the item to purchase it for living conditions similar to mine. On the other hand, that same someone got rid of the item for a reason; most but not all of my garbage pickings have been winners. The willingness, one, to leave garbage that is serviceable but not useful and, two, return a recovered item to the garbage is the line between scavenging and hoarding.

I wonder whether the philosophy of scavenging is more constrictive than productive, though. The material waste that is a sin for scavengers is merely a cost of business, or living, for the upwardly mobile person. In the modern economy, fungible consumerism seems more efficient than picayune austerity and replacing things seems like a more fluid way of life than holding onto things.

Making the world a better place with one cause, one movement, one mission at a time is selfless service, and ultimately, activism may be my life's work like activism dominated my college life. Right now though, I'm wary of jumping through external hoops, even the hoops of my own choosing and making from the causes that seductively call to me. They're noble pursuits and I've proved I'm an effective activist, but they're not of me. What is of me, internally? I don't know and that's the problem. I only know that relying on outside sources for meaning and purpose provides a respite with a simulacrum of life only. My meaning and purpose need to be internally sourced, not borrowed. It's no good to be listless and blown about, even when the blowing is by my interests and passions, and then collapse formlessly, empty, when the wind changes. The structural integrity of that life is an illusion. For sure, it's no way to a hardened reliable manhood. I must calibrate my inner compass, dig down until I hit my bedrock and anchor there, and find the castled territory within myself to claim as mine and plant my flag.

I learned this, too: "If you’re running on ideals, you’ll burn out. I would say this, and I think this universal. Any one of us can and do adopt ideals that we become convinced are worth pouring our life into, it’s never enough. The work you do must resonate with who you are at the deepest level. Some people call it a “calling” and spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to find what their calling is. . . . Ideals are like Nobel Peace Prize winners, they represent something that encourages us in the right direction, but can never give us enough steam to go take us all the way."

In his Wild Food series, Ray Mears observed that the everyday lives of hunter-gatherers are predominated by the full-time tasks of feeding their families. Men's and women's and boys' and girls' roles and relationships are defined and ordered by tangible needs. The animist cultures of hunter-gatherers are largely based on the intimate relationship between their food and the natural environment that surrounds them. The focus of their lives is basic provision and protection for their families. It's an undoubtedly arduous and seemingly anxious life, but for the men at least, it seems like a fundamentally satisfying way of life. They know their utility, their place in their family, role and relationships within the social hierarchy, and the rites of passage with which they'll be promoted. The men and women know what they each need to do for their family to survive, and they do it. Everything fits together and makes sense. A theme in Mears's visits with native or primitive peoples is their entry into modern society breaks down these essential bonds. The smarter ones return to the 'bush' and restrict their interaction with modern society in order to save their social order and cohesion. However, given that the originating building block of the hunter-gatherer society is tangible need and modern society seduces with easily obtained, industrially produced provisions and protection, efforts to hold modern society at arm's length and preserve the hunter-gatherer ethos are an uphill fight.

Men traded their provision and protection for modern society's provision and protection at a steep price. The tangible gains have been offset by a profound spiritual loss. Hunting-gathering boys and men know who they are and who they will be. Modern boys and men do not.

Individually, modern men who have distanced themselves from modern society have observed the soul satisfaction of ordering their lives around providing for their basic needs with fewer modern conveniences. Socially, while the Army is not a hunter-gatherer society, military society shares important features with a hunter-gatherer society, such as functional roles defined by utility to the whole, common purpose, hierarchy, fraternal and paternal relationships, mutual dependence, and rites of passage. My soldiering experience made sense to me on a deeper level as a man than anything I've experienced as a civilian. Modern men who haven't been immersed in a genuine masculine culture don't appreciate what's missing in their lives, just the ambiguous dissatisfaction of somehow living as less than men.

The enduring lesson above all others for soldiers is not Duty, Honor, or Country, it's Team. Acerbic red-pill housewife blogger Judgybitch describes her marriage as a team that approximates the mutually dependent relationships of hunter-gatherers. Judgybitch is not ashamed of her financial dependence on her husband and is proud that he relies on her to take care of their home and kids. To her, depending on each other to fulfill different family needs according to traditional gender roles is akin to chemical atomic bonding. Her take: "I take a lot of my life for granted. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It certainly helps me to understand that I am taken for granted in return, and that isn’t a problem that needs to be solved! It’s the basis for security and happiness and contentment. I take for granted that the members of Team JB are all working together, and I trust them to take for granted that I am, and always will be, pulling right beside them." [Bold-faced emphasis added.]

Judgybitch's characterization of her husband as her teammate sounds like it validates my quixotic pursuit of androgynous love, but there's a difference. In my exposition on desire versus love, I said, "my cherished notion of laying the foundation for love with an equal partnership with my best friend has been a mistake." Judgybitch doesn't say her marriage is an equal partnership. Rather, their partnership is based on the needs of the Army family. Complementary gender roles may be in equilibrium, equitable, or even equivalent, but they're not equal. Nor does she say her husband is her best friend. Her husband is her husband, and she describes his most important qualities to her here. Mating or courtship is not, as I once thought, an evolution of friendship. Friendship may overlap and perhaps enhance the relationship, but it's not the essence and heart of the relationship. As much as analogies instruct through similarities, careful attention must be paid to the differences.

At Rational Male, two commenters, Jeremy and YaReally, fell into an interesting mini-debate about the Manosphere versus PUA. My view is in line with Jeremy's "Yes, but having the high standards for commitment is not an endemic feature of being a PUA, it’s a feature of being a f-ing red-pill man. The PUA community is only teaching men how to be the favorite horse on the carosel. The Manosphere is what is teaching men to be men again." Jeremy doesn't identify himself as an MGTOW, but his stance is MGTOW. I also agree with YaReally's emphasis on the preeminence of actively applying red-pill knowledge and the utility of PUA, except I return to Jeremy's view that there are more ways to apply the red pill than PUA.

Melissa King, the former Miss Delaware Teen deposed due to her featured role in a porn video (note: the link goes to Youporn.com's blog post on the controversy, not directly to King's video, but it's still NSFW), was in foster care from age 12. She had psychological treatment, and in the interview, she refers to - albeit in 2nd and 3rd person - confidence, depression, anxiety, and money problems. I assume King is 19 now. I haven't read details, but the implication is her childhood circumstances were abnormal. I've read the explanation of irrational self-harming choices and behavior by adults that the state of one's mid-childhood through adolescence (say, roughly ages 9-18) forms a person's default sense of normalcy. Thus, people have an ingrained emotional algorithm that compels them to harmonize with their formative childhood experience, which is good when that experience was normal and healthy. By the same token, however, a person will tend to harmonize with an apparently dysfunctional formative childhood experience even when that person is intelligent, talented, decent, and otherwise a high achiever. In fact, formerly high-achieving adults who've succumbed to the gravity of their childhood trauma is a repeating theme in A&E's addiction treatment program, Intervention. As far as my opinion of King's participation in pornography in and of itself, apart from the possible psychological implications of doing porn despite the predictable repercussions in her situation, I don't think less of her any more than I thought less of Matt when his past was exposed. I wonder whether porn has become openly normal for King's generation. PS: King has 2 bench warrants in Maryland for failure to appear in court on theft (sounds like a misdemeanor petit larceny) and underaged possession of alcohol charges from last year. The theft charge is from June, the same month she filmed her porn video. I wonder whether the incidents are related.

There has to be more to this story of a nurse at an elder independent living facility - a nurse - who refused to perform CPR on a resident because the facility's policy forbade her to do so, which has been confirmed by a facility spokesman. The resident died. It reminds me of the story where firefighters stood by as a house burned because the homeowners refused to pay the county fee for firefighting services. The deceased may have had a funky living arrangement with the facility that prevented the nurse from performing even basic good-samaritan-passerby CPR. As reported, the 911 transcript is incredible.

Eric

INFP is not alpha

Default User compared the alphaness of the Myers-Briggs personality types. I'm not surprised INFP came in last. This is his take on INFPs:

INFP
These are the poets of the world. Quiet, deep, and a bit other-worldly. They may be hard to get to know, but will care for all those they meet. Although a reserved type they will be appreciated for their quiet warmth.
Males: INFP is most definitely a female type. INFP males may have a hard time (especially in their youth and teens). However, with their warm hearts and caring nature they just might sneak up on you. Perhaps even more than other introverted types may find it difficult to put themselves forward.
Females: Their deep and introspective natures may make them hard to fathom. Their reserve means they may be overlooked. This will be as much the other person’s loss as the INFP’s.
General: They are the most idealistic of the NF idealists. They may have an ideal for love and the other person that they cannot quite describe. They are probably the type that is least comfortable in a standard dating setting with its focus on glib charm and sometimes-cynical attitudes. The world may run on E/I STJ but it would a much worse place without INFP.

Default User says more in the comments, all of it on target and depressing. While an extraordinary surplus of selective qualities such as physical attractiveness, power, wealth, and fame can compensate (JFK Jr is said to have been an INFP), the discouraging reality is the INFP personality does not attract women and, worse, is off-putting. An INFP woman is relatively better off because a woman can cross the first barrier to love by being noticed and receptive to romantic pursuit. An INFP man, on the other hand, is required like all men to extrovertedly and aggressively pursue a woman's acceptance by actively qualifying himself to her. There, the INFP dilemma is worse than superficial disattraction; the INFP personality is also the least intrinsically capable of practicing the "seductive arts". INFP men discover to their deep dismay that their basic personality is the greatest impediment to gaining their heart's fulfillment.

In the rare instances he crosses the first barrier, an INFP man is not home free. He is handicapped in the follow-up, too. As has been often said in the Manosphere, a woman continually qualifies and judges the man she is with. When a woman tentatively agrees to a test run on a relationship with a smitten INFP man and induces him to open his inner self to her, he is in danger of making her uneasy (or view him as "intimidating"). More often than not, he induces her in short order to eject from the nascent coupling.

Even a short-lived romance exacts a high cost from an INFP man, though. He has pulled his heart open to bring her inside and transforms in order to bond with her as soulmates. When she pulls away, the wound she rips in his heart lingers.

My favorite example of frustrated INFP romantic idealism (besides my own) is canonical poet William Butler Yeats's decades-long quest for transcendent love with Maud Gonne, who repeatedly put off Yeats's entreaties while at the same time accepting lovers who were ordinary men in comparison.

PS: Hooking Up Smart has a link-heavy post on MB types and their relationship compatibilities.

Eric

My basic leadership principles

I learned these leadership principles as a soldier:

• Do my job and my duty.
• Take ownership.
• Accomplish the mission.
• Improve my craft (technical and tactical proficiency).
• Set (define and exemplify) the standard for my soldiers.
• As a baseline, work at least as hard in my lane as my hardest working soldier.
• Recognize when to micromanage, when to pitch in, and when to get out of the way.
• Know my soldiers.
• Take care of my soldiers.
• Create leaders from my soldiers.
• Peer leadership.
• Active followership.
• Respect the enemy.

I carried over those principles and added these leadership principles as a student activist:

• A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the beginning steps are no less than creation.
• Inspire with Vision.
• Do.
• Seize opportunities with aggression and intelligence, for I understand opportunities multiply as they are seized.
• Learn the parameters of the operating environment and its players, and continually update my intelligence.
• Defining the problem frames the solution.
• Strategize and outline a framework to be filled in. Start with the goals, then work backwards from there.
• Be imaginative and think big, even if we can only act small for now.
• Identify the group's organic needs and the mission's needs. They are related but not the same.
• Know my own strengths and weaknesses to fulfill the needs.
• Seek out teammates and resources to fulfill the needs.
• Communicate and foster a culture of communication.
• Articulate the 'why', not just the 'how' and 'what'.
• Knowledge is power and actionable information is lifeblood.
• Extroverted outreach and public engagement and a highly visible public profile change the social operating environment and create beacons to attract support, opportunities, and like-minded people.
• In weighing risk versus reward, I give more weight to why do than why don't do.
• Uncertainty is normal.
• A risk-averse, zero-defect mentality that seeks certainty is a self-restricting handicap that's not necessary.
• Push the envelope.
• At the same time, prepare to mitigate risks and recover.
• Account for unintended consequences as best I can in my risk analysis.
• Failures, mistakes, and defeats - if processed tactically - advance the learning curve for victory.
• OODA and learn.
• Have a future-time orientation and think ahead to the medium term, long term, and horizon, though horizon plans are inherently fragile.
• Cost permitting, act to set up future maneuvers even when the near-term benefit is obscure and the future maneuver is only a tenuous possibility.
• Anticipate and plan ahead.
• Put out as many fires as I can before they start, because I'll have my hands full with the fires that inevitably flare up.
• A good enough solution delivered on time is better than an imaginary perfect solution.
• Do the best I can with what I have to work with.
• Logistics and cost/benefit analysis.
• Be creative.
• Improvise to stretch resources.
• Where appropriate, design a group action to serve multiple purposes.
• Don't reinvent the wheel if I don't have to; observe what other groups do effectively and tailor it to our mission.
• When inventing the wheel is necessary, innovate.
• Strengthen the organizational base for longevity and growth.
• Every group action, in addition to its near-term benefit, should produce building blocks for the group and/or the mission.
• Timely event follow-up is important to invest the production from the event.
• Productive publicity from an event is more important than a well-attended event.
• Design photogenic events and take high-quality pictures.
• Grow the brand and guard the group's public identity.
• Control the narrative.
• Constantly network.
• Gather good people.
• A good team, well led, in the right structure is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Group intelligence and capabilities should multiply when combined.
• Know my teammates and position them to be their most productive.
• Balance leading from the front with facilitating teammates and accept that facilitating them means equal-or-more personal effort with less personal credit.
• Give credit where credit is due.
• Mold a team of aggressive, smart leaders who initiate, take ownership of the mission, and do.
• Prepare the group to continue mission without me.
• As best I can, staff my team with people I trust, but also recognize people I don't trust who could be useful.
• Protect myself and the group from the people I don't trust but use for the mission.
• Identify the people who play reindeer games and do not help the mission. They are cancers. Do not tolerate them. Neutralize them as soon as possible.
• If a mission-essential subordinate is doing a bad job, I can try to rehabilitate him, but I will fire him if the problem persists.
• Organizational structure is a practical constant, so make it as ergonomic as possible.
• Bureaucracy obstructs when done wrong and facilitates when done right.
• Be meticulous with the details of management, records, and organization.
• Set out criteria and goals.
• At the same time, adapt and be flexible; change and surprise are normal.
• When shit happens, make it an opportunity.
• Acting for the good of the group or mission may entail a decision that clashes with a personal belief.
• Activists seek controlled destruction as a necessary stage of creation.
• Activist passion is rocket fuel for the mission because it's explosive, so handle with care.
• When activist destruction succeeds, make sure to follow up with activist creation.
• Disappointment with the return on investment and frustration are normal.
• Near-term success does not guarantee long-term success, and the same goes for failure.
• The disposition of a leadership decision (gamble) may only manifest years later.
• The most important leadership principle was my answer to 'What are you prepared to do?'.*

*Answer: What was needed, and it was exhausting. Jim Malone's "blood oath" with Elliot Ness in the pew was basically my negotiation with Oscar when he recruited me to be his vice president.

Excerpt from Leaders and Lanes about what I learned about leadership from my high school bowling team:

I learned that leadership comes from within and that a good leader does not set out to win popularity contests. Charm and charisma help, but they are not the main traits required of effective leadership. A leader must be tough, smart and reliable. The job comes first. Friendships come second. Popularity is not a concern. The path of leadership begins with a vision that is followed by sacrifice, endless work, anxiety, and loneliness. Leaders must be responsibility embodied; excuses are reserved for politicians and critics. After high school, the Army tried to teach me about prioritizing "the mission and my men" ahead of myself. It wasn't necessary--I had learned the lesson on the bowling team years earlier.

Our best and worst leaders are revealed in times of adversity, when there are no easy answers and leaders are forced to rely on themselves. That's why our most beloved presidents are associated with our nation's wars. For the same reason, bowling teams are an ideal training ground for leadership. High school bowling differs from football, basketball, baseball, and other sports, which are granted automatic respect. Even winning high school bowling teams are usually stigmatized. A bowling captain must work against the status quo, peer judgment and, most of all, his own insecurities and those of his teammates to shape his bowlers into a proud team.

A good leader sees the dormant possibilities in his surroundings, a skill that I learned as a high school bowler. At first, I accepted the popular image of the bowling team as shameful--until we defeated a highly ranked opponent in the playoffs. I realized then how special the team could be. I saw its hidden potential, and my world changed. From then on, the status quo stopped being the only way and became just one of many options.

During my next three years of high school, I learned some enduring lessons about leadership while I built the bowling team that I envisioned. To my surprise, few of my teammates were as motivated as I was to build the team. I had hoped to share the work equally with them, but I was forced to separate myself from my friends to become the team leader. For the first time in my life, I challenged authority, in the form of my coach, because he was not making the changes I knew were necessary. From the same coach, I learned that hard work and good decisions are not always recognized, and that initiative must be its own reward. . . . The bowling team taught me that a good leader is the difference between success and failure; . . . I have learned that even among the best and brightest, leadership is a rare, valuable and an absolutely necessary trait. I firmly believe now that in everything--this world, this life--good leaders make all the difference.

Eric

Thoughts of the day

A side-by-side comparison of the George W. Bush presidency and the tragically truncated John F. Kennedy presidency is eye-opening. The evidence shows that, on balance, either Bush was a liberal or Kennedy was a neoconservative.

Progressive liberals are primarily idealists. While progressive liberalism is strong in morality, its critical flaw is weak economic grounding. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a model American progressive liberal, was frustrated after he switched his activism from civil rights to economic rights. That weakness is exploited by Marxists, who are primarily pragmatists (or materialists, in philosophical terms) with an economic focus. Marxists and progressive liberals appear similar in their methods and goals, and Marxists are expert at disguising themselves with liberal language and co-opting liberal initiatives. But where liberals practice tolerant cooperation and seek moderation with equitable balance for the greater good, Marxists employ no such self-regulating check. Marxists instead practice adversarial, zero-sum competition and advocate for maximal benefit for their clients even to the detriment of the greater good. The Marxists have no restraint in their client advocacy – think George Orwell's Animal Farm or present-day affirmative action. Progressive liberals do have a restraining check: they value principle and a balanced greater good before client. Through the mid-20th century, progressive liberals appreciated the camouflaged threat that Marxism posed to progressive liberalism. Liberal leaders such as John Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan (the father of neo-conservatism) vigorously opposed Marxist-derived Communism. As liberal activism has produced liberal policies, however, liberals have tended to outsource decision-making for those policies to Marxists. Today, Marxists have infiltrated liberal ranks to the degree that the traditional definition for Marxists is applied to progressive liberals.

At bigWowo's, Byron invited me to add my 2 cents on Army deserter Ehren Watada, which I do beginning here. The discussion ranges to other topics of interest, such as neoconservative vs liberal vs Marxist and affirmative action.

Glenn Greenwald agrees with Ralph Nader's take on President Obama and unloads on unprincipled, hypocritical, tribal Democrats and "progressives" who shrug at Obama policies that are less restrained versions of Bush administration policies they histrionically protested. He complains about symptoms of the Marxist infection but stops short of identifying the cause, while the Marxists barely make a pretense of pretending anymore. His unexamined kneejerk assumptions about Bush prevent Greenwald from making a nuanced contextual critique, and I would recommend my Perspective on Operation Iraqi Freedom to him, but at least he tries to take a principled stance. I notice, however, that unlike Nader, Greenwald declined to publicize his criticism of Obama before the election. Richard Fernandez follows up. Salon.com applies a racial lens to the troubling trend.

Recall Peter Beinart's call for a new American liberalism.

My 2016-oriented activist advice to the Right. Will they follow it? No.

The great John Yoo on the problem with Obama's policy on drones. In sum, Obama traded Bush's bright line that protected constitutional rights for a vague balancing test that jeopardizes everyone's constitutional rights.

The decision by Maker's Mark (owned by Beam, Inc.) to reduce the alcohol content to meet market demand makes me wonder tangentially how much foodstuffs are wasted in the mass market in order to meet consumer expectations for delivery on demand.

TED is famous for inspiring talks. Just today, while preparing a meal and my latest bachelor stew, I listened to stirring TED talks by Dan Pink on motivation, Steve Jobs on living by your instincts, and Simon Sinek on leadership. (Pink says he was in the bottom decile of his class in law school and never practiced law. Hm.) Recently, I was moved by Eddie Calasanz on purpose and Mark Turrell on activist networking. There's more than 1 TED channel on youtube. TEDTalks appears to be the official TED channel and TEDxTalks is an independent TED organizer.

For Valentine's Day, TEDTalks posted an 8-talk playlist, Great talks about love. So far, I've listened to the 1st 2 speakers. Their information is red pill. The 1st speaker, Esther Perel, emphasized the distinction between "love" and "desire", which match the 'beta' and 'alpha' classifications of the red pill community. Using the speaker's taxonomy, my mistake has been wanting first the secure nurturing companionate love of androgynous Eros while backseating passionate desire as a follow-on lesser included element of love. However, love and desire are different in kind, and while the two may complement, they can't be conflated. Love is selfless and desire is selfish. Her desire and my desire come first. Not enough desire for one or both of us means not enough spark. Not enough spark means no fire. No fire means no cooking. No cooking means no meal. Love is cooking the meal. The 2nd speaker, Helen Fisher, is a biological anthropologist and proponent of evolutionary psychology. I learned from her that my feelings and lingering deepseated reaction to unrequited love have been normal. Without spelling it out, both speakers supported game tenets.

One of the most hurtful things Traci told me was she didn't want to be with me because I made her think too much and she just wanted carefree "drink and dance". It was a crippling blow to my hope for our love. It meant I was actually losing Traci while I felt we were growing close. It meant my openness and the best of myself I had given her had driven her away. It meant the best thing about us - that we made each other better - bothered her and what I thought made us click together repelled her. It meant she rejected a deeper rapport with me. It meant I couldn't be myself with her. And, I needed to think deeply and honestly about my life (and still do), and Traci didn't want any part of it. I had believed we were compatible; instead, Traci conformed to Judy. I was totally wrong about the most important thing in my life.

My sorrowful realization since Traci is my cherished notion of laying the foundation for love with an equal partnership with my best friend has been a mistake. I've yearned for the romantic ideal of a kindred-spirit soulmate, and androgynous love has been my organizing principle. A key step in adopting the red pill is letting go of self-destructive habits and taking a fundamentally different view of romance and sex. That doesn't necessarily mean seducing the girl into sex as quickly as possible becomes the goal, but it does mean desire - mine and hers - must be the chief organizing principle and inform the whole rule-set. Traci told me there was no spark for her and she didn't realize I was attempting a "court". Because I was attracted to her, had tried so hard to earn Traci's love, and had read the indicators favorably, I was angry at her (I thought) callous dismissal of my investment in love. It was me, though, not her. If Traci was attracted to me initially, and I think she was, I killed her desire by seeking her love. Clinical red-pill hindsight says I should have seduced her (not that I knew how) because love is a second-order effect, but I can't regret not making a choice that wasn't an option. I wanted her love. Even now, I haven't elevated desire above love.

JRR Tolkien unpacks the phenomena of physical vs friendly vs lover in a letter (listed at 43) to his son, Michael. It's straight red pill. Every boy entering puberty but growing up without a father should read the letter.

I wrote my lugubrious Valentine's Day column about Traci over 11 years ago. 11 years. Jesus. It's not even good. The writing was fine; the substance was just a pointless confession with a pretense of wisdom tacked on. I don't regret any of my Spec columns, but that was probably my worst one. The Eros fixation in it is obvious. Writing about Traci wasn't cathartic then and hasn't helped every other time I've glued new words onto the grooved loop taking me to the same dead end. It's a ghost story that rewinds and repeats; it doesn't change: "I had a dream my life would be; So different from this hell I'm living; So different now from what it seemed: Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."

Speaking of Fantine, the excellent Les Miserables 10th anniversary special fielded a Hall-of-Fame dream team compared to the pedestrian 25th anniversary show with Nick Jonas out of his depth as Marius. Here's a fun and talented Les Miz parody by Korean airmen. Hat tip to Mad Minerva for the find.

Ray Mears's Wild Food series is surprisingly entertaining. Mears incorporates the skills he uses in his bushcraft-oriented shows with educated speculation about Britain's Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In the series, Mears is accompanied by telegenic paleoethnobotanist UCL Professor Gordon Hillman.

A NY Times article on Jeremy Lin after his game at the Nets incorporates many of the elements of my comments on Lin at jeremylin.net and here. Another Lin article at ESPN.

While Lin is being held back from displaying his total game due to deferring to Harden, the Knicks' shortcomings right now form a gaping Jeremy Lin-shaped hole. The Knicks need the full measure of every part of Lin's game, youth, and energy to solve their current struggle, which makes for a situation in which Lin could have cemented his star status this season as the Knicks' savior. Oh well - what should have been. It's not Lin's fault the Knicks screwed up his restricted free agency, and the Knicks have been harmed far more than Lin by not matching the Rockets' offer. Lin's development as a star guard would have been accelerated by his tailored fit with the Knicks' needs, but he's still on a solid Nashian Mavs-period developmental curve with the Rockets. The Knicks on the other hand have a small window to contend for the championship and sabotaged it by punching out a Lin-shaped hole in their chances.

An ahistorical but cutting satire on multicultural activism. I guess the video makers would exclude me from my country. Still funny, though.

160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes is funny.

This game guide for Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe is no-frills and straightforward, which I like.

Decent meal: Egg-with-onion fried rice, broiled fatty pork country sparerib, microwaved chicken hot dog on white bread with ketchup, hot sauce, and sour cream, stew broth (see below), 2% milk, cranberry grape juice, orange, and too much (Duncan Hines mix) fudge brownie. These days, I find it cheaper and more satisfying to cook for myself, but it takes a lot longer than take-out.

Latest bachelor stew: In the 3-quart (12 cup, 96 oz) mixing bowl, I combined a 10-3/4 oz can Campbell's ready to serve chicken with noodles low sodium soup (expired Sep 23 2010), 14.75 oz can Icy Point pink salmon, 15 oz can Dunbars cut yams (sweet potatoes packed in syrup, expired Jan 2011), 10 oz box frozen Best Yet whole leaf spinach, 32 oz fatty chicken stock (where I boiled skin and fat with the bones), water, and salt. Cooked in the Nesco. I may have lost some flavor when I scooped out a bowl's worth of liquid to make sure I had room for the spinach, which I added late. I debated saving the broth to add back to the stew later, but it provided a tasty bowl of soup with the above meal - no regrets. I can add cooked rice to max out the stew. I think I'll go with a side of bannock first, then consider adding rice. Update: The fresher eaten the better; after a day, the initial savory fish flavor changes into a less appealing fishy taste and odor. Not bad, just less appealing.

Unbleached flour seems better for bannock than bleached flour - easier to work with, more forgiving with water. I'm undecided yet whether unbleached bannock tastes better; it doesn't taste worse anyway. The unbleached pizza bannock tasted the same. I used ricotta cheese instead of sour cream, and the cheese was tasteless. I'll stop trying to be creative and use mozzarella on my next pizza bannock.

Balanced breakfast: 1 egg over medium, 1 strip bacon, 1 whole canned tomato, 2 slices whole-grain toast with sour cream (direct from freezer to toaster), 1 cup cranberry grape juice, 1 banana, 1 orange. If the bacon isn't salty and crispy, then what's the point?

Bachelor culinary observations. Shoprite turkey bacon needs to be crispy and salty and eaten by itself to have taste. Mozzarella needs to be melted on thick to have taste. Now that I know that, I feel bad about eating a big chunk of the mozzarella cheese cold. Don't overcook the pizza bannock; when the cheese is melted, it's done. Duncan Hines milk chocolate brownie mix - lacks flavor. Duncan Hines chewy fudge brownie mix - not bad. Overbaking chicken shrinks the meat, but makes the bones thin, brittle, and easy to snap open for boiling broth. I bought cheap popcorn that popped poorly and tried 'rejuvenating' the kernels with this recommendation. The popcorn didn't improve and the kernels became moldy. 1 hot dog can be cut up and made into 2 credible sandwiches with 4 slices of bread and your choice of condiments, but you'll still be hungry after eating them.

My latest bachelor meat sauce pasta was made with about 3/4-lb combined Ronzoni small shells and Mueller's elbow macaroni, about 8-oz Perdue ground chicken, 1 yellow onion, 28-oz can Hunts crushed tomatoes, 12-oz bag Birds Eye Steamfresh frozen super sweet corn, and 10-oz box Best Yet frozen whole leaf spinach. Total cost of materials was about 5 dollars, but of course, that doesn't include time, labor, and energy costs. The meat sauce was thickened when starch from the corn leached into it. Meat sauce pasta is comfort food, and I've surrendered repeatedly to the temptation to pick up a spoon and eat directly from the pan until I'm stuffed. (It is bachelor chow.) When I take an extra minute to plate the meal, though, the meat sauce pasta tastes better with hot sauce and ricotta cheese.

D'uh. It just dawned on me that Blogger uses HTML (hypertext markup language). Rather, I've known all along Blogger uses HTML because it says HTML on its editors, but I didn't put 2+2 together that I'm not limited to the Blogger editor icons, which merely insert HTML commands, and I can input other functions by typing out HTML commands. Talk about selection bias, passive acceptance, and cargo-cult application. I'm limited right now to a vague memory of the rudimentary HTML programming the Army tried to teach me a long time ago, but I'm confident with a crawl-walk-run approach, cheat sheets, and tutorials I can pick up at least a basic working grasp of HTML. It seems user-friendly and intuitive enough. This site is useful. Here are instructions on how to add a background image and how to add a rollover title to an image.

After I added the "LOVE CHERISH DEFEND IT" plaque as a background image, I had another d'uh epiphany: offer a clean left side to readers. We read English by fixating first on the left end of the line, scan left to right, then transfer our eyes back to the left end, shift down, and fixate on the next line's end. A clean left side without distractions helps the reader's eyes find the left end. Obvious, right? Yet for the life of my blog, my sidebar has floated left. The problem wasn't as obvious before I added a background image because my background was blank and the sidebar pulls up and off the screen when the reader scrolls down. Adding the fixed background image highlighted the issue. So, I've floated the sidebar to the right. I haven't decided yet to limit the background image to the right side ... we'll see.

With my new beginner's awareness and haphazard cherrypicking of HTML formatting, I've tinkered with my blog's template and the sites I caretake. They're still simple and with the same content, but they've been given a facelift with a few frills added. I've barely scratched the surface of HTML; still, I think I've plateaued for now. I'll improve next either with a project that challenges me to learn more or a structured tutorial.

After my computer crashed earlier today, I lifted it and found a singed sliver of tissue on a bottom vent. I removed it, of course. I wonder if the tissue has been the cause of the loud whirring noises my computer has been making and the break-downs. I don't recall seeing the tissue under my computer before, not that I would have left it there if I had seen it. Was the tissue actually inside my computer interfering with moving parts and just fell out the vent today (expelled by the computer)? Or maybe the tissue didn't have any effect. Lesson reminded either way: PMCS yo shit.

Ugh. Now my monitor screen has shifted 2.25 inches to the left, so the left side is off the screen and a 2.25 inch off-limits black border is on the right side. When I switch to a lower resolution, the screen realigns to the full screen but as soon as I switch back to the highest resolution, the screen misaligns the 2.25 inches to the left. The monitor's AutoConfig function didn't fix it and may actually be the cause of the problem. Annoying.

, a.k.a. Columbia blue, a.k.a. Pantone 290, a.k.a. Hex #c4d8e2, a.k.a. RGB (196,216,226). Here is an impressively elaborate technical breakdown of Columbia blue that I don't understand.

The white powder that sometimes accretes on the flat ends of AA alkaline batteries is potassium hydroxide, which is caustic.

Eric

From Defeat to Victory

I posted this quote from Rick Atkinson (An Army at Dawn - The War in North Africa 1942-1943, p 377) on November 18, 2010:

Having participated in several catastrophic defeats himself, [British General Harold Alexander] should have recognized that defeat sometimes carried annealing and even salutory properties. A great sorting out was under way: the competent from the incompetent, the courageous from the fearful, the lucky from the unlucky. It would happen faster in the American Army than it had in the British.

Mad Minerva's recent post Quote of the Day: Limitations also expressed the belief that failures and mistakes teach:

But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Last night, I watched a BBC documentary, The Somme From Defeat to Victory, with the same theme that failure is a building block for success.

In British popular culture, the unexpected massive losses on the 1st day of the Battle of the Somme are an enduring testament to the futility of war, the danger of nationalistic jingoism, and the crash of Victorian idealism. However, ending the narrative of the battle with the shocking setbacks of the 1st day overlooks the developmental lessons of the whole battle. The BBC documentary explains that the hastily reconstructed and enlarged British army suffered higher losses than necessary because of the beginner's shortcomings with which they began the contest with the experienced German army. In contrast, the experienced French army fared much better on the 1st day of the battle under the same conditions. In fact, even in the midst of the early disaster, the British army achieved breakthroughs that could have become turning points in the battle had they been expeditiously exploited. As the Battle of the Somme ground on and the British grew experienced, they developed new tactics, techniques, and procedures, eventually defeated the Germans, and accomplished their objective of relieving the German pressure on the French at Verdun. The Battle of the Somme only started with catastrophic failure. Contrary to the popular lesson, the battle was not futile. The British finished the battle victorious with a mature army that eventually helped defeat Germany.

In World War Two, the North Africa campaign served the same developmental function for the newly constructed American Army. It began as a disaster for the Americans. The German desert army led by legendary Field Marshal Rommel routed the inexperienced US forces. But the early catastrophe in North Africa was instrumental in the Americans learning to win in the desert and then in Europe.

The same learning curve played out with the American-led peace operations in post-war Iraq. Our beginner's incompetency at post-war occupation was exploited by the enemy. Despite histrionic calls to surrender Iraq to the insurgents, we stayed and improved, culminating in the counterinsurgency "Surge" led by General Petraeus that turned the tide.

Starting in 2001, Columbia students, alumni, and faculty challenged the University's 30-year effective ban of ROTC, and in 2005, the Columbia University Senate voted overwhelmingly against ROTC. The birth of the advocacy and gaining the first senate vote were foundational achievements, but the lopsided defeat in that vote was demoralizing. The advocates had to choose their course then. They would have been justified to quit after the defeat, and some did. The remaining Columbia ROTC advocates chose instead to consolidate, embrace their failures, stay smart, aggressive, and opportunistic, and learn to win. In 2011, six short years (short in institutional terms, two generations in student terms) after voting against ROTC, the Columbia University Senate voted overwhelmingly for ROTC.

Most hold forth the moral of the story of Icarus as the inevitable self-destruction that results from hubris. They discourage taking risks that reach beyond one's limitations by warning of the fate suffered by Daedalus's son. Senator Hagel, for example, based his defeatist opposition to the counterinsurgency "Surge" in Iraq on his traumatized memory of the Vietnam War. Hagel believed because his generation failed at something a long time ago in a land far away, it couldn't be accomplished anytime anywhere else, rather than allow that another American generation could engineer a solution.

The better takeaway from the story of Icarus, the Battle of the Somme, the North Africa campaign, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Columbia ROTC movement is to encourage adaptation to overcome setbacks. Interrogate limits. Utilize defeats, mistakes, and failures tactically, and respect the learning curve that may be painful and necessary to journey from defeat to victory.

---

Add: Philosophy professor Eddie Calasanz's TED talk on the importance of placing micro-actions in the context of the big picture and patience because realizing grand visions, eg, building a nation, may require a lifetime. Simon Sinek's TED talk takes the next step from Calasanz's TED talk with an operational philosophy. Sinek advocates leading with Why, How, What, in that order, because people are drawn to the underlying belief first.

Eric

Thoughts of the day

Loose criteria for starting a new thoughts of the day: new month and the feeling as I'm adding a thought to the last thoughts of the day that I've overstuffed it.

Being a computer-retarded technophobe, I still use the classic template this blog started on and I'm nervous like Jenga whenever I tweak it with a new feature. I just added pagination, which I had thought couldn't be done with the classic template, and labels (see sidebar).

Oldie but goodie: What qualifies as a 10 beauty? Judging a girl a 10 based on a photograph must be done with prejudice because some 10 beauties don't translate to photos and photo beauty may be fabricated.

Neat website what if? answers wacky questions with math and science in layman's terms. (hat tip to Mad Minerva)

Confederate American songs Dixie sung by the Metropolitan Mixed Chorus and I'm a good ol' rebel sung by Hoyt Axton (the dad in Gremlins) are catchy.

Joe Kennedy of Citizens Energy is an actual member of the Kennedy clan. I thought for sure he was an actor given the exaggerated style of the commercials.

A whole lot of Itchy and Scratchy.

Judy's favorite painting was The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot, who also painted Springtime. I bought a poster of The Storm from the Met for her dorm room.

While looking through some old files last night, I found some things I wrote about Judy that were disturbingly similar to my Traci experience. The word my recorded actions and thoughts evoked was 'habit'. I was disturbed because I attempted to learn from my mistakes with Judy, yet I fell into a similar pattern with Traci. The reason perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the similarities is my corrections were more like tinkers and tweaks; I didn't fundamentally change. Still, the axiom that the more things change, the more they stay the same applies to me, and that bothers me. The find also reminds me why it matters to keep records: I forget.

I dreamed of Traci this morning, though she only made a brief appearance, which was the point of the dream. I don't know what triggered it except perhaps a British or Australian girl (PS, she was South African) I heard on a morning radio show. The setting was a 2-story house with a living room, guest room, and my childhood room. She and I were sleeping over as guests (when it wasn't my childhood room). I saw her when we both woke up in the living room. Then she was gone, leaving her rumpled bed stuff as evidence she had been there. I asked around, but no one knew where she went. I searched for her in the living room and upstairs guest bedroom, which I thought of as her room. I found a blonde girl (not a love interest) waking up in her bed instead. I felt again the dull, stone-heavy desperation of every fiber wanting to be together and the helplessness of not knowing how to make it happen. Traci had, again, been tantalizingly close but out of my reach. The house seemed to be - or become - a British firehouse. The dream ended with me following the British firefighters and the blonde girl, who may have been with her boyfriend, out onto the unknown British city streets and then a bus stop.

Reactive desire, huh? That is different. I wish I had known about it when I was lot younger. That a man acting on his sexual desire triggers his woman's sexual desire seems like the counterpart to a woman's adoration triggering her man's affection.

The concept of a controlling "feminine variant of the super-norm" rooted in hypergamy - the "feminine imperative" dispensing the blue pill, according to Rollo Tomassi - is an even bigger foundation shaker. I haven't fully wrapped my head around the implications yet, but they contend feminism is merely a modern application of the super-norm, not the base code of the super-norm.

Thinking about blue pill and the Matrix, I guess the biggest split in the 2012 presidential election was along the urban and rural divide, not race, religion, gender, wealth, region, or other groupings. Just intuitively, the starkest culture cleavage is between city people and country people. The movie The Matrix was set in a city because 'blue pill' city people most identify with and depend on the system. The system, in turn, is most identified with the Democrats, thus city people voting their interests would more likely favor the Democrat presidential candidate. Election analysts likely have done the research on the urban/rural split, which I haven't bothered to look up.

The AALDEF polled how Asians voted in the 2012 election. Funny, no one asked how I voted. I don't believe reliable conclusions can be drawn from a 9096 sample size drawn from across the nation and then subdivided. It is interesting though that the report corroborates the urban/rural divide.

A descriptive and prescriptive must-read by David Horowitz for political reformers, from a comment in this neo-neocon post. It's aimed at Republicans but it's based on principles that are universal for activists. Add: Horowitz on Obama and Alinsky. (h/t)

We are often warned that our data on the internet is forever, so be careful about publicizing or even privately sending anything that might haunt us. Yet as anyone who blogs and posts links can tell you, links go dead all the time. Data gets moved or deleted. All of it may be electronically archived somewhere, and some things may well be on public display forever, but it's not a given that everything we place on the internet will be available to everyone as an easily accessed permanent record.

Farnam Street looks like a smart blog.

Byron Wong invited me to participate in a discussion at bigWOWO. In it, I raised the oppressor/oppressed axis of Marxism versus the civilization/barbarism axis of progressive liberalism. In practice, Marxism is adversarial, zero-sum competition whereas progressive liberalism is tolerant cooperation. In Iraq, the insurgency was Marxist whereas the US-led mission was progressive liberal.

A problem with being a pioneer who challenges a strong limit is that the pioneer internalizes the limit in order to muster the necessary faculty to battle and defeat it. Once the limit is defeated, it becomes quaint and powerless to other people, who then easily surpass it and don't look back. However, the battle-weary pioneer is still held in sway by the powerful image of the limit he had internalized. Moreover, the pioneer had configured himself for the epic battle, except now, due to his success, the role that defines him is obsolete. The pioneer is surpassed by all the people he freed. In order to catch up to other people and survive in the new normal, the pioneer who gave himself completely to the fight against the limit must now expunge the things that most define him, accept the limit-less world, deprogram his pioneer ways, start over, and program himself with a new relevant role.

Christopher Dorner ... holy shit! Dorner's manifesto seems to (have been) cut off mid-sentence in his Bill Cosby entry. I saw it described somewhere as 18 pages long, but paginated versions on-line have it at 14 or 15 pages. Dorner was acutely sensitive to the conspiracy of cliques, compounded by he seemingly was on a different wavelength than his colleagues. It's not an unrealistic fear. I, too, am anxious about unofficial social networks that turn against me while I am isolated, which has happened. Dorner's profile and parts of his manifesto indicate a conscientious model citizen - student-athlete, college graduate, Naval officer, police officer - but his current situation and other parts of his manifesto indicate an unwinding mind.

The counter-offensive to reclaim Joe Paterno's reputation makes a strong start.

Mark Turrell's TED talk on how things spread among humans, and how "spread" can be applied to world-scale social good.

There is some debate whether Chris Kyle was engaged in 'shooting therapy' with the ex-Marine Eddie Ray Routh who killed him or just hanging out at the gun range with some buddies. This Atlantic piece refutes that Kyle was attempting prolonged exposure therapy with Routh. If Kyle did have therapy in mind, I don't believe it was PE therapy. I've observed that whereas for soldiers, the Army is a way of life where rifle marksmanship is a job skill, for Marines, the Corps is a religion where the chief sacrament is mastery of the rifle. As such, if he had therapy in mind, I believe Kyle was trying to help Routh master his life in tune with the Marines' Rifleman's creed of "This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life."

Eric

Hagel hearings remind that opposition to Bush was partisan not principled

I've been avoiding politics, too upsetting, but some things get in. Neo-neocon's post on the Senator Hagel, Secretary of Defense nomination hearings makes my patriotic liberal idealist heart clench in anger.

Senator Hagel based his defeatist opposition to the counterinsurgency 'surge' in Iraq on his traumatized memory of the Vietnam War. Hagel believed because his generation failed at something a long time ago in a land far away, it couldn't be accomplished anytime anywhere else, rather than allow that another American generation could engineer a solution. I don't understand why such a narrow-minded defeatist should be in charge of the military. More upsetting is Hagel's admission of self-interested partisan motivation for undermining the US mission in Iraq.

It's not a surprise anymore, but it's still frustrating. Hagel's naked admissions are just one more reminder that President Bush reacted to 9/11 as a principled leader simply trying to do his duty as America’s Commander-in-Chief and leader of the free world – following liberal principles no less. He gave his countrymen the opportunity to reaffirm that we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, & our sacred Honor in order to battle the regressive challenge to our hegemony and make the world a better place. Instead, Bush's detractors seized the opportunity to grab power and advance their own agenda of parochial partisan self-interests at the expense of the nation and a progressive world order. They succeeded and, rather than object, the Cathedral was complicit, and the majority of the West accepted the betrayal as the new political normal. We fractured and shrank where we should have united and grown.

My recent attempt at bigWOWO to set the record straight on our Iraq intervention reinforced to me, sadly, that their point of view originates from partisanship, not principle. Their truth is thus defined. It's far enough gone that Byron, bigWOWO's proprietor, even fought the basic language necessary to understand my explanation, and I was not being esoteric. As I observed in recent thoughts, they don't want truth; they want their narrative. They don't want peace; they want allegiance. And, it's a tough (red) pill for an idealist to swallow, but morality is plastic, as plastic as the narrative.

My countrymen let me down.

Thus I turn my focus towards MGTOW even as my INFP heart continues to tug me towards the good fight of the idealist. My gut still wants to wade into the arena, champion a worthy cause, and do what I can to set things right, an impulse I embraced as a student activist with mixed results. I tried, but the serial of pettiness, debased sacredness, exposed shibboleths, betrayed trust, even senseless evil, have roiled the ground under my feet. What's wrong is too much and amorphous for my simple ethical prescriptions; I'm feeling (fellow INFP) Yeats. I'm disappointed and disillusioned. I need to save myself before I again consider saving anyone else, let alone my country and the world.

Eric

The Phantom of the Opera teaches red pill

This post started as the complementary introduction to Ralph Wiggum's unrequited love for Lisa Simpson in my October 14 thoughts of the day (which are really thoughts of the month). I kept adding to it until the thought finally grew into a post. It joins musical-inspired posts Moulin Rouge: Feeling the Duke and Little Shop of Horrors is really good.

When I was a young man, I identified with the lonely Phantom character in the Broadway show Phantom of the Opera, which I first saw on a class trip with MAGNET. Coincidentally, the girl I had a crush on at the time of the class trip was also named Christine, though I don't recall making a name association at the time. Maybe I did. In my late teens, I listened often to a CD soundtrack of the musical and identified with the misfit Phantom's tale of tragic unrequited love that upended his life and his doomed attempt to marry Christine, who instead fell in love with Raoul, an ordinary man who yet was everything attractive to women that the Phantom was not.

The 25th anniversary Phantom and Christine pair are excellent, maybe GOAT, for their expressive physical acting as well as their rich singing. Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess (who originated the role of Ariel in Little Mermaid on Broadway) add the sexual current of a passionately yearning but sexually anxious Phantom shrinking from Christine's nubile sensuality. Karimloo and Boggess played Erik (Phantom) and Christine Daae in the West End sequel to Phantom, Love Never Dies, and they may have brought their character insights from the sequel into their portrayals in the original.

Karimloo's Phantom is an awkward, hurt, vulnerable, lonely nerd who has armored and empowered himself with illusions that he strips in order to bring Christine into his inner sanctum. Her rejection of his love, combined with her choosing a lesser man, transforms the Phantom from an eccentric devoted to his art into an electrically dangerous man infused with the explosive passion of the dark side. The Phantom risks everything in an elaborate seduction, culminating in a passion play, that fails against Christine and Raoul's simple, healthy mutual desire.

I have in common with the Phantom that I thought to impress Traci with my academic prowess in Mr. Norris's class, like the Phantom thought to capture Christine's heart with his "music of the night"; neither aesthetic display won their romantic love. I also believed Traci and I made each other better when we were together, like the Phantom taught Christine to sing while she "made [his] song take flight"; but she preferred the "drink and dance" of less "intimidating" men. Like the Phantom, my lovesick tries to bring us closer only further alienated her.

The Phantom of the Opera illustrates classic red-pill themes. In Moulin Rouge, the artist got the girl and the rich patron was spurned; the opposite happened in Phantom of the Opera. In both stories, however, the painstaking courtship of the mature suitor lost to the sex appeal of the lover. The Phantom's devotion to capricious, beautiful Christine broke him and ruined his life's work. He offered her his commitment, the best of himself, and his fragile heart, not knowing they were the wrong currency to purchase her love, and was punished mercilessly for his error.

Eric