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Netanyahu and Trump Kick Ass in Iran

I sat down yesterday afternoon just to quickly check the news and see if anything major was happening. I was shocked by the reports I was reading. We seem to be witnessing something that has not happened in modern Western history since 1986: an overt attempt by the United States, alongside Israel, to kill the sitting head of a sovereign state. Not a militia commander. Not a transnational jihadist. Not a general operating in the gray zone between war and proxy conflict. A head of state embedded in the constitutional and theological architecture of a recognized country. The last comparable moment was 1986, when the United States struck Libya and targeted Muammar Gaddafi. He survived. Since then, Western powers have toppled regimes through invasion and attrition, but they have not openly executed a decapitation strike against a sovereign leader. Saddam Hussein fell after a ground invasion and regime collapse. Gaddafi died in the chaos of civil war. Osama bin Laden was not a head of sta...
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Discovering Paris, Texas

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The film opens quest-like with a vast landscape.  A man in a red cap alone in the desert. One of many marvelous shots to come, it is a visual feast. Avery and Carter were visiting us in mid-December. As usual, Carter and I spoke of films for a moment. I mentioned to him that I had recently watched a YouTube video by this guy featuring “ the 100 best shots of all time. ” I can think of several iconic shots from older films like Dr. Strangelove, Casablanca and Citizen Kane that do not appear. The 10-minute video is still worth watching. I recognized maybe 80 out of the 100 shots shown. Of note, the video wins points in my book for beginning and ending with a shot from Barry Lyndon.  D eservedly so, it is the most beautiful movie ever shot . He even chooses the Barry Lyndon soundtrack for the introduction. There is plenty of Kubrick, Malick, Tarkovsky, and lots of shots from this film I had no idea about.  The musical choices are wonderful for this presentation,...
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Eagles: Their Greatest Hits at 50

Other than One of These Nights , I didn’t own any of the earlier Eagles albums when I purchased Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)  fifty years ago. I just knew the radio songs, the Top 40 stuff that floated through the air with plenty of commercial interruption. What I didn’t know was that this record would define a whole internal season of my life. I was driving around in a ’65 Ford Falcon, which felt like freedom simply because it moved and I was inside it alone or visiting friends. This album was on the radio and on my mind constantly. I played it endlessly, easily a hundred times, probably more. Every song worked. At the time, I found it amazing that one band could produce so many terrific hits.  I was sixteen and full of myself.  I loved to laugh.  I was discovering Tolkien and Thoreau and Kurt Vonnegut. My mind could not fully absorb my curiosity of and passion for the world. Eagles were my favorite band to all that fresh freedom. Since they were not Top 40 h...
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Moral Guilt is Worthless

Well, I've published (kind of) three books inside of a year.  Raucous Reckonings is finally published. The entire Harmogenics series is complete. This book is wilder than the previous ones. Recklessly bold in places. One of the most shocking claims I make is that everyone should live a guilt-free life. Moral guilt is worthless. I do live a guilt-free life. WTF? Psychopath! Narcissist! Moral monster! Yeah, I know. That's the reflex. And I understand it. Guilt feels so deeply woven into morality that suggesting we drop it sounds like suggesting we drop morality itself. It sounds dangerous, antisocial, maybe even evil. But that reflex is exactly the problem. And here's why. There's nothing wrong with religion. Religion wasn't a mistake. It wasn't mass delusion. It did real work for human beings living in conditions we can barely imagine now. One of the things it did, very effectively, was bind moral guilt to behavior and, in turn, into the human psyche as an emot...
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“This is our most important problem”

I watched a short video recently where Sam Harris says something that is, on its face, completely right. The short, entitled “ This is our most important problem ,” states we’re losing our grip on what’s “real.” Conspiracy thinking is “noxious.” (Harris always features the fantastic vocabulary of a bright mind.) Shared reality is fracturing. As a result, technology is driving us a little crazy. All true. If you zoom out and squint, he’s basically nailed the description of the mess we’re in. Where I think Harris is slightly askew is not on what is happening but on what he thinks is doing the happening. Human beings have never had a shared reality.  They have never agreed on what is real.  Every culture on earth differs on the particulars of this at some level. This has never been otherwise.  This is why there are so many different cultures, different “true” stories, different religions.  We have been war-like for millennia because we do not share quite the same reali...
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