A rushing wind howls without rhythm and wild

Driving over the sere sleeping slopes

Rising and falling without pattern or meaning

Bringing up such a racket, percussive rattling of

The half-dead limbs and spidery half-broken

Twigs of winter-stunned wooded life waiting

Cacophony piled upon cacophony, yet the rattling

Brings rhythm into the previously-empty world

Emergent harmonies of limbs all more or less alike

Of a common length and flex and yet

Enough variance to bring high and low tones,

Fast and slow syncopations

Until the empty wood like an orchestra tuning

Stills

At the sound of three sharp cracks

A bough falls alone

Like a wand without conductor's guiding hand

And the wind and the wood sing forth in concert

For the sleeping squirrels and crows amazed awake.

Red skies at morning
Yellow and blackened
Blue in the west
The sun winks over the
Limb of the world
And is closed by
Pinked eyelid skies
The roaring is muffled
In swift cotton-swabbing
Rushing cloud-banks and
The kindled bronze
Slopes in the west
Flare and burn out
Storm rushing over
The troubled face of the deep
Sailors take warning.

In this predawn darkness
Defeated
Routed
In flight before the morning light
It roars overhead
Freight-train Fate
Crushing the air between
Steel wheels and steel rail
Howling affronted by
The dying possibility of
The night that was past
Cries judgment of the day
In the moment of its birth
Predestinate by that vast
Rumbling
Howl.

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,
She will never be quite like this again.
Her house is rocking under the blast
And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,
But this is the last, this is the last.
The last of the wine and the white corn meal,
The last high fiddle singing the reel,
The last of the silk with the Paris label,
The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable
- Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,
A door that swings on a broken bolt,
Brittle old letters spotted with tears
And a wound that rankles for fifty years -
This is the last of  Wingate Hall,
The last bright August before the Fall,
Death  has been near, and Death has passed,
But this is the last, this is the last.
There will be hope, and a scratching pen,
There will be cooking for tired men,
The waiting for news with shut, hard fists,
And the blurred, strange names in the battle-lists,
The April sun and the April rain,
But never this day come back again.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body, excerpt from Book IV

There are no apocalypses, no universal objective ends, not that we know of.  But for every life, there is a last bright August before the Fall, and some feel it, that cold whisper of winter in the pre-harvest heat of rank summer, the first leaf falling far in advance of the turning of the color, the weather turning for him and him alone.  Our endings are individual, no matter how we project them onto the screen of our times.  The best we can do is not let our times project themselves upon us, prematurely.  I would like to think that the Mayan and the Camping raptures were a passing thing, but such projections of individual ends of the world will no doubt continue, as failures mount, and the brightness fades from more family fires.

The hills are echoing with Feu de joie, and fireworks, but this year, they sing to me:

There is no future, there is no past,
There is only this hour and it goes fast,
Hurry, hurry, this is the last,
This is the last,
This is the last.

     That prison is ourselves that we have built,
     And, being so, its loneliness is just,
     And, being so, its loneliness endures.
     But, if another came,
                          What would we say?
     What can the blind say, given back their eyes?
     No, it must be as it has always been.
     We are all prisoners in that degree
     And will remain so, but I think I know
     This - God is not a jailor....

-Steven Vincent Benet, excerpt from John Brown's Body, Book 5

Lincoln really was a Hebraic saint, for the mid-century American modernists - a beau ideal for the Ugly American - not smart, not beautiful, not quick, but making a virtue of stubbornness and essential honesty. When did we lose our way? Was it when the Ugly American became a taunt and an accusation, rather than a quiet, self-effacing assertion of battered virtue? When the Quiet American replaced it in the hearts of the wise? When the educated and would-be elite spat scorn at the "middle-brow" staring back at them in the mirror?

So much for hopes and dreams.  Turns out, they were "the ghosts in the burning city of our time..."

"This is for you who are to come, with Time,
And gaze upon our ruins with strange eyes."

Nightmares and Visitants really is a heartbreaking book.  He saw death on the march, saw the tens of millions that would suffer, would break, and die.  He's largely forgotten now, which is another sign of our decline and coming fall.

We will not be saved, because we don't deserve to be saved.  We have more wealth than any people to ever trod this earth, and less wisdom than ever.  We have more people in school, than ever, and they seem engaged in the destruction of understanding and knowledge. 

The country wants to be a child again.  A simple majority has chosen to vote themselves back into the womb.  But they've put the management of that vast national womb in the hands of a chaotic crowd of imbeciles, incompetents and, I fear, at least a few abortionists.

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professorial-historical-economic and irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model T or even an early Napier,
They'd have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow,
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World! "
He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc and a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there'd never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace) like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
'Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skilful, certainly they created.
And, in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully till Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet and gunpowder and they had to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skulls, the handsome folk, the excellent scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with the sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucius, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander—'
Just to take half a dozen—
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Arcs, snouted for gas-masks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the pre-fabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved."
Then he showed his hand:
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and the armies sprang up.

"Nightmare, with Angels", Steven Vincent Benet 1935

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

excerpt from "Litany for Dictatorships", Steven Vincent Benet, 1935.

I woke to a dream of my whole neighborhood lined up outside the precinct, waiting for the doors to open.  They turned and asked me "where have you been?"

In this freakish, horribly nostalgic season of old miseries and old terrors, there are sad truths, and then there are persistent hopes.

In the pre-morning darkness, I believe in my neighbors. I believe that we haven't yet gone into that greater darkness which is behind the darkness.

I believe I see, in my mind's eye, that colored scrap of cloth above the scorched battlements, beginning to lift on the first faint breath of a predawn breeze.

Get out and vote.  Every damn last one of you all.

Well, that was relatively mild, at least so far.  Doesn't look like any major flooding in the borough as of yet.  The business park lost its power for an hour or so yesterday afternoon, so the office is covered in heavy-duty power cords leading back to the generator power taps.  Technically we're closed, but what am I going to do, sit around the house and watch anime all day long?

Jason woke me up last night to ask if town was on fire, apparently there was some sort of dramatic reddish-purple glow in the skies to his west.  Ended up going out into the heart of the storm, got a bit soaked, best anyone could guess - Jason wasn't the only one to see the glow - is that one of the transformers down at the substation northwest of town must have exploded, but not in such a way as to bring down the power, at least not in town.

Other than the creeks being up and a lot of rain, not a lot of visible damage, at least between here and home.

Long day yesterday knocking on doors.  A bunch of different neighborhoods.  Patton Township is kind of odd, one set of blocks looks like rural Florida, the next Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the next Park Forest, which is ironic, because the neighborhood is about two miles from, well, Park Forest. ^_^

One thing I encountered, which I haven't seen before, is two townhouse developments with enclosed courtyards and the "front door" hidden behind closed gates.  Like a dozen or two dozen one-family gated communities.  Like gated communities for hostile, suspicious loners and misanthropes.  Your front door is your window on the world, on the rest of humanity.  Hiding it behind a six-and-a-half-foot-tall gate is just... secretive and repellant.  One guy invited me into his courtyard, and I swear to god, sat me down with a pair of axes buried in a stump sitting behind me.  Very unnerving, and he was one of the more welcoming denizens of those particular streets.

Bad morning, better afternoon, fairly good evening as far as the fruits of my local corner of the campaign.  Ended up talking to one retiree for twenty minutes, which was interesting and all, but I was trying to beat the sun for the end of that particular neighborhood's strike-list.

Heads up, the Romney campaign office in State College (205 E Beaver, first floor on the left as you come in the main entrance on Beaver) had Romney/Ryan yard signs as of Saturday evening.  I spent about twenty minutes putting together signs that evening while I was waiting for the office manager to get back from dinner.  They also had R/R bumper stickers, I grabbed one because I don't have a yard to put a sign in.

Shortly after Brazier died, Obama issued a statement saying of the man he had once helped put 15 poor families on the street in the dead of winter:

"There is no way that we can replace the gentle heart and boundless determination that Bishop Brazier brought to some of the most pressing challenges facing Chicago and our nation."

From this article "vetting" the sitting president.   It's astonishingly awful.  The next time someone calls Romney a heartless plutocrat, point this out to them.

How the hell did they get away with it?  I'm pretty sure anyone trying to do so in Pennsylvania would be sued up one wall of the courthouse and smeared down the other wall like a nasty outtake from the Exorcist.

"The government is the only thing we all belong to."

Someone actually said that, put it in a video, and broadcast it at the Democratic National Convention, letting it go out over C-SPAN.  Intentionally.  That's horrible, sick.  That's a declaration of aspirational slavery, of willingness to be owned.

Man, I'm so glad I re-registered Republican when I bought a house in '09 and moved my residence.  I don't think I could take the shame of being a registered Democrat with that sort of thing being said in my name.

h/t.

New mainstream media stylebook definition of "a lie": a Republican national candidate accurately and precisely describing an embarrassing fact or narrative of events which casts a Democratic national candidate in a negative light.

Also, based on the report on the radio on the drive in this morning?  "independent fact-checkers" should now be taken to read "captive re-tweeters of in-house Democratic campaign talking points".  It's very strange - the convention coverage on NPR in the evening isn't especially over-the-top aside from E.J. Dionne - but the morning news is pure Mouth of Sauron, Democratic party propaganda plain and simple.

I went to the Romney victory centre in State College this evening, to make a few calls and watch the convention on their C-Span link.  The calls didn't go so great - they're still knocking the bugs out of the hookup for the phone survey system, and I'm just terrible at the scripted phone calling system.  I'm just not a salesman, and I'm  not good at scripts.  More interestingly, there was a journalism professor who thought it meet to send her students into the victory centre to pester the volunteers on convention week & find the less well-coached, well-prepared volunteers in order to harass them into silly arguments.

After the phone system crashed in early-days bug teething - typical for this time of year - I heard the professor baiting the least-prepared and most-voluble volunteer into all sorts of silly statements.  He's young, and unprepared, and pugnacious, and silly as all hell.  So I intervened.  I made the argument for limited government, Hayekian or even Burkean limitations upon government policy swagger, and quoted A Man for All Seasons, which the professora either had never heard of, or was willing to let me go toddling over the edge of the precipice.  Admittedly, I let myself riff randomly on my old, personal theory about Obama being a physical and moral coward, but towards the end, I managed to touch on the idea that the democrats are too fond of absolutist abuse of "Imperial Presidency" renunciation of small-R republican checks and balances, talking about the Obama administration abuse of executive orders in re: the workfare cancellation and the DREAM Act enactment via executive order.  Since I had a copy of Remini's third volume of his long-ass Andrew Jackson biography, I talked about his tendency towards direct-democracy pretensions and how that turned into a species of tyranny despite his claims to constitutionality and adherence to classic Jeffersonian limited-government constitutional piety.

I \dunno if I changed any minds there.  Most of her students had already left by that point, the only one listening was the young girl who had interviewed me earlier, whom I hadn't given really any thing of value.  The hard-shell ideologue who had baited the youngblood fool into jabbering about gay marriage and birth out of wedlock seems to have left long before I started debating her professor.  Which is a shame, because these were all journalism students, except for the professor, and really, somebody should have burned into their psyche the understanding that baiting some random young fool into a response you were looking for is in no way a valid goal for honest, objective journalists.  The idea is to bring forth the basic ideas of the organization under investigation, not to torment the young and foolish until they provide a hook for  your partisan distortion of what you think they're about.

We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:  the readiness is all.

That damnable neurological experiment showing a gap between impulse and decision which was used to suggest that conscious will was an illusion, an artifact of will rather than the thing itself - another group has come forward with further experimentation and evidence suggesting that the predestinates were mistaking a sort of wilful carrying wave of varying intensity for the act of choice itself.  That further suggests what laymen have long known - certain people have a property of faster, more decisive action, and that quality of rapid, sharp decision is both dependent on state of mind, and an exhaustible resource, which after long periods of use, leaves an otherwise agile and forceful mind flacid and incapable of further emotional and mental effort.

Of course, I, wanting evidence of free will, am more likely to accept this presentation as it re-establishes a predicate which I find palatable.  But should I reject a finding because it squares with my prejudgment?

h/t

So I went to see a matinee showing of The Dark Knight Rises, there was some talk about a mass shooting in Colorado on the radio, but I didn't hear until I got out of the showing that it had been in a midnight showing of the same damn movie.  That was... odd.

The movie was kind of a disappointment, BTW.  Much more like Batman Begins than Dark Knight - very much a movie of pieces, poorly digested chunks and scenes without any real integration or thematic consistency.  I don't know why Nolan finds the Ra's al-Ghul/League of Shadows storyline so engrossing, but it... just doesn't work.  At least not for me, but then, I react poorly to "all-powerful conspiracy" narratives, I tend to fear and respect chaos (the Shuler Joker) more than hidden order (the League of Shadows et al).  Mostly because I tend to think that man-directed hidden orders are inherently fragile and implausible.  Mafias don't produce terrorist political revolutionary conspiracies - political revolutionary conspiracies and terrorist cults degenerate into mafias and fissiparous criminal families.  Entropy only really works in one direction, and Eternal All-Encompassing Ideological Conspiracy is a violation of the second socio-political law of thermodynamics.

Also, the Miranda Tate character makes no sense.

Longmire is a pretty good cop show.  About a Wyoming sheriff in a county on the Montana border, lots of rural West politics, decent if not brilliant writing.  Nice to see Katie Sackhoff getting work, and Lou Diamond Phillips has gotten better with age.  They're going to have trouble after a season or so with believability, though - rural ranching counties just don't have that many murders compared to LA or New York.  It'll turn into a grittier version of Cabot Cove in short order, I fear.

This report that H&R Block messed up their joke Bruce Wayne-vs-Peter Parker tax comparison by totally blowing the charitable-deduction rule -  you can't deduct more than 50% of your adjusted gross income with charitable contributions, you can only roll the excess over to later years - doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their tax-preparation service.  I've been using their cheap online service for the last four years, since it's relatively quick - takes a long afternoon - and the results *looked* good.  But now I worry about what might happen if I get randomly audited and it turns out that their code is based on wild guesses instead of solid tax advice.  I've never understood the way the "Making America Work" deduction works in their online software, for instance - did they screw that up somehow? 

I don't have a complicated financial life - mortgage, single, not that many charitable contributions, local and state taxes, no real income outside of work, few medical expenses - so I'm not *seriously* worried.  But... concerned, maybe.  Does anyone else have a favored, cheap tax-preparation service?  I can't see actually hiring a CPA, I just don't have that sort of cash flow to justify it.

(BTW, I saw that gag tax ad on a comics webzine a couple weeks ago.  Laughed, didn't think much about it past that.  But there's a difference between a webgag and a for-real advertisement for tax preparation services.  Screw-ups are fine for the former, all good for a laugh - but if you're selling your expertise?  Argh.)

via the usual.