Posting may be light today. But Episode 4 of "Theophany" is up in the Serials section.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)

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Some days, outrage flows easily, as though from a tapped vein. Other days, I'm just...tired.

There's a pedestrian pathway that runs along the South side of Ground Zero, between the edge of the pit itself and the crippled DeutscheBank building, still draped in a black shroud, still abandoned over a year after the massacre. The pathway itself is largely covered by scaffolding, and the side of the scaffolding that faces the DeutscheBank building has been boarded up with plywood. Over the past few months, visitors from around the country and around the world have written on that plywood. I've seen messages from the U.K., Australia, Germany, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, from members of our armed service and from fire departments across America. Nearly every one of these writings expresses unconditional love and support. There is the occassional attempt at critical expression--one reads, "No war anywhere will rebuild," printed over a stubby drawing of the two towers. To which I respond, well, duh. That's sort of completely and utterly not the point.

There are a few other expressions af anti-war sentiment as well, many of which are perfectly respectable. There's one that uses the word PEACE as a kind of acrostic, and I don't mind that one, because the words the author used convey a kind of regretful sadness, rather than pedantic accusation.

Then there's the big scribble I saw yesterday, high up along one of the panels, in 2-inch black block lettering: BLAME BUSH. REPUBLICANS FAULT.

Ignoring for a moment the author's apparent unfamiliarity with the concept of the apostrophe, I must ask: where do these people come from? What sort of thumb-sucking dolt feels the need, when confronted with a wall full of support and sympathy that is literally one hundred and fifty feet long and ten feet high, to inscribe such a fatuous, pointless declaration of their own stupidity? It's not the simpleton partisanship that offends me; I would be just as irked if the cretin had written BLAME CLINTON. DEMOCRATZ FAULT.

On the other hand, there's an amusing side to this...somewhere out there, this thick-witted troglodyte scribbler is still furrowing his brow in a vain attempt to understand how the REPUBLICANS gained control of the House and Senate last month, and deciding that it must be that whole oil industry thing. He'll wait with eager anticipation for the inevitable scandal that will erupt next year when it's revealed that hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil profits are going directly to Dick Cheney! And, when that doesn't happen, he'll decide that it's that whole conservative censorship of the media thing, and so on. Always with the furrowed brow, always the utter failure to make sense of the world as it exists beyond his wall of certainty, his fortress of How It Is.

OK, that's all. The vein is tapped out. Now: coffee, and perhaps a nice, semi-stale danish-style fruit-gel cake-thing.

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"They smear with blood the golden god, the wall, the utensils of the entirely new god. The new god and the temple become clean."

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Indefatigable optimist Thomas Friedman offers his opinions on the potential for Islamic reform in Iran, using a recent speech by Dr. Hashem Aghajari as his parade example. Following this speech, in which he calls for an "Islamic Protestantism," Dr. Aghajari was arrested, and then sentenced to death early last month. The sentence has yet to be carried out, and is currently being appealed by Dr. Aghajari's lawyer against his wishes.

On the face of it, it seems as though what we have here is a reformer, who is calling for "a progressive religion, rather than a traditional religion that tramples the people," being oppressed by the anti-modernist authorities of a theocratic regime.

There is indeed much to respect in Dr. Aghajari's speech, an annotated transcript of which is available here. He advocates a distinction orginally proposed by Ali Shariati almost 30 years ago: that there is a "core Islam," which is the "religion of peace" espoused by Muslim apologists, onto which a "traditional Islam" has accreted. Dr. Aghajari maintains that this "traditional" Islam, which encompasses the current supremacy of the clergy and the tyrannical oppression of women in general and dissent in particular, is a recent addition to the faith. Like pre-Reformation Christianity, Islam suffers from a lack of individual interpretive freedom, so that the relationship between the cleric and the lay Muslim has become corrupted, and the true nature of Islam has become shrouded by cruelty and oppression.

As I said earlier, on the face of it, it seems as though what we have here is a reformer, being oppressed by the anti-modernist authorities of a theocratic regime. That what Dr. Aghajari is advocating for Islam is a necessity is, I think, beyond doubt. But, reading to the bottom of the transcript, we find that it is perhaps not just the Mullahs who disagree with him. Dr. Aghajari points out that any cleric can perform Ijtehad (a process of independent thinking and interpretation of Quranic principles) and issue a fatwa. Why, he asks, is a fatwa declaring that 'Women have as many rights as men and men and women have equal rights' declared less Islamic by the ruling clergy? Why is one more Islam than the other? The rest of the transcript dscribes what happens next:

"Voices from the Audience:
Someone shouts: "Because one fatwa is the word of the Koran and the other is not." Someone else protests, calling "Aghajari namard" (you are not a man, therefore you are a scoundrel), and repeats, "You are a liar," "namard," and "You accuse God and the prophets of lying." At this point, Aghajari leaves the meeting."

Perhaps they were the Mullahs' ringers, planted to harass Dr. Aghajari. But the other very real possibility--glossed over by Friedman--is that there is a substantial portion of the Iranian populace that, for whatever reason, opposes him.

As always, the truth of the situation is not so clearly seen. There is hope, yes. But, perhaps, not as much as Friedman would have us believe.

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We're snowed in! Food is running low. Bob the Cat is looking appetizing. God have mercy on our souls!!!

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Apologies, folks--I seem to be pretty tapped out this week. Not sure why, but sometimes it happens.

In the meantime, I would urge any of you who are intrigued by the phrase "Remote controlled blimp" to go here. It's the home of Plantraco, creators of the aforementioned blimp and also of a very small remote controlled tank-like thing called the Desk Rover. I received a blimp for my birthday, and I think everyone should have one.

Plus, the company itself is very cool. For example, instead of an "On/Off" switch, the control for the blimp has a "Groove/Snooze" switch, and it's not just some stuck-on label...the "Groove" and "Snooze" words are molded into the plastic. That, to me, demonstrates a certain commitment to being slightly odd. You should buy something from them, so that they are encouraged in their oddness.

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Sigh. Very peculiar goings-on in the head...I am not at all appreciative of my inherited neurotransmitter mechanisms, no sir. Den Beste has a long post on the role of religion in law that I disagree with for a half-dozen reasons, but I can't seem to muster up the wherewithal to respond, or even care that much, which is odd, because religion is supposed to be right up my street.

It may be because because I'm currently slogging through the first of three thousand-page volumes commenting on Leviticus, and so am up to my eyeballs in minutiae concerning the removal of the caudate lobes of livers, the proper sacrifice of kidney suet, the difference between the sacrifice of a male versus a female sheep, the mixing of oil and grain for sacrifice (which in turn may be parched, deep-fried, fried in a pan or toasted on a griddle, and there are rabbis who've commented on the differences between each), and the burning of Special Formula incense. This stuff is the nuts-and-bolts of Temple Judaism. Back in my angsty Jesus-Jumping days, the saying was that the Good Lord put Leviticus in the Bible as a cure for insomnia. On its own, the stuff is certainly soporific. Broken down in Hebrew word by word, cross-referenced with similar rites in the Ancient Near East and considered point by point, reading Leviticus becomes a long period of stupefying dullness interspersed with moments of total fascination.

So right now, the whole God/religion/culture triad is, to me, a vast muddy swamp through which I trek with inadequate footwear. Add to that an onslaught of downright bizarre dreams lately and you've got yerself the makin's of a finely toasted brain! Yazzoo!

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Mmgh. My malaise continues. I cannot be stirred to correct someone’s erroneous impression of the “Sixth Commandment,” or to weave a proper tale of the thrice-mentioned Decalogue in the book of Exodus. My energy levels are extremely low. I squeezed my big toe and my earlobe, and the thin yellow Power Strip that runs up my left side only rose up to just below my knee. I need to spend some time in the recharger; this is getting to be a habit.

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I've taken a lot of drugs in my time, for varied purposes that are probably equal parts entertainment, enlightenment-seeking, and self-medication. While certain drugs will probably always retain their entertainment value, it was during a nitrous-oxide binge awhile back that I arrived at the definitive answer regarding the whole "drugs as a path to enlightenment" thing.

Nitrous, for those who don�t know, is laughing gas. When administered at the dentist's office it's given as a mixture with oxygen. When administered in someone's living room or at a rave, it usually comes in small silver cylinders commonly referred to as "whippets" and normally used to charge up whipped-cream dispensers (although, in my opinion, there is no possible way that the manufacturers of these chargers, such as ISI and Easy-Whip, can seriously believe that America is a nation of fresh whipped-cream and artistic dessert fiends--I'm sure their sales volume is 75% inhaled, 25% whipped). The charger is cracked and inhaled via a balloon or some other device, and the inhaler experiences about 60 seconds of whacked-out stonedness. Then the inhaler needs another one, and another, behavior which lends the gas the well-earned sobriquet "Hippy Crack." People usually mix it with other drugs to temporarily charge up whatever experience they're having. By itself, the gas is dissociative, an auditory hallucinogen, and sometimes produces intense A-ha! experiences.

An A-ha! experience is what I call a drug-induced pseudo-enlightenment experience, the stereotypically trippy Have you ever really looked at your hands, man? sort of thing. My favorite story about such an experience was told by a 60s psychedelic pioneer whose name escapes me at the moment--he had spent the night smoking a large quantity of high-quality marijuana and hashish, and at one point before collapsing into bed had written down his Big Revelation That Would Explain Everything. When he got up the next morning, he eagerly read what he had written the night before: Feet go into shoes!

At any rate, during my aforementioned nitrous binge, I had one of those experiences--the creeping, certain sense that I was just about to Understand It All. Then the nitrous wore off, so I cracked another cylinder and held the gas in my lungs for longer. The sensation came again: so close! So close to the Big Big Knowledge! Then I had to exhale, and the gas wore off. So I went after it again, each time being exhorted to hold my breath longer...wait for it...almost there! The exhortations themselves took on the appearance of a skinny, wizened Indian guru on a mountaintop somewhere. He gleefully beckoned me closer and closer, until suddenly it dawned on me: if I continued attempting to get the Big Big Knowledge in this manner, I was going to hold my breath until I passed out, and then I would fall onto the floor. Then I really did get it, and burst out laughing as I exhaled and the rings of anoxia darkness around the edges of my vision began to brighten.

What did I get? That all of the Timothy Learys, and Ram Dasses, and Stephen Gaskins of the world were full of shit. The ultimate knowledge that I was so certain I could get, if only I could deprive my brain of fresh oxygen for just...a...few...more...seconds!...was, in fact, death. That's what I was edging closer towards, sitting there with my pile of empty little silver bulbs. Nitrous Oxide was no different than pot, or LSD, or mushrooms, or ether or even butane (in my much younger and much stupider days). It all led the same place, and as soon as I understood that, the zany little Indian guru guy cackled with delight and disappeared.

As I said, I've done a lot of drugs. Many, many, many hits of LSD, which taught me a lot about the workings of my own psychology, what it feels like to be a lunatic, and what it means to be "looked after" by the universe at large. I learned the same sorts of things from mushrooms, but with indigestion. Mescaline, the synthesized version of the naturally occurring phenethylamine found in various plants such as peyote, taught me how to find anything funny by making me giggle. A lot. Bales of pot taught me about psychological addiction: when I realized that all the weed was doing for me was giving me anxiety attacks and the munchies, I stopped doing it. The occasional bout of pill-popping, usually Oxycodone or Codeine, which falls squarely into the aforementioned "entertainment" category, as does the gloppy gram of fresh opium I enjoyed on the beach at Zipolite in Oaxaca. I do like the opiates. They're warm and dreamy and soft. But I've stayed away from heroin and morphine because I�m smart enough to know that I'm dumb enough to get hooked. I tried cocaine once, but didn't really see the point. There was also a bit of ether long ago, which was everything that Hunter S. Thompson said it was. There was salvia, which is akin to being ground between the giant machined gears of reality and not at all instructive, except as a brutal reminder of the lesson I learned from Nitrous Oxide. Most recently there was Ecstasy, taken only because I happened to come across a gram of pure crystalline MDMA. Like the opiates, MDMA was an excellent entertainment value, but even that wasn't really worth the personal difficulties resultant therefrom. Then there's the most common and troublesome drug, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, your friend and mine: alcohol. That's the Great Self-Medication. I learned the same lesson from alcohol that I learned from pot...mostly. It's still a problem now and again, but I'm pleased as punch to report that I have learned the lesson that the Cocaine-Addicted Electrified Rat has failed to learn: if it feels bad, stop it. This is because I am a good and smart monkey, much smarter than the rat. Usually.

But mostly, what I learned from doing drugs was how to do them. You must understand, also, that I started doing drugs at the age of three. More precisely, I was given drugs at the age of three: Dexedrine, also known as dextroamphetamine, which was what they gave hard to manage children such as myself before they came out with my favorite chemical straightjacket, methylphenidate hydrochloride, also called Ritalin. I took a bunch of that, too, well past that point in adolescence where it's really embarrassing when the school nurse shows up in class with your daily pill in a little paper cup because you've skipped out on it.

The point of all of that backstory is that I knew, from a very young age, that small, harmless-looking bits of material, when ingested, could alter my perceptions, my moods, and the way I thought about things. The common misconception is that Ritalin returns kids to some sort of "normal" state, that it just erases hyperactivity or ADHD or whatever it is that Ciba-Geigy is calling their marketing strategy these days, and makes kids into happy little attentive campers. That may be true for some, but it wasn't for me, so I became acquainted with what it meant to zone out quite early in my life. This is not intended as an excuse for my drug use, or to shift the blame for that behavior to my parents, but instead is offered simply as a reasonable explanation for my somewhat fearless experimentation and my comfort with varying sorts of substance-induced altered states of consciousness. It may also account for that unfortunate incident with the nutmeg.

The primary difference between my childhood drug use and my later exploits was always, I maintained, a matter of choice. When I was a child, I was drugged. When I was (ostensibly) an adult, I was drugging. One was passive, one was active, and the latter was more fun and, to me, much more acceptable. As I grew older and less convinced of my own maturity, I came to realize that by and large this active drugging behavior was symptomatic of underlying psychological difficulties, and I began to deal with those. Over the past six or seven years, the drugs, one by one, have lost their utility. Alcohol, as I mentioned, lingers on, but in nowhere near the quantities required for true self-medication.

Last year, after a bunch of murderers flew a pair of airplanes into some buildings and knocked them down near where I work, I decided to decrease my stress levels by buying a house. That didn't work out very well, so--overcoming my instinctive aversion to The Man's Drugs--I sought modern pharmacological help. Paxil for the brain, and lovely Xanax for the anxiety. I read up on SSRIs, and on benzodiazepines. I discovered that Xanax was considered highly addictive, and having had some experience with the drug during an earlier bout of psychological mayhem I could see why. It's got a wonderfully calming effect. So: having gotten my coveted 'scrip for Xanax from my doctor, I carefully managed my dosage and how long I stayed on the stuff, rarely more than .5 mg a day, and by the end of my second bottle I gracefully tapered off from .25 mg to .16 mg, and then to nothing. Very smooth, no muss, no fuss, no withdrawal. By then the Paxil had sort of kicked in, so my anxiety had lessened somewhat. It was the Xanax, however, that enabled me to navigate the house-buying-mortgage-getting gauntlet without busting out my assault weapons and my scopes and picking a nice high clock tower to camp out in.

As I mentioned before, I avoided the harder opiates because of the addiction potential. I managed my Xanax carefully. These are things that doing drugs taught me about. Now, almost a year after starting on Paxil, I've moved out of New York. I've got a groovy little house in a nice part of the world. It's time to lose the pharmaceutical crutch and get on with my life. Shouldn't be too hard, right? I knew that there was the possibility of withdrawal problems, as with all SSRIs. That made sense...it does, after all, muck about with serotonin, one of the workhorse chemicals of the brain and body, and it's only reasonable that you should taper off gradually to give the body time to adjust. My doctor hadn't mentioned anything about it, and, after all, I had stopped smoking simply by losing interest in cigarettes. No sweat.

As it turns out, despite having carefully managed to avoid doing drugs that might result in physiological withdrawal, despite having dropped nicotine--supposedly more addictive than cocaine--like a bad habit, somehow, I still seem to have ended up on a drug that will, in all probability, cause withdrawal symptoms when I try to quit it. After years of consumer agitation, several lawsuits, and total denial, Glaxo SmithKline has revised the Paxil labeling to include "dizziness, sensory disturbances (e.g., paresthesias such as electric shock sensations), agitation, anxiety, nausea and sweating" as possible results of ending the use of the medication. Of course, other places list the potential consequences as "intense insomnia, extraordinarily vivid dreams [both of which I've had within the last 48 hours], severe mood swings, especially heightened irritability/anger [ditto], profuse sweating, especially at night, [yup]," and so on, and so forth. If you dig through the 32 pages of documentation Glaxo SmithKlein offers on its website, you�ll also discover that all of these reactions "may have no causal relationship to the drug" and are "generally self-limiting." Yay! I was getting worried there for a minute. I'm sure that the fact that Paxil made Glaxo SmithKline $12.1 billion last year means that their science is suitably professional and unbiased.

If I had the energy, I'd be incredibly pissed off. After experimenting with all sorts licit and illicit substances and learning the important lessons about drug abuse and personal growth, after weaning myself off each one as it became problematic, after dropping cigarettes without batting an eye...once again, it's The Man's Drug that fucks me over.

Mr. Jean-Pierre Garnier can kiss my sweating, paresthetic, extraordinarily vivid ass.

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Well. I've halved my dose: from 20 mg to 10 mg. I have, as recomended by various Kick The Slouching Paxil Junk Beast sites, kept the other 10 mg half of my pill with me, in case I get the screaming heebie-jeebies and the elves start popping out of the file cabinets. But I haven't, and they haven't (although I'm fairly certain I saw I giant ambulatory eyeball scoot into one of the hallway stairwells and close the door after it as I rounded the corner).

Most anecdotal accounts suggest that the real fun won't begin until three or four days after I've halved my dosage, so we'll see how well things are going on Thursday or Friday.

In the meantime, I still have no urge whatsoever to correct the large pile of erroneous, bad, and flat-out wrong religious half-truths that are rapidly accreting on the edges of the infoscape. Ignorant heretical dogs! Soon the fires of hell will toast your tootsies! 'Ware the wrath of the Jealous And Most Correct God, who will pound your misguided noggins into the mud of truth and then do a funny little dance on your upraised rumps, sort of like a Divine Hokie-Pokie, and man that's what it's really all about! Just you wait! Rrrrrghh...!

Huh.

Apparently, it's lunchtime.

Toodle-oo!

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Apologies for the increasingly sporadic and sketchy entries over the past couple of weeks. Things should improve shortly. For those interested, I'll try my best to get Episode 5 of "Theophany" up by the end of the week. Not a promise, mind you...more of a Statement of Intent.

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Man, do I feel like a sack o' crap today. Three cheers for Glaxo SmithKline: Hip-hip...fuck off! Hip-hip...fuck off! Hip-hip...fuck off!

But seriously, folks...

I don't want to make a mistake similar to the one made by various herbal fiends and homeopathic soft-heads that I have known: I had a headache and I took this foul-smelling Chinese powder and my headache went away so I know that this foul-smelling Chinese really works! In my case, it would be the mistake of attributing the definitive cause of my sack o' crapness to the halving of my daily SSRI dosage. Could be causal, could be coincidental. If I start feeling like I've got electric shocks running through my brain, then I'll be a bit more certain: that's never happened to me before, so I'll feel more confident when assigning Paxil as its cause. As it stands now, I'm not feeling anything that I haven't felt before, so the Causal Jury's still out, arguing in the jury room while Sam Waterson paces outside and looks worried.

At any rate, I think the Total Neuronal Package is improving somewhat, because I'm actually contemplating working on some bits that would require effort, meaning research and thinking and suchlike. That's something I simply haven't felt like doing all this month, and most of last month, and the site has been suffering for it. This I choose to attribute to the general malaise that always aflicts me this time of year. Not quite Seasonal Affective Disorder...I think it has more to do with the social confluence of all of these here Holidays, what with their happy expectations and forced interactions and so forth.

Whatever the cause, I'm glad to see the return of slight urges to pick up big fat tomes and start putting together Real Bits. Soon, I feel, I will be spewing my own special brand of Religiocultural Minutiae out into the Infoscape! Just you watch.

Now: I am going to watch some mob-related television programs that I have stolen from HBO, and I will feel good about it. You can't stop me.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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Hey hey, kids!

Episode 5 of "Theophany" is up in the Serials section, and that's probably all that I'll have for today, because the brain, it is tired, and the head, it is loopy.

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Winter is a peculiar time of year for me, equal parts welcomed and loathed. Welcomed for the stillness that it brings to anywhere that isn't urban, loathed for the forced introspection that it inflicts. I think that I liked winter better when I was younger, and hadn't yet acquired the entire chorus of clamoring neuroses that exploit winter's quiet to shout at me. I don't mean that winter reduces me to a Gollum-pale hermit safely holed up in my room with blankets nailed over the windows and muttering to myself. But there is something about the season that lends itself to a focusing inward, which is where all of the stuff that needs therapizin' hangs out.

Now that I don't live in the hated city, the essence of the season is even more apparent. Last night I walked out onto the crusted snow that covers our little patch of earth, made blue-white and luminous by the splotch of moon high in the sky. There's something about snow and moon together that I find soothing...the moonlight is softly thown back up into the air, and misty plumes of breath glow in the darkness like spirits. The crunch crunch of my feet in the week-old snow was intensely satisfying. I walked back, to the fence, and peered up at the moon, the bare trees, the lighted second-floor window of my office, and the semi-dilapidated shed that I'll have to get around to doing something with someday so that I can put a kiln in it.

Later, I toddled around for awhile on my bicycle in the town darkness, which revealed just how out of shape I've become since I moved...I went from 16 miles on the bike a day to zero, and put on all the weight I'd lost and then some, probably in part due to Paxil's wonderful Puffing Effect. But for just a moment, as I looped past the snowlit expanse of the golf course near my house where I can't fly my kites, I felt that youthful wintery fascination again: quiet, solitary, and inward, but not the kind of inward that feels huddled and sad. The stillness felt good; the cold wind-forced tears on my cheeks were bracing. For a moment, all was right with world, and I didn't care about terrorists or war or politicians.

And with that, I finally put my finger on what's seems so off about my writings of late, which is that they're not off at all. It's not the season for being punditious and clever. It's the season for shortened days and stillness. It's the season for sleepy Solstice rites and icicles. And so I'll not resist the change. I'll write about snow and moonlight and night air, and leave the punditry to those of a more fixed nature.

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Wholly smoked!

Practically the entire day is gone and I haven't written a damned thing. Shame on me.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I've written a bunch of stuff about how to install Cisco's Virtual Private Network client software.

Fabulous!

But of no interest to my vast public, I'm quite sure.

In Astonished Chemical Dependency news, I've switched my dosage time: I now medicate with my 10mg of paroxetine hydrochloride at night, around 9PM or so. My reasoning? The stuff has a lifespan of about 20 hours in the bloodstream. That means that, taking it around 6AM as I have been, I was running out of luvly serotonin reuptake inhibiting chemicals at around 2AM, right in the middle of my sleep cycle. Since I'm running the risk of my brain leaping from my skull with a pistol and shouting, "Gimme more Paxil or the fat man gets it!" I thought that it might be helpful if my "dry" time was between the hours of 5-9PM, rather than first thing in the morning.

Result? I woke up feeling like crap this morning. But that's because I ate too much turkey meatloaf and peas last night. Right now, my brain is humming along and munching on a healthy supply of paroxetine. And chocolate crumb cake, but that's another issue altogether.

Soon I will leave Babylon and head back to my country estate, there to frolic with vinted grape and lighted bicycle. Woo!

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Today, I walked into someone's office and said, "I have some ideas re: the color issue."

I think I'll take a week off. My brain is turning into a memo of some kind.

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Den Beste has put up a letter I sent to him in response to a previous post of his about the idealist and, ultimately, morally muddled positions of some contributors to the New Democracy Forum.

I won't reproduce my note here--go there to read it--but in response, he brings up the source of the vague unease I felt after writing:

"Their morality, like that of a theistic believer, is deontological; that is, they believe that the rightness of an action is determined by something other than its consequences. In this case, it's not God but their Ideal, their "cause." This is opposed to the consequentialist morality that you and I seem to agree upon: the rightness of an action is determined solely by its consequences."

The problem, as Den Beste rightly points out, is that word, "solely." He thinks that pure consequentialism leads to some terrible problems, which it does...the Spock's Death Scene "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" moral code being the least of them. It also lends support to things like infanticide and the general devaluation of individuals. So clearly, being too practical when considering moral issues is a problem.

My question, then, is simply this: if consequences cannot solely determine the moral value of an act, then of what is the balance of that value composed? Budziszewski argues for the impossibility of creating an ethos without God, and surely that's one answer. His ideas rest upon the notion of our obligations to God as our creator. I do not find his arguments persuasive, because many of his characterizations of anti-theistic positions are straw men, and he seems to appeal to a sort of common sense most readily available to theists, which to my mind doesn't truly answer the difficult questions.

Maybe it's because I'm tired and semi-full of cheap wine and Open House delicacies like warm cheese and small meatballs, but I'm supremely baffled at the moment. If one rejects pure consequentialism and utilitarianism, of what is the balance of moral value composed? Is it some abstract Ideal, in which case it bears more than a passing resemblance to an obligation to God?

From whence conscience?

Sometimes, when I really, really think about these matters, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I feel like God is about to burst forth and punch me in the head.

Hasn't happened yet.

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In a comment to yesterday's post, Craig writes:

"I'm curious to know what characterizations you think are straw men, and what you think are the difficult questions that can't be answered by his brand of common sense."

Many of Budziszewski's straw men are built from words he places into his atheist's mouth. For example, he portrays the atheist's acceptance of genetic enginnering as follows:

"But our atheist will ask: What exactly is the objection to abolishing our nature? Why not abolish it? We won’t be around to mind. Our descendants won’t mind either, because we can build into their natures that they are satisfied with the natures they get. If we like, we can make an entire graded set of natures, along the lines of Huxley’s Brave New World. “I’m glad I’m a Beta,” say his Betas. So why should we reap the consequences that the tales of old foretold? Why should the pig–men use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters? Why should these litters be frightened by what, to them, would be the story of Genesis?"

Like many genetic engineering opponents, Budziszewski is ignorant of the true nature of genetic engineering--or, if he isn't, he doesn't let that knowledge interfere with his rhetoric. Implanting human genetic material from the nucleus of an aneuploid cell--which is chromosonally defective and therefore not viable outside of a petri dish--does not amount to "successfully crossing a human being with a pig." Rather than contemplate the possibility of growing new organs for humans in non-human hosts, which sounds freakish but would eventually save thousands upon thousands of lives every year, Budziszewski chooses to envision a mutant pig-headed servant class.

Like the spectre of porcine slaves, Budziszewski's atheist is a creation of his frightened imagination, a person with no ethos beyond the total exercise of human capability in all things and uncritical acceptance of all human technological advances. I could be mistaken, but I think that Budziszewski would be hard-pressed to actually find a thoughtful atheist who believes that creating a race of pig-men or a Huxleyan utopia is just dandy, and if he did, such belief would be representative of a failure of that person's critical thought processes in general, rather than a direct result of that person's atheism in particular.

He later writes,

"Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas–relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion."

Which suggests what, exactly, about God? Ten fingers and ten toes? Bilateral symmetry? Of course not; that is too anthropormorphic an interpretation of imago. Then it must not be the physicality of humanity which is in His likeness, but something about our ephemeral consciousness and conscience...which, in turn, defeats Budziszewski's arguments against genetic engineering, which can only affect the physicality of humanity. We don't engineer minds, we don't engineer souls, yet Budziszewski warns that genetic engineering will change the nature of man. The two arguments contradict each other.

Of the "sophisticated atheist," he writes:

"But if he is to be a sort of Platonist, then what does he make of Plato’s problem? There are a great many patterns, not just one. This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design. We know of only one thing that is capable of Design, and that is mind—intelligent agency. It is not enough for the universe to resemble a mind in having design; let us have no tricks, like calling the patterns “ideas” when we have not earned the right to do so. Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing. That brings us back to God—God as the theist means God, God with a mind, God in the personal sense.

If our atheist accepts this implication, then he is back in the fold; he is no longer an atheist. But if he denies it—then it will not help him even if Pattern really is the deepest reality, because in that case “Pattern” is merely a fancy name for “patterns,” and plurality of patterns without Design is merely chaos; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

I believe that the key phrase here is "This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design." Getting from "all together" to "unity" to "Design" with a capital "D" is a tremendous leap to make, albeit a very convenient one for Budziszewski. It does not follow that a "plurality of patterns without Design" is "merely chaos;" that's simply fallacious. Budziszewski's argument is: 'no chaos' requires Design; Design requires Intelligent Agent (it's the standard argument from design, like Paley's "watchmaker" argument). The argument is valid in form, but works only if you accept the premise that apparent order requires intentional ordering by some agent. A theist's sympathetic treatment of Hume's refutation of the argument from design can be found here, and an atheist's hostile treatment can be found here.

There is no reason to assume that some Agent has to deliberately bring a group of things into unity for it to be unified and appear orderly. His conclusion "Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing," is entirely unsupported by his argument, and simply insisting that this is true doesn't make it so. His hypothetical atheist is therefore quite able to go on being a Platonist, whether he's "earned" the right to call patterns ideas or not.

This is an example of the "theistic common sense" which Budziszewski uses and assumes on the part of his readers. Every theist knows that there's a Designer, and that the apparent order of the world demands it. Therefore Budziszewski feels justified in making statements like, "Behind the universe there must be a real mind" without really presenting a solid argument in support of the assertion. It simply makes sense to him, and he is is blind to its flaws. His "brand of common sense," as Craig calls it, is not akin to the colloquial "horse sense" or ordinary "common sense." It is a particular brand of theism, which like any other -ism has its own set of axioms and a position from which all of its arguments flow. Granted, Budziszewski is not engaged in an evangelical endevor here; he's preaching to the choir (except for me, of course--I'm in the vestibule). But this "common sense" is what allows him to write, with perfect aplomb:

"...I have suggested that one of the things about reality and goodness that we know perfectly well is the reality and goodness of God. Biblical tradition agrees: when Psalm 14 remarks, “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God,’” it doesn’t call him a fool for thinking it, but for saying it even though yet deeper in his mind he knows it isn’t true. From this point of view, the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he is not being honest with himself. He knows that there is a God; he only tells himself that he doesn’t."

His subsequent claim that we "need not take this from a theist like" him is disingenuous; in quoting biologist Richard Lewontin as an example of an atheist who admits "there is something not quite honest in their rejection of Him," he is really claiming the truth not of a god, but of the God. Budziszewski's portrayal of the person who is crushed by a full view of the moral law, and who "cannot escape the awareness of a debt that exceeds anything he can pay," is a reflection of his "common sense" knowledge that man will always fall short of the glory of God, and that redemption is required, which is received by the grace of God through Christ. Budziszewski is not just making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of God--a peculiar theological tic created by theologians of good conscience who were uncomfortable with condemning all of the !Kung bushmen and Hottentots of the world to hell because they had not been exposed to the Gospel--he is making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of the one true God, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, the God of Moses, the progenitor of Christ who is the Redeemer of us all.

Those who do not believe in this God are only "pretending" to be good. They are lying to themselves. It is this idea--the objective reality of the Monogod and His Book--that is at the very heart of the recent chaos and destruction we've finally been full witness to in the West. If the Arab culture had more fully mixed with Christianity instead of Judaism, we would be watching videotapes of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers to Jihad in the name of Isa al Masih instead of Allah.

This actually forms the core of my objection to Budziszewski's claims about the impossibility of achieving any sort of "true" morality without the one, true God. If you followed the link above to the fractal image, you saw a brightly colored, orderly pattern that is graphical representation of an equation, executed by a computer program. It is true that the program has a designer. It is also true that the computer itself was designed. The whole process was set in motion by a series of keystrokes, but, once started, the visible organization of the pattern was a result of the equation's initial parameters. No further input is necessary; the patterns are self-organizing, and their unity is not a reflection of design in and of itself, but is visible because of design. Even if the universe itself was created by God; even if our innate sense of Him and His moral Law is an integral part of that design--sort of an equation the solutions to which are displayed on the computer of physical reality--there is nothing about that truth that in turn necessitates YHWH's existence in particular, or interventionist redemption through Christ, or a conscience based upon a moral law revealed on the firey mountaintop of Sinai, or the truth of the divine revelation contained in Scripture.

Budziszewski clearly believes in the need for redemption, which necessitates Christ, and of the validity of divine revelation as contained in the Old and New Testaments. He's not a Deist, or even a general theist. He's a Christian, and when he argues for the natural necessity of a moral law that is God's, and an innate conscience created by that God, he is arguing for Christianity.

That, in a nutshell, is the most difficult question that cannot be answered by Budziszewski's brand of common sense. Why Christianity? Why are the Buddhists wrong, and the Muslims misguided, and the Jews obstinate? Why this God as Designer, and not that god? Why this particular moral law, and not that one over there?

I don't expect to ever find an argument that will convince me of the true reality and nature of God, because in my opinion any such argument, framed in frail human language and circumscribed by the bounds of the human cerebrum, simply cannot approach what lies beyond human understanding. If there is a God, I am rather impatiently waiting for Him to come on down, tug on my ear and draw me to Him, to unheart and unself me, to be planted in His heart and soul.

As I said: hasn't happened yet.

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Real Live Preacher serves up a seeker's faith. Definitely worth a visit if you're peering around looking for God.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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For "Theophany" fans (both of you): more is coming, I promise. But with the holidays, and all...somewhere between Christmas and New Year's, Episode Six will appear. Honest.

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Awhile back, I wrote a semi-lamentation about the passing of ham radio into the annals of technological history.

Today, I read of a group of folks who are launching very high altitude balloons with rockets attached to them, and then firing those rockets into space when the balloons reach 100,000 feet or so (the balloon/rocket vehicle is called a 'rockoon'). The rockets carry on-board ATV (amateur television) cameras, which broadcast signals earthwards.

The article is from 1998, but here are some photos from a similar launch that took place in July of this year.

Nearly every single person involved in this effort is a ham radio operator. So, far from being left by the wayside, some hams are actually pioneering civilian space launches.

Very cool.

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Well now. The holiday is nigh upon us. Remember:

Here at Peapod, we're anticipating around a foot of snow for Christmas Day. Yes! Can't beat that with a stick. Bob The Cat will soon be tossed into snow taller than she is, for the amusement of her cruel human masters. I may also attempt to ride my crazy bike through the blizzard, which is insane good fun if you've got the right gear. Schwwoop! That is the sound of my bike sliding out from under me and dumping me on my ass.

And of course, the true meaning of the season: Loot!

Cheers, everyone. I hope the jolly big fat shapeshifting master of the alien hybrid levitating deer-creatures is sufficiently kind to you and yours.

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See, now, this is the sort of freaky thing that happens to me all the time, and bolsters my faith--if not in God or gods, then at the very least in the underlying order of the cosmos at large.

Back on 12/23 I posted a Billy Fidget bit that had to do with an eBay item called God In A Box.

For Christmas one of the books I received was Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World. Vintage has been reprinting four or five PKD titles a year for awhile now; I've read all of their previous reprints, but this one (along with The Man Who Japed) was brand-new-fresh as of last month, and I haven't read it before.

So I'm sitting on the couch reading away, and I come across the following on page 78:

"I had a feeling she knew," Mavis said. "I've been conversing with her; she skirts the topic of the Anarch each time. Afraid of saying too much, I suppose. Tell me the work status of that apologia pro sua vita of Peak's, that God In A Box; is there still a typescript manuscript of it, or did you already turn it over to the Erad Council?

Stupid ordered Universe.

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Woo hoo, hey-hey, ba-pwang badoof!

With strange inverted enthusiasm, an eggnog-induced headache is currently whaling upon my posterior, but despite this I am working on improving the site. Not that anyone will notice, what with all the holiday goings-on and suchlike.

But, if for some reason you're perusing A-head, the Subject Archives are working!

Or, a beta version of them, anyway. I'm currently wending my way through over 400 past entries and assigning them categories.

Thus, you can now browse through my ingenious expositions by their subject matter, explanations of which will be forthcoming sometime in early 2003.

Frankly, some of the stuff is a bit embarrassing. But I will not hide my incompetence and lunacy! No sir!

*hic*

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (3)
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"It is a constant wonder to me how many people today have never lived with clocks, do not know them, are not aware of what the presence of a clock in the home means. I speak of real clocks, rather than battery clocks or electric clocks that so often exhibit hideous designs, fake pretensions and vulgar proportions."

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As I've stumbled through the murky forest of opinions and rants over the past several months, one of the key characteristics of certain segments of the American polity has been made clear to me: vast, unplumbed depths of ceaseless impatience.

A case in point is this incident as related by Nicholas Monahan, the summary of which is pretty much explained by the title. Basically: idiot airport security person has no sense, commits egregious and insulting offenses against pregnant wife, husband flips out, authoritarian mindset sets in, lawsuits pending. Since then the story has been picked up by BoingBoing, (twice), Silflay Hraka, and probably many others.

Now, I'm pleased to observe that the most idiotic comment I've seen to date on the story--to wit, that America is becoming "a fascist military state worse than anything Soviet Russia could ever be"--was posted by someone who isn't an American citizen and doesn't live here. It is a comment almost perfect in its stupidity, both ill-informed and internally contradictory at the same time, a fine example of its type. I stuck a pin through its head and put it in the case next to the "...we'll be just like in fucking Russia" comment made in 1997 by Big Doofus Frank, a housemate of mine whose political insights were startling in their inanity.

That being said, there are of course plenty of American citizens who will read Mr. Monahan's story of airport breast-groping and see in it grim confirmation of all that they have suspected: Oh we've seen it all before in other countries, the thin end of the wedge. Before we know where we are we will have the full apparatus of totalitarianism. Never mind that these days the U.S. airports process well over 600 million passengers a year, and that even 1,000 breast-gropings wouldn't constitute the advent of the vast machinery of oppression whose name shall be called BUSH. To some people, any failure of judgment on the part of anyone in authority is evidence of their True Thinking, a glimpse of leather jackboot beneath the cheap flouncy petticoats of "Liberty." Such failure is an occasion for wonderfully overblown rhetoric: "Secret laws and 'security' measures that do not arise from real threats, but rather from an opportunistic drive to roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead do not make us secure."

To which I respond: in whose interest, exactly, is it to "roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead?" Unless you already suspect that the Guvmint's got legions of Gestapo-clones ready to be let out of their goo-filled vats and unleashed upon the citizenry, who will then be forced to mine oil-shale for the Cheneys and Bushes, such spouting doesn't make a lot of sense.

Which is more likely: a Freemason-like cabal somewhere, ready to go at a moment's notice with a carefully pre-coordinated plan to strip us of our freedom when the opportunity presents itself, or a vast slow-moving bureaucracy that, when prompted by circumstance to react quickly, produces something sloppy and ill-considered?

People had different responses to September 11, and those who could take some sort of action did so. That's a very human thing to do in a time of trauma and crisis. So, Photographers photographed. Poets poetted. And legislators...well, they legislated.

Most probably, they legislated badly, and we accepted it. As has been remarked, this wasn't because we're stupid or they're evil; it was because we're human and so are they. Now that some of that immediacy has faded, many Americans have shaken the stupor from their eyes and realized that things are different. There's a whole new system being put in place in America's airports. It's only a few months old. And--good god!--it's not perfect! There are idiots in positions of authority! Rules and procedures that aren't clear! Breasts are being groped! We're not going to stand for it!

None of this is intended to excuse the offensive conduct of the authorities involved in this incident--to use a Rummyism, there's no question but that this needs to change. But the nifty thing about the American system of government is its ability to fix itself when broken, which in turn is largely the result of the citizenry's freedom to complain loudly and often about things they don't like. That's where the unplumbed depths of American impatience come into play. As much as I mock the shrill, fearful alarmism of certain parts of the political spectrum, I've come to see it as a necessity that contributes to a certain beauty in the system as a whole: it is because of this impatience that things improve. It is because of this vocal, perpetual dissatisfaction that slothful bureaucracies are moved into action. It is because of this petulant demand to have everything work perfectly right now that changes for the better eventually happen.

Less than a year after it was legislated into existence, we don't have an efficient, well-run airport security infrastraucture with the latest technology managed by an army of experienced, well-trained, professional security experts. What we do have is a vast array of impatient, incredibly dissatisfied Americans who will, quite simply, bitch and moan until the system improves. And then they'll complain about that.

Ain't it grand?

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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Apparently claiming intellectual nuance by association, Kristof serves up a heapin' helpin' of moral waffles for the New Year:

"So at this time of year, historically an opportunity for ethical reflection, it's time to raise a toast to moral clarity, however scarred it may often be by nebulousness, inconsistency and even hypocrisy, as still preferable to moral opacity."

That's the final paragraph. His conclusion. I find it incoherent and pillow-headed or, in the words of a professor I once knew (who of course wasn't talking about anything that I had written), "confused and inept."

Between the lead and that last sentence, we read the following:

"1. Terrorism is in the eyes of the beholder [...] 2. Wiping out terrorists is sometimes unhelpful [...] 3. In crude military terms, terrorism often works [...]"

According to Kristof, these three statements constitute the holes that "highly nuanced intellectuals" poke in "moral clarity." Yet--as even a brief perusal of the numbered paragraphs in question will quickly demonstrate--the "holes" being "poked" here are in the definition of the word "terrorism," not moral clarity. Kristof flails wildly as he tries to reconcile this purportedly high-powered thinking with something resembling a cause that is good and just, and ultimately informs us--to our great relief--that he is "strongly in favor of President Bush's campaign for moral clarity."

Unfortunately, Kristof demonstrates little awareness of the meaning of the term. He writes,

"Ideally, any private group should know that if it kills civilians, it will become a pariah and discredit its own cause."

That seems clear enough. But wait! We can't have even the briefest moment of unmuddied water, so:

"Perhaps it is hopelessly naïve to seek to make terrorism a universal taboo; perhaps a nuanced moral clarity is a contradiction in terms."

Which suggests what, exactly? That there are instances where, due to nuanced circumstances, the murder of civilians becomes a good, thus invalidating the entire idea of good vs. evil? He claims to be seeking nuance, but he's not. He's setting up a lightweight and highly inflammable straw man, which must be duly knocked down and set on fire. Moral clarity does not imply simplicity, which is, perhaps, why Kristof seems so confused.

He might be given a few points for making an attempt at ethical reflection, but then those points must be taken away from him and given to poor orphans who would make better use of them. As a whole, Kristof's piece admirably portrays a relativist's inability to grasp the meaning of moral nuance...the fact that Kristof believes that the objections he lists leave moral clarity in "tatters" suggests to me that there wasn't a lot of clarity there to begin with.

The moral issue here is not about the meaning of the word "terrorist;" this idea represents a keystone of leftist postmodern pseudo-logic whereby the redefinition of a word changes the reality of a thing or a situation. The moral issue here is that members of an ideologically coherent group with a global reach killed 3,000 American men, women, and children as part a campaign the stated goal of which is to destroy us as a nation. You may call the members of that group terrorists, Islamists, or Big Stupid Assheads; it doesn't matter. What matters is eliminating the threat that they pose to America in particular and to the members of our civilization in general.

Granted, I don't expect scintillating competence on the NYT's Op-Ed page, but this blot of verbiage seemed particularly muddled to me. I found out why when I went to the only "intellectual" Kristof mentions by name: Grenville Byford. Kristof is attempting to glean some moral meaning from Byford's "The Wrong War," and it is from this essay that Kristof receives both his thesis and his confusion.

Having jump-started many a content-free essay in the same way, I am wary of any piece of writing that begins by lifting definitions from a dictionary, even if it is the redoubtable Oxford English Dictionary. Byford uses this as the starting point for a familiar litany: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's civilian is another man's legitimate target, one man's savage terrorism is another man's only means of resistance, and so forth. All of this is based on a false dichotomy of ends and means, whereby Byford seeks to create a simplistic dissonance between the idealistic morality of ends and the practical morality of means. As I've claimed elsewhere, this stems from a confusion about the difference between what is good and what is right. That is: the right thing to do in a situation may not be the good thing to do, because "good" exists as an ideal, far removed from the mud and muck of the fighting monkeys we're pleased to call human beings. Ignoring this distinction results in attempts to judge a practical moral act by the standards of ideal morality, which in turn causes the aforementioned pillow-headedness.

Byford demonstrates this sort of confusion when he writes,

"Usually a correlation exists between the morality of ends and means. People who pursue noble goals tend to be scrupulous about how they achieve them, whereas unscrupulous people and rotten causes often go together. This fact generally makes it possible to have a sensible discussion about political morality without distinguishing clearly between the acceptability of means and ends. The case of terrorism, however, is often an exception and can force us to make difficult moral judgments -- weighing the relative merits, for example, of those who pursue a noble end through questionable or downright horrendous means and those who pursue a dubious aim with great integrity."

History is so replete with examples of noble causes coupled with ignoble means that it is hardly sensible to claim that there is anything remotely resembling a correlation between the "morality of ends and means." It depends on the scale in which the events are viewed. Was the American cause in WWII just? Undeniably. What about Dresden? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Or that young American soldier with the flamethrower who lit up a trench full of surrendering Germans who had quite recently killed two dozen of his buddies on the beachhead at Normandy?

Byford's entire argument unsteadily rests upon such conflation of individual acts and governmental policies, and is girded with utter confusion about the difference between ideal and practical morality. By opening his essay with a quote from a big dictionary, he transmits his intention: this is not to be a discussion about real things, situations, or acts. Instead, it is to be an analysis of language, a mincing of terminology, and a hash of abstraction, which will then be applied to real things, situations, and acts via some mysterious mechanism not quite understood by either the author or the reader. Very popular in academia these days, I understand.

Byford admits as much:

"The Bush administration's war against terrorism is destined to be morally unsatisfying because, if the phrase is taken at face value, it flies in the face of the multifaceted way most people really think about right and wrong."

Examine the logic, here: moral dissatisfaction will result from improper phrasing. This, in turn, rests on the highly suspect--and elitist--notion that people are, well, stupid. That when confronted with the complexities of pursuing our interests and destroying our enemies, the rhetorical tropes of the "war on terror" will throw us all into a paroxysm of confusion and dumbfounded despair. This is because, for Byford, it's not what you do that is important; it's what you say. Again, this is a reflection of a confused notion of "good" and "right," which--far from being a simple problem of terminology--has real consequences in terms of the actions for which Byford feels he can claim moral justification. Because he has conflated the ideal good with the practical right, he cannot distinguish between the longbows of Agincourt and the airliners of New York, and is unable to see that the elimination of the Wahabbist threat of Saudi Arabia begins with Baghdad.

His conclusion is simple enough:

"Interests first, ends second, means third -- this is how America thinks. It should be how it talks as well."

But he doesn't adequately explain is why this should be so.

None of this would really be a problem if such language-based confusion remained confined to the pages of little-read academic journals. But, in the manner of all things fashionable, such fluff has a way of working its way out of such confines and into the mainstream. Then, from an ill-conceived article published in Foreign Affairs, with a bimonthly readership of 185,000, the following statement is eventually birthed in the New York Times, with a total daily print and online readership of over 2,000,000:

"In the next step in the war on terrorism, we're likely in the coming months to invade Iraq in ways that will terrorize civilians there."

Thus, from the soft-thinking postmodernist brain of Byford, filtered through the credulous and confused mind of Kristof, we have the idea that the United States of America is the real terrorist in this conflict.

If--after reading my special brand of babble--you are interested in reading a serious treatment of the moral issues surrounding this conflict, I would direct you to George Weigel's "Moral Clarity in a Time of War." You might not agree with everything he has to say, but it's what genuine moral thinking looks like.

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See, now, in addition to having dreams where I meet my Trumpet Teacher (he's an old black man with white hair who wears brocade vests and lives in an old Victorian-style apartment with several tempting instruments and intriguing intricate wooden boxes lying around), I do get the psychic heebie-jeebies from time to time. This year I'm having a Bad Feeling about large public New Year's gatherings. We're about due for another visit from Ass-Qaeda, and nothing says Happy New Year, Stinking Infidel! like a cadre of suicide bombers detonating in Times Square, using the Giant Ball as a handy timing device.

So then, joy o' joys, I read this in the Post. (The folks they're looking for look like this).

Now, I've never understood the need to go stand in the cold with 500,000 other people to puke and be puked on. I can do that at home (my little house, TARDIS-like, is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside). This year, I see even less point.

But I do feel the Creeping Dread. I think they're going to pop one or two off.

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