Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

One of many great things of getting off Facebook is that it gave me more time to read. Lately, I have been reading a lot. This may sound like nothing new, since I was already reading tons of stuff on the Internet. The difference is that now I’m reading actual books. Some of them are even made of paper!

The Internet is a phenomenal resource, the likes of which the world has never seen. But somehow books are better. When you read a book from beginning to end, you get one coherent viewpoint (if you’re lucky), without a lot of jumping around. Reading things on the Internet is like watching movies on cable. You pick up a little here and a little there, and the big picture suffers. Between the time cable became popular and the introduction of pay per view and the DVR, it’s completely possible that I never saw the beginning of a single TV movie.

At least it feels that way.

I am still working on Herodotus. I got into this book as part of my guilt-motivated program of trying to read the books I pretended to read for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course, and once I was in, I was disturbed to see how long it took. I read very quickly, and it seemed like I was getting nowhere. Suddenly I had new sympathy for little twerps students who are currently struggling with heavy doses of assigned reading.

Last week I discovered the problem. I had misread the syllabus. Somehow this seems like a fitting punishment for a person who got B’s for doing as close to nothing as possible. I thought I had to start off with pages 1 through 140. Looking at the syllabus through bleary eyes after cracking the 140 mark, I discovered I was supposed to read paragraphs 1 through 140. Or something like that. Herodotus is divided up into little sections which look like paragraphs to me. I would speculate that they are the original Greek page divisions, but it’s my understanding that his work was first written on scrolls.

Whatever.

I was reading well over twice as much as I had to.

The nice thing about this is that my contempt for college students was restored. Little sex-crazed goofs, whining about safe spaces and roofying each other.

When I discovered my error, I decided to keep going, because I knew I would eventually want to finish the entire book, and it would be a bummer to have to go back and read the stuff between the parts I had already read.

So now I’m stuck in the 300’s, plowing through a lot of small talk. It’s really difficult, because he talks about 5,000 ancient countries and cities, and each one has 15 names which he uses interchangeably. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey last month, and even after that, I didn’t know until last week that Lacedaemon was Sparta.

Also, the book must have 3,000 characters, and he brings them in the way pigeons poop on expensive suits. No warning. BANG…there’s Adrastus. Is that the same Adrastus he talked about fifty pages ago? Danged if I know. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip…

I’m actually looking for a book on the Ionian Revolt, because I have realized that there is no way on earth a human being can understand Herodotus’s summary without help. The weird thing is that any book I read will be based on Herodotus, but at least the author will, hopefully, have unraveled the digressions and put it in order.

Writing the previous paragraph reminds me of another annoying issue that has come up: the proper way to use apostrophes when turning names that end in “s” into possessives. My Lit. Hum. professor taught my class that we should avoid the common practice of simply adding an apostrophe to the end of the word, and I figured he must be right, since he swam in a sea of terminal-“s” names all day, every day, with a Ph.D. to back him up. I stuck with that for decades, but then a few years ago, I read that it’s only okay to add an apostrophe and a new “s” when the result is easy to pronounce. So it’s okay to write “Jesus’s,” but you should never write, “Cambyses’s.”

It’s bothering me right now, so I think I’ll check The Gregg Manual, which is a neat reference book. I probably have Strunk & White somewhere, but I don’t know if they cover this problem.

Well, Mr. Gregg and The Macmillan Handbook of English (saved from my college days) agree: you use an added “s” except when the result is hard to pronounce. But Mr. Gregg says “Jesus’s” is hard to pronounce. Geez. Doesn’t seem hard to me.

One of the aggravating things about grammar is that authorities disagree. People who have different authorities run around correcting each other (especially in Internet comments) when neither side can really claim the high ground.

I may not be able to find a book on the Ionian Revolt. Given that they all pretty much have to restate Herodotus, maybe the people who have considered writing such books have changed their minds. This is a good example of a gap the Internet can fill. Somewhere out there, I promise you, there is a web page that sums it up in an organized manner. There are probably a bunch of websites that will do. Even Wikipedia is better than fighting with an old Greek who loved to gossip.

In addition to ancient history, I’ve been reading up on the Holocaust and submarines. I’ve always wondered how submarines work, and it occurred to me that it’s possible to find out, so I downloaded a free book, and I bought a couple of videos. I also watched some stuff on Youtube.

Torpedoes always mystified me. How can you make an engine burn alcohol under water in a sealed tube? Turns out they had compressed air tanks inside them, to feed the engines! That’s why they left bubble trails. Submariners liked electric torpedoes because they didn’t leave trails. The problem with the trails is that they were like arrows guiding destroyers’ guns directly to the submarines.

If you combine things like books, video, and the web, you can learn a lot in a hurry, in much greater depth than any student could have only 25 years ago. And yet somehow Americans are more stupid than ever! How did we pull that off? It must be the damn cat memes. They take up all the bandwidth and keep us distracted.

I’m making good use of Google Books, Google Play Books, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Scrib’d, along with various public domain downloads I’ve found, but paper books are still hard to beat. You can make notes in them. You can draw diagrams. You can make corrections. Try that with a tablet. Maybe in ten years. Also, I don’t have to worry that Big Brother Bezobama is going to get mad some day and suck all my books out of my electronic devices. He’ll have to send the jackbooted thugs. And I have all sorts of bullets. He can get at a few things, but the rest are here moldering safely on shelves, coffee tables, and exercise equipment seats.

I feel so smart these days. And I didn’t even have to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and catch a disease from the bedspread.

Before I sign off, I may as well admit that I have a new Facebook account. Because I’m a hypocrite. No, it’s because I wanted to put up a message to the people who wonder where I went. People thought I blocked them and unfriended them. Facebook doesn’t put up an announcement when you leave. So I put up an account with a brief explanation, but I refuse to add friends or spend time on the site. I may use it when necessary; some companies use Facebook to communicate with people, so if I deal with such outfits, I will have access.

I will be the only person on Facebook with NO friends. A new low. At least on Myspace I would have Tom.

I never hear from Tom. I quit looking at Myspace, and he cut me off dead. Some friend.

That’s all I have now. Wish me luck with the Ionian Revolt thing. Agent Mulder has to be right; the truth must be out there somewhere.

Songs Without Music Without Words

My progress through the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus continues.

This weekend I knocked off Sappho’s Lyrics. This is about 340 pages of song fragments. The original Greek is included. The book is arranged so you see Greek on one page and the English translation on the other.

Here is my verdict: I don’t get it.

Take 340 pages and divide it by two. That gives you 170. Then jack up the margins so they take up half the page. Then lose maybe two thirds of the original material. You end up with a very short work. On top of that, many of the fragments are completely incomprehensible. Some lines contain only one word.

There isn’t a lot of meat here. There are some full paragraphs and pages, but they are separated by big gulfs of emptiness. You pretty much have to take it one line at a time.

Here is how page 15 reads, if you string the words together: “. . . so . . . Go . . . so we may see . . . lady . . . of golden arms . . . doom . . .”

This is not just literature; it’s archaeology. It’s like trying to guess what a pharaoh’s tomb looked like after 75% of the contents were removed.

There are some pleasant bits of poetry, and there is information that tells us a little bit about Greek culture. All in all, I would say it’s a lot like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You visit just so you can say you saw it, not so you can praise it as a coherent, useful work. Have I used that analogy before? I like it.

I think Mr. Cliff agrees with me. He never wrote notes for Lyrics. If Cliff don’t care, I don’t care.

I looked around for information, and I learned a few things about Sappho. It looks like she was the Madonna of her time, except without the tastelessness and lack of talent. She was a sort of rock star. She wrote songs that were so popular, they were disseminated around the Mediterranean during her lifetime.

In the ancient world, Sappho was a big deal. She was mentioned by many ancient authors. They thought she was swell.

That’s great, but her melodies are long gone, and most of her words have also disappeared. It’s as if we were trying to reconstruct the Beatles using LP’s with big wedges cut out of them. Actually, it’s worse. It’s like trying to reconstruct them by looking at old captures of Leo’s Lyrics (a webpage that contains popular song lyrics) with half of the words corrupted: “Rocky Raccoon . . . checked into . . . Gideon’s . . . legs.” To say that finding meaning in this stuff requires value added is a gross understatement. If a scholar isn’t careful, he will end up publishing his own thoughts and feelings instead of Sappho’s.

Not that a scholar would ever do a thing like that. Oh, no.

I have to wonder: are the scholars who seem excited about Sappho just overheated? Are they letting their emotions drive them to make more of the ruins than they should? Probably.

If someone found the feet of the Colossus of Rhodes and started giving tours in a glass-bottomed boat, I wouldn’t sit in the boat shrieking that it was the most beautiful statue I had ever seen. I would probably say, “Wow, it must have been neat before it was destroyed.” That seems like a realistic reaction to reading Sappho.

I can’t find the fierce lesbianism modern scholars impute to her. She was apparently married, and she makes references to children. It sure looks like she was a mom. There are lesbian moms, but they’re generally not homosexual icons.

Human beings used to have a thing called “platonic love,” which seems a little creepy by modern standards. It was okay for two men to hold hands and tell each other how beautiful they were; it didn’t mean they were sneaking around. The Iliad is full of this stuff. The men get excited and talk effusively about their love and admiration for each other, but there are no gay relationships.

The men of The Iliad are heterosexual to a fault. At worst, they’re on the down-low. They are enthusiastic about taking female sex slaves, and they seem to view rape as a healthy, liberating hobby. They are like goats on Viagra and bath salts. Their emotional behavior toward other men seems to stop at the bedroom door. Maybe it was the same with Sappho.

Platonic love is pretty much dead (whew) among modern American men, but it’s very much alive among women. Young women get together for sleepovers, do each other’s hair, lie in the same beds, and dance together in their underwear. Doesn’t make them lesbians.

So they claim.

Anyway, platonic love more than suffices to explain the things Sappho wrote.

Sappho says a number of clever things about human nature, but I don’t think that, by itself, makes her a genius. Human beings had been around for a very long time before she was born, and it doesn’t take a million years for us to size each other up. Being the first recorded person to say this or that doesn’t make you the first person to say it.

I will read up on her a little more, but I don’t think there’s that much to learn.

Currently, I’m reading The Odyssey, which is the story of Odysseus’ return from Troy. It was translated by Richmond Lattimore, the same guy who wrote the translation of The Iliad Columbia uses.

The Odyssey has two important virtues The Iliad lacks: 1) there is an actual story, and 2) it’s shorter.

The Iliad runs around 900 pages, and almost nothing happens. There is no structure whatsoever. Scholars pretend there is, but there isn’t. The Achaians do well against the Trojans. The Trojans get discouraged. The god start helping the Trojans. The Trojans do well against the Achaians. The Achaians get discouraged. The gods start helping the Achaians. Repeat this about fifty times, and you have The Iliad.

Spoiler: the Trojans lose. But the action stops abruptly before Brad Pitt gets shot in the foot.

The Odyssey is different in that things occasionally happen. It’s not an endless cycle of alternating favor. Odysseus gets captured by a nymph. He gets freed. He has adventures on the way home. When you read The Odyssey, you feel like you’re making progress.

In the end (SPOILER), Odysseus wins. You have closure. Real closure, not the crappy kind you get in The Iliad, which ends with Hektor’s pincushiony, not-so-godlike body going home in a wagon. Even the coke-sniffers in Hollywood knew The Iliad needed punching up. That’s why they added the stuff about sacking Troy. If they had pulled the plug when Peter O’Toole got on the wagon, there would have been riots.

Here’s a theory which I would like to contribute to Iliad scholarship: The Iliad ends abruptly because the people who were subjected to Homer’s seemingly endless droning chose Hektor’s return as a good excuse to get up and leave. Or maybe they hit Homer in the head with a club at that point, to shut him up.

If anyone wants to offer me a university chair, I am open to negotiation. A chair may not be enough. I may hold out for an ottoman.

It will be hard to choose among the offers. Universities are clamoring to get conservative Christian professors who carry loaded pistols.

The next book in the syllabus is Genesis. I plan to skip that. I feel like I have that one under control. I’ve even read supplementary materials, such as Jubilees, Enoch, and The Modern Fundamentalist Fascist’s Guide to Homophobia, which I co-authored.

After that comes The Histories, by Herodotus. This book bears the distinction of having been not read by me in two different courses. I took an ancient history course in high school, and I’m pretty sure I avoided reading Herodotus, and then I almost certainly skipped it at Columbia.

Herodotus contains the story of the battle of Thermopylae, better known to Beyonce fans as 300. I watched 300 the other day, and I was highly annoyed to see bare breasts pop out for no good reason. You never know when nudity will reach out and grab you. I watched a movie about Beethoven the other day, and Ed Harris mooned the camera.

I think that was harmless. My feelings for Ed Harris aren’t even platonic.

As I so often do, I will go out on a limb and speculate. Because it’s easier than finding out the truth. I speculate that Xerxes was not an eight-foot-tall circus morphodite whose palace was actually a body modification parlor, and I further speculate that he wore actual pants. I doubt he had a ten-foot-tall giant that could fight even after you shoved a spearhead six inches into his skull (via the eyeball). I doubt the Spartan army dressed like a dance team from La Bare, and that they went on long journeys equipped only with spears, velvet cloaks, and dark red Speedos.

I don’t think the Spartans built a mountaintop temple on a crag so steep a fit man could barely climb it. How would you get the construction materials up there? How about food and water? What about wifi?

Anyway, that’s next.

I’ve learned one nice thing about the ancient Greeks. They treated their gods better than we do. They didn’t just hop in boats and sail off to kill people. They prayed and sacrificed beforehand. They were constantly asking the gods what they were doing wrong, so they could fix it. Imagine how much easier our lives would be if we treated the actual, real-life God that way.

I also noticed a major problem with the Greek religion. Well, two problems. First, the official name of the religion appears to be “mythology.” When you’re a Greek, that has to be bad for your faith. But also, the Greek gods do not get along.

Imagine that. Imagine you pray to Jehovah, and he gives you the okay, and then Jesus says, “Yeah, right, we’ll see about that,” and then he sneaks around behind the scenes, shipwrecking you on islands populated by one-eyed giant cannibals. That’s not how Christianity works. Christianity says, “God is one,” meaning, “God is unified.” The Spirit-led are unified. If we disagree about anything, it means someone is doing it wrong.

In mythology, you can’t make all the gods happy. Please one, and another one is on your case. That’s no way to run a godhead.

Another major problem: the Greek gods are a bit thick. None of them ever says anything intelligent or mature. Dealing with them is like placating huge, armed children. It’s like the segment of the old Twilight Zone movie, where adults had to kiss the rear end of an omnipotent little kid in order to keep him from projecting them into the violent horror of “Cartoon World.”

If stupid, immature gods are your thing, mythology is for you. And don’t believe the lies. It’s not the national religion of Mexico, no matter how many times you think you hear them say, “Yay, Zeus.”

That’s all I have for now. I am officially in charge of doing my elderly father’s taxes now, so I have to go and immerse myself in the new level of Tartarus known as Quickbooks. Odd name for the program, since “quick” means “alive,” which is the opposite how how I expect it to make me feel.

They say only death and taxes are inevitable. If only death came first.

Fool me Once, Shame on You. Fool me 30,000 Times, Shame on Me

Old people know stuff. Old people can connect the dots. I’m going to apply my old person skills right now and see if it pays off.

A man in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just confessed to poisoning produce at Whole Foods. Let’s add up the facts and see what we can guess.

1. Ann Arbor. This is a suburb of Detroit, which is a Muslim stronghold. That area of Michigan is almost a caliphate.

2. The criminal is male, and most Islamist terrorists are male.

3. In the store surveillance video, he appears to be pretty hairy, which is not exactly rare among people from the Middle East and nearby regions which are dominated by Islam. The Boston bombers were dark, hairy individuals. So was the nut in San Bernardino. For that matter, so was bin Laden, and so were all of the 911 killers. Is it racist to say people from that area are hairy? Yeah, okay. And there are probably lots of tall blonds in Japan.

4. The police have the man in custody, and they refuse to reveal his name.

My bet: low-budget Muslim terrorist. I would say “lone wolf,” but wolves are intelligent. Mouse poison on organic figs is not the way to kill people.

I could be wrong. Maybe he’s a Baptist whose ex-girlfriend runs the produce section at Whole Foods. Maybe she dumped him, and now he’s out to punish the world and get her fired.

Maybe he finally realized he was paying way too much for tabouleh.

Cops and journalists now have a well-established history of holding onto the names of Muslim terror suspects. If a random individual who is not a Muslim commits a crime, they release the name in a hurry. Journalists, especially, like to get the information out there fast. They don’t do that with Muslims or people who seem like they may be Muslims. They wait, as though hoping the suspects will magically turn into Norwegians. They keep trying to perpetuate the myth that there isn’t a problem among American Muslims.

For some reason, they love pretending Christians and white supremacists (same thing, in the mind of the press) are the real danger. The truth is that Christians have little interest in terrorism, and white supremacists can’t get it together well enough to do much. Most of them are too busy doing roofing, watching game shows and pirated porn in their girlfriends’ moms’ trailers, or working on chain gangs.

Place your bets.

Update

Sometimes it’s sort of nice to be wrong. It restores your faith in mankind’s ability to not be completely predictable.

The Whole Foods guy is a blond man named Kyle Bessemer. Assuming he’s not convert, he is a plain old non-Muslim American.

I was right about the San Bernardino dude, though, so it all evens out.

Make it Stop

It’s not even noon, and I want to sit down and read The Iliad, just so I can be closer to never having to look at it again.

That book is like Hillary’s cough. It won’t go away.

When I was in college (the math and science phase), I kept a lot of my textbooks after the classes ended. I even bought extra books. I bought a pile of quantum mechanics texts. I have tons of Dover Press math and science texts, including one written by my undergrad student advisor.

I kept my copy of The Riverside Shakespeare. It’s very nice. And it’s Shakespeare, so I might actually want to look at it occasionally. I kept a French poetry text by Morris Bishop.

I love Schaum outlines. I must have ten or twelve. I also kept one book and a number of study aids from law school.

The Iliad reminds me why I sold or threw almost all of my college texts out. The notion of looking at it after I complete it is inconceivable. Merely seeing it on a shelf would put a knot in my stomach.

As, when the flowing-haired Thetis, whilst browsing in the orchard of fabled Hemeroskopeion, reaches for a fallen plum ripened by the blessed rays of Apollo’s orb, and on bringing it to her fig-like lips, discovers it to be a ball of horse manure and feels her entrails tighten within her, so would my gizzard toss in my belly as I gazed upon the blind bard’s tome.

How can people dedicate their lives to studying this stuff? It takes all kinds. Some kids dream of becoming morticians.

My dad has a copy of The Great Books of the Western World, which, since he wants to throw it out, is technically mine. It’s a neat resource. It contains Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare…just about everything you need to read in order to look down on people. I don’t know how great the crusty translations of the foreign stuff are, but then I don’t know what translations P.G. Wodehouse and the guy in Quiz Show used, either, and they managed to come off as erudite.

I feel like the smart move is to Scrib’d the best translations I can find, for nine bucks a month, and then be content with the Great Books after that.

Cliff is a genius. I’ll bet he came up with his notes idea while he was reading The Iliad. He was a junior in college, and he was sitting at his desk with The Iliad to his left and a loaded revolver on his right, and he was about to toss a coin, when suddenly, like Phoibos’s arrow, inspiration struck. And now he’s rich, and kids have time to Tweet, smoke dope, and weep about their need for safe spaces.

We haven’t done right by Cliff. He’s a hero. A humanitarian. Right up there with Salk and Pasteur. God bless him. Someone should build a statue.

Or maybe they should just write a short summary describing a statue.

My brain is dry. I can’t think of anything else to say. I guess it’s time to go face the music.

They Didn’t Choose the Hero Life

I finished my daily dose of The Iliad a few minutes ago, and I feel I have to come here and vent until the pain in my wounded soul subsides.

I am very disappointed in the Greek concept of heroism. These guys stab other guys while they’re running away. They run like hell when they think the other guy has a god’s favor. When a god saves and heals them after they’ve been beaten, they come back and talk smack. Like having mommy pull you out of a fight makes you a tough guy.

The whole premise of the book is ridiculous. One idiot steals another idiot’s wife. A bunch of other idiots go to war to get her back, offering their lives in exchange for the return of what is essentially a common strumpet. The gods take sides, helping them kill each other, but they’re not consistent. Zeus’s brilliant plan is to help the Trojans mess up the Achaians until they burn one ship, and after that, to let them sack Troy, burn it, and force themselves sexually on everyone they can catch.

What is the point? Why would you help the Trojans if you plan to wipe them out a week later?

How about this idea: stay home and grow old while making money. Live to see your children marry. Don’t go to war unless someone bothers you. Am I crazy? Am I the only one who sees this as the obvious course of action?

You know what the Iliad characters are? Gangsters. Punks. They’re just like the simpletons in New York and L.A. who run around killing each other out of boredom. Your life is dull and pointless, so instead of finding an actual purpose an adult can be proud of, you stir up crap and get off on the stress.

They talk constantly about glory. It’s okay if some Trojan with Zeus on his side spreads your intestines out on the beach in an unfair fight, because you get glory.

You can’t spend glory. You can’t put it on toast and eat it. If you believe in the nutty Greek religion, after you get speared, you expect to be in hell, where you can’t even enjoy your glory. How stupid do you have to be to fall for a deal like that?

The characters are imbeciles. The gods are sociopaths. I don’t care what happens to any of them. They’re all jerks.

I’m still only on page 593. You want to hear about a mythical Greek figure I can relate to? Here it is: Sisyphus.

Reading The Iliad is like going to see the Mona Lisa. You don’t go to be impressed or to see something which is done well. You go so you can have the experience of seeing it.

The Mona Lisa is fat and ugly. The landscape behind her is amateurish. The colors are basically shades of cockroach-wing brown. The composition is right up there with the photos on baseball cards. But it’s an important painting, so you pay money to go to the Louvre and look at it.

I am looking at The Iliad. It’s like a Mona Lisa that takes two weeks to take in.

I’m starting to feel better now.

Every day, I’m eager to sit down and read this book, simply because I know it will make it be over that much faster.

I’m open-minded. People have different tastes. If you like Homer, you have something wrong with you. But I respect you.

Just to show that I’m a classics fan at heart, I’ll post a video that shows how a true artist presents a great work of literature. It’s Kirk Douglas in the Mexican version of 1954’s Ulysses. I don’t know why Homer couldn’t have presented it this well.

Where is Ray Harryhausen When You Need Him?

Where did I get the idea that I should compensate for my college-era sins by reading The Iliad? What was I thinking? I’m actually starting to sympathize with my sophomore self. I completely understand why I spent every weekend blind drunk.

I’m still not out of the five hundreds yet. Pagewise. If you put a gun to my head right now, I could not tell you what happened in the last passage I read, and it was about forty minutes ago.

Hera seduced Zeus, which is about as hard as getting Bernie Sanders to let you pick up a check. Then a god named “Sleep” ran through the Danaan camp telling everyone to get up and fight. After that, search me.

Sleep is immortal. It’s no surprise he’s enthusiastic about bloody combat. If he gets poked with a spear, it only hurts until he grows a new liver or whatever. Leftists like to call every conservative who hasn’t been to war a “chickenhawk.” It’s a horrible bit of sophistry, but that wingless shoe would definitely fit the Greek gods.

It’s awful, if you think about it. The Greek gods are like rabid Little League parents, except when Little Leaguers strike out, they go to the dugout for a participation trophy, whereas the Greek heroes go to Tartarus where they maintain their maimed forms for eternity.

I believe that’s how it works. I think I understood Brad Pitt correctly.

The Iliad is like the World Series of Little League, except the parents are allowed to charge the field and punch kids in the mouth.

I had no idea The Iliad was a thousand pages long. Because, hello, I didn’t actually read it the first time. I just assumed it was a two-day ordeal, probably because the Cliff’s Notes I actually read were about that long.

It could be worse. I tried to read Ulysses once. I got like 300 pages in before I realized it was never going to get any better. I figured it would be worth it once I got to the good part, and then I realized I was already looking at the good part. Or maybe the good part was the foreword.

James Joyce was a genius. I guess. I would rather just concede that than spend a spell in hell becoming sufficiently familiar with his work to argue the opposite.

Hemingway was a huge poser, but he was entertaining. Give him that. James Joyce went 300 pages without permitting the occurrence of a single event of interest. I can’t imagine what the remaining 32 pounds of the book were like. Maybe there was a page at the end explaining that it was all a joke, and that the publisher would send you fifty bucks for being a great sport.

I’ll never know. Unfortunately, I lost my copy in a fire. That I threw it in.

Yesterday I compared The Iliad to reality TV. That was pretty accurate. I see no reason to backpedal. But today I had another epiphany: it’s also a lot like a soap opera. It goes on forever, and nothing much happens, and there are too many characters to keep up with. One of the best things about getting way into the book is that a lot of the people you had to keep track of earlier are dead.

When I was in college, I briefly–and I do mean briefly–got into General Hospital. My freshman floor counselor had a blonde who lived with him, and she watched the show religiously. Since I inhabited the TV lounge and avoided classes, I was right there with her for a few weeks. Then I happened to see the show a few years later for some reason I no longer recall (perhaps I was being tortured so I would divulge the number of a Swiss bank account), and I was amazed to see that I could still keep up with it. So little had happened, it was as if I had gone to sleep in Port Charles on a Monday and awakened on a Wednesday.

That’s exactly how The Iliad is.

Is Port Charles right, or was that a different soap? I remember an annoying old geezer who was married to a harridan named Phoebe…or did I dream that?

The Trojan War took about a decade, and from time to time, everyone sailed home and took time off. That proves how much like a soap opera it is. Even the characters were able to skip years.

Langley Wallingford! I can’t believe I remember that! What did he see in Phoebe? Not that he was a day at the beach. But she was abominable. A beast.

Here’s something I recall. Demi Moore came on the screen, and I thought, “That poor homely little thing. She has a voice like thimbles on a washboard. She can’t even act. She will never make it.”

I don’t think the other books I declined to read (see “Lepellier Refusal,” A Separate Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Knowles, J., 1959, at 30) were this long. I guess I can check.

Okay, Columbia College has The Odyssey on the list. It’s Lattimore again. More bizarre usage and bloated verbiage, I guess. Checking Amazon…YES! It’s only 374 pages! I can do that in my sleep! And unlike The Iliad, it’s actually a pretty good story. I loved it when Kirk Douglas poked the cyclops’s eye out with a burning tree trunk.

If the book is 374 pages, the Cliff’s Notes must be a pamphlet. Should go around 60 pages. I can deal with that.

I keep thinking you have to read the classics in order not to be ignorant, but I’m really wavering. The Cliff’s Notes really aren’t that bad.

I learned tons of calculus, but they didn’t make me read Isaac Newton’s notes. I probably wouldn’t have understood them. The sole piece of his notation that survives today is the dot on top of a time derivative. If I can do integration by parts without reading the actual work of Newton or Leibniz or Cauchy or whomever, it stands to reason that I should not have to read Homer in order to understand The Iliad.

Actually, it doesn’t stand to reason, but it sounds good. Close enough for jazz. It’s like an opinion by Justice Brennan: wrong and tendentious, but smart enough to get past you anyway.

There are probably four people in North America who have read the real Iliad, in the original original Greek, not cleaned up and clarified by monks and grad students. Just saying.

With any luck, I will be done in a week, and life, such as it is, will resume. Until then, expect more diatribes, because my system cannot sustain the stress of bottling this up.

Lame Protesters Give Bigotry a Bad Name

This is kind of interesting. Apparently a few kooks held a white power rally near Stone Mountain, and they were wildly outnumbered by the people who came out to protest.

I have a lot of black friends and acquaintances, and they seem to be very concerned about white supremacists. I try to reassure them, but they don’t seem to take much comfort, because, to be honest, conspiracy theories do really well among black people. If some bonehead on MSNBC makes a crazy claim about the Klan owning Oscar Mayer and putting Satanic symbols in the olives in the olive loaf, it’s pretty likely to become intractable dogma among black people.

In fairness, white people are not exactly immune to rumor. Richard Gere could tell you about that.

Anyway, several DOZEN (not thousand) welfare recipients and part-time roofers (I’m guessing) got together between court dates to celebrate the amazing accomplishment of being white, and there were protesters, and it was the protesters, not the professional Caucasians, who attacked the police and caused problems. One of them maced a cop.

I guess I would make two points here.

First of all, no one gives a crap about white supremacy. It’s not going anywhere, so relax. I am white, and someone would have alerted me if I were supposed to be at meetings. I haven’t heard a peep. White supremacy is extremely unpopular, and it makes you look bad on Facebook and Twitter. Donald Trump is not trying to bring it back, and even if he did, he would get nowhere.

The fact that people took this rally seriously enough to come out and complain is disturbing, because it suggests that they’re severely detached from reality. It’s like getting worked up about the thirty-member Westboro Baptist Church, better known as…the Phelps family and its three minivans. A few illiterate idiots with belly shirts, holding cans of generic beer, do not constitute a movement.

Second, it is pointless to assemble and protest evil by BEING conspicuously evil.

If you protest in order to complain about white supremacy, and you mace the police, you are sort of helping the people you came to oppose. If you’re not white, it looks really bad, because in essence, you have made yourself into a visual aid for your opponents. “Look what black people do, Aryan friends.”

If you want to fight white supremacy, and you’re not white, do this: get a college degree. Then live a happy and prosperous life which doesn’t involve screaming at toothless landscaping engineers with Krylon Confederate flags with the wrong number of stars on their soon-to-be-repossessed trucks. Get a job where a number of white people answer to you. You know; like a Democrat President assembling his cabinet.

You will feel a lot better, and you won’t be charged with assaulting an LEO.

We have a real problem with deluded protesters causing problems instead of solving them. BLM is one of the best (“worst”?) examples of a reform movement which is much worse than what it’s protesting. Darren Wilson shot ONE enraged criminal in self-defense, and in response, BLM has killed or injured a whole slew of innocent people, as well as burning down an impressive number of homes and businesses. If I were a white supremacist, I would be collecting videos of BLM violence for recruiting purposes, and it would work.

Personally, I call BLM “Black Lies Matter” or “Only Black Lives Matter.” They defend people who are obviously criminals who caused their own problems, and they don’t seem too upset by deliberate collateral damage to non-blacks.

This is a useless blog post. The people who need to read it won’t, and if they did, they would never admit the obvious truth, which is that I’m correct. They would accuse me of various things, feel like they had put me in my place, and then go on believing nonsense.

Who cares? Black people get mad at me when I side with the police. White people get mad at me when I’m truthful about blatant crimes committed by cops. I make both sides mad. I’m used to it. I embrace it. You can’t live your life distraught about your inability to please fools.

If you’re a white supremacist, stop wearing Confederate flag T-shirts with the belly cut off, especially if you also have a Confederate flag tattooed on your belly. Find a job. Try to live right. See if you can get your meth-related felonies expunged. Have your remaining teeth or tooth cleaned.

If you’re a BLM nut, go home and study. Get a high GPA at whatever college will take you, and then start sending out resumes. Stop burning down convenience stores and rendering yourself permanently unpalatable to employers.

I should stop writing this stuff and start yelling it into a canyon or even an empty shipping container. It would do about as much good.

I guess I’ll come back in a day or two to see how the world has changed since receiving my helpful advice.

Shower Spray Progress

You may say your life is more exciting than mine, but then you would be a fool. I am still making progress on my daily shower spray.

I decided to check the ingredients and see what real chemists put in these products. The most useful combination I found (easiest to duplicate) was “nonionic surfactant” and lactic acid.

I am not a housekeeping chemist, but I was not raised in a cave, either. I have seen the phrase “nonionic surfactant” before. It’s on the labels of dishwashing liquids. Dawn is full of a nonionic surfactant. I guess it’s synonymous with “detergent.”

Does this mean Dawn is just as good as the surfactant in the store spray? Danged if I know. Maybe there is a huge variety of surfactants out there, with different qualities. But I have a jug of Dawn sitting around, so experimentation is cheap. Dawn is what I used in my last batch, and it seems to do the job.

I believe the lactic acid is to keep minerals from depositing on shower surfaces. This must be why people use vinegar in homemade products. It’s an acid that cuts calcium deposits. Vinegar smells, so my guess is that lactic acid is in commercial products because it does the same job without the stink.

Sadly, lactic acid is not available nearby in large cheap containers. Also, I don’t know how much I would need. Liquid acids are solutions, and the solvent is water. There’s a big difference between an acid with a lot of water and an acid with very little.

Muriatic acid (weak hydrochloric acid) is available at hardware stores, but it would probably be rough on grout. It eats ceramics in a hurry. Maybe lactic acid does the same thing.

I considered adding CLR to the spray. It’s a commercial product that eats mineral deposits. It’s supposed to eat rust, too, but I have never seen any evidence that it works. Electrolysis is the best way to get rust off of stuff, and if you can’t use that, I would go with phosphoric acid.

I don’t know what’s in CLR, but it will damage aluminum and a bunch of other stuff, so it’s out.

I wonder if citric acid would work. I’ll bet it would, and it wouldn’t smell like vinegar. I would need some cheap lemon juice. Looking around online, I see that citric acid is commonly used to remove scale from things.

The stuff I’m using now seems to be doing the trick, though.

You can buy citric acid on the web for eight bucks a pound. It’s a solid, which is something that has always confused me. I’m familiar with citric acid as a cooking ingredient. It’s also called “sour salt.” It makes foods sour. I’m used to seeing acids in liquid form, so the idea of acid powder is strange.

Maybe someone who took organic chemistry can explain.

Or someone can Google it, find the answer, provide it in a comment, and pretend they already knew it. Not that people ever do that.

I think a quarter of a cup of cheap lemon juice would be a good addition.

I don’t know if the various ingredients would react with each other.

Dealing with soap scum is a drag, so any semi-automated solution is a blessing.

I have a steam machine for removing crud from surfaces. I suppose it would work for soap scum. It works on baked-on oven grease. But it would be more work than scrubbing, and it would not be great for paint.

It is imperative that I succeed at this. The thought of spending three bucks a bottle for shower spray is just too painful for me.

Who Needs a Gypsy?

I’ll tell you something interesting about the future. If you use the Internet, one day it’s going to start telling you things about yourself that you didn’t know. And it will tell other people things you don’t want them to know.

I realized this as I was looking at annoying browser ads that popped up in response to Google searches. In the old days, web ads were fairly random, but now your computer and the computers of various organizations store and analyze material you provide incidentally, and they send you ads that seem likely to be appropriate for your needs or desires.

The ads aren’t always related to things in which you’ve shown an explicit interest. Sometimes the machines think, “This person’s activity and data are a lot like those of people who bought this product or service, so let’s send them an ad.”

Even if human beings don’t plan it, eventually you will start receiving information that will tell you surprising things. It will diagnose disease. It diagnose mental illness and personality problems. It may even tell you you’re going to be fired soon, that your wife is cheating on you, or that your area is about to have an earthquake. The computers won’t “know” these things, but the correlations will cause them to reveal them. At first the information will come through advertising, but at some point, that will change. Someone will decide the sleuthing ability of computers is too important not to harness, and they’ll start arranging for us to receive messages not related to commerce.

Various facts correlate with various other facts. We don’t necessarily know the relationships. But they exist, and over time, computers will expose them.

What if people who have a certain hidden disease like a certain food, or they look for a certain type of OTC medication which treats a seemingly unrelated condition? What if they find certain socks helpful, because of skin problems or circulation problems, the causes of which they don’t know? Computers will figure it out.

One day, the Internet will start telling people they have cancer or diabetes or other problems, based on their online activity. It will be shocking.

The Internet may tell the feds things that get us in trouble. To an extent, this already happens. Michele Catalano got a visit because someone in her house searched for pressure cookers, after pressure cookers were used in the Boston Marathon bombing. Eventually, the feds will get better at analyzing data, and visits will be more frequent. In essence, we will be searched and detained based on what the movie Minority Report called “pre-crime.”

Sooner or later, the predictive power will become so great, courts will not be able to protect us. Computer predictions will be considered probable cause. You wait and see.

Eventually you’ll have to curtain your web use very severely, or give up all hope of staying out of the matrix.

It’s going to be an interesting time.

I am Here

A couple of people have emailed me wondering if I’m dead or what. Thought I’d put up a brief post to put people’s fears to rest. Things are going very, very well. The problem is that I tend to use social media these days instead of blogging. I guess that’s a mistake. It’s like giving the NSA the keys to your house, and you lose control of everything you write, but there it is. I have so many great friends, and they’re all on the social sites, so I’ve ended up spending way too much time there.

Maybe I’ll try to do something about it.

Anyway, I hope all my readers have a great Christmas!

Thass a Big Twinkie

I know exactly what this is. It’s a sloar. And those things inside it are shubs and zulls.

Additional info:

Zimmerman Prosecutor Fail

I watched the last 20 minutes or so of George Zimmerman’s bond hearing today.

You can get bogged down in the details and sniping, but it makes more sense to examine the dispositive issues.

In order to convict George Zimmerman, the state has to prove certain things. If Zimmerman did not start a fight, and he shot to prevent a forcible felony (aggravated assault or aggravated battery), or if he was in actual, reasonable fear of severe bodily harm, he walks.

People think you can only shoot if you’re in reasonable apprehension of severe bodily injury or death. That’s wrong. Look at the statute. You can shoot to prevent a forcible felony, including aggravated assault, IF you have clean hands. If someone is committing a forcible felony, you are PRESUMED to be in fear of death or great bodily harm.

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

That’s a cut-and-paste. Look at the last part of it.

Here is the definition of “forcible felony”:

Forcible felony.—“Forcible felony” means treason; murder; manslaughter; sexual battery; carjacking; home-invasion robbery; robbery; burglary; arson; kidnapping; aggravated assault; aggravated battery; aggravated stalking; aircraft piracy; unlawful throwing, placing, or discharging of a destructive device or bomb; and any other felony which involves the use or threat of physical force or violence against any individual.

The state has to prove Martin was not in the process of committing a forcible felony when he was shot, AND that Zimmerman was not in reasonable fear of great bodily harm.

I now believe they have no chance. If the state has a bombshell that will convict Zimmerman, they haven’t shown it yet, and they have made it clear they can’t prove Zimmerman was the aggressor.

Sometimes it’s good to separate known facts from opinions and disputed facts, so let’s look at facts that can’t be reargued.

Fact (admitted by the state under oath):

1. Zimmerman and Martin fought.

2. Zimmerman had lacerations on the back of his head, consistent with having an assailant beat his head against a sidewalk.

3. There are no witnesses to the start of the fight.

4. The state has no evidence that Zimmerman was not attacked.

5. Martin was shot up close, possibly with the gun barrel against him.

You don’t really need more than that. Again, the burden of proof is on the state, and it’s very high. They can’t win by proving Zimmerman COULD have been the aggressor. They have to show that it’s the only explanation a reasonable person could accept.

Zimmerman only has to show that his version COULD be true. That’s it.

If you can’t prove Zimmerman started the fight, you can’t prove Martin wasn’t committing (or about to commit) a forcible felony. The beating took place. That can’t be disputed. If Zimmerman was attacked and Martin was beating his head on a concrete sidewalk, Zimmerman had every reason to believe the attack would progress at least to aggravated assault, and possibly to aggravated battery or murder. That’s just common sense.

If Martin attacked, it triggers the statute, and that would end the case instantly.

If Martin had merely punched him, there could be doubt. But he beat Zimmerman’s head against the sidewalk, opening two long gashes, and he broke his nose. These acts may constitute a felony in and of themselves, and coupled with Martin’s persistence (shown by the number of injuries) they definitely establish the intent to commit a felony.

The only issue is who started it. And the state has affirmatively averred it has no evidence proving Zimmerman is lying about that particular fact. With no other evidence, his word is the most powerful guide the jury has.

What if Martin had been shot from a distance? It would cast doubt on Zimmerman’s story. You can shoot to put an end to a felony, but you can’t shoot once your attacker gets up and runs off. What if Zimmerman had no injuries, or the injuries were not consistent with a battery? He would have a hard time showing a felony had been in progress. But the injuries are there, and the state says they conform to his story.

What if a witness had seen Zimmerman attack Martin? That would be powerful evidence that he committed a crime. But no such witness exists. The state says so, under oath. Witnesses heard people argue. One witness said one “figure” chased another past her home, and she can’t identify them (and chasing is not a crime). Another witness saw Zimmerman on his back under Martin. No matter how you slice it, the state has a hard row to hoe.

The cops say Zimmerman claimed Martin covered Zimmerman’s mouth and nose, and that it was at this point that Zimmerman grabbed his gun and fired. The prosecutor say they have evidence that Zimmerman is wrong. That’s fine, but it wouldn’t affect the outcome. You can say something that isn’t true and still be innocent. Maybe Zimmerman stretched the truth or even lied, but if Martin was on top of him, and Martin was the aggressor, the state loses.

Remember, Zimmerman hasn’t been charged with perjury. Murder is the charge. He can lie all day and still be innocent of murder, as long as the physical evidence backs him up, and there are no witnesses to contradict him.

The longer this case goes on, the more disgusted I become. The arrest and charges are the result of the public outcry, not a proper investigation and determination of probable cause. The governor denies this, but look at the facts. Zimmerman was free and in the clear until people started raising hell. There was no chance of an arrest. It’s amazing that the governor would tell such an obvious lie. It is definitely a lie; there is no other explanation.

I doubt Zimmerman will be tried. If O’Mara is any kind of lawyer, he’ll get this thing dismissed. The judge may be a politician, and if he is, he’ll rule in favor of the state. I guess that’s the state’s only hope. But they still have to get a jury to buy their theory.

Anything is possible. Shocking new evidence could come to light, proving Zimmerman’s guilt. But right now, by its own admission, the state has nothing.

No Evidence Required; No Appeal Possible

More and more exculpatory evidence is coming out in the Zimmerman/Martin case.

This is only evidence. It’s not necessarily proven. But the burden of proof is on Florida, not George Zimmerman. He doesn’t have to prove a thing.

1. The police say Zimmerman was found with lacerations on the back of his head, plus a broken nose.

2. The police say Zimmerman had grass stains on the back of his shirt, and his shirt was wet in back.

3. Martin’s size has been upped from 140 pounds to 150 pounds and 6’3″, and Zimmerman’s height is said to be 5′ 9″. I’m wondering what Martin’s weight will turn out to be, after the medical examiner reports. The figure of 150 is pretty low for someone that tall, especially a football player.

4. Martin’s girlfriend’s remarks suggest Martin accosted Zimmerman (Martin spoke first).

5. Zimmerman claims Martin was trying to grab Zimmerman’s gun.

6. A witness saw Martin slamming Zimmerman’s head against the sidewalk repeatedly.

7. A witness named Austin Brown says that in the moments before the shooting, Zimmerman was lying on the ground crying for help.

8. Zimmerman told police he was on his way back to his vehicle when Martin accosted him.

9. Zimmerman said Martin initiated physical contact by delivering a sudden punch which broke Zimmerman’s nose.

People are saying the “stand your ground” law applies. I don’t see it. It looks like Martin got mad, chased Zimmerman, and attacked him. It also appears pretty clear that Martin used deadly force. Slamming someone’s head on concrete repeatedly will eventually kill them.

If the facts are as they appear to be, Zimmerman didn’t stand his ground. To “stand your ground” is to stay where you are, when you have the option of leaving. If Zimmerman was on his back, helpless, with a taller assailant beating him, he could not leave. That would mean this is a very routine self-defense case. Not only that, it would show that our laws worked exactly as they should have. If the published evidence is not misleading, Martin was a violent criminal, and Zimmerman was a model citizen trying to protect his community.

That’s a far cry from what we heard last week. And I saw it coming. I knew it was stupid to judge this case before the facts were published. Nevertheless, everyone from Jeb Bush to Al Sharpton has condemned Zimmerman without trial, and they have elevated Martin to a status resembling sainthood, when he may turn out to be a common thug. We now know that he was in Sanford because his school suspended him for possession of drug paraphernalia. He was found with a bag that had contained marijuana. At the age of 14.

Even at this point, I’m not going to judge. Lawsuits and investigations have many twists and turns. Things look very good for Zimmerman, but I am not as close to the evidence as the professionals are. I’m not going to repeat the sin I criticized. Maybe Zimmerman will be convicted of something. Maybe even murder. Maybe a recording will pop up, and we’ll hear Zimmerman tell his buddies he’s going to kill a black kid for fun. But I’ll bet he is never arrested for homicide. Obama’s feds may try to nail him on some other offense, but my best guess is that the authorities will realize they can’t touch him, because he did nothing wrong.

The claims of police bias aren’t holding up, either. I’ve read the police report. It appears that they originally intended to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter, but the facts led them to conclude he was innocent, so he was not arrested. If they showed up and found a live non-black “gunman” and a dead black teenager, and they fully intended to charge the non-black man, they can’t be credibly accused of anti-black animus. And we don’t know the races of the responding officers. Won’t it be interesting if one or more of them are black?

The Miami Herald has demonstrated what this case is really about. Sorry to say it, but I was right about that, too. They put a huge story up in Sunday’s paper, with a half-page staged photo full of crime scene tape. The story was not about the Zimmerman case. It was about our “dangerous” self-defense laws (which–remember–appear to have no application to this case). From the word “go,” the press’s dishonest coverage has been aimed at getting the “Castle Doctrine,” “Stand Your Ground,” and concealed-carry laws repealed by the legislature or gutted by judicial interpretation. That’s all the folks at the Herald care about. If the ghetto has to burn, and if black people have to die or become felons or lose their homes or jobs, that’s okay with our liberal nannies, as long as gun control increases.

Thanks to the press and people like Al Sharpton, we have hundreds of thousands of people who firmly believe Martin was martyred, and they are going to expect payback, and it’s probably not going to come. What then? Will TV heads spend as much time correcting their slanders as they did publishing them? Yeah. Right. They’re famous for that. We all remember how they trampled each other, trying to get to the cameras so they could correct the claim that George Bush lied about uranium ore.

I think violence is inevitable. If the authorities admit Zimmerman didn’t break the law, there will be trouble. It may be full-blown rioting, and it may be individual acts of hate and racism, but barring an extraordinary turn of events, it will happen. And the liars and gossips will be guilty of the very thing of which they falsely accused Zimmerman. The blood of the dead will be on their hands. But bloody hands are nothing new to some of them. Certainly not Al Sharpton, who seems to think rioting is a healthy way of expressing dissent.

If rioting comes, white people will sit safely in their homes, and people of color will die and suffer. Great work, liberal press. Is that your plan for helping minorities? Gun-hating journalists appear willing to sacrifice black lives and use well-meaning black people as pawns, as long as it advances the left’s agenda.

I wish people would shut up and let qualified professionals interpret the law and the facts. I’m a lawyer, and law is not simple. I had to get a doctorate in order to get a license to practice law. If you’re not a lawyer, you have no business arguing with me or any other legal professional. For that matter, most lawyers should be quiet. I’ve noticed that a lot of them are weighing in without thinking. An education is no advantage unless you put it to use.

Even though I’m a lawyer, in matters like this, I will defer to people who have actually studied the case and the law. I’ve looked it over briefly, but there is no way I’d ask a client to rely on the smattering of work I’ve done. If I were working for money, I’d get the books out for a few days and THEN talk. So while I’m light years ahead of 95% of the people who comment in the media, what I’m writing here doesn’t begin to live up to a real standard of professionalism. It’s just idle commentary.

It’s shocking how few people understand these things. Ignorant lay people are spewing worthless opinions so devoid of merit, they remind me of what Wolfgang Pauli said: “That’s not even WRONG.” Sometimes an argument is so stupid, it’s actually counterproductive to acknowledge it. It’s like trying to have a rational discussion with Charles Manson. This is why we are told not to cast our pearls before swine. It’s why we spank toddlers instead of debating with them.

I feel like we’re on a ship headed for a mine at three knots, and no one cares.

The Judge, Jury, and Jailer Will be Back After This Commercial Message

I wonder if anyone in the Blogosphere is paying attention to the Trayvon Martin case. It’s a classic example of prosecution by media.

A kid named Trayvon Martin was visiting relatives in Sanford, Florida. He went out to get candy and a drink. On the walk home, he was spotted by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who was armed. Zimmerman followed him, thinking he might be a criminal. There was a scuffle. Zimmerman shot and killed him.

Zimmerman is Hispanic. Martin is black.

Naturally, the press is crucifying Zimmerman. Because there is strong evidence that he committed a murder? No. Because he is now the face of a good law liberals hate.

Under Florida law, you don’t have to run away when you’re attacked. If it’s legal for you to be where you are, you don’t have to jump into the ocean or out in front of traffic. You don’t have to leave your own home or leap across train tracks while your assailant laughs and sees how far he can make you run. You’re allowed to kill him without running. It’s not your job to exert yourself and subject yourself to more danger in order to save the criminal’s life. That’s just common sense. If the law were otherwise, criminals would be permitted to chase you all day, and while the law would offer you some protection, it would be of no practical use. Few people are going to prosecute criminals for picking on them and chasing them around, when no physical harm is done.

Liberals hate this law because it puts teeth in the centuries-old right to self-defense. Liberals like punishing law-abiding victims, and they want to protect stupid, violent people.

Because of their bias against self-defense, liberals are all over Zimmerman, and they’re lying about him in order to stir up the public. I feel very sorry for him. It seems like no one is defending him.

Zimmerman may be a murderer, but the truth is, we don’t know that, and the facts so far suggest he is not. We should be allowing law enforcement to make a careful investigation instead of jumping to moronic, unfair conclusions. We are supposed to have courts in the United States. We are supposed to investigate shootings and use reason to determine the rights of those involved. Zimmerman is in danger of going to jail simply because talking heads don’t like the laws of the State of Florida. That’s a terrible situation to be in.

Here are the facts.

1. Martin was unarmed.

2. Martin was walking around Zimmerman’s neighborhood.

3. Zimmerman followed Martin, believing he might be casing the houses.

4. Martin approached Zimmerman.

5. There was a fight.

6. A witness saw Zimmerman on the ground under Martin.

7. After the fight, Zimmerman had grass stains on his back, and his face was bloody.

8. No one saw the shooting.

9. There is a recording of someone screaming for help, followed by a gunshot, but the recording is of very poor quality.

10. Zimmerman claims the person screaming was him.

That’s really all we have. The Miami Herald is adding in inflammatory garbage. They pointed out that Zimmerman called the police a lot. Hello? He’s a neighborhood watch captain. That’s what they do. Other media outlets are pointing out that Zimmerman was once arrested for battery on a LEO and resisting arrest, but he was not prosecuted, and no one has bothered digging up the facts.

People are also saying that a police dispatcher told Zimmerman not to follow Martin, as if that has some relevance. First of all, it never happened. The dispatcher said, “Okay, we don’t need you doing that.” Second, the law doesn’t say police dispatchers have the authority to order you to avoid contact with people.

Why are we trying this case on TV and in the newspapers? What happened to due process? What is the point of having courts and investigators, if we’re going to let heartless media halfwits decide who goes to jail?

If there are facts that suffice to put this man in jail, presumably, the police will make an effort to uncover them. If not, he should be left alone.

It’s odd that “journalists” aren’t making more of Zimmerman’s ethnicity. He is clearly not white. Look at his photo some time. His father says he comes from a multi-racial family with many black members. He is part of a highly diverse social circle. He’s not a blue-eyed Aryan with swastikas tattooed on his forearms. It seems obvious that the press wants us to see this as a white-on-black execution, committed by a bigoted vigilante. So far, the only white people involved have been cops and journalists.

If someone knocks you down and starts beating you, you are allowed to shoot him. That would not change, even if Florida imposed a duty to retreat. You can’t retreat when you’re on your back. If Martin was beating Zimmerman, and Zimmerman feared severe INJURY (it doesn’t have to be death), then Zimmerman had the right to shoot. Believe it or not, even in 2012, you don’t have to allow criminals to beat you, just because you probably won’t be killed. We haven’t sunk that low yet. And if Martin was beating Zimmerman, he was a criminal.

If I had to guess–and that means GUESS, because unlike the other armchair detectives, I’m willing to admit I don’t know what happened–I would say Martin got mad because he was being followed. His race was probably one reason he was followed, and even if it wasn’t, it would be understandable for Martin to assume it was. He probably lost his temper and did something stupid. He probably attacked Zimmerman, not knowing he was armed. This is the most reasonable explanation.

Some people say Martin was screaming on the recording, begging for his life. If you listen to it, though, you can’t tell what the person is saying. It sounds like the word “help,” but it isn’t clear. And who is more likely to yell for help? A man lying on his back with a bloody face, like Zimmerman, or someone who is on top of him, inflicting damage?

If Martin is innocent, why is Zimmerman injured? Why were there grass stains on the back of his shirt? Did he beat himself up after he fired, in order to claim self-defense? His accusers have no explanation.

The only anti-Zimmerman explanation that makes any sense at all is this: Zimmerman attacked, Martin overcame him, and Zimmerman fired. That would not be self-defense, if Zimmerman’s attack was unprovoked. But why would he do that? What’s the point? Imagine yourself in his shoes. In thirty seconds, you can send the cops a cell phone photo and retreat to a safe distance to maintain observation. If you attack, you take a risk that your gun will be exposed to your attacker, and he’ll use it against you. There is no reason to do it, unless you’re an idiot.

Zimmerman might be an idiot. It could be that he made some kind of effort to restrain Martin, and Martin defended himself, and the fight escalated into an illegal shooting. And maybe Zimmerman somehow gave Martin time to scream for help repeatedly. But that’s a stretch.

Whatever the truth is, it should be uncovered through a professional investigation. It shouldn’t be buried under media hysteria and racist craziness. And we shouldn’t be ruining a man’s life in order to put our laws themselves on trial. If he’s guilty, he should pay. But I don’t trust ABC News to make that determination.

Internet Milestone

I just looked at The Drudge Report and learned that Andrew Breitbart has died. It’s a big shock.

I was never a fan of his, and he didn’t like me at all. He even referred to me as “evil” in a private conversation. In spite of that, or really, because of that, I am taking a minute to say that I am sorry to hear the bad news, and that I will pray for his wife and kids. This has to be a terrible blow for them.

I assume the usual graceless career trolls will be out in force today, trumpeting his demise as a victory for their side. Usually, people on the right behave better than those on the left, but I do remember the vile things some conservatives said when Ted Kennedy died, so I hope people will take the gloating in stride and not let it affect their own behavior or attitudes.