Don’t Party Like it’s 1979

My Internet friend Heather noticed I was gone from Facebook and came by to comment, saying this:

Be glad you stepped away from Facebook, the deification of Prince has been just insane.
You would not believe the ugly things that have been said to me because I pointed out that the man was a Jehovah Witness, thus destroying their fantasy that Prince did not immediately ascend to the throne at the right hand of God.

I have seen very little Prince worship on the Internet, but that’s because I’ve avoided it. It must be a nauseating, discouraging spectacle. I can’t even guess what Facebook looks like this week. In some circles, it must be bigger than the death of FDR.

I thought his music was boring. I can’t understand why anyone ever sat through an entire song. But that may be because I simply didn’t have the particular supernatural influence that convinces people he’s wonderful.

If you’re not protected by the Holy Spirit, all the other spirits can make you believe or perceive nearly whatever they want. They shape our desires and reactions all day. Surely they can convince you Prince was better than Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday.

People are still talking about his “clean” lifestyle. The man was treated for a drug overdose and then died several days later in a manner entirely consistent with a second overdose. Okay, sure, his cousin says he was clean. What would your cousins say about you a day after you died? That you were a jerk?

The world is hopelessly screwed up. If you want proof, just consider this: Satan is the god of this world. What more do I have to say? When the lowest, most foolish creature in the universe is a world’s god, things are pretty bad.

Our perceptions are very distorted. We are raised in a soup of spirits that lie to us constantly, and we are surrounded by their human stooges, who repeat the lies around the clock. One of the benefits of being Spirit-led is that the deception starts to fall away from you. When that happens, the world and its values start to look insane and depressing.

My desires keep changing. I want that to continue. I don’t want to desire poison and death any more.

A long time ago, I had a comic strip in development with an editor. I knew I was good at what I did; I had no self-deprecating illusions about it. I expected to succeed. As motivation, I cut photos of fishing yachts out of magazines and taped them in places where I could see them. I figured I would get one if I got rich.

Today, you could not pay me to deal with a yacht. A nice one burns around 150 gallons of diesel per hour, or maybe $450. It takes three people to run one well, and it takes four to fish one. Every year, it has to go to the yard, and you will pay thousands just for basic maintenance. Dockage is expensive. Where I live, the sea is too rough for fishing maybe 40% of the time. Also, a yacht attracts shallow people who think about nothing but drunkenness, money, and sex.

I used to watch Top Gear all the time. I enjoyed watching them try out million-dollar Ferraris and Bugattis. Would I want to own such a vehicle? Never. I’m not even interested in driving one. I’m content to watch other people.

You can only get two people into a supercar. Every time you park it, you provide a target for envious vandals. Everything associated with it is ruinously expensive. You can’t even drive it legally; not if you want to use a significant portion of its capabilities.

I know people who have gotten rich. They probably think they have the world by the tail. It’s really the other way around. They have to deal with employees, lawyers, economic fluctuations, regulators…forget that. They also have to deal with tremendous temptation. Businesses run into potentially fatal challenges all the time, and very often, there is an unethical or illegal way out. I don’t want to face that.

I’ve had designs on really atrocious women. One was an atheist. Others were shallow. None really cared about God. I was looking for stupid things like chemistry. Attraction and psychological compatibility are important, but if both partners aren’t Spirit-led, they will grow apart, and one will draw the other away from God. Once you’re away from God, you’re the tail, not the head. You suffer defeat after defeat. You’re exposed. I don’t need that in my life.

My musical tastes have changed. I have a big collection of albums, and I got an Ipod so I could play them in my truck. I rarely use the stereo now. I want to talk to God while I drive, and the stereo distracts me. At home, I listen to secular music from time to time, but I can’t take it for long periods. The only thing I can put up with for hours at a time is praise music. Or silence.

I don’t see the world as my oyster. I see it as a cesspool I have to wade in for a while. It’s the roof of hell. The only way to do well down here is to focus on what’s above. The presence of God is like a pair of waders.

I seriously believe people who like Prince’s disco music and his image are supernaturally deluded. He played guitar extremely well, and he did arrangements, but that makes him a highly skilled technician, not a real artist.

If you want to hear a good keyboard player, listen to Oscar Peterson. If you want to hear a truly superb guitarist, listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan. If you want to hear a top-notch singer, listen to Etta James. If you want to hear good songs, listen to Cole Porter, Hoagie Carmichael, or Hank Williams. Then go back and listen to Prince and see if you still think he’s superhuman.

The feeling I get when I think about going back to the low tastes of this world is like the feeling a college student has when he wakes up at two p.m. with a hangover, in a bed with dirty sheets, surrounded by the smell of spilled bong water. I don’t want it any more; I get the feeling parolees have when they think about going back to prison. You have to put away childish things.

This world is not a good place or a place where you can build a permanent home. It’s the second-lowest level of creation. It’s so low God doesn’t even keep a throne here. It’s the Section 8 trailer park of the universe. Enoch tells us heaven has seven levels, and we’re under the lowest one. That’s not a good place to site a future.

Prince was a little picture of Satan. He led the musical worship of himself. He focused attention on himself, not God. He was effeminate and spoiled. He devoted his life to bringing himself glory. He corrupted other people as hard as he could. He turned other musicians into little replicas of himself. If that appeals to you, fantastic, but there is nothing about it I like.

It’s so strange that our culture was simultaneously infected by two entertainers named Prince and Madonna, who attacked Christianity while displaying Christian symbols. And those are their real first names, which makes it even weirder.

I’m glad I’m off Facebook. I’m glad I have fewer hard little heads to contend with. It seems like America just turned a downward corner, like a ship upending itself before it sinks. I don’t want to be close enough to get pulled down by the suction.

New Stat Tool

This is highly irritating.

I thought my site was getting almost no traffic, so I was less inclined to write. Because I was less inclined to write, the site got less traffic.

I was measuring the traffic using Sitemeter, the same service that used to tell me 3,000 people showed up every day. I never bothered looking at my CPanel stats, because they were confusing. A few weeks back, Sitemeter crapped out entirely, showing no visits at all. I complained, and they didn’t respond.

Today I decided to stick a different counter on the page, and while I was working on it, I checked CPanel. It turns out I get several times as many visits as I thought. So people have been showing up, but I haven’t been here to answer the door.

I decided to install Statcounter today. The interface is weird, but it’s easier than trying to decipher the CPanel stuff.

I may blog more often now. Not sure.

I guess Sitemeter has really gone down the toilet. It says over three million uniques have been counted since I installed it. I have to wonder how many went unrecorded.

Anyway, nice to see you again.

Introducing a Fantastic New Blogger: Mr. N.Y. Times

Here’s an interesting fact. Real blogs have been driven out of Google News results.

I just Googled the bin Laden story, bringing up 100 “blog” results. My blog used to appear in these searches, as did the blogs of other people I knew. Guess what? Things have changed. In the current results, the closest things to blogs are Newsbusters and The American Thinker. I don’t even see Instapundit in there!

It’s so funny, being this right. Years ago, I complained that big businesses were going to take over blogging and drive the little guys out. Now look! ABC and NPR and The New York Times appear in “blog” searches, but we don’t! We are HISTORY! KAPUT! OVER!

I didn’t realize it had gotten this bad. There is really nothing left now.

It’s the craziest thing. For about seven years, a loophole opened up, and ordinary people were able to get their feet into it and hold it open and talk to the world. Then it snapped shut! What’s left? Is Youtube still doable? I don’t even know.

I underestimated the ruthlessness and selfishness of the big time press, which is saying a lot, given how much I talked about these things. I knew they resented us, and that they would try to kill us, but I didn’t know they would proactively push us out. They have to be using search engine experts and so on in order to do this, unless Google is doing it for them. This kind of thing doesn’t just happen. It has to be deliberate and premeditated.

I don’t know what to say, except for, “Thanks for all the fish!”

It doesn’t matter what I say. No one will read it!

Far-Left Whitewash Brigade Smells the Kapitalist Coffee

Pride is a terrible thing. But I will indulge.

The news says Arianna Huffington is being sued by the people who write for her website. Apparently, one of them finally realized the obvious truth: they’re providing a valuable product for nothing!

Where are the Real Men of Genius people when you need them? Someone call the Nobel committee.

I was saying this back in 2005. I compared Arianna to Tom Sawyer. Remember the story? Aunt Polly made Tom whitewash her fence. Tom hated the work, so as kids walked by, he told them it was an exclusive gig, and that it was a great privilege to be involved. After a while, he had a whole bunch of envious morons doing the whitewashing for him.

I could draw other obvious comparisons, to creatures like tapeworms, but I’ll pass.

I think one reason Arianna got away with this for so long is that she was working with writers. Everyone cheats writers. It’s accepted practice. After all, writing isn’t work. If you’re a writer or artist or musician, people will say unbelievably stupid things to you. They’ll come up to you and say, “Could you come to my house and wait for the cable guy for three straight days? It’s not like you have a job.”

Mind you, it doesn’t matter what great services these people are providing for humanity in THEIR lynchpin-of-the-universe careers. The most mediocre, fungible person on earth thinks his job is more valid than Ernest Hemingway’s. Crazy. They should ask themselves why there is no Nobel Prize in Project Management or Sales or Kitchen Remodeling.

It’s funny; if you have no education, and you literally dig ditches for a living, no one questions your right to a paycheck. But if you go to Juilliard and then play local gigs for ten years and THEN manage to sell a few songs, everyone thinks you’re a parasite when you complain about MP3 theft.

It’s insane. I’m a lawyer, and when I work on a case, what I do is writing. I look at statutes and cases, and then I write my conclusions. I can charge $400 per hour for this, and no one will blink. But if I write a 10,000-word short story, people will think it’s okay to republish it word-for-word on their blogs. And which skill is rarer and more valuable? Lawyers are a dime a dozen. Writing talent is comparatively rare.

Royalties are not charity. If you use a person’s work, you owe them money. I’m not making an argument here. I’m not stating an opinion. I’m pointing out a fact. The law backs me up. You can be sued for stealing artistic works. People are rotting in jail for it. Open a restaurant and play music without paying for it, and BMI and ASCAP will come to your door and threaten you with lawsuits. And if they sue, they’ll win.

Trying to tell this to reasonable people is like talking to people with severe brain damage. “Okay, but if I buy the CD, and I COPY it, then I can give the copy to anyone I want, because I PAID for the CD.” No, Justice Cardozo, that is not how it works. You don’t get eternal, unlimited rights when you buy a book or an album. You get the right to personal use, with all sorts of limitations. If you burn a CD for a pal, you’re a thief.

It’s amazing how greed and stinginess warp the mind. It’s like addiction. Rationalization kicks in, and rationalization is one of the strongest things in the universe. “I can admit the truth, OR I can have 100,000 free songs on my Ipod.” The truth loses.

The public’s ignorant view of royalties is what leads to problems like the one Arianna is having. Even content providers–the writers themselves–start thinking their work is worthless. That’s why Arianna was able to get her site going in the first place. People thought they were lucky to be asked to work for nothing!

I had this happen to me a few years back. I wrote a piece that was picked up by Real Clear Politics. When they asked about republishing it, I was offended that they didn’t want to pay me. In the end, I gave up and let them use it. That was stupid. It did me no good whatsoever, and I was entitled to payment. They never bothered me again. So what? Do I need nonpaying jobs? Is there some hidden blessing in donating your work to other capitalist enterprises? Of course not.

People who don’t pay for content love to talk about “exposure.” If Vanity Fair or Time Magazine prints your piece, you shouldn’t ask for money, because you’re getting EXPOSURE!

Go to the grocery, fill your cart up with steaks, and tell the cashier you deserve them because you got EXPOSURE. Tell her to make a withdrawal from your EXPOSURE account. Folks, you can’t eat exposure. It won’t buy medicine for your kids. It won’t keep you from sleeping on a park bench in February. It’s worthless, unless it’s so huge it leads to bigger things. Being republished on a blog is not that kind of exposure.

Let me use my magical translating skills. “You’ll be getting EXPOSURE” really means, “I am cheap and greedy, and I think you’re an idiot.”

Here’s what my exposure on Real Clear Politics (and websites that have stolen my material) got me: nothing. It was flattering, but you can’t put flattery on bread and make a peanut butter and flattery sandwich.

When I ran Huffington’s Toast, I wanted everyone who wrote for it to make money. I wanted everyone to be credited for their work, so they would benefit from the thousands of hits we got every day. We were going to sell stuff. We were going to have ads. Most of the other writers wanted no part of it! One of them actually called me a filthy name because I wanted to run the site correctly.

These were supposedly conservative capitalists, yet they thought I was nuts for trying to run a business like a business. They didn’t want the public to know who wrote what. I don’t know what they expected to live on while the site generated no income and no one knew the names of the writers. The friction that developed over the disagreement is what killed the website. People just quit writing. If conservative writers can be this wrong, what hope is there for the rest of humanity?

I will note that none of us went on to greatness. Allahpundit, for all his talent, is still an obscure blogger. I managed to publish three books, and only one was even moderately successful, although becoming a religious nut and interrupting my promotion campaign played a big role there. Moxie and Jeff are history. Noel…I have have no idea what he’s up to. Aaron doesn’t even have a blog. This is the great victory our socialist ideals bought us! Comrades, I salute you! The folks at The Daily Kos should get a good belly laugh if they read this. We face-planted so beautifully.

We should have been the conservative Onion (only funny). Instead, we decided our work had no value, and in the end, the free market agreed, and I deleted the website. The Onion is on TV now, and it’s still not funny, but people are getting paid, because someone, somewhere realized that writing is a product.

I should have become what I was lampooning. I should have become Arianna. I should have accepted free work and made no effort to promote or credit anyone other than myself. Maybe I’d be getting sued now, but I’d be rich. Arianna will still be rich when this is over. A lawsuit is a small price to pay.

Of course, I don’t mean that. Losing yourself and becoming what you contemn is worse than failing at an enterprise. And every bad thing that has happened to me happened for a reason. God has swept in and picked me up, and things are better now than I could ever have imagined. If I had become the anti-Arianna, I wouldn’t have God’s powerful presence in my life every day. And I would be surrounded by a lot of sour, unfulfilled, grasping, treacherous people. I’m not referring to the other HT writers. I’m referring to political media figures, generally.

It’s funny; when I look back on this stuff, I temporarily forget how I’ve changed and how much I love life. I feel like I’m the same bitter person I was six years ago. But I’m not. So many wonderful things are happening to me. I trust happiness now. In the past, it was always a rug I knew would be pulled out from under me. I’m on a positive trend that will still be unfolding ten thousand years from now. The things I wanted back then were worthless and even poisonous. Thank God I didn’t get them.

Funny coincidence: yesterday I got a notification that the registration for huffingtonstoast.com was up for expiration. I kept it in my name so no one would try to rip it off. Now the corpse is beyond hope of resurrection, so I guess I can let it lapse.

Seven Years is a Long Time to Put Off a Funeral

I see Dennis the Peasant has quit blogging.

He says political blogging has become boring, and:

Six years ago, the political blogosphere was not dominated by the money and resources of mainstream media and professional political advocacy groups. Now it is. The political blogosphere has now acquired all of the defects (and none of the virtues) of mainsteam and advocacy media. With money has come self-censorship and intellectual dishonesty.

Wow, wasn’t I here in 2007? I talked about this when Pajamas Media popped up. Let’s see. Wikipedia says that was 2004. I’m farther ahead of my time than I realized.

People like Dennis and me spelled out what would happen, and it all came true, and the lemmings and backslappers called us traitors.

Blogging is dead. Or maybe it has come back to life. Political blogs launched by genuine grassroots nobodies got big ten or eleven years ago, and they were great because they were not run by journalists, most of whom are lazy and stupid. Then Big Media noticed the blogosphere, and they started pumping money into it. We ended up with websites that were not really blogs. Chris Matthews pretends to blog. Jake Tapper. Greta Van Susteren. And they’re not the worst examples; at least they have things to say. You can probably find blog-style sites featuring Courtney Friel and and Soledad O’Brien, if you look. Cheesecake and cotton candy masquerade as entrees.

Corporations put up websites, and they force their TV meat puppets to do something meat puppets were never designed to do: write original material. Meat puppets read. They are not built to write. The circuitry is not present.

A few outsiders made it into the inner circle, and they generally became insiders. They were so excited about being recognized, and so afraid of being kicked out, they became what they originally arose to counter. Ho hum. Why read that crap? Turn on CNN, and you’ll get the same spin.

I say blogging may have come back to life, because now that we are insignificant again, blogs may become what they were intended to be: personal, truthful websites written by people who are beholden to no one.

The haves always keep the have-nots down. For a while, the have-nots did okay on the Internet. Now the haves are back in charge. The natural order of the universe has been restored.

Blogging is utterly unimportant now. Truthlaidbear should label us all microbes or maybe viruses or prions. From a global standpoint, what we do is completely worthless. It has no impact. Big Media is safe from us again. Their chosen Internet darlings (recognizable for their sheep-humbling team spirit and complete lack of talent) may get a foot in the door once in a while–they may get occasional chances to bask and kowtow in the glow of Greg Gutfeld’s stagnant, Sisyphean insignificance, or they may be mentioned very briefly on Fox–but they won’t make a living, and the rest of us are permanently locked out of the VIP room.

I don’t think we’ll see another outsider opportunity again, until bandwidth gets so cheap you can have your own hour-long Internet TV show, complete with callers and chat. Nowlive tried to do that, but it failed because there was no way to make the finances work.

Dennis made the right choice. These days, it’s all downside and no reward.

Go Look

A reader has gone and started a blog. You don’t know what you’re asking for, dude! But welcome to the fraternity.

For your reading pleasure…Through a Glass, Darkly.

I Got up to “F”

Between the Sabbath and household repairs, most of the weekend got eaten up, but right now I am enjoying a lull in activity, so I think I’ll see what other bloggers are up to.

Agent Bedhead thinks it’s hypocritical for celebs to devote their lives to seeking attention and then complain when they get it. I have to agree. Go read the whole thing. Heh. Indeed. Tom Maguire. Althouse.

Speaking of Althouse, she is a little sick of the Obama man-crush phenomenon. And it looks like someone needs to hide her fish eye lens for a week. Don’t be startled (or encouraged) by the naked blonde currently on Ann’s site. It’s not who you hope it is.

I thought I was disgusting for keeping canned goods until the bottoms rusted out and the crap oozed onto the pantry shelves. But Elisson has stolen my crown.

Cap’n Bob has an interesting revelation. Apparently, ancient Americans knew what circles were.

You’ve all heard of “eliminating the middleman.” Well, Dan from Madison has a weird story about a company that eliminated its own distributor and left the middleman with no competition. Sweet. It’s a story of stupidity and bad business practices, with a happy ending.

Via Mike at Cold Fury, Jeff Goldstein has ceased blogging. Again. Let’s hope it’s so he can do something more rewarding. He said something about a novel involving a taco shell.

CONCEALED CAMPUS! CONCEALED CAMPUS! CONCEALED CAMPUS! I just felt like sending you there.

Double Tapper is keeping track of Obama’s proven lies. And if you help, you apparently get a cool T-shirt.

Finally, Fausta is going to be doing a Nowlive show soon. When it happens, you will find it here.

Call me Drudgebart

Sondra K. says I have been neglecting her, so here is a link to a fine post she put up. I hope it will change your life the way it did mine.

Elisson says he’s dieting! Less red meat and MORE FISH!

All around me, feet of clay.

Oh no! Amanda is dieting too! Has the world gone crazy?

I may be partly responsible for their situations.

Joe Tobacco calls Joe Gandelsman out, challenging his…moderate…ness. I wouldn’t be too angry with Gandelsman. A liberal who calls himself moderate is infinitely preferable to the Moveon nuts who have a policy of calling talk shows, claiming to be “lifelong Republicans,” and then announcing that the medical marijuana industry should be nationalized and the entire Bush family should be sent to a taxidermist.

Cap’n Bob has a personal Charlton Heston anecdote. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Carl From Chicago at Chicagboyz says England is running out of electricity. Seems logical. They ran out of common sense decades ago, so it’s natural that other precious assets are now drying up. Carl says we’re headed the same way. My response: use all the power you can, while it’s still available! This is like coming up on a yellow light. You have to HIT THE GAS.

Henry Gomez at Cuban-American Pundits is pulling the plug. From now on, content you might otherwise have seen at CAP will be found at Babalu. Funny, in Miami, CAP means “Cuban-American Princess.” Anyway, now you know where to find Henry.

Two seemingly incompatible bits of news from Double Tapper: 1. Israel’s gun laws require people who are physically unfit to give up their guns. So if you get old or sick, the government makes things worse by disarming you. 2. The rabbi and off-duty soldier (describes a huge number of Israelis) who killed the Merkaz Harav terrorist were given awards for their heroism. In Israel. Good thing they were both young and healthy, or else a lot more children would be dead.

That’s all I got for now.

Oh, wait. Here’s Christopher Walken, with his take on Chanukkah.

I got an accountant. Shlomo. A Jew. He tried to explain Hanukkah to me once. He’s like, “There were these lamps, and there was a limited supply of oil, but the oil burned for eight days, and it was a miracle, and then the Egyptians made us make bricks, and we had to cut off our foreskins…yada yada yada yada,” “Get to the POINT,” I kept telling him. “Okay, fine, your Christmas story is a little different from ours, but I know sooner or later we get to the part with the tree and the fat guy in the red suit. I mean, we have that much in common. You people aren’t SAVAGES, right? I know you were behind that crucifixion thing, but that was a simple beef over turf. You guys don’t live in huts and run around in jockstraps made from your enemies’ faces, right? So skip to the part where Saint Nick comes down the chimney and gives you a new bike, because I know that’s where we’re headed.”

I never got a straight answer out of that guy, but I cut him some slack, because I haven’t paid taxes since ‘73. Which reminds me, I need to send a ham to my previous accountant’s widow.