Archive for category Commentary
Carving the Eagle
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on November 27, 2025
If Ben Franklin had gotten his way, we’d have an edible national bird. Or no one would eat turkey on Thanksgiving. That might be ok by me.
Franklin was obsessed with it. He pushed for the wild turkey as our national bird. “Bird of courage” he said, roasting the bald eagle as having “bad moral character” for stealing fish from hard-working hawks. Imagine Franklin’s Thanksgiving. Either we’d be carving an eagle, or we’d eat ham, and nobody would miss two weeks of dry breast meat.
America, commerce always first, probably opted for turkey because it’s big and easy to farm, once tamed by government subsidy. Franklin lost that round, but he did get his face on the hundred-dollar bill.
“Turkey!” as an insult peaked in the US in the 1980s, due to National Lampoon’s 1975 Gold Turkey, and then Christmas Vacation (1989). It originated in theater. A “turkey” was a flop show that opened on Thanksgiving, anticipating a run til New Year, and closed fast. By the 50s it was niche. Belushi brought it back. Kids still use it.
Despite Franklin, Congress went with the eagle as the official bird, and 250 years later the turkey’s ultimate revenge was becoming the official insult. Turkey was relegated to grocery store and playground.
That’s a truly American outcome. We didn’t crown the turkey, we commodified it, mocked it, and ate it out of habit. Poor Ben. We turned his bird of courage into a riff for failure. For a man who valued thrift, civic virtue, and self-improvement, that must be the final insult.
If Franklin could see us now, he’d shake his head, pocket his hundred, and call us what we’ve become. Turkeys.
It’s the Losers Who Write History
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on November 24, 2025
The victors write first drafts. They get to seize archives, commission official chronicles, destroy inconvenient records, and shape the immediate public memory. Take Roman accounts of Carthage and Spanish on the Aztecs. What happens afterward and indefinitely is where Humanities departments play an outsized role in canonization.
Such academics are the relativist high priests of the safe-space seminary – tenured custodians of western-cultural suicide. Their scripture is the ever-shifting DEI bulletin. Credentialed barbarians stand behind at the gates they themselves dismantled. They are moral vacationers who turned the university into a daycare for perpetual adolescents. The new scholastic is the aristocracy of mediocrity. Historicist gravediggers have pronouncing the West dead so they can inherit its estate.
Several mechanisms make this possible. Academic historians, not primary sources – whether Cicero or Churchill – decide which questions are worth asking. Since the 1970s especially, new methodologies like social history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and critical race theory have systematically shifted focus away from political, military, and diplomatic chronicling toward power structures, marginalized voices, and systemic oppression. These are not neutral shifts. They reflect the political priorities of the post-Nixon academic left, which has dominated western humanities departments since.
Peer-reviewed journals, university presses, hiring committees, and tenure standards are overwhelmingly controlled by scholars who share an ideological range scarcely wider than a breath. Studies of political self-identification among historians routinely show ratios of 20:1 or higher in favor of the left – often contented Marxists. Dissenting or traditional interpretations that challenge revisionist views on colonialism, the Soviet Union, or America’s founding are marginalized, denied publication, and labeled “problematic.” A career is erased overnight.
K-12 and undergraduate curricula worship academic consensus. Here, again, is a coherence theory of truth subjugating the correspondence model. When the consensus changes – when a critical mass of scholars finds an even more apologetic lens – textbooks follow, almost instantly. The portrayal of the European Age of Exploration, for example, went overnight from celebration of discovery to exclusive emphasis on conquest and genocide. American Founding Fathers went from flawed but visionary innovators of a unique government to rich slave-owning hypocrites, especially after the 1619 Project gained academic traction. A generation or two of Humanities college grads have no clue that “rich white man” Alexander Hamilton was born illegitimate in the Caribbean, was a lifelong unambiguous abolitionist, despised the slave-based Southern economic model, and died broke. They don’t know that the atheist Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention called slavery “a nefarious institution … the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” They don’t know this because they’ve never heard of Gouverneur Morris, the author of the final draft of the Constitution. That’s because Ken Burns never mentions Morris in his histories. It doesn’t fit his caricature. Ken Burns is where intellectuals learn history. His The Vietnam War is assigned in thousands of high-school and college courses as authoritative history.
Modern historians openly admit that they mean their work to serve social justice goals. The past is mined for precedents, cautionary tales, or moral leverage rather than reconstructed for its own sake. The American Historical Association’s own statements have emphasized “reckoning with the past” in explicitly activist language. Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) boasted, “I don’t pretend to be neutral.”
The academic elite – professional mourners at the funeral of the mind they themselves poisoned – have graduated an entire generation who believe Nixon escalated (if not started) the Vietnam War. This is a textbook (literally) case of the academic apparatus quietly rewriting the emphasis of history. Safe-space sommeliers surely have access to original historical data, but their sheep are too docile to demand primary sources. Instead, border patrollers of the settler-colonial imagination serve up moral panic by the pronoun to their trauma-informed flock.
The numbers. Troop levels went from 1000 when Kennedy took office to 184,000 in 1965 under Johnson. A year later they hit 385,000, and peaked at 543,000 when Nixon took office in 1969. Nixon’s actual policy was systematic de-escalation; he reduced US troops to 24,000 by early 1973, then withdrew the U.S. from ground combat in March. But widely used texts like The American Pageant, Nation of Nations, and Visions of America ignore Kennedy’s and Johnson’s role while framing Nixon as the primary villain of the war. And a large fraction of the therapeutic sheep with Che Guevara posters in their dorms graze contentedly inside an electric fence of approved opinions. They genuinely believe Nixon started Vietnam, and they’re happy with that belief.
If Allan Bloom – the liberal Democrat author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987) – were somehow resurrected in 2025 and lived through the Great Awokening, I suspect he’d swing pretty far into the counter-revolutionary space of Victor Davis Hanson. He’d scorch the vanguardist curators of the neopuritan archival gaze and their pronoun-pious lambs who bleat “decolonize” while paying $100K a year to be colonized by the university’s endowment.
Ken Burns said he sees cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a serious existential threat. He did. The republic – which he calls a democracy – is oh so fragile. He speaks as though he alone has been appointed to heal America’s soul. It’s the same sacerdotal NPR manner that Bloom skewered in the humanities professoriate: the priestly conviction that one is engaged in something higher than mere scholarship, something redemptive. And the nation keeps paying Burns for it, because it’s so much more comfortable to cry over a Burns film than to wrestle with the actual complexity Burns quietly edits out. He’s not a historian. He’s the high priest of the officially sanctioned memory palace. It’s losers like Burns who write history.
Deficient Discipleship in Environmental Science
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Philosophy of Science on October 28, 2025
Bear with me here.
Daniel Oprean’s “Portraits of Deficient Discipleship” (Kairos, 2024) argues that Gospel Matthew 8:18–27 presents three kinds of failed or immature discipleship, each corrected by Jesus’s response.
Oprean reads Matthew 19–20 as discipleship without costs. The “enthusiastic scribe” volunteers to follow Jesus but misunderstands the teacher he’s addressing. His zeal lacks awareness of cost. Jesus’s lament about having “nowhere to lay his head,” Oprean says, reveals that true discipleship entails homelessness, marginalization, and suffering.
As an instance of discipleship without commitment (vv. 21–22), a second disciple hesitates. His request to bury his father provokes Jesus’s radical command: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Oprean takes this as divided loyalty, a failure of commitment even among genuine followers.
Finally comes discipleship without hardships (vv. 23–27). The boat-bound disciples obey but panic in the storm. Their fear shows lack of trust. Jesus rebukes their “little faith.” His calming of the sea becomes a paradigm of faith maturing only through trial.
Across these scenes, Matthew’s Jesus confronts enthusiasm without realism, religiosity without surrender, faith without endurance. Authentic discipleship, Oprean concludes, must include cost, commitment, and hardship.
Oprean’s essay is clear and perfectly conventional evangelical exegesis. The tripartite symmetry – cost, commitment, hardship – works neatly, though it imposes a moral taxonomy on what Matthew presents as narrative tension (a pale echo of Mark’s deeper ironies). Each scene may concern not moral failure but stages of revelation: curiosity, obedience, awe. By moralizing them, Oprean flattens Matthew’s literary dynamism and theological ambiguity for devotional ends.
His dependence on the standard commentators – Gundry, Keener, Bruner – keeps him in the well-worn groove. There’s no attention to Matthew’s redactional strategy, the eschatological charge of “Son of Man” in v. 20, or the symbolic link between the sea miracle and Israel’s deliverance. The piece is descriptive, not interpretive; homiletic rather than analytic. The unsettling portrait of discipleship becomes a sermon outline about piety instead of a crisis in perception.
Fair enough, you say – there’s nothing wrong with devotional writing. True. The problem is devotional writing costumed as analysis and published as scholarship. He isn’t interrogating the text. If he were, he’d ask: Why does Matthew place these episodes together? How does “Son of Man” invoke Danielic or apocalyptic motifs? What does the sea episode reveal about Jesus’s authority over creation itself? Instead, Oprean turns inward, toward exhortation.
It’s an odd hybrid genre – half sermon, half commentary – anchored in evangelical assumptions about the text’s unity and moral purpose. Critical possibilities are excluded from the start. There’s no discussion of redactional intent, no engagement with Second-Temple expectations of the huios tou anthrōpou, no awareness that “stilling the sea” echoes both Genesis and Exodus motifs of creation and deliverance.
This is scholarship only in the confessional sense of “biblical studies,” where the aim is to explain what discipleship should mean according to current theological norms. It’s homiletics, not analysis.
But my quarrel isn’t really with Oprean. He’s the symptom, not the cause. His paper stands for a broader phenomenon – pseudonymous scholarship: writing that borrows the visual grammar of academic work (citations, subheadings, DOIs, statistical jargon) while serving ideological ends.
You can find parallels across the sciences. In the early 2000s, string theory was on the altar. Articles in Foundations of Physics or in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics carried the trappings of rigor but were effectively apologias for the “beauty” of untestable theories. “Mathematical consistency,” we were told, “is experimental evidence.” The logic matches Oprean’s: inward coherence replaces external test.
Climate science has its mirror image in policy-driven venues like Energy & Environment or think-tank white papers formatted as peer-reviewed studies. They reproduce the scaffolding of scholarship while narrowing inquiry to confirm prior skepticism.
The rhetorical pattern is the same:
- Scholarly mimicry: heavy citation and technical diction confer legitimacy.
- Rhetorical closure: conclusions are known before the analysis begins.
- Audience reassurance: readers are not challenged but comforted.
- Boundary play: the work hovers between analysis and advocacy, critique and catechism.
This month’s Sage journal offers a case that makes Oprean look like Richard Feynman. “Dynamic Effect of Green Financing, Economic Development, Renewable Energy and Trade Facilitation on Environmental Sustainability in Developing and Developed Countries” by Usman Ali et al. exhibits the same performative scholarship. The surface polish of method and technical vocabulary hides an absence of real inquiry.
Written in the formal cadence of econometrics – Dynamic Fixed Effects, GEE, co-integration, Sargan tests – it brandishes its methods as credentials rather than arguments. No model specifications, variable definitions, or theoretical tensions appear. “Dynamic” and “robustness” are prestige words, not analytic ones.
Ali’s paper deploys three grand frameworks – Sustainable Development Theory, Innovation Theory, and the Environmental Kuznets Curve – as if piling them together produced insight. But these models conflict! The EKC’s inverted-U relationship between income and pollution is empirically shaky, and no attempt is made to reconcile contradictions. The gesture is interdisciplinary theater: breadth without synthesis.
At least Oprean’s homiletics are harmless. Ali’s conclusion doubles as policy: developed countries must integrate renewables – “science says so.” It’s a sermon in technocratic garb.
Across these domains, and unfortunately many others, we see the creeping genre of methodological theater: environmental-finance papers that treat regressions as theology; equations and robustness tests as icons of faith. The altar may change – from Galilee to global sustainability – but the liturgy is the same.
“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975
I’m Only Neurotic When – Engineering Edition
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Engineering & Applied Physics on October 7, 2025
The USB Standard of Suffering
The USB standard was born in the mid-1990s from a consortium of Intel, Microsoft, IBM, DEC, NEC, Nortel, and Compaq. They formed the USB Implementers Forum to create a universal connector. The four pins for power and data were arranged asymmetrically to prevent reverse polarity damage. But the mighty consortium gave us no way to know which side was up.
The Nielsen Norman Group found that users waste ten seconds per insertion. Billions of plugs times thirty years. We could have paved Egypt with pyramids. I’m not neurotic. I just hate death by a thousand USB cuts.
The Dyson Principle
I admire good engineering. I also admire honesty in materials. So naturally, I can’t walk past a Dyson vacuum without gasping. The thing looks like it was styled by H. R. Giger after a head injury. Every surface is ribbed, scooped, or extruded as if someone bred Google Gemini with CAD software, provided the prompt “manifold mania,” and left it running overnight. Its transparent canister resembles an alien lung. There are ducts that lead nowhere, fins that cool nothing, and bright colors that imply importance. It’s all ornamental load path.
To what end? Twice the size and weight of a sensible vacuum, with eight times the polar moment of inertia. (You get the math – of course you do.) You can feel it fighting your every turn, not from friction, but from ego. Every attempt at steering carries the mass distribution of a helicopter rotor. I’m not cleaning a rug, I’m executing a ground test of a manic gyroscope.
Dyson claims it never loses suction. Fine, but I lose patience. It’s a machine designed for showroom admiration, not torque economy. Its real vacuum is philosophical: the absence of restraint. I’m not neurotic. I just believe a vacuum should obey the same physical laws as everything else in my house. I’m told design is where art meets engineering. That may be true, but in Dyson’s case, it’s also where geometry goes to die. There’s form, there’s function, and then there’s what happens when you hire a stylist who dreams in centrifugal-manifold Borg envy.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Physics
No one but Frank Lloyd Wright could have designed these cantilevered concrete roof supports, the tour guide at the Robie House intoned reverently, as though he were describing Moses with a T-square. True – and Mr. Wright couldn’t have either. The man drew poetry in concrete, but concrete does not care for poetry. It likes compression. It hates tension and bending. It’s like trying to make a violin out of breadsticks.
They say Wright’s genius was in making buildings that defied gravity. True in a sense – but only because later generations spent fifty times his budget figuring ways to install steel inside the concrete so gravity and the admirers of his genius wouldn’t notice. We have preserved his vision, yes, but only through subterfuge and eternal rebar vigilance.
Considered the “greatest American architect of all time” by people who can name but one architect, Wright made it culturally acceptable for architects to design expressive, intensely personal museums. The Guggenheim continues to thrill visitors with a unique forum for contemporary art. Until they need the bathroom – a feature more of an afterthought for Frank. Try closing the door in there without standing on the toilet. Paris hotels took a cue.
The Interface Formerly Known as Knob
Somewhere, deep in a design studio with too much brushed aluminum and not enough common sense, a committee decided that what drivers really needed was a touch screen for everything. Because nothing says safety like forcing the operator of a two-ton vehicle to navigate a software menu to adjust the defroster.
My car had a knob once. It stuck out. I could find it. I could turn it without looking. It was a miracle of tactile feedback and simple geometry. Then someone decided that physical controls were “clutter.” Now I have a 12-inch mirror that reflects my fingerprints and shame. To change the volume, I have to tap a glowing icon the size of an aspirin, located precisely where sunlight can erase it. The radio tuner is buried three screens deep, right beside the legal disclaimer that won’t go away until I hit Accept. Every time I start the thing. And the Bluetooth? It won’t connect while the car is moving, as if I might suddenly swerve off the road in a frenzy of unauthorized pairing. Design meets an army of failure-to-warn attorneys.
Human factors used to mean designing for humans. Now it means designing obstacles that test our compliance. I get neurotic when I recall a world where you could change the volume by touch instead of prayer.
Automation Anxiety
But the horror of car automation goes deeper, far beyond its entertainment center. The modern car no longer trusts me. I used to drive. Now I negotiate. Everything’s “smart” except the decisions. I rented one recently – some kind of half-electric pseudopod that smelled of despair and fresh software – and tried to execute a simple three-point turn on a dark mountain road. Halfway through, the dashboard blinked, the transmission clunked, and without warning the thing threw itself into Park and set the emergency brake.
I sat there in the dark, headlamps cutting into trees, wondering what invisible crime I’d committed. No warning lights, no chime, no message – just mutiny. When I pressed the accelerator, nothing. Had it died of fright? Then I remembered: modern problems require modern superstitions. I turned it off and back on again. Reboot – the digital age’s holy rite of exorcism. It worked.
Only later did I learn, through the owner’s manual’s runic footnotes, that the car had seen “an obstacle” in the rear camera and interpreted it as a cliff. In reality it was a clump of weeds. The AI mistook grass for death.
So now, in 2025, the same species that landed on the Moon has produced a vehicle that prevents a three-point turn for my own good. Not progress, merely the illusion of it – technology that promises safety by eliminating the user. I’m not neurotic. I just prefer my machines to ask before saving my life by freezing in place as headlights come around the bend.
The Illusion of Progress
There’s a reason I carry a torque wrench. It’s not to maintain preload. It’s to maintain standards. Torque is truth, expressed in foot-pounds. The world runs on it.
Somewhere along the way, design stopped being about function and started being about feelings. You can’t torque a feeling. You can only overdo it. Hence the rise of things that are technically advanced but spiritually stupid. Faucets that require a firmware update, refrigerators with Twitter accounts. Cars that disable half their features because you didn’t read the EULA while merging onto the interstate.
I’m told this is innovation. No, it’s entropy with a bottomless budget. After the collapse, I expect future archaeologists to find me in a fossilized Subaru, finger frozen an inch from the touchscreen that controlled the wipers.
Until then, I’ll keep my torque wrench, thank you. And I’ll keep muting TikTok’s #lifehacks tag, before another self-certified engineer shows me how to remove stripped screws with a banana. I’m not neurotic. I’ve learned to live with people who do it wrong.
I’m Only Neurotic When You Do It Wrong
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on October 6, 2025
I don’t think of myself as obsessive. I think of myself as correct. Other people confuse those two things because they’ve grown comfortable in a world that tolerates sloppiness. I’m only neurotic when you do it wrong.
In Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick mocks the need for precision. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey, has a strict regimen for everything from cellular function on up. Kubrick has Hartman tell Private Pyle, “If there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker!” Of course, Hartman hates an infinity of things, but all of them are things we secretly hate too. For those who missed the point, Kubrick has the colonel later tell Joker, “Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God.”
The facets of life lacking due attention to detail are manifold, but since we’ve started with entertainment, let’s stay there. Entertainment budgets dwarf those of most countries. All I’ve ever asked of screenwriters is to hire historical consultants who can spell anachronism. Kubrick is credited with meticulous attention to detail. Hah. He might learn something from Sgt. Hartman. In Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon duel scene, a glance over Lord Bullingdon’s shoulder reveals a map with a decorative picture of a steam train, something not invented for another fifty years. The scene of the Lyndon family finances shows receipts bound by modern staples. Later, someone mentions the Kingdom of Belgium. Oops. Painterly cinematography and candlelit genius, yes – but the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Barry Lyndon is the Dom Pérignon bottle glaring on the desk, half a century out of place.
Soldiers carry a 13-star flag in The Patriot. Troy features zippers. Braveheart wears a kilt. Andy Dufresne hides his tunnel behind a Raquel Welch poster in Shawshank Redemption. Forrest Gump owns Apple stock. Need I go on? All I’ve ever asked of filmmakers is that they get every last detail right. I’m only neurotic when they blow it.
Take song lyrics. These are supposedly the most polished, publicly consumed lines in the English language. Entire industries depend on them. There are producers, mixers, consultants galore – whole marketing teams – and yet no one, apparently, ever said, “Hold on, Jim, that doesn’t make any sense.
Jim Morrison, I mean. Riders on the Storm is moody and hypnotic. On first hearing I settled in for what I knew, even at twelve, was an instant classic. Until he says of the killer: “his brain is squirming like a toad.” Not the brain of a toad, not a brain that toaded. There it was – a mental image of a brain doing a toad impression. The trance was gone. Minds squirm, not toads. Toads hold still, then hop, then hold still again. Rhyming dictionaries existed in 1970. He could have found anything else. Try: “His mind was like a dark abode.” Proofreader? Editor? QA department? Peer review? Fifty years on, I still can’t hear it without reliving my early rock-crooner trauma.
Rocket Man surely ranks near Elton’s John’s best. But clearly Elton is better at composition than at contractor oversight. Bernie Taupin wrote, “And all this science, I don’t understand.” Fair. But then: “It’s just my job, five days a week.” So wait, you don’t understand science, but NASA gave you a five-day schedule and weekends off because of what skill profile? Maybe that explains Challenger and Columbia.
Every Breath You Take by The Police. It’s supposed to be about obsession, but Sting (Sting? – really, Gordon Sumner?) somehow thought “every move you make, every bond you break” sounded romantic. Bond? Who’s out there breaking bonds in daily life? Chemical engineers? Sting later claimed people misunderstood it, but that’s because it’s badly written. If your stalker anthem is being played at weddings, maybe you missed a comma somewhere, Gordon.
“As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti,” sings Toto in Africa. Last I looked, Kilimanjaro was in Tanzania, 200 miles from the Serengeti. Olympus is in Greece. Why not “As sure as the Eiffel Tower rises above the Outback”? The lyricist admitted he wrote it based on National Geographic photos. Translation: “I’m paid to look at pictures, not read the captions.”
“Plasticine porters with looking glass ties,” wrote John Lennon in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Plasticine must have sounded to John like some high-gloss super-polymer. But as the 1960s English-speaking world knew, Plasticine is a children’s modeling clay. Were these porters melting in the sun? No other psychedelic substances available that day? The smell of kindergarten fails to transport me into Lennon’s hallucinatory dream world.
And finally, Take Me Home, Country Roads. This one I take personally. John Denver, already richer than God, sat down to write a love letter to West Virginia and somehow imported the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River from Virginia. Maybe he looked at an atlas once, diagonally. The border between WV and VA is admittedly jagged, but at least try to feign some domain knowledge. Apologists say he meant blue-ridged mountains or west(ern) Virginia – which only makes it worse. The song should have been called Almost Geographically Adjacent to Heaven.
Precision may not make art, but art that ignores precision is just noise with a budget. I don’t need perfection – only coherence, proportion, and the occasional working map. I’m not obsessive. I just want a world where the train on the wall doesn’t leave the station half a century early. I’ve learned to live among the lax, even as they do it all wrong.
The Comet, the Clipboard, and the Knife
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on October 2, 2025
Background: My grandfather saw Comet Halley in 1910, and it was the biggest deal since the Grover Cleveland inaugural bash. We discussed it – the comet, not the inaugural – often in my grade school years. He told me of “comet pills” and kooks who killed themselves fearing cyanogens. Halley would return in 1986, an unimaginably far off date. Then out of nowhere in 1973, Luboš Kohoutek discovered a new comet, an invader from the distant Oort cloud – the flyover states of our solar system – and it was predicted to be the comet of the century. But Comet Kohoutek partied too hard somewhere near Saturn and arrived hungover, barely visible. And when Halley finally neared the sun in 1986, the earth was 180 degrees from it. Halley, like Kohoutek, was a flop. But 1996 brought Comet Hale-Bopp. Now, that was a sight even for urban stargazers. I saw it from Faneuil Hall in Boston and then bright above the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It hung around for a year, its dual tails unforgettable. And as with anything cool, zealots stained its memory by freaking out.
A Sermon by Reverend Willie Storage, Minister of Peculiar Gospel
Brethren, we take our text today from The Book of Cybele, Chapter Knife, Verse Twenty-Three: “And lo, they danced in the street, and cut themselves, and called it joy, and their blood was upon their sandals, and the crowd applauded and took up the practice, for the crowd cannot resist a parade.”
To that we add The Epistle of Origen to the Scissors, Chapter Three, Verse Nine: “If thy member offend thee, clip it off, and if thy reason offend thee, chop that too, for what remains shall be called purity.”
These ancient admonitions are the ancestors of our story today, which begins not in Alexandria, nor the temples of Asia Minor, nor the starving castles of Languedoc, but in California, that golden land where individuality is a brand, rebellion is a style guide, and conformity is called freedom. Once it was Jesus on the clouds, then the Virgin in the sun, then a spaceship hiding behind a comet’s tail.
Thus have the ages spoken, and thus, too, spoke California in the year of our comet, 1997, when Hale-Bopp streaked across the sky like a match-head struck on the dark roof of the world. In Iowa, folk looked up and said, “Well, I’ll be damned – pass the biscuits.” In California, they looked up and said, “It conceals a spaceship,” and thirty-nine of them set their affairs in order, cut their hair to regulation style and length, pulled on black uniforms, laced up their sneakers, “prepared their vehicles for the Great Next Level,” and died at their own hands.
Now, California is the only place on God’s earth where a man can be praised for “finding himself” by joining a committee, and then be congratulated for the originality and bravery of this act. It is the land of artisan individuality in bulk: rows of identically unique coffee shops, each an altar to self-expression with the same distressed wood and imitation Edison bulbs. Rows of identically visionary cults, each one promising your personal path to the universal Next Level. Heaven’s Gate was not a freak accident of California. It was California poured into Grande-size cups and called “Enlightenment.”
Their leader, Do – once called Marshall Applewhite or something similarly Texan – explained that a spacecraft followed the comet, hiding like a pea under a mattress, ready to transport them to salvation. His co-founder, Ti, had died of cancer, inconveniently, but Do explained it in terms Homer Simpson could grasp: Ti had merely “shed her vehicle.” More like a Hertz than a hearse, and the rental period of his faithful approached its earthly terminus. His flock caught every subtle allusion. Thus did they gather, not as wild-eyed fanatics, but as the most polite of martyrs.
The priests of Cybele danced and bled. Origen of Alexandria may have cut himself off in private, so to speak, as Eusebius explains it. The Cathars starved politely in Languedoc. And the Californians, chased by their own doctrine into a corner of Rancho Santa Fe creativity, bought barbiturates at a neighborhood pharmacy, added a vodka chaser, then followed a color-coded procedure and lay down in rows like corn in a field. Their sacrament was order, procedure, and videotaped cheer. Californians, after all, enjoy their own performances.
Even the ancients were sometimes similarly inclined. Behold a relief from Ostia Antica of a stern priest nimbly handling an egg – proof, some claim, that men have long been anxious about inconvenient appendages, and that Easter’s chocolate bounty has more in common with the castrated ambitions of holy men than with springtime joy. Emperor Claudius, more clever than most, outlawed such celebrations – or tried to.
Brethren, it is not only the comet that inspires folly. Consider Sherry Shriner – a Kent State graduate of journalism and political science – who rose on the Internet just this century, a prophet armed with a megaphone, announcing that alien royalty, shadowy cabals, and cosmic paperwork dictated human destiny, and that obedience was the only path to salvation. She is a recent echo of Applewhite, of Origen, of priests of Cybele, proving that the human appetite for secret knowledge, cosmic favor, and procedural holiness only grows with new technology. Witness online alien reptile doomsday cults.
Now, California is a peculiar land which – to paraphrase Brother Richard Brautigan – draws Kent State grads like a giant Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter. Only there could originality be mass-produced in identical black uniforms, only there could a suicide cult be entirely standardized, only there could obedience to paperwork masquerade as freedom. The Heaven’s Gate crowd prized individuality with the same rigor that the Froot Loops factory prizes the relationship between each loop piece’s color and its flavor. And yet, in this implausible perfection, we glimpse an eternal truth: the human animal will organize itself into committees, assign heavenly responsibilities, and file for its own departure from the body with the same diligence it reserves for parking tickets.
And mark these words, it’s not finished. If the right comet comes again, some new flock will follow it, tidy as ever, clipboard in hand. Perhaps it won’t be a flying saucer but a carbon-neutral ark. Perhaps it will be the end of meat, of plastic, of children. You may call it Extinction Rebellion or Climate Redemption or Earth’s Last Stand. They may chain themselves to the rails and glue themselves to Botticelli or to Newbury Street, fast themselves to death for Mother Goddess Earth. It is a priest of Cybele in Converse high tops.
“And the children of the Earth arose, and they glued themselves to the paintings, and they starved themselves in the streets, saying, ‘We do this that life may continue.’ And a prophet among them said, ‘To save life ye must first abandon it.’”
If you must mutilate something, mutilate your credulity. Cut it down to size. Castrate your certainty. Starve your impulse to join the parade. The body may be foolish, but it has not yet led you into as much trouble as the mind.
Sing it, children.
—
All But the Clergy Believe
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on July 21, 2025
As the accused man approached the glowing iron, his heart pounded with faith. God, he trusted, would shield the innocent and leave the guilty to be maimed. The crowd, clutching rosaries and squinting through the smoke, murmured prayers. Most sought a miracle, some merely a verdict. They accepted the trial’s sanctity, exchanging bets on the defendant’s guilt.
Only the priest knew the fire wasn’t as hot as it looked. Sometimes it wasn’t hot at all. The iron was cooled or quietly switched. The timing of the ritual, the placement of fires and cauldrons, the priest’s step to the left rather than right. He held just enough control to steer the outcome toward justice, or what he took for it. The tricks had been passed down from the ancients. Hidden siphons, pivoting mirrors, vessels-within-vessels. Hero of Alexandria had described such things. Lucian of Samosata mocked them in his tales of string-pulled serpents and mechanical gods. Hippolytus of Rome listed them like a stage magician blowing the whistle on his rivals. Fake blood, hollow idols, the miracle of wine poured from nowhere.
By the thirteenth century, the ordeal was a dance: fire, chant, confession, absolution. The guilty, trembling at the priest’s solemn gaze, confessed before the iron’s touch. The faithful innocent, mindful of divine mercy, walked unscathed, unaware of the mirrors, the second cauldron, the cooled metal that had spared them.
There’s no record of public doubt about the mechanism, and church records support the above appraisal. Peter Leeson’s Ordeals drew data from a sample of 208 ordeals in early‑13th‑c. Várad. “Nearly two thirds of the accused were unscathed,” he wrote. F.W. Maitland, writing in 1909, found only one hot-iron ordeal in two decades that did not result in acquittal, a nearly 100% exoneration rate among the documented defendants who faced ordeals.
The audience saw a miracle and went home satisfied about heaven and earth. The priest saw the same thing and left, perhaps a faint weariness in his step, knowing no miracle had occurred. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” he muttered, absolving himself. No commandment had been broken, only the illusion of one. He knew he had saved the believers – from the chaos of doubt, from turning on each other, from being turned upon. It was about souls, yes. But it was more about keeping the village whole.
Everyone believed except the man who made them believe.
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In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union still spoke the language of revolution. Newspapers featured daily quotes from Lenin. Speeches invoked the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the coming utopia of classless harmony. School kids memorized Marx.
But by then – and even long before then, we later learned – no one believed it anymore. Not the factory workers, toiling under fabricated quotas. Not the schoolteachers, tasked with revising Marxist texts each summer. And the Politburo? The Brezhnevs and Andropovs mouthed slogans by day, then retreated to Black Sea dachas, Nikon cameras in hand, watching Finnish broadcasts on smuggled American TVs, Tennessee bourbon sweating on the table.
They enforced the rituals nonetheless. Party membership was still required for advancement. Professors went on teaching dialectical materialism. Writers still contrived odes to tractor production and revolutionary youth. All of it repeated with the same flat cadence. No belief, just habit and a vague sense that without it, the whole thing might collapse. No one risked reaching into the fire.
It was a system where no one believed – not the clergy, not the choir, not the congregation. But all pretended. The KGB, the Politburo, the party intellectuals, and everyone else knew Marx had failed. The workers didn’t revolt, and capitalism refused to collapse.
A few tried telling the truth. Solzhenitsyn criticized Stalin’s strategy in a private letter. He got eight years in the Gulag and internal exile. Bukovsky denounced the Communist Youth League at nineteen. He was arrested, declared insane in absentia, and confined. After release, he helped organize the Glasnost Meeting and was sent back to the asylum. On release again, he wrote against the abuse of psychiatry. Everyone knew he was right. They also knew he posed no real threat. They jailed him again.
That was the system. Sinyavsky published fiction abroad. He was imprisoned for the views of his characters. The trial was theater. There was no official transcript. He hadn’t threatened the regime. But he reminded it that its god was dead.
The irony is hard to miss. A regime that prided itself on killing God went on to clone His clergy – badly. The sermons were lifeless, the rituals joyless, the congregation compulsory. Its clergy stopped pretending belief. These were high priests of disbelief, performing the motions of a faith they’d spent decades ridiculing, terrified of what might happen if the spell ever broke.
The medieval priest tricked the crowd. The Soviet official tricked himself. The priest shaped belief to spare the innocent. The commissar demanded belief to protect the system.
The priest believed in justice, if not in miracles. The state official believed in neither.
One lied to uphold the truth. The other told the truth only when the fiction collapsed under its own weight.
And now?
If the Good Lord’s Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on June 30, 2025
Feller said don’t try writin dialect less you have a good ear. Now do I think my ear’s good? Well, I do and I don’t. Problem is, younguns ain’t mindin this store. I’m afeared we don’t get it down on paper we gonna lose it. So I went up the holler to ask Clare his mind on it.
We set a spell. He et his biscuits cold, sittin on the porch, not sayin’ much, piddlin with a pocketknife like he had a mind to whittle but couldn’t commit. Clare looked like sumpin the cat drug in. He was wore slap out from clearing the dreen so he don’t hafta tote firewood from up where the gator can’t git. “Reckon it’ll come up a cloud,” he allowed, squinting yonder at the ridge. “Might could,” I said. He nodded slow. “Don’t fret none,” he said. “That haint don’t stir in the holler less it’s fixin ta storm proper.” Then he leaned back, tuckered, fagged-out, and let the breeze do the talkin.
Now old Clare, he called it alright. Well, I’ll swan! The wind took up directly, then down it come. We watched the brown water push a wall of dead leaves and branches down yon valley. Dry Branch, they call it, and that’s a fact. Ain’t dry now. Feature it. One minute dry as dust, then come a gully-washer, bless yer heart. That was right smart of time ago.
If you got tolerable horse sense for Appalachian colloquialism, you’ll have understood most of that. A haint, by the way, is a spirit, a ghost, a spell, or a hex. Two terms used above make me wonder if all the technology we direct toward capturing our own shreds of actual American culture still fail to record these treasured regionalisms.
A “dreen,” according to Merriam-Webster, is “a dialectal variation of ‘drain,’ especially in Southern and South Midland American English.” Nah, not in West Virginia. That definition is a perfect example of how dictionaries flatten regional terms into their nearest Standard English cousin and, in doing so, miss the real story. It’s too broad and bland to capture what was, in practice, a topographic and occupational term used by loggers.
A dreen, down home, is a narrow, shallow but steep-sided and steeply sloping valley used to slide logs down. It’s recognized in local place-names and oral descriptions. Clear out the gully – the drain – for logs and you got yourself a dreen. The ravine’s water flow, combined with exposed shards of shale, make it slick. Drop logs off up top, catch them in a basin at the bottom. An economical means for moving logs down rough terrain without a second team of horses, specialized whiffletrees, and a slip-tongue skidder. How is it that there is zero record of what a dreen is on the web?
To “feature” something means to picture it in your mind. Like, “imagine,” but more concrete. “Picture this” + “feature picture” → “feature this.” Maybe? I found a handful of online forums where someone wrote, “I can’t feature it,” but the dictionaries are silent. What do I not pay you people for?
It’s not just words and phrases that our compulsive documentation and data ingestion have failed to capture about Appalachia. Its expressive traditions rarely survive the smooshing that comes with cinematic stereotypes. Poverty, moonshine, fiddles, a nerdy preacher and, more lately, mobile meth labs, are easy signals for “rural and backward.” Meanwhile, the texture of Appalachian life is left out.
Ever hear of shape-note music? How about lined-out singing? The style is raw and slow, not that polished gospel stuff you hear down in Alabama. The leader “lines out” a hymn, and the congregation follows in a full, droning response. It sounds like a mixture of Gaelic and plain chant – and probably is.
Hill witch. Granny women, often midwives, were herbalists and folk doctors. Their knowledge was empirical, intergenerational, and somehow female-owned. They were healers with an oral pharmacopoeia rooted in a mix of Native American and Scottish traditions. Hints of it, beyond the ginseng, still pop up here and there.
Jack tales. They pick up where Jack Frost, Jack and Jill, and Little Jack Horner left off. To my knowledge, those origins are completely unrelated to each other. Jack tales use these starting points to spin yarns about seemingly low-ambition or foolish folk who outfox them what think they’re smart. (Pronounce “smart” with a short “o” and a really long “r” that stretches itself into two distinct syllables.)
Now, I know that in most ways, none of that amounts to a hill of beans, but beyond the dialect, I fear we’re going to lose some novel expressions. Down home,
“You can’t get there from here” means it is metaphorically impossible or will require a lot of explaining.
“Puny” doesn’t mean you’re small; it means you look sick.
“That dog won’t hunt” means an idea, particularly a rebuttal or excuse, that isn’t plausible.
“Tighter than Dick’s hatband” means that someone is stingy or has proposed an unfair trade.
“Come day, go day, God send Sunday” means living day to day, e.g., hoping the drought lets up.
“He’s got the big eye” means he can’t sleep.
“He’s ate up with it” means he’s obsessed – could be jealousy, could be pride.
“Well, I do and I don’t” says more than indecision. You deliver it as a percussive anapest (da-da-DUM!, da-da-DUM!), granting it a kind of rhythmic, folksy authority. It’s a measured fence-sitting phrase that buys time while saying something real. It’s a compact way to acknowledge nuance, to say, “I agree… to a point,” followed with “It’s complicated…” Use it to acknowledge an issue as more personal and moral, less analytical. You can avoid full commitment while showing thoughtfulness. It weighs individual judgment. See also:
“There’s no pancake so thin it ain’t got two sides.”
The stoics got nothin on this baby. I don’t want you think I’m uppity – gettin above my raisin, I mean – but this one’s powerful subtle. There’s a conflict between principle and sympathy. It flattens disagreement by framing it as something natural. Its double negative ain’t no accident. Deploy it if you’re slightly cornered but not ready to concede. You acknowledge fairness, appear to hover above the matter at hand, seemingly without taking sides. Both parties know you have taken a side, of course. And that’s ok. That’s how we do it down here. This is de-escalation of conflict through folk epistemology: nothing is so simple that it doesn’t deserve a second look. Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. Just ‘cause the cat’s a-sittin still don’t mean it ain’t plannin.
Appalachia is America’s most misunderstood archive, its stories tucked away in hollers like songs no one’s sung for decades.
Grocery Bag Facebook Covers
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on June 20, 2025
Kids once covered their schoolbooks with grocery bag paper, doodling on them throughout the year and collecting classmates’ comments. These covers became a slow-developing canvas of self-identity, boredom, and social standing – much like Facebook. Both blur the line between private and public, offering semi-private spaces open to public inspection. A book cover was yours but often unattended, visible to anyone nearby. Facebook hovers in the same in-between, diary and bulletin board at once.
That blur compressed identity into a single, layered plane. Book covers held class schedules, cheat notes, band logos, inside jokes, phone numbers, and the concealed name of a crush, all flattened together. Facebook’s feed mirrors this: baby photos beside political rants, memes beside job updates, a curated mess engineered for engagement. In 1986, no one called it branding, but the Iron Maiden logo or perfect Van Halen “VH” drawn on a cover was a quiet social signal – just like a profile picture or shared article today.
The social graffiti of book covers – “Call me!,” “You’re weird but cute,” “Metal rules” – anticipated Facebook’s comments and posts. Both offered tokens of attention and belonging, sometimes sincere, sometimes performative. Kids chose what to draw and whose notes to welcome, just as Facebook users filter their image through posts, likes, and bios. Each reflects a quiet negotiation of identity in public view.
Over time, both became dense with personal meaning and then, just as quickly, obsolete. A book cover ended the year torn and smudged, legible only to the one who made it. A Facebook timeline erodes too, its posts losing context, its jokes aging badly, its relationships drifting. Each fills the lulls – doodling during study hall, scrolling in a checkout line, with the detritus of distracted expression.
They’re ephemeral. Book covers were tossed or folded away with report cards and Polaroids. Facebook timelines slip backward, pixel by pixel, into the digital attic. Neither was meant to last. But for a moment, each one held a scrawl, a sticker, a lyric, something etched, then left behind. They’re the digital brown paper wrappers for an inner seventh-grader, still expressive, distracted, insecure, and trying to leave a mark before the bell rings.
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Lawlessness Is a Choice, Bugliosi Style
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on December 8, 2025
Sloppiness is a choice. Miranda Devine’s essay, Lawlessness Is a Choice, in the October Imprimis is a furious and wordy indictment of progressive criminal-justice policies. Its central claim is valid enough: rising crime in Democratic cities is a deliberate ideological choice. Her piece has two fatal defects, at least from the perspective of a class I’m taking on on persuasive writing. Her piece is argued badly, written worse. Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson, comes to mind – specifically, the point made in Outrage, his book about the OJ Simpson trial. Throwing 100 points at the wall dares your opponent to knock down the three weakest, handing them an apparent victory over the entire case.
Devine repeats “lawlessness is a choice” until it sounds like a car alarm. She careens from New York bail reform to Venezuelan gangs to Antifa assassination. Anecdotes are piled on statistics piled on sarcasm until you’re buried under heap of steaming right-wing indignation.
Opponents are “nutty,” “deranged,” “unhinged,” or “turkeys who voted for Thanksgiving.” 20 to 25 million “imported criminals.” Marijuana is the harbinger of civilizational collapse. Blue-city prosecutors personally orchestrate subway assaults. Devine violates Bugliosi’s dictum throughout.
Easily shredded claims:
A competent MSNBC segment producer – there may be one for all I know – could demolish the above in five minutes and then declare Devine’s whole law-and-order critique “conspiracy theory.” The stronger arguments – recidivism under New York’s bail reform, collapse of subway policing after 2020, the chilling effect of the Daniel Penny prosecution, the measurable crime drop after Trump’s 2025 D.C. National Guard deployment – are drowned in the noise.
The tragedy is that Devine is mostly right. Progressive reforms since 2020 (no-cash bail with no risk assessment, de facto decriminalization of shoplifting under $950, deliberate non-enforcement of quality-of-life offenses) have produced predictable disorder. The refusal of elite progressive voices to acknowledge personal agency is corrosive.
Bugliosi would choose his ground and his numbers carefully, conceding obvious points (red states have violent crime too), He wouldn’t be temped to merge every culture-war grievance. Devine chose poorly, and will persuade no one who matters. Now if Bugliosi had written it…
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defense will tell you that crime spikes in American cities are complicated – poverty, guns, COVID, racism, underfunding. I lay out five undisputed facts, that in the years 2020–2024 major Democratic cities deliberately chose policies that produced disorder. They were warned. When the predicted outcome happened, they denied responsibility. That is not complexity but choice.
Count 1 – New York’s bail reform (2019–2020): The law eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, and required judges to release defendants with the “least restrictive” conditions. Funding was unchanged. Result: 2020-2023 saw over 10,000 rearrests of people released under the new law for new felonies while awaiting. In 2022 alone, at least 107 people released under bail reform were rearrested for murder or attempted murder. The legislature was warned. They passed it anyway. Choice.
Count 2 – Subway policing collapse: In January 2020 the NYPD had 2,500 uniformed officers assigned to the subway system. By late 2022 it was under 1,000. Felony assaults in the subway system rose 53 % from 2019 to 2023. This was deliberate de-policing ordered by City Hall and the Manhattan DA. Choice.
Count 3 – San Francisco’s Prop 47 and the $950 rule: California reclassified theft under $950 as a misdemeanor. Shoplifting reports in San Francisco rose 300%. Chain pharmacies closed 20 stores, citing unsustainable theft. The legislature refused every attempt to raise the threshold or mandate prosecution. Choice.
Count 4 – The Daniel Penny prosecution: Marine veteran Daniel Penny restrains a man who was screaming threats on a subway car. The man dies. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg charges Penny with manslaughter. After two years of trial and massive expense, a jury acquits on the top count and deadlocks on the lesser; Bragg drops the case. Message sent: if you intervene to protect others, you roll the dice on court and possible prison. That chilling effect was the entire point of the prosecution. Choice.
Count 5 – The 2025 Washington, D.C. experiment: President Trump federalizes the D.C. National Guard and surges 3,000 troops plus federal agents into high-crime areas. Result in first 100 days: carjackings down 82%, homicides down 41%, robberies down 31% No gun buybacks – just enforcement. When the policy is reversed by court order, the numbers rose again within weeks. Enforcement works; the absence of enforcement is a choice.
Five exhibits, all public record. No unsourced 25-million-migrant claims, no Antifa conspiracy theories, nothing about Colorado potheads. Five policy decisions, five warnings ignored, five measurable explosions in disorder, and one rapid reversal when enforcement returned.
The defense will now tell you all about root causes. But I remind you that no city was forced to remove all consequences for criminal behavior. They were warned. They chose. They own the results. Lawlessness is a choice.
crime, history, libtards, partisan-politics, right-wing, writing
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