Welcome to my new bloggy home–a place formerly known as Blather. Wince. Repeat (dot com).

The “Blather” blog broke nearly two years ago (8/31/2012 to be precise) and I’ve been blogless ever since. I made numerous attempts to repair/restore the blog over the last two years. All were exercises in teeth-grinding frustration. I only recently learned that the heart of the blogging software (WordPress) had been commandeered by some pirate invader hack which disabled the Admin and proceeded to use the host server as a spam generator.

Efforts by smart, tech-savvy friends to recover all the content I’d created over the previous five-and-a-half years have all failed. This is profoundly disappointing. It’s a little like losing all the family pictures and videos in a fire.

The blog launched back in March 0f 2007. I remember the content of that very first post:

A day is coming in which this will be a place characterized by incisive cultural commentary, startling wit, and gratifying prose.  This is not that day.

In the years that followed I periodically ranted, preached, taught, mused, snarked, joked and observed. But I believe the best writing I did sprang from family life and milestones:

• Three beloved daughters growing up and, one-by-one, leaving the nest.
• My father’s diagnoses with Alzheimers–his noble handling of the news, his heart-breaking decline, and his passing.
• Anniversaries, engagements, weddings and funerals.
• Tributes, remembrances, regrets and givings of thanks.

I remember every one of these posts. Alas the Internet does not. Well, that’s not entirely true. The “Wayback Machine” and the wonderful Internet Archive has a few pages cached from various dates–here.

I’m still clinging to a sliver of hope that I’ll be able to recover those years of writing. Nevertheless, the last few years of my life have very much been about starting over from scratch. So perhaps it’s appropriate that there is no history behind this blog post.

As before, if you’re so gracious as to pop by here from time to time, I’ll do my best to make you glad you did.

Haven’t seen the film yet but Jonah Goldberg’s (spoiler-free) review of Dark Knight Rises is interesting and worthwhile. He points out the movie’s strong anti-Occupy Movement message. This is an aspect that most reviewers are either blind to (slaves to the narrative) or simply refuse to acknowledge.

An excerpt:

In a society of ordered liberty the physically powerful cannot compel the physically weak for their own ends (at least in theory). Strength and the will to do evil do not grant the license of arbitrary power over others. The rule of law may seem more constraining than anarchy (or even pure democracy which, after all, can be just as tyrannical as any other system), but it’s more just and ultimately more liberating as well. If men were angels, then anarchy would be the only just system of governance, for we could all govern ourselves.

But men are not angels, and that raises the dark irony and appeal of Batman. The old saw goes that Marvel comics are about flawed humans grappling with superpowers while DC comics are about gods who fight other gods. While I think this distinction is a bit overstated, Batman was always the most notable exception. Batman believes that the rule of law, which is so vital for preserving society, can become its own worst enemy when it gives too much freedom to evil men. He is the bully who keeps the bullies at bay. He is the man of will who declares that we will not live in a society ruled by men of will.

(emphasis mine)

Via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, mil-blogger Ace of Spades has passed along a list of incidents in which some prominent media type or lefty has been quick to smear the Tea Party following some tragedy. Here.

So . . . as soon at ABC News’ Brian Ross and his peeps learned the name of the Denver movie theater shooter, their first impulse was to check the name against the rolls of the Aurora Tea Party. And when he found a similar name, he went immediately onto to national television to announce it.

It became clear almost immediately that Ross had made a egregious, inexcusable mistake. The shooter was a twenty-something. The innocent Tea Party member was a Hispanic gentleman in his fifties.

It’s a telling incident. The postmodern liberals who staff the mainstream news organizations as well as write today’s television dramas and sitcoms are abject slaves to their preferred narratives. By that I mean, they’ve adopted a preferred, self-flattering view of the world and no avalanch or facts or reality will move them out of it.

In that view, the “occupy” protesters are noble, peace-loving, principled altruists.  While the Tea Party activists are dangerous, angry, selfish and ill-informed. Psychological projection, anyone?

Brian Ross and his staff live and work in a comfortable echo chamber in which all the right people “know” all the same things. They “know” that Sarah Palin is a dunce. All evidence that supports that narrative is noted and filed. All evidence that refutes it is ignored. All ambiguous evidence is spun and interpreted to support the narrative.

They “know” that conservatives are mindless, uninformed drones tuning in to Rush Limbaugh daily to find out what they’re supposed to think. They also “know” that they and their fellow postmod libs only tune into the Jon Stewart and Bill Maher for erudite, enlightened observations.

Conservatives aren’t immune from cognitive biases that lead to selective filtering of information. But as I mentioned in a previous post, conservatives don’t have the luxury if living in a media culture that is constantly reinforcing their preferred narrative.

It’s no surprise to any intellectually honest person paying attention that the major mainstream news organizations are slaves to the liberal narrative. But in the last few days Brian Ross and ABC News made that strikingly, unforgivably undeniable.

The terrible price of a Korean defection

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17767626