Have you been following the Harry Potter stories? Want to know the end now? There are five possibilities, as detailed here. But you being you-and-all could guess where this is going. The characters will all go out in a “blaze of glory.” (wink, wink)

In other news, note this from Ursula K. LeGuin on a serious writers. She writes:

Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre?

Today, 07-07-07, is the day of the Live Earth concerts, an effort by world scientists to instruct us in the coming doom and how, if possible, to prevent it. These scientists knew a Ross Perot-style chart lecture wouldn’t communicate bo diddley, so they are masquerading as rock stars. Their message, as you know, is the sky is falling.

The latest news to this effect is the refusal to resign by the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Some feel he has undermined confidence in the center’s forecasters. Also, a lake in Chile has run off into the sea due to global warming. The horror!

The Live Earth scientists want you to know that you are to blame, especially if you are an American. China can’t help it if they pollute the earth while trying to compete in your corrupted economy. Your keep-up-the-Jones greed forces them to produce cheap goods and ignore common sense environmental guidelines. You should be ashamed of yourself and thankful that righteous men and women will take time out of their busy schedules to educate your butt about your need to stop driving all over the planet and shopping at all hours of the day and night. The sky is falling, for pete’s sake.

Okay, let’s sing about it.

The bulls have been slaughtered and their entrails carefully examined by the meteorological priesthood. The shamans declare that we are entering into a period of heat and drought. This isn’t a tough call in Minnesota in July, but we always hope we might catch a break, and it’s their job to dash that hope.

I plan to potter around Blithering Heights on Saturday, staying indoors as much as possible. On Saturday I shall imprudently join the Viking Age Club & Society for an encampment at Minnehaha Park (it’s the annual Norway Day celebration). Stop by if you’re in the area. (I actually have a strong suspicion that I’m our only reader in the Minneapolis area.)

I always enjoy our events at Minnehaha Park, having lived in that part of town, off and on, for several years in the aggregate, sometime back around the time when Minnehaha Falls was brand new.

Here’s what I’m worrying about today:

As you’ve noted, I worry about everything. And I’m confident that everything I worry about will happen, even though several of them are mutually contradictory. I operate on the theory that just because the guy on my right has punched me, that doesn’t mean the guy on my left can’t follow up with a kick to the kneecap.

Anyway, I was worrying today.

Here’s what’s bothering me. Back when the American Founding Fathers were hammering out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they were working off a shared, common world view. You frequently hear people insisting that “all the Founders were Deists.” This is a) a considerable exaggeration, and b) irrelevant in a sense. Because for all the theological differences between the Deists and the Christians, they shared a basic agreement on the operation of reason and the nature of truth. They believed that if A is larger than B, and B is equal to C, then A must also be larger than C. They took it for granted that reasonable men would always agree on such things. It was an honorable thing, a sign of great-mindedness, to yield to the weight of logic.

This was a primary reason for their insistence on freedom of speech. It wasn’t (regardless of what you may have heard) because of their concern that pornography should always be freely available, but because they believed that if all the facts were stated, and all opinions heard, Reason would force all men of good will to agree in the end on the correct solution. Because Reason had objective existence, and followed scientific laws.

This is not believed much anymore.

Today, you have one side screaming its own set of facts, and the other side screaming its set of facts, and these sets of facts bear no relation to one another. The Iraq War that I follow in the news is nothing like the Iraq War that most Democrats follow in the news, for instance.

And there’s no place in our culture for the two sides to find common ground. We both suspect everything the other side says—because we’ve all been lied to too often, and we’ve come to suspect that any “fact” or news report we disagree with was probably doctored. And in the case of the Left, many of them doubt that there is such a thing as objective reality in any case.

We face a situation where the Left and the Right live in entirely different worlds, and can hardly communicate. And it’s not just a matter of Left and Right. There are an infinity of positions out there (this is one of the things that makes the Fairness Doctrine unworkable), and each opinion builds, as it were, its own self-contained universe.

I don’t see any solution for this problem.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Apparently, if you want to argue that your country needs a radical makeover, a complete rebuild from the source code, then you will want to write intellectual books describing the horrid genocide by the country’s founders even if it didn’t actually happen. That’s what Theodore Dalrymple suggests in article on a skirmish in Australia over that nation’s history.

“There is nothing much more attention-grabbing than the claim that your current happiness and good fortunes is founded on a pile of bones,” he writes. “With a bit of luck, this claim will even turn people neurotic and increase the need for therapists.” And praise you for shining the light on the historic darkness and need for change. Let us be one nation, victimized, divisible, with liberty and justice for those who deserve it. (via Books, Inq.)

I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact right now. I picked it up because I’d heard Hunter interviewed on the radio, and he described himself as “libertarian/conservative.” So far I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I’ll probably review it when I’m done. That’s not what I want to talk about tonight, though. I want to talk about the movie they made from the book. A movie I haven’t seen, and have no plans to see.

The main character in the book is Bob Lee Swagger, a grizzled, taciturn, moderately crippled Vietnam veteran. In the war he was the second top U.S. sniper. Now he lives alone in a shack in the western Arkansas hills, subsisting on his military pension, maintaining a precarious sobriety, tuning his guns and keeping his shooting skills sharp. There are three people in the world he talks to (plus his dog), and he keeps out of the way of the rest of mankind.

So when Hollywood decided to turn this book into a movie, whom did they cast to carry this interesting character role?

Mark Wahlberg.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder the genius of the mind that made such decision.

Isn’t obvious to the meanest intelligence (which, needless to say, puts it beyond the reach of most of Hollywood) that a role like that simply screams for Sam Elliot?

Sam Elliot can’t carry a major motion picture, you say? He’s too old to play a lead, you say?

I say that kind of thinking is what’s wrong with America today.

I say that if Hollywood had a lick of sense, they’d be turning out a string of big Sam Elliot movies. These movies would be like the films John Wayne made at the end—improbable action flicks about big old men (Elliot even has the advantage of not having gotten fat) who buffalo the young punks and charm the ladies, who never lie or say die, and by thunder they get the job done.

If they added a little jingoistic Americanism that wouldn’t hurt either. (I don’t know what Elliot’s politics are, but if he knew his best interests he’d do the lines and take the money.)

That would get me back into the theaters.

But will anyone listen? Ha!

I try to help. I really try.