He "will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. … He is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Can you identify the "he"? It's not Barack Obama. The statement was made by the man's father, quoted in an article printed in Slate in July 2000. I ran across that article, which is written by Bob Wright (whom I talk to from time to time on Bloggingheads), because I'd just done that post about the problem of shame, and I knew shame was one of Wright's big topics. (He's pro-shaming.)

But this article isn't about shame. In fact, it cites as a goal to "live in the present and free yourself of aspiration and anxiety" — at least if you want to play the sport played by that "Chosen One," Tiger Woods.

You can't be angry over a previous error or worried about repeating it, nor can you be dreaming of future glory. Gandhi used to say he tried to strive on "without fear of failure and without hope of success."...

At the moment of impact, various golf philosophers have held, your mind should be empty—you should be focused on the task at hand in a kind of nonverbalizable way. Many golfers are good at this sort of unconscious concentration, but the utter consistency with which Tiger Woods seems to achieve it almost does qualify him as supernatural...

Wright makes much of Woods's Buddhist background.

One hallmark of spiritual maturity is unity of internal purpose—the subordination of the mind's unruly impulses to an overarching goal....

"Athletes aren't as gentlemanly as they used to be," [Woods] has said. "I don't like that change. I like the idea of being a role model. It's an honor. People took the time to help me as a kid, and they impacted my life. I want to do the same for kids." Woods likes the Asian side of his heritage because "Asians are much more disciplined than we are. Look how well-behaved their children are. It's how my mother raised me. You can question, but talk back? Never."

Or is that about shame?

"A startling number of teen girls have admitted to having a schoolgirl crush on bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev..."

"... proclaiming their love for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect on social media."

The media is to blame for this, as I accused the other day on Bloggingheads (where Bob Wright didn't seem to get why I what I was saying or why):

"I guess no one actually watches these clips, since not one comment refers to anything we said."

"Am I wasting my time doing this kind of thing?" say I, in the comments to a post embedding a clip from a Bloggingheads episode I did with Bob Wright. I thought it was a pretty juicy segment, with lots of topics you'd be interested in hearing us talk about, but the comments — maybe because they are the earliest comments — don't riff on what we said and in some cases present ideas as if they were not in the video when they are.

Am I wasting my time doing Bloggingheads?
	Yes. It takes too long to watch/there's no transcript/I don't like your interlocutor(s).
	Yes. These things are okay, but writing posts on Althouse is much better.
	Maybe, if you don't enjoy them, but I appreciate them at least a bit.
	No. These clips add variety and dimension to the Althouse blog.
	No. I don't like to watch, but I love that you give those BHTV guys a dose of Althouse.
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"Should a five-year-old have a gun?/Why Ann doesn't like to take positions on policy questions/Gun deaths are declining, but what about spree killings?..."

"Chris Christie: Can a fat man win the presidency?/Howard Kurtz, Jason Collins, Tina Brown, and honesty/Benghazi: scandal or hype?" — those are the basic topics, as framed by the Bloggingheads enterprise, as I talk for 70+ minutes with Bob Wright.

Here's the whole thing:



I'll pull out some choice bits in a little while.

"As corporate rather than government actors, the Deciders aren’t formally bound by the First Amendment."

"But to protect the best qualities of the Internet, they need to summon the First Amendment principle that the only speech that can be banned is that which threatens to provoke imminent violence, an ideal articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. It’s time, in other words, for some American free-speech imperialism if the Web is to remain open and free in twenty-first century."

This is a big subject for me, something I've argued with Bob Wright about, notably in this March 2011 post: "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

ADDED: Here's a clip from March 2011:

"People like the idea of truth. That's one of the things that they believe, that they love truth."

"But they don't really love truth. It's not this unconditional love."

Rand Paul made being against the drones... cool.

Why Buddhism? Why truth? Why children?

I challenge Bob Wright about the way Westerners indulge in Buddhism and a few other things:

"See? He wants you to like him, people."

The notion that technology is the reason the murder rate has fallen by half.

David Gregory, neatly tweaked...

... by Drudge (in Christmas colors):



The links are: "Did David Gregory Violate DC Gun Law On National TV?" and "Mocks NRA Chief for Proposing Armed Guards; Sends Kids to High-Security School..."

And here's the transcript for the whole interview. We watched it. Gregory was all heated up, eager to extract his sound bites from LaPierre, in the typical style of recent gun control debates I've seen, like this one between Bob Wright and Jacob Sullum. The one who wants gun control cranks up the emotion, and the gun control opponent stolidly stands his ground.

It's like they intended to make an implicit argument, premised on the question: This is what a human being is like; do you want people to have guns? The gun control advocate models the answer "no" (because people run on emotion and might do unpredictable, regrettable things). The gun control opponent models the answer "yes" (because people are stable and rational).

It's all about control: Do you think people are self-controlled or is government control needed? And now, I see this post is about to bust loose into a much more general set of observations about politics, and I don't want to do that. This is a blog post, the first of the day, and it needs to come to an end. So let me leave you with 3 brief bonus observations:

1. David Gregory was not appearing on "Meet the Press" as a gun control advocate. He's the moderator... some sort of "journalist."

2. If a new federal gun control program includes a buy-back of some newly banned "assault" weapons, it will be like Cash for Clunkers. I hated Cash for Clunkers.

3. The post-Newtown gun control advocates have been emphasizing the gun, rather than the person, on the theory that a person may have murderous impulses but if he doesn't have a gun, he won't be able to do as much damage. But in real life, if you had someone in you midst who was bent on murder, you would not think: Well, at least he doesn't have a gun. If he goes off, what's the worst he can do, maybe 4 or 5 kids, max?

Reason's Jacob Sullum defends gun rights...

... in this Bloggingheads debate with Bob Wright. Bob is pushing a proposal he writes about here, and Sullum is really solid:



ADDED: Here's the section where Wright hypothesizes a school massacre every day... or every hour. Sullum calmly responds.

AND: I know a lot of my readers think Bloggingheads is too much of a slog, so here's a 17-second clip that says something shocking about rationality: