WHAT WE BELIEVE

Sitemeter predicts this little blog will have 3000 visits in the next month. Even accounting for my re-reading "Rebar for Tootsie Rolls", that means a lot of people we don't know are reading this. Many are new to Eisengeiste, and so perhaps it would be worthwhile to explain who we are and what we do here.

First of all, Eisengeiste is a conversation. It's basically the conversation you'd have in a bar with your friends if your friends were clever traffic menaces from Boston, Skinhead-whipping hotties from West Virginia, and street thugs who grew up together on the mean streets of Anchorage, Alaska in the 70s. It's a little different from a bar conversation, though, because most bar conversations are incomprehensible infantile gibberish. Eisengeiste is usually not infantile.

Eisengeiste has standards. We will not publish or comment on sex, hot sex, porn, gay porn, Britney Spears, Halle Berry nude, hot teen cheerleaders, Anna Kournikova, Ana Kornikova, Annie Kuournikafka, Christo, or libertarianism.

What does the name mean? It means "Iron Minds" in German, except we're bad at German, so not really. For you n8bes, Ironminds was a blog site that ran for while in Bubble Time. It was wildly uneven, but it had its moments. It's gone now. When we started this blog a couple years ago we wanted to make sure it was pretentious, ironic, and completely self-absorbed. So we named it The New York Observer. But we found out that was taken. So it's Eisengeiste, or Esprit de Fer, or Mentes Ferrarius, or whatever seems fitting at the moment.

Some of the contributors on Eisengeiste are actual public figures, who have posted their profiles on the Internet so they can be contacted by Hot Singles in Their Area. Some are out of the closet, but hoping no one notices. And some of us are in the Federal Witless Protection Program.

But, for all our diversity, there are themes and ideas that we all share, things we're all on board with. Topics where we all sing from the same hymnal, as it were. Briefly, these are:

• We believe that the basic unit of moral calculus is human suffering and that we live in an age where the mighty make up fairy tales to distract the rest of us from the wounds they inflict. OK, that's no different from any other age, but it annoys us.
  
• We believe torturing for freedom is like fucking for chastity.
  
• We believe The Royal Navy had a pretty good run there.
  
• We believe that most everything, including a lot of stuff you don't want, is for sale.
  
• We believes that Ulysses, wearied of wonders, wept with love on seeing Ithaca, humble and green, and that Art is that Ithaca - a green eternity, not wonders. Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same and yet another, like the river flowing.
• We believe that the current account deficit of the United States has reached unsustainable levels and will correct via continued depreciation of the dollar vis a vis the currencies of developing Asian countries.
• We believe, when playing chess against a stranger on a train, you should essay the Latvian Gambit and go for the throat.
• We believe John Taffin has matched the great Elmer Keith in his careful and nuanced presentation of the relative merits of American sixguns.
  
• We prefer the V-Max to the Vespa.
• We believe if it's not Scottish, it's CRAP, and Martyn Bennet died before his time.
  
• And Bush sucks.