The Pope went on vacation for a few days to visit the rugged mountains of Alaska . He was cruising along the campground in the Pope Mobile when he heard a frantic commotion just at the edge of the woods. He found a helpless Democrat wearing shorts, sandals, a Vote for Obama hat and a Save the Trees t-shirt. The man was screaming and struggling frantically, thrashing all about and trying to free himself from the grasp of a 10-foot grizzly bear.
As the Pope watched in horror, a group of Republican loggers wearing Go Sarah shirts came racing up. One quickly fired a 44 Magnum slug right into the bear’s chest. The two other men pulled the semiconscious Democrat from the bear’s grasp. Then using baseball bats, the three loggers finished off the bear. Two of the men dragged the dead grizzly onto the bed of their pickup truck while the other tenderly placed the injured Democrat in the back seat.
As they began to leave, the Pope summoned all of them men over to him. “I give you my blessing for your brave actions!” he proudly proclaimed. “I have heard there was bitter hatred between Republican loggers and Democratic environmental activists, but now I’ve seen with my own eyes that this is not true.”
As the Pope drove off, one logger asked his buddies, “Who the heck was that guy?”
“Dude, that was was the Pope,” another replied. “He’s in direct contact with Heaven and has access to all wisdom.”
“Well,” the logger said, “he may have access to all wisdom, but he doesn’t know squat about bear hunting! By the way, is the bait still alive or do we need to go down to California and get another one?”
John Fund looks behind the sudden assertion of regulatory authority over the Internet by a 3-2 democrat majority at the FCC, in open defiance of previous denials of such authority by congress and the federal court of appeals, and finds being implemented the first step of the long-term strategy of a Marxist professor of communications being supported by a sinister collection of leftwing foundations and activist groups, aiming at nothing less that regulatory control of on-line communication and expression.
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”
For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.
Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.
“The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot,” he told his audience. He noted that “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it’d be worthless.” A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.
After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and “said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making.” Together the two founded Free Press.
Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.
These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that “more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government.” The poll went on to say that since “currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly” to prevent a “centrally controlled Internet.”
Leftism originally created political movements by agitating the masses through a combination of flattering their desires and exaggerating their grievances, but Capitalism baffled the Left by transforming the needy Proletariat into a prosperous Middle Class, while Socialism in the countries where it fully achieved power impoverished everyone outside the Nomenklatura. Socialism consequently collapsed while Capitalism thrived, so the Left went back to the drawing board.
Absent economic grievances, the Left with remarkable ingenuity decided to hitch its wagon to the rising Environmental Movement, and to replace obsolescent economic themes intended to inspire animosity and class division with new, entirely imaginary problems requiring the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the State.
Van Jones, the Communist run out of his White House advisor position via the exposure of his political background by Glenn Beck, refers indiscreetly to trying “to pretend” that EPA interventions are required by market failure.
Riu riu, chiu is a villancico (a courtly song form emulating rustic dances) printed in a 1556 Venetian collection.
An arrangement created by the New York Pro Musica circa 1954 is now a popular standard performed by many a cappella choirs, especially during the Christmas season.
Performed here by the Nashville Early Music Ensemble at Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, TN.
Riu, riu chiu / [nightingale sounds]
La guarda ribera / The river bank protects it
Dios guarde el lobo / As God kept the wolf
De nuestra cordera, / From our lamb.
El lobo rabioso / The rabid wolf
La quiso morder, / Tried to bite her
Mas Dios poderso / But God Almighty knew
La supo defender, / How to defend her.
Quizole hazer que / He wished to create her
No pudiesse pecar, / Impervious to sin
Ni aun original / Without Original Sin
Esta uirgen no tuuiera. / The virgin was born.
Este qu’es nascido / He who is born
Es el gran monarcha, / Is the Great King,
Christo patriarcha / Christ, God
De carne uestido, / Made flesh.
Hanos redimido / He has redeemed us
Con se hazer chiquito,/ By making Himself a child
Aunque era infinito, / Although everlasting,
Finito se hiezir. / He made himself finite
Este uiene a dar / He comes to give life
A los muertos uida, / To the dead
Y uiene a reparar / He comes to redeem
De todos la cayda, / The fall of man;
Es la luz del dia / He is the light of day,
Aqueste mocuelo, / This child
Este es el cordero / He is the lamb
Que San Juan dixera. / St John prophesied.
Holiday travelers found themselves stranded at Heathrow Airport, schools closed all over Britain, sporting events were canceled, and life generally ground to a halt due to snow-blocked highways, stalled train lines, and bitter cold.
How well did the Warmist Met Office and the East Anglia Climate Research Unit do in providing guidance for British officials, especially as compared to typically warming-skeptical meteorologists? Disastrously badly is the answer.
[A]s recently as late October the Met Office was predicting that we should expect an “unusually dry and mild winter”. This was news to every independent weather forecaster in the world from Joe Bastardi to Piers Corbyn who have been predicting a harsh winter for months.
But the Met Office of course knew better thanks to its spiffy new £33 million IBM supercomputer (90 per cent funded, of course, by the taxpayer) whose precognitive powers are so great, it is said that on a good day with a fair wind behind it and can very nearly match the track record of the dead celebrity Paul the Octopus. And of course, it’s this very same computer which is responsible for so many of the “projections” – not even “predictions”, note, but “projections” – of Anthropogenic Climate Doom so lovingly detailed on its taxpayer-funded website.
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The Global Warming Policy Foundation posts a series of Met Office predictions and reality checks. The most amusing features a major reversal from late October this year.
Met Office 2010 Forecast: Winter To Be Mild Predicts Met Office
Daily Express, 28 October 2010: IT’S a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years… The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is “almost certain” to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.
————————————————————————— John Hinderaker, at Power-Line, reminds us that, a decade ago, the experts at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit were predicting sadly that snow in Britain would soon become only a memory.
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries. ...
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Our lords and masters of the national elite may have been defeated in the election last November, but they are still our rulers.
Just to drive home the point of who is in charge in this country, the liberal establishment took the lame duck congress it controls and delivered its own special Christmas present to a prized constituency. Now those second-class citizens who fail to attend elite institutions, who live outside the coastal cities and suburbs which call the shots, who bitterly cling to God and guns and are stupid enough to serve in the US military for chump change will have to accept as their equals (and often, undoubtedly, their superiors in rank and command) persons who choose to define themselves on the basis of an inclination to engage in certain kinds of unconventional (intrinsically non-reproductive) sexual activities.
Liberals don’t themselves actually serve in the military anymore. Liberals usually do not even support the military operations in which members of the armed forces risk their lives. Liberals frequently make strong efforts to undermine and delegitimitize the causes for which Americans serving in the military are fighting. Liberals routinely provide aid and comfort to the enemy opposing US forces in the field. Liberals undermine domestic support for our military’s efforts, destroy our national morale, and work tirelessly to bring about our Armed Forces’ failure and withdrawal. Liberals devote their energy to voiding and rendering useless all the American military’s efforts and sacrifices. But the liberals get to tell the American military with whom they will have to shower, beside whom they will have to sleep, who will be serving beside them, and on whom they will have to depend in action.
A certain amount of social friction and the occasional incident of abuse of authority to obtain affection is obviously an insignificant price for the American Armed Forces to pay to permit those wiser and better than themselves to deliver social equality to the oppressed and despised. Besides, along with the burden of providing a new field for the social engineering of a better future for all of mankind comes very possibly a rise to new social acceptability for the American military. Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is quoted today predicting that, along with transgendered roommates and more interesting activities in the showers, military personnel can look forward to a “new era” in the relationship between American universities and “the uniforms that guard them while they sleep.”
Isn’t that just ducky? They may allow recruiters back on Ivy League campuses, just so long as drag queens can join the Marine Corps.
David Ross was recently moved to re-read Atlas Shrugged.
In an experience shared by many, he found the novel much better, and far more worthy of respect as a work of literature, than he had remembered.
The Obama era was, for me as for so many others, an open invitation to reread Rand, so thoroughly does she seem to diagnose the psychology of our present slide into statism (Obama’s constant rhetoric about sibling-keeping might as well be plucked from the mouth of Wesley Mouch). News that Atlas Shrugged is finally being filmed also helped inch the book to the top of my pile. ...
I was trepidacious, however, not sure to what extent I might have outgrown Rand. I was not concerned about the palatability of her philosophy, to which I have never specifically subscribed, but about her prose and her craftsmanship, which self-congratulatory journalist types constantly deride as second-rate, the kind of thing that only a teenager or cultist could fail to smirk at. This passing reference in a December article in the Weekly Standard is typical:
Atlas Shrugged, while a perennial bestseller and an important artifact of 20th-century culture, is not exactly great literature (stilted dialogue and cardboard characters have ranked among the defects pointed out by critics).
I have now reread the first half of Atlas Shrugged, and I can offer my very educated opinion that it is great literature, not necessarily at the sentence level, but in the unstoppable propulsion of its narrative (has a philosophical novel ever been so engrossing?), in the massive, dauntless sweep of its ideas, and in its enormous imaginative feat of creating a myth of our entire world (Dante and Milton are Rand’s compeers in this limited, formal respect).
Even more, Atlas Shrugged is a great work of literature in its comprehensive taxonomy of modern men, in its comprehension of all their hidden springs and insecurities and frustrations and ambitions. Rand fancied herself a political theorist and metaphysician, but she misunderstood herself; she was a psychologist foremost, and Atlas Shrugged is a formidable system of psychology to contraindicate that of Freud. Eschewing the usual bedroom and bathroom preoccupations, Rand grasps that behavior is driven by what she calls ideals, conscious or unconscious structures of value that provide the context for everything we do and everything we are. Freud tends to reduce these structures to underlying psychosexual dynamics, but Rand insists on their primacy and irreducibility, and she illustrates their role as the ceaseless motive forces of life. She is also a particularly shrewd diagnostician of a certain kind of resentment and leveling instinct – James Taggart is the obvious embodiment – and she is nearly alone in realizing that this mindset is no trivial phenomenon but the rotting core of our world, explaining everything from the Soviet world-blight to our failing schools and lousy art.
Rand’s characters are ‘cardboard’ in the sense that they speak for philosophical positions and represent certain types, but each character embodies something slightly different; there is no overlap or redundancy. In the aggregate, they form a spectrum of humanity – a human comedy – that is convincing and powerfully explanatory. Rand is accused of engaging in moral black and white, but this is not entirely fair; while her scheme is moral in logic and purpose, many of her characters – Dr. Stadler for example – represent subtle, equivocal positions. They are not gray, but an intricate admixture of black and white.
Rand sketches her characters in only a few clean strokes, but these strokes are rendered so deeply and forcefully as to be ineffaceable. Who can forget Hank Reardon or Dagny Taggart? Who can forget their triumphant inauguration of the John Galt Line? Who can forget their strange, violent lovemaking? What character drafted by Henry James, by contrast, does anything but deliquesce and drift imperceptibly from consciousness, becoming a vague haze of inflection and velleity?
Atlas Shrugged is a great novel, finally, in its astonishing originality. It has no precedent in terms of style, tone, mood, or philosophy, as far as I know. Victor Hugo may account for its sweep and social engagement, and someone like Zamyatin may have influenced its anti-totalitarianiasm and latent dystopianism, but nothing accounts for its strangeness, for everything powerfully eccentric and not infrequently repellent that Rand herself brings to it, everything rooted in the passionate kinks and quirks of her personality. In the end, it belongs in the category of the sui generis along with modern masterpieces like Ulysses, The Castle, and Pale Fire.
I suppose I would say that Atlas Shrugged needs to be viewed as a fantasy mystery story operating as an extended exercise in political argument and moral instruction, different from, but fundamentally akin to such non-realistic, and intrinsically polemical, works of literature as the Divine Comedy, Pilgrim’s Progress, Utopia, Hudibras, or Gulliver’s Travels.
Rand’s characters are not so much one-dimensional cardboard figures as they are what Erich Auerbach in Mimesis refers to as figura, characters serving as rhetorical illustrations of the operation of virtues, vices, and political ideas in social, business, and civic interaction. The wonder is not that Rand’s characters do not completely plausibly resemble ordinary real world human beings, but that her walking, talking illustrations of virtues, character flaws, rationality, and corrupting delusion are as successfully animated as they are.
Rand’s really conspicuous failures, far more than in characterization, lay in her Bohemian intellectual’s lack of understanding of the normal attitudes and perspectives of businessmen and her glaringly atrocious apprehension of the state and direction of technology. Ayn Rand living in the American 1950s sees the Count of Monte Cristo commuting to the office instead of the Organization Man. George Babbitt, in her mind, becomes transformed into Zarathustra. Rand is also disastrous as a prophet of the direction of business opportunities. One pictures her taking those whopping royalty checks and purchasing bundles of stock certificates in such cutting edge industries of the future as railroads, coal mines, and steel mills. Rand was oblivious to a post-industrial reality which was just around the corner. There are no data processing engineers, chip designers, or programmers in her cast of technologists. Hank Reardon has a lighter new metal alloy. John Galt is monkeying around with cosmic rays. Nobody is building personal computers, cell phones, or the Internet.
Daily Mail reports on the conflict arising from some unwelcome plans for modernization in a 12th century Essex church.
Worshippers at a 12th century village church have launched a bitter battle to oust their vicar.
Some members of the congregation at St Nicholas Church in Tillingham, Essex, are ‘at war’ with vicar Lorna Smith, claiming that her modernisation plans will be the ‘ruination’ of the historic church.
A petition has been started calling for the Reverend Lorna Smith to quit her post as vicar after she pushed ahead with proposals to rip the pews and replace them with informal plastic chairs, dig up the floor and install underground heating.
Anne Burden, 72, a parishioner, said: ‘I simply can’t believe people can come into our village and do this to our church.
‘There have been little nicks in the picture going on since she has been here, but undoubtedly its got worse since she proposed the removal of the pews.
‘Nobody took it seriously at first when they heard but now I think she wants wall to wall carpets and to turn the place into a social centre.
‘I feel so very sad when I think about it – we were a united congregation before and people from the village who are not churchgoers all got involved with the upkeep.
‘It was a beautiful church which was at the heart of the village now that has all changed.’
The building boasts a Norman Nave and 14th century bell tower and is regarded by English Heritage as a good example of a traditional country parish church.
Mrs Smith is thought to have joined the historic church about five years ago but has divided opinion among worshippers when she backed the Parochial Church Council’s plans to modernise the building.
The Friends of St Nicholas have already raised around £20,000 towards the modernisation plans – which include removing the Victorian pews in favour of more informal seating, installing underfloor heating, building a kitchen, toilet and gallery meeting room under the bell tower.
But the scheme has been met with horror by some villagers and led to a day-long Consistory Court hearing which ruled in favour of the changes to the church.
Wśród nocnej ciszy głos się rozchodzi:
Wstańcie, pasterze – Bóg się wam rodzi!
Czem prędzej się wybierajcie,
Do Betlejem pospieszajcie
Przywitać Pana.
Poszli, znaleźli Dzieciątko w żłobie,
Z wszystkimi znaki danymi sobie.
Jako Bogu cześć Mu dali,
A witając zawołali,
Z wielkiej radości.
Ach, witaj Zbawco, z dawna żądany!
Tyle tysięcy lat wyglądany;
Na Ciebie króle, prorocy
Czekali, a Tyś tej nocy
Nam się objawił.
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Amidst the stillness of the night
Amidst the stillness of the night, a voice proclaims:
Arise ye shepherds – God is born to you!
Seize the moment,
Hasten to Bethlehem
To welcome the Lord.
They came, they found the child in the manger
With all the signs of honor
given by God ,
They shouted a greeting,
With great joy.
Welcome Savior, long desired!
Looked for for one thousand years
By kings and prophets
They waited, and you tonight
Revealed yourself to us.
Online reviews are currently scarce, but Anthony Baird did a decent job on Amazon.
Kenneth Minogue has brilliantly deconstructed the way that modern democracies have assumed for themselves the moral judgements that individuals once decided for themselves. Take obesity. Getting fat is surely one of the ultimate personal decisions, but no, it is apparently a `health’ issue now, and is properly the concern of the whole of society. This is because the populace has surrendered to the State the obligation to take care of the nation’s health, and since obesity is a major factor in the expense that the health provider must pay, the state now requires us all to be slim. Successfully elected politicians praise the electorate for their good sense in electing them to office, and then privately despair at the non “politically correct” views held by those same voters on the matters of multiculturalism, capital punishment or sex.
With the State taking over more and more of the obligations that private citizens used to consider were their own concern, (and levying high rates of tax to fund them), then this leaves those same citizens free to spend the rest of their incomes on personal pleasures, secure in the knowledge that their education, health and pensions are taken care of. While all this sounds like some Utopia, it is actually more of a “Brave New World”.
The folks at Maggie Farm and I tend very frequently to think alike. I was amused to find the New Junkie had slightly preceded me today in noticing the same book.
Is there a place for him in the Marine Corps? He thinks so.
One of the few things Bill Clinton did that I thought reflected favorably on his leadership was the attempted “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” compromise on the issue of persons inclined toward homosexual activity serving in the military.
Clinton’s DADT policy was intelligent and philosophically libertarian. I’m not sure that it was actually necessary, as I do not believe that there exists a significant number of persons of the homosexual-activities-inclined persuasion both eager to enlist in the military and emotionally stable and responsible enough to serve, but in so far as real persons meeting that description may actually exist, President Clinton’s DADT policy satisfied both their military ambitions and the needs of the armed forces for good order and discipline.
The attempt underway by the democrat party leadership of the 111th Congress, a Congress currently enjoying a 13% favorable public approval rating, to ram through a repeal of DADT in a lame duck session has more of the character of a legislative coup d’etat than conventional legislation.
The radical ideologues that found themselves suddenly empowered by a congressional majority resulting from the electorate’s choice of the only alternative in the American two-party system to the incumbent party in response to economic disaster refuse to recognize their repudiation at polls nationally in November and are proceeding to attempt to force through yet more unpopular and extremist legislation in the same high-handed fashion used to enact Obamacare.
The leftwing-controlled House has passed legislation repealing DADT and Harry Reid has expressed the intention of holding in the Senate the same kind of all-night sessions used to enact socialized health care to clear the way, in time of war, to use the American military for an unpopular form of ideological-motivated coercive social engineering.
People who have imperfect vision are not accepted for military aviation. The US military rejects people for being too short, too tall, too fat, and too thin, and even for having flat feet. I don’t know the current policy, but some years ago, persons with too many visible tattoos were not permitted to join the service. Open expression of any form of bizarre behavior, open sexuality, interest in sexual fetishism, confused gender identity, and perversion ought to remain valid grounds for exclusion or separation from the service.
The repeal of DADT will make homosexuals a privileged and protected class within the American Armed Forces. Activists and sexual predators oriented toward young persons of service age will flock to the military to plant their subcultural flag. A cloak of federal protection will descend over flamboyant displays of homosexual identity and desire and the symbolic language of sexual fetishism will take its place beside the traditional emblems of military ranks and organized units. Just as a number of Roman Catholic seminaries, in the period of vocational decline following Vatican 2, were transformed into organs of the Hominterm, there will undoubtedly before long be significant non-combat military units completely taken over by, and operated for the benefit of, perverse sexual activity to the most profound detriment of their legitimate purpose.
The kinds of American families which today send their children to serve in the American Armed Forces will think twice, after incidents featuring the abuse of authority to extort sexual access become commonplace.
The presence in the military of larger numbers of a non-combat-oriented minority privileged by a system of political protection will inevitably lead to more military personnel resembling PFC Bradley Manning working in clerical positions of trust and responsibility, and over time advancing in rank. The homosexual subculture is characteristically leftist and radically hostile to conventional society, the United States, and US Foreign Policy. Members in good standing of that subculture are highly likely, statistically speaking, to oppose the operations the US military is engaged in, and to have sympathies for, and ties, to leftwing activist groups. It is no accident that many of the most prominent British traitors of the WWII and Cold War period, the Cambridge spies, Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean, were all homosexuals.
Republican in Name Only Senators Murkowski, Collins, Snowe, and Brown have pledged to vote to break the filibuster. Let’s hope that responsible conservative Republican leadership is up to the job of stopping this outrageous assault on the American military by an insolent and irresponsible gang of politicians whose opinions and loyalties are representative of only a minority of Americans
seems to be the conservative book most of us will be reading during the upcoming holidays.
