In the wake of the battle over a mosque at Ground Zero, a move by the Hartford City Council is sure to have its critics.
The Council announced Tuesday that it has invited local imams to perform Islamic invocations at the beginning of the Council meetings in September.
An e-mail from the Common Council called it “an act of solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters.”
The email even referenced the ongoing issue in New York. “One of the goals of the Council is to give a voice to the many diverse peoples of the City, which is especially important given the recent anti-Islam events throughout the country.”
One wonders when the city fathers of Hartford, Connecticut last felt any inclination to express their solidarity with Americans serving in combat in the Middle East, or even with non-haute bourgeois Americans residing outside coastal cities and suburbs.
Their touching concern for supposititious “Muslim brothers and sisters” (How does the Philippine Insurrection song go? “He may be the brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”) has nothing to do with anything real. There is no fraternal (or sororal) connection between the greasy pols of Hartford and Imam Abdul Rauf in Manhattan or to some imaginary peaceful body of tolerant Muslims friendly and well-disposed toward non-believers in Hartford at all. The real relationship is between democrat party politicos and the form of ethical narcissism which expresses itself in gestures of political correctness.
Members of the community of fashion love to strike poses of moral superiority, and no experiences of that kind are quite so gratifying as those which simultaneously embrace the exotic other and at the same time elevate one above the unworthiness of one’s own defective culture, civilization, and fellow citizens.
I missed the Antoine Dodson “Bed Intruder” meme, until it finally hit the New York Times and was forwarded by some classmates.
Viral videos tend to have a short lifespan online. The best ones might attract a few million views on YouTube and get a mention on a late-night talk show before fading into oblivion.
The Gregory Brothers used footage of Glenn Beck on Fox News in a Web video series called “Auto-Tune the News.â€
But in one of the stranger twists in recent pop-music history, a musical remake of a local news clip transcended YouTube fame and reached the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August.
It was a rare case of a product of Web culture jumping the species barrier and becoming a pop hit.
The song’s source material could not have been more unlikely: A local TV news report from Huntsville, Ala., about an intruder who climbed into a woman’s bed and tried to assault her.
But with some clever editing and the use of software that can turn speech into singing, the Gregory Brothers, a quartet of musicians living in Brooklyn, transformed an animated and angry rant by the victim’s brother into something genuinely catchy.
The resulting track, “Bed Intruder Song,†has sold more than 91,000 copies on iTunes, and last week it was at No. 39 on the iTunes singles chart. Its video has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube.
And to top it off, the song was No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week of Aug. 2.
General Petraeus, CNN reports, is warning that some Bible-thumping Florida church’s intention to burn the Koran next Saturday might endanger US troops.
The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church’s plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, warning the demonstration “could cause significant problems” for American troops overseas.
“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan,” Gen. David Petraeus said in a statement issued Monday.
The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, plans to mark the anniversary of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by burning copies of the Muslim holy book. The church insists the event is “neither an act of love nor of hate,” but a warning against what it calls the threats posed by Islam.
The event has drawn criticism from Muslims in the United States and overseas, with thousands of Indonesians gathering outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sunday to protest the planned Quran burning.
“The burning is not only an insult to the holy Quran, but an insult to Islam and Muslims around the world,” said Muhammad Ismail, a spokesman for the hard-line Indonesian Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
With about 120,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops still battling al Qaeda and its allies in the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, Petraeus warned that burning Qurans “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems — not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”
Can one begin to imagine General McArthur warning Americans against burning the Rising Sun flag during WWII, or General Patton advising a news organization that a symbolic burning of Mein Kampf might inflame Waffen SS units?
If you’re scared of the camel-fornicating sons of the Prophet, you shouldn’t be in the US military in time of war.
Frankly, I think instead of these endless exercises in cultural sensitivity and attempts to placate the religious bigotry of the Saracens, we ought to issue US troops bathroom tissue imprinted with the Koran and burn the Koran daily as part of routine latrine maintenance.
We’re at war with militant Islam. Islamic intolerance and insolent demands for deference to their superstition are the hallmarks of the ideology which produced the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Koran and the Prophet Mohammed are Islamicist symbols in very much the same way the meatball flag, the swastika, and pictures of Adolph Hitler were intrinsic to the ideology of our enemies in WWII.
Trying to fight a war, while supporting your enemies’ proposal to build a combined recruiting center and victory monument in the vicinity of their surprise attack, and while insisting on reverential treatment of their symbols, is nothing short of ridiculous.
All this shows that liberalism is so thoroughly decadent, so utterly bound up in namby pamby inhibitions against conflict and animosity, that liberals are basically incapable of making war. The liberal consciousness requires military action inevitably to be accompanied by simultaneous appeasement, and prohibits a genuine commitment to defeating the enemy out of self-defeating fears of antagonizing anyone. All liberal wars are Korea and Vietnam. They all have to end either in concession and withdrawal or in stalemate. For liberals, appeasement is always a substitute for victory.
I didn’t originally think much of that silly Florida church’s Koran-burning demonstration, but I’ve changed my mind. I plan to look for my own copy and take it out and light it up on Saturday, too, just to affirm a general policy of Americans declining to placate hirsute barbarians afflicted with superstitious extremism. If that makes the Taliban angry, that is just too bad.
More evidence of the futility of all human endeavor for those of us with very large libraries from Bookride.
1. Auction houses have become much more choosy. Some will not look at a book worth less than £500 and cannot raise a smile for anything worth less than £5000. Few now sell big lots and if they do they tend to make pathetic sums (with a few exceptions.)
2. An older more bookish generation is dying off or downsizing to homes and flats. Their heirs tend to keep very little and sell off the collections almost intact. Books are often regarded as a nuisance and some heirs are amazed that any money is offered at all. In the case of bland book club books, dull biographies, ‘doublet and hose’ history and fat dated remainders there are no offers forthcoming and owners resort to pulping, burning or the municipal dump. Even charity shops can be choosy.
3. Ebooks are having an impact, not at present vast but buyers and sellers are confused and see books in the main as a declining asset – we are undergoing what they call in California ‘a paradigm shift.’
4. Certain categories of book are holding their own and even improving in value and desirability. Books that are uncommon on the internet or command high prices there are much wanted-expensively published scholarly works, abstruse books and those printed in small quantities. Collectables, signed books, limited editions, fine condition antiquarian books, modern firsts, rarities and trendy art books are all eagerly traded.
I think his comments of the changes in the market for old books are spot on. Important books, rarities falling into established collecting categories, will continue to be sought after, and their prices will continue to rise, but ordinary books, mass market best sellers, book club editions, a lot of the titles Oprah likes, reprintings of standard classics will be rendered completely redundant by electronic editions and will wind up pulped. Before very long, no one will be willing to give them storage space.
Her list surprised me by containing a representative from my home state of Pennsylvania, the Box Huckleberry, Gaylussacia brachycera. It is a surviving relic of the Ice Age, like the brook trout, and something on the order of 100 colonies have been identified in seven mostly Appalachian states, running from from Pennsylvania to Tennessee.
The community at Losh Run, Perry County, Pennsylvania, near the Juniata River, has been estimated to be as much as 13,000 years old, making it the oldest living organism in the United States, second oldest in the world. Only King’s Lomatia, Lomatia tasmanica, a bizarre archaic angiosperm found in 1937 in southwest Tasmania is older. But you don’t get delicious edible berries from a Tasmanian angiosperm.
Dennis Downing and Ross Salter lead the Blue Ridge hounds out onto Clay Hill Road.
We were out early this morning with the Blue Ridge Hunt at Fox Spring Woods.
The weather was very dry and scenting conditions were poor. The huntsman and the hounds were mostly working deep in the Virginia woods and this morning’s cubbing meet was short and offered few opportunities for pictures. Still, the scenery and company were delightful as ever, and I expect Karen will eventually produce some kind of photo essay, which I will link when it becomes available.
These are two of only a handful of photos I took myself.
Linda Armbrust, M.F.H., operating as whip, keeps a sharp eye out for errant hounds.
In life, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was notorious for borrowing without attribution, and the Obama White House has kept the King tradition of appropriation marching on, in an Oval Office rug in which King is credited with a line borrowed from Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker.
President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.
Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure.
This web app only runs in Google’s Chrome browser, it loads like molasses in January, and it didn’t do very much with Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, but for some people it may deliver a nostalgic tribute to your childhood neighborhood and hometown.
Los Angeles may be broke and its public school system may only graduate from high school (as of 2008) 45.3% of its students, but those minor considerations are not stopping the opening of the most expensive school ever constructed in the country’s history.
Allysia Finley, in the Wall Street Journal, comments on the Neronian insolence of it all.
At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wiltshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.
The K-12 complex isn’t merely an overwrought paean to the nation’s most celebrated liberal political family. It’s a jarring reminder that money doesn’t guarantee success—though it certainly beautifies failure.
The cluster of schools is situated on the premises of the old Ambassador Hotel where the New York senator and presidential candidate was shot in 1968. The school district insists that it chose the site not merely for sentimental reasons, but because it was the only space available in the area and the property was dirt cheap.
That was the only cheap thing about the project. In order to build on the site, the school district had to resolve protracted legal battles with Donald Trump—who wanted to build the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi there—and with historical conservationists who demanded that certain features be restored or recreated.
Set to open Sept. 13, the school boasts an auditorium whose starry ceiling and garish entrance are modeled after the old Cocoanut Grove nightclub and a library whose round, vaulted ceilings and cavernous center resemble the ballroom where Kennedy made his last speech. It also includes the original Cocoanut Grove canopy around which the rest of the school was built. “It wasn’t cheap, but it was saved,” says Thomas Rubin, a consultant for the district’s bond oversight committee, which oversees the $20 billion of bonds that taxpayers approved for school construction in recent years.
View a slide-show of the school.
I asked Mr. Rubin whether some of the school’s grandiose features—like florid murals of Robert F. Kennedy—were worth the cost. “Did we have to do that? Hell no. But there’s no accounting for taste,” he responded.
Talking benches—$54,000—play a three-hour audio of the site’s history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.
The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district’s profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district’s Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.
Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.
Mr. Rubin admits that the Roybal Center project was “a tremendous screw-up” that “should have been studied closer beforehand.” The project was abandoned for several years, only to be recommenced when community activists demanded that the school be built at whatever cost necessary in order to show respect for the neighborhood’s Latino children, many of whom were attending an overcrowded Belmont High School.
The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. But even though many Roybal kids can’t read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.
Expect more such over-the-top and inefficient building projects in the future. Los Angeles voters have approved over $20 billion of bonds since 1997 and state voters have chipped in another $4.4 billion of matching funds. Roughly a third of the cost of the Kennedy complex will be shouldered by state taxpayers.
This pompous twerp, Bloomberg, who I think has come to embody the particular stupidity of the American ruling class, because it’s a very parochial kind of stupidity. Presuming to lecture his knuckle-dragging, moronic constituents on how they don’t apparently understand the United States Constitution? It’s nothing to do with that. There are all kinds of things that are Constitutional and are legal, but are not necessarily appropriate.
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On Obama:
A lot of people think he’s going to be a one-term president. The interesting thing is whether he’s going to be a one-termer, as you say, by choice, like a James K. Polk. In other words, he figures he’s going to do what he needs to do in four years, and then he’s going to move on. And I said sometime last year, I think, that what I found odd about him is that he’s the first American president I can think of who gives the impression that the job is too small for him. …
And he’s just kind of killing time in it until something more commensurate with his abilities comes along. And given that his entire view of the world, as John Bolton likes to say, he’s the post-American president for a post-American world, the idea that he would be focused on reelection in the way a conventional politician such as Bill Clinton is, I think is not really part of his thinking. I think he’s much rather utterly transform the United States, and then swan off after a couple of years, and go be a secretary-general of the United Nations with enhanced powers, or whatever racket has been cooked up for him in those years.
Then 89-Year-Old Huntsman Melvin Poe leading out the Bath County Hounds last November (click on image for larger picture)
Norman Fine, at FoxHuntingLife.com, reports on the recent birthday party held for renowned Huntsman Melvin Poe’s 90th.
Hounds were screaming, and the huntsman was cooking. A cattle guard loomed ahead—a coop to the left and a gate to the right. The huntsman veered left.
“Melvin,” someone yelled, “the gate’s on the right!”
“Melvin just kept kicking on, right over the coop,” recalled Joe Conner, shaking his head and grinning in wonder.
Conner, who has whipped-in to Melvin for years at Bath County (VA), didn’t resurrect that story out of a distant past. It had happened only weeks before Melvin Poe’s ninetieth birthday celebration.
A month or so earlier, I had recognized the same notes of awe and wonder as I stood chatting withe Brian Smith, my farrier, about Melvin’s upcoming ninetieth birthday.
“I was just down at Melvin’s shoeing horses,” he said, “and man, he climbs up on his horse smoother than I do!”
Saturday night, August 28, friends and family gathered at the Marriott Ranch in Hume, Virginia, just down the road from Melvin’s and Peggy’s farm, to celebrate his ninetieth birthday and to honor his achievements.
PanzerBlitz, designed by Jim Dunnigan in 1969, was the best of the Avalon Hill games.
Charles S. Roberts passed away recently from emphysema at 80 years of age. Roberts was best known as a historian of American railroads, but in 1954 he took advantage of his professional experience in printing and advertising to found the game company Avalon Hill in 1954.
Avalon Hill created an entire new war gaming hobby with its board games based on historical events. AH’s crucial innovations included the use of a grid overlaid on a flat folding map, zones of control (ZOC), an odds-based combat results table (CRT), and terrain effects on movement, troop strength, morale.
The earliest games were primitive, featuring large and arbitrary units, a rectangular grid offering overly limited movement and possibilities of unit interaction, and thoroughly unbalanced scenarios.
AH’s publication of PanzerBlitz, designed by the legendary Jim Dunnigan, in 1969 represented a design breakthough featuring a hexagonal map grid, tactical level units, and multiple typically far more balanced scenarios.
Dunnigan went on to operate Simulations Publications, a rival company that eclipsed Avalon Hill and created a new era in simulations gaming.
