The extreme angle obviously precluded application of Pei Mei’s Five-Point-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique.
Allison Pearson, in the Telegraph, used a Harry Potter theme to turn the proceedings of the Murdoch hearing into comedy, but she did get off several good lines. I liked the “Galapagos turtle old” bit, and she properly paid tribute to the formidable Wendi Deng.
[O]ur first glimpse of the legendary media mogul was a huge anticlimax. Good grief, could that really be him? He was shockingly old. I mean, Galapagos tortoise old.
Despite the sharp pinstripe suit and fashionably strobing, chunky tie, the octogenarian Murdoch looked less like a master of the universe than one of those Ukrainian pensioners who is dragged from obscurity to testify about a suspected past as a war criminal.
“Nope.†“Nope.†And “nope.†Those were the News Corp chairman’s first three answers to a fusillade of passionately incensed questions from Tom Watson, who knows a great deal more about the News of the World and its reporting practices than its owner seemed to.
Seated at the right hand of the father was James Murdoch, who kept stepping in to speak for his faltering parent. “We were not in full possession of the facts,†explained James.
Never mind the facts, in the opening 10 minutes Murdoch Senior seemed to be scarcely in possession of his faculties. In the interminable and embarrassing silences between question and answer, you wondered whether our star witness, with his head lolling forward, had actually nodded off.
The only sign of the force he once was came when Rupert began to bang out his answers on the pine table in front of him with flattened palms; a defiant, almost contemptuous sound that was perturbingly at odds with the words of regret and contrition coming out of his mouth.
At one point, Wendi Deng, who was seated just behind her husband, leant forward to try to stop him hitting the table. She just couldn’t help herself; Rupert’s unconscious drumbeat of defiance was clearly spoiling the carefully calibrated performance that both men were putting on to reassure their shareholders and save their business.
Wow, Wendi! Trust me, you don’t want to mess with the Chinese-born third Mrs Murdoch. Immaculate in a coral pink jacket and polka dot skirt with killer heels, Wendi is two parts care nurse to three parts Ninja.
With her lovely head cocked alertly and her laser eyes drilling into Rupert’s impertinent interrogators, you could almost read the thoughts running through her mind:
“Ha! In my country, you take the fat Scottish MP man, leave him tied to bamboo in sun for five days, cut out his liver then serve him with soft noodle!†We’ll come back to scary Ninja Wendi in a minute. …
[Then, comes the pie attack]
There was uproar in the committee room. Louise Mensch was caught mid-question, her mouth forming a horrified O of astonishment when, suddenly, came a flying, vengeful form. Pow! Kaboom! It was Ninja Wendi.
For over two hours, Mrs Murdoch had looked like she was longing to punch someone and here was a chance. Not Tom Watson, sadly, but the next best thing. A fantastic hook to the assailant’s jaw left you in no doubt that the killer Murdoch instinct has not passed to the son, but to the missus.
When one of those pie-throwing commies went after Rupert Murdoch during Parliamentiary hearings on the News of the World phone hacking scandal, his much-younger Chinese wife, Wendi Deng, sprang to the octogenarian’s defense, delivering an excellent palm strike to the face of the attacker. Approving comments and general applause followed from all corners.
Wendi Deng, it turns out, studied at the Yale School of Organization and Management, presumably after leaving the Shaolin Temple.
Pity the fate of the less-than-top-rank right-wing blogger. Not only did the Age of Obama not create booming traffic for us, we’re actually an endangered species, argues John Hawkins.
[W]hen Barack Obama got into power, you’d have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the early Bush years.
That didn’t happen.
Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are starting up new blogs.
The problem is that there are no ecological niches vacant anymore, he contends. Insignificant microbes, to employ NZ Bear‘s metaphors, find it harder to evolve. You become a Crunchy Crustacean or even a Flappy Bird, and that’s it. The days of evolving into Higher Beings are over. There is simply too much higher quality competition for almost any blogger to overcome.
The market has also become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.
Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which is a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. …
Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.
I think there is more than a small amount of truth in what he says. The top ranking bloggers are very, very talented people who are incredibly hard working, and the successful ones now have staffs. Few people and only the most professional are going to make it to the top.
But Ann Althouse is right in offering the response that not every conservative blogger is really trying to play the game professionally. A number of bloggers, like myself and the talented crew who publish at Maggie’s Farm, think of ourselves as “boutique bloggers,” catering to a smaller, but more sophisticated and discriminating, audience. Our blogging activities reflect our own eccentric and individualistic personalities.
I often think of my own blogging as just an alternative high tech way of forwarding links to my friends.
As to future readership growth, who knows? I do find it is much more difficult to get links from the top blogs anymore, but I also long ago quit emailing links to them seeking their attention. I’m looking forward to seeing what the 2012 election is going to do for blog readership myself.
I’m more optimistic. I think, on the prospects of blogging, we can refer to Henry David Thoreau’s estimate of the human condition generally: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
Michael A. Walsh, in the New York Post, identifies the key issue in the current political crisis, something at stake even more important than economic prosperity: the choice for America of freedom versus dependency.
When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?
For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about — the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don’t believe it, just look at President Obama’s veiled threat to withhold Grandma’s Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.
The feds now borrow 43 cents of every dollar they spend. Under Obama, outlays have soared to nearly a quarter of GDP (the historical average is just under 20 percent) — and once ObamaCare starts to fully kick in around 2014, it will only rise.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest consume — at the moment — nearly half of our $3.8 trillion budget. …
The debt-ceiling cage match is the culmination of the Democrats’ 75-year-long fight to establish a voting bloc of dependents under the false flags of “compassion” and “social justice.” It’s sapped our strength, created a welfare mentality and, if unchecked, will reduce us to a nation of aging, resentful beggars with eyes cast permanently toward Washington.
The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: “and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” By definition, dependents are not free.
British newspapers don’t simply all bug people’s phones and publish photographs of naked girls. The Telegraph, for instance, commonly offers slide-shows on interesting subjects, including one on the unconventional and highly imaginative operatic stagings done on a floating stage platform on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festpiele.
There are 7000 seats and a Seebühne (a floating stage) on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival in Bregenz, Austria). Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera,” in 1999, was performed on a giant book being read by a skeleton.
Michelangelo?, Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels, 16th century, currently, Ashmolean Museum
The British Province of the Society of Jesus must be gearing up for a major weekend in Las Vegas. They just sold the oldest intact surviving European book, the Stonyhust Gospel, to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m). Now, they’re getting ready to put up the spout a painting identified by an Italian art historian as a Michelangelo which could conceivably fetch $100m or more at auction.
Campion Hall, one of six Permanent Private Halls (essentially small-scale divinity schools, operated by different religious denominations or religious orders thereof) at Oxford University, owns a painting purchased by a previous master at a Sotheby’s auction in 1930.
It was scientifically-examined using infrared photography by Antonio Forcellino, an art historian who has written several books on Michelangelo (including the just-published The Lost Michelangelos), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
The painting was previously believed to have been executed by Marcello Venusti, a Mannerist painter who sometimes worked from Michelangelo’s designs. But Forcellino was convinced that the painting was really the work of the master’s own hand, and he was able to associate the painting with a close friend of the famous artist, Tommaso Cavalieri, by the presence of 18 seals of the Cavalieri family coat of arms still present on the edge of the panel.
Dmitri offers a characteristically insouciant (some would say, “accident-waiting-to-happen”) Russian approach to playing with seriously dangerous toys.
Gasoline-flavored pork! Yum.
Dmitri has his own blog: FPS Russia, devoted entirely to videos of the man himself playing mostly with the kind of stuff the BATF doesn’t want you to have. Are flamethrowers legal in Russia, do you suppose? Does anybody know what the “FPS” in FPS Russia stands for?
Noemie Emery, in the American Spectator, is a bit too kind, I think, to the creators of the Welfare State, but she correctly identifies the fallacy of promoting wishes into rights. Authentic rights are always take the form “shall not do to you, or shall not stop you.” Legitimate rights are simply negatives commandments to violations of person, property, or liberty. Positive rights are a blank check written on someone else’s account.
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,†quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should†do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can†part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good†with a “right.
James Pethokoukis suggests that the lights burned late on Friday at the White House and loud sounds of weeping could be heard by anyone nearby.
[Friday] night in a new report, Democrat-friendly Goldman Sachs dropped an economic bomb on President Obama’s chances for reelection (bold is mine):
Following another week of weak economic data, we have cut our estimates for real GDP growth in the second and third quarter of 2011 to 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively, from 2% and 3.25%. Our forecasts for Q4 and 2012 are under review, but even excluding any further changes we now expect the unemployment rate to come down only modestly to 8¾% at the end of 2012.
The main reason for the downgrade is that the high-frequency information on overall economic activity has continued to fall substantially short of our expectations. … Some of this weakness is undoubtedly related to the disruptions to the supply chain—specifically in the auto sector—following the East Japan earthquake. By our estimates, this disruption has subtracted around ½ percentage point from second-quarter GDP growth. We expect this hit to reverse fully in the next couple of months, and this could add ½ point to third-quarter GDP growth. Moreover, some of the hit from higher energy costs is probably also temporary, as crude prices are down on net over the past three months. But the slowdown of recent months goes well beyond what can be explained with these temporary effects. … final demand growth has slowed to a pace that is typically only seen in recessions. .. Moreover, if the economy returns to recession—not our forecast, but clearly a possibility given the recent numbers …
Alarms bells must be ringing all over Obamaland today. Unemployment on Election Day about where it is right now? Sputtering — if not stalling — economic growth? To many Americans that would sound like the car is back in the ditch — if it was ever out.
), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
