Archive for December, 2011
23 Dec 2011

Es ist ein’ Ros’ Entsprungen

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Es ist ein’ Ros’ Entsprungen is an early German Christmas carol and Marian hymn performed in a harmony written by Praetorius in 1609 by the Dresdner Kreuzchor.

23 Dec 2011

Defending Scrooge

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E. Scrooge, CEO of Scrooge & Marley, LLC with his ne’er-do-well nephew Fred.


Jim Lacy
, at National Review On-Line, has a spirited defense of one of the first of the 1%-ers.

I contend that Scrooge, before he became “enlightened,” was already doing more to help his fellow man than any of the other main characters we meet in A Christmas Carol. Moreover, by giving away a substantial portion of his accumulated fortune, he drastically reduced his ability to do even more good in the world.

Scrooge was a “man of business” and evidently a shrewd and successful one. Although Dickens fails to tell us exactly what line of business Scrooge is in, a typical 19th-century “man of business” could be expected to involve himself in many endeavors — what investment advisers today refer to as diversifying one’s risk. One can infer from A Christmas Carol that Scrooge was a financier, who lent money to both businesses and individuals. He also spent long hours at the Exchange, probably speculating on commodities, buying and selling government debt, and purchasing and selling shares in various joint stock companies.

We can also infer some things about Scrooge that Dickens does not tell us directly. He left boarding school early, supposedly because his father had a change of heart toward him and wanted him home. A lack of finances may also have had something to do with it, as Scrooge’s formal education ended early and he was apprenticed as a low-level clerk to a tradesman — Mr. Fezziwig. From this low start, Scrooge exhibited a relentless drive that eventually made him rich. Along the way, his business had to survive the Napoleonic Wars, adapt to the Industrial Revolution, and fight its way through several severe economic depressions. In fact, in the year A Christmas Carol was written (1843), Britain was just coming out of a five-year economic slowdown in which only the most nimble and carefully managed enterprises survived. During Scrooge’s business life, upwards of 100 businesses failed for every one that succeeded. Scrooge must have been a very good businessman indeed.

There is no hint that, as Scrooge went about making his fortune, he was ever tainted with any scandal. He appears to be a well-respected, if not overly liked, member of the Exchange. This speaks well for his probity and recommends him as man with a reputation for fair and honest dealing with other businessmen. He probably drove a hard bargain, but that is the nature of business, and his firm’s survival as a going concern depended on it. As Scrooge is trying to keep his doors open in the midst of a great economic downturn, one should not be surprised that he is cutting firm expenses by reducing coal usage. Still, he is not being overly stingy by paying his clerk, Bob Cratchit, 15 shillings a week. According to British Historical Statistics, 15 shillings a week was about the average for a clerk at the time, and nearly double what a general laborer earned. While Cratchit may have to skimp to make ends meet, he is paid enough to own a house and provide for a rather large family. Cratchit is not rich, but by the standards of the time he is doing well. Besides, given the hard economic times, he is lucky to have any job at all. If Scrooge had not been careful with his money, his firm would have folded, and then where would Cratchit be? We may of course also infer something about Cratchit that goes unstated in Dickens’s work. His inability over perhaps two decades to advance himself or secure a better position with a more benevolent boss betrays a singular lack of ambition on his part.

Read the whole thing.

23 Dec 2011

Running a Bar in Baghdad

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The video is a teaser for an inexpensive ebook.

22 Dec 2011

Fun

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Go to Google search, type in “Let it snow” and hit Enter.

22 Dec 2011

“The Hobbit” (2012) Trailer

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To be released December 14, 2012.

21 Dec 2011

“Once in Royal David’s City”

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St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir.

21 Dec 2011

Liberal Prof Sneers at Iowa

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Professor Stephen G. Bloom: “I’ve lived in many places, lots of them foreign countries, but none has been more foreign to me than Iowa.”

Stephen G. Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa, in the Atlantic, describes with wonder and deep contempt the bizarre and backward culture of the state in which he disapprovingly resides.

Whether a schizophrenic, economically-depressed, and some say, culturally-challenged state like Iowa should host the first grassroots referendum to determine who will be the next president isn’t at issue. It’s been this way since 1972, and there are no signs that it’s going to change. In a perfect world, no way would Iowa ever be considered representative of America, or even a small part of it. Iowa’s not representative of much. There are few minorities, no sizable cities, and the state’s about to lose one of its five seats in the U.S. House because its population is shifting; any growth is negligible. Still, thanks to a host of nonsensical political precedents, whoever wins the Iowa Caucuses in January will very likely have a 50 percent chance of being elected president 11 months later. Go figure.

Maybe Ambrose Bierce described it right when he called the U.S. president “the greased pig in the field game of American politics.” For better or worse, Iowa’s the place where that greased pig gets generally gets grabbed first. …

Iowa is a throwback to yesteryear and, at the same time, a cautionary tale of what lies around the corner.

Which brings up my dog. And here’s why: My dog is a kind of crucible of Iowa.

What does Hannah, a 13-year-old Labrador, have to do with an analysis of the American electoral system and how screwy it is that a place like Iowa gets to choose — before anyone else — the person who may become the next leader of the free world?

For our son’s eighth birthday, we wanted to get him a dog. Every boy needs a dog, my wife and I agreed, and off we went to an Iowa breeding farm to pick out an eight-week-old puppy that, when we knelt to pet her, wouldn’t stop licking us. We chose a yellow Lab because they like kids, have pleasant dispositions, and I was particularly fond of her caramel-color coat. Labs don’t generally bite people, although they do like to chew on shoes, hats, and sofa legs. Hannah was Marley before Marley.

Our son, of course, got tired of Hannah after a couple of months, and to whom did the daily obligation of walking the dog fall?

That’s right. To me.

And here’s the point: I can’t tell you how often over the years I’d be walking Hannah in our neighborhood and someone in a pickup would pull over and shout some variation of the following:

“Bet she hunts well.”

“Do much hunting with the bitch?”

“Where you hunt her?”

To me, it summed up Iowa. You’d never get a dog because you might just want to walk with the dog or to throw a ball for her to fetch. No, that’s not a reason to own a dog in Iowa. You get a dog to track and bag animals that you want to stuff, mount, or eat.

That’s the place that may very well determine the next U.S. president.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Tim Grosseclose.

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A mild rejoinder from the Des Moines Register.

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Iowahawk
responds with “Is This Hell? No, It’s Iowa.”

21 Dec 2011

Businessman Killed Five in Self Defense

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Santa Monica watch dealer defending his store against armed robbers killed five criminals in the course of four gunfights. Targeted for revenge by an LA gang, he finally gave up his storefront, but he still sells watches and does repairs by appointment and on-line.

Hat tip to Lynn Chu.

21 Dec 2011

Nerf Guns Terrify Stale’s Technology Columnist

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Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10

Farhad Manjoo, Cornell ’00, is Slate’s Technology Columnist, so his take on toy guns, one would expect, ought to be well-informed, sophisticated, appreciative, and realistic.

A technology columnist really ought to be the sort of person who knows all about real guns. Firearms are an extremely important and interesting, downright fundamental, form of technology, after all.

But Farhad Manjoo’s holiday article in Stale this year is rather different from what one might have expected.

Nerf guns (which propel sponge rubber tipped plastic darts) frighten Manjoo and send him into a tizzy of anxiety. He describes the Nerf Barricade as “one of the most powerful toy weapons ever built, capable of sending a 3-inch foam dart hurtling 30 feet through the air, and then doing it again and again every half second.”

How does that compare, Mr. Technology Columnist, to the old Daisy Model 25 pump action BB-gun, my generation’s idea of a toy gun, which fired a copper-plated .177″ diameter BB at a velocity ranging from 375-450 fps (fast enough to break glass) from a tubular magazine as rapidly as you could pump the slide?

Shooting one’s friends in the face was regarded as verboten (you might put out an eye), but BB gun wars did regularly occur. The impact of a BB on human flesh stung smartly, even through clothing, and characteristically left a mark. It was a common form of deterrence to shoot oneself in the hand without flinching and then display the bruise. One’s interlocutor was thereby given to understand that you were not afraid of being shot with a BB gun, and was significantly less inclined to initiate hostilities.

Older generations of American boys additionally commonly played with home-made slingshots, a leather pad attached to two lengths of rubber strips cut from a discarded inner tube then affixed to a Y-forked branch. A good slingshot could propel much larger projectiles like marbles, ball bearings, or suitable rocks with good accuracy at very effectively damaging velocities.

We were bloodthirsty hunters in my boyhood, and we used to, I regret to say, kill the occasional incautious songbird with those BB guns. More becomingly, we also sometimes successfully nailed a rat found skulking in the open around the dump with our slingshots. (BBs just bounced off rats.) Try taking any variety of game with a Nerf gun.

But, it isn’t really the ballistic capabilities of the Nerf gun arsenal that sent Mr. Manjoo into a tailspin. It is, of course, the ethical considerations.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood.

One feels bound to question the expertise and judgment of the technology expert who would describe the above Nerf Barricade as “ultrarealistic.” So few real firearms are made of yellow plastic, and when Mr. Manjoo expresses awed respect for a toy gun’s ability to propel a harmless foam rubber dart 30′, he seems to have lost completely any sense of proportion and relative capability between the real weapon and the toy.

Someone who finds a harmless toy “scary” is, by my standards, an incredible wimp. And the kind of people who have all these hyper-sensitivities and moral issues over boys playing at war are prigs and decadents. Our blue state pseudo-intelligentsia resides in a haute bourgeois dreamworld, perfectly safe and far removed from the ugly realities of human conflict and criminal predation, protected by rough men they neither know nor respect, in homogeneous enclaves in which they have created their own Eloi-style culture in which gross moral self-indulgence parallels their conspicuous material well being.

20 Dec 2011

I Have No Explanation

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As to how it happens that our own Blue Ridge Hunt was recently filmed hunting at Persimmon Hill by a Korean NBC station for its news coverage. Principals featured included: retired Huntsman Chris Howells (releasing the hounds from the hounds truck), MFH Linda Armbrust and Huntsman Dennis Downing (both briefly commenting), and Charlie (dashing gallantly through the countryside).

1:49 video

20 Dec 2011

Next Summer, the Dark Knight Takes on Occupy Wall Street (Led By Catwoman)

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“The Dark Knight” (2008) was widely taken as heavily freighted with political metaphors sympathetic to the perspective of the political right.

Andrew Bolt was one of several commentators explaining that Batman was really a metaphor for George W. Bush.

[D]irector Christopher Nolan had to disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn’t freak and the film’s more fashionable stars wouldn’t walk.

So he hides Bush in a cape. He even sticks a mask on him, with pointy ears for some reason.

Sure, when the terrified citizens of Gotham City scream for Bush to come save them, Nolan has them shine a great W in the night sky, but he blurs it so it looks more like a bird.

Or a bat, perhaps.

And he has them call their hero not Mr Bush, of course, or even “Mr President”, but . . . Batman.

And what do you know.

Bush may be one of the most despised presidents in American history, but this movie of his struggle is now smashing all box-office records. …

Critics weep, audiences swoon – and suddenly the world sees Bush’s agonising dilemma and sympathises with what it had been taught so long to despise.

Well, “taught” isn’t actually the exact word.

As this superb Batman retelling, The Dark Knight, makes clear, its subject is a weakness that runs instinctively through us – to hate a hero who, in saving us, exposes our fears, prods our weaknesses, calls from us more than we want to give, or can.

And how we resent a hero who must shake our world in order to save it, or brings alive that maxim of George Orwell that so implicates us in our preening piety: “Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

And the next year, an anonymous segment of the public signaled its agreement as Photoshopped posters depicting Barack Obama as the film’s villain The Joker, bearing the motto “Socialism” began appearing first in Los Angeles and Atlanta and later across the country.

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Ace has seen the preview for “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), the sequel opening next Summer, and takes the High Church of Nerdiness position that director Nolan appears to be sinning by meddling with the comic book’s canon.

Based on what I see here, Catwoman is being shoehorned into the role of Economic Anarchist, someone who has a philosophical objection to private property. She says to Wayne, “When it’s all over, you’ll wonder how you all could have thought you could live so large while leaving so little for everyone else.”

Catwoman has never, AFAIK, been depicted as a revolutionary, or as having some philosophical commitment to bringing down the capitalist system. What she is is a thief who, while she’s not stealing from the very rich, likes mixing socially with the very rich.

She’s always been a bit comical in her larceny — she’s shameless about it. She just likes stealing. Maybe she actually considers herself an elite capitalist with the skill set of “taking the capital of others.”

But I never got the vibe that she wanted to end private property, or lead the poor in a revolution against the rich. She likes the rich. (And, she likes stealing their money.) Without the rich, she wouldn’t be rich herself.

This is what annoys me about Nolan– jamming square-peg human beings into the round holes of his pretty scheme of dialectical inquiry.

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Allahpundit, on the other hand, evidently does not frequent the comics stores. He simply shrugs off the purist’s objections and relishes the real world metaphors (along with the explosions and fight scenes).

Anne Hathaway gets one line but it’s a neon sign for the subtext: Apparently, Catwoman is the 99 percent. Ace is weary of heavy-handed messages in “Batman” movies, but that’s actually the only reason I might see this. If, like me, you don’t know the whole mythology and you tend to find superhero flicks tedious in a been-there-done-that way (rich criticism coming from a zombie-flick fan, I know), a little topical allegory goes a long way. Besides, from what I understand, the interrogation scenes in “The Dark Knight” were more morally ambiguous than you’d expect from a Hollywood production addressing torture in the age of terror. If Nolan ends up teasing out the occupiers’ more anarchic impulses, which seems like a safe bet considering Catwoman is one of the villains (isn’t she?), I suspect the movie’s more dialectic aspects will go down pretty smoothly.

Looks like there are plenty of explosions and fight scenes, too. What’s not to like?

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Jim Geraughty, in his emailed Morning Jolt,

Okay, call me crazy, but I’m getting a very Occupy Wall Street vibe from Bane (the bad guy) and Catwoman in the new trailer for the next Batman movie.

At one point, Catwoman explicitly says to Bruce Wayne, “A storm is coming. When it’s all over, you’ll wonder how you all could have thought you could live so large while leaving so little for everyone else.” The trailer shows only glimpses of scenes, but it looks as if a mob ransacks some luxurious location. (Does Wayne Manor get trashed again?) …

The comic fan in me would prefer a more traditional approach to the character — Catwoman was meant to be played by Catherine Zeta Zones — but tell me you can’t see the cultural upside of a movie in which the bad guys’ motives not-so-subtly mimic those of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Obviously, the trailer only gives us about two minutes’ worth of material to examine, but there’s no sign of any misguided idealism or discernable Robin Hood heroism on the part of the villains: It appears Bane blows up the field at a football stadium, killing the Gotham Rogues (played by the real-life Pittsburgh Steelers). They’re motivated by envy and greed and resentment and rage. Bane’s nihilism extends to the point where he wants to reduce Gotham to “ashes.” Tell me a better way to communicate to the great apolitical mass of America that the Occupiers are villains. …

By the way, I pity the villain who tries to poop on the Batmobile.

19 Dec 2011

Cheney Says Obama Should Have Acted to Recover or Destroy Drone

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