George Bush = "Visionary"

The Times notes:

Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination.

It recognised the fact that while Al-Qaeda and its cohorts pose the biggest short-term and perhaps medium-term challenge to America, in the long term it is the expected shift in the world’s economic and political balance towards Asia that promises to have the greatest significance.

....

Bush, meanwhile, has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China.

Read it here.

Interesting. George W. Bush, "visionary", far-sighted, strategic thinker, who is far wiser and reality-based than his critics. Sounds 'bout right to me.

Progressive Reactionaries

Mark Steyn is impressed, so am I.

There is something rather impressive about the inability of "progressives" - feminists, gays, etc - to move beyond their ancient tropes even as the world changes. But on they go, remodeling the gay disco on the Titanic.

Read it here.

A Hero Passes

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodia's killing fields, whose story of enslavement, torture, and escape awoke Americans to the horrors being perpetrated by communists in his native land, has died. He was one of the great heroes of the Twentieth Century. I mourn his passing.

Read about him here.

What Scientific Consensus?

There is not, and never has been, a "scientific consensus" on global warming. At least that is what Lawrence Solomon argues. He writes:

I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

Read the whole thing here.

City Life

Still enjoying life in the big..., well, medium-sized city. Thursday evening "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went out for an early dinner and then to the Meyerhoff to hear the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It was my first chance to hear the new musical director, Marin Alsop, live. You can listen to her discuss the night's program here while the symphony practices in the background. Not bad..., not bad at all, although her diminutive stature makes her sweeping baton gestures look a bit jerky. I was reminded of Mickey Mouse in "Fantasia".

The first half of the program was all Dvorak; first a minor piece, "Notturno in B Major, opus 40" then his famous "Sixth Symphony in D Major". Both were well done and I enjoyed the performance even though I still prefer the "New World" and was really interested in listening to the Brahms.

After the intermission came the real treat -- Andre Watts, playing Brahms Piano Concerto #2. Watts is a real showman and is fun to watch, and his technique is amazing. Here's a video of him performing Mendelssohn with John Williams. All in all, a wonderful evening.



Then on Friday we met with some friends for a light dinner. Afterwards we all trekked up to the Walters to see the Baltimore Map Festival -- a fascinating exhibit of maps from the medieval to the modern era including three da Vinci's and several maps of historical importance such as "The Map That Changed The World" pictured above. There was also a "mapping the cosmos" section featuring some stunning images taken by the Hubble space telescope. There was even an interpretive dance program which I must confess I didn't understand at all -- it had something to do with connections and interaction and stuff like that dressed up in "art speak" [which is to say, gibberish]. Afterwards, we headed back to the Harbor for coffee, cake and conversation.

Tomorrow we head back to the mountains. I'll miss the city's attractions, but Appalachian Springtime has its own powerful charms.

Oh yes..., the magnolias on Mount Vernon Square are blooming -- spring has indeed sprung!

Great Movie Scenes

This one is for the Louisiana Irishman. It's from the Coen Brothers' "Miller's Crossing". The setup: Albert Finney is a gang boss. His rivals want to kill him. He's Irish, and he's tough. That's all you need to know.

Bush and Africa

Michael Steele has a nice piece on President Bush's Africa initiatives:

While critics here at home, including many in the press, focused on attacking Mr. Bush at every turn, he steadfastly pushed for greater investments to help the families and businesses of Africa. It's the great untold story that has rarely made headlines here in America, but even so, it has truly changed the world for millions of Africans.

As Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete noted, for the people of his country and others across the African continent, Mr. Bush's "legacy will be that of saving hundreds of thousands of mothers' and children's lives from malaria, preventing new HIV infections and giving hope to those infected through care and treatment, and helping millions of young men and women get education." Perhaps most importantly, he adds, Mr. Bush leaves "the legacy of assisting African nations and people [in building] capacity for their own growth and development." Over the last seven years, the U.S. has committed $1.6 billion to trade capacity-building assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, Mr. Bush launched the Millennium Challenge Account as a new model to support governments that commit to ruling justly, investing in people and encouraging economic freedom. In May 2007, he announced the Africa Financial Sector Initiative, which will create seven new investment funds that will mobilize more than $1.6 billion through support of OPIC.

In the area of improving health care in Africa, the president's actions are already producing measurable results: nearly 1.5 million people are receiving life-saving antiretroviral medications, HIV infection from HIV-positive mothers has been prevented in more than 150,000 infants and 29 million children have been enrolled in schools, some for the first time in their lives. For Mr. Bush, that's just the beginning. On his recent trip, he announced plans to provide more than 5 million mosquito nets to Tanzanians, as well as a new investment to help eradicate certain tropical diseases.

So why did he do it? As singer-songwriter Bob Geldof pointed out, "There are no votes in helping the poor of Africa, but Bush did it anyway."

Read the whole thing here.

That's right -- he did it anyway, even though there was no political benefit to be gained. Once again, President Bush shows himself to be a far, far better man than his critics.

Buddies?

Gee, the MSM told us, time and again, that these guys really, really hated each other. Sure doesn't look like it though.

Ann Althouse writes:

I think they look great together. They seem to loosen each other up. They're sort of a cute odd couple.... [T]he two guys seem to complement one another, don't you think?

I agree. A Romney-McCain ticket makes a lot of sense on a number of levels and it is good to see that they can work well together.

This does not mean that I'm giving up on Sarah Palin, she's a lot cuter than these guys, but a Mac and Mitt ticket just seems right to me and, given Big Mac's age, seems to be looking toward the future.

Essential Viewing: Fitna

If you haven't seen Geert Wilder's film "Fitna" yet, by all means do so here.

Warning! Must be eighteen to view -- contains some really rough stuff, but it is essential for understanding the world in which we live and the challenge we face.

Read about it here.

UPDATE: The liveleak video has been taken down because of death threats against the company's employees. You can view the film at google video here.

Nothing Up Her Sleeve

A genre bending magic act -- you figure out how she does it.

Check it out here.

Warning! Definitely not work or child safe.

HT: Mister Snitch

Contrarian Thinking

I hate to spoil the fun, but it increasingly appears that the American economy is not on the brink of disaster. Why say that when the media is full of hysterical predictions of doom?

First, Paul Krugman [yes, that Paul Krugman] points out, for purely partisan reasons of course, that the looming crisis in social security payments that has pundits so exercised is not imminent and the situation is actually improving. He writes:

The latest report of the Social Security Trustees is out. I think the key message is what has happened to the estimate of actuarial balance — the difference between projected outlays and projected revenues over the next 75 years. This is the thing that’s supposed to get steadily worse as time goes by, as the 75-year window contains ever fewer years in which the baby boomers are in the work force, paying payroll taxes, and ever more years when the boomers are out of the work force and collecting benefits.

In fact, however, the actuarial balance has been improving rather than worsening. It’s now better than it’s been since 1993. What this tells us is that projections made in the mid-to-late 1990s were, in the light of subsequent revisions, way too pessimistic.

Moral: Social Security’s financial problem is relatively minor. It doesn’t deserve the emphasis it receives from most pundits.

Read it here.

Then there's this from Reuters:

LONDON - Maybe, just maybe, the financial world is not about to implode.

Such is the level of disaster mongering surrounding the latest phase of the eight-month-old credit crisis that you could be forgiven for thinking we will all soon be hoarding food and reverting to a barter economy.

At the very least, some market pricing and financial commentary has invoked a systemic collapse akin to 1929's stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed.

....

But with investors already positioning for a "worst case" scenario, there is a chance of a large pendulum swing.

Last week, a survey by Merrill Lynch showed a majority of 193 fund managers were overweight cash in March, signaling extreme caution.

No coincidence then that three-month US Treasury bill yields are their lowest since the 1950s, at less than 1 percent. Or that safe-haven gold had topped $1,000 an ounce before a violent reversal late last week that may itself signal a turn.

"People are one-way; they've got the cash; they believe equities are cheap," said Merrill consultant David Bowers. "They just need a catalyst to know when it is safe to go back into the markets."

There follows a discussion of the nature and likelihood of such a catalyst. Read it here.

Interesting.

AND THIS JUST IN:

Amid all the talk of recession and depression the economy continues to grow -- slowly, to be sure, but the final fourth quarter figures on GDP showed that the economy grew at 0.6%. This was in line with expectations and that in itself suggests that the economy has stabilized and, given the huge cash reserves hoarded in banks and investment institutions, is poised for a rebound. Note, a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. So far we have not had any, repeat any, quarters of decline. Just saying we are in a recession [and in this political season many partisans have been willing to say just that] doesn't make it so.

UPDATE:

Reuters reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. personal income rose more than expected in February as the economy teetered on the brink of a recession, while both personal spending and a key price measure increased only slightly, a government report showed on Friday.

What is more:

The personal consumption expenditure price index, a key measure of inflation, rose 0.1 percent in February after a downwardly revised increase of 0.3 percent in January. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, the personal consumption expenditure index also rose just 0.1 percent, in line with analyst expectations.

On a year-over-year basis, this core index rose 2 percent, matching the prior months' gain, which was downwardly revised from 2.2 percent.

"The decline in the year-over-year core PCE is important in that it supports the notion the Fed is making the right decision in cutting rates aggressively and not threaten long-term price stability. It argues that the Fed can lower rates in the months ahead," said Zach Pandl, an economist with Lehman Brothers in New York.

Read it here.

Gee! The economy is growing, there has been no recession, investors are sitting on piles of cash just waiting for a signal to get back in, social security seems sound, inflation is under control, and personal income is rising. Yet the Lou Dobbs crowd is screaming that we are on the eve of destruction.

Life in 2008

Back in 1968 James R. Berry predicted what life would be like forty years in the future.

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a fascinating glance back at how we thought about the future not so long ago. It illustrates an important aspect of our history. In the century before 1968 the technologies that had the greatest impact on the lives of ordinary Americans were concentrated in transportation and communications. From the telegraph to the telephone, to movies, then radio and TV a number of innovations vastly expanded the experiential world open to most Americans. From railroads to automobiles and airplanes and ocean liners Americans' ability to overcome the obstacle of distance increased with every decade. It was only reasonable to expect that the same trends would continue into the future.

What is perhaps most interesting is how a completely new technology -- computers -- is dealt with. The accuracy of the extrapolation here is impressive.

Check it out, and think again about our own expectations of what the world will be like in 2050 and beyond. Will our predictions turn out to be as accurate as this one? Probably not.

Anticipations of Spring

Spent Easter at the Inner Harbor. It was a bright, clear, glorious day. Of course I took a camera with me. Signs of spring were everywhere. Winter bulbs were blooming, the Bradford Pears at the Hyatt were popping. Even a magnolia on Charles Street had started to bloom.



Meanwhile, back in the mountains, we're still waiting [although I do see plenty of robins around].

Not Another Dialogue on Race, Please!

Jonah Goldberg has a nice piece on that nice young Senator from Chicago's call for "a national dialogue on race."

It's not like we haven't been having a continual national dialogue on race for the past half-century.

His conclusion:

Why do voluptuaries of racial argy-bargy want yet another such dialogue? For some, it’s to avoid actually dealing with unpleasant facts. But for others — like La Raza or the college professors scrambling to follow Obama’s lead — when they say we need more conversation, they really mean their version of reality should win the day. Replace “conversation” with “instruction” and you’ll have a better sense of where these people are coming from and where they want their “dialogue” to take us.

Well said!

Read the whole thing here.

RELATED:

Writing about Obama's promise to [in the words of Jonathan Alter] "instruct and illuminate and rearrange our mental furniture" Mickey Kaus writes:

I'm not sure I want to be instructed and elevated any more by Prof. Obama. I'd kind of like to rearrange his mental furniture on welfare and affirmative action, where his vagueness suggests incoherence more than brilliance. Alter holds out the prospect that an Obama Presidency will not be four years of merely winning "backing in polls for a course of action"--oh no, that's easy!-- but ... well, four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension.

Read it here.

Insufferable indeed!

Liars..., liars.....

In light of Hillary!'s recent inoperable statements regarding her visit to Bosnia[damning video here] it is perhaps useful to check out this compilation of Clintonian lies referenced by Christopher Hitchens.

What is stunning is not the fact that the Clintons lie casually and constantly about nearly everything, it is that the Democrat establishment and many members of the MSM for more than a decade have not only accepted this astounding record of duplicity, but have actually abetted it. Political operatives can, perhaps, be excused -- they, after all, are just hired guns employed by the Clintons and their Party -- but the role of the MSM is entirely despicable. Not only have they covered up and apologized for this horrid couple, but now that Hillary!'s star is beginning to fade [here], they pile on, suddenly discovering that she is..., gasp..., lying.

This dramatic pivot on the part of the MSM -- their willingness, even eagerness, to destroy their former favorite, and their determination to apologize for Obama in his hour of distress -- is perhaps the surest indicator of how the political winds are blowing.

I'm still not ready to count Hillary! and her horrible hubby out, and probably won't be able to do so until both are in their graves with stakes through their shriveled hearts, but things certainly don't look good for them.

I had long thought that I would rejoice at the fall of the Clintons, but I cannot. For all their loathsomeness, they represent a relatively sane alternative to the madness of the Obama cultists. The Clintons merely disgust me -- the Obama crowd scares me. I'm actually hoping that the horribles can pull this one out.

Collapse of the Global Warming Paradigm?

More problems for the climate hysterics emerged this week in an interview with Jennifer Marohasy conducted by the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. In it Dr. Marohasy, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, pointed out that over the course of the past decade, even as global warming hysteria has peaked, the global climate has actually been cooling, a fact that has been admitted even by the IPCC. She also pointed out that data from NASA's Aqua satellite system has shown that weather processes compensate for increases in CO2 levels and that the climate systems are far more robust than any of the major computer models assume.

As new information is being assimilated by scientists, she notes, the climate consensus is crumbling. She expects the entire global warming paradigm to collapse soon.

Let us sincerely hope so.

Read a summary of the interview here.

Happy Easter!!!

Classics

Once more it is the weekend. Time for a couple more Pennsylvania pictures. These were taken at the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum at Hershey.


Yep, that's a Stutz Bearcat, in perfect condition.


And how about taking a spin in a caddy?

If you are in the Hershey area, take some time out to visit this place. It is well worth the effort.

Check out their website here.

Dubya and the Politics of Hope

David Brooks has an excellent piece in today's NYT on the changing face of philanthropy.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital.

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Next to them, Barack Obama looks like Abbie Hoffman.

It also means that they are not that interested in working for big, sluggish bureaucracies. They are not hostile to the alphabet-soup agencies that grew out of the New Deal and the Great Society; they just aren’t inspired by them.

....

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?

And here's the kicker, the new philanthropists are advancing....

new policy model, in which government sets certain accountability standards but gives networks of local organizations the freedom to choose how to meet them. President Bush’s faith-based initiative was a step in this direction, but this would be broader.

This in a nutshell explains an essential difference between Dubya's vision for America and those of his critics. He has embraced the new, decentralized, entrepreneurial model of social advance in which the government seeks accountability rather than control; they are wedded to older models based in the nineteenth century social gospel or the naive socialism of the Progressive era in which government, guided by credentialed "experts" or religious leaders, directs society toward a defined set of goals. This is why political labels like "liberal" or "conservative" cannot usefully be applied to Bush's presidency. He has looked bravely and optimistically toward the future while his critics, on both the left and the right have gazed fixedly and fondly toward the past, fearing and reviling the future. For this reason it is Bush, not Obama or Hillary!, who truly represents the politics of hope.

Lies Of the Left -- Saddam and Terrorism

Christopher Holton explains how the Left redefined terror linkages so as to obscure Saddam's role in sponsoring terror.

Those who claim that Saddam had no “direct, operational ties” to Al Qaeda are attempting to narrow the definition of “terrorist-sponsoring nation” to an impossible scope. By this definition, a nation, like Saddam’s Iraq, can provide money, arms, safe haven and cooperation to jihadist terrorist groups and not have “direct, operational ties” to terrorists.

This was never the standard by which a nation found itself on the US State Department’s list of terrorist-sponsoring nations and implies that, unless a dictator is found directly ordering a terrorist attack, that dictator cannot be considered as linked to a terrorist group.

The “direct, operational ties” standard was invented after the overthrow of Saddam and is a ridiculous standard that can never be met.

Five years after United States forces overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon has produced a blockbuster report that has been both misrepresented and ignored. That report shows that Saddam’s Iraq had extensive ties to international terrorist groups, both Islamist and secular, including organizations that were part of Al Qaeda. No ginned up definition invented for domestic political consumption can change the truth.

Read the whole thing here.

Douthat on Hollywood and the War

Ross Douthat is a very smart guy who has seen far too many Hollywood films. Here's his take on the recent spate of anti-war movies. He has some very interesting things to say.

Check it out.

HT: Marc Ambinder

Being Fair

Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been excoriated for his comments on America's chickens coming home to roost. Putting his comments in context may, for some, mitigate their effect. It turns out that Rev. Wright was simply delivering a standard Chomskyite rant about the many victims of American power. It's a narrow and distorted view of American history, and it is disturbing to think that a presidential candidate might subscribe to it, but it is not so far outside the range of current intellectual discourse as it might seem. Many people in the academic community hold similar views.

Check out the full speech.

Baltimore Pictures

I've been posting pictures taken in Pennsylvania for the past few weeks. For a change today I'm going to do some taken down in Baltimore.


First the secular. This is the ceiling over the bar at "Gertrude's" restaurant in the Baltimore Museum of Art.


Now the divine. The image of John the Baptist in bas relief on display at the Peabody.



Still on the theme of St. John the Baptist, who needs to go to Florence when you can view Ghiberti's magnificent bronzes [in replica] for the Baptistry of St. John at the Peabody? Ghiberti started the originals when he was twenty-one years old. He was forty-two when he finished. Among the artists he beat out for the contract were Brunelleschi and Donatello.

["She Who Must Not Be Named" complains that the full-scale image is a bit blurry. That's because the ancient camera I was using only has a couple of megapixels and can't handle this level of detail.]

Castro's Socialist Workers' Paradise

Mark Milke evaluates Cuba's half century long experience with state socialism.

In 1958, the year before Fidel Castro came to power in a revolution and promised prosperity, democracy and the restoration of Cuba's 1940 constitution, the Caribbean island, while troubled by poverty, a corrupt dictator and the American Mafia, was also better off than most developing nations.

While poor compared to the United States, Cuba in 1958 had a per capita GDP of $3,170 according to the OECD. (Canada's was $8,947.). But Cuba outranked all other Latin American countries except four: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Tellingly, in 1958, the island nation's per person wealth was higher than any East Asian country or colony, save Japan, which barely beat Cuba at only $3,290. Hong Kong had a per capita GDP of $2,924, Singapore's was $2,294, the Philippines' was $1,447, Taiwan's per person GDP stood at $1,387 and South Korea's was $1,112.

Thus in 1958, Cuba was almost as rich as Japan, one and half times as wealthy as Singapore, richer than Hong Kong, and three times as prosperous as South Korea.

Fifty years later, Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

Meanwhile, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (the latter two also had dictators and problems similar to Cuba in the 1950s) have long eclipsed Cuba. They've done so not only in per capita wealth, but in measurements Castro's defenders point to when they assert the Marxist revolution "worked," such as in health care and education.

There's more. While the economy has deteriorated the institutions of state repression have flourished.

Read the whole thing here.

Megan McArdle on Market Myths

Excellent piece by Megan McCardle on the things that the economic pundits are getting wrong about our current crisis. She argues:

1. The Iraq War did not cause this problem.
2. The Bush tax cuts also did not cause this
3. Being on the gold standard would not have prevented this
4. Among the many other things that did not cause the current crisis was the repeal of Glass-Steagall
5. The collapse of Bretton Woods was also not a cause of the current crisis
6. The long twilight of American might is not yet upon us

Read it here.

Whoops, He Did It Again

The most disturbing part of Obama's "big speech" on race was his willingness to brand his white grandmother, who raised him, as a racist, simply because she admitted, after being mugged, to being afraid when a young black man approached her on the street. Didn't Jesse Jackson say something similar? Why, yes he did! Guess that makes him biased against blacks too. And, of course, the kinds of occasional private utterances Obama might have heard from the woman who loved and raised him are in no means equivalent to the venomous tirades of Reverend Wright.

Obama has been getting a lot of heat for this [here] and has been trying to explain himself in interviews.

Well, it ain't over yet.

Today in an interview with Philly's sports radio station, WIP, Barak Obama kicked his grandmother once again, saying she's no more racist than other white folk. He seems to think that there's such a thing as a "typical white person" and that person is at core a racist.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt. That Ivy League educated young man isn't handling this stuff very well at all.

Listen to the interview here.

RELATED:

Geraldine Ferraro hits back at Obama for his false moral equivalence between her and the odious Rev. Wright [here].

A Perfect Evening

A few days ago “She Who Must Not Be Named” and I ventured up to Hopkins to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard perform at Shriver Hall. Aimard is a wonderful artist; possibly, according to the Los Angeles Times, “France’s finest pianist of a generation or two (or ever)”. High praise, indeed, and he lived up to it. The program spanned three centuries of Western music, from Bach to Schoenberg, and Aimard was fully at home in each era. He presented a marvelous display of technical virtuosity and interpretive sensitivity.

The program began with eleven counterpoints from Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”. This is one of the most famous works in the Western canon and rightly so. In it the greatest practitioner of the form exhaustively and rigorously explores its possibilities. Fugues start simply, with the statement of a single “idea” which is gradually elaborated into a marvelously complex pattern. Aimard’s approach was forthright; deliberate, precise, and at first almost ponderous. But as the fugue began to develop his artistry asserted itself and he proceeded surely through the complexities that emerged.

After the intermission Aimard shifted gears radically and performed 5 Klavierstucke by Arnold Schoenberg, a twentieth century modernist famous for his explorations of atonality. The shift in styles and techniques was stunning and emphasized Aimard’s famous ability to perform brilliantly in a variety of modes. The evening concluded with a performance of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano No. 31 in A-flat Major, another radical shift in technique and mood. This is Beethoven at his most lyrical, the first movement requiring a delicate, flowing approach that stood in sharp contrast to everything we had heard before. Then, in the third movement, the piece ended with a fugue, returning us to something like our starting point for the evening and allowing us to hear the different approaches taken by two of the greatest figures in the Western musical tradition toward that rigorously defined form.

After the concert we joined some friends and headed down to “Gertrudes” at the BMA for dinner. A superb and instructive evening of great music performed by a magnificent artist, good food and stimulating conversation with friends – not bad…, not bad.

Here's Aimard performing Messiaen's Regard X "Regard de l'Esprit de Joie" Enjoy!

Another Problem for Global Warming Hysterics

Whoops! Another problem for the global warming true believers:

NPR reports

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Read the whole thing here.

Could it be that the scientists don't have quite as strong a grasp on this whole subject as they seem to think they do?

Bush on Iraq

President Bush's address on the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war.

The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, and it is just. And with your courage, the battle in Iraq will end in victory.

....

The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around. It has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be a place where Al Qaida rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs join with Americans to drive Al Qaida out.

BUSH: In Iraq, we're witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology and his murderous network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated. The terrorist movement feeds on a sense of inevitability and claims to rise on the tide of history.

The accomplishments of the surge in Iraq are exposing this myth and discrediting the extremists. When Iraqi and American forces finish the job, the effects will reverberate far beyond Iraq's borders.

Osama bin Laden once said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will take the strong horse." By defeating Al Qaida in Iraq, we will show the world that Al Qaida is the weak horse.

We will show that men and women who love liberty can defeat the terrorists.

And we will show that the future of the Middle East does not belong to terror; the future of the Middle East belongs to freedom.

Here's a link to the full transcript.

Gordon Wood and the Ideologues

Gordon Wood is stirring up a quite heated controversy among historians. His latest book, a series of essays, in the form of book reviews but actually a series of meditations on the writing of history, lambastes the profession for being irrelevant. The reason for this, Wood argues, is that with few exceptions professional academic historians, influenced by postmodernist literary theory, have focussed almost obsessively on abstruse arguments informed by left-wing ideology and questions of race, class, and gender. He writes:

The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,' 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself.

And that is the essential point. Without a wide readership, history is trivial -- it is only in its popular form that historical writing gains significant meaning. But today's academic scholars have perversely raised barriers to popular understanding of their product, adopting

the special language that literary critics now use to separate themselves from the power structure as well as the common herd of us ordinary readers: 'interpellation,' 'exfoliation,' 'ambiguation,' 'valorized,' 'intellection,' 'narrativized,' and 'meta' this and 'meta' that.

And perhaps most damning is the fact that today's academic historians are willing, indeed eager, to shape their understanding of the past to currently popular ideological stances. In today's historiography ideology and political utility stand triumphant over experience and the past is placed on the procrustean bed of present concerns. The result is a failure to appreciate the past on its own terms and to see it instead as a distant reflection of the present, and not the present as it is lived, but the present as seen through the refracting lenses of left-wing ideology.

It is ironic that the same forces that have subordinated history to ideology and theory have also induced practitioners of the craft to render their product almost unreadable. Academic historians are turning out immense quantities of crap, but it is so poorly written and conceived that hardly anybody reads the stuff. In their perversity the ideologues have made themselves and their profession increasingly irrelevant and that, considering the current state of historical understanding, is probably a good thing.

You can order Prof. Wood's excellent book by clicking on the Amazon banner at the top of this web-page.

For an overview of Wood's writings see this piece in the Claremont Review of Books.

Watching Rev. Wright

Slate magazine reproduces a Frank Luntz type audience response to Rev. Wright's "God Damn America" address. It charts the immediate reactions of Blacks, Democrats, Republicans and Independents while they watched segments of Wright's taped sermons. Check it out here.

A few things stand out. First, whenever Wright disses Hillary, dials turned up across the board. Whatever their race or party, the test subjects tended to dislike Hillary. Secondly, black viewers as well as whites responded negatively to Wright's most extreme statements. That being said, the graphs are also striking evidence that Blacks and Whites view matters quite differently. Right at the beginning, the Black viewers' responses diverged from those of the White viewers, and though the lines tended to dip and rise at roughly the same points in the address, the disparity remained throughout.

Interesting.

Arthur C Clark Passes

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. He, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were the "big three" -- the giants who dominated mid-twentieth century Science Fiction. Few men of my generation are unaware of their work and many were strongly influenced by it. All are gone now, but they linger on in our culture. A film version of my favorite Clarke novel, "Rendezvous With Rama", is currently in pre-production and is scheduled to be released in 2009 [here]. David Fincher is scheduled to direct it.

Read the Times obit here.

Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

For free samples of his work go here. In my youth I loved the "Nine Billion Names of God" and was haunted by "A Walk In the Dark".

Lileks Words of Wisdom

He's been to Disneyland and that got him thinking about the repeated failure of planned communities. I've lived in some bad places, He writes:

And the worst of them all was a planned community, in fact: the brutal Cedar Square West hive-o-humans, a concrete nightmare based on the pack ‘em-and-stack-‘em theory of community. Twenty floors of humans and cockroaches with a community center off the lobby! Come for the urine-soaked stairwells, stay for the ping-pong table whose net was stolen 2 years ago and probably used to garrote a rival.

He concludes, rightly I think:

Perhaps Utopias don’t work because they’re so bloody earnest and sincere.

Read the whole thing here.

Anthony Minghella Dies

AP reports:

LONDON - Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works as "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" into acclaimed movies, died Tuesday of a hemorrhage following surgery. He was 54.

Minghella's publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the filmmaker died at London's Charing Cross Hospital. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, "and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage."

Read it here.

I didn't always like his work product -- "Cold Mountain" was uneven, spoiled by the eccentricity of some..., well, all of its stars; "Mr Ripley" was doomed by the fact that its star, Matt Damon, can't act; but on two occasions Minghella worked with first rate talent and the result was magic. "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is a charming riff on the conceit of true, undying love, brilliantly acted by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman -- "The English Patient" is a gorgeous reprise of and response to "Casablanca". It won nine academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Who knows what other wonders Minghella might have produced. Too bad he was taken so young.

Tonight I think I'll load up "English Patient" and watch it again.

Tis the Day

Happy Hunting!

And a special holiday greetings to all the little Breslins out there. Hee, Hee, Hee.

Angry Old Folk

Hillary! and her horrid hubby, Gloria, Geraldine, now Rev. Wright -- sure seems to be a lot of angry old folk mouthing off these days. Could it be that we are beginning to see, in Obama's campaign, a generational shift not unlike that of the mid-1960's in the Democrat ranks?

This campaign, despite all the MSM blather about the injection of race and gender into the mix, is more than anything else a generational struggle on the Democrat side. A new generation of young people are flocking to Obama based on nothing more than a rejection of the sleaze and group-think that has characterized Democrat politics in recent decades. If Obama wins the nomination it will mark nothing less than a revolution in Democrat politics. That will open the way for a fair test of progressive principles. With both Obama and Big Mac running clean and above-board campaigns, with the major issues of contention well-defined, American voters will have a clear-cut, honest choice between two admirable and candidates each advancing a principled agenda.

If Hillary! and her increasingly shrill and desperate-sounding cohort of nasty old haters manage to pull this thing out, it will be a very long and dispiriting summer and fall and the election will, like ever other one in recent memory, be characterized by sleaze and slime and unfair personal attacks.

Just saying....

War? What War?

The Iraq war has faded into the deep background as far as the broadcast media are concerned. Once again the American journalistic community is failing to keep the public informed on important issues.

Remember the war in Iraq?

The question isn't entirely facetious. The war has nearly vanished from TV screens over the past few months, replaced by stories about the fascinating presidential campaign and faltering economy.

Yet Americans continue to fight and die there, five years after the war started in March 200

...

Statistics clearly illustrate the diminished attention. For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for 3 percent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's survey of news coverage. During the same period in 2007, Iraq filled 23 percent of the news hole.

The difference is even more stark on cable news networks: 24 percent of the time spent on Iraq last year, just 1 percent this year.

Read the whole thing here.

Screeching Inversion

I missed this when it appeared about a month ago, but already it seems to have entered political parlance. The term is "screeching inversion". It was coined by Plumb Bob who writes:

The short version of the screeching inversion is that the most immature among us get to pretend that they’re moral paragons, while the most mature are treated as moral pariahs, simply because the immature screech louder and a lot more often. Thus, in a morally deteriorating society, evil gets tagged as good, and good, evil.

Read the rest of his post here.

The Subversives

Michael Barone makes a point that I have been emphasizing here for some time -- a significant portion of the federal bureaucracy, both military and civilian, is subversive in the sense that they resist and try to undermine political leaders.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation's interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right.

Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native.

This is the trouble with bureaucrats imbued with the cult of expertise. They think that they are the government. Administrative "professionals" and area "experts" tend to see the political process as an impediment to effective government -- something to be evaded or overcome. But it is through that democratic process that the government itself is legitimized. When they seek to evade or ignore the demands of political authorities, these "experts" are subverting not just the administration but the government itself. The professionals, not the politicians, are the real enemies of the American people and it is they, not our elected figures, who should bear the brunt of our frustration and anger.

Hot, Hot, Hot

That's Colleen Moore in "Flaming Youth", the film that made her famous. Want to know more about her? Check out Robert J. Averich's blog Seraphic Secret. He's got her whole story, and a lot more [here].

Averich is in the business, knows a lot about the history of film, and is a wonderful source of information on the silent stars and their times. Check him out -- you won't be sorry you did.

Note to the Dictator

Hey Julius,

Beware the Ides of March.

More Pennsylvania Pictures

Well, whaddaya know? It's the weekend again. Time for a couple more Pennsylvania pictures.

"Villagers"

I had just come out of a dental appointment and decided to wander around the village for a while. It was a few days after Halloween and a local shopkeeper had put these guys on sale. I hope someone gave them a home -- they were a bargain at $10 apiece.

"Flying High"

This was a lucky catch. I was walking through Fairmont Park near the Philadelphia Art Museum when I saw this statue. As I got set to take a picture of it a red tailed hawk flew over. Combining the gesturing statue with the hawk in flight makes for a nice composition. At least "She Who Must Not Be Named" thinks so.

The Magic Flute at the Peabody

Went to the opera last night. Saw Mozart's "Magic Flute" at the Peabody. Had a good time. "She Who Must Not Be Named" was greatly amused [she likes slapstick comedy].

It was a top-flight student production [well, that's what you expect from the Peabody] and it featured some outstanding talent. I was particularly impressed by Kathryn Guthrie as the Queen of the Night [she nailed the second aria] and Jihee Kim as Pamina [started weak but got stronger as the night progressed, by the end she completely overshadowed Tamino]. Jason Buckwater, who has a natural flair for slapstick, was very good as Papageno and got a lot of laughs, especially from SWMNBN. The stage design was superb, making full use of dramatic and exotic lighting effects. It even impressed a friend of ours who worked for years in New York theater and TV as a stage and set designer/dresser. And of course the concert orchestra under the direction of Hajime Teri Murai was excellent. All in all a terrific production, a visual and auditory feast.

Of course, you have to shut your mind off and ignore the racism and misogyny, the masonic mystery hoo ha, and a lot of enlightenment nonsense about universal fraternal love, perfect virtue and such silliness. But, what the hey, it's Mozart and you should never let mere rationality get in the way of a good time.

The Wright Stuff

Reverend Jeremiah Wright might well have scuttled Barak Obama's presidential hopes. No, I take that back. Senator Obama's refusal to out and out denounce his minister's racism and overt message of hate may sink his campaign. The normally well-spoken young senator from Illinois is facing an important challenge -- one that will define him for all time.

Obama's response has been to denounce the specific statements at issue, but not the man who made them. He avers that he never heard such sentiments at any time from Rev. Wright, that Wright does a lot of good, and that because Rev. Wright was approaching retirement he saw no need to leave the congregation. [Read his statement here.] Will this be enough? Many in the MSM seem to think so, but I'm not so sure. Obama is trying desperately to preserve as many ties as possible to the radical Black community that supported his rise to power.

Power Line explains the "double game" Obama is seeking to play here.

The fault is not just with Obama. Democrats as a whole have indulged such paranoid fantasies as Rev. Wright mouths for far too long. The irresponsible willingness of party leaders, the Clintons included, to stand up to this poisonous and corrosive insanity has allowed it to flower within the Black community and some of the sillier precincts of academia. This stuff should have been exposed and denounced decades ago. One salubrious consequence of the Dems internecine conflict is that deep corruption, long concealed and ignored, is being brought to light. I suspect and hope that the Democrat Party that emerges from the current controversies will be a far better, and more honest institution than it has been heretofore.

RELATED:

Bloomberg reports that the superdelegates are breaking for Obama [here]. He has pulled almost even with Hillary.

UPDATE:

Rasmussen's latest figures show a seven percent drop in Obama's national ratings, bringing him even with Hillary, but the biggest winner seems to be John McCain, who saw sizable upticks in his ratings. What this whole rhubarb has done is to remind the nation of the nastiness that accompanies identity politics whenever it rears its ugly head, and just how very committed Democrats of all stripes seem to be to that seamy stew of bigotry and self-pity.

Read Rasmussen here.

Un-reality TV

You watch the news to stay informed on what is going on in the world. Trouble is, the broadcast media aren't a very good source of information. Steve Salerno explains just how bad the problem is.

He writes:

[T]oday’s system of news delivery is an enterprise whose procedures, protocols, and underlying assumptions all but guarantee that it cannot succeed at its self described mission. Broadcast journalism in particular is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for illuminating life, let alone interpreting it, is almost nil.

Excellent eye-opening article. Read it here.

Ends of the Earth

The Military Dad points me to this piece in which Spiked carries the anti-humanist themes of modern environmentalism to their logical conclusion.

"Ethan Greenhart", green-living guru, received a letter asking his advice:

After careful consideration I have decided to end my life. Things haven’t been going very well for me lately, but more importantly I am keen to reduce my carbon impact on the planet. Like the average Briton I probably produce around 9.3 tonnes of carbon each year. I am 26 years old, and reckon I could live for another 60 years; if I end things now I will save a total of 558 tonnes of carbon, for which I believe future generations should be grateful. But I have a question: what is the most ethical way to commit suicide? I don’t want my self-destruction to be destructive to the planet!

Read "Greenhart's" reply here. It, of course, is satire, but it embodies a deep truth -- modern environmentalism is fundamentally anti-human and as such quite dangerous. There are eco-warriors who come close to thinking this way.

Waking Up

David Mamet, lifelong liberal and famous playwright, has finally realized that his life has been a lie.

He sensed that the liberal vision of America did not match what he saw around him and began to question. Then he began to read.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

And he began to realize that liberals believed in

...a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; [while] the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And eventually he opened his eyes and realized that he had become..., a conservative.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE:

Jonah Goldberg's take on Mamet's conversion and on his critics is worth reading. Check it out here.

Resolution

I am not, repeat NOT, going to comment on the whole Spitzer thing!!!!! The Lileks post said it all.

Lileks Tries to Translate Spitzer

James explains what New York's Democrat guv meant to say -- at least I hope that's what he meant to say. If not, he inhabits the same bizarre self-referential sphere as the Hildebeast and her horrid hubby.

I don’t understand this Spitzer quote: “"I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.” I don’t know if his standards involved not getting caught, or if he’s having some weird moment in which his overarching sense of himself has just been reminded of the libidinous self he put back in the strongbox after every episode of satiation. It’s difficult to arrange a prostie romp in advance with complex details about the finances, the room key, transportation, etc., without realizing that this is, indeed, Standard Self. He could come out and say "this is my truth; I am a Trick American" and it would sound more honest.

I think the phrase he's looking for is "I did not live up to the standards I set for others."

Read it here.

Latest from Yon

Michael Yon takes you up close and personal with the "Guitar Heroes" in his latest report from Iraq. For anyone who is paying attention the blogosphere is providing the best, most comprehensive and detailed, battlefield reporting ever and Michael's reports are among the best.

Read his post here.

Percussion

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I spent an interesting afternoon at the Baltimore Museum of Art. First we and some friends had brunch at "Gertrude's" cafe, then we all wandered through the exhibits. That was fascinating because our friends were both artists and had a practitioner's understanding of what we were seeing. Then we attended the latest concert in the Shriver series. It was a blast.

The first half of the concert featured a solo percussionist, Ji Hyu Jung [pictured above], playing the marimba. She was great, performing works by Eric Ewazen, John Serry, J. S. Bach, and a wonderful, evocative short piece by Olivier Messiaen titled "O Sacrum Convivium".

Percussion is probably the most physically demanding of all forms of musical expression because it involves the entire body --watching a first rate percussionist like Ji is like watching a dancer -- everything is in motion. And her marimba is a big instrument, about eight feet long, which on some pieces involves a lot of stretching for notes.

Here's a short video of one of Ji's performances at the Peabody.



After the intermission she was joined by three other percussionists. Together they performed Paul Lansky's "Threads". When I got home I went online and found a Yale Percussion Group performance of this piece here. To find the performance scroll about halfway down the page. It's in two parts. Take a few minutes to watch it, you'll be glad you did. The same site also has a few more performances by Ji. Check them out -- she's an amazing talent.

Tree Hugging

Once again it is the weekend -- time for a couple more pictures of Pennsylvania's natural beauty.

Whenever I have the time and the weather permits I like to walk through the fields and forests with a camera. You never know what you will stumble upon. A few months ago I climbed a hill and started down the other side, then glanced back and saw this. Just an ordinary tree, branches bare and silhouetted against the sky.


Nice, ain't it? I'm a sucker for trees -- especially free-standing ones. It doesn't matter whether they have leaves or not.


And whether those leaves are green or turning.


Although I must admit that my favorite time of year is those few weeks in the Fall when I can wander through "realms of gold" [apologies to John Keats]. I actually prefer the muted golds and greens and browns of Penn's Woods to New England's more spectacular foliage (although my wife and I do like to take one weekend each Fall to travel north to New Hampshire for some "leaf peeking").

UPDATE:

It appears that Rick Lee shares my passion for trees. Read it here.

Another Manufactured Crisis

It appears that a growing number of health professionals are coming to the conclusion that the "obesity epidemic" is largely a case of media hype instigated by naive reporters, government bureaucrats, and unscrupulous health care professionals who sense the opportunity to make lots of bucks.

Read Don Surber's piece on "The Epidemic that Wasn't" here.

They're Baaaaaaack!

You know what they say about age and guile -- it beats youth and enthusiasm every time.

I am starting to feel sorry for young Mr. Obama. He actually thought he would win. And once the brash young Senator from Chicago is disposed of there's poor old John McCain.

It's not gonna be pretty.

And that is probably for the good.

Obama seems to be a nice young man, but his rhetoric has never made much sense and his campaign has attracted all sorts of really scary types. He would be a disaster as president.

Bill and Hill may be evil and corrupt and ruthless and all that, but they aren't going to be stupid.

Evil genius is always preferable to well intentioned naivete -- it does less damage.

The Kool-Aid Drinkers -- Pod People For O-ba-ma

Neo-Neo Con pointed me toward this video. It's really scary, cultish stuff -- she describes it as "creepy". Mindless pieties mouthed over a hypnotic, monotonous chant of Oh-Bam-Ahh. That this monstrosity features many of Hollywood and the recording industry's young stars is doubly disturbing.

It put Neo in mind of the award winning song "I Believe in You" from "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" [here]. In that song Robert Morse sings to his reflection in the mirror, "You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth/Yet with that upturned chin and the grin of impetuous youth/Oh I believe in you….” And in a very real sense Obama's calculated vagueness allows his followers to invest him with whatever qualities they desire, making the candidate an idealized reflection of themselves.

But there is another, darker association -- one that I make hesitantly because it is so common and inappropriately applied, but in this case I think it is apt.

One of Neo's readers was reminded of this:

The Death of the Heroes

David Harsanyi asks, "Where Have All the Superheroes Gone?".

[M]oral absolutism is frowned upon these days. Our nation seems unable to serve up fictional characters without weighing them down with moral ambiguity and layers of complex emotional baggage. Our cinematic heroes are most often tortured, imperfect souls, even when they do good. We've become so cynical, in fact, that we can't even imagine ourselves as unconditionally in the right. Sure, we still have Rambo, but at 60 and with a questionable grasp of his mental facilities, no one is overly confident.

Read it here.

Lileks agrees:

If they’d made the original Star Wars in the current day Luke would have found out that the Rebellion was a false-flag operation set up by the Empire, and he would have renounced the Force, moved back home and sold pots. I fear the next Indiana Jones movie, in a way; it’s possible he will spend the fourth movie apologizing for the first three, and do his best to battle the forces of English imperialism as he seeks to return the Elgin Marbles.

Read it here.

In the old days we understood -- absolute evil exists, and it must be fought. And the hero was the man who knew just what had to be done, and did it. Captain America fought Nazis and Commies; Superman fought criminal masterminds; Dirty Harry fought sadistic predators.

Now, it's different. I date the beginnings of the change to John Ford's revisionist western, "The Searchers", that came out in 1956. There John Wayne portrayed the traditional rugged individualist western hero as a borderline psychopath. Then came all those "adult" westerns with flawed heroes, then Clint Eastwood decided that there was no moral difference between his heroes and his villains, and the rest was a quick descent into the slough of todays masochistic relativism.

Yet today, in the wake of 9/11, we are beginning to return to the idea that absolute evil exists. Three films this year took up the theme. In Rambo we saw a return to the old days. Rambo tried to stay aloof and ignored the evil spreading just down the river, but in the end he couldn't maintain his indifference. He took up his guns and soon chunks of flesh were flying everywhere. Of course the critics panned the film. Not so two other films, judged to be "great" by the critical community. In the Oscar winning film "No Country For Old Men" the resourceful individual, played by Josh Brolin, proves incapable of opposing implacable evil. He dies a meaningless death and the film's moral arbiter, Tommy Lee Jones, simply gives up the struggle. Evil is triumphant. Then in "There Will Be Blood" the question of evil is taken a step further. Daniel Day Lewis' character, the modern equivalent of Duke Wayne's rugged individualist is no longer a borderline psychopath -- he is a full-blown embodiment of evil. And, rather than being a frontier loner, he embodies the evil spirit that animates capitalism. The moral of the film is not just that evil is triumphant and pervasive and cannot be effectively opposed, but that it is us.

Faugh!

Climate Skeptics Meet in Secret

Well, not actually in secret. Several hundred scientists and world leaders who have real doubts about the Gorey party line on global warming are meeting in New York. But it might as well be a clandestine cabal for all the attention it has been getting in the MSM.

Here's a report from Reuters that was published in the Times of India.

NEW YORK: Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his environmental advocacy, was the main target at a conference of dissident scientists skeptical of his views on global warming.

Several speakers at the conference on climate change whose theme was "Global warming is not a crisis," took pot-shots at the ex-vice president and his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won last year's Academy Award for best documentary.

"Whether we like it or not, it was extremely effective propaganda," said Timothy Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. "It was appropriate that he got an Oscar from the land of make-believe," he joked.

Read it here.

So far the story hasn't been picked up by any of the New York hometown media.

Wonder why.

UPDATE:

I wrote too soon. The WaPo has a report on the conference. Of course the account is hostile and seeks to discredit the attendees or to portray their efforts as inconsequential.

Read it here.

Bluecrab Boulevard agrees that the WaPo article is a "hatchet job". [here]

Summer Will Return

For a while I feared that Summer would not return next year.

No, I'm not talking about global cooling, but about American pop culture. Last night was the end of the first season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring Summer Glau, who previously starred in "Firefly" and "Serenity", as a teenaged terminator.

Well, good news! Summer will be back next year.

CNS reports:

Sarah Connor Chronicles ends its strike-shortened first season Monday, March 3 with back-to-back episodes, but it will be back in the fall. In a season with more misses (Bionic Woman, Big Shots, Cane, etc.) than hits, the show is a bona fide contender. It has pulled down 24-size numbers in 24's original time period, and like Arnold Schwarzenegger's titular character in the original Terminator film, it will be back.

Read the whole thing here.

HT to Instapundit.

Rust Belt Beauty

For those who appreciate the beauty of the rust-belt let me recommend a spectacular exhibit that is opening in Grafton, West Virginia this week. The photographer is Kevin Scanlon and he has the eye. Wonderful images, many of them of Western Pennsylvania. Here's a sample.

The Point and the Mon from Mt. Washington.

And another:

J&L's Aliquippa works at night.

Check out the whole exhibit online here. And if you get a chance drop down to Grafton and see it in person.