Looking Backward

David Brooks takes a look at California's plight. Once the most dynamic State in the country, it is now an economic and demographic basket case. Once the most favored destination of the middle class and entrepreneurs, it now repels both. What happened? Following Joel Kotkin he ascribes the decline to the rise of public employee unions, environmentalism, and an irresponsible elite as well as to tax reformers and anti-government skeptics. Brook's argument is essentially that only deregulation of business coupled with generously funded government programs that support business can restore prosperity. I don't think that's possible in the current political climate. This is a time for retrenchment and prosperity, if it returns, will be spearheaded by the private sector, not the government.

Read Brooks' article here.

Hanging Out In the Hood

Every once in a while my camera gets restless and needs to be taken out for a walk. Here's a bit of what we saw walking around my neighborhood.

This guy was perched right outside my front door. He wasn't there the day before, so he must have had a busy night.

Down in the bottom of the valley there is an abandoned barn. Last year I posted a picture of it and a friend of mine who is an artist asked me to take some more pictures from different angles so she could paint it. So a few days ago I trudged down and took a series of photos and sent them to her. It will be interesting to see what she does with them. Here are some of the pics I took.

And of course I took pictures of things I passed on the way, like this cornfield:

A tree branch:

This pinecone:

And my neighbor's sunflowers:

A leaf on the road:

And an old abandoned fertilizer spreader.

Yep, I live in paradise.

The Great U-Turn

 James C. Bennett has a really nice short survey of recent political history over in the National Review titled "The Great U-Turn". It offers a plausible counter-narrative to the progressive fantasy that informs nearly all standard history texts. It also places American Progressivism in a trans-national context, linking it to changes taking place in Europe and throughout the Anglosphere. And, it highlights the crucial role played by the Republican Party in slowing, checking, and ultimately reversing in the United States the general trend toward socialism that has infected Western culture for more than a century. That, he argues, is the true meaning of American exceptionalism.

Read it here.

Hanging Out At Hawk Mountain -- Part Two

I headed back up to Hawk Mountain on Saturday and the contrast with a weekday was dramatic. The place was packed with bird fanciers from all over.

This being the peak of the migration there were plenty of raptors passing through.

But for a few of us lucky people the real show took place below us. Three black vultures stopped by for a drink [there was a small pool of water in the rocks] and we were able to see them cavorting up close for quite a while.

Eventually they left and so did I. On my way back to the car I stopped by the garden. These were getting ready to pop when I was up during the week. By Saturday they were in full bloom. Nice!

Hanging Out At Hawk Mountain -- Part One

A few days ago I headed up to Hawk Mountain. Right now we are in the middle of the fall migration of the eastern raptors and this year has been pretty spectacular, just this weekend they broke their record for sighting of bald eagles [251 and still counting]. Since it was a weekday the crowds of birders would not be overwhelming and the weather was great -- a perfect day for just hanging out at one of the lookouts to see what could be seen.

Here's some of what I saw:

The first two shots are of an American kestrel

The next two are of sharpies, sharp shinned hawks.

There were lots of other birds in the sky, but they were too far off to photograph and I didn't have my long lens with me. Too bad, but there will be other days.

Mostly what I saw, though, were these things -- stinkbugs. Thousands of them swarming across the mountains. They have been a major annoyance all over the mid-Atlantic region.

I couldn't stay for long so after an hour I headed back home, stopping for a few minutes along the way to visit the sanctuary native plants garden.

All in all a very enjoyable break for the middle of the afternoon.

Sigh!

Once again, despite a valiant effort, the formerly fearsome Quaker warriors failed in their attempt to defeat  their effete suburban rivals, falling to the Villanova Wildcats 22-10. This is the Quakes seventh straight loss to the suburbanites. I suspect foul play. Certain Villanovans have been known to pray for victory, thus invoking supernatural outside assistance in their bid for dominance.

Oh well, there's always next century.

The Uprising

I'm not sure who Ben Howe is, but he captures the spirit of the Tea Party pretty well.

Sarah Palin Is the American Mainstream

So says Rasmussen:

Fifty-two percent (52%) of Likely U.S. Voters say their own views are closer to Sarah Palin’s than they are to President Obama’s, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. 

Just 40% say their views are closer to the president’s than to those of the former Alaska governor....

But note this:

Among the Political Class however, 68% say their views are more like Obama’s, while 63% of Mainstream voters describe their views as more like Palin’s. 

How's that for a disconnect?

And of course party matters. Democrats overwhelmingly identify with Obama's position while Republicans and Independents largely support Palin.This is why attempts to portray Sarah and the Tea Partiers as extremists are going to fail.

Read it here.

A British View Of the Tea Parties

It's a lot better than anything you are going to read in American papers:

First they were ignored. Then they were derided as the tools of Big Money. Then they were branded as racists, the unhinged, the unwashed, the paranoid, the subversive and the ignorant - or some combination thereof.

Now, they stand accused of aiding and abetting the enemy by splitting the Republican party and giving Democrats hope for the November mid-terms. It has been a rough ride for members of the Tea Party in the 19 months since their movement sprung up. 

But each insult and attempt to marginalise them seems only to have stiffened their resolve and swelled their numbers. Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members. 

 Read the whole thing here.

Hey, Here's An Idea!

From AFP:

Russia plans to slash 100,000 bureaucrat jobs by 2013, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Monday, in a drive to reduce costs and modernize the country's bloated bureaucracy.

"We expect that in the three years more than 100,000 federal civil servant jobs will be cut," Kudrin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

"The overall savings from this by the third year will amount to 43 billion rubles (1.4 billion dollars)," he added.

 Read it here.

Granted, it's only a drop in a bucket, but it's a start..., it's a start. We should be able to do a lot better..., let's say we cut the federal workforce by a million and work from there.

Even Song By the Yellowjackets

I ran across this on You Tube -- one of my favorite songs by the Yellowjackets. Bobby Mintzer is a beast on that sax, and as for Jimmy Haslip..., well it just don't get any better. I like this performance even better than the studio cut on the "Run For Your Life" album.



Just great!!!!!

Spooky Forces

This is interesting and might be immensely important:

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works. 

"If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation...." 

 Read it here.

Time and again we see that our understanding of the physical universe, while impressive, is far from complete, but then we have known that for a long, long time. As Hamlet put it:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Now if only someone would tell Dr. Hawking....

Judge Judy at Half Speed

Hilarous -- check it out here.

Iowahawk Strike's Again -- Fighting the Jacobins

The funniest man on the web takes on the Republican establishment. It's devastatingly funny.

I was, as you might imagine, eager to read the results of the previous evening's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Delaware. Normally I would have followed the returns by live television, but Mariska and I were otherwise engaged as hosts of a black-tie fundraiser for our new charity program, Inner City Badminton, along with our dear friends from the firmament of conservative punditry, Kathleen Parker and David Brooks. Together we passionately believe that by introducing the "grand old pastime" to the hiphop community, we will in some small way begin to repair the incalculable damage done to Republican-African American relations by the racially tactless Tea Party idiots. Spirits were quite festive, especially after Parker, Brooks and the Rev. Sharpton became entangled in a badminton net during a Tom Collins-fueled limbo tournament. By the time they were freed we were all too giddy and exhausted to worry about election returns. Indeed, why should we? For the most part, the damage inflicted by the Tea Partyists has been confined to the hinterlands west of the Alleghenies and south of Washington, so it seemed somewhat absurd to suggest that their benighted candidates might actually find success in one of the better states like Delaware. Yes, I am aware of Mr. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but as I have noted before, that particular electoral fluke can be readily explained by Brown's erotic appeal to his state's famously nymphomaniacal womenfolk....

Read the whole thing here.

Have You Ever Zwibbled?

If not try it out here.

Go ahead..., it's fun.

Worst Person Ever!

The man who made Hitler look like a boy scout. The most evil person ever to walk the face of the earth. Mao Tse Tung. At the time he was committing his atrocities he was revered by many in the West as a great figure. Even today he is revered in his homeland, although there is some admission that he might have made "some mistakes".

Here is some of what he did:

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years....


Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation....

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Read about it here.

The Good President [continued] -- Bush's Reputation

Victor Davis Hanson has a nice piece out on changing perceptions of the second Bush presidency [here]. He concludes that over time and especially in comparison with Obama, the nation is gaining a new appreciation of George Bush.

The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush at Ground Zero with a megaphone and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced "nuclear" as "nucular." Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.

America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised.

Indeed! Bush derangement, and it verged on total insanity at times, was largely a creation of political and media figures who constructed a fantasy. Seen in the harsh light of reality the unrealistic portraits of both Bush and Obama are seen for the fantastic constructs they were.

Interrupting the Happy Dance

Jim Geraghty, over at NRO, points out that the Democrats aren't dead yet, and that they are desperate. That will make for a very, very nasty couple of months ahead. Geraghty quotes his political mentor, who he calls Obi Wan:

This fall they [the Democrats] will know no checks — October Surprises, maybe every day and all day. What this means, I don’t know — bombing Iran? Capturing Osama bin Laden or some other big name and announcing the news two days before the election? Get tough with Paris Hilton and send her to Guantanamo?

Media organizations and figures (especially ABC, MSNBC, the Politico, Stephanopolis, and First Read) all of which are first wave transmitters will spread the White House's latest talking points to the public. Keep an eye on those sources, because they are White House sock puppets and will tell you where the discourse is heading.

So, this thing is far from over and the worst is yet to come. Tighten your seat belts, we're in for a really nasty fall.

Read Geraghty's piece here.

Should Babe Ruth Be Jailed?

Bill James thinks that it is unfair, as well as being a sad commentary on our times, that people in authority should wish to imprison Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for steroid use. He points out that Babe Ruth broke the rules of his time too, yet is today celebrated as the greatest ever. Read the whole thing here.

The Shifting Sands of Science

Anthony Gottleib has a nice piece in More Intelligent Life in which he notes, as I have many times in this blog, that there are a number of reasons to be skeptical toward scientific authority.I liked this paragraph in particular:

At the end of her book “Science: A Four Thousand Year History” (2009), Patricia Fara of Cambridge University wrote that “there can be no cast-iron guarantee that the cutting-edge science of today will not represent the discredited alchemy of tomorrow”. This is surely an understatement. If the past is any guide—and what else could be?—plenty of today’s science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today’s practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions, hasty generalisations, fads and hubris that marked most of their predecessors. Although the best ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Darwin, Einstein and others have stood the test of time and taken their place in the permanent corpus of knowledge, error remains inherent in the enterprise of science. This is because interesting theories always go beyond the data that they seek to explain, and because science is made by people. [emphasis mine]

 Precisely!

Read the whole thing here.

Liberal Myths

Liberals have long and loudly claimed that the modern Republican Party, especially its conservative wing, has embraced and promulgated racism. Gerard Alexander, writing in the WaPo, does a good job of dismantling the charge here. He wonders why Liberals persist in their insistence of what is obviously a falsehood. The answer is obvious -- it is in their political interest to do so. 

And while we are on the subject of liberal mythmaking, Richard Vedder writing in the Claremont Review takes a critical view of the way Democrats have systematically misrepresented the Great Depression and Roosevelt's response to it. Read it here.

Sarah Hatred

Shannon Love, one of the Chicago Boys, elaborates on a theme that is gaining increasing currency -- that the Left's irrational hatred for Sarah Palin, is based status anxiety, an old Parsonian concept recently popularized by Alain de Botton. He writes:

Palin’s success stabs [Leftists] in the heart of their anxiety. If Palin can be a successful political leader, what does that say about the leftists’ claims of intellectual and moral superiority? If people don’t just instantly assume that leftists are smarter and better than everyone else, why would people trust a leftist government to make so many decisions about the [way] people’s live, e.g., medical care?

That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.

As long as she is viewed as a significant political figure, the left’s obsession with Palin will never wane because it does not spring from rational roots. She threatens something too deep and too profound in a political subculture built around the belief that a small percentage of human beings have a vastly superior understanding of the world compared to all the rest. 

Read the whole thing here.

I think Love, Codevilla, and other recent commentators on the status system of America's post-war elites are onto something. The ever shriller protestations of today's credentialed elites increasingly sound like those of the old WASP country club set, whom they displaced half a century ago. Too bad that Digby Baltzell is no longer around. He would be the ideal person to chronicle their collapse.

The Eliminationist -- Hoping You All Die Soon

This woman is one of the scariest people you will ever see, and she is not alone. By herself, she is just a freakish oddity, but ideas like those she espouses are spreading, especially among those who think of themselves as "intellectuals" and that is a matter of considerable concern.

Dragon Boats at the Inner Harbor

Crowds turned out today to watch Dragon Boat races at the Inner Harbor.

The boats were crewed by local business, civic and military institutions.

Most of the attention was focused on the crews, but I was just as interested in the crowd. There were some strange creatures there.

And bubbles floating through the air, bemusing those they passed.

The Bubble Man and his appreciative fans.

Some random shots:

Never Again!

A Realistic View of the Internet

Trevor Butterworth has a terrific piece in Forbes on the social and ethical implications of the internet. He is, quite rightly, reacting against Princeton philosopher Peter Singer who has naively proclaimed the internet to be a transformative phenomenon that, by making information available to all, will magically liberate mankind [here].

Butterworth makes some excellent points:

The great transformation has already taken place and is comparable in scale to what took place in Renaissance Italy or the Scottish Enlightenment.

It has not been anti-corporate or particularly liberating.

Utopian philosophical speculation may be sexy, but it is no substitute for hard work in the trenches of historical research.

Technology is not science. It is more closely related to moral philosophy and should be understood as such.

We need to understand in harshly realistic terms just what the social effects of the internet are and what they are not.

Read the article here, and check out some of the people he references. It's well worth the effort.

Obama's Bigotry

Ann Althouse points out an interesting aspect of Obama's public statements on the current imbroglios surrounding the Ground Zero mosque and the Florida Koran burning.

Without hesitation, [Obama] called upon the Christian to exercise forbearance and to care for the feelings of others. He didn't dare say that to Muslims. And he talked about Muslims as if they are incapable of understanding a society based on individual liberty and freedom of expression. Obama propounds the stereotype of irrational Muslims who resort to acts of violence when they don't like what people are saying.

Read it here.

George Bush used to denounce this sort of thinking as "the soft bigotry of low expectations". He was right. The automatic assumption of a group's incapacity is indeed a form of bigotry and such assumptions permeate liberal ideology.

Sarah Palin Nails It!

She wrote on Facebook:

People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.

 Exactly! Well said, Sarah!

Some other interesting commentary:

Jim Geraghty finds it surprising that some people are surprised that Sarah Palin would denounce the Koran burning. Not surprising at all, given the amazing amount of vitriol that has been heaped on this good woman.

Allahpundit at Hot Air gets to the heart of the matter:

The grand irony of this crank pastor’s publicity stunt is that he’s trying to force the public to confront a difficult issue — when, if ever, is it appropriate to offend Muslims? — but doing it in such a grotesque, notoriously fascist manner that he’s guaranteed a united front against him among pols and pundits. Denouncing a book-burning is as easy a litmus test for decency as it gets in American politics.

Read it here.

The idea expressed in Allahpundit's last sentence, that somehow book-burning is as indecent an act as can be performed comes in for some examination from Ann Althouse. What's wrong, she asks, about burning a book?

Good lord. There's an immense difference between burning your own book as a way of saying "I hate this book" — which adds more expression to the marketplace of ideas — and the confiscation and destruction of other people's books — which is about depriving people of access to expression that they want to consume.

It's offensive to say "I hate this book" about a book that some people revere, but that's the point. It's a vigorous, vicious expression. Burning your own copy of a book is the same thing. Unless you possess the only copy of the book — or, perhaps, an artistically or historically distinctive copy — the burning is just a way of being showily expressive and getting a big audience. It's absurd that any clown who wants attention can light a tiny fire and become world famous. Get a grip, people.

Indeed! As Althouse notes, the amount of attention devoted to discussion of this act is ridiculous and serves only to increase tensions and empower obscure and offensive people. She urges us not to abet these publicity whores. But this is an election season and too many people think that they can gain advantage from endlessly chewing on this issue.

Megan McArdle on Confirmation Bias

One of the most sensible commentators on the economy writes about the use and misuse of "science" in political and policy matters.

One of the things I find most wearying about writing about economics is the extent to which people attempt to hijack economics to "scientifically prove" that their value judgements about things like the proper size and role of government are 100% factually correct--as if there were some way to empirically validate the correct marginal tax rate for people making over $100,000 a year.  

But even when you're careful, it's distressingly easy to find what you expect.  The result is a history of science developing models that used "scientific evidence" to bolster the social hierarchy of the day.  We think that phrenology and 19th century racialism are obviously preposterous--but they clearly weren't, because some very smart people believed them, and were not conscious that they were simply confirming their own prejudices.  We're still doing this kind of science today....

Read the whole thing here.

The naive presumption underlying the Progressive movement has always been the faith that "science" in its various forms would invariably produce superior policy recommendations that could be implemented for the benefit of all. More than a century of experience with technocratic regimes should have disabused us of that notion and awakened us to the horrors that technocratic utilitarianism can produce, but still the Democratic Party and a sizable portion of the Republican establishment buys into the notion that government by credentialed experts is superior to democracy. The tendency of "experts" to find what they are looking for and to issue "scientific" pronouncements that simply confirm their own biases is an endemic problem that should remind us that science is a human undertaking and as such is susceptible to all human foibles.

Persistence

He put a lot of work into this, and so far hasn't caught anything. Still he persists.

The Demagogue

Writing in National Affairs, Henry Olson discusses the nature and meaning of populism, citing the classical authorities that defined the applicable terms and concepts. Here he is on Aristotle: 

In the Politics, Aristotle defines a demagogic democracy as one in which "the decrees of the assembly override the law" and a popular faction "takes the superior share in the government as a prize of victory." The people's leader, the demagogue, incites them to pursue such despotism through extravagant rhetoric, playing on the people's basest desires and fears. The result is laid out ominously in Plato's Republic: The people — "an obedient mob" — "set up one man as their special leader...and make him grow great." The masses take the property of the wealthy to redistribute it among themselves; the people's enemies, meanwhile, are charged with crimes and banished from the city (or worse).

Read the whole thing here.

Lets see now, who on the current political scene has used extravagant rhetoric to rouse a mob of mindless and obedient followers, has overridden legal precedent with executive orders, has used the justice department to go after political foes, has declared that because "we won" the opposition should shut up and get out of the way, and has used the politics of fear to force through an unpopular agenda?

Just sayin'.

So Much For the End of Combat Operations

Baghdad (AP)

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.

The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.

Sunday's hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

 Read the whole thing here.

Iowahawk's Latest -- "Barak, Can We Talk?"

The funniest writer on the web presumes to speak for America:

Oh, nothing. It's just that it just seems we haven't had a chance to talk for a while. I mean, I know we've both been busy for the past year or so. You with your fundraisers and golfing and stuff, and me with all those appointments at the unemployment office. But you know I think it's important in a relationship like ours to keep the lines of communication open.
So anyway, I've been think that... look, this is really hard. God. Do you remember when we met at that big party in Denver back in 08? I mean when I saw you across that crowded convention floor, it was like, Oh My God. I don't think I ever saw anything like you before. I was on the rebound from a bad relationship and you were so tall and articulate and, well hot. And then I couldn't believe that of all the democracies in the room you picked me out!
Yeah I know my some of my friends warned me you were trouble, and that it was the alcohol talking. But I knew that if we gave it a chance we could make it work. You and me, together. And after you moved in, I really think we did for a while. I mean, you've really helped me get over my inhibitions and hangups, and I like to think I've really helped you grow and discover yourself. Like last year when I lent you $800 billion to pay for your demo tape and new rims for the Cadillac.

 Read the whole thing here.

"The Junkiest City in America"

From CNN:

NEW YORK -- The capital city Pennsylvania is broke and will be skipping this month's multi-million dollar bond payment.

On Sept. 15, Harrisburg, Pa., was scheduled to make a $3.29 million payment on the bonds it issued to build a trash plant. But, the cash-strapped city doesn't have the dough. 

"The city's budget is in deficit," said Chuck Ardo, spokesman for Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson. "We're looking for ways to trim the budget just to keep services going."

"Now the chickens have come home to roost," the mayor said in a statement released Wednesday.
In May, Moody's knocked the rating on its general-obligation bonds three notches to B2 -- five steps below investment grade. To put that into perspective: Moody's rating on Greece's government debt sits at A3 -- still investment grade.

So Harrisburg's rating is below that of Greece! Way to go guys. And of course they are going go be looking to the State to bail them out. If not, they're going to be bankrupt.

Read it here.

The Good President [continued] -- Missing Bush

Victor Davis Hanson notes that with today's widespread disapproval of both Congress and the current administration a lot of people are missing President Bush. He speculates on why and finds ten reasons:

1) Obama's miserable record.
2) Obama's adoption of Bush policies.
3) Obama's habit of blaming Bush.
4) Obama's yuppie lifestyle.
5) Michelle!
6) Obama's internationalism.
7) Many of Bush's harshest critics have discredited themselves.
8) Bush's "disasters" and "failures" turned out to be not so bad.
9) Bush was incorruptible and ran an honest ship.
10) Bush was authentic.

I find little to disagree with in VDH's characterizations, but then I always admired Dubya. Read the whole thing here.

Anita O'Day Sings "Sweet Georgia Brown"

I was watching "Anita O'Day Life of a Jazz Singer" on the Documentary Channel this evening and was inspired to share with you what I consider to be her single best performance. Here she is doing "Sweet Georgia Brown" at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. This was really her breakout performance and you can see/hear why.



Aaaaaah! Wasn't that nice? O'Day is one of the great ones, but I still prefer Ella. Here she is in 1979 accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra.



Ain't nobody gonna do what that woman did with her voice.

Sliming Sarah

The Vanity Faire hit piece on Sarah Palin is so bad that even liberal columnist Ben Smith cannot stomach it. Of course he blames all the hostile and dishonest reportage and commentary on Sarah, saying that it is because she won't give interviews to unfriendly journalists [like Ben Smith]. He seems to think that if she gave lots of such interviews the hostility would abate. Yeah..., sure.

Read it here.

UPDATE:

Smith is not the only one protesting the hit piece. Other liberals, feminists, and even Palin haters are protesting the piece.

Read about it here.

Early European Cannibalism

It seems that refuse piles produced by humans 800,000 years ago contain the remains of people who had been butchered mixed in with bones of other animal species. There is no indication of any ritual context so they conclude that, to ancient Europeans, human beings were just another game animal. Read about it here.

Back to School Advice

Walter Russell Mead has a piece in the American Interest advising students marching into the maw of our bloated higher education establishment on how to approach their experience. The points he makes are as follows:

1) Recognize that the real world does not work like school.
2) Most of the teachers and administrators know very little about the world you will enter after school.
3) You are going to have to work much, much harder than you expect.
4) Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right college.
5) A traditional liberal education is the only thing that will do you much good.
6) Character counts, as do good habits.
7) Relax

Most of this advice is good, especially points 1, 3, and 6. I do have some questions about numbers 4 and 5, though. It's an interesting piece, though, and well worth reading here.

The Good President [continued] -- Missing Bush

By 50 to 42 percent Ohio voters say that they would rather have George W. Bush back in the White House than Barak Obama. Read about it here.

More Left-Wing Violence

Yet another case of left-wing propaganda inciting weak-minded lefties to violence:

[Hostage taker] James Lee was linked to a manifesto that was posted on the internet, a source close to the investigation told CNN.
The angry manifesto repeatedly refers to humans as "filth" and demands that the Discovery Channel "stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants."
"Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is," the 1,149-word statement says.
....
Lee said he began his crusade to save the planet after being laid off from his job in San Diego and reading "Ishmael," a novel by Daniel Quinn about a gorilla that tells a man what it is like to live in captivity in a world where humans exploit natural resources.
Lee said he then felt an "awakening," watched former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," and decided he had been doing too little to protect the environment.
[Emphasis mine].

Read it here.

Time and again lefties in the press tell us that conservative talk shows and books incite a climate of violence that encourages weak-minded people to commit acts of destruction, and each time it turns out that the violence was perpetrated by left wingers. Now we have the testimony of the maniac to the effect that he was inspired by Al Gore's apocalyptic environmentalist screed. Will this give the MSM reason to question the validity of their anti-conservative narrative? Nah!

UPDATE:

Richard Morrison has a full discussion of the environmental terrorist's mindset here.

We should recognize that by far the biggest domestic terrorist threat emanates not from religious groups but from the environmentalist movement.

Cities of the Past and Future

Nice piece by Joel Kotkin in Foreign Policy on the cities of the future. It's a strong rebuttal to Richard Florida, and that I like -- I like a lot! It's really nice to see someone stick up for the suburbs and decry the fetishization of urban culture, And it serves as a reminder that urban theorists are, more than anything else theorists, and that they are badly in need of a historical perspective.

Read it here.

Vicious but Cute

Alan Becker's "Animator v. Animation"!

Check it out here.

It's interesting to note how a crude line drawing can invoke our sympathies.

HT to Elsie and Deedee.