Spreading the Jasmine Revolution

The success of Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" is inspiring protests throughout the Arab world. Some of them are of great significance. Here's an eyewitness account of the most important of these, in Egypt:

Wednesday, Cairo:

Tonight, protesters have surrounded the parliament building in downtown Cairo. There have been two deaths of protestors in Suez; one policeman has died in Cairo, hit by a rock. The protestors in Tahrir Square have been tear-gassed, and Twitter has been blocked within the borders of Egypt.

But this morning, as the sun burned a smoky haze off the face of this city, the streets were open and clear as I rode downtown at 8 a.m.

There had been tweets that protests would be staged in Tahrir Square and in the downtown neighborhood of Mohandeseen. These tweets were received by Egyptian authorities monitoring the hashtag #jan25, and they deployed a massive security presence to deter any demonstrations. Officers stood in groups of 6 to 8, on nearly every street corner. They blockaded the entrance to the parliament building. The teams stood quietly with folded arms watching the empty streets as the sun rose over the Nile.

Around the block, I exited my taxi and sat down at a nearby hotel for coffee, waiting as the hours passed. I saw six trucks of police pass on the highway, heading south to Mohandeseen. I jumped into a taxi and followed them.

 Read the whole thing here.

In this report CNN notes the similarities between the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, but also notes the significant differences between the two countries.

Lies of the Left -- The Anti-war Veterans

Greyhawk over at the Mudville Gazette asks what happened to the anti-war movement that was so voiciferous and so much a part of the MSM coverage of the Bush administration. He then traces the decline of the anti-war "veterans", some of them complete frauds, to provide a partial answer to the complex question.

Basically he agrees with Glenn Reynolds' assessment that they were useful idiots who, once a Democrat was safely in the White House, stopped being useful.

Read about it here.

Is SF Getting Conservative?

Patrick Richardson asks some SF authors about it and gets some interesting answers. The general response is that nobody really knows, but the left-wing hegemony of the past few decades has given way to a more diverse set of beliefs.

Read the article here.

Admission: I used to be a fan, but was turned off by the rise of the Left and moved on. Maybe it's time to start getting interested again.

How Liberal Journalists Think

Steampunk Palin

Yep, folks -- it's real. Sarah in a steampunk world. Read about it here.

The Good President [continued] -- The Tunisian Uprising

The overthrow of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali illustrates quite clearly the core dilemma facing the United States in he Middle East. The central debate is between "neocons" who consider that the long term interests of the US are best served by promoting democracy and a respect for human rights within the region, and "realists" for whom political stability is the overriding consideration and who view democratization as a destabilizing imperative that threatens American interests, at least in the short term.

Of course, in practice these two conceptual camps are not mutually exclusive. As Henry Kissinger [the ultimate "realist"] has frequently pointed out, realists are not totally insensitive to human rights and generally favor the promotion of democracy, and neo-cons are not oblivious to the dangers that attend policies based on regime change. The differences are more in tone than substance. Generally speaking during the early years of the Bush administration, neocons were ascendant, but their influence waned as the war in Iraq dragged on inconclusively. The Obama administration began with a strong realist bias, but that has slowly segued into general disinterest and non-involvement.

Tunisia has reignited the debate within the foreign policy community. On the one hand many in the West celebrate that country's "jasmine revolution" and hope that it presages a broader wave of democratization throughout the region [here]. They argue out that support for corrupt and oppressive strong man rule only heightens tensions that inevitably, as in Tunisia, produce revolt and radicalism. Others worry that opening the political process will provide opportunities for radical groups to gain influence [here]. Already Islamist groups are rejoicing over the opportunity presented to them by Ben Ali's overthrow. However, faced with a situation fraught with uncertainties and ambiguities the Obama administration has been unwilling to take a stand with either camp, signaling a general disinterest and uninvolvement. Once again the Won has voted "present".

This detachment has not met with general favor in the Arab world. In a fascinating dialogue Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute and Issander El Amrani of "The Arabist" note that throughout the region there is a wakening nostalgia for George W. Bush, and a general dissatisfaction with Obama's policy of non-involvement. At least Bush, they argue, stood for something and promoted, if with limited effectiveness, desirable long-term goals in the region.


Nostalgia for Dubya in the Arab world. Imagine that!

A World of Cities

Parag Khanna, writing in Foreign Policy, argues that we increasingly live in a global environment in which cities, rather than nation-states, are the most important form of political and economic organization. He writes:

[T]he 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones.

Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world's economy, and almost all its innovation. Many are world capitals that have evolved and adapted through centuries of dominance: London, New York, Paris. New York City's economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa's economies combined. Hong Kong receives more tourists annually than all of India. These cities are the engines of globalization, and their enduring vibrancy lies in money, knowledge, and stability. They are today's true Global Cities.

He argues that the growing predominance of urban areas will ultimately result in a situation in many ways similar to that of the Middle Ages outside Europe -- the golden age of Chinese, Muslim and Arab glory.

Now as then, cities are the real magnets of economies, the innovators of politics, and, increasingly, the drivers of diplomacy. Those that aren't capitals act like they are. Foreign policy seems to take place even among cities within the same country, whether it's New York and Washington feuding over financial regulation or Dubai and Abu Dhabi vying for leadership of the United Arab Emirates. This new world of cities won't obey the same rules as the old compact of nations; they will write their own opportunistic codes of conduct, animated by the need for efficiency, connectivity, and security above all else.

It's an interesting argument -- one that has much to recommend it. I suspect, however, that the nation-state is not going to wither and die anytime soon.

Read this provocative article here.

Now, consider an alternative.

Joel Kotkin, also writing in Foreign Policy, argues that the future lies not with centralized cities, but with the suburbs, by which he means more decentralized forms of living. The basic reason is that for most of the population, life in the emerging urban conglomerates is hellish and people will seek more comfortable and secure environments. 

As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

He is bucking a trend here. A whole generation of urban enthusiasts has been telling us that suburban life is soul deadening and that concentration of population in urban areas is not only desirable -- it is inevitable. Kotkin disagrees:

[T]he rise of the megacity is by no means inevitable -- and it might not even be happening. Shlomo Angel, an adjunct professor at New York University's Wagner School, has demonstrated that as the world's urban population exploded from 1960 to 2000, the percentage living in the 100 largest megacities actually declined from nearly 30 percent to closer to 25 percent. Even the widely cited 2009 World Bank report on megacities, a staunchly pro-urban document, acknowledges that as societies become wealthier, they inevitably begin to deconcentrate, with the middle classes moving to the periphery. Urban population densities have been on the decline since the 19th century, Angel notes, as people have sought out cheaper and more appealing homes beyond city limits. In fact, despite all the "back to the city" hype of the past decade, more than 80 percent of new metropolitan growth in the United States since 2000 has been in suburbs. And that's not such a bad thing.

In the course of my life I have lived in central cities, in suburbs, in small towns, and in exurban areas. I certainly sympathize with Kotkin's argument that life outside central cities is superior to that endured by urbanites, although I have friends and relatives who would strongly disagree. Like him I hope that the global trend toward urbanization will be accompanied by local and regional decentralization, but as Kotkin realizes, the current political culture is heavily biased in favor of urban concentration. What will be interesting to see over the next few decades will be the social and political alliances that form over the question of urban vs suburban growth.

Read Kotkin's response to the urbanologists here.

The Rational Optimist

Brendan O'Neill has a terrific review of Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist in the American Conservative.

Why, he asks, are we so pessimistic about the future when the historical record shows that at no time or place in the past have so many people enjoyed as rich and rewarding lives as they do now. The record of the past few centuries has been one of constant amelioration of human want and suffering.

The contrast between how we live today and how people lived just a few decades ago should, by all rights, be enough to perk up even the most miserable of miserabilists. Yes, there’s still poverty, he writes, especially in Africa, but overall “this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any that went before.”

There are more people (or “mouths to feed,” as the pessimists insultingly refer to us) than ever, yet we are better fed and healthier than ever, too. Since 1800, Ridley points out, the world population of human beings has risen sixfold—from 1 billion to over 6 billion—yet in the same period, average life expectancy has more than doubled and average real income has risen ninefold. In just the past 50 years, the average human “earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children, and could expect to live one-third longer.” 

It's a bracing read, one that should be kept in mind the next time you hear the gloom mongers pontificate on the state of the world. 

Check it out here.

Palinoia

James Taranto, over at the WSJ, has a thoughtful piece on Palin Derangement Syndrome. The piece inspired hundreds of comments, some of them pretty good. Check it out here.

Iowahawk's Latest -- CSI Tucson

The funniest man on the internet strikes again:

CSI: Tucson

Fade in. Chaotic supermarket parking lot, strewn with bodies in aftermath of shooting spree. Amid lights and sirens, a bearded man in black windbreaker and sunglasses ducks under the yellow police tape.

COUNTY DEPUTY
Sir -- sir! Please remain behind the cordon. This is an active crime scene investigation.
KRUGMAN (flashes New York Times OpEd badge)
I know. Krugman, CSI. This is my partner Lt. Matthews.
MATTHEWS
Who's in charge here? And where are the donuts?
DEPUTY
He's over there sir -- Sheriff Dupnik. He's in charge of the donuts, too.
Krugman and Matthews cross the parking lot, deftly stepping over sheet-covered corpses
DUPNIK
Krugman. Matthews. I was wondering when you two would get here. We've already booked a perp. Cruller?
MATTHEWS
No thanks, I'll take those two bear claws though.
KRUGMAN
What do you got with white icing? And what do you got on the perp?
DUPNIK
White male, 22, close cropped hair. Goes by the name of ‘Lucidfer Matrix Dreambrain.’ Another typical college Republican

Read the whole thing here.

The Re-election Campaign Is Underway

William Jacobson over at "Legal Insurrection" notes that the recent media frenzy sparked by the Tucson shootings, with its wild inaccuracies and libelous charges against Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers, is nothing less than a test run for the Obama re-election campaign.

Read it here.

The Good President [continued] -- Cheney Vindicated

Uberlefty Glenn Greenwald, to his great dismay, finds that the new "orthodoxy" in Obama's America is that Bush-era defense and counter-terrorism policies, defended by VP Cheney but bitterly denounced by Democrats during the campaign, have been shown to be wise and prudent. Why? Because they have been largely adopted and even extended by the Obama administration.

What is most surprising is not that Bush's policies turned out to have been correct -- a lot of us have known that all along -- but that an article titled "The Vindication of Dick Cheney" could appear in a hard-left publication like Salon. 

Read his complaint here.

The Adventures of President Hu

A Taiwanese take on President Hu's visit to Washington:

Don Surber Isn't Interested in Civil Discourse

He explains why here.

P. J. O'Rourke on the End of the "Times"

He writes:

Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that.

Read it here.

Lies of the Left -- Michelle's Contribution

Michelle Malkin has expanded her litany of lefty horrors. Check it out here.

And she has now added "Blame Righty", a compendium of leftist lies about conservatives. 

Coup in Tunisia

When "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I were in Tunisia recently we were impressed by the ubiquity of unemployed youth who sat all day, every day in cafes watching the world pass them by. One person with whom we spoke put the unemployment rate at around 30%.

Tunisia is a land of extreme economic contrasts. On one hand you have a number of gorgeous Mediterranean resorts such as Hammamet, where the nation's elites congregate and wealthy Europeans flock. On the other there is widespread poverty as bad as anything we seen anywhere in the world. Also prominently on display were the symbols of authoritarian rule -- police, heavily armed guards, and portraits of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali whose image was prominently on display everywhere.

The potential for social unrest was palpable and bothered me the whole time we were in the country. One could sense resentment in the stares of the idle young men who lined the streets of villages, towns and cities. This week that resentment erupted into full-blown revolt. A diplomatic cable, exposed by Wikileaks, exposed the corruption of the current regime and crowds took to the streets in Tunis, Hammamet and other cities. Today comes news that Ben Ali has resigned and fled the country and the Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, has assumed presidential powers. Twenty-three years ago Ben Ali deposed the republic's first President, Habib Bourghiba, and proclaimed that the era of one-man rule is over. Let us hope that after a third of a century, that promise will finally be fulfilled.

Read about it here.

Sarah Responds to the Censors

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

....

Just days before she was shot, Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment on the floor of the House. It was a beautiful moment and more than simply “symbolic,” as some claim, to have the Constitution read by our Congress. I am confident she knew that reading our sacred charter of liberty was more than just “symbolic.” But less than a week after Congresswoman Giffords reaffirmed our protected freedoms, another member of Congress announced that he would propose a law that would criminalize speech he found offensive.

....


America must be stronger than the evil we saw displayed last week. We are better than the mindless finger-pointing we endured in the wake of the tragedy. We will come out of this stronger and more united in our desire to peacefully engage in the great debates of our time, to respectfully embrace our differences in a positive manner, and to unite in the knowledge that, though our ideas may be different, we must all strive for a better future for our country. May God bless America.

Read the whole transcript here.

Brooks and the Politicized Mind

David Brooks' recent column in the New York Times laments the condition of political discourse in America today and attributes it to "the politicized mind", in other words people who see everything and anything through a political prism. Unlike his colleagues at the Times, however, he does not blame "tea partiers", "extremists" or any of the other hobgoblins of the liberal imagination. His sights [if I may still use such a term] are trained on the MSM itself. He writes:

We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.

I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible. 

 Quite right! Opportunistic, irrelevant, and shamelessly irresponsible are a pretty good description of today's mainstream media.

A Moratorium on Sociology?

George Will, in a very nice column, calls for a "moratorium on sociology" as a means of explaining the terrible things that take place every now and then. What started out as an attempt to invoke a comforting illusion of rational explanation has become a despicable and disruptive political tool wielded almost invariably against conservative. Will explains

 A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first. 

And the blame has been rolling out for more than half a century. Will traces its beginnings to the Kennedy assassination when the "explainers" argued that

the "real" culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a "climate of hate" in conservative Dallas, the "paranoid style" of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism.

I would date it earlier, to the postwar fad for Frankford school pop-psychology and its nonsensical maunderings, but Will's point is clear. The left reflexively invokes bad social science as an explanatory device for bashing conservatives, something that Rush Limbaugh noted yesterday:

Here's a partial list of some of the incidents the left has tried to pin on conservatives.  The Columbine shooters. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (specifically they tried to blame me for that).  The DC sniper.  The New York City Times Square car bomb attempt.  They tried to blame that on some Tea Partier angry at the health law, then we find out that was radical Islamists.  The February 2010 IRS plane attack in San Antonio. Remember that? It had to be an anti-government clown that flew that plane into the IRS office, had to be.  The Pentagon subway shooter. The Fort Hood attack. The Discovery Channel hostage taker.  And this guy [John Patrick] Bedell who went into the Pentagon and wanted to shoot these people up.  This guy, by the way, is a dead ringer for Loughner.  Amy Bishop who shot her colleagues at that Alabama college.

The list, as Rush writes, goes on and on. Will's call for a moratorium is well-founded, but the Left just can't help itself -- the impulse to declare critics mentally deficient is too strong, even though it ultimately operates to their detriment. Will writes:

Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained that the Tea Party movement is "the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity." Rising to the challenge of lowering his reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared Tea Partyers as racists: They oppose Obama's agenda, Obama is African American, ergo . . . 

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Amen.

Left-Wing Hate Speech

Michelle Malkin is a treasure. She has the resources and determination to catalogue the lies of the Left and in doing so provides a valuable contrast to the facile falsehoods that permeate the MSM. Here she provides an extensive catalogue of left-wing hate speech threatening violence against Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and other conservative figures.

Nice job, MM.

And check out Rush's rant on the subject of media misreporting of incidents such as the Arizona shooting here. 

The Pornography of Climate Change and the Delegitimation of Expert Authority

Brendan O'Neill writes:

You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the chasm that divides today’s so-called expert classes from the mass of humanity than the snow crisis of Christmas 2010. They warn us endlessly about the warming of our planet; we struggle through knee-deep snow to visit loved ones. They host million-dollar conferences on how we’ll cope with our Mediterranean future; we sleep for days in airport lounges waiting for runways to be de-iced. They pester the authorities for more funding for global-warming research; we keep an eye on our elderly neighbours who don’t have enough cash to heat their homes.

 This is not to completely disregard the science of "climate change" but to note the fantastic nature of the political program it has engendered. Time and again we are treated to apocalyptic fantasies dressed up in the clothing of "science".

[T]he world of difference between expert predictions (hot hell) and our real experiences (freezing nightmare) is a powerful symbol of the distance that now exists between the apocalypse-fantasising elites and the public.

What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis.

 Even more perverse is the elite's stubborn refusal to admit error.

Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. 

....


This reveals the stinging snobbery at the heart of the politics of global warming. Because what we have here is an updated version of the elitist idea that the better classes have access to a profound and complicated truth that the rest of us cannot grasp. Where we have merely sensory reactions (experience), they have reason and analysis (knowledge). Our critical reaction to the snow actually revealed our failure to understand The Truth, as unveiled by The Science, rather than revealing their wrongheadedness in predicting an ‘end to snow’. We are ‘simple’, they are ‘reasoned’. In 2011, we should take everything that is said by this new doom-mongering expert caste with a large pinch of salt....

And here we get to the core of the matter. Elite indulgence in pornographic fantasy and stubborn refusal to admit error on their part, accompanied by snobbish disregard for the real world in which ordinary people live ultimately operate to de-legitimize the elite status enjoyed by professional experts and policymakers.

Read the whole thing here.

The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority [updated]

Alan Caruba has a nice short summary of recent scientific scares that saturated the media but turned out in the end to be much less than the scientific/journalistic establishment made them out to be. They include global warming, the vaccine/autism linkage, the alar scare, the allegation that saccharine causes cancer, and the anti-BPA campaign.

He writes:

Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so.

Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions. 

Indeed! Read it here.

The Good President [continued] -- Bush and WMD

Writing in Human Events, James Zumwalt notes that Wikileaks documents confirm Saddam's attempts to obtain "yellowcake" from Niger, thus falsifying the accusations made by Joseph Wilson, and also that WMD materials were exported to sites in Syria in anticipation of the U.S. attack. In other words, in the months leading up to the invasion Saddam either possessed or was seeking to acquire the means and materials to reconstitute his WMDs.

Of course, as Zumwalt notes, little of this has been reported in the MSM.

Read it here.

Explaining the Bird Deaths

The Taiwanese have the answer:

The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority

John Paulos, writing at ABC News, summarizes a number of themes I have been posting about for the past few years -- the unreliability of scientific information presented in the popular press, the biases that undermine scientific investigation, and the dangers of basing public policy on scientific authority alone.

Read it here.

The Good President [continued] -- Missing Bush in Afghanistan

Jim Hoft writes:

It’s not just the American people who are sick of the Obama-Pelosi regime.

Afghan leader Harmid Karzai wrote in 2009 that he longed for the “golden age” of US-Afghan relations like during the Bush years.

 A lot of us in this country are longing for a return to the sanity of the Bush years too.

Denis Dutton Has Died

And the world is poorer for his passing. For several years now Professor Dutton has been my favorite go-to guy on the internet. His "Arts and Letters Daily"site  has long been the first thing I see when I fire up my computer in the morning. I also regularly visit "SciTech Daily" and "Climate Debate Daily", also founded by Dutton. The range of informed and literate commentary presented on these sites is amazing.

You can read about Professor Dutton and his many contributions here, here, here, and here.

Here is the man himself talking about his great passion.

Feminism 101

Iowahawk Strikes Again -- Job Counseling for Former Legislators

A outplacement transition guide to life beyond Washington
for former members and associates of Congress

Losing a job can be a challenging and stress-filled time. Especially during the holidays, and especially for someone like you - the soon-to-be former team associate of the United States Congress. At this moment, you may be packing boxes and moving vans with the cherished mementos and petty cash of your career in Washington. You may be wrapping those last-minute trillion dollar gifts and holiday earmarks for loyal supporters, phoning final farewells to your Washington colleagues, lobbyists, and "escort services." In many cases you may find that they, too, have lost their jobs -- and, if they haven't, will no longer return your calls. And in those lonely moments between, you ask: why me?

Hilarious as usual. Check it out here.

The Rise of Bourgeois Dignity

Around the beginning of the eighteenth century the world changed for good. It started in Holland and England, and spread from there. Slowly at first, then with ever greater speed and consequence the condition of an ever increasing proportion of the world's population became significantly better and better. Ever since scholars have been trying to understand what happened and why. The latest such attempt is a six-volume work by Dierdre McCloskey, the second volume has just been published under the title Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World.

What changed, she argues, was peoples' attitudes toward the accumulation of wealth.  

At the beginning of the 18th century, people in the Netherlands and Britain began talking about commerce as a good thing — a novelty at that time. They gave dignity to the bourgeoisie. And that drove capitalism, giving birth to the modern world.

....

What changed was the sociology. That is, what changed was the attitude of the rest of the society toward businesspeople, and with that new attitude came a change in government policy. It was suddenly all right — most clearly in the most bourgeois country on earth, the U.S.A. — to get rich and to innovate.

 It's an interesting thesis, one that rings true with me. This is an idea that I plan to explore.

You can read an interview with the author here.

The Good President [continued] -- Bush's Finest Hour

Peter Wehner remembers:

Four years ago this month may have been the low-water mark in Iraq, with the nation gripped by a low-grade but escalating civil war. The American public strongly opposed the war. Almost every Democratic lawmaker in Congress, with the honorable exception of Senator Joseph Lieberman, was in fierce opposition to both the war and what later became known as the “surge.” Republican lawmakers were losing their nerve as well. Three months earlier, in September 2006, Senator Mitch McConnell had asked for, and received, a private meeting with President Bush. Senator McConnell’s message was a simple one: the Iraq war’s unpopularity was going to cost the GOP control of Congress. “Mr. President,” McConnell said, “bring some troops home from Iraq.”


President Bush, to his everlasting credit, not only refused to bend; he increased the American commitment to Iraq and changed our counterinsurgency strategy. And while the situation in Iraq remains fragile and can be undone — and while problems still remain and need to be urgently addressed... — this is a moment for our nation, and most especially our military, to take sober satisfaction in what has been achieved. It has not been an easy journey. But it has been a noble and estimable one.


There is no need here to rehearse the names of the few who did not buckle at the moment when the war seemed lost. They know who they are. In the words of Milton, they were “faithful found among the faithless.” Their faithfulness, and in many cases their courage, is being vindicated.

Read the whole thing here.

Have A Very Zombie Christmas

Another Neat History Toy

Check out the Google "Books Ngram Viewer" [here]. It allows a search function for the frequency with which a word or phrase appears in books published from 1750 to 2008. You can trace the rise and fall of specific words, phrases or concepts over time. I, for instance, set it to trace the occurrence of the word "character". The use of the term peaked in the mid-nineteenth century and steadily declined thereafter, with intriguing upticks during WWII and after 2004. I wonder what that means [the phrase that starts every one of my research projects].

The Top 14 Astronomy Pictures

Check them out at Discover [here].

The Reliability of Scientific Authority

George Johnson and John Horgan discuss recent writings on the question of just how reliable is the scientific enterprise. Their conclusion is unremarkable: there are a lot of problems with the ways in which science is conducted and especially in how it is reported, but ultimately in a free market of ideas truth will out. Though this conclusion is itself problematic [we don't always have time to wait for the gradual, often decades and even centuries-long process by which truth is revealed] and unremarkable, the discussion leading to it is filled with fascinating ideas and references. These are two smart guys talking informally about interesting things.

Check it out.

The Emerging Class Conflict

Fred Siegel has a terrific review in the Wall Street Journal of three books discussing the current discrediting of elites, left, right, and center. Globalization and the information revolution have produced in America and throughout the West a new set of elites that have thoroughly displaced earlier industrial elites and have roused considerable critical commentary. The three authors considered in this review [David Callahan, Michael Knox Beran, and Anthony Codevilla] come at their subject from radically different points of view, and all three have interesting things to say about America's new "ruling class". Check out the review here.

Where Immigrants Settled

The "Immigration Explorer"

A visual representation. Really neat to play with. Select a year and a specific immigrant group and see their distribution across the nation. You can even select for county-level data.

So cool! Check it out here.

Where the Obscene Rich Gather

According to census data seven of the ten richest counties in America are in Virginia and Maryland near the nation's capital, otherwise known as Behemoth. Read it here. 

Can Blogs Restore the Credibility of Scientific Authority

It is now a given that the current system for evaluating academic research -- peer review and citation frequency in major journals -- has completely broken down. So what can replace it? John Hawks and Dienekes Pontikos have a suggestion: blogging.

Pontikos sees little point in formally publishing his findings. "I can bypass them entirely, and have the entire world review what I write," he wrote in an e-mail. Indeed, comments on his blog — "could you please provide the eigenvalues for the principal component analysis", for instance — read like the niggling recommendations of a manuscript reviewer.

As for Hawks, he writes:

I've often found that the best reviews of my work come from blogs and readers, not from peer review itself.

Read it here.

The much derided blogosphere, it seems, may in the end be the salvation of a corrupt scientific establishment the credibility of which has pretty much disappeared.

Lies of the Left (continued) -- Erin Brockovich

The environmental left made a lot of fuss over it, some lawyers made a lot of money out of it, and some unscrupulous film makers won a lot of awards, but it was all a lie.

Hinkley, California, the town made famous in the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich, does not show any evidence of an increased rate of cancers.

Pacific Gas and Electric, which released a toxic plume of hexavalent chromium 6 from a Hinkley-based natural gas pipeline station, paid a record $333 million to settle a class-action suit in 1996. But the California Cancer Registry has now completed three studies that show cancer rates remained normal in from 1988 to 2008.

Read the whole thing here.

Claudio Arrau and the Others

My favorite interpreter of Beethoven plays the "Appassionata" Piano Sonata No. 23; Op. No. 57, 3rd movement. It's a real test for any pianist and You Tube allows us to compare how different artists have approached it.



Aaaaaaahhhhhh!

Now listen to Horowitz perform the same piece:



And now for something a bit different, check out what Faizal Say does with the same piece:



Hey, what's wrong with a bit of over the top showmanship? It is the romantic era after all.

The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority [updated]

Leave aside rampant fraud, incompetence, and bias that have infested the scientific enterprise, what about the good science -- you know, the stuff performed by competent, reasonably objective professionals and verified by repeated confirmatory observations? Well, that can't be trusted either.

Writing in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer argues:

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts are losing their truth. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. 

....

The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. Yet the effect’s ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics.... Biologist Michael Jennions argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias. Biologist Richard Palmer suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—that is, the subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results.... In the late nineteen-nineties, neuroscientist John Crabbe investigated the impact of unknown chance events on the test of replicability. The disturbing implication of his study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data is nothing but noise. This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything.

Read the whole thing here.

And Lehrer expands on this argument in Wired [here]:

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

This is important stuff because it calls into question the bedrock of modern scientism -- the "scientific method" itself. It is upon this rock that claims to scientific authority are grounded, but more and more the rock is beginning to look like a pile of shifting sand. 

UPDATE:

Games With Words does an extensive deconstruction of Lehrer's article that discusses the sources of error -- publishers' bias; confirmation bias; a tendency to fudge figures; careerist incentives to publish false data; the fact that most scientists are piss-poor statisticians; etc. In some ways it is an illuminating piece, but in the end it doesn't repudiate Lehrer's basic point -- that much of what is reported as scientific truth turns out on close examination to be questionable at best.

Read the article here.

The Games With Words article notes that with regard to error in scientific publications we are operating on faith. We assume that the proportion of unreplicable results is low because if it is high scientists might as well "question the meaning of [their] own existence". Well, according to David Freedman, writing in the Atlantic, notes that "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong." and wonders "why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice?"

Read the whole disturbing article here.

And, check out Daniel Engber's piece in Slate on the inadequacy of the peer review process [here].

Revisiting Election 2000 -- Bush Won Fair and Square

George Will explains:

Once Gore initiated the intervention of courts, the U.S. Constitution was implicated. On Nov. 7, Gore finished second in Florida's Election Day vote count. A few days later, after the state's mandatory (in close elections) machine recount, he again finished second. Florida law required counties to certify their results in seven days, by Nov. 14.
But three of the four (of Florida's 67) counties - each heavily Democratic - where Gore was contesting the count were not finished deciphering voters' intentions. So Gore's lawyers persuaded the easily persuadable state Supreme Court - with a majority of Democratic appointees - to rewrite the law. It turned the seven-day period into 19 days.

Many liberals underwent instant conversions of convenience: They became champions of states' rights when the U.S. Supreme Court (seven of nine were Republican appointees) unanimously overturned that extension. But the U.S. high court reminded Florida's court to respect the real "states' rights" at issue - the rights of state legislatures: The Constitution gives them plenary power to establish procedures for presidential elections.
Florida's Supreme Court felt emancipated from law. When rewriting the law to extend the deadline for certification of results by the four counties, the court said: "The will of the people, not a hyper-technical reliance upon statutory provisions, should be our guiding principle." But under representative government, the will of the people is expressed in statutes. Adherence to statutes - even adherence stigmatized as "hyper-technical" - is known as the rule of law.

In the end, seven of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices (and three of the seven Florida justices) agreed on this: The standardless recount ordered by the Florida court - different rules in different counties regarding different kinds of chads and different ways of discerning voter intent - violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

Two of the seven U.S. justices favored ordering Florida's court to devise standards that could pass constitutional muster and allowing the recount to continue for six more days. Five justices, believing that the recounting had become irredeemably lawless, ended it.

Once Gore summoned judicial intervention, and Florida's Supreme Court began to revise state election law, it probably was inevitable that possession of the nation's highest political office was going to be determined by a state's highest court or the nation's. The U.S. Supreme Court was duty-bound not to defer to a state court that was patently misinterpreting - disregarding, actually - state law pertaining to a matter assigned by the U.S. Constitution to state legislatures.

Suppose that, after Nov. 7, Florida's Legislature had made by statute the sort of changes - new deadlines for recounting and certifying votes, selective recounts, etc. - that Florida's Supreme Court made by fiat. This would obviously have violated the federal law that requires presidential elections to be conducted by rules in place prior to Election Day.

So it was Gore, not Bush, who tried to game the system to steal the election. Of course none of this means anything to Democrat partisans who will go to their graves convinced that Bush stole the election.

Condi Explains How the Real World Works

Well done, Condi. The "Bush lied" charge was always an exercise in deception and the willingness of MSM mouthpieces like Couric to perpetuate it is in itself a travesty.

The Qumran Mystery Jar

This might be even bigger than Al Capone's vault. In 2004 a sealed jar was found at Qumran (the place where the Dead Sea scrolls were found]. Since then speculation has raged as to what was to be found within. Well, after six short years scientists have finally examined the interior of the jar and there they found..., gypsum [and a few pieces of charcoal]. No scrolls, no valuables, just gypsum. There is no truth to the rumor that a TV special starring Geraldo is in the works. 

The Picture that Says It All

What were they thinking?

In Bill's case it is pretty obvious. Here was his chance to step back into his favorite place, the limelight. Additionally, by acting as surrogate President, he subtly undermines Obama's image and in so doing strengthens Hillary's position should she decide to mount a primary challenge. But what about Obama? Doesn't he realize just how weak and detached this makes him look. Is he really that disinterested in the job of being President? That's sure what it looks like.

Iowahawk Strikes Again -- Obama Resigns

The funniest man on the intertubes explains why Obama called and then walked out of his press conference in order to spend more time with his family.

Obama Names Bill Clinton to Presidential Post

WASHINGTON DC - Ending weeks of speculation and rumors, President-Elect Barack Obama today named Bill Clinton to join his incoming administration as President of the United States, where he will head the federal government's executive branch.
"I am pleased that Bill Clinton has agreed to come out of retirement to head up this crucial post in my administration," said Obama. "He brings a lifetime of previous executive experience as Governor of Arkansas and President of the United States, and has worked closely with most of the members of my Cabinet."
Clinton said he was "excited and honored" by the appointment, and would work "day and night" to defeat all the key policy objectives proposed by Mr. Obama during the campaign.
"I am gratified that the President-Elect has entrusted me with this important responsibility," said Clinton. "I'm looking forward to getting back behind, and under, the Oval Office desk again. As I have told the President-Elect, I pledge to do whatever I can to serve his historic administration by making sure that none of that bullshit he talked about during the campaign will ever see the light of day. Americans can rest assured that he will be safely confined to the East Wing, as far away as possible from any potentially dangerous office equipment or nuclear buttons."

Read the whole thing here.

So it really wasn't all about Hillary after all!

The Romance of Capitalism

Ann Althouse links to a post charging that the Rolling Stones sold out to corporate interests and lost their authenticity and elicits this comment:

In fairness to the author, the divide she discusses isn't political-economic (i.e., capitalism versus its alternatives), it's merely the aesthetic: the perceived continuum between authenticity and crass commercialization.

After R.E.M. declined Microsoft’s reported $12 million offer to license “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” to roll out Windows 95, the Rolling Stones quickly grabbed the money for “Start Me Up.”

When severely tested, R.E.M. stuck to its policy not to lend their music to non-artistic uses. Whether that decision was principled or foolish, the most important factor was that it was their right to choose.
 
....

I agree that rock & roll is inherently capitalistic, moreso that than the author gives credit. But the best argument for capitalism, especially to those who are suspicious of it, isn’t that maximum commercial exploitation is always necessarily good, or cool, or even "rock & roll."

It’s that capitalism is the system that best preserves the right of individuals to choose how to order their own affairs in harmony with their beliefs and values. And gives others the choice to embrace or reject the result.

 Exactly! I couldn't have said it better. 

Read the post and the entire discussion here.

Lies of the Left (continued) -- Inherit the Wind

The recent release of a despicable liable of a movie, Fair Game starring Sean Penn, has occasioned much comment around the internet. The reason is that, such is the power of the medium, the falsehoods portrayed on the screen will become [in Richard Fernandez' words] "a reference for history" in the minds of many who see the movie. That is, many people will believe the lies because they have seen them acted out on screen. This, as Fernandez points out, is an old Hollywood tradition -- spinning liberal lies into powerful fables that affect the nation's political culture.

One of the most effective such slanders was the 1960 Stanley Kramer film, Inherit the Wind, which was loosely based on the Scopes evolution trial. It fixed in the public's mind the picture of Clarence Darrow as a crusader for scientific truth standing up to fundamentalist Christian bigots represented by William Jennings Bryan. If you are one of those who still believes that the Scopes trial was a victory for scientific rationalism, check out Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize wining book, Summer of the Gods. It will set you straight.

Perhaps the most important distortions embodied in the liberal vision is the portrayal of science as objective truth and those who question scientific authority on moral grounds as ignorant bigots. Actually there were many valid reasons to object to the teaching that Bryan opposed and in many ways the religious fundamentalist were far less bigoted than the defenders of "objective scientific truth" who assailed him.

Here [from Jonah Goldberg] is an excerpt from one of the scientific texts being challenged in the Scopes case.

Evolution of Man. – Undoubtedly there once lived upon the earth races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants. If we follow the early history of man upon the earth, we find that at first he must have been little better than one of the lower animals. He was a nomad, wandering from place to place, feeding upon whatever living things he could kill with his hands. Gradually he must have learned to use weapons, and thus kill his prey, first using rough stone implements for this purpose. As man became more civilized, implements of bronze and of iron were used. About this time the subjugation and domestication of animals began to take place. Man then began to cultivate the fields, and to have a fixed place of abode other than a cave. The beginnings of civilization were long ago, but even to-day the earth is not entirely civilized.

The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. – The great Englishman Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to realize how this great force of heredity applied to the development or evolution of plants and animals. He knew that although animals and plants were like their ancestors, they also tended to vary. In nature, the variations which best fitted a plant or animal for life in its own environment were the ones which were handed down because those having variations which were not fitted for life in that particular environment would die. Thus nature seized upon favorable variations and after a time, as the descendants of each of these individuals also tended to vary, a new species of plant or animal, fitted for the place it had to live in, would be gradually evolved.

Artificial Selection. – Darwin reasoned that if nature seized upon favorable variants, then man by selecting the variants he wanted could form new varieties of plants or animals much more quickly than nature. And so to-day plant or animal breeders select the forms having the characters they wish to perpetuate and breed them together. This method used by plant and animal breeders is known as selection.

Improvement of Man. – If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. – When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.

The Jukes. – Studies have been made on a number of different families in this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original parents. The “Jukes” family is a notorious example. The first mother is known as “Margaret, the mother of criminals.” In seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million and a quarter dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case recently studied is the “Kallikak” family. This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves!

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. – Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.

Strong stuff, that. Such was the state of scientific authority at the time of the Scopes trial. It's not surprising that many people, then and now, would find such drivel morally objectionable. From the perspective of several decades later we can see just how dangerous and reprehensible, not to say biased, settled scientific opinion was then. And is it any less now? Will scientists a century from now look back upon our current opinions aghast. The Stanley Kramer version of the Scopes trial should not stand. The whole shameful episode should not be considered a great triumph for scientific liberalism. Instead it should be remembered as a caution against placing too much faith in the pronouncements of scientific authority. In the case of movies, it is important not to believe your eyes, and in the case of science it is good to consider the moral implications of what you are being told.

Progressive Pecksniffianism

George Will has a nice piece on the two most distressing aspects of progressivism -- their naive faith in "science", and their desperate determination to control every aspect of the lives of others [here]. He writes:

Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives’ agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise – an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism’s itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon – the Pecksniffian progressive. 

Will traces the impulse back to the 1950s congressional crusade against comic books and notes that since then we have been subjected by progressive legislators and bureaucrats to a staggering series of such scares, the response to which tended to increase governmental control over the lives of the citizenry. But the impulse goes much further back than that. Social control lies at the core of every major progressive reform in our nation's history. Think, for instance, of the nineteenth century antebellum temperance reform that moved rapidly from moral suasion to compulsion. It's goal was to "perfect" society by perfecting individuals and groups within it, an imperative that translated into a determined attempt to control the social behavior of specific groups within American society. Similarly, early efforts at educational reform aimed not so much at teaching students useful skills as socializing them to middle-class norms. In the Progressive Era a "purity crusade" aimed at eradicating a broad range of behaviors that the reformers felt were undesirable. And, let us not forget, Prohibition was a Progressive reform. Throughout our nation's history the urge to probe into and control the lives of others has been a prominent feature of our political culture.

What is relatively new is the "cult of expertise" and naive scientism invoked by pecksniffian reformers to justify their varied agendas, and that is really not so new after all. It emerged not in the mid-twentieth century but in the late nineteenth with the rise of the social sciences, and the invocation of scientific authority formed an essential aspect of reform efforts during the Progressive Era. The Progressive model for reform went broadly like this: muckraking journalists would expose problems; university trained experts would study the problem and issue recommendations for action; and progressive legislators would write those recommendations into law that would then be enforced by bureaucrats, commissions, and courts insulated from the democratic process.

So scientistic pecksniffianism was not new in the post-war era; it has been an important aspect of our political culture for more than a century. But Will is right to note that in recent decades it has become far more common and far more obnoxious than it once was. Belatedly we are beginning to have a serious debate over the relative benefits and costs of these reforms and the claims to scientific authority on which they are based. It's about time!

Travel Planning?

Next time you are planning a vacation, or if you just want to waste some time exploring the oddities of the world, check out the Atlas Obscura [here]. It's a website devoted to strange, mysterious, and sometimes unsettling places you might want to visit someday. The picture above is Ohio's "Great Serpent Mound". I have friends and relatives who travel a lot for their jobs. Something like this might come in handy as relief from the tedium of the endless road.

The Old Time Game

And while we are on the subject of photo archives, here's a link to the A.J. Spalding Baseball Collection of early baseball photographs in the New York Public Library. Lots of good stuff. Check it out!

The picture is of William "Buck" Ewing, whom many consider to be the greatest player of the nineteenth century. Bill James has argued that Ewing may have been the greatest player of all time -- at least that was the opinion of several baseball professionals who saw both him and Babe Ruth play.

Old Photos of Japan

Taken between 1860 and 1930. Some fascinating stuff here. Check it out. This photo is of an Ainu woman playing a traditional musical instrument similar to a Jews harp.

Don't Touch Me

A song to sing when the TSA approaches:

Here Puss Puss

Hilarious! An alternative view of vegetarians.



HT: Instapundit

Sarah Palin, Neanderthals, and Mass Extinction

Listen to this clip from the John Batchelor show. It's the most interesting talk show on radio, largely because he follows his interests into so many fascinating areas.

Pride of Baltimore 2

There she is, anchored at the Light Street Pavilion at the Inner Harbor. I took the picture from inside the National Aquarium.

Looking east toward the National Aquarium.

The ropes you are supposed to learn.

And of course, lots of hungry birds.

Federal Hill from the north side of the harbor.

Hoagy's Skylark

Here's Hoagy Carmichael's classic, "Skylark" as performed by a young Aretha Franklin.



And here's the same song done by Ella.



It's interesting to listen to the differing qualities these two great peformers bring to the song. I actually prefer Aretha's arrangement, but Ella has that marvelous instrument that nobody, not even Aretha, can hope to match.

And here is a wonderful version by Helen Forrest, the best of the big band singers, backed by Harry James and his orchestra. Forrest is wonderful, but the real treat here is the orchestral arrangement.



I think that this performance by Maxine Sullivan is my favorite. Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled, so you have to go here to listen to it.

And finally, a couple of instrumental versions This is by the amazing Lee Konitz.



Aaaaahhh! That's what an alto sax should sound like. Now for a final treat, this is how Art Blakey and the Jazz Messingers interpreted the old standard as an exercise in bop. Not bad for a kid from Pittsburgh.



UPDATE:

Oh my! I just came across this: "Skylark" done by Andre Previn.



Interesting. Verrrrrry interesting!

C. S. Lewis on the Tyranny of Science

From God In the Dock:

[T]he new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim of knowledge. . . . This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists. . . . Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about science. But government involves questions about the good of man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. . . . On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science.

 Read more about Lewis and threats to freedom in the modern world here.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Return to the Dying Earth

If you were ever enchanted, as I was, by Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" stories, rejoice. George R. R. Martin and Gardener Dozois had put together a collection of new stories set in Vance's magical realm. Tor Books, the publisher has given us all a taste of what is in store for us. Read "The Green Bird" by Kage Baker here. Hint: it stars Cugel the Clever, my favorite Vance character.

Another Diplomatic Breakthrough

The Obama administration announced that the State Department has concluded successful negotiations with another "moderate" Taliban figure, Mullah Iowahak Muhammadavi al-Burjihad, whom officials described as the #2 man in the Taliban body & paint shop. Iowahawk has the details here.

Watching Russell Crowe

We went to see "The Next Three Days". Not many people in the theatre -- but "Harry Potter" next door was packed, mostly with families. "Days" attracted only old couples like us. Makes you wonder just what the marketing strategy for this film was.

There is a lot of talent on display in "Days", but to little effect. The narrative, copied from a 2008 French film, is a by the numbers heist flick with the difference that the treasure being liberated is Russell Crowe's wife. We have the setup, the planning, the usual complications, numerous cameos by established stars, and a nail-biting, coincidence laden, escape sequence. Nothing particularly interesting there. The direction, by Paul Haggis, is conventional and competent, no more, no less. Not very interesting either. So, why did I enjoy it so much?

Well, there was the setting. I grew up near Pittsburgh and it was fun to spot landmarks and recognize neighborhoods and to note what has changed over time. And there is a certain enjoyment in just sitting back and letting a conventional story wash over you. No matter how implausible the situations, coincidences and tension points, you know where you are going and pretty much how you will get there and there is some comfort in that. That's why so many people are willing to sit through genre flicks, being led through the same tropes time and again.

That brings us to the acting, and here we see a lot talent on display. Russell Crowe repeats his suffering everyman/unstoppable hero roles to good effect. Elizabeth Banks transitions from idealized housewife and mother to hardened, defeated, suicidal inmate, to action sidekick. Familiar stars Olivia Wilde, Brian Dennehy, Liam Neeson, and Daniel Stern, are all quite good in what are essentially cameo roles. The other secondary roles are all competently played. There really are no weak performances. But, with one exception, there are no standout ones either, and that is the fault of the writing and directing which do not allow the actors, other than Crowe, much scope to shine. I was most impressed by Liam Neeson's short bit as an expert on prison escapes. Watching him and Crowe together was a treat.

So, all in all, was it worth it? I would say "yes". Go see it if there is nothing better on tap. The trouble is, this week there is an awful lot of decent competition out there so the grosses are bound to be disappointing.

All You Could Want to Know About Aztec Blood Rituals

Check it out here. Note, this is the first of two articles -- more to come.

Making Sense of the World

In recent decades three books, purporting to explain the state of affairs in the world have been published. All have been widely read by elite policy makers; all have been extremely influential; and all three have inspired vigorous debate. They are:

The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama,

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel Huntington,

and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, by John Mearsheimer.

I would urge everyone to read all three; each gives you a useful, but limited, prism through which to view the endless debate over foreign policy. But to get a general sense of the books' arguments you can simply peruse "Conflict or Consensus: Three Visions Revisited" by Richard K. Betts, published in Foreign Affairs. [here] Check it out, then read the books. You will find that the interminable arguments on international affairs in the press and in government circles will make a lot more sense. At least, that has been my experience.

Megyn Kelly in GQ

Here she is!

Read about it here.